FEATURE: “I Was There!” Before the Dawn at Ten: The Excitement Around Kate Bush’s Return to the Stage

FEATURE:

 

 

“I Was There!”

PHOTO CREDIT: Trevor Leighton

Before the Dawn at Ten: The Excitement Around Kate Bush’s Return to the Stage

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MOST Kate Bush fans remember where they were…

PHOTO CREDIT: Ken McKay/REX

when she announced that there would be a new residency, Before the Dawn. Originally intended as a fifteen-date residency, because of demand, that then expanded to twenty-two nights. I shall come to the tension and atmosphere that was building outside the Eventim Apollo for that first night on 26th August, 2014. The contrast between what was happening outside the venue and backstage on that opening night. The sort of people who mixed together to welcome Kate Bush back to the stage. One reason why we were rocked by the announcement on 21st March, 2014, was that there had been little word from her about it. If you think about the few years before that, nobody was expecting a residency or any live work. Kate Bush put out two albums in 2011. Director’s Cut arrived in May. 50 Words for Snow came out in November. Apart from Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God) being remixed in 2012, there was not a lot of activity. Also in 2012, Bush made her first public appearance after a decade as she accepted the South Bank Sky Arts Award in the Pop category for 50 Words for Snow. Tickets for Before the Dawn sold out in fifteen minutes. There were pre-sale tickets that were available to fans who signed up to her website. After such a surge in demand, seven extra dates were added. There was this explosion of interest and a rush to get tickets. The ticket actually went on sale on 28th March. One of the most exciting things that has happened in her career. In the sense there was already this anticipation and curiosity. I love how the announcement made us feel. A complete shock! Thirty-five years after The Tour of Life, Kate Bush was back in terms of large-scale live work. There was a mixed blessing with it being a residency rather than a tour.

The fact that she performed in Hammersmith and did not need to travel meant there was more energy for the performance. Not having to move around. She liked 1979’s The Tour of Life, though it was exhausting. So much travel and energy need to keep the show moving. Now, near her home, she could enjoy herself a bit more by not having to worry about logistics and transportation. Though, ‘enjoy’ might not be the right word when it came to Before the Dawn. Bush revealed to Matt Everitt in a 2016 interview – when discussing the live album of Before the Dawn -, how she was terrified each time going on. It was not really until the end of the final show (1st October, 2014) when she could relax. One of the downsides about staying in London was that so many fans could not attend. Being based around the world, the cost and commitment of coming to see her perform was too high. Even though a lot of international fans attended, many couldn’t make that sacrifice. Also, as tickets sold out in fifteen minutes, it meant that those not fast enough missed out. So many people (me included) regretting the fact that there were no tickets left! Prior to that first night on 26th August, 2014, there was speculation what Before the Dawn would consist of. Most people interested in the potential setlist. As it was called Before the Dawn, many figured that Aerial’s A Sky of Honey could feature.

That is a song cycle about an entire summer’s day. She did perform the sublime and epic A Sky of Honey and Hounds of Love’s The Ninth Wave. I remember press trying to uncover what might be included. In The Guardian’s review of the opening night of Before the Dawn, they discussed the fact that not a lot was leaked or known before that first night:

“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”.

I shall get to the atmosphere that must have been building in Hammersmith on 26th August, 2014. I love how Peter Gabriel almost gave the game away! As Graeme Thomson notes in his book, Under the Ivy: The Life and Music of Kate Bush, in 2000, Gabriel revealed to the world that Kate Bush had a new son. That was not public information. It soon was! I can imagine that his old friend gave him a call and perhaps gave him a stern warning! So trustful and forgiving, Kate Bush must have made it known to Peter Gabriel that she was working on Before the Dawn. Gabriel spoke to Graeme Thomson on 26th February, 2014 and said how the and Bush did not really talk that much. Some cards exchanged and the odd bit. Intriguingly, he did say that her period of quiet might be interrupted soon as she has been working on something. Knowing what that meant (I assume), he almost gave everything a month before Kate Bush announced Before the Dawn! Few expected something new. Going back to my earlier thread, in fact, it was a Kate Bush re-recording of Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God) that featured at the London Olympics in 2012. I guess it is technically a remix as the vocal was new but there was an edit and rejig of the song. A blend of the new and existing. In any case, in March 2013, Bush asked her young son Bertie whether she should go back on the stage. He encouraged her. Kate Bush was keen to connect with an audience after recording and being away from the stage for so long. Among her collaborators and choice of people, she invited Adrian Noble (former creative director of the Royal Shakespeare Company) to co-direct. Author David Mitchell was asked to help write dialogue that would sew together The Ninth Wave. The two hit it off right away.

I am wandering slightly, though I will end with that first night and moments before doors opened. Bush and Mitchell were a dream team. With Mitchell more of a sounding board – as Graeme Thomson writes in his biography of Kate Bush -, drafts would be changed and worked up. It was part of an incredible eighteen months of preparation. Credit to the KT Fellowship rather than Kate Bush, this was a troupe and group effort. Actors and singers were auditioned without being aware of what it was for. There was so much secrecy around Before the Dawn. That collective bond made Before the Dawn such a familial and spiritual thing. I love how the rehearsals were quite low-key. Bush rehearsed in an old school building. It was similar to the atmosphere and dynamic of The Tour of Life rehearsals. Smaller spaces and buildings. Intimacy and focus. Different departments and people would work in different rooms. Whether that was an office or gymnasium. That school environment was one of discipline and respect. Those working with Bush asked not to talk about what they were working on. The same obsessiveness and attention to detail that Bush displayed during The Tour of Life’s preparation – from set designs and costumes and everything else – went into Before the Dawn. Making sure the tickets and programmes were as beautiful, inviting and detailed as possible. The lack of PR and hype from Kate Bush is not something other major artists would do. Making sure that the announcement would be a surprise and no insights and secrets would be given out.

PHOTO CREDIT: Ken McKay/Rex

The press reacted with archive pieces, features, hagiography, song rankings and everything Kate Bush-related! A flurry of interest and column inches that ranged from the interesting to filler and recycled. Even so, one cannot deny that Kate Bush had taken people by surprise and dropped a beautiful and life-changing bomb! The same sexist and ageist criticism that Madonna faced prior to her recent Celebration Tour was applied to Kate Bush in 2014. Many asking whether a woman in her fifties could pull off such a physical feat. In the next feature about Before the Dawn, I shall talk about some of the celebrities in attendance. The BBC commissioned a documentary, The Kate Bush Story: Running Up That Hill, which I shall dissect in another feature. It is not great…though it was a useful accompaniment and addition to all the writing and discussion about Kate Bush around her new stage venture. Bush herself was eager for people not to take photos and videos. Asking people not to use their phones or tablets, most observed her request. It was quite strict when people got inside the venue. One of the first artists to ask audiences not to photo or film her shows, this approach has been taken up by so many artists. From Jack White to Adele, Beyoncé and Prince, many legends have adopted this policy. Recently, Bob Dylan announced that he would ask people to switch off their phones when he arrives in the U.K. later in the year for a series of dates. It provoked retaliation from Damon Albarn (who seems to be annoyed by everything these days!).

Even if many artists don’t mind phones at their gigs, it does distract audiences and the performer. Crappy videos get leaked - and it is all intrusive and unnecessary! People watching phones rather than the gig! Kate Bush (and all others) was right to ban phones. She wanted people to be there in the moment and not feel the insane need to document everything and, in the process, annoy others and waste a ticket price not engaging with the show. With about 16 degrees centigrade showing on the thermometer and there being about 78% humidity, on a drizzly afternoon (but a drier night) on a Tuesday, people lined up excitedly outside the Eventim Appollo in Hammersmith. A historic night on 26th August, 2014, inside the venue, Kate Bush would have been backstage nervously pondering. After such hard work, secrecy and passionate input, this was it! People outside already excitedly saying how pleased they were to be there. The day after, they would take to social media to proclaim: “I was there!”. Little did they know they would witness one of the greatest live performances of the century. Drama, beauty, theatrics and a note-perfect star, I can only imagine the contrasting thoughts in the minds of the thousands of fans…and Kate Bush. The pressure and expectation on her shoulders. As she was in her first costume and getting her in-ear microphones fitted (the first time she had used them; it meant she could move around stage and hear the other musicians clearly). Last-minute checks and chats about the show.

Kate Bush knew she would come on to Lily. After that, it was a case of ensuring that each song was delivered as tightly and professionally as possible. Having not experienced a crowd as excitable and expectant since the last date of The Tour of Life – 14th May, 1979 at the then-named Hammersmith Odeon (Eventim Apollo) -, this was a big moment. The audience that packed in to the venue came from all corners and walks of life. The critical reactions were ecstatic! Bush was perhaps too nervous and focused to realise the impact her performance was having. How everything came together. Having imagined how her ideas would form and be executed, the rapturous reaction that first-night audience gave her on 26th August, 2014 made it clear that her hard work, secrecy and incredible vision had paid off! What was realised nearly ten years ago was a rare but always-stunning live performer showing that she had not missed a beat. Few artists could take thirty-five years away form major performance and nail it! Before rounding off, NME reacted to the first night of the phenomenal Before the Dawn:

“Outside the venue, there is a sense of celebration and heightened anticipation. I’m experiencing the same fizzing anxiety I had when trying to buy a ticket to one of the shows. Lots of people I speak to say they’re feeling “nervous.” There are costumes, t-shirts of Bush from all eras and lots and lots of velvet. Like many of the fans congregating on this drizzly, grey August day, Kate Bush changed my life. It feels good to be part of a tribe; I’m wearing a maroon velvet dress like the one in ‘The Sensual World’ and have a makeshift Kate Bush symbol tattoo on my hand. Some, though, have gone to a huge amount of time and effort to show their appreciation. I speak to a few punters outside the Apollo.

Chad, Los Angeles: “It cost me thousands of dollars in total to get here from the US but it’s totally worth it because Kate is an artist who puts her work and her relationship with her fans above commerce, above making money. That’s why she takes a long time to make an album because she cares so much about the outcome and that means more to her fans than anything.”

Ben: “We were lucky because Cloud (pictured above) got a pre-sale code as she’s been a fan for a long time but while I was trying to get the tickets she was having a fit. I’ve never seen someone so possessed, literally holding on to the walls, crying to the Lord. Every time I clicked, she screamed. It was very intense. But we got them!”

Emerson, San Francisco: “I’m a perfumer so I actually see Kate as all these layers to build this ultimate perfume, so I’m here just to be in awe of her.”

Andrea, Brooklyn: “I said to my friends that if I die after tonight then everything should feel totally OK with it. Everything else is a bonus from here on out.”

Stuart: “She’s an artist that stayed true to her self. She’s never followed fashion, she’s followed her art. I saw her in 1979 which was fabulous.”

Inside the venue, there’s tension in the air around the merchandise stall which features pendants, a first aid kit (all becomes clear later on), fish masks and the usual t-shirts, mugs and posters. People queue up for over an hour worried that they’ll miss out.

The programme is snazzy as hell and written at length by Bush herself with all sorts of interesting detail. It smells like it has real oil paint on it.

Act I

The show can be split into four parts, starting with a traditional beginning, which almost acted like a trick false start. Bush, all in black with a fringed cape-cardigan, bare foot and hair long to her lower back, stood before an impressive seven-piece band featuring two extensive drums kits with various percussion: in the programme notes she says the two key people at the start of the project were the lightning designer and the drummer. She saw the drummer as the “heart” of the project.

The Gayatri prayer – an old Vedic mantra – opened ‘Lily’, a track from ‘The Red Shoes’. ‘Hounds of Love’, ‘Joanni’, ‘Top of the City’, ‘Never Be Mine’, ‘Running up that Hill’ and ‘King of the Mountain’ followed and thus ended the ‘hits’ section of the set. Her voice sounded exquisite and remained rich, powerful and controlled through the night.

She thanked Mark Henderson, the lightning designer, and her son Bertie McIntosh, who she said had been there for 18 months and ‘pushed the button’ for her to do the show. “It’s been an adventure and it’s only just beginning,” she beamed. Bertie provided vocals and acted in the part of the son and the painter later on. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

There is something about Bush’s vocal delivery that made me hear lyrics as if it were for the first time. They way she sang the “wind is whistling” during ‘King Of The Mountain’ imitated the wind whistling through the venue. Though I’ve heard the lyrics “snow and Rosebud” from the same song thousands of times before I’d never actually imagined the literal imagery. It was an enriching symptom of the show I hadn’t expected.

Act II

Just when we thought we were in for a greatest hits set – although it seemed unlikely that Bush would choose such a traditional template – everything turned completely upside down. Yes, the rumours were true. We were going to watch ‘The Ninth Wave’, the second suite to ‘Hounds Of Love’ (1985), a concept album about a “person who is alone in the water for the night.”

Confetti canons trumpeted the change of gear; yellow pieces of paper with a verse from Tennyson’s The Coming Of Arthur, the poem the ‘ninth wave’ phrase is from. Rumbling thunder and gathering crowds gave way to a film part with an astronomer reporting a phone call from a sinking ship.

Billowing silk sheets, towering spikes that gave the impression the stage was in the stomach of a whale, helicopter search lights, lasers and a drag-on living room were just a few of the surreal facets of stage design that told the story of a woman lost at sea, struggling to stay a live during her dark night of the soul, surrounded by Fish People – a reference to her record label – inept coastguards with tails and stunning music. A soliloquy about sausages sat alongside a moving scene of Bush’s character visiting her son and partner knowing that she might never see them again.

From the first few notes of ‘And Dream Of Sheep’, which saw Bush in the lifeboat ring you’ll recognise from the tour pictures, the audience sat stunned and with baited breath. This wasn’t music with theatre and a splice or two of film thrown in; somehow the team had balanced together the three elements to create something else and rewritten the rule book of live performance along the way. It was a reminder of how avant-garde she is.

Act III

The stage shifted so the band was far left and an enormous ceiling-high Moroccan-style door stood on the right out of which a puppeteer walked with jaw-droppingly impressive skills. The puppet would remain throughout the act embraced by Bush at times as if it might be a comfort to her to have it (him? Bertie?) there as a prop. It was impossible to gauge what could be next. And it was fittingly perfect: the whole second side of ‘Aerial’ (2005), ‘The Sky Of Honey’.

You could call this part the nature segment. The backdrop changed between stunning close-up footage of British birds such as geese, gulls, chaffinches, robins and blue tits flying with the motion of their wings seen in crystal-clear detail. Never has a pigeon looked so romantic. During ‘An Architect’s Dream’ a huge screen appeared with Bertie (16, pictured above) acting the part of the painter. The main background at times resembled the burnished painting by Russian artist Ivan Aivazovsky called The Ninth Wave.

It was during this point that Bush’s impeccable movement and skilled control, taught by Lindsay Kemp in the late 70s, shone through, though her dancing was – comparably to the tour 35 years ago – at a minimum. This kinetic effect was mesmeric, as was the visuals showing a vivid crimson sunset and hyper-realistic tawny moon spinning on its axis.

‘A Sky Of Honey’ is an elemental album filled with natural sounds, including Bush herself imitating bird song, and the visuals mirrored the music, with murmurations of starlings a particular highlight. The effect was pastoral, calming and warm although typically the fairy-tale had a dark undercurrent; at one point it looked as though the puppet was savaging a sea gull and a spatter of scarlet blood hit the screen. It had that feeling of the surreal moment between waking and dreaming. Towards the end Bush had a prosthetic winged arm in the Edward Scissorhands vein before being suspended in air and flown briefly in blackbird guise to enormous cheers. Again, the lyrics sounded completely different live. I’d never realised how beautiful and evocative the line “the stars are caught in our hair” from ‘Nocturn’ was.

Act IV

“Thank you so much for such a wonderful, warm and positive response,” said Bush before closing the show. As she sat at the piano, some might have assumed she’d break into an older classic such as ‘The Man With A Child in His Eyes’ or ‘This Woman’s Work’. Oh no. ‘Among Angels’ from ’50 Words For Snow’ was followed by a euphoric version of ‘Cloudbusting’.

After she left the stage, the crowd cheered and applauded for a good 10 minutes but there was no re-entrance. There was a sense that the audience were stunned as we filed out of the Apollo; there was just so much to digest and process.

It is no ordinary artist that can tackle life, death, synchronicity, identity, spiritual transformation, empathy and the chaos of relationships with idiosyncratic ease in the space of a few hours. Some may have wanted to hear more of the older hits – music from her first four albums, including ‘Wuthering Heights’ was eschewed – but there was no denying the vitality, creativity and huge amount of work and character that’s gone into the Before The Dawn tour. Though perhaps it surprised people when watching it, the show was perfectly ‘Kate’. In an interview with Simon Reynolds in the 90s, she made this comment, which rings true today”.

From major celebrities to new fans, everyone joined together in appreciation and love for Kate Bush! I am not sure whether there are going to be many tenth anniversary features or anything special closer to 26th August. There should be. No ordinary concert or live performance, this was seismic and epochal! As Kate Bush and the KT Bush Fellowship spilled backstage and breathed out, they knew that they had delivered something magical! After Kate Bush took out her in-ears and absorbed the air and atmosphere of the Eventim Apollo, her players and cast would have been excited and releived! In the Hammersmith summer air, fans made their way in all directions. Discussing what they had just seen. Disbelief and a state of bliss! That night, I doubt few would have been able to sleep or even wanted to! The volume, drama and epic-ness of that performance ringing in their ears and around their heads. They were recalling with smiles and breathlessness a live performance like no other that had happened only a matter of hours…

BEFORE the dawn.

FEATURE: A Perfect Shot in St John’s Wood: The Cover of The Beatles’ Abbey Road at Fifty-Five

FEATURE:

 

 

A Perfect Shot in St John’s Wood

PHOTO CREDIT: Iain Stewart Macmillan

The Cover of The Beatles’ Abbey Road at Fifty-Five

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THERE is a lot written about…

PHOTO CREDIT: Iain Stewart Macmillan

the cover of The Beatles’ Abbey Road. The final album they recorded, it was released on 26th September, 1969. On 8th August that year, the band shot the cover of the album. It is, in my view, the greatest album cover ever. So iconic and discussed. Many people reacting to conspiracy theories and supposed symbolism in the shot. This pure moment where we capture John Lennon, George Harrison, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr outside EMI/Abbey Road Studios in St John’s Wood on a warm day. One of the great things about the Abbey Road cover is the sense of the still and mobile. There is movement from the band members, yet there is this feeling of stillness. Like someone has covertly captured the guys walking across a zebra crossing. I never thought it seemed too posed and planned – even though, of course, it was. There is a lot of detail in the shot from Iain Stewart Macmillan. I want to come to a few features about the iconic photoshoot. There are features that look at some of the theories about the images. The ‘Paul is dead’ theory. First, this feature from last year takes us inside a fabulous day in August 1969:

“On August 8, 1969, on a street in north-west London and almost directly outside a celebrated recording studio, one of the most famous ever album covers was shot.

Photographer Iain MacMillan took the image that would adorn the cover of the brilliant new record named after the street where he stood, Abbey Road. The zebra crossing, almost exactly in front of the studio where The Beatles had created the vast majority of their body of work, was about to become one of the most recognized sites in London.

Before the shoot began, MacMillan, a friend of John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s, had taken Paul McCartney’s initial sketch idea of the potential cover image and added detail of exactly how the famous quartet might look on the crossing. The street sign of Abbey Road that adorned the back cover of the album was taken by MacMillan on a junction with Alexandra Road that no longer exists.

PHOTO CREDIT: Iain Stewart Macmillan

Linda McCartney was also on hand to take some extra shots, before traffic was stopped by a solitary policeman and MacMillan got on his stepladder to take six images of the group crossing the road. Perhaps the four most famous men in the world walked crossed the road three times. McCartney took the lead in choosing the fifth of the transparencies to be used, partly because it was the only one that showed the group walking in exact time together. In 2012, one of the five outtakes sold at auction for £16,000.

What else did The Beatles do that day?

That afternoon, The Beatles and George Martin were inside Abbey Road, rather than outside, to resume work in a session for the upcoming album, recording “Ending,” which would become “The End.” The studio time was booked for 2.30pm, so as Mark Lewisohn reported in his Complete Beatles Recording Sessions, to kill time after the photo session, Paul took John back to his Cavendish Avenue house, George Harrison went with Mal Evans to London Zoo, and Ringo Starr went shopping. The Abbey Road album would be released seven weeks after the photo shoot, as The Beatles’ recording story came towards an end”.

Prior to moving on to features that deal with conspiracy theories and symbolic references in the cover shoot, American Songwriter highlighted an immortal photo. For a band who were known for their incredible album covers, Abbey Road stands out on top. It is a mesmerising image that will endure for generations to come. Maybe this feeling that they are striding away from Abbey Road and their lives together. Or they are confidently walking into the studio to record. There is that sense of importance about the photo by Iain Stewart Macmillan:

“Macmillan reportedly only had about 15 minutes to get the shot after The Beatles walked out onto Abbey Road. (The famous road was the location of EMI Studios, now Abbey Road Studios, where The Beatles recorded some of their music in Studio Two of the building.) The final photo was taken from up high on a stepladder.

Additionally, the album cover for Abbey Road remains the only original cover to completely omit the actual album title or band name. “I insisted we didn’t need to write the band’s name on the cover,” Kosh explained in a previous interview with BBC. “They were the most famous band in the world after all.”

What you might’ve missed

While the Abbey Road album artwork is immediately recognizable, there are a few details that might’ve evaded the average eye.

For one, did you notice that only McCartney is barefoot and out of step? Or that Harrison is the only Beatle donning a jean outfit instead of a Tommy Nutter-designed suit? Whether you did or not, the details are there, adding little intricacies to a photo that captured the personality and success of The Beatles.

Oh, and one more thing, the license plate on the white Volkswagen Beetle (LMW 281F)? It was repeatedly stolen after the album was released. Now, what kind of fan would do that? We would never dream of doing such a thing…”.

As whack and insane as conspiracy theorists are, they exist. For decades, they have been over-analysing events and spouting nonsense. Unfortunately, the cover to Abbey Road was not immune to crackpot theories. It is interesting to entertain them for the sake of this feature, as sadly, there were some who did believe Paul McCartney was dead. In fact, almost as much has been written about conspiracy theories around the cover shoot as a celebration of the shot and the beauty of it. This Biography feature from 2020 explores theories around the rumour McCartney had died:

“Ask your friends to name the biggest hoax of 1969 and you might hear the "Paul Is Dead" rumor. For much of the late 1960s, hearsay about the Beatles had been building up until the strange meme hit newspapers everywhere: that Paul McCartney fatally crashed his Aston Martin in 1966 and for years had been replaced by an impostor. Conspiracists based their claim on a car accident report involving one of McCartney’s cars. They also note years’ worth of clues found in song lyrics and on album covers ranging from Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band to the Magic Mystery Tour.

The speculation over McCartney’s demise was at an all-time high when the band’s Abbey Road album cover was later released in September 1969. For many, the cover may simply show the band harmlessly walking across London’s Abbey Road, but for some Beatlemaniacs, the imagery was a kooky dissertation in morbid symbolism. Was it a grand conspiracy or an elaborate marketing scheme? Here are eight symbols pointed out over the years in no particular order of truthiness:

It’s a funeral procession

That’s what theorists likened to the photo of the band crossing the North London Street. They point out that John Lennon’s white suit symbolized the color of mourning in some Eastern religions while Ringo Starr is donned the more traditional black. What they neglect to point out, however, is that George Harrison is wearing denim — the color of mourning in Canada.

McCartney's cigarette in his non-dominant hand

Paul held his cigarette in his right hand, even though he is a lefty.

McCartney’s feet are bare

Why? It’s a reminder, theorists say, that in some cultures the dead are buried without their shoes.

The license plate

In the background we see a Volkswagen Beetle with the plate "LMW 28IF" Conspiracists claim this to mean that McCartney would be 28 if he were alive. (Nevermind the fact that he would actually have been 27 if the rumor were true.)

The police van

Parked on the side of the road is a black police van, which is said to symbolize authorities who kept silent about McCartney's fatal fender-bender.

The girl in the blue dress

On the night of McCartney’s supposed car accident, he was believed to have been driving with a fan named Rita. Theorists say the girl in the dress featured on the back cover was meant to be her, fleeing from the car crash.

