FEATURE: Under the Influence: The Chemical Brothers’ Surrender at Twenty-Five

FEATURE:

 

 

Under the Influence

The Chemical Brothers’ Surrender at Twenty-Five

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A chart-topping album…

that was one of the best of the late-1990s, The Chemical Brothers’ Surrender turns twenty-five on 21st June. Singles like Hey Boy Hey Girl and Let Forever Be stand alongside the best songs ever released by the duo of Ed Simons and Tom Rowlands. Their third studio album arrived in 1999. It came two years after the hugely successful Dig Your Own Hole. If Surrender did not quite get the same acclaim as its predecessor, it is clear this album is a classic. It is interesting seeing how music changed and evolved by the end of the 1990s. Great Dance and Electronic albums from Basement Jaxx and The Chemical Brother stood alongside Blur, TLC and Fiona Apple. It was a fascinating time. The final albums released in the past millennium. Quite historic in a way. Ranking with the best of 1999 is The Chemical Brothers’ Surrender. I want to come to some reviews for the album. In 2019, for its twentieth anniversary, Stereogum looked at the lead-up to Surrender. The fact that The Chemical Brothers has achieved success and commercial popularity by 1999. Where could they possible head from here? It was a fascinating time for them:

“What more did they have to prove by the summer of 1999? Exit Planet Dust had commanded the attention of the dance music world, and its follow up would turn many a mainstream head beyond that. In 1996 they had an international breakthrough single with “Setting Sun,” and in 1997 they unleashed Dig Your Own Hole and, along with others like the Prodigy, Daft Punk and Fatboy Slim, convinced quite a lot of people that electronica was the new mainstream alternative music.

It certainly didn’t hurt their chances that so much major label alt rock had dully dug its own hole at that point, but the Brothers got people moving on their own merit. Doubling down on the debut’s big beats and furious loops, Dig Your Own Hole can in places come across a touch thin and jittery compared to its predecessor, but not to a degree that’s to its detriment — unlike a certain overstretched rock album from that same year released by their pal, and “Setting Sun” guest vocalist, Noel Gallagher. Dig Your Own Hole was regarded by many as a bigger and brasher version of the Chemical Brothers, but the impression of a sequel lingered in its live-set pace, similar sequencing, and Beth Orton arriving at the end to serenade you back down.

To this day the Chemical Brothers still haven’t lost fondness for their own traditions, but Surrender — which turns 20 today — was the first time they tried to consciously step away from some of them. “The records we made had quite a large impact on a hell of a lot of music,” Rowlands told CMJ New Music Monthly around the time of Surrender’s release. “And now, making this record, we feel much the same way: We’ve had to invent a new place for it.” The first two albums were consciously functional dance discs, arranged with technical aspects like beats per minute in mind, that also managed to infiltrate the pop sphere. Surrender, on the other hand, “was more put together by moods, the tone of the record and where it could take you,” said Rowlands.

Toiling away in the studio for longer than normal, Simons and Rowlands crafted a kind of classic-rock-minded rave record to cap off the era and their first decade together. Rolling Stone’s review of Surrender posited, perhaps with a glint of misguided hopefulness, that it “may be the first dance-music album about the end of dance music, or at least the end of the innocence,” before drawing more on-point comparisons to the Madchester scene from which the Brothers first sprang, Detroit techno, Afrika Bambaataa, post-punk and Kraftwerk. Others also celebrated Surrender’s multiple new directions and willingness to not just pause for breath, but to chill out here and there.

“It looks like there is life after big beat, after all,” observed Q magazine about Surrender, offering, like that Rolling Stone review, a compliment to the Chem Bros couched in a terminal diagnosis for their genre. Given the typical lifespan of many dance and electronic scenes over the years, such assessments weren’t entirely out of order. The duo themselves even noted at the time that they didn’t want to back themselves into the corner of pleasing the crowd until the crowd are no longer content with what used to please them. But this wasn’t the Brothers turning dance traitors and planning their escape, this was about redrawing boundaries and the need to grow. They weren’t the ones meant to be surrendering. They were saying, quite expressly in “Hey Boy Hey Girl,” the album’s first single: “Here we go.”

Not that the Chemical Brothers had a problem with going back to the same well when there was plenty of water left. “We like working with people whose music we’re great fans of,” Rowlands told Billboard about Surrender, “and we established nice relationships working with Noel Gallagher and Jonathan Donahue on ‘Dig Your Own Hole,’ so there’s that continuity….” Mercury Rev’s Donahue had contributed to “The Private Psychedelic Reel” on Dig and was called back to blissfully strum Surrender to a close with “Dream On.” Meanwhile, “Let Forever Be” found the Chem Bros landing on the right side of repeating themselves, with Gallagher lending a more full-chested vocal this time around to a more organic-hued cousin of “Setting Sun.”

That was just the tip of the guest list. On the album’s looser second half, Hope Sandoval drifts through “Asleep From Day,” a midpoint comedown that for its gentleness was perhaps the most startling new development on Surrender. The house shapeshifter “Out of Control” brought in both Bernard Sumner of New Order and a title-exhaling cameo from Primal Scream’s Bobby Gillespie (a man for whom the term ‘dance traitor’ had once been essentially invented after the Scream followed Screamadelica with Give Out But Don’t Give Up). Halfway though, “Out of Control” spins into a distinct pairing of open guitar chords and high bassline, and Sumner’s presence accomplishes something more meaningful than just filling a ‘featuring’ slot. “Out of Control,” like other moments on Surrender, combines homage and collaboration in a way more familiar to, but at the same time more capable than, rock music.

Make no mistake, the Chemical Brothers were up for being rock stars. “We’re not into avant-garde excursions, the sort of abstract ideas that you’ll hear on a Mo’ Wax record,” Rowlands told Muzik magazine in 1995. “We’re more like party steamrollers.” They had been throwing loud guitar samples in their tracks as far back as early single “Leave Home.” When electronica was deemed the new rock ‘n’ roll they rose to the occasion and became two of its most identifiable faces. Then, just like any rock band worth more than a mere good time, they got ambitious, and decided that steamrolling the party was no longer enough.

“Surrender feels like an old style rock record, and that’s a compliment,” wrote England’s Dreaming author Jon Savage in Mojo. “It has variation, depth and emotion, and addresses an audience outside its own immediate concerns and genre.” Though his appearance on Surrender passes almost unnoticed, the presence of Bobby Gillespie is a notable connection. Primal Scream had reset themselves again with Vanishing Point in 1997 and were putting together XTRMNTR when Surrender dropped. At this point, the Scream and the Chemical Brothers were pushing toward the same middle ground from different points along the spectrum, with the former wielding righteous modern anger and the latter focusing on good times past and present. Between the two of them at that moment, rock ‘n’ roll and electronic music were the closest they had ever been to being the same thing.

Successfully crossing over didn’t come without at least a little consternation. “I don’t like the way big beat is seen as a more acceptable form of dance music for people who aren’t really into dance music,” Simons admitted in an early 1999 interview. What he did like was seeing rock culture at that time reflecting dance culture. “Usually, it’s going to clubs that’s all about meeting up early and you all go down together, but Oasis gave you that sort of thing with rock gigs,” he said. Dig Your Own Hole had dug into the heads of legions of listeners who could probably count the number of other dance acts they liked on one hand, and it had done so with making few if any real concessions. Surrender reached even further across the imaginary aisle, and it did so on its own terms.

It also set a new precedent for Chemical Brothers albums to come. The next two in particular, Come With Us in 2002 and Push The Button in 2005, present the duo at their most pop-thinking. The singles brightly stand out, the pacing ebbs and flows, the vocalist lineups remain illustrious. The Chem Bros certainly didn’t get big turning their backs on a good formula, and the pattern-breaking they achieved on Surrender ultimately gave them a new one to work with”.

Ahead of its twenty-fifth anniversary, I would advise people to pick up a copy of Surrender. Last year, this website explored a millennial classic. When The Chemical Brothers were at the peak of their powers, they could have folded or played it safe. One does not get that with Surrender. It is a bold and brilliant album that saw them move and evolve. Not repeating what we heard on Dig Your Own Hole:

“Following 1995’s Exit Planet Dust and 1997’s Dig Your Own Hole, all eyes were on crossover UK dance act The Chemical Brothers. Surrender, released on June 21, 1999, sealed their reputation for good, building on their sterling previous collaborations and instrumental work with another walloping hour of electronica, peaking on some of their best-loved numbers and picking up critical acclaim and international chart success along the way.

It’s all on top, right from the quivering electro-vibery which kick-starts the pulsating, playfully glitchy Morse code opener “Music: Response,” its twisting filters going straight for the physical reaction it desires. The early 90s, bleepy warehouse feel of the skittery yet thumping “Under The Influence” follows, the track’s swooping and churning bassline having debuted the year before (in a different mix) as part of the duo’s dancefloor-testing Electronic Battle Weapon series.

This opening double act is something of a dramatic set-up for the most high-profile collaboration on the album, which features New Order’s Bernard Sumner, with Primal Scream’s Bobby Gillespie on backing vocals. Sumner pieces are always an event, and the landmark, sweeping, swankily rippling, and aggressively blaring “Out Of Control” soups up Bobby Orlando’s 80s hi-NRG track “She Has A Way” for a new generation. Capturing the Chems in total mastery of the tools at their disposal, and with Sumner summing up the manic energy of the impending millennial celebrations, the single release of the song also attracted a remix from legendary UK DJ Sasha.

Revamped once more

Leading on from the pitchbent, funkily scratched diversions of “Orange Wedge,” the woozy, psych-drenched “Let Forever Be” features the return of Oasis’ Noel Gallagher. It followed his hit collaboration with the Brothers on Dig Your Own Hole’s “Setting Sun”, and proved that they could penetrate the mainstream alongside all that credible club fare. The Beatles influences then drains away into the suitably languid opening section of Surrender’s centerpiece, “The Sunshine Underground.” Sampling its gently cosmic guitar riff from a library music piece by James Asher, the track eventually blasts off into a constantly changing, lightly drum’n’bass-fuelled epic sprinkled with a dusting of energetic percussion, dainty finger cymbals, and circling keys. The previous album’s updated psychedelia had made a slight return, but revamped once more.

The beautiful, classy vocals of Mazzy Star’s Hope Sandoval feature on the calm balm of the country-flecked “Asleep From Day.” Sandal proved to be a wise choice of collaborator from the indie-conversant duo, another effective singer for electronic material who later also collaborated with Massive Attack on “Paradise Circus,” from their 2010 album, Heligoland.

Soundtracking the age of the superstar DJ

The rolling bassline and questing Tomorrow’s World-esque hook of “Got Glint?” fade into the towering, totemic, buzzing smash single “Hey Boy Hey Girl,” which builds on the duo’s previous raging big-beat successes and transfers that energy into a new mold, definitively soundtracking the age of the superstar DJ with its irresistible, crisply hip-hop-laced breaks. (The Surrender B-sides were mainly new tracks rather than remixes, but Soulwax later successfully updated this classic for the 00s.) “Dream On” then utilizes instrumental and vocodered contributions from Jonathan Donahue of rising American alt.rock stars Mercury Rev to bring the album down to a welling, acoustic-tinged lullaby ending”.

I am going to finish with a couple of interviews for Surrender. NME shared their take on a classic. Even if some fans of The Chemical Brothers prefer other albums from them, I think that Surrender is their best work. It is definitely one of the best and most important albums from 1999:

“The epiphany for The Chemical Brothers arrived last year and it arrived with a blinding flash. They were up at Gatecrasher in Sheffield, they have said, surveying the Day-Glo wreckage and savouring that Mitsubishi moment - Paul Van Dyk and Judge Jules at the controls. And as the massive trance pumped around them, the revelation was complete. This might not be the future, they reckoned, but it works. And blimey, it feels marvellous.

Here we go, then. But where exactly? Where else can Tom Rowlands and Ed Simons take us that we haven't been before? What new genres can they invent this time, assuming they did in the first instance? Oh, we can credit them with big beat and hold them responsible for Fatboy Slim's entire career, but to return now with an album of breakbeat-derived delirium, regardless of quality, would be insulting and unacceptable. Instead, light sticks at the ready, The Chemical Brothers have gone raving and they've dragged their celebrity mates along with them.

'Surrender' is hardly the radical move we (foolishly) anticipated, but then the Chemicals aren't a radical group. Effective and ruthlessly proficient, yes, but never the boundary-pushers or maverick sound scientists. Theirs is a psychedelia for people who've never taken acid, techno for those unfamiliar with Jeff Mills or, more recently and pertinently, Green Velvet. If you want gloriously dumb tough house, buy Impulsion's equally impressive but pretension-free 'Love Addict' album.

Plenty has happened since 'Dig Your Own Hole' and, sure, we survived without Tom and Ed. Yet somehow, with their third album, it all seems irrelevant. We're back at the beginning, eager to see what will happen after 'Surrender' has left its colossal mark. Whether it deserves to be such an inescapably enormous, all-consuming record is neither here nor there, it just is.

And as it happens, 'Surrender' is excellent. From the opening faux-naive Kraftwerk simulation of 'Music: Response' right through to the final, Jonathan Donahue-assisted fry-up 'Dream On', it's simply a joy to listen to. Tellingly, the pair are most successful when they try something new (for them, at least). Like the irrepressibly sleek techno of 'Under The Influence', or 'Out Of Control', the best collaboration Bernard Sumner has sung on. Bobby Gillespie's also there, apparently, moaning. Its rumoured Sasha remix makes perfect sense.

'Hey Boy Hey Girl' you know, suffice to say it's a great moment in acid-bongo-pop fusion, while the Brothers' take on silken Chicago house, 'Got Glint?', even slides into graceful Balearic homage. These aside, though, and we're back on familiar ground. The album's nine-minute centrepiece, 'The Sunshine Underground', is essentially 'The Private Psychedelic Reel' smeared with glitter, and 'Asleep From Day', featuring Mazzy Star's permanently 'dreamy' Hope Sandoval, replaces previous folk-scarred outings with Beth Orton. Nice, but not quite the ticket.

Noel Gallagher rasps through the dislocated funk of 'Let Forever Be', a harmless, more subdued version of 'Setting Sun', you could argue. Noel's biggest influence on Tom and Ed, however, must be in the prevalence of utterly bland song titles. 'Orange Wedge'? It's not their finest musical moment either.

Minor gripes, admittedly, and anyway, you can always skip over them. Sufficient responses triggered, 'Surrender' won't change your life. But it will make it more enjoyable. And that, for the time being, is quite enough.

8/10”.

I am going to end with a review from Rolling Stone. I do hope that, ahead of the twenty-fifth anniversary on 21st June, there is new investigation of Surrender. It is no doubt one of the finest albums of the 1990s. A work of sheer brilliance from The Chemical Brothers:

“Dance music is something usually spoken of in the future tense: the imminent hits and next hot samples; the underground remixers ripe for prime time; the changes just around the bend. Surrender, then, is a rare thing in electronic body pop: a record about yesterday. In fact, the third sterling studio album by the Chemical Brothers, the English spin-jockey duo of Tom Rowlands and Ed Simons, may be the first dance-music album about the end of dance music, or at least the end of the innocence -- the way things were before the bungled hype of electronica; before Prodigy-copycat bands and third-rate techno compilations; before Madonna reinvented herself as a digital Dolly Lama and Fatboy Slim became the DJ king of TV-commercial residuals.

"Under the Influence," "Out of Control," "The Sunshine Underground," "Dream On": Most of the song titles here are blatant valentines to the first great age of E's and raves, Britain's fabled acid-house summers of 1988 and '89. Rowlands and Simons were there as young, thunderstruck clubbers, and they soak much of this record in literal, cheery reminiscence. "Under the Influence" is all throb and velocity -- an insistent, circular synth figure; zippy drum-machine sizzle; dive-bombing bass. At one point, the music comes to a series of gulping stops, as if Rowlands and Simons were braking the track on a turntable in real time. As the song suddenly rocks back to full speed, you have a good idea of what it was like to ride the music in a field full of loons, all off their heads on pills and shimmy.

The pneumatic roll and vocoder-filtered refrains in "Music: Response" and "Got Glint?" reference even more ancient daze: the crucial, early robo-soul of Detroit techno pioneers Kevin Saunderson and Juan Atkins; Afrika Bambaataa's early-Eighties fusion of Bronx break beats and Kraftwerk. Rowlands and Simons also evoke, brilliantly, the first stirrings of British post-punk dance culture in "Out of Control" -- a shit-hot mimicking of the 1983 New Order classic "Blue Monday" -- with, for extra cheek, lyrics and vocals by New Order's Bernard Sumner (crooning with perfect repressed-English-schoolboy menace).

If Surrender was simply meticulously rendered nostalgia, it would be just pleasant, a step down from the Chemicals' 1995 rave-tastic debut, Exit Planet Dust, and the heaving Acid Test funk of the pair's '97 chartbuster, Dig Your Own Hole. But this is a record that also moves. Dance music is primarily about the beat; without it, there is no dancing. But the best dance music is about what happens over, under, in the thick of a rhythm -- about the tidal dynamics and programmatic tension feeding the pulse. Surrender is rich in both.

Rowlands and Simons know how to get busy with the barest essentials. "Hey Boy Hey Girl" is basically a single percolating riff, a knocking beat and the starting-gun chant from Rockmaster Scott and the Dynamic Three's 1985 single "The Roof Is on Fire" ("Hey, girls, hey, boys, superstar DJs, here we go!"). Yet the mix is a hive of activity: Drums come in and out like riptides; cymbals crash with punctuative effect; wheezy keyboard licks are mounted atop each other in squishy counterpoint. The track rocks not for any one of those reasons but, ultimately, for all of them.

Replacing Beth Orton, the Chemicals' siren of choice on Exit and Dig, Hope Sandoval of Mazzy Star is suitably coquettish in her vocal cameo, "Asleep From Day." More fun is the episodic music around her: the racing-bongo segment and the toy-town folk rock culled, at least in spirit, from old Judy Collins records. In "The Sunshine Underground," a chip off the swollen-arpeggio trance rock of "The Private Psychedelic Reel" on Dig, the Chemicals tweak the core riff (played by what sounds like the love child of a sitar and a hammer dulcimer) with sly rhythmic shifts and nutty percussive touches (a bicycle bell, for instance) that fatten the piece's subtle muscularity.

As fine as Surrender is, it may be time for Rowlands and Simons to revamp their approach to making studio albums. There is a creeping sense of formula to the celebrity-vocal packages. "Let Forever Be," the Chemicals' second Revolver pastiche featuring Oasis' Noel Gallagher, lacks the crisp novelty of the Dig template, "Setting Sun." In fact, this album's best moments come without lyrics or singing. Rowlands and Simons have memorialized their gloriously wasted youth by making a record that kicks like living history. Put it on, crank it up, bust a move. (RS 815)”.

On 21st June, the magnificent Surrender turns twenty-five. I think it is still full of layers and revelations, even though I have been listening to songs from it since it was released in 1999. If you have not heard the album – or not heard it in a while -, then go and put on Surrender and let it…

TAKE you somewhere incredible.

FEATURE: Saluting the Queens: Coco Jones

FEATURE:

 

 

Saluting the Queens

Coco Jones

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I have neglected this feature…

for a while, so I want to pick it up. In Saluting the Queens, I show love and respect for an incredible woman in the industry. Whether that is an artist, label boss, broadcaster or anyone else, I like to have a wide look at amazing women doing important work. In terms of artists worth spotlighting, this takes me to Coco Jones. I have included her in my Spotlight feature. Since then, she has grown as an artist. I want to bring in an interview from last year, in addition to a couple from this year. She is someone that everyone should know. I am going to start out with an interview from last year. Jones released her fifth E.P., What I Didn’t Tell You, last year. Her debut album is out in the summer. Maybe something coming later in the year. Last year, Coco Jones was announcing herself as one of the strongest and most promising R&B artists coming through. British Vogue spent some time with a fascinating and compelling talent:

“After Coco burst onto the scene in 2012 with a lead role in Disney film Let It Shine, the South Carolina-born, Tennessee-raised triple-threat found herself on the fast-track to super-stardom. A sequel to the film was mooted, as well as her own show, and she had just been signed to a record label. “As a child star, it was all like a fairytale. I got to live a dream and play characters that were so fun, like dress up,” she says. “It just looked like my world was never going to change – it was always gonna get crazier and crazier.”

Until, that is, the label tried to force her into cookie-cutter formulas. “When I did put my personality in songs, I’d have to dial it back, because it was too much.” Coco treated it like a role: “I was acting like a singer, singing songs that I didn’t really like.” When both the planned TV show and film suddenly fell through, “the record label only knew how to market through TV shows… so trying to figure out how to market me, a Black girl who already didn’t fit into these formulas, it all just started to deteriorate.” The label dropped her too.

The fairytale castle that had felt so solid under her feet had washed away. “It was just shocking, I thought so many things were going to happen.” she says. “As I got older… you don’t want to lose such a good thing, you know? So when you don’t get the jobs, it’s less fun, it’s more painful,” she explains. “You forget how magical it was.”

Still, she tried to rebuild. She looks back at the independent music she made in those teenage years as immature (“I hadn’t really lived yet”), and auditioning for acting jobs wore her out. “There’s a lot of colourism in the industry. You can be just as talented, but because you don’t look the part, it will never be your part.”

Joining TikTok in 2020 changed everything for Coco. Her covers, singing original verses on classic songs, earned millions of likes and got people talking about her again. “Once people were seeing me on their phone screens, they were reaching out.” A manager introduced her to High Standardz, part of Def Jam, who signed her. Around the same time, she booked a role as Hilary Banks in Bel-Air. “My whole life changed in one year.”

Many Black ’90s sitcoms (Fresh Prince included) became infamous for replacing dark-skinned female characters with light-skinned actresses. Seeing Coco as the glamorous Hilary, first played by Karyn Parsons, meant a lot to so many girls. “I get a lot of support,” she says. “Black women are so happy to see themselves represented in this way.”

Despite the ups and downs, Jones wouldn’t change a thing about her journey. “God makes things happen in a way better than I ever could. I’ll rarely ever understand why, I just have to roll with it,” she says. She hopes her own path will make it easier for others to follow in her footsteps. “I want to make new standards for Black girls. There’s nothing we can’t do. I want to open the door for them to have an easier journey.”

Where were you pulling from for your EP What I Didn’t Tell You?

Stories that I wanted to share with an audience just learning about me [for the first time], and stories that I wanted to share with people who have known me since I was a kid. It’s an introduction, drawn from real stories that make up who I am and who I’ve become.

Which tracks mean the most to you?

It changes every day but “Double Back” has always been one of my faves. If I’m in the mood to dance, then probably “Crazy for Me”.

Why has “Double Back” been a consistent one for you?

It has that nostalgic feel to it. We sampled the SWV song and I know my voice reminds people of back-in-the-day R&B, which I do feel is a big part of me. Also, the coming of age story. It’s what me and my girls go through: being indecisive about a guy. He’s sure about them and you’re like: “Argh, I don’t know if I want to be outside or be in a relationship.”

Yes, your music does have an old-school grounding, who inspires you?

When I was growing up, because my mom was my team, the songs that I would learn for auditions were also ones she knew, so I listened to a lot of Whitney, Aretha  – soulful artists. As I got older, I found my own songs that really inspired me – all the R&B girls like Summer Walker, SZA and Ella Mai.

Who are some of your UK favourites?

We got to go see a Raye concert while I was there, and she was so good! There’s this other artist Ray BLK that I really love, and Jorja Smith. I listened to a lot of Bellah so when she came to my dinner, I was like, girl, oh my gosh, I’ve been listening to your music!

What was your experience of child stardom?

The fame part I did not like. I remember feeling really uncomfortable in places where I used to feel normal, because people would be staring at me, and I did not understand why. I’d be eating with my family and kids would come up and ask for pictures. I was like, “What are y’all talking about? We all at the same Applebee’s!”

What part of fame don’t you like today?

I don’t like that people disassociate somebody on TV with a normal person. That’s why people go crazy! Because they do so much stuff in the limelight, then people forget that they’re a human being, then they forget that they’re a human being because nobody around them treats them like one, and go crazy.

How do you stay grounded?

Because I had those highs of momentum as a kid, the lows really humbled me. I thought it was never going to be low again, so when it was, I was like, “Oh, wow, all of this can go away – let me make sure that this has nothing to do with my identity at all.” It’s too dangerous to place all of my heart into it, you know? So another thing that keeps me grounded is realising this is all temporary. I know it personally.

Who were your role models growing up?

In this industry, you meet your heroes, and you’re not really supposed to do that… My mum is the only one I really looked up to, because I knew her character”.

The South Carolina-born artist and actor is one of the most incredible and passionate artists in the industry right now. I think she will go on to inspire so many others through the years. She has many years ahead. Last month, ELLE interviewed an artist ready to fly. The GRAMMY-winning Coco Jones has definitely made a big impact on the industry. There is still a lot more to come. With an anticipated album coming very soon, this is an artist primed for worldwide domination:

“Coco Jones is ready to fly. After her platinum song “ICU” earned the Tennessee native her first Grammy win for Best R&B Performance, she says she feels “like I’ve climbed a mountain. I just have to get to the highest point I can so that I can leap with everything I’ve got and just take off.” This year, the 26-year-old R&B artist and former Disney kid, who currently stars in Peacock’s Bel-Air, plans to do just that. This May, she is dropping “Here We Go (Uh-Oh),” the lead single off her much-anticipated debut album, out this summer.

The sound will be familiar to fans who fell in love with the old-school R&B storytelling of her last EP, 2022’s What I Didn’t Tell You, but she’ll play around with new genres, too: “I don’t think I’ll ever fully leave my R&B comfort [zone],” she says, “but there are so many more elements to me that I want to start to sprinkle in.” Still, Jones will always hold on to the qualities that have gotten her this far. “The external awards reflect my inner tenacity,” she says. “I can think back to those times when I had no glimpse of this and I still kept going.”

What has been your most unbelievable moment in music?

Being nominated for five Grammys was not a sentence I ever thought I was going to hear at this stage in my career. That’s been the most unbelievable. And winning a Grammy feels kind of surreal as well. But the way my mind reacted to the five nominations, I was like, “No way.”

What’s your overall career goal?

I want the option to be able to be involved in whatever I’m into. If I don’t want to put out an album for five years and I want to open up an art gallery for Black women, that would be what I do. And it would be respected and it would be valued and taken seriously because of my name and because of how hard I work. I could score a movie, start a product line, or develop an artist. I want to have options to do whatever I desire.

Has your definition of success changed as you’ve gotten older and more famous?

My definition of success used to just be: Beyoncé. But I can’t focus so much on what this woman that I am a huge fan of did. I can take the core principles, the hard work of it all, the authenticity of it all, the re-creating yourself of it all. But it has to be the Coco way. I used to do that with so many people: “I want to do what she did,” and just leave it there. But I’m me, so I can’t be what someone else is. I have to find a new way.

Have any female R&B artists served as mentors to you or given you advice?

I love Ella Mai. She’s my homegirl. She’s had the type of success that I’m working toward, so she gives me a lot of advice. It’s also just the peer-to-peer support. Chloe x Halle and I are constantly uplifting each other whenever we see each other, because we grew up together in the Disney world. That’s the really beautiful part, the “Girl, we see what you’re doing. Keep going.”

You’ve mentioned that you don’t like being famous.

I don’t feel like anyone would like it if they got a taste of it. It’s very strange. I feel like an animal in a zoo sometimes. But I know that it’s not something to complain about. I think about my younger self and how I would feel when I saw people on TV in real life. I didn’t know how to act, and it’s just not normal. I’m not normal. And the human reaction to seeing me in my job, because it’s an un-normal job, is going to be an un-normal reaction. So I just have to look at it like a human response to seeing somebody that you only see on your phone. It’s strange. So I don’t take it any way but the logical way. I feel like there’s a lot of good that comes with people wanting to know more about you. You can tell them your journey, you can inspire, you can uplift. So there’s good and bad with that, too. But of course, if it was my preference, I would [just] release my songs under an alias and collect my funds.

PHOTO CREDIT: Sharif Hamza

Do you have a dream collaboration?

Mine would be Beyoncé, but I have so many other artists that I love as well: Jazmine Sullivan, Brandy, Rihanna, Alex Isley. I would do a song with Ella [Mai]. And I love Tate McRae. I think she’s fire.

Is there a question that you’ve never been asked that you’ve always wanted to share?

No one has ever asked me if the work that it takes once you do get to these things was anything that I could have understood before I got here. People see that I’m signed, I have a show, and I put things out. They don’t think, “I wonder if she knew what she was really signing up for.” The answer is no. There are so many other little things that you have to do. You have to be the final say in so many things. I didn’t know there would be so many questions that need answers, [many of which are] time-sensitive. You’re also balancing so many different sides of you: “Do you want to do this interview and this commercial? This product wants you to be aligned. Do you like this product? Can you go on tour? This artist wants you to sing on this song.” You have to constantly make sure that you can really stand on business with what you’re saying yes to. And if you don’t want to do that thing, then it’s like, “How much of this is a necessary thing for where I’m trying to get? Or is this really a choice?” On your schedule, there are things you really want to do, things you definitely don’t want to do, and things you just have to do to keep it going and not lose yourself in the midst of all those things.

I want people to think about that, too. On social media, everybody’s like, “Drop this [music].” You’re trying to still be an artist and you’re trying to live your life so you can write songs that you relate to. It’s not all glitz and glamour. The payoff is amazing, but I feel like sometimes I read comments talking about an artist. I’m like, “Girl, you have no idea what the smoke is like over here.” You have to make sure that you do what’s necessary, but also the things that are you. They don’t mesh all the time.

Where do you display your Grammy?

Right now it’s nowhere, because they have to engrave it and ship it out. It’s going to my mom’s house. When I get married and settle down into my life, that’s when I’ll be like, “Mom, let me get some of them awards back.”

I am going to end by sourcing some of NME’s recent interview with Coco Jones. Someone who is getting recognition and attention in the U.K., I feel her debut album will cement that. So many new fans are coming her way. I wanted to spend time with Coco Jones, as I think that she is someone who is one of the most phenomenal and inspiring voices in music. I am interested to see how her career and develops through the next few years:

“Courtney “Coco” Jones joins NME on a Zoom call from California, where she’s buzzing about the release of her latest track ‘Here We Go (Uh Oh)’ on Def Jam Recordings. The smooth and retro-sounding cut has swooning vocals and a catchy chorus, with lyrics which narrate the emotions that come with heartbreak and second chances in the 21st century. “I know when you said goodbye / It don’t mean no goodbye,” she sings over a sample of Lenny Williams’ slow-burning 1978 soul ballad ‘Cause I Love You’.

