FEATURE: Spotlight: Revisited: Die Spitz

FEATURE:

 

 

Spotlight: Revisited

PHOTO CREDIT: Emilio Herce

 

Die Spitz

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HERE is a wonderful American group…

who I spotlighted last year. I wanted to revisit them, as quite a bit has happened since then. They have a string of tour dates taking them into next year. In April, they will be heading to London to play the O2. There are some interviews from this year I want to bring in, as Die Spitz - Ava Schrobilgen, Chloe De St. Aubin, Eleanor Livingston, and Kate Halter – have been really busy. I will get to them soon, but first want to bring in biography from their official website:

“When the Venn diagram of passion, friendship, identity, and artistry collide, it can feel as if fighting words are spitting from your veins. And as postmodern society crumbles, Die Spitz giddily bounce between a dozen different ways to push back. If the world of rock music were an ice cream shop, the Austin quartet have sampled each flavor, flipped the freezer over, and started dancing with the employees they helped unionize. On their debut album, Something to Consume (Released Sept 12 via Third Man Records), Ava Schrobilgen, Chloe De St. Aubin, Eleanor Livingston, and Kate Halter fight against the inescapable consumption that surrounds life. “There’s a political side to it, but addiction and love can also be all-consuming,” Livingston says. And as the foursome trade off instruments, swapping songwriting and vocal duties, and generating powerful songwriting in concussive bursts, Die Spitz have created their own little pocket of the world where we can all stand on the edge together.

That unity comes in part from the deep bonds between the 22-year-olds. All four are Austin natives, with Schrobilgen and Livingston having met in preschool, befriending Halter in middle school, and immediately bringing De St. Aubin into their inner circle when they formed the band in 2022. Though they’ve only been playing together a few years (not to mention Halter only learning to play bass to start the band), Something to Consume shows a maturity and technical prowess always wielded in service of their profound friendship.

The group settled on the name Die Spitz over a “brown bag of Fireball”, opting for the feminine German definite article in place of the English. “It reminds me of the Grim Reaper spitting,” Livingston jokes. At their first live shows, they paired originals with covers from some of their inspirations: Black Sabbath, Pixies, Mudhoney, PJ Harvey, and Nirvana. The beguiling "Pop Punk Anthem" somehow encapsulates elements throughout that large musical swath, building from roiling verses to a growled chorus. “It may sound like a love song at first, but when the beat kicks in it’s the obsession that takes over,” Schrobilgen says. “The words ‘you’re a part of me’ sound loving but it can be an insane emotion and privilege over someone else’s life.”

As if their closeness as a band weren’t enough, the members of Die Spitz have also intermittently been roommates and still live near each other. “We call it sitcom life,” Livingston laughs. That said, the Die Spitz TV show would have a significantly different soundtrack to your usual sitcom fare. The Austinites express their ideas through a blend of classic punk, hardcore, metal, alt rock and more. The group have become known for their riotous live shows, where dueling cartwheels, Halter playing bass mid-crowdsurf, Schrobilgen unleashing a growling bark, and Livingston posing with the microphone on top of the venue’s bar or climbing into the rafters could happen at any moment. Pairing their mind-melting gigs with even more impressive songs has led to stints opening for (and rivaling the energy of) bands like OFF!, Amyl and the Sniffers, Viagra Boys, and Sleater-Kinney.

That shapeshifting strength comes into full view on the explosive “Throw Yourself to the Sword”, a song that raises a righteous fist of empowerment over thrash guitar. “Throw yourself/ To the sword,” the start-stop chorus begins, before taking a more modern turn. “What’s it like knowing/ None of you bitches can compete?” Livingston sees the song as an important reminder to let go of insecurities and embrace the power you have over yourself—something that unifies the Die Spitz catalog. “Be the bad bitch you are amongst the mundane and use your voice as a young person,” she says. “Don’t let these old fools tell you you can’t do anything”.

Whether on the punk chug of "RIDING WITH MY GIRLS" or the syrupy grunge of "Go Get Dressed", Something to Consume moves with rapturous conviction thanks in part to the deft production hand of Studio 4’s Will Yip. Though only recently in their 20s, Die Spitz’s impressive musicianship ties them clearly to a long lineage of frustrated people hoping to inspire change. Some people aren’t interested in being political activists via music, but it weighs on me heavily and I feel misaligned with my calling if I don’t,” De St. Aubin says. “The four of us are free spirits with multiple interests, and there’s no limit or power dynamic that can derail us.”

The thrumming “Voir Dire” embodies that expressive strength, an acoustic-driven jam that airs frustrations with American globalism. “Unless we’re part of the few in power, we’ll someday be victimized and regret that we didn’t act now,” De St. Aubin adds. “America brings war on marginalized people in our own country and other lands, and being complacent will not be comfortable forever.” Elsewhere, the grimy and pained “Punishers” explores the frustration and ache of a relationship that just won’t work despite best intentions—two people punishing each other instead of just letting go. But even when they’re tackling these sort of impactful themes, Die Spitz infuse the proceedings with a golden warmth. These aren’t songs of vicious mockery, but charged rallying calls—which in turn ties back to the band’s origin story. “It was a joke that went too far,” Halter smirks. “We never thought it was going to be a real thing.”

Across 11 tracks, Something to Consume contains multitudes and yet feels of a singular piece, an expansive and expressive set unified in its camaraderie and freedom. “We depend on our freedom—freedom to do what we want, present the ideas we want, make the music we want,” Livingston says. “Whether it’s based in metal or something soft, no matter which of us wrote the song, we all contribute and work together. As a person, I don’t have a strong ego or voice, but within this band each one of us is capable of so much more”.

As it is paywalled, people might not be able to read this interview from Rolling Stone. They interviewed Die Spitz. In their sub-header, they note how “Straight out of Austin, Texas, this punk band is playing loud, winning fans, and opening for Foo Fighters this summer”. If you have not listened to Die Spitz yet, then do make sure that you connect with them:

“When the e-mail came in from their management last year telling them they were opening for the Foo Fighters, Die Spitz drummer Chloe de St. Aubin started screaming. She was seated next to her bandmate,  guitarist Eleanor Livingston, trying to focus on homework for their online college courses, but the punk quartet they’d formed in high school just a few years earlier was occupying both their minds. Their absurdly high-energy live show and debut LP, Something To Consume, had won them a cult following, and they were both quite ready to take the next step.

“We were spiraling,” says de St. Aubin. “I was like, ‘We’re not doing anything. What are we going to do?’ And then I checked my phone.” They had secured that gig opening for the Foos at the 61,000-seat Anfield Stadium in Liverpool on June 27, 2026. It will be their biggest show ever, by quite an order of magnitude. “We eventually just started laughing,” says de St. Aubin. “And then we both forgot about what we were studying.”

The road to this moment of triumph — one of many they’ll have this year, since they’re also playing Coachella, Outside Lands, and Lollapalooza — began back in 2022, when Livingston, bassist Kate Halter, and guitarist Ava Schrobilgen were all attending the same high school in Austin, Texas. “We were super into rock bands, we smoked a bunch of weed, and liked to party,” says Livingston. “So we were like, ‘We should start a band.'”

In the original telling of this story, the epiphany came after watching the Mötley Crüe biopic The Dirt on Netflix. But they’ve erased this from their official bio. “Redacted,” says Livingston, shuddering at the thought of being associated with a group she now sees as hopelessly sleazy and misogynistic. “We were 18 and, not gonna lie, on that wavelength of, ‘We’ll get a bunch of girls and drink a bunch of beer!'”

They rounded out their lineup by recruiting St. Aubin from a nearby high school and writing songs that were the antihesis of “Girls, Girls, Girls,” even if they took a lot of woodshedding to get right. “We would practice in my parents’ garage,” says Livingston. “And we were so bad. Oh my God, we were so bad. And it was awesome. We just kept playing because it was super fun.”

They started booking gigs around Austin and developed a ritual where they’d swap instruments every few songs and take Iggy Pop-like stage dives into the audience. They recorded their debut EP, Revenge of Evangeline, in a single day in 2022, and the next year they found themselves opening for the Aussie punk crew Amyl and the Sniffers on a nationwide tour. “I think we aged ourselves seven years on that tour,” says Livingston. “I don’t know how we survived. We were doing 17-hour drives, unloading everything, selling our merch, playing the show, and still getting drunk all throughout that.”

Some nights all four of them crammed into one hotel room, and other nights they’d simply drive until they couldn’t make it any further, and then pull off into a rest stop. “We’d feel like we were going to die, because that’s where a lot of murders happen,” says Livingston. “But it was also the best time of my life.”

A big advantage of living in Austin was its easy access to South by Southwest. They got signed to Jack White’s Third Man Records in 2025 after playing a showcase gig at the yearly festival. “I had the flu and was so ill,” Livingston recalls. I wasn’t even singing for half the set. I was like, ‘Did I just die?’ And they were like, ‘Y’all were awesome!'”

Third Man teamed them with producer Will Yip, who helped them “trim the fat” off songs like “Pop Punk Anthem (Sorry for the Delay),” “Go Get Dressed,” and “American Porn.” The latter is a direct shot at sexist record industry insiders, and some older dudes who come to their shows just to leer at them. Some, they say, have even taken photos of their feet and posted them online. “It’s a very angry song,” says Livingston. “And I want the people that come to our shows just because we’re pretty women or they want to sexualize or objectify us to listen to that song and tell us if they’re still a fan.”

Thankfully, the creepy foot-fetish guys are fewer in numbers these days. “It’s now a bunch of girls and gays and people that we want to appeal to,” says Livingston. “They’re saying, ‘I like hard music, but there’s not a lot of it made by women or people who are queer.’ I want to continue making our shows a safe space for them.”

The four members of the band now tour with a road manager and a technician, and a merch manager is about to join the troupe as well. Better bookings means they can often afford two hotel rooms. “We’re moving up,” says de St. Aubin. “We might even get our own beds.”

Until recently, many of them made ends meet with retail or service industry jobs between tours, and they took online courses while barreling down the highway in the van. De St. Aubin is continuing to study psychology and business, and Livingston is majoring in business and minoring in biology, but they left their day jobs to focus as much energy as possible on Die Spitz.

“I think I got fired,” says de St. Aubin. “They were like, ‘You’re never here. We can’t keep putting you on a schedule.’ I was like, ‘That’s fair.'”

The Foo Fighters gig weighs on their minds (“I don’t know if people will show up early enough for us. I’m a little worried it might be scattered,” de St. Aubin says), but they don’t even care they’re listed on the very last line of the Coachella poster in tiny font. They’re still going to be there, playing the same day as Justin Bieber, facing an audience of thousands.

“The beauty of playing for so many people is an energy that not many people experience,” says Livingston, “especially when they know your lyrics and whatnot. It’s like you climbed to the top of a mountain. It’s freakin’ better than sex. It’s a crazy feeling”.

PHOTO CREDIT: Emilio Herce

One thing that is clear when it comes to Die Spitz is that their friendship is at the heart of everything they do. It is what makes their music and live performances so memorable and electric. There is so much love between them, you know they will be playing for decades to come. In June, Stereogum spent time with Die Spitz. We get an insight into their close-knit bond:

“The legends are true. Die Spitz became a band just so that they'd have an excuse to hang out with each other more often. Three of the four members had never even been in a band before forming Die Spitz. They were just buddies in Austin. Schrobilgen and singer/guitarist Eleanor Livingston have been friends since preschool, and they met Halter in middle school. Chloe de St. Aubin is the outlier, since she didn't really know them until relatively recently and wasn't a full member when they played their first show.

Back then, Ava Schrobilgen played drums (and still sometimes does), but she wanted to get out front, so Die Spitz needed another drummer. It was January 2022, and the other three didn't really know how to be in a band yet. Their first gig was at the Hole In The Wall, an accurately named Austin institution that holds a few hundred people. Today, they all laugh that they "played so terribly" that night.

"We didn't know anything about how anything during a show works, so we brought three separate cars," Halter remembers "We brought a PA. We brought monitors. We brought our own microphones and mic stands."

"I think it's just the 19-year-old mindset where you drink a bunch of alcohol and you're like, 'I'm gonna do whatever I want!,'" says Livingston.

"I only played a few songs of the set with them," de St. Aubin remembers. "They'd bring me onstage halfway through, and I was randomly in the crowd."

"We told her to open up the pit, mosh-instigate," Halter laughs.

De St. Aubin did her best. "I tried to instigate stuff, but at the time, I was really reclusive, so it was a very stressful task for me, to be like, 'Get into it, guys! But I'm also scared!'"

Backstage in Salt Lake City, all four members of Die Spitz are a little quieter than you might expect, but they really come alive when they're telling that story. They grin at each other. They giggle at each other's additions to the story. They talk over each other. You can see it radiate off them: They love being in this band.

When Die Spitz take the stage at Kilby, you can see that love in action before they even play a note. Kate Halter handstand-walks across the entire stage before she picks up her bass while Kesha's "Blow" blares over the speakers. After a few songs, Ava Schrobilgen jumps behind the drums, while Chloe de St. Aubin picks up a guitar and sings, the first of many instrument-switches. Eleanor Livingston holds a mic stand aloft and pumps her fist, her flaming red hair flying in all directions. The pit opens up. The members of Die Spitz never stop smiling. They might be having more fun than anyone in the crowd, and the people in the crowd are having a lot of fun.

As soon as they get off the stage, all four Die Spitz members jet over to the other side of the festival grounds to catch a furious Show Me The Body set. Later on, when I say that Die Spitz might be the heaviest band on the bill, Schrobilgen is quick to correct me, claiming that it's really SMTB. I get what she means, but Show Me The Body are weird-heavy. Die Spitz are heavy in the classic sense of the word — Sabbath-style riff-churn, gargle-roar vocals, lyrics about throwing yourself to the metaphorical or literal sword. They're a proudly horns-up old school beast of a band, and that makes them an anomaly at an indie-leaning fest like Kilby, just as it inevitably will when they join Olivia Rodrigo's tour.

There are subcultures where this kind of grit and grime thrives, but Die Spitz aren't really creatures of the doom metal or heavy psych undergrounds. Instead, they're a product of Austin's historically boundaryless music scene — a place where hardcore bands like Iron Age had their own takes on the warrior-metal spirit, where festivals like Levitation thrive, and where you can still see Frank Kozik posters from the '90s on venue walls. In their first year as a band, Die Spitz played high-profile sets at SXSW and Levitation. In their second year, they released their ultra-nasty EP Teeth and hit the road, first with OFF!, then with Amyl And The Sniffers. Things escalated quickly.

Die Spitz have been working fast, hitting career benchmarks at record speed, and all of it still feels new. When I ask them how many festivals they've played before Kilby, they're not quite sure. Fewer than 10, probably. But they love festivals. At Kilby, they run around to catch as many sets as their day will allow. In order to talk to me, they have to miss Snail Mail, which is not ideal.

To hear them tell it, Die Spitz can't stand to be apart even when they're not touring. Schrobilgen says, "We'll be at home, and we'll spend maybe a week, probably less, hanging out with our partners or our other friends, just chilling. And then I seriously start to feel, like, ill! And so sad! And when I see them again, I'm like, 'Oh my god, I'm OK! We're all OK!”.

PHOTO CREDIT: Pooneh Ghana

Kerrang! published a feature/interview in July and provided ten years why we need Die Spitz in your life. I am looking forward to them coming to the U.K. next year. I wonder if they will be booked for Glastonbury in the summer. They would be incredible. Rather than drop in all ten reasons, I have selected a few to look at:

“They’re a tight-knit gang

Eleanor, Ava and Kate have known each other for years, but when Chloe came into the picture, they realised they had the potential to go the distance as a band...

Eleanor: “We met Chloe right before we played our first show. We had some disputes over the years from just being friends for that long, and I feel like Chloe came in and was the missing puzzle piece. We had all this energy, and we needed someone like Chloe to finish the puzzle.”
Ava: “We actually bonded because we’re all vampires…”
Kate: “It’s all the blood banks that we’ve been robbing!”

They refuse to be easily labelled

Is it rock? Is it metal? Die Spitz are asking, ‘Why does that even matter, though?’

Kate: “I feel like it was intentional [to resist categorisation], but it’s also something that happened very naturally.”
Chloe: “We listen to all kinds of music, and we listen to all kinds of stuff together. I think it’s really easy to sometimes box women into a genre, so I think we realised that we had all these other interests and simultaneously didn’t want to be labelled as just one thing.”

They’ve got capitalism and consumerism in their crosshairs...

Though it’s not their entire identity, Die Spitz make their political views unambiguous, knowing there’s a mission to fulfil that’s bigger than just their band...

Chloe: “I think the U.S. has always had deep issues that have been taking a new, evil form. Every generation has their fight with authority, and this is it for me. There’s everything going on with Palestine and our ties to that, the way that our country works in terms of economics, the way that they’re happy to sell you a bunch of shit you don’t need, but won’t give you healthcare and privatise everything. It’s bullshit.”
Ava: “I also think, ‘How could you not write about it?’ It blows me away that there’s people who don’t talk about it and who don’t care and just live their lives every single day like nothing’s happening. I’m kind of jealous of them. Honestly, I feel like they are happier than we are most days. We have so much privilege, not only being white Americans, but also now having a platform. I think it’s our responsibility to continue to talk about these things and educate other people on it and fight the good fight in every little way that we can.”

They want the band to embody the representation they wish they’d had growing up

Die Spitz grew up watching men dominate stages, but now the tide’s turning, and they want to be a part of the shift towards a more feminist future...

Eleanor: “I feel like I almost had internalised misogyny growing up. I don’t think that there was enough access to – or maybe I wasn’t in the right spaces for – seeing woman rage. I had to outgrow what was being put in front of me as a teenager and a young adult. I’m really grateful to hopefully beable to do that now for other people, especially here in Texas.”
Ava: “Something that keeps us going is knowing that we are the women onstage that we wish that we saw as kids. Getting the chance to see that would have helped us accept ourselves and feel proud of ourselves. The main thing that keeps me doing this, even though I do have a lot of struggles with the little bit of fame that we have, is seeing parents bring their little kids up to me, and you can tell that that little kid is [like us]. They’ll be so happy and have stars in their eyes. It’s so sweet”.

I think I will end there. Things have grown and expanded in Die Spitz’s world since I spotlighted them last year. A lot of tour dates and people giving a lot of love to Something to Consume. I feel that the coming year or two will be even bigger. Another album, headline sets and lots of honours. Go and follow and listen to this magnificent band. It is true that they definitely need to be…

FEATURE: Room for the Love: Why Kate Bush’s Detachment from The Kick Inside Should Be Reconsidered

FEATURE:

 

 

Room for the Love

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush performing Wuthering Heights at the BBC in 1978/PHOTO CREDIT: Don Smith

 

Why Kate Bush’s Detachment from The Kick Inside Should Be Reconsidered

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I am putting out…

Kate Bush features that take us to her earliest career days. Around 1978 and before. I am re-reading Graeme Thomson's fantastic and essential book, Under the Ivy: The Life and Music of Kate Bush. If you read the first few chapters, you get a good impression of who Kate Bush was when she was at school. We learn about her earliest relationships, taking danced classes and becoming infatuated with movement and mime, in addition to the earliest recordings. It is my favourite period of her career. In terms of the albums she is proud of and how she views her first few – 1978’s The Kick Inside and Lionheart; 1980’s Never for Ever -, I feel there is a sense of detachment and Bush not really happy. She started to feel in control and content when it came to 1982’s The Dreaming. She produced that album solo. When it comes to her debut, The Kick Inside, Graeme Thomnson writes how it is unique. None of her peers were recording and writing in that way. In terms of how she addressed love and desire. The characters she brought in. So unconventional and original, this is an album that still sounds daring and hugely accomplished today. No doubt a genius, I feel the teenage Kate Bush was not ceded much control. Producer Andrew Powell assembled the band and was directing. Bush could suggest ideas, though perhaps she felt more of a bystander and not the architecture. These were her songs, so I am not sure whether she would do something different with production. Even if there would have been discussion whether she could produce, as a young artist on her debut, it would have been a huge gamble. She distanced herself from The Kick Inside pretty much as soon as it came out (February 1978). Even that early on, she wanted her music to be raw and real. The album was performed by excellent and experienced musicians. The recording period was a very happy one.

That said, Bush did want that masculine energy that we hear on later albums like The Dreaming. One of the quotes that stands out is when she said she did not want to be airy-fairy and light. “I’m not happy with being associated with such soft, romantic vibes”. That’s what she said to Kerrang! in 1984. She wanted to get heavier in the sound sense. More guts., punch, bites and masculinity. EMI would definitely not have thought that hearing her demos and her earliest recordings. With Lionheart, there was a bit of a move to something heavier. Songs like Hammer Horror and Wow a bit punchier. It seems like The Kick Inside was a compromise or disappointment, though these were her songs and she would have been able to have some call and vote. Though it seems some of the demos changed radically before they got onto the album. Whether Andrew Powell heard a heavier and bolder Coffee Homeground or Wow and then softened it. That feeling that a young female singer should be more romantic and lighter. You could say a masterpiece like Hounds of Love is so revered is because it has this hunting instinct. Big drums and big production. It is epic and masculine. By 1989, when The Sensual World came out, Bush did move to something more female. That desire to explore sounds and themes with a more feminine lens. From Never for Ever to Hounds of Love, there was this increasing push towards music that was gutsier and bolder. You can understand why she a little disappointed that her 1978 debut was a bit soft. That is not what I think, though you feel Kate Bush was a little disenchanted. I think she was wrong to distance herself. Maybe she does not feel that way today. You can hear elements of 2005’s Aerial and 2011’s 50 Words for Snow and nods back to The Kick Inside. More piano-based and with this more romantic element, I do feel things came full circle. A lot of reviews paint The Kick Inside as being a bit soft and airy-fairy. If once was the case that artists name-checked Kate Bush based on Hounds of Love, I feel more and more are invested in The Kick Inside. You can hear direct connections to artists such as Billie Eilish.

This somewhat stranger Kate Bush is intriguing and very attractive to a wave of younger songwriters. Never seeing The Kick Inside as this over-romantic and somewhat sickly album, there is this unconventional approach. Bush’s vocals always exciting and unique. It is not like The Kick Inside is full of ballads and the tracks are traditional. Although several of the tracks document love and desire, she was writing in a way that was not soft or commercial. I feel some of Kate Bush’s regret was mirroring what critics said. How they feel The Kick Inside is airy-fairy. Basically agreeing with them. This is not doing justice to an album that is bold and brave. She talks about menstruation and period pain. Suicide, incest and ghosts. You cannot define The Kick Inside as being romantic and light. Yes, there are songs that talk about passion. Though the lyrics are unusual and poetic. Think about The Man with the Child in His Eyes. How can anyone who writes a song like this not want to be associated with it?! Both Beth Orton and Fiona Apple have said how The Kick Inside is among their favourite albums. The latter grew up playing and singing songs from it. You can feel that D.N.A. in Apple’s music. How she writes about love and sex. Some songs that discuss abuse or are very open and shocking. This bravery and rawness is something that might have in part have been influenced by The Kick Inside. How fearless and open Kate Bush is on her debut. You could never listen to its thirteen tracks and think that it is soft or lacking in bite.

If she was thinking this in 1984, that would be when Hounds of Love was taking shape. I would like to think that, if asked now, she would acknowledge how incredible The Kick Inside is. I do want to bring in a case for the defence. Laura Snapes’s review of The Kick Inside for Pitchfork. I have sourced this before, but her words and descriptions highlight how The Kick Inside was anything but too soft and romantic. Even when Bush was writing about romance, you could find something cheeky, explicit, tantalising and risk-taking. Not like this teenage artist was being submissive, doe-eyed and this awe-struck woman who was writing these sappy and sickly-sweet love songs. I don’t think there is anything on The Kick Inside that tallies with Kate Bush’s disassociation. What compelled her to say this?! Her words might not have been right. Feeling that The Kick Inside was lacking in production and instrumental punch. In terms of her lyrics and singing, you can feel this electric charge and sweat. In its own way, it has quite a lot of bite and body. Even Feel It, which might be one of the most romantic or conventional, features these lines: “Feel your warm hand walking around/I won't pull away, my passion always wins”. This curiosity and passion from a young woman. She is not writing romantic and slushy songs like many of her peers. There is this physicality and risqué element. I guess Them Heavy People could be seen as a little hippy-dippy or airy-fairy. Though it is a song that is captivating and compelling. Laura Snapes’s words about The Kick Inside highlights how she was definitely not writing in a soft and overly-feminine way. Never submissive or soft, even moments that don’t gel and could be better are still so different to anything that was around in 1978:

“Besides, Bush had always felt that she had male musical urges, drawing distinctions between herself and the female songwriters of the 1960s. “That sort of stuff is sweet and lyrical,” Bush said of Carole King and co. in 1978, “but it doesn’t push it on you, and most male music—not all of it, but the good stuff—really lays it on you. It’s like an interrogation. It really puts you against the wall and that’s what I’d like my music to do. I’d like my music to intrude.” (Evidently, she had not been listening to enough Laura Nyro.) That reasoning underpinned Bush’s first battle with EMI, who wanted to release the romp “James and the Cold Gun” as her first single. Bush knew it had to be the randy metaphysical torch song “Wuthering Heights,” and she was right: It knocked ABBA off the UK No. 1 spot. She soon intruded on British life to the degree that she was subject to unkind TV parodies.

The louche “L’Amour Looks Something Like You” treads similarly brazen territory though lands less soundly. She fantasizes about “that feeling of sticky love inside” as if anticipating a treacle pudding, and there is an unctuous gloop to the arrangement that makes it one of the album’s least distinctive songs. More complex desires tended to elicit her more inherently sensual and accomplished writing. “Moving,” her tribute to dance teacher Lindsay Kemp, is so absurdly elegant and lavish that its beauty seems to move Bush to laughter: There is deep respect in her admiration for him, in concert with piercing operatic notes and impish backing vocal harmonies that sound like they should have been handled by a chorus of Jim Henson creations. “You crush the lily in my soul” as an awed metaphor for the timidity of girlhood gone away is unimpeachable.

What made Bush’s writing truly radical was the angles she could take on female desire without ever resorting to submissiveness. “Wuthering Heights” is menacing melodrama and ectoplasmic empowerment; “The Saxophone Song”—one of two recordings made when she was 15—finds her fantasizing about sitting in a Berlin bar, enjoying a saxophonist’s playing and the effect it has on her. But she is hardly there to praise him: “Of all the stars I’ve seen that shine so brightly/I’ve never known or felt in myself so rightly,” she sings of her reverie, with deep seriousness. We hear his playing, and it isn’t conventionally romantic but stuttering, coarse, telling us something about the unconventional spirits that stir her.

And if there is trepidation in the arrangement of “The Man With the Child in His Eyes,” it reflects other people’s anxieties about its depicted relationship with an older man: Will he take advantage, let her down? This is the other teenage recording, her voice a little higher, less powerfully exuberant, but disarmingly confident. Her serene, steady note in the chorus—“Oooooh, he’s here again”—lays waste to the faithless. And whether he is real, and whether he loves her, is immaterial: “I just took a trip on my love for him,” she sings, empowered, again, by her desire. There’s not a fearful note on The Kick Inside, and yet there is still room for childish wonder: Just because Bush appeared emotionally and musically sophisticated beyond her years didn’t mean denying them.

The Kick Inside was Bush’s first, the sound of a young woman getting what she wants. Despite her links to the 1970s’ ancien régime, she recognized the potential to pounce on synapses shocked into action by punk, and eschewed its nihilism to begin building something longer lasting. It is ornate music made in austere times, but unlike the pop sybarites to follow in the next decade, flaunting their wealth while Britain crumbled, Bush spun hers not from material trappings but the infinitely renewable resources of intellect and instinct: Her joyous debut measures the fullness of a woman’s life by what’s in her head”.

It did sort of bug me that Bush said in an interview that she did not want to be associated with soft and romantic sounds. That is how she saw her debut. The Kick Inside dismissed. Alongside fearlessness is this child-like wonder. You can think about modern artists like Chappell Roan very much latching onto The Kick Inside and being drawn to that. Olivia Rodrigo too. The Kick Inside was groundbreaking. Listen to Wild Beasts and their acrobatic, unusual, swooping and sweeping songs of lust and desire and you can feel that link to The Kick Inside. There is plenty of teeth and guts on the 1978 debut, though the production is not as impactful and bold as it would become when Kate Bush was producing. That does not mean that The Kick Inside is soft and romantic. As The Kick Inside turns fifty in 2028, I will be dissecting it and writing about it a lot. The Kick Inside is an album that Kate Bush should be…

VERY proud of.

FEATURE: One for the Record Collection! Essential October Releases

FEATURE:

 

 

One for the Record Collection!

IN THIS PHOTO: Victoria Monét

 

Essential October Releases

__________

NEXT month…

IN THIS PHOTO: Rachel Chinouriri

sees the release of a fair few big albums from major artists. I am recommending the albums you will want to pre-order. You can see a list here. I am starting out with albums due on 4th October. Four that you will want to keep an eye out for. Fat Dog’s Cancel Me (I’m Tired) is an album you can pre-order here. They are one of our best young bands, so it will be exciting when they release their latest album:

“The second album by South London seven-piece Fat Dog is titled Cancel Me (I’m Tired). After releasing their debut album WOOF. in 2024 and becoming one of the UK’s most exciting breakthrough bands in the process, they have a good reason to be tired. They’ve spent the period since WOOF.’s release spreading their raucous, infectious and irresistible bark around the world. The reason that they want you to cancel them is that they’ve been around the world and they’re tired. But if Fat Dog - Joe Love, Chris Hughes, Morgan Wallace, Ellis Dickson, Michael Dunlop, Dillon Harrison and Jed Bevington - are tired with the world, the world is not tired of them. In fact, the world can’t get enough of them.

With follow up Cancel Me (I’m Tired), Fat Dog have created an exhilarating, swaggering, panoramic, inventive, re-inventive, re-re-inventive electro-punk-art-pop-rock’n’roll-space-country triumph that deserves all the adjectives. Over ten mind-bending and melodic tracks, it blends electro-pop anthems, cascading rave bangers, cowboy-tinged pitstops and swirling psychedelia. Into its lyrical orbit, the record pulls mentions of addiction, family ties, love, AI, ancestry, extra-terrestrials, Chris Tarrant, S&M, B&M, H&M and M&Ms. Cancel Me (I’m Tired) possesses all the rabid frenzy and electrifying excitement of their debut but now delivered on a grand and glorious scale. Big, big things are ahead. Fat Dog are only just getting going”.

It is always brilliant when Johnny Marr releases an album. The Age of Everything is out on 4th October. You can pre-order a copy here. I am turning to Rough Trade and their words about The Age of Everything. Well, technically, they are Johnny Marr’s words. There will definitely be a lot of interest and love around this album. Judging by what has been released from The Age of Everything so far, it is going to be up there with Marr’s very best solo work:

“The Age of Everything is Johnny Marr's fifth full-length studio record. Written in London, developed live on the road across the East Coast of North America and recorded in Manchester, The Age of Everything captures the energy and tensions of the city. Sharp, fast and dynamic, filled with ideas and possibilities. “This is the record that’s been the most cathartic. The title came to me early in the process and became an inescapable idea. It seemed to sum up the way I think a lot of people are feeling. It’s all encompassing, but it's not necessarily a negative statement. There’s a sense of overwhelm in the culture brought about by technology, but looking at it with a different light, there could also be a sense of possibility.” – Johnny Marr”.

The penultimate album from 4th October I want to cover is Phoebe Green’s Premature Nostalgia. This might be an artist that you are new to or do not know much about. I would urge everyone to check out her music and pre-order Premature Nostalgia. Green is a fabulous artist who I have been following for a while now. Everything she touches is golden:

“Written and produced alongside her sister Lucy Green between Phoebe's flat in Manchester and their parents' home in the coastal town of Lytham St Annes, Premature Nostalgia finds Phoebe Green at her most psychologically unguarded - documenting the impulse to grieve moments before they've even disappeared, turning spiralling inner monologues, warped electronics and metallic textures into fractured, emotionally combustible alt-pop.

A darker and more enigmatic companion to 2025 EP The Container and her acclaimed debut album Lucky Me , Premature Nostalgia draws inspiration from artists such as Imogen Heap, Oklou, Jockstrap, James Blake, FKA twigs and Sega Bodega - embracing warped electronics, fragmented structures and more experimental forms of pop songwriting. The album also features collaborations with Picture Parlour's Katherine Parlour and incorporates field recordings and metallic textures pulled directly from Manchester's industrial landscape and club culture.

At its core, however, the album remains rooted in the bond between Phoebe and Lucy - sisters, collaborators and proud adopted Mancunians navigating the realities of independent artistry together”.