Connect the dots

Also on the back cover are a series of dots. Join some of them together and you can make the number three — the number of surviving Beatles.

Broken Beatles sign

On the back cover, we see the band’s name written in tiles on a wall and there’s a crack running through it. Of all the symbols, this one turned out to be the most meaningful, and sad. Although the release of Abbey Road was followed with ample evidence that McCartney was alive and well, what the public didn’t know was that the Beatles had secretly broken up. Abbey Road would be the band’s penultimate studio album, and the group would call it quits only a year later”.

I am going to end with a Classic Rock. Although it was a magical day in North London in 1969, instead of there being this unanimous celebration of the cover photo for Abbey Road, many espoused macabre theories. It is a shame that it almost overshadows all the brilliance of the photo. How eye-catching and sense-altering it is:

“In keeping with the pencil sketch that Paul McCartney had given to photographer Iain Macmillan, the cover of The Beatles' classic Abbey Road simply shows the four musicians walking across the zebra crossing outside Abbey Road Studios in North London.

The famous cover shot was one of six taken by Macmillan at 10am on August 8, 1969. As a policeman held up the traffic, the photographer had just 10 minutes to balance on a stepladder and get the shots. The result was striking and iconic. But few could have imagined the reaction it got.

Shortly before the release of the Abbey Road album, an American newspaper ran a story that claimed Paul McCartney had died in a car accident in 1966, and that the current ‘Paul’ was actually a lookalike called William Campbell. The rumours gathered pace and when Abbey Road arrived that October, its sleeve was pronounced by conspiracy theorists as final proof of Macca’s demise.

Inevitably, the ‘clues’ were somewhat tenuous, McCartney was out of step with his bandmates; his eyes were closed, and he wasn’t wearing shoes (like a buried body); he held a cigarette in his right hand (despite being left-handed); over his shoulder was a Volkswagen with a number plate interpreted as ‘28IF’ (ie McCartney would have been 28 if he lived; although actually he would have been 27).

The order in which the four Beatles were arranged was also deemed significant. John Lennon, bearded and dressed in white, represented Jesus. Ringo Starr, in a sober black suit, was the undertaker. George Harrison’s jeans and denim shirt made him the gravedigger.

Of course, McCartney has always dismissed these clues as nonsense. “We were wearing ordinary clothes,” he once protested. “I was barefoot because it was a hot day. The Volkswagen just happened to be there.”

McCartney’s supposed ‘death’ is old news these days, of course, but the Abbey Road sleeve continues to make headlines. In 2003, US poster companies sparked controversy by air-brushing Macca’s cigarette out of the image”.

On 8th August, it will be fifty-five years since that remarkable photograph by Iain Stewart Macmillan was taken. I love the outtakes of it. What was actually captured and used for Abbey Road is the greatest album cover ever. So brilliant and timeless in its seeming simplicity. I hope that the anniversary will compel people not only to discover more about the album cover shoot for Abbey Road. Also listen to the album itself. Perhaps the greatest album from The Beatles, it has a fittingly outstanding cover. Although some would argue against the fact it is the best album cover ever, to me it will…

ALWAYS be the best.

FEATURE: Cover Versions: Is It Possible for Modern Artists to Equal the Greatest Album Art Ever?

FEATURE:

 

 

Cover Versions

Is It Possible for Modern Artists to Equal the Greatest Album Art Ever?

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IT is interesting debating…

whether the album cover is regarded as highly now as it was years ago. Last week, Rolling Stone published a feature where they ranked the one hundred greatest album covers ever. There were some surprises in the pack. Aside from the fact that kicking off the one hundred was Spinal Tap, there were some notable omissions. Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love not making the list. Also, in terms of the top ten, Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures was at one. The Beatles’ Abbey Road, which I think is the best album cover ever, was at two. Usual suspects like Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon and The Clash’s London Calling were in the top ten. An unexpected but worthy addition, Cyndi Lauper’s She’s So Unusual, was in there. It raised debate as to what people were looking for when it comes to a classic album cover:

“THE ALBUM IS the best invention of the past century, hands down — but the music isn’t the whole story. The album cover has been a cultural obsession as long as albums have. Ever since 12-inch vinyl records took off in the 1950s, packaged in cardboard sleeves, musicians have been fascinated by the art that goes on those covers, and so have fans. When the Beatles revolutionized the game with the cover of Sgt. Pepper, in 1967, it became a way to make a visual statement about where the music comes from and why it matters. But the art of the album cover just keeps evolving.

So this is our massive celebration of that art: the 100 best album covers ever, from Biggie to Beyoncé to Bad Bunny, from Nirvana to Nas to Neil Young, from SZA to Sabbath to the Sex Pistols. We’ve got rap, country, jazz, prog, metal, reggae, flamenco, funk, goth, hippie psychedelia, hardcore punk. But all these albums have a unique look to go with the sound. The most unforgettable covers become part of the music — how many Pink Floyd fans have gotten their minds blown staring at the prism on the cover of Dark Side of the Moon, after using it to roll up their smoking materials?

What makes an album cover a classic? Sometimes it’s a portrait of the artist — think of the Beatles crossing the street, or Carole King in Laurel Canyon with her cat. Others go for iconic, semi-abstract images, like Led Zeppelin, Miles Davis, or My Bloody Valentine. Some artists make a statement about where they’re from, whether it’s R.E.M. repping the South with kudzu or Ol’ Dirty Bastard flashing his food-stamps card to salute the Brooklyn Zoo.

Many of these covers come from legendary photographers, designers, and artists, like Andy Warhol, Annie Leibovitz, Storm Thorgerson, Raymond Pettibon, and Peter Saville. Some have cosmic symbolism for fans to decode; others go for star power. But they’re all classic images that have become a crucial part of music history. And they all show why there’s no end to the world’s long-running love affair with albums”.

I am going to discuss The Beatles’ Abbey Road cover, as it turns fifty-five on 8th August. What I notice about the top twenty from Rolling Stone’s list is the 1970s is the most prolific decade. The 1990s not too far behind. Not too much from the 1980s. I was surprised that Madonna’s Like a Prayer cover was not in the top twenty. What I did notice is that only two albums from the past twenty years made the top twenty – Beyoncé’s Lemonade from 2016 at fifteen; Kendrick Lamar’s 2015 release, To Pimp a Butterfly, at twelve. Two albums released within a year of each other. Nothing from the past nine years. Look right up the top fifty, and only four other albums from the past twenty years join Lemonade and To Pimp a Butterfly. The most recent entry is SZA’s SOS (2022). That was ranked twenty-sixth. In terms of the best-ranked album covers, most of the inclusions are from albums that have been in other lists. Nirvana’s Nevermind at ten. An album cover often included in the top five. I wonder whether it is the quality of the album that dictates how we feel about a cover. If the songs seem to match the cover and there is this connection, people are more attached to the artwork. Few albums with striking covers and poor songs are deemed a classic when it comes to the artwork. Most of the albums with lauded covers have amazing music within. Is it possible to love an album cover for an album that is a disappointment? What is clear that albums that many of us grew up with and we fell in love with their covers are still hugely regarded. The passing of time has done nothing to diminish their appeal and power. It’s the same as human attraction. You can have all these emotions and feelings seeing someone you see as beautiful. That intensity grows when you learn more about them. That first impression and look is vital. It can rule the heart and change your life. I think that way about albums. If there is a cover that does not catch the eye and heart, I am less compelled to check out the album. If I do, then I often feel that there is a missed opportunity regarding making a better cover.

Whilst we might see a smattering of album covers from the twenty-first century in the highest positions, the biggest takeaway is the majority of the album covers from Rolling Stone’s list are from the past century. Most actually from more than thirty years ago. One could argue that this is subjective. All rankings are subjective. They only express the opinions of a very small selection of people. However, there is some universal truth. I am not sure whether most people, if asked, would have a personal top twenty where recent album covers were featured. I can think of a few albums from the twenty-first century that would be in mind. Alongside Amy Winehouse’s Frank (2003) would be Lorde’s Melodrama (2017) – that did make the top one hundred. There have been some great album covers from this century. If you look at Billboard’s top one hundred album covers from last year, there is a lot of crossover with Rolling Stone. Not that many modern examples making the top twenty. One could say that the streaming age means that there is less emphasis on album covers. That the artwork would be ignored. Others might say that there is such a saturation of albums now that many classics are being missed. Is there generational bias. Writers who grew up with classic albums more likely to love their covers rather than modern examples?! I there is some truth to all those statements. Many artists still put a lot of thought into album art. Pride themselves on how important that is. However, more and more, there are lacklustre covers when, in the modern age, there is this need to create something that could rank alongside the absolute best ever.

I think it is possible, in the next decade, we will see cases of covers that can challenge some of the all-time best. Maybe not as iconic as anything from The Beatles. Even so, there is this notable lack of modern album covers in ranking lists. Maybe visuals are less prominent and important. Music videos not seen as much as decades ago. There was a lot of emphasis on album covers at a time when we didn’t have the Internet. No option to post videos or edit photos like we can now. Fewer promotional avenues. Now, artists use TikTok, Instagram and have different ways of marketing an album. The rise in vinyl, I hope, leads to artists re-prioritising album covers. Major artists who can sell millions of units should not sit back and let the hype and their name do all the world. Many albums are going to be kept for decades to come. So many of the albums I grew up around stick in the mind because of their covers. Such vivid memories of discovering them. There are features that give tips about what makes an effective album cover. It is harder to stand out because of the quantity of albums coming out. The music industry has become more about visuals and images. If artists are posting photos all the time, how easy is it to have an album cover that stands out?! Some might say who really cares whether an album cover is great. So long as the music is brilliant. I would argue against that. Many people buy an album on the strength of a cover. Others will pass an album down through the generations because of the image. A truly moving album cover tells a story or gives you an indication of what the album’s story and intention is. A boring or unambitious cover can be jarring and also mean an album passes some by. Now more than ever, there is a need for the rise of the album cover. Artists really pushing themselves. As Rolling Stone’s top one hundred shows, most of the very best are from decades past. We really need to reverse this and show that, today, artists still value…

THE art of the album cover.

FEATURE: Oasis’ Definitely Maybe at Thirty: Inside the Epic Live Forever

FEATURE:

 

 

Oasis’ Definitely Maybe at Thirty

Inside the Epic Live Forever

_________

I am looking ahead…

to 29th August. That is when Oasis’ amazing debut, Definitely Maybe, turns thirty. There are some anniversary editions that you can buy. A white marble two-L.P. edition is well worth having. There is also more options here. It is going to be exciting to mark one of the most important albums of the 1990s. One that launched Oasis to the rest of the world. I have already written about Definitely Maybe. I am going to cover it again before 29th August. I wanted to use this opportunity to spotlight the most acclaimed and loved songs from the album: the sublime and epic Live Forever. Often cited as the greatest Oasis song ever, it is the third track on Definitely Maybe. I often wonder why it was not chosen as the closing track. It would have been a perfect way to end. The ending track of Definitely Maybe is Married with Children. There are some interesting and insightful features that talk about the story behind Live Forever. How it was this response to the downbeat and often depressive music coming from U.S. Grunge. American Songwriter looked inside the classic Oasis song earlier in the year:

“Noel Gallagher wrote “Live Forever” as a response to the negative and depressing messages of grunge music, which had come to dominate rock music stations and label rosters in the early ‘90s. Gallagher singled out Nirvana’s “I Hate Myself and Want to Die” as a song that particularly motivated him to put a more positive message out into the world. Specifically, Gallagher said, “I can’t have people like [Kurt Cobain] coming over here, on smack, f—ing saying that they hate themselves and they wanna die. That’s f—ing rubbish. Kids don’t need to be hearing that nonsense.”

With “Live Forever,” Gallagher wanted to express his gratitude for getting to have another day to be alive. In the song’s verse (which is repeated three times throughout the song), Gallagher emphasizes how he is focused on the possibility of each day, rather than worrying about other people’s affairs. And then he goes on to articulate that he can find beauty anywhere, even in things that can be painful.

Maybe I don’t really wanna know
How your garden grows
‘Cause I just wanna fly

Lately, did you ever feel the pain
In the morning rain
As it soaks you to the bone

In the choruses, Gallagher continues to espouse his positive outlook. In the second chorus, he asserts that there are reasons to be happy, even if we don’t get what we want. Having life turn out differently than what we hoped for just gives us a reason to be curious about how things actually did turn out.

Maybe I will never be
All the things I wanna be
Now is not the time to cry
Now’s the time to find out why

One part of Gallagher’s message is open to interpretation. He finishes up the second chorus with I think you’re the same as me / We see things they’ll never see / You and I are gonna live forever. Given that Cobain was a major inspiration for Gallagher’s lyrics, one has to wonder if this was a direct appeal to the Nirvana frontman—for him to understand that he, too, could find joy and wonder in life.

Even though Gallagher took issue with Cobain’s lyrics and song titles, he was a fan. And if these lines were directed at him, then the Oasis guitarist is saying he feels a kinship with his fellow rock star. Then again, Gallagher could have been speaking to grunge musicians—or any musicians—in general and encouraging them to appreciate what they have. Or maybe he was addressing all of us.

Nirvana was not the only band that influenced Gallagher when he was writing “Live Forever.” The melody that begins the verses was adapted from The Rolling Stones’ “Shine a Light.” Specifically, Gallagher borrowed the melody that Mick Jagger sings for the line “May the good Lord shine a light on you.” He eventually developed it into the slightly different melody his brother Liam sings: “Maybe I don’t really want to know.”

The Impact of “Live Forever,” Which Started It All

If not for “Live Forever,” Oasis may not have ever existed in the form that we have come to know. Noel Gallagher was the last member of the Definitely Maybe lineup of Oasis to join the band, and it was “Live Forever” that convinced the existing members to accept Gallagher as a member and as their songwriter.

“Live Forever” was the first Oasis song to place on Billboard’s Radio Songs chart, peaking at No. 39. It also reached No. 2 on their Alternative Airplay chart and No. 10 on their Mainstream Rock chart. It was the first Oasis single to place in the Top 10 of the UK Singles Chart, as well. Definitely Maybe, then, would peak at No. 58 on the Billboard 200 and No. 1 on the UK Official Albums Chart.

Oasis would go on to have even greater commercial success with their follow-up album, (What’s the Story) Morning Glory?, and their Top 10 single “Wonderwall.” Sometimes, songs don’t get enough credit for the role they play in catapulting an artist into the public’s consciousness. “Live Forever” certainly played that role for Oasis, and it bears some of the responsibility for the mammoth success of “Wonderwall.” It remains one of Oasis’ most popular songs in its own right”.

Released as a single on 8th August, 1994, it is a perfect opportunity to celebrate Live Forever. Thirty years after its release, this amazing and stirring anthem is still inspiring people. Its messages might have fitted more into the political and music scene of 1994. Its optimism against the backdrop of today might seem jarring or ineffective. I want to come to this feature, and their insight of Definitely Maybe’s standout track:

“The melody is inspired by Shine A Light by The Rolling Stones. The song can be found Exile on Main St. and is, most likely, written in reference to Brian Jones’ struggles. Noel drew inspiration from the chorus part: “May The good Lord Shine A Light on You.”

Allegedly, Noel Gallagher composed parts of the song using John Squire’s Gretsch G6122. The Stone Roses guitarist. Producer Mark Coyle was a roadie for The Stone Roses and lent the guitar to Gallagher.

The songwriter later told Q Magazine that he was convinced he’d written a classic from the time that the song was finished. Noel Gallagher presented a fully composed Live Forever to the band for the first time in early 1993 during rehearsals. The band was in awe of it. Guitarist Paul “Bonehead” Arthurs reportedly confronted Gallagher about the song being an original composition. “Maybe I just wanna fly” remains one of the most enduring phrases in pop music.

Oasis reaching the musical mainstream

Noel Gallagher later said that writing Live Forever finally gave him a life goal. The group would soon achieve great commercial and critical success. Oasis, particularly brothers Liam and Noel, would earn a reputation for their confidence and outspokenness.

Part of the iconic music video was shot in New York’s Central Park. The cover of the CD single shows John Lennon’s childhood home, 251 Menlove Avenue. It was bought by Yoko Ono who donated it to the National Trust.

The song has had an enduring legacy. In a poll conducted on Oasis’s official website, this song was voted Oasis’s best song. Also, in Q magazine, in October 2008, Liam Gallagher stated that this song is his favorite Oasis song. In a 2018 Radio X poll, Live Forever was voted as the best British song of all time. To claim the title, Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody, and Oasis’ won Don’t Look Back In Anger were beaten by this epic track.

It was a time when Gallagher could seemingly do no wrong. Non-albums singles like Acquiesce or Whatever would chart highly. The band was playing Britain’s biggest arenas. And, even Oasis bootlegs of the brothers’ bickering, could elicit the public’s attention. The rise and fall of Britpop, maybe, can be charted through the Manchester group’s evolution.

And, its writer, Noel Gallagher has not yet tired of hearing the song. In 2011 he talked about how the song measures up to music’s greatest compositions”.

Before finishing up, I want to come to a feature from PASTE. It is interesting reading about how Live Forever has changed people’s lives. Rather than writing about the song in terms of its chart success – it reached ten in the U.K. and was a success in the U.S. -, people talk about how it personally affected them. Such is the power and depth of Live Forever. For me, at the age of eleven, it was a big moment. I had not really heard anything like it. A moment of uplift in a music scene that was lacking this sort of pomp and optimism:

“For me, one of those songs was Oasis’ “Live Forever.” Though I didn’t hear the song when it came out on August 8, 1994 (I would’ve been -2 years old), when I encountered it in my early teens, it was a much-needed lightbulb moment. I hadn’t yet developed my passion for music at the time. I was mostly listening to what everyone else my age was listening to, which at the time, meant whatever T-Pain or Sean Kingston song happened to be popular for that month.

After stumbling on the band’s music videos on YouTube, I quickly became obsessed. I didn’t come from a family that was interested in music. I’d love to say that my parents played original Beatles, Stones and Coltrane records around the house or even that I raided my sibling’s collection of Paramore and My Chemical Romance CDs, but I can’t. All the music that I became enthralled by in my teenage years was stuff that I had dug up on my computer in solitude.

As a teen, my perception of rock music was that it only consisted of two categories: classic rock like The Beatles, Bruce Springsteen or AC/DC and whatever angsty bands were popular in the 2000s like Green Day, Panic at the Disco or Blink-182. Though I’ve since come to appreciate those two styles of rock, I had no connection to them as a teen. Classic rock was just music that boring parents listened to, and the whole pop-punk and emo thing wasn’t for me. Growing up in Ohio in the ’00s, I soon realized that most people in the states were much more interested in albums like American Idiot than an English band like Oasis who most considered past their prime.

I hadn’t heard a band like Oasis before. Liam Gallagher’s voice was gritty and rough but not so much that he couldn’t carry a beautiful, moving melody. People compared his voice to a mix between John Lydon and John Lennon and I always loved that idea of his edgy-meets-emotional vocal style. The band dressed in denim, sunglasses, button-down shirts and fancy parkas and jackets. They didn’t have ripped jeans. They weren’t dressed in all black with crazy hair or piercings. They looked cool but relatable, and even though tons of British people dressed just like them, to me, it was as if they had been transported from Mars.

“Live Forever” was the third single that the band released from their 1994 debut album, Definitely Maybe. For me, the song partially symbolized my disillusionment with a lot of the pop-punk that was coming out at the time, much of the same way that it represented the split between American grunge and Britpop in the ’90s. Like pop-punk, grunge often felt angsty to the point of self-destruction while Britpop was charming and uplifting. By 1993, Nirvana had become worldwide sensations and they released a track called “I Hate Myself and I Wanna Die.” I never was drawn in by these kind of lyrics as a kid, even if I really did hate myself and want to die. I had low self-esteem and no sense of self, but I thought if I listened to lyrics like that, it would just make those feelings more real. Instead of facing those feelings head on, I wanted to fast-forward past those dark thoughts to a time where I was happy and sure of myself. Britpop, Oasis and “Live Forever” were the antithesis of this kind of tortured rock star that was mythologized in other genres.

When I heard Liam Gallagher sing lines like “Maybe you’re the same as me/ We see things they’ll never see/ You and I are gonna live forever,” it was motivating and empowering. Despite the band’s constant fighting between brothers Liam and Noel, they were the last band to sulk or feel sorry for themselves. Their unshakeable self-confidence (or arrogance) was exhilarating, and it was everything I needed to hear as a shy teen. The song continues with the idea that all you had to do was dust yourself off and you could take over the world: “Maybe I will never be all the things that I want to be/ But now is not the time to cry/ Now’s the time to find out why.”

It was one of those songs you could listen to and strut down the street with your head held high and your chest puffed out. Even though I probably looked like an idiot, I felt like I had the whole world in the palm of my hands. When Noel Gallagher’s first melancholy guitar solo hits, it cries out like a siren and makes you remember that things aren’t always so happy-go-lucky, but when Liam’s vocals return, everything is okay again, and you’re back on cloud nine.

One of the reasons the song is so encouraging and believable without being preachy or cheesy is because of the Oasis brothers’ story. The Gallaghers came from a poor family in working-class Manchester, born to Irish immigrants and the sons of an abusive, alcoholic father. If two poor, foul-mouthed boys from Manchester could take over the UK and the rest of the world with their music after a meteoric rise, why couldn’t I at least have some confidence in myself that I could be somebody and achieve something great if I worked hard? Oasis were one of the first bands I loved and without them, I’m not sure where I would be right now”.

On 29th August, Oasis’ Definitely Maybe turns thirty. Before that, on 8th August, the album’s third single turns thirty. It was released after Supersonic and Shakemaker, I think this was the biggest release from Definitely Maybe. Still regarded as their creative peak. I hope that it gets plenty of radioplay on its thirtieth anniversary. I am going to end with the acclaim and critical reaction to Live Forever:

“While Oasis' first two singles, "Supersonic" and "Shakermaker", were modestly received, it was "Live Forever" that "got the world's attention". "Live Forever" became Oasis' first top-ten hit, reaching number ten on the UK Singles Chart in 1994. In 1995, the song charted in the United States, reaching number two and number ten on Billboard's Modern Rock Tracks and Album Rock Tracks charts, respectively. Noel Gallagher commented on the praise given to the song: "People said to me after 'Live Forever', 'Where are you gonna go after that?' And I was like, I don't think it's that good. I think it's a fucking good song, but I think I can do better."

"Live Forever" has garnered additional acclaim years after its release. In 2006, "Live Forever" was named the greatest song of all time in a poll released by Q; the song had ranked ninth in a similar Q poll three years prior. In 2007, "Live Forever" placed number one in the NME and XFM poll of the 50 "Greatest Indie Anthems Ever". Pitchfork labelled the song as Oasis' best-ever track and said of the song: "It's an honest, aspirational sentiment just as the photo of John Lennon's childhood home on the single's sleeve is an honest, tasteful exhibition of fandom." The music site went on to praise the song for its 'fearless optimism'. On 2 April 2018, Live Forever reached number one on Radio X's Best of British poll. On 5 April 2021, "Live Forever" reached number one on Radio X's Best of British 2021 poll. On 10 April 2023, it reached number one for the third time”.

A tremendous and rousing song, it is hard to believe that Live Forever is thirty. I remember it being released into the world and the excitement around the song. To this day, it remains hugely played across radio. I will write more about Definitely Maybe ahead of its thirtieth anniversary on 29th August. “Maybe you're the same as me/We see things they'll never see…

YOU and I are going to live forever”.