Jones was nominated for five categories in total that night: Best R&B Performance, Best R&B Song, Best R&B Album, Best Traditional R&B Performance, and Best New Artist, where she was up against Ice Spice, Fred Again, Gracie Abrams, and eventual winner Victoria Monét. Although she was shocked upon hearing of her nominations, it also didn’t come out of nowhere: “It’s always been a goal of mine. I think every singer who looks up to someone is inspired by the Grammys and the level of accolades and recognition, but I was especially proud to be nominated for five!”

PHOTO CREDIT: Paige Margulies

Signing to iconic hip-hop label Def Jam in 2022 skyrocketed her career to a new height. The label is known for fostering talent such as Jhené Aiko during her early days, and Rihanna, whose first seven albums, including ‘Good Girl Gone Bad’ and ‘Loud’, were released through the imprint. Jones’ 2022 debut single on the label ‘Caliber’, filled with wistful vocals and deep basslines, surged her into the public eye.

One of the ways she refined her musical identity and a coveted spot at a legendary imprint was by learning about the genres she is drawn to and developing a deeper understanding of it. “R&B has gotten more modernised,” she says.

“I think what people are really looking for is songs that inspire a feeling. Songs that have some sense of urgency, and it’s in the genre of R&B but it’s really this feeling thing that people are looking for mainly. I’m just doing the things that make me feel something, that’ll relate to whoever the right audience is.”

She attributes her love for R&B and soul to her family and upbringing. She says: “I think what draws me to R&B is familiarity and relatability. I feel like whatever music you’re raised on, you naturally gravitate more towards – R&B feels like home to me. R&B has so much cultural impact in Black American culture, and [other genres like] soul is Black history – so a lot of why I like it is because I’m a Black woman and it’s my history.”

Jones credits her father (a former NFL player) and mother (a backing singer) for being a crucial support system in her teenage years while she learned these qualities: “My mom is always so wise… she taught me how powerful it is to be confident.”

Her mother is equally as appreciative of her children, and wears their achievements with pride. Jones’ Grammy trophy is at her mother’s place; “I always send my awards to my mom… she has her own section in the house for all of her kids and all of the accolades that we’ve ever won.”

Her journey from Disney Channel star to Grammy-winning singer was not straight-forward. Disney’s music operation, Hollywood Records, signed Jones at 15 – before dropping her almost a year later following creative differences. “That knocked me all the way back,” she explains. “It was uncomfortable for me, I did a lot of partying to cope with not being where I wanted to be in life. But it also helped me forge a relationship with my faith and with God… I really wasted years with negativity and distractions. Now I’ve learnt my lessons from that.”

It took her a lot of hard work to reach the point of being able to sign to a major label again, but she credits her work ethic for the achievement; “I would just put things out. I did independent releases and funded my own videos and I auditioned a lot and would put myself out there. I would post covers even if they got low views, I did something everyday.”

In the period she was unsigned, Jones released an EP titled ‘HDWY’ [He Don’t Want You]. Written during the span of her first breakup, Jones flexes her vapory, husky voice and flaunts her newly curated R&B and neo-soul sound. “I learned what I lacked sonically through discovery of new music coming out at the time,” she explains. “I was heavily inspired by people like SZA and PARTYNEXTDOOR, and I liked people that told the truth. I can’t act like there’s nothing going on with my life, I had to figure out my truth too.”

It’s this radical honesty in her musical which made a successful comeback possible – redefining her brand from a former Disney pop star to an unashamedly authentic vocalist. She describes herself as an “emotional person”, but says that this helps her in both her singing and acting skills. “[Singing and acting] have to deal with emotion, in different ways. One is like your own story, and the other is like a story that was written,” she says.

Jones currently has a main role in Peacock’s Bel-Air, reprising Karyn Parsons’ Hilary Banks from The Fresh Prince of Bel Air. She’s enjoying it and draws similarities between Hilary and herself: “We’re both girls’ girls,” she laughs, and compares Hilary’s likeliness to the girls she is friends with in real life. She commends the skills of her castmates and is happy to be both singing and acting again. “It’s hard to balance, though, I’m not gonna hold you!”

Moving forward, she wants to hone her redefined sound and mix it with new influences in a full length project. “I just want to outdo everything I’ve already done, and experiment with new sounds,” she says. Yet, despite having already been nominated for prestigious genre-specific awards, she is determined to make herself a staple name in the industry. “R&B is more of a patience game, whereas something like pop could be a trend overnight. With R&B, it’s like a seed that needs to sprout and then grow. I want to modernise R&B”.

I am excited looking ahead to the release of Coco Jones’ debut album. Such a wonderful artist, this is someone that everyone needs to know about. Quite the opportunity salute this queen. An award-winning treasure and modern-day icon, everyone needs to follow her (Twitter: @TheRealCocoJ/Instagram: @cocjones). Here is a multi-talented artist…

POISED for greatness.

FEATURE: The Day Disco Was Demolished: The Death of the Genre in the Musical Landscape of 1979

FEATURE:

 

 

The Day Disco Was Demolished

IN THIS PHOTO: D.J. Steve Dahl organised and hosted Disco Demolition Night. This was a Major League Baseball (MLB) promotion on Thursday, 12th July, 1979, at Comiskey Park in Chicago, Illinois. The night ended in a riot. At the climax of the event, a crate filled with Disco records was blown up on the field between games of the twi-night doubleheader between the Chicago White Sox and the Detroit Tigers/PHOTO CREDIT: Paul Natkin/WireImage

The Death of the Genre in the Musical Landscape of 1979

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I have been thinking a lot…

PHOTO CREDIT: Getty Images 

about the year 1979. It is one of the most fascinating and diverse years in music history. The end of every decade brings this need for change. Artists sensing a new decade should maybe be a fresh start. A chance for older sound and movements to be replaced. We saw it at the end of the 1980s and 1990s. The end of the 1970s was no different. Before getting to a history event in 1979 and how it factored in the context of the music scene of the time, I have been considering the eclectic music of the year. I had an idea for a film that used the music and politics of 1979. A mix of a musical, drama and comedy, an opening scene could feature a mixture of songs from the year. A dazzling one-take sequenced, it would bring in everything from Disco Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk. An actress, a Disco lover or protagonist, dancing through New York City as the music plays. So many colours, sounds and sights. Imagining that made me think deeply about 1979 and how Disco was about to be publically burned and dismissed after a baseball game in the U.S. Now, Disco is very much back and in rude health. A new wave of Disco albums through the past few years has revitalised the genre. From Kylie Minogue to Beyoncé, it is wonderful seeing a style of music once deemed dead rising and strong! Think about the albums that were out in 1979. How the foreground was shifting. The Clash, Pink Floyd, Fleetwood Mac and Gang of Four released seminal albums. The more I think about 1979 and the importance of the music, the more it saddens me we are almost forty-five years from a major event that was a consecration of the genre. A type of music recently popular and at the forefront was seen as deceased. It was marked and declared in a major event.

I want to bring in a few features that discuss a moment in 1979 that was a stunt steeped in discrimination and racism. Netflix's The Saint of Second Chances told the story of the Chicago White Sox owners whose notorious ‘disco demolition’ stunt was blamed for toppling an entire music genre. In the BBC feature from last year, Dorian Lynskey gave some context and insight into a strange and horrifying moment:

“For fans of disco and baseball alike, the night of 12 July 1979 is one to remember for all the wrong reasons. In a notorious promotional stunt, a Chicago DJ named Steve Dahl detonated a dumpster filled with disco records between White Sox games at Comiskey Park, leading to a riot. Years later, Dahl claimed that disco was "probably on its way out" but admitted that his stunt "hastened its demise". Nile Rodgers of the disco group Chic told biographer Daryl Easlea, "It felt to us like a Nazi book-burning."

The so-called Disco Demolition Night figures in every history of disco but The Saint of Second Chances, a new Netflix documentary about flamboyant White Sox owner Bill Veeck and his son Mike, approaches it as a baseball story. Indeed, at the time it was seen as a shameful night for major league baseball rather than the symbolic death of disco. The Chicago Tribune damned it as "an outrageous example of irresponsible hucksterism that disgraced the sport of baseball" in a leader column headlined Veeck asked for it. 

In the summer of 1979, the flailing White Sox were attracting on average just 15,000 fans to a stadium with a capacity of almost 45,000. Bill Veeck needed a gimmick to boost ticket sales, and Mike, the team's director of marketing, turned to Steve Dahl. The previous Christmas, Dahl had been dropped from Chicago radio station WDAI when it switched, like so many others, from rock to disco. He reinvented himself at rival station WLUP as an anti-disco culture warrior who encouraged his followers, the Insane Coho Lips, to besiege and occupy disco nights in the city with the rallying cry "Disco sucks!"

PHOTO CREDIT: Getty Images

Comiskey Park had previously hosted a "Salute to Disco", with dancers on the field. Mike figured, "We ought to have a night for people who hate disco." He had the brainwave of offering discounted 98 cent tickets to anyone who brought along a disco record for Dahl and his sidekick Garry Meier to ceremonially detonate between games during the White Sox doubleheader against the Detroit Tigers. On the night, the stadium was filled to capacity, with thousands more people fighting to get in. The dumpster designated for the disco vinyl soon overflowed, so many of the excess records were repurposed as aerial missiles. The first game unfolded to a ceaseless chant of "Disco sucks!" Afterwards, Dahl and Meier circled the field in a jeep, wearing military fatigues. "This is now officially the world's largest anti-disco rally!" Dahl bragged. 

Dahl triggered the explosives, sending shards of shattered vinyl 200ft into the air. More than 5,000 fans took this as their cue to storm the field, tearing up the grass, kindling bonfires, and stealing the bases, until they were dispersed by riot police. With the ground a battlefield, the White Sox had to forfeit the second game. This mayhem was all televised, making it an international scandal. The Veecks were disgraced. Bill sold the team the following year. "That event was so traumatic it broke his heart," author Neal Karlen says in the documentary. Mike became persona non grata in the world of baseball. Jimmy Piersall, the White Sox's own broadcaster, called Disco Demolition Night "the worst promotion in the history of the world".

Disco's last gasp

From a music perspective, Dave Marsh of Rolling Stone saw the debacle as an ugly expression of the reactionary backlash that was sweeping American in 1979, the year the Reverend Jerry Falwell founded the Moral Majority, a conservative evangelical lobbying group. "White males, eighteen to thirty-four are the most likely to see disco as the product of homosexuals, blacks, and Latins," Marsh wrote, "and therefore they're the most likely to respond to appeals to wipe out such threats to their security."

Dahl has always denied bigotry. "This event was just a moment in time. Not racist, not anti-gay. Just kids, pissing on a musical genre," he insisted in his 2016 memoir Disco Demolition: The Night Disco Died. Yet at the time he derided disco as effeminate and described rock'n'roll as "threatened as a species". A media consultant canvassing young men on behalf of radio stations in 1979 reported, "Obviously, some people dislike disco for being black and gay." Ushers at Comiskey Park noticed that fans weren't just bringing along disco records. They were more likely to deposit funk and R&B discs than, say, Debby Boone's gloopy 1978 chart-topper You Light Up My Life. In their eyes, the target wasn't mainstream pop music but black music.

Disco didn't perish overnight. Donna Summer's Bad Girls led an all-disco top three in the Billboard Hot 100 that week, remained at number one for five weeks and was succeeded by Chic's Good Times. But that was the last gasp of disco's chart supremacy after two years during which it accounted for three in four chart-toppers. Across the land, radio stations who had not long ago switched from rock to disco hastily U-turned, while thousands of discotheques closed their doors.

In the long run, though, disco won. In Whit Stillman's 1998 movie The Last Days of Disco, one character delivers a passionate defence of a misunderstood scene: "Disco was too great, and too much fun, to be gone forever! It's got to come back someday." That same year, a Chaka Khan sample powered Stardust's massive hit Music Sounds Better With You, initiating a craze for disco-house records which was then picked up by Madonna and Kylie Minogue. Music critics began celebrating disco's underground roots and its pioneering gay, black and Hispanic DJs. By the time Nile Rodgers appeared on Daft Punk's Get Lucky in 2013, the rehabilitation was complete. In 2019, the White Sox's decision to invite Steve Dahl to Comiskey Park to commemorate the 40th anniversary of Disco Demolition Night was widely condemned. "I wouldn't have done it [in 1979] if I thought it would hurt anyone," Mike Veeck says in the documentary.

Nile Rodgers could see the backlash gathering in April when he told Rolling Stone, "Disco is the new black sheep of the family, so everyone has to jump on it". Two days before Disco Demolition Night, the New York Times published a column called Discophobia, in which Robert Vare equated disco with national decline: "The Disco Decade is one of glitter and gloss, without substance, subtlety or more than surface sexuality… After the lofty expectations, passions and disappointments of the 1960s, we have the passive resignation and glitzy paroxysms of the Disco 1970s."

Even in a world without "Disco Sucks", then, pop music would have been ready to move on. In his book Major Labels, the critic Kelefa Sanneh argues that the disco crash made way for new forms of blockbuster dance-pop such as Michael Jackson's Thriller and Madonna's Like a Virgin (produced by a rejuvenated Nile Rodgers), not to mention the rise of hip-hop and the birth of house music. (In a pleasing twist, the first ever house record, On and On by Jesse Saunders, was co-written by Vince Lawrence, who had been an usher at Comiskey Park on 13 July 1979.) Far from dying, dance music became more innovative and diverse. Modern club culture is indebted to the rise of disco but also to its fall”.

PHOTO CREDIT: Getty Images

A night steeped in racism, hatred, homophobia and anger, the Disco Demolition Night was more than a dislike of a genre. It was more political than that. A concerted effort to crush Black music. The Guardian’s Alexis Petridis wrote about one of music’s most notorious events in a feature from 2019:

“Forty years on, Disco Demolition Night remains one of the most controversial events in pop history. Last month, when the White Sox commemorated its anniversary, it attracted widespread criticism from Billboard to Vice and the Economist, of a kind that was absent in 1979. Then, only Dave Marsh of Rolling Stone suggested that there was something distinctly ugly about the vast crowd of white men publicly destroying music predominantly made by black artists, dominated by female stars and with a core audience that was, at least initially, largely gay. “White males, 18 to 34, are the most likely to see disco as the product of homosexuals, blacks and Latins, and … to respond to appeals to wipe out such threats to their security.”

Dahl remains defiant. He didn’t respond to a request for an interview for this feature, but made his position clear in the 2016 book Disco Demolition: The Night Disco Died. “I’m worn out from defending myself as a racist homophobe,” he wrote. “The event was not anti-racist, not anti-gay … we were just kids pissing on a musical genre.” Moreover, he was defending “the Chicago rock’n’roll lifestyle” from an unwanted musical invasion. The rise of disco to mainstream success on the back of Saturday Night Fever’s unexpected success was “a repudiation of all things rough – like rock’n’roll and bar nights” and “demean[ed] the ordinary life that kids inhabited”.

To understand Disco Demolition Night, you have to understand how commercially dominant disco had become in the US at the time. Of the 16 singles that made the top of the US chart in the first half of 1979, only three were not disco tracks. The previous year, disco singles had been No 1 for 37 weeks out of 52. “In any big city in America, you could turn the radio dial and catch disco on as many as five or more stations,” says Alice Echols, cultural historian, academic and author of Hot Stuff: Disco and the Remaking of American Culture. “It had pushed AOR not to the margins precisely, but classic rock didn’t have the dominance on radio that it once had. Live music venues were increasingly switching over to disco.”

This didn’t please everyone. “Even though record labels were making a lot of money off disco, they were holding their nose,” she says. “They were worried about it crashing, but they wanted it to crash so they could go back to classic rock. There was also a grassroots anti-disco movement, a national effort on the part of people involved with AOR. There were people who thought it threatened their livelihoods, because of its gobbling up of live venues; there were people who just thought it sounded plastic and synthetic and commercial; there were people who were just nakedly racist and homophobic.”

Nichols says that disco’s dominance was, for some of the haters, inseparable from issues such as busing and affirmative action, initiatives designed to reduce racial segregation in US schools and colleges. Fear of disco, she says, was partly “the fear that American identity was no longer synonymous with whiteness. DJs in Detroit formed a disco vigilante group called the Disco Dux Klan. Originally, their efforts were going to involve wearing white sheets and robes – they got rid of that part of it. And then there were people like Steve Dahl, for whom disco represented a sort of emasculation: you couldn’t wear a scruffy T-shirt and jeans, you had to get dressed up and, worst of all, your girlfriend or wife expected you to humiliate yourself by fucking dancing. Some of the push back against disco also had to do with feminism.”

Whatever the reasons behind it, Disco Demolition Night had a startling and immediate impact. Radio stations that had switched to disco switched back to rock. The Grammy awards cancelled their best-disco-recording category after only one year. Chic, who as Echols points out, “had made millions of dollars for Atlantic Records since 1977” – Le Freak was the biggest-selling single in the label’s history – found “suddenly no one at the label would take their calls”. Even disco labels were changing the designs of 12in-single sleeves to make their products look less like disco records. In the second half of 1979, only one disco single – Michael Jackson’s Don’t Stop Til You Get Enough – made US No 1, for a solitary week”.

PHOTO CREDIT: Paul Natkin/Getty Images

I will finish by looking more at 1979 and the radical shifts in terms of sound and tastes. How radio stations more or less ignored Disco in favour of harder sounds. Maybe not entirely racist and homophobic, it was clear there was a new need to promote Rock and music considered more masculine and ‘important’. The fact that, in July, we mark forty-five years of this horrifying moment. Now Disco has found a new generation and artists. It is very much present today. People would not have imagined back in 1979. Although artists like Madonna brought Disco into their music in the 1980s, it was declare the genre was a less prominent currency after 1979. Now, it is such an important part of modern Pop. The New York Times wrote in 2023 about a PBS documentary, The War on Disco. That documentary explored the backlash against the genre and the issues of race, gender and sexuality that informed it:

“All subcultures have their tipping points, and disco’s began in earnest in 1977. The year brought “Saturday Night Fever,” the smash hit movie about a blue-collar Brooklynite (a star-making performance from John Travolta) who escapes his rough reality by cutting loose on the dance floor. Inspired by the movie, middle-aged thrill seekers began dressing up in white polyester and hitting the scene. The same year saw the opening of Studio 54 in Manhattan, which became famous for its beautiful-people clientele and forbidding door policy.

“There was this image of the crowd outside the door on the news, with people being divided into winners and losers,” said DeNooyer, the “War on Disco” producer. “And the majority were losers because they didn’t get by the rope. It was an image that spoke powerfully, and it certainly encouraged a view of exclusivity.”

At least one man had reason to take it all personally. Steve Dahl was a radio personality for Chicago’s WDAI, spinning album rock and speaking to and for the white macho culture synonymous with that music. On Christmas Eve in 1978 Dahl lost his job when the station switched to a disco format, a popular move in those days. He didn’t take the news well. Jumping to WLUP, Dahl launched a “Disco Sucks” campaign and, together with the White Sox promotions director Mike Veeck, spearheaded Disco Demolition Night.

Organizers expected around 20,000 fans on July 12, 1979. Instead, they got around 50,000, some of whom sneaked in for free. Admission was 98 cents (WLUP’s frequency was 97.9), leaving attendees plenty of leftover cash for beer. Located in the mostly white, working-class neighborhood of Bridgeport, Comiskey Park had a built-in anti-disco clientele.

During the first game of the doubleheader, fans threw records, firecrackers and liquor bottles onto the field. By the time the crate of records was blown up, the place was going nuts, with patrons storming the field and rendering it unplayable. The White Sox had to forfeit the second game.

There were other anti-disco protests around the country in the late ’70s, but none so visible or of greater consequence. As the film recounts, reaction was swift; radio consultants soon began steering toward nondisco formats. “Disco Demolition Night was a real factor, and it did happen very quickly,” DeNooyer said. “And we hear from artists in the film who experienced that.” Gigs started drying up almost immediately.

Commercial oversaturation didn’t help. Disco parodies were becoming rampant, including a memorable one in the 1980 comedy “Airplane!,” and novelty songs had been around since Rick Dees’ “Disco Duck” in 1976 (followed up by the lesser-known “Dis-Gorilla” in 1977). But the film makes clear that the Disco Demolition fiasco and resultant coverage was a major factor in the death of disco’s mainstream appeal.

“The War on Disco” also features a 2016 interview with Dahl, who insists racism and homophobia had nothing to do with that particular display of anti-disco fervor. Demolition Night attendees who were interviewed for the film echo this sentiment.

“I would not dispute that is their truth,” Brooks said. “But I think one of the insidious ways that white supremacy has done a number on this country is that it permeates every aspect of our cultural lives. People don’t want to be told that they’re entangled in something that’s not entirely of their control.”

It’s also important to note that disco didn’t die so much as its more mainstream forms ceased to be relevant. The music and the culture morphed into other dance-ready genres including house music, which ironically emerged in Chicago. When you go out and cut loose to electronic dance music, or EDM, you are paying homage to disco, whether you know it or not. The beat is still pulsating. The sexual and racial identities remain eclectic. The Who may have bid “Sister Disco” goodbye in their 1978 song, but the original spirit lives on. As Brooks put it, “Its vibrancy and its innovations just continued to gain momentum once the spotlight moved away from it”.

PHOTO CREDIT: Chicago History Museum, via PBS

The Specials, XTC, David Bowie and The Cure were among the artists who were signalling change. They were not new artists, but I feel there was extra demand and push of their music. It was a period of transition. Even in 1979, there were albums with Disco at their heart or in their bones. From Michael’s Jackson’s Off the Wall to ABBA’s Voulez-Vous through to Donna Summer’s Bad Girls and Chic’s Risqué, there were signs that the genre was still very much commercial and popular. I don’t think that the Disco Demolition Night was the reaction and voice of the majority in the U.S. It was a tough time for Disco. In 1980, the legendary Studio closed after only three years. Its owners, Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager, were convicted of tax evasion. Perhaps the sad last nail in the coffin. I have been thinking about the quality and importance of music in 1979 without considering Disco. It would be unthinkable to see today something like the Disco Demolition Night. If Pop or Rap were given the same treatment. There was this building hatred and discrimination that manifested in a stunt that did a lot of damage. It was not a case of cheap publicity. It fuelled and fostered attitudes of racism and homophobia music wider afield than Boston. Attitudes of ignorance and aggression towards Disco artists, music and culture. I guess there have always been conflicts between groups of music fans through the decades. This was much more poisonous and political. Not really about the sound and what the music represented. I hope, on 12th July, we look at why the Disco Demolition Night took place, its impact and repercussions. How Disco did die out but has become reborn and reshaped. It is being moulded and revitalised by artists today. We should mark forty-five years of a major event in music history to appreciate Disco culture and examine how we got to a point in time where something like the Disco Demolition Night could occur. As we have seen and has been proven in years since…

DISCO could never be crushed.

FEATURE: The Digital Mixtape: Mid-Way Report: Songs from the Best Albums of the Year So Far

FEATURE:

 

 

The Digital Mixtape

PHOTO CREDIT: Beyoncé

Mid-Way Report: Songs from the Best Albums of the Year So Far

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AS we are heading towards…

IN THIS PHOTO: Nadine Shah

the middle of June, I am updating a playlist I have put out before. It concerns the best albums of the year. We are practically half-way through the year so, looking back, I wanted to compile songs from the best twenty of the year. Cuts that reflect the amazing quality, consistency and variation that has come. Many of these albums included, I feel, will be in line for awards. Some of the British and Irish albums could get a Mercury nomination later in the year. I think this year, like last, has been incredibly strong. Some brilliant debuts alongside fantastic releases from more established artists. I am sure you will find plenty to like in this Digital Mixtape. It highlights how strong music has been…

IN THIS PHOTO: The Last Dinner Party

THIS year.

FEATURE: The Digital Mixtape: Songs from the Best Twenty Albums of 2023

FEATURE:

 

 

The Digital Mixtape

IN THIS PHOTO: Kylie Minogue/PHOTO CREDIT: Cosmopolitan Magazin Deutschland

Songs from the Best Twenty Albums of 2023

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I think I have done this before…

IN THIS PHOTO: Iraina Mancini/PHOTO CREDIT: Lloyd Winters

but, as I am still very much enjoying great albums from last year, I wanted to put out an updated playlist featuring songs from the twenty best albums of a great year. Last year was one of the strongest in recent years. In terms of its variety and quality. So many standout albums that will stand the test of time. This Digital Mixtape is all about representing that gold. You may have missed some of these albums. I might put out another Digital Mixtape with songs from the best twenty albums of this year so far. In the meantime, I am representing the best and brightest from 2023. Reflecting on a sensational year for music. If you need a refresher regarding the finest albums from last year, then this mixtape should give you…

IN THIS PHOTO: Young Fathers

A good representation.

FEATURE: Groovelines: Baz Luhrmann – Everybody's Free (To Wear Sunscreen)

FEATURE:

 

 

Groovelines

Baz Luhrmann – Everybody's Free (To Wear Sunscreen)

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THERE is a lot to discuss when it comes to…

PHOTO CREDIT: Mikhail Nilov/Pexels

one of the most individual and distinct songs of the 1990s. I remember, in 1997, when Baz Luhrmann’s Everybody's Free (To Wear Sunscreen) came out. 1997 was a pretty distinct and extraordinary year for music. In a time when Britpop here was all but dead or past its peak, there was a lot of change. Established bands who were more Pop or Rock based started to experiment more. It seemed like a time where Electronic music and different sounds were changing the landscape. The music canvas was shifting. I was a teenager than and was stunned when witnessing what was happening. It was such a fertile and remarkable time for music. In all of the wonder and diversity of 1997 came this unique single. It has been the subject of parody and criticism. Many feeling it is a piss take or not sincere. Ridiculing its quasi-philosophical nature. Those who dismiss it feel it was a novelty and would not age well. I feel that the words and advice in the song are perhaps more relevant not than they were in 1997. Many of the pieces of advice, wisdom and suggestions always relevant. At such a distressing and toxic time, there is food for thought. Words that can resonate on a personal level, in addition to those meaningful on a wider stage. The song is based on Wear Sunscreen, an an essay written as a hypothetical commencement speech by columnist Mary Schmich. I am going to get to some features about the track. First, there is some excellent information from Wikipedia regarding the origins of Everybody's Free (To Wear Sunscreen):

“The essay was used in its entirety by Australian film director Baz Luhrmann on his 1998 album Something for Everybody, as "Everybody's Free (To Wear Sunscreen)". Also known as "The Sunscreen Song", it samples Luhrmann's remixed version of the song "Everybody's Free (To Feel Good)" by Rozalla, and opens with the words, "Ladies and Gentlemen of the Class of '99" (instead of "'97", as in the original column). The song features a spoken-word track set over a mellow backing track. The "Wear Sunscreen" speech is narrated by Australian voice actor Lee Perry. 10 The backing is the choral version of "Everybody's Free (To Feel Good)", a 1991 song by Rozalla, used in Luhrmann's film William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet. The chorus, also from "Everybody's Free", is sung by Quindon Tarver.

The essay, giving various pieces of advice on how to live a happier life and avoid common frustrations, spread massively via viral email, is often erroneously described as a commencement speech given by author Kurt Vonnegut at MIT.

The essay became the basis for a successful spoken word song released in 1997 by Baz Luhrmann, "Everybody's Free (To Wear Sunscreen)", also known as "The Sunscreen Song". The song reached number one in Ireland and the United Kingdom and inspired numerous parodies.

Mary Schmich's column "Advice, like youth, probably just wasted on the young" was published in the Chicago Tribune on June 1, 1997. In the column's introduction Schmich presents the essay as the commencement speech she would give if she were asked to give one.

In the speech she insistently recommends the wearing of sunscreen, and dispenses other advice and warnings which are intended to help people live a happier life and avoid common frustrations. She later explained that the inspiration came from seeing a young woman sunbathing, and hoping that she was wearing sunscreen, unlike Schmich herself at that age.

The essay soon became the subject of an urban legend which claimed it was an MIT commencement speech given by author Kurt Vonnegut. In reality, MIT's commencement speaker in 1997 was Kofi Annan and Vonnegut had never been a commencement speaker there. Despite a follow-up article by Schmich on August 3, 1997, the story became so widespread that Vonnegut's lawyer began receiving requests to reprint the speech. Vonnegut commented that he would have been proud had the words been his.

Background

Luhrmann explained that Anton Monsted, Josh Abrahams, and he were working on the remix when Monsted received an email with the supposed Vonnegut speech. They decided to use it but were doubtful of getting through to Vonnegut for permission before their deadline, which was only one or two days away. While searching the Internet for contact information they came upon the "Sunscreen" authorship controversy and discovered that Schmich was the actual author. They emailed her and, with her permission, recorded the song the next day.

Release

"Everybody's Free (To Wear Sunscreen)" was released as a single in some territories in 1997, with the speech (including its opening words, "Ladies and Gentlemen of the Class of '97") completely intact. This version appeared in the Triple J Hottest 100 of that year at number 16 in the countdown, and was released on the subsequent CD in early 1998. A limited-edition CD single was issued in the United States on February 9, 1999, but only in the Pacific Northwest region. In the United Kingdom, the song was released on May 31, 1999”.

