FEATURE: black-ish at Ten: Music Featured in the Acclaimed U.S. Series

FEATURE:

 

 

black-ish at Ten

Music Featured in the Acclaimed U.S. Series

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ON 24th September, 2014…

one of the greatest comedies of modern times premiered on ABC. Created by Kenya Barris, the single-camera comedy focused on an upper-middle-class African-American family. The incredible black-ish ended in 2022. It is one of my favourite comedies ever. So sharp, ambitious and important. Some incredibly powerful episodes. The Johnson family were led by Andre/‘Dre’ (Anthony Anderson), a successful advertising executive. His wife Rainbow, an anaesthesiologist, was played by Tracee Ellis Ross. Trying to keep their Black identities in a prominently white neighbourhood in Sherman Oaks, Los Angeles, many episodes revolved around socio-political issues. The Johnson children consisted of Zoey (Yara Shahidi), Andre Jr., a.k.a. ‘Junior’ (Marcus Scribner) and twins Jack (Miles Brown) and Diane (Marsai Martin). A well-rounded, connected and hugely talented cast made this show a huge success. Across its eight seasons, black-ish covered so much ground. So many highlights. My favourite episodes include Hair Day and Purple Rain. The latter concerns the Johnson family discussing Prince and what he means to them. Jack and Diane had not heard of Prince, so it was down to the rest of the family – including grandparents Earl (Laurence Fishburne) and Ruby (Jenifer Lewis) – to argue the case and explore his incredible impact and legacy. With each character stepping into a particular Prince song to tell the story, it is an emotional, funny and stylish episode that does justice to the late, great Prince.

I am sure that there will be a few features and celebrations of black-ish on its tenth anniversary. Even though the series ended a couple of years ago, it is important to recognise its legacy and place in comedy history. You can read more about the series here. I would recommend that you check out features such as this and this. Let’s hope that there is a reunion in the future. This feature that discussed the shows legacy highlighted how it took big swings to make big points. Huge and often relatively under-discussed subjects brought to the fore. A comedy that managed to mix its amazing humour with heart and social/political discussion, I would urge people to watch it. As this is a music blog, I will focus on the music. To mark ten years since black-ish was first aired, I have compiled a playlist of songs that featured in the series. There are a couple of Prince songs in the mix! I really miss black-ish. It is so easy to become attached to the characters and escape into that world. Some of the episodes genuinely moved me. Its 175 are among the best in comedy history. I know that there will be celebration on the official black-ish Twitter and Instagram. I wanted to provide a music salute to…

A much-missed and extraordinary comedy.

FEATURE: The Digital Mixtape: Inspiring Black Female Legends and Modern Icons

FEATURE:

 

 

The Digital Mixtape

IN THIS PHOTO: Megan Thee Stallion/PHOTO CREDIT: Kennedi Carter/Vogue

Inspiring Black Female Legends and Modern Icons

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FOR this Digital Mixtape…

IN THIS PHOTO: Beyoncé/PHOTO CREDIT: Cécred

I wanted to celebrate and unite amazing Black female icons past and present. It is not tied to anything. Instead, a look at some amazing women who, between them, have created some of the finest music ever. Incredible and inspiring artists that many of you will know. We are in a time when there is still racism and racial discrimination in music. This is impacting on Black women in the music industry. Whilst there has been improvement in terms of diversity and inclusiveness at festivals, on playlists and across the industry, there is still a way to go. Problems that need to be addressed. Through multiple generations, so many incredible Black women have put out phenomenally original and powerful music. Changing and defining genres. I wanted to salute some icons and legends that have made a difference in my life and so many others. There are of course many women who I could not include, though I was keen to put together as many as I could. Below is a mixtape of some eclectic and phenomenal music from…

IN THIS PHOTO: Tyla

COMPELLING queens.

FEATURE: Overturning the Boys’ Club: Why Is Rock and Alternative Slow to Redress Its Sexism and Gender Imbalance?

FEATURE:

 

 

Overturning the Boys’ Club

IN THIS PHOTO: Delilah Bon

Why Is Rock and Alternative Slow to Redress Its Sexism and Gender Imbalance?

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WHILST some genres…

are dominated by women and one cannot refute their supremacy and talent, it does seem that there is not enough acknowledgement and support of women in Rock and Alternative. Whether leading bands or part of them, we are still seeing a gender imbalance at festivals. Even festivals revolving around Rock are not featuring enough women. It suggest that Rock is still a boys’ club. If it appears that way in terms of acts on stage and the playlists of stations like Kerrang! Radio, that is not really the reality. The women in Rock at the moment deserve to be part of the conversation. I feel this way about Hip-Hop and Rap. How there are so many incredible women and yet there is this narrative that men rule. Rock is less toxic and boys-only than it used to be, though small steps are being made to overturn this idea that it is dominated by men. This idea that women are an afterthought. Even bands and duos made up entirely of women not played and given as much stage time of their male peers. This thought came to be because of an article from the BBC from last week. With festivals starting to wind down, we can reflect on and react to line-ups of festivals. How few female Rock artists have been included in many of the line-ups:

"When we first started in the music industry, it was pretty much a boys' club," says Hannah Richardson, Cherym's lead singer and guitarist.

"We were like, why can't girls do it? There's no reason why we can't."

Hannah makes up the Londonderry punk trio with Allanagh Doherty and Emer McLaughlin and says the industry - particularly the alternative music scene - is still not where it needs to be when it comes to equality and diversity.

That was thrown into focus when earlier this week, Slam Dunk festival revealed part of its 2025 line-up, featuring only two acts that included women.

"I'm so sick of seeing of seeing line-ups that are predominantly cis, straight, white men all the time," Hannah tells BBC Newsbeat.

"Because it's not just women that are overlooked. It's black people, it's trans people, it's marginalised people in general."

The band's drummer and singer Allanagh adds that women are so overlooked in the industry, they're often mistaken for other bands' girlfriends when they show up to gigs.

Slam Dunk revealed its first line-up announcement on Wednesday for its festivals in Leeds and Hatfield, featuring bands including The Used, A Day To Remember and Neck Deep.

Of the 20 featured acts, only two - Delilah Bon and Dream State - included female musicians, sparking a disappointed reaction from fans.

"It's giving, 'for a dollar, name a woman'," Allanagh says.

Slam Dunk is one of the UK's biggest independent rock festivals and its spokesperson declined to say anything about the line-up announcement when approached by Newsbeat.

Research by the BBC in 2017 found that 80% of festival headliners were male and dozens of festivals went on to pledge to achieve a 50/50 gender split by 2022.

But by the time 2022 arrived, Newsbeat discovered that only one in 10 headliners at the UK's top music festivals were women that summer.

In 2018, campaign group Keychange presented a manifesto to the European Parliament calling for more to be done to improve representation in the industry.

This year, it released a second manifesto , external renewing that call, along with other measures to make the music industry more equitable.

Slam Dunk's 2024 line-up poster featured five acts that included women out of the 27 that were advertised - about 20% - while in 2023, it was five out of 22, or 23%.

Meanwhile Download, which is a bigger rock festival spread across three days, filled 32 of its 111 slots - just under 30% - with acts featuring women and non-binary artists this summer.

Cherym, Panic Shack and ARXX all agree the alternative scene can be a "boys' club".

In other genres though, 2024 has been punctuated by women breaking records, from Taylor Swift's Eras tour, to Sabrina Carpenter's chart domination and Glastonbury having two female headliners for the first time.

Megan says outside of those genres, there's an element of "gatekeeping" from women and Hannah says there can be an expectation of the kinds of music they should make.

"There was an assumption that we made a particular type of music because we're women," she says of when Cherym first started performing”.

PHOTO CREDIT: Pixabay/Pexels

It is clear that stations like Kerrang! Radio and Radio X – who deal more in Alternative, indie and Rock – are not playing enough women. Appalling that women and non-binary artists are seen as inferior or an afterthought. There is this boys’ club mentality in Rock journalism. Still very much the situation where Rock is geared towards white men. Great acts like Nova Twins and Panic Shack having to fight against this sexism and misogyny that runs through Rock. Though not as overtly sexist and imbalanced as perhaps it was a few years or a decade ago, look at the statistics and modern reality and you wonder why things have not improved. If there is not call for change and awareness from all in Rock then it is left to women and non-binary artists to speak. Gatekeepers, festival organisers and labels doing little to be inclusive and redress the horrifying gender imbalance through Rock’s stages, pages and stations. If legends like Tom Morello (Rage Against the Machine) have said that women should be positioned at the front and centre of the modern Rock scene how many of his peers are echoing these sentiments?!

It does seem like there is not enough allyship from men through Rock. The marginalisation of women and non-binary artists is evident. It is not the case that women are lacking when it comes to producing wonderful and original Rock music. It is obvious that they should be playlisted and booked for festival slots. Women are producing essential and phenomenal Rock music. Overlooked and under-represented by the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Last year, the co-founder of Rolling Stone, Jann Venner, controversially stated that Black and female artists were not worthy of inclusion in his book, The Masters. For years and years, we have seen examples of the misogyny and sexism rife throughout Rock, In fact, in 2018, Garbage lead Shirley Manson spoke to Louder Sound. She was asked about her experienced and why there is such discrimination through Rock and Metal:

“Why is there a lack of women in rock and metal?

“Because the whole game of ‘rock’ was designed and maintained by the patriarchy. So if the rules are written by men, it automatically makes it very difficult for women to infiltrate, because women then have to play a man’s game and not their own game, in order to get on the board. And as it is, it’s really very difficult still for women to be treated as equal thinkers and creators in the same way that men are. It’s not enough for a woman to be a great songwriter, she has to be fuckable in order for a record company to give a fuck. And that’s patriarchy at its most terrifying.”

Rock and metal is a world where people define themselves as being more free and against the mainstream, yet there’s still a problem with female representation.

“I think the terminology surrounding rock’n’roll at this point is obsolete. Rock to me has always been more about rebellion and freedom of speech and living off-centre, and when you start having old men impose silly old rules, then it becomes something that it never was supposed to be. Music surely is supposed to continue to evolve, and change and adapt and move with the times and the political currents, and so on and so forth. It’s an old stodgy thing that has never really developed past its initial birth. When I hear someone who claims to love rock music, rock’n’roll, any kind of rebellious musical movement, tell me that women aren’t welcome and/or are incapable of being rebellious and being provocateurs or stepping outside of conformity, then I feel like laughing. I feel like dismissing that person entirely, because they’ve got the whole idea wrong. They’ve got these very stringent, strange, tiny little myopic minds that have decreed that rock’n’roll music sits within these tiny, thin parallel lines.

“To me, rock’n’roll has always been expansive. It’s an expansive idea that embraces so many different types of rebellion and provocation and resistance and political pushback. It’s all these things to me, and freedom. To be whatever you want to be. Because all the other genres of music are, to my mind when I was growing up were so much more restrictive. But to me now, rock has become that, too – it’s also become restrictive. People just want to impose rules on everyone, and fuck that. I’m fucking sick of everyone imposing rules on anybody else – it’s so tiresome. And I think that what’s sort of exciting a lot of women, currently, is as sad and awful as the #metoo movement is to bear witness to, it’s also phenomenal and very unique and unusual to hear so many female voices on a daily basis in the media, talking about the female experience, talking about the female gaze, talking about the female perspective and what female rebellion means, and what ‘pushing against the pricks’ really was about. And although it probably won’t change that much, sadly, because I feel like we’ve got such a mountain to climb, I do believe it’s educating a whole generation of young women not to put up with the fucking shit we did.”

What advice would you give to women coming up in rock and metal now?

“I’m always saying the same thing to all my girls whoever I meet, and they say the same thing, which is: Don’t. Fucking. Back. Down. Ever. It sounds so cliched, and it’s cliched because cliches exist. And it’s very hard to hold your ground in any circumstance. Whether you’re going up against another woman or another man, another idea, another system. But I think if you really have something to say and you really need to say it, then you’ll find a way to hold your ground, and it’s difficult. But it isn’t impossible, and I think there are more and more women doing it. And what is beautiful that I have really noticed lately for myself is, when I was first emerging as an artist, making music and in bands, there weren’t that many women who had come before me. It was really just a handful of women certainly that culturally we all knew of. And now that has changed so much, there’s a whole wealth of my generation, the generation after us, and the generation after them. There’s a lot of encouragement out there that didn’t necessarily exist when I was emerging, and certainly the generation before that had nobody.

“I was on tour with Debbie Harry this summer, she didn’t have anyone to look back at. She was one of the first, her and Patti Smith and Chrissie Hynde and Marianne Faithfull – all these amazing creatures. Yoko Ono. They didn’t have anybody to look back at and say, ‘Well they did it. I can do it too.’ But I think that’s changing, and that’s exciting, and as a result we’re seeing a whole new wave of provocative women starting to push back. Because I think women are angry. I think women are full of rage. And you know, as a result of this #metoo movement really engulfing our cultures all over the world, we’re gonna see some repercussions to that that can only be a great thing. For not just women, but for men, too. I think men will benefit from a more egalitarian society. I love men and enjoy them and I certainly have never ever wanted a future that is fully female – that terrifies the living daylights out of me, too. I want an equal society where all genders are represented fairly. I think that’s to the benefit of everyone. My trans friends, my gay friends, they taught me things that my straight friends could never teach me, and as a result I think that speaks to how we must all move forward”.

This new BBC article that collates words from women in Rock who have experienced misogyny and sexism calls into question whether there is determination for change. So geared at being a boys’ club, it is hard for women and non-binary artists to get a foothold. It is shocking and appalling seeing how festivals, venues and stations disregard and marginalise them. Compared to Pop music, where women are ruling and dominating without much competition, Rock is not embracing and including women. Not willing to represent them on stage. It has to change. Sad that, in 2024, Rock remains this…

UNMOVING boys’ club.

FEATURE: The Importance of Promoting Body Positivity: Why Recent Words from Kate Winslet Can Be Applied to the Music Industry

FEATURE:

The Importance of Promoting Body Positivity

IN THIS PHOTO: Jorja Smith/PHOTO CREDIT: Petros/Net-A-Porter

Why Recent Words from Kate Winslet Can Be Applied to the Music Industry

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A conversation that…

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Winslet attends the UK premiere of Lee, at the Odeon Luxe/PHOTO CREDIT: James Manning/PA

has been ongoing for years, I wonder whether body positivity and promoting real body sizes and shapes is as encouraged and celebrated in music as it should be. When we think of women having to conform to a particular shape and size for roles and to be seen as popular and appealing, you go to acting and Hollywood. In terms of films and women cast in starring roles, you feel there is still a bias towards women who are thinner and more toned. Perhaps an ideal in terms of body size. How often do we get films where women with fuller figures are in the spotlight? It makes me think about the music industry and how there is still prejudice around body image. How women are often judged on their size and figure and there is this unconscious bias and desire for a particular look. Thinner seen as desirable. Things have shifted since decades past, though I think we are a long way from seeing discriminated ended and women of all sizes embraced. In a recent interview, Kate Winslet spoke about here experienced on a film set and why women should celebrate realistic body shapes:

“Actress Kate Winslet has told the BBC that women should celebrate "being a real [body] shape" after being told on a recent film set to sit up straighter to hide her belly rolls.

Speaking about her upcoming film Lee on Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg, Winslet said it was her job to be like her character - the fashion model turned acclaimed World War Two photographer Elizabeth `Lee' Miller.

"She wasn’t lifting weights or doing Pilates. She was eating cheese, bread and drinking wine, and not making a big deal of it. So of course, her body would be soft," Winslet said.

She said women should celebrate “being a real shape, being soft and maybe having a few extra rolls”.

The actress says a 'conversation is needed' about labelling women

“We’re so used to perhaps not necessarily seeing that and enjoying it. The instinct weirdly is to see it and criticise it," she said. “It’s interesting how much people do like labels for women."

Winslet said the topic is a conversation that needs to be had.

“Life is too short,” she added. “I don’t want to look back and go 'why did I worry about that thing' and so guess what - I don’t worry anymore.”

Winslet, 48, has been a champion for women and has openly spoken out against body shaming in the past.

Winslet plays war photojournalist Elizabeth `Lee' Miller, during World War Two

In a recent interview with Harper's Bazaar UK, Winslet, external spoke of being told to sit up straighter to hide her “belly rolls” while on set filming Lee”.

How long will it take until Hollywood evolves and improves. That we are no longer in a position where actors like Kate Winslet are encouraged to hide any rolls or any of their body because it is seen as unglamorous or too much. This sizeism and misogyny that does not apply to men in the same way. Even if there is still prejudice there, there are examples where men with larger or real figures are not subjected to the same negative focus and degradation. Like they should be ashamed. It is good Winslet has spoken out, as it will hopefully lead to more conversation about the way women are judged. A clear misogyny and sexism in Hollywood that should end! The music industry doesn’t seem much better. Artists such as Lizzo have come out in recent years to share her experiences of body-shaming. How she has had to deal with so many nasty, vile and cruel comments about her body. We should be highlighting women with real body shapes. Not keep this decades-long narrative that there is an ideal look and size. Think about all the music videos and magazine covers from the 1990s and 2000s. How there was this over-sexualisation of women. When women have agency and are controlling their image then that is empowering. However, these women still are of a particular size. Very sexy, for sure, but bodies that are thinner and more conventionally desirable. Women who are fuller and curvier subjected to so much judgment and misogyny. Body-shaming and any discrimination against women’s bodies has no place in music. It still happens. There are articles like this that show artists like Lizzo and Adele are among the artists who make listeners feel most positive about their bodies. How songs by Demi Lovato and Miley Cyrus are really inspiring body-positivity anthems. However, if you take some of this with a pinch of salt, it is clear how body positivity has come out of a long tradition of artists, especially women, being negatively judged and subjected to negativity if they have real body shapes.

 IN THIS PHOTO: Kesha/PHOTO CREDIT: Sarah Morris/WireImage

Last year, Jorja Smith was the subject of body-shaming comments. It was an eye-opening and shocking moment when it showed how far we haven’t come! How women are still open and vulnerable to being shamed and abused because of their bodies. Lizzo has experienced continued body-shaming. CMAT has also been subjected to body-shaming. Whilst some call it fat-shaming, I think that ‘fat’ is an term that should be phased out. It suggests these women are overweight or unhealthy. In fact, they have perfectly healthy bodies and are not unhealthily overweight. Even if they were, then being attacked because of that is incredibly destructive and dangerous. The effect that has on their mental health. Kesha recently experienced body-shaming, though she has hit back. Rather than it running her or making her quit, it has actually made her feel more confident. It should not be down to women to speak out and ask for change! The industry needs to change. Women of all sizes need to be equal. Real body shapes featured and celebrated more. Anyone body-shaming should be blocked on social media. It is a form of misogyny that should not be tolerated in the modern age. Christina Aguilera has spoken about how music bosses said they preferred her when she was younger and skinnier – not fans of her ‘thicker’ look. It is such Stone Age and appalling language to use towards a woman. I realise that men in the industry experience it. Billie Eilish has experienced body-shaming through her career, but she came under attack for suggesting men do not experience it in the same way. Maybe tone-deaf, there is some truth to say men do not experience it as much.

IN THIS PHOTO: Christina Aguilera/PHOTO CREDIT: Kevin Winter

Think back to Hollywood and how women are denied roles because of their figure. How there is this body-shaming. Air-brushed to an inch of their life. Those with fuller figures not as prominently on covers and applauded on the red carpet as much as other women. Angel Nkomo, Latto and Tones and I have also recently opened up about their body-shaming experiences. I really hate that women still have to endure so much abuse. Sexual assault, trolling, misogyny of various forms. In 2024, we should not have to highlight so many alarming cases of women being targeted and judged. Body-shaming is running alongside body positivity. There are many women in the industry promoting bodies of all shapes, though you wonder whether labels, bosses and the industry in general will ever make a real effort to shake their discriminations and age-old prejudices. It is disgusting that women cannot be who they are and made to feel confident and sexy in their own skin! The sort of comments that they are subjected to constantly. The narrative needs to change. In the same way Kate Winslet is speaking out in Hollywood, we have incredible women speaking out in music. Incredible men and non-binary artists like Sam Smith highlighting an ill and disturbingly regressive attitude that is causing so much harm to so many artists. Instead of putting down and shaming women like CMAT, Lizzo and Christina Aguilera, they should be seen as role models. How inspiring they are! This idea that there is an ideal shape. Anything else seen as abnormal or unappealing. It creates this stigma that is going to see so many women leave the industry. It sets a toxic example and will make those coming into the industry think twice about a career if they think they will be body-shamed. Women with real and fuller shapes should be…

RESPECTED and admired!

FEATURE: Revisiting the Phenomenal Summer of Soul: The Greatest Concert Film Ever?

FEATURE:

 

 

Revisiting the Phenomenal Summer of Soul

The Greatest Concert Film Ever?

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PERHAPS apropos of nothing…

IN THIS PHOTO: Summer of Soul’s director, Questlove (Ahmir Thompson)/PHOTO CREDIT: Andre D. Wagner for The New York Times

I am heading back to 2021. In the modern times, how easy is it to produce a music documentary that is up there with the very best?! We have plenty of innovative filmmakers and fascinating subjects. However, like classic albums, modern-day works of brilliance still do not get ranked alongside the established ones. When it comes to music documentaries/concert films, can you get better than Summer of Soul?! If you have Disney+, you can watch it now. I would argue it is the greatest concert films ever. Summer of Soul (...Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised) is an acclaimed documentary film about the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival. It was directed by Ahmir ‘Questlove’. Following its world premiere at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival, it went on to win the Grand Jury Prize and Audience Award in the documentary categories. In cinemas for a brief time, it then went onto streaming services such as hulu. Marking fifty-five years of a huge festival that coincided around the time of the Moon Landing, there was not enough media attention on the Harlem Cultural Festival. Not only was it a chance to highlight the inequality and poverty through Harlem and compel the U.S. Government to act and celebrate the richness and love within the community, it showed that there was more focus and appreciation of a comparatively needless and less significant event. Even if you felt the Moon Landing was huge and moving, it overshadowed the vitality and urgency of this Harlem festival. Coming years after assassinations of key figures like John F. Kennedy (1963), and Malcolm X (1965), Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (1968) and Robert F. Kennedy (1968), this seemed like the result of growing fears and need for change. Peace-makers and inspiring politicians gunned down!

When we think of Harlem in 1969, we might think of poverty and violence. Unrest ruling. However, there was social and economic change happening. Overcoming challenges such as urban decay, there were activists working hard towards positive change. Alongside this was the vibrant and inspiring creative and social hub. Summer of Soul takes us inside the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival. Artists like Mahalia Jackson, Stevie Wonder, Sly and the Family Stone, and Gladys Knight & The Pips taking to the stage. You can read more about the festival here. I was actually made aware of Summer of Soul by Shaun Keaveny. The legendary broadcaster shouted it out on, I think, his former BBC Radio 6 Music show. He has also mentioned it on his Community Garden Radio show once or twice. Whenever I got that recommendation from him, I sat on it for a while. Watching the documentary for the first time recently, it was a mind-blowing experience! Beautifully constructed and narrated, you can feel the love and effort that went in to making Summer of Soul. With recent interviews from artists who were there (such as Mavis Staples) and contributions from festival-goers and those keen to share their impressions, it shone a light on the importance of Harlem. Not only in terms of the music and community. It was being fought for by activists and politicians. On a wider national stage, there was not the same sort of focus and care. The 1969 festival almost like this rebellion and insurrection of love and passion. Through Gospel, Soul and other genres, thousands attended the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival.

There is a whole gang of brilliant and insightful interviews with Questlove about Summer of Soul. I will select from a couple of them. I will finish with a couple of reviews for the 2021 documentary. Fifty-five years after that sensational Harlem festival, there is so much relevance and timeliness. In terms of where America is now. How we do need a similar concert like this to raise awareness of issues. Fighting against evil in the world. Although it is a different climate to 1969, there is genocide and war around the world. Poverty and injustice. How there has not been anything as electrifying as that Harlem celebration in 1969. I want to start by sourcing from Pitchfork. They spoke with Questlove in 2021 about his directorial debut. The Roots’ drummer discussed the fight to give Black music its rightful dues:

“While the rest of America was celebrating the Apollo 11 moon landing in the summer of 1969, Harlem was awash in the sounds of soul, blues, jazz, gospel, and pop. There at Mount Morris (now Marcus Garvey) Park, it was a different leap for mankind. The Harlem Cultural Festival, a concert series held over six Sundays, featured a seemingly infinite Rushmore of Black music icons: a then 19-year-old Stevie Wonder, Nina Simone, Gladys Knight & the Pips, B.B. King, David Ruffin, and the Staple Singers, to name just a few. Rev. Jesse Jackson spoke. Mavis Staples and Mahalia Jackson practically ripped the clouds out of the sky with their gospel duet. It all started in the weeks before Woodstock.

And yet, the remarkable festival footage lay dormant for 50 years before the Roots drummer Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson unfurled it for his directorial debut, Summer of Soul. The documentary—in theaters and on Hulu July 2, after winning top awards at Sundance—functions as both a concert film and a loving artifact of Black music amid the Civil Rights Movement. “Never mind the moon,” one festival-goer says in the doc. “Let’s get some of that cash in Harlem.”

Questlove first discovered the Harlem Cultural Festival in 1997 during a Roots tour stop in Tokyo, where he sat in the Soul Train Café dazzled by a two-minute bootleg clip of Sly and the Family Stone’s set, shown on a video screen. “I didn’t know they were playing to an all-Black crowd,” he recalled to Pitchfork. “I saw the word ‘festival’ and thought, Obviously it must be in Switzerland or Montreaux.” Two decades later, producers unearthed 40 hours of lost footage from the late videographer Hal Tulchin and tapped Questlove to condense it into archival gold. It was no easy feat, with the original cut clocking in at three and a half hours: “Cutting 90 minutes was one of the most painful things I’ve ever done,” he said. The result is a breathtaking capsule of Black music history that gives as much energy and gravity to the performances as it does to artists’ and attendees’ relived memories of the event.

Talking over Zoom from his office at The Tonight Show in June, Questlove discussed the daunting task of chronicling and curating such a timeless display of grandeur.

Pitchfork: In documenting this type of lost Black culture, a powerful thing happens. It’s rewriting history by actually writing us into it. What sense of obligation did you feel while working on the film?

Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson: When I was going through that funk of “ugh, I don’t know if I can do this,” my girlfriend snapped me out of it. Like: This is bigger than you. This is your chance to make history. It’s bigger than your nervousness of getting a bad review or embarrassing yourself in your directorial debut. This is your chance to right a wrong. It’s weird because the main motherlode of the interview weeks was March 13, 2020. And within days, the world was shut down. For half a second, I was like, I guess it was nice working with you guys, see ya. You’re watching death after death after death every night. Trucks of body bags on the corner. Who has the time to think about a movie when it’s like, is my mom going to be alive? After a two-week panic period, we got it together. We figured out inventive ways to conduct interviews. Mavis is a great example. We had this wheelie device that was like the Mars rovers, with a camera crew in the hallway of her apartment. They had to remote control this thing inside her apartment, and we did our audio interview that way. The timing of making this film changed this film.

Was there any point where you felt like people wouldn’t care?

No. It was gold. If anything, it was an embarrassment of riches. It was too much. I kept this on a 24-hour loop for about six months straight. Slept to it. Traveled to it. It was the only thing I consumed. I didn’t watch any movies, television shows. Nothing. If something hit me, I wanted to get it organically. While the master reel was being reprocessed and digitized—which took like five months—anything interesting I saw, I noted. When I felt that I had enough goosebump moments, I curated it like I curate my DJ sets or like I curate a show. I work backward. Always start with the ending first, and then work my way to the front.

The Mavis and Mahalia moment in the middle is insanely moving. How did the emotions in these performances help you decide the sequence?

The summit meeting between Mavis and Mahalia was one of the first things I saw. I knew it was so powerful; I didn’t want any interruptions. My first draft was three and a half hours, and that was my initial ending. But as we were cutting, we couldn’t help but see the mirroring of what was happening 50 years ago happening right now. My producer Joseph was like, “I don’t know if you want to go Kumbaya with this.” Once you force Mavis and Mahalia to the middle, it forces you to come up with an even stronger ending. By that point, I realized this is Nina’s moment to cap this off. With Nina at the end, suddenly, this film has an edge and energy to it.

When I got to the Stevie Wonder drum solo, I knew that was the gob-smacking cold-open shocker of all shockers. People have never seen Stevie Wonder in a sort of percussion context. So I figured that’s my little wink to anyone coming in with folded arms like, OK, what’s the Roots drummer going to do with this film? Of course, he’s going to do a drum solo. There’s a point where Stevie and his bandleader Gene are riffing. When Stevie comes on stage, that’s when Apollo lands on the moon. When he lightly mentioned it, you hear boos, and that was curious to me. Of course, growing up, I listened to Gil Scott and Curtis Mayfield. I’ve heard snide remarks about the moon landing in soul songs, but I didn’t realize the disdain was that strong. Once we heard boos, it’s like, whoa, let’s investigate. Unbeknownst to us, CBS Evening News’ Walter Cronkite happened to send a man-on-the-street [reporter]. It was done in a snarky way, like, “While the world stands by to watch history, they’re in the park…”

Why hasn’t there been such attentiveness toward archiving Black music, and why is it important?

I know that is my purpose. No one is more of a sentimental packrat than I am. I am a VHS-collecting, Super 8-collecting archivist. I’ll take all the first five years of Jet Magazine archives, and make my girlfriend angry because five other boxes of Right On! Magazine are in the living room. I was collecting for personal reasons. But I now see that this is important. Once I finished this, everyone was coming out of the woodworks, DMing me like, “Questlove, we have 19 hours of footage of this concert.” Wait, what?! Things I never heard of before. Somewhere between nine to 15 other incredible high-level events were filmed for posterity and rejected, so now it’s in the basement of UCLA or somewhere. I’m keeping my eye on the Universal Hip-Hop Museum that’s opening in the Bronx. I’m hoping they will preserve history. But all too often, Black culture is so easily disposable in every aspect. TikTok content creations, our slang, our music, our style. I guess the attitude has always been: It’s not a big deal. It’s just a dance; it’s just a concert. But it is a big deal. And I realized it was a big deal with our very first interviewee Musa Jackson. Initially, I was concerned because he was 5 years old [during the Harlem Cultural Festival]. What 5-year-old is going to have true insight into the magnitude of what they’re going through? But when he talked to us, he was like, “This is my first memory of life.” He’s 56, 57 now. The common thing was that no one believed. Can you imagine trying to tell people, “Yeah, in Harlem, I saw Sly and the Family Stone and Stevie Wonder”? It’s unbelievable that this could be that easily dismissed.

