FEATURE: One for the Record Collection! Essential June Releases

FEATURE:

 

 

One for the Record Collection!

IN THIS PHOTO: Olivia Rodrigo/PHOTO CREDIT: Morgan Maher for Cosmopolitan

 

Essential June Releases

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JUNE is traditionally…

IN THIS PHOTO: Lizzo

a busy one for albums. Just before the summer beckons and the festivals kick off, artists keen to put out albums. July and August are also very packed. I am going to recommend a selection of the best albums due next month. There is a fuller list here that you might want to reference for further suggestions. Let’s start off with the albums due on 5th June. I am looking forward to hearing Lizzo’s Bitch. I am a big fan of Lizzo and I always love what she puts out. The cover alone is worth getting the album for! You can pre-order it here. Rough Trade have not really spent any time giving us information about Lizzo or the album, so instantly I am forced to look elsewhere. They need to do a bit better when it comes to which albums they give information about or, like this, leave with the bare minimum! I will bring in a new interview from People. Lizzo talks about self-love, swimwear-confidence and her new album:

"You know how exhausting being fabulous is?" asks Lizzo.

The musician is known for being all things fabulous indeed, but in this case, she's talking about her newest fashion campaign. Spoiler: she's living her best life in bikinis and one-pieces on a yacht ("It's tongue-in-cheek. It's a wink and a nod").

It's been four years since the "Good as Hell" singer launched size-inclusive shapewear line Yitty in collaboration with Fabletics and two years since the brand came out with its swim line. This summer, Yitty Swim is debuting its largest collection of bathing suits with more than 25 new styles ranging from sizes XS to 6X that the brand markets for every body and every baddie.

"Swimwear was always the goal in the beginning because I truly believed that we could bring some of the shaping comfort and sexiness that our shapewear had to a swim [line]," Lizzo tells PEOPLE exclusively. "I want people to find a product that makes them feel good. My goal with Yitty has always been to create something that changes a person's day for the better and the way they feel about themselves when they walk past the mirror."

It often feels like the swimsuit genre can lack empathy for consumers, but Lizzo dreamt of creating a narrative that gave shoppers hope of finding a piece that could make them feel snatched and sexy and comfortable. She made it a reality.

In the short amount of time Lizzo has been working on Yitty, she's seen it "explode in ways we didn't even realize." So diving deeper into the category wasn't so much of an undertaking, but rather an "exciting and fun" chapter to embark on. "It's all about florals and fun colors while still having our classic shaping styles that everyone knows and loves," she says of the launch, adding that this time it was also about experimenting with the technicalities — such as the amount of compression — of a swimsuit.

Lizzo's personal mantra when it comes to swim style is as empowering as it gets. "I always like to honor my curves and my shape. The silhouette is so important to me. How are my curves? Am I flaunting them? Never want to hide them."

In 2025, Lizzo talked about undergoing an “intentional weight release journey” about two years prior and revealed in January that year that she reached her goal weight from 2014. She brought fans inside her transformative lifestyle changes and continued to embrace her beauty with all the selfies — including the swimsuit ones. Today she says, "I am just enjoying my body like I always have."

"That's the beauty of self-love. [It's about] just accepting yourself through every stage of life. Where I'm at right now is, I'm having a lot of fun, and I'm enjoying my beautiful body, and I'm appreciative for it every single day. Yitty swim helps me show it off."

As the age-old adage goes, confidence is not about the destination but the journey — that couldn't be truer for Lizzo. "What I've learned is that you're always learning and you're never done. There's always a new lesson, and I think it's about how open you are to learning that lesson." This will all be packaged in her upcoming album 𝖡̶𝖨̶𝖳̶𝖢̶𝖧̶ (out June 5).

"It's called 𝖡̶𝖨̶𝖳̶𝖢̶𝖧̶, but there's a line going through it because I'm not the names that you call me," she explains of the name. "It's about empowering yourself and loving yourself through your flaws. Life is a journey, and thank God I get to make music about it”.

A few more form 5th June before moving on to the following week. I want to spotlight Niall Horan’s Dinner Party. You can pore-order it here. Again, not any real information about the album (“Niall Horan returns with his fourth solo album, Dinner Party. Calling it “a thank you to the past and a hello to the present,” Niall delivers 12 new tracks shaped by “love, intimacy, fear, loss, hope and dreams.” Cinematic yet organic, Dinner Party invites listeners to take a seat at the table and share in the warmth, wit and sincerity that define the album.”), so I am looking around again. The former One Direction member spoke with Rolling Stone UK, and discussed finding new love, grieving, and building something new with his music:

“Horan has been in a more reflective state over the past few years. There’s the whirlwind romance of his current relationship, which anchors the album. He met his girlfriend at a dinner party he held about six years ago, proving that love really can just come knocking at your front door. He sounds settled and enamoured across the record, even as he contends with grief following the death of his former bandmate Liam Payne in October 2024. More than anything, Dinner Party is a celebration of life and love.

“This is your second album in a row that is deeply rooted in love and romance. How does that feel for you as a songwriter, in contrast to writing about heartbreak?

It’s very different stuff to write. If I have to go into the studio and make something up, then it’s harder. Sometimes I do write observational-type music, where I look at other people’s scenarios or other people’s relationships or things I might have seen on the street. But when it comes to love or heartbreak, I find if you’re going through them, you can write about them a lot easier. These last two albums have definitely been more on the romantic side, because that’s where I’m at.

You do still manage to find a level of grit and conflict, even in that. There’s this awareness that something could go wrong.

If it was all rosy, it wouldn’t be a great listen. All of my favourite songs have a bit of doubt to them. And if there’s no doubt, you’re lying to yourself. When I’m trying to put pen to paper, there has to be a bit of both in there for me. I always try, even in the doubtful songs, to have a happier ending. When I did ‘What a Time’ with Julia [Michaels], I remember listening to that song for the first time and the whole thing was “What a time, what a time, what a time.” And at the very end, she went, “What a lie, what a lie, what a lie.” And I was just like, “That’s where it’s at.” I liked flipping the song on its head and making it something different. ‘Better Man’ on this album, I did it in that. There’s a bit of bad dream and doubt, and a bit of songwriting tips and tricks.

Some artists are very insular — “I don’t want to hear anything else.” But you’re the opposite of that.

My first-ever singer-songwriter I heard was Paul Simon, which gave me Damien Rice. Or the first rock band I heard was the Eagles, and that gave me Bruce [Springsteen] and gave me Fleetwood [Mac]. You’re constantly just picking up new stuff. It’s nearly impossible not to these days, being around people and listening to what they’re listening to. Or going on Spotify or Apple [Music] and going through the different playlists. You can’t help but pick up different influences, whether they’re conscious or subconscious.

What’s driving you musically now?

I just love the evolution. I don’t think that I’ll scare anyone away with this album. I hope not, anyway. I don’t think it’s musically going, “What’s he doing?” I like that. I like the slow evolution that we get to go on together. That makes me excited for what the music is going to sound like in eight years’ time. But I do think that the crux of rock and fingerpicked acoustic guitar are always going to be there. That’s not changing. The touring really gets me out of bed. I’m just loving it more and more year on year. When I announced the tour and the album, you could feel it in the air. I think that’s exciting in itself.

Harry, Louis and Zayn are all touring this year. Have you been able to experience any of their shows?

I went to Harry’s show a couple of years ago, and that was just wild. Madness going on there. It reminded me of the 1D stadium shows where it was just seas of people jumping up and down. Watching the things going on on the floor, all the fans dancing around, I love that. You feel a sense of pride watching the boys doing what they love to do, and the communities that they’re able to create. I’m going to try and get to a Louis show of some capacity in the next few weeks.

It’s crazy watching the fans and watching how they’ve grown up, but still have that youthful energy, and what they bring to shows. Hearing that roar when each of them come out onto the stage, it’s like, “Yeah, I understand that scream. I get it.” It sounds like a rocket’s about to take off”.

Let’s come to Poppy Ackroyd and Liminal. You can pre-order the album here. This is a musician that you might not have heard of. However, I would suggest that you check out her music. She is an extraordinary composer. Someone who I am very interested in:

“Acclaimed composer and pianist Poppy Ackroyd returns with Liminal, her intimate new album. Written and recorded during a period of profound upheaval and transition, it marks a return to the core of Ackroyd’s practice, bringing piano and violin back together.

For the first time since 2019’s Feathers, Ackroyd reunites these two instruments exclusively, with every sound on the album drawn from piano and violin alone. Melody, harmony, rhythm and texture are all extracted from the physical bodies of the instruments themselves, from bowed and plucked strings to percussive elements. Working within these limitations remains central to her creative process”.

One more from 5th June that I want to highlight. Rosa Walton’s Tell Me It’s a Dream is an album that you will certainly want to pre-order. I am not sure whether Let’s Eat Grandma are releasing more albums together. Walton, one-half of the duo, is releasing her debut album. I do hope that she releases more solo work and there is more from Let’s Eat Grandma:

“The debut solo album from Rosa Walton, best known as one half of Let’s Eat Grandma. Co-produced by David Wrench (Frank Ocean, Jamie XX, FKA twigs). Tell Me It's A Dream opens a new creative chapter for Walton, a record that expands her sonic world while remaining rooted in heartfelt vulnerability and bold ambition. Despite originating during a complicated period in Walton’s life, the record ultimately celebrates love, friendship and creative freedom.

Rosa produced and performed the synth-pop song 'I Really Want to Stay at Your House' for the Cyberpunk 2077 video game soundtrack. The track became a viral sensation after being featured in the Netflix anime series Cyberpunk: Edgerunners, and has over 400m streams”.

Four from 12th June I want to cover off, including one of the most anticipated albums of this year from an American Pop superstar. One of the best artists and songwriters of her generation. First, I am getting to Bebe Rexha’s Dirty Blonde. This is an incredible artist who I have been following for a while now. I am interested by what Dirty Blonde will offer. Pre-order it here. Promising to be among the strongest albums from this year:

“You can’t put Bebe Rexha in a box. From her Grammy-winning songwriting roots on Eminem’s “The Monster” to global chart-toppers with David Guetta and Florida Georgia Line, Rexha has established herself as a premier musical chameleon. With her latest project, Dirty Blonde, she officially enters a new era as an independent powerhouse. Now signed to Empire, the Brooklyn-born star has crafted a 13-song "genre kaleidoscope" that serves as her first-ever visual album, representing a total creative rebirth and a departure from the major-label system she’s known since she was a teenager.

Recorded across London, Tokyo, and Europe, Dirty Blonde captures the energy of Rexha’s global travels. The project seamlessly blends heavy-hitting dance floor anthems with deep, personal storytelling. With the lead single “New Religion” she takes us straight to the club by reimagining the iconic dance record “Insomnia” by Faithless. On “Tokyo,” she explores a drum & bass pulse inspired by a late-night rendezvous in Japan, while “Cike Cike” (produced by long-time collaborator DJ Snake) sees Rexha embracing her Albanian heritage by mixing traditional linguistic roots with modern 808 basslines.

At the emotional core of the album is the lead single, “I Like You Better Than Me.” The track strips away the pop-star veneer to tackle themes of insecurity and self-scrutiny, blending raw lyrics with a pop-rock edge. From the Jersey-bounce-meets-country vibes of “Drink and a Little Love” to her vulnerable reflections on fame, Dirty Blonde is a celebration of an artist who is finally playing by her own rules. As Rexha firmly asserts, “The old Bebe is dead,” leaving behind a focused, stronger creator who is making the music she truly loves”.

I would also point people in the direction of Kelsey Lu’s So Help Me God. This is another incredible artist who always releases such astonishing music. Perhaps one of the most anticipated albums of this year, June is offering more than a couple of albums that people are very keen to hear. Go and pre-order So Help Me God -, as I think it is going to be astonishing. One of those albums that will win a load of critical love and show Kelsey Lu is one of the true modern greats:

“So Help Me God is the long-awaited second album from Kelsey Lu, via Dirty Hit. Moving between shadow and release, the 10-track record follows her groundbreaking 2019 debut Blood and is co-produced by Lu, Jack Antonoff and Yves Rothman, mixed by Oli Jacobs, with contributions from Sampha, Kamasi Washington and Kim Gordon. Across the record, Lu blends distorted guitars, choral swells and dark electronic pulses into a sonic landscape that moves between devotional intensity and cinematic scale. So Help Me God expands Lu’s singular creative universe - where music, visual art and performance converge into one multidisciplinary project, marking the return of one of contemporary music’s most singular voices”.

Prior to getting to that hotly-anticipated album from a Pop colossus, I do want to recommend The Bobby Lees’ New Self. Pre-order the album here. If you need some more details about this album, then below is some much-needed information from Rough Trade. It is an album that I feel many in the U.K. might not be aware of. The Bobby Lees not a huge name here. However, their music is well worth listening to:

“For The Bobby Lees, their fourth album and Epitaph debut New Self marks a thrilling new chapter for the band while doubling down on what’s always made them so magnetic.

The Bobby Lees don’t need much in the way of introduction. Within a few seconds of exposure to their furnace-blast live shows or their bottled-lightning studio records, it’s easy to hear why they’ve earned fans in legendary musicians like Iggy Pop, Debbie Harry, and Henry Rollins. They’re as uncompromising in their sound and generous with their energy as any of their punk ancestors who first rewrote the rules of engagement back in the 1970s. Led by singer and guitarist Sam Quartin, drummer Macky Bowman, and bassist Kendall Wind, The Bob- by Lees bring wildness and danger back into punk rock.
You can hear the band easing into a new confidence - one that’s both looser and more towering - all throughout New Self, from the seething, fiery “Napoleon” to the rambunctious, offbeat take on PJ Harvey’s “50ft Queenie.” This is the sound of a band who’s scrambled over shaky ground only to come back stronger than ever: more confident more connected, louder and fiercer and secure in their own skin”.

Alongside Madonna’s Confessions on a Dance Floor: Part II – which arrives in July -, arguably the biggest album of this year comes from Olivia Rodrigo. Her third studio album, you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love, is one you can pre-order here. The GRAMMY-winning modern-day genius is such a fascinating artist. Her music is astonishing and she is one of the greatest live performers in the world. Only twenty-three, who knows how far she can go. I want to drop in an interview from Cosmopolitan, who talked about “surviving her angsty years, chasing joy in her music, and the one true love of her life”:

“Do you find it harder to write about happiness?

It’s not hard to do when I’m sitting there by myself in my room, but it was never the stuff that I put out. Sometimes I listen back to it and I cringe.

Is it cringier to be happy or sad?

It’s cringier to be happy. I cringe, but I’m free. All of my favourite love songs have an element of sadness, and that’s what makes them so beautiful. A great love song has so much emotion behind it that it could go either way. I want to make love songs that you can cry to.9

9. Two of Olivia and Madison’s favourite love songs to cry to are Bright Eyes’ 'First Day of My Life' and Nick Cave’s 'Into My Arms.'

I remember after 'drivers license,; you felt this pressure to follow it up again and again and again. How has your songwriting process changed?

We didn’t have time for revisions on SOUR. The whole world was watching. I wrote and we just fucking recorded and put it out. Then with GUTS, I was under so much pressure, like, 'Oh my god, I’m never going to be able to make another good song.' It wasn’t even making music to make music. It was making music to please people or prove something.

What about this new album?

With this album, I actually was like, “I’m done with the sophomore one. Now I can have fun again.” I was writing songs the way I did when I was 16, purely for fun. There were some beautiful moments, like, “Whoa, it’s flowing out,” which feels like catching a butterfly10 in a net.

10. Butterflies are a motif that Olivia used throughout the promotion of her first two albums, and her updated site logo also hints at a butterfly, making fans speculate whether the insect would be a big part of you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love’s imagery, too. Livies are also convinced that a bee will be involved. The poster for her one-night-only show in L.A. featured a bee, which echoed a t-shirt she previously wore on the GUTS tour.

And how have you changed from the person who made SOUR five years ago?

I was so young then and felt like the world was on my shoulders and that I had to have everything together. I was motivated, but there was fear. Now I feel a lot more self-assured. My passion and work ethic come from a place of positivity rather than a scared mindset.

What’s a boundary you’re really proud of setting recently?

I always thought a boundary was like, “Don’t do this.” But actually, a boundary is like, “If you do this, this is how I will react and protect myself.” It’s not about controlling other people, it’s about how you will respond: 'If somebody does this, I will be okay because I have this plan in place of what I’m going to do.' It gives you so much more confidence and self-assuredness. And honestly, setting boundaries with yourself is really important, too. Saying you’re going to do something and actually doing it. For me, the phone stuff has got to go. Otherwise, I’m a brain rot person.15

15. This perhaps explains why Olivia follows zero people on Instagram despite having more than 39M followers. Although she has hinted at various times that she does have a finsta”.

There is one album from 19th June I want to drop in before finishing off with a few from 26th June. Graham Coxon’s Castle Park is an album that you should pre-order. This is especially exciting, because this is a never-before-heard album from the Blur legend. Any fans out there, this is an album that you will not want to miss out on:

“Titled Castle Park and recorded in 2011, the previously unreleased record comes as part of a comprehensive reissue of Coxon's complete solo catalogue, spanning 9 studio albums and 3 original soundtracks. Produced by Ben Hillier (blur - Think Tank), Castle Park was recorded in 2011 as part of the A+E (2012) sessions. Originally intended as a follow up to A+E, the release was postponed due to blur activity in 2012, before Coxon moved on to other projects. Castle Park is a collection of 10 songs that lean into the artist's classic mod sound, with lead single 'Billy Says' - a longtime feature of Coxon's live set - already familiar to fans and now finally available for the first time”.

Beth Orton’s The Ground Above is going to be one of the biggest albums from June. I love her music. You can pre-order it here. I especially love the album cover and the choice of vinyl. The Cigarette Curls Smoky Marbled looks amazing. I am thinking of ordering the album, but am aware I have quite a tight budget. The vinyl looks very inviting:

“For more than 30 years, Beth Orton has been our antenna to the cosmos, the poet laureate of forces too vast to take in all at once. A testament to her artistry, The Ground Above is Orton’s most direct and unapologetic music to date; urgent, raw, embodied and emotionally fearless, moving between subconscious expression and expansive, timeless song craft. Her voice, from whispered incantation to primal wail, equally delivers melodies reminiscent of classic songbook form. Throughout the album, Orton documents survival and renewal, motherhood and identity, political unease, and the ongoing choice to stay - in love, in art, and in the world.

As with 2022’s critical breakthrough Weather Alive, Orton self-produced the album, staying true to the collective spirit of the initial live recordings whilst sculpting and expanding, over a year long process, the record we hear today. Working with trusted musicians including multi-instrumentalist Shahzad Ismaily, Vernon Spring’s Sam Beste, drummers Chris Vatalaro (Antibalas, Radiohead) and Vishal Nayak (Nick Hakim), Trumpet player Christos Styliandes and bassist Tom Herbert, Orton reaches new heights as a producer and songwriter”.

I am not sure how I feel about the cover for Muse’s The WOW! Signal. Some might find it appropriate given the title, though I do wonder! The Devon trio released their debut album in 1999, so it is incredible that they are still putting out awesome music. You can pre-order their new album here. I have loved the band since the start, and they are always doing something new and pushing themselves. The WOW! Signal shaping up to be one of their strongest albums in many years:

“Muse are a culturally-attuned, genre-defying band who channel the anxieties of each era—technology, power, rebellion, and identity—into maximalist, stadium-ready rock that evolves with the times while staying unmistakably Muse.

Kicking off with new single “Be With You,” this next era of Muse is rooted in electronic experimentation and an insatiable curiosity. The WOW! Signal represents a world of cosmic mystery, existential hope, and the exhilarating possibility of contact with something far greater than ourselves”.

I am going to end things with M. Geddes Gengras’s Guest List. I would definitely urge you to pre-order this gem of an album. If you need some more details about this album, then below is some information. It is a bit different to the ones I have recommended, though definitely one worth checking out:

“Over nearly two decades, composer / multi-instrumentalist M. Geddes Gengras has released an enormous catalog of wide-ranging, synth-focused music in solo and collaborative settings. He has participated in influential experimental groups like Sun Araw, Pocahaunted, Robedoor, and Akron/Family. Along with Sun Araw’s Cameron Stallones and a host of Jamaican singers and artists, Gengras blurs the boundaries of dub and electronic music under the banner of Duppy Gun Productions. His solo works have appeared on labels including Room40, Leaving Records, Holy Mountain, and Umor Rex. After many years living in Los Angeles, Gengras now calls upstate New York home. M. Geddes Gengras returns to Hausu Mountain with Guest List, his fourth entry in the label's catalog since 2019 and the first to be issued on vinyl.

His albums for HausMo have ranged from the topographical ambient synth networks of I Am The Last of That Green and Warm-Hued World, to the dense technoid beat experiments of Time Makes Nothing Happen, to the lush post-rock-adjacent harmonic architectures of Expressed, I Noticed Silence.

On Guest List, Gengras composes the most ambitious song cycle that he has ever captured in the context of one album, weaving his own synths and electronics into a dense tapestry of contrasting genres and ideas all animated by the presence of an enormous cast of collaborators. In Gengras's hands, the infinite-limbed drum performances of Greg Fox, the ecstatic guitar explorations of Ben Chasny (Six Organs of Admittance), the soaring vocalizations of Christina Carter (Charalambides), and the contributions of many more artists become individual brushstrokes to paint across the canvases of his dense mixes. Channeling sonic details from his wide circle of friends, Gengras broadens his range of expression and composes the most communal and ultimately personal program of music in his bottomless catalog”.

These are the album due next month that I think that you should investigate. From Lizzo and Olivia Rodrigo to Niall Horan and Muse, it is an eclectic and busy one. Something in there for everyone. I said that June is one of the most packed months. July promises some genuinely huge albums from Madonna, Suki Waterhouse, Tyla, Tricky, and Ariana Grande. I will spotlight those soon enough. However, the above are the best albums…

OUT in June.

FEATURE: Kate Bush: The Tour of Life: Between Never for Ever and The Dreaming… Kate Bush and 1981

FEATURE:

 

 

Kate Bush: The Tour of Life: Between Never for Ever and The Dreaming…

PHOTO CREDIT: Clive Arrowsmith

 

Kate Bush and 1981

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IN previous Kate Bush features…

I have looked at particular years in her career. I am using Gaffaweb once again and what they have resourced. In terms of dates and events, they are a precious and incredible source of guidance and information. There are a couple of reasons why I am focusing on 1981. It was the year between Kate Bush releasing Never for Ever and The Dreaming. In 1980, in September, her third studio album reached number one in the U.K. It was a turning point for her in terms of sound and production. I have written about this so many times, though it does warrant repetition. Lionheart, Bush’s second studio album, was released in November 1978. Fairly similar in scope to her debut, The Kick Inside (released in February 1978), she took a big leap for her third album. In a short period of time – and with 1979’s The Tour of Life in-between -, there was this expansion of her sound and lyrics. There was an event bigger leap for The Dreaming. More experimental, denser, darker and perhaps heavier, the Fairlight CMI was more in the mix. Kate Bush, producing solo for the first time, wrote an album that established her as ‘an artist’. Rather than a Pop artist or someone who was seen as parody-worthy, The Dreaming was this big statement. I am fascinated by the year before. Bush finished promoting Never for Ever at the end of 1980. Its final single, Army Dreamers, came out in September 1980. It is unusual that there were not more singles. Three came out from that album, and the final one arrived two weeks after the release of Never for Ever. It would have been great for a fourth single to come out early in 1981 – maybe All We Ever Look For or Delius (Song of Summer). Perhaps there was this pressure in 1981 for Bush to put something out. By June 1981, it has been nine months or so since any album material had come out.

I am focusing on 1981 as it was the year when Kate Bush put out the first single from The Dreaming. Sat in Your Lap was released on 29th June, 1981. This album saw more singles released. Some in the U.K. and others specially for the foreign market. Spanning from 1981 to Night of the Swallow in November 1983. Less commercial successful singles than on Never for Ever, Bush pretty much was going straight from Never for Ever and the promotion to immersing herself in her fourth studio album. It was an intense time. However, it was not the case she was shackled to the studio constantly. 1981 was a varied and productive one. Midway through the year, she released the exciting first taste of The Dreaming. Looking at the timeline, and we can see how packed her year was:

“January 1, 1981

Kate is voted Best Female Artist for the third consecutive year in Capital Radio's listeners poll.

Kate takes two months off from everything to "recharge her batteries.".

At the first MIDEM Video Awards Keef MacMillan wins the Best International Production Award, and Kate wins the Best International Performance by an Artist Award, both for the Babooshka video.

February 1981

Kate's childhood home, East Wickham Farm, which has at its core a 14th-century hall, is listed as a building of special historic interest.

Kate does some session work on a cover version of her song Them Heavy People by new EMI artist Ray Shell.

February 21, 1981

Kate is voted Best Female Singer of 1980 in the Sounds poll.

March, 1981

Kate is making demo tapes of the material for her next album at her own demo studio.

April 1981

In a special Sunday Telegraph opinion poll Kate is voted "most liked" and "least liked" British Female Singer.

May 1981

Kate goes into Townhouse Studio with Hugh Padgham as engineer to begin the recording work of The Dreaming album. The backing tracks for three songs are put down before Nick Launay takes over as engineer. In a session that lasts until the end of June more backing tracks are laid.

Kate is tempted by the offer for her to play the Wicked Witch in the Children's TV series Worzel Gummidge, but she is already too far involved in the album and has to turn down the offer.

Let’s pause there and see that Bush achieved and did over the first five months of 1981. I love all that award recognition in January. Never for Ever was a big commercial success. It became the first album by a British female solo artist to top the UK Albums Chart. Only right that Bush would be garnered with awards. However, we can see that Bush needed time to recharge. Although there was not a load of recording and studio time in the first half of 1981, Bush was still being awarded and recognised by the industry. In February, that Sounds poll. I really love how she did some session work too. I had never heard of Ray Shell and his cover. A weird outing, but one Bush was pleased to do! East Wickham Farm being acknowledged as a site of historic interest. No doubt Kate Bush’s association helped it achieve that honour. Even though she wanted to recharge the batteries, she did work on demos and started to pit stuff together. Sat in Your Lap must have been recorded by that time, as it would not be long until the video was made. By May 1981, Bush was very much back in work mode. It would have been awesome if Bush accepted the offer of playing The Wicked Witch in Worzel Gummidge. Quite a thing to see! If the first half of 1981 was relatively calm, the second half would mean she was in the studio a lot more:

June 1981

The video for Sat In Your Lap is made at Abbey Road.

June 21, 1981

Sat In Your Lap is released. A pivotal point in Kate's career.

July 1981

Kate goes into Abbey Road studios with Haydn Bendall as engineer to complete the backing tracks.

Kate goes to Dublin to record the track Night of the Swallow with members of Planxty and The Chieftains.

July 14, 1981

Kate appears on the children's programme Razzmatazz to explain how the Sat In Your Lap video was made.

August 1981

Kate goes into Odyssey Studios with Paul Hardiman as engineer to record the overdubs on all tracks in a four-and-a-half month session.

August 6, 1981

Kate appears on the BBC TV programme Looking Good, Feeling Fit.

October 1981

Kate is working to exhaustion again on the album, and decides to take a short break, to visit Loch Ness.

The edited version of Keef MacMillan's video recording of Kate's live show is released on video-cassette.

November 12, 1981

Kate attends a party at Abbey Road Studios to celebrate the studios' 50 years of operation. She cuts the celebration cake with Helen Shapiro.

November 21, 1981

Kate appears on the commercial TV programme Friday Night Saturday Morning, a new chat show, at the invitation of the host, zoologist Dr. Desmond Morris, to talk about her music and expressive dance.

December 22, 1981

Kate takes a break from recording to tighten melodies and lyrics”.

Even though The Dreaming was not released until September 1982, it was challenging and demanding album to complete. Bush needing to recharge at the start of 1981. By the end of 1982, she needed rest and recharge once again after brutal recording and promotional duties. That forty-fifth anniversary of Sat in Your Lap. It was a pivotal moment for her. Reaching number eleven in the U.K., this was a departure from what fans expected. This percussive song that was frantic at times and there were lots of interesting and unusual elements, pleasing that it was a commercial success. Kate Bush very much showing that she was not the artist that was being lampooned and parodied after her first couple of albums. Between studios and recording various songs, there were these interesting moments. The rather weirdly-titled Looking Good, Feeling Fit does sound like a sexist nightmare. Something that seems prurient rather than about fitness, Bush did get a chance at least to show that she was committing to dance and her new material would have that sense of movement and energy. She was going head-first into an album that took a lot out of her. However, The Dreaming is arguably her first masterpiece. That period between August and October 1981 is key. Having returned to work after a break from battery recharge, she was pushing it quite hard. Perhaps some expectation from EMI in terms of when the new album would be out. Good that she visited Scotland to take a bit of time out. To walk in the countryside and see if she could find the Loch Ness Monster! Abbey Rod turns ninety-five this November. Kate Bush playing an important part in the studios’ fiftieth birthday celebrations. That appearance with Dr. Desmond Morris is really fascinating. I wish there was a better-quality video of it. An argument that so many of her interviews and music videos need an upgrade. A few days before Christmas in 1981, Bush still working hard and focused on her new album. The Dreaming would arrive less than nine months later. However, 1982 was one of her busiest. The busiest since 1978. So much studio time and hard work to get The Dreaming ready. From awards and recharging batteries to a tantalising acting offer in Worzel Gummidge, it was very much a case of…

NO rest for the wicked.

FEATURE: Spotlight: Bella Kay

FEATURE:

 

 

Spotlight

PHOTO CREDIT: Kristen Jan Wong for Billboard

 

Bella Kay

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IT is brilliant that we…

PHOTO CREDIT: Maria-Juliana Rojas for Rolling Stone

welcome Bella Kay to the U.K. very soon, as she has a few dates here. Playing London, Brighton and Manchester, this incredible American artist is one that should be known to everyone. I am going to get to some interviews with her, so we can get some insight into her life and music. However, it is worth getting some biography about this must-hear artist:

“Bella Kay is quickly emerging as one of the most emotionally resonant new stars in pop. Born in Houston, Texas, Bella writes songs that dig deep into the complexities of heartbreak, identity, and survival, brought to life by her raw, timeless voice. With a sound that blends the grit of alternative-pop with the intimacy of bedroom songwriting, Bella has quickly struck a chord with millions thanks to tracks such as “The Sick,” which proved a viral phenomenon earning over 1 billion views on TikTok with hundreds of thousands of fan-made videos since release. Bella’s debut EP sick to my stomach – including “The Sick” joined by the hauntingly honest track “Lonely” and bold breakup anthem “Call Me Baby” – is a biting, charismatic collection that captures a gifted young artist coming into her own in life, love, and sound. The arrival of sick to my stomach coincided with a number of showstopping live dates, including a debut North American tour supporting Mon Rovîa that saw sold-out stops”.

This is someone that you simply cannot afford to miss out on. I am going to move on in a minute. However, it is worth noting how Bella Kay was named Capital Buzz Artist recently, and the station interviewed her. You only need to listen to a song or two to realise that here is an artist that is going to join the leagues of the biggest artists of today. I can see Kay working alongside Pop artists of today who she admires greatly (maybe a Sabrina Carpenter collaboration?):

“Bella Kay is the type of artist who you can't ignore when you hear her music. Based in Southern California, the singer-songwriter first caught people's attention when she started teasing her debut single 'The Sick' on social media. The song quickly went viral and has since been streamed over 90 million times on Spotify alone.

Inspired by pop girlies like Sabrina Carpenter and Tate McRae, Bella has an incredible knack for combining irresistible pop melodies with the kind of confessional lyrics that leave an impression on you long after you first listen to them. It's no wonder that everything she releases has taken on a life of its own.

In January, Bella released her single 'iloveitiloveitiloveit' and it's quickly become one of the biggest hits of the year so far. In the beloved song, Bella sings candidly about her toxic relationship with toxic relationships. In the chorus, she proclaims: I'd be lying if I said I didn't love it, 'cause I do / I'm a couple minutes out from rеlapsing into you.

Bella has since released her three-track project a couple minutes and both 'steady' and 'wonder wander' capture her unique ability to express her innermost thoughts in perfect pop song form. With multiple live concerts and festival dates to come in 2026, expect to see Bella everywhere by the end of the year”.

I want to come to this interview from The Lunar Collective. They chatted with Bella Kay earlier in the year around her three-song project. She has an album coming along, so this is a really exciting time. I am a recent convert to her music, and I already love what she has put out. Whilst Kay was reeleasing music last year, I think that 2026 has been her biggest year. One that has truly got her attention and buzz. A unique artist with a long future in front of her:

“FLOATING IN-BETWEEN WORLDS OF STRIPPED BACK INSTRUMENTALS AND CINEMATIC PRODUCTION SWELLS—Bella Kay faces her emotional habits with a brutal, yet confident honesty. a couple minutes out works as a brief, but impactful time capsule of a romance just as delicate and emotional. Kay owns her vices on “iloveitiloveitiloveit” before falling into spiraling self-doubt on “Steady” and eventually finding a fragile sense of closure on “wonder wander.”

Her resonant vocals deliver lyrics worthy of secret diary entries. Kay details the emotional breakthroughs and setbacks she has experienced while fighting between her heart and mind. From her early days of performing with only herself and a used  guitar, to now building her sound  around more access to recording studios and advanced production, Kay approaches her songwriting in the same way she has from the beginning—with integrity and a commanding presence. She is brave in the face of insecurity and ignores any fear of judgement as she uses  music to capture her most raw and intense experiences.

Fresh off the heels of a personal Hot 100 record, Luna sat with Kay to chat about all things a couple minutes out, her evolution as an artist and her forthcoming debut album.

“LUNA: How did you initially discover music and find it as an outlet to express yourself?

KAY: I'd always loved singing, especially when I was really young. As I got older, I fell in love with songwriting and composition. I was obsessed with Olivia [Rodrigo] and Lizzie McAlpine. I wanted to be a songwriter. I was like, “this is the coolest thing ever!” And so I started writing songs and I got this $50  guitar at  Guitar Center. And I literally haven't stopped writing songs since.

LUNA: That's such a fun story! How do you think your sound has evolved since then and what influences have helped you shape your music and songwriting?

KAY: I think the funny thing is that I feel like the most shaping sound-wise has been in this past year. Before that, it was literally just me and my guitar. There's only so much I could have done. I think I always was really into the indie-folk kind of thing. When I started going into studio sessions, I was exposed to a whole new world. There are so many other things you can do with sound.

LUNA: Can you recall any instances in your life where a specific artist or song has stuck with you and inspired you to pursue music or to explore a certain sound? Is there a specific artist or project that has helped you through a difficult or emotional time in your life?

KAY: There are so many artists that have shaped me and made me want to pursue music. That would be an insanely long list. The one standout that changed how I see music and has shaped my sound the most is probably Sabrina Carpenter’s album, emails I can't send. That album changed my brain chemistry.

LUNA: Yeah, I agree! I listen to it all the time and it gets better with every listen. Now for a fun question. For new listeners or people just discovering you through this interview, how would you personally describe the  music you make?

KAY: I would describe it as late night drive music. My music lives in that kind of cool and sad world that I imagine while I’m on a late night drive.

LUNA: I can definitely imagine going on late night drives with your songs blasting from the speakers. You've already spoken a bit about your debut album. What else can you tease about it?

KAY: I think the coolest part about this album is I'm mainly going in with Alexis [Kesselman] and we're working with things I have done before but we are getting smarter and better. The lyrics are sharper. They're smarter. I'm so excited. I don't really want the sound to feel polished and super clean. I like that it's a bit dirty and off kilter. I think that's really cool. So we’re leaning even more so into that. And the process has been cool because now I know what to ask for when I'm in the studio. I'm like, “we should do bass, we should do this, we should do that, we should stack harmonies…” I feel like I've really found my groove with this album. I'm so proud and I'm really excited for everybody to hear it. I think it's going to be fun”.

I did want to drop in a recent Rolling Stone interview, but that is paywalled (and I am not subscribing to put in one interview), which is a massive downside of what they do. If you have subscribed to Rolling Stone, then go and check it out, so I will have to finish with an interview I can access. That is from Billboard. A tremendously proimisign artist who you instantly bond with, if you can see Bella Kay live, then do so. She will go down a storm when she plays in the U.K., that is for sure:

“With Kay’s bright, earnest voice chugging the acoustic guitar-driven track’s momentum forward from start to finish, “iloveitiloveitiloveit” is the winking lament of someone who can’t escape the cycle of a slightly concerning, rollercoaster-like romance — packaged as a carefree love song in which ignoring red flags is thrilling, not self-sabotage. (“I love it when we fight, and I like it when you’re mean,” she admits in the lyrics. “We don’t have to get into what that says about me.”)

“I don’t look at it like, ‘Oh, this is a toxic relationship,’” she says. “I look at it as like, ‘Oh!’” — she cheers, smiling and shaking her head wildly, as if she’s in the middle of a rave — “‘This is a toxic relationship!’”

Intentionally heartbreaking or not, the song’s wide-reaching relatability and punchy lyricism launched “iloveitiloveitiloveit” onto the Billboard Hot 100 in February — Kay’s first entry on the chart, which has since reached No. 17. It was officially released in January, but she first posted the chorus on TikTok immediately after writing it in “five minutes” on her guitar in November. Within the next month, she’d finished the lyrics with producer and now-frequent collaborator Alexis Kesselman and settled on its breathless, no-spaces title — despite people “teasing” her for it — to match the chaotic nature of the song.

“The whole point is like, ‘I shouldn’t do this, but I love it,’” she explains with a shrug. “It has to feel stupid and crazy.”

“iloveitiloveitiloveit” came at exactly the right time for Kay. In the spring of 2025, she decided to begin regularly posting music clips on TikTok in hopes of launching a career, despite being two years into a prelaw degree at Texas A&M. “I was so embarrassed,” the Houston native recalls of sharing her first original song snippets on the platform. “My TikToks were getting, like, 30 likes … but I kept going.”

