FEATURE: Sheer Electricity: The Avalanches’ Since I Left You at Twenty-Five

FEATURE:

 

 

Sheer Electricity

The Avalanches’ Since I Left You at Twenty-Five

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EVEN though it got its…

worldwide release in early-2001, The Avalanches’ debut album, Since I Left You, was released in the group’s native Australia on 27th November, 2000. Produced by group members Robbie Chater and Darren Seltmann (In 2000, the Avalanches had at least three core members, with the debut album being produced by Robbie Chater and Darren Seltmann, with Tony Di Blasi also a founding member), it would be sixteen years since they followed Since I Left You with Wildflowers. Since then, they have been more productive. The Avalanches now consists of Tony Di Blasi, as Darren Seltmann parted company. We Will Always Love you came out in 2020, and there are plans for a fourth studio album. However, I still think that their debut is their most startling and best. Songs rich with samples, you can hear the precision and passion that went into this album. Collages of sounds and samples that make these incredible songs. The album was recorded and produced at two separate, near-identical studios by Robbie Chater and Darren Seltmann, exchanging audio mixes of records they sampled. After the success of Since I Left You in Australia, there was this wider release. It is a tragedy to think that this amazing album might never have reached the U.K. if it did not fare well in Australia. I think its title track is one of the most joyous things ever released! Other highlights include Electricity and Frontier Psychiatrist. There are some reviews and features that I want to get to. As we are approaching the twenty-fifth anniversary of this masterpiece, it is important to bring in some context and exploration. Stereogum marked twenty years of Since I Left You in their feature from 2020. One of the biggest takeaways is how an album like Since I Left You could not exist today. Plunderphonics is a music genre characterised by the use of recognisable musical samples that are manipulated, recontextualised, and layered to create new works. This is what Robbie Chater and Darren Seltmann did with abandon for Since I Left You. Not that concerned by copyright laws, today, they would be sued and prevented from using many of the samples. It is a shame that there are such restrictions for those who want to use samples in their work:

“The Avalanches don’t make albums like Since I Left You anymore. Nobody does, really. For one thing, they legally can’t. The Melbourne production crew’s chosen genre was known as plunderphonics for a reason: Practitioners gleefully plucked samples from record after record without regard for copyright law, overlaying them into vibrant collages. The rise of this movement in the late ’80s and early ’90s was a beautiful wild-frontier moment in music, one documented insightfully in Philip Sherburne’s review of plunderphonics provocateurs the KLF’s ambient techno lodestar Chill Out. But such blatant flaunting of intellectual property could never last forever. Once the lawsuits started flying, rappers and ravers alike had to pivot to expensive cleared samples and alternate techniques.

At that point plunderphonics mostly disappeared into the realm of memory and dream, which is where Since I Left You already existed. The Avalanches’ debut floats through the liminal space between the crate-pillaging hip-hop visionaries like the Dust Brothers and Prince Paul were spearheading around the turn of the ’90s and the MP3 orgy overseen by festival-slaying mashup king Girl Talk in the second half of the aughts. Conventional wisdom suggests it’s great party music but even better for the pre-dawn comedown after a night out, when the endorphin rush is over and sleep is setting in but you’re still too abuzz to fully shut down yet. This is all true, but as good as Since I Left You sounds in the earliest hours of Sunday morning, I can testify from recent experience that it’s a fine soundtrack for making Thanksgiving crafts with your kids on a Sunday afternoon. It’s remarkable music regardless of context.

Mostly, though, Since I Left You is about mood and texture. It’s less an album than a feeling you get lost in for an hour at a time. Though many of the samples have burrowed their way into my brain as thoroughly as any original hook — from “We can book a flight tonight!” to “That boy needs therapy!” — there are no lead vocals, just an endless parade of sounds stitched together seamlessly: clattering beats, sliced-up rap verses and disco choruses, keyboards that squelch and swirl, flickers of melody looped until they achieve some kind of zen state. It’s endlessly busy, yet a wistful calm hangs over everything, a warm, woozy nostalgia for a moment you’re not sure ever really existed”.

I am going to end with a review from Pitchfork that, oddly, seems to have been published at the end of 1999 – a year before it came out in Australia! I am not sure how they managed that, though I will bypass that anomaly and focus on a rare positive review from them. Before that, I want to come to DJ Mag and their retrospective. One of the all-time classics of Electronic music, The Avalanches’ debut album still sounds so wild and overflowing with ideas. Nothing like it has come since. Maybe an album like Donuts by J Dilla (2006), but even that does not pack in as many samples as Since I Left You. The album plays with your mind and senses! It isn’t rapid like many Hip-Hop albums where there are a lot of samples. Since I Left You is quite mellow and laid back, though it crams in so much: “But there’s a mind-boggling amount going on at all times. Anywhere between 900 and 3,500 individual samples employed during the making of the album ping off one another constantly, rising and fusing and fizzing away like bubbles in a champagne glass, or molecular chemistry writ large”:

“The Avalanches’ creative isolation in the wake of ‘Since I Left You’ was mildly ironic, given that the album itself was fixated with the allure of tasting all the world’s cultural fruits. Originally entitled ‘Pablo’s Cruise’, with an overt concept about chasing love from port to port, today ‘Since I Left You’ stands as the last foghorn of a faded age.

Word-of-mouth phenomena like ‘Since I Left You’ still take place in the digital era, but they aren’t passed around on burned CD-Rs, and you’d be hard pressed to find any album with a month’s gap between release in different markets, let alone a year. As Mark Richardson elegantly wrote when Pitchfork anointed ‘Since I Left You’ as the 10th best LP of the 2000s, “The Avalanches started in Australia in late 2000 and took the slow boat west, moving from one 56k modem to the next.”

“It’s hard to describe just how different the world was back then,” Chater reflects. “My favourite music magazines from the UK took, like, two months to arrive in Melbourne on the boat. You had to be passionate to discover new music when we were geographically very distant. Our album came out here and drew a good reception, but it was nothing crazy — maybe 1,000 or so sold. Then you find out there’s a buzz brewing half the world away. I remember we were in a shared house on the dole, and one of my flatmates shouted down the hall, ‘There’s someone from England on the phone! Your album’s debuted at number 8...’ It just doesn’t compute.”

By the time ‘Since I Left You’ arrived in America, fully 12 months after the album’s Australian release, the world had profoundly changed. The after-effects of the 9/11 terror attacks caused a schism in the role of aviation. Prior to the album’s release some of the group, including Di Blasi, had never ventured outside their national borders, so regarded jet-setting as a classy, romantic folly. As a love letter to carefree travel, ‘Since I Left You’ inadvertently wound up as a time capsule itself, tying a bow atop an era that had lasted for over a half-century, yet conclusively ended in a matter of seconds.

A completely unrepeatable feat of anarcho-surrealism, ‘Frontier Psychiatrist’ was 2001’s least-likely crossover hit, etched into impressionable brains like fingers into putty. If the notion of ‘Frontier Psychiatrist’ gatecrashing the upper regions of the charts seems strange on reflection, it appears even more bizarre under a microscope. Look at the UK top 20 on 21st July ‘01 and you’ll find The Avalanches nestled next to Robbie Williams, Roger Sanchez, Ian Van Dahl, D12, Aaliyah, Shaggy and Usher. One of these things, politely, is not like the other.

Meshing rented Western movies and a recording of Canadian comedians Wayne and Shuster, ‘Frontier Psychiatrist’’s musical motifs manage to be as lucid as each of its 37 spoken word snippets. Some might vouch for the lilting calypso that guides us onto the cruise liner deck as the “record-ecord-ecord” winds to a close. Others prefer “the violin!” — Laurie Anderson’s voice again — which bursts from the rubble of crunching breakbeats and garbled nonsense, then glides through the track like scissors through wrapping paper. And though wildly scribbling turntables were commonplace at the time, who would ever think to scratch over a parrot?

Horses bray, grandfather clocks spin backward and some unnamed craftsman is making a set of false teeth in perpetuity. God bless whoever sold The Avalanches the weed when they made this one.

“The promos for ‘Frontier’ and ‘Since I Left You’ really took us to strange places,” marvels Chater. “We were flown to Germany to collect an MTV Award for Best Video — just a bunch of shy, jetlagged kids wandering around backstage, not really knowing what to do. This dude comes over to me and he’s like, ‘Jay likes your record’. I look across the room and JAY-Z is standing there, nodding at me. All you can do is laugh, like, ‘Honestly, what the fuck is going on?’”.

I am ending with a review from Pitchfork. The one that someone came out in 1999. Regardless, is this wonder of an album that was unlike anything around it. It could have failed and confounded people. Instead, it built this reputation and popularity. I remember when it came out and being struck by how bold and imaginative it was. How much work and passion goes into every track! It is such a shame that we will never hear an album like this ever again:

“Given the fact that Since I Left You, the debut album from Aussie party animals the Avalanches, contains over 900 individual samples, it's pretty incredible that this thing got released in the first place. The fact that they sample everything from long-forgotten R&B; records to golf instructionals to Madonna's "Holiday" makes it even more impressive. But what really makes this album brilliant is not as much the volume or quality of the samples used as the way that they're employed. The Avalanches have managed to build a totally unique context for all these sounds, while still allowing each to retain its own distinct flavor. As a result, Since I Left You sounds like nothing else.

Much of the beauty of the opening title song and its accompanying track, "Stay Another Season," lies in the way that the Avalanches turn obvious sonic mismatches into something all their own. It's not too common that you'll hear a sample of a horse, a rastafarian singer, and an invitation to a Club Med disco all in the same song, but somehow it makes perfect sense under the masterful direction of the Avalanches.

Indeed, many of the most interesting moments on Since I Left You come with these mismatches. "A Different Feeling" sets horn blasts from 1974 against video game sounds from 1988-- the kind of bizarre pairing of classic soul with futuristic sounds that constitutes a substantial part of Avalanches magic. "Radio," which is slated for release as the band's next Australian single, centers around a mantra-like vocal sample, a thick disco bassline, and bits and pieces of filtered guitars and synthesizers.

Throughout Since I Left You, sampled vocals are used almost like percussion. But rather than utilizing the frenetic, intricate rhythms seen in most contemporary rap, the Avalanches repeat small vocal samples over and over again, melding them into their rump-rocking grooves. And while many of these songs rely heavily on the repetition of beats and samples, no single part of the record is allowed to stagnate. Something is always being mixed up-- a sample transposed up or down a few steps, a beat chopped up into little pieces and seamlessly restructured, an unexpected vocal sample popping up out of nowhere before being swallowed up by the massive sound the Avalanches have concocted.

Another key element of Since I Left You is the keen sense of humor the Avalanches display throughout. And "Frontier Psychiatrist," one of two singles already released from the album, is simply one of the funniest songs I've heard in ages. Relying on a heavy, Ninja Tune-style beat for backing, "Frontier Psychiatrist" busts out samples from 37 spoken word recordings, resulting in an oddball, hilarious pastiche of phrases like, "You're a nut! You're crazy in the coconut!" And some brilliant scratching on a sample of a parrot.

Though it contains many distinct songs and moods, Since I Left You is a remarkably coherent record on all fronts. Aside from the fact that the Avalanches achieve a certain uniform "sound" on this album, subtler elements come into play as well. Songs blend seamlessly into one another. Samples reappear from song to song. And the album's final cut, "Extra Kings," with its breezy flute and psychedelic swells of sound, puts a brilliant twist on the album's title track, fading out with that same chipmunky voice lamenting, "I've tried but I just can't get you/ Ever since the day I left you."

In releasing Since I Left You, the Avalanches have essentially brought hundreds of slabs of inanimate vinyl to life. Though it was no doubt meticulously constructed, this is an album brimming with spontaneity, joy, sadness, humor, reflection, and general human-ness. With its high fun factor and subtle traces of deeper emotion, Since I Left You is the perfect record for the party, and for the period of regret and recovery after the party”.

On 27th November, the genius Since I Left You turns twenty-five. Released in Australia in 2000 and the following year internationally, I do hope that there are podcasts or a reissue of Since I Left You for the anniversary (though there was a Deluxe release in 2021). This dizzying and enormously accomplished album some would say should not exist because it plunders samples and modifies them. However, I think the fact that there is such strictness around copyright makes Since I Left You an example of why that should be relaxed. A quarter-century after its release and The Avalanches’ debut album still…

UTTERLY exhilarating and unforgettable!

FEATURE: Spotlight: My First Time

FEATURE:

 

 

Spotlight

My First Time

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THIS is the chance to spotlight…

PHOTO CREDIT: Cloe Morrison

the Bristol Post-Punk band, My First Time. Consisting of Isaac Stroud-Allen (guitar/lead vocals), Jordanna Forsey (drums), James Mellen (guitar/vocals) and Niamh Jones (also known as Naia) (bass/vocals), they have released a string of great singles this year, including Much Better, and Sippy Cup. I want to bring in a few interviews from this year with the band. I will end with a very recent interview from NME. I am going to start off by going back to April, and an interview with DORK. Having met whilst studying at university in Bristol, there is this organic and easy chemistry between the members. DORK found out more about The First Time and music that possesses “raw wit and thunderous hooks to challenge indie pretensions”. Make sure thew quartet are on your radar:

“Their path from campus collaboration to rising force in British alternative music wasn’t exactly pre-plotted. Though as it turns out, those university days weren’t wasted – Isaac’s music business studies would later prove instrumental in securing their record deal. It’s the kind of pragmatic detail that feels perfectly aligned with a band whose new single ‘Much Better’ takes aim at the modern obsession with artistic purity.

Speaking of that latest release, the band pulls no punches in describing its intent: “‘Much Better’ is an anti-music anthem. Stop caring about meaning finding yourself, or the importance of carefully curated art. Start cashing cheques and worm your way into real money.” They continue with delicious irony, “‘Much Better’ is for the social media business gurus that have the solution to complete self-actualisation: COLD HARD CASH.”

This refreshing cynicism comes paired with an equally unvarnished songwriting approach. When asked about his lyrical inspirations, Isaac cuts straight to the marrow: “Anything in the real world. Real world shit… ‘I’m a modern man, I piss with my phone in my hands’. That’s the sort of stuff I’m drawn to. The squeamish, the queasy, the words or pronunciations that make your hair stand up. The grease, the moisture. The hard snap of a belt buckle.”

Their character-based approach to songwriting serves a deeper purpose, too. “It allows you to take a viewpoint that’s rarely shared,” the band explain. “By taking the viewpoint of an arsehole, you can hear just how insane their thoughts really are. It’s like a messed-up therapy session where you’re speaking to a drunken oaf whose mind can’t change. Sometimes, all you can do is respond with an emoji. 🤷‍♂️. Proper deep shit.”

While their early days drew inspiration from Bristol’s politically charged atmosphere – “When we first started out, the likes of Idles (who are Bristol based) were definitely an inspiration in getting into more politically-sided music” – they’ve since evolved toward something more personal. “But now, where we’ve taken the rest of our songs, our inspirations lie more in the areas that shaped us when we were kids.”

That evolution is evident in their creative trajectory. “‘Man of Ill Repute’ and ‘Brand New’ are songs that are over two years old for us. They are some of the first songs we wrote, so releasing stuff like ‘Much Better’ feels much better.” And there’s more where that came from – “So many songs. We’re sweating buckets writing at the moment. New songs in the set, as well. We’re all salivating to release new stuff.”

The band’s ambitions for the future are as unfiltered as their lyrics: “Release lots of new songs, tour, gig and achieve a level of music domination on a global level.” But it’s not all world domination and industry critique – they maintain a charmingly diverse array of outside interests: “Badminton, tennis, Top Trumps, pastries, Dairy Lea Dunkers, Tinder, binge drinking and hanging out with our loved ones”.

I am interested to see where My First Time head. There will be call and demand for a debut album or E.P. It is hard to define their sound in terms of genre. I guess they are more Electro-Punk. I am going to move to Kerrang! and their interview from August. Commending their “impulsive, cutthroat songwriting”, they told Kerrang! about, among other things, their “abrasive lyricism” and “their mystery synth player”. I am really excited to see where the band head. After such a big year, you get the feeling that 2026 will be their most successful year yet. In terms of festival bookings and maybe releasing a full project. They are among the most hyped – and rightfully so – bands in this country:

“Everything about My First Time leaves you ravenous for more. Their witty personalities, their spontaneous songs and even their live show – where a mysterious fifth member known only as “tracksuit man” or “Bez” will often make an appearance on synth for a grand total of one song. It’s not quite Sleep Token or PRESIDENT, but K! goes in search of some answers.

“He drinks a lot backstage,” teases Isaac. “It's quite funny, because he's just by himself for 30 minutes… he’s the brains behind the operation.”

“It's funny that this is his whole bit, [because] he’s a very talented musician. He grew up playing classical piano,” adds James. Will ‘tracksuit man’ play any further part at future shows? You’ll have to come and find out for yourself, warns Naia.

“He's like Father Christmas. If you wish hard enough, he'll be there.”

As they continue to toil away in the studio, My First Time’s key ingredient is to keep surprising themselves, while having as much fun as possible. To sum up this ethos, we need only directly quote Isaac on Bodybag: ‘Don’t be such a square.’

“You don't want to be boring,” urges Isaac, with an imaginary raised eyebrow. “The most important thing, no matter what we're doing, is to never be dull”.

I am going to end with parts of a new interview from NME. If you get to see My First Time live in the future, then they are well worth seeking out. Although the band have been about for a little bit, they have come to mass attention this year, though I still think there are many that have not discovered this incredible band. My First Time met whilst studying in 2021 and have made big strides in a short time. Speaking with My First Time’s vocalist, Isaac Stroud-Allen, around the release of Sippy Cup, there are some interesting takeaways from the interview. This is a band that is going to take over the world soon enough. It is the blend of the cutting-edge and ferocious and the humorous that makes My First Time such a dynamic, fascinating and revered band:

“As much as that fun and humour are a vital part of what My First Time are doing, there’s a vicious fury behind all their music. “Deep down, we are a bitter generation. And for good reason,” says Stroud-Allen. All four band members are in their early twenties and spent a formative part of their youth in COVID-enforced lockdown. “We were constantly lectured about the importance of coming together for a greater purpose. Then we were let out into a world that’s fallen to pieces.”

He continues: “Everything that was seen as important, such as human interaction and togetherness, has seemingly been replaced by people just being fucking horrible to one another.” These frenzied times demand frenzied music. “I want people to come to our shows with an awareness that we are just getting fucked over.“

Although My First Time are comfortable with being known as a ‘political band’, they don’t want to tell people how to think. “There’s so much music, film and art that’s just so beige. If we’re fucked off about something, we’ll put that into a song,” says Mellen. “We are ‘Generation Fucked’ but if you think about that for too long, you just get miserable,” he adds, which is why their live shows are so joyful.

PHOTO CREDIT: Cloe Morrison

“It’s a nice type of escape as well because it’s not so much an ignorance or a neglect for what’s going on, it’s a triumphant acknowledgement that everyone is in on,” adds Jones. “It’s us saying ‘we know how shit this is, but look at how this shit can breed something so positive’.”

“I want people to come to our shows with an awareness that we are just getting fucked over” – Isaac Stroud-Allen

As well as buzzy performances at festivals such as The Great Escape, Dot To Dot and Wilderness, My First Time’s first London headline gig in May saw them pack out Third Man Records, turning its basement into a sweaty mass of bodies. As promised, each of the band’s shows so far has been a frenzy of excitement, catharsis and community. “It’s so validating to see that what we’re building means something to other people,” says Mellen. “We all found community going to gigs when we were younger. It’s sometimes tough to properly explain it, but you do just want to be a part of something”.

My First Time will round off a very busy and successful year I am sure with another song. I think they are probably planning what comes in 2026. There will be summer festival dates and opportunities for them to play internationally. Go and follow this amazing quartet. I am a bit new to them, though I can see myself following them for a long time to come. It is clear that this band live up to all the hype. Such brilliant and original music, this is a band that you cannot…

MISS out on.

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Follow My First Time

PHOTO CREDIT: Cloe Morrison

Instagram:

https://www.instagram.com/my1sttime/

TikTok:

https://www.tiktok.com/@my1sttimeband

YouTube:

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

Facebook:

https://www.facebook.com/my1sttimeband/

Spotify:

https://open.spotify.com/artist/2YCAJa2kGotOZAe5lWC4D0?si=5gwi0BdsRGytulZGUmDSnQ

FEATURE: Try to See It My Way… Why Recent Casting News Regarding Sam Mendes’s Beatles Films Is Hugely Positive

FEATURE:

 

 

Try to See It My Way…

IN THIS PHOTO: It has been announced that Aimee Lou Wood is a frontrunner to play Patti Boyd (for which Boyd has given her blessing) in Sam Mendes’s films about The Beatles, due for release in 2028/PHOTO CREDIT: Rosaline Shahnavaz for The Sunday Times

Why Recent Casting News Regarding Sam Mendes’s Beatles Films Is Hugely Positive

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WHEN the actors who are set…

IN THIS PHOTO: Sam Mendes (left) introduced the main cast of his upcoming four films about The Beatles on stage at CinemaCon earlier in the year/PHOTO CREDIT: Getty Images

to play The Beatles in four separate Sam Mendes films were announced earlier in the year, there was mixed reaction. I assume that the four films about The Beatles are not solely about the four members, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, Ringo Starr and John Lennon. I assume, from what we have heard, that the films will focus mainly on each member, but there will be interaction with the other members. Sam Medes will do justice to the Fab Four. And with the blessing of surviving members Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, we will see what comes about in 2028:

“Paul Mescal and Barry Keoghan have been confirmed as part of the all-star line-up who will play members of the Beatles in four major new films about the band.

Normal People and Gladiator II actor Mescal will portray Sir Paul McCartney, while Saltburn star Keoghan will step into Sir Ringo Starr's shoes.

The acting supergroup will also feature Harris Dickinson, who was most recently seen opposite Nicole Kidman in Babygirl, as John Lennon.

And Joseph Quinn will go from Marvel's Fantastic Four to the Fab Four, playing George Harrison in the big-screen quadrilogy, which will be directed by Sir Sam Mendes.

The Oscar-winning director was joined by the four actors for the announcement at the CinemaCon convention in Las Vegas on Monday.

Each film will focus on a different member of the legendary group.

"Each one is told from the particular perspective of just one of the guys," Sir Sam told the event. "They intersect in different ways - sometimes overlapping, sometimes not.

"They're four very different human beings. Perhaps this is a chance to understand them a little more deeply. But together, all four films will tell the story of the greatest band in history."

The films will be released "in proximity" to each other in April 2028.

The director explained: "I just felt the story of the band was too huge to fit into a single movie, and that turning it into a TV mini-series just somehow didn't feel right”.

