FEATURE: Jump ‘N Shout: Celebrating Twenty-Five Years of Basement Jaxx’s Remedy

FEATURE:

 

 

Jump ‘N Shout

Celebrating Twenty-Five Years of Basement Jaxx’s Remedy

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RELEASED a day after my sixteenth birthday…

a wonderful album came into the world on 10th May, 1999. At a time when Dance music was quite stale and colourless, Basement Jaxx arrived with Remedy. Its title is very apt: it is a remedy to the pallid and generic Dance and Electronic that was present at the end of the 1990s. There is not as much publicity and features about this album as there should be. Considering how significant it was. Regardless, as it is coming up to its twenty-fifth anniversary, it worth spotlighting and saluting this album. Basement Jaxx are the London duo of Felix Buxton and Simon Ratcliffe. When Remedy was being made, the duo felt that Dance music was close-minded and linear. A sorry state of affairs that they wanted to challenge. Lacking feeling and having this robotic and soulless quality, what they wanted to do was to bring depth and diversity to a scene in danger of becoming irrelevant. Tackling the superficial nature of Dance at the time, you get this togetherness and anthemic quality on Remedy. So many different styles and sounds weaving through the songs. It is such a confident debut album that does what it intended to do: shake up and transform the Dance scene. For that reason, we need to make a properly big deal of Remedy’s upcoming twenty-fifth anniversary. I will bring some reviews in. Its lead single, Red Alert, was released on 19th April, 1999. That was during my final year of high school, and I recall the song being played at my prom – though the experience was not all that happy and memorable!

Regardless, this stunning song introduced us to an album (and duo) like no other. It was a huge moment. With some well-chosen samples and some brilliant vocalists, Remedy has this feeling of a cast album. Like this very diverse and intriguing musical with different players and scenes. Songs designed to get people together and bonded. Even though there are some darker and harder moments, they blend beautifully with the vigour, fizz and carnival explosion you get elsewhere. In 2019, Stereogum marked twenty years of a Dance classic. They chart how Basement Jaxx’s Felix Buxton and Simon Ratcliffe came together and started making music. Why their debut album is an undeniable classic:

“Check your attitude at the door, and throw your coat on the floor.” This was Basement Jaxx’s house motto through the 1990s, from their first night in the back of a rundown Mexican restaurant under a railway bridge in Brixton, London, to the improved digs of neighborhood clubs like the Junction. Felix Buxton and Simon Ratcliffe made the Jaxx name, both their Basement Jaxx nights and their Atlantic Jaxx label, on a consciously unpretentious pursuit of dance pleasure. After five years that established their profile, when too much attitude started coming through the door, they stayed true to their word and moved on.

“It became the cool place to go,” Ratcliffe told Rolling Stone in the fall of 1999. “Before, we could just play the music we wanted. That disappeared. Everyone started coming with this attitude of ‘You’re cool, let’s see what you can do.'” Pulling up stakes once the too-hip onlookers show up might be anti-snobbery as its own kind of snobbery, but Basement Jaxx also had other things on their mind. Having steadily put out a series of EPs from ’94 to ’97, as well as the attention-catching singles “Samba Magic” (1995) and “Fly Life” (1997), it was time to boldly go where other contemporary electronic music duos like Daft Punk and the Chemical Brothers had recently gone before: mainstream.

The state of rock music in 1999 was uneven, and too much of it was stuck in a rut. Judging by the music press’ reception of Remedy, Basement Jaxx’s debut album released in early May of that year — 20 years ago today — dance music wasn’t faring much better. Could one artist turn the tide? “Basement Jaxx are the saviours of British house music,” declared Uncut that June. “Simple as that.” Well then. Such statements would have rung like hollow hyperbole if they weren’t coming from all sides. “More fun than Fatboy Slim, more creative than the Chemical Brothers,” affirmed Entertainment Weekly — not exactly the house aficionado’s magazine of choice, but that was the point, to invite everyone.

Buxton and Ratcliffe were indeed consciously offering a cure. Elaborating on the title to Uncut, Buxton called the album, “a remedy for all the kind of misery we’ve been having in the last few years…. All the boring generic samey club music, and all the music saying ‘We’re bored, and we’ve got no hope and there’s no way out.’ We’re saying we’re glad to be alive and everything’s cool, don’t worry.” That sentiment dovetailed with the message of what was then their most recent single, “Red Alert”; its verse “Don’t worry/ Don’t panic/ Ain’t nothin’ goin’ on but history” sought to soothe the pre-millennium tension coursing through the general populace at the time.

As far as house history goes, though they may have been as much saboteurs of purism as they were saviors of the party, Basement Jaxx respected it. “This album came about as an attempt to recapture the feeling, energy, and soul of classic Chicago and New York house music,” they told Billboard that summer. “Our songs evolved from there.” Where others wanted to replicate the details, Basement Jaxx sought to recapture the broader joy, while also making their dissatisfaction with the current state of the scene known to anyone who asked.

“In the beginning we were just trying to be House producers,” Ratcliffe told The Wire as Remedy was preparing for release. “Now we’re trying not to be House producers.” Basement Jaxx coined the term ‘punk garage’ for themselves, but even though Remedy was put out by XL Recordings, then most popularly known as home to the Prodigy, they didn’t sport mohawks and use distorted guitars like their new labelmates. Their application of punk was the anything-goes spirit (going with ‘garage’ over ‘house’ seemed more about making the witty word switch than identifying with one close style over the other) and the eclecticism they espoused, which might have even made it more a kind of post-punk garage.

As if to make a point right away about that eclecticism; that, despite the “electronica is the new rock ‘n’ roll” talk of the late ’90s, dance didn’t need to replace or be defined in opposition to anything else, one of the very first instruments on Remedy is a guitar. Albeit an acoustic Spanish guitar, but still there’s potential for finding a symbolic gesture pointing either direction in the way that “Rendez-Vu” flicks a couple of Castilian chords in circles until it drops the guitar and drops in the beat. Whether it means anything or not — ‘guitars welcome,’ ‘guitars stand aside’ — is less relevant than Remedy establishing its cleverness upfront without prioritizing it above having a good time. It’s deep house; not deep in its mood, but utilizing intellectual depth.

That so much of the buzz around Remedy had to do with Basement Jaxx’s ability to write songs that sounded like real songs, as opposed to over-repetitive techno tracks, shows the kind of expectations Buxton and Ratcliffe were exploiting. Though their Surrender that year would mix things up more, even electro-titans like the Chemical Brothers had up until then released albums that largely functioned as an idealized hour of their set sliced into skippable segments. Remedy had full stops and all manner of rhythms, not just BPM increases and decreases. It also offered up jarring juxtapositions — such as the crunching stomp, telephone ring and calmly delivered goth metal lyrics (“You were a prophet from above/ Then you came and sucked my blood/ My pain became my strength/ I am reborn…”) of “Yo Yo” — and made the unnatural feel organic.

Its focus on songwriting over function also meant that, unlike so much purpose-built dance music both then and now, Remedy didn’t call for chemical enhancement. Every song was so ripe with detail, if you were on something you might miss your favorite bit. Basement Jaxx weren’t really anti- anything, but drugs didn’t have much if any role in their process. Clubbing in the ’90s, their release was just to “dance as hard as possible.” Again, for all their right moves and right connections with the likes of Daft Punk, Armand Van Helden and other notables, this kind of difference helped cement their outsider self-image. “I never thought we’d have commercial success at the beginning,” Buxton told the Guardian in 2005. “What we were doing seemed very off to the side of what mainstream culture was into. It was nothing to do with the British dance scene, which was very much about cocaine.”

It was nothing to do with it, until it was. “…Basement Jaxx have spun the whole British dance scene upside down,” Rolling Stone informed America in August of 1999 when Remedy landed via Astralwerks, who also handled the Chemical Brothers and Fatboy Slim. Remedy didn’t quite produce a “Praise You” or “Setting Sun” crossover hit in the US, but Basement Jaxx had already been embraced by the dance world here. “Red Alert” was a genuine number one hit on the Dance Music/Club Play chart, and “Rendez-Vu” and “Bingo Bango” followed suit. Remedy’s durable shelf-life made it a record that kept attracting the kind of newcomers who only had a few scattered big beat CDs in their collection. The growth of their live show — not just two dudes behind a table but an invigorating, genuine performance with a live band, singers, and dancers — made an increasing impression as well.

Two years later, Rooty, their sophomore album, would capitalize on the attention Remedy had both gradually earned and had thrust upon it, and Basement Jaxx were on their way to being festival headliners. If musical influence is measured in how many artists follow in another’s footsteps then the breadth of their legacy is up for debate, but the nature of their approach made them nearly an impossible act to follow. What’s more, Basement Jaxx’s mission from the start had been to get free of the constraints of reverential homage, so the most appropriate respect to pay them would be to do your own thing. Remedy certainly did”.

I am going to get to some reviews now. At the time, when there was so much hype following the release and success of Red Alert, many might have been cynical and sceptical. This hot new duo tipped as the next big thing. Basement Jaxx definitely silenced critics. They more than lived up to the hype. NME addressed this in their review of Remedy in 1999:

“It's so easy to hate, to fear the Jaxx. Flick through their CV and read the kiss of death, those dreaded six words: The Best New Band In Britain. Discover that they've been called the British Daft Punk, as if that was a positive thing, and weep. Who are these bastards?

It's not hard to find out: their stern faces are everywhere, on every magazine cover. And in these magazines you can find out about their legendary club that, oops, doesn't exist any more, about how many cool American DJs think they're cool too, about Simon Ratcliffe and Felix Buxton's boho, edgy Camberwell lifestyle, about their degrees in engineering and languages, about how they've invented 'punk garage'... and, yes, these are all fair, knee-jerk reasons to hate Basement Jaxx. 'Remedy', however, is not.

Indeed, 'Remedy' is probably as good a dance album (and that's dance as in, have a dance) as anyone from these Isles has produced this decade. Hate them that little bit more now? Come on, fight it. Imagine, instead, that you're fiddling through the radio band looking for something that, for a change, consistently surprises and lifts you. 'Remedy' is that pirate. It's a wonderful new frequency where house, ragga, techno, soul, funk... Jesus, flamenco are all mashed together and it feels like some kind of perfect moment.

It's a soundtrack that starts frantically in the dead of night and progresses to a peaceful, if disoriented dawn. Here is beautifully melodic dance music that's free of pretensions, but rammed with bold intelligence; that hits you as hard in the guts as it does in the feet. It's an excellent ride.

It starts unconventionally with the folk techno barrage of 'Rendez-Vu', all flamenco guitars, vocoder and romantic longing, and really doesn't look back. Marvel at 'Jump'n'Shout''s heads-down/hands-up ragga nuttiness (MC Slarta quite rightly scorning those who, "never did know the rules/They never did go to Basement Jaxx school"). Laugh at the genius of turning The Selecter's 'On My Radio' into a punky hip-hop anthem on 'Same Old Show'. And wonder how Goldie can ever make another concept album now that his whole long-playing career has been so economically condensed into 'Always Be There''s spun-out six minutes.

These are some of the peaks on an album that really - save for 'Bingo Bango''s over-exuberant Latino outburst - doesn't have any dips. In fact 'Remedy' describes itself accurately. Maybe it will cure the British dance disease of confusing intelligence with a need to journey up its own arse, and it highlights, once again, that musical boundaries are only there to be blurred. Above all, though, it blasts your petty prejudices clean out of the water.

9/10”.

I sort of think Dance and Electronic music is starting to return to what it was like pre-Remedy. Not that it is lifeless. It lacks a certain inspiration and originality. I wonder whether, twenty-five years after Basement Jaxx’s debut album was released, there is a team, duo or producer waiting to unleash something as needed and instantly captivating. We can only hope. This is what AllMusic observed in their review:

“The duo's long-awaited debut album is one of the most assured, propulsive full-lengths the dance world had seen since Daft Punk's Homework. A set of incredibly diverse tracks, Remedy is indebted to the raw American house of Todd Terry and Masters at Work, and even shares the NuYoricans' penchant for Latin vibes (especially on the horn-driven "Bingo Bango" and the opener, "Rendez-Vu," which trades a bit of salsa wiggle with infectious vocoderized disco). True, Ratcliffe and Buxton do sound more like an American production team than a pair of Brixton boys would -- they get props (and vocal appearances) from several of the best American house producers out there including DJ Sneak, Erick Morillo, and Benji Candelario. And "U Can't Stop Me" is an R&B production that could probably have gotten airplay in major rap markets across the U.S. Elsewhere, Buxton and Ratcliffe chew up and spit out mutated versions of hip-hop, ragga, Latin, R&B, soul, and garage -- the varied sound that defined the worldwide house scene of the late '90s”.

I wonder whether anything will be written about Remedy ahead of its twenty-fifth anniversary. It warrants more than it has received. If you do not own the album then I would advise you to do so. I am going to finish with The A.V. Club and their thoughts regarding a stunningly vibrant and imaginative debut album from Basement Jaxx. So original and exciting, it has not dated at all. Such is the quality and authenticity, you can play the album now and it will connect with people:

“When people criticize dance music for sounding interchangeable, there's sadly a whole lot of truth to the accusation. Racism and homophobia certainly played a small part in the sort-of death of disco, but Americans ultimately just got sick of the same old shit. While there's plenty of creativity inherent in the DJ set, which has continued to nurture disco under the more specialized wings of house and techno, much of it seems stifled by short-term or simpleminded artistic goals. Laziness and unwillingness to take risks are the two biggest banes of the techno boom; even an average DJ can command thousands of dollars a night as long as the dancers stay happy. Basement Jaxx has seized upon this chink in the armor of house music. Knowing that it takes only a few novel elements to stick out from the homogenous crowd of disco anthem-generators, Felix Buxton and Simon Ratcliffe have gone all out to do for house music what Daft Punk did for, well, house music. Calling its music "punk garage"—a term obviously ripe with meaning for Buxton and Ratcliffe, perhaps meaningful for avid trainspotters, and utterly meaningless to the layman—Basement Jaxx takes the basic four-on-the-floor house-music template and turns it on itself. The duo's self-proclaimed "remedy" is nowhere near as revolutionary as the hype would insinuate, and Spin has already inexplicably named Remedy one of the 90 best albums of the '90s, but it does offer its distinct pleasures. In a field of mediocrity, a little effort goes a long way, and the presence of flamenco guitars on "Rendez-Vu" and skittering, Timbaland-style beats on "U Can't Stop Me" help Basement Jaxx stand out. For the BPM-minded, the retro single "Red Alert" has more than enough faux funk and chic camp to keep the masses moving, proving that Buxton and Ratcliffe know well enough to think with their feet as well as their heads”.

On 10th May, the mighty Remedy is twenty-five. It arrived at a very big and interesting time in my life. I will always have a special attachment to it. With monster hits such as Red Alert sitting alongside lesser-heard treasures like Stop 4 Love, this is an album to get lost in. One that you can play at a party and get people on the dancefloor. One where, from the first song in, people will join together and…

JUMP and shout.

FEATURE: The Digital Mixtape: R&B Queens

FEATURE:

 

 

The Digital Mixtape

IN THIS PHOTO: Olivia Dean 

R&B Queens

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IN this The Digital Mixtape…

PHOTO CREDIT: Vlada Karpovich/Pexels

I was keen to assemble a collection of tracks from R&B queens established and upcoming. Mixing together some legends of the genre and artists now who are adding something distinct and special, it goes to show how strong R&B is. I don’t think that people value the genre as much as they should, Even if some people will quibble with some selections regarding accuracy – if that artist is seen as R&B -, one cannot deny that they are incredible talents whose music can fit within R&B. Looking back through the years, we have seen some R&B queens put out astonishing music. Even if the best of the genre are in the past, there are artists now keeping that flame alive. Really doing something special and impactful. I may have omitted some artists, only because there is so much choice. This is a playlist that you will want to crank up loud! It has been a real pleasure assembling this Digital Mixtape. I am a huge fan of R&B and the queens below have made the genre what it is. For that, we owe them…

IN THIS PHOTO: Kiana Ledé

A debt of gratitude.

FEATURE: New Flowers on the Mountain: Kate Bush’s Director’s Cut at Thirteen

FEATURE:

 

 

New Flowers on the Mountain

Kate Bush’s Director’s Cut at Thirteen

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ONE of Kate Bush’s least appreciated albums…

 PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush

I do think that Director’s Cut has highlights and is important. If you think about the fact that she has been looking at her older work and re-issuing her albums, it reframes and recontextualises Director’s Cut. I am looking ahead to its thirteenth anniversary. It came out 16th May, 2011. It was the first time that Bush reworked her tracks. She has reissued her studio albums, yet this remains the only time she has taken tracks from studio albums and re-recorded them. In this case, it was 1989’s The Sensual World and 1993’s The Red Shoes. Maybe not a surprise that she would want to reapproach The Red Shoes. With a more compacted and too-1990s production sound, it is a bit compressed and tinny in places. The tracklisting seems odd too. The album would be stronger if it was stripped back and there was a track shift. Even so, there are a few weaker moments. Bush actually re-recorded Top of the City for Director’s Cut. I would have loved to have heard her take Why Should I Love You? and strip it back to how it was when Bush demoed the song. The version on The Red Shoes has too much going on. It was Prince who added so many parts and layers to the song. Even so, Bush did take lesser The Red Shoes cuts like The Song of Solomon and the title track and reworked them. I still think that the track order on Director’s Cut is out. If we approach it as a new album that flows and has its own narrative, I would not have Rubberband Girl last. Maybe she felt that was her weakest reworking. Moments of Pleasure or This Woman’s Work should have ended the album. It is me quibbling! Director’s Cut is an album of two halves.

I do like the fact that The Red Shoes gets focus. She could have instead taken songs from Never for Ever or Lionheart and reworked those. That is still something I would love to hear! The new sound and direction we hear applied to The Red Shoes’ tracks is largely successful. As I say, it would have been great for a couple of omissions to have been included. The most-streamed song from The Red Shoes that appears on Director’s Cut is Lily. I think that it is one of the best tracks on the album. I always thought that the original song should have been a single from The Red Shoes. Instead, And So Is Love was released. That gets included on Director’s Cut, though I feel it is one of the less memorable reworkings. I am going to come to interviews and reviews for Director’s Cut. It is unsurprising it split some people. It is a new album but one with familiar songs. It allowed Kate Bush to clear a creative path and release her most recent studio album, 50 Words for Snow. That came out late in 2011. It is more surprising that The Sensual World gets songs included. The fact Kate Bush found some of the sound and production flawed. I think that album is wonderful. Regardless, one can approve of her knowing her own music well enough to appreciate her decision. Whilst I feel Deeper Understanding is a misfire on Director’s Cut – as the 1989 oriignal was about the power and pull of computers and seemed strangely forward-thinking; the 2011 version makes no sense in that regard – and the video (directed by Kate Bush) is not her best, I like how she has included This Woman’s Work. When the song was originally released, as part of the soundtrack to the 1988 film She’s Having a Baby, Kate Bush was twenty-nine. When Director’s Cut came out, Bush was fifty-two. We get a new perspective and depth from the song. It is fascinating. I feel it should have been the swansong to Director’s Cut.

Opening her first album of 2011 is Flower of the Mountain. It is Bush reworking The Sensual World’s title track. Originally, Bush had wanted to use Molly Bloom’s soliloquy from James Joyce’s Ulysses. She was not granted permission. By the time she came to record Director’s Cut, that had changed. I think it was also out of copyright and in the public domain. Regardless, with that text now free to use, she renamed the song to reflect that. It is a highlight of Director’s Cut and the only track that could open the album, as I feel it was the main reason Bush recorded this album in the first place. At eleven tracks, the album runs to just under an hour. Fans can argue as to whether another song or two could have been added. Maybe a Director’s Cut 2? Let’s hear more about the album and what Kate Bush said about it. The songs on Director’s Cut is Kate Bush taking the original, remixing and restructuring them. Thee tracks were re-recorded completely. All the lead vocals on the album and some of the backing vocals were entirely re-recorded. Additionally, the drum tracks were reconceived and re-recorded. Kate Bush thought of it as a new album. It was an exciting time for fans. Her previous album, 2005’s Aerial, was her first after twelve years. It was nice having an album from her. Nobody could predict we would get another one in 2011!

Reaching number two in the U.K., Director’s Cut was met with positive reviews. Even if many fans album rankings would have it in the bottom three – alongside The Red Shoes and Lionheart -, I hope that it reappraised. Given how Bush is more willing to revisit her past music now, we can see how that truly began with Director’s Cut. The fact that she did that album to make way for new work could apply today. Bush has reissued her albums recently. Could this be the thing she needed to do before working on something new?! Who knows! I am going to come to an extensive interview Kate Bush gave to Pitchfork in 2011 in promotion of Director’s Cut. It is really fascinating and deep. First, CLASH reported on this wonderful and unexpected album. Why Kate Bush felt compelled to rework and imagine songs from two of her studio albums – both of which have very different sounds and dynamics:

“Kate Bush has spoken about her recent album ‘Director’s Cut’ and her changing voice.

An inspiration songwriter, Kate Bush recently decided to take a step back. Focussing on a neglected part of her career, the English artist opted to re-record tracks from ‘The Sensual World’ and ‘The Red Shoes’.

Collected on new album ‘Director’s Cut’ the results are fascinating. An insight into how a vital artist views her own career, Kate Bush released the album to widespread acclaim earlier this year.

Speaking to Interview Magazine recently, Kate Bush explained that she was motivated by a desire to “let the songs breathe more”.

PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush

“I really didn’t see it as a substitute for a greatest hits package, but it was something I’d wanted to do for a few years. I guess I just kind of felt like there were songs on those two albums that were quite interesting but that they could really benefit from having new life breathed into them.”

Continuing, she explained that the production on the initial albums remained a bone of contention. “I don’t really listen to my old stuff, but on occasion, I would either hear a track on the radio or a friend might play me one, and there was generally a bit of an edgy sound to it, which was mainly due to the digital equipment that we were using, which was state of the art at the time—and I think everyone felt pressured to be working that way.”

With some of the tracks dating back more than two decades, Kate Bush was forced to approach the material in a different way. On some recordings, the singer was unable to match the key of her youthful voice.

“I found that by just slightly lowering the key of most of the songs, suddenly it kind of gave me a way in, because my voice is just lower now. So that helped me to step back into it. And although they were old songs, it all started to feel very much like a new process and, in a lot of ways, ended up feeling like I was just making a new album—it’s just that the material was already written. When I listen to it now, it feels like a new record to me”.

I want to move on to an interview with Pitchfork. I have edited it down for a bit more clarity and concision, though I would urge everyone to read the full thing. It lays out the reasons why Kate Bush felt Director’s Cut needed to happen. It adds weight and merit to an album that remains undervalued and not as adored as her other studio albums:

“After more than 30 years of singular, forward-thinking music, Kate Bush is looking back. Sort of. The British iconoclast's new album, Director's Cut, re-imagines songs from her own The Sensual World (1989) and The Red Shoes (1993) with new vocals and drums mixing in with the original recordings. A few songs-- including a glacial, near-ambient take on her classic "This Woman's Work"-- have been re-recorded entirely. Leave it to Kate Bush to subvert the typical aging-pop-star reissue cycle. (Director's Cut is out today, May 16, in the UK and May 23 in the U.S. on Bush's own Fish People imprint; it's currently streaming in full at NPR.)

Though she crashed onto the UK charts with 1978's "Wuthering Heights"-- becoming the first woman to nab a British no. 1 hit with her own song-- and was an early music video innovator, Bush has retreated from the spotlight since. She's released only two albums of new material since 1990, but the 52-year-old singer/songwriter/producer/director is currently working on another record, though she's keeping details to herself at the moment. And while Bush famously hasn't toured since 1979, she's currently taking a "never say never" stance on future live performances. But even if Kate Bush never released another new song or graced another stage, her legacy and influence is remarkably strong, with current descendants like Florence and the Machine and Bat for Lashes owing much to her unique brand of pop mysticism.

We recently spoke with Bush-- who sounded as warm and wise as you'd hope-- about her intriguing new release, the ambiguities of modern technology, and the creepiness of clowns.

Pitchfork: You don't seem like an artist who takes much time to look back on your previous work. Did revisiting your own songs on Director's Cut bring up an internal conflict?

Kate Bush: There's always an internal conflict. [laughs] I don't really listen to my old stuff at all; the last time I heard the whole of The Sensual World was probably just after I made it. We just remastered The Red Shoes 10 days ago, which was the first time I heard it completely since it was made. I hear odd tracks from my albums every now and again on the radio, or maybe a friend plays me something. I don't think a lot of people listen to their old stuff, do they? I spent a long time making it, so I don't really want to spend much time listening to it again.

Pitchfork: If you hadn't really listened to The Sensual World and The Red Shoes at all, how did you even know that you wanted to remake the songs?

KB: For a few years, I've wanted to pick tracks off both albums and make them sound the way I would want them to if I made them now. At the time, I was really pleased with them; I wouldn't have put them out if they weren't the best I could do. I thought the odd tracks that I did hear from The Red Shoes had a bit of an edgy sound, which may be due to the digital equipment that everyone was using then and that a lot of people still use now. But I've always been a big fan of analog, and I wanted to try and warm up the sound of the tracks from that album. Then again, it was interesting actually hearing the whole of Red Shoes-- it actually wasn't as bad as I thought.

I mean, I could find faults with all my albums because that's just a part of being an artist-- it's hard being a human being, isn't it? [laughs] With both albums, there were a lot of ambitious ideas as well, so I was working on top of work that had already been done. I didn't have to start from scratch, so it was really something I did for myself as a kind of exercise. Although the songs are old, it's like a new record to me.

Pitchfork: The Red Shoes came out in 1993, the heyday of the compact disc. Were you recording specifically for that format?

KB: Yeah, that's absolutely right. It probably was my first album that was specifically a CD as opposed to vinyl. Red Shoes was a bit long-- which was also a part of this whole problem with the change from vinyl to CD. I think that put a lot of strain on artists, actually. With CDs, you suddenly didn't want to let people down so you tried to give them as much as possible for their money. [laughs] I didn't really feel that there were any filler tracks on The Red Shoes, but if I were to do that album now, I wouldn't make it so long.

The great thing about vinyl is that if you wanted to get a decent-sounding cut, you could really only have 20 minutes max on each side. So you had a strict boundary, and that was something I'd grown up with as well. Also, you were able to have different moods on each side, which was nice.

Pitchfork: You got permission to use part of James Joyce's Ulysses for the new version of "The Sensual World". What's your relationship with that book?

KB: I've only read it once-- it was a really long time ago, and it took me a really long time to read it. [laughs] The original idea for the song was to use part of the soliloquy at the end of the book, but I couldn't get permission. It was always a bit of a compromise to me when I had to go and write my own lyrics, which were OK but nowhere near as interesting as the original idea. So when I was putting the ideas together for this project, I though it was worth a shot to ask again-- they could only say no again. And, to my great surprise and delight, I was given permission. To actually be able to fulfill that original idea was fantastic.

Pitchfork: Did you take that green light as a sign that you were on the right track with this entire project?

KB: [laughs] No. When I started this project, I thought it was going to be really easy, simple, and quick. Then, quite early on, I just thought: "It's not going to work." I couldn't find my way in. For instance, the original vocals had an awful lot of work put into them at the time, and I wasn't really sure that I could better them-- I don't know if I have bettered them. But what I found was by lowering the key of most of the tracks, I could suddenly approach them in a different way. That was one of the first turning points.

Also, working with Steve Gadd, who did all the drums on the tracks that have a rhythm section, was a great experience because I've been a fan of his work for a long time, and his interpretation of music is quite extraordinary. He has a great subtlety in his approach, and he's someone who isn't afraid to leave stuff out.

Pitchfork: Listening to Director's Cut, a few of the songs that struck me the most were the ones where you took out big chunks of instrumentation. What was the logic behind that?

KB: There were some good songs on those albums that perhaps weren't speaking the way that they could, so I just wanted to let them breathe a bit more. One of the main things was to strip out a lot of the tracks and, in some cases, lengthen them in order to let the original musicians' performances shine out a bit more, too.

Pitchfork: A lot of the songs you picked for Director's Cut are pretty personal, and there seems to be less theatricality involved compared to the originals. Do you feel like the distance between your more performative side and your more personal side has changed through the years?

KB: [laughs] Oh, that's a really deep question. I don't know how to answer that because I'm always in the process, but hopefully I'm starting to get the hang of how to put it all together more. Sometimes when I look back on myself on those earlier records, there was so much effort going in, so much trying. With this, I was trying to make it much more laid back.

PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush

Pitchfork: Right now, there are a lot of young artists taking cues from what you've done in the past. Are you aware of things like that?

KB: I don't keep track of a lot of it, but this is what people have been telling me. I'm very flattered. I spend a lot of time working and with my family, so I don't have much time around the edges to do much else. I don't really listen to a great deal of music. I love music, but since I spend a lot of time in the studio, we probably watch a movie rather than listen to albums. I get to hear stuff, but not on the grand scale.

Pitchfork: So you're still in the studio on a day-to-day basis?

KB: Yeah, I have been for a while now, because [Director's Cut] has been ready for quite some time. Although there were a lot of ongoing loose ends with this album, like the mastering and artwork, I went straight into making a new record when I finished it. I'm really enjoying working on new material. Director's Cut is kind of a one-off rather than a continuous revisiting of old stuff.

Pitchfork: I read an old interview about how you had 200 songs going into the studio to record your first album, but at this point, it seems safe to say you're more interested in taking the time to get a handful of songs right.

KB: It's just a completely different process now. When I was first writing, I used to sit at the piano and play songs-- I'd write one or two a night. It was my hobby. At some point, it then became a process that was mainly done within the context of the studio, and writing became part of the recording process. I still sometimes just write songs at the piano, and then of course it's taken into the studio and it becomes very different.

Pitchfork: Director's Cut is being released on your new imprint, Fish People. Why did you decide to start your own label now?

KB: Previously, I wasn't in a position to do so, but now I'm delighted with my own label because it means that I have more creative freedom, which is really what I want. Although I've always had a lot of creative freedom since my third album. But now, I don't have to refer to people at the record company for certain decisions that I might have before. In many ways, it's probably quite a subtle change. But with something like [the new "Deeper Understanding"] video, I really wanted to direct it without being in it and make it like a short film as opposed to a music video. That might have been something the record company would have questioned before.

Pitchfork: You mentioned preferring analog to digital recording, but "Deeper Understanding" has a very modern-sounding vocal effect on the chorus. As a producer, do you keep track of what's going on now as far as tools and advancements?

KB: I try to. My studio is a fantastic combination of old and new, and that's how I've always liked to work. But now, the new is newer, and old remains old. I like to work with a combination of analog and Pro Tools. I love the sound of analog tape, but there's so many things you can do with Pro Tools that would be incredibly difficult and very time-consuming with analog.

When I originally did "Deeper Understanding", I wanted the computer program to have a single voice so that it was a single entity, but at the time, there was only a pretty basic vocoder so I had to use backing vocals to make the words audible. This time, I could use a truly computerized voice that would stand alone. This album would've been possible to do entirely analog, but it would've been really difficult.

Pitchfork: We were talking about Ulysses before, and it's wild to think how James Joyce wrote such an incredibly dense work without all this technology we take for granted now. It seems even more super-human.

KB: Maybe we don't realize how crafted a lot of these people were; maybe there was this element of realization. There are some extraordinary human beings who have worked in the arts who did it all by themselves. Mozart didn't have Pro Tools, but he did a pretty good job”.

PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush

Let’s finish with a couple of positive reviews for Director’s Cut. It is an acclaimed album. On Metacritic, it has a score of 80. It got a five-star review from The Independent. NME gave it 8/10. SPIN awarded it 9/10. Most critics were firmly behind this album and Bush’s need to recast and imagine some tracks from The Sensual World and The Red Shoes. I will end with a review from Kate Bush News. Before that, I am sourcing The Guardian’s take. They say, even if the idea of Kate Bush re-recording and reworking her own songs sounds unappealing, she makes it work. Knowing that it was the first of two albums from her in 2011 gives it more purpose and meaning. She needed to approach the past and right some wrongs before she could move on:

“In 2011, with the whole nonpareil musical genius/dippy woman who says "wow" issue firmly sorted out in most people's minds, her behaviour seems to grow more inscrutable still. Her new album, which admittedly took only half as long to make as its predecessor, isn't actually a new album, despite Bush's insistence to the contrary: it consists entirely of new versions of songs from 1989's The Sensual World and 1993's The Red Shoes. In fairness, you can see why she's chosen to point them up. They tend to be overlooked in her oeuvre, more because they separate her twin masterpieces Hounds of Love and Aerial than because of their content, although The Red Shoes is perhaps more muddled than you might expect, given her legendary perfectionism. Nevertheless, the decision seems to have bamboozled even her diehard fans, whose trepidation was not much mollified by the single Deeper Understanding. Again, you can see why she wants to point it up: its lyric about abandoning social interaction in order to hunch over a computer seems very prescient in the age of Facebook and Twitter. But the new version's decision to overwhelm the haunting vocals of Trio Bulgarka with Kate Bush doing one of her patented Funny Voices through an Auto-Tune unit seems questionable at best.

