FEATURE: Just Like a Photograph, I Pick You Up: The Visual Allure, Engagement and Genius of Kate Bush

FEATURE:

 

 

Just Like a Photograph, I Pick You Up

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in the final session with Gered Mankowitz at Old Chapel Studios in London in 1979

The Visual Allure, Engagement and Genius of Kate Bush

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THE start of a chapter…

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush circa 1980/PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush

in Graeme Thomson’s biography of Kate Bush, Under the Ivy: The Life & Music of Kate Bush, talks about her allure and appeal as a visual artist. Actually, someone who captivated and grabbed the camera. The chapter is called An Architect’s Dream. That title is a song on Bush’s 2005 album, Aerial, though it is very apt when we consider Bush in front of the camera. This perfect and ideal photographic subject. Something I have explored a little before, I have been thinking how that natural instinct to project the greatest looks and expressions was instilled early on. One of my favourite bits of Kate Bush memorabilia, archive artefact or whatever you want to call it, is the Cathy photobook. A collection of photos from Bush’s brother, Jay/John, it is a collection of photos of Bush from childhood. First published as a run of just five-hundred copies in 1986, it would have been fascinating given the time it was released. A year after Bush released Hounds of Love and the same year as her greatest hits album, The Whole Story, arrived, we got this look at her childhood. Black-and-white images during a period in the 1980s that seemed to be more neon, bright and variegated. Every child has photos taken of them. Few grow up in a household full of art and music and have a brother who is a professional photographer! One could say Bush was exposed to the camera and taught how to be natural but also give something extra. Thomson, in his book, talks about Bush’s early videos. Think about everything up to Breathing and Army Dreamers from 1980’s Never for Ever. If we consider Wuthering Heights, The Man with the Child in his Eyes and Babooshka. Maybe still finding her feet regarding concept and scale. That the earliest videos might seem a little wince-inducing or odd. A naivety and innocence that might seem dated or insubstantial. Bush’s initial video for Wuthering Heights did get some bad publicity.

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush with a snappy friend in Amsterdam circa 1979/PHOTO CREDIT: Claude Vanheye

Bush became aware of the camera as a child. How to not feel posed and forced as a subject. Looking completely natural but also entrancing. Her childhood photos are so interesting. Into adulthood, other emotions and dynamics came through the photos. Look at videos like that for Wuthering Heights and they are standout and timeless because Kate Bush is in there! Right from the start of her career, Bush knew where the camera was and where the boundaries were. That is what Paul Henry, who directed videos included that for The Dreaming, said. It is hard to put into words, but look at some of the expressions and looks from photos back in 1978/1979. So many different possibilities and layers without exaggeration. Such a natural subject! This aura and communication with the camera is something Bush had and did like few other artists. Gered Mankowitz, who photographed Bush in 1978 and 1979, reserved a very special place and platform for her in this respect. That she could give something to the camera that is immortal and unique. It may only be a few seconds of movement or an expression. That economy and power Bush has. Although Kate Bush was very much embracing the camera for her videos and wanted to make them more cinematic and ambitious, this was very much for the sake of the song. Ensuring that she provides a visual interpretation that was original and bold. She was not an artist trying to sell sex or make it all about her. The same is true of photographs. She would be so committed and often be in a studio for hours whilst various shots were taken. Away from that, Bush was very private and not at all starry. She was almost more comfortable being disguised and immersed in a song. Playing a character or adopting a role. That was more interesting and important to her. She felt that she was not interesting. Why people would want to see her in photos.

One of the defining aspects of Kate Bush is her changing looks and periods. Such a diverse and adaptable photographic subject who could inhabit any space or fashion and make it her own. There is this contrast between Kate Bush as a normal person at home and Kate Bush the artist on record and on the screen. Many were surprised when a video like Babooshka came out. Such a starling and eye-opening video, it is world away from the same woman who is this very sweet, shy and down-to-Earth person who would make tea and be this wonderful host! Not quite Jekyll and Hyde, Bush was definitely someone with two sides. Maybe exaggerating various aspects for creative and photographic purposes, one cannot deny how she was this genius in front of camera. Images so important to promoting her work. Pushing photographers and getting the very best out of them. Graeme Thomson does note in his book how Bush, in music videos, could go ugly, swap genders and play alluring roles. There was this walking on a precarious line. Inspired by cinema and making her music as visual as possible, it is no surprise that she was so curious and compelling in front of camera. Putting so much imagination and work into her promotional clips.

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

I am so intrigued by Bush as this visual subject. Why she is so much more distinct than most of her peers. It was that balance between someone very private and un-starry and someone in her career who was assertive and keen for people to see her videos. As a photographic subject, there was never any signs of nerves or wanting to hide. That early familial exposure and training was a perfect test run for a scarier and more high-profile canvas. Working with a range of different photographers, all of whom had so much respect and love for Kate Bush. I guess we could get into a whole new area about the music videos and how they changed through the years. How various directors talked about Kate Bush and go deep into the filming process. I am fascinated by the chemistry and magic Bush provided in photographs. How there was this aura and spirit around her that was so special and hard to pin down. Maybe it is because her brother was around her with a camera and she started in this safe and comfortable space before going into a professional and less grounded space. Even so, she adapted really naturally and was a perfect subject. So patient and collaborative! That thing about giving a brief look or doing something small that translated into something huge powerful and evocative. Photos that still provide mysterious and compelling qualities all these years later. Whether it is shots of a teenage Bush in 1978 or photos for 2011’s 50 Words for Snow, still this hugely engaging subject. I would love to know the stories behind some of those iconic photos. The shoots and the conversations between Bush and the photographer. Whether that was Guido Harari or John Carder Bush – her brother photographed her as recently as 2011 -, always so involved and inspiring. Not someone who ever looked uninterested and like she had to get this out of the way. Even if Bush could never quite understand why people would want to see photos of her and was keener to focus on the music and videos, one cannot argue against the fact she was such a fascinating person to photo. Even so, when she was in front of the camera, she gave us something that…

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1993/PHOTO CREDIT: Guido Harari

IS truly remarkable.

FEATURE: All You Had to Do Was Stay: Taylor Swift’s 1989 at Ten

FEATURE:

 

 

All You Had to Do Was Stay

Taylor Swift’s 1989 at Ten

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RATHER than feature and discuss…

IN THIS PHOTO: Taylor Swift attends the 49th Annual Academy of Country Music Awards at the MGM Grand Garden Arena on 6th April, 2014 in Las Vegas, Nevada/PHOTO CREDIT: Christopher Polk/ACMA2014/Getty Images for ACM

the Taylor’s Version release of 2023, I want to feature the original 1989. Released on 27th October, 2014, it is a few weeks or so until the tenth anniversary. One of the biggest albums of the 2010s, did those listening to Taylor Swift’s fifth studio album release it would be seen as one of the most important and best albums of the decade?! That the then-twenty-four-year-old would go on to be this modern icon. Enjoy huge tours and grow to be the biggest artist of the modern age. There are signs of that promise through 1989. A creative jump from 2012’s Red, 1989 was perhaps the highest-rated and acclaimed album of Swift’s career to that date. Since then, she has won huge reviews for albums such as folklore (2020) and Midnights (2022). I am not sure how Taylor Swift will mark the tenth anniversary of 1989 later this month. Following a dispute over the ownership of her back catalogue, she re-recorded her first six studio albums that were previously released by Big Machine. Swift then owned the masters and substituted Big Machine’s. One cannot deny that 1989, in both forms, is a supreme work! One of the producers on the album, Swift included synthesisers, programmed drums and electronic backing vocals. It was a departure from her previous work. Talking about complex and broken relationships, the subject matter was deeper and perhaps richer than her albums before. Ones that relied more on acoustic arrangements. I am going to get to some features around 1989. Most of the reviews you will see for 1989 are for the Taylor’s Version edition. I have found a few reviews for the 2014 original. An album that was number one in many countries, including the U.K. and U.S. I guess many have reappraised and reframed 1989 after Swift re-recorded it in 2023.

In October 2014, The New York Times provided their take on an exciting new album from Taylor Swift. One that said goodbye to her Country beginnings. Whilst she has not completely abandoned it, 1989 did seem like a step more into 1980s Pop influences. I kind of think of artists like Madonna who can bring in Country elements on albums like Music (2000), but also conquer Electronica and a range of influences on Ray of Light (1998). Confessions on a Dance Floor (2005) being more Disco-inspired. Swift is an innovative artist who does not rest and is fascinated by different sonic and production possibilities. Framing her lyrics in different ways to maximise their impact and relevance:

“Full of expertly constructed, slightly neutered songs about heartbreak, “1989,” which is to be released on Monday, doesn’t announce itself as oppositional. But there is an implicit enemy on this breezily effective album: the rest of mainstream pop, which “1989” has almost nothing in common with. Modern pop stars — white pop stars, that is — mainly get there by emulating black music. Think of Miley Cyrus, Justin Timberlake, Justin Bieber. In the current ecosystem, Katy Perry is probably the pop star least reliant on hip-hop and R&B to make her sound, but her biggest recent hit featured the rapper Juicy J; she’s not immune.

Ms. Swift, though, is having none of that; what she doesn’t do on this album is as important as what she does. There is no production by Diplo or Mike Will Made-It here, no guest verse by Drake or Pitbull. Her idea of pop music harks back to a period — the mid-1980s — when pop was less overtly hybrid. That choice allows her to stake out popular turf without having to keep up with the latest microtrends, and without being accused of cultural appropriation.

That Ms. Swift wants to be left out of those debates was clear in the video for this album’s first single, the spry “Shake It Off,” in which she surrounds herself with all sorts of hip-hop dancers and bumbles all the moves. Later in the video, she surrounds herself with regular folks, and they all shimmy un-self-consciously, not trying to be cool.

See what Ms. Swift did there? The singer most likely to sell the most copies of any album this year has written herself a narrative in which she’s still the outsider. She is the butterfingers in a group of experts, the approachable one in a sea of high post, the small-town girl learning to navigate the big city.

In that sense, the most important decision Taylor Swift made in the last couple of years had nothing to do with music: She bought a pad in New York, paying about $20 million for a TriBeCa penthouse.

It was a molting, the culmination of several years of outgrowing Nashville combined with interest in Ms. Swift that placed her in tabloid cross-hairs just like any other global star.

But it also afforded her the opportunity once again to be seen as a naïf. In Nashville, she’d learned all the rules, all the back roads. Now, with that place more or less in the rear view, she is free to make the John Hughes movie of her imagination. That’s “1989,” which opens with “Welcome to New York,” a shimmery, if slightly dim celebration of the freedom of getting lost in Gotham: “Everybody here was someone else before/And you can want who you want.” (As a gesture of tolerance, this is about 10 steps behind Kacey Musgraves’s “Follow Your Arrow.”)

Ms. Swift hasn’t been the type to ask permission in her career, but she has long seen herself as a stranger to the grand-scale fame that New York signifies. “Someday I’ll be living in a big ol’ city” she taunted a critic on “Mean,” from her 2010 album “Speak Now”; now here she is, making the New York spotlight her backlight.

On this new stage, Ms. Swift is thriving. And crucially, she is more or less alone, not part of any pop movement of the day. She has set herself apart and, implicitly, above.

The era of pop she channels here was a collision of sleaze and romanticism, of the human and the digital. But there’s barely any loucheness in Ms. Swift’s voice. Her take on that sound is sandpapered flat and polished to a sheen. The album, named for the year she was born, is executive produced by Ms. Swift and Max Martin, and most of the songs are written with Mr. Martin and his fellow Swede Shellback. Both men have helped shape the last decade of pop but what’s notable here is their restraint. (Mr. Martin also did almost all the vocal production on the album.) Ms. Swift’s old running buddy Nathan Chapman produced “This Love,” a mournful ballad that would have been at home of the “Hunger Games: Catching Fire” soundtrack, and the only song here that could be mistaken for a concession to country.

There are a few songs in which production dominates: the two songs written and produced with Jack Antonoff (of fun and Bleachers). “Out of the Woods” and “I Wish You Would,” which burst with erupting drums, moody synths and sizzling guitars; and “Bad Blood,” which has booming drums reminiscent of the Billy Squier ones often sampled in hip-hop.

But these are outliers. Ms. Swift has always been melody first, and if she wanted to give herself over to a producer and sound of the moment, she could have gone several different, more obvious routes, or even stayed in country, which is as hip-hop inflected as pop is these days. (For the record, there are a few sort-of-modern phrases sprinkled through the lyrics — “this sick beat,” " mad love” and the chorus of “Shake It Off,” where she squeaks “the players gonna play, play, play, play, play/and the haters gonna hate, hate, hate, hate, hate” — though they are mostly there to underscore just how out of place Ms. Swift sounds singing them.)

But by making pop with almost no contemporary references, Ms. Swift is aiming somewhere even higher, a mode of timelessness that few true pop stars — aside from, say, Adele, who has a vocal gift that demands such an approach — even bother aspiring to. Everyone else striving to sound like now will have to shift gears once the now sound changes. But not Ms. Swift, who’s waging, and winning, a new war, one she’d never admit to fighting”.

Before getting to a couple of reviews, I want to come to a feature from Stereogum. They offer up different angles and perspectives on 1989. I think this was the first Taylor Swift album I discovered and heard. Ahead of its tenth anniversary, you can feel its influence today. Maybe Swift re-recording it recently has compelled a new wave of Pop artists. Distinct nods to 1989 on the current scene. Even if some would argue it is not her very best album, it is definitely one of her most important:

“Every one of her albums sounds like a lesser artist’s greatest-hits album; 1989 makes her five for five. Swift’s albums aren’t singles-plus-filler; they’re singles-plus-potential-singles, and the songs that never dominated the radio are just the ones she never got around to releasing as singles. Swift’s voice is an instrument capable of both colossal uplift and soft empathy; she’s kept the lost-little-kid openness that made her so appealing in the first place. 1989 gleams and shimmers the way all her past albums have gleamed and shimmered; they’re just playing around with a new set of stylistic toys. But she’s using those toys to deceptive ends. On first listen, 1989 sounds like the resistance-is-futile robo-pop hydrogen bomb that Katy Perry’s Prism tried and failed to be. And it is that. But it’s also a concept album, a ’70s singer-songwriter-style song cycle about the beginning and end of a relationship. On her last album, Swift was lyrically bragging about how many James Taylor albums she owned. This time around, she’s not showing those records off, lyrically or musically, but she’s quietly emulating them.

Most of the songs on 1989 seem to concern Harry Styles, the most visible member of One Direction, who Swift dated a while back. She never names him, or even alludes to his name, though clues are there if you want to mine for them. (She makes constant reference to a car crash; she’s probably really alluding to a serious snowmobile crash that she and Styles apparently once got into.) But the specifics don’t matter as much as the subtle but genuine arc that the LP traces. It starts with excitement and play and intrigue, and it blossoms into something deeper around the time “Out Of The Woods” kicks in. But things turn bad quickly, and most of the album is Swift dealing with a breakup. She gets fire-eyed pissed on “Bad Blood,” cajoles on “I Wish You Would,” provides an exact roadmap for how to rekindle things on “How You Get The Girl.” By the time closing track “Clean” kicks in, she’s convinced herself that she’s OK with the whole thing, that she’s ready to move on.

The trick with this whole concept-album thing is that all the songs stand on their own; they don’t depend on the album’s narrative (which, to be honest, I could just be making up anyway). First single “Shake It Off” (probably my least favorite Swift song ever, at least if we’re not including the “Santa Baby” cover from the Target-exclusive Christmas EP she released a few years ago) is Swift’s stab at “Mickey” or “Hollaback Girl” or “London Bridge” or Avril Lavigne’s “Girlfriend” — the chanty brat-out that recasts Swift as a mall-pop auteur while at the same time cheerily snarling at haters and making self-deprecating jokes about Swift’s own dancing ability. (Seriously, “Shake It Off” is doing too much.) Heard in the context of the album, though, it’s her early attempt to act like the relationship never really mattered that much to her, before a sadder reality kicks in. “Style” is the song for the inevitable Target ad campaign, if that’s what you want it to be, but it’s also a horny plea for a fling to become something bigger. “Bad Blood” could be the Katy Perry ethering that wags are already calling it, but the lyrics could just as well be directed at an ex. “I Know Places,” coming so close to the end of the album, isn’t just a whispered crush song; it’s Swift’s attempt to blame the relationship’s end, retroactively, on the paparazzi who wouldn’t stop hounding the couple. And then there’s the album-opening “Welcome To New York,” a tired thinkpiece subject even before the city of New York named Swift its Global Welcome Ambassador.

Since Swift dropped “Welcome To New York,” self-righteous New Yorkers have been clogging up my Twitter timeline making jokes about it. Swift is now a jet-set oligarch using the city as a cultural signifier without thinking about what that means. I’ve seen people link the song, in vague ways, to rising police brutality and apartment rents. If you think as Taylor Swift as a brand, a song like “Welcome To New York” another indicator, like another DIY space shutting down or another corporate chain opening a flagship store in Williamsburg, that New York is not what it once was. But if you think of Taylor Swift as a human being (which is what she is), then “Welcome To New York” is a song about moving to New York. And as someone who once moved to New York, I find the song weirdly, terribly moving. Swift moved to the city in April. She’s 24. I moved there when I was 25 and at least as clueless about it as Swift seems to be. The song is a little thin and underwritten, sure; “kaleidoscope of loud heartbeats under coats” should not be the second line on your blockbuster pop album. But its Human League bleep-riff does something to me, and so does the wide-open wonderment in Swift’s voice. I felt a bit of that same feeling when I moved to New York.

The crucial distinction is that the other feeling in there — the whole oh shit, I’ve eaten Ramen every night for months and I’m still falling into deep debt thing — isn’t there. It makes sense. Swift is richer than God, and the Russian landlord who won’t fix your ceiling leak is not a part of her New York experience. She is singing about what she knows. (There’s empathy in there too: “You can want who you want / Boys and boys and girls and girls.” There’s nothing radical about that sentiment, but she’s spent her life in exurban Pennsylvania and then Nashville, and she’s amped about the idea that people can be who they are in her new hometown. It’s sweet.) Really, it’s smart for the city to snatch up her endorsement now, before the year-two ugh, fuck this place feeling sets in and she can’t convincingly feign enthusiasm for the word “bodega.” And in the album’s larger story, “Welcome To New York” isn’t about a boy, but it is about a sense of possibility, of that idea that you can do whatever you want. It creates a context for a time in your life when, say, falling in love with the guy from One Direction might start to look like a good idea.

That whole relationship-based album structure allows Taylor to do some new things with her persona, finding new wrinkles for a character that’s been established for years. She’s grown-up now, and she’s not singing about high school crushes anymore. She never sings directly about sex, but she at least alludes to the idea that she could be fucking in ways that she’s never been comfortable doing before. And she also plays around with her tabloid image as someone who’s desperate to keep a relationship together but who just can’t do it. On “Blank Space,” for example, she has fun with the idea that she’s really secretly a maneater, someone who absorbs lives completely but temporarily. “I can make guys good for a weekend,” she cackles. Or “I’m dying to see how this one ends.” She knows it’s ending. She doesn’t care.

The album’s structure, though, is less interesting than the building materials she’s using this time around. After all, there have been many, many relationship-centric concept albums with more to say about the ways people fall in love than 1989. But it’ll be a while before we hear a collection of polished steel hooks that gleam quite like this. Now that Taylor is no longer making cosmetic attempts to sound country, even a little bit, she’s openly announcing herself as a polyglot for the first time ever. And it’s fascinating to see her absorbing a new set of influences and using them as raw material. 1989 is named after the year of Swift’s birth, but she also intends it as an homage to late-’80s pop music.

She’s mentioned Madonna and Annie Lennox as inspirations, but there’s more 1989 going on on 1989. “Clean” is a Richard Marx power ballad sung more sweetly than Marx could ever manage. “I Wish You Would” has more of that classic Edge guitar tone than anything on U2’s own new Songs Of Innocence. “How You Get The Girl” has a Debbie Gibson sparkle to it. Pop music in 1989: disco and new wave and Prince’s Minneapolis sound had all been fully integrated, Latin freestyle had helped lay a foundation for the NKOTB-style teen-pop that would follow, craggy rockers like Don Henley and Tom Petty were playing around with keyboards and getting a whole lot richer by doing it, and acid house and rap were just starting to make mainstream-pop inroads. There was a pop mainstream in 1989, but it was in a messy and interesting place. If there’s a pop mainstream in 2014, that mainstream belongs entirely to one person, and that person is Taylor Swift. She’s the whole of it. And she’s in a messy and interesting place, too.

But even as she pulls in all these things from outside, she is still doing Taylor Swift things with them. Consider, for example, “Wildest Dreams,” which has Swift adapting Lana Del Rey’s phrasings so baldly that it has to be intentional. If “Wildest Dreams” is Swift’s Lana Del Rey song, though, it’s still a Lana Del Rey song that Lana Del Rey would never record. She would never rewrite Madonna’s “Live To Tell” as a 2017 prom theme, and that’s what Swift does here. Del Rey might not ever write a song this obviously, crushingly catchy, either”.

I am going to move to some reviews for 1989. Upon its release in 2014, Rob Sheffield sat down with the album and provided his thoughts for Rolling Stone. Such a truly fascinating and compelling artist, you can really see how far Taylor Swift has come in the past decade. In 2014, she was this artist on the edge of something truly wonderful. I think 1989 was the start of this transformation and realisation. Revolution and revelation from the biggest artist of her generation:

“When Taylor Swift decides to do something, the girl really knows how to overdo it. So on her fifth album, when she indulges her crush on Eighties synth-pop, she goes full blast, spending most of the album trying to turn herself into the Pet Shop Boys. 1989 is a drastic departure – only a couple of tracks feature her trademark tear-stained guitar. But she’s still Taylor Swift, which means she’s dreaming bigger and oversharing louder than anyone else in the game. And she still has way too many feelings for the kind of dudes who probably can’t even spell “feelings.”

Swift has already written enough great songs for two or three careers. Red, from 2012, was her Purple Rain, a sprawling I-am-the-cosmos epic with disco banjos and piano ballads and dubstep drops. But as every Eighties pop star knew, you don’t follow one epic with another – instead, you surprise everybody with a quick-change experiment. So rather than trying to duplicate the wide reach of Red, she focuses on one aspect of her sound for a whole album – a very Prince thing to do.

Max Martin produced seven of these 13 songs, and his beats provide the Saturday-night-whatever soundtrack as Swift sings about the single life in the big old city she always dreamed about. In “Welcome to New York,” she finds herself in a place where “you can want who you want/Boys and boys, and girls and girls.” She hits cruise mode on the floor in “Blank Space” (“I can make the bad guys good for the weekend”) and the hilariously titled “Style,” where she swoons, “You got that James Dean daydream look in your eye.”

The best moments come toward the end, when Swift shakes up the concept. “How You Get the Girl” mixes up the best of her old and new tricks, as she strums an acoustic guitar aggressively over Martin’s expert disco surge. “This Love” brings back her most simpatico producer, Nathan Chapman, for the kind of tune that they were just starting to call a “power ballad” in 1989. (The precise equivalent would be Bon Jovi’s “I’ll Be There for You.”) On the killer finale, “Clean,” English singer Imogen Heap adds ethereal backup sighs to Swift’s electro melancholy (“You’re still all over me like a wine-stained dress I can’t wear anymore”).

If there’s nothing as grandiose as “All Too Well” or “Dear John” or “Enchanted,” that’s because there wasn’t meant to be. 1989 sets the record for fewest adjectives (and lowest romantic body count) on a Swift album. Most of the songs hover above the three-minute mark, which is a challenge for Tay – she’s always been a songwriter who can spend five minutes singing about a freaking scarf and still make every line hit like a haymaker. But if you’re into math, note that the three best songs here – “How You Get the Girl,” “This Love,” “Clean” – are the three that crash past four minutes. This is still an artist who likes to let it rip. Deeply weird, feverishly emotional, wildly enthusiastic, 1989 sounds exactly like Taylor Swift, even when it sounds like nothing she’s ever tried before. And yes, she takes it to extremes. Are you surprised? This is Taylor Swift, remember? Extremes are where she starts out”.

I will end with a review from The Guardian. Even if some critics were a bit mixed and unsure in 2014, a lot has changed since then. Considering the re-recorded version of 1989 and Taylor Swift’s other albums. The fact that 1989 has influenced so many other artists and albums since 2014. I really love 1989. It is an album with no filler in my opinion:

“At 24 years old, Taylor Swift inhabits something of a unique position within the teen pop firmament. It’s not merely the fact of her immense popularity, although the sheer devotion of her fans can sometimes knock you back a bit: earlier this week, when Swift released a track consisting of eight seconds of static to iTunes – alas, the result of a technical malfunction, rather than a radical new power-electronics direction influenced by Right to Kill-era Whitehouse and Genocide Organ – her fans in Canada bought it in such quantities that it went to No 1. It’s more that Swift’s music attracts the kind of serious critical attention afforded almost none of her peers. You don’t get many learned articles in the New Yorker about the songcraft of Swift’s mortal enemy Katy Perry. No acclaimed noveliest has felt impelled to take to the pages of Salon to defend the fact that he doesn’t like Jessie J, which Rick Moody did after expressing a dislike of Swift.

On one level, that is irrelevant. What do the vast majority of Taylor Swift fans – the tweenage Instagrammers to whom Swift, according to her ghastly record company biography, represents a “loyal friend, fierce protector of hearts and one of the world’s greatest ambassadors for the power of just being yourself” – care whether their tastes have been anointed by the New Yorker? But on another, it’s intriguing: what is it about Swift’s music that causes it to be singled out in this way?

At first glance, her fifth album doesn’t offer any obvious answers. 1989 has been widely boosted as being Swift’s first pure pop album, the record on which she finally divests herself of the last remaining musical vestiges of her roots as a teenage Nashville star. But that isn’t saying much, given that you’d have needed an electron microscope to detect any last remaining vestiges of those roots in its predecessor, Red. Much has been made of Swift as a self-contained singer-songwriter, but this time around the credits look pretty much the same as the credits for every big pop album: representatives from Scandanavian hit factories (Max Martin, Shellback); a moonlighting member of a mainstream indie-rock band (Fun’s Jack Antonoff); an EDM producer chancing their arm in the world of pop (Ali Payami); the omnipresent Greg Kurstin, of Lily Allen, Lana del Rey, Ellie Goulding and Kylie Minogue fame.

Given the cast list, you would expect 1989 to be an extremely polished product, which it undoubtedly is. Even its least interesting tracks sound like hits, which is what one pays Max Martin for: at its best, 1989 deals in undeniable melodies and huge, perfectly turned choruses and nagging hooks. Its sound is a lovingly done reboot of the kind of late 80s MTV pop-rock exemplified by Jane Wiedlin’s Rush Hour. It’s bold enough in its homage to take on one vintage sound thus far avoided by 80s revivalists – the booming, stadium-filling snare sound that all artists were legally obliged to use for the latter half of the decade makes a reappearance on I Wish You Would – but not so slavish as to preclude everything else: I Know Places is powered by drum’n’bass-influenced breakbeats; single Shake It Off pitches a My Sharona-ish beat against blaring hip-hop synths; the alternately pulsing and drifting electronics of Style and Clean mark 1989 out as an album made in the wake of Random Access Memories and Cliff Martinez’s 2011 soundtrack to Drive.

But the really striking thing about 1989 is how completely Taylor Swift dominates the album: Martin, Kurstin et al make umpteen highly polished pop records every year, but they’re seldom as clever or as sharp or as perfectly attuned as this, which suggests those qualities were brought to the project by the woman whose name is on the cover. As a songwriter, Swift has a keen grasp both of her audience and of pop history. She avoids the usual hollow platitudes about self-empowerment and meaningless aspirational guff about the VIP area in the club in favour of Springsteenesque narratives of escape and the kind of doomed romantic fatalism in which 60s girl groups dealt: the protagonists of I Know Places don’t end the song being pulled lifeless from a mangled car wreck, as they would have done had the Shangri-Las been in charge of proceedings, but they sound like they might, quite soon.

She also has a neat line in twisting cliches until they sound original. Shake It Off takes as its subject that great latterday pop bugbear, the haters, but avoids the usual line – the rather brittle insistence that their presence has somehow contributed to the artist’s inner strength – in favour of suggesting you just ignore them. If you were the kind of person wont to describe pop songs as “meta”, you could apply the term to How You Get the Girl, a knowing checklist of the kind of love-song platitudes that Swift’s peers might easily punt out with a straight face. If Wildest Dreams bears a hint of Lana del Ray, there’s something hugely cheering about the way Swift turns the persona of the pathetic female appendage snivelling over her bad-boy boyfriend on its head. Ramping up the melodrama by way of Be My Babyish drums, Wildest Dreams paints the man as the victim, doomed to spend the rest of his life haunted by what he’s carelessly lost.

“The drought was the very worst,” she sings at the outset of Clean. It’s not just that this is a pretty striking line with which to open a pop song, it’s that you can’t imagine any of Taylor Swift’s competitors coming up with anything remotely like it. Whether that’s because they couldn’t be bothered – you’d have to be hard of hearing to miss the distinct, depressing air of will-this-do? that currently runs through pop music – or because they just couldn’t is debatable. Either way, on 1989 the reasons she’s afforded the kind of respect denied to her peers are abundantly obvious”.

On 27th October, it will be ten years since Taylor Swift released her incredible fifth studio album. Look at album ranking features such as this by Rough Trade, where they put 1989 first (“This album stamped a moment in time so perfectly and found me at the height of my teenage years where it felt like there was nothing but freedom and future ahead. I like to think that Taylor was feeling the same. Her graduation into pop music was immediate, armed with the powerhouse lead single Shake it Off engineered by pop legends Max Martin and Shellback, one of 3 number one singles that helped secure Album of The Year at the Grammys. The authenticity of the 1980s production combined with Taylor’s masterful one-note melodies and sense of rhythm creates a sound that is familiar and fresh at the same time, like it is literally at the edge of one decade and leaping into the next. These songs are crafted without leaving anything on the cutting room floor, like every detail belongs exactly where it is. It’s impossible to pick a favourite song because they’re all just so good”). Maybe reacting to Taylor’s Version, NME ranked it number one this year (“1989’ is a masterclass in how to make a timeless pop record. Here Taylor sacked off her country roots and embraced full-blown pop. Working with a who’s who of trendy producers and writers (Jack Antonoff, Max Martin, Ali Payami alongside indie darling Imogen Heap), she crafted a collection of glossy belters, that flit from fluffy dance-pop (‘Shake It Off’) and sophisticated electronic-tinged bops (‘Blank Space’, ‘Style’), to glorious indietronica (‘Out of the Woods’, ‘Clean’).

Stuffed with ‘80s influence, it also saw a step up in Swift’s song writing, with her sharp, pithy lyrics feeling refined and sleek, hook-laden melodies dominating the entire record. It won a mantelpiece of awards – including the Grammy for Album of the Year – but perhaps even more impressive is the fact it’s already left a massive impact, less than a decade after it was first released. And with the release of ‘1989 (Taylor’s Version)’ we have the chance to dive back into this world, the sparkling sonics sounding better than ever. From the cinematic instrumentals of ‘Wildest Dreams (Taylor’s Version)’, to from phenomenal “From the Vault” tune ‘Now That We Don’t Talk’ (which includes brilliantly Swiftian eye-rolls: “Now that we don’t talk/I don’t have to pretend I like acid rock/or that I’d like to be on a mega yacht”), it’s a welcome trip down memory lane. The songs are as fresh as they were when first released in 2014 with the choruses still getting embedded in your head. In short: ‘1989’ is Taylor Swift’s masterpiece”). GQ and Cosmopolitan had different takes on the album and where it should fit in the ‘best of’ Taylor Swift. As you can see, there are people who think 1989 is the best Taylor Swift album. If they prefer Taylor’s Version, they still nod to the original and how it is this magnificent work. Pop that is near-perfect. Ten years after its release, and it still feels so fresh and relevant. The title referencing the year Taylor Swift was born, it could have been an album that was stuck in 2014 or would go out of fashion or sound dated. As it is, this incredible album from a global superstar will endure and inspire…

FOR years to come.