Twenty-five years after its release here in the U.K., I do think that there has been nothing like it. You may get artists doing Spoken Word or even embodying some of Everybody's Free (To Wear Sunscreen) in what they do. There has not been an update. Maybe that would veer back into parody. I feel that there is an opportunity to try something. To write a song that does perhaps update some of the song’s lyrics. That said, I still find Everybody's Free (To Wear Sunscreen) to be hugely moving and powerful. I do not understand criticism or mockery directed at it. There is a great BBC documentary that explores the sensation and unlikely success of Baz Luhrmann’s Everybody's Free (To Wear Sunscreen). I am going to finish with a recent feature from The Guardian. They spoke with Baz Luhrmann and Mary Schmich about its making. The fact it came out in 1999 in the U.K. is relevant to me. That was the year I left high school. In a way, it seems like a valedictory speech or something that was a guide to adulthood. I still think about the song twenty-five years after I left high school. In 2021, Clemmie Harvey wrote an article. She argued that Everybody's Free (To Wear Sunscreen) was more relevant then than ever. I would agree:

“The song opens with the importance of wearing ‘sunscreen.’ Framed within the narrative of a public health announcement, Lee Perry’s booming voice relays just how vital wearing sunscreen is. This fact is undisputed in its universality. It seems like such an obvious piece of advice, yet as Perry continues to speak we become aware of what the rest of the track will address, ‘Whereas the rest of my advice has no basis more reliable than my own meandering experience.’ The song begins to touch upon the bizarre and chaotic nature of the experience of living, yet it does so in such a human way. The very words themselves incapsulate what it means to be human, to live a life that is often messy and chaotic, full of nuance and contradiction. It is obvious that this type of song would lend itself to parodying; that the glib cynics within us label it preachy, lumbering and obvious, with one harsh critic condemning it as ‘so bloody non-committal’(Tom Ewing, Freaky Trigger). Yet to me, it has a degree of heightened awareness, so much so that it moves beyond the realms of the tacky self-help song and becomes an encapsulation of what it means for somebody to experience life in such an individual and nuanced yet at the same time highly universal way. Towards the end of the final verse, we hear the words, ‘Advice is a form of nostalgia, dispensing it is a way of fishing the past/From the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts/And recycling it for more than it’s worth.’

It is this part in particular that resonates; the song is so conscious about what it means to impart wisdom and how that wisdom will be received. The cleverness of the song lies within this self-consciousness. It is aware of what it means to give advice and how that advice will be interpreted and skewed to accommodate simultaneously the universal as well as the singular experience.

This self-consciousness and self-awareness is further found when Lee Perry’s resounding voice states the lines,

‘Remember compliments you receive, forget the insults/If you succeed in doing this, tell me how’ .

It is because of these moments of heightened humility and awareness, that I find myself able to connect with the words. At the very same time that the song dispenses advice, it aligns itself with the very notion that by being a person means that there is no one way to live a life, no one way to take on advice and utilize it and there is no one way to feel. The song creates a thoughtful space of reflection, where the words themselves simultaneously give guidance yet have an understanding of what it means to be human in a life that is so full of different experiences. It allows for a deliberation upon the chaos, the anxieties and the insecurities that everybody feels at some point or other. It doesn’t attempt to gloss over the parts of being human that we are encouraged to hide on a daily basis, but creates a space in which these parts, these anxieties, worries, fears and apprehensions can be reflected upon.

The advice itself is a subtle combination of the quotidian as well as the profound. It is advice that reaches out and seeps into the fabric of what it means to have a very average but happy day as well as touching upon the various profound and life-changing moments that we can experience from time to time.  It is this combination that makes it so accessible. Luhrmann structures the track in such a way that allows for moments of the deep and the profound, ‘Don’t be reckless with other people’s hearts/ Don’t put up with people who are reckless with yours,’ as well as for more lighthearted moments which include reminding us all to ‘Floss’ and ‘Stretch’ and ‘Dance’ and ‘Read the instructions.’ The backing track is layered behind Perry’s voice and starts off as a single steady beat. As the track continues and Perry starts dispensing more heartfelt and more poignant pieces of advice, the backing track subtly starts to become more layered. Soft choral singing which rises and falls, frames the words and lifts them in such a way that they become even more powerful and even more transporting. Just like the nature of the advice given, the backing track subtly ebbs and flows from single instrumental layers to a much more built up sound.

For me, it is a song that celebrates the moderate. It is a song about understanding what it means to have moments of fear and chaos but knowing that they never last. Luhrmann taps into the tension that oscillates between the active control we have and the passivity that comes with certain elements of everyday living, ‘Whatever you do/ don’t congratulate yourself too much or berate yourself either/Your choices are half chance, so are everybody else’s’. Hearing these words offer a certain degree of release. We cannot control everything that happens and there is no point in trying. He also addresses the age old anxiety of attempting to control and understand our futures.

‘Don’t worry about the future/ Or worry, but know that worrying/ Is as effective as trying to solve an algebra equation by chewing bubble gum/The real troubles in your life /Are apt to be things that never crossed your worried mind/ The kind that blindsides you at 4 p.m. on some idle Tuesday.’

These are perhaps the most well known and most quoted lines of the whole track and for good reason. Luhrmann likens one of the most profound anxieties that the human race has dealt with since the beginning of existence and likened it to something as quotidian and menial as chewing bubblegum. He translates something so vast, so expansive and intangable into something that we can easily understand and relate to. These lines offer up a sense of surrender, a sense of freedom to live in the present and an attempt to acknowledge that we are all passive beings subject to the passing of time and subject to what the future may hold.

The surge of seemingly disconnected advice, ‘Be kind to your knees/ you’ll miss them when they’re gone,’ or ‘Get to know your parents/ you never know when they’ll be gone for good,’ reaches out and touches both something on the surface as well as something deep within. It celebrates the joy of being moderate and patient, something that I personally find extremely comforting right now as our lives slowly move back to some reflection of normality yet a normality underpinned by a slight hum of nervous anxiety. There is a timeless quality to the track. Whether people find it patronizing, whimsical, tacky or profoundly moving, it gets under our skin and sticks as demonstrated by the fact that it is still popular today and is still quoted. We find ourselves in very strange times right now and nobody knows what will or what can happen in the future. But what we do know, is that it is more important than ever to be kind and moderate with yourself, to understand and listen to your needs and to take the days as they come”.

 PHOTO CREDIT: Archive Photos/Getty Images

It is amazing how, back in 1997, when the Internet was new, this amazing song was almost like a statement of life. Something important that should be spread about the world. Baz Luhrmann and Mary Schmich shared with The Guardian their recollections of the song and what Everybody's Free (To Wear Sunscreen) means now:

“Baz Luhrmann, director and song producer

In 1997, my music supervisor Anton Monsted and I decided to make a charity album with remixes of songs from my films. I was working on a new version of Rozalla’s rave banger Everybody’s Free (To Feel Good) that, for Romeo + Juliet, we had turned into an ecclesiastical song with vocals from Quindon Tarver and King’s College Choir.

Around this time, a graduation speech apparently by Kurt Vonnegut offering life advice was spreading on a new invention called the world wide web. It was what we would now call viral – but it was also a hoax. Some kid had taken a column by a smart, respected columnist called Mary Schmich, who wrote for the Chicago Tribune, and instead credited it to the Slaughterhouse-Five author.

We thought it would make a great spoken word song. We found a voiceover artist, Lee Perry, to impersonate an imagined Vonnegut and spent a great deal of time getting it right, so that it felt naturally spoken and rhythmic.

We submitted it to the local radio station, trying to get Everybody’s Free (To Wear Sunscreen) heard, but they said it was too long. I thought: ‘Well, they’ll let me on the late-night arts show.’ So I said: ‘I’ll talk about whatever you want as long as you play it.’ Two minutes into the track, the guy in the booth was tapping on the glass pointing because, literally like a movie, the lights on the switchboard were going crazy. The next day, it was the biggest record in Australia.

In the US, I followed the same playbook, getting it played on college radio when the big stations wouldn’t touch it, and it was a breakout smash. Jay Leno even flew out the choir and Lee Perry to perform it on his show and Danny DeVito asked to use it for The Big Kahuna. In the UK, I got word it was going to be No 1 before it was even officially released.

It was one of those things that just struck a chord. When we recorded the track, we thought there might be a chance they’d be playing it next year, or even the year after, so we recorded alternate openings for the Class of ’98, ’99 and then 2000, but we never believed we’d run out of years, that we’d be recording it in other languages, or still be talking about it in 2024.

A lot of people thought I was the voice. It still happens. I remember being in a hotel in Texas and handing my credit card over to the kid at the desk and he went: “Oh, aren’t you that rock star, the one with the record that speaks?” Another time, I was in the gym and there was a MTV show about one-hit wonders playing. The voiceover went: “What Aussie film director had a one hit wonder in 1997? Find out when we come back!”

Mary Schmich, writer

I was a columnist at the Chicago Tribune for many years. One Friday morning in May 1997, I didn’t have a clue what I was going to write about. As I walked to work from my home along Lake Michigan, I saw a young woman sunbathing and I thought: “I hope she’s wearing sunscreen.” I hadn’t at her age and I really regretted it. I had reached a point in my life where I was ready to give out advice.

Graduation speeches in the US are a big deal so I thought it would be fun to write a fake one. I got some M&Ms, grabbed a cappuccino and started writing. I finished it and felt pretty good about it. It went in print the next day. I got a few nice letters and people seemed to like it, but that was it. Then I started getting emails from people saying that something strange was happening, that their cousin or whoever had sent them Kurt Vonnegut’s graduation address to Massachusetts Institute of Technology – and it was my column. I laughed out loud, but then began to panic that I had somehow subconsciously plagiarised Vonnegut.

I said yes and Baz created the Sunscreen Song. I loved it. It was startling at first to hear it spoken by a man, but it totally works and I don’t think it would have been so widely heard in that era, sadly, if spoken by a woman.

There are a couple of things in there that are a little outdated, like the line about paper bank statements; but I did hear my own voice telling me to keep my love letters when clearing out my closet a couple of years ago. Advice, after all, as the column notes, is a form of nostalgia and when you give advice you are really talking to yourself.

A big skincare company wanted to use it for a sunscreen advert. I’m glad I said no. It’s very personal to me. I was going through a very hard time in my life when I wrote it. I think somehow people sense that between the lines. Saying yes to Baz was a whole different thing as his song captured its spirit. It’s still deeply moving that it has affected so many people. I’m incredibly grateful this thing came out of my mind and heart and fingers on an afternoon and endured. And my friends still ask me: “Are you wearing sunscreen?”.

There did seem to be this split between some critics who were dubious and at times insulting about the song. Those who lobbed criticism its way. The polemic is the way the song took off and was a chart success. People really responding to it. I hear Everybody's Free (To Wear Sunscreen) played on the radio still. It has not really had any updated for the years since. In 1999, when I bought it as a single, I was not sure whether I would listen to the song years later. I was reacting to its immediate impact and popularity. Twenty-five years down the line, this amazing Spoken Word song still holds amazing power and resonance. If some lines or ideas are a bit dated, I think that the advice offered up…

STILL stands strong and hits hard.

FEATURE: Erase/Rewind: How a ‘Pre-Phone Generation’ Are Missing Out on Music

FEATURE:

 

 

Erase/Rewind

PHOTO CREDIT: Karolina Grabowska/Pexels

How a ‘Pre-Phone Generation’ Are Missing Out on Music

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IT is quite worrying when…

 PHOTO CREDIT: Brett Jordan/Pexels

we are in a position when the young generations are maybe falling out of love with music. Maybe they are not being exposed to it in the way that older generations were. What I mean is, when I was a child, it was very much hardware-led. In the sense we were playing music on devices like a Discman. There was this attraction to listening to music on the go. The desirability of buying C.D.s and cassettes. I grant you, streaming is brilliant in the sense that we have access to pretty much any music at any time. It gives children the sort of choice and accessibility I did not have when I was young. The affordability of being able to stream and download music at such is ease is definitely an advantage. The thing is, one wonders whether that means younger music fans are actually less drawn to music and discovery because of that. I am thinking about a recent article from The Guardian. In it, they look at how children do not necessarily have access to digital devices. Also, they often need parental permission to listen to music. Maybe this applies to young children rather than teens. It is crucial that the youngest listeners and those discovering mu8sic for the first time are given full access and do not have to struggle to listen to any music:

“My daughter is nine years old. When I was her age, in 1989, I had my own small cassette player and a beloved pile of my own tapes – brand new, or made up of songs from the radio – that I could listen to whenever I wanted. The same went for my parents’ modest CD collection (Genesis’s Invisible Touch was awesome; their three Lionel Richie albums were boring). There were a few vinyl records knocking about and there were at least two radios – invariably set to Capital FM – that I could turn on whenever.

My daughter has none of these things. The only way she can access music is by making me get my phone out and play a song on my Spotify account. The inconvenience is trifling, but more painful and alarming is the growing gap between us when it comes to musical experience.

A whole age group of kids – let’s call them “pre-phone children” – are now unable to access music of their choosing. In fact they have virtually no musical autonomy at all, not helped by plummeting investment in music tuition. As Naomi Alderman, the novelist, game writer and author of best-selling sci-fi novel The Power sees it: “So much of our technology is coded up by 25-year-olds working for companies run by 37-year-olds. They maybe have not raised children to adulthood and don’t have friends who have, so the question ‘how do I give my kid easy access to some but not all of my music’ hasn’t come up.”

There’s no concern over this and worryingly, no sense of panic about a demographic who don’t have the type of welded bond to music that only the white heat of youth can forge. 

PHOTO CREDIT: Antoni Shkraba/Pexels

It’s that searingly hot and obsessive aspect of my formative bond with music that made me notice the stark gap between me and my daughter. She enjoys music: she knows the words to at least half of the songs from Horrible Histories, and is really into the hits they adapt or parody when I reveal them to her. But she’d rather have an audiobook over an album any day. By contrast, at age nine I actively worshipped the two jet black tapes that comprised Now That’s What I Call Music! 14 – and nothing compared to one of its hits, Buffalo Stance by Neneh Cherry. It had sounds I’d never heard and words that made no sense (what was a gigolo and why did he have crocodile feet?) but playing it 72 times in a row in my childhood bedroom – a type of experience not afforded to many pre-phone children now – made me a music fan for life.

“We have changed a lot of our infrastructure very quickly by making it digital,” says Alderman, whose recent Wired article The Danger of Digitising Everything warns of the creeping disenfranchisement of anyone without a screen – pre-phone children being obvious examples. “We have not thought enough about digital inclusion, or how to allow staggered access to digital things.”

But just because I – and I’m going to assume you – had direct access to music in our pre-teens, it doesn’t mean we’re the broad norm, as Daniel Levitin, the neuroscientist, cognitive psychologist, and bestselling author of books such as This Is Your Brain on Music is keen to point out. “For tens of thousands of years, if you wanted to hear music, you had to play it yourself – or find someone who could,” he says. “The generation I grew up in is rather privileged in that we had access to music on demand. Now we’re back where we were pre-1950 – except today, children have to find an adult who can sing to them, who can play an instrument or can push the right buttons on Spotify.”

The average age that a child acquires a phone in the UK is 11. Canvassing a music class at a secondary school in Camden almost universally confirmed – though their age of phone attainment varied from 10 to 15 – that this was when they achieved musical autonomy. “Music is basically inaccessible without a phone,” one told me. “Having control over what you listen to is important because it allows you to have your own opinions on the music you listen to,” said another.

At primary school level however, where most children are still in their pre-phone era, a huge variety of different music situations exists in every home. Overwhelmingly the most common scenario is for kids to have no direct access at all – and for a parent or carer to have to facilitate any music selection a child makes, streamed to a Bluetooth speaker or headphones, or played from phone or computer speakers. Technically nobody under 13 should be using Spotify’s main service at all.

PHOTO CREDIT: Anete Lusina/Pexels

A growing number of families have a smart speaker, and some lucky kids might have their own in their room. They are perfect for a listener who is either worldly enough to know they want to hear a certain Boz Scaggs song over breakfast, or comfortable enough in their lack of musical knowledge to just ask for something generic like “gym music”. Yet there’s no space here for a curious yet fledgling music fan who has never heard of Boz Scaggs and isn’t ready to have their listening passively curated by an algorithm.

Yet some do exist. One is the Mighty Vibe: a small, screenless device that resembles the iPod Shuffle of yore and retails at around £100. Though it draws its content from a Spotify or Amazon playlist controlled by a grownup, a child can shuffle, skip or endlessly repeat the songs, listening via headphones or a Bluetooth speaker.

Bolder and far more autonomous is the Yoto. Accessible to children as young as two, it’s a speaker that plays from physical cards that carry songs and other audio content such as audiobooks. According to Dom Hodge, Yoto’s head of music and sound: “Because Yoto is a ‘controlled technology’, parents feel safer to allow children to use their player totally independently which in turn, makes the child feel more empowered and engaged with what they’re listening to.” Crucially, there are no mics, voice commands, cameras, ads or screens – save for a soothing pixel display that outlines what’s playing. They truly feel like a device that’s the sole, unencumbered property of its child owner. A recent deal with Warner Music Group will unlock many more well-known artists, while the Beatles and Queen recently became available. Hodge talks up the “sense of discovery” in their catalogue, citing a partnership with Brighton label Mr Bongo to introduce kids to music from Brazil, Ghana, Mali, Nigeria and Cuba.

But while the player also comes in around the £100 mark, the cards need to be purchased separately. Streaming has radically reduced the price of listening, and the cost of production software has also fallen, but kid-friendly music often remains costly. The American seven-year-old Miles Bonham has 2.7 million Instagram followers for his wonderful videos of beat-making and songwriting – but he’s doing it on ProTools with an array of mics, synths and more that would be prohibitively expensive for most families, and hollowed-out youth clubs will also struggle.

Kids really do need music as a form of nourishment, and it’s genuinely quite moving to discover that it has a nurturing, almost magical quality when applied to your growing DNA clone. Child psychologist Jen Lamacq says that “music is such a gift” to a developing child, citing “cognitive, language, social, emotional and even physical” learning. Levitin, currently writing his new book Music as Medicine, concurs: “As we found in my own lab, when we play or listen to music together, our brain waves literally synchronise. We release oxytocin and prolactin – a soothing hormone that is released by mothers when nursing – when we listen to music together. All these things say to us: music is supposed to be social.”

PHOTO CREDIT: Ashutosh Sonwani/Pexels

And yet, perhaps as kids get older, there should also be something antisocial about music, too – a means to preserve that vital cultural spark, the generation gap. One of the reasons I’m so concerned about my kids’ lack of musical autonomy is that I feel genuine shame that they are held hostage by my musical tastes. My parents couldn’t stand the shouty rap of Buffalo Stance while I couldn’t abide their three-album devotion to Lionel Richie – and sorry Mum, but in retrospect that Genesis album was also awful. Yet by being so dependent on the parental player, it’s harder than ever for kids to find the true voices of their era, not the increasingly irrelevant ones of mine.

It’s almost cruel then that certain things that appear to be for young music fans just aren’t. My favourite examples of this are “baby raves” or “family-friendly raves” – which often sell themselves as a nourishing musical voyage for kids, yet are mostly just an excuse for parents to get tipsy, listen to very quiet dance music of their youth, while a rudimentary “arts table” is set up to occupy the kids all day. Music media aimed at young people is mostly gone, too – the last attempt at reviving something akin to Smash Hits, the 2011-launched We Love Pop magazine, slowly mutated into a brand covering TikTok influencers before it was wound down.

A pre-phone child is more likely to forge a strong connection with gaming, given that something such as a Nintendo Switch – sealed off from the potentially dangerous open internet – is a safer device than one that can access Spotify. Though gaming may end up creating their relationship with music, according to Stuart Dredge, head of insight at Music Ally and a frequent writer on technology for the Guardian. “The music industry is working hard here: for example, there’s been a big uptick in the number of artists doing stuff on Roblox lately,” he says. “Sometimes I worry that my kids, who are 14 and 16, don’t love music like I did at their age. But then I see them singing the songs on the EA Sports FC soundtrack, or playing the new Festival music game in Fortnite, or yelling some random soft-rock track that’s unaccountably gone viral on TikTok, and I think they still have opportunities.” But the Walkman-raised part of me worries about music losing something by being totally knitted together with screen content, as a TikTok or videogame soundtrack, from an early age”.

PHOTO CREDIT: JESHOOTS.com/Pexels

This article does not argue that digital music and relying on phones is a bad thing. The crux is that this ‘pre-phone generation’ who do not have access to the technology are at a disadvantage. It is a good point. Before digital music, there was easier access to devices. Maybe not cheap, you could at least buy something that would play cassettes and C.D..s. Children are not going to go after vinyl and be attracted to that. If we have a culture when digital is favoured and seen as the most desirable and affordable, it does mean that there will be children who cannot access that. If they want to listen to music portably, where do they go?! It bring me back to my argument that we need to reintroduce slightly bygone devices. Even though there are devices where you can play C.D.s and cassettes, I tend to find they are not necessarily that affordable. Throw in the fact music is dwindling on the curriculum and there is not that much exposure for those at pre-high school age and we are in a bad situation. Without that early and tactile access, what does the future hold? That lack of music exposure and knowledge. Children maybe falling out of love with music. That is a devastating thought. Children now are being exposed to music through their parents and older people. If they love a particular song or are intrigued, that spark often ends quickly if they cannot play music. If they do not have exposure through a phone. The article does not pine for the days of C.D. players and the ephemera of past days. It highlights how this pre-phone generation are maybe not able to explore and discover music in a way we used to. In a way older children can. Not only does it affect them socially and in terms of their mental health. It may also impact the music industry. Fewer children of that age wanting to become an artist or engage more with music in a wider sense. So many psychological and physical benefits of music not available to them. If this is to continue, then that would be…

PHOTO CREDIT: Jessica Lewis 🦋 thepaintedsquare/Pexels

A terrible thing.

FEATURE: Houdini’s Great Escape: Imagining Five Great ‘Lost’ Kate Bush Videos

FEATURE:

 

 

Houdini’s Great Escape

PHOTO CREDIT: Trevor Leighton 

Imagining Five Great ‘Lost’ Kate Bush Videos

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I have touched on this subject before…

PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush

but I want to go into more detail and depth. Kate Bush released so many great singles. She is someone who is responsible for some of the most distinct and memorable videos ever. From her 1978 debut, Wuthering Heights, to the videos for Breathing, Cloudbusting and The Sensual World, there have been some truly remarkable and original examples! I have named my favourite Kate Bush videos. It is always a case with any great artist. You ask the question: What other songs could have been released from an album and, as such, been given a music video? In a way, I guess they are ‘lost’ music videos, though it is subjective with regards which songs deserve music videos. It is the case that Kate Bush had single-worthy tracks on all albums that were never released. I think the greatest opportunities for releasing singles were 1980’s Never for Ever and 1982’s The Dreaming. I think 2005’s Aerial and even 1978’s Lionheart had a few songs never released as singles. I am not going to mention those that do not feature here which should have been singles. I am interested in the potential video. Kate Bush always said how important videos were to her. The five songs I am going to mention are terrific tracks in their own right. They could have been successful singles, either here in the U.K. or abroad, and would have been accompanied by magnificent and distinct music videos. I know it does no good speculating and hypotheticals. It is fun to think about the songs that you would have wanted as singles from Kate Bush. These potential ‘lost’ videos that fans imagine. What images and storylines would play out? Below are five songs that I feel would have been good singles with awesome music videos.

PHOTO CREDIT: Kent Gavin/Daily Mirror/Mirrorpix

The Kick Inside from The Kick Inside (1978)

This was a song that Kate Bush performed for 1979’s The Tour of Life. There was this staged version of the song. She also performed the song away from the stage. One such occasion was during the De Effeling Special of May 1978. On 12th May, 1978, the Dutch broadcaster TROS broadcast a twenty-minute Kate Bush television special, recorded at the Dutch amusement park, Efteling. On 10th May, 1978, Efteling was ready to open the Haunted Castle, the most expensive attraction it had ever constructed. And they wanted to promote it as much as they could. It is a great video. Bush’s hair is white/blonde in the video and she is appears under a waterfall and lying down in a boat. Almost this funereal end. It is hard to explore the meaning and lyrics of the song at an amusement park a limited and distinct setting. Inspired by The Ballad of Lucy Wan (alternatively Lizie Wan or Fair Lucy), Bush’s title track ends her debut album. The song refers to a sister who is having her brother’s baby and fears it will bring shame upon her family. She takes her own life and leaves a suicide note. It is worth reading this feature for more detail and analysis. I think that this track should have been a single. It is remarkably mature. It would have been a good follow-up to the second U.K. single, The Man with the Child in His Eyes.

If critics felt Bush was immature, wild or this inaccessible and strange singer, the vocal at least on The Kick Inside could have changed minds. A stunning video full of drama and cinematic touches would have made it a wonderful video. Maybe a budget would not have stretched for that, yet I think Bush could have played the sister. We have an actor playing her brother. Maybe there could have been this split screen. Bush, as the heroine, struggling to deal with an unwanted and taboo pregnancy. The brother reading her suicide note or suspecting something is wrong. Maybe angry and regretful of the situation. It would have stretched Kate Bush’s acting muscles and could have had this incredible video. Whereas Wuthering Heights and The Man with the Child in His Eyes are quite low-budget and basic – but extraordinary and distinct -, this could have been an opportunity for something more ambitious. As one of the more underrated songs from her debut album, I would love to have seen this song come to life through a video. Scenes that switch between intensity, wistfulness, tension and heartache. There are some many amazing possibilities. A song that is so epic and tender in equal measures, I sort of feel like Kate Bush wrote the song with visuals in mind. Never realised and executed as a proper music video, the live performances we can see are tantalising at least.

Houdini from The Dreaming (1982)

Skipping through a couple of albums. There are songs from 1978’s Lionheart and 1980’s Never for Ever that could have had music videos. I feel Lionheart’s Symphony in Blue and Coffee Homeground could have had amazing and spellbinding videos. Never for Ever has All We Ever Look For. I think that The Dreaming was never intended as a singles album. Bush is an artist who has been told by EMI that her album did contain any singles. She said that is because she didn’t write any. Maybe Hounds of Love (1985) was more of an effort to redress that. In fact, The Dreaming is the one with no real singles in mind. Bush writing it as a body of work and not for radio play and singles. That said, singles were released – they had to be! Apart from Sat in Your Lap (the first single), there was not any notable chart success. Including international releases, songs such as There Goes a Tenner and Night of the Swallow were released. One might argue that there are no songs that would make for popular and accessible singles. I will suggest two tracks from The Dreaming that would have been more successful singles – that The Dreaming and There Goes a Tenner -, and they would have had music videos that would have been featured and helped chart performance. These tracks are the final two tracks. The first is my favourite Kate Bush song: the beguiling and sublime Houdini. Think about the song and how it spotlights the famous escapologist, Harry Houdini. This is what Kate Bush said about Houdini:

“Kate about ‘Houdini’

The side most people know of Houdini is that of the escapologist, but he spent many years of his life exposing mediums and seances as frauds. His mother had died, and in trying to make contact through such spiritual people, he realized how much pain was being inflicted on people already in sorrow, people who would part with money just for the chance of a few words from a past loved one. I feel he must have believed in the possibility of contact after death, and perhaps in his own way, by weeding out the frauds, he hoped to find just one that could not be proven to be a fake. He and his wife made a decision that if one of them should die and try to make contact, the other would know it was truly them through a code that only the two of them knew.

His wife would often help him with his escapes. Before he was bound up and sealed away inside a tank or some dark box, she would give him a parting kiss, and as their lips met, she would pass him the key which he would later use to unlock the padlocks that chained him. After he died, Mrs. Houdini did visit many mediums, and tried to make contact for years, with no luck – until one day a medium called Mr. Ford informed her that Houdini had come through. She visited him and he told her that he had a message for her from Houdini, and he spoke the only words that meant for her the proof of her husband’s presence. She was so convinced that she released an official statement to the fact that he had made contact with her through the medium, Ford.

It is such a beautiful and strange story that I thought I had very little to do, other than tell it like it was. But in fact it proved to be the most difficult lyric of all the songs and the most emotionally demanding. I was so aware of trying to do justice to the beauty of the subject, and trying to understand what it must have been like to have been in love with such an extraordinary man, and to have been loved by him. I worked for two or three nights just to find one line that was right. There were so many alternatives, but only a few were right for the song. Gradually it grew and began to piece together, and I found myself wrapped up in the feelings of the song – almost pining for Houdini. Singing the lead vocal was a matter of conjuring up that feeling again and as the clock whirrs and the song flashes back in time to when she watched him through the glass, he’s on the other side under water, and she hangs on to his every breath. We both wait.

KATE BUSH CLUB NEWSLETTER, OCTOBER 1982”.

I would have loved to have seen the great late Del Palmer play Houdini. Maybe this escape being planned and start. Kate Bush, as his wife, watching on. She slips him the key via a kiss. There is this look between them. An audience watching the trick and attempted escape. Maybe there is this unhappy end. It would be this really amazing video. I am not sure whether Houduni was ever considered as a single. I feel it could have charted well and would also suggest one Kate Bush’s best music videos.

Get Out of My House from The Dreaming (1982)

The intense and hugely powerful finale of The Dreaming, Get Out of My House screams for a music video! Inspired by Stephen King’s The Shining (rather than the Stanley Kubrick film of the book), this idea of a haunted and possessed house. Someone in it being driven mad. Again, I want to bring in Kate Bush’s words about one of her very best songs:

“Kate about ‘Get Out Of My House’

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

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

KATE BUSH CLUB NEWSLETTER, OCTOBER 1982

The song is called ‘Get Out Of My House’, and it’s all about the human as a house. The idea is that as more experiences actually get to you, you start learning how to defend yourself from them. The human can be seen as a house where you start putting up shutters at the windows and locking the doors – not letting in certain things. I think a lot of people are like this – they don’t hear what they don’t want to hear, don’t see what they don’t want to see. It is like a house, where the windows are the eyes and the ears, and you don’t let people in. That’s sad because as they grow older people should open up more. But they do the opposite because, I suppose, theydoget bruised and cluttered. Which brings me back to myself; yes, I have had to decide what I will let in and what I’ll have to exclude.

ROSIE BOYCOTT, ‘THE DISCREET CHARM OF KATE BUSH’. COMPANY (UK), 1982”.

It would have been magnificent seeing Bush as this possessed woman in a gothic house. Maybe some would draw comparisons to Wuthering Heights and feel Bush was repeating herself or she was trying to reference that song and maybe distance herself. In terms of the visuals and set, just think what would have come about! Flickering lights and a really committed and eccentric performance from Bush. Spirits, shadows and slamming doors. The section of the song where Bush brays like a donkey – which is a reference to Pinocchio – could be especially evocative! There are various vocal sections that suggest particular visuals. This might be one of the greatest ‘lost’ videos/singles. A song whose video would have been a true spectacle! Maybe it is less accessible than other tracks so might not have made a huge chart dent. I feel it is potent and bracing enough it would have sold well in 1982.