As a massive fan of The Beatles, when the main cast was announced, I was a bit miffed. In terms of the actors, I was looking for less well-known names who could get a break playing a member of the band, rather than established actors being cast. I guess their star power and cinematic pull is a big reason behind the casting. In terms of resemblance, one could argue that Barry Keoghan is best in terms of him resembling Ringo Starr. Paul Mescal too as Paul McCartney. I am not too sure regarding Joseph Quinn as George Harrison and Harris Dickinson as John Lennon. Also, in terms of casting, what out Liverpudlian actors? The ages of the four actors in relation to one another and even their heights. How convincing will they be?! I have come around more to the casting decisions, as the films will bring existing Beatles fans and new fans in. It will introduce their music to a whole new generation. Also, the pedigree of Paul Mescal, Harris Dickinson, Barry Keoghan and Joseph Quinn is clear. Humour is a massive part of The Beatles’ story, and I think the four have comedic chops and will bond easily. There is still massive interest in The Beatles. In December, it will be sixty years since Rubber Soul was released. Their sixth studio album, it is my favourite release of theirs. Next month sees the release of Anthology 4. You can pre-order the album here. The Beatles Anthology documentary series premiered on Disney+ on 26th November. Barely a year goes by without a bit of Beatles news. It is always welcomed! Books come out all the time and the fact we have two original members with us who love to talk about the band (when asked) means that the band’s legacy and meaning will ever dim. 2028 is going to be a massive year. Not only do we get these films released. There are various Beatles album anniversaries, including the sixty-fifth anniversary of their debut album, Please Please Me, and the sixtieth anniversary of The Beatles (a.k.a. The While Album).

I guess we could not judge the four films and what they would be like based off the announcement of who had been cast as Paul McCartney, John Lennon, Ringo Starr and George Harrison. People did feel that a lack of authenticity regarding accents – a lack of Liverpudlian actors – could extend to the actors cast to play Yoko Ono or Linda Eastman. In terms of making the wrong choices. However, in the last few days, there have been some very pleasing casting announcements. I almost feel that the more minor characters are more important, as they are less discussed. They also will give the four films a life and world beyond the band members. Getting the casting right there is crucial. Patti Boyd, who was married to George Harrison, has given her blessing to the actor who will most likely play her: Aimee Lou Wood. The esteemed and hugely respected actor, who is a wonderful comedic talent, will play the wonderful Patti Boyd. In terms of resemblance, I do think there are similarities between Wood and Boyd. It will be intriguing to see what era we are talking about. Maybe not when Patti Boyd and George Harrison first met (that would be on the set of The Beatles’ debut film, A Hard Day’s Night, of 1964, where Patti Boyd was in the cast). Also, some other names have been announced. Yoko Ono, far from splitting The Beatles up, was hugely important to their history and success! I think that she provided John Lennon inspiration and support to create some of his best work with the band. She was someone maligned and attacked who we should view as the brilliant human she was and is. Anna Sawai is most likely going to be be cast as Ono. I would love to see one or more of the films to be set maybe in 1967 or 1968. That would be between Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967) and The Beatles (1968). Magical Mystery Tour came out in 1967 too. Seeing this relatively new marriage of Patti Boyd and George Harrison, and Yoko Ono and John Lennon intensifying their relationship (they married in 1969).

IN THIS PHOTO: Anna Sawai is hotly tipped to play Yoko Ono in Sam Mendes’s Beatles films/PHOTO CREDIT: Angella Choe for Wonderland

The two incredible actors playing these hugely important and strong women. As important as The Beatles themselves are, so too are the amazing women they married. Far from the dismissive and sexist term, ‘muse’, these women were brilliantly talented in their own right. Whilst Yoko Ono and Patti Boyd influenced some of the band’s most powerful and enduring songs – such as Something (from 1969’s Abbey Road) -, they also had their own important and successful careers. The casting news is speculation at the moment, so it is not 100% done that Aimee Lou Wood and Anna Sawai will play Patti Boyd and Yoko Ono, as Variety report:

“The deals for Sawai and Wood are not signed, however, and it’s not certain they will be cast. A representative of Sony Pictures had no comment.

As for the rest of the Fab Four, Paul Mescal is playing Paul McCartney and Barry Keoghan will star as Ringo Starr. Saoirse Ronan has been cast as McCartney’s first wife, Linda, who also performed in his post-Beatles band, Wings; Mia McKenna-Bruce is set to play Starr’s first wife, Maureen Starkey.

Mendes is making four separate movies, one from each Beatles member’s point of view. They will intersect to capture the band’s improbable journey from Liverpool to the center of global culture, leading to their 1970 breakup. The tagline, in other words, is “Each man has his own story, but together they are legendary.” All four installments will debut on the big screen in April 2028 in what Sony Pictures is dubbing the “first binge-able theatrical experience.” The exact release timeline is unclear.

Sawai, 33, rose to fame in Japan as a singer in the girl group Faky before breaking through internationally on the Apple TV+ series “Pachinko.” She scored an Emmy for the series “Shogun,” making her the first Japanese actress to win for lead actress. Sawai will also appear onscreen in director David Leitch’s heist film “How to Rob a Bank” and the Jeremy Allen White and Austin Butler-led crime drama “Enemies.”

Wood, 31, first starred in the Netflix teen dramedy “Sex Education” over four seasons from 2019 to 2023. She’s also appeared opposite Bill Nighy in the 2022 film “Living,” and she earned her first Emmy nomination in 2025 for her role in the third season of HBO’s “The White Lotus”.

IN THIS PHOTO: Might there be a role for the peerless Jodie Comer in one or more of the upcoming Beatles films?/PHOTO CREDIT: Scandebergs for GQ

In April, writing for The Guardian, film critic Peter Bradshaw bemoaned the lack of Liverpudlian talent announced for Sam Mendes’s Beatles films. However, he did suggest one name who I think would be perfect. In terms of playing Ringo Starr’s wife, Mo Starkey. Jodie Comer resembles the late great Mary Cox (her birth name), so I do hope that Comer gets that role, as she is one of our finest actors. It would also encourage more screen time for a part of The Beatles’ story that is not discussed enough. I think Mo Starkey is written out slightly. In terms of the most important women to The Beatles, few could compete with Linda Eastman. Paul McCartney’s first wife, we lost the photographer and musician in 1998. She was an extraordinary talent. We saw her in the Peter Jackson’s Beatles documentary, Get Back, in 2021. Again, a woman who inspired some phenomenal songs. Among them is Maybe I’m Amazed. That song appeared on Paul McCartney’s debut album, 1970’s McCartney. Linda McCartney also appeared on various Paul McCartney albums and she was a member of Wings. In terms of resemblance and actors who could play Linda Eastman, there are American actors Blake Lively, Emma Roberts, in addition to Australian actors Teresa Palmer and Olivia DeJonge. Even British actor Imogen Poots and Gabriella Wilde. However, American-Irish actor Saoirse Ronan is tipped to play Linda Eastman/McCartney. As this recent article confirms, it is another casting decision that is not a done deal. However, it seems likely Ronan will be cast:

“According to Deadline, multiple sources have claimed that the star of Little Women and Lady Bird will play the first wife of Paul McCartney in the upcoming set of biopics. The singer will be played by Paul Mescal, who starred alongside Ronan in the sci-fi drama Foe.

Sony has yet to make an official confirmation.

IN THIS PHOTO: Saoirse Ronan is rumoured to play Linda Eastman alongaside Paul Mescal’s Paul McCartney/PHOTO CREDIT: Nathan Merchadier for Numéro Magazine

Each of the four films will tell the story of a different Beatle with Barry Keoghan as Ringo Starr, Joseph Quinn as George Harrison and Harris Dickinson as John Lennon. Dickinson, who recently received acclaim for his directorial debut, Urchin, has said the prospect is “frightening” in an interview with the Times.

In July, Starr said he asked for changes in the script after meeting with Mendes but is now “much more satisfied with how he’s depicted in the script”. The scripts are being written by Jez Butterworth, Peter Straughan and Jack Thorne.

“The Beatles changed my understanding of music,” Mendes said in April. “I’ve been trying to make a movie about them for years.” He added: “There had to be a way to tell the epic story for a new generation. I can assure you there is still plenty left to explore and I think we found a way to do that.”

Ronan has received four Oscar nominations and was last seen in The Outrun and Steve McQueen’s Blitz. She recently led the dark comedy Bad Apples, which premiered at the Toronto film festival, and will also be starring with Austin Butler in Deep Cuts, a music drama based on Holly Brickley’s debut novel.

Linda and Paul McCartney met in 1967 when she was a photographer and they were married up until her death in 1998. She was part of his later band Wings and was an animal rights activist who wrote vegetarian cookbooks and founded a successful food company”.

There are other key players that have yet to be cast. Their producer, George Martin, and roadie Mal Evans. There is also their manager, Brian Epstein. I guess these details and castings will happen later, as we are not sure exactly how many years these films will span and which people will need to be portrayed. However, as the Fab Four are locked in and the brilliant women who are underdiscussed when it comes to The Beatles are pretty much set in stone, it looks interesting. Some phenomenal actors who will do justice to Patti Boyd, Yoko Ono and Linda Eastman (McCartney). We will wait to hear if Mo Starkey plays a role in these films and who will portray her. There is a long way to go until 2028, so we will get teaser clips and more news close to release date. In the meantime, there is going to be plenty of Beatles-related activity. I wonder if we will get remastered and reissued releases of Beatles albums like Rubber Soul or A Hard Day’s Night. There will be some interesting books and I am sure we will even get another documentary. Definitely some solo Ringo Starr work. Hopefully a new album from Paul McCartney (his most recent album, McCartney III, was released in 2020). I, like so many Beatles fans, are excited to see what Sam Mendes delivers in 2028. It is going to be fascinating seeing The Beatles’ individual members get their own films, though there will be plenty of moments of them together through different periods. Proof that The Beatles’ influence legacy and influence is as strong today as ever. Incredible films that put in the spotlight…

THE legendary band.

FEATURE: The Death of MTV’s U.K. Channels: Why There Is Still a Place for Music Television

FEATURE:

 

 

The Death of MTV’s U.K. Channels

PHOTO CREDIT: Vision Graphixs/Pexels

Why There Is Still a Place for Music Television

__________

I don’t agree with people…

ILLUSTRATION CREDIT: Manhattan Design, New York

who say that, in the modern era where the digital is dominant, that we have no need for music television. With the rise in vinyl sales and formats like cassettes and C.D. still sustainable, I think people are keener to experience something tangible. The need for physical content will never die. I realise that the role of the music video is not as prominent and important as it was years ago, though most artists make music videos, and it is a way of expressing themselves and also introducing their music to potential fans. It is shocking to see the complete lack of music shows across the world. Even in the U.S., most of the televised musical performance are on chat shows. I guess that is a way of getting your music heard. In the U.K., we have Graham Norton and the odd talk show, though you have one artist playing a week and people are not necessarily tuning in to hear an artist. In terms of dedicated music shows, the only thing we have is Later… with Jools Holland. That has been on over three decades and, whilst excellent and a broad church regarding the artists featured, there has been no real viable alternative. Top of the Pops ended a long time ago and it seems that commissioners are unwilling to entertain the idea that a genuinely solid alternative could exist. I think there is a potential for a weekly music show to come out of Manchester or Salford. Where most of its shows was filmed out of BBC Television Centre, since 2022, Later… with Jools Holland has come from Alexandra Palace Theatre in North London. This is a gorgeous venue that allows all of this space to accommodate a host of artists. Rather than have one artist play on stage, stop the filming and then resume when the next act comes on, they each have their own stage in this circle/semicircle and you pan from one to the other. It gives the show a fluidity and more of a live feel.

It would be nice if there was a new music series from the north. In terms of breaking new artists and having this more varied music show that does more than hosting live performances and interviews, it does seem like there will no movement. I mention this, as it was recently announced that MTV is axing the last of its U.K. music channels after almost thirty years. NME reported the news that was first shared to BBC:

“MTV Music, MTV 80s, MTV 90s, Club MTV and MTV Live will all stop broadcasting after December 31, but their flagship channel, MTV HD, will remain on air. It shows reality series, including Naked Dating UK and Geordie Shore.

MTV launched in 1981 in the US, quickly becoming a staple of pop culture, having been tied to historic moments in music, including the world premiere of Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller’ video and the 16-hour broadcast of the Live Aid concerts in 1985.

There has been a marked shift in viewing habits since the channels’ heyday, with music videos more commonly consumed on YouTube and social media rather than television now.

A spokesman for MTV’s parent company, Paramount, declined to comment when approached by the BBC. Many fans, however, have taken to social media upon learning the news, with many pointing to a diminished brand identity for its ultimate demise.

“MTV was culturally and spiritually dead when it stopped airing music videos,” one wrote on X/Twitter. “Corporate-led decline of what was once the coolest brand in existence. Sad’”.

Maybe there is not a need for multiple music channels and decade-specific options. However, getting rid of all the U.K. MTV channels seems like a step too far. How much music television media does that leave us with?! I love Jools Holland’s show and I think that the spectacular venue, coupled with the calibre of artists that are invited each week, makes it essential viewing. It does show that there is a place for music television. I reject the idea that the music video is obsolete. Whilst perhaps not able to sustain an entire channel and day of scheduling, there is definitely a place for musical television that combines videos, live performances and archives. Independent music media and journalism is needed now more than ever. It could tie into a music channel. I keep coming back to that idea of a second music show on U.K. television. Do similar things to Later… with Jools Holland but also have its own angles. Featuring classical albums and do news stories and features. Year by year, the role and visibility of music television in the U.K. is dwindling. Last year, when Channel 4’s The Box was axed, The i Paper discussed “death knell for an artform that changed the world”:

“But at the same time, reality was starting to bite, and music became less important to MTV. It started in early 90s with The Real World – a show credited/blamed for launching the modern reality genre – but was soaring by 2002 with The Osbournes, and reached cultural saturation with the likes of Jersey Shore and The Hills after that. Suddenly, music videos were a respite from reality shows, filling in the gaps between Ozzy Osbourne picking up a dog turd and another fight between Heidi Montag and Spencer Pratt. Reality TV had taken over from the premiere of “Justify My Love” or “Black or White” videos as the youth’s topic of conversation. Gen X was growing up and wanted to turn that damn music down so they could hear their programme.

Then there was the rise of YouTube. In 2005, two years after “Crazy in Love” was released, a clunky video website launched at the same time as home broadband started to spread. Another two years later, in darkest Manchester, a friend came to my flat to get ready for a night out. Instead of putting the telly on, he headed over to my laptop to cue up some songs on YouTube, now owned by the mighty Google… the means of delivery had changed.

“MTV made a business decision to pivot to original programming and IP [intellectual property] revenue, but music videos on YouTube still garner billions of eyes every day,” says Schnur. MTV sensed the way the wind was blowing – they were no longer the gatekeepers and curators of playlists.

And then there was the rise of streaming, which meant people no longer bought albums and left all but the very biggest artists short-changed. The cost of music videos – especially for mid-tier artists without the deep pockets of Adele or Harry Styles – could no longer be justified as part of a campaign, with their call times, crews, choreographers, SFX and post-production. These are no longer an extension of the artist, but shop windows, and a lyric video on Vimeo or a self-filmed TikTok or Instagram clip would reach the same audience for a tiny fraction of the price. MTV quietly dropped the words “Music Television” from underneath its logo in 2021.

Is Channel 4 closing its music channels the final nail in the coffin for this once revered art form, then? “Aren’t broadcast and cable television themselves in terminal decline?”, answers Schnur, reassuringly. “[But] every so often, there’s a new music video that gives me that same sense of excitement I felt at MTV programming meetings back in the 80s. Case in point…”

Here, he shares a link with me to Eminem’s new video for “Houdini” – its cartoonish, Joel Schmacher-era Batman colour palette, celebrity cosplay and high production values are a reference-rich hark back to 2002’s “Without Me” and are clearly intended for a generation who remember the days of the statement blockbuster video, which stirred up controversy, gave birth to many a parody, and had everyone talking in the playground at morning break.

It is not intended for Gen Z, however, and will go over most of their heads – as will the closure of any music channel. Why wait half an hour hoping Sabrina Carpenter’s “Espresso” will come on when you can just watch it on your phone any time you like?

But in losing that, we lose the passive luxury of boredom – having to sit through songs you’ve never heard of – or even don’t like – getting used to them or falling love with them, watching and waiting for your new favourite to come on… The jaunty milk carton in Blur’s “Coffee + TV”; the paving slabs lighting up in “Billie Jean”; the single tear running down Sinead O’ Connor’s face in “Nothing Compares 2 U”; Steven Tyler calling out Run DMC in “Walk This Way”, or Christopher Waken bouncing off the walls in “Weapon of Choice”… These iconic moments are seared into the brains of those of a certain age. The videos still play in our heads as the songs stream from our phones.

Now? Now there are the influencers, with their money for nothing, their clicks for fees. That “Houdini” video has 72,929,469 views on YouTube, however… never write off an artform that once shot for the moon”.

It won’t be the case that there are no music television options apart from Jools Holland’s show come next year. There are programmes here and there. However, as people are still watching music videos, they want to see artists perform live and there is as much interest in legacy music as there is the new, all of this could coexist alongside that on television. Music shows also give people access to see an artist perform live they would not otherwise have the chance to. There could be documentaries and exclusive interviews. The best videos of the week and regular feature that could built a brand. MTV’s decision to jettison its remaining U.K. channels is a sad end of an era. One that really does not have to happen. I know people want to see Top of the Pops revived (the final show was in 2006), though I don’t think it would be the best plan, unless it was updated, overhauled and there was more than artists on stage miming (or performing live). Otherwise, you are not really offering an alternative, and there’s that danger a return could be short-lived. We can build a music show that has a good audience and one that mixes music news and spotlighting new artists and also a chunk dedicated to older music. A blend of live performances that is similar to Jools Holland’s guests but is a bit wider. I am not sure who would host or what the name would be, though there are more than enough people who would support this venture. Commissioners and stations are so reluctant to spend money on something they feel will be a sure-fire failure. There should be enough faith to at least broadcast a pilot and see how that is received. However, there is this mindset that says music television and music videos are dead. That one regular music T.V. show in the U.K. is enough. Most artists do not have the opportunity to – and do not want – perform on cooking shows or chat shows. They want the chance to perform on a dedicated music show. With pretty much only one option, it seems insane given the vast amount of talent out there struggling to get attention when Pop monoliths are getting the majority of attention and opportunity. Rather than bemoan the death if an era and a sad final chapter, we need to be more positive and welcome in…

A new era.

FEATURE: Mustn't Give the Game Away: Kate Bush’s There Goes a Tenner at Forty-Three

FEATURE:

 

 

Mustn't Give the Game Away

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in the There Goes a Tenner video/PHOTO CREDIT: Paul Henry

Kate Bush’s There Goes a Tenner at Forty-Three

__________

I am going to start out…

by quoting some interviews snippets I have sourced before. Relating to Kate Bush’s There Goes a Tenner. Included on her fourth studio album, The Dreaming, it was released as a single on 2nd November, 1982. On the same day, Suspended in Gaffa was released as a single in continental Europe and Australia. There Goes a Tenner was the U.K. and Ireland release. Perhaps the oddest single release day in Kate Bush’s career, one would have though Suspended in Gaffa would have made a more successful U.K. single. Maybe There Goes a Tenner could have been released more widely. Even though it only reached ninety-three in the U.K. and was her worst-performing single to that point, I really like There Goes a Tenner and feel it should be talked about. I am going to start with those interviews with Kate Bush:

“It’s about amateur robbers who have only done small things, and this is quite a big robbery that they’ve been planning for months, and when it actually starts happening, they start freaking out. They’re really scared, and they’re so aware of the fact that something could go wrong that they just freaked out, and paranoid and want to go home. (…) It’s sort of all the films I’ve seen with robberies in, the crooks have always been incredibly in control and calm, and I always thought that if I ever did a robbery, I’d be really scared, you know, I’d be really worried. So I thought I’m sure that’s a much more human point of view.

The Dreaming interview, CBAK 4011 CD

That was written on the piano. I had an idea for the tune and just knocked out the chords for the first verse. The words and everything just came together. It was quite a struggle from there on to try to keep things together. The lyrics are quite difficult on that one, because there are a lot of words in quite a short space of time. They had to be phrased right and everything. That was very difficult. Actually the writing went hand-in-hand with the CS-80.

John Diliberto, Interview. Keyboard/Totally Wired/Songwriter (USA), 1985”.

The reviews for the single were not that kind at all. A mix f bafflement and disappointment. Record Mirror’s Jim Reid wrote this in November 1982: “Blackheath beauty goes all cooey cockney-gasp in a bouncy tale of the downfall of Thatcherism and the rise of mass working class solidarity… actually it’s more trivial than that”. There Goes a Tenner is fascinating. Maybe a political song against high taxation and the British government, the song contains some of Kate Bush’s best and most unusual lyrics: “I hope you remember/To treat the gelignite tenderly for me/I’m having dreams about things/Not going right/Let’s leave in plenty of time tonight/Both my partners/Act like actors:/You are Bogart/He is George Raft/That leaves Cagney and me”. In terms of the musicians who feature on the song, it is quite basic and streamlined: drums: Stuart Elliott; bass: Del Palmer; synclavier: Dave Lawson; piano, Fairlight CMI, CS80: Kate Bush. Del Palmer features in the video as the getaway driver. I have a lot of time for There Goes a Tenner, even if most people do not. Maybe an unusual and flawed choice for a single, I think there is more depth and potential in this song than it is given credit for. Though Dreams of Orgonon highlight flaws with the song, they do write about some of the more interesting aspects of There Goes a Tenner. Even though Kate Bush revealed no political motivation in the song, you can read between the lines and see it is taking aim at Margaret Thatcher and the government in 1982. A time of austerity and hardship for many working-class people in the U.K., There Goes a Tenner reacts to this, albeit through the lens of something more playful and apolitical:

“Fundamentally, “There Goes a Tenner” channels the heist movie through a children’s panto. It treats poverty and crime with the tropes and language available to Bush through English popular culture. “Ooh, there’s a tenner/hey look, there’s a fiver” interpolates British currency onto the trope of money exploding in the middle of a robbery, as seen in such films as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. There are some hat tips to old gangster films, like when Bush observes her partners’ conduct in the middle of their robbery: “both my partners/act like actors/you are Bogart/he is George Raft/that leaves Cagney and me.” Clumsy, to be sure, but distinct in its aesthetics, and in a better song, Bush’s dive into British class politics with crime film tropes might be enlightening.

There’s something more going on here though. Bush asserted that her robbers were incompetents with limited experience: “It’s about amateur robbers who have only done small things, and this is quite a big robbery that they’ve been planning for months, and when it actually starts happening, they start freaking out.” She goes on to cite Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid as an example of hypercompetence in cinematic criminals, objecting to the composure of the genre’s heroes, observing “the crooks have always been incredibly in control and calm, and I always thought that if I ever did a robbery, I’d be really scared.”

Certainly the heist genre is populated by “chill” paragons of masculinity. It’s how you get lead actors like Paul Newman, Al Pacino, or George Clooney as top notch criminals. The genre offers the pleasures of breaking with the decorum of civil society while still keeping a layer of masculine authority in the mix, and its films tend to conclude with major punitive measures for the culprits (see Bonnie & Clyde, Dog Day Afternoon, etc).

Bush’s resulting bemusement at this is almost quaintly middle-class. “But don’t people who’ve robbed hundreds of banks get scared when they rob a bank” is the sort of question your childhood friend who’s horrified by shoplifting would pose. The pantheon of confident men in her early work is broadly absent from The Dreaming, which abounds with self-destructive masculinity. Moving beyond the bourgeois fantasy of domestic bliss between a man and a woman shakes up Bush’s faith in men. Femininity and masculinity become fluctuant, throttled by patriarchy, colonialism, trauma, and poverty. Bush could feasibly be writing a character of any gender here, but to have a woman’s voice leading the charge and vocalizing the anxiety that might pervade a robbery is canny.