In fact, it's the only moment when you can honestly say the rerecording pales next to the original. At worst, they sound as good as their predecessors, which leaves you wondering what the point is, even as you succumb to their manifold charms. It was obviously a bind that the Joyce estate refused permission to use Molly Bloom's concluding soliloquy from Ulysses as the lyrics to The Sensual World, but whether it's a vastly better song for finally having them in place of Bush's facsimile is rather a moot point. Song of Solomon, on which Bush finally abandoned her apparently bottomless store of metaphors for female sexuality in favour of a direct demand for a shag – "Don't want your bullshit," she cries, "I'll come in a hurricane for you" – is a fantastic song whether the rhythm track features pattering tom-toms or a lightly brushed snare. Occasionally, the changes genuinely add something, usually by taking things away. The force of The Red Shoes' depiction of Bush's troubled relationship with the creative impulse was always a little blunted by its presentation as a kind of perky Irish jig: with the Celtic pipes shifted to the background, it sounds sinister and more urgent. Moments of Pleasure's rumination on death is more introverted and affecting stripped of its dramatic orchestration, while This Woman's Work – the rerecording of which caused the most unease among fans – is amazing: emptier, darker and quieter than before, it's even more heart-rending. Given that the original was heart-rending enough to soundtrack a charity campaign against child abuse, that's no mean feat.

Is it worth spending six years making an emotionally wrenching song slightly more emotionally wrenching? Hmm. If Director's Cut really was a new album, if you were hearing these songs for the first time, then it probably would be considered among Kate Bush's masterpieces: certainly, the sheer quality of the songwriting makes every recent female artist who has been compared to her look pretty wan by comparison. But you're not, which means the Director's Cut ultimately amounts to faffing about, albeit faffing about of the most exquisite kind. Still, as anyone who's watched her putting up with Richard Stilgoe will tell you, Kate Bush has earned the right to do whatever she wants”.

PHOTO CREDIT: Fish People

I will finish up with this review from Seán Twomey. He runs Kate Bush News and also hosts episodes of the Kate Bush Fan Podcast. It was a surprise to everyone when Kate Bush announced a new album for 2011. Nobody would have guessed the nature of the album. What we get from Director’s Cut is an artist who definitely appreciated The Sensual World and The Red Shoes, though she was in a position where she could improve upon originals. Production and sounds that she may not be happy with now. In that sense, Director’s Cut was a whole new album:

“I suppose the nature of this project has thrown a few fans from what I’ve been reading online. There’s been a lot of talk about original versions, and what Kate was “doing” to them. “What if she changed this? How could she ever top that? What’s the point of revisiting such a perfect song?” Kate will have her own reasons for doing this record at this time, and no doubt the coming interviews will shed fascinating light on her motives. All I know is that on my very first listen I experienced each song on this album as a fresh, beguiling new entity. At no point did I weigh up which bits were “changed” or “missing”, I really wasn’t thinking about those cherished songs from The Sensual World and The Red Shoes. I was too busy enjoying these Director’s Cut songs,  each one washing over me as a new, satisfying musical moment in itself. The album, as a whole, works beautifully and there’s a few reasons for this.

The production feels consistently bright, punchy, direct and full of oxygen. The windows have been opened up, the tracks breathe in an exhilarating way. Kate’s determination to work this way when she created Aerial is continued into this album. Kate’s vocal performances are my favourite thing on this album, which might seem like a mindlessly obvious thing to say, but I lost count of the many surprising and new ways in which she uses her voice. Kate sings in her deepest tones yet on And So is Love, adding an even “wiser” layer to this meditation on the nature of love and life, before her voice soars upwards again towards the end. A fist punching the air moment for this listener. A glorious John-Lydon-esque moment in Lily where she repeats the word “darkness” was a particular favourite. Kate becomes Molly Bloom in Flower of the Mountain, the directness of Molly’s dreamy stream of consciousness captivated me. The wistful, rambling thoughts of Leopold’s wife tumble out of Kate’s mouth in earthy, confessional tones as the pulsating rhythm somehow suggests Molly’s quickening heartbeat.

The way Kate uses ‘silence’ in this record works brilliantly. Two memorable instances spring to mind; once in Song of Solomon and another time during her utterly different reading of This Woman’s Work, the choral backing reaching an almost agonising intensity before instantly cutting out. For some weird reason, and films are a conceptual thread with this project after all, I pictured that moment in Close Encounters of the Third Kind when Richard Dreyfuss is in his truck at the railway crossing and his turbulent encounter with the UFO comes to an abrupt, breathtaking end. Well, I told you these were first impressions! I loved the new This Woman’s Work, by the way, so delicate with the keyboard acting almost as points and splashes of light in parts.

Many people have picked up on the ‘live’ feel of Deeper Understanding and this is another consistent strength of this record. I felt as if I had been invited to sit in the audience of a concert performance, a special event, with all the immediacy and sense of connection that comes with that. In Moments of Pleasure, the quietest song on the album, there’s a section that made me gasp – it’s as if Kate gives a knowing nod to the people who love this song, and hands it over to us. If I’d had a cigarette lighter at that moment, it would have been lighted and held aloft. I sincerely hope we’ll be treated to this song, performed this way, in a live setting some time in the future.  Steve Gadd, who drums on most of the tracks here, is my new hero. The other, no-doubt-about-it, shining stars showcased on this record are the glorious Trio Bulgarka. Their performances from the two original albums really help to cement this new album together. It’s fantastic to hear them again in these new settings. Never Be Mine, full of fascinating new flourishes, is one song I cannot wait to explore much more deeply.

So, after one listening, what was the overall experience like? This may probably change, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that I had just watched a classic music performance film in my head, something like ‘The Last Waltz’.  What absolutely sealed this impression was the closing song, Rubberband Girl. In my imagining this was the KT Bush Band circa ’77 having a  lot of fun doing a pre-gig sound check in a pub, and it formed the “end credits” of this imagined film of mine. Perfection. The song is completely re-worked, absolutely thrilling, and so unexpected…the hallmark of Kate Bush, delicious stuff.

What an album. Thank you, Kate, Del and everyone involved in this record”.

On 16th May, Kate Bush’s remarkable Director’s Cut turns thirteen. Considering that anniversary is coming up, many might ask whether there is anything new coming from Bush. As she has spent a lot of time around her previous work, has that compelled her to write anything new. One can never say, though there is always hope that something will come someday. If you have not heard Director’s Cut for a while (or at all) then go and listen to it now. It is an album that deserves to be respected and appreciated. Little did we know in May 2011 that Kate Bush would soon grace us with another studio album. It goes to show she is always…

SURPRISING and unpredictable.

FEATURE: TikTok Killed the Video Star: Why a Seeming Decline in Music Video Popularity Is a Bad Thing

FEATURE:

 

 

TikTok Killed the Video Star

PHOTO CREDIT: rasul lotfi/Pexels

Why a Seeming Decline in Music Video Popularity Is a Bad Thing

_________

THERE is no denying…

 PHOTO CREDIT: cottonbro studio/Pexels

the fact that music videos are in decline. The fact that the format has changed. When YouTube launched in 2005, it gave artists this opportunity to have their videos viewed by the world. They did not need to rely on music T.V. Music T.V. barely exists now. I am going to come to a recent feature from The Guardian regarding music videos and how they are being replaced. The move to platforms like TikTok. People watching short clips rather than videos. This is not the first time music videos have been threatened with extinction. Prior to YouTube, music T.V. was declining. The currency and popularity of music was low. It is important to remember how important music videos are when it comes to defining iconic songs and launching artists. The ability for them to put a visual stamp on their songs. How videos can be immortalised and endure through the decades. In 2020, Rolling Stone wrote how YouTube sort of revived the artform of the music video:

“In February 2010, Lady Gaga opened up about her and Beyonce’s “Telephone” music video in an interview for KISS-FM, a month before it premiered simultaneously on E! News and YouTube’s Vevo platform. “What I like about it is it’s a real, true pop event,” she said. “When I was younger, I was always excited when there was a big giant event happening in pop music, and that’s what I wanted this to be.”

Two years earlier, shortly after she made her video debut with “Just Dance,” Lady Gaga had complained to MTV News about the absence of that kind of spectacle. “What’s been lost in pop music these days is the combination of the visual and the imagery of the artist along with the music, and both being as important,” she said. “Even though the carefree nature is something people are latching onto right away about my stuff, I’m hoping that they’ll take notice of the interactive, multimedia nature of what I’m trying to do.”

It’s hard to imagine that at one time, Gaga had to convince her audience to “take notice” of the visual aspects of her brand, and not just because of the meat dress. Nowadays, “interactive, multimedia” artists are the name of the game; Instagram and Twitter are just as crucial to the pop ecosystem as streaming numbers and festival ticket sales. Fan-driven content and interaction online are what drive major label signees to international stardom and, in recent years, have turned unknowns into major celebrities, with the “Old Town Road” story standing as the most prominent example. And at the forefront of the digital video revolution has been none other than YouTube.

By the time YouTube was founded in 2005, MTV had already switched its main programming to reality shows, but the newfound accessibility for fans to search for their favorite music videos online put another dent in the videos-on-cable model. At the same time, “viral” non-music videos on YouTube were engaging with a new kind of eye-popping aesthetic. Wacky and nonsensical clips hosted on the platform, like “Chocolate Rain” and “Shoes,” became some of the earliest internet memes to enter mainstream culture, popular for their spontaneity, low-budget look, and general weirdness.

Naturally, some music videos sought to replicate this: OK Go practically built their career on gimmick-y, lo-fi videos like 2006’s “Here It Goes Again,” where the band performs an elaborate, one-take dance routine on treadmills in front of a stationary camera. It’s the type of stunt that would be right at home on Tik Tok in 2020, but at the dawn of YouTube, there really wasn’t any music video like it. OK Go actually performed the routine at the 2006 MTV Video Music Awards — a goofy and unintentional way, on MTV’s part, of passing the torch to a new platform.

Enter Beyoncé, who inadvertently demonstrated what it takes to make a viral video (and how not to do it) when she released two visuals, simultaneously, in 2008. You couldn’t ask for a better experiment: two music videos, both from the I Am Sasha Fierce… album, both directed by Jake Nava, both in black-and-white. “If I Were a Boy” was more conceptual, with a gender-flipped narrative and higher production value. “Single Ladies (Put a Ring On It)” was simpler, a dance video based off an old Bob Fosse routine and filmed on a white soundstage. When both videos premiered one after the other on TRL, there was only video that went viral, spawning an entire dance craze and sweeping the VMAs the following year.

“I don’t think any of us predicted the amount of parodies it would attract,” Nava would later say about “Single Ladies.” “It’s a testament to Beyoncé’s mind-boggling talent and to the fact that sometimes, less really can be more.”

Gaga arrived on the scene shortly thereafter, working with visionary directors like Melina Matsoukas, Francis Lawrence, and Jonas Akerlund to achieve her vision: a gussied-up version of the queer, New York arthouse trash she’d idolized. What was so genius about her videos was that they didn’t need a gimmick to create buzz — she was the gimmick. The same could be said for the best Jackson and Madonna videos. But what sets digital-forward videos like “Paparazzi” and “Bad Romance” apart from their earlier counterparts is that within their outlandish premises, there are a plethora of smaller, absurd moments that fly by at lightning speed: Metropolis crutches, dead models, Minnie Mouse makeup, giant eyes in a bathtub, suspending crystals, monster claws. Meme-ready moments, before there were even really memes.

It took until the middle of the 2010s for artists to take full advantage of Instagram, a visual-heavy platform that couldn’t host full music videos (yet) but could certainly promote them — as long as those videos fell in line with the sleek, lightly fluorescent look that the social network prioritized. Drake’s “Hotline Bling,” which premiered on Apple Music before launching wide on YouTube, fit the Instagram aesthetic perfectly, and the brightly-colored, minimalist promotional photos for the clip drew viewers in.

It’s this long-term fan development that has incentivized artists to once again make videos a high priority; because of the disconnected nature of streaming and the rapid decline of physical album sales, videos are often the best way to draw news fans to an artist and to strengthen their relationship with existing ones. Recent developments in videos, both on and off YouTube, have worked to further capitalize on this relationship. Beyoncé released her visual album Lemonade as a televised event on HBO, before making it available exclusively on Tidal, the streaming platform she co-owns. Ariana Grande’s “Thank U, Next” was the first to utilize YouTube’s Premiere feature, attracting a reported 829,000 viewers to its live video premiere and chatroom. In an attempt to further increase streaming numbers for the single, which had been released several weeks prior to the video, Grande’s team also uploaded a “teaser” for the music video and a behind-the-scenes montage clip that both contained the entire song, further boosting the single’s chart status.

In recent years, the biggest overall shift in music videos has been the optimization for mobile platforms. It’s not uncommon now to see videos in square or vertical aspect ratios, designed for mobile phone video players or Instagram’s grid display. Post Malone recently released a “dual-phone” video for “Circles,” which required the song to be played simultaneously on two different playlists on two phones side-by-side.

This doesn’t mean that music videos will be leaving YouTube anytime soon: Google has made every indication that they want to remain the industry’s flagship video platform. But in order for them to do so, adaptation is necessary, not just from the platform and its formats but from artists who are allowed to work outside the box and bring their visual endeavors to life”.

A new report has shown how song lyrics have become more repetitive, simpler and self-obsessed. If we are embracing or popularising songs that are like this, it figures that something as fulsome as a music video might not appeal. Do people now have the desire to watch videos when you can get short clips? Do the visuals really matter now? With teasers and clips of songs available on Instagram and TikTok, the music video seems less relevant. Maybe a few iconic and modern-day classics will show how vital music videos have always been. The Guardian discussed how TikTok is threatening the long-term survival of music videos:

“In increasingly turbulent times for the music industry, one aspect has remained steadfast: its passion for stats. At the start of the decade – with YouTube a strong metric of success after the collapse of CD sales – you couldn’t move for mind-bending figures being trumpeted about music video viewership. In 2021, for example, K-pop boyband BTS’s Butter video amassed a staggering 108m views in 24 hours, breaking a record that appeared to be eclipsed on a weekly basis. Butter now sits on a not-too-shabby 950m views, a figure dwarfed by Katy Perry’s jungle-based Roar (3.9bn), Mark Ronson’s retro fantasia Uptown Funk (5.1bn) and Luis Fonsi’s Justin Bieber-assisted 2017 smash, Despacito, which has 8.4bn views.

The two dominant global forces in recent years have been K-pop and Latin music, and their big-budget music videos still rule the roost (Shakira and the Colombian singer Karol G’s TQG video was viewed more than a billion times last year). For Anglo-American pop in 2024, however, a seismic shift has occurred: music video viewership has plummeted, Beyoncé and Drake have stopped releasing videos altogether and pop’s A-list are struggling to make a dent on a platform they previously dominated.

Since its release in November last year, the video for Houdini – the long-awaited lead single from Dua Lipa’s third album – has been viewed 93m times, making it only the 27th biggest of her career. Ariana Grande’s Yes, And? clip is only on 51m views after two months; she has eight hits with over a billion. Ed Sheeran’s 2023 Eyes Closed video, meanwhile, is stuck on 77m views. Even Taylor Swift – who essentially is the music industry – isn’t immune, with Anti-Hero, the lead single from 2022’s Midnights, on a so-so 192m views. No one is suggesting any of these artists are flopping – Anti-Hero’s Spotify streams stand at 1.4bn, while each of the songs mentioned peaked at No 2 or higher in the UK – but tricky questions remain: is the music video dying out? And if so, what’s killing it?

“Asking people to stay on one page for the full length of a track in an era of scrolling is really difficult,” says Hannah T-W, an artist manager and the former head of music videos at production company Somesuch. “It’s now not a normal viewing practice. People are used to much shorter clips and devouring things really quickly.” Those “much shorter clips” proliferate due to the music industry’s latest obsession, TikTok, where songs provide backing music to user-generated clips, or as #content performed by pop stars almost through gritted teeth. Gone are the halcyon days of making a single, getting it to radio, chucking it on MTV and sitting back to watch it fly. “We’re living in a media consumption age where you have to compete with everything, everywhere, all at once,” says the creative director and music video director Bradley J Calder. “You’re not just up against other music videos, but Netflix, Spotify, TikTok and your own camera roll on your phone.”

There’s now a ripple effect: the drop in viewing figures has meant a drop in video budgets, which in turn can squeeze creativity. “The kinds of briefs I’m seeing now are mind-blowing,” says the director and photographer Olivia Rose, who has worked with Anne-Marie and Jorja Smith. Five years ago, she says, £30,000 would have got you a decent video, but now directors are being expected to use that money for “three visualisers” – the looped images or clips used as placeholders on YouTube – “for three tracks, plus TikTok content and some stills, plus the video”. While creativity can still thrive with tighter budgets, quality can suffer as directors’ skills are stretched. “The music video historically has been, and still is to this day, an art form,” Rose says. “And we’re losing it.”

Lil Nas X has released four videos that have been watched more than 500m times. But despite teasing his controversial new single J Christ – a broadside against the US religious right – for weeks on TikTok, the single bombed and the video plateaued at 18m views. The very online rapper will be au fait with another way to signpost a video’s existence, via memeable moments. O’Keefe confirms these are now being written into the briefs sent out to directors in the hope they will catch tired eyes and turn casual scrollers into fans. As Hannah T-W explains: “You do think about these things when you’re going into those massive music video moments: what’s the money shot of the music video, to use a horrible term?”

Sarah Boardman and Joceline Gabriel, who represent a host of music video directors through their company Hands, cite both general “oversaturation” of visuals and the fact that views are now being split across lyric videos and visualisers [simplified teasers for songs] “and the main video itself” as factors affecting music videos today. They also touch on perhaps a more concerning issue for the industry at large, one involving the “rarity of seeing a new artist with real charisma and hearing a really good track that doesn’t just follow a trend”. With thousands of new songs and videos being uploaded each week, cutting through the noise has become more and more important”.

In 2022, this feature talked about the history and evolution of the music video. How platforms like TikTok are changing the way we view music. Maybe budgets and potential profit means that artists are finding new ways to promote singles. The comparative risk and low reward of the music video is too much. As I will go on to explain, music videos were a way into songs for me. When I think of so many classic and important songs, it is their videos that leap to mind:

“On August 1, 1981, MTV began broadcasting on cable television. The first video it played was highly symbolic: The Buggles’ Video Killed The Radio Star. The music video era had begun. The genre would become central to pop culture. In the 1980s and 1990s, it gave rise to pop’s most recognizable stars, introduced a generation of cultural icons and colonized its viewers’ eyes and ears, as songs became inextricably associated with the imagery of their videos. But that culture began to decline around the arrival of the internet, if not shortly before.

“First, music videos on open channels disappeared, because record labels tried to recover their losses from pirating by charging significant amounts to broadcast them, so they could only be seen on pay TV. There was some competition for the audience, even though it was always light years away from the viewership of film, sports or documentaries. But the most torrid Latino music videos were always a good night-time option for platforms without porn. That lasted until the arrival of YouTube, which almost completely finished off those music video channels,” says Javier Lorbado, who was the director of the well-known Spanish music studio Sol Música from 1997 to 2014 and now works as a freelance digital communication specialist for artists, record labels and managers.

In March, Rosalía released her album Motomami with an exclusive performance for the social platform, including live performances of her songs and interviews with her celebrity friends. While Generation Z is TikTok’s primary audience, though, idols from other generations have also begun experimenting with the platform. Most unexpected has been this week’s news that Pink Floyd have made their entire song catalog available in TikTok’s sound library, and they will begin regularly posting exclusive videos on the platform.

@motomamivideo la fama ❤️‍🔥 | motomami tiktok live | #rosalia #motomami #lafama #parati #foryou #fyp #viralvideo ♬ sonido original - motomami

“It’s more and more common for people to discover music on TikTok, and if you’re not present there, you’re going to be closing off an immense opportunity for promotion. A new generation of users who may have never heard Pink Floyd could now discover them,” says Laura Estudillo, who, after working in communications at Warner, founded the agency Panorámica in 2017 and works with artists including Chanel and Alizzz. Estudillo adds that “the most important thing is for the artist to feel comfortable with the content that they share. If they do it without enthusiasm, or it seems forced, the audience will notice it, and that can be counterproductive on platforms like TikTok. The great attraction of the platform is its unprecedented capacity for making things viral. Without even having followers, the algorithm can make you into a star, which will be reflected in YouTube videos, Spotify streams and ticket sales.”

But it also brings a paradigm shift to the video format. “TikTok creates a severe attention deficit. They are extending the time that videos can last, but they don’t work as well as the short ones, and you still can’t upload an entire song. For the artist, the content they make on the platform is an extra addition. And in the best case of TikTok success, having a viral audio considering the competition out there is almost a miracle,” says Ainhoa Marzol, an expert in digital trends. “If years ago you’d told me that content consumption would be in a vertical format, I wouldn’t have believed it,” Laura Estudillo adds. “Now even screens at festivals are adapted to the format of stories.” “As a social network, I prefer Instagram, but without a doubt, TikTok is the key right now,” says musician and performer Bea Pelea. “It lets you create cheaper, more accessible audiovisual content that can give a pretty significant push.”

Logically, the economic returns vary according to the artist’s popularity. For independent artists, budgets are very low: between €1,000 and €5,000 per music video, while a 30-second commercial can cost €180,000 on average. That also creates frustrations among musicians with a low profile. “I would have liked to record more videos, because they’re important to me, but I want to do cool, up-to-date things, and our economic possibilities don’t allow that,” says Bea Pelea. The business is also tough for producers: everything is done as a favor. Luis Cerveró confesses that he stopped directing videos in 2018, when his first child was born. “A week before, I finished shooting my last one, but since then I decided that I would only leave home to do paid work.” That video had a budget of €6,000, but it is almost always assumed that the money goes entirely to production. “Nobody gets paid, not the camera people, not the makeup artists. I’ve been paid twice in my life to make a video, and I’ve made more than 60. One time very early in my career, I shot a Niños Mutantes video and I kept the entire budget, because I really needed it, and the other time is when I did the second Pharrell Williams video [Come Get It Bae] because I I felt really stupid shooting the first one [Marilyn Monroe] and not charging anything for it.” Cerveró was one of the millennium’s most in-demand independent music videos directors, and he has worked with international artists such as Battles, Liars and Javiera Mena.

@directedbymalikmedia How to shoot a low budget music video! 1. Find a location which is free to use 2. Get yourself a light, could even be a flashlight (if shooting at night) 3. Buy or rent a cheap mic to add that raw feeling to the music video! 4. Don’t over do it with crazy camera movements, keep it clean, simple & cinematic 🎥 - #ukrapper #musicartists #rapper #freestyle #musicvideo #videography #lowbudget #cinematic #simple #malikmedia #blackmagic #bmpcc #bmpcc6k ♬ original sound - MalikMedia

“For an artist, it is essential to keep thinking about having the largest possible number of videos of all their releases,” says Javier Lorbada. “It may no longer be so important to have a large budget to make an old-fashioned music video with meticulous photography, makeup, hairdressing, lighting, special effects and amazing editing. The digital world constantly demands new content in order to achieve greater exposure and reach the largest possible number of viewers. That forces artists and their companies to constantly post new music videos of the same song. In addition to the video clip, many have lyric videos, visualizations, duets, studio versions, at home, acoustic, in the rehearsal room. The truth is that this strategy works. The more videos you have, the better results you get.”

“If we talk in economic terms, it is very difficult to make a profit,” says Laura Estudillo. “You have to be very well-positioned to be able to monetize it. For labels that cover the costs, it is also difficult to earn back their investment, but they generally have more muscle to put together digital marketing campaigns that help them get views. There are more and more artists who decide not to make videos, but even so, it is still a good promotional tool. You can get more attention in digital media if you release a song with a video. You can promote it on platforms by adapting the format to small or vertical clips, and, above all, it continues to be one of the most efficient tools that a group has to present itself to an audience. I think of Rosalía or C. Tangana as current referents of Generation Z who have been able to build very powerful iconography around their image, and the importance of their videos is undeniable. Although the platforms allow us to give the artist another dimension through photos or stories, music videos continue to have the strength of placing the artist in a utopian, highly aspirational dimension.”

“In the 1980s and 1990s the video clip explored itself as art and played with it a bit. But I think that this is all outdated today. Its function is more aesthetic. It serves, above all, to mark or emphasize the tone that the artist wants to give to their own image,” points out Ainhoa Marzol. “But I don’t think it’s going to go away. Music is a sentimental industry that is really fond of doing things the way they’ve always been done. What I do think is that the form will expand. We are already seeing videos adapted to Spotify, others with key moments to play on TikTok. If the metaverse goes anywhere,, I would imagine some more interactive video clips within it, perhaps similar to albums in the format of video games, like Sayonara Wild Hearts,” the journalist concludes”.

Things are changing. Take The Veronicas. The Australian duo of Lisa Origliasso filmed the music video for their new song, Here to Dance, on a shoestring budget. They shot it on an iPhone. Maybe a perfect representation and embodiment of how artists favour something simple, easy and low-concept, it is a shame that modern technology and desires means that music videos are not as important as they once were. I am not against people filming videos on their phones or watching short clips, though it does seem to be a regression. How many of these videos will be remembered and remain in the memory? It is almost a disposable artform now. Part of the creative process rather than a chance for an artist to take a song to a new level. When I grew up, videos for tracks like Soundgarden’s Black Hole Sun, Björk’s Army of Me and Peter Gabriel’s Sledgehammer stuck in my mind. They made me realise that videos could be art. Something so much bigger. I appreciate that a lot of artists do not have big budgets. Especially independent ones. That is fair. Rather than necessarily release a music video for all singles, artists could invest in the occasional ambitious video. A way of ensuring that these songs and videos survive for years. I think that TikTok and the way artists visualise their singles now is ephemeral and is not about quality. It is about ease and affordability. So many people I know maybe not attracted to music videos because they are not as eye-catching and innovative as in the past. That does not need to be the case.

I do think that there is value and relevance regarding the music video. Music is still a visual medium. The fact that we watch so many clips and videos shows that people are not simply listening to the songs. Videos give story and layers to a song. We have an appetite for film and T.V. It is not the case that we are turning away from visuals and the video medium. I do wonder whether platforms like TikTok are a good thing. Whilst they provide easy access for artists to put out clips and engage with a large audience without spending a lot of money, everything seems to be temporary. All about quickly getting something out there. I worry about endurability and longevity. I don’t buy that artists do not make videos because they are expensive. Some of the most legendary videos ever were made on a small budget. Think of something like Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit or even Peter Gabriel’s Sledgehammer. Time-consuming, sure, but not a massive budget. Perhaps, is it patience and the effort needed to make a good video putting people off? I do feel that a few modern classics can help reverse things. Maybe Taylor Swift is an example of a modern artist who is very much concerned with the cinema and scope of a video and how it can resonate. She does have a bigger budget to work with, yet there are independent/smaller artists who are making clever and original videos. It is an artform that we can not let die. Think ahead generations. I wonder how we will remember music. Will we talk about particular songs without music videos the same as we talk about ones from the past? Without that visual stamp and something visual, what is the future going to look like? Music videos still have a place. Some of my favourites from the past few years have come from artists like Little Simz and Self Esteem. Phasing music videos out or saying that they are irrelevant in the modern age is…

A terrible cut and bad take.

FEATURE: The Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night at Sixty: A Turning Point and Explosion for the Band

FEATURE:

 

 

The Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night at Sixty

PHOTO COURTESY: Bruce and Martha Karsh/The New York Times 

A Turning Point and Explosion for the Band

_________

EVEN though the anniversary…

is a while ago, I am writing a few more features about The Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night. The Beatles’ third studio album was released on 10th July, 1964 (in the U.K.). I am looking ahead to its sixtieth. I have published another features though, for this one, I wanted to talk about the album and accompanying film – released on 7th July, 1964 – and how it was this explosion and real turning point for the band. Even though the album was released earlier in the U.S., I wanted to focus on the U.K. release date. There will be celebration and developments as we head towards the anniversary. I know there are going to be special events and podcasts put out marking sixty years of one of The Beatles’ most important moments. One reason why A Hard Day’s Night is so important is because the album marked the first time Paul McCartney and John Lennon wrote all the tracks. It was a real development of their songwriting partnership. I am going to come to some information and reviews for the album and film. 1964 was a year when The Beatles conquered America. The reaction and hysteria that greeted them when they visited the U.S. earlier in 1964. After that, their lives would never be the same again. It is amazing how fast everything came together. The album was recorded between 29th January and 2nd June, 1964. The band were set to film their first major feature film on 2nd March 1964. Wikipedia take up the story:

“According to historian Mark Lewisohn, the band were set to record songs for both the film and a tie-in LP, of which the songs from the film were completed first. On 25 February—lead guitarist George Harrison's 21st birthday—the band were back at London's EMI Studios, recording John Lennon's "You Can't Do That" for release as the B-side of "Can't Buy Me Love". The band also attempted "And I Love Her" and "I Should Have Known Better" on this day and again the following day, with the former finalised on 27 February. Two more songs from the film, "Tell Me Why" and "If I Fell", were recorded on this day”.

IN THIS PHOTO: Ringo Starr 

I want to lead on to some quotes and reviews of the A Hard Day’s Night album. If the band were popular and had a loving fanbase before then, when their third studio album came out, there were known and loved around the world. The band had no idea how their lives would take off:

"EVEN THOUGH WE FELT, 'YES, WE'RE ESTABLISHED AND WE'VE CONQUERED ALL THESE COUNTRIES AND WE'VE SOLD A LOT OF RECORDS AND THEY ALL LOVE US', IT WAS NOT A THOUGHT, 'IT'S GOING TO END TOMORROW', OR, 'IT'S GOING TO GO ON FOR EVER'. I NEVER SORT OF HAD THAT THOUGHT. IT WAS JUST HAPPENING NOW, YOU KNOW. IT WASN'T LIKE MAKING PLANS FOR THE FUTURE. IT WAS JUST ON THIS ROLL AND WE WERE ALL IN OUR EARLY TWENTIES AND WE WERE JUST GOING WITH IT."

RINGO

"IF YOU LOOK AT OUR ITINERARY SOME OF THOSE YEARS WHERE WE DID MAYBE A TOUR OF ENGLAND, A TOUR OF EUROPE, A TOUR OF AMERICA, TWO ALBUMS AND ABOUT FOUR EPS, AND THREE SINGLES, AND MADE A MOVIE ALL IN THE SAME YEAR - YOU THINK, 'OH JESUS, HOW DID WE DO THAT?'"

GEORGE

"WE OFTEN COULD RELY ON RINGO FOR TITLES COS RINGO HAD THIS HAPPY KNACK OF GETTING THINGS WRONG - LITTLE MALAPROPISMS - AND IT WAS ALWAYS BETTER THAN THE REAL ONE. SOMEONE SAID TO HIM, YOU KNOW, YOU LOOK A BIT TIRED TODAY. HE SAID, 'YEAH, I'VE HAD A HARD DAY'S NIGHT, YOU KNOW'. HE MEANT IT, AND WE ALL WENT, 'HARD DAY'S NIGHT, THAT'S GREAT!'"

PAUL

"I HAD ONE MIND THAT WROTE BOOKS OR FUNNY STORIES AND ANOTHER MIND THAT CHURNED OUT THINGS ABOUT I LOVE YOU AND YOU LOVE ME, COS THAT'S HOW PAUL AND I DID IT, YOU KNOW. LIKE, 'OH, YOU KNOW, LET'S WRITE ANOTHER OF THEM'."

JOHN

"HARD DAY'S NIGHT WAS THE FIRST BIG ONE THAT I DID. I HAD THE BENEFIT OF HAVING A DIRECTOR WHO WAS A MUSICIAN - DICK LESTER - WHO WAS QUITE A GOOD PIANIST. AND OF COURSE WE RECORDED THE SPECIAL SONGS FOR THE FILM AS, AS WE JUST DO ORDINARY RECORDINGS, AND DICK USED A LOT OF THE SONGS I'D ALREADY RECORDED, YOU KNOW, THE PAST ALBUMS. CAN'T BUY ME LOVE HAD ALREADY BEEN RECORDED, FOR EXAMPLE."

GEORGE MARTIN

IN THIS PHOTO: George Harrison

Released on 10th July, 1964, the Beatles third album in less than eighteen months was timed to coincide with the cinema opening of their first movie.

