FEATURE: The Digital Mixtape: Pride Month: Modern-Day L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.+ Artists to Watch

FEATURE:

 

 

The Digital Mixtape

IN THIS PHOTO: Mia Wray/PHOTO CREDIT: Madeline Kate

 

Pride Month: Modern-Day L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.+ Artists to Watch

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IT is Pride Month…

do I was keen to get to a playlist that combined modern-day L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.+ artists that need to be on your radar. I will put out another feature or two related to Pride, as it is important that it is discussed and celebrated. You can find out more important about Pride Month here. There are some wonderful Pride/L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.+ artists on the scene at the moment. From legends and icons through to artists coming through, they are warrant highlighting and salute. It is great to hear radio stations put together playlists and dedicated their time to marking Pride. I am sure you will know some of these artists, though there are likely to be a few that are new. It would be great to hear any tips from people when it comes to artists that should be include on the playlist. In honour of this year’s Pride Month, below is a playlist of some contemporary L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.+ artists that you need to know about. As you will discover, they are truly fantastic. These are remarkable and important artists who are…

IN THIS PHOTO: Ray Laurél

FLYING the flag.

FEATURE: Spotlight: Lambrini Girls

FEATURE:

 

 

Spotlight

PHOTO CREDIT: Titouan Massé

 

Lambrini Girls

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THERE might be a bit of…

confusion and inconsistency, in the sense that Lambrini Girls are a duo, though they are also in publicity photos with a third member, Banksy. Rather than refer to them as a trio, there are going to be photos with Banksy included. The interviews are with Phoebe Lunny and Lilly Macieira. Recent cuts God’s Country and Body of Mine are incredible and stunning examples of the Punk duo’s prowess. Lambrini Girls should be on your radar. Earlier in the year, VOCAL GIRLS spoke with the duo. Following their E.P., You’re Welcome, Lambrini Girls are definitely on a mission. One of the most powerful and important acts in the country:

“Following last year’s debut EP ‘You’re Welcome’, Lambrini Girls are back with riotous new single ‘God’s Country’. To mark its release, VOCAL GIRLS chat to the band about using their platform and responsible activism.

“I don’t think there’s any point in being a punk band and releasing a political song that’s a pile of shit,” Phoebe Lunny, vocalist and guitarist of punk duo Lambrini Girls, says firmly. She’s reflecting on their latest single, ‘God’s Country’, which takes thrashing aim at the pretty bleak state of affairs in the UK right now. “Just saying ‘don’t trust your government, let’s have a fucking beer, waheeeey’ – it trivialises it,” she continues. “I wanted [‘God’s Country’] to actually be attuned to the current political landscape.”

PHOTO CREDIT: Brodie Florence

To date, Lambrini Girls (completed by bassist Lilly Macieira) have followed the same highly-charged and unwavering path, confronting social issues such as lad culture, misogyny, transphobia, and homophobia across last year’s ‘You’re Welcome’ EP. They’re now hunkering down on a farm to write their debut album, where they do at least have the idylls of Oxfordshire countryside – complete, as they cheerfully inform me, with horses, chickens and geese – to offset the doom. ‘God’s Country’ is the first single to bridge the gap between the two projects: twisting hot-headed, flag-wielding patriotism on its head to poke holes in its logic, the song takes “God save the king” as its snarling refrain – an unfortunate coincidence given last week’s announcement of Charles’ cancer diagnosis. “The timing of that!” Phoebe sighs, shaking her head ruefully. “What can you do? That’s out of our control.”

One issue Lambrini Girls have always shouted loud about is the treatment of women and non-binary people, from their avid support of trans rights and ‘FUCK TERFS’ merch to songs like ‘Boys in the Band’,  which calls out the toxic culture enabling assault (“Problematic and well connected / But it's still being deflected / Because we separate the art from the artist”). The government’s Misogyny in Music report, published at the end of January, therefore came as little shock to either of them. “People on X [fka Twitter] were [reacting] like–,” Phoebe slaps a hand across her mouth to feign outrage, “–what?!” She sighs, exasperated. “What do you mean ‘what?’! This is our whole fucking lives! This is every non-male person’s career in music. It’s like everyone forgot the #MeToo movement happened, or think it just exclusively applied to the film industry. No!”

“Among women and queer people it’s common knowledge,” Lilly nods. “When I was first getting into music, my mum warned me about the industry and said ‘you never have to do anything you don’t want to do’, blah blah blah. Even she was completely aware of what it’s like.”

An example of social media’s mixed blessings, in the wake of the report, Instagram provided a space for people to share solidarity as well as their own experiences. Phoebe points to a statement posted by Izzy Baxter Phillips, frontperson of Black Honey. “I think what’s beautiful is that the more people who are vocal, the less scary it gets,” Phoebe says. “[Izzy’s] in a relatively big band, so a lot of smaller bands, or a lot of women or queer people, are gonna see that and think ‘it’s safe for me to do that too’. It makes it a lot easier for other people who might be a bit scared to do so – which is slay!”

Among other things, the report aims to limit the use of NDAs and develop a school programme to combat misogyny in boys. The latter point feels most critical for digging out the problem’s cultural root, but that is far easier said than done. “I feel like we’re in this weird sensationalist cycle where this kind of thing comes out and there’s a temporary uproar about it, but no one’s actually learning from it,” Lilly says. “People don’t take responsibility and don’t look at their roles in these things – particularly men, to be honest. The people who are affected by it are lower down in the power dynamic because we’re affected by it; that’s the inherent nature of it.”

“You have to recognise your privilege and use it to open dialogues, which might even get you in a bit of shit,” Phoebe agrees. “Every non-male person is putting their fucking neck on the line – it’s not enough to just see it and be like ‘aw yeah, that’s shit, let me repost that’.”

Challenging “cis geezers” and the generally unconverted to accept their sermon is why festivals and support slots are an important part of the Lambrini Girls agenda. “If you’re preaching to the choir 24/7 you’re enforcing your bubble, but you’re not making it any bigger,” Phoebe says. “In a crowd of 700 people, you might change one person’s mind, or at least make them think; that’s what’s important.” In fact, making people think seems to be the band’s raison d’être. Theirs is not a hollow, controversial-for-the-sake-of-it rehash of punk; nor is it aloof, claiming absolute wisdom from atop the high horse. Instead, Lambrini Girls are navigating both the political and digital landscape with admirable transparency - learning as they go - and making sure to scream their lungs out about any and all prejudice they see along the way”.

In February, DIY chatted with Lambrini Girls. They explained how they wanted to piss people off and make them question themselves. They are releasing such potent music that everyone needs to hear. With stations such as BBC Radio 6 Music shouting about them, this duo are primed for headline stages:

“Lambrini Girls, their vocalist and guitarist Phoebe Lunny explains, has always been “a passion project”. Born from the bones of a different band and a frustration with the Brighton music scene (and beyond), the project started in earnest when Phoebe met bassist Lilly Macieira-Bosgelmez - who’d been given 24 hours to learn the band’s set from scratch - and “something just clicked”.

Both were ambitious, determined to try and make music their career. More importantly, both were angry: about the ubiquity of misogynistic and homophobic ‘lad culture’; about the widespread occurrences of sexual assault at gigs; about the musicians and fans who perpetuate these behaviours. And so they set about addressing all these issues and more via the medium of fiery, three-minute punk scorchers - music that is virtually unignorable, intensely powerful, and utterly memorable.

“Hey mum / Why haven’t I had a boyfriend? / Um, maybe it’s because I’m potentially a lesbian?” Phoebe intones on debut single ‘Help Me I’m Gay’. Live, its performance involves asking the crowd to “put your hand up if you’re gay!” - something which can variously be “a celebration of people’s queerness” if there are lots of hands, or simply a way to show people that they’re not alone. And in encouraging this sort of community in others, the pair have gained confidence in their own identities, too. “I was a little bit more of a late bloomer with my sexuality,” says Lilly. “I started off saying ‘I’m half gay’, because I’m bisexual, and then with time I learned that actually, that’s not being half gay - [bisexuality] counts just as much. There are some parts of the queer community where you can be made to feel a bit invalidated as a bisexual person, so the band really helped me in that sense.”

PHOTO CREDIT: Emma Swann

Elsewhere on Lambrini Girls’ 2023 EP ‘You’re Welcome’, tracks like ‘White Van’, ‘Lads Lads Lads’ and ‘Boys In The Band’ take aim at society’s deeply embedded problems with sexual harassment, with the latter placing the alternative music scene under particular scrutiny. Do they think that any significant progress has been made with tackling abuse culture within the industry? “In Brighton, it seems like people are being a lot more vigilant of it and opening dialogues,” muses Phoebe. “But I think there’s a lot of work to be done in London. It’s not a safe space; there are bands that are actively known to have done very dodgy stuff who still get to play the venues everyone else does.”

The first step towards stamping out these sorts of behaviours, the band believe, is “calling out your mates and believing victims.” Lilly explains that “we’re not trying to peddle a sort of inconsequential cancel culture where you hear something bad about someone then immediately cut them out. If someone is willing to take responsibility or explore the ways in which they might have hurt someone, that’s something really positive to go off.” The same can be said for their attitude towards the social discourse surrounding trans rights; in an era where social media has us primed to think in absolutes, it’s important to give people the grace to get it wrong (misgendering someone, for example) - providing they’re willing to learn.

“There’s ignorance on one hand,” says Phoebe, who is currently sporting a Lambrini Girls cap emblazoned with the words ‘FUCK TERFS’. “Then there’s wilful ignorance. There are people who are being actively hateful and are trying to stop other people just having human rights.” But, as Lilly acknowledges, “fifty years ago we’d be having this conversation about homophobia rather than transphobia. So I’d like to hope that [trans rights] will change with time.”

Phoebe also points out that these conversations shouldn’t centre around the band. Rather, their goal is “to show allyship and use [their] platform to bring these conversations into a slight mainstream” - something they believe is intrinsic to being a punk artist. “If you’re building your platform off politics, you have to put your money where your mouth is. If you’re a political punk band, then you do have a degree of responsibility to use your platform for good”.

Last month, Lambrini Girls were interviewed by Rolling Stone UK at Awake Festival. Among their missions is to make men speak up when they see things that aren’t okay. So much modern music is empty and is all about love stories and personal woes. The music of Lambrini Girls seems much more important. They are tackling themes and asking questions that the biggest artists in the world are not. You almost wish that roles were reversed and Lambrini Girls got to tour the world and have tens of thousands of people watching them:

“The Brighton punk duo address the issue on their song ‘Boys In The Band’, which sees them take aim at musicians who take advantage of their status to commit heinous acts.

“Hide your drink, from the boys in music, Before you pass out in their limousine,” comes their stark warning on the song.

Taking aim at victim-blaming, they add: “It was completely your fault, you can’t prove it was assault. And you shouldn’t have got so drunk at their gig.”

Before performing the track at last weekend’s Wide Awake Festival, the pair also encouraged attendees to call out their friends whenever they are confronted with inappropriate behaviour.

Speaking backstage, vocalist Phoebe Lunny told Rolling Stone UK: “It’s really important to us. We’re both women, so it’s something that we can relate to directly because it’s one in four women.

“Any crowd can relate to what we’re saying because half the crowd has experienced it, it’s something which is happening constantly and it is a massive societal issue that we have. It does really just stem from the fact that people hate confrontation, calling out their friends and actually speaking to their friends about it.

“Especially in music scenes, everyone just wants to be popular. Everyone wants everyone to like them. So when they hear something dodgy, they don’t say anything.”

She went on: “I’ve been that person [who doesn’t anything] myself, I know I have. But it comes from opening a dialogue and educating yourself and learning and also relating to something hat you can’t really relate to yourself sometimes.”

Her bandmate, Lilly Maciera, added: “I think also what we’re trying to do is trying to get men specifically to take accountability and to get more involved in things that they are seeing happening. Because I think the issue applies to all of us. I don’t think it is just men, but because of the power dynamic that exists between men and women, I think generally it shouldn’t be this way, but men hold a lot of power. And I think there’s a difference between women being like, this is fucked up, this is not OK and a man saying that.

“I think the reason for this is because women can relate to experiences as such. And I think men generally can, but not all of them. And it’s less likely for men to be able to relate to these kinds of experiences because I think micro-aggressions are a part of our daily lives. I think they are part of all women’s daily lives, and I don’t think they’re a part of men’s daily lives. So I think it’s all about making men feel aware about their privilege and trying to get them to be able to identify situations that are not OK and trying to encourage men to speak up about things when they see things that are not OK”

Explaining how the song reflects the “social climate we’re in,” Maciera went on to explain how parallels can be made with the importance of speaking out against the ongoing war in Gaza.

“The genocide that’s happening at the moment is the same thing. We’re not directly affected by it, are we? But it’s very important to stand up for it,” she said”.

I really love Lambrini Girls. They are such a vital force for change and conversation. Releasing stunning music that has real depth and bite, you need to get involved and follow them. As they are on the radar of some big music websites and radio stations, you are going to see them climb even higher with each new single. I cannot wait for an album from them. Artists that call out the bad and unlawful, compel change in those not doing enough, and who are also committed and passionate activists is…

ONLY be a good thing.

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Follow Lambrini Girls

FEATURE: Spotlight: Charlotte Day Wilson

FEATURE:

 

 

Spotlight

  

Charlotte Day Wilson

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ONE of the best albums…

PHOTO CREDIT: Matthew Tammaro

of the year has come from the magnificent Charlotte Day Wilson. Cyan Blue came out in May and is an album that you need to add to your collection. I have been following her for a while now. Although she has been making music for a long time, many might know her as a collaborator rather than a solo artist. Her second studio album announces her as a major talent who you need to watch out for. I would urge people to pick up Cyan Blue. This is what Rough Trade say:

“Toronto-born-and-raised singer, songwriter, producer, and multi-instrumentalist Charlotte Day Wilson announces her highly-anticipated sophomore album Cyan Blue via Stone Woman Music / XL Recordings. Cyan Blue finds Wilson crafting a smoothly woven cyan tapestry of her eternal influences; thumping gospel piano, warm soul basslines, atmospheric electronics, and penetrating R&B melodies. Yet, it possesses a sense of vastness that rings in a new era for Wilson, one in which she’s embracing collaboration and newfound creative openness tinged with wistfulness and yearning and a reflection on youthful  innocence. “I want to look through the unjaded eyes of my younger self again,” Wilson explains of making Cyan Blue. “Before there wasn’t as much baggage, before so much life was lived. But I also wish that my younger self could see where I am now. It would be nice to be able to impart some of the wisdom and clarity that I have now onto her.”

Working with producers like Leon Thomas (SZA, Ariana Grande, Post Malone), and Jack Rochon (H.E.R, Daniel Caesar), Cyan Blue demonstrates Wilson’s sonic expertise while also showcasing the next evolution of her time-bending songwriting. Through 13 hypnotizing tracks, she continues to use music as a vessel for unpacking relationships, which in turn allows her to meet and understand herself in life-spanning, panoramic focus. But, on Cyan Blue, she challenged herself to kick her perfectionist tendencies.  “Before, I was extremely intentional about creating music with a strong foundation, a bed of artistic integrity,” Wilson reflects. “But that was a bit stifling, like, ‘Let me just make a great piece of art that will stand the test of time, no pressure.’ Now, I think I'm getting out of this frozen state of needing everything to be perfect. I'm more interested in capturing feelings in the moment as they happen and leaving them in that moment.”

While this is only her second album, Wilson’s influence in music has made a major mainstream impact. Wilson broke out in 2016 with her critically acclaimed EP, CDW, followed by 2018’s Stone Woman and made her debut studio album an official coming out moment in 2021 with the critically acclaimed, self-released Alpha.  Over the past decade, she’s been sampled by Drake, John Mayer, and James Blake, while Patti Smith has recently praised and covered Wilson’s 2016 breakout single “Work.” Additionally, she’s collaborated with artists like Kaytranada, BADBADNOTGOOD, and SG Lewis, demonstrating that there’s no sound Wilson can’t adapt to and sprinkle her cyan-colored magic over”.

Cyan Blue is a beautiful and instantly memorable album. Highlighting the fact Charlotte Day Wilson is a phenomenal songwriter. One of these artists that you need to hear. I have a few interviews that are worth sourcing. The first, from Sniffers, takes us inside a remarkable album:

“In Laurel Canyon, alongside her co-producer Jack Rochon, Charlotte Day Wilson crafted her sophomore album ‘Cyan Blue’; a graceful exploration of self through past-reflections and future desires.

While Wilson is known to have self-produced the majority of her previous projects,—from her 2016 EP ‘CDW’, and 2018 EP ‘Stone Woman’, to her 2021 debut album ‘Alpha’—‘Cyan Blue’ is a testament to creative easement achieved through collaboration.

For 'Cyan Blue,' Wilson prioritized enjoying her creative process over the pressure of producing a perfect final product. During recording sessions, she would drive to Ranson’s house each day before heading to the studio together. She shares, “those short drives were as important to us as working on the music, to listen to references while taking moments to check in on each other.” After completing ‘Cyan Blue’, Wilson stated that Rochon allowed her to feel “completely free and weird and able to make mistakes”, stressing to us the importance of having Rochon’s name “loud and clear since he was seminal to the creation of ‘Cyan Blue’.”

The creative freedom that Rochon granted Wilson doesn’t fall on deaf ears, rather their collaborative venture stands as Wilson’s most vulnerable and thought provoking feat to date. Transversing time over 13 life-chronicling tracks, ‘Cyan Blue’’s emotional resonance provides an earnest vantage point into Wilson’s desire for a clear understanding of self.

Hi Charlotte, it’s nice to meet you. Congrats on the new project.

Hello, thank you so much!

I wanted to start off by chatting about the title track ‘Cyan Blue’. You say a reflective line to your younger self; “I wish I could see through your eyes one more time”, can you expand on this wishful thought?

In general I’m on a perpetual journey of trying to connect with my inner child. I feel the most connected with myself when I feel close to the person I was when I was a child. I believe at our core we’re always those people, that we are who we are from a very young age.

Something I’ve always been aware of is my grief towards the fact that we can’t truly feel feelings again, and while we may remember the events that emotionally moved us, or recall what hurt us, or why we felt love, we don’t actually remember how those feelings felt as we lived them. As a deeply emotional person, I’ve enjoyed talking to my younger self about what those experiences felt like for me.

Looking into the future, your track “New Day” revolves around your desire to be a mother. Can you tell us about the personal narrative you shaped within the lyrics?

I wrote ‘New Day’ as I was confronting the heavy feelings I encounter when I think about being a mother in a lesbian relationship, specifically about how only one mother can be genetically tied to the child. This reality hurts sometimes, and while it’s not something I’ve necessarily spoken openly about, I hope that in putting these thoughts into a song that other people in Queer relationships who are experiencing these same feelings feel seen and heard.

I read in a past interview of yours that at the tail end of making ‘Alpha’ you began to deep dive into Joni Mitchell’s ‘Blue’; Did Joni’s song writing inform your storytelling approach for ‘Cyan Blue’?

Honestly, at large, not really. While that is a seminal album, and though I was working in Laurel Canyon, and she was a big Laurel Canyon girl, I was just using ‘blue’ as a lens to connect to the world around me.

What role did Laurel Canyon play as a backdrop to the creation of your album?

What was important for me in creating this album was to have fun with my friend and collaborator, I wanted to enjoy the process more than anything else. I didn't really care how it ended up, at the end it was just about the process and really enjoying it. Everyday in Laurel Canyon I would pick Jack Rochon up from his house and drive him to the studio, those short drives were as important to us as working on the music, to listen to references while taking moments to check in on each other”.

There are a couple of other interviews and a review that I am keen to get to. ELLE talked to Charlotte Day Wilson about her experiences from adolescence that she brings into Cyan Blue. I am fascinated by album titles that mention colours. How they have an emotional attachment. A variegated palette of albums where the titular colour holds a special significance for the artist. As Day Wilson says in the interview: “I was experiencing some sort of synesthesia with a color between green and blue”:

“Since your debut album ALPHA came out in 2021, what’s changed?

A big thing that’s changed is that things aren’t shut down anymore. My last album came out during the pandemic and I was working on it for the majority of the pandemic. It was a pretty isolating experience. It was hard to feel connected to everyone around when we were all so alone. My process with that album creatively was very insular and very isolating. I was just by myself playing everything and writing everything. Now, I’m coming out of that.

How do you feel about that album now that you’re a few years removed from it?

I love it more than I did when it came out. At the time, I still felt those perfectionist things like wanting to keep tinkering with it and not feeling sure if things were done. Now that time has passed, I think it’s aged well, for me at least.

What were you interested in exploring with Cyan Blue?

Connection. I think it’s one of the most human pursuits that we have as people. We want to connect with other folks, whether it’s people in our community, our neighbors, our partners, our friends, our parents. We want to find those moments.

Did the album title come before the songs?

No, it was a bit about halfway through that I started to think that maybe that could be the title. The other thing with the title is that my eyes are green and blue. On the title track “Cyan Blue,” I talk about how I wish I could see through my younger eyes. That’s a theme that I tend to lean towards a lot, talking to my younger self or different versions of myself. Whether it’s past, present, or future, it’s something that I find really interesting in music. So I follow those leads. Music is a vessel for me to talk to my younger self. It’s healing.

The ninth track on the album is a cover of “Over the Rainbow” from The Wizard of Oz. Was that another way you were calling back to your childhood?

[Laughs] I was lying in bed one night and I started singing “Over the Rainbow” to myself while I was in that weird liminal space between being asleep and being awake. And I was just laughing because I was changing the lyrics and turning it into a song about when a girl is over her gay phase. It was like, “Oh, she’s over the rainbow now.” So then I rewrote a bunch of lyrics to it and I recorded it like that, but we couldn’t get that cleared. So then I had to do a straight cover. In the end, I did find a lot of amazing metaphors that tied in with the rest of the album and it’s just such a beautiful song and I love the arrangement that my friend Jack [Rochon, her co-producer] and I did for it.

I wish they had cleared your original idea.

I think I’ll perform it on stage and people can hear the harshness of what the lyrics were. I think in the end it was a blessing in disguise that I wasn’t allowed to say what I was saying.

PHOTO CREDIT: Matthew Tammaro

That’s a good incentive to catch you on tour.

[Laughs] Yeah.

I also really like the song “New Day” where you sing about motherhood. What’s the story behind that one?

That’s definitely the most deeply personal song on the record. It’s about something that myself and my community and my partner talk about, but I don’t think I’ve heard people write about it before. The song is about the grief and pain that you go through as a queer person in a queer relationship when you’re thinking about having children and how only one parent can be genetically tied to that child. So I’ve always thought about how that would feel. It’s a song about how I want the child and even if she doesn’t have my face, she’ll have my name. So that’s what it’s about. I just want a new day, a new Charlotte Day.

Do you ever feel nervous about being vulnerable in your music, especially in this internet era where things get misconstrued so easily?

I do, but that’s what art is. It’s pure expression. And I know that if it’s something that’s really vulnerable, then other people have felt it too and they probably have been scared to say it or haven’t had an arena to commiserate with other people about it. The thing that I get more scared about is putting out songs that I’m not 100 percent sure are completely true to me.

Did you listen to any music while making the album?

No, I tend to not listen to music when I’m working on my projects because I feel like I absorb too much and I don’t ever want to be too heavily influenced by something. Even if I listen to a song on the way to the studio when I’m in that creative state, there’s a chance that I might end up being like, “Oh, I wanna make something like this.”

I immediately thought of Joni Mitchell’s album Blue, since the title is similar.

That was an influence. I was staying in Laurel Canyon and I was in this blue phase and obviously that album is a hugely influential album for me. But, I don’t know if I would... it’s tough. I feel like some of my heroes have been disappointing me recently. I just found out that she’s done blackface and has an album [Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter] where she’s in blackface. It’s crazy that a lot of people don’t know about that. And she’s never said anything publicly about that or apologized. The same goes for Patti Smith who’s covered my song “Work.” I can’t rock with her anymore because she has a song [“Rock N Roll N*****”] that she [released in the seventies], but she’s continued to perform it up until 2019 and has never apologized for it. It’s tough when you have these people who are hugely influential to you, but can’t rock with anymore. I was so touched that she was covering my song, but disappointed to find those things out.

Wow, I didn’t know that.

It’s fucked up. Everyone should just learn how to take responsibility for their weird fucking actions that they took in the sixties and seventies and somehow didn’t understand that that was wrong. And if you don’t understand that it was wrong at this point, then something’s really wrong with you. And if you can’t say sorry and know that you should apologize, then you’re not cool in my books.

Are you a self-taught producer?

Mostly. But I have had some really important sessions with people and some great mentors who have given me the time of day to let me ask questions about every little thing that they’re doing. But YouTube also taught me a lot.

With this new album, what did you want to achieve artistically?

What I set out to do with this body of work was to challenge my perfectionism and to just capture a moment in time and not obsess over any of the details of how this work was being put together. That was deeply in contrast to my process before. So I definitely achieved that with the help of my co-producer Jack. And I’m super proud of that. I feel like I’ve really grown because of this experience”.

The final interview is from FADER. I know this is a long feature already. It is important in exploring and properly spotlighting such a magnificent artist. With two remarkable albums under her belt (her debut, ALPHA, came out in 2021), there will be many more eyes on Charlotte Day Wilson. A fantastic artist who I hope comes to the U.K. to play at some point. At the moment she is touring North America. I would love to see and feel Cyan Blue come to life on the stage:

“The other side of the album is wishing you could relive your youth with the knowledge of adulthood. What kind of wisdom would you pass on to the teenage Charlotte?

First and foremost, be yourself. I think that's the hardest question that teens and young adults are faced with, "Who am I?" Early on in my music career, there were a lot of people encouraging me to just stay true to myself. But I didn't quite know who I was at that point, maybe because of all the things that distract and bring us further from our core childhood selves.

I would also say something like, "You will find who you are and you will not be alone and feeling confused as to why you can't see yourself in anyone around you. You'll find love, first of all, and second of all, a community."

Was there anything you wanted to capture with Cyan Blue that maybe you didn't or couldn't on Alpha?

I wanted to work in a way that was different and a little bit more uninhibited than how Alpha came together. Jack fosters a very safe space in the studio and it just felt like we were pushing each other out of our comfort zones. We both have slightly perfectionist tendencies, and so we were pushing each other to just follow our intuitions, not editing any instincts musically or creatively. It was fun to kind of have a partner in crime for that.

In what ways would he push you?

He would be honest with me when he thought something was not up to par. That liberated me. He was totally open about just saying, ‘That's not quite it. Just keep going.’

“Forever” samples The Foundations's "Baby Now That I've Found You." What was it about that song that made you want to sample it?

There's this Alison Krauss cover of that song, a super beautiful country version, that my dad used to play growing up all the time. I just sat down at the piano one day and was like, "Let me learn this song, it's so pretty." I make samples all the time and that ended up being one of them.

Something that I was dealing with when I was working on the album, and it's kind of heady and existential, was what you feel when you meet someone who you actually feel like you could spend the rest of your life with. It's the most beautiful feeling but you also have to confront your own mortality when you think about forever with someone, because forever is not infinite.

That's something that I was working through a lot on this project. That feeling of, "Wow, I might have met the person that I want to spend the rest of my life with, but that's not enough time with them."

“New Day” is written about having children in a queer relationship. I’m not sure I have heard anyone sing from the angle you take on that song before. Was that partly why you wrote it?

I think that song is my favorite one on the record, and also the most personal and vulnerable. It's something that I've thought about a lot, and that folks in my community have thought a lot about.
Watching people around me have children, and how so much of the experience of meeting two people's child, in our culture, we're so obsessed with being like, "He has your eyes and your nose." While I love doing that too with the folks in my life there was always a little bit of sadness attached to those moments for me, because I’d be thinking about the fact that that'll never happen for me.

Those were some big feelings that I needed to write about. I knew after I had written it that I also hadn't heard anything like that. It felt important to include on the record. I think in some ways, the song feels more like a celebration of coming to terms with the fact that any child that I raise will be my child no matter what.

Someone I wanted to talk about outside of the album is Patti Smith, who is a big fan of yours and has covered your song “Work” live for a few years now. That must have been surreal for you?

It was really moving at first. I read Just Kids at a pretty formative time of my life and it did inspire me to pursue a creative lifestyle in a lot of ways. Hearing her cover “Work” was one of those big kind of "pinch-me" moments, too. Since then, however, I've been made aware that she has a song from the sixties called “Rock and Roll N Word.”

She's never commented on it or apologized for it so I really don't rock with her anymore. I think that it's disgusting that she has such a violent song in the first place, and that she thought she had the authority to use a word like that and to subvert it in her own way.

I sent her a DM telling her, "I think it's a disgusting song, and I think that you should really think about apologizing.” It's obviously extremely disappointing and really sad to see. She never responded but I really think that she should be ashamed of herself.

Someone you have been working with is Nelly Furtado. What can you say about those sessions?

We've written a couple of things together. It’s an amazing experience to work with someone like her. She's just such a legend and it was really an honor to work with her. We text all the time, and she sends me music that she thinks I'll like. It's always very folky. It's really sweet”.

PHOTO CREDIT: Emily Lipson

There is another interview I am including prior to ending with a review. CLASH. There are a lot of great insights and answers. I am particularly interested in what she says about the Toronto scene. I don’t think that this area is covered enough when it comes to musical excellence. Toronto has always produced incredible artists. I can imagine it is boiling over with so many unique and fascinating musicians:

“Since your songs have always carried an emotional weight to them, would you agree that the relationships we find ourselves in are meant to build character and define who we’re meant to be in the future?

Oh yeah, I definitely agree. Not to be corny, but everything happens for a reason and no matter what, we are conscious of what we take away from any given relationship. Like I think it’s all for character building and I don’t know – I’m a believer of destiny to be honest and I think whether it’s a way of coping with the things that come our way or not, I believe that everything happens for a reason. No regrets ever in this life is basically how I try to live.

What initially shaped that perspective for you?

I guess just coming to a place now where I feel very in control of my emotional state. I feel like I’m in a place of acceptance and knowing that no matter what happens, basically, I’ll always be okay. I’m very blessed to have a very loving family and group of close friends, and I think having that foundation of love allows me to kind of go through the external experiences of my life and know that they are all kind of like… nothing will rock me at this point, basically, you know?

How important is it to establish those relationships as you get older?

Yeah, big time. I really do think friends and family are important. To me, my loved ones are the people who hold it down for me and on any given day – no matter what happens with work or anything else – if you have your people in your corner, you’re good.

In terms of the production on your second album ‘Cyan Blue’, what was it like working with Jack Rochon compared to your initial and later recording sessions for ‘Alpha’?

It was a completely different experience for me which was really fun. It’s fun to try something new at this stage in my career. My whole thesis for this new project wasn’t necessarily any sort of concept in terms of the content and lyrics, but my thesis was just I want to have fun making it. Working on ‘Alpha’ and ‘Stone Woman’, I love that music and I’m proud of it but it wasn’t always fun to work on because I spent so much time alone laboring over the granular details of the work.

I learned a lot in that process and I’m really glad that I did it because now I feel like as a producer, technically I can kind of do whatever. Any vision I have I can generally achieve production-wise on my own. But it’s just time-consuming and it can be lonely, and I was working on ‘Alpha’ during the pandemic so that was a lot of alone time already. Working with someone else – Jack specifically because I love him so much, he’s such an amazing human, an amazing collaborator, amazing musician, producer, everything. It not only accelerated the recording process, but it also made it way more fun. Just like sharing that experience with someone felt really comforting for me.

What influenced you to move on from your perfectionist tendencies? And are you still harsh on yourself when it comes to your creative intuition?

I think I have a standard that I hold myself to that is probably, generally, pretty harsh at times. But I think what motivated me to switch my process up was that I didn’t know if I was having fun, and with this project, conceptually to a certain extent and in my life and my approach with everything, I’m trying to connect with my inner child. I think we are who we are from a very young age and the further we stray from that inner child, for me personally, I feel disconnected from myself. And something that I always loved doing as a child and even as a teenager and a young adult before I really had an established career in music, was entering into a flow state with music – just having a state and feeling of play and deep imagination. And also collaboration, having fun with friends.

That’s how most people get into music because it’s a fun thing to do with friends, and the further I got away from that, I felt disconnected from myself and as a result, I think music suffers when you’re not having fun making it. I was just trying to get back to a place of joy in the process and I definitely achieved that so for me I hope that the album does well, of course, but I also just know that I had a great time making it and it’s a success in my eyes because it was a joy to make.

PHOTO CREDIT: Emily Lipson

With Toronto having its own abundance of creativity and community, was it a challenge at all to write an album without having that familiar collaborative environment in your orbit?

I mean Jack is such a familiar Toronto person for me that I think that’s what grounded me. I don’t think I could have done it with someone who I wasn’t as familiar with. I think Toronto comes with me everywhere I go and another nice thing about the entire Toronto music community is that we always find each other in other cities too. I would also say that my Toronto music community no longer really connects in Toronto, we connect elsewhere. I don’t know what that says but I think maybe people have a similar thing with me where it’s helpful to leave the city and just leave the routine of home to tap into a 24/7 creative headspace.

What’s the inspiration behind the song ‘Do U Still’?

Well, funnily enough, you know how I’m talking about this state of play? That song came about basically as a joke. Jack and I were done working for the day and I think that maybe I was taking longer to pack up than Jack was so he was ready to leave. I was just putzing around the studio, packing up or something, and he sat down at the piano and started playing a couple chords and I just started it as a joke, singing but also kind of like screaming those lyrics [laughs]. I don’t know. They just kind of came out of me, you know? I’m not going to say exactly what they’re inspired by but it did come as a joke, like “Do you still love me?”. Just as a joke, you know? And then he was just laughing and I was like “Honestly, I kind of feel like maybe that’s a song”. Again, the creative process is so different every time and that one felt very different. As much as it’s about hoping that someone still loves you, it’s a lighthearted tune that started in a very lighthearted manner.

