FEATURE: Bliss: Muse’s Origin of Symmetry at Twenty-Five

FEATURE:

 

 

Bliss

Muse’s Origin of Symmetry at Twenty-Five

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IF many feel Muse…

PHOTO CREDIT: Benedict Johnson/Redferns

released stronger albums, there is no denying that Origin of Symmetry was a major breakthrough. It contains some of their biggest songs. Their cover of Feeling Good. New Born and Plug in Baby these huge songs. Released on 18th June, 2001, I wanted to mark twenty-five years of this immense album. Led by Matt Bellamy, this was the follow-up to 1999’s Showbiz. It was a big leap. Like Radiohead going from Pablo Honey in 1993 to The Bends in 1995. That confidence and gulf in terms of quality. Perhaps 2003’s Absolution another step on. However, I wanted to look inside Origin of Symmetry ahead of its twenty-fifth anniversary. I had just finished sixth-form college when the album came out and was aware of Muse. I think 2006’s Black Holes and Revelations was the moment I really connected with them. That turns twenty on 3rd July, and I will write about that nearer to the time. I will end with a couple of reviews. At this point, Muse were being compared a lot to Radiohead and Jeff Buckley. Matt Bellamy seen as very similar to Radiohead’s lead, Thom Yorke. I want to start with Guitar.com, and their twentieth anniversary spotlight of Origin of Symmetry from April 2021. They say that the album was Muse “Demonstrating gigantic ambition and a musical finesse that would lead the trio to global ascendancy, Origin of Symmetry was a compelling mission statement, and one which brought Matt Bellamy’s ingenious guitar approach to the fore”:

“Muse’s gargantuan ambitions were first clearly revealed on 2001’s Origin of Symmetry, their second record following the muted and somewhat confused reception that met their debut. Contemporary reviews of 1999’s Showbiz heavily emphasised Matt Bellamy’s vocal similarity to Thom Yorke, and were hasty to write them off as Radiohead-wannabes (a perception underlined by the fact it was helmed by The Bends producer, John Leckie).

Critical uncertainty aside, Showbiz sold moderately well and, for many of those who listened, the debut’s grounding in small-town malaise and hormonal obsession was relatable while others recognised the precocious talent of the 21-year-old Bellamy as both inventive guitarist and virtuoso pianist. A mere two years on, Muse re-emerged with both a sharper focus – and sharper teeth.

Show me it’s real

On the heels of extensive touring, Bellamy, along with bassist Chris Wolstenholme and drummer Dominic Howard, decided to record a batch of new tracks with Tool producer Dave Bottrill, namely a song that the band had been performing live for a while. This growing favourite was driven by a propulsive, classically-inspired riff. The productivity of these sessions would result in – as the band would later state – the backbone of their second record.

A newly discovered appetite for magic mushrooms had swerved Bellamy’s songwriting into more vivid directions, and Plug In Baby’s lyrics abstractly alluded to both sex toys and a futuristic vision of computerised, synthetic love. When pressed on the song’s meaning in an interview with Channel [V] HQ’s James Mathieson in 2004, Bellamy muddied the waters further; “It’s all random, it just comes out, I’ve got no idea what I’m singing about at all, It does mean something! Trust me. But I can’t work it out myself. ‘Cause I’m subjective, you see. So I can’t actually quite work it out, that’s for you lot to work out.”

Plug In Baby was undoubtedly the strongest piece of music that Muse had written to date. Bellamy’s centrepiece riff feverishly jogged around the B minor harmonic scale with a fluidity that spotlighted his burgeoning guitar hero potential, snapped to a solid, funky rhythm section provided by Wolstenholme and Howard. The band’s regular wallowing in heartbroken angst had taken a hard right turn into sci-fi surrealism. It was a tantalising portent of what was to come.

During the sessions with Bottrill, the band laid down three more new tracks, two of which would grow into further singles – and setlist staples for the ensuing decade. The transcendent Bliss and ambitious album opener New Born alongside the moody Darkshines. The band set up live to capture the intensity of their live performances raw, overdubbing additional parts later in the process.

Though the bedrock of four of the album’s key tracks were down, Bottrill wasn’t charged with finalising the record, leaving due to a commitment to helm Tool’s Lateralus. Once more, Muse sought the wisdom of John Leckie to see through the remainder of album number two. As time was on their side, and facing considerably less label pressure following the relative success of Showbiz, The rest of the material was worked up and captured at a range of studios. The band returned to Sawmills studio in Fowey, Cornwall, ventured out to Ridge Farm Studios in Surrey before jaunting across to Real World Studios in Box, Wiltshire. On their travels, a brief spell was also spent aboard Dave Gilmour’s Astoria houseboat studio, moored on the Thames.

Peace will arise

Bellamy’s guitar arsenal was considerably smaller in 2001, with his main guitar of the Showbiz-era being a slimline double-cut Gibson Les-Paul which included a Roland MIDI pickup. Unfortunately, due to a particularly exuberant show in Dublin in 2000, this guitar was no longer workable. With a little cash in his wallet – Bellamy sought a new guitar that merged two different worlds in one unique shape, as he told Guitar.com in an interview last year: “I was torn between an SG and the Telecaster-type shape, feel, sound and everything. Those Fender-type sounds can be too thin to fill the space in a three-piece band. Having said that, I don’t play powerchords that much – I try to play lead parts or single note parts a lot, so you need a sound that’s thick in tone and broad, and not plinky and thin.”

Sketching a rough concept, Bellamy sought out the respected Exeter-based luthier Hugh Manson to realise his vision, as Manson recalled in Total Guitar “Matt came to the shop and asked me to make a guitar for him. He had a definite idea of what he wanted it to sound like. We reached the body design through a combination of me drawing and him pointing and we got there pretty quickly, I think there was just a slight alteration on the top horn.” Bellamy’s new axe, the DL-1 (dubbed ‘The Delorean’) was clad in aluminium on the front, back and sides and sported a spectrum of pickups, with a Seymour Duncan P90 in the neck and a Kent Armstrong Motherbucker at the bridge with a Roland GK2a MIDI pickup. The Delorean was also equipped with an in-built Z.Vex Fuzz Factory.

Now brandishing a guitar tailor-made for effervescent sonics, coupled with a new spiked-up hairstyle, Bellamy was carving a distinctive silhouette. The Delorean marked the beginning of an ongoing, fruitful partnership with Manson, which culminated in 2019, when Bellamy became the majority shareholder of Manson Guitar Works.

Hyper-music

Befitting Bellamy’s sparkly space-age rig, were some astounding new songs. As the Origin of Symmetry sessions continued, tracks such as the explosive electro-funk of Hyper-Music, the schizoid mania of Space Dementia and sublime album centrepiece, Citizen Erased, were revealing that the record would be both louder and more texturally adventurous.

Bellamy’s penchant for riff-craft fully flowered during the making of the Origin…, with the aforementioned album opener New Born dramatically lurching from an esoteric piano arrangement into a dirty but massively infectious riff. When released as a single, the potency of New Born’s fuzzed up riffing caught the ears of many youngsters then in-thrall to in-vogue heft of nu-metal. It was now a clear statement of fact that the Teignmouth three-piece could now stand shoulder-to-shoulder with some of the loudest bands in the world.

Fuzz Factory-soaked riffs aside, the range of Bellamy’s mastery of the guitar was illustrated; The twinkly, emotive arpeggios at the heart of Citizen Erased’s multi-section arrangement were precise and subtle. Recalling the building of this fan favourite behemoth, Bellamy remembered, in Guitarist magazine, that “Dom came in one day with this funky James Brown beat and Chris just started playing along. I then applied the chord structure that I already had and it suddenly became a full-on metal track out of nowhere. Because it was so heavy for so long we decided to add another song on to the end of it.”

Elsewhere, the delicate Spanish-tinged acoustics of the gloomy Screenager displayed a restrained nuance, while the euphoric power-chord pound of Bliss, helped to shape it into, as was later determined by Bellamy, as “Probably the most positive track – the most truly embracing song. It’s almost in awe of the situation I’ve been given, because it’s a state of mind where you give out everything you have without any need for return.” (Rock Sound, 2001)

Though the band’s more recent works have found Muse pushing their ambitions to a place that some consider the height of pretension, it’s undeniable that the enduring identity of Muse was cemented during the making of Origin of Symmetry. Its epic scope, thrilling music and emotional intensity mean that – after twenty years – Origin… is as fresh a listen as the day it was birthed”.

Prior to getting to some reviews, a feature from Indiependant and their love letter to Muse’s hugely acclaimed second studio album, Origin of Symmetry. It was an album that was a big success in the U.K. and did well on the charts around the world. Even though it didn’t make a big dent in the U.S., Origin of Symmetry did well in other countries:

“Loved by fans and critics alike—even ranked 74 on Q’s ‘Best 100 Albums of All Time’ list in 2006—it is bittersweet to revisit the album twenty years on, since this Muse, dazzling in symphonic metal, has left us. No longer do we hear the fateful tones of Tom Waits’ ‘What’s He Building’ before the first frantic arpeggios of ‘New Born’; we are rarely treated to Matt Bellamy’s vocal stratospherics in ‘Micro Cuts’, and not since that 2011 weekend has a bellowing organ transported us to the musical dystopia of ‘Megalomania’.

Yet, within Origin of Symmetry, we can see the origin of Muse’s rise to the status of rock deities. The suspenseful, Rachmaninov-inspired piano intro to ‘Space Dementia’—before the track explodes into utter frenzy—finds relatives in ‘Butterflies and Hurricanes’ (2003) and the band’s three-part ‘Exogenesis: Symphony’, which rounds off 2009’s The Resistance. Meanwhile, the anthemic ‘Plug in Baby’, which has survived best the twenty-year cull, paved the way for groove-driven hits such as ‘Assassin’, ‘Hysteria’ and ‘Time is Running Out’. Running throughout the record too is constant experimentation with synths; this indeed reached its climax in their most recent LP, Simulation Theory, which saw the band ditch their usual sounds for a deep dive into 80s synth-pop revival.

But what’s so special about Origin of Symmetry, then? Fundamentally, the record represents this era of ‘Early’ Muse—the typical label which fans use when trying to justify their favourite bands, only to see the sour reactions their opinions receive. Yet, it allowed the trio to escape the constant ‘Radiohead 2.0’ moniker which had bedraggled their debut, Showbiz, with a concept album which explored for just under an hour all their musical upbringings—from Bellamy’s classical piano and operatic studies to bassist Chris Wolstenholme’s penchant for metal. True, the second half of the record may veer slightly into more experimental zones (such as the flamenco/soft rock mashup ‘Screenager’) but stick to it and listeners will be treated to a multidimensional musical world.

But don’t just explore the album itself. Live recordings and concert videos give added depth to what the band were trying to achieve. The tracks are best experienced live and in-the-flesh; only a stage of such proportions can do justice to an album intended to push all the limits of drama. A snippet of ‘Bliss’ at Leeds 2017 was enough, though we might dream of another entire live rendition sometime soon.

For now, the record speaks for itself. Twenty years on, Muse’s revered sophomore effort stands the test of time and audiences can only wait for it to find its proper place on a platform among its devoted fans. Until then, we are left to imagine it—and imagine it I shall”.

Moving to a brilliant 2021 Pitchfork review from Jazz Monroe. This was an in-depth and passionate dive inside a Muse masterpiece. Revisiting the “grandiose British rock band’s second album, a supranatural space odyssey powered by all-too-human emotion”. I wonder if new features will be shared to mark twenty-fifth years:

“In 2001, on a Saturday-morning show with celebrity guests and a slime tank, a rakish man appears onstage with hair spiked into dyed black blades. The man is a little scary, a little sinister, like anyone cool. He wears dark shades and wiggles his arms, conjuring a lullaby from the keyboard like a hired magician. Then the guitar swings around his neck and he summons a perfect squall of distortion.

The song, introduced as “New Born,” begins to overwhelm him. He throttles the guitar, hops about the stage, barely pretends to sing and play. You know he is miming, but he also performs the artifice of mime—that is, he is miming miming—and as the credits roll another man bursts in and inexplicably breakdances. What are you watching? A satire of an empty TV spectacle, perhaps. Unless you are nine years old. At nine, you are witnessing genius.

By this point, Matthew Bellamy’s heavy rock laments had already won Muse a global cult, gripped by his softness and oddness. But that is not how the British trio got to be stars. For that, they were shipped out to studio sets for Live & Kicking and The Pepsi Chart Show, learning to peddle the shamelessly real while embracing the shamelessly fake. By the end of it, Bellamy could fluently translate his grandiose, pentatonic misery into four minutes of thrillingly throwaway pop. Stuff would get smashed, but most of the time he was freakishly good at the job.

To straddle the sincere and absurd, the real and fake, was never a stretch for a man who did not resemble his straight-faced Britrock contemporaries so much as the swaggering peacocks of ’70s glam. Before his myriad quirks congealed into lovable schtick, and arena floodlights greeted Muse’s rebirth as prog-pop conspiracists, the band released a pair of fascinating LPs: 2003’s pop opus Absolution and their 2001 space odyssey, the formidable Origin of Symmetry.

Origin of Symmetry depicts life as the school-friend trio of Bellamy, bassist Chris Wolstenholme, and drummer Dom Howard saw it: a war zone where tyrant guitars and drums vie for space with balletic miniatures and stargazing synths. Muse were playing melodrama as teenage realism, an extremely, ridiculously honest noise. My sense they were overblown—that scaling the heights of psychic tumult might not require galactic pomp and an actual jetpack—would take a few years to kick in. In the meantime, I listened to Origin of Symmetry as if to a documentary. “Space dementia in your eyes/And peace will arise and tear us apart,” Bellamy sang, machines clipping his voice to a slithery alien rasp. Wow, yes, I thought, frowning seriously into my lunchbox.

Formed in the seaside town of Teignmouth, Muse signed their first deal in 1998 in Los Angeles, before amassing a giant fanbase in continental Europe. Their province back home transpired not to be London (too jaded and skeptical) but rather in pockets of smalltown and middle Britain, where latent ambition and stifled bombast can thrive among thwarted romantics. Where Is This It, released two weeks later, garnered the Strokes a coalition of hedonists and neurotics drawn to the big city, Origin of Symmetry positioned Muse as an outpost of Radiohead’s broad church of the alienated.

The album soundtracked a pipeline out of outsiderdom for suburban students and scruffy skate kids—the next generation of techno gourmands and bong-ripping metalheads, math-rock nerds and hardcore loyalists. For at least the next decade, slapdash “Plug in Baby” covers blasted from provincial pub stages, anointing a new mainstay on the popular front of radio rock. To legions of longhair disciples, Origin of Symmetry sounded a final alarm before the tractor beam of domesticity beckoned, promising annual trips to Download Fest and pet cats curled up in Korn hoodies. The album’s cult has endured not so much by converting new fans as by presenting a pungent memory box.

Muse themselves never stopped being teenagers, happiest whipping up us-versus-them screeds and epic expansions of boyish obsessions. But nor would they nail adolescence with such panache as they do on their second LP. Origin of Symmetry romanticizes a time when pop was primal, titanic, and camp. By combining goth vulnerability with sci-fi scale and hard-rock drama, it captures a paradox of young romance: On one hand, Bellamy sounds wracked with despair, but he proclaims his heartbreak with the glee of an ecstatic preacher. Origin of Symmetry’s mercurial range honors those dueling emotions: in “Space Dementia”’s barbarian opera, “Feeling Good”’s benevolent vaudeville, “Bliss”’s Nintendo-prog fantasia, “Plug in Baby”’s widdly licks.

Their radio A-list forebears were the mannered realists of kitchen-sink Britpop, whose fetish for authenticity had awakened an everyman army of Coldplays and Travises. Across the pond, grunge had transformed goofball rock into lucrative torment, unloosing a glut of disaffected Nirvana clones. Muse’s debut, Showbiz, tried the self-serious angst thing, too. But Bellamy, emboldened by nu-metal’s reign, was nudging it into the hyperbolic. He sang with real pain—Muse are ruthlessly unironic—and channeled Berlioz and Mahler, minting a sound so ludicrously over-the-top it broke the serious/piss-take binary.

Despite little retrospective attention, Showbiz had been a commercial success, outselling higher-profile late-’90s records by bands like the Offspring and Korn. From a backwater filled with “a load of old biddies” (as Wolstenholme put it), the debut had flung Muse into orbit—playing arenas with the Foos and the Chilis and prancing about at their backstage parties. As his ego played catch-up, Bellamy dubbed Showbiz “a bit faffy and bollocks.” He had reacquainted himself with the mischievous Russian composer Rachmaninoff: both traditionalists in accelerating worlds, fond of naive melodies that sweep and lurch into sudden turbulence. Inspirited, Bellamy delayed the second album sessions to dispense with faff and bollocks.

Finally, in a rural English studio abutting a field of magic mushrooms, Muse and Tool producer Dave Bottrill recorded “New Born,” “Bliss,” “Darkshines,” and “Plug in Baby”—the latter while tripping. (They wound up “naked in a jacuzzi,” with Bellamy “deaf in one ear from falling asleep in the sauna,” he told the writer Ben Myers.) The earthy energies lingered when they reunited with Showbiz producer John Leckie, who filled their studios with percussive animal bones, llama-claw necklaces, and wind chimes for ceremonial clanging, as well as introducing the band to madcap bards Tom Waits and Captain Beefheart.

By then, their songwriting had already transformed, sometimes subtly and sometimes not. The riff and chorus of “Hyper Music” could have come from the debut, but not the flirty flair of the pinball-bumper bassline, nor the playful, fuzzy jangle that drops us into the verse. The vocal production sensationalizes the falsetto that writhes loose from Bellamy’s body—his revelry in every wet gasp before he belts out another battle cry.

At the same time, amid the clamor, Bellamy oozes sensuality. He groans like a four-poster bed, elongating “ooh”s with erotic decadence. It is possible for the casual listener to imagine the frontman a meat-and-potatoes rocker, conjuring women as shallow conduits of lust and disdain. Then he tickles you with a quietly odd lyric like the ones that pepper “Bliss”:

Give me the peace and joy in your mind.

Everything about you is how I’d wanna be.

That second one in particular, innocuous as it sounds, strikes me as wonderfully offbeat. Bellamy identifies not with the conquest but with the object of desire. It is a sentiment closer to sexually ambivalent goth (as in “Why Can’t I Be You?”) than downtuned, guitar-slinging rock.

Bellamy uses operatics to act out gender transgression, albeit while taking equal relish in what makes rock machismo click. The desire to be “over-the-top,” he said in 2001, “is inside every human being on the planet, but sexism has said that that was female….None of us are embarrassed about expressing [our] feminine side.” In lyrics delivered with enough falsetto and tremolo to shatter a mirror, his submissive “Space Dementia” narrator practically begs for emasculation. “I love all the dirty tricks and twisted games you play,” he snarls, quivering with hammy deviance. The tension lies in his tightrope walk from the sub- to the super-human, balancing claims of being a lowly worm with flashes of the sublime.

Where other virtuoso bands would marry rock with opera, Muse present the two in the midst of a messy divorce. The obliterating power of “New Born” derives from the contrast between its devilish riff and its intro, the saintly piano lullaby. “Citizen Erased,” a metallic storm, concludes with a piano coda drenched in post-apocalyptic bliss. In downtime throughout the record, where others would merely solo, Bellamy ferrets away glitzy cadenzas and sanctuaries of stillness. Muse’s sadness, like their ecstasy, is always joyfully lavish.

In press around the release, an increasingly inscrutable Bellamy outed himself as a conspiracy theorist, perhaps playing the media the same way he had played the keyboard on Live & Kicking. Aliens had planted ancient star charts on tablets in Middle Eastern catacombs. The U.S. government was performing mind control with radiation and electronics. All this made his zeal for advanced science hard to parse. Pinched from the physicist Michio Kaku, Origin of Symmetry’s title alludes to an outcrop of string theory describing an apparent symmetry of matter in a mooted 11th dimension. To find its origin, as Bellamy understood it, could lead to a sort of god. In the frontman’s personal universe, the source of stability—the origin of symmetry—was the act of creating music, he said. “Plug in Baby,” then, is as much an ode to his mythic guitar as a riff on dystopian tech.

Hallucinatory themes aside, the tone of the lyrics is painfully human, laced with spite. Lies are exposed, bitterness festers, toxic relationships crumble. (Bellamy’s endless press digressions about science and tech may have been, in the end, another bit of misdirection. It sounds to me like a breakup album.) Whatever the cause, antagonism suits him. He sings best in the role of a man possessed: so wretched and pained that histrionics seize him unbidden, expelling bile from his lungs.

In the calm that falls near the album’s end, Bellamy struggles for gravitas. Finale “Megalomania” takes a big plunge into gothic balladry but slightly bungles the landing, overestimating the depth of its existential lyric and stately organ soundscape. “Feeling Good,” as made miraculous by Nina Simone, wants to meander and kick its heels but here feels overcooked, a show tune stiffened with jazz-lounge starch. For now, at least, Muse’s powers would wane the further they ventured from their trademark gaudy discord.

But for six or seven songs—before the side-B slump, before the rock monoculture collapsed and they blasted off into stadium bluster—Muse were briefly the mightiest band in the world. Origin of Symmetry’s endurance, if nothing else, humiliates their former U.S. label Maverick, which reportedly buried the record upon Bellamy’s refusal to re-record “Plug in Baby” with manlier vocals. (The band left their contract as the album hit the UK Top 3, before a belated U.S. release in 2005.)

This year’s impressive new mix and remaster, billed as the XX Anniversary RemiXX, is even more colossal and timeless. It smooths out period giveaways like “New Born”’s dustbin-lid drums and scratchy rhythm guitar, while amplifying the baroque grandeur of the irrepressibly mad “Micro Cuts.” “Space Dementia”’s puny strings become Hollywood symphonic. Bonus track “Futurism,” initially cut over fears of flubbing it live, assumes its rightful place as a second-half pick-me-up. The reissue is definitive.

“If it wasn’t for Muse,” Bellamy once said, “I think I’d be a nasty, violent person.” And if rock is the space reserved for that rage—where bottled-up people (particularly people presented as men) can reach a new emotional tenor—then he may be right: The greatest achievement of bands like Muse is preventing literal murder. To take a humbler view, Origin of Symmetry is propaganda for self-indulgence. In a precarious adolescence, music like this can awaken a brewing madness, summon it up like a haunted shipwreck from a lake and say, “Come take a look—this is actually pretty cool!” Muse’s ilk will always be saving lives in this way or that, looking to mollify teenage mania. But few insist so persuasively that the mania, too, is a gift”.

I want to come to a 2001 review from NME. It is interesting how reviews have changed through the years. In 2001, critics knew Muse as this new band that took a big leap from their debut album. Years later, we can see all the other albums they released and how important and influential Origin of Symmetry was:

“The inner sleeve of Muse’s second album contains an illustration by Darrell Gibbs depicting humans marching into a giant white cube. In tiny lettering above the door, a sign reads ‘CHAOS’. Welcome indeed to the beautiful nightmare world of the most distorting, cartoon intense, baroque’n’roll band that Britain has ever produced.

Here comes their razorblade stuffed-toy singer Matt Bellamy, hanging from the chandelier of his overblown musical ability, electrodes screwed into his brain, singing like a harpy on fire, playing the funeral mass organ with his toes. Here’s bassist Chris Wolstenholme and drummer Dominic Howard sounding like Edvard Munch’s backing band. And here unfolds the profane, expressionist, hyper-thrilling vista feared by all those hoping the band were just Radiohead with a Freddie Mercury complex.

In two years of public life Muse have accumulated a high-pressured mythology. Half a million copies of their debut ‘Showbiz’ and one iMac advert down the line, they’ve strewn a totemic trail of destroyed equipment, confessed to a taste for mushrooms, seances and Hector Berlioz’s ‘Grande Messe Des Morts’, and announced, “If I couldn’t do this I would not want to live”.

The stakes were high. Their reinvention of grunge as a neo-classical, high gothic, future rock, full of flambéd pianolas and white-knuckle electric camp, is a precarious venture. Yet as the bloody abattoir riff kicks in on ‘New Born’, colliding with Bellamy’s fairy dreamtime piano, it’s apparent that Muse can handle their brutal arias.

Almost everything on ‘Origin Of Symmetry’ is overstated, but with Matt reined in by the constraints of a dirty rock three-piece, the operatic stuff is devastatingly channelled. ‘Bliss’ is all carnage riffs and a pleasingly corrupt lyric about innocence envy. ‘Space Dementia’ sets Bellamy’s grand piano mastery up against vaulting rock. ‘Hyper Music’ burns with a genuinely new, art punk rage.

Given the ultra-vivid tones of Muse’s palette – purity, insanity, corruption, virtual consciousness, Bach, metal and barking madness – it’s not surprising they overstep their overstepping. A happy Bellamy singing (literally) to the butterflies on ‘Feeling Good’ sits oddly, and the organ fugue finale is somewhat Hammer horror, even if the track’s called ‘Megalomania’. But relentlessly, on ‘Dark Shines’, ‘Screenager’, particularly ‘Micro Cuts’ and of course ‘Plug In Baby’, they add vicious, original serrations to the hysterical edge of extreme rock. It’s amazing for such a young band to load up with a heritage that includes the darker visions of Cobain and Kafka, Mahler and The Tiger Lillies, Cronenberg and Schoenberg, and make a sexy, populist album. But Muse have carried it off. It’s their ‘Siamese Dream’. Now begins the psychoanalysis.

Thom Yorke’s least favourite word is ‘angst’; Matt Bellamy’s is about to become ‘psychotic’. We’re the lucky ones who get to look at the pretty shapes as the blood hits the wall”.

Origin of Symmetry turns twenty-five on 18th June. It remains one of Muse’s most significant and loved albums. In 2018, when ranking Muse’s studio albums, NME placed Origin of Symmetry in second: “The dedicated Muse fan’s favourite album, ‘Origin Of Symmetry’ sounded monumental when laid to rest at Reading 2011 and has a peerless first half that takes in Muse’s best singles in the shape of ‘New Born’, ‘Bliss’ and their masterpiece ‘Plug In Baby’. Initially I found it a little too sprawling and disjointed, perhaps as a result of visiting the band in the studio during the recording and finding them full of stories of making the record while whacked off their gourds on magic mushrooms. But these days I can find more coherence in the daring and adventurous triptych of ‘Micro Cuts’, ‘Screenager’ and ‘Darkshines’ and recognize ‘Citizen Erased’ as one of Muse’s greatest achievements, the centerpiece of a grand ambitious album that they probably would’ve insisted reviewers previewed while skydiving out of space, if they’d thought of it first”. In 2023, Louder also put Origin of Symmetry in second: “Well, who saw this coming? For those who had Muse pegged as timid, mannered Radiohead-copyists on the basis on Showbiz, and let's be honest, that was most of us, the band's second coming, heralded by the astonishing alt.prog thunderbolt Plug In Baby and its equally startling follow-up New Born, was nothing short of a revelation. With the handbrake off, and Matt Bellamy given free rein to indulge his wildest Queen-meets-Rage Against The Machine-meets-King Crimson fantasies, Origin Of Symmetry was an adrenaline spike slammed into the heart of the British music scene. Even better, Bellamy now talked like a proper rock star, telling this writer, “What’s big in England is mostly simplistic bollocks." Such was the singer's new-found confidence, that he cheerfully told the band's US label, Madonna's Maverick Records, to get fucked when they demanded he re-record his vocals with less falsetto. “I was pretty aware that this album was difficult to swallow compared to Showbiz and I thought we were taking a bit of a risk," he admitted, "but our success has given me the confidence to push things further. Muse would never look back”. Following the promising but indistinct Showbiz of 1999, Muse followed it up with…

A mighty revelation!

FEATURE: The Great American Songbook: Kacey Musgraves

FEATURE:

 

 

The Great American Songbook

Kacey Musgraves

__________

IT is quite timely…

putting out a feature collecting the best work from Kacey Musgraves. As she releases Middle of Nowhere on 1st May, I wanted to look back at the amazing music that she has released so far. The Texas-born artist released her acclaimed and astonishing debut album, Same Trailer Different Park, in 2013. Before I get to that playlist, I will bring in some extensive biography from AllMusic:

“An award-winning, multi-platinum singer/songwriter, Kacey Musgraves bends country tradition to her will, writing songs that evoke the sound of classic country but are infused with progressive ideas reflecting her millennial perspective. "Merry Go Round" and "Follow Your Arrow," the big singles from her 2013 major-label debut, Same Trailer Different Park, crystallized this gift and established Musgraves as a major voice in country music who could cross over to a rock audience without playing pop. By the end of the decade, she'd expanded her musical horizons so they mirrored her expansive lyrical stance, a shift showcased on the critically acclaimed 2018 album Golden Hour, which was distinguished by how she blended retro-pop affectations with atmospheric modern electronics. Golden Hour unexpectedly won the Grammy for Album of the Year in 2019, turning Musgraves into a cross-genre superstar in the process, a status she consolidated with its melancholy and stylish 2021 sequel, Star-Crossed. After a pop chart-topping duet on Zach Bryan's 2023 hit "I Remember Everything," Musgraves returned early the next year with the folky and somewhat inward-looking Deeper Well, which included the Grammy-winning single "The Architect." 2026's "Dry Spell" was the first single from her sixth LP, Middle of Nowhere.

Born and raised in the East Texas town of Golden, Kacey Musgraves began writing songs when she was just eight years old, not long after she picked up a mandolin. By 12, she knew how to play guitar and began to write her own songs, teaming with Alina Tatum as Texas Two Bits for a self-released album called Little Bit of Texas in 2000. Throughout her adolescence, she'd write, sing, and play, performing at local festivals on occasion and releasing a series of independent albums -- Movin' On (2002), Wanted: One Good Cowboy (2003), and Kacey Musgraves (2007) -- along the way.

After graduating high school, Musgraves moved to Austin, where she would sing on songwriting demos while working on music of her own. She also took a stab at the televised musical competition Nashville Star, appearing on the fifth installment of the CMT series; she was eliminated four weeks into the season, placing seventh overall. Her appearance, along with her independent recordings, eventually attracted the attention of major labels, and she signed with Mercury Nashville in 2012. By the end of the year, she had supported Lady Antebellum on tour and released a debut single, "Merry Go 'Round." In March 2013, the song peaked at number ten on Billboard's Country Airplay chart, setting up the release of her full-length debut, Same Trailer Different Park -- which also arrived that March -- quite nicely.

Produced by Shane McAnally, Luke Laird, and Musgraves, Same Trailer Different Park debuted at number two on Billboard's Top 200, earned positive reviews, and spawned two additional hit singles ("Blowin' Smoke," "Follow Your Arrow") on its way to a gold certification. The album snagged the Academy of Country Music Award for Album of the Year, and Grammy Awards for Best Country Album and Best Country Song ("Merry Go 'Round").

The success of Same Trailer Different Park helped position Musgraves as one of the hottest stars in country music, raising expectations for her second album, Pageant Material. Arriving in June 2013, the album debuted at number three on the Top 200, but the record stalled out on the country charts; its lead single, "Biscuits," peaked at number 41 on the Country Airplay chart, and "Dime Store Cowgirl" never made that chart.

Musgraves released the cheerfully retro A Very Kacey Christmas in October 2016, then set to work on her third album of original material in 2017. Produced by Daniel Tashian and Ian Fitchuk, 2018's Golden Hour boasted a sleek, modern sheen that sounded more contemporary than either of its predecessors, capturing fans in the pop and indie realms. The critically acclaimed crossover set went on to top numerous year-end lists and, in early 2019, won Album of the Year at the 61st Grammy Awards. In addition to that top honor, she also won for Best Country Album, Best Country Song ("Space Cowboy"), and Best Country Solo Performance ("Butterflies"). In the wake of her wins, "Rainbow" was pulled as the fifth single from Golden Hour; it made it to 33 on Country Airplay and 98 on the Billboard Hot 100.

At the end of 2019, Musgraves celebrated the holiday season with The Kacey Musgraves Christmas Show, a tongue-in-cheek television special for Amazon Prime that also had its audio track released as an album. The Kacey Musgraves Christmas Show album peaked at 120 on Billboard.

During 2020, Musgraves indulged in a number of cameos, appearing on American Head by the Flaming Lips and on Shape & Destroy, the second album by her husband, Ruston Kelly. The pair fell in love during the creation of Golden Hour and married in October 2017. By the time Shape & Destroy saw release in August 2020, the couple filed for divorce. Musgraves chronicled the dissolution of their marriage on Star-Crossed, the follow-up to Golden Hour. Released in September 2021, Star-Crossed found Musgraves reuniting with Ian Fitchuk and Daniel Tashian, the co-producers of Golden Hour, for a contemplative, atmospheric record that expanded upon the genre-bending aesthetic of her Grammy-winning breakthrough. It topped the country charts and reached number three on the Billboard 200. Musgraves scored another hit in 2023, dueting with Zach Bryan on his platinum-selling hit "I Remember Everything." The song won a Grammy Award for Best Country Duo/Group Performance. She also collaborated with Noah Kahan on his single "She Calls Me Back" and in early 2024 contributed a cover of Bob Marley's "Three Little Birds" to the 2024 Marley biopic One Love. During this time, she had been recording at Electric Ladyland studios with Fitchuk and Tashian, working on songs that delved into folkier, more introspective territory than in the recent past while also making space for the occasional glittering moment of modern pop. Titled Deeper Well, the record was released in March of 2024, after which she embarked on a world tour that would last throughout the year. It became her third consecutive country chart-topper and just missed the top position on the pop chart, peaking at number two. Its single, "The Architect," netted Musgraves her eighth Grammy. After offering an expanded edition called Deeper Well: Deeper Into the Well, later that year, Musgraves surprised fans in April 2025 by releasing "Sounds from the Heart of the Woods," an experimental 20-minute ambient track of tranquil guitar playing and nature sounds. She also covered the Hank Williams classic "Lost Highway." With 2026's playful "Dry Spell," Musgraves kicked off the album cycle for her sixth full-length, Middle of Nowhere, a record that incorporates classic Texas dancehall music, norteño, and Zydeco, all threaded with her A uniquely modern sensibility”.

A sensational and hugely consistent songwriter, I am excited to hear what comes from Middle of Nowhere. I am a fan of Kacey Musgraves and always look forward to new music from her. What we discover from this playlist for The Great American Songbook is that Kacey Musgraves is…

A staggering artist.

FEATURE: Who Kept the Dogs Out? Why Lambrini Girls’ Phoebe Lunny Recent Story of Harassment Raises Urgent Questions

FEATURE:

 

 

Who Kept the Dogs Out?

IN THIS PHOTO: Lambrini Girls (Phoebe Lunny, right)/PHOTO CREDIT: Jessie Morgan for Kerrang!

Why Lambrini Girls’ Phoebe Lunny Recent Story of Harassment Raises Urgent Questions

__________

THERE is a recent story…

PHOTO CREDIT: Jessie Morgan

that I think is a personal outrage and something that should never have happened, though it also raises wider questions. I want to come to the story first of all. It involved Phoebe Lunny of Lambrini Girls. NME report how she called a male musician out, or she emailed some promoters to warm them of this artist. Knowing that they should not be involved with them, instead of being thanked or that artist being blocked or not associating with promoters, she faced a harassment charged and possible jail time:

“The singer opened up about the case during an appearance on the A View From A Bridge online show, on which people share personal stories as they talk into a red telephone on a bridge somewhere in a public space. Previous guests have included Shame’s Charlie Steen, Biffy Clyro‘s Simon Neil, Cynthia Erivo, Riz Ahmed and Niall Horan.

Lunny’s episode premiered earlier today (April 20), and it saw her speak about a harassment case that was brought against her after she opted to call out a “really dodgy” male musician, but found herself being arrested and facing six months in jail.

“I was on a run, and I get a call from a blocked ID and it’s the police, and they told me that I had a harassment case against me and that I had to come into the police station to be interviewed,” Lunny began. “So obviously, I didn’t know what the fuck they were talking about, so I got in an Uber and when I got to the police station, they arrested me on the spot.”

“This happened because I took the liberty of emailing a handful of promoters, saying, ‘hey, I’ve just seen you’ve got this band on your bill, there’s a guy in it, he’s known to be really dodgy, if you want your gig to be a safe space for women, take him off the bill’.”

Lunny went on to explain that the musician found out about her actions and reported her. “I just got put in a cell, and I was just crying because I was so confused and obviously, I didn’t even think that something like that could happen from sending a couple of emails,” she continued. “Like it’s fucking insane.”

She said the case was eventually dropped, but she was made to write a letter of apology to the man as part of ‘community resolution’, stating “how I was wrong, stating that I had no idea what I was doing, and how selfish I was.”

“What I think it’s a really good example of is how even laws which are there in place to protect women can be exploited and used for a man’s benefit,” she added. “And I think this is also part of the hugely misogynistic rhetoric which is used by the manosphere, and how they are constantly whining and victimising themselves about the system being stacked up against them, and it’s women’s fault.”

“Which is bullshit, because the system is there to aid and to protect dangerous men, and what I think you see a lot, especially after that Louis Theroux documentary came out, is guys online actively condemning this misogynistic viewpoint, which is amazing and we need that, but if they could put the same amount of passion into actually advocating for women, instead of being like, ‘I’m not like him!’ – what if you actually did something about it? Instead of just letting women be the ones who have to fucking deal with it.”

“Because the system does work for men and I think there are a lot of men out there who do call themselves an ally, but if they could actually just use their privilege, that’s gonna make way more of a change than us just all kind of wagging our fingers at Andrew Tate because he’s got mummy issues.”

She suggested that practical ways that men can be better allies include “not laughing at rape jokes” and speaking to friends if they are “watching weird fucking incel videos on Discord.”

“It’s 2026 and women are still having to scream at the top of their lungs. One out of three women have been sexually assaulted or will be sexually assaulted in their lifetimes, and we’re all focusing and centering the men still,” she concluded”.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by A View, from a bridge (@aview.fromabridge)

There is a lot to unpack and unpick. You think, if the gender roles were reversed and a male artist warned promoters about a woman that they feel they should not work with, there would not be the same result. The police would not arrest that man for harassment. Instead, the woman would be cautioned and arrested. We are still very much in a time when the system is run by men for men. What Phoebe Lunny said about men being allies and how there are some appalled by misogyny but, really, in terms of being proactive and helping improve things, they do not advocate for women. The effort is put to defend themselves. Men saying they are not like others. That is one of the most common things we see now: people (usually men) saying “it’s not all men”, when we hear about sexual assault and abuse. Rather than helping make women safer, advocating and being more useful allies, they are trying to say that they are not abusers. Which is not a high bar! They are not exactly shining examples of morality and really decent people. They are saying they are not like Andrew Tate and incels. I think this is the case in the music industry. Women, artists, fans and those through the industry, facing sexual assault and misogyny. Rarely do you hear men throughout the industry that are speaking about it and doing something. Also, that idea of the law being set up for men. So when someone warns promoters of a dangerous or ‘weird’ person, they are subjected to penalty and arrest. The man walks away and nothing is done. You wonder what those promoters did. Did the man that was named in the email booked and continues to walk free?