For its vexed class dynamics, “There Goes a Tenner” does acknowledge poverty as a motivation for its characters. “Pockets floating in the breeze” indicates impoverishment, and the final line of the song “there’s a ten-shilling note/remember them?/that’s when we used to vote for him” is a weirdly subtle political critique for “Tenner.” When the single dropped in 1982, Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative Government was enjoying a 51% approval rating in the wake of the Falklands War and Thatcher’s craven sinking of the retreating Argentinian battleship the ARA General Belgrano, killing 323 people. By the 22nd of September, 9 days after the release of The Dreaming, 14% of the United Kingdom’s workforce was reported to be unemployed. As the Tory government waged a war on inflation in its slow establishment of neoliberalism, it caused a glut of unemployment that lost 1,500,000 people their jobs. “When we used to vote for him” is an odd phrase — but clearly the robbers have turned to crime because alternatives are unavailable (one merely has to point out that poverty is a major contributor to crime)”.

The single has never really had a kind write-up or much said about it. I mark its anniversary every year, and though I have to include a lot of the same information, it is important to talk about this song. There Goes a Tenner is still a brilliant song from one of Kate Bush’s best albums. One really not designed with singles in mind. Rather than seeing There Goes a Tenner as a singles disaster and signs of a decline, it is one of ten gems that forms her amazing fourth studio album. Rather than it being a failure or minor song, There Goes a Tenner is…

FAR better than that.

FEATURE: In France They Kiss on Main Street: Joni Mitchell's The Hissing of Summer Lawns at Fifty

FEATURE:

 

 

In France They Kiss on Main Street

Joni Mitchell's The Hissing of Summer Lawns at Fifty

__________

PERHAPS not placed…

IN THIS PHOTO: Joni Mitchell in 1975/PHOTO CREDIT: Norman Seeff

alongside Blue (1971) and Ladies of the Canyon (1970) as Joni Mitchell’s best albums, I think that The Hissing of Summer Lawns deserves to be. It is another masterpiece from the Canadian songwriter. It turns fifty next month. Rather annoyingly, nobody seems to know exactly when in November 1975 this album was released! To be safe, I am publishing this before 1st November, so we can mark fifty years of The Hissing of Summer Lawns at the earliest date. I think it might have been late in November but, as there is no certainty and precision, I will have to guess and be general. Before getting to a couple of features that go inside the album, I want to source this article from the official Joni Mitchell website, as they provide so many resources around the album. A host of critical reviews. Who played on the album. By all accounts The Hissing of Summer Lawns did not get the same positivity as previous Joni Mitchell albumns. That would continue with 1976’s Hejira:

“When a Brazilian photo-journalist named Wolf Jesco Von Puttkamer took an assignment in the mid-70s to document the lives of the Kreen-Akrore, a reclusive tribe of Amazonian hunters later known as the Panara, there were serious doubts about whether they'd survive the decade. The government had built a highway through their territory in '73, redoubling their fear of strangers, and the small amount of contact they'd had with the outside world in the past had decimated them with disease. Von Puttkamer found only 130 left alive.

In one of the photos he took, a tiny girl camouflaged in stripes of genipap pulp peers out from a gap in the jungle. In another, the chief of the tribe grimaces as a doctor injects him with penicillin. In another, seven hunters wearing yellow headbands carry an enormous, trussed-up python back to their village from a riverbank. Published in the February 1975 issue of National Geographic, the images were seen by millions of readers, among them Joni Mitchell. While officials in Brasilia had been turning the Kreen-Akrore's paradise into a parking lot, Mitchell's live album Miles Of Aisles, with the serene momentum of an adult-oriented superstar going through an invincible phase, had cruised to No 2 on Billboard, outsold only by Linda Ronstadt's Heart Like A Wheel. At the beginning of March, Mitchell was chauffeured to the Shrine Auditorium in downtown LA to collect a Grammy for a song on Court And Spark- a pleasant accolade to place alongside its platinum disc. But the python and the boys in the headbands must have stirred something, because she got out her ink, drew the photo from National Geographic and incorporated it into the cover art of her next LP. In doing so, she set in motion a chain of events that shattered the calm, darkened the skies and left her seething about the criticism she never saw coming.

The Hissing Of Summer Lawns is many things. It's an exclusive peek behind the curtain of palm trees that protects the super-wealthy and the super-bored. It's a set of 10 musical pieces that are at times melancholy, graceful, fine-woven and inscrutable. It's a dossier of sophisticated observations on women's material victories and defeats as they rely on, resent or revolve around their men. Above all, it's an LP that documents the lives of an endangered species that knows little of worlds beyond its own: the indigenous tribespeople of American suburbia. On the embossed sleeve, Mitchell transposed the giant snake to a fettucine-green landscape that might have been a modern-day urban park. The skyscrapers of a metropolis towered in the distance. Lined up in front of them, occupying the space between the businessmen and the bushmen, a row of bungalows stood like tanks before an army, guarding the city's perimeter. Mitchell's motif of the summer lawn was both impressionistic and sociocultural. The incongruous elements of the cover art combined in a visual pun. The hissing sound was made by sprinklers, but a serpent can thrive in a suburban dream-home, coiling itself around a marriage.

Joining some of the dots was "The Jungle Line", the album's second song, in which Mitchell traced direct connections from Africa to the jazz clubs of New York, imagining their crammed, noisy cellars as canvasses painted by Henri Rousseau. A primitivist best known for his tropical jungle scenes, Rousseau might well have designed a club décor of "ferns and orchid vines" (as well as putting a "jungle flower" behind the waitress' ear), but the snake that Mitchell notices in the jazz band's dressing-room is only a figurative cousin to the real ones in Rousseau's The Snake Charmer. It's a "poppy snake" - in other words, the heroin that comes into the city via the trafficking routes that lead back to another humid, vine-thick jungle. To get deeper into the heart of darkness, Mitchell hitches the venue's wild clientele ("cannibals of shuck and jive") not to a backdrop of jazz horns, but to pummelling Burundi drums and the electronic growl of a Moog. A totally new event on a Joni Mitchell record, "The Jungle Line" was conceptually provocative and years ahead of its time. The primitive met the avant-garde in the ritual of after-hours safari, and everyone from Paul Simon to Adam Ant was galvanised by the rhythms.

But as the LP cover reminds us, to travel from jungle to city, the primitive must first pass through the suburbs. In isolation and affluence, the suburbanites scatter themselves like plush velvet cushions behind their gadgetry and emotional shields, while Mitchell, with penetrating eye and paintbrush, sees something slithering in their neatly mown gardens. How self-negating are the concessions, she seems to conclude, that yield and are yielded by these unhappy families. Her "third-person lyrical portraits of damaged and unsympathetic characters," as Elvis Costello once called them, now begin to make their presence felt. They change the tone of the album completely, and with them disappear any realistic prospect of another singer-songwriter confessional. What exactly appears in its place - an air of cold detachment? A sleight-of-hand elegance? An artistry so rarefied that some people don't react to it while others can't stop overdosing on it? - has been the subject of debate for four decades.

For example: Edith, picked up last night by a crime boss, awakes in his bed with a song going through her mind. The title eludes her, but her thoughts quickly turn to the man by her side. She won the contest to be his prize for the evening, beating off the competition of older girls, and the criminal empire he runs is not hers to question. She locks eyes with him across the pillow. As the song ends, Mitchell seems to suggest they're as amoral and desperate as each other: a perfect gangland match. "You know they dare not look away," she sings, holding one of the album's longest notes for as long as the two of them can stare without blinking. And that, sure enough, is one way of hearing "Edith And The Kingpin".

But another way is to listen to the musicians – all of them, or as many as you can – who, far from being emotionally detached, bring sweetness and warmth flooding into the song from all corners. This way of hearing involves smiling with eyes closed as the trumpet on the left is joined by a flute on the right, and once they've held their notes for nine seconds, an electric piano ("fresh lipstick glistening") plays a rippling trill so exquisite that a nearby electric guitar appears to sigh with bliss. Another example: "Don't Interrupt The Sorrow", which follows, has often been described as a stream-of-consciousness jazz poem, making it sound like a text of abstruse intellectualism that only someone with a triple First in Classics and Oriental Languages would enjoy. Don't believe a word of it. Cajoled along by Wilton Felder's inventively rubbery bassline, "Don't Interrupt The Sorrow" is a cavalcade of musical delights. Guitarist Larry Carlton's feather-light glides up and down his fretboard provide so many gorgeous moments that Mitchell stops singing and lets him form them into a solo.

Minutes later, when we meet the high­maintenance Southern belle Scarlett ("Shades Of Scarlett Conquering"), we can count, by all means, the cost of what she loses with her impossible demands while she adheres to the doctrine she absorbed from Gone With The Wind- but we mustn't forget to swoon to Dale Oehler's heavenly string arrangement or luxuriate in the dreamy pattern of piano notes that Mitchell reiterates with her left hand. The Rolling Stone reviewer in 1975 who claimed that the album had "no tunes to speak of' evidently missed the wood for the trees; most of the songs are inundated with instrumental parts of aching loveliness, be it Chuck Findley's Bacharach-ian trumpet on the title track or his flugelhorn's haunting three-note refrain on "The Boho Dance", and their cumulative importance is as absolute as any vocal or lyric. However, as Mitchell would learn, finding not a single tune on The Hissing Of Summer Lawns wasn't the most scathing accusation the critics in America would level.

There are two more songs about suburban marriages in the album's second half, and at the end of each one the wife makes a pragmatic decision of sorts. In the title track, an unnamed woman lives as a virtual prisoner on her husband's hillside ranch ("She patrols that fence of his to a Latin drum"), but chooses to stay because there's just enough value in their expensive home to compensate for the poverty of her dreary days. As per Mitchell's album concept, the soothing hiss that the woman can hear from her balcony has worked its mesmeric effect. When it doesn't, the result comes as a shock. A high-ranking executive on a business trip to New York ("Harry's House/Centerpiece") has an erotic daydream about his wife when she was younger ("Shining hair and shining skin/shining as she reeled him in"), before snapping out of his reverie - and we aren't prepared for it - to reveal in the last few lines that she asked him for a divorce that morning. How old is the woman? Her age isn't specified. Old enough to be bored out of her mind with her husband, that's all we need to know. Old enough to be conscious of the moisturizing lotions and the march of time. "All those vain promises on beauty jars, "Mitchell sings in "Sweet Bird", the next song, just in case a middle-aged divorcee might fancy she's escaping into a rainbow. "Calendars of our lives, circled with compromise."

Mitchell, unmarried herself, lived behind wrought-iron gates in her 1920s Bel Air mansion with her boyfriend and drummer, John Guerin. When the gatefold sleeve of Hissing... was opened, there she was, floating on her back in the secluded Eden of her swimming-pool, while 30 lines of album notes, starting somewhere above her right knee, made it clear she was elated with the product inside. "This record is a total work conceived graphically, musically, lyrically and accidentally- as a whole. The performances, were guided by the given compositional structures and the audibly inspired beauty of every player. The whole unfolded like a mystery." A mystery to be lapped up by hundreds of thousands of armchair sleuths who hung in her every word. But something went wrong. The verdict was not measured out in superlatives this time. Critics dipped their adjectives in scorn (“narcissistic”, “pretentious”, “sometimes so smug that it’s downright irritating”) and her manager had to hide the reviews from her. With its jazz overtones and clear shift away from autobiographical writing, the LP left many fans disappointed. Internet book reviewers condemn a much-hyped novel by saying they “couldn’t relate to any of the characters”. The problem with the album was that some people couldn’t relate to the fact that there were characters at all.

In the 40 years since its release, it’s been place in a much more favorable light. Mitchell was touched when Prince listed it as one of his favorite albums in the 80s. Bjork, Morrissey, and George Michael all sung its praises. Elvis Costello hailed it as “the masterpiece of that time” when he wrote about Mitchell for Vanity Fair in 2004. It’s now celebrated for the very qualities that 70s listeners found hard to tolerate: the icy stillness, the special composure, the delicate balance of colors, the manicured refinement, the considered reportage”.

I will move to Albumism and their forty-fifth anniversary salute of Joni Mitchell’s The Hissing of Summer Lawns. If you have not heard this album, then I would suggest that you spend some time with it now. Even if critics were somewhat cold to upon its release, there is no denying it brilliance. It still sounds phenomenal years after I first heard it. One of the essential Joni Mitchell albums:

“Mitchell’s fans had acquired a taste for gossip. Taylor Swift isn’t the first songwriter to use her personal life as grist for the mill. Mitchell’s laundry list of lovers includes Leonard Cohen, David Crosby, Graham Nash, James Taylor, and others. Fans had become accustomed to her songs being informed by the highs and lows of those relationships. Much of the ballyhoo (or lack thereof) was around the shift away from more popular works like Blue (1971) and her previous studio album Court and Spark (1974) that mined these experiences. That is to say, Mitchell had no intention of spilling the contents of her heart like a purse turned upside down this time.

“People started calling me confessional,” Mitchell lamented about the response to Blue, “And then it was like a blood sport. I felt like people were coming to watch me fall off a tightrope or something.” And so began the moratorium on allowing the public to live a vicarious love life through her.

Furthermore, Mitchell as an artist is adventurous and musically itinerate. Sentencing her to continue making different permutations of Blue time and again might have put her in an early grave. She needed to follow her muse, and it was very much a moving target. Hissing dabbles in world music, defiantly undiluted jazz, and incorporates synthesizers for the first time. On one hand, this is truly exciting for an artist. On the other, it drove Asylum Records to drink.

Asylum co-founder David Geffen was actually Mitchell’s roommate for a time. Though Geffen repeatedly encouraged her to write hits so she could “sell a lot of records,” he says she laughed the idea away. Roberta Joan Anderson could not be any less concerned with hits. It didn’t matter to her that Hissing’s esoteric lean made choosing a single nearly impossible. This was the album she wanted to make.

The label issued “In France They Kiss On Main Street” as a 7-inch in the winter of 1976. The rollicking release is full of youthful abandon, not unlike some of the L.A. Express-backed workouts on Court and Spark. Here, the verses scrawl romantic, devil-may-care imagery on the wall almost faster than the listener can take them in. Friendly ex-flames Nash, Crosby, and Taylor join her all-star background chorus for a fun time. In total, “France” flirted with Adult Contemporary radio for a couple months until it reached #32. But then it lost interest in the pursuit and went off to sweet talk someone else.

The title track of the LP begins its flip side with a lustrous, afternoon groove. Electric piano and Moog bass guarantee a mellow mood. The song is rife with understated musicianship, like the lazily purring horn line that follows the bridge, curling on the ground like an overfed housecat seeking attention. And every time Mitchell sings “summer lawns,” she drags its sibilance behind her like the tail of a serpent. Her perception is keen, and delivery slit-eyed. The exhibitionist has become a voyeur.

It was revealed in 2012 that Mitchell wrote “The Hissing of Summer Lawns” about renowned musician José Feliciano after visiting him and his new wife at their home in the San Fernando Valley. Attaching the lyric to Feliciano, famously blind since birth, gives a context that changes the lighting on its opulence and elitism (“He gave her his darkness to regret / And good reason to quit him / He gave her a roomful of Chippendale / That nobody sits in / Still she stays with a love of some kind / It's the lady's choice”).

Mitchell again casts a questioning eye on a relationship in “Edith and the Kingpin.” The three-act short story has no chorus, but is carried by a curious melody rolled through a winding path of jazz chords. In it, an underhanded figure in a small town sets his sights on a soon-to-be-corrupted young ingénue (“Women he has taken / Grow old too soon / He tilts their tired faces / Gently to the spoon”).

Answering the imagined questions of salivating gossip hounds, Mitchell told Mojo Magazine, “Part of it is from a Vancouver pimp I met and part of it is Edith Piaf. It's a hybrid, but all together it makes a whole truth. Basically, I am trying to present the human truth, but did [those things] happen specifically to me? What does that matter?” That’s how an intellectual tells one to mind one’s own damn business.

If that stung any, focus on the “little black dress” that Mitchell’s voice then slips into for the Hendricks-Edison composition “Centerpiece.” In this dream sequence, Mitchell indulges her Cotton Club fantasy shimmying as if to drive a hooting audience as mad as possible. It’s in the way she saunters up to all the flat thirds in the melody, shamelessly milking all the soul that can be gathered from them. The ‘50s jazz tune gets spliced into the center of “Harry’s House,” itself a compelling split-screen depiction of a marriage with its intimacy waning.

The Hissing of Summer Lawns didn’t have quite enough jazz to vie for Recording Academy honors in that category. It had just enough to scare off the timid contingent of her pop, rock, and folk listeners. It scored a GRAMMY nomination for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance, but was predictably passed over in favor of Linda Ronstadt that year.

Genuinely unconcerned with her records’ commercial performance, Mitchell would swim out into deeper jazz explorations over the next several years. Her pairing with kindred musical spirit Jaco Pastorius would define Hejira (1976). Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter (1977) would push even further past the edge of wonder. By 1979, jazz legend Charlie Mingus chose Mitchell to complete the last compositions of his lifetime on an album named after him”.

I am going to end up with a review from The Quietus from 2020. They marked forty-five years of Joni Mitchell’s seventh studio album. The Hissing of Summer Lawns contains some of Mitchell’s best songs in my view. Even though it was a relative chart success in 1975, it did not get the critical acclaim that it deserved. I am glad that there has been fonder regard in years since. It is a wonderful album:

“‘In France They Kiss On Main Street’ stands as a stepping stone between what Mitchell had been and what she was about to become. It would not have been notably out of place on Court And Spark. But ‘The Jungle Line’, with its thudding tribal drums and beat poetry incantations, certainly would. Now, there are, let’s say, issues with Mitchell and race. Not just the sleeve of Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter (1977), which one might generously explain away as theatricality in art, but her subsequent, jaw-dropping remarks about it. And to invoke the jungle, and Rousseau – whether he of the noble savages, or he of the Primitivist art; it proves to be the latter – on “Safaris to the heart of all that Jazz” in Harlem is, in today’s wince-inducing word, problematic. And yet. So evocative is its sorcery, so piercing of history’s sweep the lyric, that if one cares to justify it, one could say it is descriptive of the products of an attitude rather than an example of that attitude. And if one doesn’t, one may simply acknowledge both its uncomfortable stereotyping and its singular redolence and atmosphere, and accept that chipping away at the clay feet of great art for the purpose of bringing it down altogether is a kind of spiritual vandalism – as if the entire past must be slung out for failing to come up to code in the present.

The safari seems a preliminary excursion, but it isn’t. It travels by an unexpected route to the same set of views, which is female life seen both from the inside and the exterior. ‘The Jungle Line’’s barmaid is sister under the skin to Edith, she of the languid, lovely ‘Edith And The Kingpin’. The Kingpin is a small-time Mr Big, a local potentate, who has fixed upon Edith as his bedmate, the latest in a line of women who “grow old too soon”, raddled by cocaine and the terrors of their incumbency. Chosen, Edith has no choice. Taken, she must take what she is given. She is woman as vassal, no more free in her American town than her equivalent falling under the eye of a feudal village’s liege lord. No more free than the lavishly kept wife in the title track – who might be Edith, years on, prisoner of the man she’s captured – pacing the barbed wire perimeter of her ranch house like the caged animal she is. Or is she? Is it that liberty is impossible, or that she imprisons herself? “He gave her his darkness to regret/And good reason to quit him… Still she stays with a love of some kind/It’s the lady’s choice."

Here she is again, or again, her subcutaneous sister, in ‘Harry’s House – Centerpiece’, yet another of the post-Impressionist wonders Mitchell daubs onto the album in loose brushstrokes that coalesce with magical precision into perfect pictures; and every last one of those pictures has its shadows and it has some source of light. Here is Mad Men, three decades early. Harry in the city, surrounded by glamour and sexual opportunity; wifey in the suburbs, surrounded by dead air. And with astounding artfulness, Mitchell places at the heart of her own song a cover version, the swing-jazz standard, ‘Centerpiece’, in which the singer’s “pretty baby” is lauded as, quite literally, a piece of furniture around which his household is to be assembled. In the gap between 1958, the year of the song’s composition, when its subject was evidently intended to feel delight at such a prospect, and 1975, Mitchell unpicks how it feels to become a trophy. Edith, Harry’s wife, the “lady” of the summer lawn: all are prized possessions who learn the hard way just what it is to be acquired, when you think it’s you who’s making the catch.

Mitchell never makes things simple. Nor needlessly complex. The music on these songs flows like water running downhill, switching this way or that not for the sake of it but because it must. Its course is unpredictable and ineluctable; once followed, it could not, you sense , have gone any other way. The same is true of the feelings and images it carries along. They are as plain and as complicated as the lives they invoke. So there is no easy dichotomy whereby women at liberty are happier than women trapped by men, or by themselves. Freedom has its own hazards. “Since I was seventeen/I’ve had no one over me,” snarls the narrator of ‘Don’t Interrupt The Sorrow’, the scene of a fierce and terse battle of the sexes in which ancient, Abrahamic patterns of domineering and resistance play out via the mores of the day. Religion clutches at everything. ‘Out of the fire like Catholic saints/Comes Scarlett and her deep complaint.” Woman as something wounded. Woman as something bloody and unbowed. Woman as something red, aflame and dangerous. This is ‘Shades of Scarlett Conquering’. A lambent piano ballad, invoking Gone With The Wind and depicting a creature of unblinking will: ‘It is not easy to be brave/Walking around in so much need… Cast iron and frail/With her impossibly gentle hands/and her blood-red fingernails.’ Mitchell unfolds the femme fatale from the inside, in the most delicate and ingenious reverse origami, and makes you quiver at the truth of it”.

Even though there is no certainty exactly when in November 1975 The Hissing of Summer Lawns was released, I am going to play it safe and say 1st, even though it was likely later in the month. I was keen to show my appreciation for…

SUCH a brilliant album.

FEATURE: The Digital Mixtape: Songs from Albums Turning Five in 2026

FEATURE:

 

 

The Digital Mixtape

Songs from Albums Turning Five in 2026

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THIS is the final part…

of this run of features where I mark big album anniversaries happening next year. I am finishing off with 2021 and albums that turn five next year. Maybe not a significant anniversary, I still think that it is important. Many of the artists whose albums turn five in 2026 will be celebrating five years. Among those albums included in a mixtape are Little Simz’s Sometimes I Might Be Introvert, Olivia Rodrigo’s SOUR, Adele’s 30, and Billie Eilish’s Happier Than Ever. During a year when we were going through the COVID-19 pandemic and it was a very tense time, these albums definitely gave us some company and uplift. Some magnificent releases that are five next year. I hope that you enjoy a mixtape featuring songs from the….

BEST albums of 2021.

FEATURE: The Digital Mixtape: Songs from Albums Turning Ten in 2026

FEATURE:

 

 

The Digital Mixtape

Songs from Albums Turning Ten in 2026

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IN the penultimate part…

of this run of features that marks important album anniversaries next year, I am at 2016. Huge albums that are ten in 2026. 2016 was a pretty big year for music. In terms of the standouts from that year, we had David Bowie’s final album, Blackstar. It was released two days before his death. Other important albums from 2016 include Frank Ocean’s Blonde and Beyoncé’s Lemonade. I am going to include songs from most of the very best albums of 2016. It was such a hard and tragic year in many ways – we said goodbye to David Bowie, Prince, George Michael, Lemmy Leonard Cohen, George Martin and Glenn Frey -, it also produced some of the best albums of the decade. Such standout and enduring albums. I hope I have not missed any in this mixtape below. Showcasing what an incredible year 2016 was for albums, you will see some heavyweight and titanic albums in the pack. So many people have such fond memories of 2016 and its music, so I hope that my feature helps them…

COME flooding back.