We conducted this interview without any context, no photos, showed him nothing. Just: “Alright, tell us everything you know.” And it was almost like talking to a medium. You don’t believe him because he was spot-on with everything. He knew the Fifth Dimension had on creamsicle outfits. When we showed him the footage, the emotional outpouring started. I realized we’re giving him his life back. Even for Marilyn McCoo [of the Fifth Dimension]. She’s done everything. She was in one of the first Black groups to win a major Grammy. I was wondering, why is this particular show hitting your heartstrings with the millions of things that you’ve done? And suddenly, I realized that she and I had something in common. No matter what job they have, every Black person in their workspace has to juggle code-switching. Between Motown and certain acts that wanted not to make it but survive, you had to code-switch.

No example is more obvious than David Ruffin’s performance. It’s in the middle of August. He has on a wool tuxedo and a coat. Why would he do this? And then I thought, man, you’d rather suffer and be uncomfortable in the name of professionalism. That’s something. That was implemented in him via his Motown charm school days. I asked Marilyn McCoo why I’d never seen them be this loose and relaxed at a performance before. She was like, “We’d been dying to perform for Black people for the longest.” At that point, they were the biggest act in the world, bigger than the Supremes. They had the No. 1 song. To them, it’s like, “We had to do this because this is our one chance to get to our people”.

International Documentary Association interviewed Question about Summer of Soul, A celebration of Black joy, I think that the tremors of the documentary/concert film will last for years. I hope that more people do check out this wonderful thing. This gift that we were given. Part celebration and a concert film, there is so much social history and backdrop that adds colour and context. Few can argue against the fact that Summer of Soul is the greatest music documentary ever. Whether you class it as one of a concert film, it stands above the competition in my opinion:

“MH: Speaking of your directorial debut, tell us about what the intent was for the film, and exactly what do you think, now that you’ve had some time away from it, makes it a Questlove jawn?

AQT: Well, the intent of the film is kind of a loaded mission. As a musician, these are precious artifacts that are historical, but then on top of that it’s really making sure that it gets its right place in history.

At the time I happened to be finishing up Prince’s autobiography, and he’s telling this warm, fuzzy memory that he had of his dad taking him to his first movie when Prince was 11, which was Woodstock. He explains how that changed his life; the legend of Woodstock and the light we hold Woodstock in—all that happened because of the movie. Granted, the lineup was enough to make people from all parts of the country take a pilgrimage. But all the acts, all the memories, all the images, anything that we associate with what we think the ’60s were, chances are you’re either thinking of the March on Washington or you’re thinking of Woodstock.

For me, I still got immersed and baptized in musical education without having a Woodstock of my own to claim. But I always wondered, if this [original concert] film were given the greenlight to be just as brilliant as it could have been, what a difference that would have made in the lives of young musicians such as myself, who really didn’t have musical documents growing up.

Thank God I had parents that were super hip and super cool, that would wake me up at 11:45 p.m. so I could watch the second song on Saturday Night Live before Soul Train came on. Philadelphia was weird. It was one of the markets in which Soul Train would come on at 1:00 in the morning instead of 12:00 in the afternoon like the rest of America.

So, I often wonder, had this film come out, how different music could have been. Because Woodstock defined a generation. This could have defined us, and it’s sort of weird what Soul Train wound up doing. But, no more "would’ve, could’ve, should’ve," I think that this film is still potent and it’s timeless and the fact that it’s 50 years later and we’re still talking about the same issues will show how valuable it still is.

MH: And as we’re moving through this tumultuous time, this 21st century, the millennium, what you’ve done—pulled together these archives, created a score, curated this history—this is a Black cultural experience, but it’s also a universal experience. Your first cut was three hours and 20 minutes; talk about your process in making the film—around letting certain sequences breathe, and then cutting down others?

AQT: Well, in this case, time was really on our side. In his mission to sell the film, Hal Tulchin probably gave it one last go-around with the 25th anniversary; I think in 1994 he tried to make something happen. What winds up happening is, once we got the original reels, that process alone to transfer took a good five months. They had to bake the film, take a very sensitive bristle device and gently restore the film without scratching or destroying it.

I took the transfers that he made to VHS, which we transferred to DVD; even though it was four cameras, it’s 20 hours of unique footage. I basically made that my visual aquarium for those five months. Instead of sitting here with my pad and pen and just watching everything, I wanted it to naturally hit me. So, all the TVs in my house, in my office at NBC, my laptop—it was like a screensaver. The concert just constantly played for 24 hours. I kept notepads next to each monitor in my house.

I’ll say that for me the most important thing was, I wanted my first five minutes to be like a gobsmack, just totally surprise you by what you were watching. And I felt that nothing spoke more of that surprise than Stevie Wonder playing drums, which shocked even me! Everyone knows I’m a drummer, so of course I’d be attracted to this, so that’s the beginning.

This is also how I plan shows. I feel as though most people remember the first ten minutes and the last ten minutes of any show, but it’s almost like, what’s in between doesn’t matter. Yes, in this case it does matter, but for me, it was like, when people first see this, what do they see and what do you leave them with?

But also, I gave permission for [producer] Joseph [Patel] and everyone to really speak their voice and let me know if I was trailing off into amateur-hour territory. For the ending—initially I thought well, obviously, Mahalia [Jackson] and Mavis Staples have to close this; that’s the most magical moment of the thing. And then Joseph challenged me.

I felt it was more dangerous and edgy, and it spoke more of today to let Nina Simone have the last word, especially with "Are You Ready, Black People?", with her challenging people to immerse themselves. We live in a time where a lot of performative activism is trying to masquerade itself as actual activism, especially with social media. Once we shifted Mavis and Mahalia to the middle, it elevated the film even more, then of course, Nina’s fiery performance was the hardest to break up because that entire 45 minutes was the most magical. I’ve never seen a person just so sure of themselves in new territory. She’s not singing jazzy love ballads like "My Baby Just Cares for Me." She’s going into a new territory of activism. So, once you have those three, the story writes itself. And this is a story of change.

In 1969, younger activists were at a newer place than the older activists were. We started calling ourselves Black, our fashion and ideas got bolder, there was the voices of the Black Panthers versus the earlier ’60s civil rights..Attitudes had changed. So, it’s just filling in the blanks, really.

MH: And it was just so exciting to see what kind of story you would tell. I know that you believe that the film is so much more than a concert film. It’s not just about these extraordinary performances, but the decisions you have to make about constructing the narrative out of the material you had, and the themes that you wanted to embrace.

AQT: I’ll admit that this sort of fell in my lap, at maybe the tail end of 2016, or early 2017. I had a friend that had a copy. If you remember, Aretha Franklin was key in keeping the Amazing Grace film from coming out when she was living, but I had gotten to watch maybe 35 minutes of it, because a friend of mine had a cut of it from years before, and I always thought it was such a bold choice to show the performances with no context whatsoever. But I’m a guy that lives for Easter eggs and director’s commentaries and all those things, so immediately I started stalking anybody involved in that film. Once I heard the backstories, a part of me was like, Wow, is there a way for me to include those things as well, in this film?

So, in the beginning I kind of decided, OK, let me curate a really good, tight, two-hour performance and just make you a fly on the wall. But the more these stories kept revealing themselves, the big question was, Do we have people that attended the concert give commentary? We found about ten to 15 people, and even that was hard because you were either under the age of 10, so your memory might be spotty, or you were over the age of 75 and your memory might be spotty. For me, Musa Jackson was probably the gamechanger. He was our first interview, and the thing that I never considered was the fact that this concert was his very first memory”.

I am going to end with a couple of reviews for the majestic and hugely moving Summer of Soul. Receiving almost perfect reviews across the board, few other concert films/documentaries have ever come close to achieving that. I want to keep on with a review from Vox:

“Every moment is a surprise. After a while, you’ll find yourself sitting with mouth agape, waiting to see which incredible cultural icon will walk out onto the stage next. The footage is kinetic and vivid, shot from angles that emphasize how the crowd is responding to each performance, pulling in close to faces dripping with sweat and emotion, and sometimes shooting from the stage, through gaps between instruments, to reveal faces thrilled with the show.

I’ll never recover from watching Mahalia Jackson and Mavis Staples sing “Precious Lord, Take My Hand” on the same mic, so close we can see their individual teeth. It’s a song Jackson had performed alongside Martin Luther King Jr. many times before; King had been murdered a year before the concerts.

“Gospel was more than religious,” Al Sharpton explains. “Gospel was the therapy for the stress and pressure of being Black in America. We didn’t know anything about therapists, but we knew Mahalia Jackson.”

Thompson, realizing that the significance of the event to the Black community of the historical moment could use contemporary reinforcement, brings in commentators — mostly people who were there more than 50 years ago — to talk about what it meant to see a crowd full of Black faces celebrating. Or to have the concerts occur in a moment of revolution, of crystallizing Black identity. “By the fashion in the crowd, you could see the change happening,” one commentator says.

A generational shift was taking place among Black Americans, and it mattered that the concerts occurred while debates raged within Harlem itself about nonviolence and militance, about expanding consciousness to encompass a whole range of cultures who’d been shut out by mainstream white America.

In one sequence, Thompson weaves together a poignant exploration of the moon landing, which occurred in the midst of the festival’s run, and what the people gathered in Mount Morris Park were thinking during that “giant leap for mankind.” Archival footage reveals people significantly less convinced that landing on the moon was worth spending money that could have been used to relieve poverty and hunger down here on earth. In a manner that recounts a documentary like 2016’s O.J.: Made in America, Summer of Soul deftly weaves the mood of the time and the long history of Black expression through music into this one moment, and it practically explodes off the screen.

That we’ve been talking about Woodstock and not the Harlem Cultural Festival all this time as if it’s the moment in which a generation emerged is not all that surprising. “The so-called powers that are, or were, didn’t find it significant enough to keep it as a part of history,” one participant in the film notes. It wasn’t like the festival’s essential erasure from cultural memory was an anomaly; Black history gets memory-holed all the time. It doesn’t happen by accident. Powerful people make choices about what they think is worth preserving in the cultural memory, and what’s just fine to forget.

That’s why a movie like Summer of Soul matters. It’s not just a blast to watch — and it truly is a blast. It’s another tiny step in reclaiming the full history of America, expanding the context of our present not just for people who remember the past, but people who never knew about it in the first place. We’re fools if we don’t think burying the era-changing import of events like these is as much a part of American history as the events themselves — and movies like Summer of Soul fight back bringing the past vibrantly to life.

At the beginning of the film, Musa Jackson, who attended the festival as a kid, sits down to be interviewed about the experience. Off-camera, Thompson tells him that he’s going to start playing footage so Jackson can see it as he answers questions. But as soon as the light of the screen falls on his face, Jackson is transfixed, unable to answer questions, his eyes starting to grow wet. At the end of the film, he says that watching the footage moved something within him that always kind of doubted that his memory of the festival was real. Crying, he says, “I knew I was not crazy. But now I know I’m not. And this is just confirmation”.

In July 2021, Mark Kermode wrote a five-star review for The Guardian. Arguing that it could be the best concert film ever, this really is something that everyone needs to watch! I cannot really stress that enough. I have come to it late though, looking at issues in the world today, you wonder whether we should have something similar. Could that ever be done?! In some ways, the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival was a one-off. A phenomenon that cannot be consigned to history. We need to keep talking about it:

“This Sundance award-winner is an absolute joy, uncovering a treasure trove of pulse-racing, heart-stopping live music footage (originally captured by TV veteran Hal Tulchin) that has remained largely unseen for half a century. While Mike Wadleigh’s Woodstock and the Maysles’ Gimme Shelter have long been considered definitive documents of the highs and lows of 1969 pop culture, Summer of Soul makes both look like a footnote to the main event: a festival in the heart of Harlem that was somehow written out of the history books. Capturing Stevie Wonder at a turning point in his career, Mavis Staples duetting with Mahalia Jackson (“an unreal moment”, says Staples) and Nina Simone at the height of her performing powers, director Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson’s feature debut intertwines music and politics in one of the best concert movies of all time.

Produced and MCed by Tony Lawrence (“a hustler, in the best sense”), and supported by the liberal Republican New York mayor, John Lindsay, with security by the Black Panthers, the 1969 Harlem Cultural festival played out over six weekends in Mount Morris Park at a time of profound cultural re-evaluation, a year on from the assassination of Dr Martin Luther King. Up in space, Neil Armstrong may have been taking one small step for a man, but as a festivalgoer states: “Never mind the moon, let’s get some of that cash in Harlem.”

Astutely chosen news footage outlines a decade of tension, producing disparate strands of resistance – civil rights and Black power. Among those on stage are the saxophonist Ben Branch, whom King spoke to immediately before his death, requesting that Branch play his favourite song, Precious Lord, Take My Hand. It’s that song that Staples and Jackson perform together in a moment that matches the ecstatic heights of Amazing Grace – another long-delayed music doc, covering Aretha Franklin’s 1972 performances at the New Temple Missionary Baptist Church in Los Angeles.

Blending wry laughter with piercing insight, interviewees explain how the word “Black” shifted from a fighting-talk term of abuse to one of self-determination and pride. Trailblazing journalist Charlayne Hunter-Gault remembers the battle she fought to get the New York Times to use “Black” rather than “negro”, while others describe festival power-couple Abbey Lincoln and Max Roach as being “unapologetically Black – they lived that phrase every day”.

Watching footage of her band the 5th Dimension performing Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In with tasseled orange suits, Marilyn McCoo remembers how they had been criticised for being “not Black enough”, and how happy they were to be there in Harlem, reclaiming their identity. Then to cap it all, we watch Nina Simone showcasing a new song, inspired by the stage production To Be Young Gifted and Black, performed in a voice that the Rev Al Sharpton astutely characterises as “somewhere between hope and mourning”.

While Simone is described as looking “like an African princess”, Hugh Masekela’s performance of Grazing in the Grass seems to transport the audience to another land, soaring from the parks of New York to distant plains. Elsewhere, Sly and the Family Stone embody the psychedelic Afrofuturist R&B vibe, with Rose Stone and Cynthia Robinson giving their bandleader a run for his money on keyboards and trumpet respectively, and the audience gradually accepting that a white drummer can kick it after all.

Gladys Knight recalls that “it wasn’t just about the music; we wanted progress”; the Edwin Hawkins Singers perform Oh, Happy Day in lime-green harmony; Ray Barretto and Mongo Santamaría bring the Latin-fusion beat; BB King cradles his guitar like a baby while he sings the blues; Rev Jesse Jackson speaks to the soul; and Stevie Wonder is on fire – on drums, keyboards and vocals – as he enters a new era of meaningful jazz funk.

The fact that the “rose coming through cement” of this festival was overlooked for so long served as further evidence that “Black history is gonna be erased”. Yet Questlove’s film begins and ends with festivalgoer Musa Jackson viewing the uplifting reclaimed footage (a sly counterpoint to the horrorshow bookending of Gimme Shelter) and tearfully thanking the film-maker for proving to him that “I’m not crazy!” – that this really happened. Thanks to this terrific film, we can all share in that sense of wonder”.

Whether purely a concert film or a music documentary that has a concert at its centre, what else can come close to Summer of Soul?! Questlove’s 2021 debut is a masterpiece! Not a minute wasted. You hope there is more footage somewhere that will come to light – so engrossing is the whole experience. I might have missed it altogether though, remembering Shaun Keaveny’s words and huge praise for Summer of Soul, I decided to watch it. It was a transformative experience! So, to him, I offer huge…

THANKS for that.

INTERVIEW: Leah Kardos (Author of the 33 1/3 Book of Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love)

INTERVIEW:

Leah Kardos (Author of the 33 1/3 Book of Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love)

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THROWING ahead to 14th November…

and the release of the 33 1/3 book on Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love. It is going to be so exciting. Bush’s most acclaimed and well-known album is now being brought to the classic series. Short books that are all about terrific albums. I am not sure whether you know about the series but, for years, various albums have been brought to life. Running at 150 pages or so, they are digestible and handy guides that go deep into classics. It has been a pleasure interviewing Leah Karos about her upcoming book on Hounds of Love. The Australian academic, musician and writer resides in London. A clearly massive Kate Bush fan, Kardos “publishes and releases music with Bigo & Twigetti, contributes reviews and criticism to The Wire, and has written a book that critically analyses David Bowie's Last Works, published by Bloomsbury Academic in early 2022”. I was keen to know more about a book that I was engrossed in! Having written about Hounds of Love multiple times through the years, I thought that I knew all there was to know! However, reading through Kardos’s book gave me fresh insights and perspectives. Passionately and beautifully written, it will be a terrific introduction to those new to the album in addition to those who have heard it multiple times. Before coming to the interview, here is some more information about a book every Kate Bush fan needs to pre-order:

“Hounds Of Love invites you to not only listen, but to cross the boundaries of sensory experience into realms of imagination and possibility. Side A spawned four Top 40 hit singles in the UK, 'Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God)', 'Cloudbusting', 'Hounds of Love' and 'The Big Sky', some of the best-loved and most enduring compositions in Bush's catalogue. On side B, a hallucinatory seven-part song cycle called The Ninth Wave broke away from the pop conventions of the era by using strange and vivid production techniques that plunge the listener into the psychological centre of a near-death experience. Poised and accessible, yet still experimental and complex, with Hounds Of Love Bush mastered the art of her studio-based songcraft, finally achieving full control of her creative process. When it came out in 1985, she was only 27 years old.

This book charts the emergence of Kate Bush in the early-to-mid-1980s as a courageous experimentalist, a singularly expressive recording artist and a visionary music producer. Track-by-track commentaries focus on the experience of the album from the listener's point of view, drawing attention to the art and craft of Bush's songwriting, production and sound design. It considers the vast impact and influence that Hounds Of Love has had on music cultures and creative practices through the years, underlining the artist's importance as a barrier-smashing, template-defying, business-smart, record-breaking, never-compromising role model for artists everywhere.

Table of Contents

Track Listing

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1. The first woman

2. Still dreaming

3. I put this moment… here

4. Hounds Of Love

5. The Ninth Wave

6. A ritual in six steps

7. Before The Dawn

8. Blackbirds

9. Wave after wave”.

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Hi Leah. Congratulations on your 33 1/3 book on Hounds of Love! How does it feel that it is completed and out in the world very shortly?

Thanks Sam! I'm really pleased that it will be out soon, despite the usual jitters one feels in these situations. I'm looking forward to there finally being a Kate Bush volume in the 33 1/3 series, and I'm feeling really grateful that I was given the opportunity to contribute this one. The whole experience has been a supreme pleasure, I've got to say.

Before discussing it, tell me when Kate Bush came into your life. What was your introduction to her music?

Like a lot of people in my generation, I had a general awareness because big, early-ish tracks like "Wuthering Heights", "Wow" and "Babooshka" got a lot of airplay in Australia in the 1980s. I definitely recall the videos making a deep impression - I grew up with my eyeballs glued to 'Rage', our down under version of MTV -  I remember feeling kid-affinity for "Peter" in the 'Cloudbusting' video, and attempting the "Wuthering Heights" moves in my bedroom mirror. But the first L.P. that I discovered for myself and loved on my own was Never for Ever. This would have been when I was a student at music college, around the tail end of the '90s.

“I enjoyed the ritualistic and folkloric themes that bubbled and echoed as I went”

Obviously Hounds of Love means a lot to you. How did you tackle writing about the album? What was your writing routine like and how did you approach researching?

Once the commission came through I spent a long time listening to it, thinking about it and collecting notes. The book needed to be 33k words in the end, but I had over 200k notes at one point - lengthy tangents on whaling shanties, oceanic metaphors in literature and myth, the ins and outs of sequencing compositions on the Fairlight CMI and the Linn Drum, Irish diddling, the psychology of stage fright, Arthur's Avalon and loads more besides - and what I had was an incredibly unwieldy pile of ideas, so had to seriously rethink my approach. I needed to strike a balance between the story that I wanted to tell, writing an accessible entry point for new fans, as well as making the book a worthwhile experience for the hardcores that already know everything. The story I really wanted to tell, aside from writing about the music itself, was how Hounds of Love marked her arrival as an artist and music producer of culture-changing influence. Once that was decided, everything else fell into place.

Was there anything new you learned about Hounds of Love or Kate Bush when writing the book?

For me, yes. There were connections between songs, and correspondences and reflections between sides A and B that I hadn't quite seen before. I enjoyed the ritualistic and folkloric themes that bubbled and echoed as I went. Following the story of how it was made, it was clear that Kate's creative process was a very slow and largely solitary one, and not necessarily shared, say, between a bunch of people hanging out in a studio. Like when Del downplayed his involvement in the process in that 1993 interview saying "I don’t really feel that anybody has that much involvement in what she does, it all comes out of her own head." What that meant was I couldn't really get any useful insights from the session musicians or anyone else that was brought in to help here and there, because they didn't have the 'why'. It seems obvious to say it now, but this was an important realisation to have when writing a book about an album and how it was made. It led me to focus less on what Kate might have meant by those choices and more on what the music can do from the listener's point of view.

“For me, the song is empowering; the best articulation of determination and desire ever inscribed in a pop song”

Apart from the genius singles from the first side and the second side, The Ninth Wave, it seems that Mother Stands for Comfort is like an odd one out and never gets talked about. What are your feelings about the song and how do you think it relates to the rest of the album and connects the songs?

I think 'Mother Stands for Comfort' can offer an important perspective that balances and binds the themes of side A and B together: the comfort of family, the primal, unambiguous nature of maternal love, the fierceness of Mother Nature. Beyond the lyric, the music and sound design says so much more; Eberhard Weber's bass is like poetry, right? The emotional juxtaposition between Kate's foreground and background voices, the gentle rocking-chair beat disturbed by violent smashes. High drama minimalism! What an amazing track!

In terms of legacy and reframing Hounds of Love, Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God) springs to mind. It has taken on a new life. What were your reactions when it enjoyed resurgence in 2022 and what does the song mean to you?

I was completely tickled for her, and all of the new, younger listeners who got to discover her and her work because of Stranger Things. The timing of it all was perfect in a way - with everyone feeling so isolated and uncertain about the world coming out of the Covid-19 lockdowns, 'Running Up That Hill' and it's message of radical empathy and connection really felt like a tonic. Nearly 40 years on, the song's power only grows. For me, the song is empowering; the best articulation of determination and desire ever inscribed in a pop song.

I think many people do not discuss Kate Bush as an innovative and incredible producer when they speak of Hounds of Love. Do you feel she is under-appreciated as a producer?

She is absolutely, criminally underrated as a producer. Not only in terms of her technical and aesthetic achievements, and the ground she broke as a mainstream adopter of cutting-edge music technologies, but also in terms of her vast influence in pop music culture. There is a dearth of female producers in pop music, period. Back then and today, the situation hasn't really changed much. As you've seen, I devote quite a chunk of space in my little book to yell about what an elite and historically important producer she is. If I had more space I would have written even MORE about it.

“I hope lots of essays and think pieces get written and people are inspired to find the album again and dig in deep with it”

Hounds of Love turns forty next year. How do you think it should be talked about and marked?

Hmm. The record is already, rightfully considered a masterpiece by critical consensus, and with the Stranger Things synch placement, it feels like it's back at the top of the collective consciousness's record pile. So I don't know how the 40th anniversary should be marked... Being selfish for a second, I wouldn't mind having a deluxe expanded release with all the B-sides, remixes and the Hounds of Love alt-version/demo included, or if I was going to be extra selfish, a Dolby Atmos/surround mix of The Ninth Wave on Blu-ray - imagine how perfect? Aside from my vain wishing, I hope lots of essays and think pieces get written and people are inspired to find the album again and dig in deep with it.

Every Kate Bush fan should go and buy the 33 1/3 Hounds of Love book. What is your biggest takeaway of the album or favourite section of the book?

My favourite sections are the track by track commentaries, when I switch to present tense and focus on purely experiencing the music. Everything up to that point in the book is like elaborate table setting at a banquet, but the commentaries to me feel like the moment when we can eat the music together.

Finally, you can select one song from Hounds of Love and I will include it here. Which shall we go with?

'Jig of Life', so we can put this moment here.

FEATURE: I’ll Be There for You: Friends at Thirty: Songs Featured in the Iconic Comedy

FEATURE:

 

 

I’ll Be There for You

PHOTO CREDIT: NBC/Getty Images

Friends at Thirty: Songs Featured in the Iconic Comedy

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THERE is a very special anniversary…

 PHOTO CREDIT: Reisig & Taylor/NBC/NBCU Photo Bank/Getty Images

approaching that relates to an iconic comedy series. Friends was first broadcast on 22nd September, 1994. The NBC series began with the memorable pilot episode. Although it took a little while for critics to fully embrace the series and the six main characters – Chandler Bing (Matthew Perry), Rachel Green (Jennifer Aniston), Ross Geller (David Schwimmer), Joey Tribbiane (Matt Le Blanc), Phoebe Buffay (Lisa Kudrow) and Monica Geller (Courtney Cox) -, it did go on to become among the most popular and loved series of its generation! One that has lasted the test of time and is still talked about thirty years later. Friends ended its ten-season run with the finale on 6th May, 2004. Running at 236 episodes, it was one of the longest-run series ever. Though, this being U.S. T.V., it has some competition! All of us have some relationship with Friends. I started high school the month Friends started in the U.S. It took longer to come to the U.K. but, when it did, it was a sensation! To mark thirty years since the start of a comedy series that transcended beyond the screens and our homes, I wanted to look at music that featured through its episodes. From the theme song, I’ll Be There for You by The Rembrandts, to some of the other songs that featured through the ten-series run, this Digital Mixtape salutes thirty years of Friends. These are some diverse and amazing songs that featured in…

THIS timeless series.

FEATURE: Reaching Out for a Deeper Understanding: The Hope and Happiness in Kate Bush’s Music

FEATURE:

 

 

Reaching Out for a Deeper Understanding

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

The Hope and Happiness in Kate Bush’s Music

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EVEN the city…

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1993/PHOTO CREDIT: John Stoddardt

cannot kill the beat of a good heart. That is how I feel when I approach Kate Bush’s music. Bush spent a lot of time recording at various studios through London. Whilst not residing in the heart of the city, she did have the bustle and smog of the city around her. Living in London myself, I doubt much has changed since the 1980s. Think about how tough it would have been living and working in London. I am sure Bush was inspired by people there and brought that into her music. However, with it not being the warmest place and not having the best people, I can imagine it would have been quite tough to keep upbeat and positive. When she was living at East Wickham Farm – not too far from London but more rural and quieter - things were quite different. Family around her. I do think that this upbringing and start moulded Bush as a person and songwriter. I will explore it in a bit. You can feel the positivity, understanding and happiness throughout Bush’s albums. I feel that she differed in that sense to many of her contemporaries because of the stability and support she received when young. A solid family who were comfortable. Art and music around her. A peaceful and positivity household where there was a lot of encouragement. Not experiencing much dislocation, tragedy or upheaval, it gave Bush this really grounded and loving environment. As I have recently written about Hounds of Love, it makes me think about the positivity of that album. Once more nodding to the recent reissue of Under the Ivy: The Life and Music of Kate Bush by Graeme Thomson, you discover how there is this consistent desire to make her music uplifting and hopeful. Hounds of Love especially has this real mantra. To provide a sense of hope and happiness.

Maybe this was not as evident through The Dreaming. Whilst there is light and some positive moments on the album, perhaps Hounds of Love was an attempt to redress what was on that album. Some of the regrets, anxieties and fears. The singles on the first side of Hounds of Love have that sense of curiosity, desire, strength and positivity. The giddy joy of The Big Sky; the understanding and desire for harmony on Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God); even the sense of self-reflection and confession on Hounds of Love. Listen to The Ninth Wave and you get that desire to survive and stay strong. Think about The Morning Fog and how Bush’s heroine survives an ordeal at sea and wants to kiss the ground in gratitude after being rescued. How she yearns to see her mother, brothers and father to tell them how much she loves them. Her lyrics throughout so considered, deep and poetic. Love, light and nature in the words. The influence of her home and background comes into the music. That stability and support. It is what makes Hounds of Love such a popular and timeless album. It has this energy running throughout that is all about balancing the darkness with light. Any harrowing thought or fear is then met with the affirmative. The positives of life. How many songwriters pen songs like this?! Have a career where they lean towards the positive? It could be Bush referencing her family and keeping their words close to her heart and pen. Expressions from her mother or the support from her father and brothers. Running through and infusing so many of her songs.

Think back to the first few albums from Kate Bush. There are a lot of different emotions and dynamics to each. Think about the overall mood and intention. The Kick Inside is abound with this young woman letting her desires out. Exploring people sexuality, film, fiction and the world around her. I listen to the album and feel this joy under the surface. Maybe that is because she was a teenager still and had this really good life. I don’t think that would automatically make you a positive songwriter. Someone always looking to keep their music up. To inspire the listener and not head towards anger and accusation. Even if there are more reflective or introspective songs on Lionheart – such as Hammer Horror or Fullhouse -, you get everything from child-like wonder to a woman exploring her moods and the meaning behind colours. In Search of Peter Pan and Symphony in Blue. The hopefulness and sense of strength on Don’t Push Your Foot on the Heartbrake. On Never for Ever, there are only a couple of songs that are more troubled or darker. Army Dreamers and Breathing have a certain dread or sense of loss. Listen through the rest of the album and you can feel and hear so much warmth and light. If it is the delight of Delius (Song of Summer) or even the sound of Babooshka – which has this audible sense of dance, smile and potent energy. All We Ever Look For, Blow Away (For Bill), The Infant Kiss. These songs, whilst dealing with some heavier or unorthodox themes and topics, have a lightness to them. Instinctively as a producer giving her music this air of audio sunshine and embrace. I think that was conscious. Not a move to commercialism or accessibility.