FEATURE: One Size Fits All: Making Music Clothing More Interesting

FEATURE:

 

 

One Size Fits All

PHOTO CREDIT: NIX PHOTO/Pexels

Making Music Clothing More Interesting

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I can appreciate that it is quite hard…

IN THIS PHOTO: Paul McCartney of The Beatles photographed by Linda Eastman at the press party for Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in 19th May, 1967

to put out merchandise that is durable, engaging and original. Maybe this point does not apply as much to merchandise stalls at gigs and more about bigger chains like HMV. Band T-shirts especially I find so samey and bland. Most T-shirts with a black background and a print that is sort of stuck on. One which will fade if you put it through the wash enough times. It will crack and not last. Most of the T-shirts you see are also for male acts. It is this case of the music T-shirts all having the same look and feeling a bit cheap. It would be nice if there was more variety and eye-catching designs. On many artists’ websites, you do get a choice of clothing. From hoodies and T-shirts through to other garments, you can wear your favourite artist with pride. I think that music clothing used to be more exciting. I want to go out and be able to find something unique and standout. I have been thinking a lot about psychedelic clothing and the sort of clothes The Beatles work in the 1960s. Especially Paul McCartney in 1967. It was a really interesting time for fashion. Not to say it lacks inspiration and colour today. You can get some incredible clothing on the high street. Even so, you have to go a bit off-piste or find hidden shops and alleyways to discover the most eclectic and distinct clothes. Unless you can go to a gig and get memorabilia there, you often have to rely on websites and the high street. It may be a cost thing that means music T-shirts and clothing has to look the same and be made to cost. So that people can afford to buy them. It just feels like one size fits all. Producing a similar sort of thing. When I walk into a chain like HMV, you get all these black T-shirts with the logos and nothing more. No real choice or anything that seems either durable or eye-catching. There are websites like Etsy where you can buy music T-shirts.

Again, there is a lot of choice in terms of the artists listed, though the designs and colour scheme is very samey. I do like music clothing and it can be a real conversation starter. Maybe other people feel differently. As a massive fan of The Beatles, what you get on the high street is all the same. Nothing that is interesting. Not too much in the way of options when you look online. Even, dare I say it, Kate Bush’s website is a bit bland regarding clothing. There might be something prohibiting artists and stores from increasing their range of taking risks with designs and colour. When I was growing up, band and artist T-shirts and clothing were a big deal. They were a real way of bonding with others, whilst showing your support and love for an artist. A real sense of flair and thought has gone our of music clothing. Again, this might not apply to the memorabilia stands. Most of us are going to be shopping online or the high street. Trying to find something in the way of a T-shirt, hoodie or something else that we can wear out and keep for a while. I have found the last few music T-shirts I have bought shrink quite quickly or the designs on them fade. They are not really made to last at all. The t-shirts I wear the most are ones that do not have prints on them or anything that can come unstuck or crack. Cost might be a factor, yet there are ways that you can make music-related clothing accessible and exciting at the same time.

Maybe this malaise and issue reflects on an industry where design and aesthetic is not as important as perhaps once it was. I find a lot of album covers insipid or lacking. A big opportunity missed. There was some great memorabilia and music clothing decades ago. I think people would invest in music clothing if it were a bit more expensive but it was more than something simple and stick-on. It is no offence to the people who design and make this clothing. They are okay for a short time though, like vinyl, you do want to keep hold of your music T-shirts. BBC Radio 6 Music does a T-Shirt Day every year where people sport artists on their chest and get a song by that artist played. A lot of these T-shirts are from years ago. I wonder whether most have bought them from gigs. I look on websites selling music T-shirts and most are quite generic. Whether artists feel it would be too costly and not profitable enough putting out a range of T-shirts or any other clothing. Legacy artists too are subject to the bare minimum. It seems a shame. I go out hunting for music T-shirts and stuff like that. Wanting something cool that I can keep wearing. What I buy either doesn’t last long or I get depressed finding nothing appealing or original. I hope that this changes in years to come. It is important that design and making something distinct and standout is important. Not mass producing the same type of hoodie, jumper or T-shirt. Quite hard to find, especially on the high street, I and so many others yearn to discover something…

PHOTO CREDIT: Panos Sakalakis/Pexels

EXCITING and long-lasting.

FEATURE: One Last Look Around the House Before We Go: Will Kate Bush’s Albums Ever Come Out in Cassette Form?

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One Last Look Around the House Before We Go

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in Copenhagen in 1979/PHOTO CREDIT: Jorgen Angel/Redferns

Will Kate Bush’s Albums Ever Come Out in Cassette Form?

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I may have touched on this previously…

ILLUSTRATION CREDIT: Adobe Stock

though, as I have written God knows how many Kate Bush features – actually, about 862 in all! -, I don’t think people will object me covering this subject again. I love how Kate Bush has reissued her albums on vinyl. She definitely wants people to experience her music physically. That is a commendable and noble quest. An ethos or attitude that many other artists share. Some have criticised Kate Bush for reissuing her albums a couple of times now. Most recently, she redesigned the vinyl for each of her studio albums for independent record stores. Even though they are distinct and different from the original albums’ look, the cost of each was quite steep. However, it does mean that the albums are being brought to new listeners’ attention. The fact there was a time now long ago when you could not get Bush’s albums on vinyl. Not all of them. At least not affordably. Now, we can get the studio albums and keep them for years to come. That is the same with C.D.s. Although they have not been given the same treatment and focus, I know that Bush values that format. You can access her albums on compact disc, though I don’t feel they have been provided the same prominence as vinyl. Maybe that is understandable. It is important that her albums are more portable. Even if new cars are being made without C.D. players, people still have cars that have them and devices where you can play C.D.s. You can go to Amazon or independent record stores and find Kate Bush’s albums on C.D. I don’t think there are ones that are hard to find. Even if the vinyl versions are perhaps a greater priority for Kate Bush, she has not neglected compact disc. That is great. As the format is still very much here and will sustain for years to come, restricting her albums to one physical format (vinyl) would be short-sighted and limiting. An artist that values the tangible nature of an album can appreciate that owning her music in a handheld format that you can play portably is very important. It allows the same sort of freedom as digital music. There is a third physical format that is almost neglected entirely when it comes to Kate Bush’s albums.

Are cassettes part of Kate Bush’s equation? When we think about her music and how it can sustain and impact physically, are cassettes viable and treasured enough? Sure, modern artists from Taylor Swift to Kylie Minogue offer new albums on cassette. In a range of colours or as part of various bundles – with vinyl, C.D., a T-shirt or any other combination. I think that the more we normalise and produce albums on cassette, the more choice it gives the listeners. They in turn will seek out devices on which to play them and be able to play albums portably. The benefit of being able to listen to music on the move but having something tangible. Where you cannot skip tracks easily. Some may argue cassettes are fragile and can easily break. That devices to play them in are rare or not attractive. Thinking about Kate Bush, I remember the buzz around Stranger Things and Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God) and one of the characters on the show, Max, playing that song (which is on Hounds of Love) and how evocative that moment was. Rather than it being retro or of the 1980s, instead it gave that song more gravitas because it was being played on cassette. It was not in the background or on a record player in a room. This character was more entwined and connected with the album because they were playing a physical thing and was listening to it through headphones. An experience I don’t think you get with either C.D. or vinyl. I can understand that there is perhaps not the same demand for Kate Bush’s ten studio albums (you can throw in 1986’s The Whole Story and 2016’s Before the Dawn on that format too). I have said before how it would be a dream to have a Kate Bush pop-up again – similar to the one that was in London in 2018, where she raised money for charity and sold T-shirts with Never for Ever and Hounds of Love prints/designs, together with books like the Cathy photobook alongside biographies by Graeme Thomson and Tom Doyle. Maybe a tour poster replica.

I have said before how it would be incredible having a vending machine similar to what they have in countries like Japan. Where each of her albums would be on cassette. You would have a couple of rows of each. Maybe costing £10 each, you would then dispense them and they would be good to go. A novel and cool way of attracting people to those cassettes. Vinyl is for a particular place and time as I keep mentioning. People spending time dedicated to the album. C.D.s in cars allow people to listen on the go, but they (in-car C.D. players) are becoming rarer now. Listening to albums portability is a perfect way to experience Kate Bush, so that is why I think cassettes would be the best way to get that sort of connection. Allow people to affordably collect her albums, have physical products and listen to them at any time. Rather than rely on streaming and phones to get her music, people would have them something they can hold. Pass the albums down through the generations maybe. Some would say the volatility of cassettes would be an issue. At £10 each, people can replace them if they needed without breaking the bank. Also, we have to accept that cassettes have a place and there are plenty of artists releasing their albums on them. Others will say Kate Bush is not putting out new music and does not have the pull of someone like Kylie Minogue. Even so, Bush has reissued her albums to vinyl. That takes expense and a lot of time to get them pressed and out to shops. She also has no issue with revisionism and ensuring people know about her albums. She also adores physical music so could not object to cassettes. I think they would sell really well and could attract younger listeners. Those maybe not who are into vinyl yet and feel C.D.s are a bit old-fashioned. I think there is something different about cassettes. Their look and portability. How they are old technology but also attracting new and huge artists. Fans buying cassettes.

I come back to an artist like Kylie Minogue. Her upcoming TENSION II album is a companion to 2023’s TENSION. Its thirteen tracks features nine new cuts. The Coral Cassette version is £9 and looks amazing! It is affordable and a great buy. The more we normalise cassettes and make them affordable, that will encourage people to listen to them and collect other albums on that format. Most studio albums will fit on one cassette. Kate Bush has two albums that may require double cassette. 2005’s Aerial definitely would need to be on that format. As would 2011’s 50 Words for Snow. Bush could put out her albums through Fish People (her own label) and it would be a fresh venture. Not another reissue of the vinyl editions. People might balk at yet another reissue that would earn her money! Hankering for new music or something different. In lieu of Before the Dawn coming out on DVD (which is all but dead in the water), what can we see from her in the next year or two? I actually think cassettes are long overdue. You can find Kate Bush cassettes on sites like eBay and Discogs, though not through HMV, Rough Trade, Amazon or anywhere like that for the most part. You have to dig deep and explore. The prices can also be quite high too.

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush with Rik Mayall

Having her ten albums out there, each in a different colour (The Kick Inside in pink; Never for Ever in silver; Hounds of Love purple; Aerial in yellow; The Red Shoes in red; 50 Words for Snow in white; The Sensual World possibly in orange or green) with maybe lyrics printed in the inlay. There is something almost foreign and unusual about Generation Z picking up a cassette. At the moment, the market for cassettes seems to be for contemporary artists. Normally bigger artists. Many legacy and classic albums are reserved for vinyl and also C.D. The demand for the cassette versions is unsure at the moment. With Kate Bush, I definitely think there is a market. Cassettes can last thirty years and, if treated well, they are not going to instantly get jammed in a cassette player or break. I personally would grab at least four of her studio albums on cassette, buy a decent portable cassette player, good headphones and spend more time outside listening to her music. It would connect me with the past but also lead me from streaming and ensure I experience her albums in full without distractions. Not a cash-in or novelty, it is another way we  can keep her music alive and physical for future generations. If this was a possibility for 2025, I think we could have a whole new generation picking up Kate Bush’s phenomenal albums…

ON cassette.

FEATURE: The View from the Lighthouse: Bringing Abortion Rights into Music

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The View from the Lighthouse

IN THIS PHOTO: Stevie Nicks

Bringing Abortion Rights into Music

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I have said before…

PHOTO CREDIT: MART PRODUCTION/Pexels

how politics and big subjects is not coming into music as much as it should be. A Hip-Hop community once ignited and united against by injustice, oppression, racism and social inequality seemingly far less concerned and motivated at a time when it is rife and widespread. Pop music once confronting subjects like the AIDs epidemic, inequalities and serious subjects. That is not to say that music is devoid of this sort of activism and awareness. In fact, many artists are addressing bigger themes and things beyond their own lives. However, as we are seeing genocide and bloodshed on the news every day, there is a definite vacant space. Where artists should be shouting and asking for action! Think about women’s rights and violence affecting them. Whereas a few female artists are tackling this, why is this not a bigger topic and talking point in the modern landscape?! There should be nothing preventing artists across every genre speaking out. Label consequences, fan division or a lack of commercial and radio play success should not hold back bringing very important subjects to the fore! And yet it is. More than it should be. I do wonder about the motivation of a lot of artists. Those with the most lure and appeal should be using their platforms to really tackle vital areas. Reproductive rights are especially vital when it comes to song subject matter. Though it does not really affect women in the U.K. music, it is a major issue in the U.S. The almost illegality of abortion right across wide swathes of the nation. Throughout many states there is a Stone Age and biblical approach to abortion rights, it is insanity that the most powerful nation on Earth dictates women’s bodies! Forcing countless women to carry children against their wills. Dictating their safe right to abortions. This seeming puritanical approach is endangering so many women and forcing many to travel to other countries to abort. Others self-aborting or carrying through delivery and then giving children up for adoption. We should not live in a time when governments and controlling women’s rights and bodies. It is shocking enough to see it in countries in other continents. Where women are not allowed to show their faces in public or even speak. Seek education. Prehistoric and barbaric conditions that exist here are often seen as less appalling though, no matter how wealthy or progressive a country might seem, any prohibition or law like this is barbaric!

PHOTO CREDIT: Emma Guliani/Pexels

In the U.S., in 2024, women have fewer rights over their bodies then they did a decade ago! Every year should see progress towards equal rights and greater respect for women. That may sound horribly naïve and idyllic of me, yet how can we go backwards?! In music, abortion rights seem almost taboo. How many artists are discussing it right now?! Why left only to women to discuss an issue that also affects men too. Not only from a paternal viewpoint, also their care and consideration for women’s autonomy and reproductive rights?! Perhaps many artists feel like it is too divisive an issue or a hot potato. Something that could split their fanbase or incur backlash. As I say, there are moments when artists need to cross a picket line or barrier and speak out regardless of the consequences. Especially when it comes to something as important as abortion rights in the U.S. That is why Stevie Nicks’ new song. The Lighthouse, is so important. The music icon released the track last week. The Guardian provide more details about a very urgent, important and timely musical release:

“Stevie Nicks has released a forthright new single, The Lighthouse, inspired by the fight to reinstate abortion rights in the US.

Nicks wrote the robust, swaggering rock song in the aftermath of the June 2022 decision by the US supreme court to overturn the 1973 Roe v Wade ruling that Americans had a constitutional right to abortion.

“It seemed like overnight, people were saying, ‘What can we, as a collective force, do about this?’” Nicks said. “For me, it was to write a song. It took a while because I was on the road. Then early one morning I was watching the news on TV and a certain newscaster said something that felt like she was talking to me – explaining what the loss of Roe v Wade would come to mean. I wrote the song the next morning and recorded it that night.

“That was September 6, 2022. I have been working on it ever since. I have often said to myself, ‘This may be the most important thing I ever do. To stand up for the women of the United States and their daughters and granddaughters – and the men that love them.’ This is an anthem.”

In the song, Nicks casts herself as the titular lighthouse, guiding women to campaign for their rights. “I want to teach them to fight / I want to tell them this has happened before, don’t let it happen again,” she sings.

The chorus is similarly a call to action: “They’ll take your soul, take your power, unless you stand up, take it back / Try to see the future and get mad / It’s slipping through your fingers, you don’t have what you had / And you don’t have much time to get it back.”

Nicks is backed by Sheryl Crow, who plays guitar and bass as well as singing backing vocals. Crow also co-produced the song with 13-time Grammy winning Dave Cobb.

The Lighthouse has been released amid a US election campaign where abortion access has been at the forefront of campaigning.

Trump installed the supreme court justices who overturned the decision during Joe Biden’s presidency, and has boasted about it: “After 50 years of failure, with nobody coming even close, I was able to kill Roe v Wade,” he said in May. In August he said he had “no regrets” about the court decision, saying: “The federal government should have nothing to do with this issue. It’s being solved at the state level and people are very happy about it.”

Kamala Harris has repeatedly criticised Trump on the issue, characterising him earlier this week as “the person who said women should be punished for exercising a decision that they, rightly, should be able to make about their own body and future”.

With abortion law now decided at a state level, 14 states have banned abortion with another 11 described as “hostile” to it by the Center for Reproductive Rights. Research published this month by Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health found that doctors are being forced to provide substandard care by making women take unviable pregnancies to full term”.

Think about songs that tackled abortion rights back then. Even though abortion is not Illegal throughout the whole of the U.S., it is looking more likely more and more states will outlaw it. Let’s hope that if Kamala Harris is elected President later this year, there is going to be a bigger push to put abortion rights for all women on the table and through Congress. That there is a chance that all states across America one day will legalise abortion without any addendums or caveats. That is the basic right of every woman! Yet abortion, in so many states, is seen as shameful or murder. Even if 2022 was a year when many artists spoke out against the prohibition of abortion across multiple U.S. states, the desired wave of songs tackling this did not quite occur. I want to bring in some of this article from 2022. Pitchfork talked about the soundtrack of abortion rights – not a mix one would see popping up on Spotify! – through the past fifty years. How it has been highlighted by many women in powerful and different ways:

“It felt like 110 in the sun when the Reproductive Liberation March paraded through downtown Dallas in July, following the overturning of Roe v. Wade. But even amid the heat wave, the Black women from the Afiya Center who organized the event, as well as hundreds of other protestors, gathered with their signs and all the water they could carry to march and chant.

Joining them was a local band called the Hot Topics, who played several 1990s alt-rock classics. Desera “Dez” Moore, the group’s singer, said this choice was purposeful. “I was trying to keep the energy light and encouraging toward the beginning, with songs like ‘Drops of Jupiter’ and ‘Semi-Charmed Life,’ to bring people in with a positive light. Then halfway through, switch to songs that conveyed my frustration and rage.” Moore’s fury included a double hit of Alanis Morissette (“Ironic” and “You Oughta Know”) and the Foo Fighters’ “Everlong.” The crowd’s visceral reaction to these songs offered yet another reminder that this protest was an unflinching response to the loss of human rights.

Over the last few months, the sound of the abortion rights movement has been expressed through various styles and emotions, some more forthright than others. It’s Olivia Rodrigo and Lily Allen singing “Fuck You,” retrofitting a bratty pop song with lyrics that speak to what’s happening now. It’s Megan Thee Stallion leading chants of “my body, my motherfucking choice” alongside gloriously blunt rap anthems like “Plan B.” It’s the catharsis of screaming “I Know the End” along with Phoebe Bridgers, who has been transparent about her own abortion. The music often serves as an acknowledgement of the sadness and grief around the difficult decision to have an abortion in the first place.

There haven’t been many songs released that speak directly to the issue, so people are getting creative, sometimes retrofitting unlikely pop hits to bolster the cause. Hence the Chainsmokers’ “Paris,” with its chorus of “If we go down then we go down together,” becoming an unofficial anthem of solidarity for women on TikTok. This isn’t a new phenomenon; there never have been a lot of songs about abortion specifically. But, historically, whenever abortion rights are threatened, songs about inequality are used to meet the moment.

Musical protest around abortion dates all the way back to the second wave feminist movement in the ’60s and ’70s. Music was only a small part of the overall movement at the time, but the songs that were inspired by it were brash and audacious. In 1968, Dolly Parton released Just Because I’m a Woman, her first solo album after ending her longtime musical partnership with fellow country star Porter Wagoner. The most powerful song on that album is “The Bridge,” a first-person story of a woman who is pregnant and was abandoned by her lover. At the end of the song, she dies by suicide. Abortion wouldn’t become federal law in the United States until 1973, but that character embodied all of the women dealing with a significant wage gap, an injustice that would stop them from caring for their unborn children alone. It also illustrated the reality that women were prohibited from getting a line of credit in their own names, and faced the possibility of being fired if they got pregnant. If “Just Because I’m a Woman” was a protest song about society’s sexist double standards, then “The Bridge” was the sound of an internal revolution.

That same year, Aretha Franklin’s “Chain of Fools” and “Think” dropped a hammer on the idea of putting up with trifling men, as did the Supremes’ “Love Child,” in which a woman asks her lover to wait to have sex and consider how tough the life of a child of two unprepared parents could be. In 1969, Roberta Flack mentioned that “unwed mothers need abortion” in “Compared to What,” an anti-war song. Loretta Lynn’s 1971 song “One’s on the Way” includes a passionate mention of “the girls in New York City, they all march for women’s lib,” followed by the hope that the birth control pill, which would become available to single women in 1972, would change the world. But its main character still faces the issues of the day: She has too many kids, too much work to do around the house, and a husband who is no help at all.

The universally recognized song of the women’s movement in the ’70s was Helen Reddy’s “I Am Woman.” But it wasn’t exactly compatible with the abortion rights movement, thanks to the lyric, “I’m still an embryo/With a long, long way to go.” For some, though, the overall sentiment of the song still gave a sense of empowerment they craved. Second wavers including Joni Mitchell, Carole King, Nico, and Carly Simon released career-defining albums around the time Roe was decided, with songs about the inequities that the women’s liberation movement aimed to change, or the freedoms that sexual agency brought women. But very few wrote about the desperation of not having control over their bodies. Instead, many of these songs tapped into the dark, melancholy feelings that came from experiences of oppression”.

Artists did react to the decision by the Supreme Court’s “decision on Dobbs vs. Jackson Women's Health Organization on Friday, effectively overturning the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that codified the right to abortion, social media predictably exploded with myriad responses”. This article showed there was a lot of anger and disgust. This article names ten songs around abortion/abortion rights; songs that might not have explicitly been about abortion/abortion rights but take on new context now. Whilst this article mentions how some artists reacted fast to devastating news in 2022, how much momentum has there been since then?! In the past two years, how many artists have put reproductive and abortion rights at the front of their music? I hope that more and more do following Stevie Nicks’ latest song. In fact, another song that she wrote, Sara, is about her having an abortion. That song was released in 1979:

“Billie Eilish, Kendrick Lamar, Olivia Rodrigo and Megan Thee Stallion used the stage at Glastonbury Festival as their platform to vent.

Janelle Monae turned her presenting gig at the BET Awards into an opportunity to voice her concern.

Halsey spoke passionately during her live performances and artists including Pink, Lizzo and Eminem tweeted messages filled with fury, sadness, vows to keep fighting and financial pledges to Planned Parenthood.

Unsurprisingly, the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade after 50 years, which negated the constitutional right to an abortion, netted a swift reaction from the music community.

Some artists quickly spun their concern into new music: Ani DiFranco and Pearl Jam’s Stone Gossard released “Disorders” and Promise of the Real’s Lukas Nelson (son of Willie) unveiled a harrowing ballad about a trio forced to have babies despite extreme circumstances such as incest and date rape”.

It is staggering that women should be denied access to abortion clinics/facilities in this day and age. Anywhere in the world! The fact that it is quite common throughout the U.S. is reprehensible and abuse. Women not only being denied something as fundamental but also having their rights stripped. How any government thinks it can control women’s bodies and will is insanity and frankly inhumane! I don’t know how powerful music is when it comes to sparking change and activation, though the more and more artists that cover it in music, the greater the pressure gets. It is not down to anyone other than women who get pregnant to decide if they keep a foetus. The partner should have say, though it is women’s bodies and it is their decision! It definitely should not be something politicians feel they should be involved in. When it comes to women and their abortion rights, it is entirely…

THEIR choice.

FEATURE: Protection: Not Erasing Women’s Involvement in Their Own Work

FEATURE:

 

 

Protection

Not Erasing Women’s Involvement in Their Own Work

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WHEN on Twitter yesterday…

IN THIS PHOTO: Tracey Thorn/PHOTO CREDIT: Katherine Anne Rose/The Observer

I saw a post by Eric Alper that was met with some angry reaction. It said this: “Massive Attack's "Protection" was originally written for Madonna, but due to scheduling conflicts, Tracey Thorn of Everything but the Girl ended up lending her iconic vocals to the track”. Massive Attack’s Protection album turned thirty on 26th September. The title track opens the album. It memorably features the vocals of the legendary Tracey Thorn. The Everything But the Girl lead not only sung the vocals but penned the melody and the lyrics. Her response took no prisoners: “That's a very weird take. I didn't "lend my vocals" to the track, I wrote the entire melody and lyrics. It's an entirely collaborative track, so not really true to suggest that it existed already as a song and might have been sung by someone else”. Four years later, Cocteau Twins’ Elizabeth Fraser co-wrote the iconic Teardrop. From Massive Attack, Mezzanine, would anyone say that she ‘lending her vocals to the track”, iconic or not?! She probably would get that! The issue is that many people – and not just men, most they are the vast majority – assume that women that sing on songs by other artists are merely showing up to sing. No agency or credit. They are wheeled in to make a song sound a particular way but dismissed and marginalised when it comes to their creative input. You can see what Tracey Thorn meant! She was not a ringer or in vogue singer who Massive Attack though could do something good with the track. Her melody and lyrics make the song what it is! One of the best Massive Attack tracks ever (just behind Unfinished Sympathy in my view), the title cut of one of their greatest albums was made what it was by Tracey Thorn. It is diminishing and almost sexist to think that it was only her vocal that went into the track! In fact, Shara Nelson, who sung on the timeless Unfinished Sympathy, co-wrote the song. These incredible women whose words and ladies essentially provided the heartbeat and bones of Massive Attack’s finest moments.

It is not only misguided voices like Eric Alper that undervalue and almost dismiss women’s contributions. Even this anniversary feature for Massive Attack’s Protection mentions Tracey Thorn once. As a contributor. Think about women like her and what they helped to build. So many genius songs through the years are credited to male acts/bands and we forget the women who sung on them did a lot more than that! There are articles that explore the women written out of Indie history. Those who have practically been erased from Pop. Even if women have been dominated Pop and other genres for years now – and most of the new breed coming through is defined by female brilliance -, we still consider the genres (and all others) to be defined by men. That they make the greatest music. I remember a lot of those incredible Dance and Pop tracks from decades ago where you had this amazing woman singing. How they often were vastly underpaid and credited. Maybe not having their names down as songwriters. Seen as props or almost a gimmick. Sometimes sexualised and reduced to their gender. In essence, they were considered to be novelty and a voice. In many cases these amazing women helped write the songs and, inarguably, where the driving force behind them. Are we still living in a time when music is still male-centric?! It definitely seems to be the same when it comes to female collaborations. I think it goes further than this. Even in the modern time, there is sexism and misogyny running through the industry. In terms of the incredible women songwriters and their huge input into music. What galled me so much about the Eric Alper/Tracey Thorn interaction is that this sort of attitude pervades. Thorn could argue and dissect this much better than me. The way women’s creativity and value is so undermined and ignored. If you have a woman singing the song, that is all she is. Assumed that the blood and soul of a track is made by men. As we can hear in tracks like Protection, that is not the case!

It brings to mind books such as This Woman’s Work: Essays on Music. This book is female writers penning essays about women who inspire them. It is important that the narrative is changed. That women’s contributions and incredible work is recognised. Not assuming that women are secondary, supplementary or silent. Not only has that post by Eric Alper unintentionally opened up debate and a new conversation about how women are still seen and viewed in music. In terms of these classic songs that feature women on vocals. Not assuming they were produced and written for by men. Giving a lot more weight to female pioneers and innovators. These amazing artists that offers get snubbed and disrespected. I feel that the Eric Alper tweet was a blunder or misworded. That he meant to celebrate Tracey Thorn’s amazing vocal, whilst forgetting that she also wrote the melody and lyrics. Do people still see women as singers but no genuine writers and composers? This assumption men are the wheels and driving force. That certainly needs to be addressed and reversed. From women fronting House classics to those through Disco and Techno that have gone unpaid and under-valued, right alongside to women being underrepresented today, there is an issue through the industry and through society. The depth, value and worth of female songwriters and creativities. We need to stop with this ignorance. If nothing else, I hope that the celebration of Massive Attack’s Protection recognises the amazing woman who made the title track the stunning and moving classic it is. Tracey Thorn is not the only woman who’s true value and creativity is truncated and reduced to one thing. It has been going on for decades and it needs to stop. Phenomenal and inspiring women through music should be given…

THE credit they deserve!

FEATURE: Aces and Jokers: Inside Lady Gaga’s Harlequin

FEATURE:

 

 

Aces and Jokers

Inside Lady Gaga’s Harlequin

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I do love a surprise album…

as it means we do not have to go through the normal promotional cycle and all that predictable build-up. This one comes Lady Gaga. A companion piece to the new film she appears in, Joker: Folie à Deux, I am interested in the reviews for the album. How there is some mixed reception. People saying Lady Gaga’s vocals are phenomenal and she is a natural when it comes to covering standards. Others feeling that there are a few weaker tracks in the pack. I really love the album and feel it is important and really strong. I just love artists tackling standards and older songs. Immersing themselves in that world. More should do it. I will end with a couple of reviews for Harlequin. Prior to that, I am featuring an interview from Rolling Stone, where Lady Gaga spoke about the new album. It is interesting reading what she had to say:

“When Lady Gaga wrapped her third movie — the upcoming Joker sequel, Folie à Deux — she realized she wasn’t ready to move on from her character, Harleen “Lee” Quinzel, a.k.a. Harley Quinn. “I had such a deep relationship with Lee,” she tells Rolling Stone. “And when I was done filming the movie, I wasn’t done with her.”

With the help of her fiancé, Michael Polansky, the superstar recorded Harlequin, a companion record to the film that mostly contains sparkling renditions of standards — her first time doing so since the death of her collaborator Tony Bennett. Over 13 tracks, she interprets classics that include “Get Happy” (made famous by Judy Garland) and “That’s Life” (Frank Sinatra) while putting a modern spin on them. Harold Arlen and Ted Koehler’s 1932 song “I’ve Got the World on a String” is transformed into a seductive rocker — ideal for introducing it to younger generations. On a Zoom call from London, Gaga spoke to us about Harlequin, defying genres, and what fans can expect on her upcoming pop album.

What were your goals going in to this album?

We decided we wanted to create an album that celebrated her complexity through the lens of a lot of the music in the film, as well as originals, that would touch on the breadth of her as a woman — her darkness, her chaos, her vibrancy, her manic nature — and create a modern take on vintage pop.

You describe the album as “LG 6.5.” Do you view this more as a Harley album, or solely a Gaga record?

I view this as both, actually. That’s kind of the way that I see all of this. It is my record. It’s a Lady Gaga record, but it’s also inspired by my character and my vision of what a woman can be. It’s why the album does not adhere to one genre. I called it “6.5” because it’s not my next studio album that’s a pop record, but it is somewhere in between, and it’s blurring the lines of pop music. As you know, my collaborator Tony Bennett, who’s no longer alive, was young singing this music. It was just pop music. And I thought it was so interesting, the songs that were chosen to create this film. I wanted to explore what this music could mean today through the lens of her.

You described Joker as meta-modern, and how you can’t really pin it down to one genre. That’s how I see this album, too. Jazz is at the forefront, but there’s so many different sounds.

Thank you. I would say that that meta-modernism actually played a real role in how we approached this in the studio. I co-produced this album with Ben Rice. Michael also had a very heavy hand in the music. We talked a lot about her being somebody that you can’t clarify, because she is too unpredictable and rare. [We] used genre as a way to express that something is rare — by not adhering to one and going heavily into the avant-garde. I’m basically saying, “As a woman, I choose to be whatever and whoever I want to be at any given moment, no matter how I feel. And no matter what you want from me, I will be myself. Thank you. Love, Harlequin” [laughs].

You basically had to unlearn singing and tone down your technique while shooting the film. What about here? Were you just being Gaga and not holding back?

I did both on this record. There’s moments where I definitely tap into Lee’s voice and her childlike immaturity with song. She has this naivete. You imagine that she heard the song two times and she’s humming by herself, because she’s uncomfortable and wants to soothe herself. That made it in there. For example, the opening of “That’s Entertainment” almost sounds like a 13-year-old at a school play. In the context of a 38-year-old woman, it’s kind of unsettling. But then, “That’s Entertainment” launches into a much softer vocal that is extremely nostalgic. And I worked on that as well.

Vocally, I played with using my voice in a way that I also didn’t use ever with Tony. So this was a bit of Lee’s voice, and a new voice for me with some of the more jazz-inspired records. And then exploring — how would I sing over surf punk? How would I sing over a waltz? How could we create a version of “Smile” that feels inherent to the film? And then with “Happy Mistake,” there’s this raw fragility that’s totally Gaga, but it’s also maybe me singing on a record in a way that I never have before. So I would say that for as genre-defying as the album is, the vocal is, too. The vocal’s kind of schizophrenic, but that makes sense for Harley Quinn. And that was part of the joy of making it — the freedom of it all.