FEATURE: In Reaction to Alexandra Diamond-Rivlin’s Article for The Guardian… How Kate Bush Can Change a Life

FEATURE:

 

In Reaction to Alexandra Diamond-Rivlin’s Article for The Guardian…

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1989/PHOTO CREDIT: Kevin Cummins

How Kate Bush Can Change a Life

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THIS will be fairly brief for me…

ILLUSTRATION CREDIT: Martin O'Neill/The Guardian

but I happened upon an article that The Guardian published online yesterday that was written by Alexandra Diamond-Rivlin. She discussed her experiences of coming out as a trans woman. I am of the mindset that there are some simply brilliant women in music who are changing lives and are actually connecting with people who may otherwise feel isolated, alone or unheard. Their music has the power to save lives and speak to people when nothing else can. That is phenomenal! However, there are so many major artists, of all genders, who are all about hype and popularity. Not really about the music and all about the celebrity and unimportant aspects of music. Naming nobody specific, but giant names that get all this discussion and discourse after releasing a so-so album. There are so many other artists whose music goes deeper and is much more effective, and yet they have to struggle for a fraction of the coverage that a global megastar would. I have written about this before – recently in fact! – and how Kate Bush can change your life. How she has impacted and affected mine. Also, how much of an idol and icon she is among the L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.+ community. Kate Bush is especially noteworthy and important when it comes to communities that are still marginalised, maligned and attacked – and pushed to the fringes. I was moved by Alexandra Diamond-Rivlin’s beautiful, thought-provoking, personal and extraordinary words. It was a specific Kate Bush song that transformed her life. For me, in terms of an awakening and transformation – not like Diamond-Rivlin’s -, it was about a realisation of what music could be, and how it went beyond mainstream Pop. I first heard Kate Bush when I was very small and Wuthering Heights’s video was the first thing of hers that I saw (that song was her 1978 debut single and included on the album, The Kick Inside). I am planning a Kate Bush book at the moment and, hopefully as part of that, I will write why Kate Bush is so pivotal to me – and how she changed my life.

However, not many people talk about how an artist like Kate Bush can change someone’s life. It might only take one song. Something about the words being sung that can connect and have this hugely transformative power. I want to share a few observations and reactions to what Alexandra Diamond-Rivlin wrote in her extraordinary article:

“It wasn’t safe for me to discover The Sensual World, the eponymous track on what Kate Bush described as her “most female album”. The song was intended to be a rejection of the masculine influence that had unwittingly shaped the artist’s previous work, and an ode to something taboo within the female experience. Based on Molly Bloom’s soliloquy in James Joyce’s Ulysses – a stream of consciousness in which the character reflects on her experiences of nature, sex and love – Bush wanted to celebrate the experience of life inside a woman’s body, and the ways it gives her spiritual and sexual pleasure. I knew that, for someone like me, who was already being bullied, to openly love a song like this could make me an even more obvious target to those who saw femininity as a sign of weakness. More daunting than that, it might force me to confront my own repressed desires”.

I have written a lot about The Sensual World and how it departed from The Dreaming (1982) and Hounds of Love (1985). Albums that were percussion-heavy and had this masculine energy, The Sensual World (1989) was also an album where Bush sang with the Trio Bulgarka. They are a female Bulgarian trio whose music was introduced to Kate Bush by her brother, Paddy. The fact that a song like The Sensual World and its sense of desire, liberation and that desire (from Kate Bush) to “celebrate the experience of life inside a woman’s body” is something that affected Diamond-Rivlin. It made me wonder about Bush’s discography and how so many of her songs affect and change so may people. So often, especially when it comes to mainstream music, it is about streaming numbers, the grand and the spectacle of things. We do not talk enough about the granularity and how certain songs and words can be as impactful and important as a major gig or entire album.

Whereas Kate Bush, when she was making The Sensual World, was in a stage in her life – having turned thirty in July 1988 – when she had different priorities and wanted to maybe returned to a sound and dynamic (when it came to exploring femininity and herself through a more female-focused lens), she was also doing so at a moment when there was still huge sexism and criticism levied at her. Maybe producing a more feminine album would incur the same ridicule and misogyny she faced back in 1978 when The Kick Inside came out. However, in a 1990 interview with John Diliberto, Kate Bush remarked the following: “I just felt that I was exploring my feminine energy more -musically. In the past I had wanted to emanate the kind of power that I’ve heard in male music. And I just felt maybe somewhere there is this female energy that’s powerful. It’s a subtle difference – male or female energy in art – but I think there is a difference: little things, like using the Trio. And possibly some of the attitudes to my lyric writing on this album. I would say it was more accepting of being a female somehow”. Bush said this about The Sensual World’s title track in an interview with BBC Radio 1’s Roger Scott in 1989: “I think for me that’s an incredibly important thing about this planet, that we are surrounded by such sensuality and yet we tend not to see it like that. But I’m sure for someone who had never experienced it before it would be quite a devastating thing. (…)”.

It is heartbreaking as well as uplifting reading Alexandra Diamond-Rivlin’s words about having to live a life of secrecy and repression. As someone who wanted to come out as a trans woman earlier in life but perhaps felt that she could not through fear of bullying and alienation, there is also this sense of a song providing comfort and revelation. Diamond-Rivlin shares how she, as a teenage boy, would be mocked for having a high-pitched voice and camp mannerisms. She said “Still, it felt safer to be a feminine boy than a boy who wanted to become a woman”. That is something a lot of young people still face. The anti-trans movement and rhetoric. How so many high-profile people share their repugnant and hateful comments about trans women especially, it is such a bleak experience for those who want to come out and be accepted.  Even if musicians like Sophie-Ellis Bextor and Kate Nash have either spoken out about transphobia or showed their support for the community, the reality is that there is widespread transphobia. Our own country (the U.K.), in April, determined that the legal definition of ‘woman’ under the Equality Act 2010 refers to biological sex, not gender identity. It was crushing and a massive step back to a darker age. At a time when there is more awareness and acceptance of the L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.+ community, the reality for trans women is so challenging! It adds extra weight and power to Alexandra Diamond-Rivlin’s recollections, experiences and perspectives. It makes me wonder whether Kate Bush knows about an article like this one and experiences that so many other trans people share.

Attending a single-sex school in Plymouth, Diamond-Rivlin shared how “One morning, while we ambled along the grassland, one of the girls shared her headphones with me and played her favourite music. That’s when the discovery was made”. How lyrics in The Sensual World such as “to where the water and the earth caress … now I’ve powers of a woman’s body” were almost like splints of light in the darkness. If there were breathless expressions and formless words, there were lines that definitely stuck out and were heard clearly by Diamond-Rivlin. It was a life-changing moment of epiphany (and almost spirituality) where this ethereal voice from a Pop artist in 1989 leapt through time and space to connect with this new and young Kate Bush listener. The final paragraphs are perhaps the most indelible and standout. This passage elicited a big reaction in me: “Something shifted in me that day. Bush’s ode to womanhood felt like an invocation of all the things I knew I could be: euphoric, audacious and free. I started to view my femininity not as a flaw, but as an affirmation of life; a way of indulging in the intense pleasure of the world, nature and my body”. When Diamond-Rivlin remarks on her femininity as a teenage boy as not being a flaw (others saw it as that and, worst, something to be attacked), instead, it was “as an affirmation of life”. Something enormously positive. If Kate Bush was entering her thirties and wanted to embrace her sensuality, womanhood and this new phase of life, little did she know that this song would affect someone who was struggling to come out as a trans woman and had this secret ally and supportive prayer from an iconic artist.

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush shot for The Sensual World’s single cover in 1989/PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush

The final words from Alexandra Diamond-Rivlin are beautiful: “I danced in recognition of my own sacred womanhood. And waiting patiently for that reverie to become my everyday reality, I was able to refuse the voices that told me it never would”. This is emblematic of the power of music and how a single song can literally change a life. This is common for those who hear Kate Bush’s music. Unique And different experiences of people being in this positions where they are struggling to be who they want to be or are in a bleak place and something in one of her songs will break through that darkness and make them feel heard – and accepted. It makes me hope Kate Bush does read that article on The Guardian’s website and Alexandra Diamond-Rivlin’s incredible writing. I also wonder what Diamond-Rivlin thinks of Bush’s reworking of The Sensual World, titled Flower of the Mountain, on 2011’s Director’s Cut. This is where she finally got permission from the James Joyce estate to use Molly Bloom’s soliloquy from Ulysses (though the novel had fallen into the public domain and out of copyright by that point, so being refused permission would have been redundant). I do wonder if we will see more articles from those who have been affected by Kate Bush’s music. It would be great if there was a book when we got a collection of articles and essays from different fans and the song/moment that changed their life. At a time when there is still too much stock in the empty and overhyped, we do not talk enough about the personal and more important. How fans’ lives can be immeasurably altered for the better by the music. A title song from the '80s by Kate Bush impacted a person many years later. It is a wonderful and powerful thing! Alexandra Diamond-Rivlin’s incredible article should, I hope, lead others to share how Kate Bush’s music…

IMPACTED them.

INTERVIEW: Ellie Newton (CEO and Owner of The Trouble Club)

INTERVIEW:

PHOTO CREDIT: Ioana Marinca

Ellie Newton (CEO and Owner of The Trouble Club)

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I am going to start this interview…

 IN THIS PHOTO: Ellie Newton spoke with the brilliant Irish-Nigerian academic, broadcaster, activist and author Emma Dabiri on 24th September, in an event titled Who Got Burned by the Enlightenment/PHOTO CREDIT: Alice Lub

by making it all about me. Not in a selfish or self-indulgent way! However, there is a specific reason as to why I am spotlighting the magnificent Ellie Newton. She is the Owner & CEO of The Trouble Club, a community of 100k+ that gathers to listen and learn from brilliant women. She has interviewed some of the world's greatest individuals, including Margaret Atwood, Gloria Steinem and Nobel Peace Prize winner, Leymah Gbowee. I have written about the club numerous times, and I have been a member for a little over two years. One of the big reasons why I keep writing about them is Newton and what she has achieved – and continues to do so! In her twenties, she has built this incredible business that is more like a community. The Troublemakers (not sure if this is our official collective name, though I will go with it!) that attend the events across London and Manchester are always a wonder to be around. So many different and fascinating people! Not only are there discussions and interviews. There are social events and book clubs. Check them out. This year has been one of the most successful and important for The Trouble Club. I was going to write another general feature about The Trouble Club, though there was an Instagram post that Ellie Newton shared recently that changed those plans. She was talking about the realities of being a young woman and running a business solo. How there are these pressures and loneliness. How it does not pay much and there are so many drawbacks and challenges. At the end of it, there is that pride and joy knowing that she has built something amazing. That is the most abiding and loudest realisation, though there are those harsh lessons and daily limitations/drawbacks that made me stop and think. I did not consider how tough it can be! From the outside, one can look at The Trouble Club and see it as this great thing with amazing events, where we get to hear these incredible women speak - and it is all fun and hugely profitable. Ellie Newton has an amazing team around her. Even though she has some support, she carries so much of the weight and responsibility as CEO and Owner.

IN THIS PHOTO: Author, journalist, podcaster, speaker and presenter Candice Brathwaite was a guest at The Trouble Club on 2nd October at St Marylebone Parish Church, London

Taking it back to me, I am endlessly impressed about everything that Ellie Newton does. She not only interviews and works with The Trouble Club. I saw another post where she was in Sweden for a day or so for non-Trouble Club business. Newton has interviewed women outside of The Trouble Club, though her main passion is for this wonderfully inspiring business that has made such an impact on so many people. It has changed me hugely! This Instagram post from her was about the Candice Brathwaite event on 2nd October. I said to her how this was perhaps the best Trouble Club event ever. A packed St Marylebone Parish Church with so many amazing women (and me) showing their love for Brathwaite! It was down to Newton getting everything in line and leading this incredibly powerful and memorable interview for this amazing crowd! Given what she posted a matter of days before about the realities of being a woman running a business solo, I wonder if this event changed her thoughts. However, it is clear that there are some truths that will never go away. It is quite a lonely existence, and one that does not bring in masses of money. How it can be hard to make friends and have a social life when so much of your being goes into not only making The Trouble Club successful but merely exist! To me, a lot of what Ellie Newton wrote rang true. Our experiences are different, though I run my own website and have done so for almost fourteen years. I have published something on it every day for a decade or so now. I am planning on writing a book, and I also am juggling a demanding full-time job. I make nothing from my writing, and there are so many posts that are published and get no reaction or interaction at all. It can be hugely disheartening writing something, sharing it and then nothing! A major music artist can post anything and they get thousands of likes and shares for complete s*it. For journalists, it can be a frustrating and depressing life. I also find it hard to find time away and find too many positives though, like Ellie Newton, there is that positive at the end of it. That is the main thing and the reason we keep going: it is what we love doing and accept that it is not rose-tinted or exactly as we dreamt it.

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Someone who inspires me so much and I have huge admiration for, I guess we occasionally share a similar dispiriting experience and degree of disillusionment. Whereas I run a website and I can earn money from my day job, The Trouble Club is the vast majority of Ellie Newton’s income. It is her baby and, with it, obviously there is that intense emotion and feeling of responsibility and expectation. She has turned it into this simply wonderful space that has welcomed in incredible speakers like Candice Brathwaite, Marina Hyde, and Margaret Atwood (who is a return guest, alongside Elif Shafak, next month). I was eager to interview her off of the back of that Instagram post. One where she laid out the facts of being a business owner, and what that meant in terms of a social life, making money, and how it can be tiring. The fatigue she gets and having to make decisions. An entrepreneur in her twenties, it is a time when many of her similar-aged peers and friends are living a verry different life. Maybe one more based around family or experiencing the world in an itinerant way. For Newton, she does not have the same luxuries, flexibilities and responsibilities (or lack of, for better or worse) as many other people. And it is harder for women. Female entrepreneurs are still in the minority and do not get the same respect and opportunities as men. There is extreme sexism that pervades and infects. I do also think that Newton has a book (I Came Here to Make Trouble as a potential title?!) or TED talk in her! In terms of her story and life, it would be wonderful to hear her on the mic (there are some big podcasts that need to get her on as a guest as soon as!), or read her personal, insightful and wise words, that highlights the ups, downs and realities – a word I have used a few times, but seems like the most relevant an d precise – of being an entrepreneur in her twenties.

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It is time to get to my interview with The Trouble Club’s Owner and CEO, Ellie Newton. Someone who has done something to be hugely proud of, there is still that discussion not highlighted enough. Not only the discrimination and sexism female entrepreneurs face to this day. The way business ownership and its demands are different to what men face, definitely in terms of social mobility and family life. And earning potential too. However, that sense of accomplishment and pride at what The Trouble Club does and who it welcomes through its multiple doors should be the main takeaway. And that is mainly down to the passion and commitment of its awesome leader:

“Hi Ellie. 2025 has been one of the biggest and most successful in terms of The Trouble Club’s membership growth and how it has built its stellar reputation and name. You are very much at the centre of it. How does it feel seeing how far it has come?

It feels incredible! It has been a long road though. People see our successes, but often not the years of hard work and rejection. It has always been worth it though, as our community is one-of-a-kind!

In terms of your personal highlights from this year or favourite moments with The Trouble Club, what comes to mind?

Oh, that is so tough! Our event with Grace Beverley was amazing; our audience was slightly different than normal, and I feel like we introduced a whole new group of women to The Trouble Club.

With over two-thousand members and so much to balance and constantly build as Owner and CEO of The Trouble Club, what are the greatest challenges that you face?

So many. Every day has a different challenge, which is probably the greatest challenge overall. As the CEO, you have to spend time doing so many things and you have to make millions of decisions every day, some of which determine the fate of your business. I absolutely get executive fatigue, but in those trickier moments I remember how lucky I am to do what I do.

“It’s hard to not take everything personally when your passion-level is so high”

You recently posted to Instagram how, as a woman in your twenties, working so many hours and earning so little is life-affecting and not ideal. Though The Trouble Club has many positives, is the impact on your personal life and social mobility a drawback for you - and so many other business owners?

Absolutely. Although I would never want to deter a twenty-something woman from becoming a business owner; the pros outweigh the negatives. But yes, it is all-consuming. You can’t really take a break from it, and it takes time to build your identity outside of your business. It’s hard to not take everything personally when your passion-level is so high. But when things are going well, it makes up for everything!

The Trouble Club seems like something very personal to you. Many people, such as me, have this passion and purpose that dominates our lives and yet pays very little…and has its disadvantages. What keeps you resilient and ambitious with all of this on your mind and shoulders?

Our members and remembering the good that the club does. We get the best messages from members who have loved our events and met life-long friends. That is always what keeps me going. I also have crazy dreams for the club, and keeping them front of mind helps overcome any little setbacks.

You also said in your post how it is tough to make big decisions and be 100% sure when you do not have the experience “to know if any of the decisions are correct”. How do you deal with that? Have there been moments when some decisions have backfired or created some backlash? How do you react to that?

Of course! I’ve invested in events that haven’t sold tickets; created marketing campaigns that didn’t bring us any new members. I make mistakes every day. It is the constant above all else. My reaction is always to breathe and remember that this experience is an incredible education and every setback is a learning opportunity. I know so much more now than I did five years ago, but I had to go through five years of mistakes to get here.

“So to any woman wanting to start her own business, just do it and find your tribe”

Loneliness and running a growing business, in a time in your life when many of your contemporaries have a very different and, perhaps, ‘conventional’ life experience, must make you reflect and ask questions. How does this shape your view of the future, and do you find time away from Trouble Club duties to connect more? Or is it quite all-consuming?

It is all-consuming, but building my life outside of Trouble has become more of a focus lately. I love nature, and I’m lucky enough to live near incredible greenery, and that’s where I escape to at the weekends. This keeps me happy, grounded and reminded that the world is so much bigger than me.

Female business owners face limited access to funding, gender bias and stereotypes, difficulties in achieving work-life balance due to societal expectations, a lack of supportive professional networks and mentors, and personal barriers like self-doubt. Do you feel this is an issue that is not being addressed, and what advice would you give to women starting their own business?

I think there are incredible women talking about this (I’ve interviewed a lot of them), but sadly not enough men - you Sam being a wonderful exception. While the barriers are out there, I am in an incredibly fortunate position. I’m surrounded by women every day, and I don’t need to convince men of what Trouble is; the ones that get it just come. So to any woman wanting to start her own business, just do it and find your tribe. If you need a mentor, have the courage to ask. Most women really respond to that.

Before moving back to The Trouble Club, on your Instagram and at Trouble events, music plays an important role. As you must listen to so many audiobooks and be busy with meetings, calls and research, do you get enough time to listen to music and, if so, how important is it?

It’s funny you should say that, because it can be an issue. When I go out for a walk, I often really want to relax and listen to music, but I will also know I have three hours of an audiobook to finish for an event happening the next day, so that has to take priority. After a big event, I’ll take some really long walks and just listen to music. It is really key!

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There are some great Trouble events coming up, including the return of Margaret Atwood! When you started with The Trouble Club, could you have imagined you would welcome to the stage and interview so many brilliant and iconic women?!

Never. I’m still so thrilled by the people who say ‘yes’, and it allows me to dream bigger about who might join us in the future.

Reflecting on what you said about the demands of business ownership and how it impacts you, what are plans for The Trouble Club in 2026 regarding your role, the team’s, and any possible expansion and changes?

Our team has changed a lot recently, and the biggest change I anticipate for 2026 is bringing in more people to help us build our community. There is so much potential there, but I often don’t have the time to interact with as many members as I would like. This will absolutely be a priority when we expand the team.

You did end that recent Instagram post by saying how, in spite of all the hard truths, the “freedom” and “joy” you get from running The Trouble Club makes it all worth it. Could you ever see yourself being anywhere or doing anything else?!

It is absolutely my dream job, so it is hard to imagine myself doing anything else. However, I do have other business ideas that I’d like to pursue, but not for a very long time.

It is hard to get journalists and the media to discuss members clubs and wonderful things like The Trouble Club. Do you think that this needs to shift, and what would you say to anyone who has not yet joined and is interested - or only attends occasional events?

Yes, I would love to see more coverage! For anyone who is yet to join, just know our events are getting better every week. Our guests are exceptional but, most of all, our community of members is really really special, and not something you can easily find in a big city.

“Our members and community really make this the best job ever!”

Penultimate question: Having attended so many events myself, and seen the energy and connection in these venues; these wonderful interviews with powerful women, it seems The Trouble Club plays such an important role in so many people’s lives. That must give you heart and strength?

It absolutely does. The comments always leave me on a high. Our members and community really make this the best job ever!

Actually, this is the penultimate question. Before and after events, there are moments when the mic is off (either backstage before the interview or afterwards) where you must have heard these candid, intimate, secret or unguarded moments. Is there one that stands in your mind – or one that will remain a secret?!

Yes, I often get served some amazing tea….but those will always be a secret, sorry!

Finally, as I run a music website, I can drop a song in here. Either a new jam, the song that wakes you up. Maybe one that has personal meaning, or one that motivates you. What shall we go with?

Oooo, great question. I’m really enjoying Taylor Swift’s new album, so let’s go for The Life of a Showgirl!”

FEATURE: The Rare and the Wonderful: Kate’s Bush’s Interviews in the 2020s

FEATURE:

 

 

The Rare and the Wonderful

IN THIS ILLUSTRATION: Little Shrew features art by Jim Kay and animation produced by INKUBUS (Little Shrew design by Kate Bush)

Kate’s Bush’s Interviews in the 2020s

__________

I think that we are all…

 IN THIS ILLUSTRATION: Netflix/Courtesy Everett Collection

used to music being about self-promotion all of the time. It is part of the cycle. When it comes to albums and singles, artists have to be online and social media. There is so much competition that you cannot really pick and choose too much. That involves doing a lot of press and promotion. If you are a legacy or long-serving artist, perhaps you have the luxury of not having to do as much. When it comes to Kate Bush, this is an artist who has served her time. So many interviews through her career, now, she can be selective. This decade is the only one since the 1970s that she has not released an album in. We hope that she does put out her eleventh studio album before the end of the 2020s. That is likely. However, this decade has not exactly been quiet for Bush. She has spent the time looking back for the most part. Reissuing her studio albums, she has also been an Ambassador for Record Store Day and she has given her time and efforts to charity. Lasty year, Bush released a video for Little Shrew (Snowflake). The track originally appeared on her most recent album, 2011’s 50 Words for Snow, as Snowflake. Directing its animated video, she released it as a standalone single to raise money for War Child. Recently, the video was shown at the end of the Together for Palestine concert in London. A message from Bush was shown at the end: “Please stop the killing and the starvation of children in Gaza”. Last year, Little Shrew (Snowflake) won multiple awards at the World Film Festival in Cannes in October 2024, including Best Animation Film, Best Cause-Driven Film, and Best Female Director Short Film. That is just a flavour of what Kate Bush has been doing in the 2020s. Of course, go back to 2022 and how Stranger Things used Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God) and it shot it to the top of the charts and, in the process, it introduced new listeners to her work.