Of the album's 13 tracks seven were featured in the soundtrack of the film. One single had been released ahead of the album that being "Can't Buy Me Love"/"You Can't Do That" which had been issued on 20thMarch. It was also quite remarkable that for the first time on a Beatles album that all of the titles had been composed by John and Paul.

Since the release of With The Beatles, the previous November, their UK success had started to spread around the world. Their first US single via Capitol Records - "I Want To Hold Your Hand"/"I Saw Her Standing There" had topped the US charts for seven weeks, leading to their former US distributor reissuing 'She Loves You' and 'Love Me Do' both of which also reached the # 1 spot. In fact such was the group's popularity that in the first week of April, 1964 they held all top five positions in the Billboard chart with a further seven titles it's Hot Hundred.

Despite their success, their workload did not ease up, in fact within hours of returning from a triumphant visit to the US, which had included concert performances and three appearances on the Ed Sullivan TV show, the guys were in a TV studio in London rehearsing and recording another guest appearance.

The Spring and early Summer of 1964 saw The Beatles filming and recording new material both for the movie and their next album. They also filmed a TV special, and played a few UK dates prior to jetting off on a 27 day tour that visited Denmark, The Netherlands, Hong Kong, Australia and New Zealand. They eventually returned to Britain on 2nd July and four days later attended the world premiere of "A Hard Day's Night" at the London Pavilion.

The album reached no.1 in the UK charts towards the end of July and occupied the top spot for 21 of the 38 weeks that it spent in the Top Twenty.

In the USA, A different album was issued to that at home. The US version (issued in late June) was a soundtrack which as well as featuring a number of the songs from the UK album also included four instrumental pieces from the film's soundtrack performed by George Martin's Orchestra. A month later Capitol Records released "Something New" an all-Beatles album that included eight songs from the UK release along with a further three tracks not previously released in the US. Both albums achieved enormous success. The soundtrack album enjoyed a 14-week stay at #1 and despite the crossover of titles, "Something New" spent nine of those same weeks at #2”.

I will move on to the film soon. Before that, a couple of reviews that show why A Hard Day’s Night is such a celebrated and genius album. Pitchfork explain and explore why A Hard Day’s Night was such an impactful and important album. I don’t think the world had seen anything like it. A globe-conquering moment for The Beatles. The songs on the album seem so fresh sixty years later:

“Pop in 1964 was part of showbiz: Once the Beatles hit a certain level of box office, there would never have been any question over making a film. Pop music meant teenagers, which meant fads, which meant the clock was running on the band's fame. The jazzman George Melly, who was writing about pop in the UK press at this time, remembered being convinced several times that the Beatles had hit a peak and their fans would soon desert them. I doubt this was an unorthodox opinion.

A film career might extend the fame a little, and smooth the band's inevitable transition to light entertainment. If the film was an enjoyable romp, so much the better-- John Lennon asked for A Hard Day's Night director Richard Lester on the basis of a comedy short he'd made (later referenced in the film's famous "Can't Buy Me Love" sequence), but Lester had also helmed 1962's It's Trad, Dad!, a snapshot of the British pop world just pre-Beatles (Tagline: "The newest, most frantic fad!"). He knew how to mix music and feelgood filmmaking to commercial effect.

A Hard Day's Night, in other words, is a crucial inflection point in the Beatles' career. Coinciding with their leaving Liverpool and moving to London, this could easily have been their first step on a road of crowd-pleasing predictability: Instead, both film and this soundtrack album are a testament to how fabulous pop can be when you take care over doing it.

The album is most famous now for being the first all-original record the band put out-- and their only all Lennon-McCartney LP. Formidably prolific at this point, the pair had been creating songs-- and hits-- for other performers which must have given them useful insight into how to make different styles work. There's been a particular jump forward in ballad writing-- on "And I Love Her" in particular, Paul McCartney hits a note of humble, open-hearted sincerity he'd return to again and again. His "Things We Said Today" is even better, wintry and philosophical before the surprising, stirring middle eight.

But the dominant sound of the album is the Beatles in full cry as a pop band-- with no rock'n'roll covers to remind you of their roots you're free to take the group's new sound purely on its own modernist terms: The chord choices whose audacity surprised a listening Bob Dylan, the steamroller power of the harmonies, the gleaming sound of George Harrison's new Rickenbacker alongside the confident Northern blasts of harmonica, and a band and producer grown more than comfortable with each other. There's detail aplenty here-- and the remasters make it easy to hunt for-- but A Hard Day's Night is perhaps the band's most straightforward album: You notice the catchiness first, and you can wonder how they got it later.

The best example of this is the title track-- the clang of that opening chord to put everyone on notice, two burning minutes thick with percussion (including a hammering cowbell!) thanks to the new four-track machines George Martin was using, and then the song spiraling out with a guitar figure as abstractedly lovely as anything the group had recorded. John Lennon's best songs on the record-- "A Hard Day's Night", "Tell Me Why", "When I Get Home", "You Can't Do That"-- are fast, aggressive, frustrated and spiked with these moments of breathtaking prettiness.

The Hard Day's Night film itself was also a triumph in its way-- Lester's camerawork capturing the frenzy of Beatlemania and the way the group's music was feeding off it. It had the happy effect of introducing the group's millions of new global fans to their world-- the fire escapes, boutiques, bombed-out spaces, and well-preserved salons of 60s London. In fact the film's knowing dialogue and pop-art cinematography has a level of surface sophistication that the Beatles' records don't approach for another year or two (though they were already far more emotionally nourishing).

Watching the film you're reminded that what the Beatles had set in motion was pop music's catching up with the rest of British popular culture: In art, in TV satire, in film and fashion and literature, the 60s were already a boom time. Pop had been left behind-- tastemakers looked instead to jazz and folk to soundtrack this creativity. What the Beatles had-- accidentally-- unlocked was pop music's potential to join, then lead, the party-- though it wasn't yet a given that they'd be the band to realize said potential. A Hard Day's Night is an album of an era when pop and showbiz were inseparable-- and if it doesn't transcend that time, it does represent its definitive peak”.

I will come back to the album soon. Before getting to the film, this is what AllMusic had to say about A Hard Day’s Night. A number one smash in the U.S. and U.K., it was an instant and astonishing success. With singles such as A Hard Day’s Night and Can’t Buy Me Love ensuring its immortality, this album will be celebrated and heard for decades more. I do wonder exactly what is going to come about on the sixtieth anniversary. Whether there will be a reissue or special edition from producer Giles Martin:

“Considering the quality of the original material on With the Beatles, it shouldn't have been a surprise that Lennon & McCartney decided to devote their third album to all-original material. Nevertheless, that decision still impresses, not only because the album is so strong, but because it was written and recorded at a time when the Beatles were constantly touring, giving regular BBC concerts, appearing on television and releasing non-LP singles and EPs, as well as filming their first motion picture. In that context, the achievement of A Hard Day's Night is all the more astounding. Not only was the record the de facto soundtrack for their movie, not only was it filled with nothing but Lennon-McCartney originals, but it found the Beatles truly coming into their own as a band by performing a uniformly excellent set of songs. All of the disparate influences on their first two albums had coalesced into a bright, joyous, original sound filled with ringing guitars and irresistible melodies. They had certainly found their musical voice before, but A Hard Day's Night is where it became mythical. In just a few years, they made more adventurous and accomplished albums, but this is the sound of Beatlemania in all of its giddy glory -- for better and for worse, this is the definitive Beatles album, the one every group throughout the ages has used as a blueprint.

Listening to the album, it's easy to see why. Decades after its original release, A Hard Day's Night's punchy blend of propulsive rhythms, jangly guitars, and infectious, singalong melodies is remarkably fresh. There's something intrinsically exciting in the sound of the album itself, something to keep the record vital years after it was recorded. Even more impressive are the songs themselves. Not only are the melodies forceful and memorable, but Lennon and McCartney have found a number of variations to their basic Merseybeat style, from the brash "Can't Buy Me Love" and "Any Time at All," through the gentle "If I Fell," to the tough folk-rock of "I'll Cry Instead." It's possible to hear both songwriters develop their own distinctive voices on the album, but overall, A Hard Day's Night stands as a testament to their collaborative powers -- never again did they write together so well or so easily, choosing to pursue their own routes. John and Paul must have known how strong the material is -- they threw the pleasant trifle "I'm Happy Just to Dance with You" to George and didn't give anything to Ringo to sing. That may have been a little selfish, but it hardly hurts the album, since everything on the record is performed with genuine glee and excitement. It's the pinnacle of their early years”.

Alongside the album came the classic A Hard Day’s Night film. I still think it is the band’s best film. Even though Help! (1965) is seen as one of their best film outings, few can argue against A Hard Day’s Night being their finest outing. Their first feature film, it captured life during Beatlemania. John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr and George Harrison playing fictionalised versions of themselves. You can see and feel the natural charisma and screen gravitas of the band. They look so natural through the film. Here are some quotes from the band about the film:

"WE WERE THE SONS OF THE GOON SHOW. WE WERE OF AN AGE. WE WERE THE EXTENSION OF THAT REBELLION, IN A WAY."

John

"EVERYONE IN LIVERPOOL THINKS THEY'RE A COMEDIAN. JUST DRIVE THROUGH THE MERSEY TUNNEL AND THE GUY ON THE TOLL BOOTH WILL BE A COMEDIAN. WE'VE HAD THAT BORN AND BRED INTO US."

George

"I THINK BECAUSE I LOVED FILMS I WAS LESS EMBARRASSED THAN THE OTHERS TO BE IN ONE; JOHN REALLY GOT INTO THE MOVIE, TOO. I FELT A LOT OF THE TIME THAT GEORGE DIDN'T WANT TO BE THERE. IT WAS SOMETHING HE WAS DOING BECAUSE WE WERE DOING IT."

Ringo

"ALUN (SCREENWRITER) PICKED UP A LOT OF LITTLE THINGS ABOUT US. THINGS LIKE: 'HE IS LATE BUT HE IS VERY CLEAN, ISN'T HE?' LITTLE JOKES, THE SARCASM, THE HUMOUR, JOHN'S WIT, RINGO'S LACONIC MANNER; EACH OF OUR DIFFERENT WAYS. THE FILM MANAGES TO CAPTURE OUR CHARACTERS QUITE WELL."

Paul”

I am going to wrap up soon. I want to bring in a review from Movieweb. They write how the film revolutionised pop culture and the Rock musical film genre. A Hard Day’s Night is one of my favourite films of all time. It is so charming! You cannot help but love the band. I also feel sympathy that, in 1964, their lives were radically changed. They were unable to get any privacy or space. That opening scene of them being chased by girls down the street seems to be a slightly heightened version of their reality. How they could not walk down the street without being mobbed:

“While the popularity of the Beatles had steadily grown within the United Kingdom throughout 1963, in October 1963, the British press attached the term “Beatlemania” to band members George Harrison, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, and Ringo Starr. By early 1964, the Beatle's concerts were accompanied by mass hysteria.

International superstardom for the Beatles came in February 1964, when the band made its North American television appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, which resulted in immediate domination for the band on the American music sales charts. In March 1964, the Beatles began filming the groundbreaking musical comedy film A Hard Day’s Night, which was primarily intended to be a promotional tool for the upcoming album of the same name.

However, the film, which was released virtually in tandem with the album in July 1964, eventually transcended the cynical commercial motivation that inspired it. A Hard Day’s Night redefined the rock musical genre, which had previously been most clearly identified with Elvis Presley, whose insipid stream of comedy musical film vehicles in the late 1950s and 1960s were primarily interesting for how increasingly unhappy Elvis seemed to be to have to star in these films.

With A Hard Day’s Night, director Richard Lester merged the continually evolving Beatles phenomenon with various stylistic and technical innovations to create a joyous, original rock musical film that forever altered how musical performances were filmed.

Of course, A Hard Day’s Night also represents a poignant document of the unbridled exuberance of four indescribably talented musicians who were then simply enjoying being at the height of their creative and physical powers, oblivious to the dark times ahead.

A New Cinematic Language

Nearly sixty years after its initial release, A Hard Day’s Night seems ageless. It has transcended both the rock musical film genre that it galvanized and the music video format that it essentially invented.

From an opening electric guitar riff from the film’s titular song, A Hard Day’s Night begins to stand apart from all previous rock musical films. As “A Hard Day’s Night” plays, the film opens with the Beatles' quartet being chased by a horde of screaming fans, mostly girls, while trying to board a train for London, where they are scheduled to make a televised concert appearance.

While the blending of action and music in A Hard Day’s Night wasn’t unique to the film, the frenzied energy generated in this opening scene establishes a tone of creative freedom and inventiveness that extends throughout the rest of the film. Through the blending of action and music, this scene, like others in the film, takes the form of a short film.

Moreover, through black-and-white photography, close-up shots of the musical performances and cutaway shots of the audience, handheld and multi-camera filming techniques, jump cuts, and seemingly random bursts of absurdist humor, A Hard Day’s Night captures the Beatles with a level of intimacy and spontaneity that’s typically reserved for documentary films.

Indeed, the documentary approach in A Hard Day’s Night makes it seem like the film is an omniscient observer of the band’s gag-filled, rapid-fire interactions, which have the feel and tone of improvisation.

Springtime for the Beatles

The period of relative peace and innocence celebrated in A Hard Day’s Night is especially poignant when considering how the inexorable pressures of fame and life conspired to splinter the Beatles over the ensuing decade.

After manager Brian Epstein’s untimely death in 1967, the band formally dissolved in 1970. Later, of course, the cruel forces of circumstance and fate intervened with the 1980 murder of John Lennon and the 2001 death of George Harrison.

However, despite these events, and maybe because of them, A Hard Day’s Night remains an infectiously enjoyable and undeniably influential cinematic and pop culture landmark, which is rightfully regarded as being one of the greatest films ever made.

A Hard Day's Night Changed the World

While A Hard Day’s Night is deservedly praised for the film’s rampant creativity and technical excellence, perhaps the most consequential aspect of A Hard Day’s Night, specifically in terms of the legacy of the Beatles, is how the film defined the essential persona of the Beatles and established the band members as four distinctive individuals.

Indeed, as the Beatles were essentially introduced, both in the film and within their musical careers, as virtual clones with matching clothes and hairstyles, this is an impressive achievement. The band members were purposefully given small amounts of dialogue in the film in case their lack of acting experience endangered the film. Regardless, the band members are clearly distinguishable in the film as George, John, Paul, and Ringo, the band’s unofficial practical joker.

Moreover, A Hard Day’s Night captures the Beatles at a fateful moment in time in which the band members were coming to terms with the fact that they were poised to become the best band in the world, if not the greatest band in history, assuming that the Beatles hadn’t already reached this pinnacle during the filming of A Hard Day’s Night.

A Hard Day’s Night shows the Beatles dealing with this astonishing realization as well as can be expected. Fame hasn’t yet spoiled them. They haven’t become too cynical. They don’t seem to be under the influence of alcohol and drugs. They’re simply having fun. They were the real deal”.

In July, we mark sixty years of The Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night. The album and film will go down in history. It was the moment when The Beatles became the biggest band in the world. The album is among their very best. Incredible songwriting from John Lennon and Paul McCartney. I am excited to see how the sixtieth anniversary is marked. Whether the film is shown again at cinemas. If there is an album coming out. Giles Martin looking through the archives for demos and alternate takes. It would delight fans and give us insight into this classic album came together. The film is a masterpiece and pivotal moment in pop culture. Sixty years later, we can see how they both changed the world. Back in July 1964, A Hard Day’s Night was…

A true explosion.

FEATURE: Saluting the Queens: Lauren Laverne

FEATURE:

 

 

Saluting the Queens

PHOTO CREDIT: Lauren Laverne

Lauren Laverne

_________

IT was just over a year ago…

PHOTO CREDIT: Sophia Spring

that I last saluted and wrote about Lauren Laverne. As her birthday is on 28th April, I wanted to include her in my Saluting the Queens feature. It is appropriate that she is included in a feature that celebrates and highlights important women in the music industry. You can follow Laverne on Instagram and Twitter. She presents the breakfast show on BBC Radio 6 Music weekdays. There is so much to cover when it comes to talking about Lauren Laverne and her influence. The host of Desert Island Discs, she recently hosted a run of three live nights at the London Palladium. I have always said how there should be more interview with Lauren Laverne. Podcasts where she is featured. Also, as there is loads of stuff that I will not have time to include, I would encourage people to dig. Interviews she has conducted and ones where she has been interviewed. Check out all her Desert Island Discs episodes. As much of her archived BBC Radio 6 Music shows as you can. Even wonderful things from Spotify such as this. I would still love to hear more from Lauren Laverne as an interview subject. I am surprised someone like Adam Buxton has not contacted her. I would love to know more about her music tastes and upbringing. Sort of like Desert Island Discs, the music and memories that are important to her.

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She is such an admired and influential broadcaster, I know she is inspiring a whole generation coming through. So many young women looking up to her; those who want to follow in her footsteps. Laverne is an awe-inspiring broadcaster who we are all very lucky to have. A queen of the airwaves who is among the very best in the world, it is only right to give another pre-birthday salute to a wonderful human. Also, formerly, Lauren Laverne appeared on other artists’’ songs. She has featured alongside Mint Royale and The Divine Comedy. As the former lead of Kenickie (videos such as this are worth a watch and also lead you to an early interview too), Lauren Laverne has written and recorded songs that I grew up around in the 1990s. A wonderful songwriter who, alas, is probably not going back into the recording studio anytime soon.  I may repeat myself in terms of some interview archives and resources. This is going to be a bit of a scattershot approach in terms of the interviews sourced. Just stuff that caught my eye through the years. I am going to intersperse the text with some videos and podcasts where we get to see Lauren Laverne in her element. Also some Instagram posts and other bits. Let’s get started…

I want to start by going back to an interview from 2011. Maybe she doesn’t look back on interviews from the likes of The New Statesman. It was a time when Lauren Laverne was relatively new to BBC Radio 6 Music. She joined in June 2008. It is amazing to think that she has been at the station for almost sixteen years! Long may she continue to reign there:

“What sparked your interest in politics?

Growing up during the 1980s in the north-east probably did it. My paternal grandfather was a miner – one of my first memories is of him being on TV during the strike.

Which is home – Sunderland or London?

Put it this way: I always look at both bits of the map on the weather forecast.

You used to be in a band, Kenickie. Do you miss performing?

I don’t. Or at least I wouldn’t want to do it now. I was in the band between the ages of 15 and 21, which I think is the optimum age for those kinds of high jinks.

You’re a DJ (on BBC 6 Music) now. Would you ever return to making music?

I can’t imagine it. But not making records isn’t giving up music – I don’t feel the distinction between loving it and writing it is that important.

Why do you think the closure of BBC 6 Music was ever proposed?

There’s a bit of a conspiracy theory that it was a genius advertising campaign, but I’m sorry to say it wasn’t. I have to believe that the proposals were made with good intentions, but since part of the BBC’s charter is about stimulating creativity and cultural excellence and the station does that, demonstrably, for a modest sum, it would have been wrong to close it.

Do you think the BBC can get its priorities wrong at times?

I think it gets it right a lot more often than it gets it wrong. “Inform, educate and entertain” is a tough brief to set yourself.

What would be your plan for the BBC if you were in charge?

I’m bloody glad I’m not. Running an organisation with such a broad audience must be almost impossible: like DJing at a wedding, you’re always going to lose part of the crowd no matter which record you put on next. Maybe in both those situations you just have to lead from the front and play something you love.

You co-present 10 O’Clock Live. What’s the greatest challenge of making a live TV show?

The fact that the news never stops happening. But the way I look at it, the bits where everything fucks up can be the most memorable, enjoyable ones. You have to embrace the fact that, if you die on your arse, people will probably love it even more – and think of the Schadenfreude as your special gift to them.

You are outnumbered by your male co-hosts. Do you feel there are too few female presenters?

If that’s the case, I have no idea why. It’s not like you get to be one and they sit you down and go, “We’ve let YOU in. Now let me explain precisely why the others are outside . . . ” like a baddie at the end of Scooby-Doo.

How do you balance motherhood with work?

The challenges are ever-evolving and I negotiate them with great difficulty.

You got a strong reaction when you spoke of the benefits of starting a family early.

I was talking about my experience. I said that when I had my first son I was quite alone, in that not many of my peers had babies. I found
it quite hard, but an advantage now is being in the position of having completed my family. I’m glad I’m not at the beginning of that process. I have absolutely no view on if or when “women” should start having families. Who is “women”? It’s absurd.

Do you think it does get difficult for women in broadcasting as they get older?

I think it gets difficult for women when they’re born and remains so. It isn’t just in broadcasting.

What was your view of the recent case of Miriam O’Reilly at the BBC?

Ageism is wrong. TV is unfair. Equally true, unfortunately.

Is the coalition working?

I like the idea of moving beyond the knee-jerk sniping of party politics, but in practice I can’t see where the Lib Dems are – it’s all cuts and no cushion. It’s a Tory government, isn’t it?

What do you think of Nick Clegg and David Cameron?

I have very little interest in them as individuals. I’m interested in – and generally disapproving of – their policies.

Is religion a part of your life?

Once a Catholic . . . It’s like the Mafia – you don’t get to leave. I’m not sure I’d want to, but I’m incredibly angry with the Church at the moment.

Is there anything you regret?

Worrying when I had the time to.

Is there a plan?

Yes. It involves records, books, gin slings and great shoes. Join in if you like.

Are we all doomed?

No. Because people are (mostly) wonderful.

Defining Moments

1978 Born in Sunderland
1994 Forms the band Kenickie with her brother and two friends from school
1997 Calls the Spice Girls “Tory scum”
1998 Moves into television presenting on The Alphabet Show with Chris Addison
2002 Joins Xfm
2006 Becomes anchor of The Culture Show
2007 Gives birth to her first son
2008 Begins regular show on BBC 6 Music
2011 Becomes co-presenter, 10 O’Clock Live”.

I want to come to an interview from 2016. It made me think what a terrible year that was in terms of music losses. We said goodbye to, among others, David Bowie, Prince and George Michael. That is a tangent! Lauren Laverne spoke with The Guardian, as she was hosting Late Night Woman’s Hour. That was an incredible run of shows. I do hope that she does it again. Busy with other commitments, maybe it is not something that will be viable soon. She is also a brilliant host and has hosted, among other things, the Mercury Prize. One of our greatest talents for sure:

“Lauren Laverne is sitting in a Radio 4 studio, her new home as the presenter of Late Night Woman’s Hour. It really is a bit of a homecoming, she says, peeling a banana. Her mum listens to Woman’s Hour. In the house where she grew up, she and her brother shouted to make their voices heard over blues or the radio. “My earliest memories of Radio 4 are my mam’s dad, who worked in the shipyards. Right at the end of his life, when he was in his early 70s, he got really into it. So he was in his house on Ford Estate in Sunderland, just listening to Radio 4. He’d retired, and me mam’s one of nine so the family had grown up and everything, and he had time to have the radio on. And he l-o-o-o-ved it.”

Laverne’s grandfathers (the other was a miner) often figure in her interviews. So it seems reasonable to assume that she values her working-class heritage. Laverne’s father, like her mother, was from a large family, one of six. But both parents – “60s grammar-school kids, that classic working-class thing” – studied hard and had university jobs so that life for Laverne, growing up in Barnes in Sunderland, was comfortable.

“It was a house full of music and books and ideas that were not that usual where I was. There was always a lot of – we might call it alternative culture now,” she says. “We were this funny little middle-class outpost of a big working-class family, and that was a really lovely place to be. Because we had all the advantages of being middle class, but also had a real sense of place in history and culture that connected back to where we were from.”

Does she worry that her own children will be further removed from those origins? “Well, you know, they’re part of my family too, and they’re part of their own extended family and they have their own relationship with that, with my parents, my cousins, the place that I’m from,” she says. She’s sitting in a swivel chair, spinning from side to side as she thinks. “They’ve been on the beach that The Walrus and the Carpenter was written about!” The question was really an economic one, to which Lewis Carroll – a passion she got from her father – is an unexpected answer. I wonder if she worries about the privileges her children enjoy compared with the life of her grandfathers – does she sometimes feel the need to adjust their perspective?

“What? When we’re throwing another 50 on the fire?” she exclaims.

“My dad said a thing to me the other week that is really interesting. He said, you don’t teach kids the value of money, you teach them the value of people. And for me, that’s what it comes down to. What is a pound? What is a gold bar worth? It’s actually more about how you treat people, so that’s what I try to do.”

In many ways, another radio show is the last thing Laverne needs. She already hosts every weekday on 6 Music, she does voiceover for a children’s show, fills in time with all manner of documentaries and prize-presenting and live events – the Mercury, the Turner, the Baftas, Glastonbury. She has written a teen novel. When she counts her BBC radio stations – “I’m not sure about 4 Extra, but certainly 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5, I’ve hosted on” – she runs out of fingers. Somewhere in there, she finds time to call her mother “several times a day”.

Maybe one big change made her more open to a second, because seven months after she gave birth to her eldest son, Fergus, in autumn 2007, she started a new show on 6 Music. By the time he was two, she had the weekday slot. His younger brother, Mack, came a year later; Laverne is married to DJ and producer Graeme Fisher.

She has said before that motherhood “brings you back to the fundamental aspects of your personality”. What did she mean by that? “Well, it brings you back to brass tacks in all sorts of ways. You work out what’s important and who you want to be. I’m not saying you can’t work those things out without having kids. Of course you can. But … I happened to have kids and it gave me an imperative to decide what mattered.”

Surely she didn’t give birth and then everything made perfect sense? Did she lose herself for a while before that? “Well, I think what’s interesting is that it’s a new role, right? It’s a new job. Not just a job. You’re being a new you. Mummy. Who is Mummy or Mam or whatever? It takes ages … You learn the ropes but to really enjoy it and delight in it and feel confident, I think it takes 18 months, two years – for me,” she adds.

There has been another, unexpected consequence of having children. They have cast Laverne’s own youth in a new light. Fergus, now eight, has begun to learn guitar, the instrument Laverne played with Kenickie, the band she started in her teens with her brother and two schoolfriends. Watching Fergus, tuning the guitar for him, showing him the odd thing, has made the Laverne of her youth seem younger.

“I look at my kids now and think … I was not much older when we started to make records. That’s a real trip to look at that. You know, I experienced being in a band in that very episodic way that children experience school. Like, ‘We’re going here now! We’re doing this now!’ I wasn’t in the driving seat of my own life. Of course I wasn’t. I was a little kid. You don’t know who you are. You don’t understand the significance of things.”

She casts around for an example, her feet tapping to the tune of her thoughts. She is wearing printed Karl Lagerfeld trainers. In 1996, Kenickie supported the Ramones. “If I could go back now and say to myself as the Ramones go, ‘Do you want to support us at this gig?’, which turns out to be their last ever British gig at Brixton Academy …” she says. “Obviously, I thought it was great and they were lovely … and it was brilliant. But now I’d be: ‘Oh my God, do you know they’re music history?’”

Maybe her younger self didn’t do so badly. “I look back now and I feel terrified about all the things that I did. But also more forgiving towards myself because I was so young,” she says. “Everyone’s an idiot when they’re 16.”

You can see why Woman’s Hour thrilled at the idea of Laverne. She is the go-to woman for cutting the familiar with edge, all while making her listeners feel understood. But she also has a reputation for mischief. “Definitely, I’m mischievous,” she nods, with that funny halfway smile she sometimes has, like a smile doing a u-turn. Late Night Woman’s Hour has been billed as slightly naughty. “Intimate,” the press release says. It is recorded at night. There is wine. Forthcoming topics include birth, anger and masturbation. The very name “Late Night Woman’s Hour” seems subversively oxymoronic.

Laverne used the phrase “alternative culture” earlier to describe the atmosphere of her house growing up, but now that she has become so prolific, does she still consider herself alternative? She appears less comfortable hearing the word said by someone else. “Well, I don’t think anybody sits down and goes: ‘I am part of alternative culture’. It is … I hate to use the word ‘problematic’, but it is a problematic word, ‘alternative’: what does it really mean? But yes, in the broadest sense.”

Does she worry that she has been co-opted by the mainstream? Even 6 Music is no longer an underdog, with its record 2.2m listeners a week, a growth to which she has brilliantly contributed. Can a station that the prime minister’s wife enjoys really be considered alternative? “I think all of our listeners are very welcome,” she says, and it is typical of her that the sentence manages to sound both sincere and ironic”.

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There are interviews that I will not have opportunity to include (such as this. There are four more interviews/features that I want to cover off. The most recent takes us back to last year. I will move on to 2018. Technically, it is a feature from Music Week that looked back at their 2017 interview with Lauren Laverne. Reacting to the fact that she was going to be hosting the BBC Radio 6 Music breakfast show. She started that slot in 2018. Yet more insight into the career and importance of the amazing Lauren Laverne:

“Even then, it was clear Laverne was destined for great things and today, 20 years on, not much has changed; her quotes still sparkle with northern wit and George Orwell references and her passion for music still abounds, even if these days she’s enthusing about someone else’s tunes, rather than her own.

That makes her the perfect choice to host this week’s MWAs at London’s Grosvenor House Hotel and help celebrate a momentous year for the biz. But then, these days, wherever you find good music, Laverne is unlikely to be far away.

As well as her 6 Music show, which cheerfully champions leftfield sounds in an accessible way every weekday morning, and now has a reach in excess of one million listeners, she’s involved in presenting the television coverage of both Glastonbury Festival and the Mercury Prize (not to mention being co-founder of female-focused website The Pool). And now she basically gets to be in charge of the music biz for a few hours on Wednesday night…

“At last!” she beams. “I can’t bloody wait. It’s going to be great. Did you know the Grosvenor House room is the second biggest interior space in Europe?”

Er, no. What’s the biggest?

“I don’t know, but I’ve done gigs there before and it’s always good to have some facts in your back pocket in case there are technical issues…”

Before she does some additional research, however, it’s time to sit down with Music Week to talk 6 Music, streaming services and why Kenickie won’t be reforming any time soon…

Are you a fan of the music business?

The bottom line is, I’ve worked in all different sides of the music industry. I started out as a musician and then got into TV presenting followed by DJ-ing. The music industry has had a tricky time over the past couple of decades, but it’s interesting to see how people in other media are looking at the music industry to see how to survive and prosper in the digital age. You know, publishing has Bookshop Day now with coffee machines and in-stores and limited run editions. It’s lovely to see how the music industry is a test case for how to be adaptable and still get people’s work out there. So I feel very pleased to be part of the awards this year.

You were in a band in the ‘90s, when the business was at its commercial peak…

Absolutely. In those days – not us because we just signed the one record deal – but there were bands on the scene who were signed and dropped three times and each time they’d get a massive advance. Videos would cost 100 grand, again not for me, but that certainly wasn’t uncommon, because it was the video age and MTV was everything. That’s unimaginable now. It’s weird to look back and think about how it was back then.

Do you miss those days?

It’s changed so much, but it’s always interesting when someone releases a very old-school studio album and you hark back to the days when many bands could afford that huge studio experience to make their record. I guess there’s always a certain tier where people are still living that life, but most of the industry has had to move on. There’s an upside to that as well: you look at where British music is actually pushing things forward and making inroads – and that, fundamentally, is grime.

The British grime scene has come out of people making music in a very DIY way with what I would think of as a punk rock mentality. It’s exciting to see that going global and the Mercury Prize win for Skepta. There’s as much good music at every point in history, the industry changes around it but the ratio of really good stuff out there always stays the same. But it does change form and it’s really interesting to see how the changes in the music industry have changed the sound of the music that we listen to. There’s a lack of studios, venues, rehearsal space, all those spaces are closing down and being turned into flats. All that stuff feeds into changing the actual sound of the music that’s out there. You can also find clues about where we’re going next as a culture. Music is always at the forefront of that. The vanguard of the music scene is way ahead of the cultural conversation. Boy George was in everybody’s living room years before people were having the conversations we’re having now about sexuality and gender.

And I suppose at 6 Music you only really have to engage with the good stuff…

It is a ridiculously lucky position to be in, to be able to play a nine-minute Miles Davis track followed by four minutes of King Gizzard & The Wizard Lizard followed by Deee-Lite. We’re all so proud of the way the station’s been embraced by people and the music we get to champion.

It’s also pretty popular with the music business. What do you put that down to?

When I took over from George Lamb [in 2009], I was thinking, How do I want to pitch this? Quite early on I thought, If we make a show that musicians enjoy listening to, then I felt sure we’d take everyone else along with us. That seemed really obvious to me. It had to be good enough to broadcast to people who really knew their shit. And with 6, it’s been a case of holding the line [until] the technology’s rising tide has allowed people to access that. It’s so wonderful to see it having gone from nearly being taken off-air [in 2010] to being this small, but perfectly formed jewel in the crown.