Phoebe Lunny replied to the post after the episode (A View From A Bridge ) was shared: “Please take my experience as a reflection of the systematic issues women face daily. Thank u for all the amazing messages of support xxxx”. It is something to discuss widely. In terms of how women through every sector; in every nation and corner are not protected by the law. They will always scream for justice themselves without very much support. I have said before how music never had its #MeToo movement. Rather than that, there has been little in the way of a movement. Addressing the rise in abuse women face and how the industry is still sexist and misogynistic. I have written about it before. There are very few men in music speaking about it. As a whole, you wonder what can be done. Earlier this year, the Women and Equalities Committee chair called for change: “The Women and Equalities Committee (WEC) chair Sarah Owen MP has called for stronger legislative protections to tackle misogyny and the silencing of victims in the music industry and the creative sector in general. Owen’s letter to the Business and Trade Secretary and Culture Secretary follows the WEC’s February evidence session with Jen Smith, CEO of the Creative Industries Independent Standards Authority (CIISA), and Zelda Perkins CBE, chief executive and founder of Can’t Buy My Silence. The session was part of the Committee’s inquiry into Misogyny In Music”. So much focus still on men and men defending themselves. Nothing about the women affected. Documentaries about incels and toxic influencers but little from women and how this impacts them. In the music industry, there is still this real lack of protection, change and awareness. The government here not doing enough. Men in the industry not using their platforms and voices to call this out. There are practical ways that men can be better allies. It must be so heartbreaking and infuriating for women throughout music (and female music fans) who have to talk about their experiences and the harsh realities and nothing happens. The industry and government not doing enough. Male voices silent or a hugely small minority. We are having the same conversations every year, and yet nothing changes. As I always say when I end these features. Women throughout music…

DESERVE so much better.

FEATURE: Fourth Time Around: Bob Dylan's Blonde on Blonde at Sixty

FEATURE:

 

 

Fourth Time Around

Bob Dylan's Blonde on Blonde at Sixty

__________

IN terms of the…

definitive Bob Dylan album, is there one single that which stands out from the rest?! He is a genius who has released multiple phenomenal albums. However, many would say that Blonde on Blonde is his peak. Or the album where his songwriting genius is in every song. More so than on any other album by him. It was released on 20th June, 1966. This was a year when more than a few all-time great albums came out. The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds and The Beatles’ Revolver. It was an incredible year for music. Like The Beatles, this was an incredible run for Dylan. Not only did he release two hugely acclaimed albums in 1965 – Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited -, he followed up Blonde on Blonde with John Wesley Harding. Four very different albums but all incredible. If you had to argue which artist had the best three-album run, there is competition to say Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde and Blonde takes the honour. For years, there was confusion and contention as to the exact release date of Blonde on Blonde. 16th May became the assumed release date for a while. It changed to early-July but it has been confirmed as 20th June. Speaking with Playboy in 1978, Dylan said this of Blonde on Blonde: “The closest I ever got to the sound I hear in my mind was on individual bands in the Blonde on Blonde album. It's that thin, that wild mercury sound. It's metallic and bright gold, with whatever that conjures up”. It is almost impossible to do justice to the full brilliance of Blonde on Blonde. Its background and creation. Its legacy and influence. As it turns sixty on 20th June, I want to bring in some retrospective features and reviews. There are other features I want to get to. However, as it is paywalled and I could not get the whole article, I will source a bit of this Rolling Stone feature from 2016. Published on what was assumed to be the fiftieth anniversary – 16th May, 2016 -, Rob Sheffield was a month premature with his retrospective on this masterpiece. He discussed how “Shakespeare, Smokey Robinson and Nashville session pros fueled singer-songwriter's revolutionary double LP”:

“Blonde on Blonde is full of that “not around” chill – Dylan mixes up the Texas medicine and the railroad gin for a whole album of high-lonesome late-night dread, blues hallucinations and his bitchiest wit. Still only 24, writing songs and touring the world at a wired lunatic pace that would come crashing to a halt in a couple of months, Dylan was on a historic roll, dropping this double-vinyl epic just 14 months after going electric with Bringing It All Back Home in March 1965 and Highway 61 Revisited in August. He was moving too fast for anyone to keep up, and writing masterpieces faster than he could release them. Yet Blonde on Blonde still feels like it came out of nowhere, with a sound he never attempted again, and neither Dylan nor the rest of the world has ever quite figured out how it happened. As organist Al Kooper put it, “Nobody has ever captured the sound of 3 a.m. better than that album. Nobody, even Sinatra, gets it as good.”

If you want to argue that Blonde on Blonde isn’t as perfect as Highway 61 Revisited or Bringing It All Back Home, you may have a point. It’s a wide-ranging double album with some lightweights on Side Three and one profoundly annoying novelty song – which happens to be the leadoff track and hit single. “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35,” man – it’s like if the Beatles decided to begin Revolver with “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” or “Hello Goodbye.” But it’s his greatest album anyway, creating a sustained 68-minute spell unlike any other listening experience in rock & roll. Hearing Blonde on Blonde puts you in the position of the night watchman who clicks his flashlight at all the losers and freaks and neon madmen and wonders if it’s him or them that’s insane. In these songs, it’s probably both”.

In 2021, Guitar.com argued for the genius of Blonde on Blonde. Not that you have to make much of an argument! It is undeniable the work of a poet in full flight at the top of his game. This music maestro and revolutionary was joined by a “cast of stellar session players and completed an imperial trilogy. For many fans, it’s the ultimate Dylan record”:

“Biographer Robert Shelton wrote that Blonde On Blonde starts with a joke and ends with a hymn. Accounts differ over the order in which the songs were recorded, but McCoy believes the majestic 11-minute album closer Sad-Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands, with its streetcar visions, Arabian drums and memories of Cannery Row, came first, in the early hours of 16 February 1966. “I was playing one-handed, looking at my watch,” recalled drummer Kenny Buttrey. “It kept on and on”. It was the longest pop song ever recorded, cut in a single take, and Dylan would later proclaim it “the best I’ve ever written”.

The February sessions also yielded Visions Of Johanna and Stuck Inside Of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again, which later featured on the soundtrack to Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas. Dylan returned to Tennessee in March, these sessions culminating in a party at which everyone was encouraged to “get stoned” before recording the opening Rainy Day Women #12 & 35. “He said ‘I’m not going to do this with a bunch of straight people. We’ll send out for something’,” recalled Moss in Howard Sounes’ Down The Highway biography. The musicians, high as kites, swapped instruments and Dylan demanded the sound of a marching band, with trombonist Wayne Butler called in. Recording kicked off at midnight, Henry Strzelecki laid on the floor pushing Kooper’s organ pedals and laughing maniacally.

Mississippi blues

Announcing the album with a wonky ode to getting high was textbook uncompromising Dylan, and despite its overt drug references, when released as a single it reached No. 2 in the Billboard chart. From there, Blonde On Blonde is a bluesy masterwork, refining the blueprint established on Highway 61 Revisited. Robertson is in incendiary form throughout. He remembers the Nasvhille musicians falling silent as Dylan handed him his first opportunity, on Obviously Five Believers. “Bob and I wailed like we were at a blues bar in Mississippi,” Robertson wrote in his biography Testimony. “My extreme bending and quivering of notes wasn’t in any of these guys’ arsenals, so I wasn’t taking anybody’s job.”

The slow-shuffling Pledging My Time nods to Robert Johnson’s Come On In My Kitchen, while Most Likely You Go Your Way (And I’ll Go Mine) recalls Buddy Holly’s It Doesn’t Matter Anymore. Visions Of Johanna, with its fine opening line of “ain’t it just like the night to play tricks when you’re trying to be so quiet?” is a stunning literary love song, Kennedy playing the lead on his ES-335. One Of Us Must Know is a classic fork-tongued Dylan apology, splashed with Kooper’s swirling organ playing and jubilant piano ornamentation, bettered by the sprightly and devotional I Want You, Moss’s Chet Atkins-style intro and lyrical phrases responding to Dylan’s yearning vocal. Robertson then returns with a stinging lead part on the Chicago blues Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat, captured at the 22nd attempt.

Just Like A Woman’s “fog, amphetamine and pearls” are widely believed to refer to Edie Sedgwick, Fourth Time Around with its elegant fingerpicking in drop C tuning, is Dylan’s response to The Beatles’ Norwegian Wood, before Robertson takes his bow on Obviously Five Believers and Dylan signs off with one of the most absorbing love songs he ever crafted – Sad-Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands, written for his wife Sara Lownds. Despite stretching to an hour and 12 minutes, there isn’t a weak song on Blonde On Blonde.

“Nobody has ever captured the sound of 3am better than that album,” said Kooper after the dust had settled. Crawdaddy! editor Paul Williams called Dylan a “1960s bard with electric lyre and colour slides”. Blonde On Blonde was high art, simultaneously surreal and achingly romantic, a towering landmark in the middle of pop’s greatest decade. It reached No. 9 in the US charts and No. 3 in the UK, silencing critics who’d demured at Dylan’s electric rebirth. Melody Maker’s review was surprisingly lukewarm, underplaying a “more than competent blues rock band” and a collection that “may not be as startling as The Freewheelin’ or Highway 61 Revisited”. By 1974, NME was placing the album second in its list of the greatest records ever made. Dylan scholar Tim Riley wrote in 1999: “A sprawling abstraction of eccentric blues revisionism, Blonde On Blonde confirms Dylan’s stature as the greatest American rock presence since Elvis.”

Dylan’s first Nashville record sent a trail of bands to record in a city hitherto overlooked by musicians from both coasts. He returned for the following year’s John Wesley Harding before closing the decade with Nashville Skyline, yet while it represented a beginning in one sense, Blonde On Blonde feels more like the end of an era. One month after its release came the mythologised motorcycle accident that saw Dylan withdraw from public life and embark on a new chapter”.

Prior to coming on to a couple of reviews for Blonde on Blonde, I will source Vanity Fair and their 2016 feature on Blonde on Blonde. If an album can be considered a work of literature. Dylan did win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2016. Just over fifty years after the release of one of his greatest display of poetic brilliance and why he is an untouchable wordsmith, could a single album be seen as a great work of literary? A case for Blonde on Blonde being this great '60s novel:

“Does Bob Dylan deserve the Nobel Prize in Literature? That’s a question some casual fans and detractors are asking now that the prize has been awarded to the 75-year-old singer, songwriter, tour-horse, author, broadcaster, and inveterate shape-shifter. Dylan’s oeuvre is vast—there are entire albums that even I, a fan well on the obsessive side of the scale, have never listened to in full—but pieces of it stand out as timeless monuments, however eager some may be to dismiss them as “dad rock.” And while his stark, haunting protest songs are what vaulted him into the uncomfortable role of “Voice of a Generation,” it’s the double album Blonde on Blonde, released in 1966, that provided the fullest indication yet of what an ambitious, unruly artist he truly was.

The album is a plea, a curse, and a benediction all wrapped in one. Affection, derision, worship, and betrayal all vie for the upper hand in one sonic and poetic masterpiece after another. Fifty years after its release, it’s still hard to figure out exactly what was eating Bob Dylan when he recorded Blonde on Blonde, but it’s not hard to see why it will be remembered as one of the greatest rock ’n’ roll albums of all time. Only a 24-year-old at the top of the world could sound this precocious, this romantic, this world-weary, this incorrigible.

When Dylan and his backing band, then known as the Hawks, convened in New York for the first recording session, he had just married the model Sara Lownds. Before decamping to Nashville for additional sessions, Dylan paused for the birth of his and Sara’s first child, Jesse. But Dylan’s fraught relationship and painfully awkward breakup with Joan Baez, who had vouched for him with the folk community and helped launch him to superstardom, was not far at all in the past, nor was his complicated friendship with the troubled Warhol acolyte Edie Sedgwick.

That jumble of relationships left a tangled imprint on the lyrics on Blonde on Blonde, which veer back and forth between loving and lacerating. We know (or think we know) that “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” is about Sara (because an enraged Dylan will later say as much in the lyrics to 1976’s “Sara”), but who is the object of, say, “I Want You”? Is it a love song to Sara, or a song of lust, consummated or otherwise, aimed at Edie—or someone else entirely? 

Dylan’s wild imagination only adds to the confusion. For every clear image drawn from real life, there are a dozen animated by silly word play, absurdist scenarios, and walk-on characters worthy of Cervantes and Chaucer—or, for that matter, Jack London and the hobo memoirist Jim Tully. Even “Visions of Johanna,” which begins with cinematic specificity inside a New York apartment with coughing heat pipes and country music on the radio, eventually erupts into a mad hallucination involving a peddler, a countess, a fiddler, and a fish truck. (Those shifts in perspective make “Visions of Johanna” one of Dylan’s most famously literary songs; chances are, the Nobel committee had it in mind, along with 1975’s “Tangled Up in Blue.”)

Still, even if much of this symbolism isn’t possible to fully pin down (despite the misguided efforts of countless “Dylanologists”), it’s easy enough to get a feel for what Dylan was struggling with. There is an emotional truth to these songs, even when the literal truth keeps scurrying around the corner before you can get a good look at it. “Pledging My Time” describes taking a chance on a new relationship, despite the knowledge that the odds are stacked against success. (“Somebody got lucky / But it was an accident.”) “Leopard Skin Pillbox Hat” is a parable of sexual betrayal. (“I don’t mind him cheatin’ on me / But I sure wish he’d take that off his head.”)

“Temporary Like Achilles” and “Absolutely Sweet Marie,” like “Maggie’s Farm” before them, are about being at the mercy of a much stronger woman. (“Is your heart made out of stone, or is it lime / Or is it just solid rock?”) “Fourth Time Around” is about tormenting such a woman through sheer stubborn lousy male behavior. (“I stood there and hummed / I tapped on her drum and asked her, ‘How come?’”)

Again and again, Dylan adds layer after layer of color, plot, and character without ever fully obscuring a song’s emotional meaning. You don’t quite know what he means when he says, “Now people just get uglier and I have no sense of time,” but there’s no mistaking the import of “Your debutante just knows what you need, but I know what you want.”

And then there are the songs where Dylan lets the dealer see his cards. “One of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later)” is both boorish and weirdly tender, depicting with unflinching frankness one of those lopsided relationships that bring nothing but misery to everyone involved. The narrator isn’t in love—far from it—but he wants the person whose heart he’s breaking to know that it’s not her fault. It’s not even personal. “I didn’t mean to make you so sad / You just happened to be there, that’s all.” He describes multiple misunderstandings, one of them leading to an unexpected argument: “An’ I told you, as you clawed out my eyes / That I never meant to do you any harm.” This is charmless but recognizable behavior—the kind that rarely shows up in poetry or Hollywood movies but occurs in real life more often than we’d like to admit.

“Most Likely You’ll Go Your Way and I’ll Go Mine” tells a similar story, except this time the narrator is the one who’s in too deep. After being jerked around one too many times, he’s finally cutting bait. “You say you got some other kind of lover / And yes, I believe you do / You say my kisses are not like his / But this time I’m not gonna tell you why that is / I’m just gonna let you pass.” This, too, will strike anyone who’s spent time on the dating circuit as an entirely familiar scenario: falling for the wrong person, getting sucked in by his or her games, then forcing yourself to quit chasing that person around despite the undeniable temptation. Is Edie the object of this song? That would be my guess, but it’s hard to know.

“Just Like a Woman” sometimes feels more like a generational critique (“Nobody feels any pain”) than a first-person tale of woe, but clearly it’s rooted in some deep romantic disappointment. “But when we meet again / Introduced as friends / Please don’t let on that you knew me when / I was hungry and it was your world”—is there any human over the age of 20 who can’t relate to those words? Those same words point to Joan Baez as the target of this tune—she was, after all, the world-famous folk singer who called a largely unknown Dylan onstage during her headlining performance at the Newport Folk Festival in 1963. And anyone who’s seen D.A. Pennebaker’s documentary Don’t Look Back and witnessed Baez’s quiet agony as Dylan passive-aggressively blows her off two years later can imagine him zapping her with those lines about aching just like a woman but breaking just like a little girl.

When Blonde on Blonde was released on vinyl, it became the first double album in rock ’n’ roll history. And the entire fourth side was dedicated to “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands,” a strangely mournful ode to Dylan’s new wife whose sheer duration surprised even the band. (“I mean, we peaked five minutes ago. Where do we go from here?” drummer Kenny Buttrey later remembered thinking.) Of all the songs on the album, this one hides its meaning most thoroughly, burying whatever real-world scenario that may have inspired it under an avalanche of hallucinogenic images, from “The kings of Tyrus with their convict list” to “Your sheet-metal memory of Cannery Row.” Even the chorus is willfully opaque: “My warehouse eyes, my Arabian drums / Should I leave them by your gate / Or, sad-eyed lady, should I wait?” It doesn’t have quite the same ring as the Clash’s “Should I stay or should I go?,” but after five or six repetitions, you start to understand what he means.

Writing for the aptly named Highbrow Magazine in 2012, Benjamin Wright cites the cultural critic Ellen Willis’s theory that Dylan’s operating principle is taken from the French symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud: “Je est un autre.” “I am another.” Dylan is constantly playing hide-and-seek with his own image, his own legend, the expectations he himself has set. It’s an emphatically literary way to approach writing and life. The poet William Butler Yeats espoused a “Doctrine of the Mask,” whereby a poem should project the opposite of the poet’s personality. The work is better that way, he believed, and he was probably right”.

It is worth finishing off with some reviews for this flawless album. The greatest double album ever? I would argue that it is Kate Bush’s Aerial (2005), though that might be biased! However, Bob Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde is a towering masterpiece that has lost none of its incredible power. I have used that sentence when speaking about a few albums. However, it is the best way to describe what I need to say. Boundless genius? Hard exactly to put into words, so do forgive me! It is hard to find that many critical reviews online for Blonde on Blonde. Ones that you can access and read! However, in 2015, In Review Online provided an interesting take on the magisterial Blonde on Blonde:

“The boozy, bloozy, cacophonous conclusion to Bob Dylan’s mid-60s “electric” trilogy, Blonde on Blonde feels every bit the culmination of…something. A wild fever dream of an album, owing as much to Fellini and T.S. Eliot as to Woody and Leadbelly, it’s the sound of Dylan’s imagination pushed to the edge, perhaps even to a breaking point. The record sounds so unencumbered, so liberated, so kinetic in its energy that it’s difficult to imagine how the man could have pushed this particular sound any further; better to leave everything he had on wax and then change directions completely for the follow-up, the spare and economical John Wesley Harding. But if Blonde on Blonde represents the end of something, it also stands very much as its own world of endless possibilities, each song representing a particular rabbit trail Bob might have followed. Taken together, these songs have an effect that is initially bewildering, ultimately intoxicating, and completely paradigm-shifting. Even following the course-altering creativity of Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited, Blonde on Blonde still shocks; still rocks and rolls with a swagger that sounds like it ought not be allowed; still feels, even after all these years, like Dylan’s getting away with something, and he knows it.

The record sounds so unencumbered, so liberated, so kinetic in its energy that it’s difficult to imagine how the man could have pushed this particular sound any further

Part of the shock comes from the sound of the record, which is thick and hazy, the edges blurring together; it has more heft to it than either of the previous albums, more density than anything Dylan ever made. Its density is not impenetrable, even if it is initially overwhelming, and — working largely with Nashville session cats, their professionalism grounding Dylan’s flights of fancy — the record shakes, swings, and rumbles with more verve and vigor than anything Dylan ever made. Its garage rock mayhem is rooted in country-blues but not particularly reverential to it. The songs perfect everything Dylan tried to do with his electric albums; they are elliptical but not elusive, open to interpretation but never aloof or alienating; no one but Bob could so handily channel universal experiences through such idiosyncratic imagery, such dense and layered poetry. “I Want You” is a blur of pictures, lovestruck and dizzy, but the chorus is simple and precise: “Honey, I want you.” The naked desire in its refrain is made all the more potent by the harried storytelling in the verses. “Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again” is a tipsy account of bewildered homesickness, evoking a disorientation that eludes linear description. You could almost imagine the song flying off the rails, were it not for the nimble, in-the-pocket rhythm section. “Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat” seethes and snarls with indignation, though the narrator sounds like he’s rather enjoying his own condescension, his anger turned to bemused pity. It’s not the only blues song here — “Pledging My Time” sounds like it just stomped out of the juke joint. There are quieter moments, too, but none are as simple as they first seem. “4th Time Around” is quiet but prickly; “Just Like a Woman” has been covered many times over, sometimes sounding romantic and sometimes sounding condescending, but Bob’s own reading is perfectly open-ended; and “Visions of Johanna” may be the album’s true masterpiece. The opening line is gloriously mysterious: “Ain’t it just like the night to play tricks when you’re trying to be so quiet?” Then for seven minutes the narrator rhapsodizes about the most wonderful-sounding woman, though if you’re really paying attention you’ll note that’s not even who he’s so crazy about. It’s still kind of amazing to hear him get away with it”.

I will end with this review from the BBC and their words about not only one of the best albums of the 1960s. There is a lot of weight behind the view that Blonde on Blonde is among the greatest ever released. Bob Dylan responsible for more than one album that you can say that of. His 1966 double album is hugely influential. One that cemented him as a cultural icon:

“The world is divided into those who think double albums are a really only single albums weighed down by too much filler and the over-indulgence of their creators, and those who treasure every minute, revering the range afforded by the extra space the format provides. As someone who has yet to hear a double album that couldn’t be trimmed to single figures, I confess a bias when it comes to Blonde On Blonde. Regularly spied in orbit around heavenly bodies such as Pet Sounds, Revolver in those stellar “best album ever” lists, side one is a golden run of songs that are about as perfect as you could want.

Even a cursory glance at the highlights would be enough to confirm this first disc’s classic status: the rambunctious stomp of “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35”, the shrill punctuation of Dylan’s harp on the surly rant of “Pledging My Time”, a riotous neck-wrung blues soloing on “Leopard Skin Pill-Box Hat”, opulent, elegiac verses on “Visions Of Johanna”, the popish affectations and beautiful detail of “I Want You” and “Just Like A Woman.”

Consolidating what he’d begun on Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited, the recording of Blonde On Blonde was part of an intense, fertile outpouring for Dylan. One can understand why Dylan and producer Bob Johnston were keen to present as much of it as they could. As a result however, the taut energy of the first disc become somewhat elasticised across the second, “Sad Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands”, whose eleven minute length even caught the backing musicians by surprise, being the chief culprit. Of course one person’s prolix poetry is another’s visionary epic.

One point which both sceptics and believers can all agree on however is the extent to which Dylan is utterly at ease with himself here. Credit also, should go to the crew backing him up. And if their backing is at times a little hurried or patchy, the improvisatory nature of their trying to keep up with the man at the microphone is also a part of this album’s overall charm”.

20th June marks sixty years of Blonde on Blonde. Almost like this great work of literature, you are immersed and invested in this phenomenal album. I can only imagine what those people who bought the album in 1966 thought! Knowing the lyrical wonder of Bob Dylan, it ascended to new heights on Blonde on Blonde. In a year that produced a few all-time works of genius. Blonde on Blonde possibly the...

FINEST of them all.

FEATURE: Flyin’ High (In the Friendly Sky): Marvin Gaye's What's Going On at Fifty-Five

FEATURE:

 

 

Flyin’ High (In the Friendly Sky)

Marvin Gaye's What's Going On at Fifty-Five

__________

MAYBE people don’t feel…

that Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On is a concept album. The narrative is told from the point of view of a Vietnam veteran returning to his home country to witness hatred, suffering, and injustice. It is staggering to think the Vietnam War lasted for twenty years. Running from 1955-1977, it must have been such a frightening time in history. Pitting North Vietnam (backed by communist allies) against South Vietnam (backed by the U.S. and allies), the conflict ended with the fall of Saigon. Around the time of the release of What’s Going On, hatred, racism and violence in the U.S. A turbulent time abroad and at home, Marvin Gaye asking for peace and understanding. Gaye also talking about the destruction of the environment too. An album with a social and moral compass that is striking and relevant today, What’s Going On is one of the most important albums ever released. People talk about What’s Going On, Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology) and Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler), yet I don’t think we discuss Flyin' High (In the Friendly Sky), Right On or Wholy Holy. Such deep and thought-provoking songs. Moving and extraordinary powerful, I wants to mark fifty-five years of What’s Going On. Released on 21st May, 1971, this landmark recording should be taught in classes. Marvin Gaye raises awareness of the climate energy. Drug abuse, racism, prejudice and corruption, What’s Going On, sadly, applies a lot to modern-day America. Wars and violence raging. A dictatorship and terrorist, Gaye would have been eighty-seven if he had lived. He sadly died in 1984. What is the impact of the genius What’s Going On? In a post-pandemic world where there is a monster in the U.S., murder in the streets and inept governments around the world, it is debatable What’s Going On is more appropriate and timely than it was in 1971. Steve Pafford addressed and assessed What’s Going On earlier this year:

“It goes without saying that Gaye’s social consciousness should not be downplayed, either; it should, in fact, be celebrated, for its relative novelty at the time and for the musical skill with which he advanced it. What’s Going On was the first long-player after Sly And The Family Stone’s Stand! to attempt to challenge and illuminate the political mood of the era.

And a disturbing update on the state of things as it was. The candid blend of sorrow and awareness of injustice gave the set an invigorating sense of immediacy. But coming as it did a few long hard years after the ‘love’ movement had peaked and deflated in the face of ongoing indifference and hostility, it has an understandably mournful tone.

One gets the overriding sense that a spirit as seemingly resilient as a cash-cow “celebrity” like Marvin Gaye’s can crumble in the face of encroaching urban despair. But it would be a mistake to interpret What’s Going On as simply an angry cry from the inner city. It is that, aye, but also much more: a truly heartfelt cry for compassion, for sympathy, for common understanding, and, above all, for love. Indeed, it’s all over the album, kicking off on the immortal title track, where Gaye practically begs, “We have got to find a way/to bring some loving here today.”

The soldier, struggling to find work for himself, nonetheless finds time to look at the chaos around him and ask, “When will people start getting together again?” As the world has weathered isolation, inequality and endless political protest, it’s a question that feels enormously resonant right now.

Marvin may have departed to that great Hitsville in the sky, but What’s Going On has only gained in stature since its release, and remains largely untouched in the canon of great pop landmarks. When Rolling Stone asked “271 artists, producers, industry executives and journalists to pick the greatest albums of all time” in 2003, What’s Going On landed at number six, making it the only entry by an African-American artist to crack the top ten. Then in 2020 the same magazine declared What’s Going On was actually the best album of all time. Of course, rankings are entirely subjective but it’s hard to deny its immense lyrical and musical merit, not to mention its constant political and cultural relevance.

And guess what? America is still in a hard place, as is the world. It can often seem crass, cruel and pitiless, and much of our struggles seem to have arisen from the feeling that too few of Marvin Gaye’s concerns have been addressed in 55 years. We could use some of the things he called for today. With a little luck, and a little lurve, maybe the Master could still help us get through to better things to come”.

I am ending with reviews for What’s Going On. The first feature talked about the modern relevance of What’s Going On. In terms of its political and social messages, it was so urgent and eye-opening in 1971. However, have we learned lessons from what Marvin Gaye was singing about?! If anything, we have gone backwards. Not only was Gaye innovating in terms of his lyrics and the power of is vocals. What’s Going On changed the face of R&B, as Variety wrote in 2021:

“At the beginning of the 1970s, mainstream Black music was a massive singles scene. A handful of Motown acts, including the Supremes and the Temptations, had managed to score Top 10 albums during the ‘60s, but with the exception of Aretha Franklin’s Atlantic Records releases post-“Respect” and Ray Charles’ run of early ‘60s hits on ABC, Black artists weren’t typically creating classic album-length artistic statements on par with The Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” and Bob Dylan’s “Blonde on Blonde.”

Then along came Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On,” a 1971 game-changer that turns 50 on May 21. It would become the first Top 10 LP for Gaye, a major recording artist who’d had many hit singles but hadn’t reached higher than number 33 on the Top 200 album chart. In one fell swoop, it completed his transition from Motown heartthrob to the poet of soul music while helping to reshape the entire genre. The album was unlike anything previously released by a Black superstar: Written and produced by Gaye (a first for any Motown artist not named Smokey Robinson) and clocking in at just over 35 minutes, it secured his spot as one of music’s leading Black auteurs of the decade.

He wasn’t the first Black artist to produce challenging music after assuming complete creative control — James Brown had done it and so had former Impressions leader Curtis Mayfield — but Gaye, who butted heads hard with Motown in order to pursue a new artistic direction (he was signed to the Motown imprint Tamla), was the first to do it with such a thematically and musically cohesive statement. The nine tracks on “What’s Going On” are connected without pauses, like a stream-of-consciousness contemplation. These aren’t catchy three-minute pop confections but rather, songs with the musical sophistication of a classical suite, featuring strings, woodwinds, lyrical and musical motifs, and experimental production that blended psychedelic soul with a Phil Spector-ish wall of sound.

Inspired by social unrest in the U.S. and his brother’s three-year stint fighting in Vietnam, “What’s Going On” — whose title is a pointed statement, not a question — wasn’t just a smooth soul crooner arbitrarily taking a sharp left turn into social consciousness. If he had wanted to, Gaye probably could have spent years coasting on the 1968 success of “I Heard It Through the Grapevine,” a chart-topping smash that, at one point, was Motown’s best-selling single of all time. That probably would have helped Motown head Berry Gordy, who has said that he was “terrified” when Gaye first said he wanted to make a “protest album,” sleep easier at night.

But instead of caving to creative expectations, Gaye decided to challenge himself and his audience by embarking on a stunning music reinvention that rivaled what The Beatles had done a half-decade earlier with “Rubber Soul.” Gaye, who had once harbored aspirations to be the Black Frank Sinatra, thoroughly transformed his sound and image, creating a new chameleonic musical persona that would carry him through the ‘70s. From “What’s Going On” to “Let’s Get It On” to “I Want You” to “Here, My Dear,” no Gaye album would sound quite like the one that preceded it.

In addition to repositioning and rebranding Gaye decades before “rebranding” became a thing, “What’s Going On” blended the political and the religious in a way no singer had managed to do since Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come” seven years earlier. Looking both inward and outward, Gaye ventured into areas like social justice, environmental awareness, drug addiction, war, and faith. The singles “What’s Going On,” “Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler),” and “Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology)” all went Top 10, while “Wholy Holy,” became an enduring inspirational classic. Aretha Franklin covered it the following year on her landmark gospel album “Amazing Grace,” and one week before the 50th birthday of “What’s Going On,” “Wholy Holy” turned up in the third episode of “Moonlight” director Barry Jenkins’ new Amazon Prime miniseries “The Underground Railroad.”

“What’s Going On” wasn’t just a singular artistic achievement; it opened up other Black artists (and some White ones) to new creative possibilities. Later the same year, Isaac Hayes dropped “Black Moses” and Sly and the Family Stone released their own most-enduring musical statement, “There’s a Riot Goin’ On,” an album whose title was directly inspired by “What’s Going On.” John Lennon recorded “Imagine” about a week after the release of “What’s Going On,” and although the former Beatle had already been tackling political themes in his solo work, it’s easy to imagine him being influenced and inspired by Gaye’s foray into social consciousness”.

Of course, there was a lot of examination of What’s Going On in 2021, on its fiftieth anniversary. Every time we mark a big anniversary for this album, we talk about the brilliance of the music, but also how we should have addressed concerns Marvin Gaye tackled. He meant every word on that album and you could tell how angry he was. Why, fifty-five years after its release, have we learned so little from this opus?! We do need to look around and ask why such senselessness and ignorance rules the world. How we need to overturn and overthrow. However, as he preaches non-violence, how easy is it to quickly change the system and the modern world without violence? Are we always doomed to repeat the mistakes of history? What’s Going On will teach generations of where we were and how things need to change. The Guardian also noted how this masterpiece cuts as hard today as it did when it was released:

“No one is wrong, of course, to say that Gaye’s album cuts as deeply today as it did in 1971. A divinely inspired work driven by social rage – one that braided doo-wop harmonies, jazz and the hymns Gaye had loved as a child – What’s Going On was also Gaye’s declaration of creative independence from Berry Gordy’s Motown machine. After a decade of polished pop hits, Gaye, now in his early 30s, revealed there was a lot on his mind: the outrage of the war in Vietnam (What’s Happening Brother?); the strangulation of the natural world (Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology)); the strategic enforcement of urban poverty and police violence (Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler)). The insurgent subject matter was accompanied by a change in Gaye’s personal style: he stopped wearing ties and grew a beard. “Black men weren’t supposed to look overtly masculine,” he told his biographer David Ritz: “I’d spent my entire career looking harmless, and the look no longer fit. I wasn’t harmless. I was pissed at America.”

What’s Going On remains vital, above all, for how it turns away from that “America” and instead addresses the title question to a closer-knit group – those people gathered at the house party Gaye stages in the album’s opening moments; the “mother, mother” and “father father” he calls out to (and that the party setting might embolden him to candidly address). “Are things getting better like the newspapers say?” the speaker asks in What’s Happening Brother?, checking the claims of those in power against the authority of everyday Black people.

It is one thing to celebrate Gaye’s enduring and prescient mode of creation; another to applaud the continued resonance of his album’s concerns. We should not be sanguine, for instance, that Gaye’s understated blues critique of “trigger-happy policing” has stayed so relevant; or that anti-Black violence has so persisted over the last 50 years that it remains necessary for Black artists and everyday people to approach the task of surviving and thriving in America with the energy, elegance and grace that Gaye modelled in this landmark work. He might have hoped it would be more occasional, that his efforts might by now appear more dated. This, in any case, is the impression I get when watching Gaye introduce the title track at the Montreux jazz festival in the summer of 1980. Maybe he was tired – it was the last song of a long set – but the 40-year-old Gaye, in his frilled white shirt and sequinned red suit jacket, appears to not just work the crowd but pander to it with some contempt: “This was our very first No 1 record ever in the world, ladies and gentlemen. We were so proud. Thanks to you – you made it so. Hope you still enjoy it!”

He would be dead just four years later, shot by his own father in his parents’ house in Los Angeles. In the decades since, Black artists have continued to treat the lasting relevance of What’s Going On as both problem and promise. “I’m tired of Marvin askin’ me what’s going on,” Janelle Monáe sings in her 2013 track QUEEN.

This is precisely the kind of galvanising work that Gaye was doing with What’s Going On, for his own people in his own time – a historical point that is often obscured when we fixate on the record’s timelessness. Gaye’s critique of the Vietnam war, for example, which was informed by his brother Frankie’s experiences of the conflict, was disarmingly distinctive. So, too, was Gaye’s growing maturity, in which Black fans heard both his commitment to Black life and their own potential. “Beyond the brilliance of the string arrangements and the improvised basslines by James Jamerson, he was making power moves to give us what we needed,” music historian Rickey Vincent recently told me. “It was motivation music. Because we could tell Marvin was motivated.”

Vincent sees Gaye’s actions as “the driving force” behind Stevie Wonder’s political turn at Motown, as well as the rigorous funk of Sly and the Family Stone and the righteous soul of Aretha Franklin’s 1972 album Young, Gifted and Black. These stars, along with countless session musicians, were “doing their best work ever at this crucial moment in time” – setting the standard, in the case of Gaye and his collaborator David Van De Pitte’s meticulous string, conga, bass and vocal arrangements – for what Vincent calls “soul music as high art”.

To be sure, What’s Going On is an impeccably composed suite. Sonic recurrences are choreographed across the course of the LP: “What’s happening, brother?” one man asks another in the opening moments – a query that becomes the title of the next track, where the first song’s background harmony emerges as the foreground melody. But there is also a sense in which the sounds remain jarring and strange. So-called “timely” music often arrives before you know you need it, and is in that sense quite untimely: outrageous, out of joint, ill-fitting. Listen to how Gaye cranks the volume back up just as the title track starts to fade out – a sign of resilience as well as a petty refusal to let a track that Gordy hated end without a fight. Or how one man in the opening party scene greets another and then asks, “What’s your name?” Here is a conviviality you make just by showing up, where you don’t have to know someone to be glad they came.

What I listen for now are moments like these, which, despite repeated plays, cover versions and samples of Gaye’s songs, still sound discordant and unresolved. There are the searching chromatics of Save the Children: “Live life for the children! (oh, for the children),” Gaye sings, making his way up a haunting and halting musical scale, as if toward a future just out of reach. In this portion of the record, timing and melody come unmoored, as Gaye makes room for hard, even despairing questions: is it possible to “save a world that is destined to die?”.

Prior to getting to a couple of reviews, I did want to get to a 1971 interview between Marvin Gaye and Phil Symes from Disc and Music Echo. It ends on a sad note. Marvin Gaye told how he would not work with female singers again as he was so affected by the death of Tammi Terrell (she died in 1970 at the age of twenty-four). Gaye ended by saying, “But I won't be doing any more interviews”:

“Disc called Gaye's Detroit home, caught him halfway through a hamburger and a new song, and he agreed to break his lengthy silence to talk about his career, which is on the up again following the success of What's Going On. He quashed rumours that he'd quit, explained why he's been hiding out for three years, and what he's been doing.

"It wasn't a case of being big-headed or temperamental that kept me from doing interviews during the last three years. I was terribly disillusioned with a lot of things in life and life in general, and decided to take time out to try to do something about it.

"In a sense the rumours suggesting I had quit were true; I had retired, but only from the personal-appearance end. I did that because I had always felt conspicuous onstage and I'm not the sort of person who likes to be an exhibitionist.

"I spent the three years writing, producing and reflecting. Reflecting upon life and upon America especially – because that's where I live – its injustices, its evils and its goods.

"Not that I'm a radical – I think of myself as a very middle-of-the-road sort of person with a good sense of judgment. I think if I had to choose another profession I'd like to be a judge because I'm very capable of determining what's right and what's not."

The main result of his period of semi-retirement was the single What's Going On and an album of the same title.

"The album and single show the sort of emotion and personal feelings I have about the situations in America and the world. I think I've got a real love thing going. I love people, I love life and I love nature and I can't see why other people can't be like that.

