FEATURE: The Digital Mixtape: 1960s Summer Vibes

FEATURE:

 

 

The Digital Mixtape

PHOTO CREDIT: Jonas Ferlin/Pexels

1960s Summer Vibes

_________

WE are at the time of year…

PHOTO CREDIT: Mary Evans Picture Library/Gerald Wilson

when we are looking forward to warmer weather. Spring will come soon, then we are into the summer. It will be a good time! Even if the weather is cold and unpleasant at the moment, we are going to get some nicer conditions soon. To accelerate things – or at least protect some sense of sunshine and warmth! -, I have been looking for some summer-themed/charting songs from the 1960s. Whether they are songs for the beach or those set for summer parties, or tracks that were successful during summers in the 1960s, this mixtape hopefully will both give you a sense of summer and warmer conditions, in addition to take you back. An assortment of classics and lesser-known cuts, the below should get the mood lifted. Even if you are not familiar with a lot of these songs, I hope that the playlist below helps you imagine sunnier days…

PHOTO CREDIT: Saliha Sevim/Pexels

AND the upcoming summer.

FEATURE: Groovelines: Destiny’s Child – Bills, Bills, Bills

FEATURE:

 

 

Groovelines

Destiny’s Child – Bills, Bills, Bills

_________

AS there is a lot of talk….

about Beyoncé and her upcoming Country-inspired/sounding album. Act II, I wanted to look back at one of her earliest hits. In fact, her new album is out on 29th March. We have heard the singles, TEXAS HOLD EM and 16 CARRIAGES. It is a new direction for the icon. I wanted to cast back to her time with Destiny’s Child. The group’s second studio album, The Writing’s on the Wall, as it turns twenty-five on 14th July. I was (and am) a big fan of Destiny’s Child. One of their defining singles is Bills, Bills, Bills. The first to be released from the album, it came out on 31st May, 1999. Bills, Bills, Bills became the first number one single on the US Billboard chart for Destiny's Child. It also  it reached the top ten in Belgium, Canada, Iceland, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom. Bills, Bills, Bills was nominated for two Grammy Awards in 2000 - Best R&B Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocals and Best R&B Song. Written by Destiny’s Child’s Beyoncé Knowles, LeToya Luckett and Kelly Rowland alongside Kevin Briggs and Kandi, it was produced by Kevin Briggs. In fact, in 2021, Kandi Burruss spoke with Glamour about five iconic songs that she wrote. She discussed the legendary Bills, Bills, Bills:

“Bills, Bills, Bills”

“Bills, Bills, Bills” was Destiny’s Child lead single on their second album, The Writing’s on the Wall. Cowritten by Burruss and She'kspere, alongside the group’s members, the song earned two Grammy nominations: Best R&B Song and Best R&B Performance by a Duo or Group With Vocals.

When I got with the girls at the studio, we were singing them the idea. I had the melody of how I felt like the verse should go, and we came together for the lyrics.

I use a lot of my past relationships as inspiration. The relationship I had been in prior to [writing the song], I took inspiration from it…though I didn't tell them that. Now, this is the really funny part: One of the girls that was in the group was dating my ex at the time. So I didn’t tell them that some of the lyrics in there were inspired by him. The part that was a clear inspiration—using my phone and pretending like he didn’t use it, driving my car and not putting any gas in it—that was real stuff that had happened to me! But I won’t tell you who from the group was dating my ex”.

I want to move to Stereogum and their feature, The Number Ones. In 2022, they shine a light on Destiny’s Child’s Bills, Bills, Bills. Number one for one week, twenty-five years later, I feel it is one of the most captivating and strongest singles of the late-1990s. I did not know too much about the writing of the song and its background:

“The power is the money. The money is the power. Minute after minute. Hour after hour. Beyoncé Knowles has ascended to pop-deity status over the past few decades mostly by singing, brilliantly, about the power dynamics of romantic relationships. In that time, she’s also dealt with different ever-shifting systems of power — with the group that made her famous, with her husband, and with the rest of the pop charts in general. Time and time again, money has defined that sense of power.

As I write this, Beyoncé’s new single “Break My Soul” is sitting at #9 on the Hot 100 after reaching a #7 peak. (It’s a 9.) On that song, Beyoncé sings about being economically exploited and taking control: “Now, I just fell in love/ And I just quit my job/ I’m gonna find new drive/ Damn, they work me so damn hard.” Even amidst the hosannas that always greet a new Beyoncé record, those lines have incurred some online grumbles. After all, Beyoncê is a hugely successful pop-culture institution, way more boss than worker. She’s more likely to fire you than to quit her job. But Beyoncé has always been attuned to her moment, and the moment called for a fuck-this-shit-I’m-out song.

Twenty-three years before “Break My Soul,” the moment was different, and so were the power dynamics. The first of the many #1 hits to bear Beyoncé’s name concerned a whole different cash flow issue. On “Bills, Bills, Bills,” Beyoncé’s job wasn’t exploiting her. Instead, the song is directed at a no-account layabout boyfriend who spends all her money and who offers no support. That whole situation is no longer relevant to Beyoncé, who will never need anybody’s help to pay her automobills again. In 1999, though, economically unbalanced relationships were a hot pop-music issue, and Destiny’s Child rode that issue to the top of the Hot 100.

In retrospect, “Bills, Bills, Bills” looks like the beginning of a long journey towards dominance. In the moment, though, it probably felt like the culmination of years of effort. Beyoncé Knowles was 17 years old when “Bills, Bills, Bills” reached #1, and all the other members of Destiny’s Child were around the same age. They’d all been trying to achieve pop stardom for the better part of a decade.

Beyoncé Knowles was born in Houston, the daughter of a Creole hair salon owner and a Black medical supplies salesman. (Diana Ross and Lionel Richie’s “Endless Love” was the #1 song in America at the time of Beyoncé’s birth.) Beyoncé went to Catholic school and studied dance, and her dance teacher was the first to notice how well she could sing. In 1990, when she was eight years old, Beyoncé auditioned for the Houston-based girl group Girl’s Tyme, and that’s where she met LaTavia Roberson, a child model who wanted to rap.

Beyoncé and LaTavia both made the cut for Girl’s Tyme, and the group hit the Houston talent-show circuit. Soon enough, the group added a sixth member, LaTavia’s elementary-school friend Kelly Rowland. Kelly’s home situation was so chaotic that she eventually went to live with Beyoncé’s family. Before long, Girl’s Tyme got the call to compete on Star Search, and they lost to a band called Skeleton Crew. Beyoncé would later sample Ed McMahon’s voice on “Flawless,” a truly great 2013 track that peaked at #41.

After Girl’s Tyme lost on Star Search, Beyoncé’s father Mathew quit his job and took over as the group’s manager. He fired three of the members and added one new singer, Beyoncé’s friend LeToya Luckett. Mathew went full stage-dad, making the group practice relentlessly. Sometimes, they’d sing for tips at the beauty shop owned by Beyoncé’s mother Tina, who also acted as the group’s stylist. Eventually, Girl’s Tyme got chances to open for national R&B groups when they’d come through town. The group went through a bunch of different names, and they eventually signed to Elektra when they were known as Destiny. But Elektra dropped the group, and they became Destiny’s Child, named after a Bible passage that Tina had picked out. Destiny’s Child soon signed with Columbia, and they made their on-record debut when their song “Killing Time,” co-written and produced by Tony! Toni! Toné! member D’Wayne Wiggins, appeared on the Men In Black soundtrack.

Destiny’s Child’s self-titled 1998 debut is mostly expansively staid adult-contempo R&B. The LP eventually went platinum, but it didn’t sell well at first. The album’s one hit was the track that took the group out of their balladeer mode. Wyclef Jean co-produced and rapped on a remix of the group’s song “No, No, No.” Its big, loping beat and its hypnotic hook had an energy that the rest of the album lacked. It’s possible that the remix saved the group. In any case, it became their first single and their first hit, peaking at #3. (It’s an 8. Wyclef’s highest-charting single as lead artist, 1997’s “Gone Till November,” peaked at #7. It’s a 10. As a guest and a songwriter, Wyclef will eventually appear in this column. 

When Destiny’s Child made their 1999 sophomore album The Writing’s On The Wall, things had shifted. Mathew Knowles had realized that this group was young and that it should sound young. At the same time, R&B was going through a creative explosion, and Destiny’s Child were in a good place to take advantage. There are a few sleepy ballads on The Writing’s On The Wall, but the album also showcases the work of adventurous producers and songwriters like Missy Elliott and Rodney Jerkins. For the first single, Destiny’s Child worked with the team that had just made one of the year’s biggest hits.

Kandi Burruss, the former Xscape member and future Real Housewife, had been the primary author of “No Scrubs,” the TLC blockbuster that reached #1 a few months before “Bills, Bills, Bills.” Kevin “She’kspere” Briggs co-wrote that song, and he also produced it. Destiny’s Child had nearly finished work on The Writing’s On The Wall when they sent She’kspere and Burruss down to Houston to work with Destiny’s Child. She’kspere had been told that there was only space on the album for one more song. Destiny’s Child had not been told that Burruss was coming, and to hear Burruss tell it, they weren’t thrilled to see her. The members of the group weren’t sure about the track that She’kspere produced, but they did like the melody that Burruss came up with for it. That song became “Bug-A-Boo,” the album’s second single, and it peaked at #33.

She’kspere and Burruss ended up with much more than one song on the album. They became two of the album’s dominant creative forces, working on five different songs. On a second trip to Houston, Burruss came up with the “Bills, Bills, Bills” hook while grocery shopping. Lyrically, that hook has a lot in common with what she’d already written on “No Scrubs.” Like that song, “Bills, Bills, Bills” is a shot at a guy who’s a financial drain on his girlfriend; Burruss even reuses the word “scrub.” Like “No Scrubs,” “Bills, Bills, Bills” is also about one of Burruss’ ex-boyfriends. Years later, Burruss said that the ex-boyfriend in question was actually dating a member of Destiny’s Child when she wrote the song: “I didn’t tell them that some of the lyrics in there were inspired by him.” Burruss didn’t identify the ex or the group member he was dating.

The members of Destiny’s Child were worried that “Bills, Bills, Bills” would make them sound like they only cared about money, so they rewrote the song’s verses themselves. Beyoncé, Kelly, and LaTavia all have writing credits on the track. Those verses make it clear that the guy in the song is actually exploiting the narrator: “And now you ask to use my car/ Drive it all day and don’t fill up the tank/ And you have the audacity to even come and step to me and/ Ask to hold some money from me until you get your check next week.”

In Fred Bronson’s Billboard Book Of Number 1 Hits, Beyoncé says, “It was so catchy. We loved it. We knew it was a hit, but we weren’t sure what the song was talking about. Why would we ask a guy to pay our bills? Only if he ran them up! We wrote the verses about him taking advantage of us, even though nobody really paid attention to that part. People took it the wrong way.” Maybe “Bills, Bills, Bills” was just too catchy. The hook, with Destiny’s Child asking whether the guy can pay their telephone bills and their automobills — a great word that only exists in the context of this song — is vicious and memorable enough to overwhelm the rest of the track. Destiny’s Child sound like they’re taunting this trifling good-for-nothing type of brother for the crime of being broke. But they sound amazing doing it.

Look: We can talk all day about the financial and sexual politics of “Bills, Bills, Bills,” or even about how it recycles the messages that two of the songwriters had used on “No Scrubs” a few months earlier. But those lyrics aren’t why “Bills, Bills, Bills” hit the way that it did. Instead, “Bills, Bills, Bills” worked because it sounded like the future. “Bills, Bills, Bills” opens as a duet between a chopped-up synthetic harpsichord and a tiny stuttery dinging sound. She’kspere layers in his trademark bubble-pop noise, syncopated skitter-burst drums, and sci-fi synth tones that don’t even bother to sound like real strings.

Mathew Knowles’ R&B boot camp served Destiny’s Child well on “Bills, Bills, Bills.” Those singers were still kids, so they didn’t have to do much adjusting to fit She’kspere’s style. She’kspere and Kandi Burruss were amazed at how gifted the young singers were, how they could sing layered and complicated melodies without any help. “Bills, Bills, Bills” puts those gifts to work. On the verses, Beyoncé delivers a whole lot of lyrics in a syncopated bounce, projecting strength and aggravation while jumping in and out of the track’s pocket. She’s almost rapping. So is Kelly Rowland, who sounds well and truly fed up on the pre-chorus, sneering at “a scrub like you who don’t know what a man’s about.” The chorus, with all four singers joining up together, is a silky earworm that builds to a devastating conclusion: “I don’t think you do, so you and me are through,” delivered over that harpsichord with a prim precision that makes me think of some 17th-century royal court.

“Bills, Bills, Bills” is one of those classic examples of how pop music can work, how the way that you say something can be so much more important that what you’re actually saying. The lyrics are trite and avaricious battle-of-the-sexes stuff, and they rip off another song that had only just made those exact same points more smoothly. But that doesn’t matter one bit when the song is so layered and sophisticated and catchy and mind-boggling. This is such prime spaceship-era R&B that it was almost surprising that Destiny’s Child didn’t adapt a sci-fi setting for the video. Instead, they played fantastically put-together hairdressers, paying homage to their time singing in Tina Knowles’ hair salon. (The video’s hair salon is, however, awfully sleek and geometrically designed — almost like a spaceship.)

“Bills, Bills, Bills” was the first indication that Destiny’s Child could adapt to the sound of the moment while also transcending it. These kids had ditched their boring old sound, tapping into something sleek and playful instead, and they had made something special. They would go on to make a whole lot of other hits that were just as bright and inventive, if not more so. We will see plenty more of Destiny’s Child in this column, and then we’ll see a whole lot more Beyoncé after that.

GRADE: 9/10”.

I am going to wrap up in a second. I don’t think that Bills, Bills, Bills is a song only popular and meaningful in the 1990s. In December 2021, Vibe reported how Bills, Bills, Bills was the year’s biggest comeback song. TikTok made that deceleration. I think that it is a timeless track that still sounds fresh to this day:

“Destiny’s Child’s classic hit “Bills Bills Bills” made a huge return in 2021 according to TikTok’s 2021 Music Report. The annual analysis of music trends on the video-sharing app ranked the 1999 song the no. 1 comeback track of the year. “Comeback” tracks are classified by TikTok as trending songs released between 5 and 25 years ago.

“Bills Bills Bills” was initially released as the lead single from Destiny’s Child’s second album The Writings On The Wall. It debuted at no. 84 before on the Billboard Hot 100 chart before peaking at no.1 five weeks later, the group’s first song to reach this position.

Women musicians dominated the U.S. Top Artist and Songs Lists on TikTok’s 2021 Music Report. In fact, according to TikTok, four out of the top five artists of 2021 by catalog creations were by Megan Thee Stallion, Doja Cat, Olivia Rodrigo, and Cardi B.  Five of the top ten hip-hop songs in the U.S. came from women, including Megan’s “Cognac Queen,” Cardi B’s “Up,”  Erica Banks‘ “Buss It,” and Kayla Nicole‘s “Bundles”.

As the single turns twenty-five on 31st May, I am looking ahead to the power and legacy of Destiny’s Child’s Bills, Bills, Bills. An anthem from, in my view, the greatest girl group ever, this is a song that you still hear played today. Thinking about Beyoncé and how she is a huge solo artist and is embarking on this Country phase of her career, it made me think back to her earliest music days and her time in Destiny’s Child. I have a very soft spot for the first single from The Writing’s on the Wall. It really is…

A stone-cold classic.

FEATURE: La La Love You: Pixies’ Doolittle at Thirty-Five

FEATURE:

 

 

La La Love You

Pixies’ Doolittle at Thirty-Five

_________

ON 17th April….

 IN THIS PHOTO: Pixies’ Black Francis, Joey Santiago, Kim Deal and David Lovering/PHOTO CREDIT: JA Barratt/Photoshot/Getty Images

Pixies’ Doolittle turns thirty-five. Produced by Gil Norton, it was the second studio album from the Black Francis-led band. Francis, alongside Kim Deal, Joey Santiago and David Lovering released one of the best albums of all time in April 1989 (here are some facts about Doolittle). I am going to come to some reviews of this amazing and hugely influential album. Before that, I will come to some features about the making of. I will start with a feature from The Independent. They assessed and revisited Doolittle in 2019. Thirty years after this classic was released, they explored how songs with dark and unusual themes sparked a new Rock generation:

“At first glance, you’d worry for a world influenced by Pixies’ Doolittle. Songs about suicide, psychopaths, ecological disasters and mutilated eyeballs, delivered in a series of unholy screams, hisses, wails and growls. Sleeve images seemingly found in a serial killer’s scrapbook: human teeth lining the rim of a rusty bell, a dissected crab, horse hair curled around a spoon laid on a naked female torso. And its iconic cover, a halo-clad monkey hemmed in by quasi-religious symbols and numbers, was like a sepia snapshot from the cell of a sacrifice.

Yet influenced it was. Surfer Rosa, the 1988 debut album from these deceptively harmless-looking Boston college kids, had enraptured the music press and launched the underground cult of Pixies, with its dark, abrasive production courtesy of Steve Albini and its savage yet sweetly melodic songs pitting themes of incest, deformity, sexual abuse and violence against fun tunes about interracial sex (“Gigantic”), boy-next-door superheroes (“Tony’s Theme”) and existential snorkelling holidays (“Where Is My Mind?”).

But it was the 1989 follow-up Doolittle that turned the band into generational figureheads, as “Debaser” tore up the indie club dancefloors, “Monkey Gone to Heaven” crept seditiously into the US rock charts and the signature quiet/loud dynamic of tracks such as “Gouge Away” and “Tame” embedded itself into the burgeoning grunge scene – Kurt Cobain would famously claim that “Smells Like Teen Spirit” was his attempt at writing a Pixies song. Released 30 years ago today and giving Pixies their first top 10 UK album, Doolittle was no mere indie rock breakthrough record; it was the seed from which decades of febrile rock brilliance would sprout.

The reception that met 4AD’s 1987 compilation of eight of those demos, Come On Pilgrim, and their debut album proper the following year, plus some hard global touring, had clearly instilled confidence, however. Pixies hit Doolittle with the wind in their soiled, sordid sails. “We were still young and fresh, but starting to kind of know what we were doing,” Francis told Esquire in 2014. “When we were done with the demos I think Joey and I felt that, ‘Oh yeah... something big happened.’ We felt confident.”

“We went to a practice space and [it’s like] we were arranging a flower arrangement,” Santiago told Yahoo of their intense rehearsal period, “that’s what we came up with and thought was perfect. And it made it to the albums … People should perceive that as how natural we sound. When we practised, that’s what we whittled it down to. We really worked on sounding simple.”

These were some pretty thorny flowers. When Throwing Muses and Echo & the Bunnymen producer Gil Norton, selected for the project after working on a more commercial single version of “Gigantic”, arrived in Boston and sat Francis down in his apartment to play through the songs on an acoustic guitar, it must have felt like scouting out an exorcism.

“I never thought he was crazy,” Norton tells me. “You’re with Charles and he’s very charming so you never feel intimidated by him. The thing I learnt in that period was that he doesn’t like to repeat himself so you have to try to find ways of exciting him into doing things. There’d have to be a reason to repeat a part… I was frustrating him because a lot of the songs were quite short – a minute and 20; very rarely did they get over two minutes.

“They were great ideas for songs but they didn’t feel like they’d been fleshed out, to me. I was trying to do that and Charles got a bit frustrated on day two; we went around to Tower Records and he pulled out Buddy Holly’s greatest hits and said, ‘Look Gil, look at this’. And he turned it over – if you look at Buddy Holly’s greatest hits, most of the songs, if he gets over two minutes with one it’s a bit of an epic.”

They weren’t the walkover that Albini painted them as, then? “Charles was pretty opinionated,” says Norton. “I always think of Kim as the cool factor, so she’s always got a good opinion about what she wants and what she doesn’t like. They weren’t a walkover, but the thing I like about good bands is they’ll listen and try things and see where it leads them. By the time they got to that point they’d done quite a lot of touring and a couple of albums and their confidence as a band was maybe a bit bolder.”

Two weeks of pre-production rehearsals later, Pixies entered Downtown Recorders studio in Boston in October 1988, according to Santiago, “very ready”. For two weeks, they hammered home a song a day. Yet there was still space for the odd in-studio surprise. Wanting to record “Hey” as live as possible, Francis was forced to record his vocal in a cupboard to avoid being drowned out by the drums: “It was a really small broom cupboard,” says Norton. “He had to play the guitar with the neck facing up to the ceiling while he was playing and singing it live. I was so happy when we got a take of that that I was pleased with.”

During mixing, Norton also managed to convince Francis to include one thing on the album that wouldn’t be “portable”; a string section on “Monkey Gone to Heaven”. “We ended up hiring a string section from the Symphony Orchestra up there,” Norton chuckles. “They rocked up in their full evening dress – the girl wore a big long black dress and the boys had dickie bows. I remember Charles going ‘wow, this is amazing’.”

Other Pixies had revelations, too. Santiago found a frenzied staccato attack on “Dead” that he decided to adopt as his go-to style. “That’s when I found something – I finally found it,” he told Yahoo. “[I thought] ‘That’s one of the formulas I’m gonna stick to’.” And given the chance to sing lead vocals on “La La Love You” as a “Ringo thing”, Lovering unleashed his inner Rat Pack crooner. “He’d never sung and he was really nervous going, ‘I don’t know how to do this Gil’,” Norton recalls. “I said, ‘Let’s just try it Dave, it’ll be a bit of fun’. Once he started he was like Frank Sinatra. He started hamming it up – you couldn’t stop him once he got going.”

Doolittle was no fence-sitter’s album, though. It was an album of magical and mysterious pop tunes, often tripping over themselves to reach the next hookline, but shrouded in a crepuscular, menacing, close and corroded atmosphere. The mythologies inherent in the songs lent the album a sense of dark ancient mysticism, the violence and ecological portents gave it a very present air of danger and Francis’s unhinged deliveries spoke of a melodic master turned malevolent. It was as dark as Pixies would get and set their definitive tone and aesthetic – the best Beach Boys album ever made, losing its mind after months trapped in a psychopath’s well.

“I didn’t go in there deliberately to do that,” says Norton. “I always think of those sort of albums as a rollercoaster ride, once you got on it you don’t want to get off because it twists and turns in all these different directions. That’s why there are 15 songs or whatever on there – they’re not very long so it’s really nice that they’re like blasts of events, I suppose.”

Norton plays down the rising tensions in the Doolittle studio. Legend has it that Deal was frustrated at being sidelined as a songwriter and Francis wouldn’t allow her a front-seat role; her only writing credit on the album is as co-writer of the ruined country ballad “Silver”. Things would later come to a head on the subsequent F**k or Fight tour – Deal and Francis chose to fight, with Francis even throwing a guitar at Deal onstage in Stuttgart. The result was Deal’s seminal spin-off supergroup The Breeders, and a widening schism within Pixies that would ultimately prove fatal for their first era.

But not before they’d wrapped up their menacing masterpiece. “At the very, very end, on the last night of recording I was flying out, the band had left to go home and I was in the studio by myself for one night,” Norton recalls. “I had the cassette and I put it on and I remember listening to it thinking ‘this is gonna be a bit of a classic album’. I didn’t realise the longevity of it, but I thought ‘we’ve created something a bit special here’.” Santiago felt the same way: “We knew we had something special going on,” he told Alt Press.

Subsequent generations of fans and musicians concurred. Far beyond Doolittle’s formative influence on grunge and Nirvana’s breakout success, the record spawned imitators across the rock spectrum. You can hear it snarling in the background of the early works of Radiohead, mid-period Blur, Pavement, Weezer and PJ Harvey, and time has embedded it at the root of modern alt-rock, from Arcade Fire to Jack White, Wolf Alice and Idles. And according to Santiago, the new waves of wannabe debasers keep on coming.

“When we played the Doolittle tour [in 2009],” he told Alt Press, “and not only the Doolittle tour, but I would say since 2004, since we reformed – when you look out into an audience, the majority of it I would say is kids that weren’t even born when our records [were out], and they know every song, they sing every word… 10 years later – there are still the kids coming who are that age relatively, 14, 15 years old, who have heard about us and know all the songs. It’s fantastic. We’re a very fortunate band”.

In 2014, Doolittle 25 was released. Featuring demos, B-sides and live performances, it gave even more context and colour to an amazing album. I am not sure whether anything is planned for the thirty-fifth anniversary next month. In 2003, Rolling Stone reviewed Pixies’ Doolittle:

“As Kurt Cobain readily told anyone who cared to hear, Nirvana's Nevermind wouldn't have happened without the Pixies' Doolittle. When it came out in 1989, the Pixies' abrasive guitars and twisted, nightmarish vision were eclipsed by the bad-boy cool of Guns n' Roses and the frothy pop of Fine Young Cannibals. For angry, punk self-reflection, you had to comb the indie underground.

The Pixies changed all that, and with Doolittle laid the groundwork for Nineties rock. The album's breathtaking mix of noisy, almost surflike guitars, sweet pop melodies and primal-scream-therapy vocals inspired a generation of would-be rock stars: Nirvana adopted the Pixies use of quiet, mumbled verses and loud, crashing choruses, Courtney Love aped their banshee wails, and Beck drew inspiration from their catalog of surrealistic lyrics.

Doolittle chugs into action on a New Wave bass line and frontman Black Francis' adrenalized barking about a weird scene from a Luis Bu–uel movie. "Debaser," with its cool, crisp guitar line and lyrics about "slicing up eyeballs," sets the tone of the album. From there, the band careens back and forth from menacing to melodic, as Francis and bassist Kim Deal screech, snort and coo their way through tunes such as "Wave of Mutilation," "I Bleed," "Dead" and "Gouge Away.

" Despite the bizarrely violent song titles, the Pixies were schoolyard nerds at heart -- the only person Francis was scaring with his lyrics was himself. They turned out to be prescient: Within five years, awkward pop stars from Pavement to Weezer represented the new cool, and "Monkey Gone to Heaven" and "Here Comes Your Man" were classics”.

I will try and write about the album again before its thirty-fifth anniversary on 17th April. Influencing a whole wave of artists who followed – including Nirvana and PJ Harvey -, there is no denying the importance and legacy of Doolittle. Arriving in 1989, it was one of the most important albums of the 1980s. When Doolittle 25 was released in 2014, The Line of Best Fit were among those who reviewed it:

“The spring of 1989 saw the release of two landmark albums in the space of a month. Whilst they had little in common stylistically, each were crucial in refining and redefining the sound of guitar music to this day. These fraternal twins were The Stone Roses eponymously titled LP and Pixies second album Doolittle. Despite the fact their creators would go on to be usurped in commercial stakes by Oasis and Nirvana, both records were their creative peaks and still sound as timeless a quarter of a century later.

Doolittle, the artier of the pair, has been lovingly repackaged for its 25th anniversary and features a whopping 50 songs - 22 of which are previously unreleased - including demos of every song on the album, B-Sides and Peel sessions. Whilst many extended editions of classic records reek of cash in, Doolittle 25 is that rare thing amongst box sets, there’s very little in the way of chaff. It’s a real treat that’s not just for completists, but for anyone who loves guitar music. It’s both the story and a musical photograph of a band making their masterpiece.

When Doolittle was released there was an inevitability that it would be their breakthrough. They had the backing of Electra Records and were given more money to record it than its jaw dropping predecessor Surfer Rosa, their debut album proper after the startling Come on Pilgrim mini LP. The Doolittle demos come from the same place as the Steve Albini produced Surfer Rosa, rough and ready angular guitar rock, they could have easily released them as they were and the record would still have been remarkable. But the installation of Gil Norton as producer added more polish to the finished record and what it lacks in Albini’s bloody mindedness, which included the band chatting between songs, the shift from the demos to the finished record showed them sounding much tighter, and despite having more overdubs the songs had more room to breathe. Norton channelled both the ferocity of the songs and Francis's howl into something that certainly wasn’t mainstream but definitely more palatable. Whilst Black Francis’ scream would ultimately verge into self-parody - listen to "Rock Music" from Bossanova - throughout all the versions of the songs here it serves as a vehicle for a visceral energy, be that pent up aggression or frustration.

Doolittle opens with the notorious “Debaser”. Following a similar structure to Surfer Rosa’s opener “Bone Machine”, alongside the piercing vocals sits Joey Santiago’s astonishing guitar playing, Kim Deal’s bassline that’s more a guitar riff than a rhythm instrument and David Lovering’s metronomic drums. And lyrically it matches the ‘You’re so pretty when you’re unfaithful to me” line of “Bone Machine” with the equally disturbing “I want to grow, grow up to be, be a debaser.” And here’s where the demos earn their money. The first demo version features hardly any lyrics at all; instead it’s a slew of phonetic sounds from Francis. The now infamous “I am un chien andalusia” a reference to Luis Buñuel’s film Un Chien Andalou which inspired the “Slicing up eyeballs” line was originally “I want you to shed Apollonia!” (Apparently a reference to Prince’s Purple Rain film), But it’s not all highbrow, Francis would always use the most direct form of language if the story demanded it and never as succinctly as on the line “Girl, you’re so groovy, I want you to know.” Yet even then he stills sounds like a serial killer.

An interesting back story to the record is the friction between Deal and Francis, resulting in her forming The Breeders to get her songs heard. Whilst you can hear her laughing on the demos, compared to Surfer Rosa, Deal doesn’t get another “Gigantic” on Doolittle (the closest to it is “Into The White” on the demos and B-Sides) and her lead contribution to the finished album is the swamp blues of “Silver”, and the demo is beautifully sparse, the lack of reverb allowing the insane harmonies to be heard properly.

For all that Doolittle dealt with macabre themes of surrealism, death and the Bible, there was a tender heart beating amidst all the carnage. The 1986 demo of “Here Comes Your Man” is just, well there’s no other word for it, lovely. It’s a little slower than the album version but as equally delicate as The Velvet Undergrounds version of “Sweet Jane” on 1969 Live.

It’s also an album steeped in sex and never more so than on the Peel session version of “Tame” where Francis plays Patrick Bateman from American Psycho, when he abandons the lyrics to exhale a repeated ‘Uh-huh, Uh-huh, Uh-huh…’, to be joined by Deal mirroring it with a much sweeter but no less coital coo, you feel that you really shouldn’t be listening to such intimacy, it’s the sound of two people having sex. Deal’s harmony isn’t on the original demo, and its absence is marked, the lack of her counterpoint makes it sound more like masturbation than consummation.

Comparing the finished versions alongside the nascent ones and hearing how they develop organically is fascinating, there are only subtle changes to the arrangements. “Monkey Gone To Heaven”, sounds identical right down to the “Rock me Joe” line, “Hey” is note for note, but with a gorgeously tender vocal on the demo. Amidst all the goodies a special mention has to go to “Wave Of Mutilation (UK surf)”, which sounds like a Christmas song, maybe John Lewis should consider it for the soundtrack to their next yuletide advert. It sounds sweet as you like, but without the sturm und drang of the original. And the demo version flies by at a blitzkrieg of speed, clocking in under 90 seconds.