When the station was potentially going to be closed it really galvanised everybody [into thinking]: What does this mean, why does this matter? And then, when we were saved because of the listener protests, we literally owed them our existence. Of course, every station owes their audience its existence, but we did in a very direct way. We’d met them! We had a very direct connection and it made everybody work very, very hard and think about why we’re doing what we’re doing. We’ve all got different music tastes and backgrounds, but it definitely changed the way that we approach what we did as a station and since then it’s just flown.

How different would your life have turned out if the campaign had failed?

Well, I was pregnant. Pregnant and losing your job is never good! It would have been such a shame, obviously for me personally, but also for the listeners and for the music industry as well. We’re an important link in that chain. As the industry has changed because of the digital revolution, each link has become very important. Everything’s evened out, we’re all supporting each other and you could argue that wasn’t the case in the past, things were more top down.

How conscious is the station of that influence?

In radio terms, the rule is an audience of one, so it’s always about the one person you’re speaking to. So you can’t sit there and think, I’m so massively influential, whose career shall I boost today? It should never be about that…

I suspect it might be for some radio DJs…

I’ve met a few of them! But that’s not how I do things, personally. You start with your ‘user’, as we’d say these days, and work back. That was good enough for George Orwell, who coined the phrase ‘audience of one’ in his essay Poetry And The Microphone, which is a must-read for all radio DJs. That’s always steered me right. I’ve learned more at 6 than anywhere else. It’s where I really found my feet and and understood what I was doing and why it matters to me. It’s wonderful to have people say 6 Music is influential and can help people’s careers, I’m very proud of that and grateful, but the thing that makes my job meaningful to me is that I’ve got a listener who’s maybe having a shit Tuesday morning, or a great Tuesday morning, and I’m there with them and part of their ordinary life and their routine. That’s the magical thing.

Streaming services would say they do that too...

Well, if you just want to generally check stuff out, a streaming service is a good place to do that. Whereas, when people want something more niche, they know they’re going to get that from us. We had a few of those moments over the past couple of years, with so many important and influential musicians dying. When Prince died, nobody could get Prince on Spotify. We were desperately trying to get all these records together and making it up as we went along. There’s a community thing to it, which is different. When you’re sitting listening to a streaming service – and I don’t have a problem with streaming services, they’re really useful and brilliant – but you don’t feel like you’re joining together with other people.

You present Glastonbury and the Mercury Prize – but why is there still not enough music on TV?

It’d be great if there was more. But I’ve been badgering people about that for about two decades now and nobody listens to me. It’s one of my hobbyhorses, it’s such a missed opportunity. The thing that I think is a shame is, we’re going to run out of archive. You look at the stuff on BBC4 and all of these fantastic shows using the archive of Top Of The Pops and whatever and I think, What happens when we get to 1999? Is everything going to be iPhone footage after that? The good thing is that all the distinctions between media are melting now. So at 6 we’re visualising/filming a lot of the sessions on my show now and that is all added to the archive. Some of the Maida Vale sessions we’ve done have been unbelievably popular. There’s an extraordinary appetite for that stuff so maybe it will fall to radio to plug that gap”.

Prior to finishing with a Beatles-related feature around Lauren Laverne, there are a couple of things from 2022 I want to include. I will spotlight an interview I have sourced before. It is with The Guardian. A nice, insightful and varied question-and-answer with a broadcasting legend:

“When were you happiest?

There are different flavours of happy, but I think my favourite is the quiet contentment when several generations of family are sitting together watching a crowd-pleaser like Harry Potter on the telly.

What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?

Deflection – what about you?

What is the trait you most deplore in others?

Unkindness, meanness. People who could make the world better and choose to make it worse.

Describe yourself in three words

Hopeful, curious and thoughtful, in the sense that I am always thinking about things.

If you could bring something extinct back to life, what would you choose?

The concept of polite disagreement.

What makes you unhappy?

I find it very difficult when the people I care about are unhappy.

Who would play you in the film of your life?

Evanna Lynch who plays Luna Lovegood in the Harry Potter films.

What was the last lie that you told?

Oh, what a lovely hat.

What is your most unappealing habit?

I have a tendency to take on a bit too much and then complain about it in my head afterwards.

What scares you about getting older?

Losing people.

Which book are you ashamed not to have read?

I always feel like I’m catching up because I didn’t go to university, so War and Peace and Proust.

What did you want to be when you were growing up?

I wanted to be like my dad, who was an academic, because he had an office packed full of books, always had loud music on, and seemed to get to do what he wanted.

Would you choose fame or anonymity?

Anonymity. It’s not good for human beings to be famous, even though it’s the thing lots of people seem to want.

What is your guiltiest pleasure?

I never feel guilty about pleasure.

What was the best kiss of your life?

The first with my husband, 20 years ago. We worked together on a pop TV show in the early 00s. He invited me to a gig and we both thought other people would come, but nobody did. We realised that it was Valentine’s Day and ended up getting together.

PHOTO CREDIT: Suki Dhanda/The Guardian

What has been your biggest disappointment?

My biggest disappointment is always myself. That’s my Catholic upbringing.

If you could edit your past, what would you change?

It would have been lovely to have grown up in private like a lot of my friends.

What would you like to leave your children?

The knowledge that they were absolutely adored for exactly who they are.

How would you like to be remembered?

I’d rather be enjoyed while I am still here.

What is the most important lesson life has taught you?

The difference between simple and easy.

What happens when we die?

Life goes on”.

In 2022, for British Vogue, Lauren Laverne spoke with Amelia Diomoldenberg (Chicken Shop Date) about the art of the interview. It is a compassionate and fascinating discussion between two phenomenal interviewers. Although there is a gap in terms of age and experience, they each imparted important wisdom and experience

“To have the freedom to have your own show and vision is amazing,” Amelia Dimoldenberg, comedian, journalist and creator of Chicken Shop Date, tells broadcaster Lauren Laverne in the third episode in British Vogue and YouTube’s Vogue Visionaries series.

Following two enlightening conversations – about how to break into the beauty industry with YouTube Creator NikkieTutorials and make-up artist Val Garland, and making it in music with music legend Nile Rodgers and singer-songwriter Rina Sawayama – Dimoldenberg and Laverne met to discuss their jobs as two of today’s most successful interviewers. Here they swap anecdotes, career advice and reflect on how they’ve carved out distinctive voices and styles.

Beginning her career in the public eye as a teenager in the band Kenickie, Laverne moved into television, becoming a guest on panel shows, before finding her home in radio. “It had this brilliant intimacy,” she says of its appeal. Since 2018, she has been the presenter of the legendary programme Desert Island Discs, where her recent guests have included Adele and Kate Moss.

Dimoldenberg, meanwhile, first had the idea for her wildly popular YouTube series Chicken Shop Date – in which she takes on a deadpan persona to pose questions to musicians, actors and other well-known personalities in a chicken shop – at school. It started life as a print feature for a youth-led magazine, before Dimoldenberg decided the unique format would make first-rate viewing too.

“YouTube was always going to be the platform [to host the videos on] because it’s so accessible,” says Dimoldenberg. “I could connect with a whole range of different people and get it out there to the masses, [and] you can connect with your fans.” Furthermore, she says, “The comments are where I do a lot of my research. I’ll get a sense of what people think about a certain person or get into the mind of the fan and that’s a great way to carve questions.”

In one of Dimoldenberg’s favourite and most-watched videos (which regularly amass upwards of one million views) she interviewed Louis Theroux. “He was such a hero of mine,” she says, smiling. “A lot of my awkward interview style comes directly from him.” In that episode, Theroux recalls a rap he once wrote – “Jiggle Jiggle” – which then became a viral sensation. The pair have now recorded a music video together, also featuring Jason Derulo and Duke & Jones, which has had more than 1.6 million views on YouTube.

One thing that taught her as an interviewer was the importance of digging deep. “If I hadn’t done in-depth research,” says Dimoldenberg, “then I wouldn’t have known he did that rap in one of his documentaries over 20 years ago.”

What makes her YouTube interviews stand out, she thinks, is how they show another side of a personality. “I try and get a sense of what they’ve been asked before and figure out what kind of person I want to show them as.”

The ideal interviewee for Laverne is someone who has “nothing to prove. It’s always lovely to get people when they’ve had the success they want to have and they can just enjoy it at this point.”

In terms of the success of their own shows, Dimoldenberg credits the fact that they “have a very clear format. I think that as a viewer people can really connect with something that’s so simple with the way that it’s presented,” she continues. Ultimately, Dimoldenberg has three tips for getting a project off the ground: “Believe in your idea, be persistent and annoy people to the point where they end up saying yes”.

I will wrap up with Lauren Laverne’s reaction to The Beatles’ final single, Now and Then. Released late last year, it was an emotional and moving listen. A song that still affects me when I hear it. Lauren Laverne spoke with Radio Times and shared her verdict on the song:

“I cried like a baby! And I never cry,” reveals Lauren Laverne, recalling the first time she heard the new Beatles song Now and Then.

This emotional reaction broke one of the BBC Radio 6 Music and Desert Island Discs presenter’s own broadcasting rules - no tears on the job. “Obviously I listen to some very difficult stories when people are talking to me for Desert Island Discs. They’re often very emotional episodes,” Laverne explains. “But with this, I actually did cry.

“I’m quite a softie in real life, so I have a thing where I just can’t cry at work. But someone said to me, ‘I think you might get emotional hearing this…’ And I do have very deep connections to the Beatles.”

As the song – all four Beatles, reunited by the wonders of technology on a “lost” demo by John Lennon in 1979 – unspooled, so did the 45-year-old’s emotions. Such was the impact of the avowedly “last” Beatles track.

And this afternoon, having kept quiet about this precious experience for several weeks, Laverne can finally exhale as the world can share in the wonder of hearing John, Paul, George and Ringo back together for one final moment of musical magic.

“It’s global treasure, isn’t it?” she says. “It was quite a profound experience to get the chance to hear it [early]. And I couldn’t get over the resonance of the title: to have this final track that’s arrived out of the mists of time, which takes us back to the beginning of this amazing story – this story that’s become part of our national character...”

The new, short documentary, The Beatles – Now and Then – The Last Song, which Laverne introduced in a UK TV exclusive on yesterday’s special edition of The One Show, reflected this sentiment. She praises the “lovely, beautifully non-linear way that the film is constructed – it’s not represented in a chronological way. I thought that was so clever and so touching.”

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She continues: “It’s the story of Britain in the 20th century, I think. Lads from an industrial city who represent so strongly what Britain did, as we moved from this industrial country to being a place where arts and culture is made. Which is very much what we’re about now: this is a place where ideas are born. They represent this story about Britain, about who we all are. They represent us.

For this lifelong fan and mother-of-two who’s passed on to her children her own parents’ obsession with the band, the Beatles are everything to Laverne. Arguably, the same applies universally: the Beatles' music is in all of us. So, yes, we can all cry – and cry together”.

Ahead of her birthday on 28th April, I wanted to spotlight and celebrate the simply wonderful Lauren Laverne. A BBC Radio 6 Music stalwart and host of BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs, who knows what her future holds. It will be golden. I think she will be in broadcasting for decades more. Whether with BBC Radio 6 Music or other stations, we will see her go from strength to strength. She is an award-winning and hugely popular broadcaster whose breakfast show on 6 keeps growing in popularity. As she says, the station’s listeners are a family. Not that Lauren Laverne is the mother, yet she does exude this warmth, authority and sense of comfort that makes us all feel safer, happier and together. And for that, we offer her our collective…

LOVE and appreciation.

FEATURE: You Want My Reply? What Was the Question? Kate Bush’s The Big Sky at Thirty-Eight

FEATURE:

 

 

You Want My Reply? What Was the Question?

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush on the set of The Big Sky

Kate Bush’s The Big Sky at Thirty-Eight

_________

IN future Kate Bush features…

I am going to mix up specific song/album-related stuff with some more general things. How Bush has inspired a new generation of female artists for instance. There is a lot I want to cover off. There are some anniversaries approaching in terms of singles - and also the album, Director’s Cut. I will get to them. A track I have written about a few times through the years – though not visited for a little while – is my favourite song from 1985’s Hounds of Love: the majestic The Big Sky. It is the final single released from Hounds of Love. I am going to build in some background to the song. I also want to frame the release around what was happening to Kate Bush in 1986. Specifically around March and April. There is a lot to unpack when it comes to The Big Sky. Not least the video, which Kate Bush herself directed. Not only did she invite fans down to be extras in the video. There was also a Big Sky cream-coloured cigarette lighter that was made for fans who took part in the filming of the music video. It is shocking how low some of the singles from Hounds of Love charted. There as this sense of diminishing returns. Even though the album – released in September 1985 – reached number one in the U.K. and Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God) reached five, Cloudbusting got to twenty. Hounds of Love went to eighteen. These magnificent singles that charted so low. I wonder whether 1985 and 1986 were years when other tastes and artists were favoured on the singles charts. The Big Sky only reached thirty-seven. Such an energetic and mesmerising song, I do wonder why it was such a low-placing release!

Prior to coming to information about The Big Sky and its music video, this website provides Kate Bush timeline from March and April 1986. What was happening in the lead-up to the release of The Big Sky. Into 1986, there was still interest around Hounds of Love. Kate Bush still promoting it:

“March 6, 1986

Kate appears on Top of the Pops to perform Hounds of Love.

March 19, 1986

For the making of the video for The Big Sky Kate assembles over one hundred fans on the sound stage of Elstree Studios.

Kate records a live performance of Under the Ivy at Abbey Road Studios for the 100th edition of the Tyne Tees TV programme The Tube.

April 4, 1986

Kate participates in the first of three Comic Relief shows at the Shaftesbury Theatre. She performs Breathing live and performs a duet of Do Bears Sh... in the Woods? with Rowan Atkinson.

April 5, 1986

The second Comic Relief show.

April 6, 1986

The third Comic Relief show”.

I will finish with a feature about The Big Sky. For those who are not sure about the music video or what the inspiration behind the song was, the Kate Bush Encyclopedia fill us in. I think that The Big Sky is one of Kate Bush’s best songs. It deserved a lot more love than the chart position it got in 1986. Worthy of new love thirty-eight after its release. A song that Kate Bush rarely performed live (only the one time I think), I feel that people need to hear it:

“Music video

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

Kate about ‘The Big Sky’

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

‘The Big Sky’ gave me terrible trouble, really, just as a song. I mean, you definitely do have relationships with some songs, and we had a lot of trouble getting on together and it was just one of those songs that kept changing – at one point every week – and, um…It was just a matter of trying to pin it down. Because it’s not often that I’ve written a song like that: when you come up with something that can literally take you to so many different tangents, so many different forms of the same song, that you just end up not knowing where you are with it. And, um…I just had to pin it down eventually, and that was a very strange beast. (Tony Myatt Interview, November 1985)”

Critical reception

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

RICHARD COOK, SOUNDS, 3 MAY 1986

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

THE STUD BROTHERS, MELODY MAKER, 3 MAY 1986

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

IAN CRANNA, SMASH HITS, 7 MAY 1986”.

I am going to end with this feature from 2022. It suggests (rightly) that most people associate Hounds of Love with Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God). It is the lead song and their window in. If you need another track from the album that is deserving of equal focus and appreciation, then do go and check out The Big Sky:

“It must be an interesting moment to be Kate Bush. 39 years after her masterwork Hounds of Love came out, it’s back, thanks to a canny placement of its song “Running Up That Hill” in the hit Netflix series Stranger Things. And when I say “it’s back,” it’s actually to say that it’s hitting higher than it ever has: “Running” is at #8 of the Billboard Hot 100 in the US making it the first time Kate Bush has ever hit the top ten in this country (it only got to #30 when it originally came out, which was her previous high water mark on the US charts). Hounds of Love as a whole reentered the album charts at #28, two positions higher than its peak in 1985. In fact, the album has gotten as high up on the Billboard 200 as Bush has ever gotten, tied with her album The Red Shoes. It’s possible both the album and song could chart even higher this week. (Update, 3:33pm: Yup.) We should all have work we did decades ago hit so well with the youth of today.

Having legions of Those Kids Today glom onto one of your favorite artist is a perfect time for old people to go all hipster and gatekeepery, so I’m delighted to see that, so far at least, old school Kate Bush fans have not been like that at all — they’re genuinely happy to see one of their favorite artists have a renaissance in to pop culture. I think this is especially the case since the Hounds of Love album is probably the best marriage of Kate Bush’s commercial sensibilities (see: the first side of the LP) with her experimental urges (see: side two). There aren’t many albums that could feature both crowd-pleasing pop hits, and a thirty-minute conceptual song suite about drowning in the North Sea. That Kate Bush offers both without apology, and indeed with a certain witchy sort of glee, is part of what makes her unique in the canon of Anglosphere rock musicians. Why wouldn’t her old fans want to share this album?

And while “Running Up That Hill” is indeed probably the best Starter Kate Bush song out there — there’s just so much drama in it — allow me to suggest “The Big Sky” as a follow-up for the folks who don’t know if they want to commit to a whole album just yet. “The Big Sky” is, as they kids say, a whole bop: relentless but not unrelenting drums, bouncy rather than thundering, hammer on while Bush sings a paean to the glories of the huge bowl of the universe opening up above you. It’s not about much, but does it have to be? No! It can be about clouds looking like Ireland, and maybe people being confused about why Bush is so darn pleased about that. Be happy with Kate! Dance with her! Pause for the jet! Then dance again! Maybe it’s possible not to be happy when this song is playing, but I think you really have to work at it.

The whole of Hounds of Love is terrific, and it is one of my favorite albums. But in the days when I was still making mixtapes, it was “The Big Sky” that I picked more than any other Kate Bush song. Listen to it. Maybe you’ll hear why”.

On 28th April, we mark thirty-eight years of The Big Sky. The final single from Hounds of Love, it was an important release. The next album would be 1989’s The Sensual World. Even though there were release in-between (The Whole Story came in 1986 alongside the single, Experiment IV), this was the send-off from her most popular and acclaimed album. I think The Big Sky is the best song from Hounds of Love. A magnificent vocal and brilliant video directed by Kate Bush, it will always settle fondly in my mind. Ahead of its anniversary, I am glad I get to discuss…

THIS wonderful song.

FEATURE: Groovelines: Prince – When Doves Cry

FEATURE:

 

 

Groovelines

Prince – When Doves Cry

_________

THERE are a couple…

PHOTO CREDIT: Lynn Goldsmith

of reasons why I am including this particular song in Groovelines. We lost the genius Prince on 21st April, 2016. It was a tragic day where one of the world’s greatest and most influential artists left us. I was keen to remember him as we look to the eighth anniversary of his death. I am focusing on When Doves Cry, as it turns forty on 16th May. One of Prince’s most iconic and legendary tracks, it is from the Purple Rain album. That turns forty on 25th June. I wonder whether there will be a fortieth anniversary release of that album. Anyone who does not own the album should definitely buy it. There has not been an announcement as to whether there will be a new reissue or anything special. I hope that there is. The Purple Rain film was released in the U.K. on 27th July. Though not as acclaimed as other films starring musicians, it is definitely an important moment in Prince’s career. Maybe I will cover it closer to the fortieth anniversary. I want to stick for the moment with When Doves Cry. I am going to get to some reviews and acclaim for one of the greatest songs of the 1980s. I am going to start out with a feature from American Songwriter. They looked behind the meaning of one of Prince’s finest achievements. An absolutely towering and timeless song that is still played a lot to this day:

“When Prince died in 2016, he left a massive gap in the lives of his die-hard fans and casual listeners alike. From the omnipresent “Purple Rain” to the party anthem of the century “1999,” his songs were mainstays in pop culture. Though his music quickly made him an icon, the singer liked to keep people guessing, keeping tight-lipped on the deeper meaning behind his songs.

Upon hearing about his passing, social media erupted into a frenzy of tributes to the singer, including one poignant message from Whoopi Goldberg that read, “This is what it sounds like when doves cry.” Though the song is an obvious reference to his 1984 hit, “When Doves Cry,” it begged the question: exactly what did Prince mean when he wrote about crying doves?

Six years and many theories later, we’ve arrived at a conclusion that seems fitting. Let’s dive into it below.

Origins

“When Doves Cry” was written for Prince’s semi-autobiographical film, Purple Rain. In the film, the song plays under a montage after his character loses his girl (Apollonia) to his rival. The montage includes scenes of Prince’s tumultuous relationship with his father and intimate moments with Apollonia.

Just how much of the film is based on real-life remains a mystery, as Prince rarely gave interviews and didn’t talk much about his personal life. Either way, it seemed to resonate with much of the public as it became the No. 1 song of 1984 in the U.S.

“When Doves Cry” topped the charts for five weeks over the summer and kept Bruce Springsteen’s “Dancing In The Dark” at a standstill at No. 2. Though Springsteen, a self-professed Prince fan, didn’t mind being kept at bay by the icon, saying, “Whenever I would catch one of his shows, I would always leave humbled.”

Meaning Behind the Lyrics

Mirroring the plot of the movie, the song touches on a crumbling love affair and Prince’s fear of becoming too much like his parents. The crying doves in question seem to point to the two lovers mourning the loss of their relationship.

At the beginning of the song, Prince asks Apollonia to picture a time when the two of them were happy together before moving on to a more melancholy scenario when their relationship began to falter.

Dig if you will the picture

Of you and I engaged in a kiss

The sweat of your body covers me

Can you my darling

Can you picture this?

Dream, if you can, a courtyard

An ocean of violets in bloom

Animals strike curious poses

They feel the heat

The heat between me and you

Prince starts to get introspective in the chorus, begging the all-too-familiar question “are we becoming my parents?” He then rolls around to the titular “crying doves” line, asking why the pair continue to scream at each other.

Though the couple seems to be heavily at odds with one another, given that doves are a universal symbol of peace it seems he is actually taking an optimist’s view, hoping the two can work out their differences.

Maybe I’m just too demanding

Maybe I’m just like my father, too bold

Maybe you’re just like my mother

She’s never satisfied

Why do we scream at each other?

This is what it sounds like

When doves cry

Production

Prince played all of the instruments on the track—a lead guitar, piano, synthesizers, and a Linn LM-1 drum machine.

A bass part is notably absent from the song, though he told Bass Player magazine, he hated to see it go. “Sometimes your brain kind of splits in two—your ego tells you one thing, and the rest of you says something else. You have to go with what you know is right.”

His trusty LM-1 drum machine (now on display at his estate—Paisley Park) is featured heavily in the song. To make the unique percussion sound, Prince used a recording of a cross-stick snare drum, tuned it down an octave to give it more of a knocking sound, and ran it through a guitar processor. In addition to his prowess on guitar, Prince is acknowledged as one of the greatest drum machine programmers of the era.

Peggy McCreary, Prince’s engineer on the song, told Billboard about the day it was recorded and the singer’s confidence that it would become a hit. “[Prince] took the bass out and he said, ‘There’s nobody that’s going to have the guts to do this.’ And he was smiling from ear to ear. He felt this was the best and he knew he had a hit song… so he decided to do something really daring. That’s what Prince was all about.”

She continued, “He would run through [a song] with just a piano and a vocal. And sometimes he’d do the drums and then the bass… The room was always set up and you had to be ready to do whatever he felt like doing. It was real spontaneous. You had to be there with him, which was the hard part and the exciting part. But when you’re exhausted, it’s hard to be excited. It was the longest I ever worked with anybody in my life. I worked around the clock, 24 hours. He said sometimes the only reason he went home was so I could sleep”.

Let’s move on to NME. In a feature that spotlighted the greatest Pop songs in history, they placed Prince’s When Doves Cry at number two. A great honour for a song that seems to pack as big an emotional punch now as it did upon its release. Produced by Prince, it has this ageless equality. Still fresh and exciting to this day:

“Born out of his unceasing drive to top what had come before and an almost unceasing ability to create, ‘When Doves Cry’ is a standout track – for him, for the 80s and for all time.

The film Purple Rain told the tale of Prince Rogers Nelson’s rags to riches ascent. It was a glossy Hollywood fantasy of course, but the nugget of truth came from the singer’s real life story. And it was his ruptured childhood – his father leaving the family home when he was a youngster- which was key to unlocking the inner character of Prince’s Kid character.

In the film, his relationship with Apollonia lies in contrast to his parents’ combative and destructive one. Here, ‘When Doves Cry’’s lines resonate deeply.

Maybe I’m just too demanding/Maybe I’m just like my father, too bold/

Maybe I’m just like my mother, she’s never satisfied/

When do we scream at each other?/This is what it sounds like when the doves cry

It was the yin to ‘Purple Rain’ (the song’s) yang. Complicatedly passionate and showing the inner workings of Prince’s character in a much more in-depth way than the clunky dialogue ever could.

But the track almost never made the final cut. Both the film and the album were completed, and ‘…Doves’ was a last minute addition.

There were many theories behind what Prince proposed for the album (including a double soundtrack album with songs by The Time, Apollonia 6 and a version that had the tracks ‘Father’s Song’ and ‘Wednesday’ instead of either ‘Take Me With U’ or ‘When Doves Cry’).

But the tracklist kept on changing because Prince was so prolific and kept on writing more and more songs.

In the instance of this track he wasn’t aided by his Revolution bandmates and hit the studio on his own to create a song which, on director’s orders, reflected the scene of parental tumult. Overnight Prince created two songs, one of which was ‘…Doves’.

Opinion is divided over who inspired the track. According to at least one of his biographers it was inspired by his relationship with Vanity 6/Apollonia 6 member Susan Moonsie.

However, the timeline fits better with Vanity, who played a significant role in Prince’s life before leaving his life during the production on the film due to disputes about money.

Aside from the lyrical raw emotion on display, one of the standout features of the song is its lack of bass parts. In an extremely rare interview, Prince told Bass Player magazine:

When Doves Cry’ is most distinctive because of its lack of a bass line. The song had one but it was pulled at the last minute. They were almost done editing the movie (and) ‘When Doves Cry’ was the last song to be mixed, and it just wasn’t sounding right.

Prince was listening to the mixes of the track when one of his singers, Jill Jones, came in. “It was just sounding too conventional, like every other song with drums and bass and keyboards. So I said, ‘If I could have it my way it would sound like this,’ and I pulled the bass out of the mix. She said, ‘Why don’t you have it your way?'”

“His way” meant bass free, which was an unconventional idea to say the least. But he stuck with his instincts:

Sometimes your brain kind of splits in two. Your ego tells you one thing, and the rest of you says something else. You have to go with what you know is right.

And it was so right. The track hit the top of the US Billboard charts, selling two million and going platinum. In the UK it hit the relatively humble placing of Number 10, but it and the snowball effect of Purple Rain meant that it put him firmly on the international map.

The influence of the song has lived on, long after it left the charts. It has been covered by Greg Dulli’s Twilight Singers, Razorlight, Patti Smith and Robyn.

The Swede summed up the song’s enduring influence, when she told Pitchfork: “Prince is king to me. As this half-naked, short black guy who looked like a girl in the 70s and 80s, he was talking about women in a way that was very unusual because he didn’t objectify them. He always puts himself in a vulnerable situation. And the songs have complex views of sexuality and male and female identities, which is very rare.”

Robyn had it right; a dazzling masterstroke from a musical enigma, ‘When Doves Cry’ is a waterfall of pure pop joy”.

There are a couple of other things I want to include regarding Prince’s When Doves Cry. Stereogum, for their The Number Ones feature, explored the first single released from 1984’s Purple Rain. A number one single in the U.S. and number four in the U.K., this gem of a song was laid down at Sunset Sound, Los Angeles. I would urge people who are familiar with When Doves Cry to also check out its U.S. B-side, 17 Days:

“Purple Rain was a big movie, but it was a bigger album. The Purple Rain soundtrack is a missile aimed right at the heart of pop music. It’s all of Prince’s predilections and perversions distilled into nine songs, offered up for mass adulation. Mass adulation is what it got. The Purple Rain soundtrack sold 13 million copies in the US alone. For a little while in the summer of 1984, Prince had the #1 single, album, and film in the United States, all at the same time. Nobody had ever done that before.

The song in question was “When Doves Cry,” which Billboard would later name the #1 single of 1984. It’s the last song that Prince wrote for Purple Rain. First-time director Albert Magnoli wanted something to soundtrack a montage. In the movie, Prince’s character had just lost his girl to Morris Day, so something had to play on the soundtrack while Prince rode around on his motorcycle, looking upset and flashing back on happier times. “When Doves Cry” was that something.

“When Doves Cry” is entirely a Prince creation. After getting his assignment from Magnoli, Prince turned around “When Doves Cry” in two days. (He wrote the song in a night, then spent one day recording and one day doing overdubs.) Prince plays every instrument on the song — the synths, the guitars, the Linn drum machine, all the vocals. He’d originally put a bassline on the song, too, but he took it out. He figured that the empty space on the song, the striking spareness of the finished work, would leave more of an impression than the bassline he’d come up with. He was right.

In some ways, “When Doves Cry” is a straight-up soundtrack work — a summary of the plot and the character’s feelings at the point in the movie where it plays. In other ways, “When Doves Cry” is opaque poetry, a hallucinatory swirl of panting come-ons and animal imagery. That means it’s classic Prince — half functional, half mysterious, able to do its work while still leaving your mind spinning.

Lyrically, “When Doves Cry” is a seduction and a breakup song at the same time. In the opening lines, Prince establishes the sexual chemistry between himself and the song’s target. It’s a force so great that even animals can sense it. But now that bond has been broken, and Prince’s narrator is struggling to understand how that could’ve happened. At first, he sounds accusatory: “How can you just leave me stranded alone in a world that’s so cold?” Then he’s off on some personal internal journey, thinking about the example of his own dysfunctional parents. (Prince is the only person on this planet who could make the phrase “maybe you’re just like my mother” sound sexy.)

“When Doves Cry” has no bridge and no real resolution. Instead, it turns into a wild vamp. Early on, it’s a heavy-breathing groove that belongs to no clear genre. The intro is a Van Halen-style shredding display. The drum machine echoes and booms like Phil Collins, but it’s off-kilter, an irregular heartbeat. Prince’s voice is a discordant drone, and then it’s a heavy purr. As the song progresses, that voice turns into the yearning falsetto coo of a sexually frustrated baby gospel singer. Prince yelps and howls and keens, and then his guitars and keyboards do the same thing. A pyrotechnic guitar-heroics display goes right into a frilly neoclassical keyboard solo. In the album version, this goes on for six minutes. That version is better, but even the shortened single edit gets its point across — especially if you see it with the video.

The video for “When Doves Cry,” which Prince directed himself, is perfect in its overwhelming sense of need. Very few people in history have ever made a camera quite so horny. In the delirious opening shot, that camera glides through wrought-iron doors, over an enormous bathroom door with flowers scattered over it, right up to the steaming bathtub where Prince reclines, all the while ignoring the actual doves that flap through the room. The camera pulls right up to Prince, holding his gaze as he turns and, smoldering, rises up from the tub to dramatically beckon. (You can almost sense the camera willing itself to keep eye contact, resisting the urge to look down.)

Later on, Prince crawls naked across that bathroom floor and then, off camera, gets dressed up in frilly and glittery golden-dandy gear so that he can head to band practice. All the while, we see clips from the movie. Usually, the movie clips in soundtrack tie-in videos are forced and clumsy. But all of Purple Rain looks like a music video, and all of it fits the song.

For most of the pop stars throughout history, a song like “When Doves Cry” — and a video scene as instantly memorable as that opening shot — would run the risk of overshadowing an entire career. For Prince, of course, that did not happen. Prince was only getting started. We will see him in this column many more times.

GRADE: 10/10”.

I am going to round up Wikipedia’s article about When Doves Cry. Before that, I would also point people in the direction of this feature regarding When Doves Cry. The legacy and reaction to this near-perfect song. One of the highlights from the flawless Purple Rain, I hope that people mark forty years of this classic song on 16th May. It is definitely one of my favourite Prince songs. When thinking about Prince and his best moments and songs, I often will put When Doves Cry near the top of the list:

“In its contemporary review of the song, Cash Box said that "featuring ethereal lyrics, a pounding backbeat and a sometimes ominous musical atmosphere, this single again proves Prince to be one of the most provocative and sophisticated artists in the business. ."

"When Doves Cry" was No. 1 in the US for five weeks, from July 7, 1984, to August 4, 1984, keeping Bruce Springsteen's "Dancing in the Dark" from reaching the top spot. Because of tabulation differences, the song was announced as the year's No. 2 single on the American Top 40 year-end countdown (with "Say Say Say" at No. 1). The song was voted as the best single of the year in The Village Voice Pazz & Jop critics' poll. Billboard ranked it as the No. 1 year-end single of 1984. In 2016, after Prince's death, "When Doves Cry" re-entered the Billboard Hot 100 at No. 20, peaking at No. 8. It also ranked No. 1 on the Billboard Hot Black Singles chart for eight weeks (from June 30, to August 18, 1984), preventing Tina Turner's "What's Love Got to Do With It" from reaching the top spot for five of those weeks.