This your first time recording standards without Tony. Was he in your mind at all? I’m sure it was emotional.

Yeah. This was my first time without Tony, and it wasn’t emotional probably in the way you’re thinking. It wasn’t sad. It was actually like he was with us all the time. And also, in a funny way, if I had put rock & roll chords over production in a record that I did with Tony years ago, I don’t know how he would’ve felt about that. Tony didn’t love rock & roll. But he would’ve said, “Wow, that’s amazing.” He was somebody who loved how risk-taking and different I am, and I always thought that was so cool. He was 60 years older than me, and he would flinch less than young people that I would meet. People that would be like, “Why is she dressed that way? Why is she singing that way? Why is her stage performance so theatrical?” Tony, he just never even flinched. He was just a really compassionate, inclusive person. So he was definitely with us [in the studio], but he was mostly inside of me.

As a female producer and singer, I feel that I’ve earned my ability to show my way around this music. And that was exciting for me, because that’s also something I love to share with young people that are listening to these songs. Some of these songs are from the Thirties. It’s nice to be able to show how these things can be reimagined beyond just the notes and the style of the way they were written. Rather… what if you just tore up the book and lit it on fire and did it in a completely new way? I wanted it to be fun”.

Before wrapping things up, I want to come to a couple of reviews for Harlequin. The surprise of the album coming out. I love Lady Gaga’s work and this is her embracing and exploring her full vocal range. It is a fascinating collection of songs that is much more than a side project or lesser work. I am interested in different takes on Harlequin. I am going to end with another review in a minute. First, this is how Consequence approached the stunning Harlequin:

“The story begins, for example, with a slightly updated version of “Good Morning,” originally performed by Judy Garland and further popularized by its inclusion in Singin’ in the Rain. And while nothing can ever top the sheer joy of Gene Kelly, Donald O’Connor, and Debbie Reynolds dancing around a Los Angeles set piece in the wee hours of the morning, Gaga takes it out for a cheeky spin with a handful of references to inmates, wardens, and other plot elements waiting in Joker: Folie à Deux. When it comes to sifting through the many classic tracks she could have chosen for this collection, Gaga’s instincts are, overall, fantastic. She pulls heavily from beloved Technicolor musicals, mining Sweet Charity for “If My Friends Could See Me Now” and The Band Wagon for “That’s Entertainment.”

“That’s Entertainment,” in particular, feels like a turning point for the story Gaga is telling. Regardless of how Lee’s arc will play out in the movie, Dr. Harleen Quinzel is a character who canonically finds herself consumed by the charismatic Crown Prince of Crime to the point that she sheds most of her own identity to step into the role of Harley Quinn. She wants so desperately to be loved and affirmed by him that she’ll let her life fall to pieces in order to get his approval. All the world’s a stage, and “That’s Entertainment” feels like the moment she accepts her role.

The one glaring miss immediately follows with  “The Joker,” which Gaga pulled for obvious reasons from the little-seen 1965 production The Roar of the Greasepaint – The Smell of the Crowd. It comes across as too heavy-handed to mesh evenly with everything else happening here. The other tracks feel peppered with dark irony or devil-may-care awareness in a way that feels self-aware, while the references in “The Joker” to “the lonely clown” as the ultimate “loser in the game” are just a bit too on the nose to work. Even so, “The Joker” is clearly the point where our narrator — Gaga, Lee, Harley, or any mix of the three — takes the turn for the worse, which makes the tender “Smile” a powerful emotional centerpiece.

Harlequin then offers the first of two original tracks, “Folie à Deux,” written solely by Gaga. “Folie à Deux” is a trippy, cartoonish waltz with a haunting background vocals and explosive piano that feels entirely in line with her narrative. The other original, “Happy Mistake,” emerges in the final third as a reserved guitar ballad that wouldn’t have felt out of place on 2016’s Joanne, one of the first times Gaga began to peel back the layers of protection offered by her chameleonic stage persona.

This idea of exposure is present throughout Harlequin, too. “Playing a strung-out girl my whole career was a way for me to split off from my true self, but, it’s all me,” she told Entertainment Weekly of “Happy Mistake.” “That song says if I was ever going to find joy or happiness in my life, it would probably feel like an accident…My dedicated fans know this about me, that playing a persona had a price, and it has a price for Lee and her love of Joker. There’s definitely a way that I address that on this record.”

While Lady Gaga isn’t quite a method actor, she certainly intertwines her characters with her own DNA, a concept she’s reinforced throughout the press cycle for the film. “This idea of dual identities was always something that was a part of my music-making,” she noted on a recent episode of The Zane Lowe Show. “I was always creating characters in my music, and when I made Lee for Joker, she just really had this profound effect on me.” She’s obviously far from the first to undertake this type of project, one that uses a film as its launchpad, but there are few creators out there as committed as Gaga.

We already know that Lady Gaga can absolutely body a jazz track, which she does frequently throughout Harlequin. Her vocal prowess remains undeniable; she jumps the octave in “Gonna Build a Mountain” with such ease that Sammy Davis Jr. himself would approve. The transition between “Folie à Deux” and the determined “Gonna Build a Mountain” positions itself as that final narrative turning point, and the closing third of the project brings the storyline home. There’s certainly no happy bow, and following the thread of a toxic relationship takes us to this line in album’s closing track: “I thought of quittin’, but my heart just won’t buy it.”

The arrangements throughout the LP demonstrate the clear reverence and care she has for these standards, and the tweaks she makes and lyrical additions she adds feel playful, not flippant. She is listed as a producer on every song on Harlequin, with Benjamin Rice as her lone co-producer for most of the album. Rice has worked with Lady Gaga throughout the majority of her career, including, crucially, on the soundtrack for A Star Is Born. He has a clear and deep understanding of her vision here.

In recent days, Lady Gaga has been referring to Harlequin as “LG6.5,” placing it as a “half” project ahead of her seventh studio album. It’s a description that feels correct; Harlequin is interesting and stylistically excellent, but at the same time, it probably won’t float to the top in conversations around Lady Gaga’s best work”.

Although there have been some more mixed reviews for Harlequin, I do find it fascinating. A terrific and solid work from Lady Gaga, it does lead me to think that more artists should cover standards. It may seem tried and tired, yet Lady Gaga has revealed new sides to her with this album. Whether Harlequin is a palette cleanser or a stepping stone to a new album, it is compelling in its own right. I will end with a couple of reviews for Harlequin. This is what The Arts Desk wrote about an album that people should really check out:

“Lady Gaga has made clear this is not her official new artist album. It’s a side project, inspired by Harley Quinn, the nom-de-chaos of the Arkham Asylum inmate she plays in Todd Phillips’ much-anticipated sequel Joker: Folie à Deux. The original Joker, deep-dipped in Seventies Scorcese aesthetics, saw DC Studios demonstrate they could take superhero fictions to exciting new places. Setting the bar higher, the new film is a musical.

Judging from this album, it’s going to boast a whole heap of swingin’ jazz energy.

As a stand-alone album, it’s very much in the vein of her two albums with Tony Bennett, rather than her usual stadium cyber-pop. It contains songs featured in the film and a few that aren’t. Two of the 13-track set are Gaga originals. The rest are mostly well-known standards. The territory has been relentlessly trampled over the decades - everyone from Sinead O’Connor to Robbie Williams to Rod Stewart has had a go – but Gaga acquits herself with aplomb. Partly this is because she has a stunning voice, whether foghorn belting, gospel diva-ing or deep cabaret playful.

Sure, there are throwaway bits; Charlie Chaplin’s schmaltzy old “Smile”, a predictable easy-listening “Close to You", and a so-so “Oh, When the Saints”. None are horrid and they may well work onscreen, but they don’t show off Gaga’s unique character. Happily there’s plenty that does, notably the rockin’ Cher-goes-burlesque of “The Joker” (the Anthony Newley one, not the Steve Miller Band one!), the Gene Krupa-ish “If My Friends Could See Me Now”, the showbiz explosion of “That’s Life” and a smokey, Winehouse-y take on Dixieland gem “I’ve Got the World on a String”.

Her own songs sit easily next to well-worn classics. One is the lush waltz-time slowie “Folie à Deux”, which sounds as if it hails from a long-ago Disney princess film (albeit spiked with deliberately off-key notes), and the other is a strummed melancholic torch song, “Happy Mistake”. Lady Gaga is one of pop’s true one-off’s, often magificently so, and this outing is sprinkled with enough of her stardust”.

Whether you prefer Lady Gaga’s studio albums and her more traditional sound or do like when she takes on classic and older tracks, Harlequin offers both worlds. It is a wonderful set that will please Lady Gaga fans and those who might not have truly discovered her work. With very few jokers in the pack, Harlequin offers up…

PLENTY of aces.

FEATURE: In These Shoes? Remembering Kirsty MacColl at Sixty-Five

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In These Shoes?

PHOTO CREDIT: KPA/United (via The New York Times)

Remembering Kirsty MaCcoll at Sixty-Five

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ON 10th October…

we will mark what would have been Kirsty MacColl’s sixty-fifth birthday. We sadly lost her at the age of forty-one in 2000. It was such a tragedy and shock. A truly distinct and wonderful voice in music, I wanted to celebrate her amazing work ahead of that birthday. Before getting to a playlist of songs from throughout her career, I want to bring in some detailed biography from AllMusic:

“A talented and eclectic British singer/songwriter, Kirsty MacColl's genius was apparent, though woefully unrecognized, during her lifetime. Despite a dazzling catalog of original work, her two best-known performances were written by others. Most recognizably, she is Shane MacGowan's feisty duet partner on the Pogues' perennial classic "Fairytale of New York," while her most successful solo release is a shimmering cover of Billy Bragg's "A New England." She could have followed in the footsteps of her father, U.K. folk legend Ewan MacColl, but instead devoted her life to pop music of every conceivable stripe. Her first single, 1979's "They Don't Know," fused classic girl group themes with jangly power pop, and over the following two decades she explored country, jazz, synth pop, alt rock, and even Latin. MacColl's innate curiosity and willful attitude often precluded her from settling into any single role, which is possibly why audiences found her hard to pin down. She was a trailblazing multi-hyphenate who could write, produce, and arrange while collaborating with acts ranging from Tracey Ullman to the Smiths. Her own albums, particularly 1989's Kite and 2000's Tropical Brainstorm, were exciting stylistic fusions that combined unpredictable melodies, sharp wit, and detailed storytelling. Following her death in 2000 at age 41, subsequent generations have begun to discover her work, though her legacy outside of England remains remarkably overlooked. Various compilations have sought to draw attention to MacColl's music, the most thorough of which is 2023's career-spanning box set See That Girl 1979-2000.

Born October 10, 1959, to British folk singer Ewan MacColl and dancer Jean Newlove, Kirsty Anna MacColl grew up in Croydon with her mother. Whereas her father was a noted folk purist, Kirsty was voracious in her musical tastes, embracing pop, rock, punk, country, and everything in between. Her entry into the local music scene came as the vocalist (under the pseudonym Mandy Doubt) for punk outfit the Drug Addix. The band went nowhere, but Stiff Records heard potential in their 18-year-old singer and signed MacColl to a solo deal. Her debut single, 1979's "They Don't Know" introduced the smart melodic sense and lush vocal layering that would become one of her hallmarks. While it wasn't a hit for MacColl, a version by Tracey Ullman reached number two in the U.K. four years later. Over the coming years she wrote several more songs for Ullman including "You Broke My Heart in 17 Places." MacColl's own chart debut came in 1981 with "There's a Guy Works Down the Chip Shop Swears He's Elvis," a jangly country-indebted novelty song that served as the lead single to her debut album, Desperate Character. It was her only release for Polydor, which dropped her just as she was wrapping up sessions for Real, the synth-heavy album intended to be her follow-up. The album was ultimately shelved for the remainder of MacColl's career and wouldn't see the light of day until 2023. She moved back to Stiff and resumed recording pop singles like "He's On the Beach" and "Terry" before landing her first hit with a reworked version of Billy Bragg's "A New England."

Released in 1985 and produced by MacColl's then-husband Steve Lillywhite, the song peaked at number seven on the U.K. Singles chart and remains her best-selling song. Bragg wrote a special verse for MacColl's version and the two remained close friends and collaborators for the remainder of her career. Despite its success, she avoided an immediate follow-up, choosing instead to focus on raising her two children with Lillywhite. She was far from inactive, though, and took regular session work as a singer, arranger, and all-around creative foil. During the mid- to late '80s, MacColl sang on records by the Smiths, Robert Plant, the Rolling Stones, Alison Moyet, Simple Minds, Big Country, and many others. She even sequenced U2's landmark album The Joshua Tree, which Lillywhite was mixing at the time. She returned to the pop charts later that year duetting with Shane MacGowan on the Pogues' holiday single "Fairytale of New York,'' another Lillywhite production.

In April 1989, a full decade into her career, MacColl finally released her second album. Now signed to Virgin Records, the smartly written Kite was easily her most accomplished work to date, earning critical acclaim and a respectable placement at 34 on the U.K. charts. It also ushered in her most prolific and creatively successful period. The vibrant and diverse Electric Landlady followed in 1991, yielding the U.S. college radio hit "Walking Down Madison," a dance track co-written with frequent collaborator Johnny Marr. Despite it being her biggest American release, Virgin opted not to renew her contract and she switched to Trevor Horn's ZTT Records for 1993's Titanic Days. Written and recorded during her divorce from Lillywhite, it was made with a significantly smaller budget, though no less ambition.

MacColl's lyrics skewed more toward introspective, though the music and arrangements were as eclectic as ever and it again received positive reviews, if middling sales. In 1995 Virgin compiled the greatest-hits collection Galore which featured two new recordings, the power pop highlight "Caroline" and a cover of Lou Reed's "Perfect Day" with Evan Dando. Galore became MacColl's only album to reach the U.K. Top Ten. Another compilation, 1998's What Do Pretty Girls Do?, collated her various BBC 1 live sessions, mostly from the front half of the '90s. During this period, MacColl had become increasingly enamored of Latin and Tropicalia music. She learned to speak Spanish and traveled to Cuba and Brazil, infusing the rhythms and grooves into a dynamic new set of songs. When it was released in March 2020, Tropical Brainstorm was a significant leap forward for MacColl, fusing bright, tropical rhythms with pop, jazz, electronic music, and various other styles. She sounded reinvigorated and sharper than ever. Critics loved it and it was a modest chart success as well. On December 18 of that year, just as her career seemed to be ramping up into its second act, MacColl was killed by a passing speedboat while swimming with her children off the coast of Cozumel, Mexico. The boat was owned by a Mexican multimillionaire, though controversy remains over who was operating it at the time. In the aftermath of the accident, her family launched a Justice for Kirsty campaign and a 2004 documentary, Who Killed Kirsty MacColl?, examined the case in detail.

In the decades since her death, several compilations have been released celebrating MacColl's career, though outside of the U.K. she remains something of a cult favorite. Her 2000 song "In These Shoes?" has been featured in several commercials and television shows including Sex and the City, and "Fairytale of New York" has become a staple of the holiday season in Britain. In 2023, an elaborate eight-disc box set, See That Girl 1979-2000, was released by Universal and covered nearly every aspect of her career”.

On 10th October, I hope people will remember Kirsty MacColl. It would have been her sixty-fifth birthday. She should still be with us. Killed in such an avoidable incident, you wonder just how much more she would have given us. Regardless, we can remember and celebrate what she did leave us. An amazing legacy and a distinct and beautiful body of music from such a great (yet underrated) talent. I will be thinking about…

THE brilliant Kirsty MacColl.

FEATURE: When Kate Bush Became Catherine Earnshaw: The Reaction to and Legacy of the Beguiling Wuthering Heights

FEATURE:

 

 

When Kate Bush Became Catherine Earnshaw

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1978/PHOTO CREDIT: Gered Mankowitz

The Reaction to and Legacy of the Beguiling Wuthering Heights

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IT is usually around…

IN THIS PHOTO: Emerald Fennell/PHOTO CREDIT: Taylor Jewell/Invision/AP/Shutterstock

January that I focus on Kate Bush’s debut single, Wuthering Heights. I am pulling it forward because there is a new film adaptation coming up. Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi are going to be paired together. The Australian actors will play Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff in director Emerald Fennell's much-discussed adaptation of the classic Emily Brontë novel. The adaptation is getting a lot of mixed reaction. It is great brining the novel to the screen but, as there have been quite a few versions of the book and the definitive version is many years old, there is scepticism. I guess a modern twist or update could bring more people to Wuthering Heights. It is a novel that is still taught in schools and hugely popular. I want to talk about Kate Bush and her being inspired by the novel in 1977. The song Bush wrote around the book was a late addition to The Kick Inside. Even though the song was recorded quickly and Bush nailed her part on the first take, it might not have made it. In the sense it was written in the evening before going in to record the album, under a full moon on a midsummer’s night. Bush caught the last part of a 1967 BBC adaptation of the classic book. Starring Ian McShane as Heathcliff and Angela Scoular as Cathy, its atmospheric, haunting and strange ending captivated the teenager. Kate Bush was born Catherine Bush. Relating to another Catherine. Emily Brontë was also born on 30th July. There was connections between the author and Kate Bush. Bush could put herself in the song. Kate becoming Cathy! Producer Andrew Powell was blown away when Bush played the song for him on the piano. As Graeme Thomson writes in Under the Ivy: The Life & Music of Kate Bush, it is about the emotion details rather than the intellectual or overly-analytical. A song that hits you when you hear it. The connection it has!

Bush noted how this young girl/women was centre of a novel in a time (1847) when women’s roles and opinions were overlooked and seen as inferior. As we have this new film coming along, many people will ask whether Kate Bush’s song will feature. If Stranger Things catapulted Kate Bush to a new audience through this use in a powerful scene, will we get the same with Wuthering Heights?! It may be a bit on the nose including the song, though many have discussed her track in relation to the film. One of the things that defined how people perceived Kate Bush from 1978 is her vocal. This perception is was all high-pitched and girl-like. She was trying to improve her range and the high vocal for Wuthering Heights was deliberate. Embodying this spirit and ghost rather than anything with a heart and flesh. Released on 20th January, 1978, Wuthering Heights climbed to number one and announced this unique and startling musical talent. The fight to get that song released as the single is infamous. Bush was insistent that this was going to be her debut single. EMI wanted James and the Cold Gun. A more conventional and straight-forward song, you can see their reasoning. However, hit by this bolt of inspiration, Bush knew that Wuthering Heights had to be a single! Bob Mercer maintains that Bush burst into tears when things got heated. She strongly refutes it. It is clear that she was determined and strong-willed with her own music. Knowing that Wuthering Heights would translate. It was meant to go out on 4th November, 1977, however there were setbacks. Wings’ Mull of Kintyre dominated and was a massive number one at the end of the year. Also, the single cover with a photo by Gered Mankowitz was scrapped. It was a photo of Bush with her nipples showing trough a leotard.

Regardless, the delay did the single good. Two months before its release, promotional copies had been sent out to stations from EMI’s Automatic Mailing List. Eddie Puma, producer at Capital Radio, and presenter Tony Myatt did not follow EMI’s request to not play the single. They kept playing it! Thanks a lot to Graeme Thomson for that information! I love the whole gestation and life of the song. How it started outside the top forty and reached number one. Bush appeared on Top of the Pops several times. She never really enjoyed the experience. However, she performed the song live a fair few times and was asked about it. This idea Bush was hippy-like or something insignificant. Many dismissed her. However, plenty of people recognised her gifts and the wonder of Wuthering Heights. I always assumed that the white dress version of the Wuthering Heights video came first and then the red dress versions. The U.S. audiences being freaked by the wide-eyed and smoky video with the white dress. In fact, the red dress version came first. Keith MacMillan (Keef) directed both videos. The originals was shot in a day on Rockflix and was very low budget. EMI swiftly withdrew the version of Bush in a red dress on Salisbury Plain – exactly Baden's Clump, near Sidbury Hill – and it was recommissioned. The white dress version was shot in Ewart’s Studio A. The video was shot in the middle of the night. Brian Wiseman explains how they got halfway through and stopped and did something else. Wiseman would go on to direct the videos for Sat in Your Lap and Suspended in Gaffa.

In January, it will be forty-seven years since Wuthering Heights was released as a single. Her debut. This huge moment! Since 1978, Wuthering Heights has reached different generations. It remains flawless and endlessly fascinating. In May 2020, when selecting the one-hundred best U.K. singles ever, The Guardian placed Wuthering Heights fourteenth:

“Had the teenaged Kate Bush listened to the wishes of her record label, Wuthering Heights would not have been her debut single. EMI preferred the pop-stomp of James and the Cold Gun to the eerie, circular song that introduced her to the world. But by her late teens, Bush clearly knew herself and wisely pushed for Wuthering Heights instead. When it saw the light of day, in early 1978, it was a hit. By March that year, it had become a No 1 hit, the first single written and recorded by a female artist to top the British charts. It replaced Abba’s Take A Chance on Me, and remained at the top for a month.

It is sometimes worth remembering the incredible fact that Bush wrote Wuthering Heights when she was 18 years old, though perhaps its keen ear for adolescent angst is part of what makes it so special. She had been inspired by an old television adaptation of Emily Brontë’s novel, which led her to seek out the book. Written from the perspective of the ghost of Catherine Earnshaw, a young woman pleading with the brutal Heathcliff, whom she loves and hates, to let her soul into the house, the song is a gothic melodrama that builds until it is thick with intensity. It is a magnificent achievement, though the writing of it was seemingly painless. “Actually, it came quite easily,” Bush recalled later, telling the story of a single moonlit night at the piano. The vocal was said to have been recorded in a single take. Bush found out that she and Brontë shared a birthday, and the fates were aligned.

The casual story of its creation belies the odd unwieldiness of the song itself. The piano gently heralds the arrival of this haunted tale of lost love and longing, then that tight, high melody reels you in. It loops and lilts, ascending, descending, as Bush’s vocal urges the story on, like Catherine striding across the moors. In the BBC’s 2014 documentary The Kate Bush Story, artist after artist recalls hearing it on the radio for the first time, thinking some variation of: what on earth was that? “You can hear one note of a Kate Bush song or one note of her voice and know what it is,” said Annie Clark, AKA St Vincent, and it has been that way from the start”.

Before getting to a few other features, there is one from Literary Hub published in 2019 that makes some interesting observations about Kate Bush’s interpretation of Wuthering Heights. How the song is almost like an essay or critique of the novel on how women were perceived when Emily Brontë wrote Wuthering Heights. Such a phenomenal songwriter, Bush opened up people’s minds and attitudes. Looking at Wuthering Heights in a deeper and new way:

“According to the lore that surrounds the song, Kate Bush’s first encounter with Wuthering Heights came in 1977 when she caught the closing minutes of the BBC miniseries. She wrote the song in a single night, mining lyrics directly from the dialogue of Catherine Earnshaw Linton, one of the star-crossed lovers at the heart of the novel.

But as Bush borrowed from the dialogue, she made a crucial transposition in the point of view. When she sings, “You had a temper, like my jealousy / too hot too greedy,” the my refers to Cathy and the you to Heathcliff, the novel’s brooding protagonist/antagonist/antihero/villain (depending on your point of view). But the novel itself never inhabits Cathy’s consciousness: she is seen and heard, her rages and threats vividly reported, but everything we know about her comes from either Nelly Dean, a longtime housekeeper for the Earnshaw and Linton families, or through Lockwood, a hapless visitor to the Yorkshire moorlands and the principle first-person narrator of the novel (most of the novel consists of Nelly’s quoted speech to Lockwood, who is eager to hear the complete history of the inhabitants of Wuthering Heights and its neighboring property, Thrushcross Grange). Although the novel spans decades and multiple generations of Earnshaws and Lintons, Kate Bush’s shift into Cathy’s point of view centers the song entirely on Cathy and Heathcliff—which is fittingly how Cathy, in the novel, views the world. She and Heathcliff share one soul, she claims; everyone else, including her husband Edgar, is little more than scenery.

With this choice, Bush gives voice to a female character who—though an electric presence in the novel—is denied the agency of self-narrating, or even of being narrated through a close third person. Nelly may be presented to us by Lockwood as a simple, transparently objective narrator, but the novel is littered with moments where Nelly complicates the lives of those around her by revealing or concealing what she knows. Bush’s musical interpretation of the novel makes visible the questions that surround point of view: who does the telling? What is their agenda? Who can we really trust?

By opening up these questions, the song situates itself in the tradition of other so-called “parallel texts” that respond to or reinvent earlier, often canonical works of literature: think Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, or Kamel Daoud’s The Meursault Investigation and Albert Camus’s The Stranger. In each pairing of “parallel” and “source” text, the later work privileges characters narrated about, but never before narrated from within.

Like the novels by Rhys and Daoud, Bush’s song demonstrates how art can respond to art, and points to the ways in which crucial reevaluations of past works take place not only in scholarly articles but in one artist grappling with the erasures and silences of an earlier age. Rhys and Daoud both insist on a voice for a silenced, maligned, or dismissed colonial subject. Their aim is not to create a work that merely amends (or acts as a footnote to) the earlier text, but to produce a narrative that calls into question the primacy, and even the authority, of the earlier text.

Kate Bush’s shift into Cathy’s point of view centers the song entirely on Cathy and Heathcliff—which is fittingly how Cathy, in the novel, views the world.

Kate Bush may not have been aiming to supplant Emily Brontë, but just as the song itself points to issues within the novel, Bush’s role as its creator exposes the straitened public personae of the Brontë sisters in 1840s England. Remember that the Brontës—Charlotte, Emily, and Anne—published their own work under vaguely male pseudonyms: their first joint publication, in 1846, was The Poems of Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell. Jane Eyre appeared a year later, attributed to Currer Bell, and a year after that Ellis Bell’s name appeared on the title page of Wuthering Heights.

It was unthinkable at the time that young, unmarried women would circulate their names so freely on books that portrayed the love between a wealthy man and his hired governess, or the flare-ups of passion and cruelty that marked the relationship of Cathy and Heathcliff. The sisters also knew that women authors were routinely dismissed or pilloried by the all-male fraternity of critics, and they hoped that the Bell names would offer protection and a fair shake from reviewers. Still, one early review blasted the incidents in Wuthering Heights for being “too coarse and disagreeable to be attractive,” while even a more positive review called it “a strange book. It is not without evidences of considerable power: but, as a whole, it is wild, confused, disjointed, and improbable.” Two years after Emily’s death in 1848, an edition of Wuthering Heights was published under her own name, with a preface and biographical note by Charlotte defending her sister’s moral character against the aspersions cast on her.

Fast forward to the late 1970’s and Kate Bush finds herself a young female artist in a culture industry still dominated by men. Her record company, EMI, pushed for another song, “James and the Cold Gun,” to be her first single, but Bush insisted that her debut had to be “Wuthering Heights.” After winning that argument, she delayed the release of the single in a dispute over the cover art, and later referred to herself as “the shyest megalomaniac you’ll ever meet.” When the single was finally released in early 1978, it needed only a few weeks and a performance by Bush on Top of the Pops to claim the #1 spot on the UK charts, displacing ABBA’s “Take a Chance on Me.” Only 19, Bush became the first female singer to make it to #1 with a song that she herself had written. At a time when women were viewed primarily as interpreters of others’ lyrics—as instruments rather than creators—Kate Bush upended the narrative with her first piercing notes. She would narrate from within, and in her own words.

The song’s connections to debates about cultural literacy, art-as-critique, and the fraught space of the female artist are enough to earn the video its place in the classroom. But I also count on “Wuthering Heights” to speak directly to my students about some of life’s other, bigger questions. My students, like teenagers everywhere, often wonder when their real lives will begin: when their ideas will matter to the wider world; when the art they make will feel like more than another assignment to be graded. But if high school students campaigning across the country against gun violence can illustrate the political power of the young, then Kate Bush argues that your artistic impulses also matter, that they’re valid, and that there’s no reason to wait”.

There is this great feature I would recommend people check out. In 2012, NME named Wuthering Heights the eleventh-best Pop song ever. It is an inescapably moving and original song that will never fade in its power. The second-most streamed song on Spotify (behind Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God), it is reaching new ears by the year. More people experiencing this song for the first time. I will end by discussing the new film adaptation of Wuthering Heights and why people need to think about Kate Bush’s astonishing debut single:

“A GP’s daughter from Bexleyheath in Kent, she began playing the piano at aged 11 and composed her first song at 13. Such was her precocious, unique talent that it attracted the attention of Pink Floyd’s Dave Gilmour who was a friend of the Bush family. After hearing her play, he helped the teenager gain a recording contract with EMI. The deal included two years of development that included dance lessons, vocal training and rehearsal time with the band the KT Bush Band.

The initial spark of inspiration for ‘Wuthering Heights’ came when the singer was 12 and had caught the last 10 minutes of the 1970 TV version of the book as a child. She recalled:

I’d just caught the very end of the film. It was really freaky because there’s this hand coming through the window and whispering voices and I’ve always been into that sort of thing, you know, and it just hung around in my head. I had to write a song about it.

She finally put pen to paper in March of 1977, composing the song in her South London flat, under typically ‘Bushian’ conditions. She revealed: “I wrote it in my flat, sitting at the upright piano. There was a full moon and the curtains were open and every time I looked up for ideas, I looked at the moon.

 

Having seen the TV adaptation, she also flicked through Bronte’s classic: “I borrowed the book and read a few pages, picking out a few lines. So I actually wrote the song before I had read the book right through,” she admits.

The track was apparently done and dusted in ten minutes, and to Bush it seemed clear that it should be the first track to announce herself to an unsuspecting British public. But EMI did not agree. They wanted the somewhat more obvious ‘James And The Cold Gun’ to come first, but she was adamant that it should be ‘Wuthering Heights’.

When the song hit the top of the charts she became the first female UK singer to get to the position with a self-penned track. It also lead the EMI boss to buy her a Steinway piano to say sorry for doubting her first single instincts.

Despite having pursued a career defined by lyrical inventiveness (much of which has been inspired by novels) and musical risk-taking, to many Bush will eternally be defined by the willowy lady from the mountains, singing about “Cathy” and “Heathcliff”. As she disappeared from view in the mid-90s, to some tabloids Bush had become the ageless spirit hovering around the dales. Fiction is definitely stranger than the truth.

‘Wuthering Heights’ remains an astounding track. Timeless in its authentic strangeness and the way Bush exudes the glee and borderline madness of mysterious, young love. Dismissed at the time as a novelty hit, instead it would begin the story of Bush’s expectation-defying career with a brilliant bang”.

The final feature/article I will bring in is from the Kate Bush Encyclopedia. There is a lot of depth and interesting information about the song. Wuthering Heights was unlike anything around in 1978. I wonder how it would fare if it was released today. Could it ever get to number one?! I do hope that the song has a new lease of life in some form very soon. It is a masterpiece:

“Critical reception

The music magazines in 1978 had different reactions to Kate’s debut single. Record Mirror described the song as ‘B-o-r-i-n-g’. Others were a bit more positive.

Kate is a complete newcomer, is 19, was first unearthed by David Gilmour, and has spent time with mime coach to the stars Lindsay Kemp… the theatre influence comes through strongly from the cover… to every aspect of Kate’s song. The orchestration is ornate and densely packed, but never overflows its banks, Kate’s extraordinary vocals skating in and out, over and above. Reference points are tricky, but possibly a cross between Linda Lewis and MacBeth’s three withes is closest. She turns the famous examination text by Emily Brontë into glorious soap opera trauma.

Melody Maker, 1978

Kate about ‘Wuthering Heights’

When I first read Wuthering Heights I thought the story was so strong. This young girl in an era when the female role was so inferior and she was coming out with this passionate, heavy stuff. Great subject matter for a song.
I loved writing it. It was a real challenge to precis the whole mood of a book into such a short piece of prose. Also when I was a child I was always called Cathy not Kate and I just found myself able to relate to her as a character. It’s so important to put yourself in the role of the person in a song. There’s no half measures. When I sing that song I am Cathy.
(Her face collapses back into smiles.) Gosh I sound so intense. Wuthering Heights is so important to me. It had to be the single. To me it was the only one. I had to fight off a few other people’s opinions but in the end they agreed with me. I was amazed at the response though, truly overwhelmed.