It would be very easy to view this as a cynical cash in, especially with the release timed to coincide with the Christmas period, but Doolittle 25 is a beautiful reminder of what a gravity defying record they made. Yes, they’d see other bands reap more commercial success, but to paraphrase “Hey” This… is… the… sound… of a band so spectacularly ahead of the competition they were out of sight. Like their fraternal twin The Stone Roses, they’d have a bitter split, reform to play deliriously blissful concerts, but they never sounded as good as they did here.

If Doolittle was released today it would still without doubt be crowned a masterpiece. Even though it’s now twenty five years young it sounds as contemporary, yet out of time as ever. Doolittle 25 is the unedited musical story of how a bunch of weirdo’s from Boston rewrote the rulebook. There are certain records that have been labelled as classic’s which need to be part of your record collection, but with Doolittle the proposition is somewhat different, this is a record you need to keep listening to and finding new nuances. The sheer scope of material here will keep you entertained, thrilled and occasionally a little bit freaked out for years to come. To quote “Dead”, “Hey, what do you know, you’re lovely".

On 17th April, we mark thirty-five years of Pixies’ Doolittle. No doubt among the most influential albums ever released, I know that it will get a lot of new love and inspection ahead of its anniversary. I wanted to nod to it before then. If you have not heard Doolittle in a while then make sure that you do. It will blow you away. We got a classic second album in 1989 from…

THE mighty Pixies.

FEATURE: Only the Fools Blew It: Inside Kate Bush’s Breathing

FEATURE:

 

 

Only the Fools Blew It

Inside Kate Bush’s Breathing

_________

THE first single….

from Kate Bush’s third studio album, Never for Ever, Breathing was an incredibly important track. Maybe keen for people to see her more as an artist who is politically engaged and ‘serious’, the song concerns a nuclear war/fallout from the perspective of a fetus. It is a brilliantly dark and evocative. There was still a lot of parody and ridicule around Kate Bush in 1979. Feeling her debut, The Kick Inside, and follow-up, Lionheart, were not serious or odd-sounding, she was still being seen as this high-pitched and almost novelty artist. I think it was an interview with Danny Baker not long before the release of Never for Ever where he sort of questioned her seriousness. Whether she was engaged with politics. Subjected to sexism and patronising views from journalists, Breathing is this reaction. Kate Bush was always invested in people and politics. On her first two albums, it was only natural she would want to focus on other themes. At a time when Punk was raging and there was this wave of bands bringing political subjects to the fore, it wasn’t perhaps what Kate Bush was prioritising. Not the sort of sound and music she was interested in. She did know it was important to bring heavier subjects into her music. Never for Ever also featured Army Dreamers. The third and final single, that is about a young man needlessly being wasted on a battlefield. A victim of war. Breathing seemed to react to the threat and fear that was in the air in the late-1970s. The Cold Wat and people feeling that the world could be blown away through the push of a button.

Rather than Breathing being this raging and aggressive song, it is almost a symphony. Kate Bush creating this epic and sweeping song that was matched with a memorable video (directed by Keef/Keith MacMillan). I think the last time I wrote about Breathing was this time last year. I want to revisit it without repeating myself. Every single deserves to be written about on its anniversary. Breathing is among Bush’s most powerful and brilliant records. Released on 14th April, 1980, we look ahead to its forty-fourth anniversary. With its amazing and underrated B-side, The Empty Bullring, accompanying one of Kate Bush’s most important songs, this wonderful record reached sixteen on the U.K. singles chart. Quite an impressive position for a song that must have delighted and divided in equal measures. Critics and the press never quite sure what to make of Kate Bush or approach her music. A burden and prejudice she faced for years! Thanks to the Kate Bush Encyclopedia for collating interviews where Bush spoke about Breathing. I have sourced a few:

“It’s about a baby still in the mother’s womb at the time of a nuclear fallout, but it’s more of a spiritual being. It has all its senses: sight, smell, touch, taste and hearing, and it knows what is going on outside the mother’s womb, and yet it wants desperately to carry on living, as we all do of course. Nuclear fallout is something we’re all aware of, and worried about happening in our lives, and it’s something we should all take time to think about. We’re all innocent, none of us deserve to be blown up.

DEANNE PEARSON, ‘THE ME INSIDE’. SMASH HITS (UK), MAY 1980

When I wrote the song, it was from such a personal viewpoint. It was just through having heard a thing for years without it ever having got through to me. ‘Til the moment it hit me, I hadn’t really been moved. Then I suddenly realised the whole devastation and disgusting arrogance of it all. Trying to destroy something that we’ve not created – the earth. The only thing we are is a breathing mechanism: everything is breathing. Without it we’re just nothing. All we’ve got is our lives, and I was worried that when people heard it they were going to think, ‘She’s exploiting commercially this terribly real thing.’ I was very worried that people weren’t going to take me from my emotional standpoint rather than the commercial one. But they did, which is great. I was worried that people wouldn’t want to worry about it because it’s so real. I was also worried that it was too negative, but I do feel that there is hope in the whole thing, just for the fact that it’s a message from the future. It’s not from now, it’s from a spirit that may exist in the future, a non-existent spiritual embryo who sees all and who’s been round time and time again so they know what the world’s all about. This time they don’t want to come out, because they know they’re not going to live. It’s almost like the mother’s stomach is a big window that’s like a cinema screen, and they’re seeing all this terrible chaos.

KRIS NEEDS, ‘FIRE IN THE BUSH’. ZIGZAG (UK), 1980

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush and extras (including Paddy Bush) between takes filming the video for Breathing/PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush

From my own viewpoint that’s the best thing I’ve ever written. It’s the best thing I’ve ever produced. I call that my little symphony, because I think every writer, whether they admit it or not, loves the idea of writing their own symphony. The song says something real for me, whereas many of the others haven’t quite got to the level that I would like them to reach, though they’re trying to. Often it’s because the song won’t allow it, and that song allowed everything that I wanted to be done to it. That track was easy to build up. Although it had to be huge, it was just speaking – saying what had to be put on it. In many ways, I think the most exciting thing was making the backing track. The session men had their lines, they understood what the song was about, but at first there was no emotion, and that track was demanding so much emotion. It wasn’t until they actually played with feeling that the whole thing took off. When we went and listened, I wanted to cry, because of what they had put into it. It was so tender. It meant a lot to me that they had put in as much as they could, because it must get hard for session guys. They get paid by the hour, and so many people don’t want to hear the emotion. They want clear, perfect tuning, a ‘good sound’; but often the out-of-tuneness, the uncleanliness, doesn’t matter as much as the emotional content that’s in there. I think that’s much more important than the technicalities.

KRIS NEEDS, ‘FIRE IN THE BUSH’. ZIGZAG (UK), 1980”.

Before rounding things off, I am going to come to a couple of features around a pivotal and crucial Kate Bush song. After her first two albums, where there was a distinct sound, Breathing announced more depth and variety. An artist that could not be easily defined. After the triumph of 1979’s The Tour of Life, Bush co-produced Never for Ever with Jon Kelly. She was definitely moving towards solo-producing – something that would be realised on 1982’s The Dreaming. Treble wrote about Breathing in 2022. Kate Bush confronting nuclear war:

“Cold War in the 1960s, with songs like Barry McGuire’s “Eve of Destruction” offering potential warnings of the inevitable destruction that would occur between two or more countries engaged in a nuclear arms race. But in the ’80s, when tensions between the U.S. and Soviet Union came ever closer to a boiling point, Cold War anxiety dominated popular music in a way that sometimes revealed itself in subtle ways, like on Nena’s “99 Luftballoons” or Alphaville’s “Forever Young,” and in more overt ways as well, as on Time Zone’s “World Destruction.” For a couple years the threat of total annihilation even seemed to preoccupy Prince, who released both “Ronnie Talk to Russia” and the end-of-the-world party anthem “1999.” If you turned on the radio in the ’80s, there’s a good chance you’d be hearing songs about a coming apocalyptic scenario, whether you realized it or not.

It’s a terrifying thought. Even more so when taken into account that, at least according to the lore, a made-for-TV-movie made the matter one of utmost urgency for then president Ronald Reagan. But then again who can be blamed when the idea of having your nation destroyed somehow becomes real, however absurd the method of communication. Personally, I find Kate Bush’s take on the matter much more devastating.

Five years before releasing her blockbuster Hounds of Love, featuring her iconic single “Running Up That Hill”—which ended up back on the singles charts this year thanks to Stranger Things—Kate Bush released her own song addressing our potential impending destruction, “Breathing.” The final track on Never For Ever, an album that also contained the much more playful “Babooshka,” “Breathing” looks at nuclear destruction from the perspective of an unborn fetus, one that, if it survives, will inherit a world that’s essentially gone, and at best nearly uninhabitable.

True to much of the pop songs with fear of World War III on their mind at the time, “Breathing” isn’t scary on an aesthetic level—and Kate Bush can do scary. Check “Waking the Witch” or any number of moments on 1982’s The Dreaming for proof of that. It’s not tense and climactic like Iron Maiden’s “Two Minutes to Midnight,” either, though Bush’s sense of scale and theatrics at times could stand toe-to-toe with the best of the decade’s metal bands. “Breathing” is, instead, a characteristically dramatic ballad for Bush, one of the most powerful songs she’d written just two years into her career, made all the more unnerving by a closer read of the details within the song. Its first line tells us the stakes, the fate of the child wholly dependent on the life of the mother. “Outside gets inside,” she sings, at once extolling the safety of the fortress inside the womb, while offering reminders of the vulnerability therein, like breathing in the nicotine from her cigarettes.

The sense of doom and desperation grows deeper into the song, Bush lamenting, “We’ve lost our chance, we’re the first and the last” in its third verse, and in its final chorus—just before the image of a not-subtle-at-all mushroom cloud in its Bush-in-a-bubble music video—she desperately pleads, “Oh God, please leave us something to breathe.” Bush scales up from the most intimate and vulnerable to a more universal appeal for mercy, from the fetus that’s at the mercy of the life of its mother—which in this scenario is arguably every bit as helpless—to the civilization at large that stands to be wiped out with the press of a button.

It’s a masterful kick in the gut. Bush described the song as her “little symphony,” and though she’d released songs prior that carried a similar sense of ambition and grandeur, all of that escalated on “Breathing.” The thread of fear and anguish, as well as a subtle sense of anger at the power-hungry world leaders in dark rooms that would seal millions of innocent people’s fates without remorse, persists at every point, including its spoken-word bridge, describing the differences between a small nuclear bomb and a large one—the irony and even black humor of its placement serving only to emphasize that you’d have to be a psychopath to greenlight that kind of devastation. But ultimately it all comes back to that one very basic idea of defenselessness, whether it’s the child, the mother, or simply Kate Bush herself, desperately grasping for air in the fallout, and their pleas falling on deaf ears.

“Breathing,” heavy as the subject matter might have been, was the lead single from Never For Ever, and in doing press for the album, Kate Bush described a moment of revelation about the gravity of living during a time of continued threat of nuclear war. “Til the moment it hit me, I hadn’t really been moved,” she said in a 1980 interview. “Then I suddenly realised the whole devastation and disgusting arrogance of it all. Trying to destroy something that we’ve not created – the earth. The only thing we are is a breathing mechanism: everything is breathing. Without it we’re just nothing”.

It is worth moving to Dreams of Orgonon and their feature about Breathing. A deep and fascinating look inside a song that holds relevance today, I learnt a few things about the track and the inspiration behind it. The final track from Never for Ever, I sort of think about The Beatles’ A Day in the Life ending Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Bush ending an album with a song that simply could not be followed (similar to The Beatles in 1967):

“Breathing” is the most unified and conceptually coherent work of Kate Bush’s career. Each aspect of its composition and production strives in a single accord. Its mastering of the techniques it uses can be found as much in its broad strokes as its fine details. Bush’s songwriting makes a huge leap in quality, achieving a new standard. It is one of the greatest British singles of the early 1980s, and its reasonable chart standing (#16 in the UK) is as baffling as it is delightful. Without “Breathing,” there is no The Dreaming or Hounds of Love or Aerial. There are two major discernable eras in Bush’s career: before “Breathing,” and its aftermath.

As a conventional and sane member of society, Bush achieves creative apotheosis through a fetus’s perspective of nuclear fallout. Again, that’s not hyperbole — that is actually what the song is about, if not straightforwardly. “Breathing” contains astounding clarity, with its premise explicitly stated through lyrics such as “outside/gets inside/through her skin,” “last night in the sky/such a bright light,” and “breathing my mother in.” It’s rather clear what’s going on: a fetus (probably human, but easily headcanoned out of specieshood) knows that a nuclear bomb has exploded and is experiencing the slow irradiation of its mother’s body with horror. Its fears are expressed in primal terms. It hasn’t gone to school. Nobody has told it what happened to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. All it perceives is a bright light that destroys everything that even its mother can’t protect it from. Bodies are destroyed — the emotional reality takes over, and no rational mind will help.

On a technical level, “Breathing” is Bush’s magnum opus. Her mastery of her own voice is as impressive as the achievements of The Dreaming and Hounds of Love. Throughout the first verse, she sounds as if she’s holding her breath (“out-SIIIIIDE” sounds like shallow inhalation), crooning in a way that’s both innocent and haunting. The two refrains largely follow the first verse’s lead, while the second one sees Bush push her range upwards, making “we’ve lost our chance” a guttural invocation. By the song’s coda, she’s outright screaming at the top of her lungs for breath.

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1980/PHOTO CREDIT: Patrick Lichfield

Melodically and rhythmically, “Breathing” is on similarly breathy wavelengths. It’s in Eb minor, excepting a few detours into Eb major: the verse commences with the i chord (Eb minor), joins an augmented fifth to it (B) to create a VI chord, and then inverts the i chord with its parallel major (a favorite technique of hers — see also “The Infant Kiss”). The verse ultimately comes out largely to i-VI-I-iv-I (with some tricky slash-chord articulates of E flat major). Rhythm is consistent throughout the verse, with shifting time signatures of 2/4, 4/4, and 3/4 changing by the measure, at a pace consistent with breathing. The refrain is almost entirely in common time, excepting its final measure (2/4). The refrain’s breathing is done by its chord progression (i-III-VI), rising and falling, like an agonized chest not quite inhaling enough oxygen to keep living. Sonically, there are echoes of earlier rock songs: the bridge sounds like Bowie’s similarly cosmic “Space Oddity” in places, and a mechanical hum in the second verse evokes memories of Pink Floyd’s luddite threnody “Welcome to the Machine.”

If your reaction to this isn’t “hey, Kate, who’s your dealer?”, you are a liar and you should be ashamed of yourself. But as we aren’t in East Wickham’s social circle of 1980 and thus lack access to whatever strain Bush smoked at the time, we can interrogate more pertinent issues of why the fuck Bush is using this perspective to explore nuclear war. Since the emotional state of fetuses is pertinent to some deluded members of society, we should probably address that particular discourse. If “Breathing” were released right about now, the pro-life crowd wouldn’t latch onto it (it’s much too weird for a group of people who are busy mutilating their eardrums with MercyMe), but one could see its subject matter being twisted for reactionary ends. The song does cope with fetal autonomy, or lack thereof, but it’s incredibly abstract and fails to resemble abortion in any way (the metaphor would be weird, too: “hey Del, you know what abortion reminds me of? The fucking H-bomb!”). Furthermore, abortion, while still a major topic of conversation in the UK, where abortion was only legalized in Northern Ireland in 2019, is a fundamentally different conversation than it is in the United States.

Bush was clandestine about her thoughts on abortion, although one can deduce through an interview where she opines “that life is something that should be respected and honored even in a few hours of its conception” that her private opinions on the matter are on the reactionary side. But that’s not the subject of the song. The issue goes deeper than that — to the dredges of consciousness, the origins of human life, and the human mind’s need for survival.

Bush claimed that the political content of “Army Dreamers” and “Breathing” only served to “move [her] emotionally.” Characteristically, Bush is both wrong and insightful here. The idea that songs are less political because you’re emotionally invested in the political issues they discuss is utter nonsense. But… of course political issues are emotional. Bush even acknowledges this in the next part of the quote, saying “it went through the emotional center… when I thought ‘ah, ow!’ And that made me write.”

Perhaps nothing is more political than personal emotions. Emotions are always present in a person’s values, decisions, choices, and aesthetics. Human beings are ventilation devices for emotions. Perhaps without realizing it, the entity that moved Bush is the radical politics of emotion in the service of bodily liberation. Emotions are political. Everything is political, as no man is an island. And crucially, breathing, and who gets to do it, is political.

Recorded in March 1980 at Abbey Road. Released as a single on 14 April 1980, then as the closing track of Never for Ever on 7 September that year. A censored version of the music video was aired on Top of the Pops on April 14. Performed live by Bush (solo) at a Comic Relief concert in 1986. Personnel: Kate Bush — vocals, piano, production. Stuart Elliott — drums. Jon Kelly — production, engineering. Max Middleton — Fender Rhodes. Alan Murphy, Brian Bath — electric guitar. Larry Fast — Prophet. Morris Pert — percussion. Roy Harper — backing vocals. Image: Hiroshima immediately after the dropping of “Little Boy” (photographer unnamed)”.

Released on 14th April, 1980, it is almost forty-four years since Breathing came out. This is a song that was written after The Tour of Life. A track that was not taken on tour or performed live much. It is a shame, as one can only imagine her mounting this song on a large stage. The video is incredible though. One that stays in the mind! A song that heralded a new sound and direction for Kate Bush, it also showed that she could be deeper than many thought. React to the horrors and important issues from around the world. It is a shame that a fear that should be a thing of the past still burns today. That feeling that world leaders and dictators can damage the world and cause massive destruction. In 1979/1980, when the world was in the grip of nuclear threats, Kate Bush composed a majestic and haunting song. Breathing surely ranks alongside…

HER greatest work.

FEATURE: Know What I Mean? Blur’s Parklife at Thirty

FEATURE:

 

 

Know What I Mean?

Blur’s Parklife at Thirty

_________

EVEN though….

 IN THIS PHOTO: Blur in Tokyo, 1994 (Alex James, Graham Coxon, Damon Albarn, Dave Rowntree)/PHOTO CREDIT: Koh Hasebe/Shinko Music/Getty Images

its thirtieth anniversary does not happen until 25th April, I did want to write a few features about Blur’s Parklife. One of the best and most important albums of the 1990s, the band’s third studio album reached number one in the U.K. It is one of those albums that was both a product of the time but sounds so fresh now. In the sense that one can identify Parklife as being part of the 1990s and the sound favoured then. You can listen to it through today and it doesn’t sound dated. Still so amazing and engrossing. I will come to reviews for the mighty Parklife. I want to start off with a feature form NME. In 2019, marking twenty-five years since the album’s release, they wrote about how Blur were sort of in a last chance saloon. They had to create something magnificent after the slightly underwhelming Modern Life Is Rubbish. Parklife not only won huge reviews and big sales. It was a major cultural shift in British music. I am not including the entire feature – I hope it is cohesive and not too mangled -, though I was keen to explore a deep dive into an all-time classic album:

“Accounting tomfoolery had also left them massively in debt, meaning they had to tour and record incessantly to dig themselves out of a £60,000 financial hole. But it was slow going. Released in May 1993, ‘Modern Life Is Rubbish’ received a smattering of decent reviews, but they didn’t result in many record sales.

“We had no end of belief in ourselves,” says guitarist Graham Coxon today, “but the rest of the world had their own brains. I guess we were sort of warming up people at that point.”

Graham Coxon confirms this: “[Food Records joint boss] Andy Ross would buy me couple of pints and bag of chips every night. I was totally skint.”

For Ross, the mediocre chart performance of ‘Modern Life…’ and the hesitant endorsement of the music media (“Not a single front cover – hang your heads in shame!”) meant insecurity surrounding both band and label continued to bite.

“We’d only just come out of a really, really bad time for Blur and my record label was on a sled,” he admits. Thankfully, EMI, [who owned a share in Food records and were about to buy the label outright], gave the green light for a third album.”

But as Stephen Street recalls, another commercial under-performance was not an option.

“There was a sense of ‘this has got to work’,” he says. “But at the same time, we were confident. There seemed to be a feeling that the time was right.”

That sense continued to seep through the back half of 1993, helped by the growing feeling that Blur had fellow travellers on their quest to re-establish a potent strain of artful indie-rock with a smart (in both meanings) British accent, steel toecaps and a subtle but distinct sense of humour.

“At first it had felt like we had no compadres, no gang,” says Coxon, “until we saw Pulp and thought, these guys get it too – a bit eccentric, more highbrow pop with a bit of wit.”

Mike Smith, the A&R legend who had snapped the band up for their original publishing deal and has been a close friend ever since, could also see the tide turning for them.

“They did a show headlining the tent at Reading in August ‘93, and you suddenly realised people were really starting to get it. It was full of kids, in suits and boots – it was a take on mod identity which a lot of people got into, and it’s an easy look.”

The music press were also starting to get excited, Andy Ross recalls. “The fans really came through for the band that day, and it turned the corner significantly. A lot of journalists realised, ‘Oops, we really fucked up there’. The press in general seemed to come to a collective conclusion that they’d missed the boat, and went into damage limitation mode, getting more and more receptive to anything the band subsequently did.”

The new material ranged from cartoonishly speeding romps like ‘Bank Holiday’ to suburban vignettes like ‘Tracy Jacks’, which took the Kinksian template heard on ‘Modern Life…’ and then decorated it with strings, swirling sound effects and giddy falsetto, as well as the trademark Blur harmonies that Graham and Damon had been perfecting since they met at school. If ‘Modern Life…’ was a guitar record, this added an evocative, quirky jumble sale orchestra to their musical palette.

Street’s love of sound effects helped add further colour to this embryonic world, helping evoke a Britain of trippy TV theme tunes, enticing, ersatz fairground jingles, traffic news, juvenile delinquents, underage drinking and duck pond eccentrics. “A lot of it is nostalgic, referencing our youth,” says Coxon. “It felt comfortable to us, bringing all these elements together like creating Sunday lunch with sound.”

A key example is of course the title track, lyrically inspired by Damon’s walks through a park near his flat in Kensington Church Street. Yet for a while, its prominence on the record was in some doubt.

“It was probably the track that was the biggest pain in the butt to record,” says Street. “When we first recorded it, the drums and everything were in time and it just sounded a little bit flat, and at this point Damon was still doing the narration for the vocal. After a while we just couldn’t bring ourselves to work on it. It might not even have made the cut for the record.”

It was then that another track that they couldn’t quite nail produced the key for this one’s resurrection.

“Phil Daniels had been approached to narrate a poem called ‘The Debt Collector’ to the instrumental that’s on the album, a piece about a really nasty bailiff character, and Phil Daniels was gonna recite it. But Damon still hadn’t come up with the lyric, so we had this band meeting, and we said, well Phil’s been approached anyway, why don’t we get him to have a go at the ‘Parklife’ song instead? He came in and that turned into something we got a lot more excited about, and that’s when we put more sound effects on it, dogs barking, glass smashing, had a lot of fun doing it, and Dave went back in to do a much looser drum take on it. Then it went from the back of the queue for inclusion on the album to the front.”

Street feels that part of the problem with that song’s original gestation was that label had heard a demo and had earmarked ‘Parklife’ as a potential single, so they felt pressure to get it just right. Food Records’ policy of pre-approving songs for recording based on initial demos had long been a source of frustration for the band (indeed the nice cop, nasty cop partnership of Andy Ross and Dave Balfe would break up during the recording of the album when the latter sold his shares to retire to a soon-to-be-infamous house in the country) even if their tough love approach had got results when provoking Damon Albarn to write ‘For Tomorrow’.

Given that policy, then, band and producer were apprehensive when they took the liberty of creating a new song in the studio without the label’s prior permission.

“Damon played me this demo he’d done at home with a little drum machine, and the chorus stood out straight away to me,” says Street. “I said, ‘This is great, let’s make it what it obviously is, a disco record, record it at 120bpm, and just have fun with it.’ We programmed the bass, synth and drums and then got the band in on top of it – Alex does what he does with the bassline, and Graham does what he does with the guitar, and it still sounded like Blur, so it was really exciting.”

The song was ‘Girls & Boys’… and Andy Ross had yet to hear it.

“The next day he was asking me how the sessions were going,” says Street, “and I said, we’ve done this new track, ‘Girls & Boys’…”.

“There was this slight pause at the other end and then he was like, ‘Stephen, you’ve not been authorised to record that track…’ And I was like, ‘You’re gonna love it,’ and thankfully I was right.”

It was arguably the first song that proved that this was a band who could turn their hand to any genre and still put their own sonic stamp on it.

“It was a bit like when I was working with the Smiths,” says Street. “Both bands had a confidence where you feel like you can do anything you wanna do, in any style, and it will still hang together and it’ll still sound like a proper album.”

‘Girls & Boys’ also worked via juxtaposition of two key creative forces within the band.

IN THIS PHOTO: Damon Albarn in 1994/PHOTO CREDIT: Koh Hasebe/Shinko Music/Getty Images 

“I was being a little arty aggro player, a little bulldozer,” says Coxon, “and Alex was being all bottom-wiggling cheeky. He’s actually a hugely underrated bass player, but when I hear Uncle Monty [from Withnail & I] say ‘he’s so MAUVE’, I think of Alex in those years. But that tension, clash of personalities, and that mix of rhythms kind of helped.”

“It reminds me of Public Image,” says Andy Ross. “They came from a place of, let’s make a racket and see if convert it into a pop song. This was a pop song subverted by Graham’s noise.”

With ‘Girls & Boys’, the band were convinced they had a hit on their hands, and they weren’t the only ones. Mike Smith remembers driving around London with Damon as they played the track over and over, and later dancing around Alex James’s new flat in Covent Garden, as the bassist blasted the newly received 12-inch version of the single out of the open windows, determined the world should hear it. They soon would. And not only would it give the album a head start with a top five hit, but it would repeat a trick managed by ‘For Tomorrow’.

Just as Blur wouldn’t have pricked up disinterested ears ahead of ‘Modern Life…’ if they had chosen a different lead single, the arrival of ‘Girls and Boys’ grabbed people’s attention in a way that, say, ‘Parklife’ might not have done, given that its mockney narration could have been seen as a more predictable logical step on from their almost self-parodic final single from Modern Life…, ‘Sunday Sunday’.

But when we look back on ‘Parklife’ as the first big step in Britpop’s journey to dominating the charts of the mid-’90s, it’s slightly frustrating to note that a lot of the more inventive, anarchic and eccentric aspects of the music made back then didn’t ultimately have as big a cultural impact as the broader melodic strokes.

Graham Coxon tells of being regularly approached by guitarists citing his gnarly, abrasive fretknots as an inspiration, and he also feels ‘Parklife’ ushered in a different kind of songwriting.

“Lyrically you could see that the kitchen sink dramas with a twist had a clear influence on all of what would become Britpop. The narrative wasn’t about vaguely digging the words if it sounded good, it was proper stories – coming from ‘Arnold Layne’, ‘Eleanor Rigby’, ‘She’s Leaving Home’.”

He also feels that unlike certain notable contemporaries, they took inspiration from the sheer eclecticism of their cultural forefathers’ approach.

“What Oasis didn’t get from The Beatles was that you could learn everything – R’n’B, blues, music hall, folk, classical music, even a bit of grunge – you could get a massive education from The Beatles, not just big blocks of chords and singalongs.”

Nonetheless, the seductive pull of chart success would draw both Blur and Oasis closer to such crowd-pleasing tactics in the year that followed ‘Parklife; (“We both ended up producing sub-par work,” Coxon concedes), even if they subsequently reverted to unconventional type.

But for Mike Smith, whose job has been to track trends in British music ever since, there’s one Britpop trope that we see more than any other now – one unwittingly pioneered by Parklife tracks such as ‘To The End’ and ‘This Is A Low’.

“It’s interesting that Britpop’s enduring legacy is not the art school take of Elastica, Blur or Pulp, it’s the big rock ballad of [Oasis’s] ‘Live Forever’, ‘Wonderwall’, [The Verve’s] ‘Drugs Don’t Work’. You see a line through to Coldplay, through to arguably James Bay and George Ezra. I sadly see precious few contemporary artists doing much [that is] as left-field as Blur did.”

Well, in theory there’s no reason why they can’t. Maybe, like Blur, they just need to be angry, skint and hungry enough”.

I will move to a review from NME. Reviewing the album back in 1994, they tried to take in and evaluate an album that was a huge revelation. Few expected something as huge and brilliant as Parklife. Blur were a band many wrote off by 1994. They proved doubters wrong. I don’t think Parklife was a Britpop precursor or something very defined and of a forgotten and past time. The incredible songwriting and phenomenal range throughout means it is an evergreen and always-relevant classic. Kudos to the production of Stephen Street:

“THIS WEEK of all weeks it has been easy to forget what a daft, wonderful thing pop music can be; how it can zip into your life and make the world a happier place. And in 1994 it's easy to forget what an album actually is; CDs have turned us into album surfers, skipping the fillers and forever programming in our favourites. Help is here with 'Parklife', something that will help all of us remember. Put simply, it is a Great Pop Record.

And for once it's an LP that deserves to be played from start to finish; sure there are bumps and detours along the way but somehow these are part of the appeal. The first four tracks will knock yer sideways, and by the time you hear Phil Daniels holler "Oi!" in his role as guest parky on the knockabout title track you will know this is no ordinary LP. It's a mess, all over the place, no song blends easily into the next, they all jar into each other like some home-made compilation chucked together when you were pissed. And so a buttery pop tune like 'End Of a Century' is followed by the spiky punk attack of 'Bank Holiday' and then a spot of trad German 'oompah' drinking music. ('The Debt Collector'). On paper it sounds like hell, in practice it's joyous - a band prepared to have a laugh, to forget about the pomposity that surrounds the music business. Amid the mayhem it takes two plays before you discover the album's two true gems - the John Barry/Walker Brothers epic 'To The End' and the languid 'Bedhead' - which is kind of like discovering a fiver in a jacket you haven't worn for months.

It begins, as all pop albums should, with a hit single, 'Girls And Boys', a song that sounds as if it was designed by robots as a soundtrack to fun-fair bumper car rides - pointed, niggly, angular and persistently catchy, it's strange and magnificent that something so obtuse should have been taken to the nation's bosom. Testament to its success is the way it has inspired such ardent, nosebleeding hatred among rock puritans. Nothing like a spot of oversprung pop muzik to wind up Grandad Rock - and Blur are past masters at it.

 From their beginnings, Blur have got up peoples' noses with a strike-rate that more blatantly antagonistic bands can only dream of. During baggy, when it was cool to look like Peter Beardsley's less attractive cousin, Blur were unabashed pin-ups. Later, when their contemporaries stared at their plimsolls and courted grunge attitude, they employed a brass section and looped around like space hoppers. And as we looked to Seattle for new language, Albarn name-checked Primrose Hill and sang with an accentuated Southern accent that hadn't been heard since the likes of Anthony Newley were hip.