In a way, The Dreaming – a masterpiece through it is – was a rarity. Her only album where I hear something different or distinctly less bright. Regardless, many of the songs do have love and positivity through them. Houdini, All the Love, Suspended in Gaffa and There Goes a Tenner. That need to balance things and find positives. I think it is fundamental to Bush’s music and personality. Even when psychologically shadowy or expressing something distributed or intense, I do think there is this need for her to find meaning and resolve. The politics and warfare of Pull Out the Pin and The Dreaming. Bush as an activist or voice of reason. Get Out of My House one of the few songs in her catalogue where there are few shards of light or happiness – and I think that is natural with every artist; there will be songs that are more tense and angry. The Sensual World is an example of how Bush’s natural warmth and yearning for love was expressed in a different way. Perhaps less about family and autobiographical, there are different themes at the fore. However, you only need to listen to songs such as Between a Man and a Woman, This Woman’s Work and Reaching Out. There is this constant wisdom and strength. Maybe ‘positivity’ is not the right word. An attitude that is mature and always understanding. Consider these words from Reaching Out: “See how the flower leans instinctively/Toward the light/See how the heart reaches out instinctively/For no reason but to touch”. You get this sense of a mature and intelligent woman who knows how powerful the heart is. The heart and its roles, symbolism and how it drives us all is right at the core of so many of her songs. How it enforces our decisions and desire.

Whereas other songwriters might use the heart in a more destructive or steely way, there is always this patience, warmth and passionate blood flow in Kate Bush. You can even feel it in 2011’s 50 Words for Snow. A chilly album by definition and in the lyrics of its songs, Among Angels sees Bush very much this positive and strong figure: “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”.  The Red Shoes marked the bookends of times when family were very much in her heart. The loss of her mother the year before The Red Shoes came out. Even at a tough and busy time for Bush, there was this feeling of love and joy through the album. Almost bringing us back to Hounds of Love and how family were in her mind. Eat the Music and Rubberband Girl. Joy and fascination in one; this resilience and bouncing back in the other. Rocket’s Tail inspired by a family pet (Kate Bush’s cat). I do love that. A few of the songs about love and relationship showing great understanding and sense of positive. Constellation of the Heart: “Who said anything about it hurting/It's gonna be beautiful/It's gonna be wonderful/It's gonna be paradise”. And So Is Love: “You let it slip/You let it slip/I love you more/I love you more for it”. You’re the One: “The only trouble is/He's not you/He can't do what you do/He can't make me laugh and cry/At the same time”. It may be a bold claim but something occurs: Is there a negative line or song in Bush’s career? There are songs that are eccentric, political or about loss. Even so, I think that Bush always has patience and tries to show compromise. How there is always this degree of happiness or kindness. I can’t really recall any of her songs that attack someone or are self-destructive. Even if Get Out of My House does seem like Bush breaking down, I feel it a defence. She could have been biting or negative. In need of letting something out that needed to be said, there is little of the personal in the song. Using The Shining as a reference point. Can you think of any other artist who has never really expressed a cruel or nasty thought?! Maybe people will correct me and find songs of her that leave a sour taste. I don’t think so. Nearly every other artist I can list either has written hopeless, dark or light-less songs. Kate Bush’s family and upbringing runs through her entire discography.

Aerial was the happy resolve and result of grieving for her mother, taking time out from recording and starting her own family. The joy and love that we hear on Hounds of Love is present on Aerial. There are so many connections and parallels between those albums. Family defining both. Even if The Ninth Wave is scarier and tenser than Aerial’s A Sea of Honey, you can feel this real sense of love and positivity. The need to embrace life and everything in the world. That is when Kate Bush is at her most wonderful and moving. Where her creativity and genius is at her peak. Thinking about Hounds of Love and how it was this album defined by love and hope, you can sense if through most of her studio albums. As I say, there are few artists in history who have a body at work where the best of human nature and understanding is so present and strong. Eschewing the natural desire to let out anger and bitterness, this is all but absent from Kate Bush’s career. It could be the simple fact that this is what she is like as a person. That her family were so loving and together. There was very little division and trouble in her young life. Kate Bush has always been fascinated by people. Her main inspiration. Whether from her life, literature or film, she always seems to find the best in people. I have explored before Bush’s positive attitude towards men. It goes further than this. Her positivity towards her family and herself. This real feeling of light and strength. Kate Bush is very much someone who shows…

ALL the love.

FEATURE: Milk & Honey: Billie Marten’s Writing of Blues and Yellows at Eight

FEATURE:

 

 

Milk & Honey

Billie Marten’s Writing of Blues and Yellows at Eight

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IT is not often…

that I write about an album that is not coming up for a big anniversary. Because it is so significant to me, I wanted to look at the upcoming eighth anniversary of Billie Marten’s Writing of Blues and Yellows. Released on 23rd September, 2016, this was the debut from the Rippon-born artist. The twenty-five-year-old’s latest album, Drop Cherries, was released last year. In terms of its sounds and style, it reminds me a bit of her debut album. Since Writing of Blues and Yellows came out, Marten progressed her music and brought in new elements. Especially evident on 2021’s Flora Fauna. A blossoming and exceptional career so far. Marten has performed around the world, though I think she is worthy of bigger stages and award recognition. A fantastic songwriter with a distinct and stunning voice, it is going to be interesting seeing where she heads from here. I really love Writing of Blues and Yellow. It was a wonderful release in a rich year for music. In such a huge year for music, I don’t think that enough people spotlighted and talked about this fine debut. For me, it arrived in a year that was quite changeable and strange. In the music world, we had seen some incredible albums released, though we also lost two legendary artists: David Bowie and Prince. It was a real shock. In my personal life, I was in a job and place that I did not enjoy. Feeling trapped and stifled. Wanting to be in London – I moved there not too long after -, it was upsetting and frustrating. Music was a source of guidance and comfort. Trying to find escape and light through music. Billie Marten’s debut album resonated with me. Its sheer beauty and wonder captivated me. I got images of the Yorkshire countryside and the open world. Nature and something quite entrancing. I might well buy the Deluxe version of the album. Eight years later and I am still listening to the album!

I am not sure whether Billie Marten will celebrate it at all. Although her career has moved on, Writing of Blues and Yellows is hugely important. I think it deserves a Mercury Prize nomination. More critical reviews. I am going to get to a couple of the reviews that there are out there. Before that, an interview from Euphoriazine from 2016:

“When did you start playing and writing songs?

My Dad taught me four chords on a crappy pink guitar that he got for me when I was about 7/8. I just wanted to join in with him and my older brother because they both played and I was super jealous. Writing songs came a bit later; I think the first one was at 9 (it was God awful).

Who are your influences?

Everything in my parents’ record collection really; Kate Bush, John Martyn, Joni, Loudon Wainwright, Brian Eno, Joan Armatrading, Jeff Buckley, you know; those awe-inspiring humans that everyone wishes they were like.

Is there anyone you’d hope to collaborate with some day?

Most of them are dead sadly.  I guess people completely removed from my bubble – experimental geniuses like James Blake, Jon Hopkins, Sigur Ros, people like that. Also Kendrick would definitely be an experience to remember.

Did you always want to go into music? Were there any other jobs you dreamt of when you were younger?

I never dreamt of being in music, I quite fancy being a cobbler or a mechanic someday, or I’ve always wanted to make soundtracks for films.

You signed a record deal with Chess Club at the very start of last year. How has it affected your teenage years?

It’s affected me only in the way that it would affect anyone I guess. It’s something you must get used to, and that does take time (no matter how comfortable you pretend to be with it) but I do remember signing and the next day having to sit an exam in the hall – that was a bit mad.

You were picked up by both Apple Music and BBC Sound for “up and coming” in 2016, how was that?

Such great news. I’m incredibly grateful.

Having played at festivals and with more lined up this summer, did you have any experiences of festivals before playing at them?

Only tiny local beer festivals or ones I used to go to with my mum back in the day. But my first ‘proper’ one was Leeds/ Reading 2014, where I did the BBC Introducing stage and that’s when I first understood how incredible music festivals are.

What was touring with Lucy Rose like?

I was completely terrified really, it was something you can’t ever predict and it could have gone terribly, but thanks to Lucy and Jake and everybody there, it made the days a whole lot better. You realise that a gig is just a gig, and it can be as controlled as you want it to be. Touring really helped me with my nerves – because gigs are situations I find incredibly difficult. So for that, I’m thankful.

If you ultimate celeb-royalty power, what would be on your rider?

Hard to put myself in that frame of mind… but if I had to it’d probably be something stupid like a jar of sand from my summers in Morocco or a framed picture of all my yachts and houses. Or maybe some tartan paint.

If you could only eat one kind of food for a whole month, what would it be?

COUS COUS. No question.

But I do love a good raspberry.

What was your last Google search?

I was searching capos to buy for this rehearsal I’m about to go into actually ha. I’m barely a musician so I’m useless like that and don’t remember anything I need except the guitar. Even then I’ve left that at home sometimes!

What’s your deal with alpacas?

I so regret putting the alpacas on the Internet!! I just love them. For my birthday once I got a day of walking them, and it was GREAT. I hope to get a few someday. I like them because they make very strange noises, and I found they only let you stroke their necks. I’ll stop talking about them now”.

I will wrap up soon. Before I get there, there are a couple of reviews that I want to bring in. CLASH had some positive words for an artist who, since 2016, how got a lot more attention from critics. A debut that some overlooked, I am glad that there were assessment of an album that was my favourite of the last decade. I listen to it and remember where I was when I heard it and what it meant to me:

“If there is any requirement we must advise before playing ‘Writing Of Blues And Yellows’, it is that you shut yourself away in a room and just listen. And hope for no background noise.

Billie Marten’s thoughtfully crafted debut is a collection of tales, retrospect and self-examination. Candidly honest about her periods of mental health, ‘Teeth’ places you in the centre of her overwrought mind: “I’m writing this in a bad way, no one can hear what my head says.” Her vocals are infused with a fragility that drills down into your consciousness, whether you want it to or not. Full of contradictions, ‘Lionhearted’ highlights the songwriter’s desire to be braver, yet she fails to acknowledge that she has achieved exactly this through her overt lyrical sincerity, which is intrinsic to the success of this record.

‘Writing Of Blues And Yellows’ manages to be flawlessly delicate in terms of instrumentals and tone, drawing on inspirations from her quaint upbringing in her home-town of Ripon just near the Yorkshire Dales. Fixating upon the wilderness and nature, this is a theme that is inter-weaved throughout songs ‘La Lune’, ‘Heavy Weather’ and ‘Hello Sunshine’; later on ‘Live’, she explores her close relationship with her family, versus her yearning to explore and find some adventure.

Billie Marten delivers a pragmatic album that explores the equilibrium between her positive and negative outlooks on life, whilst confirming that being preoccupied with our own contemplation is and will forever be an ongoing process of the human condition.

7/10”.

DIY also shared their review of Billie Marten’s majestic debut album. Such an accomplished work from a teenage artist, I would urge people to check it out. Marten’s immersive songwriting that switches from the personal to the dream-like. Every song draws you into its own world. I have my favourites – Emily and Heavy Weather -, though there are lesser-played tracks like Green that are gems that needs to be investigated:

“The title of Billie Marten’s album refers to her experience of synesthesia – a condition whereby the senses are intermingled. The Yorkshire songwriter sees music as colours. And for her first record, blues and yellows are all the rage. You don’t have to be a fellow synesthete, however, for debut to be a striking sensory experience.

You can almost see the rain lashing against the windows on ‘Heavy Weather’ - an album highlight which conjures up a scene of sheltering from a storm. For the majestic ‘Lionhearted’, the buzz of guitar strings can virtually be felt with every slide along the fretboard. You can perhaps even taste the country air of her home country as birdsong trickles through on ‘Teeth’.

The Laura Marling comparison might seem like a lazy one, however the similarities extend beyond releasing a folky debut album at the age of 17. Billie is another wunderkind who’s also clearly a big thinker, able to express her thoughts in a mind-bogglingly mature and commanding way. She might be fresh-faced but there are moments of world-weariness. ‘Milk & Honey’ sees her despairing of greedy, materialistic desires over alluring strings. ‘Emily’ leans closest sonically to Marling’s debut ‘Alas, I Cannot Swim’, in which she despondently proclaims “we don’t have grace, we are foolish and shy”.

There’s a lack of ostentation from start to finish. The sound is uncluttered but never lacking in clout. It’s a quality most glaringly obvious on the acapella closer, a cover of Jane & Barton’s ‘It’s A Fine Day’. All signs point towards a colourful future for this talented teen”.

On 26th September, Billie Marten’s Writing of Blues and Yellows turns eight. I hope that she raises a glass. It has a very special place in my heart! Helping me through a difficult and bad time, I keep coming back to this album. Hooked and mesmerised by the beauty of Marten’s voice and her truly exceptional songwriting. I can imagine her writing the album in her bedroom or around Ripon. Her home and surroundings infuses everything. Writing of Blues and Yellows remains a truly…

WONDERFUL debut album.

FEATURE: Lessons Learned: Why English Teacher Winning the Mercury Prize Is So Significant

FEATURE:

 

 

Lessons Learned

IN THIS PHOTO: English Teacher/PHOTO CREDIT: Andy Ford for NME

Why English Teacher Winning the Mercury Prize Is So Significant

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EARLIER this week…

PHOTO CREDIT: Getty Images

Leeds-based band English Teacher won the Mercury Prize. It was a bit of a pleasant surprise. With heavy-hitting artists like Charli XCX nominated alongside them, maybe it was a slightly shock that they won. Although not underserved! There were a few reasons why their win was important and a relief. The Prize, to many, symbolises acknowledging a band or artist that is more underground. Not the mainstream artists. Of course, it is judged on quality, though we do want to see the more underdog artists recognised. It was a tough field this year. Alongside English Teacher, everyone from CMAT to Beth Gibbons was shortlisted. So many people have reacted positively to English Teacher winning the Mercury Prize. It is a relief that the award has gone out of London for the first time in nearly a decade! Before then, artists have either been based in London or originated there. Winning for This Could Be Texas, it spotlights music outside of the capital. The fact that artists from the North are worthy. It will help open up more conversation. Looking beyond London for music excellence. Becoming rather predictable and limited, awarding the Mercury Prize to a band away from London is an important step. Although I did think that The Last Dinner Party would triumph, I am glad that English Teacher got the award. As The Guardian wrote, it shows how crucial arts funding is. At a time when there is concern around the level of expenditure and commitment to arts and music education at schools, English Teacher show how vital it is to maintain arts funding for the future generations:

“Earlier, this year, English Teacher told the Guardian that despite being signed to a major label, Island, enjoying radio and TV exposure and being able to play 800-capacity shows in their home town, both Fontaine and bandmate Lewis Whiting recorded their album while living at home, sofa-surfing and relying on universal credit to top up the band’s £500 a month from the record company advance. The Mercury comes with a £25,000 cheque although the band haven’t decided what to do with it. Fontaine insists: “It will be invested, not frittered away.” 

IN THIS PHOTO: Charli XCX, for her album, BRAT, was among the dozen artists shortlisted for this year’s Mercury Prize

The band’s triumph comes as the Mercury prize faces questions about its future. It no longer has a sponsor and this year’s live ceremony was considerably scaled back. However, English Teacher point out that unlike many awards ceremonies, which reflect commercial success, the Mercury recognises art, originality and innovation, so remains relevant. “So many of our favourite bands won the Mercury or were nominated for the shortlist,” said Whiting. “Arctic Monkeys. Pulp. Radiohead. Portishead. There’s kudos and recognition, but it’s about the artist, not their sales.”

And since they were shortlisted, said Fontaine, “we’ve been able to play bigger gigs for higher fees. So we’re hoping to be able to put up our personal income.”

Whiting said he had already noticed a surge in their streaming figures: “I looked this morning and there were 3,000 people listening to one track.”

English Teacher’s win is the first for an alt-rock band since Wolf Alice in 2018 and, incredibly, the first for a non-London act since Edinburgh hip-hop trio Young Fathers in 2014. “Which is ridiculous,” said Fontaine, “considering the quality of music coming from other places. Maybe it [reveals] what the industry puts the spotlight on, because there’e certainly no lack of talent.”

English Teacher: The World’s Biggest Paving Slab – video

English Teacher are one of three Leeds-based nominees on this year’s list alongside Bailey Rae and jungle producer Nia Archives. Fontaine acknowledged that without the support of the city’s launchpad venues such the Hyde Park Book Club and Brudenell Social Club, “we’d definitely not be here”.

Whiting and Fontaine both grew up in small Lancashire towns. The win completes the singer’s remarkable journey from “doing open mics in Colne when I was 14, performing in pubs and clubs after leaving school and working in a Chinese takeaway,” she said.

English Teacher formed at Leeds Conservatoire – formerly Leeds College of Music – and played their first gig in 2020. Along the way, the band have been supported by talent development organisation Music:Leeds, whose Launchpad programme distributed the first two self-released English Teacher singles including the first version of The World’s Biggest Paving Slab, a song they rerecorded for the winning album, which Fontaine first wrote in her bedroom six years ago. Music:Leeds and PRS Foundation’s PPL Momentum Accelerator fund also provided funding for the band to record the first version of R&B, a song also rerecorded for their debut”.

When @Englishteac_her found out they were the Winners of the 2024 Mercury Prize. ⚡️#MercuryPrize pic.twitter.com/4BlD0qyrle

— Mercury Prize (@MercuryPrize) September 6, 2024

Another observation we can take from English Teacher winning the Mercury Prize is how original and genre-fusing guitar music is still crucial and alive. At a time when genres like Pop are dominating and taking more focus, there is always that argument as to whether guitar music is relevant and sustainable. Of course it is, though in a mainstream where you do not hear it as much as you used to, English Teacher have given hope and light to bands like them coming through. This is not solely about the Mercury Prize. It is symbolic of wider conversations. Smaller and innovative artists triumphing. The richness and diversity of music from outside of London. How English Teacher’s story and path shows why we need to ensure that we can see artists like them come through and get support. On thew subject of guitar music, The Telegraph wrote why guitar bands can be ferociously original:

“Caught in a crisis over sponsorship and how to stay relevant in the streaming age, the Mercury Prize could have taken the easy route tonight and handed the award for Album of the Year to Charli xcx.

Brat, her viral, meme-inducing, Kamala Harris-condoned album of hyper-pop and electro bangers, took over the world with its hedonistic ethos; “Brat summer” became a byword for buying another pack of cigarettes, staying out late and stumbling into work the morning after still reeking of vodka.

But the Mercury’s have never opted to reward popularity – so it’s no surprise that its judges shunned the shortlist’s more commercial offerings in favour of This Could Be Texas, the truly remarkable debut by Leeds indie band English Teacher.

It’s a ferociously original album: witty, silly and never reliant on cheap, catchy choruses to catch your attention. Reviewing the album back in April, I praised the band for their unbridled ambition, for being courageous enough to take risks.

In a music industry so often plagued by nostalgia – did you know Oasis were back together? – English Teacher are a breath of fresh air. 

Much of their allure is down to frontwoman Lily Fontaine, a bundle of charisma who spent the weeks leading up to their album release campaigning for Parliament to support grassroots music venues. The band met at university in Leeds – with Fontaine joined by guitarist Lewis Whiting, drummer Douglas Frost and bassist Nicholas Eden – and were able to do their early gigs by staying on friends’ floors.

It’s hard to overstate how encouraging it is for a working-class band like theirs – singing about real-world issues, from racial stereotyping on standout track R&B to environmental disaster and being trapped in your hometown on Not Everybody Gets to Go to Space – to be rewarded with a prize as prestigious as a Mercury. Perhaps guitar music isn’t dead after all?

They join an esteemed list of working-class talent who have won the prize in the past: Pulp, Arctic Monkeys, Little Simz. The past few years have seen the Mercury’s veer from its indie rock and folk roots to more rap or grime-orientated spaces, but English Teacher’s win doesn’t mean that shift has completely gone out of the window; much of the band’s charm lies in their fusion of different genres”.

Batshit ✍️ phenom ✍️ mercurial ✍️ @Englishteac_her on what it’s like to be the winners of the Mercury Prize 2024 #MercuryPrize pic.twitter.com/PoKVgkP0M6

— Mercury Prize (@MercuryPrize) September 5, 2024

That article makes a good point about nostalgia. How we are paying so much attention to legacy acts and revisiting the past. The originality and freshness that English Teacher provide should open our minds to the importance of new music. A lot of musical ambition stems from social media and looking at modern-day Pop icons. Perhaps a less traditional road in. Rather than it being about plugging away at venues and grassroots spaces, it is about getting there quickly. Less about talent and graft than it is something more quick and shallow. English Teacher have proved that a band can come from nowhere and, though original music and hard work, be acknowledged at the highest level! I will end with words from the band. In a BBC article, the band recognised how their victory at the Mercury Prize is so unexpected. Where they are from, things like this do not really happen:

“Made up of Lily Fontaine (vocals, rhythm guitar, synth), Douglas Frost (drums), Nicholas Eden (bass) and Lewis Whiting (lead guitar, synth), English Teacher have become the first band in a decade who were not from London to win the Mercury Prize.

Mr Clark said that was something he hoped would be "inspirational" for other young musicians from towns and cities everywhere.

"It’s not just important for Leeds, it's also inspirational for artists that, essentially through hard work, can show there is a pathway and that there are platforms to achieve success and recognition for the work they put in.

"It's a signal that people can achieve from wherever. They don't have to be from London."

Mr Clark added: "It's great to champion our local scene. I would say, let’s champion all the people from Leeds this can inspire."

Ilkley's Cow and Calf rocks feature on the album's cover

English Teacher were actually one of three acts from West Yorkshire on the Mercury Prize shortlist this year, alongside jungle artist Nia Archives and singer-songwriter Corinne Bailey Rae.

As well as thanking The Brudenell and Hyde Park Book Club venues, the band's members also name-checked a local landmark, the Cow and Calf rocks in Ilkley, which appeared on their album cover which was created by singer Lily's mother.

Speaking to the BBC's Colin Pattinson after their Mercury win, Lily said: "Where we come from, it just doesn't happen. You don't start a band thinking this is going to happen.

"So, it is a dream realised. I think that's why it means a lot.

"Me and Lewis particularly are from the north of England, towns you wouldn't associate music scenes with them."

Lily is from Colne while Lewis is from Kirkham, both in Lancashire.

"No-one has probably heard of them and now they will do, and that's kind of cool," Lily said”.

I am going to end with a feature/interview from NME. It is amazing and a big deal that English Teacher won the Mercury Prize. If some question the role of the award and what purpose it has now – and what they look for in a winner -, one cannot deny it means a lot to artists. Think of all the artists who have come before and won. It is prestigious and a huge recognition from the industry. You can feel a slight shift and revitalisation from this year’s winners. This Could Be Texas will see its sales rise. Other artists picking up the album and being inspired by it:

“As well as sharing their critically acclaimed debut album, English Teacher have also become one of the acts leading the way when it comes to spotlighting the struggles facing new artists and using their platform to help protect the future of live music in the UK.

Having already spoken out in Parliament about the difficulties that new talent face when trying to establish themselves, Lily Fontaine said that English Teacher want to continue to try and make a difference going forward.

“It was never a conscious [choice] to be like ‘We’re going to be one of those bands that does that’,” she explained. “It’s just that when we get asked questions about those things, we’re always going to be honest. If we continue to be put in situations where we’re asked about that, we will continue to be honest about it.”

Announcing as this year’s winners, 6 Music’s Jamz Supernova described the album as one that stood out to the judges “for its originality and character, a winning lyrical mix of surrealism and social observation, alongside a subtle way of wearing its musical innovations lightly, displays a fresh approach to the traditional guitar band format.”

During the band’s acceptance speech, Whiting thanked “everyone in Leeds,” while the members all made mention to their friends and family. ”My mum did the artwork [for the album] so I want to give a special thanks to her,” added Fontaine, who also made a nod to the music scene in their home city, including live venue Brudenell Social Club.

In a five-star review of the album, NME concluded: “What you have in ‘This Could Be Texas’ is everything you want from a debut; a truly original effort from start to finish, an adventure in sound and words, and a landmark statement.

“Poised for big things? Who knows if this industry even allows that anymore. Here are a band already dealing in brilliance, though – who dare to dream and have it pay off. Not everyone gets to go to space, but at least English Teacher make it a damn site more interesting being stuck down here”.

Beyond the Mercury Prize itself, there are lessons and takeaways. The role of funding and local venues. How important it is to recognise innovative and new bands coming through. How this suycecss story should be an impetus and warning. Artists who can follow suit. An industry and government who need to realise how essential venues are. Financially supporting the arts. Things can and will change going forward. If English Teacher’s This Could Be Texas seemed an unexpected win or a wonderful shock, their win and story will not be…

LONE star state.

FEATURE: Put Yourself in My Place: Kylie Minogue at Thirty

FEATURE:

 

 

Put Yourself in My Place

Kylie Minogue at Thirty

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MANY might consider…

IN THIS PHOTO: Kylie Minogue in 1994/PHOTO CREDIT: RANKIN

Kylie Minogue’s golden period to be from 2000’s Light Years onwards. Following that with 2001’s Fever. There are a run of three albums where we saw transition and evolution from her earliest Pop days. Maybe trying to evolve and throw off tags and perceptions. Move her on. Kylie Minogue’s first three albums, I feel, are more about commercial Pop and hits. Getting that instant and catchy sound out to radio stations and in the charts. 1991’s Let’s Get to It was a more advanced and mature sound. Skip to 1997’s Impossible Princess and a sense of evolution and mixing in Electronic and Dance sounds. Maybe reacting to the music that was around in 1997. Minogue always moving with the times. 1994’s Kylie Minogue arrived in a year where we saw the advent and growth of Britpop. Some brilliant Pop and classic albums. Deconstruction released the album in the United Kingdom on 19th September, 1994. After leaving Pete Waterman Entertainment, Kylie Minogue was eager to move on and prove herself as a serious artist. She signed with the independent record label Deconstruction in 1993. Bringing together a wide-ranging collective of collaborators, Minogue worked on a number of different sounds and ideas. In terms of the music, Kylie Minogue is a Pop album mixing elements of Dance and R&B. Even if many of the reviews were mixed, Kylie Minogue peaked in the top five in the United Kingdom and Australia. Maybe critics feeling that Minogue was stepping into areas that were not for her. This once young artist being produced by a Pop factory now being ‘grown up’ or stepping out of her comfort zone. Kylie Minogue is a brilliant album containing some incredible songs. I will talk more about my favourite, Confide in Me, later.

I want to start out with an interview archived by Medium. Initially published in M8 Magazine in October 1994, this was a period when Minogue was releasing music that was more daring and independent than many fans were used to. The media still trying to work out who she was. I don’t think many took her eponymous album as seriously as they should have done. Thirty years after its release and Kylie Minogue stands the test of time. It is an underrated jewel in her crown:

“Today, Kylie Minogue is sitting anxiously in the opulent (if slightly 80s) surroundings of Blakes Hotel in west London awaiting your reporter. Since touching down on Monday, she’s appeared on Top of the Pops, co-presented MTV and done a good few other promotional chores. Tonight she’s finally let off the leash to go clubbing at the Leisure Lounge. But right now she’s waiting around. Yes, despite years of juvenile longing and two months of your actual planning, Martin’s late for Kylie. Due to bomb alerts on the tube and an over-zealous cab driver who insists on showing me where Chelsea play (“Yes, I’m interested, really, but I am in a bit of a rush …”). Kylie doesn’t seem to mind, though. She greets me by name, insists that I move a little closer and proceeds to compare trainers² – a true professional. So, is it hard for you to maintain all this bubbliness then, our Kylie?

‘1987, ’88, ’89, it’s a blur. I truly can’t remember it. I was on automatic. I got tired of being on the treadmill. I was always thinking that next step ahead’

“I think that it was training years ago, from when I was in a series where as soon as the red light goes on – you’ve got to do it, which has given me good discipline for work,” she says. “I don’t like to turn up late, I don’t like to mess people around. I do the job, it’s a team effort. I give it my best and get out of there. I might be feeling really lousy but as soon as it comes on it’s [toothy grin] and soon as it comes off it’s ‘God, I hate this!””

All the signs then of that classic Gemini split personality in Ms Minogue. But does this mean that Kylie saves up all her smiles for onstage and gets depressed as soon as she’s left to think about life for too long (shades of Kenneth Williams³ here). Well yeah, kind of. “I just keep going and going,” she says. “And then it just gets to a point when that’s it. I can’t talk. I just want to go home. Having time on my hands is deadly for me. I need to be occupied, otherwise I dwell on things and make them worse, like sticking them in the oven and watching them rise and rise.

With trips to Europe, south-east Asia, America and even South Africa planned in promotion of her latest record, it sounds like, despite all the attention, this pop lark could be quite a lonely business for her. “I do get a bit lonely, yeah, just for a relationship with someone,” she admits. “But I’m very happy with my work and I’m so busy that I don’t have time to be thinking about it really. I’m not going to waste my time chasing someone around. I’ll just wait. I believe in fate. I could be in the most wonderful relationship and still have moments of feeling lonely. It’s all relative.”

Small wonder then that she’s champing at the bit and raring to go raging (as they say in Neighbours). Still, one good reason for this temporarily tepid patch in Kylie’s love life of late is the particularly purple patch which her recording career has been going through. The last 12 months have seen her collaborating with the Pet Shop Boys, Saint Etienne and M People, piecing together an album for the ultra-cred DeConstruction Records, the first that she can genuinely say that she’s proud of. But long before she got the trendy seal of approval from the likes of M8, Pete Waterman predicted that Kylie Minogue would be a genuine star with universal appeal; so why did it take her so long to escape his (distinctly paternalistic) tutelage and start to chase these goals of her own?

“I was always thinking that one step ahead,” she stresses. “I just wasn’t thinking a long way ahead. I was so preoccupied by what was happening right then that ’87, ’88, ’89 – it’s a blur. I truly can’t remember it. I was on automatic. There wasn’t space in my mind, I wasn’t capable of projecting too far into the future, but I could see that next step that I wanted to take. Then, as time progressed and I got more of an understanding of the business, I got tired of being on the treadmill.”

The catalyst for making a break? Would you believe pangs of shame at the naivete of her back catalogue? Kylie is surprisingly open in admitting that some of her older numbers simply aren’t much cop!

‘I started to feel embarrassed that I couldn’t call myself an artist. People would ask about my songs and I’d go, er … next question’

“I started to feel embarrassed that I couldn’t call myself an artist,” she smiles. “You know, I kind of was, but people would ask me about songs on my album and I’d bluff my way through a lot of it. I’d be like ‘Oh yeah, that song, er, it’s about [fakes a cough]. Next question!’, because they didn’t mean that much to me. So that’s why I took the image and twisted it, shook it up, did whatever I could with it, just as a protest to try and break through and show who I was.”