The B-side was the cult fan favorite "17 Days", which was originally intended for Apollonia 6's self-titled album. A 12-inch single issued in the UK included "17 Days" and two tracks from Prince's previous album, 1999: its title track and "D.M.S.R.". The entire title of "17 Days (the rain will come down, then U will have 2 choose, if U believe, look 2 the dawn and U shall never lose)" is now the longest-titled flip side of a Hot 100 No. 1, with 85 letters and/or numbers.

"When Doves Cry" became one of Prince's signature songs. Spin magazine ranked "When Doves" the No. 6 song of all time.[citation needed] In 2021, Rolling Stone ranked "When Doves Cry" No. 37 on its list of "The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time". In 2006, VH1's "The 100 Greatest Songs of the '80s" ranked the song at No. 5. On October 13, 2008, the song was voted No. 2 on Australian VH1's Top 10 Number One Pop Songs countdown. The "80 of the 80s" podcast ranks it as the No. 59 song of the decade. In 2016, Paste ranked the song number three on their list of the 50 greatest Prince songs, and in 2022, American Songwriter ranked the song number two on their list of the 10 greatest Prince songs.

"When Doves Cry" was sampled for use in MC Hammer's 1990 hit song, "Pray", one of the few samples of his songs legally sanctioned by Prince”.

On 25th June, Purple Rain turns forty. There is so much to uncover and explore when it comes to this album. On 21st April, it will be eight years since the loss of Prince. It will be a sad day, though it is also one where we remember him and all he gave to the music world. And culture and the wider world. When thinking about Prince’s greatest ten tracks, everyone surely puts When Doves Cry in there. It is a masterpiece! It has been a pleasure learning more about it…

FOR this Groovelines.

FEATURE: The Kate Bush Interview Archive: 1985: Keyboard/Totally Wired/Songwriter U.S.A. (John Diliberto)

FEATURE:

 

 

The Kate Bush Interview Archive

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

1985: Keyboard/Totally Wired/Songwriter U.S.A. (John Diliberto)

_________

FOR this…

edition of The Kate Bush Interview Archive – which may be one of the last -, it is a bit more complex than others. In terms of the purity of the text. There is some clarification and explanation given here when it comes to John Diliberto’s chat with Kate Bush early in 1985. This was just before we knew about Hounds of Love and what was to come from that. I will focus on Hounds of Love in a future interview feature. Here, there is discussion about the keyboards, sounds and songwriting on The Dreaming (1982):

“[The following interview with Kate was published in the June 1985 issue of Keyboard magazine (she appears on the cover sitting at the keyboard of her Fairlight.) A very similar version of the interview then appeared in the premiere (September/October 1985) issue of Songwriter U.S.A. magazine, which added the first six paragraphs of the present edition, as well as a brief discography (not reproduced here).

[Portions of the interview were also broadcast as part of the Totally Wired, Mark II series, which aired on public radio stations. The interview was conducted by John Diliberto. This, the first integrated transcription, is by MarK T. Ganzer (Thanks again, MarK!). Edited by Andrew Marvick.

[On listening to the radio interview, it became clear that Kate's comments, as printed in Keyboard, had been re-phrased and edited. Similarly, the radio interview had taken comments from different portions of the interview and spliced then together to make it sound like one continuous chain of thought. Despite these faults, the interview is quite good, as it goes into the details of how Kate uses the Fairlight in her writing. I have attempted to rectify the faults with the two interviews by merging the two and using Kate's own words where possible. Those portions that were transcribed from the radio interview will be enclosed in parentheses.]

This is an interesting discussion where we get to discover more about the process, production and technical side of the music, rather than personal misinformation and insulting questions. Too many interviews with Kate Bush talked about her looks, public perception or something unconnected with the music. Here, we do get more of what matters:

“Your image has changed dramatically from that of a pop chanteuse, as you were perceived on your first two albums, to that of someone with a very clear artistic vision, which is how people have come to perceive you since your third and fourth records. Is that an accurate assessment?

"Even on the first two records, I was doing what I'm doing now as a artist, only (because I was a lot younger, and I didn't have the room and the space to be able to truly present my music. I had to work with a producer and within certain kind of set-ups because of the fact that- that's how it was, I wasn't powerful enough basically to be able to say, 'Look, I'm producing this myself. This is what I do.' And that's what I do now.) I think that if I had been a little older, and if I'd had the experience at the time, I would have done it then, too. (But I was--When I was making my first album, I was 18. I had never really worked with a band before, let alone a producer in a studio setup. So I just had--[laughs]--I mean I just about had the guts, you know, to sing and keep it together.) But you learn very quickly what you want. By the time the second album was finished, I knew that I had to be involved. Even though they were my songs and I was singing them, the finished product was not what I wanted. That wasn't the producer's fault. He was doing a good job from his point of view- making it sound good and together. But for me, it was not my album, really."

Is the album you're working on going to be a departure from The Dreaming, or is it a continuation of the ideas you developed there?

"It's difficult for me to say, really. I think it is different from The Dreaming. When I sit down and write songs for a new album, that's one of the things that's important to me--that it's at least somehow different and hopefully interesting."

The album The Dreaming was quite a radical departure from you previous records.

"Yes, I think it is different, but I don't know if it's that different. It's very different from the first two albums, but the third album is where I think we started to get there. I think it was a progression, really. But perhaps not such an obvious one."

What were the differences?

"I think the main difference was connected to my involvement. The more I get involved in the production, then the more I'm going to get exactly what I can out of it. Therefore, it automatically becomes a more demanding and personal project."

You started using a Fairlight on Never For Ever.

"Right, I didn't have my own Fairlight and we had to hire one in. (And really as soon as I met the Fairlight, I realized that it was something I really couldn't do without because it was just so integral to what I wanted to do with my music. I think I've always enjoyed synthesizers...I found them very interesting, but I never really enjoyed all the sounds. And what really gets me about the Fairlight is that any sound becomes musical. You can actually control any sound you want by sampling it in, and then being able to play it. I mean obviously, it doesn't always sound great, but the amount of potential exploration you have there with sounds is never-ending, and it's fabulous.)

Do you write songs around the Fairlight?

"Yes, I do now. This is actually the first album that I've done that on. Up until now, I've always written on the piano. It's been a very important part of it. The songs came from the piano and the chords. But with this album, the majority of the songs have come from the Fairlight and working with drum machines and things like that."

What kind of things have you been doing with the Fairlight?

"I use the Fairlight in a basic way, really. (What really appeals to me most is the idea of having any sound that is available put into the Fairlight. And I use it mainly as I would my piano. So it's finding the sound I want, which cyan take ages- that's the most difficult thing- and then working around it musically to make it suit the song. When I'm writing a song around it, normally I just use chords with a quite simple Fairlight sound. And then if I want to build up things, I'll do small overdubs just as we go throughout the album,) with the Fairlight being dragged in every other week. So in the writing process, the main Fairlight sound goes down even on the demos. You find the sounds that work for overdubs at a later date. For me, the ideal is the combination of Fairlight and acoutic instruments, rather than it being all electronic or all acoustic."

Are you using sounds that they give you with the Fairlight, or have you been sampling your own?

"Some of the presets that they supply are actually quite good. But there's one favorite that everyone is using, called 'Orch. 5' or something. Every time anyone who has a Fairlight hears it they go, 'Oh,no! Not again!' There are a couple of good preset sounds, but I think that the most exciting thing is actually recording sounds and sampling them in. Quite often the nature of the sound changes when you put it in the Fairlight, but that in itself can be quite interesting."

You used 'Orch. 5' yourself in The Dreaming [single].

"Yes [laughs], but as far as I know, at that time no one had used it. Of course, this was the early days of the Fairlight. Actually I'm surprised that so many people have used the same sound."

You seem to go for more natural sounds, rather than electronic ones, on The Dreaming LP.

("There's a human element in that album that's quiteo a...sort of tormented human looking for, you know, how to sort out all these problems and pain. And I think it's... these sounds are right, the human sounds, the sensitive emotional sounds. It's quite an emotional album really, and I just want to suit it.) I think that the combination of very acoustic real sounds and very hard electronic sounds is fabulous too. I like to create contrasts and extremes for the atmosphere that you're building around a particular song."

When you're working out a song to a particular chord pattern you've come up with on a keyboard, what comes first, the lyrics or the vocal melody?

"Quite often, I get the lyrics and melody in a short burst. Maybe I'll get the first verse or the choruses straight away. Then it'll take me forever just trying to piece the rest together, because you have to try to maintain a level of quality within the lyrics, especially if you're trying to tell a story. You have to get the phrasing right, but you're hoping your audience will be able to see where you're going. I find that the most difficult thing to do, especially if it's something like The Dreaming, [a song] which I found totally interesting. It was very difficult for me to do that and get what I wanted across. Some of the songs really do take me a very long time, although perhaps the initial ideas came rather quickly."

Your vocal arrangements are often complex enough to suggest that a keyboard instrument was involved in coming up with the parts. Is this the case?

"Sometimes the backing vocals just come in automatically as part of a song when I'm writing it. Other times, maybe it won't be until I've recorded the main voice and a few events in the song. And then I'll think it needs something there. Those are really the two extremes: I either come up with the backing vocals in the initial writing, or I hear a hole that needs filling. Whether I build up a really thick, grand vocal depends on the song. If the song needs that, then I'll just overdub the voice and build the vocals up. If it's a very intimate song between the singer and the subject matter, then you'd write it with just one voice."

Where do you work your songs out?

"I've had a home studio for the last few years. For this album, we put together a master home studio. The difference it makes is fantastic. The obvious difference is that we're not paying a phenomenal amount of money every hour for a London studio. That makes you feel so much more relaxed. The amount of pressure that the studio situation puts on you is quite surprising. You also feel a lot freer to experiment."

We understand that before, you'd do the demos and often not be able to duplicate the same feeling in the studio.

"I think that's one of the most impossible things to do, and everyone in the business must have it happen to them. You do a demo and it's the song, the spontaneity of how you put it down, that little inflection in the voice there, or something in the demo says it all. Even though the vocals are rough and the drums are out of time, it's got the feel of the song. Them you come to master it and it's not there. It's too fast or too clean. It's just not the same. Trying to recreate the moods of something you did so spontaneously can be so impossible. What we've done on this album is make the demos the masters. We demoed in the studio so that there were no demos anymore. They've transformed into the masters."

When you started working with electronic instruments, did you start listening to what other people were doing?

"Yes, you can't help but hear other people's electronic music. music is an inspiring thing to hear. But unfortunately, 99% of my time is eaten up listening to my own and nothing else. And then, it's only listening to what I'm working on at that moment. When I'm finished, I go through these big phases of listening to other people's stuff. It's so exciting."

Who do you listen to at those times?

"I'm particularly into a label called Windham Hill. That's beautiful music--absolutely gorgeous. And there's a German label called ECM that has a lot of jazz-rock music. One of my favorite artists there is (bassist) Eberhard Weber. He's fantastic [Weber appears on The Dreaming]. I find that the most enjoyable thing for me to do when I get in from the studio, other than listen to music, is to watch videos. My ears are so tired. You get such a form of concentrated listening--you've got to listen for clicks and drums and the voice...So when you get back, you want to rest your ears and let your eyes watch rubbish for half an hour."

Why do you sometimes use other musicians to play certain keyboard parts on your records? Listening to your piano playing, you wouldn't have any trouble covering the parts that they play.

"Well, I don't play the Synclavier. I play the Fairlight, but I didn't have a Fairlight of my own until the last album, and that was only towards the end of it. In fact, that's why I had to get people in. I had to hire their Fairlight and Synclavier and I had to have them play it as well-- until I had my own."

What do you have in your studio?

"We have a Soundcraft mixing deck, a Studer A-80 tape machine, lots of outboard gear, and Q-lock. We normally use 48 tracks now, even if it's for a vocal idea or something. 24 tracks doesn't seem to go anywhere with me. And the Fairlight, of course. We have a room simulator called a Quantec, which is my favorite. It would be lovely to be able to draw the sort of room you wanted your voice to be in. I think that's the next step."

You played Yamaha CS-80 on The Dreaming. Was that hired?

"No, that was mine, but I must admit the Fairlight has taken over completely now."

What sort of piano do you prefer?

"I think my favourite piano is the one I have at home. It's an upright Bechstein. It's absolutely beautiful, but it's not ideal for master recordings. For me, the piano is one of the most difficult things to record well. It sounds good in the room, but it doesn't always sound good coming through the speakers. We find that we have to do quite a bit of work on them to get them to sound good on tape. But I like Bechsteins, and I think Steinways are quite good. I find that it sometimes helps for the piano to be older. I have a Grotrian-Steinweg piano that I use all the time in our studio, and that seems quite nice."

What sorts of things do you have to do to get pianos to sound good?

"It depends on the nature of the piano. Some pianos are very mid-rangey, so it's nice to get away from the mid- and go for the top-end and things like that. But there's only so much you can do. Hopefully, you have the nicest sounding piano you can find and you don't have to do much to it. It's also nice to have the piano in a live-sounding room with an ambience mike on it. That helps a lot."

How did There Goes a Tenner come together?

"That was written on the piano. I had an idea for the tune and just knocked out the chords for the first verse. The words and everything just came together. It was quite a struggle from there on to try to keep things together. The lyrics are quite difficult on that one, because there are a lot of words in quite a short space of time. They had to be phrased right and everything. That was very difficult. Actually the writing went hand-in-hand with the CS-80."

It's easy to hear how the piano was used for the verses, but what about the choruses? Those sections are very uncharacteristic of what you'd expect to be written on a piano?

"That was really the difficult structure of the song. I could hear what I wanted, but until we put the Synclavier in there--which was played by Dave Lawson--I couldn't get the full picture. I really liked what we did in that."

How are you putting together songs now?

"At least six or seven of the tracks on this new album have been done in totally different ways. There's one track that I literally wrote on the Fairlight and then re-did things completely with strings. And the drums, which were originally Linn, were re-done with a live drummer. Then there's another track that's completely different, where I'd write through a guitarist. It really needed to be based around a guitar and I can't play guitar. If I'd used a piano or Fairlight, it would've been wrong, so I literally had to write through the guitarist. That was fabulous."

What was it that made you decide to replace the Fairlight and Linn with real strings and real drums?

"I suppose it's when I get the voice and lyrics on, they tell me what to do. (I thought, um...Although the Fairlight strings were interesting, they didn't have the...the warmth and the intimacy that the song required, and...it sounded a bit bland on the Fairlight.) That particular song was a very intimate one. (It needed...a wooden, human error, you know, the fact that it wasn't always on the beat, and that there was this group of people working together creating that sound. I do feel that in most cases when you've got a brilliant musician and an instrument you really...I mean, what's the Fairlight there for? I think it...it's a different purpose, to me anyways. I don't feel I want to create the world's greatest cellist on the Fairlight. You know, I'd rather get a really good cello player in, and record him with a good engineer, and then use the Fairlight to do something that complimented that.) The most exciting thing for me is the combination of real and natural sounds and extremely electronic synthesized ones. It's just the blend of two worlds that I find fabulous. In the next few years, it's going to be really lovely to see how people start working these things. We've been in a real synthetic era for the last three years. People have been interested in the new advances in synthesizers. It's really exciting, and I think it's got people so wrapped up in electronics that now perhaps will come the time when the blend will happen."

What about the idea that you may not be create the best cellist on the Fairlight, but that you will be the cellist? It won't be Pablo Casals' expression, it will be Kate Bush's expression?

"Yes, I think that could be interesting, but I also think that could be boring. On this album I've done so much of the work that I really enjoy other people's input. I find it boring, actually, to have to work with my ideas all the time. (The great thing, again, you can do with the Fairlight that I enjoy so much is I can write a piece on it, say, with an acoustic guitar or a cello, and I can write it out, and then I can get a musician in to actually play that. So he's playing what I've written, but he's doing it much better than I could do.) (You see, without the Fairlight, I probably couldn't have written these parts before. I would have written them on the piano and they wouldn't have had the feel of the strings, or acoustic guitar. And at the same time, you know I don't think me playing them on the Fairlight is as good as these people. But it's an interesting blend.)"

Do you feel you have a better understanding of how these people play?

("Well, certainly in my experience, it's given me the most incredible insight into composing and how instruments work. And I think it's sort of...If you're not careful it can give you an arrogance as well, where you're sort of sitting there playing all these drums and thinking, 'Hey, you know, why can't you do this?', you know--like it's so easy. On the other hand, you know, there are little inflections that would be so difficult to get on the keyboard. I mean, you could probably get it to sound very close, but it...it might...just not sound like the real instrument. A lot of natural instruments, that's what it's about. It's the inflection of the musician, the way he works it, personalizes it. I mean, you know real instruments should never die. I don't think they can. That's what all these electronic things have come from. They should go hand in hand.")

There's a depth of texture and complexity to your last two records that makes them bear up well under repeated listening. They reveal more every time you hear them.

"That's lovely that you should say that. My favorite albums are the ones I love more and more with each listening. That would be absolutely dynamite if I felt that I was doing that for other people with my albums. Two of my ultimate favourite recordings are Magical Mystery Tour and Sgt. Pepper."

It's interesting you'd mention those particular Beatles albums, because it seems that The Dreaming and Never For Ever harken back to that time of the concept album and the idea of stepping into a different world when you're listening to a record. There is a fantasy element to your imagery.

"I always tend to resent that. I always feel that the Tolkein, fantastical images seem to suggest that they're not based in reality, which I can't help but feel that a lot of my stuff is. Not all of it, but a majority is based in reality rather than fantasy. A lot of people say this, and I can't help but feel that the first two albums set that impression. You know, the feel of the production, the high voice, they sort of had a floating feel about them. But few of those songs weren't based in reality.”

You do make a lot of social statements in tunes like Pull Out the Pin and Breathing.

"My motivations are not social or political. It's an emotional motivation, where I'm so moved by something that's happening that I have to write about it. Apart from a few artists, I think that's how most of us feel about it. We're not necessarily politically minded. Myself, I'm not all. I find politics extremely destructive. I see very few good, long term productive things being done by politics. It's one of those things that seems theoretically very sound, but practically, it must be an impossibility. I think that's just an emotional situation. Like nuclear war is a political thing, but it's also incredibly emotional, because it means we could all be blown up. And no one wants to be blown up. That's basic. The reason that you have to care about politics is because of how bad people are to each other."

It's interesting that Pull Out the Pin was written from the Vietnamese perspective.

"Yes, there was a fantastic TV documentary about a cameraman who was on the front lines. He was a brilliant cameraman and he was so well-trained a technician that he kept filming things no matter how he was feeling about it at the time. Some of the stuff he was shooting was really disturbing. Some of the Vietnamese guys would just come in and they were sort of dying in mid-air. And he'd just keep on filming. (It was a strange sort of irony that the Vietnamese who were fighting the Americans were very into Buddha...were Buddhists...And they would pop a little silver bullet that they wore on their neck--on a chain--in their mouth before they went into battle, so that if they died, they would have Buddha on their lips. This is the whole irony throughout history between religion and war. Religion, surely, would never regard killing as a good thing, and yet it is done so constantly, and so hand-in-hand as well. You know the fact that they...they would have the little Buddha in their mouth and the guns in their hands to go and kill, I found the imagery very striking.) Breathing is about human beings killing themselves. I think that people smoking is one of those tiny things that says a lot about human beings. I mean, I smoke and I enjoy it, but we smoke and we know it's dangerous. Maybe there's some kind of strange subconscious desire to damage ourselves. It would seem so if you looked back through history, wouldn't it?”.

This American interview is really interesting. Kate Bush was still not especially popular or commercial there – given how she never performed live there and rarely visited -, so it was important exposure and insight into an artist only recently truly embraced there. What came shortly after the publication of the interview was Kate Bush’s masterpiece. It was a fascinating time where she shifted between the denser and edgier The Dreaming to the more expansive and accessible Hounds of Love. It is always a pleasure reading…

WHAT Kate Bush has to say.

FEATURE: The Digital Mixtape: Hussle and Plus: Songs from Artists who Appeared in Other/Multiple Groups

FEATURE:

 

 

The Digital Mixtape

IN THIS PHOTO: Phoebe Bridgers/PHOTO CREDIT: JJ Geiger

Hussle and Plus: Songs from Artists who Appeared in Other/Multiple Groups

_________

WE get artists…

 IN THIS PHOTO: Jack White/PHOTO CREDIT: Pari Dukovic for The New Yorker

that are known as being solo artists or being in particular bands. It is not rare for them to appear in other bands and have multiple projects. There are some particularly prolific artists like Jack White who have appeared in a few different line-ups. You get some people, like Phoebe Bridgers, who have also been in a couple of different bands. I am always intrigued when we get artists who go from being solo to being on other bands. I have included drummer Matt Cameron (Pearl Jam) and Johnny Marr (The Smiths). Either that or they are in bands and then go into other bands. For this playlist, I have assembled songs from artists who have been in multiple different iterations. You may know some of these other bands, though you may not. It is an interesting and varied assortment of songs from some wonderful artists. These tracks are from artists we may know in one particular form but are spectacular…

IN THIS PHOTO: Paul McCartney with Wings/PHOTO CREDIT: Alamy

IN different guises.

FEATURE: No One Compares 2 U: Remembering the Iconic Prince: A Hits and Deep Cut Mix

FEATURE:

 

 

No One Compares 2 U

PHOTO CREDIT: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

Remembering the Iconic Prince: A Hits and Deep Cut Mix

_________

THERE are a few features…

PHOTO CREDIT: Richard E. Aaron/Getty Images

that I will put out before 21st April. That is the date in 2016 when we lost Prince. Aged only fifty-seven, we said goodbye to an icon way too soon. I am going to explore his 1984 album, Purple Rain, and some of his other sides before 21st. It is important to recognise what a remarkable and important artist he was. Before I get to a playlist featuring some of his best hits and deeper cuts, I will bring in some biography. For that, I am turning to AllMusic. It is clear that the music world will never see anyone like Prince again. It was such a shock in 2016 when we lost him. Eight years later, his absence is still being felt. He was one of a kind that is for sure:

“No artist of the rock & roll era compares to singer, songwriter, producer, and multi-instrumentalist Prince. He was the rare combination of a visionary pop conceptualist and master musician who could capture the sounds he imagined. This quality fueled his remarkable success throughout the 1980s, a decade in which he authored a string of nine gold, platinum, or multi-platinum albums that included 1999 (1982), Purple Rain (1984), and Sign 'o' the Times (1987). Ideas came to Prince so quickly that they couldn't be contained on his own records. He masterminded albums by the Time and Sheila E. and gave away hit songs to the Bangles and Sheena Easton, shaping the sound of popular music in the process. There wasn't an area of pop music in the '80s that didn't bear his influence: it could be heard in freaky funk and R&B slow jams, in electro-techno and neo-psychedelic rock, and at the top of the pop charts. Prince's reign continued into the early '90s, a time which found him swap long-time partners the Revolution for the jazz-funk New Power Generation, his band on eighth Top Ten album Diamonds and Pearls (1991). By the middle of the decade, he'd entered a cold war with his record company. Once he was emancipated from his contract, he seized the opportunity to release as much music as he could record, and again took aim at mainstream, returning to the Top Ten with Musicology (2004) and to number one with 3121 (2006). The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductee produced new music at a furious pace in his last decade, up through the simultaneous Top Ten entries PlectrumElectrum and Art Official Age (2014). That's what made his death in 2016 such a shock. His music was ceaselessly, endlessly alive and full of possibility.

Music ran in Prince's blood. The son of a jazz pianist and singer, Prince Rogers Nelson was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota on June 7, 1958. Prince taught himself how to play music at an early age and his first original songs arrived not much later. Music remained a mainstay after his parents' divorce, a period where he bounced between both households. For a while, Prince stayed with his neighbors the Andersons, whose son Andre would later adopt the stage name Andre Cymone. The pair became friends and then collaborators, forming a covers band called Grand Central with Morris Day while the three attended high school together.

Prince and Cymone's first big break arrived when Pepe Willie, the husband of Prince's cousin, brought the duo into the funk band 94 East. Prince played guitar on a few tracks on a 94 East demo and co-wrote "Just Another Sucker" with Willie, a song composed in 1977. By that point, the teenage Prince had already signed to Warner Bros. on the strength of a demo he recorded with producer Chris Moon. He headed to the Record Plant in Sausalito, California to record his debut For You, which appeared in 1978. Prince played every instrument and sang every note on For You, an audacious move for a debut. The album made some inroads on R&B radio, with its first single "Soft and Wet" reaching 12. It was quickly eclipsed by "I Wanna Be Your Lover," the first single from 1979's Prince. "I Wanna Be Your Lover" reached number one R&B and nearly cracked Billboard's Top Ten, peaking at 11. "Why You Wanna Treat Me So Bad?" gave him another significant R&B hit in early 1980, reaching number 13 on the Billboard charts, but Prince guaranteed that he wouldn't be pigeonholed as a soul act by embracing rock, pop, and new wave on 1980's Dirty Mind.

Dirty Mind was Prince's first masterpiece, a one-man tour de force of sex and music; it was hard funk with catchy Beatlesque melodies, sweet soul ballads, and rocking guitar pop all at once. It didn't perform as well as Prince on the R&B charts, but "Uptown" peaked at number five on both the Billboard Dance and R&B charts. Prince doubled down on risque rock & funk on 1981's Controversy. Pop hits eluded him this time around, but "Controversy" and "Let's Work" made the Billboard R&B chart, which wasn't the only time Prince visited these particular charts in 1981. He masterminded the eponymous debut album by the Time, a Minneapolis funk band featuring his old friend Morris Day. All this buzz led the Rolling Stones to hire Prince as an opener for part of their 1981 tour, running into audiences that were unwilling to embrace his genre-bending music. He'd soon find wider acceptance for his music with 1999.

A tightly constructed double album, 1999 served as futuristic funk-pop that showcased the extent of his range. Released in October 1982, 1999 generated three massive hits: its title track topped out at 12 but it was a staple on the fledgling MTV, while "Little Red Corvette" and "Delirious" were Top Ten hits, peaking at six and eight respectively. 1999 is also where Prince unveiled his backing band the Revolution, showcasing the group in the album's music videos and featuring them on the record's supporting tour; several members also played on 1999. Afterwards, guitarist Dez Dickerson departed and the Revolution's classic lineup of guitarist Wendy Melvoin, keyboardist Lisa Coleman, keyboardist Matt Fink, bassist Brown Mark, and drummer Bobby Z solidified. This incarnation of the Revolution was showcased on Purple Rain, the film Prince released in July 1984.

A mythologized version of his own back story largely shot in his home city of Minneapolis, Purple Rain made Prince a superstar. Preceded by the stark, startling funk of "When Doves Cry," Prince's first number one single, Purple Rain became a blockbuster, its theatrical success feeding the popularity of its soundtrack and vice-versa. For a brief period, Prince had the number one single, album, and film in the United States, a remarkable achievement. The album's subsequent singles almost all went Top Ten: "Let's Go Crazy" also went to number one, while "Purple Rain" peaked at two and "I Would Die 4 U" reached number eight ("Take Me with U," released at the end of the album's cycle, went no further than 25.) With fame came controversy: Tipper Gore formed the Parents Music Resource Center after discovering her 11-year-old daughter listening to "Darling Nikki," a sexually charged song from Purple Rain.

His stardom secured, Prince took an abrupt left turn in 1985 with Around the World in a Day, an excursion into psychedelic pop not too far removed from the Paisley Underground movement in Los Angeles; indeed, he'd give the Bangles, one of the bands at the core of the trend, "Manic Monday," which went to number two in 1986. Thanks to "Raspberry Beret," Around the World in a Day was also a hit, albeit one that paled in comparison to Purple Rain; it sold two million copies and generated only one other Top 40 hit in "Pop Life." Prince quickly followed it with Parade, which was the soundtrack to his second film, Under the Cherry Moon. Directed by Prince, the film flopped, but the eclectic Parade was another hit album, producing the number one smash "Kiss."

Prince disbanded the Revolution after the supporting tour for Parade, an excerpt of which was featured on Sign 'o' the Times, the sprawling double-album he released in March 1987. Assembled from the remnants of several incomplete projects, Sign 'o' the Times was hailed as one of Prince's best albums, showcasing the full scope of his talents. It also produced three Top Ten hits in "Sign 'o' the Times," "U Got the Look," and "I Could Never Take the Place of Your Man." Prince planned to release a collection of hard funk called The Black Album in November 1987 but he pulled the record at the last minute believing the album was too dark and immoral; it would be released in a limited run in 1994.

Prince quickly recorded Lovesexy, an album intended as a bright riposte to the darkness of the scrapped The Black Album. Lovesexy became his first album not to reach the Top Ten since Controversy and only generated one Top 40 single in "Alphabet St." Prince rebounded swiftly with Batman, an album inspired by Tim Burton's 1989 silver screen adaptation of the caped crusader. A blend of sound collage and medley, "Batdance" became Prince's first number one single since "Kiss," with "Partyman" reaching 18 later that year. Prince returned to the big screen in 1990 with Graffiti Bridge, another film he directed himself. Its accompanying album was Prince's third double-album in seven years, cobbled together from strays from the past decade and new songs, such as its lone Top Ten single "Thieves in the Temple."

With 1991's Diamonds and Pearls, Prince debuted the New Power Generation, a versatile band of professionals specializing in R&B and funk. The streamlined soul of Diamonds and Pearls gave Prince his biggest non-Batman hit since Around the World in a Day, with the slinky "Cream" becoming his last number one hit and the ballad "Diamonds and Pearls" reaching number three. The following year, Prince released his 14th album, titling it after a cryptic logo that allegedly combined the symbols for male and female. This graphic would soon be dubbed the "Love Symbol" and the album of the same name found Prince grappling with hip-hop on "My Name Is Prince" but it was the shimmering pop of "7" that gave him another Top Ten hit; fittingly, it peaked at seven on Billboard. In 1993, Prince released his first greatest-hits collection, The Hits; it was accompanied by an edition that also rounded up many of his B-sides from the 1980s.

Prince changed his name to the Love Symbol in 1993 as a protest against his label Warner Bros., who would not release new recordings from the musician as often as he desired. As the Love Symbol was unpronounceable, Prince was called "The Artist Formerly Known As Prince" (or "The Artist") during this feud with Warner, which lasted until 2000, at which time his publishing contract with Warner/Chappell expired. After releasing "The Most Beautiful Girl in the World" on his NPG Records in 1994 -- it became his last Top Ten hit, reaching number three -- Prince attempted to speed through his recording contract with Warner during the mid-'90s, beginning with 1994's Come. Bearing "The Most Beautiful Girl in the World," The Gold Experience arrived in 1995, with the postscript Chaos and Disorder closing out the contract in the summer of 1996. Prince celebrated the end of his tenure at Warner by releasing the triple-CD set Emancipation on his own NPG in November of 1996.

Greeted by warm reviews and initially strong sales -- the triple-disc set would be certified double platinum due to its size -- Emancipation didn't generate any hit singles. Abundance soon became a calling card for Prince. Just over a year after Emancipation, he released another triple-disc set named Crystal Ball. Collecting unreleased material recorded over the years, Crystal Ball was accompanied by a bonus acoustic album called The Truth; it would receive its own independent release in 2021. Soon, the market was flooded with new Prince material. Newpower Soul, an album billed to New Power Generation but effectively a new Prince album, appeared in June 1998, Warner released a disc of outtakes called The Vault: Old Friends 4 Sale in the summer of 1999, and Prince signed with Arista for Rave Un2 the Joy Fantastic, a star-studded wannabe blockbuster that performed modestly upon its November 1999 release.

Prince spent the first few years of the 2000s indulging in his love of jazz fusion on a series of records released on NPG, the first being 2001's The Rainbow Children, an album that referred to his recent conversion to the Jehovah's Witnesses. Prince returned to pop and R&B in 2004 -- and to major labels -- with Musicology, an album that brought him back into the Top Ten, while also garnering him a Grammy nomination for Best Male Pop Vocal Performance in 2005; it'd be certified double platinum by the RIAA. He consolidated his commercial comeback with 3121, which hit number one on the album charts soon after its release in March 2006. Planet Earth followed in 2007, featuring contributions from his old Revolution bandmates Wendy & Lisa. In the U.K., copies were cover-mounted on the July 15 edition of The Mail on Sunday, provoking Columbia -- the worldwide distributor for the release -- to refuse distribution throughout the U.K. In the U.S., the album was issued on July 24, debuting at number three.