Still Blur were accused of that most heinous of crimes - the jumping of bandwagons. Yet they re-invented themselves, it was no corporate marketing play, and what 18 months ago looked like retrograde precociousness (sticking up for Little England as US culture steamrollered into Hertfordshire) is not little short of maverick genius.

'Parklife' is 'Modern Life Is Rubbish's' older brother - bigger, bolder, narkier and funnier. Musically they're leagues better than before, the ill-formed ideas have reached fruition and lyrically Blur now find themselves at the end of an inheritance that starts with The Kinks and The Small Faces and goes through to Madness and The Jam. Not just because they are blatantly inspired by all four - the comparisons are easy to make - but because they articulate the everyday world with equal potency and humour. Where Ray Davies saw beauty in the skies over Waterloo Station, Damon Albarn sees it in the mirror ball above a Mykonos dancefloor. And while contemporaries like Pulp are drawn towards the seedy glamour of sex behind the net curtains, Blur see the mundanity and ennui of suburban living.

Although they may affect the stance of council estate lads (the sleeve artwork pictures them down the dog track) the characters knowingly portrayed in much of 'Parklife’. 9/10”.

I am going to wrap this feature up with a more contemporary review from We Plug Good Music. As I say, I will be putting out a couple more Parklife features before its thirtieth anniversary on 25th April. It is an album quite rightly heralded as one of the greatest and most important ever. I was ten when the album came out. It was one that definitely affected me when I heard it. A major statement from the legendary band:

“Parklife (1994) from Blur is the album that essentially sparked a whole new musical genre, and beyond that a cultural movement, that of, Britpop. Yes, to any fellow millennial, I do feel a tragic need to non-assumingly define Britpop to our proceeding, autotune generation (Maybe that’s a bit harsh, maybe not).

Mind you, for all my generational bashing, Parklife was an album that was so satirical of British ’90s culture and yet simultaneously, so influential and impacting upon it, that it’s best appreciated by a little reminiscing upon a strange and garish decade.

Britpop was the ’90s answer to that romantic, unapologetically British spirit of the swinging ’60s whereby bands like The Beatles, The Who, The Rolling Stones, and The Kinks, to name but a few, flaunted a certain, snazzy kind of national narcissism.

The ’90s saw a return of Britannia the cool, a formidable backlash against the American grunge invasion, Nirvana et al, a reformulating of British musical identity. Damon Albarn even stated directly: “I’m getting rid of grunge“. Blur, along with Oasis, Pulp and Suede, were dubbed the ‘big four’ Britpop bands, but there were many others of the same ilk – Supergrass, The Verve, and Elastica, to mention a few.

The British press galvanised the Britpop phenomenon considerably, racking up column inches into an accumulative media marathon, relentlessly fawning over the bitter Blur and Oasis rivalry, Northerners vs. Southerners, selling that central ‘Battle of Britpop’ with plenty of hyperbole, as if it was literally, territorial combat.

The ’90s art, fashion and political scenes all got in on it. It is no coincidence that Damien Hirst directed the music video for Blur’s “Country House“, nor that when New Labour got into power in 1997, photos of Noel Gallagher and his wife, Meg Matthews, in deep conversation with Tony Blair, were all over the media. Britpop took a nation by storm.

Pulp’s song, “Cocaine Socialism“, tells of Jarvis Cocker’s surprise at being invited to coked-up parties at Whitehall and his bemusement at politicians contrived, vote-baiting allegiances with pop stars. Britpop went beyond itself, sometimes transcending into genuine artistic ingenuity, sometimes descending into a hedonistic farce of one big ’90s’ cultural aesthetic.

While the early material of all the quintessential Britpop bands had a trial and error, hit or miss incoherency to it, it was Damon Albarn’s men who landed that first, definitive, prototypal classic with Parklife.

Parklife begins with “Girls And Boys“, with its Duran Duran styled bass, disco drum and keyboard jangling making for an eminently catchy opener.

It is a tongue (or whatever your preferred vice) in cheek ‘celebration’ of that infamously loutish holidaying phenomenon, generically referred to by tourist boards as 18-30 holidays in lieu of a far more accurately sordid label, whereby, say, Greece’s Zante and Spain’s Benidorm, are tragically one and the same place, England in the sun.

A chav, an STD, and a bemusement at the locals not speaking enough English, walk into an expat’s bar and the punchline is “Girls And Boys”. The song’s inspiration came from Damon’s trip to Magaluf with then-girlfriend Justine Frischmann (Yes, that’s the lead singer from Elastica, the one he ‘stole’, according to Suede fans, from Brett Anderson), whereupon Albarn noticed “really tacky Essex nightclubs”.

The opener’s distinctly nihilistic feel sets the tone for an album that seems to both revel and deplore in that niche ’90s perverse patriotic revival. Immediately after “Girls And Boys” comes “Tracey Jacks“, a ‘character’ song about a civil servant’s disgruntlement at suburban life, this is a ’90s malaise that transcends class.

We then have “End Of The Century”, which is ‘nothing special,’ and that thematic cynicism is in full and fine flow.

The millennium was approaching, and Albarn’s lyrics bemoaned society’s anticipation of it: “He gives her a cuddle, Glowing in a huddle, Good night TV“. He could only expect a future full of tacky, techy commodification, instead of the romantic, organic candlelight of the past.

That commentary on banal, unsentimental modernisation and globalisation is continued later in “London Loves“: “Coughing tar in his Japanese motor … So sleep together, Before today is sold forever”.

The title track, “Parklife“, is one of the most, if not, the most prolific Britpop song, as much well known for its raucous, comedic, music video. It won both the ‘British Single of the Year’ and ‘British Video of the Year’ at the 1995 BRIT Awards. Actor Phil Daniels cocky, cockney narration grates in the memory, in a good way.

Albarn has cited Martin Amis’s novel London Fields as a major influence on the album’s concept, and the song echoes a similar kind of psychogeography and philosophical unease. Just how Amis’s character Sam states in London Fields: “This is London and there are no fields”, there is this funny sense of urban entrapment of rural ideal, a bittersweet ethos to the title track and to its mantra, the glibly sung ‘parklife’ interspersing Phil Daniels verses.

“This Is A Low” is Parklife’s best song. It is by far the most technically impressive track on the album, a complex, looping composition, melancholic, yet soothing. There is a rightful consensus among fans and critics alike that this is the standout track, the album’s magnus opus. You have to love the strangeness of its subject, a poetic reimagining of a shipping forecast.

Among Parklife’s other challengers to accolade of the best track is the orchestral, love song “To The End“, with its accompanying eerie French vocals (courtesy of Lætitia Sadier from Stereolab), while “Badhead” is an underrated gem.

Parklife was truly a classic. There was such an eclectic array of influence – Synth, punk, pop, disco, psychedelia. Blur’s alchemy was to transmute that into a new gold standard in music, a new sound, a new kind of pop.

This album was like a Union Jack flag on a field at a festival, pinned down precariously by pints of lager, its white stripes lined with coke, its fabric sullied by young love in the ’90s. But now as new music takes centre stage and that flag has sailed off into the distance, we must always remember Parklife is up there with some of finest albums of the past few decades”.

On 25th April, we celebrate thirty years of Blur’s third studio album. Parklife is an iconic release that still reverberates to this day. With tremendous singles like Girls & Boys, Parklife and End of a Century showing what incredible quality and variety can be found through the album, there is no wonder it endures so strongly. It is hard to believe that the album is almost thirty years old! It is both current-sounding and nostalgic. Blur are still together to this day. They released The Ballad of Darren last year. It is among their best work. Parklife was a heady and fascinating time for them. Their career changed hugely in 1994. When we mark thirty years of Parklife on 25th April, I hope that they all…

RECALL it fondly.

FEATURE: International Women’s Day 2024: The King Is Dead: Female Dominance in Modern Music

FEATURE:

 

 

International Women’s Day 2024

IN THIS PHOTO: RAYE won a record-breaking six BRIT awards on 2nd March, 2024/PHOTO CREDIT: James Veysey/Shutterstock

The King Is Dead: Female Dominance in Modern Music

_________

IT is International Women’s Day….

 PHOTO CREDIT: Wendy Wei/Pexels

on Friday (8th March). It will fall only six days after Raye triumphed at the BRIT Awards. It was a moment of realisation and correction. An award ceremony that has, until this year, been culpable of not representing women and being short-sighted regarding equality, came through and ensured that music’s best were rewarded and seen. It is not only the BRITs that are recognising female dominance. Ever since music existed as a mainstream thing, it has always been unequal. Discrimination and misogyny raged. People assuming it was men who were most significant. Not to say that there has been a correction and instant overhaul. It feels like we are seeing the start of a revolution and overdue acknowledgement from the music industry. Award ceremonies are doing more to celebrate women. Festival bills this summer need to reflect that. I shall come to this. First, writing for The Guardian, Laura Snapes observed how Raye’s record-breaking BRITs sweep defied the limited imaginations of the British music industry:

“For now, Raye’s recognition by the industry-populated, 1,200-strong Brits voting academy feels like a desperate attempt by the British music business to claim her for its own and mark her success with its imprimatur: voting for the fairytale outcome while quietly ignoring the cage she was kept in. (Meanwhile you do kind of feel for the very worthy acts who missed their chance in the spotlight, some of whom, looked a bit miffed as the cameras cut away to them.) While no one should forget exactly how she aced her second act, it’s also worth noting that Raye isn’t a household name, and that if the increasingly irrelevant Brit awards is good for anything, it’s that her extraordinary, medley-style performance and overall prominence this evening will have exposed her to a whole new audience – televised platforms for the best of British music not exactly being in vast supply in 2024.

That audience feels limitless, too: Raye plays with a Winehouse-loving teen audience who never actually got to live through Winehouse’s too-brief pop heyday, as well as with older listeners impressed by the traditional talent and soul acumen she showcased in a special concert at the Royal Albert Hall last year. Where the Brits can simply clog the mantlepiece for superstars, it may well apply rocket fuel to Raye’s streaming figures in the coming week

After the controversy over the all-male best artist category last year – the Brits having done away with gendered categories in 2022 – Raye’s success also represents a course-corrective for the Brits, where 70% of this year’s winners, including those announced prior to the ceremony, were women. (At the Grammys, too, the Big Four and genre categories were dominated by women.) The most striking of the male victors was rapper Casisdead in best hip-hop/grime/rap – the genre categories all being voted for by fans – after 20 years in the game, while Bring Me the Horizon won the all-male alt/rock field. There were still WTF moments: in best dance act, Calvin Harris beat Fred Again, who – Miracle aside – was far more culturally penetrating in the last year; Jungle winning best group over Young Fathers is a triumph of sports montage music over genuinely provocative art that underscores the absurdities in paranoid Britain’s identity crisis while embodying a progressive multicultural alternative. But that’s the ever-contradictory Brits for you: a love-in for an industry that almost silenced its greatest prize”.

PHOTO CREDIT: Maria Orlova/Pexels

We still have a long way to go until the sheer quality and dominance of women is reflected across the industry. For a start, festival bills are not even completely gender balanced. That is before we go to the yearly conversation around festival headliners. Even if Glastonbury has declared there will be two female headliners, it is a long overdue step forward. Average out the past twenty years of the festival and women are severely lacking in the headline slots. Other major festivals will either have no female headliner or just one. It seems almost tokenistic to book a female headliner, in spite of the fact they are ruling and releasing the best albums year in year out. There does need to be a radical improvement from most festivals. Those not doing enough should react to ceremonies like the BRITs and be aware that things are changing. This extends to all corners of the industry. In terms of opportunities, payment and representation, there are gulfs and gaps. Female producers hugely underrepresented in studios. Too many alarming cases of sexual assault and abuse being reported. So much sexism and misogyny. Radio playlists not doing nearly enough to create gender balance – in spite of obvious quality and choice out there. What is clear is that the industry are starting to wake up to the promise, power and sheer quality women have been putting out for decades. A moment when there is movement forward. How long it will take for women across the industry to get full respect and representation, and also feel safe and heard, remains to be seen. Let’s hope it is soon. It is also evident that men no longer rule. They are not the go-to and dominant force. The landscape fortunately has shifted. Ahead of International Women’s Day this Friday, it seems like an appropriate time to salute women and their immense contribution to the music industry. Also, there needs to be more commitment from the industry to ensure that women are protected and respected. We all hope for a fairer and brighter future…

FOR women in music.

FEATURE: Flip the Cassette…? Could More of Kate Bush’s Music Be Used in Stranger Things?

FEATURE:

 

 

Flip the Cassette…?

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush (with Bonnie and Clyde) in an outtake from the Hounds of Love album cover shoot/PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush 

 Could More of Kate Bush’s Music Be Used in Stranger Things?

_________

A recent post….

 IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush with Del Palmer in September 1985/PHOTO CREDIT: Dave Hogan/Getty Images

from Kate Bush News on Instagram asked a very interesting question. As many people will know, Kate Bush’s Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God) was used on Stranger Things in 2022. The track became a favourite of Max Mayfield's; helping her cope with the death of her step-brother, Billy Hargrove. The song was instrumental in helping Max escape the wrath of Vecna. The series in which Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God) was set in 1986. That image from the set of the final season of Stranger Things. What do we know about the final season of Stranger Things? It does look like it is going to be an emotional and epic conclusion:

“The Duffer brothers have since revealed a few things since the season four finale dropped on July 1, 2022. For starters, Will is a “big part and focus” of the final season, the showrunners told Collider in an interview following the fourth season. “We’re starting to see his coming of age, really,” Matt said. “Which has been challenging for a number of reasons, some of which are supernatural. But you’re starting to see him come into his own.” Ross added that season five will most likely bring fans full circle to season one, when Will was trapped in the Upside Down, as well as potentially with Steve and Nancy, since she and Jonathan seem to be hitting a rough patch that’s not fully resolved.

Secondly, season five is almost certainly going to have a time jump, considering the actors who play the kids are all approaching (or already in) their 20s, despite technically still being in high school in the Stranger Things world. “I’m sure we will do a time jump,” Ross told TVLine in June 2022. “Ideally, we’d have shot [seasons four and five] back to back, but there was just no feasible way to do that. So these are all discussions we’re going to have with our writers when we start the room up.”

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by katebushnews.com (@katebushnews)

Third, Vecna is back — though fans don’t know in what capacity the show’s Big Bad will return. When THR asked Jamie Campbell Bower how Vecna will factor into the show’s endgame following the villain’s journey throughout the fourth season, he basically admitted he’d be back. And as for whether or not the Hawkins kids can beat him, well, it’s a possibility. “There’s always an opportunity for the good guys to win,” he said. “I think in this case, they’d have to be way smarter than they have been thus far because Henry is not one to forget and not one to let things slide.”

In December 2023, Stranger Things will make its way to London’s West End for The First Shadow, a stage play that takes place in 1959 Hawkins when Hopper, Bob Newby (played by Sean Astin in the Netflix series) and Joyce are all in high school. “When new student Henry Creel arrives, his family finds that a fresh start isn’t so easy … and the shadows of the past have a very long reach,” the play’s description reads. “This gripping new adventure will take you right back to the beginning of the Stranger Things story — and may hold the key to the end.” So, it’s probably safe to assume something in Joyce, Hopper and Henry’s past will come back in some way, shape or form in the show’s ending”.

That cassette of Hounds of Love that was seen on set has led many Kate Bush fans to speculate that another song from the album could feature in the show. I think many would love to think that another Kate Bush album could get an airing. 1989’s The Sensual World finding its way into a big scene. I guess it is understandable why there is such interest in Hounds of Love. The album got new acclaim and attention when Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God) was featured in Stranger Things. That single, which did not get to number one in 1985, reached the top of the charts in the U.K. (and other nations). I know that Kate Bush’s music has been used in film and T.V., though the recent inclusion on Stranger Things is different. Bush was pretty involved with the process. Ensuring that the scene in which Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God) featured was right. That her music was being used in a meaningful way. She was very pleased with the final result, so it would not be a shock if another cut from Hounds of Love wound up in the final Stranger Things season. It may be the case that the Hounds of Love cassette that was seen on the set is used more as a prop. That it is referred to or is a bit of a red herring. However, given the time period in which the final season is likely to be set, one would not bet against Bush’s fifth studio album featuring. It is likely to be set in 1987 at the earliest. Maybe 1988. That album would still be relevant in that sense.

When I saw the photo, I asked whether the second side of Hounds of Love, The Ninth Wave, might feature. That concept of a woman being lost at sea and being rescued. Could that be tied to a Stranger Things plot? If a Hounds of Love song is to be featured, one might feel thew first side will be explored. There are three possible singles, Cloudbusting, Hounds of Love and The Big Sky, that could get a nod. Before moving on, I wanted to use this feature to mention The Big Sky. On 19th March, 1986, for the making of the video for The Big Sky, Kate Bush assembled over one hundred fans on the sound stage of Elstree Studios. She directed the video for that single. Released as a single in April 1986, it reached number thirty-seven in the U.K. I shall wrap up by asking whether Cloudbusting and Hounds of Love might get an airing. As we are approaching the anniversary of The Big Sky’s video being filmed, I wanted to spend time with it. The Kate Bush Encyclopedia gives more details about the video and the reaction to this incredible track:

“Music video

The music video was directed by Bush herself. It was filmed on 19 March 1986 at Elstree Film Studios in the presence of a studio audience of about hundred fans. The Homeground fanzine was asked to get this audience together, and they did within two weeks. Two coaches took everyone from Manchester Square to Elstree studios early in the morning, after which the Homeground staff, who were cast as some of the aviators, were filmed, and finally the whole audience was admitted for the ‘crowd scenes’. The scenes were repeated until Kate had them as she wanted.

Critical reception

The Big Sky is a moment of real, mad bravado. The best and most threatening thing that this bizarre talent has ever done.

RICHARD COOK, SOUNDS, 3 MAY 1986

She has with her every release managed to maintain a uniqueness. She always sounds like herself and she never sounds the same, and that’s a difficult trick.

THE STUD BROTHERS, MELODY MAKER, 3 MAY 1986

Another gem from the utterly brilliant LP, this has more hypnotic pounding rhythms and chants, the orchestra sawing away as if their lives depended on it…

IAN CRANNA, SMASH HITS, 7 MAY 1986

Kate about ‘The Big Sky’

Someone sitting looking at the sky, watching the clouds change. I used to do this a lot as a child, just watching the clouds go into different shapes. I think we forget these pleasures as adults. We don’t get as much time to enjoy those kinds of things, or think about them; we feel silly about what we used to do naturally. The song is also suggesting the coming of the next flood – how perhaps the “fools on the hills” will be the wise ones. (Kate Bush Club newsletter, Issue 18, 1985)

‘The Big Sky’ was a song that changed a lot between the first version of it on the demo and the end product on the master tapes. As I mentioned in the earlier magazine, the demos are the masters, in that we now work straight in the 24-track studio when I’m writing the songs; but the structure of this song changed quite a lot. I wanted to steam along, and with the help of musicians such as Alan Murphy on guitar and Youth on bass, we accomplished quite a rock-and-roll feel for the track. Although this song did undergo two different drafts and the aforementioned players changed their arrangements dramatically, this is unusual in the case of most of the songs. (Kate Bush Club newsletter, Issue 18, 1985)”.

The final Stranger Things season is probably not going to air until next year. This year alone, we have heard a bit from Kate Bush. In fact, the past year has seen her quite active and engaging. Having reissued her studio albums with special vinyl designs, she was also recently named as Ambassador for this year’s Record Store Day UK. That event happens next month. Bush was honoured to be asked. It would be wonderful to think that she once more will consult with the Duffer Brothers about another Hounds of Love song appearing on screen. I know she is not someone who is a fan of repeating herself or doing the same thing, though if that album is important to a character or a story arc, that it is only natural that she would give her blessing. If that Hounds of Love cassette is put into a boombox and played, would we get an important blast of a Kate Bush classic?! As has been noted, the cassette version of Hounds of Love show in that on-set Stranger Things photo is the Greek release. Whatever comes about, people are speculating and getting excited. Perhaps it won’t be Hounds of Love featuring. Maybe there will be some The Sensual World. As a cassette of Hounds of Love was shown, it does seem more likely, if any Kate Bush music is featured, it will be from that album. It will be tantalising to consider what might come! Barely a month goes by now where we are not discussing Kate Bush because of some bit of news. It is wonderful that she is very much out there still in various forms. This new tease from the set of Stranger Things could well lead to another ‘Kate Bush moment’…

VERY soon.

FEATURE: International Women’s Day 2024: Queens’ Speeches: Cuts from the Best Albums by Female Artists in 2023 and 2024

FEATURE:

 

 

International Women’s Day 2024

IN THIS PHOTO: Mitski/PHOTO CREDIT: Ebru Yildiz

Queens’ Speeches: Cuts from the Best Albums by Female Artists in 2023 and 2024

_________

THIS is similar to something that….

PHOTO CREDIT: Daniel Delgado for The New Yorker

I have written about recently. Because International Women’s Day happens on Friday (8th March), I am compelled to put out a couple of features. The first one celebrates the best albums made by women last year and this one so far. I am going to move on to legendary female artists and women whose music has made an impact on me. To start, a playlist containing amazing songs from the best women in music. Last year was one dominated by female artists. Some of the very best albums of 2024 have been created by women. I think that, on International Women’s Day, we need to both recognise the brilliance of women and how much they are dominating music. Because of that, we also need to keep striving for equality and recognition. Things are improving. From Saturday’s BRITs seeing women dominating in terms of the winners, to there being small steps taken in terms of festival bills, we are moving forward. There is still a long way to go. In terms of protecting women and ensuring they feel safe. There is a lot to discuss in addition to celebrate. A wonderful mixtape of phenomenal songs from queens of music, below are some awesome songs from 2023 and this year. It proves that women are truly producing…

IN THIS PHOTO: The Last Dinner Party/PHOTO CREDIT: Cal McIntyre

THE absolute best music.

FEATURE: One for the Record Collection! Essential April Releases

FEATURE:

 

 

One for the Record Collection!

IN THIS PHOTO: The cover for St. Vincent’s All Born Screaming (out on 26th April)

Essential April Releases

_________

EVEN though we are in March….

PHOTO CREDIT: Taylor Swift

I am looking ahead to April and the great albums due. It is a busy and eclectic month for releases. I think that some of the best albums of the year so far are out next month. Ones I am predicting will be huge next month. Let’s start with albums out on 5th April. It is a packed week, though there are four that I think you need to pre-order. The first is from the mighty Bob Vylan. Humble As the Sun is an album that you will want to add to your collection. Here are more details about the album:

“When Bob Vylan won the first Mobo award for Best Alternative Music Act in 2022, the punk-grime duo took to the stage and used the platform to speak about how they managed to achieve the impossible as independent artists in a genre-defying space. “We released an album this year that we produced entirely, mixed entirely, recorded entirely, all from my bedroom…so everybody that’s here, bigging up Atlantic and bigging up Warner, fuck that, us man did it ourselves”.

It was an acceptance speech that rattled the room and built anticipation for their next projects.

Humble as the Sun, the latest album from Bob Vylan continues with much of the rage and urgency that they have come to be known and loved for, but this latest project shows that they are now stronger and wiser, bolstered by the wins and learnings that they have fought hard for along the way. The resulting tracklist aims to leave the listener feeling power alongside their anger, and brings a fresh and compelling blend of punk, rock, grime and rap together in an experimental way.

Following on from the last album, Bob Vylan Presents the Price of Life, the message woven throughout Humble as the Sun remains dark in places but is high-energy, defiant and unapologetic in its critique of a broken social and political system that so many have fallen victim to, but feel powerless against.

This album is for the underdogs, the ones who come out swinging and those who refuse to be defeated in the face of injustice, and aims to remind listeners that anger is a fire that can be harnessed and put to use. The album creation started from a conversation with the sun, which is, after all, a big ball of fire that sustains life.

From masculinity to myths about the G Spot, the themes and topics explored on Humble As The Sun make for an often humorously empowering celebration of the peoples ability to endure, overcome and bring about change.

The lyricism on this album is even more layered than their previous projects, still darkly humorous, anti-establishment and unforgiving but at times pauses to deliver much-needed words of afrmation to listeners, “You are loved. You are not alone. You are going through hell but keep going.” Bobby assures the listener, ofering an antidote to the state of the world, aiming to give some power and agency to those who hear it. At a time when so little trust or faith exists between the people and the powers that be, Bob Vylan ofers out a hand in the despondent darkness that has overwhelmed so many in the shadow of a burning planet. They guides the listener to a place where they can see some light and feel empowered to do something, to fight back, to continue pushing forwards despite the challenges faced along the way.

Mixing all of the best quintessentially British - and Jamaican - musical elements from punk to drum and bass, grime and rock, Bob Vylan creates a sound that reflects the state of the nation, at once voicing the frustrations that normal people have, while also highlighting one’s ability to persevere, overcome hardship and to change”.

Moving on to Dana Gavanski’s Late Slap. This is an album that I think you should investigate. An artist that I really like that others may not be aware of, go and pre-order an album that is not going to disappoint. She is a tremendous talent with a singular voice. Someone who goes from strength to strength. Her upcoming album looks like it may be her best so far:

“There’s a party in Dana Gavanski’s head and everyone’s invited- well, kind of. Late Slap, Gavanski’s third album, gives voice to the highs and lows of the mindscape in all its joys and terrors, injecting some much needed playfulness into the process of writing about emotionally hard things.

Gavanski fleshed out the demos with her band before taking the album—and the band—to Mike Lindsay (Tunng, LUMP) at MESS, the producer’s studio in Margate. The five-piece, which includes Gavanski’s fellow co-producer James Howard (Rozi Plain, Alabaster dePlume), tracked the record over five days.

‘Ears Were Growing,’ encapsulates the eighties zeal of Talking Heads or Klaus Nomi, pitching fantasy against reality through a playful lyric about negative self-talk, the domestic interior, and their way of creating a kind of Stockholm Syndrome equal parts comfort and fear. ‘Ribbon,’ is a tender song about the recent loss of a childhood friend, looks at the world through the lens of grief, marveling at the way the familiar suddenly loses its meaning and shape. The gently propulsive ‘Song for Rachel’ approaches the same subject matter from another angle, finding release in the simple, straight-to-the-point chorus refrain of “Cause’ you’re gone/ it’s just that I’m lost/ and I don’t know how to feel.” Not knowing how to feel, Gavanski shows us, is as valid and important a feeling as any other.

Late Slap’s unsettling artwork places the album themes in plain sight, Gavanski’s ambiguous, animated expression and screened-out black eyes bearing witness to what might be a revolving exhibition of contradictory images: cute play-fighting kittens giving way to pictures of suffering and war, golden hours dissolving into lost hours never to be reclaimed. But Late Slap is also what its title suggests - a sudden jolt, a shock to the system that seeks to reconnect with the messy flesh-and-thought humanity of simply being human. The album’s tension between cynicism and trust, openness and despair, melodrama and silliness, ultimately invites the listeners in (throw your coat on the bed over there, stranger). It welcomes you at the door, and beckons you to find tenderness in a world doing its best to desensitize us”.

An album I am particularly looking forward to is Jane Weaver’s Love In Constant Spectacle. With one of the best album covers of the year so far, this eye-catching album promises riches inside. Weaver is one of our finest and most consistent albums. Go and pre-order your copy. I am excited to see what comes from this album:

“Recalibrating her singular journey in the British musical landscape with her most open-hearted, direct and intimate collection of material yet. Love In Constant Spectacle evokes spectacular imagery and distills the artists’ vision in its purest form, elevating her inimitable sound and poetic vision to new heights.

Recapturing the melancholy of her early work whilst propelling it forward, she sketches scenes as we watch new colours, shapes and languages emerge and fill the frame. Love In Constant Spectacle sees her take measured steps towards a vivid, dreamlike record, that offers resolve in the face of life’s inevitability.

The foundations of Weaver’s sound are still evident – lush motorik drums, pulsating bass, custom modded synths and exotic fuzz pedals - but the stream is awash with scrabble piece poetry and Letraset lullabies leading to lush escapism, the free abandon that you’d associate with free jazz and the avant-garde. But, as determined and visionary as Weaver might be, Love In Constant Spectacle wasn’t executed without assistance. Here we find a long mooted unison with Jane’s first ever producer, John Parish (PJ Harvey, Aldous Harding), who has shared Weaver’s process in the surrounds of Rockfield Studios and Geoff Barrow’s Invada studio.

Love In Constant Spectacle is otherworldly, it is both intimate yet distant, a surrealist interpretation of the foundations that make us human – the stories and landscapes it paints are habitats of their own. A voyage into undisclosed pastures, it’s a heartfelt manifesto from an artist that continues to boundlessly evolve with each chapter in her career”.

I think I might cover off two more albums out on 5th April before moving to 12th.  One that I feel is going to be hugely well received is Khruangbin’s A la Sala. A real treat from the trio, their fourth studio album is going to be sensational. I would encourage people to pre-order an album that is going to rank alongside this year’s most rewarding and strong:

“Khruangbin’s fourth studio album, A La Sala (“To the Room” in Spanish), is an exercise in returning in order to go further, and doing so on your own terms. It continues the mystery and sanctity that is the key to how bassist Laura Lee Ochoa, drummer Donald “DJ” Johnson, Jr. and guitarist Mark “Marko” Speer approach music. It’s a gorgeously airy record completed only in the company of the group’s longtime engineer Steve Christensen, with minimal overdubs. It’s a window onto the bounties powering Khruangbin’s vision, a reimagining and refuelling for the long haul ahead. A La Sala scales Khruangbin down to scale up, a creative strategy with the future in mind.

The trio’s collective musical DNA, the years spent constructing it in Houston’s local-meets-global cultural stew, ensures the band continues to sound like no one but itself. A cascade of crisp melodies emanates from Marko’s reverb-heavy electric, dancing gently around Laura Lee’s minimalist almost-dub bass triangles, while DJ’s drums serve as the tightened-up pocket and unwavering dance-floor on which all this movement takes place.

Khruangbin’s aspirations and commitment to playful creativity even extends to A La Sala’s vinyl packages, of which there will be seven distinctive covers and colour-sets. Designed by the band using Marko’s multitude of travelogue photos, the images are windows from the band’s living room onto a set of daydreams, scenes of impossible skies, external glances that illuminate what is going on inside. Each cover image comes with a matching colour vinyl. These too are all about looking out and looking back, in order to better look ahead”.

The last two weeks of April are pretty busy when it comes to top-quality albums you need to order. There are three from 12th April that you will want to check out. girl in red’s I’M DOING IT AGAIN BABY! is an album that I am looking forward to. I think that this is going to be another that everyone needs to listen to. You can pre-order it here. It is going to be a must-hear album. If you are new to girl in red and require more details, hopefully the below should fill in some gaps:

“I'm Doing It Again Baby! is the eagerly anticipated sophomore album from Norway born and Oslo-based singer-songwriter Girl in Red. This 10-song album chronicles the artist’s last two and a half years with honesty and wit, and a willingness to play around with her music. With I'm Doing It Again Baby!, Girl in Red is building her music into something “more ambitious, and more exciting, and more idea-driven.” Exploring themes like confidence, criticism, self-esteem, and vulnerability, Girl in Red produced the album with frequent collaborator Matias Tellez”.

