FEATURE: Odd and Even Numbers: Bringing Feminist Books and Writing More Into the Mainstream

FEATURE:

 

 

Odd and Even Numbers

PHOTO CREDIT: Ricky Esquivel/Pexels

Bringing Feminist Books and Writing More Into the Mainstream

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THIS sort of follows up…

IN THIS PHOTO: A mural by Irish artist Emmalene in Dublin, March 2021/PHOTO CREDIT: Artur Widak/NurPhoto/REX/Shutterstock

from a previous feature where I talked about feminism’s next wave, a need for positivity and this desire and requirement for a positive men’s movement. I was inspired by an interview from Cailtin Moran. She discussed how she is putting her next book on hold and instead writing one of positive notes and almost love letters. How there needs to be positivity and hope right now. Moran also discussed how there is not a positive men’s movement. Moran’s book, What About Men?, was sort of her response to this. Writing about issues affecting men. Among other things, the book discusses the effects of pornography use in men, and the interest in Andrew Tate for an adolescent. Some asked why Moran did not write a book about, say, the transgender right’s movement. Caitlin Moran explained, in a recent interview, how she came under attack from left-wing and right-wing men alike. Accusing her of saying men are not in touch with their feelings and attacking her book and motives. It is frustrating that there was this response. In my recent feature, I explained how nearly all feminist authors (of which Caitlin Moran is one) are women. Nearly everything written about feminism or related to it has been written by women. I guess in theory that might be a small number of men who have written about feminism or published a feminist book. However, they are hard to find and I have Googled seeing what the numbers are and I could not see any male authors, journalists or academics who would be seen as feminist writers. It is quite baffling. A real lack of engagement from men when it comes to feminist writing. Many might say men do not have the real-world experiences and perspectives or women so are not qualified. They seem inauthentic or ingenuine. I do understand many might think like this but it is not the case. Nobody is expecting men to walk in a woman’s shoes. Instead, it would be nice if there were books and articles by men published that add to the incredible feminist literature and articles that are out there. Authors like Caitlin Moran. However, given the negativity she faced when published a book about men, it might seem improbable that many men would jump at the chance to write a feminist book, article or thesis. However, I may be wrong and there are some out there – which I would be interested to read!

International Women’s Day took place yesterday (8th March). One of the great things was reading all the celebratory and serious features alike highlighting brilliant women. From politicians to authors through to athletes and those in entertainment, there was so much discussion. There were great articles highlighting incredible women in music. Women and men alike saluting amazing women. Something I am becoming more and more invested in is feminist literature. I am pledging to buy one book a month. Great feminist literature. Not to flex or to appear cool. It is definitely an important thing I want to do. To be a more well-rounded feminist. At a time when there is so more misogyny and gender inequality, I am more compelled to not only read feminist literature but urge other men to. I have just purchased Laura Bates’ Fix the System Not the Women. I want to source from the start of a 2022 review from The Guardian:

“For Laura Bates, it began with a heavy piece of gold jewellery that her mother found on the passenger seat of the family car. It was a gift from her grandparents. Her mother, after two daughters, had been rewarded for giving birth to a son. “I am five years old,” Bates writes, “and have no idea I’ve already been weighed, valued and found wanting.”

This incident is the first on what the feminist writer and activist calls “my list”. She encourages all women to make one, charting a life in sexism, from the playground to the street to the workplace. “By the time I leave university, aged 20,” Bates writes, “I have been sexually assaulted, pressured to perform topless in a theatre production (I stand my ground, but the experience leaves me in tears) and cornered in the street by two men shouting, ‘We’re going to part those legs and fuck that cunt.’”

Fix the System, Not the Women is an attempt to highlight “the interlocking systems of domination that define our reality” – and to pull apart the myth that women are complicit in our own oppression. Bates’s central message, which she has developed through her Everyday Sexism Project, the online forum that has now received 200,000 stories of sexism and misogyny from all over the world, and books including Girl Up (2016) and Men Who Hate Women (2020), is that there is a spectrum of gender inequality. Sexist jokes and stereotypes are at one end. Rape, domestic abuse, female genital mutilation and so-called “honour” killings are at the other. Maternity discrimination, workplace sexual harassment, the gender pay gap “and so much more” lie somewhere in between”.

The reason for writing this feature is because feminist literature is still seen as niche, outside of the mainstream or maybe heavy-handed. You can go to websites like Amazon or Waterstones and search for feminist literature. However, in some bookshops, there is not a specific section for feminist literature. It does seem alarming. I visited a large Waterstones in Piccadilly, London and there is a section for feminist literature. Called ‘Gender Studies’. it does sound more academic. I wonder why they do not go for ‘Feminism’. If it is seen as too narrow or specific. Not serious enough. We are living in a time when feminist literature like Fix the System Not the Women or books from Caitlin Moran – and many of her female peers – are essential and should be part of the curriculum. They are not propaganda or books so heavy and depressing they are hard to read. They also are not angry and attacking men all of the time. Instead, these are female writers sharing their experiences and highlighting statistics. Raising subjects such as gender inequality and male violence that is powerful and designed to change attitudes and society. It is hard to overstate the urgency and importance of these books. It is great that bookstore stock feminist books, though they are often reduce to a very small space. When I was at Waterstones, their Gender Studies section was on the fourth floor of the store right at the further point from the entrance. I wonder why there is not more prominence put on these authors and books. It is brilliant that there is such a broad range of topics around equality, female empowerment and women’s safety. Books that very much should be front and centre at major bookstores. On Saturday, I visited Upper Street Bookshop in Angel. They have an L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.+/Feminism section. About three or four shelves for the former and I think one fewer for feminism. However, there is a nice selection of books. The fact it is that independent bookstores stock feminist books but some larger bookshops do not. It does seem shocking that, in 2025, feminism is still seen as underground or less important (than other types of books). With Donald Trump President in the U.S. and him removing women’s right to abortions, his attitudes towards women and claims of rape and sexual assault against him, there needs to be greater exposure to feminist literature that is so timely and illustrative.

With his regime filled with alleged sex offenders and there being this seemingly hatred of women, the world’s most powerful nation very much does not care about women’s rights or protection. A lot of the posts I saw on social media on International Women’s Day highlighted this fact. Talking about the rise in violence and sexual assault against women. Celebrating vocal and angry feminists. Saluting brilliant women across multiple fields. It is not only one day of the year when these conversations are taking place. There is a definite demand for writing about feminism and women’s rights. I bought Laura Bates’ Fix the System Not the Women on International Women’s Day because I was appalled and shocked by so many of the social media posts I saw. I wanted to learn more. Her book stood out to me but, as I say, I am going to purchase a new feminist work every month. Even if you can access all manner of feminist articles and e-books online, the visibility of feminist books is low. There seems to be very little prominence or consideration given to it. It is wonderful you can go to sites like Spotify or Audible and listen to great feminist books. However, when it comes to physical books, why is feminism seen as specialist interest or inferior to other types of literature?! Even if there was a great range available at the Waterstones I visited, the fact the books seemed tucked away in a large shop as quite telling. A definite imbalance when it comes to these books. Maybe there is misperception around feminist literature. Not enough knowledge about what types of subjects are addressed. I don’t know. It seems improbable that these books do not sell so giving them valuable or more accessible shelf space is risky. After all the interaction and discussion on International Women’s Day, I wonder if things will be redressed. As I mentioned before, it is crucial, now more than ever, that books around feminism (that tag and word itself may need broadening when it comes to the types of books published) are made more…

PROMINENT and readily available.

FEATURE: Kate Bush’s Symphony in Blue at Forty-Six: Inside One of Her Most Underrated Singles

FEATURE:

 

Kate Bush’s Symphony in Blue at Forty-Six

Inside One of Her Most Underrated Singles

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A reason why…

it is an underrated single as it was only released in Japan and Canada. However, I wanted to mark the forty-sixth anniversary of Symphony in Blue. The opening tracks of her second studio album, Lionheart, this was one of a few tracks newly written for that album. The remainder were older songs that were brought into the studio. One of the greatest tragedies of Kate Bush’s career is how a second album was rushed. How different things could have been if she was given more time and support in that respect. After the huge success of The Kick Inside, Bush was charged with releasing her second album. Both came out in 1978. It was an unreasonable to expect something as good as her first. However, Lionheart contains quite a few gems. Wow, the second single from the album, among them. The highlight of the album for me is Symphony in Blue. A song I have written about before when celebrating its anniversary, I will try and approach it from a different perspective this time around. One of Bush’s best singles, I think it deserves a worldwide release. Wow and Hammer Horror were released in the U.K. but I always wonder why Symphony in Blue was seen as a good single for Japan and Canada but not anywhere else?! It is weird how there used to be this thing of releasing different songs as singles in different countries. A masterpiece that is not really talked about much, I will come to an excellent article that explores this song. Even if Kate Bush said the song was inspired by Erik Satie’s Gymnopedies, this source says “The descriptions of God, sex and the colour blue seem to be inspired by reading about Wilhelm Reich’s theory in A Book Of Dreams”.

Symphony in Blue was performed during her tour of 1979. It also featured in her Christmas special at the end of that year. Whereas Hammer Horror was the B-side of the Canadian release, in Japan Fullhouse was the B-side. There is so much that I love about Symphony in Blue. In terms of the personnel on the record, musicians that played with Kate Bush on The Kick Inside. Most notable is Ian Bairnson’s electric guitar. The song also features some of her most thought-provoking lyrics. One of my favourite verses is this: “I associate love with red/The colour of my heart when she’s dead/Red in my mind when the jealousy flies/Red in my eyes from emotional ties/Manipulation, the danger signs”. I can’t recall hearing Symphony in Blue on the radio. Whereas other deep cuts have been given an airing, why has Symphony in Blue been ignored? Most of the Lionheart gets overlooked. I have heard Wow, Fullhouse, Kashka from Baghdad and Hammer Horror played on the radio. However, nobody really talks about Symphony in Blue. Such a mature song from a teenager. How Bush discusses God, love, sex, reincarnation, changing moods and a range of emotions. Consider these lines: “Blue on the walls, blue out of my mouth/The sort of blue between clouds, when the sun comes out/The sort of blue in those eyes you get hung up about”. I always think Bush wrote this song with every intention of ensuring it opened Lionheart. A newly-written song had to open that album. However, I also think she had this track in mind as a single. It is far too strong to be left as a Japanese and Canadian single. I have not even mentioned the release dates yet! Symphony in Blue came out in Japan on 5th May, 1979. It was released on 1st June in Canada.

I am going to end with part of a feature from Dreams of Orgonon. Some interesting perspective on one of Kate Bush’s greatest songs. A single that didn’t do much in Canada and Japan yet could have been a success in the U.K. A fantastic video would have accompanied it I am sure. If you have never heard this track then go and listen to it and the Lionheart album:

“To Bush, blue is “the color of my room and my mood.” It’s a ubiquitous color for her, present on the walls, in the sky, “out of my mouth” (a possible pun), and “the sort of blue in those eyes you get hung up about,” perhaps an allusion to the ever-growing canon of songs about blue eyes. Bush is making a world of blue, one where external hue, metaphor, and internal state collide in a musical act of mise-en-scène. “Symphony in Blue” is a dive into introspection wherein the act of introspection becomes the entirety of Bush’s world. Bush’s fixation on blue largely rises from dissatisfaction, remaining in a state where all you can grasp is the banal details of your immediate environment.

The second half of the first verse fixates on the thoughts that arise when “that feeling of meaninglessness sets in,” ones that pertain to “blowing my mind on God.” This part of the verse is mostly a list of idioms describing God, from the basically metaphorical (“the light in the dark”) to the scriptural (“the meek He seeks/the beast He calms”) to the bureaucratic (“the head of the good soul department”). Bush’s God always occupies the role of the enigmatic man in Bush’s songs, more an amalgam of resonances and qualities than an identifiable person. He is a presence, but a largely offstage one used by Bush to hurl her anxieties at.

In its second verse, “Symphony” explores red, a more fatal, dramatic, and alarming color than blue. “I associate love with red/the color of my heart when she’s dead.” Bush invokes a sense of viscera, with thoughts of death coming to mind as she ruminates in her room. For a second it looks like she might not survive the song. The rest of the verse is more straightforwardly physical, with Bush delivering the astonishing line “the more I think about sex, the better it gets.” As the song navigates its way out of emotional traps by listing potentials ways out, sex is inevitably going to come up.

The best way for Bush to articulate her ennui is visually: she will compare her mood to something visible. Blue is of course the color of many songs — in many ways, it’s the most musical color. One of the foundational genres of popular music is the blues. Blue is used as a synonym for sadness, a catalyst for innumerable amounts of music. Lord knows there’s no shortage of songs about blue — an even slightly comprehensive list would take up several blog posts. “Symphony in Blue” obviously apes its title from Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue,” yet kicks things up a notch by moving the color up from a mere rhapsody to a whole symphony. Perhaps the most relevant song to “Symphony in Blue” for our purposes is David Bowie’s contemporaneous and relatively similar “Sound and Vision.” From its title to its repetition of “blue, blue, electric blue,” the songs are similar in a way that’s difficult to nail down as a total coincidence (although it is entirely possible Bowie’s influence on Bush in this case was subconscious). Both use the surroundings of blue rooms as reflections of internal dissatisfaction. Crucially, both songs unify sight and sound into a single phenomenon. Bush’s chorus begins with “I see myself suddenly on the piano as a melody,” wherein melody is both a reflection of self and a visual reflection. Bush’s favorite theme of music’s tangibility has reached its apotheosis. Lionheart is paying off a debt to The Kick Inside via one of its fullest realizations of its ideas.

Musically, “Symphony in Blue” references more artists than just 20th century ones such as Gershwin and Bowie. The song deliberately gestures at 19th century French composer Erik Satie’s most famous piano compositions, the Gymnopédies. Like “Symphony in Blue,” Gymnopédie No. 1 is in ¾ and begins with a G major 7th chord. Both pieces are airy and chromatic (a trend in 19th century music to be found in the work of, for example, Debussy, another favorite composer of Bush’s), and Bush’s drifts slowly through G major, often falling onto 7th chords or flattening 6ths. There’s a jazz-influenced airiness to “Symphony” which is also inherited from the Gymnopédies and is clearly evidenced by its use of F7sus4, a true mind-fuck of a chord. The resemblance is intentional — “Symphony in Blue” is a pop song, as its reliance on Iain Bairnson’s electric guitar demonstrates, but it’s outright smuggling classical music into the charts. In Bush’s Christmas special, she begins “Symphony in Blue” by playing Gymnopédie No. 1, dutifully playing the song in G before pivoting on a D minor chord to “Symphony.” Bush is playing the cultural creator, collecting influences and displaying them for posterity. When she draws on tradition, it’s not merely to recreate visions of the past, but to find new directions for preexisting ideas. Bush spends a lot of her time looking at blue, so there was no chance she’d blue it”.

On 5th May, it will be forty-six years since Symphony in Blue was released in Japan. A county that embraced Kate Bush’s music early on, she previously released Moving and Them Heavy People (titled Rolling the Ball for the Japanese release) – both from The Kick Inside – in Japan. They were more successful and lauded. However, we should not overlook Symphony in Blue. It deserves to be written about more as it is without doubt one of Kate Bush’s greatest recordings. Stunning lyrics and a beautiful vocal performance, an overlooked gem that should get a lot more focus, love and attention. Kate Bush’s gorgeous blue symphony is a song that sparkles in gold. It is a treasure that….

MORE people should know about.

FEATURE: Kate Bush: The Tour of Life: Numbers, Astrology, Synchronicity, Otherworldly

FEATURE:

Kate Bush: The Tour of Life

 IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1978/PHOTO CREDIT: Getty Image

Numbers, Astrology, Synchronicity, Otherworldly

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REVISITING and reapproaching…

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

a subject I wrote about a while ago, I have been fascinated when re-reading a section of Graeme Thomson’s biography, Under the Ivy: The Life and Music of Kate Bush. I have written about how the paranormal and otherworldly have been present in Kate Bush’s work from her 1978 debut, The Kick Inside, to her most recent album, 2011’s 50 Words for Snow. It is amazing to think how she goes beyond the ordinary and puts the strange and spectral in these beautiful songs. It is clear that Bush’s mind is very open to things that cannot be explained. Even if God and religion were really not a large part of her work, there were references to him in some of her tracks. I think the gothic and dark is a particularly appealing subject to investigate. Think about all the songs where there are shadows or darkness weaving through the lyrics. For this feature, I wanted to look at a different side of this colour spectrum. The inexplicable, fictional or otherworldly. If the spectral and gothic are shades of grey, black (I know it technically not a colour) and red, then I want to look more at oranges, yellows and greens. Go with me on this. Returning to that Graeme Thomson reference and he mentions how Kate Bush was always taken with synchronicity and a deeper meaning behind numbers. The fact that both Kate Bush and Emily Brontë share a birthday. Of course, Bush’s debut single, Wuthering Heights, was inspired by Brontë’s only novel of the same name. Well, a 1967 T.V. adaptation of it at least! However, both Bush and Brontë were born on 30th July. Brontë in 1818 and Bush in 1958. Rather than it being a coincidence – which it is -, Bush felt that this connection had a deeper meaning. Maybe seeing it as something bigger and more spiritual than mere coincidence, that strange connection definitely would have opened her mind and imagination. Exploring the meaning and connection between dates and numbers.

Somewhat different I think to the paranormal and ghostly, there was this other side to Bush that was to do with numbers, synchronicity and astrology. I think it dated to before The Kick Inside. One song from that album, Strange Phenomena, is about coincidences and synchronicity. Menstruation and the “punctual blues”. The secret meaning behind women’s moods. I am not sure exactly when Bush started to think this way. Maybe it was something instilled from birth. Whereas most of her peers had one way of thinking about the world, it is clear Bush had this intrigue that meant she had this insatiable curiosity about life beyond the ordinary and everyday. You can trace this side to Bush back to her childhood. Not only did it inspire her most interesting and original songs. I think it impacted everything she did. Bush never really thinking and writing in a conventional and joined-up way. Maybe not until the 1990s at least. I do like Bush’s fascination with numbers. A friend of hers, David Paton (who played bass on many of her songs and contributed guitar and vocals too), noted how she thought it was spooky how he and her boyfriend, Del Palmer, had the same initials. That is common enough. However, the two shared the same birthday – it is not quite true as Paton was born on 29th October; Palmer was born on 3rd November. Maybe it is bad science, though I do like how Bush was curious about the relationship of numbers and synchronicity. How birthdays and star signs were fascinating to her. Bush definitely believes in astrology and thinks there is something in it. How when you were born affects your personality. The movement and relative positions of celestial bodies affects human affairs and behaviour. There are entire websites that talk about Kate Bush’s star sign and draw her natal chart. Kate Bush is a natal Sun-Uranus in Leo person with Scorpio Rising. In her natal chart, Bush's North Node (her destiny) is in a tight conjunction to the Lord of Fame and Success, Jupiter, in airy Libra.

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1978/PHOTO CREDIT: Brian Aris

Coming back to birthdays and coincidence, it does sort of link in to the paranormal. When thinking about the song Strange Phenomena at least. I will move on a minute. However, this article about Strange Phenomena highlights some interesting observations about the song and Bush’s beliefs:

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

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

It is not only the case that Bush talked about numbers, coincidences and synchronicity in her earliest albums. Think about Pi (π) form 2005’s Aerial. Bush fascinated with numbers once more. This time, she was reciting π to seventy-eight decimal places. The song is about a man’s fascination with reciting π. This is what Bush told Ken Bruce in a 2005 about one of Aerial’s most interesting and overlooked songs:

“I find numbers fascinating, the idea that nearly everything can be broken down into numbers, it is a fascinating thing; and i think also that we are completely surrounded by numbers now, in a way that we weren’t you know even 20, 30 years ago we’re all walking around with mobile phones and numbers on our foreheads almost; and it’s like you know computers…”

I might go into it a bit more in another feature. From her childhood to the present day, there is this depth and side to Kate Bush that not a lot of people discuss. Alongside her embrace and portrayal of the paranormal, scary, gothic and dark is this curiosity about the relationship of numbers and synchronicity. How she and Emily Brontë shared birthdays. Here is what Bush said about Strange Phenomena: “Strange Phenomena” is about how coincidences cluster together. We can all recall instances when we have been thinking about a particular person and then have met a mutual friend who – totally unprompted – will begin talking about that person. That’s a very basic way of explaining what I mean, but these “clusters of coincidence” occur all the time. We are surrounded by strange phenomena, but very few people are aware of it”. Later in life when she was reciting a mathematical constant. Whereas most artists focus on their own life and love, Kate Bush has always looked beyond that. Bringing film and literature into her music. Exploring the paranormal and otherworldly. In addition, the relationship of numbers, synchronicity and coincidences. It is all part of Kate Bush’s…

DEEPER understanding.

FEATURE: Spotlight: Sunny War

FEATURE:

 

 

Spotlight

Sunny War

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AN artist who…

PHOTO CREDIT: Joshua Black Wilkins

is currently on tour, I wanted to shine a light on the brilliant Sunny War. This is an artist I am new to but wanted to recommend to everyone. I am going to end with her new album, Armageddon in a Summer Dress. This is an album that you will want to check out. I am going to get to a couple of new interviews with Sunny War. First, this feature caught my eye. This is someone whose brilliance and importance goes beyond her music. I do hope that more and more interviews are published so that we can learn more about this incredible human:

“In 2022, punk-blues innovator Sunny War moved into her late father’s house in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and began making repairs. There was no heat that first winter and the house needed a full electrical rewiring. By winter 2023, she had the money to heat the place, but as the temperature rose each night, Sunny felt a strange impulse to patrol the house in the dark, swinging her grandfather’s machete at the ghosts inhabiting the top floor.

At the start of our Zoom call interview in January, Sunny recounts the bizarre magical realism of the weeks she spent living with an undiscovered gas leak. I ask enough follow-up questions to be reassured that my friend is not still being fumigated in her own home before I allow myself to belly laugh. “I have to fix everything,” she sighs.

Sunny goes on to explain that by the time the city discovered and fixed the problem, the mood had already been set for her forthcoming album, Armageddon in a Summer Dress. I would describe the results as psychedelic and subtly dangerous.

My friend Sunny can be a little hard to read, a fact which she mentions at one point during our call. We first met at Americanafest in 2019. It was my second year traveling from New York to Tennessee for the annual roots music conference and festival. That summer I had made up my mind to bring Black artists together during the festival for our own unofficial day party. I booked Dee’s Country Cocktail Lounge, cross-referenced names on the festival poster with Google image searches, and sent out a few invitations. Sunny agreed to perform, as did Tré Burt and Milwaukee folk duo Nickel & Rose (featuring Carl Nichols, the artist soon to become Buffalo Nichols). One after another we played our songs then stepped out onto the Madison, Tennessee, porch, most of us meeting for the first time. It was the greatest number of Black people I had ever been around in a professional space since releasing my debut album in 2017.

It was clear to me even then that Sunny was a star. Carl, Tré, and I were on ascendant career arcs of our own, but Sunny was out ahead somehow. She was already well known in songwriter circles for her inimitable movements on the guitar and for her punk rock roots, but it was the intensity of her stage presence that stood out to me most on that first meeting. I watched her suck in the air and light around her as she sang, quietly commanding the audience’s attention. Songs like “Drugs Are Bad” and “Shell” became spells when sung in War’s almost-effortless, warmly breathy style. She appeared peaceful in her own creative world amidst the restless energy of the festival.

2019 was also the year that Sunny founded the downtown Los Angeles chapter of Food Not Bombs, a national network of community groups addressing hunger. In interviews about the movement she was candid about having experienced houselessness herself and how she noticed the disproportionate presence of veterans on the street. She organized weekly meetups in which volunteers made meals and shared them, potluck-style, with their unhoused neighbors on skid row. When COVID hit they switched to burritos and sack lunches. On “Deployed and Destroyed,” one of the outstanding tracks from Sunny’s 2021 album, Simple Syrup, she invites her listener to spend three minutes and 54 seconds in the shoes of a 26-year-old unhoused veteran experiencing PTSD. When I listen to her sing “I still love you/ We’re still friends” I feel like I am sitting beside her. This is what Aristotle and contemporary Marxists call “praxis.”

Sunny is fearless on stage. Six years into our friendship I remain awed by the way in which she commands attention without ever seeming contained by it. Her presence has a kinetic power that you can more easily get lost in than describe. We met up in Chicago on a winter night in early 2023 when Sunny was on tour and I was in between tours. Both of us were depressed, I think. Wide, wet snowflakes were beginning to fall outside while we caught up over drinks. We bribed the DJ into letting us jump the line for karaoke and then launched into a formally unconventional performance of Destiny’s Child’s “Jumpin’ Jumpin’.” The mostly-white crowd of beer-drinking twenty-somethings were amused at first and then bored. I gave up. Sunny stayed the course, winning the audience over with mischief in her eyes.

Later that year Sunny released Anarchist Gospel on New West Records to well-deserved, unanimous acclaim. The album featured Americana heavy hitters Allison Russell, Dave Rawlings, and Chris Pierce. She also toured with Mitski, broadening her fandom to include more indie listeners. I cheered my friend from afar, mostly on Instagram, as her star continued to rise.

When I ask about her memories of that album cycle, Sunny enthusiastically recalls the younger audiences who discovered her music. She expresses gratitude that a 14-year-old at a Mitski concert, someone who “actually is into music for the first time in their life, in the way that you are when you hate your parents and all you have is music” would become a fan. A lot of journalists described her as an “emerging” artist or a songwriter soon to be one of the most beloved in Americana. But for those of us on the fringes of the format, Sunny had been the best around for a minute and the momentum of her career spoke for itself.

Sunny’s latest album, Armageddon In A Summer Dress, comes out on February 21. I ask her to describe the new record in her own words. “Silly,” she responds. I ask if there is a genre descriptor for her music in general. She says, “No.”  I am going to follow the artist’s lead and not do her album the disservice of describing it too much. I will say that Armageddon In A Summer Dress is her seventh full-length effort and contains her most inspired vocal performances yet – and some of her finest lyrics.

