INTERVIEW: Chris Tavener

INTERVIEW:

PHOTO CREDIT: Explore With Brendan

Chris Tavener

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THIS is someone who…

I have been following for a while and it is great to interview him. Chris Tavener has been discussing his debut studio album, Music Is a Serious Business. I would encourage everyone to listen to it. The songs are all favourites from hundreds of recent shows across the U.K. and Europe. This crowdfunded record is one that I would also encourage people to buy. An incredible and acclaimed live performer, Tavener has a run of U.K. dates ahead that takes him almost up to Christmas. A chance for people to see this unique and amazing performer in the flesh. I ask Tavener about his musical influence, the themes addressed on Music Is a Serious Business, what it was like recording out of Green Velvet Studios in Stockport, and what his plans are for next year. You can follow Chris Tavener on Facebook, TikTok, and Instagram. If you can too, pre-order Music Is a Serious Business on vinyl. Though you may have to wait a little for your copy to arrive, it is a pre-Christmas treat that will appeal to all music fans. It has been a treat speaking with Chris Tavener. Make sure that his music is…

ON your playlist.

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Hi Chris. How are you doing? What has your week been like? How well are you coping with autumn settling in?

I'm well, thank you! Enjoying autumn so far. It's been a busy few weeks touring around the country, but this week I am having a week off travelling…by travelling to Scotland. I wouldn't have it any other way though. I love getting to see new places.

Before talking about your debut studio album, can you talk to me about some of your influences. In terms of music that was in your life from a young age, which artists spoke to you?

I was a huge Bob Dylan and Beatles fan growing up. From a young age, I was also listening to artists like Arctic Monkeys, Billy Joel, Blur, Tenacious D, Arlo Guthrie, and so many others.

I became interested in writing songs when I heard Randy Newman's album work and something clicked. “Oh, songs can be stories and they can be from anyone's perspective!” I was suddenly really interested in satire from there and became influenced by other rock artists that I felt had clever lyrics. Artists like Elvis Costello, Loudon Wainwright III, Talking Heads and Courtney Barnett and Father John Misty

Your music has this satirical and witty edge. In terms of the artists that you admire, is it their humour and serious-but-witty look on life that speaks to you?

It's definitely a big part of what hooks me in as a listener. I think humour and satire is such a great vehicle for making a point about something you feel strongly about. In my view, it can have more of an impact than expressing your views literally. The artists I mentioned use subtle lyrical devices to bring you round to their point of view. I love that.

I was told by a member of the audience in Chester last week, that they appreciated how I dealt with heavy subjects without really talking about them directly. I was really pleased to get that feedback. It's what my favourite artists do and it's what I'm always trying to achieve. Whether I get

it right or not!...

“But humour is a great weapon against injustice”

I have as said how we need artists tackling big and serious themes in a witty or less heavy-handed way. Like Steely Dan (I am a massive fan and was inspired and have plotted an album with song titles, and a cover but am hampered by not being able to read or write music and only able to write lyrics and not compose or play!). Talking about these big topics, but doing so with a little humour and wit, without distilling the impact. Backing it with rich musicianship. If artists do tackle these themes, it is usually quite heavy and dark or angry. I think a song can talk about a weighty issue and be light or accessible. Would you agree?

I absolutely agree with that. These days, the news is very bleak, and the times we are living in breeds some dark and angry music, understandably. But humour is a great weapon against injustice. The world needs more light-hearted songs. I'd love to hear yours one day when you find a composer and a lyricist.

In general, in an age where so many pressing topics do need to be addressed in music, there is still reluctance or pacifism from many. Do you feel artists should use their platform to address these subjects and areas of discussion, or do you think some artists feel they might get things wrong or alienate some of their listenership?

Well firstly, I think it's great that artists do speak out. Their voices are important for change because, music celebrities especially, have so much influence. But I don't think artists need to have an opinion on every subject, it's unrealistic to expect everyone to be outspoken about all the issues of our time.

But, in my opinion, it's important for artists to know who they are and what their belief system is, for those times when neutrality isn't an option (as Ed Sheeran recently found out). You can't just sit on the fence when neutrality looks like picking a side. If you're not a politically motivated thinker or writer, then at least know what issues are important to you.

I prefer to let my music do the talking. I think it's quite obvious from my songs that I'm pretty left-leaning and I have a lot to say about politics. But none of it is overt, and I don't talk about these things all the time on my social media. Just when I think it's important or the right time to put my view out there. For what it's worth…

Your work pokes fun at modern society. You talk about A.I. and male insecurities, but through the lens of humour. Do you find it hard to do that at a time in history that is so bleak and has few pockets of light and tangible light?

I think there's a lot to laugh about with A.I. It's inefficient, fallible and downright hilarious in its mistakes. I think, while it's important to talk about the very real dangers of A.I., you can bring people into the discussion by pointing out why it's so bad in a funny way. No-one wants to be lectured, so I find putting my opinion across in songs, openly mocking A.I. is a better way for me to voice my opinion.

It's the same with male insecurities. Men and their egos are responsible for so much of the suffering in the world, but mocking that in a playful way is more likely to bring about change than becoming angry and switching people away from your message. At least that's my approach.

PHOTO CREDIT: Explore With Brendan

Music Is a Serious Business is your first album. A lot of these songs had been played at previous shows. What compelled you to lay these down in the studio, and are all the songs on the album from the live shows (favourites of yours), or are there some newly-written ones too?

Almost all of them have been ‘road-tested’ first, mainly because I wanted to make sure the humour was landing. But I started writing the first one at the end of 2022 and finished when I wrote the last one at the start of this year. Many songs fell by the way side in-between…

I wanted to get them on a record, partly for those who requested them at live shows, but also because I felt you could do so much with them in a musical ensemble. There were so many jokes and musical ideas I had in my head, that I couldn't wait to put down.

What was it like recording out of Green Velvet Studios in Stockport? What was the reason for choosing that particular space?

Well, it began as a convenience that I knew the producer there, Jonny Woodhead. He was an old friend from the open mic scene in Manchester. We recorded a single there a few years ago, just as he was building the studio, and I knew then it was going to be a special place.

When it came time for the album, Green Velvet ticked so many boxes for me. All the vintage recording techniques and equipment felt perfect to record something that was so influenced by classic and new wave rock. It was a great experience.

“On the one hand, it's a brilliant thing to have full control of how your music is made and distributed; no-one telling you what you should write about or how you should promote it”

Do you have a standout track from the album that is a favourite, or one that was perhaps the most rewarding/challenging to write?

This is a tough question. I love every song for different reasons and they all now remind me of experiences and memories in my life the past few years. If I have to name one, I think I am particularly proud of ‘Printer’, because it took multiple tries to get it right, with different piano, guitar, vocal and cello arrangements. Even the mastering took the longest on that one. But ultimately, it's now so simple and pure in its delivery that it always really makes me smile

Your music has been featured on stations such as BBC Radio 6 Music and BBC Radio 2. What is it like getting praise and backing from these stations and high-profile broadcasters?

It's great having that support, especially from people in the industry that I really respect like Steve Lamacq and Mark Radcliffe. They hear loads of new music all the time, so to hear that they found something original in my songs means a lot.

I used to listen to them before I had my songs played, so it can still feel quite surreal to hear your name on the radio!

Music Is a Serious Business was crowdfunded. How crucial was it to get that support and backing from fans of your music? Do you think the realities of recording and pressing albums is a financial barrier that is creating barriers for artist, and what are the benefits of the crowdfunding approach?

I think the industry has become more D.I.Y., with more people turning to crowdfunding these days. It was crucial for me, as it is for many artists at the moment.

On the one hand, it's a brilliant thing to have full control of how your music is made and distributed; no-one telling you what you should write about or how you should promote it.

But it's also symptomatic of how hard it's become financially. There are a lot of artists struggling to get their work heard, and that feels disheartening to see.

I'm incredibly grateful that I had the backing to make the C.D.s and vinyl for this record.

I do love artists that bring in other musicians, whether that is strings or horns etc. What was it like collaborating with other musicians for Music Is a Serious Business? How easily did you click and connect with them?

Oh I love that too! The session musicians on my album were old university friends turned professional performers, that regularly work at Green Velvet Studios. I wanted the record to have that feeling of a band playing in a room, as opposed to lots of remote recordings.

I think you can really hear that live band atmosphere on the album. Players who just click together, having fun! My hope is that fun is projected onto the record itself.

The tour for this album sees you playing a lot of dates in the North. You are from Cheshire, and Manchester is like a home to you. A lot of the industry is shifting from London to the North (the Mercury Prize is now held in Newcastle). How do you feel about there is more focus on the North and less reliance and spotlight on London and the South?

Being a Northerner myself, I'm all in favour of the spotlight moving northward. I think it's long overdue. I love playing to audiences in the South. I've had some great shows in Winchester and Brighton fairly recently. But something about the crowds up North makes me feel right at home!

“I'm on tour right now, but I'd like to get out to new festivals, hopefully Glastonbury again, and some new rock and folk festivals that I've never done before”

You have played so many shows through the years, and have this reputation as a terrific live performer. How meaningful and powerful is that connection with audiences, and do you think crowd reaction to various songs is important when it came to deciding which made it onto your album?

Oh absolutely, and that's a good observation, thank you. My first album in 2018 was a live album and I had to think about which songs would get the best reaction before I recorded it. When it came to recording this one, even though it was my first studio record, I felt the same logic should apply.

The best songs that made the audience laugh or struck a chord with them emotionally made it onto the album, which is another reason I feel it's my best work to date. Maybe one day, I'll do an extended version with the ones that didn't make it first time!

I think there were also some themes and a structure that I wanted to explore, so that had an effect on the final lineup and tracklist.

Looking ahead to 2027, what are your plans? Do you have any dream venues or ambitions that you want to fulfil?

Yes, I would say next year is about taking the album on the road. I'm on tour right now, but I'd like to get out to new festivals, hopefully Glastonbury again, and some new rock and folk festivals that I've never done before. Festivals like Green Man, Beardy Folk, Blue Dot, Shrewsbury Folk, and lots of others.

In case there are any bookers reading!

I'd also like to get the record in record shops. I'm starting small with that this year, but I'll be reaching out to more shops next year. Perhaps do some in-store shows.

Finally, and for being a good sport, you can name a song (one that is not your own) and I will end the interview with it. What shall we go with?

Let's go with ‘Radio Radio’ by Elvis Costello. I recently went to see him in Manchester on a tour called ‘Radio Soul’. This song was among the songs by Elvis that definitely inspired the sound on these recordings. I also used them as a reference for the session players.

An absolute classic and if you've never seen his clip on SNL with this song, it's well worth a watch.

It's so punk and rock ‘n’ roll.

FEATURE: Spotlight: Mulaa Joans

FEATURE:

 

 

Spotlight

Mulaa Joans

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HERE is an artist…

who has been making waves this year, though I feel next year will be her biggest yet. You can feel this momentum from the sensational Mulaa Joans. We are going to see her in a lot of Ones to Watch 2027 lists. One of the U.K.’s finest young artists, she has already received accolades and plaudits. For Sian Eleri’s Future Artist of the Month on BBC Radio 1, Joans was October’s selection: “20-year-old songwriter Mulaa Joans hails from Bath, UK. Her emotive songwriting has already found fans in Jack Saunders, Sian Eleri and Matt + Mollie, and she turned heads with a much-talked-about debut at Reading Festival in summer 2026”. Through the U.K., the U.S. and beyond, there is a wave of incredible artists that are trying to make their mark. Competing and standing out in a busy and competitive industry. You can tell those who will enjoy brief success but will probably not have the longevity they deserve. When it comes to Mulaa Joans, you know that she is going to be in the industry for many years to come. I can see her releasing so many acclaimed and different albums. Someone who definitely will be headlining festivals. I do want to come to some features and interviews, so that we can get to know this phenomenal artist. Her E.P., That Ain’t You, was released in August. It is one that I would recommend everyone listen to. I want to start out with New Wave Magazine and their spotlight feature from earlier in the year. They were speaking with her around the release of her then-new single, Phone Sex. A prolific and hugely adored artist, her debut E.P./mini-album came out in 2024. That was £70 for Peace of Mind. A couple of years later, and Mulaa Joans has taken huge steps and caught the ear and eye of radio stations, music publications and venues around the country:

“The roots of Mulaa’s journey began on social media, where she started posting covers on Tik-Tok. She began posting in her early teens and a particular clip of hers covering Etta James, really started gaining traction. This started a snowball effect, where Mulaa had thousands of people tuning in to her Tik-Tok to hear her take on popular songs. This transpired into Mulaa making the leap into moving from her hometown in Bath to London, to pursue her dream of becoming an artist in her own right.

Looking back on her early years, and discussing if there was a point where she realised she had a voice, Mulaa recalls that she has been singing for as long as she remembers. She credits her parents and the people around as driving forces behind her confidence as they were always so encouraging and never dimmed her light. In terms of her vocal style, she explains that she was never given any formal vocal training as it just wasn’t affordable, but she now sees that as one of her strengths. In the beginning of her journey, Mulaa acknowledges that she was mimicking a lot of other artists as she was still finding her voice, but she thinks the lack of formal vocal training in the beginning has helped her find her individuality as an artist. Granted, she now does have vocal training as she needs it to maintain her voice for recording and live shows, but she wouldn’t go back and change that about her journey.

Growing up at home, Mulaa was exposed to a lot of drum and bass music from her parents, which would come as a shock to many of her fans, as the music she has released is quite far removed in terms of genre. However, her songs are very direct and contains an unapologetic energy that drum and bass and electronic music is renowned for. Her dad was also a big fan of some of the classics like Michael Jackson and Prince, which checks out.

Speaking about developing her own taste that wasn’t directly influenced by her parents, Mulaa cites All the Little Lights by Passenger, The Boss by James Brown, Anti by Rihanna as well as Don’t Smile at Me by Billie Eilish as key reference points artistically. All these artists and albums had a lasting effect on her music output currently. The Don’t Smile at Me EP, changed her perspective on song writing as she realised there were no rules and you could be as left-field as you want, and it could still reach an audience, even if the meaning behind the songs were not obvious.

This is an artist who is going from strength to strength. She recently appeared on Later… with Jools Holland. I think that she is going to be a fixture of the summer festival circuit next year. There are a couple of other interviews I am getting to before wrapping up. In a very brief chat from earlier in the year, LE MILE Magazine caught some time with Mulaa Joans. This incredible singer “has already caused quite a buzz on social media. She has more than 400,000 followers on TikTok, and her song “Love Letter” alone has been streamed millions of times, with over 50,000 posts created using her sound. To get to know her a little better, she answered a few questions for us”. If Joans is not on your radar already, then you really do need to catch her. A staggering talent who is going to have a very long career:

“What does a typical songwriting session look like for you, and what tends to inspire your songs the most?

I often write songs or melody ideas and concepts in my bedroom, or while sitting by my window, to YouTube beats. It was something I always used to do when I was little because I can’t play any instruments, but I really like that I still implement that in my songwriting today. I then usually take those ideas into sessions with the people I work with, and we make the song better. I’m inspired by literally everything. I think as I’m growing up, I’m learning how to speak about things that may have happened to me in the past, things that maybe I wasn’t ready to speak about when I was younger. But I’m also very inspired by film. I often write songs based on films or TV storylines.

Your music has been all over our feeds, with videos and edits with millions of views using your song “Love Letter.” Why do you think the track connects so strongly, and what is it about it that resonates with so many people?

I honestly think it’s because the lyrics are so blunt and honest, and often people are scared to say exactly how they feel. I’ve always been a very confrontational and blunt person, so I think it comes across in my songwriting. People relate to it because it’s something they feel they want to say to someone in their life, but don’t feel like they can. The song gives them an outlet for that.

Looking back so far, what has been the most memorable moment of your career?

I think the most memorable moment of my career has been my show in Amsterdam. I can’t even express to you how crazy it is that people in another country are singing the lyrics to my songs that aren’t even out yet. That is just actually mad. The fans were so nice, and I really loved getting to stay and chat with them.

I do want to end by going back to April. HUNGER spoke with a treasure and signualr voixe who was about to have a very busy summer. Looking back at what she has achieved this year, Mulaa Joans should be very proud! She has put the work in, so it is not like this has been handed to her. Testament to her phenomenal talent and passion, this is someone who we will be talking about decades from now:

“The lyric she is most proud of is the one that tells you the most about letting go: “Your words hit like a feather.” Not a wound. Not a slap. A feather. “I was trying to figure out a way to say that without it being so obvious,” she explains. By the time she sat down to write, the person the song addressed had already lost whatever hold on Joans they once had.

When it came to recording, Joans guided the instrumental parts with the same instinct that informed her lyrics, describing the feeling she was looking for and working with the instrumentalists in the room to find it. The result is a record that sounds both immediate and settled. Though the track has been out for less than two months, it already exudes a sense of timelessness; the kind of art that won’t date because it was never trying to be current in the first place. BBC Introducing was the first to recognise that, and the rest followed naturally.

Ask Joans about her headline shows and she becomes even more animated than when on the topic of recording. Her performances are built around a piano, a voice, and an audience she addresses not as a crowd but as a room full of individuals she has made time for. “I’m a big chatter,” she says. Her shows have developed a distinct character over time: she talks on stage, genuinely and at length, shares the stories behind the songs, and allows the performance to breathe into something more reminiscent of an extended conversation than a conventional set.

 

One moment in particular from a show has stayed with her: performing ‘Love Letter’ live the first time before the song had been released. “I got everyone to scream, ‘Get the fuck out my life’, and they didn’t even know it yet,” she says. “People came up to me after and said, ‘We love that bit.’ That was really cool.”

What has gathered around those shows is, unsurprisingly, an audience that predates the viral moments and the radio plays. Often, they are people who arrived to Joans’s music early and have remained close; they’re the ones who position themselves right by the stage and make sure those standing beside them understand what they are witnessing. “The fans who have been there from the start are still at the front,” Joans says, “and they’re encouraging other people to scream it. It’s become like a collective.”

This spring also sees Joans join Sekou across his European and UK tour. For an artist who has spent the past year establishing her project closer to home, it represents a considered next step: the opportunity to walk into rooms full of people entirely unfamiliar with her work and, night after night, introduce herself. “As a support, the people haven’t paid to see you and they don’t necessarily care who you are yet,” she says. “Even if I can make one or two people think, ‘I’m really glad I came and saw her, that would be a success.’” Her approach on tour will not differ from what it has always been: present and considered. She wants her songs to resonate, and she wants the connection between herself and the people listening to feel real”.

I will end here. I think a range of magazines and websites will highlight Mulaa Joans as an artist to watch next year. Maybe NME. She has been in the industry for a little while, but I do think 2027 is going to be her biggest year. I predict big festival bookings, some U.S. shows, an album and some incredible collaborations. Some of her best work ahead. That Ain’t You is one of the best E.P.s of the year. Someone that you simply cannot afford to miss out on, here we have…

A modern icon.

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Follow Mulaa Joans

Official:

https://www.mulaajoans.com/

Instagram:

https://www.instagram.com/mulaajoans

Facebook:

https://www.facebook.com/p/Mulaa-Joans-61574653928137

TikTok:

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

Spotify:

https://open.spotify.com/artist/2bas662BATSVlnZULsRIXs?si=7_Y_HNzsSniJPXwjgYBJqg

YouTube:

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

INTERVIEW: Lara St. John and Patrick Hamm (Dear Lara)

INTERVIEW:

POSTER DESIGNER: Mark McGillivray 

Lara St. John and Patrick Hamm (Dear Lara)

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THIS is one of the…

PHOTO CREDIT: Annie Jeeves

most important and urgent interviews I have ever conducted. For decades, there has been an often-overlooked crisis of sexual abuse in the classical music space. There have been multiple instances of conservatory students, many of whom were minors at the time, experiencing abuse at the hands of instructors, only for faculty to be more concerned with protecting their school's image than holding perpetrators accountable. Dear Lara is an award-winning documentary directed by acclaimed violinist Lara St. John. The documentary came to be after St. John publicly disclosed the abuse she experienced while attending the Curtis Institute of Music. Among the multiple alleged perpetrators covered by this film are Jan Repko of Chetham's School of Music and Duncan McTier of the Royal Northern College of Music. I have been speaking with its director Lara St. John and producer Patrick Hamm ahead of the film's U.K. debut at the Women and the World International Film Festival on 11th November. Dear Lara has been screened at multiple festivals throughout North America and Europe, an and has received the following accolades: Best International Documentary from the Brittany International Film Festival, Best First Time Filmmaker from the LA Independent Women Film Awards, and the Courage Award from Cinema d'iDEA in Rome. More screenings will take place in the coming months, with a commercial release planned for 2027. For those in the U.K., you can book tickets and see the documentary on 11th November. I have been finding out more about a phenomenal, powerful and hugely affecting documentary that…

EVERYONE needs to see.

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I have been a music journalist for fifteen years now and have written about sexual abuse rife throughout the music industry. Do you think there has been change and progress at all? In reality, what would progress look like? It does seem like a #MeToo awakening or reckoning is overdue…

Patrick: Classical music had a #MeToo moment, but never a #MeToo reckoning. There have been revelations, and some perpetrators have faced consequences. But classical music has been painfully slow to confront the structures that allowed abuse to continue for decades. Allegations are still treated as isolated scandals rather than signs of a broader problem. Teachers and conductors are often elevated to almost godlike status. Young musicians depend on them for recommendations, opportunities, and careers. Institutions, meanwhile, have repeatedly put their reputations first. Real progress would mean investigating past abuses, holding perpetrators and the institutions that enabled them accountable, and changing the law so survivors have a fair chance to seek justice. Students also need to be able to report misconduct without risking their careers. I would judge progress by something quite simple: can a student report abuse without paying a professional price for it? And can a perpetrator, or an institution that protects one, still get away with it?

Lara: The change has been glacial at best. I don’t think that most of the schools in the U.K. care, until they get found out. In 2020, I wrote to the Royal College in London, for example, asking to speak to their Head of Strings, Mark Messenger, about sexual abuse (I was meaning to give him the translated complaint about Jan Repko from Amsterdam). I was informed that he had no time for promotional activities (!!) Shortly afterwards he was removed from his post for “gross misconduct”. It made me quite sure that these men protect each other.

Dear Lara is a documentary that everyone needs to see. The crisis of sexual abuse in the Classical music space has been largely under-highlighted. Why do you think that might be compared to, say, other areas of music?

Patrick: Part of the answer lies in the image classical music has cultivated of itself. It is associated with refinement, intellectual achievement, and cultural prestige. People don't particularly want to hear about its dark underbelly. We are also remarkably willing to excuse the behavior of celebrated artists, with some teachers and conductors becoming almost unassailable. There is a remarkably cavalier attitude toward allegations of abuse in parts of the industry. Classical music is a small world, where careers depend on recommendations and access to powerful people. Speaking out can jeopardize everything a young musician has worked for, while institutions have their own reasons for looking the other way, especially when the person accused is someone prominent. What struck us while making Dear Lara was the gap between public perception and what people in the industry already knew. Outsiders are often shocked by these stories. Professional musicians tend to recognize the names and the patterns immediately. The problem isn't that nobody knew. It's that far too many people knew, and far too few were willing to do anything about it.

Lara: Other areas of music, while they certainly have their own problems, do not have men being given preposterous, practically messianic, amounts of power over small children. That is our classical music problem, and we have parallel situations in the Catholic Church, for example. Because we have been so totally silenced and have not been allowed to say anything at the price of our careers (I sacrificed my own to make this movie) Dear Lara is the first ever film which really examines the huge problem for children and women and some young men in the industry.

 “However, I decided I was finally in a position to become public and force a reckoning, and every step of the way and slap in the face and punch in the gut has been worth it”

Lara, you went public about your experience in 2019 in The Philadelphia Inquirer. How difficult was it to do that, and what did it feel like to be flooded with letters from fellow survivors telling their stories?

Lara: As you might expect, it’s very hard to make public the worst moment of one’s life, and in my case, how I lost my virginity as a child in a truly disgusting manner. However, I decided I was finally in a position to become public and force a reckoning, and every step of the way and slap in the face and punch in the gut has been worth it. As every single survivor who becomes public says: I just don’t want this to happen to another child/woman/man. And, I think I am making real-life change to prevent this horror from happening to yet another generation.

It is horrifying how the sexual assault of children in Classical music is almost normalised. The abusers are often protected by statutes of limitations and institutes shielding them. I cannot imagine how difficult it is for survivors to bravely tell their stories. It must have been quite humbling but also so moving….