Despite the fact that her latest effort, ‘Kylie Minogue’ (hmmm, the album titles haven’t progressed much have they, readers?) has taken 12 months to come to fruition, she’s equally unpretentious in describing it, indeed pleasantly self deprecating throughout our chat. She tells me that M People’s reworking of the soul stomper Time Is on Our Side which closes the record, always brings to mind the red-rinse and Bacofoil of the cabaret circuit. And she even shares slight misgivings about her current look.

“You know, in five years’ time I might look back at this time and say: What were you doing in a white John Travolta disco suit with your hair in bad dreads? What were you thinking about, woman?⁴’ Some things have worked, some things have backfired, but I don’t care. They’ve brought me to where I am now.”

And where she is now of course, is poised for yet greater worldwide stardom. Madonna sized? Who can tell? Her records are better, her movies will be bigger and she has that same ambitious streak, with a sense of humour to boot, something which the Material Girl hasn’t put on display for some time. Like it or not, Kylie’s now in the kind of league where Prince can claim to have shagged her (he didn’t, she says, but they did quite a lot of psyching each other out – maybe it’s still going on) and artists on both sides of the Atlantic will drop everything to work with her. She may be more frank than the really big stars would dare to be, but she’s moving ever faster away from Scott and Charlene, Especially For You, Stock Aitken and Waterman. Still asking ‘Why Kylie?’. Then meet the new Miss M.

“If you put yourself in this position, it’s like being in front of a firing squad,” she says. “Why do it? If you make music and that’s what you love and you just put it out, that’s one thing, you don’t need to prove anything to anyone. But when you’re in the charts, you’re doing interviews and dealing with people who are flicking through magazines looking for people they can give a hard time to. When that comes at you fast and furious, you get done, you get had. But being in front of the firing squad, let me tell you, I am excellent at dodging bullets …”.

I am going to get to a feature about the album published in 2019. It is important to recognise how important Kylie Minogue was in the career of one of music’s greatest talents. How 1994 was a pivotal and crucial year. I want to move to a review from 1994 and what was being said about an album that is genuinely brilliant. Even if there are one or two lesser numbers, one cannot deny the quality on offer. How Kylie Minogue took a leap and was brave moving on from her older sound and trying something fresh and interesting:

“Kylie Minogue SO HERE it is, the one that's supposed to transform Kylie once and for all from pop kitten to credible artiste. This Herculean goal has actually been realised with a great deal of aplomb. Although seven producers were involved, instead of sounding a mess it's absolutely cohesive, excellent dance-pop. For anyone who remembers her shrill disco ditties, the imaginatively titled "Kylie Minogue" will come as no less than a revelation.

Her voice has been coaxed from a squeak to a more resonant entity, but its frailty imparts a most appealing vulnerability. The songs have been hand-tooled to accommo-. date Kylie's newly enlarged range of soaring top notes and post-coital whispers and sighs. Or perhaps it's 'Kylie who adapts herself to the elegant arrangements, complete with sitars and subtle backing vocals. Trainspotters will have hours of fun trying to distinguish the songs produced by Mercury Music Prize winners People from those by clubland heroes Brothers In Rhythm and Pete Farley.

But they're all high-gloss confections on a par with the best of Madonna. The current single, Confide In Me, has a classical violin overture that unfolds into a snakecharming Eastern melody. Kylie sounds delightfully woebegone. She snaps into sophisticated Euro-diva mode for the languid, chime-tinkling Surrender and by the time we get to the basspopping funker If I Was Your Lover, she's murmuring, "If I was your lover, I'd hold you in my arms and And what is left to our imagination, as is much else on this album. The best moments are uncomplicated "handbaghouse" opuses like Falling and Where Is The Feeling? Kylie confidently hits her stride, a Pet Shop Girl minus the cloying archness”.

Before wrapping up, there is a feature from Albumism that I want to bring in. Marking twenty-five years of the album, it is good that time has been set aside to go deeper with it. Not that many people gave as much time to Kylie Minogue as they should have done. I was ten when it came out and didn’t hear it in full until many years later. The more I listen to it now, the more I get from it. One of Minogue’s best albums I feel:

“The soft sales and mild reviews that met Kylie Minogue’s fourth album Let’s Get to It upon its landfall in late 1991 signposted that it was time for a change. The singer had done all she could at PWL Records and it was time to move on.

A customary singles package assembled and released in 1992 detailed Minogue’s first four years with the British songwriting/production troika Mike Stock, Matt Aitken and Pete Waterman. This story began in 1987 when the antipodean actress translated her television star power from the beloved daytime soap Neighbours into a lucrative recording career with a cover of Little Eva’s chestnut “The Loco-Motion.” Later, following the Stock-Aitken-Waterman synth-pop schematic on her first two offerings Kylie (1988) and Enjoy Yourself (1989) via Waterman’s own PWL imprint—in Australia she was signed to Mushroom Records—Minogue became a commercial sensation.

By the time construction was to start on her fourth LP, Aitken had defected from the trio’s ranks which left Minogue, Stock and Waterman to put the project together. Out of those adverse drafting conditions Minogue still managed to shake out a fair curtain call for her PWL tenure with Let’s Get to It. The album’s last single “Finer Feelings” pointed to Minogue’s future as she intersected with two promising writer-producers, Dave Seaman and Steve Anderson, known collectively as Brothers in Rhythm. Seaman and Anderson oversaw the lush radio edit for “Finer Feelings” and when the reviews for it came back strong, Minogue was emboldened to forego renewing her contract with PWL. In Australia, her contract with Mushroom continued to stand.

Minogue wasn’t without a label in the United Kingdom and the rest of mainland Europe for long. In 1993, she inked a deal with deConstruction Records, a boutique arm of its larger parent company BMG Records. “Kylie is regarded as a trashy disco singer, we regard her as a potential radical dance diva,” deConstruction founder Pete Hadfield remarked upon signing her, as documented within the liner notes of Kylie Minogue’s 2003 remaster. “Any radical dance diva has a home at deConstruction.” Attempting to use dance-pop and R&B tones on Rhythm of Love and Let’s Get to It to divorce herself from the identikit sonics of her first two records had worked all too well. Minogue went from being written off as a manufactured puppet to being viewed as a rote dance act—neither of those perceptions were correct.

With all parties at deConstruction encouraging Minogue to explore the variegated musical options available to her, she did just that. And while dance music certainly wasn’t off the table, she knew it wouldn’t be the only avenue ventured on her fifth album, Kylie Minogue. As early as Rhythm of Love, Minogue had begun scripting her own material, but made the conscious decision to lower her pen on this eponymic effort to open herself up to fielding songs that she thought would suit her best. Only “Automatic Love” bore Minogue’s co-writing stamp on the finished product.

Excluding two renditions of Within a Dream’s “Where Is the Feeling?” and Tobi Legend’s “Time Will Pass You By,” the remaining eight of Kylie Minogue’s 10 sides were original compositions. Behind these selections was an eclectic assemblage of writers and producers, foremost among them Jimmy Harry, the Rapino Brothers, Heller & Farley and Brothers in Rhythm. Minogue, Seaman and Anderson teaming up again confirmed that their interaction on “Finer Feelings” had helped her to reimagine the possibilities as to how she could make music. Now, with the room to create freely, the three of them formed the collaborative core for Kylie Minogue.

Unlike the songs Minogue cut with Stock-Aitken-Waterman that relied primarily on keyboards, programming and guitars, she now had access to some of the best session players and technology in the business. She took full advantage of these tools and had her collaborators utilize them to cast rich, fully realized soundscapes courtesy of a healthy blend of live instrumentation and studio craft. Now, Minogue could go to all of those places she had wanted to go on Rhythm of Love and Let’s Get to It, and beyond.

“Confide in Me,” the salvo of Kylie Minogue, is an orchestral, trip-hop tempest built around an interpolation of Edward Barton’s 1983 indie-pop piece “It’s a Fine Day,” later to be covered by Opus III in 1992. Minogue turns in a knockout performance that finds her using her middle and higher vocal register to indelibly sketch a seductive tale of adult romance and connection. Minogue doesn’t lose this momentum when she immediately pivots into the luxe pop-soul of “Surrender,” where she expounds upon her newfound growth as a singer.

From the hip-hop soul, acid jazz and worldbeat fusion heard on “If I Was Your Lover,” “Where Is the Feeling?” and “Time Will Pass You By” respectively, Minogue approximates a cordial balance between R&B grooves and pop melodies that is second to none. Then there are the straight-ahead floorfillers “Where Has the Love Gone?” and “Falling.” The two suite-like jams are fashioned from the refined brick and mortar aspects of house music and meant for long play consumption either in a discothèque or in the comfort of one’s home.

On the balladic end of Kylie Minogue reside “Put Yourself in My Place,” “Dangerous Game” and “Automatic Love.” These adult contemporary entries are nothing short of palatial and saw Minogue tighten her hold on her own brand of soulful pop. Taken as a complete body of work, Kylie Minogue was a stratospheric leap of progress”.

There are many treats and gems on Kylie Minogue. My favourite is Confide in Me. Stirring, balletic, sexy and cool, it is one of those songs that could have been a James Bond them!. Such a captivating track that showed Minogue had moved quite far from her first few albums. Impossible Princess would push that sense of dare and experimentation even further. On 19th September, Kylie Minogue turns thirty. It should be showed love and respect. Minogue’s fifth studio album will no doubt be celebrated by its creator. It is a wonderful and essential release from…

A Pop icon.

FEATURE: I Found That Essence Rare: Gang of Four’s Entertainment! at Forty-Five

FEATURE:

 

 

I Found That Essence Rare

Gang of Four’s Entertainment! at Forty-Five

_________

ONE of the…

most important albums of the late-'70s turns forty-five on 25th September. Gang of Four’s Entertainment! There are some features and reviews I want to bring in that discuss, dissect and celebrate the Post-Punk band’s incredible debut album. I want to start out with Pitchfork’s review of Entertainment! Spotlighting the album in 2005, it was after Rhino reissued the 1979 classic, adding the Yellow E.P. and four previously unreleased tracks:

“Gang of Four were a pop band. Their funk was no less stark or forbidding than, say, the more astringent Timbaland productions. They certainly weren't as twitchy, speedy, or noisy as James Brown at his most energized. Their great innovation-- Andy Gill's morse code guitar, as if playing a riff for more than a few bars caused him physical pain-- is post-punk's most ripped-off idea after badly played disco drums. They had attitude, energy, the big beat, skilled players funneling their virtuosity into the necessary notes, a handy way with a catch phrase, and sweaty live performances. Sounds like pop to me.

They formed in 1977 as part of a scene surrounding Leeds University's fine arts department that also included the Mekons and the Au Pairs. They were art students who named themselves after the Maoists that ran China until the leader's death in 1976. But they bonded over pub rockers Dr. Feelgood and 70s British blues band Free, exactly the sort of dinosaur hard rock post-punk was supposed to have purged in its own Cultural Revolution. The seeming contradiction, at least in terms of the Good Music Society the music press was constructing at the time, might have explained their sound, which critic Simon Reynolds described as a "checked and inhibited hard rock: cock rock [with] the cock lopped off."

Andy Gill kept his guitar chilly, without the blanket of fuzz provided by effects pedals and the agreeable tone of valve amps. Blues riffs do crop up, but it's almost as if Gill is playing against his technique, scattering them like fishes in a pond with a scrabble of notes. He rarely engages in anything like a solo, the ejaculation part of cock rock. Gill's playing approaches rock drama through dynamics. On "Return the Gift" he's a shrill S-O-S pattern underneath the weight of Dave Allen's bass on the choruses, a flinty, almost Derek Bailey-like anti-solo. On "(Love Like) Anthrax", he sounds like he's trying to split concrete with a garden spade on a congested street. The guitars on "Natural's Not In It" are actually kind of sexy, in an uncomfortable frottage sort of way.

The band says they were trying to get Allen to play a "quarter of the notes he was actually capable of playing," which must be a pretty alarming number given his busyness on tracks like "Damaged Goods". The bass is the only fluid part of Go4's sound, and even that's more croaky than bubbling. On "Ether" there's no bassline to speak of, just big bullfrog gulps as the guitar clangs, bell-like, and a sinister high-noon melodica whistles in the distance. Drummer Hugo Burnham played funk beats and disco snare crashes but with all the reverb stripped off so that they splashed like alcohol. He's the band's secret weapon, and stuff like the hard snare crack that sounds like a handclap on "Not Great Men" is often what makes a song. When they all locked in, as on "I Found That Essence Rare", the effect is like stuffing 10 pounds of funk into a five-pound bag.

Emotionally, however, Entertainment! is a brick. Like a black hole, no romanticism escapes it. Hints of black humor (especially in the artwork) creep into their aesthetic without overwhelming it. Relationships are reduced to "contract[s] in our mutual interest." Jon King often sings in the first person, implicating himself before anyone else: "I can't work/ I can't achieve"; "how can I sit and eat my tea with all that blood flowing from the television?" Out of one speaker, Gill drones the production details of the love song like a bored copywriter on "Anthrax", concluding "we just don't think what goes on between two people should be shrouded in mystery." Out of the other speaker, King moans that he "feel[s] like a beetle on its back/ And there's no way for me to get up".

I am going to move into an article from Post-Punk.com. They had some interesting things to say about Entertainment! In 2018. I only discovered the album a few years ago. Not knowing much about Gang of Four, it is an instantly intoxicating listen. Forty-five years after its release and you can sense the influence and impact of it in the modern scene. A work that has definitely resonate with many other artists through the years:

“On September 25th, 1979 Gang Of Four released their debut LP Entertainment!, a highly influential post-punk record that incorporates funk, dance music, reggae, and dub, with lyrics that permeates with left-wing ideology critical of capitalism, war, and the their alienating effects on society, while being influenced by the Situationist and feminist movements.

The album’s cover artwork was designed by singer Jon King and guitarist Andy Gill, and shows the influence of the Situationist International, through its reinterpretation of an “Indian” shaking hands with a “cowboy” based on a still from one of the Winnetou films starring Lex Barker and Pierre Brice. The Winnetou films were based on a German interpretation of the Wild West by Karl May (1842–1912), one of the best-selling German writers of all time, which were later repurposed by East Germany communists as critical narratives of capitalism.

The back sleeve to Entertainment! gives further socio-political commentary by depicting a family whose gluttonous patriarch says: “I spend most of our money on myself so that I can stay fat”, while his wife and child respond with: “We’re grateful for his leftovers”.

The commentary continues on the album’s inner sleeve, which features small photos of television screens juxtaposed with misleading platitudes such as: “The facts are presented neutrally so that the public can make up its own mind”; “Men act heroically to defend their country”; “People are given what they want”.

The album featured the band’s first two singles “Damaged Goods”, a Marxist critique of the transactional nature of everyday life, including romance and sexuality, illustrated through a breakup.

“Damaged Goods” was originally released as an EP, and the track “Love Like Anthrax” has its title shortened to “Anthrax” for the album, while “Armalite Rifle” is not included, but was later available on the Yellow EP, along with the b-side for “At Home He’s A Tourist”, which was “It’s Her Factory”

The album’s second single, “At Home He’s A Tourist”, is quite possibly a feminist song from both a male and female perspective about the alienation from the pressures of societal expectations and gender roles”.

I will end with another review of the album. To give another perspective. It brings me to this feature from The Quietus. In 2014, Houman Barekat pondered and reflected on Kevin J. H. Dettmar's insightful and passionate contribution to 33 1/3's series of books – that are dedicated to single albums -; a keen and informative study of Gang of Four's Entertainment! If you have never heard the album then I would recommend that you seek it out. Whilst it was very relevant in 1979, I think that it has not aged in that sense. One can apply so many of the themes and songs to the modern day:

“Entertainment!’s currency is the small-P politics of late capitalist banality, referencing commercials for Essence Rare perfume and timeshare holidays, and interrogating ‘the problem of leisure / what to do for pleasure’ (‘Natural’s Not In It’). Gang of Four were well versed in critical theory – they had cut their teeth on the Frankfurt School and the Situationists, they knew their Louis Althusser from their Raymond Williams – but, crucially and unlike so many other ‘political’ rock bands, they had the flair and the sense of fun to go with it. There’s a clue in the title: the cabaret exuberance of that punctuation mark anticipates the ironic fizz that makes Entertainment! so compelling. It is here that Dettmar’s literary grounding comes into its own, as he identifies the key ingredient that sets this album apart: it is, he writes, a question of ‘the difference between literature and propaganda …. valuing suggestive and provocative ambiguity over efficient certainty.’ Gang of Four raised a mirror to the insidious ideology of consumer society – its contamination of supposedly sacred spaces like the bedroom (‘Contract’, ‘Anthrax’) and every Englishman’s castle, home (‘At Home He’s a Tourist’). But they rarely preached. Their medium was ‘theatrical rather than confessional; narrative rather than lyric; ironic rather than sincere.’ They were, in short, storytellers.

None of which would have counted for anything were it not for the music. That Entertainment! sounds as fresh today as it did in 1979 – the same could hardly be said of many of Gang of Four’s contemporaries – is a testament to the band’s technical brilliance. As Dettmar points out, it’s the little touches that make it: the uncomfortably protracted intro to ‘I’ve Found that Essence Rare’, the chiming, circular four-note figure on Andy Gill’s guitar played 16 times rather than the usual 8; the instrumental dropouts borrowed from dub reggae – anti-solos where one instrument or another disappears from the mix for maybe 10 seconds or even 30 seconds at a time; the variations in the duration of the ‘gutters’, the silences between the songs. Call it Brechtian defamiliarisation or just messing with pop convention, Gang of Four’s unique sound was the perfect sonic complement to the ironic distance in their lyrics.

Whereas angrily ripping into the reigning monarch has a very finite shelf-life, the cultural moment so acerbically itemised by Entertainment! is very much ongoing. Long before the 24-hour stereo of today’s immersive digital fuckfest, Gang of Four were singing (on the album’s penultimate track, ‘5.45’) that ‘guerrilla war struggles are the new entertainment’. As I write this I’m watching a report on the fall of Kirkuk on the BBC website. The clip is three-and-a-half-minutes long, about the length of your average pop song; I daresay the warning that it contains some disturbing images only sharpens my attention. The report tells of Islamist militants seizing control of the city, going in all guns blazing. The story is of imminent humanitarian catastrophe, but all I can muster by way of response is to marvel, idiot-like, that it’s quite possibly the first time I’ve ever heard the expression ‘going in all guns blazing’ used non-figuratively. That’s entertainment”.

I am going to finish up with a review from AllMusic. One of the most acclaimed albums of the 1970s, the phenomenal Entertainment! turns forty-five on 25th September. I hope that it gets a lot of new words and features. Few debut albums of the decade were as essential and impactful as Gang of Four’s. Unlike so many bands of the 1970s, Gang of Four have enjoyed life beyond that time. Their latest album, Happy Now, was released in 2019:

“Entertainment! is one of those records where germs of influence can be traced through many genres and countless bands, both favorably and unfavorably. From groups whose awareness of genealogy spreads wide enough to openly acknowledge Gang of Four's influence (Fugazi, Rage Against the Machine), to those not in touch with their ancestry enough to realize it (rap-metal, some indie rock) -- all have appropriated elements of their forefathers' trailblazing contribution. Its vaguely funky rhythmic twitch, its pungent, pointillistic guitar stoccados, and its spoken/shouted vocals have all been picked up by many. Lyrically, the album was apart from many of the day, and it still is. The band rants at revisionist history in "Not Great Men" ("No weak men in the books at home"), self-serving media and politicians in "I Found That Essence Rare" ("The last thing they'll ever do?/Act in your interest"), and sexual politics in "Damaged Goods" ("You said you're cheap but you're too much"). Though the brilliance of the record thrives on the faster material -- especially the febrile first side -- a true highlight amongst highlights is the closing "Anthrax," full of barely controlled feedback squalls and moans. It's nearly psychedelic, something post-punk and new wave were never known for. With a slight death rattle and plodding bass rumble, Jon King equates love with disease and admits to feeling "like a beetle on its back." In the background, Andy Gill speaks in monotone of why Gang of Four doesn't do love songs. Subversive records of any ilk don't get any stronger, influential, or exciting than this”.

The brilliant Entertainment! is coming up to a big anniversary. On 25th September, we get to mark forty-five years of an album that won praise from Michael Stipe and Kurt Cobain. Both legends acknowledging the power of Gang of Four and their debut. Cobain especially. So many sites and sources have ranked Entertainment! among the best albums ever. In 2004, Pitchfork declared it! as the eighth-best album of the 1970s. In 2003, Rolling Stone placed Entertainment! at number 490 on its list of the 500 greatest albums of all time. Gang of Four’s acclaimed and tremendous debut is…

A seminal album.

FEATURE: Atomic: Blondie’s Eat to the Beat at Forty-Five

FEATURE:

 

 

Atomic

Blondie’s Eat to the Beat at Forty-Five

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ON 28th September…

 IN THIS PHOTO: Blondie in 1979/PHOTO CREDIT: Maureen Donaldson/GI

Blondie’s fourth studio album, Eat to the Beat, turns forty-five. Arriving a year after the classic Parallel Lines, it is not considered as highly. It is a huge album to live up to! Even so, Eat to the Beat is a wonderful album that we should celebrate. It opens with three of Blondie’s biggest songs: Dreaming, The Hardest Part and Union City Blue. I want to bring in a couple of features and a review for Eat to the Beat. Reaching number one in the U.K., I don’t think that it is fair to say that Eat to the Beat is a pale and lacklustre follow-up to Parallel Lines. That it is nowhere near as impactful and consistent. There is so much to enjoy through Eat to the Beat. I will end with a positive review from the BBC. Last year, Udiscovermusic talked about Blondie serving up a New Wave classic. Proving that they had ammunition and plenty of ideas after Parallel Lines. Not repeating themselves, the New York City band moved in a new direction. Their music did not suffer because of it:

“With their pop credentials firmly established, Blondie entered the studio ready to prove they could turn their hand to anything. Yet for all its stylistic carousing, Eat To The Beat provides a uniform listen thanks to the way it soundtracks a fantasy New York City of yellow taxis, wasted decadence, and bright-lights hunger with an exotic chic that, naturally, appealed to the group’s eagerly awaiting UK fanbase. Taking a cue from the ferocity of the group’s earliest outings, the title track is a sharp slice of Blondie’s patented pop-punk, while the likes of “Union City Blue” conjures the sort of romantic yearning you only ever get from finding yourself adrift in a city where anything can happen.

Switching styles with ease, opener “Dreaming” found the group at their most unashamedly bombastic, before offering a masterclass in street-smart punk-funk strutting, courtesy of “The Hardest Part.” Elsewhere, Eat To The Beat saw Blondie make their first notable foray into reggae, with “Die Young Stay Pretty” nodding towards “The Tide Is High” (which would top the charts on both sides of the Atlantic in 1980), while the hedonistic rush of “Atomic” was a perfectly calibrated export of New York City’s disco scene.

Often overlooked in favor of its big-hitting predecessor, Eat To The Beat had more bite than people remember, and went platinum in both the US and the UK. With the group at their most ambitious, they also created a promo video for each of the album’s 12 songs, further cementing the album as an unofficial Big Apple soundtrack while creating the world’s first video album in the process”.

In 2019, Ultimate Classic Rock spotlighted an eclectic follow-up to one of the greatest albums ever. There must have been a sense of pressure and expectation on Blondie’s shoulders. The fact people did not have to wait long between albums took away some of that anxiety and delay. They launched in with an album that contains more than its fair share of gems. Debbie Harry’s songwriting especially strong and impactful. An incredible talent leading one of the world’s best bands. You can hear shades of Eat to the Beat in albums that followed it in 1979:

“After its release in fall 1978, Parallel Lines shot up the charts, reaching No. 1 in the U.K. and the Top 10 in the U.S. thanks to the powerhouse appeal of the single "Heart of Glass," which went to No. 1 across the planet, including the U.S. The song added another influence to the band's range of musical interests, among them disco, which was at its peak after the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack dominated radio, the charts and pop culture the past year.

So, when the six-member Blondie, led by singer Debbie Harry, entered the studio in their hometown of New York City as spring turned to summer in 1979, they pretty much followed the template of the record that rocketed them to stardom the previous year. That meant some New Wave, a little pop, a throwback or two to their punk roots and, of course, more disco. And then they took it even further.

Harry, who co-wrote eight of the new album's songs, was thrust into the spotlight following Parallel Lines' success. She became the focal point of the group and was often characterized by unknowing Top 40 fans as a solo artist named Blondie. Even though their publicity department stressed the issue -- going as far as declaring "Blondie is a band" in press releases -- getting casual music fans who knew them from only "Heart of Glass" to acknowledge there were five other people making the music was often an uphill battle.

When they reconvened in the studio to make Eat to the Beat, Blondie were still working hard on that band dynamic. All six members contributed songs to the album in one form or another and, along with returning producer Mike Chapman, were determined to not rest on Parallel Lines' laurels. Eat to the Beat sounds like a follow-up, but not a sequel. And that's no small achievement.

In turn, Eat to the Beat, which came out in October 1979, was the next step in their evolution. A small step, but an integral part of Blondie's story. As producer Chapman noted in the album's 2001 reissue, tensions were high during the recording, stemming from increased drug use among various members. But Harry also began to assume more control, outlining a vision for the album that included the usual mix of pop, punk, disco, New Wave and even R&B-inflected songs.

The result was one of Blondie's greatest albums, led by the sugary rush of lead single "Dreaming," which climbed into the Top 40. Eat to the Beat doesn't waste much time from there: Two of its best songs, "The Hardest Part" and "Union City Blue," quickly follow. But the LP saves its most perfect moment for the middle of Side Two.

That's when "Atomic" shows up. The song shuffles together pop, New Wave and disco, and features a defining spaghetti western-style guitar line played by Chris Stein that's tossed into the mix with everything else. It also spotlights one of Harry's greatest vocals to that point, a strong, confident performance that showed just how far she and the band had come since 1976's self-titled debut.

The song went to No. 1 in the U.K. but barely cracked the Top 40 in Blondie's home country, stalling at No. 39. The album fared similarly, making it to No. 1 overseas but reaching No. 17 in the U.S. Still, it was a triumph for the band, whose melting-pot approach to music made them one of the most adventurous acts of the era.

The next year they scored the biggest song of their career with "Call Me," the no-doubt-about-it disco smash from the American Gigolo soundtrack that stayed at No. 1 for eight weeks. They followed that up with two more No. 1 singles: a cover of the reggae song "The Tide Is High" and "Rapture," the first chart-topper to include a rap.

The genre-jumping started long before Parallel Lines gave way to Eat to the Beat. But these two classic albums set a steady course for the future for both the band and '80s music in general. Their influence, even today, guide the career of any artist who refuses to be pigeonholed and restricted in their music. Blondie, as always, were just doing what came naturally”.

I actually will finish up with two reviews. I will come to the BBC one I mentioned earlier. Perhaps a more raw and eclectic listen than Parallel Lines, many critics noted how the lyrics on Eat to the Beat were more fatalist. A departure from their previous album, it was an impressive and quick evolution that works really well through the album:

“By 1979 Debbie Harry, Chris Stein and co. had realised their true potential. Forsaking pure rock for more diverse palette, Blondie's plan of attack now involved willfully grabbing at any passing style (as long as it could be termed 'pop') and making it their own. In this Eat To The Beat emulated and expanded on the platinum-selling Parallel Lines' formula.

Behind all this was, again, the genius (and superhuman levels of attention to detail, spending hours listening to playbacks at eardrum bursting volume) of bubblegum producer, Mike Chapman. He may have recognised in Blondie the ability to be moulded like the Sweet, Mud and all his other RAK creations at the beginning of the 70s, yet the band was equally responsible for this chart assault - writing the material that fitted Chapman's vision. One look at the credits shows exactly how democratic a place Blondie was to be as a band member. Everyone gets a mention at some point.

Maybe this accounts for the stylistic ragbag that emerges. Eat To The Beat still bears the traces of the art punk roots that had given birth to them back in their CBGB's days in New York (on the title track, the manic Accidents Never Happen and Living In The Real World); but at times the album reads like a veritable history of chart styles: Here was their first proper foray into reggae with Die Young Stay Pretty, the Duane Eddy-at-the-disco grandeur of Atomic, the skittering, Spectorish pure pop of Dreaming and Union City Blue and the Motown stomp of Slow Motion. Sound-A-Sleep goes even further back into the kind of 50s dream pop that might feature in a David Lynch film.

Americans, still hamstrung by the double-edged values of the late 60s, were always suspicious that a band first marketed as 'new wave' could be so mercenary and saw it as ersatz 'selling out', giving the album a lukewarm reception. Meanwhile in Europe their ability to soundtrack every great disco, wedding and barmitzvah was rightly valued. In the end, pop is pop and Blondie, at this point, were making the timeless variety that still sounds box fresh today”.

I am going to end things with a 1983 review from Rolling Stone. A deep and incisive review of the tremendous Eat to the Beat. Even though Blondie couldn’t quite keep the momentum and magic of Eat to the Beat alive for their 1980 follow-up, Autoamerican, that album still has many highlights. I have a very soft spot for Eat to the Beat. Atomic is a classic that is the equal of anything they have ever produced. The band sound fresh and connected throughout. It is important that we remember and discuss Eat to the Beat:

“With each LP, Blondie has updated their musical mosaic by assimilating another chunk of pop history. Plastic Letters added touches of neopsychedelic electronics to the mock-girl-group sound of the band’s debut. The repackaging and refinements of last year’s Parallel Lines helped reduce Blondie’s we-know-better-now perspective from the larger-than-life campiness of their early work to a subtler, eyebrow-raised irony: a level of detachment perfectly calculated to let the group play it both ways with a discofied song like “Heart of Glass.”

Smart, smirky and elating as those albums were, they had the unsatisfying feel of schoolwork turned in by a brilliant dilettante whose greatest effort went toward maintaining a stance of noncommittal, deathless cool that guarded against expectations while holding back energy for a future, more worthy challenge.

Alone among the bands that emerged from the mid-Seventies New York punk-club circuit, Blondie has always regarded success as necessary, well deserved and inevitable. You got the feeling that if Deborah Harry and Chris Stein didn’t become famous as rock stars, they’d gain fame as something else.

With Eat to the Beat, all that smug certainty has been vindicated. Faced with the challenge of following up the million-selling Parallel Lines, Blondie has delivered a record that’s not only ambitious in its range of styles, but also unexpectedly and vibrantly compelling without sacrificing any of the group’s urbane, modish humor. As if to distinguish Blondie from the pop revival they helped catalyze, Eat to the Beat subjugates melody to momentum: in their construction and in Mike Chapman’s dense, crystalline production, most of the tracks are organized around Clem Burke’s superb drumming. The new LP is — purposefully, I think — less overtly hooky than Parallel Lines, exchanging that album’s cool self-possession for an engaging neuroticism. If hooks are the small revelations of rock & roll, then the beat is its obsession.