With “I Don’t Love You” being a small reminder that leaving love can be just as inspiring as finding it, is it difficult at all to write about lost loves and the heartache that can come with failed relationships? Or is it just a part of the process of finding peace in yourself?

I don’t find it difficult to write about – I think it’s super cathartic to write about. But releasing it is sometimes a different story. Because usually, you know, there’s some person that it’s inspired by and I do believe that in order for a grieving process to be complete, you usually do have to cut off communication and when I have this platform as a songwriter to put out my music, it’s almost as though there’s still a conversation, you know? It’s a bit of an odd privilege but also a responsibility that you have to tell a story from your perspective and I just hope sometimes that people know that I’m only singing from my perspective and that there’s always an element of storytelling and it’s not 100% rooted in whatever is factually going on in my life. I squint at reality all the time just to follow wherever the path of least resistance is taking me in the songwriting process.

For me, it’s one of those things where I might think that I have healed from something but then I start writing a song and these lyrics flow out of me, and my subconscious is banging on the door of my vessel to tell me that I still need to process a couple of things. I think it’s cool to be kind of exposed to things within your subconscious that you maybe thought were all well and good and you clearly have to get out somehow.

One interesting line from the single ‘I Don’t Love You’ is the lyric: “It’s more peaceful being heartbroken than crying every night for you”. When did you come to terms with that realization? And how has it changed your perspective on love and relationships?

That’s a good question. I think we all have different understandings of what love is and I have, in many phases of my life, thought that love is just about perseverance no matter what and loyalty no matter what, and to acknowledge that love is just actually letting someone be their full self and encouraging their own kind of growth as a person… I don’t know. I feel like that’s what real love is to me and while being heartbroken is an awful feeling, I do think that finding peace within yourself can be cathartic. I don’t know. Being stuck in something negative is way worse. I don’t know… I don’t have a good answer for that [laughs].

While it’s equally beautiful and complicated, do you still have an obsession with love?

I do, of course, because I believe that love is the meaning of life. Simply put. I don’t really care if it sounds cliche, but I live my life with a pretty strong acceptance and understanding that without love, there isn’t a purpose to any of this. And ‘love’ extends to platonic relationships, friendships, romantic relationships, and familial relationships, and to love well and be loved well is the thing that makes me feel the most complete as a person and the most at peace and at ease. It makes me feel like I can enjoy every day knowing that I’m surrounded by love. So yeah, I would say that hell yeah I’m still obsessed with love [laughs].

What wisdom do you hope to impart on others with ‘Cyan Blue’? And is there a lesson or realization that you hope listeners can take with them into the summer months?

The wisdom and the message that I hope people can come away with in terms of this project – they might not know it if they don’t read the interviews – but really, what I want people to know is that this shit has to be fun. You gotta’ have fun making it and if it feels like you’re fighting with the music, then there’s no point in doing it. Find whatever circumstances it is that you need to have a Tabula Rasa brain going into each session in order to enter into a good headspace and just enjoy the process. Because life is short and just wishing away time or ‘stressing away’ time is selling ourselves short of the joy of the beautiful thing that is making music and making art. Whatever your rituals are with listening to the album in a car, number one is definitely turn it up loud”.

There are a selection of really positive reviews for Cyan Blue. I want to highlight one from Spill Magazine. They had some interesting takes on Charlotte Day Wilson’s second studio album. If you have not heard it then I would recommend you take a listen. It is truly one of the best of this year:

“With the release of her second full-length album, Charlotte Day Wilson provides a captivating musical production, one that is as engaging as it is sonically mesmerizing. Fans of the Toronto native have been eagerly awaiting the follow-up to her 2021 release Alpha, and thankfully she rewarded such patience with Cyan Blue, an album very much worth the wait. Packed with a spectacular range of entrancing melodies and a rather peachy rhythmic groove, this new release marks a significant sonic achievement.

Nothing sparks a soulful record quite like a well-orchestrated rhythm section. The pulsating groove confidently established throughout Cyan Blue sets the perfect backdrop for Wilson’s atmospheric vocal performance. The album opens with “My Way”, a driving tune where the underlying rhythm courses along a distinct current, teasing what is to come with a gospel-like flare. The shimmering guitar sprawled out over the infectious bass in “Do You Still” demands attention and stimulates the listener, hooking them into Wilson’s refreshing musical discourse. The dynamic range in Cyan Blue isn’t gigantic but it is staggeringly impactful. Floating away from the pulsating groove of the livelier songs, she delivers many moments where tracks are stripped down and this is where the album truly begins to glow.

The record plays like a personal reflection, one that is intimate and honest. Wilson’s voice is tranquilizing, echoing through the darkness and coaxing the listener into submission. The quieter moments are where Wilson truly provides a visceral listening experience. At the end of “I Don’t Love You”, a glaringly exclamatory song, the ensemble is reduced to a subtle bass line huddled underneath Wilson’s voice, a move that builds an intensity in her lyrical statements. This kind of dynamic restraint recurs often throughout the album and lends a potency to the melancholic tracks. In “New Day” a haunting melody is presented through the fusion of vocals and piano, both following the same fluttering tune. The result is a wonderfully somber song that digs into the sonic psyche, leading the listener into the sobering world that Wilson has created.

Cyan Blue is loaded with a spectacular range of infectious melodies, subtle ambience and even some unexpected surprises. A pensive rendition of the classic tune “Over The Rainbow” hides deep in the middle of the record and offers another small taste of Wilson’s exceptionally imaginative musical style. A record as rich as Cyan Blue deserves many listens and has a lot more to offer outside of what little is mentioned here. It has proven itself as an album that was undeniably worth the wait”.

Although not a bran-new artist, as someone releasing her second studio album, it is an interesting time for Charlotte Day Wilson. Perhaps not known by all, we are in this transition stage where her new music is going to introduce her to a much bigger audience. We are going to be hearing a lot more from this extraordinary artist…

FOR many more years.

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Follow Charlotte Day Wilson

FEATURE: Hammersmith: 26th August, 2014… Kate Bush’s Before the Dawn at Ten: That Opening Night

FEATURE:

 

 

Hammersmith: 26th August, 2014…

PHOTO CREDIT: Gavin Bush/Rex

 

Kate Bush’s Before the Dawn at Ten: That Opening Night

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I am going to publish…

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush on stage for Before the Dawn at the Eventim Apollo, Hammersmith, on 26th August, 2014/PHOTO CREDIT: Ken McKay/REX Photograph

a couple of additional features about Kate Bush’s Before the Dawn residency. That ran from August to October 2014. We look ahead to the tenth anniversary of a hugely important moment. I have already written about the day Kate Bush announced she would be back on stage for that run of dates. At the Eventim Apollo in Hammersmith, it was a return to the same venue she performed at during 1979’s The Tour of Life. The Hammersmith Odeon back in the day, it was significant that she set it here. Not only was it close to her home and meant she did not need to travel a lot and move between venues, she knew the space and how it would accommodate her concept. I want to discuss that first night very soon. It happened on 26th August, 2014. Across the twenty-two dates, Kate Bush played to about 80,000 people. After announcing it would happen on 21st March, 2014, there was this frenzy and excitement to get tickets. They sold out within fifteen minutes. A critically acclaimed residency, Kate Bush won the Editor's Award at the Evening Standard Theatre Awards. She was also nominated for two Q Awards in 2014: Best Act in the World Today and Best Live Act. I don’t think there were any tremors or real signs that Bush was coming back to the stage. Now, you would get someone leaking it or there might be teasers. That March announcement took us by surprise. Less than three years after 50 Words for Snow was released, we got a concert residency. Those who were there have said how incredible it was. I still maintain a concert film of Before the Dawn for its tenth anniversary would be welcomed and make a lot of sense.

I am going to get to a couple of reviews for that first evening performance. If you want to know more about the set-list and details of Before the Dawn, then you can find them here. What I love and thing is very important is the band. Including Omar Hakim on drums and John Giblin on bass, there were some extraordinary players around her. I think the choice of band is as important as the set. It all interlinks. There would have been a lot of rehearsals and planning. Prior to 1979’s The Tour of Life, Bush was drilling her band and did a rehearsal/run-through at a small theatre not long before that tour opened. In 2014, fewer details are known about the rehearsal process and what was involved. I am fascinated by that period between Kate Bush deciding to go back to the stage and that opening night. We will come to that soon. A couple of reviews too. The fact The Guardian did a breakdown of important events and happenings on that night. Looking on some Internet message boards, it sounds like the setlist was one thing that went through changes. She wanted to bring the suite form Hounds of Love (The Ninth Wave) and Aerial (A Sky of Honey) together. Deciding which others songs featured was tough. There had to be a limit! There were some obvious choices that fans would have demanded (Hounds of Love and Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God). It is fascinating seeing that Act 1 selection. Prior to going into The Ninth Wave, Bush needed to set the mood and put together a cohesive and varied series of songs. She said in an interview how Lily was the song to start. That she wanted to welcome people in with this sort of prayer and call. I love how Aerial’s Joanni and The Red Shoes’ Top of the City are in there. Deeper cuts that were brave but brilliant choices. 50 Words for Snow’s Among Angels features in the encore.

In all, there are songs from four Kate Bush albums. It is impossible to please everyone. There was never going to be anything from The Kick Inside and Lionheart, as Bush performed songs from those albums in 1979. Maybe 1980’s Never for Ever would have been too far back. That does leave The Dreaming (1982) and The Sensual World (1989). Fans might have wanted The Sensual World, This Woman’s Work and perhaps Sat in Your Lap to feature. Reading message boards, apparently Sat in Your Lap was considered at one stage! Never Be Mine is included in the live album (released in 2016) as a rehearsal, though it was not in the show. I think the problem with Sat in Your Lap would be sound quality. Maybe it is hard to choregraph. Perhaps her vocal range as it was in 2014 might mean it is very different to what we hear on The Dreaming. People have said it was considered for an opening track but was cut. Wuthering Heights was also rumoured to have been on the setlist at one point. That would have been magnificent. In fact, looking at this interview with David Rhodes, he said that Top of the City was chosen over Sat in Your Lap. The Big Sky was run through with the band, though Cloudbusting was selected as a better choice. There are also another few songs that Kate Bush considered included but that secret has not got to the press. That selection process is fascinating! Imagine Bush performing Sat in Your Lap on stage. It is obvious that there was a lot of thought and discussion about the dynamics and how the tracks sat together. Getting that flow and structure just so was crucial. The sets for The Tour of Life were quite spectacular. One of the issues was transporting it around. For Before the Dawn, there was this stable location that offered more freedom. In terms of the visuals and designs, perhaps The Ninth Wave was the most intense and spectacular. I love how there is a mixture of dancers/actors on the stage, including her son, Bertie, and things projected on a screen. It would have taken so much planning and time, when the setlist was confirmed, how it would all coalesce.

It is what makes the opening night so extraordinary. Few would have known about the rehearsals and deciding the setlist. Those discussions about everything from the hospitality packages, merchandise, set details, lighting, the band, right through to the poster design and the audience experience. Set aside the fact Bush was back doing a major live commitment thirty-five years since her first. As someone properly established, maybe there was extra expectation and pressure. In any regard, that first night performance was so charged. The Guardian followed all the major happenings. Well-known faces such as Lauren Laverne sharing their thoughts. A wonderful array of different celebrities there, mixing alongside all her other fans. It would have been so intense waiting for her to come onto the stage. Even if Bush and her team knew the set and were confident, I think about what Bush was doing minutes before going to the stage. The thoughts running around her head knowing, in mere minutes, she would sing Lily and be greeted by applause and rapture from thousands of fans! Not only did fans, for the first time, get to see Kate Bush perform The Ninth Wave in full. There was also a mix of songs that covered twenty-six years or so. There was no doubt critics would love the set. Kate Bush would have been incapable of disappointing or doing anything less than extraordinary. Considering how Aerial (2005), Director’s Cut (2011) and 50 Words for Snow (2011) got hugely positive reviews, she was going to nail Before the Dawn. Even so, a sense of expectation and the reality was not guaranteed to have everyone singing quite from the same hymn sheet. This is what The Guardian observed in their review:

“Over the course of nearly three hours, Kate Bush's first gig for 35 years variously features dancers in lifejackets attacking the stage with axes and chainsaws; a giant machine that hovers above the auditorium, belching out dry ice and shining spotlights on the audience; giant paper aeroplanes; a surprisingly lengthy rumination on sausages, vast billowing sheets manipulated to represent waves, Bush's 16-year-old son Bertie - clad as a 19th-century artist – telling a wooden mannequin to "piss off" and the singer herself being borne through the audience by dancers clad in costumes based on fish skeletons.

The concert-goer who desires a stripped down rock and roll experience, devoid of theatrical folderol, is thus advised that Before the Dawn is probably not the show for them, but it is perhaps worth noting that even before Bush takes the stage with her dancers and props, a curious sense of unreality hangs over the crowd. It's an atmosphere noticeably different than at any other concert, but then again, this is a gig unlike any other, and not merely because the very idea of Bush returning to live performance was pretty unimaginable 12 months ago.

There have been a lot of improbable returns to the stage by mythic artists over the last few years, from Led Zeppelin to Leonard Cohen, but at least the crowd who bought tickets to see them knew roughly what songs to expect. Tonight, almost uniquely in rock history, the vast majority of the audience has virtually no idea what's going to happen before it does.

The solitary information that has leaked out from rehearsals is that Bush will perform The Ninth Wave, her 1985 song cycle about a woman drowning at sea – which indeed she does, replete with staging of a complexity that hasn't been seen during a rock gig since Pink Floyd's heyday – and that she isn't terribly keen on people filming the show on their phones.

The rest is pure speculation, of varying degrees of madness. A rumour suggests that puppets will be involved, hence the aforementioned mannequin, manipulated by a man in black and regularly hugged by Bush during her performance of another song cycle, A Sky of Honey, from 2005's Aerial.

The satirical website the Daily Mash claimed that, at the gig's conclusion, Bush would "lead the audience out of the venue, along the fairy-tale Hammersmith Flyover and finally to a mountain where they would be sealed inside, listening to Hounds of Love for all eternity".

In fairness, this was no more demented than the thoughts of the august broadsheet rock hack, apparently filing his report direct from the 1870s, who predicted that Bush would not take part in any choreographed routines because dancing in public is "unbecoming for a woman of a certain age".

As it turns out, the august broadsheet rock hack could not have been more wrong: for huge sections of the performance, Bush's movements look heavily choreographed: she moves with a lithe grace, clearly still drawing on the mime training she underwent as a teenager forty years on. Her voice too is in remarkable condition: she's note-perfect throughout.

Backed by a band of musicians capable of navigating the endless twists and turns of her songwriting – from funk to folk to pastoral prog rock - the performances of Running Up That Hill and King of the Mountain sound almost identical to their recorded versions - but letting rip during a version of Top of the City, she sounds flatly incredible.

You suspect that even if she hadn't, the audience would have lapped it up. Audibly delighted to be in the same room as her, they spend the first part of the show clapping everything she does: no gesture is too insignificant to warrant a round of applause. It would be cloying, but for the fact that Bush genuinely gives them something to cheer about.

For someone who's spent the vast majority of her career shunning the stage, she's a hugely engaging live performer, confident enough to shun the hits that made her famous in the first place: she plays nothing from her first four albums.

The staging might look excessive on paper, but onstage it works to astonishing effect, bolstering rather than overwhelming the emotional impact of the songs. The Ninth Wave is disturbing, funny and so immersive that the crowd temporarily forget to applaud everything Bush does. As each scene bleeds into another, they seem genuinely rapt: at the show's interval, people look a little stunned. A Sky of Honey is less obviously dramatic – nothing much happens over the course of its nine tracks – but the live performance underlines how beautiful the actual music is.

Already widely acclaimed as the most influential and respected British female artist of the past 40 years, shrouded in the kind of endlessly intriguing mystique that is almost impossible to conjure in an internet age, Bush theoretically had a lot to lose by returning to the stage. Clearly, given how tightly she has controlled her own career since the early 80s, she would only have bothered because she felt she had something spectacular to offer. She was right: Before The Dawn is another remarkable achievement”.

I am going to round up in a minute. Before that, DIY were among those who attended the opening night – on 26th August, 2014 – and were keen to share their opinions on a stage return of one of the finest live performers ever. There is no doubt that those at the Eventim Apollo were blown away. I am gutted I was not fortunate enough to get a ticket. It makes me either determined to imagine a concert film will come on day:

“While you try to catch your breath and reorganise your sense of reality after three hours of an astonishing, immersive and utterly singular show, the one thing that instantly becomes apparent through the mist is that Kate Bush is not one to cede to your run-of-the-mill expectations.

The whole night feels unreal and unravels in a dreamlike fashion – even attempting to put it into words here it seems to dissolve on the screen. That’s not just because of the feverish speculation that came before the show or the fact that Bush hasn’t performed in concert since 1979, but also because whatever your hopes or anticipations for this show – one of the most eagerly awaited pop performances in history – Bush turns them on their head and pours them away in an avalanche of artistic contrariness and outlandish theatre which sees the stage filled with a wooden mannequin, fish skeletons, sheets billowing like waves, a preacher, a giant machine that hovers above the audience pounding like a helicopter as well as lighthouses and living rooms, axes and chainsaws.

Yet through all the theatrics and artistry one thing remains constant, and it’s the thing that shines through the most: the rush of humanity that ties all the ideas together; the one thing that takes Bush to that other place. It’s the innate heart that pulses through all this theatre and all these ideas: the simple truths of love, hope and family life that hold all her ideas together.

‘I feel your warmth,’ she says appreciatively as the crowd passionately cheer and clap her every move and gesture. And it’s her shy but generous smile at the response from the crowd which shows exactly what this means to her.

This is the weight of 35 years being lifted – thrown off with the skilfulness and heart that shows Kate Bush is no ‘mythic’ artist but a very real, supremely talented original. Tonight is an unequivocal demonstration that she’s a one-off: only she has the ambition, nerve and imagination to pull off the ideas that had filled her mind.

Yet at first it seems she’s going to play it pretty straight. Barefoot and dressed in elegant black, she strolls around the stage gently, occasionally twirling. It begins with ‘Lily’ as she leads a small group of backing singers that includes her son Bertie (who, she says, has given her the "courage" to return to the stage). The band that line up behind her are as tight as you would imagine. They play ‘Hounds Of Love’ and ‘Running Up That Hill’. They sound huge, they sound brilliant. If there’s one thing you notice most it’s that her voice is remarkably powerful and it’s brilliant on ‘King Of The Mountain’ which brings the opening ‘scene’ to a close, heralding a storm as a bullroarer fills the air and cannons fill the theatre with confetti.

It's now time for the drama of 'The Ninth Wave', the second half of 'Hounds of Love'. Here we see a story of resignation and resurrection played out in the most theatrical of ways. We see Bush in a lifejacket floating in water, looking up at the camera as if waiting to be rescued (she’s reported to have spent three days in a flotation tank at Pinewood Studios to create the special effects). At one point fish skeletons dance across the waves, at another a helicopter searches the crowd, before a living room (yes, a living room) floats across the stage in which a son and his father – played by Bertie and Bush's husband Danny McIntosh – talk at length about sausages.

It’s hard to comprehend exactly what’s happening but the band skilfully navigate the pastoral prog and Celtic rock. Even when the music isn’t captivating, the sheer sense of spectacle means you can’t avert your eyes for a second. As the ‘The Morning Fog’ brings the performance to a close with another standing ovation.

After a twenty minute interval – during which time the bars buzz with delirium – the third act sees her play out ‘Sky of Honey’, the entire second half of 'Aerial'. It’s so intricately detailed that you get the feeling Bush had always planned to perform these two scenes live.

‘Honey’ is a grandiose daydream moving through a summer's day. Again the scope of her vision is immense – even when the songs don’t enthral the enormous paper planes and human birds do, as we see a wooden mannequin finding himself lost and alone. Bertie plays a major part throughout dressed as a 19th-century artist – and at one point telling the mannequin to "piss off". It ends, as only it could, with Bush gaining wings and flying.

She returns to earth to perform a solo version of ‘Among Angels’ on the piano, before the band return to help close the show with a joyful ‘Cloudbusting’. "I just know that something good is going to happen", she sings as a now even more euphoric crowd jump to their feet.

Then she’s gone. You’re left with the image of a singer who has managed to retain her mystery and surprise. An enigma, the mythic artist who is intensely human. It’s overblown and preposterous and brilliant. All its startling achievements, magical highs and am dram faults – its relentless ambition and human imperfections – make it the only document you could possibly have asked for from such a unique artist. Before the Dawn is everything you would expect but couldn’t imagine”.

Perhaps one of the most important dates in live music history, the opening show for Before the Dawn occurred in Hammersmith on 26th August, 2014. There really does need to be some form of celebration or commemoration on its tenth anniversary! I know there will be magazine spreads that take us inside the residency. Get reaction from people who were there. Maybe we will see the footage come to light one day. I hope so! I am going to do a few more Before the Dawn features before the anniversary date. It is no understatement to say that those who were in the Eventim Apollo on 26th August, 2014…

HAD their lives changed.

FEATURE: I Should Have Known Better: The Beatles' A Hard Day's Night at Sixty: Their Most Underrated Album?

FEATURE:

 

 

I Should Have Known Better

 

The Beatles' A Hard Day's Night at Sixty: Their Most Underrated Album?

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WHEN we talk about The Beatles…

IN THIS PHOTO: The Beatles in 1964/PHOTO CREDIT: Walter Shenton Films/Proscenium Films

and their best albums, we often name the go-to titles: Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Revolver, Abbey Road. Those seem pretty safe. In terms of those that are underrated and are not often seen as classics, I think that A Hard Day’s Night is at the top. It is a hugely important album in the sense that it was released during Beatlemania. This band who, a year previous, had put out their debut, Please Please Me, were now known around the world. It is amazing that this cultural phenomenon exploded so quickly. There are a lot of reasons why the album is important. We mark its sixtieth anniversary on 10th July. This was their first studio album where John Lennon and Paul McCartney wrote all of the songs. Quite a leap in terms of their development and confidence. After years of performing covers at gigs and deploying their in their own work, this was a totally original Beatles album. I will argue that A Hard Day’s Night is their most underrated album. It is great that we are going to see its sixtieth anniversary. There have been no plans as of yet to reissue the album. Giles Martin – son of Beatles producer George, who has reissued and remixed other studio albums of theirs – has made no announcement. It would be fascinating to hear demos, early takes and extras recording during the sessions for A Hard Day’s Night. That would be amazing! It was an exciting and strange time for the band. Recorded between January and June 1964, the four-piece released a masterpiece. Remember that the A Hard Day’s Night film turns sixty on 6th July. That was a big moment for them. Releasing a film and album of the same name. I am not sure if that had been done much prior to 1964. Whether you see the album more of a soundtrack or a studio album, it is clear that their stock and fame had risen.

Putting out their first film a few days before their third studio album showed that there was a huge demand. A real need to see Gorge Harrison, Ringo Starr, Paul McCartney and John Lennon on the big screen. I often think that the album is stronger because one associates it directly to the film. We have visualisation of the songs. Iconic scenes being played out. That title scene with A Hard Day’s Night playing as the guys are chased by fans. One of the most iconic film scenes ever. People don’t really put A Hard Day’s Night up there with Abbey Road. Maybe there isn’t this amazing standout like Here Comes the Sun (Abbey Road), Tomorrow Never Knows (Revolver) or A Day in the Life (Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band). Number one in the U.K. and U.S., July 1964 saw The Beatles confirmed as worthy of the hype and mania. Not only did people buy the album because of the band and the excitement around them. The quality of the songwriting meant that people bought A Hard Day’s Night to immerse themselves in. Perhaps after seeing the film, they were keen to buy the album to keep those images alive. The first single, Can’t Buy Me Love, came out on 20th March, 1964. They put out the second single, A Hard Day’s Night, the same day as the album (10th July, 1964). Even though the U.S. release was different to the one in the U.K., it was evident people adored the music of The Beatles. They were a sensation! I will come to some reviews/features about the album. First, Beatles Bible provide some useful information and background to A Hard Day’s Night:

“Having conquered hearts in the United Kingdom throughout 1963, The Beatles set their sights on the world in 1964. They started it with concerts in London and Paris, before making history by conquering America in February, appearing on The Ed Sullivan Show before an estimated 73 million viewers.

The Beatles followed up their Stateside triumph with a world tour, numerous interviews, television appearances and new recordings, and starred in their debut feature film. And despite their whirlwind schedule of touring and studio sessions, the soundtrack to A Hard Day’s Night turned out to be one of The Beatles’ strongest long-players.

We were different. We were older. We knew each other on all kinds of levels that we didn’t when we were teenagers. The early stuff – the Hard Day’s Night period, I call it – was the sexual equivalent of the beginning hysteria of a relationship. And the Sgt Pepper–Abbey Road period was the mature part of the relationship.

John Lennon, 1980
All We Are Saying, David Sheff

The album was recorded over nine non-consecutive days, between January and June 1964. In between the sporadic sessions The Beatles fulfilled their touring and filming commitments, with John Lennon and Paul McCartney writing some of their strongest songs to date.

What’s more, The Beatles refused to take the easy option and delve into their Cavern Club-era songbook, selecting some of the numerous cover versions in their repertoire to pad out the original compositions. A Hard Day’s Night became their first album to consist solely of original material, and was The Beatles’ only release to consist solely of songs written by Lennon-McCartney.

The songs

The title A Hard Day’s Night had been coined by Ringo Starr, and first appeared in John Lennon’s short story ‘Sad Michael’ in his first book In His Own Write.

When film director Richard Lester announced it would be the title of The Beatles’ first film, Lennon took up the challenge to write the theme song. At the time he and Paul McCartney were in competition to write the group’s singles, and Lennon was entering a particularly productive songwriting phase.

I was going home in the car and Dick Lester suggested the title ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ from something Ringo’d said. I had used it in In His Own Write, but it was an off-the-cuff remark by Ringo. You know, one of those malapropisms. A Ringoism, where he said it not to be funny, just said it. So Dick Lester said we are going to use that title, and the next morning I brought in the song. ’Cause there was a little competition between Paul and I as to who got the A side, who got the hit singles.

John Lennon, 1980
All We Are Saying, David Sheff

The genesis of the song was later recalled by Evening Standard journalist Maureen Cleave, who was a friend of The Beatles.

One day I picked John up in a taxi and took him to Abbey Road for a recording session. The tune to the song ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ was in his head, the words scrawled on a birthday card from a fan to his little son Julian: “When I get home to you,” it said, “I find my tiredness is through…” Rather a feeble line about tiredness, I said. “OK,” he said cheerfully and, borrowing my pen, instantly changed it to the slightly suggestive: “When I get home to you/I find the things that you do/Will make me feel all right.” The other Beatles were there in the studio and, of course, the wonderful George Martin. John sort of hummed the tune to the others – they had no copies of the words or anything else. Three hours later I was none the wiser about how they’d done it but the record was made – and you can see the birthday card in the British Library.

Maureen Cleave

Lennon was the sole composer of the title track, along with ‘I Should Have Known Better’, ‘Tell Me Why’, ‘Any Time At All’, ‘I’ll Cry Instead’, ‘When I Get Home’, and ‘You Can’t Do That’. He also wrote the majority of ‘If I Fell’ and ‘I’ll Be Back’, and collaborated with McCartney on ‘I’m Happy Just To Dance With You’.

It comes and goes. I can’t believe it goes away for ever… but you can never be twenty-four again. You can’t be that hungry twice. That can never, never be.

John Lennon, 1980
All We Are Saying, David Sheff

McCartney’s contributions to the album were hardly slight either: his highlights were the classic ballads ‘And I Love Her’ and ‘Things We Said Today’, as well as the single ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’.

When we knew we were writing for something like an album [John] would write a few in his spare moments, like this batch here. He’d bring them in, we’d check ’em. I’d write a couple and we’d throw ’em at each other, and then there would be a couple that were more co-written. But you just had a certain amount of time. You knew when the recording date was and so a week or two before then we’d get into it.

It didn’t seem like pressure. It was – I suppose you’d have to think it was but I don’t remember it being a pressure. It was fun, it was great. I always liken songwriting to a conjurer pulling a rabbit out of a hat. Now you see it, now you don’t. If I now pick up a guitar and start to conjure something out of the air, there’s a great magic about it. Where there was nothing, now there is something. Where there was a white sheet of paper, there’s a page we can read. Where there was no tune and no lyrics, there’s now a song we can sing! That aspect of it made it a lot of fun. We’d be amazed to see what kind of rabbit we’d pulled out that day.

Paul McCartney
Many Years From Now, Barry Miles

In the studio

The Beatles met Francis Hall, the president of guitar company Rickenbacker, during their first visit to America in February 1964. Hall set up a meeting in New York City to demonstrate new instruments and amplifiers, and George Harrison was given one of the new 12-string 360 electric guitars. John Lennon also requested a custom-made 12-string 325 model, which was delivered at a later date.

How do I like it? Marvellous. It’s gear. It sounds a bit like an electric piano, I always think, but you get a nice fat sound out of it.

George Harrison, 1964
Melody Maker

The sound of the Rickenbacker became a key part of A Hard Day’s Night. The 12-string was perhaps most notable in the iconic opening chord of the title track, and in ‘I Should Have Known Better’ and ‘You Can’t Do That’. The instrument also influenced many of recordings that followed by bands such as The Byrds and The Searchers.

A further development in the studio was the advance to four-track recording, replacing the two-track facilities that had been used on Please Please Me and much of With The Beatles.

The very first records we made were mono, though I did have stereo facilities. To make mixing easier I would keep the voices separate from the backing, so I used a stereo machine as a twin-track. Not with the idea of stereo – merely to give myself a little bit more flexibility in remixing into a mono. So the first year’s recordings were made on just two tracks and were live; like doing broadcasts. With the great advance of four-track we were able to overdub and put on secondary voices and guitar solos afterwards. By the time we did A Hard Day’s Night we would certainly put the basic track down and do the vocals afterwards. Invariably, I was putting all the rhythm instruments onto either one or two tracks (generally one track) so you would have bass lumped with guitar. It wasn’t until later still that we began putting bass on afterwards as well, giving Paul the opportunity of using his voice more.

George Martin
Anthology

The first song to be recorded for A Hard Day’s Night was Paul McCartney’s ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’. It was taped on 29 January 1964 in EMI’s Pathé Marconi Studios in Paris, in a daytime session before one of their residency concerts at the city’s Olympia Theatre.

The session had been booked for The Beatles to record German-language versions of ‘She Loves You’ and ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’. The recordings were completed ahead of schedule, leaving the group free to record a new song.

‘Can’t Buy Me Love’ was taped in just four takes, in probably less than an hour. The song became the follow-up to ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’ when released in the UK as a single on 20 March 1964, simultaneously acting as a stopgap between future recordings and a teaser for The Beatles’ forthcoming LP.

The small matter of conquering America meant The Beatles didn’t return to the studio until 25 February, when they recorded ‘You Can’t Do That’, and early versions of ‘And I Love Her’ and ‘I Should Have Known Better’; both were remade in subsequent days.

For the rest of February and early March the group recorded songs for the film soundtrack. They also taped several songs which were eventually issued on the standalone Long Tall Sally EP.

As was typical in the early 1960s, The Beatles didn’t attend mixing or editing sessions for the album. George Martin worked on the recordings in the group’s absence, on one occasion adding a piano part to ‘You Can’t Do That’ while The Beatles were on holiday.

Filming for A Hard Day’s Night was over by the end of April, but touring duties continued. The Beatles recorded the non-soundtrack songs for the LP in just three consecutive days from 1 June 1964, before beginning their world tour of Denmark, the Netherlands, Hong Kong, Australia and New Zealand on 4 June.

In their absence the album was edited and mixed for mono and stereo by George Martin and the EMI studio engineers. It was completed on 22 June and released in the United Kingdom on 10 July”.

Chart success

A Hard Day’s Night had advance orders of over 250,000 in the United Kingdom. By the end of 1964 it had sold 600,000 copies. It spent 21 consecutive weeks at number one in the UK from 25 July 1964, and remained in the charts for 38 weeks.

More than a million advance orders were placed in the United States before its release. Within three months it had sold another million copies, making it one of the fastest-selling albums of all time. It topped the US Billboard album chart for 14 weeks, the longest run for any album that year”.

The fact that I cannot see that many articles about A Hard Day’s Night and its legacy goes to show it is underrated. There are some podcast episodes, though not as many as you would like. I do hope that there is something happening on 10th July to mark sixty years of a landmark album. One where The Beatles truly became The Beatles. Maybe something around the anniversary of the film. I want to drop in a BBC review for A Hard Day’s Night at this point:

“There may be more inventive Beatles records – Sgt. Pepper’s, for example – and there may be lusher ones – Abbey Road, for one. But no one Beatles album better encapsulated the essence of the band than this one.

A Hard Day’s Night not only captures The Beatles at the peak of Beatlemania – the most exciting time in pop music up to that moment, and arguably ever since; when continents fell and music was changed forever – but also sees them perfecting the art of pop. You may have Beatles songs that you prefer, or songs that mean more to you, but nowhere were the group more consistently brilliant than on this soundtrack

Where the film emphasised just how popular and bizarre their fame was, the accompanying album showed us just why this had happened. The title-track – with surely the most surreal name ever for a number one song – dazzles in a way The Byrds, The Monkees, The La’s and a hundred other janglers never could, while And I Love Her proved that the band could write melodies better than anyone else. Even the song they let George sing, I’m Happy Just to Dance With You, is fizzier than actual bubbles, while Lennon’s vocal (and rhythm solo) on You Can’t Do That saw him trounce The Rolling Stones for sheer snottiness.