"I can remember as a child I always kept myself to myself and I always dug nature. I used to fool around with worms, beetles and birds, and I used to admire them while the other kids were playing sports. It was like some strange force made me more aware of nature. Those kids playing sports were also showing love – love for sport. And if we could integrate all types of love into one sphere we'd have it made."

Marvin's genuine love for his fellow man was the reason behind his recording of Abraham, Martin And John, which was a British hit last July. So totally uninvolved with the music scene is Marvin that he didn't even know until Disc told him during this conversation that Abraham, Martin And John had been a single here, let alone a hit!

"The people over there dug that? Hey man, I didn't know that. I'm glad because I really dig it over in Britain. The last time I was there was five, maybe six years ago and my visit was probably one of the more memorable experiences of my life. I love Britain.

"Nobody told me that song was a hit. And I don't go around seeking out news like that; I don't get the charts or anything. To me it's so commercialised and that's not where my head is. It doesn't matter to me whether people dig my stuff or not."

However, despite that statement he does have positive feelings about the recent American success of What's Going On.

"I feel very good about it. I wasn't sure what would happen to it. But I don't feel good for myself – I didn't have much to do with the song; I feel it all came from God. He drew me into it."

He speaks of his new album in the same way – "I musn't get into ego tripping, because I didn't have much to do with it. But I'm only human and when you get a lot of pats on the back for something it makes you go on trips. I was only the instrument in the album – all the inspiration came from God himself. It's one that should be listened to.

"The material is social commentary but there's nothing extreme on it. I did it not only to help humanity but to help me as well, and I think it has. It's given me a certain amount of peace."

Following his return to the charts, Marvin has been forced to think again about his retirement from personal appearances, but he's resolute and won't appear on stage again – in America.

"But I'd certainly consider a European tour. I'd love to come back some day and say hi to the people, see the country and groove there. It's been a long time and I'm beginning to feel like an old man. I feel that people in Europe are different from Americans – I think your soul is a little deeper. What a helluva thing I'm saying! There you seem to understand my blackness, my forcefulness and my earthiness. I feel you understand and I get the vibration that you care a little more."

Marvin approaches his career with a disarming take-it-or-leave-it attitude. He will admit he only released What's Going On because "there seemed to be nothing else to do. My life, destiny and fate weren't pointing in any direction, so I thought maybe that would bring it all together a little more."

He has no plans for the future – "I don't have any plans at all. I never plan anything. I never have and I never will”.

The fact that some of that disillusion and influence On What’s Going On stemmed from Terrell's death. How Marvin Gaye never got over it. The first review I want to bring in is AllMusic and their high praise. I wonder whether an artist who would ever release an album like this today. You feel like this is a gap in music. Soul, R&B and Rap artists not tackling these themes as much as they should:

“What's Going On is not only Marvin Gaye's masterpiece, it's the most important and passionate record to come out of soul music, delivered by one of its finest voices, a man finally free to speak his mind and so move from R&B sex symbol to true recording artist. With What's Going On, Gaye meditated on what had happened to the American dream of the past -- as it related to urban decay, environmental woes, military turbulence, police brutality, unemployment, and poverty. These feelings had been bubbling up between 1967 and 1970, during which he felt increasingly caged by Motown's behind-the-times hit machine and restrained from expressing himself seriously through his music. Finally, late in 1970, Gaye decided to record a song that the Four Tops' Obie Benson had brought him, "What's Going On." When Berry Gordy decided not to issue the single, deeming it uncommercial, Gaye refused to record any more material until he relented. Confirmed by its tremendous commercial success in January 1971, he recorded the rest of the album over ten days in March, and Motown released it in late May. Besides cementing Marvin Gaye as one of the most important artists in pop music, What's Going On was far and away the best full-length to issue from the singles-dominated Motown factory, and arguably the best soul album of all time.

Conceived as a statement from the viewpoint of a Vietnam veteran (Gaye's brother Frankie had returned from a three-year hitch in 1967), What's Going On isn't just the question of a baffled soldier returning home to a strange place, but a promise that listeners would be informed by what they heard (that missing question mark in the title certainly wasn't a typo). Instead of releasing listeners from their troubles, as so many of his singles had in the past, Gaye used the album to reflect on the climate of the early '70s, rife with civil unrest, drug abuse, abandoned children, and the spectre of riots in the near past. Alternately depressed and hopeful, angry and jubilant, Gaye saved the most sublime, deeply inspired performances of his career for "Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology)," "Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler)," and "Save the Children." The songs and performances, however, furnished only half of a revolution; little could've been accomplished with the Motown sound of previous Marvin Gaye hits like "Stubborn Kind of Fellow" and "Hitch Hike" or even "I Heard It Through the Grapevine." What's Going On, as he conceived and produced it, was like no other record heard before it: languid, dark, and jazzy, a series of relaxed grooves with a heavy bottom, filled by thick basslines along with bongos, conga, and other percussion. Fortunately, this aesthetic fit in perfectly with the style of longtime Motown session men like bassist James Jamerson and guitarist Joe Messina. When the Funk Brothers were, for once, allowed the opportunity to work in relaxed, open proceedings, they produced the best work of their careers (and indeed, they recognized its importance before any of the Motown executives). Bob Babbitt's playing on "Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler)" functions as the low-end foundation but also its melodic hook, while an improvisatory jam by Eli Fountain on alto sax furnished the album's opening flourish. (Much credit goes to Gaye himself for seizing on these often tossed-off lines as precious; indeed, he spent more time down in the Snakepit than he did in the control room.) Just as he'd hoped it would be, What's Going On was Marvin Gaye's masterwork, the most perfect expression of an artist's hope, anger, and concern ever recorded”.

I am going to finish with Uncut. In 2021, they reviewed a fiftieth anniversary vinyl reissue of What’s Going On. The only thing that doesn’t change is the lack of change. That is the most sobering, angering and baffling aspect. How we react to an album like this but those in power do not take stock and rethink. The world goes on as it always has. Music does have the power to change things, though perhaps not as big as violence, corruption and abuse. The men in power putting their own desires, ego and aims above the people they serve:

“The urgency of that deadline feeds into the record. The album plays like a deep dive into the themes of the title track, mining Gaye’s malaise. It glides from beginning to end. It grooves. Arguing for its significance, the critic Nelson George compared it to Sgt Pepper, but that is more a matter of canonical significance than musical style. The Beatles never approached the intense spirituality achieved by Gaye on What’s Going On.

The flow of the album also disguises its extremities. The conversational call and response of “Save The Children” is gently rendered. The singer sounds almost defeated, until strings and sax usher in his cries of “Save the babies!/Save the babies!” Such is the mesmeric quality of the music that the apocalyptic tone of the lyrics seems incidental, but Gaye is mired in biblical pestilence. “There’ll come a time when the world won’t be singing,” he croons, “flowers won’t grow… bells won’t be ringing”.

Without Gaye’s vocal command, such sentiments might sound cranky, but relief comes quickly in “God Is Love”. The album returns to earth with “Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology)”, a solo composition by Gaye which describes a world of polluted air and poisoned seas, of overpopulation and radiation. Musically the celestial sweetness is foregrounded, while the turbulence of the saxophones offers a disturbing undertone, and the song ends with a psychedelic whimper. “Right On” takes the mood forward, though its roll call of contradictions (peace versus hatred, “enjoying ourselves” versus drowning in “the sea of happiness”) is given full expression before Gaye offers resolution with a vision of pure love which is, by the sound of his voice, both a sexual and an ecumenical matter. The album closes with the sublime “Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler)” with lyrics about the “have-nots” written by James Nyx, who also worked as a janitor in Motown’s offices. Nyx was inspired by a newspaper headline about the troubles of inner city Detroit, and when paired with Gaye’s sublime melody the song offers some relief in its crisp expression of political grievance, before giving way to a final reprise of the title track.

As an LP, What’s Going On is perfect. It is both sublimely mellow and full of jagged extremes. The urge to pull it apart and appreciate the mechanics of its peculiar subtleties is understandable. This vinyl edition adds an extra LP: a side of mono singles and B-sides, and four bonus tracks, three of which offer different mixes of “What’s Going On”. There is an unplugged intimacy when the horns and strings are removed, but when Gaye’s voice is absent, so is the song’s soul. The ‘stripped’ version of the song is previously unreleased and sits alongside “Symphony (Demo)” as a means of scratching into the lush surface of Gaye’s masterpiece. Reduced to a voice and the minimum of finger-snapping percussion, the religiosity of the singing is clear. Instructive as it is, ultimately the track is no more than half of a sandwich. “Symphony” appeared on the deluxe version of Let’s Get It On, but the improvised lyrics find Gaye still under the spell of What’s Going On. There is no great harm in these small acts of vandalism, but the adding and subtracting doesn’t achieve a great deal precisely because the original album is a carefully constructed collage of contradictions. The personal is political, the sense of history is eternal, Gaye’s analysis of world affairs is as depressing as his prescription is uplifting. Nothing has changed. Everything is the same, especially the need for change”.

It is so sort of strange celebrating an album like What’s Going On. It almost seems like a betrayal! Marvin Gaye wanted change and the world to take notice. However, fifty-five years after his eleventh studio album was released, what have we actually achieved? The same things he was crying out for us to stop are still going on. If ordinary people have absorbed his messages, those in power clearly have not. This far after 1971, you wonder whether they…

EVER will.

FEATURE: Some Grey and White Matter: Kate Bush’s Sat in Your Lap at Forty-Five

FEATURE:

 

 

Some Grey and White Matter

Kate Bush’s Sat in Your Lap at Forty-Five

__________

EVEN if I have written…

about this song a bit recently, I need to come back to it, so forgive any repeats when it comes to information included. However, on 21st June, Kate Bush’s Sat in Your Lap turns forty-five. This is such an important song in her career. For a little background, Never for Ever was released in September 1980. That was her third studio album. Many expecting Bush to release an album soon after. It would be September 1982 when Kate Bush put out The Dreaming. Even though it is only two years, I feel there was pressure from EMI that she would follow up a number-one album with something sooner. That is not how inspiration works! Today, I do think that artists – especially major ones – are expected to put music out constantly. I guess Bush would have wanted music to arrive before 1982. Though she did get struck by inspiration and released this amazing single out on 21st June, 1981. Amazing that there was a gap of over fourteen months between Sat in Your Lap and The Dreaming! Sat in Your Lap is one of the most percussive-driven songs Bush ever released. It departed from Never for Ever and it gave a window into what The Dreaming would contain. Is Sat in Your Lap the most radio-friendly or commercial song on The Dreaming? It was successful as a single and reached eleven in the U.K. I will come to its amazing music video. It is worth dropping this archive from the Kate Bush Club Newsletter of October 1982. A music icon that kickstarted inspiration during a bit of a dry spell for Kate Bush:

“I already had the piano patterns, but they didn’t turn into a song until the night after I’d been to see a Stevie Wonder gig. Inspired by the feeling of his music, I set a rhythm on theRolandand worked in the piano riff to the high-hat and snare. I now had a verse and a tune to go over it but only a few lyrics like “I see the people working”, “I want to be a lawyer,” and “I want to be a scholar,” so the rest of the lyrics became “na-na-na”‘ or words that happened to come into my head. I had some chords for the chorus with the idea of a vocal being ad-libbed later. The rhythm box and piano were put down, and then we recorded the backing vocals. “Some say that knowledge is…” Next we put down the lead vocal in the verses and spent a few minutes getting some lines worked out before recording the chorus voice. I saw this vocal being sung from high on a hill on a windy day. The fool on the hill, the king of the castle… “I must admit, just when I think I’m king.”
The idea of the demos was to try and put everything down as quickly as possible. Next came the brass. The CS80 is still my favourite synthesizer next to the Fairlight, and as it was all that was available at the time, I started to find a brass sound. In minutes I found a brass section starting to happen, and I worked out an arrangement. We put the brass down and we were ready to mix the demo.
I was never to get that CS80 brass to sound the same again – it’s always the way. At The Townhouse the same approach was taken to record the master of the track. We put down a track of the rhythm box to be replaced by drums, recording the piano at the same time. As I was producing, I would ask the engineer to put the piano sound on tape so I could refer to that for required changes. This was the quickest of all the tracks to be completed, and was also one of the few songs to remain contained on one twenty-four track tape instead of two!

Kate Bush Club newsletter, October 1982”.

Among the many things to admire about Sat in Your Lap is the musicians. Preston Heyman and Paddy Bush dealing with percussion and sticks. I really love the backing vocals from Ian Bairnson, Gary Hurst, Stewart Arnold and Paddy Bush. Kate Bush on piano and Fairlight CMI. It is this wonderful blend of sounds. Kate Bush producing the song. That idea of people wanting knowledge and saying they will do these things to be better and get knowledge but not doing anything about it. This really interesting idea for a song! Perhaps some irony in the lyrics. Or what is the word? Kate Bush had writer’s block and could not solve it. Steevie Wonder unlocked something. I want to move to an article I have included before. Published by Dreams of Orgonon in 2020,  I would love to see more articles like this that dissect the lyrics and themes of Kate Bush’s songs. Not that many people go that deep. A book that covers all of her tracks and goes into detail. We have the 33 1/3 book on Hounds of Love by Leah Kardos. Yet, other albums have not been covered. By reading this kind of analysis, I feel we get a greater appreciation of Kate Bush:

“Sat In Your Lap” conveys both frantic motivation and fearful inaction — it is enticed by the busy and productive activities of people and intimidated by the energy exerted in them, perhaps suggesting a character outwardly compelled to be a productive adult too soon (it’s possible Bush could relate). It is at once rapid, careening at 146 BPM, and petrified with fear. The music video (Bush’s first without director Keef Macmillan) swerves between stillness and freneticism. During the verses, Bush is mostly seated in a white dress, while the refrains see her cavorting with dancers in dunce caps. Former “gifted and talented” children drained by adults’ external compulsion to excel may encounter a kindred spirit in “Sat In Your Lap.” Yet even in its inertia lays a search — despite the emotional shutting down, the desperate need for knowledge and truth is genuine and constant.

The incessant refrain, consisting of Bush screaming (with occasional variations) “some say that knowledge is something sat in your lap/some say that knowledge is something that you never have,” makes the preoccupation with knowledge clear. Holy shit, says Bush, look at all this cool stuff adults do! And all these neat religious and philosophical paths! “Some say that heaven is hell/some say that hell is heaven!” Is anyone right? The sheer quantity of faiths can be incredibly disorienting to an adult. The comparable power that spirituality can have over a child is often formative.

Another animating tension of “Sat in Your Lap” is its emotional fluidity while nominally discussing knowledge: “some say that knowledge is something sat in your lap,” or knowledge is “something that you never have.” These are largely apophatic definitions of knowledge, defining it as an elusive force. The rampant emotiveness pervades a search for knowledge. “In my dome of ivory/a home of activity/I want the answers quickly/but I don’t have no energy” sees a desire for knowledge colliding with aporia and sensory overload. Without a clear path forward, sometimes the only trajectory is acceleration and exhaustion.

As the only answer to the unanswerable is sublime incoherence, the song’s coda is hermetic descent into sensory overload. Iconography blurs (“Tibet or Jeddah,” “to Salisbury/a monastery”) in a tendency that’s strong in the last couple verses, as Bush inverts Psalm 23 (“my cup, she never overfloweth”), dabbles in desert-dwelling, monasticism, cathedrals, and with “some grey and white matter,” the human brain (grey and white matter oversee the brain’s connection to the spinal cord). “Sat in Your Lap” concludes with inconclusiveness: its dance is in the terrifying glory of befuddlement. Asceticism is a cerebral process as well as physical: the brain responds to the body’s state. Bush is engaging with some genuinely fascinating systems of thought here: for all the approaches to the mind/body problem that have been formulated, responding to it with “isn’t scholastically-caused sensory overload a kind of asceticism?” is new”.

You can sense her videos and sound becoming more ambitious. In terms of the cast of characters and visuals, they became bigger and more filmic from Never for Ever onwards. Sat in Your Lap is so busy and eye-opening! It is one of Kate Bush’s best videos. The iconic Abbey Road Studios was the location for Sat in Your Lap’s video. More and more, I sort of lament the fact that Kate Bush never toured after The Dreaming. In the sense that a 1982/1983 tour could have featured tracks from The Dreaming. Seeing Sat in Your Lap performed on the stage as part of a larger concept. So many songs from The Dreaming would have been amazing on the stage! The video for Sat in Your Lap is an astonishing concept. In terms of what was done with it. Directed by Brian Wiseman, more people need to discuss this video. Here is some more information about Sat in Your Lap’s video:

“According to Kate, The video was filmed over two days, one part at a video studio, the other at the audio studios. The former provided the quick, easy technical sides to be performed, the latter provided the space and presence. The large parquet floor was to be a feature, and Abbey Road’s past, full of dancing and singing spirits, was to be conjured up in the present day by tapping feet to the sound of jungle drums – only to be turned into past again through the wonder of video-tape. The shots were sorted into a logical order: all long shots were audio studio, all others were video studio”.

I do think that all the technical details about Kate Bush’s song are compelling. Where songs were recorded and what instruments went into the mix. This behind the scenes thing. I wanted to draw from Classic Pop and their article from last year. Going inside the making of The Dreaming, the unorthodoxy of Kate Bush was producing genius results:

“She opted to self-produce, (Tony Visconti, who’d written her a Lionheart-inspired fan letter during Bowie’s Lodger, was briefly considered). In a Denmark Street demo studio, drummer Preston Heyman was introduced to Bush’s new methods. Sat In Your Lap’s piano riff reminded him of Dave Brubeck’s Take Five, he played along accordingly. She then removed his cymbals, then his snare.

It morphed into a tom-tom pattern more akin to the Warrior Drums of Burundi (used on Joni Mitchell’s The Hissing Of Summer Lawns). Eager to get the tribal, drum-heavy sound onto tape she headed to Townhouse Studios, specifically it’s ‘stone’ room. This was where engineer Hugh Padgham had created the colossal ‘gated reverb’ drums on PG3 with drummer Phil Collins.

Bush had been equally impressed with In The Air Tonight (a ‘masterpiece’). Padgham worked on Sat In Your Lap, Leave It Open and Get Out Of My House, giving Bush the rhythmic oomph she required, aided by the studio’s Solid State Logic console with its gates and compressors.

A hard, driving core aside (Rainbow’s Jimmy Bain played bass), these tracks weren’t ‘rock’ or ‘normal’ and Padgham was bewildered by Bush’s unorthodoxy. For Heyman, though, it was exactly this “weirdness that we rejoiced in”. For Sat In Your Lap, the drummer and brother Paddy Bush stood ten feet apart, swooshing bamboo sticks (a cracked one stayed in the mix too).

Space was found for one Chinese opera cymbal suspended from a rope, “throttled” periodically by Heyman. Struggling to replicate the demo’s CS80 parts, Buggles’ Geoff Downes supplied a Fairlight brass section (he was busy working at Townhouse on Asia’s debut).

In June 1981 Sat In Your Lap hit the shelves, unveiling Bush’s new direction in a white sleeve, ballet-dunce Bush glancing quizzically at a globe. Inside was a torrent of avant-garde pop; rumbling rhythms, philosophical head-scratching and a startling vocal ferocity.

Bush fretted, initial feedback was dumbstruck silence. But critics raved (“a superb blast of energy”), as did BBC’s Roundtable guest reviewers, Linx’s David Grant, and Rick Wakeman. It climbed to No.11, a year later it sat atop Trevor Horn’s all-time top ten, one of three Bush selections.

Meanwhile, The Dreaming’s sessions had steamed ahead. The in-demand Padgham left for Genesis’ Abacab, replaced by Nick Launay. His CV, including PIL’s The Flowers Of Romance, aligned the young engineer with Bush’s new almost post-punk edge”.

Sat in Your Lap turns forty-five on 21st June. It is one of Kate Bush’s finest songs. It was the introduction to The Dreaming. Nothing else on the album sounds like Sat in Your Lap. The remaining singles from the album (The Dreaming, There Goes a Tenner, Suspended in Gaffa and Night of the Swallow) did not fare well. However, that is not to take away from the brilliance of The Dreaming. A masterpiece album. Sat in Your Lap was sort of this bridge between her Never for Ever era and the start of the new one. The song proved what a hugely innovative songwriter and producer Kate Bush was. In June 1981, so few artists making songs like Sat in Your Lap. In 2018, when ranking Kate Bush’s singles, The Guardian placed Sat in Your Lap at four: “Even in a pop climate where the Associates’ Party Fears Two could become a hit, this sounded thrillingly unhinged: three and a half minutes of screeching vocals, frantic PiL-influenced rhythms and Fairlight-driven sampling overload”. We all have to salute this…

ICONIC song.

FEATURE: Murder on the Dancefloor: Will We See a Shift in Terms of the Sounds of Modern Pop?

FEATURE:

 

 

Murder on the Dancefloor

IN THIS PHOTO: Charli xcx/PHOTO CREEDIT: Rafael Pavarotti

Will We See a Shift in Terms of the Sounds of Modern Pop?

__________

PERHAPS it will not affect…

IN THIS PHOTO: Demi Lovato recently released the sultry Dance-Pop track, Low Rise Jeans/PHOTO CREDIT: Deanie Chen

every major Pop artist, though there has been this run of albums that are primed for the dance floor. From Kylie Minogue and TENSION (2023) to Charli xcx and BRAT (2024), there have been these amazing album that have definitely brought people together. Not that it has been completely dominated by women, though I think most of these Dance and Pop albums have come from female artists. Bringing in Disco and Electronic music into the Pop cauldron, the scene has been busy with these great albums that get you dancing and up. Will we see a shift towards other sounds and directions? I am intrigued by Madonna and her upcoming album, Confessions on a Dance Floor: Part II. That is out on 3rd July. This is a Dance album, though perhaps slightly different in terms of the sound of the 2005 Confessions on a Dance Floor. One of the reasons for bringing up this topic is that Charli xcx says her next album will be Rock-inspired. That album, xcx8, will probably be out later this year or next year. Speaking with British Vogue recently, Charli xcx proclaimed that the dance floor is dead. Instead, it seems like she will go in a harder and different direction:

“Making xcx8 in a fresh setting made music feel alive again: working in a tight unit and preserving a rough demo-like quality to her voice – her trademark Auto-Tune is all but gone – and Cook’s guitar. “We were doing our version of analogue, which is so silly and funny,” she says lovingly, “but putting it through our lens, and making sure that nothing felt too macho, was important.”

At this point, a good number of Charli fans may be screaming: “Guitar? Guitar???” It’s a shock: of all her albums, the one Charli likes least is 2014’s punky Sucker. Her idea of hell is watching a band (apologies to George). Real Music Bores who think guitars are authentic and synthesisers are fake had a field day when Charli headlined Glastonbury 2025, laying into her processed vocals and lack of live band. (She enjoyed the discourse, writing on X: “The best art is divisive and confrontational.”) With his label PC Music, Cook pioneered what became known as hyperpop: proudly synthetic, extreme and famously divisive. Charli started working with Cook’s crew a decade ago, when the futurist haute bubblegum of her 2016 EP Vroom Vroom neutered Sucker’s child’s-play rebellion and catalysed Charli’s bond with her ride-or-die LGBTQ+ fanbase.

The new album’s creators are all well aware of the tension that comes with going guitar-centric. Charli sees humour in it, a quality she needs in art. “For me, it’s fun to flip the form. We know there’s gonna be people who are bothered by it, but that’s fine.” The song about the dance floor being dead is going to spark some really boring thinkpieces, though, I tell her. “I know,” she says, grimacing.

Last year, accepting the Ivor Novello songwriter of the year award for Brat, Charli said: “I’m sure you all agree, I am hardly Bob Dylan, but one thing I certainly do is commit to the bit.” Her brusque observations mean any reinvention is never a whole-cloth pop star rebirth, but remains intrinsically her. “I’d always rather have a style than be vague,” she says now. “Which is the biggest crime, in my opinion.” The album’s existence embodies that commitment. “It’s looking for this intensity,” Cook says. “It’s not just this flex of, ‘Oh, I did this other album.’ She’s really responding to a feeling that a lot of people have in 2026 of there being so much, almost too much. What do you hold onto? I’m inspired by seeing how she’s so ready to do that rather than take it easy”.

I don’t think that we will ever see a death or complete reversal. However, like Britpop in the 1990s, there was this period when this type of Pop was in the zeitgeist and leasing. That then sort of got replaced by Rock and Alternative. Dance-Pop has been in vogue for a long time. Major artists like Dua Lipa putting out phenomenal albums. Legends like Madonna coming back to the dance floor (or dancefloor as one word, if you prefer?). I do feel like there is going to be a slight dimming. I don’t think Charli xcx feels Dance and Dance-Pop is dead. However, she has done that already and wants to do something different. Maybe there is a slightly exhaustion when it comes to dancefloor-primed music. When it comes to women in music, many don’t feel they are Rock artists. Still a sound and genre that is male-dominated and there is sexism. Women with guitars subjected to misogyny and sexism. I am not sure what xcx8 will contain, though Charli xcx is an artist always moving forward and trying new things. That idea of the dancefloor being dead. A big statement. I have not seen anyone else discuss it. Have we come to a period when everything has been said and done?! Jessie Ware’s latest album, Superbloom, has its heart set towards the dancefloor. Though perhaps there were few bangers or club-ready songs compared to That! Feels Good! of 2023. Perhaps there was this feeling during the pandemic that Dance music was a way of cheering us. A lot of release once restrictions has been lifted and we could get together. A moment in popular music when there was a lot of Dance-Pop and so many major artists were primed in that direction. However, I do wonder whether things are beginning to go in a different direction. Many would argue that the dancefloor is as alive and burning as ever.

Charli xcx did not want to do a BRAT 2 or say what she has said before. I get the feeling she senses something in the air is changing. An urgency or need for something rawer. I do feel cxc8 will have more punch and grit than BRAT. However, with very little known, we have to speculate at this point. Though that British Vogue interview is fascinating to read. She just needs a reset and to go in a completely separate direction: “She stresses that the next album – with its insular focus and tight-knit creation – is the reset she needed after the hype around Brat strayed so far beyond the music. “It made me crave something opposite. Getting back to something more internal is really nice,” she says softly, “and really sort of quiet”. Although it might have been Charli xcx distancing herself from recent work and not wanting to be associated with one thing, perhaps the heat of Dance-Pop has passed. Although great recent singles from artists like Demi Lovato suggest otherwise, I feel more major artists who were writing Dance-Pop are going to employ other sounds and move away from it. Not that the dance floor could ever be seen as truly dead. Madonna’s Confessions on a Dance Floor: Part II will keep that sound and genre alive. However, it might be one of the last big albums that takes us to the dance floor. It will be interesting seeing what Charli xcx does and what her Rock era will sound like. To her, a trip back to the dance floor might not be something she desires, yet there is an appetite for it still, at a time in history when things are as bleak as they have been in a very long time. If not dead then starting to lose a little bit of its heat and lustre. Music goes in cycles. A lot of big artists releasing Country albums. In years to come, we might see a new wave of Dance-Pop albums or a new form of Disco. Although you know, before too long, albums that entice us to the dance floor will be…

BACK in force.

FEATURE: Spotlight: Revisited: Brooke Combe

FEATURE:

 

 

Spotlight: Revisited

Brooke Combe

__________

A truly special…

artist who I spotlighted back in 2023. Brooke Combe released Dancing at the End of the World last year. It is a brilliant album. In terms of singles, How Can I Tell You? (To Love Me More) and Tears Won’t Lie have come out this/last year. Combe has a string of U.K. dates ahead, including slots at Camp Bestival in July and August. There are some international dates afterwards. I want to get to some fairly recent interview with Brooke Combe to give you a sense of why she is so amazing and should be followed. I have never seen Brooke Combe live, though I will correct that soon enough. The interviews I am coming to are from last year. However, as Combe has released new music, I am sure there will be other interviews coming. Prior to coming to them, here is some background to a truly spectacular musician: “Scottish soul singer Brooke Combe is best known for her breakthrough debut album, Dancing at the Edge of the World and her latest release, How Can I Tell You? (To Love Me More). Her music traces a journey from small-town Midlothian to the forefront of British soul, driven by a lifelong passion for sound rooted in Motown and early musical experimentation. With a magnetic voice and candid storytelling, Combe has risen from posting anonymous online covers to opening for major artists, all while navigating heartbreak, identity, and the pressures of rapid success. Her work confronts resilience, heritage, and self-discovery with striking honesty, shaped by her experiences growing up as one of the few Black faces in a predominantly white Scottish community”.

Naturally, there was a lot of interest around Brooke Combe last year when Dancing at the Edge of the World was released. I do want to take us back to last year and a couple of interviews around that album. CLASH spoke with an artist who puts all her emotions out there. Dancing at the Edge of the World is an “absolute stormer – vintage styled soul that feels totally refreshing, Brooke Combe isn’t satisfied with retreading old ground, instead finding her own unique place within an R&B lineage”:

“This album feels like a reintroduction for you – when did work begin on it? Did you know what you wanted to achieve from the outset?

I think when I parted ways with Island Records, the album pretty much wrote itself. For months prior to this, I was so in my own head, being sent to various songwriting sessions with amazing credible producers and songwriters really knocked a lot of my own confidence in my abilities, which instantly I knew was not a good feeling.

I had a couple of old ideas from like five years ago on my phone that ended up on the album. We probably made a conscious start to the album in about 2022 though.

How does songwriting work for you? Do you tend to get ideas down quickly, or is it laboured? What’s the root of it all, do you think?

I’m not usually someone that has the ability to say, “okay right, I’m gonna write about this specific idea I’ve got”, I’m someone who needs to feel a feeling that makes me want to write. Or be moved by a chord structure. I’m trying to get better at the storytelling side of things now, however.

You’ve said Liverpool is like a second home for you! What is it about the city that you vibe with?

I vibe with a lot of things in this city. First of all, the people make me feel at home because they’re always merry and happy to help, like the Scots and they’re misunderstood, like the Scots too. The scran in the city is another thing… wow. There are some seriously good Mexican scrans which is my go-to. I love seeing the culture as well in Liverpool. That’s one of the things that made me feel at home more straight away. I’m from the outskirts of Edinburgh, and sometimes when I’m walking around I just feel like I stick out like a sore thumb due to lack of diversity.

There’s a lot of subtlety to the arrangements – the acoustic guitar on ‘Guilt’ or the organ on ’If I Could Only Be Yours’ – did you experiment in the studio? Or did you have a clear idea of what you wanted to achieve?

We were under a bit of a time constraint whilst making the album so really didn’t want to waste a lot of time trying lots of different ideas. So, the organ on ‘If I Could Only Be Yours’ we pretty much knew it would be that sort of sound because of our demo. Same with ‘Guilt’. Fun fact, when Danny and I went to LA, we worked with a guy called Paul Butler from The Bees, on ‘Guilt’. Paul actually inspired most of the direction of the album due to his arrangement of ‘Guilt’. We all really liked the style and sound so decided to go with that.

How do you feel now the album is complete? The feedback from fans and critics has been amazing!

I’m so happy it’s finally out! It’s been a really long time coming for me. I’m sure the fans would agree. It’s nice to now sit in my lane comfortably and know what it is as a whole. Whereas my previous mixtape was just a load of unreleased songs I’d recorded really… there was no theme or coherency to it. It didn’t sum me up correctly. Well, it did for the time being but now we’re evolving”.

Prior to coming more up-to-date, The Line of Best Fit were in the company of Brooke Combe last year. Championing this rising artist (whether she would like to be referred to as such?), she is steering away from that ‘Indie’ tag that was applied to her earlier in her career. Dancing at the Edge of the World is her embracing Soul. “Raised on her grandparents’ collection of classic Motown albums, as well as the ‘90s neo-soul and R&B loved by her mum and dad”, Coombe was adding her own touch and voice to those influence, though not departing too much from that pure and classic Soul sound:

“This album has been written from someone else’s perspective,” she explains. “It's less about me and what I'm going through, and more about what somebody else, who I love, has been going through.” Writing in this different way has given her “a totally different frame of mind,” she says. “To be honest, I'm quite happy in my life at the minute, so I'm glad it wasn't a heartbreak album again.”

The recording, too, was done in a completely different way to Black is the New Gold. This time she worked with a live band in the studio and recorded to tape, allowing themselves just three takes for each song. “We only had two or three full weeks to do the album, so time was really of the essence,” she says. “For a while we were also hemming and hawing on getting strings for the record. They’re quite expensive, but for my first sort-of-debut album, I wouldn't have had it any other way.”

Another standout moment, “Lanewood Pines” feels the furthest from the indie-veering sound of Combe’s earlier releases, and celebrates youth, love, and fun as opposed to the darker, pleading themes veined through Black is the New Gold. Written in less than 20 minutes, together with Murphy, the song is named after the apartment complex where the two were staying while in Los Angeles for songwriting sessions after performing at SXSW in 2023.

“One of the producers phoned us one day and said, ‘Would you mind coming to the studio a little bit later today?” says Combe, explaining how they used the extra time to write something new for the session. “I remember it so clearly! Danny was sitting on the couch and started playing these chords and I heard this melody, so I pulled up a little keyboard on my phone and tried to find it. Once I’d figured that out, the words came to me instantly. It reminded me of that feeling when you've had a boss night out and you're with somebody you love, and then you part ways and you're just lying in your bed, buzzing about the night, and you just want to speak to them on the phone about it.”

Dancing at the Edge of the World feels like a massive step forward in confidence for Combe, and she attributes that partly to her experience of touring with Miles Kane, who she describes as “really charismatic and a good frontman.” “My confidence was through the roof afterwards,” she says. Her indie roots haven’t been completely discarded though. Last year, she featured on Courteneers’ melodic album opener “Sweet Surrender” after receiving a last-minute call from Skelly who was producing the record. “I just said ‘I’ll be there in 10 minutes,’ and it was very in-and-out,” she says. “Honestly, I was done within 30 minutes.”

She’s also a fan of rising Liverpool indie-pop band Keyside, who featured on the playlist of songs she’d listen to during the making of Dancing at the Edge of the World. Other artists in the mix were Michael Kiwanuka and Raye (“she’s smashing it”), The Beatles, and Sabrina Carpenter. “People probably wouldn’t think that I’d be really into her, but I can’t deny it. She’s just too catchy!”

Perhaps it’s not so surprising. Combe has a similarly irresistible charm, it seems, and it’s that fizzing energy that she’s bringing with her into 2025 and to the rollout of Dancing at the Edge of the World. “We're going full throttle,” she says. “So tell your mates, tell your grandparents, tell your aunties and uncles, the lot”.

Tears Won’t Lie is a phenomenal track. I wonder whether it will form part of an upcoming E.P. or album. Such a consistently remarkable artist whose music stays in the mind and heart, CLASH highlighted the track earlier this month. Since I spotlighted Brooke Combe a couple of years ago, she has done so much and has risen from this newcomer or promising artist to someone firmly established. A true great who I think we will be hearing about for a very long time:

“The singer takes soulful tropes from the 60s and 70s and interprets from a fresh angle, with Brooke’s debut album ‘Dancing At The Edge Of The World’ winning huge acclaim last year.

Embraced by the Northern Soul scene – her seven inch releases now fetch tidy sums on Discogs – Brooke Combe heads out on tour this week.

Playing London’s KOKO venue, she’ll then link with fellow modern soul figure Jalen N’Gonda for a series of European support dates.

New single ‘Tears Won’t Lie’ contains a scorching vocal, with Brooke seeming to bite down on the visceral meaning of each word.

Produced by The Coral’s James Skelly at Kempston Studios in Liverpool, ‘Tears Won’t Lie’ is another sign of her irresistibly soulful flair.

Brooke comments…

“’Tears Won’t Lie’ is a song that explores the truth that surfaces after a relationship falls apart. It’s about someone who has spent years hiding their pain behind a smile, only to be confronted with the emotional reality they can’t suppress anymore. Sort of like the moment grief, self-awareness and reality meet, and you’re suddenly awake and won’t lose yourself to love again”.

I may well write about Brooke Combe again later down the line. I wanted to revisit her music because she has put out new material and she has some exciting tour dates ahead. Someone you definitely should go and see if you can, Coombe is one of our brightest talents. Even if she is influenced by Soul greats and records she heard during her childhood and youth, she is a true original that will inspire other artists coming through. When it comes to the incredible Brooke Combe, it is clear that there is nobody quite…

LIKE her.

____________

Follow Brooke Combe

Official:

https://brookecombe.os.fan/

Instagram:

https://www.instagram.com/brookecombe/

Twitter:

https://x.com/brookecombe

Facebook:

https://www.facebook.com/brookecombe99

Spotify:

https://open.spotify.com/artist/0JXwYf8x27ZfMO2gGuh6HO?si=xYlpW0irRS6BRWT31br81A

YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEBlrVTKRZlK-tuIjmK3hLw

FEATURE: Kate Bush: Them Heavy People: The Extraordinary Characters in Her Songs: Jesus (Why Should I Love You?)/My Silver Buddha (Pull Out the Pin)

FEATURE:

 

 

Kate Bush: Them Heavy People: The Extraordinary Characters in Her Songs

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1993

Jesus (Why Should I Love You?)/My Silver Buddha (Pull Out the Pin)

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IN this series…

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush with the Trio Bulgarka

I combine characters from Kate Bush’s song. Usually selecting different albums (or B-sides), today I am uniting The Red Shoes and The Dreaming. I feel I have united these two albums before, though here are two different songs that take me in all sorts of directions. The reason for these two tracks is because they use religious figures in contrasting situations. I also want to include the Trio Bulgarka, as their lead singer, Yanka Rupkina, died on 7th April. I will start out with Jesus. Kate Bush used God’s name (not in vain) to ask that, if men and women could trade places and put themselves in each other’s shoes, then we could get a greater and more empathetic understanding. Although Jesus is not pivotal to Why Should I Love You?, it does allow me opportunity to come back to The Red Shoes. Rather than retread what I wrote last time out, it is worth noting the collaborations and this song that could have benefited from just having the Trio Bulgarka. In Why Should I Love You?, these are the credits: Drums: Stuart Elliott; keyboards, guitar, bass, vocals: Prince; vocals: Lenny Henry; tenor saxophone: Nigel Hitchcock; trombone: Neil Sidwell; trumpet, flugelhorn: Steve Sidwell; vocals: Trio Bulgarka; Keyboards: Kate Bush; arrangements by Prince and Kate Bush. I do like the fact Lenny Henry was on the song. However, I feel the most powerful moments where the Trio Bulgarka feature – Rocket’s Tail from The Sensual World (1989) and Deeper Understanding from the same album – should have been the standard. I think The Song of Solomon from The Red Shoes uses them well, though they seem buried in the mix on Why Should I Love You? Before moving to their role and what they brought to Kate Bush’s music, this is the lyric that mentions Jesus: “Have you ever seen a picture/Of Jesus laughing?/Mmm, do you think/He had a beautiful smile?/A smile that healed”.