Kate’s Fairy Tale, Record Mirror (UK), February 1978

I wrote in my flat, sitting at the upright piano one night in March at about midnight. There was a full moon and the curtains were open, and every time I looked up for ideas, I looked at the moon. Actually, it came quite easily. I couldn’t seem to get out of the chorus – it had a really circular feel to it, which is why it repeats. I had originally written something more complicated, but I couldn’t link it up, so I kept the first bit and repeated it. I was really pleased, because it was the first song I had written for a while, as I’d been busy rehearsing with the KT Band.

I felt a particular want to write it, and had wanted to write it for quite a while. I remember my brother John talking about the story, but I couldn’t relate to it enough. So I borrowed the book and read a few pages, picking out a few lines. So I actually wrote the song before I had read the book right through. The name Cathy helped, and made it easier to project my own feelings of want for someone so much that you hate them. I could understand how Cathy felt.

It’s funny, but I heard a radio programme about a woman who was writing a book in Old English, and she found she was using words she didn’t know, but when she looked them up she found they were correct. A similar thing happened with ‘Wuthering Heights’: I put lines in the song that I found in the book when I read it later.

I’ve never been to Wuthering Heights, the place, though I would like to, and someone sent me a photo of where it’s supposed to be.

One thing that really pleases me is the amount of positive feedback I’ve had from the song, though I’ve heard that the Bronte Society think it’s a disgrace. A lot of people have read the book because of the song and liked it, which I think is the best thing about it for me. I didn’t know the book would be on the GCE syllabus in the year I had the hit, but lots of people have written to say how the song helped them. I’m really happy about that.

There are a couple of synchronicities involved with the song. When Emily Bronte wrote the book she was in the terminal stages of consumption, and I had a bad cold when I wrote the song. Also, when I was in Canada I found out that Lindsay Kemp, my dance teacher, was in town, only ten minutes away by car, so I went to see him. When I came back I had this urge to switch on the TV – it was about one in the morning – because I knew the film of Wuthering Heights would be on. I tuned in to a thirties gangster film, then flicked through the channels, playing channel roulette, until I found it. I came in at the moment Cathy was dying, so that’s all I saw of the film. It was an amazing coincidence.

Kate Bush Club Newsletter, January 1979”.

On 24th September, British Vogue gave their take on the upcoming Wuthering Heights film from Emerald Fennell. There have been accusations that the film is whitewashing the book. That the casting is flawed and strange. Most articles about the film mention Kate Bush’s classic debut single. It makes me wonder if it will feature in some way:

“On 12 July, the director took to X to share an illustration of a ghostly skeleton by artist Katie Buckley. At its heart sits the title Wuthering Heights, and below it the strapline “A film by Emerald Fennell”. Above the image, it reads, “Be with me always. Take any form. Drive me mad,” the immortal words Heathcliff utters after the tragic death of Catherine Earnshaw.

Given her last feature, and Promising Young Woman before it, were both about obsession – the former about one student’s infatuation with another, and the latter about a woman’s single-minded determination to avenge the death of her best friend – the decision to adapt Emily Brontë’s seminal tale of doomed love, as well as the accompanying tagline, make perfect sense.

However, it did leave us with a number of questions, too. Will this be a faithful period adaptation, or a modern-day update? How will it compare to the countless other big-screen renderings of this particular story, from Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon’s 1939 version, to the 1992 film starring Juliette Binoche and Ralph Fiennes, and Andrea Arnold’s 2011 reimagining with Kaya Scodelario and James Howson?

Would it be Barry Keoghan, I wondered, who’d don a waistcoat and scraggly mane to play our brooding Byronic hero? And who could possibly take the part of Cathy? Well, at least on that front, we now have some answers: on 23 September, it emerged that it was not the Irish Oscar nominee but – staggeringly – his Saltburn co-star Jacob Elordi who’d be delivering Heathcliff’s impassioned monologues, while Margot Robbie, now the world’s most ubiquitous blonde after Barbie herself, would (presumably) be going brunette to embody his tormented paramour. The latter will also be producing through her company, LuckyChap, after having backed Fennell’s last two films, too.

It’s not yet clear who else will be filling out the predictably starry ensemble (personally, I hope Carey Mulligan makes an appearance again, as she has in Fennell’s past two hits, in some bonkers and unexpected role), though we do know that Fennell will be writing and producing as well as directing, and that the film is already in pre-production ahead of a UK-based shoot in 2025. So, I say to my fellow Brontë obsessives: this is not a drill. It’s time to blast Kate Bush and dig out your own battered copy of this literary classic once again”.

IN THIS PHOTO: Margot Robbie/PHOTO CREDIT: Lachlan Bailey

Although Emerald Fennell is a Kate Bush fan, I don’t think that Wuthering Heights will feature in the film. It might seem a bit shoehorned and jarring. However, what is happening is people discussing the song. How Bush was inspired to write it after watching a 1967 BBC adaptation (I think Graeme Thomson said Bush saw a 1970 film of the novel with Timothy Dalton playing Heathcliff, so maybe Kate Bush would have to confirm exactly which version she saw). I do like how there has been a shift away from Hounds of Love and Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God). Army Dreamers had a bit of a viral moment this year, though we do hope that Wuthering Heights gets this new focus. Maybe not as big as the Stranger Things effect. Emerald Fennell might include the song. You never know! I wanted to revisit it, as I think so many people have discovered Wuthering Heights because of Kate Bush. Can a modern film do the same thing?! I don’t think so. In 2018, Bush returned to the song and the author of the novel that inspired it. The Brontë Stones are a collection of four stones engraved with specially commissioned poems by Carol Ann Duffy, Jeanette Winterson, Kate Bush, and Jackie Kay. You can read more about Kate Bush’s 2018 contribution here.. Even if Wuthering Heights might not feature in the film of the same name, people are talking about Kate Bush’s 1978 debut single. That is a wonderful thing! Almost forty-seven years after its release, it remains a song that…

SOUNDS like nothing else!

FEATURE: 'Cause Somewhere There's a Place Where We Belong… Why Kate Bush’s Vocal on Peter Gabriel’s Don’t Give Up Affects Me Hugely

FEATURE:

 

 

'Cause Somewhere There's a Place
Where We Belong…

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush with Peter Gabriel at the BPI (BRIT) Awards at Grosvenor House, London on 9th February, 1987/PHOTO CREDIT: Duncan Raban/Getty Images

Why Kate Bush’s Vocal on Peter Gabriel’s Don’t Give Up Affects Me Hugely

_________

I was going to write this…

as a separate feature as something that has been playing on my mind. I will get to a very special duet in a minute. I was going to write a feature about feminism and whether I can be seen as a progressive and good feminist when, more and more, I am ashamed and angry at men. Ashamed of being associated with a gender that creates so much evil and abuse. Living in London, the difference between men and women is clear. Most of the noise, obnoxiousness, anger and awfulness that you encounter on a daily basis is by men. The extreme noise, anti-social behaviour, abuse, rudeness, sullenness, threat and general aggression is from men. With no male friends myself, I am always drawn to women and have a huge bias towards them. I gravitate towards women and always have much more affection and respect for them. I do not hate all men because I know there are some really kind and good ones! I am in a position where I dislike a large proportion of men and find my life is much more stressful and depressing because of them. I will never like or embrace my gender fully. I am hugely embarrassed and disgraced regularly by witnessing other men. Seeing on the news the abuse and violence they bring into the world. Even though it applies to a minority of men, it doesn’t excuse the fact that they are responsible for over 90% of all the crimes of sexual abuse and violence. My faith in human nature has been rocked by them. I don’t think I will ever recover in that sense. Rather than attack or call out men, instead I find myself much more invested in women and their rights. In embracing and celebrating them. Trying to be a more committed and conscientious feminist (and human being), I wonder whether my dislike of many other men makes my words and work insincere. My bias towards women means I feature fewer men on my blog.

I acknowledge that there are loads of great male artists but, more and more, controversy caused by male musicians makes me hesitant to embrace others in case they are disgraced and make the headlines for all of the wrong reason. I also find that the diversity and quality women are producing is vastly superior to that provided by men! It is an issue that I have to address but, day on day, I do think that I am losing faith in men and wondering whether the gender is going to be defined and dogged by controversy and bad. I find women much kinder and more compassionate people. More concerned with others and much more conscious of their feelings. Less aggressive. I have bee extremely depressed and tired because of other men. Affected each day by their behaviour. This may not seem to relate to music but, as Peter Gabriel’s Don’t Give Up is thirty-eight on 27th October (the same day Kate Bush released her single, Experiment IV), I wanted to write how it has impacted me. A single from Peter Gabriel’s 1986 album, So, I am focusing more on Kate Bush’s vocal. The song won an Ivor Novello Award for Best Song Musically and Lyrically in 1987. Originally, Dolly Parton was considered for the song but she turned it down. You cannot imagine anyone but Kate Bush adding this material, compassionate, reassuring and hugely affecting vocal. It is one of the most affecting vocal performances on any song. I will talk more about the video, in which Bush and Gabriel embrace for the entire song. Gabriel quite rightly was quoted as saying “There are worse ways of earning a living”. So many people would kill to have been in his place! Don’t Give Up has helped so many people through their struggles. In 2014, Elton John credited his sobriety to that song. Particularly these lines from Bush: "Rest your head. You worry too much. It's going to be all right. When times get rough you can fall back on us. Don't give up”.

The late Matthew Perry had the song played at his funeral last year as the track made a big impact on him. It was also referenced in signed copies of his autobiography Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing, which was released a year before his death. He played that song because he felt that we should not give up. Because Bush’s delivers the title and gives this reassurance against Peter Gabriel’s hopelessness and on-the-edge-of-a-bridge solemness,  I think that her vocal is more impactful and important. It is Peter Gabriel’s song and lyrics, and there is this richness and perfect chemistry between the two. Bush had previously contributed to a couple of Gabriel songs prior to Don’t Give Up. Gabriel appeared on Kate Bush’s Christmas special in 1979 and performed solo and with Bush (on a cover of Roy Harper’s Another Day). They were firm friends and inspired each other. Gabriel influenced Bush embracing the Fairlight CMI and technology. Both adapted and constructed their own studios to work on their masterpieces – Gabriel for So (1986) and Bush for Hounds of Love (1985). They had a lot in common. Although Gabriel has never appeared on a Kate Bush album, many consider Don’t Give Up to be a Kate Bush song. So commanding and unforgettable is her contribution. I will end by writing about why her vocal has an affect on me. Not the same way Elton John and Matthew Perry were moved by it. I am going to start off by looking at the song and what people made of it.

Reaching number nine in the U.K., it arrived in a year when Kate Bush was still putting out singles from Hounds of Love. The Big Sky came out earlier in the year. The single from 1986’s greatest hits, The Whole Story, arrived the same day as Don’t Give Up (27th October, 1986). Experiment IV reached twenty-three in the U.K. It was a fascinating year in terms of Hounds of Love, but also Bush working with others and also being involved with her greatest hits collection. Hearing the vast contrast between The Big Sky, Don’t Give Up and Experiment IV! Don’t Give Up has this life-saving power. There is no telling how many people it has saved from the abyss. Either from dying or succumbing to addiction. Speaking to the lonely, it resonated with me. Feeling isolated and lonely in a busy city. One that seems to be a lot colder and less kind than many others. Not feeling at home or safe. Feeling exhausted all the time. Let’s move to a feature from this year by American Songwriter. They give background to the heartfelt and extraordinary powerful duet between Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush:

“There are several stories about how Gabriel was inspired to write “Don’t Give Up.” His wife at the time claimed to have shown him a newspaper story about a young mother’s suicide, and that was the main impetus for the song. Gabriel also mentioned Depression-era photographs as inspiring the notion of overcoming adversity. Some also claim Gabriel was undergoing his own dark period when he wrote the song.

In any case, “Don’t Give Up,” like the rest of So, was brought to life with the help of producer Daniel Lanois. His job, in addition to helping Gabriel realize the sounds he was hearing in his head, was to keep him to task. The producer insisted on not inviting musicians into the project until Gabriel had banged the songs into shape and had written the bulk of the lyrics, a process which was the antithesis of how the artist had worked on previous albums.

Gabriel created the foundation of “Don’t Give Up” from a drum-machine pattern. Tony Levin added a bass line that helped to form an absorbing groove. The slightly exotic and deeply moody music stood in sharp contrast to the singles on So, and that variety goes a long way into explaining why the album is so captivating.

Choose Your Partner

Because Gabriel had already worked with British pop legend Bush on a few occasions prior to So, you might assume that he wrote “Don’t Give Up” with her in mind. (You might also assume that because she does such a mesmerizing job on the track.) But in an interview with The Quietus, he explained that he had originally imagined someone else singing:

“There’s an interesting story about this song. Because there was this reference point of American roots music in it when I first wrote it, it was suggested that Dolly Parton sing on it. But Dolly turned it down … and I’m glad she did because what Kate did on it is … brilliant. It’s an odd song, a number of people have written to me and said they didn’t commit suicide because they had that song on repeat or whatever, and obviously you don’t think about things like that when you’re writing them. But obviously a lot of the power of the song came from the way that Kate sings it.”

One can only wonder what it would have been like had Parton accepted the offer. But it can’t be denied that the chemistry between Gabriel and Bush helped push “Don’t Give Up” to a level most duets can’t hope to achieve.

What is the Meaning of “Don’t Give Up”?

Whatever may have inspired “Don’t Give Up,” it seems like the narrator of the song has been pushed to the hilt by circumstances (societal, financial) that are beyond his control. In this proud land we grew up strong, he begins. Contrast that with his current situation: No fight left or so it seems / I am a man whose dreams have all deserted.

In the second verse, he mentions that he didn’t think he’d be affected by the tumult all around him. He also hints at labor problems: For every job, so many men / So many men no one needs. His home, once his rock and foundation, no longer can provide any consolation: As daylight broke, I saw the earth / The trees had burned down to the ground.

Yet each time this guy seems to come to his lowest point, Bush’s voice bursts through his clouds with words of love and comfort. You can imagine her as his wife, or, considering the song takes on a gospel vibe, an angelic voice sent to show him his worth. There’s a place where we belong, she concludes. Even though she may not have been the initial choice, Kate Bush certainly belonged on “Don’t Give Up,” helping Peter Gabriel deliver one of his most inspirational messages”.

In 1986, Adam Sweeting of Melody Maker said of Don’t Give Up: “The stand-out track [of the album So] is ‘Don’t Give Up’… set against his sombre narrative comes Kate Bush’s imploring counterpoint, begging him to believe in himself the way his family and friends do. Her fragile anguished performance gives the piece almost unbearable emotional impact”. You can read more about the track here. Released on 27th October, 1986, I am a bit early to the anniversary. It is a truly fascinating song:

“Written by Peter Gabriel, the song was produced by Daniel Lanois and Peter and engineered by Kevin Killen and Lanois and features the guest vocals of Kate Bush. Bush had previously provided vocals for the tracks Games Without Frontiers and No Self Control on Peter’s third solo album.

The song was inspired by a Dorothea Lange photograph, but was also informed by the high levels of unemployment under the Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher of the 1980s, as Peter told the NME at the time of the release of So:

“The catalyst for ‘Don’t Give Up’ was a photograph I saw by Dorothea Lange, inscribed ‘In This Proud Land’, which showed the dust-bowl conditions during the Great Depression in America. Without a climate of self-esteem it’s impossible to function”

The cover was designed by Peter Saville and Brett Wickens for Peter Saville Associates, with photography by Trevor Key.

The single first charted in the UK on 1 November 1986, peaked at 9 and stayed in the Top75 for 11 weeks. In the USA the single reached #72 on the Hot 100 on 25 April 1987 and stayed on the chart for six weeks”.

The final feature I want to bring in is this. Although Don’t Give Up is inspired by a real-life suicide and heart-breaking tragedy, its lyrics and sentiments are more universal. They apply as much to the world today and people’s loneliness as they did in 1986. For me and so many others, that perfect blend of Peter Gabriel’s lyrics and anguished vocals are perfectly embraced and complimented by Kate Bush’s sweetness, understanding and strength. The video is so powerful. Gabriel and Bush embracing and hanging on. Gabriel trying not to fall as Bush offers this rock and anchor. It is a simple concept but potent and memorable because it does not rely on multiple cuts and a busy set and storyline. The visualisation of this hug and closeness is what the song gives to so many people:

“Calling upon his friend and fellow musician Kate Bush to duet with him, the song took on a conversational tone--Gabriel singing the part of a down-trodden man who has lost his job, and is finding no reason to stay alive, and Bush singing the part of his wife/friend/someone who cares telling him it will be alright and there is still plenty to live for. The song wavers back and forth between sorrowful and uplifting with every verse as the two "converse" through song. It's such a sweet duet with so much emotion. Though Gabriel may not have been facing the struggles himself, it's clear from the way he sings the song that he could empathize with those who were, putting himself in the shoes of someone at their wit's end. Kate Bush's sweet, airy voice of reassurance is peaceful and radiates light and serenity in the midst of darkness.

The song was released with an equally sweet music video, which is essentially just six and a half minutes of an embrace between the two singers. Their body language is so genuine and sincere that some even questioned if they were secretly an item. Whether they were or weren't isn't that important, but I guarantee no other music video will make you crave closeness with a loved one more than this one.

For me, the song always takes on a bittersweet tone. I'm sure I'm not alone in saying this for anyone else who has listened to it during dark periods in their life: It can be hard to listen to. Not because it sounds bad, but when we feel depressed, we also feel numb. But the song forces us to acknowledge our sorrow and our feelings of inadequacy and hopelessness. And that's not something that's fun to do. However, once that emotional portal is open, we become more receptive to Kate Bush's sweet, and uplifting lyrics that perhaps echo things our loved ones have told us, but we took for granted:

"Don't give up

'Cause you have friends

Don't give up

You're not the only one

Don't give up

No reason to be ashamed

Don't give up

You still have us

Don't give up now

We're proud of who you are"

When in a place of self-doubt, we often ignore these phrases of comfort. But when hearing them in song, it somehow gets through to us better. And I think--no, I know--Gabriel realized that music had that power, and that's why he made the song.

Everyone has points in their personal lives when this song can be a helpful tool for them. But I think right now as we go through a global crisis that has left millions fighting to make ends meet, over-working, and overall just feeling like giving up--we need this song just as much now as we did then. And we are so lucky that we have it now”.

As I look ahead to the thirty-eighth anniversary of Don’t Give Up on 27th October, I can appreciate how it adapts through time. It had a distinct meaning and origin in 1986. Now, it can apply to an individual’s struggle or the genocide and horror we see in the world. Having to stay strong or believe that better will come. For me, it has a very personal relevance. I identify with the lyrics and do feel in a place where I am struggling and trying to find hope. It is Kate Bush’s vocal that gets to me most. Not just because it is Kate Bush and I have that bias! To me, her delivery and the emotion she puts into her lines is so moving. Trembling and warm, there is this audible and sonic hug that comes from her singing. I know that she didn’t get the vocal on the first take and had some doubts. Bush laid down her vocals in February 1986 at Peter Gabriel’s home studio in Ashcombe House. Gabriel had previously recorded his vocals, so she followed his vocal when performing her part. After this recording, Bush felt she had “messed it up” and so she returned later to sing it again. The fact Don’t Give Up has been covered been many times shows how meaningful it is. Bush made a surprise appearance at Earl’s Court, London to sing Don’t Give Up with Peter Gabriel on 28th June, 1987 (the second photo in this post sees her on stage with him).

The most affecting lines from Kate Bush are these: “Don’t give up now/We’re proud of who you are/Don’t give up/You know it’s never been easy/Don’t give up/‘Cause I believe there’s a place/There’s a place where we belong”. It is one of my favourite Kate Bush vocals. A soulfulness and tremulous quality I would love to have seen explored more. One can say you can draw a line between Don’t Give Up and Kate Bush’s vocals on The Sensual World’s title track from 1989. I am listening to this song a lot and concentrating on Bush’s vocal. As I am struggling with some things and really not feeling safe or connected to men around me in the city I live in, I need some reassurance. Feeling alone and tired, there have been some dark and stressful times recently. Bush’s delivery of Peter Gabriel’s words are giving me some comfort. Not in people but in the music and the messages through Don’t Give Up. It is this song that gives so much light and hope to so many. I love the video and keep watching it because it lifts me. Seeing them embracing sort of comes through the screen and has this very real tangibility and power. Nearly thirty-eight years after its release, Don’t Give Up is rescuing so many people from a dark place. It hits you like a sledgehammer. How many other songs…

HAVE that sort of affect?!

FEATURE: It’s My Life: The Iconic Gwen Stefani at Fifty-Five

FEATURE:

 

 

It’s My Life

The Iconic Gwen Stefani at Fifty-Five

_________

A true music great…

celebrates her fifty-fifth birthday on 3rd October. Gwen Stefani is the lead of No Doubt and a successful solo artist. Even though No Doubt have not released an album since 2012’s Push and Shove, they did recently perform together at Coachella. I do hope that they record more music together in the future. Regardless, Stefani is busy with her solo material. She releases Bouquet in November. It sounds like it going to be a more Country-influenced release. This would be a departure for her but, with many mainstream artists crossing from other genres into Country – not least Beyoncé -, it is fertile ground for exploration and reinvention. Rather than it being bandwagon-hopping, this does seem like a natural move for Stefani. Her amazing debut album, Love. Angel. Music. Baby., turns twenty in November. It is amazing to think that No Doubt’s debut single, Trapped in a Box, was released in February, 1992. I am going to mark Gwen Stefani’s fifty-fifth with a career-spanning playlist in a bit. Before that, AllMusic provide some biography about a music legend:

“Gwen Stefani has parlayed her breakout stardom as the effervescent lead singer of the SoCal ska-punk outfit No Doubt into an enduring career as a multifaceted pop star. Before going solo, Stefani reached the top of the charts many times during No Doubt's peak. "Spiderwebs," "Just a Girl," and the ballad "Don't Speak" -- all pulled from their 1995 album Tragic Kingdom -- were iconic alternative rock hits. The early-2000s smashes "Hey Baby," "Hella Good," and "Underneath It All" found the group dabbling in pop, dance, and R&B, a musical expansion that coincided with Stefani stepping outside of the band as a featured vocalist on the hits "South Side" by techno superstar Moby and "Let Me Blow Ya Mind" by the rapper Eve. All this extracurricular activity helped set up the launch of Stefani's solo career in 2004 with the album Love.Angel.Music.Baby., a platinum blockbuster that gave her a number one single with the thumping Neptunes collaboration "Hollaback Girl," plus the hits "Cool," "What You Waiting For?," and "Rich Girl," the latter a reunion with Eve. The 2006 record The Sweet Escape consolidated her pop success thanks to the Top Tens "Wind It Up" and "The Sweet Escape," but by that point, Stefani began to venture outside of music. She launched her fashion line L.A.M.B. in 2004, a pursuit she'd develop over the coming decade. She started to dabble in film, an interest that eventually led her to joining the televised singing competition The Voice in 2014 (where she met husband Blake Shelton). Music remained essential to Stefani's appeal -- she reunited with No Doubt on occasion in addition to returning to her solo career with This Is What the Truth Feels Like, an album released a decade after The Sweet Escape. Later singles, such as 2023's ska-infused "True Babe" and 2024's '80s adult-contempo influenced "Purple Irises" with Shelton, along with her position on The Voice, reinforced her crossover pop legacy as a star who shines upon every aspect of the entertainment industry.

Born and raised in Fullerton, California, Stefani had a musical epiphany at the age of 17. She had fallen in love with the Madness and Selecter records her brother Eric was constantly spinning. Seeing Fishbone, the Untouchables, and other bands involved in Los Angeles' ska revival scene only reinforced her interest, so she was more than ready when her brother asked her to join a ska band he was forming with a friend named John Spence. Gwen originally shared lead vocals with Spence, but in December of 1987 he committed suicide, leaving the band -- now called No Doubt -- with an uncertain future. According to many interviews with the bandmembers after their breakthrough, Gwen was the glue that held No Doubt together during these hard times, pushing the group to keep trying. She was also romantically involved with the band's bass player, Tony Kanal, by this time.

After playing numerous gigs and parties, No Doubt were signed to Interscope in 1991. The label considered their 1992 debut album a flop and refused to financially support a tour or further recordings, but the band refused to give up. The self-financed Beacon Street Collection appeared in 1994 and did well enough to make nice with Interscope, but the band was once again going through a traumatic period behind the scenes. Eric Stefani left to become an animator for The Simpsons and Gwen and Tony's relationship had ended. Gwen wrote a collection of songs focused on heartbreak and rebirth that would become No Doubt's third album, Tragic Kingdom, and the rest, as they say, is history.

With the smash singles "Just a Girl," "Spiderwebs," and "Don't Speak," the album reached the number one spot on the Billboard 200 and garnered two Grammy nominations. The press began to focus on Stefani's role in the band. Voted one of People magazine's "50 Most Beautiful People," video and photo shoots focused on her and rumors spread that the other three members of the band were unhappy with the lack of attention they received. This topic of discussion continued as the band released Return of Saturn in 2000 and the heavily reggae-influenced hit album Rock Steady a year later. During this time, Stefani's romantic relationship with Bush frontman Gavin Rossdale became a frequent topic of No Doubt's songs. The pair married on September 14, 2002. She also started doing some work outside the band, lending her vocals to the remix of Moby's "Southside" and rapper Eve's "Let Me Blow Your Mind."

After Rock Steady, No Doubt took a break. Stefani approached Kanal about producing an off-the-cuff solo project that would be influenced by her non-ska favorites. Prince, the Time, Club Nouveau, and Madonna were the names thrown around and the idea was to make the project "fast and easy." Over time, the "fast and easy" record morphed into something much bigger. Old friend, former labelmate, and hit songwriter Linda Perry became involved and the project became much more polished, slick, and dance-oriented. A pile of high-profile collaborators -- Dr. Dre, the Neptunes, Dallas Austin, Andre 3000, Nellee Hooper, Jimmy Jam, and Terry Lewis -- became involved. In September of 2004, the infectious and hyper dance single "What You Waiting For?" appeared, with its accompanying video dominating MTV.

The album, Love.Angel.Music.Baby., hit the shelves in November with surreal artwork that introduced Stefani's four-woman "posse," the Harajuku Girls. The all-Asian Harajuku Girls were inspired by Stefani's fascination with the Harajuku girls of Japan, young club kids with a flippant and fun attitude toward fashion. Appearing with Stefani live, in videos, and in photos, the Girls quickly drew criticism from the Asian community, angry about the rumor that they had to sign a contract to never speak English even though they could, and that Stefani's Girls looked nothing like the "real" Harajuku girls. Nonetheless, the album was a hit and continued to roll out singles. Based on a dancehall cover of Fiddler on the Roof's "If I Were a Rich Man," "Rich Girl" became the next smash, reuniting Stefani with Eve. The cheerleader kiss-off anthem "Hollaback Girl" was the third success. While the singles were dominating pop and dance radio, Stefani appeared as Jean Harlow in Martin Scorsese's The Aviator. With music and movies checked off, Stefani moved into the world of fashion and introduced her clothing line, L.A.M.B. Taking her influence to the world of tech, she designed the Harajuku Lovers' 4.1 MP Digital Camera for Hewlett-Packard. The camera was released in a limited edition with a Stefani-designed case and a biographical DVD.

Late in 2005, Stefani discovered she was pregnant with her first child, but her schedule remained busy in 2006: along with working on L.A.M.B., she released a line of limited-edition fashion dolls complete with outfits from her videos and tours, and worked on her second solo album with producers including Akon, Swizz Beatz, Tim Rice-Oxley of Keane, Nellee Hooper, the Neptunes, and Tony Kanal. That spring, Stefani gave birth to a boy. The Neptunes-produced, Sound of Music-sampling "Wind It Up" arrived later that fall and heralded the full-length The Sweet Escape, which was released on the same day as the live DVD Harajuku Lovers Live.

No Doubt announced a return to the studio in 2008, but progress slowed to a crawl as the band experienced a bout of writer's block and the Rossdale-Stefani family continued to grow with their second child, Zuma Nesta Rock. The band maintained their momentum by touring through 2009. No Doubt eventually released Push and Shove in 2012, featuring a mix of Rock Steady-esque dancehall bangers and new wave ballads similar to Stefani's solo material. In February 2014, Stefani and Rossdale had their third boy, Apollo Bowie Flynn. Later that year, Stefani joined the judges panel on The Voice with her friend Pharrell, opening the pair to a number of subsequent collaborations. Stefani lent her vocals to fellow Voice coach Adam Levine for Maroon 5's "My Heart Is Open." She also appeared on tracks with Calvin Harris and Snoop Dogg.

By late 2014, Stefani was in the midst of a full-scale comeback, releasing a pair of singles: the Ryan Tedder/Benny Blanco-penned "Baby Don't Lie" and another Pharrell production, "Spark the Fire." The following year, she contributed the song "Shine" to the Paddington Bear movie soundtrack and a duet with Eminem on "Kings Never Die" from Southpaw. In August 2015, Stefani and Rossdale filed for divorce. A third song -- "Used to Love You" -- was released months later. It gained moderate airplay and was the only comeback single to be included on her third project, This Is What the Truth Feels Like, which was released in March 2016 and debuted at number one on the Billboard 200. The second official single from the album, "Make Me Like You," was accompanied by a video that Stefani recorded live during the 2016 Grammy Awards. Later that year, she provided the voice for the DJ Suki character in the animated movie Trolls and, along with Justin Timberlake, appeared on several songs from the film's soundtrack.

In September 2017, she released the seasonal album You Make It Feel Like Christmas, which featured a duet with her Voice co-star -- and new romantic partner -- Blake Shelton. Stefani duetted with Shelton on his 2020 single "Nobody But You," a song featured on the compilation Fully Loaded: God's Country, and added "Here This Christmas" to a reissue of You Make It Feel Like Christmas. At the end of the year, she returned to pop music with "Let Me Reintroduce Myself," a single that built upon the effervescent sounds of No Doubt. Another single, the reggae-injected "Slow Clap," followed in in March 2021, with a Saweetie-accompanied edition arriving a month later. Stefani and Shelton married in July. The ska-inflected single "True Babe" appeared in June 2023, followed in February 2024 by a second Shelton duet, the romantic, adult contemporary-sounding "Purple Irises”.

On 3rd October, Gwen Stefani turns fifty-five. It is a moment to herald one of the greatest leads and songwriters of her generation. Few people as cool as her! I always think that Stefani could have had a successful career as an actor. I could picture her in so many films. There was this magnetism that she had. Look at videos from through the years and she was such a natural. Perhaps It’s My Life is where she truly flexes her full range. A remarkable and distinct voice, we will be hearing a lot more from this unique and hugely influential artist. Let us raise a glass…

TO the divine Gwen Stefani!

FEATURE: Take a Bow: Looking Ahead to the Thirtieth Anniversary of Madonna’s Bedtime Stories

FEATURE:

 

 

Take a Bow

Looking Ahead to the Thirtieth Anniversary of Madonna’s Bedtime Stories

_________

ONE of the…

IN THIS PHOTO: Madonna at The Ritz, Paris in 1994/PHOTO CREDIT: Andy Early

most important albums in her career I think, Bedtime Stories was Madonna’s follow-up to 1992 Erotica. In 1992, Madonna put out Erotica, the coffee table book Sex, and starred in the erotic thriller, Body of Evidence. There was a lot of negativity and flack from critics and some fans. Thinking Madonna was pushing it too far, many wrote off her career. Of course, she has sustained and released tremendous albums since. It was a hard move following Erotica. It is an album that should be celebrated. Critics being prudish and needlessly sensitive. If you look at how that album inspired so many Pop artists of the 1990s and 2000s. Confident, liberated and provocative, it would not receive the same kind of criticism now. Erotica empowered and resonated with a host of women in music that we see to this day. Even so, there was a sense of compromise or apology with Bedtime Stories, Madonna was still pushing the envelope, yet it was a warmer and less sexualised album compared to Erotica. Released on 25th October, 1994, I wanted to cast ahead to the thirtieth anniversary of perhaps her most underrated album. It was a big commercial success. Hitting the top three in the U.S. and U.K., there was still this reservation from critics. Some awarded it kudos and high praise, yet many reviews were middling. Undeniable standout songs such as Take a Bow and Human Nature sat alongside some deeper cuts critics did not get on board with. There is such a fascinating blend of moods through Madonna’s sixth studio album. From mature, smooth and sensual songs such as Secret and emotional hits like Take a Bow through to the edgier Human Nature and Bedtime Story (which was co-written by Björk). Four years after Bedtime Stories, Madonna would release Ray of Light. Perhaps her greatest album, it showed that you could not write her off, put her down or predict where she would go next! I do think that the heat she got in 1992 was vastly unfair. If a male artist/band put out Erotica and Sex then they would not get the same treatment. In fact, they would probably be celebrated!