Patrick: When I joined the project, I was struck by how many people had experiences similar to Lara's, often decades and thousands of miles apart. Many had spent much of their lives believing they were alone. Speaking publicly about abuse takes tremendous courage in a small, interconnected field where the professional consequences can last a lifetime. Several people we spoke with had already lost their careers, or their love of music, because of what happened to them. Lara was able to establish a kind of trust with survivors that an outside filmmaker would have struggled to earn.

She understood what they had been through, and as a team, we felt a serious responsibility to honor that trust.

Lara: I was in a very unusual position, because I wasn’t reaching out to folks like a reporter or journalist might - they all reached out to me. And they already knew my story and my history, so it was almost comfortable for the survivors to speak to me because they knew I understood, in every sense. We hung out, talked before the cameras went on, became friends, ate dinners, drank wine, and I am in touch with everyone to this day.

Many people will be interested in the documentary but feel uneasy or like it will be pretty ‘intense’ or ‘heavy’ – which, I guess, is sort of the point. What would you say to people who are hesitant in terms of why they absolutely do need to see Dear Lara?

Patrick: Dear Lara is certainly not a comedy. We deal with difficult stories, and we don't shy away from describing abuse and what it can do to people's lives. But audiences are often surprised by the humor, strength, and defiance they find in the film. At its heart, the film follows people who refused to stay quiet, challenged powerful institutions, and kept fighting even when the odds were stacked against them. There is anger in it, but also a great deal of determination. You don't have to be a classical music lover to connect with these stories. Power, complicity, loyalty to institutions, and the cost of speaking out are hardly problems confined to music. We also worked hard to make a film, not simply an exposé. After screenings, people often stay to talk, sometimes for a long time. They are upset by what they've seen, and they want to know what can be done.

Lara: Well, documentaries are almost always intense and/or heavy. It’s not a film type one goes to for comedic relief from real life, because they are real life. I would certainly encourage parents and musicians to see it because they need insight into why and how this has happened for so long, and how they can avoid it and hold the people and institutions accountable. We don’t have magic answers, but this is a first step towards shining light on dark places. Also, for certain folks hesitant to see it, I would ask: “What’s in your closet?”

“We knew the film needed to connect those experiences and ask why the same failures kept recurring”

There are bright and positive moments. Dear Lara examines efforts at the Conservatorium van Amsterdam to make a clean break with the past, to denounce past misdeeds and build a culture of transparency and intolerance for abusers. Survivors sharing their experiences will definitely lead to bigger, consistent conversations. What have been some of the more rewarding or positive elements of making Dear Lara?

Patrick: Bringing the survivors' stories together was enormously rewarding. Many had felt isolated for years or believed that what happened to them was somehow unique. Hearing these experiences side by side makes the recurring patterns impossible to ignore. The Conservatorium van Amsterdam provided another important part of the story. It shows what can happen when an institution is willing to acknowledge past failures and confront them openly. The way music schools have traditionally handled abuse isn't inevitable. Administrators can choose to do things differently. We have also seen the film produce results. After our sold-out Toronto screening, a petition calling for accountability at the Royal Conservatory of Music gathered thousands of signatures. The institution subsequently announced an independent investigation into historical allegations of abuse. We could hardly have hoped for a more consequential response.

Lara: The Amsterdam Conservatory is a shining beacon of hope. They have repeatedly shown that they care a lot about the well-being of the students, and in so doing have created the most transparent (literally) building ever, with no locks on any doors, they have brought in team teaching, and they disallow any teaching at the homes of teachers. Conversely, the Royal Conservatory (Toronto) made us survivors and our allies work way too hard every step of the way towards getting an external investigation. They dug in their heels, and only when public opinion started to sour considerably, thanks to the film and various petitions, they finally acquiesced to getting an external investigation. It seems as though that investigation, now ongoing, will not be made public. Therefore we all question why on earth they would have re-traumatized victims for nothing. Our work there is not yet done, and as I’ve said, half-jokingly, I’ll be borrowing some signs from my American friends which say: “RELEASE THE FILES!”.

I am interested in how it came together in terms of who you featured and the direction the documentary took. How long did it take to bring everything together, as it were? Did you face any challenges along the way?

Patrick: Lara began filming in 2019, shortly after going public with her own story. For the first three years, she worked largely on her own, interviewing survivors and following leads without knowing where the project would ultimately take her. I joined as producer in 2022, and we gradually assembled a team, including our wonderful editor Christie Herring and associate producer Sanjana Bhambhani. We finally completed the film in 2026, seven years after Lara recorded her first interview. The story took shape as Lara spoke with more survivors. Across different countries, institutions, and generations, she kept hearing similar accounts of abuse, cover-ups, and retaliation. We knew the film needed to connect those experiences and ask why the same failures kept recurring. We had a hard time getting the film made. We received no documentary production grants and very little support from the established funding system. Private supporters and a deeply committed team kept us going. Once the film was finished, the first round of festival responses wasn't particularly encouraging either. Making a film about people challenging powerful institutions turned out to require a fair amount of stubbornness on our part as well.

Lara: There have been giant challenges, and it’s been a very rocky journey. Countless times along the way, I came within a hair’s breadth of giving up, and it has literally taken blood, sweat and tears of mine to make. Things got somewhat easier when I met Patrick and he assembled the team, of course, in 2022 - but before that it was me, alone, against the world of these predators and their enabling institutions. I once broke down in Schipol airport after one of the Dutch interviews, a particularly heavy one. The kind folks there nearly carted me away, but I managed to explain something in time. I was treated very badly in England during some of my forays there. I remember yelling into a phone “Why the hell am I the one caring about England’s girls and women if they themselves don’t give a rat’s ass?” (fair enough).

Also, I have sacrificed a lot. I had to halt my music career to be available for my film. I used to own an apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, and now I have a documentary. So be it, it’ll be worth it if even one child avoids my fate.

PHOTO CREDIT: Sanjana Bhambhani

I know that Dear Lara is available to universities, conservatories, and other educational and cultural institutions throughout North America. Why was it particularly important to show the documentary in these spaces? Are there plans to show it in universities and conservatories in other parts of the world?

Patrick: For us, screenings at music schools and conservatories are a priority. This is where young musicians learn what behavior is acceptable, whom they can trust, and whether their institutions will protect them. Our early test screenings confirmed something we suspected: people outside classical music reacted with disbelief, while people inside the field often recognized the behavior immediately. Their response was outrage and a demand for change. We have seen how productive it can be to put students, teachers, and administrators in a room together. We have also recently begun outreach to educational institutions in Europe.

Research data from this year highlighted how there are challenges inherent in addressing the issue of sexual abuse and harassment. Whilst studies have been published in other countries, they also “highlight a broader gap in systematic research within the American orchestral field”. With hurdles still in place – students fearing career repercussions naming their abusers -, how do you think we can overcome this and avoid issues such as pressure placed on musicians, especially women, to remain silent?

Patrick: Two things need to happen: accountability for past abuse and prevention of future abuse. First, institutions need to investigate historical allegations rather than simply waiting for the problem to disappear. Survivors also need stronger legal rights, including reforms to statutes of limitations that currently prevent many from pursuing justice. We need to make it possible to hold not only individual perpetrators accountable, but also the institutions that protected or enabled them. There must be serious consequences for both perpetrators and institutions that shield them. If covering up abuse carries little legal or financial risk, the temptation to protect the institution's reputation remains strong. Criminal prosecution and civil liability can change that calculation. Prevention matters just as much. Music schools and orchestras need independent reporting channels, protection against retaliation, credible investigations, and less dependence on the unchecked authority of any one teacher or conductor. Students are right to worry about retaliation. In this field, one influential person can derail a career. We cannot solve that by asking young musicians to be braver. The professional risks of reporting have to change. The research highlighted by Unbound Symphony is important. We need better data, especially in the United States. But there is already ample evidence of the problem. More research cannot become a reason to postpone action.

Lara: (seems like Patrick answered this one pretty thoroughly). I would just add: schools and conservatories are just a few places which need to be seeing this film. I would love for lawmakers, especially in the U.S.A., to have some screenings (and I think we’re on the way). The Statute of Limitations, which gets discussed in the film, protects perpetrators and their enabling institutions in many states, including Pennsylvania. This emboldens child abusers and the institutions who protect them because they are perfectly aware that their victim is so disempowered it’ll be years before they can speak out. At the risk of sounding blunt, I’ll just say that I managed to get raped as a child in the wrong state. I have never had any possibility of justice. Only when there is a lookback window or when the statute falls, will I ever see any.

And to echo Patrick a bit, every musician who sees it says to me “AT LAST!” with varying amounts of emotion. Non-musicians are shocked. The silence has been so entrenched, they had no idea.

Dear Lara has won, among other honours, Best International Documentary from the Brittany International Film Festival, and the Courage Award from Cinema d'iDEA in Rome. How does it feel to receive that kind of acclaim and recognition?

Patrick: The awards mean a great deal. We spent seven years making this film, often with very limited resources and no certainty that it would find an audience. It's gratifying to have the work recognized, especially after such a difficult path to completion. The messages from audiences have affected me even more. Survivors have told us they felt seen by the film. Others have shared experiences they had never spoken about publicly. We also hear from people who say the film started conversations in their own institutions. Toronto stands out. Thousands signed a petition demanding accountability at the Royal Conservatory of Music after our screening. The conservatory subsequently announced an independent investigation. That response means more to me than any award.

Lara: Actually, we just won another one! The Impact Award at Naples (Florida) Film Festival. Yes, it’s of course really nice to get these prizes and awards, but the whole point is to get it out to as many eyes as possible. If these awards can help that, great.

We have intentionally disqualified the film from, say, the Oscars, because various countries have bought broadcast rights and some have aired it. One producer at a film festival told me that it takes about a million dollars for an Oscar campaign, and I thought, well, if I had that kind of dough (I do not) I’d much rather spend it to get it in front of loads of folks than in front of the thousand or so that vote in the academy. It was an easy decision.

“What stays with me most are the conversations after screenings. People linger to speak with Lara, tell us about their own experiences, or ask questions about the film”

Dear Lara is getting a wider release next year. It no doubt will speak to those who have survived abuse. It also shines a light on Classical music and abuse that has been rife for years. What do you both want to happen in the coming years in terms of the toxic culture and distributing statistics? What can and should the industry do to ensure that there is greater accountability, repercussions for abusers, and a safer environment for Classical students?

Patrick: I hope that in five or ten years we'll look back at some of the practices that are still accepted in classical music and find them astonishing. For too long, artistic talent has been used to excuse terrible behavior. People who speak out can lose their careers while those responsible carry on. Accountability has to extend beyond individual perpetrators. Schools and orchestras need to stop quietly passing problematic teachers from one institution to another. They need proper scrutiny when allegations arise, and they need to make it safe for people to report what they know. The deeper problem is cultural. Classical music has long romanticized the authoritarian teacher, the brilliant but difficult maestro, and the idea that suffering is somehow part of becoming a great artist. We need to challenge those assumptions. Artistic excellence doesn't require cruelty. I'd be delighted if Dear Lara eventually felt like a record of a bygone culture, rather than a description of the one we're still living in.

Lara: There are still well-known abusers allowed to perpetrate their predilections in many corners of the world. The only way we’re going to make significant change in such a backwards-looking profession is if we talk about these things, report the abuse (by making it possible for people to do so without losing everything) and name the institutions who allowed this to go on for so very long, and in many cases, still do. I’ve started to see many schools start to clean house of their own accord, though. That, to me, is a hopeful sign! Also, about 50 schools have already asked to screen Dear Lara, also hopeful.

Obviously, it has been an intense and busy period for you both getting Dear Lara made and seen. That is still ongoing. However, with a little breathing room, what are your abiding emotions and memories, either in terms of feedback from survivors or how it has been received in general?

Patrick: What stays with me most are the conversations after screenings. People linger to speak with Lara, tell us about their own experiences, or ask questions about the film. Sometimes they've been carrying these stories for decades. When someone tells you something that personal, you feel the responsibility of having helped put the film into the world. I'm also struck by the number of musicians who say some version of "We all knew." That is deeply troubling. But we're meeting students and teachers who no longer seem willing to accept that silence. I'm proud of Lara and our small team for getting the film finished and in front of audiences. Lara started on her own, with a camera and a determination to make people listen. It's remarkable to sit beside her at a screening now and hear what people have to say afterward.

Lara: I won’t have breathing room, per se, for some time, since I am determined to go and be the face of my film as many places as I can! And I won’t deny that it’s heavy and tough to speak to people after such a movie, but it’s what I signed up for by first speaking out, then making the film and now travelling with it. No regrets here. We have now been selected at over 20 festivals on four continents and won six awards. We’ve been playing at schools, conservatories, libraries, musicians’ union theatres and we have or will be broadcast in three countries. That is all since the World Premiere in February.

Classical Music World, we’re a-comin’ atcha. Look out.

FEATURE: This Is Your Big Debut… Why the 2027 Fiftieth Anniversary of Steely Dan’s Aja Once More Is Sparking Ambitions in Me

FEATURE:

 

 

This Is Your Big Debut…

Why the 2027 Fiftieth Anniversary of Steely Dan’s Aja Once More Is Sparking Ambitions in Me

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A few classic albums…

PHOTO CREDIT: Anna Pou/Pexels

turns fifty next year. Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours among them. One of my favourite albums ever is Steely Dan’s Aja. That was released on 23rd September, 1977. Donald Fagen and Walter Becker would record one more album together, 1980’s Aja, before there was a hiatus or time away. They then recorded two albums in the 2000s and toured. Becker died in 2017. On 3rd September next year we mark ten years since we lost Walter Becker. Gaucho was mostly made with Donald Fagen in charge, as Becker had some personal issues. A roster of professional musicians came through the sessions. It was a marathon recording and the perfectionism of Donald Fagen was on full display. Though Aja was not exactly stress-free, you feel it was a more harmonious experience. Becker and Fagen together for most of it. Gaucho is a wonderful album. It turns forty-six on 21st November. It is worth listening to the album if you have not done so in a while. I have been thinking about Aja. There was a 2023 reissue. I wonder if there are unheard takes, demos and extras that could go onto a fiftieth anniversary reissue. Donald Fagen has not released a solo album since 2012’s Sunken Condos. I hope that he does record more material. Steely Dan have a big fanbase, though I am not sure how many younger music fans know them. Played on radio stations that have a slightly older demographic, unless their music is used in film or there are new albums, a lot of legacy artists do not get that attention from younger generations. What would be cool ahead of the fiftieth anniversary of Aja if there were some new videos commissioned.

The Beach Boys had a few of their hits accompanied by new videos a whole back. I Get Around and Surfin’ U.S.A. among them. The Beatles have had that too. When they have had albums reissues and deluxe editions, there have been videos made. I’m Only Sleeping one of the songs where we get a cool video. Steely Dan didn’t film music videos, so it is long overdue that we would get some visualisations. There are three Aja songs I feel could have very different and amazing videos. Josie, Deacon Blues and Peg. Maybe Josie as a live action with an actress playing the eponymous character. Deacon Blues could have an animated video. I think Peg had possibilities with live action. There are other songs that could benefit from a video, such as Aja and Black Cow, though I feel the holy trinity of Peg, Josie, and Deacon Blues would be amazing to see. I have written before how, since Steely Dan’s reign, there has not been a group like them. More and more, I look around music and see this gap. I have pitched an album idea before. Called American Grammar, it would have tracks called American Grammar, Can’t Buy a Thrill, Long Shot, Negative Space, I’ll Get to New York City One Day Soon, Katy’s Switch, Hipsterlooza, and Eastside. Big topics being tackled alongside themes of romantic struggle and growing older. A fantastic and striking album cover. Similar to Steely Dan and Aja, recording with a host of incredible musicians across a few studios. I know it would be an expensive process, but I do genuinely feel that there is this gulf. How you hope that someone would emerge, post-Steely Dan. Even though I would not be playing on an album, it would be great to be part of a debut album. Writing lyrics and art direction. Different singers tackling the songs. Musicians playing in a couple of U.S. studios. I can’t think of any album quite like Aja. Even if it does not tackle topics that you’d address today – L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.+ rights, political corruption in the U.S., gender inequality and women facing sexual abuse -, the rich and layered musicianship mixed with lyrics that are intelligent and compelling. Not ordinary songs that pass you by.

Thinking ahead to an important fiftieth anniversary, Aja will be introduced to new listeners. Though I kind of think it would be beneficial having music videos made. Beyond that, its legacy remains with Steely Dan. You can feel some artists since who inhabit some aspects of them and the album, though nothing particularly major or enduring. Others might disagree. Steely Dan are one of these acts that were so amazing and released these genius albums, though there is little in the way of contemporaries. Not that an Aja fiftieth anniversary celebration would change that too much. It does re-instil a desire to mix the brilliance of Steely Dan’s musicianship and wit and combine that with tackling modern themes. Keeping the essence of Steely Dan there. Maybe you can’t improve on the originals. Listening to albums like Aja and Gaucho. To do something similar but weaker. Not to suggest someone copy it and do something exactly like it. Just take that blueprint and foundation and building something that is not a replica. It does make me a bit sad that there is little direct influence of Steely Dan running through modern music. Perhaps on the fringes or some lesser-known artists. In addition to thinking about my own album based around Steely Dan’s sound and legacy, I also think too about commemorative/anniversary videos for Aja songs. Feeling Josie come to life with a popular actress as the song unfolds. Although the albums and music of Steely Dan will remain forever and always be heard, you wonder about passing the torch and who takes over. Splicing Steely Dan’s 1970s and 1980s brilliance and bringing it…

INTO the modern day.

FEATURE: Such Great Heights: Inside the Incredible and Enduring Soundtrack of Zach Braff’s 2004 Film, Garden State

FEATURE:

 

 

Such Great Heights

Inside the Incredible and Enduring Soundtrack of Zach Braff’s 2004 Film, Garden State

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NOT related to any…

IN THIS PHOTO: Garden State’s writer/director/star Zach Braff onstage for a twentieth anniversary concert in 2025/PHOTO CREDIT: Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images

news, anniversary or anything significant relating to it, I did want to look inside the soundtrack of the 2004 film, Garden State. I guess its director/writer/star Zach Braff is back in a lot of people’s homes and minds because of the new series of Scrubs. Finding peak form and seemingly entering a new phase of life, we hope that there are many more episodes to come. Braff is a successful director and writer, and it must be strange looking back to 2004 when Garden State was released. That was his debut as a director and writer. I do love the film, yet it is the soundtrack that really stayed with me. I have written about various film scores and soundtracks. How important they are. Debating which are the best. Certain directors whose film soundtracks are almost as good as the films themselves. Paul Thomas Anderson and Quentin Tarantino among them. Maybe it is the selection of songs on Garden State that makes it such an incredible album. These are songs that meant a lot to Zach Braff, but they also have this wider resonance. In terms of the standout songs, there is Caring Is Creepy from The Shins, Don’t Panic by Coldplay, and Zero 7’s In the Waiting Line. My favourite is Simon & Garfunkel’s The Only Living Boy in New York. I do like this idea of a soundtrack being like a mixtape. One that means a lot to the director/writer and is not just a collection of songs lazily slung together. Someone trying to get all these needle drops without really having much purpose for placing that particular song in the scene. Zach Braff is a big music fan, and all of the songs mean/meant something to him. I think it is that combination of well-known artists standing with some people may not have heard of. Nick Drake and Bonnie Sommerville standing bedside one another, as it were.

Iron & Wire’s Such Great Heights sharing sonic room with Remy Zero’s Fair. It is a fascinating soundtrack that has come back in my mind. In the same way some people are frustrated actors or directors, I am a frustrated songwriter. That dream will never be realised for me, so I guess music journalism is a way of being adjacent to that. Not a compromise, it is a connection to the music industry. Studio albums are brilliant, but there is something about a soundtrack that stands out. I would urge people to go and watch Garden State. You can stream it here. Quite hard to track down, I would recommend people rent and watch it when they can. Though it sounds hard and bleak when it comes to the synopsis – “Andrew Largeman (Zach Braff) shuffled through life in a lithium-induced coma until his mother’s death inspired a vacation from the pills to see what might happen. A moderately successful TV actor living in Los Angeles, “Large” hasn't been home to the "Garden State" in nine years. But even with 3,000 miles between them, he's been unable to escape his domineering father Gideon (Sir Ian Holm) and the silencing effect he’s had on his son from afar” -, it is actually pretty uplifting an funny. The brilliant Natalie Portman in one of her best roles. An incredible performance. The chemistry between her and Braff is an important factor when it comes to the film’s success. I want to come to some writing about the soundtrack. This feature from The Ringer was published in 2024. Marking twenty years of an essential and phenomenal soundtrack, Zach Braff, James Mercer of The Shins, Imogen Heap (Frou Frou), and more explain how it all came together. I have followed Braff’s career since and listened to soundtracks from his films. Nothing quite matches Garden State. One of the all-time great soundtracks:

“The movie hails from a steady wave of hip, successful soundtracks. The 2000s were full of them. Almost Famous, Love & Basketball, Marie Antoinette, Juno, (500) Days of Summer, and Twilight picked up where Singles, Waiting to Exhale, Romeo + Juliet, Trainspotting, and Cruel Intentions had left off in the ’90s. If you were a teenager or college kid (especially a white teenager or college kid) when Garden State came out, you probably had a copy of the album in your CD storage tower or at least knew someone who did. Maybe you loaded it onto your shiny, new iPod. You might have also read the blog Braff started as part of Garden State’s promotional campaign, where he dropped additional music suggestions, such as Ben Harper’s “Waiting on an Angel” and the Smiths’ “Please, Please, Please, Let Me Get What I Want.” (It was revealed just this week that another blog, in 2005, from future vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance, described the soundtrack as “so relevant to my life right now, and the story of a guy returning home, realizing that home isn’t what it used to be, etc., made me want to tear up.”) No matter how anyone feels about the film or its moody needle drops today, it was an irrefutable touchstone. An aura of cool hovered around the whole thing.

“What I think worked about the soundtrack was that you could put the tracks in order, so you could sort of experience the film through the music,” Braff tells The Ringer 20 years later. “This was back in an era where people actually listened to a full album, as opposed to just picking tracks like we do on streaming these days.”

For a Sundance breakout made by a sitcom star at a modest $2.5 million, Garden State surpassed every expectation. Miramax and Fox Searchlight paid a joint $5 million to acquire the film, which eventually grossed an impressive $35.8 million in just a limited release. The soundtrack—also featuring the likes of Coldplay, Simon & Garfunkel, Iron & Wine, and Thievery Corporation—went platinum without releasing any stand-alone singles. This is the story of how the album came together.

Part 1: “A Bunch of Friends Making a Mixtape”

Before Garden State, Braff was known as the goofy guy from Scrubs. He wrote the movie’s first draft in 2000, at which point he’d appeared in the films Manhattan Murder Mystery and The Broken Hearts Club. The NBC hospital comedy premiered the following year. What Braff calls a quarter-life crisis inspired the story of a depressed TV actor named Andrew Largeman who returns home to small-town New Jersey for his mother’s funeral. In the course of a few days, Andrew reconnects with old friends, meets a quirky love interest named Sam (Natalie Portman), confronts his emotionally distant father (Ian Holm), and more or less figures himself out. (The film was initially titled Large’s Ark, and the script included other story lines that Braff later cut. “It was the first screenplay I’d ever written. I didn’t know anything, really,” he says.) Garden State was part of a fertile subgenre fixated on suburban ennui, fitting in with contemporary releases like The Ice Storm, Happiness, American Beauty, The Virgin Suicides, and Ghost World.

Zach Braff (director, writer, and actor): It was sort of a fantasy—not only fantasy for the romantic relationship, but fantasy that I would have these breakthroughs that were keeping me from being myself. It was a very vulnerable thing to do. When I put it out there, I had no idea that it would resonate so much. No one did.

Dan Halsted (producer): I was an independent producer at the time, and I was consulting with Gary Gilbert, who was a new financier in Hollywood looking to put some money into scripts. He had met Natalie Portman at a charity function somewhere, and he said, “I would love to do anything with Natalie.” So I called up Natalie’s agent at CAA, and he said, “I’ve got this script by a guy on Scrubs; Jersey Films, Danny DeVito’s company, is involved, and they’re looking for financing.” I sent it right to Gary. Gary calls me the next day and goes, “I want to do this.” Zach was kind of a genius in that he sent a CD with the script. In the script, he had music cues saying, “Play this song here.” It was pretty much the final soundtrack.