This was a bit of a troubled song, as the Kate Bush Encyclopedia note: “Bush asked Prince to contribute background vocals to ‘Why Should I Love You’ in 1991. She sent him the track, which she had recorded at Abbey Road Studios (Studio Number One), London, England, and Prince added vocals, but also added many instrumental parts to the song, at his Paisley Park Studios. When Kate Bush and Del Palmer listened to Prince’s returned track, they weren’t sure what to do with it. They worked on it on and off for two years to try to “turn it back into a Kate Bush song”. I did mention Prince in the context of this song when writing anniversary features. He died ten years ago. I feel there are two many layers and voices in Why Should I Love You? A transatlantic collaboration that would have benefitted from Kate Bush and Prince being in the same studio and working closely. It was almost like playing chess by mail. Or making moves very slowly. Prince’s instinct to overload the song, whereas Bush wanted something more stripped. I thought she would have rearranged and de-cluttered Why Should I Love You? for 2011’s Director’s Cut. Maybe she loved the Trio Bulgarka vocals and did not want to record a new version without them. I shall look at those particular lyrics in a minute. Where she mentions Jesus. However, Bush always had this curiosity of sound and influences from beyond the U.K. Her brother, Paddy, introduced the music of the Trio Bulgaraka around the time of Hounds of Love. Bush was spellbound by the power and beauty to their voices.

Related to Why Should I Love You?, Far Out Magazine recalled how Bush really wanted to use the Trio Bulgarka. I have covered Rocket’s Tail in this feature and mentioned how they transformed it. You can feel their influence on Why Should I Love You?, though I crave to hear a version where some of the musical layers are taken out. Production warmer and richer. Just Kate Bush and the Trio Bulgarka combined:

“Sometimes known as the “Three Golden Coins”, Trio Bulgarka was a Bulgarian vocal ensemble that had a spell of popularity in the 1980s. All three members, Stoyanka Boneva, Yanka Rupkina, and Eva Georgieva, each came from different Bulgarian regions, and their varied backgrounds allowed each to bring a unique texture to their sound. After being signed to Bulgaria Balkanton and Hannibal in 1987, Kate Bush came across their work, which resulted in a series of collaborations.

1988 marked the release of the trio’s debut, The Forest Is Crying. English radio presenter John Peel first heard them through the Hannibal label recordings and played some of their music, which had a boost of exposure after their session on Andy Kershaw’s radio show.

Their string of successes continued to have a wide reach after being sampled on Belgian New Beat band Morton Sherman Bellucci’s ‘Musica’. At some point, Kate Bush came across their debut, as well as Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares, a collection of modern arrangements of traditional Bulgarian folk melodies they had performed.

Bush was desperate to use the trio on her upcoming album, 1989’s The Sensual World – and they soon appeared on three of its tracks: ‘Never Be Mine’, ‘Deeper Understanding’, and ‘Rocket’s Tail’. The latter was loosely inspired by her cat, Rocket, but as she once told the NME, actually “written for the Bulgarian girls.”

“Suddenly, there I was working with these three ladies from a completely different culture,” she recalled in an LA Times interview. “I’ve never worked with women on such an intense creative level, and it was something strange to feel this very strong female energy in the studio. It was interesting to see the way the men in the studio reacted to this. Instead of just one female, there was a very strong female presence”.

There are a few other elements I want to think about when discussing Why Should I Love You? The structure of the song is fascinating. I wonder who Kate Bush is referencing. Whether it is Del Palmer (who she was in a relationship with for many years; they were probably split when this song was written), or someone else. Bush never really wrote about specific men. However, you have to feel there was something or someone in her mind when she wrote this song. In terms of the lyrics, I do love these lines: “The fine purple/The purest gold/The red of the Sacred Heart/The grey of a ghost/The “L” of the lips are open/To the “O” of the Host/The “V” of the velvet”. The Red Shoes deals with raw emotion and heartache. There are also songs that are so colourful and full of life. This track, Eat the Music. Eat the Music is where Bush lists all these fruits and there is this urge to pull them apart; vulnerability, intimate connection, and revealing one’s true inner self in relationships, often using fruit-based metaphors to illustrate emotional consumption. Here, we get these colour. There is broad palette of colours and flavours on The Red Shoes. One of her liveliest and brightest albums. The title track also is very energised and vivacious. The verse about Jesus is intriguing. Bush dropped religion and religious figures into her music, though rarely in praise or as an act of devotion or repent. Instead, it is almost throwaway or cute. Someone possibly in love or considering love and asking if this suitor has seen a photo of Jesus laughing. That idea of Jesus depicted as laughing might seem sacrilegious. He always is drawn as serious. The idea of a smiling Jesus seems somewhat absurd! That is Kate Bush bringing humour into the song. What does it means when she asks if the man has seen a picture of Jesus smiling?! I always assumed it was a romantic situation and Bush was asking if she should love him. However, it might be something else. The way Kate Bush draws her characters and the variety in her songs. As I shall explain when talking about a silver Buddha in Pull Out the Pin, there is so much fascination about that particular choice. Although she was raised Catholic, I don’t think she can be considered a religiously-minded artist. Even through she did say her career was a mission from God, I don’t think she prayed or was a devoted church-goer.

I am moving to the second side in a minute. However, I did start by discussing collaborations. Did this aid Kate Bush or hinder her work? Her most celebrated songs are the ones where she is solo. Obviously other musicians in the mix. However, when it comes to singers, did that work at all? On Why Should I Love You?, her and the Trio Bulgarka would have been fine. Having more voices sort of makes it too dense and scattershot. You are trying to follow too many different threads and layers. However, it is the fact that Prince and Kate Bush were on a record together that is great. This feature talks about the time when the sorely missed Purple One and Kate Bush united for a song that I feel is underrated and undervalued still:

“Perhaps it was the sheer distance between their headspaces at the time that led to what happened. Bush asked Prince to contribute a few background vocals to a song called “Why Should I Love You”, which she had just recorded in full at Abbey Road Studios. But when Prince received the track, he ignored the intructions and dismantled the entire thing like a crazed mechanic taking apart old cars on his backyard. He wanted to inject himself into the very heart of it, weaving his sound amongst her sound, giving it a new soul entirely. As Koppelman explains, “We essentially created a new song on a new piece of tape and then flew all of Kate’s tracks back on top of it… Prince stacked a bunch of keys, guitars, bass, etc, on it, and then went to sing background vocals.”

Despite being the lovechild of two of humanity’s greatest music minds, the resulting track is not often mentioned on your average BBC3 pop retrospective presented by Lauren Laverne. It’s startlingly brilliant, with sometimes bizarre, musical depths. It begins as a typical Kate Bush creation; her stratospheric vocals rising across a strange organ melody and tumbling drums. But then, about a minute through, it mutates like an unstable element being dropped into boiling water. Prince invades in a huge wave of gospel sound, the pair singing in unison: “Of all of people in the world, why should I love you?” By the time it reaches the 2-minute mark, it has been completely permeated with that Paisley Park flavour; smatters of electric guitar and rich walls of vocals spilling over its borders. The purple sound arrives like a tsunami, seemingly too vivid to suppress.

Even today, the track is divisive, with some heralding it as a slice of profound art, and others filling fan forums with long rants that essentially boil down to: “It’s tripe.” But two decades later, we can look upon the final version with something resembling objectivity. It’s an endlessly fascinating creation that continues to sparkle with strangeness, forever flitting between blissfulness and an almost painful sadness upon every listen. Even the lyrics reveal an inner turmoil: “Have you ever seen a picture of Jesus laughing? Mmm, do you think he had a beautiful smile?” Kate Bush’s soaring voice wavers, as if she’s asking Prince to convince her”.

I will return to Why Should I Love You? again. There are one or two others songs from The Red Shoes I want to explore for this series. I will definitely come to Moments of Pleasure, as there are a few names mentioned in that song. Perhaps finish the series by pairing it with Them Heavy People from The Kick Inside? However, The Dreaming still has a couple of songs to offer up. Houdini is an obvious one. However, although we have this song about war and conflict, many people might not have noticed My Silver Buddah. Maybe a totem or something to protect a soldier during war, it is a striking image. However, regarding this song, this is what Kate Bush said:

“I saw this incredible documentary by this Australian cameraman who went on the front line in Vietnam, filming from the Vietnamese point of view, so it was very biased against the Americans. He said it really changed him, because until you live on their level like that, when it’s complete survival, you don’t know what it’s about. He’s never been the same since, because it’s so devastating, people dying all the time.
The way he portrayed the Vietnamese was as this really crafted, beautiful race. The Americans were these big, fat, pink, smelly things who the Vietnamese could smell coming for miles because of the tobacco and cologne. It was devastating, because you got the impression that the Americans were so heavy and awkward, and the Vietnamese were so beautiful and all getting wiped out. They wore a little silver Buddha on a chain around their neck and when they went into action they’d pop it into their mouth, so if they died they’d have Buddha on their lips. I wanted to write a song that could somehow convey the whole thing, so we set it in the jungle and had helicopters, crickets and little Balinese frogs.

Kris Needs, ‘Dream Time In The Bush’. Zigzag (UK), November 1982

I saw a programme with a camera man on the front line in Vietnam. The Vietnamese were portrayed as being very craftful people who treated their fighting as an art. They could literally smell the Americans coming through the jungle. Their culture of Coke cans and ice creams actually made them smell. Anyway, I learnt that before the Vietnamese went into action they popped a little silver Buddha in their mouths. I thought that was quite beautiful. Grotesque beauty attracts me. Negative images are often so interesting.

Robin Smith, ‘Getting Down Under With Kate Bush’, 1982”.

I do wonder about the significance of the silver Buddha. Writing for the Kate Bush Club in October 1982, Bush did say this: “This soldier is under a tree, dozing with a faint smile and a radio by his side. It’s a small transistor radio out of which cries an electric guitar. I’d swear it was being played by Brian Bath, but how could that be, way out here on our stereo screen. I pop the silver Buddha that I wear around my neck into my mouth, securing my lips around his little metal body. I move towards the sleeping man. A helicopter soars overhead, he wakes up, and as he looks me in the eyes I relate to him as I would to a helpless stranger”. The symbolic significance of Buddha. This is from Wikipedia: “Siddhartha Gautama,[e] most commonly referred to as the Buddha (lit. 'the awakened one'), was a wandering ascetic and religious teacher who lived in the eastern Indo-Gangetic Plains during the 6th or 5th century BCE and founded Buddhism”. We associate Buddha with peace and spirituality. However, Pull Out the Pin is set in the Vietnam War. This is not Kate Bush being political. However, the Americans seen as these pigs. They stank of Cologne and cigarettes. Coke and food and God knows what. The Vietnamese could smell them! The Vietnamese had Buddha around their necks and pop them in their mouths so, if they died, they would have Buddha on their lips. Maybe offering them salvation or they would be seen as peace-makers who were killed. When speaking with Keyboard in 1985, Kate Bush said this: “It was strange the sort of irony that these Vietnamese who were fighting the Americans were Buddhists and they'd pop a silver bullet that they wore on a chain around their necks into their mouth before they went into battle. So if they died, they would have Buddha on their lips. This is the whole irony throughout history between religion and war. "Breathing" is about human beings killing themselves. I think that people smoking is one of those tiny things that says a lot about human beings. I mean, I smoke and enjoy it, but we smoke and we know it's dangerous. Maybe there's some kind of strange subconscious desire to damage ourselves. It would seem so if you looked back through history, wouldn't it?”.

I do think she was not really a political writer. Everything was more emotional than political. Breathing and Army Dreamers from Never for Ever could be seen as political songs. Rather than choosing a side or commenting on violence, Bush was instead more motivated by the loss of individuals. Not the sheer volume of deaths. Drilling down to the induvial. The humans affected. Army Dreamers is about young soldiers dying, though it is more a commentary on the loss of life and the general futility of violence. How death affects so many people and why it is such a tragedy. Not calling out governments or doing these Punk-type political songs. Using this idea of Buddha as a character and expanding to discuss Pull Out the Pin. The unique nature of the song and its lyrics. I think that so few artists were writing like Kate Bush. Even now, when there is genocide and war, few modern artists talking about the violence directly or in a less political way. By which, I mean they are discussing the effect the violence has rather than attacking regimes and having that sort of angle. Pull Out the Pin is a prime example of Kate Bush writing like no other, as Medium noted in their review of The Dreaming: “Pull Out The Pin” — What could be more diametrically opposed to “There Goes A Tenner” than this song, a nightmarish account of war, as seen from the perspective of a Viet Cong warrior stalking an American soldier through the jungle, almost mocking how out-of-place and unfamiliar the American is in such an environment (seriously, who else would ever even think of such a scenario for a song?)Kate’s blood-curdling refrain, “I Love Life! (pull out the pin)” raises the tension up to an almost unbearable degree”.

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1982/PHOTO CREDIT: Pierre Terrasson

It is worth exploring that idea of the images and visuals Kate Bush brings into Pull Out the Pin. The way she writes and how she paints pictures through songs. It is also amazing to hear the production on Pull Out the Pin. Other producers could have overloaded the song with affects and instruments. There is something about Pull Out the Pin that sounds sparse and haunting but also quite epic and busy. You immerse yourself in the song and get this real sense of being pulled into the action. It is a classic Kate Bush deep cut. We are in a time when many people do not know about songs like Pull Out the Pin. The Dreaming an album that is acclaimed but not dissected and discussed as much as Hounds of Love for example. I do wonder why we do not explore Kate Bush more. Well, fans like me do, though there is not that wider fascination. How many people beyond those devoted Kate Bush fans realise that The Dreaming has such treasures?! Pull Out the Pin is a remarkable song that everyone needs to hear. Just researching for this feature makes you more connected to the song. How Kate Bush discussed the inspiration for it. I love that inclusion of the silver Buddha. Or My Silver Buddha, as it is told in the lyrics. A symbol of peace around the neck of Vietnamese soldiers. They would then put the Buddha in their mouth so, if they were shot, they would have that with them. Maybe bless them or ensure they are safe in battle even. It takes us back to that subject of Kate Bush and whether she was political. Pull Out the Pin is not as explicitly anti-war as Army Dreamers, though both of these songs document the horrors of warfare. She was always more invested in the emotion of war and the toll it took. Buddha, as this figure of spirituality and calm, transposed into a battle. The way Bush describes the sights and smells. How the Vietnamese could smell the America soldiers because of what they wore and ate. It is such an interesting angle! Such an intelligent writer, it has been great bringing together two religious figures from…

TWO amazing albums.

FEATURE: Modern-Day Queens: Zakia Sewell

FEATURE:

 

 

Modern-Day Queens

PHOTO CREDIT: Buster Grey-Jung

Zakia Sewell

__________

HERE is someone…

PHOTO CREDIT: Suki Dhanda/The Observer

who I would consider one of the best broadcaster and D.J.s in the U.K. I love Zakia Sewell. As Zakia, she is part of the BBC Radio 6 Music family, and she was on air earlier this month for their Vinyl Weekender. Such an incredible depth of knowledge and passion for music, she also has one of the best ‘radio voices’. That may sound weird, but in terms of its tone and effect, you could listen to her all day! I want to bring in some biography from her official website, so that we can glean some knowledge about an extraordinary broadcaster, writer and podcaster:

“I'm a broadcaster, writer and DJ from London with a passion for music, arts, mental health and history. I regularly produce and present radio documentaries and podcasts for platforms including BBC Radio 4, BBC World Service, Tate, and Boiler Room, covering varied topics, from British folk culture, to my mother's experience of schizophrenia, to Sabar drumming in Senegal, and was the recipient of the silver award for 'Best New Voice' at the Audio Production Awards in 2021, and Radio Presenter of the Year in the UKAN Awards in 2024.

I host Dream Time on BBC 6 Music on Sunday nights, and hosted The NTS Breakfast Show, and Questing w/ Zakia on NTS Radio between 2016-2024. I spent several years working behind the counter at Honest Jons Records in West London, and I DJ regularly at clubs and festivals in London and abroad, and have played for esteemed venues and festivals including Corsica Studios, XOYO, Berlin Atonal, HORST, We Out Here and Dekmantel.

My forthcoming book Finding Albion explores British national identity, folk culture and myth and will be published by Hodder Press in 2026. I've also written articles for publications such as Weird Walk and Resident Advisor, and have an essay published in a collection of essays by and about women in music called This Woman's Work. ​I also regularly lead radio workshops offering advice and support to aspiring radio makers and have worked on creative research projects with archives and arts institutions such as Timespan, the Stuart Hall Library and the George Padmore institute.

When I'm not doing the above, I'm singing, playing guitar, taking long walks in nature and reading weird books about pagans”.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by zakia sewell (@zzzakia)

Definitely suitable for inclusion into this Modern-Day Queens feature, there is no denying Zakia Sewell is a hugely important voice and role model. I have long talked about the incredible female D.J.s who are so incredible. Raising the bar and changing the game. However, there is still huge discrimination and gender inequality. This needs to change. An industry that relies on their talent and passion. However, still, things set up to benefit men. I am going to bring in some interviews with Sewell. She curated service95’s Sunday List earlier in the year. I am championing and spotlighting her as a broadcaster and D.J. However, she did write Finding Albion: Myth, Folklore and the Quest for a Hidden Britain. You can purchase it here:

“Zakia Sewell is on a quest for another Britain. Traversing the length and breadth of our island from Somerset to Scotland, she's seeking out a different story - one that lies beyond divisive national myths and symbols.

In Finding Albion, Zakia uncovers an alternative spirit of Britain that is vividly alive today. It is found in otherworldly folk songs, ancient legends, Celtic seasonal rites and mystic stone circles that punctuate our landscape. Her journey begins as the sun rises on the spring equinox over Glastonbury Tor, where she meets neopagans reclaiming traditions from our pre-Christian past. At summer's peak at Notting Hill Carnival she hears cultural echoes that passed along the slave trade routes from the Caribbean. On All Hallow's Eve she encounters the ghosts of Empire that are still haunting the nation, and in the depths of a Cornish winter she asks if today's new folk revival could unite our increasingly divided country?

Finding Albion brings a hopeful story of Britain out from the shadows, giving us a deeper sense of who we are, and heralding the promise of a brighter future”.

There are some great older interviews such as this that I want to dip into very quickly. I feel it is important to come to this 2018 interview with Brainchild Festival. This was at a time when Zakia had a show on NTS Radio:

“I had quite a rich and diverse musical upbringing”, Zakia explains.  But growing up in Hounslow, West London, this is not the easiest thing to come by.  “It’s not exactly a hub of cultural activity”, she laughs.  “My mum moved to Ladbroke Grove when I was about 15, so that was quite an important turning point for me because it suddenly meant I was plunged a bit closer into the city: Portobello Market, and shops, and music, and just a more vibrant, lively atmosphere.”

“I felt a bit more like it was a place that reflected me and my interests, and what I wanted to do.  The other thing is that both of my parents are musicians and I grew up around a lot of music, gigs and rehearsals.”

Mildly overwhelmed after graduating university, Zakia set out looking for a break from “intellectual activity” and stumbled upon a job at Honest Jon’s Records on Portobello Road, just two minutes away from her mother’s house.  “It was the best job ever. Two whole days a week of just pure listening, but also getting recommendations, listening to what customers were listening to.  I was getting more interesting in collecting music, so I started collecting vinyl.  Through that, I started thinking, ‘I’d quite like to share to this somewhere’”.

She started working at NTS as a production intern but never dreamed of having her own show, admitting that had she been left to her own devices, she might not have had the courage to put herself out there.  “I didn’t see myself as necessarily worthy of having a show, but it’s kind of blossomed.  And in terms of the work, again, it was just kind of by accident.  I was doing some research and ended up getting into production.”

NTS Radio has indeed been credited with “revolutionising digital airwaves” in the wake of the destruction that streaming services have brought upon the medium.  It repeatedly stays true to its tagline, “Don’t Assume”, through its consistently dynamic programming and steady influx of diverse, underground talent.  As Zakia knows, “NTS is really challenging the boundaries of what can be played on the radio.  I feel like I can do whatever I want on there; I’ve got such freedom and I really like that”.

PHOTO CREDIT: Abigail Holsborough

I will bring things up to date. However, The State of the Arts spoke with Zakia (I will refer to her using only her first name when referring to her D.J. and broadcasting work). In the conversation during lockdown, she spoke about the “healing power of music to heritage and mental health which feature prominently and poignantly throughout her work”:

“NTS radio occupies a space that has revolutionised radio and lured music aficionados back to a medium that has been in decline, due to the rise of streaming platforms such as Spotify. The station provides a treasure trove of experimental, diverse global music and is brimming with DIY spirit. From Japanese psychedelia and New wave to Bessie Jones and the Georgia Sea Island Singers, it showcases past and present but also nurtures future underground music scenes. “I feel really proud and grateful to be part of the NTS family, not only because of their incredible, varied and daring music output, but also the people, who are at the nucleus of NTS, are honest lovely people, and that is transmitted through each and every show”.

For regular listeners, QUESTING W/ZAKIA is sacrosanct to the ephemeral beauty of Saturday mornings. Zakia commenced her NTS passage as a Production Intern and never dreamed of having her own show, a “happy accident”, which started with an 8am Wednesday slot, and has bloomed into a weekly Saturday show. “They’ve really supported me and allowed me to find myself and do my own thing, I can’t imagine I would get away with what I get away with on NTS anywhere else… like the rambling”. The personal nature of Questing, the shout-outs, the tracks played to “thrash around your bedroom” (a very welcomed feature during lockdown), immerses listeners week on week, especially the impromptu moments, which make the show even more intimate.

“I feel like it’s an honest reflection of who I am and the music I love and hope this resonates with people, I’ve felt that even more strongly during this lockdown period, there is a connection between where I’m at, the music that’s healing me and what other people need”. Zakia explains to me that she compiles track-lists intuitively, following her own mood but also considers the collective atmosphere. This was evident in a recent show which addressed the shocking, racist killing of George Floyd. It was powerfully and thoughtfully curated and described as “a musical meditation on grief, rage, resilience and resistance”. The sounds and spirits of the civil rights and black power movements, free jazz and jubilant sounds of resistance were played, and it clearly illustrated Zakia’s intrinsic talent to positively channel a wide range of emotions, activism and meditative sounds through the airwaves.

Zakia’s personal heritage has provided her with a huge source of inspiration, from the ethereal field recordings played on her NTS show to radio documentaries, Big Drum on Little Carriacou, Speaking Sabar and My Amey and Me. Eloquently, she expounds “As a mixed- race person, there is a bit of soul searching to do about how two rivers meet in you, whether they blend and flow together or whether they come into conflict. Music is one way of trying to understand that and helps me to navigate and find the meeting places. When I listen to a field recording of my grandparents speaking in their rhythmical Welsh accent, and then I hear someone from the island that my mum’s parents are from, and hear the lovely Carriacou accent, there is something comforting in finding the parallels in the rhythms, sounds and music”. This is something that resonates with many of us, tracing and connecting with our heritage through art forms – be it music, literature or film. For me, music, especially that of my Indian heritage, has the ability to spiritually encompass my entire body in an otherworldly way, something that Zakia relates to: “music hits you, there is a body memory with music, and it cuts through the am I aren’t I, should I shouldn’t I, you just feel it.”

With the recent surge in activism towards fighting racial injustice, sparked by the case of George Floyd and powerfully led by the Black Lives Matter movement across the globe, essential and long-pleaded-for conversations around structural racism and legacies of colonialism within the UK have been re-ignited. The Art of Remembering podcast, produced by Zakia last year for Tate, is an incredibly timely, informative and important listening experience. Led by artists, poets and activists, it explores how art can be used to address the erasure of important events that has led to a history of ‘misremembering’ and gives thoughtful background to the campaign to decolonise Bristol – the Countering Colston movement. “I hope, through the podcasts and documentaries that I make, that I can contribute a little to unearthing stories that are often unheard and overlooked in mainstream narratives. I’m very privileged to have access to platforms like the BBC and Tate and so try my best to use those platforms to centre the voices, experiences and perspectives of people of colour”.

There is this interview that I would direct people to check out. I want to go back to this Observer interview from last year. Making the move from NTS Radio to the BBC, Zakia Sewell talked about respecting your elders (she is someone who champions older female artists), and the intimacy of radio. She talked about why radio is always going to be superior to playlists on streaming sites:

“What’s been the biggest change moving from NTS Radio, one of the coolest stations in the UK, to the BBC?

I’ve always been drawn to music from the past, like the folk revival of the 1950s and early 1960s and the spiritual jazz of the 1960s and 1970s, so it was great to do an archival show on NTS – an anything-goes, totally free space, where it was wonderful to grow and find my voice. A big change at 6 Music has been the sense of duty you get to support and nurture new artists as a BBC broadcaster. You suddenly tap in to that responsibility. It’s exciting to think of relationships you can build with artists over the years.

Which new artists are exciting you?

Clarissa Connolly, who brings ancient-sounding folk melodies into the present with her productions, and her incredible voice. Then there’s Cameron Winter – even with just his voice and piano, I sense he’s going to become some kind of superstar. And Sharada Shashidhar, who’s got this kind of Kate Bush style of singing, then draws in Indian classical music and jazz.

How are radio shows better than playlists made by algorithms?

The storytelling. I could be playing a field recording from West Africa in 1959 and then something contemporary by an ambient producer – my job then is to weave together these worlds and create a narrative through the sequencing of the tracks and the elements I choose to connect them. You can really help people to enter into the music through stories. Late at night, when I broadcast, it’s like you’re whispering to someone, or you’re in the act of listening together. There’s a real intimacy in radio that people long for.

You’ve DJ’d extensively around the world. What’s been your best gig so far?

At an arts festival in Iceland, where I was beaming out dub reggae through this incredible sound system into an amazing landscape. I felt so far away geographically from the origins of dub, but that moment captured for me the power and the beauty of music. The idea that something could find its way from Jamaica through to this moment by a fjord with the sun out... I love thinking about the kind of journeys that music takes, when you can be there in the moment, and witness that magic”.

Whilst I am most interested in her hosting Dream Time on BBC Radio 6 Music. I am going to end with a recent interview from The London Magazine. She talked about the remarkable Finding Albion: Myth, Folklore and the Quest for a Hidden Britain. In terms of her literary career, I do wonder what comes next:

“How would you describe your intellectual formation? You previously made a programme on Stuart Hall for BBC Radio 3, and you mention Raymond Williams at one point in the book, alongside Jeremy Deller, Dylan Thomas, and others. Who are you into?

It’s a weird book in a way, because it brings together things that aren’t usually brought together. Brit(ish) by Afua Hirsch is a book about mixed identity and empire that finds its way into Finding Albion without being discernibly there. I suppose in some ways my book is a kind of follow up to Hirsch. David Olusoga’s work revealing the black history of Britain was a massive influence too. Georgina Boyes’s The Imagined Village was one of the first books to really scrutinise Cecil Sharp’s legacy and the ways that folk culture has been romanticised and fictionalised by collectors throughout the centuries. I don’t mention Stuart Hall in the book but his memoir Familiar Stranger is interesting because in that book all of his theory is synthesised into this very personal story about his upbringing in Jamaica. I found that useful for thinking about the relationship between the personal and the political. I think he’s really brave because usually in academia there’s this divide between the lived experience and the theory, but he marries those things together and says, absolutely, my ideological, philosophical output is completely rooted in my personal, subjective experience. I really value and respect that. So he’s in the ether. Akala’s Natives is far more polemical in a way that my book isn’t, but he’s in there too, in the mix. All About Love by bell hooks was also an influence, in the way that she talks about the relationship between the personal and the political and healing, ultimately, and this book is about healing the nation. It’s about what we need to do in Britain in order to heal from the sins of our past. In the book I write about Gabriele Schwab’s idea of opening up the crypt and facing the spectres within. We can understand that on a personal level in terms of psychoanalysis, but what if we apply that to the collective?

In the book you stage a distance between the personal and the collective by performing a kind of embarrassment or cynicism towards the events you’re witnessing or taking part in. In the first chapter, set on the Glastonbury Tor, you ‘cringe a little at the idea of hand-holding so early in the morning’ and then decide to leave after reaching your ‘“woo-woo” quota for the day’. How important is embarrassment in all of this?

Traditional symbols of Britishness and particularly Englishness are so haughty. They are symbols of power and might and success and ruling the waves. I love that folk culture punctures that a little bit. Yes, okay, we may have been the ‘great’ nation who ruled the waves, but then you go and see Morris dancing on May Day morning and it’s a bunch of blokes with beer bellies sloshing around with tankards of ale. It’s amazing and it’s fun and the costumes are incredible, but it’s a bit ploddy and a bit silly and you just think, this is real Englishness. It’s so much more appealing, at least to me. It’s infectious and joyful and eccentric and mischievous and playful. I feel like these are all the aspects that are completely sidelined or eclipsed by these grand imperial narratives that are so dominant when we’re thinking about identity in this country.

I think that embarrassment is important because the reaction that a lot of people have to folk culture is that it’s cringe or uncool. If people have been fed this vision or idea of the English as a superior, ultra-civilised nation, then it is going to be confronting or humbling perhaps to see these silly, slightly ploddy, strange events happening all around the country and realise that this is the real culture of the people. It was only in 2024 that the government opted to protect Britain’s folk culture under UNESCO’s convention on intangible heritage. UNESCO set that scheme up over twenty years ago and Britain is one of the last countries to opt in to protecting their intangible heritage. What’s that about? Why wouldn’t we? Why would we be one of the last? I wonder if that embarrassment is part of it, that there’s something about these aspects of our culture that undercut or challenge the dominant view of who the British are. That sense of embarrassment is important because in a way it brings us back down to Earth.

You said earlier that we are experiencing a folk revival. Where do you think that comes from? Why is folk culture so big at the moment?

It’s interesting because we talk about a ‘revival’ but that suggests that it ever went away. There are these ripples or surges where folk rises up in moments of great change or uncertainty as something that represents a rootedness or groundedness. It makes sense that throughout the ages, whether it’s the industrial revolution, post-war or now, when things are feeling out of control people start to yearn for the traditions of the past, for old tales or songs that feel rooted in the ground. I think there are multiple layers to it. On one level, it is a response to exclusionary visions of Britishness that are becoming more commonplace. There’s a yearning in people to be able to feel proud of where they’re from without being drawn into the toxic visions of nationhood that are conjured by the far right. But it also taps into a wider longing. There’s this broader trend of people becoming more interested in astrology and spirituality and crystals, and Gen Z predominantly identify as spiritual. People are searching for alternative ways of understanding our position in the cosmos and the world around us. We’re seeing a collective leaning-in to the woo-woo. People need anchors, especially in the tumultuous times in which we live.

Another big thing is the environment. Following the Wheel of the Year or attending rituals on May Day morning or the winter solstice satisfy a desire people have to be more connected to the seasons and cycles and wider system of nature, as opposed to being separate from it. In a way it’s undoing or reclaiming many of the ways of knowing or ways of being that were obliterated or banished to the sidelines by the Enlightenment way of thinking that has structured the world in which we live. There’s a yearning to reclaim some of these discarded elements of culture that for so long were looked down upon, and perhaps now people are seeing there’s value in them.

Folk culture also resists the certainty of atheism, especially the swaggering, masculine atheism of figures like Christopher Hitchens or Richard Dawkins, which is so popular online.

It goes back to what we were saying about nuance and the in-between. Maybe this pagan ritual will bring about a good harvest. Maybe it won’t. Does it matter? Do we need to know? Do we need to find out the science of how much of an impact people gathering together on the summer solstice to ring bells and sing songs might have on the environment? Folk is an embrace of the mystery, the not needing to know. It’s flexible and porous, so you can add a bit of Celtic ritual in with a bit of Malaysian folk practice. The vagueness of it appeals to people. Maybe that says something about where we’re at collectively. People are wanting to embrace the in-betweens and the unknowns.

Do you think there are any limits to this folk revival? In the last chapter you pay nearly thirty pounds to visit Stonehenge, with its ‘mega-modern visitor centre rendered in glass and steel, where pagans in cloaks stand queueing for their lattes’. At the May Day celebrations in Oxford, you watch a ‘sea of glowing iPhones hover above the crowd’. How has the internet shaped things, for better or worse?

The contemporary revival is very much an online phenomenon. It’s a wonderful thing because it means lots of different types of people have been able to partake in this folk surge. It doesn’t matter if you didn’t grow up in a rural village where there’s a seasonal custom that happens every year. People have been able to find and connect with each other and that’s one of the reasons, apart from the demographic shift, that this contemporary folk revival is a lot more diverse than the revivals of the past. I was a weird, folk-obsessed, mixed-race kid and I didn’t have anyone else around me, as far as I knew, who looked like me and was interested in folk, until I started seeing people on social media and connecting with people like Angeline Morrison, who’s just set up the Black British Folk Collective. All of these things are happening and only possible because of the internet. But then of course there is the instagramification and tiktokification of it all, where brands see it trending and want to get their mitts on it. It’s very hard to define what folk is, but one of the defining aspects of folk culture is that it has nothing to do with institutions or corporations. The purity of it means that it tends to be local people raising funds among themselves and spending their money on keeping these things alive”.

I will end there. An incredible author and a phenomenal and established broadcaster and D.J., I have talked about her book. However, for this blog, she is perhaps more relevant as a world-class D.J. and a proud member of BBC Radio 6 Music. A truly wonderful voice, this is a queen of the decks and airwave. Someone who I have…

SO much love for.

FEATURE: Spotlight: Revisited: Lime Garden

FEATURE:

 

 

Spotlight: Revisited

Lime Garden

__________

I feel Lime Garden…

are one of the absolute best British bands in circulation. I spotlighted them in 2022. Their second studio album, Maybe Not Tonight, was released earlier this month. A stunning quartet of Chloe Howard, Annabel Whittle, Tippi Morgan, Leila Deeley, the Brighton band played a homecoming gig at the Green Door Store on 19th April. They return to Brighton 14th May for The Great Escape 2026. They have European and British dates coming through this year. A growing and loving fanbase throwing their weight and love behind Lime Garden. I will finish with a couple of reviews for Maybe Not Tonight. I am going to bring in a couple of recent interviews. NME spoke with Lime Garden’s frontperson, Chloe Howard, about their second studio album. In the conversation she explores “why “it's important to show the realistic side of self-destructive fun behaviour":

“Another single that’s been dominating indie radio airwaves is ’23’ – a devastating self-reckoning about life in your 20s not being quite as you’d imagined as Howard mourns: “At 17 I had the world in my hands and at 23 I just lost it/Something about the fact I’m losing my edge I’m getting further away from a profit.”

“I had a nightmare where I was talking to my 17-year-old self and she was giving me a hard time about where I was in life,” she told NME. “I thought that would be a fun situation to write about, but in general I am quite hard on myself.”

And what did her 17-year-old self expect of her?

“I think she thought I’d have a Lamborghini and a stable income by now, but hey – it’s 2026!”

Fair enough. After all, the anxiety and fear of your mid-20s is hard enough without being heightened by modern pressures.

“Every 23-year-old would say it’s the hardest for them,” she added. “When you’re in your early 20s you think the world revolves around you, and that’ll be the same for every generation ever. But I do think with social media, the element of comparison is stronger than ever. We’re all insane at that age.”

The work to be creative while constantly being judged online, as well as what already comes with everyday life, also fed into the album. “I hate the way my body looks too, if that helps, but it won’t,” Howard sings on ‘Body’. “I hate the way I’m looking at you, you look so beautiful…I’m jealous, and I blame you for it.”

“We’re in a weird position because we’re in a band,” said Howard, explaining the song. “We see way too many photos of ourselves. No human should see that many photos of themselves. We’re young women and people are mean online.

“It’s about being open about that and being a bit more vulnerable. Our conversations about that definitely bled into the lyrics.”

‘Maybe Not Tonight’ was also written during a period of collective “mass breakup” among the band, feeding into the ethos of tracks like ‘Body’, ‘Lifestyle’ and ‘All Bad Parts’ facing up to uncomfortable truths to make sense of of the world.

“We have a studio in Peckham and we’re there every Tuesday and Wednesday,” Howard said. “Our writing time became a therapy session for each other. It was very cathartic. We would scream and cry together, and then we’d go out together. The whole album and writing process was fuelled by those emotions.”

Ultimately, the album is a process of working through anxieties, fears, traumas and one’s own choices and mistakes, or as Howard put it, “You have to actually face up to yourself”.

I shamefully overlooked Lime Garden when I published a feature predicting which artists and albums will be shortlisted for a Mercury Prize later this year. I do feel like Maybe Not Tonight could be among the dozen shortlisted. DIY spent some time with Lime Garden recently. 2024’’s One More Thing was a fantastic debut. Since that came out, the quartet has shared tour vans, bar rounds and highs and lows. Now, Lime Garden have “distilled the irresistible alchemy of their best mates/band dynamic into new LP ‘Maybe Not Tonight’ - a riotous ode to the glorious chaos of a good night out”:

“Maybe Not Tonight’ is an album poised on a knife-edge. Following the narrative arc of a similar such night out, it starts with ‘23’ - a look at the running-out-of-time existential crisis that anyone in their mid-twenties is familiar with - before we find our protagonists hitting the self-destruct button, exploding a perfectly innocent pre-drinks (‘Cross My Heart’) into an unhinged swirl of dwindling self-awareness (the title track) and wronged romance (‘Undressed’).

Anyone vaguely familiar with Lime Garden will know that one album which dominated their playlists over the last four years was a certain lime green club-pop behemoth. Its exploration of the millennial experience through the lens of letting life get a bit messy is clearly weaved into the fabric of ‘Maybe Not Tonight’, but in a way that speaks less to trips to Berghain and more to impromptu meets in The Hope and Ruin. Chloe ponders the parallels: “I think with albums like ‘brat’, that’s a very one-sided view on going out. Charli xcx is a gorgeous, rich, 33 year old woman, and we’re a bunch of skint 24-year- olds, so it’s a very different experience for us. We were channelling that to an extent, but we wanted it more to feel like you’d bumped into us in the smoking area and we were just baring our souls to you, then regretting it the next day!”

Cue Annabel shyly explaining how the opening night of a European tour in Amsterdam near-perfectly coincided with her relationship ending. Ideal. “We’d all been feeling angry and chaotic across that summer,” she recalls, “but I’d had a break-up one week before the tour started and venues treat you so nicely in Europe, so we got given so much free beer that we were out until probably five or six in the morning. Obviously, I threw up everywhere; it was the best start to a tour you could hope for!” 

