FEATURE: The Great American Songbook: Tinashe

FEATURE:

 

 

The Great American Songbook

 

Tinashe

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THE next instalment of this series…

will collate the work of an iconic American artist. However, you can say that Tinashe is definitely a modern-day role model and queen. An artist who inspires so many others. I wanted to explore her music for The Great American Songbook, as this Kentucky-raised artist, born Tinashe Jorgensen Kachingwe, has an incredible catalogue. One that does not get discussed and explored enough. A phenomenal songwriter and such a distinct voice in music, she has been compared to Janet Jackson, Aaliyah, and James Blake. Though her style and sound is very much her own. I will end this feature by compiling a twenty-song mix, that takes us from her 2014 debut album, Aquarius, to 2024’s Quantum Baby. She has collaborated with other artists, though I am going to keep this to her studio albums only. I will start out with AllMusic and their biography of the great Tinashe:

“Tinashe is a contemporary R&B artist who moves with ease -- and sometimes blurs the line -- between sensual slow jams and pop-flavored dance tracks. Having established herself as an actor and model, she made her commercial breakthrough in 2014 with the slinking "2 On," a platinum Top 40 hit collaboration with producer Mustard and guest rapper ScHoolboy Q. This led to a trio of full-length projects for RCA, including Aquarius (2014) and Nightride (2016), both of which went Top Ten R&B/hip-hop. She starred in the Emmy-nominated Rent: Live and charted with her first two independent LPs, Songs for You (2019) and 333 (2021), before she offered BB/ANG3L (2023) and Quantum Baby (2024), related short albums containing some of her most popular singles, including the Hot 100 hits "Nasty" and "No Broke Boys."

Before she made her recorded debut as a solo artist, the singer, songwriter, and producer born Tinashe Jorgensen Kachingwe was known for acting and modeling work. Originally from Lexington, Kentucky, she moved in the early 2000s to Los Angeles, where she established her acting career. Toward the end of that decade, she joined the Stunners, a short-lived teen pop group that recorded for Columbia and Republic and opened for Justin Bieber. After the group's 2011 split, Tinashe went solo with a low-key contemporary R&B direction, released a pair of 2012 mixtapes, and ultimately signed with major-label RCA. In 2013, she collaborated with Jacques Greene on the one-off track "Painted Faces" and released her third mixtape, Black Water, near the end of the year.

Tinashe made her RCA debut and commercial breakthrough in January 2014. The single "2 On," was released that month and reached number 24 on the Billboard Hot 100. It also peaked at number five on the R&B/hip-hop chart and eventually went platinum. Appearances on Erik Hassle's "Innocence Lost" and RZA's "Doctor" followed through that May. Her debut album, Aquarius, landed in October, debuted at number 17, and was given an additional boost from the gold-certified Stargate and Iggy Azalea collaboration "All Hands on Deck." The self-released Amethyst and RCA-issued Nightride mixtapes, along with numerous guest appearances and headlining singles, preceded Tinashe's second proper album. Boasting a guest list that included Offset, Ty Dolla $ign, and Future, Joyride arrived in April 2018 and entered the R&B/hip-hop chart at number 29.

After starring in the Emmy-nominated Rent: Live, Tinashe signed a management deal with Roc Nation and went independent with Songs for You, issued in November 2019. The holiday EP Comfort & Joy followed in 2020. Tinashe then unveiled a slew of singles, including the breezy "Bouncin'" and the Buddy collaboration "Pasadena," before she issued the full-length 333 in 2021. The album's 2022 deluxe edition included the single "Naturally." Tinashe guested on the Calvin Harris single "New to You," along with Offset and Normani, and made additional appearances on songs by Snakehips, Gryffin, Shygirl, and KYLE. Tinashe's slinking "Talk to Me Nice" and booming "Needs," respectively co-produced by the duos of Nosaj Thing and Scoop DeVille and Royce David and Jonny Made It, previewed BB/ANG3L, a 20-minute album that arrived in 2023. Within a year, she was back with Quantum Baby, another set of similar length. Closing track "Nasty," a collaboration with Ricky Reed and Zack Sekoff, became the singer's second Hot 100 single before she began a 2024-2025 world tour dubbed Match My Freak, named after the song's hook. "No Broke Boys," a Quantum Baby track, became a global hit when Disco Lines remixed it in 2025, making it Tinashe's second U.S. Top 40 hit”.

He most recent album, Quantum Baby, was the second part of a trilogy that started with 2023’s BB/Ang3l. You wonder how she is going to end that trilogy. She is such an incredible artist who has consistently put out genre-fusing and astonishing. A modern visionary who I feel is almost not given quite as much love as she deserves, it is a chance to salute a great. An American artist who will continue to push forward. As The Line of Best Fit said when closing their review of Quantum Baby: “The best part is she’s never satisfied staying still”. Who quite knows…

WHERE she’ll head next.

FEATURE: Speaking Words of Wisdom… Can Hollywood Ever Truly Evoke the Realities of Being a Major Artist?

FEATURE:

 

 

Speaking Words of Wisdom…

 

Can Hollywood Ever Truly Evoke the Realities of Being a Major Artist?

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THERE have been a fair amount of…

IN THIS PHOTO: Michaela Coel and Anne Hathaway in Mother Mary/PHOTO CREDIT: Eric Zachanowich/A24

films from the past few years where music is at the centre. Whether biopics or films where actors are playing artists, I do wonder whether Hollywood can ever truly portray the star power, complexities and realities of what it is like to be a major artist. The highs, lows and nuances. I raise this, as there was a recent article from Adrian Horton in The Guardian, who said that Mother Mary is the latest film to fail to convey the life of an arena-touring artist into a compelling and authentic cinematic experience. The film stars Anne Hathaway and Michaela Coel. It has won a lot of rave reviews. Many commending Anne Hathaway’s performance in the central role. This is what Empire said in their four-star review regarding the premise: “The set-up seems simple. On a Thursday, sad-girl pop star Mother Mary (Anne Hathaway) shows up at the offices of her former designer, Sam Anselm (Michaela Coel), and requests a dress to be made for her headline show that Sunday. The pair, it’s immediately clear, have not spoken in years, and Sam is not thrilled to see her. But against her better judgement, she agrees. Sam asks the singer to describe her thoughts and feelings, which she will then translate into her fashion, calling it a “transubstantiation of feeling” — the kind of lapsed-Catholic line that might be dismissed as pretension. But it speaks to a profound truism: that the creative process is effectively a search for the divine, for the metaphysical, the world beyond the visible”. In terms of its angle and straying away from a basic or cliché story of a major artist and their life, this is a great psychological drama. This is what Rolling Stone wrote in the conclusion of their review: “Having shifted the register into both spooky action and good old-fashioned spookiness, Mother Mary rushes headfirst into Giallo-colored delirium — and it’s here that the film either abandons you or works its way into your own psyche like a malevolent specter. Lowery is grasping at something that lies beyond the confines of genre flicks, cracked-up character studies, and highfalutin fashion dramas, and when he and his cast do tune into that desired frequency, it’s thrilling and unsettling in a way that’s hard to nail down. A certain leap of faith is required. But for those who believe that movies can get into your head and under your skin in ways that sometimes defy description, and tap into the same transcendent state that great pop music does — that sensation of temporarily floating into some other dizzying realm — this is for you. It isn’t the movie you think you’re walking into. Amen for that”.

I will drop in parts of that feature from The Guardian. However, I wonder what critics and cinema-goers are looking for when it comes to films that revolve around artists. Do they want to see the realities of touring life and the incredible highs, but also those backstage moments and the real tough times Many biopics have struggled because they are either whitewashing and sanitising too much )in the case of the recent Michael Jackson biopic, Michael), or they are seen as  getting the balance wrong. The actor playing an artist not convincing. The tone of the film being off-balance and jarring. It is very hard to get it right. With plans for a Julia Garner-starring Madonna biopic and a Joni Mitchell biopic slated, you do wonder if they will fail or manage to strike gold. When we think of fictional characters who are very similar to major Pop artists, perhaps Smile 2 and Skye Riley is one of the most gripping modern films. Released in 2024 and starring Naomi Scott, many compared Skye Riley to Lady Gaga. That is another psychological film. A Horror. There is the danger that, if a film around a massive artist is too straight and does not have edge or this original angle, then it might come off as too flat or boring. These are interesting takeaways from that article on The Guardian’s website:

“By all accounts, the pop elements of Mother Mary, meant to color a character whose relationship to fandom serves as an overarching metaphor, were made with great reverence for an artform often easily dismissed as, well, easy. On the Popcast, Hathaway waxes poetic about studying pop music like an academic, and Mother Mary certainly appears erudite – speaking nonsense, sure, but well-versed in the precise choreography, deific grace and outsized persona of an archetypical pop star. But the effect is not, as FKA twigs put it in the same interview, “total feeling” despite imperfect approximation. It is the opposite, and the latest disappointing example of a nagging paradox: pop’s power is everywhere – commanding evermore feelings, attention and fan investment – yet almost nowhere, at least convincingly, in film and TV

Mother Mary, to be fair, sets itself the very difficult task of not only convincing us of the music’s reality but also its fictional popularity, a thing which requires ineffable star quality – that quicksilver thing that makes a certain performer pop on camera, or why, say, Harry Styles stood out in One Direction – that definitionally cannot be created, only trained. The impossibility of reverse alchemy, of creating the matter of cultural legend, is the same reason why Amazon’s splashy Daisy Jones & The Six, which employed almost as much star wattage to create an alternative Fleetwood Mac, fizzled on impact.