The Fog from The Sensual World (1989)

Many people may not know about The Fog. It is an underrated song from The Sensual World. Whereas Kate Bush’s mother has been seen in a music video, The Dreaming’s Suspended in Gaffa, it would have been nice to see her father in a bigger role. Hannah was seen embracing Kate for Suspended in Gaffa. Robert’s voice is heard on The Fog. It would be amazing to have seen him in a video for the song! The track could have worked on Hounds of Love. Maybe on its second side, The Ninth Wave. It has that quality and importance, it is such a shame that it was not a single. I guess more obvious choices like This Woman’s Work and The Sensual World won the day because they are more instantly singles. They have that depth and gravitas. That said, one could well envisage something stunning. It is whispered, dreamy, grand, growing, strange, wonderful and interesting. A song that has such visual possibilities. I want to bring in some words from Bush about The Fog:

“Again, it’s quite a complex song, where it’s very watery. It’s meant to be the idea of a big expanse of water, and being in a relationship now and flashing back to being a child being taught how to swim, and using these two situations as the idea of learning to let go. When I was a child, my father used to take me out into the water, and he’d hold me by my hands and then let go and say “OK, now come on, you swim to me.” As he’d say this, he’d be walking backwards so the gap would be getting bigger and bigger, and then I’d go [Splutters].

I thought that was such an interesting situation where you’re scared because you think you’re going to drown, but you know you won’t because your father won’t let you drown, and the same for him, he’s kind of letting go, he’s letting the child be alone in this situation. Everyone’s learning and hopefully growing and the idea that the relationship is to be in this again, back there swimming and being taught to swim, but not by your father but by your partner, and the idea that it’s OK because you are grown up now so you don’t have to be frightened, because all you have to do is put your feet down and the bottom’s there, the water isn’t so deep that you’ll drown. You put your feet down, you can stand up and it’s only waist height. Look! What’s the problem, what are you worried about?

ROGER SCOTT, BBC RADIO 1 (UK), 14 OCTOBER 1989”.

The strings on the track are so stirring and moving. Listen to the song and it seems like this track that could be on a film soundtrack. One that could be on the big screen. It has that ambition. Maybe leaving it to the imagination gives it this power and promise. I do think that a staggering video could have come. As Bush was directing her own videos by this point, maybe she would have helmed it. She was still using other directors, so there were possibilities. A larger budget that for her early albums and those singles. Maybe Bush in Ireland. Walking the coastline or in the water. Something that is windswept, slow motion in places. All wind and weather.

Mrs. Bartolozzi from Aerial (2005)

I can appreciate that Kate Bush, when Aerial arrived in 2005, was probably not too keen on singles. She had to release one. King of the Mountain was the last to feature her in a physical and filmed role. She kept asking director Jimmy Murakami is she looked okay. He had to reassure Bush that she looked fantastic. I feel there was reluctance, twelve years after The Red Shoes, to be on screen. As a mother by then, her life had changed. After King of the Mountain, Kate Bush was still putting out singles, though they were featuring other people/animated. She never appeared on a new T.V. interview from Aerial on. It was a period from then until now where she has mostly conducted interviews at her home or via phone. The odd public appearance here and there. Not the same artist who was filming videos and seemingly everywhere for years. I think fans would have welcomed a second single from Aerial, even if Bush was not in it. Mrs. Bartolozzi is the song I am thinking of. It could have been animated. That idea of domesticity and the fantastical. The clothes spinning and entwining in the machine. This almost sexual tango. The clothes on the line perhaps reminding her of a lover or lost figure.

“Is it about a washing machine? I think it’s a song about Mrs. Bartolozzi. She’s this lady in the song who…does a lot of washing (laughs). It’s not me, but I wouldn’t have written the song if I didn’t spend a lot of time doing washing. But, um, it’s fictitious. I suppose, as soon as you have a child, the washing suddenly increases. And uh, what I like too is that a lot of people think it’s funny. I think that’s great, because I think that actually, it’s one of the heaviest songs I’ve ever written! (laughs)

Clothes are…very interesting things, aren’t they? Because they say such an enormous amount about the person that wears them. They have a little bit of that person all over them, little bits of skin cells and…what you wear says a lot about who you are, and who you think you are…

So I think clothes, in themselves are very interesting. And then it was the idea of this woman, who’s kind of sitting there looking at all the washing going around, and she’s got this new washing machine, and the idea of these clothes, sort of tumbling around in the water, and then the water becomes the sea and the clothes…and the sea…and the washing machine and the kitchen… I just thought it was an interesting idea to play with.

What I wanted to get was the sense of this journey, where you’re sitting in front of this washing machine, and then almost as if in a daydream, you’re suddenly standing in the sea.

KEN BRUCE SHOW, BBC RADIO 2, 1 NOVEMBER 2005”.

This is a definite single. So many fans would have been intrigued by a video. Mrs. Bartolozzi would also have been a chart success. It is a wonderful song that could have got a lot of airplay. A video that takes us inside a house. The washing machine and the garden as the rain pours. Maybe pairing images of the home and domestic chores with the landscape and ocean. Above are five songs not released as singles that could have been. Those that could have also had epic music videos. These are my choices. I wonder if anyone has their views and songs. The fact that everyone will have different views shows how cinematic-worthy and filmic her songs are.

FEATURE: Spotlight: Parsnip

FEATURE:

 

 

Spotlight

PHOTO CREDIT: Izzie Austin

Parsnip

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ALTHOUGH this incredible Melbourne band…

 PHOTO CREDIT: Jamie Wdziekonski

have been on the scene for a fair few years now, I think that they are still relatively unknown in the U.K. It can be the case that a great and popular Australian band might take a bit longer to gain traction elsewhere than a band based in the U.K. or U.S. Played by the likes of BBC Radio 6 Music, Parsnip are a band that need to be on your radar. Although I am not a fan of their choice of name, one cannot fault the music. They are a phenomenal band with a very long and bright future. Consisting of Carolyn Hawkins on drums, Stella Rennex on guitar and vocals, Paris Richenson bass guitar and vocals and Rebecca Liston on keyboards, this group of friends are a phenomenal proposition. I am going to get to a recent interview with them. First, there are a couple of features about recent single, The Light. Released back in February, it was a tantalising and brilliant cut from their new album, Behold. That was released on 26th April. CLASH were among those who shared their thoughts on The Light:

“Melbourne group Parsnip dart out of the tracks with new single ‘The Light’.

The four-piece caught attention with two helter-skelter seven inch singles, before delivering 2019 debut album ‘When The Tree Bears Fruit’.

Working patiently on a follow-up, Parsnip have signed to UK based DIY collective Upset The Rhythm, who will release new album ‘Behold’ on April 26th.

New single ‘The Light’ shows just why this band are so special: a tightly wound piece of off kilter indie pop, it recalls everyone from those glorious Kinks singles through to seminal Sarah Records band The Field Mice via the messthetics of The Raincoats.

With a fuzzed out garage-punk guitar solo, this is the kind of rip-it-up-and-throw-it-away nonchalance The B-52s made their own.

Parsnip’s Carolyn Hawkins comments…

‘The Light’ is about having the wool removed from your eyes and seeing everything as it really is, blindingly clear, for the first time. I was thinking a lot about the transformative power of anger in grief and healing, and I guess I also just wanted to express how I was feeling. Rage always produces the catchiest songs.

I was inspired by the Rumi quote “The wound is where the light enters you”, as well as Leonard Cohen’s ‘Paper Thin Hotel’, which describes the experience of hearing an ex sleeping with someone else in the next room, and his liberation at realising he no longer feels anything. I also included a little interlude that rips off “Nervous Breakdown” by Black Flag, because that felt relevant too”.

The band have accrued a strong and passionate following here in the U.K. NME are fans of Parsnip. I think that they will get a lot of gig demands here very soon. A band that cannot be confined to Australia. I think that The Light was a song that introduced some new fans to this wonderful group. Again, they should be on your radar:

“Parsnip have released ‘The Light’, the first single lifted from their just-announced album, ‘Behold’.

Released Tuesday (February 13), the single is carried by sunny guitar melodies, propulsive percussion and sing-along jangle pop vocals. “‘The Light’ is about having the wool removed from your eyes and seeing everything as it really is, blindingly clear, for the first time,” Parsnip drummer Carolyn Hawkins explained in a press statment.

“I was thinking a lot about the transformative power of anger in grief and healing, and I guess I also just wanted to express how I was feeling. Rage always produces the catchiest songs.”

‘The Light’ is inspired by the Leonard Cohen track ‘Paper Thin Hotel’, which recounts the singer’s “liberation at realising he no longer feels anything,” Hawkins added.

‘The Light’ is the first preview of Parsnip’s upcoming second album, ‘Behold’. Set for release on April 26 via Anti Fade Records and Upset The Rhythm, the 13-track project will mark the Melbourne/Naarm four-piece’s first full-length since their 2019 debut album, ‘When the Tree Bears Fruit’”.

I want to come to this interview with the band. There are not many recent interviews with Parsnip. I think that publications and websites around the world should connect with the band. They have a distinct sound that should be played far and wide. I think that the rest of this year is going to be eventful for Parsnip:

“For our readers who aren't familiar, take us through the origins of Parsnip. How did you four all meet and decide to make music together?

Bec: Stella and I played in a band together before Parsnip back in Sydney, so it was excellent timing that the band needed to find a new keyboardist the same time I moved down to Melbourne in 2017!

Carolyn: Paris (who I knew through her band Hierophants) and Stella (who I was living with at the time) came up to me at Jerkfest in 2016 and were talking about how we should make a band. I think we told everyone that night. The next day we all messaged each other saying, "can we actually make that happen for real?? I wasn't joking!" We originally had Sequoia (from Melbourne band The Clits) playing keys, and then Bec joined a few months later.

Paris: Yeah, I was in a rut! I watched The Punk Singer and wanted so badly to be in a band with like-minded people on the same level as me, not just the inexperienced-girl-in-a-band. It was also the first time that I felt like I belonged somewhere playing in my first band Hierophants. I wanted that on another level. The thing was I knew I wanted to play with both Stella and Carolyn but I didn't say anything 'cause I was too shy, but word got to Stella and then Stella approached Caz, then after our friend Sequoia left, Bec arrived at just the right time, who was poached by Stella.

Stella: Yes, what they said :^).

What are your thoughts looking back on the band's journey and how you've grown together?

Bec: It has been incredibly affirming and encouraging playing in a band where we share similar experiences within the music scene, it has been easier to shake off disappointing or disrespectful comments as a unit together. Our lives look so different from eight years ago, I am always so grateful for Parsnip remaining such a positive constant in my life.

Carolyn: I think we are friends first, bandmates second, and in the time we've known each other, we've all individually gone through lots of life changes… eight years is a lifetime ago. In terms of band stuff, I feel like our songwriting has really morphed — it feels more natural to collaborate and throw ideas out there, which I guess is just about becoming more comfortable with each other in a creative sense.

Paris: I'm very glad to have found that sense of belonging I was seeking through Parsnip, and that despite whatever the world throws at us, we are still at it. It is a testament to our enduring friendship. I am glad we are working more collaboratively, and there is still a lot of freedom and acceptance regarding expression. I'm certainly grateful the others have been keen to work on ideas I have brought to the group all this time, and it is fascinating to hear ideas emerging from all members. Also, as musicians, everyone has come a long way in terms of each member's skills.

Stella: Spanning almost the entirety of my 20s, at this point Parsnip is the longest relationship I've been in, and I wouldn't have it any other way. We have grown up together and surfed life's ups and downs beside each other. I love being a prong on this fork and I feel lucky to have these great people by my side, in music and life.

PHOTO CREDIT: Kelli Blackmore

What is it like returning with new music this year after not putting out a release since 2020?

Bec: Exciting! It's been so long it all feels new again!

Carolyn: Yeah, definitely exciting. It's been a long time coming, so it's cool to finally be able to show people what we've been busy working on.

Paris: It is exciting and kind of nerve wracking at the same time. It can be weird when you have an idea sitting in your brain so long and then it's out and exposed to the world. But super glad we are back!

Stella: Yes, I agree. It's exciting and a long time coming. I'm really happy with how the album turned out, I think it's our best collection of songs so far. I look forward to hearing how others interpret and do, or don't (haha), enjoy the songs. Even if everyone else hates the songs I'll still back them and love them as our collaborative creations, maybe we are just (five years) ahead of our time.

What can you say about the making of your upcoming sophomore album Behold. How exactly did it all come together in three sessions over the last three years?

Carolyn: So hard to remember now! Two of the songs were recorded at the same time as the Adding Up 7" way back in early 2020. We generally all need to be in the same room to get stuff done, so lockdown really threw a spanner in the works for making new songs. After two years of lockdowns and a year of playing shows, we had some new material ready to record, and we booked in a day with Billy with the idea of recording another 7". We were chatting in the carpark afterwards and Billy suggested we try for an album instead, so we continued to write songs and did another recording session a few months later with both Billy and Jack.

Paris: I liked this more relaxed approach of recording in multiple sessions with Billy, rather than rushing through twelve or more songs in one session as we had in the past. I also really appreciated having my partner Jack help with overdubs at home.

Stella: It was a rather organic process, we weren't overly rushed and many of the songs were developed collaboratively over a number of years. Other songs came together pretty naturally during the recording process. We are lucky to have Billy and Jack on our side, they are so wonderful to work with; encouraging, enlightening and know how to press the right buttons [laughs].

How did these batch of songs progress from their initial demos? Were there any that turned out entirely different than you had expected while experimenting with ideas?

Carolyn: I can only speak for my own songs — but my demos are always super basic, I just record them on my phone. They take on a life of their own once we start collaborating and workshopping them as a group, which is an exciting thing to see and hear.

Paris: I had some really old Garageband demos, but I also felt I wanted the rest of the members to have more freedom to bring their ideas and skills. So it was fun to see what emerged.

Stella: A few of these song ideas, I guess I'm mostly referring to "The Babble" as that came from an old demo of mine, have been sitting undeveloped for many years. It was a fun process to bring them into the Parsnip cauldron and watch them grow from a sketch of a song idea into a fully developed song”.

Which song from the record means the most to you (and why)?

Bec: A parent doesn't choose favorites! But "Pockets" was written back in 2019 and has been part of our live set since then, so I am looking forward to it  finally being out in the world.

Carolyn: I agree with Bec, I love them all, but I did cry the first time I heard Paris’ ending to Kutastha (on the harmonium), so maybe that.

Paris: "Unearthing," which is a devotional song, not necessarily a love song written for an individual, but feels very meaningful in terms of my spiritual journey and the love and gratitude I feel being on the path.

Stella: Hmm I don't necessarily have a favorite…I'm rather fond of "Clear Blue Sky" as the style is very up my alley, our homage to The Dovers.

Can we expect any nifty music videos around the new album?

Bec: Sure can!

Carolyn: In the works!

How excited are you for the release of this album and to get back playing more Parsnip shows?

Carolyn: We have been playing a little bit! And it's been nice. Trying to figure out how to play some of the new songs live has been a challenge, but it's been fun to share them.

Paris: It feels great to have new material and showcase how the band has evolved. Looking forward to what lies ahead!

Stella: It is rather exciting and I sure do look forward to April 26th — Behold's Birthday”.

‘Behold’ continues with numerous memorable highlights such as ‘Duality’, with its a blend of fragile post-punk and Nuggets-style 60s psychedelia and the slide guitar of ‘L.O.N.E’. ‘Placeholder’ could have easily found itself being released by Sarah Records in the late 1980s while ‘Pocket’ is an instrumental brimming with insistent but swirling organ, punctuated by sax.

The album’s best run of songs begins with ‘The Babble’ which has the air of a 60s summery classic rescued from the attic, its upbeat melody aided by buoyant whistling and some 12-string guitar. It is followed by ‘Turn To Love’ which stays in that era, led by mesmeric keyboard lines and great rough and ready harmonies. ‘Clear Blue Sky’ reverts to psychedelia, but of the clear-sighted, see how many melodic ideas we can explore in a short space of time variety rather than a male version that prioritises lengthy guitar solos.

Led by Paris Richens’ scampering bass, ‘Papier Mache’ recalls Lungleg and has them revealing “My head is gonna split in two, fix it with flour and glue” as a revelation of their DIY, Blue Peter ethos. The closing track, ‘Kutastha’, is the longest, heading towards the five-minute mark with wah-wah guitar and a harmonic drone fadeout which initially felt less appealing than the rest of the album but gradually reveals its charms upon repeated listens. First and foremost, ‘Behold’ is a lo-fi pop album, albeit one spliced with a crazed sense of adventure. This is one Parsnip that I will happily gorge upon”.

If you have not yet discovered Melbourne’s Parsnip, then make sure that you get onto them. Check out their new album and follow them on social media. They are a very special group that should be embraced and shared. I have a feeling we will see the rise and rise of Parsnip. They are going to be together and hitting strong…

FOR years to come.

_________

Follow Parsnip

Instagram:

https://instagram.com/parsnip_hq/

Twitter:

https://twitter.com/HqParsnip

TikTok:

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

YouTube:

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

Spotify:

https://open.spotify.com/artist/4ZIKi7TqpUr0YI5uz3c8KY

FEATURE: Prince’s and The Revolution's Purple Rain at Forty: Inside Its Epic and Iconic Title Track

FEATURE:

 

 

Prince and The Revolution's Purple Rain at Forty

Inside Its Epic and Iconic Title Track

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ONE of the best albums of all time…

PHOTO CREDIT: Liu Heung Shing/AP

celebrates its fortieth anniversary on 25th June. Prince’s (that he recorded with The Revolution) sixth studio album, Purple Rain, was to huge critical and commercial acclaim. I am going to write another feature about it closer to the anniversary date. Here, I wanted to look inside its legendary and huge title track. One of the best title tracks ever. It is interesting where Purple Rain was placed on the album. Prince configured at least two unique track listings of Purple Rain prior to setting the final running order – 7th November, 1983 and 23rd March, 1984. In the 1983 line-up, Purple Rain was the first track on the second side. It is an odd track order. Purple Rain could be nowhere but the final track! Given it is nearly nine minutes and is so epic, it could only be the swansong. Nothing really could follow it. I am glad that it does end the album. I will bring in a Wikipedia feature before getting to some features about it:

“Purple Rain" reached number two on the US Billboard Hot 100 and stayed there for two weeks, being kept off the top spot by "Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go" by Wham!. It reached the summit in Belgium and the Netherlands. It is certified gold by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and is considered to be one of Prince's signature songs. Following Prince's death in 2016, "Purple Rain" re-entered the Billboard Hot 100, where it reached number four. It also re-entered the UK Singles Chart at number six, placing two spaces higher than its original peak. In France, where it originally peaked at number 12, "Purple Rain" reached number one around a week after Prince's death.

"Purple Rain" was ranked number 18 on Rolling Stone's 2021 list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time and is included in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's 500 Songs that Shaped Rock and Roll. During Prince's performance at the Super Bowl XLI halftime show in 2007, "Purple Rain" was the last song of his set; the event became especially notable when actual rain fell during the performance while the stage and stadium were lit up with purple lights. The Super Bowl XLI halftime show featuring Prince has topped lists of the best Super Bowl halftime shows of all time. Prince performed the song as the opening of a medley of his hits with Beyoncé at the 2004 Grammy Awards. It was also the final song he performed at his last concert, which took place on April 14, 2016”.

The first feature I want to spotlight is from Neo Music. Last year, they explained and explored the story behind one of the finest tracks ever. Definitely one of Prince’s best. Many still feel like the 1984 album is underrated. The third single from the album, Purple Rain arrived on 26th September, 1984 – around three months after the album:

“THE ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT OF PURPLE RAIN

Prince intended to work with Fleetwood Mac singer Stevie Nicks on Purple Rain when he originally wrote it as a country song. According to Nicks, she received a 10-minute instrumental version of the song from Prince with a request to write the lyrics, but she felt overwhelmed by the task. She later said, “I listened to it, and I just got scared. I called him back and said, ‘I can’t do it. I wish I could. It’s too much for me.'”

Prince then asked his backing band, The Revolution, to try the song during a rehearsal. He said, “I want to try something before we go home. It’s mellow.” According to Lisa Coleman, one of the band members, Prince changed the song dramatically after Wendy Melvoin, another band member, started playing guitar chords to it. She said, “He was excited to hear it voiced differently. It took it out of that country feeling. Then we all started playing it a bit harder and taking it more seriously. We played it for six hours straight, and by the end of that day we had it mostly written and arranged.”

Prince recorded the song live at a benefit concert for the Minnesota Dance Theatre at his home base venue, the First Avenue nightclub in Minneapolis, on August 3, 1983. That performance was Melvoin’s live debut with The Revolution. She was just 19 years old. Bobby Z, the drummer of the band, said, “It certainly was one of the best concerts we ever did.”

The concert was recorded by David Rivkin (aka David Z), Bobby Z’s brother, using a mobile recording unit. He said, “With Prince, you never knew. I thought we were recording a concert, but I wasn’t sure if it was going to be a record, too. I knew they were working on the movie as well. You just had to go in prepared to record whatever it was going to be as well as you could.”

Other tracks that were recorded during that concert were I Would Die 4 U and Baby I’m a Star, which also became part of the Purple Rain album and film soundtrack. Prince later performed overdubs while working at Sunset Sound in Los Angeles from August to September 1983. He edited out a solo and an extra verse that diluted the emotional content of the song. He also added strings and backing vocals by Clare Fischer and The Steeles.

PRINCE’S PURPLE RAIN LYRICS

Prince’s Purple Rain lyrics are a powerful expression of his personal and artistic journey. It is a power ballad that combines rock, R&B, gospel, and orchestral music. It is the title track and final song on the album Purple Rain, released on June 25, 1984, by Warner Bros. Records. The album was also the soundtrack to the film of the same name, which starred Prince as The Kid, a talented but troubled musician who struggles with his family, band, rival, and love interest.

Prince wrote Purple Rain as a tribute to his father, who attempted suicide. The song also expresses Prince’s desire to reconcile with his former lover and bandmate Apollonia Kotero, who left him for his rival Morris Day in the film. It was recorded live at First Avenue in Minneapolis on August 3, 1983, with an audience of 1,500 people. Prince later overdubbed some vocals and guitar solos in the studio.

THE MEANING AND INTERPRETATION OF PURPLE RAIN

The lyrics of Prince Purple Rain are full of symbolism, emotion, and message. Purple Rain represents a new beginning, a cleansing factor, and a spiritual guide. Prince explained that the concept of purple rain relates to the end of the world, being with the one you love, and letting your faith or God guide you through. Bandmate Lisa Coleman shared that it means a new beginning. Purple is the sky at dawn; rain is the cleansing factor.

He also used the colour purple to symbolise doom and faith in his previous album, 1999, which included lyrics like “…could have sworn it was Judgement Day, the sky was all purple…”

The song expresses a sense of loss, sadness, remembrance, and reverence for a relationship that is over. Prince sings, “I never meant to cause you any sorrow / I never meant to cause you any pain / I only wanted one time to see you laughing / I only wanted to see you laughing in the purple rain.” He also sings, “It’s such a shame our friendship had to end.“

Purple Rain has elements of blues, soul, rock and roll, and gospel music. The song also showcases Prince’s vocal range, from his falsetto to his lower register. The song also features one of the most iconic guitar solos of all time, which showcases Prince’s virtuosity and emotion”.

In 2019, Louder Sound also took a look at a genius track. Purple Rain, in their view, reclaimed Rock for Black artists. It was a track that was played widely across radio. It is interesting how, on 3rd August, 1983, Prince and The Revolution broke from filming the Purple Rain film and recording its soundtrack album to play a forty-five-minute benefit gig for their choreographer, Loyce Holton. The band ended by playing Purple Rain:

“One of the great successes we experienced was not to just be thought of as a black R&B band,” Revolution keyboardist Lisa Coleman believes. “We had struggled for a couple of years, trying to write one song for a black music station, and one for a rock station. But Purple Rain the song was played on every kind of radio station, from country to Americana to rock ballad. And it’s just so perfect that it came from Prince, who nobody knew what to make of. Are you serious? Who is this guy?”

The question went to Prince’s heart, Coleman believes: “He never wanted to lose his black audience, that was really important to his identity. Because even within the black community, there was tension about how light his skin was, whether or not he was gay. Can we really call him one of us? That mentality was important to him, but he also was trying to grow beyond that. I think it was a struggle for him, all of his life.”

Having been reduced to tears by bigoted Stones fans when he supported them in androgynous garb in 1981, the Purple Rain album sleeve saw him astride a motorbike sporting a Little Richard pompadour, while on the record he was a Hendrix-like virtuoso, in defiant riposte to music which had buried its black roots.

The Revolution first heard Purple Rain at the Minnesota warehouse where they recorded most of the album. “It was on Highway 7, out in the boondocks,” says Coleman. “He was messing around on guitar, calling out the chords. And then Wendy [Melvoin, the band’s teenage rhythm guitarist and backing singer] started playing the chords in her Wendy way, and he loved it! The intro is Wendy, and her voicings on those chords are beautiful and Joni Mitchell-esque. I came up with the string parts. During the course of that day – maybe a day or two? – it just came out of us.”

A Record Plant mobile recording truck was outside First Avenue when they turned up that August. Inside, it was hot as hell. “It was pushing 90 degrees Fahrenheit and dense with cigarette smoke,” Bobby Z explains. “It was a toxic environment.” Coleman remembers the club being “packed with people”. The band were exhausted from the album and film, adding to the heightened atmosphere. They’d also be playing music the crowd hadn’t heard.

After Melvoin’s opening acoustic chords, Bobby Z’s drums – mostly acoustic, and triggering Linn drums later added to in the mix – accompanied Prince’s singing for the first two minutes. “It’s just a back-beat and him from his guts,” Bobby says. “It’s just so raw for him. I remember those two minutes. Because the room is silent except for the pattern you’re playing. He was in the moment, and you’re in it with him, and it was a special place to be. It was a whole different planet.”

“That night it was on fire,” says Coleman, “and nobody’s singing along. It was just so different for Prince, almost a country song. But it got to them by the end, and his guitar solo was so beautiful. I get chills thinking of it. I always kept my eyes on Prince, in case he needed something, but I could see the faces and wide eyes in the front. It was like a kid seeing Santa Claus.”

There’s as much tension as release in this atypical rock epic (nearly nine minutes long on the album, after Prince cut a verse). Coleman’s string arrangement – played on her Obie FX keyboard on the night, with a string quartet added in the studio – has a classical, calming quality, as Prince’s voice and guitar clamber for the heights.

“It is that contrary motion that made it cool,” Coleman considers. “The verses are so intimate and personal, like he’s trying to talk to you. He liked the strings coming in slowly, and their warmth. And then, at the end vamp, where they’re going down and he’s going up, maybe it’s keeping it from flying away completely. It’s repetitive, and it keeps saying, ‘I’m here with you.’ And then his guitar solo is pleading, ‘Please be here.’” “You’ve got this dirge or ballad beat behind it,” Bobby Z reflects.

“You’ve got pleading in the vocals. You’ve got agility and spins and pirouettes in the guitar solo. And then the strings pull your heartstrings. Purple Rain is like a Stairway To Heaven. It’s non-religious, but people feel reverent about it. Even if you walk in on a casino and some crappy band are playing it, it still has something different”.

I am going to end up by going back to 2017 and a feature from The Guardian. They spoke with the track’s keyboard player, Lisa Coleman, and drummer Bobby Z. Rather than this being a track purely recorded in the studio, it was laid down in a packed and sweaty club in Minneapolis. It must have been quite a moment capturing a moment of music history in a relatively anonymous space:

Lisa Coleman, Keyboards

Being in Prince’s band was like getting in a sports car with a racing driver. Even though you felt a bit scared – why is he going so fast? – he could handle it, and it brought so much joy. I first met him in 1979. He was looking for a girl keyboard player and I happened to be one. One of my best friends got a job at Prince’s management agency. She called me about him, and I didn’t know who he was. I made a tape of myself playing a couple of songs and I flew to Minneapolis and he picked me up at the airport. We were both very shy, so it didn’t go well at first – but we ended up hitting it off.

The audition was pretty immediate. It was eight or nine at night when we got to his place. He told me there was a piano down the stairs, and I took that as a hint he wanted to hear me play. He came down a few minutes later and picked up a guitar. I was checking him out just as much as he was checking me out. He had a poster on his wall of Kris Kristofferson and Barbra Streisand in A Star Is Born. I thought that was kind of young. Me being from LA and my father being a musician meant I was around the music business, but it was a different feeling with Prince. He had the vibe of living music – his house smelled like a recording studio.

It took a handful of years for us to work up to being that completely fabulous Purple Rain band, so tight and good. I think we lived up to the flamboyant image because we worked so hard. When Wendy Melvoin joined to play guitar, it made a big difference. I was happy because she was my girlfriend, and Prince was so excited – she was like a new kitten to him, the way that he was precious about her. You could feel a new beginning. I think he chose each of us for very simple reasons, not because we were virtuosos – although we were very good. There was another quality he needed to have around him: a blend of loyalty, a spirit of young hunger and a musical quality he didn’t have. Every one of us had something he didn’t have, even though he had it all.

Purple Rain was one of the songs we were working on before we decided what the film was going to be. At first he wasn’t sure Purple Rain was actually a Prince song. It was kind of a country number and he gave it to Stevie Nicks, but she felt intimidated by it. So one day he decided to fool around with it at rehearsal. Wendy started hitting these big chords and that rejigged his idea of the song. He was excited to hear it voiced differently. It took it out of that country feeling. Then we all started playing it a bit harder and taking it more seriously. We played it for six hours straight and by the end of that day we had it mostly written and arranged.

In 1983, we performed at a benefit show at the First Avenue club in Minneapolis. This is where the song was recorded live, though at the time we didn’t know that was the plan. Prince was really excited and kept pumping us up: “We’re making history tonight.” It all makes sense now: if you’re going to record something, make sure you’re as badass as you can be. Don’t fuck around.

It was Wendy’s first show. To have that be her anointing was a lot to live up to. But he was so supportive of her. He took her under his wing. He helped her relax and not be too nervous. We were unsure what was going to happen, but we hit the stage with such conviction that it didn’t really matter. The crowd were with us. It was hot, it was August, it was jampacked in the club. It was sweaty and smoky and vibey as hell.

Afterwards, I went into the studio in Los Angeles with Prince to work on it [the live recording had string overdubs added, and was edited from 13 minutes to 8 minutes 41 seconds]. I did the string arrangement – we didn’t hire session players, it was me calling my brother: “Can you get a couple of friends and come do some strings?” Prince made the decision to lose the third verse, making it more concise. He was completely right. The third verse didn’t really match the other two – it was a different spirit and it didn’t belong in the song.