FEATURE: The Wedding List: Kate Bush News Updates: After the Repackaging and Merchandise…

FEATURE:

 

 

The Wedding List

PHOTO CREDIT: Fish People

Kate Bush News Updates: After the Repackaging and Merchandise…

_________

I realise that this is quite niche…

PHOTO CREDIT: Trevor Leighton

though it taps into something that fans are wondering about. If you look at the official Kate Bush Twitter account, most of the updates we have seen over the past few years have been about reissues or merchandise dropping. Take things back the past thirteen months or so. After celebrating one billion streams of Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God) in June 2023, there was then not a lot posted for the next year. What we have seen are announcements about older work. New Hounds of Love merchandise was dropped in November. Though it gives fans that option to buy some really cool things – I fancy a T-shirt or an umbrella! -, there is also the issue around cost. We all love Kate Bush. It is no surprise how much I admire her and her work. I like investing in Kate Bush-related books. I have not got much in the way of merchandise. This was around the time Bush reissued her studio albums for independent record stores. Redesigning the vinyl with unique colours and looks. So close to Christmas, it was a chance for fans to get their hands on something very special. Again, if you look at the albums, they can cost about £40 or more for vinyl. If you have the originals, maybe it would feel a bit much investing in anything extra. I was tempted to get the new version of The Kick Inside. It is unavailable at the moment, though the newly-redesigned vinyl was over £30. I guess worth it if you love the album. A special Baskerville Edition of Hounds of Love came out. Understandable that this was released. Given the increased popularity of Hounds of Love following 2022’s Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God)/Stranger Things explosion, there were a new generation coming to the original.

https://t.co/C2nOEItRnN pic.twitter.com/6ZOafmfna9

— Kate Bush (@KateBushMusic) December 1, 2023

In terms of cost, again, it was quite high for fans. Various options and boxes can set you back, depended on how much you spend. As something to treasure and keep for years, I guess the investment is worth it. For those who love the original Hounds of Love and wanted to add to it, I suppose paying £138 for the single-vinyl Baskerville Edition is a bit rich. In December 2023, the Cloudbusting umbrella came back in stock. A nice and nifty brolly, it is £40. Quite nice to get and, as it was so close to Christmas, it was offering gift options. Kate Bush donated two signed boxsets to War Child UK. There then came The Dreaming (Escapologist Edition). Rather than them being expanded and with no stuff, there was this new packaging and design. I can appreciate how Kate Bush wanted to keep the momentum going with her albums. Attracting new fans and trying to make sure people were as enticed by physical music as possible – rather than going to streaming sites and hand-picking. Maybe the prices put some casual fans off investing. In 2024, there was a January announcement that the Kate Bush store was up and stocked. Great options like hoodies and a jigsaw. It was interesting seeing how the posts were announced and branded. I think there was a drive when the albums were reissued to put special focus on Hounds of Love. It was more about Fish People – Kate Bush’s record label – and taking it away from the albums and more towards a wider arc. Her empire.

PHOTO CREDIT: Fish People 

On 24th January, there was another push regarding merchandise. The only two updates that have come onto the Twitter page concern merchandise. Well, for Record Store Day Kate Bush was the Ambassador. There was a special reissue of Eat the Music. From 1993’s The Red Shoes, it put focus back on the album. The latest update from the Kate Bush Twitter account is about a bit of merchandise. You can get Fish People-branded bath towels and towels for the beach. It is summer, so it is good that there is a Kate Bush-related accessory you can take with you. At £40 a pop, it is a fairly pricey towel. Before moving on, there are a couple of observations. Kate Bush clearly loves her fans. I never feel she wants to exploit them or make herself richer. The success of Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God) last year would have made millions. Rather than this being her seeing how much fans will invest, it is providing options for those new to her work – and the old guard who have supported her for decades. Without new music coming out, there is always a danger that people will feel she is obsolete. Retired. Engaging in any way means that she is still current and there is that possibility. Branding things with Fish People also puts her label first. The unofficial name for her fans, it does seem odd for an artist who would not want to release music to promote her label. I don’t buy that she is merely all about reissues and repackaging. Merchandise is great, though the news of a beach towel or a T-shirt, or even a studio album with a new design might not cause the same thrill as something new – even if it is something unheard or unseen.

Personally, I would go for a Fish People T-shirt and could be tempted to part with some cash for a new reissue of Never for Ever. This year has and will be one with plenty of Kate Bush love and merchandise. Whether it is her official line or books about her. We have an upcoming book by Leah Kardos for 33 1/3 about Hounds of Love. Graeme Thomson’s Under the Ivy: The Life and Music of Kate Bush has been a huge success. If all of this movement and exploration of Kate Bush means that more people discover her work then that is a really good thing. I have been bemoaning how the young generation are not aware of Kate Bush. Merchandise definitely is a way of getting people into Kate Bush. They can then check out the music. Reissuing her albums too. I do wonder whether the existing and dedicated fans will be more interested in books and merchandise compared to younger listeners. With so much attention being on the digital and quick, something that is an investment and physical might have a harder time penetrating a generation that maybe relies more on the intangible. Even if more vinyl and physical music is being sold, there needs to be the entice of something new on unheard. I remember reading some of the reaction when it was announced a Fish People-branded bath and beach towel was out. A few days ago, we saw some people balk. Others who thought it was another bit of selling and retrospection from an artist who, until a few years ago, rarely did any of that.

Kate Bush recorded a song called The Wedding List for 1980’s Never for Ever. I have been thinking about a wedding list. In terms of gifts for the couple rather than a guestlist. The desire that many fans have. Sure, most would love to have the albums and merchandise. Bush is very much still present in the music industry. I do feel that putting out Fish People through music and merchandise is not as much about profit and money than it is preparing for something. Clearing out the old to make way for the new. With every announcement we get through social media, perhaps there is this feeling that Bush is relying more on her past work and putting that to people. Concentrating on merchandise rather than anything new. Of course, she owes us nothing. That is the thing. She doesn’t need to announce she is retiring or not making any music. Kate Bush has done enough to earn rest for the rest of her life! She has released ten studio albums and given the world so much. It does not even need to be a new album. As Before the Dawn is ten next month, many have been wondering if anything related to that will be released. I understand it would technically be issuing something older. Unlike albums, those who could not attend the residency would get something new. If a DVD or on a streaming service, it would be a dreamed to see one of those filmed nights. Of course, when we all look to Kate Bush’s social media, there is the hope that something bigger will come about. Again, it does not have to be an eleventh studio album. It is important to appeal to older and new fans. Putting out merchandise and existing albums does make her more visible and discussed. In terms of continuing that, there are possibilities with documentaries and podcasts that could add to this.

PHOTO CREDIT: Fish People

As I have written about many times, there is this tension and excitement. Feeling that, one day, there will be something we were hoping for. I have recently put out a feature asking how we can keep Kate Bush’s music alive and very much at the forefront years and decades from now. Unless there is something fresh, bigger and a continued campaign, there will be a bigger problem keeping Kate Bush in the minds of a generation who will be used to the new and instant. Perhaps less interested in a legacy artist. Not that a new album will completely change that. It does mean that an impression we have about Kate Bush is re-examined. I was discussing this with someone on social media. How there is still this image of her being weird and reclusive. Something that has never been shaken free! I guess you could say many legacy or older artists cannot connect with younger people. Most have documentaries and more discussion about them. We can’t really rely on a Stranger Things moment each generation. Even if her streaming numbers have increased and other songs have seen a boost – including Army Dreamers, Babooshka and Oh to Be in Love -, that might have been the result of Stranger Things. So many missed out on that. It was a distinct moment that has died down. The lack of awareness about Kate Bush’s name and music among a certain generation can only worsen unless there is something new. Whatever that is. That also needs top be joined with a reframing of how we see Kate Bush and what her music means. That is goes deeper than one song. I love seeing her albums reissued and there being merchandise available to buy. She loves her fans and, in turn, they have repaid her by their support and buying her stuff. Now, at a crucial moment when so much has been brought back out and revamped, there is this desire for a change. If it something to do with Before the Dawn or a new project, most people would place this on the top of…

THEIR wedding list.

FEATURE: Super Graphic Ultra Modern Girl: Why Chappell Roan’s Experiences with Her Fans Raises a Lot of Questions

FEATURE:

 

 

Super Graphic Ultra Modern Girl

PHOTO CREDIT: Lucienne

Why Chappell Roan’s Experiences with Her Fans Raises a Lot of Questions

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THIS is an experience…

a lot of artists will share. It is not necessarily the bigger you get the more destructive and intrusive fans can be. Sure, those who have millions of fans will find they get a lot more fans invading their privacy. Less able to switch off and have any sort of privacy. Because of social media and how we interact today, rising artists get this too. I think it may be worse for female artists. Not only are they subjected to more sexual harassment and that side of thing. I also think, when it comes to their private life, women are subjected more to fans who blur boundaries. Most fans are respectful and give artist space. However, there are cases of artists who are stepping back from music because of fans’ intrusiveness and obsessiveness. Chappell Roan is a terrific young artist who released one of the year-best albums last year with The Rise and Fall of  a Midwest Princess. She is someone I hope will be in the industry for years to come. However, as we can see from this NME article, she has found fans getting too close. Rather than there being this distance and professional courtesy, many have made her feel scared, violated and threatened. A sort of creepy and inappropriate sense of intrusion:

“Chappell Roan has revealed that she’s actively avoiding getting more popular than she already is after fans have begun displaying “stalker vibes” – see what the pop star had to say below.

Over the last year or so, Chappell Roan has organically become one of the fastest growing pop stars in the world, having performed opened Olivia Rodigo‘s ‘Guts’ tour before putting on headline-making performances at Coachella and Governors Ball this year.

However, the pop star has revealed that she’s uncomfortable with the level of fame she’s attained, and that fans have begun displaying worrying behaviour that makes her feel unsafe.

Speaking on the latest episode of the Comment Section podcast with Drew Afualo, Roan said: “People have started to be freaks — like, [they] follow me and know where my parents live, and where my sister works. All this weird shit.”

Roan recalled: “This is the time when a few years ago when I said that if [there were] stalker vibes or my family was in danger, I would quit. And we’re there. We’re there!”

She told Afualo: “I’m just kind of in this battle… I’ve pumped the brakes on, honestly, anything to make me more known. It’s kind of a forest fire right now. I’m not trying to go do a bunch of shit”.

This is not an isolated case. Artists such as Rihanna and Taylor Swift have had to deal with stalkers. In many cases, it is a single person who is culpable. For some artists, there are sections of their fanbase that cross the line. I know it doesn’t apply to most of Chappell Roan’s fanbase, though when you have quite a large section who are being disrespectful and encroaching into her private life, it does call into question the relationship between artists and fans. I suppose music has always had their problem. Some fans who feel it is their right to know everything about an artist. That obsession and need to dig and step where they have no business going. I am not saying fans need to have a wary distance. It is an artist’s right how much of themselves they give up online. Many want to remain quite private because it can be quite risky and exposing being too open. In any case, it is not up to fans to say what an artist should reveal. Whether they should be more person and interact more. Chappell Roan tours and gives fans opportunities to see her in the flesh. She also connects with them online and gives interviews. That is her professional obligation. It can be distressing for artists knowing that many of their fans follow them around or know their family. When they take things far too far and go from being fans to bordering on stalking. It has a massive impact on an artist’s mental health and security. I think it is the security element that is most worrying. Artists such as Ethen Cain have asked fans to be more respectful to one another at her gigs. It is bad enough when there is bad behaviour at gigs. Also having fans who are too intense and choose to go where they have no business.

PHOTO CREDIT: Pixabay/Pexels

It makes me think about fan culture and that relationship between artists and their supporters. I am not sure what the first steps are. There needs to be this understanding from fans that artists’ family and friends are off limits. That there is this boundary that cannot be crossed. I feel social media and the Internet age has not been a total blessing for artists. It does give them a greater reach and interaction with fans. There can be more of a bond. Less distant than how things used to be. The bad side is that many fans feel like they are quite alright to treat artists like friends. That there is no issue making them feel uneasy by getting involved with their family. It would be awful if we got to a place where artists gave the bare minimum and there was no real interaction and reveal. Just keeping things strictly to music. It is not okay that artists such as Chappell Roan have to think about their career and what they say because of their fans. That small percentage of her fanbase punishing the rest. It does seem to be female artists who are enduring more cases of obsessive and inappropriate fans. That feeling that they are their families are being stalked. In such a dangerous and increasingly dark and violent work, there is a wider worry of how far will fans go. It is not only about privacy and ensuring an artist’s family are protected. There is also that very real concern about personal safety. We need to start talking more about fans and their interaction with artists. How there cannot be more cases that are similar to Chappel Roan’s. How the industry can protect artists. We, as music lovers, respecting artists and not making them feel uncomfortable. It is distressing, angering and disturbing when some fans take things…

A step too far.

FEATURE: The Digital Mixtape: Jeff Buckley’s Grace at Thirty: The Artists He Inspired

FEATURE:

 

 

The Digital Mixtape

 PHOTO CREDIT: Mikio Ariga

Jeff Buckley’s Grace at Thirty: The Artists He Inspired

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ON 23rd August…

we celebrate thirty years of one of the all-time best debut albums. One of the best albums ever. Grace from Jeff Buckley. Although it got some mixed reactions upon its release in 1994, in years since, it has been recognised as a masterpiece. Fitting into a scene in 1994 where nothing like this existed, critics did not know what to make of it. There was so much buzz around Jeff Buckley prior to release. Perhaps critics expecting something different. If it did not connect with the media as it should in 1994, now, we see Grace as a classic. We sadly lost Jeff Buckley in 1997 at the age of thirty. He recorded other songs and was in the process of recording his second album before he died. It means what he left us was this one album. Though we remember and play the songs from Grace, I think one of the most profound and obvious impacts of the album is the artists it influenced. Think about those who have cited it and Jeff Buckley as an influence. So many artists through the years. I wanted to mark the upcoming thirtieth anniversary of Grace with a playlist featuring songs from artists who have definitely been inspired by Grace. You can either hear it in their music, or they have mentioned Jeff Buckley as someone important to them. It will be bittersweet marking thirty years of Grace on 23rd August. It is clear that Jeff Buckley’s 1994 debut album is…

A thing of rare beauty.

FEATURE: Spotlight: Imogen and the Knife

FEATURE:

 

 

Spotlight

PHOTO CREDIT: Ruby Pluhar

Imogen and the Knife

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THE amazing E.P…

Some Kind of Love came out on 19th July. From Imogen and the Knife, it is one that I would recommend everyone check out. Before getting to some other interviews, I want to bring in, in its entirety, an interview from DORK. They spoke to Imogen and the Knife about her anticipated and phenomenal debut E.P. Giving us an insight into the five tracks:

“Rising talent Imogen and the Knife has unveiled her eagerly anticipated debut EP ‘Some Kind of Love’, a poignant exploration of love’s multifaceted nature. Hailing from Newcastle but now based in South-East London, Imogen crafts a unique world that draws inspiration from iconic artists like Kate Bush and Nick Cave while carving out her own distinctive voice.

The five-track EP weaves together deeply personal narratives, from recurring dreams to formative sisterly bonds, all united by their examination of love in its various forms. Imogen’s commitment to her craft shines through in lyrics that cut straight to the heart, living up to the surgical precision implied by her moniker.

Here, Imogen takes us on an intimate journey through ‘Some Kind of Love’, track by track, for our latest Artist’s Guide.

MOTHER OF GOD

Mother of God is a play-by-play of a recurring dream I had during a pretty turbulent and transitional time in my life. The images were already there: the boat-shaped house, the knife with my initials on it, the mosaic of faces.

“Mother of God! This can’t be the only one” is a waking realisation that, unless addressed, the dream and the pain won’t leave. Which is apt because after it was written, the recurring dream, at least, did.

IF IT WON’T TALK OF RAIN

This is essentially a musing on my upbringing as a fiercely proud northerner and musician, what this meant as a young woman choosing to leave home, how I continue to navigate a torn identity, the men in my life and how they’ve shaped me, how I love them, how it’s complicated. Northerners are rooted in a culture of song and place, and there’s a defiant and bleak romanticism ingrained in us. It commanded my outlook on life, and this track is an exploration of the spectrum of love, joy, pain and torment that comes with it. Ultimately, what use is my voice, as a Northerner and as a woman, if I’m not exploring all shades of what makes that?

RED (IS MY COLOUR)

This is one of those songs that fell out fully formed, which usually happens when I’m searching for something. I guess it’s a broad question of legacy, womanhood and our learned behaviour that shapes the continued degradation of women. It asks what it would truly mean to start again without any influence of heritage or structures; what parts of us are unknowingly intrinsic to the cycle of hurt. The song addresses you, myself, anybody. It’s less of a call to arms and more of an invitation to look inward.

PARIS NIGHT

This one is for my younger sister. I somehow managed to whisk her away to Paris at the last minute on a particularly bleak weekend (Boris had just won the election), and it was a really formative time in our relationship.

I didn’t really know what was going on with my life, and she was just about to leave school. It was a strange, quiet, apprehensive bubble of time. I remember looking at her and thinking, “I’m not sure what we’re going back to; I’d rather just stay here”.

My nearest know I’m not quiet about her being the most precious thing on the planet to me. It’s not the first or the last song about her, but it’s maybe the best.

SOME KIND OF LOVE

The EP opens and closes with a dream.

I was very close with someone when I was a kid, I don’t really know them much anymore, but they found their way into a dream I had, and we had a really moving conversation. Of course, it was my brain that made up what they were saying and how we interacted – the layers of that are really interesting to me. I figured it’s some kind of love that keeps them floating about my subconscious.

I titled the EP after this song because each track explores love of some kind in its own way. Love shapes my experience of this world. It’s beauty and it’s pain. I hold a lot of it. Sometimes, I’m not sure where to put it, and then, sometimes, a collection of songs appears”.

PHOTO CREDIT: Aaron Wyld

The moniker of Imogen Williams, this London-via-Newcastle talent is someone being tipped for great things. Getting under the radar of some big websites and magazines. NME were among those to chat with Imogen and the Knife about Some Kind of Love. Intrigued by a game-changing E.P., it is interesting discovering what the E.P. means to her. Some of the artists that have influenced her:

“That sense of freedom imbues her new EP ‘Some Kind Of Love’, which arrives this Friday (July 19). You only need to hear the breadth of its first few singles to know how adventurous this new direction is. ‘Mother Of God’ is a choppy, sultry bop drawing from the brooding grittiness of her icon PJ Harvey, while the tender piano-led ‘If It Won’t Talk Of Rain’ is an intimate, lovelorn ballad where Williams ponders: “If he takes me for dinner / can he wave my fee / I guess music is love and my loving is free.”

Such candid themes haven’t come for Williams totally out of the blue. Having originally established herself as a solo artist back in 2018, releasing piano-driven pop under her first name, she sees the era of ‘The Knife’ as more of a subtle reinvention. “It’s more of a continuation and a growth. I’ve always been writing like this, it’s just developed and taken on new forms.”

NME: So how did the concept of ‘The Knife’ come about and why change it up now?

“I’ve been playing my own music from the age of 15 so there’s definitely been lots of reinventions as I’ve gone through life. Everyone changes as they get older and it’s felt apt to do that with my music. After my brief break, I started putting on live nights back in 2022. I did a series called ‘Imogen And Friends’ in London and Newcastle which restored my faith in the fact that music is never going to leave me. At the same time I had all of these songs lying about, so it really spurred me on to set about making the record of my dreams.”

Your music has always been deeply personal. What does ‘The Knife’ itself mean?

“‘The Knife’ is about reclaiming. I was born with hip dysplasia which meant that I had loads of corrective surgeries from a young age. That’s definitely one of the reasons why I make music and have always found solace in it. I’ve been living with chronic pain my whole life and being under the knife was a huge part of growing up. So it’s the reclaiming of that surgical knife, but I also wanted to allude to the fact that I have a band and it takes a village: it’s my producer, it’s the piano, it’s so much more than me.”

You’re massively proud of your Newcastle roots as an artist as well. How does that come through in the new direction?

“That part of me gets stronger the more I’m away from the north and Newcastle, but I feel really lucky to have that connection. Much like the Irish and Welsh, so many northerners are born into a culture of song. I think that’s so beautiful and it’s really important to me and it’s underpinned all of my writing. I understand that I’m a storyteller and that’s been passed down through my family. For me, it comes back to this culture of song and of community and of love, really. That’s the main thing for me and maybe that isn’t talked about enough. I spend so much of my time being so nurtured by my community up there.”

Love is of course a massive overarching theme of the EP. Did that present itself quite early on in this period of self-discovery?

“I refer to the EP as a patchwork of songs because they’re from quite a few different times in my life. I just cherry-picked the tracks that I love from across the last couple of years. When I put them together I found that they’re all exploring love in some way or another. It explores what love can be in all different capacities and I think that was a nice way to tie them all together. All of my songs are fuelled by love in some capacity. Love infiltrates absolutely everything I do.”

You’ve cited everyone from PJ Harvey to CMAT to Lana Del Rey as inspirations. I guess the common thread is these powerful women who have always done it on their own terms?

“They’re all massively important to me. PJ Harvey has been a huge one, I channel her musically but more importantly the way she navigates her art and life. She managed to remain artful and mysterious and elusive while being really cool and brash. I love CMAT, her performance at the Big Weekend actually reduced me to tears. it made me realise I’d been so devoid of women just going for it. She sounded so beautiful while screaming like a siren and talking about the most devastating stuff ever through a lens of drag and comedy. It was the perfect show”.

I am going to finish with an interview from The Line of Best Fit. More about her background and path to where she is now. Formerly trading under the name IMOGEN, the new name and sound came after a period of rest. She is now creating her truest and most memorable music. It all bodes well for an artist we will be hearing from years down the line:

“She moved to London to take the infamous popular music course at Goldsmiths, a degree that launched many artists before her. “Newcastle to New Cross,” she jokes. “That really challenged what I thought I was doing. It wasn't necessarily a songwriting course, it wasn't really a music course, it was more of a philosophical, existential, constantly asking the question, ‘What are you bringing to the world as a musician and why is it important that your voice is heard?’ It was so important and it was such an incredible education to have.”

Having made music under her full name while playing in Newcastle, after graduating from Goldsmiths she dropped the Williams and continued to gig and record her brooding and capacious, emotionally-driven pop balladry. But after a few years and the stop-start of the pandemic, she found herself questioning everything. “I think what I've really struggled with, and still do to an extent, is the idea of shoehorning this inherently anti-capitalist, anti-structural thing - which is music making and wanting to connect with other humans through the art of songwriting and performing - into this insanely capitalist structure,” she says. “I just didn’t know if that's what I wanted to do.”

After a few weeks of soul-searching she stripped everything back to its beginnings. She began to put on her Imogen and Friends live nights around London and in Newcastle, she began working on new material with writer/producer Alex Parish, and she added a new suffix to her artist persona, Imogen and the Knife.

During the pandemic, Williams had applied for a role with the Ivors Academy, the body for UK songwriters and composers. She found herself accepted onto their board of directors. “It gave me a sense of belonging but also extreme validation, which I didn’t have before,” she smiles.

Armed with a new sense of identity and confidence, she applied for PRS’ Momentum Fund, landing the funding to bring her new project into fruition. Working alongside Parish, the pair put everything into the creation of an EP. “Obviously we went to RAK Studios. I was like, well, if I’ve got the money!” she laughs. “I got all my friends to play on it and I got to pay them, just people I knew and loved. It just felt so wonderful and I really feel like you can hear that it was made in that room. I like to think it’s money well spent.”

Released next month, Some Kind of Love is an expansive and elegantly orchestrated collection of dark, progressive, and sonically captivating pop echoes. From the grinding bass pulse of first single “Mother of God,” masterful in its dynamics, to the stark confessional of follow-up “If It Won’t Talk of Rain,” the EP showcases Williams’ direct narratives and joyfully unreserved compositions.

New single, “Red (is My Colour)”, out today, is an elegant cut of classic songwriting with dark undertones, its delivery soft but its lyrics sharp. “It’s a constant question of what are we doing? Why does this perpetual cycle of violence towards women and non-men keep happening?” she explains. “I’m not really accusing anybody, it’s more like, everybody, nobody and me. It’s just posing a lot of questions, because I have them all the time.”

PHOTO CREDIT: Ruby Pluhar

Having secured new management off the back of the recordings, Williams decided to keep everything close to home and release through the company’s own imprint, Vertex Music. “It felt so natural to go in a homely direction in a way that just felt right. It felt like a well-oiled machine. It felt like everyone’s vision aligned and it just kept it in the family. It’s made the whole process a lot easier and less daunting,” she says.

As Imogen and the Knife, Williams has created a world within which she can step back and let her music take on its own life, from the most devastating riffs to the lightest sentiment, her songs are free from her own boundaries and realities. “Some of them are rageful, some are desperately sad, some are joyful,” she says. “It’s just ruminating on different kinds of love and how the lens through which I see everything is just this lens of love. I think it’s the thing that really just propels me through life”.