I am going to publish another feature closer to 25th October. Saluting an album that has never got huge respect and appreciation. You can never please critics! Luckily, Ray of Light silenced doubters and confirmed that Madonna is one of the most resilient and gifted artists ever. I will end with a couple of reviews for Bedtime Stories. I am going to open with a 2014 feature from Billboard where producer Babyface and Donna De Lory provided their thoughts on Bedtime Stories twenty years after its release:

“Twenty years ago this month, Madonna released her sixth studio album, Bedtime Stories, a classic that came out at a strange crossroads in her career.

While Madonna certainly didn’t lack for fame in 1994, the button-pushing Erotica album had soured many critics and fans. For the first time in a decade of superstardom, people weren’t shocked by her antics anymore — even worse, they often seemed exhausted by her.

Artistically speaking, she’d spent the last four years challenging and subverting America’s sexual puritanism. But after releasing an entire book called Sex featuring nude pictures of herself and other celebrities, there didn’t seem to be anywhere else to go in that realm.

It didn’t help that she’d detonated 14 F-bombs on a March 1994 episode of The Late Show With David Letterman, an infamous appearance that racked up FCC complaints and distanced her from Middle America. Evita was two years away and the overt sexuality of Erotica was growing stale — so when Bedtime Stories hit, Madonna’s career was at a strange point.

To that end, Bedtime Stories is lyrically and musically a much warmer album. She sacrifices some bawdy entendres (compare Erotica‘s “Where Life Begins” to Bedtime‘s “Inside of Me”) and focuses on autobiographical matter.

Instead of Erotica‘s chilly, pounding dance pop, Bedtime puts Madonna in softer sonic territory. There’s the singer-songwriter-y “Secret,” the avant pop of “Bedtime Story” (co-written by Bjork), the new jack swing jam “I’d Rather Be Your Lover” (featuring Meshell Ndegeocello rapping), the Herbie Hancock-sampling ballad “Sanctuary” and the lush, orchestral R&B of “Take a Bow.”

But softer sounds didn’t necessarily mean muted lyrics. “Human Nature” finds Madonna taking on her critics more directly than ever with a logical, defiant attack on slut-shaming. And while album opener “Survival” is a cozy R&B-pop song, it was similarly unrepentant in attitude.

The inviting R&B sound of Bedtime Stories is due in part to co-producer Dallas Austin, who longtime Madonna backup singer Donna de Lory describes as “part of her tribe at that time.” Also on board were co-producers Nellee Hooper, Dave “Jam” Hall (hot off Mary J. Blige‘s debut, What’s the 411?) and, of course, Kenneth “Babyface” Edmonds.

While Edmonds had recently worked with TLC and Toni Braxton, he tells Billboard it was one of his own hits that brought him to Madonna’s attention.

“Madonna was a fan of a song I did, ‘When Can I See You.’ Because of that, she was interested in working with me,” Edmonds recalls. “She came to me for lush ballads, so that’s where we went.”

Babyface would collaborate with Madonna on three songs — two of which, “Forbidden Love” and “Take a Bow,” ended up on the album. Although the latter became Madonna’s long-running No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100, Edmonds says he wasn’t gunning for chart-toppers when they met.

“I wasn’t so much thinking about the charts,” Edmonds recalls. “I think I was more in awe of the fact that I was working with Madonna. It was initially surreal, but then you get to know the person a little bit, and you calm down and then it’s just work. And work is fun.”

When Edmonds played Madonna the bare bones of a song that would become “Take a Bow,” she immediately took to it. “It was just a beat and the chords. From there we collaborated and built it up,” he says. “I was living in Beverly Hills and I created a little studio in my house, so she came over there to write.”

As for “Forbidden Love,” Edmonds recalls that track came together with similar speed. “She heard the basic track and it all started coming out, melodies and everything… It was a much easier process than I thought it would be.”

Donna De Lory, however, wasn’t surprised at how easily Bedtime Stories came together when she and fellow backup vocalist Niki Haris were called in to provide harmonies on “Survival,” co-written by Austin. At that point, she’d been performing with Madonna for seven years.

“The minute you walked in [the studio], she was giving you the lyric sheet,” De Lory tells Billboard. “That was the atmosphere — we’re not here to just hang out. It’s fun, but we’re here to work and get this done.”

And what Madonna sets out to do, Madonna invariably succeeds at. De Lory recalls the sessions for “Survival” took just a “couple of hours” and there were no retakes.

Similar to Babyface, De Lory describes working with Madonna as a creative partnership, even if she was the one setting the tone. “Once she got her ideas out, she was open to your ideas. You didn’t want to go in with her and right off the bat say, ‘Well, I hear this,’ because she was so specific and articulate. She already had the sound in her head. But after she’d spoken, we’d put our two cents in. We always had ideas, like, ‘Can we answer this line with an extra “survival” [in the background]?'”.

I am going to move to a feature from Albumism. They marked twenty-five years of Bedtime Stories. Though they maintain the album was met with positive reviews, I think it is hard to see that from the reviews available. There was a note of disappointment with many of them. Regardless, Bedtime Stories got more love than Erotica. Rather than it being a compromise to critics and this U-turn from her previous position and sound, it was a natural evolution for Madonna:

“But, it was Erotica—and its companion book Sex—that nearly leveled Madonna. A loose concept LP concerned with taboo sexual mores and emotional masochism collapsed under its own misshapen weight; worse, the songs simply weren’t there on the whole. By placing “the event” ahead of a proper commitment to the thematic task of the album itself, Madonna made herself an easy target to be dismissed as a shrewd media manipulator versus the adept singer and songwriter she is. Insulated by the pop culture hysteria she’d generated for a decade, the critical blowback from Erotica/Sex unceremoniously burst that bubble—it was likely a sobering experience.

Yet, there was a silver lining to the difficulties she endured with Erotica in that they helped her gain perspective and grow to realize that she wanted the public to recognize her as an artist. This outlook gave Madonna a newfound focus going into Bedtime Stories. Sessions for her sixth studio set began with Shep Pettibone, Madonna’s principal producer and compeer for Erotica. One of the initial compositions Madonna and Pettibone started work on was its eventual first single, “Secret,” but they ultimately and amicably parted ways, as she wanted to take the urban-pop vibe of that anterior album in a new direction. Madonna returned to finish “Secret” with Dallas Austin, an up-and-coming voice in the contemporary soul genre who had produced sides for Monica, Grace Jones and Joi, among others.

Austin’s work with Joi on her debut The Pendulum Vibe (issued in June 1994) had been of note to Madonna and led to her fast recruitment of Austin for one of two collaborative cliques on Bedtime Stories. That first clique included (but wasn’t limited to) an astonishing array of talent: Kenneth “Babyface” Edmonds, Dave “Jam” Hall and bassist/vocalist/Maverick signee Meshell Ndegeocello. Repurposing the coarser R&B-pop sonics she had laid out on Erotica, Madonna fashions them to be seductively intimate and groove-oriented for Bedtime Stories. From the bluesy, acoustic funk of “Secret,” to the breezy jam “Don’t Stop” and around to the silky shuffle of “Inside of Me,” these songs and most of the LP are sculpted from a mix of expert live instrumentation and impressive studio production.

Almost all of the aggressive beat and groove combinations that defined Erotica are absent with the exceptions of “I’d Rather Be Your Lover”—a side that deliciously weds Ndegeocello’s bass playing (and rap) to Madonna’s smoky mezzo-soprano—and “Human Nature.” The latter track, a stinging rebuke toward Madonna’s Erotica/Sex naysayers, would have been better served up as a B-side as its petulant script threatened to fracture the more demure, introspective air Madonna embodied on Bedtime Stories. Thankfully, the surrounding song stock buffers and neutralizes its antagonistic energy. Musically though, “Human Nature” is an interesting piece with it being erected around the Main Source hip-hop banger “What You Need”—Main Source themselves had loaned a portion of their cut from the jazz musician Walter Maynard Ferguson’s selection “Spinning Wheel.” “Human Nature” represents one of Bedtime Stories’ multiple arrangements that contain clever sample traces or interpolations, along with “I’d Rather Be Your Lover” (Lou Donaldson),  “Inside of Me” (Aaliyah, The Gap Band, Gutter Snypes), “Forbidden Love” (Grant Green), and “Sanctuary” (Herbie Hancock).

Lyrically, Bedtime Stories showcases Madonna’s keen pen that captures the elusive emotional space between strength and vulnerability through love songs or semi-autobiographical entries. “Survival,” “Love Tried to Welcome Me” and “Sanctuary” are undeniable canonical highlights.

Spotlighting “Sanctuary,” Madonna and Austin were the primary assemblers for the downbeat ambient track that slips beautifully into the palatial electronica of “Bedtime Story.” It is here that the second clique Madonna partnered with on Bedtime Stories announces itself. Written by Marius de Vries, Björk and Nellee Hooper, the latter Massive Attack associate and Madonna co-produce this mesmeric slice of existentialist electro-pop that prognosticates what was to come with her next long player (1998’s Ray Of Light) in four years’ time. That Madonna manages to keep “Bedtime Story” in line with the ruling R&B arc of the record is an impressive feat and evidence of her skill toward applying a consistent tone for an album despite any supposedly dueling sounds”

Erotica was attacked because of its sexual nature. Madonna always judged because of her sexuality and provocative nature. It was misogyny and sexism that she faced throughout her career! She still has to answer to critics to this day! I want to drop in almost the entirety of this VICE feature from 2014, as it argues brilliantly how Bedtime Stories is Madonna’s most important album:

“That’s why her album Bedtime Stories, even as it celebrates its 20th anniversary, is still her most important work. For months leading up to its release, it was marketed as an apology for her sexual behavior, and critics hoped it would be her return to innocence. Instead, she offered a lyrical #sorrynotsorry and a response to the problem of female musicians being scrutinized for their sexuality rather than their music. As a result of the public’s moral concerns, it has become Madonna’s most quietly important album, setting the tone for how artists deal with critiques of their sex life.

In 1992, Madonna released Erotica, a techno concept album and ode to bondage, alongside the coffee table book Sex, a softcore pornographic photo catalog of her and her pals. The concurrent releases created enormous and long-running backlash, resulting in multiple countries banning the album from radio airplay and the Vatican banning Madonna from entering. Madonna was already well established as an icon, but her frank lyrics on S&M and published photographs of analingus incited the harshest public outrage in her career. Bedtime Stories was slated to be her one last chance at redemption, and Warner Brothers agreed to produce it under the auspices of a less provocative image.

Both the label and her publicist Liz Rosenberg did everything they could to reverse the damage from Madonna’s last projects. They had her release the soundtrack single “I’ll Remember” to bring her a family-friendly hit and further increase speculation that Bedtime Stories would convey her apology. The album’s promo video promises that there will be “no sexual references on the album” and even panders with Madonna saying “it’s a whole new me! I’m going to be a good girl, I swear.”

Madonna-shaming was a two-part construct: First she was scorned for her sexuality, and then she was eclipsed by it. Since it cited her sex appeal as her sole commodity, the promo video had everyone wondering what she was going to sing about if the topic wasn’t sex. Speculation leading up to Bedtime Stories focused on her exit plan for becoming irrelevant, whether she planned on future facelifts, and what she would offer as a middle-aged version of herself.

“When you’re a celebrity, you’re allowed to have one personality trait. Which is ridiculous,” Madonna told the Detroit News in 1993. When Bedtime Stories was finally released on October 25, she addressed both aspects of the shaming process. Despite the promises in her promo, she continued to acknowledge her sexual desires, although she also experimented with the sound and subject matter. Beginning with “Survival,” a song she co-wrote with Dallas Austin, Madonna doesn’t hesitate to address the backlash and sings “I’ll never be an angel / I’ll never be a saint it’s true / I’m too busy surviving.” The lyrics continue to convey a loosely drawn narrative of the punishment she endured from the media and her feelings leading up to the release, and the songs are carried mostly by R&B melodies produced by Austin, Nellee Hooper, and Babyface.

The definitive single on the album is an explicit rebuke of the backlash. In “Human Nature,” she confirms that wasn’t sorry and that she’s not anyone’s bitch, and she paired the song perfectly with a video that toys with bondage like an Erotica throwback. Right when she is about to drop the mic she whispers, “would it sound better if I were a man?”

Madonna asserted her lack of apology on the grounds that she had not said or did anything unusual; it was simply unusual for a woman to say it. In an interview with the LA Times, she defended Bedtime Stories by saying “I’m being punished for being a single female, for having power and being rich and saying the things I say, being a sexual creature—actually, not being any different from anyone else, but just talking about it. If I were a man, I wouldn’t have had any of these problems. Nobody talks about Prince’s sex life.”

Beyond offering Madonna’s final word on the scandal of her sexuality, the album pivots to address the misconception that her sexual persona limited her versatility as an artist. The narrative in Bedtime Stories immediately turns introspective, relating “I know how to laugh / but I don’t know happiness.” While the album borrows mostly from R&B and new jack swing, it becomes more experimental with the Bjork-penned title track, accompanied with a video that could not have explored the collective unconscious better if Carl Jung directed it. The video for “Bedtime Story” is the first instance of what would become Madonna’s long history of culture-plucking spiritual inquiry, and to this day is stored in a collection at the Museum of Modern Art. As a pair, “Human Nature” and “Bedtime Story” prove that Madonna owned her sexuality and would not be eclipsed by it. While the former fully embraces the decisions she made with previous albums, the latter dismantles the “slut” narrative that her overt sexuality discredits her depth as a performer. Surely people would see this as a feminist masterpiece, no?

IN THIS PHOTO: Madonna in New York, September 1994/PHOTO CREDIT: Bettina Rheims

Still, critics didn’t get it. The New York Times’ Jon Pareles waxed nostalgic for when “Madonna thrived in the 1980s on being sensational and suggestive against a tame mainstream backdrop,” calling her more recent work “vulgar instead of shocking.” Critical reception continued to focus on the scandal of her attitude rather than the actual record. “Madonna’s career has never really been about music; it’s been about titillation, about image, about publicity,” began one TIME review, which wasn’t unique in its premise. Any mention of the album’s experimental sound or numerous collaborations were overshadowed by her promiscuous image and once again left cheapened. Bedtime Stories as an album was not the clear apology the public demanded, and its emotional depth was largely ignored. At best, it was thought of as Madonna’s return to a safer expression of sexuality.

The record found commercial success with the release of “Secret,” and “Take a Bow,” but the two most important songs never broke into the Top 40, a problem Madonna hadn’t faced in nearly ten years. Today, Bedtime Stories is not the first album that comes to mind in Madonna’s legacy. It is, however, the most relevant to many of the cultural conversations that are still happening. Had she acquiesced to the public’s call for apology, it could have set a dangerous standard for how the public can decree an artist’s silence, and it would have allowed the categories for female singers to remain in place. Critical anticipation of the album predicted either a penitent pop star or a one-dimensional sexpot. She defeated both categories, and left the critics to ponder if sexuality and solidity are as mutually exclusive as they had hope”.

I am going to end with two reviews. I will finish with a December 1994 review from Rolling Stone.  To show some of the negativity and misunderstanding around Bedtime Stories, below is a review from Pitchfork. Published in 2017, there is this feeling that Bedtime Stories is inessential. I disagree with that. This is one of her most consistent and fascinating albums:

“Bedtime Stories, the confused, the misunderstood. The early ’90s found Madonna at peak levels of media saturation. Inescapable! Seven years of hits compiled on The Immaculate Collection, Madonna featured on virtually every award show, Dick Tracy paraphernalia in the McDonald’s Happy Meal. I saw her name on a religious pamphlet: “We Christians must reject the mainstream acceptance of the ethics and morals of Marx and Madonna.” I saw her in The Far Side, her Gaultier-ensconced breasts puncturing an inflatable life raft in a cheap sexist gag. She was less a musician and more a holy ghost. Bedtime Stories was the first Madonna album that felt like a non-event, an asterisk to her omnipresence, another hot day in a heat wave.

And as such, this album has been difficult to assess as an art object. Madonna was, in 1992-1994, an artist under siege. Sex, her soft-core porn coffee table book, had been called obscene; it has been subsequently been reassessed as a smart and entertaining post-feminist grand jeté. Her previous album Erotica, with its diversity and effective New Jack Swing tourism, was received generally well and is now considered among many of her acolytes to be her masterpiece. But Bedtime Stories is, if we must go full Pepsi Challenge with Erotica, a blurry non-event of an album.

Closing track and hit single “Take a Bow” is a kind song, lush in production and sentiment, and deservedly hung around the charts longer than any other of her singles. Babyface’s appearance here, at the height of his own artistry, is frankly lovely. It is for many fans, myself included, Madonna at her most sensitive and brave.

Bedtime Stories’ final single, “Human Nature,” in contrast, did poorly on the charts, and yet is one of her most effective grooves, with her anti-slut-shaming slogan, “I’m not your bitch, don’t hang your shit on me” thwocking its way through Jean-Baptiste Mondino’s amazing video. It is handily one of Madonna’s best songs.

Conversely, the album’s most successful worldwide single, “Secret,” beloved by many, just meanders—even upon its release I recall my young ears being distracted by the single edit’s monotony when it appeared on radio playlists. On the album proper, the track drags interminably over five-plus minutes. Listening again now, it sounds like a lesser version of subsequent album Ray of Light’s “Frozen,” the dry crumbs of “Secret”’s acoustic guitar tracks waiting to be muted and replaced with William Orbit’s thrilling, tensile production.

Most infamously, we have “Bedtime Story.” Like many other former teenagers falling head over heels for Björk’s first solo album, I recall staring incredulously at the B. Guðmundsdóttir credit when it appeared in Madonna’s liner notes. The song itself is unimaginably disappointing—sterile and static, a less-daring second cousin to “Violently Happy.” Björk’s detached science-textbook approach toward a love-song, which works so well when paired with her own mystic Icelandic aesthetic, doesn’t sit well alongside Madonna’s enthusiastic consumerism. Perhaps the song has some appeal, decades later, now that we’re familiar and tolerant of the sound of Björk-on-autopilot. Perhaps we view it affectionately as a blueprint for her subsequent masterpieces on Ray of Light. Ultimately it remains, to my ears, Madonna’s first truly embarrassing flop.

And most of the rest of the album never really achieves any level of indispensability. Several attempts at New Jack balladry have lovely moody productions married to unremarkable songs or performances. Opening track “Survival,” as carefully constructed as it is, sounds, well, much tidier than Madonna’s contemporaries. The “Inside of Me” sample of Aaliyah’s “Back & Forth”—out the same year—just reminds me as a listener about how 1994 was the year of Toni Braxton, Salt-N-Pepa, and Janet Jackson; far more exciting music than this.

IN THIS PHOTO: Madonna in 1994

The deep cuts on the B-side of Bedtime Stories have their fans. Babyface is here, Massive Attack’s string arranging collaborator Craig Armstrong is here also, with an expensive sounding moment, and there’s a cute Herbie Hancock sample on “Sanctuary.” But these songs, for me, are undone by all having nearly identical melodies and moods to “Secret.” What attempts to be sultry and smooth comes off as beige and un-fascinating; my mind wanders and my time is wasted. When Madonna plays tourist with gay culture, with Broadway, with Hollywood, with UK jungle, she is able to keep things (usually) deferential and still interesting, and often, achieve transcendence. But here, she sounds woefully out-of-her-depth as a songwriter and singer when slinging these square attempts at R&B balladry.

It is a compliment to the artist that only here, over a decade into her career, on her sixth studio album, does she, for the first time, let this listener down. Take “Human Nature” and put in on a golden record, play “Take a Bow” at my funeral, and let the rest of this sleepy album be forgotten; it is, to my ears and memory, Madonna’s first truly inessential moment”.

Let’s finish with a review from Rolling Stone. This was published in 1994. It is a more positive approach compared to what some critics afforded. I hope that Bedtime Stories gets more love and some fresh investigation on its thirtieth anniversary on 25th October. It is a wonderful album from the Queen of Pop. One that I remember coming out in 1994. It has lost none of its brilliance:

“Still, in so doing, Madonna has come up with some awfully compelling sounds. In her retreat from sex to romance, she has enlisted four top R&B producers: Atlanta whiz kid Dallas Austin, Kenneth “Babyface” Edmonds, Dave “Jam” Hall and Britisher Nellee Hooper (Soul II Soul), who add lush soul and creamy balladry. With this awesome collection of talent, the record verily shimmers. Bass-heavy grooves push it along when more conventional sentiments threaten to bog it down. Both aspects put it on chart-smart terrain.

A number of songs — “Survival,” “Secret,” “I’d Rather Be Your Lover” (to which Me’Shell NdegéOcello brings a bumping bass line and a jazzy rap) — are infectiously funky. And Madonna does a drive-by on her critics, complete with a keening synth line straight outta Dre, on “Human Nature”: “Did I say something wrong?/Oops, I didn’t know I couldn’t talk about sex (I musta been crazy).”

But you don’t need her to tell you that she’s “drawn to sadness” or that “loneliness has never been a stranger,” as she sings on the sorrowful “Love Tried to Welcome Me.” The downbeat restraint in her vocals says it, from the tremulously tender “Inside of Me” to the sob in “Happiness lies in your own hand/It took me much too long to understand” from “Secret.”

The record ultimately moves from grief to oblivion with the seductive techno pull of “Sanctuary.” The pulsating drone of the title track (co-written by Björk and Hooper), with its murmured refrain of “Let’s get unconscious, honey,” renounces language for numbness.

Twirled in a gauze of (unrequited) love songs, Bedtime Stories says, “Fuck off, I’m not done yet.” You have to listen hard to hear that, though. Madonna’s message is still “Express yourself, don’t repress yourself.” This time, however, it comes not with a bang but a whisper”.

The Standard ranked Madonna’s Bedtime Stories as her ninth-best (“Certain detractors have always tried hard to depict Madonna as ‘too much’ of something – and by the early Nineties, she was constantly under fire for her provocative pop. A few years earlier, Pepsi famously pulled out of sponsoring her Blonde Ambition tour after Like A Prayer and its sexy take on Catholic iconography attracted the ire of the Vatican. Then came Erotica: a daring and plain sexy album which came accompanied by the explicit photobook SEX. Another predictable bout of pearl-clutching followed. Even Madonna grew weary of the outrage cycle, and decided her next album would head in another direction. “Sex is such a taboo subject and it’s such a distraction that I’d rather not even offer it up,” she told Los Angeles Times”). In 2015, Billboard ranked it sixth (“Express yourself/Don’t repress yourself,” Madonna coos at the top of “Human Nature,” a quick reminder that her Bedtime Stories album — while not as hardcore as 1992’s Erotica — certainly wasn’t a mea culpa for her polarizing previous project. Instead, the 1994 album captured Madonna in transition, swiveling away from explicit sexuality and relying on R&B and balladry before she dove headfirst into dance music four years later. Songs like “Human Nature,” “Secret” and “I’d Rather Be Your Lover” proved more compelling than most of the New Jack music being released in the mid-90s, and “Take A Bow” added a classic slow jam to Madge’s canon”).

It came in fourth in this recent feature (“Criminally underrated! Before going through her discography, I did not know any singles in the album. When it was time to listen to it, I was impressed. Just like the masterpieces that follow in this ranking, Bedtime Stories carries an impecable cohesiveness. It shows an improvement over Hard Candy on Madonna’s ability to blend into R&B. Human Nature is a perfect, catchy “f — you” to the criticism she faced on her Sex book era. Bedtime Story is a beautiful effort that experiments on different sounds and references Mexican surreal painters in the music video. And Take A Bow is a soothing, calm ballad. It may not be as iconic as the rest of the albums in this ranking, but it surely is one of the best”). Gay Times placed it fifth in their feature (“Out of every Madonna album, Bedtime Stories remains the most criminally underrated, and arguably her most important. Human Nature (both the song and the video) is one of her finest singles of all time, giving a solid middle finger to her critics and those who attempt to suppress female sexuality in the aftermath of her controversial Erotica era, while its more experimental moments including Sanctuary and the Björk-penned Bedtime Story are pure bliss to the ears. Placing it above fan favourites like Erotica and Like A Prayer may raise a few eyebrows, but listened to in the current musical landscape, the album’s R&B/Pop sound sounds remarkably current – more so than any other early-to-mid Madonna release. Take A Bow, beautifully backed by a full orchestra, remains a staple in Madonna’s greatest hits, and helped tone down her image for an offended public”). Definitely underrated and overlooked by some, Madonna’s sort-of-apology for her maligned 1992 album, Erotica – though in years since it is seen as one of the most influential albums ever -, Bedtime Stories did tone down her image a bit but offered plenty of new layers. More depth and passion. The same edgy that we are used to. It was not her completely retreating and sanitising herself thankfully! On 25th October, we mark thirty years of Bedtime Stories. It is an album that I think…

IS one of Madonna’s very best.

FEATURE: Looking Like a Happy Man: Kate Bush’s King of the Mountain at Nineteen

FEATURE:

 

 

Looking Like a Happy Man

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

Kate Bush’s King of the Mountain at Nineteen

_________

EVEN if…

I celebrate the anniversary of the song fairly regularly, it is important to talk about it. Sorry if I am not saying anything new but, on 24th October, 2005, we got the first Kate Bush single in over a decade. After 1993’s The Red Shoes, there was doubt that Bush would release another album. She had reached a point in her career when she needed to step away and think about herself. After having a son in 1998 and moving house, she was settling down and enjoying time away from the limelight. It was not a complete shock that King of the Mountain arrived. In 2001, there was an interview where Bush talked about her family and a new album. We knew that it would come along but were not sure exactly when. How would it sound and what would be the first single from it? When it came to Aerial, Bush only officially released one single. King of the Mountain opens the album and is the most single-worthy. There are other songs on the album that could have been singles – Mrs. Bartolozzi for one -, yet there was this feeling she did not want to give too much away. It would have meant additional promotion. Bush not overly happy being in videos. King of the Mountain was her final music video where she was featured. It was a turning point. Perhaps self-conscious about the way she looked after so long away from music, she did look fantastic in the King of the Mountain video!

I think King of the Mountain was already about a decade before the rest of Aerial. Whether you she intended to release it as a single in the 1990s or this was the first step on a new album I am not too sure. I have said before how it seemed to mirror her own experiences. Being seen as this recluse, Bush was sort of hiding away. King of the Mountain mentions Elvis Presley and whether he is still alive “Looking like a happy man”. Maybe over-reading the lyrics, Bush using that artist to represent herself. How the media were wondering whether she was and assuming she had disappeared. Instead, she was living happily in private. I can hear a lot of herself in the song. Bush adopting an Elvis accent and drawl through the song. With Kate Bush producing and Del Palmer engineering, this is a hugely solid and brilliant single. Her young son Bertie designed the single cover art for King of the Mountain. It is very much this family affair (Del Palmer and Kate Bush were in a relationship for about fifteen years). It is no surprise that the single did well in the chart. It reached number four in the U.K. There was so much excitement around Kate Bush coming back. One of her more popular singles, she did not do any live performances at the time. She did bring the song to the stage in 2014. There are some fantastic interviews to promote Aerial where she spoke about King of the Mountain. The single was first played on 21st September, 2005 on BBC Radio 2. With its video directed by  Jimmy Murakami and Bush’s writing, production and vocals at their peak, I think more sure be written about King of the Mountain. How important this song is.

The lyrics are incredibly evocative. Distinctly from the pen and mind of Kate Bush, I wonder where she was when she wrote them and what inspired the song’s direction and themes. My favourite lines are these: “Elvis are you out there somewhere/Looking like a happy man?/In the snow with Rosebud/And king of the mountain/Another Hollywood waitress/Is telling us she’s having your baby/And there’s a rumour that you’re on ice/And you will rise again someday/And that there’s a photograph/Where you’re dancing on your grave”. In their feature ranking Kate Bush’s fifty best songs, MOJO placed King of the Mountain in thirty-sixth. This is what they observed: “The first song written (and partially recorded) for Aerial, in 1997, and the song that announced its completion eight years later, is an atmospheric meditation on the possibility that Elvis lives on in some iconic hinterland, sledging on Kane’s Rosebud. The slinky marimba groove, tough drums and skanky guitars (by Bush’s husband Dan McIntosh), provided an early clue this album would be unlike anything she’d done before, albeit reassuringly compelling and eccentric”. In 2018, The Guardian ranked Bush’s singles. King of the Mountain came in eleventh: “Comeback album Aerial wasn’t exactly overburdened with obvious singles. Perhaps the beautiful, sunlit Somewhere in Between might have worked out of context of the Sea of Honey song-suite, but instead Bush plumped for a song that involved her impersonating Elvis and knowingly ruminating on the benefits of withdrawing from the public eye”. Earlier this year, Classic Pop placed King of the Mountain fourteenth when deciding on Kate Bush’s forty best songs: “Written a good decade before its eventual release as part of Aerial, King Of The Mountain – her first single in 12 years – wonders if Elvis is still out there, somewhere living normally, having been subjected to such intense fame during his career. It also referenced parallels between Presley and Citizen Kane, hence ‘Rosebud’. Her biggest hit in over 20 years, it went to No. 4 in the autumn of 2005”.

I am going to end with some round-up and reviews for King of the Mountain. Even those who were not huge Kate Bush fans could have resisted the excitement and anticipation that surrounded her first single in many years. What it would deliver. This is what Drowned in Sound noted in their 7/10 review for the mighty King of the Mountain:

“There’s my idea of taking a break and there’s your idea of taking a break. And then there’s Kate Bush’s idea of taking a break. The wandering enigma of British pop has been gone for twelve years. Which means the last time we saw Kate Bush was in the nineties – and let’s be honest, who can remember them?! (I can actually remember them very well, but that last bit scans rather nicely dontchathink?)

So what on Emily Bronte’s misty earth has she been up to for the last twelve years? Well, I imagine she’s been raising a family and proba…yadda, yadda, yadda – who gives an arse? She’s got a new album coming out. She’s called it ‘Aerial’. And ‘King Of The Mountain’ is the first indication that it might be as ace as we hoped it would be.

For a while, I always thought that Kate Bush was taking the piss when she sang. Either that or she was celebrating her release from the mental asylum by screaming at passers-by, then softly informing them that she has a house on top of the hill that they simply must visit because the garden path is made of swords and the kitchen is run by the trees. Of course, that was then. Now, having actually listened beyond ‘Wuthering Heights’, I’d stick her up their with the very best. So apart from the remarkable voice, why do folk dig The Bush? Thankfully, some answers can be found in ‘King Of The Mountain’. Sort of. A slow-burning reggae groove, peculiar lyrics, electronic phasing, tribal pulsing and a shuddering, vintage vocal are all in there. She also talks of “the wind whistling” – which in a Kate Bush track, can only be a good thing. Thing is, the track doesn’t really go anywhere and if the lady herself wasn’t singing it could be considered terribly dull. Still, the pastoral princess returneth – Yeth!”.

Dropping this single in a 2005 music scene when there was nothing like King of the Mountain, there were some impassioned reviews for one of the most anticipated returns in music history. How much Kate Bush had been missed! You can read further reviews for the single here. It was clearly a beloved single release from an artist who proved, no matter how long she had been away, she had lost none of her magic and ability to stand out from the crowd:

“The NME has reviewed the single in style: “Ok, so it was hardly worth waiting a decade and a bit for but then what is? Nothing that we can think of. What it is, mind, is an apt reminder of just how little everyone else is trying right now and just how Ms Bush has been missed. It’s five minutes of druggy acenes, has a mental breakdown in the middle, and sounds like Sade washing down lyrical razorblades with plummets of fizzy white wine nabbed from Massive Attacks rider. But with more heart than a Canadian AOR radio station or a passionate snog with a Care Bear. If we were excited about the album before we heard this (and we were, very), now we’re EXCITED IN BIG CAPITAL LETTERS.” Eye Weekly in Toronto writes: “The famously melodramatic (some would say screechy) chanteuse’s influence on such singers as Björk and PJ Harvey has come full circle on “King of the Mountain,” currently available only as a download. The rumbling bass and propulsive drumming recalls Harvey’s “A Perfect Day, Elise,” while Bush takes her creepy torch-song vibe down a notch, mostly reining in her upper register to devastatingly intense effect. Learning how to smoulder is the final frontier for great singers, and Bush does it without giving up the vulnerability that made every teenage wallflower in the ’80s stare longingly at her LP jackets.”