Prior to getting to five albums from 11th October that are well worth pre-ordering, I would recommend people check out Victoria Monét’s Frequency of Love. There is not a huge amount of detail out there concerning the album, but Rough Trade provide some information. Another album that you should consider pre-ordering. October shaping up to be one of the best months for new albums. Some wonderful releases are due:

“Victoria Monét opens a fresh chapter with Frequency of Love, a record that feels timeless, elevated, and fully in command. Blending R&B with the romance of classic cinema and the pull of the dance floor, it plays like a rich, sensory listen shaped by love, vibration, and the full scope of her artistry.

A multi-hyphenate superstar and 3x Grammy Award winner, Victoria Monét made her debut album JAGUAR II one of the most celebrated releases of its moment. It earned seven Grammy nominations and landed on Best of 2023 lists from Barack Obama, Jay-Z, Rolling Stone, TIME, and Vogue.

The praise around Victoria Monét has come from every corner, including Beyoncé, Janet Jackson, and Bruno Mars. Frequency of Love builds on that foundation with style, confidence, and serious presence”.

Shifting now to 9th October and some tremendous albums. I’ll start off this week with Dawn Richard’s Creole Culture. This is an artist that I have a lot of respect for. I love her music, so I am looking forward to hearing what is on offer through Creole Culture. You can pre-order it here. An album I predict will get a lot of positive reviews when it comes out:

“Dawn Richard returns to her King Creole era with Creole Culture, a bold, future-facing love letter to New Orleans. Drawing on her Black and Native American heritage, it completes the arc begun with New Breed and Second Line, this time telling the city’s story through her own eyes.

Following her avant-garde R&B collaborations with Spencer Zahn, including 2024’s Quiet in a World Full of Noise, this record softens the brass-heavy swagger without losing its power. It moves through triumph, grief, desire and reflection, blending R&B, soul, hip-hop, pop and jazz with real care.

Guests including Big Freedia, Anjelika “Jelly” Joseph, Tarriona “Tank” Ball and Durand Bernarr help build the atmosphere. From enough to fiesta, Creole Culture is expansive, deeply personal and one of Dawn Richard’s most striking records yet”.

Moving from Dawn Richards to Jamie T and Ghosts (100 Days of Morning). His latest album follows 2022’s The Theory of Whatever. This is an artist whose music I have listened to for years. So this is another album that I am going to explore when it comes out. You can pre-order it here. To think, it has almost been twenty years since he released his debut album, Panic Prevention (2007):

“Jamie T returns with Ghosts (100 Days of Morning), an 11-track collection shaped during a difficult period and filled with old ghosts brought back into focus. It looks at growing up, leaving youth behind, love, loss and the brittle nostalgia of halcyon indie-era nights.

There is a real sense of release here too. Ghosts (100 Days of Morning) feels just as much about letting go as it does reclaiming identity, with 3310, the introspective closer Tallahassee and Cocktail, a collaboration with Damon Albarn, all standing out.

The album is produced in part by Jamie T, James Dring of Loyle Carner and Blur, and Hugo White of The Maccabees”.

Three more from 9th October that I want to cover off. Jess Williamson’s A Mile South of Heaven is an album you can pre-order here. Again, this may be an artist who is new to you. Though I do feel that she is someone that you should invest in. Her sixth studio album follows 2023’s Time Ain't Accidental. A prolific and extraordinary artist, here are some details about her upcoming album:

“Jess Williamson has built one of the most distinctive voices in American music — crystalline, acrobatic, and unmistakably her own. The Texas-born, Los Angeles-based singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist has spent the better part of a decade carving out her own lane at the intersection of indie folk, alt-country, and a deeply personal confessional tradition. Now, on her seventh studio album, she steps into new creative territory.

Produced by Shooter Jennings, the album finds Williamson's artistry meeting its ideal counterpart. Jennings brings a deep-roots sensibility and studio instinct honed across decades, and together they've crafted twelve songs that honor the grit and sweep of classic country while remaining unmistakably contemporary. Williamson's voice remains the central instrument: front and center, emotionally unguarded, carrying the kind of weight that demands a room go quiet. But with Jennings at the helm, the sonic canvas is richer and more expansive than anything in her catalog to date — full of texture, warmth, and that ineffable Nashville-meets-Laurel-Canyon atmosphere that lives somewhere between Linda Ronstadt and Waylon Jennings”.

Remi Wolf’s Mud is due on 9th October. You can pre-order the album here. There is not a lot of information on this one either, but I hope that the below does provide some intrigue. Wolf is an artist who always delivers incredible music, so I feel that Mud is going to be an album you cannot afford to miss out on. I am definitely going to listen to it when it comes out:

“If Remi Wolf’s first two albums, Juno from 2021 and Big Ideas from 2024, lived in technicolor, her third LP Mud feels more earthy, grounded and close to the soil. The colour is still there, but it comes from a more rooted place.

That directness runs through the whole record. Written with real rawness, Mud strips away synths and programmed drums to leave Remi Wolf at her most lyrically and sonically vulnerable. These songs carry the feeling of singing around a campfire with friends and a couple of guitars, because that is how making the album felt to Wolf.

To reach that clearing in the forest, she had to carve out a new trail first”.

Prior to getting to 16th October and a few albums from that week you’ll want to pre-order, the final one from 9th October is Sheryl Crow’s Pick You Up. You can pre-order the album on Galaxy Blue vinyl. One of the most striking album covers of this year too from the iconic and legendary American artist. Someone I have been following since her debut in the 1990s:

“These songs arrive as a heartfelt reflection on being human and wanting connection. Born from life in this exact moment, they reckon with the chaos and constant noise around us, while holding tight to hope, love, and the beauty that still surrounds us.

There is a real sense here of songwriting as a way through: making sense of what is going on inside and all around, and turning that into something shared. The hope is simple and generous: that whoever hears these songs feels less alone.

Think of them as a soothing moisturiser for chapped hearts. When being awake can feel like trudging through a burning desert, these songs offer a reminder that this is only of a moment, and that life remains a beautiful gift worth sharing”.

Four from 16th October that you will want to pre-order. The first is Florrie’s Magic for a While. You can pre-order the album here. If you have not heard of Florrie, I would thoroughly recommend that you listen to her music. She was formerly an in-house drummer for the production house Xenomania, where she played on major Girls Aloud hits like the 2008 single, The Promise. I loved her 2024 debut album, The Lost Ones, so I am very interested in what she will offer with her second album. A remarkable and singular songwriter. In June, The Line of Best Fit shared news of Florrie’s forthcoming album:

“Magic For a While started to take shape in early 2025 while Florrie - a drummer, singer-songwriter, and model from Bristol - was living alone in Los Angeles. Recording live drum loops, she brought the raw sketches into rehearsal rooms to build tracks through instinctive jam sessions.

“I wanted the record to feel live,” she explains. “I wanted energy in it. I wanted things to feel human.” Higgins, a co-writer and producer on much of the LP, helped shape those live impulses into sleek, expansive pop productions.

Florrie first built a cult reputation in the early 2010s through a string of self-released singles and EPs with Xenomania, while her drumming anchored hits like Girls Aloud’s “The Promise” and her songwriting credits extended to artists including Kylie, MNEK, and Tove Lo. More recently, she has played London’s O2 Arena supporting Girls Aloud and toured the US with G Flip, moving her beyond an internet-pop underground to a new audience.

Magic For a While is the follow-up to Florrie's debut solo album, The Lost Ones, which was released in 2024”.

A few more albums from 16th October that you will want to pre-order. Fontaines D.C.’s Dopamine Chamber is among the most anticipated albums of this year. The Irish band are in their prime right now, in the sense they are being talked about as potential Glastonbury headliners. They have risen to that stage in their career. You can pre-order their album here:

“Fontaines D.C. release their fifth studio album, Dopamine Chamber, released via XL Recordings. Produced by James Ford, it is the follow-up to 2024’s UK platinum-certified Romance – and the sound of a band moving decisively away from the guitar language of their early records into something colder, stranger and more synthetic.

Dopamine Chamber arrives like a constellation behind undulating sighs of smog: potent balladry, anthemic melodies glinting through the murk. In a world tipping towards collapse, it asks how pleasure mutates amid peril—and what our pursuit of it reveals about us. Across the album, Fontaines D.C. – Grian Chatten, Carlos O’Connell, Conor Curley, Conor Deegan and Tom Coll – move between gratification and dread until the two meld together, reflecting the overwhelm of artificial intelligence, environmental collapse and political violence all riding the same algorithms as memes, jokes and celebrity culture. “The album itself is a dopamine chamber,” says Chatten. “You step inside and we test these different mind- or mood-altering pieces of music on you.”

Where Romance held its tension in balance, this record tips it. “I think Romance was maybe 60 per cent human and 40 per cent corrupted by automation, and a loss of feeling,” says Chatten, who spent time among the faded grandeur of Venice, Vienna and Sicily in search of lyrical inspiration. “This one feels more like 60 per cent corrupted — the mask is wearing the face a little more.” He resisted any pull towards easy optimism: “I felt it would be more powerful to leave the hope out and reflect the ugliness honestly. This one needed to feel more like a catastrophic warning.”

“Our albums have always questioned a sense of place,” says bassist Conor Deegan. “First Dublin, then being away from Dublin, and then trying to find the romance elsewhere. On this record, the question became: where do you escape to?” Into the self, perhaps – or hedonism, fantasy, cosmetic perfection, eternal youth or the endless refresh of a screen.

Fontaines D.C. have spent five albums refusing to repeat themselves – from Dogrel (2019) through A Hero’s Death (2020), the No. 1 Skinty Fia (2022) and the anarchic, kaleidoscopic Romance (2024). Dopamine Chamber is their most radical turn yet: cold synthesiser tones, marching drums, samples and triggers, several songs with no guitars at all, and the swooning strings of 1960s Italian pop pulled into something synthetic. For guitarist Conor Curley, the aim was to break from the band’s own reference points: “I was trying to find stuff that pointed into the future.” It was made with James Ford between London, the English countryside and Palermo, where Chatten recorded vocals in a makeshift booth built from mattresses and cushions.

“There’s a poignant sense of us being on the brink of some other kind of form of humanity, or non-humanity,” says Chatten. For their fifth album, Fontaines D.C. have built the chamber. What happens to the listener inside it will be the experiment”.

Prior to wrapping things up with three albums from 30th October for you to pre-order, there is one more from 16th October (none from 23rd October I am highlighting). Rachel Chinouriri’s I think I spoke too soon is the next album I am recommending. This is an artist that I really love. You can pre-order it here. Here are some details about an album that you will definitely want to get a copy of:

“Two-time Brit Award nominee and winner of the 2026 Silver Clef Best New Artist award, Rachel Chinouriri steps into a new chapter with I think I spoke too soon.

Threading dancefloor synth-pop through her tender indie songwriting, the record leans into the pull between polished glamour and creeping self-doubt. It follows her acclaimed 2024 debut, What A Devastating Turn of Events, while pushing her sound into sharper, bolder territory.

At its core, this is a deeply autobiographical release, with Chinouriri exploring sobriety, femininity, and identity through the blurred emotions of her early-to-mid twenties, all shaped by one question: “If I continue down this path, will I like who I’ll become?”.

The Avalanches’ No Bad Memories is an album you should pre-order. I was not aware that The Avalanches had a new album coming out, so it took me by surprise somewhat. Over twenty-five years since their debut, Since I Left You, we are still getting incredible music from the Australian group (they currently consist of Robbie Chater and Tony Di Blasi, along with multi-instrumentalist Andy Szekeres):

“The Avalanches return with their fourth album No Bad Memories, a new album inspired by the simultaneously magical and unsettling ways advertising, technology and pop culture become woven into the fabric of our memories. No Bad Memories is an ambivalent love letter to the nostalgic pull of commercial jingles, start-up chimes and forgotten audio logos. Featuring collaborators including Karen O, Jamie XX, Portraits of Tracy and many more.

CD TRACKLIST
01. Bd-R 
02. Together (feat. Nikki Nair, Jessy Lanza & Prentiss)  
03. Xerox Altalink B8055 (feat. Ryoji Ikeda) 
04. I Give Everything I Have 2 U (feat. Loaded Honey) 
05. Every Single Weekend (feat. Jamie xx)  
06. Friends Forever 
07. Blue Shadows (feat. Karen O)  
08. Logoland   
09. Like Clockwork / Hit By Traffic (feat. Khadija Al Hanafi) 
10. All The Time In The World (feat. Rivers Cuomo, Vegyn & Baby Marlboro)  
11. 3D Glasses Not Included 
12. Vida (feat. Erick the Architect) 
13. Paradise Island (feat. Khadija Al Hanafi & Mike Patton) 
14. Unicorn Quest™ (feat. Ryoji Ikeda) 
15. Far Away (feat. John Glacier & Khadija Al Hanafi)  
 16. Our Love Is Alive (feat. Suzanne Ciani & Barry Can't Swim) 
17. Evergreen Altar (feat. Vegyn) * EXCLUSIVE TO VINYL, CD, CASSETTE
18. Can't Get Over Losing You (feat. Portraits of Tracy) 
19. Watch Out! It's Cloudy (feat. Khadija Al Hanafi) 
20. Highfield (feat. Panda Bear) 
21. Under Yr Power 
22. SUV Heaven (feat. Khadija Al Hanafi) 
23. One More Fantasy (feat. Carly Simon) 
24. Break Out Corporate Tag (feat. Ryoji Ikeda & Portraits Of Tracy) 
25. Magic Wand (feat. Barry Can't Swim) 
26. Superfun!™ TV Spot (feat. Mike Patton) 
27. No Bad Memories  
28. The Pavements Light (feat. Haruomi Hosono) 

VINYL TRACKLIST
SIDE A:
01. Bd-R 
02. Together (feat. Nikki Nair, Jessy Lanza & Prentiss)  
03. Xerox Altalink B8055 (feat. Ryoji Ikeda) 
04. I Give Everything I Have 2 U (feat. Loaded Honey) 
05. Every Single Weekend (feat. Jamie xx)  
06. Friends Forever 
07. Blue Shadows (feat. Karen O)  
08. Logoland  

SIDE B:  
09. Like Clockwork / Hit By Traffic (feat. Khadija Al Hanafi) 
10. All The Time In The World (feat. Rivers Cuomo, Vegyn & Baby Marlboro)  
11. 3D Glasses Not Included 
12. Vida (feat. Erick the Architect) 
13. Paradise Island (feat. Khadija Al Hanafi & Mike Patton) 
14. Unicorn Quest™ (feat. Ryoji Ikeda) 
15. Far Away (feat. John Glacier & Khadija Al Hanafi)  

SIDE C:
16. Our Love Is Alive (feat. Suzanne Ciani & Barry Can't Swim) 
17. Evergreen Altar (feat. Vegyn) * EXCLUSIVE TO VINYL, CD, CASSETTE
18. Can't Get Over Losing You (feat. Portraits of Tracy) 
19. Watch Out! It's Cloudy (feat. Khadija Al Hanafi) 
20. Highfield (feat. Panda Bear) 

SIDE D:
21. Under Yr Power 
22. SUV Heaven (feat. Khadija Al Hanafi) 
23. One More Fantasy (feat. Carly Simon) 
24. Break Out Corporate Tag (feat. Ryoji Ikeda & Portraits Of Tracy) 
25. Magic Wand (feat. Barry Can't Swim) 
26. Superfun!™ TV Spot (feat. Mike Patton) 
27. No Bad Memories  
28. The Pavements Light (feat. Haruomi Hosono)”.

Moving into 30th October, that brings me to Caroline Rose’s Gentling the Horse at the Walt Whitman Mall. The Long Island-born artist is so prolific. Last year, she released Year of the Slug. You can pre-order Caroline Rose’s forthcoming album here. I am really looking forward to this. Below is a brief bit of detail that gives you a glimpse inside an album that you will want to pre-order for sure:

“Caroline Rose returns with Gentling the Horse at the Walt Whitman Mall, the first release on their newly launched independent label, Suck records. Produced by John Congleton, it feels expansive, unguarded, and full of sharp, clear-eyed songwriting.

Across Gentling the Horse at the Walt Whitman Mall, Caroline Rose follows the strange overlap of humor and grief that runs through modern American life. The record balances pointed observations about crumbling capitalist structures with a deeply human hope for connection.

There is beauty and absurdity here in equal measure, with wildness, tenderness, and satire all sharing the same space. Led by Yip Yip Yow, a longtime fan favorite performed live for nearly a decade before its official release, this album opens an exciting new era for Caroline Rose”.

The penultimate album I am recommending is Jordan Rakei’s A Safe Place to Be Wild. Not too much detail about this album available, but you can pre-order it here. Jordan Rakei is a tremendous artist whose debut, Cloak, came out in 2016. The New Zealand-Australian musician is one of the very best in the world, so A Safe Place to Be Wild is going to be among this year’s best albums:

“A Safe Place To Be Wild is the seventh LP from Jordan Rakei, arriving after more than a decade of pushing the boundaries of soul, jazz and alternative R&B. Fearless, intimate and emotionally direct, the album finds Jordan embracing uninhibited self-expression and placing vulnerability at the centre of his songwriting. Stripping everything back to raw feeling and unfiltered moments, A Safe Place To Be Wild captures an artist fully stepping into himself, confronting the fear of exposing his inner world and finding power in doing so”.

The final album I am spotlighting for this feature is The Big Moon’s Forever. This is a band who I am a fan of. You will want to pre-order this incredible album. The Big Moon are such an amazing band, so there will be a lot of eyes on Forever. A lot has changed for the band since their previous album, Here Is Everything:

“What happens after happily ever after? And how do you make forever count? These are the preoccupations at the heart of The Big Moon’s buoyant yet beautifully bittersweet fourth album, Forever.

Four years on from last LP Here Is Everything – and a further eight since frontwoman Juliette Jackson first laid the foundations for the band – the London-formed four-piece find themselves in a very different, if similarly challenging, headspace. Where that record was conceived in the context of COVID and found Jackson processing the life-altering experience of new motherhood, Forever examines what’s left when you’ve already checked off many of the major milestones, and is tempered by a first-hand understanding of life’s fragility.

The truth is, the past couple of years have been a big readjustment for Jackson. In 2024, she was diagnosed with a cholesteatoma – a benign but destructive cyst inside the eardrum which has to be removed with surgery. Jackson explains, “I permanently lost most of the hearing on one side, which was pretty much existential, because writing songs is my job and my identity.” Stoic by nature, Jackson forged forward with songwriting regardless but found herself faltering. “I couldn't hear properly, everything sounded out of tune and I was just struggling to find a point at all, just writing these miserable songs I couldn't really hear.”

The answer was to shift her outlook completely, manifesting “a happy ending that didn’t exist yet.” “I just decided to write songs for this imaginary time, one or two years in the future, when I would be all healed and happy again. I didn’t know if I would ever get to that point but, by projecting and almost tricking myself into it, it actually became a really nice way of writing.” It proved an extremely fruitful approach, producing some of the brightest songs of The Big Moon’s career to date. Recorded over three weeks at Norfolk’s Bam Bam Studios, with Kevin Morby-collaborator Sam Cohen co-producing alongside the band, Forever is brimming with hook-heavy alt-pop gems, not least because Jackson had fallen out of love with writing verses.

“Over the years I've got more impatient with music,” Jackson explains with a grin. “I just like getting straight to the point.” As bandmate Celia Archer explains, they hope the album proves uplifting. “They're not trivial songs lyrically or thematically or musically, but Jules has shown us you can face all this stuff and choose to be hopeful and find power from it. Hopefully other people can apply that to their own lives”.

October is a busy and varied month for albums. From Sheryl Crow and Johnny Marr through to Remi Wolf, Fontaines D.C. and Caroline Rose, there is something in there for pretty much all musical tastes. I hope that my recommendations have given you some options if you are looking for albums to pre-order. It does go to show that October is indeed…

AN exciting month.

FEATURE: Spotlight: Quiet Light

FEATURE:

 

 

Spotlight

PHOTO CREDIT: Grace Alexander

 

Quiet Light

__________

I am going to come to…

PHOTO CREDIT: Sophia Liv Maguire for NME

a review of Quiet Light’s Blue Angel Sparkling Silver 2 mixtape, that was released earlier in the year. Many people know about Quiet Light, though I am relatively fresh to her work. If you are also new to her, then I hope that this feature provides some necessary information and substance. There are some interviews that I am covering off. Let’s start off with The Line of Best Fit and their interview from July. They write how this Texas-born artist brings emotion and accessibility to Ambient music. “Riya Mahesh didn’t get into Juilliard’s vocal performance program, she thought her career in music had come to an anticlimactic end”. When The Line of Best Fit spoke with Quiet Light, she was back home after taking leave from medical school to complete her latest album:

“Her first release with True Panther Records — the label behind Oklou, Grace Ives, Model/Actriz, and Frost Children — the album has quickly become one of the year’s critical darlings and made Mahesh herself one of the buzziest indie up-and-comers.

Blue Angel Sparkling Silver 2 is one of those records that feels like a turning point — both for an artist and a scene. It positions itself in electronica, ambient, and even occasionally hyperpop-leaning production while managing to find an extremely grounding emotional core in lyrics that feel like pages from a long-lost Richard Linklater screenplay and an addictive edge the hookiness of a Swedish pop song. Along with her True Panther labelmates and others like Chanel Beads, she’s pushing forward the style of yearning, intelligent indietronica that’s slowly coalescing in the scene. It’s perhaps the modern version of the Imogen Heap sound, updated for a generation that puts glitch rappers and Elliott Smith on the same playlist.

“I wanted to make an ambient record where you could show it to your random co-worker who doesn’t know anything about ambient music and they love the songs,” Mahesh says of her sonic mission for the album. “I wanted to make something that was experimental but still traditionally pretty.”

Mahesh is no stranger to a busy schedule. While working in a hospital and studying for her medical board exams — which, mind you, she’s now completed — she also managed to release five albums — including the first Blue Angel Sparkling Silver — along with scores of other singles and EPs.  “What would happen is the previous album would enter the mixing stage, and then I would start the next one,” she explains. “It was definitely, like, compulsive music making.” Sure, it was, as she describes it, a bit of a Hannah Montana double life, but she also wouldn’t trade it. In fact, she feels it made her better. What she calls the “militaristic” discipline of medical care turned into a hyper-diligent approach to perfecting her craft. “No matter what, you need to get up every day at a very early hour and go to the hospital and help people,” she says on her med school mindset. “That mentality really carried over into music, because there were periods where I was going to give up on this whole thing, like no one was listening, it’s a lot of work, I was spending a lot of money getting it mastered.

All of Blue Angel Sparkling Silver 2 was self-produced, a point she takes particular pride in. There’s a special sort of pleasure, she tells me, in correcting someone who assumes she had nothing to do with the production of her record. Women, as she rightly points out, are astoundingly underrepresented in producing circles, particularly in the ambient-electronic scene she calls home”.

It is interesting that here is an artist who is not rushing things. There is so much emphasis on content and artists putting out as much music as possible. Though Quiet Light hopes to release another record, she is going to pursue other interests. Music is very dear to her, yet she is not going to leap straight to another album. Artists can take a few years and then put out music. No real sense that Blue Angel Sparkling Silver 2 requires a quick follow-up. FADER interviewed Quiet Light in April. I am picking up various sections of the interview. It is interesting learning about her background, and especially how important the piano is to her:

“Mahesh grew up playing classical piano in Dallas and like many who learned an instrument young, she initially felt burdened by the classes her mother enrolled her in. That later changed when she realized that piano could be a “vessel” for everything she’d been feeling. As she got older, she found new meaning and connection in classical music. She found joy in developing her skills as a vocalist, training in opera for 10 years. But she still made time to listen to Disney Channel stars and country music. “Throughout my whole life, [music has] been the thing that gets me through the day,” she says.

She knew she wanted to make a sequel to 2023’s Blue Angel Sparkling Silver 1 because that record was “the truest version of myself,” she adds. “This whole concept of free-form ambient music that isn’t really ambient [but] has a lot of pop elements.”

I ask her how she feels now that her music has officially transformed from a private exploration into a wider career. “[Thinking] my music is so personal and so pure that I can’t share it with other people [is a] pessimistic take,” she says. “At the end of the day we all go through breakups, we all move, we all go through traumatic life events, [we all experience] happiness as well as love.”

She plans to release another record and then continue pursuing other interests for a period. She’ll still make music, as always, but the career machinations may pause. Music isn’t an all–or-nothing endeavor for her, but a part of life regardless of the show bookings or contracts.

“People like Lorde who are huge massive mega-stars take like four years where no one hears anything from them,” she says. “It’s important for me to be able to keep music as sacred as it possibly can be”.

The final interview I am getting to is from NME. They recently spoke to Quiet Light’s Riya Mahesh, among other things, taking part in Olivia Rodrigo's all-female festival, Daisy Chain Fields. You can read her diary here. It is incredible that we have artists like Quiet Light. Though she might not release another mixtape or album for a while, it is clear that she has already made a huge impact:

“Instead of one viral spike, Quiet Light and her fanbase have grown “organically” as more people find the music and come to shows every year. Mahesh, who will tour Europe and the UK later this year, counts herself lucky. “I’m not The Dare, which is freeing in a way,” she says. “I really didn’t think the music would mean anything to anyone except me, so it feels really special.”

“I never had that self-belief most artists have at a young age, that they’re destined for greatness,” she continues. “I’ve always been doubtful of my own musical talent. Anytime anything good happens, I’m just shocked.” When a song from her first ‘Blue Angel’ record appeared on a Spotify editorial playlist, her first reaction was pure panic: “I remember thinking, ‘What? People know about this?!’”

Signing to True Panther earlier this year took things to a new level. Six years of doing everything alone had made her a true “auteur”, taking the time to hone and execute her exact vision of Quiet Light. But self-sufficiency was reaching its natural ceiling: “I had ideas that were bigger than what I could do with my MacBook Pro.” Self-releasing music was also lonelier than she expected. “I’d put out a song, people would listen for a day or two, and everyone would forget about it.” Having a team now has been “really good for my mental health”, she shares. “It’s nice to have people with you to share in your success or failure.”

It’s partially changed how she sees the industry, too. Once a pessimist who used to resent the heavy emphasis on music marketing and pressure on artists to “really sell the product”, she now points to the likes of PinkPantheress “building a whole brand around plaid”, or Charli XCX’s immersive swerve from ‘Brat’ to ‘Music, Fashion, Film’, as proof that reinvention and creative direction can present real opportunity. “It’s actually a really amazing time to be an artist,” she says. “A couple of years ago, I would not have said that.”

Quiet Light will be the first artist in the line-up to perform at Daisy Chain Fields, which takes place in Irvine, California this Saturday (August 29). Quiet Light shows have historically been solo or minimalist affairs, but this weekend she’ll perform with a full band for the first time. “I’m all about a challenge,” she says, brightening also at the news that her Austin friends, and past NME Cover stars, Die Spitz are also on the bill. “It feels like a homecoming.”

The all-women, Lilith Fair-inspired bill – from Rodrigo, Chappell Roan and Doechii to Garbage, The Breeders and Bikini Kill – is performing for free, raising money for charities supporting women and girls, especially reproductive health. As a healthcare worker and “Texas girl at heart”, Mahesh feels the connection personally. “Things involving women’s bodies are really going to shit in Texas,” she says. “It really feels like we’re going backwards as a society. I’ve been trying to adopt a more hopeful mindset and work to make things better in my own way”.

I am going to wrap things up with a review for Blue Angel Sparkling Silver 2. The Quietus provided their assessment of a mixtape that has Pop precision running right through it. I am not sure whether she is playing dates in the U.K. in the future. I feel there are a lot of people here that would really want to come and see her play. Bringing this sensational new mixtape to the stage:

“Quiet Light’s music is best listened to during the in-between parts of life, where change is most felt. Fittingly, her mixtape Blue Angel Sparkling Silver 2 throws the listener into the middle of this moving sound, with ‘Star100’ beginning like a half-heard conversation. Layering delicate harmonies, gliding synths and soft drum patterns, the song spirals through accelerated changes in tempo and pitch until reaching a climax, after which details melt away to leave the bare essentials, concluding with a sampled conversation asking why no one’s midlife crisis ever involves Bagel Bites.

The opening track reworks 2024’s ‘Love90’, a standout from the self-produced projects of Texas-raised artist and medical student Riya Mahesh, released ahead of signing to True Panther, home to Oklou and Jawnino. Her debut with the label is a companion to 2023’s independent Blue Angel Sparkling Silver. It’s a seamless evolution rather than a hard reset, aligning with a prolific set of releases that establish a coherent voice and visual identity.

The listener is lulled into a meditative state by the sitar drones of ‘New Dream’, whilst the scattered voicenotes and warped sounds of ‘You Say I Love You’ evoke Madonna’s ‘What It Feels Like For A Girl’ and Oneohtrix Point Never’s ‘Still Life’. Quiet Light successfully toes a line many struggle with; this is music rooted in the present, echoing Addison Rae or Dean Blunt, while carrying the timelessness of artists like Mazzy Star.

While Mahesh’s previous work was at its best when constructing impressionistic vignettes, here we see her refined precision as a pop songwriter. Standouts include the pitched-up hooks in ‘Postinternetfame’, as she laments a broken relationship, “singing Jeff Buckley in the car, saying things I know you don’t mean.” On lead single ‘Berlin’, the chorus is reminiscent of Avril Lavigne’s ‘Complicated’, where a deceptively effortless melody opens into a cathartic sing-along. Her skill lies in finding depth in the everyday, shaping simple observations into heartfelt stories.

Moments of intersection are the most central element to the mixtape. A peripheral voice in ‘Self Tape’ declares it “cusp season”– a term describing transitions between zodiac signs and relationships–before abruptly cutting to ‘Postinternetfame’. This flux is underscored by the placement of ‘The Sound Of You Leaving’ as track two. Sparser by design and laced with harmonic ambiguity, it captures the hollow sense of someone walking out of your life. While its position disrupts the mixtape’s flow, its intent feels unmistakable.

There’s a striking coherence to the Quiet Light project, underpinned by a lingering sense of longing. With a discography already defined by depth and conceptual clarity, Mahesh’s latest mixtape demands recognition to match her soft ambition”.

Go and follow Quiet Light. She is an artist that I can see enduring for years. Although there is no rush and she will take time to put out more music, it is exciting to see where she heads next. Finishing medical school and looking at other projects in the meantime. I really love Quiet Light and will look out for her music. Go and follow her on social media. Blue Angel Sparkling Silver 2 is the latest release from…

AN enormous talent.

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Follow Quiet Light

FEATURE: Spotlight: Haute & Freddy

FEATURE:

 

 

Spotlight

 

Haute & Freddy

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THIS is a duo that…

I am new to. I was reading some recent interviews with Haute & Freddy, and it piqued my interest. They released their debut album, Big Disgrace, in March. I will end with a review of that album. Prior to getting there, I wanted to bring together some interviews from this year. At the moment, Haute & Freddy are on tour. They head to the U.K. in November. Four interviews to get to. I am starting out with Cosmopolitan and their chat from August. They spoke with Haute & Freddy following their amazing Lollapalooza set:

“Michelle Buzz and Lance Shipp are not your typical pop stars. After cranking out hits and landing songwriting credits for artists like Britney Spears, Katy Perry, and Kylie Minogue, the pressure forced the duo and creative partners to nearly give up on their dreams of releasing their own music. That is, until they found a release from writing songs for the sake of playful creation. They found insatiable joy in their new songs; thus, their onstage Renaissance-era circus-runaway personas, Haute & Freddy, were born.

In an industry plagued by up-and-comers who feel they must evoke a certain gravitas to move up in the machine, it’s incredibly refreshing to see two artistes, at their core, bring a necessary whimsy back to the pop landscape. After years of melancholy piano ballads—which will always have a place in this writer’s heart—Haute & Freddy’s sonic universe isn’t afraid to be too loud or take up space.

Your Lollapalooza set was so electric, and I was incredibly impressed by you coming up with songs on the fly. How does it feel to bring Big Disgrace to bigger stages?

Haute: It feels right, because it’s a big disgrace, baby! But it’s intimidating because we have to fill the emptiness on these big stages, space-wise. I really love having the painted cart facade because we want to take attention away from LED screens and bring that old theater vibe back. But I’m running around, and I can’t stop it. I always tell Lance (Freddy) I’m going to move less or I’m going to pass out. On those bigger stages, it’s constant because I want it to feel like a small theater so bad.

Freddy: We have a lot more space to run around. There’s a song after “Symphony for a Queen” where we do this theatrical heavy breathing, and that’s campy, but it’s also needed in the moment.

Haute: My body’s like, “Oh, you’re finally breathing right. Thanks!”

I’m curious, because your personas are circus runaways who escaped to do things on their terms, and that seems like a beautiful allegory for how you both found this version of yourselves as artists. As Haute & Freddy evolves, how do you make sure you’re still giving yourselves the freedom to surprise yourselves?