This was the first and only Beatles album to be entirely composed of Lennon/McCartney songs, and that unheard-of-in-1964 cockiness shines through. Even the wistful songs – Things We Said Today and I’ll Be Back – were more confident than sad. This is, next to the White Album (a very different kettle of fabs), my favourite Beatles album, and has been ever since I heard it. The exuberance of the 1960s, the genius of The Beatles, and the total unstoppable confidence of the best band in the world realising that they were the best band in the world, are all contained here. Essential”.

I am going to talk about how very few rank A Hard Day’s Night among The Beatles’ best. One cannot deny it is one of their most important albums. Prior to getting to that, this is what Pitchfork wrote in their 2009 review:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In 2022, The Independent placed A Hard Day’s Night sixth. Gold did the same for their feature. Ultimate Classic Rock did the same. It does seem predictable when it comes to the top-five albums. The same ones will appear in there – Rubber Soul, The Beatles, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Revolver and Abbey Road – but in a different order. In 2011, Rolling Stone readers placed the album a lowly ninth. NME ranked it eighth-best in 2012. I guess the sixth-best Beatles album is a good position. It means it is far stronger than most other albums ever released! I do feel like there is this unflinching view that there are these five golden albums. A Hard Day’s Night kind of gets close but does not equal them. I can understand the songs might not be as strong as you hear on Revolver, say, but the sheer importance and excitement on the album, for me, puts it high up the list. Few journalists have gone deep with the album. Considering A Hard Day’s Night was the band, at the time, at the peak of their powers, why is A Hard Day’s Night not talked about more?! In America in 1964, the year America grieved John F. Kennedy's assassination; when Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act; when poverty, inequality, and war became part of our daily dialogue, The Beatles provided some hope and light for American fans. Here in the U.K., there was tension and unrest. Harold Wilson, in October 1964, entered the Election campaign determined to end thirteen years of wasted Conservative rule. There was a need for change. Oddly, sixty years later, we are in a similar position. A Hard Day’s Night really started what came after. In terms of Lennon and McCartney writing original songs and being this incredible partnership. The sheer size and wave of popularity and attention around The Beatles in 1964 means A Hard Day’s Night has this importance and stature. Maybe it is slightly buried by Beatlemania. Maybe people think it is a product if that, rather than it being a truly great album. I maintain that it is underrated. As it turns sixty on 10th July, I hope people write about the album. Explore the context and background. Go deeper into the songs. Really do it justice. The astonishing A Hard Day’s Night is…

A seismic album in Pop history.

FEATURE: Saluting the Queens: Sabrina Carpenter

FEATURE:

 

 

Saluting the Queens

 

Sabrina Carpenter

_________

THIS is another…

Saluting the Queens where I turn the spotlight on an artist rather than someone else in the industry. Recognising women throughout the industry is important, although there is an amazing artist that I wanted to salute. Sabrina Carpenter might not be known to some. She is one of the most important and distinct Pop around. Her latest studio album, 2022’s Emails I Can't Send, was acclaimed and a chart success. It is announced that her next album, Short n’ Sweet, is out on 23rd August. She is someone I genuinely believe is going to get bigger and more acclaimed. Someone who will do huge headline slots and command the biggest stages in the world. In a busy and crowded Pop market, Carpenter is an artist that everyone needs to look out for. Even though she has released five studio albums, her best days and biggest successes are still ahead. There are a load of great interview with Sabrina Carpenter you can check out through YouTube. Some wonderful print interviews too. There are a few interviews from late last year/this year that are more up to date. Giving us an insight into an incredible artist. I want to start out by sourcing a GRAMMY interview from December of last year:

“When Sabrina Carpenter was 9 years old, she posted her first video to YouTube: a cover of Taylor Swift's "Picture To Burn." Fifteen years later, Carpenter isn't just a pop force to be reckoned with in her own right — she's sharing the stage with Swift.

While Carpenter certainly hasn't been a stranger to the spotlight before this year — she launched her singing career in 2014, the same year she gained recognition for her leading role in Disney Channel's "Girl Meets World" — her Eras Tour slot is indicative of the monster year she's had. Since her fifth studio album, emails i can't send, arrived in July 2022, Carpenter has continued to reach new career heights, from garnering billions of streams, to being named Variety's Rising Star of 2023, to headlining her biggest sold-out tour yet.

"In such a weird way, I guess I've tried to do my best and be enjoying what I'm doing without being too aware of what's going on," Carpenter admits to GRAMMY.com. "The love of what I do is in the actual making of things, so I've been making so much music and writing so much over the last year. Seeing this cool, organic reaction to it is great. But in the moment, it's hard to grasp it."

In between the Argentina and Brazil Eras Tour stops in November, Carpenter topped off her banner year with another bucket list item: a Christmas project. The six-track EP fruitcake nods to one of her biggest hits to date, "Nonsense," with a revamped version aptly dubbed "A Nonsense Christmas."

Shortly after wrapping her 2023 Eras Tour run, Carpenter took GRAMMY.com on a rollicking journey through her biggest milestones of the past 12 months.

Opening For Taylor Swift On The Eras Tour

When I first found out, it was through a text and there were a lot of emojis and exclamation points. That was really how it happened; it wasn't through managers or anything. When Taylor texted me and asked if I wanted to come on tour with her, I threw my phone across the room.

It's a really surreal thing. I covered one of her songs when I was 9 years old and definitely, throughout my life, she was an artist and a songwriter and businesswoman who I've always admired. So to call her a friend and be a part of something as iconic as this tour, I still can't process it.

I'm still on the tour into next year and have been learning as much as I can along the way. I actually feel bad about how many shows I've been to because so many people want to see this show, so I feel lucky and privileged to have seen it as many times as I have!

Creating Her Latest Billboard Hot 100 Hit, "Feather"

I was actually on the phone with my producer, John Ryan, and we were laughing about it because honestly, when we made it, we were just having fun. We wanted to make this song about all the s—ty events happening in my life, because it's so much more fun to turn it into a positive than to sit in the sadness.

When we wrote it, it was me, John and one of my closest friends, the songwriter Amy Allen. We were just literally dancing around when John was playing a chord progression and a cool, feathery thing on the piano. We wrote it in two hours and the fact that it fit so perfectly on the deluxe [version of emails i can't send] was a very kismet situation.

Getting Honored With Variety's Rising Star Of 2023

Just to be recognized by them was also surreal, because then I'm in a room with a bunch of people whose music I listen to, songs I study, and producers I love. I was just sitting there talking to them — and it's not, like, imposter syndrome, because it did feel like such an honor. It's cool to be able to do the thing I love the most, and when those things happen it's just icing on the cake. I'm very grateful for them.

Solidifying Her Status As A Songwriter

I wrote my first song when I was 10 years old and it was very bad. But it was always something that I loved doing.

When I got a little older and to a place where I got people's opinions, I was always made to feel like it wasn't my place; like I should just listen to them, be sent songs and be happy with them. But something really tricky for me is that I would actually have a real weird internal reaction singing lyrics that didn't feel honest to me, or didn't feel something I would say. I just always had a specific point of view — and I'm a Tarus, so I'm a little stubborn.

But over time, writing became a necessity for me; if I didn't write a song, I wouldn't be able to make it through these situations in life. I'm very lucky that I now get to do it all the time, but also that the people I work with who I love so much all believe in me so much”.

I think that Sabrina Carpenter is a phenomenal artist that has not been embraced by the mainstream as much as she should have been. Maybe the dominance of artists like Taylor Swift overshadows someone like Sabrina Carpenter. It is a shame. Her music is among the strongest out there. I would urge everyone to check it out. Even though it is not strictly a conventional interview, I like this chat between Sabrina Carpenter and (fellow actor and artist) Maya Hawke from earlier in the year. Published through Interview Magazine, there are a few sections I want to highlight:

“After getting her big break in 2014 on the tween sitcom Girl Meets World, Sabrina Carpenter has finally escaped the prefab pressures of Disney-kid stardom by snatching back her artistic identity. She followed up her first four albums with 2022’s Emails I Can’t Send, a more dangerous departure that saw the 24-year-old performer finding vulnerability in pop star problems like public breakups and internet hate. Taylor Swift took notice (she asked her fellow Pennsylvania native to help kick off the international leg of her Eras tour), as did the Catholic Church, which beefed with Sabrina over the video for her single “Feathers” (YouTube it). Someone else who’s been paying attention is the actor and singer Maya Hawke, who called Sabrina up to unpack the complexities of pop stardom.

CARPENTER: I genuinely feel the same way about you and your songwriting. Every time I see you perform you have such a genuine, raw portrayal of emotion.

HAWKE: Thank you. But part of why I look up to you is that the visual aspect is really hard for me. I love to paint and I love to act and sing, but connecting the dots between the three is a really big challenge. I’m curious, did it come all at once or have you been piecing it together slowly?

CARPENTER: I like to keep my eyes and ears open for things that resonate with me because that’s what brings my world to life. But most of the time I have absolutely no idea what I’m doing. The more I keep creating, the more ideas just come out of the woodwork.

HAWKE: It’s like collage.

CARPENTER: Absolutely. It just has to be true to you, as clichéd as that sounds, because there’s no formula, as much as people like to think that you sit in an office and people tell you what you should wear and how you should act onstage.

HAWKE: Yeah. It’s more like you sit alone in your room and people call you and go, “What are you wearing? What’s the plan?” And you’re like, “I don’t know. Maybe this?”

PHOTO CREDIT: Conor Cunningham

CARPENTER: And then you end up finding what makes you feel comfortable. For me, clothing has had a huge part in that. It’s been a process of finding out what actually makes me feel comfortable. And oh my god, I’m not going to be comfortable in what I’m wearing right now in three to four years. But I have to follow what I feel at that moment.

HAWKE: That’s such a zen way to think about it. Sometimes I look back at things I did early on, like, “I wish I’d known what I now know about myself,” so that I could’ve been more consistent. But if I hadn’t experimented in all the ways that I did, I don’t think I would be myself now.

CARPENTER: The mistakes lead you to knowing yourself the most. If I didn’t wear the hideous things I wore when I was 13, whatever fedora I had, I don’t think I would’ve been the same person I am today. Also, what a humbling experience to look back and be like, “I’ve changed.” That’s a really good sign that you’ve lived life the way you should.

HAWKE: I think so, too. I wanted to ask you about the organic growth of “Nonsense.” That song wasn’t a single, right? A fan found it and then it exploded, as far as I could tell.

CARPENTER: Yeah. Sometimes I get insecure about pop music and the fact that it can’t always resonate with people. So it was really special for me to experience that song having its own life, maybe because it felt like the closest to my true personality, as silly as that sounds.

HAWKE: That makes total sense.

CARPENTER: I was at a really, really low point in my life about two years ago, so I was writing very few optimistic love songs. That one always stuck out, but I felt like it might discredit some of the songs on the album that were about more sensitive subjects, so it almost didn’t make it in. People in the past had told me my music didn’t have symmetry, that I didn’t have every song sounding the same, and that got in my head. So I’m grateful because the fans decided on their own that it meant something to them.

PHOTO CREDIT: Conor Cunningham

HAWKE: You talked about being insecure about pop music, and I was curious, did you consciously select a genre or did the style of songs you were writing just lend themselves to pop?

CARPENTER: Honestly, I don’t love the idea that a pop star is someone who makes catchy songs with easy-to-grasp concepts. It resonates with part of me, but I grew up with Stevie Nicks and Dolly Parton and Carole King and Patsy Cline, and that music didn’t necessarily feel like pop to me.

HAWKE: Right.

CARPENTER: I feel a lot freer and more excited about what I’m making now because I’ve realized that genre isn’t necessarily the most important thing. It’s about honesty and authenticity and whatever you gravitate towards. There were a lot of genres in my last album, and I like to think I’ll continue that throughout writing music.

HAWKE: That’s so smart. Your voice has so much capacity and clarity, and that lends it so well to how you’re producing because you can really jump the octave, for lack of a better term. I thought there was going to be a question here, but it’s really just a compliment. Your voice is incredible.

CARPENTER: [Laughs] Thank you so much. I don’t know how to take a compliment. How are you with that?

HAWKE: I deflect when I don’t agree with the compliment. I also deflect if I actually think the thing someone is complimenting me on is an insult. If they’re like, “You’re so quirky,” I’m like, “Thanks.” If I like the compliment, internally I’m a mess, but I’m just, like, “Thank you. That means so much to me.”

CARPENTER: I think being quirky is a compliment.

HAWKE: Anything can be a compliment or an insult. It’s all about what you were made fun of as a kid. I was bullied for being too quirky and weird, and now those things make me sensitive, but only because of my little child self that’s living inside my grown-up body. How did people react to you as a kid?

PHOTO CREDIT: Conor Cunningham

CARPENTER: Ironically, I was bullied for singing. I had really big dreams as a child, and it worked out for me. [Laughs] I did well in school, but I’ll be honest, I started homeschooling really young. This sounds so dramatic, but I felt safer learning the way that I did. I was in an online school, and then I started working at a pretty young age, so I got out of those little toxic circles that you sometimes don’t even realize you’re in because you’re so young. So I was grateful for that. Were you homeschooled?

HAWKE: I think because both of my parents were child actors, it was really important to them to not take me out of school. During my teen years I used to scream and cry at my parents, asking them to let me work, but they wouldn’t. I graduated high school and then I did a year at drama school and then I started working at 19. But I was always jealous of the people who got a head start.

CARPENTER: When I was younger a lot of people assumed it was my parents’ dream that they were trying to fulfill through me, and I always had to tell people it really had nothing to do with anyone but my 11-year-old self. But 19 is an amazing age to start having full control of what you’re doing. I started writing my debut album as a child and I would’ve never, ever put that out if I had started a little bit older.

HAWKE: I put my debut album out at 20 and I wouldn’t have put it out this year. [Laughs] But every time you change you look back and say,“I would have done it differently.” It’s all just organic growth. And it’s great you put out your debut album when you did. It started the train, and now you have Emails I Can’t Send and it’s extraordinary.

PHOTO CREDIT: Conor Cunningham

CARPENTER: Thank you. I definitely think timing plays a huge role in all of this.

HAWKE: It’s one of my favorite albums of the year. The whole thing makes you feel good, but the lyrics fill you with powerful thoughts about your own life and relationships. It doesn’t seem like you cut out any pieces of yourself to make this record.

CARPENTER: Thank you. I get chills when it’s received that way because I think one of the trickiest things for an artist is accepting being misunderstood. It comes with making art in any capacity.

HAWKE: Totally.

CARPENTER: I wrote most of the songs on Emails I Can’t Send not intending to ever put them out in the world, because I don’t think I would’ve written those songs if I thought about other people hearing them.

HAWKE: I actually feel that in the record. I started listening with “Skin” and then did a deep dive of your other stuff, but this record feels like you plunge 1,000 feet deeper into your own gut, and I’m so grateful you did.

CARPENTER: Thank you. Unfortunately, you have to allow yourself to get to that point where you’re even able to do that, and until I made this album, I wasn’t at that place where I felt I could. The other day, this guy was like, “Life is so long. You just have to follow the things that make you feel something, whether that’s good or bad.” And I was like, “Wow, I always hear life is short.” But it made me really excited about the fact that I’m going to find my way through.

HAWKE: That’s a very, very important thing to remember. It’s both things. An hour can feel like an eternity and a day can go by in the blink of an eye. Time seems to be what you make of it and if you treat your life like it’s long, it will be”.

I do hope that people check out Sabrina Carpenter’s music. She is someone who always comes across so well in interviews. By that, I mean she seems incredible intelligent, charming, compelling and intensely likeable. I am going to finish with an interview from Cosmopolitan. Among other things, Carpenter talks about opening for Taylor Swift during her Eras Tour:

“Late last year, in your acceptance speech for the Variety Hitmakers Rising Artist Award, you mentioned how your mum would reference The Tortoise and The Hare story when you were a kid and how it helped you get comfortable with “the mindset of a slow rise.” At first I was like, 'Oh, I totally relate to that.' And then I thought, 'But wait. She’s only 24 [at the time]. She got her first acting job at 11. She had this major role at 15.' It made me think about the ways in which ambitious women continue to move the goalposts for ourselves.

I was really nervous when I gave that speech, to be super frank. That award was such an honour, but it was one of the first speeches I’ve ever given, in this room of all these people I admire.

I was a kid when I saw that Miley Cyrus was 16 and touring arenas. And so my mind went, 'At 16, you’re going to tour arenas.' And then when that didn’t happen, I was like, 'Oh.' I think if you really look at how long I’ve been singing and acting, it’s a long time compared to the instant gratification that some people have. I never had the instant thing, which now I feel very lucky about because I have a lot of experience. Even if I’m light-years ahead, I would rather feel that I’m behind and have the ambition to think, 'Oh, I can always work a little bit harder. I can always try something new.' There are things I haven’t done yet that I really want to do.

What kinds of things?

Well, I feel so grateful that I’ve been able to tour an album that I really care about for almost two years and that my fans have given it a life longer than I ever could have asked for. I put two and a half years into making this album, and it’s a shitty feeling when you put so much time into something and people want something new in two months. So I’m trying to really take this experience in before moving on to the next thing… but I’ve been working on the next thing for a minute. I’m starting to feel like I’ve outgrown the songs I’m singing, which is always an exciting feeling because I think that means the next chapter is right around the corner.

Does a next chapter look like more music or a return to acting or…?

I go to the movies and I get really jealous of the people in the movies. I’m like, 'Oh, I want to be in a movie.' And then I go to concerts and I get jealous of people onstage. I’m like, 'Oh, I want to be onstage.' I think that’s a good sign. The hardest thing for me to do sometimes is to stop and take a moment to recognise how much I grew in the last year. I didn’t think 24 was going to be special at all. When I turned 24, I was like, 'What is this year even made for?' Because 21 is always very pronounced, 25 is always very pronounced. But the middle ages, oof. Even with songs, there’s 'Nobody likes you when you’re 23.' But shit about 24.

So has 24 been different than you expected?

You still feel very youthful, you can still wear very short skirts, but you also feel more insightful and have a bit more knowledge and experience. You’re better able to know the people that you want to invite into your life, whereas before you are just nice to everybody and want to be everyone’s friend. I think that’s what’s happened to me in the last year and a half. Instead of being like, 'Do people like me?' it’s 'Oh, do I actually like you?' Not in a mean way, but in a sense of, do I want this energy around me all the time? Is this someone who adds to my life?

What are those things that you look for to determine whether somebody’s additive to your life?

People who stimulate me and don’t just agree with everything I say. And people who are funny. When I meet people that feel very genuine and pure, I hope to keep them in my life. Because that’s the only way that I’m going to stay close to the ground in any capacity. But also, part of learning is keeping the wrong people in your life for a period of time. I’ve learned that lesson the hard way a couple of times, for sure.

Tell me about the day-to-day of life on the road with Taylor Swift for The Eras Tour.

What’s been so fun about this tour is getting to perform in places I haven’t before. And I’m quite jet-lagged because we’re all over the world. So sleep is super important. The hardest thing is turning your brain off and getting everything to quiet down. But I’m grateful for my inability to turn my brain off at times because that’s when I come up with ideas. I feel creative. I feel excited. After a show, I think a lot about what I want to do differently the next time and what I want to do with my own show in two years.

I did two legs of the Emails I Can’t Send Tour, and that was amazing, but it was a much more rigorous schedule. I feel so genuinely lucky on The Eras Tour because I get to perform a set that I’m super comfortable with, and then I get to watch one of the greatest performers every night. My favourite thing to do has always been to watch people who look so comfortable in their bodies onstage, like Madonna and Britney and Prince. Sometimes when you don’t have a mirror in front of you and you can’t actually see how you look, a lot of the learning comes from watching a video back and thinking, 'Oh, I thought I was giving more than I was actually giving.' And it’s been a very tall order being on a stage that big because — and this is not even to sound like a pick-me, like when girls are like 'I’m so small, I can’t reach the top shelf' — I’m literally 5 feet tall. So sometimes when I’m on that stage, it feels so huge that I just have to be larger than life in some capacity.

It almost feels like a Broadway show because everything is so synchronised but at the same time feels so in the moment. That’s an art. It’s really hard to teach. It’s really hard to learn. And I feel so lucky that I get to watch Taylor perform every time. It makes me want to tour the world again, which is a good feeling.

It sounds like you’re really energised and excited by what you’re doing — I can imagine that if you weren’t, you’d risk burning out.

Yeah. I’d be smoking a pipe a day. It would be rough. No, I’m still very much in love with it. I think that’s the whole goal, to keep falling in love with what you do all the time in new ways. With this industry, if you’re focused on the wrong things, it can be easy not to feel that way. If you’re focused on the things that excite you and the things that bring you that inspiration, that joy, it’s a more lighthearted experience.

What would be “wrong” things to focus on?

Anything that makes you question your own innate feelings and ideas and emotions. You read all of these interviews with artists in the past where the work that they were the most criticised for or the work that they were the most scared of was the thing that felt the most honest to them. And I always try to keep that in mind — to not take what other people say too heavily.

Considering that you’re in a much more constant feedback cycle than previous generations, you have to be particularly intentional about taking a step back and knowing what noise to drown out.

Correct. You have to be discerning, protect your energy, as they say. Because everyone has the ability to say whatever they want. And you’re like, do you have a degree in anything? People comment all the time, sounding like vocal instructors talking about technique, and then you go to their profile, and they’re literally working at GameStop [an American electronics company]. And by the way, no offence to anyone that works at GameStop because I love GameStop. But I just mean it in the sense that people will be doing something so different with their lives and have opinions on things that they aren’t an expert on 

So I understand how you approach friendships and meeting new people. Can we talk about how you approach dating? As you put your hands over your face to hide!

A lot of it, for me, has been fate. I know that’s super broad, but I don’t actively look for it. The relationships that I actually want to put my energy into have to be so interesting or invigorating because they take me away from the other things I love. So yeah, it’s fun and it’s messy. I think I’m still just at this place where I’m really enjoying the newness of all of it.

Do you use apps?

No. I have one app, and I usually just never open it. But there would be times where I would just want to see that other people exist. I know that sounds weird. Because when you’re on tour for a very long time, you’re just like, oh my god, there’s no one around.

Just tens of thousands of screaming girls.

Yeah. It’s either screaming girls or it’s people you work with. So when I was a lot younger, I was like, 'Maybe I should get an app to see if there are human beings.' But I’ve never, ever, ever, ever gone on a date from an app. It’s always just been by fate and by chance, people I meet or people that I connect with through friends and things like that.

I’d imagine your experience is very different from the average 25-year-old.

I don’t know. What’s an average 25-year-old? What was your dating experience when you were 25?

I’m a terrible example. My husband and I started dating in college. I was 23 when we got engaged, which is wild to think about now in my thirties.

Oh my god, you’re one of those. My best friend just got married and she’s my age.

Do you like the guy [she's married]?4

Oh, I love him. He’s amazing. It just made me feel like I was so behind or something. And then I realised, no, no, no, she’s just ahead.

Everybody’s on their own timeline. I have friends who have gone through divorces in their twenties.

I love how we’ve normalised that. Because that makes me feel a lot less scared when it comes to dating in general. When I was younger, the one thing I always thought was, why would I date this person if I didn’t see myself marrying them? I just wouldn’t even put energy into it. But now I have a mentality that there are relationships that are meant to be in your life, even if it’s only for a couple of weeks.

Okay, so across your personal life and your professional accomplishments — of which there are many — what are some of the things you love most about yourself?

I love this question. I think the fact that I really, really do love to find the humour and joy in things, even if they feel really dark and heavy. That’s saved me a lot of the time. Ooh, answering this is tricky. Because you’re like, am I going to say my hair? I’ve always loved the way I care about my friends. When I love people, I just care about them so much and want them to feel loved and seen. And then third, I would say I like my ass. I will do squats till the day I die”.

A new single Espresso, was released in April. I hope that it leads to a new album. That song proves that Sabrina Carpenter is among the most distinct and consistently brilliant Pop artists of her generation. I am looking forward to seeing where she goes from here. Her new album, out in August, will tell us more. No doubt a queen primed for the mainstream, there is no doubt Carpenter is a future icon. This stunning artist is…

AMONG the very best.

FEATURE: HIT ME HARD: Why Pitchfork’s Reaction to Billie Eilish’s New Album Opens Up Debate About Music Criticism

FEATURE:

 

 

HIT ME HARD

IN THIS PHOTO: Billie Eilish/PHOTO CREDIT: Aidan Zamira for Rolling Stone

 

Why Pitchfork’s Reaction to Billie Eilish’s New Album Opens Up Debate About Music Criticism

_________

I do realise that…

PHOTO CREDIT: picjumbo.com/Pexels

I may be part of a problem that I am about to highlight. Also, music criticism and journalism is subjective. When it comes to reviewing an album or project, those charged with stating their opinion are free to score it as low or high as they wish. It is good we have a wide-ranging spectrum of takes on something like a new album. Artists do want the feedback. The public can obviously make their own minds up when it comes to opinions. Journalists are good at using their experience to frame an album in a way that brings it to life. Maybe finding small flaws or offering constructive criticism. I do find a lot of reviews are quite brief. I know some sites do limit word count though, when it comes to an album, a few paragraphs seems like the minimum. Many do not even do that. A debate that has raged for decades is the value of journalists. I think ‘critics’ implies those who are going to be critical, rather than provide a critical analysis. I have backed away from reviews because of the little traffic they gained when I share them. I still firmly believe that it is important that we have journalists giving their thoughts on an album, E.P. or song. I think we can all agree that certain reviews or overly-harsh or deliberately provocative. Others that are lazy or unfairly low. That is the nature of journalism. One site I do really like but is renowned for its low and bewildering album review scores is Pitchfork. Over the years, they have given artists like Lana Del Rey really low scores for albums objectively brilliant. Their review for Billie Eilish’s HIT ME HARD AND SOFT has drawn criticism. Chief among those calling it out is Eilish’s brother and co-writer, Finneas O'Connell (as album producer he is known as ‘Finneas’). As NME report, he was not best pleased with their 6.8 our of 10 assessment of an album that has won its fair share of four-star reviews from other sites and sources:

“Finneas has hit out at Pitchfork over its review of Billie Eiliish’s new album ‘Hit Me Hard And Soft’.

Eilish’s brother and frequent collaborator co-wrote the follow-to 2021’s ‘Happier Than Ever’, and is credited as the record’s sole producer.

Eilish’s third studio effort earned a four-star review from NME, who praised the project for being “bold” and “confident in its execution”. “In trying to write an album for herself, she’s made one that will resonate harder than anything she’s done before,” it concluded.

Pitchfork was less favourable, however – awarding ‘Hit Me…’ 6.8 out of 10 (Eilish’s first two albums earned scores of 7.2 and 7.6, respectively).

The publication wrote: “Every song on this big album has some detail worth hearing, but the insistence on multipart epics and ballads kills the momentum […] The much-hyped live instrumentation is more window dressing than it is integral to the artistry, and Jon Castelli’s brightly saturated mix leaves the extraneous elements to fight for space in the more crowded sections.

“All these enhancements cancel each other out until ‘HMHAS’ is just another good record from Billie and Finneas – certainly tasteful, and arresting sometimes, but all the session musicians in the world can’t make it a masterpiece.”

Finneas has since responded to the review while replying to a fan on TikTok.

“Nothing cool about writing a positive review of an album everyone likes – they’ve gotta have an angle,” he wrote.

“They gave [Lana Del Rey’s debut album] ‘Born To Die’ a 5.5 – it’s their whole hater-ass bag.” Check out the screenshot below.

Eilish recently said that ‘Hit Me Hard And Soft’ was “the most genuine thing” she’s ever made. “It feels very, very me and it feels like all of the music is exactly who I am,” she explained.

The star went on to say that she felt somewhat pigeonholed after the huge success of her 2019 debut album, ‘When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?’. She added that she overcompensated on ‘Happier Than Ever’ as a result.

Elsewhere, Eilish and Finneas said they had “never ever, ever loved something more” than their latest LP”.

Even if it one site giving consistently underrating reviews to great albums, it is fair to question how valid music criticism is. Not everyone will love everything or the same thing. I do find a lot of sites have a reputation for marking too low. When mixed with other reviews, it does rather stand out. Whether you feel they are being objective or deliberately harsh, it must be frustrating for artists to read reviews that go in quite hard. In the case of Pitchfork and Billie Eilish, they did say HIT ME HARD AND SOFT is no masterpiece. That is fine. It is the tone and angle of the review that seems rather dismissive. Finneas O’Connell might be subjective in his anger, yet I have seen many share the same views of that review.

It is a complex debate. I can appreciate those who say that reviews are not essential because people can form their own opinions. Like literary critics, it is not just about someone saying whether they like or dislike an album. There is perceptive about production, sound and aspects that the average listener might not know about. It is exciting for artists and fans reading reviews for a brilliant album about to arrive. I know how many artists value reviews. So many different takes and opinions can confuse things I guess. If someone says something and someone else something else, who do you trust?! Listeners will have the ultimate say. It is good to get a variety of opinions. What worries me is that reviews that are harsh or seem to take against an artist for no real reason might put listeners off trusting journalists. Pitchfork can be pretty random and strange with their reviews. It is not only them. A journalist is a music fan so, like any listener, they seek different things in an album. They have their own thoughts and takeaways. Music is universal, yet the listening experience is unique. At a time when we should really highlight how essential music journalism is, stories like the one where Finneas O'Connell blasted Pitchfork does muddy things. If a reviewer or site sees an album everyone likes and then feels it necessary to purposely downgrade it or feel there needs to be some negativity, it is frustrating defending music reviewing. I still find it has a place and real purpose. Even so, the Pitchfork review for a fabulous Billie Eilish album…

HIT pretty hard.

FEATURE: Among the Dozen… Predicting Albums That Could Make the Shortlist for this Year’s Mercury Prize

FEATURE:

 

 

Among the Dozen…

IN THIS PHOTO: Nadine Shah

 

Predicting Albums That Could Make the Shortlist for this Year’s Mercury Prize

_________

I have…

IN THIS PHOTO: SPRINTS

already put out a feature predicting albums that could well be in the running for this year’s Mercury Prize. The closing date for entries has already passed. We are in that gap between the window closing and the shortlist being announced. I know some say awards aren’t everything and the Mercury Prize is a little limited though, if you think about the fact Ezra Collective won it last year (and they are Jazz-based), then it is broad. I know it has a problem handing it out to London artists. I think it has gone to a London/London-based artist for the past nine years. If you count artists born outside of London but now based there, we could see a tenth consecutive year where a London artist wins it. It calls into question the relevance of an award that does not look beyond the capital. I know they are awarding it based on quality and merit, yet one would imagine that there is a slightly London bias. I don’t think we will see a London-based/born artist win it this year. I am holding cards close to check. I have in mind an artist who I think will win it. Rather than focus on each album and give you reviews and details, I have compiled a playlist of songs from fifteen albums that I feel will be in the running. In the coming weeks, we will see others make their Mercury Prize predictions. I think that the twelve shortlisted albums will be announced next month. I think the past year has been a remarkable one for British and Irish music. I have compiled a playlist of songs from fifteen albums I think are favourites to get a Mercury Prize shortlist nod. It is clear from this stellar list of albums that it will be a tightly-contested event. We will know who walks away with the honour later in the year. For now, wrap your ears around some wonderful songs (from great albums) by incredible British and Irish artists. The fifteen artists in this playlist are all worth of…

A Mercury Prize shortlist inclusion.

FEATURE: Not So Good Ones: Do Labels Truly Allow Artists to Be Themselves?

FEATURE:

 

 

Not So Good Ones

IN THIS PHOTO: Charli XCX

 

Do Labels Truly Allow Artists to Be Themselves?

_________

SOMETHING interesting…

PHOTO CREDIT: Nadine Fraczkowski/The Guardian

came out of a recent interview with Charli XCX. Before getting to that. You can pre-order her new album, brat, which comes out on Friday (7th June). Here is an artist who has not been welcomed into and embraced by the mainstream like some of her contemporaries. Maybe her style of music and persona is not considered to be as radio-friendly or accessible. I think most Pop artists today are sanitised. I think that they are expected to be a certain way. Maybe not talk out of terms of say anything that could divide fans or cause a storm. Not to say they are manipulated or, as part of their contract, told to dress, speak and act in a particular way. I feel there is a divide and difference between women and men. Less control and independence for female artists. This takes us to Charli XCX. Her new album comes out on the Asylum label. Not to say she is honed in and limited by the label. Some aspects of the interview with The Guardian gave pause. Maybe still seen as an outsider in Pop, I do feel that there is still a desire personality type or artist model that means anyone who has a bit of an edge or does not want to be like anyone else is seen as an outsider. As such, they do not really get the same critical plaudit and visibility as other artists:

“You used to get one shot in the music business: the wrong marketing, the wrong song and you’d never be heard from again. This was not the case for Charlotte Aitchison, better known as Charli XCX, who posted tracks on Myspace so long ago she invited comparisons to Kate Nash. Still just 31, and living between London and LA, she has written countless hits for other people – Icona Pop’s shouty I Love It, the slinky Señorita, sung by Camila Cabello and Shawn Mendes – as well as carving out a niche in experimental pop. Her songs can be brash and bombastic (you might know Boom Clap) but her personal vibe is dry and knowing. Her last record, 2022’s Crash, was a concept album about becoming a mainstream pop star: when it went to No 1, and she scored a song (Speed Drive) on the Barbie soundtrack, it seemed that she’d made it for real.

While most people under 30 know very well who she is, much of the world doesn’t, and this strange state of “famous but not quite” inspired one of the songs on her new album, Brat.

“The industry’s changed a lot,” she says. “I’ve been told for so long that I’m an outsider and I never really felt accepted into the British music scene. The press has perpetuated that narrative of me. I’m this girl who straddles the underground and pop music, and that, for some reason, is really difficult for some people to wrap their heads around.”