Some Kind of Love is among the best and original E.P.s of the year. I am excited to see where Imogen and the Knife heads next. Having discovered her relatively recently, I am curious to see what happens next. A wonderful artist with a singular talent, her captivating music…

CUTS deep.

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Follow Imogen and the Knife

PHOTO CREDIT: Aaron Wyld

Official:

https://imogenandtheknife.com/

TikTok:

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

Instagram:

https://www.instagram.com/imogenandtheknife

Twitter:

https://x.com/imogen_theknife

Spotify:

https://open.spotify.com/artist/4nfBa9tw0IWAdtirqqmrbY?si=5C8bbMNASL-LwE9YIiHEWg

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https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCclITd99Hs0KwIJ9996vRCQ

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FEATURE: Say My Name: Destiny's Child’s The Writing's on the Wall at Twenty-Five

FEATURE:

 

 

Say My Name

Destiny's Child’s The Writing's on the Wall at Twenty-Five

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EVEN though the album was…

 IN THIS PHOTO: Destiny’s Child in 1999/PHOTO CREDIT: REX/Shutterstock

released in Japan on 14th July, Destiny’s Child’s The Writing’s on the Wall came out in the U.S. on 27th July, 1999. Because of that, I wanted to mark twenty-five years of one of the most important and still underrated albums of that decade. As the group were unhappy with their 1998 debut album, Destiny’s Child, they sought more creative control and direction of the follow-up. Selecting a range of producers and collaborators, the results show. The Writing’s on the Wall is a more eclectic, confident and consistent album. With the vocal arrangements and compositions bolder and more experimental in places, this was an album that took Destiny’s Child to the next level. Mixing unconventional with classic, we get R&B, Neo-Soul and a range of other genres mixed together. In terms of the album itself, The Writing’s on the Wall was intended  a concept album around the Ten Commandments. Each of the tracks represented a different state or sin. Infidelity, deception and separation for example. There are religious themes and references through the album, though I think most people love The Writing’s on the Wall because of the blend of vocals and the incredible songs. There was a lot of issues and controversy around the album due to the departure of original members, LeToya Luckett and LaTavia Roberson. Internal group strife and split. Farrah Franklin and Michelle Williams stepping in. I always think of Destiny’s Child as led by Beyoncé. She is very much the driving force of the group. Even though there was a change of personnel and not everything was as harmonious as it could be, the second album from Destiny’s Child is incredibly strong.

I want to bring in a few features about The Writing’s on the Wall. Consequence wrote about the album in 2019. They discuss and dissect the group changes and spotlight the amazing and timeless songs. Without doubt, one of the finest albums of the 1990s. Hugely influencing R&B and putting Destiny’s Child among the greatest and most important girl groups ever, one cannot deny the sheet importance of The Writing’s on the Wall:

“Because it was already clear that Beyoncé was the star. She was the leading voice on Destiny’s Child, but she would dominate on 1999’s The Writing’s on the Wall. The group dynamic had changed. From a young age, the girls had performed together. Now one was elevated above the others. As they were finishing The Writing’s on the Wall, this was bothering LaTavia Roberson and LeToya Tuckett.

It didn’t help that Matthew Knowles was paying himself above the standard management rate. He had financed the group and then quit his job to pursue this dream. He now felt entitled to a bigger share of the financial success. And that success was coming quickly. A month before their second album dropped, lead single, “Bills, Bills, Bills,” debuted at No. 84. Five weeks later, it was the No. 1 song in the country.

Written by Kevin “She’kspere” Briggs along with Kandi Burress of Xscape, the song brought new attitude to Destiny’s Child. If their debut album was about anything, it was about trying to find love. Now Destiny’s Child cared about something more: Respect. The protagonist of “Bills, Bills, Bills” isn’t some idle sugar baby. She’s tired of loaning out her car, her cell phone, her credit cards, and more. She’s an independent woman exhausted with her dependent man.

Buoyed by “Bills, Bills, Bills”, The Writing’s on the Wall entered the charts as the No. 6 album in the country. It opens with a playful, Godfather-inspired sketch. The girls are introduced with mobster names. In need of counsel, they seek out “Destiny’s Child’s Commandments for Relationships.” Every song is introduced with a menacing commandment, so yes, The Godfather is being blended with the Bible. It’s silly and fun, even if it does go on a bit long. The first song is introduced with Thou Shalt Not Hate.

After that comes Thou Shalt Pay Bills, Thou Shalt Confess, and Thou Shalt Not Bug. These four resulting songs fit together like gears in a clock. The glow-up of “So Good” whirls into “Bills, Bills, Bills”. With Missy Elliott’s help, “Confessions” spins into the catchy kiss-off of “Bug a Boo.” It’s a killer four-track run.

“Bug a Boo” is another single from She’kspere and Burress. Looking back, it’s clear She’kspere and Burress, an R&B trailblazer with Xscape, deserve at least some credit for shaping Beyoncé’s image. The attitude in these Destiny’s Child songs is, to a certain extent, the attitude of the ghostwriters. On the other hand, imagine She’kspere starting with the thin voices and clumsy flows of TLC and then moving on to Beyoncé. On “Bug a Boo”, Beyoncé just about sings faster than Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes ever rapped. Better yet, you can hear every word. This is the album where we start to appreciate Beyoncé’s incredible technical skill.

“Bug a Boo” was the last music video featuring Roberson and Tuckett. In December of 1999, they began a lawsuit. They hoped to get a new manager, someone objective who wasn’t related to Kelly Rowland and Beyoncé. They wanted a more standard financial arrangement with their manager. They wanted to be taken seriously as founding members of one of the most popular groups in the world.

They didn’t know they’d been kicked out until they saw the new music video on MTV.

Perhaps Roberson and Luckett had a point, and Matthew Knowles was stealing from them. Perhaps they took some bad advice. Perhaps they would have been unhappy as semi-anonymous backup dancers, always standing behind Beyoncé in slightly worse light. Or maybe they had been part of the group for so long that they couldn’t imagine it without them. Now, like Big Brother and the Holding Company, they are footnotes in someone else’s story.

Michelle Williams and Farrah Franklin appeared in the “Say My Name” music video, pretending to sing Roberson and Luckett’s parts. The controversy helped promote the song, as did the color block music video directed by Joseph Kahn. The story within the song is wonderfully specific. The cheating didn’t happen in the past; it is currently happening during this phone call. 

Produced by Darkchild (“The Boy Is Mine”), “Say My Name” is actually quite weird. The music starts out simply enough, with a melodic guitar and sharp 808s. But the chorus fills up with all sorts of musical boings and wobbles, with guitar wahs and electric beeps. It’s the melody, though, that is the most striking aspect of the song. The notes comes in staccato bursts, demanding perfect precision from vocal chords and tongue. Today we take for granted the influence of hip-hop on pop music. Destiny’s Child is a big reason why.

There aren’t many dull spots on The Writing’s on the Wall, but they have in common that they waste Beyoncé. “If You Leave” is a group duet with the ladies of Destiny’s Child and the gentlemen of Next. It’s a boilerplate ballad, like a B-side from K-Ci and JoJo. “Temptation” has a boring, undemanding melody. Considering the steamy subject, there’s a real lack of heat.

But altogether, and especially for a pop album, the non-singles are remarkably good. “Now That She’s Gone” would sound pathetic in a collection of love songs, but here it sounds vulnerable, like a rare moment of weakness. “Hey Ladies” vibrates with rage and frustration. The lyrics veer about for targets, sometimes twisting into self-loathing before lunging again at the cheating man.

The album’s layout is easy on the ear. Some albums frontload the singles and backload the ballads, which is like getting all the taco meat in one bite and all the sour cream in another. Here, there’s a really nice distribution of the uptempo, the down-tempo, and the earworms.

The Writing’s on the Wall produced one more single, “Jumpin’ Jumpin’”, which became their second No. 1. Having conquered radio, there was nothing left for Destiny’s Child to do but rule the clubs. The music video was the last to feature Farrah Franklin. She wasn’t a good fit for the group. Rather than replace her, Destiny’s Child downsized to a trio. Fittingly, Beyoncé recorded, “Jumpin’ Jumpin’” by herself, and so hers is the only voice we hear anyway.

By the end of the promotional cycle for The Writing’s on the Wall, the thing that was already happening behind the scenes exploded in front of our eyes. Beyoncé was the star. When two of the founding members disagreed, they were no longer part of the group. I don’t want to minimize their experience, which was no doubt full of mental distress. It’s hard thinking you’re part of the core and being told you’re not. Most of us would struggle. But it feels like they missed out. If you’re not a Destiny’s Child superfan, you might’ve already forgotten their names”.

Can we really talk about Destiny’s Child in 1999 and not mention Beyoncé?! She was already established herself as someone who could forge a solo career. An incredible talent who was very much at the heart and centre of the best moments from The Writing’s on the Wall. Even so, it is as group effort. In 2019, Stereogum marked twenty years of Destiny’s Child stunning sophomore album:

“Around the same time Destiny’s Child were making that first album, Timbaland and Missy Elliott were reshaping the way rap and R&B would sound. Timbaland’s production — globular bass, tricky counter-melodies, sci-fi beep-whirrs, weird rhythmic hiccups, vast expanses of negative space — was a radical departure from the relatively straightforward swingbeat of its era. It took rap music months to absorb those new ideas, and it took R&B years. But by the time Destiny’s Child made their mind-bogglingly successful sophomore album, it had happened. Three months before The Writing’s On The Wall hit stores, TLC’s sublime “No Scrubs” made it to #1. On that song, producer Kevin “She’kspere” Briggs took a glimmering and processed acoustic-guitar figure and ran it through a post-Timbaland prism, supercharging it with clicks and blips and stutters. That style became the template for Destiny’s Child, who did great things with it and who got huge in the process.

he’kspere produced five songs on The Writing’s On The Wall, including two of the four singles. He co-wrote all five of them with his then-girlfriend Kandi Burruss, the former Xscape member and current Real Housewife. When Destiny’s Child brought She’skpere and Burruss to Houston, the duo were told that there was only space for one more song on the record. But the duo gave them “Bug A Boo,” and the group ended up building the entire album around that sound. Beyoncé, in particular, had a flair for it. Thanks in part to her father’s boot camps, she was able to sing intricate and sophisticated melodic lines over these intricate and sophisticated tracks. She was also able to personalize the songs. All four members of Destiny’s Child got co-writing credits on the album’s songs because they would rewrite the lyrics, twisting them into the right shapes. But Beyoncé in particular could sing this stuff like she meant it.

That post-Timbaland sound is all over The Writing’s On The Wall. Superstar producer Rodney Jerkins brought it to the eventual #1 hit “Say My Name,” refracting and atomizing a traditional R&B ballad into a skittering, panting masterpiece. Beyoncé co-produced “Jumpin’, Jumpin’,” another future hit, building a club jam out of oscillating synth-lasers. Missy Elliott herself produced and rapped on “Confessions,” adding a computerized alien moan. There are more conventionally mid-’90s R&B moments all over The Writing’s On The Wall, like “Sweet Sixteen” or “If You Leave,” the duet with the R&B boy band Next. There’s even a lovely album-closing rendition of “Amazing Grace” that’s clearly there to show the group’s pure vocal bona fides. But this is an album with its heart in the future.

It’s also an album with a cynical, jaded, sometimes-transactional view of love. All through the album, men are letting down the members of Destiny’s Child. On “Bills, Bills, Bills,” they’re mad at no-account men sponging off of them. On “Bug A Boo” and “Say My Name,” they’re suspicious, sure their men are creeping. On “Jumpin’, Jumpin’,” they’re ready to cheat themselves. After all, who needs a healthy relationship when the club is full of ballers with their pockets full grown? When a full-grown Beyoncé went back into accusatory mode years later on Lemonade, she had the weight of cultural memory working for her. We’d already known since she was a kid that she wasn’t taking any bullshit.

But Destiny’s Child itself became a cynical, jaded, transactional entity soon afterward. Original members LaTavia Roberson and LeToya Luckett tried to separate themselves from Mathew Knowles, convinced that Beyoncé and Kelly Rowland were getting more money and attention. They found out that they were out of the group when they saw other girls lip-syncing their parts in the “Say My Name” video. They sued. Thanks to the resulting public-relations shitstorm, Beyoncé spent the next year or so in damage-control mode. But there was no lasting damage. In the end, Destiny’s Child got even bigger, and The Writing’s On The Wall kept selling.

It sold, and it sold. The Writing’s On The Wall debuted at #5, and it never climbed any higher. But as all four singles rolled out, the album kept moving units. Its biggest sales week came after it had been out for a year. In the end, it moved more than eight million copies. And it turned Beyoncé into a star. Beyoncé, who dominated every track on The Writing’s On The Wall, was young enough to take immediately to the new sounds that were suddenly reshaping R&B aesthetics. And she’d practiced hard enough that she had the technical skills to handle tracks like that while still broadcasting personality all over them. She was made for her times. She became a conqueror”.

I am going to end up with another great feature. This one ranked the tracks on The Writing’s on the Wall. Also in 2019, Stylist wrote how Destiny’s Child captured an impressively full picture of what it is be a woman. Teenagers when the album was released, it is startling mature and confident. So worldly-wise and experienced. Feminist and empowering, it is small wonder The Writing’s on the Wall inspired so many others. Feminist-themed and led music by everyone from Rihanna to Megan Thee Stallion. Two years later, in 2001, Survivor was released. It featured the classic line-up of Beyoncé, Michelle Williams and Kelly Rowland. I still think The Writing’s on the Wall is the group’s best album:

“Despite being only 17 when the album was released, Destiny’s Child had already cultivated a feminist message that stood out amid the saccharine girl-pop and heartbroken ballads of their contemporaries.

For artists who had lived so little, they managed to capture an impressively full picture of what it meant to be a woman

Playing off the theme of the 10 commandments, interludes like “Thou shall know when he’s got to go” punctuate songs about financial freedom, toxic relationships and sexual expression.

For artists who had lived so little, they managed to capture an impressively full picture of what it meant to be a woman.

There are the unashamed celebrations: opener So Good is boastful, laughing in the face of anyone who ever doubted them. Club anthem Jumpin’ Jumpin’ is an ode to having fun with your friends – and, more importantly, without your partner. Temptation tells the tale of a woman lusting after a man, a refreshing flip of the age-old script.

PHOTO CREDIT: Getty Images

Then there are the warnings: beware of the scrub who won’t pull his weight, says Bills, Bills, Bills. Remove yourself from obsessive, claustrophobic relationships, says Bug A Boo. Don’t ignore the signs of a cheater, says Say My Name.

And it was these, the original “leave him, sis” anthems, that were far and away the biggest singles from the album. They validated so many women’s romantic experiences, giving us permission to point our fingers and nod our heads at each other in recognition.

They weren’t mopey, sentimental songs about heartbreak. They were knowing. They were powerful. They were full of fight.

And it’s no coincidence that, over the next 20 years, Beyoncé would weave this empowering magic into a personal brand – it’s evident on everything from Run The World (Girls) to Single Ladies to Sorry.

Michelle Williams’ depression post signals a change in our approach to seeking help

With writing credits on 11 of The Writing’s On The Wall’s 16 tracks and the lion’s share of the vocals, it’s fair to say this was a warm-up for baby Beyoncé.

Her father was no fool making the young Destiny’s Child sit and study videos of The Jackson 5 and The Supremes for hours on end – it was always the plan that Beyonce would go the way of Michael Jackson and Diana Ross, rising from a successful group to become a world-dominating star in her own right.

The fact that someone as talented and luminous as Kelly Rowland could be overshadowed is truly testament to Beyonce’s dazzling star quality, even as a teenager.

And as early as The Writing’s On The Wall, she was already head and shoulders above the rest, straining to get ahead. She was experimenting with what worked, what connected with women everywhere, and she’s been honing that craft ever since.

Why every woman needs to watch Beyoncé’s empowering Homecoming documentary

The chopping and changing of the group’s line-up would have detracted from the music in most cases, but the drama became background noise as we focused firmly on the woman standing in the spotlight.

A seminal classic, The Writing’s On The Wall was the official announcement that a star had been born. It gave us the first taste of the proud, joyful feminism so many of us were lucky enough to grow up on. Thou shall listen to it on repeat”.

On 27th July, it is twenty-five years since The Writing’s on the Wall was released in the U.S. A seminal and hugely groundbreaking album, it launched Destiny’s Child to the world. Iconic songs like Say My Name and Bills, Bills, Bills. The album still sounds fresh and alive today. You can see the artists it has influenced and how it changed R&B. A massively successful achievement from Destiny’s Child, The Writing’s on the Wall has lost one of its power…

AFTER quarter of a century.

FEATURE: Live to Tell: The Announcement of the Madonna Biopic, Who’s That Girl

FEATURE:

 

 

Live to Tell

IN THIS PHOTO: Madonna in 1987/PHOTO CREDIT: Alberto Tolot

The Announcement of the Madonna Biopic, Who’s That Girl

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THERE was a lot of build-up…

PHOTO CREDIT: Madonna

when Madonna previously announced her biopic. Originally, she was writing it with Diablo Cody. Cody has no regrets about losing the project with the Queen of Pop. I think the explanation why the film didn’t materialise is because the script was not to Madonna’s liking. Perhaps not what she had in mind. Others have separate theories about what happened. Regardless, it was a blow, because it was shaping up to be a magnificent proposition. With Julia Garner cast in the lead, we possibly could have seen a representation of Madonna in 1986 or 1987. I was envisaging Madonna’s True Blue era (1986). There have been films and documentaries about Madonna. Not biopics as of yet where the Queen of Pop is at the centre. Since the project was abandoned, Madonna has been on her worldwide Celebration tour. This astonishing and acclaimed series of gigs around the world, one could forgive her for wanting to rest and spend time away from the limelight. Some might fancy a Madonna album. Instead, it seems like there is this desire to get her biopic going again. I am sure we will hear more news in the coming weeks. There are Madonna albums coming later in the year. The fortieth anniversary of Like a Virgin in November. Bedtime Stories turns thirty in October. News has broken that we could soon see a much anticipated biopic. Here is some more details:

“Madonna’s biopic has risen from the ashes. The highly-anticipated project, which has been years in the making and was pronounced “dead” last January, is officially back on the cards.

On July 16, Madonna shared an Instagram video of herself working on the script for her biopic. In case you forgot, Madonna is self-directing and co-writing the film’s screenplay which will focus on her career and her “broader, unvarnished story.”

“I Need A-lot of Bandz to make this………..OKAY,” she captioned the video in which she could been seen seated behind a typewriter.

The “Material Girl” first announced the biopic back in 2020 after someone else had attempted to write her life story. She revealed that she was working with the Oscar-winning screenwriter Diablo Cody on the script (though, she was since replaced by Erin Cressida Wilson), which was given the tentative title of Little Sparrow at the time. Of course, much conversation was had about who would play Madonna. Alexa Demie, Sydney Sweeney, Barbie Ferreira, Florence Pugh, Bebe Rexha were all speculated to have earned the role at one point.

It was Julia Garner, however, who ultimately pulled away from the pack. She was reportedly offered the part in 2022 (before the project was called off due to the singer’s Celebration world tour) and is back in the mix for its revival. Per Entertainment Weekly, the Inventing Anna actress is still attached to the lead.

From plot details, cast updates, and a working name, here’s everything to know about Madonna’s biopic, below.

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Does the Madonna biopic have a title?

Madonna’s Instagram post keyed fans in on a potential title. While there’s no confirmation just yet, it appears that the project will be called Who’s That Girl.

The title references the singer’s 1987 comedy film and song of the same name.

What is Who’s That Girl about?

Madonna previously stated that the project will follow her “struggle as an artist trying to survive in a man's world as a woman, and really just the journey,” which she called “happy, sad, mad, crazy, good, bad, and ugly.”

The film will likely feature major milestones of her career—writing “Like a Prayer,” her smash hit “Vogue”—and more, less-documented narratives like her connection to New York City’s ballroom scene.

Who is in the Who’s That Girl cast?

Garner, so far, is the only name who is all but confirmed to appear in the cast. Julia Fox has been rumored to play Madonna’s longtime friend Debbi Mazur and even met with the singer to discuss the part.

“I mean, I’d still love to but I genuinely don’t know,” Fox said of the role recently, adding that she “might have already aged out of that casting”.

It would be amazing if Julia Garner was to play Madonna. In turns of the setting, I guess it would be the mid-1980s. We will get to discover more in time. I think, when it came to reservations before, it was whether Madonna could carry this off on her own. In terms of writing and directing the film. That seems to be the case now. Madonna is a good director, though one feels that an objective outsider who is a Madonna fan would be a better choice. Perhaps a too subjective lens, one wonders whether other hands and eyes would make the biopic stronger. However Who’s That Girl turns out, it is going to be a huge event. With others trying to tell her story, this is the moment that Madonna can tell her true story. It is likely to be raw, quite unflinching and filled with incredible music. Whether it is going to be purely personal or whether there are some elements of fantasy, fans around the world will flock to see it. It has been a very long and successful career for Madonna. Over forty years since her debut album, she has changed the face of popular music. I have been thinking and there have not been that many representations of Madonna on the big screen. In terms of using her music or telling her story. I guess there was fear that Madonna would sue or criticise. It is always a bit risky when an artist writes and directs a biopic. Maybe they are not going to be critical and objective. Having that necessary editing and filter which could turn a potentially okay film into something magnificent. Such is the importance of Madonna’s story, you do wonder how it could go.

I think fans are hopeful and exciting. She does not need to prove herself. It is a rare moment where the woman behind some of the greatest Pop music in history lets you into her life. Having a biopic that is about a very specific time period would be too restrictive. It would be a struggle to make a convincing and focused film it was career-spanning and took in a lot of time. What is likely is going to be Madonna survival and rise. Perhaps multiple actors playing her in different periods. Featuring her wiring some iconic hits, but more about he overcoming sexism and misogyny and succeeding in a male-dominated music industry. Rather than it being a traditional biopic or jukebox musical type of thing, you feel this is going to be closer to a tough and inspiring film with music scoring it. Some darker edges and controversial moments. Madonna is the only person who knows the truth and will not hold back. It seems like she wants to tell her story in her own words. When we find out about casting and the exact plot, we’ll get a clearer picture of what is in store. It is amazing that a project that was once thought dead and beyond revival is being picked up. No doubt buoyed by her triumphant world tour and the love people showed her, there would be this same interest for a cinematic release. What will critics make of a Madonna-penned and directed film?! Are they going to prejudge?! It is a gamble for her to shoulder so much, though you know that it is going to be compelling and memorable. If some doubted her and tried to put her down, there is no denying how everyone is eating their words. Such a singular and strong artist who has survived and conquered. Nobody now is asking…

WHO’S that girl?

FEATURE: Songs for Our Daughters: Laura Marling’s Comments About Motherhood, and Reflection for the Music Industry

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Songs for Our Daughters

PHOTO CREDIT: Tamsin Topolski/Vogue

Laura Marling’s Comments About Motherhood, and Reflection for the Music Industry

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WHEN she released the album…

IN THIS PHOTO: Laura Marling and her daughter/PHOTO CREDIT: Tamsin Topolski

Song for Our Daughter, Laura Marling was not yet a mother. That has recently changed. I am going to come to an interview where she discusses motherhood. This is a songwriter, only thirty-four, who has been in the industry for many years. Song for Our Daughter is her seventh studio album. Her eighth, Patterns in Repeat, is out in October. She is without doubt one of the most astonishing songwriters of her generation. Her way with words and the scenes and images she conveys through her music are passionate, intimate, detailed, poetic and rich. For many years, I guess one of the main focuses was on other people. On characters. Many songs about herself. I guess, with a daughter now in her life, that will shift. It made me think about the impact motherhood surely has on female artists. How it can provide huge and fresh inspiration, though also perspective and clarity. For Marling, I guess there is that need and desire to be more home-based and spend time with her young daughter. On the other hand, a new album will bring with it touring demand. Trying to see fans and make sure that she is committed to that. It is a hard balance. One can understand why she would focus her energies and priorities more to her daughter than being as busy and full-on with music as before. I want to start with an interview from The Guardian from earlier this month. Some sections about new motherhood and how that has affected and infused Marling:

“Laura Marling is wondering whether to sacrifice her career for motherhood. The 34-year-old singer-songwriter, who first found fame with her enchanting yet earthy folk as a teenager, has decided to stop touring completely after becoming a parent. In fact, she might pack in the whole music thing entirely. “One of the great privileges of my life is turning out to be that I started my career early, and I can sort of wind it down,” says Marling with cool-headed contemplation: her conversational trademark.