Another terrific album out on 12th April is Maggie Rogers’ Don't Forget Me. One of the most accomplished and original songwriters in the music world, her forthcoming album will highlight her many gifts. This is an album that you should add to your collection. Available for pre-order, do consider grabbing hold of Don’t Forget Me:

“Grammy Award-nominated songwriter / producer / performer Maggie Rogers releases Don’t Forget Me, her third studio album, via Capitol Records. She co-produced Don’t Forget Me with Ian Fitchuk (Kacey Musgraves, Maren Morris) at Electric Lady Studios in New York City, writing eight of its 10 songs with him and penning two alone. There’s a warmth to Don’t Forget Me. It's an album that sounds like a Sunday afternoon. Worn in denim. A drive in your favourite car. No make up, but the right amount of lipstick. Something classic. The mohair throw and bottle of Whiskey in Joan Didion’s motel room.  An old corvette. Vintage, but not overly Americana”.

There are loads of wonderful albums out in April, so do investigate them all and see which ones best suit your tastes. I want to highlight four from 19th April worthy of further study. Lucy Rose’s This Ain’t The Way You Go Out is an album you will want to pre-order. Another release that has a striking cover, I am particularly intrigued to see what lucy Rose offers us with her new album. She is one of our most important artists:

“British musician Lucy Rose released a third album, No Words Left, back in 2019. It garnered the strongest critical acclaim of her career and culminated in a sell- out show at London's Barbican theatre. It was a record that ruminated in a sort of hushed reverence, emotionally charged and deftly delivered.

Lucy had planned to spend some well- earned time at home in the record's aftermath, having toured relentlessly since her late teens. She'd balanced that precariously spinning plate by forming her own record label too, Real Kind Records, putting out new records by artists she admired and thought deserved her due care and attention. With both plates spinning, she managed to catch them just before the pandemic ensured her plan for some rest and recuperation became an enforced reality. She welcomed her first child, Otis, in the summer of 2021. All was well until she was diagnosed with a rare form of pregnancy induced osteoporosis.

With a life being lived upside down, and only now without the indignity of excruciating pain, making music wasn't seeded top of Lucy's priority list. Any fleeting thought of writing a new record, or even sitting down with a guitar or at a piano, took a back seat to building up the strength to walk and care for Otis. As her confidence started to rebuild, so did her usual inhibitions in the making of music. Inspired by a trip to America with friend and rapper Logic, she later worked with renowned producer Kwes to finish the record.

This Ain't The Way You Go Out is an album constructed from the ashes of despair, nurturing the tiniest of green shoots and giving life to something that had looked otherwise spent. It's a new era for Lucy, and an era in its purest, truest sense. An artist re-awakening herself to the power of music, and having a lot of fun in the process of its discovery and delivery”.

It is always a treat when we get a new Pearl Jam album. Many would not have expected one this year. Pearl Jam’s Dark Matter comes four years after Gigaton. Even if you are not a diehard Pearl Jam fan, I think that this is an album that you will want to pre-order. NME provided further details about the legendary band’s upcoming album in a feature from last month:

“Pearl Jam have announced their new album ‘Dark Matter’ and shared the title track – check it out below.

The band’s 12th album – the follow-up to 2020’s ‘Gigaton‘ – is out April 19 via Monkeywrench Records, and can be pre-ordered/pre-saved here.

The band have already hinted at what fans can expect from the new record, with guitarist Mike McCready recently sharing that it’s “heavier than you’d expect”.

“We have a bunch of songs tracked,” he said in an interview with Classic Rock. “We worked with Andrew Watt, who’s a younger pop producer-type guy, but he’s really a rock guy at heart — I think we’re his favorite band. When we were in the studio with him this past year, he really kicked our asses, got us focused and playing, song after song.”

McCready continued: “There’s the melody and energy of the first couple of records. Andrew pushed us to play as hard and melodic and thoughtful as we’ve done in a long time. I feel like Matt Cameron’s drumming has elements of what he did in Soundgarden.”

Watt has previously worked with artists including Miley Cyrus, Post Malone and Lana Del Rey, and also has also had credits on albums from rock artists like Ozzy Osbourne.

As for his own contribution, McCready said “you’re gonna hear a lot more lead guitar from me, stuff I haven’t done in a long time”.

Reviewing ‘Gigaton’ in 2020, NME said the album saw “one of the biggest rock bands in the world return to semi-brilliance”. The three-star write-up continued: “Eddie Vedder and co.’s 11th album won’t change your life, but should boast enough vitriol to satisfy long-term fans”.

On 19th April, we also receive another wonderful album in the form of Pillow Queens’ Name Your Sorrow. An album I am already tipping to be nominated for the Mercury Prize later in the year, this Irish band are among my favourites. I have been following them for years now. You can pre-order their upcoming album here:

“After forming in 2016, Pillow Queens released a series of singles, honing their craft and working towards their first album, In Waiting (2020). Along the way there has been acclaim from UK and American press, many sold-out gigs and an appearance on James Corden's Late Late Show. After signing with Canada’s Royal Mountain Records, they released a follow-up album, Leave the Light On in 2022, touring the UK, US and Europe extensively, including shows at Austin’s SXSW and supporting Phoebe Bridgers in Glasgow.

Three albums in three years indicates a serious work ethic, for their new album Name Your Sorrow they stuck to a strict schedule. They showed up every day from 9-5, in a windowless Dublin room to just play, swap instruments and experiment. From there, they decamped to a rural retreat in County Clare along the Atlantic coastline of Ireland, to immerse themselves further. “ The palpable shift in sound and tone is possibly the result of working with a new producer, Collin Pastore from Nashville, who has produced boygenius, Lucy Dacus and Illuminati Hotties. The band holed up for three weeks at Analogue Catalogue studio in Newry, and quickly noticed that the change of scene and personnel impacted on the record.

The result of combining new experimentation, heartfelt lyrics and a sound that pinballs from quiet and loud offers a kind of catharsis. Of picking through the shrapnel to find slivers of hope. Previously, the band have road-tested new tracks live, playing them to an audience and reworking them based on the crowd’s reaction. They haven’t done that this time, because the songs already feel fully formed. The band also had to unlearn the process of questioning whether a song sounded like “a Pillow Queens song”. There are definite links to the last two albums, but Name Your Sorrow feels like a triumphant step in another direction”.

Before I get to four album from 26th April you’ll want to pre-order, one of this year’s biggest arrives on 19th April. Taylor Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department comes off the back of her world-straddling and record-breaking Eras Tour – which is still going at the moment but has already been heralded a modern masterpiece – and sees her follow from 2022’s Midnights. You can order here. Last month, Billboard gave details of what we know so far about the album:

“Taylor Swift gave fans a lot more than they bargained for at the 2024 Grammys, dropping the bombshell news mid-acceptance speech that her new album, The Tortured Poets Department, is arriving this year.

The welcome news came as the pop star was accepting best pop vocal for her 2022 record Midnights — aka, the last album she announced without warning during an awards show acceptance speech. “This is my 13th Grammy – which is my lucky number, I don’t know if I’ve ever told you that,” she teased the crowd from the stage at Crypto.com Arena Sunday (Feb. 4). “I want to say thank you to the fans by telling you a secret that I’ve been keeping from you for the last two years …”

Swift went on to reveal the pending arrival of The Tortured Poets Department before posting the album’s sultry cover almost immediately after she left the stage. “All’s fair in love and poetry…,” she captioned the artwork. “New album THE TORTURED POETS DEPARTMENT.”

Later that night, the 34-year-old singer-songwriter took home a historic fourth album of the year for Midnights, but Swifties were probably more excited for the new LP announcement, especially because most were expecting that the musician would announce her long-awaited Reputation (Taylor’s Version) at the ceremony instead — so much so that “Rep TV” was trending ahead of the Grammys. Swift has been steadily releasing re-recorded versions of her first six albums since 2021. Following Fearless, Red, Speak Now and 1989, she only has her self-titled debut and Rep left to go — but clearly, fans will just have to wait a little longer as the Tortured Poets era takes hold

From the release date to the song titles, see everything Billboard knows about Swift’s 11th album The Tortured Poets Department below.

The Title

Obviously, the album is called The Tortured Poets Department — but fans suspect there are layers to that title. Namely, Swifties were quick to note how similar it sounds to a certain group chat shared by Swift’s ex-boyfriend Joe Alwyn and Paul Mescal, as revealed by the two actors in a December 2022 Variety interview: “The Tortured Man Club.”

The Cover

In the black-and-white album cover shared by Swift moments after announcing the album, she poses in a black top and shorts with her arms wrapped around her body, lying back on white bedding. Similar to the original 1989 cover, the top half of her face is obstructed.

Stylist Joseph Cassell revealed on Instagram that the photo features Swift wearing a black cami tank top and matching high-rise briefs from Mary Kate and Ashley’s fashion brand The Row.

The Tracklist

Swift shared the album’s full tracklist one day after announcing the project, revealing that Tortured Poets has a total of 16 songs plus one bonus track:

“Fortnight”

“The Tortured Poets Department”

“My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys”

“Down Bad”

“So Long, London”

“But Daddy I Love Him”

“Fresh Out the Slammer”

“Florida!!!!”

“Guilty as Sin?”

“Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?”

“I Can Fix Him (No Really I Can)”

“loml”

“I Can Do It With a Broken Heart”

“The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived”

“The Alchemy”

“Clara Bow”

Bonus Track: “The Manuscript”

The Collaborators

The Tortured Poets Department tracklist featured two major collaborations: Post Malone, whose name is billed on track one, “Fortnight,” as well as Florence + The Machine on track eight, “Florida!!!”

Both Posty and Florence Welch have sung Swift’s praises in the past, with the rapper calling the pop star “a great f—in’ songwriter” in an October 2023 interview with Howard Stern, and Welch and Swift trading compliments in a 2015 Billboard interview.

“What sets Florence apart? Everything,” Swift said at the time. “Every time I’ve been around her, she is the most magnetic person in the room — surrounded by people who are fascinated by the idea of being near her”.

Wrapping up with April albums and we get to 26th. The first from that week that you need to check out is Fat White Family’s Forgiveness Is Yours. There are not that many details know about the album. Released through Domino, you can pre-order it here. If you do not know much about the band, I feel that this is an album where you do not need much about. You do not need to know about the band. You can start here and get so much from it:

“Fat White Family are back with the most sophisticated, vital and flamboyant creation of their career. The cult south-London band’s resplendent fourth album Forgiveness Is Yours, like everything they’ve done, has pushed them to the limits not only of their creative talent, but of their health, their sanity, their very existence”.

I would also urge people to pre-order Pet Shop Boys’ Nonetheless. The legendary duo show no signs of slowing or dropping the quality! Do make sure that you pre-order it. Their latest work is amazing. You will not want to miss out on this album. It follows from 2020’s Hotspot. A duo that rarely put a foot wrong:

“UK electronic pop icons Pet Shop Boys return with a brand-new studio album Nonetheless, preceded by first single "Loneliness". Produced by James Ford, the music on Nonetheless is both uplifting and reflective, mixing electronics, live instruments, and orchestral arrangements. The songs are very melodic and quintessentially Pet Shop Boys with a fresh, open sound, bringing together classic strands of PSB song-writing and moving them in new directions.

Having sold in excess of 50 million records, Pet Shop Boys are easily the most successful UK duo of all time. BRIT awards and Grammy nominations have been numerous, including in 2009 when Pet Shop Boys won the BRIT for outstanding contribution to music; in 2000 Pet Shop Boys’ song-writing was rewarded with the Ivor Novello award for Outstanding Contribution to British Music - with over 70 hit singles spanning five decades, song-writing remains resolutely at the core of Pet Shop Boys’ continuing relevance and success”.

A band coming back from a while away, The Zutons’ The Big Decider. This is going to be a fantastic album from a truly distinct band. You can pre-order it here. I would suggest that people check this out. I am really looking forward to The Big Decider coming out. The band’s debut album, Who Killed...... The Zutons?, turns twenty on 19th April:

“Recorded at Abbey Road Studios with legendary songwriter and producer Nile Rodgers, alongside the band's original producer Ian Broudie. The multi-platinum selling band released three studio albums between 2004 and 2008, scoring 9 UK Top 40 singles including two Top 10s with ‘Why Won’t You Give Me Your Love?’ and the all- conquering ‘Valerie’, the latter a triple-platinum hit for Mark Ronson and Amy Winehouse. Now they return to share the fruits of their extended time away. The Big Decider comes into view as an album of stark significance to the band, completed by Dave McCabe (guitar, lead vocals), Abi Harding (saxophone, vocals) and Sean Payne (drums, vocals). Written against the backdrop of a decade and a half’s worth of lived experience, it is born under the weight of family tragedies, lives lost and created, reality checks, and home truths faced up to and stared down. Wrestled into shape under the kind of steam that only decades-long friendships - with all their messy fall-outs, make-ups, breakdowns and ultimately love - can muster, The Big Decider became the sound of water passing under the bridge, and love for music, love for each other, and love for creating together becoming the most important thing of all”.

The final album I want to highlight might be the best from April. It is definitely going to be you cant afford to overlook. St. Vincent’s All Born Screaming comes out on 26th April. With an incredible cover and an interesting premise/theme, this is going to be an incredible album. One from a music queen and hugely innovative artist. St. Vincent produced All Born Screaming. She is a remarkable producer who does not get credit for that. All Born Screaming should correct that. Go and pre-order this essential album:

“Album number seven and St Vincent continues to thrill, educate and be innovative. Her first fully self-produced album (having co-produced every one of her previous efforts), All Born Screaming is St. Vincent at her most primal. Featuring Clark leading “a curated group of rippers” through the brawny “Broken Man,”  the mordant catwalk sashay through the deafening assault of self-loathing that is “Big Time Nothing,” the sublime, elegiac earworm “Sweetest Fruit," All Born Screaming is equal parts spiritual desolation and rapturous acceptance. “If you’re born screaming, that’s a great sign,” says Clark, “because it means you’re breathing. You’re alive. My god. It’s joyous. And then it’s also a protest. We’re all born in protest in a certain way. It’s terrifying to be alive, it’s ecstatic to be alive. It’s everything”

April is a busy and wonderful album for releases! Some huge albums come out then. I have recommend some that you may want to pre-order and add to your collection. If you need some guidance as to which albums are worth spending some money on and time with, then I hope that the above…

IS of assistance.

FEATURE: A Unique and Amazing Live Event: Inside the BBC Radio 6 Music Festival 2024

FEATURE:

 

 

A Unique and Amazing Live Event

IN THIS PHOTO: BBC Radio 6 Music’s Tom Ravenscroft and Deb Grant/PHOTO CREDIT: BBC

Inside the BBC Radio 6 Music Festival 2024

_________

LATER in this feature….

I will hear from BBC Radio 6 Music D.J.s Deb Grant, Stuart Maconie and Chris Hawkins. They will share their memories of the BBC Radio 6 Music Festival and how they are feeling about this year’s one. Coming from its new permanent home in Greater Manchester, it will host some incredible artists and D.J.s. Running from 7th-10th March, amazing artists like Gossip and The Smile will play. You can find out more details about the BBC Radio 6 Music Festival via the station’s Instagram page. Before getting to interviews and insight from Deb Grant, Stuart Maconie and Chris Hawkins, here is the press release for one of the year’s most essential festivals:

“The incredible line up for this year’s BBC Radio 6 Music Festival, which takes place from Thursday 7 – Sunday 10 March in Greater Manchester, was announced live on air this morning by Lauren Laverne (7.30am–10.30am).

The station’s flagship live music festival, which is now based permanently in Greater Manchester, will once again feature performances you won’t see anywhere else, new music debuts, unique collaborations and surprise guests. The artists who will perform at O2 Victoria Warehouse Manchester include:

Thursday 7 March

• Young Fathers, performing a unique collaboration with the Hulme and Moss Side based NIA community choir, supported by Hak Baker and SHERELLE (DJ set)

Friday 8 March

• Gossip, with their first UK show in four years and giving 6 Music the global premiere of unreleased material as well as celebrating International Women’s Day, supported by CMAT and AFRODEUTSCHE (DJ set)

Saturday 9 March

• The Smile and the London Contemporary Orchestra with a world exclusive performance and the first time the Thom Yorke, Jonny Greenwood and Tom Skinner project have performed with an orchestra. The Smile will be supported by Jordan Rakei and Mary Anne Hobbs + Anna Phoebe (a unique hybrid performance featuring a DJ set from Mary Anne and Anna playing live violin and viola)

Further shows include a BBC Music Introducing night at Band on the Wall and New Music Fix Live at YES, the first time the 6 Music Festival has visited the venue. Club nights will include Indie Forever at Band on the Wall and Rave Forever at Archive, Depot Mayfield Manchester in partnership with the Warehouse Project. There will also be Morning After Mix Live events on the Saturday and Sunday at RAMONA: Jamz Supernova will broadcast her 6 Music show from the venue on Saturday 9 March (1pm-4pm), which will feature a live DJ set from Konny Kon (Children of Zeus), and Cerys Matthews will present from RAMONA on Sunday 10 March (10am-1pm), with a live DJ set from Femi Koleoso of Ezra Collective.

DJs playing across the city at the festival during the weekend include:

Lolly Adefope, Space Afrika, 96 Back, Daphni, Lily Fontaine (English Teacher), Mary Anne Hobbs, I. JORDAN, Femi Koleoso (Ezra Collective), Amy Lamé, LCY, Mica Levi, Rainy Miller, Not Bad For A Girl, DJ Paulette, Emily Pilbeam, salute, DJ Seinfeld, Nathan Shepherd, Iceboy Violet, Yyre and Konny Kon (Children of Zeus).

Highlights from the festival will be broadcast on BBC Radio 6 Music and BBC Radio Manchester from MediaCityUK in Salford, as well as on BBC Sounds, BBC Four, BBC iPlayer and BBC Music’s YouTube channel.

Tickets for each separate event will be available from 10am on Thursday 18 January via www.bbc.co.uk/6musicfestival. All events are 18 and over only.

Young Fathers says: “A 6 Music stage has been given to us and the door of endless possibilities has been opened. Beyond anything else it will be a night to celebrate a wide mix of folk coming together. GERONIMO!!”

Hak Baker says: “6 Music has been a long-time supporter but I feel since the birth of my debut you lot have just taken it to another echelon. I just can’t thank you enough for broadcasting my messages on the airwaves. Outside East London, Manchester, home of theHaçienda, has long been my fave city. We always sell out over there and we always have it large, most importantly so bringing it heavy on March 7 2024. Couple of newbies no one’s ever heard and a few more tricks up the old wizard sleeve. Hold on to ya hats!!”

Gossip, who will be performing never heard before tracks, says: "We're so excited -Manchester is going to be the first to hear our new record live! Such a special crowd, we've missed you so much and can't wait to be back!"

CMAT says: "My performance at the 6 Music Festival will be the best show you’ll see in your whole entire life!  Expect camp, gay people, energy, country music as well as mediocre guitar playing from me and very good guitar playing from other people. When I was making my first album and listening to 6 Music most days, Iggy Pop played one of my songs on his show. I heard it from the other room and ran in to hear Iggy Pop’s mouth forming my name - it was a crazy day for the parish."

During an on air interview with Lauren Laverne, The Smile says: “ARRGGGH - we’ve got a lot of work to do to prep for the 6 Music Festival as it’s one thing to do it in the studio, but it’s another thing to do it live. We’ve decided to work with the London Contemporary Orchestra on the performance but as they’re all incredibly versatile musicians, we’ll figure it out!”

Jordan Rakei says: “I’m really excited to play in Manchester again because it’s one of the earliest shows I can remember after moving to the UK in 2015, so I can’t wait to show love to the city that showed me love when I first moved over. I’ll be playing new music as well as some of my favorite older songs. I’ll also be bringing my biggest band I’ve ever had, there will lots of singers on stage so I’m super excited!  I’m a massive fan of 6 Music because whenever I turn the radio on, I always hear something progressive, which pushes me to discover new music in all different fields, sounds and genres. It’s somewhere I tap into to learn something new because it’s very easy to get caught up in what you know. So it’s such an honor to be at a festival championing new music like this… so super grateful!”

Lauren Laverne says: “We can’t wait to kick start the 6 Music Festival and find out what some of our favourite artists have in store for us - in a busy festival season this is a chance to see and hear something brand new! See you there!”

IN THIS PHOTO: CMAT

Samantha Moy, Head of 6 Music says: “The 6 Music Festival is always a very special moment in our year and we can’t wait to bring our audience some truly unique performances. Come and join us! ”

Mayor of Greater Manchester Andy Burnham says: “It’s fantastic to see the BBC Radio 6 Music Festival returning to Greater Manchester this year. We’re immensely proud of our musical heritage, but also the phenomenal depth of talent and the exciting independent scene across our city-region right now. As BBC Radio 6 Music has always supported new and alternative artists, it’s a perfect fit for the festival to have its permanent home here for years to come.

“There’s so much new Greater Manchester music out there right now that deserves to be heard, which is why it’s so important to develop platforms for emerging artists. That’s precisely what we’ve been celebrating with the Mayor’s Artist of the Month on BBC Radio Manchester, and like BBC Radio 6 Music, we want to help those acts get on and reach new audiences.”

6 Music Festival 2024 full line up

Thursday 7 March

6 Music Festival at Victoria Warehouse Manchester from 6.30pm

• SHERELLE (DJ Set)

• Hak Baker

• Young Fathers (performing a unique collaboration with the Hulme and Moss Side based NIA community choir)

BBC Music Introducing at Band on the Wall from 7pm:

• OneDa

• Witch Fever

• Porij

New Music Fix Live at YES from 10pm, featuring DJ sets from:

• Yyre

• Rainy Miller b2b LCY

• Iceboy Violet b2b 96 Back

• Space Afrika b2b Mica Levi

Friday 8 March

6 Music Festival at Victoria Warehouse Manchester from 6.30pm in celebration of International Women’s Day

• AFRODEUTSCHE (DJ set)

• CMAT

• Gossip

Indie Forever club night at Band on the Wall from 9pm, featuring DJ sets packed with solid gold, upbeat indie bangers:

• Emily Pilbeam

• Amy Lamé

• Lily Fontaine (English Teacher)

• Lolly Adefope

• Nathan Shepherd (Good Future)

IMAGE CREDIT: BBC

Saturday 9 March

Jamz Supernova x Morning After Mix Live at Ramona, live on air from 1pm–4pm featuring DJ set from:

• Konny Kon (Children of Zeus) (3pm-5pm)

BBC Introducing presents Open Decksat RAMONA from 5-8pm

• RAMONA sees the return of BBC Introducing presents Open Decks, offering the unique opportunity for emerging DJs to jump behind the turntables to perform at this year’s 6 Music Festival. There will be a sign-up sheet at the door and all genres are welcome! Participants are encouraged to share original compositions as part of their mixes. The only things attendees will need are their USB’s, headphones and their A-Game!

6 Music Festival at Victoria Warehouse Manchester from 6.30pm

• Mary Anne Hobbs + Anna Phoebe (DJ set from Mary Anne and Anna playing live violin and viola)

• Jordan Rakei

• The Smile and the London Contemporary Orchestra

Rave Forever at Archive, Depot Mayfield Manchester from 9pm, in partnership with the Warehouse Project featuring the finest dance music from across the decades, with DJ sets from:

• Not Bad For A Girl

• DJ Paulette

• I. JORDAN

• Daphni

• DJ Seinfeld b2b salute

Sunday 10 March

Cerys Matthews x Morning After Mix Live at Ramona live on air from 10am – 1pm featuring DJ set from:

• Femi Koleoso of Ezra Collective (12pm-2pm)

6 Music presenters including Chris Hawkins, Craig Charles, Deb Grant, Mary Anne Hobbs, Don Letts, Amy Lamé, Lauren Laverne Stuart Maconie, Cerys Matthews, Gilles Peterson, Jamz Supernova, Mark Radcliffe and Tom Ravenscroft will all be broadcasting live over the festival weekend from MediaCityUK in Salford and the festival venues.

There’ll be live and recorded-live performances from every event broadcast on 6 Music across the schedule for listeners to enjoy, wherever they are in the UK.

6 Music Broadcast Schedule

Thursday 7 March

• Chris Hawkins (5am-7.30am), Lauren Laverne (7.30am – 10.30am), Mary Anne Hobbs (10.30am – 1pm) and Craig Charles (1pm-4pm) will all broadcast from MediaCityUK BBC studios

• 4pm-7pm - Huw Stephens from Band on the Wall

• 7pm–11pm - Deb Grant & Tom Ravenscroft from YES, featuring live music from Victoria Warehouse Manchester and Band on the Wall.

• 11pm – 2am (into Friday 8 March) - New Music Fix Live featuring live DJ sets

Friday 8 March

• 5am-7.30am - Chris Hawkins

• 7.30am–10.30am - Lauren Laverne

• 10.30am–1pm - Mary Anne Hobbs

• 1pm-4pm – Craig Charles

• 4pm-7pm - Huw Stephens

• 7pm–11pm - Deb Grant & Tom Ravenscroft, featuring live music from Victoria Warehouse Manchester

• 11pm – 2am (into Sat 9 March) Indie Forever club night live from Band on the Wall

IMAGE CREDIT: BBC

Saturday 9 March

• 8am–10am - Mark Radcliffe and Stuart Maconie

• 10am –1pm - Craig Charles

• 1-4pm – Jamz Supernova x Morning After Mix Live, featuring DJ set from Konny Kon (Children of Zeus), from RAMONA

• 4-7pm – Gilles Peterson

• 7-11pm – Deb Grant and Tom Ravenscroft, featuring live music from Victoria Warehouse Manchester

• 11pm-3am (into Sunday 10 March) – Rave Forever at Archive, Depot Mayfield Manchester

Sunday 10 March

• 8am-10am - Chris Hawkins

• 10am-1pm – Cerys Matthews x Morning After Mix Live, featuring DJ set from Femi Koleoso from RAMONA

• 1pm–4pm – Guy Garvey

• 4pm-6pm – Stuart Maconie and Deb Grant present highlights from the 6 Music Festival 2024

• 6pm-8pm – Amy Lamé and Don Letts present Now Playing - 10 years of the 6 Music Festival

• 8pm-10pm – Freak Zone Manchester special presented by Stuart Maconie

• 10pm-00:00 – Lose Yourself Manchester special

BBC Radio Manchester will hear from BBC Music Introducing Live at Band on the Wall on Thursday 7 March, bringing listeners performance highlights from the Manchester-based artists playing that evening.

All BBC Radio 6 Music and BBC Radio Manchester programmes will be available on BBC Sounds after broadcast.

On the evening of Sunday March 10, BBC Four will broadcast programmes from the 6 Music Festival.

IMAGE CREDIT: BBC

From early afternoon on Saturday 9 March, BBC iPlayer will stream performance highlights from the festival, including Gossip, Young Fathers, Hak Baker and CMAT before showing sets from Jordan Rakei and The Smile live from Victoria Warehouse.

Sets will also be available to watch on BBC iPlayer for 30 days, with individual tracks available on BBC Music’s YouTube channel.

In the lead up to the festival, listeners can enjoy programmes celebrating artists who are performing at this year’s festival, and stars of past festivals.

Gossip’s Beth Ditto will feature on The First Time With…, presented by Matt Everitt on Tuesday 16 Jan (11pm-midnight), following the recent interviews with Cate Le Bon, Holly Johnson, John Grant, Stormzy and David Holmes, which are available to listen to now on BBC Sounds. In addition to her work with Gossip, Beth has also collaborated with Calvin Johnson, Simian Mobile Disco, Jarvis Cocker, Paul Weller and Graham Coxon. As a solo artist she is known for her self-titled EP, released in 2011 and her album Fake Sugar (2017).  In November 2023, Gossip announced that they will release their first album in 11 years, Real Power, produced by Rick Rubin.

This year’s headliners will also be featured in February as the station’s Artist in Residence, a four episode series which takes a journey into the musical soul of an artist, based around a theme or mood. Young Fathers will host four episodes w/c 12 February (Monday-Thursday, 11pm-midnight), Gossip w/c 19 February (Monday-Thursday, 11pm-midnight) and The Smile w/c 26 February (Monday-Thursday, 11pm-midnight).

From Tuesday 16 January, BBC Sounds presents a 6 Music Festival Back to Back Sounds collection, launching with themed episodes of Indie Forever, Rave Forever and The Morning After Mix.

Artists who have previously performed at the festival, or are performing this year, will be featured in 6 Music’s Artist Collection (Tuesdays, midnight-5am), including Thom Yorke (9 January), Gossip (6 February), The National (13 February), Depeche Mode (20 February), Little Simz (27 February) and Young Fathers (5 March).

Since it began in 2014, the 6 Music Festival has taken place all over the UK, including in Manchester, Tyneside, Bristol, Glasgow, Liverpool, Camden (London) and Cardiff and has seen performances from artists including Anna Calvi, Bombay Bicycle Club, Depeche Mode, Ezra Collective, Goldfrapp, Hot Chip, Johnny Marr, Kae Tempest, Khruangbin, Little Simz, Pixies, Primal Scream, Róisín Murphy, Self Esteem, Wet Leg and many more.

The 2023 festival featured performances from Loyle Carner, joined by the AMC Gospel Choir, Christine and the Queens, who gave the global premiere of his new live show and Arlo Parks, with the world-exclusive performance of her latest music and guest appearances from Romy and Tom Coll of Fontaines D.C.”.

I have been fortunate to grab some words from three incredible BBC Radio 6 Music D.J.s who will broadcasting from the festival. Thanks to the amazing Chris Hawkins (who broadcasts weekdays on early breakfast), Stuart Maconie (who broadcasts weekend mornings with Mark Radcliffe and hosts The Freak Zone) and Deb Grant (who presents the New Music Fix weekdays). They share their thoughts on the BBC Radio 6 Music Festival moving permanently to Greater Manchester, in addition to sharing their memories of festivals past - and the artists they are looking forward to catching at this year’s festival…

CHRIS HAWKINS

PHOTO CREDIT: BBC

It is great to see the 6 Music Festival in Greater Manchester. How important does it feel knowing that it is taking place there?

The festival launched in Greater Manchester and it’s fantastic to be here, ten years on. Manchester is one of the U.K.’s great music cities and there’s a great buzz about the festival this year - it’s an awesome line-up.

The festival is now permanently going to be based there. How important is that too? Do you feel it will draw more eyes and bodies to what is happening in Greater Manchester?

The Manchester music scene is thriving. Maybe I’m biased cos I live here, but I think there’s more great music coming out of the city than ever before. The Festival not only brings great acts to Greater Manchester but also celebrates some of the best venues in the country.

You have been at quite a few of 6 Music’s festivals? Do you have particularly favourite memories? How do you think it has grown through the years?