There is a haze hovering in the top layers of some of these tunes. The winding guitar melodies often weave themselves into the vocal lines, but sometimes they go their own way. I ask her if audiences are reacting to the Black anarchist content of her songs differently than they did the last time she released a folk album with transparently leftist politics. “I don’t feel like people pay that much attention to my lyrics,” she responds. Her primary musical concern, she reflects, is playing the guitar. And in any case, the best way to metabolize these songs is by listening to them repeatedly.

Sunny, Carl, Tré, and I have remained loosely intertwined in the years since that first Americana kickback. We have toured together. We run into each other at festivals and in thrift shops. Tré and Sunny were roommates for a time and in the summertime can be seen riding bikes like cousins in Sunny’s recent music video for “Scornful Heart.” I interview my friends periodically.

We all continue to embody aspects of the blues tradition while resisting categorization. Sunny continues moving patiently through her own cycles of living, transforming, creating in darkness, and then telling the story. She leaps unexpectedly from now to the future and then doubles back to sample tradition, inviting you to keep up. Her lyrics are disarmingly empathetic. Like all great artists, Sunny moves in her own time, less concerned with debating the canon than she is with creating the future. She looks back on the nights she hunted ghosts with her grandfather’s machete joking, “That wasn’t me!”

There is great integrity in Sunny’s storytelling, which means that no matter how long it has been since we last spoke, she will catch me up quickly when we meet again. I ask her who the narrator of “No One Calls Me Baby” is, trying to signal that I am a feminist who recognizes women writers as authors beyond the world of autobiography. But she quickly tells me that the narrator is her and fills me in on the past few months of her life. She has been single for over a year, and has been learning to enjoy the alone time in a house she owns. We commiserate about being single, but we are both leaned back by this point, looking down on loneliness together. “No one calls me baby anymore/ I hold my own hand now…”.

I want to move to an interview from The Line of Best Fit. Speaking with her around the release of her fourth studio album, they found her at her most maximalist. An artist documenting the American decline. This is somebody that the whole world needs to know about. One of the most compelling and important artists in music today:

“Sunny, born Sydney Ward, was destined to be a bluesperson. “My grandma took me to see B.B. King and I saw Bo Diddley when I was a kid. My whole family is really into blues. Blues and gospel, that’s just what I grew up listening to,” she tells me from her home in Chattanooga, Tennessee on an overcast winter’s morning. But just as her career has already stretched much further than blues singers of the early twentieth century, so too has it meandered into other genres, other modes of working and writing.

“Punk rock is the other side of me. I listen to a lot of trap music. I like a lot of electronic music. Then I also really like bossa nova. I listen to a lot of country. I listen to reggae. Well, only old reggae and ska. I listen to a lot of soul music. If it’s good, I fuck with it,” she says, barely pausing to take a breath. Ward’s string of full-length albums mirror this broad tapestry of taste; while 2018’s With the Sun is sparse and to-the-heart blues songwriting in the traditional mode, 2021’s Simple Syrup adds splashes of jazz to this near-perfected template and 2023’s Anarchist Gospel salutes her Nashvillian roots with a nod and a wink to country.

In 2024, the nonagenarian elder of country music Willie Nelson covered Ward’s own “If It Wasn’t Broken” for his album Last Leaf on the Tree, the track nestled amongst his interpretations of songs by, among others, Nina Simone, Tom Waits, and Neil Young. Like the 91-year-old Nelson, whose battered, bruised, scraped, and scribbled-on nylon-string guitar has travelled the road with him for over half a century, Ward, too, has kept her instrument close at hand throughout. Her commitment to those six strings is such that, like Nelson, she recently developed nerve damage and carpal tunnel syndrome in her hand. “They gave me a steroid injection and I’m supposed to wear a brace every day. It is better than it was. It still kind of hurts sometimes, though,” she tells me. “I’ve been playing for 27 years,” she adds, laughing, by way of an explanation.

Ward’s connection to Nelson is also borne out in her collaborations with Nelson’s son Micah (Particle Kid), with whom she made the 2018 collaborative album Particle War. What is especially remarkable about Nelson’s cover of "If It Wasn’t Broken", though, is how easily it translates into his own style. When sung by Ward, the song is inimitably in her own world-weary but defiant style, but sung by Nelson it takes on a timeless and malleable quality; it becomes, in other words, a modern standard. Fittingly, then, songwriting is what Ward sees as her ultimate vocation, transcending even her role as singer and performer: “I don’t want to be a singer as much as I want to be a songwriter. I want to write for other people. If somebody was like ‘I need you to write a song for Mariah Carey,’ that would be fun.”

These songwriting aspirations speak to the inherent humility at the core of Ward’s music, her eagerness to collaborate and to willingly vacate the spotlight at particular moments. Her latest album, Armageddon in a Summer Dress, contains such an array of open-hearted and open-minded collaboration that it feels near-maximalist when compared with her bare-bones early recordings. Take "Scornful Heart" for instance – a bold and telling choice for the record’s second single that features friend and collaborator Tré Burt on lead vocals rather than Ward herself. “That song is for me and Tré’s band, which is going to be called Smooth Harrisons. That was the only song we finished and I was just like… we should put that on the album – on my album.”

Her work with Andrija Tokic, who produced both Anarchist Gospel and Armageddon in a Summer Dress, has also broadened her sound. “I like Andrija because he’s down to record, like, hitting a can with something and then putting a bunch of effects on it. He's down to do stuff just to see. He’s more experimental. Like, let’s just try this. There’s one song [on the album], ‘No One Calls Me Baby’, where we’re using an autoharp. Just doing fun stuff, fun studio stuff.” This collectivist approach is something Ward says she wants to replicate live, too: “My first two shows of the year are going to be with a five-piece band and I’m hoping that we tour as a band. I’ve never done that before. You can’t even jam when you’re by yourself, and I actually do take solos and shit if I’m playing with other people. It gives you room to just do more fun stuff musically”.

PHOTO CREDIT: Joshua Black Wilkins

I am going to finish with a review for Armageddon in a Summer Dress. Even if I am new to Sunny War, I am determined to discover as much as I can. Her music is so moving and arresting. Some of the most heart-stopping and shocking words on her album arrive on the song, Walking Contradiction: “Doesn’t matter what your silly little signs have to say/‘Cause the genocide is funded by the taxes that you pay”:

“Sunny War has done it again. Her brand new album, Armageddon in a Summer Dress (out February 21 via New West Records), is yet another anarcho-punk-roots masterpiece in her already deep-and-wide catalog of superlative recordings. The project builds on the sonic and rhetorical universe of her critically acclaimed and triumphantly received 2023 release, Anarchist Gospel, further expanding her charming, down-to-earth doctrine of mutual aid, community, and truly radical ideas – musically, and otherwise – exactly when we need them most.

That fact – the apropos timing of this collection of songs and their release – feels most striking because this music wasn’t written expressly to be a response to the current critical mass of fascism, oligarchy, and attacks on human rights in our country and around the world. Instead, the messages and morals in these songs are well-placed, not as slapdash reactions to the current political discourse or as activist-branded cash grabs in a terrifying societal moment, but by focusing on the real day-to-day implications of such imperialism as evidenced within War’s own life and her own inner circle.

On Armageddon’s opening track, “One Way Train,” she sings:

When there’s no one left to use
And no police or state
And the fascists and the classists
All evaporate
Won’t you meet me on the outskirts
Of my left brain
Close your eyes and take a ride
On a one way train

This album is exactly such a refuge on par with the singer’s “left brain” – and stemming directly from it! – in “One Way Train.” Armageddon is a respite from the noise of the news cycle and the sensationalism of consumerist media that needs not deny the realities we all witness and live through in order to be a resting place. This isn’t toxic positivity or “joy” and “hope” as cudgels to smack down criticism of inequalities, corruption, and ruling classes, thereby reinforcing the status quo. The songs of Armageddon in a Summer Dress do feel hopeful– but because they acknowledge and grapple with these issues, instead of willing them away under the rug or into hiding.

The deft and artful positioning of these incisive songs is directly tied to the ways anarchy, mutual aid, and solidarity have been woven into War’s life as an artist – and as a human, since even before she picked up the guitar. These are embodied, real concepts to Sunny, not just intellectual ideas and hypotheticals.

Punk and blues, folk and grunge ooze out of songs ripe for protest and resistance, but never packaged in a pink crocheted pussy cat hat or internet-ready bumper sticker quips. Sunny War knows the violence and tyranny we all face – she has faced it her entire life – and gives it the treatment it deserves, but without ever preaching or finger-wagging. The beliefs evident in Armageddon in a Summer Dress are never contingent on which team, “red or blue,” holds the power. Rather, the hope and tenacity in these songs feels derived from an intrinsic understanding that it’s always been “the many versus the few” and “the powerless versus the powerful” where the battle lines are drawn, instead.

“Walking Contradiction” – which features punk icon Steve Ignorant – is searing in its indictment of toothless neoliberalism having landed us in this exact political and social scenario:

…While the war pigs killed more kids today
Picket signs were made 6,000 miles away
And all the lefties and the liberals were marching so you know
Just because they pay their taxes doesn’t mean that they don’t know
All the pigs and the big wigs foaming at the mouth
Look down at us laughing like we’ll never figure out
All the war outside starts here at home
If they didn’t have our money they’d be fighting it alone
Doesn’t matter what your silly little signs have to say
‘Cause the genocide is funded by the taxes that you pay

Stopping and inhabiting this song, one of the project’s singles, and its message is illuminating. Especially when you realize it was written under the prior administration, but applies to the current one as well. And, perhaps, to every other presidential administration in U.S. history.

Armageddon in a Summer Dress still feels light and rewarding, though. It’s flowing and intuitive, and decidedly charming, even with these stark messages. Because, like most of Sunny War’s creative output, it actually drives to the heart of the issues we all turn over in our minds and on our screens each day, rather than tilting at superficial, sensational windmills that end up reinforcing our oligarchic status quo.

Of course, this album is not solely political and anarchic and intellectual. In fact, it’s not attempting to be cerebral and be-monocled at all. These are songs of love, of grief, of being an individual with a collective mindset in an individualist world with collective blindness.

There are songs of introspection, of perception, of self growth, of regression. Each feels fully realized in production, lush and deep. But there, in the gaps, in the bones of each track, are War’s signature fingerstyle licks, hooks, and turns of phrase on the guitar. She plays banjo throughout the project as well, and though the referenced genres evident on the project are endlessly rootsy, the blues and folk approach that charmed much of the bluegrass, folk, and Americana worlds previously serve a more subtle purpose here. War’s personality on her instruments is still prominent, and is ultimately successful playing more of a support role to the greater whole. Above all else, you can tell creating this album and these songs must have been so much fun to make.

Tré Burt, Valerie June, and John Doe – along with Ignorant – all guest on the record, which was produced by Andrija Tokic and recorded in Nashville, just up the highway from War’s current hometown of Chattanooga, Tennessee. Like Anarchist Gospel, seeing War’s community of collaborators grow and morph on the new project again speaks to the way this guitarist-songwriter-performer’s mission is an active, constructive one. It’s never merely a mantra hung on the wall to be admired from afar.

As we all face an ongoing apocalypse, as we each reckon with the indisputable fact that we are already living in dystopia – and have been – Armageddon in a Summer Dress is the perfect album to bring along with us. Dancing and flowing and twirling through the end of the world is certainly not a winning strategy, but dancing, marching, caring for one another, and lifting each other up despite Armageddon and imperialism might just do the trick.

She perhaps encapsulates this feeling best alongside wailing organ on “Bad Times:”

Had nothing so I had to borrow
What I owe’s gonna double tomorrow
Maybe now or in an hour or so
I’m gonna have to let everything go

So long room and board
And all the other things I can’t afford
You’re overrated anyway
I’ll be good soon as you
Bad times stay away
Bad times stay away
Bad times stay away
Bad times stay away…

This affirmation is not the end game, it is merely the beginning. If we take Sunny War’s ideals to heart, if we sing along at the top of our lungs, if we do mutual aid on a daily basis, if we take each moment, one individual second at a time– we, too, can navigate through Armageddon in a Summer Dress, emerging on the other side in a better, more just, more sunny world”.

I am not sure whether Sunny War is coming over to the U.K. anytime soon. I hope that her music catches the ear more fully of stations like BBC Radio 6 Music. So that there is more exposure for someone who I think is going to have a long career. I will return to her music soon enough.  I wanted to use this opportunity celebrate and highlight…

A phenomenal artist.

____________

Follow Sunny War

Official:

http://www.sunnywar.com/

Instagram:

https://www.instagram.com/sunnywarmusic/

Twitter:

https://x.com/SunnyWar

Spotify:

https://open.spotify.com/artist/01GKiTphQwz4guZQntMha8?si=IoOlxYiOR6eYMuRGUN0G_A

YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCbkvZUD6w-3QWR4qjJQpP-w

Facebook:

https://www.facebook.com/sunnywarmusic/

FEATURE: The Digital Mixtape: The Lady Gaga Collection

FEATURE:

 

 

The Digital Mixtape

The Lady Gaga Collection

_________

THE reason for…

PHOTO CREDIT: Domen & van de Velde

highlighting Lady Gaga is because her latest album, Mayhem, is out and receiving positive reviews. I wanted to use this Digital Mixtape to compile a selection of Lady Gaga’s songs. The best-known tracks and some deeper cuts. I am going to get to that mixtape soon. Before that, I wanted to include a review for Mayhem. This is what NME said

“When Lady Gaga first announced ‘Mayhem’ in January, she said it “started as me facing my fear of returning to the pop music my earliest fans loved”. She hasn’t literally tried to recreate the sound of 2008 – there’s no reunion with her ‘Just Dance’ producer RedOne – but Gaga has tapped into her old sense of excess. On her first proper pop album since 2020’s house-infused ‘Chromatica’, she dials absolutely everything up to eleven.

Gaga telegraphed her return to core values on recent single ‘Abracadabra’, a sinewy synth-pop banger that culminates in a truly ludicrous vocal hook: “Abracadabra, amor-oo-na-na!” Thankfully, it’s no red herring on an album that stomps out of the speakers with unselfconscious confidence. We get Gaga delivering a stuttering, ‘Poker Face’-style vocal hook on ‘Garden of Eden’, Prince-ish slinkiness mixed with punk on ‘Killah’ and the dark melodrama of ‘Bad’-era Michael Jackson on ‘The Beast’.

Longtime Little Monsters will find plenty of references to Gaga’s pop past as well. Take ‘Perfect Celebrity’, where she comes across as a battle-hardened version of the starlet she played on her 2008 debut ‘The Fame’. “You love to hate mе, I’m the perfect celebrity,” she sings, before an onslaught of lashing guitars remind you that Gaga’s stage name is a nod to a Queen song.

Co-producing with Andrew Watt (Rolling Stones, Post Malone) and Cirkut (Charli XCX, Rosé), Gaga infuses her bombastic dance-pop sound with stadium rock theatrics throughout. ‘Don’t Call Tonight’, an evocative and anthemic snapshot of a toxic relationship, is begging to be belted out in front of 70,000 lit-up smartphones. Then there’s disco-rap banger ‘Zombieboy’, where Gaga sometimes sounds a bit like a musical theatre kid channelling Blondie’s Debbie Harry – but just about gets away with it.

There’s a nonchalant confidence in the way Gaga sticks to her maximalist vision without pandering to contemporary pop trends. Most ‘Mayhem’ tracks run close to or over four minutes, making them mini-epics in the TikTok era. Only ‘How Bad Do U Want Me’, which has shades of ‘1989’-era Taylor Swift and Yazoo’s synth-pop classic ‘Only You’, doesn’t sound totally and thrillingly Gaga. ‘Die With A Smile’, her relatively restrained soft rock duet with Bruno Mars, is sequenced at the end like a palate cleanser after a feast of bold flavours.

Ultimately, ‘Mayhem’ feels like a great Gaga album because it’s just so much fun. At times, it’s a bit like reconnecting with an old friend who makes sense even when they seem to be chatting nonsense. When she sings “river in my eyes, I’ve got a poem in my throat” on ‘LoveDrug’, it’s just her overblown way of saying she’s sad and tongue-tied. Seventeen years after she broke through with ‘Just Dance’, Lady Gaga remains pop’s foremost agent of impeccably crafted chaos”.

I am going to wrap things up. One of the most original and influential artists of her generation, I wanted to mark the release of an excellent new Lady Gaga album. A look back through her career. Someone who has many more albums in her. If you are fairly unfamiliar with her work or are a huge fan, this mixtape should give you a thorough representation of…

A music great.

FEATURE: Classic Acts and Modern Icons: Reacting to the First Wave of Names for This Year’s Glastonbury Festival

FEATURE:

 

 

Classic Acts and Modern Icons

Reacting to the First Wave of Names for This Year’s Glastonbury Festival

_________

EVEN though…

IN THIS PHOTO: Neil Young/PHOTO CREDIT: Ryan Pfluger for The New Yorker

every year the Glastonbury Festival is announced there is division and wildly differing reactions, this year does have some clear positives and exciting first-timers. At such a horrible, unpredictable and frightening time, I think music and festivals in particular are more important than ever. There are some big takeaways from the names that have already been announced. Of course, there will be more names coming up. The poster will get fuller. What we did get yesterday (6th March) were the three headline acts that will take to the Pyramid Stage, together with those that will headline other stages. Before getting to some reaction, The Guardian wrote about the varied and exciting names that have just been announced:

“This year’s Glastonbury set will feature two first-time headliners in the British pop-rock group the 1975 and the US pop-punk songwriter Olivia Rodrigo.

The band, led by Matty Healy, will top the Friday night billing on the Pyramid stage. Rodrigo will perform on Sunday. In 2022, the Drivers License singer performed on the Other stage, a set that boasted a guest spot from Lily Allen and an excoriation of the US supreme court following the overturning of Roe v Wade a day earlier.

In between on Saturday comes a previously – accidentally – announced headline set from Neil Young and his band the Chrome Hearts. On 1 January, Young declared, out of the blue, that he was withdrawing from this year’s festival owing to his perception that it was under broadcast partner the BBC’s “corporate control”. Two days later, he said he had received “an error in information” and that the festival was “back on our itinerary”. He previously headlined in 2009.

The soul-pop star Raye will play on the Pyramid stage before Young. The 27-year-old Londoner is already something of a national treasure after walking away from her major label to find critical and commercial success with her debut album, My 21st Century Blues.

The festival previously revealed that Rod Stewart would take this year’s “legends” slot. Stewart, who turned 80 in January, said he was “more than able to pleasure and titillate” at his age.

The Other stage headliners have also been revealed. After turning the world lime green with her culture-dominating album Brat last summer – and rivalling Dua Lipa’s headline extravaganza with merely a DJ set at Glastonbury 2024 – Charli xcx will headline the festival’s second stage on Saturday. The London rapper Loyle Carner headlines it on Friday, and the Prodigy will close the stage on Sunday – the dance group’s first Glastonbury performance since the death of their frontman, Keith Flint, in 2019, just before that year’s festival.

A raft of talents old and new are among this year’s first-time performers. At the breakout end of the scale, there is the Stick Season troubadour Noah Kahan, the That’s So True songwriter Gracie Abrams, the Messy singer Lola Young, the euphoric Brits-minted star Myles Smith, the cheeky American-Ghanaian rapper Amaarae and the A Bar Song (Tipsy) star and Beyoncé collaborator Shaboozey.

There are more surprising debuts from Alanis Morissette, Busta Rhymes, Brandi Carlile – who will be fresh off the back of a duets album with Elton John – the US girl group En Vogue, Anohni and the Johnsons, the cult British funk act Cymande, the hard-touring Osees and everyone’s friend electric, Gary Numan.

Worthy farm stalwarts scheduled to perform include Ezra Collective – riding high off winning best group at this year’s Brit awards – the Australian punk tykes Amyl and the Sniffers, Jorja Smith, Creedence Clearwater Revival’s John Fogerty and the roots reggae stars Burning Spear and Black Uhuru.

Friday also sees the return of the Isle of Wight indie duo Wet Leg, presumed to be back this year with their second album. The Irish pop star CMAT is another returning talent, along with the Bath dance iconoclast PinkPantheress and Sheffield’s Self Esteem, who returns with her new album, A Complicated Woman, in April.

After winning best rap album for her mixtape Alligator Bites Never Heal at this year’s Grammy awards – which also featured a performance hinting at the magic she will bring to Worthy Farm – the Florida rapper Doechii will headline the West Holts stage on Saturday”.

The biggest ‘negatives’ perhaps – or things that seem odd – revolve around the headline slots. One can appreciate the fact a legend like Neil Young has been booked. He and his band will be a popular choice. I was expecting Olivia Rodrigo to have been booked a couple of years ago. Although it is a really good booking, I wonder why she was not a headliner closer to the release of her 2023 album, GUTS. However, as an established artist, it is appropriate she is given a bigger stage. However, it just seems like the timing is a bit off. I wonder whether someone like Sabrina Carpenter was considered for a headline slot. With such much momentum behind her right now, she would have been a huge booking. Carpenter plays at London’s Hyde Park on 5th July, but maybe there was a budget issue. Perhaps Carpenter was approached but did not feel up for it. There could be a lot of reasons for it. However, I do think it is great that the headliners are a mix of ages. You have the iconic Neil Young and he will bring this golden set. It will be a hugely emotional experience for older and younger fans alike. No line-up is ever going to unite people. D.J., broadcaster and journalist Georgie Rogers said in an interview when asked for her reaction that it is impossible to please everyone. You always get people saying it is the worst line-up ever or the best. In truth, the past few years have definitely been more towards the ‘best’ end of the scale. The fact that there is gender balance being struck is vital. Upcoming artists given exposure and opportunity. More varied in terms of the musical palette. Icons like Paul McCartney and Elton John headlining. We have also seen Dua Lipa and SZA headline. One of the festival’s biggest issues was a lack of female headliners on the Pyramid Stage. Before they booked two female headliners (SZA and Dua Lipa) last year, there had only been four female headliners since the year 2000. That is a shocking and frankly depressing statistic! I was expecting either two or three female headliners this year. Will we ever see a year when female dominance is reflected in an all-female line-up on the Pyramid Stage headline slots?! The fact that such a big step forward was taken last year pointed at a new tide and improvement. If we have incredible women headlining other stages, the Pyramid Stage has only one female headliner.

Some might say the fact it is not all-male is a positive. That is true. It was be a massive step back to have no women. However, like last year, there is one odd inclusion. I can appreciate Coldplay were a crowd-pleasing booking last year. However, it didn’t seem fresh or a reaction to this new album that was wowing critics. It seemed a little lazy. This year, The 1975 have been booked. Aside from the fact that their lead Matty Healy – who I have made no secret of disliking enormously – is controversial, the band have not released an album since 2022. Being Funny in a Foreign Language got positive reaction but the band have not put much out in the three years since. It does seem another case of bad timing. It is baffling why they were selected when there are so many other bands that are more worthy. Fontaines D.C. would have been awesome headliners. Solo artists like Sam Fender. I was also thinking about Kylie Minogue. She was due to headline in 2005 but was replaced by Basement Jaxx. Minogue was diagnosed with breast cancer and one would have hoped that twenty years on, she would have been given that headline slot. She has played since 2005 but with the remarkable TENSION (2023) ranking alongside her best albums, she would have been a phenomenal booking. Also, her 2000 album, Light Years, turns twenty-five in September. Its iconic lead single, Spinning Around, turns twenty-five shortly before Glastonbury starts this year. As Glastonbury does not started until 25th June, Minogue will be done with The Tension Tour. It would be a perfect finale or encore if she was a Glastonbury headliner! The biggest omission is Charli xcx. Headlining on the Other Stage on the Saturday night, why not a Saturday headline slot on the Pyramid Stage?!

Dua Lipa was booked last year. Olivia Rodrigo this year. Charli xcx is arguably more popular and worthy. I reckon her Saturday headline slot will get more attention and buzz than The 1975’s headline slot. It does seem a weird oversight. Her time is now. With the momentum created from last year’s BRAT – which many highlighted as their album of the year -, she would be one of the best headliners from recent years! I think that her set will be a five-star spectacle, but you have to ask why she was not asked to headline the Pyramid Stage. It would mean two women headlining the festival’s biggest stage. Keeping that advantage from last year. Even though this year is not a step back, it does seem to be a missed opportunity. However, it is good that artists like Charli xcx and Doechii get a big platform. That might not have happened in years past. The festival organisers (Emily and Michael Eavis) aware of more female visibility in headline slots. Greater parity across the bill. Still a festival leading the way when it comes to gender inequality, though there is clearly room for improvement. The Pyramid Stage headline bookings have raised some questions. Though we have to celebrate the positives. Neil Young and The Chrome Hearts will be amazing. Olivia Rodrigo is definitely going to smash it! The biggest takeaway from the announced names is how broad it is. Something to please everyone. Alanis Morisette a first-time booking. Timely, as her third studio album, Jagged Little Pill, turns thirty on 13th June – two weeks before she plays Glastonbury. Busta Rhymes is an unusual call but a great one! En Vogue, Lola Young and Supergrass playing on the same day (Friday) as Self Esteem. It is a great Friday that promises so many treats. We will get more names but the ones announced so far are amazing.

Saturday is a brilliant one. Doechii and Charli xcx. Nova Twins and Gary Numan. Aside from some questionable calls like The Script and Kaiser Chiefs, they do work when you think about their demographic and fanbase. Appealing to a different crowd than Doechii or Beth Gibbons. Sunday ending the festival with a bang. Possibly the most diverse day, the Legends slot sees Rod Stewart take to the stage. He plays on the same day as The Prodigy, Olivia Rodrigo, Kae Tempest, The Brian Jonestown Massacre and the newly-reformed The Maccabees. When more names are announced, I think we will see a lot of rising artists given incredible recognition. Although I have some concerns and issues with the line-up – especially the main headliners -, it is subjective. Again, you cannot please everyone! Eclectic genres and time periods. Gender parity and important headline slots for women. Some older and classic bands sitting alongside modern icons. Perhaps one of the most enjoyable diverse line-up in many years! Last year’s festival was a wonderful thing. I think that this year’s could be even bigger and better. When more names are announced, we will get a clear picture of what Glastonbury 2025 will look like. However, the first wave of names offers plenty of positives! That is the main thing: the positive majority. My niggles aside, it is great that the U.K.’s biggest music festival is still going strong. Down at Worthy Farm, from 25th to 29th June, there is going to be…

A huge celebration!