…here’s an article on Peter Bochan’s Alternative Music Blog which reveals that King Of The Mountain is the 231st song about Elvis! “At least one of his white jump suits is in the video with Kate, along with a storyline that seems to be a throwback to the “Is Elvis Still Alive” period in tabloid journalism, mixed with some Citizen Kane “Rosebud” imagery and some dodgy shots of Kate that seem to hide her from any full-figure viewing–maybe she’s going through her own “later elvis” type period. Whatever the reason, this first sample from the upcoming “Aerial” is very encouraging, “King Of The Mountain” is vintage sounding and full of the usual “moments of pleasure” that Kate has been delivering since 1977’s “Wuthering Heights”. Read more here…BBC Radio 1 may be largely ignoring the single from it’s playlists (no, we can’t figure it out either) but one DJ, Rob Da Bank continues to rave about the single: “She makes us wait 12 years and then bam! She’s back and jeepers creepers the lady’s been busy if this, the first single from her new album Aerial is anything to go by. Wooshy wind noises – check! Mystical lyrics – check! Genius reggae guitar and bountiful production – check! Best pop song of the year so far and proud to be a Blue Room tune. Welcome back!” See it at the BBC Radio 1 website here…finally, need wheels to get to the record shop next week to buy the single? The “big black car” from the Cloudbusting video is up for sale – see here!”.

It is hard to believe that it has been almost nineteen years since King of the Mountain was released. On 24th October, we mark that anniversary. With its B-side of Sexual Healing – an unusual choice of cover but one Bush adds her own stamp to -, it was a huge treat getting this new Kate Bush music! Aerial would arrive on 7th November. Bush performed this song as part of her set for the 2014 residency, Before the Dawn. A chance for her to bring this amazing song to life on the stage. Her most successful single since the 1986 duet with Peter Gabriel, Don’t Give Up, King of the Mountain is a truly magnificent single from…

ONE of her best albums.

FEATURE: Kate Bush: The Tour of Life: Exploring an Under-Read Interview from 1984

FEATURE:

 

 

Kate Bush: The Tour of Life

PHOTO CREDIT: Denis O’Regan

Exploring an Under-Read Interview from 1984

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I want to briefly…

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

return and dust off The Kate Bush Interview Archive. This Kate Bush: The Tour of Life takes us back to 1984. I know I have recently focused a great deal on Hounds of Love and that era. I will dip back in briefly because of a very special 1984 interview I don’t think many people know about. It captures a particular (and important) moment in Kate Bush’s career. There are quite a few interviews available from 1985. When Hounds of Love was released. There are not really many from 1983 or 1984. Louder Sound recently shared a feature looking back to 2011 where they featured an interview conducted by Mick Wall. He is one of the world's leading Rock and Metal writers. The same age as Kate Bush (sixty-six), he recalled reaching out for an interview in 1984 but not expecting to hear back. A rare chance for insight into the writing of Bush’s 1985 masterpiece. Bush must have known about Mick Wall and his music tastes. Finding kinship and things in common, it would have been thrilling to be invited to her home to be around someone putting together songs that would appear on one of the greatest albums ever. It seems like they instantly hit it off:

“It all seems like a dream now… but back in 1984, during what was then viewed as a period of unprecedented reclusiveness for a major rock star, I put in a request to interview Kate Bush. Expecting nothing back – she had more or less disappeared since her 1982 album The Dreaming had received such a bashing in the press – I was astonished when the record company got back and said, “She’d love to speak to you.”

It seemed the opportunity to be interviewed by a bona fide rock writer intrigued her. “She likes Def Leppard,” they added, hopefully. Strange to relate by today’s manicured PR standards, but I was given her address and told to pitch up sometime that week. A few days later I was at door of the south London house Kate used as her home-from-home workplace; a space to play piano, dance and listen to records.

She answered the door herself with a big smile and ushered me in. Dressed in an understated way – no make-up, hair brushed but not sculpted, just jeans and top to keep her warm – Kate was 25 at the time, and very beautiful.

She skipped off to make tea and I knelt by the record player, flipping through her albums. I recall seeing Bryan Ferry’s These Foolish Things, some Pink Floyd, some Bowie, plus some other things I didn’t easily recognise. Classical, maybe? Dance?

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush captured in the studio during the recording of Hounds of Love in 1984/PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush

She returned with tea and biscuits and we sat cross-legged on the floor together. With no new album to promote, I didn’t really know what I should talk about. I hadn’t actually expected to be given an interview. Somehow we got onto the subject of smoking dope, and she giggled and talked of “pinning” – pretending to inhale from a lump of burning hash held up by the unbent pin of a badge.

Kate said she was “very influenced in my writing by old traditional folk songs, handed down by new generations of musicians but with the original atmosphere and emotion still maintained. The sort of music my mother would have listened to and danced to, and used to play for me when I was very little. It’s probably my biggest musical influence.”

…It was her ability to dance so extravagantly that made her live show, which I’d recently caught at London’s Palladium, so enervating and different. “I got so incredibly nervous before I’d go on,” she confessed. “All I’d ever really done in the way of live performance before the tour were TV shows and videos. And the sort of props and ideas for the show we were carrying around with us seemed a bit ambitious, a bit awesome, at first. But I loved those shows. Once I was onstage I had so much fun. I would like to do more of it...”

In another life, could she have made a career out of dancing? “I had people approaching me at the dance class, asking if I wanted to go to Germany and dance in clubs and things, and for a time I really got into the dance thing... But I don’t think I was good enough. I didn’t stand out enough.”

Did she write all the time? “No. I have to be forced to write for an album.” She wasn’t very prolific then? “I used to be. I used to write every day, and if it wasn’t very good keep a little bit and maybe use it in something else. As soon as Wuthering Heights became a hit, though, my whole routine was just blown apart. It was extraordinary how suddenly everything changed.”

Were her dancer mum and musician had worried when she signed to EMI at 16? Sex and drugs etc? “No, not at all,” she smiled. “They had seen it coming for a long time. The original idea was to see if we could sell my songs to a publisher, not that I should be a singer or a performer or anything. We had quite modest, curious aims. So it was gradual and they were always supportive.”

Kate told me she was currently writing songs for a new album – which was to be Hounds Of Love. She explained how she hennaed her hair, crimped it occasionally, and that she had make-up artists and hair beauticians available, as well as costume designers equipped to run off fantasy threads like the still-legendary Babooshka number”.

I am fascinated by this interview because I did not know about it. I can imagine that it would have been hard for Kate Bush to take on too many interviews. As she was making a new album, there would have been this need for secrecy. Now, if there was a new album, she would interview the year it came out. In 1984, she was at a point when Hounds of Love was coming along but not complete. Her home studio was built and it was a really exciting time. Although there would have been stress and some hard days, the production process for Hounds of Love was one where Bush established herself as one of the best. Being invited into her world and getting to soak up the atmosphere around her. I assumed that the Mick Wall interview was at either East Wickham Farm – where she recorded most of Hounds of Love – or the 17th-century farmhouse in the Kent countryside near Sevenoaks she moved into with Del Palmer (her boyfriend and engineer/musician) in 1983. The mention of the South London “home-from-home” seems to nod to East Wickham Farm (in Welling), though it could be a flat that she had in South London. That hospitality and warmth Bush has always exuded. She seemed really relaxed and at a place where she was a lot more at ease. You can see interviews from 1982 where she seems tired or strained. The result of working on The Dreaming. In 1984, Bush was busy in the studio and there was this coming together of some of her most ambitious and remarkable work. This Mick Wall interview gives us a rare glimpse into the psyche of Kate Bush in 1984. 1985 would see her very busy with promotion. I would love to see more photos from Bush recording Hounds of Love and creating this masterpiece album. Maybe we will see that one day. I was keen to make people aware of an interview that really provokes images and warmth. A 1984 chat that finds Bush in a good place. Some assumed Bush had disappeared or was retired because she had not released a new album. It was clear that this was so far from the truth! In 1984, she was busy writing and recording. Little did the world know what she would gift the world…

THE following year.

FEATURE: The Digital Mixtape: Songs from Incredible Albums Turning Thirty Next Year

FEATURE:

 

 

The Digital Mixtape

Songs from Incredible Albums Turning Thirty Next Year

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IN December…

PHOTO CREDIT: Andrea Piacquadio/Pexels

I am going to run a series of The Digital Mixtapes collating songs from albums celebrating big anniversaries next year. Taking in classics from 1965, 1970, 1975, 1980, 1985, 1990, 1995, 2000, 2005, 2010, 2015 and 2020. It is something I enjoy. However, I might repeat myself because I want to focus on 1995 now. Because Supergrass recently announced that they will be back on the road next year touring to mark thirty years since the release of their debut, I Should Coco, I was thinking about other albums released that year. 1995 is one of the biggest and most astonishing years in music history. 1994, 1995 and 1997 being tremendous. Because Supergrass (Gaz Coombes, Danny Goffey and Mick Quinn) start a ten-leg tour from May next year to mark thirty years of their amazing debut, I have been thinking about contemporaries’ albums that made a commercial or critical impact in 1995. As you can from the playlist, there were loads of epic and timeless albums released! I hope that I have not missed any! Whether you were alive in 1995 or are looking back as a younger listener, the assortment of songs gives you a flavour of what was popular nearly thirty years ago now. I will mark the best of 1995 in December but, because of Supergrass taking back to the road, this Digital Mixtape celebrated…

THE best of 1995.

FEATURE: Kate Bush’s The Sensual World at Thirty-Five: Inside the Amazing Singles, and Three Songs That Could Have Been Singles

FEATURE:

 

 

Kate Bush’s The Sensual World at Thirty-Five

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

Inside the Amazing Singles, and Three Songs That Could Have Been Singles

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AS Kate Bush’s…

The Sensual World turns thirty-five on 16th October, I wanted to put out a couple of features. In this second one, I am going to look at the amazing singles released from Bush’s sixth studio album. Compared to 1985’s Hounds of Love and the singles released from this album, The Sensual World offered something different. Reaching number two in the U.K., this is among Kate Bush’s most successful albums. An artist who always charts high with her albums, The Sensual World was a success around the world. Although the reviews were not as universally positive as they were for Hounds of Love, there was a lot of love for her 1989 underrated and understated masterpiece. Perhaps not as acclaimed as its predecessor,  I do think that The Sensual World has a richness and depth that is not explored and dissected as much as it should. Hounds of Love’s singles all went to the top forty in the U.K. The Big Sky was the lowest placing at thirty-seven. Hounds of Love had four singles. The Sensual World three. I am going to spotlight those three singles and suggest three songs that should have been considered as singles. I think the album could have benefited from at least one further single. The first single, The Sensual World, was released on 18th September, 1989 and reached number twelve in the U.K. It was quite a high chart position. One of Bush’s most beloved songs, this charged and sensual track has this beauty, lust and heat that gets into the blood. One of Kate Bush’s most stirring and accomplished set of lyrics. Let’s start out here, The Kate Bush Encyclopedia gives more information about the first single from The Sensual World:

“The Sensual World’ is a song written by Kate Bush. It was originally released as a single by EMI Records on 18 September 1989. Also released on her sixth album The Sensual World.

Bush was inspired to write the song after hearing Irish actress Siobhan McKenna read the closing soliloquy from James Joyce’s Ulysses, in which the character Molly Bloom recalls her earliest sexual experience with husband-to-be Leopold Bloom. The book was published in 1922.

Kate, believing the text had fallen to public domain, simply lifted parts from it and sang them on the backing track she’d created. She approached director Jimmy Murakami to make a video for the song, and he expressed doubts because he suspected James Joyce’s grandson Stephen James Joyce had the rights to the book. Kate then contacted him numerous times, but the Joyce estate refused to release the words. She spent over a year trying to gain permission before accepting defeat.

In the end, she kept the backing track but “re-approached the words”, writing a lyric that sounded a lot like the original text but also added the dimension of ‘stepping out of the page / into the sensual world‘, in effect Molly Bloom stepping out of the book and walking into real life.

Musically, one of the main hooks in the chorus of The Sensual World was inspired by a traditional Macedonian piece of music called ‘Nevestinsko Oro’ (‘Bride’s Dance’). A recording of this piece of music was sent to Kate by Jan Libbenga. As in the traditional version, the melody is played on uilleann pipes, in this case by Irish musician Davy Spillane.

There’s a few songs that have been difficult to write. I think the most frustrating and difficult to write was the song, ‘The Sensual World’. Uh, you’ve probably heard some of the story, that originally it was written to the lyrics at the end of ‘Ulysses’, and uh, I just couldn’t believe how the whole thing came together, it was so… It was just like it was meant to be. We had this sort of instrumental piece, and uh, I had this idea for like a rhythmic melody, and I just thought of the book, and went and got it, and the words fitted – they justfitted, the whole thing fitted, it was ridiculous. You know the song was saying, ‘Yes! Yes!’. And when I asked for permission, you know, they said, ‘No! No!’ That was one of the hardest things for me to swallow. I can’t tell you how annoyed I was that, um, I wasn’t allowed to have access to this great piece of work that I thought was public. And in fact I really didn’t think you had to get permission but that you would just pay a royalty. So I was really, really frustrated about it. And, um… kind of rewrote the words, trying to keep the same – same rhythm and sounds. And, um, eventually, through rewriting the words we also changed the piece of music that now happens in the choruses, so if they hadn’t obstructed the song, it would have been a very different song. So, to look at it positively, although it was very difficult, in the end, I think it was, it was probably worth all the trouble. Thank you very much.

Kate Bush Con, 1990

A lot of people have said it’s sexy. That’s nice. The original piece was sexy, too; it had an incredible sensuality which I’d like to think this track has as well. I suppose it is walking the thin line a bit, but it’s about the sensuality of the world and how it is so incredibly pleasurable to our senses if we open up to it. You know, just simple things, like sitting in the sun, just contact with nature. It’s like, for most people, their holidays are the only time they get a real burst of the planet!

Will Johnson, ‘A Slowly Blooming English Rose’. Pulse (UK), December 1989”.

Kate Bush’s production is amazing throughout The Sensual World. I think that her songwriting is as good as on any album. A remarkable collection of ten songs. Even though three singles were released, there are three others that could have worked. And had some remarkable versions and high chart positions. However, the second single from The Sensual World is a masterpiece. Considered one of her best songs, This Woman’s Work has been featured on adverts and in films. The song has been released several times as a single. On 20th November, 1989, the public were able to purchase a single that appeared the year before in a successful film. This Woman’s World reached twenty-five in the U.K. Not a high chart position, I do think that it deserved a lot better. The closing track of The Sensual World – Walk Straight Down the Middle was a bonus track on C.D. and cassette versions -, it is a gorgeous and truly moving song. Again, the Kate Bush Encyclopedia offers insight and background to this stunning song:

“This Woman’s Work’ is a song written by Kate Bush. It was originally released on the soundtrack of the movie She’s Having A Baby in 1988. A year later, the song was included in Kate’s sixth studio album The Sensual World.

The lyric is about being forced to confront an unexpected and frightening crisis during the normal event of childbirth. Written for the movie She’s Having a Baby, director John Hughes used the song during the film’s dramatic climax, when Jake (Kevin Bacon) learns that the lives of his wife (Elizabeth McGovern) and their unborn child are in danger. As the song plays, we see a montage sequence of flashbacks showing the couple in happier times, intercut with shots of him waiting for news of Elizabeth and their baby’s condition. Bush wrote the song specifically for the sequence, writing from a man’s (Jake’s) viewpoint and matching the words to the visuals which had already been filmed.

The song was used in the 21st episode of the third season of Party Of Five, an episode of the TV series Felicity, an episode of the soap opera Another World, the second episode of the series Alias and in the first episode of the second season of The Handmaid’s Tale. The song was also used in the film A Man Called Otto.

Critical response

A luscious, spiritually elevating showstopper ballad. How does anyone get that much cool into a voice? Ecstatic with wintry tragedy, undeniably beauteous.

Chris Roberts, Melody Maker, 25 November 1989

Is it possible through pop to truly represent the emotions of a young man stranded in the waiting room while his lover’s life is threatened by the birth of their baby? I think not. Unless you’re Kate Bush…

Len Brown, NME, 25 November 1989

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

Kate Bush Con, 1990”.

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

The third and final single from The Sensual World was her first single of the 1990s. It is also the lowest-charting releases from the album. Released on 26th January, 1990, Love and Anger reached thirty-eight. One of the most interesting aspects of Love and Anger is its B-sides. Ken, The Confrontation and One Last Look Around the House Before We Go are fantastically varied songs. Ken is probably the standout. I love the B-sides from The Sensual World. This Woman’s Work had Be Kind to My Mistakes and I'm Still Waiting. The Sensual World boasted Walk Straight Down the Middle and The Sensual World (Instrumental). It is also worth mentioning how Love and Anger reached number one on the U.S. Billboard Modern Rock Tracks chart in 1989. It was Bush's only chart-topper on any U.S. chart until 2022. Love and Anger features David Gilmour on guitar. One of the most difficult songs Bush ever wrote, I am glad that there was some positive critical acclaim for the single. The first taste of Bush as a singles artist in the 1990s. Again, a huge thanks to the Kate Bush Encyclopedia for information about Love and Anger:

“Critical response

Unfortunately the ‘serious’ music press in the UK was not too positive about this single. Only the magazine Kerrang! offered praise.

Is it too late to take back all those gushing hymns of praise we wrote in homage to Kate’s recent LP? [This is] pretty dispensable, fairly orthodox pop-rock listening.

Paul Lester, Melody Maker, 3 March 1990

Kate seems to have lost the plot… all middle without a beginning or an end… lost in an unfocused mire…

Tim Nicholson, Record Mirror, 3 March 1990

Dynamic understanding and depth that is quite untouchable. Bloody fantastic.

Phil Wilding, Kerrang!, 3 March 1990

Remarkably, US reviews were much more positive:

Bush recalls her ‘Big Sky’ in this lively introspective number from the hit album… already a no. 1 smash with modern rock programmers.

Bill coleman, Billboard (USA), 9 december 1989

This bristles with vigour electricity and life… fuelled by cascades of crashing guitars and a huge chanting chorus of background vocals… captures the power and sweetness of Kate Bush’s voice and music.

College Music Journal (USA), November 1989

It’s one of the most difficult songs I think I’ve ever written. It was so elusive, and even today I don’t like to talk about it, because I never really felt it let me know what it’s about. It’s just kind of a song that pulled itself together, and with a tremendous amount of encouragement from people around me. There were so many times I thought it would never get on the album. But I’m really pleased it did now.

Interview, WFNX Boston (USA), 1989

I couldn’t get the lyrics. They were one of the last things to do. I just couldn’t find out what the song was about, though the tune was there. The first verse was always there, and that was the problem, because I’d already set some form of direction, but I couldn’t follow through. I didn’t know what I wanted to say at all. I guess I was just tying to make a song that was comforting, up tempo, and about how when things get really bad, it’s alright really – “Don’t worry old bean. Someone will come and help you out.”
The song started with a piano, and Del put a straight rhythm down. Then we got the drummer, and it stayed like that for at least a year and a half. Then I thought maybe it could be okay, so we got Dave Gilmour in. This is actually one of the more difficult songs – everyone I asked to try and play something on this track had problems. It was one of those awful tracks where either everything would sound ordinary, really MOR, or people just couldn’t come to terms with it. They’d ask me what it was about, but I didn’t know because I hadn’t written the lyrics. Dave was great – I think he gave me a bit of a foothold there, really. At least there was a guitar that made some sense. And John [Giblin] putting the bass on – that was very important. He was one of the few people brave enough to say that he actually liked the song.

Tony Horkins, ‘What Katie Did Next’. International Musician, December 1989”.

 IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush captured during the photoshoot for The Sensual World’s single cover/PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush

I am going to match the three singles with three songs that could have been singles. 1993’s The Red Shoes offered up five singles. Not all of them were U.K. releases. I think that The Sensual World could have offered more. As it approaches its thirty-fifth anniversary, I have selected three songs that could have been successful singles. The first is The Fog. The third song on The Sensual World, I often think that it is a track that could have been on Hounds of Love. Appearing on the second side, The Ninth Wave. It is a phenomenal moment that is my favourite from Bush’s 1989 album. Apart from The Fog being an epic song, it also features the voice of Kate Bush’s father, Robert. I love song of the lyrics and exchanges: “Just put your feet down child/The water is only waist high/I’ll let go of you gently/Then you can swim to me/Is this love big enough to watch over me?/Big enough to let go of me/Without hurting me/Like the day I learned to swim?”. I think that The Fog could have had a brilliant video and would have charted high. Apologies if I have covered this topic and song before. When thinking about singles that could have followed Love and Anger, I feel The Fog would have been a natural success. I will donate to the Kate Bush Encyclopedia because, when it comes to information and details of Bush’s music, they are on top:

“Again, it’s quite a complex song, where it’s very watery. It’s meant to be the idea of a big expanse of water, and being in a relationship now and flashing back to being a child being taught how to swim, and using these two situations as the idea of learning to let go. When I was a child, my father used to take me out into the water, and he’d hold me by my hands and then let go and say “OK, now come on, you swim to me.” As he’d say this, he’d be walking backwards so the gap would be getting bigger and bigger, and then I’d go [Splutters]. I thought that was such an interesting situation where you’re scared because you think you’re going to drown, but you know you won’t because your father won’t let you drown, and the same for him, he’s kind of letting go, he’s letting the child be alone in this situation. Everyone’s learning and hopefully growing and the idea that the relationship is to be in this again, back there swimming and being taught to swim, but not by your father but by your partner, and the idea that it’s OK because you are grown up now so you don’t have to be frightened, because all you have to do is put your feet down and the bottom’s there, the water isn’t so deep that you’ll drown. You put your feet down, you can stand up and it’s only waist height. Look! What’s the problem, what are you worried about?

Roger Scott, BBC Radio 1 (UK), 14 October 1989

That started at the Fairlight. We got these big chords of strings, and put this line over the top, and then I got this idea of these words – slipping into the fog. I thought wouldn’t it be interesting to sort of really visualize that in a piece of music, with all these strings coming in that would actually be the fog. So I wrote a bit of music that went on the front of what I’d done, and extended it backwards with this bit on the front that was very simple and straightforward, but then went into the big orchestral bit, to get the sense of fog coming in.
Then we put a drummer on, and Nigel Kennedy, the violinist, came in and replaced the Fairlight violin, which changed the nature of it. He’s great to work with – such a great musician. The times we work together we sort of write together. I’ll say something like, “what about doing something a bit like Vaughan Williams?”, and he’ll know the whole repertoire, and he’ll pick something, and maybe I’ll change something. By doing that we came up with this different musical section that hadn’t been on the Fairlight.
So when I got all this down it seemed to make sense story-wise. This new section became like a flashback area. And then I got the lyrics together about slipping into the fog, and relationships, trying to let go of people.
It sounded great with the Fairlight holding it together, but it just didn’t have the sense of dimension I wanted. So we got hold of Michael Kamen, who orchestrated some of the last album, and we said we wanted this bit here with waves and flashbacks. He’s really into this because he’s always writing music for films, and he loves the idea of visual imagery. So we put his orchestra in on top of the Fairlight.
Again a very complicated process, and he was actually the last thing to go on. I don’t know how anything comes out as one song, because sometimes it’s such a bizarre process. It does seem to work together somehow.

Tony Horkins, ‘What Katie Did Next’. International Musician, December 1989”.

A song that was released as a single in 2011, Deeper Understanding is one of the most obvious overlooked songs on The Sensual World. It is such a natural single. Director’s Cut was Bush reworking songs from The Sensual World and The Red Shoes. Even though the new version of Deeper Understanding is great, it does not have the same impact as the original. It was prescient and scarily accurate Bush discussing the impact and control computers had in 1989. It all came true! It was less futuristic and impactful in 2011. That is why I think the 1989 version should have been a single. On the version from The Sensual World, Charlie Morgan plays drums. John Giblin played bass – he would also appear on the 2011 version -, whilst Paddy Bush handles tupan. The highlight is the Trio Bulgarka (soloist: Yanka Rupkhina) on vocals. A penultimate visit to the Kate Bush Encyclopeida, I feel Deeper Understanding would have been a top-twenty single in 1990. It could have followed Love and Anger or been the fifth and final single – if we had The Fog as the fourth:

“Kate about ‘Deeper Understanding’

This is about people… well, about the modern situation, where more and more people are having less contact with human beings. We spend all day with machines; all night with machines. You know, all day, you’re on the phone, all night you’re watching telly. Press a button, this happens. You can get your shopping from the Ceefax! It’s like this long chain of machines that actually stop you going out into the world. It’s like more and more humans are becoming isolated and contained in their homes. And this is the idea of someone who spends all their time with their computer and, like a lot of people, they spend an obsessive amount of time with their computer. People really build up heavy relationships with their computers! And this person sees an ad in a magazine for a new program: a special program that’s for lonely people, lost people. So this buff sends off for it, gets it, puts it in their computer and then like , it turns into this big voice that’s saying to them, “Look, I know that you’re not very happy, and I can offer you love: I’m her to love you. I love you!”

And it’s the idea of a divine energy coming through the least expected thing. For me, when I think of computers, it’s such a cold contact and yet, at the same time, I really believe that computers could be a tremendous way for us to look at ourselves in a very spiritual way because I think computers could teach us more about ourselves than we’ve been able to look at, so far. I think there’s a large part of us that is like a computer. I think in some ways, there’s a lot of natural processes that are like programs… do you know what I mean? And I think that, more and more, the more we get into computers and science like that, the more we’re going to open up our spirituality. And it was the idea of this that this… the last place you would expect to find love, you know, real love, is from a computer and, you know, this is almost like the voice of angels speaking to this person, saying they’ve come to save them: “Look, we’re here, we love you, we’re here to love you!” And it’s just too much, really, because this is just a mere human being and they’re being sucked into the machine and they have to be rescued from it. And all they want is that, because this is “real” contact.

Roger Scott, BBC Radio 1 interview, 14 October 1989

I suppose it’s looking at society where more and more people are being shut away in their homes with televisions and computers, and in a way being encouraged not to come out. You know, there’s so many people who live in London in high-rise flats – they don’t know their neighbors, they don’t know anyone else in the building. People are getting very isolated. It was the idea of this person who had less and less human contact, and more and more contact with their computer, where they were working on it all day and all night. They see an advert in a magazine for a program for people who are lonely and lost, so they write off for it. When they get it back in the mail and put it into the computer, it’s the idea – a bit like an old sci-fi film, really – where it would just come to life and suddenly there’s this kind of incredible being there, like a great spiritual visitation. This computer is offering this person love, and the idea that they’ve had such little human warmth, they’re getting this tremendous affection and deep love from their computer. But it’s so intense it’s too much for them to take, and they actually have to be rescued from just being killed with love, I suppose.

WFNX Boston radio, Fall 1989”.

There were four other songs on The Sensual World I have not covered. One or two not suitable as single. There is one song that I think could have been a stronger chart entry than The Fog. Never Be Mine was re-recorded for 2011’s Director’s Cut and also featured during the 2014 residency, Before the Dawn. It is a track that Bush clearly has affection for. I do feel it could have been a successful single. A wonderful album with so many strong songs, it is interesting reading what Kate Bush said about the track:

“Kate about ‘Never Be Mine’

It’s that whole thing of how, in some situations, it’s the dream you want, not the real thing. It was pursuing a conscious realisation that a person is really enjoying the fantasy and aware it won’t become reality. So often you think it’s the end you want, but this is actually looking at the process that will never get you there. Bit of a heart-game you play with yourself.

Len Brown, ‘In The Realm Of The Senses’. NME (UK), 7 October 1989

I wanted a sort of eastern sounding rhythm. I wrote it first on the piano, though the words were completely different, except for the choruses. I did it on the piano to a Fairlight rhythm that Del programmed – I think that maybe because of the quality of the sounds, it was harder for Del to come up with the patterns. And I was more strict – he found it much harder. I think the pattern in ‘Heads We’re Dancing’ is really good – really unusual, the best he came up with. But ‘Never Be Mine’ was kind of tabla based. We got Eberhard (Weber) over to play bass and he played on the whole song. When we were trying to piece it together later we kept saying it just doesn’t feel right, so we just took the bass out and had it in these two sections. You hardly notice it going out at all. I think the song has a very light feel about it, which helps the whole imagery. The Uilean pipes have a very light feel, and the piano is light… I think it’s a nice contrast when the bass suddenly come in.
The piano on this is an upright Bernstein that has a really nice sound – I think it has to do with proportions for us. We did have a big piano and it’s a small room, and it didn’t record well. The small piano sounds much bigger.

Tony Horkins, ‘What Katie Did Next’. International Musician, December 1989”.

On 16th October, The Sensual World turns thirty-five. It is one of Kate Bush’s best albums. As I mentioned in the first anniversary feature, critics now place it high in the album rankings. Normally third or fourth. It is an amazingly compelling album released at a time when Bush was in her thirties and was writing in a different way. More concerned with her femininity and embracing her womanhood, it was different to her previous work. I do really love the three singles that came from the album. It was natural that The Sensual World and This Woman’s Work would be singles. The two most celebrated songs from that album. Even if Love and Anger is less obvious, it is still a wonderful song. I feel there was capacity to have one or two other tracks released as singles. As I suggested, there was plenty of choice. Just think what videos she would have made for The Fog or Deeper Understanding! It is tantalising. In any case, what we did get was three strong singles from an amazing album. Released in a year where Hip-Hop was ruling and Pop was evolving, perhaps The Sensual World did not really fit in. Some critics took against it and felt the album is not her strongest work. Contemporary critics regard it very highly. What we do get from The Sensual World are ten songs with their own skin and sound. They fit together wonderfully. Bush did rework four of The Sensual World’s tracks in 2011 for Director’s Cut. Interestingly, two were originally released as singles: The Sensual World (renamed Flower of the Mountain); This Woman’s Work was also re-recorded. The other two are songs I have suggested as lost singles: Deeper Understanding and Never Be Mine. Maybe Bush was not happy with those tracks and felt they benefited from being taken apart and given more room and space to breathe. What The Sensual World highlighted brightly is that there are…

NO artist quite like Kate Bush.

FEATURE: Good Riddance (Time of Your Life): Why Dynamic Pricing Ticketing Needs to End

FEATURE:

 

 

Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)

IN THIS PHOTO: Green Day/PHOTO CREDIT: Samuel Bayer 

Why Dynamic Pricing Ticketing Needs to End

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IT did not start with Oasis…

IN THIS PHOTO: Liam and Noel Gallagher of Oasis

though dynamic pricing and these ridiculously inflated ticket costs for fans was definitely brought to the forefront when they recently announced 2025 reunion gigs. So many people desperately wanting to see the band but, due to demand, only these very expensive tickets left. It did cause understandable fury and disgust from fans. Like Oasis were cashing in. There is debate as to whether this pricing scheme and model makes it harder for scalpers to sell tickets at an inflated cost. However, if that is the case, then a lot more needs to be done to ensure that all fans can get access to affordable tickets. If you do not know about dynamic pricing, this article from The Guardian explains more:

“Oasis fans spent many frustrating hours of the weekend locked in a desperate race to secure tickets for the Mancunian band’s long-awaited reunion tour.

Shows were initially advertised at £148.50. But when fans finally reached the front of the queue, after many hours of waiting, many found that basic standing tickets had been rebranded as “in demand” and had jumped in price to £355.20.

The culprit is an increasingly common strategy known as dynamic pricing. It is commonplace in other industries but how and why did it creep into live music?

What is dynamic pricing?

When a seller does not set a fixed price for their product, but instead adjusts what they charge in response to changing demand. Airline tickets and hotel rooms are a longstanding example, rising during the school holidays or at weekends. More recently, companies such as the ride-hailing app Uber have deployed “surge pricing” to adjust prices more rapidly, in response to real-time demand fluctuations. Unlike ticketing, this in theory balances out the supply and demand equation by attracting more drivers to the area.