Blondie’s obsession here is with dreams and distance — the band’s usual themes, now suddenly personalized by its own success. Like a comedian who outlasts and outclasses the subjects of his impressions, the group itself has become a pop image as powerful as any it can invoke. Blondie has invariably recognized the resonances that stardom has from without: Jimmy Destri’s “Fan Mail” on Plastic Letters captures perfectly the lightheaded devotion of hero-worship. Now they’re comparing perspectives. Without ever approaching a music-biz cliché, Eat to the Beat explores the nagging paradoxes of success — like the way it imposes distance between you and your surroundings, your memories and your dreams. Or the contrast between internal and external transformation, means and ends, recognition and risk taking.

“Dreaming” makes the keynote statement. Burke’s drums roll in and out like the inexorable pounding of breakers on the beach, nearly drowning out Stein’s twangy, Beatles-style guitar riff and the keening, insistent reiteration of the six-note refrain. Harry’s voice emerges in smooth peals, as if she’s found a place for herself beyond the waves:

Reel to reel is living rarity
People stop and stare at me
We just walk on by
We just keep on dreaming.

Holding private thought so dear raises the ante on fantasies: the dreams played out on Eat to the Beat are all high-stakes dramas. The throbbing, witty “The Hardest Part” weds — not for the first time — sexual and financial fantasy (“No short heist/No overnight/Big money/Take it to Brazil”), while “Union City Blue” evokes life-or-death romance. Mixed with the intertwined-guitars-and-keyboards density of “Dreaming,” “Union City Blue” has the force of an incantation. Key words — power, passion — slip out with a resonant urgency. Harry’s finally using her sweet tones to create real emotional intensity.

Eat to the Beat shows off Deborah Harry’s increasing pleasure in her craft — the histrionic screeching of “Victor” must have been fun — as well as her incredible improvement as a stylist. (The record’s only dud is “Sound-a-Sleep,” an insomniac’s lullaby with artificial crooning à la Doris Day.) It’s exhilarating to hear her give thematic depth to the contrast between “Shayla” and the title tune; her wordless, whippoorwill vocals in the former do more to convey the apotheosis of an ex-working girl (it could be Harry’s own story) than do all of Stein’s banal, “cosmic energy” lyrics. If “Shayla” is about arriving, the careening, jumping “Eat to the Beat” makes the route explicit — you travel to the top, toes tapping, by way of a lot of rock & roll street corners. Alternately petulant and gleeful, Harry flings lyrics around like a prizefighter.

In “Accidents Never Happen” and “Die Young Stay Pretty” (the latter a carousel reggae number with mock-steel-drum punctuation), the band enumerates constraining real-world pressures and expectations. In search of blessed predictability (“… in a perfect world/Complications disappear”), Blondie finds only the time clocks of mortality and the media. With “Atomic,” meanwhile, they deflect some of these expectations by going the steely irony of “Heart of Glass” one better. By uniting a Ventures guitar line, a pulsing Eurodisco synthesizer and cascading female harmonies with some deliberately facile lyrics (“Your hair is beautiful …/Atomic me tonight”), the group smoothly rewrites sexual clichés.

Eat to the Beat comes full circle with “Living in the Real World.” A giddy, raveup response to “Dreaming,” it’s about the frenzied scuffling — no holds barred — in your head when your body’s keeping pace with a world that’s become the dream of success. With a pout that sounds like she’s eating jujubes, Deborah Harry romps through Jimmy Destri’s glib, wide-eyed lyric: “I can be whoever I want to/I talk to me/I even agree.” Her overdubbed, cheerleader-style shriek of “I’m not living!” builds the song to a climax that — like so much of the LP — sweeps you along with its heady solipsism. For Blondie, it seems, the most compelling dreams are the ones you’ve already seen come true”.

On 28th September, Eat to the Beat turns forty-five. I am not sure if there will be any commemoration or anything special planned. The fourth album from Blondie, many compare it to and judge it on the strength of Parallel Lines. That is not fair! Eat to the Beat is its own album and should be heralded! Maybe not their very best album, Eat to the Beat should not be ignored or seen as less. Instead, it is this huge and amazing album filled with richness. Ahead of its anniversary go and check it out. Blondie’s 1979 album is…

TRULY atomic.

FEATURE: The Digital Mixtape: Bruce Springsteen at Seventy-Five

FEATURE:

 

 

The Digital Mixtape

Bruce Springsteen at Seventy-Five

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A big birthday of a major artist…

is coming up pretty fast. The legendary Bruce Springsteen turns seventy-five on 23rd September. I wanted to celebrate by compiling a career-spanning playlist saluting The Boss. One of the most consistent and iconic songwriters ever, I am glad that Springsteen is out there and recording albums. Still touring. That said, one wonders how many more years Springsteen will tour for. His latest album, 2022’s Only the Strong Survive, is among his best I think. He is an amazingly arresting artist responsible for some of the all-time best songs. If you want to keep up to date with everything Boss-related, you can go to his official site. Before I get to a mixtape featuring some of Bruce Springsteen’s very best songs and some deeper cuts, AllMusic have a deep and detailed biography about this much-adored artist:

“Bruce Springsteen once said he intended to make an album with words like Bob Dylan that sounded like Phil Spector with vocals like Roy Orbison's, a nifty summary of many, but not all, of his artistic ambitions and a key to his appeal. Unlike any other singer/songwriters saddled with the appellation of "the new Dylan" in the early '70s, Springsteen never hid how he was raised on '60s AM radio. He loved rock & roll, whether it was the initial blast from the '50s or the mini-symphonies from the days before the Beatles or the garage rockers that surfaced in the wake of the British Invasion, and all this could be heard within his wild, wooly collective E Street Band, a group who debuted on his second album, 1973's The Wild, The Innocent & The E Street Shuffle, and who would support him throughout most of his career. The E Street Band allowed Springsteen to touch upon all of his beloved music -- rock & roll, soul, jazz -- but he would still step outside the band to do an occasional solo project, often acoustic-oriented excursions into folk where he'd deliberately pick up the story-telling torch left behind by Woody Guthrie. Here, Springsteen turned the working class into myth, but that same sense of romance was evident in his rock & roll, surfacing spectacularly on his 1975 album Born to Run. Greeted by superlative reviews along with the rare distinction of his appearing on the covers of the news magazines Time and Newsweek within the same week, Born to Run put Springsteen on the map and over the next few years he worked hard, touring regularly with the E Street Band and releasing the acclaimed, successful records Darkness on the Edge of Town and The River. What pushed Springsteen into the stratosphere was 1984's Born in the U.S.A., a record that turned into a 15-million-unit-selling phenomenon and made him a global superstar. He had some difficulty with the fallout of fame, stepping away from the E Street Band for nearly a decade as he wandered through a series of albums of varied quality, but at the turn of the millennium, he reunited the band for a successful tour and then found an artistic rebirth with 2002's The Rising. From that point on, Springsteen kept the E Street Band as his regular touring band and would often bring the group into the studio for such albums as 2007's Magic and 2020's Letter to You. He also stepped away from the band to pursue such adventurous projects as his autobiographical one-man show Springsteen on Broadway in 2017, the lush, cinematic 2019 album Western Stars, and Only the Strong Survive, a 2022 collection of soul covers.

Bruce Springsteen was born September 23, 1949, in Freehold, New Jersey, the son of Douglas Springsteen, a bus driver, and Adele (Zirilli) Springsteen, a secretary. He became interested in music after seeing Elvis Presley perform on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1956 and got a guitar, but he didn't start playing seriously until 1963. In 1965, he joined his first band, the Beatles-influenced Castiles. They got as far as playing in New York City, but broke up in 1967 around the time Springsteen graduated from high school and began frequenting clubs in Asbury Park, New Jersey. From there, he briefly joined Earth, a hard rock band in the style of Cream. Also in the hard rock vein was his next group, Child (soon renamed Steel Mill), which featured keyboard player Danny Federici and drummer Vini Lopez. (Later on, guitarist Steve Van Zandt joined on bass.) Steel Mill played in California in 1969, drawing a rave review in San Francisco and even a contract offer from a record label. But they broke up in 1971, and Springsteen formed a big band, the short-lived Dr. Zoom & the Cosmic Boom, quickly superseded by the Bruce Springsteen Band. Along with Federici, Lopez, and Van Zandt (who switched back to guitar), this group also included pianist David Sancious and bassist Garry Tallent, plus a horn section that didn't last long before being replaced by a single saxophonist, Clarence Clemons. Due to lack of work, however, Springsteen broke up the band and began playing solo shows in New York City. It was as a solo performer that he acquired a manager, Mike Appel, who arranged an audition for legendary Columbia talent scout John Hammond. Hammond signed Springsteen to Columbia in 1972.

In preparing his debut LP, Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J., Springsteen immediately rehired most of his backup band, Federici, Lopez, Sancious, Tallent, and Clemons. (Van Zandt, on tour with the Dovells, was mostly unavailable.) The album went unnoticed upon its initial release in January 1973 (although Manfred Mann's Earth Band would turn its lead-off track "Blinded by the Light" into a number one hit four years later, and the LP itself has since gone double platinum). The Wild, The Innocent & The E Street Shuffle (September 1973) also failed to sell despite some rave reviews. (It too has gone double platinum.) The following year, Springsteen revised his backup group -- now dubbed the E Street Band -- as Lopez and Sancious left, and Max Weinberg (drums) and Roy Bittan (piano) joined, and in 1975, Van Zandt returned to the group. With this unit he toured extensively while working on the LP that represented his last chance with Columbia. By the time Born to Run (August 1975) was released, the critics and a significant cult audience were with him, and the title song became a Top 40 hit while the album reached the Top Ten, going on to sell six million copies.

Despite this breakthrough, Springsteen's momentum was broken by a legal dispute, as he split from Appel and brought in Jon Landau (a rock critic who had famously called him the "rock & roll future" in a 1974 concert review) as his new manager. The legal issues weren't resolved until 1977, during which time Springsteen was unable to record. (One beneficiary of this problem was Patti Smith, to whom Springsteen gave the composition "Because the Night," which, with some lyrical revisions by her, became her only Top 40 hit in the spring of 1978.) He finally returned in June 1978 with Darkness on the Edge of Town. By then, he had to rebuild his career. Record labels had recruited their own versions of the Springsteen "heartland rock" sound, in such similar artists as Bob Seger & the Silver Bullet Band (who actually preceded Springsteen but achieved national recognition in his wake), Johnny Cougar (aka John Mellencamp), Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers, Meat Loaf, Eddie Money, and even fellow Jersey Shore residents Southside Johnny & the Asbury Jukes, to name only some of the more successful ones. At the same time, the punk/new wave trend had become the new focus of critical devotion, making Springsteen seem unfashionable. Notwithstanding these challenges, Darkness earned its share of good reviews and achieved Top Ten status, selling three million copies as the single "Prove It All Night" hit the Top 40. (In early 1979, the Pointer Sisters took his composition "Fire" into the Top Ten.)

Springsteen fully consolidated his status with his next album, the two-LP set The River (October 1980), which hit number one, sold five million copies, and spawned the Top Ten hit "Hungry Heart" and the Top 40 hit "Fade Away." (In 1981-1982, Gary U.S. Bonds reached the Top 40 with two Springsteen compositions, "This Little Girl" and "Out of Work.") But having finally topped the charts, Springsteen experimented on his next album, preferring the demo recordings of the songs he had made for Nebraska (September 1982) to full-band studio versions, especially given the dark subject matter of his lyrics. The stark LP nevertheless hit the Top Ten and sold a million copies without the benefit of a hit single or a promotional tour. (Van Zandt amicably left the E Street Band for a solo career at this point and was replaced by Nils Lofgren.)

But then came Born in the U.S.A. (June 1984) and a two-year international tour. The album hit number one, threw off seven Top Ten hits ("Dancing in the Dark," which earned Springsteen his first Grammy Award for Best Male Rock Vocal Performance, "Cover Me," "Born in the U.S.A.," "I'm on Fire," "Glory Days," "I'm Goin' Down," and "My Hometown"), and sold 15 million copies, putting Springsteen in the pop heavens with Michael Jackson and Prince. For his next album, he finally exploited his reputation as a live performer by releasing the five-LP/three-CD box set Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band Live/1975-85 (November 1986), which topped the charts, was certified platinum 13 times, and spawned a Top Ten hit in a cover of Edwin Starr's "War." (In March 1987, "the Barbusters" -- actually Joan Jett & the Blackhearts, took Springsteen's composition "Light of Day," written for the movie of the same name, into the Top 40.)

Characteristically, Springsteen returned to studio work with a more introverted effort, Tunnel of Love (October 1987), which presaged his 1989 divorce from his first wife, actress Julianne Phillips. (He married a second time, to singer/songwriter/guitarist Patti Scialfa, who had joined the E Street Band as a backup vocalist in 1984.) The album was another number one hit, selling three million copies and producing two Top Ten singles, "Brilliant Disguise" and the title song, as well as the Top 40 hit "One Step Up." The album earned him a second male rock vocal Grammy. (In the spring of 1988, Natalie Cole covered the Springsteen B-side "Pink Cadillac" for a Top Ten hit.)

Springsteen retreated from public view in the late '80s, breaking up the E Street Band in November 1989. He returned to action in March 1992 with a new backup band, simultaneously releasing two albums, Human Touch and Lucky Town, which entered the charts at numbers two and three, respectively, each going platinum. A double-sided single combining "Human Touch" and "Better Days" was a Top 40 hit. Of course, this was a relative fall-off from the commercial heights of the mid-'80s, but Springsteen was undeterred. He next contributed the moody ballad "Streets of Philadelphia" to the soundtrack of Philadelphia, film director Jonathan Demme's 1993 depiction of a lawyer fighting an unjust termination for AIDS. The recording became a Top Ten hit, and the song went on to win Springsteen four Grammys (Song of the Year, Best Rock Song, best song written for a motion picture or television, and another for male rock vocal) and the Academy Award for best song.

In early 1995, Springsteen reconvened the E Street Band to record a few new tracks for his Greatest Hits (February 1995). The album topped the charts and sold four million copies, with one of the new songs, "Secret Garden," eventually reaching the Top 40. Despite this success, Springsteen resisted the temptation to reunite with the E Street Band on an ongoing basis at this point, instead recording another low-key, downcast, near-acoustic effort in the style of Nebraska, The Ghost of Tom Joad (November 1995), and embarking on a solo tour to promote it. The LP won a Grammy for best contemporary folk album, but it missed the Top Ten and only went gold.

A much more prolific songwriter and recording artist than what was reflected in his legitimately released discography, Springsteen went into his vault of unreleased material and assembled the four-CD box set Tracks (November 1998), which went platinum. Whether inspired by the playing he heard on those recordings, bowing to constant fan pressure, or simply recognizing the musicians with whom he had made his most successful music, Springsteen finally reunited the E Street Band in 1999, beginning with a performance at his induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. All the members from the 1974-1989 edition of the group returned. (Characteristically, Springsteen sidestepped the question of whether to use Van Zandt or Lofgren in the guitar position by rehiring both of them.) They embarked on a world tour that lasted until the middle of 2000, its final dates resulting in the album Live in New York City, which hit the Top Ten and sold a million copies.

Springsteen's writing process in coming up with a new rock album to be recorded with members of the E Street Band was given greater impetus in the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the resulting disc, The Rising (July 2002), contained songs that reflected on the tragedy. The album hit number one and sold two million copies, winning the Grammy for rock album, and the title song won for rock song and male rock vocal. Following another lengthy tour with the E Street Band, Springsteen again returned to the style and mood of Nebraska on another solo recording, Devils & Dust (April 2005), taking to the road alone to promote it. The album hit number one and went gold, winning a Grammy for Best Solo Rock Vocal Performance. One year later, Springsteen unveiled another new musical approach when he presented We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions (April 2006), an album on which he played new arrangements of folk songs associated with Pete Seeger, played by a specially assembled Sessions Band. The album reached the Top Ten and went gold as Springsteen toured with the group. It also won the Grammy for Best Traditional Folk Album. The tour led to a concert recording, Live in Dublin (June 2007), which reached the Top 40.

Once again, Springsteen recorded a new rock album, Magic (October 2007), as a precursor to re-forming the E Street Band and going out on another long tour. The album hit number one and went platinum, with the song "Radio Nowhere" earning Grammys for rock song and solo rock vocal. (Another track from the album, "Girls in Their Summer Clothes," won the rock song Grammy the following year.) Sadly, longtime E Street Band keyboardist Danny Federici succumbed to a three-year battle with melanoma on April 17, 2008: his death caused the first irrevocable change in the group's personnel (saxophonist Clarence Clemons would die on June 18, 2011, due to complications from a stroke). Federici was replaced by Charles Giordano, who had played with Springsteen previously in the Sessions Band.

Springsteen finished the tour in 2008 and held several additional shows in support of Senator Barack Obama, whose presidential campaign had kicked into hyperdrive earlier that year. While playing an Obama rally in early November, Springsteen debuted material from his forthcoming album, Working on a Dream, whose tracks had been recorded with the E Street Band during breaks in the group's previous tour. The resulting album, which was the last to feature contributions from Federici (as well as his son, Jason), arrived on January 27, 2009, one week after Obama's historic inauguration. It immediately hit number one, Springsteen's ninth album to top the charts over a period of three decades, and it went on to go gold and win him another Grammy for solo rock vocal. In February, Springsteen and the E Street Band provided the half-time entertainment at Super Bowl XLIII. The group's tour, which featured full-length performances of some of Springsteen's classic albums at selected shows, ran through November 22, 2009. In December, the 60-year-old was ranked fourth among the top touring acts of the first decade of the 21st century, behind only the Rolling Stones, U2, and Madonna. The same month he was a recipient of the Kennedy Center Honors.

Springsteen's 2010 was devoted to a revival of Darkness on the Edge of Town, with the 1978 masterpiece receiving an expanded box set called The Promise: The Making of Darkness on the Edge of Town; the set contained a feature-length documentary and a double-disc set of outtakes that was also available separately. As Springsteen began work on a studio album produced by Ron Aniello, who'd previously worked with Patti Scialfa, Clarence Clemons died. Clemons' last recorded solo appeared on "Land of Hope and Dreams," one of many politically charged songs on the resulting album, Wrecking Ball. Supported by a major media blitz that included a showcase week of Springsteen covers on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon and the Boss delivering a keynote address at South by Southwest, Wrecking Ball appeared the first week of March 2012. Before the end of that month, he embarked on a mammoth world tour to promote the album, on which he eventually took in 26 countries over the course of 18 months.

Late in 2013, it was announced that the E Street Band would receive a belated induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in early 2014. Prior to the induction ceremony came High Hopes, Springsteen's 18th studio album. Inspired in part by Rage Against the Machine guitarist Tom Morello, who had temporarily replaced Van Zandt for the last six months of the Wrecking Ball tour and also played on the album, High Hopes was a collection of covers, reinterpretations of old songs, and leftovers; it appeared in January 2014 and easily reached number one on the album charts. He toured with the E Street Band through the late spring, and also issued the EP American Beauty, which consisted of four unreleased songs from the High Hopes sessions.

In late 2015, Springsteen released another audio/video box set offering an in-depth look at one of his classic albums. The Ties That Bind: The River Collection offered a remastered version of Springsteen's 1980 album, along with an expansive disc of outtakes, an early single-LP version of the album Springsteen pulled prior to release, an original documentary on the making of The River, and a complete concert filmed in Tempe, Arizona, in 1980. In the fall of 2016, Springsteen released a memoir entitled Born to Run, which was accompanied by a career-spanning collection called Chapter & Verse that he compiled himself.

Shortly after publishing his memoir, Springsteen adapted the book for the stage in the guise of the Broadway production Springsteen on Broadway. Opening in October 2017, the show ran until December 2018. Upon its conclusion, the production was captured on film and a double-disc album; the record debuted at 11 on Billboard's Top 200.In June 2019, Springsteen returned with his first studio album of original material in five years. Titled Western Stars, the solo record was produced by Aniello and debuted at number two on Billboard's Top 200. Later that year, he released the accompanying concert film to Western Stars, which he directed himself; a soundtrack was released in conjunction with the movie. Springsteen next reunited the E Street Band for Letter to You, an album recorded live in the studio and featuring finalized versions of songs Bruce wrote in the early '70s. Letter to You was released in October 2020 and debuted at number two on the Billboard 200. An archival album, The Legendary 1979 No Nukes Concerts, arrived in November 2021. Springsteen next turned his attention to cutting a collection of classic soul covers with Aniello. Taking its name from a Jerry Butler hit, Only the Strong Survive appeared in November 2022, debuting at number eight on the Billboard 200. It picked up a Grammy nomination for Best Traditional Pop Vocal Album. 2023 also saw Springsteen and Patti Scialfa team up for the single "Addicted to Romance," which appeared on the soundtrack for the romantic comedy She Came to Me”.

To mark Bruce Springsteen turning seventy-five on 23rd September, I will end with a playlist of tracks from his first through to his latest album. One of the most important artists who has ever lived. Such timeless music that will be discussed for generations to come. I have known and admired Bruce Springsteen’s music since I was a child, so it is wonderful knowing he is still out there putting out incredible albums. Let’s hope that continues for years. In the meantime, it is time to properly show respect for The Boss…

AHEAD of his seventy-fifth birthday.

FEATURE: Roll with It: Why Band Reunions Can Be a Mixed Blessing

FEATURE:

 

 

Roll with It

IN THIS PHOTO: Liam and Noel Gallagher of Oasis

Why Band Reunions Can Be a Mixed Blessing

_________

NOBODY could have missed…

PHOTO CREDIT: Rahul Pandit/Pexels

the sheer hysteria around Oasis getting back together again. Technically, it is the brothers Liam and Noel Gallagher getting back together, as they are the only two original Oasis members reforming for gigs next year. That doesn’t matter to fans, as they are only focused on the songwriter and vocalist. There has been controversy around the ticket prices and specifically Ticketmaster are under fire as they were selling ‘in-demand’ prices for some of the tickets – costing fans five times the standard price. It has been a real mess. Many other fans getting error messages and waiting in a queue and being kicked out as they were assumed to be bots. It is not the band’s fault though, knowing the fans’ desire and demand, one would have though these tickets could have been priced lower. I don’t think it is the venues demanding higher prices to cover their costs. There is some wiggle room between what the venue charges and what is just to Oasis. It does seem that there is a bit of exploitation of the fans. Make the ticket prices lower. I guess it is the same with any big artist. There is an element of greed knowing that they can sell thousands. There have been various takes around Oasis’ reunion. God Is in the TV, MSNBC, The Guardian and The Standard published pieces. The Guardian produced more than one. On the plus side, it is a chance for fans older and new to see those songs performed live one more time. There is that nostalgia value and unpredictability. A band almost as known for their fighting as their songs, we have a year to wait until the gigs. The Gallagher brothers could fall out long before then and everything could be called off. I guess it will be nice for a reunion and seeing the brothers finally bury the hatchet.

At a time when we are trying to stamp out toxic masculinity, there is an argument that bringing Oasis to the stage is a bad move. A band defined by laddish behaviour and a lack of progressive thought, is that a good example and something to highlight?! Also, it is clear money is a huge motivator for the reunion. So many other bands might come out of the woodwork. Even so, many fans are delighted to get tickets and getting the chance to see Oasis perform for a final time. I do hope there are no albums or music plans as is will dent their legacy. With two great albums, some excellent B-sides and some patchy work, there is no way they can get anywhere near to their best work today. It would be a sad spectacle hearing that back in the studio. The gigs essentially are a way to relive the past and get a slightly less spectacular version of the gigs they performed in the 1990s. One hopes that the Gallagher brothers recognise the importance of the gigs and do not reduce them to bicker-fests and display the same kind of behaviour they did in their heyday. I am obviously not one of the people excited or even interested in the gigs, though it is good for fans to have this good news. Aside from outrageous ticket prices and many who missed out because of technology issues, thousands will have their dreams come true. One of the effects of a band like Oasis reforming is that other bygone acts are thinking the same thing.

The Smiths are another band that we close to reforming recently. Again, a band with some controversy and toxicity around them, specifically Morrissey and his political views, would it be a wise move giving him the spotlight at high-profile gigs in front of thousands of fans?! It is no surprise that Johnny Marr has vetoed the reunion idea. Not wanting to share the stage with his songwriting partner. The Guardian reported the news. As the band have not performed together for four decades or so, what is the appeal of them getting back together? It does seem that there is this chance for money and new attention. Is there really an actually need for them to get back onto the stage?! It is odd that this brief flash of nostalgia is so sought after. What happens when they finish the gigs? It is a slightly faded and less impactful flash of the past:

“Morrissey has claimed he accepted a “lucrative offer” this summer for a Smiths reunion – but Johnny Marr ignored it.

Social media has been buzzing this week since Noel and Liam Gallagher announced they were getting back together for Oasis concerts in 2025.

If two brothers who despise each other with such vitriolic passion can get back together for the good of music, asked fans, why can’t Morrissey and Marr?

On Thursday Morrissey, 65, posted a statement on his website saying: “In June 2024 AEG Entertainment Group made a lucrative offer to both Morrissey and Marr to tour worldwide as ‘The Smiths’ throughout 2025. Morrissey said yes to the offer; Marr ignored the offer.”

The statement added: “Morrissey undertakes a largely sold out tour of the USA in November. Marr continues to tour as a special guest to New Order.”

Marr, 60, has not yet responded, and his representatives declined to comment. But earlier this week, when a Smiths fan posted on X: “If Oasis can do it, The Smiths can too (I’m delusional)”, the guitarist replied with a photograph of the grinning Reform UK leader, Nigel Farage, pint in hand.

The Smiths, who formed in Manchester in 1982, are regarded by many as the greatest band of their generation with Morrissey the best lyricist and Marr the top guitarist. Marr left the band in 1987 and he and Morrissey have since achieved successful careers.

Morrissey performing during a concert in Mexico City in 2018. Photograph: Claudio Cruz/AFP/Getty Images

Morrissey has long lost his “criminally vulgar” shyness, stretching and often breaking the patience of fans with controversial pronouncements on politics, including once expressing support for the far right For Britain party.

He has also said Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, “cannot talk properly”; that “even Tesco wouldn’t employ [the Labour MP] Diane Abbott”; that halal meat is “evil”; and “the modern loony left seem to forget that Hitler was leftwing”.

In an interview two years ago, Marr revealed it had been “18 or maybe 15 years” since he last spoke to Morrissey in person. He also said there was “zero chance” of them getting back together”.

There is now betting on which bands will get back together next. Again, it seems about the money and no real purpose. I understand that some bands have reformed successfully and gone on to have a successful new stage of their career. It can be beneficial having time apart and coming back together. In many cases, these are bands who never officially split and instead just didn’t put albums out for a while. You only need to look at articles like this, this and this to see pitfalls of band reunions. Disasters. I guess there is an element of family and legacy building behind Oasis’ reunion, though talks of how much money will be made is what many other bands will see. Rather than it being about serving fans and any reason beyond money, there will be this cash-grab. Band reunions can be very lucrative. ABBA, Blur, Spice Girls are among those who have taking to the stage again, though in very different ways. I do sort of hope the buzz and endless excitement around the Oasis reunion dies down. It has dominated the press for too long. Sadly, we will see many other bands in the coming weeks and months discuss possible reunions. The Smiths’ plans are dead in the water. Who next?! I can’t legitimately think of any band who broke up or haven’t been together for years/decades that I would like to see back together. All the bands that I want to see perform and record together again are still active but have been dormant for a while – Radiohead top of that particular list. I think we should focus on new acts and artists coming through. There is value in legacy bands coming together though, for so many reasons, there has to be very good reasons for it. Otherwise, things turn into this rather sad circus. Reliving the past days in a less-than-impressive way and making a lot of money. The best and most genuine reason for a band to play together again is for the fans. Because they have worked out differences and their main concern is now making up for lost time. One last time together to serve the fans. That motivation around money normally gets in the way, which is why I hope that the Oasis reunion does not lead to a wave of other bands following in their footsteps. Although many fans are delighted and there are some good reasons for the Gallagher brothers to get onto the stage, I do think that their best days and music are…

WELL behind them.

FEATURE: Reaction, Reflection and Commercial Success: The Complicated Legacy of a Classic: Kate Bush’s The Dreaming at Forty-Two

FEATURE:

 

 

Reaction, Reflection and Commercial Success

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

The Complicated Legacy of a Classic: Kate Bush’s The Dreaming at Forty-Two

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I have nothing but admiration…

for Kate Bush’s fourth studio album, The Dreaming. When you get critical ranking of her albums, The Dreaming does better now than it would have done when it was released. As it came out on 13th September, 1982, I wanted to mark forty-two years. Specifically, the complicated legacy of the album. How it was seen in 1982, how it seen now, how Kate Bush judged and assessed the album through the years. The fact that it was a commercial success but EMI were not happy. Almost apologetic. In some ways the choice of singles and lack of chart success was Kate Bush’s fault, though this idea she was a commercial artist and would release Pop singles for the charts was terribly naïve! There is a lot to unpick and unpack. I can imagine where critics were coming from in 1982. Maybe not expecting such a leap from 1980’s Never for Ever, perhaps they were ready for something softer and less layered. Never for Ever is layered, though it is a lighter album. One that seems more easier to listen to. The Dreaming is complex and experimental. It is Kate Bush pushing technology more and immersing herself in a slightly darker and more personally revealing album. It is a phenomenal work, yet maybe critics felt an artist like Kate Bush, who was still seen as quite a hippy-dippy or lampoonable young woman who was a bit of a novelty, should not be making an album like The Dreaming. That it was not the right move or she was not fit to do so. I am going to take from this feature by the Kate Bush Encyclopedia. Rather than critics being miffed or taking the transition and evolution badly, there was quite an insulting tone to some of the reviews:

“Critical reception

Upon its release, ‘The Dreaming’ met with a mixed critical reception. Many were baffled by the dense soundscapes Bush had created.

Quaint, admirable, unclassified, Kate Bush goes her own sweet way… production hard to fault… ranges from the ethereal to the frankly unlistenable.

Sunie, Record Mirror, 1982

It’s the sort of album that makes me want to kidnap the artist and demand the explanation behind each track.