LotusFlow3r, a three-disc set, arrived in 2009, featuring a trio of distinct albums: LotusFlow3r itself (a guitar showcase), MPLSound (a throwback to his '80s funk output), and Elixer (a smooth contemporary R&B album featuring the breathy vocals of Bria Valente). Despite only being available online and through one big-box retailer, the set debuted at number two on the Billboard 200 chart. A year later, another throwback-flavored effort, 20Ten, became his second U.K. newspaper giveaway. No official online edition of the album was made available.

From mid-2010 to the end of 2012, Prince toured throughout Europe, America, Europe again, Canada, and Australia. In 2013, he released several singles, starting with "Screwdriver" and continuing with "Breakfast Can Wait" in the summer of that year. Early in 2014, he made a cameo appearance on the Zooey Deschanel sitcom The New Girl, appearing in the episode that aired following the Super Bowl. All this activity was a prelude to the spring announcement that Prince had re-signed to Warner Bros., the label he had feuded with 20 years prior. As part of the deal, he wound up receiving ownership of his master recordings, and the label planned a reissue campaign that would begin with an expanded release of Purple Rain roughly timed to celebrate its 30th anniversary.

First came two new albums: Art Official Age and PlectrumElectrum, the latter credited to 3rdEyeGirl, the all-female power trio that was his new-millennial backing band. Both records came out on the same day in September 2014. Almost a year to the day, he released HITnRUN: Phase One, with contributions from Lianne La Havas, Judith Hill, and Rita Ora. A sequel, HITnRUN: Phase Two, was released online in December 2015, with a physical release following in January 2016. Also in early 2016, Prince set out on a rare solo tour, a run of shows he called "Piano and a Microphone." The tour was cut short in April due to sickness, however, and Prince flew home to Minneapolis. On April 21, 2016, police were called to Paisley Park where they found Prince unresponsive; he died that day at the age of 57.

On June 2, 2016, Prince's death was ruled by the Anoka County's Midwest Medical Examiner's Office to be the result of an accidental overdose of fentanyl. His premature death and incredible achievements prompted an outpouring of emotion from fans, friends, influences, and professional associates. On the following week's Billboard charts, he occupied four of the Top Ten album positions and four of the top singles positions. As the particulars of his estate were sorted out by the courts -- the singer didn't leave a will, which complicated matters -- his Paisley Park complex was opened to the public in the autumn of 2016. That holiday season, NPG and Warner released 4Ever, a double-disc hits collection that contained the unreleased 1982 outtake "Moonbeam Levels." Upon its November 22, 2016 release, it debuted at 35 on Billboard's Top 200. The long-promised expanded reissue of Purple Rain appeared in June of 2017, featuring a disc's worth of previously unreleased music from Prince's vaults. Anthology: 1995-2010, a double-disc compilation of highlights from Prince's latter-day recordings, appeared in August 2018 in conjunction with the digital re-release of his post-Warner catalog; it was part of a deal with Sony Legacy, which also masterminded physical reissues of these latter-day records in the subsequent years.

The archival Piano & A Microphone 1983 appeared in September 2018; it debuted at 11 in the U.S. and 12 in the U.K. The next major reissue was Originals, a collection of Prince's original versions of 15 songs he gave to other artists. Featuring his versions of "Manic Monday," "Nothing Compares 2 You," "Jungle Love," and "The Glamorous Life," Originals arrived in June of 2019; it debuted at 15 in the U.S. and 21 in the U.K. A deluxe edition of 1999 -- containing two discs of unreleased material from Prince's vault, a live show from 1982, and a disc of single variations -- appeared later that November. In May 2020, Sony reissued all of the 2002 albums released under the "One Nite Alone" moniker as the box Up All Nite with Prince: The One Nite Alone Collection. This set was overshadowed by the September release of a Super Deluxe edition of Sign 'o' the Times, which expanded the original double album with a wealth of unreleased studio recordings and live material.

Welcome 2 America, the first completed, unreleased album culled from Prince's vaults, appeared in July 2021. The album was recorded in March 2010 prior to his Welcome 2 America Tour and featured bassist Tal Wilkenfeld and drummer Chris Coleman. It debuted at number four upon its release”.

A phenomenal musician and one of the greatest songwriters of all time, we know that his brilliance will live on forever. It was a huge shock in 2016 when, on 21st April, we learned he had died. To mark his memory and celebrate his music, I am going to put out a few features showing how incredible he was. The first ends with a playlist that has some recognisable hits and some deeper cuts. It shows the full breadth and width of the talent of…

THE purple one.

FEATURE: Proof of Time: Inside Marina Diamandis’s Eat the World

FEATURE:

 

 

Proof of Time 

Inside Marina Diamandis’s Eat the World

_________

I always think that…

 PHOTO CREDIT: Brendan Walter

poetry and music are interconnected. Even though music is much more of a performative artform that is more about community and crowds, that is not to say poetry is an entirety private pursuit. I do think that poetry is underrated and undervalued. Throughout the years, musicians have engaged in poetry and released their own volumes. It is interesting reading their poems and how it differs to their music. It highlights a different side to them. I also feel that artists might hold things back in music. As they may perform it live in front of a big audience, perhaps there is a feeling of reservation about some of the music. Being too honest or open. Poetry allows artists to go beyond that. Maybe adopt a new persona or introduce elements that they would not put into the music. This takes us to Eat the World. It is the upcoming debut poetry collection from Marina Diamandis. Whether you have heard any of her albums or not, I would advise you to pre-order the book. It sounds like this book is full of fascinating and moving poetry from a tremendous songwriter. Waterstones have more details:

“The debut poetry collection from singer-songwriter Marina Diamandis mines themes of teenage trauma and the messy complexity of relationships with the same unerring ear as her celebrated song lyrics.

Raw and moving poems of love, solitude, and the struggles of youth, from fan-favorite and platinum-certified singer Marina.

'I thought if i ate the world, i would finally be full, i would never be hungry again.'

In this debut poetry collection, Marina's talent for powerful, evocative song lyrics finds a new outlet as her words weave stories of resilience and self-discovery. Each poem resonates with the same creative melodies and emotional depth that have made her an artistic sensation. Hailed by The New York Times for 'redefining songs about coming of age, and the aftermath, with bluntness and crafty intelligence,' Marina delves even further into teenage trauma, youth, and the highs and lows of relationships in these profound, autobiographical poems.

Eat the World compiles Marina's original poems and collaborative illustrations to form a collection that transcends the boundaries of music and literature. Her poetry invites readers to explore the human experience through her perspective, offering a profound glimpse into the artist's soul and the universal emotions that connect us all”.

Marina Diamandis joins a list of established artists who are poets. The likes of Joni Mitchell and Patti Smith have released volumes of poetry. I do think that Eat the World is one of many poetry books from Marina Diamandis. I am excited to read more from an exceptional artist. Not to say music is restrictive or means artists hold thing back. Poetry can allow them to detach from music and find this new form of expression. A freedom and liberation that can also impact their music. Inspire them when they next release an album. I am not sure whether the poems from Eat the World are going to be animated and turned into videos. Whether Diamandis has plans to tour the poems and do readings. This feature from Rolling Stone announces a terrific and intriguing book from a masterful artist. Marina Diamandis discussed her upcoming poetry book and what she has learned about herself through writing the book:

“Marina Diamandis was on shrooms a few years ago, writing what she thought were lyrics for new music. A few days later, she looked at everything she had written and realized she wanted to go beyond just songs.

“I tried, and it just felt so weird,” she tells Rolling Stone. “I suddenly was like, ‘I think these are poems, actually.’ As soon as I accepted that, I started writing poetry every single day. For a whole summer, it was every single morning.”

What came out of those writing sessions was Eat the World, Marina’s debut poetry book, which Rolling Stone can exclusively announce will drop Oct. 29 via Penguin Random House. 

The book intertwines Diamandis’ musings with gorgeous artwork as the singer explores her experiences with dating, reflects on some dark moments in her life, and examines her early career and her “Marina and the Diamonds” days with compassion.

Diamandis says the poetry captures a side of her that’s much more vulnerable and less processed. “There’s stuff that still feels slightly embarrassing to me, but it’s because I am exposing a genuine part of myself that maybe isn’t as glam and glitzy as I would like to portray,” Diamandis admits. “But I think that’s a healthy thing. That’s freedom to me: being able to show up as yourself and being OK with it.”

From her home in Los Angeles, Diamandis spoke about several of her Eat the World‘s poems and gave Rolling Stone an update about her upcoming music:

You’ve been talking about the poetry book for two years now. In October 2022, you tweeted, “I’ve been writing a poetry book this last year. It’s spicy, and brutal, and funny, and sad, and kind of like my lyrics, but way more savage.”

Oh my God. Is it that long ago? It is going to be exactly that. Books just take time to write, especially, with poetry. There is a parallel to an album in that you are encapsulating one chapter of your life, and this definitely felt like that. Sometimes, you can’t decide when it’s done until it feels instinctively like it’s finished. It’s been done for about six months.

How are songwriting and poetry writing different for you?

I’ve discovered this magical new form of expression where I can still story-tell like I do with my songs, but I’m able to be way more honest and open about things that is just not possible with songwriting. I love the element of fantasy still with pop and with concepts, and sometimes, you have to forego a little bit of the objectivity of a situation for that. So with poetry, it’s completely different. It’s like I’m able to play with and process the past in a completely different format. It’s like there’s no rules.

What have you learned about yourself through the process?

I really learned about the parts of myself that I wasn’t comfortable with at all. I think, on the subject of relationships, they’re amazing because they are mirrors for us. Even being out of relationship, if something ends or if you’re doing random dating, all of those things just show us different parts of ourselves. The book has allowed me the space to be able to explore thing I wasn’t happy about myself in a way that I just don’t think I could have with music.

“Sex Robot” was very relatable, and touches on your experience dating in your 30s. What’s that been like?
I can’t be totally honest, because we’re doing an interview! I think we all struggle with that no matter what age because I think we are living in a very confusing time. The way that we function on social media has distorted the way that we perceive our lives and other people’s lives. I’m very much focused on how my life feels as opposed to how it looks. I’m just feeling very happy and content in myself now.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by MARINA (@marinadiamandis)

One poem, “Proof of Time” seems to be an encapsulation of what you think Los Angeles is: a plastic kingdom, perhaps. What inspired that one?

I’m obsessed with L.A., but sometimes I cannot get over this feeling that nothing is old. It feels so strange coming from Europe, particularly Greece and Wales, where everything is old as fuck. That poem is about longing for something deeper rooted to give me that sense of belonging. I was trying to fuse this feeling of this very modern culture, like lip fillers and butt lifts and plastic keychains on Hollywood Boulevard with this sense of history that comes the earth here: the nature, the canyons, the history of the Tongva tribe that lived here for 7,000 years before they all got wiped out.

What does the “Eat the World” poem reflect about the rest of the book?

It was one of the first poems I wrote. I wanted to encapsulate this feeling I’d had throughout my teens and my twenties that drove a lot of my work at the time. It’s like this insatiable need to be loved, essentially, and no matter what you achieve, there’s nothing that can really fill it permanently. I don’t feel like it’s tapping into negative things. I think it was just a reflection on how things were, and I wrote that when I got out of my record deal with Atlantic. It was a real end of an era where I could look at how I had been. I don’t think I really am looking for validation in the same way at all. I think now, it’s just like, is it fun? Is it going to contribute something positive in the world? Otherwise, why am I doing it?

It seems like you’re going through a transitional time in your life.

Definitely. I don’t even know what’s coming with music. All I know is that I feel different, and I also don’t feel in a mad rush. I feel like this next record’s going to be important, and I think the poetry book is also reflective of that. I’m able to take a left turn and do something that was genuinely just for the joy of doing it. I’m in a separate part of my memory bank. That’s how it feels.

You seem more free. Are you?

Yes. I am. Thanks for noticing.

What’s that like?

Oh my God. It’s amazing. Wait. Let me ask you. Do you feel free?

I don’t think so. I feel so stuck on this idea of where I want to be. I feel so chained to the idea of what I want in the future that I don’t feel like I’m free right now.

That’s so interesting. You’ve sparked something in my head, because when we go through these feelings, we think that we’re the only ones that could possibly be feeling that specific thing. For myself, it’s just related to how I grew up and feeling scared actually to be who I want to be. I think the last few years, I’ve really broken through that. I would always walk around the world thinking that everyone is free except for me, which is so ludicrous. I think a lot of us in creative professions are doing it because it makes us feel free in some way. It’s like a portal to freedom. Poetry has made me feel free, because it’s writing about things that, if I’m quite honest, I would rather people not know”.

It seems like writing poetry has been a totally different experience of writing for Marina Diamandis. She revealed in the interview with Rolling Stone that new music has been written. Her latest album, Ancient Dreams in a Modern Land, was released in 2021. It was hugely acclaimed. I do think we will learn so much about Diamandis through Eat the World. Some songs can allow license and fiction. Poetry, to me, seems much more direct and revealing. Make sure you pre-order a copy. It is going to be a major release:

“Helena Gonda, Senior Commissioning Editor at Canongate, says: “These poems are a form of catharsis, revealing hidden depths and full of surprising admissions. It will come as no surprise to Marina’s fans that her poetry contains the fizzing sparks of the wordplay of her songs and, like them, this collection promises to be playful and provocative. We are thrilled to be launching ‘Eat The World’ at Canongate…”.

As a fan of Marina Diamandis’s poetry, I am looking forward to owning Eat the World. In addition to her fans, there will be a whole new host of people who will bond with her words. I think it may inspire other artists to release books of poetry. With so much attention around albums and how we can learn a lot about musicians through them, I feel more attention and spotlight needs to be given to poetry. How they can reveal new depths about a songwriter. Diamandis’s Eat the World is going to be an essential purchase. A brilliant revelation from…

A wonderful artist and creative.

FEATURE: The Kate Bush Interview Archive: 1980: Sebastian Faulks (Sunday Telegraph)

FEATURE:

 

 

The Kate Bush Interview Archive

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1980/PHOTO CREDIT: Brian Aris

1980: Sebastian Faulks (Sunday Telegraph)

_________

I am going to wrap up…

The Kate Bush interview archive. Before I do, I have trips to 1982 and 1985 to tick off. Maybe another one from 1980. I am forever indebted to this website for producing interview transcripts involving Kate Bush from throughout the year. This one, from July 1980, sees Sebastian Faulks of the Sunday Telegraph speaking with an artist just shy of her twenty-second birthday. After two studio albums in 1978 and The Tour of Life in 1979, Bush was in the studio making Never for Ever. The album would be released in September 1980. It was an exciting time for an artist undergoing this sonic and production transformation. Maybe there was still this critical perception of her as being weird or unusual. However, after the tour, it was clear this artist many diminished and mocked was a bona fide star. Never for Ever would take her to a new level. I wanted to highlight this interview because there are some great insights and exchanges. Aside from there being an air of patronising. As with so many interviews, there is misinformation, misconception and condescension. How long would it take for the media to treat Kate Bush with due respect and like any male artist?! She was still being portrayed as and handled like a child or some oddity! However, there are moments – where Kate Bush speaks – that makes the interview interesting and worthy. I have edited it to tighten it slightly, though most of it remains intact:

“At 19 Kate Bush was hailed by the pop press as the most important pop singer of the decade. She combined ethereal and elusive beauty with a seaside postcard suggestiveness; her high-pitched voice suggested pathos, humour and drama.

She followed the hit single "Wuthering Heights" with a best-selling album, The Kick Inside, and won every available award. The only doubt was whether she could perform for an audience; whether she had the physical stamina, and whether the songs had enough variation to compensate for the fact that prolonged exposure to her voice rendered it less a dramatic wail than an irritating shriek.

After six months preparation Kate Bush set off on tour in January 1979. Accompanied by a troupe of dancers, jugglers, musicians, and engineers she traveled round the country, arriving at the London Palladium in April. The Daily Telegraph reviewer wrote of her show: "It beggars belief... a stunningly original stage performance... she has struck the balance between the vivid and the simple and it is devastatingly effective... a dazzling testimony to a remarkable talent."

The show was a new departure in the pop world for the way it incorporated elements of dance and circus entertainment, and for its original use of specially-designed cordless microphones, which allowed Kate Bush to keep both hands free as weaved, danced, and tumbled about the stage. For each song she adopted a new persona, aided by lightning costume changes. Male dancers rocked her gently as she became a serpentine oriental seductress; motor bikes roared as she turned into a strutting leather queen; silence descended as she metamorphosed into a lonely waif at the piano; and then she rose up through the dry ice clouds for "Wuthering Heights", a woman wailing for her demon lover.

Now here she sits in the canteen of the Abbey Road Recording Studios, this tiny grinning girl whose feet dangle some inches from the ground when she is in the studio chair. Her hair, naturally a dark gypsy brown, is currently a fashionable bronze-pink. Her face is pixie-ish and when she smiles she has a dimple - but only on the left and so high up that it almost looks as though she is squinting. She is wearing skin-tight black satin trousers, shaggy boots and a loose black jumper. She would look more like 21 were it not for her tiny childish fingers.

For the past three months Kate Bush has been shut in the basement of the building recording songs for her autumn-released new album. She says she feels like a flower without sun, wilting, but she does not complain much because the new record is crucially important to her. There is a slight air of panic in the studios. Kate has a unique talent, but there is a feeling that the Palladium shows displayed every aspect of it to the greatest possible extent. She has to try to find a way of transcending the limitations of her voice and it's wearing qualities.

She herself scorns such suggestions. "People said I couldn't gig and I proved them wrong. I'll just have to prove them wrong again. you see, the new album represents a new direction for me; it's where I'm at now, not last year. I'll just keep on creating, keep on performing."

But there are, in fact, no plans for another tour. "Maybe next year... I need five months to prepare a show and build up my strength for it, and in those five months I can't be writing new songs and i can't be promoting the album. The problem is time... and money."

Information is a key work for Kate Bush. She is like magic, fastening on to glittering slabs of knowledge and half-glimpsed images - a dip into the books of Gurdjieff, the Caucasian mystic, a clutch of old films, a fashion magazine, a science textbook, an overheard conversation. "All artists are thieves. You eat what you steal, digest it and it becomes a part of you. You never just copy, of course." This mad eclecticism is what made her stage shows intriguing

"I have to keep an eye on her, you know," says Kate Bush, glancing over her shoulder. "I mustn't let her get out of hand." She looks down. "Sometimes, it's funny, I feel sort of... inferior to her, you know, and I can feel myself starting to behave like her in real life." She is talking, it turns out, about her stage self. "It's frightening," she adds. And then: "you've got to behave appropriately for the situation whether you find yourself in a social situation... I just want to be a human being, you know; I'm a human being first and foremost."

This is a not untypical slice of Kate Bush conversation. A great deal of what she says is pure rock cliche', but it is illuminated from time to time by oblique and original comments. All are delivered with equal charm and sincerity, with an edge of surprise always cracking the almost consonatless London accent.

School bored her and though she had some good friends she preferred to lock herself away in her room. "I worked out this dance and mime to The Beatles' Eleanor Rigby. I just lived in the world of the song for days and days, dancing it, getting it right." Meanwhile she also listened to Billie Holiday, Judy Garland, Gene Kelly and a new group just appearing on the British scene, King Crimson. ANd then she started writing her own songs, "mostly about myths, spirits, that kind of thing; not fairies... stronger than that."

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1980/PHOTO CREDIT: Mirrorpix/Getty Images

What happened next was like something from a fairy story. When she was 14 she made a tape of her songs and, via a friend of a friend, it found its way to David Gilmour, guitarist from the Pink Floyd group, Gilmour, who has a reputation for helping new talent, paid to have proper recordings made and played them to EMI, who signed her up at once. She was to start recording for them when she was a little older, "when I felt ready to handle the situation."

So Kate - as she was by now - left St. Joseph's School, Abbey Wood, with armfuls of O-levels, a recording contract and a windfall legacy from her aunt tucked away in the bank.

The next step in her education was to study with the mime and dance artist Lindsay Kemp, of whom she speaks in tones of awe and gratitude. "the first time I saw him it was like a whole new world opened up for me. He did more than I'd ever seen done on the stage before and he never opened his mouth!"

She has worked hard at her dancing and is lucky enough to have long legs, which give a sinuous elegance to some of her less orthodox movements. She smokes and stays up late, though she has been a vegetarian for the last five years - which, she says, makes her feel much better in body and mind.

Kate Bush was brought up a Roman Catholic, but "it never touched my heart." She now professes to a vague humanistic belief in the central premise of most religions - that we should be kind to other people.

She is a curious mixture of naivete' and sophistication. Her avowed aim is to lay herself open to as many influences as possible - to go on gathering information and "carry on learning."

What she has yet to do is learn how to be selective - to filter the various stimuli so that she can see what is useful and what is dross. Her second-single, "The Man With The Child In His Eyes", was a touching and subtle song about the different ways in which the ageing process effects men and women, which she wrote when she was just 13. Yet her latest single, "Breathing" is about the environment - that corniest of all rock standbys - and sounds far more like the work of a teenager.

Time is short and the pop public is fickle. If the new album is a flop and there is no tour in prospect, Kate Bush has only the frequent impersonation of her on televisions (for which she is very grateful) to keep her in the public consciousness. She does not seem worried. "I'll just carry on performing. It's the only thing I know how to do."

She is very young to be facing such a watershed in her life, but luckily she has the resilience of youth as well as its vulnerability. In the long term she would like to have children, but it would be unfair to them, she says, to think about that just yet.

She lives in a plant-filled flat in a 19th century house in one of the quieter streets of Lewisham, southeast London. She and her brothers each have a floor. "A very ordinary flat," she calls it, "though I like it because it's got all my things in it. It's just far enough out to be nice and quiet. I'd like to live in the country really but the flat's best for the moment, while I'm working in London, because I can't drive, you see."

She is understandably reticent about her private life. When she is not working she says she likes to sleep. "then I like to catch up on things - go and see my parents, go and see friends. And I like to catch up on all the films I've missed and I just like watching telly." She is also a keen cook. She makes her own bread an any number of vegetarian dishes - "Being a vegetarian makes it that much more of a challenge."

As for boyfriends, she says, "yes, sure I have one; I have lots of boyfriends, you know, I really like people."

Simon Drake, a musician who worked on her shows, once said: "There are more young men in love with Kate Bush than any other performer." Her reaction to this is: "An incredible compliment! I love it when people say I'm attractive, because I don't really see it myself - I don't think I'm beautiful. But it's the nicest thing you could say!"

And there is no false modesty of disingenuousness in that remark. It is odd that Kate Bush made her name as a performer because the audience never knew what character she would appear to be next; yet she is so irresistible as a person because she is quite guileless”.

You can still sense a distinct tone that is mirrored in other interviews. It is angering that (mostly male) journalists didn’t understand her music and was asking some inane and silly questions. However, as I like to uncover interesting things in interviews from important times in her career, this one struck my eye. As I say, there may be a few more coming before I finally wrap up The Kate Bush Interview Archive. It is fascinating reading her words from years gone by. How her career developed and the fact she was doing so much promotion. In every interview, she is professional, calm, intelligent and interesting. Proving that she is one of the most special and fascinating artists…

OF her time.

FEATURE: Pictures of You: Robert Smith at Sixty-Five: The Best of The Cure

FEATURE:

 

 

Pictures of You

PHOTO CREDIT: Tom Sheehan

Robert Smith at Sixty-Five: The Best of The Cure

_________

THERE is a lot of talk and speculation…

about a possible new album from The Cure. The band have not released one since 2008’s 4:13 Dream. The iconic group are led by Robert Smith. I am going to end this feature with a playlist of The Cure’s hits and deep cuts as Robert Smith turns sixty-five on 21st April. The only constant member of The Cure, Smith is one of the most distinct and talented artists of his generation. I want to come to a biography of the amazing Robert Smith ahead of his birthday:

“Robert James Smith (born April 21, 1959 in Blackpool, England), a guitarist, vocalist and songwriter, has been the lead singer and driving force behind English post-punk band The Cure since its founding in 1976.

Highly influenced by The Beatles, Jimi Hendrix and even David Bowie he started playing guitar at the age of 12. Smith has played the 6 and 12 string guitars; 4 and 6 string bass guitars; double bass; piano; drums; violin; trumpet and trombone, in various combinations.

Robert is the third of four children born to Alex and Rita Smith. His siblings are Richard, Margaret, and Janet (who is married to Porl Thompson, the lead guitarist of The Cure).

Smith grew up in a Catholic atmosphere and went to St. Mary's high school in England as a teenager. However, he is not religious, but sometimes he feels that he wishes he was. One example of his desire for belief is in the aptly-titled Faith.

Smith has written or co-written the bulk of The Cure's music and lyrics in a career spanning 35 years. He has also been involved in other musical projects, including a stint with Siouxsie & the Banshees and his side-project with Steven Severin called The Glove. He has also contributed vocals to a number of independent projects and performances, among them the B-side of the Faith cassette which is a 30 minute track from a movie project - Carnage Visors.

Robert Smith is instantly recognizable for his image, which includes deliberately smeared red lipstick and messy black hair that some have compared to a large spider. He first used Siouxsie Sioux's lipstick while he was high on opium. Smith's image has contributed to the frequent classification of The Cure as a goth band, a moniker Smith rejects. Smith is also known for his distinctive wavering singing style.

Smith's lyrics are frequently poetic and as frequently inscrutable. Smith has stated that they are often the product of some "altered state," such as drugs or sleep.

Smith met Mary Poole in school when he was 14 years old. Smith explains that his class was asked to choose partners for an activity. He mustered the courage to ask Mary and, as he says, got lucky. They have been together since and were married in 1988. The song "Love Song" was written as a wedding present for Mary. They have agreed to remain childless.

In October 2004, he stood in as one of three guest presenters for John Peel on BBC Radio 1, a week before the DJ's untimely death.

"Just Like Heaven" is reportedly Smith's favorite pop song that The Cure has produced and easily one of the public's most popular in which he details a lost love: " found myself alone alone alone above the raging sea / that stole the only girl I loved / and drowned her deep inside of me. "

Public opinion has often been that, according to the music he writes, Robert Smith must be a deeply depressed soul. However, this quote disputes that sentiment:

" At the time we wrote Disintegration…it's just about what I was doing really, how I felt. But I'm not like that all the time. That's the difficulty of writing songs that are a bit depressing. People think you're like that all the time, but I don't think that. I just usually write when I'm depressed." -Robert Smith in a 1989 interview

Smith is the only member who has been in The Cure the whole time it has existed. When asked who their favorite lineup is, most fans will almost always mention Smith along with Simon Gallup, Porl Thompson, and Boris Williams.

Collaborations

In 2003, Robert Smith worked in collaboration with the band Blink-182 on the track "All of This" off their album Blink-182.

In 2004, Blank & Jones remixed " A Forest" featuring Robert Smith on vocals. There is an EP+ Bonus DVD with 4 audio remixes, The music video featuring Robert Smith and an interview by Blank & Jones with Robert Smith that takes place before the video shoot. That year, he also provided vocals for Junior Jack for the club hit "Da Hype". In November, he joined Placebo onstage at their Wembley arena gig to sing Placebo's "Without You I'm Nothing" and Smith's own "Boys Don't Cry." Robert Smith also co-wrote and supplied vocals for the Tweaker song "Truth Is".

In 2004, Junior Jack also did a remix of the song Da Hype on his album Trust It featuring Robert Smith.

In 2005, Robert Smith teamed up with Billy Corgan, the former lead singer of both the Smashing Pumpkins and Zwan, to do a cover of the Bee Gees' "To Love Somebody" on Corgan's first solo release, TheFutureEmbrace.

For more than two decades, Robert Smith has been hinting at a solo album which has never materialized. It is often believed that most of his solo writing ends up in The Cure, with such closer tracks as "Homesick", "Untitled", "Treasure", "Bare", "Going Nowhere", but Smith denied this, crediting those songs to other members:

" I didn't write "Homesick" and I didn't write the music too. It's another misconception. Out of the 12 songs on the CD, I think I only wrote six musically… "Untitled"… (to Simon ) You wrote that one ? …It was Roger . So it couldn't have been a solo album and if I'd done on my own it wouldn't have sounded anything like The Cure anyway apart from my own voice. The Top album could have been a solo album but it's not true the way we worked in studio " – Robert Smith in a 1989 interview

In 2001 Robert was going to end "The Cure" and work on his solo album. He was convinced otherwise by producer Ross Robinson, who himself is a massive fan of The Cure. Ross told Robert that he "had to make at least one more Cure album, the Cure album". This is why the 2004 album is simply titled "The Cure" (says Smith in an AOL interview). Making that album reminded Smith of why he enjoys doing what he does and another Cure album is due out in April of 2006, putting the solo album on hold once more”.

In addition to their being this speculation around new music from The Cure, Robert Smith himself is still in the music news. He is one of the artists who signed an open letter warning against the predatory use of A.I. in music. On 21st April, we celebrate the sixty-fifth birthday of a legendary songwriter and singer. Whether you are a fan of The Cure or not, you cannot deny Smith’s influence and brilliance. We all wish him…

MANY happy returns.

FEATURE: Groovelines: Beyoncé – BLACKBIRD

FEATURE:

 

 

Groovelines

PHOTO CREDIT: Blair Caldwell

Beyoncé – BLACKBIRD

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I do not normally…

include cover versions in Groovelines. Considering how celebrated Beyoncé’s cover is of The Beatles’ Blackbird, I wanted to feature it here. It is from her new album, COWBOY CARTER. The original, written by Paul McCartney, featured on The Beatles’ eponymous album of 1968. Whilst it was interpreted as a song about civil rights, McCartney never really said it was until much later. Not until the 1990s. I think many Beatles fans, prior to the 1990s, probably felt that Blackbird was about a literal blackbird. Beyoncé’s version is quite radical in terms of the sound and vocal. Bringing different things out of the lyrics. Giving new depth and meaning to a classic song. COWBOY CARTER is one of the most celebrated albums of the year. Among Beyoncé’s very best. Many have singled out BLACKBIRD as a highlight. It also features the brilliant Tanner Adell, Brittney Spencer, Tiera Kennedy, and Reyna Roberts. I want to go deeper with this song. There are a few features that are worth spotlighting. Rolling Stone recently celebrated the revisionary brilliance and power of Beyoncé’s reading of Blackbird:

“It’s a stroke of Beyoncé’s revisionary genius that brings the story of “Blackbird” full circle. She claims the song as if Paul McCartney wrote it for her. Because, in so many ways, he did.

Paul tells the story of writing it in his 2021 book The Lyrics. “At the time in 1968 when I was writing ‘Blackbird,’” he recalls, “I was very conscious of the terrible racial tensions in the U.S. The year before, 1967, had been a particularly bad year, but 1968 was even worse. The song was written only a few weeks after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. That imagery of the broken wings and the sunken eyes and the general longing for freedom is very much of its moment.”

Paul wrote this song as a dialogue with Black America; Bey’s “Blackbird” is part of that call-and-response, proof that the song always meant exactly what McCartney hoped it would mean. It’s one of the most profound and powerful Beatles covers ever, right up there with Aretha Franklin’s “The Long and Winding Road.” 

“I had in mind a Black woman, rather than a bird,” Paul says of the song in the 1997 book Many Years From Now, by Barry Miles. “Those were the days of the civil rights movement, which all of us cared passionately about, so this was really a song from me to a Black woman, experiencing these problems in the States: ‘Let me encourage you to keep trying, to keep your faith, there is hope.’”

Paul was especially moved by the Little Rock Nine — a group of teenagers, the same age as so many Beatlemaniac fans, who caused a nationwide racist outrage in 1957 when they tried to enroll in an all-white high school in Little Rock, Arkansas. Gov. Orval Faubus called out the National Guard to block the kids from setting foot in the school. Writing “Blackbird” in the summer of 1968, with high-profile anti-Black violence in both the U.S. and the U.K., he turned that into the song. “As is often the case with my things, a veiling took place so rather than say ‘Black woman living in Little Rock’ and be very specific, she became a bird, became symbolic, so you could apply it to your particular problem.”

“Blackbird” is a song with a long history in Black music, from reggae (the Paragons’ gorgeous version from 1973) to jazz legends including Ramsey Lewis, Sarah Vaughn, and Cassandra Wilson.No song has a deeper dialogue between the Beatles and the Black America that gave them their voices. Anderson .Paak put his spin on “Blackbird” in 2013, years before he ended up contributing to Paul’s album McCartney 3 Imagined, with his funk remix of “When Winter Comes.”The Beatles’ sidekick Billy Preston, who plays with them all over the Get Back movie, gospelized it in 1972, as the flip side of his Number One hit “Will It Go Round in Circles.” His version is on the superb Ace Records anthology Come Together: Black America Sings the Beatles.

Beyoncé brings all that history to her version. There’s also a Paul-like playful humor in the way she makes a horse the star of her album cover. (Could Chardonneigh be the new Martha?) In other words, she is Macca Fierce.