Chloe then unfurls another story of some French festival antics: “Me and Annabel stayed out watching Hot Chip until the festival shut down and we were thrown out, basically. We had to walk the whole way back to our hotel, which we didn’t realise was about two hours away from the site. We were just running through fields of crops trying to get back; we have so many stupid stories like that!”

As much as there is a rich vein of fun running right through the middle of both the band and this new record, liberation also comes balanced out by discussions of self-doubt (‘Body’), jealousy (‘Lifestyle’), and the general sense that the release partying can provide is something of a coping mechanism in a world which feels constantly on the verge of tearing itself apart. Reflecting on why the dancefloor is now the lingua franca for new acts (Fcukers) and established artists (Harry Styles, Arlo Parks) alike, Chloe posits: “We were all like 17 or 18 when Covid started, and we missed out on quite a lot of the partying era of our lives. As soon as we were let out, we went fucking nuts!”

While not a complete departure from the sights and sounds they made their name with, ‘Maybe Not Tonight’ finds Lime Garden with the shackles off, refusing to play by any rules. To paraphrase Annabel’s beloved Daft Punk: it’s bigger, better, faster, and stronger.

After two years sat on a record that took them about six months to complete, Chloe is already raring to go for Album Three: “[‘Maybe Not Tonight’] made us less afraid to take risks, which is all I’ll say about the next record”, she quips. But for the time being, the quartet are basking in a sea of their own success. “The longer we do this, the more I’m grateful to keep doing it,” Chloe beams. “I think my dream is just to keep rocking out until we’re 70 year old ladies or something.” Annabel agrees - sort of - before adding “world domination” to their list of desires. If Lime Garden continue at this pace, we’d challenge anyone to stand in their way”.

Before getting to a couple of reviews for Maybe Not Tonight, DORK spent time talking with Lime Garden. They chatted about how “Tuesdays spent writing, crying and screaming became the backbone of their second album”. An exhilarating, hugely talented and original young band bringing Rock back into the conversation – Charli xcx recently said how she was moving from the dance floor and her next album will be a Rock one -, here is a musical sensation who dreams of playing Glastonbury’s Pyramid Stage. And that wish will be granted in 2027 I feel:

“As a group, making 'Maybe Not Tonight' marked a shift in confidence. Priorities changed, boundaries strengthened, and musically, the band allowed themselves more freedom. For Leila, that meant embracing bolder guitar parts and sharper textures. “The guitars are so much more free, bolder, chunkier, more feedback, and more brash and spikey on this record, which I love,” she says. That confidence was tied closely to personal growth. “I was in a place of really trying to learn to embrace the positives of anger and learn to stick up for myself more at the time. I like that this comes through in the record.”

The album is also built around a concept that revealed itself almost accidentally. During sessions, drummer Annabel Whittle drew a bell curve mapping the emotional arc of a night out, placing tracks along it. “It blew our minds,” Leila says. Side A captures anticipation and excitement, while Side B spirals into insecurity and emotional fallout. “Seeing your ex with someone else at said party, bringing up all of your insecurities and crying on the way home, wondering if you’ll ever be able to love anyone else again,” she explains, before laughing at the drama of it all. “A painful yet very relatable experience, we hope.”

If there is one thing no one warns you about your mid twenties, according to Lime Garden, it is how suddenly lost you can feel. “The cockiness from adolescence wears off,” Leila says. “You go through one breakup and are like, where am I, who even am I, and what am I even doing?” Experiencing that confusion simultaneously brought the band closer. “We could understand each other very well, and maybe not feel as insane through sharing our similar experiences.”

Balancing that emotional intensity with touring and day jobs proved to be the biggest challenge. “Definitely figuring out the message we wanted to convey all the while balancing it with working and touring,” Leila says, laughing at the realities of indie band life. But the end result feels worth it. She hopes the album surprises people. “Lyrically and musically it’s bolder, wiser, braver,” she says. “Annabel has really added a harder, braver electronic flavour which has levelled up our sound to the max.” Chloe’s performances, she adds, were often goosebump-inducing. “It makes you feel like you’re hearing all of her secrets, perhaps ones you shouldn’t have overheard.”

Looking ahead, the ambitions are big but heartfelt. Tokyo remains a dream. Glastonbury Pyramid Stage, naturally, is on the list. In the meantime, the band are deep in unexpected obsessions, from beekeeping to ice hockey. “I can’t stop researching beekeeping,” Leila says. “There’s something so interesting about how those little guys instinctually work together in community; it’s genius.” As a band, though, their current fixation is firmly elsewhere. “Ice hockey is well and truly on the mind,” she laughs. “We went to a game in London the other day for Chloe’s surprise birthday, it was epic. They even played ‘Welcome to the Jungle’ by Guns N’ Roses at one point. It all felt very theatrical and dramatic and showbiz, which we of course enjoyed.”

What Lime Garden want most right now is simple. They are touring extensively this year, and they want people in the room. “We will be very tired, very satisfied and proud and tired,” Leila says. “Come see us play. Rock is alive”.

Getting back to NME for their take on Maybe Not Tonight. Showing their love for a reckless soundtrack to life in your twenties, Lime Garden's second album “wears its messiness on its sleeve, Lime Garden’s second is figuring life out, track by track”:

“As Brighton quartet Lime Garden were beginning work on the follow-up to their 2024 debut ‘One More Thing’, their four members went through what they’ve described as “a mass break-up”. A somewhat unfortunate act of sisterly symbiosis, each split with their respective partners in tandem “like dominoes”. Rather than sit and wallow in their collective misfortune, however, vocalist/guitarist Chloe Howard, guitarist Leila Deeley, bassist Tippi Morgan and drummer Annabel Whittle chose chaos – and now blazing, brilliant second album ‘Maybe Not Tonight’ lands as a slice of victorious closure.

Loosely structured across a big night out, the reckless spirit of the album might stem from a period of personal disarray but it also lends itself extremely well to the famously difficult junction of a second record. Where many bands overthink themselves into a corner, trying to turn out something slicker and more serious, there’s a hedonistic, ‘fuck it’ energy to the first half of ‘Maybe Not Tonight’ that practically fizzes out of the speakers. Lime Garden’s playfulness has always led to their best work, but here they sound fully unleashed: experimenting with cheeky, wonky synths on ‘All Bad Parts’ and deadpan slacker delivery on ‘Downtown Lover’.

When Charli XCX appeared on the Tape Notes podcast, she walked listeners through the messy trajectory of ‘365’, from owning the club to overdoing it in the toilet cubicle. ‘Maybe Not Tonight’ takes this idea and transposes it for twenty-somethings with a maxed-out overdraft, a pouch of rollies and a dream. Opener ‘23’ sees Howard take a deep breath and step into the mix; the aforementioned ‘All Bad Parts’ is probably the most mischievous song about the crutch of alcohol that we’ve heard in a long time, while ‘Maybe Not Tonight’’s title track rages through the night, landing like a lost indie sleaze classic.

By the album’s second half, we’ve hit the self-lacerating part of the evening when the demons kick in. ‘Body’ seethes jealously at another woman across the room (“I hate the way I’m looking at you / You look so beautiful”), while ‘Undressed’ shrivels at the sight of an old flame over Deeley’s Strokes-esque guitars. But even when the internal monologues are dark, the band’s innate knack for an indie hook stops these thought spirals from ever killing ‘Maybe Not Tonight’’s vibe.

On ‘Always Talking About You’, Howard admits her secret fantasies: ”I want to be famous / I want to be rich / I want everybody to say that’s that bitch”. The first two points might remain in question, but when it comes to getting over your exes, Lime Garden are those bitches that have come out the other side, all guns blazing”.

I am finishing up with Song Bar. They had some insightful and warm words for an album that I feel is going to win the band awards. Lime Garden embarking on these tour dates at the moment. All of this experience on the road will strengthen their shout at headline slots. They are talked about as a phenomenal live band. Go and see them if you can:

“Zesty, fresh, infectiously catchy, smash-and-grab synthy indie-pop-rock by the Brighton quartet, packed with fabulous riffs and melodies and droll, tongue-in-cheek lyrics that engagingly chart the highs and lows, the joys and insecurities of a big night out. As lead singer Chloe Howard describes: “The album is about a night out, from start to finish. As the night progresses, you’re having a great time, until your ex walks in with someone else. You hate the way you look but rather than going home, you press the big red button and get even more drunk. Eventually, you take yourself home full of melancholy, chaos and anger.” The instantly hooky opener 23 is perfect pop with a choppy guitars and a simple, insistent, deep bass-y boing, and the line: “When I was 17 I had the world at my feet; and at 23, I just lost it.” Cross My Heart has faint echoes of the rousing synth-pop La Roux’s Bulletproof, but also distinctive Lime Garden guitar funk energy, the band unafraid to capture the feel of energising pop from anywhere from the 80s to 2000s and add something of their own. Downtown Lover is noisy brasher guitar indie, Howard’s bright assertive vocal across chaotic fuzz guitars. All Bad Parts is eccentrically squiggly synth pop and funk disco, the title track a splashy piece of syncopated indie undulating between brief uncertainty and voluminous dance joy. Every track explodes with a fresh, vital energy, from the darker feedback tones of Body to the thrum of Undressed to the tender-to-brash ebb-and-flow tones and insecurities and sounds of Do You Know What I’m Thinking About? A fabulous release that moves between stop-start clever asides and explosions of sound when in full throttle, they are also hugely entertaining live prospect. Out on So Young Records”.

With the extraordinary Maybe Not Tonight out there collecting rave reviews and Lime Garden having this busy diary. It is going to be an exceptional remainder of the year. From there, they will get U.S. dates, big festival bookings and grow into one of the most revered bands in the world. That is why I wanted to come back to…

THIS astonishing Brighton quartet.

__________

Follow Lime Garden

Official:

https://www.limegarden.co.uk/

Instagram:

https://www.instagram.com/limegardenband

Twitter:

https://x.com/limegardenband

TikTok:

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

YouTube:

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FEATURE: Dead Flowers Still in Bloom: The Rolling Stones' Sticky Fingers at Fifty-Five

FEATURE:

 

 

Dead Flowers Still in Bloom

The Rolling Stones' Sticky Fingers at Fifty-Five

__________

IT does seem strange…

IN THIS PHOTO: The Rolling Stones photographed in 1971/PHOTO CREDIT: Peter Webb

when marking a big anniversary of a classic album from a legendary artist and also mentioning they have new music coming out. That is the case with The Rolling Stones. Whether trading as The Cockroaches or their own name, there has been excitement around that. I am writing fortieth anniversary features for Madonna’s True Blue, also celebrating the fact she is going to released Confessions on a Dance Floor: Part II in July. It is great that these amazing artists continue to release music decades after they put out these incredible albums we all still talk about! In the case of The Rolling Stones, this album is considered their best by many. Either this, Exile on Main St. (1972), Let It Bleed (1969) or Beggars Banquet (1968). It is clear that the band had this golden run from 1968 to 1972. You can say it extended to 1973 with Goats Head Soup. Nestled in that golden streak is 1971’s Sticky Fingers. It was released on 23rd April, 1971, so I am marking fifty-five years. One of those albums with no weak tracks, you have Brown Sugar, Wild Horses and Sway, stacking up against Sister Morphine and the sublime, underrated Dead Flowers. Sticky Fingers was inducted into the GRAMMY Hall of Fame in 1999 and is considered one of the greatest albums ever released. I want to come to some features and retrospectives as we prepare to mark fifty-five years of one of the defining albums of the 1970s. I want to start with GRAMMY, and their feature from 2021. Marking the fiftieth anniversary of Sticky Fingers, they note how it is “essential and dangerous rock and roll project that marked a rebirth for the iconic band”:

“The succession of high-profile drug busts and tragedies that shadowed the Rolling Stones in the late 1960s came to a head with the 1971 release of the band's 11th U.S. album, Sticky Fingers.

Recorded amid the disastrous Altamont concert aftermath and between famously debauched concert tours of the U.S. and Europe, Sticky Fingers is every bit as raw as the band's lives were at the time. The smoky barroom swagger of "Sway," the twitchy riffs and raspy vocals of "Bitch," and the grooving yet grimy "Brown Sugar" reflect just how wild the rock and roll ride had become for the band.

A drug bust in 1967 that ensnared Mick Jagger and Keith Richards was a prelude to the years that followed. Rolling Stones co-founder Brian Jones drowned in his swimming pool two years later, less than a month after the Stones fired him for excessive drug use, which had led to dwindling involvement with the group; he barely showed up to sessions for Let It Bleed, the band's 10th U.S. album, which was released in the months following his death.

Eager for a fresh start and desperate for cash, the Stones played a now-legendary concert at Hyde Park in London and hit the U.S. for their first tour in two years during the latter half of 1969. Chaos followed the band, culminating in a free concert at the Altamont Speedway in the hills between Livermore and Tracy, California. Billed as a sort of West Coast Woodstock, with a lineup featuring Jefferson Airplane, Santana and the Grateful Dead, the concert instead punctuated the end of the hippie peace-and-love era.

Clashes between members of the Hells Angels motorcycle club, which was hired as concert security at the event, and audience members created an atmosphere so charged, the Grateful Dead chose not to perform, even though they had helped organize the event. One biker assaulted Jefferson Airplane singer Marty Balin while others took aim at concertgoers like Meredith Hunter, who was stabbed to death in front of the stage during the Stones' performance.

The tragedy followed the triumph of the first recording sessions for Sticky Fingers, which had begun four days earlier at Muscle Shoals Sound Studio in Florence, Alabama.

Opened earlier that year by a group of session musicians known as the Swampers, who had backed Aretha Franklin on "Respect," the studio was hungry for its first hit. With the Rolling Stones, they got two: "Brown Sugar" and "Wild Horses," the album's two singles, were tracked at Muscle Shoals, alongside a faithful cover of Mississippi Fred McDowell's "You Gotta Move," between December 2-4.

"Brown Sugar" has the distinction of being one of the most controversial songs to hit No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100, where it peaked in May 1971. Musically, the song is a Stones master class that builds on a signature Richards guitar riff. By the time Bobby Keys blows his climactic saxophone solo, the guitars are playing off each other, percussion and piano are clanging away underneath, and Jagger is howling his head off.

The song's lyrics, however, are another matter. Although Marsha Hunt, a British actress of African descent, with whom Jagger fathered a child in 1970, is credited as the muse behind "Brown Sugar," the song is rife with allusions and outright explicit references to slavery, sex and drugs that were indefensible even half a century ago. In a 1995 interview with Rolling Stone, Jagger called the lyrics "a mishmash" that combines "all the nasty subjects in one go." He appears to have cooled on his lyrical concept over the years, though; in the same interview, he said he "never would write that song now."

At the other end of the spectrum, the country-tinged "Wild Horses" and the album-closing ballad "Moonlight Mile" show a more introspective Jagger, wistful and longing on the former and road-weary on the latter. Acoustic guitars provide the foundation for both songs, as well as "Dead Flowers" and "Sister Morphine," while tremulous guitars and ascending horns accent the otherwise sparse, pleading soul of "I Got the Blues."

Sticky Fingers also marked several key personnel changes in the Rolling Stones universe. The ouster and subsequent death of Brian Jones led them to hire guitarist Mick Taylor, of John Mayall's Bluesbreakers, who refueled the band's energy.

Taylor stepped into the role fully on Sticky Fingers, providing nuances like the chiming harmonics on "Wild Horses" and setting the jam-band template with his extended guitar solo on the seven-minute "Can You Hear Me Knocking" over a single-chord vamp. He played all the guitars on "Moonlight Mile" after an increasingly unreliable Richards failed to show up to sessions at Stargroves, Jagger's English countryside home, and often nodded off while high on heroin when he did. Taylor would have to step up more in the coming years as his bandmate's habit grew.

The end of the group's relationship with record label executive Allen Klein and his ABKCO label also gave lift to the band and began the modern era of the Rolling Stones. Sticky Fingers was the first album released on Rolling Stones Records, which debuted the iconic lips-and-tongue logo, designed by John Pasche.

Despite landing right in the middle of what many fans consider their golden era—the four-album run from 1968-1972 that also included Beggar's Banquet, Let It Bleed and Exile on Main St.—Sticky Fingers marked a rebirth for the Rolling Stones; the album's legacy and impact would continue to evolve in the decades to come”.

I am going to move to a Medium article that discusses the iconic cover for Sticky Fingers. Often cited as one of the very best album covers ever, it has endured through the decades and still has this cool to it. How would you describe it?! Controversial or sexual?! It provokes so many different reactions. It perfectly reflects what lies within Sticky Fingers:

“No other Stones album cover would express the band’s decadence so well. According to 100 Best Album Covers: The Stories Behind the Sleeves by Storm Thorgerson and Aubrey Powell (themselves legends of album cover design), Warhol suggested the idea of using a real trouser zipper to Mick Jagger at a party in 1969. Jagger, intrigued, asked Warhol to do the design.

Warhol’s former manager Paul Morrissey was quoted in 100 Best Album Covers thusly: “Andy was sensible enough to know not to be pretentious when doing album covers. This was a realistic attempt at selling sex and naughtiness. It was done simply and cheaply, without the pretensions that seem to go with other covers.”

The stark black-and-white close-up of a man’s crotch captured the cheap, simple approach. “It was a cheap camera and cheap film,” said Morrissey. “I have no idea what brand.”

The red rubber stamp design of the album title and band’s name added to the gritty look.

Artist Craig Braun was responsible for translating Warhol’s design into a functional album cover. As told in a 2015 New York Times article, Mick Jagger insisted that the zipper needed to work, and it had to reveal something when you pulled it down.

“[The Rolling Stones] knew if they put jeans and a working zipper that people were going to want to see what was back there,” Braun said.

Braun obtained a photo of the Andy Warhol model in his white underwear to slip behind the zipper. (Contrary to popular belief, it’s not a close-up of Mick Jagger’s crotch you see when you pull down the zipper.)

Realizing Warhol’s vision was a chore. The zipper damaged some of the initial pressings when the albums were stacked and shipped to record stores. The zipper literally dented the vinyl inside the sleeves pressed against it. Removing the zipper would ruin its effect. The solution was for each zipper to be manually pulled down just far enough that the tip of the zipper would no longer rub against the vinyl of any other albums in shipment. As Braun told Joe Coscarelli of the New York Times:

“I got this idea that maybe, if the glue was dry enough, we could have the little old ladies at the end of the assembly line pull the zipper down far enough so that the round part would hit the center disc label,” he said. “It worked, and it was even better to see the zipper pulled halfway down.”

As famous as the cover is, the artwork inside is also notable for the debut of the Rolling Stones’s iconic tongue logo, designed by John Pasche. The tongue logo would become as famous and recognizable as the Nike Swoosh logo, which also appeared for the first time in 1971.

If the album cover reminded us of the Stones’s dirtiness, then the rolling tongue recast the band in a new light: a rock and roll brand, and eventually a lucrative one, gaining revenue streams from touring and merchandising, and corporate deals that few, if anyone, envisioned in 1971. And that tongue retains its power as an icon used in co-licensing deals between the Stones and businesses such as Lucky Brand”.

In 2021, Vanity Fair also ran a feature about that cover. Craig Braun collaborating with Andy Wrahol when it came to the packaging and cover of Sticky Fingers. A cover that stands out and is timeless in its simplicity. It says so much without it being this busy, packed cover. Pitchfork reviewed Sticky Fingers in 2015. If ever there was an album that was The Rolling Stones as the greatest Rock band in the world, then this was it:

“Brown Sugar" launches the record with its quintessential blues-rock riff and lyrics that get more questionable the closer you listen (Jagger has since said it was a bit of a wind-up, "all the nasty subjects in one go"). But words were secondary for the band at this point— Sticky Fingers is about melody, and playing, and style. The Stones were always fascinated with American music, but after the death of Brian Jones in 1969 and their move away from psychedelia, their connection to blues, R&B, and country music grew even more intense. From the loping country-folk of "Wild Horses" and the tongue-in-cheek honky tonk of "Dead Flowers" to a Mississippi Fred McDowell cover ("You Gotta Move") to the swelling Otis Redding-style R&B of "I Got the Blues" to the crunchy boogie of "Bitch" to the Latin-flavored Santana jams of "Can't You Hear Me Knocking", Sticky Fingers is a love letter to these forms, the culmination of obsessions these musicians had had since childhood. But where they once sounded like English boys doing their version of the blues, now their songs felt as lived-in as their inspirations.

By this point, the Stones were so convincing playing rootsy American music it made little sense to compare them to their British peers. Musically at least, the Rolling Stones of 1971 had more in common with the Allman Brothers than they did the Who. Along with the barrelhouse piano, pedal steel, and Stax-like horns, Sticky Fingers was also only the second album to feature the guitar work of Mick Taylor, and his clean, fluid, and highly melodic leads bear a strong resemblance to Duane Allman's playing from this period.

But ultimately, this is Mick Jagger's album, the same way Exile is Keith's. Of all the iconic vocalists in '60s and '70s rock, Jagger remains the hardest to imitate, at least without sounding ridiculous. That's partly because he himself never minded sounding ridiculous, and he turned his almost cartoonish swagger into a form of performance art. Jagger's voice never sounded richer or fuller than it does here (Exile mostly buried it, to artful effect), but he's doing strange things with it, mimicking and exaggerating accents, mostly from the American South, with an almost religious fervor.

When the Stones were coming up, the line on British singers is that they sounded American because they grew up listening to those records; on Sticky Fingers, Jagger pushes that kind of mimicry to places that run just short of absurd. His twang on "Dead Flowers" is obviously played for laughs, but "You Gotta Move" is harder to get a bead on, partway between homage and parody and delivered with abandon. "I Got the Blues" is utterly sincere, with Jagger flinging every ounce of his skinny frame into it. Wherever he stands in relation to the material, Jagger is selling it, hard, and by extension selling himself as a new kind of vocalist. "Sister Morphine" and "Moonlight Mile" are the two songs that stray furthest from American music reverence, and they are highlights, showing how well the Stones could convey weariness and a weird kind of blown-out and wasted beauty.

With reissue culture in overdrive, we're seeing which classic bands kept the most in their vaults. The Stones, like Zeppelin, didn't keep much. The 2010 version of Exile on Main St. pretty much cleaned out the vault as far as music from this era, so what we have here are alternate mixes, an inferior but still interesting different take of "Brown Sugar" with Eric Clapton, the one true rarity that has long circulated but never been officially issued. There's also, depending on which version you get, a good deal of vintage live Stones, which is the main thing to get their fans excited. Selections from two 1971 gigs, both recorded well, capture the band in a peak year.

To my ears the Stones' live prowess has never quite translated to recordings. The best live records are about more: more heaviness, more jamming, more crowd noise, more energy. And their music didn't necessarily benefit from increasing any one of those things. Their songs were about a certain amount of balance between all of the elements, which is why their recordings sound so platonically perfect. With their live records, you can focus on the grooves and the riffs and the collective playing, but it's easier to notice moments of sloppiness and mistakes. Still, as far as live Stones on record, the material here is about as good as you will get.

The Stones entered the '70s still young and beautiful, but they'd have their share of problems just like everyone else; they got into disco and then in the '80s they dressed like they were on "Miami Vice" and then finally they fully understood what nostalgia for them was really worth and they discovered the power of corporate synergy. Given the weight of history behind it and its centrality to the story of both the Rolling Stones and rock music as a whole, it can be difficult to put on Sticky Fingers and try and hear it for what it was: the highly anticipated new album from one of the biggest bands in the world, a group that at the time hadn't released a new one in two years (in 1971, that was an eternity). They were called the World's Greatest Rock'n'Roll Band for entirely too long, but if that designation ever applied it was here”.

I am going to end in a minute. In 2007, the BBC shared a review of Sticky Fingers. Reaching number one in the U.S. and U.K. in 1971, some say this was a revival for The Rolling Stones. Others the tip of their peak or part of this incredible run of perfect albums. Even if some of the songs remain controversial – Brown Sugar is one that has problematic elements and would not be accepted now if it was released new -, Sticky Fingers is a stunning album of focus and ambition:

“By 1970 the Stones had earned the right to take a little time to turn out their next album. Bedding in new boy, Mick Taylor, on their well-documented tour of the States the year before had also involved a little studio time at Muscle Shoals studio. The results of these sessions and songs held over from Beggars Banquet were also brought to the table when they reconvened, still a little bruised from the apocalyptic events at Altamont. These were now grown-up men with families, demons and more to cope with who assembled at Jagger’s Stargroves mansion with their mobile studio in the summer of 1970.

In the topsy-turvy world of success they’d had more than their share of recent ups and downs. Sticky Fingers was destined to be the triumphant first release from their self-owned label but this success was leavened by the fact that they’d signed over their back catalogue to previous manager Allen Klein and had to give him the royalties from Brown Sugar and Sway to boot. The incessant touring meant that the band were now world citizens, but they still moved closer to their American roots. Using the usual support cast of Bobby Keys, Ry Cooder and Nicky Hopkins they turned their experiences into ten tracks of narcotic misery and sexual frustration. All wrapped in a very louche Andy Warhol sleeve.

Narcotics are a major theme, of course, but also loss, frustration and incredible world-weariness. Reviews at the time complained that Sticky Fingers lacked the bite of previous releases like Let It Bleed or Beggars Banquet, but it’s this very quality that makes the album special. Like Neil Young’s Tonight’s the Night, the sense of a wake creeps through tracks like Dead Flowers and Sister Morphine.

Elsewhere, the Delta serves as a touchstone for some of Jagger’s most heartfelt wailing as on I Got the Blues and You’ve Gotta Move, while he’s never bettered his letchery on Brown Sugar. Taylor’s arrival is keenly felt on Can’t You Hear Me Knocking?, with its Santana-esque coda. Sway and Bitch are hard-bitten rockers that couldn’t exist without Charlie’s taut snare.

Eventually the whole thing collapses in on itself with Moonlight Mile. A coked-out, somnambulant drift through an era’s last days, and a beautiful end to a beautiful journey. While many hold their next album, Exile On Main St., as their zenith, Sticky Fingers, balancing on the knife edge between the 60s and 70s, remains their most coherent statement”.

Because this landmark and astounding album is fifty-five on 23rd April, a chance to learn more about it and why it is considered such a classic. An album passed through the generation. With one of the most discussed and arguably best covers ever, I feel we will talk about Sticky Fingers decades from now. As the band are looking at releasing new music and are still on the road, I wonder how they feel…

ABOUT their 1971 album.

FEATURE: Lord Only Knows: Beck's Odelay at Thirty

FEATURE:

 

 

Lord Only Knows

Beck's Odelay at Thirty

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IT is exciting…

IN THIS PHOTO: Beck in 1996/PHOTO CREDIT: Martyn Goodacre

marking the thirtieth anniversary of one of the best albums of the 1990s. There is no doubting that Beck’s Odelay holds that title. In terms of its reviews and how it was received. How it endures to this day. Odelay was released on 18th June, 1996. The fifth studio album from Beck, it contains classics such as Devil’s Haircut and Where It’s At. I want to bring in a few reviews/features for this extraordinary album. Although Odelay only just made the top twenty in the U.K. and U.S., it received a lot of positive reviews. One of those albums that has gained this incredible legacy. I am not sure why it was not a top ten in 1996. However, there is not denying the impact it has made on artists since its release. In 2008, Rolling Stone spoke with Beck about the newly reissued classic. He provided a guide to each track. I cannot get the full version of the feature, though I can provide a taster:

“I thought Odelay might be the last time I got a chance to make a record,” Beck says of his 1996 album. “I was acutely aware that I was thought of as a one-hit wonder.” But almost twelve years later, Odelay is the definitive Beck album, full of funk, noise and sliced-up jokes. It’s now receiving the deluxe reissue treatment, with an edition that adds nineteen outtakes, remixes and B sides.

Beck reminisces about his landmark disc at the Hollywood studio where he’s quickly recording a new one with a producer he declines to name. “We’re not going to get sidetracked,” he says. “This one might be coming out sooner than people would think – definitely this year.” Today, he’s working in a modern facility full of expensive blond wood; back in 1995, it was the smallest room in the Silver Lake, L.A., house of the Dust Brothers (Mike Simpson and John King), the production team behind the Beastie Boys ‘ Paul’s Boutique. “It was tiny,” Beck says. “And one wall, floor to ceiling, was all records.” Although Beck emphasizes that “a lot of Odelay was played, not sampled,” many of those records were called into service, from Them’s version of “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” (the organ part became the backbone of “JackAss”) to a sex-ed. album called Sex for Teens (Where It’s At), which provided the funniest bits of the single “Where It’s At.”

The reason they had so much time to listen to records? The trio was using an early version of Pro Tools: After every take, the computer required about a half-hour to compile the data. Technology aside, Beck says he doesn’t feel like much time has passed: “When I go back to it, not a lot feels different. I’m into the same things, you know what I mean?”

“RAMSHACKLE”

The last track on Odelay was salvaged from an earlier set of sessions. “It was a whole record’s worth of stuff, somewhere between Big Star, Pavement and Nirvana.” That lost disc was almost finished when Beck first hooked up with the Dust Brothers. “ Odelay was very informal. I just showed up one day with the slide guitar and a couple of harmonicas, and we started working.”

“.000.000”

This Sabbath -style freakout, originally a B side to “Devils Haircut,” was recorded at the Beastie Boys’ L.A. studio. “It had a big skate ramp in it,” Beck recalls. He isn’t sure how one would pronounce the song’s title and can’t even decipher the words anymore. “There were definitely lyrics, and they were very meaningful. I think.”

“DEVILS HAIRCUT”

The recording of the album was split in half by Beck going on the 1995 Lollapalooza tour. “Everything we did before was very complex — we would spend weeks on each track. When I came back, we did a bunch of songs really quick in two weeks. We did ‘Devils Haircut’ and ‘New Pollution’ back to back in two days.”

“THE NEW POLLUTION”

Odelay’s third single had some of its most inscrutable lyrics, like “She’s got a cigarette on each arm.” “Most of the vocals on the record were scratch vocals,” Beck says. “We just grew attached to them.”

“GOLD CHAINS”

A previously unreleased track featuring the chorus “I’m going back home with my gold chains swinging.” “We went back and mixed that. It was never a serious album contender — we were just fucking around one day.”

“BURRO”

This “Jack-Ass” B side was a Spanish translation of the song, rerecorded with a mariachi band from an L.A. Mexican restaurant. “I tried to sing it straight, but I got carried away. I ended up sounding like Mario Lanza”.

There are a couple of other features I want to come to before finishing off. In 2016 (twenty years after its release) XS Noize spent some time with Odelay. Even though 1994’s One Foot in the Grave was well-received, there were many who doubted Beck’s chances of survival. An artist that they thought would not last much longer. Odelay silenced through doubters and confirmed Beck’s status as this unpredictable and always-shifting artist. Odelay was a major breakthrough:

“There are two elements to “Odelay” that reflect the times it was recorded within. The album rode the peak wave of the sampling trend with 28 different samples that were culled from numerous genres; Schubert, Grand Funk Railroad, Sly Stone, Lee Dorsey, Rare Earth and Edgar Winter are just some of the credited samples. In addition there were a significant number of contributors: Beck of course played everything you can think of and in addition; Joey Woronker, Mike Millius, Mike Boilo, David Brown, Greg Leisz, Charlie Haden and Ross Harris all made worthy and significant contributions. The utilization of sampling and the various musicians and contributors made for an approachable recording loaded with infectious ebullience. It showcased Beck in all his smart-ass glory as he shamelessly genre bent throughout the record.

Although the label placed no pressure on Beck in studio, when the album was delivered to the label Beck was haunted by the feedback. His greatest nightmare was realized when a record executive said,” Odelay was a large mistake for Beck’s career.” Beck spent months thinking he had blown his music career forever. Thankfully the record executive was wrong. The album was embraced by radio and fans. It reached #16 on Billboard in the US and become the first hit album for Beck in the UK reaching #17. There were five singles released; Where it’s At, Devil’s Haircut, The New Pollution, Sissyneck and Jackass. “Odelay” was nominated for Grammy’s Album of the Year in 1997, and won the Grammy for Best Alternative Music Album; additionally Beck won the Grammy for Best Male Rock Vocal Performance for Where it’s At. The success of “Odelay” put to rest the opinions of many in the industry that Beck was a lightweight novelty cult act.

On “Odelay” Beck jumps immediately into the deep end with Devil’s Haircut which was written in a day. It is a perfect display of defying logic; where things went perfectly together even though they should not. The cranking gritty guitar and the familiar beat meld for a grand accompaniment to this surreal walk through the Post Modern end of the century. The song should have come with a warning because it lodged itself in your brain and you could not get it out. It displayed the brilliance of Beck’s off the cuff quicksilver brain. This song will always reside within the pantheon of spectacular Beck tracks.

In contrast Hotwax took six months to create. Here the genres switch quickly careening from folky blues to psychedelic and then into hip hop. That neck snapping switch up should be unsettling but this is Beck we are talking about and he ends up producing another winning track. The lyrics are stream of conscious but unforgettable with my favorite still being, “silver foxes looking for romance in the chain smoke Kansas flash dance ass pants.” … and epic catchphrase “the enchanted wizard of rhythm”. The song is a bridge from Mellow Gold into “Odelay”.

Lord Only Knows provided even more catchphrases as the protagonist of the song laments the inevitable craziness of the world. Here Beck fully utilizes a world weary blues and gospel undertone to emphasize his gleeful abandoning of all hope in making sense of the nonsensical. The song is jam packed with ironic truths that became instantly quotable.

The album shape-shifts again with The New Pollution and it’s off kilter marriage of Brit wave 60’s pop and Day-Glo irony. The surface of this song is squeaky clean and innocent but lyrically is actually quite disturbing. Punctuated drums, Hammond organs and the distorted drum loop act as a time machine taking us back decades in sound. It is a whip crack crisp pop song. Where The New Pollution is an irony laden pop confection of sorts, Derelict delivers something completely different. Once again Beck messes with conventions blending an Asiatic feel with psychedelic and produces a feeling of madness with world beat percussion. The song attempts to portray a beggar/derelict exploding into a word salad of thoughts with no edit. “Novacane” delivers a hard edged ballsy hip hop attack. The bassline sets the platform for a song that explodes into a hip hop/P funk fest. The title of the song is apt as it conveys the deadened feel of the analgesic drug. This song sounds simply spectacular coming out of the speakers as Beck creates another unique collage that would become his trademark.

Where It’s At was another intentional bridge from Loser. It truly is the song to point to when explaining the genius of Beck. There are so many catchphrases including the epic, “Two turn tables and a microphone” that have stood the test of time are still being used 20 years later. The amazing thing about the song is that there is a little something here for everyone; even a total square could totally buy into the vibe Beck was laying down. On the track Beck takes us for another trip through the bizarre yet none of it seems strange. The real brilliance is Beck weaving the disparate sections of the song into one unified massive track with throbbing bass and Hammond organ bring the selection home.

Minus Is another nonsense poem that becomes something wondrous in Beck’s capable hands. Here a post punk garage band feel pervades. The track utilizes insistent drums and LoFi crunch production to perform its dirty work. The selection bounces along and then there is that slo mo tempo shapeshift before it returns to a hellbend beat. The track is like a bad LSD trip, with Beck yelling the word “frogs” at the end as the song grinds to its cacophonic end.

Sissyneck is a spectacular blending of funk, R&B and country rock providing one hell of a groove. Presented is another hard luck Joe trying to make rational the irrational. The chorus is priceless, “I got a stolen wife and a rhinestone life and some good ol’ boys. I’m writing my will on a three dollar bill in the evening time.” The pictures painted with the lyrics are at once classic and disturbing as we meet various dodgy characters. The Hammond organ and stuttering drums deliver a locomotive feel to the accompaniment.

Readymade is a wonky track with the marriage of Mexicali influence with techno. It portrays a fly blown traveler as he passes through life. Illuminating the track are lyrics like, “and my bags are waiting for the next life”, as if Beck is saying I’ll be waiting for the karmic paybacks for the wrongs done in this life. The electronic effects of the track punctuate the intentionally tawdry feel of the song.

High 5 (Rock the Catskills) is an ebullient rocking hip hop song, in which the Dust Brothers were channeling their Beastie Boy experiences through Beck. The mind meld between producers and artist are at their most obvious on this track. It is a blast of a song that is totally shambolic and should not work but is a great piece of music.

The final listed song on the original release is Ramshackle which was the only song to survive the original recording sessions. It draws the album to a close with a beautiful folk feel. It also gives hints to the beauty that will surface on later releases, Sea Change and Morning Phase.It is a poetic melancholy rambling illuminated by sage advice and insight, calling to mind the works of Woody Guthrie. The song is made more poignant by the not quite on key loose string acoustic guitar. The song ends at the 2:45 mark and runs silent until the hidden 45 second wonky tech track with a repeating robotic vocal. Again a straight forward song is meddled with in order to meet the requirements of being messed around.

With Odelay Beck was able to slay the doubts many had about his prospects for longevity in popular music. Many musical experts at the time made the mistake of assuming because Beck makes what he does look so easy and does it with a happy go luck journeyman’s approach that he was not trying or working very hard. Those people could not have been more wrong. Beck’s output looks effortless because he is that gifted. The brilliance of Odelay is Beck’s almost supernatural ability to weave immense texture and genre shapeshifting together on the release and come out with so many beloved hits. Beck would move on from “Odelay” continuing to follow the twists and turns of his own unique musical inklings. He secured his career with “Odelay” making sure his future ventures would get the notice they deserve. If you want to introduce the younger generation to an ambitious musical adventure “Odelay” is an excellent way to start”.

I am going to finish off with Albumism. There will be new features published for Odelay when it turns thirty on 18th June. I was thirteen when Odelay came out. It was a period in music when things were changing. Especially in the U.K. This enormously inventive album came out in a time when Britpop was fading away and there was this sense of shift and different sounds and genres coming to the fore:

“Following the pervasive success of “Loser” and the lo-fi major label debut LP Mellow Gold (1994), the invariable backlash materialized, with Beck being unfairly accused of one-hit wonderdom and embracing kitschy artifice over musical substance. Two years later, however, he silenced the haters in convincing fashion with the release of the ambitiously conceived and masterfully executed Odelay, which formally established him as a bona fide artiste with an unconventional and imaginative musical vision.

The album that Beck originally began recording as the follow-up to Mellow Gold was a notably more acoustic-driven, maudlin suite of songs. He ultimately scrapped most of the material, and started fresh with a new sonic direction, aided in large part by hooking up with the L.A. based production duo of E.Z. Mike (Michael Simpson) and King Gizmo (John King), more affectionately known as the Dust Brothers. Renowned for their studio wizardry on the Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique (1989), Young MC’s Stone Cold Rhymin’ (1989), and Tone Loc’s Lōc-ed After Dark (1989), among other projects, the Dust Brothers brought a seasoned hip-hop sensibility and penchant for innovative sampling to their recording sessions with Beck.