IN THIS PHOTO: From left: Wendy Melvoin, Prince and Lisa Coleman accepting an Oscar for Purple Rain/PHOTO CREDIT: Bettmann Archive

Bobby Z, drums

In 1978, I was at Moon Sound Studios in Minneapolis, working with a different band. Prince was in Studio A making his first tape. It was dynamite, gunpowder. I heard it walking across the hallway one morning. I went in and I saw the afro.

I was working for his manager as a delivery driver, and my job became driving Prince. We spent seven months basically alone together. We were bonded as friends, which eventually made getting the job of drummer harder. I was very grateful that he hired me and very grateful that he took me for the whole ride.

There were people in the Revolution who weren’t committed to staying forever, and you can’t build a band like that, but by summer 1983 we had a special chemistry. He was always kind of a solo artist, but the fact that the Revolution were able to give him the colours on a palette made me proud.

Purple Rain was brought in at the end of a rehearsal. We had just gone through the set twice and he said: “I want to try something before we go home. It’s mellow.” For me it was natural: I could give it the big rock beat and be John Bonham. But when it starts, it’s really a country song.

The soundtrack recording began in 1983, when he used a mobile recording truck to capture Purple Rain, I Would Die 4 U, Baby I’m a Star and the workings of a couple of others. Documenting what we did was commonplace, and he used it as a tool to improve. We would watch videos as part of our rehearsals, and it caused a dramatic improvement. When you see yourself look stupid, you fix yourself a lot better. All he had to do was show it to you.

That day at First Avenue, it was 90 degrees – a humid wet August, cigarette smoke everywhere. It was a battle to get through, and it was kind of forging metal in hot conditions. But he got the performances out of people who were just for one minute to his level, and it was a beautiful thing.

We ended up losing the third verse. To edit it the way he did was genius. He was an incredible editor, and this was back in the days when we were splicing tape. Another feather in his hat. Because Prince was such a great musician, he was able to find pieces of music in his head, and then with Scotch tape put them together into something completely different – there were some real gutsy moves back then. He had a vision in his head for everything from fashion to the sound of the snare drum to the catering truck. He knew everything”.

On 25th June, 1984, Prince released one of his biggest albums. Many debate where it comes when ranking the studio albums. Some would place 1982’s 1999 or 1987’s Sign o' the Times higher than Purple Rain. It is amazing to think that, forty years later, Purple Rain is underrated and not as poured over as it should be! Not only is the title track standout. It also boasts songs like When Doves Cry, Let’s Go Crazy and I Would Die for U. I think Purple Rain is Prince’s greatest title track. The extraordinary finale to his sixth studio album, I wanted to spend some time with the biblical Purple Rain. From its modest and gentle beginnings to its epic rise and spine-tingling end, it is one of Prince’s…

ABSOLUTE masterpieces.

FEATURE: It’s Been a Week! Saluting the Magnificent Shaun Keaveny

FEATURE:

 

 

It’s Been a Week!

PHOTO CREDIT: Joe Magowan

Saluting the Magnificent Shaun Keaveny

_________

RATHER than this being…

an early birthday gift/mention – for he was born on 14th June, 1972 -, instead, this is s celebration and salute of one of our finest broadcasters. Everyone knows how much I love Shaun Keaveny. You can follow him on Twitter and Instagram. I have been a fan and devotee since his BBC Radio 6 Music days. I think I tuned into his shows from 2014 or there abouts. He left the station a few years back and, at the time, it was a big shock. Not his decision at all, it was a huge mistake for a station that let go one of their biggest talents. Where would he go from there?! It was a devastating loss for the listeners. Since then, Keaveny has become one of the busiest and most eclectic broadcasters in the country. I want to come to some interviews that were published post-BBC Radio 6 Music. I shall do some admin now. It’s been a little while since I wrote a feature about Shaun Keaveny. Since then, he has done so much! In addition to standing in for Liza Tarbuck on her BBC Radio 2 Saturday slot, he has stepped in to host The Folk Show (Mark Radcliffe is taking some time off and will be back on BBC Radio 2 and 6 Music soon). He has also presented on Greatest Hits Radio, BBC Radio London, appeared numerous time on BBC Radio 4. I shall come to his current podcast, Your Place or Mine with Shaun Keaveny, soon enough. In terms of podcast appearances, there have been a fair few – mostly music-themed, Keaveny has chatted about The Beatles and beyond. His other podcast, The Line-Up with Shaun Keaveny, might be on a fallow year. The latest episode was in July 2023. It is a series where guests chooser their fantasy festival line-up. Simon Pegg is the latest guest. I do hope that it comes back very soon!

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One can forgive Keaveny for not having enough time to keep things like that going. Although I do not know the circumstances, many of us hope that this podcast will be back soon. You can traverse and dig deep for podcast episodes on Spotify. A recent one with Russell Howard for his Wonderbox series is well worth a listen. Shaun Keaveny presents on Community Garden Radio. A listener-run station, it is this independent and wonderful station that broadcasts out of Fitzrovia. It started not long after Keaveny departed BBC Radio 6 Music. In addition, we have the wonderful podcast, Shaun Keaveny’s Daily Grind. Also – and where does he find the time and energy?! – there is Your Place or Mine with Shaun Keaveny. Hosted alongside comedian/geographer/historian Iszi Lawrence, it is a show where guests try to convince Keaveny to get off his sofa and visit their favourite location.

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Everywhere from New York (Guy Garvey) and The International Space Station (Tim Peake) has been discussed. It is a funny and fascinating series that I hope runs for many more series. I wonder now, nearly three years after he left BBC Radio 6 Music, Shaun Keaveny feels about his career. Would he have thought he would do so much in this relatively short period?! Spanning multiple stations and shows, it has been amazing and right that he has enjoyed this success and opportunities. I hope that Keaveny gets to step in for Liza Tarbuck again soon, as he is great on BBC Radio 2 (I also forgot to mention that he stepped in for Johnnie Walker and The Rock Show). I am going to round off pretty soon. I am interested looking back at some of the interviews that came after the BBC Radio 6 Music departure and the then-new Community Garden Radio.

I think that the next few years will be as busy and exciting for Shaun Keavney. Close to his fifty-second birthday, he might feel the need to slow down a bit and work fewer days. His daily podcast for Radio X means that this might be a bit tricky! In 2023, Big Issue spoke with Shaun Keaveny. From a huge digital radio station to presenting on a smaller, community-led station, it was a transition. Rather than a step down, this pioneering move was actually one that allowed for greater freedom. Not restricted in terms of playlist, what he could say and how the show would run. A revolution that will surely see the growth of this type of radio station:

“The Big Issue: How did The Line-Up come about?

Shaun Keaveny: It was conceived of in the deepest, darkest depths of lockdown. It was born of that deep-seated sadness that a lot of us music fans carried around that time.

Obviously, since then, we’ve gone back to the fields in earnest, but we’ve got all kinds of other horrendous challenges around us. So, it’s just a great escape to get in a room with one of my favourite people. We are ostensibly talking about music and their favourite acts… and about 20 per cent of the discussions have been about that. The rest is an outpouring of either complete trivia, or we go incredibly, deeply emotional. Because that’s what music does, isn’t it? It takes us to those emotional places.

It’s like if you have a chat with somebody in the car, more seems to come out sometimes because the pressure’s off. You’re looking out the window, so your mind drifts off, and then you are talking about things you weren’t expecting to talk about.

I think the genius of Roy Plomley coming up with Desert Island Discs was exactly that. You can say: “why did you choose this song?” Which is an incredibly basic interview question. But then the next question can be: “so it reminds you of your mum when she died…?” And then all of a sudden, you’re in much deeper water.

What are the advantages of doing it yourself versus your old job at 6 Music?

I’m a broadcaster. That’s the way I see it. I just love putting headphones on and hearing my voice. I do a thing called Community Garden Radio, which is like a Patreon radio show, every Friday. And that’s about the most free I’ve ever felt speaking into a microphone. We’ve built our own tiny little radio station and we broadcast to our little cabal of superfans. We can do whatever we want. We can play whatever music we want. I can write the most outlandish sketches and deliver them or swear, which is puerile but freeing. It’s like how I imagine Howard Stern must’ve felt in 1989. The freedom before certain strictures came in is very, very intoxicating. I love that.

I always hanker to go back to live radio, out there to the nation. And I’m actually doing it in January. I’m standing in for one of the biggest legends ever in radio, Johnny Walker, doing his rock show radio for four weeks. That’s the ultimate adrenaline thrill for me. One day in the future, I would love to get back to doing that on a daily basis. 

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Can you be more political when you’re not on staff at the BBC?

Yes. That’s one of the payoffs that you have to consider when you take a job like that. You can’t go around espousing your niche political view when you’re doing a breakfast show for a big corporation.

One of the great pleasures of the last year or so for me, has been the freedom of being able to speak my mind. I don’t for one minute think that it makes any difference. But it doesn’t matter, as a citizen, I really enjoy doing it. There are so many things that I feel really passionate about. And I feel like sometimes I want to say that.

Having said that, discourse is virtually non-existent. It is a binfire of the vanities: everybody thinking that what they say is more important everybody else. I’m hoping that we are slowly moving to a better place with all that, but at the moment it’s like we’re at the bottom of the barrel, aren’t we? We couldn’t really get much worse than it is at the moment. But then we’ve been saying that for the last five years.

You’re often compared to my one of my great heroes, Terry Wogan. Do you think he would be doing podcasts if he was still with us?

It’s such a kind thing to be put in the same paragraph as Terry. He took me under his wing when I started on the breakfast show at 6. He used to regularly come down and feed us carbohydrates. He was the ultimate human hug and the world just needs so much more of that.

I guess he probably would have ended up doing a podcast on BBC Sounds and it would have been bloody brilliant. But he was a curious mix, Terry. He was he was a hard-working guy. But he was a smart-working guy. He just used to look at everything as, what’s the path of least resistance to get this job done really well? All the stories are true about how he got so good at being on the radio that he would just turn up with about nine minutes to go. His producer would just hand him a colossal pile of emails, he’d sit there with a big cup of coffee, start going through and away you go – that’s your show. That’s where you want to get to in life. Then you go home see your wife, see your kids, learn to play golf.

You’ve said before that you were confused about why the BBC let you go from your 6 Music show. Has it become clearer with time?

Everything becomes clearer in time. It causes you a certain amount of grief when a big change happens to you. And then you give it a year, and you go, “Oh yeah, I should have seen that coming a mile off. It’s fine. Look at where we are now.” So I’m utterly sanguine about it. No hard feelings. The BBC gave me something unbelievable. They gave me a 14-year stretch in one of the hottest slots that you can imagine in the world of radio. There are no better places to work. So, how can you look back on that with any bitterness? I simply don’t. I feel it was a gift, and it’s still giving to me, so I’m pretty bloody lucky”.

There is one more Big Issue interview I want to bring in. They spoke to Shaun Keaveny again in October of last year. Whilst the idea of a daily podcast might have seemed achievable, putting it into action must have been a bit daunting and scary. Months on from its launch and it is this hugely successful daily relief. Something that has already accrued a lot of listeners:

“The Big Issue: I’m sorry but the first thing I have to ask is… a daily podcast – are you mad?

Shaun Keaveny: Oh, my God. I knew somebody was going to point this out. I’ve just started absolutely canning it myself. To be perfectly honest, the only way that this is going to work, is that I’m gifting the first part of every day to the gods of content. So everything that happens almost from when I wearily blinked my eyes open to about two o’clock in the afternoon: it’s all fair game. I’ve got to try and harvest as much stuff as I can in that time.

I just listened to your pilot episode, in which you realised it would take two weeks to do each edition of Shaun Keaveny’s Daily Grind…

That was a moment, I had a real dark night of the soul. I’ve been very temperate for quite a long time but I made a terrible mistake of going out for a few drinks the Friday before last. I got the beer fear on the Saturday morning. I was in a freefall panic, bolt upright at 6.50am. I just sort of sat at the laptop trying to bang out contingency plans or fake my own death. But you know, between myself and my genius producer Ben and the goodwill of the whatever audience we’ve got, I’m confident that we are going to create something at least mildly diverting.

You started by rummaging through some literal rubbish.

Ages ago, when I was at 6 [Music], I was talking to my good friend and producers there, trying to come up with ideas for the afternoon show. We had all kinds of daft ideas, none of which we brought to fruition. I have written down on a piece of paper – and I don’t think I was joking, either – Dry Stone Walling with Shaun Keaveny. Because, number one, I like being in nature; number two, I love dry stone walls. The other idea, slightly more seriously, was I think people chat better when they’re already doing something. When you’re doing something mundane, you feel a bit less under the microscope.

But what the litter-picking was all really about – I bought these litter picking devices two years ago on Amazon, I hadn’t used them. I thought, wait a minute, this is a golden opportunity here to use these. Who doesn’t like walking up and down the canal?

And you’re making the canal a bit nicer for everybody else.

I mean, we got a full bin bag in 40 minutes. It is only a tiny contribution to the planet’s woes, but it made me feel a little bit better.

Talking about feeling a little bit better, you have promised to delve into the papers, which strikes me as not a brilliant way to feel better.

The news cycle now is so unbelievably sad and terrifying, with so much unimaginable human suffering going on all around, I personally find it very difficult to get through that.

The only thing that I have got in my armoury is to try and use my one slight talent, which is to give people something else to think about for a little bit. It’s not to say this stuff isn’t happening, or we should ignore it. It’s just a little oasis of silliness for a little while for us to catch our breath.

And so, it’s gonna be hard but we’re going to be picking out the real ‘and finally’ parts of the news that we can have a little bit of fun with. Those are the ones that we’re going to be using… with hilarious consequences, or at least mildly diverting consequences.

What is making you angry at the moment?

It would be disingenuous of me to pretend that I didn’t have an axe to grind – because I do. Where I come from, just about everybody that I know and love are of a very similar socio-political persuasion. We believe in social justice. We believe in helping people, rather than ignoring people who are in need.

We’ve been presided over for such a long time by people who seem to have normalised – they’ve almost made an artform out of blaming other people for shit. There’s a callousness and a cruelty to discourse in modern politics that makes me want to cry. It’s a difficult time for humans to be alive and to be trying to make sense of the world, because there’s so much info and a lot of it’s not particularly good for your mental health.

That’s one of the reasons why I’m trying to be a little bit more meditative. What can I do in the world that might make me feel a little bit better and a bit more connected to the human race?

In a time of callousness, there’s something rebellious in connecting with people.

I think that’s right. And I think that’s what Big Issue does. You don’t have to be Noam Chomsky to understand that what the big money, the big corporations, are interested in is atomising us and making us a little bit more frightened of each other, so they can make capital out of that fear and competition. What people like The Big Issue do so beautifully, is say: no, that’s not what we’re about. We’re about bringing people together.

You know, I’m being very, very highfalutin about a stupid daily podcast that might kill me. But if there’s any kind of ethos behind it, it is that.

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We talked about politics there. A lot of people are saying we’re about to see the back of this government we’ve had for a long time. Would it be better if we didn’t have them and maybe had the other lot in for a while?

I honestly do think all you can really do is look at the facts. Look at the record, look at the things that have been enacted, the beliefs that have been inculcated over the last 13 years and draw your own conclusions. It’s easy for governments to say, we’ve had this financial crash and we’ve had Covid. Yeah, there have been unbelievable challenges.

But some of the some of the moral choices that have been made over the past few years, in our name, have sat very uncomfortably for me. And I just think, to be as apolitical about it as possible, just to look at it almost as a matter of physics… sometimes it’s just better to have a change and let somebody else have a go and hope there might be a change.

Maybe we’re not done with kindness yet. Maybe that’s not an outdated concept. Maybe it’s something that we actually really need. I’d love to see that implanted back into society a little bit.

What are you most looking forward to about Shaun Keaveny’s Daily Grind?

I’m really interested to explore what it’s like to connect our audience. It’s one of the slightly less obvious attributes of podcasts. A lot of the time they don’t use audience, it can very often be a one-way process. Whereas we’re really trying to get the audience involved. So I hope that works. But also just being out of the studio, whether it’s recording a chat with some huge star in a pub for our tax deductible pop quiz… I’m imagining Bob Dylan in the local beer and burger, you know?”.

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In October 2023, writing for GQ, Jessie Atkinson spoke with one of her broadcasting heroes, Shaun Keaveny. Speaking about The Daily Grind, it was another new chapter and big move for a legend of radio. Someone who has in some ways moved from being a broadcast great to this podcast king, it will be wonderful seeing where he goes from here:

“And now the presenter is returning to daily broadcasting, albeit in a podcast format. Created from a dedicated studio with Global Radio in the mornings and dropping every afternoon, Daily Grind will be, as Shaun himself describes, a “distilled essential oil of Keaveny”. That is to say that there will be no music, but there will be interviews, listener missives and plenty of the cosy, deadpan humour that made Keaveny one the BBC’s most popular — and cosiest — broadcasters. As he sits “heart in his mouth” at the dawn of his return, we asked Shaun how he’s feeling about it all.

How are you?

I’m currently in the womb of the Daily Grind studio and I’m waiting for the first one to go out. I’m bloody nervous actually.

Daily Grind, like your former BBC Radio 6 show, is all about celebrating the mundane moments in life. What do you think the value in that is?

It goes without saying that the news cycle gets more upsetting everyday, and we don’t want to pretend stuff like that’s not happening, but we do want to look at smaller aspects of life and try and bring some pleasure out of them. It’s this lower stakes business that we’re interested in the most..

What are the pedestrian minutiae of your mornings?

I’ve got a load of kids to get out of the house, so I’ve got to get the dependents out of the way first before I can concentrate on anything else. Our youngest, she has a little owl alarm that lights up, so the first thing I always hear is her flutey little four year-old voice saying: “My owl’s awake, daddy.” The central crank of my getting out of the house and making it a good day is making stovetop coffee. And then I’m going to come to the studio…

What’s it like?

It’s a proper place. My only stipulation was the light had to be quite low. Not off but really toasty and moody like an elderly gentleman’s front room.

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No big lights!

People think I’m mad at home; I go around flicking all the big lights off. I understand you need them in an operating theatre — you can’t have smoky lamplight when you’re having a heart bypass — but the rest of the time when you’re just sitting around having a glass of wine you’ve got to turn them off.

Do you have any middle-aged shout outs?

My life is just one long middle-aged shout out. The most obvious recent example is that almost overnight, my eyesight went shitter. The next step for me, I think, is to make the writing bigger on my iPhone. Then I’ll be in the pantheon of late middle-age.

How are you preparing for daily recording again?

I’m not good at giving up things that are bad for me. I’m not Slash in 1993 or anything, but I do like to nip out for a couple of pints here and there. Burn the candle at both ends. Stay up watching music documentaries when I should be in bed. All of that wild and crazy stuff. But in recent times, I’ve been trying to save up my energy a bit because I can instinctually tell that the next few weeks and months are going to be an onslaught.

What will you be drinking while recording?

I’ve got to be careful that I mitigate and limit the amount of caffeine that I drink because otherwise it could be very destructive to my career. But the problem is that I’ve got no willpower at all and the other problem is that there’s a decent coffee machine next door with the Clooney-style pods.

What music have you been listening to lately?

On Community Garden Radio I choose an hour’s worth of music. We just played a fantastic young artist called Lola Young. Glass Beams are really good, and the new Stones album is bloody good, too. People like Young Fathers blew me away at Glastonbury. CMAT: she’s absolutely fantastic as well”.

Rather than this being purely a birthday-timed feature about Shaun Keaveny, it is another chance to show just how incredible his career is. One of the hardest-working people in broadcasting, he spans podcasts on BBC radio to Community Garden Radio. Wonderful podcasts and opportunities covering on various programmes and stations. It is so well-earned and incredible seeing Shaun Keaveny go from strength to strength. Although sometimes exhausting, it is a new career rise and renaissance. All of his fans and listeners hope…

LONG may it continue!

FEATURE: My Name Is, But Not Me… The Importance of Kate Bush’s First Three Albums

FEATURE:

 

 

My Name Is, But Not Me…

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1979/PHOTO CREDIT: Brian Aris

The Importance of Kate Bush’s First Three Albums

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I am going to bring in…

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1979/PHOTO CREDIT: Gered Mankowitz

an interesting podcast that recently went out. It sort of ties in a bit with a recent feature Tom Doyle published in MOJO. He release the fascinating and must-buy biography, Running Up That Hill: 50 Vision of Kate Bush. I would suggest people buy that copy of MOJO. It talks about Kate Bush’s early career. The first few albums. We get some insight into The Kick Inside and Lionheart from 1978; revelations about 1980’s Never for Ever, in addition to facts about 1979’s The Tour of Life. Also go and get his book. He is someone who knows a lot about Kate Bush. He has interviewed her more than once. Most memorably in 2005 around the release of Aerial. It was interesting reading the MOJO feature, as it takes us away from Hounds of Love. Something that gets more focus, it is interesting focusing on that period between 1978 and 1980. A transformative one for Kate Bush. The feature includes, near the end, a quote from Kate Bush from 1980. Wrestling with fame and celebrity, she knew that her name carried weight and there was fame around her but, as the title suggest – “My name is, but not me”. She said that she was just being me. She said that in September 1980 when Never for Ever was released. Saying that as people literally queued down the street in London’s Oxford Street to get a copy signed. Bush said how it was frustrating that things that were transient in her mind for so long were suddenly becoming solid. The thing that she released into the world and could not change. When in the mind, everything can be edited or made better or different. When people hear it, they make judgement and it sort of defines who she is.

It was interesting. Not that Kate Bush has disowned those first three albums. A lot of artists do that. They hit a peak – usually more than three albums in – and then dismiss those early works. I don’t think any huge artist in history has hit their best within the first three albums. Maybe Radiohead and a few others are exceptions. It normally takes a bit longer. For Kate Bush, she released her debut album when she was nineteen. By the age of twenty-two, she has released threes studio albums, toured in the U.K. and Europe, promoted her work around the world and had this accelerated growing up in the public eye. It is easy to see why she was struggling with fame, being grounded and what her work symbolised. Whether it was true to her. I love going back pre-The Kick Inside. Reading the MOJO feature, we learn that the KT Bush Band did small gigs at the Rose of Lee pub. I did not know that Bob Mercer of EMI caught one of the performance and, in April 1977, put the band in De Wolfe Studio in Soho and did some recording. Nothing from that session made it onto record. One song, Dear Dead Days, is one of those great lost gems. Those musicians did not play on The Kick Inside. Sessions for that album began in July 1977. The KT Bush Band played around Fulham, Chelsea, Putney. They did one-nighters in East Sussex and Essex. I think that all the background and backdrop goes into the first two albums. How there are these fascinating photoshoots. Gered Mankowitz shot Bush between 1978 and 1979. These iconic photos. She had, as Mankowitz explained to MOJO, these strong collaborative ideas and presented a sensual image. She was always energetic and burned up any space given. Such fun and productive shoots. There were informal shoots like one at her family home at East Wickham Farm in May 1978. Bush sat by the door on at the piano. One, where she picked up a gun from the mantlepiece – not sure why – and was stood on a bearskin rug. In 1980, Andy Philips photographed Bush outside the EMI offices in Manchester Square. No hair or make-up at all: just Kate Bush spontaneous and natural. All of this texture and personality feeds into the two 1978 albums and Never for Ever.

I have dropped in a couple of interviews from the time to see how Bush approached questions and what she was being asked. I feel like she is a bit down or less warm to The Kick Inside, Lionheart and Never for Ever. Maybe a slightly tough journalistic circuit and increased demands. Not enjoying too much working with producer Andrew Powell. Thinking she was not being listened to. Her music not being presented as it should be. It is clear that, from the debut album, Bush was so astute and was drinking everything in. In the control room, she was so interested and you knew that even then she wanted to produce her own albums. Perhaps that is why she has a slightly downbeat view towards that time. I am fascinated by all of it. One of the more interesting segments of the Tom Doyle MOJO piece is how, in 1978, before the release of Lionheart, Bush invited Brian Bath (who was in the KT Bush Band and played on Lionheart but more fully on Never for Ever) to her flat where she was living in Brockley. They worked on guitar parts and structuring the songs. Bush convinced EMI and Andrew Powell to use her band for Lionheart. Musicians including Brian Bath and Del Palmer travelled with her to France to record. They recorded two backing tracks – for Kashka from Baghdad and Wow – before there was a rethink. Bush wanted her band because she could communicate better with them and, as a result, get something purer and more fitting to her style. I feel the fact the band from The Kick Inside came out to the Super Bear Studios near Nice and took over soured the mood. Bush knowing, at that moment, that she did not want the same producer for her third album.

Never for Ever is a lot more of what Bush wanted in an album. She produced with Jon Kelly. It is a magnificent album that reached number one in the U.K. It is very timely the feature in MOJO. When many people are drawn towards Hounds of Love (her fifth studio album, it was released in 1985) and that is the starting point for so many, there is this new evaluation and spotlight of her first three albums. So much detail and insight. A good companion to the MOJO spread is the new podcast from Music Maps – the Rock n Roll Book Club. They use a particular place as a jumping-off point of conversation. We were sent to East Wickham Farm as Tom Doyle chatted about her early albums and The Tour of Life. I picked up some stuff from that episode I was not aware of. Although not explicitly named at the time, instead of the Hammersmith Odeon – where she ended the run -, there were plans to use a beautiful venue that was hanger-like. The only one that logically fitted the description is Alexandra Palace in London. Bush felt sick when she released how small she would be compared to the vastness of that space! There were plans at one point to incorporate robots into the set. Already there was magic, mime, theatre, dance and poetry. Tom Doyle also said how many people get wrong the circumstances in which lighting assistant engineer Bill Duffield died after the warm-up date at Poole Art Centre. The truth is, as it was a new venue and it was quite cutting-edge, they had this flooring that was retractable. It seemed that a panel was left open so, when he was looking around the venue – which was not properly and adequately lit -, he did not see the gap there. Falling fifteen foot onto concrete, Duffield was taken to hospital and died days later. Maybe there are memories like that which impact how Kate Bush sees her first few albums.

It is hard to say. Perhaps she was so young and still trying to find her own voice. Not yet producing alone, it was a period of evolving and growing. I do feel that there is so much to enjoy and discuss regarding that period between 1978 and 1980. It was so busy and eventful. Three fantastic and different albums came from that period. I suppose it would have been quite strange going from, a few years earlier, at school and in a comfortable family home to being this artist that everyone knew. Traveling around the world and her life being turned upside down. At the same time, Kate Bush had a vision of her own music and perhaps felt that she was not being heard or given enough control of her material. Go and order a copy of MOJO and explore what Tom Doyle writes about the period and this birth of a unique and compelling artist. I would also advise people to listen to the albums. The Kick Inside, Lionheart and Never for Ever are wonderful and so different to anything around at the time. Even though she did go onto produce and release more commercial successful albums – and ones she was happier with -, you cannot underestimate and discount her first three albums. They are important statements. That tussle between her name being known and worldwide. Kate Bush wanting to remain private and grounded. She was not this starry celebrity. So many conflicts and tussles. You can see why she may look at 1977 through to 1980 as a bit murky, tiring and not her finest years. If some saw her as this phenomenon or strange artist, Bush simply said she was being herself. Who she had always been. She wanted to take more control, spread her wings and focus on the music. After the success of Never for Ever, she was definitely…

GRANTED that wish.

FEATURE: Beatlemania Reaches Australia: The Legendary Band’s Incredible 1964 Tour

FEATURE:

 

 

Beatlemania Reaches Australia

IN THIS PHOTO: The Beatles with drummer Jimmie Nicol in Adelaide, Australia on 12th June, 1964/PHOTO CREDIT: The Vincent Vigil Collection

The Legendary Band’s Incredible 1964 Tour

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1964 was…

IN THIS PHOTO: Crowds mob the car carrying the Beatles from Adelaide airport to the city centre/PHOTO CREDIT: Keystone/Getty Images

a huge year for The Beatles. It was the one when they truly exploded. Having only released their debut album the year before (Please Please Me), they were thrust into the limelight fully so soon! It must have been head-spinning! Like nothing the music world had ever seen or has seen since. We all know about Beatlemania reaching America in February 1964. One would not imagine that Australia would latch onto The Beatles so quickly. Even so, when the band – John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Jimmie Nicol (Jimmie Nicol was a temporary member of The Beatles during their 1964 tour of Europe, Hong Kong and Australia) and George Harrison – reached the land down under in June 1964, they were met with hysteria and thousands of fans. As written here: “In June 1964, the world tour began. They went to Scandinavian, Holland, Hong Kong, Australia and New Zealand. Ringo missed part of the tour because he was in hospital with tonsillitis, but returned to play the gig in Melbourne, Australia, June 13, 1964”. It is clear that their music had truly reached the nation. Resonated and connected in a way possible no other artist had done in the country. I want to go into more detail about the dates they performed in Australia. First, in 2022, The Guardian wrote about The Beatles arriving in Adelaide for the Australian tour:

“When the Beatles arrived in Australia in 1964 for their first and only tour of the country, huge crowds greeted them everywhere they went. But one of the biggest turnouts was in Adelaide, where an estimated 350,000 people flocked to the city to catch a glimpse of them.

Adelaide wasn’t originally on the tour schedule, but local radio presenter Bob Francis petitioned to have it added, and 12,000 tickets were sold out in just over five hours for four shows, two each on 12 and 13 June.

The Beatles were the biggest band in the world and their songs were dominating the Australian charts with hits such as Can’t Buy Me Love (No 1 for six weeks in May and June 1964) and All My Loving, also previously a No 1.

It was one of the most intense outpourings of Beatlemania around the world, typified by the fans’ high-pitched screaming – although Ringo Starr was stuck in London with tonsillitis and was briefly replaced on drums by Jimmie Nicol until rejoining the band in Melbourne.

Thousands of people lined the Anzac highway from the airport to the town hall reception and then on to their hotel, all hoping to catch a glimpse of the band as they went past in convertibles.

Conservative Adelaide had never seen anything like it. In front of the town hall people swarmed around the cars, with the police having to lock arms to hold them back.

The Beatles went on to play Festival Hall in Melbourne and Sydney Stadium before flying to New Zealand to finish off the tour”.

The fact the band travelled all that way must have been strange in its own way. The boys from Liverpool in a country that was new to them. The Beatles' flight touched down at Sydney Airport just before 7:45am on Thursday, 11th June, 1964. The night after, they would perform in Adelaide. It was dizzying and a whirlwind for the band. Beatles Bible discusses that first date of the tour:

“An estimated 200,000 people lined the 10-mile route between Adelaide Airport and the city centre in the hope of seeing The Beatles’ motorcade. More than 30,000 surrounded the Town Hall, where they met the city’s mayor, James Campbell Irwin, along with council members and their families.