Braff: The hardest thing in the world to convey with a screenplay is tone. One thing about putting songs in and giving people a mix CD back in the day was that I hoped I could convey the vibe.

Cary Brothers (“Blue Eyes”): Zach and I met in college at Northwestern. I was playing at the Hotel Cafe in the singer-songwriter scene in Los Angeles, and Zach got the funding for Garden State. He came to me and said, “Hey, can I put ‘Blue Eyes’ in Garden State?” At the time, it was a very independent film that was really under the radar.

Braff: Musicals were what got me into the business. My father loved musicals. If I had any leg up at all, it’s that since I was a tiny kid seeing so many musicals, I was aware that the right song in the right place could give people goose bumps.

Chad Fischer (composer, Garden State score): I played drums for Colin Hay, the singer from Men at Work, in the early ’90s, and we cowrote some songs together. Zach and all his buddies would come and see Colin play at Largo [in Los Angeles]. This is the late ’90s, early aughts. That’s how Zach fell in love with Colin’s solo acoustic music, and that’s how “I Just Don’t Think I’ll Ever Get Over You” made it on the soundtrack.

Colin Hay (“I Just Don’t Think I’ll Ever Get Over You,” speaking to Stereogum in 2022): I had that song, I think probably ’96 or something like that, on an album called Transcendental Highway. And it wasn’t until 10 years later, when Zach put it in the film and then Sony released it as part of the soundtrack, that people started to really notice the song. It gave me faith in myself in a way. Because I thought to myself, “Well, I was right. It was a good song, and people did like it if they were exposed to it.” And that’s what Scrubs and the Garden State film did. It just helped youngsters discover that they liked some of these tunes I was doing.


Brothers: I played that Coldplay record [“Don’t Panic”] for Zach for the first time because my roommate worked at Capitol Records, [Coldplay’s U.S. label]. I was just such a music nerd. There were a few of us who were friends who would go up to Zach’s house with stacks of CDs. He would describe a scene, and we would throw out a bunch of ideas. It had the energy of a bunch of friends making a mixtape. Nobody was telling us what to do.

Halsted: Zach wrote to all the artists and gave them a whole point of view and said, “Look, I only have this amount of money.”

Robert Kraft (former president, Fox Music): I recommended explaining that he couldn’t afford the prices he was being quoted but desperately wanted their songs. This was a Baz Luhrmann hack that I borrowed.

Braff: When I had my initial Sundance cut of the movie, you can pay a fee for the music just to use it at a festival. I remember being told, “Don’t get too attached to all this music. You’re not going to get Coldplay. You’re not going to get Simon & Garfunkel. You’re not going to get Nick Drake. We just don’t have the money for that.” With the help of [music supervisor] Amanda Demme, who did the business side of all of these deals, little by little we started getting them.

Halsted: We paid maybe $2,500 to $5,000 a song. Back then, a soundtrack song was probably a minimum of $25,000 to $50,000.”.

Though Garden State is an amazing film, and kudos to Zach Braff for all it achieved! It is hard enough to write and direct a film, but turning in such a commanding, complex and compelling performance whilst directing yourself and others is a feat! Rare that a soundtrack has this whole other life. Becomes bigger than the film. Last year, there was this special anniversary celebration of the soundtrack. Artists included on the soundtrack performed. On stage were Imogen Heap, and The Shins (among others). Zach Braff there. Natalie Portman also there. Showing how important the film and its music is to her. An incredible celebration in Los Angeles, The Guardian were in attendance. Twenty-two years after the film came out, there is a generation that may not be aware. Now, Zach Braff is this celebrated actor, producer, writer and director. His latest film (as an actor), Clean Hands, looks amazing. A far cry in terms of the role he plays in Garden State. I wonder if he thinks back to 2004 and when that film was released to the world. Whether he knew the soundtrack would connect with so many people and be discussed all these years later:

“It’s been two decades since the release of Garden State, Zach Braff’s film about an alienated young actor’s struggle to find meaning in life. But while the movie itself became a cult classic, perhaps its biggest legacy is its soundtrack, which went platinum, won a Grammy and became a cultural touchstone among a certain subset of the American population.

So it was no surprise that, when Braff announced a 20th-anniversary concert celebrating the album, at which each of its dozen or so artists would perform, tickets were going for hundreds of dollars. This was Woodstock for elder millennials – at least a certain swath of us who, when the soundtrack came out in 2004, found an outlet for our big teenage feelings in bands like the Shins, Frou Frou and Iron and Wine. All three were among the performers at Los Angeles’s Greek Theater on Saturday evening (technically nearly 21 years after the album’s release). The concert raised money for the Midnight Mission, a century-old LA charity fighting homelessness.

One of the film’s most memorable scenes features Natalie Portman handing Braff a pair of headphones, telling him the music he’s about to hear “will change your life, I swear”. At the show on Saturday, it was clear her words hadn’t just applied to Braff’s character. The Greek was packed with fans, including a strong contingent of cool-dad types; there were beanies, graying sideburns and jeans whose width would make gen Z shudder. Several people were wearing trash bags in honor of another of the film’s best-known scenes.

Braff, who curated the soundtrack and organized the concert, began the night by lamenting Portman’s absence – she couldn’t make it from her home in Paris, he said, as she joined him on stage. She was one of a host of surprise guests, who also included Danny DeVito, Sarah Paulson, and Donald Faison and Sarah Chalke of Scrubs, where Braff got his start. Taylor Swift was not there, but she contributed a signed guitar to be auctioned for the cause.

The first performance was the last track on the album: Winding Road, an acoustic pop song by Bonnie Somerville. Then came Sophie Barker with In the Waiting Line, Zero 7’s mellow contribution, and Cary Brothers with a robust rendition of his song Blue Eyes. Clips from the film and behind-the-scenes footage played as the stage was rearranged between artists.

The Birmingham, Alabama, alternative band Remy Zero reunited for the first time in 15 years to play Fair, from the film’s soundtrack, as well as Save Me, which didn’t appear in the film. “The only person in this world that could get us together is Zach Braff,” said the band’s singer, August Cinjun Tate. Thievery Corporation followed with an infectious performance of the sitar-led Lebanese Blond.

The evening wasn’t without its technical difficulties; there were a few false starts to songs, occasional random audio feedback, and at one point the videos stopped working, so Braff came on stage and did a little dance to fill time. But the minor slip-ups only enhanced the relaxed, casual atmosphere; despite the 6,000-seat outdoor venue, it felt a bit like we were all in Braff’s living room as his favorite artists performed, not out of a sense of duty but for the joy of it. That joy extended to the crowd, who gave standing ovations to virtually every musician. I’d known that people loved the soundtrack in 2004, but I hadn’t been prepared for how that enthusiasm had endured.

IN THIS PHOTO: Natalie Portman and Zach Braff/PHOTO CREDIT: Matt Winkelmeyer

Among the evening’s highlights was Colin Hay’s performance of the heartbreaking I Just Don’t Think I’ll Ever Get Over You on a booming 12-string guitar. At 71, he performs with a particular gravitas, and his voice is as powerful as ever. Simon and Garfunkel were shockingly unavailable to play The Only Living Boy in New York, so the Milk Carton Kids covered it, with Braff noting that its chorus, about being gone without knowing where, felt appropriate: “I suppose that’s what I was really trying to write about in my early 20s, this abyss that I felt in my chest.” He added: “I couldn’t see it at the time, but 20 years later I think I can. Writing this story was definitely a callout to the universe … I was looking for like-minded souls who know that sometimes it helps if you can manage to laugh through some of those tears.” He applauded the community that had formed around the film, the tattoos and wedding proposals he’d witnessed, “the babies that were made – you know that you had sex to this soundtrack. ”Next came Iron and Wine’s Sam Beam with his cover of the Postal Service’s Such Great Heights, followed by another of the night’s high points: a duet with Madison Cunningham on Nick Drake’s One of These Things First, with a tease of the Sesame Street theme song that fit oddly well. Imogen Heap and Guy Sigsworth, AKA Frou Frou, reunited for Let Go, as well as an improvised piece based on a melody provided by the audience. But perhaps the most striking performance of the night was another cover: the jazz musician Laufey’s version of Coldplay’s Don’t Panic, with just piano and vocals. Building from a delicate introduction to a powerful chorus, she transformed the two-minute song into a sweeping, dynamic piece that deserves its own release.

Of course, the Shins were saved for last, performing New Slang – as heard in Portman’s headphones – and Caring Is Creepy. The soundtrack helped launch the band’s career; as the singer, James Mercer, said: “It changed my life, I’ll tell you that.”

Reflecting on that line, I found myself unexpectedly moved. Garden State came out at a moment when music was transitioning from physical to digital – it was a brief period in which songs were increasingly accessible, but there was still work involved in tracking them down, and a sense of pride in thinking you’d found an artist your friends might not know about. There was value in obscurity, or the perception of it.

Or maybe that’s just how everyone feels at age 19. Either way, the soundtrack offered many listeners that crate-digging experience – an introduction to artists like the Shins, or even Nick Drake, whose posthumous star was rising – and an invitation to seek out more music that would change their lives.

It’s hard to imagine a film character saying that line today; it’s too fluffy, too idealistic, too 2004. But I’d almost forgotten the feeling existed at all. On Saturday night, for a few hours, it came back”.

I remember lots of people dumping on Garden State and Zach Braff. It was fashionable for some to take shots at it. Almost like some had to defend the film. The film is remarkable and should be shown more love (critical reception was largely positive)! Its soundtrack is the stuff of legends. Few directors who can put together such a brilliant and impactful soundtrack. Zach Braff instantly ranked alongside the legends of film. In 2004, Treble Zine reviewed Garden State’s soundtrack:

“There are maybe a handful of people in the television and film industry who can put together a soundtrack effectively. John Hughes and his people were the masters of the 80’s high school soundtrack for sure, but who has met the challenges in our time? One of my votes would go to Joss Whedon. He can hit or miss when it comes to background music, that inconsequential song playing in the background of a club or bar, but when it comes to the `big moments’ (to steal from his writing), he can do very little wrong with his song selections. And besides, he had Aimee Mann, The Breeders, and Cibo Matto guest star on his show. Quentin Tarantino is another one, especially after the two Kill Bill soundtracks, who excels at creating a meaningful and powerful soundtrack.

There is, however, a new king, an executive soundtrack producer to which all others will and should be measured. That person is Zach Braff, the talented writer and director of Garden State. I have to believe that Braff soundtracked the film as he was writing it, picking particular songs that he felt fit the mood of what he was trying to write and picture, or possibly even writing scenes whilst listening to particular songs, thereby entwining them forever. Most of the songs are from a few years ago, some of them a lot longer ago, but most from the time that he was probably writing the film. The soundtrack and film open with the jangly slow guitars of Coldplay’s “Don’t Panic.” The tone and lyrics of the song perfectly fit the mood of the film in its opening minutes, showing Braff as the numb and medicated loner, Andrew Largeman. The Shins’ “Caring is Creepy,” from their first album, Oh, Inverted World, is set to highlight the first feelings of freedom that Largeman feels after taking his grandfather’s motorcycle out for a spin.

Zero 7’s “In the Waiting Line” plays during a party Largeman’s friend Mark throws. As the soothing music plays, contradictory to the activity of the party but in sync with the passivity of Largeman, the party rushes around the stoic main character, showing his detachment from the world, and how, as the medicine leaves his body, he begins to thaw to the world around him. The Shins make another appearance in a moment that some might view as a forced way to get another song in, but that I see as one of the most real moments in the film. In a doctor’s waiting room, Large meets Sam, played by Natalie Portman. She is wearing headphones and so Large asks her what she happens to be playing. As has happened many times in my life, rather than explain it, she simply places the headphones on Large’s ears explaining that he’s “gotta hear this song, it will change your life, I promise you.” The song is the astounding “New Slang.” As I was watching the film in a Seattle theater, as soon as the opening strains of the song played, a voice behind me said, “Of course.” Yeah, my thoughts exactly. The song is brilliant and beautiful and there could be no other Shins song that would have been as effective.

Colin Hay, formerly of Men at Work, contributes a surprisingly powerful ballad called “I Don’t Think I’ll Ever Get Over You,” another case of putting the right song in the right place. I won’t tell you all of them so as to not spoil the movie if you haven’t seen it. Underappreciated band Remy Zero has the distinction of being one of two bands that have the most memorable associates to the film’s scenes. The chorus to “Fair,” from the great album Villa Elaine, plays as Sam offers to tap dance for Large in front of a huge fireplace. It’s a touching and poignant event in the film and comes right after a moment that could easily bring one to tears. The lyrics, “So what if you catch me / Where would we land?” are central to the entire story.

The king of whispery singer / songwriters, Nick Drake, shows up with the great “One of These Things First,” originally from his album, Bryter Later. It seems as though contributions from this tragically deceased artist are mandatory in soundtracks, but again, here it’s placed wisely, taken care of, and loved. Thievery Corporation’s “Lebanese Blonde” is the closest thing to a Quentin Tarantino homage that the movie and soundtrack could come up with. In a nod to Reservoir Dogs, (somewhat, and somewhat Goodfellas, p.s. I know that’s not Tarantino), this song plays as Large, Mark, and Sam saunter in slow motion through a hotel’s hallways on a mission. (By the way, Goodfellas is not one of those soundtracks that is done particularly well, in my estimation. Most of the songs are cliché, obvious, and clumsy, especially movie closer “Layla.” The coda to the song sounds like it was designed for closing credits. Come on, let’s get a little more creative, shall we?) Simon & Garfunkel’s “The Only Living Boy in New York” plays as the trio return from their mission and has another set of lyrics that weigh heavy on the film: “Half of the time we’re gone but we don’t know where.”

Sam Beam, a.k.a. Iron & Wine, brings his b-side treasure to the world with his rendition of the Postal Service’s “Such Great Heights.” I had a slight problem with this song’s inclusion and placement in the film, but I will admit that it’s probably only I that has this problem. The song hit me so emotionally the first time I heard it that I was forever changed by it, just like Sam mentions about “New Slang.” I felt that the scene that the song accompanied should have had the same emotional weight the song had for me. This is a purely personal observation and takes nothing away from either the song or the movie. In fact, now that I think about it, it makes the earlier “New Slang” scene even more real. I did this same thing, placed headphones on a friend to force her to listen to this song that hit me so hard. After hearing it, she approached me somewhat teary-eyed, sarcastically said, “Thanks a lot,” and was also changed by it.

Frou Frou is the one other band, besides Remy Zero, that has the most memorable associations. First of all, it helps that the song is used in the commercials for the film. Secondly, you combine the beautiful voice of Imogen Heap with the production of Guy Sigsworth, who helped Bjork with a few singles, and you’re bound to get a good song. Combine that good song with the most emotionally charged scene of the film and you have a near perfect moment. What vaults it to perfection is the fact that, yet again, the lyrics match the event to a tee. The soundtrack ends with “Winding Road” by Bonnie Somerville, normally a song that I would dismiss as just a song for the rolling credits, a la “Layla,” it also has apt lyrics in “Someday we’ll find our way home.” For those of you who have seen the movie, you know what she means, in more ways than one.

Zach Braff, you talented S.O.B., I am in awe of your talents. Please make more films, and don’t let anyone mess with the soundtracks”.

As Scrubs is on its new run and gathering spectacular praise, I was thinking about its star Zach Braff’s filmography. Remembering when I watched Garden State back in 2004. How its soundtrack obviously complimented the film wonderfully, though it is also this standalone wonder. One of the very best soundtracks ever. It is hard it track a copy to vinyl in the U.K. This is the kind of soundtrack I’d love to see reissued to vinyl, C.D., and even cassette. Introduce it to a whole new generation. As so many younger listeners are abandoning algorithm-driven streaming and want the physicality and warmth of physical formats, film soundtracks like Garden State’s need to be readily available. Let’s  hope it does get reissued at some point, as it proudly stands alongside…

THE greatest film soundtracks ever.

FEATURE: Modern-Day Queens: The Big Moon

FEATURE:

 

 

Modern-Day Queens

PHOTO CREDIT: Melanie Lehmann

The Big Moon

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THIS is one of my…

favourite groups, and one I have been following since their 2017 debut album, Love in the 4th Dimension. I am going to finish with a review of The Big Moon’s latest album, Forever. I have done this for one or two artists lately, but I think that Forever could well be nominated for the Mercury Prize next year. It may be their finest album yet. Before I get to that review, it is worth spotlighting some interviews with the London band. One that I have so much affection for. Their career and lives has changed since 2022’s Here Is Everything. I did want to lead off with The Line of Best Fit and their interview with Jules Jackson. Their lead vocalist and songwriter “tells Alex Dewing about finding freedom in the future’s eternal uncertainty”. I do think that Forever is a remarkable album. The Big Moon are on tour at the moment. You can check the dates here. They play London’s O2 Academy Brixton on 27th November:

“Jackson didn't set out to make an album about this uncertainty. The title only began to take shape towards the end of the writing process, when she recognised a thread connecting the songs. “I don't know if it's something I decided to write about. I think it's just something that came out,” she explains. “I realised as I was sort of coming to the end of writing it that I was constantly singing about, like, eternity and foreverness, and what's next. Then it all kind of made sense.”

The album's search for a happy ending began somewhere more immediate. The past couple of years had brought a significant readjustment for Jackson, who was diagnosed with a cholesteatoma in 2024. The benign but destructive cyst required surgery to remove and left her with almost no hearing in one ear. During this difficult period, she found herself writing songs that reflected how she felt, but weren't helping her feel any better. “I found myself writing really sad songs, and I was just like, ‘Who's this for? Like, I'm not enjoying it. It's not making me feel any better.’”

Instead, she decided to imagine what 'feeling better' might sound like. “I just did a full turnaround and was like, ‘Let's just write some songs for when I feel better.’” A type of manifestation, the future she pictured wasn't one of grand achievements, but simply being back on stage with the band and well enough to enjoy it. In that sense, Forever became a way of writing towards a life she hadn't quite returned to yet.

The songs themselves can take similarly unexpected turns. “Gravity” began life as a power ballad, complete with multiple tempos and key changes, before Fern Ford suggested turning it into a disco track. Drawing on the drums of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Ford found a way to give the song more bite. “The drum beat in Gravity changed the whole song,” Jackson recalls. “After you came up with that, we were like, okay, let's go down that road.”

It's a reminder that, despite the personal ideas underpinning Forever, The Big Moon's music remains a collective effort. Jackson leaves room for the others to reshape her demos, with the band developing songs together before taking them into the studio. Ford's own production work has also opened up new possibilities. On “Sounds”, she used tape loops recorded on a four-track machine, capturing the other members singing into separate channels and embracing the imperfections. “It was out of time, which is what made that moment work,” she explains. “I'm just absolutely chuffed the tape loop's gone onto the new record.”

Jackson, meanwhile, has grown more confident writing with people outside the band, learning to make up melodies and lyrics in front of strangers. It's not always comfortable. “You have to really embarrass yourself to do that,” she laughs. “There's no, like, magic way to do it. You just do it in this really dumb way. Even Taylor Swift.” It’s a willingness to keep learning that comes in handy in an industry that has changed considerably since the band's early days, when touring meant sleeping on sofas and playing small venues wherever they could. They now have more freedom to choose which tours to take on, although Jackson, a parent of two, jokes that life on the road can feel like a break from cleaning porridge off the floor”.

The penultimate interview I am including is from DORK. I hope that what I am including in this feature adds something. In terms of illuminating The Big Moon and providing context and background to Forever. I am keen to interview them one day, as their story is fascinating. Almost a decade from their debut and they are as bonded and brilliant as ever. I can see them recording together for many more years:

“Manifesting is a term which inspires a grimace from both Jules and Soph – and, admittedly, us too – but it is, in a way, what happened.

"It's more like inventing," Jules states, "I was inventing this happy ending that I imagined would be in a year or two years, and I'd be like, 'Yay, I'm alright now, so I want to sing about these things instead'."

Soph adds, "That's an amazing way of handling it rather than being stuck in it. Then you get to that point, and it's like, you got yourself there by getting yourself there."

Jules smiles and says, profoundly, "You have to find your hope from somewhere, don't you?"

As much as the world that the band create across 'Forever' is a fictional, fantasy world, it nonetheless takes its cues from the more everyday but no less special moments from Jules' everyday life. She is now a mother of two young kids, a transformational experience for anyone, and is ticking off other milestones that grown-ups have to face; when we chat to the band, she is in the unenviable position of trying to pack up and move house.

"Once I decided to write something that was kind of a fantasy or for this future happy ending, I just started really enjoying writing, and it became really fun.

"When you're tricking yourself into the headspace of a different character, everything's so much easier because then you don't feel like you're giving yourself away and you don't have to be incredibly real and deep to your truth."

She continues, "You can sort of skim over it a bit, but then even through writing and pretending you're someone else or somewhere else, everything you come out with is still you. You're only tricking yourself that it's not real. Everything that comes out is still totally real, and the songs are all about real things in my life. I just enjoyed writing them a lot more."

Soph chimes in: "Music can often be escapism, and I think it's cool that you're able to do that for yourself. I feel like a thing that people seem to like about The Big Moon is coming to shows and having some sense of escapism and a lot of fun together; it's always this celebration. There is nostalgia and sadness in there, but mostly it's celebratory."

Looking forward, past the mechanical stuff that they conversely clearly do not love – namely, fighting the algorithm to make sure their fans hear their music – their hopes and dreams for the band don't extend all that far: they don't want anything as much as the band.

"I want it to continue and this thing to keep building," Soph says. "We've been getting lots of messages from people about being back and being able to have that connection with people, and you're like, it's all there and exists."

Jules smirks: "Yeah, we just want to do the band."

As the chat comes to a close, it ends with a quote from Soph that is as fittingly cosmic as it is wholesome: "The Big Moon, forever. That's the tagline”.

The final interview is from Rolling Stone UK. They spoke with The Big Moon’s Juliette Jackson about her health challenges and trying to find joy in the midst of pain and struggle. The Big Moon have been operating for twelve years now. It is brilliant they are still so connected and inspired. They are one of our greatest groups. One that I was eager to shine a light on here:

“Tell me about how the surgery impacted your relationship with music.

It means I’m hearing things in mono, kind of. It has affected my enjoyment of music, actually. I still enjoy going to shows and seeing music live, because it’s really fucking loud, but I don’t listen to music on headphones anymore. When you’re listening to music, you can turn it up really loud and you can feel if it’s right… I’ve lost that ability. In the studio, I’m always talking to my bandmates – like, “OK, we recorded all the bits, but does it feel good?” So I’m trusting them now. Luckily, they know what they’re doing!

There’s also a lot of happiness and hope in the album – how did you reach that point?

When I was really ill and couldn’t hear anything, I was in pain and isolated because I couldn’t communicate with people very well. I was writing all these sad songs because I couldn’t really hear or sing in tune. Usually, writing songs is a cathartic thing, but writing sad songs about a sad thing, it felt too real. I was like, ‘You know what? At some point, I’m gonna get better. I don’t know what form that’s gonna take, but I’m gonna be playing with my band again, and I’m gonna want to be playing a song that is really fun and upbeat.’ I painted this picture of a happy ending in a year or two’s time, when we’d be playing at a festival and it’d be really sunny, and I was like, ‘Those are the songs I want.’ I feel like I tricked myself into being hopeful, and it worked. 

On the song ‘Fun’, you sing: “Fun is as complex as misery” – what informed that lyric?

When I was writing this album, I wanted to write very short pop songs. I got really bored of verses; I got impatient. Maybe that’s something to do with my hearing as well, but I was like, ‘Give me the big juicy bit of the sandwich – I don’t care about having a starter!’ ‘Fun’ is a song about how you’re supposed to suffer for your art, and that’s how you make “real art”, but it’s just not true. Having fun is an integral part of life… it’s not a stupid way to spend your time. I feel like pop music gets put down for not being dark or mysterious, but it’s just as real and it’s just as juicy and important”.