Haute: I know myself better at this stage in life, and I know what keeps me playful or when things are getting too busy. I’ll take a day off, drive two hours to a smaller town, and look around an antique shop or go to the art supply store and buy brushes, even if I don’t know what I’m going to paint. I need those kinds of things that don’t have a mission for my creativity to stay happy and healthy or else it will feel like I have to instantly please people.

Freddy: Listening to each other and continuing to be open. I find the most surprises in trying things we don’t know will work, but we do it anyway. There’s a lot of beauty behind the “I don’t know”.

I want to head back to April and an interview from DORK. There is a lot of love for this Los Angeles duo in the U.K. They have this growing fanbase. It will be exciting when they come over here and play some dates soon. An act that definitely needs to be on your radar. Big Disgrace is definitely among the best debut albums of 2026:

“While a lot of Haute & Freddy is about embracing ridiculousness and over-the-top exuberance, it's also about something fundamentally important: community and connection. An implacable bond between the artist and the fans. "I think it's what we were craving," says Buzz. "I was craving community. The music heals me, too, and reminds me of my happy places."

The community bond is most clearly visible in the way that the Royal Court play along and match the band with their own creativity. They come to shows with their own distinct looks and styles. "Oh, man, I think we were in Chicago, and this person came in with an all-tuxedo where they affixed flowers to their shoulders, it was almost like two hoops that went all the way up to their ears, and it was just this arch of pink flowers," gushes Lance as he recalls one of the most memorable fan looks. "Our fans now come up to us, and they're like, please let us know what the dress code is. We need some lead time because it takes us a while to make these outfits," laughs Buzz.

The circus theme does actually take on a wider, deeper resonance for the duo. "Circus came from this emotional place of me truly climbing out of a long depression," reflects Buzz. "Literally just me and the universe, vibing on this fantasy of life as this circus, and the fairy tale that is Haute & Freddy. It just gave me this playground out of depression, and it still makes me feel like things make sense. It wasn't that long ago that Lance was like, yeah, I think the circus was a literal metaphor for our careers. I never put that together, but it does feel like you want to be an artist amongst these artists, but your skill set isn't the tightrope, and it's not juggling. These things that other people are really good at, I didn't feel like I was good at. The circus story is from a true emotional journey."

The album 'Big Disgrace' is the endpoint of that journey, but it's also just the beginning of a world that Haute & Freddy are building for themselves and for their community. The album's opening track, 'Symphony For A Queen', encapsulates that. "It's the show tune of the album," says Buzz proudly. "It's very much about getting the look you want and embodying if no one understands me or if society is pushing against what makes me true and beautiful, then I'm going to do that for myself. That stage is metaphorical, but it's an emotional, imaginary place of going and feeling like you're cheering yourself on. I'm beautiful and perfect here." In pop music in 2026, there are few things more beautiful and perfect than Haute & Freddy. Lose yourselves in the madness”.

It is interested how a lot of former songwriters who were frustrated at not getting credit or being in the shadows are not up front and have their own careers. It takes me to NME and their July interview. One of my favourite sections of the interview is this: “My whole life feels like ’80s Kate Bush,” Buzz says. “There’s no Haute without Kate”. If you have not heard Haute & Freddy, then do make sure that you check out their music:

“Haute & Freddy have come to realise they share a lot of common ground – so much, in fact, that Buzz says they felt “friend embarrassment” for failing to exchange demos sooner. Both grew up making music in church, which provided a solid grounding in live performance, and both loved choral music and Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals. (“I am still absolutely spellbound by the synth sounds in his Cats score,” Buzz says today.) The duo’s musical theatre side emerges on ‘Symphony For A Queen’, the baroque opening song from ‘Big Disgrace’. It begins with Buzz singing a crystalline melody over pizzicato strings before the entire song morphs from Broadway ballad into a spangly toe-tapper. Lord Lloyd-Webber would surely approve.

Finding a like-minded partner-in-crime proved invigorating for the duo. “We were just so tired of having to be in a box when we were writing songs,” Shipp says. “So we basically said: ‘Let’s make music without really having a goal. Let’s just play.’ And that gave us the freedom to make whatever we wanted.” As they let their musical imaginations run wild, they also invented the characters of Haute & Freddy and concocted an outlandish backstory. The seed was an old-timey font they were drawn to – “it was very circus flier,” Buzz says – but the idea grew roots when they dropped their debut single, ‘Scantily Clad’, at the end of 2024.

Songs like ‘Dance The Pain Away’ and ‘Shy Girl’ hit so hard because they pulse with palpable emotion. “I have struggled with self-hate for the majority of my life. So many times, I’ve thought it was finally over and then it’ll smack me again: this little tug of depression,” Buzz says. She and Shipp wrote ‘Shy Girl’ as a way of excavating her pain after ‘Scantily Clad’ began to gain traction and Buzz wondered whether being an artist could actually become a viable career. “That song is such a lantern,” she adds. “It’s me saying: ‘Go out there and have fun. Don’t steal your own joy.’”

Perhaps because they combine high-camp visuals with high-impact hooks, Haute & Freddy have already built a fervent queer fanbase. ”With me being queer, I’m not surprised, but I just didn’t know whether that would happen,” Buzz says. “To be honest, I felt like in my [songwriting] career, a lot of my music didn’t resonate with anybody.”

For this reason, their main goal is to keep serving the Royal Court. “It’s crazy having people tell us ‘this song is changing lives’ or ‘the world needs you right now,’” Shipp says, which prompts an “oh my gosh, yes!” from Buzz. ”It still doesn’t feel real that we’re writing songs that people connect to,” she adds. “This whole project has been a huge gift to my life”.

The final interview is from Metal Magazine. Even if I am a new convert to the wonderful world of Haute & Freddy, I can tell that they are going to be making music for so long to come. Big Disgrace got such positive reception. You know there is appetite for more music from them. I will try and see if I can catch them when they play London in November. I really love what they are putting out into the world. Such a compelling and interesting duo:

“Every publication has tagged them as one of the best newcomers and emerging talents of the year, but Michelle Buzz and Lance Shipp have been creating music for a long time now (they have written and co-produced music for the likes of Katy Perry, Kylie Minogue, Britney Spears and Calvin Harris). Both had established careers as songwriters before meeting in Los Angeles, and began writing together simply for fun, without expectations or rules. They soon created the characters of Haute and Freddy, using them as vessels for real-life emotions and a more uninhibited approach to creativity. Their debut single, Scantily Clad, became a viral success on TikTok, followed by tracks including Anti-Superstar, Dance the Pain Away and Shy Girl, which attracted millions of streams and attention from outlets including Rolling Stone, People and SPIN, among others.

Their music combines infectious melodies, bold vocals, ’80s-inspired synths and playful irreverence, something they make sure to translate into their live shows. From the dream of becoming a Showgirl at Heart to the defiant declaration of I Like My People Weird, Haute & Freddy encourage listeners to resist the pressure to fit in and make space for their most authentic selves. At its core, the project is an invitation to embrace difference, have fun and let the inner freak take centre stage. “I don’t know if it’s more about the empowerment of intimacy or the simplicity of letting community soothe the insanity of life right now, but regardless, it’s shamelessly dramatic”, they say of Touch Touch. It comes with a new video directed by Amalia Irons, enriching their already fabulous visual world that feels like life in another time; another possibility.

We spoke to the band a few days before they kicked off the next leg of their sold-out Big Disgrace World Tour, and discussed the freedom they discovered in making Big Disgrace, the ’80s pop and art that shaped their sound, their influences, and the importance of creating spaces where weirdness, self-expression and difference can be celebrated.

Big Disgrace isn’t just an album title: it’s almost a manifesto about embracing what makes you different. Throughout the record you balance escapism with real emotional struggles, and we can identify moments reflecting depression, burnout, longing, identity. You mentioned that you started creating music as Haute & Freddy for fun, but the outcome is impressive beyond the music itself: there’s so much love in it. Did creating the whole record teach you something important about yourselves that you didn’t know before?

Michelle: Creating Big Disgrace definitely taught me to follow the fun and trust myself. I had dealt with the fallout of my previous artist project completely flopping, a songwriting career with ageing credits that weren’t keeping me afloat financially, trying to stay in LA surrounded by colleagues who had hit their stride — I was truly under the impression that a successful career in music was not coming for me. Getting to that point where I made peace with not ‘making it’ in music, I was able to start valuing my own happiness. Haute & Freddy was my version of a giant miniature Lego city in a basement; this hobby fantasy world I couldn’t stop building while I got ready to have a job outside of music. Big Disgrace taught me that magical things happen when you express yourself without thinking about the next step.
Lance: Making Big Disgrace was my confirmation that the universe will reward you for being yourself at all times.

Freaks encapsulates something really interesting: traditionally, marginalised people have reclaimed some of the insults they have historically received and turned them into statements of pride. This song owns the word, and it’s brilliantly brought to life visually in its music video. You worked with Amalia Irons on it (and others), and it reminds me of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. How did the song and the video come about?

Michelle: I love that it’s also a circus term that can now be rebranded instead of being used as an insult. We love taking that kind of terminology – same with “oh, what a big disgrace” – and making it something proud and unashamed. We wrote it in Topanga with Askjell (same collaborator as Sophie, Fields of Versailles, Sweet Surrender) and it was an explosive day. I feel like us and The Rocky Horror Picture Show share a similar approach to poking at conservative hang-ups, so I wanted to honour that through the video as much as possible.

Your album is a balm for the queer community and anyone who feels like they don’t belong. Now that you’re travelling the world, how do you see things in terms of equality? There’s a scary feeling that we’re going backwards and that there is more and more racism and hate present in our daily lives.

Michelle: I feel this a lot; it’s impossible not to. But I will say, going on tour this year to so many different places we had never been before, seeing the big variety of ages in the Royal Court, feeling the kindness in that room, the respect people are having for each other, the joy and self-expression – I don’t know if it’s naive, but it makes me feel like maybe the majority of people in this country really do want things to evolve and make sense.
Lance: I see the world the same way as I always have. Every person is equal. To me, it’s so simple: we all deserve the same opportunity to live freely and not feel like our life is in danger because of the colour of our skin, who we love or how we want to express ourselves. At our shows, that’s the space we want to create, where everyone can feel loved for who they are.

You have written songs for major artists like Katy Perry, Britney Spears, and Kylie Minogue, among many others. And recently Lady Gaga shared your music on her social media. Are there any other artists you’d like to collaborate with?

Gaga would be at the top of our list, we’d love to make a big musical number with her. We’d also love to collaborate with The Last Dinner Party, maybe do a little verse or something”.

Ending with DORK and their five-star review of Big Disgrace. For anyone who has not listened to this album, I would urge you to hear it now. You can feel touches of Lady Gaga, Kate Bush, Tori Amos and others in their work. Though what we get from Haute & Freddy is distinctly theirs. They have this sound and chemistry that is so incredible to behold:

“There was a time when pop stars stalked the pages of the world's greatest music weekly with vamp, vogue and vigour. Haute & Freddy understand that era in their very bones, to the extent that it wouldn't take too much convincing to believe they'd been created by a third wish on an issue of 80s Smash Hits. On 'Big Disgrace' they drag that old glamour into present tense with songs so immediate they can trap the algorithm in amber.

This is theatrical pop with precision and purpose. Not simple dress-up or retro karaoke, and certainly not a stack of dog-eared references hoping to pass for a personality. Haute & Freddy know exactly why 80s pop still works when it works. It is not all shoulder pads and eyeliner, though both are more than fun enough to drag out of the closet. It's because the hooks are headlines and the attitude is doctrine. Style and substance as a manifesto for mischief.

The album moves with the confidence of artists who can frame the canvas as well as paint it. From the first run of songs, it's clear. 'Scantily Clad', 'Shy Girl', 'Anti-Superstar', 'Sophie' and 'Dance The Pain Away' all point to the same core instinct to make pop that performs at full speed without ever losing composure. Each track understands both entry and payoff. There is no meandering between ideas, no apologising for demanding to be massive.

What is striking is how cleanly they manage tone. Camp is all over this record, but handled with utter discipline. The jokes land because the writing is sharp. They flawlessly commit to character and emotion without any sense of irony. That is hard to do. Plenty of artists can be funny. Plenty can be sincere. Very few can be both, fewer still through the lens of massive, honking electropop.

The production is knowingly period-aware, but never a museum exhibit relic. While the lineage is obvious, 'Big Disgrace' isn't ever just played for pure nostalgia. It's a record that studies the greats, then rewrites the blueprints with signature flair. The result is fresh in the only way that matters.

There's a proper narrative arc here that gives the record weight beyond just surface thrill. There's bags of posture, yes, but also a method, too. The temptation with maximalist pop is to keep adding until Marie Kondo is called round to sort out the clutter; Haute & Freddy dodge that trap because they understand subtraction and division, too. They know when to let the drama flow or when a chorus is already doing enough; they know when to leave a song before familiarity turns to exhaustion. Every moment feels deliberate rather than under- or overcooked.

If there is a criticism to make, it is a flattering one. A couple of tracks are so strong that they have their own sense of repeat-play gravity, but that is hardly failure. Momentum stays high, and by the end, the album has the satisfying shape of a debut that already knows what it is.

'Big Disgrace' does not sound like promising first steps; it sounds like a final arrival announced on the ballroom floor. Haute & Freddy have made a record that understands pop as theatre and craft - it preens, struts, poses and leaves enough earworms behind to have Prince Charming stalking the neighbourhood for months. For a record so invested in pose and posture, the real triumph is the simplest trick of all. The songs are undeniable”.

I am going to finish off there. Big Disgrace is one of the albums of this year. From the phenomenal Haute & Freddy, you cannot afford to overlook this U.S. duo. Taking their wonderful music around the world right now, when touring is done, I guess they will be thinking of more new music. Whatever comes next, it is going to be sensational. Go and show your love for…

THIS tremendous Los Angeles duo.

___________

Follow Haute & Freddy

FEATURE: Almost Like Being There… Kate Bush’s Before the Dawn Live Album at Ten

FEATURE:

 

 

Almost Like Being There…

 

Kate Bush’s Before the Dawn Live Album at Ten

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NOVEMBER is a month…

PHOTO CREDIT: Ken McKay/Rex Features

where we mark a fair few Kate Bush album anniversaries. One this year involves the live album for 2014’s Before the Dawn. That residency took place at the Eventim Apollo in Hammersmith. The album came out on 25th November. I am going to bring in a couple of reviews for the album. There is this regret that I, and so many others, were not there is 2014 to see Before the Dawn. There has been discussion for years about how good it was. Like it was this life-changing experience! I can believe that. Not that we can go back in time and correct things. There was talk a DVD would come out, though this is not going to happen. Kate Bush not convinced by the sound quality or not wanting it to be released. I am not sure the official reason, but you feel like it was not to her standard. It is a shame, as many would love to see the production. However, the live album does give you a sense of what it was like. The atmosphere in the room. It is wonderfully mixed and produced. One of the best live albums ever. You can sort of project yourself into the album, like you are watching this show happen. Even if it is not quite the same thing as being in the venue, I did get a little bit of the energy and aura of that residency. Before the Dawn is an amazing live album. Upon its release, Before the Dawn reached number four in the U.K. I do want to look in the archives and bring in some stuff I have used in other features. There was a bit of promotion around the live album. FADER spoke with Kate Bush in 2016 around the release of the album:

“You really dug into the archives for your 2014 live shows. How has your relationship with your older material evolved?

Well, part of the decision to do the live shows was because it was such an interesting challenge to work with the two narrative pieces [“The Ninth Wave” and “A Sky of Honey”], rather than just doing a bunch of single tracks.

It was within such a specific context, because [the setlist] was very much put together for a live event. Through that process, the songs naturally evolved because I was working with a band, a lot of whom I never worked with before. I just chose tracks that I wanted to do, that really worked with the band, and to keep it really focused in a rhythmic way.

Although the music was always kept as the lead, I didn't want the visuals to feel separate. What I had hoped was that what had been created was an integrated piece of theater that worked with the music — that it wasn't just music that had theatrics added to it — that there was a real sense of it being something that worked as a whole.

As a performer, do you you get lost in the moment or do you focus on the technical intricacies?

I had to stay really focused as a performer because I'm quite nervous, and I wanted to make sure I was really present when I was performing so that I could try and deliver the character of the song. And actually, the first set was the most difficult part to perform for me, because almost each song is from a completely different place.

Before the 2014 shows you hadn’t toured since 1979. When your return to the stage was so well-received, did you wish you’d done it sooner?

I don't know really. The original show was of the first two albums that I’d made, and I had hoped that to do another show after I had another of two albums’ worth of material. And as I started getting much more involved in the recording process, it took me off into a different path where it was all about trying to make a good album. It became very time-consuming, so I moved into being more of a recording artist. And every time you finish an album, there's the opportunity to make visuals to go with some of the tracks. So I became very involved in that, as well”.

I think that Before the Dawn is one of the best live albums ever. In terms of what was performed, the biggest takeaway was the two suites that she brought together. The Ninth Wave from 1985’s Hounds of Love and A Sky of Honey from 2005’s Aerial. Around these suites, Bush performed other songs from Hounds of Love, in addition to a sprinkling of some from other albums. One of the best inclusions was Among Angels from 2011’s 50 Words for Snow. It was a triumphant stage production. One that has echoed through the years. Kate Bush herself so grateful to everyone who came and showed such warmth. This is what she wrote in the linear notes for Before the Dawn:

“It was an extraordinary experience putting the show together. It was a huge amount of work, a lot of fun and an enormous privilege to work with such an incredibly talented team. This is the audio document. I hope that this can stand alone as a piece of music in its own right and that it can be enjoyed by people who knew nothing about the shows as well as those who were there.
I never expected the overwhelming response of the audiences, every night filling the show with life and excitement. They are there in every beat of the recorded music. Even when you can’t hear them, you can feel them. Nothing at all has been re-recorded or overdubbed on this live album, just two or three sound FX added to help with the atmosphere.
On the first disc the track, Never Be Mine, is the only take that exists, and was recorded when the show was being filmed without an audience. It was cut because the show was too long but is now back in its original position. Everything else runs as was, with only a few edits to help the flow of the music.
On stage, the main feature of The Ninth Wave was a woman lost at sea, floating in the water, projected onto a large oval screen – the idea being that this pre-recorded film was reality. The lead vocals for these sequences were sung live at the time of filming in a deep water tank at Pinewood. A lot of research went into how to mic this vocal. As far as we know it had never been done before. I hoped that the vocals would sound more realistic and emotive by being sung in this difficult environment. (You can see the boom mic in the photo on the back of the booklet. This had to be painted out of every shot in post-production although very little of the boom mic recording was used. The main mic was on the life jacket disguised as an inflator tube!) The rest of the lead vocals on this disc were sung live on stage as part of the dream sequences. The only way to make this story work as an audio piece was to present it more like a radio play and subdue the applause until the last track when the story is over and we are all back in the theatre again with the audience response.
Unlike The Ninth Wave which was about the struggle to stay alive in a dark, terrifying ocean, A Sky Of Honey is about the passing of a summer’s day. The original idea behind this piece was to explore the connection between birdsong and light, and why the light triggers the birds to sing. It begins with a lovely afternoon in golden sunlight, surrounded by birdsong. As night falls, the music slowly builds until the break of dawn.
This show was one of the most exciting things I’ve ever been involved in. Thank you to everyone who made it happen and who embraced the process of allowing it to continually evolve”.

I am going to finish up with a couple of reviews for Before the Dawn. I have looked at this album before and discussed its brilliance. It turns ten on 25th November, so it is a big anniversary. It is worth noting how, as UNCUT write in their review, that Before the Dawn is not one single performance captured. It comprises of recordings from throughout the twenty-two dates of the run:

“This allows for the inclusion of a wonderful rehearsal version of “Never Be Mine”, a piece of pastoral ECM restored to the running order after being dropped at the eleventh hour. It appears during Act One, the part of Before The Dawn which most resembles a conventional concert. This is the opening seven-song sequence where Bush ticks off some hits and performs them straight.

The rolling rhythm and quicksilver synthetic pulse of “Running Up That Hill” is beautifully realised, while a rapturous “Hounds Of Love” locates the taut, wolverine snap of the original. She toys with the chorus melody, throwing in a Turner-esque entreaty to “tie me to the mast”, a measured tinkering in keeping with the prevailing musical sensibility. Bush, the ultimate studio artist, opts for faithful reproductions of her oeuvre with just a few twists. Nothing has been re-recorded or overdubbed; presumably there was no need. The band of stellar sessionmen are supple, empathetic and meticulous, as is the Chorus of supporting actors and singers recruited mainly from musical theatre. Among their ranks young Bertie, only 16 at the time, does a remarkably proficient job.

Bush’s voice remains a wonder. These days it’s deeper and huskier, cross-hatched with bluesy ululations and soulful stylings. On the opening “Lily”, she sings like a lioness, drawing sparks from the words “fire” and “darkness” over a thick, plush groove. During a terrifically showbizzy “Top Of The City”, she rises from a serene whisper to a banshee howl. Riding the chimeric reggae of “King Of The Mountain” she transitions from sensuous earth mother to lowering Prospero, summoning the tempest during the tumultuous, drum-heavy, propulsive climax.

This is a key moment in Before The Dawn, a hinge between the straight gig and the theatrics which follow. From now on, listening to the album is sometimes akin to hearing the soundtrack to a film being screened in another room. Act Two, The Ninth Wave, is particularly tricky in this regard. The conceptual suite about a woman lost at sea after a ship sinks lends itself to a sustained visual experience, but has to work harder on record. At Hammersmith, “Hello Earth” was staggeringly operatic, as dramatic and contemporary as any modern staging of The Ring or Parsifal. Here, it is merely – *merely* – a magnificent piece of music.

Similarly, onstage, “Astronomer’s Call”, co-written with novelist David Mitchell and voiced by Kevin Doyle, aka Molesley in Downton Abbey, was a technical necessity, a chance to lay out some slightly clumsy exposition while the stage was being re-set. Arguably, there is no virtue in its being included here aside from historical accuracy. The same is true of a sub-Outnumbered, hammy am-dram domestic skit – “shitty shitty bang bang”, “jellyvision” and all – featuring Bertie McIntosh and Bob Harms. It has been shortened, but should probably have been removed entirely.

At times like these, Before The Dawn is unsure whether it’s a cast recording of a West End musical or a live album. The music, however, is uniformly wonderful. On “Under Ice” the band lock into the song’s oppressive, jagged rhythm, perfectly articulating its chilly claustrophobia. “Waking The Witch” becomes a frantic six-minute soul-funk work-out, stabs of organ and distorted guitar merging over the screams of the Witchmaster, played with terrifying plausibility by Jo Servi. “Jig Of Life” is all flinty Celtic rhythm, with Kevin McAlea – the sole remaining member from Bush’s Tour Of Life band – excelling on the uilleann pipes. After the dark drama of “Hello Earth”, “Morning Fog” arrives like light flooding the room. It’s easeful and organic, burnished with acoustic guitar and accordion. Saved from the sea, Bush has slipped out of character and is restored to herself, murmuring like a newly woken lover. When she softly sings “You know what, I love you better”, the crowd embrace it as an affirmation of their enduring loyalty and cheer wildly. It’s a lovely moment.

The meditative feel holds for the opening part of Act Three, A Sky Of Honey. It’s a more unified piece than The Ninth Wave, the songs eliding seamlessly, allowing for full immersion. The mood is slow, stoned, dream-like. “Prologue”, a ten-minute tour de force dominated by Bush’s rippling piano and John Giblin’s lyrical bass, is lifted by a new, jubilant coda. “Ding dong, ding dong, ding dong/Bring it on, break it down… summer!” Bush sings, harmonising with the peal of distant bells. “An Architect’s Dream” and “Somewhere In Between” are spotlit as slinky, sensuous explorations of the creative connections which occur in the liminal spaces. The sultry “Sunset” climbs towards a rattling flamenco climax, Mino Cinélu’s percussive power pushing the song “all the way up to the top of the night”. As Bush sings in her most headily perfumed purr, the thought occurs that her voice has never sounded better. Her maverick instincts, too, remain on point. On “Aerial Tal” she mimics the song of the blackbird over a new-agey wash of synths.

It all leads to the rising, rhythmic 20-minute climax of “Nocturn” and “Aerial”. Amid bells and birdsong, a new tension informs the music. Over an angry squall of guitar and a heavy artillery of bass and drums, Bush wails about her “beautiful wings” – shades of PJ Harvey here – as the music pushes up and up. It ends with frenzied chanting and what sounds like an explosion. Listeners may imagine Bush disappearing in a puff of smoke; in fact, she was hoisted into the air, black wings and all, airborne at last.

The encores wheel back to the show’s no-concept beginnings. She sings “Among Angels” alone at the piano. Almost unspeakably intimate, it’s a timely reminder that, for all the theatrics, if Bush were ‘just’ a singer she would still be utterly remarkable. This is followed by a celebratory “Cloudbusting” – another of her classics which you suddenly realise you’ve never heard performed live, whether by Bush or anybody else – which sounds like the best kind of circus music. Long and loose, it’s a musical smile, “like the sun coming out”. And then it’s over.

At the start of Before The Dawn, after the rousing crowd response to “Lily”, Bush chirps, “Oh thank you, what a lovely welcome!” She says little else until the end of “Cloudbusting” when, clearly moved, she exclaims, “Oh my God! What a beautiful sight! Look at you all, I will always remember this.” Above all else, the album seems to seek to honour that sentiment, a physical testament to an extraordinary shared moment between artist and audience.

There may be an argument for excising the dramatic interludes, and perhaps even a handful of songs, in favour of something leaner and more sculpted. But that would be to bind Bush to the conventions she has spent an entire career challenging, and to misunderstand the ambition and intention behind Before The Dawn. What we have instead is an exhaustive audio souvenir of a momentous event, simply to remind us – and perhaps Bush, too – that it really did happen after all”.

Let’s finish things with a review from Pitchfork. Laura Snapes provided her take on Before the Dawn. Some might feel that the album is a little polished or not raw enough. In terms of the song selections, some people felt there were omissions. However, the overall feeling is that that residency was stunning. Everyone who was there experienced something that will stay with them forever. I do think that the live album is remarkable. Something that every Kate Bush fan should add to their collection:

“Live albums are meant to capture performers at their rawest and least inhibited, which doesn’t really apply to Before the Dawn. Bush is a noted perfectionist best known for her synthesizer experiments and love of obscure Bulgarian choirs, but her recent work has skewed towards traditional setups that reunite her with the prog community that fostered her early career. With marks to hit and tableaux to paint, the 2014 shows were more War of the Worlds (or an extension of 2011’s Director’s Cut) than Live at Leeds. But never mind balls-out revamps of Bush’s best known songs; with the exception of tracks from Hounds of Love, none of the rest of the setlist had ever been done live—not even on TV, which became Bush’s primary stage after she initially retired from touring. These songs weren’t written to be performed, but internalized. Occupying Bush’s imagination for an hour, and letting it fuse with your own, formed the entirety of the experience. Hearing this aspic-preserved material come to life feels like going to sleep and waking up decades later to see how the world has changed.

“Jig of Life” is the midpoint of Before the Dawn, and its crux. It forms the part in “The Ninth Wave” where Bush’s character is exhausted of fighting against drowning, and decides to succumb to death. A vision of her future self appears, and convinces her to stay alive. “Now is the place where the crossroads meet,” she chants, just as her (then) 56-year-old voice channels her 27-year-old one. Despite her alleged taste for burning one, Bush’s voice has gained in power rather than faded with age. It’s deeper now, and some of the songs’ keys shift to match, but it’s alive and incalculably moving, still capable of agile whoops and tender eroticism, and possesses a newfound authority. When she roars lustily through opener “Lily” and its declaration that “life has blown a great big hole through me,” she sets up the stakes of Before the Dawn’s quest for peace. In Act One, she’s running from the prospect of love on “Hounds of Love” and “Never Be Mine,” and from fame on “King of the Mountain,” where she searches for Elvis with sensual anticipation. She asks for Joan of Arc’s protection on “Joanni,” matching the French visionary’s fearlessness with her own funky diva roar, and sounds as if she could raze the world as she looks down from “Top of the City.”

Rather than deliver a copper-bottomed greatest hits set, Bush reckons with her legacy through what might initially seem like an obscure choice of material. Both Acts Two and Three take place in transcendent thresholds: “The Ninth Wave”’s drowning woman is beset by anxiety and untold pressures, with no idea of where to turn, mirroring the limbo that Bush experienced after 1982’s The Dreaming. That suite’s last song, the cheery “The Morning Fog,” transitions into Aerial’s “Prelude,” all beatific bird call and dawn-light piano. The euphoric, tender “A Sky of Honey” is meant to represent a perfect day from start to finish, filled with family and beautiful imperfections. “Somewhere in Between” finds them atop “the highest hill,” looking out onto a stilling view, and Bush’s eerie jazz ensemble anticipates the liminal peace of Bowie’s Blackstar. “Not one of us would dare to break the silence,” she sings. “Oh how we have longed for something that would make us feel so… somewhere in between.”

Purgatory has become heaven, and in the narrative Bush constructs through her setlist, “A Sky of Honey” represents the grown-up, domestic happiness that staves off the youthful fears explored on Hounds of Love. For her final song, she closes with a rendition of “Cloudbusting,” a song about living with the memory of a forbidden love, which is even more glorious for all the hope that it’s accumulated in the past 30-odd years. Bush’s recent life as a “reclusive” mother is often used to undermine her, to “prove” she was the kook that sexist critics had pegged her as all along. These performances and this record are a generous reveal of why she’s chosen to retreat, where Bush shows she won’t disturb her hard-won peace to sustain the myth of the troubled artistic genius. Between the dangerous waters of “The Ninth Wave” and the celestial heavens of “A Sky of Honey,” Before the Dawn demystifies what we’ve fetishized in her absence. Without draining her magic, it lets Bush exist back down on Earth”.

I am going to leave things there. The wonderful Before the Dawn turns ten on 25th November. Such a tremendous album that I love listening to, I wonder how Kate Bush reflects on the 2014 residency. What her feelings are now. Whether we will ever see her on the stage again. It would be something if she did do something else live. If that is a one-off or a few dates. Perhaps you had to be there to get a true sense of how transformative and effecting Before the Dawn was. Though, listening to the album, you can get a what it was like being…

IN the Eventim Apollo.

FEATURE: Easy Street: Songs for the Deaf: Why ‘Controversial’ Men in Music and Their Past Should Not Be Ignored

FEATURE:

 

 

Easy Street

IN THIS PHOTO: Queens of the Stone Age’s Josh Homme

 

Songs for the Deaf: Why ‘Controversial’ Men in Music and Their Past Should Not Be Ignored

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THERE are articles…

PHOTO CREDIT: Viktoria Slowikowska/Pexels

that you read and they sort of pass you by. Either they are quite light or you don’t really connect with what is being said. There are others that impact you and stay in your minds. The latter was the case when I read a recent article in The Guardian by Laura Snapes. It concerned men in music whose abusive and dark pasts have not only resulted in little or no punishment and reciprocations. In fact, they are allowed to continue their careers and fans seem to have forgotten, or seem not to care, about their abusiveness and celebrate them. Queens of the Stone Age’s lead, Josh Homme, is the latest case. Someone who assaulted a female photographer at a gig, allegedly abused his ex-wife, Brody Dalle, and has had more than a bit of controversial surrounding him through his career. If it was a woman in music in that position, they would have been cancelled. There would be criticism and ongoing ramifications. For decades, men in music have been called out for appalling and reprehensible behaviour and abuses, yet their careers continue and nothing happens. The #MeToo movement started in 2006, though it was reignited in reached Hollywood in October 2017, triggered by investigative reports into producer Harvey Weinstein. He was eventually brought to justice and imprisoned, though it took multiple brave women and a long wait for them to see a monster behind bars. In terms of music, from Chris Brown and Josh Homme to so other men in the music industry, this movement has not come for them. In fact, #MeToo did not really infiltrate and influence music in the same way it did in Hollywood. Though you can say that it needs to be reignited for Hollywood too, as there are abusive men who continue to act and earn millions. What Laura Snapes wrote about Josh Homme was eye-opening and powerful:

“As part of the promo for Queens of the Stone Age’s new album Perfecth, the band has set up a novelty complaints hotline for fans to call. “No bitching too big, no whiny too tiny,” it promises. I’ll bite: how about the fact that frontman Josh Homme’s ex-wife Brody Dalle testified in court that he head-butted her so hard that she “saw stars” and said he had fantasised about killing her? Or that he kicked a female photographer in the face? It’s certainly not what anyone’s talking about as part of Homme’s friendly neighbourhood rock star image rehabilitation: duetting on Shania Twain’s new album, taking the couch on Celebrity Gogglebox, teatime BBC 6 Music interviews.