Nearly 250,000 people lined the Anzac Highway in Adelaide from the charming airport to the city centre. I told the writer Al Aronowitz all about it for the Saturday Evening Post a few weeks later. ‘It was like the Messiah come to Australia,’ I said, understating as best I could. ‘Cripples threw away their sticks and blind men leapt for joy,’ The only thing left for The Boys after this tour, I told him, would be a ‘healing tour’ of the world. It was like that. There were so many people of all ages and types reeling and a-rocking with joy that it felt as good as good can be. And if it felt good to the fans, it felt even better to us. I was called into The Beatles’ open car for the trip from the airport, and the journey was long and joyful and somehow humbling. You shoulda been there, John said on postcards later, and maybe some of you were. In the open car, George, now wide awake and full of delight, pointed in disbelief at the ribbons of people stretching as far behind and ahead as the eye could see. I had some difficulty in believing I was really here, a material witness to this unprecedented public love affair. How the hell, I wondered, do I come to be in Australia in a Victory Parade with the Most Famous People on Earth? Was this what I had always wanted?

Yes. Oh, yes. Definitely.

Derek Taylor

Fifty Years Adrift

We sat up on the back of our cars and all the people were out of their homes and hospitals, and then we went into the square. We got onto the Lord Mayor’s mantelpiece and waved at the whole crowd. It looked like something out of Dodge City, dirt roads and a Rock Ridge façade, or that’s what it seemed like to me. It was like ‘The Sheriff’s coming, ding, ding, ding.’ I’ve got photos, which I took from sitting up on the back of our car in the J. F. Kennedy position in the cavalcade.

George Harrison

Fifty Years Adrift, Derek Taylor

The Beatles were given toy koala bears. John Lennon told the reception, “Wherever we go, anywhere in the world, this reception which Adelaide has given us will stick in our memories.”

The group was shadowed by local DJ Bob Francis from 5AD, who interviewed them in a range of locations including the Town Hall balcony. Francis also booked the suite next to theirs at the Hotel South Australia, from where he gave listeners hourly updates.

Three hundred thousand people welcomed us to Adelaide. It was like a heroes’ welcome. George waved too. That was the kind of place where we would go to the town hall and they would all be there in the centre of the city. If it had happened suddenly, overnight, it might have gone to our heads; but we had come up bit by bit, so it didn’t (not too much). We were just very pleased that everyone had turned out.

We were still close enough to our Liverpool roots to know how it would feel, and what it would mean, if we had showed up in the middle of town to see a group; so we could feel it in their spirit. I think we quite enjoyed it all. It can get a bit wearing, but it certainly wasn’t then.

We came in from the airport – it was the same in Liverpool for the première of a A Hard Day’s Night, with the whole city centre full of people – and the crowds were lining the route and we were giving them the thumbs up. And then we went to the Adelaide town hall with the Lord Mayor there, and gave the thumbs up again. In Liverpool it was OK, because everyone understands the thumbs up – but in Australia it’s a dirty sign.

Paul McCartney

Anthology

Meanwhile, Ringo Starr, who had missed the early part of the tour due to illness, flew to Australia via San Francisco, Honolulu and Fiji, accompanied by Brian Epstein. Starr left his passport in London, delaying the first flight of the journey, but was eventually allowed to board the aeroplane without it.

The passport was eventually found and sent to London Airport, from where it was sent to San Francisco and reunited with its owner during the drummer’s stopover on 13 June.

Over 50,000 applications had been made for tickets to see The Beatles in Adelaide’s Centennial Hall, which had just 3,000 seats. The group played two sets on this day, and two more on the following day.

The compère was Alan Field, and the support acts were Sounds Incorporated, Johnny Devlin, Johnny Chester and The Phantoms.

The Beatles performed the same 10 songs at all their Adelaide shows: ‘I Saw Her Standing There’, ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’, ‘All My Loving’, ‘She Loves You’, ‘Till There Was You’, ‘Roll Over Beethoven’, ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’, ‘This Boy’, ‘Twist And Shout’, and ‘Long Tall Sally’.

I always remember the one gig in particular, I think it was in Melbourne [sic], doing the count-in to ‘She Loves You’, which was One, Two, dum be dum, ‘She Loves You’, with the down beat coming on ‘Loves’. I looked at Jimmie [Nicol] and said, ‘OK?’ and he said, ‘Yeah.’ Right, then… ‘One, Two’ and he froze and sort of had a quick brain-fade. Panicky, he lashed out and went ‘crash’ – and somehow the song got going.

George Harrison

Fifty Years Adrift, Derek Taylor

Brian Epstein sold the rights for one of the 12 June shows to be recorded for radio broadcast. It was titled Beatles Show and was transmitted on 15 June, with sponsorship from Surf detergent.

The Adelaide concerts were recorded for possible release as an album. I recall being driven to a studio to hear and approve the recording: to my uncritical ears, the tapes sounded all right and I gave them the provisional approval I’d been authorized to give. It was a weighty responsibility for someone so recently converted to popular music, and I was far too quickly and easily pleased. Whatever The Beatles sang was perfect to my ears. The Boys themselves later described the tapes as ‘crap’ (or one of its many synonyms) and they were never officially released, though no doubt they have turned up since as valued bootleg.

Derek Taylor

Fifty Years Adrift!”.

Even if the 1964 tour of Australia is notable for lacking Ringo Starr for the start of it, I wanted to mark sixty years of an important moment. The band has already cracked America and were beloved in their native U.K. It seemed perhaps inconceivable that they would be taken to heart so quickly in other nations. Especially in far-flung nations like Australia. You can read about The Beatles’ dates in Sydney. Noting how it was a connection to international culture and music for young listeners in 1964, it was also a moment of rebellion for Sydneysiders. This article from The Sydney Morning Herald in 2020 explained how The Beatles were a love language that bonded families. One that has truly stood the test of time. I would urge people to read the whole thing. However, I wanted to drop in the opening portions of the feature:

“By the time Paul McCartney sued his fellow Beatles, and their parent company Apple Corps, in London’s High Court of Justice on December 31, 1970 to dissolve the band, their relationship had taken on the emotional pallor of a family meal that’s gone south.

The insecurities, incandescent rage and jealousy that had crackled for years between the four men are well known: George Harrison and Ringo Starr felt stifled and unappreciated by McCartney and John Lennon, who allowed the first two only two or three songs of their own (sometimes less) on each album.

Lennon and McCartney, who had bonded over the early death of their mothers when each was a teenager, clashed over musical tastes: McCartney’s “granny” songs, Lennon’s primal screams. (McCartney dubbed The White Album “The Tension Album”.)

And let's not forget the big-ticket items: the stress of touring, so-called interfering girlfriends, drug addictions and violence. (Lennon once broke into McCartney’s house, after McCartney missed a recording session for Abbey Road, and damaged a painting.)

Far less known, though, is that in the 50 years since their official breakup – and the 40 since Lennon’s murder on December 8, 1980 – the four lads from Liverpool have been the glue that has bonded many Australian families, for better and occasionally for worse.

“It was always on,” says Nicolas McKenzie of The Beatles’ music in his childhood Sydney home. “Always.”

And it was often the band’s music to which he’d turn in order to help his father - the late, renowned journalist Mark Colvin - cope with his debilitating pain.

“So Dad was always the model father, he was so generous, he was so loving … but he would have these moments where he’d be like ‘I’m watching TV’ and you knew he was in absolute agony,” says McKenzie, 37, a musician and music journalist.

Colvin contracted a rare auto-immune condition while on assignment in Rwanda which led to two hip replacements and ongoing dialysis. “I would just read between the lines … and would go [listen to music]. I’d be like ‘I’m not going to bother him'.”

Colvin taught McKenzie how to identify which Beatles songs were written by which musician – Colvin was partial to the Lennon/McCartney song A Day In The Life – and told his son about his connection to Lennon’s darkness.

“He knew that Lennon was super damaged, but also knew just how brilliant he was and how everyone kind of loved him, and there was a little bit of that element of fear, he was dangerous, and I think that he actually thought that Lennon was very similar to his father,” says McKenzie.

Mark Colvin's father John was a senior figure in MI6, Britain’s foreign intelligence service - “[he was] super sweet to us … he was super intelligent, but he could just kind of vanish".

In between vanishing acts, John Colvin had taken the young Mark to see The Beatles perform in London, where Mark grew up.

The Beatles toured Australia in 1964, enjoying their largest-ever fan gathering in Adelaide when around 300,000 people, nearly a third of the city’s population at the time, lined the 20-kilometre route between the town’s airport and the city centre to greet them. However the band abandoned live performance two years later.

Partly this was because wherever they went they could barely see anything outside of their hotel rooms; when they ventured out, they were stampeded. (“50 TEENAGERS HURT IN WILD CITY CRUSH” read the headline in The Age on June 15, 1964, about the 20,000 people who’d gathered outside the Southern Cross Hotel in Melbourne, some perched in trees.)

The Beatles 1964 Australia tour as remembered by those that were there. Video by Tom Compagnoni.

On the other side of the band’s hotel room walls, there was often a loneliness quite at odds with the teenage abandon Beatlemania had helped unleash.

“Bob, it’s John here, would you come have a drink with me?” Lennon said to Sydney disc jockey Bob Rogers one morning, who accompanied them on the 1964 tour for radio station 2SM.

“I went around to the room, he was there in bed with a bottle of red wine,” says Rogers, now 94. “So I had to sit in the bed with him, and drink the red wine, at seven o’clock in the morning.”

A year later, Lennon’s song Help! would be released. Years later Lennon would pick out the song as one of his favourites because it was “real”: “It was me singing ‘Help’, and I meant it.”

For Maree Trafford, thinking about the night she saw The Beatles at Sydney Stadium in Rushcutters Bay reminds her of that rare, shimmering moment in time when she was able to enjoy the comfort of a beloved cousin, not long before they were separated.

“I bawled all the way through, and Narelle screamed her lungs out and had a sore throat for a week,” says Trafford of her younger cousin, who was her “little sister, my best friend, everything, all in one”.

On 12th June, 1964, The Beatles performed their first date in Australia. It was a hugely important tour in a nation that was experiencing the first real taste of a Western musical juggernaut. I guess it was the same for the U.S. - even if Elvis Presley got their just before The Beatles. For Australia, it was a massive cultural moment! It is sad Ringo Starr did not get to experience all of it. In the year of Beatlemania around the world, their stop in Australia was pivotal. Throughout the tour, crowds sometimes topped six figures. The Beatles touching down in Australia in June 1964 was…

A huge moment for the country.

FEATURE: Call the Shots: Why the Pop World Needs the Return of Girls Aloud

FEATURE:

 

 

Call the Shots

IN THIS PHOTO: Girls Aloud’s Nadine Coyle, Cheryl Cole, Kimberley Walsh and Nicola Roberts/PHOTO CREDIT: Fascination Management

Why the Pop World Needs the Return of Girls Aloud

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I normally hate it when …

PHOTO CREDIT: BBC/PA

a journalist uses the word ‘return’ when talking about an artist releasing a single or album. Their first new material in a matter or weeks or months is not a ‘return’ – it is, in fact, them doing their job! It does seem very dramatic. The pressure artists have to constantly put out music leads to this rather strange use of the word ‘return’. That said, in the case of Girls Aloud, that might be appropriate. The fact is that their last album was released in 2008.Out of Control was a commercial success. A  great album from the quintet. In 2021, Sarah Harding died. It was a massive blow, not only for Girls Aloud but the entire music industry. Part of this incredible and hugely important group, it is understandable that there was doubts about them coming back and touring. I am going to come to a recent live review. There are hopes that there might be new material. I guess it is a conflict putting out new material without Sarah Harding. Even so, Cheryl Cole, Nadine Coyle, Nicola Roberts and Kimberley Walsh are on the road and are back together. There is another article from The Guardian that I want to get to. A reason why we need Girls Aloud back in a fuller capacity. However, prior to that, they were at a recent tour date in Dublin and shared their opinion:

“Eleven years have passed since Girls Aloud performed together as a five-piece for the final time, but adoration has endured in the interim – perhaps even intensified in the glow of 00s nostalgia. The group not only hauled themselves out of TV talent show Popstars: The Rivals, but then had 20 back-to-back UK Top 10 hits, four of them chart-toppers. As well as the strength of their voices, and their bubbly and even occasionally lairy personalities, their acclaim came from collaborations with Xenomania, the production team who took 60s girl group tropes and kitsch, and warped them through 21st-century sonics.

One of the quintet, the effervescent Sarah Harding, died of complications from breast cancer in September 2021, at the age of 39. Devastated by the death of their bandmate and friend, plans to mark Girls Aloud’s 20th anniversary were paused.

But hard-won celebration rather than sober mourning is the central mood of 30-date arena tour The Girls Aloud Show. The jubilant audience, a sea of twinkling sequined outfits and parents dancing with their Girls Aloud-inculcated children, eagerly anticipate the four-piece who are fashionably late. The curtain falls, revealing Nadine Coyle, Cheryl Tweedy, Kimberly Walsh and Nicola Roberts on tall podiums, as the latter takes the lead with Untouchable, taken from their fifth and final album, Out of Control (from 2008).

An unexpected opener – the only one of their singles not to go Top 10 in the UK – it quickly makes sense as visuals of Sarah Harding appear on enormous screens watching over the arena. In light of the group’s grief, several songs, including this one (“I need you here again to show me how”) feel all the more relevant to their story. Its roaring reception intensifies when the beat of The Show drops and the foursome are lowered to the stage, launching into a lively routine. It’s a strong first act – with the exception of some first-night vocal jitters from each member – featuring thrilling performances of Something New, Love Machine, Can’t Speak French and Biology.

Those early nerves soon dissipate, with Roberts’ solos proving to be the strongest and Coyle’s the most show-bizzy. Walsh and Tweedy also do well in their moments in the spotlight, but the group remain at their best when they come together to belt out irresistibly harmonised choruses. Along with playful banter from Tweedy (warning fans in the pit they might need to catch her if she falls off stage) and heartfelt appreciation from Walsh to the Irish crowd, the first show sets off firmly on the right foot.

Harding continues to be present via the screens that act as large-scale digital scrapbooks of their music videos. With Whole Lotta History, Roberts tells the crowd how they had “no idea how poignant this song would become in our journey,” when they recorded it back in 2005. In the song’s final moments, a montage of Harding plays with the four members facing her, embracing before exiting for the first of four costume changes. The tribute ends with the message: “The darkest nights produce the brightest stars”.

I do think that there is a void in music right now. Pop music is not in trouble, though there is this moment of transition. Huge artists like Taylor Swift and Dua Lipa are selling massive units and producing brilliant music. In terms of the new crop coming through, there is this mixture of TikTok artists and something quite modern. Very few stand out as competitors and future icons. I do love a lot of rising Pop artists. There is a feeling that something is missing. It might be that girl group connection. Spice Girls have toured since their split, yet you feel they will not return to the studio. That is a real shame. Same with Sugarbabes. You’d love to hear a new album from them, as they are one of Britain’s greatest groups. There is not a lot in the way of new girl groups that can compete with the legends. The chemistry between the Girls Aloud members and their incredible catalogue means that there will be a desire for them to return. The Guardian wrote last year about how Girls Aloud’s return was a beneficial thing for Pop:

“Along with the Shangri-Las and the Runaways, Girls Aloud are one of the greatest girl bands of all time. As someone born in 1989, it was probably the Spice Girls that I should have been obsessed with. Sure, I had the collectible photo album now doing a brisk trade on eBay. I could do the signature leg-kick of fellow scouser and ardent LFC supporter Mel C. But the Spice Girls never spoke to me.

That Girls Aloud did, a group born from a music talent show I did not watch, at a time when I was a moody mid-teen more accustomed to listening to Interpol’s Specialist for the 15th time in a row, is testament to a seductive combination of brilliant music and charismatic personality.

The band were never meant to be the breakout stars of Popstars: The Rivals, ITV and Simon Cowell’s twist on their previous show, Popstars (whose underdogs would also go on to enjoy surprise success in the form of Liberty X). The format reboot was simple: the show’s boyband and girl band would go head-to-head for the 2002 Christmas number one slot.

It initially looked as though the excruciatingly named One True Voice would win. But that seemed less likely when their insipid cover of a not-amazing-to-start-with late Bee Gees album track was chosen as the boys’ contender, while Girls Aloud came bursting out the gate with the surf riffs and drum’n’bass pulsating energy of Sound of the Underground (with a gritty video shot in a cavernous abandoned warehouse to boot). The latter song hit No 1, and would stay there for four weeks. Girls Arrived.

Much of the band’s phenomenal success and longevity – 21 Top 10 singles, four of them No 1s – was, undoubtedly, down to the genius production outfit Xenomania. Responsible for Sound of the Underground (apparently inspired by late-90s dance hit Addicted to Bass and nursery rhyme The Wheels on the Bus), Xenomania, founded by producer Brian Higgins, would go on to become permanent collaborators.

In Higgins’ hit factory (actually a Grade II manor house in rural Kent), he, the group and chief songwriter Miranda Cooper would squirrel away, recording songs as glorious and experimental as Biology (which kicks off with a sample of the Animals, eschews the usual linear verse-chorus structure, and changes direction three times); Love Machine (recorded in 18 parts, melding rockabilly and 80s synth sensibilities); and the frankly batshit Sexy! No No No (electro-punk with a Nazareth sample).

But it’s lesser-known album cuts that hold a special place in my heart. The barmy Miss You Bow Wow on their final album, Out of Control, or its stablemate Love Is The Key, which goes from creepy hymn intro to line-dancing country swagger to a harmonica solo played by Johnny Marr. Or Graffiti My Soul, which sounds like Run DMC and Aerosmith’s Walk This Way performed by Willie Nelson in the Hacienda, then remixed by the Prodigy.

Even the so-called flops, such as Long Hot Summer, which still reached No 7, were a cut above most chart fare, and the songs which weren’t as avant garde (the Spector-inflected The Promise, written in seven minutes; the ballad Life Got Cold) were nevertheless outstanding examples of their respective genres.

But the “girls” themselves were crucial. Though sometimes hesitant in the face of Xenomania’s more outre instincts (Nicola Roberts worried about Sound of the Underground because “we didn’t have drum and bass up north at the time”) they have multiple songwriting credits, including on four of the best tracks from Out of Control. As evidenced by their jump-through-hoops talent show origins, each could actually sing, possessing distinctive vocal styles that complemented Xenomania’s jigsaw-like process”.

It is not only about girl groups. There is some of that. They are practically non-existent now. I don’t think it is because there is not a call or space for them. It is maybe a lack of decent enough writers or sounds that catch public attention. Even if the members of Girls Aloud are in their late-thirties/forties, that is not to say that they would need to change their sound. The sort of ageism and misogyny that you get when women of that age release music. Perhaps not capturing the buzz that they had at their peak, they could still create some really wonderful albums. It might be that conflict of recording without Sarah Harding. The fact that their current tour is getting such positive reviews and ecstasy shows that there is this love and demand. This absence of anything like Girls Aloud is very telling. They are a legendary group that still has a lot in them. A clear reason they are touring together. Not only honouring Harding, there is love and affection between the members. I may have missed any announcement. I don’t think any firm plans have been made regarding a new album. The fact is that girl groups can reform and enjoy a really successful second stage of life. I don’t feel that Pop music is reserved for artists in their teens and twenties. The live performances Girls Aloud are embarking on proves they are still at their peak. Pop music does need them to come back. They have potential anthems left. Songs that can rival Sound of the Underground and The Promise. There is this aching and desire. Great to have them on stage and performing hits to the fans. What comes after that?! Maybe there are reservations and reasons. Perhaps there is music and plans in the back of their minds. If Girls Aloud released a new album and came fully back into music, they would be welcomed…

WITH opened arms.

FEATURE: Groovelines: Santana (ft. Rob Thomas) – Smooth

FEATURE:

 

 

Groovelines

Santana (ft. Rob Thomas) – Smooth

_________

THERE is a lot written…

IN THIS PHOTO: Carlos Santana and Rob Thomas/PHOTO CREDIT: Frank Micelotta/Getty Images

about one of the biggest songs of the 1990s. In fact, a song that has gone on to become one of the most acclaimed ever. That said, there is a divisive element to it. Some people who have heard it a lot – when it originally came out in 1999 and since – feel that the earworm has lost any charm. Others outright dislike it. I would recommend that people who are not aware of Smooth by Carlos Santana and Rob Thomas check it out. The first single from Santana’s eighteenth studio album, Supernatural, this was a return to form and prominence of a legendary musician. Smooth was a song that become a colossus and, in the process, gave Santana a new lease of life. Cynics might say the collaborations through the album was an attempt for Carlos Santana to remain relevant by hooking up with more relevant and contemporary artists. I think it was a necessary exploration and diversity from a legendary artist. Someone who did not need to prove himself. Even so, Smooth was a remarkable introduction to Supernatural. A chart hit around the world – including getting to number one in the U.S. -, I am going to get to a couple of features about a huge song. A commercial blockbuster. Before getting to them, I want to bring in a bit of the Wikipedia article for Smooth (who incorrectly list the release date as 15th June, 1999):

“Smooth" is a song performed by American rock band Santana and Rob Thomas of Matchbox Twenty, who sings the lead vocals. It was released on June 15, 1999, as the lead single from Santana's 1999 studio album, Supernatural. It was written by Itaal Shur and Thomas, who re-wrote Shur's original melody and lyrics, and produced by Matt Serletic.

The song was an international success, reaching number one on the US Billboard Hot 100 for 12 consecutive weeks. It was the final number-one hit of the 1990s and the first number-one hit of the 2000s, and the only song to appear on two decade-end Billboard charts. "Smooth" was ranked as the second-most-successful song ever on Billboard's Hot 100 60th Anniversary listing. In 2000, the song won a Grammy Award for Record of the Year, Song of the Year, and Best Pop Collaboration with Vocals. "Smooth" also peaked at number one in Canada and charted within the top 10 in Australia, Austria, Ireland, and the United Kingdom”.

There is an oral history feature from Rolling Stone that was published in June 2019. That was to mark the twentieth anniversary of Smooth. As it turns twenty-five on 29th June, I wanted to go deep with the song. One that came out in my final months of high school. There was some great Pop released in 1999. Some terrific Dance music. Smooth sort of overtook everything. In a year when Britney Spears was coming through, you could not get away from the hegemony and simply unstoppable momentum of Smooth. I guess, because I heard it as a teenager and have grown accustomed to it, the song sounds natural and familiar. People who might have discovered it a few years ago might feel it is outdated. I think Smooth is a catchy and great track that has this swing and catchiness. A joy that does not ask for anything but the listener’s smile. In 2022, The Number Ones featured Smooth. Although they object to a certain commercial nature and a slight uncool nature of Rob Thomas of Matchbox 20 and Carlos Santana joining forces, they could not avoid and deny its appeal and importance:

“The last #1 hit of the 20th century wasn’t just an unlikely smash. It was a blockbuster that defied all known laws of cultural consumption. Santana’s “Smooth” could’ve easily been a hackneyed, desperate grab for relevance from an artist who hadn’t had a radio hit in many years and who hadn’t been in the top 10 in decades. Instead, the song took advantage of a few different cultural headwinds and snowballed into its new role as a nearly Thriller-level cultural phenomenon. Nobody could replicate what Carlos Santana and his collaborators did with “Smooth” — not even Carlos Santana himself. The song was a one of one, a freak stars-aligning burst of consensus in an increasingly fracturing pop landscape.

In retrospect, “Smooth,” accidentally or not, rode a few different waves. The song came on the heels of the Latin pop explosion, the manufactured and hyped-up blast of excitement that still made full-on mainstream stars out of figures like Ricky Martin, Jennifer Lopez, and Enrique Iglesias. The song also took advantage of the burst in growly post-grunge soft rock that had put “Smooth” singer and co-writer Rob Thomas’ band Matchbox 20 on top. And “Smooth” could also be considered the final chart eruption from the baby boomer generation that had ruled the charts for decades. It seems entirely fair to say that Carlos Santana was the last boomer icon to top the Hot 100. (Someone like Madonna, who will appear in this column once more, is technically a baby boomer. But Madonna is an icon who happens to be a boomer, whereas Carlos Santana is a boomer icon.)

Those factors all played a role in the story, but I don’t think any of them led to “Smooth” becoming the pop bulldozer that it was. Instead, I attribute the song’s success to something else: It was just too fucking catchy to fail. “Smooth” stacks hooks on top of hooks, and those hooks are the diamond-sharp type that sink into your brain, that can never be extracted. “Smooth” isn’t just stuck in my head right now. It’s stuck in yours, too. If you’re old enough, “Smooth” has been playing on loop in your head for more than 20 years. Right now, this very second, “Smooth” is squirming its way through some part of your cerebellum, and it will remain there until the day you die. It’s eternal. It’s just like the ocean under the moon.

Nobody could’ve predicted that “Smooth” would hit the way that it did, but a whole lot of people had to work hard to put the song in position to succeed. “Smooth” wasn’t a random occurrence that took everyone by storm. Instead, it’s the best-case scenario for record-label meddling, the kind of thing that every A&R rep envisions when they give notes about how an album really needs a single. The people who made “Smooth” all deliberately set out to craft a hit, and they all succeeded to a degree that they couldn’t possibly have imagined.

One of those people was Carlos Santana. In 1999, Santana’s legend status was secure. He’d made hits. He’d sold millions of records. A year earlier, he’d joined the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame, and he’d convinced one of his heroes, the enigmatic ex-Fleetwood Mac axe-wizard recluse Peter Green, to play with him at the induction ceremony. But that wasn’t enough for Santana. He wanted to get back into the game. He wanted hits.

When he made “Smooth,” Carlos Santana wasn’t a contemporary hitmaker, but he was a familiar name. The man wasn’t starting from zero. He’d already done that. Carlos Augusto Santana Alves was born in the Mexican city of Autlán, and he eventually moved with his family, first to Tijuana and then to San Francisco. Santana’s father was a mariachi musician, and Santana and his brothers all learned guitar when they were young. Carlos Santana loved blues guitarists like BB King and John Lee Hooker, and he played in Tijuana clubs when he was still a little kid. In San Francisco, Santana got into jazz and folk and psychedelia. After high school, he worked as a dishwasher and saved up enough money to buy a Gibson SG. In 1966, when he was 19, he started the Santana Blues Band.

The people at Arista soon found that there were a great many artists who wanted to work with Carlos Santana. They lined up collaborations with Lauryn Hill, Wyclef Jean, Everlast, Dave Matthews, and even Santana’s guitar-hero peer Eric Clapton. Even with that lineup, plenty of the people at Arista weren’t convinced; Clive Davis said that the album was nicknamed “Davis’ Folly.” At a certain point, someone from the label told Davis that the label needed to stop spending money on this thing, to put the album out already. Davis refused. The album didn’t have a single yet.

One of the songwriters who pitched a track to Santana was Itaal Shur, the co-founder of the acid jazz group Groove Collective. Shur had one hit under his belt; he’d co-written the neo-soul star Maxwell’s 1996 single “Ascension (Don’t Ever Wonder),” which peaked at #36. Shur tried to write something that would have the same kind of groove as Santana classics like “Black Magic Woman,” and he came up with “Room 17,” a track about a couple getting together for an illicit tryst in a hotel. Shur recorded a demo for the track, arranging everything himself, and he was convinced that it was a hit. Pete Ganbarg loved the music, but he didn’t think the lyrics would work for Carlos Santana at all. Santana was a family man, and he wouldn’t want to get into anything sexual like that. So Ganbarg said that he could use the song’s groove but that another songwriter would have to come up with the lyrics and the vocal melody. A publishing exec suggested Rob Thomas.

Rob Thomas was (and is) 25 years younger than Carlos Santana. Thomas was born in Germany, where his father was stationed in the Army, six months after Santana released Santana III. (When Rob Thomas was born, the #1 song in America was Al Green’s “Let’s Stay Together.”) Thomas had a rough, chaotic upbringing in South Carolina and Florida. He dropped out of high school, spent a few months in jail for car theft, and went homeless for a while. Eventually, Thomas became the singer for an Orlando club band called Tabitha’s Secret. When that group broke up, Thomas and two other ex-members started a new band called Matchbox 20.

Matchbox 20 signed with Lava Records and released their debut album Yourself Or Someone Like You in 1996. At first, the record went nowhere, and the band almost lost their contract. But a radio station in Alabama started playing their song “Push,” so Lava made it a single. On the strength of “Push” and the similarly yarly “3AM,” Matchbox 20 took off nationwide, and Yourself Or Someone Like You eventually went platinum 12 times over. (Thanks to the goofy-ass chart rules of the ’90s, “Push” and “3AM” never made the Hot 100. But Matchbox 20 will eventually appear in this column, so we’ll get deeper into their story then.)

When Matchbox 20 got done with the years that they spent touring behind their debut album, Rob Thomas moved in with his girlfriend in New York. One of Pete Ganbarg’s publisher friends told him that Rob Thomas was a brilliant songwriter but that he was “doing nothing except smoking pot and playing PlayStation.” (That sounds amazing to me. My guy was living the dream.) Thomas spent an afternoon working on the song, and he eventually hit on the idea that he should write about his girlfriend, the half-Spanish and half-Puerto Rican model Marisol Maldonado. In that Rolling Stone oral history, Thomas said that he was kicking around a few ideas and that he “realized somewhere in the middle of it that I had this wealth of information because I had this smokin’ hot Latin girlfriend already.”

Thomas took a crack at the song, and then he honed it further with Itaal Shur, who lived a couple of blocks away from him. “Smooth” turned into an ode to a “Spanish Harlem Mona Lisa,” even though Maldonado is from Queens. On the song, Thomas promises to “change my life to better suit your mood, ’cause you’re so smooth.” He liked the idea that he could be singing to a woman or that he could be describing the way that Carlos Santana plays. Thomas recorded the demo, thinking that another singer would be on the record. (Thomas had envisioned George Michael, who would’ve crushed it.) Carlos Santana didn’t like the “Smooth” demo at first because he thought it sounded too close to “Guajira,” a song that Santana had recorded in 1971. But when Clive Davis wrote to Santana and told him that “Smooth” was a hit, Santana agreed to record it.