What about in live music?

For the biggest artists, limits on venue capacity mean there is often far more demand than supply.

In the US, dynamic pricing has long been the standard approach to this imbalance, with prices ratcheting up for the most in-demand shows. In the UK, artists have historically been more restrained, keeping ticket prices artificially low so that access is more about luck and dedication than the size of your wallet. However, in recent years dynamic pricing has become increasingly common.

How did dynamic pricing take off in the UK?

In 2018, Ticketmaster had its regular “primary” ticketing business but also owned two “secondary” ticketing websites, GetMeIn and Seatwave.

Secondary sites, which allow people to resell at any price, are overrun by professional touts, who can flip thousands of tickets for a huge profit. Amid public outcry over touting, Ticketmaster shut down GetMeIn and Seatwave, scoring a public relations victory.

Soon, fans started noticing the emergence of Ticketmaster Platinum, a controversial “premium” service that drip-fed higher-priced tickets into the market, after gigs were supposedly sold out. That year, Paul McCartney’s UK tour appeared to have sold out within minutes. But seats at the SSE Hydro in Glasgow, which had been on sale at £65, were later released via Platinum for more than £500.

Could artists stop dynamic pricing?

The decision ultimately rests with the artist, their managers and promoters. However, Ticketmaster is owned by Live Nation, a globe-spanning promotion and ticketing behemoth that is the dominant force in live music in most major economies. It has an incentive to advise the use of dynamic pricing because Ticketmaster takes a cut of the ticket price. The higher the price, the higher the cut.

Music industry sources say artists are often told that dynamic pricing deters touts from fleecing fans. In theory, the higher face-value price decreases the margin on offer for touts. However, Oasis tickets have also been dynamically priced in Ireland, where for-profit resale is illegal and secondary sites are not advertising tickets for shows at Croke Park”.

I disagree that it has to be like this. That there is no other way. It does very much seem to be down to the band. Supergrass recently announced that they are hitting the stage to celebrate thirty years of their debut album, I Should Coco, next year. When announcing the news, they took a dig at Oasis and their dynamic pricing controversy:

“Supergrass have announced a reunion tour to celebrate the 30th anniversary of their debut album.

The ten-date tour next year will be the first time the Oxford band, who split in 2010 but reunited in 2020, have ever played their debut album I Should Coco live in its entirety.

The album reached number one on the UK album charts on its release on 15 May 1995, and features tracks including Alright and Caught by the Fuzz.

Announcing the tour, the band took aim at fellow Britpop icons Oasis and the recent furore surrounding ticket sales for the Manchester-rockers' comeback shows.

"Supergrass return to perform their debut album live, in its entirety, for the first time plus a small selection of additional fan favourites," the band's announcement on Monday said.

"Dynamic pricing not included," they added, referring to a policy that saw the cost of some tickets to the upcoming Oasis gigs double due to high demand”.

 IN THIS PHOTO: Siupergrass in 1995

One can argue that there has always been imbalance when it comes to ticket pricing. Most major artists tour in big venues, so you can pay relatively little and be up high and not have a great view, or you can be at a better vantage point and pay more. Some artists charge for V.I.P. tickets and there has always been this issue with that discrepancy. Also, think about artists like Taylor Swift and the fact that some fans were charged $11,000 for a ticket. It is eye-watering amounts of money! It means only celebrities and the very wealthy can afford them. These expensive tickets might also be bought by fans who can’t afford it but are determined to see an artist. That fear of missing out can lead them to make risky decisions. If you are in the same venue and all get the same experience, then why is there such a huge gulf?! It is true that most major artists’ ticket princes are high. Attending live music should be more affordable though, when you take into consideration venues’ costs and other factors, sometimes it is unavoidable. With V.I.P. tickets, you sort of know what you are paying for, yet dynamic pricing seems to offer no luxuries or benefits. Essentially fans getting the same deal as others but having to pay so much more for it! It is frustrating because you can see bands like Supergrass and brilliant artists who charge fans far less. Make it much more affordable. I don’t think artists have their hands tied and they are being forced into a corner. They can have control regarding the types of venues they play and, essentially, the cost of tickets. Oasis were reacting with greed to demand. More concerned with money and profiting than ensuring that all their fans had a fair chance to come see them, this is also true of artists like Taylor Swift and Green Day.

The U.S. band have made headlines because they are also implementing dynamic pricing for upcoming gigs. Again, the rationale seems to be that these high-priced tickets – that seem to provide no benefit or real exclusivity that would justify such a steep mark-up – makes it harder for scalpers to benefit. However, fans can buy ordinary tickets and resell them and make a big profit. I don’t believe dynamic pricing safeguards fans from scalpers. There needs to be action and activation regarding this insane ticketing system and ensuring that fans are not ripped off. That is what is happening. Dress it how you like but it boils down to this: artists are gouging fans and hiding behind flimsy excuses and a clear sense of greed. The Guardian discussed the recent announcement that Green Day tickets for a future Sydney show are going for $500:

“Dynamic ticket pricing helps combat ticket scalpers, the company behind $500 Green Day tickets claims – but music industry insiders and consumer groups dispute that, with some concerned the controversial practice skews live events to the rich.

Dynamic pricing – when the cost of products rise and fall according to demand – is well established in Australia, from Uber’s surge prices to utilities and airline fares.

It’s increasingly prevalent in entertainment, with Australian fans of Pearl Jam and now Green Day paying variously inflated amounts depending on when they bought their concert tickets. The Australian Grand Prix and Australian Open are also onboard, with seats at the 2024 men’s final fetching between $2,000 and $6,000.

On Wednesday, it was possible to buy “in demand” tickets to Green Day’s Sydney show for $399.60 to $499.60. Set price tickets started at $217.16, despite being advertised at $135.60. Tickets for the band’s Melbourne and Gold Coast shows were slightly lower and fixed at set prices.

Both Ticketmaster and Ticketek defended the practice, telling Guardian Australia prices were set by artists and their teams. They also claimed demand-driven pricing mitigates the problem of ticket scalping, when tickets are bought – often by AI bots – and resold at inflated prices.

“Artists and their teams set their prices and ticketing strategy. Ticketmaster helps execute,” a Ticketmaster spokesperson said. Cameron Hoy, the COO and head of global ticketing at TEG and Ticketek, said dynamic pricing “is directed from the artist and or promoter”.

Some artists have pushed back. The Cure labelled the practice “greedy”, while Taylor Swift chose set prices for her Australian shows and dynamic prices for other legs of her Eras world tour. Green Day’s management was contacted for comment.

In February, Michael Rapino, the president and CEO of Ticketmaster’s owner, Live Nation, told the company’s quarterly earnings meeting the “best sales pitch” for dynamic pricing – which he planned to roll out around the world – was that it ate into scalpers’ earnings.

Jarni Blakkarly of consumer rights group Choice has been investigating the “concerning” impacts of the trend that began in the US. He questioned Rapino’s theory, given Australian state and territory laws prevent resale values more than 10% above the original ticket sale value.

“If everyone purchased their tickets at different prices, how will the consumer know the price they are paying is 10% above the sale price?” he said. “I think dynamic pricing would make it harder to stop ticket scalping.”

Taylor Swift chose set prices for her Australian shows and dynamic prices for other legs of her Eras world tour. Photograph: Joel Carrett/AAP

Dion Brant, the CEO of Frontier Touring, which is promoting the tours of Luke Combs, Supergrass and Primal Scream, said about half a dozen of Frontier’s visiting artists, including Paul McCartney, have chosen to apportion a small number of dynamically priced “platinum” tickets as an anti-scalping measure.

Selling a small percentage of tickets dynamically “makes sense” because it caters to the portion of the market willing to pay more for guaranteed decent seats and the money goes to the artist rather than to “abhorrent” scalpers, he said.

But the practice is more questionable when a large portion of tickets is priced according to demand, he said.

“This notion of trying to drive demand to such a point where people will pay anything, or confuse them to such a point where they don’t know what the real price is … we’re really uncomfortable with and we look to avoid at any cost,” he said.

The practice is here to stay, said Blakkarly, who has seen dynamic pricing in US supermarkets forcing customers to pay more for chilled drinks on a hot day. 

PHOTO CREDIT: Vishnu R Nair/Pexels

“There are no laws against it but there’s a valid discussion to be had about whether it should even be allowed in Australia,” he said, with the increasingly widespread practice raising “valid” questions around equity and ethics.

“At a minimum, companies need to be really open and transparent about how they are pricing tickets,” he said. “It really comes down to what consumers are willing to put up with.”

One of those was Green Day fan Madison Closter, who paid $280 for general admission to the “golden circle” standing-only section at the band’s Gold Coast show. The ticket was not dynamically priced but she said she was repeatedly unable to buy the tickets in her cart due to being told there was “no seating available for purchase”.

“This created a false sense of scarcity when purchasing,” she said.

“It is getting to the point where it is not viable for a lot of people to go to big concerts.”

Ticketek and Ticketmaster both said dynamic pricing works both ways, delivering discounted prices when demand is low – but Blakkarly said he had yet to witness that in practice.

“Do we really want to make a society where only the mega-rich can afford to go to a concert?” he said.

“There needs to be a broader public discussion about ticketing and whether live events should be more accessible to people from an equity perspective”.

It is madness that we should be discussing dynamic pricing! Rather than fans being priced out and others having to pay through the nose, there does need to be a bigger movement and campaign to ensure ticket prices remain affordable. So many gigs these days have standard tickets at such a stupidly high price! It can’t be only about the venue costs. There is an element of exploitation from artists. Plenty have provide you can play bigger spaces but keep the prices low. If scalpers and A.I. is a big threat then that needs to be tackled as soon as possible. From Oasis to Green Day, we are seeing exorbitant tickets prices overshadow the music. Venues are struggling and live music is facing a really rough patch. Seeing live music is so essential and a wonderful moment! Whilst dynamic pricing seem to be something bigger artists are implementing, it is still happening too often. Live music should not be reserved for the wealthy. Even your ordinary seats should be kept as low as possible as fans also have to factor in the cost of travel and so many other things. A gig can really stack up when it comes to cost! Dynamic pricing will put people off. It doesn’t need to be this way. We all hope we live to see the day when we say to dynamic pricing…

GOOD riddance.

FEATURE: The Wild Ones: Suede’s Dog Man Star at Thirty

FEATURE:

 

 

The Wild Ones

Suede’s Dog Man Star at Thirty

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ON 10th October…

 PHOTO CREDIT: Kevin Cummins

Suede’s Dog Man Star turns thirty. Although, in 1994, Suede’s second studio album was not as revered and celebrated as their eponymous debut, in years since it has been seen as a masterpiece. One of the best albums of that decade. A real classic that boasts some of their best work. If their debut was inspired by artists like David Bowie, there is a more varied and eclectic palette that goes into the sound of Dog Man Star. Reaching number three in the U.K., I want to celebrate thirty years of a tremendous album that I can feel inspiring artists to this date. Prior to getting to a couple of reviews for Dog Man Star, there are some features that explore the album in greater depth. On its twenty-fifth anniversary in 2019, The Quietus investigated Dog Man Star around the release of an anniversary reissue. There will be a thirtieth anniversary reissue arriving on 2nd October:

“From the moment Brett Anderson and Bernard Butler started to hone their songcraft, the seeds of Suede’s second album, Dog Man Star were being sown. "It was always an album we knew we could make," say Anderson now. Early compositions like ‘Pantomime Horse’ and ‘The Drowners’ B-side ‘To The Birds’ are supremely confident structures, swelling to operatic climaxes, shifting gears like mini-symphonies. On ‘Where The Pigs Don’t Fly’, the stop-start intro has an almost regal sense of presence. This was music with poise and purpose, music that demanded to be heard by a band that demanded to be seen. Onstage and in song, the pair had forged an almost telepathic, brotherly bond. According to Butler’s recollections in John Harris’ The Last Party, they smoked the same cigarettes, dressed identically, the concerned Butler would accompany Anderson home on the tube.

In July 1993, three months after the release of their debut album, Suede teamed up with Derek Jarman for an AIDS benefit at the Clapham Grand. The show was their most lavish spectacle yet, augmented by cellists, piano and guest singers Chrissie Hynde and Siouxsie Sioux. Behind the band, the director’s Super 8 images flickered. Jarman had made visuals for Suede’s forebears, The Smiths and the Pet Shop Boys (both of them included, along with The Commotions on the Melody Maker ad Butler originally responded to). This wasn’t a gig. It was an event, the gesture a band entering an imperial phase would make. Their next release would be an eight-and-a-half-minute stand-alone single, ‘Stay Together’, that came wrapped in a gatefold sleeve. But just as Suede were ascending to that rarefied realm where commercial success keeps the company of ‘high art’, they started to fall apart…

Brett Anderson is hedonistically lapping up the shirt-shredding adoration that Suede are receiving in Britain and beyond. Like bassist Mat Osman and drummer Simon Gilbert, he is enjoying success. Anderson has gone from taking the occasional E and smoking the odd spliff to being quite a serious user. Crucially he sees a link between drugs and his songwriting. Bernard Butler, on the other hand, is panic-stricken, fearful of fame, irritated by the music biz treadmill and the clichéd rock star excesses his bandmates are indulging in. He’s also increasingly confused by the Brett Anderson character he reads about in Suede’s press.

As Suede tour the world, Anderson and Butler’s ideas for the band get bigger, just like the gap between them. Anderson hears Buddhist monks chanting in a Kyoto temple and decides he wants to summon a similar hypnotic sound to raise the curtain on Suede’s second album. Butler road tests new material at soundchecks, the booming sound of the riff and the drums fills empty halls. It’s a brutal beefy thud that he wants to recreate on the next Suede album. A visceral thump to the punch-bag of Suede’s public image, a fatal blow delivered to the debut’s top-heavy sound. It’s a raw, live noise that will tear through quiet songs and overdub-rich textures. Outside of the studio, those empty halls are the only places that will hear Butler play Suede’s new song.

As Suede embark on a second US tour in September 1993, tragedy strikes. Butler’s father passes away. He flies home for the funeral and then swiftly, insanely, returns to New York on a tour that, all will later agree, should be cancelled. Grief-stricken and missing the domestic anchor of his girlfriend, he moves further away from his bandmates. Too young, too drug-addled and too English, Anderson fears that trying to console Butler will only further damage their fragile relationship. Haunted by his own recent loss of his mother, he looks away. Butler travels with the road crew, gets stoned and composes continuously. Unbeknown to him, Anderson is writing furiously too, and onstage, Anderson and Butler are increasingly competitive. In New York, their last US gig is such a ferocious display of one-upmanship that only one record company representative dares approach them backstage.

Meanwhile back in London, Britpop has been gathering momentum since Anderson appeared on that Select cover superimposed onto a Union Jack with a not-so-graceful ‘Yanks Go Home’ headline. Suede’s touring has opened them up to broader vistas, from Kyoto’s chanting monks to Tinseltown’s casting couch atrocities. When their arch rivals Blur tour America, it concentrates their focus on a ‘British image’ (the mid-60s US blacklisting of heroes The Kinks triggered a similar Anglo-centric shift). Former Suede member Justine Frischmann has formed a new band, Elastica. ‘Car Song’ drives home the difference between her new music and that of her old band. An angular, perky two-and-a-half-minute backseat romp, it contrasts starkly with ‘She’s Not Dead’s languid foreplay, it’s motor tragedy romance.

Dog Man Star will be the most cinematic of records, peopled with James Dean, titles borrowed from Brando flicks, it even uses Marilyn as a Venus/Aphrodite archetype on ‘Heroine’. Butler’s music will be his most visual yet, "a song and a soundtrack", as Buller observed. Hollywood will worm its way into the album in the most random way. Both Anderson and Butler play movies in the studio, a constant backdrop, and a chance switching of a TV channel at the end of ‘The Asphalt World’ reveals the voice of Lauren Bacall in Woman’s World, a 1954 Technicolor drama.

Such heartstring tugs, such grand gestures reflect a band unafraid to think big. As weird as Anderson’s lyrical ideas are getting there’s also the desire, the ambition to write an American number one, to pen that evergreen anthem that sweeps the airwaves of daytime radio, a big broad stroke of genius that buries itself deep into the hearts of the kind of people he writes about. A song for lovers to marry to, a song to transport the housewife away from the drudgery of the everyday. It’s a song he always tries to write. One day he succeeds. After he writes the top line and lyric to ‘The Wild Ones’ he walks around Highgate in a gleeful daze. The only problem is that Butler wants to drag it from the realm of the morning show and into the outer limits with an extended outro that sticks Anderson through a Leslie cabinet.

Anderson’s new writing is rife with contradiction, just as Butler’s music zig-zags between euphoria and woe. The push of his acid-expanding imagination and of seeing new continents merges with the pull of old Suede themes and Anderson’s past, of suburban graves and housewives waiting by windows. No matter how far through America and Europe ‘Introducing The Band’ travels or how "far over Africa" and "endless Asia" ‘The Power’ glides, there is that inescapable impact of the suburbs on the English psyche. "Don’t take me back to the past," Anderson had begged at the end of ‘Stay Together’s rant, but it is forever present on Dog Man Star”.

I am moving on to a feature from GQ. They also looked at Dog Man Star on its twenty-fifth anniversary. I remember the album coming out in October 1994 and how it sat alongside other albums from the year. At a time of Britpop and other stands, Suede definitely stood out. They crafted an album that stands alongside the very best and most important of the 1990s:

“Second albums are often a disaster because bands have nothing left to say. If anything, Suede had too much left to say when they recorded theirs between March and July 1994. This difficult second album was difficult to make, difficult to sell and difficult for some to listen to. When it was released that winter, Dog Man Star caused a mixture of awe, confusion and sniggering. But the 25 years since have been kind to this imperfect masterpiece. It is the art of falling apart.

“It was our imperial phase,” Anderson tells me. “Everything we were writing felt like gold dust. But we knew people were listening and with that comes hubris.”

It was more ambitious but more masochistic than anything their contemporaries could conceive, let alone pull off. Suede didn’t quite pull it off themselves and yet Dog Man Star remains a remarkable achievement.

“The first album started Britpop but we didn’t get sucked into that cavalcade of nonsense and we wanted to go somewhere else,” says Anderson. “We saw other bands jumping on the British bandwagon and Dog Man Star was a reaction to that.”

“Dog Man Star fails quite a lot,” says bassist and founding member Mat Osman, “but it falls in a really interesting place. It’s a pretentious record, in the sense it’s reaching for something beyond its grasp. There’s something quite charming about that.”

The original version of Suede was formed in 1988 after Anderson and Osman met Justine Frischmann at University College London. Butler, an Afghan hound to Anderson’s poodle, joined the then Camden Town scenesters a year later after answering an advert in the NME, gradually replacing Anderson’s then-girlfriend Frischmann, who left in 1991 to date Damon Albarn and eventually form Elastica. Drummer Simon Gilbert had joined a year earlier at the recommendation of Ricky Gervais, of all people, who was their pretend manager for a few months.

Butler’s writing and playing has a uniquely dynamic melodrama and a sense of theatre that dovetailed with his partner’s. Suddenly labels were clamouring for a signature. Their first trio of hits on Nude and the debut album (which won the Mercury Music Prize in 1993) suggested Suede’s rise to national and then global dominance was inevitable. The grime of the Suede universe was in balance with a sense of seedy charisma that had been missing from British music since the Seventies. “Those early records were very on-the-cheap sexual glamour,” says Maconie. “It’s more about snogging than actual sex. Illicit, rushed, cramped and finding the glamour in that.”

“I look back on those days – until things really fell apart – with great pleasure,” says Osman. “It’s an amazing feeling, like you’re in the eye of the storm. To walk out into the streets and feel like this world was yours. We had money. We were young. With Dog Man Star it’s easy to think of it as this dank thing, but there are moments of pure joy in it.”

The volatility that powered Anderson and Butler’s collaboration soon turned into something as likely to destroy as to create. In the gap between the hype of Suede and the near collapse of Dog Man Star, the band did what successful bands do, although by the time of their biggest hit “Stay Together”, in February 1994, Butler, it seemed, wanted to resist the inexorable rush to debauchery. “You can justify drugs by saying you are trying to expand your ideas,” says Anderson. “We lived a pretty dissolute lifestyle. It was a mad blur of consumption. In between moments of hedonism we’d stumble into the studio and write songs and go on tour and I don’t know how we managed to get anything done. Every day was crazy.”

The mood of Dog Man Star changes so acutely from song to song it’s hard to get a feel for it at first, but eventually a broader narrative emerges in which each story complements the next. “Bringing ‘We Are The Pigs’ out as the first single may have been commercial suicide, but it’s still my favourite,” says Maconie. “It had everything about Suede distilled into that four minutes. Some of the reviews of Dog Man Star used the word pretentious, which makes me think, ‘Great.’ By and large, when a rock critic calls something pretentious it means it’s interesting.”

“The Wild Ones” is Anderson’s sweetheart song and it’s the epitome of his and Butler’s ability to communicate a kind of elated melancholy, with a chorus that conveys as much joy as pain. “‘The Wild Ones’ is pure romantic pop,” says Anderson. “It’s the most uplifting thing we ever did.”

After three months of barely contained animosity, the one-in, one-out arrangement became unsustainable and Butler quit before the album was completed. “I didn’t have the diplomatic skills to deliver what I needed to do,” said Butler, now a successful producer. “I’m full of apologies now.”

Session guitarists were brought in to finish “The Power”, a rousing sing-a-long about breaking free, Anderson’s most beloved theme. Now, Buller indulged the band in Butler’s absence. Some of the extended outros were cut. Brass and strings were added. A tap dancer was hired to record a percussion track. A zither was recorded and abandoned when they realised the zither player couldn’t play the zither. London’s Philharmonia Orchestra was enlisted for the last song. Just the usual rock’n’roll breakdown stuff.

“It was a strange period after Bernard left,” says Anderson. “There was a real sense of relief. I don’t mean to be catty but it had been very unpleasant for a long time and it felt like a weight had lifted. We had a few days in the studio when there was a weird sense of release. But then we suddenly realised we had work to do and we thought, ‘What the fuck are we going to do now?’.

I will end with a couple of reviews. I want to start with one from AllMusic. For an album that was recorded during a turbulent and trouble time for Suede, what resulted is something surprisingly cohesive and consistent. It is a credit to the band that they managed to write such affecting and timeless songs whilst their relationship was going through such strain:

“Instead of following through on the Bowie-esque glam stomps of their debut, Suede concentrated on their darker, more melodramatic tendencies on their ambitious second album, Dog Man Star. By all accounts, the recording of Dog Man Star was plagued with difficulties -- Brett Anderson wrote the lyrics in a druggy haze while sequestered in a secluded Victorian mansion, while Bernard Butler left before the album was completed -- which makes its singular vision all the more remarkable. Lacking any rocker on the level of "The Drowners" or "Metal Mickey" -- only the crunching "This Hollywood Life" comes close -- Dog Man Star is a self-indulgent and pretentious album of dark, string-drenched epics. But Suede are one of the few bands who wear pretensions well, and after a few listens, the album becomes thoroughly compelling. Nearly every song on the record is hazy, feverish, and heartbroken, and even the rockers have an insular, paranoid tenor that heightens the album's melancholy. The whole record would have collapsed underneath its own intentions if Butler's compositional skills weren't so subtly nuanced and if Anderson's grandiose poetry wasn't so strangely affecting. As it stands, Dog Man Star is a strangely seductive record, filled with remarkable musical peaks, from the Bowie-esque stomp of "New Generation" to the stately ballads "The Wild Ones" and "Still Life," which are both reminiscent of Scott Walker. And while Suede may choose to wear their influences on their sleeve, they synthesize them in a totally original way, making Dog Man Star a singularly tragic and romantic album”.

I am going to end with a review from the BBC. The more I read about and discover what went on during the recording of Dog Man Star, the more impressive the album sounds. Such a monumental release from Suede. It is sad that their central songwriting duo were fractured. Some might say that this mood improved the album or added something special:

“After the party – the hangover: One year on from the louche-but-rocking debut, Suede had begun to irrevocably fracture at their very core. Luckily, out of such travails are great works of art born.

By this point the chemistry (in all senses) was becoming a little strained. Retreating into a drug-assisted solitude, Brett Anderson’s lyrics were less concerned with the politics of modern love and more with the effects of the morning after. Solitude, paranoia and self-loathing were the themes here. When he sings ‘If you stay we’ll be the wild ones…’ it’s with a quiet desperation that’s clinging to a lifestyle that’s gone horribly wrong.

The downbeat mood pervades everything here. Even on peppier rockers like “The Hollywood Life” or “New Generation” the guitars of Bernard Butler here sound more spiteful, suffused with a vicious metallic edge. It was here that they formerly parted from the Britpop pack as well (‘I don’t care for the UK tonight’ sings Brett on “Black And Blue”).

At the heart of this album is the real-life drama of Anderson’s and Butler’s increasing alienation. Before the album had even been mixed the pair, once touted as a Lennon and McCartney for the post-E generation, had split. Butler subsequently told of how he turned up to the studio one day to find all his equipment outside the locked door.

Yet, while Dog Man Star stands as a testament to the destructive power of thrill-seeking love and ego-bloating drugs it remains a far deeper and sonically adventurous ride than its predecessor. There’s still a huge dollop of Scott Walker-meets-Bowie-in-the-streets-of-Soho-at-5-in-the-morning archness that can grate. And Anderson’s melodrama can be slightly over-egged on tracks like “The 2 Of Us”, yet with its reverb-drenched lushness and fabulously melancholy audio verite ambience (virtually every track is prefaced by or marbled with some low-key moodiness that recalls Talk Talk’s golden period) it’s an album that continues to fascinate and reward: It’s possibly their least dated work.

While the band struggled heroically (and succeeded) to consolidate their success after Butler’s departure the legend of the band’s lost potential really stems from Dog Man Star. Never had misery sounded so alluring, reaching out to all the lonely urbanites that ever woke up alone. For this alone it remains timeless”.

Turning thirty on 10th October, the stunning Dog Man Star was a real moment of crisis for Suede. Some critics in 1994 felt Dog Man Star was out of step with what was being released that year. Something pretentious or weird. Luckily, Dog Man Star is now seen as one of the very best albums ever. You can even hear the influence of the album on bands like Radiohead and Pulp. Adding a darker edge to their Rock template. Such a legacy and stature, Dog Man Star still feels so important and original…

THIRTY years on.

FEATURE: The Ledge: Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk at Forty-Five

FEATURE:

 

 

The Ledge

Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk at Forty-Five

_________

A very important album…

PHOTO CREDIT: Norman Seeff

is coming up to its forty-fifth anniversary. Though it had to follow the mighty Rumours of 1977, Tusk is still a superb album in its own right. It is interesting considering albums that follow classics. The pressure and expectation and how artists respond to that. The twelfth from Fleetwood Mac, the double album came out on 12th October, 1979. Ahead of its forty-fifth anniversary, I wanted to celebrate a very interesting and incredible album from the U.S./U.K. band. Rumours arrived at a time when the group were going through turbulent times. Relationships and marriages ending. Tension in the studio. What did result from that time is an undoubted masterpiece. Many consider Tusk to be a lesser follow-up. It is a more experimental album. Lindsey Buckingham exerting more control in terms of the sonic direction and production. There are many gems and standout tracks from the album. Sara, Think About Me and its mesmeric title track. The production on Tusk is especially notable and fine. I guess there was a certain degree of a blank cheque after the success of Rumours. Tusk’s costs were initially estimated to be about $1 million. It was later revealed that the true figure was about $1.4 million - making it the most expensive Rock album recorded to that date. Critics inevitably compared Tusk to Rumours. Rumours sold over ten millions copes and was lauded by critics, whereas Tusk was not as well received by critics and sold four million copies. However, Tusk is another classic from Fleetwood Mac. I want to share some reviews and features about Tusk. Its forty-fifth anniversary is very soon, so it is a perfect time to celebrate it.

Starting out with a feature from The Ringer. They marked forty years of the mighty Tusk. It is a fascinating feature that I would compel people to read in full. It tells a lot of the story behind Tusk and the impact of the album. Forty-five years later and the layers and contours of Tusk are still revealing themselves. Such an important period in Fleetwood Mac’s history:

“An underappreciated aftershock of punk’s first wave is the kick in the ass it gave to some of the previous generations’ heroes, pushing some of those “dinosaur bands” to make their most adventurous music in years. Punk dared the Stones to make 1978’s Some Girls, their best and most brash record since Exile on Main St. It’s also the inspiration for some of the great Buckingham compositions on Tusk, from the taut, sneering “What Makes You Think You’re the One” to the haunting, oddly dissonant last-call dirge “That’s All for Everyone.” Buckingham was constantly experimenting in Studio D, searching for undiscovered tones and textures: He got the grumbling, blown-out sound of excitable punk ditty “The Ledge” by tuning his guitar down to sound like a bass. (“It sounds to me like it was put in a cement mixer and almost spat out,” he later said, proudly.) “I remember Lindsey used to make such a horrible sound,” the album’s coproducer, Ken Caillat, said in Ryan Reed’s book Fleetwood Mac FAQ. “He would physically make me distort the guitar so that it sounded like fingernails scraping across a chalkboard. I remember when he was recording ‘Not That Funny,’ he insisted he wanted a really weird-sounding vocal, so he made us tape a microphone to a tile floor, and he was doing a push-up over the microphone, singing, ’Not—that—funny—is it?!’ Anything to make it weirder was better on his songs.”

As a counterbalance to Buckingham’s punk outbursts, Tusk showcases some of McVie’s most straight-forwardly lovely compositions: opener “Over & Over” sets a rose-colored tone, while the understated “Never Make Me Cry” is a perennial tear-jerker. Perhaps the most Rumours-reminiscent cut is McVie’s rousing “Think About Me”—one of Tusk’s few full-band jams. Tusk wouldn’t have confounded listeners if even half its songs sounded like this, but restless shape-shifting was also a consistent part of Fleetwood Mac’s ethos, even from the Peter Green days. “They had been a blues band, then a jam band, then a rock band, then a soft rock supernova,” Davis writes. “The Rumours groove had to be part of a progressive continuum, not the endgame.”

One of the most acrimonious fights during Rumours was over the exclusion of Nicks’s masterpiece “Silver Springs.” The band had to make some cuts to keep Rumours confined to a single LP, and when it came time for the final sequencing, the languorous, slow-tempo-ed “Springs” was first on the chopping block. “I started to scream bloody murder and probably said every horribly mean thing you could possibly say to another human being and walked back in the studio and completely flipped out,” Nicks said years later, recalling the conversation with Fleetwood when she first learned the song’s fate.

She got her revenge on Tusk. While Buckingham often approaches songwriting like a code to be cracked (“I’ve learned more about the mathematics of songwriting—how to fit pieces together, line length, timing chords and melodies,” he said around the time of Tusk’s release), Stevie’s process was more intuitive, her songs less rigorously structured. She thrived in open space and sprawl, something Tusk generously supplied. Her songs on the record are loose, unhurried, and exploratory, from the poignant ballad “Storm” to the meditative confessional “Beautiful Child.” The bluesy rocker “Angel” showcases a gravely, newly mature tone of Nicks’s voice that she’d explore further on Bella Donna, while the fan-favorite “Sisters of the Moon” furthered her witchy self-mythology: “A black widow spider makes / More sound than she,” Nicks sang, “and black moons in those eyes of hers / Made more sense to me.”

Buckingham was, more than anyone, the sonic mastermind behind Tusk. But the very fabric of Tusk is also variety, collaboration, and bricolage—an alchemy he never could have achieved alone. If Rumours was the result of a handful of passionate, often-inebriated people standing elbow-to-elbow in a too-small room, Tusk is the sound of them stomping into their respective corners. To love Fleetwood Mac is to marvel at the beautiful absurdity that these five very different people were ever in a band together, let alone a band whose songs could hang together so well. In this sense, the improbably cohesive Tusk just might be their defining record.