But it’s Vox Lux, Brady Corbet’s 2018 precursor to The Brutalist, that remains the most divisive and compelling pop star movie in recent memory for its pitch-black view of pop music as fundamentally empty, stardom a Faustian bargain; in it, a school shooting survivor becomes a star played by a sneering Natalie Portman, but her music contains no depth, nor comfort, just violence metabolized into earworms that slowly poison her. It’s an incredibly dim view – the movie, unsurprisingly, made little money – but so wildly ambitious and unnerving as to be unforgettable. (I can’t say the same for the music, which is both too low-budget, and too disdaining of actual pop, to take seriously.)”.

Even if many music biopics have been commercially successfully, they have fared less well with critics. The recent mockumentary, The Moment, starring Charli xcx was not reived well by all. If Mother Mary combines elements of Beyoncé, Lady Gaga, Ariana Grande and Taylor Swift, does the balance and blend work into something convincing and memorable. Anne Hathaway and Michaela Coel are terrific, and Mother Mary is rightly being hailed by many as a fascinating and bold film that takes risks and does something different. It is hard to pull off that feat. Perhaps no single film can do everything, in terms of getting that star power and appeal radiating from the screen. Someone playing an artist and making sure that they convince. Is it hard to fictionalise Pop music and artists? There is an argument for that. Even if incredible films like Smile 2 succeed in some ways, there are those that say the film struggled to carve out its identity and stand out. It may well be the case that it is impossible to create a fictional artist and story that also is relatable to modern Pop. The machination’s and machinery. Whilst Mother Mary is a brilliant physiological drama with some incredible surreal moments and some committed performances, did it address the gristle of Pop stardom? That is what Adrian Horton asks in her review. It is an interesting discussion. If people have examples of music biopics or films where they wholeheartedly succeed. It has been many years since a music biopic has received praise across the board and has ticked all of the boxes. In terms of films that have actors portraying fictional artists, and trying to articulate the realities of the Pop world and also have that sheen and shine. The earworms and easy charm but also something that digs deep and explores the depths and darkness of Pop. The real struggles arena-touring artists face. Would that be a tonal mess? I am a huge fan of Anne Hathaway, and she is brilliant in Mother Mary. Even so, will Hollywood and the film industry ever create that alchemy and be able to produce a film that takes the best elements of Smile 2, Mother Mary, great music biopics and the 2024 rom-com, The Idea of You, and transcend beyond parody? It may take the right script and concept. However, it may be the fact that the reality of touring the world and being at the mercy of fans and the media is only best described and portrayed by real artists living through that. Trying to fictionalise and asking an actor to truly convince as a modern mainstream artist and have that star power might be…

AN impossible undertaking.

FEATURE: Spotlight: Persia Holder

FEATURE:

 

 

Spotlight

PHOTO CREDIT: Emily Anna

 

Persia Holder

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I cannot find any interviews…

PHOTO CREDIT: Rankin

with her from this year, so I will dip back to last year when spotlighting and talking about Persia Holder. Her E.P., I Didn’t Think You’d Hear This, was released last  July. I wanted to cover off a couple of interviews around the release of a marvellous debut E.P. There are only a couple I could find, so I will combine them. This is another artist I am spotlighting who is playing Brighton’s The Great Escape Festival. Here is some biography about one of brightest artists. There are so many talented musicians coming through. If she would not class herself as emerging, perhaps there is an argument that Persia Holder is not known to all. That will soon change: “With her blend of emotional pop and soulful storytelling, Persia Holder is part of a new wave of British artists redefining vulnerability. Her debut EP I Didn’t Think You’d Hear This introduced a voice both powerful and deeply human — one that turns late-night thoughts into anthems. Persia writes songs that hold space for heartbreak, self-growth and the quiet moments in between”. The first of two 2025 interviews I am sourcing is from Ticketmaster Discover. Persia Holder tells how her voice has always been like a protective mechanism. She has a truly extraordinary voice:

“The voice is singer-songwriter Persia Holder’s strongest instrument, and the piano the vehicle that carries it forward. So is her gift for sharing personal storms and emotional ‘Baggage’, as the title of her 2024 debut single goes, in poignant, key-laden narratives that hit home, regardless of what you’ve been through. Released in summer 2025, her first EP I Didn’t Think You’d Hear This assembles recent singles like ‘Echo’, a sweeping inner monologue of broken promises, in a patiently crafted, deeply expressive five-song portrait of an artist navigating the challenges of her 20s in choruses that effortlessly soar.

You’re quite open about having gone through your fair share of emotional challenges. How do you feel these have shaped your songwriting — are there any experiences or moments that you feel have defined you as an artist?

A 100%. Growing up with a single mum, a very strong female woman around me, I always felt like I could do anything I wanted to do and my mum would support that. I think seeing her raise two kids on her own gave me the strength to be like, “okay, I wanna do something that’s scary”, which is follow my dreams.

And also I tried to look at the challenges I faced — it’s a double edged sword cause, obviously, you don’t wanna go through stuff like that, but also it’s given me this gift of things to write about and to try and shape my stories in a way that make other people feel seen, which I think is one of the most beautiful things about music. You know when you hear a song and you think, “Oh my God, that’s captured exactly how I feel!”. I try and do that through my music. Not that all my struggles are relatable — not that everybody’s are, but I think there’s a way to craft that narrative where people feel like there’s a bit of their story in there.

Your music seems like an outlet and a form of healing. Was there a song that was particularly hard to write?

Yeah, I think actually my first release, “Baggage”. I really struggled in lockdown. For me, it was really tough mentally losing connection with people, losing the friendships that anchored me when I was struggling.

I wrote that song pretty soon after lockdown, just about how isolated we all felt in that time and how important it is to have someone in your corner that you can reach out to and unpack all your baggage with and it’ll be a safe place. I think it’s really easy to think everybody has that. To have someone who you feel safe enough to be open with and talk to about things that feel kinda scary. That song for me was super important, that came out first. It’s not just about love for me. It’s kind of framed in a romantic way but it’s really about connection and struggle. I wanted people to hear it and think about love, but also maybe hear that underlying message. That was, to me, such a great first song to put out into the world.

How difficult is it to find the right people to work on that kind of music especially, that is so vulnerable?

That’s a really good question. I’m very deep, I’m very emotional. I struggle with surface level, that’s why my songs are normally, you know, there’s always something at the core of them. I think my biggest problem has been finding people that I feel safe enough to even explore with. And it’s not something you can really predict. It’s really when you get into the room, you either feel that or you don’t. And that’s not to say you don’t have an amazing session or make a friend. There’s a specific feeling I get where I feel like I can really delve here, go down some deep holes and not feel judgement. I think that’s the main thing.

Cause if I write from a place of no fear, I think you hear that reflected in the writing. When you can relate, other people in the room can relate to me and I feel like I’m not alone here.

You sang to over 5000 people at the Royal Albert Hall last December. How was that experience, what were some of your highlights this year — and how do you plan to build on this and take things to the next level?

It was really funny, I got a call from my old manager at the time, and it was about three days away. He said you’re booked to support Jamie Cullum at the Albert Hall on Friday, for example, and it was like, a Wednesday! At that time I’d only ever played just me and keys — playing myself. So we got a keys player in and we had about an hour before to play together and rehearse. So it’s all super last minute but we ended up smashing it. The first time I could stand on stage, didn’t have to worry about the piano, just sing and get all the emotions out. It was absolutely incredible! It was one of those moments where you think, “This is why you do this”. To see all these faces… ‘Baggage’ had just come out in October, so it was very early on to my EP coming out and it felt like a great way to to honour that.

Getting support from BBC Introducing has been really huge this year. It was something that I’d always really hoped, to get played on the radio. As a Londoner born and raised, getting support from the team in London is just amazing. Playing this German festival, I had a couple of fans who had come to see me — I think, at this stage, you don’t always think many people whowould do that. That made me think that I can’t wait to keep growing this.

Next step is really solidifying my live set-up. I’ve now got a band for the first time, which is amazing, so it’s not just me and piano. It’s drums and track, guitar to try and really emulate the tracks a bit better. Cause not all the songs are super sad and ballady. Having a track and drums to bring the energy, so the set feels like it’s got dynamics. I think an EP two is the next step, for sure”.

PHOTO CREDIT: Rankin

I am going to finish off with HUNGER and their fantastic interview. Persia Holder discussed her then-new single, Echoes. The extraordinary singer-songwriter is “using her big voice to sing about the small stuff”. I would love to interview her one day, as I am really excited to see what comes next. If there is going to be an album or another E.P. Holder has one of those voices that moves you as soon as you hear it. Her music comes deep from her soul. I Didn’t Think You’d Hear This is a remarkable debut E.P. that you need to listen to:

“According to Persia Holder, life begins at the piano. A “chronic overthinker”, the twenty-four-year-old songwriter finds herself in front of the keys every time she needs to channel an emotion or musically exorcise an experience from her mind — which I’m told is very often. In fact, emotion is at the beginning and end of all her music. It’s a two-way street between the inspiration the south Londoner derives from the city around her and the way her sound travels back into the world. That, Holder tells me, is how she came to write her upcoming (and debut) EP, I didn’t think you’d hear this, which is slated for this July.

But Holder’s new single, ‘Echo’, is the reason we’ve caught up today — and one of many reasons why she’s quickly becoming one of London’s ones-to-watch in the music space. With a voice and musical taste reminiscent of early-2000s icons like J-Lo, Rihanna and Amerie, she delivers unapologetic, knife- to-the heart songs with hefty vocal runs (her song, ‘Don’t Wanna Take it Slow’, is a high-class diss track). It’s by using this big voice to sing about the small stuff that makes Holder in equal parts extraordinary and relatable.