We are in the living room of her London house, which is being redecorated – everything is piled into boxes; the one next to me is crowned with a baby music book and multicoloured blocks. Marling is on the floor, absent-mindedly pushing the legs of her trousers up over her knees and back down again. “There’s a part of me that feels like, will I just disappear? Maybe it would be nice to go and get old out of the spotlight – like Kate Bush.”

Marling is remarkably cheery at the prospect of professional oblivion. Since having her daughter in February last year, motherhood has become her new calling: “I was like, I only want to be doing this, everything else is secondary.”

That is one side of the story, anyway. The other is that Marling will be releasing her eighth album, the characteristically exquisite Patterns in Repeat, this autumn. She wrote it during the first three months of her daughter’s life. “I was just bouncing a BabyBjörn and playing guitar all day. It was all written looking her in the eye,” she says with total serenity and (somehow) not a hint of smugness. Marling was “high as fuck after giving birth, for six months. Literally psychedelically high,” a mood compounded by the realisation that parenthood hadn’t eroded her songwriting skills. “I felt such huge relief that it hadn’t changed that channel at all; I felt like the cat that got the cream.” After she had finished the album, she recorded it in a studio that she set up in the living room.

Marling feels her own beatific experience of motherhood is underrepresented. She found pregnancy itself “very painfully heteronormative – and I never use words like that, can I just say. But I was like: ‘Wow, there is no getting away from tits and ass,’ whereas that was never my pronounced feature!” But her new life with her daughter was unmitigated joy, and she struggled to find “anyone [saying]: I’m so happy that this has changed my life in this way.” Patterns in Repeat does just that, sometimes extremely literally. The closing track features the couplet: “I want you to know that I gave it up willingly / Nothing real was lost in the bringing of you to me.” On opener Child of Mine – a lush hymn to the cosmic joys and terrors of the mother-child bond – she vows she is “not gonna miss” a single moment of her daughter’s life. She is not wrong about her talents remaining intact; Child of Mine is the most beautiful thing she has ever written”.

For all her newfound focus on motherhood, there is the small issue of family finances. Marling admits that “touring was the biggest way I made money, and I do need to keep making money.” To that end, she is wooing subscribers to her Substack newsletter, also titled Patterns in Repeat, a series of richly referential, characteristically thoughtful essays on her life and the art of songwriting: “I’ve been doing it for nearly 20 years, and I’ve got quite a nice little collection of things to say”.

PHOTO CREDIT: Tamsin Topolski

It is interesting what Laura Marling says about her particular experiences of motherhood not really being discussed. I wonder whether there is reluctance from some in music to talk about the highs and lows of motherhood. Whether that is the physical and emotional strain or the unmitigated fulfilment and joy. Of course, women who are new mothers discuss this in their songs. There are beautiful and personal lines written about that bonding and experience. Is there a reluctance from some to talk about the full breadth and depth of motherhood, lest it alienate fans or seem too personal and possibly unrelatable?! I wonder if the industry as a whole is still accommodating to mothers. There is still so much pressure for artists to tour. For many, this is the only way they make money. The realities of being on the road means that many mothers spends days, weeks and even longer away from their children. Laura Marling’s seeming peace with potentially ending her career to dedicate her time to motherhood is commendable. I wonder whether part of that is to do with touring and the near-impossible task of being able to do so in a meaningful way and spend time at home. There are articles like this and this that talk about how to be a touring musician and a mother. There is still this sad realisation that many women coming into music might choose music over motherhood. The grim reality of doing both and how it is hard to do it all. There are so many positives, though. As Laura Marling discussed in that interview with The Guardian. Before that, this interview from last year saw musician Katie Melua and FOH Engineer Bryony October chat about  how they balance life and motherhood on tour. They also discussed reasons why bringing a child on tour is a realistic option more productions could look into:

“I can’t justify encouraging young women to consider a career in the live music industry without addressing the fact that having a child could effectively end your career,” began Bryony October, FOH Engineer for Ward Thomas and Katie Melua. The latter artist was currently sitting next to October nodding along profusely in the grand setting of Birmingham’s Symphony Hall – hours before doors opened to punters keen to hear some of the singer-songwriter’s latest material, along with hits from Nine Million Bicycles and The Closest Thing to Crazy. At a cursory glance, as the crew set about putting the final pieces in place, this tour seemed much like most others. However, a closer look at the bus passenger lists reveals this tour is travelling with two people under the age of three.

For Melua’s latest outing, the singer-songwriter had opted to bring her seven-month old son, Sandro, out on the road with her, taking inspiration from her long-serving FOH Engineer whose young son, Jesse, was also joining the crew on the tour – a decision the two mothers agreed sent a strong message to the wider touring industry.

Long-time readers may remember that October and her partner, Jake Vernum, spoke to TPi almost a year ago about the struggles of being new parents while both still working in the live events industry [see TPi #268]. During that time, October explained how she had brought her son out on the road with her, sometimes with Vernum coming along to handle parental duties and also recruiting her mother to take on childcare duties.

Both during that interview and again when TPi spoke to October in Birmingham, she explained how she felt that having a child was career suicide, as an extended break from the road would mean that clients new and old would simply stop calling.

“I’ve had nothing but positive feedback since that article last year. People seemed delighted and surprised that this was happening as it was a concept that was seemingly impossible for the crew at least. I feel I’ve given women a bit of hope that having a child doesn’t have to be a career ender,” reported October.

“Bryony has been a huge inspiration for me to take the leap into motherhood,” explained Melua. “Admittedly, many of my close friends are either full-time mothers or successful businesswomen who have nannies helping them raise their children. I didn’t know any mothers who toured, so when I saw what Bryony was doing it, it made me feel like I could as well. There really hasn’t been any major differences in terms of logistics on this tour – it just required good communication with the entire team and a choice of which bus to go on.”

The tour featured a family and a crew bus with the crew split between the two. “If any of the band or crew want some peace, they had a choice to go on the other bus, although we have found the family bus is actually a lot quieter,” laughed Melua. “Last summer when Jesse was out with us, we only had one bus, which we kept segregated with Jesse and his carer using the family lounge at the back”.

If some artists are able to balance motherhood and touring, many others find that they have to make a difficult choice. Many women might consider not having children because their careers will suffer. I wonder whether there is enough support for women in music who have children. For women in general. Think about women who work in professional studios and those right throughout the industry. Fewer opportunities to begin with, they also find that their careers will be affected massively if they have children when in a job. Maybe Laura Marling is in a position where she can financially and personally afford to take steps back. Others are not so fortunate. It does call into question whether the industry is accommodation of and supportive towards women. It still very much seems geared towards men. What does come out of motherhood is the experiences and fulfilment. This can either feed directly into the music and lead to the most astonishing and satisfying songs of an artist’s life. Also, there is something that goes deeper than many other songs. A viewpoint and dynamic that many of us are either unfamiliar with or can never experience. A potent, moving and very personal paen that can also resonate with many other people. We will hear this on Laura Marling’s new album, Patterns in Repeat. Again, I wonder if there is this encouragement of new mothers very much being honest, open and broad about their experiences of motherhood.

From the almost unheard of toughness and struggles through to how it can be so nourishing, enriching and life-changing. Few artists maybe going to those lengths. It is a shame. I hope that Laura Marling’s words and music will inspire others. That there is more examination of motherhood and its wonders. If motherhood can very much ignite songwriting juices and elevate a career, there is still that struggle for mothers on tour. It can be very hard for new mothers to have a professional career life they did before children. Not able to do the same tour dates and travel as far. Maybe having to take a baby on the road and find compromises. Maybe some can take to platforms like TikTok to compensate for less touring or make revenue. It is not ideal. Many women might not want to. Others might feel comfortable. It is a shame. What should be a very positive and incredible experience – new motherhood – might mean a lot more sacrifice. More than any other career. There is the other side to the page. The motivation for so many incredible new songs. A whole new perspective. It would be great if there was a way where new mothers in music could have more support. Not having to decide whether they want a career or motherhood. It is unacceptable. How can things change?! The industry recognising how important motherhood is to artists. How it is essential that women can still enjoy their careers and be supported. That stories about motherhood and its beatific benefits are highlighted and encouraged. A wider range of voices on the subject. The industry does need to get behind women and help lessen that burden or having to either wind down their career or balance things. Laura Marling’s word hit me and made me think more widely about women in music and motherhood. A subject that should be talked about…

A lot more.

FEATURE: The Men I Love: Kate Bush’s Feminism, Attitude Towards Men and Positivity

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The Men I Love

PHOTO CREDIT: Trevor Leighton

Kate Bush’s Feminism, Attitude Towards Men and Positivity

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I am going to discuss this more…

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush at the launch of Never for Ever in 1980/PHOTO CREDIT: Getty Images

in an upcoming feature about when Kate Bush met Del Palmer. Their relationship. For this feature, I am reminded of how Kate Bush’s attitudes towards men and relationship with feminism is very different to so many other artists. In a modern sense, few could call Kate Bush overtly feminism. She hardly discussed the importance of women in music and name-checked other female artists who she was inspired by. In fact, the vast majority of artists Kate Bush was influenced by growing up were men. Nearly every musician and singer she worked with were men. That slightly changed by the time she got to 1989’s The Sensual World. When you think about all the people Bush has worked alongside, it is a vastly male landscape. One might think this that she is not an artist who could be considered a feminist. Perhaps not giving opportunities to women like she should. Although she has employed women for The Tour of Life and Before the Dawn, listen to her albums, and there are not many female voices – both vocally and musically. In the 1970s, when Bush was starting out, it was a post-feminist world. She rarely discussed her music and recording with her boyfriends. Whether it was as not to threaten their masculinity – that she was perhaps more successful and acclaimed – or they would be too demanding of her time. Indeed, as Graeme Thomson wrote in Under the Ivy: The Life & Music of Kate Bush, whilst friends around Kate Bush were getting married and settling, Bush’s steely single-minded focus on music and her career was perhaps very different to what was expected of women at the time. If the lack of women in her music collection, interview quotes and personnel suggested someone who was against her own gender and was not a feminist, the way Bush approached her career and ordered her priorities suggests a different kind of feminism. Someone who was, without knowing, inspiring other female artists. In a male-dominated scene, Bush was keen to prove herself and not be told what to do. That strength and maturity stood her own and defined her career.

Maybe a whole strand and discussion I cannot do justice to here, think of the women in music who cite Kate Bush as an influence. How they approach their careers. If you look at feminist artists of today, Bush might not compere or seem to relate. She was not vocal about other women too much or especially keen to work alongside them for the most part. It wasn’t all that unusual through the 1970s and 1980s. It was a very male-dominated environment. Most of the session musicians and producers were men. There was so much misogyny and sexism in the media. Hard for women to really be taken seriously. Maybe not instinctive or natural for female artists to work with other women unless they were in a band. Most of the successful female artists of the 1970s and 1980s worked mostly with men. In some respects, maybe things have not moved on too far. One of the reasons why I wanted to write this feature was to explore a side of Bush’s personality and music that actually make her music empowering and feminist in a way that is not shouted, accusatory, political, sloganeering or conventional. Rather, it is Bush’s approach to men. I can’t really think of a song in her catalogue where she is angry at men or slams them. Few other female artists can claim that there are no examples of anger and backlash against men. Men cannot really claim that either. Kate Bush’s approach to men has been one of admiration, curiosity and desire. Respecting their child-like quality without patronising and endorsing any kind of immaturity, nasty side or sexism coming from men. Finding the good and positive sides. I think that has made a huge impression. Not only on the listeners, but also for women coming through who were intrigued and compelled by Bush’s music. From The Man with the Child in His Eyes - recorded in 1975 - through to some of her later work, she has always had this patience and respect for men.

Can you really connect this unusually positive approach to men with feminism? Maybe some people raised eyebrows listening to her songs. The way she was quite open and forward about her desire for the male form. For their bodies and minds. Not someone who felt the need to be bashful and prudish. She argued why anything was wrong with thinking and feeling this way. Again, today, some might feel that this is not feminist. I appreciate how women feeling independent, empowered and accepted is crucial. This often means a certain autonomy and distance from men and their control. Kate Bush has never been soft, submissive or second to anyone. Her strength and sense of passion and pride means that she has always been able to balance healthy personal and professional relationships. Someone who had a lot of respect and affection for men, though never at the expense of her career and space. This is all reflected in her music. No sense of bitterness, feeling trapped and heartbroken. Even after she broke with Del Palmer, songs from around that time were sad and regretful and never angered and blame-shifting. There was this mature sense of reflection, strength and understanding. One could look at the very healthy relationship her parents had. The love and unending support she got from them. Even if she grew up in a comfortable environment, she would have known people who were in far less stables homes. Parents separating or fighting. A time when there was a lot of domestic violence and huge misogyny in society and behind closed doors. With two older brothers who were very caring and inspiring in terms of poetry, music and, to add, supportive of everything their sister did, this all moulded how she considered male companionship and relationship.

Having David Gilmour as a mentor. Another strong male role model, his passion, faith and support also affected and influenced how she viewed men. There is a lot more to discuss on this matter. Almost this unique and unflinching positivity towards men. When so many of her peers react to heartache or struggles in relationship with harsher words and sentiment – a natural reaction and mindset for any songwriter of any gender -, Kate Bush has always remained respectful and curious. More compelled to get beneath the skin and inside the mind of her male lovers, friends and inspirations. Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God) was literally her asking for men and women to swap places to they could better understand one another. It remains her defining song. Is it important to think of Kate Bush as a femninist? Even if, at a very early stage of her career, she provided an unwise and naïve quote about what a feminist was (I think she thought they were butch, hairy-legged and unwomanly), that is not to say Bush is anti-feminist. Her feminism and strength comes from the way she has forged this career on her own terms. How she has influenced generations and, to this day, remains one of the most distinctly brilliant and pioneering songwriters and producers. The way she worked alongside men but was calling the shots. In relationships but not beholden to them or relying on the men she was with. At all times she was fascinated and moved by them. This wisdom and love through her lyrics that spanned decades. If that stems all the way from her childhood or a conscious decision she made early in her career to have this attitude towards men, there is no doubting how it makes her music come across. Would she be as popular and unique if her songs were similar to her female peers?! If she wrote break-up tracks or was vengeful or angered?! These types of lyrics are perfectly fine and are part of modern feminist artists’ work. There is something about Kate Bush and her approach to men that marks her out. Individually, how she was blazing a trail for other women at times when the scene was focused towards men. Where women were belittled, marginalised and seen as vastly inferior (to men). This all goes to show and highlight that Kate Bush is…

AN awe-inspiring woman.

FEATURE: Heaven: Talking Heads’ Fear of Music at Forty-Five

FEATURE:

 

 

Heaven

Talking Heads’ Fear of Music at Forty-Five

_________

MAYBE the finest album…

PHOTO CREDIT: United Archives/Getty Images

from Talking Heads, Fear of Music turns forty-five on 3rd August. Recorded at locations in New York City during April and May 1979, it was produced by Brian Eno and Talking Heads. If someone asked me where to start with Talking Heads, I would recommend Fear of Music. Alongside well-known songs like Life During Wartime, I Zimbra, and Cities, there are great under-heard songs like Air, Heaven and Drugs. There is competition when it comes to the ultimate Talking Heads album, Maybe their debut, Talking Heads: 77, 1980’s Remain in Light or 1983’s Speaking in Tongues. I think that Remain in Light is their peak, though it is great to have conversation and discussion about this. As it turns forty-five very soon, I wanted to bring in a few articles about this incredible release. Prior to getting to some reviews, a couple of interesting features give us an insight into a masterful work from a legendary band. In 2019, Albumism dived into and explored Fear of Music:

“Made up of David Byrne (lead vocals, guitar), Tina Weymouth (bass), Chris Frantz (drums), and Jerry Harrison (keyboards and guitar), Talking Heads were a tried and true New York art-rock band. Spawned when three of its members met while attending the Rhode Island School of Design, the group made its bones playing in the punk and rock clubs of Manhattan during the mid to late ’70s.

The band had released the critically acclaimed Talking Heads: 77 (1977) and More Songs About Buildings and Food (1978) before beginning to draw some nationwide attention. After performing a cover of Al Green’s “Take Me to the River” on American Bandstand, people really started to take notice. And so the group reacted in the most peculiar way possible, recording and releasing Fear of Music, their third album, 40 years ago.

Fear of Music is an enigmatic album. The lyrics can seem to defy interpretation. Sometimes they are bellowed in thick, affected accents. Occasionally they are literally gibberish. Reading through the lyrics to some of the songs, it’s never quite clear whether or not Byrne is fucking with us. Like, did he really record a serious-minded song warning about the effects of air on human life? And not pollution, but, like, actual air?

Musically, Fear of Music is alternately busy, harsh, chaotic, mechanical, and occasionally stripped down. Both Byrne and famed producer Brian Eno, who had begun working with the group during the recording of their second album, utilized a whole host of studio wizardry to transform the group’s art-rock stylings into something almost unrecognizable

Fear of Music is a tough nut to crack, and much more talented writers than myself have spent thousands of words trying to decipher it. In 2012, famed author Jonathan Lethem wrote an entry in the 33 1/3 book series about the album. Unlike other entries in the 33 1/3 series, there were no interviews with the members of the band or others involved in the recording process or “making of” anecdotes from inside the recording studio. Instead, the book documents Lethem’s obsession with the group and Fear of Music as a whole, attempting to analyze the album and discuss its significance to Talking Heads’ legacy, as well as his deep and personal relationship to the long player, as it was integral to his musical development. Lethem later admitted in interviews that the album was “a really slippery subject” and just as inscrutable to him when the book was written as when it was originally released.

While I certainly love Fear of Music, I don’t share the same four-decade attachment to it. It came out when I was four years old, and I discovered it about 20 years ago when I began to really delve into the band’s discography. I appreciate it for being not only one of the group’s strangest albums, but also one that served as the bridge between their punk and avant-garde days into their attempts to expand their musical influences.

One such example of the group branching out musically is the album-opening “I Zimbra,” an amalgam of afro-beat and disco. It’s Fela Kuti as filtered through CBGBs filtered through NYU. Or in the reverse order. In a move that represents both the Talking Heads of this period and Fear of Music overall, Byrne, Eno, and the band chant phrases from “Gadji beri bimba,” a poem by Dadaist Hugo Ball.

It terms of subject matter and themes, when they can be discerned, Talking Heads seem to be concerned with exploring different facets of city life and the fear present in these environs. Byrne sings about the overt and beneath-the-surface difficulties that denizens of urban centers face, from existential dread to seemingly mundane minutiae. Many of the song titles seem purposefully bland, (“Paper,” “Heaven,” “Air,” “Electric Guitar,” etc.), allowing Byrne to deal with the topics in either a straightforward or, more often, abstract manner.

“Mind” is one of the album’s early highlights, a rock jam where Byrne vents his frustration with someone who appears completely resistant to change. It features the best guitar work on the album, especially the itchy, echoing main riff. “Cities” plows headlong at a madcap pace, guitars and keyboard charging with reckless abandon. The lyrics seem like a stream of thought on Byrne’s part, vacillating between prosaic and ridiculous. But even as he contemplates the benefits and costs of living in the city, lyrics like, “But it all works out, sometimes I'm a little freaked out” reflects the feelings of uneasiness that many can feel living in the city.

“Life During Wartime” is one of the best-known entries on Fear of Music. One of the group’s concert performance staples, the version that appears on the Stop Making Sense (1985) live album is already one of their most acclaimed recordings. The original version doesn’t have the same intensely frenetic energy, but it’s still an arresting piece of songwriting.

The song is a first person account of the rigorous life of a Weatherman-inspired revolutionary, attempting to scrape by on an austere existence in the heart of NYC. Subsisting on peanut-butter sandwiches and living without any of the basic luxuries (no headphones or record players allowed), he coordinates with his comrades as they attempt to blend in with the city’s population, while planning and instigating civil insurrection. Lyrics like ”I got three passports, a couple of visas, you don't even know my real name” and “I changed my hairstyle so many times now, I don't know what I look like” are integral in making it seem real and immediate.

“Animals” is another of the aforementioned “This is a joke, right?” songs on Fear of Music. The song is outright belligerent, with Byrne railing against the untrustworthiness of… animals? “I know the animals are laughing at us / Don't even know what a joke is / I won't follow animals' advice / I don't care if they're laughing at us,” he barks over a driving guitar riff. I’m sure there’s some subtext that I’m missing here, but in the meantime, I can’t make heads or tails of it.

IN THIS PHOTO: David Byrne/PHOTO CREDIT: Chris Walter/WireImage

But overall, Fear of Music is at its best when Talking Heads get overtly weird. The creepiness of “Memories Can’t Wait” lends to its awesomeness. Byrne’s vocals are heavily laden with effects as he sings over a menacing guitar riff, as he explores the thought process of someone trapped by his own memories, unable to rest, due to his owns regrets on how he’s lived his life.

“Drugs” is Fear of Music’s true masterpiece in experimental rock and ambient music, with Byrne and Eno taking the song “Electricity,” a staple of their live performances, and turning it into something that’s both minimalist and complex. The story goes that Byrne and Eno worked separately, cobbling together disparate pieces into a darkly psychedelic piece that sonically approximates the feeling of taking drugs. Chimes appear frequently, with other odd elements being incorporated into the piece, such as frogs croaking and disembodied vocals. It’s a fittingly disquieted coda to a truly peculiar piece of work”.

In 2021, Guitar.com saluted the genius of Fear of Music.  An absurdist masterstroke, they also spotlighted the “jarring and impulsive role” guitars plays through the album. I have found a new appreciation for Fear of Music after researching it. I hope there is a lot of celebration and new words written about it ahead of its forty-fifth anniversary on 3rd August:

“Never listen to electric guitar” commands a typically unbalanced David Byrne on Fear of Music’s penultimate cut, aptly dubbed Electric Guitar. With any other band, you’d likely expect that a track titled after this most cherished of instruments would foreground it prominently – a flashy lead break here, pummelling chords there. But Talking Heads were not like other bands. And, Fear of Music is quite unlike any other album. In fact, the closest Electric Guitar comes to such a moment is probably a skittish, minuscule riff that darts away from the songs’ taut chorus in abject terror. Strident stadium rock, this was not.

This is Fear of Music, Talking Heads’ third album, and their second (of three) that they would make in collaboration with Brian Eno. Across its eleven tracks, the interplay of the band’s instruments with each other and Eno’s synthetic froth is explored, leading to some of the band’s most arresting songs, wherein the conventional mechanics of a post-punk band are upturned, dissected and re-organised. The wonderful results encompass a spectrum of often warring tones, textures and moods.Ghosts in a lot of houses

Though Fear of Music would be the second part of a trilogy of Eno-collaborations (culminating in the venerated polyrhythms of Remain in Light), this wasn’t at all the initial plan. Though sessions for the new record initially took cues from the Eno’s often chopped-up working methods, the man himself would only be called back into service after a creative roadblock was hit.

Putting aside some early ideas to pursue a more disco-oriented direction, Talking Heads decided to get back to basics, setting up live in Frantz and Weymouth’s loft – their former practice space. “We came into our loft, we set our instruments up. We then did something we’d never done before, we brainstormed, or we jammed.” Weymouth told The South Bank Show in 1979, when explaining the Fear of Music writing process. “Half the time it was awful, But then all these little interesting things would happen and that would get recorded on tape, and David would take it home. He’d pick out the parts that went along with his lyrical ideas.”

But, without the guiding hand of Eno, the group faltered. A quick phone call later, and the synth sage delightedly returned to co-produce the record. Before long, the sketchy, half-formed ideas began to find their footing, as Eno encouraged even more loose-form songwriting. Guitarists Jerry Harrison and David Byrne worked tightly together, making sure their respective melodic and riff figures combined, or – more interestingly – didn’t.