As her fan base took off that summer — largely thanks to viral clips of her moody, stripped-down tracks “Lonely” and “The Sick,” which appear in full on her November 2025 self-released EP sick to my stomach — she signed with Atlantic Records in July and then partnered with Immersive Management’s Adam Mersel and Priscilla Felten in October.

The fire had been lit — she just needed one song to pour gasoline on the flame. Released on Jan. 11, “iloveitiloveitiloveit” did that in abundance, racking up nearly half a million uses on TikTok to date. “When it started charting, I was like, ‘This is insane,’” Kay says tentatively, as if she still can’t quite believe it herself.

But the most fulfilling evidence, she says, is how loud her fans scream the words back at her when she sings the track at shows. Felten notes that Kay’s performances have been key to the success of “iloveitiloveitiloveit” — particularly her series of free, intimate pop-up concerts in Los Angeles, London, Houston and more cities beginning in November.

“The L.A. show in particular … even though [the song] was unreleased at that time, hearing it in that context — and the word-of-mouth that spread from there — was powerful,” Felten says of the 100-capacity performance. “It was also the first time you were seeing her [in person], because everyone had just known her solely through a phone.”

Mersel adds that Kay dropping “iloveitiloveitiloveit” on a Sunday evening, forgoing the industry-standard Friday release window, has been a strategic win — and one inspired by Kay’s prior farm-to-table delivery of sharing songs straight to social media. “During the school year, when Sunday nights can really be the blues for a lot of kids, it’s a nice little treat before the beginning of the week,” Mersel says, pointing out that the team has stuck with non-Friday releases for Kay’s other singles. “[Fans] felt like they were communicating with her in real time. They didn’t feel like there was a middleman involved.”

Next on the agenda is her first headlining tour through theaters in Europe and North America this spring, plus even more yet-to-be-announced live shows after that. And, if all goes to plan, Kay will release her already nearly complete debut album this summer. She says that the sound and emotional nuance of “iloveitiloveitiloveit” has informed the project more than any other track, recalling with a self-deprecating laugh, “I was talking to Alexis, and I was like, ‘There’s not enough sad songs.’ And she was like, ‘Bella. There’s like one and a half happy songs, and they’re not even really that happy.’”

But just as she did with “iloveitiloveitiloveit,” Kay has her own way of looking at things. “A good sad song to me is always going to be a happy song, just because you feel so understood [by it],” she says. “I want to make sure that I do pop my own way. I don’t want it to be super shiny and polished — I want it to be dirty and real”.

Connect with Bella Kay and listen to her wonderful music. With her debut album being worked on and with us fairly soon, it is a moment when this ‘rising’ artist will truly ascend and establish her place as a modern great. I believe that when it comes to her music. I have featured a lot of artists in my Spotlight feature already this year, though few are as brilliant…

AS Bella Kay.

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Follow Bella Kay

FEATURE: Spotlight: no na

FEATURE:

 

 

Spotlight

PHOTO CREDIT: Toshio Ohno

 

no na

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THIS may be the first time…

that I have featured an Indonesian girl group on my blog. I have featured K and J-Pop groups, though I don’t think any from Indonesia. I feel there is so much reliance on heralding and discussing music from the U.K. and U.S., we do not realise the wealth and breadth of talent around the world. The tremendous no na are comprised of Christy Gardena, Esther Geraldine, Baila Fauri, and Shazfa Adesya. They debuted in May 2025, so it is still new days for this exciting, dynamic, hugely talented and promising group. I want to get to some interviews with them. Their recent single, rollerblade, is tremendous. They have such chemistry and this incredible sound that sets them apart from any other group. In October last year, Masarishop introduced us to the members of no na and outlined what makes them unique:

“No Na was formed under the banner of 88rising in Jakarta, Indonesia, a hub of cultural creativity and music innovation. The group is composed of four multi-talented young women, each four No Na members are has unique backgrounds and artistic influences that shape the group’s identity:

1. Baila Fauri: Powerhouse Vocalist with Creative Flair

Born in Jakarta on September 28, 2001, Baila Fauri holds the position of main vocalist and emotional center for No Na. She comes from a background rich in classical singing and theater. She initially caught public attention as a Top 6 finalist in Indonesian Idol Junior 2014. Her impressive vocal range and strong stage presence are complemented by her creativity off stage, Baila enjoys fashion design and content creation. She frequently sketches outfits or shares covers and behind-the-scenes moments on social media. Her earlier solo tracks like "Eye to Eye" (2019) and "3 Dots" (2020) have made her a Gen Z icon, combining artistry with authenticity.

2. Christy Gardena: Graceful Soul with a Ballet Background

Christy Gardena, born September 4, 2000 in Lombok, brings elegance and depth to No Na as both a soulful vocalist and trained dancer. Before her debut, Christy was already recognized in Indonesia’s performing arts scene, securing third place in the International Dance Asia Competition 2019 in the duo category. Her professional ballet background enriches No Na’s choreography with grace, while her heartfelt voice adds warmth to the group’s sound. She also built a loyal following on TikTok with her dance content, admired for her down-to-earth personality and poetic sensibility, which occasionally finds its way into No Na’s lyrics.

3. Shazfa Adesya: Dancer, Scholar, and Digital Creator

Shazfa Adesya, born in Jakarta in 2003, is the lead dancer and visual of her group, recognized for her precise moves and captivating presence. She graduated from the University of New South Wales, Sydney, with a degree in Media in Public Relations & Advertising, showing a blend of intelligence and creativity. Shazfa developed her skills in campus K-pop dance groups and quickly gained popularity online as a TikTok influencer with her dynamic and innovative dance videos going viral. Her stage charm and academic accolades, like being on the UNSW Dean's List in 2022, make her a unique talent admired for both her art and adaptability.

4. Esther Geraldine: Versatile Vocalist with a Creative Edge

Esther Geraldine was born in Bali on September 13, 2001. She contributes her skills as a singer, rapper, and songwriter to No Na. Coming from a family rich in musical talent, she learned to blend Western pop with Indonesian traditional sounds, influences evident in her writing style. Esther gained attention on Indonesian Idol Season 10 and later released her own track, "Rarity" in 2021. She also teamed up with Dipha Barus and Afgan on "Keep It Hush", displaying her wide-ranging abilities and willingness to work with others. Her relaxed but engaging manner endears her to fans, as does her bold approach to artistic experimentation and advocacy for mental health.

What Makes No Na Unique?

Unlike many emerging girlbands, No Na thrives on authenticity and cultural pride. They often weave Indonesian identity into their artistry, whether through instruments like the angklung and gamelan in their arrangements or choreography inspired by traditional dances. This blend of modern pop and heritage resonates with both local fans and international audiences seeking something fresh.

Beyond their music, No Na is committed to addressing socially relevant themes. Their songs touch on empowerment, mental health, equality, and environmental sustainability—topics that make them relatable to Gen Z and millennial listeners. This thoughtful storytelling creates a deeper connection with fans and positions them as role models in the industry.

By early 2026, No Na’s international trajectory reached new heights with their headline-making appearance at the Head In The Clouds (HITC) Music Festival 2026 in Los Angeles. Taking the global stage alongside heavyweights like Rich Brian and the global girl group KATSEYE, No Na proved they belong among the world's elite performers.

Their HITC 2026 set received unanimous acclaim, with critics praising their sharpened choreography and the seamless integration of Indonesian cultural motifs into a cutting-edge pop production. Sharing the lineup with such powerhouse acts not only solidified their status on the international circuit but also served as the ultimate launchpad for their 2026 world tour. With a full-length album on the horizon, No Na’s presence in Los Angeles has firmly established them as a premier force in the global music scene”.

I am going to move to an interview from March from FZINE who spent time with this phenomenal quartet. A genuinely thrilling prospect, no na are the “rising pop princesses from Indonesia who are carving out a new brand of pop girl groups: SEA-Pop”. I am not sure if they are coming to the U.K. at all this year, though I know they would be hotly in demand, as their fanbase here is growing:

“They’re Indonesia’s first global girl group – a new term that’s been coined to describe musical ensembles that have been assembled specifically to appeal to audiences across the globe. This brand of girl group was first introduced by K-Pop behemoths JYP Entertainment and Hybe Entertainment in 2024 through VCHA (now Girlset) and Katseye.

No Na, on the other hand, was assembled by 88rising with a pretty similar method — sans the drama of a reality competition show. All the girls were scouted from Indonesia, moved to Los Angeles a year later for training and development, and then made their debut as No Na in May 2025 with Shoot, an R&B-inspired single that showcases their silky, clear vocals and harmonies.

“We were forced – just kidding!” Baila jokes, when asked about how they came together as a group. It’s clear that there are going to be a lot of giggles during this interview.

“It wasn’t really training, but we explored a lot of genres here and there, and then we finally made our debut!” Shaz explains. “The artist development phase was about two to three years,” Baila elaborates, “We spent a year in Jakarta and a year in Los Angeles.” Now, the whole group is based in Los Angeles.

As No Na starts their journey of musical world domination, spotlighting their Indonesian roots is a non-negotiable. As Esther explains: “We always strive to put some sort of Indonesian element into everything we do — the music we release, the dances, our clothing, our styles, the way we represent ourselves. We’re very proud of our culture and we want more people to know Indonesia. There are so many talented creatives to work with in our country.”

On being an all-Indonesian girl group representing Indonesia to an international audience:

The most obvious way is their style, which Shaz sums up perfectly: “Look at our outfits! Very island concept — all Indonesian.” She strikes a pose. Each of the girls have on variations of Indonesia’s traditional wear of kebayas and sarongs – with a No Na twist, of course.

Esther and Baila, for example, accessorise with corsets, Shaz has a pair of brown knee-high boots, Baila has a plastic skirt layered over her outfit – all of them are wearing gold jewellery with an orchid motif (a small dedication to their fans named Orchids). “Everything’s intentional!” Esther grins when this is pointed out.

Their R&B-inspired sound is blended with traditional Indonesian instruments. Their biggest musical inspirations are some of the greats from the ‘80s — Janet Jackson and Whitney Houston, for example. “We love blending different eras and genres to create a No Na sound,” Esther says.

So far, it’s working. Numbers aside, the high-energy Work has accumulated dance covers, music video reactions, even memes. “We were so excited. We were very proud,” Esther says, about their initial reactions as the song started to go viral on social media, “It’s so fun to see everyone’s versions of the dances and everything.”

“Everything’s so creative,” Shaz adds.

“The ambulance!” Esther exclaims, as the other girls squeal and laugh, “[The fans] want to send us their hospital bills.” They’re talking about their favourite reactions now. The best ones they’ve seen have been fans’ attempts to recreate Christy’s backbend at the start of Work’s choreography.

“Shout out to Raffy!” Baila exclaims. “Raffy did this [piece of] content where he attempted Christy’s backbend and ended up in an ambulance,” Esther explains.

“Man, he tried everything,” Baila says.

“Everything. And he’s still trying to do it until now, I think,” Christy says.

As talents across Southeast Asia begin to make waves across the world, it only makes sense for No Na to think beyond Indonesia and consider regional representation. SEA-Pop, short for Southeast Asian Pop, is now a growing pop sub-genre, especially given the slew of homegrown acts going international.

Label-mates like Indonesian singer Niki, Indonesian rapper Rich Brian and Thai rapper Milli, are just some of the examples of musicians who are making it abroad. In the girl group category, Filipino girl group Bini and Malaysian girl group Dolla have gained plenty of traction too.

Esther says it best: “There are a lot of amazing Southeast Asian artists out there, and we’re glad to be part of that movement, and we’re just so lucky that we’re moving alongside so many wonderful Southeast Asian individuals and groups and just incredible creatives. We’re very proud.”

Anyone watching them can see just how strong their bond has become after several years of living and training together. There’s an ease in how their conversation flows and how they interact with each other; when one member flounders with English, another easily supports. When one member speaks, all the other girls nod along, grinning when their eyes meet. They speak, move, and breathe as a unit.

Adjusting to a new foreign environment was hard, but their quick friendship made things much easier. After all, they were four young Indonesian girls chosen for a chance of international pop stardom – all they had was each other.

Christy, as the girls explain, had the most difficult time: “It was my first time going abroad, so of course I missed my family, friends, and food. But now I have the girls here, so it’s fine!”.

PHOTO CREDIT: Athirah Annissa

There are great interviews like this from Billboard last year after no na debuted with shoot. 888’s incredible girl group looking to the future. How they want to represent Indonesia and showcase the country to the world. There are some incredible girl groups at the moment. From British acts like FLO and Say Now to K-Pop’s AHOF, Cortis, KiiiKiii, IRISÉ, and idntt. However, I think that no na are going to be one of the biggest in the world. Even if it is early days, they are already causing a lot of tremors. Their music hitting people in a very powerful way. Fusing traditional and classic R&B with their Southeast Asian roots, NME featured this incredible group last month. It is clear that this phenomenal group are going to be conquer the globe. Proudly representing Indonesia:

“Even when you are exploring different genres, at the core of your sound is R&B. Where does that stem from?

Esther: “We grew up with R&B. And I think also [when we were] starting out, [during] the artist development three years ago, we were also singing a lot of R&B songs. We were paying homage to a lot of early-2000s artists as well. We practised TLC, we practised Ciara.”

Baila: “We got to choose our songs, and we chose R&B. It’s just in our blood.”

How did you work with 88rising to find and build upon this island girl sound and concept?

Esther: “We say ‘island’, they say ‘yes’.” [No Na laugh] “We communicate our wants, they communicate their wants, and we find a middle ground.”

Shaz: “We discussed a lot. We tried a lot of concepts. I remember before we debuted, we tried so many photoshoots just to see how we look in different concepts, but island girl was just what defined us, so that’s what we went for.”

Christy: “I remember, we were all together [thinking about what we] all have in common. And then, we said it together: ‘Island girl’.”

Baila: “Because Indonesia has like 17,000 different islands, so we’re all island girls.”

PHOTO CREDIT: Toshio Ohno

You really bring your Indonesian and Southeast Asian roots into your music. It’s in the lyrics, sound, outfits, dance…

Shaz: “Every time we do something, we always try to implement Indonesian elements. For example, before we make our [music videos], we have a discussion on what [we can add] that is very Indonesian or Southeast Asian. With ‘Work’, it was the traditional ceng-ceng instrument from Indonesia and the batik in our costumes.”

Being in a girl group isn’t easy, especially in this era of social media and parasocial relationships. How do you guys deal with the attention?

Esther: “I’m very into watching people’s reactions and what they like about it, what they don’t like about it. That way, we know for future releases and future projects what to do and what not to do, what people like and what people don’t like, while also protecting what we wanna do as artists. We’re very open to listening to what people say. But if it’s just coming from an ill-intentioned [place], we usually just…” [motions her hand over her head]

Baila: “Just know that we laugh at your hate comments.”

What parts of Indonesian culture have you not showcased yet, but would like to in the future?

Baila: “You know what I wanna try? I really want to try piring.”

Esther: “I was thinking the same thing!”

Shaz: “It’s a traditional dance from the Padang region and they do this…” [Esther passes Baila a plate to balance on her hand] “and they just dance with it on their hand.”

PHOTO CREDIT: Toshio Ohno

Esther: “I wanna showcase Indonesian food in our music videos. I don’t think we’ve done that before. More people need to know that we have really good food.”

Shaz: “For me, clothing. There are so many [types of] traditional clothing that we have, and because we have it different[ly] in every region, we just wanna show more and more.”

Christy: “I want people to know [that in] Indonesia we eat with our hands [without utensils]. People [are] gonna [be] like, ‘What?’”

Baila: “‘You eat with your hands?’ Yes, we do.”

Esther: “It’s [more] fun that way too.”

No Na will be turning one in less than a month. Did you ever imagine the group would be so successful in such a short time?

Baila: “This is all a surprise to us. Of course, we manifested for this to happen, but we didn’t actually think that it was gonna happen.”

Shaz: “And this soon!”

Baila: “Yeah, and we haven’t even turned one yet. We’ve barely started walking, but we’re so grateful for all the love and support.”

Esther: “And we still have a long way to go. As much as we feel like, ‘OK, this is a great start’, but we’re coming back for more.”

Baila: “Don’t get tired of us. We promise there’s more”.

I am going to leave things there. Perhaps the most promising and talented girl group to come through in quite a few years, perhaps they would not want to simply be labelled as a ‘girl group’. However, it is going to be wonderful seeing where they go from here. If you have not heard their music and amazing singles rollerblade, and work, then do make sure that you listen. You will be guaranteed to instantly fall for the stunning no na. This year has already been a big and busy one for them. They are only going to rise in popularity. This is one of the best, brightest and most talented groups…

IN the world.

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Follow no na

FEATURE: Kate Bush: The Whole Story: Inside Her KBC Article Issue 5 (April 1980)

FEATURE:

 

 

Kate Bush: The Whole Story

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush pictured at the British Rock and Pop Awards at the Café Royal, London on 26th February, 1980 (where Bush won the award for Best Female Singer)/PHOTO CREDIT: Mirrorpix/Getty Images

 

Inside Her KBC Article Issue 5 (April 1980)

__________

ALTHOUGH this series…

sometimes does not need many words from me, it is more about uncovering archives and rarer writing that fans can discover. Thanks to Gaffweb and their invaluable resources. Kate Bush: The Whole Story gives me a chance to look at the writings of Kate Bush. Rather than traditional promotional interviews, this is Kate Bush writing for The Kate Bush Club. Great interviews to go alongside them. We get to see new sides and something deeper. Not the standard questions she was asked. These exclusive and personal words from Kate Bush too. This edition goes back to April 1980 and the fifth issue of The Kate Bush Club. This article was published at an interesting time. A very busy time for her: “A month after, in May 1980, The Kate Bush Club holds its first convention at the Empire Ball Room, Leicester Square in London. Kate attends. The edited version of Keef MacMillan's recording of the May 13th concert is given its first public showing. After working twenty or more hours a day, Kate finishes Never For Ever. Its release is put back, however, until September. Kate takes a badly needed holiday”. Gaffaweb provide a useful timeline, so we can see the context of this article and interview from April 1980? In that month, that was happening in her career? Well, it was especially busy and exciting: “April 11, 1980: Breathing receives its world debut on the BBC Radio 1 review programme Round Table. The reviewers are literally stunned. April 14, 1980: Breathing is released. The video, which includes a scene of a nuclear explosion, is controversial enough for the BBC to disallow it from being screened in its entirety on Top of the Pops. (Note: This is PFM's interpretation. More likely they just felt that it was too long and slow for that programme's format.--). Kate tapes a long interview for German television for use in a forty-five minute documentary comprised of discussions of Kate's career with her family and excerpts from the Hamburg and Mannheim live shows, to be called Kate Bush in Concert. April 25, 1980:Kate appears on the BBC TV programme Nationwide to be interviewed about her "protest" song. The controversial part of the video is screened for the only time on British television. (Again, this may be misleading: Nationwide simply played the video, for a programme devoted to the subject of nuclear disarmament.--)”.

Let’s get to the incredible article and interview that fans got to enjoy in April 1980. Never for Ever was released in September 1980. Its first single, Breathing, was released in April. So it was a big moment releasing the lead single from her third album:

“With Love from Kate"

Hello. Can you feel spring beginning to happen? Every day on the way to the studio I go past a winter tree, surrounded by lots of yellow and purple crocuses, and it makes my eyes spin with the colours.

Things are going well with the album. Although we've still got lots to do, we can feel the tracks speaking to us more and more--telling us what we want to hear. It's very exciting being so involved in something you love. Doing the production with Jon Kelly is a fabulous combination and the room is always full of Jons, as our assistant engineer is called Jon, too, and often our visitors are donned the name Jon!

The next visual event is a Dr. Hook special. I hope to depict two new songs from the album, with the help of Paddy for one. It should be lovely to meet Dr. Hook as I've heard nothing but praise of them as people. One of the things I've enjoyed this last year was to work with other artists on their projects. Isn't Peter Gabriel's single Games Without Frontiers ] fantastic? I can't wait to hear his new album [ Peter Gabriel number 3]. Peter is an extremely talented and lovely man, and to work with him was really fun and a great experience--as it was to do some vocals on Roy Harper's new album [ The Unknown Soldier ]. I've been a fan of Roy's music for years, as have all my family, and to work with him on his music was very special.

I really hope you enjoy being in the Club. As long as you are all happy, that's all that matters. Thank you to all of you who voted for me in the various awards. Each vote means, "Yeah, go on, do it!", and that gives me the courage to go on.

Interview

If vegetarians are against the killing of animals for food, why don't they object to them being killed for leather?

"I think there are a lot of vegetarians who are against animals being killed to make leather, and they do go out of their way to wear rubber and plastic shoes and belts, but I think that there is a practical side to it, as well. Leather is very warm, and it's nice to look at, but it does require a lot of effort for most of us to make a different choice from the normal, and I find myself that I do wear quite a few leather shoes. Not that I consciously buy them because they're made of leather, but I do have a few, and I think it's something to do with the tradition of leather being used in clothing. But there's no excuse for the mass production of leather, and I think it comes down to effort and how far you really want to go. It's up to you in the long run."

You are a vegetarian and yet you wear fur coats. Why?

"I don't wear fur coats. I haven't got one. I don't own one and I don't believe in wearing them--I may have occasionally been in photos with one, but it wouldn't have been mine. It would have been one that I'd borrowed because it was very cold; for instance in Switzerland, when I did the Abba special. [In fact, as far as I know, that was the only time Kate has ever been seen in a fur.] But I don't believe in people wearing fur coats, I think it's very extravagant and again, I think people don't tend to associate the clothes with the animals they come from, especially the rare animals that some of the coats are made of. You can get incredibly good imitation ones now--I've seen ones that I thought were real fur and they weren't. they're really fantastic, and they cost less, too."

Do you follow vegetarian recipes from books, or do you make up your own?

"I do follow recipes from books, but I find that normally I don't stick to them, especially if I haven't got all the ingredients, and I tend to substitute different vegetables. If I'm feeling really brave, occasionally I base a meal on a recipe and make the rest up. Cooking is quite a logical thing, really, and you soon learn the things that go together--what works and what doesn't."

You say in interviews that you don't eat meat because you don't believe in eating life. But you eat plants, and they are living things. Why?

"I do eat plants, and I know they're living, and I'm fond of them, but I think you have to find your own level. I could live on pills, but I don't think it's very human to do that--that is something we dream of in the space age: food without texture or mass. I don't think plants mind being eaten, actually. I think they'd be really sad if no-one paid that much attention to them. I appreciate them very much for the things they give me. I'd be very sad if there weren't any vegetables, and normally it isn't the actual plant that's killed--it's the fruit or vegetable that's taken off. I think this is the purpose of plants, that they grow to be eaten. The only problem is that it has become a very mass-produced market, again, and that the really natural, unchemicalised environment doesn't really exist. Too many chemicals are used on plants, but while there is a demand for brightly coloured food in pretty packets, that's how it will carry on. But you can get fresh, organically grown vegetables. You can grow them yourselves, and if you look around and ask, you'll find that there are a few shops and some local farms that sell vegetables that have not been grown in chemically fertilised ground."

What sort of music do you like to listen to, if, or when, you have free time? Do you like heavy rock such as Led Zeppelin?

"The sort of music I like to listen to when I've got the time is Pink Floyd's album The Wall; Stevie Wonder's The Secret Life of Plants; and I really like classical music like John Williams's. I don't like that much heavy rock, and I must admit that I've never really listened to Led Zeppelin, but I like any music if it's good. The Who are the best group I ever saw live, and I thought they were fantastic. I think they probably turned me onto it, and the Beatles were really good when they were heavy."

Which is your favourite song out of those you have written and why? Which of your albums is the more important to you personally and why? There seems to be more emphasis on Lionheart in your letters and in the Club merchandise.

"I haven't really got a favourite song, because I have a very love/hate relationship with them all, and sometimes get bored with them. I tend to associate things with a song, instead of just seeing it for itself. I think the album which is most important for me is the one I'm working on, and I think it's obvious why: I'm much more involved, and it's something I want and I haven't done it for a long time. Probably the reason there's been more emphasis on Lionheart in all the merchandising and from myself, is just because that was my last album. And it's quite catchy: we were calling the people around us during the Tour "Lionhearts" and that was a very significant part of last year for all of us. But soon it won't be so much "Lionheart" any more. It'll be something else."

Do you believe in UFOs and life on other planets?

"I really believe in UFOs, and I don't see why there shouldn't be life on other planets. We haven't got off this planet yet, really, so how can we say if there is or isn't. It seems unlikely that we would be the only ones. There have been so many reported that I'm sure they exist, and I really hope I see one--and a whale and a giraffe up close."

When you go on stage, do you ever feel nervous?

"When I go on stage, yes, I do feel nervous. I feel much more nervous when I have to go up and collect awards and speak to people than I do when I actually perform, and I think that's because when you perform, you have a part like an actor, and you fall back on that if you know it well enough and can carry it through. I enjoy it so much. I think when you have to be yourself, you're so conscious of being yourself that you wonder what people think, but it soon goes once you're up there."

Do you know anything about the messages scratched on the smooth circle just before the centre of the records? Why are they there?

"Yes, I don know something about these messages because I wrote them, and they are messages to go with the record. It's something that has been practised by several people. In fact, have a look through your albums, you'll probably find quite a few that you didn't even know were there."

In your TV special, who wrote the song sung by you and Peter Gabriel, and will it ever appear on vinyl? Also, what were the names of the new songs you did on that show?

"In the TV special the song that I sang with Peter Gabriel, Another Day, was written by Roy Harper--a very beautiful song from his album Flat Baroque and Berserk, which you can buy from your record shops along with his most recent one, which is brilliant. It's a really good song, and it will be on vinyl one day, hopefully soon, but not with this album. [Kate has still not released this recording.] The names of the new songs that were done on the show were The Wedding List, The Ran Tan, Egypt and Violin."

When will the new album be released? Will it include Egypt and Violin?

"Hopefully the new album will be released quite soon, and it will include Egypt, Violin and lots of others."

When you sit down to write a song, do you fit the words to the music or the music to the words? Also, when you write a song, do you imagine the sort of dance routine you might do?

"When I write songs I normally get the music first. They used to come together, but now the music seems to be sparked off by an idea before the lyrics, and the lyrics usually fit in just behind the music. It's not very often that I actually see the dance routine when I'm writing the song. When it's written, there are basic things there already, and in fact I find that the more I write--especially recently for this album--the more I see things when I'm writing. This is unusual, and I tend to shut them out because I can't concentrate so well on the song itself."

When you start recording a song, do you have an overall idea of how it will end up? Also, at what stage do you start to think about the album cover? The last two really seemed to fit into the albums themselves. [True of the first cover, but I have yet to figure out the narrative behind the cover of Lionheart. Kate has never explained it.]

"When you do start recording a song, you normally have an idea of how it will end up, hopefully, because that's why you are going in to record it in the first place, and a song can take so many different forms--they can take ten minutes to do, or they can take two months. Normally, the stage at which the album cover is conceived is by the time recording has actually begun. I think that's quite important, because it's not until a certain stage after you've started that a vibe emanates about how the songs are going to fit together, what the sounds are going to be, and what the general feel of the music is. We've always had the artwork started by about a third of the way through, and you try to make the picture say what the album is about, to create some kind of vibe that the music does, and hopefully they should fit together."

Is Anthony Van Laast Dutch? Van Laast sounds like a Dutch name. [Van Laast was Kate's choreographic associate and part-time dance instructor during the early years of her commercial career.]

"Anthony isn't actually Dutch, himself, I don't think. But I think his mother was, and that is her maiden name he uses."

An interview in Record Mirror mentions "Jay". Who is this?

"Jay is my brother--John Carder Bush."

Was the concert with the London Symphony Orchestra televised? [Kate sang sary Blow Away during a concert celebrating the 75th anniversary of the LSO.]

"No, it wasn't."

In Strange Phenomena you sing "G arrives" Who or what is "G"?

"'G' is in fact someone we know called Mr. G."

Someone once said that Coffee Homeground was about a crazy taxi driver. Is this true?

"Coffee Homeground was sort of based on a taxi driver that I met once, yes, but I wouldn't like to say that he was crazy because a lot of people say that I am!"

How tall are you?

"I'm 5' 3 1/2", I think!"

What was your job before you became a singer?

"I didn't have a job before I became a singer. I left school and started dancing, and then got a recording contract."

A K.B.C. member who is also a member of the Prisoner Appreciation Society asks, Do you like The Prisoner?

"Yes, I really like The Prisoner, I think it was fantastic and I used to watch it when it was first on TV on Sunday nights. Patrick McGoohan was amazing. They should show it again."

What school did you go to?

"I went to a school in Abbey Wood called St. Joseph's."

How did you meet Julie Covington? [An English pop singer who once recorded a cover version of Kate's song The Kick Inside.]

"I met Julie Covington through Jay. He is a friend of hers, and I've known her for a long time."

Where was the photo that appears on the front cover of Lionheart taken?

"This photo was taken in a photographic studio by Gered Mankowitz somewhere in London."

In a film magazine it said that you turned down the offer of singing the title song to the James Bond film Moonraker. Is this so, and if so, why?

"Yes, this is true. I thought it was a very lovely song, but I just didn't think it was for me. I think Shirley Bassey did it a lot better than I would have, anyway."

Who are the two girls on Page 3 of the Christmas Newsletter? "They are Lisa and my Ma. Lisa is the lady who deals with all your letters that come through to the Club, and she's starting to take a lot of the workload off Nicholas's shoulders. You'll be hearing a lot more from her in the future." [Lisa Bradley is now the chief editor of the Newsletter. Nicholas Wade was apparently in charge only for the first five issues.]

On the TV special, what were the trousers that you wore for Foot on the Heartbrake made of, as they appeared to be stretchy? Also on the subject of Heartbrake, you seem to like motorbikes. Do you?

"Those trousers were made by a guy who deals in stretch fabrics, so they are stretchy, and it's very good material. I do like motorbikes. I think they're very beautiful machines, but they often seem to be abused. Shame!"

In two of your songs you refer to Peter Pan. Is he a particular favourite of yours?

"I refer to Peter Pan because he stands for a lot of things. He always has and he always will. People just don't want to grow up, so I think he's everyone's favourite whether they like it or not."

What breed are Zoodle and Pyewacket, and what colour are they?

"Zoodle and Pye are--I think you call them 'moggies'. One is black with one little white toe and the other one is black and white."

Has Ben Barson got a brother called Mike who plays keyboards for Madness?

"Yes, it is Ben's brother."

What has happened to the band since the Tour of Life? Will any of them be working with you again?

"Since the Tour of Life we've worked together and they're also doing lots of work with other people. They're in great demand, being such wonderful musicians, and of course I'll be working with them again, and you will see more of them. They send you their love."

Did you leave school with any qualifications in music?

"Yes, I got an 'O'-level in music." [In fact, Kate earned no fewer than ten "O"-levels.]

When Faith Brown and other impersonators mimick you, what is your reaction?

"I don't really watch much television. I haven't been for quite a while--since I've been doing the album. But the ones I have seen I think are really funny. I think it's incredible that I should be chosen from so many to be imitated."

Vegetarianism

People probably eat so much pre-packaged food because it's always so easy to get in shops, and they don't connect it with live animals. If they actually had to kill the animal themselves, they would probably have great difficulty in doing it. People who live and work with animals can be aware of what they are doing when they kill an animal. They realise that they're going to be eating it, rather than it being sent off to be sold in supermarkets. On some levels this seems to be all right, because it's on a one-to-one basis: you feed and look after the animal for a certain length of time and then it repays you by becoming your food. But it's the mass-production of living creatures just to be eaten, and the fact that people aren't really aware of what they're eating, that I don't like.

These days it seems more and more probable that fish are likely to contain pollution--which can't do you any good--as they have no choice but to eat all the muck that's in the water. But hopefully people's general awareness is getting much better, even down to buying a pint of milk: the fact that the calves are actually killed so that the milk doesn't go to them but to us can't really be right, and if you've seen a cow in a state of extreme distress because it can't understand why its calf isn't by it, it can make you think a lot.

Working in London, I often have to go past meat markets, and when I see all those people working in there with blood all over them, and dead animals strung up from meat-hooks, just waiting to be devoured, it's like something out of a horror film. When I realised that, I didn't want to eat meat any more. I became more conscious about the things that I did eat. I think this helped me to learn more about food, because I had to start thinking what the nutritional value of something was, and I'm still learning about things I didn't think I could eat, which is really good. Just the discipline of not eating meat is a very good thing. It's like giving up anything you like--it hurts at first, but then you feel much better for it. I don't know whether it was just me, but when I first became a vegetarian I was really hungry a lot of the time, but I'm not now, and I wonder if that's because my stomach has adjusted. When you eat meat, you do ten to eat more than you need, and the body has to work a lot to break it all down.

It's interesting how the traveling that I've done reveals things about people's diets. In many European countries it's very hard to get something that hasn't got meat in it. There was one instance in Germany where I asked for a bowl of tomato soup and, having been assured that it contained just tomatoes, I tucked into it. But about halfway through the soup I could see all these lumps floating around at the bottom, and of course they were all meatballs. They just naturally do things like putting bacon and meatballs into vegetable soup, without even thinking about it. So many shops are meat-oriented: it's all sausages and pies, and the only other things you can really get are just potatoes and salads, when there is such an enormous variety of non-animal foods that can be eaten. Looking forward to a breakfast of toast and marmalade, and then getting a couple of slabs of cold meat and white bread pushed under your nose, isn't the way I like to start my day.

Japan seemed to be more vegetable-oriented. They take great pride in their vegetables, although they're greatly into fish, and this is causing them and the dolphins a lot of problems. I found Australia very meat-oriented, too, and this might have something to do with it being such a young country, and it's true that meat does give you a lot of energy. I suppose there was a time when a slab of bacon fat for breakfast might have been necessary for somebody working in a heavy manual job. But I've found that if I keep an eye on the sort of vegetarian food that I eat, I don't have any problems about dancing and singing on it.

It all comes down to looking more closely at the sort of food you are just used to having and saying to yourself, Do I really need to eat this, or is there something that will be better for me? The more people who get into good vegetarian food, the easier it will be for us. If I go into a restaurant with friends, and they settle down to a feast of meat and sauces and so on, I usually end up with salad and chips--which is OK, but that's about as far as most restaurants can go in the direction of vegetarian food”.

It is a really interesting interview. Kate Bush talking about food and her diet. Though she does touch on music, it is mostly about vegetarianism and food, which reveals new elements to Kate Bush. Things you would not necessarily get with typical music interviews. I am ending by dropping in a video of Kate Bush speaking with Delia Smith about vegetarianism too, as it seems to relate and has that similarity. A great and funny article and interview. How Kate Bush was laughing at how many Johns/Jons there were in the studio with her! The songs for Never for Ever taking shape. I might dip into The Kate Bush Club and another article from her for a future feature. For now, I hope you have enjoyed this edition of…

THIS new series.

FEATURE: Kate Bush: Them Heavy People: The Extraordinary Characters in Her Songs: My Pussy Queen (Egypt)/Sylvia (Come Closer to Me Babe)

FEATURE:

 

 

Kate Bush: Them Heavy People: The Extraordinary Characters in Her Songs

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush circa 1980

 

My Pussy Queen (Egypt)/Sylvia (Come Closer to Me Babe)

__________

I am going to…

PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush

dig into a very early Kate Bush song for the second side of this feature. I had forgotten the charters that appear in her earliest tracks. Those that are in demo form and not many fans are that familiar with. One of the tracks I want to investigate has a character called Sylvia that has drawn speculation. As to the identity of the Sylvia and what it means in the context of the song. However, I am starting out with a character that may well get me into some hot water. Recently, I featured Ran Tan Waltz and the fact it has some spicy lyrics. Kate Bush in quite bawdy and risqué mode. However, there is a brilliant lyric in Egypt that raises smiles and the eyebrows! I am going to bring in the lyrics. It relates to My Pussy Queen. I will look at Egypt and being an underrated song on Never for Ever. The way Kate Bush brought in different cultures and countries through her music. Also, how she evolved and was in a happier place for Never for Ever. There is a lot of fascinating things to discuss about Egypt. The song was performed during the Christmas Special in 1979. The way she depicted the song for that show. Ran Tan Waltz got its sole live outing there. It would have been hard to replicate Egypt or build pyramids for a stage version or anything in a T.V. studio. What she did come up with for the Christmas Special is parody-worthy. Maybe there is this feeling that she did the best she could to depict an Egyptian flavour. However, looking at the performance now, it does seem strange and perhaps a little outdated. I don’t think it was cultural appropriation. I shall mention this more in a bit. However, it is interesting learning the background to this underrated pearl of a song:

“‘Egypt’ is an attempted audial animation of the romantic and realistic visions of a country.

Kate Bush Club newsletter, September 1980

The song is very much about someone who has not gone there thinking about Egypt, going: “Oh, Egypt! It’s so romantic… the pyramids!” Then in the breaks, there’s meant to be the reality of Egypt, the conflict. It’s meant to be how blindly we see some things – “Oh, what a beautiful world”, you know, when there’s shit and sewers all around you.

Kris Needs, ‘Fire in the Bush’. Zigzag (UK), 1980”.