I am finishing with a review of Forever. The Guardian wrote a four-star review. In their header, they note how “the hell of hearing loss inspires a defiantly hopeful pop-disco marvel”. If you are new to The Big Moon, I would compel you to go back to their debut and work forward. However, make sure you do not miss Forever, as it could be their most important album yet. It will be interesting hearing what comes next and what the coming years offer:

“From the outside, it looks as if things have gone swimmingly for the Big Moon. Fronted by Juliette Jackson, a former waitress who dreamed big, they have been active for 12 years, a success in itself in these days, notching up four albums including this latest. They have enjoyed a Mercury nomination (for 2017 debut Love in the 4th Dimension), decent chart positions, good-sized gigs and streaming figures in the hundreds of thousands, or millions in the case of 2019 single Your Light.

Delve beneath the surface, however, and things haven’t always been so sunny. After their debut’s ramshackle wide-eyed pop, second album Walking Like We Do detailed the travails of contemporary womanhood, and Your Light found Jackson bemoaning her generation’s lot with a weary resignation: “We were promised the world, but so was everyone else”. 2022’s Here Is Everything was conceived during Covid and processed Jackson’s life-changing experience of becoming a mother, including the disorienting experience of lack of sleep. Tricky stuff, if nothing that made Jackson’s concerns much different from vast swathes of the population.

Forever, though, has a much more troubling backdrop. In 2024, the singer was diagnosed with a cholesteatoma – a destructive cyst inside the middle ear that requires surgical removal. It caused her to lose most of her hearing on one side, which would be an alarming and unbalancing experience for anyone, never mind someone whose life and livelihood centres so much on sound. As she admits: “It was pretty much existential, because writing songs is my job and my identity.” When she was even able to think about writing songs, she understandably found herself writing material so throughly miserable she didn’t like it. At which point she did a complete volte face, and began writing songs not just to cheer herself up but actively imagining “a happy ending that didn’t exist yet”.

There are historical precedents for such a sudden pivot from agony to ecstasy. One thinks of New Order throwing off the bleakness of Ian Curtis’s death, and their grand but morose debut Movement, to blissfully reconfigure for Temptation and Power, Corruption and Lies; the Cure’s mid-80s pop rush after years of magnificently anguished albums, or Bon Iver’s move from the melancholy For Emma, Forever Ago, recorded in an isolated log cabin, to the lush, more celebratory Bon Iver, Bon Iver. Here, Jackson’s personal shift results in a collection of joyous, uplifting, ethereally classy pop-disco tunes that have an extra frisson because they have come about through sadness. Shimmery opener Gravity clings to the simple joy of picking up your child from nursery, an unlikely but effective launchpad for a rapturous pop song with shades of Dreaming-era Blondie.

Three Things celebrates youth and pop (“My whole life imminent / I remember living inside the songs on the radio”), the wistful undercurrent carefully smothered in bouncy, MGMT-style keyboard riffs and juddering sequencers straight out of new wave and disco. The universally relatable Fun imagines a life beyond constraints – “I’ll slip away and take my brain on holiday” – the dreamily summery sounds recalling Haim and, appropriately, Madonna circa Holiday.

If Jackson’s lyrics have a recurring theme, it’s of relishing – rather than fearing – life’s transience. Delicate harmonies, Fleetwood Mac production gloss and Soph Nathan’s big guitar twangs power recent single F.O.R.E.V.E.R, a rather poetic song about grabbing moments and milestones while we can, because “some day the ocean will include the drinks that we spill / And rain that used to be red wine will fall on this hill”. The yearning, classic 60s pop-tinged Can I Get a Reading Please picks up the theme: “Life’s not long, regret is though / Can you tell me something I don’t know?” The slightly country Sounds gets even darker – “I’m going to lose something very dear to me, if not now eventually” – but such shadows are more than banished by the overall musical sunniness and loveliness.

The Bananarama-ish I See You, Honey seems to celebrate the comfort of being loved (“There’s no need to say ‘I love you’, it’s everywhere to me”). Other songs celebrate the power of determination as Jackson is “pushing through” obstacles in Speed Bump or insisting “I can give a good life / As long as I’m still on my feet” during Sounds. The album’s sense of finding joy in sometimes difficult circumstances crystallises on the wonderfully titled You Remind Me That I’m Dying (And That It’s Good to Be Alive), those words providing what may well be this year’s most bittersweet euphoric chorus. “Happy endings that don’t exist yet” or not, the song is an absolute banger, which suggests Jackson and her band really do have a lot to smile about”.

The mighty and beautiful The Big Moon are a group I feel will have a busy summer next year. Lots of festival appearances. Forever has received a lot of positive reviews. Learning about the background and especially Jules Jackson’s struggle makes it an even more impactful listen. It is a remarkable album from a group who are so strong and united. This comes through in their albums and live performances. I have not seen them live, but I will try and correct that at some point. The admiration and love they are receiving right now. It is great to see, and long may…

IT continue.

__________

Follow The Big Moon

PHOTO CREDIT: Jessie Morgan

Official:

https://www.thebigmoon.co.uk/

Instagram:

https://www.instagram.com/thebigmoon

Twitter:

https://x.com/thebigmoon

Facebook:

https://www.facebook.com/thebigmoon/

TikTok:

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

Spotify:

https://open.spotify.com/artist/0KU55rzxAihPhi27MAuz9O?si=oRHczDwbRLypZV6E8SxnQg

YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC02iDva0dKpiqLUPQJR0ETA

FEATURE: Spotlight: UCHE YARA

FEATURE:

 

 

Spotlight

PHOTO CREDIT: Tom J. Johnson for NME

UCHE YARA

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BACK in September…

UCHE YARA released her debut album, BODYSCANNER. There were promotional interviews around it, and I want to come to some. I will pop in a review of the album. This is an artist I am a little fresh to. Let’s get to some recent interviews, so that we can discover more about this amazing artist. She is a multi-instrumentalist with Nigerian roots. She grew up in Austria and now lives in Berlin. I want to start with DORK and their interview from last month. As I am new to UCHE YARA, I am sort of learning about her through interviews. The path to BODYSCANNER:

“Her debut album, ‘BODYSCANNER’, arrives two EPs and three years after that. Eleven tracks. She wrote them, produced them and played most of them, with nobody behind her in the studio suggesting the chorus might want to come in earlier. Her explanation of how it got made: “I’ve written the album with my body, and now my mind knows it.”

Pressed on what writing with your body actually entails, she is admirably specific about something essentially unprovable. “It’s about going back to the deepest, most innocent place of intuition. I stop thinking so much and suddenly I’m writing and recording things that almost feel like they’ve always been there. It effortlessly satisfies me on such a deep level. It feels round and urgent at the same time.”

She was trained to do the opposite. She started on classical percussion as a child and put six years into it, wrote her first small pieces for marimba, picked up an electric guitar at 13 and was writing songs by 16. At 17, a teacher put her in front of the management team she still works with, on the strength of a batch of demos that, she says “will probably never see the light of day”. The other option on the table was medicine. “Somehow the path away from becoming a doctor and towards music became more and more obvious,” she says.

She moved to Berlin in 2021, the week after school finished, mostly because her team was already there. It did not immediately take. “It’s really only over the last year that Berlin has started to feel like home to me,” she says. “Berlin has opened my eyes in so many ways. It showed me that things aren’t just black and white, but that there’s so much colour in between… in identity, in art, in music.”

‘DIVA CLUB’, the album’s most immediately euphoric moment, was assembled the same way round as everything else. The instrumental sat about for months with no words attached. “I kept coming back to it, already with a pretty concrete structure and some melody ideas, but I had no lyrics.” So she applied the only rule she seems to hold. “I remembered my number one thing in songwriting: the song will tell me what it wants anyway. So I sat down and listened. What I heard was: arena, sport, adrenaline, cheering, this feeling of setting off, goofiness.”

What it wanted was a roller derby captain marshalling a chaotic FLINTA team towards victory, FLINTA being the German-speaking scene’s collective term for women, lesbians, intersex, non-binary, trans and agender people. It went in as camp and came out as something rather sturdier, a discovery she also made in arrears. “It was really through playing it live that I realised how much power the song carries.”

What she wants from the album is stated with no hedging whatsoever. “I want them to trance out. To feel possessed by the song, rocked by it, moved by it. I also want there to be a certain kind of eeriness to it. I want to transport you into a world of its own, maybe even one you can’t fully figure out”.

I was captured by an Off Key interview. Regarding BODYSCANNER, it is “Confident, honest and radical in root and execution, the self-produced record shines through a multi-facetted club sound that demands to be experienced”. I do wonder whether UCHE YARA will perform in the U.K. next year. It would be interesting to see BODYSCANNER come to life on the stage:

“A pulse of electronic sound waves, hypnotic vocals and a striking guitar riff pull you into UCHE YARA’s debut album “BODYSCANNER”. The record blends club textures with sharp, memorable lyrics. As a multifaceted artist and multi-instrumentalist, UCHE YARA has been creating genre-bending music for years. All these facets now merge perfectly in “BODYSCANNER”, which she recorded with collaborator Alex the Flipper. “I always thought working on an album would be super stressful, but it was a flowing process. It felt as if I wrote this album with my body, just giving my intuition free rein”, she says.

This focus on the body, the self, connecting with itself and others is a central theme of the album. “I can only connect with others when I am connected with myself, when I am present, and when there is space for myself and for the connection itself. Connections happen when your inner child awakens, when there is resonance.”

Playing off the theme of the x-ray scans, the song “BODYSCANNER” asks the listener to remove all their layers: “Please, remove all your layers, I’m your body scanner, let me see who you are.” I asked UCHE YARA whether letting other people see who she is makes her freer or more vulnerable. “It is a tension between both and it depends on the space whether I feel safe removing my layers,” she says. There is multiple layers to the lyrics, UCHE explains. “They are superficial yet turn the focus inward. To me, this is similar to the experience of being in a club: being seen but also observed. I only realised the depth of the song after creating it.”

A central theme of BODYSCANNER is the tension between how we see ourselves and how we are seen. I asked UCHE YARA about her experience of it: “I have realised, through the process of this album, that I am read as a Black woman. I am from a white country, a white environment. I have lived so naively, but I am being read politically, and I only really noticed this in Berlin, in my community. It is extremely interesting to work through this now. I have lived in a parallel universe within my own body.”

This is where the tension, the disconnect between how people are being perceived and how they perceive themselves, was most evident, she has ever realised. Her community and Berlin have helped her work through this, yet she still feels disconnected, especially from Berlin club culture. I wanted to know what UCHE YARA would change about the club culture: “People need to be more attentive; we need greater understanding of the singularity of the moment and the space we share. It should be understood as a collective musical experience. We shouldn’t try to be digestible for a certain crowd we’re scared of not fitting in with. I had the best club experience at a BiPoC Queers-only event. Everyone was just there to experience the music together. But the casualness of drug use, the need to consume to connect, which is present at too many events, should be questioned.  Overall, we need safer spaces. Clubs need more funding and education about the origins of club culture too”.

Prior to coming to a review of BODYSCANNER, I want to include part of an NME interview. Some amazing U.K. press for an artist who many would like to see come back here soon. Even if I am a little new to the phenomenal UCHE YARA, I am hooked by BODYSCANNER. For anyone else who has not really explored her music, I would suggest you listen to it now:

“The mood change of Yara’s newer material is a softer alternative to the “cold and edgy” environments where she often finds herself in her adopted hometown of Berlin, a far cry from where she grew up in Austria: a village on the outskirts of Linz, a tranquil city on the Danube River. There, she was trained classically at a local music school by educators who taught her that music was a “playground”.

“I was so lucky to be led by teachers that pushed this inner child in me,” she says. “Even as a child I was always creative and pushing for something that I hadn’t heard or seen before.” She’s quick to credit those teachers with instilling a classic rigour and an avant-garde fearlessness in her: “These are the people that laid the soil where everything is growing right now.”

Those teachers helped prime Yara for her transformation into a seasoned live performer. Yara is currently touring behind ‘Bodyscanner’, with a live show where she performs in the middle of the room, surrounded by the audience. “It’s even better if there isn’t even a stage,” she says. “At first people don’t know how to act, but they’re instantly immersed. They’re like, ‘whoa, what is even happening?’ And I love that.”

In 2023, Yara told NME that being on stage has always felt “natural” to her. She played festivals like Wilderness and The Great Escape before releasing any music, and as guitarist for Austrian punk-funk band Bilderbuch, opened for The Rolling Stones in Vienna in 2022. As of June, she’s officially Bilderbuch’s touring guitarist, having replaced longtime member Michael “Snacky Mike” Krammer. The new position in Bilderbuch, who perform at arenas and festival mainstages in their home country, “came as a shock”, but she is delighted to be “playing with my heroes”. “It makes me emotional,” she adds, saying she is a little “intimidated by the job” but honoured at the same time.

In her own solo career, Yara is increasingly making body music that invokes Grace Jones and FKA Twigs at her most avant-garde – songs that are certainly built for the club. But she didn’t initially feel at home in Berlin’s storied techno venues. Yara moved to Germany in 2021 to be closer to her management team, but didn’t immediately settle into the local culture. “I always felt like an alien because I didn’t enjoy myself as much as others did [in Berlin],” she says. “I’m not interested in commercialised events, and I find techno to be very harsh, not my taste. All I ever wanted to do was to move.” Salvation eventually came in the form of Fade, a night built around inclusive, community-driven dancefloors. “It’s a BIPOC queer event that is so much about the collective and about the music. The whole thing felt so warm; the feeling of belonging was crazy for me. Finally, I felt at home and not like I was poking out”.

In her own solo career, Yara is increasingly making body music that invokes Grace Jones and FKA Twigs at her most avant-garde – songs that are certainly built for the club. But she didn’t initially feel at home in Berlin’s storied techno venues. Yara moved to Germany in 2021 to be closer to her management team, but didn’t immediately settle into the local culture. “I always felt like an alien because I didn’t enjoy myself as much as others did [in Berlin],” she says. “I’m not interested in commercialised events, and I find techno to be very harsh, not my taste. All I ever wanted to do was to move.” Salvation eventually came in the form of Fade, a night built around inclusive, community-driven dancefloors. “It’s a BIPOC queer event that is so much about the collective and about the music. The whole thing felt so warm; the feeling of belonging was crazy for me. Finally, I felt at home and not like I was poking out”.

I am ending with a review from DORK. There are not a lot of reviews for BODYSCANNER. Though it is clear that this is such a special album. One that instantly hits you. Go and follow UCHE YARA on social media, and if you can get to see her live then do so. A remarkable I see very good things for. A wonderful career ahead:

“The opening minute of 'BODYSCANNER' is enough to make you sit up and go: oh, hello. Weird, hypnotic and immediately addictive, its title-track feels less like an introduction than UCHE YARA grabbing your brain, pressing a few undocumented buttons and seeing what happens.

It's a ridiculously confident way to begin a debut album, particularly because there isn't much around right now that sounds quite like it. Yara has described wanting listeners to "trance out" and feel possessed by the song, and mission accomplished. That peculiar repetition burrows in fast. Good luck getting it back out.

The rest of 'BODYSCANNER' has the slightly unenviable job of following it. Nothing quite matches that opening high, although there are ideas everywhere: electronic textures, rock, R&B, strange rhythmic turns and dance music that seems to be examining the club from a funny angle rather than simply trying to make it go off. 'DIVA CLUB', born from Yara imagining herself as captain of a roller derby team, brings some welcome goofiness, too.

What carries the record is the sheer confidence of it. UCHE YARA has made a debut that seems entirely unconcerned with whether you immediately understand what she's doing - you probably won't. You'll want another go, though”.

UCHE YARA is wonderous. I love BODYSCANNER. I love the title track. It is the perfect way to open the album. So pulsating, electric and fascinating. Shadowy and sexy, it is only the start of things. Surprised that there has not been wider exposure and conversation. Let’s hope that this changes, as everyone needs to familiarise themselves with UCHE YARA and the stunning BODYSCANNER. It is a bold, fascinating, powerful and accomplished debut album from…

A name to remember.

__________

Follow UCHE YARA

Instagram:

https://www.instagram.com/uy.sweetheart

TikTok:

https://www.tiktok.com/@uy.sweetheart

Facebook:

https://www.facebook.com/p/UCHE-YARA-100089796858434

Spotify:

https://open.spotify.com/artist/2yOJnAGg41NV4aech301xj?si=yguXdDH4T2KRAOdAdL8Row

YouTube:

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

FEATURE: The Great American Songbook: Beck

FEATURE:

 

 

The Great American Songbook

PHOTO CREDIT: Mikai Karl

Beck

_________

I do feature…

Beck quite a bit. There is another reason to update any playlist I have previously published. Ride Lonesome was released in September. One of the albums of the year, I do want to pop in NME’s review for this incredible work. If you have not heard the album then please make sure you do. Masterful songwriting from one of the all-time greats:

“Last spring, Beck played two massive orchestral shows at London’s Royal Albert Hall. The setlist leaned heavily on his 2002 album ‘Sea Change’, a melancholic masterpiece adorned with gorgeous orchestral arrangements. Until these shows, the chameleonic indie-pop star had never performed the album with all the trimmings and, as he explained to the audience on the first night, he was thrilled at the opportunity to realise its songs with an 85-strong team of musicians.

At the time, he said that the concerts had inspired him to work in the studio with an orchestra – though stopped short of saying he was recording an album. Instead, in typically gnomic fashion, Beck described the endeavour as an “undisclosed, unnamed project”. 18 months later, here is the distinctly album-shaped ‘Ride Lonesome’, a 12-track collection of aching chamber pop tunes in the vein of ‘Sea Change’ and its 2014 spiritual sequel ‘Morning Phase’.

The result is a drop-dead gorgeous meditation on heartache and solitude, with the title track – and lead single – setting the tone for a suite of songs that is more spectral and ethereal than its predecessors. “You got to ride lonesome”, he sings over plaintive acoustic guitar on said title track. “You got to try to find the road… And follow it all the way home, alone”. This is the central thesis of ‘Ride Lonesome’. On ‘Falling Through My Hands’, a soothing lullaby wrapped around a gentle, looped guitar riff, he reflects on lost love with devastating directness: “I’m wanting you / But you’re falling through my hands this time”.

‘Ride Lonesome’ is the first album Beck has released since his divorce from Marissa Ribisi, to whom he was married for almost 15 years, was finalised in September 2021. They’d already split by the time he released 2019’s futuristic ‘Hyperspace’; if that album found him cresting the wave of this disruption, its successor is perhaps the sound of someone facing the reality of what lies ahead.

‘Sea Change’ was also released in the aftermath of a break-up, while ‘Morning Phase’ followed a career-threatening back injury. It’s striking that, in another time of upheaval, Beck has returned to the fold with the musicians who helped him make those records (Radiohead collaborator Nigel Godrich, who produced ‘Sea Change’, also mixed ‘Ride Lonesome’). For all the heartache, there is a seam of optimism and acceptance on a record that should offer succour to those who need it, too”.

On 11th December, Devil’s Haircut turns thirty. I am not sure whether I will write an anniversary feature around that. I did want to compile twenty golden Beck cuts for a mixtape, though. Taking us from his work in the 1990s to a couple of tracks from Ride Lonesome, it is hard whittling things down to twenty when it comes to this music legend. One of the most innovative artists, Beck always changes between albums. He can do something more eccentric and experimental but also produce these emotional and heartfelt albums. Nobody quite like him out there. This Los Angeles-born artist is one that I have been a fan of…

FOR decades.

FEATURE: Just a-Popping Up in My Memory: Kate Bush’s December Will Be Magic Again at Forty-Six

FEATURE:

 

 

Just a-Popping Up in My Memory

Kate Bush’s December Will Be Magic Again at Forty-Six

_________

THERE may be a lot…

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush working in Abbey Road Studio 2 in 1980

of the same information that I have brought in before. However, it is that time of year where I look at the Kate Bush’s Christmas single, December Will Be Magic Again. In terms of how people write about it, I don’t think it has ever quite been given the appreciation it deserves. As I have said before, this is a great song. Released on 17th November, 1980, it is forty-six years of this underrated gem. December Will Be Magic Again was one of Kate Bush’s earliest exposures to Abbey Road Studio. The B-side of December Will be Magic Again, Warm and Soothing, was the first song she recorded there. Although it only reached number twenty-nine in the U.K., I do think it is a song that is stronger than its chart position. The reviews around the time were a little mixed. It was a Kate Bush single, so there were those who liked her that were happy to see it. Though there were those who felt Bush was this high-pitched or airy-fairy singer. December Will Be Magic Again did little to shift that. It does paint some traditional pictures with the lyrics. Lovers embracing, and people by the tree. The snow falling. I do like how this was written and recorded at Abbey Road Studios. The song never got a music video, though Bush did record a live version of it for her 1979 Christmas special. The song did appear on other singles after 1979. It also featured on Elton John's Christmas album, Elton John's Christmas Party. So it did have this longer life. Now, December Will Be Magic Again is played on the radio. I wanted to explore it a bit for its forty-sixth anniversary. In terms of the chronology, this is a song that was heard first live before it came out as a single. It was released in 1980, though it was heard by the public the year before. I am not sure why it did not come out earlier.

This is from the Kate Bush Encyclopedia say about the first airing of December Will Be Magic Again: “On 22nd December, 1979, the BBC broadcast the Christmas Snowtime Special, which was probably a compilation (for export) of four TV specials made earlier in the year, including the Abba Easter Special and a programme called Disco in the Snow, featuring Boney M and guests. Kate Bush appeared in this special with a hastily recorded version of December Will Be Magic Again, in a version that has become known as the ‘Bongo Version”. The Christmas special, Kate, was broadcast on 28th December, 1980. I do wonder if many new Kate Bush fans know about this song. Christmas singles tend not to get great reviews, unless they are one of the classics. Hard to win much praise compared to conventional singles. Kate Bush did not get too much love when December Will Be Magic Again came out. “Sounding like she’s just been rutted from the rear with a particularly rampant reindeer, Kate reminds us of the joys of the season at considerable length and expense. Lush, sentimental, extravagantly produced… destined to become a Christmas irritation; and airwave itch you won’t be able to scratch”. That is what Allan Jones wrote in Melody Maker in December 1980! I do think about Kate Bush recording at Abbey Road Studios. She would use the studios a lot through her career, though this was new for her in 1979. This is the same year that she started recording her third studio album, Never for Ever. The privilege at recording at the studios. I will come to an article from Dreams of Orgonon that I have sourced before. In 2023, The Delete Bin provided their take on December Will Be Magic Again:

“The song namechecks Bing Crosby and his immortal Christmas anthem nearly in the same breath as she namedrops Saint Nicholas. Of course, being Kate Bush, the perspective in this song soon takes a unique turn beyond those holiday associations. “December Will Be Magic Again” provides a winsome, magical aura that has something to say about new ways to view things in a troubled world at the end of a year.

Sure there are further references to mistletoe and kisses, those things being staples in Christmas music that also hint at the pagan roots of the holiday. But what really makes this song a Kate Bush composition beyond her identifiable lead voice is its unique perspective. The song comes from the point of view of a force of goodwill toward all that falls with the snow. Like a white snowy blanket, it seeks to cover the city to turn its harsh surfaces into one’s that sparkle with beauty – and magic.

“December will be magic again.
Don’t miss the brightest star.
Kiss under mistletoe.
I want to hear you laugh.
Don’t let the mystery go now.”

-Kate Bush, “December will be magic again”

This is what lies at the center of this song which is one of optimism and hope that just because the world can be full of ugliness, it doesn’t mean that it’s devoid of beauty or beyond hope. Sometimes, something as simple as a snowfall on even the most troubled of places can make all the difference, introducing a new way to look at a place, and maybe even of a time and set of circumstances, too. With different perspectives, one can more easily find new paths through the dark and the muck.

That’s what we can all hope for as we go into a new year; that we find the magic again to lend us this kind of hope. This is not to trivialize the problems that continue to unfold in troubled times. But with learning to look at things from different perspectives, sometimes we can find beauty and meaning where we didn’t expect to find it”.