Melody Maker, 1982

A work of pure inventive genius… intriguing heady stuff. One of the most powerful and unique vocalists in contemparary music.

Tarin Elbert, Music Express (Canada), 1982

Kate Bush shouldn’t be an unknown quantity very much longer. The Dreaming is her masterpiece, a perfect blend of romantic poetic imagery and daring musical approach. Bush’s ace-in-the-hole is her ability to fuse differing musical influences (jazz, classical, folk) and nest them comfortably within the boundaries of conventional pop song writing. (…) She’s the only female rocker out there doing anything original (or experimental).

Nick Burton, Record (USA), 1982

A mad record… with only two antecedents, the historic ‘Sergeant Pepper’ by the Beatles and the extraordinary ‘Dark Side of the Moon’. Of the first in its extraordinary character and creative spirit; of the second in its technical perfection.

Jean-Marc Bailleux, Rock And Folk (France), 1982”.

There is still a sense of confusion or cliché when people tackle The Dreaming. Even if there were some glowing reviews, the overall reaction was mixed. Those who disliked the album really had to explain why. That The Dreaming is weird or a hard listen. Considering there were other artists in 1982 making albums that were not instantly accessible or commercial, you wonder why there was such negativity or at least bemusement towards Kate Bush. If the oddness and strangeness of the album was seen as forced or unlistenable to some in 1982, today the album is being seen in more positive terms. Either ahead of its time or gaining new respect and meaning considering what Kate Bush followed The Dreaming with, I do think that we need to reassess and reappraise her 1982 masterpiece. There is at least more analysis and exploration of The Dreaming today. The last decade or so have seen some interesting and deep dives into the album. How it has influenced other artists. I want to source from this Pitchfork review from 2019:

“The Dreaming really is more a product of the 1970s—which actually sort of began in the late ’60s and extended through most of the ’80s—when prog rock musicians sold millions, had huge radio hits, and established fan bases still rabid today. But the album also came out in 1982, and it only cemented the sense of Bush as a spirited, contrarian of Baroque excess in a musical moment defined largely in reaction to prog’s excess. It’s exactly that audacity to be weird against the prevailing trends that made Kate Bush a great feminist icon who expanded the sonic (and business) possibilities for subsequent visionary singer-songwriters. While name-checking Emerson, Lake & Palmer or Yes is relatively unheard of in today’s hip hop, indie, or pop landscapes, Kate Bush’s name was and is still said with respect. Perhaps it’s because unlike all those prog dudes of yore, she’s legibly, audibly very queer, and very obviously loves pop music, kind of like her patron saint, David Bowie.

On The Dreaming, Bush’s self-proclaimed “mad” album, her mind works itself out through her mouth. Her cacophony of vocal sounds—at least four on each track—pushed boundaries of how white pop women could sing. Everything about it went against proper, pleasing femininity. Her voice was too high: a purposeful shrilling of the unthreatening girlish head voice; too many: voices doubled, layered, calling and responding to themselves, with the choruses full of creepy doubles, all of them her; too unruly: pitch-shifted, leaping in unexpected intervals, slipping registers until the idea of femme and masculine are clearly performances of the same sounding person; too ugly: more in the way cabaret singers inhabit darkness without bouncing back to beauty by the chorus in the way that female pop singers often must.

All this excess is her sound: a strongly held belief that unites all of the The Dreaming. Nearly half of the album is devoted to spiritual quests for knowledge and the strength to quell self-doubt. Frenetic opener “Sat in Your Lap” was the first song written for the album. Inspired by hearing Stevie Wonder live, it serves as meta-commentary of her step back from the banality of pop ascendancy that mocks shortcuts to knowledge. A similar track, “Suspended in Gaffa,” laments falling short of enlightenment through the metaphor of light bondage in black cloth stagehand tape. It is a pretty queer-femme way of thinking through the very prog-rock problem of being a real artist in a commercial theater form, which is probably why it’s a fan favorite.

In her borrowing further afield, her characters are less accurately rendered. This has been an unabashedly true part of Bush’s artistic imagination since The Kick Inside’s cover art, vaguely to downright problematic in its attempts to inhabit the worlds of Others. On “Pull Out the Pin” she uses the silver bullet as a totem of one’s protection against an enemy of supernatural evil. In this case, the hero is a Viet Cong fighter pausing before blowing up American soldiers who have no moral logic for their service. She’d watched a documentary that mentioned fighters put a silver Buddha into their mouths as they detonated a grenade, and in that she saw a dark mirror to key on the album cover. While the humanizing of such warriors in pop narrative is a brave act, it’s also possible to hear her thin arpeggiated synth percussion and outro cricket sounds as a part of an aural Orientalism that undermines that very attempt.

The closer “Get Out of My House” was inspired by two different maternal and isolation-madness horror texts: The Shining and Alien. In all three stories, a malevolent spirit wants to control a vessel. Bush does not let the spirit in, shouts “Get out!” and when it violates her demand, she becomes animal. Such shapeshifting is a master trope in Kate Bush’s songbook, an enduring way for her music and performance to blend elements of non-Western spirituality and European myth, turning mundane moments into Gothic horror. It’s also, unfortunately, the way that women without power can imagine escape. The mule who brays through the track’s end is a kind of female Houdini—a sorceress who can will her way out of violence not with language, but with real magic. At least it works in the world of her songs, a kingdom where queerly feminine excess is not policed, but nurtured into excellence”

It is interesting reading how critics appraise The Dreaming in the modern time. A lot differently to how it was viewed in 1982. Maybe this feeling that Kate Bush was taking a big gamble in 1982 or was ruining her career. Not respecting her need to move forward and produce an album that felt right to her. So many snobby and awful takes on The Dreaming. I will move on in a minute. In 2012, The Quietus had their say about an overlooked classic. An album that has never really received it dues:

“It remains a terribly sad record. A treatise on "how cruel people can be to one another, and the amount of loneliness people expose themselves to". Perhaps John Lennon’s murder and the dog-eat-dog ethos of Thatcherism had cast their shadow here. While the record was being made, the Falklands crisis escalated and unemployment rose. Many of The Dreaming’s characters seem to be caught in the vice grip of western ‘civilization’; the hapless robber in ‘There Goes A Tenner’, the aboriginal way of life on the brink of erosion on the title track, the Vietnamese soldier meeting his American nemesis on ‘Pull Out The Pin’. They may symbolize the tightrope walk Bush felt she was embarking on with the record. But this dense and allusive stuff with twists and turns requiring as many footnotes as TS Eliot’s The Waste Land, shares that poem’s occidental disenchantment.

And like that modernist masterpiece, The Dreaming glimpses at a very metropolitan melancholy. Bush would never make an album in London again, a city she felt had an air of dread hanging over it’. ‘All The Love’, a forlorn musical sigh, features percussive sticks imitating Venetian blinds turning shut. It climaxes with messages from Bush’s actual malfunctioning answerphone: all very modern alienating devices, straight from the same world of Bowie’s ‘Sound & Vision’. This was after all, the year Time magazine voted the computer as person of the year. Palmer’s ECM-like drowsy bass almost sobs with regret.

Throughout The Dreaming, sound speaks. ‘All The Love’ is subdued relief. But its constituent parts hover desolately in the mix, pitching a ‘lack of love’ song with a choirboy, somewhere between Joni Mitchell’s road trip jazz on ‘Hejira’ and the void of Nico’s ‘The End’. Full of space & loneliness.

At the centre of this creative storm is Bush. The vocal performances are a multi-faceted assault on the singer’s sometimes squeaky, whimsical past. There are guttural, larynx-shredding exclamations juxtaposed with whispers, sometimes on even the softer songs. A master of counterpoint and vocal embroidery, which Bush attributed to her mother’s Irish ancestry, the singer layers the songs with kaleidoscopic variety. Even the mellifluous ‘Suspended In Gaffa’ has shrieking incisions. Her voice is largely deeper and thicker than before, the unbridled emotionalism now more potent, due to its stringent control. On ‘Houdini’, a pint of milk and two chocolate bars were consumed to give her voice the required "spit and gravel" (‘Night Of The Swallow’ and ‘Pull Of The Pin’ also have phlegmatic operatics

For such an extreme album, its influence has been far-reaching. ABC, then in their Lexicon Of Love prime, named it as one of their favourites, as did Bjork whose similar use of electronics to convey the pantheistic seems directly descended from The Dreaming. Even The Cure’s Disintegration duplicates the track arrangement on the sleeve and the request that ‘this album was mixed to be played loud’. ‘Leave It Open’‘s vari-speed vocals even prefigure the art-damaged munchkins of The Knife vocal arsenal. Field Music/The Week That Was arrayed themselves with sonics that seem heavily indebted to Bush’s work here. Graphic novelist Neil Gaiman even had a character sing lyrics from the title track in his The Sandman series. John Balance of post-industrialists Coil confessed that the album’s songs were all ideas that he later tried to write. But Bush got there first. And The Dreaming remains a testament to the exhilarating joy of "letting the weirdness in”.

 IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush signing copies The Dreaming at the Virgin Megastore, Oxford Street, London in September 1982/PHOTO CREDIT: Pete Still

Going back to the article from the Kate Bush Encyclopedia, they collected together interview segments where Kate Bush talked about The Dreaming. Whilst it is an exceptional album that showcases a district songwriting and production style, it was quite a tough period. Bush putting everything into the album. It is sad that Bush almost had to defend the album and play down its brilliance. Perhaps reacting to critics’ takes or the fact that making Hounds of Love as a happier and less challenging process:

Kate about ‘The Dreaming’

After the last album, ‘Never For Ever’, I started writing some new songs. They were very different from anything I’d ever written before – they were much more rhythmic, and in a way, a completely new side to my music. I was using different instruments, and everything was changing; and I felt that really the best thing to do would be to make this album a real departure – make it completely different. And the only way to achieve this was to sever all the links I had had with the older stuff. The main link was engineer Jon Kelly. Everytime I was in the studio Jon was there helping me, so I felt that in order to make the stuff different enough I would have to stop working with Jon. He really wanted to keep working with me, but we discussed it and realised that it was for the best.

‘The Dreaming’. Poppix (UK), Summer 1982

Yes, it’s very important for me to change. In fact, as soon as the songs began to be written, I knew that the album was going to be quite different. I’d hate it, especially now, if my albums became similar, because so much happens to me between each album – my views change quite drastically. What’s nice about this album is that it’s what I’ve always wanted to do. For instance, the Australian thing: well, I wanted to do that on the last album, but there was no time. There are quite a few ideas and things that I’ve had whizzing around in my head that just haven’t been put down. I’ve always wanted to use more traditional influences and instruments, especially the Irish ones. I suppose subconsciously I’ve wanted to do all this for quite some time, but I’ve never really had the time until now.

‘The Dreaming’. Poppix (UK), Summer 1982

The thing about all my album titles is that they’re usually one of the last things to be thought of because it’s so difficult just to find a few words to sum the whole thing up. I’ve got this book which is all about Aborigines and Australian art and it’s calledThe Dreaming. The song was originally called “Dreamtime”, but when we found out that the other word for it was “The Dreaming” it was so beautiful – just by putting “the” in front of “dreaming” made something very different – and so I used that. It also seems to sum up a lot of the songs because one of the main points about that time for the Aborigines was that it was very religious and humans and animals were very closely connected. Humans were actually living in animal’s bodies and that’s an idea which I particularly like playing with.

Paul Simper, ‘Dreamtime Is Over’. Melody Maker (UK), 16 October 1982

I think [The Dreaming] is about trying to cope…to get through all the shit. I think it was positive: showing how certain people approach all these negative things – war, crime, etc. I don’t think I’m actually an aggressive person, but I can be. But I release that energy in work. I think it’s wrong to get angry. If people get angry, it kind of freaks everybody out and they can’t concentrate on what they’re doing.

Jane Solanas, ‘The Barmy Dreamer’. NME (UK), 1983

I have no doubt that those who buy singles because they like my hits, are completely mystified upon hearing the albums. But if it comes to that, they should listen to it loudly! If a single theme linked. The Dreaming, which is quite varied, it would be human relationships and emotional problems. Every being responds principally to emotions. Some people are very cool, but they are silenced by their emotions, whatever they might be. To write a song, it’s necessary that I be completely steeped in my environment, in my subject. Sometimes the original idea is maintained, but as it takes form, it possesses me. One of the best examples would be this song that I wrote on ‘Houdini’: I knew every one of the things that I wanted to say, and it was necessary that I find new ways that would allow me to say them; the hardest thing, is when you have so many things to fit into so short a space of time. You have to be concise and at the same time not remain vague, or obscure. The Dreaming was a decisive album for me. I hadn’t recorded in a very long time until I undertook it, and that was the first time that I’d had such liberty. It was intoxicating and frightening at the same time. I could fail at everything and ruin my career at one fell swoop. All this energy, my frustrations, my fears, my wish to succeed, all that went into the record. That’s the principle of music: to liberate all the tensions that exist inside you. I tried to give free rein to all my fantasies. Although all of the songs do not talk about me, they represent all the facets of my personality, all my different attitudes in relation to the world. In growing older, I see more and more clearly that I am crippled in facing the things that really count, and that I can do nothing about it, just as most people can do nothing. Making an album is insignificant in comparison with that, but it’s my only defence.

Yves Bigot, ‘Englishwoman is crossing the continents’. Guitares et Claviers (France), February 1986

My first production. A really difficult album to make. People thought I’d gone mad, the album wasn’t warmly received by critics. People told me it was a commercial disaster but it reached number three so that’s their problem.

‘Love, Trust and Hitler’. Tracks (UK), November 1989”.

Consider all of this together with two contrasting facts. The Dreaming was a commercial success in many countries. It reached number three in the U.K. It was not as though the public heard singles like Sat in Your Lap and The Dreaming – the two released prior to September 1982 – and were put off! They were not expecting a different album at all. They supported Kate Bush. Her dedicated fanbase and new fans who were intrigued by what she was putting out. There is also the fact that EMI were so close to giving the album back to Kate Bush. They felt that taking two years to follow up Never for Ever was a long time! That what was produced was not what they were looking for. I like how Kate Bush took three years to follow up The Dreaming and also produced an album that went to the top of the U.K. chart! Her quality and vision cannot be faulted. Her record label not really understanding her or showing as much support as they should have. Though, given chart placings, perhaps there was some minor justification. Nervous of her producing and taking ‘a long time’ – most artists today take a couple of years or longer between studio albums! – to produce something that was not commercial. It did not have any hit singles on it. Bush knew that. She wasn’t trying to write any! That assumption that Kate Bush should follow what she did before. I think of The Dreaming as a rebellion against a whole load of things. Having another producer mould her work. Have critics define and insult her. This feeling that she was one thing. The fact that The Dreaming did get mixed response in 1982 could have destroyed it. Instead of reverting to the past, she pushed forward and changed unhealthy aspects of The Dreaming’s record process. Kate Bush never gets respect for her production work. The Dreaming is a phenomenal album and one that has inspired so many other artists. Whether Bush felt she was going mad at the time or that was just a defence against critical negativity I am not sure. What I know is that, forty-two years after its release, The Dreaming remains a work of brilliance. One that is also underrated. One that is truly spellbinding because she…

LET the weirdness in.

FEATURE: An Arresting and Soul-Moving Title Track: Kate Bush’s The Sensual World at Thirty-Five

FEATURE:

 

 

An Arresting and Soul-Moving Title Track

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

Kate Bush’s The Sensual World at Thirty-Five

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AHEAD of marking the album’s…

thirty-fifth anniversary, I wanted to spend some time with its title track. The Sensual World was the first single released from one of Kate Bush’s most acclaimed albums. Released on 18th September, 1989, this amazing single was a departure from what we heard on 1985’s Hounds of Love. Not that The Sensual World was the next single after that album. Bush released Experiment IV in 1986. That was the only single released from her greatest hits album, The Whole Story. The Sensual World was a new phase. Not a massive departure from Hounds of Love, it at least did show new side’s to Bush’s music. The first single released in her thirties, there is a depth and lyrical aspect to the song that hinted at a different approach. If Hounds of Love was quite a masculine album in a lot of ways – especially with percussion and sound -, The Sensual World was more feminine. Regarded as one of her greatest singles, I wanted to celebrate and explore The Sensual World ahead of its thirty-fifth anniversary. I will go deeper with the song. Before that, Kate Bush Encyclopedia provided some critical reception to the song. Some words from Kate Bush about The Sensual World:

“Critical reception

The first Kate Bush single in three years was met quite positive reviews.

A dazzling return to form after a few slightly indifferent releases. The best song she’s written since ‘Army Dreamers’, even if slightly on the long side.

David Giles, Music week, 23 september 1989

She’s got bloomin’ sexy… in which talk of desire, touching, and Kate’s own breasts is rife. But these aren’t merely shock tactics… a delicate and all-consuming song.

Tim Southwell, Record Mirror, 23 September 1989

She sings of a deep sensuality that ensures that I have to wear baggy trousers when I dance. Beautiful, warm, and ever-lasting.

Kerrang!, 23 September 1989

Kate about ‘The Sensual World’

Because I couldn’t get permission to use a piece of Joyce it gradually turned into the song about Molly Bloom the character stepping out of the book, into the real world and the impressions of sensuality. Rather than being in this two-dimensional world, she’s free, let loose to touch things, feel the ground under her feet, the sunsets, just how incredibly sensual a world it is. (…) In the original piece, it’s just ‘Yes’ – a very interesting way of leading you in. It pulls you into the piece by the continual acceptance of all these sensual things: ‘Ooh wonderful!’ I was thinking I’d never write anything as obviously sensual as the original piece, but when I had to rewrite the words, I was trapped. How could you recreate that mood without going into that level of sensuality? So there I was writing stuff that months before I’d said I’d never write. I have to think of it in terms of pastiche, and not that it’s me so much.

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

The song is about someone from a book who steps out from this very black and white 2-D world into the real world. The immediate impressions was the sensuality of this world – the fact that you can touch things, that is so sensual – you know… the colours of trees, the feel of the grass on the feet, the touch of this in the hand – the fact that it is such a sensual world. I think for me that’s an incredibly important thing about this planet, that we are surrounded by such sensuality and yet we tend not to see it like that. But I’m sure for someone who had never experienced it before it would be quite a devastating thing. (…) I love the sound of church bells. I think they are extraordinary – such a sound of celebration. The bells were put there because originally the lyrics of the song were taken from the bookUlyssesby James Joyce, the words at the end of the book by Molly Bloom, but we couldn’t get permission to use the words. I tried for a long time – probably about a year – and they wouldn’t let me use them, so I had to create something that sounded like those original word, had the same rhythm, the same kind of feel but obviously not being able to use them. It all kind of turned in to a pastiche of it and that’s why the book character, Molly Bloom, then steps out into the real world and becomes one of us.

Roger Scott, Interview. Radio 1 (UK), 14 October 1989

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

Kate Bush Con, 1990”.

The video itself is arresting and cinematic. Co-directed by Kate Bush and Peter Richardson, it is one of her most iconic. Reaching number twelve in the U.K., it was her most successful chart placing in the country since Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God). Technically, if you count the Peter Gabriel song, Don’t Give Up, it was the highest placing since that song - though in Kate Bush’s universe, The Sensual World was seen as a return to form. The history is interesting. When Bush re-recorded the song and titled it Flower of the Mountain for 2011’s Director’s Cut, she finally got permission to use text from James Joyce’s Ulysses. Whether this version was better than the original. Many argue that The Sensual World is better because of its suggestiveness and Bush’s lyrics. How she produced her own version of Molly Bloom’s soliloquy. There is not a lot written about the song itself. People explore the album and the songs from it though, for its amazing title track, there are not that many words dedicated to it. It is a pity, as The Sensual World is one of the most interesting and arresting songs! I love the composition and musical richness of The Sensual World. Paddy Bush on whips. Some incredible bass work from Del Palmer. Charlie Morgan’s percussion. The most essential and powerful musical element is the fiddle from John Sheahan, uilleann pipes from Davy Spilane and Dónal Lunny’s bouzouki. Sheahan and Lunny worked alongside Kate Bush on Hounds of Love.

Some of Kate Bush’s most evocative and poetic lyrics can be found on The Sensual World. The verses are incredibly moving and vivid: “Then I’d taken the kiss of seedcake back from his mouth/Going deep South, go down, mmh, yes/Took six big wheels and rolled our bodies/Off of Howth Head and into the flesh, mmh, yes”. I do love Bush’s words. How she builds her own world. Touches al the senses: “To where the water and the earth caress/And the down of a peach says mmh, yes/Do I look for those millionaires/Like a Machiavellian girl would/When I could wear a sunset? mmh, yes”. I like the idea of Kate Bush hearing Irish actress Siobhan McKenna reading the closing soliloquy from James Joyce’s Ulysses. Her character recounting her earliest sexual experience with her husband-to-be. Bush felt that that Joyce’s text was in the public domain, so she paired it with the backing track that she had created. Jimmy Murakami was the man she approached to make a music video at the time. He would later direct her for King of the Mountain. That was the single from 2005’s Aerial. I think, in some ways, that song and The Sensual World share some DNA. Also, that title connection between King of the Mountain and Flower of the Mountain. It must have been frustrating not being able to use text from Ulysses. Kate Bush had always had an interest in exploring sounds and scents from other nations. I think this came more to the fore on The Sensual World and its follow-up, The Red Shoes (1993). In terms of genres, Bush exploring everywhere from Africa to Europe. Working with the Trio Bulgarka on both albums. The incredible Bulgarian vocal trio. A traditional Macedonian piece of music, Nevestinsko Oro (Bride’s Dance), was in her mind. It makes me think back to her earliest years and her brother Paddy introducing her to unusual and untraditional sounds. Music that many of her friends and peers would not have known about.

 PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush

I want to end with section of an interview from 1989. Kate Bush was speaking with NME’s Len Brown. Bush gave a song-by-song guide to the album. I think it is very interesting reading the interview and how Bush approached the title track for The Sensual World. Almost defining the album in terms of its energy and lyrics, this was Bush exploring different sides to her artistry and personality. Always inspired by literature and film, The Sensual World is one of her most captivating and acclaimed songs:

“Four years from Hounds Of Love, 12 months since we last met in the company of three Bulgarian grannies called Trio Bulgarka, Kate’s changed little physically. Still petite, naturally older, her hair’s still long and henna-ed and the nervous laugh is as infectious as ever.

Musically she’s been gone a long time. Sure there’ve been collaborations (Gabriel’s ‘Don’t Give Up’), charitable outings (Amnesty, Comic Relief, Ferry Aid) and The Whole Story compilation, but The Sensual World is her first fresh substantial work since the ‘Experiment IV’ single in late ’86. Reasonable people were beginning to wonder whether, at last, she’d lost it completely and thrown in the towel.

What’s always been remarkable about Kate Bush has been the ability to withdraw from the music world, escape from the machine, and return months or years later with something rejuvenating, original, set apart from chart-fodder disposable pop. Like Bowie in the 70s, Bush in the 80s has been one of the true oddities, exceptions to the rules. Always out of step, always unique.

And always, as The Sensual World implies, provocative. Bells ring as you enter her ‘Sensual World’, bells of celebration, of sensual joy. "The communication of music is very much like making love," she once said, so it’s entirely appropriate that she should derive her title track from James Joyce’s Ulysses and, in particular, Molly Bloom’s thoughts on sex, sensuality and oysters at 2/6 per dozen.

"Because I couldn’t get permission to use a piece of Joyce it gradually turned into the songs about Molly Bloom the character stepping out of the book, into the real world and the impressions of sensuality," says Kate, softly, almost childlike. "Rather than being in this two dimensional world, she’s free, let loose to touch things, feel the ground under her feet, the sunsets, just how incredibly sensual a world it is.

"I originally heard the piece read by Siobhan McKenna years ago and I thought ‘My God! This is extraordinary, what a piece of writing!’ it’s a very unusual train of thought, very attractive. First I got the "mmh yes" and that made me think of Molly Bloom’s speech, and we had this piece of music in the studio already so it came together really quickly. Then, because I couldn’t get permission to use Joyce, it took another year changing it to what it is now. Typical innit!"

The result is extraordinarily sensual mouth music, far removed from the cod-pieced crassness that usually passes from physical love songs: "And at first with the charm around him, mmh yes / he loosened it so if it slipped between my breasts / He’d rescue it, mmh yes".

"In the original piece it’s just ‘Yes!" – a very interesting way of leading you in, it pulls you into the piece by the continual acceptance of all these sensual things. ‘Ooh wonderful!’ I was thinking I’d never write anything as obviously sensual as the original piece but when I had to rewrite the words I was trapped.

"How could you recreate that mood without going into that level of sensuality? So there I was writing stuff that months before I’d said I’d never write," she laughs. "I have to think of it in terms of pastiche and not that it’s me so much."

Having begun her career on The Kick Insider singing lines like, "Oh I need it oh oh feel it feel it my love" and "feeling of sticky love inside", and then gone on inLionheart to write a lyric like "the more I think of sex the better it gets", her reluctance to get too sensual, too fruity a decade later may seem a little strange.

But as Bush has increasingly gained control over the presentation of her music and her image during this period, stepping back from early marketing attempts to titillate (God, how they worked!) these reservations are understandable.

She claims The Sensual World contains the most "positive female energy" in her work to date and compositions like ‘This Woman’s Work’ tend to enforce that idea.

"I think it’s to do with me coming to terms with myself on different levels. In some ways, like on Hounds of Love, it was important for me to get across the sense of power in the songs that I’d associated with male energy and music. But I didn’t feel that this time and I was very much wanting to express myself as a woman in my music rather than as a woman wanting to sound as powerful as a man.

"And definitely ‘The Sensual World’, the track, was very much a female track for me. I felt it was a really new expression, feeling good about being a woman musically."

But isn’t it odd that this feminist or feminine perspective should have been inspired by a man, Joyce?

"Yes, in some ways but it’s also the idea of Molly escaping from the author, out into the real world, being this real human rather than the character, stepping out of the page into the sensual world."

So is this concept of sensuality the most important thing to you at the moment, is it one of the life forces?

"Yes, it’s about contact with humans, it could all come down to the sensual level. Touch? Yes, even if it’s not physical touch, reaching out and touching people by moving them. I think it’s a very striking part of this planet, the fact there is so much for us to enjoy. The whole of nature is really designed for everything to have a good time doing what they should be doing…

"Fancy being a bee, leading an incredible existence, all these flowers designed just for you, flying into the runway, incredible colours, some trip…"

Mmh, buzz.

Many mumbles have breathed their last since Kate Bush first arrived on our screens, flouncing about in dry ice and funeral shroud, oddly crowing ‘Wuthering Heights’; obviously different and apart from any musical movement before or since. But whereas the all-conquering, universally acclaimed Hounds Of Love affair at least slotted into the-then pop world, The Sensual World is clearly even more out of step with the current piss poor post-SAW scene.

Probably because it’s got a slightly ethnic feel, founded on Kate’s use of Irish and Bulgarian musics and musicians in the creative process. Perhaps because she’s been free from pop for so long. Maybe because she’s crossed the threshold of 30?

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in the cover photo from The Sensual World’s single/PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush

"God! Yes, I’m sure it’s all tied in with it," she laughs. "I think it’s a very important time from 28 to 32-ish, where there’s some kind of turning point. Someone said in your teens you get the physical puberty and between 28 and 32 mental puberty. Let’s fact it, you’ve got to start growing up when you’re 30, it does make you feel differently, I feel very positive having gone through the last couple of years."

She’s not specific about what she’s actually gone through in recent years, apart from the usual trials by media. If you were to scan back through the smeared pages of cheaper organs you would probably come to the conclusion that she’s been a) pregnant b) fighting drug and alcohol addiction c) 25 stone and d) having several flings with Peter Gabriel.

More credibly, it seems she’s been reclusively struggling with her music and even living in bliss (somewhere near Kent, apparently) with long-term lover, bassist and moustachioed-mixer Del Palmer.

And yet one is naturally tempted to peer into The Sensual World and inquire whether or not a song such as ‘Between A Man And A Woman’ is a personal account of romantic difficulties? ("It’s so hard for love to stay together / With the modern Western pressures".)

"But anything you write, people tend to think it’s about you," she says, nervously. "Like Woody Allen, his films are obviously very personal, there’s obviously an awful lot of him in his work, but you see him being interviewed and as soon as he’s asked if it’s personal he gets really defensive, it’s a very awkward area…”

In a recent feature, MOJO ranked The Sensual World twenty-second in their top fifty Kate Bush songs listing. It is interesting reading what they say about a song that still sounds fascinating and moving to this day. Thirty-five years after it was released into the world:

“Like trains of thought continually tumbling” is how Kate Bush described Molly Bloom’s soliloquy at the end of James Joyce’s 1922 novel, Ulysses. It isn’t hard to see why the rhapsodic conclusion of Joyce’s modernist masterpiece took root in the singer’s subconscious. With Wuthering Heights, 11 years previously, Bush had alchemised Catherine Earnshaw’s tormented pleas for Heathcliff’s forgiveness into a sexual fever dream and if anything, Molly’s speech was an even more suitable case for such a treatment. From the first “Mmh, yes” that emerges from the opening peals of wedding bells, Bush’s languorous performance astrally vaults the listener to the mother of all postcoitally sunny Sunday mornings. One ironic consequence of The Sensual World’s success was that, by the time Bush set about re-recording it for 2011’s Director’s Cut, Joyce’s estate had clearly been won over by the purity of her intentions. With permission now granted, the new version – retitled Flower Of The Mountain – duly reverted to the original words, and saw Bush confer a breathier, worldlier ambience on Bloom, as if channeling the woman enjoying the memory of first love, rather than the woman in the memory. For all of that, it’s the first version that remains the definitive one”.

In 2018, The Guardian ranked The Sensual World in fifteenth. That was in their feature where they were placing her singles. What Hi-Fi? published a feature this year where they named the songs of Kate Bush which are best to test your stereo to. The ones with the best sound. The Sensual World was in there. Also this year, Classic Pop placed The Sensual World ninth in the top forty Kate Bush songs. A track that is respected and regarded highly today. Even if it was an unconventional single release and very different to what was being released in 1989, there is no doubting the fact that it is popular and seen as one of Bush’s best moments. So much groove, sensuality and dance through the song. This waltz and dizzying dream that the listener gets sucked into. So many scents that entice the heart and entice the mind. It is a wonderful song that I first heard in the 1990s. Ahead of The Sensual World album turning thirty-five, I wanted to spend time with the single. Released on 18th September, 1989, we need to spotlight and celebrate this song. Introducing this amazing new Kate Bush album, it was clear there was a mix of positivity and slight confusion from critics. Some maybe not embracing this new direction. Many noticing the clear potential and prowess of the song. It is both grand and intimate. I thought that I knew everything about The Sensual World’s title track. I have learned something new writing this feature. Amazing that new layers of this stunning track are being revealed…

AFTER thirty-five years.