I’ve been at every 6 Music Festival since the start; at Victoria Warehouse when Blossoms were incredible and I got to introduce The National. I’ve seen the National loads but that was the best I’ve ever seen them. Royal Blood in Gateshead was explosive and IDLES were utterly sublime in Cardiff in 2022.

“I’m also really looking forward to CMAT - a real future star”

You are going to be broadcasting through the festival’s duration. How will your shows differ from your normal BBC Radio 6 Music broadcasts? Is there a little extra electricity and excitement in the air?!

Definitely. We have a unique connection with our audience. It’s a real community of like-minded music fans so the festival is a great chance to get together and do what we love - experience amazing live music shows.

There are so many terrific artists on the bill. Which are you most looking forward to hearing from?

This year’s headliners are fantastic - Young Fathers, Gossip and The Smile will all be brilliant. I’m also really looking forward to CMAT - a real future star.

STUART MACONIE

PHOTO CREDIT: BBC

Yeah, it’s permanent home is now Greater Manchester. Which, if it’s going to have a permanent home, I’m delighted about. I love the fact that we used to tour around and get to meet 6 Music listeners around the country, but I know this makes a great deal of sense for its to have a permanent home. I’m delighted that its now the world that I come from and that I broadcast from and love. It has a very rich musical heritage. It’ll be great to meet people. Manchester and Salford are pretty well-situated for people who are going to come from elsewhere for the gigs.

What I love about the 6 Music festival. I should say two things. Getting to meet listeners. It’s always great to meet listeners face to face, because when you’re broadcasting, you don’t know who’s listening. In these days of communication; text and emails and that kind of thing, we get much more instantaneous communication than we ever would have got once. But even so, it’s nice to shake a hand and see people in the flesh. That’s always great.

“Getting to meet listeners. It’s always great to meet listeners face to face, because when you’re broadcasting, you don’t know who’s listening” 

It's also great to meet my colleagues. We are a station with a great sense of community. We’re a very diverse station., but I think we’re coming from a very similar place in terms of our enthusiasm for music and our interest and curiosity. It’s actually really good fun for me to meet my colleagues as friends for a couple of days socially. The people I wouldn’t normally see because they broadcast elsewhere in the country.

I do look back at past 6 Music festivals with great affection. It seems invidious to single out any favourites. I loved Glasgow, because I practically lived at Barrowlands and I got to know the bar staff by name. But they’ve all been great, really. Cardiff was great; Liverpool was great. Newcastle was great. Favourite gigs? I would say would be The Coral in Liverpool, who were amazing. Hot Chip at The Sage in Gateshead, who were amazing. Khruangbin in Cardiff was an amazing thing. Those are three that absolutely spring to mind.

This time, I’m looking forward to seeing Porij and Young Fathers and The Smile. I’m introducing The Smile on stage. It’s going to be interesting. I love that album (Wall of Eyes). Quite Prog-y. Could be King Crimson in parts – so obviously I’m going to love that.

As for you feeling should it be seen as prominent as Glastonbury. Well…that is quite a big claim and a bold claim, Sam. But who knows.. Maybe one day…

DEB GRANT

PHOTO CREDIT: BBC

It is great to see the 6 Music Festival in Greater Manchester. How important does it feel knowing that it is taking place there? It seems like a very natural home…

For me personally, speaking as someone who’s only lived in Manchester since last May, it feels completely right for the festival to be making its home here. The music scene in this part of the country, from grassroots to stadiums, is absolutely thriving. There’s something very special happening here with live music and also with new music – Great Manchester obviously has a rich musical history, but new artists are emerging all the time who are right at the cutting edge in terms of creativity across a huge breadth of genres. It’s exciting to be putting a spotlight on all of that and bringing music fans here to enjoy it, whether in person or via the radio.

I think a lot of people overlook Manchester and the surrounding areas in terms of its importance and the wonderful, eclectic venues. Is it fair to say more people should be looking here when it comes to the live scene and local talent?

I can’t emphasise enough how incredible the live scene is here. Any given night presents you with a whole range of options, from garage rock in a sweaty basement to heritage pop in an arena full of dry ice. There are multilevel venues with a different vibe in every room, there are invite-only raves in disused mills, DIY festivals, multi-venue all-nighters, it’s overwhelming sometimes! And the local talent is outrageous – we are constantly discovering new Manchester bands to play on New Music Fix, and that’s not because we’re specifically looking at Manchester music; it’s just seems to be a petri dish of creativity!

“…where else will you catch Gossip, The Smile and CMAT and Iceboy Violet all on the same flyer?!”

Compared to every other festival out there, what would you say distinguishes 6 Music’s?

The line-up is so carefully selected by people who really care about music – bands our listeners love who we know will put on an amazing live show, always with something special or exclusive included in their set, along with artists we adore whose music we want to share on a broader scale. Just like on the station, all genres are represented, from the familiar to the wonderfully weird – where else will you catch Gossip, The Smile and CMAT and Iceboy Violet all on the same flyer?! Also, 6 Music has always felt like a family to me: the DJs and the listeners all united by a more-than-just-casual love of music, so to bring everyone together in a physical space feels very, very special.

The whole four days looks awesome. Friday (8th March) features Gossip, with their first U.K. show in four years. They are giving 6 Music the global premiere of unreleased material as well as celebrating International Women’s Day, supported by CMAT and AFRODEUTSCHE (DJ set). Which artists are you particularly looking forward to seeing?

This is the beauty of BBC Sounds and iPlayer – myself and Ravers [Tom Ravenscroft] will be broadcasting for most of the festival so I’m not sure how much I’ll get to see in person, although I’m very excited about putting Young Fathers and Hak Baker to air on Thursday and staying up late at YES with Iceboy Violet, LCY, Yyre, Rainy Miller and 96 Back at our New Music Fix night. OneDa will be amazing on Thursday too. Then later in the week there’s The Smile and Jordan Rakai. Obviously, the legendary DJ Paulette, Femi Koleoso - who is such a ray of positivity and will be just the boost of energy I need by Sunday after four days of celebrations (when I’m on air with Stuart Maconie).

“The festival is an extension of the station in that way, always breaking new musical ground, always looking for new talent and giving it the spotlight it deserves”

So many artists reveal how important the 6 Music Festival is in terms of launching their career and standing as a highlight. Is it fair to say it is one of the most influential and essential when it comes to platforming the best and most exciting new talent?

The festival is an extension of the station in that way, always breaking new musical ground, always looking for new talent and giving it the spotlight it deserves. Listeners look to 6 Music for their new favourite bands, I know I do, so the festival is doing that in a sweatier, more visceral way.

Many will talk about the artists included through the three days, though lots of amazing D.J.s are featured. Do you think festivals in general should give more spotlight and voice to D.J.s as well as artists?

I think it’s a great balance – the line-up reflects what 6 Music looks like in 2024, a space for a whole range of musical experiences, from large venues and big names to cutting edge dance music, indie gigs to raves. I just wish I could be in several places at once.

To end, you can select a song from any artist appearing across the festival and I will play it here. What shall we go for?

96 Back is going B2B with Iceboy Violet at our New Music Fix Live show at YES on Thursday night and I think it’s going to be WILD. There’s a brilliant edit 96 Back did of a Hudmo [Hudson Mohawke] and Nikki Nair track which Hudson Mohawke actually played during the mix he put together for us in Glasgow last year. If it gets played on Thursday I will lose my mind.

The BBC Radio 6 Music Festival takes place from 7th-10th March in Greater Manchester. Tune in on 6 Music, BBC Sounds, BBC iPlayer and BBC Four.

FEATURE: The Deal They’re Making… Kate Bush’s Role as Ambassador for Record Store Day UK 2024

FEATURE:

 

 

The Deal They’re Making…

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

Kate Bush’s Role as Ambassador for Record Store Day UK 2024

_________

ON 20th April….

PHOTO CREDIT: Mick Haupt/Pexels

we celebrate this year’s Record Store Day UK. RSD 2024 has some incredible exclusives and releases. A day where we celebrate the culture of indie record shops, there is a lot to look forward to. You can follow Record Store UK on Twitter. It is one of the most interesting and quality-heavy years in recent memory. You will definitely want to be involved:

“Record Store Day UK is proud to announce this year’s list of exclusive and special releases coming on Saturday 20th April!

Get ready for collectible and limited-edition records from the likes of Jessie Ware, Noah Kahan, Gabriels, Katy J Pearson, Blur, Sophie Ellis-Bextor and many more!

Hundreds of artists have come together to celebrate the UK’s independent record shops which are at the heart of local communities up and down the country. Artists, labels, and stores on every continent in the world* have signed up for the 17th edition of the annual event which champions the unique culture of independent record shops and the art of vinyl.

*Except in Antarctica...nobody needs to queue up outside a store in there on a cold April morning!

With special records spanning rock, pop, jazz, hip-hop, reggae, classical, folk - and even a release from ‘The Rocky Horror Picture Show’ – there will be something on offer for music fans of all ages and tastes at their local record store in April.

And that's not all! Record Store Day is delighted to welcome exciting talent such as Laufey, Holly Humberstone, Fizz, English Teacher, Maisie Peters and BRIT nominees - Noah Kahan, Young Fathers and Olivia Dean to this year’s list.

Established fan favourites such as The Rolling Stones, Tom Grennan, Notorious B.I.G, Garbage and Lily Allen will also be releasing special vinyl editions to throw their support behind the hard-working music lovers running records stores all over the UK”.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Record Store Day UK (@recordstoreday)

One of the most exciting aspects of this year’s RSD is that Kate Bush is their Ambassador. The Ambassador is someone who champions record shops around the U.K. and acts as the face of the event. As part of the day, Bush’s song, Eat the Music, will be released as a 10”. Here are more details. The song is from 1993’s The Red Shoes. It was released as a single in the U.S. on 7th September, 1993, though not in the U.K. Here, Rubberband Girl was favoured as the single. It is great that the song is getting this standalone release. It is such a coup that Kate Bush is Ambassador. Record Store Day UK announced the news proudly:

“Record Store Day UK is honoured to announce Kate Bush as this year’s official ambassador.

As part of her role, Kate will champion the special and unique culture of record shops all over the UK and celebrate the art of vinyl.

Kate will also release a special 10” Record Store Day edition of “Eat the Music” exclusively in independent record shops on Saturday 20th April.

The single was originally scheduled to be the first release from her 1993 album “Red Shoes”, but was cancelled in favour of “Rubberband Girl”. The RSD edition is now set to be a hugely collectible release for Kate Bush fans.

Kate has recreated her own unique version, a beautiful UV printed 10” with her preferred track list of: Eat the Music, Lily and Big Stripey Lie.

As Record Store Day ambassador, Kate Bush joins an illustrious list of artists including Taylor Swift, Elton John, Noel Gallagher and the 1975.

Kate said today:

“What a huge honour to have been asked to be Ambassador for this year’s Record Store Day. It really is a great privilege. Isn’t it great to see how the resurgence in vinyl has taken the music industry by complete surprise? It had decided to leave vinyl far behind, but it would seem that not everyone agrees! I love that!

I know there are many, many artists who are just as excited to see the audience turning the tide. In the same way that some people like to read a book on Kindle but also want to have a book as a physical object, a lot of people like vinyl and streaming. Both have different appeals.

The added bonus of vinyl is that it encourages people to listen to albums. An art form that I’ve always thought can be treasured in a unique way. An album on vinyl is a beautiful thing, given a strong identity by its large-scale artwork. There’s a much more personal connection with the artist and their work.

It’s been fun putting designs together for some of the previous RSDs. This year’s design echoes the cancelled release of Eat the Music as the first single from the album, The Red Shoes. The image was intended to be on the cover of the single bag and is now on the disc as a UV print.

The title, Eat the Music, is meant to be a playful nod to 'If music be the food of love, play on,' from Shakespeare's Twelfth Night.

Each year Record Store Day gathers more attention, more momentum, and attracts more people who cram into indie record stores all over the world to see what’s up. What’s new?

This year, I hope you have a fantastic time at this very important event, and that you get to celebrate music that’s been specially released for you.

Very best wishes,

Kate”.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by The state51 Conspiracy (@state51)

The news was announced on Wednesday (28th February) and received so much love and fascination. Few expected someone as huge and adored as Kate Bush would be an Ambassador for RSD. She has always been a champion of physical music. There will be more updates and bits from her as we head towards 20th April. Bush’s delight that vinyl is turning the tide and is selling so well is wonderful to see. She doesn’t mind people streaming, yet she understands how important physical music is. That tangible nature of the format. So many people have shared their excitement that Kate Bush is this year’s Ambassador. RSD is going to be a magnificent event. Kate Bush’s Eat the Music release is among a wave of wonderful releases. I wonder what the rest of this year holds for Kate Bush. This is quite a big step. She won’t be doing any public appearances or interviews, though her Ambassador role shows that she is still engaged. Someone dedicating herself to physical music and independent record stores, one wonders if she is preparing to release something herself. Her passion for physical music is clear. She has reissued her albums and recently brought out some special editions. She knows how crucial it is to have something physical. A product that you can hold and keep. Record stores are at the very heart f of the music industry. These spots where record buyers congregate and mix. It is vital that we keep them alcove and show support. Record Store Day UK is a yearly event where we see this buzz and new interest in record stores. Kate Bush’s patronage is a massive thing. One of the most important artists ever, reading her statement (in reaction to news of being the Ambassador) was so wonderful. She is proud to have been asked. Her clear love of vinyl and how you get something physical and real in your hands. An album that you can keep for years. How crucial record stores are. As we look forward to 20th April, we show love and respect to RSD Ambassador, Kate Bush. Go and get a copy of Eat the Music if you can from your local record shop. It is a beauty that you will want to…

ADD it your list.

FEATURE: Saluting the Queens: Allie X

FEATURE:

 

 

Saluting the Queens

Allie X

_________

RETURNING to this feature….

 I wanted to salute the amazing Allie X. The Canadian artist released her new album, Girl with No Face, on 23rd February. It follows on from 2020’s Cape God. An amazing and inspiring artist, I will bring in a few interviews with her. I am starting out with this one from Eurphoriazine. There may be some who have not heard of Allie X. I think she is one of the most compelling and important artists in music. Someone who is so intriguing and fascinating;

“Congratulations on your third studio album, Girl With No Face. You’re really close to unleashing it into the world. How are you feeling?

Good! Especially with this one, I do feel quite good about it. It’s such a long time coming. I just wanna get it off my chest and get that crucial part of the equation, which is the audience. It becomes something else once there’s an audience and I’m ready for it to make that transition.

It’s your first self-produced album. For that reason, does it feel like your most rewarding too?

I just feel so proud that I managed to get it done [laughs]. I did have a little bit of help at the end there with a fella named Justin Meldal-Johnsen. I definitely couldn’t have gotten it completed without him, but largely the process was me alone in a room for years and I really didn’t think I was gonna make it during a lot of points. It will be very gratifying to have it out in the world. I can’t say that response doesn’t matter. If this was like my most hated album for some reason, it probably would change how I feel about it. I just can’t help that. Or if it was my most celebrated and successful, that would probably have a bearing as well.

You’re very interactive with your fans and always have been. Media-wise, are you someone who likes to read your own press?

Yeah. I’ve never had an experience where I’ve been completely brutalized in the press. So maybe if I had I wouldn’t. Generally, I’m reading my reviews and the articles that come out about it. One thing I’m avoiding is fan forums, like, that is too much for me. That is a bit too intense. I made a mistake of looking once, years ago, and I was like, never again [laughs]. But other than that I generally do read and I’ll even search myself on Twitter just to see what the honest opinion is. I feel like that’s a good place to sort of see if fans truly like it or if they’re just saying that they are when they’re tagging you.

You previously explained this album has no clear theme or concept. Was that a cautious decision or did it just work out that way?

You probably read that in the Rolling Stone article that came out in October. And at that point, I hadn’t really wrapped my head around it enough. That interview came a bit early for me. At this point, I would say that it is more sort of thematically and conceptually together in my head. For me, this one is about this whole process of making it and sort of where I’m at now. I feel that this was a transition in my life that kind of liberated me. The act of taking on all creative responsibility as well as most business responsibility in the last few years, for better or for worse, has completely taken the reigns on my own life and my own career. It’s kind of giving myself a blank slate and a fresh start in terms of absolutely everything coming from me. I guess conceptually in the music, there’s a lot of identity exploration as usual because I always kind of have an aspect of that in my records. There’s definitely an element of fantasy and layers of anger being released. I would say Girl with No Face, as a concept, has something to do with this seed inside of me that I uncovered over the course of a few years. She almost became another presence in the room that guided me through writing it.

I remember you said in a 2020 interview that you were still on a journey to discovering yourself. Now that it’s four years, I was wondering how much has changed during the creative process of this album?

Yeah, I do think a lot changed. I think I just let certain things be about myself now that I wanted to hide before or wanted to change. I now just sort of let it be. I’m trying to be very honest with both my fans and with the press or with anyone in the industry that I speak to. That would probably be the thing I would identify as the biggest change in me.

The latest release, “Off With Her Tits,” is having a moment with fans and even new listeners on TikTok. What’s it like witnessing that in real-time?

It’s good. I mean, these are really good numbers for me. They’re still not numbers that are like taking the world by storm or anything, but for my standards and, and what I hope for, I’m very happy with them. I felt really glad that the community just got it and that I didn’t have to explain anything, really. It was just sort of understood. And I feel like that song is very me. I feel like I found a tone there that found a balance between darkness and then just ridiculousness and camp. I was able to get some monkeys off my back by making fun of them basically, you know? That’s been a really gratifying process for me to release this song.

There are so many standouts on the first listen and I wanted to talk about a few of them. Let’s start with the opening track, “Weird World.” Tell me about this song.

That was the first song I wrote for the album because “Girl with No Face,” the seed of that started in 2014, so I guess technically that’s the oldest song, but “Weird World” was the first one that I sat down and wrote for this project in the summer of 2020 where I was like, “Oh, I think there’s something here. I think this is worth pursuing as a body of work.” The reference to 1984 and the lyrics, it’s got dystopian themes. I think without me knowing it, it really set the stage for what became sort of a theme of my writing over the next few years, which was coming to terms with reality and sort of seeing the world differently than I thought it was. And then dealing with all the emotions that came with that.

You previously mentioned when announcing the album that one of the songs had an “early Madonna” vibe. Were you referring to “Galina?”

Yes! I’m specifically referring to the synth baseline because if you listen to those early Madonna records, whoever was producing those baselines or play or the session player that was doing them, they were so all over the place and brilliant. I really was thinking about that type of synth face when I programmed that line. I don’t know if the melody or anything is very Madonna but I definitely took inspiration from the track.

“Hardware Software” is an obvious standout just for its production alone. It’s so wacky, I love it.

I was watching, I forget what film it was, it was some French film and I was listening to the soundtrack and realizing that French contemporary music, not pop music, but contemporary classical, they have these really wacky chord progressions and modulations and voicings. The next morning I sat down and I was like, “I wanna try to write that kind of voicing.” That’s where that came from. I just rapped over it and then “Hardware Software” came out. It is a whole another level of wacky. It was kind of just an improvised half-day at my parents’ house. I wrote that and thought, “Yeah, I think this could be on the album” [laughs].

Was there any reason why you wanted to close the album with “Truly Dreams?”

Because it’s the only one that’s a bit of a more of an optimistic song. Whereas the other ones are a bit of a punch you in the face, punch you in the gut, take off your tits, take off your face, you know, at the end of this, the record I wanted to say, “But I’ll keep dreaming.”

You tend to tour your albums. You’ve already got in-store record shop appearances planned. Is a tour announcement on the horizon?

I’d like to but I’m also like scared to tour. I’m scared of the loss of money and I’m scared of getting sick again. I had to cancel a big tour in 2022. I feel like I can’t afford to do that to people again. Like, I don’t wanna lose. So I don’t know. And I have PTSD about the whole thing but I also love to perform and promote my stuff, so I’m struggling with it actually at the moment. We’re looking into touring, but we haven’t made a final decision.

Lastly, what are you hoping listeners will take away from the album when they do hear it?

You know, first and foremost, I think what I always want listeners to take away is a sense of belonging. A sense of feeling something. I like them to have their own personal experience. I don’t need it to be all about me. I think once music has an audience, it’s meant to become something else. So that would be my first wish is that it gives people some relief or it gives them a chance to express themselves or it gives them something to relate to, something to cry to, something to laugh to. But my second wish, on a personal note, would be that I just put something out there that really represents who I am and very authentically who I am. That chance for me to be seen and understood would be the secondary thing that I would wish for. I think that’s the great privilege of being an artist, is having a chance to really like, take your feelings, put them in the world and have people say, “Yeah, I understand that, I see you,” you know?”.

Moving onto InStyle and their chat with Allie X. This feature is all about saluting incredible women in music. I feel we have this amazing and really strong artist who is also an amazing talent. Girl with No Face is such a phenomenal album from a truly distinct artist. I would urge everyone to check out her music:

“InStyle: We’re less than 10 days away from the release of Girl With No Face; describe your state of being.

Allie X: "I’m definitely enjoying myself now more than I have been through making the record and the campaign; most of my work is done at this point. It’s been an enormous lift. I don’t even know how I’ve done it—producing and writing myself, and then I took over management as well. Every aspect of my business, I oversee. There’s not enough hours in the day, and I’ve been pretty stressed. I’m glad to just talk about it, and be dressed up, and perform. This is fun. It’s a celebration."

InStyle: John first put me on to your music, and we stan. How would you describe your relationship with your fans?

Allie X: "It’s multi-faceted. First and foremost, I’ve come to understand that fans are the only thing that matters—truly. In the music industry, we have as many as 30 people on our extended team at times, and they’re all advising you, and some people are associated with big artists and have a lot of money and can advance you, blah, blah, blah. When I first started in the industry, I really thought those were gatekeepers, right? But what I’ve realized is that all I need is fans. I just want people to consume my music, to buy tickets to my shows, to purchase my vinyls. My fans can provide my livelihood. I appreciate that there are people in the world that want to hear what I have to say and interpret it and relate to it. What a privilege.

At the same time, I do find—and this is in the song “John and Jonathan”—fame sort of strange. And I’m not that famous, but I do find this idea of being someone that’s worshiped or whatever a strange position to be in. Seeing fan culture or being adjacent to it has always been a bit strange to me. People say (and not in these exact words), 'You’re so perfect!' I’m so, so flawed. I barely ever get recognized, and I really like that. I like having some sort of anonymity."

InStyle: So far, you’ve dropped “Black Eye,” “Girl With No Face,” and “Off With Her Tits” as singles, inspired by music legends like Kate Bush, Giorgio Moroder, and New Order. What’s the thematic through-line; what “era” would you say you’re in?

Allie X: "I’ve never written something where I’ve referenced an era so hard (with exceptions): the U.K. in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s; there’s a little bit of New York in it as well, but that transition from punk music into post-punk to synth-pop. I love the spirit of that time, and I love the experimentation that was happening, so if you know that music and you listen to this record, you hear all those references. That’s not something I’m trying to hide. By putting it through my own lens, it doesn’t exactly feel like that time—what came out of me is my eccentric and theatrical side, in my singing style, and lyrically. This is truly a goth-pop record."

InStyle: Right. I understood it to be about being perceived and having fans. I love the lyric, “Jon likes coffee black, and John, au lait,” because it mirrors what John and I actually like and our aesthetic. How did you come up with that, considering you don’t really know us?

Allie X: "There’s a lot of wit in this record and it’s a nice, witty line. I cracked myself up with that one."

InStyle: You seem to be having fun musically.

Allie X: "I am! Parts of me were so fun, and parts of it were absolutely tortuous and that’s because the writing process does not really lend itself... it’s one thing to sit at a guitar or piano and be like, This is the melody or the idea. A lot of writers are comfortable doing that by themselves; it’s another thing to build an entire track from scratch—all the melodies, all the lyrics, come up with all the harmonies, figure out all the gear to use. It was a huge technical challenge and learning curve."

InStyle: How are you thinking of performing Girl With No Face?

Allie X: "I’m not an artist that can dream—maybe for a music video, definitely for stills I can. But in terms of live, I can’t dream of my fantasy production and then go execute it. When I think of live production, I think, full-on hack, full-on thrifty mindset. I really like what I did for my ‘Secret LA’ show, which was sort of a museum vibe. It was basically boulders, red rope, and chalk powder… One day, if I have a huge budget I’ll do amazing things. There’s a clip of Lady Gaga from very early days, when she hadn’t broken yet, and I’ll always remember it—someone in the audience commented on her disco stick, and she was like, ‘Yeah, you love my little disco stick, you wait until you see the things I’m gonna do.’ I don’t know if I’ll ever reach a level where I can actually do all these crazy things, but I feel the same way. You can’t imagine the things I’d do if I had the budget."

InStyle: It seems like you’re shedding past versions of yourself on this record. Who is Allie X, and how has your artistry evolved?

Allie X: "Who’s Allie X today? I wish I knew. I’m sure you guys, John and Jonathan, relate to this idea that it’s one thing to... as longtime partners, you probably see progression in each other better than you see it in yourself, right? I know with my partner, I can see how he’s changed, or where he’s at—it’s easier from an outside perspective. When you’re inside of yourself, you can make certain observations, but at least inside me it's so chaotic—I don’t really know how to analyze, but I will attempt to.

The changes in me from doing this record have been pretty profound. I’ve let go of a lot of dreams, and I’ve found new ones, which has been beautiful. ‘Weird World’ is about seeing the reality of who I am in the world, and that hurts, but it also is so empowering to understand the truth and to see things as they really are. When I started Allie X, I was terrified to even reveal my eyes, I was so, If they see me they'll think I’m ugly. If they know my age they’ll think I’m too old. If they know about my health struggles, no one will want to work with me. It was so much. 

At this point—and this ties back into what I was saying about how it comes down to the fans—I don’t care what anyone thinks except my fans. If my fans don’t think that it’s a liability for me to be someone with chronic illness that’s also doing pop, if my fans don’t think that I’m too old, if my fans don’t think that I’m whatever, then I don’t care what anyone else thinks, you know? It feels good to have honest interviews and conversations like this where I feel comfortable just saying that. That’s been a big transition. Looking forward, I’m hoping for some peace that comes into my life. I feel like I’ve been fist-out, fighting for the last few years, in a private and lonely way. I’m hoping to manifest a calmer era, to enter my adult years in a way”.

I am going to round up with a review from The Line of Best Fit. Girl with No Face is a tremendous album. I have been following Allie X for a while now. One of the most original and phenomenal artists on the scene. I think that everyone should know about her and listen to her music. This is a moment when she has truly arrived. Anyone who does not know about this stunning artist yet surely will do:

“The ingredients of pop are all there: conventionally structured songs, well-worn electronic beats, clean vocals. But those same ingredients somehow feel uncanny – and while uncanniness has always been a part of Alexandra Hughes' mission as Allie X, it’s fair to say that she’s never sounded quite so maniacally weird as she does here.

Uncanniness, of course, isn’t just about weirdness: it’s about the familiar becoming unfamiliar, and there’s plenty of familiar sounds here, from cheeky nods to Kraftwerk to flashes of A-Ha and the Human League. The album opens with “Weird World,” an 80s-inspired synthpop track that peppers flourishes of German in amongst X’s trademark sardonic wit (“Hail Satan / at least he keeps a promise”). From there we move at a marching pace through track after track of demented thrills, the inventiveness and glee never once letting up. Hughes has co-written songs for BTS and Troye Sivan, but in the four years since her last album, Cape God, she certainly seems to have saved her best material for her own Allie X persona.

Indeed, for fans of Allie X it can sometimes seem surprising that she’s not better known. Her early music was tipped by Katy Perry, of all people; mixed commercial success seems to have driven her increasingly towards the darker, more bizarre end of her sound spectrum. Girl with No Face is like listening to someone who’s given up on success completely – and the results are electrifying. When Hughes addresses the issue of her success directly on “You Slept on Me,” it’s with bird-flippingly brazen relish: “I’m an icon honey! / This isn’t a chore / And I need to make money / so give me yours!”

Pastiche is a risk for many artists, but for Hughes it’s an opportunity, giving her unsettling, shape-shifting persona full command. Self-defacement (and -debasement) is a key theme of Girl with No Face, as though the only way to take control of one’s own identity is to erase it. That theme is most obvious in the title track itself, but it’s deployed most magnificently on “Off with Her Tits,” an utterly bonkers, completely unique song about… well, cutting your tits off. The lyrics don’t directly reference gender dysphoria – though “My body is a prison” comes close – but given Allie X’s strong LGBTQ+ following, it’s hard not to make the connection.

“Off with Her Tits” also makes the most of Hughes’ astonishing vocal abilities, which are given full rein amidst the wild abandon of these songs. “Truly Dreams” is another great example of this: it’s one of the brightest-sounding tracks on the album, with Hughes’ voice dancing down pentatonic stairways, belting out choruses and howling into its uppermost register.

If Cape God felt like Hughes beginning to create her own universe, Girl with No Face marks her apotheosis as her deity. Still sleeping on Allie X? It’s time to wake up: her spaceship has truly landed”.

I was keen to keep this feature going. Recognise brilliant women in music. In terms of those who we should all be aware of and follow, check out Allie X. With a new album out and some much-deserved recognition her way, so many eyes are trained her way. Girl with No Face is one of this year’s finest albums. Go and follow her on Instagram. I have so much respect and appreciation for Allie X. If you do not know about her, then she really needs to be…

ON your radar.

FEATURE: Spotlight: Jazmin Bean

FEATURE:

 

 

Spotlight

PHOTO CREDIT: Jamie Lee Culver

Jazmin Bean

_________

I am going to….

get to the new album by Jazmin Bean, Traumatic Livelihood. Their album is among the best of the year so far. There is so much interest and buzz around Jazmin Bean. One of the most original and compelling new artists on the scene, I want to spend some time with a fascinating and stunning talent. Starting out with an interview from Gay Times from last year. Bean discussed their upcoming theatrical debut album, kicking addiction, and taking over The Great Escape:

“From the age of 15, Jazmin Bean has slowly crafted their own twisted reality. Now, hyperpop’s underground royalty is crawling out of the gutter and into the spotlight. Transforming trauma into triumph, Bean resides in a dark saccharine daydream of hyperpop and trap metal inflections. While the real world kept them silent, the artist has carved out a nightmarish kingdom of solace from treacle-thick aesthetics that unapologetically pull you in.

In the latest taste of their full-length debut, Bean’s sound is pink and predatory to the core — it’s the sound of survival, a sugary sweet, abrasive snarl of warning to keep your distance. Yet, sitting in front of us, there’s a woozy, syrupy haze that engulfs them entirely; a patchwork vision of fluffy pastels and hard work. No matter where our conversation steers, whether it’s stories of child abuse, addiction, or isolation, the artist sinks themselves into an atmosphere of calm. This image of composure, however, has been a determined journey: “Once you’ve really been put through the wringer, your stress levels change,” Bean reflects, calmly applying another layer of rose-tinted lipstick. “When you’ve experienced deathly stressful situations, you realise it could always be a lot worse.”