“More than ever now, people are rewarding the niche,” says Aitchison. “Finally, it seems fine that I’m just myself, and suddenly people like it. It’s good to finally be accepted. I’m happy with the winding path I’ve taken, and with my status as more of an outsider, because sometimes I feel a bit awkward being in the club. I’m at peace with it all. It’s all cool.”

She now lives in the Hollywood Hills, in a house formerly owned by Scottish DJ-producer Calvin Harris, and is engaged to George Daniel, drummer of the 1975. In a music world ruled by one or two artists who barely speak to the press, Aitchison’s directness is invaluable. “I hate the traditional LA approach to songwriting,” she says. “Having a kind of therapy session at the beginning, talking about what is going on in your life, then turning a sentence or two of that into a song – that’s my nightmare way of writing,” she says. “It produces very flaccid songs in my opinion.”

“We’ve got past the point of the media always pitting women against one another,” she continues. “In the mid to late 00s, it literally sold magazines and papers: ‘Britney versus Christina’, ‘Paris versus Lindsay’. Then feminism became a popular marketing tool. In the music industry, it was distilled into this idea that if you support women, and you like other women, then you’re a good feminist. The reverse of that is, if you don’t like all other women who exist and breathe on this Earth then you’re a bad feminist. If you’re not a girl’s girl then you’re a bad woman.

“That’s just such an unrealistic expectation of women,” she says. “Relationships between women are super-complex and multi-layered. You can like someone and dislike them at the same time; you can feel jealous of somebody but they can still be your friend; you can have the best time of your life on a night out with someone but not be that close to them at all. You can pose with your arms around a person at an awards show, but in reality you’re feeling not worthy, or small – or really cocky, or confident, or a huge multitude of different emotions. One day you can feel completely on top of the world; the next day, you can feel like your career’s over. The song is saying, sometimes it’s really confusing to be a girl, and that’s fine.”

“Persona is intrinsic to the modern-day artist, unless you completely reject it and do something alien-like and cold... I can’t wait for somebody to do that, actually. I can’t wait for someone to be really cold and mean and icy. But we’re not in a place where any major artist could do that. I hope someone dares”.

It is true that one does not hear Charli XCX on various radio stations. I think she is someone that the industry is overlooking. I am not sure whether brat will change that in that sense. Her Pop music is forward-thinking and progressive. It is very different to everything out there. It is clear that labels want their artists to be liked and admired. It is far less risky for them. I guess that makes some commercial sense. In some ways, this often comes at the expense of any form of free expression or a personality and sound that steps away from the desired and more accessible. I am sure Charli XCX would like to be more embraced and respected by the industry. That she is allowed to be true to herself and find the same sort of success and focus as many Pop peers around. I am not sure whether a cold or icy Pop artist would be overly successful. It would be interesting. There does seem to be this correlation between being nice, smiling and saying all the right things and success. In an Internet age, labels do very much mould artists to almost look and sound the same way. One might say that Pop artists should be bright and happy. That they should fall into line. That may be naïve of me. I was struck by what Charli XCX said. Here is an artist who is inspiring and nice. Watching and reading interviews with her, she is very real and honest. There is not the same sheen and energy as other Pop artists. In some ways, she is more genuine and honest than most of her contemporaries. The fact that female artists particularly might be expected to be very happy and energised all the time. As she has said, women are pitted against other women. Female relationships are complex. It seems quite discriminatory and intimidating for artists coming through. Many simply might not have the personality or preference to be likeable in a rather inane or pointless way. They can be seen as more serious or sullen and still get huge acclaim and popularity. It doesn’t really happen.

I wonder whether women especially in Pop and further afield have any chance of being authentic and choosing their own approach and personality and will be accepted and not prohibited from the mainstream. I do think that there is a nervousness from labels. Artists are not going to be deliberately offensive or angry, but there is fear of anything different or alternative. It is phenomenally hard being an artist now. With the Internet and social media adding so much difficulty and complexity, it is hard to navigate. Fans can be so divided and capricious. There is this fickleness and changing demand. If you are experimental or different then people will take against you. If you are more commercial then you are seen as a sell-out or attacked. It is impossible. Charli XCX has released phenomenal and successful albums. Even so, she is under-exposed and under-played. It is good that Charli XCX does seem to be at peace with being an ‘outsider’. That being herself is accepted. Her reservations about artists now having to live through the internet and there not being barriers between artists and fans. That the currency and commodity of niceness – in all its meaninglessness – is still sought-after from labels. Will artists ever be able to be more authentic and themselves and have the label promote them as fervently and widely as others on their roster?! Will labels always favour and demand that artists be…

THE ‘good’ ones?

FEATURE: Kate Bush’s Babooshka at Forty-Four: Her Best and Most Important Album Opener?

FEATURE:

 

 

Kate Bush’s Babooshka at Forty-Four

PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush

 

Her Best and Most Important Album Opener?

_________

I never need an excuse to speak about…

Kate Bush’s Babooshka. There are a couple of good reasons today. For a start, on 27th June, the single turns forty-four. It reached number five in the U.K. upon its release and Bush produced the song alongside Jon Kelly. They were producers for her third studio album, Never for Ever – Babooshka was the album’s second single. I always think it is interesting when an artist releases singles way before an album comes out. I guess you need to gain momentum. Never for Ever’s first single, Breathing, came out in April 1980. With Babosohka following a couple of months later, it would be three months more before Never for Ever arrived (it was released on 8th September, 1980). There is so much to explore with regards Babooshka. From live performances through to the video all the way to the lyrical meaning, it is a fascinating song from Kate Bush. It’s B-side, Ran Taz Waltz, was premiered (in a magnificently odd way) during Kate Bush’s Christmas special in 1979. I think it is very underrated. Rather than an album track as B-side, we have this song with its own life and purpose. I would love to explore it more one day. I want to argue that it may be her best album opening track. Definitely her most important in my view. Also, as American Songwriter recently wrote about the song, I want to include what they wrote. Before getting to those, we need some background on Babooshka. Including words from Kate Bush abouts its origins. Thanks to the Kate Bush Encyclopedia for providing details about a truly spectacular and magical track:

“Performances

Kate performed ‘Babooshka’ in various European programmes, including Collaro (France), Countdown (Netherlands) and Rock Pop (Germany). Her performance of the song in a Dr. Hook television special remains the first, and is memorable for the costume she is wearing: on her the right side she resembles a staid Victorian lady in mourning dress; on the left side a glittering, liberated young woman in a silvery jumpsuit, with bright lightning-streaks painted down the left side of her face. Her figure is lit so that only the “repressed” side of her costume is visible during the verses of the song, and mainly the “free” side during the choruses.

Cover versions

‘Babooshka’ has been covered by Astral Prince, Brain Grimmer, Sonia Cat-Berro, Kat Devlin, Eartheater, Goodknight Productions, Göteborgs Symfoniker, The Hounds Of Love, Yuri Kono, Miss Platnum, Mr. Sirius, Oldelaf, the Plunging Necklines, Niki Romijn and Debra Stephenson.

Kate about ‘Babooshka’

‘Babooshka’ is about futile situations. The way in which we often ruin things for ourselves. (Kate Bush Club newsletter, September 1980)

Apparently it is grandmother, it’s also a headdress that people wear. But when I wrote the song it was just a name that literally came into my mind, I’ve presumed I’ve got it from a fairy story I’d read when I was a child. And after having written the song a series of incredible coincidences happened where I’d turned on the television and there was Donald Swan singing about Babooshka. So I thought, “Well, there’s got to be someone who’s actually called Babooshka.” So I was looking throughRadio Timesand there, another coincidence, there was an opera called Babooshka. Apparently she was the lady that the three kings went to see because the star stopped over her house and they thought “Jesus is in there”.’ So they went in and he wasn’t. And they wouldn’t let her come with them to find the baby and she spent the rest of her life looking for him and she never found him. And also a friend of mine had a cat called Babooshka. So these really extraordinary things that kept coming up when in fact it was just a name that came into my head at the time purely because it fitted. (Peter Powell interview, Radio 1 (UK), 11 October 1980))”.

Like so many Kate Bush songs, Babooshka came from a less-than-traditional source. Few songwriters like her were on the scene in 1980. The fact that she did not know about the Russian word for grandmother. The angle of the lyrics. Aged twenty-one when the song came out, she was writing purely from a hypothetical stance. In terms of relationships and trust, nothing that we hear in the song relates to her experiences. Making it all the more remarkable that she would come up with it! Almost a poet or author in terms of her songwriting. So many peers wrote about love and deceit in very ordinary and cliché ways. Kate Bush was penning amazing songs full of rich imagery and depth. I am going to claim that Babooshka is her most important album opening track – maybe some would argue if it is the best. I was pleased that American Songwriter focused on Babboshka last month. Their article mentions a great 1980 interview. I would hope that, ahead of the song’s forty-fourth anniversary, journalists take the song apart and explore it in more depth:

“A Test of Fidelity

In a 1980 interview on the Australian TV show Countdown, Bush explained “Babooshka” and its origins: “It was really a theme that has fascinated me for some time. It’s based on a theme that is often used in folk songs, which is where the wife of the husband begins to feel that perhaps he’s not faithful. And there’s no real strength in her feelings, it’s just more or less paranoia suspicions, and so she starts thinking that she’s going to test him, just to see if he’s faithful. So what she does is she gets herself a pseudonym, which happens to be Babooshka, and she sends him a letter. And he responds very well to the letter, because as he reads it, he recognizes the wife that he had a couple of years ago, who was happy, in the letter. And so he likes it, and she decides to take it even further and get a meeting together to see how he reacts to this Babooshka lady instead of her.

“When he meets her, again because she is so similar to his wife, the one that he loves, he’s very attracted to her. Of course she is very annoyed and the break in the song is just throwing the restaurant at him. … He loves her very much, and the whole idea of the song is really the futility and the stupidness of humans and how by our own thinking, spinning around in our own ideas, we come up with completely paranoid facts. So in her situation she was in fact suspicious of a man who was doing nothing wrong, he loved her very much indeed. Through her own suspicions and evil thoughts she’s really ruined the relationship.”

The Video

The simple video featured Bush in two guises. During the gentle verses, she’s dressed in a black bodysuit with a veil over her face, portraying the older woman in her song, dancing with a large double bass that symbolized the husband. In the dramatic choruses, she vamps dramatically in a skimpy warrior outfit, her eyes popping wide and cutting a dangerously alluring figure as she represents the temptress that was her own self. It was an effective way to use a low-budget concept. Bush was always a striking performer, exploring different ways to make her videos engaging.

While not a hit in America – she’s only had the one, and you know what it is – the single for “Babooshka” went to No. 2 in Australia, No. 4 in France, No. 5 in Ireland, Israel, Italy, and the UK, and No. 8 in New Zealand. It sold over a million copies in the UK and France, and has racked up 44 million YouTube views and 158 million Spotify listens.

A year and a half before the massive resurgence of “Running Up that Hill,” this Bush song got attention as part of a Tik Tok Challenge around late 2020. Young women (and a couple of men) lip-synched and/or performed to the major verse to chorus transition in the song. Their interpretations varied wildly.

With “Babooshka,” Bush took the familiar themes of distrust and infidelity and spun them into her own unique tale. “‘Babooshka’ is about futile situations,” she told the Kate Bush Club newsletter in 1980. “The way in which we often ruin things for ourselves.” That heartbreak certainly made for a classic song”.

Bringing cinematic and literary references to the fore, Never for Ever was Kate Bush’s broadest and most fulfilling album to that point. Where she was free to produce alone – with Jon Kelly at least; Andrew Powell (who produced 1978’s The Kick Inside and Lionheart) does not feature – and, with it, bring a fuller lyrical and musical paillette to the front. I suspect that there was little room for too much ambition and experimentation on her first two albums. EMI keener for their prodigy to get herself established and then, when things were commercially secure, allow a bit more expansion. Bush was not willing to work with someone who did not share her vision and let her be more involved with production. As such, the opening song to Never for Ever had to be a statement of intent. Some would argue there are stronger opening tracks on her albums. How about Moving from The Kick inside? Surely Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God) from Hounds of Love (1985). Even King of the Mountain from Aerial (2005). I would say that, in terms of its impact and freshness, Babooshka might be top. Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God) is majestic. Though there has been oversaturation. It is played more than any other Kate Bush track. Not that it diminished its impact. I feel it is so over-familiar and almost synonymous with Kate Bush now. Other options like Moving and The Sensual World (from 1989’s The Sensual World) have their merits. I feel there is something extra from Babooshka. In terms of the way it starts this brilliant run of tracks. Delius (Song of Summer) and Blow Away (For Bill) then lead to All We Ever Look For. It starts Never for Ever phenomenally strong and perfectly precedes this run of beautiful songs that give you a flavour of the album. Babooshka has touches of the Fairlight CMI. Some standout Fender Rhodes piano and electric bass. A number two hit in Australia, there is this gravity and heft to Babooshka. The perfect way to open her third studio album. Kate Bush brilliantly bookending Never for Ever with these accomplished and intriguing tracks. The mighty and epic Breathing ends the album.

I would say it is her most important opening track. After two studio albums – Lionheart was not as well received as The Kick Inside - and a tour the previous year, there was this sense of expectation. From critics, maybe they felt that Kate Bush was past her best. After a slightly underwhelming – in their view – second studio album, could she deliver on her third?! I do feel there was a lot of doubt. People who has seen her during The Tour of Life had different expectations. There was this blend of fans’ expectations who were at the tour and those who were not. In any case, there were a lot of eyes on her. Some had gone lukewarm so, when you hear Babooshka, that is confirmation that Kate Bush cannot be written off or counted out! Listen to the opening few seconds. You are instantly hooked by that sound. I feel Kate Bush knew as soon as she wrote Babooshka that it was going to be the opening track. It is the perfect way to introduce listeners to a new phase of her career. Maybe if she had opened Never for Ever with Delis (Song of Summer) or All We Ever Look For, I don’t think it would have made the same impact. Perhaps people feeling it was very similar material on her previous two albums. Babooshka is like nothing else! I would argue it is her most important album opener. A song that very much lets you know what Never for Ever holds in store. I know I have said in the past how there are stronger opening albums tracks from Kate Bush, though I feel Babooshka might steal the title now. Before rounding off, I want to bring Dreams of Orgonon and their excellent feature about Babooshka. Lending weight to the argument that it is among Kate Bush strongest songs:

“Let’s walk back to the beginning of Babooshka’s narrative genealogy, the traditional English folk song “Sovay, the Female Highwayman.” The song (which Bush could have heard from A. L. Lloyd or her social circle of musicians) tells of a maiden who “dressed herself in man’s array,” pretends to be a highwayman, and holds her lover at gunpoint, demanding his treasures. The man gives Sovay his pocket watch but refuses to part with his precious engagement ring. Having seen her fiancé’s loyalty in practice, Sovay departs from him. The next day, Sovay’s fiancé sees her with his pocketwatch and learns the truth. Sovay explains that she only disguised herself “for to know/whether you were a man or no,” darkly adding “if you had given me that ring,’/ she said, ‘I’d have pulled the trigger/I’d pulled the trigger and shot you dead.’” It’s a morbidly funny song that creates a radically subversive woman protagonist (Blackadder the Third arguably homages it,) in a tradition of stories about women who break under the pressure of their partners. Sovay takes a socially unacceptable mode of agency, testing her partner’s dedication to her by literally threatening to rob and kill him. She undergoes a pleasant psychotic break, staging a rebellion against the norms of class society achieved by settling into one of its most despised professions. 

Kate Bush is relatively at home in class society. She’s exactly the kind of creative white woman Virginia Woolf writes about in A Room of One’s Own, which posits the ideal writing situation for women as containing an excess of leisure time and a private room. While Bush has written songs about working class people, she’s done so from a skewed theatrical perspective rather than a social realist one. Class dynamics in her stories tend to include heavily exaggerated behaviors and tropes, although they can be accompanied by a subversion of the established social order. In “Babooshka,” Bush switches out Sovay’s bandit for its middle-class equivalent — an adulteress. In her version of the story, the man is complicit in the hoodwinking, as he chooses to go along with this strange woman writing him letters (a bourgeois medium of communication). Rather than simply being outmaneuvered by his lady, he betrays her (in doing exactly what she wanted him to do). There’s a fundamental power imbalance here that, while arranged by one gaslighting partner, relies on unethical predilections from both parties, rather than a straightforward narrative of a gentleman being manipulated by his lady love. Neither “Sovay” nor “Babooshka” reveal the aftermath of their seminal betrayals, but both songs present clear cases of boundaries being crossed.

Now let’s turn to Babooshka’s husband. Bush is largely right when she says Babooshka is responsible for ruining their relationship. She manipulates her husband, lies to him, and connives the situation that undoes their marriage. The song is positioned around her failure to treasure the love and support she has. There are even hints that she turned on her husband long before she conjured up her catfish, particularly in her husband’s observation that the catfish resembles “his wife before she freezed on him/just life his wife when she was beau-ti-ful.” There’s a distressing suggestion that Babooshka is simply no longer attractive to her husband and stopped being beautiful when she stopped paying attention to him. However, Bush fails to account for the fact that Babooshka’s husband cheats on his wife. It can hardly be said this isn’t an emotional affair — he has a correspondence with a woman who reminds him of his wife when she was young (which. Ew) and goes to meet her behind his wife’s back. These activities match any coherent definition of adultery. That the song doesn’t take him to task for this is odd, and suggests Bush’s leniency towards her male protagonists is a tad blinkered (and vindicates Graeme Thomson’s self-assured observation of Bush’s tendency to obviate masculinity’s faults). As major as Babooshka’s transgressions are, the precise nature of them speaks to the complexity of Bush’s gender politics.

Of course, the song’s moral ambiguity is its most interesting aspect. While there’s an almost reactionary slant to the way “Babooshka” perceives relationships, particularly in the way it treats gender along binary and determinist lines, Bush does push against the grain. She often demonstrates a willingness to interrogate the internal experiences of her characters, particularly women characters. Exploring the ramifications of jealousy is crucial to imbuing her characters with interiority. Bush has Babooshka’s husband failing similarly, even if she doesn’t realize it. Most texts are buzzing with suggestions their authors haven’t considered. In the case of “Babooshka,” Bush enacts a complex meditation on how gendered expectations can poison relationships. Babooshka lets her suspicions and preoccupation with re-becoming young and glamorous overcome her life, and her husband lets his treacherous predilections towards young beauty lead him astray. No party comes out morally in the clear, and yet neither is entirely unsympathetic. They’re trapped in an ugly binary where people are programmed to perform in ways incompatible with human psychology. If there’s a way to use the framework of folklore in a thoughtful and modern way, this is it.

As such, “Babooshka” makes the case that Kate Bush’s songwriting can be multiple things at once and create a conflicting hive of meaning, and that Bush’s love for the archaic is hardly blinded by a nostalgic haze. She demonstrates a consistent willingness to interrogate how stories like these work, how human beings act when plugged into myth and folklore, and the ways in which these situations are incompatible with humanity. Some of the most complex women in fiction are characters in Kate Bush songs. Never for Ever’s status as the first studio album by a female artist to reach #1 in the UK remains significant for a number of reasons. If Dreams of Orgonon has a thesis, it’s that Kate Bush is a traditionally-minded person who can’t stop herself from writing feminist songs. Break the glass. Howl “Babooshka, ya-ya!” The 1980s are here, and there’s a new swordmistress of chaos to herald them.

Demoed in late 1979; recorded at Abbey Road Studio Two in January-June 1980. Issued as a single on 27 June 1980 with “Ran Tan Waltz” as a B-side; subsequently included as a track on Never for Ever. Performed on several TV programmes. Personnel: Kate Bush — vocals, piano. Stuart Elliott — drums. John Giblin — electric bass. Max Middleton — Fender Rhodes. Paddy Bush — balalaika, backing vocals. Gary Hurst — backing vocals. Brian Bath, Alan Murphy — electric guitars.

Even if some critics in 1980 were dismissive of Babooshka – NME were particularly snotty and short-sighted! -, it is clear that the track has picked up legions of fans. Although Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God) is the most-streamed song of hers on Spotify, Babooshka is second. The power and pull of the video is a big reason why it has been viewed so many times on YouTube. With forty-four millions views, it is hugely popular. I hope that  4K version might be released at some point. The world would receive Never for Ever in September 1980. Kate Bush already released one single, Breathing, prior. Perhaps a moment to prove that she was a serious artist who was aware of political avenues and concerns – some (Danny Baker among them) criticised Bush as not being serious or lacking the political edge of her Plunk peers -, Breathing was an understandable first release. The more accessible Babooshka is a perfect album opener. It is accessible yet it is unusual and distinct. Instantly different to what Kate Bush had recorded for her first two albums, it was important that she made a big mark with that opening track. Hooking listeners and showing she was this varied and evolving artist. I think the success of Babooshka a reason why Never for Ever went to number one. In doing so, Kate Bush was the first solo female artist to have a studio album go to number one in the U.K. That sounds like a mistake. It is not! I listen to Babooshka and settle in for this phenomenal experience. One where all the senses are engaged. As it turns forty-four on 27th June, I wanted to mark that. Beyond this, argue the case that Babooshka is her most important album opener. And, yes, her best. A huge moment in Kate Bush’s career, Babooshka helped to cement the fact that this amazing young artist…

WAS here to stay.

FEATURE: Legends of NW1: From The Dublin Castle to KOKO: Inside the Documentary, Camden

FEATURE:

 

 

Legends of NW1

 

From The Dublin Castle to KOKO: Inside the Documentary, Camden

_________

IT can be a difficult balancing act…

 IN THIS PHOTO: Dua Lipa in Camden

properly representing a place, scene, person or time in music history. Whether you are doing a music biopic or documentaries about a particular scene or album for instance, it may be impossible to dig deep and make everyone happy. I mention this because a new four-part documentary, Camden, is available on Disney+. For those who are not aware of Camden’s prominence and importance, this Dua Lipa-produced guide is a great and informative introduction. I will bring in a review or two for the series. Ending with a playlist featuring artists who appeared in the documentary. That is perhaps the crux of the reviews that lean towards the mixed or negative: those who were missed out that should be in the mix. The Punks. A lot of the Britpop acts not in there (Graham Coxon of Blur does not feature). Maybe sanitised or a little surface rather than a deeper dive. Having watched the series, I think Camden covers a lot of ground. It focuses on the legends, revels, outsiders and pioneers that owe Camden a debt. The iconic venues that so many famous artists started out in. Dua Lipa is the main guide, yet we hear from Questlove, Noel Gallagher, Lauren Laverne, Jazzie B, Pete Doherty and beyond. What we do get is a real map and guided tour. How close all these diverse and vital venues are. Important to shine a light on the independent venues and their importance – at a time when they are threatened and under-funded. That is a vital takeaway. Hearing artists wax lyrical and romantically about the vibe, pull and passion in Camden. How anyone can be who they want. People like Boy George feeling more seen and welcomed, in spite of some roughness and prejudice. How American artists came over and noticed how different it was in Camden.

The fact there was this acceptance and different textures. So many different people. Tribes mixing together. Maybe a look at the Punk scene and a few more episodes. I have seen reviews that say it is a bit hollow and features almost no history. What I took away from Camden and want to focus on is how many artists got their start there. Maybe we will see something in the future that explores the darker elements. Rather than outright positivity, something that balances the good and the bad. More older Punks included. Regardless, rather than make Camden this Mecca that will attract people in like a themepark, it does highlight an essential postcode on the global music map. How Camden is still a vital hub for artists. I am keen to get to that playlist. There are a couple of bits I want to include. NME, in their three-star review, gave a balanced look at Camden:

“Trying to condense the history of the postcode into four (roughly) hour-long episodes means that Camden is entertaining, but occasionally scattershot and lacking focus. Episode one largely revolves around the rise of local pop colossus Lipa and Coldplay, via indie citadel The Dublin Castle, where Madness led the two-tone ska explosion in 1979 and the Queen of Camden Amy Winehouse could later be found pulling pints.

It’s big on reverential mythos, like the documentary equivalent of a blue plaque, but there’s gold amidst the platitudes. The second instalment, ‘Rebels and Misfits’, hots up thanks to the inclusion of The Libertines and quote-machine Noel Gallagher. The latter, who bagged a flat in Camden in 1993, mocks the clichéd documentary convention of filming an artist foraging through the racks of a record shop by remarking: “There’s a lot of One Direction here!” He also remembers being kicked out of Britpop boozer The Good Mixer for (ahem) “good naturedly ribbing Graham Coxon at the bar”.

Breaking down the barriers between artists and fans, The Libs’ Pete Doherty recalls posting gigs happening in their abode with less than half an hour’s notice – much to the chagrin of Barât, whose washing was hanging in the bathroom. He also shares the story of The Clash guitarist and ’Up the Bracket’ album producer Mick Jones falling asleep twice while recording its title track.

Episode three, ‘Pioneers’, traces how American hip-hop stars including Public Enemy and The Roots relocated to Camden to escape the straitjacket of stateside expectations of what Black artists should be. Then the final furlong zeroes in on partying: Boy George swaps suburbia for Camden’s heady exotica, pioneering DJ Norman Jay sets up free warehouse parties as a reaction to the apartheid of London clubbing, and Sister Bliss discovers house music in Camden warehouses before Faithless play their first gig at local venue the Jazz Café.

Only Amy Winehouse’s first manager Nick Shymansky offers an alternative to the love-in by suggesting that “Camden was a dangerous place for someone like her”. Elsewhere, many of the same points keep getting made. By the time Lipa turns up in Cyberdog to find another way of saying “Camden lets you be whoever you want to be!”, cold-hearted viewers might be tempted to reply: “I want to be someone watching a deeper dive!” At times, seeing Olympic-level interviewees like Gallagher and Boy George hemmed in by the talking head format feels a bit like watching Tom Daley dive into a bathtub.

Still, with Chris Martin noting that Coldplay’s early days revolved around six pubs in the area (“If you could guarantee you’d bring ten people, they’d let you play”), and Little Simz highlighting the importance of free artist development schemes at The Roundhouse, Camden implicitly feels like a love-letter to endangered independent venues. The question is: with Disney+ memorialising it in a documentary, does authentic “non-conformist” Camden risk becoming an ersatz rock ‘n’ roll theme park?”.

You can look at the range of reviews for Camden. The Standard, Ham & High, and Independent had their say. Prior to coming to the playlist, there are two more things tick to off. This article featured the directors of Camden and their perspectives:

“On May 29th, 2024, Disney+’s new series titled Camden hit the streaming service around the world.

It’s a four-part documentary series that highlights the town in London, called Camden, where many ‘big name’ celebrities made their first marks and started their journeys into the people they are today. It introduces viewers to the culture and lifestyle of the area, showing everyone the magic that this town holds.

Besides being executively produced by Dua Lipa, the series features artists such as Coldplay’s Chris Martin, Little Simz, Boy George and Yungblud, just to name a few.

The episode directors that brought the series together are Toby Trackman, known for documentaries around sensitive subjects, Yemi Bamiro, who has a background in sports, and Sarah Lambert, who has also worked on documentaries of tough to hear topics.

For the interviews, we asked these episode directors about their personal ties to Camden, their own histories with music, their inspirations and more. Here’s what they had to say, and don’t forget to check out Camden now on Disney+, and on Hulu in the US!

Camden as a Location:

The namesake of the series is a town in London called Camden Town, more commonly known as just Camden. The sheer number of noteworthy people that either grew up in Camden or lived there for extensive periods of time is something to be studied, hence the reason for this docu-series.

The location itself nowadays doesn’t look like it has much to offer and is described as ‘alternative’ by the Visit London website. Coldplay’s Chris Martin takes it a step further and describes it as a ‘sh*thole’, affectionately, in his interview in the series.

Trackman:

“Yeah, I think Camden’s legacy is greater than its environment. It’s pretty scummy and these days it’s overrun with tourists during the day, but it’s characterful is one way of describing it.

“I mean it’s colourful, it’s vibrant. You’re going to see graffiti everywhere, all kinds of shops and markets and bars.

“I mean, it’s just kind of quite a lively place that somehow has managed to resist the tide of gentrification that’s kind of flattened and homogenised so much.”

Bamiro:

“I was at MTV for like five or six years. It was the early 2000s and Camden was still a hub music and creativity. It was when MTV was still this is pre-YouTube, it wasn’t all scripted reality.

“I guess it was about taking the excitement of those years and putting them into an episode about all this music and all these artists that I’d always loved forever. Whether that be Questlove or The Roots or Chuck D or Gilles Peterson.

“It was just an opportunity to bring everything full circle in terms of working in TV in Camden in the early 2000s and now you actually get an opportunity to tell a story about, the creative art that Camden was in terms of housing all of these incredible artists.”

Lambert:

“I used to always really like going to Camden as well, because I feel like when you’re making a documentary about a place, you have to be in the place, you have to feel it.

“The reason we’re here talking about Camden is because it has this distinct energy that nowhere else has. It’s a specific type of place. So, I think just going there and being there, it’s different now than it was 15 years ago, when I first moved to London. The market is completely different.

“A lot of it has changed, but it still has that edginess. I love the edginess of Camden, so I think being there, listening to the music, and trying to absorb as much as I can, read as much as I can, watch as much as I can, really delve into it.”

IN THIS PHOTO: YUNGBLUD in Camden

Inspirations and Motivations for the series

Every creative mind gathers inspiration from different aspects of life. Some people get it from locations, others from experiences.

Trackman:

“It’s been thrilling. It was really good fun. It was thrilling and wonderful. Me, I have another life in music as well as film. So, to be able to give and be given the opportunity to combine the two of them together is just a brilliant opportunity.

“I think that’s coupled with the level of aspiration that the channel had, and the production company had for how we were going to kind of realise things.

“When you step into that environment where you’re led by an Oscar winning team, and you’ve got access to mega A-listers, and you’ve got production saying, here’s all the resources that you need, go and have fun.

“That’s a really exciting safe space to be in, where you know that you can experiment, and push things and you’ll be supported. It was a wonderful opportunity.”

Bamiro:

“Like, obviously, the episode had a structure, but most of the time, I’m just asking them questions about stuff that I’m interested in.

“I know that it’s stuff that other people would be interested in, lots of people don’t know that The Roots used to live here, or people don’t really understand how big, Soul for Soul were in the 90s, and the fact that they were one of the first British bands to break America.

“So, there were all these things that I’d always found interesting, but it was just an opportunity to delve into that in detail and connect that back to the common denominator in all of this, Camden.

“The diversity of music, diversity of dress, of style, of thought. That was the reason why, all these artists were allowed to flourish.”

Lambert:

“When I first moved to London, we went out in Camden every weekend. I have so many memories. Every Friday night, we went to Coco.

“I think I was in the hallway with a friend. She was like, you know, Pete Doherty drinks here. We were both like, ‘Oh my God, Pete Doherty’. During the interview, Pete and I were like trading notes on Camden pubs, which was just hilarious.

“But what I have always really appreciated about Camden, and I think this is actually, similar for Yungblud, is that if you come from somewhere where things are like a bit more restrictive.

“I’m Irish, it’s like a smaller culture, a smaller community, people pay attention to what other people are doing.

“When I moved to London and particularly Camden, you could just do whatever you want. No one cares. Like the lengths you would have to go to, to get noticed in Camden is spectacular because there are so many characters everywhere.

“I just found that really freeing to go somewhere where you can just be yourself and no one cares, no one’s going to bring you down.

“It is just like a nice free place and I think that’s what lingered, that’s what resonates with Camden now. Even though it’s changed over the years, there is just something about it. You come out of the tube station, and you look up and down and nowhere else looks like that.”

IN THIS PHOTO: Nile Rodgers in Camden

Histories with Music:

Unsurprisingly, the directors of Camden, like so many of us, have overwhelming love and even dependence on music in their lives. Same as the artists they’ve worked with to bring this series to life.

Trackman:

“I grew up in Bristol in the 90s in the peak Massive Attack era. There was a pirate radio station, I’d get these 20-minute sessions every week from this this guy up in London called Gilles Peterson, playing all this other stuff that’s just like, wow, what’s that?

“I heard he had a record label, and I wrote to him at age 15, asking for some work experience. It probably wasn’t directly from him, but anyway, someone said yes.

“So off I went. I went and stayed up in London at my grandma’s and hung out in Camden at 15 with, all the jazz cafe Dingwall’s crew and that really got me into DJing properly, in that Gilles Peterson, Norman Jay world.

“Then when I went back to Bristol, I got involved more heavily in the sound system jungle world. I’d go back up to London to play Bagley’s and all that kind of stuff.

“I was in a live hip hop band, we were there as the DJ, and we were playing at the jazz cafe around the same sort of time that The Roots were kind of doing their thing.  Sadly, we were never on the same bill. I can’t quite claim that fame, but that was, that was my, that was my world.

“When they came to me and discussed this project, I was like, this is me. I can bring this to life in the most authentic way because I was there. I know it. That’s just brilliant. It’s the best fun over the last year and a half, living in my teenage fantasies again, basically.”

Bamiro:

“I think the rule that I have in relation to the work that I pick is that I always have to have some sort of like personal connection to the work, because if I if I don’t, then I can’t, it would be me being disingenuous, and I wouldn’t be able to necessarily do it justice.

“It always feels like a privilege to work on things like this because I’ve loved music since I was like 11 years old. I’ve loved this type of music since I was 11 years old.

“So there’s always like a little pinch yourself moment when you’re doing this job because it’s something that, if I could have told my 15-year-old self that, you get to hang out with Chuck D and talk to him about coming to Camden in the 80s with Def Jam and Public Enemy. That’s mind-blowing stuff.”

Lambert:

“I listen to the music all the time from different artists, because I think it’s all about the music.

“Whenever I prepare for any interviews or research anyone, I just listen to the music over and over, to the point where this morning, my partner put on a really random Joe Strummer song, it came on Spotify.