FEATURE: Juicy: The Notorious B.I.G.’s Ready to Die at Thirty

FEATURE:

 

 

Juicy

The Notorious B.I.G.’s Ready to Die at Thirty

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ON 13th September…

we will mark thirty years of The Notorious B.I.G.’s debut album, Ready to Die. Its title is quite chilling, The Rap prodigy was killed less than three years after its release. He died at the age of twenty-four. I want to spend some time with one of the greatest debut albums of the 1990s. An artist who burned briefly but helped change the course of Hip-Hop history. Ready to Die was recorded from 1993 to 1994 at The Hit Factory and D&D Studios in New York City. This groundbreaking debut  album, a loose semi-autobiographical concept, tells of the rapper's experiences as a young criminal. We lost The Notorious B.I.G. days before Life After Death in 1997. I want to bring in a few features about this incredible album. One of the very best of all time. The first of three features is Stereogum. They highlighted and dissected Ready to Die on its twentieth anniversary in 2014:

“Word around the campfire is that Biggie Smalls, when he was recording Ready To Die, wanted to record a track with DJ Premier and M.O.P. and Jeru The Damaja. Can you even imagine what that would sound like? How fucking incredible that would’ve been? There are precious few Biggie/Premier collabs, but every last one of them is a solid-gold classic. Premier’s creative peak coincided exactly with Biggie’s all-too-brief career. And Biggie could do no wrong during those Ready To Die sessions. Imagine if he was on a track with three guys who knew that Premier sound inside and out. Biggie could be as raw and rugged as M.O.P., and he could be as intense and cerebral as Jeru. If he’d been on a track with those guys together, he would’ve had to be both at the same time, and he could’ve done it. But Sean “Puff Daddy” Combs vetoed the plan. And here’s what kills me: Puffy was right. He wanted Ready To Die to have a slick, populist sense of focus to it, and that’s exactly what it had. As much as I want to hear that hypothetical collab — and I would punch a puppy in the eye to hear it — it’s honestly better that the song never had a chance to exist. Ready To Die is, for my money, the best rap album ever made. It is as close to full-length perfection as rap music has ever come. I have a hard time believing that any extra song, even that song, could make it better. Best to leave Ready To Die alone, to let it be great.

There are a few non-Biggie voices on Ready To Die. There are those shards of older rap classics on the intro track, those sampled swirls of old soul songs. There are those breathy Puffy interjections. There’s reggae singer Diana King growling all over “Respect.” But there is only one guest-rapper on Ready To Die, and that turned out to be a very canny casting decision. The one guy is Method Man, easily the hottest rapper in New York at the time, a guy who carried a mysterious forbidding energy to everything he did. Meth, at his peak, had a dangerous sing-songy purr, a way of hopping around the track while staying dead in the pocket. Everything he said sounded cool as fuck. He had gravity.

Every single song on Ready To Die sounds like the final word in an argument. “Juicy” remains the best up-from-nothing inspirational song in rap history, transcending because Biggie knew how to take the specifics of his own life and make them resonate as something bigger, something mythic: “I never thought it could happen, this rapping stuff / I was too used to packing gats and stuff.” He never works to make himself sound larger-than-life. Instead, he’s vulnerable and goofy, remembering taping mix shows on the radio and freezing when the landlord cut the heat off, and using those hardships to luxuriate in everything he’d earned. But for all his warmth, Biggie could be chillingly cold and violent. And it’s hard to imagine a better crime narrative than “Warning”: Biggie playing the two sides of a stressful conversation, slowly building tension, layering on details until those details take on their own character. “They heard about the pounds you got down in Georgetown / And they heard you got half of Virginia locked down” — another rapper could’ve made a whole album out of the backstory that that one line implies, but here it’s just another narrative touch, a piece of the puzzle. But when he does make threats, he’s tense and concise, never wasting words: “Fuck around and get hardcore / C4 to your door, no beef no more.” It’s expert pulp-fiction storytelling, as vivid and brutal and economical as a Parker novel.

Biggie contained multitudes. The whole drug-kingpin character wasn’t exactly new in rap, but nobody had ever pulled it off with anything like Biggie’s level of panache. And he did it so well that everyone who came after, including his friend Jay-Z seemed to be playing catchup. But Biggie was, of course, never a kingpin. He was a midlevel street guy, and the album has even more power when he’s talking about the fears and hazards that come with that trade. He could confess to younger, dumber mistakes, sympathizing with his younger self but still conveying the idea that the decisions he was making were stupid ones: “Put the drugs on the shelf? Nah, I couldn’t see it / Scarface, King of New York, I wanna be it / Rap was secondary, money was necessary / Till I got incarcerated, kinda scary… Time to contemplate: Damn, where did I fail? / All the money I stacked was all the money for bail.”

If there’s a narrative thrust to Ready To Die, it’s in Biggie’s conflicts with his mother, a woman who would become famous as a public mourner after his death. On first song “Things Done Changed,” he’s describing the savage age he grew up in, but he’s reveling in it, not mourning the supposedly-more-innocent time that had passed. There’s a twinge of bitterness to the song (“Back in the day, our parents used to take care of us / Look at ‘em now, they even fuckin’ scared of us”), but there are more threats, more boasts about the guns he’s carrying. Throughout the album, he mentions arguments with his mom, ignored advice, times when he got kicked out of the house. He lists his mother’s breast cancer as the reason he’s stressed. He gives off a vague impression that he knows he’s wrong during all his fights, but he never changes his ways. On the album-ending “Suicidal Thoughts,” he gets so deep into his own failings that he portrays himself killing himself, shooting himself in the head while he’s on the phone with Puff. It’s a weird and telling ending to such an otherwise-triumphant album, and a chilling listen in light of the way Biggie’s life would end just three years later. That ending, and those arguments with his mother, turn every moment of overcoming the odds into a hollow victory, and they add pathos to an album that could be exultant. On Ready To Die, every silver lining has a cloud.

I haven’t even mentioned Biggie’s voice yet, a booming clarion that cut through everything around it. That voice was malleable — he loved playing two different characters on the same song, and he could always make both of them distinct — but it was a bulldozer, not a finesse instrument. That voice was all blunt-voice power, which made it all the more startling when you noticed the writerly poise that went into so much of what Biggie was saying. There are turns of phrase on Ready To Die that couldn’t possibly be any better-crafted. “I don’t chase ‘em, I replace ‘em”: I think I giggled with stupid glee for 20 minutes the first time I heard that line. “How you living, Biggie Smalls? In mansion and Benzes, giving ends to my friends, and it feels stupendous”: That’s probably my favorite good-life line of all time, a note-perfect description of how good it feels to help the people around you. There’s a reason why so many rappers have stolen so many lines from Ready To Die at various points: When those lines entered your brain, they wouldn’t leave. (There’s also the reprehensible shit, the robbing pregnant women and “talk slick, I beat you right.” But in the way the album discusses Biggie’s own failings, it’s possible to think of those moments as Biggie adding more moral wrinkles to his character. That’s how I’d like to think of them, anyway.)

In a way, Ready To Die sounds even more current 20 years later than Illmatic, the other impossible-not-to-discuss New York rap masterpiece of 1994 — and that was an album explicitly designed to stand outside of time. Ready To Die was focused on sounding current in 1994, but rap has never gotten over it, and we still have stars like Rick Ross who are trying to equal its sense of larger-than-life cool. Illmatic is an absolutely incredible album, but one of its greatest assets is the way Nas sounds like he’s lost in a dream, completely trapped within his own head. Biggie doesn’t sound like that. Even when he’s rapping about workaday struggles, he radiates impossible confidence. He was 21 and 22 when he was recording Ready To Die, and he sounded like he already knew he was the baddest motherfucker in the whole city. Think of how you were at 21 or 22. Imagine feeling that self-assured. It’s impossible. It doesn’t compute. And that’s one of the things about Biggie’s way-too-early death that stings the worst: If he sounded that confident, that put-together, at 21, how would he sound now”.

In terms of accolades, Ready to Die has been heralded as a classic by so many sources and sites. One of the greatest Hardcore Rap albums of all time, this sensational debut reinvented East Coast Rap. For those who have not heard Ready to Die, its thirtieth anniversary is a perfect opportunity. It still sounds like nothing else! A truly original and mesmeric work of supreme confidence and invention from The Notorious B.I.G. Earlier this year, Rolling Stone ranked Ready to Die twenty-second in their list of the 500 best albums ever:

“Ready To Die’ is the debut record of The Notorious B.I.G., and the only one to be released within his lifetime. Biggie Smalls was signed by Sean “Puffy” Combs to Uptown Records after the latter heard his demo tape. Biggie would subsequently start recording the album in 1993 but when Combs was fired from the label, Biggie’s future was left in the balance. Combs would ultimately start Bad Boy Records, to which Biggie would be signed, but in the interim he made ends meet by selling drugs. By the time the recording was finish, Biggie was 22-years-old.

The record opens with the narrative of a woman giving birth. As the baby comes we hear the song ‘Pusherman’ by Curtis Mayfield playing. Brilliant subtlety as that single was released in 1972, the same year that Smalls aka Christopher Wallace was born. This gives an indication that the record is somewhat autobiographical. That song is about a drug dealer, foreshadowing Wallace’s brief stint later on. The track then cycles through ‘80s and early ‘90s Hip hop songs, ‘Rapper’s Delight,’ ‘Top Billin’ and ‘Tha Shiznit,’ a clever device to illustrate the passage of time. It ends with Biggie being released from jail, mirroring his real life as he was arrested in 1990 for dealing crack. Lead single starts off the lyrics, “Yeah, this album is dedicated/To all the teachers that told me I'd never amount to nothin'/To all the people that lived above the buildings that I was hustlin' in front of/Called the police on me when I was just tryin' to make some money to feed my daughter (it's all good)/And all the niggas in the struggle.” The song documents his struggles and rise, discussing how he had realised his dreams. Second single, ‘Big Poppa’ is one of the most recognisable Hip Hop songs of the ‘90s. Heavily sampling ‘Between The Sheets’ by The Isley Brothers, the title references on of his nicknames. Third single, ‘One More Chance’ held the record for highest debuting rap single on the charts at #5, until that record was smashed by Puff Daddy and the song, ‘I’ll Be Missing You,’ which was a tribute to Biggie himself. The song interpolates Jackson 5’s ‘I Want You Back’ in the chorus. The album is smooth and his voice is one of the most recognisable in Hip Hop. His flow was just so natural. Biggie Smalls would elevate East Coast Hip Hop and raise the bar. His ability to tell stories was second to none in Hip Hop. Wallace would be murdered 3 years later, 16 days before the release of the follow up, ‘Life After Death’ (#179). Never before have the titles of two albums had such a sense of dramatic irony”.

Actually, there are a couple more features I will come to. NME published a feature in 2019, twenty-five years after the release of Ready to Die. They explored nine surprising things about an era-defining album. I don’t think I heard the album in 1994. I came to it a bit later. In perhaps the best year for music ever, Ready to Die perhaps didn’t get quite the same sort of acclaim and celebration as others. It is clear Biggie’s debut album influenced a whole generation of rappers who followed:

“It doesn’t romanticise thug life

The Notorious B.I.G. kept things real when it came to describing his life as a drug dealer, making sure to include the downsides of trapping, like the threat of being caught by the police or running into issues with other dealers. That honesty added an extra grit to ‘Ready To Die’ that means its still one of the most real portrayals of thug life in hip-hop.

Contrary to popular belief, Biggie didn’t always freestyle the lyrics

Part of the folklore surrounding ‘Ready To Die’ paints Biggie as a rapper who had no need for a pen and paper, memorising his bars and delivering them off the top of his head instead. But that wasn’t always true – Method Man told Complex in 2011 that the late star had once shown him the lyrics to ‘The What’ as he was writing them, specifically the line “I’ve got more Glocks and tecs than you/I make it hot, n****s won’t even stand next to you.”

One of its tracks was included in an anthology of African American literature

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Way before Kendrick Lamar was picking up Pulitzers, Biggie’s tracks were also being recognised as masterpieces of writing. ‘Ready To Die’’s ‘Things Done Changed’, which explores how life on the streets had changed, was one of only a handful of hip-hop tracks to be included in the Norton Anthology of African American Literature.

The samples are on point

Before ‘Ready To Die’ was being sampled by the likes of Kanye West and Travis Scott, it was Biggie who was doing the sampling. While some samples were removed from the record after some legal issues, it still contains plenty of great interpolations, from Isaac Hayes’ ‘Walk On By’ on ‘Warning’ to Curtis Mayfield’s stone-cold classic ‘Superfly’ on ‘Intro’.

The baby on the cover was paid only $150

The sleeve for ‘Ready To Die’ features a small child with an afro sitting in the middle of an oasis of white space. While you might assume it to be a childhood photo of Biggie himself, the boy in question is actually Keithroy Yearwood. The now-25-year-old was hired through a modelling agency and paid just $150 (£121) for the shoot.

It didn’t get the recognition it has now until after its creator’s death

Sure, the reviews for ‘Ready To Die’ were good, but the record wasn’t the runaway success you might expect for something regularly near the time of best albums of all time lists. Instead, it missed out on recognition from the Grammys when its only nomination – Best Rap Solo Performance for ‘Big Poppa’ – lost out to Coolio’s ‘Gangsta’s Paradise’.

Some of it is pretty dated now

“Super Nintendo, Sega Genesis,” raps Big on ‘Juicy’. “When I was dead broke, man, I couldn’t picture this.” The track detailed the rapper’s rise to the top, with those two games consoles listed as luxuries beyond his younger self’s wildest dreams. Later, he adds a “50-inch screen, money green leather sofa” and “a limousine with a chauffeur” to his list, but it’s those initial picks that haven’t stood the test of time. These days, they just seem quaint compared to the VR machines he could have rapped about in 2019.

You could get a copy of the album by visiting Biggie’s Brooklyn house

It seems unlikely that any of today’s young rappers would be found pushing copies of their records from their homes, but Biggie did just that back in the ‘90s, according to Busta Rhymes. “I watched Biggie give away ‘Ready to Die’ and thought he was crazy,” he told Vlad TV. “From his house, dubbing the album on a double cassette deck and had a line in front of his crib on St. James like he was selling the best coke ever. That was like the most illest shit because it was his way of marketing himself.”

The title is chillingly prophetic

The record’s narrative charts Biggie’s journey from life to death, with the final track ‘Suicidal Thoughts’ finding him ready to end it all. The album’s title turned out to be something of a tragic prophecy – in 1997, two weeks before the release of his second album ‘Life After Death’, the rapper was murdered in LA”.

There are other articles I want to direct people to. Billboard published a track-by-track celebration of Ready to Die on its twentieth anniversary. Ten years later, Ready to Die still holds so much power and importance. A seminal Rap album from a great that was lost far too soon. I want to end with a feature from Tidal. In 2019, they highlighted the timelessness of a monumental album. One that does not skip a detail lyrically. It is almost unmatched in terms of its skill. A phenomenal debut from The Notorious B.I.G. One everyone should listen to:

“In a letter sent to his school teacher George Izambard, the late French prodigy Arthur Rimbaud wrote: “The suffering is tremendous, but one must bear up against it to be born a poet, and I know that’s what I am.” A poet wasn’t merely a writer to Rimbaud, a poet was a thief of fire.

Christopher Wallace, born 81 years after Rimbaud’s passing, did not call himself a poet, but throughout his 1994 debut album, Ready to Die, under the hip-hop pseudonym The Notorious B.I.G., the Brooklyn-born rapper found the words to describe coming of age as a black man in a New York City that burned of cocaine smoke and sung the harmonies of gunfire.

On the album’s cinematic intro, a baby is born. Vignettes follow, revealing an impoverished upbringing. The baby, now a grown man, ends the song by sticking up a train ― a thief of money, not fire.

The first six songs that follow the intro ― “Things Done Changed,” “Gimme the Loot,” “Machine Gun Funk,” “Warning” and “Ready to Die” ― all encompass the ache of poverty and how starved bellies manifest into a language of violence, robberies and drug dealing. Ready to Die is an album made by a natural-born rhymer who saw the humor in the struggle, who found poetry in the tremendous suffering that unfolded in an unfair world.

The Notorious B.I.G., also known as Biggie Smalls, doesn’t skip a detail lyrically. The beatings are brutal, the sex is pornographic, the joy is inspiring, the stress is suffocating. It’s writing rooted in fantasy and realism ― too vivid to be imaginative, too unbelievable to be trusted as authentic.

Along with razor-sharp storytelling, Biggie grounds Ready to Die as an autobiographical period piece with emotional nuance. There’s sincerity found across the 19 tracks, but few lyrics better represent Biggie’s earnestness than the timeless statement made before the album’s lead single “Juicy” begins:

This album is dedicated to all the teachers that told me I’d never amount to nothin’. To all the people that lived above the buildings that I was hustlin’ in front of that called the police on me when I was just tryin’ to make some money to feed my daughter and all the niggas in the struggle, you know what I’m sayin? It’s all good, baby baby.

In December ’94, three months after the release of Ready to Die, famed author, culture critic, and prominent hip-hop journalist Touré wrote an impressive profile of The Notorious B.I.G. for The New York Times titled “POP MUSIC; Biggie Smalls, Rap’s Man of the Moment.”

“Though many rappers exaggerate about the lives they led before becoming performers, some are actually former drug dealers. Few have ever been as open in detailing their criminal past as Biggie Smalls, and none have ever been as clear about the pain they felt at the time,” he wrote, praising Ready to Die as a balanced and honest portrait of a dealer.

Almost 25 years later, over the phone, Touré is still enamored with the duality of the late rapper’s debut. “Yeah, you’re selling this poison, but you’re doing it for family,” he exclaims, still amused by a drug dealer who berated his neighbors for suggesting how he chose to feed his daughter.

The way Touré views it, Ready to Die added layers to a character often depicted as only treacherous. “Nobody thinks they’re the villain or the bad guy, right? You’re always the hero of your movie,” he says.

Duality is essential to the underworld narrative on Ready to Die. In this story, no one is pure and everyone is hungry, which leads to unethical decisions and unwavering paranoia. Even success is tainted (“Damn, niggas wanna stick me for my paper”).

“I’m scared to death. Scared of getting my brains blown out,” Biggie confessed to Touré, an admission that came three years before his violent, unsolved murder. But for all the fear that B.I.G carried, there was equal, if not more, love for the rising rap star.

“Dude was big,” Touré recalls, finding no better way to describe Biggie’s career growth following Ready to Die. “Coming out of the Apollo that night, cars were playing his music. He was the total package. It was no performance. He was just real.”

Robert Christgau, one of the first and most revered legends in music criticism and the former Village Voice chief music critic and senior editor, wrote his review of the album in 1999, not 1994, for a book collection. “I’m outraged when anyone gets robbed, beaten, or pimped, descendants of slaves especially,” Christgau wrote, a visceral reaction to the “Gimme The Loot” lyric, “I’ve been robbin’ motherfuckas since the slave ships.” The next sentence begins, “Hence, I’m not inclined to like this motherfucker. But the more I listen, the more I do.”

“On the one hand, that’s a great line,” Christgau remarks to TIDAL, adding, “but on the other, it offended me.” Christgau’s review of Ready to Die doesn’t solely touch on urban survival, but also malevolence. For all Biggie’s lovable charm, there’s cruelty in a line like “I be beatin’ motherfuckers like Ike beat Tina.”

The duality of Biggie’s persona isn’t lost on the veteran music writer. “I’m a critic; I write about music, but I’m moralized, and I don’t have any shame about it,” he says. “I think about the ethics and the moral meaning of everything I listen to, that doesn’t mean I can’t overcome my objections and be taught things about my prejudice”.

To prove its continued importance, Ready to Die gained an honour this year. It was selected to the National Recording Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, and/or aesthetically significant". On 13th September, it is thirty years since the release of Ready to Die. A work that introduced Biggie Smalls to the world. We lost him less than three years after his debut album came out. Regardless, in his short life, he left an indelible mark. Ready to Die made a huge impact when it was released in 1994. It truly is a Hip-Hop masterpiece that has lost…

NONE of its significance.

FEATURE: Spotlight: Magdalena Bay

FEATURE:

 

 

Spotlight

PHOTO CREDIT: Lissyelle Laricchia

Magdalena Bay

_________

ONE of the most talked-about…

PHOTO CREDIT: Lissyelle Laricchia

and talented acts in modern music, Magdalena Bay have just released one of this year’s most best albums. An instant classic. Imaginal Disk was released on 23rd August and has received unanimous praise. This incredible duo hail from Miami, Florida and are based in Los Angeles, California. Consisting of Mica Tenenbaum and Matthew Lewin, Magdalena Bay have released two studio albums, three E.P.s, and three mixtapes (called Mini Mixes) - comprised of one-to-two-minute songs with accompanying homemade green-screen music videos. Their music has evolved quite a bit since their earliest work. I wanted to draw attention to a duo who are getting a lot of attention but might not been known to everyone. Magdalena Bay are coming to London on 13th November. Prior to that, they are touring through North America. You can purchase tickets here. I am going to end with a couple of interviews for Imaginal Disk. It is a concept album that is really fascinating. Rare for an act to put out a concept album in this day. There are examples, though most studio albums released are a lot straighter and tend not to have a conceptual arc. I am going to start with a few recent interviews. So we can get more detail and background about Magdalena Bay and their stunning second studio album, Imaginal Disk. A duo whose new album twins Pop and Prog-Rock. Vogue’s interview gives us some insight into this incredible two-piece:

“In the current pop landscape, there are few acts as exciting—or as remarkably consistent—as Magdalena Bay. The duo, made up of Matt Lewin and Mica Tenenbaum, high school buddies turned partners in life and work, have spent the best part of a decade quietly churning out slices of synth-pop genius, married with distinctive visuals created by the pair themselves. That journey culminated in their debut album, 2021’s Mercurial World: One of the year’s most inventive pop records, it served as a rollercoaster ride through the band’s eclectic sonic universe, while also boasting some of the catchiest hooks in recent memory. (Seriously: Three years later, I still can’t get “Hysterical Us” out of my head.) Why, then, have they remained something of an in-the-know favorite for pop fanatics, when in a more just world their singles would be topping charts?

Their second album, Imaginal Disk—released tomorrow—may change all that. Across 15 all-killer, no-filler tracks, the duo flex their preternatural instincts for writing an irresistible pop melody, while also venturing into uncharted territory. The theatrical sweep of lead single “Death and Romance”—all groovy, ABBA-esque keyboards and thundering drums—flirts with psych-rock, while the delightfully bonkers “Tunnel Vision” builds and builds with Tenenbaum’s cherubic vocals over twinkling piano before it erupts into a epic prog-rock breakdown of guitars and live drums, synths squiggling around them like fireflies. And you’d be hard-pressed to find a catchier, cleverer slice of pop perfection than “Image” on any other record this year.

“It’s conceptual, but I wouldn’t necessarily call it a concept album,” says Lewin when he and Tenenbaum dial in from their Los Angeles studio. (In the background, their walls are covered with guitars and a Memphis Group-inspired sculpture the pair sourced from Facebook Marketplace.) While in the past, their visuals have consisted of a charmingly chaotic mish-mash of the post-Internet and the new-age—their old website was inspired by the Y2K kitsch of GeoCities pages—this time around, there’s a greater focus on the world they’ve constructed around the record, with an overarching narrative following an alien called True (played by Tenenbaum in the videos) who is implanted with, then rejects, an “imaginal disk” and begins her journey towards understanding what it is to be human.

It somehow never feels overwrought, or like the pair are being bogged down by the more outré aspects of what they’re doing. Indeed, when you boil it down, the appeal of Magdalena Bay is actually fairly simple: they’ve got fantastic melodies, immaculate production, and a welcome lack of self-seriousness. Because as any great pop songwriter knows, there’s a genius to simplicity—and Imaginal Disk is nothing if not a window into the minds of two weird and wonderful geniuses at work.

Here, Magdalena Bay talk about their unique take on the classic concept album, why they returned to their high-school roots when it came to the record’s influences, and their plans to bring the Imaginal Disk world to life while on the road.

Vogue: How are you feeling right now, a couple of weeks out from the release of the album?

Matt Lewin: I think we’re just eager to get the whole thing out, because you do the singles and it’s heartbreaking—well, not heartbreaking, but it’s a tough process, because you really just want people to listen to it all the way through. So you give people these little tastes of it, but you feel like you’re not getting the full thing. We’re ready for all of it to be out.

Mica Tenenbaum: Very ready.

Given it’s something of a concept album, what came first: the songs or the concept?

MT: At first, the music.

ML: The songs always come first.

MT: But I was entertaining some concepts while we wrote the songs. Because with Mercurial World, it was very much a case of songs first, concept later. So I did want to keep those broader ideas in mind when working on this one, without necessarily forcing anything.

ML: I would say it’s like a loose concept album. It’s not like a Tommy situation where the songs outline the story. I think there are themes throughout the album, but I feel that’s the same with Mercurial World. It’s conceptual but I wouldn’t necessarily call it a concept album. I don’t know if you agree, Mica?

MT: I think I agree. We just started writing the music in between touring gaps, the little time we would have at home in LA. Maybe 60% of it was written that way, and then we had a dedicated chunk of time to finish the rest of it, which was nice.

ML: I think once we had the music and we had the sequencing and we listened through the record, we were like, “Well, we could overlay this story on top of the music”—and that’s the story of the visuals. But it’s not necessarily inextricably tied to the music, it’s just a layer of meaning on top of the record.

Where did the Imaginal Disk title come from, and what does it mean to you both, exactly?

MT: I think we first came across the title because I was just really... Wait, how did we find the stuff about the insects in the first place?

ML: It was almost reverse engineered, because we came up with the album cover concept first, so we had this idea of someone inserting a disk into someone’s forehead. Then I think separately Mica was reading about the caterpillar-butterfly metamorphosis process, and there is a biological term called an imaginal disc, but with a C, which is a genetic code carrier that exists within the caterpillar that basically once the caterpillar completely melts into a goo in the cocoon these imaginal discs are the instructions with how to rebuild it into the butterfly. So then it became this double entendre with the CD disk concept that we had for the cover, and this symbol of metamorphosis that tied into a lot of the themes that Mica was already writing about and had in mind for the record.

MT: The cover came first? I’m not convinced by that.

ML: I swear!

Those themes of transition and evolution definitely recur throughout the record. Was there anything specific going on in your lives while making it that drew you to those questions?

MT: I had restarted therapy. It’s interesting, because when I was in high school I would go to the same therapist, so I returned to her a bajillion years later—I’m from Argentina, and the therapist I go to is from a Lacanian school of psychoanalysis, which is very hip now. I’m not super educated on those details, it just feels like what I imagine regular therapy is, but with a lot more focus and importance placed on dreams and the subconscious, which I find really inspiring as an artist. When we were talking, there were a lot of big questions coming up—and the record ended up being about the big questions too.

ML: I remember you were asking me all these questions like, “What do you think forms your identity? Are you the same person that you were when you were 10 years old? What really exists and what’s the through-line between your consciousness?” Because you feel like a completely different person, and it feels like almost a different life from a child version of yourself to the adult version of yourself, so what really constitutes you? What’s the ship where eventually every part of the ship was replaced?

MT: I was just reading about that, I forget what it’s called.

ML: It’s still the same ship if at some point every single piece of it was replaced over time. So it led to these questions of what constitutes the self—what is the core of that?

Was the character of True based on yourself in any way, Mica?

MT: She’s based on me, for sure. I feel like the lyrics within themselves have their own logic and story, and they are complete and intact in a way. And then we’ve layered this story over it, which is also informed by the lyrics. So it’s almost like another version of me. It’s the sci-fi interpretation of the personal story the lyrics tell.

It’s always pretty tough to pin you down in terms of genre, but one of the things that stood out to me was the really epic prog-rock moments on the album. Was there anything specific that led you down that path this time around?

ML: I think it was just a shift in what we were listening to at the time. We reverted to a lot of what we listened to when we were in high school when we first met, which is a lot of classic rock, ’70s prog-rock, Radiohead. I think when we were making Mercurial World we were really tapped into the contemporary pop scene and were really inspired by that, but the wave we were on while we were writing Imaginal Disk was very different and I’m sure that made its way into the music. It also ended up being that a lot of the songs required live drums rather than electronic programming, and I think that helped a lot to shape the sound of the record and push it in a different direction.

It definitely lends the album a very epic quality. Did you set out when writing the record to go bigger and bolder in that sense?

MT: I don’t know if it was conscious.

ML: Yeah. It’s hard to pin down why. I feel like some bands are like, “Okay, we’re going to make our disco record,” and before they even get in the studio they’re like, “I have a vision for how the record is going to sound.” But I feel like our writing style is that we just get into a flow state and then something comes out, and all the little micro-decisions you make while writing are informed by your tastes at the time, and then it ends up formulating into a song”.

PHOTO CREDIT: Lissyelle Laricchia

I want to move on to a great interview from Stereogum. Magdalena Bay discuss how Flash Gordon, Peter Gabriel, Björk’s Dancer in the Dark score and other influence go into their stunning high-concept conceptual album, Imaginal Disk. If you have not heard of the duo and any of their music, then I seriously suggest you have to. They are going to be a massive festival act very soon. With each new release, they are establishing themselves as one of the most spectacular and original acts around. I am a fairly recent convert to their music:

“Magdalena Bay are bringing back the heady concept album. Much of contemporary pop music is concerned with past trauma, astrological signs, and capital-V Vulnerability, and it feels like ridiculously conceptual pop music has fallen to the wayside in lieu of self-mythologization and not-so-subtle autobiography. On the other hand, the pop duo comprising Mica Tenenbaum and Matthew Lewin made a record about a character named True, whose body rejects a “disk upgrade” forced into their forehead by aliens, designed to bridge the speculative connections between humans and apes. Or something like that.

The album in question — Imaginal Disk, out this Friday — underlines a different type of vulnerability, one in which truly believing in your outlandish ideas pays off to the highest extent. The whole narrative is as unapologetically weird as the music is relentlessly catchy. If Grimes wasn’t up to whatever the hell she’s doing right now and went back to making excellent synth-pop in the vein of Art Angels, then it would probably sound something like Magdalena Bay.