Through music, make-up and fashion, Bean has learned to combat and process the darker chapters of their life. Creating an unsettling veil of hyperpop fantasy, the artist’s full-throttle soundscape doubled up as a sonic safe space which allowed them to detach from their reality. Bean’s bruisingly sweet vomit-between-your-teeth persona became a vital outlet for a young rough-cut teenager. “Who I became on Worldwide Torture was kind of like a superhero,” Bean muses. “It was written from the perspective of what I wished that I could have done in all these abusive situations, situations that I wasn’t really safe to speak up about. It was a way of coping through it.”

Despite adolescent vulnerabilities, the gutsy, sharp sound of Worldwide Torture is anything but vulnerable. From start to finish, Worldwide Torture is positively carnivorous and unflinchingly bold. Serving up nail-bomb nursery rhymes and embittered electronic distortion, Bean would go on to pioneer an entirely fresh genre of bratty grunge pop. In fact, the musician proved how far alternative innovation could be stretched, inspiring a wave of grunge-tinged artists to arise in their wake.

Over the years, some have labelled Bean as an ‘industry plant’ due to their quick circulation as a next-wave artist. However the truth is anything but that — “I wrote Worldwide Torture during my GCSEs, and I raised like £500 for the title track’s video,” Bean tells GAY TIMES. The video’s frilly exploration of poisoned innocence exists solely due to a mass of promised “pay backs” which all came through in the end. Yet, despite circumstances, Bean was confident and assured in their vision. “I’m so proud that this little 16-year-old created a whole world.”

Four years on, Bean’s growth since Worldwide Torture has been immense. Sonically they have soared to new heights of acclaim, yet the personal development that Bean has undergone is equally as major. After a stint in rehab for ketamine addiction, Bean’s outlook on life and creativity entirely shifted. “I’d practically written what was going to be my debut album before rehab, but, when I got out, I scrapped the whole album,” Bean admits. “It was actually pretty good, but I was just on a lot of drugs. I wanted to rewrite tracks to avoid any sense of ‘woe is me.’”

Thematically, Bean’s debut is raw. Much like their EP, the album reflects on years of trauma, biting back and taking control. Yet, while themes may seem depressing, Bean insists the album is anything but; “I asked on Twitter the other day, ‘What do you consider a sad song?’ and people were saying that some of the most upbeat previews I’ve posted were sad,” Bean frowns. “In my mind, it’s not a sad album. Talking about something that was sad at the time doesn’t mean it’s a sad song!” The artist, instead, hopes people can understand the positivity of the album’s reclamation and re-framing of trauma; “It is very cathartic for me, the album is taking back a lot that I’d thought I’d lost.”

Turning 20 served as a reflective moment in Bean’s life for this very reason. “A lot of people’s childhoods get ripped away from them and they don’t even realise it til later on, and turning 20 really made me reflect on that,” Bean admits. Their recent Acoustic Church Session release featured a cover of Marina’s iconic Teen Idle, and it proved to be a fitting performance to wave out their teen years. “As someone who grew up very, very quickly, turning 20 has been very strange for me. It’s supposed to be this coming-of-age moment, but it kind of just made me feel washed up and trauma filled.”

Despite feeling like their teen years were stolen from them, Bean’s growth has allowed them to now embody the character that dominated Worldwide Torture. “I wanted to talk about my teenage experience and the things that I just wasn’t ready to talk about before,” Bean tells us. “I became the person that I was talking about. I did all the things I was daydreaming about, and ended the things that were hurting me”.

There are a few more interviews I want to bring in before round off. DIY chat with Jazmin Bean back in November. An artist who has endured so much pain and horror, they are finally ready to tell their story. Traumatic Livelihood is an album of revelation, honesty, catharsis, rawness and power:

“14-year-old Jazmin Bean was going to the US, but they couldn’t tell their friends. Even if they could, they didn’t know how to. It wasn’t for a holiday, and it wasn’t to visit family. “I was groomed by a man that was much older than me,” Bean says, plainly.

They’re sitting down on a kerb in LA, basking in the sunshine. “I’m very happy to not be in British weather right now,” they say over Zoom. “I prefer the sun so, so much.”

We’re talking about their debut album, ‘Traumatic Livelihood’. It’s an album that Bean’s fans have been clamouring for since they broke out on the scene in 2020 - and there are approximately 900,000 of those fans now on TikTok alone. Back at that time, Bean was known for their extreme beauty style, love of anime, and their shocking performance tactics. Their debut EP ‘Worldwide Torture’ - released aged 17 - spawned some of the tracks (‘Yandere’ and ‘Hello Kitty’) that remain their biggest hits to date.

But in reality, a lot was going down behind the scenes. In June 2022, Bean announced they had been in rehab for a few months. It was a decision that had been a long time coming after four years of struggling with addiction - particularly with ketamine - that started around the same time they began being groomed.

“I was around 14 when that happened,” Bean begins. “I was being shipped back and forth across the world and obviously exploited quite badly, sexually, and isolated from a lot of friends and family. I was trapped in this one bedroom in the Bronx, not really knowing what was going on.”

As a result, they turned to drugs to cope. “A lot of my drug usage at a young age came from that repressed memory and blocked that trauma,” they explain. “Your brain blocks out trauma and I just started remembering things that I didn't even know happened. And so that was a lot for me to overcome mentally.”

Just years later, and still in the grip of addiction, Bean would simultaneously rise to fame as one of the most exciting names in alternative music. They were only 16 when they released ‘Hello Kitty’, which now has 23 million views on YouTube. It’s a raging speed-metal track whose accompanying video features the singer’s famous makeup style at the time; like the track’s titular animated feline was glitched out and turned into a demon. But even then, there were signs in Bean’s music that something wasn’t right: “One day I'm gonna get stretched too hard and snap like a rubber band,” they sing.

Through it all, they would continue to release music that showcased the singer’s wild creativity. 2022’s ‘Puppy Pound’ is set to a punishing bark, while Bean struts around in a fluffy pink dress with slick black latex gloves and boots. But at that point, they were in LA “with the wrong people and no parental guidance, making song after song after song”.

Bean, knowing they had hit rock bottom, decided to go to rehab. It’s a move which their label, Island Records / Interscope, was entirely supportive of and even paid for, and is something Bean believes every label should offer. “The data shows that musicians are bad with addiction!” they exclaim. “I don’t know the science behind it, but the stories are plentiful. I’m really appreciative that they understood my journey and welcomed me back with open arms.”

Emerging from rehab, Bean listened back to what was supposed to be their debut album. What they found, however, was a project that sounded like “a cry for help”. “This album sounds like it's coming from someone who is on a lot of drugs and really unwell,” they recall thinking. “It wasn't aligning with my point of view or what I wanted to do with my style.”

Additionally, Bean felt the album was “trying too hard to do all the different genres that were popping off”. Though they concede that “there were some good songs”, they decided to scrap the album and start fresh with new material they could relate to.

For the most part, however, ‘Traumatic Livelihood’ is a raw document of Bean’s singular life, of overcoming their past and carving out a new future. “It's a very weird experience,” they admit. “It's hard not being able to find stories that I relate to. But someone said to me: ‘Maybe you're just going to have to be that story for someone else’. That was a really hard pill to swallow”.

I will wrap up soon. Soundsphere have been among those keen to know more about Jazmin Bean and their music. I am new to Bean’s music and name. I have been listening back and reading interviews they have been involved with. It is always very moving. Someone who has had this impossibly difficult and traumatic past is making music that will no doubt heal and connect with so many other people:

“Discussing the anticipation building up to the record’s release, Jazmin bares all: “I am super excited. It feels almost unreal that it is even coming out because I have overcome so so many hurdles getting it out into the world and it is almost here.” The excitement beams from their face as they talk about Traumatic Livelihood and what it means to them as an album. “It is well obviously an album about dramatic and tragic events, but it is full of lively sounds, and stacked with upset happy pop references,” Jazmin explains when identifying the concept and themes behind the record. Adding on, they say: “The title merges these two themes,” it is most certainly an album which explores highs and lows, peaks and drops, happiness and despair.

Traumatic Livelihood includes hit after hit, and Jazmin states: “I am most excited for people to hear the title track,” as they beam with an excited grin. Their expressions whilst talking about their debut record shows how much this album means to Jazmin – it has been a long time coming. The title track – ‘Traumatic Livelihood’ – repeats: “I can do anything I want,” and is laced with passion and determination, intertwined with a modern pop influence. Adding in abruptly before the optic of conversation shifts, they say: “Oh! Also Stockholm Butterfly!” This track appears the rawest and most personal on the record – it seeps with vulnerability. If you want to get to know Jazmin on a deeper level, ‘Stockholm Butterfly’ is the track to start with. The Melanie Martinez sonic influences peers through the track as Bean looks back on their traumatic past as a child and teenager and calls out those who exploited their vulnerability and youth. “That sweet child inside of me,” mirrors the longing Jazmin misses from their childhood – yearning to be innocent again despite the trauma faced.

Defining success for any artist – especially those new to the scene and emerging with their debut record like Jazmin Bean can be a trying task, yet Jazmin words it perfectly. “Having respect from people who you think are cool has made me feel so successful. Chasing awards and stuff, I do not know, I feel like the end outcome is never as big as you want it to be, but having respect from peers however is success to me,” they say. Their peers will be proud of this record: it is a tight-knit and cohesive collection of songs.

Bean ends a summarising statement about the entire recording, writing and releasing process for Traumatic Livelihood: “This album has had so much thought put into it. Worldwide Torture was a scrapbook of ideas, this record was a beautiful journey.” The excitement exudes from the singer-songwriter: the journey has been tiring yet worth it. Traumatic Livelihood will cement Bean into the industry and allow them to wedge their creative and beautifully crafted visual world into the stratosphere”.

I am ending with a recent interview from NME. It is true what they say about how Bean is crafting cinematic Pop that celebrates recovery, retribution and life after trauma. It is among the most important, moving and strangely uplifting music you will hear. For anyone who has not checked out Jazmin Bean, I would advise you listen to their music:

“Do you think you’ll ever release the album that you wrote before rehab? Did any of those songs make it onto this album?

“No. Actually, none of them did. Everything was post-rehab. I think I started writing about two months after I got out. I know the writing really started happening three months after getting out. I never put any of the songs from before rehab on this album. They’re not the same genre. They were like electronic pop slash summer industrial. They were all over the place really. I don’t think I’d ever do anything with them. I think they will just live in my files.”

There are a lot of themes of retribution on the album. You’ve spoken about how the courts failed you when you tried to pursue a legal case against your abuser. Did writing this album feel like a way to get some of the closure you were denied down legal pathways?

“Definitely. ‘Stockholm Butterfly’ was a big one for me in addressing that. A lot of the songs address that overall period of time in my life. I thought this person was going to rot in jail for a very long time because the crime was very severe. I wrote a song called ‘Sock Puppet’ that never made it onto the album. There was a bridge in that song that very much alluded to the fact that this person was already in jail, but they never ended up going. A lot of the album helped me get over that.”

Is there a message that you’d like the album to give to survivors of abuse?

“When the case failed, it threw me into a spin because I thought that I was going to get to be this success story for people and help people speak up. I thought I was going to get to be that voice that could help people address things when they think no one is going to care or listen.

Then I became the person that no one really listened to, so I was stopped in my tracks for a moment. I was like, ‘What am I going to do? I’m just another failure story in a bunch.’ There’s nothing worth taking from this series of events because the story is the same as everyone else’s which is that no one really cares, especially not the legal system. Most abusers just do walk free. I didn’t really know if I was going to speak on anything because I didn’t think it was inspirational, but I hope that whatever they’re going through, they can take those songs and feel powerful. That’s what I would like.

I feel very powerful when I listen to the songs. I have a song called ‘Charm Bracelet’ that’s referencing that. I didn’t want it to sound like a ‘poor me’ song. It was more saying that it’s going to be fine. You just do not have control over what happens. You can’t just be mad at a god or the world. You just have to keep going.”

Your previous releases were more influenced by rock and metal, but this album leans into a more cinematic kind of pop music. Why did you decide to change direction?

“I was feeling like I needed a big change. I felt like I started becoming such a brand of this one genre and this one clothing style. I wanted to change it up and it came naturally. I just started experimenting. Then I found a couple of songs that I really felt connected to and we just went off that vibe. I feel like it was very natural for me to go into the genre”.

A magnificent artist who we are going to hear a lot more from, go and follow Jazmin Bean. A new artist to my ears, I am not compelled to follow their career and see where they go from here. Traumatic Livelihood is such an important and memorable album. One that you will be hit by the first time you hear it. It is proof that Jazmin Bean is an artist that…

EVERYONE should know about.

___________

Follow Jazmin Bean

PHOTO CREDIT: Jamie Lee Culver

Official:

https://www.jazminbean.net/

Tiktok:

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

Instagram:

https://www.instagram.com/jazminbean/

Twitter:

https://twitter.com/abortjazminbean

Spotify:

https://open.spotify.com/artist/6blEmsLU25ewy8hHtgZaSL

YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCyRbG_9KOfuucZbn8TzUFOw

FEATURE: The Digital Mixtape: Neneh Cherry at Sixty

FEATURE:

 

 

The Digital Mixtape

 Neneh Cherry at Sixty

_________

AN iconic artist….

PHOTO CREDIT: Steve Eichner/WireImage/Getty Images

celebrates her sixtieth birthday on 10th March. The sensational Neneh Cherry is one of the all-term greats. In June, her phenomenal debut album, Raw Like Sushi, turns thirty-five. I have been a fan of hers since the 1990s. Her most recent release arrived in 2022. The Versions consisted of reworked versions of songs from Cherry's back catalogue. It featured guest appearances by artists including Robyn and Sia. I want to mark the upcoming sixtieth birthday of Neneh Cherry with a career-spanning playlist. Featuring the well-known tracks and deep cuts, it demonstrates the awesome talent of a singular and influential artist. First, AllMusic provides detailed biography of a music legend:

“Neneh Cherry forged a groundbreaking mix of genres in the late '80s that pre-saged the emergence of alternative rap and trip-hop, and has gradually added to a discography filled with similarly unpredictable twists. The singer, songwriter, rapper, and producer got her start in the U.K. post-punk scene before she made a mainstream breakthrough as a solo artist with the global smash hit "Buffalo Stance," which sent her eclectic solo debut, Raw Like Sushi (1989), to the Top Ten of charts in several countries, and led to a Grammy nomination in the category of Best New Artist. Rather than follow the standard path of a commercial musician, Cherry opted instead to record solo albums every few years, and has assisted on material headlined by artists ranging from Peter Gabriel to Gorillaz. In the 2010s, she recorded a series of wildly creative albums, namely The Cherry Thing (2012), Blank Project (2014), and Broken Politics (2018), and in the following decade collaborated with younger artists on new versions of songs from earlier in her career, heard on The Versions (2022).

Born Neneh Mariann Karlsson on March 10, 1964, in Stockholm, Sweden, Neneh Cherry is the daughter of West African percussionist Ahmadu Jah and artist Moki Cherry. Raised by her mother and trumpeter stepfather Don Cherry in Stockholm and New York City, Cherry left school at age 14, and in 1980 relocated to London to sing with the post-punk group the Cherries. Following flings with the Slits and the Nails, she joined the experimental funk/post-punk outfit Rip Rig + Panic and appeared on the group's albums God (1981), I Am Cold (1982), and Attitude (1983). During this period, she also recorded with New Age Steppers and as one-third of the one-off group Raw Sex, Pure Energy. When Rip Rig + Panic broke up, Cherry remained with one of the spin-off groups, Float Up CP, and led them through Kill Me in the Morning (1985). The next year, she was featured on "Slow Train to Dawn," a single off the The's Infected.

In 1987, Cherry and fellow artist Cameron McVey (aka Booga Bear) became long-term creative and personal partners after they met as models for Ray Petri, creator of the Buffalo fashion house. Later that year, Cherry co-wrote and was featured on a B-side version of Morgan/McVey's Stock Aitken Waterman-produced "Looking Good Diving," titled "Looking Good Diving with the Wild Bunch." Signed to the Circa label, Cherry hit the U.K. singles chart as a solo artist in December 1988 with "Buffalo Stance," itself a revamped version of "Looking Good Diving with the Wild Bunch." The Bomb the Bass collaboration reached number three in the U.K. (and performed similarly well in several other territories). Furthermore, the song neatly forecast the eclectic fusion of pop smarts and knowing hip-hop energy showcased throughout the parent album, Raw Like Sushi. A number two (and eventually platinum) U.K. hit issued in June 1989, the LP featured executive production from McVey and additional input from the likes of Will Malone and Nellee Hooper, as well as Mushroom and 3D of Massive Attack. A pair of additional singles, "Manchild" and "Kisses on the Wind," followed "Buffalo Stance," as did a nomination for a Grammy in the category of Best New Artist (won by Milli Vanilli).

After she contributed to the benefit album Red Hot + Blue (with an interpretation of Cole Porter's "I've Got You Under My Skin") and Massive Attack's Blue Lines (as co-writer, arranger, and background vocalist on "Hymn of the Big Wheel"), Cherry returned with her second album, Homebrew, in 1992. A more subdued collection than Raw Like Sushi, the number 27 U.K. chart entry featured cameos from Gang Starr and Michael Stipe, and writing and production assistance from McVey, Jonny Dollar, and Geoff Barrow (pre-dating the latter's emergence with Portishead). Cherry returned to the charts in 1994 as Youssou N'Dour's duet partner on "7 Seconds," another global hit, but was otherwise on child-raising hiatus until 1996, when she resurfaced with Man, a number 16 U.K. hit containing "7 Seconds," an update of Marvin Gaye's "Trouble Man" (featuring piano from half-brother Eagle-Eye), and "Woman," an empowering response to James Brown's "It's a Man's Man's Man's World." A remix version of the album, simply titled Remixes, followed in 1998. Cherry prioritized family life well into the new millennium, raising her daughters Naima, Tyson, and Mabel, and cropped up with intermittent activity, including collaborations with Live's Edward Kowalczyk ("Walk Into This Room"), Peter Gabriel (OVO), and Gorillaz ("Kids with Gunz"), as well as recordings with her band cirKus.

Cherry returned in the 2010s with some of her most progressive recordings yet. For 2012's The Cherry Thing, she fronted the Thing, the experimental Scandinavian jazz trio whose founding mission was to play her stepfather's music. The album mixed originals with imaginative reworkings of songs initially recorded by the likes of Ornette Coleman, the Stooges, Suicide, and indeed, Don Cherry. In 2013, she collaborated with London duo RocketNumberNine on their album MeYouWeYou, and worked with them on her long-awaited fourth proper studio album, Blank Project. Produced by Kieran Hebden (aka Four Tet), the album was released in 2014 and consisted of originals written by Cherry with McVey and Paul Simm. Another set with Hebden on production, the meditative and undaunted Broken Politics, followed in 2018.

A 30th anniversary expanded reissue of Raw Like Sushi was released in 2020. The same year, the first verse of the album's "Buffalo Stance" was included in Dua Lipa's Club Future Nostalgia: The Remix Album (mixed by the Blessed Madonna), and Cherry co-wrote and appeared on the Avalanches' "Wherever You Go." Admiration for Cherry's first three solo albums continued to grow, and in 2022, Cherry partnered with ten artists -- ranging from daughter Tyson and Jamila Woods to Sia and Robyn -- to record The Versions, consisting of updates of highlights from Raw Like Sushi, Homebrew, and Man”.

Many happy returns to the incredible Neneh Cherry. An artist so loved around the world, I am wrapping things up with a playlist featuring her amazing work. From 1989’s Raw Like Sushi to Broken Politics of 2018 (The Versions features more of other artists than it does her), Cherry has released some truly world-class albums. That is why I wanted to salute…

SUCH an important artist.

FEATURE: The Digital Mixtape: Guy Garvey at Fifty

FEATURE:

 

 

The Digital Mixtape

PHOTO CREDIT: Thomas Butler/The Guardian

Guy Garvey at Fifty

_________

ONE of my favourite people in music….

turns fifty on 6th March. Guy Garvey is the leader of Elbow. To mark his upcoming birthday, I have ended this feature with some great Elbow hits and deep cuts. A selection of their music that also demonstrates Guy Garvey’s amazing vocals and songwriting. I am sourcing from Wikipedia here for some Garvey biography, as it seems to be the fullest and most up-to-date:

“Garvey grew up in Bury, Greater Manchester and comes from a working class, Catholic family and he is one of seven siblings. He told The Guardian in 2015, that he was named Guy, after another Catholic, Guy Fawkes. He also told them he was bullied at school, due to his ears, which he had pinned back at the age of 12, his sister Gina, told the Guardian that the school bullying may have contributed to her brother's sensitivity. His parents separated when he was aged 12, and they had divorced by the time he was 13. His father was a former grammar school boy who could not afford to go to University; a Trade Unionist, he spent most of his working life as a newspaper proofreader and as a chemist at ICI. His mother was a police officer who went back to university and became a psychologist. Garvey has five older sisters: Gina, Louise, Sam, Karen, and Becky. His younger brother is the actor Marcus Garvey.

In the early 1990s, while at sixth-form college in Whitefield, near Bury, Garvey formed Elbow with Mark and Craig Potter, Pete Turner, and Richard Jupp. He serves as the lyricist of Elbow, and has been widely praised for his songwriting throughout his career. As well as vocal duties Garvey has also played a wide variety of instruments live including both electric and acoustic guitar, trumpet, and various forms of percussion. Elbow won two Ivor Novello awards for best song writing for the 2008 single "Grounds for Divorce" as well as best contemporary song for "One Day Like This". He was awarded a lifetime achievement honour by the Radio Academy in 2014.

Amongst other work, Garvey produced and recorded the I Am Kloot album Natural History (2001). Alongside Elbow keyboard player Craig Potter he also produced I Am Kloot's single "Maybe I Should" (2005, not associated with any album), their Mercury Music Prize nominated 2010 album Sky at Night and their 2013 album Let It All In. Elbow were themselves Mercury Music Prize nominees, in 2011, for the album Build a Rocket Boys! and won the prize in 2008 for their album "The Seldom Seen Kid". In addition, Garvey made an appearance on Massive Attack's 2010 album record Heligoland.

He is a member of the British Academy of Songwriters, Composers and Authors (BASCA).In April 2012 Garvey became a patron of the Manchester Craft and Design Centre. In recognition of his outstanding contribution to music he received, in July of the same year, an honorary doctorate from Manchester Metropolitan University, a Doctor of Arts.

Garvey has been a presenter on BBC Radio 6 Music since 2007 (Sunday afternoon 2 pm to 4 pm, British time) and previously presented a show on Sunday evenings on XFM. He had a monthly column in the now-defunct listings magazine City Life and is a patron of the Mines Advisory Group (MAG), the Manchester-based charity responsible for clearing war zones of mines and munitions worldwide.

In 2015, Garvey announced that he would be releasing his first solo studio album while continuing his duties as Elbow's lead songwriter. The resulting album, Courting the Squall, was released on 30 October 2015, by Polydor Records in the UK. On 27 October 2015 Garvey appeared on BBC Two's Later... with Jools Holland, where he performed "Angela's Eyes" and "Belly of the Whale".

In January 2024, Elbow performed on the The Graham Norton Show and afterwards Garvey joined Norton's guests to promote Elbow's tenth studio album, Audio Vertigo which will be released on the 22 March, their tour starts on the 7 May 2024”.

To mark the approaching fiftieth birthday of the wonderful Guy Garvey, I thought it would be appropriate to compile a playlist. I would suggest people check out his solo ands non-Elbow work, though I am going to keep it strictly Elbow here. Such an incredible talent, there is nobody in music quite like him. Such a distinct and consistently brilliant songwriter and artist, let’s hope we have many more years of the phenomenal Elbow. It is true that Guy Garvey is…

A music legend

FEATURE: The Kate Bush Interview Archive: 2006: Philippe Badhorn (Rolling Stone France)

FEATURE:

 

 

The Kate Bush Interview Archive

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

2006: Philippe Badhorn (Rolling Stone France)

_________

I feel a bit guilty….

about doing this feature, as all the hard work and passionate research is already been done by this great archive! One that collates all the print interviews from Kate Bush from 1978 to 2011. I guess I select the interviews, write a bit around the text, select the part of the interview that is the best, then add in videos and photos. Even so, at least it allows Kate Bush fans to read interviews they may not have come across. A lot of my recent features have mainly been from the 1970s and 1980s. I have not focused on Kate Bush’s Aerial/mid-'00s period. The interview I am focusing on now is from Rolling Stone France. It was published in 2006. Philippe Badhorn was charged with speaking with Kate Bush following the release of her superb 2005 double album. Aerial reached twelve in France. I guess the language barrier may mean some questions and interactions are a little more strained or different to other interviews. Even so, as you will see below, the interaction between Bush and Badhorn is interesting and quite comfortable. We get some interesting and often funny answers from Bush. Standard and over-used questions around Bush’s privacy and ‘reclusiveness’. I love the interviews from the Aerial period. Kate Bush was no stranger to the French media. This fascinating interview from 1990 is one of the best. Rolling Stone France have some much-deserved coverage of one of Kate Bush’s greatest and most personal albums. One that was a ‘return’ after 1993’s The Red Shoes:

“Twelve years to release a new album. The eighth since 1978. Because she prefers life to glory, Kate Bush has been too long away. But her aura has not faded. Rare meeting with an artist who has always called the tune.

The masterless voice.

In Abbey Road studios, west of London, some Beatles don’t record every day. John, a young assistant, tells that a big company’s big wig hired studio 2 a whole day last week to practise how to deliver a speech with emotion. Just where the Fab Four recorded most of their music. Just where Kate Bush supervised together with Michael Kamen the orchestral arrangements of Aerial, her double album released at last after 12 years of discographic silence. Kate Bush gives one of her rare interviews in the control room of this very studio, a comfortable place overhanging a large wooden room where stands a Steinway and waits an army of microphone feet.

To say the truth the lady is late. Her house is hidden just 2 hours north of London, but the traffic seems heavy today. At last she arrives, alone, handing a big wicker basket filled with a thick Filofax and all kinds of notebooks.

First of all its disappointment. The press photographs soften the fact that at 47 Kate Bush isn’t any longer the emotion stirring white which, the sensual, sophisticated and eccentric savage who inflamed the senses of the aesthetes of a whole generation (or even two). But she holds graciously her ample figure with the ease of those who get along with their body.

We sit side to side on the sofa in front of a cup of tea. The sweetly searching look of her hazel eyes, the irresistible and indefinable smile, the voice with deeply musical intonations : nothing more is needed to be under her charm.

Philippe Badhorn: You remain faithful to Abbey Road studios, still you record mainly at home. You wanted very soon (1983) to have your own studio.

Kate Bush: I like Abbey Road for its atmosphere. I feel quite comfortable there. But to have my own studio is not only a question of artistic freedom. In a very pragmatic way, it’s also a question of money. As soon as you get into a long period of time, the bill becomes overwhelming. In a regular studio, I couldn’t have had enough time to experiment.

Philippe Badhorn: You started this record 9 years ago. Did you have to re-record a lot so that it sounded consistent ?

Kate Bush: I was very much concerned about the cohesion. So I tried to give it a global atmosphere of flow, of flux. King of the mountain, Sunset and An architect’s dream were there very soon. But in the definitive version of King of the mountain, a lot of stuff from the early work is still there, the keyboard for instance. Most of the vocals too were recorded 9 years ago. On the other hand, the drum parts and the rest were recorded the 45 last days (she says years instead of days, Freudian slip), a very intense period. What’s been done during that period creates the cohesion. I am glad when I am told that the album doesn’t sound like a collection of moments apart.

Philippe Badhorn: King of the mountain was the first title. It draws a picture of Elvis living in a kind of childlike Olympus. Elvis reappearing was mentioned at that time.

Kate Bush: Yes, now that you say it, it’s true. I thought it was a lovely idea that someone so cherished would still be alive and happy somewhere in some limbo (in the song Elvis goes tobogganing riding Rosebud, symbol of childhood and lost innocence in the film Citizen Kane by O. Welles ). I remember a show in the 50s with Elvis. The host didn’t talk about him as an egocentric and selfish person but as an unpretentious and sweet one and I do believe he was. When he got older, he didn’t seem to be happy. Maybe he was.

Philippe Badhorn: Is Elvis your opposite? You work at your own pace, you manage to have a life away from show-business when he stepped out of day-to-day reality.

Kate Bush: I believe he really was a sweet and fun loving nice guy who couldn’t say no. Nobody would want to be that famous. I was already asked if I felt I was like him. Thank god I don’t. I’m not as famous, nobody is, except maybe Frank Sinatra or Marilyn Monroe, but she died because of that sooner than him. It’s hard to have the whole world looking at you.

Philippe Badhorn: Have you ever wanted to be famous ?

Kate Bush: No.

Philippe Badhorn: But you need other people’s opinion, don’t you?

Kate Bush: It’s ambiguous, it’s true, like for every artist. I spent a lot of time on this record. I want people to listen and appreciate the music. But being the centre of attention makes life more difficult. We all feel that some aspects of modern life are intrusive, it’s hard to keep one’s own space. I consider myself as a writer. Maybe people don’t think of me that way but that’s how I feel. A writer needs a strong connection with reality. My family and my domestic life are incredibly important for me and essential for my work. It maybe comes from my Irish roots on my mother’s side.

Philippe Badhorn: But you don’t like being described as a recluse.

Kate Bush: Because I’m not. Someone who never meets people and never goes out is a recluse. I’m not like that, I meet people but I spend a lot of time in the studio and I don’t go to parties or premieres often. Especially these ten last years I have lived a normal life. And was happy with it. The only trouble is I was sometimes afraid I wouldn’t finish this record. Time seemed to evaporate during this period. I hadn’t planned it would take so long. I would have been terrified if I was told so. It was profitable time though.

Philippe Badhorn: You devoted yourself to your son

Kate Bush: I moved to the country. We had another studio built. Albert was born (Bertie, in 1998). It’s difficult to make a record and raise a little boy. But the time spent with him hasn’t been lost. He’s aware his mother is well-known but it’s not been a problem for him. I’m a normal person, not some strange and absent entity.

Philippe Badhorn: You protect your private life but one song is named after your son (Bertie). It’s the most wholehearted declaration of love from a mother I’ve ever heard.

Kate Bush: My life, friends and family, was always part of my work (a very Bushian example : her partner Danny MacIntosh plays the guitar on the album and her ex, Del Palmer, now a friend, recorded and mixed it ). My work is very, very personal and intimately connected to my everyday life. This is one of the reasons why I want my house to be a home, not a goldfish bowl. I have this place, my home, my base, that should stay a bit secret. But how not to have a song about my son when he’s such a big part of my life? I don’t think I put him on public view, as I would if I showed him on television. It’s inside my own creative space. There are some photographs of Bertie in the record booklet. But he doesn’t really look like that any longer, it’s not like a photograph in a tabloid. But it’s true, in this world, there’s a worship of celebrity on many TV programs. I can’t believe it ! It’s somehow funny but I think it’s crazy and I really don’t want to be involved in it !