Homme and Dalle clearly had a complicated relationship: he allegedly tried to throw her boyfriend off a balcony; he claims that she was violent towards him; both have taken out restraining orders against one another; Homme has full custody of their kids after Dalle’s boyfriend was found to have forged her signature on an application for a restraining order. Homme has recently talked about coming through a dark period, including successful treatment for cancer, and getting a handle on his vices. Nevertheless, there is clear footage of him brutally kicking the camera of photographer Chelsea Lauren back into her face, which he acknowledged in an apology video, and court testimony from Dalle alleging that a drunk Homme told her “I want to fucking strangle you right now” on one occasion, and head-butted her on another.

Almost a decade after the mainstream #MeToo movement, it’s clear that audiences’ nostalgia for artists who made art that meant something to them at a formative age overrides the inconvenience of violence against women. Couple that fondness with an expensive publicity campaign and the counternarrative never stands a chance, easily dismissed as the shrill cries of cranks. I believe firmly in rehabilitation and second chances, but haven’t been able to shake a sense of horror that millions of people can apparently look past allegations and evidence of violence against women when engaging in supposedly feelgood pop culture.

The notion of so-called rock’n’roll behaviour, many have theorised, was partly why music never had much of a “#MeToo moment”, that hopeless relic of a phrase. When bad behaviour isn’t just accepted but venerated, real wrongdoing can be brushed under the same whisky-stained rug. Blind eyes are turned, offenders are remade as outlaws, myths are upheld, party lines toed: “It’s so safe to play along / Little soldiers in a row,” as Homme sang in Go With the Flow. The jokey complaints hotline might be the most honest part of QOTSA’s return: a grim reflection of the fact that nobody is taking this shit seriously any more”.

It is disheartening and disgusting that he is played on stations like BBC Radio 6 Music and interviewed. The station is not the only one who plays Queens of the Stone Age’s music. Though the fact that he is allowed air time and is talked about in adoring tones is tone-deaf and inexcusable. So far, Homme has not faced any significant punishment. He continues to record music and tour. He is played on the radio and there has not been any real issues for him. Now more than ever, the music industry needs its #MeToo movement. If men like R. Kelly and Diddy are imprisoned for their abuses and crimes, they are in the minority. It also took a very long time for them to be brought to justice and, in the case of Diddy, his prison sentence of fifty months is incredibly lenient. Although some blame should be on fans who continue to support these abusive artists and stations who play their music, the industry in general needs to do more. In 2026, we are in a position where high-profile figures like Josh Homme or Chris Brown (his 2009 felony assault of then-girlfriend Rihanna, subsequent domestic abuse allegations, and a recent 2026 guilty plea for an attack in London, have not resulted in imprisonment (bar a two-month prison sentence in 2014, after being kicked out of a court-ordered rehab facility, which violated his probation from his 2009 assault case regarding Rihanna) or cancellation continue to carry on like nothing has happened. Why do fans overlook these men and seemingly forgive what they have done or show no concern for the women who have been affected?! That article in The Guardian is from a female journalist who is asking why a cosy makeover for these men who have done atrocious things but are admired and thrive. There seems to be little disgust and protest from men in the music industry. Very few (if any) who speak out against those who should have faced imprisonment and retribution. In the case of Josh Homme, the likes of Celebrity Gogglebox and BBC Radio 6 Music need to ask themselves some questions. Why allow someone who has this documented history of abuse air and screen time?! The optics are that they either choose to ignore what has come before, or they feel like men of his popularity and status should slide. More than that, you wonder whether they are concerned about the women who have been affected and traumatised.

Josh Homme is not the only culpable male, though he is a prime example of how needed a new #MeToo movement is. For artists like Shania Twain, they really do need to answer criticism and backlash when they record and perform with people like Homme. From the outside, you see these men slide and face very little in the way of torment – some half-assed apologies or regret is simply not good enough! –, and other feel they can slide. That they can commit abuses and violence and get away with it. There is this moment in music where there needs to be protest and unify to ensure that these men are not allowed to thrive and not face any substantial punishment. I did not even really consider how appalling and unjust it is until I read the article. Is it futile holding out hope that those in power in music will do something?! That radio and T.V. stations blacklist and ban those who are accused or abuse and violence?! At the moment, if men have enough power and popularity behind them, they are allowed leniency. This undeserved tolerance and rehabilitation will continue to go on and on. I do think that there needs to action. The issue extends beyond male musicians. At major festivals, there are scores of sexual harassment and assault cases that have an appalling conviction rate. Women in music and D.J.s discussing harassment and abuse. There calls for stronger protections to tackle misogyny in music. Has anything improved or changed in reality?! Such is the width and depth of abuse, misogyny and sexism across music, what is to be done?! You think about the women who are impacted and how they feel. Those who see these high-profile artists spotlighted and treated as though nothing has happened. The anger and disgust they must feel! That Laura Snapes article writes how men with a “chequered history” – we need to call it ‘abuse’ and ‘criminal’, as words like ‘troubled’, ‘controversial’ and ‘chequered’ seem very pale and semi-forgiving – keep their adoring fanbase. How, “Almost a decade post-#MeToo, audiences no longer seem to care”. It is harrowing, angering and enraging that this happens! But if fans and radio stations and the industry seem not to care, what hope is there?! They will continue to celebrate and play these artists. Queens of the Stone Age’s recent single, Easy Street, is, according to Josh Homme, “about understanding the imperfection of your life. The song, like your life, is in the mistakes. Its imperfections are unbeatable”. He seems almost to be making light of allegations against him and the fact that his ‘imperfections’ have caused huge damage. Far from facing backlash and any damage to their careers and earnings, artists like Chris Brown and Josh Homme continue to stroll…

DOWN easy street.

FEATURE: Can I Have It All Now? Kate Bush’s Suspended in Gaffa at Forty-Four

FEATURE:

 

 

Can I Have It All Now?

  

Kate Bush’s Suspended in Gaffa at Forty-Four

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I do like to mark…

album and single anniversaries each year when it comes to Kate Bush. Despite the fact that I have written about this song before and am going to repeat myself, I did want to discuss Suspended in Gaffa, as it turns forty-four on 2nd November. Whilst the inferior There Goes a Tenner was released in the U.K, Suspended in Gaffa was released in Australia and Europe. It doesn’t happen now, as we don’t have physical singles, but you would get artists who released different singles in different territories. The Dreaming did not have much in the way of ready-made singles. Kate Bush’s 1982 album was a commercial success, though not as high-selling as her earlier work. Suspended in Gaffa is a terrific single and one of Kate Bush’s best songs. It did not really do much when it was released. There are various reasons to love this song. The musicians on it. Including her brother Paddy on mandolin and strings and her then-boyfriend Del Palmer on bass, it is this glorious song whose video features a cameo from Hannah Bush. Kate’s beloved mother, I will come to articles around this song. There is a lot to discuss with Suspended in Gaffa. The Dreaming is full of gems, but I especially love Suspended in Gaffa. In terms of its lyrics and what the song is about. There are interviews where Kate Bush talked about the inspiration behind Suspended in Gaffa:

“‘Suspended In Gaffa’ is, I suppose, similar in some ways to ‘Sat In Your Lap’ – the idea of someone seeking something, wanting something. I was brought up as a Roman Catholic and had the imagery of purgatory and of the idea that when you were taken there that you would be given a glimpse of God and then you wouldn’t see him again until you were let into heaven. And we were told that in Hell it was even worse because you got to see God but then you knew that you would never see him again. And it’s sorta using that as the parallel. And the idea of seeing something incredibly beautiful, having a religious experience as such, but not being able to get back there. And it was playing musically with the idea of the verses being sorta real time and someone happily jumping through life [Makes happy motion with head] and then you hit the chorus and it like everything sorta goes into slow mo and they’re reaching [Makes slow reaching motion with arm] for that thing that they want and they can’t get there. [Laughs]

Interview for MTV, November 1985”.

Kate Bush Encyclopedia also contains a section about the video. This is something I have included before, but it is really great to read what Bush said about it and working with her mother. How charming and loved she was on the set:

“The video did remain uncomplicated – just a few effects and just one extra: but a very special. one. There is one section where a child’s voice says, ‘Mother, where are the angels? I’m scared of the changes.’ And there was only one person that could be addressed to – my mother. When I asked her to appear in the section, contrary to my concern about her nerves, she was more than obliging and said, ‘Yes’. She was definitely the star of the day, and waited patiently hour after hour as we slowly moved through the bulk of the shooting to eventually reach her debut. I was amazed at her grace and stamina: as all of us began to wane and wilt, my mother continued to blossom and glow, and her only worries were getting back home in time to get dinner and hoping she would not succumb to an attack of giggles during the vital moments of being on screen. She needn’t have worried, for she is a natural professional, a real star and my favourite mum”.

The video is one of the best from Kate Bush. Brian Wiseman directed it. The singles from The Dreaming had these videos that were quite cinematic. Compared to her very earliest videos, there was this growing ambition. Or the videos were becoming more cinematic in my view. Hounds of Love (1985) took another step. The videos from that album are iconic. I do want to get to a couple of articles about Suspended in Gaffa. I think this is a hidden gem. Even so, it has been covered quite a bit, though I have never heard it on the radio. Or not for a long time.

Before getting to a Dreams of Orgonon, there is a recent article from Paste that ranked the best one-hundred songs of the 1980s. Suspended in Gaffa came tenth. This was the highest-ranking track from Bush in that list. People might think Hounds of Love, Cloudbusting, Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God), Babooshka or The Sensual World would come higher, though it is this pearl from The Dreaming that got the honours:

“No other album captures the ambition to “have it all”—namely as a woman artist—in all its grotesque glory like Kate Bush’s The Dreaming does, as it remains not only a witches’ brew of sweat, blood and the desire to consume any oncoming obstacle whole, but an unfiltered testament to the wrath of her artistic vision. Even in a decade containing most of her career highlights, Bush would never swing quite this big again, something she clearly already knew while writing the record’s rickety waltz, “Suspended in Gaffa.” Even while shrouded in biblical metaphor, Bush’s line of questioning is clear: Is it possible to reach new creative heights in an industry that often casts people like her aside? Is it possible to see god (of any strain) again once you’ve glimpsed him already? Is it possible to “have it all”—create challenging work, be taken seriously, and escape with your sanity to tell the tale? By this point in her story, Bush had already broken records and made history as a woman “having it all” on the charts, but “Suspended in Gaffa” marks another milestone of Kate Bush discovering what she was meant to sound like: brilliant, unwieldy, and never replicated”.

Even if Suspended in Gaffa is a bit of an underrated track, there have been lists and polls where it has been placed quite high. MOJO published an article in July ranking Bush’s fifty-best songs. At twelve is Suspended in Gaffa: “Bush once suggested Suspended In Gaffa was a hangover from her Roman Catholic upbringing. The wonky time signature, oom-pah-pah piano intro and breathlessly delivered lyrics (“Can I have it all?”) complement the idea that it’s about briefly glimpsing the divine. Yet it also evokes that dreamlike state where you can only move in infuriating slow motion and everything is tantalisingly out of reach”. In 2024, Autostraddle published a fascinating article about Kate Bush and her music. This is what they said about a song I am keen for people to investigate: “Suspended in Gaffa” similarly puts piano and percussion in the forefront together with an uptempo buoyancy that makes the track feel almost hypnotic. Bush’s vocals stress certain syllables of the words throughout to connect the composition with the spiritual conundrum the speaker is having in the lyrics. The cinematic lyrics describe the feeling of wanting something desperately but not being able to reach it without putting in the work it takes to get it. There’s a raised-in-Catholic-household angst permeating the song that feels especially cathartic for me”.

I am ending with an article I have sourced before. Dreams of Orgonon wrote such insightful and detailed articles about Kate Bush’s songs, and this article about Suspended in Gaffa is tremendous. I did want to source a bit of it, as I feel a lot of people are not aware of this song or have not heard The Dreaming. Ahead of its forty-fourth anniversary, I was keen to spotlight one of her greatest moments. And that incredible video where she got to embrace her mum:

“Public response was ambiguous. In the years since its release, The Dreaming has gained a reputation as Bush’s most underrated album. This is a slight exaggeration, if a basically understandable one. The Dreaming peaked at #3 in the UK, but it domestically sold a relative paucity of 60,000 units (to compare, Never for Ever sold 100,000 UK units, and even Lionheart hit 300,000). It wasn’t close to a commercial failure by any means, but it was decidedly less popular than Bush’s prior work. This can be explained by a number of factors, from the obvious aesthetic ones (The Dreaming’s maximalism was viewed by some as a bridge too far for Bush), to timing (“Sat In Your Lap” predated the album’s release by over a year), and EMI’s timid promotional campaign. Reviews were mixed, if better than they’re sometimes declared in retrospect. The indelibly truculent Robert Christgau offered The Dreaming a conditionally approbatory review (“the most impressive Fripp/Gabriel-style art-rock album of the postpunk [sic] refulgence makes lines like ‘I love life’ and ‘some say knowledge is something that you never have’ say something”). Melody Maker’s Colin Irwin effused about Bush’s “fearsome twisted voice” for “put[ting] the fear of God in me,” while future Pet Shop Boy Neil Tennant observed Bush’s efforts to “become less commercial.” Record Mirror’s Daniella Soave curtly acknowledged Bush’s ambitions while saying “until I’ve heard it another 50 times I haven’t a clue.” What stands out in the majority of reviews is their areas of accord: everyone agreed that The Dreaming was defined by multiplicity, weirdness, a distinct non-commercialism, and a willingness to try everything. Even if listeners couldn’t agree on whether The Dreaming worked, everyone had a grasp on what it was.

This degree of unified disagreement speaks volumes on the nature of The Dreaming. For a pointedly (and willfully) unkempt LP, its nucleus of formal ambition and complex emotional catharsis is remarkably consistent. The album boils down to an exploration of fairly close-knit concepts: the liberatory effects of madness in women, the untethering of the subconscious, the symbiosis of body and mind, and the aching voice of repressed people. Its ethos is a cathartic one, about freeing one’s emotions from self-imposed bondage. The resulting emotions can be scary, but The Dreaming treats that as neither positive nor negative, merely a fact of having emotions.

One perspective that appears throughout The Dreaming is that of childhood and play — it treats the untethering of the subconscious as revealing a small, confused child. From one perspective of maturity, people can be viewed as complex adult emotions and cynicism burying a repressed inner child. “Suspended in Gaffa” certainly lends itself to this reading. Panto-like in its musical qualities (and certainly in its music video, which we’ll get back to shortly), it’s a waltz in C major, playful and initially parsimonious. Par for the course in The Dreaming, the verse’s chord progressions follow the rhythm in shape, particularly with its descending patterns of two major chords followed by minor chords (V-IV-ii, then V-IV-vi-iii), with a result of nearly staccato chipperness and a less cheerful supertonic or submediant. Its buoyancy is something of a ploy though — Bush’s vocal, while acrobatic in its emphatic lunges towards certain syllables (“OUT/in the GARden/there’s HALF of a HEAVen”), maintains a certain reservation often running lyrics together (“Whenever I’ve sung this song I’ve hoped that my breath would hold out for the first few phrases, as there is no gap to breathe in,” Bush wrote later), as Bush sings primarily from the back of her throat with results that sound like she’s gulping the lyrics, likely a frustrating move to listeners with less patience for Bush’s sometimes unintelligible lyrics. “FEET Of MUD” and “IT ALL GOES SLO-MO” are certainly B.V.s for the ages.

Yet at the core of this excess, there’s a simplicity to “Suspended in Gaffa.” It has the same expansive and consumptive obsessions as its sister songs — youthful aporia, an obsession with an unreachable god, a desire to unite with the subconscious. Yet it filters this through a childlike, somewhat Carrollian filter, with a surfeit of internal rhymes, abstract nouns, and ambiguous pronouns like “out in the garden/there’s half of a heaven/and we’re only bluffing,” “I try to get nearer/but as it gets clearer/there’s something appears in the way,” “I pull out the plank and say/thankee for yanking me back/to the fact that there’s always something to distract.”

The lyric is an endless series of prevarications, often relating to knowledge, or the unattainability of it (see “Sat in Your Lap”). The refrain’s “not till I’m ready for you,” “can I have it all now?/we can’t have it all,” “but they’ve told us/unless we can prove that we’re doing it/we can’t have it all” speak to an “all or nothing” approach, not identifying exactly what’s at stake so much as its urgency. Desire gets codified as an end in itself, often for a god (“I caught a glimpse of a god/all shining and bright”) — “until I’m ready for you” gives away the game (constructive spiritual union with a deity is impossible if one is unready to consent). “The idea of the song is that of being given a glimpse of ‘God’ — something that we dearly want — but being told that unless we work for it, we will never see it again, and even then, we might not be worthy of it,” Bush explained to her fan club. Tapping into the subconscious is a difficulty — when one has a glimpse of something wondrous, there’s a desperation to retrieve the feelings associated with it. “Everything or nothing” can be a neurodivergent impulse, but it’s also how a taste of the sublime works.

The nature of aporia in “Suspended in Gaffa” is cinematic. There’s the title, obviously, referring to the line “am I suspended in gaffa?,” itself a reference to gaffer (or “gaffa”) tape, which is commonly used in film and stage productions. The laboriousness of cinema is inferred a few times (“it all goes slo-mo”), as reflections and manipulation, staples of cinema, get pulled into the mix. Bush even goes quasi-Lacanian at one point; nudging herself with “that girl in the mirror/between you and me/she don’t stand a chance of getting anywhere at all,” a moment of amusing self-deprecation”.

I will end here. A divine moment from the wonderful Kate Bush, Suspended in Gaffa is a song that I will always admire. It has got a bit of acclaim in years since it release, though not as much as it deserves. It is the most-streamed song on The Dreaming, so there is awareness of it. Its video viewed two million times on YouTube. The lyrics are incredible. This is my favourite section: “With a camel/Who's trying to get through it/Am I doing it?/Can I have it all now?/I pull out the plank and say/"Thank you for yanking me back to the fact that there's always something to distract...". Forty-four years after it was released in a single, Suspended in Gaffa is one of the greatest things…

KATE Bush has recorded.

FEATURE: The Great American Songbook: HAIM

FEATURE:

 

 

The Great American Songbook

PHOTO CREDIT: Robbie Lawrence for The New Yorker

 

HAIM

__________

THIS time out…

for The Great American Songbook, I am focusing on a tremendous Californian trio who I am a big fan of. HAIM are sisters Este, Danielle and Alana Haim. Their debut album, Days Are Gone, came out in 2013. I think they are really underrated. Their albums have won acclaimed, though not quite as much positivity as they warrant. I am going to finish this feature with a twenty-song mix featuring their best tracks. Before getting to that mixtape, I am bringing in some biography from AllMusic:

“As HAIM, Este, Danielle, and Alana Haim let the influences of 1970s rock, '80s synth pop, and R&B from the '90s flow onward through their music like Ventura Boulevard winding through their hometown of Los Angeles. The sisters were veteran multi-instrumentalists when they released their certified gold 2013 debut album, Days Are Gone, which featured the platinum-selling single "The Wire." That polish -- and their knack for hooks -- led to critical acclaim and their first Grammy nomination. HAIM leaned into harmony-laden, sophisticated pop on 2017's gold-certified Something to Tell You and emphasized their relatable songwriting on 2020's widely acclaimed Women in Music Pt. III, which made them the first all-female rock group nominated for the Album of the Year Grammy Award. On 2025's I Quit, the wit, vulnerability, and musical prowess that took HAIM to the upper reaches of the charts and electrified audiences were distinctive as ever.

Este, Danielle, and Alana Haim were born and raised in California's San Fernando Valley. Their parents were musical (their dad, Moti, played drums; their mother, Donna, sang) and encouraged the sisters to play instruments at an early age. While the sisters were still kids, the family formed the band Rockinhaim, which played sets of classic rock covers at charity shows. In 2005, Este and Danielle became members of the pop group the Valli Girls, whose songs appeared on the soundtracks to the film The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants and the 2005 Nickelodeon Kids' Choice Awards.

The three sisters formed HAIM in 2007, with Danielle on guitar and lead vocals, Este on guitar and bass, and Alana on guitar and keyboard. Though they played occasional gigs, the band took a back seat to their other interests. Este completed her degree in Ethnomusicology at UCLA in two years instead of the usual five. Meanwhile, Danielle Haim became a touring musician after being discovered at a Laurel Canyon jam session by Jenny Lewis. She first joined Lewis' band, then played guitar and percussion for the Strokes' Julian Casablancas, and was a member of CeeLo Green's backing band for a brief stint.

Touring so much made Danielle miss playing music with her sisters, and HAIM became their main focus in 2012. The trio honed a sound inspired by the music they grew up with -- Joni Mitchell, the Beatles, Santana, Motown -- as well as contemporary R&B. In February, they released the EP Forever as a free download on their website. After playing South by Southwest, they landed a deal with Polydor in the U.K. and a management deal with Jay-Z's Roc Nation later in the year. Tours of the U.K. and Ireland with Mumford & Sons and Florence + the Machine, as well as the single "Don't Save Me," raised HAIM's profile, and at the end of 2012 they became the first female group to win the influential BBC Sound of 2013 award.

Early in 2013, Danielle Haim contributed to Major Lazer's album Free the Universe, while the entire band appeared on Kid Cudi's album Indicud. During this time, HAIM worked on their debut long-player with producers Ariel Rechtshaid and James Ford, adding more drum machines and synths to their sound for a polished, poppy feel. Following sold-out headlining concerts and a festival appearance on Glastonbury's main stage, their debut album, Days Are Gone, arrived in September 2013. The record topped the charts in the U.K., reached number six on the Billboard 200 Albums chart, and spawned the hit singles "The Wire" and "Forever." In the wake of its release, HAIM's widespread acclaim included a Grammy nomination for Best New Artist.

Capitalizing on Days Are Gone's success, HAIM spent the better part of two years touring on their own and in support of Taylor Swift, Rihanna, and Florence + the Machine. They also collaborated with Stevie Nicks on a version of Fleetwood Mac's "Rhiannon"; sang on Calvin Harris' fourth album, Motion; and contributed to The Hunger Games: Mockingjay, Part 1 and The Divergent Series: Insurgent soundtracks. HAIM returned in July 2017 with Something to Tell You, which featured production by Rechtshaid, Dev Hynes, and Rostam, and boasted a smoother sound than their debut. The LP peaked at number two on the U.K. Albums Chart and hit number seven on the Billboard 200, while the single "Want You Back" reached number ten on Billboard's Hot Rock & Alternative Songs chart. A deluxe version of the album appeared in December 2017. As with Days Are Gone, HAIM toured extensively in support of Something to Tell You, sharing the stage with artists ranging from Ringo Starr to Robyn and playing at 2018's Coachella festival. Along with their busy tour schedule, in 2018 they were featured on Twin Shadow's single "Saturdays" and Dirty Projectors' "That's a Lifestyle."

HAIM started 2019 with a pair of collaborations. Danielle Haim contributed vocals to several tracks on Vampire Weekend's fourth album, Father of the Bride, which was released that May. That month, the band appeared in the Lonely Island's Netflix special The Unauthorized Bash Brothers Experience alongside Maya Rudolph on the track "IHOP Parking Lot." Later that year, HAIM released several singles, including October's "Now I'm in It," which peaked at number nine on Billboard's Hot Rock & Alternative Songs chart. In June 2020, HAIM issued Women in Music Pt. III, an album that confronted issues the sisters were dealing with (the death of Alana's best friend, Este's Type 1 diabetes, Danielle's post-tour depression, and her partner Rechtshaid's cancer diagnosis). Co-produced by Danielle Haim, Rechtshaid, and Rostam, the album balanced its heavy themes with lighter sounds that borrowed from styles ranging from U.K. garage to classic rock. Along with snagging a Grammy nomination for Album of the Year at the 63rd Grammy Awards (making them the first all-female rock band to do so) and a nomination for "The Steps" for Best Rock Performance, Women in Music Pt. III topped the U.K. Albums Chart and reached number 13 on the U.S. 200 Albums Chart. HAIM also appeared on Taylor Swift's album Evermore.

In 2021, Alana Haim made her film debut, starring in Paul Thomas Anderson's Licorice Pizza; Este and Danielle played smaller roles in the film. That year, HAIM contributed "Cherry Flavored Stomach Ache" to the soundtrack for the British romantic drama The Last Letter from Your Lover and issued a remix of "Gasoline" that featured Swift. In turn, the band appeared in the video for Swift's Midnights single "Bejeweled" and performed on several dates of her 2023 Eras tour. While working on their fourth album, HAIM issued the single "Home" as part of the soundtrack to the movie Barbie in July. A few months later, the trio commemorated the tenth anniversary of Days Are Gone with a deluxe edition of the album bundled with demos and remixes. In March 2025, HAIM delivered "Relationships," the hip-hop-tinged, Rostam-produced lead single from their fourth album. Arriving that June, I Quit offered post-breakup soul-searching that touched on disco, shoegaze, and country as well as the band's genre-defying signature sound. Along with Rostam, HAIM's collaborators included Tobias Jesso, Jr., Justin Vernon, David Fridmann, and Cass McCombs”.

I really love HAIM. They are a tremendous trio who I hope we get many more albums from. Their most recent, last year’s i quit, is incredible. Maybe you are unfamiliar with them. I hope this mixtape draws you to their music. I have been following them since their debut album, and I have loved everything they have put out. The wonderful HAIM are incredible songwriters. This stunning trio are…

SIMPLY brilliant.

FEATURE: Spotlight: Sofie Royer

FEATURE:

 

 

Spotlight

PHOTO CREDIT: Jasmin Baumgartner

 

Sofie Royer

__________

I did want to spend some time…

with the brilliant Sofie Royer. She is a Californian-born, Austrian-Iranian multi-instrumentalist and producer who I am new to. Her new album, before/after, came out on 4th September. There were some new interviews published around that release which I want to get to. I am starting out with DORK and their conversation. This interview actually is from June:

“A conservatory-trained violinist who grew up in Vienna, she later moved to California, helped build Boiler Room's LA presence and worked at Stones Throw before launching a solo career that has steadily developed across 2020's 'Cult Survivor', 2022's 'Harlequin' and 2024's 'Young-Girl Forever'. Along the way, she's built a catalogue that pulls from high and low culture in equal measure, pairing sharp observations with references to everyone from Rainer Werner Fassbinder to Falco.

That background helps explain why Royer is difficult to pin down. On new album 'before/after', due in September, she turns her attention inward, examining the patterns, contradictions and recurring cycles that shape her own life. It's a record concerned with time, identity and the habit of measuring ourselves against imagined versions of who we once were and who we might become.

"I was in a little bit of a limbo last year," she says of the period that informed the record. "I was all over the place geographically (my year began with shooting a movie on the Czech border) before being in Los Angeles and then New York for the better part of the year when I wasn't touring. Perhaps that's evident on the record”.

Royer remains sceptical of how cultural industries handle artists who resist easy categorisation. "I think regardless of category, it has to be marketable, the art has to easily provide multiples," she says. "I just crave something unimaginable sometimes."

The refusal to fit neatly into a box has coincided with increasing recognition. Royer has opened for artists including Lana Del Rey and Belle & Sebastian and worked with producers whose credits include Charli xcx, Sabrina Carpenter, SZA and BLACKPINK. Yet she doesn't see external milestones as a reliable source of confidence.

"I'm happy and grateful about all the opportunities I've had, and they've been really exciting," she says. "This February, when playing shows back to back opening for Belle & Sebastian, who'd been one of those bands that I've listened to for so long since I was a pre-teen – that's always thrilling!"

Still, she adds, "real security in identity (whether as an artist or otherwise) fluctuates and remains removed from what can be identified as a milestone or whatever. There's confidence in knowing oneself that allows you to seize opportunities with certainty and not anxiety. There are far more annoying internal factors that end up making me question my existence/identity".

I am moving to The Line of Best Fit and their interview from this month. If you have not heard before/after, then do go and listen. The new single from the album, Actress, is fantastic. The Line of Best Fit note how Sofie Royer “confronts the all-too-familiar ways we can become our own biggest obstacle; while finding humour in the endless pursuit of artistic success”:

“Rather than adapting its characters, Royer draws on the theatrics around performing and the ways it can shift identity. Her mysterious constructed character, named Angel Jane in the song, commands the microphone before something begins to feel off: the faces staring back are suddenly unfamiliar and, soon, she’s stranded in the spotlight, looking to the “stage cues” to tell her what she’s meant to be. The accompanying video extends that fascination with inhabiting different roles. Inspired by a photograph Jim Jarmusch posted of an abandoned box of shoes, it sees Royer trying on different pairs before taking the stage in angel wings. Trying on somebody else’s shoes becomes a literal expression of the different roles we inhabit.

For Royer, that visual extension is inseparable from the fun of making records. “In an ideal world, every single song would just have a music video, but there’s no money for that,” she laughs. Visuals, she says, offer “a really fun and special way to be able to visually communicate what your songs are about, which I think is sometimes easier than talking about it.” When I bring up her tongue-in-cheek description of being caught between pop, indie and the art world, as referenced in “Sold out the jazz club” she quickly zooms outward from her own career. “We live in postmodernity,” she argues. “Everyone’s cross-referencing, everyone has this wealth of references to draw upon,” she adds, before wondering aloud what innovation even looks like under those circumstances.

An example she cites is a track by Shoreline Mafia’s Phoenix Flexin, “Rubberz,” which had recently caught her attention. Delving into ’80s disco-style with a voice and sound that did not resemble Flexin’s previous hip hop sound, prompted online speculation about generative AI, which the artist vehemently denied, and, of course, generated further discourse about artists using AI in this way to boost publicity for their tracks. Royer doesn’t express much interest in litigating whether the song actually used AI, but rather what the conversation says about originality. It leaves Royer deliberately unresolved: “I get nervous because I’m hesitant to say, ‘Oh, there’s absolutely no innovation right now, and everything’s just post-postmodern,’ because it makes me sound jaded and cynical, when I’m actually not,” she says.

Royer doesn’t shy away from the ways she is similarly suspicious of easy answers on before/after. Even recognising our tendency to measure the present against what comes before or after doesn’t necessarily release us from it. “It’s like, ‘Hey, great. Like, I realise that I’m not in the moment, but what now?’” Royer says. “The whole way that society operates and is structured is set up to be anticipatory. We’re always in anticipation of the next day.” Contentment, she suggests, is hardly profitable: “If everybody’s content and happy and able to exist on very maybe simpler terms, capitalism wouldn’t really work”.

The final interview I am bringing in is from The Guardian. Sofie Royer is a truly unique artist. Someone who you cannot compare with anyone else out there. The Guardian state, in their headline/sub-header how “writing some of today’s wittiest music – though she’s ‘too pop for the art world, too indie-darling for the mainstream’”. On 17th September, Sofie Royer plays London’s Rough Trade East:

“Her debut album, Cult Survivor, was released in 2020, but performing it live “was like reopening an old wound”, so she started broadening her writing. She dressed up as a pierrot character for 2022’s Harlequin, “a different persona to help me get over the fear of being perceived as a singer on stage, maybe”, and based 2024’s Young-Girl Forever on a French philosophical tract about culture’s obsession with young women. “The beauty of age is that you care less and less about it. You couldn’t pay me to go back to my 20s.” She reconsiders. “I mean, you could pay me, because I’m self-employed, so I’m down for money.”

She is much admired by her peers, with Lana Del Rey, Air and LCD Soundsystem all getting her to support them on tour, but she’s not headlining the same venues. She addresses that relative lack of financial success and fame uproariously on the new album. “Always a nominee, never a winner / The longer I keep this up the less I can afford dinner,” she sings on Sold Out the Jazz Club, just one of many references across the album to how Royer is, as that song’s chorus has it, “too pop for the art world, too indie-darling for the mainstream”.

“Very few professions are as measured in metrics as people working in the arts,” she says, “specifically music, and these metrics are publicly available” – Spotify listeners, tickets sold. “And not only that, then you’re being interviewed: ‘Where do you see yourself in five years? What does success mean to you?’ That’s what I wanted to perhaps release when it came to these songs.”

She has also released herself from therapy, singing “I spent five years on that couch, and I’m not ever going back again” on another new song, C’est la D. “I was actually in therapy for longer than five years, but it just sounded so cool to sing five instead of seven,” she deadpans.

She says she certainly needed therapy to begin with, but when she reached the cap to her free hours from the Austrian state, her therapist said she could continue, but he didn’t think she needed it any more. She agreed with him: “We as humans have a certain semblance of resilience, but there’s a lot of financial value placed in today’s market of psychoanalysis. In a lot of other cultures, that maybe aren’t as socialist as the one I currently enjoy living in, there’s more value in keeping somebody unhappy and dependent on therapy for the rest of their life.”