On 23rd November, 1979, Bush recorded December Will Be Magic Again in Abbey Road’s Studio 2. Dreams of Orgonon wrote about the song in 2019. Even though they say the single version is overproduced and it doesn’t have much meat on the bones, I do think it is one of Kate Bush’s more underrated songs. In terms of its timing, December Will Be Magic Again was released after more successful singles in 1980. Never for Ever came out in September 1980. Babooshka and Army Dreamers came out earlier and reached five and sixteen (in the U.K.) respectively. It was not the case that December Will Be Magic Again was the end of a golden run. Sat in Your Lap (the first single from 1982’s The Dreaming) reached eleven. In terms of sound and production, things did shift after December Will Be Magic Again, Certainly in terms of Bush’s vocals:

“Yet with “December Will Be Magic Again,” we see the end of a certain kind of Bush song. It’s her last track that can be feasibly reimagined as hailing from her pre-Kick Inside years, with its relish for childhood delights and simple attributes of a domestic environment. That approach has reached a breaking point. From now on her quiet songs will be more adult and introspective. She’s going to do silly songs in the future, of course — but even the silly stuff often carries plenty of weight. Bush’s earlier work is an ambitious testament to what youthful artistry can accomplish. Few songwriters are particularly mature early in their career. With Bush, a lot of her recurring themes from across her career are already in place on her first couple albums. For all its shortcomings, “December Will Be Magic Again” signals the end of Bush as prodigy as she moves into the era of the Fairlight, global conflict, and becoming a masterful singer to rival Peter Gabriel. Farewell, last of the Phoenix tradition. You’ve carried us far”.

I don’t think this song really got a lot of affection back in 1980. Its T.V. outings in 1979 are interesting, yet it is only in years since that it has received more exposure. December Will Be Magic Again does not sit with the all-time Christmas classics, though it is definitely one that warms the heart. You might well be hearing it on stations about now. Summoning the joy of Christmas, I think more should be written about this song. A single released on 17th November, 1980, this yuletide treat is…

WORTHY of praise and love.

FEATURE: Spotlight: Radie Peat

FEATURE:

 

 

Spotlight

PHOTO CREDIT: Dave Smith

Radie Peat

_________

I did write about …

LANKUM a while ago. However, I am spending time with their incredible member, Radie Peat. She is primed to release one of the best albums of this year with No Human Tongue Can Tell. Radie Peat is an artist with one of the most astonishing voices in all of music. Lankum released their most recent album, False Lankum, in 2023. It was shortlisted for the Mercury Prize. I am not sure if the Dublin band are going to record more music together. Radie Peat’s debut is an essential listen. Rather than source the entire interview, I did want to look at Songlines and their conversation with Peat. This is a long-awaited solo album that is rightly getting a lot of praise. No Human Tongue Can Tell is “a collection of old songs reclaimed for the women in them”:

“Radie Peat’s first formal encounter with music was rather unintentional. “I have three sisters, all of them older than me, and they were going somewhere on Tuesdays,” she says. Unwilling to be left behind, she asked to tag along: “I was like, ‘I want to go, too.’ I didn’t actually know what I was asking to go to. Then someone put a tin whistle in my hand, and I was like, ‘Oh. OK. This is what
this means.’”

Peat tells me this in North Dublin, where we are settled in the boardroom of Bohemians FC on a mizzling August day. Next door is Lankum’s rehearsal space, currently occupied by band member Ian Lynch. Peat’s partner, Daniel Lambert, the club’s COO, has made this alternative space available for us to talk about the launch of Peat’s new album. Peat, her hair cropped short, sits beside me in a black rain jacket with the word ‘FENIAN’ printed on the back in bright red lettering – a cast-off from Irish rap group Kneecap, whom Lambert manages.The boardroom is a strangely corporate setting in which to talk about folk music, but Peat is a warm and thoughtful interviewee, and the aesthetics of the room soon fall away.

Not long after the tin whistle was handed to her, Peat was playing a range of instruments, with concertina (which her father also plays) becoming central. “There were always multiple instruments lying around the house,” she remembers, “which is how I picked up most of them. If it’s there, you play it.”

She was sent to an Irish-language school known for its focus on music, where she met aspiring musician Cormac Mac Diarmada. After a sojourn in Sicily where she started playing nylon-string guitar – the only instrument she could find – she returned to Ireland and began attending a session involving Mac Diarmada. The brothers Ian and Daragh Lynch, who had a duo called Lynched, were also present. They invited Peat and Mac Diarmada to play on their Cold Old Fire album in 2014 and eventually asked them to join the group. Two years later, the band officially changed their name to Lankum. Their dark blend of folk, drones and doom crystallised and reached wider and wider audiences through Between the Earth and Sky (2017), The Livelong Day (2019) and their Mercury-nominated False Lankum (2023). The latter, in particular, made Lankum central in a ‘new Green wave’ of Irish music alongside Fontaines DC, Gilla Band, Kneecap and The Mary Wallopers. It is hard to go to any Dublin folk gig without being in sight of at least three Lankum T-shirts at all times. Peat also formed gloom-folk group ØXN with Katie Kim, Eleanor Myler and Lankum’s producer John ‘Spud’ Murphy, releasing their debut album, CYRM, in 2023. Now, she is finally dropping her long-awaited full-length debut: No Human Tongue Can Tell.

“I watched a documentary on Mike Oldfield making Tubular Bells in my mid-20s, and I was fascinated by the idea of writing all the parts yourself and playing them all yourself,” she says about the genesis of the album. “You’re totally limited by your own ability and the instruments you play, the way your brain sees the music.” She was also inspired by her ØXN bandmate Katie Kim’s solo work, Enya (whose vocal layering Peat wanted to emulate) and her friend, the musician and performance artist Andy the Doorbum. “He makes all his albums [himself],” Peat explains, “and I had a lot of chats with him and became more determined that I wanted to record like that.” So she did, layering her vocals, adding mellotron and playing almost every instrument, with only a few contributions from other musicians and producer Murphy at her side. “I forced myself into this kind of opposite-of-collaboration area,” she says. “My intention was to make it sound like its own thing, that it couldn’t sound too much like anything else I’d done before because that was with other people.”

After so much collaboration, I wonder if going solo brought doubts. “You’re shining a big spotlight on what you know and what you don’t,” she agrees. “What you can do and what you can’t do. There were times where I was like, ‘Oh my God, why am I so bad at this?’” She lays her hands palms-up on the table in front of her and looks up at me, smiling. “Look, making an album can be like that anyway. You tend to question everything. I have yet to make one where I don’t have a musical existential crisis, but I think maybe that’s part of putting in enough effort. It’s that you care a lot.” There were moments of lightness, too. “I didn’t have to explain myself to anybody,” Peat reflects. “I could put abstract ideas in there, feelings and memories that I don’t even have to explain now. That was exciting and fun and easy.”

It was the songs themselves – mainly old Irish and English folk songs – that ultimately led to it being a solo album. “There were songs that I was finding and starting to sing but I thought, this doesn’t suit Lankum and I don’t think it suits ØXN,” says Peat. She was finding herself “drawn to songs where the female person in the song has a more active role, where they’re not just the victim of something, or an object of lust. As a woman singing the songs, you need a bit of female empowerment in there.” They lent themselves to a more personal project.

The album has been a long time coming. Peat might have put it off for years, but pregnancy gave her a deadline. “I went in and started tracking stuff at five months pregnant”, she states. Before I can ask when that was, she already has the answer: “My daughter is now four and a half. It turns out doing all the layers yourself takes a really long time – and much longer if you take time off to have a baby.” The result is a complex, richly storied album.

No Human Tongue Can Tell opens with ‘Hares on the Mountain’, a beguilingly simple song about temptation and wisdom. Peat first heard it on Folk Roots, New Routes, Shirley Collins’ 1964 album with Davy Graham. She is a huge admirer of Collins, both as a singer and as a collector who travelled with Alan Lomax. “It’s scandalous that the Lomax collection is not [named after] Lomax and Collins,” she says. “[Shirley] obviously has a fascination with the Appalachian versions, same as I do.”

Peat first recorded the song with her Lankum bandmate Daragh Lynch for Myles O’Reilly’s video series This Ain’t No Disco, putting it together in two days when they needed an extra song. They pitched it down from Collins’ version, because “she had an extremely high voice and I don’t,” Peat laughs. That stripped-back performance, with Lynch’s rich, deep guitar rhythm and Peat’s raw voice, is well worth a watch on YouTube. For the album, though, she wanted to move away from an arrangement that was so close to the original. Instead, she looked to Shirley’s recordings with her sister Dolly, “where they’re these interlocking, busy arrangements”. Reverb-soaked rhythm guitar is backed by long, climbing notes. A few verses in, Peat’s low self-harmonies enter and a Mellotron’s wobbling strings ebb and flow, giving the busier arrangement a rumbling poignancy.

The other song from Shirley Collins’ repertoire on the album is ‘Bonnie Boy’, which also draws on Anne Briggs’ well-known version. It tells of a woman who sees the man she loves with someone else, and ends with her resolving: ‘And whether he loves me / or whether he don’t / I’ll walk with that boy now and then.’ That tenderness, twisted up with hurt, returns on ‘Still I Love Him’, which Peat’s friend John Francis Flynn found in the Irish Traditional Music Archive and set to a melody of his own. After each increasingly ugly encounter with her abusive husband, the song’s narrator insists she loves him still, and always will. Peat layers her voice into a soaring choral refrain, and the clash between the song’s cruelty and its joyous chorus is deliberate. “People don’t stay in unhealthy relationships without a lot of love for the person,” she says. “Those two things are true at the same time. [The song] is absolutely not a call to stay with somebody just because you love them, but I think sometimes there’s this narrative of, ‘why didn’t you just leave him?’ That’s not really painting the full picture of how much it takes for someone to leave someone”.

IN THIS PHOTO: Lankum

Prior to ending with The Guardian and their five-star review of No Human Tongue Can Tell, there is another fantastic interview I am keen to explore. No Human Tongue Can Tell is out on 13th November. You can pre-order it here. Peat plays Union Chapel, London on 3rd November and Vicar Street, Dublin, on 20th November. I live near Union Chapel, but I think tickets are gone now (or will be soon). I want to come to The Observer. It is a U.K. publication, but there is also Irish coverage too. I do hope that there are interviews in more publications prior to the release of No Human Tongue Can Tell:

“Don’t go combing through her new album, No Human Tongue Can Tell, for answers. For one thing, none of the nine tracks were written by her, but are interpretations of existing folk songs that Peat has been collecting over the years. Like costumes, she has tried on several of them in different contexts, including with Lankum. Here, she doesn’t merely do the songs justice with her formidable contralto voice, which expresses anger and longing to often staggering effect. She remakes them outright so that it feels – though they’ve been passed down through generations – as if they’re being performed for the first time.

“I always knew I wanted to do it, but I never prioritised it,” she says of making a solo record. Her main focus was on Lankum, whose soaring popularity as purveyors of intense, drone-heavy folk had taken its members by surprise. “We never imagined this amount of people would want to listen to the really weird music we make,” Peat tells me. She finally got down to recording the LP in 2021, between Lankum’s third and fourth albums, but became pregnant not long afterwards. “My plan was to finish the whole thing before I had the baby,” she smiles. “But, obviously, that didn’t happen – it took a few more years.”

The delay had as much to do with her ambitious creative process as starting a family. “I got the idea for how I wanted to do it partly from watching a documentary on how Mike Oldfield had made Tubular Bells, which I thought was fascinating because he has all these recordings of himself layered on top of each other. And that takes more time.”

More often, Peat was drawn to songs told from a female perspective. “I just found those very interesting,” she says, “especially where the woman in the song is not just an object of desire, but has actual agency. Some of the songs are really old, so you’re talking about a time where women would have had way less rights than I do currently. [But] what I found is that these songs are surprisingly progressive.”

Why, I wonder, did she decide to work entirely with songs from the past rather than writing any of her own?

Well, first of all, she says, “when you write the arrangements, you’re bringing it into a different world, anyway”. But de-emphasising the self is part of the point of folk music, she goes on. “For me, it’s an egoless medium, because the songs have travelled through generations and they’ve been changed by so many people over the years. There’s something about that that I find very comforting, because it’s this universal human experience. It’s not limited to just your experience and view of the world – you have this collectiveness there too.”

But, she adds with a smile, lest she erase herself from the picture completely: “I do change them a lot as well.”

Peat sees Lankum’s rise, and the concurrent resurgence of Irish folk music, as part of a broader cultural revival “where people are learning Irish again, they’re getting interested in our folklore, clothes designers are referencing traditional Irish textiles. Although,” she adds as a caveat, “‘revival’ implies that that happened before, whereas I’m not sure Irish people have ever been this comfortable with their culture. We’re looking at it and not recoiling, and being like, actually, there’s some good stuff here.”

There’s a shadowy flipside, however. “Talking about cultural revival, it makes me uncomfortable that, at the same time as this very valid and necessary revival of interest in our own culture, there’s also the rise of rightwing ideology that is just really racist and xenophobic and – I’m ashamed of it, to be honest. I’m ashamed that the tricolour has become a symbol for hate, I’m ashamed that people are feeling threatened and unwelcome in Ireland. I think we’ve really gone astray there, especially for a country [from which] so many millions of us have emigrated. It makes me very sad.”

She acknowledges that class divides are playing into hostilities, exacerbated by countrywide housing and healthcare crises. ”People are feeling marginalised, and especially in working-class areas, they are being pushed to the side. I just think they’re directing their anger in the wrong direction. They should be annoyed with the government for mismanaging. But, unfortunately, a lot of people seem to think that it’s the people who live next door who look a bit different …” She breaks off, looking uncomfortable. “I hope that all makes sense. I’m not a politician.”

Perhaps that discomfort is one reason she prefers to channel other people’s words in her music rather than writing her own. The most impassioned song on the album, Dark Horse of the Wind, was written by Irish folk singer Liam Weldon in 1966. Half a century on from the 1916 Easter Rising, it reflected on the failures and corruptions of the Irish state in no uncertain terms: “Now charlatans wear dead men’s shoes, aye and rattle dead mens’ bones / Ere the dust has settled on their tombs, they’ve sold the very stones.” Sung by Peat another 60 years later, the words have lost none of their bite.

That makes the album sound forbidding, but there’s a gentleness to it as well, and a spaciousness that contrasts with the intensity of Lankum’s sound. And there’s an alchemy in how she is able to transform disturbing subject matter, such as the abusive relationship on lead single Still I Love Him, into achingly beautiful music.

Then there’s the murder ballad that emulates the feel of Valium. It’s not the first blood-soaked number Peat has played in her career. What draws her to such dark material?

“The drama!” she intones, laughing. “Obviously, they’re about extreme states of human emotion and behaviour, but I find them interesting as well. Why do people write ballads about murder? I suppose, like, why do we make films about murder? It’s so morbid.”

She watches a lot of crime dramas, she says. “I’m not sure why, but I do. I find them interesting. And in a way, songs are almost like newspaper headlines – the ones that survive are the ones that fascinate the most.”

That sounds like a good encapsulation of her new album. Next, she plans to make new music with both Lankum and ØXN. She’s already started the process with the former, and if their recent single, an incantatory, electronic-curious cover of the Specials’ Ghost Town, is any indication, it could spell a very new direction for the band.”

PHOTO CREDIT: The Observer

Let’s end with Jude Rogers’s review of No Human Tongue Can Tell. This review in The Guardian declares this the best Folk album of the year. Hard to argue against that! I am excited to hear it. What is available so far is absolutely transfixing. You listen to the songs in a state of bewilderment. Amazed by what you are hearing! I imagine there will be so many positive reviews for it. Do not bet against No Human Tongue Can Tell being shortlisted for next year’s Mercury Prize:

“Lankum singer Radie Peat’s extraordinary debut album begins without frills or ornament: just her voice, stark and low, each breath like air vibrating through the metal reeds of a harmonium. Singing Hares on the Mountain to the tune Shirley Collins arranged for 1964’s Folk Roots, New Routes, Peat accompanies herself subtly on Fender Rhodes piano before adding layers of Mellotron and Wurlitzer. Her simple, quiet approach is consistently startling and profoundly moving.

No Human Tongue Can Tell collects songs of female struggle, suffering, strength and endurance, although Peat only realised this, she writes in her liner notes, after limiting her choices by her “own mind and abilities” and “personal preferences”. Epic statements clearly aren’t her bag; her gut-deep connection with songs she’s sung live for years clearly matters more, with many delivered in new versions, pulsing with urgency.

Willow Garden, performed in a major-key chorus by Lankum in 2017, becomes a reverb-heavy, haunting elegy, with Peat’s handling of the lyric “poor little girl” buckling with sadness. She paints the woman “hanging out the wash” vividly against rolling guitar arpeggios in Same Old Man, and summons oceans of yearning in the frightening Still I Love Him, a song found by fellow contemporary Irish singer John Francis Flynn, in which a woman savagely beaten by her husband remains emotionally bound to him.

Just as arresting is Peat’s take on Dark Horse on the Wind, Liam Weldon’s 1966 lament for the lost dream of the Irish republic, written on the brink of the Troubles. “Now the warriors spring from the earth / To maim and kill their own,” Peat sings against a solid drone. John “Spud” Murphy’s production brilliantly brings out earthy, granular details, from the sucking-in of air through Peat’s concertina bellows on Cailín Deas to the disruptive thwack of Eleanor Myler’s drums. How staggering for traditional songs to taste so like fresh blood: stunning, brutal and unforgettable”.

I will leave things here. The exceptional Radie Peat is an artist you need to connect with. I am looking forward to more albums from her. I am not sure if there is more work with Lankum coming or whether Peat is focusing on her own work right now. There are a couple of U.K. dates in December, before Peat heads to Europe. Interesting she plays Tower of London on 2nd December! If you can get a chance to see her then do so, as hearing songs from No Human Tongue Can Tell on the stage will be an experience to remember. I was keen and excited to spotlight…

THIS treasured artist.

___________

Follow Radie Peat

PHOTO CREDIT: The Observer

Official:

https://www.radiepeat.com/

Instagram:

https://www.instagram.com/radiepeat

YouTube:

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

Spotify:

https://open.spotify.com/artist/2HzXwEzn6g3waLTIufC1Ji?si=XlwGBhmkSe6fShcHVQUnhA

FEATURE: Kate Bush: Something Like a Song: Pull Out the Pin (The Dreaming)

FEATURE:

 

 

Kate Bush: Something Like a Song

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1982/PHOTO CREDIT: Steve Rapport

Pull Out the Pin (The Dreaming)

_________

I am revisiting …

Pull Out the Pin, as I feel it is one of the standout tracks from Kate Bush’s fourth studio album, The Dreaming. I am reading Tom Doyle’s book, Running Up That Hill: 50 Visions of Kate Bush. There is a chapter on Pull Out the Pin. I will come to some other feature about the song. However, it is worth quoting some of what Doyle says. He argues how Pull Out the Pin might be the first full realisation of the cinematically-minded sound Kate Bush was striving to achieve on 1980’s Never for Ever. It is such a dense and beautiful song. Though it is also quite dingy. You can pretty much smell the song! In terms of the sweat, tobacco and mud. So many great things to highlight, though the late Danny Thompsons’s “snaking double bass and Brian Bath’s choppy guitar” are up there. Doyle notes how Bush drops herself into the action, casting herself as “a dirt-bellied, patiently stalking Viet Cong soldier”. I think there was this feeling from the press that Bush was not politically-minded or she was not as serious as other artists. It was a sexist attitude, but I feel there was always this venom aimed at her. This simple Pop artist that was a bit weird, where was the relevance and depth?! A couple of tracks from Never for Ever did have a political angle. Army Dreamers and Breathing. Pull Out the Pin continued that. Before continuing looking at Tom Doyle’s writing, it is worth looking at the inspiration behind the song. This is what Kate Bush wrote for the Kate Bush Club newsletter in October 1982:

“We sat in front of the speakers trying to focus on the picture – a green forest, humid and pulsating with life. We are looking at the Americans from the Vietnamese point of view and, almost like a camera, we start in wide shot. Right in the distance you can see the trees moving, smoke and sounds drifting our way… sounds like a radio. Closer in with the camera, and you can catch glimpses of their pink skin. We can smell them for miles with their sickly cologne, American tobacco and stale sweat. Take the camera in even closer, and we find a solitary soldier, perhaps the one I have singled out. Sometimes a Vietnamese would track a soldier for days and follow him, until he eventually took him. This soldier is under a tree, dozing with a faint smile and a radio by his side. It’s a small transistor radio out of which cries an electric guitar. I’d swear it was being played by Brian Bath, but how could that be, way out here on our stereo screen. I pop the silver Buddha that I wear around my neck into my mouth, securing my lips around his little metal body. I move towards the sleeping man. A helicopter soars overhead, he wakes up, and as he looks me in the eyes I relate to him as I would to a helpless stranger. Has he a family and a lady waiting for him at home, somewhere beyond the Chinese drums and the double bass that stalks like a wild cat through bamboo? The moving pictures freeze-frame and fade – someone stopped the multi-track, there’s more overdubs to do”.

I do love the lyrics for Pull Out the Pin. So evocative and distinct. This is my favourite passage: “You learn to ride the Earth/When you’re living on your belly and the enemy are city-births/Who need radar? We use scent/They stink of the west, stink of sweat/Stink of cologne and baccy, and all their Yankee hash“. Tom Doyle observes how Bush creates this vocal ventriloquism. Her voice is electronically double-tracked. It goes from calm to sinister. This idea of different personalities and emotions coming through in one song. Bush’s music always has this slightly sinister edge I think. Think back to her debut single, 1978’s Wuthering Heights. Ghostly and dark, there are so many incidents of Bush inhabiting the ghastly, spectral, sinister and unnerving. Doyle writes how David Gilmour provides a vocal counterpoint and has never sounded “so coolly menacing, and never up to this point had Bush sounded so deeply immersed in such an unlikely role”. It is that Floyd connection. You can say Breathing was her most Floyd-esque song. Pink Floyd a band she loved growing up. I actually think there are songs from The Kick Inside (1978) that are influenced by the band. Though Pull Out the Pin could be her most Pink Floyd moment to this point in her career. It was this method-like approach to a song. Bush almost an actor immersing herself in what she is singing. The Wall, released in 1979, was a Pink Floyd album that impacted Bush heavily. The helicopter effects in Pull Out the Pin coming from that album in terms of bringing in various effects and sounds. Not the only time Bush used a helicopter sound. It is perfect for Pull Out the Pin as it adds this visual dynamic. You can listen to the song and get a real sense of warfare in Vietnam.

I am not sure whether Bush’s allegiance as it were was to America or Vietnam. I think she was fascinated by this idea of smalling out the enemy. Being able to detect soldiers through scent. Pull Out the Pin is not Bush rallying against the Vietnam War and her decrying war. I guess that is implied. I think she was just fascinated by this documentary she saw and wanted to write a song about it. I did want to end by quoting from an interview in ZigZag from 1982. This sense that there was this leap from Never for Ever to The Dreaming:

“The Dreaming was a brave step. Not easy enough for the radio so it stiffed. But Kate stands by it as a necessary trailer for the breadth and progress of her strange new album. She can be a pop star or go on and break ground way beyond the Radio One rhino enclosure where feeding time is all glossy white soul and those covers. The Dreaming can't even be spotted in the hills. It pulses with new shapes and guises, voices crawl over your ears and gnaw the brain like beautiful maggots. The drums are enormous, the spaces cavernous. Few songs have an actual chorus [This is absolutely untrue. All ten songs on The Dreaming follow various kinds of traditional verse-chorus-bridge structures.], but each has its own atmosphere and theme, from a macabre look at Vietnam to pure horror. Life and death.

I was bowled over by the new depth and range in Kate's voice. The new deep one on The Dreaming contrasting with the airy familiar. A cracked rasp slicing through Houdini, defiant scream frazzling Pull Out the Pin while a nest of demons burst out of the stomach on Get Out of My House. Backwards and beyond Leave It Open.

"This is the first time that I actually enjoy listening to my voice," says Kate modestly as we talk on an EMI sofa. "It's a big breakthrough. Though Never For Ever was getting there, it was really compromise all the way, because I couldn't do any better at the time. I think it's the vocal chords as you get older. They do something. I can actually put some balls into my voice for the first time. It's exciting!"

The songs are longer and more open, less defined, with a different feel on each. [The songs may be more complex, but they are not less "defined".] Kate welcomes this outsider's first impressions, however garbled mine come over.

Tilts head: "It's like a progression. I've never written songs long as these before. Before they were like three minutes. They all had quite a different process. The idea was to go into the studio each night, put on the rhythm box machine and write something on the spot. Every night I was getting a song, even if it wasn't much good. There'd be an idea I could use in another song.

"It was all spontaneous initially, and became very thought out afterwards. Before, it probably worked the other way. We'd spend ages writing songs, and get it all down quick in the studio”.