Crafting the intricately woven songs that would ultimately constitute Odelay was an organic, liberating process replete with new sonic adventures for the kindred musical spirits involved. “We’d always been forced to sample from records,” Dust Brother Mike Simpson explained to MusicRadar in 2011. “Whereas with Beck he’d say, ‘I’ve got some ideas,’ and plug in his guitar and just start riffing. He’d play a bar or a measure and we’d take that and loop it up and he’d be like, ‘Oh, that’s incredible. Wow, I don’t even remember playing that!’ We were of like minds, had the same goals, and were looking to make the same kind of music.”

Indeed, the kaleidoscopic, multi-layered Odelay—named after the phonetic spelling of the Spanish expression “órale,” the equivalent of “right on” or “word” in English—reflects the convergence of a vast expanse of unorthodox ideas, musical inspirations, and bold experiments across its thirteen songs. However, to the credit of its creators, the album is a coherent and cohesive one, never descending into hodgepodge territory from the weight of its grand ambitions. This is progressive music, to be sure, but it’s also one of the most insanely catchy and vibrant albums you’ll ever have the pleasure of hearing.

From a lyrical perspective, Beck has been forthright about his preoccupation with ensuring that his words are, first and foremost, compatible with the sonic structures of his songs. Hence why the lyrics featured throughout Odelay are more akin to wistful streams of consciousness than calculated messages with profound underlying meaning contained therein.

“I didn't want to be pretentious or pompous in the way some songwriters suddenly decide, ‘OK, now I'm a poet; I'm going to turn these lyrics into poetry,’ Beck confided to Rolling Stone in 1997. “For me, the words still have to be funky. Especially in the area of music I'm working in: It's not art music; it's not conceptual. The words have got to feel good, and they have to sound good; they have to fit the rhythm. That's the hardest thing. You got a melody, you got this thing that's musical, and you want to stick words on it. Words can really weigh something down. And if you put in the wrong words, I'm telling you, it'll ruin the music; it'll ruin the melody.”

Beck would subsequently refine and streamline his songwriting approach beginning with the follow-up effort Mutations (1998) and more noticeably on Sea Change (2002), but here, his words defy intuitive comprehension, and instead exist in a surreal, dreamlike state that commands listeners to exercise their imaginations.

Five singles were officially released from Odelay, with the hypnotic “Where It’s At” the first and most memorable among these. Propelled by a cacophony of distorted melodies, oddball vocal snippets, and the unforgettable chorus chant of “Where it’s at! I’ve got two turntables and a microphone,” with a robotic echo lifted from Mantronix’s 1985 single “Needle to the Groove,” Beck gives you little choice but to wholeheartedly accept his invitation to the “destination a little up the road.”

Though less ubiquitous than “Where It’s At,” the four other singles are all unequivocal standouts. The rollicking, breaks-driven “Devil’s Haircut” and buoyant “The New Pollution,” which samples the horns of saxophonist Joe Thomas’ 1976 composition “Venus” to stunning effect, are the album’s most exhilarating, pop-friendly fare. On the more subdued tip, the sprawling “Jack-Ass,” presumably an ode to listlessness in life and love, and “Sissyneck,” a countrified exploration of the free-ramblin’ existence, are both irresistible gems.

A commercial and critical triumph that went double platinum and secured countless accolades, including the 1997 GRAMMY Award for Best Alternative Music Album alongside a nomination for Album of the Year, Odelay proved the album that convinced listeners, and the music industry at large, to finally give Beck the credit he so rightfully deserved.

“Odelay was expected to be such a failure,” Beck admitted to Pitchfork in 2011. “I remember the record company having some kind of party right before there was a big merger when everyone got fired. It was after Odelay had sold 2 million copies and I remember the head of the record company giving this speech in which it was obvious that he was very confused about its success. I think everyone felt that way. So pretty much everything since has been a bit of a retreat from that kind of success”.

The mighty Odelay turns thirty on 18th June. Possibly Beck’s best-known and most extraordinary statement, it still strikes hard today. As uDiscover Music wrote last year, Odelay turned the Californian artist into an internationally-recognised name: “Hansen was named Best International Solo Male at the BRIT Awards, won similar accolades from the NME, Rolling Stone and others, and Grammys for Best Alternative Album and Best Male Rock Vocal Performance for “Where It’s At.” Beck had far more than two turntables and a microphone: now the world was at his door”. This classic still shines and radiates…

THREE decades on.

FEATURE: Kate Bush: The Whole Story: Kate's KBC article Issue 12 About The Dreaming

FEATURE:

 

 

Kate Bush: The Whole Story

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush photographed in 1982/PHOTO CREDIT: Steve Rapport

Kate's KBC article Issue 12 About The Dreaming

__________

THIS next part…

of Kate Bush: The Whole Story continues looking at articles/writings from Bush for the fan club. I started by discussing an interview and article I think was from 1983. That was when she was writing Hounds of Love. I am skipping back to 1982. That was when she released The Dreaming. In the third part, I will probably break away from the Kate Bush Club and Bush’s entries. However, I will come back to it, as it is a really engaging and insightful resource. What she was going through during the recording of her albums and how she was feeling. Here, for the twelfth issue of the Kate Bush Club, we got some updates from the icon. I love how there was this period where Kate Bush was writing to her fans and keeping them abreast of all the progress and happenings. After finishing her most demanding and detailed album, it must have been a kind of relief to get the album out:

“It's been a very long time since I spoke to you. It was last year--can time really keep going faster? I would like to apologise for the long gap since the last magazine and fill you in on what's been happening. It seems that every time I do something, it takes me longer to do. This album has taken one year to record and I have never done anything so involved before. After all this time, I do feel happy with the results and I just hope that you will too.

I have had a lot of help with this album. I never could have done it alone, and each person has contributed something very special.

We worked between several studios, getting time where we could at the studios with the facilities we required, eventually settling in at Advision Studios, where we finished all the overdubs and mixed the tracks. We also worked at The Townhouse and The Odyssey, and at Abbey Road Studios, where all the backing tracks were recorded.

I used several engineers, working with Hugh Padgham, Nick Launay, Haydn Bendall and Paul Hardiman. All of them were very important and all played major parts in how the album has ended up sounding.

Hugh worked on Sat In Your Lap, Get Out of My House, and Leave It Open. Hugh was a lot of fun to work with and as the first engineer on the album, he started it off in a very productive and positive way. I met Hugh when I had the pleasure to sing some backing vocals for Peter Gabriel, and I was very impressed with the sounds and the creative atmosphere. Hugh has worked with The Police, Genesis and XTC, just to mention a few.

We felt very pleased with the backing tracks and were excited at the results; however, Hugh was too busy to continue, and so I worked with Nick Launay, who had been trained by Hugh. Nick worked on Houdini, All the Love, There Goes a Tenner, The Dreaming and Suspended in Gaffa. The majority of the backing tracks were recorded with Nick at The Townhouse.

We were working through the warm summer last year, and much dedication was required from all to stay in the studio all day without succumbing to the sun.

Nick is a very young engineer and has already worked with Public Image, Phil Collins and John Martyn. Again there was a great working relationship and we were all sad that Nick was too busy to continue and that the time at The Townhouse had run out.

I moved on to Abbey Road, working with Haydn Bendall. I met him on the last album when I was working with Jon Kelly. Haydn was co-producing Sky and I found him a very patient and understanding engineer. Haydn also engineered Roy Harper's last album and among many other artists, helps up and coming writers to get their ideas securely on to tape, often securing record contracts at the same time. Haydn worked on Night of the Swallow and Pull Out the Pin. Our assistant engineer Danny Dawson, affectionately known as Dan-Dan, became part of the working team on the two tracks, and it was really enjoyable. It always is fun when you work with nice people.

The two tracks are finished and Haydn's time runs out too, so...I find Paul Hardiman, with a lot of help from Hugh Padgham.

Paul has worked with a great variety of acts, from Slade to Keith Emerson and Soft Cell. We worked at Odyssey Studios up until Christmas [1981], and by then Paul and I had a great working relationship. I felt I could communicate with him very easily and he could get the sounds I needed to hear, very quickly. We ran out of time at Odyssey and Paul suggested Advision, studios he knew from experience. He took me around there one afternoon on a Sunday. The studio was deserted and we went down to a small control room that proved to have a brilliant sound. We were sitting listening to tapes at full blast and I was falling in love with the room when the door slowly opened and a rather anxious looking studio manager edged around the door. He saw Paul and sighed with relief, and explained how he'd expected a gang of thugs to be tearing up the studio while listening to tapes of their choice-- as far as he had known, the studio was empty. We asked him if there would be any time for us to use the studio, and the three weeks we booked were to turn into more like three months. Paul and I were very excited about settling in to one studio, and Paul had some wonderful effects for sounds that he'd put away for a rainy day. I'm pleased there was a lot of rain to come.

Although all the engineers were invaluable, Paul was of special value. He became a constant companion during the album and I would often ask he advice, knowing I would get an honest answer. He is also a very funny man, so he kept us all laughing-- donning silly hats and pulling funny faces.

At Advision we met Dave Taylor--he was the assistant engineer, and he worked with us for months until the album was finished and mixed. Dave was also the maintenance engineer, and on quite a few nights, when we went home to bed, he would be up all night twiddling inside machines or trying to figure out why the digital machines weren't working. Every night we ate take-away food, watched the evening news and returned to the dingy little treasure trove to dig for jewels.

Now it's all finished, I think of the beginning. Twenty demos, ten of which became the album. In these demos all the moods and sounds were captured, and all the way through the album these demos were referred to. Often the session would stop, we'd dig out the 1/4 inch tape of the track we were working on, and with the original flavour and sounds strong in our heads, the session would begin again. In many ways it would have been interesting to have used the demos as masters, they were so spontaneous.

Del Palmer engineered all the demos and every night he would sit up in the cramped little control room, getting different sounds for each track. He sat through hours of harmonies and takes of lead vocals, replying "I'm not bored" as many times as there were cups of tea, and nodding "Yeah, Kate, I think it sounds great!", a phrase to be echoed by Hugh, Haydn, Paul--Bless you all.

Perhaps I could now walk you through the album, track by track, starting with:

Sat In Your Lap

I already had the piano patterns, but they didn't turn into a song until the night after I'd been to see a Stevie Wonder gig. Inspired by the feeling of his music, I set a rhythm on the Roland and worked in the piano riff to the high-hat and snare. I now had a verse and a tune to go over it but only a few lyrics like

"I see the people working,"
"I want to be a lawyer," and
"I want to be a scholar,"

so the rest of the lyrics became "na-na-na" or words that happened to come into my head. I had some chords for the chorus with the idea of a vocal being ad-libbed later. The rhythm box and piano were put down, and then we recorded the backing vocals "Some say that knowledge is..." Next we put down the lead vocal in the verses and spent a few minutes getting some lines worked out before recording the chorus voice. I saw this vocal being sung from high on a hill on a windy day. The fool on the hill, the king of the castle... "I must admit, just when I think I'm king."

The idea of the demos was to try and put everything down as quickly as possible. Next came the brass. The CS80 is still my favourite synthesizer next to the Fairlight, and as it was all that was available at the time, I started to find a brass sound. In minutes I found a brass section starting to happen, and I worked out an arrangement. We put the brass down and we were ready to mix the demo.

I was never to get that CS80 brass to sound the same again--it's always the way. At The Townhouse the same approach was taken to record the master of the track. We put down a track of the rhythm box to be replaced by drums, recording the piano at the same time.

As I was producing, I would ask the engineer to put the piano sound on tape so I could refer to that for required changes.

This was the quickest of all the tracks to be completed, and was also one of the few songs to remain contained on one twenty-four track tape instead of two!

There Goes a Tenner

"Everybody synchronize watches. Remember there's only half an hour to do the job. We've been rehearsing for weeks, so nothing should go wrong. Let's run through it one more time:

"I go in and distract the guard,
Frank's out the back in the getaway car,
The sign on the door turns from open to shut,
We keep them all covered, you blow the safe up,
We grab the cash, make a hasty retreat,
And tear across London using the backstreets.
Remember, be careful, give nothing away,
The arm of the Law is as long as they say."

Pull Out the Pin

We sat in front of the speakers trying to focus on the picture-- a green forest, humid and pulsating with life. We are looking at the Americans from the Vietnamese point of view and, almost like a camera, we start in wide shot. Right in the distance you can see the trees moving, smoke and sounds drifting our way...sounds like a radio. Closer in with the camera, and you can catch glimpses of their pink skin. We can smell them for miles with their sickly cologne, American tobacco and stale sweat.

Take the camera in even closer, and we find a solitary soldier, perhaps the one I have singled out. (Sometimes a Vietnamese would track a soldier for days and follow him, until he eventually took him.) This soldier is under a tree, dozing with a faint smile and a radio by his side. It's a small transistor radio out of which cries an electric guitar. I'd swear it was being played by Brian Bath, but how could that be, way out here on our stereo screen.

I pop the silver Buddha that I wear around my neck into my mouth, securing my lips around his little metal body. I move towards the sleeping man. A helicopter soars overhead, he wakes up, and as he looks me in the eyes I relate to him as I would to a helpless stranger. Has he a family and a lady waiting for him at home, somewhere beyond the Chinese drums and the double bass that stalks like a wild cat through bamboo?

The moving pictures freeze-frame and fade--someone stopped the multi-track, there's more overdubs to do.

Suspended in Gaffa

Whenever I've sung this song I've hoped that my breath would hold out for the first few phrases, as there is no gap to breathe in.

When I wrote this track the words came at the same time, and this is one of the few songs where the lyrics were complete at such an early stage. The idea of the song is that of being given a glimpse of "God"--something that we dearly want--but being told that unless we work for it, we will never see it again, and even then, we might not be worthy of it. Of course, everybody wants the reward without the toil, so people try to find a way out of the hard work, still hoping to claim the prize, but such is not the case. The choruses are meant to express the feeling of entering timelessness as you become ready for the experience, but only when you are ready.

Leave It Open

Like cups, we are filled up and emptied with feelings, emotions-- vessels breathing in, breathing out. This song is about being open and shut to stimuli at the right times. Often we have closed minds and open mouths when perhaps we should have open minds and shut mouths.

This was the first demo to be recorded, and we used a Revox and the few effects such as a guitar chorus pedal and an analogue delay system. We tried to give the track an Eastern flavour and the finished demo certainly had a distinctive mood.

There are lots of different vocal parts, each portraying a separate character and therefore each demanding an individual sound. When a lot of vocals are being used in contrast rather than "as one," more emphasis has to go on distinguishing between the different voices, especially if the vocals are coming from one person.

To help the separation we used the effects we had. When we mastered the track, a lot more electronic effects and different kinds of echoes were used, helping to place the vocals and give a greater sense of perspective.

Every person who came into the studio was given the "end backing vocals test" to guess what is being sung at the end of the song.

"How many words is it?"

"Five."

"Does it begin with a 'W'?"

It is very difficult to guess, but it can be done, especially when you know what the song is about.

I would love to know your answers.

The Dreaming

We started with the drums, working to a basic Linn drum machine pattern, making them sound as tribal and deep as possible. This song had to try and convey the wide open bush, the Aborigines--it had to roll around in mud and dirt, try to become a part of the earth. "Earthy" was the word used most to explain the sounds. There was a flood of imagery sitting waiting to be painted into the song. The Aborigines move away as the digging machines move in, mining for ore and plutonium. Their sacred grounds are destroyed and their beliefs in Dreamtime grow blurred through the influence of civilization and alcohol. Beautiful people from a most ancient race are found lying in the roads and gutters. Thank God the young Australians can see what's happening.

The piano plays sparse chords, just to mark every few bars and the chord changes. With the help of one of Nick Launay's magic sounds, the piano became wide and deep, effected to the point of becoming voices in a choir. The wide open space is painted on the tape, and it's time to paint the sound that connects the humans to the earth, the dijeridu.

The dijeridu took the place of the bass guitar and formed a constant drone, a hypnotic sound that seems to travel in circles.

.

Women are never supposed to play a dijeridu, according to Aboriginal laws; in fact there is a dijeridu used for special ceremonies, and if this was ever looked upon by a woman before the ceremony could take place, she was taken away and killed, so it's not surprising that the laws were rarely disobeyed. After the ceremony, the instrument became worthless, its purpose over.

It's interesting how some songs attract lots of ideas--this was definitely one of them, and because of the amount of ideas in this song, it made me concentrate on others, so they would not be neglected or left behind. Percy Edwards was among the ideas for this song, and he too was a real pleasure to work with. He really is the only man who imitates the voices of animals to the extent that he does, and is greatly respected for his talents. It is so beautiful to watch him burst into birdsong in a studio in the middle of London. I had images of him waking with the dawn chorus, taking part with blackbirds, the sparrows, the thrushes... but we were in the studio with Percy, and there was work to do, so he became sheep, dingoes and Australian magpies. The light grew dim and we were out in the bush on a warm windy night by the light of Percy, our fire.

Percy is a true professional, and he kept us all in awe with his wonderful ways. He was, however, a little upset by the treatment of the kangaroos, but after Paddy and I explained it was the only way to get the sound we wanted, he completely understood the situation and tried to communicate to the kangas what they had to do. The only problem was he couldn't remember the kanga word for "Dang" so he worked on "Boing" with a "D".

Night of the Swallow

Ever since I heard my first Irish pipe music it has been under my skin, and every time I hear the pipes, it's like someone tossing a stone in my emotional well, sending ripples down my spine.

I've wanted to work with Irish music for years, but my writing has never really given me the opportunity of doing so until now. As soon as the song was written, I felt that a ceilidh band would be perfect for the choruses. The verses are about a lady who's trying to keep her man from accepting what seems to be an illegal job. He is a pilot and has been hired to fly some people into another country. No questions are to be asked, and she gets a bad feeling from the situation. But for him, the challenge is almost more exciting than the job itself, and he wants to fly away.

As the fiddles, pipes and whistles start up in the choruses, he is explaining how it will be all right. He'll hide the plane high up in the clouds on a night with no moon, and he'll swoop over the water like a swallow.

Bill Whelan is the keyboard player with Planxty, and ever since Jay [Kate's eldest brother John Carder Bush] played me an album of theirs I have been a fan. I rang Bill and he tuned into the idea of the arrangement straight away.

We sent him a cassette, and a few days later he phoned the studio and said, "Would you like to hear the arrangement I've written?"

I said I'd love to, but how?

"Well, Liam is with me now, and we could play it over the phone."

I thought how wonderful he was, and I heard him put down the phone and walk away. The cassette player started up. As the chorus began, so did this beautiful music--through the wonder of telephones it was coming live from Ireland, and it was very moving.

We arranged that I would travel to Ireland with Jay and the multi-track tape, and that we would record in Windmill Lane Studios, Dublin. As the choruses began to grow, the evening drew on and the glasses of Guiness, slowly dropping in level, became like sand glasses to tell the passing of time. We missed our plane and worked through the night.

By eight o'clock the next morning we were driving to the airport to return to London. I had a very precious tape tucked under my arm, and just as we were stepping onto the plane, I looked up into the sky and there were three swallows diving and chasing the flies.

All the Love

Although we are often surrounded by people and friends, we are all ultimately alone, and I feel sure everyone feels lonely at some time in their life. I wanted to write about feeling alone, and how having to hide emotions away or being too scared to show love can lead to being lonely as well.

There are just some times when you can't cope and you just don't feel you can talk to anyone. I go and find a bathroom, a toilet or an empty room just to sit and let it out and try to put it all together in my mind. Then I go back and face it all again.

I think it's sad how we forget to tell people we love that we do love them. Often we think about these things when it's too late or when an extreme situation forces us to show those little things we're normally too shy or too lazy to reveal.

One of the ideas for the song sparked when I came home from the studio late one night. I was using an answering machine to take the day's messages and it had been going wrong a lot, gradually growing worse with time. It would speed peoples' voices up beyond recognition, and I just used to hope they would ring back again one day at normal speed.

This particular night, I started to play back the tape, and the machine had neatly edited half a dozen messages together to leave "Goodbye", "See you!", "Cheers", "See you soon"... It was a strange thing to sit and listen to your friends ringing up apparently just to say goodbye. I had several cassettes of peoples' messages all ending with authentic farewells, and by copying them onto 1/4" tape and re-arranging the order, we managed to synchronize the "callers" with the last verse of the song.

There are still quite a few of my friends who have not heard the album or who have not recognised themselves and are still wondering how they managed to appear in the album credits when they didn't even set foot into the studio.

Houdini

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.

Get Out of My House

The Shining is the only book I've read that has frightened me. While reading it I swamped around in its snowy imagery and avoided visiting certain floors of the big, cold hotel, empty for the winter. As in Alien, the central characters are isolated, miles (or light years) away from anyone or anything, but there is something in the place with them. They're not sure what, but it isn't very nice.

The setting for this song continues the theme--the house which is really a human being, has been shut up--locked and bolted, to stop any outside forces from entering. The person has been hurt and has decided to keep everybody out. They plant a "concierge" at the front door to stop any determined callers from passing, but the thing has got into the house upstairs. It's descending in the lift, and now it approaches the door of the room that you're hiding in. You're cornered, there's no way out, so you turn into a bird and fly away, but the thing changes shape, too. You change, it changes; you can't escape, so you turn around and face it, scare it away.

"Hee Haw"

"Hee Haw"

"Hee Haw"

Lots of love,

Kate
xxxx”.

It is huge thanks to Gaffweb that we have these entries and archives. Testament to their dedication and passion that they have transcribed all of this for us fans to enjoy. I shall return to this site for the fifth or sixth part perhaps but, next, I might take us back before her debut and look at some of the artefacts and writings from pre-1978. For this Kate Bush: The Whole Story, I did want to drip into the treasure trove that is her thoughts and recollections for the Kate Bush Club. Those fan club entries that must have been so thrilling and fascinating to read. This one from October 1982 is deep and gives us a window into recording The Dreaming and details about the tracks. Commitment and real love for the fans from an artist who still..

HAS no equals.

FEATURE: You Always Taught My Right from Wrong: Madonna's Papa Don't Preach at Forty

FEATURE:

 

 

You Always Taught My Right from Wrong

IN THIS PHOTO: Madonna in 1986/PHOTO CREDIT: Herb Ritts

Madonna's Papa Don't Preach at Forty

__________

ONE of the most…

iconic Pop songs of the 1980s – or of all-time – turns forty on 11th June. In terms of her fashion, look and songwriting, Papa Don’t Preach is peak Madonna. The second single from her True Blue album, that turns forty on 30th June. I am doing more anniversaries around that. Papa Don’t Preach was a real breakthrough for Madonna. In terms of the maturity of the lyrics. Co-writing the lyrics with composer Brian Elliot, Papa Don’t Preach tell the story of a teenage girl who becomes pregnant and chooses to keep her baby, despite her father's objection. A huge number one success around the world, it is arguably that Papa Don’t Preach truly cemented Madonna’s reputation as one of the most innovative and evolving artists of her generation. As a modern icon. Only a few years from her eponymous debut album, she had done so much and her sound changed and her talent grew. Papa Don’t Preach is a masterpiece. There are some features that I want to get to. As we mark forty years of Papa Don’t Preach, it is worth remembering that Madonna has announced a new album, Confessions on a Dance Floor: Part 2. It comes out on 3rd July. She has barely slowed since she broke through. One of the hardest-working and consistently brilliant artists. Still very much the Queen of Pop! I want to first come to American Songwriter and their feature that tells the story behind the classic:

“Meaning Behind the Song

The song’s origins begin outside of Elliot’s recording studio where he allegedly overheard gossip on the street from girls at a nearby high school. Elliot would often see students standing outside the front window of his studio that they’d use as a mirror and hang-out spot, sharing gossip and stories from school. Elliot used this as inspiration for the song about a teenage girl who winds up pregnant, begging her father for compassion and assistance as opposed to judgment.

“I saw it as a sensitive plea for compassion and understanding about a young girl who found herself at a crossroads in life and didn’t know where to turn,” Elliot explained to the Los Angeles Times in 1986, describing “Papa” as “a love song, maybe framed a little bit differently.”

Elliot intended for the song to be recorded by another artist he was producing at the time, Cristina Dent. But when Michael Ostin, the A&R executive at Madonna’s label Warner Bros., heard the song, he asked to pitch it to Madonna instead. The superstar says that she was drawn to the confident nature of the song, as the young woman stands up to her father and friends, making it clear that the choice about what to do about the pregnancy is her own. Papa don’t preach I’m in trouble deep/Papa don’t preach, I’ve been losing sleep/But I made up my mind, I’m keeping my baby, she sings in the chorus.

The Message

”’Papa Don’t Preach’ is a message song that everyone is going to take the wrong way,” Madonna told Rolling Stone in 1986. ”Immediately they’re going to say I am advising every young girl to go out and get pregnant. When I first heard the song, I thought it was silly. But then I thought, wait a minute, this song is really about a girl who is making a decision in her life. She has a very close relationship with her father and wants to maintain that closeness. To me, it’s a celebration of life. It says, ‘I love you, father, and I love this man and this child that is growing inside me.’ Of course, who knows how it will end? But at least it starts off positive.”

The singer’s predictions were right. The song drew critical acclaim, while also having a polarizing impact at the time, as some critics felt like she was supporting teen pregnancy, while anti-abortion groups felt as though the song was in line with their views. “It just fit right in with my own personal Zeitgeist of standing up to male authorities, whether it’s the pope or the Catholic Church or my father and his conservative, patriarchal ways,” Madonna said to Rolling Stone in 2009 about why the song was a natural fit in her repertoire. “There have been so many fallouts, they all get confused. But for ‘Papa Don’t Preach,’ there were so many opinions, that’s why I thought it was so great. Is she for “schma-smortion,” as they say in Knocked Up? Is she against abortion?”

Regardless of the polarizing opinions, the song shot to the top of the charts around the world, including the Billboard Hot 100, and has solidified itself as one of Madonna’s career-defining hits”.

There are some features and interviews to get to. A couple of archives from New York Times. The first discusses how Papa Don’t Preach is a fantastic song and this memorable Pop song. Though its messages and themes rankle and has caused division and controversy. Although Madonna liked to challenge and cause controversy, Papa Don’t Preach is this growing Pop artist putting in deeper themes into Pop music. Not just being flippant about pregnancy, it was a superstar redefining the genre and traditional narratives:

“Madonna's new song ''Papa Don't Preach'' hit the top of the pop charts a few weeks ago and all around the city her voice is heard, singing of adolescent pregnancy. It drifted through Kathie Peters's headphones on a recent afternoon as she made her way to a pizza parlor in Queens, and the 18-year-old broke into a sidewalk boogie:

''Papa don't preach, I'm in trouble deep Papa don't preach, I've been losing sleep But I made up my mind, I'm keeping my baby.. . .''

Later that day, she took part in a ''sexuality rap session'' at an adolescent services center in Manhattan, The Door, at 618 Avenue of the Americas at 18th Street. When a social worker leading the group mentioned ''Papa Don't Preach,'' Kathie Peters shook her head and said: ''Too many kids are getting pregnant. They don't know what they're getting into. I don't like the message.''

''But,'' she added with a sheepish smile, ''I do like the beat.''

Many young people like the beat. The song is the second single from Madonna's third album, ''True Blue,'' currently one of the best-selling records in the United States. In the popular video, the rock star portrays a pregnant teen-ager who begs her father to bless her decision to keep the baby. Song Gets Criticism and Support

As its popularity has increased, so has the criticism and support the song has received from groups concerned with pregnancy and abortion.

''The message,'' said the executive director of Planned Parenthood of New York City, Alfred Moran, ''is that getting pregnant is cool and having the baby is the right thing and a good thing and don't listen to your parents, the school, anybody who tells you otherwise -don't preach to me, Papa. The reality is that what Madonna is suggesting to teen-agers is a path to permanent poverty.''

However, groups opposed to abortion see ''Papa Don't Preach'' as a positive, ''pro-life'' song. ''Abortion is readily available on every street corner for young women,'' said the president of the California chapter of Feminists for Life in America, Susan Carpenter-McMillan. ''Now what Madonna is telling them is, hey, there's an alternative.'' Lace Gloves and Rosaries

Mr. Moran remembers how his agency's clinics were filled last year with girls wearing fingerless lace gloves and rosaries around their necks, in imitation of Madonna's fashion style.

''Everybody I've talked to believes she has more impact on young teen-agers than any other single entertainer since the Beatles,'' Mr. Moran said. ''That's what makes this particular song so destructive.''

Mr. Moran and others in the family planning field fear that the song will undermine their efforts to promote birth control among adolescents and that it will encourage teen-age pregnancy. More than a million American teen-agers become pregnant each year, according to the Alan Guttmacher Institute, a New York-based national research organization.

A campaign to discourage teen-age pregnancy began earlier this week, from the Mayor's Office of Adolescent Pregnancy and Parenting Services. Subway posters, television and radio spots will carry the slogan ''Be Smart About Sex,'' and L.L. Cool J., a rap artist, has recorded a ''Smart Sex Rap'' for radio.

''We're using the same medium to put across a very different message about being smart and avoiding teen-aged pregnancy,'' said Alice Radosh, the office's coordinator. ''The timing of the Madonna song concerns us.''

Mr. Moran said his Planned Parenthood chapter is sending a ''critical memo'' to radio and television stations in the metropolitan area urging them to ''think carefully about playing this song to young audiences.'' He added that his chapter is asking Warner Brothers Records, the parent company of Madonna's label, to donate at least 25 percent of earnings from the song to programs that promote responsible sexual behavior. Teen-Agers React Positively

Teen-agers do react positively to the song, said Ms. Carpenter-McMillan, who recently took a television crew to a Los Angeles maternity home where she played the music video for an audience of teen-agers. ''These were young girls, 14, 15, 16, living through tough times, going against parents and boyfriends,'' she said. ''Knowing someone like Madonna is in their corner, saying, 'All right! Go for it!' was so uplifting.''

For the most part, Madonna has avoided the debate. The singer will not comment on the song's use as an anti-abortion statement, according to a spokesman, Liz Rosenberg. ''She's singing a song, not taking a stand,'' Ms. Rosenberg said. ''Her philosophy is people can think what they want to think.''

Shortly before the record's release, however, in an interview with a New York Times music critic, Stephen Holden, Madonna described it as ''a message song that everyone is going to take the wrong way'' and predicted she would be accused of ''advising every young girl to go out and get pregnant.''

The song, written by Brian Elliot, with minor lyrical revisions by the singer, tells of ''a girl who is making a major decision in her life,'' Madonna said in the interview. ''To me, it's a celebration of life.''

In Washington, Tipper Gore, a founder of the Parents Music Resource Center - a group that a year ago spurred Congressional hearings on the issue of sex and violence in rock music lyrics and has criticized Madonna's songs in the past - has spoken out in favor of ''Papa Don't Preach.''

''To me,'' Mrs. Gore said, ''the song speaks to a serious subject with a sense of urgency and sensitivity in both the lyrics and Madonna's rendition. It also speaks to the fact that there's got to be more support and more communication in familiies about this problem, and anything that fosters that I applaud.'' Papa Don't Preach Papa I know you're going to be upset 'Cause I was always your little girl But you should know by now I'm not a baby You always taught me right from wrong I need your help, daddy please be strong I may be young at heart But I know what I'm saying The one you warned me all about The one you said I could do without We're in an awful mess And I don't mean maybe -- please Chorus: Papa don't preach, I'm in trouble deep Papa don't preach, I've been losing sleep But I made up my mind, I'm keeping my baby I'm gonna keep my baby, mmm... He says that he's going to marry me We can raise a little family Maybe we'll be all right It's a sacrifice But my friends keep telling me to give it up Saying I'm too young, I ought to live it up What I need right now is some good advice, please Chorus Daddy, daddy if you could only see Just how good he's been treating me You'd give us your blessing right now 'Cause we are in love We are in love, so please Chorus”.

This interview shows Madonna in relaxed mood. True Blue an album more varied and perhaps more heartfelt than her previous work, not only were the compositions different. I think there is this new maturity. Her lyrics also exploring subjects like teen pregnancy. I can understand why some parents in America might have felt like Madonna was glamorising it. However, it is this song of defiance and protest:

''I like challenge and controversy - I like to tick people off,'' Madonna boasted, tossing her head and flashing a mischievous half-smile. The 27-year-old pop star was sipping a diet cola in a conference room at the New York offices of Warner Bros. Records. She appeared almost demure in a pink-and-blue flowered dress and a very short haircut inspired by the late-50's gamine look of Jean Seberg, Audrey Hepburn and Leslie Caron. Gone along with most of her hair was the heavy makeup and jewelry that made last year's Madonna resemble a contemporary street version of Marilyn Monroe in ''Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.''

''After awhile I got sick of wearing tons of jewelry - I wanted to clean myself off,'' Madonna said flatly. ''I see my new look as very innocent and feminine and unadorned. It makes me feel good. Growing up, I admired the kind of beautiful glamorous woman - from Brigitte Bardot to Grace Kelly - who doesn't seem to be around much anymore. I think it's time for that kind of glamour to come back.''

If Madonna's new upscale look represents a dramatic swing away from the provocative sex symbol who wore lingerie as outerwear and crucifixes like diamonds, it does not signal an end to her courting of controversy. ''Papa Don't Preach,'' the second single from her third album, ''True Blue'' (Sire 25442; LP, cassette, compact disk), is bound to rile some parents of teen-age girls. The protagonist of the song, which was written by Brian Elliot, is a pregnant adolescent who begs her father to bless her decision to keep the baby and marry her boyfriend. Madonna sings it in a passionate, bratty sob that makes the plea immediate and believable.

The song has also been turned into a compelling slice-of-life music video. Filmed on location in a working-class neighborhood of Staten Island, with Danny Aiello playing the father, it features a virtuoso performance by a waifish, saucer-eyed Madonna, who looks all of 15 as she quivers anxiously, awaiting her father's response. Like Michael Jackson's ''Billie Jean,'' the song and its video have an iconographic resonance that could push Madonna's career to an even higher plateau than the household-word status she attained last year with her 6 1/2-million-selling second album, ''Like a Virgin.''

'' 'Papa Don't Preach' is a message song that everyone is going to take the wrong way,'' Madonna proudly predicted. ''Immediately they're going to say I am advising every young girl to go out and get pregnant. When I first heard the song, I thought it was silly. But then I thought, wait a minute, this song is really about a girl who is making a decision in her life. She has a very close relationship with her father and wants to maintain that closeness. To me it's a celebration of life. It says, 'I love you, father, and I love this man and this child that is growing inside me.' Of course, who knows how it will end? But at least it starts off positive.''

''Papa Don't Preach,'' for which Madonna contributed a couple of minor lyrical revisions, is the only song on the album that Madonna didn't have a strong hand in writing. The song was sent to her by Michael Ostin, the same Warner Bros. executive who discovered ''Like a Virgin.'' Most of the album's eight other songs Madonna co-wrote with Patrick Leonard, the musical director for her 1985 tour, or with her sometime songwriting partner, Stephen Bray. The three also co-produced the LP”.

I am going to end with Stereogum and their feature from 2020. The Number Ones celebrates chart-topping singles from throughout the years. Regardless of what you think of its messages and whether it is harmful or empowering, there is no doubting the credentials of this song. It is a masterfully written and produced song. One that is the standout from True Blue:

“Those strings on the intro are an announcement, an almighty flex. Madonna's True Blue was her third album, but it was the first one she made when she was already a massive star, a foundational pop-music figure. Up until then, Madonna had been associated with a particular sound. Madonna made club music, post-disco dance-pop. Even her ballads nodded to that sound. So it must've been at least a little jarring for people to hear the fussy, rococo strings that open "Papa Don't Preach" -- or, for that matter, to hear those strings fade into a story-song about a pregnant teenager desperate for her father's approval. The strings nod to classical, to baroque, and to the Beatles-style psychedelia that had made a big deal about incorporating strings like those a couple of decades earlier. Madonna was doing what she felt like doing, and the things she felt like doing were working.

"Papa Don't Preach" wasn't the first single from True Blue; that was " Live To Tell," Madonna's previous chart-topper. But "Live To Tell" was a movie-soundtrack ballad, and it came out months before the album. Masterful as it is, "Live To Tell" didn't announce a great leap forward the way "Papa Don't Preach" did. "Papa Don't Preach" signaled that Madonna had enough juice to make a social-issue song that was also a stylistic left-turn. And for all its gutsiness, "Papa Don't Preach" still worked as post-disco dance-pop. Its strings faded into jittery, propulsive synth-bass and big, mechanized drums, and this story about a girl begging her father to accept her big life decision somehow became escapist club fare. That's a magic trick. That's cowboy shit.

"Papa Don't Preach" wasn't supposed to be a Madonna song. A decade earlier, the songwriter Brian Elliot had tried to become a pop star himself, but his self-titled Warner Bros. debut hadn't gone anywhere. By 1986, Elliot was producing demos for a singer named Christina Dent, who never really went anywhere either. Elliot had written "Papa Don't Preach" for Dent, and he'd played the song for the Warner A&R executive Michael Ostin. Ostin liked "Papa Don't Preach" enough to play it for Madonna, and she loved it. Ostin talked Elliot into giving "Papa Don't Preach" to Madonna, and she turned the song into a whole other thing.

Madonna is credited as the co-writer of "Papa Don't Preach," but her contribution is apparently limited to a few added-on lyrics. And yet "Papa Don't Preach" means more coming from Madonna than it would've meant from an artist who wasn't yet established. Part of it is the production. Madonna co-produced "Papa Don't Preach" with her old friend and collaborator Stephen Bray, who she'd known since before dropping out of college. (Around the same time as he was working on True Blue, Bray joined a reconstituted version of the Breakfast Club, the band that Madonna had been in before she got famous, and they peaked at #7 with 1987's " Right On Track." It's a 7.) But part of it is also the way "Papa Don't Preach" plays into the persona that Madonna had already established.

On Like A Virgin, Madonna had weaponized her own sexuality, finding a transgressive lane within mainstream pop stardom and becoming a target of parents' watchdog groups like the PMRC. But on "Papa Don't Preach," Madonna sang about a possible consequence of that sexuality. Her narrator is a teenager girl who is scared but determined. She's not thrilled about the fact that she's pregnant, but she's made up her mind. She's keeping her baby.