FEATURE: Spotlight: Sienna Spiro

FEATURE:

 

 

Spotlight

 

Sienna Spiro

_________

I will end with a review…

for her new E.P., SINK NOW, SWIM LATER. One that has got a lot of critical praise, it is no wonder the amazing Sienna Spiro is being talked about as a talent to watch. The nineteen-year-old London-based artist is turning heads right now. I am going to move to a few interviews with her. So that we can discover more about this incredible artist. Sienna Spiro is the daughter of jeweller Glenn Spiro, who named a yellow diamond ring the Sienna Star after her; when auctioned in June 2021, the diamond sold for $3.4 million. It is a pretty cool fact. However, it is her musical upbringing that is more important. The artists she was exposed to in her earliest years. Influenced and affected by artists such as Frank Sinatra, Etta James, and Amy Winehouse, Spiro began writing songs at the age of ten. She was also inspired by Hip-Hop artists of the 2000s. During the pandemic, in 2021, Spiro started uploading videos of herself perform to TikTok. Gaining momentum and love across the platform, she released a series of popular and extraordinary singles. Last year was a busy and exciting one for her. She is in the middle of a run of tour dates at the moment. Tomorrow (11th March), she plays at the 02 Academy Brixton alongside Nao and Nectar Woode. I predict that she will be playing huge international dates and big festivals stages soon enough. I am going to start out with this feature from New Wave Magazine. They are big fans of Sienna Spiro’s work:

“You may know Sienna from her breathtaking covers on TikTok that distract you from scrolling and pull you in to listen to the 18-year-old’s newest releases that hear her soulful raspy tone. What is for sure is the talent Sienna Spiro has possessed from songwriting since ten years old. Beyond her years in her capabilities within sound, composition and performing, the singer debuts two new singles this year, ‘NEED ME’ and as of today, ‘MAYBE’. Sienna tells us, “It’s a super intimate project. These songs are for people to get to know me but also to interpret and feel in their own way”.

In conversation with New Wave Magazine, Sienna opens up about her journey so far into the music industry and learning the process behind creating, finishing and releasing a song. Something that is quite clearly natural for the artist. From pre-teens into adulthood, Sienna’s well versed background of sounds has evolved her into a multitalented songwriter with no limits to her talent in genre techniques. “It comes really naturally because it’s what I listen to growing up as a kid”.

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“It feels weird to have something out. Going from bedroom songwriting to writing with other people but I love the writing process”.

The single ‘NEED ME’ hailing in over 1.2 million streams, is an experimental ballad drawing from Sienna’s personal experiences in a soulful captivating sound. The minor chords and key changes create a solid foundation as a mature and delicate introduction to the singer’s artistry. Inspirations include jazz musicians such as Etta James and Frank Sinatra but also include a range of Hip hop legends from the early 2000’s who have created a natural influence over her music and fashion styles.

In the digital age of TikTok, the platform has grown Sienna’s audience into a community she deems feels more like “friends rather than fans” who recognise the singer and relate to her on a personal level. Reinforcing this connection through both singles, the artist utilises each track to draw emotion, frustration and confusion into riffs, runs and a strong vocal range that carries her raspy notes.

Most recently performing at London’s KoKo Camden venue, Sienna says she is most comfortable when singing at acoustic shows and expresses the value of gaining feedback from her performances. Not to mention the importance of what she is wearing she says, “what I wear matters massively, I cannot sing in a dress”.  It comes naturally for the singer to dress in style, it impacts more than comfortability, combining her love for Hip hop in music with streetwear in her style”.

There is a lot of new press interest for Sienna Spiro. Someone who is going to have a very long and illustrious career, at only nineteen, it is incredible how assured and complete she sounds. Like she has been making music for decades. It will be exciting seeing how Spiro expands and evolves through the years. I want to move to this interview from 10 Magazine and highlight a lot of their chat with this stunning and original artist:

“With a voice that lingers long after the last note fades, Sienna Spiro is more than just a rising star – she’s a storyteller, weaving raw emotion and intimate confessions into every song. At just 19, the London-based singer-songwriter has already built a powerful presence, amassing millions of streams and captivating audiences with her distinctive blend of soul, R&B and pop.

Sienna’s journey began in quiet moments of self-discovery, writing songs from a young age of 10. But it was her spine-tingling cover of Donald Glover’s Redbone – which racked up over 6.7 million views on TikTok – that first revealed the sheer magnetism of her voice. That moment of viral recognition wasn’t just a fleeting spark; it was the ignition of something much bigger. When she finally introduced the world to her own music, the response was instant. From the hypnotic allure of her debut single Need Me to the vulnerable, aching ballad Maybe., Sienna’s ability to translate emotion into melody has earned her nods from the likes of SZA and Snoh Aalegra, as well as chart placements across Denmark, Sweden, Norway and the UK.

Now, with the release of her highly anticipated debut EP on February 21st, Sienna steps fully into her artistry. Featuring the passionate defiance of Need Me, Back to Blonde and a collection of unreleased gems, this body of work cements her as a voice impossible to ignore. It’s not just music – it’s an invitation into her world, where heartbreak, self-discovery and resilience come alive in every lyric.

Fresh off a sold-out headline show at Hoxton Hall and celebrating one million streams for Back to Blonde, Sienna Spiro is ready for the next chapter. If her path till now is any sign, this is just the start.

1. Who is Sienna Spiro?

Still trying to work that out.

2. Three words that sum up your vibe?

Stubborn. Passionate. Honest.

3. Which artists had the biggest influence on you growing up?

My dad used to play the greats – Frank Sinatra, Nina Simone, Etta James, Donny Hathaway, Marvin Gaye and Sara Vaughn in the house all the time and that’s really what started my love for music.

4. What can fans expect from your new EP?

They can expect a really intimate project, where I feel they can get to know me on a personal level but also discover their own meanings within the songs. The EP is also split into two sections with ‘sink’ songs and ‘swim’ songs so I feel there’s something in there for everyone.

5. What do you hope fans take away from this EP?

I hope they take away whatever they are needing at this moment in their life. I also intentionally kept the music stripped back, so people can focus on the real song and  get to know me better.

6. What has been your career highlight so far?

Definitely my headline show in November. That was really an insane unmatched experience which I’ll never forget.

7. How does TikTok influence your creative process?

I don’t think TikTok influences my creative process, but it definitely is a sounding board and a place of discovery which I think is amazing”.

I am going to get to a new interview from NME very soon. Before I come to that, I want to highlight Wonderland. and their interview with Sienna Spiro from last month. Someone I am new to but am committed to following, I can definitely understand why there is a tonne of excitement about her. Like she could raise to the same heights as some of her music idols. Perhaps our next true great voice. Someone that will be talked about many years from now:

“How would you describe your sonic identity? What ingredients go into the Sienna Spiro melting pot?

My sonic identity at the moment feels both intimate and expansive. It’s grounded in raw vocals, paired with interesting and original melodies and textures. Lyrically, I strive for honesty and visceral expression, without dictating too much of what I think the listener should feel. Frank Ocean is kind of the pinnacle of lyricism for me. I have a deep love for jazz and soul, which will always be part of my sonic DNA, alongside influences from hip hop, R&B, folk, and even Latin music.

Why did you decide to start pursuing music as a career?

It was never really a conscious decision to be honest, its always been the natural thing to do. I don’t think I could or would want to do anything else. Music is such a big part of me and the fact I get to do it as a job is insane and such a blessing.

Congratulations on your debut EP, “SINK NOW , SWIM LATER”! How are you feeling about the release?

Thank you so much!! It’s a weird feeling you know, I’ve been working on this project for so long and its been such a process to get all the songs and creative right that it feels like a relief to finally have it out but i’m also very nervous and really hope people resonate with it!

What was the process of creating the work?

I wrote these songs over a period of time where I was finding my sound and finding the people I wanted to work with- so the songs came first and then I found the title which just made everything make sense and the world started coming together.

What inspired you sonically throughout the process? Is there any key influences?

My main influences have always been jazz and soul so naturally that was a huge influence for me, As well as different sounds, I love different textures and weird sounds usually things I hear in everyday life or in the studio would just spark something in me and id feel inspired and that where some of the songs where born. But some artists that I listened to during the time I was writing these songs where Frank Ocean, Nina Simone, Olivia Dean, Lianne La Havas, Mustafa, Stevie Wonder, Donny Hathaway, Beatles, Little Simz etc.. Theres been so many artists that have inspired me so these are just a few.

What are you tackling across the project, thematically?

This project was written at a time of significant change in my life. It explores the complexities of being young and a woman, the beginnings and endings of relationships. Even though the songs all have their own story and world they all relate to the feeling of being on the outside, whether thats needing validation, the desire to be kept around or even just needing an escape and doing that through fantasy. This project (I think) really captures what its like to be a young person who feels a lot in todays society.

Your songwriting is admirably vulnerable throughout. How did you find the comfort and confidence and be open and honest in the way you express yourself as an artist?

Thank you! To be honest I really struggle with vulnerable songwriting because it often means being honest with yourself! Which I am not very good at. But I really surrounded myself with people that allowed me to feel safe and pushed me to do better, and i’m so grateful because for the music on this project where its so intimate it’s incredibly important”.

Before finishing off with a review for SINK NOW, SWIM LATER, I want to come to a great interview from NME. A breakout artist who has such a distinct sound and is both grounded and ambitious, it is amazing people like SZA not only know about her music but are cosigns. Putting their name and weight behind her! Not a bad achievement for someone who is just starting out in a professional sense:

“For Spiro, the journey to her debut EP has been long and, at times, challenging; she started writing her own songs from age 10 and found solace in words when she struggled to fit in growing up. “I always felt like the biggest weirdo ever and I got bullied,” she shares. “Everyone made me feel so alien. And I also think that had something to do with being undiagnosed with ADHD at the time.”

But that all changed when she joined East London Arts and Music (ELAM) aged 16 and connected with fellow musically-minded creatives. At the same time, her online covers – often filmed from the floor of her shower or planted on her bed – began to take off thanks to her truly powerful voice, which channels the timeless blues, soul and jazz vocals of legends like Etta James and Ella Fitzgerald, who Spiro listened to during her childhood.

In fact, mere weeks after uploading her TikTok cover of Finneas’ ‘Break My Heart Again’, she found a manager and decided to drop out of music school after eight months to move with the momentum of her fledgling career. Now signed to Capitol Records, her new EP is an intimate introduction to the personal stories behind her soulful vocals. As she looks to the year ahead – which includes a support stint on tour with Nao – Spiro reflects on the last nine months of growth, her first ever shows and hopes for the year ahead.

Your first TikTok cover was ‘Break My Heart Again’ by Finneas. What was your reaction when you saw the viral response?

“I filmed that cover literally just before I was about to get on a train to go to Reading Festival. I remember I posted it the first day I joined music college. I didn’t think anything of it, and then it was so overwhelming. It reached a bunch of people and I got so many messages from people that wanted to collaborate and people that wanted to meet. The most full circle thing to me was I ended up doing a session with him last year.”

Your live vocals are so powerful. Have you always been a confident performer?

“I’m quite a shy person, even though that’s quite shocking. But I feel the most myself [when] performing. It’s where I feel the most present. When I was younger, I really felt like nobody would ever listen to me, and I’ve always had trouble speaking and expressing myself, and I’ve felt the most seen and the most listened to when I was performing and when I was on stage.”

SZA commented on Instagram that your cover of Childish Gambino’s ‘Redbone’ was “insane”. What was going through your head when you read that?

“There’s been a bunch of things that have happened where I’ve just been like, ‘There’s no way this is real!’ I had a bit of a silent moment and I had to step out of the room, called a couple of my friends and just freaked out for a second. I’m such a huge fan of hers, and I’m so in awe of her and love her so much, that that was a very crazy moment.”

You said the songs on your new EP were written during a time of trying to navigate the “layers of being young and being a woman”. What did that look like?

“There’s so much that didn’t make sense, especially in the world at the time for women and in politics. There’s so many struggles that women have and that I’ve had myself, especially with body image. I struggle with that a lot, and there’s a song called ‘Cyanide’ which is quite toxic but it’s very real. And I really wanted to make sure I wasn’t lying and being honest. A song like that is the stuff that was going through my head, and it was me trying to make sense of things.”

Your numbers across streaming and social media are already huge. How have you found that process of making fans so quickly?

“It’s a really surreal process because you’re kind of thinking ahead of everything. And there’s rarely a moment that you sit back and think, ‘These are real people’ until it’s in real life, and then you see people, and you interact with people, and you watch people interacting with your music.

“I don’t even know how to compartmentalise it, because that’s what I need to do to understand things. But it’s really crazy, to be honest; I sometimes find it hard to believe myself.”

What do you see when you think about the future of Sienna Spiro?

“The main goal that I’ve always wanted to achieve is writing an album that I hope changes music in a good way, and that I feel completely proud of, start to finish. Because I think that’s hard to achieve with all the rush these days. I really hope that is something I achieve”.

I am going to end up with and return to New Wave Magazine. Their thoughts on the spellbinding and phenomenal E.P. from Sienna Spiro. Do make sure that you are aware of her and get involved with her music. I would expect her name to be in the mix when the full line-up for this year’s Glastonbury Festival is announced. She is going to go very far in music, that much is clear:

“Teasing singles throughout the year, giving a jaw dropping debut performance in Hoxton this past November, and announcing her UK & European tour this week, we included have been counting down the days to hear the full project of Sienna Spiro’s debut EP SINK NOW, SWIM LATER. Writing the material for the EP since Sienna was 16 years old, the four year journey has been executed into an exceptional 8 track project delivering more than our expectations.

PHOTO CREDIT: Petros

Reminiscing on our conversation for New Wave in July of last year it is hard to believe how far the artist has come in such a short amount of time. Then, listeners from TikTok were melting over her Donald Glover & Amy Winehouse covers and requesting classics for the singer to record which eventually catapulted into her original verses being shared for the world to hear. “BUTTERFLY EFFECT” opens the project with a sombre entrance to the project with a title that foreshadows the effect of Sienna’s debut, one intital beginning that is about to make a large difference in this chaos theory.

Her magnetic performances via the screen were enough to have viewers and fans hooked creating a young loyal fan base for the singer to relate her lyrics to. This fan base were the ones who sang word for word at Hoxton Hall to the five songs of the EP that were already released last year. Sienna used her first solo show as an opportunity to give us a glance at the full track list including newer additions “ORIGAMI” and “CYANIDE”. There was a lingering sense of awe and emotion in the crowd which is exactly how it feels to listen to this EP back to back. A complete journey of ups and downs, feelings of loneliness, anger, frustration and insecurity comes along with tracks that also create an empowering sound of vengeance, power and confidence.

The EP’s cover art is expectedly on brand for the singer featuring her signature tomboy style, an oversized tailored look and a vintage car for what we can only guess to be part of her admirable storytelling approach, photographed by Petro Studio.

Last week Sienna’s second track on the EP featured as BBC Radio 1’s Song of the Week which currently has almost 4 million streams. Radio hosts compared Sienna’s vocals to those of Raye and a “young Adele”. Counting jazz musicians from Sinatra to Fitzgerald to hip hop legends as her inspirations, there are fusions of both genres combined with pop melodies that build her unique sound. The slower acoustic track “I DON’T HATE YOU” captures Sienna’s soulful raspy tones that magnetically draws you into her lyrics through a scalic minor crescendo. Effortlessly, Sienna’s voice glides off the back of strings and drum rolls on this track layered with echoing backing vocals that build up to a breathtaking outro. Tracks like this one and “BACK TO BLONDE” build Sienna’s repertoire that cements her as one of the contenders you think of for a record like the Bond theme song.

“ORIGAMI” begins with semibreve accordion notes giving an eerie introduction into the heartfelt gospel-like track. Sienna mixes her production with string sections, heavy bass instrumentation and fluctuates between soft vocals and raspy riffs and runs that blend so well together you never know how the next verse is going to sound. In contrast to the London born artist’s favourite track “MAYBE”, hears forte piano chords and arpeggios and violins form a breakup anthem accentuated by Sienna’s powerful voice on what is by far her most popular track so far on the project reaching over 37.5 million streams.

Experimenting with a more sultry sound “CYANIDE” has a darker feel with an electric guitar underpinning the heavier lyrics Sienna sings. The words create a sense of numbness that flow over metaphorical lines on body confidence, young love, and simply the mind of a young woman’s tribulations, “just wanna be thin, I know it won’t be enough… if you wanna see my blueprint it’s not under my blue jeans”. The artist’s debut project unleashes a rare lyrical vulnerability and talent of executing multiple tracks that share this feeling in a variety of ballads and anthems for her audience.

Every year, month and week there are new artists entering the music space, even more frequently from London within the pop scene. Less often are they 19 years old with a tour including Australian/EU & UK shows with co-signs from the likes of Snoh Aalegra & SZA, and an EP under their belt. Since her viral TikTok covers there was an unwavering confidence in Sienna’s listeners that she was destined for success in the jazz and pop industry, this EP has just confirmed it. If you came from a first listen of “TAXI DRIVER” or “NEED ME”, there is more of the personal journey to hear on this project. Be prepared to have your heart strings pulled on in Sienna Spiro’s debut EP as it unleashes a new sound experience that you didn’t know you needed to feel until now”.

I will end things there. Undoubtably one of the most important artists of this year, there is so much love out there for Sienna Spiro! Being tipped as a massive name of the future, it is jaw-dropping hearing her sing. That voice so distinct and soul-stirring. In Sienna Spiro, we have in our midst a…

BREATHTAKING artist.

____________

Follow Sienna Spiro

Instagram:

https://www.instagram.com/siennaspiro/

TikTok:

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

YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCd5sMkyvImc50eLIpwy3UaQ

Spotify:

https://open.spotify.com/artist/02gSuSAWEdWa5UOvqzjX6v?si=tCAGWFcDQsiTkgMykZUBNw

FEATURE: The Gold Standard: Brilliant Queens of Rap and a Genre Still Struggling with Misogyny and Inequality

FEATURE:

 

 

The Gold Standard

IN THIS PHOTO: Megan Thee Stallion

Brilliant Queens of Rap and a Genre Still Struggling with Misogyny and Inequality

_________

LIKE so many people…

IN THIS PHOTO: Doechii

of my generation, I grew up listening to and inspired by the music of Rap’s queens. Some real icons and queens came through in the 1990s. As we recently celebrated International Women’s Day (8th March), it made me think of genres where women are still overlooked or discriminated against. Even if women are ruling Pop and other genres, Rock, Alternative and others still struggle with gender imbalance and misogyny. One of the worst offenders is Rap. It is a genre still seen as a man’s place. Still very much struggling when it comes to supporting and encouraging women. Still great toxicity and sexism. Even if the U.S. is seeing new queens like Doechii rule and strike forward, here in the U.K. there is a much less balanced Rap scene. Very male-dominated. A genre of music not as active and notable compared to Rap coming out of the U.S. Women in Rap are breaking barriers and setting records. It was notable that Doechii became only the third woman in GRAMMY history to win the Best Rap Album ever. Here is some more information:

“Don't mind us crying after watching Doechii's acceptance speech at the 2025 Grammy Awards.

The Tampa born rapper became only the third ever woman to win Best Rap Album at the 67th Annual Grammy Awards on Sunday for her standout mixtape Alligator Bites Never Heal. The moment was especially meaningful considering the last woman to win in that category, Cardi B, was present to award Doechii with the honor. Before Cardi B and Doechii, Lauryn Hill was the first ever woman to take home the award for Best Rap Album for The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill in 1999. Doechii accepted her award, one of the first of the evening, in a custom Thom Browne number, a designer that has been supportive of her since her rise as an emcee to watch in recent years.

"I don't wanna make this long but this category was introduced in 1989 and only two women have won— Lauryn Hill — wait, three women have won! Lauryn Hill, Cardi B, and Doechii!" the rapper began her speech. "I put my heart and my soul into this mixtape—I went through so much and I dedicated myself to sobriety and God told me I would be rewarded and he would show me just how good it can get."

Doechii continued her speech with an inspiring message to her fans and any young women watching tonight's ceremony.

“I know there’s some Black girl—so many Black women—watching me right now. And I wanna tell you, you can do it," she said through tears. "Anything is possible. Don’t allow anybody to project any stereotypes on you”.

It is important to highlight women across Rap and Hip-Hop. Think about the legends and icons of the past who paved the way for the queens of today. I don’t think enough is said about women of Rap. Last year, Spotify presented The Gold Standard: An art exhibit celebrating Hip-Hop’s women-led renaissance:

“Women have been integral to hip-hop from the beginning, contributing to its growth despite encountering barriers and significant challenges. As early icons like MC Lyte, Salt-N-Pepa, and Queen Latifah used the their bold lyrical styles to advocate for women’s rights, they paved the way for Lil’ Kim, Missy Elliott, and Ms. Lauryn Hill to command the spotlight in the ’90s and ‘00s through their diverse expressions of confidence, femininity, and allure.

Today we are in a golden era of women in hip-hop, one in which MCs like Cardi B, Megan Thee Stallion, and Doja Cat have simultaneously enjoyed unprecedented success. To celebrate this renaissance, Spotify hosted The Gold Standard, a special art exhibit in NYC spotlighting the new generation of women in hip-hop, celebrating their influence on music and culture from 2018 to today.

Featuring the work of fine artist Manon Biernacki, The Gold Standard features Cardi B, Megan Thee Stallion, Doja Cat, City Girls, Saweetie, Latto, Sexyy Red, Ice Spice, GloRilla, and Flo Milli as subjects in a series of Spotify-commissioned portraits.

Following a Renaissance theme, each piece in the series nods to each woman’s artistic mastery and honors their contributions in shaping the genre.

“A playlist like Feelin’ Myself continues to prove that there is strong demand for women in hip-hop and the music they make. The listeners are often early adopters, and they tend to go hard for their faves,” said Briana Younger, Spotify Editorial Lead, Hip-Hop. “Over the years, we’ve seen more women than ever breaking out and having these big cultural moments that energize people. The playlist is best for being a snapshot of the most recent stuff, but with the exhibit, we wanted to showcase the longevity of this era. All of the women we included and even others that we didn’t—they aren’t just one-hit wonders or has-beens. They’ve consistently been a part of the conversation, evolving the way artists can function and have success in this landscape, and it’s important to celebrate that”.

Even if, in the U.S for sure, there is a new wave of incredible women in Rap, there is still an issue with lyrical themes from male artists. Even to this day, there is still objectification and misogyny. This not only encourages other male Rap artists to follow suit. It sends out an incredible toxic and troubling message of how men in the genre view women. A decades-old issue that has not really died down at all. In 2024, NME published a feature looking at a resurfaced clip from 2022, where AJ Tracey discussed objectification of women in Hip-Hop and Rap:

“Recently, a clip recirculated online of the West Londoner talking at the prestigious Oxford Union in October 2022. A student asked Tracey if the objectification of women in rap and drill was integral to the genre’s culture and how to change it.

The ‘Ladbroke Grove’ star began by thanking her for her question, adding that it is “a serious one”.

“I do not think the culture and the objectification of women are one and the same,” he said. “I think it’s a decision young men make – to rap about certain topics. Sometimes they feel that they are rapping about their lived experiences but, in general, they’re actually hurting a large group of people by the comments they make.

He explained further: “And, I’m sure a lot of them aren’t aware because they’re young and naïve. I’m sure I’ve said things in the past that are offensive to certain groups but as you learn and grow – as a human and as an artist – you learn to not say these things. Some of the environments you grow up in are very toxic and we don’t learn these lessons as a kid, and we have to learn them as an adult and, by the time you get to an adult – if you have the spotlight on you – these mistakes that you’re making are amplified.”

He added: “So, to answer your question: it’s, again, something that we have to tackle. I don’t think a lot of the youth that are making a lot of the comments that you are alluding to: they’re not aware of the severity of what they’re saying and how hurtful it is to other people. So, it’s something that we need to teach, for sure.

“As I say, any good artist is growing and evolving – any human, to be honest. We’re all changing and we need to look out for each other and make sure that we’re pulling people up when we can”.

Not only is there misogyny throughout Hip-Hop. There is this continuation of misogynoir (hatred against Black women). The Rap beef continuing between Kendrick Lamar and Drake not only reveals a nastiness and some rather obnoxious accusations – Lamar accusing Drake of being a paedophile -; women are used as pawns and collateral damage. The genre has a real misogyny issue. I am going to move on in a minute. For Black women, misogyny is nothing new. This article highlights that in the wake of the Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs sex trafficking case from last year. Amy DuBois Barnett wrote about Andre Harrell, the founder of Uptown Records and the kingmaker who gave Diddy his first break, and words of advice he gave to her. If Hip-Hop and Rap used to be a battleground for men to sort out their feuds and beefs, it was also about how they were going to (mis)treat women – who they viewed as property and assets. Have things really improved at all?

“Andre’s wise words stuck with me as I puzzled how to command respect within a culture that valued physical attractiveness and style over my master’s degree and my position running a key source of relevant journalism for a critical demographic. I understood what Andre meant, that much of the male bravado in hip-hop masked anger, frustration and corresponding deep insecurity that stemmed from poverty, trauma and emotional voids. And that the misogyny within hip-hop culture ran as deep among the mostly male execs as it did the music itself.

After its explosive growth from a regional subculture to a multimillion-dollar international industry, hip-hop was at a zenith. Hip-hop and mainstream culture were indistinguishable; models were walking high fashion runways in dookie chains and durags, and hip-hop music executives and artists ran a key part of New York’s social scene. I’d watched hip-hop’s decisive takeover in the 1980s from the front stoop of my family home in Harlem. Kurtis Blow, Run DMC, LL Cool J, Queen Latifah and Will Smith were releasing party songs that still get people to the dance floor. Though the music began to change in the late ’80s, the predominant vibe into the early ’90s was still funky, fresh fun.