With that, we did get a brilliant interview from Kate Bush. I think her first interview since 2016. It was a rare and wonderful chance to hear from Bush. She spoke with Emma Barnett for Woman’s Hour in 2022. I recently heard Barnett speak and discuss how she got that interview. She got in contact with Bush’s P.R. team and was told that she could be put in touch with her. Perhaps unexpected given the infrequency of Kate Bush interviews, Barnett also spoke with Bush last year. I will end with these. However, as busy as Kate Bush has been this decade with various projects, there have not been a load of interviews. That is understandable. No new music since 2011, I do wonder how many requests there. Hounds of Love turned forty in September, so you wonder whether anyone approached her to talk about the album. Bush rereleasing her albums could have come with some interviews. Maybe there were requests but Bush did not want to do press around them. I think the interviews she has given in the 2020s have been great. However, there was a recent interview that I was not expecting. I want to drop some of it in. It was about Bush’s Little Shrew (Snowflake) video. It was with Ramin Zahed at Animation Magazine. Little Shrew (Snowflake) screened as part of the rich animated shorts program of this year's Woodstock Film Festival on 18th October:

“You have experimented with animation before (Elder Falls at Lake Tahoe, Wild Man) What do you love about creating art in this medium?

I’ve really loved animation ever since I saw my first Disney animation in the cinema. When I was a little girl that was the only way to see a Disney Film. They were never shown on TV and you could only see whichever film was doing the ’rounds’. This had the effect of making them very special. Something precious. I guess that feeling of them being special has stuck. In the context of Little Shrew, animation was the perfect medium – allowing us to create a tiny little creature who could travel through exactly the environment I imagined. It would never have had the same hit in live action. That’s the beauty of animation…anything and everything is possible.

What are some of your favorite animated shorts and movies, the ones that left a deep impression on you?

Like I said, the magic of those early Disney movies never really goes away. Snow White, Dumbo, The Jungle Book have especially stayed with me. I’d have to add Pixar’s Ratatouille and Monsters Inc. to the list. I also love Allegro non Troppo and Belleville Rendez-Vous (The Triplets of Belleville).

How did you decide which song to accompany the anti-war message of the short and why?

When I was trying to think of what the music would be, “Snowflake” just popped into my head and I thought – yeah, that could work. I knew we’d have to edit it down. The original track ran at over seven minutes and as animation is a very expensive medium, I knew it would need to be no more than three or four minutes long. I think the main reason I thought of that track is because the lead vocal was sung by my son when he was a little boy, so the presence of a little child is already center stage.

I felt the vulnerability of a young boy’s descant voice could work very well as the companion to the poor little shrew. They both have a tenderness about them.

Your music has always inspired hope and the exploration of a spiritual world beyond this material one. What is your take on the sorry state of the world in 2025? What gives you hope?

Thank you very much. what a really lovely thing to say. I guess it’s hard not to feel that this is the most frightening time I’ve ever known. Not just because of the wars, the reckless and arrogant attitudes of many of the world’s leaders, but also our fragility, both physically and mentally. I feel we’re losing our resilience .I  worry how social media is encouraging people to become more narcissistic. It’s also making people anxious. What gives me hope are the wonderful people like the doctors who work in the middle of war zones, children who are finding ways they might be able to save the planet… As long as people’s hearts can still be touched, then there is hope. Then they can be moved to act in a way that could really make a difference”.

Even though there have not been a lot of Kate Bush interviews in the 2020s, the ones she has been involved with have been fantastic. Two of them were conducted by Emma Barnett. The first interview with Bush was in 2022. This is when Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God) was experiencing a revival after it featured in Stranger Things. Emma Barnett spoke with Kate Bush on a landline. Bush was on the landline. When hearing Emma Barnett speak recently at an event in London, I think it was this interview where she recalled how Kate Bush rang in Woman’s Hour and said that it was Catherine (her full name). Not a case of someone calling her and it being passed to one of her team. Kate Bush called in like a regular caller! That sense of normality is rare for an artist of her stature. Bush reflected on the song placement on Stranger Things and how people have reacted to it. I have spoken about this before. Bush saying how she does not have a smartphone and instead has an old rick of a mobile. One people take the piss out of her for. Calling from a landline and recalling how she was so proud of what Stranger Things did and how her song scored this powerful scene involving Max Mayfield. In terms of protocol, an interviewer would not normally ask Bush if she was working on new music. I am not sure if that was mentioned before the interview, as the question did not come up. Instead, it was very much about the current time and Stranger Things. It seemed like a missed opportunity but, to be fair, Bush had no plans to record new music in 2022. She was busy with other stuff. The same is partly true last year. Busy with retrospection and reissuing, it was also a moment when she revealed she wanted to do something new.

Emma Barnett once again spoke with Bush about another occasion when her music was used in this bigger project. Whereas 2022 was about this T.V. show and the reaction there, last year seemed more important. Little Shrew (Snowflake) and War Child. As The Guardian explained in their article, Bush was asked about new music. Perhaps  was permitted this time. Or Barnett just had to go for it. It provoked the biggest revelation from her since 2014 and Bush announcing she would come to the stage for her Before the Dawn residency:

“Kate Bush has said she’s “very keen” to make a new album, saying, “I’ve got lots of ideas … it’s been a long time.”

In a rare interview on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on Friday, the 66-year-old English singer said there are “lots of ideas” she wants to pursue. “I’m really looking forward to getting back into that creative space,” she said.

Bush shot to fame in 1978 with her debut Wuthering Heights, and is best known for hits including Babooshka and King of the Mountain.

In 2022 she found a new generation of fans when her 1985 hit Running Up That Hill was featured on Netflix series Stranger Things and re-entered music charts around the world. Her last album was 2011’s 50 Words for Snow.

Bush, who has generally shied away from the spotlight across her career, spoke to BBC to promote a new short film she wrote and directed to raise money for children affected by war. The four-minute animation, titled Little Shrew, is set to her 2011 track Snowflake and encourages viewers to donate to international charity War Child. In the film, the titular animal searches for hope across a war-torn city.

A still from the short animated film Little Shrew, written and directed by Kate Bush. Illustration: Kate Bush

“I started working on it a couple of years ago, it was not long after the Ukrainian war broke out, and I think it was such a shock for all of us,” Bush told BBC. “It’s been such a long period of peace we’d all been living through. And I just felt I wanted to make a little animation … to draw attention to how horrific it is for children.”

The film is free to view and can be found on the singer’s website.

Asked if she was working on new material, Bush told Today host Emma Barnett: “Not at the moment, but I’ve been caught up doing a lot of archive work over the last few years, redesigning our website, putting a lyric book together. And I’m very keen to start working on a new album when I’ve got this finished. I’ve got lots of ideas and I’m really looking forward to getting back into that creative space, it’s been a long time.”

Asked if it was something she’d been thinking about for a while, Bush replied: “Yes it is, really. Particularly [in] the last year, I’ve felt really ready to start doing something new”.

We are over half-way through this decade. For Kate Bush, it has been a decade perhaps more varied and successful than the 1990s and ever the previous one. In terms of the impact she has had on people and what she has achieved without even releasing new music. There has been some looking back, through she has also raised money for charity and won awards. In terms of where we go from here, I feel we will see new music. Maybe not next year, though definitely by 2027. It has almost been fourteen years since 50 Words for Snow came out, so there is that demand. We will get some new interviews with that. The ones she has given (mainly audio) have been among the best I think. Not this pressure of promoting work and being on a bit of a treadmill. Aerial turns twenty next month, so I am curious whether there will be any interviews around that. Maybe not. Perhaps it will be new music that gets Bush talking more widely. It was great we got that recent exclusive, where Bush discussed Little Shrew (Snowflake) and this wonderful video. It is always a delight when we read or hear interviews. How this amazing and influential artist is active and she stuns and innovates constantly. Raising money and revisiting her music. Changing lives and making this big impact. There are very few artists like her. As we look towards 2026, I do wonder what the year will hold and whether we will hear from Kate Bush. It would be wonderful to imagine! In the meantime, I did want to look back on her 2020s so far and a few of the interviews conducted. Getting some rare and precious words from…

A music queen.

FEATURE: Spotlight: Charlotte Plank

FEATURE:

 

 

Spotlight

Charlotte Plank

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ONE of this year’s…

finest and most indelible E.P.s was released by Charlotte Plank. ClubLiminal is a sensational thing to behold. This is another case of me spotlighting an artist who has been around for a little while, though it is a key time to highlight. I am going to come to some interviews first. However, let’s get some biography first. Latitude Festival provided some background earlier this year ahead of Charlotte Plank playing for them:

“Plank releases Alternative, electronic pop inspired Dance EP – ClubLiminal: British vocalist
and songwriter Charlotte Plank releases her sophomore EP, May 2025, through RCA UK
Born in Australia to British acid house-loving parents, Charlotte Plank grew up with dance
music, but it clicked when she discovered drum & bass as a teenager in the UK. Initially
taken by the energetic rush of the music and the scene’s tight community bonds, she was
later drawn to the more songwriting-led elements of the genre. Hearing how producers
balanced nostalgic samples with fresh techniques — soul, jazz and blues samples, with
junglist breaks and heaving sub bass — planted a creative seed in her.

At the same time, Plank loved alternative pop music. Rudimental’s 2013 debut, Home, was a
flashpoint, showing her how the genre could go from DIY raves to main stages, with
vocalists and players connecting with a live audience. As Plank discovered her own voice,
she fell for the powerful harmonies and deep messages of Amy Winehouse; Plank wrote
poetry and lyrics, and performed R&B standards in local venues. “I feel that I’m a writer first,
above anything else” she says.

When the pandemic lockdowns began, Plank felt that the time was right; she started building
beats on Logic and the stew of influences bubbled up. She made dance-inflected pop music
that sampled elements that felt right for her generation — indie rock riffs, hyperpop hooks —
and led with her own vocals. On 2022’s ‘Hate Me’, Plank explores youthful self-loathing and
romance.

These early, self-released songs showcase a deft hand for blending emotional lyricism and
alternative pop melodies with high energy rave beats; what Plank calls “biographical
storytelling with beats”, akin to the likes of Shygirl, Charli XCX, Rina Sawayama, A. G. Cook
and Caroline Polachek.

In a moment of fateful synchronicity, these tracks caught Rudimental’s attention. The band
invited her in to perform with them in 2022, at London’s Brixton Academy and Radio 1’s Big
Weekend in Dundee, and after a rapturous reception to the shows, Plank became in
demand. She collaborated on Rudimental singles ‘Dancing Is Healing’, which peaked at No.
5 on the UK Official Singles Chart, and ‘Green & Gold’, which she wrote, featuring Skepsis
and Riko Dan.

In the studio, Plank’s skills as a collaborator compounded: she worked with/wrote for Jazzy,
Hybrid Minds and Turno, notably on the latter’s 2023 single, ‘Rave Out’. As a solo artist, she
released a mixtape, InHer World, on Black Butter Records, before moving under RCA UK
label in 2024. Seeing how pandemic-era feelings of stunted abandon and heightened
introspection were pulsing through her peers, she channelled this into InHer World, her
dynamic debut EP.

Starting the year as VEVOs ‘Dscvr Artists to Watch’ for 2025, Plank released on May 2nd
2025 through RCA UK, her sophomore 2025 EP ‘ClubLiminal’.

This fresh body of work sees Plank’s sound collaborate with Producers such as Jakwob,
Kurisu and Mike Kintish to highlight her introspective storytelling and vocal soars in unison.

Subliminal stories that cling to club walls through Planks ability to dance between intimacy
and chaos – always with a nod to her underground roots.‘Nightshift’ riffs off Groove Armada’s
‘Superstylin’ with a slick, high energy impact; ‘Ellen’ narrates youthful indecision and crises;
‘Stargirl’ dances with the darkness of fame and childhood turbulence. Across the EP, there’s
a blending of agony and ecstasy, of what Plank has playfully coined “melantronic”.

“To me, a sad song doesn’t need to sound sad,” she says, on how this confessional, hybrid
style of alternative pop and dance music speaks to Gen Z listeners. “It’s about finding
comfort in the chaos by telling stories about these transitional moments, about the battles
I’ve been through. I want to bring those stories to light in ways that resonate and make
people realise they’re not alone”.

There are other interviews I want to come to. However, earlier in the year, the Standard spoke with an artist who was “uniting ravers old and new with her soulful-yet-banging dance music which she has dubbed ‘melantrolic’”. If you have not discovered Charlotte Plank yet then do go and listen to her phenomenal music:

“My music is like hedonistic indie sleaze-tinged dance music that moves between intimacy and chaos, bridging the underground to the mainstream, and I’m like the friend on your shoulder,” says Charlotte Plank in breezily confident style when I somewhat unfairly ask her for the hard sell. “It’s like relatable, unfiltered storytelling that’s gonna make you feel something on the dancefloor.”

If all we hear about dance music now is that’s it’s over, as dead as rock’n’roll, maybe even deader given all the club closures and younger generations preferring caramel lattes to MDMA … well Plank might change all that this year. Is the 23-year-old the saviour of rave? It’s in the blood.

She’s the daughter of a couple of club kids who met in Australia, her father over from Manchester with her uncle, who was a DJ. After the family came back to the capital, she devoured her mother’s mixtapes and was singing soul music in pubs, until she realised, “singing to old men at 13 wasn’t quite as fun as going to raves”.

She was writing stories and poetry, studying English literature and music technology while immersing herself in drum’n’bass and, “random squat situations, random clubs in London, house parties and festivals. I was interested in merging different experiences”.

Lockdown hit when she was 19 and she spent it merging diverse influences like “Imogen Heap, Aphex Twin, Clams Casino, Amy Winehouse, such different worlds. There’s no blueprint, I’m freewheeling.”

A self-released single Hate Me was a TikTok hit and she made a name featuring on two Rudimental tracks. Last year she toured, played Glastonbury, and released two songs, Stargirl and Ellen, which hit a sound that is both nostalgic and new, the sound of raves past and raves to come.

“I’ve coined my music ‘melantronic’,” she says, “melancholic electronic. It’s corner of the club music. Like if you’re on a night out and you go to the loo and you’ve just realised how f***ed you are”.

I am going to move to a great interview from UKF. Speaking about her incredible sound and wonderful album, ClubLiminal. Charlotte Plank’s answer regarding her songwriting process is particularly interesting. This is an artist I have known about for years, and it is great to see her getting this hype and love:

“Unstoppable powerhouse vocalist and producer Charlotte Plank is currently seeing her latest vision ClubLiminal come to life, infusing classic jungle, experimental indie pop and dance, carving out a sound that’s not only authentic but deeply relatable. From reworking her high energy tracks into lush stripped back acoustic gems to recording new mashups, Charlotte couldn’t be busier ahead of her country wide ClubLiminal tour.

Perpetually on the brink of something big and new, we caught up with Ms Plank to chat about everything from her songwriting process to the evolution of her sound since those early collaborations with Rudimental and Notion, and what it’s like navigating what’s shaping up to be a truly unforgettable summer of 2025.

Classic jungle holds a special place for you—who are some of the key influences that shaped your sound in this genre?

Classic jungle has heavily inspired my music from the start. I think initially because, when I was young, I sang a lot of soul, RnB, indie music—many different genres—and jungle has always sampled and lent itself so well to blending with other genres so seamlessly. I’ve been inspired by the likes of LTJ Bukem, especially the way he blends ambient jazz, strings, and breaks so beautifully. His Producer 01 album has heavily influenced tracks like stargirl and ellen. The likes of Goldie and Shy FX have also heavily influenced elements of my sound. Along with Calibre, who mixes ambient, jazz, soul, breaks, and dub so well, his work really influenced little miss sunshine.

Can you walk us through your songwriting process? Do you usually start with the lyrics or the melodies? How does it typically go?

It really varies. I’ve got this sort of Bible on my phone—it’s just my notes app, but you wouldn’t want to read it. It’s basically a stream of consciousness where I jot down random thoughts at any time of day—song inspirations, lyrics, or even just single words. There’s all sorts in there, from song titles to fragmented ideas.

Usually, I either go in thinking, I need to talk about this, I need to write about this, or I’ll scroll through my little songwriting Bible for inspiration. But I’m generally more of a melody-first person as well.

So either I’ll lay down a chord structure or record random melodies as voice notes. I use my voice notes kind of like my notes app—I’ll just record ideas whenever they come to me. It always seems to happen when I’m in the car, when I can’t actually use my phone, and I’m like, I’ve got this idea! I’ve got this idea! I try to capture it in the moment, but then later, I go back and think, Wait, what was that idea I was trying to find?

I feel like most writers are the same—there’s no strict process. Usually, the most chaotic situations lead to the best stuff.

I love that. So I’d say your lyrics definitely come from a personal place?

Yeah, 100%. I love writing for others, and I really enjoy that process, but I find it hard to write about purely hypothetical situations. I feel like that happens a lot in dance music—like, imagine you’re going out and feeling this or that. Each to their own, but for me, it’s difficult to write about things that haven’t happened or aren’t happening around me. My lyrics usually come from personal stories, things my friends are going through, or just observations about the world around me.

I was saying the other day that I like to imagine my music as a soundtrack to my life—almost like romanticizing everything, as if I’m in some kind of modern-day fairy tale. That’s how I try to shape my sound—something cinematic, coming-of-age. A lot of people can relate to it because it’s about growing up, finding yourself, and navigating the weird and wonderful parts of that journey.

Yeah, it definitely comes across in both the music and the videos…

Thank you! I’m excited to explore visuals even more and really dive into that world because it’s such a big part of my overall vision. For me, the music and visuals go hand in hand, and it’s a great way to showcase more of my personality.

I think visuals add so much more character to a song. It’s easy to just drop a track and be like, Here it is, but being able to tell a story through the visuals as well makes it so much more impactful.

Where do you want to see it go from here?

Yeah, I mean, to the public, it might look like I’m evolving, but to me, it just feels like a natural progression. I’ve always been open about drawing inspiration from so many different genres—dance, indie, alt-pop. Even with my first song, Hate Me, I think I described it as if Nirvana, Aphex Twin, and PinkPantheress had a baby. It was a whole mix of influences, and I think that’s just continued to grow and evolve as I’ve become a better writer and been exposed to even more inspiration.

Right now, I feel like the music I’m making is the most exciting and the most true to me. It was really nice to hear the other day on the radio—when chemical fashion was played, one of the DJs said, It really feels like Charlotte has been on a journey over the past couple of years, experimenting with sounds, and this feels like the most ‘Charlotte Plank’ song we’ve had yet. That meant a lot because there’s so much more where that came from.

I actually feel like I’m a year ahead of my own project. I’ve already written a lot of music for the next year, and I’m kind of already in that next headspace. As I said, I wouldn’t call it impatience, but my attention span is short—I’m always onto the next thing. But I think that’s a good thing, to always be ahead, evolving, and growing. I’d hate to be stuck in one place or pigeonholed. One thing about me is that I’ve always been experimental—I want to be a pioneer of something new. I don’t want my music to just sound like something else. I want people to say, That sounds like Charlotte Plank.

That’s what excites me—working with producers and hearing them say, I’ve never made anything like this before. That’s exactly what I want. So I’m just really excited for the world to hear more and make their own minds up about it. I think it’s some of the most exciting stuff I’ve made yet.

If I had to put it into words, I’d say it’s indie-tinged dance music—somewhere between intimacy and chaos. It’s relatable, raw, and forward storytelling over a mix of indie, atmospheric, and chaotic dance sounds. Over the next few months, I’ll be exploring different tempos and sonic worlds, and I’m excited for people to step into my melantronic world”.

A couple of other interviews to get to before finishing off. HUNGER spoke with Charlotte Plank recently. Anyone who has not experienced this phenomenal artist, then do go and follow her and listen to ClubLiminal. This year has seen so many tremendous E.P.s released. I think that ClubLiminal ranks alongside the cream of the crop:

“Clara Taylor: Tell me about your recent debut tour!

Charlotte Plank: I wanted the experience to be like your favourite club night, while also watching your favourite band. Growing up, I saw The 1975 and London Grammar, but I was also going to these weird, random squat raves. I loved the feeling of both, so I wanted to bring them together. We had some crazy shows, like when we performed on a boat. The whole thing was shaking. It was probably the sweatiest show I’ve ever done. A bit of a white wine blur, to be honest.

CT: What went into the decision to tour with an all-female band?

CP: It was never a premeditated plan. It just fell into place. Gabi [King] is an amazing drummer — she also drums for The 1975 – and is an absolute machine. It was always a dream of mine to have a cellist, so having Kristina [Rhodes] was great. We became this girl-power crew in this male-dominated industry. Things are getting better for women in the dance space, but there’s still a long way to go. Female DJs still get so much shit and they don’t get taken seriously. That’s why it’s so great to see this new wave of female artists smashing it and hyping each other up.

CT: Your EP, Clubliminal, feels like a coming-of-age project. What inspired it?

CP: Stories of stuff that happened to my friends and me when we were younger. It’s like a coming-of-age fairytale that romanticises the trials and tribulations of growing up. The most personal song is ‘Ellen’. Ellen’s my middle name and it’s a letter I wrote to myself just before I got signed. The lyrics, “Ellen, if you can make it past twenty-seven”, reference the 27 Club because Kurt Cobain, Amy Winehouse and Jimi Hendrix were big inspirations of mine. It’s about going through tough times and wondering how I’m going to make it work.

CT: Were there any surprising parts of writing such personal records?

CP: I’ll go into a session and my subconscious just bleeds out. I was in a toxic, jealous relationship and didn’t realise how much it affected me until I wrote about it. I guess it’s a diary of the subconscious.

CT: Did you have a specific feeling in mind when making the Clubliminal?

CP: Clubliminal is about club music with all the subliminal thoughts and feelings. It’s designed for any point of the day — whether you’re in your room coming down from a night out, or suddenly sad about something you didn’t realise upset you. But equally about the euphoria of being on the dancefloor and lost in the moment. Like, when you meet someone in a club bathroom and you’re telling them your life story, crying. Alone-together kind of vibes”.

I am ending with this review from Original Magazine. If you are fresh to Charlotte Plank, there are some great interviews. Explore more on YouTube. She is such an engrossing and compelling artist. Someone with many years in the industry ahead. ClubLiminal is something truly special. You only need to listen to it once until it is permanently in your head and heart:

“My thing is adding some kind of storytelling over club music,”

she tells Original Magazine. Anyone attuned to the sound of narrative already knows this to be true of the young artist. Her rebellion, giving dance music heart, history, and a heroine, is what makes Charlotte Plank such a compelling new voice on the UK music scene. Her EP is a shimmering blend of cinematic soundscapes, raw emotion, and fierce intent, tracing her evolution not just as an artist, but as a narrator of modern life, femininity, and club culture.

“I guess my whole thing is, I find it hard to write hypothetically, I find it so much easier to write about stuff that’s actually going on in my life or with my friends.”

This frank, deeply felt authenticity pulses through every beat of her newest project. From euphoric bangers like Nightshift to the emotive lyricism of Stargirl, there’s a rare emotional range on display.

Often, Plank achieves this by sealing somber lyrics in an upbeat wrapper. “You can listen to it on a surface level as a club tune and then re-listen to it when you’re coming down on the bus home and be like, ‘oh, I get the lyrics now.’”

It’s little surprise, then, that storytelling runs deep for Plank. “Going back to when I was a little girl, I used to write to a fairy,” she recalls, seated in the garden of her childhood home. “It was like a next-level tooth fairy situation. My mum would always write back, and I think that’s where my storytelling started.”