“And he was like, ‘who is this?’ I was like,’ Oh yeah, that’s Joe Strummer’. He was like, ‘how do you know’? And I was like,’ because I have listened to every Clash song so many times, you would not believe it’. It’s like. burnt into my mind.

“It’s all about the music. I used to always really like going to Camden as well, because I feel like when you’re making a documentary about a place, you must like to be in the place, you must feel it.” 

Final notes:

The youth coming into the industry in the following years are in the minds of Camden’s episode directors. What words of advice would they give to those following in their footsteps?

Trackman:

“I think we’re at an interesting time at the moment while one set of opportunities seems to be closing, a whole other set of opportunities are opening.

“The exciting thing about that is that the opportunities are opening.  There are less boundaries attached to those, there are less gatekeepers, and I think that’s so exciting.

“I think when we were in Camden filming this, there was a club night that we filmed at the Dublin Castle called Club Smiler, which is the living embodiment of the, of the Neuromantics from the 80s, and it’s completely open in terms of identity.

“It was just so inspiring and thrilling to see these young people dressing like they just did not care what anybody thought.

“That was so empowering. I think that gave me real hope. There’s a lot more bravery, I think now than there has been for a long time, in young creatives. That coupled with the freedom of some of those opportunities that are out there, it is exciting.

“I hope that we’ll see, people keep pushing and taking risks because I think the main message is that the more risks that you can take, the truer that you can be to your voice, then potentially the greater the rewards.

“The most inspiring bits of advice I ever got from another on a project, I was working with a famous author. He said, ‘there’s no such thing as originality, don’t worry about that’.

“All you’re doing is remixing your influences through your experiences and that will be original, but don’t worry about trying to create something truly original.

Just do what you want. That is the message.”

Bamiro:

“I would say just use your initiative and just keep hustling. It doesn’t take anything to find someone’s email online. If it’s a director that you like, or a producer, or you see someone’s names in the credits, and you admire their work, send them an email.

“Let them know that you like their work, and would they be up for having a zoom call? It’s all about how you can be self-sufficient, if you don’t necessarily have the money or the funds or the resources to move to London or move to a big city.

“It’s important that young people understand that it’s a tribe. Never be shy to reach out to people and tell them how into their work you are. Everybody loves compliments and everybody has an ego and I think it’s the best way to connect to somebody.

“Then just build from there because I think most people want to share and help where they can, so I think it would be just hustle and never rest on your laurels and never think that it’s out of your reach.

“Sometimes it’s the simplest things like sending an email or just reaching out to someone or sending someone a DM on Twitter or Instagram.”

Lambert:

“I think be curious. I think I am probably just naturally quite a nosy person and I’m really interested in people.

“When I’m interviewing them, when I’m preparing for interviews, I, I am really invested in what they’re saying, and I think that comes across.

“Don’t be afraid. I think this is so true for the creative industry. It took me a while to learn this.

“Don’t be afraid to just email someone and ask for a little favour, because everyone’s been there.

“Everyone has had to get their foot in the door. When I started in this industry, I didn’t have any contacts. I didn’t have an auntie that works at ITV.

“I just had to scrape my way in myself. For that reason, if people ever contact me, I’m always like, ‘yes’, how can I help?

“Everyone’s had to do it. So, you should never be shy about doing it. If there’s someone’s work, even now that I admire, I will just email them and be like, ‘watch something’. Then just send my true thoughts being like, ‘I really like that for this and this reason. I really respect your work, I’d love to work with you sometime’, and most people will respect that. They’ll really appreciate that you’ve taken the time to look at their work.

“Don’t be afraid to be cheeky, that’s probably the number one rule.”

Conclusion:

Camden serves as a fun, nostalgic documentary series for those familiar with the town. It also covers important topics such as the country’s politics. The series is worth a watch to anyone who is familiar with the area and/or those that have planted their roots there. These celebrities share their stories in a way that is heartfelt and warming. The directors make sure that the scenes move us with the words.

The directors of Camden are talented and down to earth, which compliments the themes behind the documentary. In watching the series you can see each thoughtful detail within each episode”.

I am ending with an NME article that lists all the music that was featured in the four-part series. Perhaps there will be more interest and investigation of Camden after this documentary. It is definitely important that we recognise all the different sides to this area of London. Its full history and importance. We get a brilliant soundtrack throughout Camden. So many wonderful artists and memorable songs:

“The music docuseries Camden landed on Disney+ this week, but which songs from the area’s history are included on the show?

The show, which is executive produced by Dua Lipa, goes behind the scenes with some of the world’s biggest artists, revealing untold stories of how Camden in London shaped their lives and careers.

Per a description, the four-part series explores “Camden’s rich history” through “archive footage, observational filming and interviews” with the likes of Chris Martin, The Libertines, Yungblud, Little Simz and Nile Rodgers.

“Hearing from world-renowned musicians as they relive their Camden experiences; from their very first gigs to sell-out concerts, the highs and lows of nights out and a youth spent discovering music,” it adds.

In a statement, Lipa said: “Executive producing the new original documentary series that celebrates the very place I started all of this is such a major full circle moment for me!

“Camden will always have a special place in my heart and I’m humbled to share that with some absolute icons.”

Asif Kapadia (Amy) is the series director, while the individual episodes are directed by Toby Trackman, Yemi Bamiro and Sarah Lambert.

In a three-star review of the series, NME wrote: “With Chris Martin noting that Coldplay’s early days revolved around six pubs in the area (“If you could guarantee you’d bring ten people, they’d let you play”), and Little Simz highlighting the importance of free artist development schemes at The Roundhouse, Camden implicitly feels like a love-letter to endangered independent venues.”

“The question is: with Disney+ memorialising it in a documentary, does authentic “non-conformist” Camden risk becoming an ersatz rock ‘n’ roll theme park?”

Here’s every song in Camden, the Disney+ documentary

The show’s four (roughly) four hour episodes include a rich history of the luminaries associated with the area’s various music scenes. See a full list below.

EPISODE ONE

The Clash – ‘Janie Jones (live)’

Dua Lipa (ft. DaBaby) – ‘Levitating’

James – ‘Sit Down (live)’

Madness – ‘One Step Beyond’

Babyshambles – ‘Killamangiro’

Coldplay – ‘Shiver’

Coldplay – ‘Yellow’

Dua Lipa – ‘Blow Your Mind (Mwah)’

Little Simz – ‘Offence’

Little Simz – ‘Dead Body’

Dua Lipa – ‘Hotter Than Hell’

EPISODE TWO

Oasis – ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll Star’

The Libertines – ‘Can’t Stand Me Now’

Kenickie – ‘In Your Car’

Oasis – ‘Supersonic’

The Libertines – ‘Up the Bracket’

Oasis – ‘Cigarettes & Alchohol’

YUNGBLUD – ‘21st Century Liability’

Bob Vylan – ‘We Live Here’

Bob Vylan – ‘Wicked & Bad’

YUNGBLUD – ‘Lowlife’

EPISODE THREE

The Roots – ‘Proceed’

Anita Baker – ‘Sweet Love’

M-Beat (ft. Nazlyn) – ‘Sweet Love’

The Roots & Tariq Trotter (ft. Erykah Badu & Eve) – ‘You Got Me’

Nas – ‘The World Is Yours’

Soul II Soul – ‘Keep On Movin’

Soul II Soul (ft. Caron Wheeler) – ‘Back To Life (However Do You Want Me)’

Public Enemy – ‘Bring The Noise’

Black Eyed Peas – ‘Joints & Jam’

EPISODE FOUR

Bicep – ‘Opal (Four Tet Remix)’

Culture Club – ‘Time (Clock of the Heart)’

Roxy Music – ‘Love Is The Drug’

Visage – ‘Fade To Grey’

Konk – ‘Your Life’

Steve “Silk” Hurley – ‘Jack Your Body’

Faithless – ‘Insomnia’

Eliza Rose e Interplanetary Criminal – ‘B.O.T.A. (Baddest of Them All)’

Landlord – ‘I Like It (Blow Out Dub)’”.

Regardless of critical reaction, the fact is that Camden is a great beginner’s guide to the area. It will definitely get people invested in a cornerstone of London’s music history. One of the epicentres. A hub that has attracted so many different types of people through the decades! I would advise people to watch it. The genuine happiness and pride you hear from artists who played at a Camden venue and owe so much to it is really humbling. They are genuinely in in owe of Camden and its people. This expansive documentary is worth your time and focus. There are definitely some gems and insights…

TO be found.



FEATURE: The Digital Mixtape: So Shine Bright: Female Artists with Diamond Singles

FEATURE:

 

 

The Digital Mixtape

IN THIS PHOTO: Rihanna/PHOTO CREDIT: Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images Entertainment/Getty Images

 

So Shine Bright: Female Artists with Diamond Singles

_________

IT is great when we get to…

IMAGE CREDIT: Rihanna

celebrate women in music and their successes. Rihanna has just been named the female artist with the most diamond singles to her name. The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) bestows a diamond award upon those songs that have moved at least ten million equivalent units, combining actual sales and equivalent streaming figures. It is an incredible honour for a song to achieve that. Relatively few artists have achieved multiple diamond single successes. Rihanna is one of the biggest artists in the world, so it is not that surprising she would have some to her name. Even so, it is a monumental achievement. It also means we can shine a light on other women who have diamond singles. I am going to end this feature with a playlist of female artists and their diamond singles. Queens of music who have accomplished something remarkable. NME were among those who reported the news of Rihanna’s triumph:

“Rihanna has shared her response after it was revealed she has received the most amount of diamond singles for a female artist.

As of May 31, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has confirmed via their website that Rihanna has achieved seven certified diamond singles – ‘Umbrella’, ‘We Found Love (feat. Calvin Harris)’, ‘Stay’, ‘Love the Way You Lie’, ‘Needed Me’, ‘Work’, and, yes, ‘Diamonds’.

Four of these (‘Umbrella’, ‘Work’, ‘Needed Me’, ‘Stay’) were the latest to be awarded diamond, following ‘Diamonds’, which received it back in April. Four are solo leads while two feature guest verses by Jay-Z (‘Umbrella’) and Drake (‘Work’), and the last a feature she did for Eminem (‘Love the Way You Lie’).

With this achievement comes the accolades by RIAA for having the “Most Diamond Singles for a Female Artist” and “Most Diamond Certified Titles for a Female Artist”. To this, Rihanna responded with a tweet, accompanying a visual of these feats, saying: “ain’t no back n forth”.

A single is awarded diamond by RIAA when it reaches 10 million equivalent song units. According to the RIAA, one song unit is equal to a sale of a single digital song, or an accumulation of 150 audio and video streams.

Per Forbes, the artist previously in the lead was Katy Perry, who holds four diamond singles in ‘Firework’, ‘Dark Horse’, ‘Roar’, and ‘California Gurls (feat. Snoop Dogg’). In June 2023, Perry beat out Lady Gaga’s total of three diamond-certified singles (‘Bad Romance’, ‘Just Dance’, ‘Poker Face’) before she was dethroned by Rihanna in April with ‘Diamonds’.

Rihanna’s last release was 2022’s ‘Lift Me Up’ recorded for the Black Panther: Wakanda Forever soundtrack, while her last album was 2016’s Anti.

Last April, Rihanna shared her latest update on new music. “It’s gonna be amazing. It has to be — that is the only reason it’s not out yet,” she told Extra at a Fenty Beauty event in Los Angeles. “If I’m not feeling it and I’m not feeling like it represents the evolution, the time I spent away. There should be a show of growth, right?”

“I want to play, and I feel like music is a playground, and I want to have fun with it and show truly where I am at.” She also prefaced that she’s “not a big collaborator”, so any guest performer on a new record would have to be “very intentional”.

As we think about possible new music from Rihanna, it is worth celebrating the fact that she has earned more diamond singles than any other female artist. To mark that, and with songs from other female artists who are in the ‘diamond league’, this playlist combined huge singles that…

SHINE bright.

FEATURE: Full Throttle: The Prodigy’s Music for the Jilted Generation at Thirty

FEATURE:

 

 

Full Throttle

  

The Prodigy’s Music for the Jilted Generation at Thirty

_________

ONE of the defining albums…

of the 1990s might well be one of the most important albums ever. In terms of how it both fitted into the mood and landscape of music and the underground in 1994, but also how radical and remarkable the album was. On 4th July, 1994, The Prodigy released Music for the Jilted Generation. It followed on from their 1992 debut, Experience. In my view the defining album from The Prodigy, I think that Music for the Jilted Generation still sounds so fresh and essential. In the sense that nothing really exists like it! Nothing that has the same grime, attack, incredible production values and this amazing soundtrack. Throwing Breakbeat, Hardcore, Dance and Trance into this variegated and intoxicated brew, this album arrived in perhaps the finest year for music ever. Even in 1994, I don’t think anyone had taken Breakbeat and Hardcore to the mainstream. This was a defining and seismic album that was produced by Liam Howlett and Neil McLellan. This was the pre-Keith Flint line-up (in the fact he was not in the studio but was performing with them and photographed as part of the group). I cannot really think about any album from The Prodigy without thinking of the late great. In any case, The Prodigy’s second studio album is a mind-blowing piece of work. I want to get to some features about Music for the Jilted Generation. Those that explore its legacy and importance. In 2014, to mark twenty years of a true cornerstone, Vice looked at the context of music in 1994. What was happening and where The Prodigy fitted in:

“Jungle had gone overground, four-to-the-floor was exploding into hard house, happy house, handbag house and all the rest, the grimmer side of heavy drug use was becoming impossible to ignore, skunk was beginning to oust waftier, more benevolent strains of weed, and the words "dark" and "darkside" were slang terms of choice. Where two years earlier the breakout smokers' hip hop sound had been the boisterous party funk of Cypress Hill, now it was the Gothic drama of Wu-Tang Clan. My personal illustrative moment was seeing a beat-up old Mini barreling through Brighton; blasting out distorted gabba on a crap soundsystem and in place of the standard "ON A MISSION" rear window sticker, so symbolic of the "go-get-'em" energy of rave, they had "MISSION ABORTED".

This is the world that Music for the Jilted Generation was precision-tooled to soundtrack. The Prodigy had already come punching and kicking into the dance world, both perfecting and satirising the sound of hardcore, "killing rave" (as an early Mixmag cover story had it), proving that performance and bolshey personality still had their place among the faceless DJs, and delivering an absolutely shit-hot album in The Prodigy Experience. But Music for the Jilted Generation was the perfect divestment of any last fucks given, a willfully uncool thrash-about that didn't rely on allegiance to any of the micro-scenes now proliferating, but somehow provided some weird sort of negative unity across the whole proverbial generation; perfectly expressing the skunk-paranoia, vodka-swilling, bad-E's collective "UGGGGHHH" that came after all the "Woo yeah, c'mon, let's go!" of rave's peak years.

Early tracks like 'Charley' and 'Everybody in the Place' showed the first glimmers of an instinctive understanding of The Big Riff that was not about the hypnosis of techno, or even the hyper-stimulation of hardcore, but about dragging the music back into the fist-pumping, chant-along experience of rock music. For better or worse, they and their shows preempted everything that is big and brassy in 21st century EDM. Every new superstar DJ with huge LED shows, massive riffs and vertiginous drops, and most of all Skrillex, owes them a very substantial debt.

Just like a lot of new EDM, Music for the Jilted Generation is basically very ugly. The pop-hardcore of The Prodigy Experience is still there: teeth gritted as tightly as ever, rock riffs expressing hard guitar music as full fat cheese, heading back towards the trash of Mötley Crüe and co. that grunge self-righteously decided to save us from, and the electronic elements all reach for the shiniest, most instant rush effects. If you listen now to 'Start the Dance (No Good)' you'll hear how, for all its hardcore tempo and breakbeats, it sits as close to Faithless and Felix 'Don't you Want Me' as anything you could describe as underground. Everything is on the surface. There's nothing subtle from beginning to end – and that includes the disaffection that it expresses, which for all the pontificating about injustice of 'Their Law' is nothing more than that aforementioned "UGGGGGHHH" than any more sophisticated articulation of what it was to be alive in 1994.

All of which is precisely why it works. Nobody wanted political analysis or fine detail from Liam and his gang of dark clowns. We wanted to mosh. We wanted a racket that drowned out our tinnitus and picked us up in the same way that a bag of cheap speed did. And for all its negativity and steam-hammer unsubtelty, Music for the Jilted Generation created good times. The first time I ever saw The Prodigy live at a festival, I was in a bad mood. Darkly stoned and paranoid, I surrounded by a right old mix of people but notably a large contingent of football hooligans, banging back the lager, coke and GHB.

The minute 'Voodoo People' struck up though, something overwhelmingly joyful happened. Scowls turned to the kind of deranged grins you'd expect to see at a happy hardcore night, and everyone in the tent started pogoing and moshing like one big, friendly, sweat-soaked blob of undifferentiated tissue. Somehow, amongst all the "UGGGGHHH", we'd all found just a little bit of the rave spirit that we'd been missing. This spirit of dumb-fuck rock-raving goes nowhere but into the watered-down blokey-ness of big beat and eventually Kasabian, but back then? Good God, it felt like a relief”.

I will move on to a feature from CLASH. In 2019, around the time of its twenty-fifth anniversary of Music for the Jilted Generation, they looked at the genre-busting classic. I was ten when it came out. Although I was not really aware of it then, by the time I was in my final years of high school, I was hearing songs from it all the time. It would have been the time that the follow-up, Fat of the Land, was released. That came out in 1997:

“When the Prodigy’s Keith Flint passed away earlier this year, it felt like an era died with him. For many, Keith was the Prodigy: the firestarter igniting rave’s demonic silhouette at a global scale on 1996’s ‘The Fat Of The Land’. So it’s easy to forget that before Flint’s snarl ever made it to record, the Prodigy were already tearing at the edges of what rave could be.

When ‘Music For The Jilted Generation’ was released in 1994, UK rave’s heyday was already waning. While hardcore splintered into clubs and subgenres, ‘Jilted’ instead revisited and re-energised the sound’s origins in hip-hop and punk rock. Producer Liam Howlett and dancer-MCs Flint and Maxim Reality promised not a return to the underground but an unholy matrimony of rave’s anarchic spirit and, well, everything and the kitchen sink.

Over 13 wildly different tracks, ‘Jilted’ swerves between the cinematic (on adrenaline-infused chase sequence ‘Speedway’) and the stadium (on rock-rave manifestos ‘Their Law’ and ‘Voodoo People’). Elsewhere, its final, three-part ‘Narcotic Suite’ finds Howlett furthest from his comfort zone, stretching rave tropes to urbane electronica (‘3 Kilos’) and sci-fi mind-benders ‘Skylined’ and ‘Claustrophobic Sting’.

End to end, the record tests the limits both of hardcore experimentalism and its original CD format – Howlett himself later regretting its 78-minute running time. Ambitious, yes. Interesting throughout, absolutely – though judge the flute solos on ‘3 Kilos’ for yourself.

Really, the power of the record shone through not on these high-minded outliers but on its string of hits – arguably the Prodigy’s finest, where Howlett’s craft reached new heights. ‘Jilted’ was packed full of hooks, even though few of them were what you’d call melodic.

Sure, there are tunes: the pitched-up vocals on ‘Break And Enter’ and ‘No Good (Start The Dance)’, the stadium-worthy shredding on ‘Their Law’. But take standout ‘Voodoo People’ for example: borrowing a two-tone riff from Nirvana’s ‘Very Ape’, it barely shifts from one note, and is the better for it. Even its anthemic synth part is more squelch and distortion than melody, as can also be said for the chainsaw-synth on ‘Poison’ – a slow motion sledgehammer blow of a record that squeezes endless musicality from a juggernaut breakbeat chassis.

It’s this weird alchemy of muted melody, texture and production tricks that stick in the brain. The magic of the Prodigy lies in these staccato, concentrated bursts of noise and energy, neatly described by Maxim’s refrain on ‘Poison’: a “pulsating rhythmical remedy”. But a remedy for what? Who jilted this generation? Sharp as edges, this album undoubtedly deepened rave’s affinity to anti-authoritarian punk.

‘Their Law’ famously soundtracked the pushback against 1994’s anti-rave Criminal Justice and Public Order Act – the musical equivalent to its sleeve art’s notorious middle finger to the cops. And yet, as Howlett as insisted, this wasn’t politics; the Prodigy always embodied a feeling of lashing out, at whatever.

And perhaps that was both their deepest cynicism and most prodigal genius. After all, Keith Flint’s iconic status in pop culture rests on a similarly infectious kind of catch-all rebelliousness: just burn it all, and have a party while you’re at it.

Live, this was always the Prodigy's stock in trade, a terrifying euphoria that at any moment could switch either to utopia or apocalypse – and this formula found its purest expression in 1994. If Flint was the Prodigy’s devilish master of rave ceremonies, then ‘Jilted’ is its dark text”.

I know that there will be new pieces written about Music for the Jilted Generation ahead of its thirtieth anniversary on 4th July. Many might say that their second album was a natural progression from 1992’s debut, Experience. So much more intense, different and layered was their sophomore album, it took a lot of people by surprise. Kerrang! noted this fact in 2019. The shockwaves that Music for the Jilted Generation caused in the music landscape back in 1994. Really nothing quite like it was right at the forefront:

“Of course, revisionist history will suggest that we all knew that when it came out, on July 4, 1994, but in reality, we didn't have a clue. Not the faintest. Indeed, The Prodigy's second album, Music For The Jilted Generation, emerged from so far out of the left-field that we didn't even see it coming. At least, not on the rock scene. The album debuted at Number One in the UK charts, but The Prodigy weren't even on our radar then. If anything, they were considered the enemy. Anyone who tells you otherwise is, quite frankly, talking out of their arse.

Rock music, you see, was pretty damn healthy in 1994, but it was evolving, as it always has. Around the mid-’80s the barriers between punk and metal came down, and thrash was born. Crossover, whatever the hell you want to call it. Two tribes that had previously been enemies in a very literal sense had come together, and by the ’90s more barriers were falling. The unthinkable was becoming, well, thinkable. This is especially true of the Judgment Night soundtrack of 1993, which saw such improbable collaborations as Slayer and Ice-T, Biohazard and Onyx, Faith No More and Boo-Ya T.R.I.B.E, Pearl Jam and Cypress Hill, metal and hip-hop colliding in the most unlikely ways, to result in something that was undeniably brilliant. Opening doors that were impossible to close again.

And then there was the dance/techno scene waaay off over there in a field of its own, perhaps best summed up by the cartoon in Viz magazine of Ravey Davey dancing around a car alarm. Granted, the field in which they resided was the cause of national headlines and moral outrage due to illegal raves, which ultimately led to the so-called Criminal Justice and Public Order Act of 1994, a knee-jerk reaction that prohibited such gatherings, restricting – among other things – the right to freedom of assembly, with bizarre references to 'repetitive beats'. But while this was a concern to any right-minded rock fan, the music was not.

The Prodigy, meanwhile, were massive on the dance scene. Their 1992 debut album Experience is considered a classic of the genre, but songwriter Liam Howlett, having conquered that scene, was growing bored with it and looking for fresh challenges. Due to the eclectic nature of European festivals, they had shared stages with the likes of Rage Against The Machine, Suicidal Tendencies, and Biohazard, and they wanted some of that energy. As MC Maxim Reality put it, “We're used to parties where kids get carried over the barrier now and again, but suddenly there's a sea of people jumping around and stage diving! It was unbelievable!”

So began the change to a heavier sound, Liam sampling rock guitars and recruiting guitarist Jim Davies, a Pantera fanatic who would beef up the live sound on tracks like Voodoo People and Their Law. But still the rock world was clueless. Maybe a handful of rock fans – literally a handful – were aware that something cool was going on, but to the rest The Prodigy were assumed to be little more than a joke, if we're completely honest.

That The Prodigy somehow ended up being championed by Kerrang! was almost entirely accidental. In June ’95, a full year after the release of Jilted Generation, I went to Glastonbury festival pretty much on a whim. It was hot and sunny that year. Skunk Anansie and the Black Crowes were playing... it seemed like a good idea at the time. By Friday night, having imbibed a few substances, my friends and I were in party mode. A couple of them wanted to check out The Prodigy and I didn't want to watch Oasis, so I went along with them. What I witnessed for the next hour was utterly mind-blowing!

In hindsight, The Prodigy were still very much a dance band, yet to make the full transition to rock, and Jilted Generation is a dance album, albeit a very good one, with just a couple of rock tracks. It's no wonder we got death threats for covering them. But, also in hindsight, there are elements here that are not too far from the trance vibe of Hawkwind, and, in some ways, it was inevitable that the energy of dance music would eventually seep into the rock scene. Killing Joke had flirted with dance beats on the Pandemonium album of ’94 and they were not alone. The big difference was that The Prodigy had the audacity to do it the other way around and to do so entirely on their own terms”.

I am going to end with an NME review of Music for the Jilted Generation published in 2000. Prior to coming to that, DJ wrote a feature in 2018 explaining how The Prodigy were the voice of youth. Following such a turbulent time in British politics, the Essex trio released an album that clearly resonated with so many people. Music for the Jilted Generation went to number one in the U.K. A truly remarkable feat for an album whose sounds and samples make it so arresting, fascinating and compelling:

“Speaking with Clash Magazine to mark the album's 20th anniversary, Liam Howlett, the master sampler and musician behind the music, stated that the now-famous picture was chosen before the Criminal Justice Bill was passed. Even if the album's mood wasn't intentionally reflective of the events surrounding the bill, the more personal reasons for The Prodigy's metamorphosis were still resonant.

"I remember standing on stage in Scotland, at a rave, and it just felt silly,” Howlett told Clash, adding that at one point the group had considered splitting up. “I was like: ‘What the fuck am I doing here? I’m not into this. It’s now so far from what it was.'” It's a sentiment that's many have echoed recently about the state of the current club scene.

The “Fuck them and their law” hook from 'Their Law', the album's second track, where Howlett defied expectation by teaming up with Brummie grebo rockers Pop Will Eat Itself, may have been as aimed at the conventions of the rave scene as it was the authorities shutting it down. Filled with grungy guitar lines and feedback, its acerbic, aggy energy coiled to less than 120bpm, it's about as far away from 'Experience' as it was possible to go. This uncoupling from the inanely happy sonics of hardcore they had begun with — keeping the breaks but adding a darker, gritter edge — also fuelled another iconic album track, 'Voodoo People'.

A reverence for live bands over the facelessness of techno helped steer The Prodigy to become festival headliners by the mid-'90s, including taking them to Glastonbury in 1994. It's a metamorphosis that happens before your eyes in the video to 'Poison', the album's last single. A slow acidic cut built around various funk breaks, a bare-chested Maxim Reality is recast as the group's lead singer with Liam playing drums, while Keith further develops the erratic dancing style that would eventually become his signature. Leeroy Thornhill, the band's long-limbed proto-shuffler who left in 2000, is already starting to look out of place in his baggy rave garb.

If there was a jilted generation in 1994, then there's another for whom this album still rings true today. Thanks to ever-tightening licensing laws and draconian legislation, councils are doing their best to shut down nightlife once again. The inevitable result is more free parties. After years of the corporatisation of clubbing, it's also finally getting its political bite back. Conversations about racism, sexism, homophobia and more have opened up not just political dialogue but also musical dialogue, with everything from EBM and industrial techno to jungle and gabber coming to the fore. For many, The Prodigy's marauding energy and no rules mindset were a gateway into this. With the world going to shit, it's time to restart the dance”.

I am going to end with this review from NME. Even if Music for the Jilted Generation leans less heavily on samples than Experience, I think the choices on their second album are more potent. A grubby and hard-hitting album, go and grab a copy if you do not own it. I think the album is relevant today. The fact that we are in another bleak time for British politics. Although we are not in a situation where rave culture is being cracked down on and there is this rebellion, one can look at society and culture and find workable comparisons. How we need an album that kicks and screams in the same way:

“LIAM HOWLETT is The Prodigy; young Essex bloke, mythmaker, monster raving loony and purveyor of some of the most life-affirming, computer-driven dance music of the '90s.

There is a cynical school of thought that questions the validity of his muse because he's actually managed to sell over a million records in Britain alone, but this is just the work of jealous scenemakers who would elevate 'intelligent', undanceable techno/ambient tracks made by cowboys over truly populist stuff.

What Liam Howlett has managed to do, with his second LP, is cut across entrenched class and racial barriers to soundtrack the lives of those left behind by the botch-up job of the Conservative economic 'miracle'. 'Music For The Jilted Generation' is a stormy requiem for those under siege by the heavy-handed, almost fascistic Criminal Justice Bill; for those outsiders about to be criminalised for enjoying themselves; and for those for whom life has become such a landslide they have to resort to stimulants for sustenance. It all starts with a voiceover from a harassed Hollywood gangster, cuts into the sampled crunch of breaking glass mixed with heavy beats, and ends, almost an hour later, with the voice of the Hal Computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey reporting a malfunction in its semi-human mind. In between, The Prodigy show that you don't need elaborate texts to send a message across, just hints by way of titles, sampled voices and dialogue, and a wide-ranging musical mood that fires the imagination. Far from being faceless and functional, there is a distinct identity here clarified by recurring motifs, juddering breakbeats, wild electronic noises and the actual 'shape' of the tunes.

'Break & Enter' suggests an amoral ambiguity at the heart of The Prodigy's ethos that only gets more pronounced as the LP progresses. Its theme of daylight robbery could be a metaphor for subverting the system or could just be a wanton celebration of criminality - the actual crushing dancetrack offers no clues. 'Speedway (Theme From Joyriders)' takes the irresponsibility a step further, and while you're not sure if Liam is castigating or condoning this dangerous bloodsport, the music definitely celebrates fast, uninhibited driving. To cap it all, the closing 'Narcotic Suite' offers three songs linked by a druggy theme - a tale of a deal that goes wrong - the anachronistic, flute-driven jazz-funk of '3 Kilos'; the orchestral, brooding 'Skylined'; and the computerised death-throes of 'Claustrophobic Sting'.

Elsewhere, there's no let-up on dance propulsion. 'Full Throttle' is literally just that - a junglist, beat-heavy construct taken at breakneck speed - whilst 'Voodoo People' likens the rave scenario to a black magic ritual. With The Prodigy as witchdoctor, of course.

And if it's obvious, screaming hit singles you're after, you can do a lot worse than soon-to-be-released anthem 'Their Law', wherein Liam Howlett meets Pop Will Eat Itself in a clash of wills, a battle between deep electronic bass and howling rifftastic perspective. The recent chartstorming 'No Good (Start The Dance)' is also included to show how much of a finger on the collective pulse this rave/pop star maintains.

When you hear 'The Heat (The Energy)' and a sound effect akin to someone saying "wanker, wanker", you know Liam Howlett doesn't always take himself seriously. He does not want to be a spokesman for his generation but, by default, he's ended up as a spokesman for degeneration - a frontline reporter sending eye-witness accounts from the war between the authorities and Britain's multi-hued youth. He's a Robocop and a modern-day Beethoven rolled into one.

9/10”.

On 4th July, The Prodigy’s Music for the Jilted Generation turns thirty. In some ways it is a product of the political times of 1994. In others, as I have said, it is as urgent and necessary today as ever. No artists like The Prodigy exists in modern music. I do feel we need something like Music for the Jilted Generation right now. Let’s hope that anniversary celebrations of a classic compel…

REBELLION and rising.

FEATURE: Groundhog Day: Why CMAT’s Experience of Body-Shaming Needs to Lead to Change

FEATURE:

 

 

Groundhog Day

 

Why CMAT’s Experience of Body-Shaming Needs to Lead to Change

_________

IT seems that…

we are so slow to progress and evolve in terms of attitudes. More specifically, one hears of far too many cases of sexism, racism, homophobia and misogyny in music. So many artists are subjected to the most vile and abusive views and comments. Women especially are the most vulnerable and attacked. I know that male artists are subjected to body-shaming. It is something that is aimed more at women. It seems to go back to decades-long attitudes that are not exclusive to music. This ‘ideal’ of a body or what someone should look like. I still think we are in an age where white, thin and young artists are the most desirable. Artists like Lizzo have been body-shamed in recent years. It is disgusting that we still have to see and hear such regressive and disgusting comments. It is clear that we are in a pattern where not a lot changes. We see a case of an artist being body-shamed and there are comments pointing out how outrageous it is. Not a lot is learned from it. In terms of how women (and other genders) are portrayed and celebrated. Still, in the mainstream and on most magazine covers, we have artists who have a particular body shape/size. It is rare to see anything different. I hope we live to see the day where full-figured women are celebrated and seen as role models. That body size should not be seen as an issue. I am bringing up this subject, because one of our modern greats, CMAT (Dublin-born Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson), has been subjected to recent body-shaming. She is one of the most talented and distinct artists in the world. Her album, Crazymad, For Me, was released late last year. I hope that it is line for a Mercury nomination later in the year. We will find out which twelve albums are shortlisted next month I think. It would only be right that the albums is among the twelve.

It is such a shame that we have to hear of artists receiving any form of hate and discrimination. Various forms of misogyny are rearing their head time and time again! As NME report, CMAT recently gained a slew of body-shaming comments when a video of her performing at the Big Weekend event got a lot of the wrong type of reaction:

“CMAT has responded after the BBC disabled comments on the video for her performance at Big Weekend due to extensive body-shaming.

The Irish singer-songwriter took to the stage at the 2024 edition of BBC Radio 1’s Big Weekend, which was held at Stockwood Park, Luton at the end of last week.

However, footage of her set began to gather unwanted attention online, with many flocking to the post to criticise the musician about her appearance. After being up for less than a week, the BBC then decided to disable comments on the video.

Now, following the decision, Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson herself has responded to the backlash, and shared what it was like to face online abuse.

“Yesterday the BBC had to turn comments off a video of me performing at big weekend because so many people were calling me fat in the comments,” she shared on X/Twitter last night (May 29).