But the increasing violence of inner cities altered by drug use and poverty spawned the rise of gangsta rap, which would end up dominating the genre by the mid-’90s. At first, music labels wouldn’t even sign music with misogynistic overtones. But as gangsta rap’s glorified depictions of violence gained acceptance within lyrics and urban iconography, so did sexually explicit themes that, ultimately, expanded into widespread misogyny. Women were derided with vulgar nicknames and viewed as whores deserving of violence.

Sociologist Ronald Weitzer and criminologist Charis E. Kubrin, both of George Washington University at the time, wrote a 2009 journal article titled “Misogyny in Rap Music” that described five main misogynistic themes: derogatory naming and shaming of women, sexual objectification of women, distrust of women, legitimating violence against women and celebration of prostitution and pimping.

When music labels saw the traction that violent and misogynistic music was getting, they shifted their approach to distributing gangsta rap records (while still not signing the artists). When music chronicling murderous street life and sexist violence began to get radio play, the labels gave in and started signing gangsta rap artists. Interscope’s groundbreaking partnership with Dr. Dre, Suge Knight and Death Row Records opened the floodgates and led to the proliferation of “controversial” hip-hop.

The culture surrounding the music shifted too, emboldening artists and executives to unabashedly play out the misogynistic musical themes in real life; it became aspirational for men to be violent toward women. Because, at its peak, hip-hop culture was synonymous with mainstream culture, the impact of this was felt not just in music but also in fashion, sports, film and all entertainment forms. It became acceptable for a platinum rapper to grab my ass in a club, for a well-known label executive to lock the doors of a limo and refuse to let me out until I kissed him, for my Motorola pager to be filled with lewd propositions from entertainment and sports power brokers, or for men to casually call me a “bitch” or “ho” when turned down. I heeded Andre’s advice while watching women without benefit of his sagacity make one too many missteps with the wrong baller and get treated much, much worse”.

If a surge in brilliant and empowering female talent in the U.S. existed in a scene that is still clearly misogynistic, there seems to be less attention paid to female rappers in the U.K. It is clear that male Rap artists in the U.S. do not protect or support women. Still very much a case of women fighting to be heard without much allyship from men. In the U.K., there does seem to be a real lack of female Rap and Hip-Hop artists. Do they look at the scene here and feel discouraged?! I am sure there are so many incredible women in Rap who want to come through but are looking at the genre in the U.K. and feel disheartened. This article from The Times reacted to Little Simz being the only woman nominated in the Best Hip-Hop/Grime/Rap act category at this year’s BRITs. She has won before but lost out this year to Stormzy. One woman in a five-person category. Very telling about the lack of female representation across these genres at the BRITs:

“We have to fight harder to be seen.” “As a woman you have to work much harder.” “Men can be mediocre and still thrive. Women have to be extra good, extra different, extra interesting.” These are the sentiments of three successful British rappers: Cristale, Ms Banks and Enny.

It’s no surprise — just look at the nominations for the major music awards in the UK. In the four years since the hip-hop/grime/rap category was introduced at the Brits, only one woman has been nominated: Little Simz (in 2022, 2024 and this year). She is also the only woman to have won the award for best hip-hop act at the Mobos in the past ten years, a prize she took home in 2023 and 2024. No British female rapper made it on to the Top 40 albums or singles chart in 2024.

This gender disparity is all the more striking because in the US it’s the opposite story. Doechii, a ferociously talented 26-year-old from Florida, won the Grammy for best rap album in February. More and more female rappers are making the Top Ten there — from Nicki Minaj and Cardi B to Megan Thee Stallion, Ice Spice and Doja Cat — to the extent that in 2023 the New York Times announced: “The future of rap is female.” That said, Doechii was still the only woman on the list of nominees for that Grammy category this year and she, Cardi B and Lauryn Hill are the only women to have won it.

“There’s a very masculine energy within rap. Sometimes women are made to feel like it’s not their place,” says Ms Banks, a 30-year-old rapper from London with 500,000 monthly Spotify listeners. She and Cristale both talk about receiving comments on social media telling them to “get back to the kitchen” and that women shouldn’t rap.

The history of the genre bears this out. “In the Nineties and 2000s, there was a one in, one out mentality. They could only ever support one woman at a time,” explains Arusa Qureshi, the Scottish-based author of Flip the Script: How Women Came to Rule Hip Hop. “In the UK we still haven’t got past that.”

In David Kane’s book on UK rap, What Do You Call It?, he interviews the British rapper Shystie, who tells him that in the early 2000s the radio wouldn’t play both her and Estelle, another female rapper, so they went for Estelle. “That kind of deterred me from making more music,” she recalls.

Despite the hurdles, British women have been making their mark on rap since it came over from the US, starting with Cookie Crew, the duo who formed in south London in 1983. “I remember seeing Ms Dynamite on the Mobos on TV and being obsessed with her,” says Tiffany Calver, 30, a BBC 1Xtra host whose show spotlights emerging hip-hop artists. She points to Estelle, Lisa Maffia, Lioness, Lady Leshurr and Shystie as other favourites from her childhood. “But the fact of the matter is I can list you all of these names quite quickly, whereas if you were to ask me about the male counterparts I’ve grown up listening to we’d be here for hours.”

In 2022 Little Simz burst into the mainstream consciousness with four Brit nominations, a win for best new artist, four Mobo nominations and a best album win for Sometimes I Might Be Introvert, as well as taking home the Mercury prize and an Ivor Novello for her song I Love You, I Hate You. “We were so happy because it was a ‘finally’ moment, screaming from the rooftops: finally she’s being seen,” Calver says. But, she adds, it was interesting to see her win best new artist. “I’d known Little Simz as an artist since ten years before that — it definitely was not an overnight thing.” In fact she released her first mixtape, Stratosphere, in 2010, aged 16.

Her independence and refusal to compromise have inspired other artists, such as Enny, 30, from London, who has two million monthly Spotify listeners. Marketing and image is a big part of that. “Women are starting to expand outside of the stereotypical idea of what a female rapper should be,” Enny says. For her this stereotype is “oversexualised — I’m not going to beat around the bush”. Ms Banks releases her music independently and promotes it herself.

Little Simz also became known to the wider public through her acting work, most prominently playing Shelley in Top Boy and herself in the Spider-Man film Venom: Let There Be Carnage. Cristale, 23, the only woman nominated in the hip-hop category at this year’s Mobos, also appeared in Top Boy as well as Channel 4’s Queenie, expanding her audience. “I definitely think acting has had a massive part to play in my development because it showed people that I’m a multi-genre artist.” She has more than a million followers on TikTok, not just thanks to her music but also her entertaining “get ready with me videos”.

Women still need more exposure. “The guys get to have a lot of fun,” Enny says. “They get to do football stuff and all these charity things. I don’t think there’s a space that pushes that same energy for women.” They also, crucially, are under-represented on the live scene, an issue that’s compounded by the closure of many grassroots music venues: 125 in 2023 and two still closing every month.

In 2021 researchers from Utrecht University and Universitat Pompeu found that streaming services were more likely to suggest male artists. Festivals are still male-dominated: 63 per cent of the acts in UK line-ups last year were either all-male or male-led. This month Wireless, a rap and hip-hop festival in London, announced that the Canadian rapper Drake would headline all three days. The top five most popular songs on UK radio last year were by men; female artists made up just 26.8 per cent of plays.

A report from the women and equalities committee last year also found that women were under-represented in positions of authority in the music industry. Ms Banks recalls moments where “you’re not really always looked at as a colleague or someone that you can just collaborate and work with. It’s more what they can gain from you … sexual advances and stuff.”

There is an overriding feeling of optimism, however, in all my conversations with rappers, writers and tastemakers. Calver points to the proliferation of women hosting rap, grime and drill shows, such as Ellie Prohan on Kiss and Sian Anderson, a fellow 1Xtra presenter”.

I wanted to talk about the modern women in Hip-Hop and Rap that are successful in a genre that has long been focused on men. Where women have been and are still seen as property or inferior. Whilst the U.S. is spotlighting some amazing women coming through right now, there seems to be a real issue in the U.K. A comparative lack of visibility. If rappers like Stefflon Don and Nadia Rose were killing it a few years back, how many women other than Little Simz do people name when they think of women in British Rap, Grime and Hip-Hop? There does need to be a change. In terms of the U.K. scene and making it more accessible for and conscious of women. Ensuring their voices are heard and new talent is nurtured. That contemporary Hip-Hop and Rap queens are given the same opportunities of their male counterparts in terms of festival slots and playlists. The recent success of Doechii at the GRAMMYs should both shine a light on female talent in Rap but also raise questions. A lack of award representation. Misogyny and misogynoir together with a lack of support from their male peers. Apart from a few cosigns and collaborations, women still crop up in Rap lyrics as objects. Subjected to violence, degradation and toxic remarks. The queens of Hip and Rap, past and present, deserve…

HUGE respect.

FEATURE: The Digital Mixtape: All Saint: Melanie Blatt at Fifty

FEATURE:

 

The Digital Mixtape

PHOTO CREDIT: David Fisher/Shutterstock (via The Guardian)

All Saint: Melanie Blatt at Fifty

_________

PERHAPS this birthday might not…

IN THIS PHOTO: All Saints (Nicole Appleton, Melanie Blatt, Shaznay Lewis and Natalie Appleton) in 1997/PHOTO CREDIT: Tim Roney

be on everyone’s radar. Melanie Blatt, a quarter of All Saints (with Shaznay Lewis, Nicole and Natalie Appleton) turns fifty on 25th March. All Saints were hugely important to me when I was a teenager. Their amazing debut album, All Saints, came out in 1997. I still have it somewhere. The group’s most recent album, Testament, was released in 2018. I live in hope that we have not heard the last of All Saints. Melanie Blatt has released solo material and collaborated with other artists. I will include a few solo tracks/collaborations into mix. Before getting there, I want to bring in a bit of biography from AllMusic:

“Melanie Blatt was the founding member of one of the most successful girl groups of the '90s, All Saints. Born in Camden, London in 1975 to a French mother and English father, Blatt attended the prestigious Sylvia Young Theatre School at the same time as Denise Van Outen, Emma Bunton, and future bandmate Nicole Appleton. After performing in Drive, a short-lived band featuring U.S. actress Julienne Davis, and providing backing vocals for dub-funk outfit Dreadzone, she met songwriter Shaznay Lewis and, along with Simone Rainford, formed All Saints 1.9.7.5. Following the departure of Rainford, the pair recruited sisters Nicole and Natalie Appleton, dropped the numbers from the group's name, and signed a record deal with London Records. All Saints went on to become the Spice Girls' biggest rivals, scoring five number ones, two multi-platinum albums, and two Brit Awards before disbanding in 2001.

Following collaborations with Artful Dodger on the Top Ten hit "TwentyFourSeven" and hip-hop outfit Outsidaz on "I'm Leavin'," she released her first solo single in 2003, the Xenomania-produced "Do Me Wrong," and began work on her debut album, Shine, with Aqualung's Matt Hales. However, following the failure of her second single, "See Me," to enter the Top 75, plans for its release were shelved and she parted company with her label. In 2006, she reunited with the rest of All Saints to record third album Studio 1, and has since abandoned a music career to concentrate on her TV work. Blatt also appeared in the critically panned Dave Stewart gangster film, Honest, and on ITV2 covering the Brit Awards and participating in the network's music chat show The Hot Desk”.

An artist I have always admired, I do hope that we will get All Saints back and another album from them. There is this great interest and revival of girl groups or all-female groups from the 1990s and 2000s such as Girls Aloud and Sugababes. Because the saintly Melanie Blatt celebrates her fiftieth birthday on 25th March, I wanted to assemble a mixtape with some All Saints and deep cuts together with a few solo/collaboration cuts. This is a hearty salute to…

AN incredible artist.

FEATURE: Early Risers: Predicting Which Albums Could Be in the Running for the Mercury Prize 2025

FEATURE:

 

 

Early Risers

IN THIS PHOTO: Sam Fender

Predicting Which Albums Could Be in the Running for the Mercury Prize 2025

_________

ALTHOUGH it is March…

IN THIS PHOTO: Lambrini Girls/PHOTO CREDIT: Nicole Osrin

I wanted to look ahead to the Mercury Prize. Although the awards are not until the autumn, we are sort of halfway between last year’s ceremony and this year’s. Last year’s prize was won by English Teacher. Their album, This Could Be Texas, was a deserved winner. I think there are some strong albums released late last year and this year that are likely to be among the shortlist when it is announced later in the year. That usually happens a few months before the ceremony. Highlighting the best albums from British and Irish artists, the Mercury Prize is one of the highlights of the music calendar. Because of that, I wanted to do an early temperature check. Ten albums that could be on the shortlist of ten. Some of the albums that could be in contention…

LATER in the year.

___________

Sam Fender – People Watching

Release Date: 21st February, 2025

Label: Polydor

Producers: Adam Granducie/lMarkus Dravs/Sam Fender/Dean Thompson/Joe Atkinson

Review:

“Sam Fender has had a hell of a few years. Granted, with the release of his 2019 debut ‘Hypersonic Missiles’, he rocketed to the top of the charts, but the fervour that would unfold in the wake of its follow-up, 2021’s ‘Seventeen Going Under’ was still hard to comprehend. Graduating rapidly to festival headliner, and bagging a slew of awards along the way, his step up to a bonafide stadium artist has been swift.


It’s little surprise as to why; on ‘Seventeen Going Under’ the North Shields songsmith penned a series of powerful, poignant offerings that dug deep into the heart of working class struggle, with the kind of consideration and compassion that only can only ever come via real life experience. It was stunning in its sentiments, and along with some perfectly-plotted meme moments along the way (his hungover appearance on BBC Breakfast still does the rounds now), his reputation as the ultimate man of the people was solidified.

That’s why his next step is all the more interesting. With a handful of stadiums already booked and on their way to selling out (this year will mark his third, fourth and fifth time filling his beloved St. James’ Park), it’d be easy to imagine Sam busting out ten ready-made bangers for this third record, but what he does instead is so much more satisfying. While led by its storming - but no less devastating - lead single ‘People Watching’ (its chorus’ anthemic refrain of “Somebody’s darling’s on the street tonight” is up there with ‘Dead Boys’ and ‘Spit Of You’ in terms of a lyrical trojan horse), the album is, on the whole, much more sedate than its predecessor.

Unafraid of delving into both the personal and political - and, at times, where the two very much intertwine - ‘People Watching’ is an album that burrows under the skin of current society and refuses to dress up its stark reality. Take ‘Chin Up’’s tale of the current cost of living crisis (“The cold permeates the neonatal baby / Can’t heat the place for fucking love nor money”) or the disastrous impact of privatisation and capitalism explored in ‘Crumbling Empire’ (“My old man worked on the rail yard / Getting his trade on the electrical board / It got privatised, the work degraded / In this crumbling empire”); these songs paint a vivid and all too real picture of society in disarray.

But in among these portraits of the “marred streets”, there’s also a glimpse into the mind of our narrator: a young man struggling to find his place in this new version of his world. The twinkling ‘Wild Long Lie’ - a song that will seems all too familiar for any expats heading back to their hometown at Christmas - showcases this best, with Sam’s quiet realisation of “I think I need to leave this town” perhaps optimising the feelings of displacement that fame can so swiftly bestow.

Unsurprisingly, for an album that feels so intimate, its music follows suit. Having worked with The War On Drugs’ Adam Granduciel, there’s an almost filmic quality to these tracks (especially in the widescreen, Joni Mitchell-nodding closer ‘Remember My Name’), matching the observational nature of their lyrics. Less adrenaline-fuelled than some of his previous work, it’s also easy to sense the fingerprints of his own musical hero here too; while ‘Seventeen…’ could mirror Springsteen’s 1975 break-out ‘Born To Run’, this feels closer to the darker, more meditative moments of ‘Darkness On The Edge Of Town’.

Is this the album that people are expecting? Probably not, but that doesn’t matter. Instead, ‘People Watching’ is a bleak but astonishing rumination on our current times, viewed through the lens of Sam’s whirlwind past few years - an album that undoubtedly firms up his position as one of the great songwriters of our time” – DIY

Standout Cuts: People Watching/Crumbling Empire/Remember My Name

Key Track: Wild Long Lie

The Cure - Songs of a Lost World

Release Date: 1st November, 2024

Labels: Fiction/Lost/Polydor/Universal/Capitol

Producers: Robert Smith/Paul Corkett

Review:

“Our first taster from the album was the opener, ‘Alone’, it still stands as a perfect vibe-setting number for the album. Reminiscent of the outfit’s ‘Disintegration’ era, the band builds a mood for over three minutes before Smith enters the picture, his voice unchanged since the 80s.  With imagery of birds falling from the sky and bitter dregs, it’s apparent that we’re not getting another ‘Friday I’m in Love’ on this album. That’s not to say there isn’t beauty to be found. The following ‘And Nothing Is Forever’ is gorgeously wistful, Roger O’Donnell’s sparkling keys adding sweetness to Smith’s tale of loss. It’s classic Cure and really captures what makes the band so unique. A command of shadow and light.

The icy ‘A Fragile Thing’ may be the closest the album gets to producing a ‘pop’ number. Matching the spirit of the group’s mid-90s b-sides, the track feels like an anti ‘Lovesong,’ Smith’s conversational vocal delivery dropping harsh truths about how love and commitment can be a blessing and curse. ‘Warsong’ sees The Cure at their most mighty in decades, guitarist Reeves Gabrels unleashing wailing guitars as Smith roars about the poisoning effect of hatred and pride. Especially poignant with the current geopolitical issues.

‘Drone: No Drone’ sees the welcome return of what this reviewer likes to call ‘Sassy Smith’ mode. During these moments – see also ‘Wendy Time,’ ‘Never Enough‘ – the messy-haired icon spits lyrics over a funky beat with a tangible level of irritability. It’s a fun reprieve from the emotional heft of its surrounding tracks and gets the head bopping. A good thing, too, as the following ‘I Can Never Say Goodbye’ deals directly with the loss of Smith’s older brother Richard. A stately affair, the track is bound to resonate with those who’ve felt the world-changing effect of grief, Smith delivering his best vocals on the record.

The previously unheard ‘All I Ever Am’ makes for a welcome surprise, Gallups’ zippy bassline leading the charge on SOALW’s most uptempo moment. Sure, it’s still focused on memories and regret, but it’s a bit of a banger at the same time, Smith’s baritone bass laying down some serious licks. Before we know it, we come to the aptly titled closer ‘Endsong,’ arguably the number that made the biggest impression when aired live a few years ago. With a length of 10:23, it’s clear listeners are in for something epic, and boy, the band delivers.

Sounding melancholic and majestic as only The Cure can, ‘Endsong’ is a behemoth of emotion. A thick wall of tribal drums and shrieking guitars creates an apocalyptic tone, only reinforced by Smith’s mention of ‘blood red moons’ and repeated refrain of “It’s all gone.” It quickly joins the ranks of other great Cure closers, such as ‘Sinking’ and ‘Bloodflowers.‘ It sounds enormous and best captures SOALW’s spirit. There is no escaping the passing of time.

The old idiom ‘Be careful what you wish for’ is often applied to veteran groups dropping a new album but definitely not here. With ‘Songs Of A Lost World,’ The Cure has not only produced something worth the wait but added another classic to their already sterling catalogue. This is a late-career gem from one of the world’s most idiosyncratic acts.

With a sense of finality running through the LP, it was fair to assume that this may indeed be the end of The Cure’s story. However, as fans know, Robert Smith’s future plans are ever-shifting and a recent interview has revealed another album is almost complete. Onwards then! 9/10” – CLASH

Standout Cuts: A Fragile Thing/Drone:Nodrone/All I Ever Am

Key Song: Alone

Laura Marling – Patterns in Repeat

Release Date: 25th October, 2024

Labels: Chrysalis/Partisan

Producers: Laura Marling/Dom Monks

Review:

“Laura Marling’s rightly-lauded last album, ‘Song For Our Daughter’ (2020), saw her achieve the supreme feat of creating an intensely moving body of work around an imagined child; in the four years since, she actually has become a mother, and the result is ‘Patterns In Repeat’ - a tapestry of love, lineage, and the inextricable links between parents and their children. Now eight albums in, Marling has always mined emotional depths with only the most simple of tools - namely, an acoustic guitar and that singular voice - and here, her signature understatedness is taken even further. The record features no drums at all; instead, each track is blanketed by swathes of lush strings, any additional embellishment having been deemed surplus to requirements. As such, ‘Patterns In Repeat’ is both stunningly intimate and endearingly raw; recorded in Marling’s home studio with her child there in the room, there are aural fingerprints of domesticity - her baby’s gurgling, or the shake of a dog collar - stamped across the finished product, enduring testaments to the context of its creation.

The love of a parent is an obvious, palpable throughline - opener ‘Child Of Mine’ is the purest distillation of such, a pact made and promise sworn: “Last night in your sleep you started crying / I can’t protect you there though I keep trying / Sometimes you’ll go places I can’t get to / But I’ve spoken to the angels who’ll protect you”. Around this central spool, however, are wound the threads of the myriad other emotions parenthood awakens. ‘Looking Back’ (written by Marling’s own father when he was in his twenties) and the incredibly poignant ‘Your Girl’ (which lands like a response to the call of ABBA’s ‘Slipping Through My Fingers’) both speak to a renewed, acute awareness of the passing of time; centrepiece ‘The Shadows’ is a reflective rumination on how the start of one chapter necessitates the end of another. The twinned ‘Patterns’ and ‘Patterns In Repeat’, meanwhile, see her consider her own childhood through a different, more empathetic lens, having gained a deeper understanding of the behaviours and decisions of her parents.

“I want you to know that I gave it up willingly / Nothing real was lost in the bringing of you to me,” Marling sings softly on the titular closing track. Ahead of giving birth, she has said she faced the internal question of whether motherhood would dilute or extinguish her artistry. ‘Patterns In Repeat’ is a deft and conclusive answer” – DIY

Standout Cuts: No One’s Gonna Love You Like I Can/Caroline/Lullaby

Key Song: Child of Mine

FKA twigs - EUSEXUA

Release Date: 24th January, 2025

Labels: Young/Atlantic

Producers: Aod/Jeff Bhasker/Marius de Vries/Eartheater/FKA Twigs/Felix Joseph/Koreless/Ojivolta/Stuart Price/Stargate/Tic

Review:

“This “bliss” is unlike any other. According to her, we can redeem its most exact sense by using the term “eusexua” that she coined while filming in Prague three years ago, with dance music and culture’s tremendous help. It encompasses propitious feelings born out of sexuality and – to add from her hypnotising performances for Valentino and On – honest desperation to feel a connection. In some way, physicality is naturally embedded into it: bodies doing freestyle choreographies in a hazy, brutalist warehouse, techno beats consuming every sound that dares to compete against them. On the titular record, that very sense paints a similar setting (see the music videos for this era so far) in which her vocal and musical power meet their most emotive selves.

As she remarked in a recent interview, EUSEXUA isn’t a bona fide dance album but rather a “love letter” to the genre that has reframed her thinking. The pulpish slashes and abrupt reverses on its spectacular high point “Drums of Death” and the head-spinning climax on “Striptease” may sound like extreme yearnings. Yet, the transformative music takes pride in externalising them and granting a concrete form that we can use as a mode of cathartic release. This is a fresh resolution for her music career. “Perfect Stranger” and “24hr Dog” reek of hopeless impulses sprung from the festering need for human contact, but they don’t develop like her past works. The hysterical pleasures overrule them, sustained by dance and techno’s gratifying template.

Twigs continues to emphasise more on how words sound and less on what they mean. Her lively 2022 mixtape CAPRISONGS was the starting point, on which “meta angel”, “jealousy”, and many more wring out syllables like clothes soaked in luxurious detergent water. Where words were cherry-picked to bring forth an irresistible manifesto of female power on 2019's MAGDALENE, they’ve transmuted into well-articulated carriers of limpid emotion on EUSEXUA – a pivot from complex syntax. Succinct instructions like “Turn your love up loud to keep the devil down” on “Girl Feels Good” and “Work me to satisfy the core of your mind” on “24hr Dog” dominate the lyrics while their orgasmic melodies take over as the singular showcase for twigs’ unique songwriting.

They sometimes leave an uncatered desire for more lyrical depth. In several cases, however, the electrifying music makes up for what’s unfulfilled. For the first time, Koreless takes up the role of EUSEXUA’s primary producer. He casts an eerie mist over every song, a motif that mostly clears towards the end of each piece where all kinds of beats collide and generate a more liberating version of themselves. On “Sticky”, twigs gives in to bodily pleasures, evading “overcomplicated moments”, then snappy, lightning-struck synths plummet down as an escape route. “Room of Fools” delivers a dreamlike transcendence led by her majestic voice after clashes of Björk-esque stems. Koreless’s outstanding lead in the production undeniably shapes much of EUSEXUA’s deliciously bizarre identity.

The vocal contribution from Eartheater on the title track, the ear-catching twists and turns from Stargate on “Perfect Stranger”, and the darker tunes from Ojivolta all make an unrivalled masterclass on world-building. Even the cranky shockwaves, like “Childlike Things”, lurch forth without alienating what’s already established. But EUSEXUA tumbles down into an undesirable hole at the last minute. When putting the healing message aside, “Wanderlust” is amongst her weakest closers for its more predictable structure; after many wild switch-ups and uses of left-field imagery, placing it as the finale feels like an unnerving undoing of their function. It may be a wake-up call to festering reality. All seismic pleasures must meet their end, after all, and what else can we do except relive them by clicking rewind?” – The Line of Best Fit

Standout Cuts: Eusexa/Perfect Stranger/Striptease

Key Song: Room of Fools

Lambrini Girls – Who Let the Dogs Out

Release Date: 10th January, 2025

Label: City Slang

Producers: Daniel Fox/Lambrini Girls

Review:

“The tree’s come down, the hangover’s passed and it’s time to rage again. Peace on Earth can’t last forever anyways, and no amount of tinsel can disguise society’s broken foundations. Thankfully, with their debut album, Lambrini Girls are here to sort it out. There might be protest albums everywhere right now, but Who Let The Dogs Out? goes far beyond mere chest-beating and shitting on the government. This one is special. It might also be the most fun you’ll ever have while screaming at the world.