Philippe Badhorn: You moved house, you had a baby, OK. But your perfectionism certainly put off the release.

Kate Bush: Perfectionism isn’t the right word, I’m rather quick-tempered and I know what I want. Getting right the images I have in my head is always delicate. People think I spend years to write a song. Actually it’s often wooorg (she pretends to vomit). What takes time are the arrangements, finding the right atmosphere, the right emotional quality of the vocals. But I don’t try to erase all imperfection. I don’t believe in perfection. For instance in Mrs Bartolozzi the voice plays with the piano. There’s a part I really hate. But as part as the whole song, I could’nt get the same emotional quality on the other takes. This version is a bit out of tune, I don’t pronounce the words the way I wished but the emotion I was looking for is there.

Philippe Badhorn: It’s probably the most ambiguous song on the album (her eyes sparkle as I say ambiguous). An ode to domestic happiness (especially the laundry) but one can think of a darker meaning.

Kate Bush: Some of my friends loved it, others thought it was a funny interlude, and others didn’t feel comfortable either they thought it was about the disguise of a crime or it was too personal. But it’s not me in particular.

Philippe Badhorn: Don’t you want everything clean and shiny?

Kate Bush: I do a lot of housework, I especially like the laundry. There’s a link between the washing, the clothes and the person wearing them, the water in the washing machine and the sea. I do a lot of laundry especially since I have a child. I think it’s a way of being close to my roots and to life. As a child I saw my mother wash and be the main character at home (daddy was a doctor). It’s incredibly important for me. I like to have a connection with this work. Holding a house isn’t that slavery to me.

Philippe Badhorn: The feminists will appreciate. On the other hand you also sing about Joan of Arc (Joanni) without a ring on her finger and wearing a bright armour.

Kate Bush: I wanted two records for this album. One is a concept about the changing of light and birds songs during the day. The other is about very different persons, Mrs Bartolozzi, Elvis or Joan of Arc are archetypes, very strong people.

Philippe Badhorn: Are you a mix of the three ?

Kate Bush: Do you think so? Maybe (laughs)”.

A wonderful interview that you should read in full, 2005 and 2006 was quite busy for Kate Bush in terms of press and promotion. Even though this was the first album with no T.V. press or much visual promotion, she did plenty of print interviews and some great radio chats. In future parts of The Kate Bush Interview Archive – I said I would end the run but, with some post-2005 interviews still to go, I may do a few more -, I will look at the period between Aerial and 2011’s Director’s Cut. Aerial, a magnificent and expansive album where Bush is in peak form, still sounds remarkable nearly nineteen years after its release. You can tell how much it meant to her. If you have not heard the album in a while, take some time out and explore its…

PHENOMENAL songs.

FEATURE: Do It Again: First The Dan…Maybe Don? One Final Look Inside the Remarkable Quantum Criminals: Ramblers, Wild Gamblers, and Other Sole Survivors from the Songs of Steely Dan

FEATURE:

 

 

Do It Again: First The Dan…Maybe Don?

IN THIS PAINTING: Steely Dan’s Donald Fagen/ART CREDIT: Joan LeMay/University of Texas Press

One Final Look Inside the Remarkable Quantum Criminals: Ramblers, Wild Gamblers, and Other Sole Survivors from the Songs of Steely Dan

_________

I am going to take….

another look inside Quantum Criminals: Ramblers, Wild Gamblers, and Other Sole Survivors from the Songs of Steely Dan. With text by Alex Pappademas and paintings by Joan LeMay, I bought three copies of the book. I was lucky enough to get a couple of signed copies from LeMay when there was a book launch in London last year. I was instantly immersed in this book. I have been a Steely Dan fan since I was a child. Now forty, I am as amazed and obsessed by them as I was back then. I am going to come onto some points  regarding Steely Dan and their influence. For any Steely Dan fan who does not have this book in their collection, I would urge them to go and get it. Here is some more detail:

“A literary and visual exploration of the songs of Steely Dan.

Steely Dan’s songs are exercises in fictional world-building. No one else in the classic-rock canon has conjured a more vivid cast of rogues and heroes, creeps and schmucks, lovers and dreamers and cold-blooded operators—or imbued their characters with so much humanity. Pulling from history, lived experience, pulp fiction, the lore of the counterculture, and their own darkly comic imaginations, Donald Fagen and Walter Becker summoned protagonists who seemed like fully formed people with complicated pasts, scars they don’t talk about, delusions and desires and memories they can’t shake. From Rikki to Dr. Wu, Hoops McCann to Kid Charlemagne, Franny from NYU to the Woolly Man without a Face, every name is a locked-room mystery, beguiling listeners and earning the band an exceptionally passionate and ever-growing cult fandom.

Quantum Criminals presents the world of Steely Dan as it has never been seen, much less heard. Artist Joan LeMay has crafted lively, color-saturated images of her favorite characters from the Daniverse to accompany writer Alex Pappademas’s explorations of the famous and obscure songs that inspired each painting, in short essays full of cultural context, wild speculation, inspired dot-connecting, and the occasional conspiracy theory. All of it is refracted through the perspectives of the characters themselves, making for a musical companion unlike any other. Funny, discerning, and visually stunning, Quantum Criminals is a singular celebration of Steely Dan’s musical cosmos”.

The language used throughout the book is beautiful and evocative, Beautifully written and phrased, you are stunned by the words of Alex Pappademas! These rich and interesting characters from Steely Dan’s songbook brought vividly to life. We get insight into the songs and the period in which they were written. Accompanying these characters are the paintings of Joan LeMay. Many of us have images in our mind of various characters. What Rose Darling, Jack (from Do It Again) or Kid Charlemagne looks like. Her artwork, together with Pappademas’s words, are a match made in Heaven. So wonderful to see alongside one another, Quantum Criminals: Ramblers, Wild Gamblers, and Other Sole Survivors from the Songs of Steely Dan is such a wonderful and gorgeous book. One that you will read over and over. I have often wondered about the influence of Steely Dan. Maybe still seen as an acquired taste, Alex Pappademas felt the world was much more Steely Dan-esque now than it has ever been. In terms of the politics and sense of unease in the air. That their music and lyrics are more suited to the world today than maybe back in the 1970s. Because of that, they seem more relevant than ever! Maybe not as popular as they should be, you only hear the odd few songs of their played on U.K. radio. Something I argued recently is how many listeners and fans love Steely Dan and keep their music alive. Their influence is definitely felt there. Even so, how many artists in music now as obviously influenced by the group? How many take to heart the music of Walter Becker, Donald Fagen and crew?! I feel that there is nobody in modern music very obviously continuing the legacy of The Dan. That is a real shame!

I do think that artists need to read the book. The more you learn about the characters, songs and process of Fagen and Becker, the more you will listen to the albums. I hope that we do see Steely Dan’s music infiltrate into modern music. I have been inspired to write songs and think about an album similar to a Steely Dan one. Constructing ideas and thoughts very much influenced by reading Quantum Criminals: Ramblers, Wild Gamblers, and Other Sole Survivors from the Songs of Steely Dan. Kudos to Jessica Hopper for getting Alex Pappademas and Joan LeMay together for this book. For manoeuvring them into each other’s orbit. There are interviews like this and this that go into detail and depth. Alex Pappademas and Joan LeMay discussing Quantum Criminals: Ramblers, Wild Gamblers, and Other Sole Survivors from the Songs of Steely Dan and their memories and love of Steely Dan. Prior to moving along, there is a portion of this NPR interview that struck me:

“The chapters in this book give such deep studies of the personalities who populate Steely Dan's songs (and, by extension, of the musicians who brought them to life). Did your relationship with any of these songs change while writing about them, illustrating them, or otherwise getting inside the heads of these characters? Did you learn anything about the songs that genuinely surprised you while working on this project?

LeMay: I learned so much. On our weekly calls, Alex always excitedly ushered me into the entrance of several wormholes he'd been traversing, and it was a constant delight. Thinking deeply about what these characters were wearing, what they might've been doing in the narrative beyond the narrative, thinking about their environment, how they held their faces, how they held their bodies — it was an immersive way to listen. I'd had ideas in my head about so many of the characters because I tend to think visually, but there were lots of fantastic surprises, like when we dug into Cathy Berberian, for instance. I'd never looked up what she looked like before.

Pappademas: I think what surprised me the most as I dug deeper into these songs was how much empathy Donald and Walter seemed to have for their characters. It's not something they're usually given credit for — the idea people have about them is that they're always snickering amongst themselves, making fun of the people they write about, but I think that's actually more true of somebody like Randy Newman than it is of Becker/Fagen. I think there's always a real sense of humanity's plight underneath whatever coldness or archness is more easily detectable in their work on first blush — even when the people they're writing about are doomed or deluded or depraved, you don't get the sense that they're judging these characters, most of the time. There's an attention paid to the human longing that motivates people to these weird actions and they don't judge the longing, of, say, the guy who's hung up on a sex worker in "Pearl of the Quarter" — whereas Frank Zappa, given the same storyline, would absolutely write about what a moron that guy is.

Steely Dan's lyrics are famously somewhat cryptic, and Walter Becker and Donald Fagen were quite averse to having their lyrics read as straightforward personal narratives. It's clear that so much research went into illuminating these songs, but there's also a healthy dose of creative speculation, too, both in how the subjects of the songs are described and how they're depicted.

LeMay: The only characters I painted that weren't 100% creative speculation (and really, less speculation and more my personal interpretation) were those having to do with actual, living people, like Cathy Berberian, Jill St. John and G. Gordon Liddy. I had a folder on my computer called "DAN CASTING GALLERY" full of images of people in my life, found photos, '60s and '70s fashion catalogs, advertisements and sewing pattern packaging. I painted from a melange of those images mixed with things that had been in my head forever, as well as from a ton of photos of my own body posing in different ways for reference. The most important thing to me was getting the humanity — the profoundly flawed humanity — of these characters right.

Pappademas: And it works — I try to get across that humanity in the text, but having Joan populate this world with real human faces made the finished product into something greater than I could have gotten to on my own.

IN THIS PAINTING: The El Supremo from Show Biz Kids/ART CREDIT: Joan LeMay/University of Texas Press

Anyway, my answer to the question above is that when I'm writing criticism, for sure, but also when I'm writing reported pieces, I feel like there's always an element of creative speculation in what I do. It's just more or less constrained by facts depending on what kind of piece it is. Even if you've sat in a room with somebody for hours you're ultimately imagining their inner life based on what they've told you, and sometimes on what they haven't told you. In terms of Quantum Criminals, yeah, Steely Dan definitely tried to discourage any attempt to read these lyrics autobiographically — and the fact that all their lyrics were composed by (or at least credited to) two writers was their first line of defense against that kind of reading, because even when they're writing in the first person you're conscious that the "I" in every Dan song is to whatever degree a fictional character and therefore a distancing device. But I think it's human nature — or at least it's my human nature — to intuit the opposite and look for places where the art seems to correspond to what we know to be the contours of an artist's life. Because the other thing about Steely Dan is they liked to obfuscate; the fact that they rarely owned up to their music having an autobiographical component (with certain exceptions, notably "Deacon Blues," which they admitted was pretty personal) doesn't mean it wasn't autobiographical. And at times — as with "Gaucho," a song about a duo torn apart by a third party who might be the personification of drugs or other forms of hedonism, recorded for the album Donald made mostly without Walter because Walter's addiction issues had pulled him away from the band — the correspondences became too tempting to not explore. Which is what happens when you write cryptically; it's human nature to decrypt.

I don't know; I guess I'm doing the same thing Taylor Swift's fans do when they decide that some opaque lyric is an Easter egg about this or that relationship of hers, or what A.J. Weberman was doing when he decided "The sun isn't yellow, it's chicken" was Bob Dylan confessing to faking his own death, or what the people who think The Shining was Stanley Kubrick exorcizing his guilt over faking the moon landing. The difference is that I think I'm right and I think those other people are all nuts, because I'm in my bubble and can't imagine the view from theirs”.

It is sad that we will never see new music from Steely Dan. The great Walter Becker left us in 2017. He would have been very proud of Joan LeMay and Alex Pappademas’s book. I am not sure what Donald Fagen thinks of it. The passion and detail does great justice to Steely Dan’s unique and genius music. Fleshes out these incredible and intriguing characters. As there is so much love for Quantum Criminals: Ramblers, Wild Gamblers, and Other Sole Survivors from the Songs of Steely Dan, and it is clear LeMay and Pappademas have this shared love and connection, it makes me wonder whether we will see them back together again. As of this month, there is no news as to whether Donald Fagen will follow up 2012’s Sunken Condos. We await a fifth studio album. I know he did interviews in 2022 where the subject of new music came up. He said how he has written some songs and spent some time in the studio. Still busy touring as Steely Dan, I guess we will hear new Donald Fagen music in the next year or two. Would Joan LeMay and Alex Pappademas do anything with Donald Fagen’s characters?! Steely Dan’s discography is more expansive and character-filled, though there are so many Donald Fagen songs with these Steely Dan-like characters that would be fascinating to know more about. From titular characters like Security Joan, Morph the Cat, Maxine; there is also the Slinky Thing from the track of the same name (from Sunken Condos), H Gang (Morph the Cat), Miss Marlene and Planet D'Rhonda (both from Sunken Condos), Morph the Cat’s Mary Shut the Garden Door and The Night Belongs to Mona; the album’s depiction of Death in Brite Nightgown.  There is also Tomorrow's Girls (from 1993’s Kamakiriad) and Ruby Baby (from The Nightfly).

Donald Fagen as a solo artist has created some wonderful characters across his four solo albums so far. Even if Alex Pappademas and Joan LeMay do not work on anything else Steely Dan-related/adjacent again, it would be epic if they came together for something. Such is the brilliance of Quantum Criminals: Ramblers, Wild Gamblers, and Other Sole Survivors from the Songs of Steely Dan we hope, like Donald Fagen and Walter Becker reuniting for 2000’s Two Against Nature – after Steely Dan went on hiatus after 1980’s Gaucho -, that the multi-talented LeMay and Pappademas do more. On 2nd March, Steely Dan’s third studio album, Pretzel Logic, turns fifty. It compelled me to dive back into Quantum Criminals: Ramblers, Wild Gamblers, and Other Sole Survivors from the Songs of Steely Dan. Not only an essential purchase for Steely Dan fans, I would advise anyone knew to the genius of Donald Fagen and Walter Becker to read it. It made me think about Donald Fagen’s solo work and all the incredible characters in the albums. The history and background of the albums and how, in 2024, we look ahead to see if the master will grace us with any new music. Pages and pages of beautiful paintings, spellbinding words that do full justice to the songs of Steely Dan, I will keep reading Quantum Criminals: Ramblers, Wild Gamblers, and Other Sole Survivors from the Songs of Steely Dan. It offers up something new with each visit. It truly is a…

WORK of dedication and genius.

FEATURE: Stay Flo: Solange’s When I Get Home at Five

FEATURE:

 

 

Stay Flo

Solange’s When I Get Home at Five

_________

WITHOUT doubt….

one of the best albums of 2019, I wanted to mark the upcoming fifth anniversary of Solange’s When I Get Home. The follow-up to her 2016 debut, A Seat at the Table, it is a phenomenal album that remains her most current. We all hope that Solange gifts the world with a third studio album soon enough. I will come to some reviews for the astonishing When I Get Home. Reaching number seven in the U.S. and eighteen in the U.K., Solange’s When I Get Home was a commercial and critical success. Let’s start off with a Pitchfork feature from 2019. It reacted to a film screening of When I Get Home:

“Tonight in Houston, Solange hosted “album experience” events across Houston for her new album When I Get Home. The event, which streamed live on Apple Music and her BlackPlanet website, began with a screening of the Solange-directed When I Get Home film and ended with a conversation between Solange and writer/art curator Antwaun Sargent.

The new album features contributions from Panda Bear, Blood Orange, Cassie, Earl Sweatshirt, and others. During the conversation, Sargent asked Solange about her process of incorporating collaborators. “Editing is just such a huge part of my process,” she said. “I would say that it’s 80% editing, and for some reason, I just have the discipline for it.”

She also discussed the process of giving collaborators the freedom to create on their own terms before deciding how to incorporate their contributions in the final product. “The best for me is to invite people into the space and say ‘do you.’ It could be six hours before I hear the one ad-lib or the one thing where I think, ‘OK, that is how I can extend this into an expression of what I want to achieve.’”

She emphasized her role as the album’s producer, calling producing “my heart and soul.” “Speaking my truth, it is rather difficult as a producer to be reduced to just the songwriter or just the artist when you spend 18 hours editing one drum sound,” she said. “We’ve come a long way from that for women, but it’s still got a little ways to go—the way we’re able to have that conversation about Rick Rubin but we’re not extending that conversation to others.”

When asked about the process of writing the new album, Solange revealed some musical inspirations she turned to at the time, including Stevie Wonder (and specifically his album The Secret Life of Plants), Steve Reich, Alice Coltrane, and Sun Ra—music that emphasized repetition.

She also discussed the difference between When I Get Home and her previous album, 2016’s A Seat at the Table. “Obviously with A Seat at the Table I had so much to say,” she said. “With this album I had so much to feel. Words would have been reductive to what I needed to feel and express. It’s in the sonics for me.”

At the beginning of the talk, Solange revealed that she quietly rented a house in Houston to begin work on new music. “I think after touring the last record, there were a lot of things that were happening to my spirit—things that feel sort of out of control,” she said.

Later, she discussed Texas’ influence on the When I Get Home film. “I knew about a year and a half ago, it would be really really important to me to tell a story about black cowboys.” She added, “I feel so privileged to meet so many of these cowboys and hear their stories and see them pray before they go in the bull ring and see what they’re willing to do to their bodies for the sake of entertainment, which is something I can relate to.”

She finished by addressing the feeling of being home in Houston for the album’s rollout. “It’s just joy everywhere,” she said. “It just feels good. That’s what home does for you. I could be anywhere in the world, but nothing is gonna make me feel like this place does”.

I want to stay with the visual and cinematic aspect of When I Get Home. In collaboration with WeTranfer, there were these incredible and extended screenings of When I Get Home at institutions across the world. The reaction from those watching the screening was powerful. This article explained more:

“It’s essential for museums to recognize the important cultural contributions of artists across disciplines, beyond static artwork that hangs on walls,” says Lauren Argentina Zelaya, the Director of Public Programs at Brooklyn Museum where the film screened last week.“Institutions need to include music, film and video that reflects the contemporary society we live in, and to showcase art and creativity that reflects the lived experiences of people who do not historically feel welcome in museum’s spaces.”

It’s a truth that When I Get Home speaks to, the reassurance and justification of your own identity in a time when the fundamental idea of belonging has been called into question. Peeling off its layers further, we speak to Solange to delve into the core messages at the heart of When I Get Home, and find out how her roots taught her more than any history book ever could.

When I Get Home is about identity and self expression, what do feel you’ve learnt about yourself through the process of creating it?

I’ve been telling a story about a really pivotal moment in my life when I was around ten years old that left an explosive impact on me. I went to a church summer camp in Houston and it was my first time experiencing what I would call the spirit - however you feel closest to interpreting that - and, because I really did not know how to unpack it all, it scared the hell out of me. I struggled with confronting that force for so long, this idea of an energy so strong it could transform your tongue or cause you to faint or shout and dance in ways that were out of your body. I would just want to run from it.

The film is really about standing still in that unknown, and feeling solitude and sanity in the silence of it all. The reckoning of what I may hear and see if I did in fact silence all those parts of myself and if I could really live with, and swallow, the truths that come up. For me personally, it speaks a lot about reimagining the infinite possibilities of darkness, and changing the way we experience that vastness of space. I got to sit with Scarface while I was making this album and he said some really powerful shit to me about his constant need and attraction to darkness, and I realized in that moment how much we have been taught to only rely on light as a guiding force for healing and rebirth. I wasn’t leaning into the possibilities of darkness out of fear, but even from a filming perspective leaning into the vastness that blackness creates was so expansive for my process.

All of these conversations for me have been grounded in evolution. Thinking that you know the way and then having gone through something completely out of my control - which for me at the time was my health - and coming up with new ways of experiencing and coping with the world. For me rebirth always starts at the beginning, which was coming home.

Growing up in my mother’s hair salon constantly reinforced that I never had to subscribe to this one dimensional version of myself.

PHOTO CREDIT: Saint Records/Columbia

Home and the idea of belonging are integral to the film. What does this notion of ‘home’ mean to your creativity?

I started touring at 13 which often made me feel this overwhelming sense of longing for home. Even when I was actually home sometimes in the physical sense of dwelling, I still felt like I wasn’t home in my body and my spirit, and returning to Houston started to answer a lot of these questions for me. I still have a real issue with sitting my ass down in one space, but I recognized how much of me was grounded in the city and how there are parts of me that are just so damn Houston that I feel really proud of.

Starting to unpack what it really meant to grow up in a neighborhood like Third Ward and being able to say the phenomenal Debbie Allen and Phylicia Rashad are from there, or Devin the Dude, who informed so much of my young adulthood, lives in Third Ward, or Pat Parker, a brilliant poet who was also activating in really incredible revolutionary ways is from Third Ward is powerful. I feel really proud, and honestly honored to have been able to invite them into the fabric and the storytelling of this album because those are the moments that express things I could never fully articulate about myself.

Discovering that video of Debbie and Phylicia singing to their mom, and starting off with “I boarded a train, kissed all goodbye” instantly felt like home, in the sense of both leaving and returning, and so to be able to sample that was incredible.

And sampling Pat Parker’s poem “Poem to Ann” is for me about creating connectivity to the work that she’s done but also saying this is all in the lineage of where I’m from and who I am. Or being able to say that I witnessed hundreds of cowboys trail riding from Texas to Louisiana on any given weekend at the Zydeco playing the accordion and line dancing with pride. That informed my vantage point of Western culture long before my dusty American history book could ever. Things like the innovation of Screw and how transformative it was for me to put on a Swishahouse ‘Fuck Action’ tape to do my homework to, and I swear that pace and frequency has impacted the entire wavelength I operate from! I’m like, ‘everybody need to slow the fuck down!’

I was also so honored to have worked with other insanely talented filmmakers and artists from Texas on this project who could really translate the spirit of all that into the film; Terrance Nance who directed the piece for ‘Dreams’ and Autumn Knight whose piece ‘Directions to Prairie View’ is a historical black college in Texas I used in the video for ‘Beltway’. Robert Pruitt, who’s also from Houston, lent his work and that resonates with me so deeply. I feel forever grateful to have had such phenomenal hands touch this project and help me reach places I couldn’t have reached on my own. 

Speaking of the powerful education you received growing up in Third Ward, what did being amongst women of the black community there teach you about beauty, and how you see yourself?

Man, it’s taught me everything really! I can’t even put into words how grateful I am for the experiences I had growing up in my neighborhood, in my community of women, and I never ever take that shit for granted. I mean, growing up in my mother’s hair salon constantly reinforced that I never had to subscribe to this one dimensional version of myself because I got to bear witness to so many bomb ass incredible black women all on their own personal walks and journeys figuring this shit out. There were parts of all of them I wanted to reflect in my own existence. I got to see and hear their stories in a space where they felt safe, cared for and radiant, and could unapologetically celebrate their beauty and transformation. I got to go to the Ensemble Theater and have teachers who looked like me encourage me to write out my little itty bitty feelings, and then teach me how those little bitty thoughts could be transcribed into something they called a monologue, which back then was mind blowing for me - that expansive allowance of thinking. I simply would not even be close to the woman I am without those experiences.

And who are the female artists and creatives that are leading the way and inspiring your practice now?

That list could go on forever! We out here! I’m a big fan of Megan Thee Stallion and Tierra Whack and all the innovative energy and damn skill that they are bringing to the music space. Then there’s Jenn Nkiru and Frances Bodomo. All of the conversations and visual languages they are establishing through filmmaking have had an impact on me. My girl Kelela is really shining and killing things both musically and visually and I’m so excited to see all the places she’s going to continue to take us. And Syd is a wonder! I’m so lucky to have a tribe of incredible friends who are all killing it in their own practices of film and art.

Then there’s also Melina Matsoukas, Armina Mussa and Toyin Odutola. Lynette Yiadom leaves me speechless every time I experience her work and is a huge source of inspiration. Kilo Kish is also doing really incredible things through different expressions of mediums and artwork. Karon Davis’ sculpture always blows my mind. Honestly, I could go on and on and on! The list is endless. It’s such a pop’n ass time for boundless expression and I’m really excited to witness all of it.

Where do you plan to take your art, it’s now such an integral part of your musicality and your career?

I think the thing I feel the most is just an abundance of gratitude that I’ve been able to have and be a part of a community of people who support my work as it evolves and activates in so many different spaces and mediums. These are people who nurture that and inspire me to keep creating and give me an even greater understanding of the work I’ve created to this point. People who haven’t told me to shut the fuck up for being really annoying when I’ve said I can’t say this through music, or even dance, I need to say this through sculpture or architecture. I’m really interested in expanding on more tactile practices and exploring all of the ways in which new materials can help articulate parts of me I am yet to really dive into. I’m getting to know my body more and more every damn day and that includes all the ways I want to continue to explore my physical self through new work. I’m also feeling really excited about the future of creating new pieces and musical arrangements to present in a more philharmonic space with larger ensembles and combining that with more theatrical interpretations of my performance”.

I will come to reviews now. Pitchfork were among those to show plenty of love and respect to Solange’s When I Get Home. As A Seat at the Table was so regarded and successful, there was a sense of expectation on an album that followed three years later. I know that many are asking whether there is going to be new music from the amazing Solange:

“In a T Magazine interview with Solange published last fall, writer Ayana Mathis described the making of the new album as taking the singer back to “a kind of Houston of the mind.” It’s a city that figures heavily in Knowles family mythology as the birthplace of Solange and her sister. At the time of the interview, we didn’t know the name of the record, When I Get Home, which indicates that this is an album about return. Now we have music and an accompanying short film that reconstructs the Houston of Solange’s mind.

It’s not literal objectification of the past so much as a future memory of the city, an ephemeral mental grid. See-sawing bass booms from phantom slabs, wood-grained and candy-painted per local tradition. Synthesizers and samples ricochet off the tall, empty office buildings of downtown Houston, reverberating to the heavens. Black cowboys gallop through the dusk—the clip of hooves a drumbeat. Space refuse is treasure. And snatches of vocals from hometown rappers Devin the Dude and Scarface float like murmurs from passing car windows.

Three years after releasing the soul-baring opus A Seat at the Table, Solange has ditched traditional song structure and world-weary lyrics for a sonically and thematically ambiguous record that feels freer, and less burdened by the white gaze. Although Houston is the beating heart at its core, much like New Orleans pulsed through A Seat, the music’s spectral, free-associative quality suggests that the idea of “home” is less rooted. Solange offers a fundamental lesson of those who leave: Home isn’t something you can possess, it lives on without you. Perhaps she also understands that we can’t trust our memories and so Solange gives her music motion. We slide into this “Houston of the mind,” on a repeated refrain that reinforces the slipperiness of recall: “I saw things… I imagined/Things… I imagined.”

The music is so in motion it’s hard to pin down. Its obliqueness does not give it automatic significance; instead, like in jazz or drone music, engaged listening instigates feeling. Because Solange doesn’t offer a clear thesis like on A Seat at the Table, the onus falls on the listener to get close and make their own meaning. That can be a liberating creative impulse, particularly for a pop star who is widely considered an auteur. Solange and her musical collaborators—for what it’s worth, nearly all men aside from Abra and Cassie—duck and weave through various time signatures, burying Easter Eggs beneath bold keys, Moog magic, and textured drum lines that embellish the omnipresent low end. There are samples, background vocals, and additional personnel credits to people representing Houston’s past, present, and future: from Phylicia Rashad and the poet Pat Parker, to Solange’s young son Julez Smith II, who has a production credit on the interlude “Nothing Without Intention.”

When I Get Home is exploratory, but still kind of glossy. The melodies on “Down With the Clique” and “Way to the Show” could be rearranged remnants from her first album Solo Star, released in her teen pop days. Pharrell, the king of sheen, shows up with his signature four-count intro on “Sound of Rain,” a song that perfectly channels the kitschy, pixelated optimism of late ’90s/early aughts futurism. He also brings his toolkit staples of tightly wound drums and syncopated piano for “Almeda,” an early fan-favorite because of an unexpected feature by a baby-voiced Playboi Carti who raps about diamonds shining through the darkness on a track where Solange heralds Black ownership. We’re in Houston, so only one track hints at the time Solange recently spent in Jamaica. “Binz” is a wall-slapper, waist-winder, booty-popper. The airy three-part harmonies that have been her true calling card since covering the Dirty Projectors’ “Stillness Is the Move” ascend over a dense arpeggiated bassline, and then give way to playful back-and-forth toasting between Solange and The-Dream that echoes the incantations of Sister Nancy: “Sundown, wind chimes/I just wanna wake up on C.P. time.”

Solange is frolicking here, using a freeform template that aspires to the endlessly uplifting magic of Stevie Wonder, the psychedelic pleasures of chopped and screwed music, or the spiritual jazz of Alice Coltrane and the Arkestra of Sun Ra. One of her chief collaborators throughout is John Carroll Kirby, whose solo music could only be described as New Age. Standing on the Corner, a young New York City jazz group, provide some sublime moments of drama and tension—a perfect template for the gestural, post-modern, Kate Bush–esque choreography that Solange prefers.

When I Get Home is particularly beautiful as an ambient piece that’s unencumbered by the emotional catharsis of A Seat at the Table—but it is missing a palpable thesis statement. Fourteen of the album’s 19 tracks clock in at under three minutes, but the patchwork effect suggests a more stream-of-consciousness bricolage than, say, Tierra Whack’s idea-led brevity. She’s got a lot of ideas, but I’m still left wondering what this album can tell us about her aesthetic practice. (Despite its title, the interlude “Nothing Without Intention” doesn’t provide a clue.) But this need for direction only matters because A Seat at the Table felt so urgent.

Here, Solange is unhurried. The album rewards repetition, in listening and in execution. Repetition can cue a meditative state; it can also be code. “I saw things I imagined, things I imagined,” she sings on the opener. “We were down with you, down with you,” she continues on “Down With the Clique.” And by the time she switches up the single phrase repetition on “Almeda,” listing with pride, “Brown skin, Brown face, Black skin, Black braids,” the album is half over and the mood, the dream state, resets.

Some spiritual traditions use repeated mantras or prayers to invite awareness and presence, others as a way to invoke the past or alter the future. Design principles teach that repetition communicates unity and cohesion—enter “My Skin My Logo,” where Solange trades admiring verses with a cooing Gucci Mane, whose name conjures an endless monogram of interlocking Gs. The song itself is childlike and loving; the macho rapper softening his nursery rhyme-flow for something that sounds like an actual nursery rhyme. It’s through repetition that Solange resurrects a timeless, formless Houston of her mind. She uses the device extensively and almost compulsively, trying to remember, trying harder not to forget, and trying even harder to situate these traditions within a wider context of Black music and culture in America”.