Pull Out the Pin is a Kate Bush song that is not discussed a lot. In terms of new listeners, are they aware of gems like this?! It is such a work of wonder. Kate Bush produced The Dreaming and I feel wanted to make an album more cinematic and experimental. Where she could use the Fairlight CMI more and add something deeper into her music. As a singer, this was her at her most versatile and interesting. Her voice somewhat lower and gravelled at times. Giving songs more grit and this masculine energy. Bush seeing herself as this solider and sniffing out the enemy. It is such an interesting idea for a song. One that showcased Bush’s endless genius and imaginative approach to songwriting. If there are better songs than Pull Out the Pin in her catalogue, there are few songs that are so immersive and cinematic. A compelling track from…

A music innovator.

FEATURE: I Use the Enemy: Sex Pistols’ Anarchy in the U.K. at Fifty

FEATURE:

 

 

I Use the Enemy

Sex Pistols’ Anarchy in the U.K. at Fifty

_________

IN terms of songs…

that kickstarted or defined a genre, I think we associate Sex Pistols’ Anarchy in the U.K. with igniting Punk music. Anarchy in the U.K. was released on 26th November, 1976. Ahead of its fiftieth anniversary, I wanted to explore the debut single from the London-based Punk band. Featured on their 1977 album, album Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols, the track was number fifty-six on Rolling Stone magazine's list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time in 2004. This is what they wrote: “Written by: Paul Cook, Steve Jones, Glen Matlock, Johnny Rotten. Produced by: Chris Thomas, Bill Price. Released: Nov. '77 on Warner Bros. This is what the beginning of a revolution sounds like: an explosion of punk-rock guitar noise and Johnny Rotten's evil cackle. The Sex Pistols set out to become a national scandal in the U.K., and they succeeded with their debut single. Jones made his guitar sound like a pub brawl, while Rotten snarled, spat, snickered and ended the song by urging his fans, "Get pissed/Destroy!" The Pistols' record label pulled the single and dropped the band, which just made them more notorious. "I don't understand it," Rotten said in 1977. "All we're trying to do is destroy everything." Even though Anarchy in the U.K. reached thirty-eight in the charts, it is considered one of the best and most important songs ever. Sex Pistols are touring at the moment, minus their former lead, Johnny Rotten. There is animosity between Rotten and the other members. Frank Carter is leading the band now. I wonder if Paul Cook, Glen Matlock and Steve Jones will mark fifty years of Sex Pistols’ debut single. There have been some interesting articles written around Anarchy in the U.K. There are going to be a wave of news ones on its fiftieth anniversary. I want to start with a 2004 feature from Sound on Sound. They looked inside this classic. Produced by Chris Thomas and engineered by Bill Price, we do get to learn the story of this massive explosion. A moment in music history that is so important:

“After getting together in 1975, the quartet of Rotten, drummer Paul Cook, bass player Glen Matlock and guitarist Steve Jones quickly attracted a large and virulent fanbase on the live circuit, and by May of the following year they were recording demos produced by guitarist Chris Spedding. Two months later Dave Goodman produced some more demos, one of which, 'I Wanna Be Me', quickly ended up as the 'B' side of the Pistols' first and only EMI single, 'Anarchy In The UK'. Produced at Wessex Studios in October of that year by Chris Thomas and engineered by Bill Price, 'Anarchy', with its simple structure and defiant, in-your-face attitude, basically defined punk, and it caused an immediate furore following its release on Friday, November 26, 1976.

This, in addition to the firestorm generated by the group's expletive-filled live television interview with Bill Grundy seven days later, as well as reports of similar antics at Heathrow Airport en route to a tour of Holland, prompted EMI to pull the plug on January 6, 1977. A&M followed suit after a stormy seven-day relationship, and when CBS pulled out of negotiations it was Virgin who finally stepped in and released the next single, 'God Save The Queen'. By then, Sid Vicious had taken Glen Matlock's place in the line-up and the band had returned to Wessex to record their seminal album, Never Mind The Bollocks Here's The Sex Pistols.

Primarily an engineer since beginning his apprenticeship at Decca Records in 1962, Bill Price had worked with Eric Clapton, John Mayall, the Moody Blues and Tom Jones before moving to AIR Studios in 1970, where he helped with the design and was involved with projects by Mott The Hoople, Pink Floyd, Stan Getz, Stevie Wonder and Paul McCartney. When Chrysalis Records purchased both AIR and Wessex in 1976, Price joined the latter where, as at AIR, he was appointed chief engineer. At the same time he was also made studio manager and befriended Chris Thomas, for whom he engineered productions of records by Elton John, Pete Townshend and the Pretenders, while Price himself would go on to produce anyone from the Clash and Jesus & Mary Chain to the Waterboys and Big Audio Dynamite.

Having just produced an album by Ian Hunter, as well as another by a soft-rock outfit named Racing Cars who enjoyed chart success with the single 'They Shoot Horses, Don't They?', Bill Price experienced a little bit of culture shock when first encountering the Sex Pistols.

"They were a bit of a snotty bunch to start with," is his diplomatic understatement. "They treated the studio like the BBC Home Service and looked at me as if I was wearing a white lab coat that had a pocket stuffed full of Biros. It was as if they had walked into the arms of the Establishment, and there was also a general reluctance to comply, although that didn't last long. Johnny was the main protagonist, acting like he was consorting with the enemy, so I had a little chat with him, telling him the artists I'd worked with, what the job was, and that we were there to help, and after that the attitude completely changed. It was only an act, treating both Chris and I as if we were Bill Grundy, and it wasn't going to get them in the newspapers. All it was going to do was make the record worse, so they quickly became very pleasant, easy people to work with."

Having heard the demoed material, Price and Thomas were impressed by its raw energy as well as its commercial appeal. Melodic, no; catchy, yes. "By then there was already a lot of music biz buzz about the band," Price says, "and if you played any of the demos you would recognise they were by the Sex Pistols, not least because Johnny's voice is so distinctive. They might have had slightly different tempos and slightly different arrangements, but there was nothing too drastic... There weren't harps or violas! The energy was largely the same. I mean, it's pretty hard to make Steve Jones sound tame."

The layout of Wessex Studios for the recording of 'Anarchy In The UK'. The drums were placed near the centre of the 15 x 10 metre live room, with two pairs of ambient mics used to capture the room sound."For the kit itself I had a standard setup: an AKG D12 on the bass drum, a Neumann KM86 on top of the snare, a Shure SM57 underneath the snare, an AKG 451 on the hi-hat, and a Neumann U67 for the tom-toms — this was before we had the Sennheiser 421s. The main effect inspired by Chris's 'dustbins being kicked downstairs' comment involved me keying different ambience mics off the drums as they were being hit, using the old-fashioned Kepexes. These were the earliest American gates available, and using them was pretty much an integral part of the sound. Chris's suggestion that we could shorten the ambience with gates, providing more without it sounding too distant, all made total sense to me.

"Paul Cook started off only just able to play drums, yet by the time we were halfway through the album he was really solid. It was definitely a good idea that he took up playing the drums, although it was also unfortunate that when we started recording the Sex Pistols he hadn't been doing this for very long. He'd only had a kit for a matter of months. He certainly hadn't been knocking around with other bands for several years. Still, within a couple of months he was 10 times the drummer he had been when we started the sessions.

"On 'Anarchy in the UK' we're hearing him at the start of this whole process. He'd often have a problem keeping time when it came to a drum fill or changing from hi-hat to a cymbal; all of the things on which learner drummers tend to skip time. However, we managed to get around that. Chris Thomas would insist on getting pretty perfect rhythm tracks, so, particularly on those early sessions, there was a lot of multitrack editing of what was ultimately used as just the drum track — although the whole band would be playing for the vibe, the bulk of the day would be spent doing a lot of takes and these would be edited together purely for the drum track. Then the guitar, bass and vocals would be overdubbed onto the resulting patchwork."

Price recalls that, in line with the rest of the band's equipment, Cook's drum kit was "pretty crappy and beaten-up. Steve Jones had a Fender Twin that had lost the benefit of its front grille, meaning that you could see the loudspeakers. People would say that made it sound better, but when I asked Steve what had happened to the grille he said 'Oh, I had to get rid of that. The name of the band I nicked it off was written on it.' And that was probably quite true!"

A couple of other features to get to before finishing off. Ultimate Classic Rock marked forty-five years of Sex Pistols’ Anarchy in the U.K. in 2021. I do wonder which artists and bands today are influenced by that song. In terms of what its legacy is today, I am not so sure. It definitely had a massive impact in the 1970s, though perhaps it wasn’t instant:

“What’s often overlooked is the 3-minute 31-second song itself. It had a difficult gestation as Rotten, Steve Jones, Glen Matlock and Paul Cook – Jones was 21 at the time, the others were 20 – struggled to crystallize their intent. The song began to take shape in the summer of 1976, as bassist Matlock told Rolling Stone in 2018. “I had half an idea for a big overture, and I just started playing that descending chord progression and everybody picked up on it and said, ‘Where’s it go next?’ And I sort of geared it as we went along. John, it happened, had a bag of lyrics – just sheets of paper in a plastic bag – and he pulled something out and he said, ‘I’ve been waiting for you to come up with something because I’ve got this idea.’”

Rotten said his lyrics had been inspired by the Pistols’ own “despondencies and discrepancies” as they attempted to secure success. “I felt under serious pressure – and so did others, I think – and was trying to coin phrases and write words that would unite us as a band, as we were so bitterly opposed to each other,” the singer recalled in 2016. “’Anarchy In The U.K.’ was the end result. The ideas in that song had been rattling around in my head for years, but I had never had an outlet. Then there I was all of a sudden, a singer in a band.”

He continued: “The people running the country at that time were running it into the ground… Young people were constantly being told that they had no future. They certainly had no money. I had to bunk on the subway just to get to rehearsals. There would be trash everywhere, it felt like the downfall of Western civilization – we’re talking race riots, the National Front. It was a society facing imminent collapse, so I threw ‘anarchy’ into that mix, even though there weren’t that many anarchists running around at the time.”

The recording was “quite a lengthy process actually,” Matlock told Songfacts in 2018. “Initially, we went in with a guy who was our live sound engineer, Dave Goodman, who was kind of good enough. He had never really produced anybody properly, so he didn't have enough clout or wherewithal to tell Malcolm McLaren not to be in the studio. And Malcolm was like the devil at his ear, going, ‘It’s not exciting enough – it's got to be faster.’ And it was getting faster and faster, and losing all its groove. In the end, we effectively went on strike, and said, ‘No, it's fine,’ and we got a different guy in, Chris Thomas, who has done some fantastic work over the years. We set up, started playing, and he said, ‘I think we've got it now.’”

Matlock – who reported that he’d been trying to channel Motown session bassist James Jamerson on the track – recalled that they’d had to wait for Rotten to arrive and record the vocal. “He didn't rush down because he was like, ‘You're useless, you can't play. You’ve been in there for weeks.’ And we said, ‘No. We've done it.’ We were right all along – we just needed the right person to realize it. And then Steve loaded up the guitars over the next few days.”

In 2017 Rotten told Rolling Stone how challenging it had been to perfect the opening words. “It took me time,” he said. “They would be telling me to count the beats, and I didn’t know what the fuck they meant – what are beats? Paul would always be very helpful with me, but at the same time it was infuriating because I wouldn’t know the terminology.”

The song would also change in the studio. “On the original demo, at the start of the song, I sang ‘Words of wisdom’ before ‘right now’ … I removed it because there is no point of overdoing it," Rotten explained. "I always thought if I over-aggrandized it, it wouldn’t mean much. When we were rehearsing we always tried to remove what was superfluous; we took out all the extra guitar flurries – Steve willingly did that most sensibly – and Paul would cut a song down to its simple roots.”

Matlock, whose tenure in the band didn’t last much longer, rejected the suggestion that he’d “hated” the song’s lyrics. “The only line that always made me wince was, ‘I am an antichrist/I am an anarchist’ – they don’t rhyme, and it always gets me,” he admitted. “Songs that don’t rhyme properly gets me somehow. It had nothing to do with the sentiment. But if you then want to go onto a whole sociopolitical argument about whether it is a good thing to have real anarchy in the U.K. and whether that’s ever going to happen is another matter. But I was quite proud to be onstage singing that song”.

I do want to finish with UNCUT. Coinciding with Sex Pistols playing a series of fiftieth anniversary shows with Frank Carter, Glen Matlock, Steve Jones, Paul Cook and producer Chris Thomas reflected on making Anarchy in the U.K. It is an incendiary and fierce anthem that many might say has relevance today. In terms of its spirit of anarchy and protest, can we apply it to the U.K. in 2026? It is going to be interesting to see what is written about the single ahead of its fiftieth anniversary:

“JONES: When we first started and we’d play up north in these working men’s clubs, everyone hated us. They’d sling bottles at you and it was terrifying. But as the year went on, with gigs like the Screen On The Green [in Islington], there was a vibe because people came to see you, they wanted to be there.

MATLOCK: We played “Anarchy…” as our first number in Manchester. I’d finished writing it earlier that week.

JONES: We recorded the version that’s on [fabled bootleg] Spunk in Denmark Street when we demoed the songs we had with our sound man, Dave Goodman. Then once we got a deal with EMI, we attempted to do “Anarchy…” properly with Dave. But he was way too stoned on weed.

COOK: Dave went through the song time and time again and we just lost ourselves. When we heard the final mix in Malcolm’s office, we thought, ‘Oh, no. Is this how we sound?’ Another factor is The Damned had just released “New Rose”. We listened to that and thought, ‘We’ve got to do something really special here.’ Steve and me were both Roxy fans and suggested Chris Thomas as producer. He’d worked with The Beatles and all sorts and we never thought he’d do it.

CHRIS THOMAS: Malcolm contacted me. They came over to my house for me to listen to the demos, minus John, because Malcolm didn’t want him there. “Pretty Vacant” stuck out. I thought that could be a fantastic record. The fuss around them made me nervous, but the material was there. They were already in Wessex, so we stayed there for “Anarchy…”.

COOK: Wessex was a cavernous old priory with a big ceiling. I wasn’t in a booth, it was all open, the guitar was too, so it felt like we were doing a gig. We just set up and whacked it out.

THOMAS: Wessex was horrific because there’s frigging carpet everywhere, dead as a bloody dormouse. We gated the drums to give them ambience.

MATLOCK: The third and fifth take are spliced together. It finishes the way it does because the tape ran out.

THOMAS: When John turned up, I would imagine he was very angry for being excluded. We put him in a little vocal booth and he just screamed. I thought, ‘Oh my God.’ I went in there and said, “I can’t really understand what you’re singing.” He said, “You’re the one with a track record. You sort it out.” I thought, ‘Oh, Christ. Let’s go to the pub.’ He walked behind me, gobbing in the street all the way, and I thought, ‘Oh no, what is this?’ He had quite a few pints of Guinness and came back and got a few takes, and then I did a comp, editing between the takes, literally going through it line by line. It still wasn’t there, so pretty soon afterwards, we went to Ramport, The Who’s studio in Battersea. We did an afternoon there on the vocal. We did Wessex, Ramport and then Wessex at least once more, doing more takes then taking the original comp and always upgrading it: “Oh, that line’s better there”, or, “That little snigger’s nice.” Then finally we had a vocal track.

COOK: Every line was fantastic. You can go through the whole song, with its confusion and anger, and “I don’t know what I want, but I know how to get it”, “I want to destroy passersby”. Every line’s brilliant and we could relate to it all – especially the last verse, with what was going on at the time with IRA bombs going off everywhere.

THOMAS: It was essential that you heard every syllable. That was the whole point of being so precise in editing and comping, because there is so much character in John’s extraordinary voice. I wanted to make sure that I got every little piece of it. It was really, really important. It pays off because it ends up in the most fantastic performance.

JONES: We built on the backing track with my guitar overdubs. That was my favourite time in the Pistols, making “Anarchy…”, and Never Mind The Bollocks… later. I could barely play then. They spent time on me. It wasn’t work. It was creative and fun.

THOMAS: I wanted to keep some of the stuff that I heard on the demo, like a bit of feedback that comes in accidentally, a nice touch worth repeating. Bits of guitar were orchestrated and threaded on quite carefully. Then on the third day we mixed it. Steve and Paul were asleep upstairs where there was a pool table. John was in the control room. I went, “OK, it’s time to turn it up now and play it loud.” John stood up and he went, “That’s our anthem.”

MATLOCK: It sounds heavier because the tempo’s just right, it’s not too fast. It’s got a majesty to it. When it came out, Melody Maker’s Caroline Coon called me up and said, “How would you describe the music?” I said it’s like an overture and she used that in her review.

COOK: I was coming out of the Marquee and they played “Anarchy…” over the speaker. Everybody in the crowd started singing along with the chorus. That’s when I first realised it was a significant song.

MATLOCK: Was the Grundy debacle a week after “Anarchy…” came out bad luck? If all that hadn’t happened, I don’t think we’d be sitting here now. But we were just on the cusp of being a proper touring band when we couldn’t play on the Anarchy tour and they tried to ban us. It became quite intense and the band started devolving into factions. That was the end of my tenure. I’d only just turned 20. Did “Anarchy…” contribute to the assault on us? Yeah. It wasn’t “Love To Love You Baby”.

COOK: It was never the same after the interview and when Sid joined, he was into the chaos. But the joie de vivre we had before came across in the records, especially “Anarchy…”.

JONES: I appreciate it more than ever when we do it live now. Obviously it’s a bit different with Frank, but you’ve got all ages singing along and it’s a beautiful thing. I couldn’t care less about politics, and my whole idea is when we do a show, I just wanna make people happy and forget the nonsense in the world. You can see the joy in people’s faces. Have I got that joy Paul talked about back? Yeah, I have”.

The rebellious and righteous Anarchy in the U.K. turns fifty on 26th November. Sex Pistols’ members are all now in their seventies, so their relationship with the song is different to what it was when they were twenty. Johnny Rotten’s vocals on this 1976 song are so raw and exciting! It must have been such a thrill and shock hearing this song. Despite not being a big chart success, it certainly resonated with a generation who bonded with the song’s messages. Whilst some see it as being a product of the 1970s and a reaction to the politics and society of the time, I do feel that it contemporary in terms of relatability. In 2026, this Punk gem is…

SO relevant and fresh.

FEATURE: Groovelines: Queen – Somebody to Love

FEATURE:

 

 

Groovelines

Queen – Somebody to Love

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I wanted to look…

at one of Queen’s best songs. On 24th November, it will be thirty-five since we lost Freddie Mercury. Rather than do a playlist and something random, I wanted to use the opportunity to feature a Queen classic. One that Freddie Mercury wrote, Somebody to Love, was included on Queen’s 1976 album, A Day at the Races. The album turns fifty on 10th December. I wonder if there will be any anniversary recognition. If the surviving members will say anything about the album or whether there will be a reissue of some sort. Somebody to Love was the lead single from the album. That song turns fifty on 12th November. So this is partly to mark that anniversary and also to remember Freddie Mercury ahead of the anniversary of his death. Reaching number two in the U.K., Somebody to Love was a big commercial success. There were some critics who were not too hot on the song, though many noted how Queen were pushing the boundaries of Pop music. Operatic and symphonic, Somebody to Love is this huge and heartfelt song that showcased Mercury’s incredible voice and songwriting. I am going to end with a feature from 2021. Ultimate Classic Rock recalling when George Michael fronted Queen in 1992 and performed Somebody to Love at a Freddie Mercury tribute concert. I will start with American Songwriter and their article that talked about the meaning of Somebody to Love:

“The Shadow of “Rhapsody”

It’s not quite accurate to say “Bohemian Rhapsody” and A Night at the Opera (the album that contained the song) put Queen on the map in 1975. They had already been lurking in the singles charts before that with songs like “Killer Queen,” and their ’74 album Sheer Heart Attack had been a top hit in both the UK (No. 2) and U.S. (No. 12).

But that wildly ambitious track did indeed send the band up a few levels in the rock hierarchy. Releasing anything after such a smash would be daunting enough. Couple that with the fact Queen would be recording for the first time without Roy Thomas Baker, the producer on their first four albums, and the next record, titled A Day at the Races, could have been problematic.

Luckily, the quartet possessed strong ideas of what they wanted their next album to be. As always, the lead single would be crucial. Queen gamely tried something a little different with that track, leaving behind the extremes of light opera and hard rock in favor of a little bit of American gospel.

Queen and the Queen of Soul

Mercury’s unabashed love of the music of Aretha Franklin came bounding to the forefront when he began writing “Somebody to Love,” as he explained in an interview found in the Queen The Greatest YouTube series. In fact, he even annoyed his bandmates with his constant praise of her:

“And there’s me going on about Aretha Franklin, sort of made them go a bit mad. … I just wanted to write something in that kind of thing. I was sort of incentivized by the gospel approach that she had on her albums, the earlier albums.”

Queen made sure not to make the stylistic change so drastic that it might alienate fans of their earlier hits. The layered vocals sounded enough like “Bohemian Rhapsody” to give fans a little bit of déjà vu. And Brian May added a typically lyrical guitar solo. Beside those elements, however, “Somebody to Love” certainly owes a lot to the testifying style of Franklin and other gospel greats. That style set Mercury up for one of his finest individual vocal performances, one where he displays staggering range and palpable feeling.

What is the Meaning of “Somebody to Love”?

“Somebody to Love” casts Freddie Mercury in the role of hapless romantic, and it’s a role he plays to the absolute hilt. He immediately sets his despairing tone after the a cappella open: Ooh each morning I get up I die a little. His only companions are the Greek chorus-like backing vocals that follow him around, seconding his emotions. Example: I get down (down) on my knees (knees) and I start to pray (praise the lord).

The narrator shows frustration at the neglect he’s been suffering from the deity he keeps addressing: I have spent all my years believin’ you / But I just can’t get no relief, Lord. Bits of quirky humor sneak through to keep matters from getting overwrought, such as when the narrator’s acquaintances worry about his mental health: They say I got a lot of water on my brain.

But this wouldn’t be a Queen song if there weren’t some kind of triumph over opposing forces, and that comes in the final lines when the narrator, against all evidence to the contrary, finds optimism: I ain’t gonna face no defeat / I just gotta get out this prison cell / Someday I’m gonna be free, Lord. That leads to the coda, as the backing vocals repeat the refrain and Mercury soars all around them with his improvs. Maybe the narrator of “Somebody to Love” comes up empty, but the song itself proved Queen could tackle genres that few other rock bands could even attempt”.

Prior to ending with that feature about George Michael and his cover of Somebody to Love, there is an NME article from 2023 I want to bring in. Greatest Hits Radio listeners named Bohemian Rhapsody as the best song ever. Often seen as the finest work from Queen, a former roadie for the band recalled how Mercury felt Somebody to Love was a better song. In terms of songwriting. It is a towering performance that I don’t think the band ever equalled:

“Queen’s Freddie Mercury thought ‘Somebody To Love’ was “better” than ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, according to a roadie who once worked with the band.

Speaking to Greatest Hits Radio after ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ was named ‘greatest song of all time’ by over 6500 listeners, former roadie and author of Queen Uncovered Peter Hince remembers the band coming up with ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ and Mercury’s thoughts on the track.

Speaking to Greatest Hits Radio he explained: “The band were recording [album] ‘Night At The Opera’ and we were going around all these different studios in London and doing bits in each place so I was hearing bits and pieces of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, but I didn’t hear the whole thing for quite some time. I remember hearing the opera bit and thinking it’s going to be an introduction tape for the live show – I had no idea it was a song!”

He continued: “The video is arguably what helped it become so huge in Britain…and the other thing is that, sadly, Freddie isn’t around anymore and it’s one of his legacies that piece of music so is still something people find very emotional.

“Also, nothing really had been done like it before and probably nothing since – with all the technology now it is easier to get certain studio effects whereas with Queen it was all about spending enormous amounts of time and being incredibly innovative. So I think part of [it’s appeal] is in the fact that it took so long to do and it was this real labour of love for Fred.’

“…Freddie actually said ‘Somebody To Love’ was a better piece of songwriting than Bo Rap. He felt that as a pure piece of songwriting it was better,” he concluded”.

I will end with Ultimate Classic Rock. A 1992 tribute concert for Freddie Mercury gathered artists together to pay tribute to the late Queen frontman. It was quite a task tackling Somebody to Love. Few artists have the power and technical ability to do full justice to the song. However, there is one artist that does have the lung and gift to conquer the song: George Michael. It is also sad, as this Christmas Day marks ten years since Michael died. One of the greatest artists we have ever seen:

“George Michael fronted Queen for a performance of “Somebody to Love” before thousands on April 20, 1992, at Wembley Stadium.