For Phoebe Lunny and Lily Maciera, fun and fury are inextricable. It certainly helps the medicine to go down, but it gives them an irresistible edge as they make a righteous racket about gentrification, workplace sexual harassment, neurodiversity and more.

Impressively still, pretty much any of these tracks could have been a single. The quick-witted Filthy Rich Nepo Babies ('Hugo wants to be a rock star, smashing up five grand guitars / His dad works at Sony') and the sapphic twist-and-shout of No Homo ('I like your face and it’s in a gay way!') are overflowing with outlandishness, but this band can lurch between silly and serious quicker than you can say ‘patriarchy’.

Even in Nothing Tastes As Good As It Feels’ confrontational, often uncomfortable examination of eating disorders, they still squeeze in wisecracks. 'Kate Moss gives no fucks that my period has stopped' they rage. By its end, Phoebe’s screaming 'GIVE ME FULL FAT, YOU FUCKING BASTARDS!'

We know Lambrini Girls are noisy sorts, but they’ve not quite had enough credit for how great they are with guitars. If they happened to be on a mission to change that, it shows. The menacing buzz that powers opener Bad Apple sounds as much like a distress signal as the police siren that opens it. The squalling Love – a tirade against mistaking toxicity for genuine love – boasts riffs that must have been created with some secret sauce that induces cravings for endless repeat plays.

It all ends with a discordant dance party in the form of C**tology 101, a joyful celebration of self that reclassifies everything from letting go and setting boundaries to autistic meltdowns and 'Doing a poo at your friend’s house' as 'c**ty'.

Still, they’ve done something even more audacious than releasing a track with an off-the-scale number of C-words in it. They’ve dropped an album of the year contender just 10 days into 2025. Big power move, that. Verdict: 4/5” – Kerrang!

Standout Cuts: Company Culture/You’re Not From Around Here/Cuntology 101

Key Song: Filthy Rich Nepo Baby

Rose Gray – Louder, Please

Release Date: 17th January

Label: PIAS

Producers: Pat Alvarez/Zhone/Sur Back/Joe Brown/Alex Metric/Rob Milton/Sega Bodega/Ryland Blackinton/Vaughn Oliver/Sam Homaee/Frank Colucci/Shawn Wasabi

Review:

“Rose Gray’s ‘Louder, Please’ is a mission statement for life from an artist with a laser guided focus on ecstatic dance floor abandon and the transcendent power of dance music’s energy rush.

Hedonism and the desire to have more, more, more permeate the whole record. Opening track ‘Damn’ sets the tone with its rough and dirty groove while ‘Free’ is warm and enveloping in its blissed out expansiveness. The lyrics often have a spiritual and inspiring quality to them that harkens back to the prime era of late 80s dance discovery when anything seemed possible

The thing that makes the album so engaging is it’s not just a parade of beats and poppers o’clock bangers. There’s depth, feeling and rich emotion from Gray’s skilful songwriting, a testament to the years she spent honing her craft as an artist and writer. All this is highlighted in stunning fashion on the spoken word memories and reflections of ‘Hackney Wick’, nostalgic and stirring it’s a track that evokes The Streets ‘Weak Become Heroes’ and feels like something Gray has waited all her life to say.

The album is a sonic journey for head, body and soul to soundtrack all your partying needs for 2025” – DORK

Standout Cuts: Wet & Wild/Party People/Switch

Key Song: Angel of Satisfaction

Heartworms – Glutton for Punishment 

Release Date: 7th February, 2025

Label: Speedy Wunderground

Producer: Dan Carey

Review:

“You’d be forgiven for seeing the stark, black-and-white artwork of ‘Glutton For Punishment’ and assuming it contains a much gnarlier or darker set of music than it does. Its provocative title echoes industrial music’s aesthetic obsession with BDSM imagery; the kind of phrase Depeche Mode or Nine Inch Nails would have utilised back in the mid-1990s.

‘Glutton For Punishment’ is painted in dark hues, but its electro, industrial and post-punk blend is an impressively vibrant and straight-up fun listening experience, rife with kinetic rhythms and strong choruses that worm their way into your brain once they’ve conquered your heart. On her impressive debut, Heartworms (real name: Jojo Orme) unveils a seemingly effortless knack for making jet-black music that explodes in vibrant colour across your frontal cortex.

Produced by the in-demand Dan Carey (Fontaines D.C., Squid, Wet Leg), ‘Glutton For Punishment’ is a proper auteurist collection – nine tracks that revel in and unpick its creators’ myriad obsessions, both aesthetic and psychological. Along with the goth-tinged genre blending, Orme’s interest in military history rears its head on imagistic highlights ‘Warplane’ and ‘Extraordinary Wings’, while explorations of a fractured relationship with her mother appear on the engrossing ‘Smuggler’s Adventure’.

However, for all the intriguing and enigmatic lyricism, it’s Orme’ musical craft that really stands out. No two tracks on ‘Glutton For Punishment’ sound alike, but are held together by Heartworms’ commitment to an ambitious and successful attempt to juggle differing tones. A track like ‘Jacked’, built around dark techno synths, or ‘Mad Catch’ and its unusual, angular lead guitars, teeter on the edge of abrasion, but are fused to such strong, powerful vocal melodies and danceable grooves that they consistently materialise as gripping, singular goth pop bangers.

The only tiny criticism is that once or twice Heartworms’ palette ventures a little too close to retro eighties post-punk worship; see the guitars and drum machines of ‘Celebrate’ as an example. But other than that minor quibble, this is a seriously strong debut from an artist in total command of her craft, one that’s all the more impressive for so elegantly incorporating eccentric, sometimes abrasive ideas into its unabashedly pop vision. 8/10” – CLASH

Standout Cuts: Just to Ask a Dance/Extraordinary Wings/Glutton for Punishment

Key Song: Jacked

jasmine.4.t  - You Are the Morning

Release Date: 17th January, 2025

Label: Dead Oceans

Producers: Julien Baker/Phoebe Bridgers/Lucy Dacus

Review:

“Released via Phoebe Bridgers’ Saddest Factory Records, her signing is the stuff of indie legend. Having toured with Lucy Dacus pre-transition, they continued to demo-swap until Cruickshank convinced her friend to play the tracks to Bridgers. Both musicians wanted to produce the album, and with their boygenius bandmate Julien Baker privy to the conversation, it was settled that all three would take on the role. Cruickshank then flew her trans-femme bandmates to LA to join her for the recording.

The songs on You Are The Morning were born out of some of the darkest moments of Cruickshank’s life. After coming out to her friends and family in Bristol, she found herself homeless and dealing with a divorce. She moved to Manchester and slept on floors and sofas, quietly writing her thoughts, experiences and fears into song.

Tracks like “Woman,” the first song she wrote after coming out, are so dense in emotion you can feel them tightening across your chest. Recorded with the Trans Chorus of Los Angeles, the song takes on a new, and perhaps even more vital importance upon its release.

Community is a big theme for Cruickshank, and the bright reprieve of “Best Friend’s House,” with its Daniel Johnston innocence, captures the warmth and safety of something so simple.

First single “Skin on Skin” is a blow-by-blow of Cruickshank’s formative experience of t4t intimacy, the lyrics as evocative as Baker’s guitar solos, while the Elliot Smith indebted chug of “Elephant” eschews chorus for an ever-captivating rhythmic revolution of verse.

Her love of Adrianne Lenker plays out across some of the record’s more delicate moments, including its title track which platforms her intricate guitar-work alongside poetic ode. Written for one of her best friends, the song breaks into chorus with a message of hope.

It’s that promise that things might get better which forms the heart of You Are The Morning. Even on the wild-eyed bombast of the Bridgers duet “Guy Fawkes Tesco Dissociation,” as Cruickshank imagines herself floating in a blood-filled tub, there’s still the glimmer of a brighter future. “I won’t act,” she promises, the track itself alive with staccato turn of phrase. “With my eye movement I’ll see you dent cans just for to get the discount. We can rewind and un-dent reprocess and desensitise,” she sings, each line its own hook.

Just as Cruickshank has put her body and soul into the writing of her debut, the boys’ production perfectly complements its dynamics and sentiment. There are moments when they turn the pressure up; from the aching harmonies of “Breaking in Reverse” to the wall of sound on “Elephant,” and moments when they bring it crashing down. “New Shoes" – an old release reworked with loaded emotion – almost feels invasive to listen to.

You Are The Morning comes at a time when life is getting darker for the trans community. While Cruickshank couldn’t have predicted the political climate her album would be greeted with, she could probably have guessed it. Even though the songs are painfully personal, they offer a wider hope. The world feels dark right now, but albums like this give promise that the dawn is coming” – The Line of Best Fit

Standout Cuts: Skin on Skin/You Are the Morning/Guy Fawkes Tesco Dissociation

Key Song: Woman

Antony Szmierek - Service Station at The End of the Universe

Release Date: 28th February, 2025

Labels: Mushroom Music/Virgin Music Group

Review:

“Manchester’s Antony Szmierek has always had a knack for finding profound meaning in life’s mundane waypoints, and his first full-length record transforms these familiar pit stops into a metaphysical journey that would make Douglas Adams proud.

The former teacher turned word-wielding dance architect hasn’t just crafted an album – he’s created an entire universe where everyday characters cross paths at his imagined Andromeda Southbound services.

The album opens with its title track, a swirling blend that introduces us to an ensemble cast including a hen party, a wandering yoga teacher, and star-crossed lovers who could have stepped out of a Mike Leigh film. These characters weave through the record like threads in a cosmic tapestry, their stories intersecting and diverging with the precision of orbital mechanics.

The production throughout is masterful, echoes of musical heritage scattered throughout, but in a way that never feels derivative. Instead, Szmierek has absorbed these influences and reassembled them into something distinctly his own. ‘The Great Pyramid of Stockport’ might be the album’s creative peak, turning a local landmark into an existential meditation on permanence and legacy. It’s preceded by ‘Rafters’, where “the Patron Saint of Withington” meets “a pound shop Geri Horner” in a love story that somehow manages to be both ridiculous and deeply moving.

The record closes with ‘Angie’s Wedding’, a euphoric finale that brings the whole cast back together in what might be heaven, might be a wedding reception, or might be both. The Orbital-inspired synths and breakbeats create a sense of transcendence that feels earned after the journey we’ve been on.

What makes ‘Service Station At The End Of The Universe’ so special is how it balances its narrative framework with genuine heart. Szmierek has created something rare: an album that works both as a collection of immediate, affecting songs and as a larger narrative about how we find meaning in the spaces between destinations. It’s like overhearing a hundred different stories while waiting in line for a mediocre coffee, and realising we’re all chapters in the same grand novel” – DORK

Standout Cuts: Rafters/The Great Pyramid of Stockport/Angie’s Wedding

Key Song: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Fallacy

Richard Dawson - End of the Middle

Release Date: 14th February, 2025

Labels: Weird World/Domino

Producers: Sam Grant/Richard Dawson

Review:

“The intrigue surrounding Richard Dawson’s latest album begins before you’ve even pressed play. With a title like ‘End Of The Middle’, the veteran Geordie folk singer is inviting multiple interpretations of his work without even needing to hear a guitar string strummed or his characterful drawl.

In an era of such political upheaval, it could very easily point to the end of centrism as a political ideal. The world over, politics is increasingly being fought by those on the fringes, in particular the far-right, who continue to shout the loudest and dominate a news cycle that simply cannot find a way to contain its pervasive, damaging rhetoric.

Equally, it could relate to our relationship with aging, a topic equally at home in the current zeitgeist with films like The Substance throwing a spotlight on both personal and societal reactions to that most natural of human process. Zeroing in on Dawson’s own personal context – approaching his mid 40s, originating from the north of England, with a career of socially-focused music behind him – seems to provide a third, most tantalising reading. Class.

The idea of a class system is not something unique to the United Kingdom, but it does feel like our specific approach to connecting people’s worth to their monetary wealth is uniquely long-standing and sophisticated, making it difficult to define and, therefore, even more complex to untangle in the name of progress.

With this reading, ‘End Of The Middle’ turns into a record that focuses on the end of an accepted definition of a British middle class. With those sitting on hereditary wealth beginning to define themselves as working class simply because they have a part time job with little-to-no stakes, there’s an argument to be had about whether it’s become redundant as a concept already.

Dawson, seemingly, doesn’t think so, as he takes 45 minutes and nine songs to construct a collage of the relative comfort and mundanity that comes with being envious of those richer than you and those worse off than you. In other hands, there’s the potential for this subject matter to transform a record into an embittered undertaking, but Dawson is a cannier operator than most.

Instead, he presents this reality at face value, injecting these compositions with the kind of humour that draws a wry chuckle, and the kind of quaint familiarity that makes this all seem fairly aspirational, even if the characters at the centre of its gaze are discomforted by their lot in life.

Taking his cues from Japanese film director Yasujirō Ozu, a man who used his entire filmography to track how intergenerational familial tensions reflect wider societal discussions about traditions and transformation, Dawson allows you to make the call for yourself on how you feel about those in this comfortable limbo. It’s an exceedingly impressive character study that, with its straight-faced and straight-laced perspective, gets under the skin of these conversations in a way that you fear a more judgemental or overtly sympathetic observer wouldn’t be able to.

An album of rare patience and empathy, ‘End Of The Middle’ doesn’t ever allow itself to descend into forthright commentary. Instead, it presents its scenes to you, inviting you in, and allowing you the time to reflect on the quiet luxury of finding such comfort a drag, in turn asking you to consider the fates of those who would find such a life an aspirational relief from the breadline. An album for our times, indeed. 8/10” – CLASH

Standout Cuts: Gondola/The question/Polytunnel

Key Song: Boxing Day sales

FEATURE: Groovelines: Kylie Minogue – Spinning Around

FEATURE:

 

 

Groovelines

Kylie Minogue – Spinning Around

_________

IT has been a while…

since I did a Groovelines feature. This is where I explore a classic song. The reason I am spotlighting Kylie Minogue’s Spinning Around is because it turns twenty-five later in the year. Minogue is currently on tour and is in the U.S. very soon. From all accounts, Kylie Minogue’s Tension Tour is getting huge reviews. There will be a lot of eyes on her. I wonder whether Minogue will be asked to headline Glastonbury this year. She has appeared at Glastonbury but never on the Pyramid Stage as a headliner. I hope she is booked soon enough. The past couple of years have seen her hit a new career peak. 2023’s TENSION got a lot of five-star reviews. Many see her work now as the best she has ever released. Many might argue it was her first two albums of the twenty-first century. After the mixed reviews for 1997’s Impossible Princess, few expected what Kylie Minogue delivered in 2000 with Light Years and 2001’s Fever. Two of her greatest albums, it was a renaissance and reinvention that showed you could never write her off. On 19th June, the first single from Light Years was released. Spinning Around was a number one in the U.K. and Minogue’s native Australia. The single was a revelation! I wonder if there are any plans for a twenty-fifth anniversary special. Something to mark one of the most important releases of her career. Before getting to some features about Spinning Around, I want to get to some information from Wikipedia regarding the legacy of Spinning Around:

“Following its release, the music video became popular for the gold hotpants Minogue sported. It resulted in a media sensation regarding her bottom. British national broadsheet newspaper The Sunday Times deemed her bottom a "wonder of nature" and The Sun sponsored a campaign to "have Kylie Minogue's rear-end heritage-listed, preserved for "posteriority" on the grounds that it's an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty." Readers were requested by the tabloid newspaper to persuade the government to make sure "[Minogue's] bum remains in safe hands - by turning it into a national institution." Rumours and speculations claiming Minogue had undergone plastic surgery to make her bottom look more appealing also began to arise during this time. In the same year, English broadcaster and journalist Johnny Vaughan commented "if an alien landed on Earth he would think Kylie's arse is the world's leader." Minogue's stylist and close friend William Baker explained his decision to "showcase" her bottom in the video, saying "Kylie's bottom is like a peach - sex sells and her best asset is her bum.” The singer's response to the attention regarding her bottom was "dry," claiming "You never know what the future holds. It could become a pear." It was reported that Minogue had her bottom insured for five million dollars”.

Co-written by Paula Abdul, Spinning Around is ranked alongside the best Kylie Minogue singles. I shall end with links to a couple of single ranking features where Spinning Around is high in the mix. First, in 2020, Official Charts spoke with the track’s producer, Mike Spencer. One cannot really overstate the impact the song made in 2000. A perfect summer hit, it was also seen as a bit of a comeback and career resurgence for Kylie Minogue. I was in sixth form college when Spinning Around arrived. It was a song that was played widely and fondly discussed. Having been a fan of Kylie Minogue since I was a child, it was a real revelation:

“As comebacks go, Kylie's Spinning Around, released in 2000, was less a reinvention and more a reminder of what Kylie Minogue is all about: fun, sparkly and undeniably catchy pop tunes.

After taking a left-turn on 1998’s Impossible Princess, an intriguing, experimental album that divided critics, Spinning Around was a return to the core principles of Brand Kylie. It was fun. It was camp. It was for the clubs. It was tiny gold hot pants.

Rather than re-treading her Stock, Aitkin & Waterman sound, which didn't hold the nostalgic value then that it has today, Spinning Around played into the disco-pop revival happening in 2000 (see also: Spiller’s Groovejet and Modjo’s Lady Hear Me Tonight).

The result was Kylie’s I Should Be So Lucky for the new Millennium - and it went down a treat with the public. Spinning Around landed straight in at Number 1 on the Official Singles Chart with opening sales of just over 82,000. Against the odds, Kylie was back.

To celebrate the release of her new album, Golden, read back our interview from 2018 with Mike Spencer, who produced Spinning Around (and has also worked on this incredible list of hit singles) and told us more about how Kylie's big comeback track came together.

Hello Mike! All these years later, Spinning Around is still a great pop song. It’s aged well, don’t you think?

"I guess it has, yes! It was part of the beginning of Kylie’s sort-of second incarnation. At the time, I was just starting out - I’d had very little chart success. In fact, Spinning Around was my first Number 1 record."

How does someone who was just starting out as a producer suddenly get to work with Kylie?

“I remember I was based in Roundhouse studios in London at the time. People at this point had assumed Kylie couldn’t get back inside the Top 20. Obviously she’s really famous and an iconic artist, but her career had gone adrift somewhat. I guess it was just one of those records that struck a chord.

“I’d been working with Beverly Knight at the time on music that had a very soul edge to it, and that’s what Spinning Around was in its original demo form. It was a soul record. The musicians I was using on it were Rob Harris from Jamiroquai and Winston Blissett who played for Lisa Stansfield. We upped the tempo and made it into a disco record. We didn’t know if it was necessarily the right thing to do, but it felt like a return to where she’d come from, back to what she does best."

You’d sort of updated Kylie’s '80s sound for the Noughties.

"In retrospect maybe, but we weren’t thinking like that at the time. The SAW (Stock Aitken Waterman) sound was very processed, very programmed. Although this was a processed dance record, it actually has real instruments playing, harping back more to the original disco era. In hindsight, it looks like a genius move, but at the time – honestly - it was a bit of a shot in the dark."

After that initial meeting, what was she like to work with in the studio?

"I recorded the instruments with the band in London and flew out to do the vocals with Kylie. I met her in a restaurant on Sunset Boulevard on January 4. I remember I was quite star struck actually. She was great in the studio. We spent a week out there recording the vocals [and] the whole experience was really fantastic."

Wasn’t Spinning Around originally intended for Paula Abdul? She has a writing credit on the song.

"I sort of knew it had been for her at some point – she definitely has a writing credit on it. That version was a lot slower – much slower in fact. It was a different song – the tune, production and concept were all different.”

Given Kylie’s career seemed to be on a downturn, was there pressure to make sure this was going to be a hit? Was there a brief on what sound they were going for?

“Not really, no. I’d had a level of success with Beverley at Parlophone and they seemed to like what I was doing with her, in particular a remix I’d done for her I’d based on Chic’s Good Times. The label liked that and asked for a similar treatment with Kylie. It was rough though. It was a, ‘Can you make this work? Can you unlock it?’ situation rather than specific instructions.

“There wasn’t much noise around Kylie at the time, which is probably why I was lucky enough to get the gig in the first place. Nobody was falling over themselves to work with her. I loved the whole experience though."

There’s an effortless quality to the song; how long did it take to bring it together?

“Quite a while. I remember I recorded the band in a studio in London on tape and ran it into Pro Tools. I also recorded a vocal on 2” tapes and took it out to LA. I remember because I got stopped at the airport with them”.

 Not as much has been written about Spinning Around. Not as much as there should have been. I do hope that there is more words written about Spinning Around closer to its twenty-fifth anniversary on 19th June. I want to bring in an NME review from 2005:

“And on she goes. The years might pass but Kylie will only look younger, keep wearing smaller and smaller hotpants and continue pumping out ever more hyperactive pop music. Even when she’s done little more than eat at The Ivy for two years, she attracts more interest than all the mini-Britneys can hope for in a lifetime.

It’s good to know there’s some things in life you can rely on. And after Dance Kylie, Dodgy Madonna Kylie and Ill-advised Indie Kylie, the pint-sized Princess of Pop has returned to what she knows best. ‘Spinning Around’ is made of the same fizzing, giddy disco-pop that made Kylie famous in the first place and will thrill gay discos everywhere. Co-written by (yikes!) Paula Abdul, it has gloriously little substance and little worth remembering above the glittery, hi-NRG chorus where Kylie reminds us all that she’s back, back, back (“I’m spinning around, get out of my way”). Indie chancers throw away your hair slides and take note. This is the sound of someone enjoying what they do. Does it scare you?”.

In 2020, The Guardian ranked Kylie Minogue’s singles. They placed Spinning Around at number one (“Over the course of her career, Kylie has tried her hand at being Indie Kylie, Moody Kylie, Mature Kylie and indeed Covering Toots and the Maytals on a Children’s TV Show Kylie (see her 2009 version of Monkey Man with the Wiggles). But the fact remains that Kylie was essentially put on this earth to make glitzy, euphoric, balls-out pop bangers, and Spinning Around is the glitziest and most euphoric of the lot. A bold restatement of core values following her 90s dalliances with the left field; a perfect pop-disco nugget, a single only the terminally joyless could fail to enjoy”). Last year, when deciding on Kylie Minogue’s best forty songs, Classic Pop placed Spinning Around twelfth (“Not necessarily everybody’s favourite Kylie song – even her new label Parlophone didn’t hear a hit at first – this track brought the forlorn princess back into the public consciousness after an extended plateau. Co-written by Paula Abdul (for whom it was originally intended), the original demo was a down-tempo affair, so much so that producer Mike Spencer dubbed it “a different song”… but once it had been augmented with a classy disco design, and with eye-popping gold lamé hotpants in the video, Kylie was propelled back to No.1”). A song that Kylie Minogue has performed multiple times live since its release (including on her current tour), Spinning Around is a real fan favourite. It turns twenty-five on 19th June. The lead single from her seventh studio album, Light Years, the album itself turns twenty-five on 22nd September. I wanted to shine a light on its most famous single as I wonder if it will get a twenty-fifth anniversary release. Maybe Minogue will say a few words about the song. Hugely influential to this day, there is no doubt Spinning Around has influenced legions of artists…

SINCE its release.

FEATURE: Kate Bush: The Tour of Life : The Success of Her Albums vs. Singles

FEATURE:

 

 

Kate Bush: The Tour of Life

The Success of Her Albums vs. Singles

_________

ONE of the most notable…

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1989/PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush

aspects of Kate Bush’s career is the comparative chart success of her singles and albums. I know it can be difficult putting together a consistent run of singles. With each song sounding different and released at different times, it can be tricky finding that balance. Even though Kate Bush had quite a few top twenty singles, there were others that charted much lower. However, when you look at her ten studio albums, her greatest hits collection, 1986 The Whole Story, and the 2016 Before the Dawn, they all charted in the top ten in the U.K. In fact, with the exception of Lionheart – which reached number six – all of those albums charted in the top five. That is a remarkable achievement! Not many artists can claim such statistics. There is quite a gulf between Kate Bush’s albums and singles when it comes to commercial success. I suppose people will buy the album but think that the singles are really not as essential. In terms of singles released from her studio albums, I think Kate Bush has had four top five successes. There are a smattering of singles that reached the top twenty and a few that either didn’t chart or were very low. There Goes a Tenner reached ninety-three. That was from The Dreaming. Deeper Understanding (from Director’s Cut) reached eighty-seven, whilst Wild Man (50 Words for Snow) reached seventy-three. When those singles/albums came out in 2011, Bush had a run of eleven top ten albums. More impressive than this, top five albums in five different decades. I suspect, when an eleventh studio album does come out, it will place in the top five. One can look at some of her more modern singles. They charted quite low as they are digital releases. Maybe people streaming or buying the albums.

Kate Bush’s fans love to hear her music on a physical format. She urges her listeners to do that. If a single comes out digitally and there is no physical product then fewer people will buy them. Perhaps Bush does not see herself as a singles artist. It is about the albums. It wasn’t until 1982’s The Dreaming when we saw this huge and dramatic difference between the singles and album placings. The Dreaming reached three in the U.K. One of its singles, Sat in Your Lap, reached eleven. The remaining singles charted low or not at all. It wasn’t really a singles album. You can see albums like The Kick Inside (1978), Never for Ever (1980), Hounds of Love (1985) and even The Sensual World (1989) as having more obvious singles. It is hard when it comes to singles. Choosing ones that are commercial vs. ones that Kate Bush wants to put out there. If EMI wanted her to write singles and get radio play, Bush more and more was concerned with a body of work that was true to her vision and not motivated by the need to write hit singles. Hounds of Love compromised a bit in that sense. In terms of the album position (one in the U.K.) and the fact all of its four singles were top forty (three in the top twenty) meant that the balance was struck. However, since then, and especially from King of the Mountain (from 2005’s Aerial) onwards, Bush has not been too invested in singles. In the EMI years, they might have wanted three or four singles at least to come from each album. Aerial has one single. Director’s Cut and 50 Words for Snow had one single each. A taste of the album. Bush wanting people to invest in albums. Digital singles perhaps not holding any appeal. 50 Words for Snow sold 50,000 copies in the first week of its release.