Byrne recalled in his superb book, How Music Works, that, from the outset of their working relationship, Eno had suggested the band play totally live in the studio, “Without all of the typical sonic isolation. His semi-blasphemous idea seemed worth a try, despite the risk of it resulting in a muddy recording. Removing all that isolating stuff was like being able to breathe again. The result sounded – surprise! – more like us.” Further impediments to band harmony were removed further as the new album got underway, and studio recording equipment was largely kept outside within a pair of mobile recording studio vans. These vans were unobtrusively parked outside and wires were carefully threaded through the building and windows so they could capture the sound from the loft.

Putting aside some early ideas to pursue a more disco-oriented direction, Talking Heads decided to get back to basics, setting up live in Frantz and Weymouth’s loft – their former practice space. “We came into our loft, we set our instruments up. We then did something we’d never done before, we brainstormed, or we jammed.” Weymouth told The South Bank Show in 1979, when explaining the Fear of Music writing process. “Half the time it was awful, But then all these little interesting things would happen and that would get recorded on tape, and David would take it home. He’d pick out the parts that went along with his lyrical ideas.”

But, without the guiding hand of Eno, the group faltered. A quick phone call later, and the synth sage delightedly returned to co-produce the record. Before long, the sketchy, half-formed ideas began to find their footing, as Eno encouraged even more loose-form songwriting. Guitarists Jerry Harrison and David Byrne worked tightly together, making sure their respective melodic and riff figures combined, or – more interestingly – didn’t.

Byrne recalled in his superb book, How Music Works, that, from the outset of their working relationship, Eno had suggested the band play totally live in the studio, “Without all of the typical sonic isolation. His semi-blasphemous idea seemed worth a try, despite the risk of it resulting in a muddy recording. Removing all that isolating stuff was like being able to breathe again. The result sounded – surprise! – more like us.” Further impediments to band harmony were removed further as the new album got underway, and studio recording equipment was largely kept outside within a pair of mobile recording studio vans. These vans were unobtrusively parked outside and wires were carefully threaded through the building and windows so they could capture the sound from the loft.

That ain’t allowed

Byrne was growing into a masterful rhythm guitar player by this point, as evidenced by the flurried chords underpinning the verse of Air, the tense muted chug of Animals and the almost Chic-like slick funk that circles the congas of I Zimbra. Meanwhile, Harrison was keen to accentuate the guitar landscape with laddering riffs and subtle arpeggiations. The eastern sounding riff which surges with an electricity between the lurching F and G chords that open Paper is a notable example of the pair’s approaches working harmoniously in tandem. Byrne’s funk guitar playing would only strengthen as the years passed, leading engineer Eric Thorngreen to eventually describe him as “One of the best rhythm guitar players who ever lived.” (Sound on Sound).

Though exact details around the precise gear that was used on the album is hard to verify, tone was most likely provided by a pair

Byrne was growing into a masterful rhythm guitar player by this point, as evidenced by the flurried chords underpinning the verse of Air, the tense muted chug of Animals and the almost Chic-like slick funk that circles the congas of I Zimbra. Meanwhile, Harrison was keen to accentuate the guitar landscape with laddering riffs and subtle arpeggiations. The eastern sounding riff which surges with an electricity between the lurching F and G chords that open Paper is a notable example of the pair’s approaches working harmoniously in tandem. Byrne’s funk guitar playing would only strengthen as the years passed, leading engineer Eric Thorngreen to eventually describe him as “One of the best rhythm guitar players who ever lived.” (Sound on Sound).

Though exact details around the precise gear that was used on the album is hard to verify, tone was most likely provided by a pair of Fender Twin Reverb amps, and Byrne was rarely seen without one of his two identical ‘63 sunburst Fender Stratocasters at the time. His tight Strat tone is unmistakable on tracks such as the bouncy Life During Wartime – the record’s first single, and perhaps the most ‘conventional’ sounding track on the record. At least from an instrumental point of view. Its bluesy double-stopping riff in A minor, tightrope-walks back and forth across Frantz and Weymouth’s robust groove. On the track, Byrne also paints one of the album’s most visceral lyrical landscapes – lyrically depicting a future wherein a revolutionary character keeps his head down within a violent dystopia.

Memories Can Wait

Upon release, on 3rd August 1979, Fear of Music was immediately recognised as being both a darkly hued, unsettling record as well as something quite special indeed by critics, and a notable evolution of the band’s musical universe. Despite critical adulation, this “brilliantly disorienting” (Rolling Stone) album failed to break significant commercial ground on either side of the Atlantic, though time has rightly shone more light on the album’s importance not just in the unfolding narrative of its creators, but to the broader progress of pop as the 1970s reached a downbeat climax.

Though the band’s third collaboration, Remain In Light is often held as the band’s singular greatest recorded achievement, it’s here amid the tense, paranoid musical landscapes of Fear of Music where the most balanced combination of the ‘Heads’ propulsive, wiry energy and Eno’s near-academic, investigative creative ethos is heard. As Simon Reynolds perfectly summed up in Rip it Up and Start Again, “Fear of Music represented the Eno/Talking Heads collaboration at its most mutually fruitful and equitable. His role encompassed being a kind of fifth player and an editor who spotted ‘little playing ideas that might have been accidents, or accidents of interaction’ that the band might otherwise have missed.”

On Fear of Music, you can hear a band adjusting themselves from being just four members of an oddball post-punk guitar band, into an expansive and multifarious musical vehicle. Diversifying their instrumental flavours, dabbling with complicated syncopation and taking their sharp instrumental textures in unconventional directions, Fear of Music marked a perfect bridge between what the band were, and what they would become. It remains, even on its own terms, a bewitching listen”.

I am going to end with a couple of reviews for Fear of Music. Undeniably one of the best albums of the 1970s, it was the start of a remarkable trilogy of albums from Talking Heads. This is what AllMusic noted about the third studio album from David Byrne, Jerry Harrison, Tina Weymouth and Chris Frantz:

“By titling their third album Fear of Music and opening it with the African rhythmic experiment "I Zimbra," complete with nonsense lyrics by poet Hugo Ball, Talking Heads make the record seem more of a departure than it is. Though Fear of Music is musically distinct from its predecessors, it's mostly because of the use of minor keys that give the music a more ominous sound. Previously, David Byrne's offbeat observations had been set off by an overtly humorous tone; on Fear of Music, he is still odd, but no longer so funny. At the same time, however, the music has become even more compelling. Worked up from jams (though Byrne received sole songwriter's credit), the music is becoming denser and more driving, notably on the album's standout track, "Life During Wartime," with lyrics that match the music's power. "This ain't no party," declares Byrne, "this ain't no disco, this ain't no fooling around." The other key song, "Heaven," extends the dismissal Byrne had expressed for the U.S. in "The Big Country" to paradise itself: "Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens." It's also the album's most melodic song. Those are the highlights. What keeps Fear of Music from being as impressive an album as Talking Heads' first two is that much of it seems to repeat those earlier efforts, while the few newer elements seem so risky and exciting. It's an uneven, transitional album, though its better songs are as good as any Talking Heads ever did”.

I am going to end up with a review from Pitchfork. Discussing the album in 2020, they wrote how Fear of Music took Talking Heads from New York Art Punks to a spectacular Pop Group. For anyone who has never heard Fear of Music, I would advise that you seek it out. It is a phenomenal listening experience that demands repeated spins:

“Fear of Music can be read, in part, as an attempt to throw buckets of conceptual cold water on everything that had made the Talking Heads beloved, or to at least submit it to rigorous forensic testing. They experimented with their songwriting process; instead of working from Byrne’s compositions, they entered the studio cold, jamming together until the shape of something promising emerged. As they did on More Songs About Buildings and Food, they enlisted Brian Eno as producer, but this time Eno played a much bigger role: It was Eno who suggested a Table of Contents approach to the tracklist, which turned the song titles into a litany of proper nouns, and it was he who furnished the Hugo Ball poem for inspiration when Byrne was struggling with writer’s block.

As a band of former design students, the Talking Heads thought harder than most about presentation, about the telling power of surfaces. On Fear of Music, they repeatedly drew attention away from the picture to gesture at the frame: The radio announcement for the album was a simple, stilted intonation—“Talking Heads have a new album/It’s called Fear of Music”—repeated over and over. The album cover was a black obelisk, alternately bumpy and smooth but admitting no light and emitting no clues. There was a song called “Electric Guitar,” and the refrain, as the electric guitars gnashed their teeth in every available space, was “Never listen to electric guitar.” The bittersweet futility of this command neatly encapsulated a band that was a tangle of conflicting impulses in 1979. They shunned every method that had worked for them before, attempting perhaps to become a different version of themselves, and yet they only purified their essence. In jettisoning old methods and throwing themselves into new ones, they embraced the only true underlying force of their music: relentless interrogation.

The album plays out like a series of mini-stand up routines about the absurdity, or the pointlessness, of human observation. Each song contains at least one declaration of seeming authority (“Hold on, because it’s been taken care of”; “Find myself a city to live in”), which Byrne goes on to repeat with increasing mania and decreasing confidence. As the music subdivides itself into a million tiny repeating phrases, you feel a grasping mind trying and failing to find purchase.

“Everything seems to be up in the air at this time," Byrne observed mildly on “Mind,” with deadpan irony. On Fear of Music, he became our metaphysical straight man, able to defamiliarize the world, object by object, with his through-a-telescope gaze and his curious tone. He describes his “Mind” like some peculiar object that has crash-landed in his living room. “Drugs won’t change you/Religion won’t change you/What’s the matter with you?/I haven’t got the faintest idea,” Byrne mutters. Imagine a multi-tentacled alien attempting to put on a pair of pants; this was Byrne trying to make sense of reality.

The scratching sound on “Cities” mimic pencils blackening every inch of a paper’s free space, and the keyboards, the vocals, strike with the force of a typewriter hammer smacking paper. This was writing and thinking as a percussive act, each note a small panicked violence on reality, the force and insistence belying the foreknowledge that all this would disappear eventually. Cities would fall to war, the good times would end, were always ending—if Byrne wasn’t going to break his bug-eyed poker face to spell all this out to you, Jerry Harrison’s guitars and keyboards were going to scream it. The guitar that intrudes at the end of “Mind” is like a pained groan, begging Byrne to shut up. The ratcheting sound ringing throughout “Cities” sounds like a scythe trying to sever the talking head from its body, once and for all.

At the center of Fear of Music is “Life During Wartime,” inarguably one of their five most iconic songs. The lyrics ratchet paranoia all the way to the top: We open with a van loaded with weapons, rumored but not seen, and a gravesite “where nobody knows.” A triumph consists of finding some peanut butter to last you “a couple of days.” Everything else—records to play, letters to write, identity crises to have (“I’ve changed my hairstyle so many times now…”) is just quaint, a reminder of better times when we were allowed to be miserable for our own little reasons. Significantly, it’s the calmest that Byrne had ever sounded on record to that point—all the quavers in that reedy voice were suddenly smoothed out. The panic is always in the anticipation; when the disaster hits, we’re oddly calm. “The sound of gunfire, off in the distance/I’m getting used to it now.” I’m getting used to it now—is there any proclamation of success bleaker?

The song, and Byrne’s vocal performance, offered a premonition of the shellacked hair and hard angles of his big-suit, early-’80s Stop Making Sense era, which would begin in earnest with 1980’s masterpiece Remain in Light. There was an incipient pitilessness to the American air; the country had just elected Reagan. New York City was a pyre of burning tenements and a city teetering on the brink of financial ruin. When chaos descends, talk is the first thing deemed cheap. So Byrne burned his notebooks, as the lyrics went, and all that was left was the burning in his chest that kept him alive. Civilization is a privilege; anxiety is a privilege; worrying about paper and minds and dogs and drugs are privileges, and they might constitute the best and sweetest moments of your life. That’s the joke, that’s both the setup and the punchline: You think you’re miserable now? This misery is the good part.

And that would be the epigraph of Fear of Music if it weren’t for “Heaven.” It’s a song that Byrne almost didn’t write, based on a melody he nearly threw away. Eno heard Byrne humming it to himself and drew the song out of him, like a forced confession. The band in heaven plays your favorite song, plays it all night long. It’s a place where nothing ever happens; everyone leaves the party at the same time, and every kiss begins again exactly the same. The song is a prayer for order, a cessation of observation. When the act of observation, which grants us our humanity and fuels our neurosis, falls away—what’s left? Pure experience, untouched by anything else. “There’s a party in my mind, and I hope it never stops,” Byrne says on “Memories Can’t Wait.” Maybe the best moment happens when everyone leaves”.

On 3rd August, we mark forty-five years of Talking Heads’ Fear of Music. It is not only one of the best albums Talking Heads released. It is among the greatest albums ever released. To be fair, Talking Heads released five incredible albums in a row. Their debut, Talking Heads: 77, into More Songs About Buildings and Food. Fear of Music was an evolution and new step up that kept this golden streak going. With Brian Eno as producer, Remain in Light was another masterpiece. There then came Speaking in Tongues (which the band produced themselves). Although 1985’s Little Creatures was a slight dip in quality, it was still another acclaimed release. To many, Fear of Music remains the pinnacle of Talking Heads’ creative output. There is stiff competition. However you feel, one cannot deny the fact Fear of Music deserves new respect and investigation ahead of its forty-fifth anniversary. All these years later, it remains…

A true masterpiece.

FEATURE: Oblique Strategies: Eno: Reinventing and Reframing the Possibilities of the Music Documentary

FEATURE:

 

 

Oblique Strategies

Eno: Reinventing and Reframing the Possibilities of the Music Documentary

_________

AS someone not fully aware of…

Brian Eno’s brilliance and incredible career, I have done a lot of looking back and catching up. There is a lot of new focus about his work and brilliance through the documentary, Eno. I am going to come to a couple of reviews for it in a minute. I think that music documentaries are a hard thing to get right. One of the big issues is keeping the length down. Able to make something both concise and authoritative. Having it be balanced and engaging to new fans and long-serving alike. It is almost an impossible task for any filmmaker to make a music documentary that pleases everyone and can fit everything else in. That is why Eno interests me. Perhaps it is the other end of the spectrum. In the sense that its innovation means no two viewings of the documentary are the same. It means that so many hours of audio and footage can be included so that you do not have to restrict yourself to one single narrative and piece. Here are some more details about Eno:

“Brian Eno is the subject of a new career spanning documentary that is uniquely generative: a film that’s different every time it’s screened. Compiled from hundreds of hours of video footage, music and interviews, the film explores Eno’s music, art and ideas, giving the viewer personal insights into his creative processes.

Accompanying this groundbreaking new film is a soundtrack that serves as a companion audio journey touching on Eno’s output throughout his rich career. The 17 tracks included on the album feature work from early solo outings such as 1974’s ‘Taking Tiger Mountain’ and 75’s ‘Another Green World’, acclaimed collaborations with the likes of David Byrne, John Cale, Cluster and more recently, Fred again… all the way through to music from his latest album, ‘FOREVERANDEVERNOMORE’, and his 2021 appearance at the Acropolis in Athens with brother, Roger”.

IN THIS PHOTO: On 11th July, Brian Eno spoke to Lauren Laverne on BBC Radio 6 Music about Eno/PHOTO CREDIT: BBC

I will get to a couple of reviews for Eno before moving on. In their five-star write-up, The Guardian stated how it is quite hard to review the documentary. With every viewing being different, you can only really give your account of events. It won’t apply wholly to anyone else who watches Eno. It is a fascinating project none the less. Something that has not really been done before:

“How do you capture the mercurial character, the elastic creativity and the prolific and endlessly inventive output of an artist such as Brian Eno – member of Roxy Music, producer of David Bowie and others, musician, activist, artist – in a conventional documentary? The answer, as director Gary Hustwit realised, is that you can’t. The traditional approach of the average music documentary – a dutiful plod through talking-head interviews and archive footage – might pin down a few of the biographical facts of Eno’s life and work, but it could hardly be further removed from its spirit.

And so Hustwit, who first worked with Eno in 2017 when the musician created a score for the film Rams (about the German designer Dieter Rams), decided to think outside the box. The result is an extraordinary work that takes its cue from Eno’s auto-generated musical projects. Using specially developed software (dreamed up in collaboration with creative technologist Brendan Dawes), Hustwit has created an exhilarating and innovative cinematic experience: a generative film that is different every time it screens.

It proves to be a uniquely challenging project to review – the version of the film that I viewed will never be seen again. My iteration, in which David Byrne and Talking Heads featured prominently, was thoughtful and philosophical; I imagine there are far more angular and abrasive possible versions (I would be fascinated to see an incarnation that touched on Eno’s tricky collaboration with Devo, for example). What is particularly striking, however, uniting most critics so far, is how elegantly the film flows; there is a curious, intuitive logic weaving together these randomly chosen scenes and clips. It’s an outstanding achievement”.

There are always restrictions with music documentaries. Truly great ones can fit everything in and give a complete portrait of an artist or music event. I don’t know whether there will be attempts by anyone else to follow from Brian Eno and do something similar. I am interested whether Eno will have an impact on how music documentaries are made and perceived. This is what the BFI said about Eno:

“To tackle a tireless explorer of music as a system of rules and patterns, the American documentarian Gary Hustwit has found an appropriately complex strategy. Not for Brian Eno a by-the-book compilation of archive footage and talking heads (Eno got one of those in 2011, with the epic but conventional Brian Eno: The Man Who Fell to Earth 1971-1977). Instead, Eno is a fascinating honeycomb of interlocking sequences, each tackling a different facet of his artistic methods and philosophy or a moment from his career, and playing in a jumbled order, which can change from day to day or from screening to screening.

Common to many of these particles are warm, unguarded interviews with Eno at his home and studio in Norfolk, where he’s seen layering sounds at his computer and out admiring shrubs in his garden. Indeed, it seems that for him sound-making is a quasi-horticultural pursuit. His interest in generative music derives from his thrill in planting something and watching it grow; in seeing complexity arising out of simplicity. “I like things that don’t look like they’re changing,” he says.

Hustwit’s jigsaw-puzzle pieces include invigorating sequences about Eno’s notebooks, his breakfast habits (or denial of them) and his invention of the ‘oblique strategies’ cards with which he throws haphazard instructions into his artistic projects. Roxy Music, David Bowie and a mixing-desk session with U2 are in the blend too. It doesn’t really matter what order these come in: each of these collaborations are the molecular elements that form a larger pattern of creative endeavour.

From helvetica font (Helvetica, 2007) to the industrial designer Dieter Rams (Rams, 2018), Hustwit has shown a preoccupation with creative systems and processes. His fragmented scheme here brings to mind François Girard’s prismatic look at another mathematically minded artist, Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould (1993) – though the short films are now randomised, like a playlist set to shuffle.

The attempt to create an aleatoric, generative cinema to match Eno’s methods – via bespoke software which Hustwit developed with creative technologist Brendan Dawes – is inspired. If there is a flaw in the conception, it’s in the stubborn limitations of the medium. Watching the sequences in different orders may get the neurons firing off in new directions and making serendipitous connections but the film itself doesn’t grow, can’t grow, in any organic way.

More controllably, the transitions between sequences are accompanied by rows of jumbled letters on screen and a digital scrambling sound: corny and very un-Eno signposts that the thing we’re watching is changing”.

I do like music documentaries, though there always seem to be flaws or drawbacks. What you find is that the filmmaker either does not dive deep enough or things are quite sanitised. You have a picture of that subject that is missing details and truth. The restrictive length of documentaries means it is naturally difficult to create true balance and richness without things being too long. Then you risk it being bloated and people’s attentions wandering. Eno, as I said, is an extreme example of how you can have a documentary that omits nothing and everyone has their own unique experience. This regenerative visual experience is intriguing. In any respect, I do wonder whether we are now in a position where music documentaries can have these limitless possibilities. Or at the very least there are few restrictions. You could make a documentary about, say music of a particular decade or band, and ensure that everyone goes away happy. I like the idea of having different viewing experiences. Maybe not infinite or endless. You could have something slightly different over five or six different versions. I don’t know. Regardless, we have technology that allows us to take documentaries to new places. Eno is proof of that. Whilst some note that this regenerative and new approach to documentaries means we can never get to the core of a subject or feel this sense of completion, it does mean that everyone who sees Eno has their own perspective. That is a wonderful innovation that is so…

EXCITING to see.

FEATURE: The Maths of Music: Exploring and Pondering the More Analytical and Fantastical Side of A Beautiful Artform

FEATURE:

 

 

The Maths of Music

PHOTO CREDIT: mahdi chaghari/Pexels

Exploring and Pondering the More Analytical and Fantastical Side of A Beautiful Artform

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I have been thinking about…

IN THIS PHOTO: Professor Hannah Fry

how, when we talk about music, we often do so in very personal ways. There is passionate journalism and brilliant discussions. How analytical do we get about this incredible artform? In terms of using numbers, equations and mathematics to look at different sides of music. Some may say that seems quite dry, cold and uninteresting. That is not the case. I have been thinking about Professor Hannah Fry and how she applies numbers and mathematics to subjects from love and life. She appears on Lauren Laverne’s BBC Radio 6 Radio morning show for The Maths of Life. Where she applies probability, statistics and numbers to a range of unusual and fantastic thoughts, subjects and scenarios. It is always revealing and fascinating. I guess The Maths of Life is a natural extension from The Mathematics of Love: Patterns, Proofs, and the Search for the Ultimate Equation. This is Fry’s 2015 book:

“The roller coaster of romance is hard to quantify; defining how lovers might feel from a set of simple equations is impossible. But that doesn’t mean that maths has nothing to offer.

This book pulls back the curtain to reveal the patterns in love that can be explained through maths and offers  up a valuable new perspective on matters of the heart: What’s the chance of us finding love? What’s the chance that it will last? How does online dating work, exactly? When should you settle down? How can you avoid divorce? When is it right to compromise? Can game theory help us decide whether or not to call?”.

Professor Hannah Fry also presented Magic Numbers. This was a multi-part series where she took viewers through the evolution of maths. Thinking about that title and, in musical terms – according to De La Soul – how three is the magic number, it made me think about how Fry can reveal so much about important events, figures and sides of life through mathematics. It is not purely about numbers. However, when even thinking about the number three and how this can apply to so many different things in music. In terms of albums, songs and chart successes.

I am not sure whether it is her area of expertise and passion. I was wondering about music and how there is not a podcast or series where maths is applied to music. In terms of its history, popularity and more unusual sides. I love Fry’s essays for The New Yorker like Why Graphs Are a Matter of Life and Death. Making mathematics and its importance perhaps more accessible. So many people think it is an inaccessible, difficult, one-dimensional or unnecessary subject. How it doesn’t really apply to life and have any significant meaning. Mathematics runs through everything in life. From the everyday to the decisions we make to wider world events, I wonder whether this can be applied to music. I am going to come to that in a second. First, from an interview earlier this year, Professor Hannah Fry spoke about mathematics’ broader appeal and making it more accessible. After their bio (“Hannah Fry is the IMA President for 2024 to 2025. She is a professor in the mathematics of cities at University College London. Hannah is an author and presenter, who hosts numerous podcasts and television shows, including The Curious Cases of Rutherford & Fry, The Secret Genius of Modern Life and Uncharted with Hannah Fry”), there were some interesting discussion points:

“What advice would you give to a mathematician who aspires to communicate their research to a wider audience?
OK, buckle up because I’ve got some tips.

The very first rule of communicating, before you do anything, is that you have to start off with who your audience is. What is it that they want? What is it that they know? And what is it that they’re interested in? If you start off with identifying that, then you can plot a path to where you want to take them.

Almost always when I see communication done, it goes in the opposite direction. It starts off with people saying, ‘This is what I want to tell people.’

Really good communication is not about you. It should never be about you, and it should never start with you. It has to start with the people you’re talking to. And maybe that even starts with listening before talking to find out where people are. I think that’s the absolute number one rule.

The second thing that’s worth saying is that a lot of mathematicians think the public or non-technical people won’t really understand or aren’t really interested in big ideas. I’ve never found that to be the case. I’ve never once found a limit to the level of technical detail that people are interested in finding out. The only limit is their motivation to do so.

Let me see if I can give you an example. During the pandemic I was still recording programmes and so I would get taxis into town. Once when I was in a taxi, I had this really long conversation with the cab driver (who I’d never met before) about exponential functions, logarithmic axes and basically differentiation. Essentially, you know, like the rate of change and the rate of rate of change. We had this really long conversation about it.