Maybe it was just ahead of its time. Tusk’s double-album breadth might have stunted its commercial prospects in 1979—the 2XLP retailed for $16.98, around $50 adjusted for inflation—but in the more-is-more logic of the streaming era, it seems downright normal. (Drake’s mammoth-selling 2018 album Scorpion, for one example, is 15 minutes longer than Tusk.) Forty years later, it remains the blueprint for what comes after astounding commercial success, if an artist is too itchy and creative to simply rest on their laurels. Its forward-thinking ethos has kept it fresh all this time. “Tusk is not going to sound dated in five or 10 years,” the writer Blair Jackson predicted all the way back in 1981, “and I would be willing to bet that a lot more people will slowly be convinced of the album’s greatness than will forget all about it.” You can say that again”.

I will move on to another fortieth anniversary feature. This one is from Albumism. Whereas excess and dislocation seemed to define Rumours, it is Lindsey Buckingham’s obsessiveness and drive that maybe defines Tusk. Alongside Stevie Nicks, Mick Fleetwood, Christine and John McVie, the band created an album that I don’t think should ever be compared negatively to Rumours. It is a compelling double album with very few weak moments:

“Rumours’ massive success has been extensively documented and most of us are well aware of how it spawned countless critical and commercial plaudits, chart peaks, millions upon millions of units shifted, sold-out tours, and the coveted Album of the Year prize at the 1978 GRAMMY Awards. Indeed, Rumours ensured that Mick Fleetwood, Nicks, Buckingham, and the McVies were firmly entrenched in the rock & roll high life.

With the band’s newfound global superstardom came substantial freedom, influence and power. Which was invariably followed by exorbitance in its various forms. Much has been made of the drugs, financial recklessness, and romantic shenanigans that plagued the band during and after the recording of Rumours. But this penchant for excess would also manifest creatively, as the band embarked upon the harrowing task of recording the follow-up to their landmark LP.

More accurately, this penchant for creative excess was fueled by Buckingham’s obsessive ambition in conceiving of and executing the vision for Tusk. Stubbornly determined to differentiate Tusk’s musical identity and resist the temptation of a Rumours rehash, Buckingham’s adventurousness was not well-received by his bandmates initially. As a result, he became more protective and territorial about the album’s gestation. “When it came time to go into the studio, I just had to stick my neck out,” he recalled to Rolling Stone in 1980. “I told Mick that I wanted to put a machine in my house, to work on my things there. I had to pursue things that were in my head, and not be intimidated into thinking they were the wrong things to do.”

While McVie and Nicks stuck closer to their signature songwriting approach, Buckingham boldly branched out in various ways, experimenting with leftfield sounds, non-sequitur lyrics, and varied vocal approaches. Unveiled in September 1979 as the lead single and title track from the then-forthcoming album, and featuring unconventional instrumental contributions courtesy of Buckingham banging on a Kleenex box and Fleetwood slapping lamb chops (yes, you read that right), “Tusk” represents “the embodiment of the spirit of the album,” according to Buckingham, as quoted in Tusk’s deluxe edition liner notes. Sounding far removed from any song that the group had recorded up to that point, “Tusk” is driven by Fleetwood’s pounding percussion juxtaposed with Buckingham’s monotone, séance-like refrains which ultimately segue into a manic frenzy of a war-like chant punctuated by the big, boisterous brass of the USC marching band recorded at Dodger Stadium. It’s a hefty hodge-podge of a song, but it’s also instantly memorable.

Perhaps not surprisingly, amongst the four official A-sides that Warner Bros. released from the album in the US, “Tusk” was the lone Buckingham-led entry. Granted, his endearing ode to romantic innocence “Save a Place for Me, his self-proclaimed “rockabilly on acid” trip “That’s Enough For Me,” and the Charlie Watts influenced “Walk A Thin Line” were all designated as B-sides stateside, while his Fred Schneider inspired new wave funk foray “Not That Funny” surfaced abroad in the UK.

Buckingham’s songs unabashedly defied the convention of radio-friendly construction. Securing airplay was never the goal for him here, which freed him up to focus his energy toward stretching his sound in newfound ways. His liberated approach was evidenced early in the album’s sequencing with the idiosyncratic instrumentation of the second track, the two-minute stomper “The Ledge,” which he confessed was driven by his interest in “trying to find things that were off the radar” and intentionally playing notes that were “a little incorrect.”

“We didn't really like [Tusk],” McVie confided to The Guardian in 2013. “We just kind of went ‘okaaay.’ [Eyeroll] Because it was so different from Rumours. Deliberately so. In hindsight, I do like that record, but at the time me and Stevie would be like, ‘What the hell is he doing in the toilet playing an empty Kleenex box for a drum?’”

Suffice to say that while her bandmate was fixated on pushing the sonic envelope with Tusk, McVie was just fine with sticking to her tried and true script of crafting emotive, unembellished songs of love and longing. A somewhat stark contrast to the noticeably more uptempo opening tracks of its two precursors (Buckingham’s “Monday Morning” from 1975’s Fleetwood Mac and “Second Hand News” from Rumours), Tusk opens with McVie’s laid-back, countrified torch song “Over & Over,” as she summons her lover—presumably her then-boyfriend Dennis Wilson—to do right by her fragile heart. A sleeper highlight for me, the multi-layered “Brown Eyes” features an airy groove with intricate vocal dubbing, not to mention uncredited guitarwork from Fleetwood Mac founder Peter Green. Amidst her other subdued offerings (“Never Forget,” “Never Make Me Cry,” “Honey Hi”), McVie recaptures the pep in her sonic step, harking back to her Rumours gem “You Make Loving Fun” with the groove-laden love song and third single “Think About Me.”

Released on October 12, 1979, two days after the band were awarded a coveted star on Hollywood’s hallowed Walk of Fame, Tusk’s subsequent story reinforced the extent to which Rumours proved to be both a blessing for the band (not to mention a financial windfall for Warner Bros.) and a curse due to the sky-high expectations that it set for repeated success. In discussing the marketing campaign that Warner Bros. set in motion to support the album, Shelly Cooper, then the label’s director of advertising, once remarked, “I wouldn't hesitate to say that we'll be spending considerable amounts for a long time to come.”

Tusk went on to sell four million copies, an impressive amount by today’s standards (or any standards for that matter), but fell well short of Rumours’ eight-figure haul, leading Warner Bros. executives and industry pundits to deem it a disappointment. A few valid theories might help to explain why Tusk undersold relative to expectations, including its higher price point as a double-album, its dearth of radio-ready fare, and the mixed critical reception that greeted it due to its perceived lack of cohesion. Fleetwood has even posited that sales were undermined from the get-go when radio stations affiliated with the long-since-defunct broadcasting conglomerate RKO “leaked” Tusk by playing it in its entirety prior to its official release, offering listeners the opportunity to record the album for free.

Despite the initial (and largely misguided) scrutiny by various parties, Tusk has thankfully weathered the criticism rather well in the 40 years since its arrival. “I think everyone was looking for Rumours 2 … So yes, it did have an alienating quality to it in the moment,” Buckingham admitted during a 2011 Gothamist interview. “But then, you cut to a few years later when you could be more objective about it, and as tastes change and evolve and as a younger generation gets a hold of things, they see them not only for what they are musically but possibly for why they were made in context. They can even appreciate the fact that there was someone out there who was trying to undermine the idea of repeating the formula of the brand. There’s a certain kind of idealism attached to Tusk as a subtext to the music, and I think people now can respond not only to how colorful and experimental it is, but also why it was made.”

Critical over-analysis be damned, Tusk remains an immersive and fascinating listen, imperative for an expanded understanding and appreciation of the band’s musical history. “We'll never forget tonight / It will be alright,” McVie sings in the album’s concluding lines, and the unforgettable Tusk certainly sounds quite alright four decades on”.

I am going to end with a couple of reviews. Apologies for any repetition in terms of story and detail. It is important to frame the time in which Tusk was recorded and released. How it was affected by the culture around it and how it contributed. Pitchfork reviewed Tusk in 2019. Whereas love broke and dissipated during Rumours, what is the inspiration and focus for the follow-up? It seems work and channelling that focus and energy into something creative guided a lot of Tusk’s process:

“The autumn of 1979 was, by any reasonable accounting, a challenging time to be alive. The world felt tenuous, transitional: panicked families were fleeing East Germany via hot air balloon, China was restricting couples to one child each, fifty-two Americans were barred inside the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, pending release of the Shah. It was also the year of Tusk, the album in which Fleetwood Mac, a soft-rock band second only to the Eagles in their embodiment of easy 1970s gloss, completely lost their minds. It was the band’s twelfth album, though only its third with the now-iconic lineup of guitarist Lindsey Buckingham, drummer Mick Fleetwood, bassist John McVie, keyboardist Christine McVie, and singer Stevie Nicks, and it reflected a personal tumult so claustrophobic and intense it felt global in scale—an after-the-fall re-telling of catastrophic heartache and its endless reverberations.

By this time, Fleetwood Mac was widely beloved for its melodic, harmonized jams, which evoked Laurel Canyon, curtains of strung beads, turquoise jewelry, pricey incense, scarves flung over floor lamps, and brandy poured into a nice glass. Despite their smooth, murmuring sound, few of the band’s records pull punches emotionally, but even compared to a cry of pain like “The Chain,” Tusk is singular. It is pocked with heartbreak, resignation, lust, hope, and deep hurt. It poses unanswerable questions. It reckons with the past, and what that past means for a future. It invariably makes some people want to lock their door, excavate half a joint from the recesses of their couch cushions, and spend the next fourteen hours contemplating the Buckingham-Nicks union as one of the great failed loves of the twentieth century.

Just two years earlier, the band had released Rumours, a collection of pert and amiable love songs that sold over ten million copies and spent thirty-one weeks at the top of the Billboard 200 chart. Rumours is presently among the top ten best-selling albums in American history, and, as of 2009, has shipped more than forty million units worldwide. It was—it remains—an album owned by people who have only ever owned eleven albums.

Commercial success on that scale is, of course, a complicated thing to navigate; for Fleetwood Mac, it was presaged and then aggravated by outrageous amounts of cocaine and an awful lot of intra-band copulation. I don’t mean to be reductive about the group’s emotional dynamic, but I can’t think of another assemblage of five able-minded adults who created and survived such a preposterous tangle of romantic investments and divestments (to wit: Nicks and Buckingham, McVie and McVie, Nicks and Fleetwood, Fleetwood’s wife and former member Bob Weston, McVie and the lighting designer, and Fleetwood and Nicks’ then-married best friend—to cite just the handful of permutations known to the public).

By the time Tusk was released, the two primary relationships sustaining the band (Christine and John’s marriage, and Lindsey and Stevie’s long-standing romance) had fully dissolved, which seemed to qualify Fleetwood Mac, in some perverse way, to go on to become one of our best and bravest chroniclers of love’s horrifying tumult. Being tasked with singing backing vocals for a song written by your ex-lover, about you, months (and eventually years) after the relationship ruptured? Hold that in mind—just how excruciating that must’ve been. Then find a video of Buckingham and Nicks performing “Silver Springs” (a song written by Nicks about Buckingham, withheld from Rumours, and later released, either cruelly or keenly, as the B-side to the single “Go Your Own Way,” a song written by Buckingham about Nicks) and try not to lose your mind completely when, as if to narrate the precise mechanics of their break-up, Nicks announces: “I’ll begin not to love you… Tell myself you never loved me.”

It’s “Silver Springs,” more than any other track in the band’s pre-Tusk discography, that tells the story of how Buckingham and Nicks lost each other, and, ergo, the story of Tusk; performing the song live, they frequently end up locked in a kind of tense combat stance. When Nicks’ cool, steady voice begins to dissolve into something feral and nearly deranged (“Was I just a fool?” she finally hollers) she’ll often take steps toward him. He always meets her gaze, calmly, and with determination. Maybe they’re putting us all on, but there’s something in those moments that makes True Love—the preposterous, fairy-tale kind, the sort that never resolves itself, that can’t be outrun or eschewed, not ever, not after decades, not after a lifetime—seem entirely possible, even to the most hard-boiled cynics. I bring this up because it’s the only explanation I can think of as to how the band kept going, despite what must’ve seemed, to anyone watching, like a cataclysmic implosion. True Love doesn’t care if your relationship ends; it remains, it buoys you.

If Rumours was the band’s break-up record, Tusk covers arguably even more complicated ground: how to transform a romantic partnership into a purely creative one, while remaining mindful of all the perilous ways in which love nurtures art, and vice-versa. That the band did this at all, much less successfully, much less good-naturedly—in promotional photos for Tusk, Nicks is pictured resting her left hand disconcertingly close to a bulge in Buckingham’s blue jeans—is dumbfounding.

The result is a beautiful and terrifically strange album. From the outset, Buckingham was insistent that the band not churn out a sequel to Rumours. His was a defensive, contrarian pose: Let’s deliberately not recreate that colossal commercial and critical success; let's instead do something different, artier, less bulletproof, more experimental, more explicitly influenced by punk and new-wave, and less indebted to pop. Tusk contains twenty songs and is seventy-two minutes long. It retailed for $15.98 (or $52.88, in 2016 dollars). Its terrifically unattractive cover features a grainy, off-center photograph of a disembodied foot getting chomped on by a dog. The title is a euphemism for cock. Its sequencing is plainly insane, seesawing between two equally manic moods: “Everything is totally going to be fine!!!” and “This plane is going down and we’re all going to die!!!”

Tusk took thirteen months to make, and was the first record to amass production costs of over a million dollars. It was called self-indulgent, and it is. Legends abound regarding the details of its composition and recording. Nicks described their space in Studio D as having been adorned with “shrunken heads and leis and Polaroids and velvet pillows and saris and sitars and all kinds of wild and crazy instruments, and the tusks on the console, like living in an African burial ground.” Everyone agrees Buckingham was losing it a little—that he was chasing something (artistic greatness? avant-garde credibility?) and pursuing it wildly, haphazardly, like a crazed housecat stalking a black fly about the living room. Did he really have a drum set installed in his bathroom so he could play while on his toilet? (More reasonable minds have suggested he merely liked the acoustics in there.)

One solid argument against Tusk—though it could also be levied against Rumours—is that it lacks narrative coherence, in part because it features three songwriters (Nicks, Buckingham, and McVie), each working in their own distinct style. Still, while Nicks and McVie contributed some truly lovely tracks—“Sara,” “Beautiful Child,” “Think About Me”—the record clearly belongs to Buckingham, who wrote nearly half its songs, insisted upon its scope, and is its unquestionable spiritual center, the hamster on its wheel. The engineer Ken Caillat described Buckingham as “a maniac” during the sessions. He said it without equivocation. “The first day, I set the studio up as usual. Then he said, ‘Turn every knob 180 degrees from where it is now and see what happens.’ He’d tape microphones to the studio floor and get into a sort of push-up position to sing. Early on, he came in and he’d freaked out in the shower and cut off all his hair with nail scissors. He was stressed.” 

At one point, Buckingham insisted that the band rent out Dodgers Stadium, and arranged to have the 112-piece U.S.C. Marching Band back them on the title track (his bandmates went along with this; none of the group’s foundational romantic relationships were intact, but Tusk still couldn’t have been made by people who didn’t trust one another implicitly). “Why don’t you tell me what’s going on? Why don’t you tell me who’s on the phone?” Buckingham and Nicks chant, their voices paranoid. Buried somewhere in there is a riff that could have sold a zillion cassingles, had this been 1977. But it wasn’t.

Though Tusk’s most memorable tracks are also its strangest (like “The Ledge,” a manic, pitter-pattering kiss-off in which the band’s signature harmonies are overridden by a guitar that’s been tuned down and turned up), there are a handful of songs that harken back to Rumours’ rich palatability. “Save Me A Place” plays like an extension, at least lyrically, of “Go Your Own Way,” in which Buckingham begrudges his lover’s unwillingness to grab what he’s half-offering her. A lot of Buckingham’s lyrics from the late ‘70s seem to simultaneously admit trepidation and cast him as the aggrieved party; he seems, in an endearing way, oblivious to his own caveats, or how they might dissuade another person. “Guess I want to be alone, and I guess I need to be amazed/Save me a place, I'll come running if you love me today,” he sings on “Save Me A Place.” He later described the song as vulnerable. “None of us had the luxury of distance to get closure… It’s about a feeling that’s been laid off to one side and maybe not been fully dealt with, sadness and a sense of loss.” It captures the wildness of recovery: what happens when love dissipates, and you have to find a new thing to believe in? What if that thing is work?

Buckingham funneled all of his disorientation into these songs. Tusk is, more than anything else, a document of that feeling and that process—of bewilderment turning into ambition writ large. What happens when a complicated, wounded person grows exhausted and unimpressed by the commercial medium he took to naturally, maybe even instinctively, but no longer believes is important or curative? It’s not hard to imagine the voice of Buckingham’s internal foil during these sessions, whispering seedily, naysaying each new melody, pushing for more: “This is fine, but it’s not Art.” I don’t know anyone who cares about making things who hasn’t at some point lobbed the exact same challenge at themselves: Can’t you do better? Hasn’t someone done this before? Haven’t you done this before? You get the sense of a broken-down person trying to rebuild himself. He is diligent about getting the architecture right.

All of which makes “I Know I’m Not Wrong”—the first song the band started recording for Tusk, and the last one to be finished – even more poignant. When Tusk was reissued, in 2015, the expanded release included six (!) different “I Know I’m Not Wrong” demos, all recorded by Buckingham in his home studio. The chorus is a declaration of intention, of confidence: “Don't blame me/Please be strong/I know I'm not wrong.” It’s not a thing a person gets to say very often. But Tusk isn’t a record that gets made more than once”.

I will wrap up in a bit. Rolling Stone reviewed Tusk in 1979. In a year when albums from The Clash, Michael Jackson, Pink Floyd, and Talking Heads were perhaps getting bigger acclaim and making a larger impact, Tusk was definitely one of the most anticipated albums of the year. I think that it stands up and still sounds amazing. For anyone who has not heard Tusk then make sure that you check it out:

“Like “The White Album,” Tusk is less a collection of finished songs than a mosaic of pop-rock fragments by individual performers. Tusk‘s twenty tunes — nine by Lindsey Buckingham, six by Christine McVie, five by Stevie Nicks — constitute a two-record “trip” that covers a lot of ground, from rock & roll basics to a shivery psychedelia reminiscent of the band’s earlier Bare Trees and Future Games to the opulent extremes of folk-rock arcana given the full Hollywood treatment. “The White Album” was also a trip, but one that reflected the furious social banging around at the end of the Sixties. Tusk is much vaguer. Semiprogrammatic and nonliterary, it ushers out the Seventies with a long, melancholy sigh.

On a song-by-song basis, Tusk‘s material lacks the structural concision of the finest cuts on Fleetwood Mac and Rumours. Though there are no compositions with the streamlined homogeneity of “Dreams,” “You Make Loving Fun” or “Go Your Own Way,” there are many fragments as striking as the best moments in any of these numbers.

If Christine McVie and Stevie Nicks were the most memorable voices on Fleetwood Mac and Rumours, Lindsey Buckingham is Tusk‘s artistic linchpin. The special thanks to him on the back of the LP indicates that he was more involved with Tusk‘s production than any other group member. Buckingham’s audacious addition of a gleeful and allusive slapstick rock & roll style — practically the antithesis of Fleetwood Mac’s Top Forty image — holds this mosaic together, because it provides the crucial changes of pace without which Tusk would sound bland.

“Not That Funny,” “What Makes You Think You’re the One,” “That’s Enough for Me” and “The Ledge” affect a rock & roll simplicity and directness that are strongly indebted to Buddy Holly, an obvious idol of Buckingham’s. These songs have the sound and spontaneity of beautifully engineered basement tapes. A bit more sophisticated yet still relatively spare, “Save Me a Place” boasts closely harmonized, un-gimmicky ensemble voices and acoustic textures that underline the tune’s British folk flavor. But Buckingham’s most intriguing contribution is Tusk‘s title track, an aural collage that pits African tribal drums, the USC Trojan Marching Band and some incantatory group vocals against a backdrop of what sounds like thousands of wild dogs barking. “Tusk” is Fleetwood Mac’s “Revolution 9.”

The calculated crudeness of Buckingham’s rock & roll forays both undercuts and improves Tusk‘s elaborately produced segments. And several of these segments demonstrate that the limits of the California studio sound, developed in the Sixties by Lou Adler and Brian Wilson for the Mamas and the Papas and the Beach Boys, have at last been reached. Fleetwood Mac has arrived at the point where technologically inspired filigree begins to break down rather than enhance music, where expensive playback equipment is not only desirable for appreciation but necessary for comprehension. In McVie’s “Over & Over” and Nicks’ “Storms,” the production goes too far, and the tracks quiver with an eerie electronic vibrato.

The basic style of Tusk‘s “produced” cuts is a luxuriant choral folk-rock — as spacious as it is subtle — whose misty swirls are organized around incredibly precise yet delicate rhythm tracks. Instead of using the standard pop embellishments (strings, synthesizers, horns, etc.), the bulk of the sweetening consists of hovering instrumentation and background vocals massively layered to approximate strings. This gorgeous, hushed, ethereal sound was introduced to pop with 10cc’s “I’m Not in Love,” and Fleetwood Mac first used it in Rumours’ “You Make Loving Fun.” On Tusk, it’s the band’s signature. Buckingham’s most commercial efforts — the chiming folk ballads, “That’s All for Everyone” and “Walk a Thin Line” — deploy a choir in great dreamy waves. In McVie’s “Brown Eyes,” the blending of voices, guitars and keyboards into a plaintive “sha-la-la” bridge builds a mere scrap of a song into a magnificent castle in the air. “Brown Eyes” sounds as it if were invented for the production, rather than nice versa.

About the only quality that Stevie Nicks and Christine McVie share is a die-hard romanticism. On Tusk, Nicks sounds more than ever like a West Coast Patti Smith. Her singing is noticeably hoarser than on Rumours, though she makes up some of what she’s lost in control with a newfound histrionic urgency: “Angel” is an especially risky flirtation with hard rock. Nicks’ finest compositions here are two lovely ballads, “Beautiful Child” and “Storms.” Her other contributions, “Sara” and “Sisters of the Moon,” weave personal symbolism and offbeat mythology into a near-impenetrable murk. There’s a fine line between the exotic and the bizarre, and this would-be hippie sorceress skirts it perilously.

McVie is as dour and terse as Nicks is excitable and verbose. Her two best songs — “Never Forget,” a folk-style march, and “Never Make Me Cry,” a mournful lullaby — are lovely little gems of romantic ambiance. With a pure, dusky alto that’s reminiscent of Sandy Denny, this woeful woman-child who’s in perpetual pursuit of “daddy” evokes a timeless sadness.

The wonder of Fleetwood Mac’s chemistry is that the casting of these two less-than-major talents in pop music’s answer to Gone with the Wind elevates them to the stature of stormy rock & roll heroines — one compelled to reach for the stars, the other condemned to wander the earth. Within the context of the group, we not only accept these women’s excesses and limitations, we cherish them as indispensable ingredients of their characters.

The aura of romance is finally the real substance of Fleetwood Mac’s music. If the band has an image, it’s one of wealthy, talented, bohemian cosmopolites futilely toying with shopworn romantic notions in the face of the void. Such an elegant gossamer lilt is also synonymous with the champagne buzz of late-Seventies amour. But perhaps, as Tusk‘s ominous title cut and other songs suggest, in today’s climate of material depletion and lurking disorder, the center of things — including Fleetwood Mac themselves — cannot hold. Plagued by internal conflicts and challenged by New Wave rock, this psychedelically tinted folk-rock tribe might well be the last and most refined of a breed of giddy celebrants who, from the early Sixties on, prospered on the far shore of the promised land as they toasted the pure splendor of a beautiful and possibly frivolous pop dream”.

On 12th October, we mark forty-five years of Tusk. The next studio album Fleetwood Mac released is 1982’s Mirage. Once more, the band headed in a different direction. Perhaps moved more back to the sound of Rumours. A less experimental and all-encompassing album. I think that Tusk is among the band’s very best work. Even if Tusk is considered a little bit of a commercial let-down, there is no doubt that it is…

A creative triumph.

FEATURE: Compact But Mighty: Thinking About the Sustainability of the Decades-Old Format

FEATURE:

 

 

Compact But Mighty

PHOTO CREDIT: Wellington Cunha/Pexels

Thinking About the Sustainability of the Decades-Old Format

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NOT that it is a major revolution…

IMAGE CREDIT: Dribble

but it is a major revelation! The compact discs has been around for decades and did experience this peak and surge through the 1990s and 2000s. Of course, as technology developed and new formats came in, compact discs were starting to fade from the forefront. Not as advanced and desirable as they once were. People might say C.D.s have always been flawed. A little too fragile and not as cool as a vinyl. Less portable than a cassette. It is amazing that the compact disc has survived all this time. Perhaps not surprising now at a time when people are slowly starting to move away from streaming. It is still a vastly popular medium, though physical music speaks to people in a different way. I really love we can enjoy both. Vinyl has this resurgence and new lease. It is the most popular form of physical music. Compact discs have enjoyed a brief rise. A new time in the limelight. Not as prominently as vinyl, though we look ahead to a big anniversary that I hope will compel people to keep investing in compact disc. In November, it will be forty years since the introduction of the Sony Discman. In 1984 (the D-50), it was a real breakthrough and boom. The Walkman came out five years previously. The opportunity for people to listen to compact discs on the move! That freedom was a real pull for music lovers in the 1980s. Through the 1990s, the Discman became even more popular. I remember owning one and taking it everywhere. A wallet of C.D.s and my Discman. It changed the way I experienced music. Forty years after its release, I am looking out at the current market and the options out there.

PHOTO CREDIT: Maor Attias/Pexels

Depending on your budget, you can get a pretty good C.D. player similar to the Discman. They range from retro and sleek to a little more modern. When it comes to the flaws of the Discman, they might be hard to remove. The fact that you do get skipping. The disc skipping or stopping because of the movement and obvious fragility of the player. I know that modern versions are sturdier and a little more reliable. I would love it if there was a modern-day version of the Discman. Something that could come in a range of colours and was mass produced. Affordable for those who this is their first portable compact disc player or those who have owned one before. Though many people dislike C.D.s and feel there are too many issues – many albums still come in plastic cases and the C.D. itself no more resistant to scratching and damage than they were decades ago! -, one cannot deny the reason they are still around now. To own an album in your hand that is a permanent thing. Vinyl is great, though you have more options with a C.D. where you can play it and how you can experience them. They offer more possibilities. Earlier this year, it was reported that C.D. sales increased for the first time in twenty years:

“Digital and entertainment retail association ERA has issued its preliminary numbers for the past year, and they make encouraging reading for the physical music sector following years of overall decline (although vinyl sales alone have soared for the past decade and more).

Overall, UK spending on music streaming subscriptions, vinyl, CDs, downloads and cassettes grew by 9.6% based on value in 2023, nearly twice as fast as 2022 (which saw an increase of 5%). As part of that sales performance, there was a rare increase in CD sales last year – the first in two decades.

The £2.22 billion total for 2023 was the highest since 2001, the historic peak of the CD era, and just 0.08% short of that record. It was more than double the level of 2013 when music sales were being hammered by internet piracy.

Two years ago, ERA reported a rare increase in overall physical sales (vinyl, CD and cassettes combined) during 2021, although that wasn’t repeated the following year as vinyl sales growth softened a little in 2022 (but still outsold CD for the first time in terms of revenue).

But 2023 was a blockbuster year for physical music sales, delivering growth across the board. A strong release schedule included albums by Taylor Swift, whose 1989 (Taylor’s Version) was the biggest seller on vinyl last year, as well as Take That, the Rolling Stones, Lewis Capaldi, Lana Del Rey, Blur, Olivia Rodrigo, Pink, Kylie Minogue, Foo Fighters, Metallica and Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds.

ERA said that overall physical sales increased by 10.9% year-on-year to £311 million, a significant improvement on 2022’s 4% decline. It was also ahead of the 7.3% growth for physical sales in 2021, which was then the first such increase since 2001”.

I don’t think one can say that compact discs selling in high numbers is nostalgia. Many of those buying C.D.s are too young to remember them when they were popular. Also, it is more to do with a love of physical music and not necessarily the C.D. and connecting it to the 1980s and 1990s (and early-2000s). If you think about vinyl and its price and limitations in terms of portability and size, cassettes are more volatile. Maybe fewer portable cassette players on the market. Compact discs are affordable and relevant today. I want to bring in this article, which asks whether the rise in C.D. sales are because of nostalgia or a Gen-Z trend:

“CD sales are experiencing an unexpected resurgence and are now well ahead of digital download album sales. According to the Recording Industry Association of America‘s (RIAA) mid-year report, CDs sold almost three times as well as digital albums in the first half of the year. CD sales totalled $236.7 million, while downloads generated only $87.8 million. These figures show a remarkable shift in favour of physical recordings, which many had declared dead.

Why the CD is suddenly booming again and what it means for streaming

Interestingly, the comeback of the CD is largely due to younger listeners. According to the French music industry group SNEP, 43% of CD purchasers are under the age of 35. This generation is showing a growing interest in physical music formats, which can be attributed to several factors.

Firstly, CD sales offer a tangible connection to music, which is increasingly valued in the digital age. In addition, many people prefer the uncompressed sound quality of CDs to streaming or compressed digital files. Nostalgia also plays an important role: for many young people, the CD represents a return to a medium they only know from stories of their parents. In addition, CDs are a cheaper way to build a physical music collection than vinyl records.

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CD sales are exploding: Why young people are going retro

While CD sales remain stable, digital downloads are in sharp decline and represent only a small part of the music industry’s total revenue. In the first half of 2007, digital album sales generated just $87.8 million, down 18.5 percent from the previous year.

Single track sales also fell by 16.1 per cent to $81.8 million. Overall, digital download revenue fell by 15.8 per cent to $189.7 million. This clearly shows that music lovers are increasingly turning to streaming services and digital downloads are becoming less in demand.

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CD and vinyl sales are outperforming digital formats: What it means for the future

In addition to CD and vinyl sales, which continue to play an important role in the market, streaming services are also experiencing growth. Paid subscriptions to music streaming services grew by 4% to $5.7 billion, accounting for nearly two-thirds of the music industry’s total revenue. It seems that physical recordings and streaming can co-exist, while digital downloads are becoming less important.

This could mark the end of digital downloads, while CD sales are making a surprising comeback. The music landscape is therefore more diverse than ever, with a mix of physical and digital formats catering to different listener preferences”.

PHOTO CREDIT: Martinus/Pexels

Against this sign of a resurgence - or a rise at the very least - in C.D. sales and popularity comes the news that new cars are being made without C.D. players in them. Against news that C.D.s are being bought more, it seems like a very myopic decision. I still listen to C.D.s in the car. It is an easy and natural way for people to hear them. Enjoying albums over a long drive. It has left a sour taste:

“Car manufacturers are turning their back on seven million music fans in the UK by removing CD players from new cars, according to digital entertainment and retail association ERA.

Commenting on new data from Which? reporting that no new cars in the UK now include a CD player, ERA CEO Kim Bayley said: “With 15% of the UK adult population reporting that they listen to CDs in their cars, this is a remarkably short-sighted move by carmakers to stop fans listening to the music they love.” 

In the latest edition of ERA’s long-term consumer tracking study conducted by Fly Research 15% of the UK adult population reported that they listen to music on CD in their cars, slightly fewer than the 16.6% of people who listen to CDs at home. 

While the latest figures on CD listening are down on five years ago (2019: 27.6% in-car and 31.2% in-home), it still amounts to around seven million individuals. That equates to around 20% of the 34.5m people with active driving licenses. 

While CD sales have been on a sharp slide for the past 20 years – down to 11.4m in 2023 from their 2004 high point of 170m – recent years have shown signs of a rebound. Vinyl sales have been growing for 18 years and there are signs that CD could be set for a return to growth. 

“Carmakers seem to be looking through the rear-view mirror when it comes to CD,” said Bayley. “The lesson of vinyl is you should never write off a music format. Even today 50% more people say they listen to music on CD as on vinyl”.

That is one bit of a sad news in a sense of hope. That an old format can revive and find a new audience. It is great that compact discs, alongside cassettes and vinyl, are healthy and showing physical music is very much in demand. In November, the Sony Discman turns forty. It should be an occasion to mark a big anniversary of a piece of kit that should not be seen as past it or a sign of a different age. Instead, it should be retooled and reintroduced to coincide with the current state of C.D. sales. I think that sales will continue to rise. Rather than the compact disc being a relic of the past, it is very much…

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A part of the future.