I guess one can look at her album success and that is the main story. A single that went top twenty in the 1980s could have sold more than a top ten song from another decade. Same with the albums. The Kick Inside sold over a million and went to number three. It would have sold more than The Red Shoes, which reached number two in the U.K. The chart positions can be a bit misleading. In terms of the singles market, perhaps it was more about trying to fit in the scene at the time. Hammer Horror from 1978. Not really like anything around it. However, the album it is from, Lionheart, was a chart success. Is it a case of the albums being bought mainly by her fanbase and that love and dedication never waning. The singles being more about the general public. I wonder why there was such a discrepancy between the success of the singles from 1985’s Hounds of Love and those from The Dreaming. Was it a case of 1982’s music scene being dramatically different to what Bush was putting out or are the singles on Hounds of Love better and more radio friendly? Everyone will have their own views. Both of those albums sold well, though The Dreaming was dwarfed by Hounds of Love. Lionheart reached number six in the U.K. but has sold more than The Dreaming – which reached three in the U.K. I am fascinated by the numbers. Why certain albums sold okay and charted high whereas others sold big and charted slightly lower. The same with singles. From her number one debut single, Wuthering Heights, in 1978, through to and including Army Dreamers (1980), Bush had all top forty singles in the U.K. One exception was Hammer Horror reaching forty-four. From 1980’s December Will Be Magic Again through to Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God) in 1985, there was this weird period. Singles like Night of the Swallow and There Goes a Tenner struggling.

Certain singles released for specific countries and territories. They tended to struggle compared to those more on general release or released in the U.K. From Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God), Bush did not have another top five U.K. single for twenty years. King of the Mountain. The expectation and wait for new material accounts for the latter’s success. It is surprising that songs like The Big Sky (Hounds of Love), This Woman’s Work (The Sensual World) and even Rubberband Girl (The Red Shoes) did not crack the top ten. After King of the Mountain, there was this dive in single chart positions. Lyra (which featured in the film, The Golden Compass) was released in 2007 and reached 187. Deeper Understanding and Wild Man reached the top 100 but not by much. Even if there was inconsistency and real peaks and troughs, her albums remained solid and popular. The Red Shoes and Aerial went Platinum. However, Director’s Cut and 50 Words for Snow went Gold. That may seem like a decline. However, both of those latter albums were top five. I guess the fact each only had one single released from it and it was a time where physical singles were not a thing accounts in some ways to a slightly less impressive album sales haul. However, Kate Bush has remastered and reissued her studio albums since 2011. The overall sales figures given a boost whereas her singles are a thing of the past. Like The Beatles releasing a boxset with all of their singles in for the fans, I would love to have all of Kate Bush’s singles in this nice boxset. I wonder what accounts for the mixed fortunes of the singles compared to the solid showing for her albums. Fans knew when the albums came out and knew they wanted to buy them. Maybe the singles did not appeal too much or mixed reception from the press put some people off. Her albums were going to sell well no matter what. However, the singles has to compete with what was out at the time and had to fit in too. No surprise Hounds of Love’s singles did well considering the Pop and Rock scene of 1985. Compare that to, say, The Dreaming’s singles from 1981, 1982 and 1983 and The Red Shoes’ singles from 1993 and 1994. Everything around them vastly different. Especially the 1990s.

Maybe other people will have their theories. I wanted to explore this subject. In her early career, certain singles were released for different countries. Bush sometimes battling EMI to make sure the singles she wanted to come out were released. It is about the timing of the singles. The third, fourth or fifth single from an album is not going to do as well as the first or second. Also, I guess it depends how close the singles came out in relation to an album regarding their success. The Dreaming suffered because its first single, Sat in Your Lap, was released two years before the final one. However, when it came to albums like Hounds of Love and The Sensual World, it was a bit more consistent. In terms of albums that have a fair few obvious singles, I would say only The Kick Inside, Never for Ever and Hounds of Love stand out. It is a hard thing to judge and explain. You can say that it doesn’t matter how well the singles did but it would have done at the time. Even in 2005 or 2011, Bush needed the single to get attention and radio time. Even if the albums got into the top five, that is not to say EMI were okay with the singles being a bit patchy in terms of their commercial lure. I love how twelve albums from Kate Bush have reached the top ten. Few artists can match that! However, Bush’s singles ranged from chart toppers and those in the top ten to ones that didn’t chart or were very low-placed. So curious and interesting. Although Bush released some iconic singles and we must acknowledge that, it is very clear that the chart success and consistent run shows that she is…

VERY much an albums artist.

FEATURE: The Digital Mixtape: Flower Power Cuts

FEATURE:

 

 

The Digital Mixtape

 ART CREDIT: Julia Tulub

Flower Power Cuts

_________

NOT really motivated by anything…

PHOTO CREDIT: Viktoria Slowikowska/Pexels

I have been thinking about the summer of 1967. That first Summer of Love. Images of togetherness, free love and flower power. Whilst some may dismiss that period as idealistic or ineffective, I do think that the modern world could learn from that time. We need a new Summer of Love. Against the hatred and division in the world, it is a very strange and destabilising time. I hope that things improve but they do not look good at the moment. To help distract for a moment from the unfortunately grim realities of the world, I have compiled a mixtape of Flower Power songs. Some peaceful, inspiring and colourful songs from back in the 1960s and 1970s. A collection that could and should appeal to multiple listeners and generations. Evocative songs I feel are still relevant today. Sit back and relax to this…

PHOTO CREDIT: cottonbro studio/Pexels

INCREDIBLE mix.  

FEATURE: Spotlight: Revisited: Doechii

FEATURE:

 

 

Spotlight: Revisited

PHOTO CREDIT: IB Kamara for DAZED

Doechii

_________

IT may seem…

PHOTO CREDIT: John Jay

underwhelming or lacking if I include Doechii in Spotlight: Revisited. Seeing as she is a huge artist now who is very much on her way to the mainstream, one might not be able to label her as a ‘new’ artist. However, as this feature is me shining new light on artists I originally included in my Spotlight feature, I wanted to return to Doechii. To me, she is the most essential and finest voice in Hip-Hop right now. I love her music. So distinct, compelling and original, this is someone who is going to the big leagues. Hip-Hop and Rap still have an issue with sexism and misogyny. Doechii is an artist who will inspire other women coming through. There is nobody on the scene who writes like her. I am fascinated to see where she goes. Her 2024 mixtape/album, Alligator Bites Never Heal, was received to critical acclaim. I am going to end with a couple of reviews for the mixtape. First, I want to get to a few recent interviews with Doechii. The first interview I want to spotlight is from The Cut. Fresh from her GRAMMY win, the unapologetic Florida rapper was only getting started. The rest of this year is going to be massive for her:

“Though she has experienced this kind of virality before, mostly on TikTok, where her songs tend to soundtrack everything from puppeteering performances to “Get Ready With Me” videos, this moment feels different. She’s collected co-signs from Kendrick Lamar (he called her “the hardest out”) and Tyler, the Creator, who told me, “She’s really sick. Like, super-duper-duper-duper good.” And then there are those Grammy nominations: Best New Artist, Best Rap Performance, and Best Rap Album. She’d go on to win the Grammy for Best Rap Album, giving a heartfelt speech to boot. Since the category’s creation in 1996, she said, “two women have won …” Then she corrected herself: “THREE women have won! Lauryn Hill, Cardi B, and Doechii!” The moment was capped off by a performance of her songs “Catfish” and “Denial Is a River,” in which she rapped with a fleet of dancers wearing Thom Browne. (“This is serious,” she told me between rehearsals before the show. “It reminds me of when I would do talent shows and it was cute for everybody, but it was very, very serious for me.”) Right after the ceremony, she dropped a celebratory track, “Nosebleeds,” with a gramophone as the single’s cover art. On the song, she boasts, “Everybody wanted to know what Doechii would do if she didn’t win / I guess we’ll never …,” seemingly referencing Kanye West’s infamous Best Rap Album winner’s speech at the 2005 Grammys.

Doechii’s career has been operating in hyperspeed ever since the artist released her 2020 single “Yucky Blucky Fruitcake,” an acerbic, wry song about bits of her childhood — food stamps, Lisa Frank lipstick, and getting caught masturbating. The title was inspired by Barbara Park’s Junie B. Jones children’s-book series. “I was a lot like Junie. She did what she wanted. She was very curious, and she just went for it,” Doechii says, settling into a small leather couch back at her hotel, both legs crossed beneath her, brown leather boots still on. “Even though she had her issues, she had this feminine rage about her that I really, really liked.” Since “Yucky Blucky Fruitcake,” she has received pressure from her label and fans to make cookie-cutter hits to please the masses, but she pushes back: “I don’t like making music just for a moment. I like to make music for therapy, for an inner experience, an inner purpose, and not just for an algorithm.”

Doechii was born Jaylah Ji’mya Hickmon in Florida. She says her dad writes raps in his spare time and her mother, the more “analytical” one, primarily raised her. She grew up in Tampa, a place she says will always inform her body of work. Her “Swamp Princess” persona and the reptilian titles of much of her discography? That’s all Florida. But it’s not only her artistry that’s been influenced by the Sunshine State — “My chaos, my freedom, just my raunchiness,” she says. Doechii remembers a night at her grandmother’s house by the railroad tracks when she, her cousins, and her younger sisters, all still children, tore off their shoes and began racing on a patch of concrete. “The whole family was outside barefoot. The little kids would race. The aunties. Then we made Grandma and Grandpa race. We just do it bare feet,” she tells me. “That’s the most Florida shit.”

When she was in the sixth grade, she says God told her to write down the phrase “I am Doechii.” The decision saved her life. “I don’t want to get super-dark,” she says, raising her eyebrows when she looks at me. “I was getting bullied so bad that I was thinking about killing myself. I realized, Oh, fuck, I’m gonna kill myself and then I’m gonna be the only one dead. The bullies aren’t gonna be with me, and everything they said is not coming with me either. I would just be gone,” she says matter-of-factly before cracking a half-mouthed grin. “And then I was like, Fuck that!” She’s almost yelling now, leaning back into the couch and waving her hands playfully. “Fuck that shit! I’m not going for that! And this wash of peace came over me, and I received ‘I am Doechii.’ But it was more like this feeling of — I made a choice, a decision. I am the most important character in this movie. This is my motherfucking movie.”

Doechii’s sound is a callback to old-school ’90s hip-hop; playful, up-tempo contemporary spoken word; pop-culture references; and Gen-Z shitposting. On Alligator Bites, which she says is for “the girls and the gays that have a passion inside of them and are sassy, independent, strong, but they need an extra push,” she mocks the hamster wheel of the music industry, blows raspberries, and trolls her own label, yet still pumps the brakes on the irony by peppering in soulful bridges. She claims the mixtape’s name popped into her head via the same higher power that christened her with her stage name. “God told me to do it, and I did it,” she says. The meaning of the mixtape’s title still evades her, but Doechii trusts the process: “I know that God will reveal to me what it means later.”

PHOTO CREDIT: Richie Shazam

On “Nissan Altima,” Doechii flexes her rapping chops and gets cheeky about her bisexuality — “She munchin’ on the box while she watchin’ Hulu” — in just two minutes. “Denial Is a River” is a traversing, therapeutic conversation. “People are a little bit worried about you … / Why don’t you just tell me what’s been goin’ on?” the other voice asks before Doechii admits to her experiences with drugs and alcohol: “I like pills, I like drugs … / I like daydrinkin’ and day parties and Hollywood … / The shit works, it feels good, and my self-worth’s at an all-time low.” It’s a relatable cycle of self-destruction, and Doechii’s vulnerability is striking. “I have moments where I am worried and I’m like, Maybe I should dial it back because that’s a little too honest, but I don’t give a fuck because I know that in the end, it’s going to pay off more for me to be real,” she says. “In my music, I have to be raw and explicit or else it’ll make me uncomfortable. I don’t like secrets.” To record the mixtape, she locked herself away for an entire month, letting only her sound engineer, Jayda Love, in on the process.

PHOTO CREDIT: Richie Shazam

Doechii attributes the retro sound of much of Alligator Bites to her newfound sobriety, a lifestyle she adopted this past summer to allow her brain to “remember things.” She has started to feel a little sentimental, too. “I’m gravitating back towards things that I used to love,” she tells me. “The first album I ever purchased and ever remember listening to in full length was The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill.” The nostalgia trip also inspired the creative direction of her “Denial Is a River” music video, a modern-day homage to the laugh-track sitcoms of the ’90s, starring Zack Fox, Rickey Thompson, and Earl Sweatshirt, among others. “Old-school hip-hop is vulnerability,” Doechii says. “I’m gravitating towards the pure skill that was incorporated. Anyone who doesn’t think that hip-hop is an intellectual genre, I think that assumption is rooted in racism.” The women who paved the way for someone like Doechii to come along — Lil’ Kim, Mary J. Blige, Missy Elliott — pushed back against the notion that sexual liberation had to come at the cost of vulnerable emotional transparency. “The feeling that I have when I listen to The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill is the same feeling I want some other Black little girl to have when she listens to me,” Doechii says. “And in order for her to have that feeling, I have to talk about my feelings”.

There is a lot of new buzz around Doechii after she won the GRAMMY for Best Rap Album. In the process, she became only the third woman ever to win that trophy (Ms. Lauryn Hill is one of the other two women). I want to start with a brilliant interview from DAZED. Discussing the GRAMMYs, Met Gala and Superbowl, it is a time when the whole world has caught up. People around the world know Doechii’s name:

“Outside of the big night, what is a typical day in the life of Doechii? Is there a routine you adhere to?

Doechii: Lately, I’ve been starting my mornings early with tea and a good stretch. I’ve been trying this peach ginger tea. It’s really good. I like to meditate and have time to myself before I start the day. I’m around a lot of people all the time and as much as I seem social, I’m really an introvert and I like to be by myself. I have my routine before I get social in the day, and then I either write a poem or try to create something in some way before I start. And then I get straight into work.

I’m sure you’ve seen everyone reposting your old YouTube videos by now. Coincidentally, the day before our shoot was 10 years to the day of your first YouTube upload. In the second video you posted, you spoke candidly about practising your confessions: “Every morning and then, right before I go to bed, I confess everything that I want in my life and watch it come to pass.” Is this something you still do today?

Doechii: Absolutely. When I talk about my meditations, a lot of it includes my confessions and the things that I desire. I still take time to imagine and dream and think of new goals... Actually, I’m going to change the word ‘goals’ to: I just like to imagine. You have to dream and find time to dream or else you stop creating new things to chase. So, yes, I like to do that, and I like to have my affirmations and claim them.

Tell me about that girl. Who was Jaylah back then, and what’s her backstory?

Doechii: I’m still that girl. I’m very good at chasing my dreams. I’ve always been mesmerised by my life and what it could be. The concept of being able to manifest anything is cool to me, and so I made it my business. I just wanted to share with other people the cool things that I’d learned and tapped into. How you could dream and be something. How you can change yourself and change your circumstances. And I would just vlog my life because I thought the way I lived was cool and I wanted to teach people how to tap into this thing. And that’s who that girl was and still is.

PHOTO CREDIT: IB Kamara

I’d love to get a sense of Tampa and some of your earliest memories or pivotal moments of growing up there. How has it informed you?

Doechii: One moment sticking out to me is around 2007, when I lived in Sulphur Springs and my house was one house over from this community rec centre. It was in the hood, and they would do barbecues and sports, and all the kids from the neighbourhood would go there. A lot of my earliest memories of Florida are based around community and culture. Black people coming together, being creative and doing cool shit. Everybody would come to the rec centre on the weekends and stunt in the hardest outfit, just to do it. My earliest memories of fashion and showing up in a look and getting a look off was at my local rec centre. Or playing tetherball in the heat; everybody coming with the hardest hairdos and music, rappers and mixtapes, all of that started in that community. A lot of my memories are based around that.

Where in those moments was Doechii born? How did she come to be?

Doechii: Doechii wasn’t born until years later. This was around sixth or seventh grade. I was bullied so bad that I was becoming somebody else for someone else’s comfort. It fucked up my head because I always knew I was that girl. I always knew I was dope as fuck. My taste level was very high when I was young. I was not into the shit that everybody else was into. Not to say they weren’t into cool shit, but my shit was just cooler. So, anyway! [laughs] I was in a position where I thought about killing myself because the bullying was so bad. Then I had this realisation: I’m not gonna do that, because then they’re gonna all get a chance to live and I’m gonna be the one dead, and look at my taste! Nobody wants that. I don’t want that. That’s not the life I want to live. It made me realise I had gotten down to a point where I was thinking about taking my own life because of what other people thought about me, and I realised, “OK, what do I really think is important? What do I want here?” I had that realisation pretty young, and that birthed Doechii.

Who were you becoming? Who did you want to be?

Doechii: When people bully you, they want you to feel ashamed of yourself. They want you to feel insecure, to feel bad. They want you to feel ugly, like, “Bitch! You shouldn’t have that confidence. Look at you, your dark skin, you’re ugly, you’re stupid, you’re weird. Why are you wearing that? You should not feel this confident and be looking like that.” That’s how they wanted me to feel, and I was starting to become that person. Like, “Oh, maybe I shouldn’t be acting like this. This confident. Maybe I shouldn’t be wearing these things, maybe I shouldn’t be listening to this type of music. Maybe I shouldn’t be going these places.” I was in gymnastics and shit when it wasn’t cool. I was becoming less of myself to make them more comfortable, to fit the box that they wanted me in, and that wasn’t truly who I was. I was brilliant and have always been stunning.

You’ve described yourself as an alt Black girl and have just detailed some of your struggle to fit in in the past. SZA recently discussed the lack of alt-Black-girl representation when she was growing up on The Drew Barrymore Show, and so I wanted to ask you your take on this. Did that representation exist for you at all?

Doechii: Yeah, that representation for me was in Janelle Monáe, Lauryn Hill, SZA in high school, André 3000 – Outkast in general, actually – Missy Elliott. Those alt-whimsical archetypes in music are what I lean towards. Grace Jones!

What role does storytelling play in your writing? Alligator Bites Never Heal has a clear narrative but how do you translate these personal stories into universal messages?

Doechii: I treat songwriting like my vlogs. I treat the songs like my diary. Just say what it is – say what happened, honestly. I have no idea. I don’t know how I’m doing this. I don’t know how it’s translating to the masses at all. I’m just being really honest about my life. That’s it.

How does vulnerability or transparency serve you and the work that you create?

Doechii: It is my gateway to the next part of myself; honesty, authenticity and audacity are how I unlock the next level of myself. I have to do that by being honest about who I am in each moment. Sometimes that can be hard. And that’s what vulnerability is to me. It’s having the audacity to be real with yourself and then love yourself. Like, this is who I am right now. I don’t like this part of me, but it’s still worth it, right? It’s still worth talking about and writing about”.

I am going to end with a couple of reviews for the phenomenal and award-winning Alligator Bites Never Heal. NME awarded it four stars and had a lot of praise for an artist blowing up right now. I hope that Doechii comes to the U.K. and performs a few dates as there are so many people here who would love to see her on the stage:

“With her last offering – the 2022 EP ‘She/Her/Black Bitch’ – Tampa’s Swamp Princess proved to the world why she was a hybrid-pop powerhouse in the making. Doechii’s effortless switch between her avant-garde rap bark and syrupy vocals showed she has musical agility like no other; pair that with her unapologetically quirky style, and she quickly secured a spot in the upper echelons of current hip-hop. But, on her third mixtape, ‘Alligator Bites Never Heal’, her wacky personality takes a dip, and Doechii adopts the darkness of the swamp.

The 26-year-old’s latest single ‘Boom Bap’ wasn’t just a satirical clap back at those who “said they wanted her to rap” – it sets the tone for the throwback hip-hop vibes that can be found throughout the record. That’s no bad thing – Doechii is a witty, comical songwriter who can tell you vivid stories with little effort, and this approach allows that side of her to shine (see ‘Denial Is A River’ for proof of that, where she narrates the heart-wrenching time she found out she was being cheated on while in her own therapist’s chair). But, compared to her recent singles’ dance and pop-R&B sounds, this lyrical style is a swift detour that takes over most songs on the 19-track mixtape.

‘Alligator Bites Never Heal’ doesn’t feel like a record made for radio or to show off how adaptable Doechii can be. Instead, it reflects her personal struggles – like the doom she feels about approaching her thirties, industry politics and label demands, and her place in the music world. Through it all, her honesty must be commended.

From the opening track ‘Stanka Poo’, she gets candid, sharing that she feels reduced to a “TikTok rapper, part-time YouTube actor”. ‘Boiled Peanuts’ continues her frank sharing, the rapper complaining, “Label always up my ass like anal beads / Why can’t all these label niggas just let me be?” before calling herself a “dying sunflower leaving a trail of seeds”. This sense of being trapped or feeling inadequate is all over the mixtape, turning what should be a bright and joyous record into something more upsetting.

‘Alligator Bites Never Heal’ ultimately finds its way to a brighter place as Doechii pulls us out of the dark and misty swamp and into the warmth of her current home in the Sunshine State. After ‘Nissan Altima’, the Floridian shows off her musical versatility, trying out new genres like bossa nova (‘Beverly Hills’) and synth-led hip-hop (‘Huh!’, ‘Fireflies’). The gentle guitar and airy harmonies of the soulful titular track, meanwhile, create an ethereal experience while Doechii begs us to “dance with her”.

At first, Doechii gets into the nitty gritty on this release, but – by the end – she finds solace and strength, making the mixtape feel more like a sonic diary of her emotional journey. It’ll take time to see if it becomes a standout in her discography, but this boldly brazen record definitely makes a statement”.

I am going to finish off with a review from Rolling Stone. I think most people in the U.K. know Doechii from DENIIAL IS A RIVER. It is a phenomenal cut. I would urge people to explore the rest of her catalogue. We are going to get many more albums from Doechii. There is no doubt this queen is primed for greatness:

“Doechii — a fierce and fearless lyricist with a natural ability to shape-shift — became Top Dawg Entertainment’s first female rapper right on the heels of Kendrick Lamar’s departure from the label. That could have set her up to be an heir to an impossibly gilded throne. It would make sense to look at her that way. The expanse of talented rappers left on the roster are Lamar’s friends who have solidified their own domains, too established in those roles to take such a vaunted spot. Though Doechii’s signing was preceded by young Long Beach rapper Ray Vaughn’s, she quickly garnered a broader audience with the viral hits “What It Is (Block Boy)” and “Yucky Blucky Fruitcake” — one a sexy, sung homage to early-aughts R&B with a sample of TLC’s “No Scrubs,” the other a hybrid of high-energy schoolyard bars and raps over dreamy Nineties hip-hop. She quickly crafted opening-act slots on tour with SZA and Doja Cat into major moments, crushed Coachella, and got loved on by women across Black music, from Janelle Monáe to JT of the City Girls. With SZA currently standing as the toppest of the dawgs on TDE’s roster, it’s fair to wonder if she and Doechii will shape the future of the label’s prestige.

Yet, with her full-length debut, Alligator Bites Never Heal (a gesture to the Florida roots of the self-proclaimed “Swamp Princess”), she makes herself more than a successor. She’s a fully realized artist, with immense technical and curatorial skill. (This is one of the only recent albums that deserves to be 19 tracks long.) On it, she slickly glides from gritty boom-bap, sensual electronic, dance music, Miami jook, and earnest soul with a wicked pen and brilliant charisma. Her varied vocal tics and beat selections are often akin to Lamar’s — like her creeping and nefarious “Skipp,” which plays like a spawn of Untitled Unmastered’s tracks two and seven — but she also sounds like as much a student of A Tribe Called Quest, Missy Elliott, and Nicki Minaj.

She’s also just a human being, and most often she simply sounds like Doechii. This is a feat of originality for someone so early in her mainstream career. The standout is “Denial Is a River,” in which Doechii gives an Oscar-worthy performance as both herself and a therapist of sorts in an immaculate display of her quirks, relatability, and tenderness. She dishes on her depression and failed relationships, and defends a pesky drug habit she picked up in Hollywood, before blasting into “Catfish,” an assertion of why she made it there. Doechii can be brash, reckless at the mouth, and dizzyingly dexterous, but her gentle heart is at the mixtape’s core — her fears, vices, and dreams as she becomes who she always knew she could be are at the center.

Early on Alligator Bites, she seeks to settle any debate about her rap bona fides, with track after track of hardcore spitting on beats that sound like they were plucked out of hip-hop’s golden era and had the dust blown off them. Yet, on the sarcastic single “Boom Bap,” complete with retro scratching by her touring DJ, Miss Milan, she pokes fun at the idea that her ability to skate like that is what makes her worthwhile. After making fart noises into the mic and peppering the song with deeply unserious scatting, she says, “Get Top on the phone/Tell him it’s all rap, nigga.” It’s a rather brazen evocation of her label head and a nod to Lamar’s Untitled Unmastered itself. “Say it’s real and it’s rap and it boom and it bap and it bounce and it clap and it’s house and it’s trap – It’s everything! I’m everything!” she screams.

Throughout the emotional journey of Alligator Bites, she confronts the expectations of her label as a major source of strife for her (without exactly differentiating between TDE and Capitol Records, where she is also signed). She bemoans that they’re “always up my ass like anal beads” and pushing her toward “TikTok music,” but also shows reverence: “Who’d-a got the ball from Big Moo,” she says of current TDE co-president Moosa Tiffith, who signed her, “and who’d-a dunk it?” Later, at the end of “Profit,” where she raps, “My label hate the direction I’m going, they knock my shit,” there’s a recording of a call between the two of them. “I just wanna tell you that I’m proud of you,” Tiffith tells her. “I love you, like, talk your shit, go crazy. I mean, go be the icon that you are.” It feels familiar, like the historically contentious but fruitful relationship between SZA and her manager and TDE co-president Terrance “Punch” Henderson, and you see what magic has come of that. Here, the result is one of the year’s very best albums”.

Let’s leave things there. Doechii will be playing in the U.K. on 23rd August. She will feature at Victoria Park. She has also been confirmed for Glastonbury. A huge platform and well-deserved booking. A perfect moment for her to slay in the U.K.! If you have not witnessed the brilliance of Doechii then check her music out. In years to come, she will rank alongside the queens of Hip-Hop. The icons she looks up to. This amazing artist has…

A bright future ahead.