But most of all, Bey’s version ties in mostdirectly to Sylvester’s disco version of “Blackbird” from 1979, the most outrageous and radical version ever. She evokes this song’s history in queer Black disco culture— connecting it to her whole Renaissance project. Sylvester was the first gay Black pop star who was out of the closet, as far as the public knew. Tragically, he also become one of the first stars to pass in the Eighties AIDs epidemic. But in 1979 he was back in San Francisco as a hometown hero, after breaking big nationwide. “Blackbird” is his falsetto-disco celebration from Living Proof, one of the Seventies’ greatest live albums. He was on top of the world: There was an official “Sylvester Day” in San Francisco, where he received the key to the city from the mayor, who happened to be Diane Feinstein. That night he headlined the War Memorial Opera House, and did the most beautiful “Blackbird” ever heard — until now.

Sylvester claims “Blackbird” for himself and his community. He trades call-and-response vocals (“Y’all ready, girls?”) with his backup singers, eternal disco legends Martha Wash and Izora Rhodes, the Two Tons o’ Fun. (They later blew up as the Weather Girls, belting their classic “It’s Raining Men.”) When they sing “You were only waiting for this moment to arise,” you can feel the whole crowd rise to join them. They’re not hiding out in the shadows anymore. They’re spreading their wings. It’s their night to fly. This is their song, and their moment.

Beyoncé has always loved reclaiming rock & roll as Black female performance. It’s one of her artistic passions — check her mind-blowing versions of the Doors’ “Five to One,” Alanis Morissette’s “You Oughta Know,” and even Kings of Leon’s “Sex on Fire.” She turned the Yeah Yeah Yeahs into “Hold Up.”Long before Stevie Nicks had her grand 2010s comeback, Destiny’s Child got her back on MTV with “Bootylicious.” Most spectacularly, the Lemonade classic “Don’t Hurt Yourself” is Beyoncé channeling Memphis Minnie’s “When the Levee Breaks” through Led Zeppelin, with Jack White wailing on guitar. But “Blackbird” is different, because McCartney wrote the song explicitly about Southern Black women and their struggle through American racism in the 1960s.

When Paul performed in Little Rock in 2016, he met for the first time with Thelma Mothershed Wair and Elizabeth Eckford, two of the Black women who incited so much racist controversy by trying to enter an all-white high school. Meeting these two heroes had a profound impact on him. “Incredible to meet two prisoners of the civil rights movement and inspiration for ‘Blackbird,’” Paul said at the time. “Way back in the Sixties, there was a lot of trouble going on over civil rights, particularly in Little Rock,” he told the crowd that night, introducing the song. “We would notice this on the news back in England. So it’s a really important place for us, because to me, this is where civil rights started.”

But “Blackbird” is also in the tradition of his songs about everyday women and their unseen struggles— “Eleanor Rigby” and “Lady Madonna” with the Beatles, “Another Day” and “Jennie Wren” and “Little Willow” solo. (His empathy for his female characters was always radically different from other male songwriters of his generation, to say the least.)

PHOTO CREDIT: Blair Caldwell/David Redfern/Redferns/Getty Images

Bettye LaVette did one of the most emotionally cathartic versions in 2020, a gritty old-school R&B performance at 74, singing the lyrics in the first person. She felt a deep connection as soon as she heard it, saying, ‘‘I wonder if people know he’s talking about a Black woman?’” She made it the centerpiece of her 2020 album, Blackbirds, where all the other songs were popularized by Black women singers — Nina Simone, Billie Holiday, Ruth Brown. “It is about the road that I came across on,” she told the crowd at Farm Aid 2021. “This song was written by Mr. Paul McCartney. But it is about me, and them.”

From their earliest days, they played songs by Ray Charles, Smokey Robinson, the Shirelles, Little Willie John, the Marvelettes — always aspiring to live up to that spirit. On their early U.S. tours, they refused to allow segregation at their shows in the South. (McCartney, 1964: “There’s no segregation at concerts at England, and in fact if there was, we wouldn’t play ‘em, you know?”) “Rock & roll is Black,” John told Jet magazine in 1972. “I’ll never stop acknowledging it: Black music is my life.” For both Paul and Ringo, that connection remains at the heart of their music. When Ringo turned 80 a few years ago, he hosted his Big Birthday Special livestream to raise funds for Black Lives Matter. He sat at his drums and told the worldwide audience, “Let’s say it again: Black lives matter! Stand up and make your voice heard!”

That’s why it meant so much to McCartney — more than any of them — to hear how his African American peers responded. Aretha’s versions of his songs always meant the most to him, because she heard that same Black history in these songs. When he wrote “Let It Be,” he sent her a demo in hopes she’d record it, even though he knew she would sing rings around him. (Her “Let It Be” came out in January 1970 — months before the Beatles version.) She did “The Fool on the Hill,” another song inspired by the civil rights struggle — for years, when Paul did it live, he added a sample of Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. Most of all, Aretha claimed “The Long and Winding Road,” leaving all other versions (including McCartney’s) in the dust.

For Paul, as with the other Beatles, the connection to Black American music was deep, but it was especially important for him that it to be a two-way dialogue. Beyoncé’s “Blackbird” is one that really completes the song — a profound moment in her history, the Beatles’ history, and this timeless song’s history. In so many ways, “Blackbird” has always been waiting for this moment to arise. And Beyoncé makes the song rise higher than ever before”.

Echoing and reiterating some of what Rolling Stone said regarding Blackbird’s history and meaning, The Guardian note how timely this new version is. Although many artists have shared their take on The Beatles’ Blackbird, few are as potent and moving as the one on COWBOY CARTER. Of all the cover versions of the song, I think that Beyoncé’s is the best. A natural and unforgettable highlight from COWBOY CARTER:

“Written just weeks after the assassination of Martin Luther King, the lyrics, especially the opening lines, are steeped in metaphor and symbolism. McCartney went on to tell GQ how “in England, a bird is a girl [or was in 1960s slang], so I was thinking of a Black girl going through this – you know, now is your time to arise, set yourself free, and take these broken wings”. There’s perhaps an equally oblique – if not exactly hidden – reference to the Little Rock students themselves in the line “all your life, you were only waiting for this moment to be free”. (Shortly before John Lennon was assassinated in 1980, he claimed to have contributed one “important” line to the song, although took the identity of the line to his grave.)

The finished recording – which features McCartney, his guitar and tapping foot, along with blackbird sounds from an effects tape – took the Beatle 32 takes before he was happy with it. Years later, in 2016, McCartney played Little Rock and met Thelma Mothershed-Wair and Elizabeth Eckford, two of the original students, and tweeted that it was: “Incredible to meet two of the Little Rock Nine – pioneers of the civil rights movement and inspiration for Blackbird.”

Beyoncé is by no means the first artist to cover Blackbird. The likes of Billy Preston, Sarah McLachlan, Crosby, Stills & Nash, the Dandy Warhols and even Dave Grohl have all had a go. But her version has a deep resonance: a spiritual interpretation with subtle strings, it pointedly features the Black American country stars Brittney Spencer, Tanner Adell, Tiera Kennedy and Reyna Roberts – musicians who have struggled to gain a foothold in the notoriously gate-kept Nashville establishment in which women and Black artists are often marginalised. By introducing the song and its historic meaning to her vast, largely youthful audience, Beyoncé has given this timeless, but always timely, gem a new moment to arise”.

I want to finish up with an article from the BBC. They write how BLACKBIRD is the key to COWBOY CARTER. It is an extraordinary and individual rendition of a song that means to much to so many people. Over fifty-five years after its original release, it is still being interpreted and covered by artists. It shows the power and genius of Paul McCartney’s songwriting:

“It feels appropriate, then, that Beyoncé has not only covered the song, but used it as an opportunity to showcase the talents of four other black women. On Blackbiird – the name slightly tweaked to reference that Cowboy Carter is the act ii of a three-part musical project – Beyoncé collaborates with four black female country singers: Tanner Adell, Brittney Spencer, Tiera Kennedy and Reyna Roberts. Adell, who released her debut album Bunny Buckle last year, has built a huge following on TikTok, a way of bypassing the traditional gatekeepers of country music and forging her own path. After Beyoncé announced her new country direction at this year's Super Bowl, Adell tweeted: "As one of the only black girls in the country music scene, I hope Bey decides to sprinkle me with a dash of her magic for a collab." (It's not clear yet if Adell was a last minute addition on the album, or if she already knew something we didn’t).

Standing on the shoulders of giants

Beyoncé is not the first black artist to cover Blackbird: musicians including Bettye LaVette, The Paragons, Anderson. Paak, Ramsey Lewis and more have put their take on McCartney's song. But as with everything Beyoncé does, the choice is intentional and when she, helped along by four new exciting voices in country music, sings: "You were only waiting for this moment to arise," it feels like a significant moment.

Cowboy Carter is both an act of defiance and a valuable lesson in cultural history

Research by digital publication The Pudding found that, out of 182,848 songs played across 29 country music stations over 19 days in 2023, just 14 were by black women. Even the force of Beyoncé's star power wasn't enough to get her access to the club; when she performed her song Daddy Lessons with The Chicks at the Country Music Association Awards in 2016 she faced a backlash from some who thought she didn't belong there. In a statement apparently referencing this, posted on Instagram before Cowboy Carter's release, she says the album was: "born out of an experience that I had years ago where I did not feel welcomed… and it was very clear that I wasn't. Because of that experience, I did a deeper dive into the history of Country music and studied our rich musical archive."

Beyoncé has taken the up the challenge to show that she has just as much right to take on country music as anyone else – and she's also used it as an opportunity to showcase the talents of others. Amid the headlining grabbing appearances from Miley Cyrus, Dolly Parton, Post Malone and Willie Nelson, the album features lesser-known artists old and new, including banjo player Rhiannon Giddens and Nigerian-American singer Shaboozey.

The Linda Martell Show pays tribute to one of the most significant yet underappreciated female country singers of all time. Martell – who also appears on the track Spaghetti – was the first solo black female country singer to achieve significant commercial success – despite only releasing one album, Color Me Country. The record gave her several big country hits, and she was the first female black country singer to appear at the prestigious Nashville venue Grand Ole Opry, but she frequently came up against racism from both the industry and public and her career was cut short. With an appearance on Cowboy Carter, more people might now realise the contribution she made.

Beyoncé recently said that she she was "honoured" to become the first black woman to top Billboard's Hot Country Songs chart, but she also knows she is standing on the shoulders of many other musicians who have grappled with a genre that continues to be hostile to them. On this album she makes sure we're aware of who many of those are – from the trailblazers of the past, to the voices of the future.

But while Cowboy Carter is both an act of defiance and a valuable lesson in cultural history, Beyoncé herself has said that, one day, she hopes the music can stand on its own – whatever genre. "My hope is that years from now, the mention of an artist's race, as it relates to releasing genres of music, will be irrelevant”.

It has been interesting featuring Beyoncé’s cover of Blackbird. I am not sure many people expected it to feature on her new album. Among a small selection of covers (including Dolly Parton’s Jolene), we see Beyoncé’s gifts and ability as an interpreter. She makes the song her own, though she also makes it an anthem for others. If you have not heard Beyoncé’s version of Blackbird, I would thoroughly recommend it. It is perhaps the standout of her…

STUNNING new album.

FEATURE: Do You Remember the First Time? Pulp’s His 'n' Hers at Thirty

FEATURE:

 

 

Do You Remember the First Time?

Pulp’s His 'n' Hers at Thirty

_________

ONE of the most important…

albums of the 1990s turns thirty on 18th April. Pulp’s His 'n' Hers was a breakthrough for the Sheffield band. Their fourth studio album, it followed 1992’s mediocre Separations, His 'n' Hers was an instant classic. Pulp would follow this incredible work with Different Class a year later. It was a real period for them. Produced by Ed Buller, many publications have listed Pulp’s His 'n' Hers as one of the best albums of all time. You can get the twenty-five anniversary edition of the album here. To celebrate the upcoming thirtieth anniversary, I want to bring some features in. That give us background and context. Why and how His 'n' Hers is such an important album. I will end with a couple of reviews. I will start with NME’s piece about His 'n' Hers on its twenty-fifth anniversary. It is fascinating to learn why His 'n' Hers is so enduring and important:

“Pulp had been kicking around for sixteen-years by the time their fourth album His ‘n’ Hers arrived in the April of 1994. Sixteen years – the earliest of them under the quite terrible moniker of Arabicus Pulp (a merging of the title of a 1972 Michael Caine thriller and a brand of coffee Jarvis Cocker had found in the Financial Times commodity index) – that encompassed a debut gig at Rotherham Arts Centre, a little bit of John Peel Show-exposure that most thought would be the summit of the band’s achievements, as well as a period where the singer, Jarvis, would perform live in a wheelchair, after falling out of a window trying to impress a girl.

So much misery has seeped into British soil since the peak of Britpop, that much of the music which once felt so shiny and hopeful then, jars in 2019. The 18-30 fuelled hedonism of Blur’s Girls And Boys feels obscene in an era of zero-hour contracts and the crippling neurosis of social media.

Oasis once sang that you might as well get on the white line, which doesn’t scan in an austerity hit country that can’t afford to pay its rent, let alone buy drugs. And let’s be honest, the whole thing feels uncomfortably unrepresentative of the multicultural landmass that is modern Britain. When Suede’s Brett Anderson adorned the cover of Select Magazine in 1993, pouting infront of the Union Jack, it felt like a challenge for British musicians to raise their game and create a scene to be proud of. Now, it feels a bit like a flyer for a particularly fey pro-Brexit rally.

Released just weeks after the death of Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain, and thereby positioned at the arrowhead of seismic pop cultural upheaval, His ‘n’ Hers is the exception, in that it’s a record that largely reflects the state of Britain even now.

As a record created by a band hailing from Sheffield, the heart of The Industrial North, this might be because the landscape the band are describing – one in which kids steal cars for kicks, where broken people break each other further, where everyone is just trying to find some glimmer of light in the darkness – isn’t indistinguishable from the state of your atypical northern metropolis all these years on. These are geographical areas still untouched and unloved.

It’s because, within an era where we’re recontextualizing our understanding of masculinity, Jarvis’ early nineties musings on love, sex and romance sound ahead of their time; Pink Glove, for example, is a pop song very much about sex, sang by a man who obviously really enjoys sex, and yet it’s concerned primarily with a woman’s enjoyment of it. There’s an awful lot of songs about sex on His ‘n’ Hers. Do You Remember The First Time? Babies. Lipgloss. Most of them sordid. And yet unlike the incoming machismo that would ultimately drive all the freaks and dreamers from indie, all of them sound like they’ve come from the mind of a man who actually likes women.

His ‘n’ Hers has endured because it’s a record that sounded out of time even when it arrived. Made by people who looked like their outfits had been acquired at an Oxfam closing down sale, produced by Ed Buller – who the same year, would bring his ethereal touch to Suede’s excellent Dog Man Star – it’s a record that manages to sound completely in thrall to the great pop of the past – Roxy, Bowie, Human League, Scott Walker, Serge Gainsbourg – while also quite unlike anything that had been heard until that point and nothing like anything that’s followed since”.

I am flipping to a feature that was written in 2014. Marking twenty years of His 'n' Hers, Stereogum discussed how Pulp had this amazing three-album run that started with their 1994 masterpiece. Even though His 'n' Hers was a success in the U.K., it did not crack the U.S. During a time of Britpop – where Pulp were seen as a Britpop band. Perhaps albums like His 'n' Hers were too unfamiliar and out of step with the U.S. scene in 1994:

“If we take the band’s taste in their own back catalog seriously, this week marks 20 years since Pulp first mattered. His ‘N’ Hers was the first Pulp album to chart in the band’s native UK (#9), as well as their first to produce charting singles: “Razzmatazz,” “Lipgloss,” and “Do You Remember The First Time?” It was successful as a reinvention, too, essentially washing away the collective memory of the long-running experimental synthesizer group and replacing it with the image of the most studious, most prurient band doing this new thing called Britpop. Whether it was fair or not, Pulp were associated with a scene that made Cocker seem downright professorial at 30, and this was before he even had his now-trademark beard and glasses. It, Freaks and Separations aren’t without their charming moments, but His ‘N’ Hers changed the conversation. Pulp weren’t necessarily angling for the top of the charts now, but they’d put together how to get there.

The seeds for Pulp’s second act were planted prior to His ‘N’ Hers, but just barely. In his great 2011 retrospective on the band, The Quietus editor Luke Turner identified “My Legendary Girlfriend” as the “moment where the brilliance of Pulp as a pop band — seedy, intense, original, yet with a catchiness and wry everyman approach that could make them chart-toppers — first became really clear.” The track first appeared on a 1990 12″, then a 1992 7″, then finally as the obvious standout on Separations, and Candida Doyle’s insistent synth showed Pulp’s keenness for playing fast and loose with the chasm between dance music and rock. The song wasn’t a hit, but you can see its importance on His ‘N’ Hers tracks like “She’s A Lady” and “Acrylic Afternoons.” Pulp’s early recordings are marred by a lack of confidence and youthful inexperience that “My Legendary Girlfriend” obliterated. And then every song on His ‘N’ Hers obliterated it.

His ‘N’ Hers also saw Pulp become Pulp in the most crucial way of all: Jarvis Cocker came into his own as a lyricist. There were inklings of his libidinous erudition before, including on “My Legendary Girlfriend,” but his work on tracks like “Babies,” “Pink Glove,” and “Razzmatazz” placed him firmly in an acerbic class of his own. Sometimes he dressed his prurience in innocence (“We listened to your sister/ When she came home from school/ She was two years older/ And she had boys in her room”) and other times pushed the limits of good taste with an analogy (“He doesn’t care what it looks like/ Just as long as it’s pink and it’s tight” almost certainly isn’t about a glove). Whatever his approach, he was successful in shining a harsh and honest light on human sexuality that still remains uncommon in pop. He didn’t just sing about sex, either, even when he was singing about sex. He filtered it through musings on the British class system, gender politics, crime, familial dysfunction, and addiction. His ‘N’ Hers was Cocker’s breakthrough. It’s no coincidence that the book that collects his finest lyrics is called Mother Brother Lover — it was on His ‘N’ Hers that he started using those easy rhymes less for ease of melody and more to paint complicated relationships within a pop context. To this day, he’s peerless.

For better or worse, it’s impossible to talk about Pulp in 1994 without talking about Britpop in 1994. The two most enduring albums lumped in with the movement that weren’t by Pulp — Blur’s Parklife and Oasis’ Definitely Maybe — came out that same year. Britpop’s shift from NME-approved buzzword to actual genre tag was well underway, and if you trusted the music weeklies, Britain’s soul was at stake in the Oasis-Blur rivalry. Despite having been a band since 1978, the success of His ‘N’ Hers felt just out-of-nowhere enough to make Pulp seem like a part of this new wave sweeping Britannia. Their Sheffield origin made them outsiders to a London-driven scene, as did their intellectual bent, but all catchy guitar music coming out of Britain in 1994 was being called Britpop, so the tag stuck. What’s remarkable about listening to His ‘N’ Hers, Definitely Maybe, and Parklife one after the other 20 years later isn’t just how great they all are, but how little they resemble one another. It’s liberating to hear them free of the context of their alleged movement. If anything, it makes it seem even more incredible just how much amazing guitar pop was coming out of Britain at the same time. Pretending Britpop was a cohesive, tight-knit scene was a convenient way of explaining its quality, but it’s more impressive without being shoehorned into an easy context”.

Before getting to some reviews, I am bringing in a 2023 feature. It suggests that His 'n' Hers was the birth of modern-day Pulp. Listening back to His 'n' Hers thirty years later, you can feel this sense of confidence and excitement. It was wonderful watching the album come out! How it made people aware of the true brilliance of Pulp and the genius of Jarvis Cocker:

“Thrust towards the limelight

His ’N’ Hers may have thrust Pulp towards the limelight, but, like many of the characters Jarvis sang about, they always seemed more comfortable as voyeurs – a recurring subject throughout Pulp’s career, but one never so perfectly explored as on “Babies.” Spying on a female friend’s sister having sex? Check. Turning it into a confused daydream in which “I want to give you children” presages the thought that “You might be my girlfriend”? Why not. Finding yourself caught in flagrante with the sister “because she looks like you”? Seems the only outcome…

Desperation; thwarted romantic ambitions; an anthemic tune that distracts from some of the grubbiness – this was Pulp’s rebirth in full effect. But there was biting satire here, too. “A promo video is simply an advert for a song” ran the title card in front of the “Babies” video. But for the full power of Jarvis’ sardonic observations, you have to turn to His ’N’ Hers’ opener, “Joyriders.”

Nothing joyful here. The song’s scuzzy guitar riff sets the tone for a bunch of vandals causing a ruckus in a small city center (“We don’t look for trouble/But if it comes we don’t run”). But while the bluster is undercut by the declaration, “We like women/“Up the women, we say/And if we get lucky/We might even meet some one day” – delivered with minimum flash for maximum droll humor – the buffoonery careens into a truly sinister ending. “Mister, we just want your car/’Cause we’re taking a girl to the reservoir/Oh, all the papers say/It’s a tragedy… but don’t you want to come and see?” No details are given, but such is Jarvis’ masterful storytelling, we have everything we need – or want – to know right here.

Where “the modern-day Pulp was born”

And so His ’N’ Hers’ opposing strands become clear: deep yearnings and adolescent fumbles pitted against pent-up frustrations that tip over into something altogether darker. “Have You Seen Her Lately?” mixes small-town gossip with a lifeline for lost souls; “Lipgloss” and the masterful “Pink Glove” look at what happens when the glamour’s gone and the rot has set in; and if “Do You Remember The First Time?” presents itself as a synth-pop anthem for indie dancefloors the world over, its mix of bravado and self-analytical desperation is pretty much impossible to find anywhere else in chart history.

This, Jarvis has said, is where “the modern-day Pulp was born.” For those who’d missed His ’N’ Hers’ release, on April 18, 1994, they couldn’t fail to take notice of the group’s triumphant Glastonbury headline slot the following year. But while that would make Jarvis and co household names overnight, His ’N’ Hers bears witness to the true Pulp: coming around uninvited, peeking through your blinds, and rummaging through your underwear… hiding in cupboards, just waiting to catch a glimpse”.

I am going to end with a couple of reviews. AllMusic are among those who have given His 'n' Hers a passionate review. If anyone has not heard this 1994 work of brilliance, you really need to seek it out. Although many fans will say Different Class is the best Pulp album ever, one cannot underestimate and overstate the importance of His 'n' Hers. I wonder whether the band will mark thirty years of their fourth studio album. It would be interesting to hear how they see it all these years later:

“Pulp had been kicking around since 1981, but for all intents and purposes, their 1994 major-label debut, His 'n' Hers is their de facto debut: the album that established their musical and lyrical obsessions and, in turn, the album where the world at large became acquainted with their glassy, tightly wound synth pop and lead singer Jarvis Cocker's impeccably barbed wit. This was a sound that was carefully thought out, pieced together from old glam and post-punk records, assembled in so it had the immediacy (and hooks) of pop balanced by an artful obsession with moody, dark textures. It was a sound that perfectly fit the subject at hand: it was filled with contradictions -- it was sensual yet intellectual, cheap yet sophisticated, retro yet modern -- with each seeming paradox giving the music weight instead of weighing it down. Given Pulp's predilection for crawling mood pieces -- such effective set pieces as the tense "Acrylic Afternoons," or the closing "David's Last Summer" -- and their studied detachment, it might easy to over-intellectualize the band, particularly in these early days before they reached stardom, but for all of the chilliness of the old analog keyboards and the conscious geek stance of Cocker, this isn't music that aims for the head: its target is the gut and groin, and His 'n' Hers has an immediacy that's apparent as soon as "Joyriders" kicks the album into gear with its crashing guitars. It establishes Pulp not just as a pop band that will rock; it establishes an air of menace that hangs over this album like a talisman.

As joyous as certain elements of the music are -- and there isn't just joy but transcendence here, on the fuzz guitars that power the chorus of "Lipgloss," or the dramatic release at the climax of "Babies" -- this isn't light, fizzy music, no matter how the album glistens on its waves of cold synths and echoed guitars, no matter how much sex drives the music here. Cocker doesn't tell tales of conquests: he tells tales of sexual obsession and betrayal, where the seemingly nostalgic question "Do You Remember the First Time?" is answered with the reply, "I can't remember a worst time." On earlier Pulp albums he explored similar stories of alienation, but on His 'n' Hers everything clicks: his lyrics are scalpel sharp, whether he's essaying pathos, passion, or wit, and his band -- driven by the rock-solid drummer Nick Banks and bassist Steve Mackey, along with the arty stylings of keyboardist Candida Doyle and violinist/guitarist Russell Senior -- gives this muscle and blood beneath its stylish exterior. The years etching out Joy Division-inspired goth twaddle in the mid-'80s pay off on the tense, dramatic epics that punctuate the glammy pop of the singles "Lipgloss," "Babies," and "Do You Remember the First Time?" And those years of struggle pay off in other ways too, particularly in Cocker's carefully rendered observations of life on the fringes of Sheffield, where desperation, sex, and crime are always just a kiss away, and Pulp vividly evokes this world with a startling lack of romanticism but an appropriate amount of drama and a surplus of flair. It's that sense of style coupled with their gut-level immediacy that gives His 'n' Hers its lasting power: this was Pulp's shot at the big time and they followed through with a record that so perfectly captured what they were and what they wanted to be, it retains its immediacy years later”.

I am ending with a review from the BBC. Without doubt one of the 1990s’ biggest and best albums, there will be so much love for His ‘n’ Hers on 18th April. Even if it is thirty years old, it has not dated or lost any of its brilliance. It still sounds like nobody else by Pulp! This distinct, original and fascinating album from the Sheffield band:

“Released in 1994, His ‘n’ Hers was Pulp’s breakthrough album some 16 years into their existence. It finally gave them a taste of success as well as introducing Jarvis Cocker to the general public, just as Britpop – Parklife was released the week after, and Oasis were readying their second single – came along as a then-refreshing shot-in the-arm.

From the opening Joyriders – “Oh you, you in the Jesus sandals, wouldn’t you like to come and see some vandals?” – it was clear the move to a major label had sharpened their sound and focus into a very appealing Alan Bennett / Roxy Music hybrid.

His ‘n’ Hers presented insights into the sort of behaviour that might land one on a register of some kind today: being inept with women, hiding in wardrobes watching your sister having sex, failing to turn your husband on, illicit affairs while the old man’s away. Such observations, such cheeky voyeurism, over cheering art-pop set Pulp aside, into a field of one, attracting a vast army of the misfits they’d eventually celebrate.

Singles included the trebly Lipgloss and the we’ve-all-done-it furtive fumblings of Do You Remember the First Time, beside a new mix of the majestic Babies.

But these weren’t the only highlights. There’s also the northern Gaynor disco sheen of She’s a Lady; the detailing of the tease and eventual boredom of fetish with Pink Glove; the throbbing narration of David’s Last Summer; and the bosom-shifting gossip detail of Have You Seen Her Lately?

Best of all, it was all served with an air-punching atmosphere of triumph, an almost celebratory feel. It seemed so far away from the mildly unsavoury fare that peers like Suede were offering.

Apparently it missed out on the 1994 Mercury (Music) Prize, to M People’s Elegant Slumming, by one vote. That didn’t matter in the grander scheme, as Pulp would soon go supernova – Common People and Different Class were just a year away. But His ‘n’ Hers remains a glorious notice of where the Pulp story really begins. A classic, basically”.

It is amazing to think that His ‘n’ Hers was so close to winning the Mercury Prize. No matter. In the scheme of things, it has endured longer and made more of an impression than M People’s Elegant Slumming. As we head towards the thirtieth anniversary of Pulp’s breakthrough, it deserves to be heard and experienced…

BY a whole new generation of fans.

FEATURE: Kate Bush: The Deep Cuts - Pi (π)

FEATURE:

 

 

Kate Bush: The Deep Cuts

Pi (π)

_________

A track that I have…

mentioned before but not expanded on, Pi (or π) is included on the first disc of Kate Bush’s double album, Aerial. Released on 7th November, 2005, it is one of her most astonishing albums. Split into two distinct discs the first, A Sea of Honey has more traditional and conventional album tracks. Like the first side of 1985’s Hounds of Love which, in many ways, is similar to Aerial. The second disc of Aerial, A Sky of Honey, is a song suite featuring nine short songs. They are set over the course of a single summer’s day. The second track on Aerial, following King of the Mountain, it is bold placing from Kate Bush. As producer, she would have wanted that track there for a reason. King of the Mountain was the single and a relatively straightforward track. Leading into an odder and more oblique song like Pi is quite brave. It pays off. From there, we go into Berite. One of the lesser-loved tracks on Aerial, it is a paen to her then-young son. The fourth track is Mrs. Bartolozzi. Some would argue that the sequencing on the first disc is not great or doesn’t create a good flow and balance. I think Kate Bush got it right. Pi is high up but, as it is a long song (6:09) and quite unusual, it needs to be high up. There is a whole other feature and conversation to be had when it comes to Aerial and its tracklisting and order. Twelve years after she released The Red Shoes, Bush put out a double album. She had to make sure, in addition to making sure the quality was high, putting the tracks in the right order for the best listening experience. I think that she did that. I am going to come to a feature that tackles Bush’s reading of pi. This mathematical constant is probably one that few people know in full. When Bush recites pi/π, there is a different version to the real one. First, the Kate Bush Encyclopedia gives details about one of Kate Bush’s most unconventional track. As this is her, that is quite a claim! A track that I never hear people talk about. They should:

“π’ is a song written by Kate Bush. Originally released on her eighth studio album Aerial in 2005. The song described a man who has “a complete infatuation with the calculation of π”. She actually sings the number to its 78th decimal place, then from its 101st to its 137th decimal place. The difference between the two works out like this:

Real Pi: 3.
1415926535    8979323846    2643383279    5028841971   6939937510
5820974944    5923078164    0628620899    8628034825   3421170679
8214808651    3282306647    0938446095    5058223172   5359408128

Kate Bush Pi: 3.
1415926535    8979323846    2643383279    5028841971   6939937510
5820974944    5923078164    06286208
8214808651    3282306647    0938446095    5058223

Cover versions

‘Pi’ was covered by Anne Sofie Von Otter and Brooklyn Rider and Göteborgs Symfoniker.

Kate about ‘Pi’

I really like the challenge of singing numbers, as opposed to words because numbers are so unemotional as a lyric to sing and it was really fascinating singing that. Trying to sort of, put an emotional element into singing about…a seven…you know and you really care about that nine. I find numbers fascinating, the idea that nearly everything can be broken down into numbers, it is a fascinating thing; and i think also that we are completely surrounded by numbers now, in a way that we weren’t you know even 20, 30 years ago we’re all walking around with mobile phones and numbers on our foreheads almost; and it’s like you know computers…
I suppose, um, I find it fascinating that there are people who actually spend their lives trying to formulate pi; so the idea of this number, that, in a way is possibly something that will go on to infinity and yet people are trying to pin it down and put their mark on and make it theirs in a way I guess also i think you know you get a bit a lot of connection with mathematism and music because of patterns and shapes…

KEN BRUCE SHOW, BBC RADIO 2, 31 OCTOBER 2005”.

I do love how there is a bit of an error – whether intentional or not – in Pi. Where she sings the constant mostly correct and in sequence, though there is this difference. It is a reason (among several) why the song is so interesting. This feature takes us inside a really intriguing and hugely original song. One that I feel should not be relegated as a deep cut that does not get played or examined:

“I have been listening to Aerial, the new album from Kate Bush, and it just gets better with every hearing.

One of my favourite tracks is "Pi":

"a sentimental ode to a mathematician, audacious in both subject matter and treatment. The chorus is the number sung to many, many decimal places." - Observer Review

But something kept nagging me about the song. Was Kate really singing Pi to 150 decimal places?

I got hold of the lyrics and checked them against an online version of Pi. All was well for the first 53 decimal places but then Kate sang "threeeeee oneeeee" when she should have sang "zeeeeeeerooo" instead. She recovered for the next 24 digits but then it went to hell in a handbasket when she missed out the next 22 digits completely before finishing with a precise rendition of her final 37 digits.

PHOTO CREDIT: Trevor Leighton

It may seem a bit pedantic to make a fuss but if you are going to sing Pi then you should make an effort to get it right.

"Sweet and gentle and sensitive man
With an obsessive nature and deep fascination for numbers
And a complete infatuation with the calculation of PI

Oh he love, he love, he love
He does love his numbers
And they run, they run, they run him
In a great big circle
In a circle of infinity"

If Simon Singh can get Katie Melua to re-record her song because of a error about the age of the universe then maybe I can get Kate to re-record Pi.