That imaginative spark never left her. Her debut EP was aptly titled In Her World, a nod to her self-confessed tendency to live “in my own little world all the time. There’s a lot bubbling away under the surface that people don’t always see.”

What bubbles now is a new vision for UK dance music: expansive, literary, intimate. “I like to use a cinematic soundscape, which you can hear across the EP,” she explains. “It adds to the emotional rawness.” Her attention to sound as a sensation is shaped by a background in music technology and a musically rich upbringing. But when asked about her biggest influence, Charlotte credits her mum without hesitation.

“My thing is adding some kind of storytelling over club music,”

she tells Original Magazine. Anyone attuned to the sound of narrative already knows this to be true of the 24-year-old artist. Her rebellion — giving dance music heart, history, and a heroine — is what makes Charlotte Plank such a compelling new voice on the UK music scene. Her EP is a shimmering blend of cinematic soundscapes, raw emotion, and fierce intent, tracing her evolution not just as an artist, but as a narrator of modern life, femininity, and club culture.

“I 100% owe all of this to my mum,” she says fondly. “She brought me up on such a wide range of stuff. From Motown to Stevie Wonder, Otis Redding, Amy Winehouse… even The Cure.”

Plank’s storytelling is both sonic and literal. Every voice note and metropolitan sample is a breadcrumb in her immersive sonic universe. “The other day, my boyfriend recorded me sleep-talking… I used it in a song! I do the same thing with random conversations”.

The wonderful Charlotte Plank needs to be on your radar. Go and follow her and listen to the incredible ClubLiminal. I am excited to see where Plank heads next and what is in store. It is very clear that this amazing talent has a…

HUGE future ahead.

___________

Follow Charlotte Plank

Official:

https://www.charlotteplank.com/

Instagram:

https://www.instagram.com/charlotteplankmusic/

TikTok:

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

Twitter:

https://www.twitter.com/haaidj

Spotify:

https://open.spotify.com/artist/4U5QErgn94wZGw1rJz01BO?si=N7BS6rn3S4WKR5n4-xlAJw

YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCqii4npxgqpu4OEROBErQ1A

FEATURE: Spotlight: HAAi

FEATURE:

 

 

Spotlight

HAAi

__________

AN artist I have not…

featured yet, it is time to come to HAAi. The Australian-born, British-based D.J. and artist has been on the scene for a long time. Years. However, as she has released HUMANiSE very recently, it is a perfect time to spotlight her. Earlier this month, HAAi spoke with JunoDaily, who was interviewed around the release of her brilliant second studio album. It is one of the standout albums of the year. I will end with a positive review for HUMANiSE:

“I’ve always been a bit of a glitchy girl when it comes to my music production,” laughs HAAi, aka Teneil Throssell. “To me, it’s when music tech goes wrong that it’s at its most exciting, there’s just so much beauty in it.”

From playing records in the divey boozers of East London to today’s globe-straddling DJ diary packed with over 100 shows across five continents in 2024, Teneil is one of the hardest working selectors and producers in the UK.

Signed with iconic electronic label Mute since 2019, her trajectory so far has taken in her debut, ‘Baby, We’re Ascending’, a DJ Kicks compilation and her heavy-hitting collaboration with Fred Again… and Romy, ‘Lights Out’. The soon-to-be-released second album, HUMANiSE, is the latest installment in this creative journey smudging the lines between psychedelia, mind-expanding electronics and dubby dancefloor thrum. When we speak, Teneil is beaming enthusiastically from a hotel room in Mexico in the midst of a North American tour. A week later, we witnessed her rule the Saturday night of the Convenanza festival in the medieval castle of Carcassonne in France. She’s clearly a thriving artist in glorious flow, armed with a record to explode the fallout from our addiction to AI and algorithms.

“I wanted there to be two sides to the album’s personality, one to represent machine learning and technology, then also the human element with the storytelling, the lived experiences via the vocals of myself, the choir and the other contributors,” says Teneil.

“Rather than be opposed, this is about bringing these things together and learning how they can co-exist.”

Writing and co-producing with her friend Pat Alverez helped enhance how she channelled and pinned down her ideas. Teneil believes the uncertainties of life as a solo artist can leave you open to questioning the quality of your endeavours.

“Sometimes you can tear your hair out when you’re working on your music yourself,” she explains. “But with Pat and Jon Hopkins, I found people to quell any concerns, particularly as these worries sometimes make me wonder if I’m on the right path. But ‘Satellite’ was the first track, then I just got into the rhythm of it to the point where I chatted with management to say: ‘I think I’m actually writing an album’.”

Born in Karratha, Western Australia, and spending her formative musical years in Sydney, Teneil moved to the UK as part of the psych-rock outfit Dark Bells before the band split. Jon Hopkins is a long-term collaborator she met in its aftermath who helped her tap into songwriting alongside its ability to showcase the potential transcendence of the dancefloor.

“I did some sessions with Jon for HUMANiSE, he’s such a good friend and a great collaborator to bounce ideas off,” she says. “We talked a lot about technology, what our feelings are about fast-paced machine learning that seems to be interfering in everything. The theme for the record came out of these conversations.”

Making music on tour has also meant she’s been able to get instant feedback on any of the tracks she has designed with the dancefloor in mind. This part of the process – on moments like ‘Hey!’ from HUMANiSE – have shown her how there is a strong link between production and how she would play them out.

“I’m currently working on this big remix project, and it’s been a good way of doing it, to make it while on the road,” Teneil says. “As I’m making the tracks, I’m thinking about little moments or how they might open up a set. One of my favourite ways to write is on a plane contemplating how something would work at a festival or in a club show that night. But with HUMANiSE, most of it is far more intimate or not for the dancefloor so no one has heard it other than my management and girlfriend. I’m now excited to see how it will translate to a wider audience”.

Moving on to CLASH, who noted how HAAi gets personal on her new album. I must admit I was not aware of her music until earlier this year. She is this extraordinary multitalented and someone I am fascinated in now. Despite her relatively long career so far, I think it is important to spotlight HAAi now, as this feature is not only for brand-new artists:

“HUMANiSE’ also showcases HAAi’s fascination with performance as world-building, now fully realised in ‘HUMANiSE’ (live album performance, from Drumsheds)—a film by New Vision Originals capturing a live, immersive interpretation of her new album. The performance unfolds inside a meticulously crafted installation of a ‘90s office: a time capsule lined with ring binders, Rolodexes, fax machines, reams of A4 paper, and landline telephones—reimagined within the cavernous shell of London’s Drumsheds. Styled and dressed by TOGA Archives, HAAi and her collaborators—Jon Hopkins, Alexis Taylor (Hot Chip), Obi Franky, KAM-BU, TRANS VOICES, and queer activist Kaiden Ford—inhabit this surreal workspace, weaving in and out of filing cabinets as the conceptual world of the album unfolds in real time.

“I’ve always had this dream of doing something that is purely immersive and having people from the audience be part of the set itself… it’s definitely ambitious, but that’s something that’s kept me up at night for years,” she says. ‘HUMANiSE’ embodies this vision, blurring the line between performer and listener and emphasizing that music is a shared, human experience. The album, out now via Mute, reckons with what it is to be human in an increasingly digital world as AI threatens to eclipse everything and our screens separate us from each other. Through collaboration and community, HAAi explores the importance of a sense of togetherness and hope.

The album’s glitchy, unpredictable nature mirrors the volatility of the technologies it reflects. HAAi revels in frequency shifts, stutters, and abrupt structural changes, highlighting the friction between human emotion and machine precision. In ‘Shapeshift’, featuring KAM-BU, a laidback spoken word section grows into complex rhythmic layers, a sonic metaphor for duality — the person we are onstage versus the one we inhabit privately.

HAAi’s vocals, fragile yet commanding, thread through the album, bringing warmth to complex sound design. “I wanted this ‘human heart’ to be front and centre,” she reiterates, emphasizing the balance of vulnerability and technical mastery. Tracks like ‘Stitches’ and ‘Voices’ create moments of euphoric, dreamlike emotional clarity, while ‘New Euphoria’, with Alexis Taylor and TRANS VOICES, encapsulates the album’s communal spirit: “Even though ‘HUMANiSE’ is about how the world is starting to change beyond our control, it’s important to keep a sense of togetherness and hope”.

The Quietus spent time with HAAi (Teneil Throssell) about her music and this extraordinary new album. HUMANiSE is a very appropriate title. The Quietus explain how, as our relationships and lives are directed and dicatetd by algorithms, HAAi’s new album “finds a counterforce in the joy of real-life connection”:

“The concept of HUMANiSE was simple: re-centre vocals in her music and explore sounds away from the dancefloor. The result is a collection of tunes, somewhere between dance tracks and songs, incorporating a haze of reflections and tender confessions of care without the sacrifice of a techno thrum. Think: the morning after a rave, cuddling on your friend’s couch, braindead sipping coffee and Pedialyte, cracking up all the while. HAAi hasn’t lost her channel changer’s sensibility, and the songs are full of tricks and musical double entendres but more mid-tempo and wintery.

Nearly every track is toplined by her voice or one from her found family of collaborators (most of them appear on multiple tracks or on her previous full length record.) On ‘New Euphoria’, a 120 bpm slow build, Alexis Taylor of Hot Chip calls out with a mechanically fragmented voice that is answered by the celestial echoes of the Trans Voices choir. When writing the song, HAAi envisioned a wistful cyborg character, part-human part-android, embodied by Taylor’s voice. “I wanted it to be this yearning relationship between a person and something that wasn’t totally human – but a very sweet one.”

According to HAAi, the presence of technology is also central to the performance. “The film itself is a reaction to how we digest music,” she says. “It leans into the idea of what Humanise is: trusting technology but knowing it can be volatile as well.” She points out the way that algorithms, everywhere from Spotify to TikTok, are shaping both the kinds of music that find an audience, where they can encounter them. It’s one of the reasons why she chose to write the album and has been experimenting with ways to bring more live performances with her onstage. As for machine learning and other technological factors shaping nightlife, she’s a realist. She wants to find ways to coexist that can protect  the livelihoods of people who have found a career and a community in nightlife.

“One of the biggest parts of DJing is your connection with people. I’m looking, I’m seeing, and I’m taking my own experiences of what I’ve loved when I’ve been on a dancefloor, and showing that to people. You’re reading, whether it’s being received or not ,and making changes in what you’re doing based on that. I don’t see how you can bottle that,” says HAAi”.

I am going to return to CLASH and their review of HUMANiSE. In their words: “Electronic maven foregrounds her voice on an intimate, almost confessional album…”. I do think that HUMANiSE is one of the best albums of this year. If you have not discovered HAAi, then you really need to follow her:

“From the opening moments of ‘Satellite’ – a collaboration with Jon Hopkins, Obi Franky, ILĀ, and TRANS VOICES – the album establishes its dual ambition: the synthetic and the organic, the ecstatic and the tender. Layered with choirs, delicate vocal lines, and sweeping synths, the track sets the tone for a record that never settles into a single mood. It’s a record of contrasts: machine-driven beats meet rich, human emotion; ecstatic grooves sit alongside moments of stillness and reflection.

HAAi’s vocals, previously a subtle thread in her work, are a revelation here. On tracks like ‘Can’t Stand To Lose’ and ‘All That Falls Apart, Comes Together’ (featuring poet James Massiah), her voice carries vulnerability without ever feeling fragile. These are songs that demand attention, not only for their sonic ambition but for their ability to make space for the listener to inhabit them fully. HAAi’s decision to foreground her voice is more than a stylistic choice—it’s a statement, a reminder that even in a world driven by machines and screens, music remains a profoundly human experience.

The album’s collaborative spirit reinforces this theme. HAAi draws on a network of friends and collaborators—from Alexis Taylor (Hot Chip) and rapper KAM-BU to Kaiden Ford and choirs led by ILĀ and Wendi Rose—to craft a sense of community. There’s a generosity here: ‘HUMANiSE’ doesn’t feel like an individual statement so much as an invitation into a shared emotional space. Tracks like ‘Shapeshift’ and ‘New Euphoria’ are not only sonically thrilling but also feel alive with the energy of collective creation.

Despite its sprawling ambition, ‘HUMANiSE’ never loses sight of its core. It is an album about connection in an age of digital distraction, a reminder that emotion and empathy remain central to the human experience. HAAi navigates complex textures, breakbeats, and anthemic synths without letting the album feel cold or detached. Instead, ‘HUMANiSE’ is warm, immersive, and grounded, a record that can transport you to both the dancefloor and an introspective space within minutes.

From the pounding, kinetic drive of ‘Go’ (feat. Kaiden Ford) to the cinematic dreaminess of ‘Rushing’ (feat. ILĀ & TRANS VOICES), the album is a testament to HAAi’s range and vision. Each track has its own identity, yet together they form a cohesive narrative about resilience, connection, and the beauty of shared experience. There’s a tension throughout, between exhilaration and intimacy, that keeps the listener engaged from start to finish.

In a landscape saturated with electronic music that often prioritizes spectacle over substance, HAAi has crafted something rare: a record that is both intellectually rigorous and emotionally generous. ‘HUMANiSE’ is not just a collection of tracks; it is a vision of what electronic music can be when it embraces vulnerability, community, and the human heart. For anyone who has experienced HAAi’s DJ sets, the album captures that same sense of euphoria and attention to detail—but adds an intimate, almost confessional dimension that feels wholly original”.

I shall leave it there. I am late to HAAi, though I do feel that it is a perfect time to explore her music and her wonderful second album. You can see her upcoming gigs and a chance to see HAAi. HUMANiSE is a perfect balance of the energy, euphoria and D.J. experience, as CLASH state, with something intimae and confessional. Such a deep album that you will come to over and over again, everyone needs HAAi…

IN their life.

___________

Follow HAAi

PHOTO CREDIT: Sophie Webster

Instagram:

https://www.instagram.com/haaihaaihaai/

Bandcamp:

https://haai.bandcamp.com/

Twitter:

https://www.twitter.com/haaidj

Spotify:

https://open.spotify.com/artist/0pkLgeB9j465x1QB2kRoy4?si=PaOz9adDSN-D5Z0tbCoKQQ

YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHWuJDbejSmrhLeo1FkDlkQ

FEATURE: The Digital Mixtape: Songs from Albums Turning Fifteen in 2026

FEATURE:

 

 

The Digital Mixtape

Songs from Albums Turning Fifteen in 2026

__________

THIS anniversary feature…

takes us to the best albums of 2011. It was a busy and interesting year for music. I have combined songs from the standout albums of that year. Maybe fifteen is not as significant anniversary as ten or twenty, though it is important to remember and spotlight the gems of 2011. From Kate Bush to PJ Harvey to Fleet Foxes, it was a varied and rich year for music. Even if your memories of the year are dim, I am sure that a lot of it will come flooding back when you hear the mixtape! It was one of the stronger years of the 2010s, though, as we shall see, 2016 was perhaps the most epic year of the decade. Have a listen to the mix below and enjoy the very best of a magnificent year. These albums turns fifteen next year, and I wanted to salute them here. This is the best of thew greatest released…

IN 2011.

FEATURE: The Digital Mixtape: Songs from Albums Turning Twenty in 2026

FEATURE:

 

 

The Digital Mixtape

Songs from Albums Turning Twenty in 2026

__________

IF not the very best…

year from the 2000s, 2006 did give us a few classic albums. I wanted to mark the best of 2006, as these albums will be turning twenty next year. A big anniversary, we need to mark these great albums. I have three more features in this run where I mark important anniversaries. Some might remember 2006 more fondly than me. I think that it was certainly a changeable time and there were some interesting new artists coming through. However, most of the albums I am including in the mixtape at the end are from bigger artists. Regardless of whether you remember these albums or were not really old enough to remember 2006, you will find much to appreciate here. I was a couple of years out of university when these albums came out, so I have find memories of many of them. Below is a full and eclectic mixtape featuring songs from the best albums…

2006 had to offer.

FEATURE: Spotlight: Eli

FEATURE:

 

 

Spotlight

Eli

__________

THERE is a lot of excitement…

PHOTO CREDIT: Anthony H. Nguyen

around the release of Eli’s debut album, Stage Girl. That is out on 31st October. I am going to come to some recent interviews where we can learn more about this extraordinary artist. I am going to start out with an interview from Capital FM, and their My Life in 20. It is fun and insightful, and there are a few questions and answers that particularly interested me:

“20) What album could you listen to 20 times over and not get bored?

I’m gonna go with SZA's Ctrl. It’s the most absolute classic timeless album, especially for my generation I think. It was truly the first album I was proud to call my favourite.

19) What topic could you talk about for 19 minutes straight without notes?

The cultural impact and shift that is, was and will forever be 'Diet Pepsi' by Addison Rae.

18) What was the most important thing to happen in your life when you were 18?

I started to accept my mental health issues like OCD and depression. I also began to try, and fail, to work on coping with and managing them. It was a moment of clarity and fear but an important step in my mental health journey.

12) If you could live the life of any other person for 12 hours, who would you be?

Simone Biles. I wanna know what’s it like to fly.

7) Which of the seven deadly sins are you most guilty of?

Honestly, I don’t know what a seven deadly sin is and I even tried to google it but I am gay so that’s apparently a sin or something.

6) You can invite six people to your dream dinner party, who would you invite?

Ariana Grande, Mariah Carey, Nicki Minaj, J.Lo, Rihanna and Frances Whitney.

1) Who or what is your one true love?

Halloween is my one true love. Also Nathan Fielder and Alex Consani, strictly parasocial”.

The next interview I am going to source is from June. Eli released her Girl of Your Dream E.P. that month, so there was a lot of intertest in her unique and outstanding music. Although perhaps not as known in the U.K. as she is in the U.S. and especially in L.A., there is growing interest and exposure here. This “Massachusetts-to-LA transplant making music that sounds like it’s 2003” is being hailed as Pop’s new sensation. She has co-signs in the form of Addison Rae and Troye Sivan. The brilliant i-D spoke with Eli in the summer about her extraordinary E.P. and her burgeoning sound and career:

“She’s been hustling for a while. Eli spent a few years as a Vine kid, and dropped early tracks released under a different name (she signed to Zelig Records, home of King Princess, in 2023). At 24, she’s finally having her moment, even if some influences she’s pulling from were barely on her radar growing up. Like the aesthetics of Stacie Orrico (she doesn’t know who she is), or the sounds of Imogen Heap’s 2005 record Speak For Yourself. What is real, though, are her lyrics: inspired by her life in America’s coastal cities, run-ins with nepo babies who brag about screwing The Dare, embracing a DIY attitude, and a series of dumb men she’s since left behind. 
Eli writes and produces almost everything herself—albeit guided by the musical friends she lives with in East LA. She describes herself as “a Victorian woman trapped in 2013.” We called her up to talk about persona, pop girls, and why all of a sudden the world is ready for her sound”.

Tell me this lore. You’re from Massachusetts right? 

Yep, I grew up Catholic in suburbia. Now it’s Trumpville. I was itching to escape. I went to a scary public school and didn’t have friends. Singing online was my escape. That’s where it started—making music alone in my bedroom. Then I moved to New York for school for a bit.

What did you study?

A BFA in music. But it was during COVID. Then there was an abroad semester that I took. I went to Berlin for just five months. It was also still COVID, so not the rawest Berlin club experience. So I was like, “Okay, I’m out of New York now. I have a moment to evaluate who Eli is out of Massachusetts and New York. What am I trying to do?” Where do people go? Los Angeles.

When did you make the move?

2023. I was in love with a girl, so I impulsively moved back to New York for a year. That’s what “Marianne” is about. It was the craziest decision I’ve ever made. I could see myself staying here for five years, then I’m going to Italy. 

What’s LA done for your songwriting?

It’s been instrumental. It’s helped me understand the entertainment world. I’ve gone to the clurbs, I’ve gone to Tenants of the Trees, and left uncomfortable or pissed off enough to write a song about it. Everybody has their own journey, but there’s a lot of people who are kicking their feet up, yet they’re killing it. That’s [what inspired] “God Bless the BFA.”

I wanted to talk about the mood and the aesthetics of the music. Where did that come from?

I’ve heard the Disney Channel storyline of “Be yourself.” I’ve had therapists tell me to be myself. I have a lovely “Live, Laugh, Love” mom who has “Be Yourself” hung up all over the house. But I did not fully grasp what that meant until this past year. I realized how much I was running from as a queer person. After moving here and being around people that I love, for the first time I had the space to figure myself out. Now, everything has hit me artistically in all the right places. 

I wasn’t even consciously trying to make something really joyous. I was long inspired by pop girls. All of the artwork [for the EP] I made on my phone. I’ve been that girl in her bedroom, not going to class, just sleeping all day then waking up at 3 a.m. to go on YouTube to watch Ariana Grande. I was Stan Twitter adjacent. 

All your current songs are from an upcoming album called Stage Girl, right? What’s the vision?

I believe that singing is my calling—God put me here to sing. That’s what my mom told me growing up and it stuck. Not saying that I’m here to bring back singing…”.

I guess there will be more interviews with Eli around the release of Stage Girl. I am going to end with a recent interview from NME. If you have not heard the music of Eli yet then make sure you check it out, as she is astonishing. One of the most promising voices in Pop right now. As NME say in the top of their interview,“ the 24-year-old singer delivers a dazzling audition for pop superstardom, bringing with her a heightened sense of self-awareness and authenticity”. Before sourcing from the interview, there are a couple of key observations. How Stage Girl promotes joy and really brings that to the fore. How there is going to be a mix of the best Pop of the '90s and '00s. Acts like TLC and Mariah Carey alongside Disney Channel stars of the ‘00s. Also, Eli is really putting singing key in the mix. In terms of the power and potential of the voice. It is a true singing album. Power, depth, emotion and layers to every song:

“In her childhood, Eli was a “living, breathing theatre kid” who never actually did musicals growing up in the small town of Norfolk, Massachusetts. “I kind of resented the part of my upbringing that wasn’t able to have that outlet,” she reveals, but also owns up to having it in “a weird internet way” as a former Vine star. She later went to New York to study a BFA at NYU – “this arts degree that I didn’t get, but I almost did,” she says cheekily – before releasing a string of singles under a different name and moving to LA.

Drawing from Y2K culture isn’t new by any means, but there’s a heightened self-awareness and authenticity with the way Eli does it in her music now that elevates it beyond nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake. It’s how she genuinely loves the “mismatched, disgusting, kitschy” outfits of the era or creates lyric videos that look like they were made on Windows Movie Maker, but does so with a nudge and a wink. Much of that comes through on the album’s two breakout singles – girlhood anthem ‘Marianne’ and the “cheesy, cheap piano”-led masterpiece that is ‘Girl Of Your Dreams’. Both have helped her find fans in some of the current pop scene’s leading names, including Troye Sivan, Doechii and Zara Larsson.

 

‘Girl Of Your Dreams’ was a practice in “instinctual” creation and “pure joy” that happened at the end of a long day in the studio when she and her collaborators (Mike White and Sean Kennedy, known for their work with former NME cover stars Chappell Roan and UPSAHL, respectively) had a bit of extra time. But as much as she works off instinct, ‘Stage Girl’ is also highly tuned and intentional – after all, it is only a 10-song record in an era of 40-song deluxe editions. “I’m a firm believer in cohesion and curation, especially on a debut album,” she says.

s Eli waxes lyrical about the ins and outs of both her brand of pop and her peers’, she stumbles upon a revelation. “This conversation is really honing in on the fact that I’m a fan, and you can be a fan and you can also be a star,” she muses. But, for that epiphany to really make sense, you’d need to view it through the lens of the fictional American Idol-style TV singing competition that the singer has created to accompany her debut album.