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Follow Doechii

PHOTO CREDIT: IB Kamara

Official:

https://www.iamdoechii.com/#/

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https://www.instagram.com/doechii/

TikTok:

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

YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCksiqtuWYtN2YluvAQnV2dQ

Spotify:

https://open.spotify.com/artist/4E2rKHVDssGJm2SCDOMMJB?si=2soCU8AvScWiiizD3YcDvw

FEATURE: Kate Bush’s Purple Reign: Prince and Our Queen

FEATURE:

 

 

Kate Bush’s Purple Reign

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1993

 

Prince and Our Queen

_________

THIS is the second feature…

IN THIS PHOTO: Prince in 1993/PHOTO CREDIT: Lynn Goldsmith

in a row where I am taking from Tom Doyle’s brilliant book, Running Up That Hill: 50 Visions of Kate Bush. There is a section that caught my eye. Maybe some Kate Bush fans do not realise Kate Bush and Prince worked together. Bush was featured on Prince’s 1996 album, Emancipation. That was a rare occasion where Bush featured on another artist’s album. She had done earlier in her career. Featuring alongside the likes of Peter Gabriel, Big Country, Roy Harper and Go West. However, by the 1990s, it was quite rare for Bush to feature on any other artists’ work. Her and Prince had a kinship. Even though they were collaborating remotely and did not see each other often, there were similarities between them. In terms of how they worked and this idea they were both slightly reclusive and strange. Press perceptions round Prince and Kate Bush. However, when they did work together for Kate Bush’s 1993 album, The Red Shoes, the result was not brilliant. I have spotlighted Why Should I Love You? before. I have also mentioned how, when Prince and Madonna worked together for her 1989 album, Like a Prayer, the song they collaborated on was underwhelming. That was Love Song. The two briefly dated in the 1980s and they had a complex relationship. However, there was a more straightforward relationship between Prince and Kate Bush. What could have been a wonderful and harmonious collaboration – think Bush and Peter Gabriel’s duet, Don’t Give Up – instead was an overloaded and messy. On 21st April, it will be nine years since Prince died. Only fifty-seven, Kate Bush was among those who paid tribute. When promoting the live album of Before the Dawn in 2016, she talked to Matt Everitt and shared her memories of Prince. It was a huge loss for the music world.

It is great that he and Kate Bush worked together. Although separated by technology, the two did get to share some recording space together. Tom Doyle argues how the two don’t seem to have much in common on paper. Prince was this showman who was not averse to publicity and loved the stage. He was fine with fame. Bush, someone who was more private and never wanted to be famous seemed to be an opposite. However, the two shared common ground then it came to the record studio. Both wanted control over their music. Bush got that in 1982 when she produced The Dreaming. Prince found it earlier when 1978’s For You came out (two months after Bush’s debut, The Kick Inside). Both were both in 1958. Prince born seven weeks after Kate Bush. These musical prodigies, there was this connection. Think about their work in the 1980s. Prince’s When Doves Cry has no bassline and the bass Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God). Both have vocal choirs and LinnDrum beats. Idiosyncratic synth lines and brilliantly deployed and stacked vocals. When Doves Cry arrived in 1984. A year later, Bush released Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God). It was not until 1990 that the two met in person. She was there for one of his dates during his Nude Tour. It was a more stripped-back (no pun intended) tour compared to the Lovesexy Tour of 1988 and 1989. Bush said how Prince was the most extraordinary and innovative live performer she had seen. Prince told his engineer Michael Koppelman that Bush was his favourite woman. Prince and Bush met backstage. The idea of them working together was floated. After Prince returned to the U.S. after the Nude Tour completed, he and Kate Bush spoke on the phone. Bush had this song – Why Should I Love You? – that she felt would benefit from having Prince’s vocals on backing. Listen to the demo of Why Should I Love You? and it sound vastly different to what would appear on 1993’s The Red Shoes. What is on the album is a reduced and cutdown version of what Prince sent back to Bush. The seven-minute-long version (which leaked online) that Bush intended for The Red Shoes had some similarities with tracks like When Doves Cry. Understandable why it might appeal to Prince.

Rather than Prince adding his vocal and it being this long and interesting song that could end The Red Shoes, Prince took it apart. He “tore it apart, rebuilding it entirely”. As Tom Doyle notes, Prince looped “a four-bar section from the chorus of the song, he engulfed it with an avalanche of ideas, filling up two 24-track tape reels, adding new drums, playing guitar, bass, keyboards and, almost as an afterthought, singing the actual vocal hook”. Michael Koppelman had to point out to Prince that he had sung a part wrong. The line, “of all the people in the world” he had recorded “all of the people in the world”. This possible dream collaboration had gone slightly awry! Prince rather confidently said he and Bush spoke about it and she was okay with him changing the words. Koppelman arrived at the studio one day to find Prince cutting up his vocal takes and sampling them to rearrange the words. Perhaps Prince realising he had made a mistake but not admitting it! The master tapes were sent back to Kate Bush and nothing was changed. She called the studio in the U.S. and was informed Prince was working on the track. A month after that, Prince’s tapes arrived at East Wickham Farm. Del Palmer (Kate Bush’s engineer and former boyfriend) told Sound on Sound how Prince had covered forty-eight tracks with everything you could imagine Not a complete disaster, he and Bush went over the song time and time again to get it into shape. Puzzling what to do with it, the version on The Red Shoes is closer to Prince’s overloaded version than Kate Bush’s more retrained original. It is one of those what-if moments. If Prince has reigned it in. If Bush had not asked him to feature and released her version. Their relationship working on that track was remote. They never met and instead would send each other stuff. Pre-Internet (or it was in its infancy), this was tapes mainly sent in the post. A bit of a letdown, it was perhaps impossible to meld these two incredible artists satisfactorily.

Listen to Bush’s backing vocals for My Computer on 1996’s Emancipation. A song that examined online relationships – Bush was ahead of the curve and sung similarly about technology’s grip for 1989’s Deeper Understanding -, you can barely detect Bush’s voice. For two artists that admired one another so much, it is a shame there is not a good, clear and clean example of the two in harmony. One can blame Prince for letting his ego take control. However, maybe he was not able to work with another artist and hone things in. Similarly, when Bush has worked with other artists since, she has called the shots and not allowed anyone else to control its direction and sound too heavily. When Prince died in 2016, she commended his artistry and control he has over his output. I can picture the two meeting in 1990 when Bush went to see him perform during the Nude Tour at Wembley Arena. I can imagine they were both quite nervous. Bush admired Prince so that opportunity to work with him was a must. Even if the final result was not as she’d imagine, she can at least she had Prince on one of her studio albums! I often wonder too if they would collaborate again if Prince were still with us. You can imagine they would be nodding to each other. It is such a tragedy that Prince died. As Prince died on 21st April, 2016, I wanted to use this feature to talk about the time he and Kate Bush met. Working together first on Why Should I Love You? Bush featuring on his My Computer. It is credit to Kate Bush that Why Should I Love You? was not one of the songs she reworked for 2011’s Director’s Cut. That album saw Bush reapproach songs from 1989’s The Sensual World and The Red Shoes. Maybe she considered Why Should I Love You? but wanted to honour Prince and not change it. It was clear then as it is now that Prince has a very…

DEAR place her heart.

FEATURE: Kate Bush: The Tour of Life: The Q Awards, 2001

FEATURE:

 

 

Kate Bush: The Tour of Life

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush at the Q Awards on 29th October, 2001/PHOTO CREDIT: Getty Images 

The Q Awards, 2001

_________

I have written about this before…

but I wanted to come back to a pretty big and important event from Kate Bush’s career. After The Red Shoes came out in 1993, there was a period when Kate Bush was out of the public eye. There was the odd single release and thing here and there but, for the first time in her career, there was a very long gap where we did not know if another album would come. Of course, Bush did release a double album in 2005. Aerial was released that year but she wrote some of the album way before then. However, in 2001, there was not really any expectation Kate Bush would bring us new music. The longest gap she left between albums to that point was between The Sensual World in 1989 and The Red Shoes in 1993 (there was also a four-year gap between Hounds of Love in 1985 and The Sensual World). We have had a longer gap since. Bush has not yet followed up on 2011’s 50 Words for Snow. However, there have been interviews with her since. She gave us her Before the Dawn residency in 2014. Bush’s most recent interview was near the end of last year. However, it was quite unexpected that we would hear from her in 2001. Not to repeat too much of what I have said before. However, I did want to mention a 2001 appearance at the Q Awards and an interview around that. It had been about seven years since Bush was last seen in public. Since 1994, things had been pretty quiet. It is amazing that journalists might struggle to recognise Bush after that time. It is like if Paul McCartney went away for seven years, you would still be able to recognise him after that time. The truth was Bush had not changed radically. She was still the same distinct and engaging person she was in the 1990s. However, now, there was a fresh energy and impetus. She became a mother in 1998 and was enjoying caring for her son, Bertie. There must have been some hesitation around appearing in public and doing any interviews after such a long time away.

However, it was journalist John Aizelwood that was tasked with interviewing Bush in a challenging year. In September 2001, there were the terrorist attacks in the U.S. Less than two months later, the Q Awards took place. It was a very strange atmosphere. Perhaps not as rowdy and charged as years previous, I guess there was a feeling of sombreness and  fear in the year. Kate Bush must have felt affected by what happened in the U.S. so might not have been quite in the mood to do an interview of speak positively. In spite of the time period, she did give her time to Q and John Aizelwood. The journalist was worried he would not recognise Bush. However, he did instantly. She was dressed down in jacket and trousers. This expectation that she would be in something eye-catching and starry. A woman now in forties, not much has altered. Bush noted Aizelwood and waved him over. They were at Harrods. She ordered a pot of tea and they sat down to chat. It was an interesting time for her. The year previous, in 2000, Peter Gabriel let slip that Bush had a child. This set the press in a frenzy. Maybe she felt she needed to do some press and speak after the sort of hysteria from the tabloids. This feeling that Bush had hidden a child away and this was scandalous. She had also been tipped to win a Q award, so she used the occasion to do her first press interview since 1994. John Aizelwood noted how Bush seemed keen to do the interview and it was not forced. Four years almost to the date until she released a new album, this was an occasion for Bush to buy herself a bit of time. EMI would have been excited for her to do the interview too. Aizelwood briefly met Kate Bush’s husband Danny McIntosh and son Bertie. They went off to shop. Bush told Aizelwood that she didn’t always want children but she looks at her son and knows that magic exists. She gave birth to him. Clearly, this was a very different artist to the one who was giving interviews in 1993 and 1994.

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush and John Lydon

One of the points that came out of the interview is how Bush was drained following The Red Shoes. The batteries had run out and she needed “to restimulate”. Sending time watching bad sitcoms and quiz shows, she wanted to be in a position where there were no demands. She saw friends occasionally but she was flat and needed time away. I am paraphrasing from a chapter in Tom Doyle’s Running Up That Hill: 50 Visions of Kate Bush book. He dedicated a chapter to 2001 and that interview/award appearance. Aizelwood was told that Bush lived in a flat in central London. She told him where but asked she did not print it. She had gone to see films and shows but kept life pretty undramatic. It was not too long until family and motherhood was on her mind. Aizelwood did get out of Bush that she was working on a studio album. Comparing her to director Stanley Kubrick – who died in 1999 -, she said how she adored him and how he had creative control. When pressed about the album and when it will arrive, Bush did not give too much away. It would be four years until she released Aerial so it was quite a gamble revealing that information and there being such a long period until anything arrived. Bush said she didn’t want to discuss something that was not finished. I am a tad confused as to when the Q Awards took place in 2001. I thought it was November but, as Tom Doyle writes, Bush arrived early at the Park Lane Hotel ahead of the award ceremony on 29th October, 2001. Our of practice being in front of photographers, rather than the mandatory and somewhat outdated red carpet process – where artists and actors pose for the cameras and give short interviews to everyone – Bush rushed down and inside. That is what every one of us would do but, as there was expectation she would chat, she was booed by the assembled press and crowd.

Bush was worried that the public were booing her. John Aizelwood reassured her they did not but she was already deflated. This special occasion did not get off to the best of starts! It was a busy and existing year for music. Musicians including Liam Gallagher, Damon Albarn, Cher, members of Manic Street Preachers and Radiohead were all at the ceremony. Word got round that Kate Bush was there. It must have been this moment of joy for them but also a feeling they might be upstaged! Maybe impetus that they should be on their best behaviour too! One might expect everyone there to be fawning and invade her privacy. The only artist who maybe crossed that line was Elvis Costello, who walked over to her table and gave her his phone number in the hope he would collaborate with her – to this date they never have. Fanboying over Kate Bush, she must have been taken back by all this interest! Considering her previous album came out in 1993 and it did not get a great reception, it just showed how loved and relevant she was – even when she was not releasing music. Her musical peers were pleased to see her. Midge Ure presented the Classic Songwriter Award to Kate Bush. Recalling the first time he met her, when Bush’s name was read out, everyone in the room for on their feet applauding this moment. I love how Bush’s first words were “Ooh, I’ve just come (cum)”. This was a line from The Fast Show. Bush always a fan of comedy. Not what anyone would expect from her, it perhaps took away some understandable nerves! Once the rapture died and Bush chatted to Donavon, she was whisked upstairs where she had her photo taken with John Lydon. A fan of each other’s work, when Lydon collected his Inspiration Award, he declared how much he loved Kate Bush and her music. Quite a magic and strange evening at the Park Lane Hotel! Lydon was interviewed after he left the stage. He was not happy how artists were clearly indebted to her – he was not kind about Tori Amos –, and he said how Bush was a true original. Not someone abiding by slavish rules.

Like Elvis Costello, Lydon was rendered someone quiet and spellbound by Bush. The same man who arrived at the ceremony in a horse-drawn rag and bone cart and was very much as punk as you’d expect was now polite and well-mannered! Unlike Elvis Costello, John Lydon was not trying to get Bush to work with him. Instead, it was two friends sharing a moment together. Nigel Godrich (the Beck/Radiohead producer was at the helm for the latter’s 2000 album Kid A and 2001’s Amnesiac) was also trying to creatively hook up with Kate Bush. Noting how as a teenager he identified with her music, I guess he wanted to produce or mix her next album. Bush was doing things on her own and, though touched, would never invite or satisfy these unsolicited requests. Before John Aizelwood said goodbye to Kate Bush, she revealed her proudest achievement of 2001 was quitting smoking. Something she did for her son I am guessing, Bush also confessed the last record she purchased was Bob the Builder’s Can We Fix It? Bush said she and a few people were going for drinks. She did not say where. Aizewlood concluded how things spiralled out of control. First badly and then really well. She was very happy there and there was ample proof that she was loved. Maybe that night spurred her creative process and expanded her ambitions regarding Aerial. That people were genuinely excited about what was coming next. Aerial did arrive in November 2005. Perhaps those who attended the Q Awards in 2001 felt Bush was just about to release new music. There would be a wait. However, when Aerial did arrive, we could understand why it took quite a while to come to light. I think about the 2001 award appearance and wonder if there will be an occasion soon where Bush gets an award and shows up. You would hope that the BRITs would have made an award for her. I think that the NME Awards should make some space for her. Any excuse to honour Kate Bush! It would be worth it to have a repeat of the 2001 Q Awards and…

THAT wonderful night.

FEATURE: International Women’s Day 2025: Inspiring Change and Togetherness in the Music Industry

FEATURE:

 

 

International Women’s Day 2025

PHOTO CREDIT: KoolShooters/Pexels

Inspiring Change and Togetherness in the Music Industry

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AS 8th March…

IN THIS PHOTO: Sabrina Carpenter/PHOTO CREDIT: Getty Images

is International Women’s Day, I want to put out the third and final feature to mark that. In music terms, there is no denying that the music industry is now being dominated by women. In terms of the best music being made. Not in terms of those in power and those with the most control. Think about the most acclaimed artists and best albums. Women are ruling and getting the most attention. They are also sweeping award ceremonies. The GRAMMYs was defined by female brilliance. So too was the recent BRITs. Charli xcx among the big winners. Even if the awards were slightly skewed towards men, it was women who shone brightest and won biggest. There is still not true equality in terms of this sense of achievement, boundary-breaking brilliance. I think the reverberations from the GRAMMYs and BRITs – and other award ceremonies – should compel some form of change and moves towards parity. When we look around, there are still fewer opportunities for women. Most professional producers are men. In terms of the songwriters appearing on the Billboard Top 100 and radio playlists. Most are men. Last year saw female journalists, artists and those in the industry talk about misogyny and discrimination. The rise in sexual assault. Radio playlists still have this male bias. Journalists writing about the male bias on Spotify. Huge festivals and smaller ones still struggling to book women and make them headliners. It is very much their issue and not because of a lack of options and visibility. Boardrooms and studios male-heavy and getting worse because of lay-offs and cuts. Across music, there is this gap between the quality of music and what women are bringing and the way they are represented and rewarded. In spite of award blitz and chart success together with huge reviews and sell-out tours, I think this International Women’s Day should be a chance for the industry to reflect and commit to change. When I see award ceremonies like the BRITs, GRAMMYs or something like that, there are few occasions when men speak about women in music and their excellence. Solidarity and showing their feminism. Very few interviews where men in music are talking about women. Both in terms of how things need to improve whilst saluting their power.

The enormous creative weight women are creating and the value they generate. Although there is not female solidary across all genres, we are seeing a lot of togetherness and support. Women in the industry connecting and there being this sisterhood. That is not to say men are not doing enough. In terms of collaboration and men in music giving props and shout outs to women, things are better than they used to be. However, it is quite telling that at virtually no televised or big event do you see anything in the way of true support from men. There is no viable and substantial feminist movement or agenda from men. Few using their platform to talk about women in studios, those on stage and the incredible songwriters and artists who are dominating. Look at wider society and when you search for the best feminist writers, books and thinkers, virtually all of them are women. In fact, I think all of them are. In terms of men writing about a feminist movement or tackling gender equality, virtually none. Maybe zero in history who have written about feminism and the need for men to be involved. This hugely one-sided thing. Of course, there are male journalists who write about women and spotlight female artists. However, when it comes to writing about issues around equality, gender, discrimination and abuse for instance, again almost everything is written by women. The importance of discussing these things and the pleasure of raising women and showing support should be expected and mandatory. As I have written before, there is no positive male movement. No movement too that integrates men into the feminist movement. Into the next or new wave. No male voices or pens contributing. Music is the most brilliant, universal thing that brings us together. A common language. I am not saying women are in dire need and they are accusing men of lacking empathy or support. I just look around and see women killing it and there being very little from men in terms of seeing this and showing their solidarity and also calling the industry out for its failings.

PHOTO CREDIT: Pixabay/Pexels

Sexism is still rife throughout music. It is not a thing that ended in the 1990s or has necessarily died away. As recently as last year reports were published regarding male bias and ongoing discrimination. I do love it when men in music – whether artists, journalists or someone else – champion women or talk about the wave of female dominance. It does not happen often but it is clear that there is at least this recognition. However, it seems foundational. When it comes to those fighting for equality. Highlighting systemic and endemic issues and also coming out as feminists – or if that word seems unappealing or outdated to some, then a modern substitute -, then there is this problem. Now more than ever there seems to be this need for unity and more from men in music. It is frankly depressing that you can go to any search engine and look for men writing about feminism or tackling subjects around gender and equality. Prominent voices are women’s. In terms of column inches and soundbites, far too few men contributing and doing what is required. One might say that music is an equal playing field and there is no need for it. Women would find it somehow insulting and ingenuine if men were more proactive. I look at all the female excellence, this solidarity and impact – from innovative artists, those slaying on the red carpet; the awesome collaborations, world-class albums and year-defining singles, plus those in every corner of the industry whose voices are so vital – and something is missing. I do think that there needs to be change. Coming off the back of the BRITs – where Jade, The Last Dinner Party, Charli xcx and Billie Eilish were among the winners -, there were some male journalists shouting out the winners (I think CLASH’s feed commentary was from Robin Murray). It got me thinking about music’s queens. How important they are and how we need to see greater moves towards equality and solidarity. An important subject to raise…

ON International Women’s Day.

FEATURE: Spotlight: Sunday (1994)

FEATURE:

 

 

Spotlight

PHOTO CREDIT: @bypip

Sunday (1994)

_________

IT is great that…

the brilliant Sunday (1994) will be playing in the U.K. in May. Their debut tour is one that you will want to be a part of. An acclaimed band that are being tipped as one that will help define the sound of 2025, I am going to get to some interviews with the trio that consists of Paige Turner, Lee Newell, and drummer ‘X’. I am new to their music so it has been interesting learning more about them. The British/American group have a sound I think will take them very far. There are a good range of interviews out there. Some are from 2024. One or two from this year. I am going to head back to last year for the first two. Even if the trio are being tipped as ones to watch this year, they were very much on the rise last year. On the radar of many people. Their debut tour – which starts on 26th April – will bring their music to new people. I want to start off with an interview from DIY. Last year, they spoke with the creative centre of Sunday (1994): Paige Turner and Lee Newell:

“What are your earliest musical memories?

Lee: I remember being carted about in the backseat of my dad’s shabby white Citroën BX. It was back in the early 1700s, so we’d be listening on cassette. He’d play The Prodigy, Skunk Anansie, The Smiths, Nirvana, Pet Shop Boys and everything in-between. I was an only child to teenage parents, so I got a very contemporary musical education. The backseats were right next to the speakers; it sounded tinny and harsh, and I absolutely loved it.

Paige: Being in a Jazz club on a weeknight with my parents and grandparents watching my grandfather play a set. It always seemed to end so late that I never wanted to get up for school the next day. My first songwriting experience was on my grandparents’ couch with my brother and an acoustic guitar. I was so nervous to try and write, but I remember being so proud and then my mom forced us to perform it at a family dinner. It was awful.

You come from Slough and California - two backgrounds that seem on the surface to be very different. What were these places like to grow up? What would you say is the common thread that creatively ties you two together?

Lee: I found it extremely difficult. It was a very violent place to grow up, and as exciting as exposed brick. As soon as I stepped outside the haven of home, I was a nervous wreck. It felt like I was stolen from another world and left to decay on a planet that did not breathe the same air as me. When I found other people that felt the same I would cling on to them, and they’re still my best friends to this day. It was the same when I first met Paige - I couldn’t spend a minute away from her. It was like we were part of the same cosmos.

Paige: The suburbs of California were quiet and mundane; smoking weed in the Costco parking lot wasn’t exactly Camden Town. I was trying to escape to gigs and festivals every chance I had, dreaming that I could be the singer of one of those bands I was seeing. When I met Lee my whole world opened up; I haven’t been bored since.

There’s a real sense of nostalgia to your output; does this stem from a yearning for a particular time/place, or from a more general escapist desire?

Lee: We get that a lot! Although I have to say, it isn’t intentional. Lyrically, the songs are about significant moments of our lives, so perhaps the nostalgia stems from there. Sonically, we just write from a place of instinct - I just throw my guitar around the room until it makes a noise we like. Then we record it”.

I would urge anyone new to Sunday (1994) to read other interviews and listen to all of their music. This is a group that very much have their own sound. One that is being taken to heart by people around the world. Let’s move to another 2024 interview. This one is from The Line of Best Fit. I am so excited about Sunday (1994). Even if they are quite fresh to me, I can instantly tell they are here for the long-run:

“Creatively, Paige Turner and Lee Newell are two sides of the same coin; one complimenting the other and finding space for each others’ ideas at any given moment; listening to their music there’s a kindred chemistry. So it would be hard to believe that they grew up on opposite sides of the world, one in LA, the other in Slough.

Newell, hailing from England – and previously the vocalist in reviled indie band Viva Brother – was raised on “whatever my dad was listening to," he tells me. "He was very young, so I had quite a contemporary sort of musical upbringing in terms of a parent's point of view. So I was listening to Prodigy, The Clash, REM, and then, like, Britpop stuff, Oasis and Blur and all that Suede.”

Turner however leant on the likes of jazz through her grandfather. “I don't listen to too much jazz, but some of that influence definitely I would take into my vocal approach. My dad loved classic rock, Led Zeppelin, and Steely Dan. I mean, The Beatles, obviously.”

Locations and upbringings aside, their pursuit of music and willingness to share it is what enabled them to find common ground and expand as artists. The pair met backstage while Newell was touring as part Brooklyn synth group Love Life and supporting The Neighbourhood. It was the ultimate meet-cute for musicians. Becoming friends first, he tells me they “haven't really left each other's side since, truthfully.”

Since forming as a group – along with an enigmatic drummer known simply as "X" – they’ve released a self-titled debut EP and are now gearing up for the deluxe edition, with the first single being “TV Car Chase”. Given that introductions only happen once (and they say first impressions count) they tell me just why the deluxe EP is so important, for both the fans and for themselves. “So we'd released six songs before, and the first one we put out was ‘Tired Boy’, which is a similar pacing to ‘TV Car Chase’. So it felt like a reintroduction,” Newell tells me.

Turner agrees on the sentiment: “The other two songs that are on the deluxe that are coming out, are maybe like, a different side to us. So we didn't want to scare people and make people think, ‘oh shit, they've already changed.’ I mean it doesn't sound too different from what we put out. We just wanted to ease back into the release.”

What reaffirms the pair's confidence in their music is that they aren’t ready to stray away from it to shock listeners, with Newell explaining, “We tend to sort of go for more mid paced, slower songs, because I feel like you can get the message across easier lyrically, at least.”

Such mid-paced tracks are becoming a signature for the group, making it clear that lyrical content is as important as all the other elements that make up the DNA of Sunday (1994). Their process is usually organic and much like many musicians, it’s a coping mechanism, a time of reflection and in this case, survival as Turner tells me. “I went on antidepressants, and I was still very in a very dark place while we were writing the song," she says. "And if anything, these three songs on the deluxe were kind of the thing that got me through that period. I was feeling so terrible. But I would be like, ‘no, let's just sit down and write a song’, because it was the only thing that distracted me from what was going on in my mind”.