Egypt was a song that was performed for The Tour of Life in 1979. Bush depicting herself as this seductive Cleopatra. In 1979, it might have been a bit strange for audiences in the U.K. and Europe hearing a song about Egypt. I do admire that Bush was looking to talk about a country in a realistic way. Many might have the cliché images of pyramids, pharaohs and this romantic element. However, even today, think about countries in Africa and the Middle East and we have this rose-tinted vision. There are nations torn up by war and corruption. Whilst some could see Egypt as this slight song that had no real depth, it was Kate Bush being balanced in her view of a country that did get romanticised. I am not sure whether she ever visited the country. However, I do feel like many preferred the live versions of the song rather than what appears on Never for Ever. Some of the snap and momentum of the live version lost when brought into the studio. I am going to come to the brilliant Dreams of Orgonon and their interpretation of Egypt. This song, alongside Violin, is seen as the weakest on Never for Ever. It is a fantastic album where Kate Bush and Jon Kelly produced together. It went to number one, and confirmed Kate Bush was a genuinely great artist. There are some wonderful lines in Egypt. The opening lines are brilliantly evocative: “Follow the Nile/Deep to much deeper/The Pyramids sound lonely tonight”. The instrumentation gives the song this unique flavour and feel. Preston Heyman providing incredible percussion. Fender Rhodes and Minimoog by Max Middleton. Electric bass from Del Palmer. Paddy Bush playing Strumento de Porco. Mike Moran playing the spacey Prophet 5. I think one of the good or bad things about the song is the obliqueness of the lyrics. Or Kate Bush not being explicit. She is not talking about sewers and the violence in a country. Instead, she summons up all these classic images and familiar themes. However, there are lines like “She’s got me with that feline guise/Got me in those desert eyes” that suggests there is a dangerous seductiveness. That all of this grandeur and history suckered her in and, when going deeper into Egypt, the harsher realities present themselves.

Just before Kate Bush tells how she “drifts with dunes”, there is this immortal section: “My Pussy Queen/Knows all my secrets”. I am taking My Pussy Queen to be a literal character. However, you can interpret this in a number of ways. A feline goddess or something sexual. It does sound quite saucy when you read it. Though, when you hear it sung, there is not the sense Bush is winking at the listener. That said, Bush does offer up that line of “She’s got me with that feline guise”, which makes sense. Bush could have been referencing Bastet (or Bast). She was the primary ancient Egyptian goddess depicted as a cat or a woman with the head of a cat. Originally a fierce lioness warrior, she evolved into a protector of households, women, children, and domestic cats, representing fertility and joy. She was widely worshipped in the city of Bubastis. This fascinating article discusses Bastet and a cult of feline deities:

“The fascinating and sometimes exotic character of ancient Egyptian religion finds its perfect symbolization in the feline goddess Bastet. In countless museums and exhibitions, we meet her depicted as a seated cat with varying divine iconography such as a scarab on her head. In a motionless, yet vigilant, pose easily seen on real cats, the beautiful, divine Bastet typifies an ancient world of mysterious beliefs.

Bastet, Lioness and Cat

Bastet’s main cult location is Bubastis, an important city in the southeastern Nile Delta. But the earliest attestations of Bastet come from the galleries under the famous step pyramid of Djoser at Saqqara near Memphis. Thousands of sherds of stone vessels from burials of the 2nd dynasty (around 2800 BCE) were discovered there. Some have short inscriptions mentioning deities, including a Bastet depicted as a female with the head of a lioness, plus priests and a possible cult place of Bastet in Memphis. It might be that Bastet was originally a deity of the royal residence and, judging from the etymology of her name, a derivation of the name of the ointment jar b#s.t. – perhaps a goddess connected to royal regalia. Merging the concept of a deity with a protective ointment, the protective and mighty nature of a divine lioness would have fit royal ideology. Temple of Bastet, Bubastis

The earliest attestation of Bastet at Bubastis dates to a later period, the reign of Pepi I of the 6th dynasty (around 2270 BC). This evidence comes from the decorated door lintel at the king’s Ka-temple showing Bastet and Hathor. Again, Bastet is depicted as an anthropomorphic female with the head of a lioness. Tomb stelas from the elite cemetery of Bubastis of the same period preserved the titles of Bastet temple administrators, so we can assume that a temple and cult of the goddess existed there by the end of the Old Kingdom.

It is unclear how the cult of Bastet found its way from the early dynastic residence at Memphis to Bubastis. One theory is that, in the early 3rd millennium, prides of lions lived in the Delta’s semi-desert fringes. With its seasonal lake at the center, the Wadi Tumilat offered an excellent sanctuary for these animals. At the time, the Delta supported large herds of cattle that were key to an emerging centralized state with royal agricultural domains but also an irresistible hunting ground for lions. Egyptians could easily observe attacks by lions and especially lionesses, which are known to be active hunters that use impressive teamwork. It is not far-fetched to deduce these observations would lead to the worship of those fearsome, fascinating animals”.

This is not the only case of Bush transporting herself beyond England. Inspiration for other songs have taken her to the U.S. and Ireland. She has also ‘travelled’ to Australia and beyond. The Dreaming’s title track was Bush trying to tackle the destruction of Aboriginal Australian homelands, and its culture and lives by white settlers, who were searching for weapons-grade uranium. The track tackles too themes of environmental ruin, colonial violence, and the loss of indigenous spiritual ‘Dreaming’ (or Dreamtime). Some criticised Bush for that song and felt it was cultural appropriation. Or this case of white privilege. Can you say the same about Egypt? Though Bush is not attacking a group of people or as political as she was in 1982, a couple of years prior on Never for Ever, there is this discussion of a side to a country not often discussed in music. Dreams of Orgonon wrote about some of the trickier themes and issues with the song:

“The perception of Egypt is occidental: Bush is captivated by the myth of Egypt, the country that’s found in history books rather than the one that actually exists on the Sinai Peninsula. She’s dealing with iconography more than actual lived history once again. Falling into the pervasive Western trope of depicting Eastern landscapes minus the people (The Lion King, anyone?), she sings about an unpopulated landscape, a playground for colonizers rather than a place where people live. In his classic text Orientalism, Edward Said describes the East as “a theatrical stage affixed to Europe,” where the interests of Western imperial powers are acted out. The ever-theatrical Kate Bush operates similarly.

To Bush’s credit, she attempts to grapple with this tension. An early part of the discordant lyric — consisting of a mere two verses and two choruses, which almost entirely fail to rhyme — makes mention of how “the sands run red/in the land of the Pharaohs.” Bush’s gaze shifts from the bloodshed: the chorus begins with “I cannot stop to comfort them/I’m busy chasing up my demons.” At the very least, she tries to deal with the solipsism of Western colonialism. Fetishization of Egyptian objects becomes a sickness that distracts from the exploitation and cruelty of material history.

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1980/PHOTO CREDIT: Andy Phillips

The problem is that while Bush does take something of a critical hammer to colonialist attitudes, she engages in those very attitudes. Presenting Egypt as hypnotic is maybe not the critique Bush thinks it is. In fact it only buys into the Orientalist trope of the East as inherently mysterious and esoteric: just look at the first edition cover of Said’s Orientalism, with its snake-charming painting. And for all that I tipped my hat to Bush for her acknowledgement of Egypt’s violent conflict, it’s a very minimal part of the song. The unpopulated landscape is still almost the entirety of “Egypt”: there are no people in it. It’s not that I want Bush to write a song about the Suez Crisis or Yom Kippur. I shudder at the thought of such a song from nearly any white artist. But “Egypt” is such a minimalistic piece of songwriting it’s hard to derive anything conclusive from it.

This is no surprise given that “Egypt” was the first new song written for Never for Ever (“Violin” was recycled from the Phoenix years). It’s oddly shaped and difficult to parse — it sounds outright unfinished, with its sparse lyric and chorus. More than likely it was written in between Lionheart and the Tour of Life, as it made its first appearance on that tour, where it was introduced as visual spectacle instead of an album track. As a result the song is more something to be seen than heard, as it was originally written for the stage. In concert, Bush strove up to the audience draped in full Cleopatra-meets-Captain-Marvel, draped in the red, blue, and gold livery, heralded by pipes and Preston Heyman’s powerful drumming. The subsequent performance is tense and distant — its frantic arrangement keeps it from getting dull, and it’s more driving and catchy than its record counterpart. The tour’s punchy and often acoustic arrangements give “Egypt” more weight than it would later have, and the song would be worse off without it.

As the world rapidly organizes itself into new modes of capitalism and imperialist expansion, Bush is producing a soundtrack for its disasters. Her new music shows tradition crashing down on people who’ve followed them blindly, and sometimes she gets caught under the debris. Shortly we’re going to see how she deals with personal catastrophe as well. It forces her to look outward. Yet despite the abyss gazing also, she’s a bit too immersed in Western solipsism to see where it’s looking”.

I will come back to Dreams of Orgonon for the second song I am talking about. I do feel that Egypt is an underrated song. Sure, if you think about the lyrics and inspiration behind it, you can see some negatives or drawbacks. However, as a piece, it is a gem that is not often talked about. I can imagine it had more flair and power when seen on the stage. That said, you get this evocative and beautiful song on Never for Ever. Its placing too. It ends a run of slightly romantic of gentler songs. After the more intense and propulsive Babooshka, which opens the album, there is Delius (Song of Summer), Blow Away (For Bill) and All We Ever Look For. Egypt then follows, and the song that comes after that is The Wedding List. Going back into something more dramatic. Perhaps some parallels and comparisons between Babooshka and The Wedding List. Violin then follows, which is perhaps the most energetic and hard-driving song on Never for Ever. Perhaps there was a sense of sameness with that run of gentler songs. How Egypt required more bite and punch to elevate it and retain interest. Where else would you put Egypt? I think it could work as track eight and following Violin. The Infant Kiss is track eight. You can feel Kate Bush is in a happier place. She was happy enough recording The Kick Inside and Lionheart through 1977 and 1978. However, Andrew Powell was producing. These were Bush’s songs, though the final version was very much in someone else’s hands. I can imagine the joy and experimentation she did as a producer. Songs like Egypt show new layers and this sense of a producer trying to take her music to new places. It is admirable that she documented something less conventional and discussed for Egypt. If the lyrics do provoke some serious questions, the fantastical elements are wonderful! My Pussy Queen. Never truly revealed who that is, you can draw a line between that and feline deities. It is the playful and sexual wording that make it one of Kate Bush’s finest offerings!

PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush

Let’s go back further in time. Quite a few of Kate Bush’s earlier songs got retitled. Berlin got renamed The Saxophone Song. Rinfy the Gypsy went through some changes and was part of this way she would change her mind with titles and there would be this evolution. A demo that was recorded in 1976, I did want to mark fifty years of these incredible recordings. Come Closer to Me Babe was called Goodnight Baby at one stage. The demo appears on the bootleg Cathy Demos Volume Four. The name and character of Sylvia is referenced more than once. It is this verse that is especially intriguing: “What is it that you whisper/When you close your eyes?/Come closer to me, babe/Is it me it's all about?/And who is it that you're always/Calling in your sleep?/Who is Sylvia?”. Before coming to who Sylvia might be, it is worth noting how little is written about Kate Bush’s earliest demos. I am thinking back fifty years, when Bush was a teenager. She finalised her record deal with EMI in 1976, so this was a time when she was writing a lot and putting down demos. She had already recorded songs that would appear on The Kick Inside, her 1978 debut album. In terms of how much material was available for that album. So many songs never made it onto albums, so people do not really know much about them. It is weird that few dissect and spotlight these incredible tracks. The earliest signs of her genius. There are other elements I want to explore. In terms of these demos leading to The Kick Inside and Bush’s growing ambitions and confidence as a songwriter. I am going back to Dreams of Orgonon and some words about Come Close to Me Babe. It is a mysterious song, and we do not really know who Sylvia is: “Come Closer To Me Babe” is the reflection of a lullaby in a cracked mirror. The singer tries to sing their lover to sleep to get their guard down and reveal something. Who’s the Sylvia he calls out for in his sleep? Is he reading The Bell Jar too much? Or should Kate boot his ass out the door? As usual, Bush declines to condemn the man. Sylvia remains a mystery as the curtain closes—probably best for everyone”.

PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush

I am dropping some photos from John Carder Bush of Kate Bush when she was a child, as there is not much audio I can include regarding this song. Even so, I do think of Kate Bush writing these songs that would only get as far as demos. What struck her to write them. Whether they started as poems and then she decided to work them into songs. At school, there would have been this unhappiness and sense it was not fulfilling. Even so, poetry was something she loved and she developed a fascination with words and literature. There are manty examples of tracks that we can hear versions of, though very few people know about them. Snow Bowl, A Rose Growing Old, Something Like a Song, The Craft of Love, and Frightened Eyes. Something Like a Song probably dates back to 1973. One of Kate Bush’s earliest tracks. Cusi Cusi and Go Now While You Can are these remarkable tracks that have barely seen the light of day. People can say that many of these sound quite primitive and are similar. Bush was definitely developing as a songwriter. Manty of the 1973 demos were her poems effectively set to piano. These demos were her and the piano, so you really only got this one-dimensional musical viewpoint. It was clear Bush was already a wonderful player that young. Remember, in 1973, she turned fifteen. Exceptionally young to write such quality songs! The Kick Inside was her further developing. In terms of the confidence as a player and the themes she was exploring. In the space of a few years, she had come on leaps as a writer. I do wonder how old many of those songs are. Like Oh to Be in Love and Kite. Bush might have written the earliest versions a few years before recording them. What I love about a song such as Come Closer to Me Babe is that it is almost fifty years to the day when Bush recorded it. There is not going to be this big anniversary. I feel it is quite momentum and important we shine a light on these songs. Bush now might not want people to hear them and she may have vague memories of writing and recording them. However, it is a huge part of her life and the earliest recordings we have. The rest of the world would know her by 1978. However, a couple of years previous, Bush was taping these beautiful songs. Many started as poems. Others not. All quite different in terms of their themes and inspirations, I do not know many other people who explore these tracks.

Early Demos was an unofficial album released that featured many of her early demos. “The album The Early Years was prepared for release in early 1986 by a West German company. Someone, somehow has got hold of one of tapes, which appeared to have contained not only a number of Kate’s early (circa 1973) demos, but also embryonic versions of more well-known tracks. An album that was planned but quickly got shut down was The Early Years, and you can appreciate why Bush might not have wanted this to come out. It was 1986 and the same year she released the greatest hits collection, The Whole Story: “A West German company appeared to believe that it had bought the ‘rights’ to this tape and was set to issue an album entitled: The Early Years. EMI-Electrola in Germany were aware of this. For some reason, they took no action in preventing the release. The album was in fact pressed and white labels send out in an attempt to secure overseas distribution deals. At this point Kate herself became aware of the proposed release, and feeling that her early mistakes are not fit for public consumption, took the appropriate legal action. The album was not released and the entire stock of the albums that were pressed was destroyed”. There is that discussion now and whether Kate Bush would ever let her demos be put onto an album. They are available on YouTube and it is only right we get to hear them. A difference making them part of an official release. Aged sixty-seven, it seems a lifetime ago. I think it is important we mark fifty years of the demos that were recorded in 1976, though there are ethical debates as to whether we should upgrade or polish these demos and do something with them. That said, I feel more discussion needs to occur. These embryonic flashes of genius practically left to collect dust! There is something wrong about that.

IN THIS PHOTO: Sylvia Plath

Let’s focus on Come Closer to Me Babe. That mention of a Sylvia. You could jump and say it is about the poet, Sylvia Plath. If you take this figure in the song to be about Plath, there is an interesting connection to the title of a Kate Bush album – though with a slightly different spelling. This information is especially fascinating: “In the final months of her life, beginning in October 1962, Plath experienced a great burst of creativity and composed most of the poems on which her reputation now rests, writing at least 26 of the poems of her second collection Ariel, which would be published posthumously (1965 in the UK, 1966 in the US)”. Kate Bush’s 2005 double album is called Aerial.  At a time when Kate Bush herself was experiencing this burst of creativity, was she thinking about Sylvia Plath? Kate Bush’s brother, John Carder Bush, was a poet, and he introduced his sister to a lot of different works. Many of the poems Bush wrote at school were quite dark. She has said how they were quite morbid and about death. Considering how Sylvia Plath died by suicide in 1963 (the American poet died in London), was this Bush adding a darker and slightly deathly touch to a romantic song? Also, why would a lover call out Sylvia Plath during their dreams? Bush definitely writing about love and passion in very interesting ways when she was a teenager. The Man with the Child in His Eyes seems this fantasy man or someone that people say is “lost on some horizon”. A sea-farer or adventurer, almost like dipping into classic poetry. There are articles about The Cathy Demos and a lot of the songs written in 1973 and re-recorded in 1976. The history of these demos really fascinates me. In terms of the story behind Come Close to Me Babe. It seems like the man has a secret or there is something he cannot share whilst they are awake. It is only when he is asleep that he calls Sylvia out and there is a mystery as to why he does this: “Come closer to me now/For I know there's something you must tell me/When slumber slips between your lips/Will the secrets ooze out easily?”. This woman that he is always calling in his sleep. These line warrant scurrility: “What is it that you whisper/When you close your eyes?/Come closer to me, babe/Is it me it's all about?”.

IN THIS PHOTO: Sylvia Kristel/PHOTO CREDIT: Getty Images

It would be hard to draw a line between a man lusting after someone else in the 1970s and a poet who died in 1963. Rather than this being an attraction to someone literal and alive, is there more of a psychological angle? The only notable Sylvia who was alive in the 1970s that could be whispered by a man seduced in his sleep is Sylvia Kristel. She was a Dutch actress and model who appeared in over fifty films. She was the eponymous character in five of the seven Emmanuelle films, including originating the role with Emmanuelle (1974). You can read more about her here. Another connection to a Kate Bush song (however loose) is that Kristel dated Ian McShane from 1977 to 1982. 1977 was the year when Kate Bush wrote Wuthering Heights. It was a 1967 BBC T.V. adaptation of the Emily Brontë novel that inspired her to write the song. Ian McShane played Heathcliff. Cathy was played by Angela Scoular. A phenomenal actress whose sadly premature death puts me in mind of Sylvia Plath. In terms of how much she struggled with mental health issues and they both lived with bipolar affective disorder (though Scoular did not die by suicide, she was in the grip of the illness and did cause her own death). Though, we will never know who the Sylvia in Come Closer to Me Babe is. I am not certain Kate Bush now would remember who she had in mind. Though it is that mystery that gives this track and so many of those demos such place and prominence now. Fifty years on and we need to magnify them. Thinking about a young Kate Bush writing these songs and then sitting at her pianos and capturing them. Even though they did not feature on albums, we can hear the recordings and wonder what might have been. Come Closer to Me Babe is a classic example of her genius coming through…

AT such a young age.

FEATURE: Spotlight: Emma Smith

FEATURE:

 

 

Spotlight

PHOTO CREDIT: Veronika Vee Marx

 

Emma Smith

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I will share this feature…

after Emma Smith has played Ronnie Scott’s (3rd May) but before she plays in Watford at the Palace Theatre. I have known about her music for a while, though I have never seen her live. It must be quite an experience seeing her on stage. This is an artist that you really need to know about. One of the most effecting and incredible, Smith is a true treasure. I will come to some features and interviews. It is worth grabbing some biography from her official website:

“Parliamentary Jazz Vocalist of the Year winner, Emma Smith’s star is on the rise. With diverse and extensive experience performing everywhere from the Royal Albert Hall in London to the world’s leading jazz clubs, it’s no wonder that Emma’s shows are fast becoming the hottest ticket in town. She has collaborated with the likes of Michael Bublé, The Quincy Jones Orchestra, Jeff Goldblum and Jeremy Pelt / Wayne Escoffery quintet. Along the way, she has built a formidable reputation as a powerful, expressive artist on the global jazz scene, nurturing a loyal fanbase that returns show after show.

Emma’s many accolades to date include the widespread success of her long-established vocal harmony group, The Puppini Sisters, as well as a four-year stint as a broadcaster on BBC Radio 3. She also holds a position with her home club’s acclaimed touring group, the Ronnie Scott’s All Stars. Following a triumphant tour with American supergroup Postmodern Jukebox, Emma’s career continues to soar — with tastemakers tipping her as one of the most exciting voices in jazz today.

Growing up in a family of jazz musicians, it was inevitable that Emma would catch the bug for joyous, swinging music. With a saxophonist mother and a trumpeter-composer father, she was surrounded by jazz chords, bebop records, and three-part vocal harmony from a young age. But Emma cites her biggest influence as her grandfather — an East End trombone player who began in British Army bands and rose to prominence playing with legends such as Sammy Davis Jr., Oscar Peterson, Barbra Streisand, and Frank Sinatra. Emma says, “He never skipped a day’s practice. He taught me that you’re only as good as your last performance. I’ve adopted my Grandad’s work ethic, wide-eyed adoration for the music, deep gratitude for the life it gives me, and limitless ambition.”

That work ethic has paid off. In recent years, Emma has received a range of awards and acknowledgements from both critics and institutions — including being one of only two singers ever to be awarded the Worshipful Company of Musicians Medal, reaching the finals of the Montreux Jazz Competition, and being named Jazz Act of the Year at the 2024 Jools Holland Boisdale Music Awards, competing alongside Ezra Collective, Courtney Pine, and Nubya Garcia. She was nominated for the Parliamentary Jazz Award in the Jazz Vocalist of the Year category in both 2022 and 2023, before proudly winning the title in 2024. Stateside, she reached the final five in the 12th Annual Sarah Vaughan International Jazz Vocal Competition, selected from over 280 submissions representing 37 countries — and was the only non-USA-based singer to compete.

Emma’s rise to prominence has been cemented by her critically acclaimed studio work, showcasing her as a multifaceted jazz singer, arranger, and traditional songwriter with exceptional vocal ability. Her solo album Meshuga Baby was hailed as a breakout release, amassing millions of streams and receiving widespread radio support from Jamie Cullum (BBC Radio 2), Cerys Matthews (BBC 6 Music), TSF Jazz, and Jazz FM.

Her much-anticipated new album Bitter Orange arrives in summer 2025 via US label La Reserve, where she is the first UK artist to join their ultra-hip roster. An intimate snapshot into the mind and personal life of a self-making female artist, Bitter Orange captures Emma’s mission to be heard and make an impact in today’s world — with a sound rooted in yesterday”

There was a lot of love for her 2025 album, Bitter Orange. A bewitching and beautidul collection of songs, it is an album that I keep coming back to. A new favourite reach time I pass through. Emma Smith displaying her gifts as a vocalist. A truly captivating live talent, I follow Emma Smith on Instagram and can see videos of her performing. You get a window into her life and day to day. I do a series called The Great American Songbook. I spotlight American artists who have a remarkable catalogue. Though, there is no link to the traditional meaning of The Great American Songbook. It is a canon of influential, enduring popular songs and jazz standards, primarily from the 1920s to the 1950s. Emma Smith is masterful and compelling when interpreting these songs and making them her own. I am keen to include this interview from UK Jazz News, where Smith discussed making her third album, Bitter Orange:

“I hope you can hear the camaraderie and the joyfulness which we get from playing together,” declares London singer Emma Smith delightedly, referring to pianist Jamie Safir, double bassist Conor Chaplin and drummer Luke Tomlinson, who accompany her on her latest album Bitter Orange. “It evidences the commitment and loyalty we’ve had with each other for ten-plus years.”

Smith and Safir co-arranged the songs on Bitter Orange, which are mainly from the Great American Songbook. “We do the arrangements together, in the same room at the same time – we’re able to think musically as one person,” she says”.

Smith makes bold changes to many of the songs. The album begins, for example, with a brief introduction, which she gives the title ‘Hey World, Here I Am!’ This comprises several lines extracted from the song which follows, ‘I’m The Greatest Star’. Smith personalises these lyrics, so that the ‘American Beauty nose’ becomes a‘big beautiful Jewish nose.’ The song of course comes from 1964’s Funny Girl, the musical in which Barbra Streisand starred on Broadway. “It’s important to find your own voice within such a repertoire,” reflects Smith. “And I’m so connected to my Jewish identity [that] it’s a real statement for me: I’m reclaiming something I used to get bullied about, for the whole world to hear on a record that will live on the internet for ever and be in people’s houses across the world.”

Smith explains further her feelings about the song: “It’s an affirmation of confidence. But when Fanny Brice, Barbra’s character, sings it there’s an element of desperation and sadness that I really relate to. When she sings, ‘That’s why I was born/I’ll blow my horn/Till someone blows it,’ that always cracks me open because there is a feeling of, ‘I was born to do this and when is the world going to recognise it?’ I’m sure many artists can relate to that.”

Smith has also found success as a broadcaster and for four years presented Radio 3’s Jazz Now, with Soweto Kinch and Al Ryan. “The concept of the show was fantastic because it was artists interviewing artists,” she says. “Maybe after I’ve won my Grammys and played at the Royal Albert Hall and sung a James Bond soundtrack, I’ll go back to broadcasting!”

Smith released Meshuga Baby, her follow-up to The Huntress, in 2022. “It was nerve-wracking because there were ten years between the albums so I put a lot of pressure on myself to get it right,” she admits. “It was very important for me to highlight my Jewish heritage and I got to showcase the fun and bold artist that I am. I’m really proud of that work and still sing songs from it every gig – Willie Dixon’s ‘Seventh Son’ is a really fun encore and we do ‘Makin’ Whoopee’ because it’s been streamed over two million times on Spotify alone.”

The sexism that exists in the music industry infuriates Smith. “I’m running my own business, I’m my own manager and until recently my own agent and label, so now most men treat me with respect. But there are still some who don’t. We’ll arrive at gigs and people will only talk to Jamie as if I’m incapable of receiving the information about when soundcheck is! It’s a constant fight to be taken seriously and recognised for what I do – [I’m] not just able to sing in a nice frock and heels, I do all the arrangements, with Jamie, I design all the front covers, I do the liner notes, the set list, all the advance publicity for my tours, the marketing campaigns, the ads for the shows, I create all social media content, I design the T-shirt, get the T-shirt printed, I go and press the vinyl, I write the mailing list … Every single element! And so when you get patronised by a man it’s incredibly frustrating and insulting”.

I will end with a review for Bitter Orange. However, I did find this feature from Orinda News. Orinda is in California. Emma Smith played some U.S. dates recently and went down a storm. Playing at an iconic New York venue, this is an immense talent that I feel should played more. I know her music has spread beyond Jazz stations, though I have not heard her much on mainstream stations and covered by some of the biggest music and culture websites:

“It’s easy to see why England’s Emma Smith sold out her recent six concerts at New York’s storied Birdland, despite a raging storm that had most of the East Coast snowed in. Her powerful voice is enhanced with vocal nuances and her playful attitude creates an intimate relationship with her audience – making it seem as if she is singing to each one individually.

Bay Area audiences have a chance to see this dynamic performer when she makes her West Coast debut at the Live at the Orinda! concert series March 22.

In a recent interview, Smith noted she might do one or two original songs, plus some unusual fringe songs, including something from the 1950’s “Cinderella” musical.

“But I’ll concentrate mostly on the Great American Songbook, which is my jazz home,” Smith said. “It’s so fantastic, and I just do my own arrangements of some of those fabulous songs.”

Smith also plans a homage to her rich family history which includes her mother (saxophonist), her brother (guitarist) and her father (trumpeter/composer). But it was her grandfather who became her mentor.

An East End trombone player who began playing in British Army bands and rose to prominence playing with such legends as Sammy Davis Jr., Oscar Peterson, Barbra Streisand and Frank Sinatra, he helped hone the young musician’s skills.

“He never skipped a day’s practice,” said Smith. “He taught me that you’re only as good as your last performance. I’ve adopted my Granddad’s work ethic, and I have a wide-eyed adoration for the music and deep gratitude for the life it gives me.”

Her aunt also influenced Smith’s singing style, which has a fun theatrical, sassy side to it.

“My auntie was in musical theater and performed with the Royal Shakespeare Company among many others. She taught me from a young age to be a storyteller,” Smith said. “I grew up watching such old musicals as ‘Fiddler on the Roof,’ ‘Funny Girl,’ ‘Hello, Dolly’ and ‘Chicago’.”

Surrounded by jazz chords, bebop records and three-part vocal harmony from a young age, Smith was destined for a musical career.

Following her studies at the Royal Academy of Music, Smith first received widespread success with the vocal harmony group The Puppini Sisters as well as her studio work, which solidified her multifaceted talents as a jazz singer, arranger and traditional songwriter with exceptional vocal ability.

“The Puppini Sisters are such an important part of my music education,” she said. “I just love the close harmonies we did.”

Smith also enjoyed the retro glam dresses they wore for such songs as “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy” and, when she went solo, Smith included the look in her concerts.

“When traveling, I like to go vintage shopping. What I’m wearing in a show is often a marker of my travels,” said Smith.

And travel is something Smith often does.

Last year, she traveled for over 11 months, spending the holidays in Athens and celebrating Christmas Day at the Acropolis.

“Luckily, I love traveling, especially to Poland and all these amazing Italian towns,” Smith said. “Being on the road so much, I don’t have time for a personal life, so I just create a social life wherever I am. I also like to tour with musicians who I enjoy socializing with”.

With one of the most striking and memorable album covers of last year, Bitter Orange won a lot of praise. The award-winning artist bringing life to old classics. The Arts Desk provided their thoughts on the exceptional Bitter Orange. It is one of my favourite albums from last year. Emma Smith is truly wonderous:

“Emma Smith, one time Puppini Sister, has established herself over the past decade or so as one of the UK’s most compelling jazz singers, now signed to hip Brooklyn label La Reserve, with Bitter Orange, a new album of classics from the Great American Songbook. The 2024 Parliamentary Jazz Vocalist of the Year launched the album from the stage of Ronnie Scott’s over four sets across two hot, high-summer Soho nights.

She’s got artistry and showbiz all sewn up in one body-sculpting outfit, and between songs delivered very funny, sassy and illuminating asides – best of which was a story about her granddad, who stole a trombone from a music shop while working on the Docks during the war (he paid for it eventually). He went on to become a player in British Army bands, then for the likes of Frank Sinatra and Barbra Streisand and many others. One of Smith’s earliest memories is being on stage with him at Ronnie Scott’s, around the age of three.

Smith’s Bitter Orange comprises 12 songs, and from the opening snippet of “Hey World, Here I Am” through that seasoned drinker’s lament “Make It Another Old Fashioned Please” (the club’s bar obliged) to a ‘lost’ Disney song from Cinderella, “I’m In the Middle of a Muddle” and an existential, expressionist primal take on “Bewitched, Bothered & Bewildered”, it’s a powerful, lived-in reimagining of some very well known songs. On “Bewitched” her vocals dig in and reach into the murky depths of complex passions and emotional hotspots with a mixture of power, force, delicacy and nuance, holding and bending grace notes and bringing out the song’s unspoken emotions.

Along with “Bewitched”, the album peaks with the final three – “Funny Face”, which segues into “My Funny Valentine”, and “Polkadots & Moonbeams”. Here is some of her finest singing to date. It’s rich, deep and delicately nuanced, and she’s ably supported on stage and on record by her regular three-piece of pianist Jamie Safir, bassist Conor Chaplin and drummer Luke Tomlinson on drums. Smith’s Bitter Orange is no forbidden fruit – it’s time to make it one of your five a day”.

I will finish it there. I wonder what is next from Emma Smith. After her tour dates. She might not yet be thinking about another album, though I wonder if she will mix in newly-written songs with standards from The Great American Songbook and beyond. These older tracks that she breathes new life into. Her voice carries so much emotion and power. That is why I am keen to see her live one day. If you do not know Emma Smith and her music at the moment, then you really should set aside some time and…

GET to know her.

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Follow Emma Smith

FEATURE: Spotlight: Yves

FEATURE:

 

 

Spotlight

PHOTO CREDIT: Paix Per Mil

 

Yves

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THIS Spotlight feature…

PHOTO CREDIT: Paix Per Mil

is about the simply incredible Yves. She is a South Korean singer who rose to prominence as a member of the South Korean girl group, Loona. Her latest E.P., NAIL, has garnered a lot of praise. I am going to come to a review soon. I want to start out with Wonderland. They sat down with Yves ahead of her headline show at NTS 15 last month.

“15 years. Feels like yesterday to someone, but when put into context, you’d be surprised at how much has happened in that time. 2011 was the year we all couldn’t avoid Rebecca Black’s “Friday” no matter how hard we tried, when Game of Thrones first premiered and, for some reason, when we were all addicted to Angry Birds. It’s also the year the world was blessed with NTS (short for “Nuts To Soup”), a 24/7 radio station founded by Femi Adeyemi in a small studio in Dalston with the little savings he had. With an eclectic, unpretentious selection of music from artists on the periphery of the industry, it became a holy grail hub for discovering some of the best talents out of the UK and, eventually, the world.

From 13th to 19th April, NTS celebrated their 15th anniversary with a city-spanning programme of 15 blockbuster shows across its hometown, London. The lineup read like a love letter to the station’s genre-agnostic spirit, from art-pop powerhouse Arca to electronic savant Oneohtrix Point Never, Parisian rap riser Jeune Morty and K-Pop trailblazer Yves. The latter took over Earth Hall on 17 April,  supported by Drain Gang-affiliated DJ Mechatok and Stockholm-based experimental artist Oli XL .

Formerly part of K-Pop group LOONA, Yves stepped out on her own in 2024 with her breakout track “LOOP” featuring Lil Cherry, and hasn’t looked back since, refining her unique sound that fluidly blends K-Pop, electropop and R&B. And then there’s her fanbase – fiercely devoted, unmistakably loud, their anticipation bleeding through several walls in as we sit down in the green room for a chat right before her headline show at NTS 15.

PHOTO CREDIT: NTS Radio

“NTS is a very global platform that everyone knows,” says Yves, perched on the sofa in a pale yellow hoodie, sleeves rolled up, translator Diane by her side. “I feel like just because I’m so interested in music in general, my way of discovering NTS was really natural.” Despite being born and raised in South Korea, she talks about the station like it’s an essential listen for any music lover, anywhere on the planet.

It’s clearly a platform that any rising star wants to be involved in and appear on, a stamp of approval from world-renowned curators who have their finger on the pulse for who’s going to be their next co-signed breakout. When you look at the résume of artists that the UK radio has unearthed – from the aforementioned Arca to underground legend Dean Blunt and queen of left-field dance Shygirl – it’s pretty easy to see why. “They do a great job of showcasing a lot of great UK artists to a bigger, wider audience,” Yves adds. “I feel like they’ve found a more global perspective on defining music in a different way, which I think is really great.”

She’s long had a soft spot for UK talents, citing Amy Winehouse as one of her earliest influences and even performing one of her songs at her girl group auditions back in the day. “She was a legend and also broke away from the norm, and I feel like I really followed that kind of inspiration,” says Yves.

Considering her own genre-slippery, electronic leanings, however, her current UK favourite feels almost inevitable. “My girl PinkPantheress,” she says, simply. With two collaborations already under her belt, including a feature on the UK artist’s revamped edition of her “Fancy That” mixtape on “Stars + Yves”, it felt like a dream come true – considering she’s a fan of “her whole discography”.

Following the hype-raising appearance on Pink’s deluxe mixtape, the K-electropop artist follows up her remix of underscores’ “Do It” with her latest EP, “NAIL”. Having dropped it on the same day as her show in East London, she’s eagerly waiting to perform her new tracks at Earth Hall about 30 minutes after our conversation. “Compared to my other releases before, I played a big part in the songwriting and production of it,” she says on her increasingly hands-on approach. “I turned 30 in Korean age this year and, because 30 is kind of a turning point, I feel like this release is kind of a turning point in my career and life, just because I put a lot of my own personal thoughts and stories in the lyrics and music”.

ZAPEE sat down with Yves about her astonishing new E.P. and world tour. Having completed some European tour dates, I do wonder what the summer holds for Yves and whether she will play any festivals at all. She is someone who I would love to see live, as I can imagine her shows are hugely powerful and impressive. Someone who would stay long in the mind:

“Q. How are you feeling about your comeback on April 17th?

Yves: As much as we worked hard on my return, it’s been about 8 months since my last comeback, so I’m really curious and excited about how the fans will react after such a long time. I’m looking forward to what their favorite song will be from this album, and, on the other hand, I’m also worried if fans will like my change of color.

Q. Was there anything you were most concerned about or particular difficulties you had while preparing for your EP album NAIL and title track?

Yves: I was just really happy to be given the opportunity to express my thoughts and feelings in the lyrics. NAIL is an album where birth and death especially coexist, and I hope the lyrics written imagining the concept of death reach the fans with comfort and empathy.

Q. How was the process of creating the EP with PAIX PER MIL?

Yves: Throughout the course of several sessions, I was able to find out what genre I was good at, and I think I had time to think about which genre I should try again. I got closer to producer IOAH while preparing for the fourth EP, so I was able to work more honestly and comfortably than before. I think I was able to release better songs. This time around, I specifically participated in the lyrics a lot, and I wanted to show fans my honest self, so I expressed my thoughts and what I wanted to say to the fans.

Q. It has been two years since your solo debut and LOONA. At what point did you feel you grew the most as an artist?

Yves: I feel like I have an unwavering mindset, no matter what critics say, and I have my own backbone. After starting my solo career, I heard many good things and encouraging words, but of course, there were also unsettling criticisms and commentary. At first, it was hurtful and difficult, but I took those words as attention and feedback and thought I should grow up and work harder. I am grateful for all the time that has passed now because I feel that I’ve become stronger and more flexible at the same time.

Q. What track from your new album would you recommend fans listen to the most?

Yves: I’d like to recommend “birth” the most. It’s an impressive song to repeatedly hear if you are feeling lethargic and depressed because of the lyrics “Let’s be reborn, let’s wake up as a new me.” I recommend this song because I made it, hoping fans who listen to this song can recover their self-esteem and find vitality in their lives again.

Q. Your last collaboration with PinkPantheress was a hot topic. What other artists would you like to work with?

Yves: There are definitely artists that I want to collaborate with, and we actually communicated with each other at times. However, there are a few things that have not yet been made possible due to the conflicting schedules. If we go into too much detail about our future plans, it might take away some of the fun, so we hope you’ll look forward to what’s ahead and our upcoming collaborations.

Q. Is there a particular stage or city you’re most looking forward to visiting for your upcoming tour in Europe and the U.S.?