Naturally, "Papa Don't Preach" became a political football. Anti-abortion groups claimed "Papa Don't Preach" as an anti-abortion song. Tipper Gore, co-founder of the PMRC and pop-music boogeywoman, loved "Papa Don't Preach," calling it "an important song, and a good one, which discusses, with urgency, a real predicament which thousands of unwed teenagers face in our country." The feminist lawyer Gloria Allred, meanwhile, said that Madonna should "make a public statement noting that kids have other choices, including abortion."

Madonna never made that statement. At the time, she didn't say anything for or against abortion rights. The song never mentions the word "abortion." When Madonna's narrator sings that her friends are telling her to give the kid up, you don't know if they're talking about abortion or adoption. Maybe, for Allred, that was the problem. At the time, Allred said, "Pop songs have an enormous impact on kids today. They get their messages from music much more than from what they learn in school or in church. It becomes almost a religious message -- a code or part of their belief system." That's pretty much what Tipper Gore had been saying, too.

It gets weird when people talk about pop music as messaging rather than as pop music. I do that shit all the time. Everyone in my line of work does. Maybe, if I'd been a professional critic in 1986, I would've had some kind of take on whether "Papa Don't Preach" was an implied anti-abortion cop-out of a song. And maybe that's how Brian Elliot meant it. (At the time, he said, "If Madonna has influenced young girls to keep their babies, I don't think that's such a bad deal.") But "Papa Don't Preach" isn't a sweeping polemic about kids and sex. It's a pop song -- a great one.

For me, the strength of "Papa Don't Preach" is in how limited and specific its scope is. Madonna's narrator is one overwhelmed kid with a romantic idea in her head. It's hard to imagine things turning out well for her and her boyfriend. You can hear the doubt in her voice when she's imagining her own possible future: "He says that he's going to marry me/ We can raise a little family/ Maybe we'll be all right; it's a sacrifice." Her friends are telling her to go have a life instead, but she's not listening. That stubbornness almost feels admirable, even if it means she's going to have a hard future ahead of her.

I hear "Papa Don't Preach" as being in the tradition of the girl-group songs of the early '60s. (Elsewhere on True Blue, Madonna pays more direct tribute to that sound.) The best of those songs laid out storylines and situations. The point isn't the resolution, and it certainly isn't what that situation says about things happening in society. Instead, the point is the fear and love and anxiety and hurt that someone might feel in that moment. Madonna nails all of it.

"Papa Don't Preach" is one more example of how Madonna, a technically limited singer, could always capture the feeling of the song. On the first verse, when she's telling her father that she needs help, her voice is tremulous and hesitant. As the song goes on, her voice becomes stronger, but it keeps an anguish and a desperation. When she says that she and her boyfriend are in love, she sounds like she's melting. When she pleads for her father's blessing, she's in agony. It's a raw, messy conversation, and Madonna lets all those conflicting feelings bubble right up to the song's surface. Her voice says more than the words do.

For all the pathos of its story, though, "Papa Don't Preach" still works as pop music. The beat is steady, but all the song's flourishes -- the strings, the quasi-Spanish guitar solo, the coos of the backup singers -- float around that narrator, as if they're consoling or encouraging her. (One of the backup singers, Siedah Garrett, will appear as a featured guest in a future column.) "Papa Don't Preach" has hooks, too. It's dainty and insistent and urgent, and it glues itself right into your brain the first time you hear it. If "Papa Don't Preach" had been simply a message song, it would've aged like fine milk. But it's not a message song. "Don't Preach" is right there in the title. Instead, the song is a marvel of craft.

The video is pretty expertly crafted, too. Madonna made the "Papa Don't Preach" video with director James Foley, the filmmaker who'd just directed her then-husband Sean Penn in At Close Range. Foley had directed Madonna's "Live To Tell" video, but that one is really just Madonna close-ups and At Close Range clips. The "Papa Don't Preach" video, on the other hand, is a whole mini-movie. Madonna tries out a couple of different styles -- the hyper-styled dancer of the performance clips and the tough tomboy of the narrative scenes. But the video is way more of a showcase for Madonna's acting than for her ever-evolving persona.

The "Papa Don't Preach" video also probably did good things for Alex McArthur, the extremely handsome young man who played the one Aiello warned Madonna all about. A year later, McArthur played a serial killer in William Friedkin's Rampage. That was pretty much his entire run, though. Watching the "Papa Don't Preach" video today, it's weird to think that Danny Aiello became way more of a star than Alex McArthur. McArthur has the kind of face that seems to demand Tiger Beat covers. Aiello does not. But Aiello could act, and he had personality. Sometimes, those things matter.

The "Papa Don't Preach" video is made with style and grace, but it's the song that really does the heavy lifting. "Papa Don't Preach" rules, but it isn't one of my favorite Madonna songs. There's an intensity to her best tracks that I don't really hear in "Papa Don't Preach." Maybe there's just a bit of distance because I know she's singing in character, or maybe I just prefer my dance-pop catharsis raw and uncut. But "Papa Don't Preach" is still a masterful piece of pop craftsmanship -- one more great entry in an all-time run. We will see Madonna in this column again”.

The majestic Papa Don’t Preach turns forty on 11th June. It is one of Madonna’s most popular and celebrated songs. I think this period of her career is the most fascinating. In terms of her looks, fashion, sound and her cultural impact. Papa Don’t Preach proved – if that was ever needed in 1986 – that Madonna is…

A Pop genius.

FEATURE: Spotlight: Ella Langley

FEATURE:

 

 

Spotlight

PHOTO CREDIT: Caylee Robillard for Rolling Stone

Ella Langley

__________

I do wonder whether…

PHOTO CREDIT: Eric Ryan Anderson for Billboard

the incredible Ella Langley will tour in the U.K. at some point. She has a huge run of U.S. dates, ahead. The Alabama-born Country singer-songwriter is known for her candid storytelling and Rock-infused Country sound. Langley has been based in Nashville since 2019. Her phenomenal new album, Dandelion, was released this month. It reached number one in the U.S. I am going to end with a couple of reviews for this incredible album. I am going to start out with some interviews. Billboard spent some time with an artist who is shouting out women in Country. How they are taking Following the massive success of her single, Choosin’ Texas, and breaking records “Billboard's Women In Music Powerhouse has her sights set on Saturday Night Live and stadium sellouts”:

“This record feels like a more mature version of my artistry,” she says. “I was walking into every [writing session] with vision boards and a 100-song reference playlist. A lot of Johnny Lee, Ronnie Milsap references. Think summer nights, fireflies, a bonfire lit. I love to dance. I grew up dancing, so I wanted something where, when I listen to songs, I listen to the instrumentation.”

Langley will bring those songs to life with her trademark rock star swagger and Stevie Nicks-meets-Jessi Colter style when she embarks on an arena tour behind the album in May — just part of a busy 2026 itinerary that also includes opening shows for Morgan Wallen and Eric Church.

Who do you think of when you think of a powerhouse artist?

Dolly Parton. She acts, sings, and every day she leaves the house looking incredible. I aspire to try; I’m in sweats most of the time. Miranda [Lambert], Reba [McEntire], Jo Dee Messina, Gretchen Wilson, Stevie Nicks, Joan Jett. What I’m drawn to with strong women is their ability to be trailblazers. They’re not afraid to take risks. Just explore your artistry and have fun with it.

How have you dealt with your newfound fame?

I’m still figuring it out. I graduated [high school] with 32 kids [in my class] and I guess that benefited me, mainly because everyone is famous in a small town. It’s odd to view yourself like that. When I think of another artist, I view them as an artist. But when I view myself, it’s weird to think so many people out there that know me, that I don’t know them. But the fan experiences I’ve had — people come up and talk about what the music means — have been cool.

What is on your career bucket list right now?

[Saturday Night Live] — to be a musical guest and then one day, maybe host. Sell out stadiums, that’s always been my goal. I want to start acting in the next year. I like thrillers but also love comedy. I’m not a big romantic movie lady, so probably something funnier or a little more intense.

“Choosin’ Texas” made history at No. 1 on the Hot 100 at the same time that Megan Moroney’s Cloud 9 debuted atop the Billboard 200. How do you think these simultaneous milestones might affect other women country artists who are trying to break through?

Seeing women at the top of the charts together is incredible. It’s a testament to the stories we’re telling and how they’re resonating with fans. I do hope it keeps opening doors for female artists in the future who’ve been waiting for their turn.

Do you feel a responsibility to mentor other women artists who are coming up?

Absolutely, and there’s so many talented women coming up right now. I’m so excited for what music’s going to look like in the next two to three years. Women are about to take over, I’m telling you that right now. It’s cool to be, hopefully, someone that someone else looks up to in that way”.

I am moving on to an interview from Rolling Stone. Rather than this being an artist with an ego or feeling the need to be hyper all the time, Ella Langley seems much more chilled out and modest. Grounded and instantly relatable, this is someone who will make music history time and time again and go down as one of the greatest Country artists ever:

“Whatever inspires Langley’s easygoing brand of country music, it’s working. Ear­lier this year, she made history when “Choosin’ Texas” hit Number One on Billboard’ s Hot 100, Hot Country Songs, and Country Airplay charts at the same time. Morgan Wallen, Post Malone, and Shaboozey are the only other artists to ever achieve the feat; Langley is the first woman. To date, “Choosin’ Texas” has spent five nonconsecutive weeks atop the Hot 100. When she conceived the song, with country star Miranda Lambert and the songwriters Luke Dick and Joybeth Taylor, Langley says she was thinking about a tall tale she had heard involving Lambert, a kangaroo, and a traffic stop.

“We were at this writers retreat, and I just asked her,” Langley says, laughing. “She had a dog in the back and a kangaroo in the passenger seat, and got pulled over. I said randomly, ‘I’m sure [the police officer] was like, She’s from Texas, I can tell.’”

That line ended up becoming the hook of “Choosin’ Texas,” the song that knocked Harry Styles’ “Aperture” out of the top spot and catapulted Langley into the mainstream. She says its theme of unrequited love — a cowboy returns to his cherished Lone Star State, leaving Langley alone at a bar sipping Jack Daniel’s — is universal. “Everyone can relate to wanting something that doesn’t want you back, whether it be a relationship or a job,” she says. “I’m giving my heart to people a lot. And that’s scary to constantly do, because no one wants their heart broken.”

‘She lives life in a big way’

Langley reunited with Lambert when it came time to record Dandelion. They sing together on “Butterfly Season,” and Lambert co-produced the album with Langley and Ben West. The women have a bond forged before they ever met at that writers camp. When Langley was only a teenager, her family suffered a serious financial crisis, and she took solace in “The House That Built Me,” Lambert’s hit ballad about returning to where you were raised many years later. “We lost our house to the bank the day after my 14th birthday,” Langley recalls. “I heard that song for the first time around then. I was like, ‘Whoa, she’s singing about my life.’”

“Ella has a fiery spirit,” Lambert says. “She lives life in a big way and on her own terms. With this record, I wanted to honor her vision every step of the way.… It felt important to help her make choices that stayed true to who she is as an artist.”

Dandelion also includes a nod to another strong-willed woman from country music’s past: a faithful cover of Kitty Wells’ 1952 track “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels,” the first song by a solo woman to ever top the country charts. Langley loves the song and its message of empowerment so much that she uses it as the alarm on her smart speaker at home. “She had some balls on her, you know?” Langley says.

This spring and summer, Langley will play stadiums with Wallen and perform at festivals in California and Kentucky; in May, she’ll kick off her headlining Dandelion tour. “Putting on the live show has been the number-one dream for me,” she says.

Thanks to “Choosin’ Texas,” she’s also become a Number One pop songwriter, which makes perfect sense when you consider the full range of her listening tastes. “My biggest influence was Stevie Nicks, and the symbolism in songs,” Langley says. “Sometimes I’ll put in words like ‘Drinking Jack all by myself.’ That can mean a lot of things. Yes, literally, I’m sitting here drinking Jack, but what it’s also saying is ‘He’s gone!”.

Dandelion is undoubtably one of the best albums from this year. It is a masterpiece. I want to lead with a five-star review from Independent. Anyone who does not know about Ella Langley or is new to her work really needs to investigate her and listen to the magnificent Dandelion:

“In February, Ella Langley became the first woman ever to simultaneously top the Billboard Hot 100, Hot Country Songs and Country Airplay charts with her tangy, twangy country rock single “Choosin’ Texas”. It’s the mainstream success that the 26-year-old Alabamian farm girl’s been chasing all her life. “Did anything and everything to get where I’m at, and damn if it don’t feel good!” she sings on her second album, Dandelion. But later on the same song, “Somethin’ Simple”, she concedes that while “living the dream” she still cherishes the basics: “A house on the hill, horse in the yard, a dog at my feet, pickin’ my guitar, supper on the stove, hard-workin’ man taking off his dirty work clothes…”

So – although Langley first found fame singing covers on TikTok – there’s no reinventing the wagon wheel on this rich and accomplished record. There’s a classic feel to her assured blend of polished Nashville radio sounds, rootsier strumming, barbecue soul and 1970s rock arrangements (complete with the odd swirl of strings and hand claps). Langley’s a confident old-school songwriter with a great, straight-shootin’ voice: it recalls peak Shania Twain in an ability to bounce from fun to heartbreak, pure notes with a dusty little husk. When Langley saddles up, she takes a song by its reins. In recent interviews, she’s said she fought her label hard to keep the spoken sections they hated on the Riley Green duet “You Look Like You Love Me” – which turned out to be the breakthrough single from her 2024 debut album, Hungover. “If I go in and cut something, it's because I believe in it,” she said. And these 15 new songs are delivered with the head-held-high spirit of a woman who’s just shown The Man that her instincts are right.

Dandelion nails its colours to a traditionalist mast with bookending snatches of the old folk tune “Froggy Went a Courtin’” (which she used to sing with her paternal grandfather) and a swaggeringly good cover of Kitty Wells’s feminist country classic “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels”. Dandelion’s title song is a brand statement in which Langley sings over a mellow sway of pedal steel and thumped drums that she’ll always have “The Bible in my blood, and the ’Bama in my veins”.

Langley’s love songs find her yearning for cowboys to love her “from the bottom of your boots to the top of your hat”. On the mellow, organ-backed “Me and You Time” she just wants a break from her busy schedule. “Gotta Quit” is a line dance bop that sees her trying to shake the memory of “that night on your grandpa’s farm – scram!” When she’s unlucky in love, as on the Miranda Lambert co-write “Choosin’ Texas” (with its Eaglesesque highway guitars and flecks of mandolin) she’s always reaching for a glass of “Jack”. If you made a drinking game of taking a shot every time she mentions her favourite whiskey, then you’d be loaded by the end. Although on the breezy “Be Her” she also longs to be the kind of woman who “drinks wine by the glass, not by the bottle”.

Her work leans so heavily on the standard barroom furniture of the genre that, on the page at least, it seems formulaic. It’s Langley’s assured craftswomanship and intentional delivery that keep her from slipping into cliche. Even when it’s “Last Call for Us”, Langley’s still standing. This is a solid, saloon-door-slammer of a country classic”.

I am ending with a positive review from NME. The incredible Ella Langley is an artist that needs to be known by everyone. I do really hope that she comes and plays in the U.K. She is going to headline huge festivals very soon. I wonder if she has dreams of sharing the stage with music legends. One of the greatest songwriters of her generation. Dandelion is an unforgettable album:

“In case you’d missed the memo, country music is having a moment. In the past two years, massive popstars like Beyoncé and Post Malone have spurred the movement internationally, eschewing their established sounds to commercial success, so much so that country music’s share of the UK singles market has doubled, reflecting a growing enthusiasm for all things Americana.

As Ella Langley releases her second album, ‘Dandelion’, she’s sitting pretty on the top of the Billboard Hot 100 courtesy of the album’s lead single, ‘Choosin’ Texas’. Sprouting from the sweet spot between country and pop that has struck a chord with die-hard fans and casual listeners alike, the song captures the pang of rejection from a lover “two steppin’” from life with her in Tennessee to put stakes on a girl from the “Lone Star state” over the twang of bittersweet guitar and a toe-tapping beat.

While Langley herself can’t figure exactly why this particular ode to star-crossed love has connected with fans in such a powerful way, there is a warming, Shania Twain-like charm to her storytelling that both empathises with and bolsters the young women in her audience. Take, for example, the ache of forbidden dalliances on the lovelorn ‘Low Lights’, wistful connections not made to last with the inevitable doom of ‘We Know Us’ and the tender resignation of ‘Last Call For Us’.

However, taking the loss on matters of the heart meanders between tales of Langley brushing herself off and ploughing forth anew, as she flits between possibilities as a career-driven go-getter and the small-town life she left behind. “When days are long, I drift away / I play the song I used to play,” she sings of the memories that keep her grounded on the comforting expanse of ‘Loving Life Again’; meanwhile the easy-breezy ‘Somethin’ Simple’ recounts her bewilderment at her high-flying dreams becoming reality, and the soft-life yearnings that have replaced them.

There is a poignant question mark around the 26-year-old as she attempts to pin down who she is now, following the two years since her debut album ‘Hungover’ and the extensive touring that followed. The infectious hooks of ‘Be Her’ quip Langley’s introspective frustration of wanting to be the self-composed independent woman who invokes respect – not that she’s not striving in the right direction on the Miranda Lambert duet ‘Butterfly Season’: “Don’t even know her, that girl from last October. / Right now I’d like to show her who we’ve turned into.”

Despite recurring allusions to spreading her wings, starry-eyed title track ‘Dandelion’ courts the realisation that, no matter how far her career takes her from home, she is proud of and will never escape her roots. “Bible in my blood and ‘Bama in my veins,” Langley says, while quipping how no amount of fame can make her switch Jack for champagne. Because, if we’re being honest, her wildcard authenticity and fiery free spirit is the reason all eyes are on her now”.

You may not know much about Ella Langley. That will all change. Perhaps more celebrated and spotlighted in the U.S., there are publications and sites here in the U.K. championing her work and highlighting her brilliance. Ella Langley will one day be seen as one of…

THE all-time greats.

___________

Follow Ella Langley

Official:

https://www.ellalangley.com/

Instagram:

https://www.instagram.com/ellalangleymusic/

Facebook:

https://www.facebook.com/ellalangleymusic

TikTok:

https://www.tiktok.com/@ellalangleymusic1

Twitter:

https://x.com/ellalangleymsic

Spotify:

https://open.spotify.com/artist/6BRxQ8cD3eqnrVj6WKDok8?si=eugkzuqyRGCRxVOn5h5ohw

YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCo80hok0dbQapOH6dJl9Hqw

FEATURE: Spotlight: The Anchoress

FEATURE:

 

 

Spotlight

PHOTO CREDIT: Talie Eigeland

The Anchoress

__________

I may have spotlighted her before…

but, as a new album has been announced, I did want to talk about the wonderful The Anchoress. The moniker of Catherine Anne Davies, I have written about her a lot and reviewed her work. However, it is a perfect time to reconnect with a phenomenal artist and producer. One of our very best producers and musical minds, I think I first connected with her over our shared love of Kate Bush, especially her gifts as a producer. I would urge everyone reading this to listen back to her previous work, as she is one of the most talented artists this country has produced for decades. Work that is so nuanced and layered. Important, urgent, beautiful, potent and fascinating, I can attest to her brilliance as a live performer, having seen a The Anchoress show a few years back. Featuring her fellow Welsh queen, Gwenno, The Anchoress’s new single, I Had a Baby Not a Lobotomy, has a title that makes you smile but also makes you ask questions. Knowing that particular phrase holds power to The Anchoress. As a mother herself, what compelled her to write that song. I am going to come to a very recent NME interview where she discussed that single. I am going to pick a physical copy up over the weekend, though I felt it important to source it now to provoke and move others to do likewise. The Anchoress has also announced a date in London to promote her forthcoming album. Though I shall also come to that very soon! I am rushing this out, as a lot has dropped at once, and it is very exciting for fans of hers. Prior to getting to an interview from last year, prior to getting to that NME intervbiew, I feel it is worth highlighting. You can actually read details of the forthcoming album, As We Once Were. I will bring in another Substack feature from her, though The Anchoress talked about the vanishing music press and how valuable they are.

At a time when so many new artists need coverage and there is this jostle to be seen and heard, music journalism is as essential and required now more than any time in history. Social media, people sharing recommendations does not equate to the depth and passion, and knowledge, of music journalism! Especially independent sites like mine. Before that, some news on an album that will stand up beside the best of this year:

“If you just tuned in to my live interview with Steve Lamacq on BBC 6 Music then you will know that the cat is now out of the bag (or the first single at least…) and you can now preorder my new album, As We Once Were.

It will be released via Last Night From Glasgow this Summer and there’s lots of limited edition goodies on offer so don’t sleep on this. The first 100 copies of the double LP and first 100 CDs sold by LNFG will also be signed by me. There’s also lots of bundle discounts if you want multiple formats and even the option to include a rare test pressing: Preorder the album here.

We’ve also just announced a one-off special album launch show at London’s legendary 100 Club – the oldest independent venue in the world – on Saturday August 22nd with a parent-friendly early curfew of 10pm. Tickets are very limited and go on sale on Tuesday 14th April at 10am here.

BBC 6 MUSIC PREMIERE & NME FIRST INTERVIEW
Thanks to everyone who tuned in live tonight to BBC 6Music with Lamacq playing the first single from the album, ‘I Had A Baby Not A Lobotomy’ and chatting about all my exciting news! If you missed it, you can listen back to the show here.

ALBUM FORMATS

SO… what will you be getting? 14 tracks and around 58 minutes of brand new music. Formats wise, the album will be released on 2LP vinyl (in two colour options: coral and linen) with a leopard print etching on side 4 which I’m very excited about. Apparently this is the closest you can get to actual leopard print vinyl. Yes I did ask.

The standard gatefold CD will come with a lovely 24 page lyric booklet, while for the completists, the ltd edition deluxe 2CD hardback media book edition will include a 48 page hardback book with exclusive artwork, unseen photos, extended liner notes, scans from my studio notebooks + 1 additional CD featuring original demos, alternative mixes, and writing demos. All for just £25

A strictly limited edition cassette album will also be available to conceptually complete the beautiful back cover art, which has been lovingly created again by Simon Morse at Standard Designs in homage to the lost cassette tape of my grandmother’s voice that inspired much of the album. No spoilers on that just yet as it will give away some of the very special guests that appear on the record that I will be teasing you all with over the coming weeks…

SO WHY PREORDER?

So why part with your money now? Well, preordering makes a HUGE difference to me, the artist.

Not only does it give us the best chance of another UK Top 40 chart placement, it also signals to a wider network of shops and retailers that the demand is there. That The People (YOU) have spoken with enough notice. We don’t want to have a repeat of 2021 where we run out of stock in release week because it wasn’t clear that so many folk would want a CD!

Preordering also helps to finance the huge manufacturing costs involved and also makes sure that we can fulfil demand, as stock has to be made many months ahead of the release date, especially with vinyl.

So what’s it all about?

As We Once Were is my third studio album and the long-awaited follow-up to the UK Top 40 album The Art Of Losing, which scooped up a rack of Album of The Year nods from The Sunday Times, to Prog, to the Mail on Sunday. With Sir Elton John naming it “one of my favourite records of the year” and Caitlin Moran calling it “the inadvertent, beautiful and truthful soundtrack to this moment”, it went on to sell over 10,000 physical copies via the power of word of mouth.

I created this new album at my very own Black Lodge Studios, while being given access to Pete Townshend’s collection of vintage analogue synthesisers to produce an epic 14-track widescreen exploration of the nature of time and transformation.
Against the backdrop of the birth of my daughter (after the multiple losses documented on The Art Of Losing) and the discovery of my grandmother’s voice on a long lost cassette tape in her mother’s attic, I found myself asking the question: “What can we build out of the past? Are we destined to be held down by it? Can we ever return to these past versions of ourselves?”

This is As We Once Were.

I really think it’s my best work to date. And you know what a perfectionist I am…

Preorder it now and be part of this new chapter.

PREORDER HERE”.

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I would suggest you subscribe to The Anchoress’s Substack, as the posts are really enlightening and thought-provoking. Also, a window into the creative process and experience of an exceptional talent. Her production alone should be discussed a lot more though, as many women in the industry can attest, they are not seen as producers. The statistics around opportunities for women and the number in professional studios is shocking! An industry that needs to embrace female producers and create an environment for them. Women often discriminated against for wanting maternity leave, for example. Perhaps relevant to The Anchoress’s new single. Though I need to focus. I want to draw from an interview The Quietus published, where The Anchoress discussed her favourite albums. I will bring in sections about The Smiths’ Strangeways, Here We Come, Fiona Apple’s When the Pawn…, and, naturally, Kate Bush’s The Dreaming. I am hoping to be part of an event for the album in June (before the forty-fifth anniversary of its lead single, Sat in Your Lap). I wonder if The Anchoress would speak or provide her take on one of the songs from the album (my favourite is Houdini, but she may have her own standout!):

“The idea that you can interweave – in a very different way to the Manic Street Preachers – your educational pursuits and your more intellectual interests into your music was a real revelation to me. As somebody who was a quintessentially camp person, Morrissey’s mode of speaking and approaching lyrics felt very like home to me. I feel really conflicted about Morrissey now with his right wing nonsense. There’s still a special place in my heart for a lot of The Smiths’ music, although I do find it impossible to separate the art from the artist and I don’t really put them on anymore.

The dynamic between Morrissey and Johnny Marr was certainly something that informed the way I worked with Bernard Butler on our collaborative album. As someone who tends to usually work alone, writing and producing without any interference, I definitely took on the Morrissey-Marr model. We found a very fruitful and quick way of working where he was creating these beautiful musical landscapes and I would write the music and lyrics on top.

This is a really important record to me because it’s Fiona Apple who basically taught me how to play piano. I never had piano lessons in my life, my parents couldn’t afford to send me and it wasn’t an option for us. When I finally got to university, I used some of my student loan to buy a small keyboard from Argos. It was probably way more than I should have spent on something that wasn’t food but I was harbouring this secret plan that I wanted to be a songwriter and a producer and knew that I needed to play more than guitar, something that I’d already taught myself to play.

There weren’t many piano equivalents of the guitar tab books that were around at the time, but Fiona Apple did have this music book for Tidal, her first record. I bought that and was just thinking ‘Fuck! I’m never going to be able to do this!’ She has quite complex jazz chords – and that’s not the kind of thing you want to be tackling when you first start playing. I remember the girls in my halls – many of whom had grade eight piano – were taking the piss out of me, trying to teach myself. Here I was, trying to play ‘Pale September’ by Fiona Apple as my first attempt on the piano!

But there was something about this record that opened everything up. It was a very kind of rhythmic way of writing, almost rapping – I know Kanye West has gone on to say it was a massive influence on him – in terms of his metrical rhythms. For me, it hugely influenced my approach to the instrument in that her music taught me how to play that instrument so I guess it finds itself seeping into my playing because the chords she used are the ones I taught myself. It’s the same way I taught myself to play guitar with Radiohead, you’ll find all those sounds in my music too.

This album for me kind of goes hand in hand with Vespertine in that it’s the other record that made me think it’s possible for me to make music in the way that I wanted to, which was to write and play and produce everything myself. I remember when I was first doing demos for some major labels. They would invite me into the studio and I would just, every time, every day, come out crying because of how terrible the experiences were in terms of me having zero agency. I just wanted to go back and work in a shop like I did when I was a student. Nothing about the experience made me happy. It made me realise that the thing that did make me happy was the process of making a record and being a producer was inherent to that.

Kate Bush’s The Dreaming showed me that it was possible. It was the first record she did where she got to be the sole producer – she’d co-produced on the previous ones. This is the first record where she has full control and it’s brilliantly, batshit, bonkers. For me, it’s the first time you really get to experience the full breadth of her brilliance and her sonic eccentricity. In the same way that I constantly reference Vespertine, The Dreaming is another, with all its incredible sound collage, the spoken word voices, the theatricality, its multi-genre leanings – the jukebox style record that it is – if you listen to my first album, it’s very much influenced by that. It changed my way of thinking about music entirely – thinking that it’s okay to have a ballad alongside a kind of screamo metal song!

Once that clicked with me, I stopped making music for a year because I thought if I can’t do it on my terms, I wasn’t doing it at all. Those experiences in the studio certainly made me not want to go back to that in a hurry, as did how I was treated as a woman. Like many, I had terrible experiences with men in the industry and I ran away from it for a time: I didn’t want to be anywhere near an industry that made women feel like this. I was also constantly asked what school I went to, making me realise few people from backgrounds like mine were here. I was so naive about the industry: I had no idea what it was like and frequently legged it out of meetings.

I went to America and just accepted that I was giving up because trying to have that control in the music industry that I found myself in as a young woman, felt impossible: the labels wouldn’t let me play anything, let alone produce or develop anything. I was staying in far Northern California and after a good few months away from it, I slowly started to find the confidence to play again after those terrible experiences. Very gradually, I started writing music again, but on my own terms, with no label, learning how to play things myself, how to put a record together from scratch. Eventually, my debut album emerged on my terms and I’ll always credit this record with showing me that was possible, and for finding my way back to music”.

I am going to end with that NME interview. However, as The Anchoress wrote after speaking with Steve Lamacq on BBC Radio 6 Music, radio has always been an influential and powerful presence in her life. As an artist and a music lover. Out on the Last Night from Glasgow label on 7th August, go and pre-order As We Once Were:

“Growing up listening to the radio was an integral part of the daily thrum of my house.

We weren't really allowed to watch much TV but there was always music: my parents' vinyl collection and the constant hum of Radio 2 in the background. Terry Wogan in the morning, the chart countdowns of yesteryear at the weekends. A musical education by osmosis, as it were.

As I got older, listening Steve Lamacq and Jo Whiley on the radio of an evening was a hugely formative part of shaping my music taste. And it was the first place that I ever heard my beloved Manic Street Preachers; a moment that truly changed everything for me.

I have no doubt that I would not have become the first in my family to go to university had I not tuned in at that precise moment, with open ears and an open mind, to hear that litany of literary names — Miller, Mailer, Plath, Pinter — that I would go on to make a reading list of so that I could take it to my local library and begin my path of self-education. A twelve-year-old girl from South Wales, scribbling names into a notebook she didn’t yet have the books to fill.

Fast forward a few decades and I remember meeting Steve Lamacq for the very first time when my debut album was released and I was a guest on his Roundtable show, breathlessly thanking him for playing ‘Faster’ and changing my life path.

He was characteristically gracious about the whole thing. I, characteristically, was not cool about it at all…

The importance of public service broadcasting has never been more vital, and never more under threat. A real human hand-picking the songs that they think will move you, change you, shape you, rather than a soulless algorithm making its best statistical guess at what you probably already like.

I can’t imagine a computer deciding that a 12-year-old girl, who was previously obsessed with Kylie Minogue and Karen Carpenter, would be so strangely moved and excited by the aggressive and angular tones of the Manics. And yet, it was just what my brain and ears craved.

That’s the whole point. You don’t know what you need until someone who cares points you towards it.

I’ve been prompted to think about this as I stand on the brink of sharing something new, live on the radio next week.

If you tune in to Steve Lamacq on BBC 6 Music from 4pm this Monday 13th April, I’ll be joining him to talk about my new single and unveiling other exciting news!

You can listen live on BBC Sounds and online here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002tr0l”.

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I am going to source that NME interview. Apart from committing the cardinal sin that all press and radio do when an artist does not release music every week, The Anchoress has not ‘returned’. She is, and always will be, an active producer and artist. This idea she retired or spent years away. In fact, she has been steadily releasing music for so many years. However, NME are not the only ones culpable of using that horrible word. Andrew Trendell asked the questions and spent time with the amazing The Anchoress. It is a fantastic interview. Go and pick up a copy of NME:

“So much of this record was born out of the early years of my daughter’s life, and I really wanted to collect together and call out all of the clichés, stereotypes and dumb shit that people say to women who’ve had babies that I had encountered myself,” Davies told NME. “I started a note in my iPhone, just writing down each thing I heard pop out of people’s mouths: from the assumption that I would no longer be touring, to the assertion that I would no doubt ‘mellow out’ and have some kind of personality transplant.

“Quite the contrary: motherhood radicalised me. And I know I’m not alone in this.”

Davies continued: “So many friends have spoken about labouring under the false assumption that we had somehow reached a place of gender equality, until they became mothers and discovered how regressive so many of the systems still are around parental leave, maternity pay, and the practicalities of rearing children when it now takes two full-time wages just to exist.

“When I put it all together, it really felt like a litany of misogyny and lazy bias but it also revealed the utter inanity of most of what we are told or assumed about as a result of choosing to procreate. I’ve spent a lot of time following brilliant campaigners online who are working towards equal flexibility in the workplace and shared parental leave for freelance workers – and no, we are not entitled to it, unlike those who are employed, which still shocks people when they find out.”

PHOTO CREDIT: JJ Eringa

What can you tell us about your relationship with Gwenno and what she brings to the track?

“Gwenno is just extraordinary, as an artist, as a person, as someone who has quietly and determinedly shown that there is absolutely no reason why any of this has to stop when you become a parent. She gave me so much good, practical advice when I was first trying to navigate touring post-pregnancy. I took my daughter on tour with the Manics two summers ago (including taking her to Glastonbury) and was genuinely nervous about how to manage it all, and Gwenno really set me straight.

“She was an absolute lifesaver. I’ve looked up to her enormously, just watching her get on with it and do an incredible job of proving that it can be done. So when I was making this record, she felt like the only person I wanted on this song. The authenticity of her voice adds something I couldn’t have anticipated and was just perfect for what the track needed.”

How representative is this of the album to come?

“It captures the energy and the refusal to be quiet but I’d also say it’s one of the more overtly combative moments on the record. Think of it as kicking the door open rather than the whole room. But the album as a whole has a much broader emotional range than this first single might suggest. There are a few songs that go to some genuinely dark and tender places. There’s a song I wrote crumpled on the floor that I’m still not sure I’ll ever be able to play live. There’s a queer anthem inspired by the love letters between Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West (which features a special guest on vocals and guitar).

Can we expect any other guests on the album?

“Ssshhh! Apart from Gwenno, I can’t tell you about all that quite yet, but there is quite a star-studded cast of collaborators on there. Some familiar faces and voices, and also a couple of people who might genuinely surprise. I’m very proud of who came to the table and what they brought. To paraphrase Tori Amos, I had a big loan from the ‘girl zone’ and the conversations I got to have in the making of this record were as nourishing as anything that ended up on tape -and quite a lot of it did end up on tape.”

When can we see you on tour?

“I’ll be playing a one-off album launch show at London’s legendary 100 Club – the oldest independent venue in the world – on Saturday August 22, with a parent-friendly early curfew of 10pm to make it more accessible to all. No more worrying about getting the last train home or arranging childcare until midnight.

“I wanted to make it something people could actually come to, whatever their situation – which is why I’m also working with The Ticket Bank to make some tickets available for those on benefits. Beyond that, more dates are coming – and I promise they’ll be planned with the same thinking. Watch this space”.

I am going to end things there. I hope to interview The Anchoress soon and go to that gig at the 100 Club in London. I love everything she does; whether that is solo work, collaborating with the Manic Street Preachers or anything else. This phenomenal voice, not just musically, but in a wider social context. In terms of raising issues around gender inequality, misogyny in music and how women like her (as a new mother) are seen and how the situation for pregnant women and new mothers is worse than other women in the industry. We are at a point when there needs to be this seismic shift and massive overhaul. How realistic that is remains to be seen. Follow The Anchoress, pre-order As We Once Were, and go see her live. As of publishing this feature (15th April), there are tickets available, so get in there quickly! I wanted to show some new love for…

AN amazing queen who I respect hugely.

___________

Follow The Anchoress

PHOTO CREDIT: Talie Eigeland

Official:

https://www.theanchoress.co.uk/

Instagram:

https://www.instagram.com/theanchoressofficial/

Facebook:

https://www.facebook.com/theanchoress

YouTube:

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

Spotify:

https://open.spotify.com/artist/2Z4qmyxotDkAbZ0TpXyZyw?si=W5KicktPT2GFw-4YMUS_DA

FEATURE: Spotlight: Avery Cochrane

FEATURE:

 

 

Spotlight

Avery Cochrane

__________

A lot of people are talking…

about Avery Cochrane as a star of the future. A terrific voice in music. It is hard to disagree. Listen to her extraordinary E.P., Male Validation and Other Drugs, and you can this is someone who is going to have an enormous career! The music has a familiarity to it, yet this is distinctly her voice. Music that you listen to and get caught up in, rather than being passive and it washing over you. I want to get to some interviews with Avery Cochrane, as she is someone you really need to know about. I want to go back to September and an interview from The Luna Collective. They spoke with Avery Cochrane around the release of her then-new single, Shapeshifting on a Saturday Night. A song that advocated for the introverts and overthinkers, as Luna write:

“LUNA: How did you get into music?

COCHRANE: I started singing in choir. In middle school and high school, I had a jazz choir. I think jazz specifically was such a great genre to start with, because so much of it depends on improvisation and making mistakes and coming up with things as you go. I've taken a lot of what I've learned in jazz choir into my songwriting today. Then I went to school, and I kind of put music on the back burner a little bit. But when COVID hit, which was my freshman year, I was kind of, like, forced to do something other than school or do something to fill the time of being locked away in quarantine at 18 years old. I rediscovered my love for music and singing, and I've always written songs, but I started writing them to be released and recorded during COVID. That’s when I started a little less than five years ago, and it's just been non-stop ever since. I've been trying to do as much as I can, as often as I can since I started releasing.

LUNA: Was there a specific event that inspired “Shapeshifting on a Saturday Night?”

COCHRANE: No specific event, just a combination of a lot of different events that I've experienced over the last 24 years. I think the concept of shapeshifting can can be done in any context, starting from an early age - you do it on the playground to fit in with other kids, whether that's like being a mean girl or something because you think you want to fit in that way, or wearing something that you don't really want to wear. I feel like shapeshifting begins at a very early age to adapt into what you think society or your surroundings want. I just chose the concept of a Saturday night because I personally don't like going to the club at all; I hate it. But when I was in the college setting, or frat parties or the club, or whatever your friends are doing, I would feel like, I don't want to do this at all, and everybody's having a great time, what's wrong with me for not having a great time or not wanting to do this? And I like the alliteration of Shapeshifting/Saturday Night.

LUNA: This release follows your single “Corporate Ladder,” which is also a very vulnerable track. Do you ever get worried about sharing these emotional songs with people?

COCHRANE: Honestly, not really. I think I used to, but the first song I ever released was a pretty vulnerable track, a pretty emotionally-charged track about somebody I literally met on Tinder. And, like, that's pretty embarrassing [laughs]. But it’s human and, I don't know. I just find comfort when people say, I relate to this so hard. And these lyrics are so relatable, it makes me feel better, because I know I'm not alone in feeling these things. I know I'm not the only one that's wanted to quit her day job and has been frustrated with corporate America, or has shifted on a Saturday night, or has crashed out about somebody they knew for three months. I know that these are common experiences, at least that's what I tell myself. So surprisingly, I don't get that worried about it, being vulnerable.