Camille Bavera: I’ve heard you lock away emotions until they’re ready to become music. Would you say that’s true?

Persia Holder: When I was a kid, anytime I felt overwhelmed or upset, my mum would find me at the piano, singing for hours. I didn’t even realise I was processing anything, but that instinct to express myself through music was always there. It’s probably why I’m drawn to writing and performing songs that hold depth and lived experience. Now, as an adult, I’ve definitely noticed myself almost subconsciously storing moments away — my Notes app could tell a thousand stories. I’m a chronic overthinker, but there’s real magic in being able to alchemise pain into something beautiful. Sometimes I think I’ve moved on from something only to write a song and realise I hadn’t healed from it at all. That’s such a deeply human thing.

CB: Your music silently screams Rihanna, J Lo and other Y2K icons. Where do you pull from for musical inspiration?

PH: That’s such a compliment! I’ve always been drawn to artists like Rihanna, where emotion lives in every vocal run, every pause. I think that era of music, especially the early 2000s, gave us these big, emotional pop songs, and I definitely carry that in my own way. I love making music that feels like a memory you didn’t know you still held.

CB: What would you say is your favorite song on the EP?

PH: That’s a tough one, but I’d have to say ‘Don’t Wanna Take It Slow’. I was crushing hard on a guy who was actually one of my best friends, and on a drunken night out he said the classic line, “I think we should take things slow”. I literally ran to the bathroom, opened my Notes app, and wrote that down on the spot. I brought it into my next session the following week — no shame. It’s wild looking back now because that was three years ago, but I still know how universal that feeling is — the confusion, the waiting, wondering what someone actually wants from you. The lyrics are pretty much word for word. And yes, the guy definitely knows it’s about him [laughs]”.

Do go and follow Persia Holder. I do think that the next few years will be really big for her. I am new to Holder’s music, though I am instantly engrossed seduced. Reading interviews that she has conducted, I really need to see her live one day soon. When listening to her music, you know that Persia Holder is going to go…

A very long way.

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Follow Persia Holder

FEATURE: Spotlight: Ava Joe

FEATURE:

 

 

Spotlight

 

Ava Joe

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THIS run of Spotlight features…

PHOTO CREDIT: Garry Jones

is around artists who played or will play at The Great Escape Festival in Brighton. So much incredible rising talent at that festival. I think a lot of industry figures attend so that they can discover some of the best new artists around. That takes me to Ava Joe. Her Big Beautiful Mess EP came out in April. I want to bring in some press around that. Before bringing things up to date, there is an interview from last year. The Line of Best Fit spoke with Ava Joe around the release of her debut E.P., Try Me:

“Offstage, Joe speaks with the same soft intensity that runs through her debut EP, Try Me, a reflective project that explores the rawness of healing, control, and survival, with an element of diaristic lyricism and intimacy that allows listeners to be let in on something that sounds personal and sacred. Ava is cementing herself as a striking and fresh voice of the UK soul scene.

We chat about her childhood beginnings growing up in Devon, featuring a blended family of ten, where rock music was a constant backdrop thanks to her dad’s band rehearsals. The young Ava Joe dabbled in theatre, appearing in school plays and assemblies, and landing the angel role in nearly every nativity production; however, it was songwriting that drew her in deeper. That eventually led her to the BRIT School, an institution renowned for its ability to shape some of the UK’s most beloved acts, including two of her inspirations, Adele and Amy Winehouse.

Speaking on the experience with distance and clarity, Joe looks back on that time as quietly pivotal. “One thing that BRIT really did for me is it opened up music,” she says. “I was introduced to jazz musicians and funk and soul. It just opened everything up musically, completely.”

A self-proclaimed student of early 2000s-pop, the soulful artist was fascinated by the pop girls of the time, such as Lily Allen, Adele, Lady Gaga, and Britney Spears. But it was her time at BRIT, which introduced her to musical diversity and left a lasting impact on her musicianship. “Looking back, it was such a beautiful experience because it introduced me to so many different types of music. “If it wasn’t for BRIT, I definitely wouldn’t be the artist I am today.”

That same openness pulses through Joe’s five-track debut EP, Try Me, which maps and follows the emotional wreckage and knowledge left behind by a controlling relationship she had entered at just the age of sixteen. The songs sift through the aftermath with hard-won clarity, curiosity, and care, rather than looking back in only anger. Now, at twenty-three years old, Joe began writing the project after leaving the relationship, once enough distance had passed for the memories to soften and for perspective to sit in.

“It was definitely written in the healing process,” she says. “When I was in all of that dark stuff, it was just happening, I almost couldn’t write. It was like I just had to live it. But I always knew, going through it, there was a tiny little bit of hope. And that hope kept saying to me: ‘This is going to be for your music. You’re going to write about it.”

That experience is mirrored via the track “Polly Pocket,” one of the EP’s standouts. “Sometimes this happens when you’re writing — you’ll have a title already,” she explains. “So I knew that I wanted to write a song called ‘Polly Pocket’ and I knew what I wanted to write it about.”

The name appears as symbolic, offering listeners a glimpse into the slow process of reclaiming your voice. “I was in a relationship that was very, very controlling,” she says. “I was in quite a vulnerable, naive place in my life. I was only 16 when I met him. It was on and off for a very long time. But it got very dark… he would pretty much tell me what I can and can’t wear.” She pauses for a moment. “I wouldn’t have any of that now,” she firmly states.

I ask if writing Try Me helped her make peace with that version of herself. “It’s definitely helped me know what not to go for in a guy,” she says with a soft laugh, hinting briefly at where she is now, happier and more grounded. But the conversation quickly turns inward, as she reflects on the deeper inner workings of having more compassion for both her past and present self. “I think I give that younger place in me a lot of love and compassion,” she says.

Therapy has become an anchor in Ava’s personal life and work. It comes up as a framework for how she processes the past, approaches relationships, and creates music. “I actually just started, which is very long overdue,” she says. “It’s helping so much. It’s helping with my music too, because it’s allowing me to process things and give the creative space in me way more free flow.”

And that space is crucial to her process. “Music is something that I go to and turn to when no one else is there,” she says. “It helps me through everything. It’s never left me. It’s never going to take anything from me. It’s never going to let me down or leave.”

That sense of musical safety grounds Ava, even as the shape of her sound continues to shift with her. Joe is still discovering her sound and voice, literally and artistically. “I still feel like I’ve got such a long way to define my genre even further,” she says. “I feel like I’m trying out a lot of things and trying out different sounds to see what works.”

Adele was one of Joe’s earliest inspirations, and for a while, she imagined a more straightforward path for herself—something clean-cut, classic, familiar. But life, as she puts it, had other plans. “After going through things, my voice changed with it,” she says. “Now you can almost hear the trauma in my voice, which is very strange. That’s why I love artists like Billie Holiday and Chet Baker. You can actually hear the pain.”

I tell her that her EP and aesthetic remind me of Lana Del Rey’s early days as Lizzy Grant, and she lights up, explaining how Lana is one of her inspirations and the impact that she’s had on female artists.

It tracks: Like Del Rey, Joe is drawn to the nostalgia that music brings. “It’s such a powerful feeling,” she says. “It’s like you miss it, but it fucking hurts. It’s gut-wrenching if you think of a certain memory and time. And when you hear a song and it makes you feel nostalgic even when you’ve never heard it before, that does something to me”.

I will come to CLASH and their recent chat with this incredible artist. Although she is an artist who has a lot of fans and some high-profile admirers (including Cate Blanchett), I do not think that she gets played on the radio enough. Ava Joe is an incredible artist who I feel will be releasing music for decades more:

“Sat outside Next Door Records in Dalston, I see Ava Joe rushing across the road, with all pleasantries exchanged and chit chat beginning, I was eager to start recording to ensure I didn’t miss any quotable gems.

Having travelled during much of her younger life, which encompassed Ireland, Devon, Surrey and London, Ava had plenty of time to pursue hobbies, music being the main one.

With influences such as Lady Gaga, Britney Spears and Adele – the strong vocalist that Ava would become was almost predestined, “I was really into singing, like I remember getting a karaoke initially one Christmas and I was obsessed with Lady Gaga, Britney Spears, Adele and Lily Allen, all of the sort of like mainstream pop artists at the time.”

She gives credit to her father, “My dad is in a band, actually, and I think growing up, seeing him play and listening to his music and just being around that, sort of really inspired me.”

Ava continues, “I feel so blessed that I knew from such a young age. Literally from the age of three, I was like, ‘This is what I want to do.’ And ever since then, I’ve just stuck with it.”

Having started ‘writing’ at 14, taking on a school project on the Aztecs, Ava didn’t start taking it seriously until she was 16. Seeing it as a form of therapy; “I was about 14 when my parents got divorced and my whole world sort of just like collapsed and that’s when I really started writing because like I always wanted to write but I felt like I never really had much to write about until that happened and then there was so much loss and so much pain that I couldn’t really do anything but write about it, you know?”

Ava has used songwriting as a way to express her angst through relationships, family problems, anxiety and life experiences, both positive and negative.

She cites her childhood experiences, travelling around at a young age, as the reason she can get along with so many people.

Ava mentions she is unable to make long-term friendships and this has left her feeling like she does not belong in some environments, but this allows her to take on intimate writing and collaboration projects with the ease of knowing she may not meet this person again. She doesn’t look back with a negative look, however, believing “everything happens for a reason”, allowing her experiences to become fuel for creativity, “It’s kind of like a form of therapy to me as well.”