Yves: I’m looking forward to performing my new song the most. I think it’s special that the first performance for this comeback begins with the tour. We have prepared more powerful and cool choreography for the performance, so please look forward to it. Fans may not be familiar with the lyrics of the new songs, but I’d appreciate it if concertgoers could enjoy the atmosphere and energy of the new songs that you’ll feel in that moment.

Q. In Korea, there is a pleasant superstition that says, “If you see a ghost in the recording studio, it will be a hit.” Did you have any interesting experiences while preparing for this album?

Yves: I remember having a lot of scary dreams while I was working on the album and after I finished working on it. Maybe I was very worried about whether the fans would like the song or not. I think I also had a nightmare about a big spider chasing me. I was nervous and worried about this EP, so I can’t wait to release it and see good reactions from the fans.

After sharing all of her honest feelings and interesting processes for creating her new album, Yves wanted to share a final message with her fans. With great emotion and excitement, Yves lets ZAPZEE readers know just how much she appreciates the support and interest of old and new fans alike.

Yves: We always seem to be close to each other, but sometimes we feel distant. I always say I love you to my fans, but I always feel sorry that I can’t express my greater sincerity. I’m trying to create opportunities to meet fans more often and in a better way every time, but it’s not easy. This year, I’ll be by your side more often in a variety of ways, so I hope you stay with me as you have done so far and we can spend many joyful days together. I love you!”.

PHOTO CREDIT: Wonyoung Ki for NME

This NME interview is worth sourcing prior to getting to a review of NAIL. NME write how Yves is fuelled by her time in the group, LOONA. She is now “effortlessly adventuring through electronic, indie and alt-pop”. This is an artist that you need to watch, as I feel we will hear a lot more from her:

“Right now, the 29-year-old is in the early years of her second artistic life – one that’s driven by her desire to do exactly what she wants, but is also, in part, a reaction to the system she had to participate in during her first, as one-twelfth of the K-pop girl group LOONA. Their seven-year run – defined by a sound that was both dreamy and empowering, cult appeal (captured in a collaboration with Grimes) and passionate fandom – came to a tumultuous end in 2023 when they succeeded in terminating their contracts with their then-label BlockBerry Creative. Most of the members went on to re-debut in new groups, as part of either LOOSSEMBLE or ARTMS. Yves, though, chose to go it alone. Instead of finding an established K-pop label to call her home, she veered into uncharted territory by signing to Paix Per Mil, the independent label founded by Korean hip-hop and R&B producer Millic.

“I wanted to make the music that I want and be able to share that with the rest of the world,” she tells NME, sitting in a swivel chair, a blue LA Dodgers baseball cap – its side adorned with her logo of a red apple, a fruit she’s long associated with rebellion – pulled down low over her face. “I feel like I owe that to myself – to be able to keep trying what I want to do and keep discovering that.” The members of LOONA were encouraged to write their own songs and were given practice rooms to work from, but Yves found there was little opportunity for the results to be released. “As it is with the usual K-pop pattern, the company would pick the concept and the song and give it to the group,” she explains. “So most of the time, we would just receive songs. It was a one-way path.”

Even when she was a child growing up in the coastal city of Busan as Ha Soo-young, music occupied a lot of Yves’ time. She and her older sister (who is also now a songwriter and producer called Min!n) would spend hours entertaining themselves with Korean music shows while their parents were at work. “We would sing along to the people on TV and even print out lyrics and do our own little concerts to each other,” Yves recalls. “I feel like that’s how I came to love music and be able to find the enjoyment of what music can be.”

She decided early on that she wanted to be a singer, but her mother wasn’t so keen. “There’s this big memory I have from when I was little where I had a conversation with my mum where I was in my school uniform, crying,” Yves smiles. “I said, ‘If I don’t become a singer, then there’s nothing else that I want to do.’”

The “inner conflict” she felt from ‘Dim’’s success fed into ‘Soap’ and her third EP ‘Soft Error’. “From a literal standpoint, if you use soap, it shows what’s really underneath,” she explains. “I tried to use that meaning to really show who I am, rather than what other people think of me.” The song samples ‘Sugar Water Cyanide’ by Rebecca Black, another artist who shed one musical life to embark on new adventures.

And now, ‘Nail’ marks a “turning point” for the rising soloist. She earned her first writing credit in her solo discography on ‘Soft Error’’s ‘Ex Machina’, and now this record is packed with Yves co-writes. Bouncing from house to alternative R&B and alt-pop with ease and low-slung allure, it captures in a non-linear way “a life cycle from birth to death and then beyond that” – exploring themes that, in Yves’ opinion, are common if not deeply explored in K-pop. “I took the challenge to go deeper than what was being represented [elsewhere].” The Lolo Zouaï-featuring title track, for instance, plays on the similar pronunciations of “nail” in English and “tomorrow” in Korean to create an ode to letting go and liberating yourself from worries about both the past and the future.

The EP’s closer, ‘Birth’, though, is perhaps the strongest indicator of where Yves is at right now. “Be born again,” she whispers between bubbling electronics. “Be born in your own light.” It’s a direct nod to the rebirth she’s been through since leaving LOONA and starting out anew on her own. “You can always start again,” Yves affirms. “There’s always another chance”.

I am ending with Ones to Watch and their thoughts on NAIL. This is an extraordinary artist who I was instantly struck by. I did not know about her past work and have come in unaware of what has gone before. I do feel like Yves is a stunning talent who will play a lot of U.K. dates in the future:

“Since launching her solo career in 2024, South Korean popstar Yves has taken ownership over what her music can, and should, sound like. Her new project NAIL is an ambitious dance-pop experience that speaks volumes, both with and without words. As someone not entirely familiar with her work in LOONA, I was recently introduced to Yves from her appearance on underscores’s “Do It (Remix)”, which was the perfect preparation for diving into this intriguing new project.

When you’re in a group, your individual freedom is suppressed by nature. In NAIL, Yves embodies the music entirely to the point where even when she’s not singing, she’s communicating the internal message. The project has moments of both abstract and straightforward delivery, strengthening its thesis. The record opens with “it”, a track that primes listeners for a mixture of industrial beats and Yves’s tender vocal performance that works beautifully in tandem. With exquisite use of distortion and a spaced-out beat, the track is both dreamy and intense. It introduces her sound by keeping the music unpredictable but not abrasive, something that shouldn’t make sense but does.

The following track “HALO” brings the energy up by focusing on the production, letting vocals take a backseat. But don’t be fooled, this track still has something to say. Over a deliciously subdued house beat, Yves uses repetition to enter a trance-like state. It’s clear this is an artist who knows the value of creating a vibe instead of having to explicitly say it through so many words. The transition from “HALO” to the project’s title track is essential to highlight, as it took my breath away (literally). Just as the trance feels impossible to escape, there’s the sound of a door opening to another room, leaving the music behind and creating a 4D experience for the listener. We hear exasperated heavy breathing that perfectly sets up what comes next.

“NAIL (feat. Lolo Zouaï)” is the thesis statement of the EP, which makes sense for a title track. Over a disjointed computer beat, there’s a whispered demand: “Stop taking my picture”. This lyric changes everything. This track focuses on freeing one's mind and letting your body do the feeling instead. It’s communicated with so much confidence that you have no choice but to agree. It’s a true standout track with so many layers, which means it can be taken as deep or as simple as you want to perceive it.

With “NAIL (feat. Lolo Zouaï)” and “Break it (feat. Lexie Liu) back to back on the tracklist, one thing is for certain: although Yves has shed her girl group past, she still works wonderfully with another female vocalist to bounce off of. The second collaboration on this project is the most traditional pop song on the record, but still strays from expectation in exciting ways. It’s only right to add a song about breaking the rules, which Yves has done consistently throughout this EP and her solo career.

The final track on this record is also aptly named, and acts as a final release in this complex soundscape of an EP. “birth” feels like breathing, with a high pitched melody that floats above the clouds. Fans of oklou will undoubtedly connect with this one, and appreciate the personal twist Yves offers on the beloved computer-pop sound that’s become classic over the past few years. There’s a melancholy to this one, mixed with airy vocals and production that combat the sensitivity with letting go. It’s a beautiful way to close out the project.

As an introduction to the world of Yves, NAIL is about as perfect as you can get. All of the elements come together to create something entirely her own, never comprising creativity and personal expression in any moment. The focus on bodily sensation tells us more about her artistic point of view than words can sometimes convey, which creates a closeness between the listener and artist. This record is another fabulous addition to the ever-evolving “hyper-pop” genre, and a testament to the late SOPHIE’s everlasting impact. Thankfully, Yves is making it entirely her own”.

I am going to wrap up now. NAIL is the latest work from the extraordinary Yves. I am now committed to following her work and seeing where she heads next. NAIL is an E.P. that you need to check out, as it truly confirms Yves is a special artist. One that has…

MANY years ahead.

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Follow Yves

FEATURE: Try Again: Aaliyah at Twenty-Five

FEATURE:

 

 

Try Again

 

Aaliyah at Twenty-Five

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ONE of the most heartbreaking…

IN THIS PHOTO: Aaliyah photographed on 23rd May, 2001 in London/PHOTO CREDIT: by Hamish Brown/Contour by Getty Images

losses in music history was when Aaliyah died on 25th August, 2001 at the age of twenty-two. Killed in a plane crash after flying back from the video shoot for Rock the Boat. The story behind how she got on the plane and how she did not want to board it makes it especially tragic. Aaliyah was one of the most influential artists of her generation. Her legacy remains. Artists such as Beyoncé has cited Aaliyah as an influence. Aaliyah released three albums in her lifetime. Her 1994 debut, Age Ain't Nothing but a Number, comes with certain controversy, as it was produced and co-produced by Aaliyah’s mentor. R. Kelly. Currently serving a thirty-one-year prison sentence after being convicted on multiple charges involving child sexual abuse. She and R. Kelly married when Aaliyah was aged fifteen. The marriage was annulled by her parents in February 1995. On 13th August, Aaliyah’s second studio album, One in a Million, turns thirty. This time, without R. Kelly as producer or writer, there is a much stronger and less tarnished reputation to this album. On 7th July, 2001, Aaliyah released her extraordinary final studio album, Aaliyah. I think that it is her strongest album. One where you truly feel that Aaliyah relegalised her full potentials. A moment where she hit a peak. It makes it really sad that she would not be able to follow this album. I want to mark twenty-five years of an album that has this massive influence. It was a mature step forward for Aaliyah and completed this overhaul. As The Independent's Micha Frazer-Carroll writes, “acts such as Destiny's Child, Ashanti, Amerie, and Cassie capitalized on the success of the album's "idiosyncratic sound", while Aaliyah's "pared-back vocal phrasing" established an archetype for a "more stoic R&B singer" that would influence vocalists like Ciara and Rihanna”. Reaching number one in the U.S., Aaliyah boasts incredible singles, We Need a Resolution, More Than a Woman and Rock the Boat. The brilliant Try Again was a European and Japanese edition bonus track.

Before getting to features and reviews for Aaliyah, I want to feature a cover story that first appeared in the August 2001 issue of VIBE Magazine. Some of the tone is quite standoffish and insulting. However, it is important to highlight this cover story, as it was published about a month before Aaliyah’s untimely death:

“With a new album and the romantic lead in the upcoming Anne Rice-adapted flick Queen of the Damned, Aaliyah is ready for superstardom. But don’t think you can get too close to her. Hyun Kim tried and found out that some things are best left alone. Illustration by Alvaro. Styling by Angela Arambulo

Aaliyah lives the perfect life. To hear her tell it, she wouldn’t change a thing. “This is what I always wanted,” she says of her career. “I breathe to perform, to entertain, I can’t imagine myself doing anything else. I’m just a really happy girl right now. I honestly love every aspect of this business. I really do. I feel very fulfilled and complete.”

It’s true that a young woman with a burgeoning career in music and film might as well be ecstatic about her life. In fact, there’s nothing more annoying than hearing some spoiled star whine about the pitfalls of success. So, while Aaliyah’s comments are refreshing, you can’t help but wonder if things sound, well, too good to be true. She speaks like a veteran politician – well prepared and press savvy, like she’s reading from an unseen teleprompter.

Of course, 22-year-old Aaliyah has been preparing for stardom since childhood. And now that she’s made it this far, it’s impossible to determine when she’s in performance mode, or just honestly being herself. A trained actress who is quickly becoming a hot property in Hollywood, Aaliyah has mastered the art of hiding herself from the public. It started back in the day, when she always rocked dark sunglasses.

If moviegoers weren’t ready for interracial heat then, they’d better brace themselves now. In the upcoming Queen of the Damned, Aaliyah plays Akasha, an ancient-Egyptian vampire. Based on a combination of Anne Rice’s The Vampire Lestat and The Queen of the Damned, the movie is slated to show Aaliyah in intimate scenes with her Irish costar, Stuart Townsend. Perhaps what’s more striking than the eroticism of her role is that Aaliyah is the biggest star in the movie. The blockbuster Anne Rice movie Interview With the Vampire: The Vampire Chronicles boasted Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt, Antonio Banderas and a big Hollywood budget. Queen costs $35 million and has no marquee actors. This doesn’t concern Michael Rymer. “There were two factors for casting Aaliyah. I was very keen that Akasha, an Egyptian queen, not look like Elizabeth Taylor,” he says, referring to 1963’s Cleopatra. “And not only did [Aaliyah] do a good job on Romero Must Die, but people went to see her. This is a really difficult role, and she took on a huge challenge. She worked her ass off for this film.”

Aaliyah trained hard for her role, working closely with her acting coach for a month and then another month with a speech coach in New York. While filming in Australia, she worked with a personal trainer because she wore revealing outfits and a stunt coordinator for her flying scenes. “I have to exude power and be regal,” she says of her role as the mother of all vampires. “I love Egypt. I love vampires. It was the dream role, so I worked very hard.”

During her four-month shoot, Aaliyah somehow found the time to finish her new self-titled album. She began recording it in 1998 before Romeo. She stopped, wrapped the film, and released the super-catchy number-one single “Try Again” off the soundtrack. She traveled to Australia, shot Queen during the day, and hit the studio at night. The new album focuses more on her voice, bringing it to the forefront as opposed to hiding it behind the layered production. It was never her plan to take five years to follow up the double-platinum success of One In A Million. In between, her infectious 1998 hit “Are You That Somebody?” off the Dr. Dolittle soundtrack not only reminded her old fans that she still had it, but introduced her to new fans as well. At the time, “Somebody” was the biggest hit in Aaliyah’s career. She gave us just enough of the tasty appetizer to keep our palates whetted. “When it comes to overexposure, that’s something that I will always be aware of,” she says. “Because I never want that. This is my life, I love it, but it’s important for me to take breaks. Don’t want to overload anybody.”

Aaliyah’s career, like her personal life, is observed in lashes. She comes and goes when she wants. Unlike Mary J. Blige, Lauryn Hill, and Madonna, who pull the public across the fine line between their private and public lives, Aaliyah puts a velvet rope between hers. While most artists scream for creative control of their songwriting and production, Aaliyah–who modestly refers to herself as an “interpreter”–is primarily interested in performing.

“I’m not one to give everything and pour my heart out in one of my songs,” she says. With Hankerson, her uncle, as the CEO of the label she signed to, her mother, Diane Haughton, as her manager, and her cousin Jomo Hankerson as executive producer of her albums, it’s obvious that the marketing, promotion, and sale of Aaliyah is the family’s business. And her father, Michael Haughton, used to comanage her until he fell ill (her family won’t reveal with what). Aaliyah runs every decision by her older brother, Rashad. Her entire world is a tight, closed network, open only to those close to her.

When the people who know her best describe Aaliyah, you would think they were speaking of an angel. Fatima says, “Aaliyah is the sweetest artist I know.” Her best friend of five years, Kidada Jones, uses the words “grounded,” “emotionally balanced,” and “unaffected.” And according to Jones and Aaliyah’s mom, she has a great sense of humor. She’s good at imitations, especially of her mother’s deep voice. Aaliyah likes to make prank phone calls with Jones to what she calls “public establishments.” When asked to go into more detail, Aaliyah chooses not to–for personal reasons, of course.

Even when Aaliyah was young, she was private. “She was a very quiet child,” remembers Dr. Denise Davis-Cotton, whom Aaliyah says guided her education in high school. “Very polite, personable, conscientious. She knew her goals in life at a very young age.” Her mother attributes it to her daughter’s creativity. “She’s quite a complex young lady,” Haughton says. “She’s always been like that. It’s just a part of the genius of herself.”

As a child, it was apparent that Aaliyah was ahead of her peers. During her audition for acceptance to her high school, Aaliyah sang the aria “Ave Maria” in Italian. She was only 14. With the help of private tutors and independent-study programs, Aaliyah graduated high school with a 4.0 GPA. Her home life was pet-packed, with ducks, dogs, and iguanas running around her suburban Detroit home. Her exposure to varied cultures has influenced her approach to music. Aaliyah encourages Timbaland to get as creative as he wants when making up her beats. “She always likes to go to the left,” he says. “She’s the only one who’s willing to use those tracks. It wouldn’t be right if she didn’t.”

After bowling a low 73, Aaliyah decides that she wants to play video games before heading to her Upper West Side apartment to read Harry Potter books. She wants to get as much rest as she can. In a month, she’ll head back to Australia to play Zee in Matrix 2 and 3. After that, she’ll play the lead in the Whitney Houston-produced remake of the ’70s film Sparkle, which is still in its embryonic stage. But for tonight, Aaliyah just wants to be a regular girl. She blasts away would-be killers with her pink gun in the hyper-violent Time Crisis II.

When Aaliyah eventually gets shot to death in the game, she decides she’s had enough. “I’ve always been mysterious,” says Aaliyah. “My mother and father always used to ask me, ‘What are you thinking, what’s going on?’ There are times when I don’t understand myself, you know what I mean?” You do understand, and you can’t help but believe every word she says as she continues, “I have black-out shades in my apartment, I push a button, it’s totally dark. I think I’m a bit of a vampire in real life, and there are times when I just want to be myself. I wanna be alone.”

So instead of hiding from the world, maybe all the secrecy is Aaliyah’s way of discovering herself; her way of holding on to what’s true in a hazy world of glitz and imagery. “People feel like they own you in this business, and, to a certain degree, they do,” she says. “But there’s a part of me that will always be just for me”.

In 2022, PopMatters celebrated and spotlighted an album whose “patented brand of Black pop, a mélange of hip-hop, electropop, and soul, set the standard by which other urban-pop singers were judged and set the stage for Beyonce and Rihanna”:

“What sets Aaliyah apart from pop/R&B records of the city. The work that Aaliyah and Timbaland made each other defined as “The ‘street but sweet’ brand of R&B she crafted with…Missy Elliott and Timbaland, both defined and reinvented the sound of ‘90s urban music.”5 The album opens with a classic Aaliyah/Timbaland jam, “We Need a Resolution”. Written by Static Major (another brilliant talent who died far too young) and crafted by Timbaland, it’s a pop wonder. A sinewy synth undulates alongside skittering beats and vocal samples before Aaliyah’s cool vocal enters, surfing on the wave-like synths. As Aaliyah croons, synthetic hand claps keep in time. It’s an odd yet thrilling record and a brilliant choice for a first single.

The song is a mini-suite, cramming sounds of electrofunk, pop, and soul – it’s a breathtaking accomplishment of technological flair. But it’s important to note that Aaliyah’s moody performance is as integral to the song’s brilliance as is Timbaland’s studio sorcery. Aaliyah’s vocals are multi-layered and collaged throughout the song, as she acts as the lead singer and her own backup group; it’s wall-to-wall Aaliyah. When singing the hook or chorus, the stacked Aaliyah vocals hypnotize listeners as they slither. In 2001, “We Need a Resolution” harkened to the future of Black pop music in which hip-hop, pop, synth-pop, and soul would be pulled together into a brilliant, shiny sound.

Timbaland’s odd genius weaved itself through Aaliyah, popping up on two other tracks, both of which were singles. “More Than a Woman” is a swirling mass of sounds and noises – strutting electric guitars, squeaky rubbery bass, and a humming synth – that sounds stately and grand, nearly cinematic. Though the song is gaudy and overstuffed, there’s restraint in Timbaland’s handling of the song’s structure. Just as we expect the track to reach a euphoric crescendo, the tune pulls back, so we never get that beat drop we want. It’s a brilliant way of confusing listeners and keeping them on their toes.

On the third track that sees Timbaland and Aaliyah work together, “I Care 4 U”, the maestro throws logic out of the window by recasting his muse as a 1970s soul balladeer. Instead of indulging in his techno musical genius impulses, he creates a languid, sexy slow jam. The lyrics are penned by Timbaland’s longtime partner, Missy Elliott, a talent as unique and brilliant as his. Stepping away from the flashy high-gloss of the other tunes he created for Aaliyah, “I Care 4 U” is a swaying, stirring slow dance of a tune. It’s a song that not only pays homage to the soul divas of the 1970s like Minnie Riperton or Syreeta Wright – Michael Odell wrote that the song is “the sort of 1970s style ballad that Aaliyah’s aunt, Gladys Knight, would approve of” 6 but it puts Aaliyah’s gorgeous, silken voice on display.

Divas with sweet croons like Aaliyah are often underrated in comparison with the leather-lunged soul shouters who work overtime to smash as many notes as possible into one word, but as Hyun Kim pointed out, “Aaliyah’s singing voice, while not all that powerful, sounds like she’s whispering in your ear from the pillow next to yours, slowly seducing you over Timbaland’s simmering beats.” 7 As if to prove Kim’s point, on “I Care 4 U”, Aaliyah’s smooth voice displays pleasing tones and colors, impressive timbre, and beguiling richness.

Though Timbaland and Aaliyah are forever linked with each other, their sounds intertwined, his presence on Aaliyah is relatively spare compared to their previous work, her 1996 album One in a Million, in which the producer is credited on half of the album’s tracks. Instead of being defined as a Timbaland production, Aaliyah is at once consistent and diverse, with an abundance of talent. Nathan Rabin noted that despite many of the collaborators listed in the credits, “[Aaliyah] feels surprisingly cohesive.”8 Though the chemistry between Timbaland and Aaliyah is irresistible and inimitable, the other songs on Aaliyah display the singer’s ability to fill the soundscapes created for her with her distinct gifts.

On the single “Rock the Boat”, producers Eric Seats and Rapture Stewart craft a song that is as good as anything Aaliyah had done with Timbaland. The mid-tempo R&B tune is a gorgeous, lush, swinging confection with subtle hints of 1980s quiet storm ballads. Aaliyah’s vocals are at their prettiest – light and airy, floating like soft butterflies on the pillowy synths. Though her singing is sedate and lowkey on the record, it’s as effective as any scale-climbing wail from a bigger-voiced singer, as Shenequa Golding rightly asserted that the softness of her voice did not indicate of vocal prowess.9 In fact, the economy of Aaliyah’s singing pinpoints the excellent way she uses nuance and phrasing to embody the sensuality of the song’s lyrics. Like a modern day Lena Horne, Aaliyah uses her voice to set the mood, allowing for the flexibility and agility of her voice to enliven the languid groove.

Seats and Stewart work magic with Aaliyah on the album tracks, as well. In what could be seen as the best song on the record, “Extra Smooth”, the pair outdo themselves, placing Aaliyah’s sexy purr in a funky setting with pulsing synthesizer. There’s a slight, cartoonish weirdness to the track, especially in the song’s woozy open, with the swinging synth rolling in, sounding like something from Rugrats (In his review, Ernest Hardy called the tune “playful”).10 Her performance is all attitude and swagger. On a record stuffed with high points, this song stands out.

The other Seats/Stewart productions like “Loose Rap” and “U Got Nerve” are extravagant vehicles for the skill of the production duo. These songs are prime examples of top-shelf urban-pop tunes that capture a fantastic blend of electronic music with R&B. Earlier, I mentioned Janet Jackson’s Control and the comparison is apt. In 1986, Jimmy Jam & Terry Lewis pioneered a new sound with Jackson that married synth-pop, soul, funk, and dance-pop. The metallic sheen of the Seats/Stewart songs are just as marvelous in their sonic novelty as are the Jam, Lewis, and Jackson tunes. Like Control, Aaliyah is a predictor of Black pop music. On the enduring power of his work with Aaliyah, Seats said, “When people say the album still feels fresh, or that it feels timeless, I appreciate that.” He adds, “I don’t know if any of us sought out to make a classic album…You hope to do the best work.”11

Aaliyah was released in the summer of 2001, and it’s an essential record when looking at the innovation and evolution of Black pop in the 21st century. Its roots can be traced to the synth-driven sounds of hip-hop born in the Bronx, but the album’s sound feels like it’s been recorded in outer space. The swinging beats of New Jack Swing gave way to the scattered, chipped beats, giving the songs an unpredictable and off-kilter sound.

For a mainstream pop record, Aaliyah pushes the boundaries of radio-friendly urban pop. Because of these songs, pop radio was forever changed: echoes of Aaliyah can be heard on records like Brandy’s brilliant Afrodisiac, which saw Timbaland conjure some of that special magic he shared with Aaliyah with Brandy; Destiny’s Child’s final album, Destiny Fulfilled; Ciara’s debut, Goodies; Justin Timberlake‘s solo debut, Justified; and Monica’s After the Storm. Much like Janet Jackson’s Control set a template of sorts for dance-pop divas in the 1980s, Aaliyah’s patented brand of Black pop, which was a mélange of hip-hop, electropop, and soul, set a standard against which other young urban-pop singers were judged.

After Aaliyah came out, her label looked to its vaults to release unreleased material. In 2002, Blackground released I Care 4 U, a compilation of Aaliyah’s greatest hits, as well as a selection of tracks that failed to make the cut for Aaliyah. In 2021, it was announced that a final studio LP will be released. Unstoppable is a project that will include contributions from artists like Drake, Ne-Yo, Future, and the Weeknd, who is featured on the album’s first single, “Poison”, released eight years after her last single. It’s unclear whether the material on Unstoppable will measure up to Aaliyah’s work while she was alive, but her legacy won’t be marred, even if the new music isn’t as good.

Aaliyah is a perfect urban-pop record whose lasting influence can be heard still today, 21 years later.  As Jasmin Kent-Smith put it, “The album’s cultural butterfly effect is still being felt today. The LP known to many as The Red Album shifted the needle of R&B, breaking away from the shiny, wistful love songs that were the genre’s stock-in-trade towards something edgier and more futuristic”.

I want to come now to SLANT and their thoughtful and positive review of Aaliyah. Without doubt one of the strongest albums of the 2000s, it does come with that sadness and tragedy. However, listen to the songs twenty-five years on and they remain so relatable and fresh. Artists of today definitely referencing the album and carrying that torch:

“Long before the new wave of teenage pop stars, Aaliyah made headlines with her all-too-sophisticated R&B and a sordid romance with R. Kelly. But who could have predicted that the talented young teen would emerge a leading lady of hip-hop by the age of 21? While there’s no doubt that smart production has been key to Aaliyah’s success (courtesy of Kelly, Missy Elliott, and Timbaland), the multi-faceted entertainer’s personality glimmers on every track of her self-titled third effort. Mostly coquettish snake-charmer, sometimes scorned lover, Aaliyah almost always recalls Janet Jackson—only with better pipes.

Aaliyah is also further testimony to the indelible watermark Janet’s big brother has left on today’s hip-hop artists and producers. With its relentless sci-fi video-game blips and staccato vocals, “U Got Nerve” is a sharp ode to the Jackson dynasty. Elsewhere, “What If” deftly incorporates industrial-strength guitars and enough pop-drenched angst to make Michael proud. But what sets Aaliyah apart from other artists reared on ’80s R&B is that she often does it better. “Rock the Boat” and “It’s Whatever,” though reminiscent of Janet’s sex dramatizations, are more Marvin Gaye.

Most of Aaliyah traces the slow erosion of relationships, from an overzealous courtship (the key-shifting “Extra Smooth”) to the first single, “We Need a Resolution.” With a seductive Middle Eastern vibe and a guest rap interlude by Timbaland, “Resolution” maturely presents two perspectives, the yin and yang of passive-aggressive miscommunication. Our female protagonist coyly asks, “Where were you last night,” while a backward loop echoes the sentiment through the end of the song. Showcasing a more sultry side to Aaliyah’s voice (not unlike Sade, another confessed influence), the ballad “Never No More” is old-school soul injected with future hip-hop.

But like she says on “Loose Rap,” “it ain’t just rhythm and blues.” The track is doused with subtle Neptunian electronica and aquatic sounds that gurgle beneath Aaliyah’s distinct velvet harmonies. If the beyond-burgeoning actress was ever approached to play a cartoon superhero, the synth-heavy “More Than a Woman,” with its millennium-ready empowerment and sensitive vocals, would make the perfect theme song for the fictional vixen (“You go, I go/’Cause we share pillows”). From the very first seconds of its sampled cinema, “I Refuse” is steeped in melodrama. A theatrical orchestration of pianos, guitars and strings progressively builds to a dramatic climax with a minimalist percussive backdrop straight out of Björk’s Homogenic.

Like Elliott’s genre-bending So Addictive, Aaliyah provides a missing link between hip-hop and electronica. The album’s biggest flaw, however, is the absence of a vocal cameo by Elliott (though Timbaland’s unrivaled production skills will make you swear you can hear the rapper’s sly laugh throughout the disc). Following in the footsteps of some of today’s biggest icons, Aaliyah has learned how to align herself with A-list producers without losing her individuality and, instead, makes the sound her own”.

I will end with Pitchfork and their review of Aaliyah. The masterpiece from New York City-born Aaliyah Dana Haughton, I do hope that there are new features published recognising her genius. It was that leap in maturity. Unfair to judge Aaliyah in those terms, as she was in her early-twenties when her final album was released. However, her eponymous album was such a shift from 1996’s One in a Million:

“In reviews and profiles from the time, Aaliyah is praised, at the expense of some of her peers, for eschewing the “candy-coated” sound and style of the charts; actually, she was simply pre-empting the trends many of her peers would eventually try on. The glossy girl- and boy-band era was at its peak at the turn of the century, and before pop acts would attempt to replace that sheen with cool, calling on “urban” producers like Timbaland and The Neptunes, Aaliyah modeled the perfect balance of pop, R&B, and hip-hop. Months before Britney Spears made headlines for performing with a snake at the MTV VMA awards in 2001, Aaliyah had done it in the video for “We Need A Resolution.” Her personal style, creative direction, and choreography were legendarily inventive. She made comfort look luxe as the original little shirt, big pants girl, and tore through dark-and-mysterious years before Keanu Reeves made leather trench coats trendy (in the early years, her omnipresent sunglasses and then side-swooped hair prompted widespread rumors of a lazy eye). By the time of Aaliyah, she’d reinvented herself yet again, this time brighter and more streamlined. Her dancing, unlike that of many of her peers, was fluid and interpretative, designed to communicate more than to be imitated by fans in bedrooms and basements around the world. Her image was like her music: risky and adventurous, with a fondness for just the right amount of cheek.

Nearly 20 years after her death, she persists as a moodboardable influence, finding lasting presence not purely of nostalgia but as aesthetic inspiration for a generation that came to age in her absence. Searching Aaliyah’s name on Tumblr brings up thousands and thousands of images—watermarked red carpet photos, GIFs and photo sets ripped from music videos, and the occasional ode of fandom. One photo, of what appears to be a performance look, appears to be a direct inspiration for Solange’s current tour wardrobe: a triangle bikini top with straps crisscrossed across the torso and a pair of flowing, loose-fitting pants.

But Aaliyah has been a reference for Solange, and others, elsewhere, too: The multiple-part harmonies that have become the younger Knowles’s signature were in fact once the signature of Aaliyah, most in focus on, Aaliyah. On what would have been Aaliyah’s 36th birthday, Frank Ocean shared his own take of the Isley Brothers’ “At Your Best,” which she’d first covered more than 20 years earlier, in 1994. She’d updated it with a spare, solemn almost-whisper, and Ocean’s version, which was eventually given a proper release on Endless, draws equally from Aaliyah’s falsetto as from the Isley Brothers’ original. There are traces of her influence elsewhere, too; the layered harmonies and gentle melodies of Beyoncé’s “I Miss You,” co-written by Ocean, could easily have been recorded first, albeit with more restraint and whimsy, by Aaliyah. Understandably, among the most common refrains about the singer was that she was ahead of her time.

And yet, paradoxically to its significance, the legacy of Aaliyah is now diminished by its absence from streaming services. After her death, Blackground Records, run by her uncle and cousin, faced some operational and legal issues. The label’s domain name has lapsed, and a final release promised by an associated publishing company has not materialized. There have been a couple of false starts—a posthumous album helmed, and then abandoned, by Drake and 40; an unsanctioned greatest hits release; the sale of her catalog to a publishing company—but most of Aaliyah’s catalog has remained unavailable to stream or download. Age Ain’t Nothing But A Number, the album written and produced by her abuser, is the only accessible release. For many artists, this could mean being written out of history, forgotten to more convenient nostalgia. For Aaliyah, it means something rarer—a legacy defined not by industry profiteers and hologram start-ups but by friends, fans, and kindred artists”.

You wonder what could have come from Aaliyah had she not died. Aaliyah is an album that hinted at this new path and brilliance that could have seen her recording brilliant albums to this day. Appearing in more films and working with some extraordinary artists. It makes that loss so intense and shocking. However, rather than mourn and focus on the tragedy, it is worth recognising her brilliance, and an album that has this incredible legacy. One that will endure forever. This icon and inspiration left behind a wonderful final album that proved she was one of the greatest voices and artists…

WE have ever seen.

FEATURE: You Gotta Get with My Friends… Spice Girls’ Wannabe at Thirty

FEATURE:

 

 

You Gotta Get with My Friends…

 

Spice Girls’ Wannabe at Thirty

__________

IT is not an exaggeration to say…

IN THIS PHOTO: Geri Halliwell, Melanie Brown, Victoria Adams, Emma Bunton and Melanie Chisholm circa 1996/PHOTO CREDIT: Tim Roney/Getty Images

that this is one of the most important debut singles ever. One of the best too. Spice Girls released Wannabe on 26th June, 1966. Its thirtieth anniversary is coming up. I wrote about it recently, to mark thirty years of its recording. Since then, Spice Girls have shut down any rumour they are performing together or there is any sort of reformation. Instead, I do feel they will mark thirty years of Wannabe and say something about it. Such an iconic moment in British culture, everything about this song struck a chord. Its amazing one-shot video and the infectious and indelible chorus. The energy of the song and bond of the group – Emma Bunton, Geri Halliwell, Melanie Brown, Melanie Chisholm and Victoria Adams (as they were known in 1996; before marriages) – makes Wannabe such a compelling song. One that transcends generations and tastes. You can put the song on now and it still sound so exciting. Not many moments since that have been so huge in popular music. Introducing this group who would be around for a brief time but make such an enormous impact. I was thirteen when Wannabe came out. It was a revelation. British music did have great female Pop artists, though Britpop bands and that sound still hanging around. Male-dominated. Spice Girls might have been a bit clunky or insincere with their Girl Power mantra – in the sense that it seems like a marketing gimmick or others beats them to it -, though it definitely captured a generation of young and teenage girls. A number one in the U.K., Wannabe also went to number one in the U.S. Spice Girls’ debut album, Spice, came out on 19th September, 1996. There were other brilliant singles from the album – such as Say You’ll Be There -, though Wannabe had to be the debut! It is the perfect introduction to one of the all-time great groups.

Apologies if there is repetition from my first feature about Wannabe. However, as I could not overlook its thirtieth anniversary, I wanted to explore this masterpiece Pop song thirty years on. In 2024, Wannabe was celebrated by GRAMMY on the day it was released in the U.S. (7th July). Wannabe was released in the U.K. on 8th July, 1996. Though it was released in Japan on 26th June, so I am using that date:

“While the Spice Girls may have seemed like an overnight success in America, its members had been working their way through the British music scene for years. In March 1994, hundreds of aspiring stars crammed into Dancework Studios in London after an advertisement was posted in The Stage magazine looking for the next girl band.

The groups were randomly split up, taught a dance routine, and then had to perform the song for talent managers and father-son duo, Bob and Chris Herbert. One month later, with 10 girls left, the initial final four — Melanie "Scary Spice" Brown, Melanie "Sporty Spice" Chisholm, Victoria "Posh Spice" Adams, and Geri "Ginger Spice" Halliwell — were all chosen to form the final group with a then-17-year-old Michelle Stephenson. The group moved into a home together, where they received additional dance training and vocal coaching. However, Michelle was soon replaced by Emma "Baby Spice" Bunton, completing the lineup of Spice Girls that as we know them today.

"Of course I regret I'm not a multi-millionaire like them. But at the time I left the group I knew I was doing the right thing and I still think it was the right thing," Stephenson told The Mirror in 2001. "It wasn't my kind of music and they were not living the lifestyle I wanted."

The group's charisma and corresponding archetypal personalities were put on display in the music video for "Wannabe." The iconic, single-take music video shot in London’s Midland Grand Hotel (now St. Pancras Renaissance Hotel), became as legendary as the track itself. In 2015, Billboard included the video for "Wannabe" in a list of 10 iconic girl group videos, solidifying the video's lasting impression.

Directed by Johan Camitz, the video was the perfect visual introduction to the group: Ginger Spice unapologetically dances through the hotel in a sparkly Union Jack leotard alongside Scary Spice, whose bold persona is conveyed through carefree dances that included whipping her hair around. The group's distinct, playful personalities remained a key selling point used throughout their career.

"Wannabe" producers Matt Rowe and Stannard first saw the Spice Girls at a showcase, and the duo instantly knew that they had the next group of superstars. Soon after, Rowe and Stannard worked with the group to produce "Wannabe," and the chemistry was undeniable.

In her 2002 book, Catch a Fire: The Autobiography, Brown recalls that the producer duo understood the group's vision and automatically knew how to blend "the spirit of five loud girls into great pop music."