“Today a different video of me at the BRIT awards is going viral on south american tiktok and now people are calling me fat in spanish.”

In a follow-up post, she added: “I didnt realise it was ILLEGAL to have a HUGE ASS !!!! i am GUILTY as CHARGED it is time to lock me up and throw away THE KEY!!!!! By the way i am an award winning songwriter that has released two albums which were received to ‘universal acclaim’”.

It is impressive that CMAT handled the whole thing with humour and calm. She shouldn’t have to. Time and time again, when we see something like this, do people learn?! I know most music fans are kind and respectful, though we still see far too many thinking it is okay to be disrespectful and offensive. Highlighting the fact that an artist is not super-thin or a way they see as sexy and desirable. It is not only musicians that face this. Take a recent article from The Spectator, where actors Nicola Coughlan was body-shamed. That drew reaction from The New York Times and The Guardian. The jist and takeaway from those articles is that we should not have to talk about body size and whether it is seen as acceptable, desirable and fashionable not to be skinny. Retrograde attitudes, like lumbering dinosaurs, cling on. Have we made much progress?! Like ageism and misogyny in the music industry, there is still body-shaming happening that is very damaging and disturbing. Some may see it as harmless, though the comments left by people are demeaning and upsetting. It will pervade this perception that artists like CMAT should not show skin or dress in a way that reveals their bodies. How many women like CMAT are proudly thrust to the forefront as role models?! Think about how women like her are still, in a way, put to the margins. If we want to inspire conversation, inspiration and change, we need to ensure that more is done to promote body positivity.

I hope that the bile that was received after CMAT’s Big Weekend set does not deter her. She is steely and bright – not to mention hugely desirable and incredibly sexy – and will take it in her stride. One never knows how deep comments go. So many women through music have to face this sort of thing constantly. Of course, all genders experience some form of discrimination though, more and more, women are being abused for the way they look or the music they write. Whether that abuse is aimed at their age, looks or simply their gender, the industry is still hot with some of the most horrible and offensive attitudes. It has to stop. One might say what can be done in terms of correcting the course. I have said how there needs to be more media positivity and spotlighting when it comes to body positivity and make it normalised. How all body shapes and sizes are beautiful. If someone is healthy and happy then that should be promoted and discussed. CMAT is someone producing the most amazing music possible. She is witty, intelligent, enormously talented and someone, I hope, who will be making music for decades more. I can see her collaborating with artists like Dolly Parton, Shania Twain, Beyoncé, and more. Not confined to Country or any genre, she is this wide-ranging and brilliant artist whose songs are filled with honour, truth, reliability and wisdom. We need to respect people like her! We need to respect artists across the board. If body-shaming continues and we do not see anything wrong with it – and those who make the comments are free to do it again -, then it is a sense of Groundhog Day. Not only do comments like the body-shaming against CMAT causes damage to their self-worth and mental health. It means that artists might leave the industry, feeling that they cannot be respected and feel safe if they do not look a particular way. We simply cannot…

LET that happen.

FEATURE: Spotlight: Tiny Habits

FEATURE:

 

 

Spotlight

  

Tiny Habits

_________

THIS is a band that…

I have been excited about for a long time now. I am spotlighting them now because their album, All for Something, was released last month. It is an extraordinary debut from the U.S. trio. Tiny Habits formed in Boston in 2022. They consist of Berklee College of Music students Cinya Khan and Maya Rae and alumnus Judah Mayowa. Their debut E.P., Tiny Things, was released in April 2023. I am going to get to an assortment of interviews with the group. I will end with a review of their phenomenal debut album. First, I want to bring in an interview from The Gryphon:

“2023 was a year for trios. Boygenius made their big comeback; MUNA reached new heights; and with Tiny Habits’ debut EP releasing in April of that year, they proved that three is the magic number. On the aptly named Tiny Things, Judah Mayowa, Cinya Khan and Maya Rae cemented themselves as the future of folk, finding themselves part of Spotify’s ‘Juniper: Artists to Watch’ series.

On May 24th, Tiny Habits released their debut album, All for Something; I caught up with the band two days before the album’s release, breaking down their key inspirations, creative processes, and more.

One of the things that interested me about you guys is that you’re not the ‘traditional’ image of folk music; two of you are women, and two of you are people of colour. You intersect so many marginalised identities, but you’re thriving in the folk scene. Is this something that affects you, or something you think about when you make music?

Judah: It’s on my mind almost every day, because most of the folk scene is white, but I think it’s awesome, especially because our fanbase and the people who come to our shows are really diverse. It’s very cool, but also a little scary.

Cinya: It’s interesting to me that this is the first time that’s really been brought up in an interview! I feel like that’s because the music doesn’t really bring that up, as if it speaks for itself. I like the idea that it can be the fabric of who we are but not at the forefront.

Yeah, that reminds me of Laufey, who you’ve collaborated with before – her song ‘Letter to My 13 Year Old Self’ is centred around race and gender, and what it’s like to be othered, but everything else is her just doing her own thing, I think it’s really cool you’re both doing that!

Maya: Thanks! We love her!

How do your collaborations generally come about?

M: A lot of it happens through social media; that’s how we started out, just posting videos online, and it’s led to us collaborating with a lot of really cool people. Most of it is through Instagram and TikTok, like opening for Gracie Abrams and Noah Kahan.

C: We actually met Kacey [Musgraves] in real life first; we played a show in New York where we were on the same bill as her, and we became friends.

M: Social media is a very powerful tool! It has its pros and its cons, but it’s very powerful.

So, the album comes out in two days! I’m reviewing it, and it’s all I’ve been listening to all day, I love it. When did everything start to fall into place?

C: A lot of the songs have been around for a while, and we compiled them all together last summer. We flew out to LA to meet with Tony Berg, our producer, and that’s when it began! We had a couple of days with him, not recording anything, just singing the songs, and focusing on what the album needed to feel like a full body of work. We finished it in January, so it was a really long process. We were back and forth a lot

M: We were touring in-between, so it was all recorded in different chunks, which was good.

C: Yeah, it was helpful.

M: Being able to sit with the music, and then come back to it and change things was really cool.

I wanted to circle back to Tony Berg for a second; I’m a huge Boygenius fan, and I remember being excited when I saw his credit on ‘Small Enough’. How did your collaboration come about?

M: It was our manager, Steve! He’s known Tony forever. Over the summer, we were shopping around for producers, and Tony came into the mix pretty early on. We had a conversation and pretty much said, ‘Let’s do it!’ and we made the whole record with him.

Why did you choose to call the album All for Something?

C: It was the same way we named the band actually, just texting names back and forth. We went through so many names, one of them was A Little Bit Farther, the name of the tour. Humans Made This was another one. The end of our song ‘Wishes’ has a lyric that says, ‘I wish these wishes weren’t all for nothing,’ and I was like, ‘All for Something?’ Maybe everything we’ve done was necessary, all the hardships are for something, and that’s just what life is. It felt really fitting because the album’s themes circle around despair, and then hope. Or a hardship, and then a lesson learned.

Contrasts and parallels are something I picked up on in your music, like how ‘Tiny Things’ and ‘Delay’ both talk about doing dishes; was that intentional?

M: We had this question recently! There was no reason behind it, it just sounded nice.

I’m sure as musicians you listen to a lot of music, what are you all listening to at the minute?

J: The new Mk.gee record, Two Star & The Dream Police, is in my rotation a lot.

C: We’re all listening to the new Flyte record, and I’ve been listening to a lot of Pine Grove.

M: Deeper Well by Kacey Musgraves!

C: Cowboy Carter too, that’s a bit more amped up. I’m usually in more of a chill mode, very tired and sleepy; we’re not really shaking ass!

What were the key inspirations for the album?

C: Leith Ross’s To Learn is up there, the first song on our album is very parallel to that.

M: It’s all very Phoebe Bridgers-esc; naturally because Tony [Berg] worked on it with us, it’s very organic sounding.

J: Ryan Beatty too, if you know who that is?

Yes! I love him, ‘Cinnamon Bread’ is my favourite of his.

C: Mason Stoops played guitar on that record, and he plays on ours too! Tony is so well connected and has such a historical mind for music: any time you’d have an idea, he’d have a song to show you. That sort of stuff inspired the album a lot; like, we’d listen to a Beach Boys song, and then put a Beach Boys-style harmony into a song.

You’ve described ‘Mudroom’ as the perfect lead single for the album; what goes into the process of single selection? Is that fully in your hands?

J: Yeah, it’s fully in our hands. ‘Small Enough’ was technically the first single, but we wanted to contrast that and show our gentle side. ‘Mudroom’ was the start of the album cycle, and we wanted to do something a little different.

I wanted to talk about ’Small Enough’, because the album version is quite different to the single version. What made you want to go back and revisit it?

C: That was the first song we worked on with Tony, and the turnaround was really fast because we had to put a single out. We had our qualms with it, and after we had the context of the other songs on the record, it stuck out in a really strange way. We thought it’d be nice to tweak it and make it more seamless in terms of the record.

Do you guys have a big goal in mind? Whether that’s a collaboration, an award, anything!

C: I want to buy a house, that’d be nice!

M: A Grammy would be nice too! Even to go to the Grammys would be cool. Ultimately, and I feel like I say this for all of us, being able to live comfortably, and support the people we love, while doing what we love, is the ultimate goal. Seeing the world, loving each other and everyone else in our lives, and being happy! That’s the dream!”.

There are a lot of really interesting bands around at the moment. I think that there is something about Tiny Habits that stands out. Their debut album is a stunning release. I look forward to seeing where they go from here. I am going to move on to an interview from Thomas Bleach, where we get some new insight into the trio and their amazing debut album, All for Something. If you have not heard of the group, I would urge you to follow them on social media:

“THOMAS BLEACH: Your debut album “All For Something” is a beautifully introspective body of work that is raw, vulnerable, and healing. When you listen back to the record in its entirety now, what feelings and thoughts overcome you?

CINYA: I’m really proud of us every time I listen to this record. I think the title of the album kind of encapsulates what the process of creating it was like; we went through a lot separately and together and oftentimes it felt like the end was very far away. But every event and experience was genuinely necessary to help shape the way this album turned out, as well as the people we became throughout making it.

TB: The first song I want to talk about is ‘The Knocker’. The imagery behind this song mixed with your soft vocals draw the listener in so gently. Can you explain the creative process behind this track?

CINYA:  I actually wrote this song for a songwriting class at Berklee. We had this exercise called “free writing” where someone would say a random word and we would write for an allotted amount of time and then underline any words or phrases that felt interesting enough to be part of a song or in this case, the title of it. I think the word for that one was “door”. I was in a relationship where I put a lot more effort in than I was receiving. I was literally always going to this person’s house and they would never come to me. It was such a symbolic representation of the dynamic between us. Therefore I was…. “the knocker”. This song took a long time to get right and we went through a lot of versions, constantly adding things and taking things out. We felt satisfied by the end when we sort of simplified things and let the song speak for itself.

TB: ‘Malleable’ hears you singing “How’d you think I’d take that? Cuz you seem surprised about me crying” which is such a heartbreaking and relatable lyric. Where were you when you wrote that lyric?

CINYA: Thank you! This song means a whole lot to me. This lyric definitely breaks my own heart because it makes me remember how I felt during the time of writing this song. I was in a situation where a person would say not-so-kind things under the guise of being honest. I never understood why it was necessary. I would feel so hurt by those things and wish I hadn’t heard them at all because I would fixate on them and allow them to dictate the person I became. ‘Malleable’ is about loving someone or having an attachment to them to the point of changing and disregarding not only your needs, but the entirety of your being to allow the relationship to continue. I think I needed that experience so I could write this song and so I could figure out who I was after so much of me had been dissolved.

TB: ‘Broken’ and ‘Planting Flowers’ both feel like very important songs on the album, and I love that they are back-to-back as they capture an intense guttural pain as well as a reminder that things will get better. Was that something you always envisioned by putting them next to each other in the tracklisting?

JUDAH: I’d say that was sort of unintentional when creating the sequence of the tracks, but we’re very happy that they ended up together. It took us a second to realize that tracks 6,7 and 8 make so much sense story wise because it goes from intense pain and hardship to acceptance and hopefulness, which is so beautiful. It’s a great moment in the project for people to hear us individually.

MAYA: I feel like although maybe unintentional at first, I’m also very glad the tracklist ended up this way as our “solo” songs are sort of “holding hands” with each other in a sense. It feels special that these songs are sequenced together.

TB: ‘Wishes’ is one of the most special songs I have heard so far in 2024. Your harmonies along with the soft guitar are soothing and heartbreaking at the same time. And the lyricism… Let’s talk about that. One of my favourite lines is “Wish I was in my body ‘stead of hoverin’ above”. Can you explain where that lyric came from?

MAYA: Thank you very much! This line happens in my verse…I was basically just trying to say that I wish I was more present a lot of the time rather than constantly thinking about something else. My brain is constantly turning and thinking about the next thing, and I wanted to express how it can be really hard for me to be present & just enjoy a specific moment.

TB: If you could pick one song from the album for people to discover your music through, what song do you think represents you as a group and this album the best, and would want them to listen to first?

CINYA: ‘Wishes’ I think. And then ‘Salt and Sand’.

TB: Earlier this year you opened for Gracie Abrams in Australia which seemed like a dreamy experience. What was one of your favourite moments from your time down under opening for her?

JUDAH: One of my favorite moments, besides playing in front of insanely large crowds in Australia, is when we got to spend some time with Gracie during a day off and got to know each other more. She genuinely is one of the kindest and most genuine people I’ve ever met, and I’m so grateful for those memories and experiences with her and her team. I cant believe we’ve gone from fans to friends, but we love her endlessly and cannot wait to see her in this new era!

TB: What was the biggest misconception you had about Australia that you debunked while you were here?

CINYA: I think I was expecting to see kangaroos hopping everywhere. Not true!

MAYA: I was also expecting to see massive spiders everywhere that are like crazy poisonous…didn’t see a tarantula once..

JUDAH: I was also expecting really big scary bugs everywhere, but I only saw one”.

I have a couple of interviews that I want to get to before that review of All for Something. DORK spoke with Tiny Habits last month. There are a lot of interesting takeaways from the interview. I like how all three members contribute to the songs. There is this unity and harmony that comes through from the entire creative and recording process. Another reason why their debut album is so spectacular and focused:

“Tiny Habits are a band who buzz with a special kind of magic, an organic alchemy that has swiftly propelled the trio into a rarified artistic realm. As Maya Rae, Cinya Khan, and Judah Mayowa prepare to unveil their highly-anticipated debut album ‘All For Something’, their journey represents a masterclass in songcraft, vulnerability and the profound power of creative kinship.

Rae is home in Boston, preparing to graduate from Berklee College of Music, the hallowed grounds where Tiny Habits were formed. Khan is basking in family time during a visit to Florida, while Mayowa is savouring friendship in Boston before they embark on their upcoming European tour run.

United yet distinct, the three share an innate collaborative symmetry at Tiny Habits’ core. Each member writes, arranges and lends their voice to the lush harmonic tapestries that have attracted audiences worldwide. It’s a potent fusion crystallised over three years of creative immersion and personal growth – the pinnacle so far their most recent headline tour across North America, their first ever as a headline act. “It was the most heartwarming and rewarding experience,” Rae gushes.

Tiny Habits’ origin tale shines like a beacon – three kindred artistic spirits converging at their shared alma mater in fateful fashion. “We all met at Berklee College of Music here in Boston. It was during Covid, so school was basically online, so we kind of met on Instagram,” Rae recounts. “I invited Judah and Cinya over one night after quarantine to sing with me in my dorm, and the rest is history! We made a bunch of videos that semester, and a year later, we were officially a band.”

PHOTO CREDIT: Sam Williams and Maggie-Barger

From those humble dorm room sessions blossomed a singular magic, their celestial harmonies instantly casting a spell over audiences worldwide. “As we started posting videos, we definitely saw that people were really moved by them and what we were creating,” says Rae. “It was cool to see people from all over interacting with us, and we felt so excited to keep creating together.”

Distilling Tiny Habits’ essence into just three words, Khan simply offers: “Honest, human, and harmony.” These hallmarks radiate through ‘All For Something’, the album’s title, an empowering mantra affirming their shared higher purpose. As Khan explains: “It took us forever to find a title. We thought we had cracked the code a couple of times, but then the creative process would continue, and those titles would no longer feel fitting.”

“After recording our song ‘Wishes’, which feels like one of the album’s highlights, we took another stab at album titles. The song’s last line is ‘I wish these wishes weren’t all for nothing’, so we decided it would be beautiful to spin that around and title the album ‘All For Something’. Everything we have gone through as a group, as well as individually, has proven to be for some greater purpose.”

One quintessential highlight for Khan was the raw intimacy of recording ‘Salt & Sand’. “It was the last song we made for the album, and we tracked the drums and piano simultaneously in one take as Judah sang a guiding vocal. [Producer] Tony Berg looked at me with tears in his eyes as it was happening. It was such a special moment.”

Yet their quest was as arduous as it was rewarding. “There were tons of challenges, but there was always a silver lining,” Khan says of working with “truly a one-of-a-kind producer” Berg. “He pushed us in ways we had never been pushed before. It was so interesting and necessary to have someone observe and challenge the way we arranged vocally. We had a very Tiny Habits way of harmonising, and working with Tony brought a totally different perspective that gave us more freedom than we felt we had before, which, interestingly, often came from limiting ourselves in certain ways.”

Berg’s innovative spirit catalysed an ethos of openness, with Tiny Habits embracing unexpected sonic inspirations. “Any word you say will spark something in Tony Berg’s brain, and the next thing you know, you’re listening to anything from Gregorian Chants to Radiohead,” Khan marvels. “The songs for this album were all pretty much fully written before we got to the studio, but I think a lot of inspiration sonically came from the players. We had so much fun working with different personalities and allowing them to play whatever they felt made sense”.

The final interview I am highlighting is from NME. I know that Tiny Habits are gaining traction and popularity in the U.K. The trio have come a long way in a short amount of time. The group have a series of gigs booked through the year. They are touring around North America. I do hope that they come to the U.K. and play very soon. They are a wonderful act that everyone should have on their radar. All for Something is one of the standout debut albums of the year so far:

“Tracing Tiny Habits’ journey to date draws attention to just how rapidly things have accelerated. Since officially forming in 2022, they’ve toured with Gracie Abrams and Noah Kahan, backed Lizzy McAlpine for her Tiny Desk performance and received praise from Elton John and the late David Crosby. On their first night singing together, cross-legged on the floor, they covered ‘Happy and Sad’ by Kacey Musgraves. Two years later they were harmonising with the Grammy-winning artist on her tour bus. Of all the highlights shared together thus far, it’s this that Mayowa quickly names the pinnacle. “It was one of those moments I did not process, and then two weeks later, I was like, ‘Oh, that happened!’” he laughs.

With upbringings scattered across the North American continent, each of Tiny Habits brings a set of cultural differences that subtly manifest in their varying vocal styles. Mayowa’s mother was a worship pastor in Birmingham, Alabama, meaning his early exposures to music were in church. For Khan, songwriting began as a form of teenage rebellion when her parents moved from drizzly New Jersey to the Sunshine State of Florida. It’s where she joins the call from today, a country-distance apart from her bandmates who are recuperating from the US leg of their tour in Boston, before they head to Europe. Rae grew up in Vancouver, Canada, where she spent her adolescence singing jazz standards alone in the city’s grassroots venues.

PHOTO CREDIT: Sam Williams

It’s why, when their harmonies made their way onto TikTok through a string of sentimental, slowed-down covers (everything from Carly Rae Jepsen’s ‘Call Me Maybe’ to A-ha’s ‘Take On Me’) they were received with rapturous acclaim, thanks to their unique ability to transform even the most ubiquitous pop songs into something entirely new. Though the virality of those early clips is now an integral part of their origin story, with the commenters being the ones to encourage them to release original music together, Tiny Habits are wary of the labelling of ‘TikTok Artists’ that’s been attached to many who came up through the platform post-pandemic.

“We’re not social media people at all. We’re not influencers, it’s really difficult for us to find the motivation to be consistent [with posting],” Khan explains, the ceiling fan behind her buzzing as it slices through the thick Floridian heat.

The band admit, however, that their relationship to the app is evolving from despair at its insatiable hunger for content to an appreciation of the real people behind the usernames in their comments section. “I’ve realised that that’s how people find you. That’s how you create a community,” Khan says. “To recognise that makes it less of an obligation and more of.. I don’t want to say it’s an honour, but it is an honour because all these people are taking time out of their day to watch it, to comment, to share it. And I think that’s really beautiful. So I’ve changed my perspective, because I used to hate [TikTok], but now I’m a fan.”

PHOTO CREDIT: Sam Williams

Now on their first headline tour, the real-life moments of connection forged through their music are all the more prominent anyway. At a recent gig, Mayowa witnessed a proposal from the stage — a friend of his college friend who had soundtracked simple moments of his relationship with their song ‘Tiny Things’. He decided if the song was played, he would propose to his long-time girlfriend.

“It was insane, they were holding each other while slow dancing and he whispered it,” he says, beaming while Rae and Khan, who were unaware of this particular anecdote, gasp. “Since then, every time we sing that song, I look out to see who is slow dancing and holding each other. We wrote a lot of the songs in stairwells, just sitting with each other, so it’s really cool that they have an impact on people that we don’t fucking know.”

This speaks to the vulnerability that runs through Tiny Habits’ music like a golden thread — one that subtly defines ‘All For Something’. Produced by Tony Berg [Taylor Swift, Boygenius], their debut album often feels like a series of heartfelt confessions. On ‘Wishes’, they take turns to delicately vent the things they’d like to change about their lives, from their relationships to parents to self-image, while ‘Flicker’ deals with an unrequited, toxic love.

“Man oh man oh man,” Mayowa laughs, leaning back on his bed and recalling the latter song’s conception. “I was really going through it. I was being put through the wringer by someone that I had feelings for. And I was like, ‘I need to write about this. I need to get this out. Because what else do you do when you’re a singer-songwriter?’”

PHOTO CREDIT: Sam Williams

Recording and releasing an album only two years on from establishing themselves as a band speaks volumes of Tiny Habits’ immense popularity — perhaps something that can be partly attributed to a wider folk-pop boom currently sweeping the US. Noah Kahan’s ‘Stick Season’ recently topped international charts, and fellow Berklee student Lizzy McAlpine’s ‘Ceilings’ was one of the biggest tracks of 2023.

Rae suggests this newfound hunger for folk is part of a collective longing for softness, following a tumultuous few years of global history – the same turbulence that pushed Tiny Habits into a post-lockdown singing session all those years ago. “I think people find comfort in connecting, and I think the folk world is a little bit more lyric and story-based,” Rae says. “Life is hard. I think people just want to hear words that maybe they can’t necessarily say, coming from another person that they feel they can connect to.”

Tiny Habits are perfectly poised, in that case, to deliver these much-needed doses of comfort. “We are very sensitive, vulnerable humans,” Mayowa says. Though they admit it’s the support of one another that’s made space for openness within their music. “When it’s someone’s song that they’ve written and we’re singing with them, it just feels like we’re having a conversation and holding their hand,” he continues. “Harmonising is like, ‘Hey, girl, we got you. We’re here. We got your back.’”

It’s why, above all, an unconditional friendship exists at the core of Tiny Habits – from the half-serious covers they sang, homesick and grappling with life in a new city three years ago, to the songs that now make up ‘All For Something’. And it’s something they’ve vowed not to lose sight of. “It’s just such a blessing to be able to sing with each other,” Khan says. “It feels like we’re just chatting with each other, and to sing a harmony on somebody’s story – with your best friends – is just the sweetest thing ever”.

I will finish off with a review from When the Horn Blows. There have been some really positive reviews. I think it is impossible not to like Tiny Habits. Their sound and songwriting instantly gets into the heart. They have even been given the nod of approval by Elton John. It is clear they will be commanding some big stages in years to come. Make sure that you follow them and keep abreast of their developments:

“To many, the underlying foundations of Tiny Habits - Maya Rae, Cinya Khan and Judah Mayowa - were formed on somewhat of an old chestnut. While many saw them sharing covers with one another in their Berklee dorm stairwell as a start-up cliche, many others just saw a wholesome exchange between three avid singer-songwriters eager to share their three-part harmonies out into the musical world.

Their reimagined versions of songs matched with their signature sound drove in viral success but it wasn't too long after where they dabbled into their own works. Lead hemenway, released at the end of 2022, gave us a flavour before we ventured into the new year.

Their first cozy folk-ladled EP of Tiny Things in 2023 was certainly a real eye-opener to what the trio can achieve. Encompassing delicate acoustic varnishing, the subtle six-parter, ironically, was a huge moment for the trio.

Spurred on by support slots from both soothing pop writers Gracie Abrams and Noah Kahan in the Autumn of 2023, this year sees Tiny Habits' release their highly-anticipated debut record.

A saving grace of whimsical flutterings, All For Something channels the trios' inner boygenius carving indie-folk musings for the soul. The album is sweetened by piano trickles and gentile drum instrumentals but the album's mainstay are the three's signature sound, as they entwine and weave beautiful harmonies within one another. A push-pull narrative of conceptual heartbreak, All For Something is a tale of striving in the face of life's problems. People Always Change and Flicker are the steady indie outpourings, as they bring deserved energy in-between moments of sombre pondering. Malleable is gorgeous songwriting, while four-minute Wishes is a prize worth unpacking, as Judah provides contrast with his lower end.

Tiny Habits are another rising collective where folk flowers bloom and All For Something is a great reflection of this. A perfectly brewed cup with a perfect soundtrack to match - Tiny Habits are certainly one of those on folks' folk watchlist. Even Sir Elton John approves”.

I will finish off there. Tiny Habits are a fabulous trio primed to go a very long way. Their debut album, All for Something, is well worth seeking out. I know that you will fall under their spell. If you have not experienced the wonder of Tiny Habits, then make sure you add them to your playlist. They are guaranteed to…

STAY in the memory.

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Follow Tiny Habits

FEATURE: Treasured Discs and Famous Friends: How the Importance and Brilliance of Kate Bush Reaches Far and Wide

FEATURE:

 

 

Treasured Discs and Famous Friends

PHOTO CREDIT: Trevor Leighton/AFP/Getty Images

 

How the Importance and Brilliance of Kate Bush Reaches Far and Wide

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EVEN if I might have covered this before…

IN THIS PHOTO: Author John Boyne recently appeared on Desert Island Discs, where he selected Kate Bush’s Night of the Swallow as one of his eight discs

I think it is amazing that Kate Bush continues to reach audiences around the world. I do like how there is this massive and diverse fanbase. Ordinary people like you and me. The real foundation of her support. Even so, it is nice looking at other layers and levels. The famous faces and more high-profile fans. I have been thinking about that for a few reasons. One happens to come with Desert Island Discs. John Boyne is the latest castaway to select a Kate Bush track as one of his eight discs he would take to the desert island. The acclaimed writer talked about Night of the Swallow. Taken from 1982’s The Dreaming, it is one of Bush’s most underrated tracks. Released as a single in Ireland, it could have found more success if it was a U.K. single I feel. Even so, it is might be considered a deep cut. John Boyne not only selected the song as one of his eight: he chose it as the one he would save from the waves. He waxed lyrical about its meaning. How he has heard the track countless times and holds it very dear. It is one of the many times Kate Bush’s music has been chosen for Desert Island Discs. It is not the case of one single track of hers being selected by all the castaways. Caitlin Moran chose Wuthering Heights as one of her eight when she appeared. Each track means different things to each castaway. The range of professions of the guests shows that Bush’s music does go so far and wide. Whether it literature, science or entertainment, her music does seem to resonate and speak in a way other artists and music does not. I know most huge artists have famous fans. There seems to be a depth and width regarding Kate Bush’s fanbase I associate with precious few. Maybe David Bowie or The Beatles.

Desert Island Discs is a good example of the psychology and psychological impact of her music on people who work across arts and the sciences. To regular fans like us, we have our own reasons to love her. For those who write or create or do anything like that, they have their own dynamics and reasons. Picking a track of hers is a big deal. When listening to castaways talk about their choices, there is this raise in the voice. Inflections and emotions that are very powerful. Kate Bush hitting their heart and soul. When her songs are chosen as the one they would save, then that means even more. John Boyne’s recent appearance is a classic example of Kate Bush’s music being very personal. Every story about one of her songs moves me. I am also thinking ahead to the tenth anniversary of Before the Dawn. That started in August 2014. The residency in Hammersmith attracted tens of thousands of fans. Most of those in attendance were regular punters and fans. Some came from nations very far away. What was also interesting was the amount of celebrity guests. Maybe not surprising given the fact this was Bush’s first major stage endeavour since 1979. The opening night on 26th August, 2014 was covered by The Guardian. They noted how some of the well-0lknown names watching included David Gilmour. In fact, if you read Graeme Thomson’s Under the Ivy: The Life and Music of Kate Bush. He name-checks many of the famous faces who were there during the residency. Anna Calvi and Gemma Arterton spoke to Newsnight about what they took away from watching Kate Bush. As we get closer to the anniversary, it made me reflect on how many well-known people across multiple disciplines and walks of life were standing alongside other fans. It may not be a shock that Kate Bush’s music commands this devotion.

It is not only special occasions and radio shows. On social media, I follow a lot of people who constantly talk about Kate Bush. Whether they are broadcasters playing her music, writers contributing to magazine articles about her, or people like Graeme Thomson re-issuing a biography, that spectrum of amazing and varied famous names blows me away! Of course, the fact that Kate Bush has so many fans in the music world makes things extra interesting. Those who have been inspired by her. Everyone from Florence Welch to Björk, it does make me wonder whether that will compel her to work with any of them in the future. I do hope so. I wanted to use this feature to get people thinking about the sheer volume of famous names who have love for Kate Bush. That recent Desert Island appearance from John Boyne just showed how deep that appreciation for Bush goes. Hearing these powerful words from people who hold certain songs in high regard. It reveals things from a track that we might not have thought about. The list of ‘famous’ – people either in the public eye or better known than most of them – people who are Kate Bush fans continues to grow. All of this swell and buzz is beautiful to see and hear. Beyond the famous faces, simply going online and reading what people write about Kate Bush on a daily basis proves how relevant she is to this day! I am thinking to August and the tenth anniversary of Before the Dawn. That mingling of thousands of long-term and die-hard fans alongside celebrities. Such a truly beautiful combination and occasion! I hope that a decade of that residency makes Kate Bush think of the fans and the breadth of love that was there for her. How many artists command…

 IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush performing in Hammersmith for Before the Dawn in 2014/PHOTO CREDIT: Ken McKay/Rex Features

SUCH affection and devotion?!

FEATURE: Spotlight: Master Peace

FEATURE:

 

 

Spotlight

  

Master Peace

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ONE of the finest debut albums…

of this year came from Master Peace. The south London star has recently won an Ivor Novello. I am going to come to that news next. If you have not bought his debut, How to Make a Master Peace, I would urge you to pick up a copy. Before getting to know Master Peace more, The Line of Best Fit reported on an important recognition of one of our finest young songwriters:

“Master Peace was shortlisted for the award alongside fellow rising stars; Blair Davie, Chrissi, Elmiene, and Nino SLG The accolade follows the release of his debut album, Making A Master Peace, earlier this year. He now joins artists such as Victoria Canal, Willow Kayne, and Naomi Kimpenu.

Celebrating the win, in a post on his socials, Master Peace shared his gratitude for his supporters: "I can’t put into words how emotional I am right now, you guys kept me going through the highs and lows, the good and bad, and everything in between, I put out my album in March and it’s been received so well, I never expected this when I wrote this record and I thank you guys for believing in me I couldn’t do it without you”.

I am going to get to some recent interviews in a little bit. I am also going to bring in a review for How to Make a Master Peace. First, this question and answer from Fred Perry gives us some background and insight into a remarkable artist. Someone that should be on everyone’s radar. I think that we are going to hear music from Master Peace for many years to come:

“Name, where are you from?

My name is Master Peace, I’m from South West London (Morden).

Describe your style in three words?

Left, different, experimental.

What’s the best gig you’ve ever been to?

The best gig I ever went to was Easy Life in London. It was absolutely amazing and inspiring in the sense that if you work hard, that could be me in a couple of years or months. And just the lighting, to the sound, to the crowd's reaction, it just really made me feel good.

If you could be on the line up with any two artists in history?

The two artists I would wanna be on a line up with are The 1975 & The Smiths. The reason why I would pick these two acts is that The Smiths inspired me to make music in the first place, and The 1975 are just my favourite band overall - like I’d do anything for them to hear my tunes!

Which subcultures have influenced you?

Rock. 'Cause there are different types of it like indie, goth, and heavy metal. They all still come under rock and how the whole genre has expanded throughout the years is very influencing.

If you could spend an hour with anyone from history?

The musician I would spend an hour with if I could would definitely have to be Liam from Oasis. That guy is a genius, a free spirit with so much talent and I would really want to get advice from him music-wise and hear his story with him and his band.

Of all the venues you’ve been to or played, which is your favourite?

My favourite venue would definitely have to be the Ace Hotel and Camden Assembly. Every time I perform at these venues the sound system is always slapping! And I enjoy the different amount of people who are local and just come down to watch the gig etc.

Your greatest unsung hero or heroine in music?

My favourite unsung hero would definitely be Chris Martin from Coldplay. His writing skills are amazing, like the lyrics really speak to you. Growing up when I first heard 'Viva La Vida' it really changed my childhood,  the chords and the instruments used in the song to make it what it is - an ultimate classic.

The first track you played on repeat?

'Don't Speak' by No Doubt.

A song that defines the teenage you?

'Pompeii' by Bastille.

One record you would keep forever?

'Wonderwall' by Oasis.

A song lyric that has inspired you?

“Nobody said it was easy.”