LUNA: Yeah, honestly, music connects people. So having songs like these is really special. It's reassuring to know that other people go through similar experiences to what we go through. I also want to talk a bit about your single “The Executioner.” I really like the line, “God, help me. I am female.” We all have our interpretation of being a woman, but what does it mean to you?

COCHRANE: It’s a beautiful question. That one is tricky, because I guess when I wrote it, it was one of those things where I felt it really strong, but I wasn't really thinking about what it could mean. And whenever I play it live, I encourage the audience to sing along at the end of the song, and some men will come up and be like, As a cis, straight guy,I felt a little weird singing along at the end. I understand that, but it's a song for everybody. I think everybody has a balance of masculine and feminine in them, and I do think the feminine are the traits of people that get exploited or taken advantage of the most. And that can be in a cis, straight man, it can be in a trans woman, it can be in a trans man, it can be in a cis woman, like it can be in literally anyone. Everybody has divine femininity, and I think that, like your kindness or your sensuality, for example, I feel like those are feminine traits, and I think those things get exploited the most. So I think that the softer, nurturing, emotional qualities of someone is, is the God, help me. I am these things, and I think these are beautiful things, but somebody's taking advantage of them.

LUNA: There's such a refreshing honesty in your lyricism. How do you achieve that? What is your writing process like?

COCHRANE: It honestly kind of feels like I take lines from my journal. I try to journal every day, because I read “The Artist’s Way” a couple times. It's by this woman named Julia Cameron. She wrote it in the ‘80s or ‘90s, I think, so it's pretty dated, but it's all lessons that you can apply 40 years later. And one of them is to write every day, and that's really hard to do with short attention spans and technology at our fingertips. Sometimes I'll do a voice memo journal or something, but I think it's just a matter of being in touch with what's going on, how you're feeling. Being emotionally self aware of how you're feeling, and then just not being afraid to turn those into lyrics”.

There is another interview around the single that you should check out. The Seattle-born artist among the best-kept secrets in music. Someone who can take anxieties and relatable stresses and turn them into anthems. No wonder that she resonates with a wider and adoring fanbase! I am going to mangle this interview from Teen Vogue slightly, but I would encourage you to read the entire thing. I wanted to select a few sections from it. So many fans of her music spending time with Avery Cochrane and going deep. It is fascinating learning about her background and path into music. It is clear that Cochrane is going to elevate to the same heights as the biggest modern Pop artists. This L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.+ icon and superstar-in-waiting released potentially the best E.P. of the year with Male Validation and Other Drugs:

“It feels like it’s building to something,” says 24-year-old singer-songwriter Avery Cochrane, sitting in the high-ceilinged studio at Artist House, a publishing and recording studio in New York City’s SoHo neighborhood. Producer Benzi Edelson (who has worked with Noah Kahan, John Legend, and more) is fiddling with a drum rack, twisting the nobs on his setup while the instrumental they scaffolded together on a Leslie baby-grand piano plays on a loop. Cochrane wants a “big pop cinema sound.”

Six months ago, Cochrane left the same golf course job where she’d been working since she was 14 and moved to Los Angeles on the back of the success of her biggest hit to date, the euphoric “Shapeshifting on a Saturday Night,” which has over 3.8 million plays on Spotify. The comments sections on her videos are filled with things like “here before it blows up,” and “the people aren’t here yet… but they will be,” and “this is my proof i was here before the stadium tours.” Her second EP, Male Validation and Other Drugs, dropped March 27, and in seven smartly written, well-crafted songs, it communicates something clear: This is an artist who can hold her own in an exciting class of pop upstarts who are on the rise after the Sabrina/Chappell breakout wave.

IN THIS PHOTO: Avery Cochrane on stage at Nightclub 101/PHOTO CREDIT: Charlie Bahama

Cochrane grew up as the baby of the family with an older brother. Her mom helps rich people organize their belongings before a move. (A plus: They often want to discard designer clothes, leaving Cochrane with a sizable collection.) Her dad works at a small health care publishing company in Seattle and is a baseball coach. They were not a musical family, but she stumbled into it anyway. She journaled obsessively and wrote songs in secret so as not to seem “weird” at the age when you just want to be cool. In high school, she played softball, sang in jazz choir, and dabbled in theater. She was Troy Bolton, she jokes, except she was just in the ensemble of Hairspray.

Cochrane left Seattle to study journalism at San Diego State University in 2019, then ditched the journalism major once the pandemic hit and moved back in with her parents, realizing she didn’t know what she wanted to do yet. During those 2020 months, she wrote songs and began recording them. She didn’t re-enroll at SDSU, and instead took some production and music-theory classes at a local community college, while working customer service jobs and writing more songs. But in spring 2022, she went back to SDSU; she finished her degree in 2024, this time in political science.

Cochrane is in a speed-dating era as she continues to develop her sound, which currently draws on a lot of ’70s and ’80s pop. (Her new EP has six lead producers across seven songs.) She does see the appeal of working with just one or two producers, a la Taylor Swift and Jack Antonoff, or Chappell Roan and Dan Nigro, especially when diving into really emotional, personal material.

The breakup, for example, is on her mind as she works on this next record. “Losing Streak” captures some of the falling apart between Cochrane and her ex-girlfriend, who she calls her "first serious queer relationship.” (Cochrane uses bisexual or pansexual for herself, but isn’t too pressed about labels.) That four-year relationship shaped many of the ideas on Male Validation and Other Drugs that she could see coming to some kind of resolution on the full-length album.

“I think after historically mostly being with men, there was a lot I had to learn and go through and unlearn,” Cochrane says. “That's why I was motivated to make my project about the male gaze, because that continued to seep into my actions and thoughts and behaviors, even in a sapphic relationship.”

As Cochrane figures out the sounds to go along with her lyrics, she’s developing her pop star aesthetic and performance style, which, she says, has felt overwhelming in the past. “I never really had an idea of what I wanted to be visually,” she shares. With a team behind her now, including a creative director for her music videos, it’s easier. She’s learning what she likes and doesn’t. “I want it to be campy. I want it to have queer themes, but not super overt,” she says. “I want it to be feminine, but I'm open to it changing and expanding. I want to look good.”

She already has a theatricality to her approach: At Nightclub 101, she wears a big black faux-fur coat and sunglasses as she wades through the crowd to get to the stage, phones flashing in her face, conjuring the image of a beleaguered celebrity as she begins singing “Griever.”

Cochrane drops the coat to reveal a shiny silver bodysuit, flips her hair, winks at the audience. Suddenly, she is not Avery, a regular 24-year-old in leggings and flats, hunched over a laptop. She is a Pop Star. She wins over the crowd, cracking jokes and introducing new fans to bits of lore, including a nonsense word—"intricities” instead of “intricacies”—she recorded for her song “Losing Streak.” Onstage, she has a fan flip a coin to decide which word she’ll sing live in the performance”.

I am going to end with a new interview from Atwood Magazine that was published earlier this week. They spent time with an artist who is not only making some of the best music out there, but she is also bringing so much strength and joy to so many people’s lives. Maybe she would not want to be seen as an idol, though it is clear that she is! The next few years will see her continue to grow and play some huge stages around the world. I would love to see her in London when she is next here:

“The exploration of stark contrasts and their inevitable chasms of turmoil are well shouldered on the EP, wherein the song “Loneliness in Numbers” is perhaps the best example of Cochrane’s satire skills.

A commentary on the vapidness of social media’s preoccupations amidst the darkness of current events, it’s the track I was most excited to be able to stream once the EP dropped. So I got pumped with the plastic front to back, cause I gotta look good for the nuclear blast, she sings facetiously in the lyrics. “You’re scrolling and you’re seeing all these beautiful, unobtainable women, and then you see like, you know, breaking news, drone strike here! And you’re like, oh my gosh, how am I being fed this much information about two completely unrelated things? Like, OK, product placement here, borderline pornography here, and political violence here,” explained Cochrane of what she unravelled in the lyrics.​​

The track reminds me in many ways of Lily Allen’s hit song, “The Fear,” released way back in 2008, as well as Marina’s lyrics on “Oh No!” from her 2010 breakout album, The Family Jewels, which have held onto a timelessness that I believe Cochrane’s work is also destined for.

In the weeks leading up to the EP release, Cochrane released one final single, “Losing Streak,” which immediately landed on 5 Spotify editorial playlists, including All New Pop, which used Cochrane’s photo as the playlist cover for the week. The track is centered on a growing divide between two lovers, and the release included a music video which opens with Cochrane arriving at a house with a boombox. Despite still being unreleased at the show where I interviewed Cochrane, the crowd knew the chorus well and sang along with fervor.

PHOTO CREDIT: Aaron Sinclair

“We left the session with just the chorus,” Cochrane explained of working on the track. “Then I posted it on TikTok and it did really well. So I was like, God, I need to go back and write these verses, but it was really hard to lock in and write these verses about this relationship that I was still in, that was kind of on the rocks. It was painful to write about, to be so honest about it in real time. I like to write a lot of my songs in hindsight, so this one is very fresh.”

Pushing herself in this regard has paid off – while Cochrane met fans at her merch table, I meandered down the line and spoke to those waiting, surveying them on which song they’re most looking forward to being able to stream once the EP is out. “Losing Streak,” said Bellise Sachetto, as she held onto Cochrane’s set list, standing in line with fellow concert goer, Grace Brummel. “Same,” said Brummel, nodding adamantly. “We’re in agreement,” they said in unison. The two of them drove 45 minutes from Orange County to come to the show; another fan flew into San Diego from Colorado. I asked Sachetto where she would put the set list once she got home. “With my Taylor Swift one, from the Eras tour,” she said immediately.

When I asked Cochrane what the “other drugs” are on the EP – aside from male validation – it seemed like every answer was both a description of a release and a trap, proving the precision of her writing to send listeners into frenetic loops of joy and deep thinking.

“Antidepressants, like sertraline. Sex, but that kinda falls into the male validation of it all,” she said as she counted on her fingers how many things she’d listed. “And then, approval, wanting approval, and shapeshifting – that feels like a drug to me, going out and partying and trying to fit in. Anything that’s trying to fill some void that you haven’t filled in yourself.”

As I wrapped up the interview with Cochrane, I asked her for thoughts during the final stretch of the EP release, and what she was most looking forward to. “I’m really excited to release the rest of the songs and give context to what these existential crises are,” she said, referring back to our discussion of her soft spot for tarnished narratives of the gilded age. “I’m excited to give context to the politics behind the music. Because I feel like my music isn’t overtly political,” she described. “I like to give subtle nods. I hope people can feel that and hear that in the music and the lyrics”.

I will leave things there. Having gifted us with the Male Validation and Other Drugs E.P. and some great new interviews out there, more and more people are discovering the music of Avery Cochrane. She is simply extraordinary, and we are going to be hearing about her for years (and perhaps decades) to come. You need to connect with this extraordinary artist, because it is very clear that she is…

GOING to be a Pop supernova before long.

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Follow Avery Cochrane

PHOTO CREDIT: Rachel Bennett Photography

Instagram:

https://www.instagram.com/avercc/

TikTok:

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

YouTube:

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

Spotify:

https://open.spotify.com/artist/2I0aPV0zqzG1LKhsMaKFDR?si=n1Drojf7TaONKjTNqWh4WQ

FEATURE: Rolling the Ball… From Seiko to Fruitopia: Kate Bush and Commercials

FEATURE:

 

 

Rolling the Ball…

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1978 for a print advert for Seiko in Japan/PHOTO CREDIT: Flashbak

From Seiko to Fruitopia: Kate Bush and Commercials

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IT is not an extensive list…

PHOTO CREDIT: Flashbak

but there have been a couple of occasions where Kate Bush did enter the world of commercials. Not especially in a committed ways, mind. However, there was a small bit of vocalisation from Kate Bush. It takes us back to June 1978 and Kate Bush’s trip to Japan. I guess what many artists would do in the U.S. at the start of their career, Kate Bush did in Japan. She was never concerned about America. They did not get her music or understand her. Bush had better success in Japan. A few of her singles doing very well there. Them Heavy People was renamed Rolling the Ball and reached number three. It was released as a single in September 1978. That was a couple of months before Kate Bush’s second album, Lionheart, was released. However, Bush was still promoting The Kick Inside towards the end of 1978. There are not many examples of Bush lending her music and voice to advertising. She would in the 1990s, though only her voice and some compositions. For Seiko, Kate Bush did a spot and Rolling the Ball figured in. I am not sure whether there was a deal that the song would be used in the advert before being issued as a single, or EMI issued it after her visit to Japan and that connection. It is quite an odd association, though almost unique in Bush’s career. She would not revisit the country after 1978 as far as I know. Indeed, I am also unsure how she agreed to the advert. Whether it was a quick shoot and she earned quite a bit and thought it would be good exposure. She did not have much association with Seiko or is synonymous with them. Dreams of Orgonon talked about Kate Bush’s June 1978 trip to Japan. The cover to The Kick Inside features Bush in this Eastern setting. This slightly unusual and inexplicable connection with the East. A girl from Kent, who mostly listened to British and European music, it did seem like a slightly random step. However, you cannot deny the unusualness of Bush’s hectic and eventful visit to Japan:

“Bush’s relationship with Japan is slightly vexed. She’s… well, Bush is a bit rough on the issue of cultural appropriation. The cover of The Kick Inside is famously orientalist, and we’ll have lots to talk about when we talk about The Dreaming. Bush certainly has respect for other cultures, but takes the European artist’s path of lifting cultural touchstones rather than delicately conversing with their creators — indeed, she slightly flubs her one English TV interview discussing Japan when she refers to Japanese people as “not saying how they feel.” It’s a cryptic moment and some of the messages it sends aren’t great.

Even Bush’s performances, the primary record for this period, aren’t terribly well documented. There are low-quality recordings of them, but seeing as Bush’s usual bandmates didn’t accompany her to Japan and interviews in which she discusses the trip are nigh on impossible to come by, it’s hard to find any behind-the-scenes insight into this period, which renders Bush’s work in Japan ever stranger. In addition to “Moving” and a performance of “The Man with the Child in His Eyes,” she stages the most bizarre dance number rendition of “Them Heavy People” ever on a TV show called Sound in S, with co-lead vocalists and a host of dancers. It looks nothing like any other performance of the song ever — it’s genuinely bizarre a song that mentions G. I. Gurdjieff would be treated like this. Sure, Bush has a poppy edge, but this is showbiz, not her own brand of pop.

The most jarring moment of all comes in the form of… Kate Bush doing Japanese watch commercials. That’s not a shitpost, that is a thing that literally happened. Twice. And they use “Them Heavy People,” which didn’t seem to catch a break in Japan (as it was released as a Japan-exclusive single and reached #3 on the charts, this is understandable). “We have many varieties of mood within us, but it’s up to you to choose,” Bush enunciates possibly the most animistic commercial slogan ever. It’s a strange pair of adverts, and there’s probably a reason Bush did commercials so sparingly her next foray in the business wouldn’t be until the Nineties”.

I am not sure how Kate Bush reflects on the adverts now. I forgot there was a pair of adverts. However, I love everything to do with 1978 and what Kate Bush did. She must have tired of the traveling even at that point. In 1978 alone, Bush was fly to America and New Zealand. A brief Japan visit was probably necessary but it would have sapped her. Not many people discuss the Seiko promotion, though I feel it is interesting it is not her only exploration into commercials. So much intrigues me about that first hook-up. Bush recording a tagline in the studio. Her heart not completely in it, through it was for a Japanese audience, so providing her directions would have been difficult. I think that was an issue that manifested itself in the spots. How there probably wasn’t a director or producer who spoke great English. Trying to muddle through. You can see some of the translation barriers when she was at that Song Contest and doing some live work in Japan. Quite awkward by all accounts and measures.

That seemingly weird connection between Them Heavy People and Seiko. A Seiko logo appears on the insert's back side of the Rolling the Ball single, which makes it Bush's only commercial release featuring any kind of product endorsement. Bush also appeared in print ads for the brand in Japan. I wish there were crisper and cleaner photos of those print adverts, as the ones out there are a little blurry or scratchy. However, there are a few articles that looked at these Seiko adverts. You can see the photos here. She looks pretty cool and very beautiful. The adverts not too bad. She gives it all she can, though it must have been quite a confusing and strange environment for her! In 2022, Classic Rock talked about Kate Bush in Japan and her Seiko collaboration:

“Moving had been released as a single in Japan four months earlier, with Wuthering Heights as the b-side, and while soul legend Al Green won the contest, Bush's success – she shared the festival's silver prize with Chicago soul act The Emotions, whose Best Of My Love single had topped the US chart the previous year – meant that local label EMI Music Japan were eager to capitalise.

The answer? Seiko Watches. The company produced a series of print ads featuring Bush wearing their timepieces, while the September release of new single Them Heavy People saw the singer wearing another watch on the cover with a Seiko ad appearing on the back. The same song was used in a TV spot, in which Bush engaged in some freeform dance moves before offering a short, somewhat profound voiceover.

“We have many varieties of mood within us," she says. "It’s up to you to choose.”

The single was success, reaching number three in the Japanese chart. It was backed by The Man With The Child In His Eyes, a song Bush famously wrote when she was just 13, although a super-rare, promotional-only double vinyl 7" was also produced, with the second disc featuring the two tracks released in February, Moving and Wuthering Heights. Own a copy? It's worth a small fortune.

Quite why the famously independent Bush got involved with the commercial behemoths at Seiko hasn't been made clear. And it remains the only time she's leant her face to such an campaign, although she was commissioned to write some music for the adverts that launched Coca Cola's Frutopia drink in 1994 (other ads were soundtracked by the Cocteau Twins and The Muffs).

Maybe she just fancied some free watches”.

I forgot to mention Kate Bush had traction and footing in Japan with the Moving single release. This brief spell of Japanese appreciation and commercial success. I do have a fondness for her print and T.V. adverts for Seiko in Japan. Not a lot of people talk about it, though it was this bizarrely charming part of a whirlwind and exhausting visit to Japan. Little over three months after her debut album was released and she was still unknown largely, Bush was performing in front of thousands of people in Japan and appearing on T.V. and in print. It must have blown her mind!

There was a gap when Bush did not do advertising. She did radio adverts where she had to say her name and that she loved that station/D.J. People still do it now. Probably not something that she enjoyed. However, it was part of the intervbiew circuit. In 1993, she released The Red Shoes album and the short film, The Line, the Cross and the Curve. It was another exhausting time and Kate Bush was not getting the critical love she deserved. Feeling less committed to plotting another album or promotion after that, little risk taking on an advertising commission. To give a little background, and sourcing from Graeme Thomson’s Under the Ivy: The Life and Music of Kate Bush. The Line, The Cross and the Curve for a cinematic release in April 1994. The video went on sale in October. The world, as Thomson rites, “shrugged”. In 1994, her cover of The Man I Love for a tribute album to George and Ira Gershwin and entered the chart in July. It was a fantastic song and allowed her to take her voice in a direction that we had not seen in her studio albums. Bush donated a couple of pieces of original artwork for War Child for a charity auction in September 1994. Bush appeared on Top of the Pops in November 1994. It was in promotion of the final single from The Red Shoes, And So Is Love. There was a strange amount of activity from Bush that nobody talks about. As British music was exploding with Britpop and all these new sounds and bands, Kate Bush was doing her own thing and broadening her horizons. This was a $30 million campaign  to accompany the U.S. T.V. campaign for a new Coca-Cola drink, Fruitopia. Liz Fraswer of The Cocteau Twins was the voice for the U.K. adverts. Whether the producers through the two were similar and interchangeable?! Ever since that 1978 advert for Seiko, Kate Bush would have been approached so many times for various companies and products.

You can understand why she did it in 1978, as it was the start of her career and there was the commercial exposure, financial reward and a way of getting her new music to a new audience. In 1994, she had released seven studio albums and it would not be until 2005 that she would release another album (with Aerial). I feel like it was quite lucrative for Bush. Even though The Red Shoes did alright on the U.K. chart and reached number two, it was not a massive-selling album. It did well in the U.S., but she was not shifting what she did with The Kick Inside and getting the reviews she was for 1985’s Hounds of Love. Perhaps a bit of a downturn, getting a chance to compose some short instrumental pieces for this interesting range of different-flavoured drinks allowed her to spread her wings and do more in the way of composing rather than songwriting. Graeme Thomson muses that the little scraps and musical ideas that had not made it onto albums could be used for the adverts. She had full control. It was a series of thirty-second snippets where each piece of music had their own titles: Solstice, Some People, Nice, Skin, Soul, What If, Thirsty, Person, and Fighting Fruit. I think my favourite title is Fighting Fruit. What we do get is a little bit of a nod back to 1982’s The Dreaming. In terms of the experimentation. Something different from the mainstream. Hard to put a finger on. Bush not constrained by Pop conventions and what was expected. Not that Aerial was a fuller realisation of the musical ideas she produced for Fruitopia, though you can feel that these short pieces could have been strung together into something longer. Maybe a conceptual suite around the drinks or a concept that involves the making of the Fruitopia adverts.

I have often wondered whether Kate Bush considered film composition. Being given this lease to orchestrate cinema. I can imagine she was approached at some point, though she might have been busy or felt constrained by a lack of vocals. This piece form the Kate Bush Encyclopedia provides more details. A total of eleven different adverts. Titles that differed to what Graeme Thomson noted: Fighting Fruit, Nice, Passion, Raspberry, Message of Love, Soul, Where Were You?, Teaser, Summer Solstice, Some People, and What If? You can see this list of the adverts with descriptions. It was this fascinating project. You can understand why Kate Bush was attracted:

“When Kate Bush took the assignment to do the music for Coca-Cola’s Fruitopia ads, it was indeed free rein for her. Chiat/Day, New York, creative director Marty Cooke and executive producer Andrew Chinich were overjoyed when Bush agreed to do not only one, but all nine of the spots in the Fruitopia campaign. Perhaps the fact that they told her she could do anything she wanted with the scores had something to do with it. In any case, Cooke and Chinich were just glad to get Bush on the job, which she did from London with a bunch of hand-picked musicians. “She said she was interested in providing a lot of variety, from Japanese drummers to Moroccan music… and she came through in spades,” Cooke says”.

The “odd, rhythmic, electronic pop she was making around the time of The Dreaming” is what Graeme Thomson writes in his book. You can sort of hear it. I have included a few of the adverts in here, just so you can see what she was coming up with. Really interesting. The Red Shoes was quite varied in terms of the instruments used and mixing genres, cultures and continents. However, she had to reign things in slightly for an album. Not so for the Fruitopia adverts, so you get this wider and more eclectic blend. This is what Dangerous Minds wrote when they revisited Kate Bush’s Fruitopia adverts last year:

“Rewatching the Fruitopia ads now, it’s hard not to smirk at how earnestly trippy they are. Think teenage poetry meets an acid comedown, all swirling colours, slow-motion fruit, and vague cosmic guff. But Bush’s music gives them real bite—just enough weirdness to stop it all feeling like a total piss-take. It’s classic ‘90s advertising hubris: slap some Cocteau Twins on a juice ad and call it deep. Still, there’s something charming about how over the top it all is. For a soft drink campaign, it went surprisingly hard on the vibes”.

Since 1994, Kate Bush has allowed her music to be used in adverts. However, she has done nothing like the Seiko and Fruitopia adverts. It would be amazing if Bush completed the trilogy, though you feel she does not need to and adverts do not have the same spark and allure. Instead, we can remember fondly two very different advertising campaigns. Fruitopia Bush more the composer, whereas Seiko features her in print adverts and we get to see her. There is still that lingering at the as to whether Kate Bush will…

EVER do it again.

FEATURE: Before Today: Everything But the Girl’s Walking Wounded at Thirty

FEATURE:

 

 

Before Today

Everything But the Girl’s Walking Wounded at Thirty

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I’LL finish up on a review…

IN THIS PHOTO: Everything But the Girl (Tracey Thorn and Ben Watt) in 1996/PHOTO CREDIT: Juergen Teller

of one of the best albums from the 1990s, Walking Wounded. From the incredible Everything But the Girl, it turns thirty on 6th May. I did not realise that this was their ninth album. Amazing consistency and stamina from an astonishing duo. Also, the fact that that they were hitting a new peak nine albums in! I will get to a few articles that revisit this brilliant record. Walking Wounded is one of my favourite Everything But the Girl albums. I am going to lead off with Albumism and their great twenty-fifth anniversary retrospective of Walking Wounded from 2021. I remember when it came out in 1996 and I loved it. It was a time when I was still in the thrall of Britpop and its aftermath. Everything But the Girl provided something different and somewhat deeper:

“Though critical darlings for two decades on the strength of their early-career solo albums—Thorn’s A Distant Shore (1982) and Watt’s North Marine Drive (1983)—and string of seven albums as a duo beginning with 1984’s Eden through 1992’s Acoustic, it was their 1994 album Amplified Heart that initiated the transformation of their career.

More precisely, though Amplified Heart is a stellar affair all around, one remixed single from the LP proved game-changing for the group. When the original album version of “Missing” was released in August 1994, it made only minor ripples across the airwaves and within the record shops.

Fast forward fourteen months to October 1995, and the revered house DJ/producer Todd Terry reinvigorated the single by layering in more dancefloor-friendly beats, and the single quickly became a massive worldwide hit, one of the most universally beloved dance anthems of all time. After experiencing a career lull in the early ‘90s, Thorn and Watt were suddenly propelled to newfound heights of global popularity and commercial acclaim that at long last rivaled the critical recognition they’d garnered to date.

Coupled with the unanticipated success of the “Missing” remix, Thorn’s stunning vocals on Massive Attack’s “Protection” single a handful of months prior, and Watt’s continued exploration of the London drum and bass circuit, Everything But The Girl’s sound was destined to evolve from their more acoustic and jazz-indebted blueprint.

Upon its release in May 1996, Walking Wounded, the pair’s ninth studio effort, represented the most fully realized manifestation of their career rebirth to date. Though the group’s sonic adventurism also posed creative and professional risks. “This next step in our musical career was exciting,” Thorn declares in Bedsit Disco Queen. “There were no certainties involved in any of it, no sense of treading familiar ground; rather, a strong feeling of heading out into unchartered waters. Just before Walking Wounded came out, I remember thinking that it could go either way. We might triumph or we might fall flat on our faces. We worried that we would annoy some of the drum-and-bass underground by making a pop version of a sound that was still so new, but in the end even that never really happened.”

Masterfully produced by Watt, Walking Wounded marks the formal expansion of Everything But The Girl’s musical palette, through the adoption of more electronic, drum and bass, and house flavored soundscapes. Yet despite this new direction, the group’s arrangements are still comingled with their signature emotive songwriting & dazzling melodies. Thorn’s reassuring vocals and contemplative lyrics about the vicissitudes of life and love are perfect complements to Watt’s lush, beat-driven soundscapes.

Opening the album with a riveting rush of melodic drum and bass, “Before Today” is not your prototypical love song. And this is a good thing. A very good thing. When Thorn seductively demands “I want your love / And I want it now,” the immediacy of love and her determination to have it could not be more palpable.

Released as the second single, the shimmering stunner “Wrong” examines the “little give and take” that defines love founded upon reciprocity. More than any track on Walking Wounded, “Wrong” is most reminiscent of “Missing” and augurs the house-blessed stompers that would feature on the group’s follow-up and final album Temperamental (1999). Like its precursor, “Wrong” gets the Todd Terry remix treatment here as well, though while the beats are more pronounced, Terry’s redeux is admittedly not much of an eye-opening expansion upon the original.

A shining example of an album that exquisitely merges the cerebral, emotional and physical, Walking Wounded is the culmination of Thorn and Watt’s unparalleled devotion to songcraft and fearlessness in taking the bravest of chances with their music. Virtues that have continued to characterize their respective post-EBTG solo careers. Twenty-five years on, Walking Wounded still sounds as sublime as ever”.

It is worth getting to a review or two, just to see what critics make of this album. However, I do want to source what Rhino said in 2017 for their feature on an album that went to number six in the U.K. and scored some stunning reviews. It was a groundbreaking release from a duo who were raising the bar twelve years after their debut album, Eden. Tracey Thorn and Ben Watt would release two more Everything But the Girl albums. Temperamental came out in 1999. Apart from NME giving it 1/10 (some sh*t who clearly didn’t bother listening to it!), it did get some great reviews. Not to say 2023’s Fuse is their final album together, though it was a great album and featured highly in the year-end lists. Making the top ten in so many. One can argue Walking Wounded is not only one of the last big peaks from Everything But the Girl but maybe the best album they ever released:

“The overarching sound of the British duo Everything but the Girl (singer Tracey Thorn and instrumentalist Ben Watt) had after years settled into a pleasant, melodic pattern—keyboards and acoustic guitars laying the melodies over a mix of live and electronic percussion, with Thorn’s contralto providing the main focus and finishing touch. Something odd happened with 1994's AMPLIFIED HEART, though—a Todd Terry club remix of the song "Missing" became a massive worldwide hit, and it suddenly became apparent how ripe EBTG's music was for such aural reassessment. Heretofore unrecognized space in many of their songs' mixes could be filled with beats, echo and other accoutrements of dance music. In the right hands, a track that might have provided an agreeable diversion on the radio or in a dorm room CD player could be positively deadly on the dance floor.

Turns out the best person to take advantage of this development was Ben Watt himself, and on EBTG's next record, 1996's WALKING WOUNDED, he blew their sound wide open. The change is evident from the first notes one hears, on "Before Today"—a dreamy keyboard sample, looped several times before Thorn's voice is heard, trailed by a synth bass and hi-hat. The beats get more frenetic, paddling furiously as the song slowly slinks along. One realizes immediately how well the sound ushered in by the "Missing" remix fits EBTG's songs.

Watt plays with drum 'n' bass beats on the title track, as its skittering percussion is molded with the melody and Thorn's haunting denouement for a relationship ("Nothing can replace the us I knew"); there's a stillness that cuts through the busy undercurrent. A great contrast is "Flipside," probably the most accessible up-tempo track on the record, with a big beat contrasting the intensely inward-looking lyric. The breakdown in the middle of the song is perfect, and the slightly out-of-phase vocal provides just enough unsteady energy throughout to keep the listener engaged and moving. And longtime fans put off a bit by the club trappings will be comforted by "Mirrorball," on which an acoustic guitar provides the melodic base, lifted up in the mix, with the electronic beats dropped down. It's the most "traditional" of the album's many fine offerings.

Some might claim that Thorn and Watt were merely glomming onto a fad or three by making WALKING WOUNDED such a club record, and while acts like Massive Attack and Portishead had all but pioneered this kind of sound, EBTG proved themselves quite capable of thriving in the same space. Unfortunately, they weren't long for the world—1998's similarly structured TEMPERAMENTAL is the last we've heard from them as a band—but they certainly left a mark”.

In 2019, Pitchfork featured Everything But the Girl in their series where they revisit a great album from the past. They spend some time with a stellar and magnificent 1996 album that still sounds utterly engrossing to this day. I don’t think it has aged at all. I wonder whether Tracey Thorn and Ben Watt will mark thirty years of Walking Wounded somehow:

“In spring 1995, Thorn returned to New York with Watt, where they spent a couple of months working on more ideas for Walking Wounded. During that trip, they learned that Terry’s remix had blown up in Miami and, in fact, across the States, breaking out of the clubs and into the charts. Worldwide, it went on to sell 3 million copies.

In the months before “Missing” mania hit the UK, Watt had dived headfirst into London’s drum ‘n’ bass scene. He heard DJs like Fabio and Doc Scott at atmospheric drum ‘n’ bass pioneer LTJ Bukem’s night Speed, and connected with the freeform flow of the sound that Bukem has compared with jazz. His enthusiasm eventually convinced Thorn to join him at the club night. “It wasn’t a rock gig, and it wasn’t a rave—it felt like something new again,” she wrote in her memoir. “Strange and yet familiar, it felt possible.”

The mental space that these new encounters cracked open can be observed in the clarity with which both Thorn and Watt approached their songwriting on Walking Wounded. On the breezy “Flipside,” which features lyrics by Watt and scratching by Scottish producer Howie B, the moment Watt’s life got turned upside down is directly referenced: “London, summer ’92/I think I’ve changed a lot since then, do you?” In the next verse, Watt writes that he is “blasted land,” comparing himself to a coastline that’s constantly shifting at the mercy of the sea. It’s a poetic reminder that the processing of trauma can shape you as much as the incident itself.

In Thorn’s mouth, the lyrics serve to underline that Watt’s near-death experience left them both reeling, questioning everything they used to know. The flipside to “Flipside” comes in the form of a slo-mo drum ‘n’ bass number called “Big Deal.” Written by Thorn, she uses the titular phrase sarcastically in an attempt to deliver a reality check. With an air of frustration, she seems to sing of Watt’s search for answers in the club: “You say you wanna get cured, you wanna turn off your head/Oh and you say it hurts, and you feel unsure/First you doubt yourself and then you doubt her/Big deal, that's the way we all feel.” Everyone goes through trauma in some form or other, the song suggests, what matters is giving one another the space to work through it.

The strength of Walking Wounded lies in exactly that. Each Everything But the Girl album has its own style and story, but the one on which Thorn and Watt’s individual gifts shine brightest is the one on which they stripped everything back. They shared their knottiest feelings, created dialogue with skeletal new sounds, and made the record in a much more insular way than they ever had previously. Its timely sonics and emotionally wrought themes spoke as much to teenagers, myself included, as it did the band’s adult contemporaries (Bristol drum ‘n’ bass head Roni Size gave it thumbs up). Walking Wounded remains Thorn and Watt’s biggest-selling album with worldwide sales of 1.3 million. It did the kind of well that prompted U2 to ask them to be their tour support, something they ended up turning down because, well, they needed some space. Thorn and Watt’s relationship had been tied to their career from the very beginning, and it was time to listen to the cries for independence that Walking Wounded so clearly contained. Instead of going on tour, they started a family, and set the wheels in motion for their separate careers to come”.

I am going to finish up with the Entertainment Weekly and their hugely positive review of Walking Wounded. When we talk about the best albums of the 1990s, I don’t  think Walking Wounded is mentioned enough. Musical brilliance from Everything But the Girl. Anyone who has never heard it really does need to do so as soon as possible:

“Savvy songwriters can make even the edgiest music go pop. Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain won the world’s ardor by distilling a decade’s worth of mangy underground American rock into an embraceable new sound. Madonna scored a doubleplatinum success by shaping the subterranean gay dance style known as ”sleaze” into 1990’s Erotica. And now Everything But The Girl stand poised to take the sounds best loved by today’s hipsters to Everymall U.S.A.

On Walking Wounded EBTG infuse the swank of neo-lounge music, the whir of ambient-dance, and the spaciness of trip-hop with the sweetest pop melodies these genres have ever encountered. The groundbreaking result seems at once abstract and immediate, untamed and accessible — Julie London updated to the age of Bjork.

Not that the group’s pop-friendly brand of lounge ranks as coldly opportunistic. No act has better earned the right to bring this music to the masses.

Fourteen years ago, this English duo first matched the cool elan of Peggy Lee (courtesy of singer Tracey Thorn) to the bossa nova beat of Burt Bacharach (via musician Ben Watt). Not since the Carpenters last nailed a hit in the mid-’70s had the pop world heard so exalted a sound. While bands like The Style Council and Swing Out Sister also mined marimba’d beats, none did so with the commitment, variety, and depth of EBTG. If their seven studio albums had twee and mannered moments, the group still managed to provide the broadest possible influence for today’s neo-lounge acts, from Portishead to Stereolab.

After years of attracting only the cognoscenti, EBTG finally cracked the pop charts this year when a house remix of their 1994 song ”Missing” became a surprise top 10 hit. With that encouragement, EBTG opted to set all of Walking Wounded‘s 11 tracks to dance beats. Yet, in choosing beats more radical and complex than those featured on ”Missing,” they’ve created something far more unexpected and new.

For an aural blueprint, the duo clearly drew on two key recordings — both from U.K. trip-hop pioneers Massive Attack. Throughout Walking Wounded one can hear echoes of Thorn’s memorable cameo on the title track of Massive Attack’s last LP, Protection, and a 1995 collaboration between Massive and Madonna on a cover of Marvin Gaye’s ”I Want You.”

Expanding on those revolutionary records, Walking Wounded floats Thorn’s wan vocals over a soundscape of sputtering, hissing, and clacking beats. A clutch of eccentric rhythms turn up, from the funk rumblings of ”Single” to the ambient sway of ”Big Deal.” Watt’s sparse and spacious production lets all these sounds sparkle in air, creating a dizzying 3-D effect.

Watt also coaxes an incredible range of textures from his synthesizers — from the trampoline-bounce bass of the title track to the bedspring explosion of drums in ”Good Cop, Bad Cop.” Such sonic gymnastics comprise their own new subgenre in the U.K., called drum ‘n’ bass, a form whose celebrated ace, Spring Heel Jack, collaborated on some tracks here.

To help ground the sound, Watt and Thorn offer an array of gorgeous melodies. All undulate with a sensuality perfectly suited to Thorn’s burgundy voice. In her lilting style, Thorn recalls the sophistication of Dionne Warwick at her peak; she comes across as both haunted and aloof. By juxtaposing her woozy cadences with the brusque clatter of the beats, EBTG create a great counterpoint — the musical equivalent of manic depression.

This excited sense of melancholy fleshes out the group’s pining lyrics. Every song follows a ruinous love. ”I’m eating less and drinking more,” moans Thorn in a song that recalls the aftermath of a particularly bad affair. Another love proves painful enough to reduce her to childhood, causing the singer to plaintively ask, ”Is this as grown-up as we ever get?”

Coupled with the probing and pulsing music, these torchy sentiments achieve a psychological resonance, putting EBTG way above the campiness of most neo-lounge acts. In fact, their synthesized whooshes and bleats provide modern pop’s first corollary to the weird sounds cooked up by the early ’60s’ most avant-garde lounge stylists: Esquivel and Martin Denny.

By marrying such musical leaps to their sterling pop sensibilities, Everything But The Girl provide a classic service: They offer an ideal conduit between today’s chic underground and pop fans everywhere. A”.

On 6th May, it will be thirty years since Walking Wounded was released. A masterpiece I feel is still underrated. Not discussed as much as it should be. I do hope too that we hear more from Everything But the Girl, as that musical chemistry between Tracey Thorn and Ben Watt (who are married) always yields such wonderful results. More than evident through their…

1996 album