"Wannabe" was an inescapable radio hit in the '90s — for all the right reasons. From the punchy beat and distinctive vocal inflections, to the shouts of "if you wanna be my lover," the song remains as a persistent earworm.

Even science backs that claim up. According to a 2014 study conducted by the University of Amsterdam and Manchester's Museum of Science and Industry, researchers found that study participants were able to identify and name "Wannabe" in an average of 2.29 seconds, making it the quickest recognized song in the study. This was ahead of Lou Bega’s "Mambo No 5" and Survivor’s "Eye of The Tiger," and underscores "Wannabe’s" celebrated and timeless status.

While the song itself is a lively, carefree summer anthem perfect for blasting in the car with the windows down, its lyrics resonate with a powerful message of female empowerment and friendship, standing tall above conventional romantic themes.

"Girl Power embodies much more than a gender," Gerri Horner, formerly Halliwell, told BBC in 2017. "It's about everybody. Everybody deserves the same treatment, whatever race you are, gender you are, age you are. Everybody deserves a voice”.

In 2022, Stereogum included Spice Girls’ Wannabe in their The Number Ones feature. I did include this last time, though I do like their insights and analysis. I am not surprised it was a chart-topper in the U.S. Spice Girls seen as a quintessential British group, though their appeal is universal. The empowering messages resonated around the world. Wannabe is one of the catchiest songs ever released. No wonder it was a commercial smash:

“Wannabe" came out in the UK in the summer of 1996, and it was an immediate smash. The Spice Girls' first four singles all went straight to #1 in the UK, and they were the first act ever to pull off that chart feat. When Spice came out in the UK, the album sold millions of copies, even though the UK is small enough that selling millions of records is very difficult. A British pop phenomenon might've been a hard sell in the US at the time, but the Spice Girls got a big push here, too. "Wannabe" got its US release in January of 1997, and it debuted at #11, jumping all the way to the top a few weeks later. For a few months, I heard it all over the place.

The crudeness of "Wannabe" is not a drawback. Before the girls even start singing, we get Melanie Brown and Geri Halliwell yelling about what they really really want over a hyper-compressed synth that sounds like a guitar. That riff genuinely rocks, and it always reminded me a bit of Elastica's "Connection," so maybe the Spice Girls really were Britpop. Once they hit the chorus, the sweetness comes in, but the propulsion never disappears. As singers, none of the Spice Girls are gifted enough to compete with the American R&B stars who were their pop-chart competitors, but their sheer adrenalized charge is more than enough to overcome that. It never even occurred to me that the rap part was a rap part; it just always sounded like different Spice Girls happily yelling at each other. That was fine with me. It was fun to hear them yell at each other.

"Wannabe" was never supposed to exist in isolation. It's simply a vehicle for the whole Spice Girls machine. The machine worked. The Spice Girls never managed another American chart-topper after "Wannabe," but three different singles from Spice did barnstorm their way into the top five. After "Wannabe" and "Say You'll Be There," there was also the almost-ballad "2 Become 1," which peaked at #4. (It's a 5.) Spice sold seven million copies in the US, and it was the biggest-selling album of 1997.

For a couple of years, the whole Spice Girls circus was just relentless. At times, the music almost seemed secondary to the whole marketing juggernaut, the dolls and posters and Pepsi ads. Before 1997 was over, the Spice Girls starred in their own movie Spice World, which aimed for A Hard Day's Night-style zeitgeist silliness and which is now remembered, half-fondly, as a deeply strange time capsule of late-'90s pop culture. There is, for instance, a scene where the girls meet some aliens who want their autographs.

Along with that movie, the Spice Girls also released their sophomore album Spiceworld at the end of 1997, and their single "Too Much," which peaked at #9, became their last American top-10 hit. (It's a 6.) The album also had singles like "Spice Up Your Life" and "Stop," which were serious jams but which couldn't quite make the top 10. ("Spice Up Your Life" peaked at #18, "Stop" at #16.) In 1998, while the group was in the midst of a global tour, Geri Halliwell announced her departure from the Spice Girls. She was dealing with personal issues, and the attention was a bit much. Spiceworld still went quadruple platinum in the US.

Geri Halliwell's departure broke the spell. Without Halliwell, the Spice Girls followed Spiceworld with the 2000 album Forever. Their single "Goodbye" managed to reach #11 on the Hot 100, but the album only sold a tiny fraction of what the other two had done. A month after the LP's release, the group announced an indefinite hiatus, and all the former Spice Girls went on to solo careers.

None of the solo Spice Girls became stars, though Victoria married David Beckham and turned herself into a big deal in the fashion world. All of the Spice Girls released solo albums, but none of them has ever made the Hot 100 as a solo artist. When they get back together, though, they're still a huge draw. All five Spice Girls reunited for a hugely lucrative 2007 tour, and they also played the closing ceremony of the 2012 Summer Olympics in London. A lot of stars played that ceremony, but the Spice Girls were the unmistakable headliners.

In 2019, the Spice Girls once again reunited, and they once again filled stadiums and made a whole lot of money. Victoria Beckham sat that reunion out. In a Stereogum interview last year, Melanie Chisholm told my colleague Rachel Brodsky that she wanted to do more reunion shows, especially in America. I have very little doubt that it will happen. The Spice Girls are stronger together than they are apart.

As a chart phenomenon, the Spice Girls really only lasted about a year in America, but they were harbingers of change. The pop charts were about to get a whole lot brighter and more energetic. The kids buying records, kids younger than me, didn't have much use for their older siblings' favorite music. They wanted something else. That something else would be known as "teen-pop," even though much of the target audience was decidedly preteen. We'll see a whole lot more of that music in this column in the weeks ahead”.

Definitively and scientifically proven to be one of the catchiest Pop songs ever, I want to end with this Redbrick review that was last updated in 2022. I do wonder what will be written for its thirtieth anniversary. It would be great if artists were interviewed together about their memories of the song and standout lines. It is one of those songs that not only was a cultural phenomenon. It was the birth of this whole movement and Pop sensation. A group who would have a score of number one songs and influence so many major Pop artists of today:

“One can only imagine how many pinch me moments The Spice Girls must have had throughout the years. Twenty-five years ago they had no idea just how big their song ‘Wannabe’ would become when they released it. Look forward to today and the song has become an iconic anthem that is still sung by many no matter the occasion – whether that be on a night out, jamming out to songs in the car or singing in the shower. It is often rare for a cheesy song like ‘Wannabe’ to still be popular decades on; usually music evolves and tastes change making songs irrelevant. So, what exactly did The Spice Girls do differently to make sure that their debut song escaped the pit of one hit wonders?

The Spice Girls were formed in response to a 1993 advert in a trade magazine looking for girls to form a girl band. Hundreds applied but eventually the crème de la crème were chosen and a young Geri Halliwell, Melanie Brown, Melanie Chisholm, Emma Bunton and Victoria Adams entered the world of stardom. Little did they know that they were about to become one of the most successful girl bands of all time, paving the way for many others to follow their lead; without The Spice Girls’ success in a male dominated industry, it is highly likely that the likes of Girls Aloud, Sugababes, The Saturdays and Little Mix would never have formed. They were able to use the media to their advantage and build up a credible name for themselves – soon enough the whole world would recognise them as Ginger, Scary, Sporty, Baby and Posh Spice – becoming the ultimate feminist icons. The Spice Girls changed the music industry’s perception of women forever… and it all started with ‘Wannabe.’

The Spice Girls changed the music industry’s perception of women forever… and it all started with ‘Wannabe’

‘Wannabe’ was the perfect debut song for The Spice Girls; they were able to transform an overused love song into one that prioritised friendships over relationships. The whole song screamed ‘girl power’ from start to finish which was very unusual at the time it was released. Shock horror – a woman is no longer solely singing about pining after a man or suffering from heartbreak. There is actually more to a woman’s life than pleasing a man. This approach to music made the five girls instantly likeable; finally there was music on the radio that girls and women across the world could relate to. To them, the girls were a familiar resemblance of their own real-life friends, each bringing their recognisable and distinct style and personalities to the band. Their energy was like no other, with listeners knowing that the girls had their backs, becoming a platform for female voices to be heard.

‘Wannabe’ was centred around the idea of friendship, a rarity for a chart topping hit. It laid out a woman’s priorities in a relationship which, you may have guessed, was likely to cause quite the stir in an industry that was predominantly controlled by the patriarchy. The song put women’s wishes and needs at centre stage with the girls singing with pride ‘I’ll tell you what I want, what I really really want.’ Oh, and if a man did not meet her simple, very reasonable requests then that’s his loss. The girls even made references to their sexual preferences – they had the power to get the lyrics ‘We got Em in the place who likes it in your face/ We got G like MC who likes it on an…’ onto mainstream radio. The song made it very clear that women don’t exist to please men in the bedroom – much to patriarchal disappointment.

The song put women’s wishes and needs at centre stage

Why the nation still plays ‘Wannabe’ on repeat is no mystery. Those who grew up with the song listen to it as a beautiful piece of upbeat nostalgia whilst the teenagers and young adults of 2021 can relate to the song’s message just as much as their parents did when they were younger. In a generation that focuses on feminism and girl codes, the idea of prioritizing ‘friendship’ over relationships is strongly supported. The song teaches young girls and women to appreciate their own worth which is something that will always be relevant.

Today, The Spice Girls are role models for women all over the world, many of whom were not even born when ‘Wannabe’ was first released. With the iconic outfits, catchy lyrics, important messages and the girls’ fun personality it is no wonder that twenty-five years later, The Spice Girls will continue to go down in history as one of the best bands ever to exist. ‘Zigazig-ah’”.

Wannabe changed the mid-1990s Pop landscape. It was a much-needed explosion of colour and female empowerment and friendship. Wannabe is about how friendships and self-respect is more important than romantic relationships. Not that many artists )even women) expounding that in the 1990s. Spice Girls would release other songs that emphasised this message. Talking about safe sex. They were empowering but also responsible. Resonating with girls and teens who perhaps felt relationships were the be-all-end-all and that friendships were second-best. This amazing group changed the game.

The fact Spice Girls’ members all had their own nicknames (Sporty, Ginger, Posh, Baby and Scary – you know which name applied to which members!), gave them this extra layer. Rather than it being cartoon-like, you felt more of their personality. Always funny that Geri Halliwell was stuck with ‘Ginger Spice’. Pretty obvious and meant she could never change her hair colour! Nothing to do with any attribute. However, I was also a big Spice Girls fan. I had grown a bit weary of the male-heavy mainstream and guitar music. Spice Girls offered something fresh and much more invigorating. In 2016, marking twenty years of Wannabe, VICE discussed the song’s power and legacy. How it essentially saved '90s Pop from a boring male-led death. The excess and peak of Britpop had passed. We needed something to pick us back up. I feel Spicemania and that whole thing was much more memorable and impressive than Britpop:

“That phrase was the centrepiece of the Spice Girls debut single “Wannabe” in 1996 and while it may have initially been devoid of any linguistic meaning, it’s arguably gone on to define the topography of the decade. When we think about the 1990s, we may think about Furbies, or Dr Dre, or Cat Deeley getting gunged on SM:TV Live, but it’s “zig-a-zig-aah” that captures a certain nuance of the era. It is the sound of girl power revving its engine up again, of the rise and culturally dominant nature of pop groups, of a better time where new friendships were formed over dancing, dressing up, and debating whether or not Geri Halliwell was a better singer than Sporty Spice. Look into the history books and you’ll see it. 1990s: the “Rachel haircut”, Adidas poppers, and “zig-a-zig-aah”.

The thing is – as is always the way with history and ideas and cultural retrospectives – not everyone agrees you can put the 1990s in a blender and end up with the cool, refreshingly powerful sound of the Spice Girls debut single. For a start, there are still a lot of people who think The Stone Roses are God’s only gift. But there’s also the fact that the Spice Girls attracted a fair amount of criticism for their brand of pop. To some, they killed feminism, subverted morality and embarrassed us all. To others, it was infuriating to see them emerge, supported financially by a major label and physically by Wonderbra’s, straight to number one. If you asked one writer this week, the eventual demise of the 1990s into today’s world of depravity is all down to the Ginger Spice, Baby Spice, Posh Spice, Scary Spice, and Sporty Spice. But fuck that. It’s now been twenty years since the release of “Wannabe”, and it’s hard to argue the importance that the track had on our collective experience through the years that have come since. Just in case anyone is confused, though, I’m going to do exactly that.

Before “Wannabe” was unleashed into the world, 90s pop music in the UK was dominated by men, with the charts saturated by either Britpop lads or boy bands like Take That and East 17. This isn’t to diminish the women who were making their mark on the charts – the likes of Gabrielle, Des’ree and The Cardigans among others – but rather than the intergenerational appeal of the Spice Girls, these were artists that mostly belonged in your parents CD changer. With their more simplistic, relatable take on cheery pop, Spice Girls felt like a perfectly-timed antidote. Even now, the opening riff of “Who Do You Think You Are” conjures up an almost irrepressible feeling of invincibility. With our saved-up pocket money, the Spice Girls taught a generation of girls that they were the new queen-makers.

Of course, “Girl Power” did exist pre-Spice Girls. The term was brought about by all-female group Mint Juleps back in the 80s with their song “‘Girl To The Power of 6”, before riot grrrl powerhouse Bikini Kill used the phrase in a zine. But it was the Spice Girls who brought the message into the mainstream, subsequently launching a consumer-friendly brand of feminism to a whole new generation. In many ways, the pop group were tied up in the spread of third wave feminism – a wave that was attracting a much younger audience. As a kid, I had no clue who Germaine Greer was, but I was all about my “girl power” crop-top. This was about girls being supportive to one another; about women and girls coming together, having a good time and accepting themselves. Whether you agree with their brand of feminism or not, pedalling a message of female solidarity and empowerment in the process can hardly be looked upon with disdain.

While boy bands were devised to sing to girls, the Spice Girls sang with them. More to the point, they were working-class girls, pulled from various regional suburbs, that appealed directly to other working-class girls. The Spice Girls represented a new window to fame based on singing and dancing, which, as Valerie Walkerdine put it in 1998, presented pre-teen working class girls with “the possibility of a talent from which [working-class girls] have automatically been excluded by virtue of their supposed lack of intelligence or culture.” Asking my friends now why they loved the Spice Girls so much, most of them say it was because they were five girls who were best mates, but who all had different personas that made everyone feel like they had a place. Obviously the dynamic wasn’t perfect – the only woman of colour being donned “Scary Spice” is all kinds of problematic (though maybe I’m bitter ‘cos, as the only non-white kid in my year, I was made to be her in the playground even though my favourite was Baby) – but it felt close to perfect at the time.

To high-brow music snobs – AKA, cynical husks who cannot understand the unrelenting positivity that’s instilled within the roots of pop music – a girl group who were “manufactured” may not seem very “cool” or “authentic”. But Spice Girls weren’t meant to appeal to fans of Radiohead. Besides, they co-wrote most of their own songs, and insisted – against the advice from label executives – on “Wannabe” being their first single. In fact, before they even released anything, the Spice Girls bailed on the management team that put them together in the first place, taking the master copy of their recordings along with them, which is pretty badass.

As the Spice Girls’ reign went on, they seemed to become less of a musical entity and more and more of an overt marketing tool, with Pepsi, Walkers, Polaroid, Barbie and more scoring very lucrative deals with them. But their success on the non-musical side of things only serves to reinforce the pop cultural phenomenon they had bestowed upon the British music industry and the world. A pop act having this much sway in the products people were buying was unprecedented – on that scale, it seems unlikely to ever be repeated. That a group of girls could have such monocultural significance was inspiring. You can roll your eyes and say “Girl Power’’ was a vapid marketing ploy, but the 2016 Wannabe remake “#WhatIReallyReallyWant” is proof of the staying power of the concept, and of how unifying the idea of women banding together to get their voices heard can be. Plus, Nelson Mandela called meeting the Spice Girls one of the best moments of his life. Are you really going to argue with Nelson Mandela?

If it hadn’t been the Spice Girls, maybe another group would have filled that consumerist pop vacuum, but they didn’t. Two decades later, their songs still slay the dancefloor. Naysayers will point to 21st century celebrity culture and reality shows as being the “fault” of the Spice Girls, but I’d argue their impact on pop music was way more far-reaching than modern pop consumerism. Without everything that came after Scary Spice’s laughter at the beginning of “Wannabe”, could there have so easily have been a Britney playing coy girl next door without Baby Spice? What of Christina, Sugababes and – importantly – Destiny’s Child? The room for the latter’s focus on Independent Women was arguably paved by Girl Power. As recently as June, Adele chanted a bit of “Spice Up Your Life” whilst on stage in Amsterdam, and it made sense that one of the biggest female pop-stars of our time should feel indebted to the Spice Girls”.

It is interesting how the press perceived and viewed Spice Girls. Many quite snobbish and insulting. Thinking they were a gimmick and mocking their Girl Power message. This THE FACE interview Miranda Sawyer conducted with the group in late-1996 is not worded in the most complimentary manner. Though, if you snigger at a group who say they want to empower girls and women around the world, over a million Brits have bought Wannabe:

“In case he forgot his name,” says Geri. It’s time to leave. The Spice Girls have to record interviews for The Box and The Chart Show, do a radio face-to-face, a cover story for Live And Kicking magazine plus three photo shoots. As Emma, Geri, Victoria, Melanie B and Melanie C make their way out through the school yard to the waiting cars (“Everyone ready? One, two, three. OK, out we go!” Then NOISE) the little girls surge forwards, arms outstretched, breathless.

They don’t grab though, not seriously; they just scream. And scream. And then they stop, look at one another and collapse into hysterics. There’s a thing about little girls. They know how they’re meant to behave: scream at pop stars, cry about boys, obsess about girl-stuff, worry about fashion. And they know how they want to behave. Cool about girl-stuff. Laughing at boys. Wearing what they want, what they really really want. Like pop stars”.

Other groups did come along and had this goal of female empowerment. You can say some major Pop artists like Taylor Swift are all about that. However, Girl Power was so much of what Spice Girls were about. Is any artist/group today doing it the same?! Although we cannot have another Spice Girls, are there enough artists keeping that flame burning?! Whatever you think of them as a group, few can deny the incredible legacy and brilliance of Wannabe. Released on 8th July, 1996 in the U.K., I am marking its Japanese release date. 26th June, 1996 was its first release. Although more popular in the U.K. than Japan, obviously there was reasoning behind that schedule and decision. Thirty years on, and Spice Girls’ debut single remains…

ABSOLUTELY perfect.

FEATURE: Empire State of Mind: Why Alicia Keys Discussing the Barriers Women Face in the Music Industry Should Create Urgency

FEATURE:

 

 

Empire State of Mind

 

Why Alicia Keys Discussing the Barriers Women Face in the Music Industry Should Create Urgency

__________

I have written about…

PHOTO CREDIT: cottonbro studio/Pexels

this subject a few times before. If we think about modern music and the abiding impressions we get. In terms of the best, most successful and inspiring music, most is coming from women. That has been true for many years. And it will continue indefinitely, as I don’t think we will see a time when male artist will dominate in that respect. There are a lot of great artists producing their own music. Some amazing women in the industry who produce their own music. However, it is very much true that the gatekeepers and those who have the greatest sway and influence in terms of changing the landscape of studios and the industry are men. Most of the producers in professional studios are men. It is an old boys’ club. It has been that way for decades. Alicia Keys raised in an interview with The Times. The incredible New York-born icon talked “about making new music, the terror of sudden fame and putting her art collection on show”:

“There were big moments along the way, like performing a duet of Changes with David Bowie for her Keep a Child Alive charity at the Hammerstein Ballroom in New York on November 9, 2006, which turned out to be Bowie’s last live performance. (“What a breaker of rules, what a unique person. Sharing a stage with him was unforgettable.”) Then in 2009 came Empire State of Mind, the duet with Jay-Z that has since become the hip-hop anthem of New York.

“I still can’t believe how much it moves people, how it speaks to having a dream and going for it,” she says of the paean to the Big Apple that was the Billboard No 1 for five weeks. “Neither Jay nor myself could do anything new for a whole year afterwards because nothing else was burning into the consciousness.”

What advice would she give someone now going through what she went through? “The first thing I would tell an artist is that they belong there, because when it happens you think, why me? You get impostor syndrome. I would also tell them to trust people who give good energy because it really helps to talk to others who have been through similar experiences. And I would tell them to own their intellectual property. People love to utilise what we create, and own it, and maximise it, and take loans off it, and build their businesses off of it…”

She stares into the middle distance. “So I would advise artists to think about how to become the owners of their own creations.”

She’s warming up to the subject of learning the hard way. “No one tells you these things,” she says, of having a viable career as an artist in the music business. “You deal with all these executives and lawyers who love to take their percentages and overcharge you, but they never say, ‘How can we ensure you’re here to stay?’”

“As time continues I get to be more confident, more creative,” says KeysMilan Zrnic

Keys isn’t naming names, but She Is the Music, a non-profit organisation she co-founded to get more women into the music industry, is clearly a response to dealing with men in the industry who did not have her best interests at heart.

“The music world becomes a good old boy network and all the incredible women working as engineers and producers are not given an open door,” she says. “Women make up 2 per cent of the entire business. I’m a producer and here we are, doing a bunch of work, killing it, so it’s shocking that the number is so small. Rather than just being pissed off about that, it was time to create opportunities.”

Feminist messages have popped up throughout Keys’s career, from A Woman’s Worth to Girl on Fire to Superwoman. “It’s true,” she says. “I didn’t aim to come up with feminist message songs, and most of them were written because I wasn’t feeling that strong so I had to give myself a pep talk to keep going, but it is a thread through my work.”

Perhaps the various business interests are also a product of wishing to take agency over her life after being pulled from pillar to post at such a young age. She founded Keys Soulcare, a skincare and make-up brand. “As a performer, I found myself under a lot of stress and it affected my skin,” she says. “But a lot of us are feeling stressed today, so I was thinking about creating something that would help not just people’s skin, but the way they relate to themselves. We’re told the most shallow things are the most important.”

Keys says that while female celebrities have always faced scrutiny, social media has now spread that pressure to almost everyone. “It’s quite negative: how you’re supposed to be, what you’re supposed to have, how you’re supposed to look,” she says. “Social media is one of the biggest experiments ever created, but nobody did a trial run to discover how it would affect the human psyche. People were just excited about the new frontier and now we’re seeing the effects. It will continue with AI, which we’re walking through in real time, seeing things at a rapid rate that aren’t actually real, and it’s being created without a strong moral backbone. That’s why it’s more important than ever to create things with meaning”.

KEYS is the most recent album from Alicia Keys. That was released in 2021. Maybe they are not big revelations or fresh insights being raised. However, an artist as huge as Alicia Keys discussing how few women are producing and give opportunities should lead to some change and larger conversation. We keep having this discussion and raising the statistics. Opportunities really not being created for women. The studio not a space that is necessarily inviting or set up for women. Even though articles like this from 2021 note that there are some awesome female artists producing their own work and leading the way, so many are doing this and not getting any recognition or respect. And when it comes to women credited as producers, the number is shockingly small. I last wrote about this when Lady Gaga made a powerful point at the GRAMMY Awards earlier in the year. HTL Music Business Academy reacted to her speech and wider realities regarding gender inequality and why women make up such a small percentage of producers:

“At the 68th Grammy Awards in 2026, Lady Gaga urged women to “fight for your songs, fight for yourself as a producer” during her acceptance speech. However, the data reveals a stark disconnect between this encouragement and the reality of women in music industry statistics. Women received less than a quarter of all Grammys at 23%, marking a dramatic 14 percentage point drop from the previous year’s 37% and the lowest level since 2022. This decline extends to nominations as well, where representation fell from 28% to just 24%.

The visibility of female artists collecting awards masks a deeper problem. When Bad Bunny accepted the 2026 Album of the Year award, he shared it with 12 male producers, songwriters, and technicians who weren’t on stage with him. This pattern repeats across major wins. Since 2017, men have claimed 76% of nominations and wins across all Grammy categories, while women have secured only one in five awards during the same period.

Behind-the-scenes roles where women are virtually erased

Producer roles remain the clearest disparity in the representation of women in the music industry. Since its introduction 51 years ago, no woman has ever won the Grammy for Producer of the Year, Non-Classical. In 2026, all five nominees were male. Current data shows women make up just 5.9% of producer credits on year-end Hot 100 charts, while men control 94.1%.

Songwriters face similar obstacles. Women comprise merely 18.9% of songwriter credits, with an overall ratio of 6.2 men to every one woman songwriter across 13 years of Billboard Hot 100 charts. Engineers and technical roles show equally dismal numbers, with women representing only 5% of these positions worldwide.

The collaboration problem in male-dominated genres

Genre analysis reveals where the inequality between men and women in the music industry hits hardest. Metal shows 0% representation of women in key technical roles, while rap registers just 0.7%. Christian and gospel music follows at 0.8%. Even electronic music, which leads other genres at 17.6% female producer representation, still left 37 of its top 50 songs with zero women credited in any technical roles.

IN THIS PHOTO: Lady Gaga

Gender assumptions about technical abilities

Persistent assumptions about women’s technical capabilities create barriers in production and engineering roles. Women working in studios report being questioned about their competence, with one producer sharing the insulting line: “Women know nothing about rock & roll”. The perception problem runs deeper than individual comments. Over 40% of women stated their work or skills were dismissed by colleagues, while 39% cited stereotyping and sexualization as career impediments. Women in audio production believe they’re held to higher standards than male colleagues, with around 94% reporting this disparity. In effect, women must double-prove themselves to gain the same basic respect men receive automatically.

The lack of role models and visibility

Women face an epidemic of invisibility in key technical roles. Only 5% of audio engineers are female, creating a void of visible role models for aspiring professionals. This absence becomes self-perpetuating. Women don’t know about production careers because they’re not exposed to female producers at opportune ages. Besides limiting awareness, this invisibility affects performance. Studies show people tend to fulfill stereotypes when made aware of them, even subliminally.

How stereotypes prevent women from entering the field

Gender socialization shapes career paths from childhood. Boys receive technologically heavy toys before girls, and gender biases steer young boys toward guitar and bass while directing girls to violin and cello. These small disparities create long-term effects, reinforcing perceptions that women lack suitability for production roles. A whopping 79% of women in music are performing musicians, but only 12% are studio or mastering engineers.

Industry gatekeepers and antiquated practices

Male dominance in gatekeeping positions perpetuates inequality. Men hold disproportionate power in A&R and hiring roles, creating a “boys’ club” mentality. Power builds through trust, reputation, and relationships, leaving women with little leverage. Male producers get approached repeatedly for commercial projects, resulting in lack of diversity”.

PHOTO CREDIT: Anna Pou/Pexels

It is great that artists like Alicia Keys are talking about creating opportunities. Rather than get angry about the statistics and how female producers are in the vast minority, look at imbalance wider afield through the industry, as Music Radar highlighted last month: “The USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative has published its annual Inclusion in the Recording Studio study, which examines the representation of women and people of colour in the Billboard Hot 100 Year-End charts as artists, songwriters and producers. The report's conclusions are troubling, finding that 2025 saw "no progress" for women in music, with a decrease in participation across every single category measured. The percentage of female artists dropped by 1.6% year-on-year to 36.1% in 2025, while the percentage of women credited as producers fell from 5.9% in 2024 to 4.4% in 2025. The USC Annenberg report also found that more than 90% of 1400 songs evaluated across 11 years did not feature a female producer – in comparison, only seven of those songs did not credit a man in a producing role”. For sure, there are women in the industry supporting other women and shouting them out. However, when we look at the gatekeepers and those high up through the industry, there is little action or any sort of progress. Not really an interest in changing things. Despite the fact women are dominating when it comes to the best music and the standout tours, behind the scenes, there is troubling inequality and imbalance that has been like that for so long. And we are going backwards too. Women are calling for change and talking about the barriers they have to face, and yet the industry does very little. That idea of the old boys’ club still present. It is affecting festival headliners and bills. Even if small steps are being made there, look at award ceremony nominations and representation and recognition of women, and their brilliance and dominance is not being rewarded and recognised. You do continuingly wonder if that will change. If those who can make change and affect real progress will…

EVER take notice?!

FEATURE: Get Up Off Our Knees: The Housemartins‘ London 0 Hull 4 at Forty

FEATURE:

 

 

Get Up Off Our Knees

 

The Housemartins‘ London 0 Hull 4 at Forty

__________

I think that…

it might have one of the best album covers ever. The colour scheme and font. That is The Housemartins’ debut, London 0 Hull 4. Released on 9th June, 1986, I wanted to celebrate its fortieth anniversary by bringing in some features and reviews for it. Happy Hour, Flag Day, Sheep and Think for a Minute, not only some of the best songs on the album, but also some of the best of the 1980s. It was many people’s introduction to Paul Heaton. He would obviously then lead (in terms of songwriting; they had several lead singers through the years) The Beautiful South and now has an amazing career as a solo artist. He has recorded with his former The Beautiful South mate, Jacqui Abbott, and now he records with Rianne Downey. One of the greatest songwriters who has ever lived, there is so much wit, personality and all forms of human life in his music. With The Housemartins, social observation and political commentary. It is also worth noting The Housemartins also featured Norman Cook. Later rebranded as Fatboy Slim. The line-up was completed by Stan Cullmore and Hugh Whitaker. Whitaker was replaced on drums by The Beautiful South’s Dave Hemingway for the second studio album, The People Who Grinned Themselves to Death. Both albums co-written by Paul Heaton and Stan Cullimore. Reaching number three in the U.K., London 0 Hull 4 was released shortly before The Smiths’ The Queen Is Dead. Morrissey getting all this recognition as a world-class lyricist, though I have always felt Paul Heaton is superior – and a much nicer bloke too (and we share a birthday!). I will come to reviews for one of the truly great debut albums. However, first, there is an interview published in November 1986 by International Musician & Recording World. Maybe obvious to most, but The Housemartins’ debut album takes its title from where the band were from, Hull. In the form of a football score, Paul Heaton cheekily digging at London and suggesting there were no great bands there in 1986, but at least four great ones in Hull! The other three in that score included Everything But the Girl:

“People like the Housemartins. Some people think they're the future of Pop music, some girls think they're the sexiest bunch around, but most people just like them.

There's obviously something Machiavellian about this. This group was obviously constructed from Plasticene prototypes, the product of many years' market research, a modern day Monkees. The funny thing is, the faceless media persons at Go-Disc Records, the hub of this exercise, consist of Andy and Juliet McDonald, faithful assistant Porky, and a rather scraggy dog. So how did it all start, guys? Stan Cullimore:

"We met because Paul (Heaton, singer) put this advert in the paper saying buskers wanted, and together we just started busking as a two piece in Hull, purely because we were both a bit skint at the time. Then we moved from busking, because we wanted to play a few gigs indoors, and we became a four-piece and started getting normal gigs. We still used to busk as a four piece,though, in York and Hull, which was good fun, with just a snare drum, acoustic guitar, and a bass amp with a little battery in it..."

These extra personnel were Ted on Bass, (who left earlier this year due to what The Sun called 'political differences' in their 'Top Group Want To Kill Off Royals' expose), since replaced by Norman Cook, and Hugh Whittaker on drums. Somethings might have changed since then, but they've still managed to keep everything pretty portable.

"We don't take much gear out with us these days — we're surprisingly lightweight. We've done gigs where we're the headliners and the other bands are taking their stuff off stage before we go on and they're bringing up these enormous artics full of flight cases with their names sprayed on them in big letters. Then we arrive in a Transit van with seats in it, back it up, chug chug chug, and everyone shouts 'Hey, Noddy's arrived!' We've got two guitars each, our amps are about this big, and the drum kit fits into two shoeboxes."

'This big' is about the size of a Sessionette, which Stanley swears by. The bass amp is a small HH combo. Guitars consist of a Rickenbacker 610, and Tokai Tele, with a Fender Contemporary bass. Not that they're really equipment buffs, as Paul reveals:

"We spend about 10 minutes a year talking about equipment, we spend most of our time talking about football, our relationships..."

Stan interrupts: "In a way we feel it's quite naughty, like not doing your homework. I have to remind Hugh to get a pair of drumsticks before gigs a lot of the time. We don't have a lot of technical interest, though I suppose we have a comfort interest, like Norman wants a bass that isn't too heavy, I want a guitar that doesn't break any strings, Hugh wants a drumkit that he can put up quickly."

Mind you, it wouldn't do for Hugh to have a drum kit that he could put up too quickly, because that would cut down on the football. In true Housemartins fashion the rest of the band plays soccer while he sets up his kit. Presumably their choice of support for their tours is heavily influenced by their competence as an opposition football team. Even if their gear's still minor league, though, they're now firmly in the First Division. To some people it looks as if they've come from nowhere, but that isn't really the case:

"Everything's happened in such a gradual way that we haven't really noticed. For a start, we were working together for a year before signing any record contract, and we had Flag Day as our first single, which we were really excited about, but which didn't really do anything. Then we were in Peel's chart last year, the Festive Fifty, and we got a little following that way, and by playing around the country. Then the next single, Sheep, just got in the bottom of the charts, about number 50, so to us it seems like a slow process of growing. To people who only take notice of what's in the Top 40, which I suppose is the majority, it does appear that we've just arrived like that. To us it seems like we've been going for years..."

The Housemartins are obviously in a good position with Go-Discs; they've now had the predictable offers from the big companies, who think that temptation is personified by large advances. All the same, after one success, the pressure is obviously going to increase. Stan:

"I think even now that Go-Discs, and Chrysalis, will be looking for another hit record — they won't be looking for any self-indulgence from us. From now on every record will have to be aimed at the top. I really do reckon that we'll be one hit wonders..."

"I think we'll get a hit next year," Paul Heaton continues. "I don't think we really give a toss, but you can never tell. After we've had a flop, we might get really depressed about it, but at the moment we don't really mind. There's an unsaid and unwritten pressure, there's a natural progression where you have to get higher".

I want to turn to The Vinyl District from 2023. They go deep with London 0 Hull 4. Making some keen observations about an album I hope gets a load more love on its fortieth anniversary. Some not entirely sure of the exact release date, though I am going by what a few sites say. Other say it is July 1986. I am not sure if Paul Heaton would know the exact date?! It is strange that there is not a definitive record, as it makes marking the fortieth anniversary a bit tricky:

“You’ve gotta love a band of chipper Christian lads who deliver lines like “Don’t shoot someone tomorrow that you can shoot today.”

I’m talking, of course, about The Housemartins. Hailing from Hull, England, these Socialists for Jesus dressed up their angry agitprop in jangly pop clothing, but there’s no denying their righteous anger–they didn’t like what they saw in Margaret Thatcher’s Green and Unpleasant Land, and they lifted their cheery voices and, well, raged.

On their 1986 debut LP London 0 Hull 4, The Housemartins denounce fence sitters, sheep (“They’ve never questioned anything”), surrender monkeys (“Now apathy is happy that/It won without a fight”) and people who “listen without their ears.” The Housemartins practiced a radical Christianity, as is evidenced by the lines, “We’ve got to form a congregation and sink down the nation/Batter all the sinners to the ground.”

Ignore the words and what you get are a bunch of fey and frothy tunes with great soul vocals; this quartet of Hullensians could almost be mistaken for Wham!, except Wham! never advocated shooting anybody–they were too busy inspiring people to shoot them.

Sanctimony never sounded so divine as it does on London 0 Hull 4. What you get are four choirboys who sound like they just tossed off their cassocks and surplices, and their angelic (and very soulful) voices and jangly guitars put a deceptively ear-pleasing gloss on their very subversive messaging. Which basically amounts to “Wake up you complacent wankers, the rich and indifferent are bringing our country down around your working class ears.”

They certainly get their point across on “Get Up Off Your Knees,” the pleasantly upbeat tune that includes the “shoot someone today” lines. Radicals that they are, the lads forego the power of prayer in favor of more direct action–“Time to end the praying,” sings Paul Heaton, “Listen what they’re saying.” That said, their message isn’t always so clear; I can’t for the life of me decide whether the very happy-making “We’re Not Deep” is a simple anthem to sleeping late, or a pointed jab at folks who refuse to wake up and smell the bitter coffee.

On the melancholy piano rocker “Flag Day” (think Elton John circa Blue Moves) Heaton writes off staging appeals for the poor (“It’s a waste of time if you know what I mean”). Which doesn’t make him a fucking Libertarian so much as a wild-eyed radical looking for, er, more drastic means of wealth distribution–“Too many Florence Nightingales/Not enough Robin Hoods,” he sings, “Too many haloes and not enough heroes/Coming up with the goods.”

“Happy Hour” is a bouncy salute to the dubious joys of joining your workmates for a drink after work–haircuts smile, you’re out with the boss, everybody’s busy opening their wallets and closing their minds. No wonder Heaton sings–and I have to say he reminds me a bit of good old Morrissey–”It’s happy hour again/I think I might be happy if I wasn’t out with them.”

“Sheep” is as happy-making musically as it’s straightforward lyrically; “It’s sheep we’re up against,” sings Heaton, and that’s a message that always rings true. “Think for a Minute” goes against the grain insofar as it’s downbeat on all fronts–the song’s medium tempo fits the lyrics about England’s decline into hopelessness and apathy like a glove. It’s an enjoinder to stop and think, but Heaton doesn’t sound so sure anybody’s listening.

“Freedom”’s message is simple enough: “So this is freedom/They must be joking.” But if that sounds like a bummer, just try to not sing along. As for “Lean on Me” it’s the LP’s odd song out, a stripped down, straight-up gospel number (not to be confused with the Bill Withers’ classic) that limns the limits of despair: “Down and out without hope” sings Heaton over and over again to the accompaniment of a piano, and his voice is as lovely as it is doeful.

My only complaint with London 0 Hull Four is that while its lyrics are pointed, they may not be pointed enough–they lack the ugly specifics and quicksilver imagery of your best agitprop. That said, if you’re looking for an album that will make you happy and make you think, this one will be your cup of tea.