The breakout songwriter has since evolved from Lady Gaga karaoke, citing new influences such as Winehouse, The Beach Boys, Chet Baker and Radiohead.

Writing has evolved from her early Aztec storytelling to adapting poetry that she writes on her own typewriter, “I feel like there’s poetry in my songs, and I feel like it’s, again, it’s inspired by the same kind of things, the land, the relationships, the life, the emotions.”

She elaborates, “I love art, I just love art, I love poetry, I love paintings, I love songs, I love music. I think it’s all around us and I love it”.

Some Other Time spent some time with Ava Joe. It is interesting what they remark about her style and music. How you might think, judged on her fashion and aesthetic, that the music would have a set sound. However, it is very different to what you might imagine: “Beneath the soft glow of stage lights, Ava Joe exudes the intoxicating glamour of the golden age of French New Wave. There is something of Anna Karina about the London-based singer-songwriter; big, bouncy hair, cat-eye flicks, and vintage dresses. Her songs, however, betray the illusion, cracking the veneer to reveal a more complex, Lynchian figure”:

“In many ways, the EP marks a significant leap forward, a tight collection of tracks that channel both the hedonistic reverie and emotional turbulence of life in your early twenties. Juggling those dissonant feelings, she masterfully shapes the contradictions into something cohesive, crafting a project that feels more expansive and enthralling than her debut.

‘Am I A Dreamer’ was the first track to really catch our attention. Here, Ava is still finding her footing, but asking the bigger questions. Gentle and meandering, it drifts through existential longing, meditating on love, loss, and the finitude of life over the hum of crudely plucked acoustic guitars, playing out as something reminiscent of early Corinne Bailey Rae.

Time will defeat us
End this loneliness
Consuming me
Am I a dreamer
Or did you leave her
For me?

Across the rest of the EP, there are countless opportunities to sink into the depths of a ruminating mind. A sense of excavation, almost exorcism,  runs through the heart of the project. As the tracks unfold, Ava gradually lays herself bare, revealing more with each individual cut, ultimately arriving at a place of release while offering listeners something to anchor their own emotions to. There’s a quiet sense of communion here, a mutual recognition. You see her, and she sees you.

That instinct has been there from the very beginning of her journey as an artist. “I remember writing a song when I was 14, my parents had just divorced and I wrote something for my mum’s birthday. My whole family came round to watch me sing it in the living room, and everyone started crying,” she recalls. “Looking back, it was a really bad song, but I feel like it’s always a good sign when people cry to music.”

Like many, Joe’s early understanding of love was shaped by the rupture of her parents separation. “My whole world came crumbling down,” she says. Naturally, that experience stayed with her, distorting ideas of relationships in the years that followed and drawing her into unhealthy patterns. “I feel like when you’re in that kind of state, you attract the wrong kinds of men or people in general. From there, I got into quite a few toxic relationships.” These themes, present on her debut in tracks like ‘Eleanor Close’ and ‘Polly Pocket’, continue to form a key source of inspiration today.

Our twenties are crucial formative years, often defined by the slow collapse of our expectations, of love, life, and who we thought we might become. In Dubliners, James Joyce captures this disillusionment in ‘Araby’, a story driven by romantic idealism that ultimately gives way to something starkly sobering. There’s a similar tension running through Ava Joe’s music. Like Joyce’s narrator, her songs trace a misalignment between fantasy and reality, between a wide-screen vision of love and the quiet, often painful recognition of what it truly looks like.

That kind of upheaval can often leave you questioning your place in the world, something Joe has been contending with of late. “I’ve always felt like I’ve never really found my place in the world, and then I realised that is my place, and I love it,” she says. It’s a perspective that feeds directly into the emotional core of this new record, the idea of finding solace on the fringes. The misadventures of misfits and mavericks. Here, we sense that she isn’t searching for any form of resolution, but instead finding acceptance, not just as an artist, but as an individual.

Reaching that point, however, required an internal shift, a new kind of radical generosity toward herself. “For this EP, and just in general, how I was feeling when I was writing it, I was more accepting. I’m being warmer to myself, more loving to myself,” she explains.

‘Milk & Honey’ is perhaps the purest distillation of this newfound warmth, forming the silver-screen centrepiece of the project. Borrowing subtle stylistic cues from 60s acts like The Ronettes, the track plays out like a runaway romance. Star-crossed lovers speeding down an open freeway, Ava’s hair caught in the wind, suspended in a state of ecstasy. The imagery is unmistakably cinematic. Built around hazy guitar lines and a slow-burning rhythm, the track immerses you in a dreamlike trance.

Dreamers
No one can reach us
I’m his bad girl
He is my leader

That sense of sepia-toned nostalgia becomes a key motif throughout Big Beautiful Mess, shaped in part by the way the record came together. A self-confessed “old soul,” Ava explains, “I had Woodstock on my mind, that sense of freedom, and we were writing while watching videos of people dancing in fields during the 60s. It just kind of made itself.” That influence is perhaps clearest on the EP’s title track, a euphorically psychedelic number, perfectly suited to the languid euphoria of those long summer nights.

Whatever comes next for Ava Joe feels like an exciting prospect. Having experienced an extended period of creative release that culminated in this project, her inspiration shows no signs of slowing. “At the moment it’s just flowing out of me, and I love being in that state, not overthinking the lyrics, just letting the feeling take over and speak for itself.”

It’s not always clear where Ava Joe the person ends and the artist begins. For some, creativity takes the form of a constructed persona; for others, it flows as a natural extension of the self. In her case, the two feel almost inseparable. As romantic ideals fracture and yield to lived experience, what emerges is something more honest, the gradual unfurling of a young woman learning to inhabit the intensity of her own emotions and discovering the beauty within them.

“My life is not very boring, I feel like my emotions keep it entertaining,” she says. “I’m very up and down and all over the place. I love that about myself. It’s hard, but I really do love it. That’s kind of the point of the EP, things can be intense and chaotic sometimes, but I think there is a beauty in it”.

I am going to finish the interview section with The Standard. One of the coolest artists in London and one of our very best young songwriters, if you have not heard the Big Beautiful Mess EP, then do go and hear it. This is someone “with a style and sensibility aimed at taking listeners into another world to have their heartstrings plucked”. Go and follow her and see her live if you can:

“New EP Big Beautiful Mess is a dreamy world to enter, but founded on harsh realities. The songs are truly psychedelic in that sense, and the Sixties were an important inspiration.

“Freedom is the key theme,” she says of the record, “We recorded the title track while watching a film of people dancing at Woodstock. We wanted to get that feeling of freedom across, being wild and young. And finding beauty in things that aren’t beautiful. The beauty in the sadness, finding beauty in pain, finding beauty in the mess.”

Born in Devon, she lived in Ireland and Surrey before settling in London. She’s the eldest of 10 children from a blended family and started writing songs amidst her parents’ divorce when she was in her early teens. She always sang, but songwriting became an outlet.

“I think that period caused me a lot of problems. It caused me to sort of seek love in the wrong places. But through it all I knew that this was going to be my story, this is what I'm going to write about and I wouldn't change it.”

The Brit School, with its diverse mix of people from different background, helped bring jazz, funk and soul into her style. Still, after a bad relationship in her late teens, she found she couldn't sing: “I lost everything, my people, my voice, myself... I had to build it all back again.” That voice now is a powerful yet vulnerable instrument wired directly to her heartstrings; Sunkissed on the EP, about the fleeting joy of first love, sees it rise on emotion till it breaks.

“It’s always been about turning a bad situation, a heaviness or a sadness, and channeling it into something beautiful that can then uplift you, and others too. It's a universal language beyond words, it's a magical thing.”

With the likes of Sienna Spiro also doing distinctive things while retaining control of their direction, Ava is part of an exciting new wave of female singer-songwriters. And while she acknowledges the risks of delving into the darkness for material, she also possesses a steely confidence that could take her stadium-sized.

“I supported Jalen Ngonda on his UK tour and played at Hammersmith Apollo and it made me realise I'm meant for bigger stages. I've always wanted to be a singer for really big audiences. I want my music to be reached by as many people as possible”.

I have only recently discovered Ava Joe, though this is someone who has won the ear and praise of so many fans. Her Big Beautiful Mess EP is a stunning collection of songs. I was trying to find some reviews for it, though there was not a lot of choice. People should have written about the E.P., as it is wonderful. I am publishing this ahead of Ava Joe’s appearance at The Great Escape Festival. If this artist is not on your radar already, then make sure…

THAT she soon is.

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Follow Ava Joe

FEATURE: Spotlight: Alice Costelloe

FEATURE:

 

 

Spotlight

 

Alice Costelloe

__________

AS Brighton’s The Great Escape…

is on between 13th and 16th May, I am doing Spotlight features around artists who are appearing on the bill. Or have appeared, as some will go out after the festival. An artist I have known about for years and am not sure why I have not spotlighted yet is Alice Costelloe. Perhaps a little late in spotlighting her, I feel she is an artist who does not have as much support and love as she deserves. She has a large fanbase, though there are stations who have not played her music. I feel she deserves bigger festival placings and much more airplay. Before getting to some interviews, this is what The Great Escape say in their biography:

“London based Alice Costelloe – formerly of critically acclaimed shoegaze duo Big Deal (Mute Records) and previously live bassist for Superfood began her solo endeavour at the end of September 2023.

In 2024 she signed to cult UK label Moshi Moshi Records and released her EP ‘When It’s The Time’. Her debut album ‘Move On With The Year’, produced by Mike Lindsay (Lump/Tuung) in his Margate studio released February 2026, is a break-away record consisting of 10 tracks of beguiling art-pop built on self- trust, instinct, and a necessary process of creative detangling”.