Eventually, everyone decided that Rob Thomas should sing on “Smooth,” and they went through all the music-business headaches necessary to clear Thomas’ appearance. Since Matchbox 20 recorded for a competing label, these were considerable, but they got it done. Thomas finally met Carlos Santana for the first time when he joined Santana and Matchbox 20 producer Matt Serletic to record “Smooth.” In Leila Cobo’s book Decoding “Despacito”, Thomas remembers the first thing Santana ever said to him: “Hey, you must be married to a Latin woman; that’s the kind of thing a white guy married to a Latin woman would say.” I find that to be fucking hilarious. In that same book, Santana himself says that he did indeed tell Rob Thomas that: “He had a different type of sassiness about him.” That’s hilarious, too, not least because it’s true.

In general, I think of Rob Thomas as one of the most generic rock singers of an era that was absolutely infested with generic rock singers. But on “Smooth,” Thomas does manage to conjure a certain level of sassiness. (He says he was just imitating George Michael, the guy he’d imagined singing the song in the first place, which tracks.) There’s something vaguely uncomfortable about this chesty-bellow guy trying to get all soulful with it, but Thomas mostly succeeds. There’s a nice interplay between Thomas’ voice and Santana’s guitar solos. They know to stay out of each other’s way, to complement one another. Santana’s leads are big and clean and melodic, and they add drama to what Thomas does. For his part, Thomas does a nice job going from the sexy-crackle verses to the vein-throb chorus.

The whole thing is just catchy. It was always catchy, from the first time anyone heard it. The groove has a bright sparkle to it, all these horns and pianos and congas winding their way though the track. Thomas growls out stuff that will be stuck in our collective heads for all of eternity. You know all the lines already. “Man, it’s a hot one.” “My muñequita.” “Give me your heart, make it real, or else forget about it.” Those “Smooth” lines — the “it’s a hot one” bit in particular — become memes every few months because they’re just stuck in our shared brain-space”.

I am going to end with a feature from Esquire. Published on 29th, 2019, it was published to mark twenty years of a twentieth century classic. There is another feature I would advise people to check out. So much context and insight into a track that was a massive smash at the end of the decade. Smooth was a song that so many took to heart right away. I still thing it remains relevant and fresh twenty-five years later:

“It is easy—perhaps too easy—to dislike “Smooth,” the Grammy Award-winning 1999 hit by Carlos Santana featuring Rob Thomas of Matchbox Twenty off the multi-platinum album Supernatural. The song's combination of tepidity and synthetic spice is like a dry English muffin misted with Tapatio. Its introductory drum fill, iconic to some, is gaudy and triggering to others. Even Santana himself wasn’t a fan when he first heard it.

Two years earlier, the 50-year-old guitarist was staring down a mid-career crisis. Despite years of steady output and critical acclaim, he felt out of touch with younger audiences and regretful that his teenage children no longer heard him on commercial radio. So, acting on the advice of his wife (and his longtime spirit guide, which he calls Metatron), Santana arranged to meet with the record producer Clive Davis at a lavish bungalow in the Beverly Hills Hotel. The two agreed that staging a proper comeback would require an arsenal of contemporary hits; and Davis, who signed artists such as Bruce Springsteen and Pink Floyd, believed he knew just how to get them.

“Give me half the album and trust that I will find material that is integral to your artistry,” Davis told Santana. “The other half of the album will be whatever you want it to be.”

The result was Supernatural, which featured a buffet of ‘90s hitmakers, including Wyclef Jean, Lauryn Hill, and Dave Matthews. “Smooth” was the very last single Davis and his team delivered to Santana, who at first thought it sounded too rough, “like a painting that needed to be completed,” he said. It also reminded him of “Guajira,” a slinking, piano-driven track with a similar intro, from his 1971 album Santana III. He wasn’t sure about the fit, or the vibe, or even Rob Thomas. It wasn’t the sort of song his band was in the habit of playing.

PHOTO CREDIT: Getty Images

In retrospect, that was precisely the point. From the instant it hit U.S. airwaves in June 1999, the track seemed destined to jackhammer its way into America’s consciousness. Thanks to its key personnel—an aging virtuoso and a rising pop rock star—the demographic potential was almost comically broad. And although haters deny it, the song’s musicianship is slick and impeccable.

It also didn’t hurt that 1999’s pop music environment was uniquely primed for a hit of this magnitude. Latin pop crossovers were ascendant, with Ricky Martin’s “Livin’ La Vida Loca,” which debuted that March, as recent proof of concept. Meanwhile, U.S. album sales were soaring and Napster, the file-sharing service that would eventually firebomb much of the music industry’s critical infrastructure, was only a few weeks old.

Twenty years after its release, "Smooth" enjoys the gilded status of America’s second-most popular song of all time, right behind Chubby Checker’s “The Twist” and right above Bobby Darin’s “Mack the Knife,” according to Billboard. Its potency derives largely from the fact that it is impossible to not react to—whether with excitement, exasperation, derision, or muddled, semi-ironic affection. It was meme bait before memes even existed: the rare cultural product whose very existence morphed into a sort of provocation.

PHOTO CREDIT: Getty Images

“This song belongs with something that people need every day in their lives: air, water and sex,” Santana says. “You can have food—granola, or whatever. But basically, air for your lungs, water for your body, and s-e-x for your psyche.”

Supernatural’s basic blueprint was cribbed from Deuces Wild, a 1997 album that paired B.B. King with a collection of established artists, including Bonnie Raitt, Van Morrison, and D’Angelo. Although that effort didn’t impress reviewers (Rolling Stone concluded that its “juke joint authenticity” was smothered by a “Ritz Carlton budget”), Supernatural’s creators thought they might improve on the idea.

Just as Ganbarg was nearing a panic, he encountered the first of several lucky breaks that occurred during the creation of “Smooth”: Evan Lamberg, an industry friend, called out of the blue to ask if he still needed songs. Lamberg introduced Ganbarg to a young musician named Itaal Shur, who was developing a salsa track called “Room 17” about an illicit hotel rendezvous. Ganbarg loved the basic components, but he found Shur’s lyrics bizarre and kind of tactless.

“It was about a groupie meeting Santana after the concert in a hotel room,” Ganbarg recalls. “Which, if you know anything about Carlos Santana, is 180 degrees opposite of who he is.” (Shur, for his part, maintains the song was simply about two long-estranged lovers cheating on their significant others.) After some negotiations, Shur agreed to polish the track with Rob Thomas, who had just wrapped a tour with Matchbox Twenty and, in Ganbarg’s recollection, “was living in an apartment downtown in Manhattan with his girlfriend, and he was smoking pot and he was playing Playstation.” In other words: enjoying the trappings of a blossoming semi-stardom.

That Shur and Thomas worked so well together—and so quickly—turned out to be another happy accident. The two went from complete strangers to heads-down collaborators virtually overnight. Thomas changed the key of “Room 17” and added a chorus. He re-worked the lyrics to de-emphasize adultery and focus instead on a lusty yet G-rated commitment to his fiancée, the model Marisol Maldonado (eventually described as his “Spanish Harlem Mona Lisa”). It all felt easy, casual.

“It was pretty much songwriting 101,” Thomas says. “At the time, I didn’t think there was any significant moment happening there. We were just kind of in [Shur’s] apartment studio chilling out.”

PHOTO CREDIT: Kevin Mazur/Getty Images

Meanwhile, each tweak felt to Ganbarg like a form of pain relief, a chiropractic adjustment. He allowed himself to believe that maybe, possibly, “Smooth” could turn into the hit he so desperately needed—a song that could move both asses and records. When he played it for his boss Clive Davis, a notoriously tough critic, Davis agreed: They were onto something.

Just one problem: Santana wasn’t interested. He required reassurances from Davis, who had first signed him in the 1960s, whose opinion he deeply respected, and who he had been chanting about, in compulsive sets of 27, during meditation sessions.

“So I have to go in sheepishly to Clive Davis’s office with my tail between my legs and say, ‘Clive, I need your help,’” Ganbarg recalls. “‘You’ve got to tell Carlos that this song is a hit, or else he won't record it.’” Davis dictated a note to Santana, which Ganbarg hurried off to fax. A few days later, Santana relented. He would record the song—as long as Rob Thomas did it with him, live.

“It was pretty much songwriting 101. At the time, I didn’t think there was any significant moment happening there.”

“I believed him a little bit, but I didn’t believe completely,” Santana says of Thomas. “Something happens when Brother Rob Thomas sings at the same time with the Santana band and myself in the same room. All of a sudden, two and two become seven instead of two and two becomes four.”

If there’s one thing that’s remarkable about the recording of “Smooth,” it’s how plainly unremarkable it all felt in the moment. Yes, Santana himself now describes the experience as a “tsunami of positivity,” devoid of egos and full of “EN. ER. GEE;” and yes, he gifted Rob Thomas an elaborate tapestry as soon as they walked into the studio; and yes, he asserts that the forces of gravity and time may have dissipated momentarily. But for many of the musicians involved, it felt routine—an-easier-than average session in service of a simple tune. They recorded live, ran through the track a few times, liked what they heard. Then they went home.

“I listen to it, and it's like, ‘Oh! it's like a song!’” says bassist Benny Rietveld. “We were used to just recording jams.”

PHOTO CREDIT: Kevin Mazur/Getty Images

“The only thing that I remember is just trying to get it to feel right,” adds drummer Rodney Holmes. “Just doing your job: You show up at the studio, you've learned the music. So now, it’s ‘Let’s execute.’ And that was it.”

Simple in theory. Yet it’s worth pausing for a moment to point out that the musicians on “Smooth” are not exactly a gaggle of toothless vagabonds, busking for quarters. They are elite, hall-of-fame-level players with eye-popping resumés and decades of experience. This is perhaps an obvious point, but it’s also one of the most important—and overlooked—aspects of the song’s success.

“We play like there’s no tomorrow,” Santana says. “We play like if you’re gonna get a heart attack by getting to that note, then gosh darn it, get the heart attack. But get the note.”

Everyone agreed the song sounded like a hit. But executives at Arista were still worried about the mechanics of selling America on something new from Santana. So they made a shrewd choice: When distributing the single, they left off the guitarist’s name, marking the CDs simply as “Smooth” and “Mystery Artist.”

Soon, the song’s magnitude, its infectious omnipresence, began to dawn on the creators themselves. For some, the realization came through blunt repetition: hearing it in the grocery store, then in a nearby pharmacy shortly thereafter. Others flipped between radio stations that were playing it simultaneously, or heard it blasting from a beat-up Pontiac in Hawaii, or were simply told by their wives: This could actually be something.

Rob Thomas’ own “aha” moment was goofy and cinematic. “It was one of those weird things that never happens anymore,” he says. “I was just walking down West Broadway and I stopped at a crosswalk, and this car full of hot girls—a convertible—pulled up at the red light and they were blaring ‘Smooth.’ It took me a second to realize what I was listening to. So my first thought was, when I see a bunch of hot girls in a car listening to it, there’s something happening here.” Two days later, in Los Angeles, he was walking through a hotel lobby. “This big fucking guy, just fully tatted, this crazy dude, comes running over to me and he’s like, ‘That fucking Carlos track is on fire, man! Good job!’ I was just like, ‘Oh shit! All right. That’s something.’”

The song was released as a single on June 29, 1999. It was certified gold by September 13 and platinum by November 9. It was the first number one song of Santana’s career, and it stayed at the top of Billboard’s Hot 100 for 12 consecutive weeks (and in the top 10 for 30 weeks). Then it topped the charts in 10 other countries. At the following year’s Grammy Awards, it won Record of the Year, Song of the Year, and Best Pop Collaboration with Vocals. Santana won Album of the Year for Supernatural, Best Pop Collaboration with Vocals, Best Pop Performance by a Duo or Group With Vocals (for “Maria Maria”), and Best Pop Instrumental Performance (for “El Farol”). Nine Grammies in total.

The awards provided a deluge of delayed recognition for Santana, a living legend who over his decades-long career had only won once, in 1988, in the Best Rock Instrumental Performance (Orchestra, Group or Soloist) category. In one photo from the evening, Thomas, Santana, and Clive Davis cradle their statues, each wearing a befuddled smile. Santana, in particular, looks ecstatic. The awards teeter cartoonishly in each man’s arms, as though the Recording Academy had backed up a dump truck and deposited them.

In the expansive canon of American popular music, there are various species of earworms. Some are harmless; some are venomous. Some wriggle in and out in mere minutes. The most powerful kind, though, are those that stick around despite a hapless listener’s best efforts at self-preservation. You really have to hand it to these fuckers: They enter the brain and immediately make themselves at home. They hang pictures, arrange furniture, sign a long-term lease. It goes without saying that they never, ever move out.

Like the cannonball gimmick, “Smooth,” as a cultural product, scrambles our receptors. Its omnipresence has created a nearly infinite spectrum of strong affinities and hostilities, some of which are difficult to parse. It remains fertile for parody—whether with memes that inquire whether today is, in fact, “a hot one,” or with T-shirts that proclaim: “I’d rather be listening to the Grammy Award-winning 1999 hit Smooth by Santana feat. Rob Thomas of Matchbox 20 off the multi-platinum album Supernatural.” At its worst, it is a tongue-in-cheek weapon to be deployed at captive audiences (dinner parties, car passengers); at its best, a colossal hit, crafted with equal parts joy, virtuosity, and cold calculation. In the middle, where most of us reside, it is the largest and most inclusive in-joke of all time. In all cases, the best approach is to simply surrender.

“Here’s the key to miracles and blessings,” Santana says. “Do you have the willingness to allow the spirit to come in? And do you have the discipline to get out of the way?”

So yes, it is possible to hate “Smooth” for the cynical mechanics of its creation, for its permanent residence in our heads and homegoods stores, for the line about a “Spanish Harlem Mona Lisa.” Yet because the song’s success is self-inflicted through decades of our own weddings and parties and makeout sessions, any hatred is also, by definition, a form of self-hatred.

None of this, by the way, is lost on its authors, who like you and I cannot seem to escape it. They continue to hear it at Whole Foods, on their own device’s shuffle function, on commercial radio, and when they are traveling in other countries.

“Even today, in all honesty, I’m OK if I never hear that song,” Thomas says. “When I say that, I love playing it and I love performing it. And I would play it every night, and I have a great joy every time that I do it. But I’m OK if I don’t hear it again”.

On 29th June, it will be twenty-five years since Smooth was released. A song that spent three months atop the U.S. chart, you still hear it a lot today. I know its creators and writers might feel tired of hearing it, they know how important the song is. A single that introduced Santana’s Supernatural and very much put him back in the spotlight, I really like the song. I first heard it at high school and was instantly bonded to it. Regardless of any cynicism and accusations the song is cool or cloying, it is a belter that is guaranteed to…

GET you moving.

FEATURE: Kate Bush: The Deep Cuts: Strange Phenomena

FEATURE:

 

 

Kate Bush: The Deep Cuts

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

Strange Phenomena

_________

I have included a few songs…

from The Kick Inside for Kate Bush: The Deep Cuts. It is an album that is known for a couple of songs. Its U.K. singles. Like so many Kate Bush albums, people gravitate towards the singles and maybe do not investigate those deeper cuts. A song I have discussed many times in other contexts is Strange Phenomena. One of my favourite songs from The Kick Inside, it is a remarkable mature, unconventional and fascinating song from a teenage artist. Discussing, among other things, coincidences and menstruation, we get one of Bush’s most hypnotic vocal performances on her debut album. One of these songs that many non-Kate Bush fans are unaware of, I think it should be played more and better known. Another great example of the peerless songwriting talent of Kate Bush. For someone so young, she was writing about such unusual and interesting subjects. So different to anything that was released in 1978. More in common with classic literature and poetry, it must have been strange for some to hear an album like The Kick Inside. Before getting to a feature about Strange Phenomena, the Kate Bush Encyclopedia have an article that collects quotes where Bush discussed one of the standout tracks from her debut album:

“Kate about ‘Strange Phenomena’

[‘Strange Phenomena’ is] all about the coincidences that happen to all of us all of the time. Like maybe you’re listening to the radio and a certain thing will come up, you go outside and it will happen again. It’s just how similar things seem to attract together, like the saying “birds of a feather flock together” and how these things do happen to us all the time. Just strange coincidences that we’re only occasionally aware of. And maybe you’ll think how strange that is, but it happens all the time. (Self Portrait, 1978)

“Strange Phenomena” is about how coincidences cluster together. We can all recall instances when we have been thinking about a particular person and then have met a mutual friend who – totally unprompted – will begin talking about that person. That’s a very basic way of explaining what I mean, but these “clusters of coincidence” occur all the time. We are surrounded by strange phenomena, but very few people are aware of it. Most take it as being part of everyday life. (Music Talk, 1978)”.

There is so much to discuss and dissect regarding Strange Phenomena. It has an interesting placement on The Kick Inside. After Moving and The Saxophone Song, then comes this gem. It is then followed by the sharper and more Reggae-tinged Kite. The first four songs really set the mood of the album. If the final four or five songs are more about love, loss and the self, then the first four or five are a little less ‘conventional’. I do especially love Strange Phenomena. It was released as a single in Brazil on 1st June, 1979. As it is forty-five very soon, it is another reason to go deep. Before rounding up, I want to bring in an article from Dreams of Orgonon. Some very insightful details and observations about one of Kate Bush’s most underrated songs:

“Strange Phenomena” famously begins with an arpeggiating (A/F) ode to menstruation, “the phase of the moon when people tune in.” In her typical fashion, Kate Bush refers to menstruation as “the punctual blues,” suggesting both a musical quality and a natural rhythm to this particular bodily function (she also refers to it as something “every girl” knows about, but in her defense trans issues were not a topic of national conversation in 1978). Throughout The Kick Inside, Bush has made a case that all functions of the body are a thing of beauty, whether those be love-making or flying. With the opening of “Strange Phenomena,” Bush has extended her invitation of bodily functions into the fold beyond the pleasurable or fanciful and to parts of life women and other menstruating individuals aren’t encouraged to discuss in everyday life. Even more intriguing is how Bush frames menstruation as an almost musical act. In addition to her quasi-musical coinage of “the punctual blues,” she calls a period the phase “where people tune in.” To be sure, menstruating a subject people discuss in private, bringing discomfort to cisgender women and often triggering severe bouts of dysphoria in transgender men. It’s an aspect of life that unites lots of people in their unease by widespread patterns and, more importantly, rhythms of nature. Bush dignifies menstruating by making it a musical process. If there’s a central idea to The Kick Inside, it’s that everything is music.

This exercise of defining musicality as a unifying force isn’t confined to physical planes in “Strange Phenomena.” Bush described the song as being “about the coincidences that happen to all of us all of the time. We can all recall instances when we have been thinking about a particular person and then have met a friend who — totally unprompted — will begin talking about that person.” She more or less paraphrases this in the song, referring to “a day of coincidence with the radio.” Texts are a source of coincidence as well, such as when “you pick up a paper/you read a name/you go out/it turns up again and again.” There’s a sense Bush is being haunted by text, that the spoken word will accompany her wherever she goes. This is where Bush differs most radically from, say, Burroughs or Foucault, in that this constant presence of language and strangeness is a comfort to her, something to tip her hat to.

There’s a philosophical dimension to this as well: Bush once referred to Synchronicity while discussing “Strange Phenomena” in an interview. In short, Synchronicity is psychoanalyst Karl Jung’s concept of the interconnectivity of coincidences. Coincidences bearing similarity but no common cause are termed “meaningful.” This is a pretty easy way to argue for paranormality, and Jung did so (this is not the last time a psychoanalyst will influence Kate Bush. If you’ve read this blog’s title, you already know how). Bush picks up on this, heartily saluting the spectres and weirdness of everyday life.

“Strange Phenomena” is textured with little mysteries and details. Without the Internet at one’s disposal, listeners would go years not understanding some of the song’s allusions. There’s the obscure line “G arrives/funny, had a feeling he was on his way,” which seems inexplicable in context (apparently G was a person Bush knew, while my initial guesses were that G was the Almighty Herself, John Berger’s character G, or David Gilmour himself, most plausibly) yet brings a social instinct to the song, suggesting that people can be just as mysterious as events. The presence of people is mystical to Bush — the living can be ghosts as well. In many ways, “Strange Phenomena” is about clustering: when people gather and events happen close together, magic occurs. “We raise our hats to the hand a-moulding us,” sings Bush, nodding to spiritual forces beyond human understanding.

Sheer abstraction isn’t the only sort of mysticism that surfaces in “Strange Phenomena,” as Kate Bush will often decorate her lyrics with obscure cultural references. The chorus’ emphatic declaration of “soul birds of a feather flock together” is a sweet mystical touch. The most delightfully off-kilter part of the song is the end of the chorus, which has Bush repeatedly singing “om mani padme hum.” This is a Sanskrit mantra, hardly the sort of language you’d hear in a 1978 pop song. Apparently it means “the jewel in the lotus,” but Bush was unaware of this. When pressed on the meaning of the phrase, she admitted up front she had no idea what it meant (although she later published its definition when a fan sent it in). There’s a certain Caucasian ignorance to this, yet the charm of including Sanskrit on a popular album is nonetheless high.

Such is The Kick Inside as a whole. What it lacks in presentation, it more than amply makes up for it in ambition. If you have a song like “Strange Phenomena” on your album, you’re in good shape. If you have that, “Wuthering Heights,” “The Man with the Child in His Eyes,” and “The Kick Inside,” you’re more than set for a career of strong music. The Kick Inside is one of the strongest debut albums of its era, and I’m looking forward to seeing where we go from here.

Recorded 1977 at London AIR Studios. Performed on the Tour of Life in 1979. Personnel: Kate Bush — vocals, piano. Stuart Elliott — drums. David Paton — bass. Ian Bairnson — guitars. Duncan Mackay — synthesizers. Morris Pert — percussion. Andrew Powell — electric piano, production”.

This is a song that I would love to have seen Kate Bush perform live in 1979. Maybe a hard song to appropriately or powerfully stage, it does seem like the Tour of Life version and mounting was pretty impressive. I hardly see this song played on the radio. It is a shame, as it is one of her minor masterpieces. On an album with so many sophisticated, bold, unconventional and unique songs, this is among the best. I would love to see more written about this song. Like other songs from The Kick Inside, it gives us an insight into Kate Bush in her earliest stages. This blossoming and hugely promising songwriter whose work would evolve and develop very quick. I really admire her debut album because it is so unlike anything the industry would have expected. As you can hear from the remarkable Strange Phenomena, Kate Bush could make any subject sound…

SIMPLY magical and essential.

FEATURE: The Digital Mixtape: The Chillout Playlist

FEATURE:

 

 

The Digital Mixtape

PHOTO CREDIT: Armin Rimoldi/Pexels

The Chillout Playlist

_________

I like to put together playlists…

PHOTO CREDIT: Todd Trapani/Pexels

now and then on a particular theme. This Digital Mixtape is all about chillout songs. Whether you see it as a genre or a looser word for music that has laidback vibes, I think we can all do with something a bit more soothing. Chillout does not necessarily have to mean completely relaxed. A song that makes you feel better or can calm you. It can have some energy to it. I hope that the songs below help to put you in a lighter mood. In future Digital Mixtape features, I am going to compile some more eclectic and energised songs. I felt there was place and purpose combining some chilled out cuts. Those that should get the nerves calmed and the body relaxed. If you do require songs to cool and soothe as well as raise a smile, then I hope that the mixtape does the job. Put it on and…

PHOTO CREDIT: Fabian Wiktor/Pexels

DRIFT away.

FEATURE: He’s So Aware of All My Situations: Kate Bush’s June 1975

FEATURE:

 

 

He’s So Aware of All My Situations

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in March 1978/PHOTO CREDIT: Jill Furmanovsky

Kate Bush’s June 1975

_________

I have looked inside…

this important month in terms of Kate Bush’s career though, as it was forty-nine years ago, I am coming back to it. It was an interesting point in her career. Bush was a couple of years away from recording her debut album, The Kick Inside. I am not only going to focus on June 1975. It will be the centrepiece. I want to look at the couple of years before and after. In June 1975, Bush was a month shy of her seventeenth birthday. At a time when most people of her age would leave school and would either be pursuing further education or going into work. I have been spending a lot of time discussing Kate Bush’s early career. I will move on to her later work in future features. I think it is fascinating look at 1973 onwards. So young at the time, she would get a professional nod and interest from EMI in 1974. The deal was completed in 1976. She would record The Kick Inside in 1977. It was a few years of real acceleration and growth. The reason why I want to focus particularly on June 1975 is that is when Kate Bush stepped into a professional studio to record her first tracks. Two of the three she would record appeared on The Kick Inside. The Man with the Child in His Eyes and The Saxophone Song were from the voice of someone who was sixteen. Bush sounds so mature and composed. It must have been a nerve-wracking experience! At this time, she was being mentored by David Gilmour. The Pink Floyd legend had seen her potential and paid for the professional recordings. Acting as an executive producer, he was very instrumental in getting Kate Bush signed and in front of EMI. Gilmour knew that Bush’s family might have preferred her to continue education and not go into music so soon.

EMI knew this too. They were not asking Bush to record an album straight away. In fact, they encouraged her to take some time to grow and develop her music before releasing the album. This early signature and meeting. I am not sure how many major labels would do that in today’s climate! Bush would go onto tour small pubs and clubs in and around London (mainly) with the KT Bush Band just before being called into the studio. Early live exposure that would provide some useful experience. In terms of recording, prior to 1975, there were demos recorded by Bush at her family home. Sitting in East Wickham Farm and putting down these modest but beautiful songs, it was a big leap in June 1975. She had not done anything as huge as that before! Regardless, what we hear on The Kick Inside is what was recording in June 1975. So amazingly professional and mesmeric. This wonderful website takes us through 1973 and 1974:

“1973

Kate records at Gilmour's home studio. The backing band is comprised of Gilmour himself on guitar, and Peter Perrier and Pat Martin of Unicorn on drums and bass, respectively. The songs recorded at this stage include Passing Through Air (later to surface on the b-side of the 1980 single Army Dreamers) and a song now known as Maybe.

[Again, a bit more detail would have been welcome here. There is no mention of how many songs were recorded during these recording sessions. Incidentally, an excerpt of this version of the so-called Maybe, which presumably first appeared on Kate's original demos, was played by Kate during a radio programme called Personal Call. It should not be confused with the presumably more professional version of the recording which was made the following year (see below) but which has never been heard by fans.]

The new demos are again circulated to record companies with no result.

1974

With no progress in her musical ambitions, Kate seriously considers a career in psychiatry.

Kate takes her "O Level" examination and obtains ten "Pass" grades, with best results in English, music and Latin.

1975

Gilmour decides that the only way to interest the record companies in Kate's talent is to make a short three-song demo to full professional standards. He puts up the money.

It is interesting that Bush recorded at Gilmour’s home studio. That must have been quite intense. Though, with a trusted friend encouraging her, it perhaps prepared for going into AIR Studios. That is where she recorded the rest of The Kick Inside. June and July 1975 provided some real contrast. A headiness and first professional recording in June. Some reality and education in July 1975.

June 1975

Kate goes into Air Studios in London’s West End, with Gilmour as producer, Andrew Powell as arranger, Geoff Emerick as engineer. The three songs recorded are Saxophone Song (also known at this stage as Berlin), The Man With the Child in His Eyes, and a song which fans refer to as Maybe.

July 1975

Kate takes her “mock A Level” examinations.

While Pink Floyd are at Abbey Road Studios recording Wish You Were Here, Gilmour plays the three-track demo to Bob Mercer, then General Manager of EMI’s pop division. Mercer is impressed and negotiations are opened.

The deal takes some time to conclude. It is much discussed at meetings between Kate, her family, Gilmour and EMI.

I love the fact that in July 1975 Bush was taking exams and, at the same time, there was this movement around her professional career and record deal. It must have been a strange tussle! Having recorded a few songs in the studio the month before, Bush would have wanted to do more and spend time writing. I guess she had to do exams and have a fallback. It would have been strange and exciting at the same time.

I am going to bring in what happened in 1976 before focusing back on June 1975. There is a bit of confusion as to what exactly happened that year. What we do know is that Bush would not continue in education. She was set to follow a career as a musician:

1976

Kate gets a small inheritance, and decides to leave school to concentrate on preparing herself for a career in music. She buys an old honky-tonk piano for 200 Pounds and begins screeching into existence her unmistakable voice.

[This statement implies that the twenty-two demo-recordings which are now circulating among fans date from no earlier than 1976. I do not know what the basis is for Peter's assumption, however.]

The EMI deal begins to take shape. A publishing contract is settled first”.

June 1975 is a pivotal moment in Kate Bush’s career. In a future feature, I will discuss the relationship between Kate Bush and David Gilmour. How they found one another and continued to be in each other’s lives.

Prior to closing up, it is worth looking closely at the two songs recorded at AIR in June 1975 that made their way onto The Kick Inside. The Saxophone Song is one of the more underrated songs from her debut album. Dreams of Orgonon looked inside a song that was recorded by a then-teenage Kate Bush. A remarkable sonic experience:

“I’ve tried to avoid being proleptic with this blog, so as to evaluate songs as they may have sounded to a listener upon their initial creation. Sometimes that’s impossible. Later developments will demand we recontextualize a song. The public first heard “Saxophone Song” after “Wuthering Heights” caught everyone’s attention. Behind the scenes, “Saxophone Song” is the earlier track—recorded almost three years prior to the release of The Kick Inside. The take recorded in the 1975 session is the one that shows up on the album. It’s not quite one-of-a-kind—only this and “The Man With the Child in His Eyes” made it from the ‘75 session to the album, and their anomalousness is noticeable when they’re separated from the LP’s other crisper tracks. “Saxophone Song” seems like a simple Cathy demo at first glimpse—it’s loaded with the same obscure attempts at poetic phrases abundant in the early songs (“a sturdy lady in tremor/the stars that climb from her bowels”). The singer is once again excited by a mysterious stranger in a magical place, in this case a warm tavern in Berlin (which, incidentally, was the song’s original title). That Elton Johnesque fascination with showbiz as foreign spectacle isn’t gone. For a professional (and “canonical”) song, it’s not too far removed from Cathy’s juvenilia.

Yet “Saxophone Song” is unmistakably a Kick Inside track, one that arguably signals the transition from the central character of our blog from being Cathy to becoming Kate Bush. That’s not just because it’s on the album—it clearly fits with the general style which permeates the record. In part, this has something to do with Andrew Powell, the producer/arranger/keyboard player who oversees this track and rest of Kate’s first two albums (the song also features the first appearance of guitarist Alan Parker,  previously of the band Blue Mink and a Kate Bush mainstay).