GRADED ON A CURVE:
A-“.

The final review I want to introduce is from The Line of Best Fit. Released in 2009, they looked at the Deluxe Edition of London 0 Hull 4. It is one of the absolute best albums ever. Even though The Housemartins were together for two albums, they definitely made their mark on music:

“Two years ago, The Guardian ran a blog citing Carter The Unstoppable Sex Machine as the most successful, yet least influential band in recent memory ”“ a fair point, well made. That said, The Housemartins’ two-album career was arguably just as successful, with two top ten albums and a glut of increasingly chartbound singles, with just as little influence; aside from spawning the underappreciated Beautiful South (whose early albums are, if anything, even more deserving of a reappraisal) and the overexposed Norman Cook, they’ve hardly spawned a legion of imitators ”“ now that Jack Peñate’s “gone Afrobeat”, anyway. With no specific anniversary in sight, this “deluxe edition” of 1986’s London 0 Hull 4, the first and most successful of their albums, seems like a randomly deployed attempt to address this issue, boasting a shiny remastering job and the obligatory second disc of bonus tracks.The original album itself remains a pretty comprehensive guide to everything right and wrong with Thatcher-era indie. Though the crystal clear remaster makes it an essential repurchase for anyone who already owns the almost-unlistenable earlier CD version, the production remains as reassuringly leaden as anything released on an independent label in the ‘80s. Likewise, the songs’ influences are similarly limited, veering almost exclusively between northern soul and The Smiths. This combination occasionally strikes gold, as on ‘Get Up Off Our Knees’, the album’s most dynamic moment and, classic single ‘Happy Hour’ aside, its bona fide floor-filler, as well as the riotous ‘We’re Not Deep’, which wins points for its gloriously tongue-in-cheek “ba-ba-ba” chorus, and its audacious placement before one of the album’s deepest soul cuts, ‘Lean on Me’.

Sadly, it’s hard to listen to much of the album without involuntarily breaking into ‘I Want the One I Can’t Have’, especially ‘Reverend’s Revenge’ which as a throwaway instrumental all but invites the comparison, and ‘Sitting on a Fence’, which is at least saved by Paul Heaton’s keening falsetto and still painfully relevant lyrics (“He’d rather not get his hands dirty/He’ll still be there when he is thirty...”).Indeed, Heaton’s socially-aware lyrics have dated remarkably well, at least compared to those of labelmate Billy Bragg, and this is perhaps thanks to the broadness of their messages. The band’s crowning glory is ‘Flag Day’, which criticises “too many hands in too many pockets [and] not enough hands on hearts,” while condemning the self-righteousness of those who’d “like to change the world [by] deciding to stage a jumble sale...for the poor.” The mix of withering bitterness and resignation in Heaton’s voice as he intones the last three words is almost palpable. The single version which opens disc two makes this even clearer, as a solitary trumpet chimes in with a mournful refrain; compared with the album version’s overdramatic production flourishes which just ring false given the lyrical content (pseudo-Jools Holland piano? Check. Ill-advised melodica interlude? Check...), this stripped-back rendition is arguably its definitive version.Sadly, it’s also the best thing on disc two, which otherwise relies on b-sides, covers and BBC session tracks which are almost indistinguishable from the originals. The band’s charming acapella take on Curtis Mayfield’s ‘People Get Ready’ anticipates their number one hit ‘Caravan of Love’, and tracks like ‘I Smell Winter’ and the vitriolic ‘Drop Down Dead’ would have been right at home on the album proper, but studio antics like the painfully long ‘Rap Around the Clock’ are simply a joke too far, and strictly for obsessives. Still, for all its flaws, the album proper sounds better than ever and if a new generation of bands starts making a career out of ripping off ‘Happy Hour’ (unlikely though that scenario may be), there won’t be any complaints from this corner”.

I am pretty sure it is 9th June. In any case, we are about to celebrate forty years of The Housemartins’ wonderful debut album, London 0 Hull 4. I don’t think a group like them had come around for a long time. Paul Heaton then going off to have this successful career in another band. Norman Cook would soon become an established D.J. and artist. Stan Cullimore went on to become a writer and author. Despite the fact The Housemartins shone brightly for a short time, their extraordinary debut album…

STILL sounds so utterly compelling.

FEATURE: Everything’s Just Wonderful: Lily Allen’s Alright, Still at Twenty

FEATURE:

 

 

Everything’s Just Wonderful

 

Lily Allen’s Alright, Still at Twenty

__________

IT must be weird…

for Lily Allen looking back to 2006 and her debut album, Alright, Still. Considering how different it is to her current album, West End Girl. Both albums have humour running through, though West End Girl is tough, exposing, explicit, raw and personal. Perhaps more vulnerability and hard-hitting than Alright, Still, which is lighter and more care-free. Allen was in a different place then and in her early-twenties when it was released. Twenty-one, in fact. This was a London-born artist putting this album into the world. There are some tougher moments, but there is a lot of bite and wit. Released on 13th July, 2006, it came out ten days after its lead single, Smile. LDN is another big single from Alright, Still. Smile reached number one in the U.K. It is shocking that Allen was rejected by various labels before signing to London Records. They lost faith and interest, so Allen met with production duo Future Cut and signed to Regal Recordings. Receiving critical acclaim and reaching number two in the U.K., I wonder if the labels who rejected her regret the decision. Considering how successful it was, they did make a big blunder! I guess there are parallels to West End Girl, in that Lily Allen was tackling failed and strained relationships with humour. However, she was single and not married during Alright, Still. A very different and much darker, damaging situation for West End Girl. I will drop the comparisons, as I want to focus on Alright, Still. I am cutting large chunks of this interview out, but Pitchfork spoke with Lily Allen in 2006. It is interesting how they start the interview. In terms of how Allen was written off as gobby or foul-mouthed and got a lot of hate. Mainly because she was a woman and there was a lot of misogyny at play:

“A number of my friends and colleagues dislike Lily Allen-- and nearly all of those detractors are men. Perhaps it should be expected that a willful, precocious female whose characters have little patience for male sexual inadequacy and who threaten to avenge a broken heart by sleeping with their ex's mates would appeal more to women than men, yet the ease with which many brand the singer a bitch or worse is disconcerting.

And for what? Being a brazen and sharp-witted woman who recorded a breakup album that's breezy, mischievous, and catchy rather than all acoustic-bedded tears and exposed veins? To do the latter would have been both dreadfully boring and sorely out of character for Allen, a savvy 21-year-old Brit whose readymade press stories-- to the UK tabloids she's the "potty-mouthed, pint-sized pop diva, daughter of actor Keith Allen"; to the broadsheets, she's the queen of MySpace, having captured a sizable audience after posting her demos on the social-networking site-- and charming debut LP Alright, Still made her an overnight success at home.

In the U.S., Allen is merely dipping her toes into the water, having recently played a series of brief, tentative shows in advance of the January 2007 American release of her album. And even here the internet fueled much of her success. Despite a sound that's a hard sell in the U.S. indie community, American mp3 blogs embraced her early and often. Perhaps they considered this MySpace success story to be their spiritual kin, but bloggers happily tracked her every move, posting everything from her 50 Cent-biting song about her grandmother ("Nan, You're a Window Shopper") to a pep talk for her weed-smoking baby brother ("Alfie") to barbed-tongue attacks on former lovers and catty girls (most of the rest of her tracks).Top of Form

Pitchfork: Do you think that the "potty-mouthed, pint-sized" thing, that you get that treatment because you're a woman?

Lily Allen: Yeah, if a guy says something bad about another artist it's like a bravado thing to start beef. But if a girl does it then it's considered, like, bitchy and catty. Which isn't true. Everything I say is constructive and for a reason. I don't just slag someone off for the sake of it.

The other thing about this industry and the film industry is that I've seen young people come in and out, fuck up their lives, become heroin addicts. So when Luke takes himself so seriously, I say, "Come on, you look ridiculous. This could all be over in a year-and-half, so just enjoy it."

Pitchfork: So you think you're better equipped to deal with fame because you've seen its pitfalls?

Lily Allen: I'm just very realistic about it all. I'm really happy to be here. I'm fucking exhausted, but I think a lot of people in this industry really grin and bear it, and are like, [Valley Girl accent], "Ohmigod, it's so great to be here. Thank you so much."

But, yeah, I'm really happy that people are buying my record, and that I'm able to play shows for those who appreciate what I'm doing. But I know those people may move onto something else in a year's time, and I might not write a very good second album. It happens to a lot of artists. [Laughs]. The thing to do is not take yourself so seriously. The moment when you sort of start to believe all that stuff is when you get in trouble.

Pitchfork: Do you think your assertiveness-- and it's in your music, as well-- do you think being a young woman that people assume that you're a bitch? Would that even bother you?

Lily Allen: To a certain extent everyone expects women-- especially in this industry-- to sit and look pretty and do what they're told. Like the Tommy Mottolas of the world. There are a lot of women that come into this industry who are so scared of losing what they have that they just sort of sit up straight. Why are they so afraid? I built all of this from the very beginning, and it could all be over in six months. But that doesn't mean I can't start something else up and make that work just as well. There's so much out there for me to-- I'm 21 years old [Laughs]. There's no way I'll be traveling the world and singing to people in 10 years' time.

Pitchfork: Now that you're more successful, do you think the label will take more interest and demand more control?

Lily Allen: I don't know. I made the album for £25,000 pounds and recouped that in a week-and-a-half. I'm in a position of power with them. I don't owe them anything, so… yeah they'll listen to me. Unless I'm like, working with Timbaland and Burt Bacharach.

Pitchfork: On something like "Knock 'Em Out"-- something even that innocuous-- you start by asserting that this track could be about anyone, that it isn't necessarily about yourself. Do you feel that you have to take pains to assure listeners that your music can connect to a wide range of people because you've had a different background than most of your listeners?

Lily Allen: I'm not writing all of these songs as if they were from my perspective, and those are the things I'm experiencing. But at the same time, my mother came to London when she was 17 years old with one daughter and a suitcase and nothing else-- no money, no education. She was a punk. And, we didn't have any money for the first 10 years of my life. We lived in what you call the projects, and we ate beans on toast. My mom came from that background, but she just worked really hard to feed us and keep a roof over our head, and that probably keeps my eyes open.

But people don't see that because now my mom is a film producer and my dad is an actor. At they think it must be really easy-- "she was really rich"-- and that's not true. My dad left home when I was four. I didn't speak to him really until I was 15. So, I feel that I can talk about things with some conviction because I have experienced them to some extent. But it doesn't mean that I'm saying, "This is my life." I don't live in a council flat, but I live in London, which is an incredibly cosmopolitan city. I see a variety of people and things just riding through it”.

In 2006, it was the early days of Myspace and the Internet was quite new. Before social media, maybe harder to get an impression of what an artist was really like, but there was also a lot of judgement around Lily Allen. Miranda Sawyer spoke with Lily Allen ahead of the release of Alright, Still. Published in The Guardian, there was this idea of her being precocious and enormously self-assured. Rather than being someone who was rude or standoffish, Allen was hugely honest, and without any ego. I wonder how people who interviewed and reviewed her in 2006 see her now. Knowing how her career has progressed and that she is this established and acclaimed artist. How many who encountered her music in 2006 thought she would have a big career two decades later? You can feel the urgency and brilliance of Alright, Still:

“It takes 10 minutes with Lily Allen to realise that she is one of the most self-assured women you are likely to meet. She seems predestined for fame: not through some lame X Factor desperation, or tits-and-teeth training, but because she's an original - fearless and funny - and because it suits her. She's born for the VIP area: such upbeat company she could single-handedly kill off the celebrity need for cocaine. Vogue is planning to photograph her and GQ and every other paper now wants an interview ... . and she sparkles so hard there's a backlash before she's even started.

On the internet, there have been rumblings about Lily's background, a feeling that she must have exploited her parents' showbusiness contacts to get where she is and that she isn't qualified to write about everyday life. 'Well, I've worked really hard for five years, my dad's never met anyone from my label, he's never even met my manager,' she states. 'It's annoying when people assume that you're handed something on a plate, when it's actually completely the opposite. They're all pussies in the record industry, they thought I was a risk. It's not a secret that I like to go out and have fun and also the music's quite reggaeish, and I'm a white middle-class girl, which they couldn't get their heads around. Anyway, if there's one famous person that's going to go against you, it's my dad. Unless I was Pete Doherty's daughter or something.'

Of her songs' subject matter, she says: 'I've been conscious to try and write about stuff that happens to people from all different backgrounds. Obviously I'm not going to go, I've been going to film premieres since I was five, it wouldn't make sense! People have said, "Who is this girl who's written stuff as though she's come off a council estate?" It's galling. I live in London, I read the Evening Standard on the tube.' Lily lights up a cigarette, fiddles with her multiple necklaces. We talk about really famous people. She saw Victoria Beckham in a brasserie the other day, 'and she did that thing that I hate, which is sending someone out before her to see if there were any paparazzi outside. While she was waiting, she was looking in the mirror, checking herself out, like this ... ' Lily pulls a ridiculous face. 'And she's so skinny! I was talking to a friend of mine about this weight issue for women and he said, "Guys don't like skinny women." And I thought, What makes you think it's about men? It isn't actually. It's more about women. 'Anyway, because I'm a bit of a fuck-off person, I want to be a bit chubbier than most. If there's going to be little girls listening to Lily, I'd like them to think "she writes good songs and she's also not saying we have to be skinny". No one looks like models except models: that's the whole point.'

Then she makes a suggestion about Posh Spice that is so lewd that I almost splutter my coffee all over the table.

As you may have guessed, Lily has no Beckham-beating ambitions. In fact, she's not sure that 'this' - she means making music - is her ultimate goal. 'I don't want everyone to think that I've arrived, because this might not be what I end up doing,' she insists, mysteriously. She says that, when she was young, she figured out that if she did 'the whole school thing' and went to university, she'd spend a third of her life preparing to work for the next third of her life, to set herself up with a pension for the next third of her life, 'and I was just like, "Fuck that, I'd like to make fuck-loads of money and then retire by the time I'm 30, please!" That's what I want, to have a really exciting block of about 10, 15 years, then marry someone with enough money, get a house in the country and have kids. I really want to spend lots of time with my kids and sit round the table every night and make Sunday roast and grow nice flowers.'

You don't have to be Dr Tanya Byron to work out that Lily's longing for stability is the result of her background. She was an unhappy child, attending more than a dozen different schools before leaving permanently at 15: 'I just used to fuck things up for myself.' She'd make the same mistakes wherever she went: finding kids of her age too immature, she'd befriend sixth-formers, who would then leave early to prepare for A levels, leaving her socially stranded. She couldn't concentrate on any subject she wasn't interested in, she ran crying from every exam, she never did her homework.

There was one teacher at one school she liked. 'He used to teach classical studies, and he'd tell us stories and it was just amazing. Greek mythology! I was mesmerised. But it's stories which are fun ... I can't remember dates. History: who gives a fuck? So you can sit down at a dinner party in 10 years time and go "Oh, in 1066, the Battle of Hastings ... Some treaty was signed ... or whatever."'

She can sound like a nightmare, though she says she was the easiest one of her siblings: her older sister, who her mum had at 17, was a wayward teenager, and her younger brother has attention deficit disorder. 'My mum took me to dinner parties, because I was the one she could do that with. I was really pretentious and precocious, people would say things, and I'd be like "That's really difficult, how did that make you feel?" and they'd be like, "Fuck off, you're only 10!"

After she walked out of school, Lily did a variety of jobs. Her mother and father instilled ambition in her, in different ways: 'My mum's not a handout woman. She always said, "If you want to go and buy expensive dresses and shoes, then go and earn a penny." And my dad calls me up every day going, "What have you written today, why aren't you in rehearsals, why aren't you playing live gigs?"' Before she found music, she worked as a barwoman, a florist ('I loved it, but the early mornings got too much'), even an actress: she got a bit part in Elizabeth (her mother produced it). At one point, she helped out at my friend's PR business: he, too, thought she was on her way to fame. 'Lily's not got a nervous bone in her body,' he says.

Still, despite her confidence, you only have to read her blog or listen properly to her songs to know that Lily isn't all gob: she wants to be liked, but by people she's interested in. 'I don't start hating people, but I just kind of grow out of phases,' she says. 'I was going out raving when I was 13, 14 and two years later I was like, actually, you're all losers and you're all taking ketamine and turning into heroin addicts and I don't want to be your friend any more. But I never burn my bridges with people, I just step forward to something else.'

Lily's self-sufficiency and grown-up attitude has led her into some odd situations. During the making of her LP, she worked in Manchester for a while, and stayed with ex-Happy Monday Bez, who's a friend of her dad, and his sons Jack and Arlo. At one point, Bez had to go to London for a night, so he left her to look after the kids. 'He said, just put them in a cab to school, make sure they've got their packed lunches, so I was like, "Yeah, cool" and then he didn't come back for a week! He'd ended up in Dublin or somewhere ... Still,' she considers, 'it makes a good anecdote”.

I want to end with a couple of reviews for Alright, Still. The last one is from 2021. However, I am leading with a review from when Alright, Still was released. DIY provided their views. I am not sure exactly when it was published. However, there was an assumption here, and through a lot of reviews, that Lily Allen was this slightly confrontational or aggressive artist. Someone you wouldn’t hang with. I am not sure that she was giving off this impression, though that is how a lot of people framed her and Alright, Still:

“We love Lily Allen. Sure, she’s probably not the type who’d warm to us when out in Soho of a weekend, and there’s a chance if you had the ‘wrong’ facial expression she’d be likely to throw a few punches. But, that’s probably why we love her and debut album ‘Alright, Still’: they don’t pretend to be anything they’re not.

The hardest right hooks are provided with the ex-bashing ‘Not Big’ and ‘Friend Of Mine’, the former with such lyrical hilarities as ‘I’m gonna tell the world you’re rubbish in bed now/And that you’re small in the game’, and the latter a downbeat tale of losing a friend to drugs. You can’t help but assume both stories are true.

Comparisons to The Streets are easily made via ‘Friday Night’ (‘I push her back/she looks at me/and says/’what ya tryin’ to say’) and especially ‘Knock ‘Em Out’, both, not unlike Mike Skinners’ work, crude comments on club culture.

Allen’s personality works best, however, when she’s playing the ‘Angry Young Woman’ - the Kate Moss-referencing, bureaucracy-bashing ‘Everything’s Just Wonderful’ about as much insight in to a Brit youngster as you’re going to get. ‘LDN’ is one of the most honest tracks about the capital city written in a long time, and ‘Shame For You’, along with ‘Take What You Take’ should undoubtedly be considered the offspring of ‘Girl Power’.

Just when you’ve decided Allen’s a hard-nosed cow, however, ‘Alfie’ and ‘Littlest Things’ come to the rescue. The former’s desperate plea to her younger brother to ‘get off your lazy arse, Alfie please use your brain’ is nothing if not as affectionate as siblings ever get, and the Mark Ronson-produced ‘Littlest Things’ liable to make even the most cold-blooded feel for the broken-hearted 21-year-old”.

I will end with a 2021 review from The Boar. Marking fifteen years of the extraordinary Alright, Still, I feel that this album has aged so well. The songs still seem so fresh. Although you cannot really feel its influence directly with new artists, the songs and albums have endured. The brilliant Lily Allen has been touring West End Girl and has been a huge force in the industry for two decades:

“To me, the album feels strangely nostalgic and familiar. This is probably due to Lily’s London accent, which reflects the area we both grew up in. It is rare to hear a British artist sing in their authentic accent, so it was great to be able to hear not only a unique accent but also one that I am very familiar with. On top of this, there is a whole song dedicated to London. ‘LDN’ is a song that encompasses a small part of what it’s like to live in London. The underlying message is that things are not always as they seem, and although London is a dream city for some, it is far from perfect.

I really like the album because no two songs are the same, both in terms of the lyrics and the style of song. It is labelled as pop, but it is influenced by a whole variety of genres including Jamaican ska, reggae and hip hop. Some contrasting songs that come to mind are ‘Littlest Things’ in which Allen reminisces about a relationship and the happy times she had with a partner, and ‘Knock ‘Em Out’, which is about being pestered for your number when you are simply not interested. Another example of the range of topics covered can be seen in ‘Not Big’. As you can probably guess from the name, this song is about being disappointed in your partner’s size. This message of sexual dissatisfaction is largely echoed in ‘Not Fair’ which was part of her next album.

It is refreshing to see an artist sing about what can often be seen as ‘taboo topics’

Although I should not have been singing most of these songs at the age I discovered this album, I do think it is refreshing to see an artist sing about what can often be seen as ‘taboo topics’. In large part due to the taboo topics mentioned, this album was quite ground-breaking at the time of release. There were definitely other artists who released songs about sex, but this was usually in a less implicit manner and with a different message in mind (I can’t think of another song that was so forward about being disappointed). I particularly like that this album came from a female artist because women’s sexual pleasure was, and unfortunately still is, so much more of a taboo than men’s.

I think this album is iconic, and will never get old. Even though a considerable amount of time has passed, which is particularly evident when looking back at the music videos, the songs are still great, and the album is still fun to listen to. My fondness of the album is only furthered by the fact that I admire Lily as a person. Although she has often been at the forefront of negative media attention, she has remained her authentic self throughout. When Alright, Still came out, Lily was just 21 years old. Being the same age as I write this article, I see the young Lily as an example of a young woman who is ready to take on the world, and that is inspiring.

Allen’s follow up album, It’s Not Me, It’s You, was released three years later. This featured some of her most well known songs to this day including ‘F**k You’ and ‘Not Fair’. Unfortunately, I do not enjoy her most recent album No Shame anywhere near as much as her older ones. I feel as though Lily’s uniqueness, both in voice and style, has taken a back seat, and her recent songs have veered towards the mainstream. That being said, they are still very much worth listening to. As you could probably tell if I didn’t say it: Alright, Still is one of my favourite albums of all time, and I think that everyone who hasn’t heard it should give it a try”.

We celebrate twenty years of Alright, Still, on 13th July. In a year that saw incredible albums from Muse, Amy Winehouse, Arctic Monkeys, and The Streets, there was something about Lily Allen’s debut that was so different and distinct. Not that there are similarities with between the other albums. Just that Alright, Still is so extraordinary and individual. Two decades after its release, and Alright, Still…

IS hugely impressive.

FEATURE: The Wedding List: A Dream Celebration of Huge Kate Bush Fiftieth Anniversaries

FEATURE:

 

 

The Wedding List

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush

 

A Dream Celebration of Huge Kate Bush Fiftieth Anniversaries

__________

I am pretty sure that…

IN THIS PHOTO: Margot Robbie shot for Vogue Australia in January 2026/PHOTO CREDIT: Lachlan Bailey

2028 is going to be a great year. Maybe not for world events, though when it comes to music, I think that there will be some decades-best albums released. Pop evolving and other genes coming to the forefront. Also, Sam Mendes’s Beatles films will be released. I feel there will be some sort of movement or event like the Summer of Love. At a period in history when there is such brutality and violence, a reaction to what is happening around the globe. Also, there will be important anniversaries. In terms of albums turning thirty, a few to note: Madonna’s Ray of Light, Fatboy Slim’s You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby and Ms. Lauryn Hill’s The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill. There are going to be things to celebrate, for sure. As this is a Kate Bush feature, there are several dates that are hugely significant. I am essentially trying to manifest a dream of mine. I said I would do this when I publish my 10,000th feature, though Squarespace doesn’t tell you how many features you have published, so I am guessing. I reckon I will not hit that number until the end of this decade. However, there is something that I would love to do ahead of that. Kate Bush would not want a big fuss made around her seventieth birthday. That is on 30th July. That is fair enough. However, inevitably there will be features run and maybe a podcast or audio documentary made. People wanting to show their appreciate and respect. Her debut single, Wuthering Heights, turns fifty on 20th June. Her debut album, The Kick Inside, turns fifty on 17th February.

Either flying out to Los Angeles or New York (the former probably because of the fact many of the people live out there who I want to speak to), it would be great to write a piece for The New Yorker. I have always wanted to do this. Being unknown to them, perhaps it is somewhat far-fetched. I do feel that a celebratory feature about Kate Bush’s debut single/album would be a popular one. Draw people to it. The idea would be uniting artists and others in the entertainment industry/culture – authors, actors, directors etc. -, who would talk about Kate Bush. When they heard her music, what it means to them, and their favourite song/line. Either working with the same photographer for each interview or one that each interviewee selects, it would combine maybe ten or fifteen people. I am thinking how Margot Robbie recently talked about how Kate Bush is important to her. She recreated the dance to Wuthering Heights whilst she was on the set of Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights”. In terms of U.K. artists (who could be interviewed from London), Charli xcx and Florence Welch seem like they would have some great insights and words to say about an artist that has influenced them. In the U.S., Olivia Rodrigo, Billie Eilish, Lady Gaga and Hayley Williams are among those who are inspired by Kate Bush. And Big Boi. Björk is a massive Kate Bush fan. She is based in Iceland, though an interview could be coordinated there or in the U.K./U.S. (if she is visiting). Mainly, it would be those in music I would love to interview. Perhaps one or two actors/directors. ROSALÍA and Lily Allen also fans. It would be amazing to either recreate Kate Bush photos for the shoots and work alongside John Carder Bush, Guido Harari, Gered Mankowitz, Trevor Leighton and others who have photographed her through the years, or have these exciting and Kate Bush-influenced shots captured. I have never been to L.A. or New York, though going there for a couple of weeks and conducting these interviews would be amazing. I guess it would have to start in the summer of 2027, as it would take a lot of preparation, editing and work to get it published at the start of 2028.

Things could change between now and then. We hope that Kate Bush releases another studio album. That could heighten the chances of a commission happening. Making her more relevant ad visible somehow. As long as Bush herself was okay with it and had no objections, it would be a way of marking a date(s) that are very significant. I feel Kate Bush is one of the most influential artists of today. In terms of the artists who are influenced by her and the phenomenal albums released through the years that have elements of Kate Bush in them. A few years ago, or before Stranger Things used Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God) and Kate Bush’s music reached a whole new audience, perhaps there was less widespread knowledge of Bush and appreciation of her music. Finally, in 2022, America embracing Kate Bush! Some might say that artists do not usually get afforded this sort of honour when their debut album or single turns fifty. But think about Bush’s significance and how comparatively little has been written about her. A woman who undoubtably helped change the sound of modern Pop and inspired so many artists and people around the world, it would seem like a fitting tribute. It also could bring together newer artists/well-known fans with those who have been with her for many years. Having an assignment to interview these people and there being these great photographs taken and appearing in a special for The New Yorker in January/February 2028 would be a dream! Of course, this is wishful thinking on my part, and it couldn’t happen without them and there being this generous budget. And what they would get out of it. They run long-read interviews with artists, though if I was in the U.S. and speaking with someone like Billie Eilish or Florence Welch in London, that would cost time and money.

IN THIS PHOTO: Greta Gerwig photographed in 2023 for Vanity Fair/PHOTO CREDIT: Norman Jean Roy

I know that there will be articles published to mark fifty years of the sublime Wuthering Heights and The Kick Inside. I am not sure how many and where from, though quiet a chunk of the music media here and the U.S. will do something. Again, maybe an audio documentary or radio celebration. But nothing massive I would imagine. Perhaps the only time – or the most fitting – this could happen, this unique opportunity to unify a range of Kate Bush fans. The BBC did that in 2014 for their documentary on her but, in the twelve years since, so many other major names and incredible artists have expressed their love of Kate Bush. So we need to update things. How would Bush herself feel?! If she was to approve it, I can imagine she would be flattered. After all, nobody is asking her to take part of say anything, as I is unlikely she would want to be photographed or interviewed. Though it may not be totally impossible to get some written words from her as an introduction. Her memories recording Wuthering Heights and The Kick Inside. How she feels knowing so many incredible creatives and important people have her to thank (in part) for their success and talent. A dream guest list is taking shape but, as mentioned, maybe keeping it to fifteen tops would not make it an unwieldy read and something that costs too much. Perhaps eight or so artists then having the remainder be taken from the worlds of film, T.V., literature, art and theatre. Or politics. I know Greta Gerwig is a Kate Bush fan. Alongside Margot Robbie, maybe uniting them again (Robbie starred in Gerwig’s 2023 film, Barbie). Marking fifty years of the arrival of a life-changing artist. This incredible feature run in The New Yorker. Even if it is two years away, it will take a while to put together and finalise. It would be a dream I would…

LOVE to see realised.

FEATURE: Finalising the Deal… Kate Bush and the Summer of 1976

FEATURE:

 

 

Finalising the Deal…

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush on holiday in Kent in 1972/PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush

 

Kate Bush and the Summer of 1976

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I feel a fiftieth anniversary…

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1977/PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush

is very important, so I am especially keen to mark any that applies to Kate Bush. Last June, I wrote about her recording The Man with the Child in His Eyes and The Saxophone Song (known as Berlin at the time) at AIR Studios. In June 1975, those two songs, alongside Maybe, were recorded and overseen by Executive Producer, David Gilmour. The tracks appeared on her 1978 debut album, The Kick Inside. I am once more turning to Gaffaweb and their invaluable timeline for assistance when it comes to celebrating fifty years of Kate Bush fundraising a record deal with EMI. The broader summer of 1976 was very important. In August, she passed her driving test on the second attempt. That allowed her freedom and this independence important for such a budding and ambitious young artist. In July, just after her eighteenth birthday, there was this hugely important event: “Kate finally settles a recording deal with EMI. The contract is for four years, with options at the end of the second and third year. Kate receives a 3,000- advance [and 500 Pounds for publication rights]. EMI are content for Kate to take time to write songs, sharpen her lyrics, train her voice and generally have time to "grow up”. Earlier in the year, the EMI deal begins to take shape. A publishing contract is settled first. However, in that summer of 1976, Kate Bush signed a major record deal and passed her driving test. Although the former is more significant than the latter, I feel that both are very important. There was discussion with EMI before 1976, though Bush turned eighteen, so it was probably deemed she was an adult and could navigate a record desal and the demands on her. She would step into AIR Studios tie record the remainder of The Kick Inside in the summer of 1976.

Almost a year to the day since that deal with EMI was finalised, Bush was in the studio and recording one of the most extraordinary and important debut albums in music history. It would have been hugely exciting for her. That idea that there were options at the end of the second and third years of that four-year deal. An option is a clause allowing a record label to extend the agreement for additional periods or albums. It allows the label the exclusive right to require the artist to produce more music, without the label being obligated to do so, usually used to keep an artist signed while limiting the label's risk. £3,000 in 1976 is roughly around £28,000 to £33,600 today. That was quite a lot for a teenage artist. It did give her some flexibility to record or go to dance classes. Use that money towards things that would help her career. Buy instruments or whatever she needed. I think that by this time, Bush was living at 44b Wickham Road, Brockley. Her brothers, Paddy and John, occupied the below and above flats (though I am not sure whom lived in each). It is quite cute having three siblings living above and below one another. Closer to London and now good to drive, the summer of 1976 was an unusual but important one. Other women her age were probably going to university or more likely the world of work. Instead, Kate Bush was looking ahead to realising a dream that she had. To make an album. Rather than being famous or chasing any sort of wealth, she wanted to complete an album and have that in her hand. It seems so strange that we are marking fifty years of that EMI deal. Such a significant moment, I am not sure if anyone else will write about it. I want to discuss something else that she did in the summer of 1976 that is mentioned in the text I am dropping in. It is from a 2022 feature that Classic Rock published. Discussing Kate Bush’s long road to Hounds of Love (her 1985 album):

“In this most open of households, her earliest explorations were encouraged. By 13 she had already set her poems – including The Saxophone Song and The Man With The Child In His Eyes – to primitive piano chords. “I could sing in key but there was nothing there,” she told Trouser Press. “It was awful noise, it was really something terrible. My tunes were more morbid and more negative… they were too heavy.”

By the following year she had recorded several cassettes’ worth of demos and song sketches on her dad’s Akai reel-to-reel tape machine. Impressed, her family enlisted Ricky Hopper, a record plugger friend of John Bush’s, to hawk them around the labels in the hope of getting a publishing deal.

After all the majors had turned them down as “uncommercial”, Hopper contacted his old Cambridge University buddy David Gilmour. The Pink Floyd guitarist was sufficiently impressed to invite Kate to record a demo at his Essex home studio, backed by him and the rhythm section from Unicorn, a band he was also nurturing. “I was convinced from the beginning that this girl had remarkable talent,” Gilmour later said.

After that didn’t work either, Gilmour decided the only way forward would be to record three properly arranged songs. Putting up the money himself, he booked time at London’s AIR Studios in June 1975, bringing in arranger friend Andrew Powell, who had worked with Cockney Rebel, Pilot and Alan Parsons. They recorded The Saxophone Song, The Man With The Child In His Eyes and Maybe, with members of the London Symphony Orchestra (the first two songs would appear on her debut album, The Kick Inside).

Gilmour played the demo to Bob Mercer, then head of EMI’s pop division, who was impressed enough to sign her up. A deal was eventually sealed by July 1976. Having left school with 10 ‘O’ Levels, Bush set up a company to manage her affairs – a precocious glimpse of the total control that would come later in her career.

EMI were willing to give the young singer time to craft her songwriting and performance. Ever the maverick, she began to study with Lindsey Kemp, the provocative mime artist who had been a mentor to the young David Bowie. Under Kemp’s tutelage she began to imbue her music with character and movement – magic extra ingredients in her presentation”.

Alongside that deal being finalised, there was also this developing of her dance talent. Dance so important to Kate Bush, the summer of 1976 was a time when she took some big steps regarding training. Going back to Gaffaweb and their chronology from July 1976: “Kate pursues her dancing, first at the Elephant and Castle, South London. But after seeing Lindsay Kemp perform in Flowers, she attends his classes at the Dance Centre in Covent Garden. After Kemp goes to Australia, Kate trains with Arlene Phillips, choreographer of Hot Gossip. [It is probably at this time that Kate's association with Gary Hurst and Stewart Avon-Arnold, her longtime dancing partners, begins.]”.

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

That switch in terms of the locations around London. How important Lindsay Kemp was. However, she stuck with dance and studied under Arlene Phillips. I do like that Kate Bush had such a productive and interesting summer of 1976. Especially that July. I also appreciate how tough it would have been to find the energy in the summer of 1976. July 1976 was exceptionally hot, forming part of a brutal heatwave with an average temperature of approximately 18°C to 18.2°C. The summer (June-August) was one of the hottest in over 350 years. Temperatures in southern England regularly exceeding 32°C (90°F) for fifteen consecutive days, peaking at 35.9°C (96.6°F) on 3 July in Cheltenham. It must have been quite scary in a way! Regardless, Kate Bush had a music career to focus on. She was still developing her piano playing and singing. As we learn, her late-night practising ruffled the feathers of her neighbours: "I'd practice scales and that on the piano, go off dancing, and then in the evening I'd come back and play the piano all night. And I actually remember, well, the summer of '76 which was really hot here. We had such hot weather, I had all the windows open. And I just used to write until you know four in the morning, and I got a letter of complaint from a neighbor who was basically saying "Shuuut Uuuup!" cause they had to get up at like five in the morning. They did shift work and my voice had been carried the whole length of the street I think, so they weren't too appreciative”. I have used a photo of Kate Bush as a girl for the main image, as this is something that she would have thought about at this age. Maybe not knowing what a record deal was. I mean, getting to a point where her curiosity of music and expressing herself through that medium was realised in this way. The summer of 1976 was such a transformative time for her, so I wanted to celebrate fifty years of this pivotal and significant time. The biggest event being the finalisation and completion of the record deal with EMI. Truly, no looking back. It was a moment Kate Bush as the artist, debatably, was born and started. From here, she could realise…

THE kick inside.

FEATURE: Good Girl: The Subject of Hypersexualisation and the Male Gaze in Pop Music

FEATURE:

 

 

Good Girl

IN THIS PHOTO: Paris Paloma recently appeared on Woman’s Hour and talked about creating feminist anthem, labour, her incredible new single, Good Girl, and how modern music (or Pop) is still very much expected to conform to the male gaze

 

The Discussion and Subject of Hypersexualisation and the Male Gaze in Pop Music

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MANY might say I am…

not qualified to discuss this subject. However, I think that this subject is worth discussing. I was listening to Paris Paloma on Woman’s Hour. She was telling Anita Rani how she was not seeking validation at all. That she didn’t care if people – the industry; men – found her attractive or not. Discussing her anthem, labour, and new single, Good Girl, she also touched embracing  body positivity. You can listen here. I still feel there is so much emphasis on woman in music being seen as attractive and desirable. I will come to this, but is there this prerequisite that women are there for the male gaze. That they should show flesh and if they are not deemed attractive or sexy, then they are not worth anything. There was a period when body positivity was being discussed and celebrated. Perhaps less common now. Artists such as Lizzo very much at the forefront of that. Paris Paloma is an artist who, like so many of her female peers, has been valued and judged on how she looks. Rather than what is important: the music that she is making. It can be risky lashing back against that demand and desire. The fixation with women’s bodies. Not only stigmatising and misogynistic, there has always been this push from the industry. That woman’s bodies should be deemed ‘attractive or ‘sexy’. That is the way they get respect. Paloma said that women should be able to express themselves freely, but they should not have to flaunt their bodies to conform in order to be seen as attractive or valued. She lamented the loss of that body positivity movement and how now there is this Ozempic-fuelled reverse. That women are thinner or there is this pressure for women to be thinner, so that they are seen as attractive. This is something that is not discussed much in music.