Her amazing debut album, Move on with the Year, was released in February. It is an extraordinary work that will stay in your heart and mind long after you hear it. It is worth noting how her has some great dates and festival appearances. I have never seen Alice Costelloe live, though I will try and catch her at a London date, as that is where I am based. Her slot at The Great Escape will earn her more focus and attention. The chance to hear songs from her debut album. I have loved her music for a while, so it is always pleasing when she gets recognition and bookings! This is an artist that everyone needs to know about.

There is so much to love and adore about Alice Costelloe. I especially love her voice. More than most other singers, she carries so many different emotions and layers. It is a beautiful voice, but there are these depths and characteristics that give her music such resonance and nuance! A phenomenal songwriter, we all need to shine a light on a supreme talent. One of very best artists in my view. In fact, I don’t think I will dip back that far, as most of the older interviews are from when she was with Big Deal. Instead, I will drop in two reviews for Move on with the Year. It might seem insulting to call Alice Costelloe a ‘rising’ artist. That is not what I am referring to her as. However, it is important to spotlight her, partly because she released her debut solo album. Also, because she is a gifted artist that should be celebrated more. I want to start with an interview from Karma Magazine.  They say how “Move On With The Year is Alice Costelloe’s path to processing a tough past that until now was left in the shadows. In it, she faces the damage left by her father’s addiction and emotional absence head first— from the very beginning, Alice Costelloe refuses to comply with what is demanded…”:

“The 80s sound of the album caught my attention, which made me wonder about the artists that inspired her. Costelloe admitted that the 80s influence was more from Mike Lindsey’s production. Besides that, she cites Cate Le Bon, Weyes Blood, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Leonard Cohen and Harry Nielsen: “I’d worked with Mike before, and I knew he had this whole kind of like treasure chest of amazing synths and all different things, it was sort of like this coming together of what I imagine in my head. Classic influences from those legend acts, and then bringing together this modern enough 80s sound that he’s really into. That’s a byproduct of our collaboration.”

While the title of the album Move On The Year evocates interpretations from the listener, Costelloe explained her perspective on the decision. “I felt like I was trying not to be too negative. When I was writing, I was thinking this is about progress as much as it is about engaging with difficult feelings and memories. It’s about engaging with them so you can get to the other side of them. Move On With The Year summed up that, and it was genuinely where I was at the time when I was recording it. I was going through lots of difficult things, and was just thinking, if I can get this album out, I can move on with the year.” She remembers turning towards music since she was a teenager as a way to move on.

When asked if what matters most to her is immortalising moments of the past or if it’s simply a necessary process to put them aside, she remarked that she never thought of music as immortalizing memories. “I was thinking more about just actually being yourself and being open with the world.” She feels that she spent a lot of her childhood and some of her adult years hiding different parts of herself. “For me, engaging with memories and writing them out for other people to see was a part of just trying to be okay with all the parts of myself and my past. If I put it all out there, then the world is going to see a 360 degree vision of who I am, and then that’s done, and I don’t have to deal with it.”

PHOTO CREDIT: Bex Aston

“This whole record, I wrote whatever came naturally,” she continues. “I’ve spent so many years resisting writing this record. I genuinely think I’ve been resisting since I was a teenager. When I started writing it, I thought I’m going to write the songs that come naturally. If I never put it out, it would also be fine.”

When asked which song can she recommend for the Karma! Magazine Playlist, she replied, “The track that’s coming out with the album next month is ‘Feet On The Sand,’ and that is, like, one of my favorites on the album. It’s never made sense as a proper single, but I do think it sums up the album and the sound of the album.”

Her songwriting is intriguing as well, with lyrics such as “My friends are dropping like flies” referring to people around her getting married. “It’s a really hard thing to put into words and to not sound bitter. I’m so happy for everyone and whatever choices my friends make. I do find it hard to square feminism and marriage and some of the associations that are still there with marriage. And I know people who are married in completely amazing equal relationships. It was more about the rituals around weddings that can feel a bit…”

When asked which color she or her music would be, she responded with pistachio green. “It’s the first color that came to mind, but that is just my favorite color.”

To end the interview, there is a quote by Costelloe that I was interested in, which is “The older I get, the more I understand it’s not healthy to be hiding or to be ashamed of parts of yourself.” I inquired of the album’s impact and reinforcement in that realization. “I think it’s something that I still struggle with. I’m sure lots of people have this with their work and their personal self, but I work in an Orthodox religious community, so I do really have to split myself every day and be super polite, not swear, and lots of other things. I come home and I have to remember I’m a musician, I’m creative, I can swear if I want”.

Two more interviews to cover off before wrapping up with some Move on with the Year reviews. One of the most emotionally open and raw albums. Though it is an album filled with beautiful moments. Let’s come to CLASH and their interview. They observe that “Move On With The Year’ is bold, brave, and hugely honest, a song cycle that filters through uncomfortable emotions and early life trauma to emerge emboldened, and refreshed. At times, it can be challenging, but Costelloe’s frankness – and gift for ear-worm melodies – means that it’s engaging at every turn”:

“Congrats on the new album which is a hugely impressive piece of work! How does it feel to share something as honest and personal as this?

Thank you! It feels both amazing and a little bit scary. I’ve spent a lot of my life being very private and only showing certain parts of myself, so it feels both liberating and a bit insane to reveal so much.

Much of the record deals with your father’s addiction issues, and the impact this had on you and your family. What made this the right time to confront those topics?

As I started writing the record I tried EMDR for the first time which massively helped me navigate everything me and my siblings had experienced dealing with an addict parent. It helped me to see my situation really differently, I could see the impact all of this had had on my life, but I understood that it didn’t have to define me or the rest of my life, and for the first time I could be more objective. At the same time my dad was becoming less and less in touch with reality to the point where I knew he’d never hear the record and I think that made me feel freer to write it.

‘Damned If You Do’ feels incredibly honest – what was it like to record that one?

It is I think one of the more upbeat songs on the album so it was actually more fun than most to record! Me and Jono Helsby my drummer had worked a lot on getting the groove of the song locked in so it felt really instinctive when we tracked the bass and drums together. But I just couldn’t sing these vocals properly in the studio so we actually mixed in a lot of my demo vocals and so maybe that helped me to feel a bit less on show when we recorded.

When I was writing it, I was feeling creatively fulfilled in a way I hadn’t since I was a kid and it made me think about how much I’d hate this to have to change if I were to have a life with more serious grownup commitments! For me it’s always the big milestones in life that remind you of absence, so as I contemplated the possibilities of marriage and children, the subjects felt particularly complex for me as I was thinking about not only the way it might change my creative output but that these would also be milestones that would bring into focus the absence of my father.

What was the biggest challenge when making this record?

Learning that being productive all the time is not productive! When I first started working on the album I was super disciplined about writing and demoing daily, but repeatedly found myself getting stuck and burnt out. Once I realised that you can’t endlessly mine your creativity without also feeding it with good things – music, art, nature, friends (whatever fills your cup) – I changed my approach and found I could write much better and easier if I regularly took myself on little adventures. I explored London as if I was a tourist, and went to more exhibitions that year than I probably have in my whole life, it really helped to be absorbed in something other than music. Taking in all the amazing culture and vitality of the city inspired me to keep going.

A number of live shows are upcoming – are you looking to seeing how these songs translate in the live environment?

I’m really looking forward to playing the album live. For the tour this Spring we’re going to play the album tracks in order from start to finish. It’s going to be an interesting experiment and I think requires quite a lot of patience and kindness from the audience, as some of these songs are very slow and very quiet and some might say quite sad. In a world where our attention is strained and shifting all the time, asking people to engage with a whole album is a lot, but I believe in music lovers, and if it works, I think these shows are going to be extra special.

What’s next for you?

We start our little UK tour at the end of this month, and then it’s quite a hectic year with festivals and another headline tour in October, but all exciting things ahead! Having spent so many weeks by myself writing and demoing this heavy record, I’d love to spend some time this year working collaboratively on something lighter with someone whose work I admire. I think I need a breather from being exclusively stuck inside my own head and experiencing someone else’s approach and perspectives would be a welcome relief!”.

 

I will get to DIY’s review of Move on with the Year, though I first want to come to their interview from February. I can imagine it would have been tough instantly transitioning from playing in bands to going solo. The dynamic is different. Being used to sharing the stage and studio with bandmates, doing things on her own must have been scary as well as liberating. If you are a solo artist, then everything is on you. However, being solo also means Alice Costelloe can let her voice and words take charge. She can be very honest and personal, rather than have to share credit or sing songs that don’t feel true to her:

“Making ‘Move On With the Year’ became a period of growth in more ways than one. Coming from a hefty family of creatives (including fashion designer Bella Freud and painter Lucien Freud) meant there was an unspoken pressure to succeed. At the same time, her musical touchstones were largely male, shaping a narrow idea of what an album should be: a grand, capital-C Concept filled with oversized ideas and lyrics. So when it came to her own attempt, she tried to fit that mould: “I wrote some awful songs about London and Greek mythology,” she chuckles. “I had this weird idea that I wasn’t enough and I needed to make it somehow grander, lyrically. I hope no one ever hears the songs I wrote before figuring out what to make this album about. It was like someone posturing on what an album should be.”

When she finally figured out why she’d been struggling, it all made sense. “I’d been comparing myself to these men that weren’t really relevant to my life, even though I love the music they make,” she says. The breakthrough came when she stopped trying to impress anyone, instead choosing to let everything out and writing directly from how she felt. “I’d just said: ‘whatever happens, that’s what this record is going to be’.” That shift produced ‘Anywhere Else’, the album’s opening track. “Once I’d got that down, everything else just came from there.”