From 'The Scientist' by Coldplay.

The song that would get you straight on the dance floor?

'Million Miles' by Bakar”.

Prior to coming to some 2024 interviews, I quickly want to bring in a chat from Rolling Stone UK. Looking at the release of a vital and astonishing debut album, they asked whether there was any concerns that sounds influenced by Indie of the 2000s was going to fit into the modern scene. Perhaps not as widespread as previous years, it is both refreshing and nostalgic hearing an artist looking back and bringing this sound to the present day. Through his prism and vision. It is an incredible blend that stands in the memory:

“Across How to Make a Master Peace, you can hear the dark and energetic indie of Bloc Party on ‘Panic101’ and the electro rock of LCD Soundsystem and The Rapture on ‘LOO SONG’. The loose, rowdy ‘Shangaladang’ splits the difference between Pete Doherty and M.I.A, while Georgia collaboration ‘I Might be Fake’ sounds like The Smiths’ ‘Barbarism Begins at Home’ put through a nu-rave filter. It’s an indie album in spirit and energy, but its sound bounces around restlessly, and Peace is endlessly inquisitive in his sonic choices.

Working with producer Matt Schwartz (Yungblud, Dylan), Peace left the comfort zone of his more traditional, boxed-in indie sound on last year’s Peace of Mind EP to explore genre more widely and recklessly. “You don’t risk enough,” the producer told him, Peace recalls in our Rolling Stone UK interview. “You don’t really throw yourself out there.” The album is the sound of this risk paying off. Divorced from current trends and chasing only personal satisfaction, it dives headfirst into Peace’s past and his inspirations. It’s the sort of record that could completely change a teenager’s life.

What was it that you wanted to change about your sound and style after the Peace of Mind EP, and how has this influenced the album?

I played it safe on that EP. I knew where I came from and what I like and the reason people fell in love with me in the first place. It was very obvious — guitars and drums. You knew what you were gonna get. On the album, I realised that I needed to push the boat out. There’s no way I can just sit on the sidelines and do the same thing again. I know a record like this will stand the test of time, and I want people to reference it when they’re making their own records in the future. I didn’t want to make what people want to hear in the current day and age. I wanted to make what I like and to stand behind it.

Did it feel like a risk to make a 2000s-influenced indie record when it’s not a sound that’s in the zeitgeist right now?

It is definitely a risk, but all the people whose music I love — M.I.A., Blood Orange — their music has stood the test of time. I know all this shit because I’ve studied it like it’s an exam. Not to blow my own trumpet, but I know that no tune here sounds like anything else. This album is fucking clear. It needs a Mercury because I know it’s pushing a boundary.

It seems like you’ve had trouble being taken seriously as a Black indie artist. Do you think that’s something people are now finally understanding about you?

I can make as many indie songs as I want, I can fucking fly this flag, and people still call me a rapper. Then you have people like [Murray Matravers] the singer of [the band formerly known as] Easy Life, who raps on every song, but people aren’t gonna call him a rapper. They’ll call him a pop star! I talked to Rachel Chinouriri about this, and I was just like, “Bro, when are they gonna take us in? When are they actually going to accept us into that realm?” All I’ve wanted for so long is for people to just take me in, just a little bit. Take away the race and just actually listen to the music. It feels good to [be] finally, slowly getting there”.

Back in March, CLASH talked with Master Peace about the making of his album. This unique and incredibly promising artist who takes inspiration from a variety of sources – Including The Streets (Mike Skinner) – but very much makes the music his own. I don’t think there is anyone on the music scene quite like him. How to Make a Master Peace could well be in line for a Mercury Prize later in the year. I think it is a shoo-in to be on the shortlist alongside other wonderful British and Irish albums:

“I genuinely believe this album is the most honest and authentic piece of work from anyone in my pay grade at the moment, in terms of sonics, songwriting and hooks. I don’t think anything else comes close. But the way the game works, people get praise for minimal stuff but then you get people like me who are the underdog. If you guys actually paid attention, you’d realise I’m on to something here. You can’t reference me an album that sounds like it.”

So says Peace Okezie (better known as Master Peace), the brains behind ‘How To Make A Master Peace’. Stacked with anthems-in-waiting, his debut album sees the young man putting the best elements of indie sleaze, electro-pop, and rock music into a blender, garnishing it with his own force of personality to create an eclectic body of work that stands apart from the crowd.

It’s been a long time coming, as Peace tells Clash in our exclusive chat, with debut single ‘Night Time’ now half a decade old: “We’ve definitely seen a lot! There’s been a lot of moments; highs, lows, super-highs, and super-lows! It’s definitely a relief because a lot of artists don’t get the chance to drop their debut album. I’ve managed to make music consistently since ‘Night Time’, so I’m very grateful, for sure.”

The time has been used effectively, allowing Peace the time to diversify both his sound and the lyrical content. “I feel like the early stuff was definitely based on one scenario and on one relationship and one vibe,” he explains. “It was the only thing I knew, because when you’re at that age (18/19) that’s all you ever know, really. You can only write about what’s currently going on in your life.”

“Whereas with this album, there’s a whole lot of things that are spoken about that I’ve never really touched on before. It definitely is very important to me to get these things out for people to eventually see me in a certain light. I feel the early stuff was very one-way, whereas this album is as far away from one-way and predictable than anything I’ve ever put out. I expand on stuff I’ve never really expanded on before, and it’s good that people are going to see that side of me.”

Peace puts a lot of the credit for his development down to producer Matty Schwartz (YUNGBLUD, KSI) saving the musician from ditching everything and subsequently pushing him to do better. “Matty was an angel from God,” he says, effervescently. “That man was sent from the higher-ups. I nearly stopped the Master Peace project. Not music in general, but I was a bit over it and I was going to start a new alias. I was thinking about it a lot and then I met Matty. At first, we didn’t like each other. I couldn’t stand him because we both had differences of opinions.”

“But he was like, ‘You are talented and there’s a certain element of music you haven’t channelled yet. It could serve you really well as an artist and who you are as a person.’ He made my debut EP (for the new era of Master Peace), and he changed my whole mentality. If that man had never come into my life…there would be a new artist, and it wouldn’t be Master Peace. I got chewed up and spat out and I didn’t really want to do it anymore. I was selling out shows and doing a lot more tickets than a lot of artists who have come and gone – and I’m still here, standing – and they were getting more love and praise than me. Essentially, I was feeling sorry for myself.”

Displaying a laudable dedication to his craft, Peace spent 2022 listening to seminal debut albums in a bid to identify what made them classics. When asked which albums in particularly he’s referring to, the Londoner answers before the question is finished: “I owe my debut album to Calvin Harris’ ‘I Created Disco.’ That man took a risk. Not many people get that calling from God, but he got it and absolutely delivered. At the time, everybody was so slow and didn’t understand that he was on to something. That’s what I’m saying, this whole scene is so whitewashed, you feel underrated all the time. And for me, double the whammy because I’m a Black artist making a type of music, this indie sleaze stuff. You always feel like you’re getting the crumbs when you should be getting the full meal like everyone else. My music’s just as good, if not better.”

“When I was listening to ‘I Created Disco,’ people were dissing it and putting it down but 20 years on, it’s one of the most experimental, forward-thinking albums of our generation, in my opinion. Calvin probably didn’t even realise he was on to something at the time, but for me that album, M.I.A., ‘Arular,’ Bloc Party’s ‘Silent Alarm’… I reference all those albums because they stood the test of time. The Streets’ ‘Original Pirate Material’… all of them stood the test of time for a reason. They talk about what is happening in their life now, and the sonics and the tools to make it what it is. That’s how I see my album; it’s in that pocket. That’s why I spent so long listening to debut albums because I knew within myself that it was how I wanted my album to sound: as authentic and real as possible.”

“‘Heaven’ [a track on the album] sounds like a record from early Example,” he claims, correctly. “I used to be into that music. I used to be scared of the dark when I was a kid and I used to put on the radio when I’d go to bed. There was a thing called ‘Friday Night Kiss’ and they’d play a lot of dancey songs for Friday night. I feel that’s where my brain went to, making songs like ‘Heaven’. It’s a song from that trancey, early 2000 pocket.”

Yet it’s not all bangers: ‘Panic101’ is the sort of arms aloft, heart-on-the-sleeve indie anthem which would make The Lathums head back to the drawing board. “My favourite track,” confirms Peace. “I feel it’s the most honest – again – feeling loss, regret, and shame. Having a failed relationship and feel you can’t make it right no matter what you do. That anxiety and panic of not knowing what’s to come; whether you and this person will be together or not. That was something I was going through at the time and it was weighing heavy on me. I couldn’t understand why it was weighing so heavily, but it was. There’s just something that I really needed to get out and say, and that person will know it’s about them when they hear this record. I struggled with over-thinking and anxiety, and that record’s about feeling like I could lose it all. I made this person my everything and now I’m leaving with nothing, but I wanted to make it right. How we gonna make it right if you won’t pick up all my calls or talk, y’know?”

Although Master Peace may have spent the last few years naval gazing, he’s also keenly aware of the issues facing musicians in 2024. He was fortunate to be the recipient of some funding from the BPI’s Music Export Growth Scheme so his immediate future as a recording artist is secure, but the artist is aware he’s one of the lucky ones: “It’s sad because it shouldn’t be like that. I feel like I’ve put in a lot of work, but anyone who is a musician, I commend them. Big respect because it’s not easy. There’s so much financial stuff you have to take a loss on. There’s so many things that come with it, you have to be thick skinned and strong. You’ve got to be smart as well. Not intellectually but realising what’s for you and what’s not.”

“The government awarding me those funds was insane. I didn’t expect it. I know in the past they’ve given it to Dave and Little Simz and a few other people (and) the fact they give it to artists they think are going to pop off this year, and they’ve given it to me, is crazy. It’s going to help me tour this year and next. I’m very grateful and I wish there was something that could help artists more. After COVID, everything was fucked up for artists to tour, and Brexit and whatnot. There needs to be some sort of thing that’s installed to help everybody else out. Even if it’s not a large quantity of money, just something! People need to eat and pay rent, bills and all that shit. It’s a bit unfair that the government doesn’t really recognise that at times”.

Prior to coming to a review for How to Make a Master Peace, NME featured this wonderful young talent. Someone who wanted to create this cultural reset for Generation Z. An Indie smash that harks to the early-2000s, yet is very much geared to the 2020s. I think he has managed to achieve that. The acclaim the album received shows what faith and respect there is out there for Master Peace:

“Peace recently toured with The Streets, and has ambitions of becoming the same type of unhinged, chaos-creating live performer as Mike Skinner, who has also become somewhat of a mentor. “I played him a bit of my album and asked what he thought,” he says. “[Skinner] was like, ‘Don’t worry about what I think, and don’t worry about what everyone else thinks’ Worry about what you think. I asked him how [‘Original Pirate Material’] managed to stand the test of time,” Peace adds. “He’s like, ‘Because I didn’t care what people thought when I first made it, I just made it because I like that type of music. I wasn’t trying to get a hit, I was just trying to make good music that people will resonate with that will then change my life, which it did’.

“You’re just making music that you like, and that you’re into,” Skinner told Okezie. “People will gravitate to it if you believe that they will.”

In making the album and undergoing this sonic shift, Okezie felt he was deliberately going against the zeitgeist, making music he was told by others was outdated and unfashionable. Since then though, indie sleaze has become a buzzword again and the chaotic, sex-fuelled songs of The Dare are making headlines and filling rooms. After the album was finished, more sets of ears gravitated towards the classics of ‘00s indie, with the soundtrack to Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn turning younger listeners onto Bloc Party and MGMT, as well as Sophie Ellis Bextor. “It’s one of those happy accidents,” Okezie grins.

Growing up in rural Surrey after moving from South East London as a child, Okezie was torn between the indie staples he was hungrily consuming and his childhood interest in the UK rap scene. ‘Shangaladang’, a loose and languid highlight from the album, quotes Skepta and reflects on his early days in London, which stood in stark contrast to the suburbia where he ended up spending most of his childhood.

“I’ve never really spoken about my childhood,” he says, “but I grew up around people that were involved in crime. That song is about people that I used to be friends with that were about that life. There’s people that rap about it, and there’s people that live it. Those people live it, they live that life through and through. People would say that I’m a sweet boy from Surrey who ain’t going through nothing. But I’ve seen some shit that makes you question whether I’m doing the right thing, if I’m even supposed to be a musician.”

‘How To Make A Master Peace’ is an escape, then, from things past and present that have held Okezie back. It’s also an early contender for the best British debut album of 2024, an album of rare energy and charisma that wants to change the world, and could conceivably do so for a small corner of it.

“I feel like I’m a dark horse,” he concludes of his place in the industry. “Everybody knows the bands that the industry is putting to the forefront, and I don’t need to name names. Then I’m here like, come and join this train!’” Falling – with his infectious and ever-present enthusiasm – into a football analogy, he adds: “Sometimes I feel like I’m sitting on a bench waiting to get put on in the 90th minute. I’m like, ‘Nah, man, I want to play the full game’. I’m gonna get that first team play, man, I can feel it”.

There are other interviews such as this that I would advise people to check out. I am finishing with a review from NME. They lauded the bag of colours and sounds that combine to make a distinct and instantly recognisable debut album. I think Master Peace will build from this and create a string of classics. It is clear that he is going to go very far:

“I’m what a rockstar looks like” were the words of a young and exuberant Master Peace, speaking to NME four years ago. It’s a statement that the London artist, born Peace Okezie, has since followed through on, bridging the worlds between rap, punk and indie through singles like 2019’s ‘Night Time’ and The Streets collaboration ‘Wrong Answers Only’. He now finds himself armed with a range of styles, which continue to seamlessly interchange in his music.

Whilst the heartfelt moments imbued in his earlier material may have struck a chord with Bakar fans, Okezie’s debut LP ‘How To Make A Master Peace’ transports you straight to the dancefloor. These 11 tracks would certainly find a home at a modern indie club night alongside Wet Leg or The Snuts. Coupled with his infectious personality, this album establishes Okezie as the party-starter the genre never knew it needed.

Mashing explosive beats with groovy guitar lines, ‘How To Make A Master Peace’ vibrates with energy from the get-go. Opener ‘Los Narcos’ channels the riffs and textures from The Hives’ heyday; later on, ‘Get Naughty!’ pairs bombastic production with call-and-response vocals.

The arrangements here are also defined by their basslines, which vary in pace and intensity, from low-key (‘Happiness Is Love’) to rhythmic and wickedly addictive (Georgia team-up ‘I Might Be Fake’). On the latter, layers of synths build a foundation for the track’s curveball of a chorus, making it the catchiest sing-along on the album. It’s a masterclass in organised chaos.

Okezie even ventures into pure pop territory on ‘Heaven’: ““Let me see paradise,” he sings, teasing a wave of euphoria before the track shifts towards an electro-house break. It makes for a real standout moment, while also cementing Okezie’s status as a burgeoning creative force”.

Tipped by the Ivors as a rising star, there are few higher honours than that! After the release of an acclaimed debut album, it is full steam ahead for Master Peace. On 15th June, he plays as part of Chaka Khan’s Meltdown in London. There is going to be some serious attention from festival organisers and venues. Some of the first big steps towards future superstardom. Do all you can to ensure that you…

KNOW his name.

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Follow Master Peace

FEATURE: I Get Around: The Importance of a New Documentary and Book Concerning The Beach Boys

FEATURE:

 

 

I Get Around

  

The Importance of a New Documentary and Book Concerning The Beach Boys

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EVEN if a new documentary…

about The Beach Boys on Disney+ has not won over all critics (some say it is too sunny, conventional and cuts off the story too soon), many have noted how it is an essential and thorough look at The Beach Boys. The highs and lows. Whereas many music documentaries gloss over harder aspects and controversy, this one does not. There are some minor flaws, yet The Beach Boys does a great job in exploring and expanding on the music and legacy of the group. Rolling Stone highlighted how the documentary will introduce The Beach Boys to a new generation of fans. How it will reveal new information to diehard fans. With the initial line-up consisting of Brian Wilson, Mike Love, Al Jardine, Carl Wilson and Dennis Wilson, the group quickly established themselves. I like how the documentary takes us from their debut, 1962’s Surfin' Safari, and how a simipler and more direct form of songwriting made a real impact. One can feel a real shift in terms of complexity and songwriting from 1966’s Pet Sounds. One can run that alongside The Beatles’ music. From 1963, they we rewriting punchier and shorter Pop songs. They expanded and explored the studio more from 1965’s Rubber Soul. There was this friendly competition between the two bands. I think that The Beach Boys will help bring their incredible and timeless music to new listeners. I am going to discuss that more.

First, I want to bring in reviews and takeaways from the new documentary. A bit of information about a new book (that was written by the band). The first time we have heard the story of The Beach Boys from The Beach Boys. This is what Variety noted when they reviewed The Beach Boys:

“When you sit down to watch a documentary about the Beach Boys, you know what you want: to be immersed in the California dreamin’ of the group’s early surfin’-hit days, in the jaunty beauty of songs like “I Get Around” and “Help Me Rhonda,” and in the story of how Brian Wilson began to figure out a way to turn pop songs into miniature symphonies. You want to be immersed in the recording of “Pet Sounds,” in the Beach Boys’ rivalry with the Beatles, in the derailed masterpiece that was “Smile,” and in how Brian’s mental and emotional problems began to tear himself and the group apart. You want to know how the other Beach Boys, caught in the wilderness, found a way to put the group back together, though it’s almost like they became a different group. You want to see the Beach Boys’ saga told in all its sublimity and fragility, from L.A. to “Holland,” from Van Dyke Parks to Manson, from “God Only Knows” to “Kokomo.”

“The Beach Boys,” co-directed by Frank Marshall (who made the 2020 music-doc milestone “The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart”) and Thom Zimny (who’s directed about a thousand Springsteen videos), accomplishes all of that nicely. I wondered how, exactly, the movie was going to pack the Beach Boys’ vast career into an hour and 53 minutes. But in its unabashedly conventional and fan-friendly way, it brings this off with a tasteful clarity and showmanship. In moment after moment, it gets the Beach Boys.

There are fantastic archival photographs, unseen until now, that give us an intimate glimpse of who the Beach Boys were as individuals (the inner sweetness of the wild child Dennis Wilson, the inner toughness of the hypersensitive Brian). And though so much of their story is familiar that it’s now practically mythology, Marshall and Zimny don’t let themselves get steamrolled by that. They’ve crafted “The Beach Boys” with open eyes, as if there’d never been another film about them (even though there have numerous documentaries as well as the transporting biopic “Love & Mercy”). The result is a movie that a young person who knows nothing of the Beach Boys might find enthralling, and that an ultrafan like myself can still find immensely satisfying, because the film has an inquiring temperament. It coasts along on the telling detail, the anecdote juste, the insight you haven’t heard before.

I never knew, for instance, that Brian, as a teenager, was so obsessed with the Four Freshman that he sat down at the piano to nail down the precise arrangement of the dizzying jazz-meets-big-band harmonies of 20 of the group’s songs, a process that he says “was my entire harmonic education.” I knew that “Pet Sounds,” one of the greatest albums ever made, was a heartbreaking commercial failure, but I didn’t know that Capitol Records was so unenthusiastic about the album that they refused to put any promotional muscle behind it. (If the company had believed in it more, who knows what would have happened? Music history might have been different.)

I didn’t know that the Beach Boys were set to headline Saturday night of the Monterey Pop Festival but dropped out, all but stamping themselves as relics in the new age of rock. I didn’t know that Murry Wilson, the Wilson brothers’ father, Svengali manager, and all-around micro-critical and doting/abusive presence, decided to cash in by selling the Beach Boys’ song catalog…for $700,000. (Today it would easily be worth half a billion.) I didn’t register, in the midst of the Beach Boys’ catchy but lackadaisical ’70s albums, what a paradigm-shifting phenomenon the 1974 greatest-hits double album “Endless Summer” was. I remember when it came out, but the documentary shows you that it was, in effect, the original jukebox musical, an album that reconfigured the Beach Boys’ majesty for a new era.

For all that, the best thing about “The Beach Boys” is that it actually takes in the group through a sharp and sophisticated critical lens. I’m more than capable of enjoying a pop-music documentary that’s a little too starry-eyed for its own good, like “Billie Eilish: The World’s a Little Blurry” or “Coldplay: A Head Full of Dreams” or “ZZ Top: That Little Ol’ Band from Texas” or “Pink: All I Know So Far” or “The Greatest Night in Pop.” But I’m also on record as complaining that too many of these movies now leave out any critical perspective — and by that I don’t just mean recognizing when an artist fails. I mean filling in, with passionate and penetrating commentary, what it is that makes them great.

“The Beach Boys” has memorable critical voices, like Don Was, the record producer who 30 years ago directed a fine documentary about Brian Wilson’s music (“I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times”), or Josh Kun, the cultural historian who wonderfully articulates the rising and falling tides of the Beach Boys’ discography. The movie goes deep into the sound and meaning of their harmony: the way they began to sing together as kids, their voices fusing with a genetic unity (it was the three Wilson brothers, their cousin Mike Love, along with their friend Al Jardine). Love and Jardine are interviewed extensively in the film (Brian shows up, but is mostly represented by older interview clips), and as Jardine recalls it, “We were like notes on a keyboard.” That sounds like a cliché, but it’s no exaggeration. They all sang as one.

The musician Lindsey Buckingham crystalizes the special symbiosis that existed between the Beach Boys and the Beatles. The two groups are usually portrayed as trying to top one another, but Buckingham notes that they were actually united in a larger quest to redefine pop music. Brian’s original deity was Phil Spector, whose direct influence you can hear in “Don’t Worry Baby,” but it was “Rubber Soul” that changed the game.

Brian heard it as a concept album, unified by sound and theme. He knew then that that’s where he wanted to go. There’s a good story about how Bruce Johnston, who by 1966 had joined the group, was trying in an underfunded way to get the word out about “Pet Sounds” in England. Derek Taylor, who’d been a publicist for the Beatles and was now doing that job for the Beach Boys (he was the one who came up with the “Brian is a genius” meme), invited Johnston up to a hotel suite, where John Lennon and Paul McCartney were waiting for him, “dressed in Edwardian suits,” all so that they could hear “Pet Sounds.” They listened to it several times and went into the studio to record “Sgt. Pepper.”

“The Beach Boys” captures the glories of Brian working with the Wrecking Crew on “Pet Sounds,” the way that “Smile” grew beyond him (the movie should have mentioned that the completed version of “Smile” released in 2004 was a transcendent vindication of Brian’s vision), and the teasing hit-or-miss quality of the albums they made after that. If you listen to some of the best songs on those albums, like “Feel Flows” and “Forever,” they show you how the other Beach Boys had learned to compose in the style of Brian. Yet no one could orchestrate a song in three astral dimensions the way he could.

Even Brian, after a while, couldn’t do it anymore. If you listen to a song like “Darlin’,” which closes out the movie (we see the Beach Boys performing it in front of 400,000 people in Washington, D.C., on July 4, 1980), it’s got the Brian magic, but the magic has been brought down to earth. It no longer lifts you up into the stratosphere. By the late ’70s, the Beach Boys had become the first pop superstars of nostalgia. They surfed their own legend. Then again, when talking about the Beach Boys, one should probably be suspicious of a word like nostalgia, when what we really mean is timeless”.

I would advise anyone who is even a passing fan of The Beach Boys to watch the new documentary. There are some fascinating takeaways and revelations. This interesting feature highlights a few key moments and talking points from an outstanding new documentary. It is one that I would urge anyone to watch. As much as anything, you get to witness and experience a soundtrack like no other. One of the most important groups ever:

“From their humble beginnings as a California surf group with fantastical harmonies to recording the experimental and boundary-pushing albums that forever revolutionized pop music, The Beach Boys’ journey from teenage phenomenon to American legends is full of the ups and downs that make up any great saga, all in the pursuit of recording some of the most beloved music ever made.

The Beach Boys goes a step further in telling the band’s whole story, with nearly two hours full of never-before-seen archival footage, new interviews with the band members and other music industry luminaries (including Lindsey Buckingham, Janelle Monáe, Ryan Tedder, Don Was), and selections from the official Beach Boys catalog. This is the definitive portrait of The Beach Boys, whether you only know the hits or are a lifelong fan. Here’s what we learned from watching The Beach Boys.

The Beach Boys have always been a family affair, with Brian, Dennis, and Carl Wilson being raised by their songwriting father and musician mother. Though they each had different musical interests, the Wilson brothers grew up singing three-part harmony on long car rides together, which they credit as the “birth” of The Beach Boys.

Brian Wilson and Mike Love first bonded over their love of doo-wop, especially The Four Freshmen

Mike Love was a first cousin to the Wilsons and grew up loving music and singing harmonies with the Wilson brothers. Brian and Mike especially loved the doo-wop of their youth. The Four Freshmen were a strong influence, inspiring Brian to learn all the chords and arrangements to their songs and four-part harmonies. Brian even credits them for his entire harmonic education. For most of their studio career together, Brian and Mike complemented each other nicely, with Brian being the introverted producer who wrote the songs and Mike the lively frontman who wrote the lyrics.

Dennis Wilson, the only Beach Boy who surfed, suggested that the band write songs about surf culture

It’s ironic that the band most associated with surfing did not surf much themselves. Dennis was the exception, and he was the first person to suggest that the band try to write lyrics that reflected the booming surfing culture of their native Los Angeles. This helped distinguish the Beach Boys since most surf music at the time was just instrumental. It’s also worth noting that Carl, though not as much of a surfer, was a big fan of surf rock, most notably The Ventures, The Marketts, and Dick Dale and the Deltones.

Phil Spector’s production on The Ronettes’ “Be My Baby” blew Brian Wilson away—and inspired him to hire The Wrecking Crew

Phil Spector and his famous “Wall of Sound” production style was another huge influence on Brian, especially the large ensemble sound that powered The Ronettes’ classic hit “Be My Baby.” That single featured the legendary Wrecking Crew studio band, whom Brian later hired to help with his increasingly bigger and more complicated songs on Pet Sounds. This new influence can be heard on The Beach Boy’s 1964 single “Don’t Worry Baby,” which marked a turning point for the group’s sound and for Brian as a more confident producer.

Glen Campbell briefly replaced Brian Wilson as a touring Beach Boy

Speaking of the Wrecking Crew, as Brian focused more on working in the studio and collaborating with the supergroup, the rest of the band agreed to let him stay off the road and hired a rotating cast of musicians to help flesh out their live show. Wrecking Crew member and future country superstar Glen Campbell was one of those stand-in musicians, who was greatly impressed with Brian yet was not ready for all the girls screaming during The Beach Boys shows.

It was Al Jardine’s idea to cover the traditional Bahamian folk song “Sloop John B”

Other than their brief time with the Wilson’s childhood neighbor David Marks, Al Jardine was the only non-family member of the classic Beach Boys lineup. A longtime friend to Brian and fellow high school football player, Al held his own with his own harmonies and musical ideas. One example was his idea to cover “Sloop John B,” specifically The Kingston Trio’s version of the classic folk song. Brian loved the idea so much that he took on the challenge of repurposing “Sloop John B” onto the keyboard, turning it into a pop masterpiece and Pet Sounds standout.

Derek Taylor, The Beatles’ publicist, was brought on to help with the PR for Pet Sounds

The friendly competition between The Beach Boys and The Beatles is well documented; Brian first heard The Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show while touring in New Zealand and immediately felt pushed to improve his musical craft. What might not be as well known is that The Fab Four’s famous press agent joined the Beach Boys’ team to help with Pet Sounds, since Capitol Records wasn’t sure how to promote it. It was Taylor who pushed the idea of promoting Brian as the Beach Boys’ lone genius, much to the chagrin of the rest of the band who felt like their contributions weren’t being appreciated at the same level.

Instead of promoting Pet Sounds in the US, Capitol Records instead focused on promoting the Beach Boys’ first greatest hits album

Even with the help of The Beatles’ publicist and all the glowing reviews of the album—with Paul McCartney even admitting that “God Only Knows” was a perfect song and a direct inspiration for Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band—Capitol focused instead on selling Best of the Beach Boys, the band’s first compilation album that focused on singles and B-sides. Though now rightfully cited as one of the greatest pop albums ever made, Brian was hurt by Pet Sounds’ lack of commercial success in the US, even if the album was a critical and commercial smash in the UK.

The band considered shortening their name to just “The Beach” to shake off their upbeat youthful image

The years following Pet Sounds were full of great creativity but also tension. After the aborted Smile sessions, Smiley Smile marked the last time Brian led the musical direction of The Beach Boys. The group had reached a crossroads and felt out of step with the increasingly harder-hitting youth counterculture. To mark a new era, the band considered going by just “The Beach” to lose the baggage of their past success and better reflect their desire to write more mature music.

1974’s Endless Summer went No. 1 and revitalized The Beach Boys for a new generation

During this time of uncertainty, Capitol released Endless Summer, a new Beach Boys greatest hits compilation that focused on the Beach Boys’ pre-Pet Sounds hits. It was a massive record that went No. 1. A new generation was introduced to The Beach Boys, and the album helped turn the group into a stadium-touring machine. They have been touring in different configurations, and making fans and music lovers happy, ever since”.

To go with The Beach Boys documentary is a book. It is exciting that we get this personal and authoritative history of the group from the members. It may seem inconsequential or random that in 2024 we are getting this documentary and book. The band are not official reformed and touring. There is also not any plans of album reissues as far as I know. Even so, it is brilliant that we get overdue fandom and focus on this iconic group:

“Here, for the first time in print, is the history of The Beach Boys, by The Beach Boys.

Their only official book, The Beach Boys by The Beach Boys is the ultimate chronicle of one of the world’s greatest bands. Through their unique sound, complex harmonies, sensational live shows and use of innovative recording techniques, The Beach Boys became woven into the cultural fabric of America and influenced generations of musicians globally. This book documents how it happened.

Brian Wilson, Mike Love, Al Jardine and Bruce Johnston together provide a combined career narrative especially for this book, and through meticulous compilation from sources worldwide, Carl Wilson and Dennis Wilson’s words are equally represented. Documenting how they went from a Hawthorne garage band to a global phenomenon, they tell the astounding story of their ascent: perfecting their harmonies, initial fame as a surf group, and then their ultimate progression as pioneering recording artists to become one of the most musically complex ensembles in history.

Their text is accompanied by iconic images, never-before-seen negatives and rare ephemera. Given unprecedented access to their personal archives, The Beach Boys by The Beach Boys offers intimate insight into the lives of the group. Also opening their archives are Brother Records and Capitol Records, all of which assist in illustrating their remarkable journey.

Expanding the narrative are a host of contributors who have been involved with or inspired by the band's music, including Peter Blake, Lindsey Buckingham, Eric Clapton, Elvis Costello, Ray Davies, Bob Dylan, Def Leppard, the Flaming Lips, Bobby Gillespie, David Lee Roth, The Jesus and Mary Chain, Jim Kerr, Roger McGuinn, Graham Nash, Jimmy Page, Carly Simon, Pete Townshend, Rufus Wainwright, Thom Yorke, and many more.

A group collaboration, The Beach Boys by the Beach Boys is, in effect, The Beach Boys’ autobiography. Like their music, it is poignant, frank, often humorous but always sincere.

Finally, here is The Beach Boys’ own story”.

There is more to discuss beyond the documentary and book. It is especially sad that The Beach Boys’ songwriting genius, Brian Wilson, has recently been placed under a conservatorship. Experiencing poor health, there is hope that Wilson can record with The Beach Boys again. Even so, I wonder if he has seen the new documentary and the response to it. I hope that we see a new appreciation of Brian Wilson and just what an important and brilliant songwriter he is. There have been some recent YouTube videos of classic tracks. Storyline and modern visuals around timeless songs. I hope that there is more remastering and re-release of their music. I am thinking how there has not really been much use of The Beach Boys’ music in film and T.V. How their catalogue could sit beautifully within a film. Whether it is about the 1960s and someone growing in the time – where The Beach Boys’ songs are on the soundtrack – or there is a musical about them. There is definitely opportunity and a new demand. With younger listeners discovering their music, what will the next step be?! On 13th July, their sixth studio album, All Summer Long, turns sixty. Brian Wilson turns eighty-two next month. There are further anniversaries and reasons for celebration. I do hope that we get some momentum and continuation of attention on The Beach Boys going forward. If you have not seen the new documentary or read the book, they are well worth checking out! Real understanding of the band and their history. I think that we will see a new wave of affection for this legendary band. Will they ever write and perform together again? When it comes to that question…

GOD only knows!

FEATURE: Put in the Pin: The Fashion and Iconic Looks of Kate Bush

FEATURE:

 

 

Put in the Pin

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush performs Suspended in Gaffa on the French T.V. show, Champs Elysees, in October 1982/PHOTO CREDIT: Araldo Di Crollalanza/Rex Features

 

The Fashion and Iconic Looks of Kate Bush

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I think we often…

PHOTO CREDIT: Getty Images

define Kate Bush in certain ways. Most of it revolves around her sound and music. Her as a producer or an original. So much around the writing, recording and production. How many people discuss Kate Bush as a fashion icon?! Maybe not directly connected to the music, there is no denying the fact that her sense of style and changing looks are extraordinary and an essential part of her. The reason I am discussing this again – I have a feeling I have talked about it in the past – is because there has not been a book about that. Books like Taylor Swift: And the Clothes She Wears are about modern icons. Taylor Swift is undoubtably a fashion and style icon in addition to being a global megastar. Same goes for other major artists today. Few talk about Kate Bush as this artist whose outfits, looks and shoots are as important, eye-catching, original and stunning as the music. If we talk about artists like Madonna in terms of fashion and looks, Kate Bush is often seen as more modest and less worthy. If you think about the polemics, Kate Bush trumps so many others. From modest and girl-next-door shoots to these extraordinary outfits we see in her live performances for The Tour of Life, through to various shoots where she was dressed in an array of different colours, textures and styles, this creates a variegated and nuanced palette! I will get to a couple of articles that discuss and dissect Kate Bush’s fashion. How she is an icon because of this too. As integral as the music in many ways. From all of her videos through to her shoots and day-to-day choices, it was all different and distinct. There was a lot of new interest in Kate Bush from generations Z and Alpha when Stranger Things used Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God) and there was this explosion of interest through TikTok videos. It gave journalists impetus to explore subjects and themes around an artist who arrived in music nearly forty-five years before Stranger Things opened her up to a new world. Glamour looked at Kate Bush’s key looks and fashion moments for a feature in 2022.