Still, the ideas presented here are entirely Tenenbaum and Lewin’s own. Even aside from the sci-fi story bred into the record, the music itself is immaculate. It refines on the solid, shimmery foundation the two established on their debut, 2021’s Mercurial World, by somehow making their world even more mercurial. These songs take twists and turns that mirror the futuristic bent of the lyrics, and it’s immediately memorable despite its thrilling unpredictability. The Miami-bred, Los Angeles-based musicians double down on their ideas here, and it’s refreshing to hear glimmering pop music that is this unafraid of itself, carving its own singular path.

It makes you wonder where one even gets these kinds of ideas in the first place, so it only seemed natural to probe Lewin and Tenenbaum’s brains about the inspirations that led to Imaginal Disk. In a wide-ranging conversation, the duo shared how Suspiria (1977), Fiona Apple, ELO, the Unarius Academy of Science, and more influenced their excellent new album. Below, press play on new single “That’s My Floor” and enter the world of Magdalena Bay.

Paul McCartney

MICA TENENBAUM: I got into my first Beatles phase and then Paul McCartney phase in 2022, which would have been right as we were starting to write the album. So that’s probably some sort of influence, right?

MATTHEW LEWIN: Yeah, it was fun. I’ve been a lifelong Beatles guy, and it was fun to go chronologically through their discography with Mica.

TENENBAUM: I remember it was right when that documentary came out, which was so fun. I’ve been obsessed with Ram ever since.

Get Back is what made you dive in?

LEWIN: It came out right when we were starting to go through chronologically. So it was probably what brought it up for me. I was like, “You should probably get familiar with the history to appreciate it.”

Is Paul your favorite Beatle, then?

TENENBAUM: Yes, I think so.

LEWIN: I’ve always been a George guy my whole life, and then I think Paul took over as my favorite in the last maybe five years or so or during this deep dive we’ve done.

The documentary kind of portrays him as this mastermind behind the whole enterprise. And George is just like, “I want to be more involved.” And he’s like, “No, do what you’re told.”

LEWIN: For sure. It’s kind of annoying. But he’s good, which makes him annoying is that he’s undeniably good. [laughs] What can you do?

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Fiona Apple

TENENBAUM: We’ve been Fiona Apple fans for a long, long, long time. And in high school, when we were in a progressive rock band together, she was a very big songwriting influence for me. So it aligns with this situation where, as we were starting to write this album, we were listening more to what we were listening to in high school and revisiting things and regressing a little bit. [laughs] We totally stopped listening to any contemporary music and delved into Fiona Apple, a little bit of Radiohead, and some ’70s stuff. I feel like, in some way, she might have influenced the songwriting a little bit more than some previous Magdalena Bay stuff.

Björk’s Score For Dancer In The Dark

Is Björk also within that, as you put it, regressive high school era?

LEWIN: We watched Dancer In The Dark, which was new for me. I’d never seen it before even though I was into Björk for a while. That’s one of the things where we picked up on little elements, like the opener track to that film score is just this beautiful horn arrangement. It’s like, French horns and trombones and all brass. In that aspect, it really made us want to include more orchestral brass on this album, and there are a few songs on it that were pretty directly inspired by that and in some of the brass arrangements. I guess it’s probably not an overall songwriting influence. It’s more just like little things here and there.

Donkey Skin

TENENBAUM: We’re fairly inspired by that visually, just the sets and the color. As we’ve been working on our videos, films in that vein have been a big source of inspiration for us.

LEWIN: There’s something about the color palette or the set design. We were watching just generally the way film looked in that era of late ’60s and ’70s. It’s not something that we are following directly because our music videos don’t have that. They’re filmed on green screen, so we don’t have those practical status backdrops, but hopefully there’s something we’re taking from that because we do love it so much.

TENENBAUM: So whether it’s the color treatment or just some sort of mood, there’s some inspiration going through.

Peter Gabriel Music Videos

LEWIN: Obviously “Sledgehammer” is the big Peter Gabriel video that everyone knows and loves. But you have to watch the video for “Steam.”

TENENBAUM: That might be my favorite, I gotta say.

LEWIN: It’s like peak early CGI craziness; it looks so horrible but so cool at the same time. “Sledgehammer” is amazing because it’s all stop-motion, and you can see the frame-by-frame work. It has such a nice look to it. But “Steam” is just so cool in a completely opposite way where it’s so obviously digital. There’s something really funny and cool about that”.

Before getting onto some reviews, there is another interview that I am keen to highlight. The Line of Best Fit spoke with an amazing duo who are keen to defy your expectations. The Line of Best Fit sat down with Magdalena Bay and chatted about conceptualism and weirdness in Pop. For a duo who some might feel are eccentric or have an oddness, Travis Shosa notes how the conversation with Mica Tenenbaum and Matthew Lewin was one of the most normal of the past year:

“Imaginal Disk, the duo’s new album, is the fruit of that desire to marry accessibility with eclecticism. It is patently the most “out there” thing Tenenbaum and Lewin have recorded together, precisely because it is neither normal nor strange, but instead a heated wrestling match between pop convention and the more fanciful tangents and progressions that threaten to twist pop’s form up like a pretzel. There’s no “Killshot”: there’s really not even a “Secrets (Your Fire)” or “Hysterical Us.” Which is to say that the simple immediacy that some fans might be expecting from Mag Bay has been traded for songs readily shift and sprawl out from their origin points, placing a greater emphasis on soundscapes, new vocal techniques, and oddly layered rhythms. In a sense, it’s Tenenbaum and Lewin re-engaging with their musical roots and working out what place they have in their music going forward.

Mag Bay swung hard with the album’s first music video back in June: an eight-minute off-kilter sci-fi odyssey for “Death & Romance” and what would later be revealed as its unofficial outro, “Fear, Sex.” Tenenbaum plays a character named True, who spends most of the video gyrating in a spatially displaced aquamarine bedroom or in the foreground of some uncanny bucolic scenery. Lewin is a being of pure light: the two kiss, and Tenenbaum gets some of the light stuck in her mouth. All the while, they’re being monitored by aliens or gimps or alien gimps, and they attempt to kidnap this being of pure light before he escapes in his UFO, leaving True behind. Then she gets “updated” with what is presumed to be the titular Imaginal Disk.

That the video is bizarre isn’t surprising: Magdalena Bay has established a bent towards the absurd early on through their TikTok clips and full mini mix videos. Rather, it’s the style and grandiosity of the song itself which is striking. “Death & Romance” is effectively the best baggy revival tune since George Clanton’s “I Been Young,” though if that song is for swaying lighters at the club, “Death & Romance” is a big, bombastic epic that launches itself into the cosmos. Synths crop up, but the core instrumental hook is built around these punchy piano chords and the choppy drums that shuffle underneath. It’s catchy in the way that pop often is, but it’s also a bit disorienting. Mag Bay has a habit of nestling little references into their lyrics and melodies (see the pseudo-interpolation of Madonna’s “Material Girl” on their first album’s title track, “Mercurial World”). Here, the “wires in your head” line calls back to Pink Floyd’s “If.”

Lewin more directly compares “Image” to another of Gabriel’s videos. “You have to check it out if you haven’t seen the video for ‘Steam.’ ‘Sledgehammer’ is super claymation, very analog. ‘Steam’ is like, Peter Gabriel fucking around with early ‘90s CGI.”

Tenenbuam chimes in with, “‘Steam’ is like, so weird, yeah?”

And while Imaginal Disk’s mysterious and alien aesthetic and sense of atmosphere might be more closely aligned with Roger Waters-era Pink Floyd, it’s Gabriel’s writing with Genesis that seems to most closely inform the writing on the album’s proggier cuts, such as “Tunnel Vision.” Gabriel’s had a gift for imbuing his dense compositions with a sense of lightness and levity, and Mag Bay does the same here with its delicate but tightly layered and constantly evolving synth lines. By the time the track reaches its back half, however, it melts down into this swathe of heavy droning, frantic drum fills, and squelching electronics. I remember lines from “Image” that get me hunting down timestamps: the first chorus makes a reference to “22 more minutes.” A minute later, the next chorus kicks in “21 more minutes.” This feels like the initiation of a countdown. So I go to check what comes 22 minutes after that first chorus and “Image.” It’s that back-half breakdown in “Tunnel Vision” which leads into the album’s next act. It’s the reboot, the “brand new image.”

PHOTO CREDIT: Lissyelle Laricchia

Tenenbaum and Lewin don’t deny Imaginal Disk’s conceptual nature, but they do sort of undersell it. “The way it makes sense in my mind is these layers of meaning… the album within itself is just an exploration of self and consciousness, and is quite personal in some ways,” says Tenenbaum. “But of course, we love to sprinkle in the sci-fi within the lyrics and narrative and storytelling.”

Regarding the narrative of the album versus the story being told through the videos, Lewin adds: “It’s like another interpretation of it. It's not like we’re not doing like Tommy or something where the album is the story and very intrinsically one in the same. And you could listen to the album like you’re watching the movie. I think for us, the idea is the album exists on its own, as its own piece of art, and then the videos that we’re making are one interpretation of that.”

Tenenbaum concedes that she is inspired by vocalists that are more naturally aligned with her range. “But I think on this record, I was trying to expand that a bit, and I was listening a lot to Paul McCartney and David Bowie. And of course, I’m never gonna sound like them. But I’m trying to pick up on what I can, whether that’s the tiniest things, like enunciation, or a certain earnestness or more bravado on others. I try to think less about gender and style constraints, and just more about a character, depending on what a song is saying.”

Characters — multiple — are at the center Imaginal Disk, despite Tenenbaum boiling the record down to an exploration of self. “I think “Angel On a Satellite” feels very like me.” I hang on that a bit, mainly the uncertainty of it. “Maybe to me, at least. Someone else might listen to it, and I just think it sounds like me, but in my head — where I have a huge microscope on every sound that comes out of my mouth, it sounds a little different to me than what I’ve sung before. Like, more raw, more natural, a little lower in my register. Maybe more Fiona Apple-inspired. I don’t sound anything like her, but I’m trying to channel that more natural delivery.” I find myself stuck on the idea of channeling naturalism. “And then in “Cry for Me,” she continues, “where I’m singing in a different way at the end — more dramatic and shouting — that’s another type of character there. I mean, like, literal character, but also character to the voice.”

The best I can piece together is that Imaginal Disk involves multiple personified facets or aspects of Tenenbaum’s perceived self. We could go as far as to call Imaginal Disk “Jungian.” While there’s no specific admittance that True from the videos is one of the characters of the album itself — at least in a literal sense — the symbology of the name itself can’t really be ignored. If I were to theorycraft, Imaginal Disk seems to be a metaphor for working through a personality crisis. Are Mag Bay up-and-coming pop stars or are they still the Genesis heads from a decade and a half ago? Tenenbaum’s shifted her vocal style so much since then that she has to “channel” her natural register. And there’s a sort of duality between horror and wonder between realising you can be whoever you want to be, but you might lose sight of “True” along the way.

But again, Imaginal Disk seems to be about rectifying that. Some fans have playfully referred to the disk insertion in the “Death & Romance” video as a lobotomy. But Occam’s razor dictates I look at it as software: an appropriate Internet-age representation of how our minds develop over time. We patch out bugs and create new ones, add new features, etc. Some features are worth reimplementing”.

I am going to end with some reviews. In their five-star write-up, NME examined post-Internet existentialism on the duo’s second studio album. An album that “captures the visionaries at their most expansive: kaleidoscopic and overproduced in all the right ways”. I think that Imaginal Disk is going to voted as one of the best albums of this year very soon. It is a phenomenal work that everyone needs to hear:

“You are formless, yet you are still you,” write LA synth-pop duo Magdalena Bay on the eerie corridors of the darkly sci-fi website that accompanies their second album, ‘Imaginal Disk’. It’s the sort of metaphysical, techno-spiritual world-building fans expect: today’s alt-pop is no stranger to otherworldly e-girl pantomime and puzzling fictional websites, and Magdalena Bay’s expands upon their mysterious universe.

Over five years, Mica Tenenbaum and Matthew Lewin’s vaporwave fantasia has spanned post-internet mysticism and new-age philosophies. Their acclaimed debut, 2021’s ‘Mercurial World’ – a surreal silvery disco that landed somewhere between Grimes and Chvrches – was cacophonous and maximalist hyperspace pop, vast and unending. Satire and sincerity drove their Y2K retro-futurist vision, where the overstimulating internet became a portal to self-discovery. Their chops garnered a credit on the debut EP from TWICE‘s Jihyo, and even Lil Yachty got Magdalena-fever on 2023’s ‘Running Out of Time’.

Across the kitschy pilgrimage of its cerebral follow-up ‘Imaginal Disk’, Tenenbaum and Lewin further consolidate this lore, but cracks in the matrix – the real world, the negative effects of being terminally online, etc – threaten the euphoria of online escapism. It’s soundtracked by the same anachronistic, trippy synth-pop of its predecessor but grounded by the busk-y tambourine and analogue percussion of indie-pop.

There’s an artful slant thanks to Chairlift-indebted avant-pop, yet it’s never pretentious or – despite its sci-fi narrative – too concerned with the future. It’s still innovative, mind, but where ‘Mercurial World’ was informed by modern pop, ‘Imaginal Disk’ avoids the influence of new music almost entirely, according to press material.

Nostalgic instrumentation softens the synth-pop edge of ‘Imaginal Disk’, which has the added benefit of cementing its instant timelessness, imbuing the record with a campy, psychedelic, maudlin approach – one that feels all the more interesting as a counter to minimalist, bratty, party pop.

While gothic, theatrical St Vincent-ish vocals infatuate the wistful ‘Vampire in the Corner’, a Woodstock shrooms trip inspires the hypnotic delusion of the satirical ‘Love is Everywhere’ (which interpolates that sun-drenched Lil Yachty cut). Then, an 80s-inspired, I Saw the TV Glow-coded monster stalks the accompanying video for indie-disco track ‘Image’; celestial horns and echo chambers usher soft-pop armageddon on the unravelling groove-rock of standout ‘Tunnel Vision’, and Tenenbaum is a dancefloor deity on noughties grunge banger ‘That’s My Floor’.

By the time the technicolour show-stopper ‘The Ballad of Mica and Matt’ reprises the cutesy melody of its earthbound, pacifist opener ‘She Looked Like Me!’, it’s crystal that ‘Imaginal Disk’ captures the visionaries at their most expansive, yet corporeal. Stylishly gauche and expertly overproduced, kaleidoscopically experimental and expressionistic, ‘Imaginal Disk’ is a zeitgeisty time capsule of anxious post-internet existentialism and the online condition observed through a synthy flower-power lens. Here, Magdalena Bay are underrated pop messiahs at the top of their game”.

The final review is from The Line of Best Fit. Giving it 9/10, they salute a duo “discovering their sci-fi synthpop niche”. Even if you are not a fan of this type of music, I guarantee that you will love Imaginal Disk. The more you listen to it, the more it grows on you. It is very much a modern-day great that will rank alongside the best albums of the decade. It will be exciting when Magdalena Bay come to the U.K. as they have a large and growing fanbase here:

“A pairing of metaphors this nerdy – one deriving from the process of metamorphosis, the other pulled straight out of the science fiction canon – is par for the course for Matthew Lewin and Mica Tenenbaum, the precocious young duo that makes up Magdalena Bay. The two started out in a prog band in high school before realizing that nobody listens to prog anymore. At least, nobody that they cared about. So instead, as they went on to study at the most elite universities in the United States, they dropped their band entirely and swapped inspirations from art-rock to Top 40 radio in search of notoriety. Making synthpop would be simple, they thought – after all, they had spent their time writing insane twenty-minute jams moving in and out of 7/4 time, and what’s a short radio bop compared to that?

It could have been that easy. But Matt and Mica never quite discovered how to be normal, and eventually, it seemed like they didn’t want to. Even on their debut album and (many) other releases, the duo’s pop music paid homage to and subverted the pop zeitgeist in the same breath. They put Mariah Carey-esque love songs back-to-back with EDM slow-burners back-to-back with shoegaze-y pop rock, stitched together by song transitions smooth enough to make their releases appear more like megamixes (or, sometimes, literal “mini mix”es that they released as EPs). The elements of pop were there – verse-chorus-verse structures, hooks that would get stuck in your head for months, et cetera – but they were augmented with something more unique and artsy. Call it music theory geekery, or a lingering desire to make something as grand as their past work. But whatever that quality is, it has blossomed to full fruition on their sophomore album: prog-rock or otherwise, this is the most weird, complex music they’ve ever made. Imaginal Disk is a testament to good old-fashioned artistry – it’s the product of a band intensely honing what they want to sound like and ending up with a style so unique that it’s barely possible to describe. It’s dorky and strange and dramatic, like the duo themselves. And it sounds like nothing I’ve ever heard.

Imaginal Disk is held together by a loose concept: a character named True being coerced into getting a disk inserted into her head, leading to the creation of a new parallel being. This story is explored extensively throughout the surreal music videos released alongside many of the album’s singles. But that concept isn’t strictly important to the album: the band told Best Fit that the album is a broad “exploration of self and consciousness” and that the videos’ overarching narrative acts as a complementary interpretation of the album’s themes. By that framing, Imaginal Disk looks less like a sci-fi rock opera and more like just a collection of pop songs centered around a common theme. But the album still feels like something larger than the sum of its parts.

Perhaps that’s because the whole album, unlike anything Magdalena Bay has made before, has a unified aesthetic. That’s not to say that the album is homogeneous – anything but. Trying to describe this album in terms of its contemporaries, I only ended up with meaningless word salad: Age of Adz-era Sufjan Stevens if he made space rock revival, the Pet Shop Boys covering ABBA, every Kero Kero Bonito song mashed into one. Despite that, every track on Imaginal Disk somehow manages to sound like the same album.

Part of that is Mica’s distinctively airy vocals, part of it is the wash of psychedelia that coats every track in a hypnagogic aura. It’s also because everything on Imaginal Disk, no matter the sound, is turned up to 11. The lyricism is musical-theater levels of dramatic, and the instrumentals match that vibe – the raging distorted guitars swallowing the mix on “That’s My Floor,” the crunchiness on the final chorus of “Image,” the 80s string-synth-drum-machine combo on “Cry For Me”. Magdalena Bay’s past work had that same bombastic vibe, but when it’s surrounded by a unified theme and aesthetic, it feels so much more gratifying.

As great as Magdalena Bay’s previous releases were – and they were great – they didn’t exactly have a sound, as much as they were good at every sound. By contrast, in press releases, Lewin said that the process of creating Imaginal Disk was realizing “what a Magdalena Bay song sounds and feels like.” On one hand, that sounds like nonsense, because the album barely has a consistent genre. Even calling this “synthpop” feels like a disservice. But Imaginal Disk still feels like a band discovering their voice.

If I had to describe this album’s ethos, perhaps it wouldn’t be that far from the truth: it’s a prog-rock band making pop music and refusing to compromise on the best qualities of either. There are weird key changes and genre modulations and grandiose stories packed throughout this whole album, right next to some of the catchiest hooks of the year and danceable rhythms and nostalgic 90s-throwback material. It’s avant-garde, catchy, accessible, confusing, and fantastical, all in the best ways. It’s fitting that the album’s biological namesake is a metaphor for evolution, because Imaginal Disk sees Magdalena Bay channeling their overflowing creative energy into something novel – in a way, like an animal metamorphosing and inheriting its full body”.

Go and follow Magdalena Bay. They are an incredible duo have released one of this year’s best albums. Imaginal Disk is a brilliant introduction to them. I would suggest also going back to the start though. Not just listening to Imaginal Disk. Even though Magdalena Bay are rising and have an army of loving fans, there are some that are unaware of their brilliance. Make sure that you check out this duo…

STRAIGHT away.

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Follow Magdalena Bay

Official:

https://imaginaldisk.world/

Instagram:

https://www.instagram.com/MagdalenaBay/

Twitter:

https://x.com/MagdalenaBay

TikTok:

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

Spotify:

https://open.spotify.com/artist/1oPRcJUkloHaRLYx0olBLJ

YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/c/MagdalenaBay

FEATURE: Trump Card: The Backlash Against the Former President from Artists Angry He Is Using Their Music Without Permission

FEATURE:

 

 

Trump Card

IN THIS PHOTO: Beyoncé (whose song, Freedom, was used in a Donald Trump campaign video and was removed after it was contested by her and the label)/PHOTO CREDIT: Rafael Pavarotti for British Vogue

The Backlash Against the Former President from Artists Angry He Is Using Their Music Without Permission

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IT is not a new thing…

 IN THIS PHOTO: Donald Trump is standing as the Republican candidate for U.S. President in this year’s Election

where politicians use artists’ songs without their permission. We see it in this country. Boris Johnson was criticised for using songs from artists that did not want to be aligned with him. Rishi Sunak too. Rather than approaching artists to see if their music can be used, instead it seems politicians are playing whatever they like at rallies, speeches and events. It does create this issue for artists. They do not want to be aligned with a particular politician and party! Also, it is exploiting their music and using it without permission. Rather than suing an individual or network that uses a song, this is a politician. It is more complex and harder to get a result. They can take to social media to blast them and call them out. Even so, politicians can dig in deeper. They are only interested in whipping up fervour and controversy. This is especially true when it comes to Donald Trump. The Republican candidate for the presidency of the U.S.A., we are at a time when he and his Democrat rival Kamala Harris are campaigning. She has won support from a range of artists. The campaign advert for Harris uses Beyoncé’s song, Freedom. From 2016’s Lemonade, this song has a deeper meaning and significance. Trying to make history as the first woman to be elected President – and also the first woman of colour -, it is great that she has support from a Megan Thee Stallion, Sheila E., John Legend, Maren Morris and so many others. There is this strong and varied group of artists with a lot of pull and sway who have thrown their support behind Kamala Harris. It is a very positive movement and moment where we hopefully will see history made! And Trump defeated. Hopefully a loss will mean him retreating more into the shadows.

One of the biggest issues with Donald Trump – among many! – is how he uses music without permission. Artists that really detest him. One case is Bruce Springsteen. A political football, as ana article from Rolling Stone recently noted – and I will quote from soon -, The Boss is angry that Donald Trump has been using his music. He is not the only artist. As Rolling Stone explore, he has a history of unauthorised use of music through the years. Playing whatever songs he wants. The artists he does play lashing back and demanding he stop using their music:

“Sure, it’s not uncommon for politicians to use popular songs at events and campaign rallies — but lots of artists have drawn the line when it comes to Donald Trump. Since the former president began campaigning ahead of the 2016 election, some musicians have not been happy to hear that the Trump team has played their music, often without authorization. From Canadian singer Céline Dion to the family of soul icon Isaac Hayes, they’ve done everything from issuing public statements to sending cease-and-desist letters to Trump through lawyers.

Here’s a list of the artists who have told Trump to back off and stop using their songs.

Beyoncé (2024)

While most complaints have focused on music played at Trump rallies, Beyoncé and her team issued a cease-and-desist letter after a Trump campaign spokesperson used her song “Freedom” in a short video shared online. The clip paired the Lemonade track with a 13-second clip of Trump getting off an airplane — a pretty pointed choice as “Freedom” has become an unofficial anthem of sorts for the Kamala Harris campaign. While Beyoncé did give the Harris campaign permission to use the song, a source close to the musician told Rolling Stone they “absolutely did not give permission” to Trump campaign, and that Bey’s label had threatened to issue a cease and desist. —J.B.

Céline Dion (2024)

Céline Dion was not happy when Donald Trump used her Titanic classic “My Heart Will Go On” at a recent campaign rally. “And really, THAT song?” she wrote on social media when she learned he’d been playing the hit. The Canadian star’s team issued a statement on Aug. 10 slamming the former president for “unauthorized usage” of the track from the Nineties film. “Celine Dion does not endorse this or any similar use,” the statement from Dion’s team said.

The family of James Horner, the song’s composer who died in 2015, also said in a statement that “the Horner family does not endorse or support the Trump/Vance campaign or its use of the song at its events. The campaign does not reflect the beliefs and values of James Horner or his family. It is important to the family that his music not be used by those seeking to profit inappropriately from his work after his death.” —T.M.

Isaac Hayes’ Family (2024)

The family of late soul singer Isaac Hayes wants to stop Trump from playing the hit “Hold On, I’m Comin’” at rallies and events, including at an NRA convention. Hayes’ son, Isaac Hayes III, shared that they planned to file a lawsuit after learning that the Trump team has used the song about 135 times without licensing the song or asking for permission. “I was pissed,” Hayes told The Hollywood Reporter. “There’s just been a mass shooting. So why are we using it at the NRA convention? I wanted to take legal action because Trump has made statements against women, and here is a man who has been convicted of sexual abuse. I’m a brother to seven sisters, and I don’t want anybody to think of ‘Hold On’ and think of Donald Trump.” —J.L.

Sinéad O’Connor’s Estate (2024)

Sinead O’Connor’s estate quickly shut Trump down when he started using the late singer’s song “Nothing Compares 2 U” at his rallies in Maryland and North Carolina. “It is no exaggeration to say that Sinéad would have been disgusted, hurt, and insulted to have her work misrepresented in this way by someone who she herself referred to as a ‘biblical devil,’” O’Connor’s estate representatives shared in a statement to Variety. “As the guardians of her legacy, we demand that Donald Trump and his associates desist from using her music immediately.” —J.L.

Johnny Marr (2024)

While the Smiths might seem wildly out of place at a Trump rally, the camp certainly tried it. In early 2024, multiple political reporters took to Twitter to share how the hopelessly desperate “Please, Please, Please, Let Me Get What I Want” was making its rounds with MAGA folks. Founding guitarist and the song’s writer, Johnny Marr, immediately responded when he quote-tweeted a video saying, “Ahh … right … OK. I never in a million years would’ve thought this could come to pass. Consider this shit shut right down right now.” —M.G.”.

As I mentioned Bruce Springsteen is an artist that has been quoted by both Donald Trump and Tim Walz (the Democrat nominee for Vice President). Whereas Walz is someone who is a genuine fan of Springsteen (and, in turn, The Boss would be pleased to have his support), Donald Trump seems to pick up on a song title that fits a general message of theme and uses it. No care for the artist or what they are feeling. This Rolling Stone article charts the history of U.S. politicians employing The Boss’s music. Why Donald Trump’s involvement is particularly jarring for someone who genuinely hates him:

“Just over 40 years ago, Ronald Reagan became the first American president to name-drop Bruce Springsteen. “America’s future rests in a thousand dreams inside your hearts,”  he told a crowd at a New Jersey campaign stop in September of 1984. “It rests in the message of hope in the songs of a man so many young Americans admire — New Jersey’s own, Bruce Springsteen.”

Springsteen was, of course, at a pop-cultural peak in that moment, fresh from the release of the world-conquering blockbuster Born in the U.S.A., with a flag on the cover and an easy-to-misconstrue title track. In the decades since, he’s made his left-leaning political views quite clear, campaigning for Democratic candidates and even partnering with Barack Obama for a podcast series and book. And even in the far-flung political era of 2024, where Beyoncé’s “Freedom” scores Kamala Harris‘ campaign, Springsteen’s name and music keep popping up — Donald Trump has him on his mind, Tim Walz is a vocal fan, and “Born in the U.S.A.” played at the Democratic National Convention.

Steven Hyden‘s excellent new book, There Was Nothing You Could Do: Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the U.S.A. and the End of the Heartland, traces the pop-cultural and political impact of that album. He recently sat down with Rolling Stone to discuss Springsteen’s continuing political relevance and more.  (To hear more from Hyden on his book, check out the Rolling Stone Music Now podcast — his segment begins around the 42-minute mark of the Katy Perry episode above. Go here for the podcast provider of your choice, listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or just press play above.)

The first big Springsteen moment of this campaign was when Donald Trump started musing onstage, pretty much out of nowhere, about the fact that Bruce doesn’t like him. What did you make of that, especially in the context of your book?

Trump’s relationship with classic rock is really interesting. He’s obviously a big fan of Sixties and Seventies rock music, as a lot of people his age are, and it’s an awkward situation because it’s not reciprocated from any of these people — Springsteen among them. These are his heroes, in some respects, at least musically speaking, and yet they view him unanimously as being bad for the country.

There’s so many musicians who don’t like Trump, but he keeps zeroing in on Springsteen. The fact that Bruce doesn’t like him — called him a moron, specifically, when I talked to him for Rolling Stone in 2016 — really bothers him. And I think that’s connected to the way Bruce carries some sort of American weight that other rock stars don’t.

Yeah, I think there is something with Bruce where that felt true 40 years ago, and it’s probably even more true now. He’s not seen totally as a political figure, but he feels more like a political figure than any other rock star. But he also has the populist thing going with him. There’s probably a part of Trump that feels like these are the people that I’m speaking to — Bruce should respond to me as well because he’s the middle-American-type guy, speaking up for average Americans. Now, of course, Trump isn’t actually doing that, but I think that there is some delusional thing in his mind, thinking that he and Springsteen in some ways are on the same side. So there probably is a little extra sting there, to not get that acceptance from Bruce”.

It is quite damaging for artists when a politician like Donald Trump uses their music. Fans of those artists might think they have given permission and they support him. That can be devastating. Although most fans know the truth, there are some who will jump to conclusions. At a particularly charged time in U.S. history, a lot rests on the result of the Election! If a recent poll suggested Kamala Harris is edging Donald Trump, artists and music an have a lot of influence. On the positive side, many artists have come out in support of Harris and that reaches millions of voters. There is this negative. Music being played by Donald Trump. How damaging that can be and what impact that can have on the vote. Also, it calls into questions a decades-running issue around political figures using music without permission. There does need to be a framework where we should have clearance and a process. Not simply a politician can play any song they like without authorisation. It is not fair on artists and it does create this uncomfortable conflict. Donald Trump is especially reckless and prolific. Using it as his own trump card. A song that gives him an advantage. Pulling this trick out of the bag. People thinking the artist whose song is playing has endorsed him. It creates this atmosphere and mood that fires up his supporters. Even the backlash and publicity from him stealing songs works in his advantage. In the sense that more supporters will come his way. It needs to stop. Although M.I.A. recently showed support for Donald Trump, not many credible or reputable artists ever will. He has to use these dirty tricks to get their attention. Playing their music against their wishes. Politicians who know artists will turn them down. They are then left with precious few options. Whilst the use of music at events and rallies does not have a massive impact on voting habits, we do all hope that Donald Trump’s use of music against artists’ wills does not create…

ANY lasting damage.