 

From there, the record took shape quickly, and it soon became clear that it was more than just a debut album. Instead, it formed a patchwork of childhood memories, shaped by the experience of growing up with a father living with addiction. While EMDR therapy had already helped her process much of it, writing the record allowed her to revisit those memories with distance, bridging the gap between memory and acceptance. “It was about exploring it to the nth degree so I could kind of let it go. I would have never been able to get this record down if I had been finding it as heavy as I had in previous years,” she reflects.

This mindset filters through the record’s lyrics. Take the self-affirmation in ‘How Can I?’ or the album’s final moments, where she quietly announces her departure: “I’ve already done my time / I’m going to walk into the garden / And say my last goodbye”. Slowly but surely, the album became less about individual moments of pain and more about the collective process of letting go and moving on. She realised that while she couldn’t change the past, she could change how she thought about it. She explains: “I didn’t want it to be like a ‘screw you’, like, ‘hate you’. I was coming from a place of ‘I just need to be okay and move past this’.”

At the same time, she began widening her musical frame of reference. “I was consciously listening to albums by women. Cate Le Bon, Weyes Blood… I listened to Joni Mitchell for the first time! I thought: ‘What is going on, that I’ve got to be this age and not listened to a Joni Mitchell record all the way through?’” she exclaims. It was the first step to reducing her impostor syndrome. It also gave her permission to write smaller, quieter songs without feeling like she was being too “feminine” or “vulnerable”.

Then came the instruments: “I’m just so sick of guitar,” she laughs, reflecting on the time. “I’m not bored of all guitar music; I’m bored of me and guitar.” Looking for a way out, she bought a £60 flute on Amazon and taught herself how to play it. It was another way of refusing the habits she’d fallen into. “I was like, ‘I can play a recorder, I’ll be able to play this’. A flute is actually so much harder to play than a recorder!” Encouraged by producer Mike Lindsey, the flute quickly became central to the record, appearing on every track.

The last thing she needed was confidence, a shift that happened in great part thanks to Mike. “He doesn’t need everything to be perfect, so I just instantly felt like it was okay that I play many things at a sort of average level,” she reflects fondly. “Honestly, it’s the first time I’ve not felt like an impostor in a studio.”

Thus, ‘Move On With the Year’ was born. What began as a practical attempt to get an album finished became a farewell to old habits, borrowed voices, and a lesson in self-belief. “As a result of trusting my instinct, things worked out really well”.

It is well worth reading DIY’s four-star review for the incredible Move on with the Year. I did recently publish a feature where I predicted a collection of albums that might well be shortlisted for the Mercury Prize later in the year. I would say that Alice Costelloe is also in with a shot. She thoroughly deserves to be among the dozen! I would not bet against that happening. Although it is a brief review, I think it is worth bringing in. This is what DIY say:

“While Alice Costelloe first stepped out as a solo artist back in 2024 with the soft, synthy EP ‘When It’s The Time’, for this full-length debut, the former Big Deal and Superfood member adds dashes of self-taught flute, recorder and organ to the mix beneath her husky vocal, all while lyrically retaining her lofty curiosity.

‘Move On With The Year’ marries sonic familiarity with emotional lyrical introspection, her often dainty but always dependable indie pop toying with minimalism while she expresses past wounds, emotional distance and long-avoided family scars. A huge step forward musically, as it would appear to be personally”.

Alice Costelloe is a queen that has released one of the great debut albums of this year. I do hope it is rewarded with award recognition! I am going to make a real effort to see her live, and I would love to interview her one day. I listen to Move on with the Year. It is so affecting! I can only wonder how challenging and upsetting it must have been writing some of the words and singing them in the studio. I feel that Costelloe’s songs will connect with other people who have been through similar things. I wonder if writing the album had a cathartic effect or helped her in some way.

I want to end with a review from Popmatters. They called Move on with the Year “refined, elegant art pop, in which her crystalline voice floats over a rich palette of electronic instrumentation with grace”. Alice Costelloe is truly special. If you are able to go and see her live, then make sure you do:

“The fact that the London-based singer-songwriter Alice Costelloe, the great-great-granddaughter of Sigmund Freud, is, on her debut album Move on With the Year, probing into her unconscious to conjure up memories of her estranged father might seem too on the nose or a send-up. Don’t worry, it isn’t either. Instead, it’s a gallant portrayal of a child of a parent battling substance abuse—in other words, it’s an indie pop record with a subject matter barely acknowledged, let alone expressed with such finesse and stoicism. Yet, despite the heaviness of its themes, you could be floating.

The post-war English poet Philip Larkin wrote, in his customary sardonic tone, “They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do.” In the next stanza of “This Be the Verse”, Larkin opens with a punchline to a joke that never existed: “But they were fucked up in their turn.” The specter of Move on With the Year is, of course, Costelloe’s absent father, who moves through the songs fucking her up, or, in her own words, “a vagabond haunting the night.” Yet, perhaps in realizing that he, in turn, was subjected to the errors of his parents, Costelloe doesn’t appear to be reproachful—if anything, compassionate.

It’s this acute sensitivity to the writing, along with not eschewing hard truths, that makes Move on With the Year a compelling and, more importantly, moving piece of work. Moreover, it never falls into the trappings of mawkishness—even when the content is direct and hits you with the sheer force of involuntary memories, which is what Move on With the Year is: a series of reverie-laden imagery set to supple and graceful indie-pop tunes.

To zero in on the lyrics would be to miss what makes Move on With the Year special: a perfectly executed, sophisticated pop record, complete with warm, analogue production. After disbanding the shoegaze duo Big Deal in 2016, Alice Costelloe released her debut EP in 2023, So Neurotic, and, a year later, followed it up with a second, When It’s the Time, produced by Mike Lindsay (one half of LUMP with Laura Marling), whose brilliant production on Move on With the Year accentuates the acoustic woodwinds, synths, Moog, mellotron, crunchy tambourines, rolling drums, and acoustic guitars.

Costelloe’s blithe vocals make you feel as if she has replayed these memories a thousand times: flipping the scenes as if by hand to find a new image, or a new meaning behind an image, and by doing so, the emotion attached to the image dissolves to leave her singing with aplomb like Cate Le Bon and Lael Neale.

The synth-washed opener, “Anywhere Else”, starts so slow that you can almost hear the thoughts of the singer running backwards to a time when innocence, perhaps, can be regained. By the end, the dream is over, and the singer is left with sadness and pain, indignation and desperation, a feeling that fate has dealt her the wrong cards. When the narrator receives a call from the hospital concerning her father, Alice Costelloe screams “Ahhhhhh”, bringing to mind Munch’s The Scream, an existential scream traveling the distance from adulthood to childhood to somewhere between reliving and living.

“How Can I” picks up where “Anywhere Else” left off: the hospital. However, it is about the narrator’s birth, when her father was absent. Musically, it begins with a punchy motorik snare, followed shortly thereafter by a pulsing synth, a recorder, and a tambourine.

Move on With the Year, written in 2024, is infused with stately pop arrangements that hint at an array of influences: 1990s alternative rock (as seen in the dreamlike, Spiritualized-like “Too Late Now”), 1970s soft rock, 1960s chamber pop, and, lastly, the girl groups of the 1960s. Halfway through Move On With The Year, “Damned If You Do” lifts the listener out of the past and into the present: a narrator witnesses friends’ weddings, all the while believing her father will not walk her down the aisle.

Writing in such a candid and direct manner is, firstly, brave; secondly, it can be difficult to pull off. Trauma isn’t interesting in and of itself, which is why many artists are right bores: they fail to look up from their wounds to see that everyone—including their deceased grandmother (god bless her soul)—is/was fucked, as Larkin jocosely highlights. However, Alice Costelloe is too self-aware to become self-indulgent—perhaps she has read Freud’s 1914 essay, On Narcissism.

“Of Course I Know”, the zenith of Move on With the Year, could be Cate Le Bon singing a ballad on Let It Be, complete with a spectral mellotron and a recorder solo. “If I Could Reach You”, the penultimate track, is by far the catchiest track onthe album, an earworm that will have dancing and crying, neither or both. Lastly, the dark wave “Is There Something (Goodbye)” isn’t a sanguine conclusion but a resolute goodbye, instead.

Move on With the Year is a work of refined, elegant art pop, rendered through stunning production, in which Alice Costelloe’s crystalline voice floats over a rich palette of electronic instrumentation with grace. In many ways, Costelloe has taken an intensely personal subject matter and transcended it, as if the real story—the only story, in fact—of the record is the music, which is to say she is a survivor. Although she cannot entirely lay the ghost of her father, the record isn’t a pyrrhic victory: by confronting the past, the present is lived and, possibly, embraced. If not, this album will make you dance. Sometimes that is enough”.

Even if I have known about Alice Costelloe as a band member and was aware of her solo work, I wanted to spotlight her now, as she plays at The Great Escape, and there has been this time since her debut album was released. A chance to let some dust settle in a way and look at this debut further from its release. I am so interested to see where she goes next and what her future music will sound like. Whether her next solo album will be similar to Move on with the Year. Alice Costelloe is…

ABSOLUTELY exceptional.