I cannot any reviews for before/after. It is a brilliant album from an artist that you should know about. I am already a fan of her and her work. She is so utterly fascinating. In terms of her background and sound. I am really interested to see where she goes next. Go and follow Sofie Royer. A wonderful artist who I think we are going to hear about for years to come, it has been great finding out more about her. She is definitely one of the finest artists out there. Someone who you…

NEED to know.

___________

Follow Sofie Royer

FEATURE: Love Is a Losing Game: Amy Winehouse’s Back to Black at Twenty

FEATURE:

 

 

Love Is a Losing Game

 

Amy Winehouse’s Back to Black at Twenty

__________

IT is rather unfortunate…

IN THIS PHOTO: Amy Winehouse in 2006/PHOTO CREDIT: Broomberg & Chanarin

that one of the greatest albums of the 2000s has a lead single that seems inappropriate or tragic, given the artist’s premature death. Amy Winehouse’s Rehab was released on 23rd October, 2006. I will not mark that song, as I feel it is somewhat awkward doing so. Winehouse died at the age of twenty-seven in 2011 of alcohol poisoning. It was one of the moist heart-aching losses in music history. However, her second and final studio album, Back to Black, turns twenty on 27th October. It is being reissued for its anniversary. Rolling Stone UK provide details of a release all Amy Winehouse fans will want to get:

“The 20th anniversary of Amy Winehouse‘s seminal second album Back to Black will be celebrated with a deluxe reissue.

The late singer’s career-defining second album arrived on October 27, 2006 and went on to sell over 25 million copies globally, as well as netting Winehouse five Grammy Awards including Record of the Year and Song of the Year.

To mark that milestone, the album will now be reissued in a series of formats which will take in unreleased demos, rare B-Sides and a live recording of Winehouse’s 2007 show at Amsterdam’s Paradiso venue. 

Also included in the new formats is previously unseen photos by the record’s original photographers Alex Lake and Mischa Richter, as well as as well as new liner notes from producers Mark Ronson and Salaam Remi.

It will be released in a special 3LP clear vinyl and multiple limited-edition 1LP variations, including a Chalkboard Marble colour vinyl. There will also be a webstore-exclusive 1LP Zoetrope vinyl featuring moving footage of Winehouse.

The reissue will be released on October 27, and is available to pre-order here.

Check out the tracklisting in full below.

Tracklist: 3LP
LP1 – Side 1: Back to Black
1 ‘Rehab’
2 ‘You Know I’m No Good’
3 ‘Me & Mr Jones’
4 ‘Just Friends’
5 ‘Back to Black’
6 ‘Love Is a Losing Game’

LP1 – Side 2
1 ‘Tears Dry on Their Own’
2 ‘Wake Up Alone’
3 ‘Some Unholy War’
4 ‘He Can Only Hold Her’
5 ‘Addicted’

LP2 – Side 3–B-Sides & Demos
1 ‘Valerie’ (Live at BBC Radio 1 Live Lounge)
2 ‘Monkey Man’
3 ‘Hey Little Rich Girl’
4 ‘You’re Wondering Now’
5 ‘Do Me Good’
6 ‘Close to the Front’

LP2 – Side 4
1 ‘I’m No Good’ (‘You Know I’m No Good ‘- Original Demo)
2 ‘Fuckery’ (‘Me & Mr Jones’ –Original Demo)
3 ‘I’ve Been Drinkin’’ (‘Just Friends’ –Alternative Version)
4 ‘Back to Black’ (Original Demo)
5 ‘Love Is a Losing Game’ (Original Demo)
6 ‘Tears Dry’ (Alternative Demo)

LP3 – Side 5 – Live From Paradiso Amsterdam / February 8th, 2007
1 ‘Addicted’
2 ‘Just Friends’
3 ‘Tears Dry on Their Own’
4 ‘He Can Only Hold Her / Doo Wop (That Thing)’
5 ‘Wake Up Alone’
6 ‘Back to Black’

LP3 – Side 6
1 ‘You Know I’m No Good’
2 ‘Me & Mr Jones’
3 ‘Rehab’
4 ‘Love Is a Losing Game’
5 ‘Valerie’

Tracklist: 3CD, Digital

Disc 1– Back to Black
1 ‘Rehab’
2 ‘You Know I’m No Good’
3 ‘Me & Mr Jones’
4 ‘Just Friends’
5 ‘Back to Black’
6 ‘Love Is a Losing Game’
7 ‘Tears Dry On Their Own’
8 ‘Wake Up Alone’
9 ‘Some Unholy War’
10 ‘He Can Only Hold Her’
11 ‘Addicted

Disc 2–B Sides, Bonus Tracks & Demos
1 ‘Valerie’ (Live at BBC Radio 1 Live Lounge)
2 ‘Cupid’
3 ‘Monkey Man’
4 ‘Hey Little Rich Girl’
5 ‘You’re Wondering Now’
6 ‘To Know Him Is to Love Him’
7 ‘You Know I’m No Good’ (feat. Ghostface Killah)
8 ‘Do Me Good’
9 ‘Close to the Front’
10 ‘Rehab’ (Demo Version)
11 ‘I’m No Good’ (‘You Know I’m No Good’ – Original Demo)
12 ‘Fuckery’ (‘Me & Mr Jones’ –Original Demo)
13 ‘I’ve Been Drinkin’’ (‘Just Friends’ –Alternative Version)
14 ‘Back to Black’ (Original Demo)
15 ‘Love Is a Losing Game’ (Original Demo)
12 ‘Tears Dry’ (Alternative Demo)
17 ‘Some Unholy War’ (Down Tempo)

Disc 3 –Live From Paradiso Amsterdam / February 8th, 2007
1 ‘Addicted’
2 ‘Just Friends’
3 ‘Tears Dry On Their Own’
4 Cherry’
5 ‘Fuck Me Pumps’
6 ‘He Can Only Hold Her / Doo Wop (That Thing)’
7 ‘I Heard Love Is Blind’
8 ‘Wake Up Alone’
9 ‘Back To Black’
10 ‘You Know I’m No Good’
11 ‘Me & Mr Jones’
12 ‘Rehab’
13 ‘Love Is A Losing Game’
14 ‘Valerie’

Tracklist: 1LP Colour / 1LP Zoetrope
Side 1
1 ‘Rehab’
2 ‘You Know I’m No Good’
3 ‘Me & Mr Jones’
4 ‘Just Friends’
5 ‘Back To Black’
6 ‘Love Is A Losing Game’

Side 2
1 ‘Tears Dry On Their Own’
2 ‘Wake Up Alone’
3 ‘Some Unholy War’
4 ‘He Can Only Hold Her’
5 ‘Addicted’

Tracklist: 1CD Amazon Exclusive
1 ‘Rehab’
2 ‘You Know I’m No Good’
3 ‘Me & Mr Jones’
4 ‘Just Friends’
5 ‘Back to Black’
6 ‘Love Is a Losing Game’
7 ‘Tears Dry On Their Own’
8 ‘Wake Up Alone’
9 ‘Some Unholy War’
10 ‘He Can Only Hold Her’
11 ‘Addicted’”.

There are a couple of interviews from 2006 with Amy Winehouse I want to bring in before getting to features and reviews. After the minor success of her 2003 debut album, Frank, Back to Black was this multi-award-winning masterpiece. It is gut-wrenching to think what she could have achieved on her third album without press harassment and if she was able to overcome her addictions. It is almost unavoidable bringing ion interview achieve without mention of alcohol. The Irish Times interviewed Winehouse late in 2006. I did want to highlight this interview, as it was published after the release of Back to Black. However, its opening paragraph observes how Winehouse walked into a bar for the interview and was not sober. I did not want to include that section, as it seems insensitive:

“Winehouse has kept the drama for her record. Back to Black is a belter, an album more bewitched, bothered and bewildered than pop ever gets to be these days. Split right down the middle with heartbreakers and soul shakers, it has Winehouse swapping the jazz lounge she frequented for her Frank debut for a basement where '50s and '60s girl groups hang out comparing their men and their hair-dos.

The new company suits Amy. Once you hear her magnificent defiance on the brassy and bold Rehab ("they tried to make me go to rehab," she sneers. "I said no, no, no"), you'll be hooked. As confessional, troubled, humorous and honest as songs get about a woman falling in and out of love with men, drink, weed and the gym, Back to Black is rousing and brave on every level. It's the sassiest, sharpest Motown album imaginable.

Winehouse talks fondly of the girl groups who inspired her, who provided a soundtrack for her musings, when she began writing songs for the new record. "The Shangri-Las, very dramatic and atmospheric. The Ronettes, very stylish. The Shirelles, they had coolness and attitude, they had vulnerability."

Vulnerability

Winehouse became fascinated with how those singers projected and protected their vulnerability. After all, some of them had desperate, depressing back-stories but were cooing like angels. "I loved those heartbreak songs they used to do, especially the way the girls sounded so heavenly. Yet they were also singing about the kind of heartbreak you would find at the bottom of a bottle of whiskey. They knew all about sorrow."

When it came to Back to Black, Winehouse was more than ready to be heartbroken. While Frank had been a big old hit (250,000 sales, glowing critical reviews, an Ivor Novello award and a Mercury Music Prize nomination), Winehouse's personal demons were having a field day at her expense. Her relationship at the time was falling apart, leaving her to find solace in weed and booze. Something had to go. Scratch that; lots of things had to go.

"I don't smoke weed anymore so I'm not so defensive as I was back then," she says. "I'm not as insecure as I was either. I go to the gym, I run loads and I'm much healthier than I was.

"When I did my first album, I was smoking too much weed. I mean, I was really proud of that album at the time and I still think the songs are up to scratch. But you have to remember I had never made an album before. When you have a producer with you who is far more experienced, you do tend to become a bit 'yeah, that's cool' in the studio and go with the flow. And when you're smoking weed, you just don't care about anything except who has the next joint."

Relationship change

Another change has been in the relationship with her record label. After Frank was released in 2004, she slammed what she saw as their inefficiencies. "The marketing was fucked, the promotion was terrible, everything was a shambles," she railed in one memorable interview at the time.

Now? "It was my first album and I didn't know what I was doing so I was learning as I went along. I don't think the label had a clue what to do with it either, so it was a learning curve for them as well - and they had to deal with me mouthing off all over the place! This time, I know what is going on so I'm better prepared. And the label know how to deal with me as well."

The next heave-ho was her management. When Winehouse first emerged, all queries were directed to pop svengali Simon Fuller.

"It was never right," is how the singer now considers this dalliance with the man behind The Spice Girls and Pop Idol. "My manager on paper was not the person doing the day-to-day stuff. He was a lovely fellow but he didn't care about music. He was definitely one of those people who left their work in the office. I needed someone else, I needed someone who really cared."

More karma

You also no longer find Winehouse being so lippy to her fellow pop stars. This means less entertaining quotes for the masses (Katie Melua was once summed up as someone "singing shit songs that her manager writes for her"). But Winehouse thinks about this change in more karmic terms. "I have stopped slagging people off as much as I did. Not because I think it will sell more records or it looks bad for me, but because I don't wish anything bad against anyone. Everyone has a job to do."

Winehouse takes another sip from a glass of red wine. Of course, one vice remains. "I do drink a lot, and I'm a bad drunk, a very violent drunk," she says. "It's only since I started going out with my boyfriend Alex that I have realised what a horrible drunk I am.

"My ex-boyfriend would be saying things like 'stop doing that, you're an idiot' and rowing with me when I was drunk, which just made me worse. With Alex, he will bring it up the following day when I've sobered up. It really embarrasses me to hear I've punched him in the face six times. Again."

Winehouse winces. "Of course, it does make me want to cut down on the booze. I really do try not to drink, but I'm a very self-destructive person."

There's a soft smile on her face now. "I keep saying to my boyfriend that he can take it. I'm a little girl, he's a big guy."

Still, no matter how much of a "bad drunk" she is, we won't likely see Winehouse joining the boozy and stoned celebs shoring up a rehab clinic in the near future.

"Do you really think I could be pushed into doing anything I didn't want to do like that?" There was one attempt at rehab and that didn't get very far. "It was my old management's idea. I literally walked in and walked out. I knew it wasn't for me.

"Some people go to rehab and treat it like Butlins. Some people go because they think it will really sort them out and it does. But me, I'm from the school which believes that you can only sort yourself out, you can't rely on other people to sort out your problems."

Ronson alliance
Winehouse says she sorted out her problems by working so intensely on the new record. She's proud as punch with the results, and with her new alliance with producer Mark Ronson, the young New York producer who put a summertime bounce into Lily Allen's album.

"I have the same publishing company as Mark and they wanted us to meet for a while. I wasn't really interested at first. I thought he was just some big hip-hop beats geezer and I have Salaam Remi as my hip-hop guy, he has always been there for me. When we did finally meet up, I played him what I was writing and what I was listening to. You could see a lightbulb going on in his head. We just clicked right away personally too."

However, Winehouse didn't want to make the same mistakes she felt she had made with Frank, so she still kept a close eye on proceedings. "I was really geeky about it. I scrutinised everything that was going on, I was really paying attention to what Mark was doing. I trusted him, but I still watched what he was doing."

She doesn't know if Ronson will be around for her next record, but she has a good idea what kind of songs she wants to write. "I want to do an album of winsome, pining songs. I like that idea. I don't want to do another record of 'screw you' songs.

"Yeah, it will be a romantic record. I am a very romantic person. I don't mean romantic in a flowers and chocolates kind of way. It's more like if it's raining, I'll go up to the window and press my nose against the glass and sigh at how beautiful it all looks”.

A very different kind of interview, The Guardian chatted with Amy Winehouse shortly before Back to Black came out. It is interesting, as she talks about her relationship with men. She reveals how “Men are far more straightforward. They don't dwell on things and play psychological games”. It is a fascinating chat with someone on the precrisis of global stardom:

“I've never been a boyfriend kind of girl. I'm too selfish. A couple of years ago I would have said that I would end up as one of those women who lives with 20 cats and 40 piles of newspapers, but I'm thinking a bit more optimistically now because I've met someone I really like. I've been with Alex for six months and he moved in about a month after we met - it felt natural, and not at all scary. He's like my best mate, which probably sounds really sad. Actually, there is something inside me that is a proper little housewife. I love cooking for him, even though he's a chef and knows much more about cooking than I do! I constantly want to look after people, but I've only met a couple of men in my life who deserved or appreciated it. My first proper long-term boyfriend Chris (he's the fella that I wrote my first album about) was lovely, but he didn't really appreciate it. It was my second boyfriend, Blake, who kick-started my domestic instinct. I immediately saw he was someone who hadn't been treated right, so I practically put him in my bag and said, 'Right, you're coming with me!'

I wouldn't say I'm a feminist, but I don't like girls pretending to be stupid because it's easier. I would say that there is still more pressure put on women to look good, but I have some very vain male friends. The papers go on about how I lost weight, but I didn't even notice myself losing it. I used to smoke £200 worth of weed a week, that's two ounces, which is disgusting, and it made me eat crap food on impulse. I lost the weight when I stopped smoking weed and got into the gym instead. I like my gym because there are all these sweaty men around to gear me up and get my adrenaline going. You want to sweat and look good. When I'm in a women's gym and they see me in my standard make-up (it's my war-paint, I wear it all the time), the women look at you as if to say, 'Who are you trying to impress?' At the men's gym it's like, 'Run girl, run!' I don't mind being looked at by men, I'm competitive - anyway, every girl likes being looked at by men.

If I'm checking out a man I'll usually go for someone who is at least five nine, with dark hair, dark eyes and loads of tattoos (that was Blake). But, saying that, my current boyfriend is the most beautiful man I've ever seen in my life, and he's blond, so I guess it doesn't matter that much. I just like a man who I can muck about with, and who can take a joke. I admire men who don't take anything seriously, like Dean Martin, who had this amazing ability to distance people from himself. He never talked about troubles with his marriage and would have a line for everything. Also Sammy Davis Jr, who treated all that racism like water off a duck's back. He was like, 'Fuck it, I've got music.' That's how I feel”.

Let’s get to the album itself. Why is Back to Black so revered and has endured two decades later? How did it change Pop music forever? GRAMMY provided their analysis and showed love for Back to Black in 2024. It is definitely one of the most influential albums of the past couple of decades. I remember the awe and sense of wonder around the music press in October 2006:

“When Amy Winehouse released Back To Black in October 2006, it was a sonic revelation. The beehive-wearing singer’s second full-length blended modern themes with the Shangri-Las sound, crafting something that seemed at once both effortlessly timeless and perfectly timed.

Kicking off with smash single "Rehab" before blasting into swinging bangers like "Me & Mr. Jones," "Love Is A Losing Game," and "You Know I’m No Good," Black To Black has sold over 16 million copies worldwide to date and is the 12th best-selling record of all time in the United Kingdom. It was nominated for six GRAMMY Awards and won five: Record Of The Year, Song Of The Year, Best New Artist, Best Female Pop Vocal Performance, and Best Pop Vocal Album.

Winehouse accepted her golden gramophones via remote link from London due to visa problems. At the time, Winehouse set the record for the most GRAMMYs won by a female British artist in a single year, though that record has since been broken by Adele, who won six in 2011.

Written in the wake of a break-up with on-again, off-again flame Blake Fielder-Civil, Black To Black explores heartbreak, grief, and infidelity, as well as substance abuse, isolation, and various traumas. Following her death in 2011, Back To Black became Winehouse’s most enduring legacy. It remains a revealingly soulful message in a bottle, floating forever on the waves.

With the May 17 release of Sam Taylor-Johnson’s new (and questionably crafted) Winehouse biopic, also titled Back To Black, it's the perfect time to reflect on the album that not only charmed listeners but changed the state of a lot of popular music over the course of just 11 songs. Here are five ways that Back To Black influenced music today.

She Heralded The Arrival Of The Alt Pop Star

When Amy Winehouse hit the stage, people remarked on her big voice. She had classic, old-time torch singer pipes, like Sarah Vaughn or Etta Jones, capable of belting out odes to lost love, unrequited dreams, and crushing breakups. And while those types of singers had been around before Winehouse, they didn’t always get the chance — or grace required — to make their kind of music, with labels and producers often seeking work that was more poppy, hook-packed, or modern.

The success of Back To Black changed that, with artists like Duffy, Adele, and even Lady Gaga drawing more eyes in the wake of Winehouse’s overwhelming success. Both Duffy and Adele released their debut projects in 2007, the year after Back To Black, bringing their big, British sound to the masses. Amy Winehouse's look and sound showed other aspiring singers that they could be different and transgressive without losing appeal.

Before she signed to Interscope in 2007, "nobody knew who I was and I had no fans, no record label," Gaga told Rolling Stone in 2011. "Everybody, when they met me, said I wasn’t pretty enough or that my voice was too low or strange. They had nowhere to put me. And then I saw [Amy Winehouse] in Rolling Stone and I saw her live. I just remember thinking ‘well, they found somewhere to put Amy…’"

If an artist like Winehouse — who was making records and rocking styles that seemed far outside the norm — could break through, then who’s to say someone else as bold or brassy wouldn’t do just as well?”.

Amy Exposed The Darker Side Of Overwhelming Success

Four years after Winehouse died, a documentary about her life was released. Asif Kapadia’s Amy became an instant rock-doc classic, detailing not only Winehouse’s upbringing, but also her struggles with fame and addiction. It won 30 awards after release, including Best Documentary Feature at the 88th Academy Awards and Best Music Film at the 58th GRAMMY Awards.

It also made a lot of people angry — not for how it portrayed Winehouse, but for how she was made to feel, whether by the British press or by people she considered close. The film documented Winehouse’s struggles with bulimia, self-harm, and depression, and left fans and artists alike feeling heartbroken all over again about the singer’s passing.

The documentary also let fans in on what life was really like for Winehouse, and potentially for other artists in the public eye. British rapper Stormzy summed it up well in 2016 when he told i-D, "I saw the [documentary, Amy] – it got me flipping angry... [Amy’s story] struck a chord with me in the sense that, as a creative, it looks like on the outside, that it’s very ‘go studio, make a hit, go and perform it around the world, champagne in the club, loads of girls’. But the graft and the emotional strain of being a musician is very hard. No one ever sees that part."

These days, perhaps because of Winehouse’s plight or documentaries like Amy, the music-loving population seems far more inclined to give their favorite singers a little grace, whether it’s advocating for the end of Britney Spears’ conservatorship or sympathizing with Demi Lovato’s personal struggles. Even the biggest pop stars are still people, and Amy really drove that point home”.

In terms of leaps in production, songwriting quality and singing, although Frank is phenomenal, few people could predict what Amy Winehouse would produce as its follow-up. I really love her debut, but nobody can deny that Back to Black is her greatest work. In 2019, The Guardian explained why Back to Black is the greatest album of this century. Some might argue artists like Fiona Apple have topped it but, think about its impact, influence and genius, I am not sure any album since 2006 has surpassed Amy Winehouse’s final studio album

“Certainly, it could not prepare the listener for Back to Black: nothing about Frank suggested that its creator was going to make a genuinely epochal masterpiece. Something had happened to Amy Winehouse in the three years that separated her second album from her debut: skinny, covered in tattoos, dressed like a cartoon of a 60s girl-group member – complete with a vertiginous beehive modelled on that of the Ronettes’ Ronnie Spector – she was almost unrecognisable. The lyrics of its lead single suggested that whatever had happened wasn’t good – no one pleads with you to go to rehab if your life is in perfect shape – but the music was so ebullient you could easily overlook that.

Her sound had changed as dramatically as her appearance: with Frank’s producer Salaam Remi joined by Mark Ronson, then a virtual unknown, Back to Black offered an update of 60s soul and girl-group pop. Characteristically self-effacing, Ronson has suggested that his primary contribution to the album was keeping Winehouse out of the pub, but in reality his decision to relocate the recording sessions to Brooklyn’s analogue Daptone studios and employ its house band, the Dap-Kings, was a masterstroke.

The Dap-Kings had already spent a decade honing their retro soul style, first backing obscure deep funk singer Lee Fields, then Fields’s former backing vocalist Sharon Jones. They gave the album’s sound a toughness and grit that is usually missing when contemporary producers ape the 60s output of Muscle Shoals and Hitsville USA. The sound chafed against the lyrics’ plethora of 21st-century references and hip-hop-influenced intonation (“I’ll check him at the door / Make sure he got green / I’m tighter than airport security teama”), and against Winehouse’s Sarah Vaughan and Billie Holiday-influenced vocals.

The tension between musical styles was infinitely more gripping than Frank’s clumsy attempts to highlight Winehouse’s jazz chops through scat singing and decorating tracks with samples of crackling vinyl. Moreover, it didn’t sound like a knowing pastiche, largely because Winehouse had dispensed with the hired songwriting help and written a set of songs that were strong enough to bear comparison to those she had been influenced by. You could tell how good they were by the artists they attracted: within months of Back to Black’s release, Prince had taken to covering Love Is a Losing Game on stage. As if to underline the qualitative similarity of Winehouse’s songs and the music that inspired them, Ronnie Spector began performing the title track live amid the Ronettes’ hits.

Understandably, everyone went on about Winehouse’s voice. It was a snappy, ragged, extraordinarily expressive contralto that still carried something of the nasal north London drawl of her speaking voice, perfect for conveying both heartbreak and sass. It dispensed with the usual firework-display theatrics of the modern soul diva in favour of an idiosyncratic, apparently untutored approach to phrasing that lent everything she sang a directness and immediacy. Set against the contemporary backdrop of melismatic oversinging and arch indie rock, Back to Black offered a reminder of what it sounded like to really mean it.

A rare instance of critical acclaim chiming with public taste, it sold millions. It may well be the most influential album of the last 20 years. The immediate effect of its success was a wave of artists obviously working in her image. Female vocalists made retro soul-influenced music, replacing Winehouse’s troubled unpredictability with something less volatile and more marketable: earthy everyman good humour or cute kookiness. Adele was by far the most successful, but at one point there seemed to be dozens of them, all filling the void created by the fact that Winehouse was increasingly unable to play live, let alone complete another record (as the posthumous Lioness compilation revealed, she recorded virtually nothing in the final years of her life, taping only two songs for a projected follow-up). Winehouse’s vocal style became a kind of all-purpose pop template, its idiosyncrasies reduced to a series of slurred, prematurely aged tics intended to signify emotional authenticity. Nearly 15 years on, you still can’t move for twentysomething men who sound like ravaged blues shouters and twentysomething women trying their best to channel Billie Holiday.

And Back to Black ushered in a new vogue for soul-baring albums rooted in the artist’s lives: an updated version of the early 70s trend for confessional singer-songwriters, rebooted for the age of social media, with its oversharing late-night posts and belief that rock and pop artists should be #relatable (Facebook opened to everyone over 13 with a valid email address four weeks before Back to Black’s release; Twitter’s tipping point came five months later). For better or worse, we currently live in a pop world that Back to Black unintentionally helped to create, where writing frankly about your personal experience is the most noble occupation a pop star can pursue; where artists are queuing up to tell the world about the neuroses and trauma that inspired their latest work; where everyone from Drake to Taylor Swift to Beyoncé has their songs pored over for IRL references.

Whether that is a positive state of affairs is moot: the quality of Back to Black isn’t. Untangle it from its legacy and the appalling backstory of its songs, and you are left with an astonishing album – an unexpected, unprecedented burst of creativity and talent that still hits home emotionally, no matter how many times you hear it. It feels impermeable, the kind of album people will still be listening to and talking about for decades to come: the 21st century’s most obvious candidate to join the pantheon of all-time classics”.

I will end it there. On 27th October, 2006, Back to Black was released. It reached number one in the U.K. and two in the U.S. It has been certified fifteen-times Platinum here. Frequently mentioned in polls of the greatest albums ever, Florence And The Machine, Sam Smith, Jorja Smith and so many other artists have been impacted and influenced by Amy Winehouse and Back to Black. The album won five GRAMMY Awards, three of which were for Rehab. But, as I say, I do feel uncomfortable discussing a song where Winehouse refuses to go to rehab. It has this sour taste now. Though I am including the song in this feature, as it is part of the album and was a single. At the 2008 GRAMMYs, Amy Winehouse won Best New Artists. Back to Black awarded Best Pop Vocal Album. In a way, a lot of that fame and attention was a curse as much as a blessing. I do wonder what Winehouse would think of this album still inspiring people, two decades after its release. Camden’s proud daughter released an album that will be discussed and adored for decade. When you think about that, Back to Black has…

AN immense legacy.

FEATURE: Don’t Fight It, Feel It: Primal Scream’s Screamadelica at Thirty-Five

FEATURE:

 

 

Don’t Fight It, Feel It

 

Primal Scream’s Screamadelica at Thirty-Five

__________

NOBODY can deny…

the genius and legacy of Primal Scream’s Screamadelica. Their third studio album was released on 23rd September, 1991. This was a week in music that saw timeless albums come out. In the U.S., A Tribe Called Quest’s The Low End Theory and Nirvana’s Nevermind came out on 24th September. I wanted to mark thirty-five years of Screamadelica. I hate to not include the whole feature, but there are sections from The Quietus and their feature from 2021. They celebrated thirty years of Screamadelica. “Two themes are routinely described as transformative for Primal Scream’s celebrated 1991 recording: acid house and Andrew Weatherall. But, as Ben Gilbert outlines, other factors led to an album that was both era-defining and defined by the era in which it was made”. It is a fascinating piece:

“Understandably, given the acclaim Screamadelica has generated in the three decades since coming out, this period has been well documented. Two key themes are routinely described as transformative for Primal Scream: acid house and producer Andrew Weatherall. But, while both had an obvious impact, there are other factors that led to an album that was era-defining but also defined by an era where studio technologies allowed a band interminably drenched in their own influences to dive into them like a bath full of ecstasy.


As Gillespie freely admits, the group certainly lifted, if not thieved, a vast number of other people’s ideas to fully realise the fabric of his mind for Screamadelica. “Everything was up for grabs, because of the technology and the way people could sample in the way they couldn’t before. Rap and hip hop records were doing it, house, dance records,” explained Gillespie, perhaps in reference to albums like Paul’s Boutique and 3 Feet High And Rising, both released in 1989, which redrew the art of music production.

“It was like the wild west. No copyright laws,” he said, making comparisons to William Burroughs’ cut-up method. “It was what everybody was doing. It was a culture,” said Gillespie. Of course, the dominant British culture in this period was acid house, a scene that his band initially felt was so acutely anathema to their leather-clad rock & roll dreadnought that guitarist Robert ‘Throb’ Young reportedly threatened to excommunicate McGee from the Scream Team after he was spotted wearing “a baggy T-shirt”.

Improbably comic parties began to shape the future narrative. “There was always the Scream at one end, and Alan championing house music and playing it to them. Then Bobby would put on Goats Head Soup and all the Scream would go mad. Then Alan would take it off and put some more house on. This was going on all the time”, Lawrence from Felt told Cavanagh. Innes has rather more unifying memories of the period, explaining: “We took to the acid house clubs like ducks to water,” he said in Jockey Slut’s tribute to Andrew Weatherall. “The girls were incredible looking, the atmosphere was brilliant, there was no violence and the music was great. Better than some indie club playing the Wedding Present.”

Gillespie had previously dismissed modernising the Primal Scream sound. Quoted in Cavanagh’s book, he insisted: “We’re not that stupid.” But the singer went along with a proposal from either Innes or Jeff Barrett, founder of Heavenly Recordings and former PR at Creation, that Weatherall should remix/“fucking destroy” ‘I’m Losing More Than I’ll Ever Have’. Weatherall, whose only previous studio experience apparently involved watching Paul Oakenfold overhaul ‘Hallelujah’ by Happy Mondays, was perhaps the only music journalist on Earth to enjoy the Primal Scream album, writing effusive reviews about its ballads for the Boy’s Own fanzine.


“The thing about Andrew was that he was a non-musician,” said Gillespie, who first met Weatherall in the summer of 1989 at a rave in a field in the Brighton countryside. “Because he wasn’t aware of the rules, he broke them. He wasn’t trying to make hit records. That never entered his mind. He just wanted to make interesting tracks that worked on the dancefloor.” Reflecting on Weatherall’s 2020 death in The Observer, Gillespie celebrated his friend’s ability to divine the “ecstatic blues”: “No one else would have thought of constructing tracks like he did, arranging our melodies and music into abstract pop songs.”

Alongside Weatherall, engineer Hugo Nicolson’s influence on these sessions cannot be diminished. Witness their collaborative process on a second mix of ‘Don’t Fight It, Feel It’: “I gated the drums and keyed them off a cowbell which I programmed to do a rhythm I’d heard on a Jungle Brothers record. Then I grabbed a bit of bass fill from halfway through the song, turned it backwards and used that as the bass,” he told Sound On Sound. On Weatherall’s instruction, he also located a pivotal component: “I found a crappy whistle sound on the Korg M1 and played what turned out to be the main hook of the song.”

Gillespie has compared the band’s spirit and approach on Screamadelica to that of Parliament-Funkadelic. With ‘Higher Than The Sun’, The Orb’s Alex Paterson become part of this loose collective, contributing one of two titanic versions. His ‘Higher Than The Orb’ mix contains another percussive fill, from ‘Wah Wah Man’ recorded in 1971 by Young-Holt Unlimited, and a more amorphous spirit described by Gillespie as “Starsailor music”, in reference to Tim Buckley’s disorientating and light years from home 1970 album of the same name”.

There are a couple of other thirtieth anniversary features I want to include. I guess there will be thirty-fifth anniversary features shared very soon. The Skinny wrote how Screamadelica is still influential today. I don’t think that it has lost any of its power and brilliance. That is in part thanks to the genius production of Andrew Weatherall. I think I first heard this album not long after it came out in 1991:

“The album opens with Movin' On Up – unashamedly cribbing from The Rolling Stones' Sympathy for the Devil – which provides one of the few links to past and future Primal Scream with the searing hard-rock guitars, but the prominence of gospel singers, the electronic production and Gillespie's light touch vocals are the first signs that this is a different beast. The psychedelia is immediately dialled up on the cover of Slip Inside This House, with whirling sitars sitting next to a syrupy Amen break. And then Don't Fight It, Feel It runs dangerously close to the vapid dance music of the era that paired interchangeable soul singers with pseudo-transcendent electronics, but is saved by Weatherall's Midas touch and the thrilling Italo-house piano that enters midway through. These three songs are very different, but they represent the album perfectly in their marriages of dance and rock, along with so much more.

Gillespie is a less prominent vocal presence throughout the album (sometimes not appearing at all), frequently ceding the floor to the many experimental flourishes; the pitched-down orchestra plus haunted yodelling of Inner Flight; the shrill, overbearing saxophone of I'm Comin' Down; the corny/cosmic psychedelia of Come Together (which gestates for almost five minutes before the uplifting chorus comes in); the spooky accordion of Shine Like Stars. It gives the album an inclusive, cohesive feel, ideal for the sense of collective hedonism and creative freedom that permeates and defines Screamadelica.