On YouTube, Eli has been documenting her path to becoming the next stage girl, from bedroom singer to live auditions. Through the series, Eli is unafraid to both poke fun at herself and live her truth, from a cheeky nod to her being an artist who happens to be trans (one of the characters she plays is named ‘Eliza Mann’) to her story as a “small town girl who’s terrified to leave her bedroom”.

It’s a universe that Eli’s growing legion of fans have bought into wholeheartedly as well, sharing their excitement about Stage Girl online and going to shows in character. “When I’m seeing them be like, ‘I’m the next stage girl’, and talk about how they’re gonna fit into Stage Girl, what their talents are and how they’re gonna audition, I’m still having trouble understanding that they’re real because that’s really crazy,” she says.

It might be hard for Eli to get her head around that reaction, but her imminent debut album should only escalate the enthusiasm around her. As she continues to grow, she’s enjoying exploring all the “joy, potential, worth and value” of her artistry, and has big plans for the future, like bringing her one-woman show, also called ‘Stage Girl’, to New York’s theatre stages, followed by Australia because “they stream my music, they’re killing it”.

I am going to end there. Stage Girl is definitely one of the most anticipated albums of the year. One of the most important debut albums of this year. With huge fans such as Doechii recognising the brilliance of Eli, she is going to have this upward trajectory. So many great times ahead of her! At the moment, there are a few mainstream Pop artists perhaps not at their best. Lacking a certain energy and originality. Artists like Eli are injecting something much needed. She is going to be this global megastar…

VERY soon.

_____________

Spotlight Eli

Official:

https://www.journalofadoll.net/

Instagram:

https://www.instagram.com/journalofadoll/

TikTok:

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

YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYX-1Ym1DT6a0jIXVdSI_tg

Spotify:

https://open.spotify.com/artist/0phkgcpVchB7IJFJ7KcSP1?si=asVGeIR3She0ZkAz1t2-Kg

FEATURE: Spotlight: Asha Banks

FEATURE:

 

 

Spotlight

PHOTO CREDIT: Radhika Muthanna for Wonderland

Asha Banks

__________

THIS is an amazing young artist…

PHOTO CREDIT: Sophie Webster for NOTION

who many might know from her acting work. Asha Banks is a St Albans-born talent who began her career as a child actress in the West End. She played the lead role in the 2022 film, The Magic Flute, and appeared in the 2024 BBC series, A Good Girl's Guide to Murder. Banks’s debut E.P., Unite My Tongue, was released in March. This is someone who I think you should all follow. In terms of Asha Banks’s style and type of music, maybe Dream/Soft Pop. It is very much her own blend. I love her debut E.P. and I can tell she has huge passion for music. I know she will enjoy a long career. I want to get to a few recent interviews with Banks, where she talks about her music. Like I say with every artist who also is an actor, I think the disciplines from that feed into the music. They bring those skills and attributes into their songs. A certain ability and intuition that gives the music this distinct power and conviction. Maybe I am wrong, but you can see how music and acting naturally intertwine. In March, Asha Banks spoke with NOTION about starring in My Fault: London and releasing her debut E.P. It is interesting in the interview how she says she wants to act and sing. How she also wants to go into musical theatre. Someone who will grace the stage plenty of times in musicals and big productions:

“It’s foggy in LA, but Asha Banks is feeling bright and sunny. “I’m just so, so happy… I feel full.” She’s had a busy month: My Fault: London, her new film, was quickly followed by Untie My Tongue, her first EP.

The latter is full of songs exploring heartbreak and the end of the relationship “from its early stages to its ending stages”, encompassing a wide range of feelings. On ‘Shiver’, Asha asks an ex-lover, “Do you think about me as much as I think about you?”, while ‘Closing Time’ sees her contrasting the “sugar rush” beginning of a relationship with the realisation that “only one of us knows it’s closing time”. Fundamentally, the EP is about truth: telling it, asking for it, attempting to figure it out. “They felt like pivotal moments in a relationship,” Asha says now, “It was about telling a story.”

Having acted from a young age after being cast as young Eponine in the West End production of Les Misérables, Asha Banks is accustomed to telling other people’s stories, other people’s truths. What was it like to speak for herself, this time? “With acting, you’re bringing to life somebody else’s creative vision, which is beautiful and which I love doing. But it was really exciting and a different venture to kind of tell my own story. It’s daunting, but it’s also so exciting to me.” As the title of the EP implies, this is Asha’s moment to speak.

Songwriting, in fact, has long been a part of how she expresses herself. “I wrote my first song when I was six. My mum says it was called ‘Mummy Is My Darling’,” she laughs, “I loved writing songs about my family members and how much I love them. I think the next one was like, a song about my grandma.” She’s always been dependent on music, “in an emotional way”. “You can materialise something that’s happening inside you. That process really helps me. And it also resonates with other people, it can allow them to realise something about themselves.” With two shows at Omeara in London coming up, she’s excited to see those feelings reflected back at her on the faces of her audience: “I feel like I’ve met so many of my fans online, so it’s going to be so surreal to smile at people and give everybody hugs.”

Growing up, she was drawn to her parents’ favourite music – Joni Mitchell and Nora Jones from her mum, Jack Johnson from her dad – and she feels the influence, even now, of that confessional strain of writing. “There was this initial fear of being vulnerable, and the need to be very transparent, but once you let it out, it becomes beautiful.” Genre, too, is something she’s comfortable exploring without being boxed in by it. “It was about finding something that felt really true,” she says, “When we were writing the EP, we were trying not to think too much about the exterior world… we just wanted it to sound right, emotionally.”

In writing so transparently about her real life, does she ever feel too exposed? “I feel like you’re kind of just forced to be completely honest, whether you want to be or not, because you have to just get over the fact that people are going to listen to it. Otherwise it’s not going to hit the same. The songs that everybody loves are the ones that are truthful.” And, she says, music gives her an outlet to feelings and experiences she wouldn’t otherwise know how to handle: “If I couldn’t write about everything that happens, it would probably swallow me whole.”

She is, however, also inspired by things that haven’t happened to her. ‘Feel the Rush’, another track on the EP, is written from the perspective of Noah, her character in My Fault: London. “It was a different approach. I hadn’t written about an experience that isn’t my own before. I wrote the song literally five days after I finished filming, so I was still very much in Noah mode. I know the character so well and it was a lovely way to [get] closure and finish the circle.”

There are a couple of other interviews I want to bring in. Back in February, Square Mile spent time with Asha Banks. This is someone who wants to do it all. In addition to this burgeoning and brilliant acting career, you can tell how much music means! In terms of how naturally it comes. I do think that we will see a string of albums from Banks. Unite My Tongue is a fantastic E.P. and a tantalising taste of this distinct and accomplished young songwriter:

“There’s another feather in Asha’s rather large cap: her songwriting. “Music is always my escape,” she tells me. She’s been making up songs since she was about six. Her repertoire has expanded from thirty-second songs about how much she loves her dog to her upcoming EP.

After a long day on a TV set, she’ll retreat to her bedroom and get writing. There are two guitars propped up by her desk, ready to go. Straight after filming My Fault: London wrapped, Asha recorded the six songs for Untie My Tongue. The first tracks ‘So Green’ and ‘Feel The Rush’ are already out. The remainder start streaming on 7 March. It’s already shaping up to be quite the year for Asha Banks.

Asha’s parents raised her on Joni Mitchell and Norah Jones. She’s always been drawn to guitar-led, writing-driven music, like Lizzy McAlpine and Bon Iver. Asha categorises her own sound as “indie folk slash pop. Music that feels earthy and folky and summery and floaty.” The bridge of ‘Feel The Rush’ layers up Asha’s vocals to create an ethereal, glittering sound. ‘So Green’ racked up 100,000 streams on Spotify within the first two months.

The real joy for Asha isn’t just watching the numbers go up and up, but being able to share her music with other people. She performed these songs live for the first time at Shoreditch Treehouse in December, and hopes to do many more shows around London. “Given my background in theatre, I crave the performance. Because it’s live, it evolves every time and you get to live with it for ages.” Watch this space.

It’s impossible for Asha to pinpoint which form of creativity calls to her the most. She can’t pick between theatre and film, or even acting and singing. She wants to do everything – and no doubt she will. “I’d love to do loads of different roles and play loads of different sort of characters and try loads of different things and different styles and different mediums. I really just love doing it all”.

PHOTO CREDIT: Rankin

As Asha Banks revealed to HUNGER, she is working on a new E.P. Her sophomore release, How Real Was It?, is out in November. I am excited to hear that. Infused with and influenced by Los Angeles, it might be a sunnier and bigger release than Unite My Tongue. Two E.P.s in a year shows how focused and prolific Asha Banks is as a songwriter:

“Ciarán Howley: Where to start? Let’s go back to the beginning — who were your biggest musical influences growing up?

Asha Banks: I’ve kind of realised recently that so much of my music taste just came from my parents. My dad was always playing Take That in the car, and my Mum loved Norah Jones, Joni Mitchell and Janis Ian. I didn’t really choose to listen to those artists, but they absolutely influenced me. And Jack Johnson — such a dad artist, right? I do wonder, like, if they’d been heavy-metal heads, my
career would probably have been completely different.

CH: 2025 is a big year for you — your debut EP Untie My Tongue arrived at the start and How Real Was It? lands in November. How does it feel to put out such raw, vulnerable work — and so much of it?

AB: It’s definitely a mix of daunting and exciting. The first time I released something, it was terrifying — it was mine, and then suddenly it was everyone else’s. But seeing how people connect with my songs is just the best part. I’ve played a lot of these songs live already, so I’ve had a glimpse of what people like, but hearing it all fully produced is such a different thing.

CH: What can we expect from the new EP? Is it a complete sonic departure or more of a natural progression from the first?

AB: How Real Was It? is definitely a natural progression. If the first EP was very present and in- the-moment, this one feels more reflective. Some of the songs I wrote at the same time as the first EP, and some I wrote in LA, which was my first time writing there. Just being in the sun made a massive difference — like, I swear it infiltrates the music. So a few songs have this sunnier feel, but it’s still rooted in my sound.

CH: So, what’s next for Asha Banks?

AB: I’ve got a headline show coming up at Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre in September, which I’m so excited for. My brother did shows there as a kid, and I was always jealous. Now I’ve finally put myself on that stage. And I’m in LA right now finishing the How Real Was It? EP and doing more writing. I’m also going on tour later this year. So, yeah — lots happening”.

I will leave it there. I was hoping to find a few reviews for Unite My Tongue. It deserved a lot more press and attention! However, when How Real Was It? is released in November, there should be some reviews up. This is an artist and actor who has big ambitions and you can see embarking on world tours and collaborations with huge artists. For now, she is looking ahead to the release of her second E.P. Banks has a couple of international dates before the end of this year and some great U.K. gigs scheduled for next year. Although she sounds so fully-formed and brilliant right now, the truth is that she is…

ONLY just getting started.

____________

Follow Asha Banks

PHOTO CREDIT: Sophie Webster for NOTION

Instagram:

https://www.instagram.com/ashaabanks/

TikTok:

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

YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_pY4KEaXdrNu2E-3VjCPug

Spotify:

https://open.spotify.com/artist/2uDFxcjRQnf8mjFwfqieSw?si=sdymjD5PTtyG7f4AVvZ7uQ

FEATURE: The Digital Mixtape: Songs from Albums Turning Twenty-Five in 2026

FEATURE:

 

 

The Digital Mixtape

Songs from Albums Turning Twenty-Five in 2026

__________

I am getting near…

to the end of this run of features combining songs from incredible albums that have important anniversaries next year. I have four more to go after this. For this one, I am to the year 2001. Albums that turns twenty-five next year. 2001 was a pretty remarkable year for new music. In terms of there being this holdover and continuation of sounds from the 1990s mixing with the sounds of the 2000s. Genres diversifying and changing. In the mixtape at the end of this feature are sensational albums from the likes of The White Stripes, Björk, and The Strokes. It is a really interesting year for music. I have collated songs from the very best albums of 2001. As I keep saying, even if you are not old enough to remember the year or were not yet born, then you should still be able to connect with a lot of these albums. The mixtape shows what a strong year…

2001 was.

FEATURE: Kate Bush’s Aerial at Twenty: Ranking the Sixteen Tracks

FEATURE:

 

 

Kate Bush’s Aerial at Twenty

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

Ranking the Sixteen Tracks

__________

IT may seem…

like sacrilege or wrong to see Aerial’s A Sky of Honey as nine separate tracks instead of a continuous piece, as Kate Bush would have wanted. The original Aerial, released on 7th November, 2005, had two discs. The second of the double album, A Sky of Honey, was separated into one tracks. A later release then had A Sky of Honey as a single flowing suite. I am obviously not going to include any audio with Rolf Harris on it. He was The Painter on the original An Architect's Dream and A Painter’s Link. His vocal was rerecorded by Bush’s son, Bertie. However, the nine tracks and moments on A Sky of Honey have their own personality and place. As do the seven tracks on the first disc, A Sea of Honey. A collection of songs that seem to summon images of the deep and water. The second disc about the lightness and expanse of what is above. Nature and the full scope and potential of the natural world explored by Kate Bush. In 2021, I ranked the seven tracks from A Sea of Honey, but I will expand on that. My ranking for A Sea of Honey will also be different. As Aerial turns twenty on 7th November, this anniversary feature is me ranking the sixteen tracks. You might disagree with the order – and I have changed my mind through the years -, so let me know how you would order things…

___________

SIXTEEN: The Painter’s Link

Track Number: Eleven

About:

“Versions

There is only one studio version of this song.

A live version appears on the album Before The Dawn.

Performances

The song was performed live as part of Kate’s Before The Dawn shows in London, 2014.

Lyrics

The painter:

It’s raining

What has become of my painting

All the colours are running

The chorus:

So all the colours run

So all the colours run

See what they have become

A wonderful sunset” – Kate Bush Encyclopedia

FITEEN: Pi

Track Number: Two

About:

“I really like the challenge of singing numbers, as opposed to words because numbers are so unemotional as a lyric to sing and it was really fascinating singing that. Trying to sort of, put an emotional element into singing about…a seven…you know and you really care about that nine. I find numbers fascinating, the idea that nearly everything can be broken down into numbers, it is a fascinating thing; and i think also that we are completely surrounded by numbers now, in a way that we weren’t you know even 20, 30 years ago we’re all walking around with mobile phones and numbers on our foreheads almost; and it’s like you know computers…

I suppose, um, I find it fascinating that there are people who actually spend their lives trying to formulate pi; so the idea of this number, that, in a way is possibly something that will go on to infinity and yet people are trying to pin it down and put their mark on and make it theirs in a way I guess also i think you know you get a bit a lot of connection with mathematism and music because of patterns and shapes…

Ken Bruce show, BBC Radio 2, 31 October 2005” – Kate Bush Encyclopedia

Standout Lyrics:

“Sweet and gentle and sensitive man

With an obsessive nature and deep fascination

For numbers
And a complete infatuation with the calculation

Of π”

FOURTEEN: Joanni

Track Number: Six

Review:

“The bad news is…well, there isn’t really any bad news, unless you were expecting K. Bush to take on W. Bush—the closest we get to war imagery is “Joanni,” a song about Joan of Arc. Instead, raising her family informs most of the record” – SLANT

Standout Lyrics:

“Elle parle à Dieu et aux anges

Dans ses prières

Venez Sainte Catherine

Venez Sainte Marguerite

Elle a besoin de vous de

Les voix, les voix du feu

Chantent avec ma petite soeur

Les voix, les voix, les voix”

THIRTEEN: An Architect’s Dream

Track Number: Ten

Versions

“There are two studio versions of this song. The original studio version, included on the album Aerial, features Rolf Harris as the painter. In the remastered version, released in 2018, his voice is replaced by Kate’s son Bertie’s, taken from a live performance of the song. 

A full live version appears on the album Before The Dawn.

Performances

The song was performed live as part of Kate’s Before The Dawn shows in London, 2014” – Kate Bush Encyclopedia

Standout Lyrics:

“Curving and sweeping

Rising and reaching

I could feel what he was feeling

Lines like these have got to be

An architect’s dream”

TWELVE: Somewhere In Between

Track Number: Fourteen

Review:

“In contrast to the dark and unsettling The Ninth Wave, Bush’s second great song-cycle, Aerial’s A Sky of Honey, is glowing and blissful: a summer’s day condensed into 42 minutes of music. It includes the utterly gorgeous and, it has to be said, profoundly stoned-sounding Somewhere in Between, which perfectly captures dusk slowly settling” – The Guardian

'What kind of language is this?' Kate Bush sings, self-interrogatively, on the title track, the last of the album. It's a good question, to which she offers a partial answer on 'Somewhere in Between', which in ambition and content is where most of the songs on this album are suspended - somewhere in between the tighter, more conventional structures of pop and the looser, less accessible arrangements of contemporary classical and the avant-garde; somewhere, in mood and atmosphere, between the lucidity of wakefulness and the ambiguity of dream; between the presumed innocence of childhood and the desire for escape offered by the adult imagination; between abstraction and the real” – The Guardian

Standout Lyrics:

“Somewhere in between

The waxing and the waning wave

Somewhere in between

The night and the daylight

Somewhere in between

The ticking and the tocking clock

Somewhere in between

What the song and the silence say”

ELEVEN: How to Be Invisible 

Track Number: Five

About:

“In an effort to avoid dreary literary jargon, I’d like to applaud the unexpected delights that are Kate’s symbols. Take, for example, “How to Be Invisible,” with its “Eye of Braille/Hem of Anorak/Stem of Wallflower/Hair of Doormat.” Unorthodox, contradictory, and yet totally applicable to the socially invisible. Reading this piece, I physically felt the lines, “Take a pinch of keyhole/And fold yourself up/You cut along the dotted line/You think inside out.” I believe I have folded into myself before and, with self-loathing, “cut along the dotted line.” Haven’t we all?” – Living Life Fearless

Standout Lyrics:

“I found a book on how to be invisible

Take a pinch of keyhole

And fold yourself up

You cut along the dotted line

You think inside out

And you’re invisible

Eye of Braille

Hem of anorak

Stem of wallflower

Hair of doormat”

TEN: Prelude

Track Number: Eight

About:

“Versions

There is only one studio version of this song.

A live version appears on the album Before The Dawn.

Performances

The song was performed live as part of Kate’s Before The Dawn shows in London, 2014.

Lyrics

Mummy…

Daddy…

The day is full of birds

Sounds like they’re saying words

Credits

Keyboards: Kate

The Sun: Bertie” – Kate Bush Encyclopedia

NINE: King of the Mountain

Track Number: One

Versions:

“There is only one official version of ‘King Of The Mountain’: the album version, which was also released as a single. However, there are a few unofficial remixes of the track, all issued in 2005 on bootleg 12″ singles.

A live version appears on the album Before The Dawn” – Kate Bush Encyclopedia

Standout Lyrics:

“Another Hollywood waitress

Is telling us she’s having your baby

And there’s a rumour that you?re on ice

And you will rise again someday

And that there’s a photograph

Where you’re dancing on your grave”

Review:

“There’s my idea of taking a break and there’s your idea of taking a break. And then there’s Kate Bush’s idea of taking a break. The wandering enigma of British pop has been gone for twelve years. Which means the last time we saw Kate Bush was in the nineties – and let’s be honest, who can remember them?! (I can actually remember them very well, but that last bit scans rather nicely dontchathink?)

So what on Emily Bronte’s misty earth has she been up to for the last twelve years? Well, I imagine she’s been raising a family and proba…yadda, yadda, yadda – who gives an arse? She’s got a new album coming out. She’s called it ‘Aerial’. And ‘King Of The Mountain’ is the first indication that it might be as ace as we hoped it would be.

For a while, I always thought that Kate Bush was taking the piss when she sang. Either that or she was celebrating her release from the mental asylum by screaming at passers-by, then softly informing them that she has a house on top of the hill that they simply must visit because the garden path is made of swords and the kitchen is run by the trees. Of course, that was then. Now, having actually listened beyond ‘Wuthering Heights’, I’d stick her up their with the very best. So apart from the remarkable voice, why do folk dig The Bush? Thankfully, some answers can be found in ‘King Of The Mountain’. Sort of. A slow-burning reggae groove, peculiar lyrics, electronic phasing, tribal pulsing and a shuddering, vintage vocal are all in there. She also talks of “the wind whistling” – which in a Kate Bush track, can only be a good thing. Thing is, the track doesn’t really go anywhere and if the lady herself wasn’t singing it could be considered terribly dull. Still, the pastoral princess returneth – Yeth!” – Drowned in Sound

EIGHT Sunset

Track Number: Twelve

Review:

“'A Sky of Honey' is music of pagan rapture - songs about acts of creation, natural or otherwise; about the wind, rain, sunlight and the sea. Sometimes it is just Kate alone at her piano, her voice restrained.

Sometimes, as on the outstanding 'Sunset', she begins alone and softly, but soon the tempo quickens and the song becomes an experiment in forms: jazz, progressive rock, flamenco” – The Guardian

Standout Lyrics:

“Who knows who wrote that song of Summer

That blackbirds sing at dusk

This is a song of colour

Where sands sing in crimson, red and rust

Then climb into bed and turn to dust

Every sleepy light

Must say goodbye

To the day before it dies

In a sea of honey

A sky of honey

Keep us close to your heart

So if the skies turn dark

We may live on in

Comets and stars”

SEVEN: Bertie

Track Number: Three

About:

“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)” – Kate Bush Encyclopedia

Standout Lyrics:

“Sweet kisses

Three wishes

Lovely Bertie

The most wilful

The most beautiful

The most truly fantastic smile

I’ve ever seen”

SIX: A Coral Room

Track Number: Seven

About:

“There was a little brown jug actually, yeah. The song is really about the passing of time. I like the idea of coming from this big expansive, outside world of sea and cities into, again, this very small space where, er, it’s talking about a memory of my mother and this little brown jug. I always remember hearing years ago this thing about a sort of Zen approach to life, where, you would hold something in your hand, knowing that, at some point, it would break, it would no longer be there.

Front Row, BBC4, 4 November 2005” – Kate Bush Encyclopedia

Standout Lyrics:

“My mother and her little brown jug

It held her milk

And now it holds our memories

I can hear her singing

“Little brown jug don’t I love thee”

“Little brown jug don’t I love thee”

Ho ho ho, hee hee hee”

FIVE: Aerial Tal

Track Number: Thirteen

About:

“Versions

There is only one studio version of this song.

A live version appears on the album Before The Dawn.

Performances

The song was performed live as part of Kate’s Before The Dawn shows in London, 2014.

Credits

Keyboards and Vocals: Kate” – Kate Bush Encyclopedia

FOUR: Prologue

Track Number: Nine

About:

“Versions

There is only one studio version of this song.

A live version appears on the album Before The Dawn.

Performances

The song was performed live as part of Kate’s Before The Dawn shows in London, 2014.