Can you imagine me having this conversation with somebody where they’re quizzing me about this stuff in 2019 or even in 2024? It would never happen in a million years, but during Covid a random person asked about logarithmic axes. There was a reason to care so he was motivated to understand, and then actually there was no limit to how much he wanted to know about it.

When you’re trying to communicate technical ideas to people, you have to create a motivation instead of starting with the technical idea. I think that’s really essential. You have to put in the work to get people to commit to listening to you. You have to get their permission. That’s a better way to phrase it. You have to get their permission to talk to them, and that’s something that’s earned, right? Not demanded. I spend a lot of time thinking about how you do that.

Ultimately, I think right at the heart of it, every human is fundamentally the same. We all like surprise, we all like intrigue, we all like mystery, we all like humour and we all like wonder as well. If you can use some of the narrative storytelling tricks that appeal to every single person, then I think that you can very easily dress up technical ideas in a way that doesn’t feel like you’re just giving a boring lecture.

How important do you think the work you do is in broadening the appeal of mathematics?

I hope it makes a difference. It’s really difficult to tell. I do get lots of amazing letters from young people and a lot of families as well. I always joke that my two main audiences are middle-aged men and teenage girls.

When panel show requests come in, I do think about them because I am stepping quite far away from my original intention of something (like documentaries) that is quite a worthy cause – actively changing the perception of this subject, which you and I both know to be so much more, so much deeper, so much more joyful, so much more glorious than the average person thinks it is.

What I decided was that actually you’re not going to change everybody’s mind. Obviously. You’re not going to suddenly make everyone in the country into mathematicians. But I think that if you can just have a positive association with the idea of a mathematician then that in itself can have some positive benefit”.

PHOTO CREDIT: Lum3n/Pexels

Most of the writing we read about music is from a personal perspective. Reviews and interviews. You do get features that look at different subjects and news breaking. How often do we apply subjects like science and mathematics to music? Professor Hannah Fry uses mathematics and applies it to areas of love and life. Whether it is statistics, graphs, data or anything else, it brings to life some fascinating ideas and discussion points. Really quite engrossing, educational and thought-provoking. I have never seen this done with music. Whether it is a mathematical study of decades of music, the number three, the changing nature of love songs – with statistics and graphs to back up some interesting findings -, I would be really fascinated to see a podcast or series where something akin to Professor Hannah Fry’s The Maths of Life/Mathematics of Love applied to a music landscape. I love how she can bring universal and obscure themes, people and subjects to life in real, passionate depth through mathematics. I don’t think we really look at the common and obscure of music in an analytic or scientific way. It is always the same sort of approach discussion and narrative. I am not sure, whether it came to life, who would present such a thing. Exploring music through a more mathematical lens would be engrossing. Changing how we discuss and uncover the full beauty of music is important. Making these discoveries. Reframing assumptions and questioning how we see and perceive music. Going deep and broad. Discovering, what in fact, is…

THE magic number.

FEATURE: Among Angels: Kate Bush: The Divine, Mystical, Spiritual, Philosophical and Mysterious

FEATURE:

 

 

Among Angels

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in a promotional image for 2011’s 50 Words for Snow

Kate Bush: The Divine, Mystical, Spiritual, Philosophical and Mysterious

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I can’t quite recall…

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

when I last covered this subject. I know I have done it before. I have been reading the new issue of Graeme Thomson’s Under the Ivy: The Life and Music of Kate Bush, and I at near the beginning still. One of the sections that caught my eye is when Thomson discusses some of the things Bush writes about. In terms of her subject matter, of course she is influenced a lot by literature and film. From television, there is Wuthering Heights and Delis (Song of Summer). From film, she got inspiration from The Innocents (The Infant Kiss), Night of the Demon (Hounds of Love), La Mariée Était en Noir (The Wedding List), The Red Shoes (The Red Shoes). Even though he claims Get Out of My House was inspired by the Stanley Kubrick film, The Shining, Bush was actually influenced by the original book from Stephen King (she also alludes to Pinocchio in that song too). No matter. The point is that Bush was looking at the screen and page for a lot of guidance. That was not the only area she traversed that was away from the personal and ordinary. One of the most interest corners of her musical palette is the darker, more spiritual and curious side. Whether it Bush talking about mysticism, religion or strange creatures and mythical figures, it is one of the most interesting aspects of her writing. Bush was not raised in an especially strict religious family, though the fact that the Bush household was full of art and conversation meant that, inevitably, so many different ideas and theories would have come into her life. In the sense it wasn’t perhaps the same upbringings many of her peers would have in the 1950s and 1960s. Whether it was various T.V. shows or literature that also opened Kate Bush’s imagination up to what exists beyond the ordinary and tangible, I am not too sure. It was clear that she had a very curious mind.

One could argue that she was born spiritual and curious. That was always the way. Perhaps so. I also think that the art and words she was exposed to contributed. Bush was compelled by the poetry that her brother Jay wrote. Bush wrote poetry in school. Uninspired and a bit trapped by the conventional and rigid structure there, it is only natural that she would have let her mind wander. There are a few examples of the mystical and spiritual coming into her songs pre-The Kick Inside. Those early demos. However, you can really hear it from her debut onwards. Right up until her latest album, 2011’s 50 Words for Snow, you can sense those strange beings and odd spirits. Not just a childhood and teen fascination. On The Kick Inside, aside songs of love and passion, we also hear about topics that many listeners in 1978 might have considered or been exposed. I would say there are three songs that look at the otherworldly, mystical and unconventional in that sense. Strange Phenomena is in part about menstruation. It is also about coincidence. The opening lines, “Soon it will be the phase of the moon/When people tune in” takes us somewhere magical and spiritual. The repeated mantra, “Om mani padme” translates to “praise to the jewel in the lotus” (Padma is the Sanskrit for the Indian lotus (Nelumbo nucifera) and mani for ‘jewel’, as in a type of spiritual ‘jewel’ widely referred to in Buddhism). One can say that Bush’s interest in Buddhism and spiritually might have come from listening to bands like The Beatles. Indian influences perhaps from George Harrison. A lot of the 1960s culture. Peace and love. Perhaps. I think it this vibrant and intellectually keen young woman who was never attracted to the ordinary and conventional. This rebellion defined her entire career.

Think about Wuthering Heights and the fact that it is about the ghost of Catherine Earnshaw trying to grab Heathcliff’s soul away. This figure that appears at Wuthering Heights in the cold and wants to come inside. Bush weas influenced by the 1967 T.V. adaptation of the Emily Brontë novel. I love these images of spirits and the chill of the night. It takes from a very specific and particular part of the book. Rather than it being about the passion of their relationship and the beauty of the Yorkshire Moors, it is haunting and this strange obsessions. Her debut single signalled that here was an artist with a mindset and approach different to anyone else around her! Them Heavy People is perhaps the most overt nod to the philosophical and spiritual. This pursuit of knowledge how it enriched Kate Bush. These teachers and voices whose words and philosophies she absorbed. Consider lines like this: “They open doorways that I thought were shut for good/They read me Gurdjieff and Jesu/They build up my body/Break me emotionally it's nearly killing me/But what a lovely feeling!”. That reference to ‘Heavy’ in the title. Those people who have depth rather than them being oppressive or depressing. They were ‘rolling the ball’ to her. That gift of knowledge that lifted out of teenage confusion and blues. Enlightenment and understanding. People would interpret songs like Them Heavy People and Strange Phenomena and lead their mind to sex or the erotica. I have seen these theories online. Many song on The Kick Inside are about sex, though examples of where she embraces the purer and more spiritual should be interpreted as such – and not everything is about lust and sexual.

Maybe Lionheart has fewer examples of the mystical and philosophical. However, the opening track, Symphony in Blue, does nod to the divine. The divine of sex (“Good for the blood circulation”). Bush seeing herself at the piano and the fear of death and doom leaving her as she plays. It is quite a deep and challenging thing to write about. Thinking of her own mortality as a teenager. How different colours represent sex and death. There is a section of the song that sticks in my mind. God would appear several times through her songs. Here, his presence and influence is described in a very curious and beautiful way: “When that feeling of meaninglessness sets in/Go blowing my mind on God/The light in the dark, with the neon arms/The meek He seeks, the beast He calms/The head of the good soul department”. Think about 1980’s Never for Ever and examples of the spiritual and strange. Blow Away (For Bill) was about the sad loss of lightning assistant Bill Duffield. He died in a freak accident after the warm-up performance of 1979’s The Tour of Life. Placing Duffield in the heavens alongside other departed artists like Minnie Ripperton, Marc Bolan, Keith Moon and Sid Vicious. Lines that nod to the divine and otherworldly: “From people who nearly died but survived/Feeling no fear of leaving their bodies here”; “Put out the light, then put out the night/Vibes in the sky invite you to dine”. I think there was always a belief in Kate Bush that people lived on. Someone who perhaps did not want to accept that this is it. That spirits continue to live on after death. Whereas some might feel that the strange and otherworldly was more a part of her early career, I think that her mid/late-career work has more examples. From Hounds of Love onwards. There is an example from The Dreaming that I want to get to next.

I may have missed some examples and cases where Kate Bush brings ion the God-like, spiritual, philosophical and strange into her music. There may be other examples on The Dreaming (1982). Influenced by Stephen King’s The Shining, many critics of the time interpreted Get Out of My House as being about Kate Bush’s mindset. The stress and paranoia she might have felt pushing herself producing this album. The feelings that were in her head. Whereas songs beforehand has a lightness and beauty about them, this is dark and demented. Previous spiritual, philosophical and religious theorising and illumination replaced by something more sinister and strange. Not that this was a pivot moment. Instead, Bush was thinking more about subjects such as possession and something more threatening: “Woman let me in!/Let me bring in the memories!/Woman let me in!/Let me bring in the Devil Dreams!”/I will not let you in!/Don’t you bring back the reveries/I turn into a bird,/Carry further than the word is heard”. Hounds of Love is where we really get a lot of the spiritual and transcendent. Maybe it reflected something changing in Kate Bush’s life. In The Dreaming was a denser and slightly eerie listen, Hounds of Love did have some of that. It was also about understanding and acceptance. Kate Bush bravery revealing her fears and cowardice on songs such as Hounds of Love. Think about Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God) and how it is about a man and woman swapping places so they can better understand one another. Bush, as the narrator, wanting to do a deal with God.

Hounds of Love’s title track opening with the lines of “It's in the trees!/It's coming!”. That dialogue from Night of the Demon, again, there is reference to the strange and sinister. Darkness and light mixing alongside one another. A few songs on the album’s second side, The Ninth Wave, mention spirits and witchcraft. Or the idea of being a witch. The 1985 masterpiece is a blend of colours and emotions. About acceptance and revelation. Passion and discovery. About survival and soul-searching. Waking the Witch, at a time in The Ninth Wave when the heroine is losing hope and strength, plays with this idea this woman almost being a witch-like figure. When speaking with Richard Skinner in 1992, Bush said of Waking the Witch: “I think it’s very interesting the whole concept of witch-hunting and the fear of women’s power. In a way it’s very sexist behaviour, and I feel that female intuition and instincts are very strong, and are still put down, really. And in this song, this women is being persecuted by the witch-hunter and the whole jury, although she’s committed no crime, and they’re trying to push her under the water to see if she’ll sink or float”. Lines that stand out include these: “You won't burn (red, red roses)/You won't bleed (pinks and posies)/Confess to me, girl (red, red roses, go down)/Spiritus Sanctus in nominee/Spiritus Sanctus in nominee/Spiritus Sanctus in nominee/Spiritus Sanctus in nominee”. Again, redemption, faith and belief coming into her music: “Bless me, father, bless me father, for I have sinned”. You could be talking about a priest or even her own father. Watching You Without Me and Hello Earth could be interpreted to be about dying and the spiritual. The former almost puts the spirit of the woman lost at sea at her family home. Them waiting for a call to make sure she is okay. This feeling that the woman is watching over them as they wonder where she is. Hello Earth is a song I always feel is the heroine looking from the skies to the sea. Maybe having lost her fight to stay alive, her spirit is watching on – though Bush originally implied the woman was rescued and it was not a case of her dreaming about being rescued.

There aren’t too many examples of the spiritual, occult, heavenly, philosophical, mystical or strange on the next two albums. I guess there is strangeness. In terms of songs’ themes, there is more of the personal. I guess you could say that The Red Shoes’ (1993) Lily is about Lily Cornford. A friend of Bush’s, she worked as a colour healing therapist. This is what Bush said about Cornford “I met her years ago and she is one of the nicest people I’ve ever met. She is very giving and I love spending time with her. She believes in the powers of Angels and taught me to see them in a different light, that they exist to help human beings and are very powerful as well as benevolent forces. She taught me some prayers that I found very useful (particularly in my line of work), she helped me a lot and I guess I wanted to pass on her message about our Angels – we all have them, we only have to ask for help”. Again, I might be missing some prime examples of songs on The Sensual World (1989) and The Red Shoes. I think I might finish with examples of Aerial (2005) and 50 Words for Snow (2011) of the more otherworldly and mystical. King of the Mountain is a sort of ode to Elvis Presley. The spirit of the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll being on a mountainside somewhere. Either as a spirit or having retreated there. “Elvis are you out there somewhere/Looking like a happy man?/In the snow with Rosebud/And king of the mountain”. The first single Kate Bush released since 1994 (And So Is Love) takes us to a very unusual place. Never conventional or predictable, King of the Mountain looks at this legendary artist and puts him in this spiritual and unusual place. A song filled with intriguing lines: “Why does a multi-millionaire/Fill up his home with priceless junk?”.

Maybe 50 Words for Snow is the album where you get the most examples of Kate Bush exploring the spiritual, mythical and divine. I am not sure whether it has anything to do with her age or that she was almost nodding back to the start of her career or childhood teachings. That curiosity that she had when she was young. Think about songs like Lake Tahoe. This ghostly spirit of a woman rising from a lake. When interviewed by The Quietus in 2011, this is what Kate Bush said to John Doran about Lake Tahoe: “It was because a friend told me about the story that goes with Lake Tahoe so it had to be set there. Apparently people occasionally see a woman who fell into the lake in the Victorian era who rises up and then disappears again. It is an incredibly cold lake so the idea, as I understand it, is that she fell in and is still kind of preserved. Do you know what I mean?”. There are at least two other songs on the 2011 albums where we are taking to a spiritual or mythical place. I named this feature Among Angels, though Bush has not really discussed the song. Even so, there are lines in it that obvious nod to angels: “I can see angels standing around you/They shimmer like mirrors in summer/But you don’t know it/And they will carry you o’er the walls/If you need us, just call/Rest your weary world in their hands/Lay your broken laugh at their feet”. There are a couple of other songs from 50 Words for Snow that I want to cover off before finishing this feature.

Misty is all about fantasy. Whereas there are some darker songs on 50 Words for Snow, there is something magical about Misty. Even though it does end sadly (the snowman melting in the bed), you can look at The Snowman and a slight nod to that as a source of inspiration. However, this being Kate Bush, she took that idea of brining a snowman to life to a new place. This tryst and sensual encounter! Even if the logistics would suggest it would not be the most comfortable experience, I love the imagery and thoughts in the song. If Bush dismissed it as a bit of a silly idea, it does take us back to the start of her career and the sort of imagination she brought to her music. Going beyond the ordinary and tested. This is what she said to BBC’s Front Row in 2011: “It’s a silly idea. But I hope that what has happened is that there’s almost a sense of tenderness. I think it’s quite a dark song. And so I hope that I’ve made it work. But in a lot of ways it shouldn’t because… It’s ridiculous, isn’t it, the idea of the snowman visiting this woman and climbing into bed with her. But I took him as a purely symbolic snowman, it was about…No John, he’s REAL (laughs)”. Going back to that interview from The Quietus, Bush spoke about what Wild Man is about: “Well, the first verse of the song is just quickly going through some of the terms that the Yeti is known by and one of those names is the Kangchenjunga Demon. He’s also known as Wild Man and Abominable Snowman. (…) I don’t refer to the Yeti as a man in the song. But it is meant to be an empathetic view of a creature of great mystery really. And I suppose it’s the idea really that mankind wants to grab hold of something [like the Yeti] and stick it in a cage or a box and make money out of it. And to go back to your question, I think we’re very arrogant in our separation from the animal kingdom and generally as a species we are enormously arrogant and aggressive. Look at the way we treat the planet and animals and it’s pretty terrible isn’t it?”. Bush has always been curious about things outside of the explainable. Whether it is god, spirits, angels, karma or anything else, it has defined some of her best moments. Bush and this idea of creatures and the mystical. Maybe that comes from films and T.V. where beasts and ghosts lingered. Bush being exposed to these visual stimulus and sources of inspiration. A woman who has been fascinated and lead to the unusual and divine. When it comes to that word, Kate Bush is…

THE most divine of all.

FEATURE: Groovelines: Kylie Minogue – The Loco-Motion

FEATURE:

 

 

Groovelines

Kylie Minogue – The Loco-Motion

_________

THIS song…

takes me back to my childhood. There is a lot to celebrate about Kylie Minogue this year. She has recently performed in the U.K. and completed a residency in Las Vegas. Her latest album, TENSION, was released last year to huge critical acclaim. Her second studio album, Enjoy Yourself, turns thirty-five in October. The Kylie Minogue album turns thirty in September. Rather than mark a big anniversary, instead I want to go back to the start. Mark the approaching thirty-sixth anniversary of her debut single, The Loco-Motion. It is a cover version, though Kylie Minogue very much adds her own take on the song. A number one in many countries in the world, it reached number two in the U.K., three in the U.S. and it was a chart-topper in Minogue’s native Australia. At only twenty, this was an exciting first step for Minogue. The lead single from 1988’s Kylie, I wanted to spend some time with a hugely important release in the history of Pop music. I was four when the single came out. I dimly remember The Loco-Motion. I first heard it when I was five or six. Maybe my introduction to Kylie Minogue, I then heard other hits like Hand on Your Heart and Better the Devil You know. The Loco-Motion has a special place in my heart. Before moving on, here is some Wikipedia information about a terrific debut single from the icon:

“Background

Australian pop singer Kylie Minogue released a cover version of the song in July 1987 as her debut single, under the title "Locomotion". After an impromptu performance of the song at an Australian rules football charity event with the cast of the Australian soap opera Neighbours, Minogue signed a record deal with Mushroom Records to release the song as a single. Initially recorded in a big band style, the project was radically reoriented by producer Mike Duffy, who was on loan to Mushroom from Pete Waterman's UK company PWL. Duffy recorded a whole new backing track, inspired by the hi-NRG pop of Dead or Alive, but retained Minogue's original vocal.This version was released on July 13, 1987, in Australia, where it became one of the biggest selling Australian records of the 1980s. It was later released the same year in New Zealand, Italy, and Sweden.

The success of the song in her home country resulted in Minogue's signing a record deal with PWL Records in London and to working with the successful team Stock Aitken & Waterman (SAW). The producers decided to totally re-record Minogue's version of the song, with Pete Waterman slating her original Australian recording, which he claimed was poorly produced. Original producer Mike Duffy instead blamed the decision to re-record on Waterman's alleged wish to claim the prestige and royalties that looked set to roll in from the track's looming placement of the soundtrack of the 1988 film Arthur 2: On the Rocks, starring Dudley Moore and Liza Minnelli. On July 28, 1988, the re-recorded version produced by SAW was released worldwide with the title "The Loco-Motion". This release, also a major success, reached the top five in Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States. This version of the track substitutes the Australian term railway for the American term railroad in the song's lyrics.

Reception

The 1987 "Locomotion" release was a huge hit in Minogue's native Australia, reaching number one on the Kent Music Report singles chart and remaining there for seven weeks. The 1988 release of the song in the United Kingdom debuted and peaked at number two on the UK Singles Chart — the highest entry on the UK charts by a female artist. It remained in the number two position for four weeks before falling to number three. With sales of 440,000 it was the eleventh best selling single of the year. The song became Minogue's third top five single in the UK and remains one of her most successful single releases to date.

During late 1988, Minogue traveled to the United States to promote "The Loco-Motion", where she did many interviews and performances on American television. The song was used in the comedy film Arthur 2: On the Rocks. "The Loco-Motion" debuted at number 80 on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 and later peaked at number three for two weeks. The song was Minogue's second single to chart in the U.S., but her first to reach the top ten. To this day, the song remains as her highest-charting single in the United States; however, her second overall and most recent song to reach the top ten, 2002's "Can't Get You Out of My Head", ended up outselling "The Loco-Motion". In Canada, the song also reached the top five in the pop sales chart. In 2023, Robert Moran of Australian daily tabloid newspaper The Sydney Morning Herald ranked the song as Minogue's 17th best song (out of 183), describing it "a surprisingly gritty sex track built on chugging synths and girl-group harmonies”.

There is something nostalgic and exciting about The Loco-Motion. Originally released on 13th July, 1987, it was the re-released version (with a slightly amended title) from 28th July, 1988, produced by Stock Aitken Waterman, that became a worldwide smash. There is no denying that the production is dated. It is very much part of that factory rotation sound of the 1980s. Even so, it is a really important song that launched Kylie Minogue to the world. Some may see The Loco-Motion as overly-happy or grating. If you play it enough times. It is defiant and hypnotic. A song that probably resonates harder for those who remember it first time. People approaching it new now might not be able to relate or see how important it is. As it is a landmark release and the start of the story for the brilliant Kylie Minogue, it is a shame more has not been written about it. It is a shame. Ahead of its thirty-sixth anniversary, I wanted to spend some time with it. I wonder how Kylie Minogue sees the song now. Because it turned thirty-seven (the original release) last Sunday, it is no surprise Minogue performed the song when she was in London. It means a lot to her. Still playing those early tracks. It is rare for an artist with decades of experience to keep in her those initial singles.

Credit to Minogue that she has this fondness for the earliest years. I want to end with a feature that is both affectionate and slightly tongue-in-cheek about The Loco-Motion. Whether you hyphenate the song or not, there is no denying its infectiousness! This feature was written in 2018. I was keen to highlight a few segments from it:

“Last summer was the height of this song’s popularity — for me, personally. I don’t think it has “topped the charts” for well over a decade. It was my first summer living in Los Angeles. I had moved right before the election, in October of 2016. In my mind “the election” is always this one, and there is a distinct “before” and “after” period. I do not feel equipped to summarize what Los Angeles is or is not, its character or landscape, and I want to avoid debunking any misconceptions about either, but I do know that when I moved here, it felt like a promise of better days ahead. And it was mostly due to

the palm trees. For months after moving here I laughed out loud every single time I saw a palm tree. Even better when there was a short one next to a tall one. The jokes — they write themselves.

Whether it was my natural proclivity to personify inanimate objects or a desperate need to laugh in the face of absolute bleakness, after the election I found myself seeking out symbols of pure, simple joy. I became obsessed with smiley faces. I watched endless hours of cartoons. I earnestly googled “adult mobile,” thinking it would be nice to have one circling over my bed. Now that I write it all down, I guess you could say I was regressing.

Any place can feel like a small town if you live there long enough. I lived in Northern California my entire life. When people asked me why I moved, the truthful answer is that I just didn’t want anyone to know me anymore. Here is a metaphor: the Bay Area is like a church organ. Everyone is connected, part of the same machine making the same sound. Also, they are charitable and community-oriented. After a while, though, you get sick of the low, droning, organ sounds, and you think that maybe you could pick up a new instrument. Although I did say I was not equipped to make any statements about LA, I am wildly confident in my metaphor-making. If the Bay Area is an organ, then Los Angeles is an orchestra. There is a distinction between string people and wind instruments and the percussion section, but everyone wants to be the conductor.

I have a habit that my therapist calls “letting my moods rule my behavior,” instead of the emotionally healthy alternative, which is to gesture to your behaviors and say, “oh no, after you!” What you’re supposed to do, you see, is go to the gym when you don’t feel like it, see friends when you’d rather be alone, eat a full meal instead of chewing on a piece of gum in the hopes that your headache just goes away. On the Wikipedia page for “Loco-Motion” (the original song), there is a subcategory called “The Loco-Motion Myth.” A total sucker for conspiracies and popular untruths, I scrolled down to find that the dance came after the song, and not the other way around. Whether this has anything to do with what my therapist told me or not, I decide that it definitely, absolutely does, and I decide this with such a certainty that I find it almost pre-ordained, a divine folly in the greater universe of myths. The Locomotion I am sure now, is exactly, precisely, what I have been needing. And so I listen to it, on repeat, for days. I am trying to exorcise myself. Rid myself of dread, fear, and the occasional bout of spontaneous, uncontrollable crying.