Real Pi: 3.
1415926535    8979323846    2643383279    5028841971   6939937510
5820974944    5923078164    0628620899    8628034825   3421170679
8214808651    3282306647    0938446095    5058223172   5359408128

Kate Bush Pi: 3.
1415926535    8979323846    2643383279    5028841971   6939937510
58231974944  5923078164    06286208
8214808651    3282306647    0938446095    5058223

In case anyone is worried about the accuracy of the published lyrics I did check the audio against the published lyrics and can confirm that they are the same”.

In spite of the fact that it is quite a rare and under-known song, Pi (π) was featured on The Simpsons' twenty-sixth-season finale, Mathlete's Feat. I want to bring in some press and words about Pi. In 2005, The Guardian reviewed Aerial. They discussed the merits of songs like Pi, and how the tracks are positioned well. They have their place and purpose:

“But Aerial succeeds because it's all there for a reason. And because the good stuff is just so sublime. 'King of the Mountain', Bush's Elvis-inspired single, is both a fine opener and a total red herring. Bush's juices really get going on 'Pi', a sentimental ode to a mathematician, audacious in both subject matter and treatment. The chorus is the number sung to many, many decimal places. It's closely followed by a gushing ode to Bush's son, Bertie, that's stark and medieval-sounding. The rest of disc one (aka A Sea of Honey) sets a very high bar for disc two, with the Joan of Arc-themed 'Joanni' and the downright poppy 'How to Be Invisible' raising the hair on your arms into a Mexican wave”.

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in an alternate publicity shot for Aerial/PHOTO CREDIT: Trevor Leighton

I wanted to highlight Aerial’s Pi and include it in this Deep Cuts feature. It is a song that I have hardly hear played on the radio. It is one of those songs that would have passed many people by. If you have not heard the track, then I would suggest that you check it out. Then go and listen to the entirety of Aerial and see how it fits in. A song that builds up with this beautiful and quite spacey introduction - that reminds me of Pink Floyd - and then turns into this gorgeous and tender song. Some intriguing and wonderful lyrics (“Oh he/love, he love, he love/He does love his numbers/And they run, they run, they run him/In a great big circle/In a circle of infinity"). Some exceptional bass work from Eberhard Weber and great additional vocal work from Lol Creme. Such an arresting and interesting song. It switches mood and direction. Elongating some numbers and skipping over others. Giving the song a rare and unusual energy and sense of consideration. Almost mystical and sermon-like. Even if Kate Bush does not quite recite pi perfectly, I think that her strange, magical and fascinating song is…

A perfect ten.

FEATURE: Far Out: Blur’s Parklife at Thirty: Celebrating a Classic and Ranking the Tracks

FEATURE:

 

 

Far Out

Blur’s Parklife at Thirty: Celebrating a Classic and Ranking the Tracks

_________

ON 25th April…

IN THIS PHOTO: Damon Albarn, Graham Coxon, Dave Rowntree and Alex James/PHOTO CREDIT: Fiona Hanson/PA Images via Getty Images

Blur’s third studio album, Parklife, turns thirty. I have already written one feature about it. For this one, I want to get on to ranking its sixteen tracks. Although some might say there is a clear and unarguable top three, many might debate the middle and lower end of the rankings. There is no denying the quality and impact of Parklife. There are those who say that it is a quintessential Britpop album. One that defined an age and inspired Britpop around it. I do think that Parklife was atypical in that way, Something that occurred and succeeded on the fringes of Britpop. I want to bring in a couple of contrasting and interesting features about Parklife. One that embraces it in Britpop terms, whilst the other feels it should not be seen as a Britpop album. Perhaps labelling it and trying to narrowly definer it does not do justice to its breadth, depth and range of emotions. I am going to start with a feature from 2014. Marking twenty years of Blur’s Parklife, Stereogum looked at an album that was a breakthrough for Blur. Two years after Moden Life Is Rubbish – which was sexcellent and underrated -, they released their first masterpiece. A big step forward from them:

“This is sort of weird to think about, but Parklife was at the time positioned as something of a comeback for Blur. After seeing some moderate success with early singles like “She’s So High” and “There’s No Other Way,” (which hit #8 on the UK Singles Chart) Blur had departed from their more Madchester-indebted beginnings and approached what would become the Britpop sound with 1993’s Modern Life Is Rubbish. That transition was a strained one. Blur may have flirted with pop success during the Leisure days, but they weren’t taken seriously critically, and were seen as a ripoff of and studio cash-in on bands like Happy Mondays, the Stone Roses, and the Charlatans. As Michael wrote in his anniversary piece for Modern Life Is Rubbish last year, Blur returned from their first, by-all-accounts miserable tour of America with a frontman possessed: to dethrone bands like Suede and take the mantle as the era’s eminent British band, to assert an identity of Britishness sonically and thematically. Blur’s sophomore album had to change their lives and prove something. It was to be a departure from the last generation of British music Blur had at first been lumped in with, as well as a sharp rejection of the American grunge movement. Modern Life Is Rubbish achieved the latter, allowing Blur to crystalize that idiosyncratically English identity Albarn was seeking, but it didn’t make them stars.

With Modern Life Is Rubbish failing to produce major singles, the making of Parklife had a make-it-or-break-it vibe to its creation, partially due to the band’s precipitous financial footing at the time. It of course wound up catapulting them to superstardom, boasting four hit singles (“To The End,” “End Of A Century,” “Parklife,” and “Girls & Boys,” one of the only Blur songs aside from “Song 2″ that I’ve ever heard in public in America). The album was massive, and depending on your allegiance and preferences it basically comes down to this, Definitely Maybe, or Different Class as the quintessential and most pivotal Britpop album. There’s a reason we chose this week to do Britpop Week.

In hindsight, Parklife is the second installment in a trilogy that begins with Modern Life and ends with The Great Escape. Each of these are high up on the list of my favorite albums, period (as are Blur and 13, but I digress), and there have been different moments when each one had its time as my favorite spot amongst the three. I assume I’m in the minority here, but there’s also been a lot of times where Parklife was actually my least favorite of the three. This is not the most rational critical take, and I am aware of this. Modern Life was indeed a manifesto and a confident artistic statement on its own, but Parklife refined the vision, perfected and deepened Albarn’s panoramic take on a certain slice of British life and culture in the ’90s. The Great Escape took it one step further — a glossy, overblown, final act that threw the same themes and images of Parklife into a sort of pop art overdrive. That’s actually why I liked it the most for so long; it was the disturbed and disturbing hangover to Parklife. (Also, it had “The Universal.” Also, it had “He Thought Of Cars” and “Entertain Me.”) There was nowhere else they could take this version of themselves after that, and they needed the reset button of Blur. You could likely make the argument that there was nowhere they could take this version of themselves after Parklife, really. There are strands of Britpop that go back further than 1994, and the genre splintered and mutated even into the ’00s depending on how you look at it, but no matter what parameters you apply to it, Parklife remains definitive. Albarn said it all here.

There is impressive range on most of the Blur albums, but it’s particularly staggering on their Britpop trilogy. Parklife wasn’t my entry point into listening to Blur, but two of its songs were: “Girls & Boys” and “This Is A Low.” These could not be further apart tonally or sonically. “Girls & Boys” blew my mind when I first heard it. That near-indecipherable first line that opens it, and thus opens Parklife. The way the guitars first slash in under Albarn drawling “On holiday” during the first verse and then keep scraping as Albarn sings “Love in the ’90s/ is paranoid.” The fact that there’s a lyric that goes “Love in the ’90s/ is paranoid” in the first place, and the fact that it’s the first of Albarn’s many proclamations about the times-they-lived-in. That hilarious and brilliant and nonsensical chorus: “Girls who are boys who like boys to be girls/ who do boys like they’re girls who do girls like they’re boys.” I didn’t know who the hell this guy was, but I wanted to hear more.

Where “Girls & Boys” starts Parklife off with a squiggly bit of dance-pop equal parts trashy and snarky, “This Is A Low” essentially ends it with what remains one of Albarn’s best sad songs. And while he’s wielded wit and condescension ably throughout his career, Albarn excels at a dark song: “Sing,” “Resigned,” “Beetlebum,” “Tender” (or, you know, all of 13), Gorillaz’ “El Manana,” The Good, the Bad, & the Queen’s “Herculean.” But “This Is A Low” still stands out. Most of Parklife is jaunty and spiky and acerbically tongued, and then “This Is A Low” comes along as this entirely crushing conclusion. The power is mostly in that chorus, which is built on a melody that seems to be the exact aural embodiment of every shade of despair and loneliness available in the human condition. The importance of Graham Coxon’s guitar solo(s) cannot be overestimated here, though. The way the guitar rises up out of one refrain, a gradually overwhelming tide of distortion, and then twists and echoes against itself sums up just as much anguish as Albarn’s vocals. It does something truly powerful when it groans to a halt, then calls back out insistently right before the last intensified refrain comes in. It’ll bring you to your knees. It might be the best moment in all of Blur’s catalog.

Last month at South by Southwest, I saw Damon Albarn twice. He is a very different performer solo than with Blur — more subdued, playing balladeer rather than frontman. Bizarrely, even in talking to people ten or fifteen years older than myself who had ostensibly been standing around waiting to see him, I found myself repeating a similar explanation: “The singer of Blur? No? He was also behind Gorillaz?” Without fail, it was the latter that people recognized. That’s part of the fun of this whole Britpop Week and of looking back at a record like Parklife — there’s an evangelism streak to it, an urge to geek out about artists that are only, still, tangentially known Stateside. That makes the process of revisiting this stuff invigorating, and Parklife still stands as one of a handful of pinnacles in the whole narrative. It’s a rare thing to come around to a landmark album’s twentieth birthday and still feel the need to climb onto something, demand people’s attention, and let them know there is a brilliant song called “This Is A Low” on a brilliant album called Parklife, and that they are missing out. Intellectually, you know it’s not true, but it doesn’t matter: two decades on, Parklife still has the sound of something that’s just starting”.

Reaching number one in the U.K., Parklife is one of the most successful and acclaimed albums of the 1990s. Most people define it as a Britpop album. It does a disservice to the meaning and importance of Parklife. An album that has richness and its own sound. In 2014, Time argued how Parklife should not be seen as the cornerstone of the Britpop movement. Thirty years since its came out, I hope there is reassessment and positioning of this wonderful and timeless album:

“There was a time when everyone you knew knew songs from Parklife by heart. Parklife wasn’t underappreciated — but it was misunderstood.

Britpop fractured; there was no way that something that big couldn’t. By mid-1995, with new albums due from both bands, there was an apparent feud between Blur and Oasis that divided fans. Oasis had a proletarian appeal, eschewing the observational, dryly comedic lyrics that made Blur famous for passionate exhortations for listeners to “roll with it.” They reminded the public that they were “free to do whatever [they] like if it’s wrong or right [because] it’s alright,” never mind the lack of clarity on what “it” actually was. Consequently, Blur was derided as pretentious, insincere and overly intellectual. As Oasis’ stock rose, so did the belief amongst listeners that sincerity was synonymous with quality, and Blur’s Albarn found himself under fire from fans and critics for not singing about “himself.” As the larger genre limped towards irrelevance over the next couple of years — arguably culminating in Be Here Now, Oasis’ unexciting third album — the whole thing was declared little more than an exercise in 1960s nostalgia gone wrong by critics embarrassed by their wholesale embrace of it years earlier.

Listening to Parklife again today, one of the first things you realize is that there really isn’t that much of the ’60s in there. That’s not to say that the album isn’t filled with references and outright theft at times (“Jubilee” sounds like a close relative of David Bowie’s ”Boys Keep Swinging”, although not as close as Blur’s later ”M.O.R.”), but unlike Oasis’ fondness for the Beatles discography, Parklife’s lending library runs across decades: you can hear hints of XTC, Ray Davies, Gary Numan and the English New Romantics of the 1980s, not to mention the jazzy French romantics of the 1960s throughout the album.

For all that Parklife is the work of a young band — “the mind gets dirty as it gets closer to thirty,” one line goes, with the big three-oh still seeming like a distant destination — it’s a remarkably confident, even cocky album. (A line from critic David Quantick about the Beatles recording Revolver and realizing “we are young and we can do anything” — that combination of talent and the invincibility of youth — comes to mind.) But Parklife is also a kind one, as well. “We all say, don’t want to be alone” Albarn sings in “End of A Century.” In “This Is A Low,” he sings of melancholy as something that can bring comfort: “It won’t hurt you/ When you’re alone, it will be there with you.” Even the album’s “comedy” songs show empathy towards their target characters. “Jubilee” is an outsider hated by all, who would love to be accepted but “no-one told him” how to do it, or where to go. For all that the Blur of this era would be attacked for being too arch and unemotional, Parklife is as warm and inviting as anything Oasis (or any other Britpop band) released during the same period.

Parklife may have inspired other bands to reach into their record collections, but it has a breadth and heart that so much of what followed lacked (including the band’s own The Great Escape, which feels cynical and uninspired in comparison). It has an inclusiveness towards music that stands at odds with the small-minded attitude that ended up defining so much of what Britpop became. In many ways, Parklife is larger than the genre that grew up around it, holding it up as a standard-bearer so proudly. It sounds as fresh today as it did 20 years ago — a summation of British pop music up to that point in all its occasionally contradictory, throwaway glory”.

I am going to end by ranking the fifteen tracks from Parklife. They all have their own merit, though there are some that stand out from the pack. I am referencing SPIN and their 2023 feature that provided a track by track guide to this genius album. Whatever you think of Blur’s third album now, one cannot deny the significance of its release. How it had this massive impact when it arrived on 25th April, 1994:

“SIXTEEN: Lot 105

Like side one, side two also ends with another mostly instrumental novelty. “Lot 105” isn’t much to speak of, but like the Beatles’ “Her Majesty,” it’s a cheeky addendum to a serious closer — one last fleeting expression of fun and creativity before we all go our (hopefully) merry ways”.

FIFTEEN: Far Out

The album’s second “side” begins with this sparse, trippy number, which has the distinction of being the only Blur album track written and sung by bassist Alex James. Here, he sounds like Syd Barrett staring into space during an astronomy lecture, as he plaintively muses on the names of various moons and stars.

FOURTEEN: The Debt Collector

This horn-laden, instrumental fairground waltz serves as a demarcation between the vinyl and/or cassette sides of Parklife.

THIRTEEN: Clover Over Dover

This harpsichord-propelled ditty is another musical left turn, the repetitive rhyme scheme of which almost obscures the depression inherent in the lyrics (the narrator fantasizes about jumping or being pushed off Southern England’s famous white cliffs).

TWELVE: Magic America

Blur is about as quintessentially British as modern rock bands come, but it has flirted with the U.S. since the beginning, and “Magic America” is one of its more overt winks in that direction. The song balances disdain and curiosity with lines like “fifty-nine cents gets you a good square meal / from the people who care how you feel.”

ELEVEN: Jubilee

“Jubilee” joins “Message Centre” as the album’s most uptempo, guitar-forward tracks, with the band giving off strong T. Rex glam vibes while Albarn turns his critical eye to a teenage slacker who won’t leave his couch and video game console.

TEN: Tracy Jacks

Blur returns to familiar motifs in this Kinks-y character sketch, which explores the ennui of the working class (“Is a golfing fanatic / but his putt is erratic”) and its potential breaking points. By the end, the title character has been arrested for running around naked and has bulldozed his own house to the ground (“It’s just so overrated”).

NINE: Trouble in the Message Centre

Coxon cranks his amps on this cautionary tale of rave culture excess, which fades into a memorable wordless singalong.

EIGHT: London Loves

We’re back in “Girls & Boys” territory with this jaunty, electro-pop number, as the rhythm section and Albarn’s cooing vocals attempt to rein in guitarist Graham Coxon’s angular riffing.

SEVEN: Girls & Boys

Blur rode the album opener’s undulating bass line and pulsing Eurodance beat into what was then new territory for the band: a top-10 placement on the U.K. singles chart and worldwide airplay in clubs and on dance floors. The subject matter was inspired by a Spanish vacation Albarn took with then-girlfriend Justine Frischmann of Elastica, during which he was bemused by the obligation-free hookup scene prevalent in the local bars. Maybe modern life wasn’t so rubbish after all?

SIX: Badhead

Parklife calms down a bit with this song, which meditates on a relationship the narrator seems to have given up on: “Today I’ll get up around two / from a lack of anything to do.”

FIVE: Bank Holiday

Ninety seconds of terse, punk-tinged energy, “Bank Holiday” packs in as many pints and BBQ revelries as it can before it’s sadly “back to work again.”

FOUR: End of a Century

Parklife’s fourth single is a catchy, coming-of-age reckoning that feels more autobiographical than the surrounding tracks: “Your mind gets dirty / as you get closer to 30.” The song also touches on Albarn’s relationship with Frischmann and how couples often find themselves starting at the flickering light of a TV rather than at each other.

THREE: …To The End

Albarn is thankfully back on the mic for this song, on which his soaring choral vocals interweave with the echoing French refrains of Stereolab chaunteuse Laetitia Sadier to create one Blur’s most enduring ballads. It’s the only track on Parklife not produced by Street, with the similarly named Stephen Hague manning the boards instead. Blur recorded another version with Albarn singing the vocals in French, and in 1995 remade the entire song as a duet with French singer Francoise Hardy.

TWO: Parklife

The album’s ebullient title track is perhaps the quintessential Britpop song, propelled by Quadrophenia star Phil Daniels’ deadpan Cockney verse narration and the band’s beery, pub singalong choruses (with Coxon handling the sax part). “You never knew exactly what the song was about, and I still don’t,” which is part of the magic of it,” Daniels said years later. “What I do know is that as soon as it began to get played on the radio, dustmen started apologizing for waking me up in the morning.”

ONE: This Is a Low

Ever the showmen, Blur saves one of its best for the ostensible album closer. This fan favorite is replete with British place-specific name-checks, shipping forecast allusions, soaring choruses, and an epic Coxon guitar solo. Albarn was scheduled to undergo a hernia operation the day the song was recorded, and when pressed for lyrics, drew from a handkerchief James had given him that was embroidered with different geographic locales. This top achievement contrasts with and crowns an album full of pop oddities”.

On 25th April, we celebrate thirty years of Blur’s Parkllfe. An album that sounds so fascinating and playable to this day, go and play it if you have not heard Parklife for a while. Even if there are one or two tracks not up to Blur’s best, some of their biggest songs can be found on Parklife. Embraced and acclaimed by critics at the time and since, we are going to love and respect Blur’s Parklife..

TO the end.

FEATURE: Simpler, Lesser, Slower, Weaker: Why a Worrying Trend Regarding Songs Lyrics Should Give Artists Pause

FEATURE:

 

 

Simpler, Lesser, Slower, Weaker

PHOTO CREDIT: Anna Tarazevich/Pexels

Why a Worrying Trend Regarding Songs Lyrics Should Give Artists Pause

_________

EVEN though a recent study…

PHOTO CREDIT: Andrea Piacquadio/Pexels

showing how songs lyrics are getting more repetitive and angrier only takes us to 2020, one suspects there has not been a radical shift in the past four years or so. Maybe not surprising to some music fans, it is reported that lyrics are simpler and more self-obsessed. What could be causing this?! Are platforms like TikTok and trends there contributing to a sense of repetition and a lack of originality? Also, given the state of politics and how the world has changed since 1980, maybe lyrics have reacted to that in some way. I guess music does shift and we will see change again soon. It is concerning that, especially over the past few years, a lot of song lyrics have gone in one direction. This article from The Guardian shares findings of a study that suggests a homogenisation of song lyrics:

“You’re not just getting older. Song lyrics really are becoming simpler and more repetitive, according to a study published on Thursday.

Lyrics have also become angrier and more self-obsessed over the last 40 years, the study found, reinforcing the opinions of cranky ageing music fans everywhere.

A team of European researchers analysed the words in more than 12,000 English-language songs across the genres of rap, country, pop, R&B and rock from 1980 to 2020.

Before detailing how lyrics have become more basic, the study pointed out that US singer-songwriting legend Bob Dylan – who rose to fame in the 1960s – has won a Nobel prize in literature.

Senior study author Eva Zangerle, an expert on recommendation systems at Austria’s University of Innsbruck, declined to single out an individual newer artist for having simple lyrics.

But she emphasised that lyrics can be a “mirror of society” which reflect how a culture’s values, emotions and preoccupations change over time.

“What we have also been witnessing in the last 40 years is a drastic change in the music landscape – from how music is sold to how music is produced,” Zangerle said.

PHOTO CREDIT: Tim Gouw/Pexels

Over the 40 years studied, there was repeated upheaval in how people listened to music. The vinyl records and cassette tapes of the 1980s gave way to the CDs of the 90s, then the arrival of the internet led to the algorithm-driven streaming platforms of today.

For the study in the journal Scientific Reports, the researchers looked at the emotions expressed in lyrics, how many different and complicated words were used, and how often they were repeated.

“Across all genres, lyrics had a tendency to become more simple and more repetitive,” Zangerle summarised.

The results also confirmed previous research which had shown a decrease in positive, joyful lyrics over time and a rise in those that express anger, disgust or sadness.

Lyrics have also become much more self-obsessed, with words such as “me” or “mine” becoming much more popular.

The number of repeated lines rose most in rap over the decades, Zangerle said – adding that it obviously had the most lines to begin with.

“Rap music has become more angry than the other genres,” she added”.

PHOTO CREDIT: Anna Pou/Pexels

It is not to say that this trend cannot be reversed One does worry that a more homogeneous or less flexible Pop mainstream might not create fast or natural improvement. It is clear that social media might have contributed to a more recent change. The fact that a simplicity and repetitiveness is more impactful and digestible to a new generation. Music is getting more personal I feel. Artists writing more from a first-person perspective. Whilst there might be explanations and reasons as to why lyrics are simpler than they once were, one wonders whether it is a bad thing. I guess those looking for something deeper and more fantastical and brighter has choice. We are in a time when all kinds of artists can be accessed through streaming services. Are these new findings a simplification? Although thousands of songs have been researched and studied, the fact is that there is a lot of other music that has not been included. Maybe the Pop or Rock mainstream has become simpler or angrier. Does that mean that all other music has followed suit?! Perhaps it is not the case that artists are writing more repetitive songs because of a lack of imagination or lyrical ability. Perhaps less poetic and diverse as pre-1980, I suppose listener demands and tastes have enforced this change. With streaming services meaning we are perhaps looking for songs that are shorter and more memorable, artists have had to adapt. Radio playlists are quite competitive. If listeners relate to lyrics that are angrier or have a certain vibe, that does mean that other artists are going to replicate that to fit in.

PHOTO CREDIT: Michael Burrows/Pexels

That first ten to fifteen seconds of a song is crucial. Getting the listener hooked. Maybe few would tolerate a slow build or an extended introduction. In order to get people listening and stay with the song, maybe there has been this forced compromise. I don’t feel that all lyrics conform to the angrier, simpler and more repetitive model that has been suggested. There is ample music out there where one can appreciate. I do wonder whether things can and should change. Again, nobody is saying lyrics are worse. It is obvious that things have altered since 1980. As we become more reliant on streaming and perhaps have less patience for more complex songs/lyrics, is there a way back? I think that artists do need to take these new findings quite seriously. There is a danger than song lyrics will become indistinct. When we look back at music from now a couple of decades on, how will we view and assess them? I guess sone could say that some of the most popular Pop of the 1960s relied on quite simple lyrics. The Beatles were not immune. It is this more self-serving and angrier nature of lyrics that makes me feel artists are trying to be more revealing and direct. Maybe they are seeing what is happening in politics and the wider world and, as such, their lyrics absorb this. I do hope that things change in years to come. That we can still retain a certain simplicity and repetitiveness to some lyrics, yet also have a swathe of songs where there is something a bit more expansive and original. Discovering that so many song lyrics are simple, repetitive and angry is, quite frankly, quite…

PHOTO CREDIT: lil artsy/Pexels

ALARMING to see.

FEATURE: They Say, No, No, It Won't Last Forever! Searching for the Lyrics to Kate Bush’s Ivor Novello-Winning The Man with the Child in His Eyes

FEATURE:

 

 

They Say, No, No, It Won't Last Forever!

Searching for the Lyrics to Kate Bush’s Ivor Novello-Winning The Man with the Child in His Eyes

_________

THERE are a couple of things…

I want to discuss in this feature. I have discussed The Man with the Child in His Eyes before. Released on 26th May, 1978, it was the second (U.K.) single from her debut album, The Kick Inside. After a number one with Wuthering Heights, she followed it with a track that reached six in the U.K. It reached three in Ireland and actually got to eighty-five in the US Billboard Hot 100. There are a couple of reasons as to why I am revisiting this song. For a start, it is almost forty-five years since the track won an Ivor Novello. Bush won for The Outstanding British Lyric. Actually, Wuthering Heights was nominated for Best Song Musically and Lyrically – though it lost to Gerry Rafferty’s Baker Street (which it beat for The Outstanding British Lyric). In the same ceremony, George Martin was given the Outstanding Services to British Music. You can see more of the winners here. I cannot find the exact date of the ceremony, though we are coming up to the forty-fifth anniversary. If this site is to be believed, it does seem like she won the Ivor Novello on 29th April. That was when she was performing a run of shows for The Tour of Life. That day, Bush was at The Amsterdam Carre Theater. It is not the only time Kate Bush has a connection with and honour from the Ivors. In 2002, she was given the Outstanding Contribution to British Music award. That was a few years before Aerial was released. In 2020, Bush became a Fellow of The Ivors Academy. With that last honour coming when she was sixty-one and the first when she was twenty, it goes to show that she has been celebrated and recognised as a world-class and influential songwriter for decades now. It still amazes me a song she wrote when she was thirteen won her an award and got so high in thew charts. Such prodigious talent at such a young age! The Man with the Child in His Eyes remains one of her most loved and beautiful songs. This pure and gorgeous moment that appears just before Wuthering Heights on The Kick Inside.

There has always been a bit of mystery regarding the subject of The Man with the Child in His Eyes. As she was thirteen when she wrote it, I detach the song from the romantic or sexual. Maybe more of a teenage fantasy, instead it seems more to be fictional or imagined. There are those who think that it is about Steve Blacknell. As we source from the Kate Bush Encyclopedia: “Born in Lambeth, South London on 6 September 1952, Steve Blacknell started out as a toilet cleaner in a mental hospital in Bexley, Kent. During this time he had a relationship with Kate Bush – before she became famous. During this time she wrote The Man With The Child In His Eyes, which Blacknell claims is about him”. I never felt this was true. Kate Bush herself never said it was about Blacknell. She has said it wasn’t about anyone specific. I consider it more of a poem that turned into a song. Other says it was written about her mentor, David Gilmour. It is the mystery of the song’s origins that gives it so much power and appeal. I always like to think this teenager imagining a few lines and it formed into this evocative and beautiful song. I have said before how the one thing I would love to own related to Kate Bush is the Cathy photobook. Consisting of photos her brother John Carder Bush took from her childhood, it is an intimate and fascinating look at Kate Bush before she was Kate Bush. Cathy. At home in East Wickham Farm, Welling, we get this access to someone who, not many years after the photos were taken, would choose a career in music and soon be a major name.

I do often think about The Man with the Child in His Eyes. Specifically the lyrics. If there was this rare and unique item that I could have then that would be it. The original handwritten lyrics. In 2010, Steve Blacknell put up Kate Bush’s handwritten lyrics of The Man With the Child in His Eyes for auction via the memorabilia/auction website 991.com. I guess its owner would never consider re-auctioning them, but I would love to know where in the world they are. I love how authentically juvenile yet classic the lyrics are. Written in hot pink felt tip pen, there is a blend of the child-like and elegant. Something pure and historical, this is the template or starting place of a song that would win an Ivor Novello award about seven or eighty years after the song was written. Kate Bush recorded the song in 1975 with David Gilmour acting as executive producer. Laying the track down in AIR Studios in London. Bush was accompanied on the song by an orchestra. That was an experienced she said terrified her. Regardless, her vocal performance is flawless. Compare the vocal sound of that – which she recorded when she was sixteen – and the one for Wuthering Heights. Even though they were recorded a couple of years apart, you feel like you’re listening to two completely different people.

Bush made her debut (and only) live U.S. T.V. appearance on SNL in 1978 and performed The Man with the Child in His Eyes. During that performance, Paul Shaffer played piano. In the same way as Kate asks where her man is during this classic song, I wonder where the lyrics now are. A man perhaps lost sea or missing, what about those beautiful hand-written lyrics that one could imagine her penning in her bedroom when she was thirteen. The mix of excitement and focus as she composed those words. Why a pink felt tip pen?! I always would have though there’d be a fountain pen or something like that. I guess, as she was so young, she would have had a selection of felt tip pens and felt that hot pink was perfect for the task and look of The Man with the Child in His Eyes. There are so many treasures and precious rarities out there fans would really love to possess. I think that these lyrics are what I would pay anything for. A rare piece of Kate Bush history hanging on my wall! I pine and yearn for these lyrics. I have been wondering why Steve Blacknell decided to release for auction words that, if not directly about him, where given to him by Kate Bush. It does seem mad that he would let these out of his grasp! Regardless, they are now somewhere else. I am not sure what state they are in, though I do hope that whoever has them has kept the page clean and protected so that no damage is done to these important and award-winning words. I guess the fact that the lyrics – or a love letter depending on whether you feel The Man with the Child in His Eyes is about Steve Blacknell – were sold for £10,000 means they would be out of most people’s price range (including mine).

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush with Steve Blacknell

Looking at this source, we learn more about the song and those lyrics. Steve Blacknell discussing his relationship with Kate Bush and how he went from a toilet cleaner at a psychiatric hospital to working in the music industry. No doubt Kate Bush gave him a certain confidence to pursue his dreams and to move into the industry. He in turn obvious motivated her a lot. Just reading about how the two came together and how they briefly inspired one another intrigues me! It is a shame that these lyrics are not in a museum or somewhere that the public could see:

“But Steve Blacknell, Kate's first boyfriend, revealed the story behind the music as the hand-written lyrics went on sale at music memorabilia site www.991.com.

Penned in girlish pink ink and featuring circles instead of dots over the 'i's, the piece is part of a package which features hand-written lyrics to another track from The Kick Inside.

Steve Blacknell, 58, of Hythe, Kent, said: 'By the spring of 1975 she had become my first true love.'

'All I really knew about her was that she wrote songs, played the piano and lived in a lovely house with an equally lovely family.'

The pair would 'plot their destinies' together, with Kate vowing to dedicate her life to music, and Steve also planning a career in the industry.

Steve, who was working at the time as a toilet cleaner in a local hospital, said: 'She had her heart set on becoming a global star and I was going to be a flash DJ.'

'One day I would introduce her on Top Of The Pops. In the summer of 1975, I finally got my break and landed a job as a marketing assistant with Decca Records.'

'It was then that I finally thought I was equipped to hear her music and it was a day I'll never forget. I went round to her house and she led me to the room where the piano was.'

'I thought "Oh my God". What I heard made my soul stand on end. I realised there and then that I was in love with a genius.'

Steve took Kate to gigs by groups such as The Incredible String Band and Camel, but as her career took off, their love faded.

Steve added: 'As things hotted up for her, so our relationship cooled and we drifted apart.'

'But I've been told by those around her that I was indeed The Man With The Child In His Eyes and I know that those words were given to me by someone very special.

'They say you never forget your first love and in my case it's as true as it is for anyone. It's true too that she went on to charm, enlighten and entrance people all over the world.'

'I'm proud to have known and loved her, and proud to have shared such amazing times with the genius that is Kate Bush.'

Julian Thomas, of 991.com, said: 'This is one of those items that comes on the market once in a blue moon. We're expecting a lot of interest because Kate Bush is a highly collectable artist”.

I have been thinking a lot about Kate Bush’s 1979. During The Tour of Life, when she was twenty, she was taking her first couple of albums around the U.K. and Europe. In the middle of all of this, Bush won an Ivor Novello for The Man with the Child in His Eyes. This majestic and sublime song she wrote when she was thirteen was given this big honour. Maybe Kate Bush would not have wanted the original hand-written lyrics to the track to leave the hands of Steve Blacknell. Perhaps they are not that sentimental to Kate Bush now. I don’t know the name of the person who has the lyrics for The Man with the Child in His Eyes. I keep imagining how this piece of paper of such importance is out there somewhere. I do not know of any other Kate Bush written lyrics that has been auctioned. There are fan letters and things like that, yet there is something special and more impactful when you think of the history of The Man with the Child in His Eyes and the way the song would grow into this award-wining and much-loved track. Considered one of her very best, the song won a prestigious Ivor Novello almost forty-five years ago. The way those lyrics Bush wrote when she was thirteen transformed into what it did is…

AMAZING to think.