Combine that audience with those reached by live television and radio broadcasts in 76 countries across the globe, and Michael's voice reached hundreds of millions of ears during the Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert for AIDS Awareness. But the late pop star was really thinking of just one person.

"The performance most well known in my career," Michael said in the documentary Freedom, "was sung to my lover who was dying."

Anselmo Feleppa had just been diagnosed with AIDS, but Michael wasn’t publicly out – so his relationship with Feleppa was a secret. That left Michael to take the stage while enduring a very personal pain, even as he honored another of the disease's victims.

“I went out there knowing I had to honor Freddie Mercury and I had to pray for Anselmo,” Michael said in the film, which was produced before he passed away in 2016. “I just wanted to die inside. I was so overwhelmed by singing the songs of this man I had worshiped as a child, who had passed away in the same manner my first living partner was going to experience.”

Mercury died six months before this tribute concert, which co-starred Metallica, Def Leppard, Guns N' Roses, Elton John and other A-list artists. Highlights included Annie Lennox and David Bowie performing "Under Pressure," and Queen teaming with Robert Plant for "Innuendo." But Michael’s work that evening in London was stunning.

With the three remaining Queen members beside him, Michael launching into a stomping take on “39” fit for an Irish pub session. He welcomed Lisa Stansfield for a tear-jerking collaboration on "These Are the Days of Our Lives." But “Somebody to Love” – which was paired with "These Are the Days of Our Lives" for 1993's Five Live, a benefit EP for the Mercury Phoenix Trust – brought the house down.

Michael's performance inevitably led to thoughts of a more permanent role in Queen.

"I remember hearing the rumors, but it wouldn't have suited us," Roger Taylor later told Classic Rock. "George wasn't really used to working with a live band. When he heard the power he had behind him in rehearsal, he couldn’t believe it. He thought he was on Concorde or something."

Taylor called it "a thrill to work with George Michael," though he wasn't surprised by how fluidly the former Wham frontman stepped into Mercury's hard-to-fill shoes. "I knew he had that in him," Taylor told Classic Rock. "In addition to the great delicacy which he has — the great control, great dynamics — he has enormous power. And from the moment he stepped into the rehearsal room and was doing 'Somebody to Love,' we went, 'Whoa.' I think in most people's feeling, he got closest to the range of Freddie himself."

Michael felt that same magic too, and had only kind thoughts for Queen. "It was probably the proudest, proudest moment for me of my career," Michael said in Freedom, "because it was me living out a childhood fantasy, I suppose, to sing one of Freddie's songs in front of 80,000 people. It was a really strange mixture of incredible pride and real sadness for me”.

On 12th November, it will be fifty years since one of Queen’s best singles was released. On 24th November, we remember Freddie Mercury thirty-five years since he died. If most polls put Bohemian Rhapsody top when it comes to ranking the best Queen songs, there are those that place Somebody to Love high. In 2018, The Guardian ranked Queen’s U.K. singles in 2018. Somebody to Love came tenth. Rolling Stone named the ten best/most essential Queen songs in 2024. The readers decided. Somebody to Love came in fourth: “Queen had a tough task in front of them when they went into the studio to begin work on their 1976 LP A Day at the Races. How in God's name do you follow up "Bohemian Rhapsody?" Freddie knew he couldn't match the grand madness of that song, but he still came up with a pretty incredible soul tune with "Somebody to Love." He wrote the song on the piano and then dubbed in vocals by Brian May and Roger Taylor, making the trio sound like a full choir. It was a huge hit that year, reaching Number 13 in America. George Michael delivered a stirring rendition of the tune at the 1992 Freddie Mercury tribute concert”. Earlier this year, u DiscoverMusic named the twenty essential songs from Queen. Tracks that redefined Rock. Somebody to Love was among the selected: “Somebody To Love” demonstrates Queen’s ability to deliver brilliant soulful, gospel-flavored pop. Mercury’s lyrics, about the search for salvation and spiritual redemption, was the ideal opening single from the A Day At The Races album and shot to No.2 in the charts. Mercury’s respect for soul music legend Aretha Franklin was a major inspiration behind the song”. Somebody to Love is a masterpiece from Queen. A single about to turn fifty, it still sends shivers down the spine when you hear it. A peerless vocal from…

THE late great Freddie Mercury.

INTERVIEW: KSMBA

INTERVIEW:

KSMBA

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IT has been a thrill and pleasure…

interviewing the wonderful Sydney-born, Melbourne-based producer, D.J. and vocalist, KSMBA (Bella Kasimba). With You is a brilliant single that explores vulnerability, intimacy, and the power of genuine human connection. Their rise through Australia’s Electronic music scene is wonderful to see. I was a big fan of the single, Touch, and With You is a resolution to that song. Beyond radio play and success there, KSMBA was named Mixmag’s Artist to Watch for 2026, selected as a triple j Unearthed Feature Artist, and appeared on the cover of 10 Magazine Australia’s Music Issue in collaboration with Chanel. I was keen to learn more about this incredible multi-talented D.J. and producer. Whether there is more music coming. Dig a little into their musical tastes and loves I am also keen to see KSMBA in the U.K., as there is definitely a waiting and adoring fanbase here. You can follow KSMBA on Instagram  and TikTok. I think that next year is going to be such a massive and successful one for KSMBA. A real honour to discover more about…

THIS wonderful human.

_________

Hi KSMBA. How are you doing? What has your week been like?

Hello!

I am doing quite well, thank you. I am currently getting my hair braided, catching up on some admin bits, and moodboarding on Pinterest. This week has been a beautiful balance of finalising things for my next single and working on new music. I had my voice lesson yesterday too which is always so eye opening, and stayed up probably too late (as always) comping vocal takes.

Before discussing your music, what have been your highlights from this year?

The highlights of this year have actually been quite internal. I have put an enormous amount of work into my song writing, my vocals, and really honing in on the vision I have for KSMBA. Looking back at this time last year, all of these aspects have evolved so much.  I feel much more assured in what I’m creating, what I want to say, and where I want to take this project.

The other big highlight has been building the team around me. I have started working with the most brilliant manager, and it has been so beautiful seeing how much this has allowed things to grow and expand. Having someone else in the trenches with me, who wholeheartedly believes in what I am doing, has given me a lot of confidence and more mental space to be creative. I also recently signed with agents in the U.S. and Asia as well as a new agent for Australia,  and I'm extremely excited to be beginning plans for my first overseas shows and building out my Australian live strategy.

“With You is about allowing yourself to be completely seen by someone else, and the bliss that comes with surrendering to that connection”

Tell me a bit about your latest track, With You. It comes after a successful and busy period of touring. Did your time on the road influence the track at all?

I wrote With You in July last year actually, so it’s been sitting on my hard drive for a while. I definitely get inspired from playing shows , but my songs are a bit like a journal for me, so they are often born out of a feeling or an experience that I find myself needing to process or express.

With You is about allowing yourself to be completely seen by someone else, and the bliss that comes with surrendering to that connection.

I loved Touch, and the track received amazing feedback. As With You is out, are there plans for an E.P. or anything else before the end of the year?

Thank you!! I love Touch as well.

At the moment, I'm continuing with singles (the next one will be out in early December!), but I am also working on an E.P. for next year that I am so unbelievably excited about.

I had lunch with the amazing Francois Tetaz earlier in the year, and something he said to me REALLY unlocked a shift in how I approach songwriting. It was along the lines of “say what it is you are wanting to say”. Such a simple concept, but surprisingly difficult in practice!

That’s really been my guiding light the last few months. I’ve been pushing myself to be more direct, more adventurous, and less concerned with what I think I’m ‘supposed’ to make. I’m very excited for people to hear where that’s been taking me.

“I also think being so involved in music my whole life has meant my imagination has always been given space to roam free”

How does being a D.J. impact your music? Is there this close relationship between the two?

This is a great question, and something I think about a lot. There’s both positive and negative aspects. I think DJing can sometimes make you think inside a particular framework for the types of songs you can/should make, how they should be structured, and even what they should communicate. I have been spending a lot of time consciously challenging those expectations in my music.

On the other hand though, DJing gives you an instinctive understanding of how music moves people physically, and it is so valuable to be able to test out tracks on a dancefloor, feel how people respond to it, then take that knowledge back into the studio.

Ultimately, I want to make music that works on a dancefloor, but I don't want the dancefloor to dictate the limits of what I create.

I spotlighted you late last year, but you have had a very busy 2026. What have been your highlights from this year? What was it like being named Mixmag Artist to Watch for 2026?

Being named one of the Mixmag Artists to watch for 2026 was very special, especially so early on in my career. When you are building something from the ground up it can be very hard to stop and look around and see the progress you have made, but something like this is a beautiful reminder that things are starting to resonate with people.

In many ways I feel I am only just getting started, and this just adds more fuel to my fire!

I am always keen to shine a light on amazing D.J.s. and producers. I know you are classically trained and graduated from London’s Royal College of Music. How important do you think this education and experience has impacted and informed your sets?

I absolutely do not think that formal music training is a requirement to be an artist, or more specifically a D.J. or producer, but it has been a huge part of my own journey.

Music has always been the centre of my life. My earliest memories are sitting at my family piano and making up songs, and forcing whoever was around to be my audience. The path that I found as a kid was to pursue music through an instrument so I put all of my determination and energy into that.

I think pursuing anything at a high level teaches you a huge amount. Discipline, how to work at something, getting comfortable with setbacks, working collaboratively. I also think being so involved in music my whole life has meant my imagination has always been given space to roam free.

At this point, I can’t separate what is a result of my training versus what is just me, but I have enormous gratitude for that chapter of my life.

I guess there is this greater depth and musicality to you compared to some D.J.s? Obviously music was a big part of your early life. What was it that compelled you to become a D.J., rather than, say, become a Classical musician or become part of a symphony?

I wouldn’t necessarily say so! I think that the craft of DJing in its purest form is its own art form.

I think what I'm trying to build is slightly outside of that framework though. Creating music is really at the core of what I do, and for that my background has without a doubt shaped how I approach things.

There wasn’t one definitive lightbulb moment, but more a gentle unravelling as I let my curiosity and instincts lead me. I knew I wanted to write music and I knew I wanted to share that music and perform. Once I began the initial exploration of the kind of music I wanted to make, DJing was the natural first step.

I don’t think DJing will be the only way I perform live though and I’m excited to explore things beyond the DJing booth.

“I think it’s this experience, more than any specific musical tradition, that has informed how I see the world, and in turn, the music I make”

There is still gender inequality when it comes to festival bills and exposure. In terms of polls and the ‘best D.J.s’ lists, (white) men still dominate. Often, you have been the only member of a line-up who is Black, queer and gender-diverse. Do you feel things are improving or changing, and what does the industry need to do? Perhaps still a boys’ club, do male D.J.s need to show more allyship and stop solely bigging-up their male peers?

This is a huge question , and I can’t speak definitively on whether things are changing since I’m still relatively new to this, and my experience has predominately been in Australia.

So-called ‘Australia’ has an extremely shameful history that has never been adequately reckoned with, and one that many white Australians are still unwilling to confront honestly. It would be naïve to imagine that the music industry somehow exists outside of these broader structures, so of course this is reflected in who is getting booked and who gets platformed.

As the brilliant Audre Lorde said, “the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house”.

I don’t know the answer, and in order to mentally stay afloat I try to focus on my own personal sphere of influence and where I feel I have something to contribute. My hope is that by putting myself wholeheartedly into my music and my career, showing up with all the facets of myself, and doing what I can to uplift others, I can create an environment where others feel they can do the same.

Ultimately though, meaningful change requires the people who currently hold power to question who they’re giving opportunities to, whose perspectives they value and why.

Talk to me about your Ugandan heritage and roots. You have said that “I wholeheartedly believe that dance music is a place that can foster a lot of really beautiful things”. Is this tied to your Ugandan heritage, or is that influence more felt in the country’s strong traditions around drumming and dancing and how you have incorporated that into your music?

You know I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently while I’ve been writing new music and thinking more deeply about the stories that I want to tell.

I’ve never lived in Uganda; my lived experience more so is that of being a third-culture kid. Navigating the space between different cultures and identities. Not quite belonging here, not quite belonging there. I think it’s this experience, more than any specific musical tradition, that has informed how I see the world, and in turn, the music I make.

As we head towards the end of this year, what have you set your sights in for 2027? Maybe in terms of new music or a venue that you have always wanted to play?

Lots of new music, my first international shows, and continuing to expand the KSMBAverse!!!

Are there any gigs or tour dates booked for the U.K. soon, as you have a big fanbase here?

Nothing locked in yet, but getting back to the U.K. to play is very high on my list!

Finally, and for being a good sport, you can name a song (one that is not your own) and I will end the interview with it. What shall we go with?

I’m going to have to cheat and name two songs. Tinashe’s Too Easy, and Nina Simone's I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free . Both living on repeat in my head.

FEATURE: Join Us for The Last Waltz! The Band's Final Performance at Fifty

FEATURE:

 

 

 

Join Us for The Last Waltz!

IN THIS PHOTO: The Band and everyone else on stage closing out The Last Waltz/PHOTO CREDIT: Ed Perlstein/Morrison Hotel Gallery

The Band's Final Performance at Fifty

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THIS is one of those anniversaries…

that might not get picked up or be written about. However, I noticed that The Band’s final performance, known as The Last Waltz, is coming up for its fiftieth anniversary. As Wikipedia state: “The Last Waltz was a concert by the Canadian-American rock group the Band, held on American Thanksgiving Day, November 25, 1976, at Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco. The Last Waltz was advertised as the Band's "farewell concert appearance", and the concert had the Band joined by more than a dozen special guests, including their previous employers Ronnie Hawkins and Bob Dylan, as well as Paul Butterfield, Bobby Charles, Eric Clapton, Neil Diamond, Emmylou Harris, Dr. John, Joni Mitchell, Van Morrison, the Staple Singers, Ringo Starr, Muddy Waters, Ronnie Wood, and Neil Young. The musical director for the concert was the Band's original record producer, John Simon”. I wrote about this five years ago, so there may be some information that repeats itself. Even so, fifty years after this incredible performance. It was sort of a farewell but not. The Band did release more albums after 1976. The Last Waltz documentary/film was released in 1978. Jericho was released in 1993, ten years after The Band reformed without guitarist and songwriter Robbie Robertson. Even so, that 1976 performance that was then made into a 1978 album is the final album from the original line-up. I will come to some reviews and features. I want to start with a 2015 feature from Ultimate Classic Rock, who looked inside a legendary farewell concert:

“A wise man once said it's better to burn out than fade away, and on Thanksgiving Day in 1976, the Robbie Robertson-era edition of Band did just that: Their final concert together was a blaze of glory called The Last Waltz.

After spending more than 15 years on the road – first as a backing band and then as a recording act in their own right – they called it quits as a touring entity by leading an all-star ensemble through an epic night of food, dancing and rock 'n' roll. Commemorated by director Martin Scorsese, the event would later serve as the grist for one of the most beloved concert films of all time, but on Nov. 25, 1976, it was simply one heck of a show.

At the time of the concert, the Band was enjoying a run of success dating back to its 1964 formation as the backing crew for rockabilly singer Ronnie Hawkins. After rising to prominence as Bob Dylan's band in the mid-'60s, the group – consisting of bassist/vocalist Rick Danko, drummer/vocalist Levon Helm, multi-instrumentalist Garth Hudson, keyboard player/vocalist Richard Manuel and guitarist/vocalist Robertson – embarked on a recording career that produced six straight Top 40 albums, including their platinum self-titled 1969 release.

In the context of the times, their music was resolutely and singularly old-fashioned, evoking a homespun Appalachian feel that was often utterly out of step with current trends. That didn't stop them from breaking the Top 40 with several singles, including 1969's "Up on Cripple Creek" and 1972's "Don't Do It." (Ironically, the song that would become arguably their trademark number, "The Weight," petered out in the lower reaches of the pop chart.)

All of which is to say that when they announced their retirement from the stage, the Band were still very much in demand – and had acquired enough famous friends over the years that The Last Waltz quickly became a star-studded affair, featuring appearances from former benefactors Hawkins and Dylan as well as a long list of guests that included Van Morrison, Eric Clapton, Neil Young, Muddy Waters, Joni Mitchell, and Dr. John. Considering that the audience was treated to a turkey dinner and ballroom dancing prior to the start of the show, the event's $25 ticket price – which was a lot of money at the time – ended up being quite a bargain.

If the music was solid, the Band's ties were already starting to fray. To begin with, the concert never would have happened in the first place if Robertson hadn't decided to leave the road, effectively making their live retirement a unilateral decision that rankled the other members of the group.

Resentment over Robertson's control of the Band's affairs extended to decisions as simple as who should join them in the lineup – such as his infamously divisive insistence that Neil Diamond be brought on to perform a cut from his recent Robertson-produced LP. (Walking offstage after his performance, Diamond supposedly challenged Bob Dylan to "follow that." Dylan was said to have issued the scathing retort, "What do I have to do, go on stage and fall asleep?")

Sadly, the Band would quickly disintegrate into rancor in the years following The Last Waltz, with the film itself proving a persistent sore spot between former members – particularly Levon Helm, who openly resented the way he felt Martin Scorsese focused on Robertson. For all the bad blood surrounding the show, however, Waltz remains a high point of '70s rock, as well as the arguable apex of each of the members' respective careers.

Even as they were falling apart behind the scenes, they managed to demonstrate the strength of their musical bond – and the result remains a powerful example of just what can happen when talented artists are able to set aside their differences long enough to give in to the power of song”.

Prior to ending with a 2023 feature that marked forty-five years of The Last Waltz album, I did want to bring in a review from Toronto Star  that reacted to the somewhat iconic and much-storied final performance from The Band. I can only imagine what the atmosphere was like at San Francisco’s Winterland Ballroom on 25th November, 1976:

“SAN FRANCISCO - "Any day now / Any day now / I shall be released."

They were looking at one another as they sang these words early yesterday morning. There was Eric Clapton on one side of the stage, grinning lazily at Ron Wood, Paul Butterfield, and Muddy Waters. There were Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Neil Diamond and Van Morrison on the other side of the stage.

Bob Dylan, a broad-brimmed hat hiding his eyes, stood with his legs apart. Behind him, swaying like a friendly bear, stood Ronnie Hawkins. At the very back Ringo Starr pumped away methodically with his drum sticks.

And at the very centre of it all was the Band - guitarist Robbie Robertson soaked with sweat; bassist Rick Danko; drummer Levon Helm and pianist Richard Manuel all laughing, organist Garth Hudson with his eyes closed.

It was the end of five hours of almost non-stop playing for the Band. It was also the group's last stop after 16 years on the road. The Last Waltz, as they called their farewell concert at the old Winterland ballroom, was just that.

"You can go home now folks", said an usher as the crowd filed past him into the damp foggy streets of the Fillmore district. "It's all over."

This was more than just a farewell concert for the Band. It was in many ways a swan song for an entire generation of rock. The Last Waltz was the last of the true '60s events - one that will eventually seem as important as the Beatles' first appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show, or Woodstock, or Altamonte.

The Last Waltz was a compacted musical experience of varied threads woven tightly together into a consistent pattern. It was a concert by and for a single generation - those who grew up in the 1960s. It was, in short, a rock concert for adults. Most of its performers were people who are in their 30s, who have gone through the publicity mills and now guard their privacy, who are cautious about their careers. What they do is done with careful consideration.

"That's why we want to make sure everything is done correctly," said Robbie Robertson before the show. "That's why it was important to have it on (the American) Thanksgiving Day. We wanted to show our thanks in the best way possible."

For the Band, this meant spending $200,000 to decorate the hall and feed a crowd of more than 5,000, and another $100,000 as an advance on a movie of the concert, directed by Martin Scorsese (Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, etc.). For the crowd this meant paying $25 a ticket for a complete turkey or smoked salmon dinner and, as one girl explained, "more stars than you can find on the entire hit parade."

Faded grandeur

Using props from the San Francisco Opera Company, Bill Graham's crew of 500 workers turned the worn Winterland interior into something out of La Boheme. The setting was of faded grandeur. The stage was surrounded by an elegant backdrop. Six enormous chandeliers were suspended from the ceiling.

Shortly after the doors opened at 4 p.m. Thursday, a full-sized orchestra played zesty waltzes in an artificial garden setting complete with two hedges and fake statuary. Banquet tables, later removed for the concert, were covered in white linen. Funky elegance was the tone. Some bikers turned up in crumpled tuxedos while other fans in jeans and T-shirts swept around the dance floor to the strains of Strauss.

Despite all the paraphernalia and despite the complexity of the operation, nothing seemed rushed. An enormous about of food was consumed - 220 turkeys weighing a total of 5,600 pounds, 400 gallons of apple juice, 300 pounds of Nova Scotia smoked salmon brought from New York by Bob Dylan, 6,000 bread rolls, 2,000 pounds of peeled yams. Using walkie-talkies to keep the food supply coming regularly, the caterers fed everyone in the five hours before the Band went on.

"Something like this is only made possible when you can afford to not make a profit," explained Graham, who started his career as a concert promoter in 1965 with a benefit for the San Francisco Mime Troupe. It's likely, though, that the Band will make a profit aside from the $125,000 taken in from ticket sales. The concert was recorded and a spokesman for the Band explained that "everyone played for the minimum union scale and they all want to see an album come out of this."

There's the movie, too. Martin Scorsese became involved with the Band when he was shooting Mean Streets in New York and went to Woodstock, where the Band was living, for a break from work. They became friends. "So he knows exactly what they want," explained the spokesman. "If this doesn't become the best rock movie ever made, it will become the most expensive home movie ever made."

The choice of the Winterland ballroom was important. The Band made its concert debut here in 1969 - a year after its first album, Music From Big Pink, and the year before the group appeared on the cover of Time. Even in 1969 the group represented the culmination of a lot that had happened to rock - from '50s rock, which they had churned out for eight years with Ronnie Hawkins, to country, blues and Bob Dylan, with whom they worked in the mid-'60s.

The Last Waltz was the crystallization of all these influences. The crowd, jammed on the floor, reacted to each song as if greeting a long-lost friend. Backstage things were no less enthusiastic. Ronee Blakley, who had appeared with Rolling Thunder, couldn't even get close to the stage. "This is unbelievable," she mumbled.

David Bromberg, Dylan's former accompanist, almost backed into Ringo Starr, who had flown in from Los Angeles in the private jet rented by Neil Diamond.

"I'm taking it very easy," said Ringo. Bromberg was otherwise inclined. "On a scale from 10 to 10," he said to no one in particular, "this concert rates a 15."

Walking almost unnoticed was Albert Grossman, Dylan's first manager. He ended up managing the Band when Dylan left him in 1967 and wasn't about to admit the group had quit performing together for good. "It is just not going to happen," he said shaking his head.

The big time

Certainly the Band acted on stage as if they would never quit. First Ronnie Hawkins joined them. "This is the big time, the big time," he kept saying as he and his former sidemen snapped briskly to one of their old hits, Who Do You Love?

Dr. John cooled things down a bit with some rolling gospel piano, but Paul Butterfield and Muddy Waters teamed up with the Band for an intense, almost overpowering version of Mannish Boy. Then Eric Clapton took things even further by swapping guitar solos with Robbie Robertson in Farther On Up The Road.

The peak seemed to have passed when Neil Young appeared. With Joni Mitchell singing behind him backstage, he and the Band tried a tentative version of Helpless. This was followed by Four Strong Winds, a song "written by a friend of ours, Ian Tyson," said Robertson. But Young was barely halfway through it when he forgot the words of one of the verses.

The Canadian connection wasn't left there, however. After Joni Mitchell offered three songs and after Neil Diamond and Van Morrison had appeared, Mitchell and Young teamed up with the Band for Acadian Driftwood. "They call my home the land of snow," they sang. The hall seemed strangely quiet.

Final chords

Outside limousines were lining up. Inside, the Band had just finished the final chords of The Weight. "Now," said Robbie Robertson quietly, "Bob Dylan."

Dylan's appearance was no surprise. Much of the line-up had been made public in the month since the Band announced its retirement. Dylan's performance was a surprise though. This was not the mellow folkie of Rolling Thunder. This was the Dylan of 1966, raw and uninhibited.

"Baby let me follow you down," he sang as the Band freewheeled behind him. Slowly people started walking out on stage - Eric Clapton, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Ringo Starr, Ron Wood. Robbie Robertson, looking around, nodded and gave the downbeat for I Shall Be Released.