Before rounding off with news around new music, I want to introduce NME’s five-star assessment of 2019’s When I Get Home. Turning five on 1st March, I think it is important to revisit this incredible album. One that is not played and shared as much as it should be:

“On the February 28, Solange announced the surprise release of her follow-up to the stunning 2016 album ‘A Seat At The Table’. The frenzy that erupted was colossal, and rightfully so, as she released a record that confirmed her already established greatness.

Each of the 19 tracks on ‘When I Get Home’ is magical. The opening intro consists of minimal piano with the repeated phrase, ‘Things I imagined”; this simplicity runs throughout the whole album, as airy beats, like pillowy clouds, elevate the listener. The tactical use of repetition is used to place the listener where she wants them to be; right up there with her – there’s a real sense of intimacy throughout the record.

‘Binz’, for instance, has a 46 second intro of a repeated drum sequence and bass guitar. She gives us up-tempo and groovy vibes, and we can’t help but bask in the song, yet she strips this away with the vulnerable ‘Beltway’. This is where Solange lets the fun and playful side of ‘When I Get Home’ melt into something more unguarded and raw. Here she displays a powerful ability to manipulate her audience – though you’ll be more than happy to go with her.

In addition, ‘When I Get Home’ is a celebration. A celebration of females. A celebration of black culture. But mostly a celebration of music. With exceptional – and somewhat unexpected – features (Gucci Mane, ’90s rapper Scarface), Solange’s blended approach to R&B is nothing short of breathtaking. The ninth track, “Almeda”, boasts a universal hook, while Playboi Carti’s staccato ad-lib “what”, intertwined with Solange’s lullaby-like vocals, is spectacular, and tips the song into a masterpiece. The song’s celebration of blackness runs through Solange’s lyrics (“Brown skin, brown braids / Black faith still can’t be washed away”). The lighthearted feeling of track uplifts the powerful words.

In dropping her self-produced record without fanfare, she’s showed us the magnitude that women can achieve on their own. And then there are the lyrics. ‘We deal with freak’n’ is a spoken word skit about encouraging women to see their self worth (“Do you realise how magnificent you are?… We are walking embodiments of God’s consciousness”). Solange is using her platform to say: “We are unbreakable”, and she can’t be commended highly enough for that.

‘When I Get Home’ reminds us that she’s a frontrunner of R&B in her own right. With soothing production, enveloped with numbing vocals, she leaves you in a state of utopia. This surprise album of 2019 was something we didn’t know we needed”.

On the subject of new music, Solange discussed her plans and current activities in an interview with Harper’s Bazaar. Ahead of the fifth anniversary of When I Get Home, there is a lot of speculation around a third album. I know that we will get new music from Solange soon enough. It is understandable there is a lot of excitement and demand given the power and quality of her first two albums:

“Solange knows her fans are eager to hear new music from her, but she’s still marching to the beat of her own drum—or in this case, tuba.

In an interview for Harper’s Bazaar’s March 2024 cover story, the superstar opens up about finding her latest musical obsession in the brass instrument.

“I love it,” she says. “I’ve started writing music for the tuba, and I am trying to talk myself into releasing it, but I can only imagine the eye rolls from people being like, ‘This bitch hasn’t made an album.’ ”

The last time the artist released a musical project, it was in 2019’s When I Get Home, her fourth studio album, which featured contributions from Pharrell Williams, Steve Lacy, Dev Hynes, Playboi Carti, and Tyler, the Creator.

Explaining her love for the tuba, Solange says, “It sounds like what the gut feels like to me. … There’s a way that it takes up space that you can’t deny, and it also just feels very Black to me.”

PHOTO CREDIT: Larissa Hofmann

On working with her on When I Get Home, Tyler, the Creator tells Bazaar, “It’s such a pure feeling that she’s really tapped into. … I think that’s why I liked her, because [her art] wasn’t based on chasing any zeitgeist, whether it was something political or like, yeah, I’m down like a fucking undercover cop. She’s not an undercover cop. She’s just her, and she makes whatever she wants. I feel like 80 percent of artists with these opportunities to put something out don’t do that, because they’re chasing numbers. She got daughters … like, it’s a lot of them out there that’s not citing her.”

Solange also reflected on the album that preceded When I Get Home, 2016’s A Seat at the Table, widely considered her artistic breakthrough.

As she explains, “A Seat at the Table, and the work that went into it, was all about origin: finding the way that history was generationally repeating itself or evolving and all of the ways that I found those stories within me”.

On 1st March, the wonderful When I Get Home turns five. Such a wonderful and moving listening experience, go and check it out if you have not done in a while. I wonder whether Solange will react to the fifth anniversary or say anything. One of the best albums of the last decade, When I Get Home showed that Solange was in a league of her own. A singular artist creating some of the most important music around. All eyes will be on her when it comes to…

WHAT comes next.

FEATURE: Sherbert Sunset: Little Simz’s GREY Area at Five

FEATURE:

 

 

Sherbert Sunset

Little Simz’s GREY Area at Five

_________

SOME might say….

PHOTO CREDIT: Jen Ewbank

that a fifth anniversary is not a big thing. Like it is half-way to a proper anniversary. In my opinion, it is important to mark a fifth anniversary. It is quite a big deal. In any case, there are two albums that arrived on 1st March, 2019 that are worth highlighting. The other, Solange’s When I Get Home, is one I am also covering. For this feature, I want to go deeper with Little Simz’s GREY Area. Since the release of her third studio album, Simz released the Mercury-winning album, Sometimes I Might Be Introvert, in 2021. NO THANK YOU came out at the end of 2022. The E.P., Drop 7, came out on 9th February. I also forgot to mention that Drop 6 came out in 2020. She has been pretty busy since 2019! There will be great excitement around a possible new album this year. She seems to get stronger and more amazing with every release. GREY Area is arguably one of her best albums. Nominated for the 2019 Mercury Prize – it lost out to Dave’s PYSCHODRAMA -, this album should get love ahead of its fifth anniversary. I will come to a couple of the glowing reviews for GREY Area. Even though it charted low in the U.K., it did reach number one on the R&B Chart, oddly. Regardless, GREY Area is now seen as one of the finest albums of the 2010s. A masterful and stunning work of brilliance from one of our best artists and musicians. I want to start with an interview from The Line of Best Fit:

“Essentially, this is what the album’s about. It’s one big grey area. Nothing is black and white. Nothing is set in stone,” Simz says.

It’s not the only time that Simz, whose real name is Simbi Ajikawo, debates life’s twists and turns during our conversation. There’s an uncertainty, she says, that’s symptomatic of this period of adulthood. “I think the more I speak to my friends and people in my age group about it, the more I realise we’re all going through it,” she says.

“Some people go through it silently and some people are a bit more vocal. I think I was someone dealing with it to myself silently until I started opening up and was like, ‘Oh, so you’re going through it as well? Oh, sick.’ I mean, not sick! But just that I don't feel so alone in it.”

GREY Area arrives after a couple of years of intense highs and lows in which Simz has played sold-out headline shows, collected MOBO nods, and joined Lauryn Hill on the hip-hop queen’s recent anniversary tour. Simz talks of “life-changing” experiences, including a tour with Gorillaz in 2017. “A lot has changed. My life is changing in such a drastic way. Just being in that environment with Gorillaz, around legends – it definitely changed my perspective on a lot of things.”

But the peaks met the troughs. “I think, personally, the more I was on the go and away from home, the more I missed out on family and friends,” Simz explains. “I guess I just found it a bit hard to keep that balance of work and personal.”

Simz thinks that she possibly overwhelmed herself in 2017 for her second record’s promo cycle and other collaborations, which spun her into a “constant state of anxiety” and “just being down.”

“Obviously people see you on stage, and they live through your social media, but there’s a lot that goes on behind the scenes,” Simz says, addressing the facade of a ‘glamourous’ music industry. “There’s a lot of moving parts, a lot of hard work. I took on a lot. I think it kind of affected my physical and mental state a little. I hadn’t given myself a moment to just breathe. I felt like people expected a lot from me, and I was just giving and giving and giving and burning myself out.”

The antidote was throwing herself back into making music once the tours were over. “I really took time and just got in the studio and worked. I kinda needed that; I kinda needed that time to cleanse and be stationary. Hone in on my thoughts and focus everything.”

Simz is grateful, for herself at least, that creating music is both a passion and a coping mechanism. “Some people will go through stuff and, I dunno, turn to substance abuse – whatever it is they need to deal with certain things,” she says. “But I’m lucky enough that my outlet was music, getting in the studio and being able to write about these things. After I’d written the album I did feel a sense of clarity and like, ‘Ok, I know where I’m at at now. It feels like I’m normal again. I’m functioning like a human being as opposed to a robot.’”

Perhaps this is little surprise; those familiar with Simz’ back catalogue will know that she’s a prolific writer. In the space of nine years she’s released four mixtapes, seven EPs, and – including GREY Area which drops this Friday – three studio albums. To date, everything has been released on her own label AGE 101.

Growing up, Simz was a keen, precocious performer. She was showcasing her talents in drama classes from the age of nine. By 11, she was playing her own music at Islington Academy. In her teens she secured a role on the CBBC superhero show Spirit Warriors and later a role in E4 youth drama Youngers. Then she turned back to music. In 2013, aged 19, Simz released her fourth mixtape Blank Canvas, premiering it via Jay-Z’s Life + Times website.

Simz’ debut record, 2015’s A Curious Tale Of Trials + Persons, was a concept album about fame replete with role-playing characters and Simz’ pithy rhymes. Its 2016 follow-up, Stillness In Wonderland, displayed musical vignettes about navigating life’s uncertainties via a rich tapestry of R&B, electronica and jazz. On the latter record’s track, “Wings”, Simz spits: “This the type of music that ain’t never going to sell? / Well, what if I prove you wrong?”

"I’m tapping into the more musician side of me as opposed to just the rapper side...I play instruments so I’m listening to things with different ears now”

Is she trying to prove naysayers wrong? Simz has no doubt produced some of her most impactful, immediate material to date in GREY Area. In “Offence” it’s clattering beats, contorted synths, and jazz flutes bolster incredible affirmations: “I'm Jay Z on a bad day / Shakespeare on my worst day.” Meanwhile, “101 FM” is an engrossing tale of Simz’ life story over a looping, pentatonic video game 8-bit hook. “Boss” has the bluesy snarl and stomp of Kanye West’s “Gold Digger”. In fact, she namedrops West later in the song: “Learnt from 'Ye then went and touched the sky n****” Throughout the record Simz equips artistic self-belief with sturdy mechanics.

“I think it was all a natural progression to be honest,” she says of these brasher sounds. “I didn’t go into writing this album thinking, ‘I want this to reach more people.’ I mean, obviously I want it to reach more people, but I want to make music that this time round is going to transcend. It was more that, for me, I wanted to be more experimental and try new things.”

Simz, who describes the writing and recording process as “a true collaboration”, adds that GREY Area is her most musical work to date. She’s picked instruments up more than ever this time. In the past she’s been stuck with the label “UK female MC” or “rapper” (a mistake she once corrected The Guardian about).

Really, Simz is an artist in myriad ways. She raps, writes lyrics, composes, produces, and ‘dabbles’ with the drums, guitar and bass. ‘I’m tapping into the more musician side of me as opposed to just the rapper side,” she says. “I play instruments so I’m listening to things with different ears now”.

I think GREY Area was the album where I discovered Little Simz. When I truly tuned into her work. I went back and listened to Stillness in Wonderland (2016) and A Curious Tale of Trials + Persons (2015). The Independent sat down with Little Simz to discuss the awe-inspiring GREY Area. Many observing how this was her most complete and confident work to date:

“I don’t open up to people,” she says. Yet the 25-year-old, born Simbi Ajikawo, is hardly reticent, as we sit by the window of a pub overlooking the Thames – around 20 minutes away from where she grew up in North London – to discuss her superb new album, GREY Area.

“At the time I was writing, I was in a very confusing headspace,” she explains. “Everything was in this weird area, and it was all a shade of grey. Being in your mid-twenties feels like a strange place to be. I’m still discovering myself and things are a lot more complex than they were five years ago. Nothing’s straightforward. I’m peeling off layers as I’m getting older, and finding more and more about myself.”

This feeling of being adrift provided the title for her new record. GREY Area is her third studio album, in a career that has also seen the release of five EPs, a mention on Forbes’ “30 Under 30” list, praise from Jay-Z and Kendrick Lamar, collaborations with everyone from Ghetts to Gorillaz, and a tour with her idol Lauryn Hill. It is an LP that, one hopes, will finally snag her a more mainstream audience and put a stop to the “underrated” tag that precedes most mentions of her name.

“I did go through a phase where I didn’t understand what more I had to do to prove myself,” she recalls. “Sometimes I go on my Twitter and I see comments like ‘Simz is so stepped on, so underrated’, but I can’t keep focusing on the people who don’t wanna f*** with me. I’m over it. I’m just putting my energy into the people who have been supporting, and who get it and understand what I’m trying to do. Maybe that’s just me getting older.”

I think that’s what makes my music have this international feel,” she says. “I’m from London – this is my home – but I feel as though my music can stretch way beyond. And especially with this album, I think we’ve found a clever way to open it up a lot more.”

It helped to surround herself with a team of people she trusted to make the record, such as her childhood friend Inflo, GREY Area’s producer, whose previous credits include Michael Kiwanuka’s breakthrough album Love & Hate. “We had that chemistry there already,” Simz says, “so getting in the studio was easy.”

There are moments of startling vulnerability on GREY Area, but before you reach them you’re met with the full-throttle assault of “Offence” – where Simz weaponises her formidable lyrical skills (“I’m Jay-Z on a bad day, Shakespeare on my worst days”) before unleashing the war cry: “I said it with my chest and I don’t care who I offend”.

“If you get offended, then that’s on you,” Simz says now. “I’m not doing this cheap stuff just because I’m female.” She wanted this record to have a gritty, Nineties underground vibe, which led to elements like the vocal distortion on “Boss”. She also worked with live musicians rather than samples, which she “didn’t have the luxury of doing” on the 2017 concept album Stillness in Wonderland. She has also included three featured artists, all carefully chosen and vastly different to one another: Jamaican reggae star Chronixx, with whom she last collaborated on the 2016 track “LMPD”; Kiwanuka; and the Swedish electronic band Little Dragon”.

It is worth bringing in an interview from Vice. There are some interesting exchanges and revelations from the interview. A very natural and honest artist who is inspiring others coming through. GREY Area was a massive statement that announced Simz as one of the finest voices of her generation:

“Simz started rapping aged nine, putting music up online and getting on mics wherever she could around London via her star-making youth clubs (I’m talking Leona Lewis and Alexandra Burke as other alums). Born Simbi Ajikawo and raised in Holloway by her mother, a devoted foster carer, Simz’s gallons of creative energy needed an outlet. So as a teen she acted too, appearing on TV shows like CBBC’s Spirit Warriors and E4’s Youngers, but music kept drawing her back. By the time she’d started her music technology degree at University of West London, in Ealing, her career was taking off. And she soon realised she couldn’t do both. Quitting uni would show both sides to herself: her ambition, and her insistence on doing things her own way. Really, she’d been like that her whole life. As a child, she remembers, “100% my vibe was ‘I’m just doing my thing,’ literally. And as much as it may be shocking to people that I’m indie and doing music, if you know me from when I was little I’ve always moved in a way that is independent. I’ve always done my own thing. My friends and that, close people, my family, they know this about me: Simbi moves how she wants to move. I’m not following no this and that.”

You can see that in how she’s built a career as an independent artist. But beyond that, Simz has pushed on with unorthodox projects – absolutely loads of EPs, curating a festival, never once changing her sound to please others, slapping away the dreaded “femcee” label – without much initial support from the traditional UK music industry gatekeepers. Yes, she’s received MOBO Award nominations and recognition from ticketing app Dice, for her live shows, plus an Association of Independent Music Award for her 2016 debut album A Curious Tale of Trials + Persons. But it took a good few years for her co-signs to flood in outside the easily siloed world of black music (which now underpins the majority of pop, even when people try to brush it away with an ‘urban’ tag). She still hasn’t received a major award nod.

Even spending a short time in her presence, you clock that she’d rather get on with the work. I mention how Grey Area feels like a snapshot, of her headspace and outlook now. Unlike her past releases, focused on near-fantastical worlds and dream-like states, Grey Area is grounded in today, in London, in her. “It’s funny you say that, cos the other day, I was listening to my oooold music. My Soundcloud stuff, and that. And I was like, ‘oh my days, I proper remember feeling like that.’ I just… remember, you know? As I’ve continued on my journey, I’ve forgotten some things, cos I’m so focused on going forward, going forward, going forward. But what I deeped is that without me even knowing, I’ve been documenting my life for as long as I can remember. And that’s so cool… I’ve had so many streams of thoughts, and I’ve put them all out there.” Sometimes, doing so felt daunting, she adds, but it was all worth it.

Our conversation meanders for a bit, as our food now sits cold on our plates. We discuss how young rappers are now expected to arrive fully-formed, engaging on social media and opening themselves up to public scrutiny without much protection. Since she started so young too, I wonder if she ever takes the time to reflect on what’s she’s accomplished so far, as an independent artist in such a wild wild west industry. It’s a few days shy of her 25th birthday. She pauses for a bit, sipping her juice. “You know what’s mad? Last night, I prayed.” She sounds relaxed now, more at ease. “I was praying for aaaages, it was a long prayer. I was going through points in my life and thanking god for that time when I done that, and done this. And as I was saying it out loud I was like, ‘oh yeah… I’ve done that. I’ve been an award nominee, I’ve played there…’ I can forget those things. Going forward, the next five years, when I’m 30 – and I know I’m chilling now – I’m so excited to grow wiser”.

I will come to some reviews now. AllMusic highlight how Little Simz comes out swinging from the opening track. GREY Area is an album that wastes no time in getting under the skin and into the head. A faultless work from a genius:

“British rapper Little Simz has been a prominent figure on the scene for several years; even so, she is often sidelined by the rise of grime and U.K. drill in spite of her introspective, prescient wordplay and desire to explore interesting and diverse styles. On her third full-length album, Grey Area, Simz has reached a new peak, with an honest record that isn't afraid to take shots at the world at large. It's also incredibly concise -- an aspect that many of her peers often miss the mark on -- with no filler despite the broad variation the record boasts.

Simz comes out swinging on opening track "Offence," which acts as a declaration of intent for everything that follows, as she bellows "I said it with my chest and I don't care who I offend." It acts in part as a battle cry but also as a primer for truths, both personal and social, that she is capable of exploring. This double-edged approach is demonstrated over the next two tracks, with "Boss" aiming outward and "Selfish" decidedly inward; the latter is a master class in songwriting -- it manages to be soothing and powerful in equal measure. The lush instrumentation draws comparisons to Solange's "Cranes in the Sky," as the vocal range and classy atmosphere in both tracks brings them unavoidably parallel to each other.

Grey Area has no real weaknesses, as Simz takes her sound in multiple directions without sacrificing quality. Take the nostalgia trip of "101 FM," which has an unconventional melody and takes an unashamedly rose-tinted look at days gone by yet remains captivating. It slides straight into the low-slung groove of "Pressure" featuring Little Dragon -- who continue to stun with their guest spots. They act as one of four collaborators, also including Cleo Sol, Chronixx, and Michael Kiwanuka, all of whom are used to add flavor rather than dominate the songs they appear on.

At this stage in her career, Little Simz is at the top of her game, asserting herself as a global contender by displaying well-realized variety and concise lyrical flow. Her evolution up to this point was a clear signifier, with all the components in place even in her early work; on Grey Area, it feels as if everything has come together in perfect unison, resulting in one of the strongest rap albums of 2019”.

I will end with NME’s assessment of GREY Area. It does turn five on 1st March. I hope that Little Simz gives it a nod. An album that took her to new heights, go and listen to it if you have not heard it before. It is an album that will instantly draw you in:

“Fiercely confident and unapologetically forthright, the stunning new album from Little Simz is a reminder of her bold – and, sadly, sometimes underrated – talent. With punching bass lines and whip-smart melodies, 25-year-old Simbi Ajikawo takes us on a wild ride through her world, laying her vulnerability bare with admirable openness.

The London rapper has been co-signed by Kendrick Lamar and was the first independent artist on Forbes’ ‘30 under 30’ list. But her previous record, 2016’s ‘Stillness In Wonderland’, flew under the mainstream’s radar, perhaps because it’s a knotty concept album that demands the listener’s close attention. She’s since confessed that she’s questioned her craft, and wondered whether her hard work is worth not having her loved ones around. Well, ‘Grey Area’ is filled with immediate, punchy hooks, and we’re all the better for it.

The record swells with pride, and Simbi’s celebration of her sense of worth is catching. See opening track, ‘Offence’, where she reminds us that she’s back again and has to pick up where she left off before (“I said it with my chest / I don’t care who I offend – uh huh!”). Her unapologetic words, coupled with that vicious beat, make you feel unbreakable, and set the tone for the journey you’re about to embark on.

On ‘Flowers’, the final track, Simz wonders if the ambition she has for herself – wanting to be legendary and iconic – comes with darkness. Here, she reflects on her idols, such as Amy Winehouse and Jimi Hendrix, and ruminates on their dizzying highs, but tragic endings. It’s a indication of the mindset she was in while writing ‘Grey Area’; the north London powerhouse was going through a dark time, which became pivotal in her creative process. You can hear this free-flowing energy – up and down– that runs through the album.

Across these 10 tracks, Simz utilises her most valuable commodity: honesty. Having stripped away the narrative cloak that shrouded the highlights of ‘Stillness In Wonderland’, she’s crafted a knockout record – and finally come true on her early promise. This is the best rap record of the year so far”.

On 1st March, we mark five years of GREY Area. From the peerless Little Simz, she would go on to create perhaps even stronger work. I feel her third studio album is very important. A moment when she shifted up a gear. A gem from 2019, it deserved more awards and chart success. Even so, now, it is viewed as one of the best albums from the last decade. Five years from its release, GREY Area has lost…

NONE of its brilliance.

FEATURE: Groovelines: Hole – Miss World

FEATURE:

 

 

Groovelines

Hole – Miss World

_________

ON 28th March….

Hole’s Miss World turns thirty. The first single from their second studio album, Live Through This (which is thirty next month), I wanted to go deeper with one of the defining songs of the 1990s. Written by Courtney Love and Eric Erlandson, this is a song that will be instantly recognisable to fans of Hole. One of their most-loved moments. I wanted to look ahead to that anniversary. Eric Erlandson and Courtney Love began writing Miss World in the summer of 1992 following the departure of former band members, Jill Emery and Caroline Rue. I will quote from Wikipedia:

“An early version of the song, recorded with drummer Patty Schemel and Love's husband and Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain, was recorded in BMG Ariola Ltda in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil on January 21, 1993. Featuring Love on lead guitar and vocals, recently recruited drummer Patty Schemel and Cobain on bass, the trio recorded the song, alongside others such as "She Walks on Me", "Softer, Softest" and "Closing Time", during breaks in Nirvana's session. Sound engineer Craig Montgomery stated that though some songs were "half-baked ideas", "'Miss World' was a fairly complete song at that point" and "'the most fleshed out song' of the session"

The band played the song live on July 15 and 16, 1993, during their performances at the Clapham Grand in London and at the Phoenix Festival in Stratford-upon-Avon, respectively. The official album version of the song was recorded as part of the Live Through This sessions at Triclops Studios in Atlanta, Georgia in October of that year”.

There are features and reviews of the fabulous Miss World. Even though the single does not turn thirty until next month, its  promotional music video for was recorded in Los Angeles in February 1994. It is the only music video by Hole that features bassist Kristen Pfaff. Directed by the legendary Sophie Muller, it is the perfect accompaniment to the song’s lyrics and themes. There is a poignancy to Miss World. A week after its release – on 5th April, 1994 -, Kurt Cobain died. One of the most tragic and heartbreaking events of the 1990s, we lost an icon. A death that obviously deeply affected Courtney Love. Burning Blogger discussed this in the context of his review of Hole’s Miss World from 2014:

“A single so good and a video so superb, and also a song so precious to me, that I thought it was worth marking in a completely separate post.

Released on March 28th 1994, Miss World is a song that, like the entire album it preceded, has had a special place in the immortal playlist of my mind for twenty years. I think I may have said the same thing in a post about Nirvana’s In Utero album, but there comes a point where a work of art – in whatever medium – transcends beyond its initial nature, be it a painting, a film, a song or whatever else, and has been with you so long that it has become part of the fabric of your very consciousness, of your very life.

Although Doll Parts and Violet are more popularly thought of as the primary singles from Live Through This, it’s Miss World that was the first; and it has, especially because of its video, always seemed like the single that most acts as a microcosm of its parent album, in terms specifically of its evocative themes and imagery.

The superb Sophie Miller directed video features the same Carrie connotations and beauty-queen motif that characterizes the iconic Leilani Bishop cover image of the album. Being the single that preceded the album’s release, we can presume this was the deliberate idea.

The imagery is so resonant, the tone so perfectly captured, the essence of the song so powerfully evoked. Sophie Miller’s video is like a mini film in itself, as well as acting like a fitting thematic trailer for Live Through This.

This is Hole’s best music video, by far. The imagery is iconic. The whole thing – musically and visually – resonates powerfully.

Another reason I’ve always liked it so much is that it seems to capture the band as a whole (or as a Hole) in a way that other Hole videos didn’t do; although of course it’s always Courtney-centric, there’s nevertheless appropriate coverage given to Patti Schemel, Eric Erlandson, and Kristin Pfaff. I also think – I might be wrong – that it’s the only Hole video to properly feature Pfaff, who died barely a couple of months after the single was released.

Pfaff is said to have influenced the lyrics of the chorus, which she also provided haunting backing vocals for, her voice offsetting Courtney’s utterly hauntingly in the mix.

Wonderfully conceived and brilliantly executed, it really is a video perfectly tailored to so beautiful a song. No one makes music videos as tasteful and as beautifully conceived as this anymore. “Music is dead” is a tired, cliched thing to say these days, but in artistic terms there’s probably a case to be made that “Music videos are dead”, or at least dead as a meaningful art-form in itself and not just as over-indulgent promo material.

Another thing too I’ve always liked about the Miss World video, and about the song itself, is Courtney’s emotional nakedness and vulnerability; vulnerability not being a facet that often comes across in Courtney Love’s screen persona, even though it does in her music. The highly Carrie-influenced motif and the Courtney-as-Miss-World-character at the beauty pageant juxtaposes the same triumph/tragedy, elation/sadness duality that permeates the song and much of the Live Through This album.

With hindsight that duality also is all the more poignant in light of subsequent events; what’s extraordinary is that Kurt died precisely a week after the single’s release and a few days before the album’s release-date. What should’ve been Courtney’s and Hole’s creative and commercial triumph and a celebration of an extraordinary album was overshadowed, almost swallowed up, by that soul-destroying tragedy.

The themes and imagery seems so eerily prophetic: Live Through This itself was set up to be Courtney’s and Hole’s commercial and creative triumph or coronation – and instead, it was a moment or event marred by tragedy. You can see that distilled in the Miss World video: the triumphal coronation or homecoming is underpinned by an ever-present bittersweetness or sadness.

As for the song itself, it is of course superb. Tender, plaintive, even heartbreaking, but yet with a chorus that manages to be kick-arse and bittersweet at the same time. Written by Courtney and Eric Erlandson, that classic Courtney/Erlandson dual guitar dynamic is probably most memorable on this track of all the songs on the album, really evoking a perfectly bittersweet tone to act as vehicle for the lyrics in the same way the verse-guitars on Violet does, while the dual Courtney/Pfaff vocals for the chorus are just absolute perfection.

Lyrically, the song, though said by some to be partly about substance abuse, is more obviously a song about warped or damaged self-image, self-loathing, self-esteem, distorted body image, and a theme that seems to flow through a number of Love’s songs; that of the duality/paradox between inner beauty/ugliness and the outer ugliness/beauty as projected into the world and onto others.

It’s not even my favorite song on the album (which illustrates just how good that album is); I probably think Violet or Jennifer’s Body are better songs. But really that’s just minutiae, as it’s virtually impossible to separate the different tracks on that album, as that’s like taking apart chapters in a novel – the whole album is threaded together inextricably, Miss World being a vital piece of a larger story.

But even on its own, what an extraordinary song and how beautifully visualized in the art of video”.

In 2021, Rolling Stone revisited the classic and unforgettable video for Miss World. For anyone who was a teenager in the 1990s, this song and video would have resonated in some way. The first taste of the second album from the sensational Hole, I do think that Miss World deserves more airplay today. Such a strong and incredible single that didn’t really trouble the charts (though it reached thirteen in the U.S .Billboard Modern Rock Tracks chart):

“THINGS GOT HEATED (or, shall we say, brutal) last week when Olivia Rodrigo announced her Sour Prom concert film, which featured a photo of her as a Gen Z Carrie wearing a tiara while holding a bouquet of roses. But as her mascara-streaked eyes gazed into the distance, trouble loomed ahead.

Within hours, Courtney Love pointed out the similarity between Rodrigo’s photo and the cover of Hole’s 1994 album Live Through This, and the two musicians had a heartfelt exchange about “twinning” (with Love playfully asking for flowers and a note). Instead of leaving it at that, Love then took to Facebook, where she responded to users’ comments a bit differently. “Does Disney teach kids reading and writing?” she wrote. “God knows. Let’s see. Yes, this is rude. Rage inducing? Honey if I had a dollar for everyone this happens? I’d be real rich!”

None of this is surprising — in fact, the exchange is reminiscent of Love and Lana Del Rey in 2012, when Love called out the singer for covering Nirvana’s “Heart-Shaped Box.” (“You do know the song is about my Vagina right?” she said). But Love and Del Rey formed a friendship following these comments. Hopefully, she’ll soon befriend Rodrigo, too.

But enough of that. Let’s revisit Hole’s “Miss World,” a legendary video soaked in beauty pageant glory and angsty riffs. Love stars as Miss World, who pampers herself before taking the stage in her signature kinderwhore outfit. With a backdrop that reads “Cleanliness Is Next to Godliness,” Love tears through the track with her band; it’s the only Hole video to feature the late bassist Kristen Pfaff, who assists on backing vocals.

As the video concludes, Love is crowned queen and gifted a bouquet. It’s Carrie but somehow more tragic, as Love sings lines like “Kill me pills” and “I’ve made my bed, I’ll die in it” that contrast with the glamour. What teenager — especially one of a younger generation who didn’t grow up with MTV — wouldn’t be enamored by it!”.

I will wrap up now. I will look at the thirtieth anniversary Live Through This closer to April. It is, in my opinion, one of the defining albums of the 1990s. Of course, one cannot really discuss it without also talking about Kurt Cobain. The first single from the album, Miss World, deserved a spotlight. Such a powerful and important song that has endured all these years. It turns thirty on 28th March. I wonder how Courtney Love feels about the track today. If you have not heard this song in a while, I would suggest that you…

PLAY it now.