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Follow Alice Costelloe

FEATURE: Fever Pitch: A Netflix Documentary, A Classic Album at Twenty-Five, and Pop Reinvention

FEATURE:

 

 

Fever Pitch

IN THIS PHOTO: Kylie Minogue with director Michel Gondry in Paris in March 2026. Chanel unveiled its latest global campaign starring Margot Robbie, with a reimagining of Kylie Minogue’s 2001 hit, Come Into My World. The campaign is for the CHANEL 25 handbag, and was directed by Gondry – who also directed the original video more than two decades ago. Kylie Minogue herself makes a special appearance in the film, marking twenty-five years since the release of the track (information courtesy of Variety Australia)

 

A Netflix Documentary, A Classic Album at Twenty-Five, and Pop Reinvention

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I am thinking about…

PHOTO CREDIT: Netflix

Kylie Minogue, as this year is already shaping up to one of her most important. A Netflix documentary, KYLIE, will get a release date soon. I will come to details of it. In October, Fever turns twenty-five. Her eighth studio album is a classic that I feel has influenced so many modern artists. I wrote about this in a recent feature. I want to come back to the fact Minogue is an underrated artist in terms of how she has transformed Pop and is one of the great reinventors. I have also said how last year, she should have been offered the headline slot at Glastonbury. Maybe she will next year, as it would be a chance to celebrate twenty-five years of Fever and bring this career-spanning set together. Here are some more details about a documentary that will hear from one of the true greats:

“From her breakout role as Charlene in the ’80s Australian soap Neighbours to chart-topping success across five decades, Kylie Minogue has never stopped reinventing herself. Now the new documentary KYLIE explores how she reshaped pop and became one of music’s most enduring icons, selling over 80 million records.

In this intimate three-part documentary, Kylie Minogue opens her personal archives and reflects on a life that continues to captivate, inspire, and soundtrack multiple generations. Featuring footage from home movies, personal photographs, and new interviews with Kylie herself (as seen in the first-look image above), the documentary shows the woman behind the hits. It examines how she’s faced public scrutiny, personal loss, and illness with grit and grace, earning respect far beyond her own fandom.

Directed by Emmy and BAFTA Award winner Michael Harte (Three Identical Strangers, Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie, BECKHAM) and produced by John Battsek’s Ventureland — the multi-award-winning team behind The Deepest Breath, WHAM!, and BECKHAM — KYLIE features insights from friends, family, and collaborators including Dannii Minogue, Jason Donovan, Nick Cave, and Pete Waterman. The docuseries celebrates the joy, connection, and euphoria that make Kylie unmistakably Kylie.

Check back for more information, including when KYLIE will be released”.

I really wanted to talk about the documentary, but there are other things to bring in. There have obviously been a fair few documentaries about Pop greats. From Madonna to Taylor Swift, it allows us a chance to hear about their legacy and amazing career and contributions from those around them. A lot more concert documentaries coming out. In the case of Kylie Minogue, there is so much to say about her. Whilst KYLIE might not be able to cover all of the bases, it is going to be unmissable. Someone who has experienced loss, is a cancer survivor, has gone through some ups and downs regarding critical approval, she is now in this new phase of her career. Fever and 2000’s Light Years were important albums. Reinventions that found Kylie Minogue celebrated once again after previous albums did not win too much critical love – her 1990s work is fascinating but does not get that much love (her 1994 album, Kylie, is among her best) -, this was very much her back on top. Fever might be her very best album. Though albums like TENSION (2023) are up there with her best. It is the way that Minogue is able to shift genres and personas. Or looks. She is also this style icon. Through the years, she has sported so many incredible looks and we often look at artists such as Madonna when considering the style greats. Though Minogue needs to be in the conversation. I want to move to DAZED and their interview published a few days ago. The interview explores her Pop legacy, “personal style, Fever at 25, and her starring role in JW Anderson’s latest campaign”:

“It’s been almost two years to the day since Kylie Minogue met Jonathan Anderson. On the first Monday in May, 2024, the princess of pop took a much-needed break from her Las Vegas residency to attend the Met Gala. The dress code that year was ‘The Garden of Time’, and Minogue wore a custom Diesel gown that transformed her into Sleeping Beauty – and sleepy she was, exhausted from performing night after night. Despite her fatigue, there was one person who could persuade her to attend an afterparty, and that person was Anderson. Naturally, Kylie out-danced everyone and ended up being the person on the dancefloor.

Immediately, the pair hit it off, and earlier this year the Australian icon fronted JW Anderson’s AW26 lookbook, alongside the likes of super model Mona Tougaard and fashion journalist Tim Blanks. Anderson might be one of the busiest people in fashion – juggling his namesake label while designing womenswear, menswear and couture at Dior – but he’ll always make time for Kylie. Today (May 1), the duo have reunited once again, giving Dazed the exclusive look at the second iteration of their AW26 campaign, which you watch below. “Kylie Minogue brings a special excitement, an emotion,” says Anderson. “Placing her within this world allows something new to emerge.”

2026 marks a huge year for Kylie. Not only is she a JW Anderson It-girl, she’s also about to drop a hotly anticipated three-part Netflix documentary about her life. Then, she’ll be celebrating the 25th anniversary of her monumental 2001 album, Fever. Plus, we can expect a few more surprises too, as she explains below.

PHOTO CREDIT: JW Anderson

Hey Kylie – when and where did you first meet Jonathan?

Kylie Minogue: We first met at his party after the Met Gala in 2024. I was doing my Vegas residency at the time and was really clinging onto my sanity with the workload and seemingly endless other things. So I wasn’t entirely sure if I would get to an afterparty. I asked how long it would take to get to Jonathan’s party and the answer was twelve minutes. I couldn’t argue with twelve minutes, so headed downtown. That’s where we met and that’s where I was one of the last ones dancing. He was divine and the night was wonderful. We didn’t meet again until the lookbook photoshoot, so next time I’d say ‘how about a cup of tea!?’

This year marks the 25th anniversary of Fever! How will you be celebrating?

Kylie Minogue: This depends. Can you keep a secret? Hmmmmm. What I can say is that I will definitely be celebrating. It’s an album that still stands up, marks a real point in time not only for me but for some others and it’s such a weird and wonderful mix of emotions looking back.

Do you have a favourite look from the Fever era?

Kylie Minogue: Omg, so many. Grace Jones’ white catsuit and Manolo Blahnik white pumps from the “Can’t Get You Out Of My Head” video for starters. I also love the Dolce & Gabbana looks from the tour, the Clockwork Orange section, and the ballad section.

What’s something you’re looking forward to this year?

Kylie Minogue: There’s a lot happening. My Netflix documentary is coming very soon, we'll be celebrating the 25th anniversary of Fever later this year, and a few other little surprises...”.

It is this interesting point where this Pop queen is still reigning. Having gone through different stages and experimented with various sounds, she always remains fresh and exciting. I wonder how she will follow TENSION and this Disco/Dance period. Fever sort of Electronic and Dance. She has moved through sounds and you always get this incredible visual campaign. Minogue as arresting, iconic and stylish as she ever was. She turns fifty-eight on 28th May, so I wonder how she will celebrate. In terms of her next album and what she will do, you wonder if it will be personal and something more emotive. A more soulful or jazzier album. If there will be a slight return to Fever and that sound. Minogue is responsible for influencing modern greats like Dua Lipa. I wonder what she has planned for Fever’s twenty-fifth anniversary. It is such an important album, maybe a special concert series, those songs backed by an orchestra, a special short film or new videos. Will there be an expanded vinyl edition? I am going to write about this album and how it was a turning point. Though Minogue has experienced tragedy and personal challenges and relationship breakdowns, she always remains so strong. In terms of her artistry and vision, she never compromises at all. One of those artists that is true to herself and has faced her fair share of ageism and scrutiny. However, defiant and always brilliant, Kylie Minogue releases the absolute best music, is this incredible and awe-inspiring live performer, and you know she will continue to be this way for many years. KYLIE is a documentary that will not only appeal to her fans. I feel there will be interest from those new to her music or people who followed her in the 1980s and perhaps dipped out. I have been a fan for decades, and it is always sad when Minogue is not mentioned in the same breath of the greatest artists ever. Let’s hope 2027 sees a Glastonbury headline slot. In terms of new music, we will see what comes. A big anniversary to mark in October. I would also love to see another Christmas album from her, though she may not want to do that anymore. Whatever comes, it is going to be incredible. So many reasons to admire and love…

THIS music titan.

FEATURE: Kate Bush: Something Like a Song: Tawny Moon (Before the Dawn)

FEATURE:

 

 

Kate Bush: Something Like a Song

 

Tawny Moon (Before the Dawn)

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I am thinking about…

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush performs on the opening night of her Before the Dawn residency with her son, Albert Mcintosh, during Somewhere in Between/PHOTO CREDIT: Ken McKay/Rex Features

Kate Bush’s Before the Dawn, as I have been listening to it a lot lately. The more that I listen to, the more I am transfixed by it. Kate Bush’s vocals are so powerful! I was not at any of the shows, yet I feel like I am there and transported to Hammersmith when she performed her run of twenty-two dates in 2014. The live album was released in November 2016, so we mark ten years of that soon. I am going to come back to that live album and also explore the residency, as there is so much to unpack and dissect. A fascinating and awesome residency, I am going to bring in some words about a special and unique song. Bush performed the entirety of The Ninth Wave and A Sky of Honey. These two suites appeared on 1985’s Hounds of Love and 2005’s Aerial respectively. The first act features eight tracks that are a mix of songs from various albums. The Red Shoes, Hounds of Love and Aerial are represented. The second act is The Ninth Wave, then the third act consists of A Sky of Honey. The encore brings us Among Angels from 50 Words for Snow (2011) and Cloudbusting (from Hounds of Love). A gem that does not appear on her albums and was included in the residency is Tawny Moon. Perhaps a bit controversial calling it a Kate Bush song, it is performed by Albert McIntosh. It is a Kate Bush song, though it very much hands the spotlight to her son. We heard Albert (or Bertie) on Aerial, Director’s Cut and 50 Words for Snow prior to Before the Dawn. For Before the Dawn, Mcintosh got to show his acting chops. He was also the Creative Adviser and played Son, and Painter. It is part of Kate Bush’s residency, though this is a rare occasion where I am throwing the focus to Albert Mcintosh. There is not a lot of information about the song, though those reviewing the residency and live album did have their say on Tawny Moon. This is what the Irish Times noted about this underrated jewel: “Surprisingly, one of the highlights of the collection is new song Tawny Moon - a song sung by her son, Albert, who prompted her comeback and took part in the ensemble of backing vocals throughout the show. That song was taken from Act 3, based largely around the Sky of Honey song suite from 2005's Aerial, as she observes the work of a painter from the 19th century, replete with birdsong and a significantly lusher, more pastoral palette to draw from”.