Cover versions

‘Prologue’ was covered by Göteborgs Symfoniker” – Kate Bush Encyclopedia

Standout Lyrics:

“Oh so romantic, swept me off my feet

Like some kind of magic

Like the light in Italy

Lost its way across the sea…

Roma Roma mia

Tesoro mio, bella

Pieno di sole luce

Bali cozi bene, bene

Pianissimo

Pianissimo”

THREE: Aerial

Track Number: Sixteen

About:

“It would be fanciful to claim ‘Aerial’ as definitively club-friendly. A multi-faceted work ranging over reggae, pop, rock, flamenco, renaissance madrigal and icy synthetics, it’s too immersive, too elusive, too damned expansive to be entirely one thing. Yet a unifying ambience threads its way through the music. ‘Pi’ is chill-out prog, with murmuring electronics and a spacey synth wash. ‘Joanni’, with its trip hop indebted beats, squelchy funk groove and trippy strings, nods to the Bristol-centric sounds of ‘Unfinished Sympathy’ and ‘Man Child’. The beginning of ‘Somewhere In Between’, where the rhythm mimics drum’n’bass, could actually be Massive Attack, with Bush doing a guest turn a la Tracy Thorn or Liz Fraser.

These clues pave the way for the album’s climax, where things turn positively Balearic; albeit, Balearic, Devon-style. In the final 25 minutes of ‘Aerial’, Bush proves that she understands the key tenets of dance music, the upward arc, the competing tensions of build and release. We find her, in her mid-40s, blissed-out, ecstatic, rapturous, climbing to the top of world. As she sings as the album rushes towards its finale: ‘We become panoramic!

At first, the mood was slow, stoned, dream-like. Then the sultry ‘Sunset’ climbed towards a rattling flamenco climax, Mino Cinélu’s percussive power pushing the song ‘all the way up to the top of the night’, setting up the impossibly thrilling climax of ‘Nocturn’ and ‘Aerial’. Amid bells and birdsong, a new tension informed the music. Over an angry squall of guitar and a heavy artillery of bass and drums, Bush wailed about her ‘beautiful wings’ as the music pushed up and up.

It ended with frenzied chanting and what sounded like an explosion. Listeners to the ‘Before the Dawn’ live album might imagine Bush disappearing in a puff of smoke. In fact, she was hoisted into the air, black wings and all, airborne at last” – Disco Pogo

Standout Lyrics:

“All of the birds are laughing

All of the birds are laughing

Come on let’s all join in

Come on let’s all join in

I want to be up on the roof

I’ve gotta be up on the roof

Up, up high on the roof

Up, up on the roof

In the sun”

TWO: Nocturn

Track Number: Fifteen

About:

“Though the album was recorded elsewhere, ‘A Sky Of Honey’ is redolent of Bush’s second base, a cliff-top house on the South Hams peninsula in Devon, with its own boathouse and private beach. This feels like the locus of a suite which moves from a country garden to the shore, to the Atlantic, birdsong running as a thread through it all.

Having spent much of ‘Aerial’ murmuring through a beguiling sun-flecked idyll, Bush begins to shake us awake as the music climbs higher and the day extends. On ‘Sunset’ the sea turns honeycomb, reflecting the sky as the light begins to change. The music at first floats, then pauses, then surges, becoming a kind of Balearic flamenco. ‘Nocturn’ begins as an ambient chill-out track, reflecting a gentle, pastoral hedonism: ‘We tire of the city,’ purrs Bush. ‘We long for something more.’ Then the beat kicks in and the music begins to build. Bush finally lets fly vocally, switching between a keening sensuality and primal chanting. What’s happening? The sun is coming up, that’s what, and ‘all the dreamers are waking!’ It’s utterly electrifying.

‘Aerial’ strengthened the connection. In 2021, London-based DJ and producer Ranj Kaler reworked ‘Nocturn’, accentuating its Balearic tendencies. “I always loved that track, it had a real Café del Mar kind of feel to it,” he says. “I used to play the original a lot at the beginning of the night. With the remix, I wanted to capture that beachy vibe, going on a journey to the seaside and away from the city. Making it a bit funkier but keeping that melancholic feel.” Does Bush know about it? “I did send a message and I didn’t get anything back!” – Disco Pogo

Standout Lyrics:

“Could be in a dream

Our clothes are on the beach

The prints of our feet

Lead right up to the sea

No one, no one is here

No one, no one is here

We stand in the Atlantic

We become panoramic”

ONE: Mrs. Bartolozzi

Track Number: Four

About:

“Well, I do do a lot of washing [chuckles]. I’m sure I would never have written the song if I didn’t… You know, just this woman, in her house, with her washing. And then the idea of taking the water in the washing machine with all the clothes, and the water then becoming the sea… and I also think there’s something very interesting about clothes. They’re kind of people without the people in them, if you know what I mean? [Kate laughs] They all have our scent, and pieces of us on them, somehow.

Front Row, BBC4, 4 November 2005” – Kate Bush Encyclopedia

“But the one track on Aerial that best bridges the divide between Bush's domestic and creative existences is the haunting piano ballad Mrs Bartolozzi, in which a housewife character drifts off into a nostalgic reverie while watching clothes entwining in her washer-dryer. It's also the one track set to polarise opinion among listeners, with its eerie, unhinged chorus of "washing machine ... washing machine". Bush acknowledges as much.

"A couple of people who heard it early on," she says, dipping a spoon into her avocado, "they either really liked it or they found it very uncomfortable. I liked the idea of it being a very small subject. Clothes are such a strong part of who a human being is. Y'know, skin cells, the smell. Somebody thought that maybe there'd been this murder going on, I thought that was great. I love the ambiguity” – The Guardian

Standout Lyrics:

“I watched them going ’round and ’round
My blouse wrapping itself around your trousers
Oh the waves are going out
My skirt floating up around my waist
As I wade out into the surf
Oh and the waves are coming in
Oh and the waves are going out”

FEATURE: Modern-Day Queens: Doja Cat

FEATURE:

 

 

Modern-Day Queens

PHOTO CREDIT: Dave Meyers

Doja Cat

__________

A couple of reasons…

PHOTO CREDIT: Greg Swales

why I am featuring Doja Cat in this Modern-Day Queens. Firstly, her phenomenal new album, Vie (French for ‘life’), gained critical acclaim. It is a fantastic album and is her fifth album. It comes two years after Scarlet. I really love the physical and digital covers for Vie. The aesthetic of the album is wonderful. I have been following Doja Cat for a while now, but this is the first album of hers where I have immersed myself. I will end with a  couple of positive reviews for Vie. Before that, there are some interviews that I want to get to. In August, NME reacted to an interview Doja Cat had with Zane Lowe about her upcoming album. I think that Vie might be among her best work, and it is definitely one of the best albums of 2025:

“Now, in a new interview with Apple Music 1’s Zane Lowe, Doja has shared her experience working with former fun. member and Bleachers leader Antonoff.

“I’m working with Jack Antonoff and working with a person that’s new in my life,” she told Lowe. “And so it’s the grappling with talking about something personal and creating something fresh, and then getting to know someone new, and then all of these things fell together really naturally.”

The musician has previously said that the album will be more of a “pop-driven” version of her previous LP ‘Scarlet‘. She went on to explain how the producer has helped in inspiring this sound, saying: “He’s just been such a wonderful person to work with,” adding: “But yeah, I think it’s just been nice to play.

“I really played through the whole thing … I think what I wanted to do was play with my voice in ways that are a little bit less unconventional. And so I’m shrieking a little bit on this album, and that’s been a lot of fun.”

In an interview with NME last year, Antonoff spoke about how he chooses which artists to work with: “If there’s ever something that sounds interesting to work on, I try to meet people and see if I can imagine doing things with them.”

“You know, the ability to make something with someone is so delicate that you could like someone, you could love their work, but it might not work. You just have to try and be very honest when it happens and when it doesn’t.”

“And I tend and intend to follow the things where I feel a lot of inspiration and excitement. It’s all kind of gut feeling, but yeah, it can be a bit awkward if it’s not there. Because you can’t really fake it.”

Doja went on to tell Lowe how events in her love life had shaped the record’s lyrical content. “There’s other things outside of myself that were inspiring me to write about these things,” she explained. “I had been in relationships that made me think about things in a different way, and I think naivety is a big part of this album too. I speak about rushing and love-bombing in a way.

“I think sometimes people don’t know that they’re doing it or they do, but giving excessive compliments and gifts right off the bat, that sort of thing,” she added. “I thought that was a really fun thing to write about.”

In April, Doja Cat began teasing her new era, which she confirmed was being titled ‘Vie’. Since then, she’s been steadily teasing the project, including the nostalgic pop tune ‘Jealous Type’. Earlier this month, she hosted a surprise album-listening preview party.

‘Vie’ will mark her first LP since 2023’s ‘Scarlet’, and while she hasn’t dropped a new album since, she did release a collaborative track with Jack Harlow titled ‘Just Us’ earlier this year, which was accompanied by a star-studded video featuring the likes of Matt Damon, John Mayer, PinkPantheress and Succession actor Nicholas Braun”.

To slightly detour, there is an interview from ELLE from the summer. Doja Cat was asked about the Met Gala, new music, and fronting Marc Jacobs’s pre-fall 2025 campaign. I think that Doja Cat is this modern-day icon who has this incredible music side but there is also her own style. I always think that Doja Cat would be an amazing actor, though there have been few opportunities put her way. She is this incredible all-round talent that I am excited to see where she heads next:

“When did fashion first become a way for you to express yourself as a performer?

Even in the beginning, I was always super visual, but I wasn’t good at styling for a long time. I definitely use clothing as a means of expressing different moods in a more campy and wild way. I think my fashion has become more sophisticated over the years, but it’s still out-there.

Is there a past look or style moment that stands out as your favorite?

I mean there’s so much, but I think one of the most inspiring moments for me was when I went to Schiaparelli’s couture show in 2024. I just remember how emotional that experience was. I mean, everything that Daniel [Roseberry, the artistic director of Schiaparelli] does is incredible. But I think that was just a very emotional show as far as the attention to detail, the light, and the way that it played off of the clothing.

Was there a particular piece from the collection that you especially loved wearing?

My favorite was definitely the pink jeans with the white T-shirt. I loved the little appliqués. It was just very comfy, but it was also very sexy, and I love anything that kinda rides low. I didn’t feel swallowed by the clothes, which can sometimes happen. It all felt right.

Do you think your style will become more girly and pop-inspired this summer?

I think in some sense, yes. But I’ve sort of been traveling toward things that felt quite a little bit more understated, sophisticated—things that have some accents in the deeper jewel tones. I really love smokier, sexier, sultrier colors, especially as far as my album rollout and the creative. It’s different from the campaign, but I think it’s nice before getting ready to [do the rollout] that I kind of step into something other than that”.

I want to come to an interview with The New York Times from last month. On Vie, she pushes herself to the max. For Doja Cat, “that means leaning into her pop roots and “doing what I know I know how to do”. It is a fascinating interview that I have taken some parts from. Giving you more insight into Doja Cat and the amazing Vie:

“A very online 29-year-old technology addict, the musician born Amala Dlamini is trolling, usually — but she means it, too. Trailed since her 2019 breakthrough by a string of these micro-controversies — the bouts of brutal honesty but also her stubborn, subversive allegiance to so-called racial chat rooms and edgelord T-shirt choices — Doja Cat appears to find personal and artistic fuel in sparring, especially when shadowboxing with the mirror.

On “Vie,” out Sept. 26, Doja Cat marries the sleazy side of ’80s synths and up-tempo R&B (Prince, Janet) with the confidence and visual bombast of glammy rock.

“I listen to so much good music, and when I do that, I beat myself up and think that my music should be better,” she said behind blackout shades at her home in Calabasas, Calif., in between heated rounds of Fortnite on the big screen. “I remember making all those songs for ‘Planet Her’ and ‘Hot Pink’ and being like, ‘I don’t wanna listen to this.’”

“I’m doing things that people like,” she thought in recent years, “and I’m glad that they enjoy it. But now, I am going to veer off the edge of the [expletive] cliff, and do whatever I want to do, and listen to my intrusive thoughts,” she added, “in order to make me feel like I’m doing something productive for myself and not just the brand.”

The resulting follow-up album, the rap-heavy “Scarlet” from 2023, was supposed to be a corrective. Darker, more personal and shot through with the defensiveness of an M.C. who was sick of her technical skills being questioned, the album was less successful than the two before it, but still went platinum and delivered a No. 1 single, “Paint the Town Red.” For Doja, even a swerve proved popular.

More crucially, though, “Scarlet” taught Doja Cat that the chip on her shoulder was permanent. “Not to diminish it, but it was a bit of like, I just need to get this out — it was a massive fart for me,” she said of her attempt to be taken more seriously. “I thought fixing that would entail making music that was more visceral or more emotional or maybe more angry or more sad. And I enjoyed performing it onstage, but it didn’t get me all the way there. So I want to return back to what I know.”

And what Doja Cat knows are old-fashioned hits.

On “Vie,” her fifth album, out Sept. 26, the pop star is strutting back into the broadest of tents and hitting a split in a bedazzled leotard. Marrying the sleazy side of ’80s synths and up-tempo R&B (Prince, Janet) with the confidence and visual bombast of “cock-rock” glam — think Mötley Crüe, Poison, Kiss, “not that I even really listen to them, necessarily” — songs like “Take Me Dancing” and “Jealous Type,” the album’s lead single, are unabashed and unpretentious, even if they pull from a deeper reference bucket than the sparkly surface lets on.

“It’s overtly sexy and it becomes kind of silly, which is likable and fun,” Doja said. “I just always want to keep that sense of fun, but I never want to be too goofy.” She cited Nina Hagen, the German cabaret-punk throwback, as another inspiration — “a hot girl who isn’t trying to just be a hot girl,” Doja explained. “She has layers to her.”

Featuring production for the first time by the pop polymath Jack Antonoff, alongside Doja Cat’s go-to lineup of lesser-known studio hitmakers (Y2K, Kurtis McKenzie), “Vie” — French for life — is very much “a continuation of ‘Planet Her’ and ‘Hot Pink,’” she said. “I’m doing what I was perfecting in the beginning. I’m doing what I know I know how to do.”

PHOTO CREDIT: Chantal Anderson

The recording process for “Vie,” on the other hand, found Doja “more openhearted” when it came to “making music that other people can enjoy, she can enjoy, and it not being so heavy,” McKenzie added, noting that Doja once again wanted to show off her voice and perform the role of pop star. “‘Scarlet’ allowed her to miss that.”

The pair had never met before collaborating on the album, which started as a vague idea about R&B songs — or maybe the intersection between punk and jazz — at Brad Pitt’s Miraval Studios in France near the end of last year.

There, though, Doja hit on a theme lyrically, inspired by the cartoonish version of French romance — “the mustaches with the rose in the mouth,” she said. “I wanted to embody it in sort of a tongue-in-cheek way,” but also earnestly: “As a daughter of a single mother taking care of two kids, romance is something that I feel is my life lesson because it’s not something that was ever really there.”

She has long considered herself a sex writer. “Like that’s my whole thing,” Doja said. “I have floggers and whips all over my walls.” But “Vie” is different, she added, “because I’m talking about not only my own sexuality, but his.” (Having most recently been linked to the actor Joseph Quinn, Doja Cat said she is “just having fun” and “allowing things to happen,” while noting that she both loves men and loves “bullying men.”)

“I’m doing what I was perfecting in the beginning,” Doja Cat said of her new album. “I’m doing what I know I know how to do.”

The matching musical palette, Antonoff said, was a side of the ’80s that could be considered the opposite of yacht rock — “you’re not being tasteful,” he explained. “It’s a little bit more in that ‘4 a.m., driving around the dark’ kind of zone.”

For Doja Cat, the choice was as much physical and visual as it was musical. “I know who I am and how I want to perform,” she said — all out and in-your-face. “I wanna move, I wanna dance.” In preparation for bringing the full spectacle of “Vie” to audiences around the world this fall and through next year, she has been working out harder than ever, taking ’80s fitness to the max. “It’s an excuse to look great,” she said.

As for the songs, Doja is “a lot more” forgiving now than she has been of her own music, especially in the recent past. But it’s a process. “Do I wanna listen to it? No, I turn it off still,” she said. “But I can appreciate it”.

PHOTO CREDIT: Chantal Anderson

I will end with a couple of reviews for Vie. One of the best albums of the year in my view, The Guardian said that Vie finds a softer and more openhearted Californian artist who has not lost the fun and mischief. Vie is an album of balances and varying emotions. We hear both the sugar and the spice:

“Is this just another troll? Doja Cat’s new album is titled Vie – French for “life” – and the original artwork (changed at the last minute) features the 29-year-old Angeleno surrounded by roses, ever the picture of congeniality. Doja has become known, in recent years, as mainstream pop’s master agitator: she tells her superfans to “get off your phone, get a job and help your parents with the house”, disavows her own hits before they’ve even left the upper echelons of the charts and is totally unapologetic about what can be described, charitably, as edgelord behaviour. Doja’s 2023 album Scarlet – a prickly, antagonistic record designed to prove her bona fides as a rapper – seemingly shut the book on her time as a pop hit-maker with a bracing, refreshing meanness.

So there is precedent for the notion that Vie’s lead single Jealous Type – a piece of slick, cinematic 80s pop of the kind Doja used to toss off with abandon – was a fake-out. It’s not exactly that: Doja’s fifth album does find her returning to the sugary, aerodynamic well of her 2019 LP Hot Pink and 2021’s Planet Her. This time around, it feels as if she and producer Jack Antonoff have found a more comfortable middle ground between the gloss of that world, which she’s criticised over and over again, and the desires of the brilliantly snarky fire-starter who tore her way through Scarlet.

Hearing the push-and-pull between those sides of Doja is enormous fun. AAAHH MEN! is like a sinister take on Chic’s Le Freak, its blown-out, sleazy strut a perfect soundtrack for Doja’s conflicted internal monologue: do I want to take a guy home for sex, or just to lambast him? It’s hard to tell which she’s leaning towards: “I have too much tolerance / You ugly and fine as shit / And if I had more common sense / Then I would grab my ride and dip,” she raps, clearly relishing the opportunity to trifle.

More often, it’s a sweeter side of Doja taking hold, although rarely the uncomplicated sexpot of early singles such as Say So. On Silly! Fun! she raps with flustered abandon about being in love for the first time over the kind of dazed, lovesick production that wouldn’t sound out of place on a Chappell Roan record. When she raps “I’m in love” or “let’s have kids,” the final word of each phrase is sung by a disembodied backing vocal, like she wouldn’t dare say it out loud – a charming, canny detail. Doja has said she probably wouldn’t listen to this music herself, but she’s locked in nonetheless, applying the same detail to frothy pop songs as she does to one-liners such as: “He ain’t hungry for money / I told him: ‘Come eat the rich.’” (See seventh track All Mine.)

Can a leopard change its spots? That seems to be the question Doja is trying to answer musically and lyrically across Vie. She is smart enough not to give any clear answers, ending the album with Come Back, a glowing, bitter love song that shares a strand of its DNA with Donna Lewis’s I Love You Always Forever. “I’m pleased I ain’t the bitch you was hopin’ for / If we keep this up and you hold my doors / And you take my bag, and you hold me more / I don’t think that would make up for the hope I lost,” she raps, weariness coating every inch of her voice. There’s no trolling here – just an earnest relationship postmortem, set to production that’s so twinkly and lovesick it would make even Carly Rae Jepsen blush. A leopard can’t change its spots, but maybe Doja Cat can”.

Even though some have stated how there is Pop pastiche on Vie and there is a sense of it being unfocused at times, I would disagree. I think that it is a solid work that showcases her brilliance. She even received criticism for the album cover. I think that it is a standout and striking cover. Rare in a year when there have been precious few memorable album covers! This is what NME wrote for their four-star review of Vie:

“If 2021’s ‘Planet Her’ is a sparkling fantasy world of glossy pop and alien allure, then Doja Cat’s fifth album ‘Vie’ is meant to be its “masculine” musical sister: an intimate, sensual ride threaded with zappy synths and funk bass. The album rarely feels assertive in a traditionally male-coded way; instead, it thrives on texture, groove and vocal fluidity, creating a seductive, immersive experience that refuses to sit still. Doja’s metamorphic vocal delivery – shifting from fluttery falsettos to animated rap scratches – is the glue, scratching, spinning and looping over the beats like a turntablist teasing vinyl.

Early missteps highlight the album’s tension between intention and execution. Considering the album’s ’80s inspirations, the lead single ‘Jealous Type’ is a cliché interpretation with shimmery, upbeat melodies paired with romantic despair, making it feel like a weak introduction to the album. Similarly, ‘Couples Therapy’ and ‘Stranger’ slow momentum, offering quality production but little that compels movement.

But these minuscule slips are overshadowed the moment ‘Gorgeous’ blasts through your speakers – when groove, sensuality and clever playfulness reach full force. It exudes debonair confidence, making you want to slink around the world like you’re Jessica Rabbit. ‘All Mine’ demonstrates Doja’s vocal dexterity, her high, jazzy, bluesy register floating above the beat before she cuts back into it like a DJ spinning vinyl. In ‘Take Me Dancing’, the album’s sole feature SZA arrives as a cameo rather than a crutch, lending a multigenerational joy reminiscent of Cameo’s ‘Candy’ and ‘Word Up!’ but never overshadowing Doja’s command of the track. Across these songs, she proves that her vocals are both instrument and performer – seductive, playful and endlessly inventive.

Throughout ‘Vie’, Doja doesn’t lean into brute masculinity in the way you’d think; instead, seizing dominance through feminine-coded moves like jealousy, seduction, and emotional manipulation. She’s still authoritative, just cloaked in softness rather than swagger. There’s a glimpse on ‘Lipstain’, which is a perfect snapshot of women’s playful, biting power as she snarls over the nostalgic beat: “Every girl’s a queen, but I’m the boss / We gotta mark our territory for them dogs, girl.” But when she finally flirts with trendy casual misandry on ‘AAAHH MEN!’, she taps into something closer to true attack-dog masculinity, battling with the push-and-pull of being attracted yet repulsed by the male species.

Doja’s production choices amplify this effect. Powerful ’80s-style synths, slapping basslines and occasional modern 808s combine to keep the album moving and engaging. ‘Acts of Service’, ‘Make It Up’ and ‘Silly! Fun!’ layer lush, bluesy chords over warped synths to create sultry, body-forward grooves. By the cinematic closer ‘Come Back’, it feels like the credits rolling on an ’80s coming-of-age film: reflective, glimmering and full of resolution after a kaleidoscopic journey through love and desire.

‘Vie’ proves that Doja Cat remains pop’s ultimate shapeshifter, offering an album that moves, seduces and entertains on its own terms. Now using nostalgic power-pop as her vehicle, Doja’s voice – morphing, scratching, fluttering and crooning – drives it with full throttle, keeping every track alive. It’s intimate, playful, and downright fun, and once it gets its tenterhooks into you, it won’t let go”.

Another reason why Doja Cat makes it into this Modern-Day Queens is because she turns thirty on 21st October. Many happy returns to her! With a brilliant album out and plenty of tour dates booked for next year, it is an exciting and busy time. Go and follow Doja Cat and listen to Vie. She is no doubt a modern-day queen and idol. Someone who inspires so many others and stands out from her peers. This truly amazing artist is going to keep putting out great music…

YEARS from now.

_________

Follow Doja Cat

PHOTO CREDIT: Marc Jacobs

Instagram:

https://www.instagram.com/dojacat/

TikTok:

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

YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzpl23pGTHVYqvKsgY0A-_w

Spotify:

https://open.spotify.com/artist/5cj0lLjcoR7YOSnhnX0Po5?si=fD0wd9B7QoG_BtEO2z0etQ