By the time Screamadelica won the inaugural Mercury Prize in 1992, the burgeoning movement was over, the dance elements to be subsumed into the harder rave scene of the 90s and the rock elements to provide the seeds that Britpop would soon take up and ride to chart domination for the rest of the decade. Tellingly, the band never attempted another album that sounds like this one, perhaps appreciating the unique, lightning-in-a-bottle magic at play here.

But its influence has been strongly felt both at home and abroad; Scottish indie was brilliant in the 80s (Orange Juice, The Associates, Aztec Camera etc), but the parameters were fairly narrow until Primal Scream opened the door to funk, house, electronic etc. This openness continued in great 00s bands like Life Without Buildings and Franz Ferdinand and is still felt today in Django Django and even Young Fathers.

Outside Scotland, Daft Punk have praised Screamadelica's brilliance and Mark Ronson cites the album as the one that got him into indie, informing his production style to this day. Solar Power, the first single from Lorde's most recent album, is clearly indebted to Loaded, so much so that she contacted Gillespie to get his approval. Lorde claims she'd never even heard of Primal Scream, all the more evidence that the band's influence has seeped into international musical culture, though perhaps lacking the recognition.

For a brief moment, rock, acid-house, psychedelia and more congealed into a gleeful genre-less gloop that focused more on vibes than posturing, an unabashed desire for joy that wouldn't be seen again until the internet started to break down genre borders in the late 00s. It couldn't happen again, and it would be foolish to attempt, but Screamadelica is the culmination of that moment and a potent gateway drug to experience those feelings again”.

I will end with Classic Rock and their 2021 feature. I can appreciate that there may be fewer thirty-fifth anniversary features, as a lot has been said already and people might not be able to add to that. However, Screamadelica still resonates and is being discovered by a new generation. Classic Rock say this in their sub-header: “how self-belief, speed, dance music and the best producer the Stones ever had combined to make Primal Scream’s truly progressive and psychedelic masterpiece”.

“They were certainly living the life. Screamadelica was a filthy party animal of a record. It was a place where the tribal edicts of rock’n’roll were played out amid the glowstick rallies of rave. The album’s unbowed hedonism was typified by songs like Higher Than The Sun, Gillespie intoning to some imaginary Golden God: ‘I live just for today/Don’t care about tomorrow.’

“That’s exactly how I felt,” Gillespie says today. “I didn’t care if I died. I know that sounds dramatic, but it’s all there in the lyrics. We were out there taking ecstasy and speed. Speed was our main drug of choice, then people got more money and got into cocaine, then they got into heroin and it kind of fucked everything up. But I can’t really include heroin here, because while we were making the record it’d be speed and ecstasy. We’d never record on it though; you can’t play rock’n’roll on ecstasy.

“Acid house was similar to the LSD explosion of the sixties. The music was different, but I think it released a similar amount of energy and creativity in people who maybe hadn’t realised they had that inside them before. The energy in the clubs was intense. It reminded me of early rock’n’roll and punk. And that energy was extremely seductive. So we were up for days, living what it says in the songs. Being up for days meant we were exposed to a lot of great scenes and wild, strange, dangerous people. And fucking weird scenes with weird women. But we were a serious band when it came to recording and gigs. We may have partied at the weekends, but every week we were in the studio writing. At that point in your life you’re really out to prove to the world what you can do.

“We had a fucking great time, and that found its way into the music and the songs. I think it’s a very euphoric record. To me it’s ecstatic rock’n’roll. It’s what rock’n’roll should be: joyous and celebratory.”

Amid the mixes by Weatherall, Hypnotone and The Orb – who took Higher Than The Sun into the freakoid realm of cosmic dub – Screamadelica was notable for a more obvious Primal Scream influence. Jimmy Miller was the producer behind The Rolling Stones’ killer streak of albums from 1968’s Beggars Banquet through to Goats Head Soup in ’73.

When engineer Colin Leggett quit three days into the sessions for Movin’ On Up, Gillespie knew just who to call to finish what was already an ultra-Stonesy track: “The one guy in the world I wanted to mix us was Jimmy Miller. But he was hard to find, because within the music industry he was seen as a burn-out. But I went up to Eden Studios and he mixed Movin’ On Up for us there. And it was incredible. Then he did Damaged with Andrew Innes. We were blown away. He was really into groove and rhythm. On Movin’ On Up there’s this mad percussion thing going on, and it’s Jimmy playing two Coca-Cola bottles.”

So was Screamadelica ultimately a balancing act between guest producers and the Primals’ own artistic vision?

“With Andy Weatherall, I think we were both coming from the same place,” Gillespie offers. “I think we married a rock’n’roll attitude and sensibility and songwriting instinct to Andy’s knowledge of the dancefloor and contemporary rhythms. Also, Andy was a bit of a punk. He wasn’t a musician, but what he had was ideas in abundance. I think the best records are not just made by people with loads of technique, it’s about attitude and imagination.

"And between Andy and us – and The Orb and Jimmy Miller – we made a fantastic record. I’ve got to give those guys credit, but then they did what producers are supposed to do. Producers are supposed to enhance your songs and suggest things. For example, I know the Stones struggled with the rhythm of Honky Tonk Women, then Jimmy Miller came up with the cowbell intro. Charlie Watts said that it was Jimmy’s riff. And that’s one of the most famous intros in the whole of rock’n’roll.”

True to their own wilful nature, Primal Scream refused to repeat Screamadelica. Give Out But Don’t Give Up, in ’94, was instead a return to the visceral charge of time-worn rock’n’roll. The music press largely bemoaned the fact that this was no Son Of Screamadelica, and duly waded in. True, the album may have been uneven, but there were more than a few choice moments.

“Even if we’d wanted to we couldn’t have made another Screamadelica,” reasons Gillespie. “We were in a different place, and so was Andy Weatherall. I know that he didn’t – and we didn’t – expect that success. And then we went away and toured the world. Some of the band got into heroin. My take on it is that the creativity seized up a little. It was a really strange period, then out of that came the …Don’t Give Up album. We could have made a better record than that, but maybe that record was as good as it could be. There are two songs from that that we play live every night: Rocks and Jailbird. At the time, the music press in Britain slagged it. But when we play Rocks at our gigs these days, younger and younger generations just love it and the place goes fucking nuts. To me it’s like School’s Out by Alice Cooper.”

Primal Scream have made some striking albums since – chiefly Vanishing Point (’97) and Riot City Blues (’06) – but none more memorable than 2000’s XTRMNTR. Coming at the opposite end of the decade, it can almost be seen as the sinister flip-side to Screamadelica. It’s a dense, punishing listen, shot through with abrasive riffs, hard-nosed electronica and a misanthropic world-view. It’s like that second Summer of Love never happened at all.

“Screamadelica is an emotionally warm record,” Gillespie agrees, “whereas XTRMNTR is the other end of the scale – angry, paranoid, vitriolic, scathing. But then that’s part of my character and part of the character of the band. When he heard XTRMNTR, Alan McGee said to me: ‘That’s the record you’ve wanted to make all your life.’ And I went: ‘Yeah, you’re right’”.

I do feel, at such a hard and dark time, Screamadelica is a record to embrace and escape in. It is euphoric and warm. It has this energy that can lift the heart and mood. I was only eight when the album came out, so it was not until I was an adult I properly dived in and listened. I would urge everyone to play and immerse yourself in Screamadelica, as it is one of the greatest albums…

EVER released.

FEATURE: Spotlight: DEELA

FEATURE:

 

 

Spotlight

PHOTO CREDIT: Chukwu


DEELA

__________

I know that…

DEELA has been on the scene for a little while. Though I think the past year or two have been her strongest and most important so far. Her latest album, Wicked, was released last year. I want to bring in a few interview with this British-Nigerian artist. In 2024, 1202 spoke with DEELA around the release of her then-latest E.P., Good Girl No Dey Pay. It is a remarkable E.P. Since then, she has put out so much interesting work. One of these artists who has been working tirelessly but has not quite got all the recognition that she deserves:

“So tell me about your latest EP. I love the sensual dance vibe of each song. What goals did you have when approaching this project?

I worked with this one producer. His name is Genio, and he has a very distinct type of drum pattern that he uses on his beats. So, going forward, I was trying to make something that was in a different space compared to the other stuff that I have because I feel like when I started making music, it was almost not duplicated to what I listen to. I listen to a lot of Young Nudy, Young Thug-type of music. I gravitate towards that sort of beat, those hip-hop-type beats. When I was coming back to Lagos, I was like, ‘It needs to be a different sort of production to kind of catch their energy.’ Rap is not a huge genre that people listen to in Nigeria. I was thinking of how I could switch it up. That's how I came into the whole Good Girls No Dey Pay EP.

With your music, I love how I can hear different elements from various genres of Afrobeats, hip-hop, and R&B. Which track on the EP do you feel best embodies the multi-genre influence?

I would say ‘Kryptonite’ because it's very dance-like, but then, at the same time, still very mellow. I don't know how to explain it. It just sits in different pockets. And ‘Final Boss’ as well because that's like hip-hop, but then the drums are very Afrobeats. It’s more like alté. That’s what they call it in Nigeria—alternative music—but they call it alté. Like Odunsi and Santi, that’s where you’ll hear it sometimes. That's kind of where it comes from.

I love how your outfits and the style of your cover art play into your visuals. Who are some of your fashion inspirations?

I love Bree Runway. She has the most amazing archives. Also, Leomie Anderson—those are the British girls when it comes to dressing—and obviously Rihanna. She's an icon. She changes her style with every album she drops, which I thought was really cool. But it was still very much authentic to her. It never seemed like it was a gimmick. And Aaliyah because she has that tomboy-like style as well, but in her own way. I like grunge things like spikes, leathers, blacks, and dark looks, but with a spin that doesn't make it too dark”.

There are a couple of interviews from this year that I want to come to. CASAWI chatted with DEELA in July. This is an artist that I have seen recommended by other music websites, and I was compelled to check her out. In a position where she is getting praise from some huge publications, here is someone primed for world domination. Though DEELA has her own plans for what comes next:

“Your musical foundation features a contrast between your mother playing Anita Baker and your father listening to Jay-Z. What is the process of blending emotive balladry with hard-edged rap to define your sound?

Every time I step into the studio, I am trying to create with no boundaries. I am protective of sharing my true emotions, but I have seen how doing so directly stunts my songwriting process. My process generally involves journaling and a lot of voice note recordings I refer to when I get to the studio.

You completed a Biomedical Science degree at the University of Manchester and dedicated your research to sickle cell disease. How does university research influence your independent approach to the music business today?

I am always researching. Watching performers I like and taking notes, studying the people before me and how they stayed relevant, new music globally, and what makes their production interesting. The research never stops, to learn something new every day is the goal.

You recorded your 2025 project Wicked in Lagos with producers like Genio Bambino and Black Culture. What was your daily routine during these writing camps and how did working in Nigeria affect your creative choices?

There is truly no place like home. Being in Lagos makes me feel more at ease because most of my immediate family lives there. Every day was a different vibe entirely. I knew the energy I wanted Wicked to have with reference tracks. The general rule every day was to have a hook and a verse for whatever beat we made from scratch. Some things get me in the zone, and this includes having loads of fruits and snacks as I am unable to make music hangry, lighting a scented candle to get me in the mood, and journaling before setting foot in the studio to let go of any bad chakra.

You built your career independently by learning the mechanics of the music industry. What advice do you have for other artists who want to build an audience without relying on record labels?

I would say study the game, have influences, but always make sure what you are giving is true to you. Also, do not focus on the numbers or other people, building takes time, especially on your own.

Dazed and Clash recognized you as an artist to watch in 2026. What are your next steps beyond your collaborations with Little Simz and DJ Vanco and what themes do you plan to address in your future releases?

I am going to be dropping more music. I love rapping over interesting beats combining genres together like electronic and rap or even afro-house and afro-electronic. Expect me to explore themes of love and vulnerability, fully stepping into my womanhood and what this means to me”.

I do want to finish with CLASH, who recently named DEELA as one of their artists to watch. Someone who is going to a massive name very soon. I am looking forward to seeing what she does in 2027. With this amazing body of work under her belt, DEELA has this incredible and loyal fanbase. I can see DEELA going on these huge international tours very soon. Playing U.S. festivals:

“From Lagos to London, DEELA is injecting the spirit and rhythms of Nigeria into UK trap. Finding inspiration everywhere she goes, the rapper is merging worlds to create a fresh, futuristic sound, dubbed ‘Wicked Babe Music’. Growing up in Lagos, her move to England for school at just 12 was a massive culture shock. Thankfully, she found solace in London’s burgeoning grime scene. “It just blew my mind,” she says. “It was such a different style of rapping. It gave me a whole new perspective.”

Despite feeling torn between two homes, music bridged her disparate worlds. It was a producer friend at university who first encouraged her to jump on a track. “I remembered when I was younger, I used to write poems and do all this creative stuff, but I kind of just lost myself. So making music was me finding myself again,” she reflects.

DEELA shared her debut mixtape ‘Wicked’ last year. Her rave-ready anthems – bassy, percussive, atmospheric backdrops layered with her signature slick bars – ushered in a new era of ‘Wicked Babe Music’. It embodied “the spirit of being confident and a go-getter; it’s also the attitude of being Nigerian.” To DEELA, it’s more than music: it’s an aura. “What’s so funny is I didn’t actually come up with the concept,” she explains. “I posted a video to my track ‘Patience Ozokwor’ and people on TikTok were like, ‘Wicked Babe Music is so back’. It made so much sense! It’s very Nollycore, very confident babe.”

The production DEELA spits over is never predictable. She pulls inspiration from rave, the Alté scene, and UK dance hybrids. “One thing about me, I love rapping over any style,” she shares. “I can give it some space but I always come back. I have so much to say.”

Trusting your gut and doing something different often requires taking the long road, but some recent major collaborations tell us she’s on the right track. DEELA featured on the highlight on Little Simz’ experimental-dance EP ‘Sugar Girl’, later performing with her at Cross The Tracks. She supported Amaarae in Paris and London, and linked up with South African producer Vanco on the infectious Afrohouse number ‘Repeat’”.

Go and follow DEELA and spent time with her work. Recent singles  Dey Play! and Gbona are incredible. If you are not aware of this remarkable artist, then do go and follow her on social media. She is an absolute sensation. I do think that she warrants more column inches and playlist inclusions. DEELA will be a household name soon. Only a matter of time for this…

MUSICAL supernova.

___________

Follow DEELA

FEATURE: Excursions: A Tribe Called Quest’s The Low End Theory at Thirty-Five

FEATURE:

 

 

Excursions

 

A Tribe Called Quest’s The Low End Theory at Thirty-Five

__________

ALTHOUGH A Tribe Called Quest…

put out a wonderful debut album with 1990’s People's Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm, their second album, I feel, is their strongest. The Low End Theory is one of the greatest albums ever. Released on 24th September, 1991, I am marking its thirty-fifth anniversary. This is one of those classic albums that did not get the same acclaim upon its release as subsequent years. Maybe critics wanted a repeat of the group’s debut or were not hot on it. In years since it came out, The Low End Theory is ranked alongside the all-time best albums. I did want to get to some features and reviews around it. Upon its release, The Low End Theory did not make the top forty in the U.S. or U.K. Maybe the more minimalist approach confused critics who felt that The Low End Theory would be fuller and harder-hitting. I want to start with The Ringer and their fascinating dissection and examination of a masterpiece. There were a lot of features around this album in 2021 as it turned thirty:

“Hip-hop is said to be the music of drums and I think that is true, though not in the way that is commonly meant. Rap has, since its creation, relied on rhythm and the sonic possibilities it forms. And yet what most links the genre to the sound at its core is the fact that hip-hop, more than than any other American art form, uses the past to reflect the present. It’s music made possible by melding together other kinds of music into something different, something new.  (What doesn’t change helps form what is constantly in flux.) Released 30 years ago Friday, nothing in the history of rap music embodies that ethic quite like A Tribe Called Quest’s The Low End Theory.

The meaning of the album’s title is still a trick question of sorts. The rapper and producer Q-Tip—who joined DJ Ali Shaheed Muhammad, the late, great Phife Dawg (friends with Tip since childhood), and sometimes-Y member Jarobi in the group—has long said its thesis is twofold. First, The Low End Theory refers to the low end of the sound spectrum, the bass frequencies, and the consistent and delicious fashion in which they are employed throughout the project. Second, it refers to Black people, and how, as he once told Netflix’s Hip-Hop Evolution, they are at “the low end of the totem pole” in U.S. society. This, though, is where things get sticky. Because, although The Low End Theory does veer at times into political concerns, it is not really a political album. There are spates of social critique on the project that have aged decently in some instances (see: “Show Business”) and less decently in others (see: “The Infamous Date Rape”); and there is a strain of early-’90s Pan-Africanism that surges through the tracks—but The Low End Theory is never just, or even mainly, that.

Over the years, because of its sample-heavy sound and Ron Carter feature, folks have taken to calling it a love letter to jazz, a claim that is kind of true (I can’t imagine the record without the influence of jazz music), but also a takeaway that its creators have rebutted. (“Just say A Tribe Called Quest makes good fuckin’ music,” Ali told Spin in 1991, when asked about being labeled “jazz-rap.”) And yes, the record worships at the altar of the low end of the sound spectrum, but it revels just as much in brotherhood and laughter and braggadocio and “Vibes and Stuff.” The truth—the thing that really makes the album what it is—is that there isn’t just one answer. The Low End Theory uses jazz, particularly its bass frequencies, to communicate something that was a certain kind of political but also a bit undefinable and entirely unique. In other words: A Tribe Called Quest.

Bob Power is here and he was there for The Low End Theory too. I ask the esteemed producer and sound engineer what Tribe were like in their youth, and he’s got to be real with me. Bob worked with Erykah on Baduizm, laced D’Angelo’s Brown Sugar. Bob’s been around the block. Bob doesn’t bullshit. “I just saw a bunch of kids—literally—coming in the door who happened to be really good people, really nice people, straightforward, not stiff, funny,” he recalls, a touch of nostalgia in his voice. “I was fascinated by it.”

They weren’t supposed to work together. In 1990 Power was an engineer at a studio in New York called Calliope. He’d picked up a job there a couple of years earlier after a few decades that included a career as a jazz musician, bouts in academia (undergrad at Webster College in St. Louis, a master’s at Lone Mountain College in San Francisco), and a couple of years scoring TV shows. Tribe was working out of Calliope when their sound engineer had to leave town for a few weeks and Power filled in. He was old enough that he didn’t worry about trying to be buddies. “You’re there to make their thing work well,” Power says, erudite as always. He struck a bond with the group and helped engineer and mix the rest of their first album, People’s Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm.

The record was a launching pad to an era. In 1990 the industry was at the precipice of an inflection point. The titans of late-’80s rap—LL Cool J, Run-DMC, Public Enemy, and N.W.A—were all, to varying degrees, still potent forces in the game. (A week before People’s Instinctive Travels was released, PE dropped their seminal Fear of a Black Planet.) The hot winds of change were starting to rise, though. Ice Cube had just gone solo. LL was about to go on a two-and-a-half-year break. The first golden age couldn’t continue forever. People’s Instinctive Travels didn’t outsell any of rap’s ruling powers, but along with fellow Native Tongues member De La Soul’s debut, 3 Feet High and Rising, it did usher in a new sound. The album was light and airy, with hits as smooth as soft serve. A track like “Bonita Applebum,” luscious and flirty, or “Can I Kick It?,” with its hypnotizing Lou Reed sample, portended a different kind of rap, one built as much on melody and vulnerability as gusto and brute strength.

What Tribe was trying to do on The Low End Theory was at once hip-hop at its essence and, invariably, unheard of. When I ask Power how the group pulled it off, he points to the members themselves—the people behind the music. “There’s an intangible thing that happens at a place and a time and with certain people, and you can’t bottle it and you can’t re-create it. You can try—what happens as a professional is [as] your chops get better, as your skill set gets better, you can get closer to faking it—but magic happens at its own speed.”

And magic is what they called it. The reception to The Low End Theory was, at least within the walls of hip-hop, rapturous. The Source awarded the album five mics, hailing it as a classic. The album peaked at no. 13 on Billboard’s Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums chart, and reached no. 45 on the Billboard 200, but sales were never the optimal measuring point for Tribe’s reach. There are children, like myself, who have been raised on it and have spent their whole lives bathed in it and an entire strain of music it birthed. When Dr. Dre, years later, discussed his sonic inspiration for The Chronic with Q-Tip, he cited The Low End Theory. When Kanye, speaking at Phife Dawg’s 2016 memorial service, revealed the first album he ever purchased, he didn’t hesitate: The Low End Theory.

We’ve known the record for so long that it’s easy to forget what it sounded like on first listen. How Phife’s “YO!” at the top of “Buggin’ Out” resembles the arrival of some mighty and celestial being. The way that Q-Tip speaks in triplets over the xylophonic shuffling of “Vibes and Stuff.” The tenor of love coursing through  “Check the Rhime,” every handoff between the two showmen at its head (“Yo, Phife, you remember that routine” … “Yo, Tip, do you recall when we used to rock”) melding the song into a whomping stew. “Stern firm and young with a laid-back tongue,” Tip lulled us on “Jazz (We’ve Got)” with its modal funk, and we never questioned the veracity of the message, because over those horns, how could anyone disagree with anything? By the time the album-closing posse cut “Scenario” arrived—with Phife breaking the track’s orbital bone and Busta engulfing it in flame—there was no choice but to swoon. What The Low End Theory did—what it still does to this day whenever it’s played—is make listeners feel like they are in league with someone at once familiar and unlike anyone they have ever known before”.

In an article that was originally published in 2011 to mark twenty years of The Low End Theory, it was republished in 2021. I wonder if there will be any retrospectives published to celebrate thirty-five years of The Low End Theory. The Quietus went inside an album that I feel still sounds so current. It has not dated and reveals new layers. One of the best-produced albums ever:

“While it’s surprising today to hear The Low End Theory described as "commercial", it wasn’t a very common reaction 20 years ago either. Certainly, next to People’s…, its reliance on a primal hip hop blend of hard rhymes and harder bass made it sound at first almost austere. The New York group’s debut had found Q-Tip, Ali-Shaheed Muhammad, Phife and satellite member/spirit guide Jairobi positioned as the first post-De La Soul rap act, its cartoonish, brightly coloured sleeve helping imbue the record’s eclectic samplescape with a similarly psychedelic atmosphere. ‘Can I Kick It?’s Lou Reed lift and breezy amiability turned Tribe into minor global pop stars, yet it was the nearest to the mainstream the group ever got. Just as 3 Feet High & Rising wasn’t all dayglo hippy hop, and De La would prove themselves to be formidable true-school innovators, so Tribe emerged here as purist rap paragons, makers of music of much rawer shading than the accessible, melodious debut had led some to expect.

Yet The Low End Theory took Tribe to that fabled "next level" hip hop acts always bang on about by performing the trick every authenticity-obsessed artist most dearly wants to execute. They crossed over without selling out – in fact, they crossed over while retrenching. Contrary to what Weiss and colleagues thought at the time, …Low End… is harder-edged, darker, and, in terms of its adherence to established hip hop codes, actually a little bit conservative. (Not that that’s a bad thing, of course.) The record became beloved of fundamentalist b-boys because it rooted itself firmly in the music’s core sonic, conceptual, lyrical and artistic values, yet managed to increase the band’s appeal to listeners who generally shunned rap for sonic or ideological reasons. Here was a group from a still outsider genre, uniting hardcore fans and curious outsiders by making music that worried more about integrity, commitment, creativity and resolve than it did appealing to the mainstream. Who’da thunk it?

Even after 20 years it’s difficult to work out quite how they did it: the music makes no concessions to outsiders – meaning, essentially, anyone outside the group and their immediate circle of creative associates – and, a couple of half-decent jokes aside, neither do the lyrics. There are formal and aesthetic changes from the first LP, but they’re slight: even the much-vaunted coup of landing the input of jazz bass icon Ron Carter has minimal impact on the album as a whole (he only appears on one song, so the notion that Carter’s appearance somehow validated hip hop as jazz’s heir – which was claimed in all apparent seriousness at the time – doesn’t really hold water). Compare the boom and thwack of the mighty ‘Buggin’ Out’ with ‘Can I Kick It?’, and they’re really not all that dissimilar – both are snapping, fairly sparse drum loops underpinned by cyclical bass lines. What’s changed is implied rather than overtly stated: the use of ‘Walk On the Wild Side’ is a deliberate reference the listener is expected to get, while the bassline from ‘Minya’s the Mooch’ by Jack Dejohnette’s Directions – which to start with is an album track released on an experimental jazz label rather than a global radio staple – has been chopped up and reconstructed in a sequence so different even its makers might struggle to recognise it. It surely ought to be the more "difficult" track to listen to – less accessible, less direct – but the opposite is true: the bounce is infectious, the melody drilled into the music from the bass simply thrilling, and it leaves ‘…Kick…’ trailing in the dust, clearly the work of a band yet to find their own unique voice. If it’s tracks like this that made the Jive staffers feel the record was more commercial, you can sort of see why, yet it’s beyond counterintuitive: this is a kind of universality that can only be achieved by doing the polar opposite of dumbing down”.

There is one more feature that I want to bring in before finishing off. SLANT explained how The Low End Theory “remains a stellar execution of hip-hop methodology”. It is interesting where Sophia Ordaz writes how “A Tribe Called Quest’s 1991 breakthrough album, The Low End Theory, is as much a totem to today’s youth of color as it was when it came out, which is equally a testament to its significance as the unshakeable hold that the album has on hip-hop past and present”:

“The Low End Theory is a jazz-rap touchstone through and through, powered by the vitality and chemistry between Q-Tip and Phife Dawg, who truly go head-to-head here. Both rappers subverted the figure of the hyper-masculine rap god: Q-Tip was the bespectacled loverboy and front-stoop poet with a nasal but mellowed-out flow, while Phife was the high-pitched Five-Foot Assassin, the charmingly self-deprecatory Funky Diabetic with a potty mouth. Together they were a union of soul and mind, the concrete and the abstract, the lowbrow and the highbrow, the worm’s eye view and the bird’s eye view, the feet on the ground and the head in the clouds, with Muhammad, overseen by Q-Tip and assisted by engineer Bob Power, orchestrating from the DJ booth, dishing out the blood, flesh, and muscle that composed the Tribe corpus.

No track better encapsulates Q-Tip and Phife’s chemistry than “Check the Rhime,” which contains the most famous call and response in all of hip-hop: “You on point, Phife?” “All the time, Tip.” As you’ll know if you’ve seen Michael Rapaport’s controversial documentary Beats, Rhymes & Life, it was rare for Q-Tip and Phife’s relationship to be that effortlessly harmonious. Childhood friends turned embittered business partners, they were driven apart by misaligned goals and motivations, thankfully reconciling to record the group’s stupendous swan song, We Got It From Here… Thank You 4 Your Service. (Phife sadly passed away from diabetes-related complications before the album’s release in 2016.)

Hip-hop has no shortage of iconic duos: Pete Rock and C.L. Smooth, Andre 3000 and Big Boi, Talib Kweli and Mos Def, Method Man and Redman, Prodigy and Havoc, Pimp C and Bun B. But Q-Tip and Phife may be the greatest because they complemented and completed each other. In Shadow and Act, Ralph Ellison wrote, “Each true jazz moment…springs from a contest in which each artist challenges all the rest, each solo flight, or improvisation, represents…a definition of his identity: as individual, as member of the collectivity and as link in the chain of tradition.” Like Ellison’s jazzmen, Q-Tip and Phife defined their individual identities by reviving traditional materials and playing off of one another. And it’s fair to say that each MC found himself in the other, even if that meant losing a piece of his individuality along the way.

The Low End Theory’s sequencing stimulates without requiring the listener to exert great effort to engage with it; like cruising on a skateboard through an urban landscape, it elicits a pleasant alertness and awareness of the present. On “Buggin’ Out,” dueling percussion samples, drums from Lonnie Smith’s “Spinning Wheel” and Jack Dejohnette’s Directions’s “Minya’s the Mooch,” make for a harmonious though slightly off-kilter union. When the drums drop out altogether, the spotlight is solely on Phife delivering one of his most self-possessed performances. “Vibes and Stuff,” “Skypager,” and “What?” are jazz-rap concoctions that go down smooth and easy, the latter song composed of a catalog of questions. And on the showstopping “Butter,” Phife bemoans the trials and tribulations of being a player, accompanied by an electrifying saxophone lick from a Gary Bartz tune.

Though “Show Business” and Q-Tip’s coinage of Industry Rule #4080 (“Record company people are shadyyyy”) still rings true in today’s music business, other moments on The Low End Theory, like the cringe-y “Infamous Date Rape,” feel antiquated in retrospect. There’s a tendency to look back on the album as sacred hip-hop doctrine, but the group’s members were by no means enlightened prophets or model adherents to progressive politics, though some of Q-Tip’s early verses are very much begging you to see them that way.

The Low End Theory has often been called the Sgt. Pepper’s of hip-hop. And, undoubtedly, it’s as influential to its respective genre. But the album is more of an organic progression of hip-hop, rather than a rupture from it. Where the Fab Four aimed to conquer new frontier, looking to English vaudeville, Indian classical music, and psychedelic drugs for inspiration, A Tribe Called Quest recontextualized and reinvented old into new—which was the ethos of rap from its inception—drawing inspiration not from some exterior entity, but from experiential and inherited knowledge, acquired from coming of age on Linden Boulevard and poring over their parents’ old Minnie Riperton and Roy Ayers records. The album is a stellar execution of hip-hop methodology, proving just how ripe with potential it was and continues to be.

Inspired by a beat that he heard Pete Rock working on, “Jazz (We’ve Got)” uses a slowed-down clarinet sample from Jimmy McGriff’s “Green Dolphin Street,” molding it into a plaintive wail that seduces the listener, urges us to stay immersed in the sonic soup of the song. Jazz is A Tribe Called Quest’s lodestar, but I suspect that they’re referring to more than just the musical tradition when they recite over and over, “We got the jazz.”

For A Tribe Called Quest, jazz is an outlook, an ability to improvise when life throws you curveballs, to adapt and create even as the forces around you would suppress or silence you. Q-Tip has said that The Low End Theory’s title refers to the album’s bass-loaded sound as well as the status of the black man at the low end of the social hierarchy. Living life in the way of jazz, being able to roll with the punches and innovate against all odds, is A Tribe Called Quest’s response to that struggle. Decades later, that positive jazz-inspired outlook on life is The Low End Theory’s enduring legacy”.

I will wrap it up here. On 24th September, it will be thirty-five years since the release of A Tribe Called Quest’s The Low End Theory. This is an album that you need to own on vinyl. Ahead of its thirty-fifth anniversary, I did want to explore one of the most important albums ever. It is a shame that some critics were underwhelmed in 1991. Since it came out, The Low End Theory transformed and reshaped Hip-Hop. It created a blueprint for Alternative and conscious Rap. This is an album that everyone needs to hear in their lifetime, as The Low End Theory is…

A hypnotic listen.

FEATURE: Modern-Day Queens: Grace Cummings

FEATURE:

 

 

Modern-Day Queens

 

Grace Cummings

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THERE have been a fair few…

PHOTO CREDIT: Jeff Andersen Jnr

new interviews published recently, as Grace Cummings released her album, Bloodhorse!, last month. The Melbourne-born artist is coming to the U.K. in November. You can find details here. I did want to include a few interviews with Cummings. I am starting with CLASH and their conversation with Grace Cummings. They write how her new album has “classical flair and a passion for surprise”:

“Could you go back to the process and explain how you began sketching the album out, or how that works for you?

Grace Cummings:  Well, I think that writing any album sort of starts from the moment you stopped recording the last one. For instance, I’ve had songs on previous albums where I wrote it on the day of the last recording, but we didn’t have time to record it, so it was on the next one.  This time I went in with over fifty songs that I could choose from, but I didn’t really have any kind of preconceived concept or story or whatever. But the one thing that I did want was to be as much of myself as possible. It was important to me to be extremely honest and true and not to worry about how that came out.

Did you feel different expectations of yourself either internally or externally when going on to album number four or did it just feel like a natural continuation of the process that you’d built up through the previous ones?

GC: A little bit of both, but I did have the expectation of myself to just not to care about outside judgment or opinion. I think that I’ve gone through a particular kind of change in my life where I’ve realised, not that previous albums have been untrue, but that some of my opinions and what I think I like or dislike, have kind of been adopted by others, and I’ve realised that that’s not actually who I am. This time around, I just thought, ‘fuck that’. And I’ll get back to being who I am, really.

In some ways, the album sounds like it could have been made at any time in the last forty or fifty years. It seems to have been crafted as an album and not a collection of individual tracks. Is that deliberate?

GC:  I certainly think of things as a whole, and I know that’s sometimes not the way that you should think about it. But I can’t help it, and it’s not going to change because I love that, and I think that it’s really important. I kind of think about it as being like in acts almost.