IN THIS PHOTO: The Last Dinner Party/PHOTO CREDIT: Phoebe Fox for NME

I love the fact that there has been a slew of features about Kate Bush and getting the look. I wonder, if you think about some of the new bands and artists coming through, whether they have adopted some of Kate Bush’s wardrobe and fabric. Maybe The Last Dinner Party’s changing looks – as NYLON write: “Victorian funeral garb, they jump to jewel-toned Renaissance fare, and then crisp lace tops and babydoll dresses of the Virgin Suicides variety” – has been inspired in some part by Kate Bush. So many other modern artists have borrowed something from Kate Bush in that sense. I like how this Sloane Street article from 2022 shows how to replicate some of Bush’s looks. I personally love ‘The dance look’! I will look at the divide between her music video styles, various fashion shoots and her more home-grown looks. I will also write about the need for a book that collates photos and illustrations, charting Kate Bush’s evolving looks and how she was this vital fashion icon. Someone whose aesthetic and visuals were as strong as the music she produced. There are two features I want to come to. This one highlights how artists such as Florence + The Machine, Bat for Lashes and St. Vincent have definitely taken guidance and inspiration from Kate Bush when it comes to their fashion and on-stage outfits:

“Nobody ever perfected the feminine as ethereal quite like Kate Bush. An influence on innumerable modern pop stars and style icons – Florence + the Machine, Bat for Lashes, Bjork and St Vincent, to name but a few, Bush is an icon of music, style, and feminism all at once. Incorporating costume wholeheartedly into her music videos and performances, she used her attire as an equal arm of her unbounded creativity as any other artistic medium. Her iconic, enormous wavy brown hair and angelic Wuthering Heights white dress cemented her place in pop culture iconography, and informed my relationship to femininity and performance more than any other artist.

Bush’s tribute to Emily Bronte’s classic novel continues to be both her most iconic song and music video; the sweeping, ethereal interpretive dance moves, the wild facial expressions, the translucent red or white chiffon dress with enormous, billowing sleeves that have informed my – and many others – taste in neo-Victorian romanticism. Everything Florence Welch does now can be taken from that performance; the otherworldly, ghostly femininity, the floaty, sheer fabrics, the powerful, modern witchiness. It’s a performance that rivals the intensity of Bronte’s extraordinary novel itself. Her beauty choices of the 80s, too, trickle down to designers the world over; the heavy fringe and thick, dark hair, deep berry lipstick and intense smoky eyes have informed many recent catwalks in their witchy, gothic-romantic revivals, which have in turn been responsible for countless glamorous night-out looks on the high street, all black lace and sheer panels.

At a time when fashion tended overwhelmingly towards the forward-looking, the shiny, futuristic fabrics, the business-influenced party power-dressing, the big skirts and sleeves and hair and a vision of the future from the 50s, Bush took a softer, more nostalgic, more quietly theatrical view; borrowing from Pre-Raphaelite painting, Japanese art history and textiles, and the culture of mine and contemporary dance from which she rose, Bush’s look – like her sound – operated in its own imaginative sphere.  Her countless bodysuits and leotards spoke of a practical, dance school mentality; the idea of wearing the easiest outfits to perform in, to allow for movement, to dance and fly and fully express yourself, can be seen in the classic bodysuits and worshipping of good basics of the recently-passed American Apparel. Bush approached fashion from an artist’s sensibility and with the eye of a costume designer; her commitment was, first and foremost, to character, to performance and to creative freedom.

For me, Bush’s style was crucial to the formation of my emerging teenage femininity. With a penchant for both the theatrical and the gothic, I moved out of my early teens emo phase – grew beyond enormous black band hoodies and colour striped socks in search of something more subtle, that still worked with my intense love of black eyeliner. Bush offered a take on the gothic heroine that was joyous, all about exclamation, high emotional states and love of nature. She was powerful, magical, reclaiming the fainting gothic heroine and putting her centre stage; she was unapologetically eccentric, taking influence from innumerable, seemingly disparate sources, she made incredible music and gave no cares if anyone thought she was weird or mad, she was the coolest, funkiest earth mother, the best kind of witch. Every modern popstar owes something to Kate Bush; countless catwalks are in debt to her eye to the stage; I owe her to this day for my ideas of what femininity can be”.

Perhaps an unconventional style role model, at a time when many of her peers were more conventional or ordinary, Kate Bush definitely stood out. DAZED wrote in 2022 about the influence of Kate Bush’s eclectic looks and fashion selections. Someone who was a chameleon inside the studio and out. I cannot discuss Kate Bush’s importance without talking about fashion. How each year and period of her career was blessed with an array of wonderful photos and inspirational fashion choices:

Nearly 40 years after it was first released, Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God)” has become the hottest song of the summer. Playing a prominent role in the dark new series of Stranger Things, the offbeat ballad has become a global hit, as endless streams by a new generation of Bush fans propelled it to the top of the UK charts. First appearing on Bush’s 1985 album Hounds of Love, the track is a rallying cry for extreme empathy that explores what could be achieved if two lovers swapped places to understand one another better – themes which feel just as timely and pertinent as they did back then.

Despite her fame, Kate Bush has managed that rare thing as a mainstream musician – retaining a cult-like aura that still makes listeners feel like insiders sharing a secret. To those in the know, this appreciation extends far beyond the music. A great foreshadower of the slick pop package expected today, Bush’s work has always been led by an understanding that a great singer uses all her available tools. From taking lessons with David Bowie’s dance teacher Lindsay Kemp to devising music videos that cover every genre from sci-fi to macabre fairytale, Bush’s vision was, and is, multi-faceted. Clothes have played an integral part in this creative odyssey, cementing Bush as an idiosyncratic fashion icon in the process. 

KATE’S KEY LOOKS

Let’s reverse to the beginning. Bush burst into the limelight in 1978 with her debut album The Kick Inside. She was just 19. The lead single “Wuthering Heights” remains one of her best known to this day, its high-pitched, broken-hearted register still a favourite among brave karaoke-goers. Two separate music videos released to accompany the Emily Brontë-inspired track featured Bush fluttering around a field and a stage in flowing gowns: one red, one white. Often, this is the Kate Bush we still imagine, all big hair and ethereal seventies regalia.

Away from her videos, Bush was frequently pictured wearing rustic knits, silk blouses, waistcoats, colourful tights, thigh high-boots, and a further succession of diaphanous dresses. Her style suggested not only hippyish ease but a particularly English kind of eclecticism: all thin fabrics and big woolly socks. She wasn’t afraid of high fashion drama either. A series of photos of her taken in the late ‘70s by Claude Vanheye see her in various jewel-coloured Fong Leng pieces, with one ritzy yellow number worn to walk a leashed crocodile.

The needs of dance also influenced Bush’s love of glittery bodysuits and tight lycra – all the better to move in. Her 1979 show The Tour of Life was a heavily costumed affair, featuring outfits including a magician’s top hat and tails, a veil, wings, leotards, and WWII army attire. Always ahead of the game, she was also the first singer to perform with a wireless microphone headset, her stage sound engineer Martin Fisher devising it from a coat hanger.

During those early years, Bush was prodigious. The Kick Inside and Lionheart were both released in 1978, Never Forever came in 1980 (featuring a brilliant futuristic look complete with chainmail bikini for “Babooshka”), and The Dreaming in 1982. The latter, which marked her most experimental work to date, received lukewarm reception but has since been recognised as a classic. Bush then stormed back onto the charts in 1985 with Hounds of Love.

Forever a shapeshifter, across the course of the album’s music videos and shoots Bush fashioned herself into a small boy complete with knitted jerkin for “Cloudbusting”, an overcoat-clad dancer for “Hounds of Love”, and an Ophelia-style figure in a life jacket framed by flowers for the album’s B-side telling the story of a slowly drowning woman. For “Running Up That Hill” she opted for grey leotards and hakama – draped Japanese trousers – ideal for the video’s soft purple light as she and fellow dancer Michael Hervieu (dressed identically) grappled together in a series of motions that rolled between intimacy and distance.

A LASTING INFLUENCE

To some degree, it’s hard to write about Kate Bush’s ‘style’, because so much of it exists in service to her music. Take her 1993 album The Red Shoes. There it’s all about the scarlet ballet slippers, used to reference Powell & Pressberger’s 1948 film of the same name – itself nodding to Hans Christian Andersen’s gruesome tale of a girl cursed to dance forever. For Bush, clothing is both kinetic and character-forming. It frees or accentuates the body. It allows the wearer to play role after role. Often, her vision has extended beyond the merely human. In her promotional images you can find her dressed as both a bat and a lion.

There is a narrative that exists in the fashion world – that of the slightly awkward kid who spends their adolescence sketching in their room and grows up to create clothing that fulfils their hunger for beauty and fantasy. No wonder Bush appeals to that cohort. It’s one of the reasons why she’s so beloved. Yes, there’s the emotional precision of her lyrics and the expansive reach of her sounds. Yes, there’s that fantastic willingness to be intelligent and daring and strange. But there’s also an implicit suggestion about the galloping power of the imagination, particularly when combined with an outsider-ish sensibility that leaves you dreaming about literary ghosts or the merits of the mathematical symbol Pi.

That’s why her fashion choices are so memorable too. It’s not just their ethereality or eccentricity, but the stories they tell. Designers love to throw around vague statements about creativity, but in someone like Kate Bush you see the full force of an active, searching mind – and an understanding of what the dressing up box can do. Really, it’s a very simple fashion philosophy. To become someone new, all you need is a costume change”.

PHOTO CREDIT: Guido Harari

I can see the evolution. I loved the shots that Gered Mankowitz took of Kate Bush in 1978 and 1979. From shots of her in leotards – Kate Bush as the dancer – to more elegant and heady (the wonderful ‘Hollywood’ shot is one of the best photos of Kate Bush), we saw many different sides early on. Kate Bush not wanting to be defined or controlled by a label or the wider market. Very much putting her on stamp on her looks and fashion. There was a mix of the more down-to-earth and the elevated. I think the early music videos and Bush’s The Tour of Life showcased how much the images and fashion was tied to the music. How they could define the song as much as anything. Think about the white and red dress versions of Wuthering Heights. The video for Babooshka. The contrast between the photographs of Gered Mankowitz and her brother, John Carder Bush. How there was this different dynamic and aesthetic when she collaborated with Guido Harari between 1982 and 1993. I think my favourite early-period Kate Bush looks took place in Amsterdam. You get this immediate contrast. Only in her early-twenties, there was this real sense of confidence and individual identity. Kate Bush was not dressing to fit in with expectation or promote the music. She was very natural. Her photoshoots were unique and memorable. I love this shot of Bush by Barry Schultz. Taken in Amsterdam in 1979 – when she was performing live there -, you get the boots and jeans combination one saw on the U.S. cover for 1978’s The Kick Inside. A blend of colours and textures. You can tell I am no fashion expert, so it hard to describe! I love how stunning the ensemble is. How there is this sense of the ordinary and extraordinary in one look. Compare that to the photos she took with Claude Vanheye. She was snapped wearing Fong Leng in some truly breathtaking images. One sees Bush in a parking garage. There is some debate, but I think she is with a crocodile rather than an alligator. One has a wider nostril than the other. Someone can say for sure. Some ask whether it is a real thing. It would be hugely dangerous to have a real crocodile or alligator there! Even if it was a zoo animal. I think it is either a model or prosthetic version. One that could be posed for a photo. Who knows…maybe it is real?!

PHOTO CREDIT: Claude Vanheye

The fact we get two distinct sides to Kate Bush in Amsterdam highlights what a remarkable, compelling and important fashion icon she was. The ordinary and supreme fashion going side by side. There is debate as to whether the Claude Vanheye shots were from 1978 or 1979. I feel they must have been the same time as the Barry Schultz shots. Every album and year brought a new range of periods in terms of her fashion. Never for Ever (1980) was distinct. Photos from Andy Phillips and Patrick Lichfield once more explored and exposed the various sides to this amazing and chameleon-like artist. Search for images of Kate Bush in 1982 and you get something vastly different to 1985, 1989 or 1993. There was no sense of Bush dressing to fit the times or what her peers were dressing in. There is almost too much pack in and discuss when it comes to Kate Bush and fashion. We have photobooks of Kate Bush. There has not been anything dedicated to her in terms of her fashion and styles. Looking at Bush through the years and her different looks. At a time when books about Kate Bush focus more on the music or are generally biographical, I do feel there is a gap for someone to go deeper with her fashion. A combination of photos and illustrations, Sketches and comparisons. How her fashion choices have inspire more contemporary artists and those outside of music. The more I think about Kate Bush and her style, fashion and extraordinary looks, the more I understand that she is truly…

ONE of a kind.

FEATURE: Love Buzz: Nirvana’s Bleach at Thirty-Five

FEATURE:

 

 

Love Buzz

 

Nirvana’s Bleach at Thirty-Five

_________

ONE of the most important…

IN THIS PHOTO: Nirvana in Hoboken, 13th July, 1989 (via Medium)

debut albums ever is also one of the most underrated. On 15th June, 1989, Nirvana released Bleach. In a year that saw an explosion of Pop and essential Hip-Hop, maybe Nirvana’s Grunge sound was not as widely appreciated as it should have been. It does seem that some were a bit dismissive of Bleach. An album that is far stronger than it has been given credit for. Released through Sub Pop, this incredible debut album was produced by Jack Endino. What is noticeable about Bleach is the lack of Dave Grohl. Chad Channing plays on the album. Though his parts are perfectly fine, one reason why 1991’s Nevermind is so iconic and powerful is the technical skill and gravitas Grohl injects. Not to say that Bleach received negative views. Far from it. It has received love from a range of critics from its release to now. I feel it is one of those albums that got some positivity in 1989 but has grown in stature through the years – unlike Nevermind, which was an established classic in 1991. Thirty-five years later, you can hear and feel the influence of Bleach running through contemporary bands. I will end with a couple of reviews for Bleach’s twentieth anniversary release from 2009. Before that, there are a few features I want to highlight. I want to start out with this feature from 2019. It waxed lyrical about a classic album that still stands up after all of this time. Approaching it in 2019 – thirty years after its release:

“Nirvana’s debut was released by Sub Pop Records on this exact day 30 years ago. Bleach was recorded for only $606, a frugal amount for the trio consisting of Kurt Cobain, Krist Novoselic, and then-drummer Chad Channing. (Nirvana went through a slew of drummers — four in total — before landing its most permanent, Dave Grohl.)

The album was recorded at Reciprocal Recording, which was located in the Ballard neighborhood in Seattle. The tiny, triangular studio, run by Chris Hanzsek, Jack Endino, and Rich Hinklin, remains iconic for its indie commissions from bands all over the US in those days, most of which were acts associated with C/Z Records, Twin Tone, Amphetamine Reptile, and the aforementioned Sub Pop. The studio is also known for being the birthplace of “grunge” music, having recorded early albums by bands such as Soundgarden, Mudhoney, and Green River.

On January 23, 1989, Nirvana recorded their first demo with Jack Endino, who sent a copy to Sub Pop afterwards; a few months later, Nirvana returned to the studio to record Bleach for the label. Humble beginnings for a record that has sold over two million copies and remains Sub Pop’s best-selling release.

Over the course of 30 years, Bleach has been assessed and dissected again and again — deemed by some as the ultimate “grunge” album and by most as a seminal record in the “genre” … you may be wondering why I’m putting “grunge” and “genre” inside quotation marks. It’s because grunge isn’t a genre of music; it’s a subculture — one defined by certain emotional traits and one very much influenced by the environment from which it emerged.

It was Nirvana’s Nevermind that brought the attention of “grunge” to the masses, and as game-changing as that record was — I don’t think anyone is arguing that it wasn’t — it was its embryonic predecessor that really encapsulates what it means to be “grunge.” Bleach, not Nevermind, evokes The Pacific Northwest. No, it doesn’t represent the vegan-eating, beer-brewing hipsters with square-framed glasses or any cliche now associated with the region. (Let’s be real; those are all the transplants who moved here because suddenly it was cool. Thanks a lot, Fred Armisen!) Bleach represents The Pacific Northwest and us who inhabit it in our purest form.

Bleach sounds raw, authentic, emotive, anxiety-ridden — a perfect match for the neurotic, depressed, and highly anxious Northwest personality — and like a product of the same environment that shaped the region’s inhabitants. In The Pacific Northwest, the passive, apathetic, and disenfranchised teenager grows up to be that same adult, a result of being raised in, and staying in, a land of perpetual rain where you see more darkness than light. The pop magnificence that everyone heard on Nevermind was the more polished, more easily digestible version of the sentiment on Bleach. Nevermind had the same guttural wails of frustration and isolation without being buried in sludge, but lacked the real teenage-angst sensibility that’s found on Bleach.

When I hear Kurt Cobain harmonizing with himself on the raging punk track “Negative Creep”, or echoing through the sludge, “You’re in high school again/ You’re in high school again,” on “School”, I’m instantly filled with a painful self-awareness and anxiety — the same kind I felt as a teenager listening to the record for the first time and realizing, like “School” alludes to, that you never really leave high school and that the world falls into the same pointless patterns, no matter where you are or how old you become — a sentiment that really has followed me into my adult life.

There’s an ongoing joke that everyone from The Pacific Northwest is perpetually 17 and filled with angst. I’ll give Fred Armisen this: the dream of the ’90s is still very much alive here, but that’s because it never really left. This is just who we are. The music and lyrics on Bleach sound like they are being chewed up and spat out, and there’s a tension and aggression we identify with, a kind that differs from the zeitgeist captured on Nevermind and the rest of Nirvana’s discography, which the rest of the world claimed for themselves when Seattle blew up. The idea behind songs like “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and “Come as You Are” is that the youth of the time could only muster up a shrug and mumble, and through a good ear for pop hooks and lyrics, this punk band was able to encapsulate an entire generation of frustrated and dissatisfied youth.

However, what this assessment fails to understand is that even after the Seattle Sound and all that came with it, including hordes of cultural invaders, had faded in the late ’90s, the feelings and sentiments stirred by Nirvana are still very much alive with every generation produced in The Pacific Northwest. While outsiders have keepsakes and artifacts from that heady time, we are still very much reveling in it and living it. Not in the hysteria but in the underlying, ineradicable ideas that define who we are as a people. And this comes from more than just being young and scrimping out an existence in a nothing town outside larger cities.

Bleach captures more than just the societal snippet of “grunge” with its slower tempos, dissonant harmonies, complex instrumentation, and angst-filled lyrics that often address themes of social alienation, apathy, confinement, and a desire for freedom — themes that stem from living in a place where there are more trees than people and where a feeling of being suffocated by landscape is inherited”.

If many see Nevermind as the commercial breakthrough and this iconic album, and its follow-up – and the band’s final album together -, In Utero, as Nirvana at their rawest and most genuine, perhaps most see Bleach as a ‘promising debut’. Listen harder and you will find it is much more than that! This feature from last year examined and highlighted a caustic debut that was the precursor and stepping stone to Nevermind. Even in 1989, Nirvana were sowing seeds to music that would change the sound of music. Announce them as one of the defining bands of their generation. Kurt Cobain establishing himself as a peerless and unique songwriter:

“Future Seattle luminaries such as Mother Love Bone, Soundgarden, and Mudhoney had already swung by for sessions at Endino’s Reciprocal Studio, and Nirvana’s first demo also opened doors for them. It caught the attention of Jonathan Poneman, co-founder of the iconic indie label Sub Pop, who went on to release the band’s first single – a cover of Dutch psych-rockers Shocking Blue’s “Love Buzz” – during the autumn of 1988.

Propelled by Novoselic’s spidery basslines, Cobain’s slashing, psych-flecked guitar, and his grainy but charismatic howl, “Love Buzz” offered the world the first taste of Nirvana’s future greatness. Though only initially available as the first of Sub Pop’s limited-pressing Singles Club releases, the record also achieved international recognition, with UK rock weeklies Sounds and Melody Maker both awarding the song their Single Of The Week accolade.

Cobain and Novoselic were joined by new drummer Chad Channing for “Love Buzz,” and he remained on board for Bleach: the product of several short but intensive sessions with Jack Endino at Reciprocal across the festive season of 1988 and January ’89, which reputedly set the band back a mere $600.

In keeping with the emerging Seattle grunge sound, Bleach was loud, heavy, and uncompromising, with most of its key moments – “School,” “Blew,” and the dark, tortured primal scream of “Negative Creep” – owing a debt of gratitude to metal/hard rock forebears such as Black Sabbath, along with Nirvana’s Seattle contemporaries Melvins, whose pioneering sludgecore sound was highly rated by Cobain.

Bleach’s stand-out track, though, prototyped the sound that would deliver Nirvana onto the global stage. The Beatles’ early albums and The Knack’s Get The Knack were regulars on Cobain’s stereo as his band prepared their debut, and these notably more melodic influences compelled him to write his first straight-ahead pop-rock love song, “About A Girl,” about his then-girlfriend, Tracy Marander.

Nirvana credited their friend Jason Everman in the Bleach sleevenotes, though Everman didn’t appear on the album. He did, however, briefly join the band as second guitarist for the nationwide US tour following the record’s release: a trek which resulted in several popular album cuts such as “Blew,” “Love Buzz” and the transcendent “About A Girl” becoming college-radio staples.

Though not a Billboard 200 hit until it was reissued after the success of Nevermind, Bleach did sterling work in launching Nirvana internationally. Having attracted rave reviews, including one from the NME, which suggested that Nirvana’s debut was “the biggest, baddest sound that Sub Pop have so far managed to unearth”, Bleach’s grassroots success led to a much-acclaimed UK and European tour in late ’89 and galvanized Kurt Cobain into composing songs such as “Breed,” “Polly” and “In Bloom,” which would bag Nirvana a major record deal and lead to them dramatically reshaping the future of rock’n’roll”.

There are a couple of other features/reviews I will finish with. Before that, Albumism took a look inside Bleach in 2019. Three decades since it came into the world, its meaning and impact had grown and evolved. It is perhaps not shocking that Bleach struggled slightly in 1989. Such a vital and huge year, commercial success went to other genres and artists. That is not to say Bleach was unworthy of more focus. It should have a lot more copies. I feel it has been embraced and appreciated more in subsequent years:

“Despite being rush recorded for just over six hundred dollars at Reciprocal Recording Studio in Seattle (later Sleater-Kinney would record their 1997 album Dig Me Out there) the production remains muscular and pulsating throughout. Nirvana’s reputation as a solid live band allowed them to translate this onto record and produce a set of songs that fizzled with young energy. At no point does the listener believe the recording is below par or in any way sounding rushed. The only complaint in the recording/production of Bleach is the weak inclusion of Chad Channing’s drums that, in comparison to Cobain’s crunchy guitar and Novoselic’s rumbling bass, appear undercooked, tired and tinny. Channing was and is a solid drummer, but the recording doesn't capture his energy well. The drum sound quality only improves when Melvins drummer Dale Crover takes up the stool for “Floyd the Barber,” “Paper Cuts” and “Downer.”

Still, all this is in retrospect. Bleach, alongside In Utero (1993) made zero sense to me at the time of initial listening. I wrote about In Utero for this very publication last year for its 25 anniversary. The basic premise in that article was that in order to access and understand the music contained on In Utero there needed to be the required time and effort made by the listener to engage with it on its own terms. Being young, dumb and full of...er...fun, In Utero and its anguish was not immediately accessible to me. As time wore on, the majesty of the record began to have its way. Slow at first, but then with great impact. Once In Utero was deciphered and made sense, so did Bleach.

I’m not saying it was easy. Like In Utero, there was an angle to the record. Start with the bouncy and boppy songs to find the groove and then launch into the heavier stuff. Bleach shares something with In Utero and perhaps one can’t be understood without the other. Both, try as they might, bury the pop sensibilities underneath feedback wails, chainsaw-like guitars, and Cobain’s more exaggerated vocal performances. It makes for an uneasy listening experience, but a rewarding one when it all clicks.

Upon listening to the record thirty years on to reacquaint myself for this very article it can’t help but be noted how infectious and immediate the music is. How in parts the grunts, drawls, and wails of Cobain sound much like the vocal stylistics of the era’s more flamboyant frontmen. Bleach was one of many records that kicked open the doors to a new era, but it borrowed from previous musical eras to achieve it. In the mix are punk, glam rock, sludge metal, sixties ditties, and straight-up pop. It is in essence a definitive Nirvana record.

Bleach has been reassessed over the years as a Grunge standard and has rightly sold in the millions. It encapsulates the frustration and dissatisfaction of being young and eking out an existence in a subpar town when the world is there for the taking. In fact, anyone wishing to distill and understand the sound and era of those times could do no worse than to listen to Bleach in full. It really is the very definition of the strange and short lived Grunge genre”.

I will actually finish with an NME feature rather than a second review of the Deluxe Edition of Bleach. Pitchfork reviewed the album in 2009. To mark its twentieth anniversary, Sub Pop reissued the album with a 1990 live show as a bonus. Also, their legendary 1992 set at Reading was finally given a DVD/CD release:

“The line between cool and uncool has never been less defined: We live in a world where Hall and Oates have become as influential to emergent indie-rockers as Joy Division, and Journey's "Don't Stop Believin'" has become as much of a hipster-bar last-call anthem as "There Is a Light That Never Goes Out". And yet, even in an era of omnivorous musical consumption and boundless genre tourism, the sight of a computerized Kurt Cobain belting out Bon Jovi's "You Give Love a Bad Name" in a recent Guitar Hero 5 demo reel was enough to revert the good/bad taste divide back to 1988 borders. For Nirvana fans, the Guitar Hero scandal was more than just a case of a dead rock-star's visage being exploited for the sake of peddling product. Few artists treated record collections as an extension of personal politics quite like Cobain; having him sing a hair-metal hit is not just contrary to his musical taste, but his entire value system. (Though one can't help but wonder what a guy who once skewered alpha-male behavior in a song called "Mr. Moustache" would make of indie's current facial-hair fetish.)

And yet, Cobain was no stranger himself to challenging accepted notions of cool. When it first emerged 20 years ago, Nirvana's debut album, Bleach, represented an equally heretical notion to some indie aesthetes: Flipper-grade sludge-punk molded into Beatles-schooled pop schematics. By 1989, indie rock was already making a rightward shift across the radio dial-- Dinosaur Jr. had covered Peter Frampton, the Butthole Surfers were dropping in not-too-subtle Black Sabbath and Zeppelin references-- but rather than using post-hardcore noise to desecrate their traditional FM-radio influences, Nirvana used it to give their dinosaur rock more teeth. In Cobain, they had a frontman with uncommonly melodic instincts, but shot through a voice that sounded like it was coughing up blood; in Krist Novoselic, a bassist who could hit the heretofore untapped sweet spot between Paul McCartney and the Melvins.

But unlike most rock bands who divided pop history between before and after, Nirvana's impact was not immediate. Upon its release, Bleach was a modest indie rock success at 40,000 copies sold, and the album's low-budget legend-- it was recorded for a scant $600, footed by the band's temporary second guitarist, Jason Everman-- often overshadows the music within. At that point, Nirvana had yet to divest itself of its Pete Best: drummer Chad Channing, whose scrappy style wasn't fully suited to the band's growing propensity for crater-inducing stompers. (Three Bleach tracks-- "Floyd the Barber", "Paper Cuts", and "Downer"-- were actually helmed by Melvins thud-master Dale Crover, and you can really tell.) And the album's first single-- a cover of 1960s Dutch-popsters Shocking Blue's "Love Buzz"-- is more emblematic of the dementoid new wave that Nirvana would indulge in on their future B-sides than the metallic Pixies-punk that would turn them into stars.

But rather than unfairly compare it to the platinum sheen of sophomore release Nevermind, Bleach is best appreciated today as a snapshot of a specific time and place, of a Seattle scene bubbling up before it turned into a media adjective: In the Aero Zeppelin grind of "School" and the Mudhoney-quoting scum-bucket thrash of "Negative Creep", you have the perfect audio manifestation of the stark, exhilarating black-and-white Charles Peterson photos that captured late-80s Seattle like a series of strobe-light flickers (and which populate much of this reissue's 52-page photo booklet). Original producer Jack Endino's new remastering job gives Bleach a much-needed boost in fidelity, but there's an intrinsic, primordial murkiness to this album that can't be polished-- while Axl was welcoming the masses into the Sunset Strip jungle, Nirvana dragged the Sub Pop set into the bleak, chilly backwoods from which they came.

Though briskly paced, Bleach is a front-loaded record, the maniacal/melodic contrasts of its stellar first half-- anchored by the epochal anti-love song "About a Girl"-- ceding to the more period-typical grunge of its second. The bonus live performance included here (recorded in 1990 at Portland's Pine Street Theater) suggests as much, mostly ignoring Bleach's side B to showcase important transitional tracks: the scabrous pop of "Sappy" (later to emerge as "Verse Chorus Verse" on the 1993 No Alternativecompilation); "Dive", a blueprint for Nevermind's plutonium-grade rockers; and "Been a Son", which bears the influence of Cobain's beloved Vaselines (whose "Molly's Lips" is covered here). It's a testament to both Endino's live-in-the-room production style and Nirvana's raucous onstage energy that Bleach and the bonus concert set sound like they were cut in the same session. But the concert also presents Nirvana in a light that the band's subsequently troubled and tragic story so rarely affords them: a simple, playful power trio who could lay waste to a drunk club crowd on a Saturday night”.

I am going to end with a feature from NME. Back in 2015, they argued why Nirvana’s amazing debut album should not be confined to the shelf. How it should be celebrated and discussed more. As it is turns thirty-five on 15th June, I hope new focus comes its way. I think it does have a couple of filler tracks, though they somehow add to its charm and scrappiness. What you get from Bleach is a band not yet fully formed, and yet you can feel those seeds of genius. The sheer promise and originality. How they would go on not only to influence so many artists coming through. They would write their name in the music history book:

“Bleach’, released over 27 years ago on June 15, 1989, isn’t Nirvana’s unwanted child, but it still has to fight damn hard for elbow room in Nirvana’s legacy. Between the world-changing ‘Nevermind’, the harrowingly raw ‘In Utero’ and the swansong vulnerability of ‘MTV Unplugged’, there’s scant room in the legend for a debut LP that was still too indebted to Seattle’s murky grunge sound to be deemed a bona-fide classic. It didn’t change pop culture forever, but instead only sold 40,000 copies in the US until the release of ‘Nevermind’. Rather than exploring a rock star’s struggles with fame, pressure, self-loathing and drug addiction, it was the voice of a grouchy slacker.

Yet ‘Bleach’ is far too important to be cast aside as the runt of the litter – because here, for all the flaws and foibles, were the first flickering signs that Nirvana would become something special. ‘School’ looms into life on a wave of murky feedback and then erupts in a rudimentary-yet-blistering riff: sonically and lyrically it’s as simple as they come, but there’s something about that scabrous bellyaching that perfectly sums up a desire to kick against the pricks and their bitchy, adolescent cliques.

Likewise, the helter-skelter racket of ‘Mr Moustache’ takes aim at dim-witted alpha males and their macho posturing as Kurt yelps witheringly: “Yes I eat cow/I am not proud.” Later, he’d claim that he wrote all of the album’s lyrics in one evening and they didn’t carry any great weight of meaning, but he was already capable of vocalising how it felt to be discontent and disenchanted. ‘Bleach’ married scratchy, irascible noise to the most adolescent of concerns – school, bullies and, on ‘Scoff’ as on ‘Been A Son’, parental strife – and made them feel like the most important issues in the world. As Nirvana grew in stature, so Cobain’s bugbears became more complex, too, but he’d never lose the knack for lending a voice to everyone who was similarly pissed-off, for understanding his audience in a way that Axl Rose, Eddie Vedder et al never could.

And if ‘In Utero’ is often hailed as the purist’s Nirvana album with its bleak, unvarnished sound, it’s worth remembering that it was purposefully abrasive, a discontented troublemaker thumbing its nose at everyone who now wanted a piece of it. ‘Bleach’ is violently raw because it couldn’t be anything else: recorded for just $600 and in 30 hours, there’s no play-acting in the rough, guttural ‘Negative Creep’ or the narky thrash of ‘Blew’. Even the lead single ‘Love Buzz’, a cover of the Dutch band Shocking Blue, is a weird and warped little thing, a far more ambitious, tongue-in-cheek and playful record than anything Mudhoney or Soundgarden were mustering at the time. Similarly, it’s hard to imagine any of their contemporaries being capable of something like ‘About A Girl’. Kurt’s first true masterpiece, the fuzzy and deceptively sweet melodies and none-more-simple structure undercut by the lyrical tangle of dependence, debt, conflict and lust – an unconventional treatment of a love song that’d crop up in ‘Heart Shaped-Box’, too – and showed Nirvana’s soft underbelly could be just as arresting as their ear-splitting thrashes”.

On 15th June, it is thirty-five years since Nirvana’s Bleach was released. How many people who bought the album that day realised it would be one of the first big steps from a band who would change music?! Astonishing songs like About a Girl and Negative Creep showcase how peerless the band were. This incredible album is worthy of more love than it got in 1989. It has been reappraised but, still, it is underrated. Let’s hope that it gets full respect and acknowledgement…

FOR its thirty-fifth anniversary.