Maybe, yes, men might not have the best perspective or sense of understanding, though I have seen few male journalists ever condemn this standard and sexism that has been rampant for decades. It ties into hypersexualsiation in music vs. body positivity. It is brilliant that women can feel confident and comfortable and there is this healthy image. That they do not have to slim and be a certain shape/size. That women can feel comfortable in their skin and talk about it. Paris Paloma does not care if people find her attractive. Someone who wants to feel safe and comfortable in her vessel. How it is so tragic that women still have to be moulded to fit the male gaze. Paris Paloma is not here to be a male fantasy or expose herself. How there is so much pressure on women to be slim. If they are not, then that criticism and attack against them. Paris Paloma saying that is not empowering for women to act, dress or look a certain way when that is pretty much what they are expected to do in order to conform to the male gaze. It was a powerful interview and statement that does raise that question. Will attitudes in music ever change?! I love the crop of modern female Pop artists. In terms of what they are producing. Artists like Sabrina Carpenter, I feel, are modern-day queens and incredible artists who will be remembered for decades to come. However, there is still this hypersexualisation. That question as to whether women are being free and expressive and it is positive writing sexualised songs and performing in a provocative and sexual way. That it is liberating and empowering other women. Or whether it is what the industry expects and what they have to do to be noticed. That it sets a bad example to young girls. Not something men are judged on. They are not sexualised and do not need to dress a certain way to sell records or get opportunities. I was reading a post on Instagram – I forgot to save the link so can’t remember who posted it -, but it asked whether there is needless hypersexualisation and whether women should be doing this. Using Ed Sheeran as an example of a male artist who is not expected to be sexual to sell music. Men not held to this standard or defined by their bodies.

This has been happening for decades. Think about a legendary icon like Madonna. Although she was very much someone who was comfortable in her body and used her sexuality to her advantage and was very open about sex and desire, you do wonder how much of that was expected. That she felt she needed to sell records. Madonna might argue that she was empowering herself and others. You can definitely argue this! Facing such abuse and misogyny during her career, songs like Human Nature struck back against critics who condemned Madonna for being evocative and talking about sex. Today, as she prepares to launch Confessions on a Dance Floor: Part II, you could say that she is still as bold and brilliant as ever. However, she still has to face misogyny and ageism. So many female Pop artists influenced by Madonna. There is this argument as to whether she and so many others are body positive and expressing their sexuality in a positive way or whether it is what women are expected to do. Tow this line. Last year, Belinda Carlile talked about hypersexualisation in Pop and cited Dua Lipa as an example of a hugely talented artist who was performing in this very sexual and charged way. How it was embarrassing and not empowering. One might say there is a distinction between hypersexualisation and conforming to the male gaze and sex-positivity. In general, there has been a reversal in terms of attitudes to sex. Perhaps there is more judgement when artists discuss sex. Decades ago, especially in the '00s, so much of modern music was about sex. Much more at the forefront. Sabrina Carpenter is a wonderful artist who very much should talk about her sex life and be sex-positive. However, like Madonna a few decades ago, she is judged and faces condemnation for being seen as risqué, as the BBC wrote last year:

“Carpenter's breakthrough came last year with the song of the summer, Espresso, and her Grammy-nominated album – amazingly, her sixth – Short n' Sweet. By then she'd long shed her Disney roots and embraced a coquettish, 50s bombshell look and overtly sexy persona. "I'm so [expletive] horny," she sang on Short n' Sweet's Juno. She made an eyebrow-raising play on the word "camaraderie" on Bed Chem. Things got even filthier when she toured the album, acting out sex positions and simulating sex with a male dancer. Outraged parents have decried her as a bad influence on their daughters.

A blonde bombshell pop star causing moral outrage with her overt sexuality? It all felt quite familiar. Carpenter certainly isn't shy about her love of Madonna, paying homage to the singer's Blonde Ambition era on a Vogue cover (shot by Steven Meisel, the same photographer behind Madonna's book) and wearing the star's 1991 Bob Mackie Oscars dress to last year's VMAs.

IN THIS PHOTO: Sabrina Carpenter/PHOTO CREDIT: Red Light Management

Whereas Madonna's overt sexuality felt radical, Carpenter's has a more tongue-in-cheek feel – to the point where some have questioned whether it's a marketing ploy. Criticism intensified in June when she unveiled the cover for Man's Best Friend, featuring the singer on her knees as a man grabs her hair. It drew ire from several quarters – some feminists, women's charities and fans thought it was degrading to women. Conservatives thought it was overtly sexual. Others defended the singer, calling the reaction puritanical and suggesting the image was satire. Carpenter later revealed an alternative "approved by God" cover – and this week said the original image was about deciding "when you want to be in control".

It all ramped up anticipation for the album's release, fuelling speculation on whether this might be Sabrina's Erotica, a daring and subversive, sex-positive album. In fact, the album has turned out to be, as one critic for The Times described, "surprisingly vanilla". Despite the provocation prompted by the cover – and nine out of the 12 tracks being labelled as explicit – there is nothing especially radical in either the music (perfectly pleasant, occasionally great '90s-and-Abba-inspired pop, with no hooks to quite rival Espresso) or the lyrics. Sure, there are plenty of lines that would make your grandmother blush, but Carpenter's album doesn't reveal anything that shocking – just a young woman exploring her sexuality and writing smart, funny and sometimes smutty lyrics about the realities of modern dating. So why all the fuss?”.

Not that sex is a controversial subject. Music cannot be too sanitised or purified. However, rather than this being a case of artists honestly talking about sex and doing so in a healthy way, there is still this feeling that so many women feel they can only get a toehold and be seen if they are hypersexual. That they are invisible. If they look a certain way and dress in a manner not seen as sexy and commercial, then they will be side-lined and buried. Whilst Sabrina Carpenter, Dua Lipa and so many of their peers are phenomenal artists who are inspiring so many girls and women, are they performing and writing in a way that fits into the male gaze? Do they feel they need to do that to stand out and get recognition?! They are hugely talented artists, and it may be them being very real and empowering. Being confident in their bodies. Though there is a connection between modern mainstream Pop artists getting buzz and attention and the nature of their music and performances. Not with every major female Pop artist. Though it applies to so many. Last year, Annie Lennox spoke with The Independent about her new memoir. Among other subjects, Lennox discussed how music is and always has been hypersexualised and misogynistic:

“Lennox, who went on to have an extremely successful solo career in the 1990s, has resisted reductive labels all her life. She has also always resisted the pop industry machine that tends to regard young female stars as bait. In 2013, she spoke out against the oversexualised state of the music business, condemning in particular “pornographic pop videos”. What does she think about the landscape now, which has arguably become even more sexualised thanks to the explicit provocations of artists such as Sabrina Carpenter and Charlie xcx? “I was originally objecting to the fact that [it was the] record companies [who] were promoting this hypersexualised look,” she says. “They were like, ‘Whoa, we’ve got soft porn with a musical background. That’ll make a ton of money.’ And it did.

“Now these artists, the ones you’ve referenced, they’ve found their niche, and I’m not saying it’s all soft porn. But hypersexualisation has become so normalised. I would say that if you want to do that, then you just have to live with whatever comes from it. That will be your life experience.”

Lennox and Dave Stewart met in a health food restaurant in Hampstead in 1975, where she was a waitress – and formed The Tourists and later the Eurythmics (Lewis Ziolek)

Lennox herself found the music industry in the late 1970s to be very “male-led”. “They certainly would have wanted to exploit my female side more,” she says. “And that was never said explicitly, but it was there. And so doing things in the way we did was always like a bit of a rebuff.” In 1986, she famously took off her top to expose a red bra while performing “Missionary Man” at a Eurythmics concert in Birmingham. “That had less to do with exploiting my sexuality than sticking a middle finger to the male gaze. I was saying, ‘I will do what I like on my terms”.

It is a complicated debate. If we tell modern Pop artists to be less sexualised and change things, that is telling them what to do with their bodies. Also, you can say it is expressive and empowering for women to discuss sex and have this confidence. Even so, there is a double standard in music and this idea still that women are not judged on talent and their words. More, they have to also be sexy and attractive to get ahead. Whereas men do not. This article from 2024 examined female sexuality in Pop and discussed the dangers of hypersexualisation and what that message says to young girls:

“Can you even imagine the uproar if a little boy were to be dressed in a nude coloured bodysuit, dancing with very adult-like moves to a song about one-night stands and alcoholism, or writhing around a cage with nearly nude adult? And yet Sia did this with two of her hit videos and very little was said about it. Because the child in question was a girl.

A Devastating Impact On Girls

Such explicit videos of female sexuality in pop are certainly exerting a negative influence on little girls. Even back in 2007 the American Psychological Society issued a report on the sexualisation of young women. They found “virtually every media form studied provided ample evidence of the sexualisation of women”. And since then, things have only gotten worse. One word, my friends: WAP.

In study after study, women – and increasingly, young girls –  are portrayed in overtly sexualised ways. Vastly more than men. Unlike films, music videos are available for young children to watch without restriction. But some are getting so raunchy, there is a warning of ‘Adult Content’ before them. For example? Miley Cyrus’s MTV Music Awards performance where she ‘ejaculates’ smoke and glitter. Since the music video was originally created for youth culture, it’s a sad day when MTV has to carry warnings of ‘adult content’.

It’s About Safety, Too

The hypersexualisation of women in pop is more than a morality issue. It is one of women’s safety and equality. Studies show that girls who are exposed to sexualised content are more likely to endorse gender stereotypes and place attractiveness as central to a woman’s value. Boys who are exposed to this content are more likely to sexually harass females, and have inappropriate expectations of them. A shocking one in three girls in the UK say that they are ‘groped’ at school, or experience other unwanted sexual contact. Sexual harassment is practically routine at work, on public transport and other public spaces

Following  a series of reviews, most recently the Bailey Review on the Commercialisation and Sexualisation of Childhood, the UK Government has decided to enact  a series of measures to tackle sexualisation, including tighter guidelines on outdoor ads containing sexualised imagery, age-ratings on video games, restricting children’s access to online pornography.

A  new project, Rewind and Reframe, has been set up by leading women’s groups in the UK. The End Violence Against Women Coalition, Imkaan and Object aim to provide a platform for young women to speak out about sexism and racism in music videos by blogging and sharing their experiences on a new website”.

It takes me back to Paris Paloma and what she was saying. How she does not care if people find her attractive. She is making music on her terms and wants to feel comfortable in her body without feeling the need to exploit herself or be exposing. It is sad how the male gaze still dictates how female Pop artists write and perform. Will that ever change? What can change that? Women in Pop are fully entitled to do what they want. Though one feels there is this pressure on them to be sexual. One could say most of their fans are women, so this sexualisation is empowering and not for men and their gaze. However, so many videos are directed by men and labels run by them. The industry still sexist and geared towards men. These Pop artists are so amazingly talented, you sort of feel that women run this risk of being forgotten or even dropped by a label if they act and say they are not going to do this. That they want to make music their way and it does not matter if they are seen as attractive and desirable. So many of the new weave of brilliant women in Pop are phenomenal songwriters. You read interviews and they are so compelling, compassionate and admirable. Incredible women who are so strong and empowering in what they say. But when you look at videos, listen to songs and see them live, there is that sexualisation/hypersexuality. Wil the industry ever truly respect women?! Can they make music and be popular without their bodies being on the line? People will point to artists who have succeeded and not do so whilst being very sexualised. However, those are perhaps rare cases. The male gaze still driving sales and demand. Body-positivity perhaps gone. Now, there is a standard that says women in Pop need to be super-thin and need to conform. I hope that anyone who reads this and is a woman in music forgives any missteps or ill-informed opinion. Though I am very much moved by what Paris Paloma said to Anita Rani recently on Woman’s Hour. How women’s bodies are commodities and they are judged on their looks and figures seemingly more than their brains, words and talent. Or that so many women have to be very sexualised to sell music. Nothing new (sadly) in the music industry you wonder if this is something…

THAT will ever change.

FEATURE: Beneath the Sleeve: Joni Mitchell - Blue

FEATURE:

 

 

Beneath the Sleeve

  

Joni Mitchell - Blue

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THIS is not the first time…

IN THIS PHOTO: Joni Mitchell Performing at the Isle of Wight Festival in 1970/PHOTO CREDIT: Tony Russell/Redferns/Getty Images

that I have spotlighted Joni Mitchell’s Blue. The fourth studio album from the Canadian icon, it was her most acclaimed album to that point. In fact, it remains her most revered album. That one that has endured and is talked about often. In terms of the all-time greatest albums, Blue is always in the conversation. It was released on 22nd June, 1971, so I did want to mark its fifty-fifth anniversary. Go deep with this true classic. I will get to some features and reviews around Blue. However, from Joni Michell’s official website, we get some insight, background and explanation of Blue’s creation and brilliance from Rob Hughes:

“Commercial success didn’t sit easy with Joni Mitchell. Clouds had gone gold and brought with it a level of popular appeal that took away some of her everyday liberties. Having finished Ladies Of The Canyon in 1970, she vowed to take a year off, ostensibly to recharge her jaded batteries, but also to escape what she felt was an increasing sense of claustrophobia. “I was being isolated, starting to feel like a bird in a gilded cage,” she explained to Rolling Stone’s Larry LeBlanc. “A certain amount of success cuts you off in a lot of ways. You can’t move freely. I like to live, be on the streets, to be in a crowd…”

In many ways, it signalled the start of Mitchell’s conflicted relationship between art and celebrity. Now that the “black limousine” and “velvet curtain calls” of “For Free” had narrowed into the reality of her own life, she needed to regain her peripheral vision, restore a degree of clarity. Mitchell came to despise show business, declaring fame “a series of misunderstandings surrounding a name”. Not for nothing did David Geffen once tell her: “You’re the only star I ever met that wanted to be ordinary.”

There were major upheavals in Mitchell’s private life, too. Her intense love affair with Graham Nash, which had coincided with an accelerated spurt of productivity from both parties, was nearing its end, resulting in a series of petty squabbles. Against this backdrop, Mitchell decided to head for Europe, where she travelled around Greece, Spain and France. Her main seat of exile was the island of Crete, where she took up residence in a cave amid a hippy community in the fishing village of Matala. It was from here that she sent Nash a telegraph home. He was busy laying a new floor in Mitchell’s kitchen when it landed, it read: “If you hold sand too tightly in your hand, it will run through your fingers. Love, Joan.” “I knew at that point it was truly over between us,” Nash recalled, disconsolately, in his memoir, Wild Tales.

Mitchell was introduced to the Appalachian dulcimer on Crete and adjusted to the unhurried rhythm of local life. The experience brought her into contact with a number of characters, who in turn helped reignite her creativity. One such figure was Cary Raditz, a wild-haired American chef who was blessed, in Mitchell’s words, with “fierce-looking blue eyes” and “the mark of Cain on his brow”. The pair began a relationship, sealed by a song she’d written in honour of his birthday: “Carey”.

As more musical ideas started to flow, Mitchell noticed the formation of certain recurring themes – love, loss, escape, a quest for some kind of indefinable spiritual truth. And for all the delicious scenery, food and ready company, she was homesick. Shifting from one continental base to another only amplified the feeling. While in Paris, she poured her longing for her adopted West Coast into another fresh tune, “California”.

She returned to her native Canada in late July, playing Toronto’s Mariposa Folk Festival alongside James Taylor. Mitchell and Taylor had met a year earlier, at the Newport Folk Festival, but now they became romantically involved. A month or so later, she visited him on the set of his Hollywood road movie, Two-Lane Blacktop, where they wrote together and, as Taylor told Uncut in 2015, “had some of the most outrageous good times”. By October, they were sharing a stage at London’s Paris Theatre, recorded for BBC Radio One’s In Concert series, with Mitchell unveiling a handful of new compositions.

She returned to London at the end of November to perform at the Royal Festival Hall, where the new songs were met with unanimous approval by reviewers, among them the NME and Melody Maker. The latter’s readership was similarly smitten with Mitchell, voting her 1970’s Top Female Performer in its year-end poll (ahead of Aretha Franklin, Grace Slick, Sandy Denny and the recently departed Janis Joplin), despite her paucity of live shows.

Back home by early ’71, Mitchell and Taylor were viewed by the American music press as Hollywood’s golden couple; two young, photogenic singer-songwriters whose liaison embodied the free-spirited ambience of Laurel Canyon. Both set about preparing their respective solo albums, with Mitchell singing backing vocals on what would become Mud Slide Slim And The Blue Horizon – most notably on his cover of Carole King’s “You’ve Got A Friend” – and Taylor repaying the compliment by adding guitar to “California”, “All I Want” and “A Case Of You”. They also accepted an invitation from King to appear on a reworked version of “Will You Love Me Tomorrow” for Tapestry, then being cut in the same A&M studio that Mitchell had booked.

The relationship quickly turned sour, however. Apparently devastated by Taylor’s decision to call it off, Mitchell funnelled her pain into the other songs she was recording for the appositely named Blue. The album duly became a document of a life in flux, a diary of physical and emotional displacement set against a backdrop of restless travel and doomed love affairs.

Short of the affectations of Clouds or the airy folk-pop of Ladies Of The Canyon, Blue was almost uncomfortably direct. Mitchell again refused to coat the songs in fussy arrangements, preferring to place her voice front and centre over spare guitar, dulcimer and piano, her vulnerability plain for all to hear. She later told Rolling Stone that “at that period of my life, I had no personal defences. I felt like a cellophane wrapper on a pack of cigarettes. I felt like I had absolutely no secrets from the world, and I couldn’t pretend in my life to be strong. Or to be happy. But the advantage of it in the music was that there were no defences there either.”

She was to use a more curious, semi-grotesque analogy in 2014’s Joni Mitchell: In Her Own Words, telling interviewer Malka Marom that she’d dreamed she was watching “a bit fat women’s tuba band. Women with big horns and rolled-down nylon in house dresses, playing tuba and big horn music, and I was a plastic bag with all my organs exposed, sobbing on an auditorium chair at that time. That’s how I felt. Like my guts were on the outside. I wrote Blue in that condition.”

The implication here is that Blue is an unwavering litany of distress and despair, an inventory of misfortune with no light relief. But it’s actually a counterweight of ecstasy and agony, of the best and worst of times. Nash is supposedly the subject of the piano-led “My Old Man”, Mitchell riding the climatic extremes of romantic love in breathy soprano. “He’s my sunshine in the morning/He’s my fireworks at the end of the day/He’s the warmest chord I ever heard” she sings at her sunniest, her voice adopting the shifting cadences of jazz. It’s in direct contrast to the clouds that descend in his absence: “But when he’s gone/Me and them lonesome blues collide/The bed’s too big/The frying pan’s too wide.”

The exquisite “A Case Of You”, also rumoured to be about Nash, finds her trying to absorb the lessons of a failed love affair that refuses to let her move on. As if to measure the depth of its impact, Mitchell addresses her quandary in religious terms: “Oh, you’re in my blood like holy wine/You taste so bitter and so sweet.” The sensitivity of her lyrics is echoed in the deft accompaniment of Taylor’s acoustic guitar and in the poignant tones of Mitchell’s dulcimer, the latter providing much of Blue’s graceful fragility. As testament to its enduring pull, “A Case Of You” became one of her most-covered tunes, siring versions from as far afield as KD Lang, Nancy Wilson, James Blake, The Decemberists’ Colin Meloy and Prince (as, naturally, “A Case Of U”).

Of the trio of songs considered to be inspired by Taylor, “All I Want” alludes to the jalousies and insecurities that appear to have undermined their relationship from an early stage. All Mitchell wants, she sings, her fluted voice rising and dipping over silvery dulcimer, “is to bring out the best in me and in you too”. But it feels like honest delusion rather than realistic hope. Her opening lines give a truer indication of her emotional condition: “I am on a lonely road and I am travelling/Travelling, travelling, travelling/Looking for something what can it be/Oh I hate you some, I hate you some, I love you some.”

As she explained to Cameron Crowe some years later: “In the state that I was at in my enquiry about life and direction and relationships, I perceived a lot of hate in my heart… I perceived my inability to love at that point. And it horrified me some.”

The title track follows a similar line of confession. A sombre lullaby that finds Mitchell alone at the piano, the song appears to directly address Taylor’s heroin addiction – “Ink on a pin/Underneath the skin/An empty space to fill in” – while attempting to strike a note of optimism. Yet the prospect of self-destruction is too enticing to ignore out of hand: “Everybody’s saying that hell’s the hippest way to go/Well I don’t think so/But I’m gonna take a look around it though.” Arguably the most affecting moment on the entire album occurs halfway through “Blue”, when Mitchell sings “lots of laughs” with such forlorn resignation that it’s almost impossible not to well up.

Stephen Stills is on board for the more sprightly “Carey”, bringing a quasi-calypso rhythm to a tune that details Mitchell’s sojourn in Matala. Despite revolving around her activities with Raditz – another devilishly “mean old Daddy” to whom she’s helplessly drawn – it’s essentially a conflicted piece of travelogue that contrasts the simple hedonism of Cretan nightlife with homesickness for California. Mitchell can’t seem to decide what she wants more – the wine, laughter and scratchy rock ‘n’ roll of the Mermaid Café or the comforts of the Canyon. “Oh, you know it sure is hard to leave here Carey/But it’s really not my home,” she declares, double-tracking herself on harmonies, with Russ Kunkel adding tactful percussion. “My fingernails are filthy, I got bleach tar on my feet/And I miss my clean white linen and my fancy French cologne.” Raditz also features in the equally fidgety “California”, in which Mitchell’s loneliness and dislocation are all too apparent.

For all its thwarted romance and soul-stripping, it’s this question that sits at the heart of Blue. Mitchell is ultimately trying to reconcile her life with her art, compressing an elusive search for personal contentment into a grand artistic statement. Blue is sad, funny, poetic, revelatory and often achingly candid. And such an intensive experience that it feels much longer than it’s relatively slight 35 minutes.

Issued in the summer of 1971, Blue did brisk business both at home and abroad, cracking the Billboard Top 20 and peaking in the UK Top 3. It quickly became a landmark against which the work of all confessional singer-songwriters would be measured. Graham Nash says he still has a hard time listening to it. Mitchell herself has called it a turning point in her career.

It was also the album that finally established the 27-year-old as an American superstar. A situation that would once again test her ambivalence towards her own fame”.

In 2021, to mark fifty years of Blue, Ultimate Classic Rock hosted a roundtable with its writers discussing this masterpiece and what it means. In 1971, it firmly established Joni Mitchell as one of the songwriting greats. Even if the attention perhaps made her feel uncomfortable, today, she is surely proud of the impact of Blue:

“As Blue turns 50, we asked UCR’s writers to answer four questions about the album and its legacy.

Is Blue Joni Mitchell’s best album? Why or why not, and if not, what is?

Michael Gallucci: It's not only her best album, it's one of the best, and most influential, albums of all time. There were singer-songwriter albums before Blue; there were even singer-songwriter albums by women before Blue. But after that record, everything changed as far as artists opening a little more of themselves to listeners. It's one of the most personal albums up to that time. Fifty years later, it's still one of the most open, and candid, albums ever made.

Allison Rapp: Yes. There's no doubt that Mitchell's first three albums (Song to a Seagull, Clouds, Ladies of the Canyon) showcase quite a lot of her talent as a lyricist and arranger, but Blue is her most intimate, personal and vulnerable statement as a songwriter. There's an element of wisdom and experience to Blue that wasn't necessarily present on her earlier records, plus the distinct sense that Mitchell, usually fiercely independent, is letting her guard down in a way she had never done before and didn't do as intensely on subsequent albums.

Annie Zaleski: Most definitely. She transformed what folk-rock could be and sound like. Along with Judy Collins, she provided a much-needed female perspective to what was going on at the time in the lives of the post-Beatles generation, voicing with confidence how a rich inner life intersects with a tumultuous outer life.

Gary Graff: It's her best, but not necessarily the first album I'd refer to new listener. Its virtues - the raw intimacy, the vein-spilling vulnerability, the subtle instrumentation and those no-punches-pulled vocals - make for a tremendous song cycle but not always a comfortable listen. I'd probably send folks to Court and Spark, For the Roses or Ladies of the Canyon as more accessible gateways and then steer them to Blue once they're in the door.

What’s your favorite song on Blue and why?

Gallucci: "A Case of You" is breathtaking in its near simplicity. Mitchell's dulcimer and James Taylor's acoustic guitar are the musical bedrock here, and her lovely lyrics - "I could drink a case of you and still be on my feet" - pretty much disguise a breakup song in some of the most romantic lines ever written. The entire album plays along a similar path, but "A Case of You" is the standout moment.

Rapp: Every song on Blue seems to fit in perfectly with the others and tells its own unique short story, but "Case of You" will always be my favorite, if not just for its lyrics: "Part of you pours out of me in these lines from time to time." "Little Green" is a close second - Mitchell wrote it in 1966, two years before her debut album, after giving her daughter up for adoption, but the song was on the back burner for several years. It's an even more poignant listen knowing the weight the song must have carried for that long.

Zaleski: I know it's a cliche but "River." The more I listen and analyze the origins of the song, the more brilliant it becomes: It's a song full of contradictions - loneliness vs. being around others, feeling stuck vs. dreaming of a better life, solace vs. feeling bereft - but never feels chaotic, just the heartfelt musings of someone trying to figure it all out. Plus, using "Jingle Bells" as a tease for the song is brilliant; it conveys but also subverts the idea of sentiment.

Graff: "California" is a happy respite from the Blue fray. Love the way it personalizes the Golden State as a state of mind and being, and dresses it up with so many details it feels like you're hearing a movie. Plus, how can you argue with any track that has Jim Keltner, Sneaky Pete Kleinow and James Taylor playing on it, albeit quietly?

Is it the beginning of a new era for her? Or is it the end of her first era as a recording artist?
Gallucci: In some ways, it's both. She was slowly building to this moment since her 1968 debut, Song to a Seagull. That's a tentative record, but Mitchell's songwriting showed great promise, and she developed her voice on her next two albums, Clouds and Ladies of the Canyon. While Blue marked the end of this initial growth period, it also gave her the creative freedom and confidence to move on to the next stage of her career with the more jazz- and classical-minded For the Roses and Court and Spark. Every Mitchell album, really, from 1969-76 is a transitional one.

Rapp: Blue, overall, feels like the closure of one door and the opening of another, as though Mitchell had things she needed to get off her chest before moving onward both sonically and emotionally. There were new avenues to discover in terms of arrangements, instrumentation, chord structures and collaborations, but none of it really seems feasible without the definitive statement that Blue was.

Zaleski: I think it kicks off her imperial phase - Blue's creative structures and lyrical vulnerability opened up her songwriting and creativity and empowered her fearlessness.

Graff: I'd call it the latter and ending that first era on a high note. The albums that awaited - For the Roses, Court and Spark and beyond - brought in more instrumentation, a different sense of arrangement, different voices, most notably Tom Scott's, to accent the vocals that laid so bare on Blue and its predecessors. It's very much Mitchell reaching a (very satisfying) peak and moving beyond.

Because they're so intertwined with real (and famous) people, do the songs sound and feel too personal? Or do they strike a universal chord?

Gallucci: The first time I heard Blue, I had no idea the songs were connected to real people. It was only after a few years and countless listens that I found out that Graham Nash, James Taylor and others were the inspirations for these songs. I just assumed Mitchell, as other songwriters had done in the past, had pulled these songs from collective experiences and sources. So, I don't think they're too personal at all. Knowing the backstories now certainly gives the album more perspective, but in no way do they alter my first impressions of the album: I loved the album then, and it's still one of my favorites.

Rapp: Anyone who's ever loved someone can recognize and relate to the themes in these songs. Her lyricism is sharply specific in many spots on the album, but it's also the palpable emotion Mitchell's vocal delivery that really resonates with others. Of course, the songs are tailored to her life, but in this case, vagueness wouldn't have served the album justice. There's actually a lot of common ground between Mitchell and her listeners when it comes to personal romance and loss, which is a large part of why Blue has stood the test of time. There will always be love and heartbreak, and there will always be Blue to encapsulate that mood.

Zaleski: Not at all too personal; if anything, because they draw from her own life, they have extra passion and meaning. Of course, Mitchell's gift as a songwriter (well, one of them) is channeling real-world experiences into songs that are universal but also applicable to a variety of situations or life experiences. That's because she avoids the trap many lyricists fall into: She's not myopic but able to have some perspective on what she's been through and articulate her life experiences with clarity.

Graff: Boy, that's a toughie - especially since we know in retrospect (and did, to a degree, then) what was going on in her life. These are songs, sometimes explicitly, about very specific people (Graham Nash, James Taylor, Carey Raditz) and travels, with defining details in every one. But Mitchell writes in such a way that invites the listener to find themselves in her stories, and who hasn't felt like they're "on a lonely road ... looking for something to set me free" at some point in their lives?”.

There is this interview that I want to come to next. First published in two parts in Acoustic Guitar magazine (August 1996 and February 1997), Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers recalls sitting down with Joni Mitchell in 1996. Her recollections and reflections about Blue are particularly interesting.

“Even today, Blue stands out for its intensely personal storytelling and emotional transparency. I asked Mitchell whether, at the time she wrote these songs, she was prepared for sharing her interior life with the audience in this way.

I was opened up. As a matter of fact, we had to close the doors and lock them while I recorded [Blue], because I was in a state of mind that in this culture would be called a nervous breakdown. In pockets of the Orient it would be considered a shamanic conversion.

It begins with a sense of isolation and of not knowing anything, which is accompanied by a tremendous panic. Then clairvoyant qualities begin to come in, and you and the world become transparent, so if you’re approached by a person, all their secrets are not closeted. Like a Gypsy, you get too much of a read on who a person is. It makes you see a lot of ugliness in people that you’d rather not know about, and you lie to yourself and say something nice about them to cover it up. It gets very confusing. In that state of mind I was defenseless as a result, stripped down to a position of absolutely no capability of the normal pretension that people have to survive.

When [Blue] first came out, I played it for Kris Kristofferson, who said, “God, Joan, save something of yourself.” He was embarrassed by it. I think generally at first that people were embarrassed by it, that in a certain way it was shocking, especially in the pop arena. People [usually sing], “I’m bad, I’m bad, I’m great, I’m the greatest.” It’s a phony business, and people accept the phoniness of it. It’s fluff, it’s this week’s flavor and it gets thrown out, and it isn’t supposed to be anything really more than that.

By the time I made the next albums, I had stabilized psychologically, I would say, to a degree where, like we all do, I had some defenses. But that descent cracked me wide open, and I remain wide open to this day. I don’t want to develop too many defenses. I’m a kind of experiment, a freak of nature. I’m going through the world in an open way trying to trust in a time when human nature is so mangled and corrupt, probably more so than it ever was, where there is no honor, and greed is fashionable. I know the world is wicked; it doesn’t shock me anymore. As a matter of fact the thing that stuns and shocks me is human kindness; I see so very little”.

The Times also marked fifty years of Joni Mitchell’s Blue in 2021. They talked about the pain that went into the album. Learning about Mitchell’s bravery in putting all these difficult and painful struggles and heartaches into her music. An album that inspired generations of confessional singer-songwriters:

“While Blue expressed disillusionment with the trappings of success, it also came in the wake of Mitchell’s break-up with Graham Nash. A year previously they had been the golden couple of the Laurel Canyon scene. He wrote Our House about their groovy life together. She responded with Blue’s My Old Man, a far more troubled love song on which she admits to having the blues when he’s gone, but also not feeling ready to commit. “I believed in that relationship and suddenly it was over,” Mitchell said. “I also lost most of my Los Angeles friends. When I left him, they took his side.”

Mitchell escaped to Greece, and in early 1970 she was in the fishing village of Matala in Crete when she heard an explosion. She turned round to witness a man being blown out of the doors of a restaurant after the stove he had been lighting exploded. So began her brief affair with Cary Raditz, immortalised on Blue’s Carey in the line: “You’re a mean old daddy but I like you.” Raditz was a true hippy, living in a cave on the coast and refusing to be impressed by the presence of a celebrity in his midst.

Mitchell wrote about their primitive life together on Carey, including her confession that she did actually quite like clean white linen, fancy French cologne and other aspects of bourgeois life. “Cary watched all his friends go kind of gaga over me,” Mitchell told Crowe. “He resented me for that. He was always trying to put me in my place in front of his friends.”

One way or another, these experiences fleshed out Blue. Mitchell really was sitting in a park in Paris reading about the Vietnam War in a newspaper and concluding that peace was just a dream some of them had, when she began to tire of Europe’s old, cold ways and longed for the freshness and optimism of LA, as recounted on California. On The Last Time I Saw Richard she paints a scene of being in a bar at closing time with a folk singer friend called Patrick Sky, who warned Mitchell that hopeless romantics like her end up as cynical drunks. It was rare for singer-songwriters of the time to write so directly from life without hiding behind metaphor.

Back in her native Canada for a Toronto festival, in July 1970 Mitchell hooked up with James Taylor, for whom she wrote All I Want, a beautifully simple expression of not needing anything when you’re with the right (or, in this case, wrong) person. “I want to wreck my stockings in some jukebox dive,” she confessed. Taylor took Mitchell back to his parents’ house in North Carolina for Christmas, where beside the living room fireplace she sang A Case of You, one of the cleverest love songs written. “I could drink a case of you, darling, and I would still be on my feet,” sounds like a challenge as much as a declaration of passion. It has been speculated that Mitchell wrote River about that time, but River is about feeling lonely at Christmas. Perhaps Mitchell was drawing on her feelings for Nash, even as she spent Christmas with Taylor.

Mitchell once compared her state of self during the making of Blue to “a cellophane wrapper on a packet of cigarettes”, although it is only in hindsight that we know just how much she was giving away. At the time Rolling Stone magazine’s Timothy Crosse concluded that the cryptic words of Little Green were “so poetic that it passeth all understanding”. When the daughter she gave up for adoption in 1965 surfaced in the late 1990s, the real meaning of lines like “a child with a child pretending”, a reference to Mitchell being so young and unprepared for motherhood when she became pregnant, was revealed.

Counter to the spirit of a time when stars would drop in on each other’s sessions — and with Carole King recording the equally influential album Tapestry down the hall — Mitchell made Blue with the door of her room at LA’s A&M Studios locked. Taylor contributed some guitar parts shortly before their relationship petered out. “James was a walking psychological disaster anyway,” Mitchell said of their lack of suitability.

After the album was made Mitchell retreated to a cabin in Canada and didn’t play live for a year, but in the process of exposing herself so entirely she helped an entire generation to deal with their own emotional realities. With its cover photograph of Mitchell bathed in a blue light, harsh but tragic, Blue was her unguarded triumph. She concluded in her interview with Crowe, expressing amazement that Blue still means so much to people: “Truth and beauty. That’s what I hope to deliver.” And in a rare video post this week she added: “Fifty years later people finally get it. That pleases me”.

I am going to end with this review, that argues that Blue might be a perfect album. There are few that can truly be called that though, when it comes to this 1971 release, you would be hard pressed to find any weaknesses – or anything less than perfect:

“What makes an album perfect?

Maybe it's lyrics, composition, the music itself, or the emotion that it sparks. Maybe, it’s critical acclaim, the meaning that it brings, or something special yet undefinable that only the artist themselves can bring to the table. Whatever one may consider it to be, Joni Mitchell's solo 1971 album 'Blue' meets all of these requirements as a masterpiece of performance, production, and song-writing that is without a single weak spot. A decade prior, labels had still seen albums as receptacles for already popular songs. This was until the first half of the 1970s changed the music industry entirely, bringing the idea of the album as a medium to the forefront. Blue epitomises this - its songs all have a gravity of their own, yet still come together as a cohesive work of art greater than the sum of its parts. The perfect record, that, once finished, compels its listener to start it over, without hesitation.

Released over 50 years ago, the album is inspired by Mitchell's travels throughout Europe, where she left the traditional domestic comfort of Los Angeles with a one-way plane ticket to immerse herself in new experiences and pursue freedom on her own terms. Blue reflects the archetypal 'hero's journey' as she brought it to her experiences, travels, retrospective thoughts on the men in her life, her poetic observations and her relentless self examination. Perhaps as a result of this inspiration, 'Blue' gives us the sense that it was crafted to be consumed whilst in motion, immediately opening with the idea of travel, with the line, "I am on a lonely road and I am traveling, traveling, traveling, traveling". Mitchell's clear, yet haunting soprano takes us on an emotional rollercoaster throughout the album - for example, immediately after the beautifully elegiac “River”, a song about loneliness and heartbreak, comes the album's most unabashedly cheerful song, "A Case of You". In the hands of many other artists, this progression would be jarring, upsetting the integrity of the album. However with Joni, it just works.

But on top of the production and performance of the album, it's Mitchell's gift for sophisticated, beautiful melodies coupled with her lyrical language that makes Blue reach the height that it has. From the Ginsburgian imagery of Blue to the exultant "California", to the gentle yet mellow "Little Green", the album contains great range, yet still works as a cohesive whole, with diminished chords capturing the sound of nostalgia throughout the album, as various songs are interspersed with motifs from each other.

Perhaps because of its title; “Blue” has a reputation for being morose, with a certain vulnerability and weariness in Mitchell's voice making it hauntingly yet eloquently vulnerable as it captures moments of intense loss and sadness - making it a great album to cry to! But it would be a mistake to limit the album by perceiving it only in this way. It displays a vast array of emotion, part of what makes it so great, and from the opening moments of “All I Want” Mitchell is full of energy - “Alive, alive," she wants to "get up and jive.”

However all the while, she often links her lyrics back to her past, with the idea of her home in California always somewhere in the back of her mind. The album is highly personal, with many songs alluding to a handful of famous ex-lovers and musicians. And while Mitchell never tried to disguise these experiences, focusing too finely on who a song is 'about' diminishes its power and misses the point of its art - the context surrounding the album is merely a surface concern, distracting from its craft and its oceanic force of emotion.

"Blue" has always had a strong legacy of critical acclaim, winning countless accolades and repeatedly placing in the 'top albums of all time' for multiple music publications, featuring in The Rolling Stone's '500 Albums of All Time' and receiving a perfect score on Pitchfork, going on to inspire the likes of Prince, Bjork, Bob Dylan, and even Taylor Swift. As a New York Times tribute writes, "half a century later, Mitchell’s “Blue” exists in that rarefied space beyond the influential or even the canonical" as "the story of a restless young woman questioning everything — love, sex, happiness, independence, drugs, America, idealism, motherhood, rock ’n’ roll."