The other day I walked past an ice cream truck. That particular jingle has a morbid quality to it, too. No matter the melody, its sound always has the effect of slowly being beat down by the heat, of a record being warped, tangled tape prolapsed out of cassettes. The music shuts off, the driver leans his head onto the steering wheel, and no kids come. I think to buy one, but I never carry cash.

The Locomotion, in contrast, has the auditory quality of revival, of hope, of newness, of Kylie Minogue, hero of the gays and cancer survivor, of staying alive, even when it seems so easy to just snap”.

It is wonderful that Kylie Minogue played The Loco-Motion a couple of days ago. She is proud of the song and what it achieved. It means a lot to me too. In the U.K., nearly thirty-six years ago, we were introduced to this incredible and vivacious Pop artist. Little did we know that she would be dominating the charts and releasing music all these years later. If you have not heard the brilliant and undeniably catchy The Loco-Motion, then you really need to…

JUMP on board!

FEATURE: The Digital Mixtape: Paul Epworth at Fifty: A Selection of Songs from the Legendary Producer and Songwriter

FEATURE:

 

 

The Digital Mixtape

PHOTO CREDIT: Alex Waespi

Paul Epworth at Fifty: A Selection of Songs from the Legendary Producer and Songwriter

_________

ON 25th July…

IN THIS PHOTO: Among many other artists, Paul Epworth has produced for Bloc Party (pictured in 2004)

an incredible producer and songwriter turns fifty. You may not have heard of him, though I guarantee you have heard quite a few songs that he is credited on as a producer and/or songwriter. That person is Paul Epworth. I am going to end with a playlist featuring songs he has a credit on. Ahead of an important birthday, it is worth reflecting on how much great music this amazing talent has had a hand in. It is interesting, when we think about producers, how diverse their credits are. More than the artists they are associated with. Truly great producers are able to work with a variety of artists and add their own stamp on the music. That is the case here. Prior to getting to a mixtape of songs he has produced or had a writing credit on, AllMusic provide a detailed biography about the incredible and multi-talented Epworth:

“Multi-award-winning British producer Paul Epworth made his name helming albums for megastars like Adele and Rihanna before launching his own solo career in 2020 with his debut Voyager.

Born and raised in the leafy London commuter town of Bishop's Stortford, Epworth got his start in music in the early 2000s as frontman for the little-heard indie band Lomax. The group released one album, 2003's A Symbol of Modern Living, before disbanding. Epworth then began a solo remixing and production career. He released a couple of electronica singles under the names Phones and Epic Man, but it was his production work on a trio of zeitgeist-grabbing debut albums by Futureheads, Maxïmo Park, and Bloc Party that secured him immediate notice. As both producer and songwriter, Epworth went on to shape the sound of a diverse roster of stars including, most notably, Adele, Rihanna, and Florence + the Machine; later he would go on to work with Coldplay, U2, and Mumford & Sons, among many others. Epworth also made acclaimed remixes, often under the name Phones. In the course of his career, he won no fewer than five Grammy Awards, and a coveted Academy Award for the song "Skyfall," from the James Bond film.

In September 2020, Epworth released his debut solo album, Voyager. A high-concept effort combining Epworth's twin loves of classic sci-fi and '70s R&B, the album fused elements of funk, disco, spiritual jazz, and hip-hop, and featured a plethora of guest vocalists including Ishmael, Vince Staples, Ty Dolla $ign, Kool Keith, and Jay Electronica”.

Such a distinct and legendary producer, Paul Epworth has helped elevate songs to new levels with an incredible Midas touch. I was keen to assemble a mixtape of his worth ahead of his fiftieth birthday on 25th July. This playlist just goes to show what a prolific and consistent talent…

THIS man is.

FEATURE: She is Heaven-Sent: How a Hollow and Problematic Feminist Mainstream Track Causes More Issues Than It Solves

FEATURE:

 

 

She is Heaven-Sent

IN THIS PHOTO: Katy Perry/PHOTO CREDIT; Jack Bridgland

How a Hollow and Problematic Feminist Mainstream Track Causes More Issues Than It Solves

_________

WE are living at a time…

when women’s rights and safety seem as exposed and threatened as at any other time. Their physical safety and lives endangered. Violence and misogyny is rising. Whether online or outside, how safe is it being a woman?! It is horrifying that we are seeing such male violence and abuse. On the other side of things, we should be celebrating the brilliance of women. Not only how we should be making them feel safe and protected in a violent world. Their rights, value and importance needs to come roaring through. How the modern world would be better if more women were in charge. A move from the patriarchy and the toxic evil of male violence and misogyny and a move to a matriarchy and a far safer world for women. I hate the world we live in. I fear for women. They are amazing people and yet, when you think about all the worst crimes, violence, offence and bad things in the world, the vast majority is perpetrated by men. The strength and humanity of women. Their humility, intelligence and beauty. We need to fight for equality through the world. There are artists, most of them women, writing incredible feminist anthems. Whether it is artists promulgating the power of women and their merits or others showing their defiance and anger against male violence, misogyny and sexualisation, we need more songs like this. We need more male artists actually putting women at the front. Writing their own feminist anthems. There is a wave of great sex-positive songs from women. Others that are about sisterhood, togetherness and recognition. In 2024, I feel women are as attacked, endangered and exposed as ever. So much violence and misogyny directed at them. The huge rise in male violence and Stone Age views. Feminist tracks not only that strike against the way women are treated, marginalised and abused. There are feminist tracks all about the way women are striking out and leading. The moral and intellectual leaders. Videos that are inventive, eye-catching and moving. If a video is quite sexual, it is through their control and gaze. Not a male lens that distorts their messages or distils and dilutes their meaning.

PHOTO CREDIT: Cynthia Parkhurst

Not that it is the only example, though it is a current one that muddies the water. WOMAN’S WORLD is not a Katy Perry ‘comeback’ single. She did not get lost in the wilderness: she started a family and took time off. It is her first single for a long time. Because of that, there are a lot more eyes and spotlight on the song than there would normally be. She has come back on the scene with a track that has created criticism. Vulture and Pitchfork have shared their views. I am going to come to a review of The Guardian. It is not so much about the quality of the singing or music. If this was a normal Pop song about love or anything else then there would not be such vituperative and negative reaction. What Perry has released is a so-called feminist anthem. I feel her intention was to celebrate women and say how the world is dominated and run by women. Admirable in spirit and theory, though the whole package is problematic and troubling. Not only is the song produced by Dr Luke – who has been accused of assault, coercive behaviour and sexual abuse -, its video puts me in mind of the horrendous visual for Eric Prydz’s Call on Me from 2004. At that time, there were a lot of sexualised versions of women. Videos where their bodies were used to sell singles. There was a difference between male artists using it to appeal to base instincts. Female artists like Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera showing body and sex-positivity. Liberating and confident videos that, today, may seem like exploitation and the demands of record labels. Using sex to sell. WOMAN’S WORLD has that rather uneasy and queasy essence of the early-2000s. For a song about sex or freedom, there would not be such a problem with Katy Perry putting out a video that takes us back twenty years. There are a lot of issues regarding Perry’s new song.

On a feminist song, one of the worst things is pairing it with a video that sends out the wrong message. It is almost like A.I. or men pitched the video. A song about how great it is being a woman and how they are in charge. Women acting like men and letting it hang loose. Showing curves. The video does, despite its better intentions, have this male gaze. It is what we would imagine if we wanted to highlight the worst traits of music videos from the 2000s. I am going to move on in a minute. However, I should get to some observations Laura Snapes made for The Guardian in her one-star review for WOMAN’S WORLD:

“Perry’s clubby missile of a new single, Woman’s World, had affirmed to me that yes, it is a woman’s world – and you’re lucky to be livin’ in it. In her woman’s world, women are nuanced, winners, smart, soft, pretty, prickly, fiery and shiny. As the video demonstrated, you could be a Rosie the Riveter type (but, like, hot) or a businesswoman or a big sexy bionic horse. Women can have it all! Thank god someone finally said it.

There was another strange sensation. That of being dragged back in time, possibly in some kind of cosmic wagon pulled by the scary bionic horse woman. Back to almost exactly a decade ago, to August 2014, when Beyoncé performed at the MTV Video Music awards in front of the word FEMINIST, emblazoned in big baby pink letters, and the whole world had to be passed its collective smelling salts at the pop-cultural notion that girls just wanted to have fundamental rights. Maybe a few years further back, even, to when the brash electro-pop of Lady Gaga stressed the importance of being exactly who you were. (Incidentally, Gaga’s biggest hit of 2014 was Do What U Want, with R Kelly, another winding reminder that we were ever so young.)

Woman’s World is Perry’s first solo single in three years: “the first contribution I have given since becoming a mother and since feeling really connected to my feminine divine,” the 39-year-old pop star said in a statement. Her last album, 2020’s Smile, was her first since her 2010 superstar breakout Teenage Dream not to hit No 1 in the UK or the US. She has made subsequent stints in Vegas. The sense, going into her seventh album era, is of a 2010s pop star now very much on the back foot – one compounded by pre-release visuals that seemed nakedly inspired by the warped futurism of next-gen stars Arca and Charli xcx. At least the imagery suggested some kind of attempt to embrace pop’s present; then the credits for her new album 143 were revealed, heavily featuring Perry’s old collaborator Dr Luke.

In 2014, Kesha sued Luke (real name Lukasz Gottwald) for sexual assault and battery, sexual harassment, gender violence and emotional abuse. Luke denied the claims and countersued for defamation, alleging that Kesha, her mother and management had fabricated the claims to escape the record contract she had signed with him. In 2016, a judge dismissed Kesha’s claims. Kesha had also accused Luke of raping Perry, which Perry and Luke denied, and in 2020 a judge ruled that those comments were defamatory. In 2023, Luke and Kesha settled his defamation claim.

No conviction has ever been brought against Luke, although he is perceived by many as a pariah within pop music, and any artist – such as Kim Petras – who works with him becomes subject to disparaging online commentary from pop fans and will be called upon to defend the choice. When the collaborators for 143 were announced, Kesha simply tweeted “lol” – widely assumed to be a reference to Luke’s involvement – and was later photographed in a T-shirt emblazoned with the same word. The actor Abigail Breslin also called out the news, and later said she received death threats for doing so. Much of the online commentary around Woman’s World underlines the disconnect between working with a producer who comes with such baggage to make a song about the strength of women.

  The video for Woman’s World suffers from a much more benign case of mixed messaging. It starts out as some sort of attempt at satire, with Perry dressed as Rosie the Riveter and gals in work gear recreating the famous Lunch Atop a Skyscraper photo. They pretend to flamboyantly wee in urinals, which are quickly swept away (with far less glamour than in George Michael’s canonical Outside video) to reveal the stripped-down gang chucking away wellness paraphernalia – including Perry winking as she hurls a can of her own seltzer brand – to dance in a circle waving sex toys at each other. Boobs are oiled and bedazzled in stars-and-stripes bikinis. Perry wields a bedazzled screwdriver. It is perhaps less the trenchant comment on how women are sold the tools of their own disempowerment that Perry presumably intended than a preview of the Makita power tools calendar 2025.

Muddled in with all this turbo cheesecakery are blatant grasps for gay standom. “She’s a sister and a mother,” Perry sings, winking at drag culture so hard you suspect she’d pop a hernia if her abs weren’t hard as armour. Later in the video, as bionic horse Katy strides through some sort of apocalyptic scene – having rebooted as a sexy equine cyborg after being crushed by an anvil – two men kiss in the windy maelstrom. This clumsy expansiveness stumbles in a later bit when Perry rides in a monster truck with a sparkly uterus hung from it, an inadvertently apt symbol of all the essentialist, pandering nonsense going on here.

Not to sound like one of those men (actually I’ll take Perry’s insistence that it’s my goddess-given right as a woman to be essentialist, OK!) but: this garbage has six writers. Granted, it is infernally catchy, but it is the Bic for Her of pop, the pink Yorkie for girls (get your lips around this!), a song that made me feel stupider every sorry time I listened to it”.

I am going to come to another review before rounding up. There are so many reasons why there needs to be an augmentation of any feminist song coming out that sends good messages and hits the mark. More activation from artists who should put women’s rights at the forefront. Whether highlighting male violence and how we need to fight against it and protect women, or songs that focus on the strength of women and how they are slaying, this is what mainstream artists should be doing. Putting videos out that match the lyrics. Rather than Katy Perry getting the tone right and creating a modern-day feminist anthem produced by a woman with a video that is as captivating and visually arresting as anything Beyoncé or Taylor Swift could put out, there is so much wrong with WOMAN’S WORLD. Consequence shared their opinions about perhaps the most divisive song of 2024:

“What’s so head-scratching about this set of visuals, which Perry never fully commits to as satire, is that this is not how feminism should ever feel. Perry told Apple Music2 that her decision to focus on this theme was because “this is the first contribution I have given since becoming a mother and since feeling really connected to my feminine divine.” Connecting with the feminine divine doesn’t mean co-opting traditionally masculine spaces; ideally, it means celebrating the unique joys of womanhood. Feminism isn’t about proving we can do everything men can do — these days, the road to empowering women shouldn’t be centering men at all. Plenty of women drink whiskey and know how to operate power tools, but that’s not even the core of the issue here. It’s that this is the most baseline, tip of the iceberg, generic attempt at feminism, and the result is Perry never actually saying anything of substance.

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A post shared by KATY PERRY (@katyperry)

Everything about the focus of the track feels 15 years too late to be interesting, and the music video doesn’t help. There’s obviously something to be said for escapist pop or harkening back to the sounds that dominated charts through the early 2000s, but “Woman’s World” is a nothing burger served on a chrome plate. Take out any of the fun arena energy of “Roar” and you’ve got this chorus: “Celebrate! ‘Cause, baby, we ain’t goin’ away/ It’s a woman’s world and you’re lucky to be livin’ in it.” Doesn’t the visual of jade rollers on Perry’s face make you feel lucky to be alive? This isn’t camp; this is boring.

In a world where very few structural or institutional systems make us feel like we’re strutting sexily through a “Woman’s World,” no part of me wants to turn up the volume on this one. The timing is bad, and so is the song. This reality might be something Perry tries to touch on in the muddled second half of the video, when an anvil crushes her and turns her into a reanimated, inflated version of herself that wields the gender symbol for woman in the form of an influencer’s ring light — and, bafflingly, linking up with YouTuber Trisha Paytas”.

It is a shame that male artists are not writing about women. Putting their merits and safety at the front of their tracks. It is such a harrowing and horrible time where we need to support women and ensure that male violence is ended. Also, there has never been a better time to say outright how this world could charge very much for the better with women on top. How women should be celebrated and given greater rights and equality. Some mainstream artists are writing important and brilliant feminist tracks. It is a shame that there are those like WOMAN’S WORLD that are sort of undermining them. Getting the wrong sort of attention. I do hope that something good might be able to come from the backlash against WOMAN’S WORLD. Throughout the years, there have been examples of songs that discuss a woman’s world. The realities of being a woman. These are the type of songs that we need to hear…

IN the modern age.

FEATURE: Guilty Conscience: A Lack of Bite and Innovation from Male Artists in Hip-Hop at a Crucial Time

FEATURE:

 

 

Guilty Conscience

A Lack of Bite and Innovation from Male Artists in Hip-Hop at a Crucial Time

_________

ONCE was the time when…

PHOTO CREDIT: Maurício Mascaro/Pexels

Rap and Hip-Hop was at the absolute forefront of music. The most important and potent words being spoken by anyone. I would say that, from the 1980s through to the early-2000s, there was no denying how essential and important Hip-Hop was. At times of political division, warfare, social upheaval and racism, Hip-Hop’s best stood up and poured out their poetry. Lines, sounds, samples and vocals that hit hard and cut deep. Timeless songs that still hold weight and reliability to the day. I am thinking about artists such as Public Enemy, N.W.A., Queen Latifah, Lauryn Hill and Jay-Z. Even more modern artists like Little Simz and Kendrick Lamar have managed to carry on that legacy. That said, Lamar’s reputation and standings has been tarnished what with his continued beef with Drake. Not to say that Hip-Hop has lost its potency and quality, though you can say that there is a big problem. Apart from queens of the genre and a few of the male artists making it captivating and cutting, there is very little beyond that. Such a pale version of what it used to be. I guess popular tastes shifting to Pop means that Hip-Hop is more in the shadows. Not this wave of groups like you used to have right throguhout the 1980s and 1990s. I think there are some incredible women in Hip-Hop adding something very special. Think about a lot of the male artists and how truly ineffective they are. I am thinking about Eminem’s new album, The Death of Slim Shady (Coup de Grâce). He is still a rapper whose flow, lyrics and delivery is better than anyone around. Undeniably brilliant when it comes to wordplay, this is someone whose genius cannot be dented. Back in 2000, when his third studio album, The Marshall Mathers LP, was released, he was being heralded as one of the finest rappers of his generation. A work of brilliance. There was controversy when it came to his subject matter. Constant homophobia, misogyny and threats of violence against women (and gay men), you had to wonder whether he was squandering his gifts by hiding behind this vulgar and offensive alter ego.

His new album is out. I am glad that we do not have to encounter quite the same kind of horrible, homophobic and misogynistic lyrics he spewed back in the late-1990s and early-2000s - though there is still some of that in various songs on his new album. What you could rely on is the sort of bite and anger that he delivered. There is anger in Hip-Hop at the moment, though so much of it is through obnoxious beefs. Think about the great Hip-Hop albums of the past decade, and there are few comparison to the classics of the golden age of Hip-Hop. That period from the 1980s right through the 1990s when there was this wave of cutting and essential Hip-Hop. Artists can make an impact and reign as powerfully and prominently as their peers. I think artists like Eminem rely on being offensive. At a time when there is more consciousness and care when it comes to what we say and how we interact with various groups of people, many have lost their edge and purpose. Relying on that shock value, rather than doing anything purposeful with their skill, anger and passion. As The Guardian writes, this seems to be the case with Eminem:

“It’s so single-minded in its recreation of the Eminem of the early 00s that it occasionally seems weirdly anachronistic. There is the occasional barb thrown the way of “woke” culture, but far more lines that use the long-superseded term “political correctness”. There are references to Eminem’s addictions, despite the fact that he’s been clean and sober for 16 years. There’s an entire song devoted to mocking Christopher Reeve, who died 20 years ago: it turns out the track was actually written for 2004’s Encore, but pulled after the actor’s passing. There are tapes of Eminem’s daughter Hailie, now a 28-year-old married woman, but in the context of the recordings here, still a small child, as she was on 2002’s My Dad’s Gone Crazy. There is an interlude that suggests the album will be greeted with protests so furious they spill over into riots, which it’s hard to listen to without thinking: yeah, he wishes.

The days when Eminem could provoke that kind of angry response feel long gone, as evidenced by the reaction to Houdini. Some people online made a half-hearted attempt to summon up outrage over its line mocking the incident in which Tory Lanez shot Megan Thee Stallion, but nobody really bit, perhaps because there were more diverting things happening in hip-hop. Where does a sick gag about Megan’s shooting sit next to Kendrick Lamar claiming US No 1 with a track that claims Drake is a paedophile? Complaining about Eminem making sick gags feels a bit like complaining that the toilet paper aisle of the supermarket contains too much bog roll.

Clearly that fact hasn’t escaped Eminem, who nevertheless goes all-out to cause offence. There are jokes about people with disabilities, about rape, about the sexual misconduct allegations made against rapper/mogul Diddy, about overweight people and finding trans women unattractive. Eminem indulges in a certain degree of having his cake and eating it, following a lot of these lines up with a lyric that disputes or apologises for them, locked as he supposedly is in a battle with his alter ego. Occasionally, the grim stuff lands a queasy punch. More often, it feels so desperate that it ends up committing the cardinal sin of being boring and repetitious: put it this way, if Caitlyn Jenner got a royalty for every time her name was used as a punchline, she’d be an even richer woman.

That said, there are things to enjoy about The Death of Slim Shady. Eminem’s technical abilities are as striking as ever: striking enough that when he claims rappers go after Lamar because they’re too scared to come after him, it doesn’t feel like an entirely hollow boast. The guest appearances by underrated Atlanta rapper JID and Shady Records affiliate Ez Mil are strong. As well as Lucifer, a handful of tracks work in purely musical terms. The brooding menace of Road Rage shifts thrillingly into acid-fuelled electro. Guilty Conscience 2 gradually and effectively ratchets up a sense of tension. The staccato strings and soul vocal of Bad One are put to eerie good use.

But for all its attempts at time travel, The Death of Slim Shady feels like just another late-period Eminem album. It has successes and misfires in equal measure. It’s not bad enough to count as terrible, not good enough to count as great. It’s bolstered by technical ability but afflicted by a creeping sense of purposelessness. It’s doubtless another huge hit, but there isn’t enough to counter the incisive line about Eminem recently posited by Questlove: that he’s a man “maybe with nothing to say any more, but with quite a talent for saying it”.

Hip Hop’s male artists at least should have a guilty conscience. Not to say they are bad artists or making music that is not cutting the mustard. I feel that we are in a time when they need to stand up. Rap and Hip-Hop being afflicted still with misogyny and aggression. Artists like Kendrick Lamar showing the very worst sides of Hip-Hop. Think about what Hip-Hop used to be and what it is now. We are in this crucial time. Where are these huge albums that tackles the political corruption and horror in the U.S.?! How about genocide in Gaza?! The rise in male violence, continued police corruption and the way so many people struggle to keep their heads about water?! Fertile soil and plenty of ammunition for artists to launch from. Springboards that are not being approached. Again, if we want to see this sort of passion come out in important lyrics that tackle big themes, we look to women. It is a pretty tepid and directionless scene right now. That is not to say there is no great Hip-Hop coming from male artists. There is. I think that there is more division and violence in the world than there was during years when Hip-Hop legends dedicated entire albums calling out this injustice and evil. Why not now?! Is it the case that, like Eminem, artists want to rely on being offensive and misogynistic?! It seems pretty desperate that there are so few albums from men in Hip-Hop lately that capture your attention. I am trying to think. Maybe stuff from Run the Jewels a few years back. There is so much to address. The climate emergency and the terror the U.S. finds itself in regarding its leader. So much uncertainty and evil. You have to ask where the outrage and that same sort of anger is that defined Hip-Hop in the late-1980s. Even the more comical and peaceful blends of Beastie Boys and De La Soul.

It seems a shame that many artists feel muzzled and restricted because of ‘wokeness’. That feeling they cannot say anything and have no freedom. That essentially means they can’t write music without offending people and being bigoted. If we have come to that point then we are in trouble! I know many men in Hip-Hop are becoming more personal and revealing. This is great to see. We need that in Hip-Hop. What we are seeing less and less is what Hip-Hop should have at its core: voices that are saying what politicians are not. The sort of righteousness and common sense that is lacking from our leaders. It is a deafening silence in Hip-Hop. As I say, it seems to be a case of male artists lacking. I can’t think what is holding them back. At the moment, the toxicity of Rap beefs threatened to derail any noble and pure attempts at political and socially aware Hip-Hop. There is this black mark that needs to be erased. I think we are in a really frightening and unsettling time. So few artists having any sort of teeth and attack. If they do, their energies are going towards the wrong subjects. We don’t hear the same sort of sample and sonic innovation as years past. It has been years since a genuine Hip-Hop classic has come out. You get the odd masterpiece here and there. It is such an opportune moment when artists should be stepping up. I guess we don’t really have Rap groups anymore. More solo artists and fewer collectives. Even so, there is the firepower, talent and potential out there. It is being squandered. Old masters releasing tepid and toothless music. New artists perhaps overlooked or perhaps wary of being too political through fears of divisiveness and backlash. Where are artists standing up for women and showing solidarity rather than attacking them and debasing them?! What about the men of Hip-Hop igniting some of that intensity and fire that defined the best Hip-Hop albums of the decades past?! Where we are now is troubling. Aside from a few wonderful and important artists coming through, most of the rest are…

A disappointment.