More broadly, the song’s themes gesture to both the past and future. Long-term concerns of Kate’s music such as spectatorship, place, and the tangible effects of music surface in “Saxophone Song”—the singer is captivated by this cool stranger in Berlin playing a saxophone. Yet it’s not simply a matter of watching a performer—the artist is interested in the relationship between audience and performer as a partnership, one in which the spectator participates as much as the player, as evidenced by the song’s framing of the listener’s experience (“there’s something very real in how I feel, honey”). The person playing the saxophone is fantastically talented, but they’re a vessel. What matters here is the magic their music awakes in the listener, and just as importantly, the source of the magic”.

I also want to stick with the same blog and their feature about The Man with the Child in His Eyes. One of the most beautiful and extraordinary songs Kate Bush ever laid down, many have interpreted the track as relating to David Gilmour. How important he was. Even though the truth is that the song relates to men in general who have a child-like quality, one cannot ignore potential links to Gilmour:

“So what we’re given with “Child” is that ever-so-rare thing in pop music: a young person’s vision of the world, undiluted by executive interference. In it Kate sings about a strange, wonderful man, older than herself but with an adolescent spirit that’s not unlike hers. The song is somewhat impenetrable, like any artistic work by a young person beginning to navigate the world, and it’s accessible and applicable and gorgeous. It’s rare for artists to pull this off successfully so early on, which may account for the limited amount of in-depth analysis on “Child”—Ron Moy finds little to say on the song in his book Kate Bush and Hounds of Love, and Deborah M. Withers’ classic Bushology text Adventures in Kate Bush and Theory skips the song altogether (frankly the best reading of the song hails from this Tumblr post). The most useful critical take comes from Graeme Thomson’s seminal biography Under the Ivy:

“[Kate] is surely unique among female songwriters in that her canon contains not a single song that puts down, castigates, or generally gives men the brush off. She has never been feminist in the bluntest sense — she wants to preserve and embrace the differences between the sexes and understand the male of the species. Many songs display a desire to experience fully what it is to be a man; she invests them with power,  beauty, and a kind of mystical attraction which is incredibly generous.”

Thomson is straightforwardly doing his “male writer gotta male writer” thing (one has to eye-roll at his audible sigh of relief when he talks about how nice Kate is to men), but there’s a key point in there. Kate’s music is very generous to men, perhaps overly so (perhaps best demonstrated by “Babooshka,” in which the main character’s husband gets off scot-free for an attempt at infidelity). In interviews, Kate has made it clear that the song talks about just that internal spark. “It’s something I feel about men generally… that a lot of men have got a child inside them, you know. I think they’re more or less grown-up kids,” she explained in a 1979 appearance on the BBC One children’s programme “Swap Shop,” to an amused Noel Edmonds (yes, *that* Noel Edmonds) and vocal studio crew. Kate grasps the fine line between being childlike and childish (the latter being perhaps a more common quality). What she’s talking about is a childlike sense of adventure, a desire and willingness to play games and believe in fantastic things. “Nobody knows about my man/they think he’s lost on some horizon.” Only she gets him; this is a part of the man’s internalism he only shares with her. Nobody gets this. He’s at an age where his fantasizing is considered adolescent enough to be an eccentricity.

And the singer is at that transition point where the storyteller becomes as much of a point of interest as the story. In part, “The Man with the Child in His Eyes” is about someone learning what it’s like to have a person to themselves for the first time. They’re experiencing that magical feeling of being with someone who understands and who makes sense to them. It’s not clear what their relationship is—there’s an adolescent ambiguity to the song. “Maybe he doesn’t love me/I just took a trip on my love for him,” sings an almost-certainly-stoned 16-year-old in her award-winning lyric. But despite her lack of sure-footedness, there’s no danger here, no exploitative or sexual dimension to this relationship—it’s a mature but innocent dynamic, and a genuine, human, unmanufactured one”.

Forty-nine years ago, in June 1975, a young Kate Bush recorded three songs at AIR Studios. Two would appear on her debut album. At a moment when she was still at school and there was some doubts whether she would have a long-term career, these big steps were made. It would have been fascinating being in the studio and seeing Kate Bush recording. After that moment, it is was clear that…

NOTHING would be the same again.

FEATURE: Spotlight: J Noa

FEATURE:

 

 

Spotlight

J Noa

_________

AN artist I am…

a little late to, the sensational and powerful J Noa (Nohelys Jiménez) is a teenage Rap prodigy that has been dubbed the ‘daughter of Rap’ The Dominican artist has incredible flows and is one of the sharpest and most original lyricists on the block. Last year, she released the seven-track E.P., Autodidacta. I shall come to some interviews from this year. First, from last year, J Noa spoke to Rolling Stone around the release of the stunning Autodidacta:

“J Noa comes from San Cristobal of Santo Domingo, a common playground for foreign creatives but a tough neighborhood for its residents, similar to the neighborhood of Capotillo. Growing up in San Cristobal inspired J Noa to start making music when she was just eight years old, as she told the famous radio host Brea Frank.

J Noa developed into a powerful performer and storyteller after achieving visibility through her impressive freestyle “Frente a Frente,” featured on the legendary DJ Scuff’s YouTube series. Feeling that the subject matter in rap culture at the moment is somewhat repetitive, J Noa had a particular goal for Autodidacta: “I feel like I came to revive rap,” she tells Rolling Stone. “To me, most rappers should be intentional about what they write, about what they recite. Otherwise, why would rap serve them, or why would they be considered rappers if they don’t live the reality of what they’re rapping about?”

A self-described fan of the genre and all that it offers, she’s eager to demonstrate the complexity of Dominican culture, identity, and challenging lived experience on this project. At the same time, she wants to show the nuances and dignity of her home.

Her lyricism highlights the tragedy of adolescents forced to “grow up too fast” and the vicious cycles that cause the same problems to repeat over again. Noting the difficulties that she witnessed firsthand alongside her young peers, J Noa pulls from an array of real-life topics, from teen pregnancy to gang violence to even drug addiction. On her Autodidacta’s emotional track “Betty,” she turns her lens on parents who are still maturing alongside their kids.

“Some parents are still adapting to technology and they themselves are growing up while they raise their children,” she says. “In ‘Betty,’ I speak to how adapting or not doesn’t necessarily make the difference in domestically violent situations in the households, and some need to realign their priorities”

In other songs on the EP, she boldly calls out the government’s inability to allocate funds for what Dominicans on the island need. “Que Fue” looks at the frustration over leadership’s negligence and lack of resources, like gas and electricity, that has become a growing problem across the Caribbean. The issue has been highlighted in the past, by Luis Ovalles in his classic Eighties merengue classic “Se Fue La Luz,” by Poeta Callejero in “16 de Mayo,” Guaynaa in his “Maria” freestyle, and Bad Bunny in “El Apagon.”

Her delivery is worth noting: J Noa raps at impressive speeds in a distinctively Dominican way. Through her lyricism and unique style, she wanted to combat the backwards idea of Dominican Spanish being “bad Spanish.” Instead, she shows its beauty and complexity.

Achieving such respect and critical acclaim as a young artist isn’t easy, especially in a culture whose art is constantly reduced to stereotypes. Genres like Dominican dembow are constantly diminished, and their depth is often ignored. Dominicans often face the racist burden of “proving themselves” to outsiders, despite all of their crucial contributions to music at large. And yet ironically enough, the country is constantly exploited for its cultural richness.

J NOA IS making it her mission to enter new spaces with her unique sound while holding onto every bit of the essence that makes her who she is. By pouring her all into the music, she shines a light on both the strength and vulnerability of the world she comes from while showing a brilliant sense of pride in herself.

“My self-esteem is never low,” she says. “If people say, ‘What a pretty girl who’s dark skinned.’ To them, I say I’ve always been too much to handle. When it comes to my skin color, my pride is as high as an 180 mile tall skyscraper. In other words, nobody is ever bringing me down.”

Currently, J Noa is finishing high school at an alternative school to ensure she can keep up with the creative demands of Sony, her label, who signed her in January 2023. On Autodidacta, she boldly decided not to include any features, adequately using every minute of each track to say what she had to and putting more weight on her courageous outspokenness.

The project also comes with bold visuals that show that J Noa has her eye on every detail of her project. She worked alongside her collaborators Lennyn Salinas and Daniel Bethencourt and made it a point to create videos that went beyond the obvious. “We created straight movies because that was what was needed to reinforce what you were hearing lyrically,” she says.

Autodidacta is a display of Dominican excellence. J Noa’s clear direction is a testament to her discipline and the care she puts into her work. “Autodidacta speaks to my intelligence and my strength as a young, Black female rapper. It’s something that I’ve always wanted to show, as well as the notion that in rap, it’s about obtaining the public’s confidence and their respect, too.” She’s working toward a better future, and instead of standing by and watching, she’s contributing to a reality she can be proud of”.

I will move on to We All Grow Latina and their chat with an artist that should be on everyone’s radar. Although she is known in the U.K., I don’t think the music of J Noa is played as much as it should be. A recent interview with NME could well see that change. Her music warrants a lot of airplay and love. She is s future legend that we are seeing blossom and bloom:

“Born Nohelys Jiménez, this Dominicana’s raps don’t stray too far from the realities of growing up in the neighborhood 5 de Abril in San Cristobal. Admittedly, her raps are pretty mature for what you can expect to hear from a 17-year-old, but J Noa raps about what she knows and has witnessed firsthand in the Dominican Republic. Her delivery mirrors that maturity and boldness.

“The boldness and maturity that I express in my songs and the delivery of my raps come from how I’ve grown up and what I have learned along the way.”

“The boldness and maturity that I express in my songs and the delivery of my raps come from how I’ve grown up and what I have learned along the way,” says J Noa.

As she speaks, she spares all humblebrag and any self-doubts; she’s very matter-of-fact about her intelligence and wit. It’s what has shaped her to be who she is today.

“Since I was little, I’ve been very smart. I’m the kind of person that will see something, and I will have an idea born out of it. I didn’t have a regular childhood like other kids who were playing in the park, so I grew up having to learn a lot about life.”

Fighting the Stereotypes Contra El Barrio, One Lyric at a Time

She has seen quite a lot growing up in San Cristobal and had to grow up fast. Her freestyles and raps are a vivid look into the socioeconomic state of her neighborhood and her country. Her listeners are the visitors, and she is your tour guide. As depicted in the music video for her latest single, ‘Betty, she shows us how in the barrios of the DR, one’s life can immediately change due to bad decisions, bad company, limited resources, and limited opportunities.

“If you look at the music video, the people that I’m taking in the golf cart with me are upper class. I’m showing them what it’s like to live inside the barrio, so my objective is to open consciousness,” says J Noa. “I’ve actually brought upper-class people to my neighborhood, and they were able to put themselves in the shoes of my community. They left and made sure to give back to the neighborhood. I know my neighborhood isn’t the most beautiful thing in the world, but it also isn’t the most terrible place either. I want to show the beauty of it as well, but the problem is that if I only talk about the good, then no one will pay attention. I need to shed light on the bad, so I can help improve it. Because if it’s all good, then no one is going to think that anything needs to be fixed.”

J Noa isn’t just trying to put her neighborhood on the map to the outside world – she’s also speaking directly to her community. In ‘Betty,’ she describes the cautionary tale of a 17-year-old girl swayed by bad company, teen pregnancy, and drugs. She wraps up the song saying, “lo que le paso a Betty te puede pasar a ti, solo espero que tus decisiones no sean igual.” (“What happened to Betty can happen to you too, I just hope that your decisions aren’t the same.”)

“It’s not just to show the upper-class how it’s like to live in the hood,” says J Noa, “but also open the minds of young girls who follow me and might be in the same situation as Betty. I understand with one positive message and piece of advice that I can give, I can inspire them as someone who is also their age, is working in music, and is also in school. I hope to show them that they can do it too.”

As I speak to J Noa, 17-year-old me is resonating with her message in trying to defy the stereotypes and statistics set for kids from the hood. Having been raised in Compton myself, I let her know that I, too, understood the damaging narrative attached to girls from the hood like me. However, she tells me that it wasn’t just the external world that expected her to fail as someone from el barrio; it was close family friends too.

J Noa Is Writing Her Own Lyrics and Her Own Narrative

“There was one time in our house I overheard them telling my mom that she needed to be careful with me growing up because my eyes were ‘muy vivos,'” she shares. Of course, anyone else would think that a description of having eyes that looked vivid would be a compliment, but this person was implying that J was too smart for her own good, and it was going to end her up in trouble.

“They told her ‘ella es demasiado inteligente, tú tienes que tener cuidado con ella,'” she shared with me. “They told my mom unpleasant things about me. They even told her she needed to be careful with my sexuality. It’s a pressure I’ve felt since a little girl.”

But she’s used that pressure to change the narrative others decided to write about her without her permission.

“When you have that type of pressure, you just want to grow up, shut those people up, and prove to them how wrong they were in making those assumptions about you.”

“When you have that type of pressure, you just want to grow up, shut those people up, and prove to them how wrong they were in making those assumptions about you.”

And she’s done just that. At just 17, she has signed with Sony Music Entertainment, has been covered on Billboard Latin, CNN en Español, Remezcla, People en Español, Univision, and Telemundo (to name a few), and has racked up over a million views on her YouTube channel. And as the self-proclaimed La Hija Del Rap, she is living up to her idols Melymel (La Mama del Rap) and Lápiz Conciente (El Papa del Rap) with a fire flow that keeps all those that cross her path bewildered by her prowess.

A Love Letter to Rap, Black Women, and Herself

However, in such a male-dominated field, I’m curious about how she’s been able to navigate her path as a rapper despite her gender and age.

“This industry is practically a boy’s club, but my age works in my favor. Since I’m young, people are like ‘wow, she’s 17, and she’s rapping with those rhymes and that maturity,'” she shares. “It’s like people forget that rap is for men when they hear me. Still, people make comments online saying that my rap style is just for men and that if I keep up with this style I’m going to change my personality and become a tomboy. What does that have to do with who I am?”

And that is one thing I learned about J Noa in this conversation: she doesn’t care an ounce about what you think or say about her. She is unfiltered and unapologetic in the way she carries herself and in her delivery because she does this for herself, for the girls that look up to her, and for the genre that raised her.

“I dedicate my rap style to Black women. I am a woman that loves my color, and I will defend my color. I was born with rap, and I will die with rap. And the legacy I want to leave is that I was always rap”.

Prior to ending up with the NME interview, there is a quick-fire interview I want to bring in. Earlier in the month, VIPER sat down with J Noa. An award-nominated talent, I know that we are going to see her grow and grow. One of the modern-day Rap talents that can sit alongside the icons and legends one day soon:

“Dominican rap prodigy, J Noa earned her first Latin Grammy nomination for Best Rap/Hip Hop Song. Get to know her better with this VIPER Presents interview…

What five words define your sound?

Authentic, versatile, story, real life, flow.

Tell me something unique about your creative process.

My ideas flow wherever they please. No matter where I am, if I have a new idea, I write it down. I stop whatever I’m doing because, to me these are opportunities I have to take advantage of.

Which song of yours would you like people to hear first?

‘Autodidacta’ because it’s a song where I openly express myself, my talent and who I am as a person. ‘Fronteo’ is about what I clearly have, which is my talent.

What inspired you to make that song?

I just wanted to create a relevant idea that stands out among the multitude of songs I have, one that represents me as a rapper in its fullest expression. And obviously, to surprise people with my skill in double tempo.

What’s the most vulnerable you’ve allowed yourself to be when writing/making music?

I really wouldn’t know what to say because I restrain myself a lot from vulnerability. I don’t like feeling weak, so I think it’s a topic that’s a bit taboo for me.

What’s the best/worst experience you’ve had on stage?

In all my time on stage, I haven’t had any bad experiences because I make sure to prepare very well before stepping onto a stage. Even with the audience, I haven’t encountered any situations that make me uncomfortable.

What is your favourite song to perform?

‘Autodidacta’ because I live in that moment like nothing else in the world. I think if it were a person, it would be my crush.

Which artist/song/album made you want to make music?

The guys in the neighbourhood doing freestyle in front of my house sparked my desire to become someone in life and progress to help my family. However, I wasn’t inspired by a specific artist because I didn’t even have knowledge of this genre.

What’s the meaning behind your name?

My real name is Nohelys Jiménez, so “Noa” comes from Nohelys and the “J” from my last name, which is Jimenez.

If you weren’t making music, what would you be doing instead?

In university studying psychology, or who knows, maybe I would have been involved in another project related to art, because since I was very young, I’ve been very inclined towards art, especially live show.

What’s success to you?

Feeling good about what I’m doing, making my family happy and being well mentally.

What moment in your life/career forced you to change direction?

I believe that moment hasn’t arrived yet. I’ve been doing the same thing since I started, and I haven’t taken another path or direction. Hopefully, things will continue this way.

Where can people keep in touch with you?

On my Instagram channel, or you can also message me directly on Instagram DM”.

It is timely focusing on J Noa. Her debut album, Matanse Por La Corona, is released on 23rd May. I would advise people to seek it out. Such a phenomenal Rap artist, this teenage prodigy is going to go places! NME spotlighted an artist with a strong and compelling voice. Someone whose incisive storytelling puts her out in front:

“J Noa was only 15 years old when Sony Music first reached out to her; she signed with the major label soon after. In the years since, trips to the US for recording and promo events have become the norm, but she’s been determined not to let the hype get to her, and insists that her creative process has remained the same throughout.

She recalls entering large recording studios for the first time and having to adapt to the new environment, from observing how different producers worked to learning how other artists worked on vocal melodies without having lyrics in place. But it’s worth noting that by this point, she had already been rapping for years.

Jiménez first started spitting bars at the age of eight, freestyling with local boys in the streets of her neighbourhood in San Cristóbal. Her hometown is located 30km west of Santo Domingo, the capital of the Dominican Republic, and her local area — which she recently showed fans around in the video documentary ‘Mi Barrio’ — has greatly impacted her capacity for storytelling, the poverty and struggle she saw firsthand giving her a greater sense of perspective from an early age. As she raps on ‘Betty’, the heart-rending tale of a young, vulnerable teenage girl from the hood who unexpectedly winds up pregnant, “a ustedes le sorprende para mí es normal” (“You are surprised, for me it’s normal”).

“I witnessed all of that in the flesh,” she tells NME. “I was just telling the story, so there wasn’t really pressure. But once it was out, I felt that feeling; I started seeing comments and seeing people realise what ‘Betty’ was about, and when I detect pressure I feel that I have to lead by example. If I’m going to tell these kinds of stories and bring light to these problems, I can be part of the problem. If I’m making a rap about being an educated person and here in the interview I portray myself as being an uneducated person, that’s not being consistent, so I need to be true and lead by example.”

PHOTO CREDIT: Fiona Garden

This reflects Jiménez’s belief that rappers are “the journalists of the hood”. It’s a viewpoint she backs up consistently in her music, which explores a wide range of pertinent issues relating to social inequality, politics, relationships, and mental health, all of which she feels a responsibility to document. Her recent single ‘Era de Cristal’ is a good example. Its video displays Jiménez confined in a box bedroom, tossing, turning and visibly struggling to keep it together, these visuals reflecting lyrical content that centres around anxiety and insomnia, with lyrics like “mirando como cae la noche el cielo, una lágrima que adorna mi cara y rueda y mi cuello” (“watching the night fall into the sky, a tear adorns my face and rolls down my neck”).

“Rap is history,” she continues. “History needs to be told, and where I come from, the hood, there was a lack of a voice. There were stories, but no one to tell those stories. I’m part of the hood that now has a voice, and I want to use that voice to tell those stories. With my genre, with my skills, I’m capable of bringing light to these narratives.”

This attitude is a central facet of her forthcoming debut album (due out May 23), ‘Matanse Por La Corona’ (‘kill for the crown’). Produced largely by Honduran-born, LA-based producer Trooko – “he’s a master,” says Jiménez – the album leans heavily on recrafted jazz and soul melodies, from the neat double bass riff that opens ‘Cenicienta’ to the coarse Chubby Checker vocal sample that’s chopped-up and scattered across the tough hip-hop track ‘Arrogante’. Mirroring the figurative violence of its title, ‘Matanse Por La Corona’ sees her spit rapidly against an intense, jumpy beat centred on tight, triumphant bursts of horns that evoke the open credits of a 1960s detective drama (they’re sampled from Canadian composer Dennis Farnon’s 1974 track ‘Snowmobile’). What was the intention behind that evocative album title?

“The point is to acknowledge that I’m not working towards this objective [of ‘killing for the crown’]. It’s not something that matters to me, having that recognition or fame,” she says. “I’m doing this because it’s what I like, I’m working on my own agenda, with my own goals of growing as an artist. I’m telling everyone that they can kill for the crown, but that’s not my agenda, I will be here doing my own thing!”

Perhaps it’s this singularity, this lack of regard for petty beef, commercial success or the trappings of fame, that makes J Noa such a likely candidate to rise to the top. Posing for her NME shoot against a deep red backdrop, her hair braided and fashioned into a majestic floral shape above her head, she exudes the energy of a star. She seems comfortable, staring down the camera, and shuffling with ease to the light reggaeton beats that blast from a speaker by the side of the studio.

The following day, she jumps onstage at renowned Camden venue Electric Ballroom to support Venezuelan funk/soul four-piece Rawayana, and stomps around with the same assured self-confidence. For an 18-year-old, Jiménez has a formidable stage presence and command of the room; she strides around with purpose, and the mostly Spanish-speaking crowd respond fervently to bold lyrics like “Piden guerra, pero vienen sin bala no hay quien resista / A una barra que te deja en coma el tiempo que tú exista” (“They ask for war, but they come without bullets, there is no one to resist / To a bar that leaves you in a coma for as long as you live”). You get the feeling she was built for this.

“Rap is a lifestyle,” she says. “I’m pure hip-hop. There are many ways to do hip-hop, but for me it’s about focusing on the lyrics while also being a bit aggressive. It comes from my personality; I’m bold, I’m aggressive, and I want to represent that I am a strong Black woman. What I do, it comes out of my heart”.

With her debut album out on 23rd May, and a growing fanbase in the U.K., the Dominican Rap artist will take over the world. She is ambitious, keen and hugely impressive. Someone who is a teenager but has this amazing maturity and focus. It will be fascinating seeing where her career heads in years to come! Make sure you follow her. We are seeing the rise of…

A future icon.

___________

Follow J Noa

Instagram:

https://www.instagram.com/jnoamusic/

TikTok:

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

Twitter:

https://twitter.com/jnoamusic

YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzvn-o81V4DOyE0XHSq9Ubw

Spotify:

https://open.spotify.com/artist/4gknAwZk7sfjge8Bho6xre?si=Cvr7q12nSxqrgskkNJKA6A

FEATURE: Queens to the Front: How Women Are Leading the Way in the Industry

FEATURE:

 

 

Queens to the Front

N THIS PHOTO: Billie Eilish/PHOTO CREDIT: Petros Studio

How Women Are Leading the Way in the Industry

_________

I guess we are years away…

PHOTO CREDIT: Wellington Cunha/Pexels

from truly being able to say that parity has reached the music industry. In terms of pay and power, I think it is going to be a very long time before women are on the same level as men. I have written before how the music industry would benefit from being a matriarchy. Rather than it being a case of women ruling sternly and in the same way as the patriarchy, a much more considerate and progressive leadership would hugely benefit all through the industry. I do think that we need to have discussions about how women need to be at the forefront when it comes to the industry. How we need to ensure that future generations coming into music are not subjected to the same inequality and barriers women are subjected to now. Rather than this being anything against men in the music, it is very clear that women are really pushing things forward. Some might disagree but, in terms of the music being put out, women are still very much on top. I am always going to be biased in favour of women. That is not a subjective thing. It is very clear that the most brilliant and original albums over the past few years have been from women. The biggest and most spectacular tours of the past couple of years have been from female artists. Many of the best-reviewed gigs have been. So many of the tipped artists for this year are women. It is clear that the queens are dominating. It is the story across most genres. It is too much to list all the amazing albums made by women the past few years. It is not only across genres that women are ruling. In terms of age demographics and countries, there does seem to be this phenomenal consistency. Two new albums, one from Billie Eilish and the other from Beth Gibbons, demonstrate the sheer brilliance and variety that there is out there.

There is a bigger point that I want to lead onto. How there has been improvements and development yet, still, I don’t think women are valued as much as they should be. The majority of power in the hands of men. Things need to change. The incredible passion and brilliance that they bring to all corners of the music industry warrants a lot more. I want to start with reviews for brilliant new work from two very different female artists. The Guardian reviewed Billie Eilish’s Hit Me Hard and Soft:

“The album tellingly reserves its brightest hues for Lunch, a track that presses a distorted drum machine, ska-inflected guitar and a sudden explosion of noisy, EDM-inspired bass into the service of a lascivious thumbs-up for lesbian sex. Eilish, who built her image on a very recognisable kind of teenage surliness – in photographs taken during her rise to superstardom, she tended to fix the camera with a look of uncomprehending contempt – sounds as if she’s grinning as she sings it.

There are beautiful melodies here, and some very distinctive lyrical touches – on Birds of a Feather, she pledges her love until “I rot away, dead and buried … in the casket that you carried”. But you do start wondering if Hit Me Hard and Soft might not be a little too opaque for its own good. Wildflower slips in one ear and out the other pleasantly enough, an underwhelming state of affairs given how arresting Eilish’s music has proved in the past.

But, as if on cue, the album suddenly shifts focus midway through. The temperature drops, the atmosphere turns more discomfiting, the songs become longer and more wilfully episodic. Subject to jarring shifts in mood and tempo, they frequently end up somewhere completely different from their starting point. The soft rock of L’Amour de Ma Vie is usurped by a clipped beat and burbling synth bass that recalls Joe Jackson’s 1982 hit Steppin’ Out, but not before Eilish’s vocal is warped to the point where she sounds as though she’s retelling the story of a doomed love affair in a mocking baby voice. The Diner melds creepy vocals to an echo-drenched reggae-esque lope, then suddenly slows down, re-emerging as an eerie show tune as the lyrical saga of unrequited love turns murderous. The thick synthesiser chords of Bittersuite swell until they overwhelm the song entirely in a dark, instrumental coda. Blue seems to concern a relationship with another wounded celebrity – “too afraid to step outside, paranoid and petrified of what you’ve heard” – alternating between empathy and the sense that the celebrity is simply too damaged to deal with: the rhythm track sounds similarly indecisive, spluttering in and out of life to haunting effect.

Odd lines and images from earlier lyrics keep reappearing in the second half of the album, as if the later songs here are commenting on, or updating, the previously depicted events. The effect is both enigmatic – when a line from Skinny about feeling “like a bird in a cage” reappears in the completely different setting of Blue, it isn’t clear whether it’s reiterating or undercutting the point – and compelling: what initially seems straightforward becomes deeper and murkier.

An album that keeps wrongfooting the listener, Hit Me Hard and Soft is clearly intended as something to gradually unpick: a bold move in a pop world where audiences are usually depicted as suffering from an attention deficit that requires instant gratification. Hit Me Hard and Soft isn’t in the business of providing that. In its place, it offers evidence that, among the ranks of mega-selling pop stars, Billie Eilish remains a fascinating law unto herself”.

One of our best artists, Beth Gibbons, has just released a stunning solo album. In an industry that is still ageist, we have seen an album from a young U.S. Pop artist and an older and established queen producing equally wonderful work. This is what The Guardian said about Lives Outgrown:

“No one is ever going to accuse Beth Gibbons of over-exerting herself in the rapacious pursuit of fame: her solo debut arrives 22 years after her collaboration with Rustin Man, Out of Season, 16 years after the last Portishead album, Third, and 11 after it was first announced.

In fairness, Lives Outgrown has a unique sound you suspect was only arrived at after lengthy experimentation. The Rustin Man album echoes through the acoustic guitar and folky melody of Tell Me Who You Are Today, and on Reaching Out; so do the hypnotic rhythms that underpinned Third’s We Carry On and The Rip. But Lives Outgrown ultimately draws you into a soundworld entirely its own. Strings play mournfully low and squeal discordantly; the snare-free drumming resolves into a Bo Diddley beat on Beyond the Sun, and elsewhere rumbles ominously, like the last sound you’d hear before being ritually sacrificed.

Gibbons’ careworn voice threads through it: intimate, in-your-face and utterly distinctive as ever, singing about ageing and loss. “Come through my heart when you can”, she pleads on Whispering Love, apparently to the ghost of a late friend or relation. The album’s autumnal gloom is affecting and enveloping, although occasionally dappled with warmth and light, as when Lost Changes’ lovely chorus arrives, or a solo violin spirals skywards on For Sale, or a children’s choir appears during Floating on a Moment, albeit singing “we’re all going to nowhere”. A dispatch from the darker moments of middle age, Lives Outgrown is occasionally challenging, frequently beautiful and invariably gripping”.

PHOTO CREDIT: Sound On/Pexels

We are heading into festival season. I may sound like a broken record when it comes to highlighting the slow movement forward made by the industry compared to what women are producing. How truly vital and important they are. I spotlighted only two new albums. The truth is that every month we are receiving such stunning work! From great emerging artists coming through to some icons of the scene. I wanted to salute that on its own. How each year is dominated by women. It makes me think about the continuing gaps and issues that need to react to the merit from female artists. I know that we are seeing steps forward though, with each bit of good news, there seems to be two steps back. When we hear of women discriminated against and sexually assaulted. Prejudice and ageism still very much present. Festival bills and radio playlists still not balanced and where they should be. Women having to work harder to get the same opportunities as men. It is always angering knowing that such phenomenal artists and women are not being given their dues. It is worse than that. If we look at the side of the scales where women are releasing the best music, putting on the most captivating gigs and are these amazing advocates and representatives, they are still seen as somehow commercially inferior. Having to endure so much abuse and this real lack of respect. Male advocacy and allyship is not where it needs to be either. Few of their peers tackling what is happening and helping to call for change. I have said the same thing time and time again. I am always stunned – but not surprised – when hearing a magnificent album or discovering this unforgettable artist. These inspiring women. Beyond albums and gigs, label owners, venue bosses, journalists and D.J.s together with their sisters are changing the industry. Making it so much stronger. Will we see the day in our lifetimes when women are equal and the industry moves away from the male dominance and patriarchy to a better landscape. Not that the music industry is as toxic and unshifting as other areas of society. It is one where women are clearly worthy of a lot more than they get. Made to feel safe, respected and heard. You have to ask…

WHEN will that happen?!