And the reason it sounds like that is because Jonathan’s an analogue guy. That’s how everything’s recorded and listened to, you know, like everything, even the synth stuff, we’re manually getting that in the right tempo while it’s going into the tape. But though he’s analogue, but he’s also hi-fi. I love that too because everything is something real, even though it doesn’t sound like it, except for one thing on the album, and yeah, I want to listen to something like it’s an album. I don’t really want to listen to things like they’re supposed to be on a computer.

You are four acclaimed, and increasingly popular, albums in, how close do you feel to that?

GC: Very far. My ambition is to be truthful and that includes this. I don’t want to say something that isn’t true. I’m very far from it. It’s hard.

Also, being an Australian, being so far away from everything, it’s extremely hard. You kind of haemorrhage money all over the world. It takes a lot.

Sinead O’Connor said that the reason you make an album is you’ll go fucking mad if you don’t. That’s true. But I’m very far from being able to sustain myself. It’s incredibly stressful. You know, not to be like woe is me, but I’m also extremely, extremely grateful and extremely lucky to be where I am. But it’s a testament to the care and the need that I have to do it. Because I think a lot of people would fucking give up. It’s not for the faint of heart.

So now that the album is out, what’s the plan for the next, and where do you hope to be at the end of it?

GC: Well, for the rest of the year, I am doing tours in Australia and the UK and Europe with my band, and in the US just alone or with one other person. I’m really looking forward to that. In an ideal world, in an ideal world, I just hope that this finds the right people that connect with it, and that I will keep being pushing myself to just have a little bit more courage every time, you know”.

There are a few more interviews that I want to explore God Is in the TV spoke about Bloodhorse! It is an album where she got the opportunity to turn painful things into things that give her great joy and relief. I have been following Grace Cummings for a little while now. An extraordinary artist that everyone needs to know about and listen to:

“Recorded in Topanga Canyon, California, with GRAMMY-nominated producer Jonathan Wilson (Father John Misty, Angel Olsen, Margo Price) like her last album, it was another fulfilling artistic experience for her. “I love that guy, and I’ve worked with him every day for the rest of my life because he’s amazing,” Cummings enthuses of working with him. “Recording Ramona, we became really good friends because of, you know, similarities in the way that we approach music, but just similarities in the way that we are and the playfulness that we have together is something that I find really, really important.”

“I’m up for anything, and he’s up for anything. I think that different musical shades, a lot of it I wanted to do; I knew that I wanted to go in there and do that and kind of delete some other kind of musical shades, if you will, from previous records,” she explains of the albums shifting sonics.

“I just don’t want to do the same thing over and over again, like that would be boring for me, at least, and he’s got no problem with that, which is awesome. It’s just anything goes...”

“I love that guy; he’s a freak, and he kind of understands me being that way as well. We just kind of go in, and there’s not too much planning at all, at least not this time. I think that works really well because a lot of it is just spontaneity, and it feels present and good at the time. I think that’s kind of the best thing that you can hope to capture, really. If I plan something out too much, I don’t think it’s going to be very good.”

‘My God’ comes replete with a homespun video by director Ben Portnoy. The song itself is an emotive, haunting piano track with striking percussion that simmers wonderfully around Cummings’ deep, breathy vocals, recorded while she was suffering from pneumonia. Her voice and lyrics house a deep disquiet at the world “Lyrically, this song is about hatred, jealousy, rage. The God here is the dark forces that are wrapping around us, that we scroll through, the toxic energy that binds us together in this modern world, and the fear we feed it every day”, Cummings confides.

“When I speak about God, I don’t speak about it with religion in mind. ” She continues, “I speak about it because it’s a gateway into talking about the fallibility of people and questioning your own morals and humanity and pain, and I think God is the biggest word for that.”

“I think that we’re constantly asking for help or in desperation or something like that. This song, though, is, I suppose, pretending to have a God that I certainly don’t believe in. But the force of it is enough to be a God, like a Greek God. It’s dark, and it’s vengeful, and hateful. I think that it is represented in a lot of our world and a lot of our communities, and it makes me very sad. Sometimes I find myself subscribing to it myself, on your phone or whatever, see how much people go on and just tear each other apart and build armies, founded on hate for no reason. It’s just like you’re worshipping something here. It’s not good.”

“We can talk about the Greek gods; they certainly weren’t all happy and merry. Not at all, they’re killing each other left, right and centre and putting in little curveballs for us down here out of spite and vengeance and hate.” She continues, “There’s a God for this, a God for that, a God of the sky, a God of the sea, and they are fallible just like us. It’s just the bigness of them, or of the mythology or of stories about God or different kinds of theology, different beliefs that I’m interested. And it’s just a word to trigger something huge that none of us really know much about.”

Cummings says of the album’s title, “A bloodhorse is a horse expected to be a winner. But they can often also be temperamental, fearful, fragile and easily broken. Sometimes I feel like I’m a trapped animal. When I go to sleep, sometimes it’s like I’m in the gate, twitching. And as soon as I open my eyes, I’m fucking running.”

“Someone brought up that I talk about animals a lot, which I guess I do. I didn’t really realise. But it’s the symbol, I suppose, that I’ve chosen: temperamental, flighty, fight, flight and hide and trapped and all that kind of thing. All related to fear, really, anxiety. But that’s the human condition, isn’t it? ” Cummings asks.

“I think we’re all very much the same, really. I don’t think anyone’s that terminally unique. I just think that some people look into it a little bit more and some people don’t. I envy people that don’t feel the need to look into it that much, but I can’t get it out of my head. I guess that’s why I do things to occupy myself, and make music to feel better”.

Rolling Stone Australia spoke with one of their greatest modern artists. Grace Cummings is a hugely consistency and hard-working artist. “vulnerability, the realities of Australia’s music industry, and learning to lean into who she really is”. I have not seen Grace Cummings live, though I will try and catch her at some point. Her music has garnered praise from around the world:

“What do you hope fans get out of your new album?

What I hoped for myself was to lean in to who I am, try and keep trying to move away from judgement; of myself and from the outside. It’s funny… because “leaning in to who I am” really has meant connecting with who I was when I was a child, before outside noise made me feel like I had to be a certain way to please certain people. I don’t wanna be like that anymore. If I’ve got the privilege of having a platform where I can make something that people may find to connect with, I want it to be real. To be true. I hope somebody might have their hand held by this music, I hope that somebody might feel more understood. If I shot for the moon, I’d hope that people might want to lean into who *they* are — in a way that might have made them be burnt at the stake a few hundred years ago.

When publications like Pitchfork, us, and NPR praise your music, how does it make you feel? Do you pay much attention to it?

I’m really grateful that my music can reach people and does reach those platforms. It doesn’t feel very real to me sometimes, and I guess I have a gap in the connection of understanding that it is “real”. What I really feel is the connection between us and the the people in the room when I/we play live.

If you had to choose the most notable musical influence on your sound, who would it be and why?

I find that changes often, and I’m in all honesty not very sure. Anybody who I can hear truth in, vulnerability, risk, raw and unsettling exposure of themselves… Some things touch you in a way that you can’t explain. But I really look up to people who take the risk to be themselves.

It’s such a tricky time for working musicians like yourself. How have you noticed Australia’s music industry changing over your career? Has it gotten better or worse, in your opinion?

It’s pretty hard. I think sometimes from the outside it might look like things are easy and you’re ticking boxes and living the life… but the changes in the industry make Australian musicians and teams some of the hardest working and self sacrificing people I have ever met. It lets me know that anybody making music and trying to get it out there is doing it because their passion for it is fucking huge and real”.

PHOTO CREDIT: Charlie Kinross/The Guardian

Grace Cummings has been compared to artists like Nina Simone, Nico, and John Cale. Even though Bloodhorse! Deals with “themes of identity, gaslighting, manipulation and betrayal, with a depth that only someone well-versed in otherworldly angst could reach”, Cummings has found peace and a life-saving quality in music. The final interview I want to bring in is from The Guardian:

“Since releasing her debut album, Refuge Cove, in 2019, Cummings has had success both in Australia and overseas, playing international festivals including Great Escape in the UK. Though she is a sure-footed songwriter whose last album, Ramona, was shortlisted for the 2024 Australian Music prize, Cummings has spent a lifetime trying to better fit people’s expectations – ever since that formative night-terrors incident.

In her track The Magnum Opus of The North is a Cowboy Boot, she describes the kind of man “who cosplays as tortured poets or cowboys, pretending to be disaffected”. Recently she’s come to the realisation that she has been a bowerbird in her relationships, borrowing opinions, taste and values and assuming them to be her own.

“I’ve been mirroring people’s behaviour in order to please them,” she says. “I’m autistic and I didn’t really realise what that meant. Now I want to live my life the way that I am – in a way that I would probably be burned at the stake for a couple of hundred years ago. I only want to do things that teach me something, or help somebody. The fucking coolest thing is to care. And I do care, so much.”

The aforementioned cowboy theme pops up a few times, including in an abbreviated, highly sexual AI country banger with a male vocal (it’s as surreal as it sounds), and in the video for My God, shot at The Lawrence Rodeo in Maclean, New South Wales. The rodeo becomes a physical manifestation of the hatred she describes in the song, the kind of hatred that people direct at strangers online. “The rodeo is this fucking strange environment where people have a bloodlust,” Cummings says. “A real depiction of us just sitting and watching something that’s quite awful.”

My God, the first single from the album, has a percussive urgency with its uh-huh-huh refrain. When recording it, Cummings had pneumonia, which forced her to experiment with her breath – picture the sound you might make when jumping into freezing water. “I’m leaning more into vocalisation without words, and this was primal sounding,” she says. “It’s the way that some people soothe themselves and their nervous system.”

With her track FAKE, she wants the listener to feel as though they are being dragged under water. The line “if you would just be a good girl” is so offensive to her that she has omitted it from the official lyrics and uses a glottal stop to make it almost unintelligible. In the video, she chokes on viscous black blood when singing it.

Seeing Cummings live, there’s a similar feeling of purging, as if watching a seance or someone speaking in tongues. “There’s definitely a milking of catharsis going on, but there’s no acting in it,” she says. “Sometimes I have no idea what’s going to happen and my band are like, fuck. But then you’re like, ‘Oh well, I guess that was there and needed to come out at some point’”.

CLASH provided their review of Bloodhorse! They wrote some interesting insights into one of the albums of the year. I know there is going to be a lot of love waiting when Cummings plays the U.K. in November. I think that she is a truly unique artist. I wonder where she goes from here:

“‘My God’ is a juddery, twitchy and almost equally dramatic piece, packed with off-beat vocal fills and “uh huh”s which continue the eye-opening feel of the album as a whole. But by now we’re at least partly acclimatised: perhaps getting used to expecting the unexpected. The song explores the “jealous creep” and “wounded animal” which lives in our ubiquitous handheld devices: the god – or idol – of our modern age. It ends with a soothing resolution in a quick piano chord which foreshadows the lead instrument of the third track, ‘Paradise’. This is a slower number, but still steeped in Cummings’ unusual sonic choices (the insistent open hi-hats and possible harpsichord). ‘FAKE’ takes the sound palette even further and elevates it thanks to an inarguably beautiful chord sequence, the kind that rends the heart no matter your constitution. Swelling strings and a head-turningly menacing tone from Cummings anchors this as a visceral piece of songwriting. Just as enjoyment has really set in, though, the track abruptly dissolves into a monotone drone – an undercurrent of electronic hum which may have been there all along and, for all we know, might continue forever.

It doesn’t though, instead melding after two long minutes into the bed of title track ‘Bloodhorse!’ That transition is a truly inspired move, evoking intense emotion which Cummings has explained seeks to evoke the feeling of gasping for air or “Alice falling down the rabbit hole.” The song which emerges is set on a racy, pattering rhythm section, and there’s plenty of entertainment to be had even while Cummings continues to push every boundary she can find. Like the rest of the album, this is an accessible form of the avant garde: challenging in part and extremely innovative but allowing space for essential music ingredients to flourish also.

A quick aside to note that the subsequent “take two” of this track has to be heard to be believed – putting it mildly, it bears no resemblance to its namesake but seems to take the form of an adult-rated, AI-delivered country and western mashup. Cummings’ thought processes are sometimes impenetrable and inexplicable but that, after all, is what sets humans apart from the apes (and the machines).

‘I’m Not Crazy’ is set on more “typical” ground: a woozy, acoustic guitar-prominent confession exploring misdirected love. Coupled with ‘John Lennon’, Cummings now seems to have entered a retro lounge pop era (and seems to have an impressive budget for string sections) too. Then, another startling contrast and an exploration of the misty mysteries of childhood night terrors: ‘WITCH! WITCH! WITCH!’ evokes primal fears from a knowing standpoint, using slow-paced and eminently enjoyable melody to paint dark pictures.

That’s already a lot to take in. What’s left are three reflective songs, leading us with  Cummings ultimately to a place of farewell and acceptance through a process of fierce self-help (‘My Island and Me’) and seeking of peace (‘The Magnum Opus of The North is a Cowboy Boot’), both songs built on gorgeous piano riffs.

As the final track, ‘See you in Fifty Years’, presents unanswered and perhaps rhetorical questions of what our futures may hold, it’s impossible not to share at least some of Cummings’ desire to seek – if not find – answers. For us mere mortals to understand every nuance of what Cummings is aiming to say in ‘Bloodhorse!’ may not be a realistic goal, though. This is a unique and intensely unsettled album, swerving from anxiety to hope; dream-like with some of those visions clearly amounting to nightmares, and others much less clear-cut. There are countless moments of brilliance, with only an occasional drop of energy, but perhaps it’s entirely unreasonable to expect Cummings to operate constantly at fever-pitch. Go back, listen again and you will likely find more secrets which have been tantalisingly hidden by this singular artist.

8/10”.

Go and connect with the remarkable Grace Cummings. If you are new to her work then go and listen to Bloodhorse! I do hope that there are more tour dates next year, as I will try and get along to see her play. For now, I am enjoying one of the standout albums from this year. The brilliant Grace Cummings is one of…

OUR best artists.

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Follow Grace Cummings

FEATURE: Spotlight: Miss Kaninna

FEATURE:

 

 

Spotlight

PHOTO CREDIT: Joel Thomas Wilson

 

Miss Kaninna

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IT is exciting…

PHOTO CREDIT: Joel Thomas Wilson

sharing the work and brilliance of Miss Kaninna. Her mixtape, BLACKPRINT, was released last month. I am keen to spotlight her, as this is an artist that you should know about. At the moment, she is busy touring and is doing dates in her native Australia. I want to start out with an interview from CLASH. I am curious whether Miss Kaninna is coming to the U.K. to play soon enough, as people would love to see her:

“Back in 2021, you might have struggled to recognise Miss Kaninna. “I wore a hazmat suit, and I was fucking injecting people with shit,” she tells CLASH. What could be a scene from The Substance was, in fact, the rapper’s daily routine, working as a mental health nursing student during the pandemic.

As is the power of her ever-articulate tracks, a couple of underground gigs quickly spun into three ARIA nominations, an award for best Hip-Hop EP at the 2025 Australian Independent Music Awards for her debut, ‘Kaninna’, and a 2025 support tour with Kneecap. “I feel confident in things that I can do well, and I know that I’m good at,” she tells CLASH.

In BLACKPRINT you write: “My pen be a gun.” How did you know that being an artist was the way you wanted to share your story?

My whole family are performers and singers, and also very political. So, it wasn’t actually like, ‘Oh, I’m gonna be a singer, I’m gonna be political.’ I never thought that politics was going to be a part of my music in such a big way. As a kid, I just wanted to be like Britney Spears, like Beyoncé and the Pussy Cat Dolls, and they’re not political at all.

I remember performing music as a kid – I liked musical theatre – and I was always put at the back. It was constantly like, while I know I’m good at this, because you’re black, because you’re Aboriginal, you have to be at the back, not sing anything too political. And then it’s like, well fuck you, I want to be the one in the front, the one that gets attention.

What was that experience like, the first time you got to be centre stage?

I was working in hospitality at the time, at a couple different bars, and a guy who ran one of the bars had his own band, and because it was lockdown, there were no gigs. A couple of underground gigs started to pop up, and he put on a show and was like, ‘Why don’t you come and open with me?’ I was like, ‘Well, I only have one song that I’ve written,’ and he said, ‘Well, we’ll just do all covers then.’

I did Naughty Girl by Beyoncé, Tyrone by Erykah Badu and some Sneaky Sound System. It was so random, but it was sick. There were no other girls doing music like that in Tasi, and no one was rapping either. So it was a pretty infectious feeling.

How does it feel to constantly describe your experience to all the people asking you to share your story?

It’s like trying to describe a dog to someone who’s never seen one. Unless you have been in Australia, lived there and know Aboriginal people, you really can’t fathom the history and the experience. Then I have to come over here and promote my music, which seems so irrelevant. I feel like I have an opportunity to speak about things that are not music-related, and gain allies in the white and black communities here so that they listen not only to my music, but to other Aboriginal creatives and politicians. Having my human rights is the goal, and music is the vessel.

Tell us about the upcoming Australia tour, and what’s next after that.

I’m really excited – it feels like my first time again. I haven’t had a chance to perform these songs in front of these people before, and a lot of them have been watching me since Black Britney. A lot of people are like, ‘Oh, your music is so different?’ and I’m like, ‘Yeah!’ I’m just trying to figure it out. I’m writing an album at the moment, and I’m developing my sound a lot more.

On tour, I’ve got some incredible opening acts. I like to dictate my show a lot, so it’s really annoying when you go to a festival and you’re not allowed to have the visuals up. I like to create a show where I get to create the story and a space where people can come and feel safe and be part of music, of something, that doesn’t feel too judgemental”.

I want to move to Rolling Stone Australia. They caught her in the middle of her European tour recently. The Tasmania-born six-time ARIA nominee was in conversation about her tour and exciting mixtape. To her, changing the world is the goal. Music is the vessel in which she can do that. You just know that she is going to be making music for years to come. “As her profile within the Australian industry has risen, so too has the responsibility she feels to remain authentic, unapologetic, and real when it comes to how she steps in a room, shows up for her people and for those who may feel like their voices can’t be heard”. If you have not connected with Miss Kannina, then go and follow her on social media:

“The BLACKPRINT mixtape is a lesson in overcoming, achieving and embracing one’s own power. It’s also a lesson in letting the joy in; the Kaninna we hear on this project is a woman empowered, yes, but also a woman who is comfortable in balancing softness with the raw intensity audiences love about her.

As she simply puts, it’s a discovery in free will. “A lot of artists and people in the industry have a mindset of: how do we hop on a trend? How do we make this big? I think that the biggest songs in the world, the most important ones, were never made to do that,” she says. “They were made to get an emotion down on paper and record that, so that people could feel it too and be seen. Or they were songs that could speak on an issue that needed to be spoken on.”

“Someone gave me some really good advice just after ‘Blak Britney’ came out,” she remembers. “I was thinking that I needed to release another ‘Blak Britney’. I had caught the wave and I was focused on how to keep going, that if I didn’t go viral again it was all going to fall apart. I spoke to this big artist and she was like, ‘As long as you’re having fun when you’re releasing new music and you can stand back, look at it and be proud of what you’ve done… You know you’re creating art.’” That was just so fucking true.

“Even if you don’t like the song, it’s about having a relationship with that song, knowing that it’s not only doing something for you but also for other people.

“‘Dawg in Me’, for instance. I love that song but it’s not my favourite anymore and I don’t really like doing it, just because I’ve done it for so long. I took it out of the set and every show I’ve done in Europe, people are screaming an encore for ‘Dawg in Me’. It’s done so much for other people. I think that’s something I’m coming to terms with a lot more. As an artist, I’m around that music a lot and I listen to the music a lot, but it might be someone’s first time hearing it.”

Looking ahead to what this BLACKPRINT era can potentially grow into, the wheels are already turning for Kaninna.

Exposure to more audiences internationally is feeding into how she is approaching her live shows at home. The validation received on the other side of the world has only added fuel to the fire that has been burning bright since her powerful breakthrough year.

Continuing to grow as an artist and performer go hand in hand, and with the opportunity to grow BLACKPRINT throughout the rest of this year, she’s ready to push herself further than before.

“What I am excited about is being able to create a show that is high production, high quality, with really talented musicians,” she enthuses. “Doing it in front of 1,500 people, 800 people, 500 people, whatever. It’s a show where people can come and feel like they are part of something”.

I am going to finish with BRICKS and their recent interview with Miss Kaninna. Even if I am new to her music, this is someone who I am going to follow closely. For BRICKS, “The First Nations rapper talks honouring Aboriginal history, touring with Kneecap, and making music that demands to be heard live”:

“The mixtape’s title is more than just a play on words; it’s also an homage to the Black artists who have revolutionised rap, and paved the way for a new generation of artists to rise with them. “I’ve always been a big Nicky fan, and she has The Pinkprint,” she shares, also citing Jay-Z’s The Blueprint. “I don’t really fuck with Jay-Z like that, but you can’t deny his impact on hip hop.”

Taking her own unique spin on the metaphor, the title was imbued with personal meaning as the artist reflected on the vastly misunderstood and downright incorrect histories Aboriginal communities are expected to accept. “I’ve been thinking a lot about the connections between reality and lies,” she shares. “Lies about Aboriginal people’s right to this land and how long we’ve been here – and what has been taken from us is our humanity.”

For Miss Kaninna, her artistry is inspired by an inherent longing to correct the misinformation she repeatedly hears. “I really do believe that Aboriginal people have been here since the beginning of time. We are the oldest living culture in the whole world. We still practice what we practised 100,000 years ago, and before then, it’s probably lost,” she explains. “The BLACKPRINT is really reminding people that this is stolen land, and it is an illegal occupation.” She draws comparisons to other illegal occupations, such as the Palestinian genocide by Israel. “It’s become quite evident between colonised peoples that we have to find solidarity in one another, so the ‘blackprint’ is trying to pay homage to my family – my family has always known this land, and I’ve never left.”

While working on the mixtape, Miss Kaninna was far from the studio – supporting on the European leg of Kneecap’s Fenian Tour. The experience helped shape the project, doubling down on her vision for a fully-rapped record. “Going on tour with those boys was such a good full-send into rap,” she explains. “Coming off the back of a rap tour, I felt so focused on writing lyrics and what I was trying to say. Getting to play my songs live – I played ‘MOB TIES’ and ‘STOLEN WAGES’, which are two songs about my community – overseas was a trip, because I didn’t think anyone could relate to what I was saying.”

To build the visual language of BLACKPRINT, Miss Kaninna worked with Adriane Neshoda. “I talked to her about colour schemes early on, and just how important colours are,” she shares. Central to the project was the original Aboriginal flag, designed by Luritja artist Harold Thomas in 1970, along with an alternative design that features a golden spear and its ties to the Aboriginal Tent Embassy, the longest continuous protest for Indigenous land rights in the world. “If people want to really learn about Aboriginal history, they need to look into the Tent Embassy,” she asserts.

Both flags prominently feature the colour yellow, leading to the golden yellow wig Miss Kaninna adorns on the mixtape cover. “Half of my face is covered because I wanted to represent any of us, all of us, from this country,” she explains. “Any Aboriginal person is the blackprint. Any black fella, any person with Aboriginal blood in their veins, is the blackprint. It’s not just me I’m representing anymore”.

The final thing I am dropping in is from Beat. They shared their thoughts on a furious and funny mixtape. BLACKPRINT is one of the most immediate and memorable releases of this year. I do wonder how much support she has in the U.K. I feel that her music should be played on our stations. There will definitely be demand for her to come and play for us:

“A proud Yorta Yorta, Dja Dja Wurrung, Kalkadoon and Yirendali sovereign woman, Miss Kaninna relishes in calling out “Aussie-Aussie-Aussie/ Oi-Oi-Oi” chanters (mad props) and gets dirty/freaky in a casually graphic way (eg. “Do the splits lickin’ back on a dick” – the Parental Advisory Explicit Content sticker is valid). “I ain’t afraid to take it there” is an understatement. Sorry not sorry, prudes, Miss Kaninna’s not for you.

She’s hilarious, too: “Mug too fug, I had to go celibate.”

BLACKPRINT mixtape is great party music, but it’s born from resistance. She’s all about educating people the world over on the true history of “so-called Australia”, with a focus on Indigenous land rights, preserving the oldest living culture on Earth and fostering Black power. Every single word on here is worth memorising.

With its hi-hat-heavy beat, CHAT MY SHIT references old-school hip hop. This intro cut runs for one minute only, but cuts to the chase: “I’m Indigenous so you know you gon’ be feelin’ this and if you don’t then you’re prob’ly white supremacist… I got land back on my mind and I’m looking for a fight.”

The title track opens with a tweaky drone, before thwacking drums bring it home; the big-beat mayhem of Smack My Bitch Up by The Prodigy is referenced on this one. Listen out for the sound of silence, used to spectacular effect in the track’s final quarter.

Slinky bass glides through the creepy-hot LOOK AT ME NOW (feat. Kobie Dee). Sax is used sparingly, hitting like sprinklings of gold dust.

Bass notes played on piano, blazing electric guitar licks, clanking sounds that bring RATM to mind – her nuanced beats are delightfully unpredictable with a live-sounding edge.

“FUCK YOU, BITCH!” – HANDOUT, which features Waanyi/Gangaliida MC Jamahl Yami, opens with a bang. Miss Kaninna’s scattergun rapping astounds while she dismantles white Australia’s systemic racism. Inspired percussion drops later in the arrangement and the dancefloor beckons.

When her delivery hits boiling point, we hear Kelis’s Caught Out There choruses (the fuming “I hate you so much right now!” parts) as an influence.

“You hide behind your screen but ima meet you at your front door, BITCH!” – the hectic STOLEN WAGES veers into punk-rock territory while exposing cyclic dispossession.

A self-described “Black pop baddie”, Miss Kaninna is ultimately a truthteller. She’s furious about injustice, but also chic and unmesswithable.

Miss Kaninna’s braggadocio is warranted (“Deadly bitch ’til the day I die”). Bring on the debut album!”.

I am going to finish things here. The sensational Miss Kaninna is an artist that you definitely need to know. She is simply incredible. Go and check out BLACKPRINT. It is a mesmerising project. There is going to be that excitement around a debut album. This Australian-born queen is…

A major talent.

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Follow Miss Kaninna

FEATURE: Wonderful Teachers, Ready to Teach Me… Those Who Inspired and Shaped Kate Bush’s Connection to Dance

FEATURE:

 

 

Wonderful Teachers, Ready to Teach Me…

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1979/PHOTO CREDIT: Gered Mankowitz

  

Those Who Inspired and Shaped Kate Bush’s Connection to Dance

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PRIOR to coming to the last features of this year…

IN THIS PHOTO: Lindsay Kemp onstage in his production, Flowers, in which he played the lead role of Divine (in 1975, Kate Bush saw Kemp for the first time in a performance in Bloomsbury, London)/PHOTO CREDIT: Getty Images

and doing stuff aimed at the Kate Bush Christmas market – gift ideas for new fans -, there are some other features I want to cover off. As I have said in a previous feature, I am exploring once more Graeme Thomson’s Under the Ivy: The Life and Music of Kate Bush. Going from the start to the very end, I am thinking about Kate Bush’s early life and career. Something I have talked about again but wanted to approach from a different slant, her love of dance is something that defined so much of her work. Some of those early Gered Mankowitz photos focusing on Kate Bush as a dancer, rather than a traditional artist. It is not the case that Bush always incorporated dance into her career. However, it was one of her earliest loves. Shy as a child and teenager (and an adult), the idea of committing to dance and expressing herself in quite an exaggerated and uninhabited manner, would have been terrified. So you wonder why she decided to pursue dance. Certainly, a lot of the music she grew up around and admired was by artists who were not necessarily dancers or were defined by dance. When she a student at St. Joseph's Convent Grammar School between 1969-1978, dance was part of her education. Though, like everything, it was quite formal and impersonal. Bush did not get along with her dance teacher. Perhaps because of their contrasting personalities. Bush, even so young, ambitious and someone who was not conventional and did not want to be bound by strictures and conventional teaching. Even though she would have been stimulated and wrote poetry, her experiences at school were largely unhappy and unsatisfying. Not getting the nourishment and inspiration that she would get elsewhere. Graeme Thomson notes how her bedroom at East Wickham Farm allowed her the privacy to work on routines to songs like The Beatles’ Eleonor Rigby. Whilst not the go-to when you think of danceable tracks, she had a wide range of records at her disposal, so I don’t think she was limited to 1960s Pop.

However, that idea of taking this fascinating with movement and dance and bringing it into public. She could dance freely and without shyness at home, only wary that a parent or brother might walk in and catch her. Worried they might laugh or she would be embarrassed. Of course, as she knew that she would have to take classes and be around other people, her first steps into dance were tentative or largely unspectacular. In the sense that she was not an instantly great dancer. The gap between Bush singing with EMI and going into the studio to record her debut, The Kick Inside, in 1978 allowed her time to muse and think about what to do. She thought about her appearances, physicality and her body. Naturally, that would lead her to dance. There would have been moments in the Bush household at East Wickham Farm where the family danced, though it was not part of her day-to-day routine. Her first eye-opening moment was watching a production by a dance teacher who would make an enormous impact. One honoured in the opening song of The Kick Inside, Moving. Lindsay Kemp’s production of Flowers, which was a re-imagining of Jean Genet’s 1943 novel, Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs (Our Lady of the Flowers), played at the Collegiate Theatre in Bloomsbury, London, and then at The Roundhouse. Bush was not exactly a stranger to unconventional or esoteric art. If those are the right word. Her brother Jay’s poetry was often quite dark and unusual. In terms of the books she read and the culture that was in her household, it was different from a lot of her schoolfriends. Though Flowers was a mind-altering moment for Kate Bush. Populated by drag queens, sailors and murderers, it is a production that might raise eyebrows and see backlash today. Showing how we have not really progressed or evolved. I am not sure what the wider reaction to Flowers was when it was staged in 1975. For Bush, it was impactful enough that she would leave school and following her love of physical movement. If you feel her seeing the final gig of David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust in 1973 was pivotal in terms of pursuing music and that love of live music, Lindsay Kemp was this figure who captivated Kate Bush. In the sense he could communicate so strongly without opening his mouth or using words. Bush knew something was missing in her music. The expression in her music.

You can feel this in The Kick Inside. The person who crushed the lily in her soul, as Kate Bush sings, is Lindsay Kemp. In the sense he unlocked something in her. Brought out this confidence. Fifty years ago, in 1976, Bush took drop-in mime lessons for 50p a session. She couldn’t enrol in a dance school, as she had no formal qualifications and nobody would admit her. David Bowie was one of Kemp’s students, so that also would have appealed and spoke to Kate Bush. Lindsay Kemp’s mime and dance classes was not about “who and what you were; it was about what you could become”. Graeme Thomson notes how “It’s not acting, it’s emotional amplification; finding the right part of her character to accentuate in order to represent the emotions of her songs, dissolving the fixed parameters of the corporeal into the amorphous, ever-changing “moving liquid” alter ego, bursting through boundaries and rolling over obstacles”. When Kemp went to Australia to tour, Bush began studying with American mime artist, Adam Darius. He taught at the Dance Centre down Floral Street in London’s Covent Garden. When Darius moved his classes to Elephant and Castle, Kate Bush followed him. These teachers imparted discipline and routine, but there was the visceral and unconventional, rather than the formal. Aside from Lindsay Kemp and Adam Darius, Robin Kovac was also hugely important. The routine for Wuthering Heights (Bush’s 1978 debut single) was choreographed by Kovac. She was an English Literature, Dance and Drama graduate of Florida State University. Kovac was instantly struck with Kate Bush and loved having her in the class. Bush modestly felt she was useless at the start, Bush became frustrated and depressed she could not absorb and nail the routines. Though Kovac said how it takes a decade to become a good dance, Bush was a fluid, astute and dedicated student and soon vastly improved.

“Kovac taught a contemporary style, with touches of jazz, heavily influenced by Martha Graham’s ‘contractions’. Anyone who has seen Bush’s early videos and live performances will immediately recognise the following description: “Contractions begin in the stomach, as if someone knifed you, and you just press back, rounding the back,” says Kovac. “It’s not that you’re getting smaller, you’re actually getting bigger in the back, like a bow, but it’s called contraction because you’re lifting up and away from the legs. The body must flow through that, because you’ve started an impulse, spreading through the body”. Kovac’s classes at the Dance Centre attracted actors. She also taught, as we learn from Graeme Thomson’s book, at Rose Bruford College in Sidcup, not far from Welling. By the time Bush called Robin Kovac to choregraph for her at very short notice, she would have been living at 44, Wickham Road with her brothers.  This request was for the Wuthering Heights video. Kovac charged £30, and in her flat in Archway Road, this iconic routine was taking shape. Although Bush forgot to credit Kovac when asked who choregraphed the video – she said she was influenced by Lindsay Kemp -, Bush did write a very sincere and sweet letter of apology when learning about her rare lack of manners and accreditation. I want to come to the last teacher, Anthony Van Laast. Adam Darius’s teaching was all about emotional release. Bush was able to overcome inhibitions and a lack of self-confidence. The ability to express her physical side was of paramount importance. Even if the media focused on her voice, looks and mocked her, Bush’s movement and dancing was enhancing her videos and live performances.