Sunday (1994)’s eponymous debut album came out last year. It is a remarkable and affecting listen I think. I will end with a review of that album. Before getting there, the final interview I want to source from is DORK. Published in January, their feature charts the progress of the band. One that has had this long gestation and evolution process. Countless demos and a decade before they were really fully in bloom:

“In a world where artists are expected to have it all figured out as teenagers and know not only their creative identity, but how to cope with the pressures of presenting it, it’s more refreshing to see people who have taken their time in figuring it out. It then becomes more fulfilling for them, of course, but also richer for the listener – the artists know more about who they are and what they can do.

“After going through a lot of heartbreak within any field, if at the end of it you still want to keep going, that says a lot,” Lee affirms. “I don’t think suffering for your art is a pre-requisite, but I don’t think it hurts. You find out who you really are when you struggle. We’re figuring out who we are now.”

That journey of exploration and discovery is documented on the EP, and emotions run high, but not always in the way you’d expect. Take ‘Blonde’, a tale about watching your man leave you for a younger, prettier model – rather than being angry at her ex or bitter towards the new woman, feelings are internalised and self-directed as Paige fulfils a fantasy in her mind.

She recounts, “When you’re young and experiencing something like that, you can’t help but think: what’s wrong with me? Why do they want someone else? There must be something wrong with me. That’s a trait we both have in common; we both constantly think everybody hates us.”

PHOTO CREDIT: Nick Espinal

‘The Loneliness Of The Flight Home’ puts Paige in Lee’s mind as he pens his sorrows during a particularly dreary journey to the UK, and this magical fusion of minds shows off the band’s transatlantic appeal. It also highlights the main draw of Sunday (1994): the infatuated, complex couple at the centre of it all.

“Paige is so much better at articulating how I feel than I am,” Lee praises. “We’ve unlocked another level to our relationship, and I feel like I learn more about Paige through our music. It’s been fascinating and I feel super lucky to be able to do this together.”

There are some complexities to this, as Paige recognises. “I feel bad for other people who come into working with us because we have to try hard to make it not be just us two against everybody else. It’s an interesting dynamic.”

It’s good that the duo are used to spending time together because there’s plenty more of that to come – after selling out their debut live shows in the UK and the US, they are lined up to hit the big stages in support of girl in red. On top of all that, and recently expanding their EP with a deluxe rerelease, they are now formulating new music to expand their world.

While they try to ignore overthinking any outside opinions and stick to the fundamentals (“if we both like it, then that’s it”), Paige and Lee are both bolstered by the support they have been shown. “The main way our new music has been coloured is that we feel more confident,” Lee says. “Everything feels a little more technicolour, just more of what it already is.” Meanwhile, Paige is ready to let loose: “I’m not as nervous to say anything that’s out of left field; the fans have shown us that they get it. Time to say some weird shit”.

I am going to end with this review for Sunday (1994). A wonderful album. I am not sure whether the group have plans for an E.P. this year or another album. It will be interesting to see what comes next. The recent single, Doomsday, is one of the best of the year so far I feel. Go and check out this remarkable trio:

“Forgive me while I wallow in the melancholic wonderland that is Sunday (1994)’s debut EP, a melodic treatise that conjures such cool 1990s-era bands as Curve, Garbage and the Sundays. In fact, I’d argue that the six songs—which include their debut single “Tired Boy” and its addictive followup, “Stained Glass Window”—are tuneful portals to another time. When I close my eyes, it feels like I’m back in the living room of our first apartment, where Diane and I spent many nights enjoying the random mixes created by our Sony 5-CD player. (We each picked two discs and agreed on one.) The EP would have fit in with whatever we paired it with, from the bands mentioned above to Shawn Colvin to the alt.country gems we enjoyed at the time.

Yet, as much as a throwback as these songs are, they simultaneously sound fresh and new. The latest single, “Blonde,” is a good example. Paige Turner’s pouty vocals wrap around wistful lyrics that find her longing to be like her old beau’s imagined new girlfriend, while Lee Newell’s emotive guitar wrings slo-mo reverberations from minor notes. There’s more going on than just that, however, from (Racer) X’s steady drums to the handclaps to the profane shout-out that follows the mention of Chatsworth.

The other new songs—“Mascara,” “Our Troubles” and “The Loneliness of the Long Flight Home”—fall into the same mood-inducing mode. Theirs is an analogue sound in a digital age, if that makes sense. Newell and Turner are self-professed cinephiles and, now that I’ve heard the EP in full several times, it’s safe to say that though Sunday (1994) create 35mm-lensed music, wide in scope, they approach their songs with a noir-ish sensibility, filling them with many shadows and just a little light”.

I will finish off now. There are a lot of artists coming through at the moment you need to connect with. Among the most interesting and worthy are Sunday (1994). I would be intrigued to hear what they sound like live. I can imagine that they are a pretty popular and arresting proposition. That might be something I can find our for myself when they come to the U.K. in May. In the meantime, listen to the incredible music…

FROM Sunday (1994).

___________

Follow Sunday (1994)

Official:

https://www.sunday1994.com/

TikTok:

https://www.tiktok.com/@thebandsunday1994

Instagram:

https://www.instagram.com/sunday1994forever/

Twitter:

https://x.com/Sunday1994band

Spotify:

https://open.spotify.com/artist/1vTFaCiaR50b2IXELHW52U?si=mHOmo7yfTYOX2VjfvrL-XA

YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/@sunday1994forever

FEATURE: The Digital Mixtape: That’s What’s Up: Linda Perry at Sixty

FEATURE:

 

 

The Digital Mixtape

PHOTO CREDIT: Don Hardy

That’s What’s Up: Linda Perry at Sixty

_________

IF many might…

only recognise Linda Perry as the lead of the band 4 Non Blondes (whose most famous song is What’s Up? of March 1993), others acknowledge her as one of the most important and acclaimed songwriters ever. Someone who has written songs that we all know and love. The playlist at the end of this feature combines many of those tracks. Linda Perry turns sixty on 15th April. Perry was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2015. It is only right that I salute her ahead of her birthday. Before getting to that playlist, it is worth bringing in some biography:

“Linda Perry, as lead singer and main songwriter for 4 Non Blondes, wrote the group’s international 1993 hit “What’s Up?” prior to establishing herself as a major songwriter and producer. Her writer/producer credits including such hits as Pink’s “Get The Party Started” and Christina Aguilera’s “Beautiful," both chart-toppers.

Born April 15, 1965 in Springfield, Mass., Perry pursued her interest in music while a teenager in San Diego, then moved to San Francisco in 1986, where she sang original songs and played guitar on the streets, having written her first song by age 15. She joined 4 Non Blondes in 1989 and became its lead singer and chief songwriter. Disappointed with its polished pop sound, she subsequently left to pursue a solo career, commencing with her 1995 solo debut album In Flight, and resulting in her successful songwriting/producing activities.
In 2000, Perry wrote and produced eight tracks for Pink’s Grammy-nominated album M!ssundaztood—including the Grammy-nominated “Get the Party Started.” The following year she wrote "Beautiful," which was nominated for a Grammy for Song of the Year and won Aguilera the Best Female Pop Vocal Performance Grammy--and "Cruz," both of which appeared on Christina Aguilera's hit album Stripped.

Since then her name can be found on compositions and recordings by numerous artists including Jewel, Britney Spears, Courtney Love, Gwen Stefani, Alicia Keys, Celine Dion, Blaque, Sugababes, Lillix, Robbie Williams, Melissa Etheridge, Sierra Swan, Solange Knowles, Gavin Rossdale, Juliette and the Licks, Lisa Marie Presley, Fischerspooner, Unwritten Law, L.P., Kelly Osbourne, James Blunt, Cheap Trick, Ben Jelen, Enrique Iglesias, Giusy Ferreri, Faith Hill, Gina Gershon, the Dixie Chicks, Vanessa Carlton, Kelis, Ziggy Marley, Skin, The Format, Goapele, The Section Quartet, Adam Lambert, KT Tunstall, Little Fish, and her band Deep Dark Robot, with which she toured in 2011.

Also in 2011, Perry, who has launched the labels Rockstar Records and Custard Records, began publishing acoustic cover songs that she recorded at the piano with her iPhone, and in 2014, she appeared in the VH1 reality television show Make or Break: The Linda Perry Project, in which she worked with young musicians.

Perry has won two ASCAP awards for her songwriting. Among her other noteworthy compositions are Alicia Keys’ “Superwoman,” Gwen Stefani’s “What You Waiting For?” and “Wonderful Life,” Courtney Love’s “Letter To God,” Christina Aguilera’s “Hurt” and “Candyman,” Kelly Osbourne’s “One Word,” Celine Dion’s “My Love” and James Blunt’s “No Bravery.”

In other activities, Perry works closely with several organizations to promote charity, freedom of expression, individuality and acceptance. These include the Los Angeles Gay & Lesbian Center, and the Art of Elysium, which encourages working actors, artists, and musicians to volunteer their time to creative enrichment programs for children battling serious medical conditions, and named her its Visionary Recipient of 2014”.

On 15th April, the music world will wish a very happy sixtieth birthday to Linda Perry. I hope that radio stations use the day as an opportunity to play songs written by Perry. The vast range of her talent is impressive. I am going to end things there. A genius songwriter who I hope writes a lot more songs yet. The tracks I have included in the mixtape are a combination of songs she either wrote solo or collaborated with other songwriters on. It goes to show that there are few other songwriters…

AS talented as her.

FEATURE: Remakes and Sequels: Kate Bush’s Director’s Cut at Fourteen

FEATURE:

 

 

Remakes and Sequels

Kate Bush’s Director’s Cut at Fourteen

_________

THIS time around…

when speaking about Kate Bush, I want to look ahead to the fourteenth anniversary of her ninth studio album, Director’s Cut. I take issue with people who say this is not a studio album because it is a one (an album) where Bush reworked and re-recorded older songs. Calling it a remix album rather than a studio one is incorrect. Director’s Cut is a new work and a new album. The first of two she would release in 2011. The second, 50 Words for Snow, arrived that November. Not much has been written about Director’s Cut. A few reviews and the odd piece but, largely, it is ignored and overlooked. Seen often as one of the less worthy albums of hers. If you look at album ranking features Director’s Cut often comes eighth, ninth or tenth. Granted, it is not in my top five Kate Bush albums, though I look fondly on Director’s Cut and would not write it off or see it as significant. Definitely part of the cannon. Director’s Cut revisits songs from 1989’s The Sensual World and 1993’s The Red Shoes. The songs were remixed and restructured, three of which were re-recorded completely. All of the lead vocals on Director’s Cut were recorded new, as were some of the backing vocals. The drum tracks were reconceived and re-recorded (Steve Gadd on percussion). Released on 16th May, 2011 through her Fish People label, this is unique in Kate Bush’s discography. The one and only time she has reapproached songs that first appeared on other studio albums. Rather than seeing this as remixing old tracks and this not being a studio offering, it very much should be seen as a completely new work. I think that her choice of tracks to explore are interesting. I have said before how some inclusions – such as Rubberband Girl (originally on The Red Shoes), Deeper Understanding (originally off of The Sensual World) and even Flower of the Mountain (originally titled The Sensual World) – are maybe odd and songs you might expect to feature, those such as Why Should I Love You? (The Red Shoes) and Love and Anger (The Sensual World) are not included.

It is interesting to learn why Kate Bush decided to embark on the album that would become Director’s Cut. Almost six years after she released the magnificent double album, Aerial, her mind was maybe thinking back. Before embarking on an album of all original material, there was this sense of some of her older work needing to be reassessed and re-recorded. I can appreciate there are stresses and some unhappy memories associated with The Red Shoes. In retrospect, the album does not sound as warm and rich as it could have been. Perhaps too much machinery and technology at her hands when she produced The Sensual World. Wanting to strip these albums back and ensuring that only essential layers and sounds remain. Not only can we see these older songs in a brand new light. I know people were compelled to look back at the albums the songs are from. I am repeating things I have said before though, when thinking of Director’s Cut, we need some context. In this 2011 feature from The Guardian, there is some useful detail and background:

"I think of this as a new album," Bush said. Though some of the 11 tracks were first issued more than 20 years ago, all have new lead vocals, new drums, and substantially reworked instrumentation. Three of the songs, including This Woman's Work, have been completely re-recorded. "For some time I have felt that I wanted to revisit tracks from these two albums and that they could benefit from having new life breathed into them," Bush explained. "Now these songs have another layer of work woven into their fabric."

The Sensual World is perhaps the most changed of these tracks – it has not even retained its original title. Now called Flower of the Mountain, the original lyrics have been replaced by a passage from James Joyce's 1922 novel. "Originally when I wrote the song The Sensual World I had used text from the end of Ulysses," Bush said. "When I asked for permission to use the text I was refused, which was disappointing. I then wrote my own lyrics for the song, although I felt that the original idea had been more interesting. Well, I'm not James Joyce am I? When I came to work on this project I thought I would ask for permission again and this time they said yes ... I am delighted that I have had the chance to fulfill the original concept”.

Prior to coming to some reviews, I want to bring in part of an interview from 2011. Interview Magazine asked some interesting questions I wanted to highlight. There were not that many interviews conducted around the release of Director’s Cut. It is a shame. A certain level of apathy from the press. Maybe Kate Bush wanted fewer interviews around this album as she knew she would be releasing another one shortly afterwards. In retrospect, the level of exposure and attention paid to Directors Cut was underwhelming. I think people should explore this album as many unfairly criticise it:

“Bush’s most recent album, Director’s Cut (Fish People/EMI), offers reinterpretations of 11 of her previously released songs, with new vocal performances and instrumentation. “Flower of The Mountain” (originally released under the title “The Sensual World”) is typical of Bush’s expansive musicality. A time-traveling ode to sensual surrender, the song draws on Arabic melodies to create a primal, ancient atmosphere. “Song of Solomon” is a slow, bouncing, bass-heavy blues groove, stretched out and slowed down as if played in zero gravity. “Lily” is a mad vision of fear, fire, funk, and biblical name-dropping. The content of the songs is equally diverse; on “Deeper Understanding,” she even offers a futuristic high-concept R&B ode to the addictive false solace of the Internet. But the finest and most startling moments on Director’s Cut are the simplest and most stark: “Moments of Pleasure” is a painful meditation for voice and piano, and the aching melancholy of “Never Be Mine” should literally come with a warning—it will stop you in your tracks.

Despite all the 52-year-old Bush’s successes, she has chosen to lead a very private life. She has only toured once and has generally been reticent about giving interviews. But when I spoke with her by phone from her home outside of London, she was gracious, easy-going, and anything but reclusive.

DIMITRI EHRLICH: I thought we’d begin with talking about Director’s Cut. Let’s talk about “The Sensual World” [off 1989’s The Sensual World]. I know that when you first recorded that song, you had originally wanted to use some text from James Joyce’s Ulysses, which is always a favorite on pop radio here in America.

KATE BUSH: [laughs] Yes.

EHRLICH: But the Joyce estate refused permission, and now, 22 years later you finally got the okay.

BUSH: Yes, originally, as you say, I wanted to use part of the text, and approached for permission, and was refused. I was a bit disappointed, but it was completely their prerogative—they were being very protective to the work, which I think is a good thing. So I had to sort of go off and write my own lyrics, which . . . They were okay, but it always felt like a bit of a compromise really. It was nowhere near as interesting as the original idea. When I started to work on this project, I thought it was worth a shot just asking again, because they could only say no. But to my absolute delight—and surprise—they agreed.

EHRLICH: Looking at your lyrics to “Song of Solomon,” I found it interesting how you juxtaposed sexuality with spirituality. What inspired that?

BUSH: Well, it was quite an interesting process for me to go back and re-sing these songs because, for all kinds of reasons, they’re not the songs I would write now. I can’t really remember what my thought process was when I wrote that one originally. I just thought it was one of those songs that could benefit from a revisit. That was just one of the songs that popped into my head. I didn’t really take a great deal of time choosing the list of songs, I just kind of wrote down the first things that came into my head.

EHRLICH: It’s funny. I’d think revisiting those songs would almost be like looking at old photographs or reading old love letters from a long time ago, because as a songwriter, the emotions that you’re tapping into are the most primal, raw, and immediate ones. Was it strange to step into the emotional clothing you had worn 20 years ago and see how it fit and wonder, Who is this person?

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

EHRLICH: Why did you decide to re-record existing material rather than do something new, or just release the old versions remixed, or whatever?

BUSH: Well, I really didn’t see it as a substitute for a greatest hits package, but it was something I’d wanted to do for a few years. I guess I just kind of felt like there were songs on those two albums [The Sensual World and The Red Shoes (1993)] that were quite interesting but that they could really benefit from having new life breathed into them. I don’t really listen to my old stuff, but on occasion, I would either hear a track on the radio or a friend might play me one, and there was generally a bit of an edgy sound to it, which was mainly due to the digital equipment that we were using, which was state of the art at the time—and I think everyone felt pressured to be working that way. But I still remain a huge fan of analog. So there were elements of the production that I felt were either a little bit dated or a bit cluttered. So what I wanted to do was empty them out and let the songs breathe more.

EHRLICH: Your music has always been defiantly different than American pop. Do you have a love-hate relationship with classic American pop? Do you just find it boring, or is there something about it that you secretly enjoy as a guilty pleasure?

BUSH: [laughs] What a thing to say! No, I mean, god, some of the best pop music ever has come out of the States. Some of that Motown stuff is some of the best songs ever written. It’s not that I don’t like American pop; I’m a huge admirer of it, but I think my roots came from a very English and Irish base. Is it all sort of totally non-American sounding, do you think?

EHRLICH: In a good way. Your music is very original—especially the lyrical structure. It doesn’t have the kind of obvious rhyme structure and subject matter.

BUSH: Oh, well, thank you. I think with some of the rhyme structures that might be connected to the fact that I do sing in an English as opposed to an American accent, which a lot of English singers have done.

EHRLICH: I went to Oxford for a period while I was in college, and we used to say America and Britain are two cultures separated by a common language.

BUSH: I think it’s a very interesting observation. I think I was just lucky to be brought up in a very musical family. My two older brothers were, and still are, very musical and very creative, and music was a big part of my life from a very young age, so it is quite natural for me to become involved in music in the way that I did.

EHRLICH: What were your early lyrics about when you began exploring composition?

BUSH: Initially, I used to just play hymns that I knew.

EHRLICH: Interesting that your music is so adventurous, melodically, because hymns tend to be very simple, so it’s interesting that you came from such a grounded place.

Bush: Well, I just sort of used to tinker around, and then I moved on to the piano. My father was always playing the piano. He played all kinds of music—Gershwin, all kinds of stuff. He was really a hugely encouraging force to me when I was little. I used to write loads of songs when I was really young, and he was always there to listen to them for me. And it was a really wonderful thing that he did because he made me feel that they had some worth, even when they didn’t really. And he was always very honest with me. He’d say if he didn’t think perhaps one song wasthat good, or he liked that one. What was greatwas that he’d give me that time, and would always come and listen when we’d written something. So, you know, he was fantastic because he gave me the sense that he believed in me.

Ehrlich: Your lyrics often seem highly personal, but some of your earlier songs drew on more cinematic source material, like old crime films for “There Goes a Tenner,” the British horror movie The Innocents [1961] for “The Infant Kiss,” and even The Shining [1980] for “Get Out of My House.” How do these sorts of influences make their way into your work? Is it a conscious thing, or does it just happen?

BUSH: Well, “Get Out of My House” was more to do with the book than the film, just to say that. But whatever is going on in your life when you’re writing has to somehow seep into your work. And maybe if my songs feel personal, that’s very nice. I like that. I take that as a great compliment. But there are very few that really have any sort of autobiographical content. I guess that you could say that “Moments of Pleasure” has some autobiographical content, probably out of all the songs I’ve written. But I think what is great is that if anything that I do is interesting to somebody else, then I really don’t think it matters at all what I had originally intended. If people like the song, or they can draw some feeling from it, then I’m really happy about that. Quite often, lyrics get misunderstood—and I never mind that either. I guess what all artists want is for their work to touch someone or for it to bethought provoking”.

I will wrap up soon. However, before doing so, it is worth getting some critical perspective. First up is NRP and their words. It was hugely exciting and unexpected when Kate Bush announced Director’s Cut. Since 2011, Bush has reissued albums and looked back. It was quite rare back in 2011. Not many occasions when she spent time and effort re-engaging with previous work. You know she must care deeply about The Sensual World and The Red Shoes but felt that something was missing. A new opportunity to record the songs so that you can feel and hear what was perhaps missing first time around:

“Bush is best known for her canonized 1985 album Hounds of Love. It's tempting to call that record a turning point in pop: It's as weird as it is catchy, as intelligent as it is danceable. And it's only gotten better with age.

Four years after Hounds of Love, Bush released The Sensual World, on which the uncompromising singer did something out of character: She compromised. The album's title track was conceived as a distilled version of Molly Bloom's soliloquy from James Joyce's Ulysses. (If you're like me and just couldn't make it to the end of Ulysses, you may remember the passage from Sally Kellerman's impassioned reading in the Rodney Dangerfield movie Back to School.) When Bush approached the Joyce estate about using actual passages from the book, the estate declined, leaving Bush to paraphrase the text as best she could. (So Dangerfield got the thumbs up, and Bush didn't? Who says the man didn't get any respect?)

In the eyes of fans, The Sensual World hardly suffered from the limitation, but "good enough" never sat right with Bush. So, more than 20 years later, she asked again — and this time got the answer she was looking for.

The opportunity to remake the song motivated Bush to tinker with other entries in her discography. The result is Director's Cut, a collection of 11 revamped songs that made their first appearances on The Sensual World and 1993's The Red Shoes. With new words and vocals, "The Sensual World" has been re-christened "Flower of the Mountain." Bush re-recorded all of her vocals and the drums, but left most of the other instrumentation untouched, including Eric Clapton's guitar in "And So Is Love." (Okay, so she's made a few mistakes here and there.)

For those familiar only with Hounds of Love, Director's Cut is bound to open eyes. It's less energetic, hardly danceable, and it at times resembles the work of Bush's duet partner Peter Gabriel. But give the songs time. Let Bush's songwriting sink in. Just like her, you'll find yourself wanting to return to them”

The second and final review is going to come from Pitchfork. I have found a few very positive reviews. Many tend to be the sort of three-star middling ones that hint at positives but also feel that there is something futile about Director’s Cut. Many preferring the original versions. I feel that Director’s Cut allows us to get this wonderful perspective on songs that have new gravity and meaning with a lower and older voice singing them. Especially tracks like This Woman’s Work and Moments of Pleasure:

“Director's Cut transforms songs from 1989's The Sensual World and 1993's The Red Shoes. Sometimes crucial elements (rhythm tracks, vocals) are re-recorded. Some aspects (like certain guest performances) are left unchanged. Occasionally an entire song gets a note-by-note remake. It's a major and unexpected reinvention of familiar and very time-bound material, not quite "new" and also not quite what fans have been playing for years now. The very different mix of Director's Cut changes not just the sound but the emotional kick inside many of these songs. What was once the work of a shy woman who came to roaring life on record is now just as often subdued, reflective, inward-looking. It's worthy of standing as its own entry in Bush's discography, without necessarily replacing the albums it draws from.

At the time of its release, The Sensual World seemed both up to date and not of its time. The glossy studio-obsessive production sounded definitely of its moment, fitting for the era of booming drums and reverb-soaked pop trifles from bands like Fine Young Cannibals and INXS. But the songs, and Bush's performances, were stark reminders that she actually came out of the same tradition that gave us the operatic vocals of prog rock, the jazz-tinged complexity of the Canterbury psychedelic scene, the unashamed theatricality that led to Peter Gabriel dressing up like a giant daffodil. It made for a strange hybrid, the smoothness of the Big 80s meets the complexity and expressionism of the prog 70s. Much of the record's tension came from wrapping shiny pop accessibility around songs that might burst into emotionally raw strangeness at any time. Bush played to the moment, but couldn't be contained by it.

By the time of The Red Shoes-- with its prog structures, guest-star guitar heroics, world music touches, all given another dose of pop polish-- Bush's music was too ornate to fit in with the stripped-down "realness" of alt-rock. It was also still too defiantly individual to sit alongside the work of her 70s and 80s peers, many of whom had moved into comfortable, profitable, and bland MOR singer-songwriter territory. Her moment hadn't so much passed-- though it'd be hard to point out anyone else making music that sounded like this at the time-- as she'd become a genre-of-one. The fussed-over textures and genteel folk touches of adult contemporary peeled back mid-song to reveal naked eroticism, rage, joy, Bush's voice spluttering out wordless weirdness or leaping into ecstatic ululations.

What Bush has done on Director's Cut, put simply, is to strip the 80s from these songs. (That goes for the Red Shoes material, too, even though the album was released in the 90s.) The gigantic drums and digital polish, what both dated the music instantly and gave it that stark contrast between accessibility and the deeply personal, have been replaced with less showy rhythm tracks, and a warmer, more intimate atmosphere. On the original "The Sensual World", the elements drawn from Celtic folk felt like striking intrusions in an all-digital world. Renamed "Flower of the Mountain" here, those rustic elements no longer feel quite so out of place, whether you found the original an intriguing hybrid or an awkward merger of old and new. The songs still don't have the feel of a band playing together, but they have a new unity, even the synthetic elements part of a lovingly handcrafted sound. "The Red Shoes", another Celtic-inflected standout, with one of Bush's wildest performances, gains a new intensity precisely because the instruments no longer feel so sterile”.

I do love the tone and feel of Director’s Cut. When critics rank the album as bottom or last, they always say that these new versions will never replace the original. That was never the aim. Rather than seeing it as Kate Bush covering her own songs, you need to see Director’s Cut as fresh work. A series of eleven new tracks. As a body of work, they hang together. Granted, I would replace maybe three of the tracks and bring in three that I feel would work better. I think I mentioned before how the tracklisting is unusually out of balance. Bush was obviously going to open with Flower of the Mountain as that was sport of the whole reason for Director’s Cut. However, it is very middle-heavy. Ending with Rubberband Girl seems odd as I feel that This Woman’s Work would have been a perfect closer. However, these niggles aside, we should show more respect for Director’s Cut. Released on 16th May, 2011, Bush’s ninth studio album cleared the path for 50 Words for Snow. As nobody else will write about Director’s Cut ahead of its fourteenth anniversary, I felt that it at least deserved…

THIS recognition.