The wonder of Mitchell's writing is its seamless blend of personal and public, the mundane converted to the universal. Blue is a dynamic album that cannot be pinned to any specific genre - it isn't a specific album so much as a precise one, an intricate tapestry of ambiguity as her voice combines with her music in a faultless intersection of song-writing, production and performance in a way that reflects true artistry, coming together to make Blue an album that I, at least, consider to be perfect”.

As Blue turns fifty-five on 22nd June, it was important to include it for this Beneath the Sleeve. One of the most influential albums that has ever been released, it was a turning point and pinnacle of 20th-century music. Blue will be discussed for generations to come. Its author last performed live a couple of years ago. I do hope that we see Joni Mitchell on the stage again. So much love out there for her. Blue, fifty-five years after its release, remains this…

PEERLESS album.

FEATURE: Modern-Day Queens: Kehlani

FEATURE:

 

 

Modern-Day Queens

 

Kehlani

__________

SO far this year…

we have received some truly wonderful albums. In terms of the absolute best, there are few that match Kehlani. The eponymous album from the Californian-born artist is incredible. They have released this album that everyone needs to hear. I wanted to include Kehlani in this Modern-Day Queens, as I have been a fan of their music for a long time now. I will end with a review of Kehlani. However, it is important to first come to a few recent interviews with Kehlani. I am starting out with an interview with Wonderland. Even they use the pronouns ‘she’ and ‘her’, I am using ‘they/them’. Kehlani has said they prefer ‘they’, as it reflects their non-binary identity. Wonderland. spent time with the sensational Kehlani. They say how “she’s done justifying herself in public. Her new album speaks for itself. So stop asking questions and listen – she’s about to have you “Folded”:

“Kehlani herself couldn’t have predicted the magnitude of the record. “Honestly, it feels like [the film] Inception,” she says of the response. “There were songs I feel like I really put my foot into – “Folded” for sure – but there was nothing about the creative process that made me logicise, ‘Oh, this is the song that’s going to do it for everyone.’ I’ve gone in with so much intention before, thinking, this is it, and it wasn’t. So for this to have been such an easy process – I made a song with my friends and thought, ‘Maybe I’ll tease it, maybe I’ll put it out’ – and now it’s doing its thing, felt indicative of something bigger happening in my life right now. It’s changing everything in a positive way. When I think about the success of the song, I see it as part of something larger in my personal legend.”

Inspiring TikTok challenges that invite “medium singers” to the table, and embraced by R&B fans longing for a return to the genre’s roots, “Folded” became Kehlani’s first Billboard Hot 100 Top 10, peaking at number six, and her first-ever US R&B/Hip-Hop number one. The past year for the 30-year-old singer has felt kismet; the seeds she’s been planting are now in full bloom.

Her fifth studio album – and ninth project overall – is slated for release at the end of March. In the meantime, she’s intentionally focusing on her wellness, getting rest in rare pockets of time between final touches, incoming features, and the mastering process.

Kehlani spent her twenties grinding, releasing four albums and three mixtapes that cemented her as one of R&B’s most promising young talents, distinguishing herself with resounding swag and emotional intelligence. From the jump, her songwriting stood out because she goes there – equally vocal about love when it’s blissful and tender, and when trust erodes and turns toxic, leaving nothing but disappointment, rancour, and a migraine. It’s not all heartbreak, though. The singer-songwriter also has a knack for writing bops that are s-e-x-y, from the declarative “What A Girl Wants” to the entendre-laced “8”.

PHOTO CREDIT: Sophia Wilson

Discernment, she notes, is the greatest lesson she learned during this decade. “Discernment, all around: people, places, things, opportunities. Discerning what it feels like when you’re being healthy, discerning what it feels like when you’re not, not letting anything cloud your relationship with God. Discerning my own behaviour – whatever is solely in my control – and making that my responsibility. I think I learn everything as a crash course, and it’s on display for the world, so I’m always learning this double lesson: the super personal one, and the lesson that comes with the intense magnifying glass of my career and so-called celebrity. So I’m always getting the double ass-whoop. I’m used to it at this point,” she guffaws.

Raised in Oakland, Kehlani was sonically shaped by the Bay Area’s rich and eclectic music history. She jokes that you’d think her family was from Philadelphia, given the amount of neo-soul she was raised on. The late D’Wayne Wiggins of Tony! Toni! Toné! – who worked with everyone from Alicia Keys to Destiny’s Child – acted as a mentor during her formative years. R&B runs deep in Kehlani’s veins; she is not only a devoted student of the genre, but one of its fiercest keepers.

Kehlani knew it wasn’t if but when this record would happen. “Basically,” she says, “I will say this, I always have such a macrocosmic view of everything. I know there are times in art and history when it’s finally time for certain things, things that couldn’t exist before. People have been making this R&B complaint for so long, but there were still so many people doing it. There was also this complaint from the public: ‘We don’t want you guys to oversing, and when you guys dance it’s too much movement, and these songs are too long, and we won’t make these types of songs pop.’ For a while, the standard had been set by listeners. I watched plenty of artists stick to the R&B route, and people were just like, ‘Okay.’”

“Missy Elliott once tweeted that there was a moment when labels stopped asking her to do R&B albums with R&B artists because they didn’t want people to sing anymore – because people weren’t purchasing or supporting that kind of music. I just think there’s something happening in history where people in art are demanding real shit. They want better-quality shit, and for the first time, I think they mean it. They’re ready to support it. Maybe we’re in a renaissance where I feel like, ‘Okay, let me come out and peek around, and I can do what I really want to do.’ I don’t have to focus on people saying, ‘It has to be so different, so cool.’ I think there was a barrier placed on R&B for so long – it had to be so alternative, kind of cool, become a ‘genius’ thing for people to realise it’s best. A lot of traditional R&B records got ignored, so it’s fun to be able to return to the genre”.

A couple more interviews to cover off before rounding off with a glowing review for Kehlani. Their fifth studio album, Kehlani follows 2024’s Crash. They have some tour dates coming up, including a trip to Sunderland on 24th May for BBC Radio 1's Big Weekend. That is going to be an incredible gig! Let’s move to another interview. I think I will then finish with two album reviews instead. It is worth noting how Kehlani won two GRAMMYs this year for their song, Folded. They won in the categories of Best R&B Performance and Best R&B Song. Billboard actually put that song at the core when they spoke with Kehlani earlier this month. A huge international success, perhaps the moment where everything is clicking for them:

“In 2017, you received Billboard’s Women In Music Rulebreaker honor, and in your acceptance speech you said, “My entire career I’ve been very outspoken … I can’t help it.” How have you held true to that?

I’ve learned a lot about what it means to carry your ­morality and your humanity and be under a microscope for it. I’ve learned a lot about what that expectation of perfectionism looks like … what kind of pressure that comes with. I learned a lot about how to handle it correctly — and I’ve learned a lot of it through mishandling it and being contradictory and hypocritical, and it’s something everybody goes through when there is something you’re passionate about that involves two very opposing opinions. I think the most important thing for me was to learn how to be called in and let people teach me, but also to really just trust that I know my heart and trust that even in the instances when I can’t explain to millions of people why I’ve done something or what this meant, that there was a good reason because that’s who I am.

How has “Folded” shifted the tides in your career?

When you’ve experienced a lot of resistance that you are ­acutely aware is resistance … like, “Wow, nothing is working out … No matter which direction I turn, everything feels like pulling teeth. Making photo shoots happen is impossible. Getting people to call me back is impossible,” all of this is just like, “Wow.” I’m having these conversations and I’m like, “Wait, really? That’s it? You’re down?” I’m in a period of the least resistance. And it’s a really nice place to be.

“Folded” will appear on your upcoming fifth album, Kehlani. What impact do you hope this album will have?

I want to do this album at Carnegie Hall with an orchestra. I really want some of these songs to make it into movies … and ultimately just have a really historical personal moment for me, and hopefully keep adding to the genre because that’s the coolest thing that “Folded” has done beyond anything — I’m watching the conversation change and I’m a part of it”.

The first review I am including is from NME. They write how Kehlani has drawn from every era of their past. Kehlani is the sound of “the unshakeable R&B titan ushers in a new era and finds security in her own skin”. I really love the album and feel that it will stand as one of the best of the year when we near the winter. Few albums can match it:

“Music has always been a safe space for Kehlani. Over the past 17 years, across four albums and four mixtapes, the singer has been in pursuit of her truest self, navigating personal relationships, her gender and sexuality, and embarking upon motherhood along the way. Despite experimenting with her sound in recent years, with the reggaeton-inflected 2024 release ‘Crash’ and more understated 2022 album ‘Blue Water Road’, underneath it all, old school R&B is where Kehlani flows naturally.

Her biggest hits prove this fact: from ‘Nights Like This’ to ‘Toxic’ to ‘After Hours’, her proficiency in creating sultry slow jams is unmatched. Making good on the success of last summer’s hit single ‘Folded’, which amassed over 800million global streams worldwide plus a collection of remixes featuring Toni Braxton, JoJo, Mario, and Ne-Yo, Kehlani’s self-titled fifth album is a satisfying time capsule of R&B which leans into nostalgia and celebrates how far the singer has come.

Opening with crashing cymbals and Lil Wayne, lead track ‘Another Luva’ is a mid-2000s throwback that has Kehlani doubling down on her ride-or-die, before segueing into the laidback hip-hop shuffle of ‘No Such Thing’ featuring Pusha T and Malice under their collaborative moniker Clipse. The album’s long list of features also serves as an amalgamation of the singer’s influences: ’90s R&B titans Brandy and Usher, the inimitable rap of Missy Elliott and Lil Jon, and the 2000s nostalgia of T-Pain and Big Sean all make an appearance. Despite the impressive array of collaborators, there are times when ‘Kehlani’ feels unnecessarily long.

While the Cardi B-featuring ‘Pocket’ acts as a feel-good intermission for a collection that often lingers on love that has gone awry, as an album, ‘Kehlani’ is devoted to undulating matters of the heart. Smooth and sultry, ‘I Need You’ captures the earnest physicality of longing for a lover; meanwhile ‘Back and Forth’ shows a more toxic side of when suspicion enters the chat, as ‘Out The Window’ pleads for a partner to return: “Check your insecurities,” says Kehlani in the former. “Leave ’em at the door of our home.”

As forthcoming and blunt as she has been about love, sex, and heartbreak, it is this soul-bearing storytelling and relatability that has always set Kehlani apart. Lusty yet vulnerable, ‘Ooh’ encapsulates desire, peaking with dramatic guitar riffs and dextrous coos. With shimmering production, soaring harmonies and melodramatic conviction, the intimate self-reflection of ‘Unlearn’ outlines her commitment to growth and willingness to “do the work if you still believe”. And while growth may not appear pretty at first, finding security within your own skin and knowing who you are manifests a glow that is unshakable. This is who she is now and, as she says, simply, at the top: “I am Kehlani”.

The final review is from Variety. They salute a triumphant album. Perhaps a moment when Kehlani has figured out who they are and there is this moment of clarity and realisation, I do wonder how they will follow this album. This modern icon has put out an album that is hard to forget or ignore. Signalling Kehlani as one of the most important artists of their generation:

“Nearly a decade after releasing her debut “SweetSexySavage,” Kehlani has finally arrived at the self-titled album. An eponymous project this deep into a career is no small proclamation — it’s traditionally a one-time event that’s meant to suggest a body of work is so emblematic that it speaks for itself, or it reflects the artist in such a way that it summarizes their creativity in the most complete way possible.

That feels appropriate for Kehlani, whose 2024 album “Crash” was perhaps the most unfocused she has been on a record, grabbing across genre lines for a project whose broad scope created imbalance. “Kehlani,” her fifth studio album, course-corrects the spaghetti-against-the-wall approach of “Crash” by centering the sound in one specific arena: millennium R&B at the intersection of pop.

The project is a love letter to her influences, from the litany of era-specific guest appearances — Lil Wayne, Usher, Brandy, T-Pain, Lil Jon — to the instrumentation and references permeating through the music, like the Pharcyde flip on “No Such Thing” with Clipse (a very rare feature, it should be noted) and the unmistakable bass thumps of Busta Rhymes’ “Put Your Hands Where My Eyes Could See” on “Back and Forth” featuring Missy Elliott. (In case you were wondering, yes, there’s an Aaliyah reference on there, too.) If the self-titled is a way to translate your artistic intention into sound, Kehlani shows that she’s at her best when she embraces the building blocks that made her, subsuming herself in the aesthetic and conventions of her influences while adapting them into one of her most powerful mission statements to date.

Nostalgia has become a de facto crutch for many contemporary artists looking for a genre to carry an era, yet Kehlani’s deep dive feels as much an appreciation as it is a retrofitting. Kehlani is clearly a student of the game, and here, the devil is in the details. If “Anotha Luva” featuring Lil Wayne recalls the summer breeze of Amerie’s “Why Don’t We Fall in Love,” it’s because she managed to track down Rich Harrison, the song’s producer, to deliver an instrumental in its lineage. “Oooh” touts a writing credit from Keri Hilson because the song was originally a demo from one of Hilson’s late ’00s albums. Lead single “Folded” sounds like a country cousin of Faith Evans’ “I Love You.” Closing ballad “Unlearn” is a spot-on sequel to JoJo’s “Never Say Goodbye,” right down to the horn blasts at the end of the chorus. (No surprise there, as songwriter Antonio Dixon worked on both songs, decades apart.)

But what keeps “Kehlani” from slipping into pastiche is the artist herself, who radiates a confidence and frankness that only comes with age. At 31, Kehlani has experienced the grip of love and its occasional demise, several times in the public eye, yet here she frames the rollercoaster of romance with clarity and intent. You can picture her lying awake at night, pining for a love long gone, on “I Need You,” a traditional R&B ballad featuring Brandy and produced by Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis. A few songs later, she’s right back where she started, “laying here next to you,” even though she didn’t intend to on the feel-good “Shoulda Never” featuring Usher. Inevitably, she finds stasis in being on her own with “Cruise Control,” a celebration of freeing yourself from the tumult of a relationship — the type of growth that takes real experience to spark.

At the core of “Kehlani,” like all of her projects, is her vocal talent, which she wields to great effect across this album. Part of Kehlani’s charm is the effortlessness of her voice, which is so powerful and distinctive that it helps maintain momentum even when a song is a little too on the nose (the fingersnapped “Call Me Back” featuring T-Pain and Lil Jon). It’s what helped push “Folded” into mainstream ubiquity in an era where the R&B crossover hit faces diminishing returns, a testament to how she’s refined her performance over time.

To that effect, the timing couldn’t be better for the self-titled album. Kehlani is at the peak of her artistic powers — she just took home her first pair of Grammys for “Folded” in February — and she says as much on the album’s intro: “You’re about to hear a heart that’s been stretched, healed and reborn, a voice stepping into its truth with no fear, no filter and no apologies.” Knowing who you are can be a lifelong struggle, yet Kehlani seems to have it finally figured out”.

I am wrapping up now. Full respect and love to Kehalni. They are an artist I have been liostening to for years, but I feel the latest album is the very best. From here, I feel they will continue to put out incredible music and work with some amazing people. Maybe a Kehlani and Mariah Carey collaboration soon? That would be amazing! If this is someone new to you, then make sure that Kehlani is…

ON your radar.

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Follow Kehlani

FEATURE: Kate Bush: Them Heavy People: The Extraordinary Characters in Her Songs: Bertie (Bertie)/Bing Crosby/Old Saint Nicholas/Mr. Wilde (December Will Be Magic Again)

FEATURE:

 

 

Kate Bush: Them Heavy People: The Extraordinary Characters in Her Songs

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in a promotional image for Aerial in 2005/PHOTO CREDIT: Trevor Leighton

 

Bertie (Bertie)/Bing Crosby/Old Saint Nicholas/Mr. Wilde (December Will Be Magic Again)

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I am running…

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush shot in December 1980/PHOTO CREDIT: Patrick Lichfield

out of characters for this series. I have maybe four or five to go before I have to put it to bed. This is where I paid character’s from Kate Bush’s albums. Or B-sides and rarer songs. There is this huge difference between the songs I am focusing on here. The first one mentions Bertie. That eponymous song from Kate Bush’s 2005 double album, Aerial. I will raise some themes relating to that song soon. I will then move to a track that is seasonal. Kate Bush’s sole Christmas single, December Will Be Magic Again. I cannot wait until later in the year to discuss it. As it has quite a few diverse characters in it, it is worth exploring for this series. Let’s start with a very special person who is the focus of Bertie. There is a lot to unpick and examine. However, I will move to an interview from 2005 and that very special album. I also want to think about how people view Aerial. Also, how that affection and open love for a child in a song is quite rare still. My first conversation point relating to Bertie is the boy behind the song. Born Albert McIntosh in 1998, Bush’s only child has been the subject of more than one song. He has been a big part of her career. Bertie is the first time that we realise huge affection for her song. Think about some of the lyrics: “Here comes the sunshine/Here comes the son of mine/Here comes the everything/Here's a song and a song for him”. That idea of her young son being this immeasurable sense of joy and fulfilment. When Aerial came out in 2005, Bertie was seven. I feel that Bertie is one of the most underrated songs in Kate Bush’s catalogue.

Some reviewers felt the song was too cloying. In terms of that sentimentality and sweetness. Bush delightfully singing about sweet Bertie. Almost hymnal in its importance. “The most willful/The most beautiful/The most truly fantastic smile/I've ever seen”. Bertie (Albert) is in his twenties now. I am curious how he views this song. His mother singing with such passion about her new son. There are other moments through Aerial where her son features. Maybe not named directly, new motherhood and domestic duties seep through many of the songs. Bertie is the most naked declaration to her son. One of the most common lines in Bertie is “You bring me so much joy”. Not only is Bertie obviously about her son and how he changed her life. His birth affected how Bush recorded and conducted her career. Now, she realised that the balanced shifted and how beneficial it was. Before, she would record and work tirelessly and not have too much free time. With a young child that needed her time and energy, recording definitely did not dominate like it did before. The task of being a mother the upmost importance. In an interview to promote Aerial, this is what Kate Bush said of Bertie and her son’s impact and place:

“He’s such a big part of my life so, you know, he’s a very big part of my work. It’s such a great thing, being able to spend as much time with him as I can. And, you know, he won’t be young for very long. And already he’s starting to grow up and I wanted to make sure I didn’t miss out on that, that I spent as much time with his as I could.
So, the idea was that he would come first, and then the record would come next, which is also one reasons why it’s taken a long time (laughs). It always takes me a long time anyway, but trying to fit that in around the edges that were left over from the time that I wanted to spend with him.
It’s a wonderful thing, having such a lovely son. Really, you know with a song like that, you could never be special enough from my point of view, and I wanted to try and give it an arrangement that wasn’t terribly obvious, so I went for the sort of early music… (Ken Bruce show, BBC Radio 2, 3 November 2005)”.

It gets me thinking about artists and bringing their children directly into the music. How many others have done something similar to what Kate Bush did with Bertie?! I guess it is nothing new artists talking about their children. However, in terms of putting their name in and the way Bush was so unfiltered. So much modern music, especially Pop, is about love or themes around relationships. Parenthood is not as common in music as you’d like. I do wonder whether there is any sort of stigma or commercial barrier. An artist I wrote about fairly recently, The Anchoress, released a song called, I Had a Baby Not a Lobotomy. The Anchoress (Catherine Anne Davies) describes it as “a tongue in cheek litany of all the stupid things people said to me when I had a baby… an anthem for anyone who has ever been written off for daring to procreate”. Whereas many women talk about the highs and joys of love, the lows of break-up and are very independent and defiant, they rarely talk about children, motherhood and that desire. There are modern greats that are mothers, though I am curious whether their fans would engage with songs about their children. Would a major Pop artist release a song where they solely sing about their new child?! One of the things that makes Bertie so powerful and unusual is that it was not necessarily common to write paens to your children. Over twenty years since Aerial arrived, it is still not as routine and widespread. I will end this side by reacting to how people felt about Aerial and where it sits in Kate Bush’s cannon. However, I do want to loosely discuss Aerial and Bush talking about it. Bertie, this jewel in a spectacular double album. In 2005, Tom Doyle interviewed Kate Bush in her home. There are sections I want to highlight that discuss her new domestic routine and how she has recalibrated and focused following a very difficult period. After 1993’s The Red Shoes, she has something similar to a nervous breakdown. Bertie’s arrival giving her new lease and energy:

“You release The Red Shoes in 1993, your seventh album in a 15-year career characterised by increasingly ambitious records, ever-lengthening recording schedules and compulsive attention to detail. You are emotionally drained after the death of your mother Hannah but, against the advice of some of your friends, you throw yourself into The Line, the Cross & the Curve, a 45-minute video album released the following year that - despite its merits - you now consider to be "a load of bollocks". You take two years off to recharge your batteries, because you can. In 1996, you write a song called King of the Mountain. You have a bit of a think and take some more time off, similarly, because you can.

Two years later, while pregnant, you write a song about artistic endeavour called An Architect's Dream. You give birth to a boy, Albert, in 1998 and you and your guitarist partner Danny McIntosh find yourselves "completely shattered for a couple of years". You move house and spend months doing it up. You convert the garage into a studio, but being a full-time mother who chooses not to employ a nanny or housekeeper, it's hard to find time to actually work in there. Bit by bit, the ideas come and a notion forms in your mind to make a double album, though you have to adjust to a new working regime of stolen moments as opposed to the 14-hour days of old. Your son begins school and suddenly time opens up and though progress doesn't exactly accelerate ("That's a bit too strong a word"), two years of more concentrated effort later, the album is complete. You look up from the mixing desk and it is 2005.

If the completion of Aerial put paid to one set of anxieties for Bush, then its impending release has brought another - not least, a brace of newspaper stories keen to push the "rock's mystery recluse" angle. It seems the more she craves privacy, the more it is threatened. "For the last 12 years, I've felt really privileged to be living such a normal life," she explains. "It's so a part of who I am. It's so important to me to do the washing, do the Hoovering. Friends of mine in the business don't know how dishwashers work. For me, that's frightening. I want to be in a position where I can function as a human being. Even more so now where you've got this sort of truly silly preoccupation with celebrities. Just because somebody's been in an ad on TV, so what? Who gives a toss?"

Kate Bush begins to tidy up the plates and cups and get ready for Bertie's arrival home from school with his dad”.

I want to move on shortly. However, Kate Bush must have been nervous how the public would receive the album. Aerial this ambitious double album. It was her biggest undertaking since 1985’s Hounds of Love. Both albums affected and infused by and with family and home. Twenty years after that masterpiece, Kate Bush producing another masterpiece. It could have been a disaster. Messy. Some reviewers picked songs they felt were a bit weak, though most of the reviews were ecstatic. Kate Bush being hailed as a true great and genius. Songs like Bertie showcase her endless invention and experimentation. The instrumentation and arrangement of the song. Viols: Richard Campbell, Susan Pell. Renaissance guitar: Eligio Quinteiro. Percussion: Robin Jeffrey. Keyboards: Kate Bush. String Arrangement: Bill Dunne. The sheer scope of Aerial is staggering. I have a few more characters from the album to cover off. Songs including A Coral Room and An Architect’s Dream.

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in a promotional image for Aerial in 2005/PHOTO CREDIT: Trevor Leighton

I am now fondly moving to Kate Bush’s only Christmas single. I am not even including the unnamed lovers that are mentioned in December Will Be Magic Again. However, among the traditional and expected Christmas imagery – the snow falling and bells playing -, Kate Bush does combine some names. Bing Crosby/Old Saint Nicholas/Mr. Wilde. Bush discusses and mentions Father Christmas. That is not unexpected. However, it is beautiful that he made it into a Kate Bush song. There is something child-like about her gorgeous Christmas song. I am going to drop in lyrics that mention the brilliant characters. However, I think my favourite lines are these ones: “Ooh, dropping down in my parachute/The white city, she is so beautiful/Upon the black-soot icicled roofs”. Two of the main characters in December Will Be Magic Again are mentioned early on: “December will be magic again/Take a husky to the ice/While Bing Crosby sings White Christmas/He makes you feel nice/December will be magic again/Old Saint Nicholas up the chimney/Just a-popping up in my memory”. That choice of Bing Crosby and that Christmas classic tune. I forgot to mention that December Will Be Magic Again was released on 17th November, 1980. I will talk about critical reaction and the fascinating characters. I also want to mention Abbey Road Studios. However, the performances of December Will Be Magic Again are amazing: “Kate performed ‘December Will Be Magic Again’ on television twice: the first performance took place during the Christmas Snowtime Special, broadcast by BBC television (UK) on December 22, 1979. In it, Kate, dressed in a red suit, sits in a large wicker chair with red velvet upholstery. She uses some imitation snow to emphasize a few lines from the song. The second performance, during the Christmas Special called Kate, broadcast on December 28, 1979, features Kate on piano and Kevin McAlea on keyboards and electric piano”.

I think December Will Be Magic Again has a great cast of characters. You can imagine children and adults by the tree in the warm. Celebrating Christmas or waiting for the big day. However, Bush has this charming traditional approach in the song. The scenery and backdrop quite stereotypical, but in a good way. White Christmas as that song of choice. Perhaps an artist that has a difficult legacy – Bing Crosby accused of being a domestic abuser and assaulting his children -, when Bush wrote December Will Magic Again, that song would have been a staple. Now, White Christmas seems a bit old-fashioned. But you can feel Bing Crosby coming out of the radio. A family sitting in their living room and listening to that classic coming on. Rather than refer to him as Father Christmas or Santa, Old Saint Nicholas. That is not what you often hear in Christmas songs. Though there is evidently that child-like curiosity of this mythical (sorry!) figure. I will come to the third character in a minute. However, Bush was at a stage in her career where she was commercial successful. December Will Be Magic Again was released shortly after her third studio album, Never for Ever, went to number one in the U.K. However, Bush was still not seen as a serious artist by many in the press. Writing for NME, Andy Gill said this: “Kate is “cute”… and no doubt you’ll be force fed, as you will with turkey”. Melody Maker offered this feedback: “Lush, sentimental, extravagantly produced… destined to become a Christmas irritation; and airwave itch you won’t be able to scratch”. I have argued How December Will Be Magic Again is hugely underrated and did not deserve criticism. Sexism still in the industry. Bush being dismissed and belittled. It was not until Hounds of Love in 1985 when there was the respect that Kate Bush deserved. Still being seen as this irritating or unusual artist. I feel December Will Be Magic Again should have been celebrated and shown more love. I want to discuss the significance of Abbey Road Studios.

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush at the 1980 British Rock and Pop Awards/PHOTO CREDIT: Mirrorpix/Getty Images

I have seen articles saying the original version was recorded at AIR Studios. However, Kate Bush wrote and recorded December Will Be Magic Again at Abbey Road Studios. She recoded Never for Ever at Abbey Road Studios and AIR Studios. December Will Be Magic Again was one of the earliest songs she recorded there. Very much settling into the space, I think that the iconic nature of the studios very much infuses into the song. Abbey Road was this hallowed space where Kate Bush always wanted to record. She would do so on a number of occasions. In terms of AIR Studios set against Abbey Road Studios, I feel the latter offered her more space and options. In terms of technology and what she could do there. The history of the studios. It would have been expensive recording December Will Be Magic Again. However, it is brilliant that it was recorded there. I wonder what compelled Bush to write it. Maybe there was a feeling she needed a Christmas single. Or she may have been inspired to put pen to paper because she was thinking about Christmas. The selection of Oscar Wilde to drop into a Christmas song might seem unusual. Kate Bush sings these words: “Light the candle-lights/To conjure Mr. Wilde/Into the Silent Night/Ooh, it’s quiet inside/Here in Oscar’s mind”. I am curious that those lines mean. Is Kate Bush evoking Oscar Wilde in this Christmas fantasy? Quite intriguing lines. The emptiness inside Oscar Wilde’s mind. Why would that be? I do love the unique insertion of a playwright great in a Christmas song and why Kate Bush decided to use him. Also, how all these characters weave and interact. You envisage this very busy nighttime scene. The lovers being blanketed by snow. People in their homes listening to Bing Crosby or gathered around the tree. Old Saint Nicholas going down chimneys. Where Oscar Wilde fits in interests me the most. Why Kate Bush decided to use him. Kate Bush might have been reacting to a quote from Oscar Wilde: “I think after Christmas would be better for publication: I am hardly a Christmas present”. That sourness about the season. Using him in a song almost to kill the mood. Or someone who takes against Christmas in a scene filled with Christmas cheer.

Before wrapping up (no pun intended!), something occurred that I had not thought about. Dreams of Orgonon noted this when they wrote about December Will Be Magic Again in 2019. In terms of this single ending a particular period of Kate Bush’s career: “Yet with “December Will Be Magic Again,” we see the end of a certain kind of Bush song. It’s her last track that can be feasibly reimagined as hailing from her pre-Kick Inside years, with its relish for childhood delights and simple attributes of a domestic environment. That approach has reached a breaking point. From now on her quiet songs will be more adult and introspective. She’s going to do silly songs in the future, of course — but even the silly stuff often carries plenty of weight. Bush’s earlier work is an ambitious testament to what youthful artistry can accomplish. Few songwriters are particularly mature early in their career. With Bush, a lot of her recurring themes from across her career are already in place on her first couple albums. For all its shortcomings, “December Will Be Magic Again” signals the end of Bush as prodigy as she moves into the era of the Fairlight, global conflict, and becoming a masterful singer to rival Peter Gabriel. Farewell, last of the Phoenix tradition. You’ve carried us far”. That idea of this being the last novelty or ‘silly’ song. She would record other sillier songs, though there is a playfulness and a comedic side that she explored up until 1979/1980 that was not as common afterwards. Bush wanting to be seen as a serious artist and shed a particular image that the press had. I said how December Will Be Magic Again is child-like and has this innocence. Bush was only just in her twenties when she wrote the track, so one could appreciate why it had this slightly childish quality. Also, I feel Bush also wanted to appeal toa young demographic with a Christmas song. A day that she maybe associated more with children. But this idea of her. A sad transition. December Will Be Magic Again being one of the last songs that could be perceived as a little immature or juvenile. Her songwriting more serious and adult after that. You could say December Will Be Magic Again lacks real meat or any huge substance. I feel it light and slightness is one of its charms. It is this familiar and traditional Christmas song with some interesting edges and inclusions. That selection of characters. Oscar Wilde cropping up with Bing Crosby. From Kate Bush’s son, Bertie, in the song of the same name from Aerial to a trio of characters from a 1980 Christmas single, demonstration of her songwriting brilliance and breadth. I will bring you more examples of this in…

THE next edition.

FEATURE: Kate Bush: The Tour of Life: The Pianistic Purity of Her First Three Albums

FEATURE:

 

 

Kate Bush: The Tour of Life

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

 

The Pianistic Purity of Her First Three Albums

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SOMETHING that Stuart Maconie…

said on his BBC Radio 6 Music weekend show with Mark Radcliffe recently struck a chord with me. He said that he prefers Kate Bush’s first few albums because of their pianistic priority. That barer and perhaps more emotionally raw quality. There are a few distinct phases to Kate Bush’s career. 1978’s The Kick Inside, 1978’s Lionheart and 1980’s Never for Ever did see developments and evolution. Although piano is key and core to those albums, Bush did incorporate the Fairlight CMI on 1980’s Never for Ever. She was already friends with Peter Gabriel. He joined her on stage as part of her 1979 The Tour of Life for a benefit gig. That was to remember Bill Duffield, who was part of her team, and was killed after the warm-up gig in Poole. From then, Bush and Gabriel did work together. She was on his album and Gabriel took part in Bush’s 1979 Christmas special, Kate. Peter Gabriel was already using the Fairlight CMI in his work, and he opened Kate Bush’s eyes to its possibilities. So progressive and advanced, it could produce so many different sounds and effects. However, I still associate Never for Ever with a certain delicate and romantic nature. Songs like Delius (Song of Summer), Blow Away (For Bill) and The Infant Kiss could have fitted on her first couple of albums. Whilst there are elements of Lionheart that are bolder and different from The Kick Inside, both are very piano-led. Never for Ever is a little more experimental in terms of the technology and electronic influence of the Fairlight CMI. The next phase was from 1982’s The Dreaming and 1985’s Hounds of Love. Both albums emboldened and heightened by the Fairlight CMI. Bush as solo producer, these are very different but ambitious. Extraordinary and layered. 1989’s The Sensual World and 1993’s The Red Shoes could be seen as the next phase, whilst her work from 2005’s Aerial onwards marks a new phase and chapter.

You can isolate The Kick Inside, Lionheart and Never for Ever. Bush going from being produced by Andrew Powell on her debut, assisting him on Lionheart, then working with Jon Kelly on Never for Ever. Each album a step on from the previous. The Kick Inside is my favourite album ever, and I think one reason is because of the piano. The beauty of Bush’s playing. Her phrasing, expressions and style. Critics were comparing her with Joni Micthell and Carole King in 1978. Bush respected those artists, though she was very different. Less confessional. Her playing, I feel, broader and lighter. There is drama and sadness in some songs, though there is also delight, flights of fancy, joy, seductions, curiosity and wide-eyed wonder too. Such a broad palette. Kate Bush underrated as a pianist. I can see why Stuart Maconie loves the pianistic quality of those first three albums. Some see that purity as a negative. Hounds of Love and The Dreaming more respected and loved because they are fuller and more experimental. In the sense you get more genres and sounds blended. Bigger productions and perhaps more musical depth. The range of instruments gave Bush license to expand her horizons and what she was writing. Perhaps that natural nuance when you experience these layered and deep songs. That takes something away from the beauty of her playing. I have seen some who say the arrangements are basic or her playing developed and got better. I can appreciate that she is phenomenal on later albums like Aerial and 50 Words for Snow (2011). I feel the piano on her first three albums perfectly compliment her vocals. Think about all thew characters Kate Bush inhabits and how she was so distinct from her contemporaries. The reason I come back to her first three albums, especially The Kick Inside, is the piano. Her favourite instrument and her passion, you can sense her heart and soul in every performance.

If you had to ask which Kate Bush ‘period’ or run of albums were their favourites, most would go from The Dreaming to The Sensual World inclusive. I have not really seen anyone else discussing this. The importance of her first three albums. Why the piano is so essential and effective. Kate Bush herself distanced herself a bit from those albums. She was not producing on her own, so she had limitations to what she could include and how much control she had. I do think that from The Dreaming on, she was happier as an artist, as she was producing so got the final say. She was not having to compete or compromise. Perhaps she feels her songwriting was not its best. I would say The Dreaming and Hounds of Love are more masculine albums. Bolder and more percussive. Bush might have felt the first few albums were a little lacking in gravel and punch. That an effete or slightly unambitious or undercooked musical element was there. A single dimension when you focus on the piano. Elton John was and is an idol of Kate Bush’s. You feel like her love of the piano was because of him. When she became more experimental, artists like Peter Gabriel, Frank Zappa and David Bowie more in her consciousness. One cannot overstate the importance of her earliest songs and Kate Bush on the piano. How they captured the attention of her mentor, David Gilmour. Last year, Music Radar discussed The Man with the Child in His Eyes. Included on The Kick Inside, we learn about Kate Bush’s early life and how the piano spoke to her:

“Catherine’s work demonstrated a distinctive, albeit quirky, voice, yet there was something more broadly resonant about this early tranche of songs. Perhaps there was somebody out there who could market her music.

Using an Akai tape recorder, Catherine and her brothers taped over fifty of her original compositions. Next, Paddy and John hit-up an array of music industry-adjacent contacts, met via their own folk scene adventures, with the aim of eventually shopping Catherine’s demo to the big labels.

A few A&Rs did hear the demo, but some were daunted by either her youth, or the jarring oddness of Kate’s high-register vocal and distinctly intellectual musical universe. Sadly, everybody passed.

Catherine’s story might well have ended there, were it not for the interjection of John Bush’s good friend Ricky Hopper.

Hopper, a close Cambridge University chum of Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour, had been trying to help John get his sister’s music heard to no avail.

Upon hearing that Gilmour (then riding high after the release of Floyd’s 1972 opus The Dark Side of the Moon) was on the look-out for new artists to nurture, Hopper decided to pay Gilmour a personal visit.

“A friend of mine [Ricky], (that was) a friend of her brother arrived on my doorstep one day with rather squeaky demos of her,” Gilmour told the BBC’s Tracks of my Tears in 2006.

Enamoured by what he heard, and excited at the prospect of what she might be able to achieve with the right backing, Gilmour knew Kate was worth his time.

But David also knew that the business-minded execs would likely not share his enthusiasm for a teenager who clearly needed a fair amount of development work.

“The songs were too idiosyncratic,” David told The New Statesman in 2005. “It was just Kate Bush, this little schoolgirl who was maybe 15, singing away over a piano. You needed decent ears to hear the potential, and I didn’t think there were many people with those working in record companies. Yet I was convinced from the beginning that this girl had remarkable talent”.

I think about Kate Bush in the summer of 1976. PROG published a feature last year about The Kick Inside and the making of that. We learn how Bush got up early, practiced her scales, wet off to dance class and then played piano late into the night: “I’d get up in the morning, practise scales at my piano, go off dancing, and then in the evening I’d come back and play the piano all night,” she told VH1, recalling the remarkably hot summer of 1976. “I had all the windows open and I used to write until four in the morning. I got a letter of complaint from a neighbour who was basically saying, ‘Shut up!’ They got up at five to do shift work and my voice carried the length of the street”. Going back to where we started, and Stuart Maconie showing his love and appreciate of Kate Bush’s first few albums. I would agree with him in terms of their superiority and the purity of the piano. The pianistic beauty and enduring wonder of them. Like him, those albums are…

SO special to me.