The dance side was misunderstood and often ignored. Bush recalled how her father said she used to dance to music on the telly but, after some people walked in, saw her, and then laughed, she was embarrassed and stopped. If there is one missing chapter from Kate Bush’s career that I am desperate to discover and uncover, is what form her reconnection with dance took when she recorded Hounds of Love. I am not sure whether it was Anthony van Laast who worked with her. Her association with Van Laast pre-dates 1979 and The Tour of Life. He appeared in the video for Hammer Horror. That was the first single from her 1978 album, Lionheart. This feature about The Tour of Life talks about Anthony Van Laast:

“But then Bush was big news. Her star had been arcing across the firmament ever since she first appeared on Top Of The Pops just over a year earlier. That memorable performance, playing her first single, Wuthering Heights, had introduced her as an utterly new and fresh talent. There had been an instant clamour for her to play live, though it would be 14 months before she did.

Looking at Nationwide from the vantage point of 2014, it’s amazing how much unguarded access she granted the filmmakers over a six-month build-up. Footage of early production meetings where people are crammed onto chairs and sofas in a tiny dressing room is followed by a clip of a leotard-and-leggings-clad Bush being worked hard by choreographer Anthony Van Laast during three initial weeks of “gruelling exertion” just to prepare her for several weeks of even more intense choreography.

Remarkably, the camera was allowed into Wood Wharf Studio in Greenwich, south London, where the singer was drilling her eight-piece band through Kite and Wow. Here, it’s possible to get a real sense of the pub gigs she’d started out playing just a couple of years before. “I think the main reason they listen to me is because I’m paying their wages,” she says of the rest of the band, her girlish, sing-song voice cut with chewy south London vocals”.

Alongside Lindsay Kemp, Adam Darius and Robin Kovac, Anthony Van Laast was a valuable and incredible teacher. I am curious whether there were any other dance instructors and choreographers that Bush worked with in the 1980s and 1990s. I will come to that thought in a second. However, there is this other article that also discusses Anthony Van Laast and Kate Bush collaborating for The Tour of Life. One of the most intense periods of her creative life in terms of the physicality required, it would have been a real tough period preparing for an international tour:

“Planning for Bush’s tour (known then and during its existence just as the Kate Bush Tour) began at the end of December 1978 with a brainstorming session involving Bush and set designer David Jackson at EMI’s headquarters. Further preliminary meetings were held at East Wickham Farm in January, and shortly afterwards Bush was meeting wardrobe consultant Lisa Hayes. Rehearsals then began in earnest: Bush spent mornings at The Place performance center in Euston, preparing the tour’s dance routines with choreographer Anthony Van Laast (now of Mamma Mia! and Harry Potter fame) and dancers Stewart Avon Arnold and Gary Hurst. These sessions were as collaborative as they were instructive: Bush had worked with Van Laast before, as he’d appeared in the “Hammer Horror” music video as her masked dancing partner. They spent the mornings designing routines for the show, informed by Van Laast’s seasoned dancing skill and Bush’s mime training. It was a positive union: the resulting concerts have notable dancing which is inseparable from the songs it’s set to. As Bush had to both sing and dance onstage, she and Van Laast worked out choreography that would both work as dance and allow her to sing without losing her breath. The minimalism of “Moving” and Bush’s all-limb gesturing during it is one such careful work of planning, as is her most frenetic gun-happiness during the extended bridge of “James and the Cold Gun,” where she doesn’t sing”.

There were definitely periods where Bush let her dance instruction and training lapse. She needed it for The Tour of Life, and you can feel a physicality in videos for 1980’s Never for Ever and 1982’s The Dreaming. It is clear, whilst producing The Dreaming, she ate junk food and there were these exhausting night and days recording. She suffered from nervous exhaustion and, for Hounds of Love, she incorporated a healthier diet and a recommitment to dance into her life. In addition to this, rather than record out of multiple expensive studios, Bush had built a bespoke studio at her family’s home at East Wickham Farm. I am interested who she called on for Hounds of Love. I do know that the legendary Diane Grey choregraphed the spellbinding video for Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God). I feel there was a period after Hounds of Love and during The Sensual World (1989) where dance was less at the fore. By the time of The Red Shoes and the Kate Bush-penned/directed/starring The Line, the Cross and the Curve, came out in 1993, it seemed that she was once more immersed in dance. Or that the videos and film required a certain physicality. Lindsay Kemp appeared in the film, so I am not sure whether he helped with any of the choreography and provided any training and instruction. Regardless, we can see some incredible people who helped Bush unlock this immense and profound physicality and expression.

From her eyes being opened by Lindsay Kemp’s Flowers and the friendship they enjoyed (Kemp sadly died in 2018), through to the underrated importance of Robin Kovac, the connection Bush forged with Adam Darius, through to the brilliant Anthony Van Last and Diane Grey, these passionate and impactful teachers helped take Kate Bush from this shy but eager student to this captivating and world-class dancer. Her videos and live work immeasurably enhanced and enriched. I have not even talked about George Gurdjieff (who she name-checks in The Kick Inside’s Them Heavy People (“They open doorways that I thought were shut for good/They read me Gurdjieff and Jesu/They build up my body, break me emotionally/It's nearly killing me, but what a lovely feeling”), and The Fourth Way: “Gurdjieff taught that most people live in a state of "waking sleep"—acting on mechanical habits, conditioning, and automatic reactions without true self-awareness. To break this sleep, traditional paths required leaving the world to practice as a fakir (focusing on the physical body), a monk (focusing on emotion and faith), or a yogi (focusing on the mind)”. I will close here. I am going to write a lot more features around Graeme Thomson’s Under the Ivy: The Life and Music of Kate Bush, as there are things that I wrote about a while ago but wasn’t to reapproach, reassess and reframe, and things I missed or briefly alluded to at other times. It has been a pleasure discussing dance, movement and incredible people who brought something almost spiritual and transcendent out of Kate Bush. To them, fans around the world…

OFFER eternal thanks.

FEATURE: Full English? Kate Bush and a Particular Kind of Cultural Influence

FEATURE:

 

 

Full English?

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1980/PHOTO CREDIT: Adrian Boot

 

Kate Bush and a Particular Kind of Cultural Influence

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I have touched on this before…

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in an outtake from the Lionheart (her second studio album) cover shoot of August 1978/PHOTO CREDIT: Gered Mankowitz

but I am coming back to Graeme Thomson’s must-own book, Under the Ivy: The Life and Music of Kate Bush. I am utilising this book for the next two features. Starting from the beginning, I was caught by something that was raised early on. In terms of Kate Bush and the nature of Englishness. Of course, she was born in England (in Bexleyheath, Kent), and she has lived in England her entire life. In many ways, Kate Bush is a quintessential English artist. Most of her influences were born in the country. Her mannerisms, love of tea and so many areas of life do rather define her as n English artist. And yet, there is also this Irish blood running through her. Not literally. More of a connection to her late mother, who was born in Ireland. I don’t think you can say that Kate Bush is 100% English. I always associate her with being half-Irish. When she was growing up and living at East Wickham Farm, she was living in a middle-class household in a nice neighbourhood. I have been there a couple of times, and East Wickham Farm is this rural property surrounded by older houses and more modern builds. It is this jewel in a long street in South East London. Formerly part of Kent, there was not a lot of international exposure. In the sense that her street would be largely composed of English residents. However, she travelled widely and was in London a lot. In terms of the music that was played in the Bush household, there was a lot of English Folk. Irish music and influence from her mother. Her brother Paddy, who played on most of her studio albums, favoured less traditional or obvious music. All sorts of sounds and genres exposed to his sister. That would occur throughout her career. Esoteric and slightly unusual, that extended to instrumentation as well. Though I think that most of the music a young Kate (or Catherine) Bush gravitated towards was English. Elton John a particular hero. She listened to David Bowie and Roxy Music. Though she also brought in Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart and music beyond the U.K.

In the 1960s, this was a time when The Beatles exploded. The music of that decade defined by incredible English artists. The Rolling Stones and The Kinks among the very best. Into the 1970s, Kate Bush also fell under the spell of Pink Floyd. Graeme Thomson notes some of the literary influences and loves of a young Kate Bush. Works that she treasured into adulthood. J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan (which was referenced in more than one song; In Search of Peter Pan among them). Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, and Oscar Wilde’s The Happy Prince. That “aching sense of loss and deep-rooted Englishness” exists in so much of her music.  Although she would have loved The Kinks and The Small Faces, her music does not have the kitchen-sink vignettes of the former or the impishness of the latter. Bush connected, as Thomson observes, “with a harder, more mythical England, a pre-Christian Celtic land, a deep, green dream of a country that has never truly existed except buried deep within our own minds”. I do love that thought. I could imagine how Bush connected with the grand old gardens she had access to as a child. She would go seeking and search at Hall Place at Old Bexley. Bush was a fan of Ealing comedies, children’s books and cheesy T.V. shows that were very English at their heart. This idea of roaming in wild flowers and rustic climbs. A land of ghouls and phantoms. Even if there was this enormous influence from her mother’s Irish heritage, so much of Kate Bush’s young being and mindset was around a certain type of Englishness. There was this “yearning to return to uncomplicated, instructive modes of behaviour, an acute sensitivity to the crackle and static of real life”. The early photos her brother John (Jay) took of her at East Wickham Farm. The ivy and tall walls. A decerped barn and leaf-strewn pool. The “open fires and old bellows”.

If Bush has grown up in London, perhaps she would have had a more cosmopolitan experience. Life at East Wickham Farm was a treasure trove of discovery and realisation. The cover to Lionheart. It suggests a world of hidden spaces, dark corners with peace and solitude. A little later on, Bush talks about her parents. Her father, Robert, was born in a village in English. Not from a privileged family, he was very smart and won a place at medical school to train to become a doctor. He served in the army and when Kate Bush’s eldest brother John was born (in 1944), Dr. Bush served in the army whilst his wife, Hannah (who was a staff nurse) was at home caring for her first child. If Kate Bush was closer ion resemblance to her mother, in terms of her mannerisms and personality, her father the dominant force. Bush having that same calm and patience. Her voice and speech more similar to his. There is no doubt that so much of Bush’s earliest work was about England. This older and more mythical view. Something romantic. World away from the realities of cities in the 1970s and 1980s. Not to say that Bush was shielded away as a child. It is true that most of her musical and cultural touchpoints were English. In terms of her Irishness, Bush had this warmth and ability to welcome and embrace everyone. That came from her mother. There are articles that examines English aspects and themes in Bush’s music. When writing about Oh England My Lionheart (from 1978’s Lionheart), Dreams of Orgonon explored the Englishness and Britishness of Bush’s music:

“It’s difficult to imagine Kate Bush heralding from any place except England. It’s certainly easy to understand why she’s popular in countries outside the U.K., but Bush is a uniquely English phenomenon. She came from pastoral England and often sings about British culture. Her work, especially on Lionheart, is full of allusions to English and Irish folklore, and she’s predominantly influenced by British music (glam rock was also a chiefly UK-locked phenomenon). Unlike most British rock singers, Bush doesn’t shy away from singing in an English accent, as she herself has pointed out. Bush is uniquely hard to categorize as an artist, but she’s consistently staked herself out as an English singer.

Even more than most of her albums, Lionheart is cohesively British. This is reflected by such songs as “In Search of Peter Pan” and “Wow,” both of which pile on staples of British culture, and the album’s title. “Lionheart” is a word mostly associated with England, conjuring up images of Richard the Lionheart and British staunchness. Its connotation is of fearlessness and an endless march, of “God Save the Queen” and Trafalgar. Even the cover of Lionheart suggests frigidity: Kate Bush sits in an attic with gold cloth draped around her, perched on top of a wooden chest, with a stuff lion’s face resting on the floor next to her. There’s a standoffishness to it which the anabatic, orientalist cover of The Kick Inside lacks. The cover suggests that this is a more serious album, one that’s placing itself in a lineage of British stalwarts”.

I don’t think that Bush was tipping into nationalism. It could be perceived as that. She was not a political songwriter or someone who was trying to stir up division and controversy. This 2024 article celebrated Kate Bush’s music. With its “haunting mysticism and eccentric charm, offers an unexpected gateway to English identity and culture”. Bush was not someone trying to define herself as English and wave the flag. I feel it was just that so much of her upbringing and tastes was to English cinema, T.V., literature and music. Though she would sing in different accents and weaves instruments from around the world into her music. The article also asks this: “Doesn’t much of the joy of life lie in noticing the small things that make us who we are?”. Fascinating and compelling points to consider:

“Everything I do is very English and I think that’s one reason I’ve broken through to a lot of countries.’ All I had to go on was Lionheart, which contained many clues, several of which, like references to Hammer Film Studios and the TV show The Sweeney, would only, in those pre-internet days, be clearly understood many years later. The melancholy closing track, ‘Oh England, My Lionheart’, is a concentrate of references that would certainly sound familiar to a British person – wassailing, London Bridge, abandoned air-raid shelters ‘blooming clover’, Peter Pan stealing children in Kensington Park, Shakespeare, the timeless poetic course of the river Thames, the ravens in the Tower – but which, to a French person trying to imagine them, sounded wonderfully strange and exotic. There was also a sense of almost post-apocalyptic loss about the song, which spurred me on to find out more about the things Bush appeared to locate in a paradise lost.

Bush’s songbook was to me a primer for learning English and becoming attuned to a British accent, though as Graeme Thomson has pointed out in Under The Ivy, his comprehensive and recently updated biography of the artist, Bush, who enjoys modulating and distorting her pretty voice, has also sung in Australian, Irish, French and German accents and ‘has impersonated a donkey, a witch, a bird and an enchanted house’. Through her songs I, a French outsider, was first shown a glimpse of the cultural landscape that had shaped her.

Bush is a cinematic songwriter. The inspiration for the song ‘Wuthering Heights’ came to her not from the novel but rather from a scene in a 1970 adaptation that showed ‘a hand coming through the window’. The song ‘Hounds of Love’, about the panic nature of love, opens with the thrilling line: ‘It’s in the trees! It’s coming!’ from the 1957 British horror film Night of the Demon and the video pays homage to Hitchcock’s 39 Steps, with a dash of the 1945 supernatural portmanteau film Dead of Night. I was living in England by the time Bush released The Red Shoes in 1993, and I enjoyed the confirmation of her allegiance to the distinctly English films of Powell and Pressburger. With their dreamlike interplay of historical timelines, A Canterbury Tale and A Matter of Life and Death always put me in mind of how, in ‘Oh England, My Lionheart’, Bush compresses thousands of years of national history into the line: ‘Dropped from my black spitfire to my funeral barge”.

This podcast finds Graeme Thomson discussing Kate Bush’s Irish roots. A podcast about artists who are actually Irish. Give Kate Bush Back to the Irish is what the episode is called. To this day, we talk about Kate Bush as a narrowly English artist. I guess that is fair enough, as she herself has so many English qualities and influences. I would be interested to read a book or article that charts Kate Bush’s global connections. In terms of where she travelled and promoted her work. Sounds and instruments from different countries. If a lot of it has its core in England, we find that Bush is not strictly 100% English in that sense. In terms of her fanbase and famous admirers, they come from far and wide. She has a massive following in American now. Australia and Japan. Countries she visited, they understood and connected with her long before the U.S. did. In examining Kate Bush’s upbringing and Englishness, do we also bring in themes such as race and class? Bush was comfortably middle-class, with very few of her songs documenting working-class worlds and characters. In terms of her sound and music tastes, very little in terms of Black influence. Personally, I don’t find this problematic. Bush not being exclusionary or ignorant of other classes and races. It was a life in 1950s, '60s and '70s England. Living outside of the city in a suburban street, one can forgive Bush for not having a certain diversity, worldliness or understanding or worlds and people beyond her family home. It brings me to another Dreams of Orgonon article. This one about James and the Cold Gun. Included on Bush’s 1978 debut album, The Kick Inside, Bush’s ideas of England are pastoral and middle-class, rather than the more cosmopolitan and diverse England that was prominent in large cities:

“There is another distinctive element of Genesis that Bush’s work inherits: Englishness. While the predominant trend in British rock was to pluck from American music to make it big, Genesis came from a school of art that looked to its homeland for its stories. There’s a pastoral quality to much of their music that’s more at home in a tradition with As You Like It than The Great Gatsby. English land and politics come into Gabriel-era Genesis songs quite often, and Bush’s nurturing relationship with British mythos bears similarities to this approach (which will come to a crescendo in “O England My Lionheart”).

Furthermore, the Englishness of Bush’s vocals is also similar to Genesis. In a 1985 interview, Bush distinguishes between British artists who sang in English accents (David Bowie and Roxy Music) and those who sang with American voices (she cites Elton John, Robert Palmer, and Robert Plant). Bush expresses a preference for the former tradition, perhaps liking the familiarity of it. Peter Gabriel fits into this tradition well enough, articulating syllable endings that Mick Jagger would spit across the vocal booth. When Bush works in disparate genres, she brings her own English vision to them (Bush’s vision of Englishness is of course deeply middle class and white. There’s a conspicuous absence of working class people in most of her music, although we’ll get to the exceptions soon enough)”.

There have been articles where Kate Bush’s name has been used when talking about English nationalism. This article from The Guardian says this of Kate Bush: “She could not be anything but English”. Rather than Kate Bush ignoring everything other than English, I do feel that there was a certain commercial lure to Englishness in the 1970s and 1980s. When Bush spoke with Melody Maker in 1978 and talked about Oh England My Lionheart, she fought back against those who feel the song is sloppy and old slosh. An area she wanted to explore, Bush observed how “Everything I do is very English, and I think that's one reason I've broken through to a lot of countries. The English vibe is very appealing”. One could say that a slightly narrow Englishness to her early work was a reason why Bush never resonated with American audiences. It was not conscious on her part. There is never this feeling of rallying around the flag or anything like this. Bush understood the international lure of Englishness, but this was the world Bush was brought up in. I don’t think her distinct Englishness is something that is a negative or damages her work. So much of her music is about characters and takes from literature, film and T.V., rather than anything strictly or problematically English. And bands like The Kinks could also be seen as extremely English. In terms of the scenes they create and the people they discuss. Bush, I feel, more wide-ranging and worldly. Maybe her earliest work was largely placed in an English world, from The Dreaming onwards, Bush took us to foreign war grounds, Australia, America, Ireland and far beyond. This coincided with her travelling more and being introduced to all kinds of music. As I mention, there is probably a book in this. At sixty-eight, Bush still resides in England and has not drastically changed her life since she was born. Though her work has reached the entire world and I don’t think you could see her entire catalogue as distinctly and rigidly English. Anyway, I was compelled to dig deeper after re-reading Under the Ivy: The Life and Music of Kate Bush and considering her Englishness. Whether it was an issue or something that is charming and intriguing. An English birth and Irish heritage, the divine Kate Bush is an…

INTERNATIONAL icon.

FEATURE: Exploring John Carder Bush’s Kate: Inside the Rainbow: Yellow, Green, Blue: The Final Albums of the 1980s

FEATURE:

 

 

Exploring John Carder Bush’s Kate: Inside the Rainbow

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1989

 

Yellow, Green, Blue: The Final Albums of the 1980s

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I am covering…

a few colours in this series, as I have spent a lot of time in the ‘red’ portion of the rainbow and sort of run out of room almost, so I am covering there colours here. It is appropriate, as I am going from Hounds of Love through to The Sensual World. There was this evolution and change, so there is a lot to cover. The final part of this series with take us into indigo and violet. Into The Red Shoes, the final notes John Carder Bush includes in his book, Kate: Inside the Rainbow. The penultimate edition takes us from page 169. This is the video for The Big Sky. This was one of Bush’s earliest videos as a director. Imaginative and full of different characters, Carder Bush observes how “The video shoot for ‘The Big Sky’ was lots of fun; a kind of ‘Mary Poppins rooftops of London’ set and that beautiful bird. It was one of those videos that when, during the breaks, you would come across groups of extras in incongruous combinations of characters; an astronaut and a kamikaze, Baron von Richthofen chatting to a bunch of US marines and jet fighter pilots playing electrical guitars next to Superman”. We then see the amazing photos for the cover of Hounds of Love. For the album’s second side, The Ninth Wave. They are some of the most memorable photos John Carder Bush took of his sister. Kate Bush looking amazing. Aside from the colour scheme, which is purple and pink, there is one particular shot, on page 174, of Bush with silver dragon earrings. Even if the shot is romantic and has this sensuality and calm, there is something fierce and proud when it comes to these earrings. Bush showing that she had this strength and fire inside her, I feel. Bush’s make-up is incredible. Purple eyeshadow and pink/red lipstick. Her hair flowing on this purple backdrop, I wonder what the inspiration was for the shot. One of the most enduring images of Kate Bush.

Though, as we know, Hounds of Love’s cover has Bush’s two dogs, Bonnie and Clyde, with her. Before getting to The Sensual World on page 232, we do get this series of photos. Bush behind the camera when she was directing videos. She directed the videos for Hounds of Love and The Big Sky. Lots of really interesting photos from the sets. When she was in the Cloudbusting video. Playing the part of Peter Reich, this is what Kate Bus said of Cloudbusting: “It’s a song with a very American inspiration, which draws its subject from ‘A Book Of Dreams’ by Peter Reich. The book was written as if by a child who was telling of his strange and unique relationship with his father. They lived in a place called Organon, where the father, a respected psycho-analyst, had some very advanced theories on Vital Energy; furthermore, he owned a rain-making machine, the Cloudbuster. His son and he loved to use it to make it rain. Unfortunately, the father was imprisoned because of his ideas. In fact, in America, in that period, it was safer not to stick out. Sadly, the father dies in prison. From that point on, his son becomes unable to put up with an orthodox lifestyle, to adapt himself. The song evokes the days of happiness when the little boy was making it rain with his father - Yves Bigot, ‘Englishwoman Is Crossing The Continents’. Guitares et Claviers (France), February 1986”. It takes us to The Sensual World. I think the cover is the best one from Kate Bush. Many might say Hounds of Love is the very best. Others would say Never for Ever. I do feel that The Sensual World is the standout. In  terms of the composition of Bush with a flower covering her mouth. It is such a beautiful and striking image, so I was interesting to hear from John Carder Bush how he came about this concept. He writes how “I had shown Kate the beautiful edition of the book Ordeal by Roses, and she had been drawn immediately to one particular photo, so, yes, the way this shot is printed and lit is inspired by the iconic shot of the Japanese novelist Yukio Mishima by Eikoh Hosoe. Although one eye is in the shadow, it looks lit in the same way as the one not in shadow. But there the resemblance ends; or does it? They are both holding a rose … The rose, the most sensual flower, with its perfume, its elegant beauty, its passionate colour and, of course, its thorns, is like love itself. Whereas Mishima has a challenging flint in his eye, Kate is full of trepidation, yet her posture is very upright and challenging. Mishima wants what he senses; Kate is not so sure, and this is much more interesting. The background was a Spanish shawl of Vivienne’s. However, one of the biggest differences is that the Mishima shot was taken on a small ‘spy cameras’ to be able to harden and contrast the image when printed, and mine was taken with a Hasselblad with the intention of creating subtle skin tones while still retaining the impact of the idea of the two eyes”. I did not know any of this. I assumed that there was a link to Ulysses.

This is the novel that inspired The Sensual World’s title track. Or the soliloquy from Molly Bloom. She could not use the text, so she came up with her own words. I was not aware how John Carder Bush and his sister decided on the photo and its background. We do see the colour version of the album cover, but the black-and-white is better in my view. Like a classic Hollywood actress or an artist’s muse, you feel all this intent and emotion in Kate Bush’s eyes. We also learn about the shoot for This Woman’s Work. A single that was released in 1989, it was first used for John Hughes’s film, She’s Having a Baby, in 1988. It does seem to be one of those shots that had no specific concept or direction. Bush shot in black-and-white with her head in her hands. It is a beautiful shot. The final part of this series is brief. The notes from John Carder Bush about The Red Shoes. He did shoot his sister up to and including her 2011 album, Director’s Cut. There are a couple of shots from 50 Words for Snow. So he has been involved with almost every album. I am not sure why he did not take shots for 2005’s Aerial. Trevor Leighton dealing with those promotional images. No real insight why John Carder Bush was subbed there. However, you feel like he will be behind the camera again when Bush decides to release another album. I love the photos during The Sensual World. Kate Bush looking so happy and relaxed. That move from Hounds of Love to her final album of the 1980s. She was now in her thirties, and her music was exploring new subjects.

Bush more aware of age and ageing. The Sensual World a more feminine album than The Dreaming (1982) or Hounds of Love. I think the photos her brother took in 1989 are some of the very best. She looks amazing and so happy. You can tell that here was someone she was at ease with. Having been his photographic subject for decades, Kate Bush is at her very best. From the iconic shots for the Hounds of Love cover and images captured during her videos, there are also others that many people would not have seen, Guido Harari also photographing her for Hounds of Love and The Sensual World. He would photograph her for The Red Shoes and the short film, The Line, the Cross and the Curve. Both of these incredible photographers bringing layers and different sides from Kate Bush. I love those words about the cover shoot for The Sensual World. What the inspiration was. There are so many connections to literature, art and film throughout Kate Bush’s career. Few artists have that same depth and variety. In terms of the links to various films, T.V. shoes, works of literature and beyond. It is sad to wrap up this series. I realise I have covered a few colours o the rainbow in this feature, but I misjudged thigs at the start, so we get a lot of shades of red and I did need to go through the spectrum. However, even though the final part is brief, there is going to be plenty to say. The Red Shoes the last album John Carder Bush would shoot for until 2011. I do love Kate: Inside the Rainbow, and I would recommend that people buy it. All these incredible photographs that we do need to see in a gallery or exhibition. Some unforgettable images of…

HIS beloved sister.

FEATURE: In the Snow with Rosebud: Kate Bush’s King of the Mountain at Twenty-One

FEATURE:

 

 

In the Snow with Rosebud

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

 

Kate Bush’s King of the Mountain at Twenty-One

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IN terms of seismic…

single released, few were as big as Kate Bush and King of the Mountain. 1993’s The Red Shoes was her previous album. Aerial came out in November 2005. On 24th October, 2005, King of the Mountain arrived. It reached number four in the U.K. I think it is among her best singles. Though you feel songs like How to Be Invisible or Mrs. Bartolozzi could have been great singles, King of the Mountain was perhaps the most appropriate. Because it was written back in the 1990s and was the first thing on the album Bush wrote, maybe getting it out there after all those years was important. Also, its lyrics discuss Elvis Presley and this king of the mountain. The ideas that he is alive and is hidden away somewhere. It is about celebrity and fame. Bush theorising whether Presley is alive and has retreated from the spotlight. It is one of those great conspiracy but, alas, Presley did die in1977. Bush herself stepped away from the spotlight and started a family. Her son Bertie was born in 1998. The illustration you see on the single cover for King of the Mountain was by him. It is a fascinating and typically Kate Bush song. As it is twenty-one soon, it makes me wonder about her next single. King of the Mountain came out twelve years after The Red Shoes was released, but Bush had released music after 1993. Though this was a new single after such a long time. Now, it has been nearly fifteen years since she released a single. If you don’t count the recent Little Shrew (Snowflake). 50 Words for Snow’s Wild Man came out in October 2011. I don’t think a new Kate Bush single will feature her in it. King of the Mountain is the last time we will see her in a video. Bush was self-conscious and worried about her appearance. She is magnetic in the video, though I don’t think it was the most comfortable experience. Even so, the single and video was received with huge warmth. BBC Radio 2 gave it its premiere on 21st September 2005.

I recall when King of the Mountain came out. It was this massive moment. People not quite sure exactly when and if any new stuff from Kate Bush would arrive. It was also one of this song included in Bush’s 2014 residency, Before the Dawn. I am going to bring in some articles I may have sourced before, but there is very little written about King of the Mountain. This article takes from Tom Doyle’s book, Running Up That Hill: 50 Visions of Kate Bush. He interviewed Kate Bush in 2005 in promotion of Aerial:

“Aerial began with ‘King of the Mountain’, the first song Kate had written for the album. Its lyric explored the idea that Elvis Presley was alive and well and living in some remote, snowy, elevated location. More significantly, it was someone who’d had myths built around her, writing about another individual who’d had even greater myths built around him. It was essentially a song about fame.

‘There’s only three or four people who’ve been as famous as Elvis,’ Bush reckoned. ‘You’ve got Elvis, you’ve got Frank Sinatra . . . even Marilyn Monroe, I think it probably happened more after she died. But Sinatra and Elvis lived these lives that . . . I mean . . . I can’t imagine what it must have been like.

‘What a horrible nightmare. Particularly for somebody like Elvis. Because the impression I get was that he was fun-loving and just happened to be really gorgeous and sexy and talented. And I think, y’know, partly why people respond to him the way they do – and I really feel strongly about this – is that people [sense] an intention from somebody, whether it’s an actor or a singer. People felt that Elvis was a really genuinely sweet person and that’s why everybody loves him so much. Not that I know a great deal about Elvis, but I thought he was a very beautiful- looking man with a fantastic voice and this fun-loving quality where you see he’s up there kind of taking the piss out of himself.’

I said I’d recently re-watched Presley’s 1970 Vegas-era documentary, That’s the Way It Is, and it had struck me that it often must have been a real laugh being Elvis.

‘Well, I hope it was. What I see is somebody who was a sweetheart in the truest sense, just being eaten alive. To be as famous as he was . . . how could anybody survive that and still be a human being? I see him as being destroyed really by the fact that he was so famous. So I just love the idea of him being alive somewhere, away from all the people and the greed and the wanting to take him over”.

That idea that Elvis Presley was innocent and sweet and got eaten by fame. Maybe we forget some of the controversy and darker sides of him. Though he was hugely respected and undeniably brilliant, there were aspects that cannot be ignored or put down to the pressures of fame. Even so, he was one of the biggest artists ever and would have felt manipulated. Pressured and almost forced to keep recording, performing and being in films. I do wonder whether Kate Bush recognised some similarities. Not to the same extent, though she did have a hectic career. So much attention came her way, she would have been uncomfortable with some of it. Consciously stepping away from music for a bit to focus on herself and family, you can see some autobiography in King of the Mountain, even if Kate Bush rejects that notion. MOJO placed King of the Mountain thirty-sixth in a list of Kate Bush’s best songs: “The first song written (and partially recorded) for Aerial, in 1997, and the song that announced its completion eight years later, is an atmospheric meditation on the possibility that Elvis lives on in some iconic hinterland, sledging on Kane’s Rosebud. The slinky marimba groove, tough drums and skanky guitars (by Bush’s husband Dan McIntosh), provided an early clue this album would be unlike anything she’d done before, albeit reassuringly compelling and eccentric”. The Guardian said the following about King of the Mountain. They judged it as her eleventh-best single: “Comeback album Aerial wasn’t exactly overburdened with obvious singles. Perhaps the beautiful, sunlit Somewhere in Between might have worked out of context of the Sea of Honey song-suite, but instead Bush plumped for a song that involved her impersonating Elvis and knowingly ruminating on the benefits of withdrawing from the public eye”

There was so much anticipation. King of the Mountain released on 24th October, 2005. Then Aerial came out on 7th November. That period between getting this new Kate Bush single - the first in a while -, and then this double album. I wonder whether she considered releasing any other songs as singles. At this point, I feel Bush was more about albums. Rather than release multiple single, she wanted people to get the album and experience it as a whole. That is why she only released one single from her two albums after that (Deeper Understanding from 2011’s Director’s Cut and Wild Man from 50 Words for Snow, also 2011). I was not in Hammersmith at any of the twenty-two dates in 2014 to see this live. Though I can tell from the live album how atmospheric a performance it was. The crowd awe-struck by this song. It is among my favourites from Kate Bush. Twenty-one years after its release, there is now this wait once more. We have heard from Kate Bush fairly recently, so she is not hiding away. And yet, she is an artist that has so many fans and is loved around the world. I am not sure that she has the same stress and weight on her shoulders as she did in 1993 leading up to 2005. You do have to wonder what the next single will be about. Whether she will release one at all. She may just put an album out and that will be it. Twenty-one years after its release, King of the Mountain is still played on the radio. One of those songs that was huge in 2005, in terms of its significance, it also meant that Bush was still relevant and adored. Number four single and a number three album, that was some achievement, seeing as she had not released anything for a while. King of the Mountain, this wonderful and epic song from…

THIS music queen.