Tawny Moon appears after dusk. Kate Bush noting it was the perfect time to slot this song in. Seeing the moon rising and writing about it. Even though it is not sung by Kate Bush, I wanted to include it in this series. Though I have seen some reviews saying that it was not a highlight hearing Albert Mcintosh sing solo and being maybe a bit overdramatic, there was a lot of kindness for Tawny Moon. Background Magazine caught Before the Dawn and discussed Tawny Moon. Providing a mixed review: “Miss Bush's son Bertie got to shine in a solo, the song Tawny Moon, and although he's only sixteen he proved to be both a very talented singer and actor, who clearly felt very much at home on stage, but his voice sounded quite musical-like and therefore couldn't appeal to me that much. I had the feeling that a larger part of the audience felt the same”. When reviewing the live album, Kate Bush biographer Graeme Thomson said this when writing for UNCUT: “A new song, “Tawny Moon”, is slotted into A Sky Of Honey, and it’s good, a churning, mechanical piece of modern blues, sung gamely by Bush’s teenage son Bertie McIntosh”. If you ignore horrible reviews and hatchet jobs like this one, you’ll find that there was a lot of fascination around Tawny Moon. It is interesting what Kitty Empire said in this review for The Guardian: “Bertie stars as the painter in A Sky of Honey and sings a new song, Tawny Moon. While this maternal indulgence is only natural from Bush, Bertie's voice is more suited to the West End stage than art pop”. I wonder why this song was not considered for Aerial, and whether Kate Bush thought of a song like this to allow Albert/Bertie a chance to shine solo? It would have made an interesting addition. I think that her lyrics are wonderful and evocative. The first verse sets the scene: “I'll give every cloud a silver lining/Every star will be bright and shining/Tawny owls swoop, the howling wolf/Every swimming pool will shiver with excitement/I've made the wind blow and starry heavens hang/I ache from head to toe, I've got blisters on my hands”. Albert appearing on Aerial very briefly. When it was rereleased in 2018 and Rolf Harris’s parts were replaced – in light of his sexual assault conviction -, we do hear Mcintosh there. I guess he was too young to sing Tawny Moon in 2005, though it would have been great if Tawny Moon made an appearance. A studio version.

Aerial has this complex history and there is that unfortunate black mark where Rolf Harris appears on the original. I wonder too if he was ever considered for 2014 to appear on stage. As I wrote recently regarding this, it was largely down to her son that she did the residency and came back to the stage, so he was always a first choice. His acting is great and he was a key part of the residency. I really like Tawny Moon. The lyrics are brilliant. I like these lines: “Oh, my love, my love, my Luna/Night is nearly here/Here comes the night, she shimmies across the track/I've got to get it just right, I've got blisters on my hands “. Bush wrote about the nightingale and how “She knows precisely why/The unrequited poet cries”. Bush also mentioned the “Queen of Bedlam”. That would be a great character study for my series, Them Heavy People…, though I will try and keep that pure and reference songs Bush has song. I needed a place for Tawny Moon. To see it in a new light. It is a beautiful and stirring song I could see fitting into a West End show or something dramatic where Albert Mcintosh leads. The final lines are particularly romantic and evocative: “Rise and shine, Tawny Moon/I'm gonna paint all night with the Tawny Moon/I'm gonna dance all with the Tawny Moon”. In spite of the acidic reviews from a couple of people, I do have a lot of love for Tawny Moon. The one time I will include a Kate Bus song in this run that was not sung by Kate Bush. Its importance, though, is a reason for inclusion. As it is her son showcasing his vocal and dramatic talents. Also, and perhaps handily for her, a brief chance to rest her voice and slow down before she was singing and back at the front! On thew beautiful and brilliant Tawny Moon, we get to see…

THE son rising.

FEATURE: One for the Record Collection! Essential June Releases

FEATURE:

 

 

One for the Record Collection!

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

 

Essential June Releases

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JUNE is traditionally…

IN THIS PHOTO: Lizzo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What’s driving you musically now?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Do you find it harder to write about happiness?

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

Is it cringier to be happy or sad?

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

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

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

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

What about this new album?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

OUT in June.

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

FEATURE:

 

 

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

PHOTO CREDIT: Clive Arrowsmith

 

Kate Bush and 1981

__________

IN previous Kate Bush features…

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

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

“January 1, 1981

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

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

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

February 1981

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

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

February 21, 1981

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

March, 1981

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

April 1981

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

May 1981

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

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

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

June 1981

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

June 21, 1981

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

July 1981

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

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

July 14, 1981

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

August 1981

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

August 6, 1981

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

October 1981

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

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

November 12, 1981

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

November 21, 1981

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

December 22, 1981

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

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

NO rest for the wicked.

FEATURE: Spotlight: Bella Kay

FEATURE:

 

 

Spotlight

PHOTO CREDIT: Kristen Jan Wong for Billboard

 

Bella Kay

__________

IT is brilliant that we…

PHOTO CREDIT: Maria-Juliana Rojas for Rolling Stone

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

AS Bella Kay.

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FEATURE: Spotlight: no na

FEATURE:

 

 

Spotlight

PHOTO CREDIT: Toshio Ohno

 

no na

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THIS may be the first time…

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

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

1. Baila Fauri: Powerhouse Vocalist with Creative Flair

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

2. Christy Gardena: Graceful Soul with a Ballet Background

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

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

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

4. Esther Geraldine: Versatile Vocalist with a Creative Edge

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

What Makes No Na Unique?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Everything’s so creative,” Shaz adds.

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

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

“Man, he tried everything,” Baila says.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PHOTO CREDIT: Athirah Annissa

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PHOTO CREDIT: Toshio Ohno

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Esther: “I was thinking the same thing!”

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

PHOTO CREDIT: Toshio Ohno

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shaz: “And this soon!”

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

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

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

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

IN the world.

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Follow no na

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

FEATURE:

 

 

Kate Bush: The Whole Story

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

 

Inside Her KBC Article Issue 5 (April 1980)

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ALTHOUGH this series…

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

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

“With Love from Kate"

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

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

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

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

Interview

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Do you believe in UFOs and life on other planets?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"No, it wasn't."

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

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

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

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

How tall are you?

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

What was your job before you became a singer?

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

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

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

What school did you go to?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Yes, it is Ben's brother."

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

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

Did you leave school with any qualifications in music?

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

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

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

Vegetarianism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THIS new series.

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

FEATURE:

 

 

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

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush circa 1980

 

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

__________

I am going to…

PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush

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

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

Kate Bush Club newsletter, September 1980

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

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

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

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

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

Bastet, Lioness and Cat

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush

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

PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush

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

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

IN THIS PHOTO: Sylvia Plath

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

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

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

AT such a young age.

FEATURE: Spotlight: Emma Smith

FEATURE:

 

 

Spotlight

PHOTO CREDIT: Veronika Vee Marx

 

Emma Smith

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I will share this feature…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And travel is something Smith often does.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

GET to know her.

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Follow Emma Smith

FEATURE: Spotlight: Yves

FEATURE:

 

 

Spotlight

PHOTO CREDIT: Paix Per Mil

 

Yves

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THIS Spotlight feature…

PHOTO CREDIT: Paix Per Mil

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

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

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

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

PHOTO CREDIT: NTS Radio

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PHOTO CREDIT: Wonyoung Ki for NME

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MANY years ahead.

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Follow Yves

FEATURE: Try Again: Aaliyah at Twenty-Five

FEATURE:

 

 

Try Again

 

Aaliyah at Twenty-Five

__________

ONE of the most heartbreaking…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

WE have ever seen.

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

FEATURE:

 

 

You Gotta Get with My Friends…

 

Spice Girls’ Wannabe at Thirty

__________

IT is not an exaggeration to say…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ABSOLUTELY perfect.

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

FEATURE:

 

 

Empire State of Mind

 

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

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I have written about…

PHOTO CREDIT: cottonbro studio/Pexels

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Behind-the-scenes roles where women are virtually erased

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

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

The collaboration problem in male-dominated genres

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

IN THIS PHOTO: Lady Gaga

Gender assumptions about technical abilities

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

The lack of role models and visibility

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

How stereotypes prevent women from entering the field

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

Industry gatekeepers and antiquated practices

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

PHOTO CREDIT: Anna Pou/Pexels

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

EVER take notice?!

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

FEATURE:

 

 

Get Up Off Our Knees

 

The Housemartins‘ London 0 Hull 4 at Forty

__________

I think that…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

GRADED ON A CURVE:
A-“.

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

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

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

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

STILL sounds so utterly compelling.

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

FEATURE:

 

 

Everything’s Just Wonderful

 

Lily Allen’s Alright, Still at Twenty

__________

IT must be weird…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IS hugely impressive.