The show was over. But "just because we're not going to tour anymore doesn't mean the music stops," Robertson had said before the show. "We've been going so long we'll never stop completely”.

Let’s end with Albumism and their feature from 1st April, 2023. Looking ahead to the forty-fifth anniversary of The Last Waltz album of 7th April, 1978. It is one of those musical moments where I’d like to go back in time and see, just to feel and sense the emotions in that space. Whether it truly lives up to the legend and hype that surrounds it. It truly was a big moment in music history:

“The amazing thing about this four-hour tour de force, which chronicles the band’s supposed final concert, is that it functions like a Shakespeare play: an audience member can find whatever they’re looking for if they spend enough time turning it over. (It is also Shakespearean in the sense that there’s one character who dresses weird, doesn’t have much to do with the plot, does silly things, and everyone likes it. In Shakespeare’s case it’s usually a clown; in ours, it’s Van Morrison).

Across this incredible night of music, The Band span the full range of human emotion. You can say it’s about goodbyes, you can say it’s about the history of rock & roll, or about drugs, or good, old-fashioned fun, and all of these things would be right. But when I hear Garth Hudson play the saxophone, I know that The Last Waltz is about the necessity and fragility of friendship.

First, there’s the onslaught of guest musicians. The Band got as good as they were because they spent years backing up the likes of Ronnie Hawkins and Bob Dylan before they ever put pen to paper. This is how you get a crew that can credibly back up Joni Mitchell (on tunes from 1978’s Hejira, mind you) and Muddy Waters on the same night. Their decision to put themselves in the background for more than half the songs played at their final show obviously demonstrates that they feel gratitude toward people who have helped their career, but there’s something deeper going on.

The guests give the night its geography. They divide up the soundtrack in ways that The Band might not have done on their own; there’s the blues section in the beginning, the folk section in the middle, and the hard rock near the end. This feels like the arc of a life—there are moments of incredible, uplifting joy, and moments of searing, don’t-know-what-to-do-with-myself anger. The Band lean on the guests to pull these different sensations out of them, sometimes rollicking, sometimes mournful, to say: “wherever you are, we have been there too, and we got through it because of what we have done for one another.”

But of course, The Last Waltz was not all sunshine and rainbows. Famously, the evening itself was a point of contention for the group, with Robertson advocating for the group becoming a studio-only outfit and the rest of the members wanting to continue. If Hudson, Helm, Danko, and Manuel had their way, we wouldn’t have this album.

This is the part that burns me up. I’m not here to adjudicate who was right and who was wrong—I’m just pointing out that The Last Waltz reminds us that every great friendship somehow comes to an end. Someone moves away, mean things get said, bands break up, people die. Maybe you stay in touch, and maybe you don’t, but most friendships don’t get a swan song—they don’t get a four-hour stretch to celebrate everything that these people have done for you. If you’re lucky, there’s a hug goodbye, a long overdue letter, or a speech at a wedding.

But the ideal is The Last Waltz. The ideal is a chance to do what you’ve always done together, one last try, a victory lap, celebrating everything that you have done for one another.

There are two ways to listen to this record, and they’re both right: the first way is as the last time the group did something. If you’re looking for this, listen to the yearning in the voices on “Forever Young,” or the special-occasion filthiness of “The Shape I’m In,” the joy of “Life Is a Carnival” or the ominous tenor of “Chest Fever.”

The other way to listen is as every time a group did something: a lightning-in-a-bottle distillation of years of music. If you want this version, look for the carefree romp of “Such a Night” or, yes, Hudson’s practiced entry into “It Makes No Difference.” This is dwelling in the history; not looking in the bleakness of the future without these people and leaving everything you have on the stage. It’s finding delight in what these friendships have given you.

The Last Waltz is a night of incredible musicianship, yes. The versions of “The Weight” and “Helpless,” on their own, are worth writing a tribute about. But in its sprawl and lack of artifice, I also see so many things I’ve wanted to say, or so many things that I’m yet to say to the people who I love. Any time I watch it, I’m reminded of a new dimension of the human story—making it one of the most necessary albums I know”.

Even if some see the album as self-serving and too slick, it is clear that the 1976 performance by  Rick Danko, Levon Helm, Garth Hudson, Richard Manuel, and Robbie Robertson, who were joined by guests including Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Van Morrison, Muddy Waters, Neil Diamond, Ringo Starr, Dr. John, and Ronnie Hawkins, was something special. Martin Scorsese’s documentary one of the greatest that has ever been made. You can read more about it here. On 25th November, it will be fifty years since that incredible concert. If few people will write about it, I thought it only right to give it…

THE weight it deserves.

FEATURE: Four Sticks: Led Zeppelin IV at Fifty-Five

FEATURE:

 

 

Four Sticks

Led Zeppelin IV at Fifty-Five

_________

THIS might rank…

IN THIS PHOTO: Les Zeppelin in Milan in 1971

alongside the best albums of the 1970s. Many might claim this to be Led Zeppelin’s finest hour. Though there is stiff competition! Though I think its proper title is Four Symbols, it is commonly known as Led Zepperlin IV. In terms of the quality through this album, there are classics like Black Dog, Rock and Roll, Stairway to Heaven and When the Levee Breaks. Not a wasted moment, we have the sublime Misty Mountain Hop, thunderous Four Sticks, and the excellent Going to California and The Battle of Evermore. I think Robert Plant and Jimmy Page are at their peak regarding their songwriting and their performances, though it is John Bonham’s drumming that I feel steals the show! As it turns fifty-five on 8th November, I wanted to bring some features and reviews in. This is an album that I first listened to when I was a child. Lots of Led Zeppelin in my house! Four Sticks might be my favourite from the album, though I would also put Misty Mountain Hop up there. Everyone will have their own choices. I may have sourced some of these articles when I marked its fiftieth anniversary in 2021. Apologies if there is repetition! I am not sure how much fuss will be made of its fifty-fifth anniversary. Fans will note it. Maybe Led Zeppelin’s Instagram. Recorded out of Rolling Stones Mobile Studio at Headley Grange, Headley, Island, London, and Sunset Sound, Los Angeles. It was a chart-topper in the U.K. A behemoth of an album that I absolutely love. I will start off with a 2020 feature from Classic Rock that takes us inside the making of Led Zeppelin IV:

“The group began to settle in at Headley Grange, Page and Plant revelling in the atmosphere which was so different from the sterile surrounds of a normal studio. It was the idyll of the early 70s; gentleman rockers at large in the country, gear set up for extended jams, and some sedate – by Zeppelin’s Herculean standards, at any rate – recreation on hand.

Tour manager Richard Cole noted: “There weren’t any serious drugs around the band at that point, just dope and a bit of coke. Mostly we had an account at a shop in the village and we’d go down there and collect large quantities of cider. They were playing at being country squires. They found an old shotgun and used to shoot at squirrels in the woods. Not that they ever hit any. And there was this lovely old black Labrador dog wandering around which we used to feed.”

Each day, the band and Ian Stewart would gather downstairs and jam. Significantly, Stu had included his battered old upright piano in his luggage. He quickly assumed the same role he had with the Stones: a terrific, bluesy piano player with a particular feel for old-style rock’n’roll. But if Stu’s involvement was partly accidental, serendipity surrounded the making of the whole album.

In the middle of an early session, John Bonham began banging out the cymbal-led introduction to Little Richard’s Keep A-Knockin’. Stu playfully added a Jerry Lee Lewis roadhouse piano riff and Page and Jones picked up the ball and ran with it, knocking out a riff based on old Sun Records-era Scotty Moore guitar lines. Plant cut in with his own improvisation, and rather than trip into a rock’n’roll standard he began wailing nonsense lyrics built around a chorus of ‘It’s been a long time since I rock’n’rolled, mama!’

The lightbulbs went on. “We were doing something else at the time but Bonzo played the beginning of a Little Richard track. We had the tape running and I started doing that part of the riff,” Jimmy remembered. “It ground to a halt after 12 bars but we knew we had something. Robert came in with the lyrics and within 15 minutes the song was virtually complete.”

When they began playing the track in their live set during their European and US dates later that year, Plant introduced the tune under the title It’s Been A Long Time. After they had latterly settled on the more straightforward title, Rock And Roll would open Zeppelin’s live show from late 1972 through to 1975. But if Headley Grange was big on atmosphere, its aged walls also brought other, less expected advantages. The hallway was known as the Minstrel’s Gallery. The sound bounced around a natural bowl, and echoed back up the three flights of stairs.

“The other guys were out having a drink and John Bonham and I were at the house,” recalls Andy Johns. “He complained that he wasn’t getting the sound he wanted. I finally said to him, I’ve got an idea. We got his drums and put him in the hallway and then hung two mikes from the staircase and pointed them towards the kit.

“I remember sitting there thinking it sounded utterly amazing, so I ran out of the truck and said, ‘Bonzo, you gotta come in and hear this!’ He shouted: ‘Whoah, that’s it! That’s what I’ve been hearing!’”

Page was equally enthusiastic: “What you’re hearing on the record is the sound of the hall with the stereo mic on the stairs second flight up. There was a lot of different effects in there. Phased vocal and a backwards-echoed harmonica solo. I’d used backwards echo as far back as the Yardbirds’ days.”

Decades on, Bonham’s performance on When The Levee Breaks, an old Memphis Minnie and Kansas Joe McCoy recording that Zeppelin rearranged quite radically into a narcotic, blues rock colossus, has become the most sampled drum sound of all time, first taken by the likes of the Beastie Boys and the house music DJs in the late 80s, it has been used on hundreds of rap and dance tunes. It has been speeded up, slowed down, distorted, stretched and condensed, and it remains one of the most startling percussive statements ever committed to tape.

Otherwise, Page remembers When The Levee Breaks being a difficult track to record: “We tried to record that in the studio before we got to Headley Grange and it sounded flat. But once we got the drum sound at Headley Grange it was like – boom! And that made the difference immediately.”

The sessions for the fourth Zeppelin album continued to develop organically. They were still drawing liberally from Page and Plant’s blues influences and were increasingly drawn towards the folk sounds that had either enthralled, enraged or confused those listening to Led Zeppelin III.

The reputations of Led Zeppelin’s four members have long been cast in rhetorical stone. Page as the virtuoso embodiment of the band’s creative spirit; Plant as the sexual, sinuous rock god; Jones as the scholarly muso; and John Bonham as the take-no-prisoners, hard-living, party animal. And yet as inspired and inventive as songwriters as Page, Plant and Jones were, and are, so Bonham was their equal as a musician, and as an important musical ‘voice’ in the band. His influence cannot be overstated, and nowhere more so than on the fourth album, where his contribution went way beyond his natural power and newly-discovered drum sound.

Bonham’s work on every track was superbly applied, and no more so than his dropping off the beat at 4 minutes 17 seconds into Misty Mountain Hop, the album’s nod to the medicinal properties of good, strong weed. Elsewhere on the album, Jones had an electric synth riff that the band were unable to nail until Bonham laid down a can of Double Diamond (much maligned and now forgotten workingman’s brew), picked up two drumsticks in each hand and, as Jimmy Page remembers, “just went for it. It was magic. We had tried different ways of approaching it. The idea was to get an abstract feeling. We tried it a few times and it didn’t come off until the day Bonzo did that.”

In a nod to John’s genius, the band decided to call the song Four Sticks. “It was a bastard to mix,” says Andy Johns.

More than any other Led Zeppelin album though, before or since, the fourth album, would become both glorified and then later vilified, before coming full-circle latterly to be glorified again for one track: Stairway To Heaven. Destined to become one of their two most famous songs (just ahead of Whole Lotta Love), we all know this one.

Still consistently voted one of, if not the, most popular and most widely known rock songs in history – kind of like Bridge Over Troubled Water and Bohemian Rhapsody all rolled into one – it has become the National Anthem of rock music.

Of course, it’s also said to contain beastly goings on if played backwards. And at least one of those involved in its creation, Robert Plant, has subsequently formed a relationship with the song that can only best be described as ambiguous. But when a song assumes such magnitude in people’s minds, the side effects can be strange, for those nearest to it just as much as those who are merely projecting their own thoughts and ideas into the song’s unashamedly metaphysical poetics.

Page had much of the chord sequence on a demo when they first tried it out. “I’d been fooling around with the acoustic guitar and came up with the different sections, which I married together. So I had the structure and then I ran it through Jonesy. I’d had the chord sequence pretty much worked out and Robert came up with about 60 per cent of the lyrics on the spot.”

Andy Johns: “We did the track at Island in London. Jimmy had the tune pretty much worked out. He played acoustic in the isolation booth. He was the thread that held it all together. We had Bonzo out in the main room and John Paul played a Honer electric piano.”

Plant’s lyrics were pieced together very quickly while the band was at Headley Grange. “Jimmy and I stayed up one night and we got the theme of it right there and then,” he recalled. “The lyrics were a cynical thing about a woman getting everything she wanted without giving anything back.”

It was Jones who came up with the memorable opening sequence: “We always had a lot of instruments lying around so I picked up a bass recorder and played along with Jimmy.”

Page took three separate attempts at the heavens-shaking guitar solo which became the orgasmic crescendo of the song; rather than deploy the usual Gibson Les Paul he returned to the battered old Telecaster that he had acquired from Jeff Beck and used on the first Zeppelin album.

"I winged that guitar solo, really. When it came to recording it, I warmed up and did three of them. They were all quite different from each other. I did have the first phrase worked out and then there was the link phrase. I did check them before the tape ran. The one we used was definitely the best.”

The result was one of the only guitar solos in history as likely to be whistled by milkman as air-guitared in the bedroom. And yet the song would become so ubiquitous that it overshadowed a brilliant body of work. As a result, Plant, for one, has an uneasy relationship with Stairway… now.

“There’s only so many times you can sing it and mean it. It just became so sanctimonious,” he said. An attitude that resulted in major row backstage with Page before their televised 1988 Atlantic Records 40th anniversary reunion at Madison Square, in New York Garden. Robert had decided, at the last moment, that he didn’t want to sing it. He finally relented, just before they went on, but the subsequent performance was accordingly dull and uninspired.

Richard Branson’s then newly-established Virgin Records set up special stalls to sell it, demand was so great. It was a similar story in the US, though Carole King’s Tapestry kept it off the No.1 spot. It didn’t matter. The airplay generated by Stairway To Heaven ensured the album remained in the Top 40 of the US album chart for the next six months. The record company had understandably wanted to release it as a single but the band steadfastly refused to allow it.

“We wanted them to hear it in the context of the whole album,” says Page, simply. They never looked back. Led Zeppelin IV, as it inevitably became known, is now confirmed as one of the biggest-selling hard rock album of all time, with sales to date of over 29 million”,

GRAMMY published a feature in 2021 around the fiftieth anniversary of Led Zeppelin IV. Their biggest-selling and world-conquering album still sounds like a revelation to this day. For anyone who knows Led Zeppelin and has not heard their fourth studio album, go and listen to it. Such a staggering  I don’t know how much I loved it when I was a child. In years since, I have absorbed and understood the brilliance of Led Zeppelin IV:

“It's the one with "Stairway."

That's all millions of fans have needed to know when picking up Led Zeppelin's best-selling fourth album, which was released 50 years ago this month. That's true in part because the record sleeve itself didn't give them much else to go on. The packaging was intentionally mysterious, without any words or insignias on the cover, only a peeling wall with a framed picture depicting a graying man hauling sticks on his back.

Colloquially known as Led Zeppelin IV, IV, or sometimes Runes in reference to the four runic symbols chosen by band members Jimmy Page, Robert Plant, John Paul Jones, and John Bonham to represent themselves, the officially untitled affair is a massive wallop of sound, the 1971 rock classic standing as a quintessential expression of the band's lyrical mysticism, folk leanings and bruising hard rock.

For the first three years of Led Zeppelin's existence, stretching from their formation in the summer of 1968 to the release of IV, the band was in constant motion, releasing three albums in a span of just 22 months. Led by former session and Yardbirds guitarist Page, fronted by a then-unknown Plant, and anchored by bassist Jones and drum-basher Bonham, the band built its fanbase by bringing its bombastic live show to concert halls across the U.K., Europe and North America.

Breaking in America was central to the band's strategy. They crossed the Atlantic Ocean seven times to tour the U.S. before releasing IV, building from opening for groups like Vanilla Fudge and Iron Butterfly in 1968 to headlining a two-night stand at the 20,000-capacity Madison Square Garden in New York City in under two years. Not long after that September 1971 run, the quartet returned to Headley Grange, where they had recorded part of III, armed with a batch of new songs that would change their lives.

By the time the band parked the Rolling Stones Mobile Studio outside the eighteenth-century retreat in rural southwestern England, its four members were locked in like a machine. The band hired engineer Andy Johns, who had just worked in the studio while tracking the Rolling Stones' Sticky Fingers, and as a result, the record's production values leapfrogged their previous albums, which were mostly recorded in various towns while on tour. The live-in rehearsal and recording situation at Headley Grange yielded more than enough music for their upcoming album, leaving them with extra songs that appeared on 1975's Physical Graffiti. The eight songs that made the cut, though, were stone-cold classics.

"Black Dog" opens the album with an explosive pentatonic blues-based riff in the tradition of Page's classic "Heartbreaker" [a highlight from Led Zeppelin II] and a shrieking vocal performance from Plant. Bonham deepens the groove with propulsive drumming that alternates between 4/4 and 7/8 time, providing the backbone to the call-and-response interplay between vocals and guitar. "Rock and Roll" follows, a straight-laced, up-tempo boogie inspired by Little Richard.

Zeppelin returns to the Celtic folk it explored on III for the mandolin-based "The Battle of Evermore," which finds Plant exchanging vocal lines with Sandy Denny of Fairport Convention [famously covered by Heart's Ann and Nancy Wilson on the Singles motion picture soundtrack in 1992, billed as The Lovemongers]. Later, contemplative, fingerpicked acoustic-folk ballad "Going to California" mellows the vibe after "Misty Mountain Hop" and "Four Sticks," an off-time experiment played by Bonham holding two drum sticks in each hand.

The album's most famous experiment came on the hypnotic "When the Levee Breaks," originally composed by Kansas Joe McCoy and Memphis Minnie, with Johns capturing the sound of Bonham playing drums at Headley Grange with microphones hanging from a nearby stairwell. Johns slowed down the tape when he recorded the rest of the band, giving the drums an apocalyptic scale.

And then there's "Stairway to Heaven," the eight-minute epic that pulled all the band's strengths together into one song. Page wrote the song's delicate, acoustic opening section while staying with Plant at a remote cottage in Wales, then assembled the middle and climactic third section at Headley Grange, with Plant writing vocals on the spot.

"Stairway to Heaven" has become a cultural touchstone thanks to its enormous popularity on FM radio in the 1970s and '80s. The song's descending opening guitar figure became so well known that it made a cameo as "the forbidden riff" in 1992's Wayne's World, which winked at the song's enduring popularity. In 2014, that same riff was the subject of a lawsuit claiming the band lifted it from the song "Taurus" by the L.A.-based Spirit. A jury cleared Zeppelin, and the lawsuit finally ended in March 2020 when an appeals court upheld the verdict.

With legal questions in the rearview, the song's legacy is undeniable. "Stairway to Heaven" has notched more than half a billion streams on Spotify alone, and it ranked No. 61 on Rolling Stone's 2021 redux of its list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. Page's fiery leads in the third section topped Guitar World's list of the 50 Greatest Guitar Solos in 2009.

The seven other songs on IV have earned similar legacies through another path: sampling. Bonham's beats became foundational to hip-hop, and nearly every track on IV has been sampled—including dozens of instances for "Black Dog" and "Stairway to Heaven." But the cavernous drum intro to "When the Levee Breaks" has been sampled more than 200 times, most notably in "Rhymin' & Stealin'" by Beastie Boys, "Kim" by Enimem, "Army of Me" by Björk, and "Don't Hurt Yourself" by Beyoncé featuring Jack White.

The popularity of Led Zeppelin's fourth album endures. At present, it is the fifth best-selling album of all time in the U.S. for moving 23 million copies. Worldwide, the album has sold 37 million copies and ranks the twelfth best-seller of all time. In 1999, the Recording Academy inducted it to the GRAMMY Hall of Fame.

The monumental success of Zeppelin's fourth album turned the band into a stadium act, and the momentum carried them through 1973's House of the Holy and 1975's double-album, Physical Graffiti. The band's pace slowed during the latter part of the decade, due to a car accident that left Plant in need of rehabilitation, as well as spiraling substance abuse with Page and Bonham that ultimately led to the drummer's death in 1980.

While their post-IV musical output only strengthened the band's legacy as one of rock's most potent forces, after five decades those eight songs still sound every bit as adventurous and groundbreaking”.

I am going to end with Classic Rock Magazine and their review from 2024. I think this is an album that you cannot find fault with. Almost perfect, I wonder what young generations make of it. Even though it is hugely influential, there are no bands around today quite like Led Zeppelin:

“Of all their records, Led Zeppelin’s fourth album, released in late 1971, remains their most admired work. From Jimmy Page’s unimpeachable riffs, through John Paul Jones musical invention and Robert Plant’s clarity of vocal to that titanic John Bonham drum sound, IV still emits a freshness that belies its age.

Black Dog’s machismo, Rock ‘N’ Roll’s Bonham-propelled brutality, Plant’s honeyed, evocative Sandy Denny-complemented vocal on The Battle Of Evermore, Stairway To Heaven’s mainstream-slaying production and dynamism and that’s just side one. After defining metal and folk-rock, IV’s encore was to unwittingly provide hip-hop with When The Levee Breaks, source of its ultimate breakbeat.

The epithet ‘tight but loose’ has always accurately described the band’s aesthetic. Squeaks, scrapes and microphone bleed were not errors to be corrected in Page’s production ethos, but rather characterful and inherent ingredients of the feel. That, and the world’s biggest fuck-off drum sound ever committed to tape.

Much has been written on the technicalities of this recording – basically two microphones hung above Bonham’s kit set up in a three-storey-high hall – and it’s not too much of a stretch to venture that Headley Grange, where IV was recorded, is the fifth member here. This ambience positively saturates the none-more-familiar finger-picked figure that introduces Stairway, the band’s finest recorded moment, near enough adding delay, such is the size of the reverb.

It’s been both loved and loathed in equal measures, but nowhere is Page’s supreme understanding of rock dynamics better illustrated than on Stairway, with a song that teases and caresses and then climaxes with nothing less than the world’s greatest ever guitar solo”.

Actually, there is a feature from Classic Rock from 2021 that I will end with instead. On its fiftieth anniversary, Led Zeppelin’s three surviving members - John Paul Jones, Robert Plant and Jimmy Page -, looked back at this album. The full interview was published in MOJO. Classic Rock provided some exerts. It is interesting what they say about an album that sits alongside the biggest and best from all of music:

“The three surviving members of Led Zeppelin -  Jimmy Page, Robert Plant and John Paul Jones - look back upon the making of their band’s monumental fourth album in a new interview to celebrate the album’s forthcoming 50th anniversary.

And while guitarist Page acknowledges that he was the band member driving the album sessions at Headley Grange in Hampshire in January 1971, he dismisses suggestions that he exerted a dictatorial role over proceedings: “I wasn’t walking around with jackboots and a whip,” he says with a laugh, as reported in the new issue of Mojo magazine, which has Zeppelin on the cover.

The making of Led Zeppelin IV actually began at Island Studios in London in December 1970, but Page suggested relocating the sessions to the former Victorian workhouse at the dawn of the new year, wanting the band to have a space where they could have privacy and time to write and create while living under one room.

“Headley Grange was cold, damp, dirty, smelly,” John Paul Jones tells Mojo’s Mark Blake. “I remember walking into my room and thinking, Oh really? I had to steal someone’s electric fire.”

“Why is John complaining?” Jimmy Page asks Mojo. “We were there to work. I don’t want to say anything to embarrass Mrs Smith, the lady in charge. Headley was a bit austere. But there was no, ‘Let’s get stoned or go to the pub and get pissed.’ That wasn’t our raison d’etre. It was ‘eat, sleep, work’, but at the same time, I wasn’t walking around with jackboots and a whip.”

“It’s like there was a magical current running through that place and that record. Like it was meant to be.”

In the interview, Page and Jones talk about the writing of the album’s centrepiece, Stairway To Heaven.

Jimmy said, ‘I’ve got this thing and it’s in different sections’,” Jones recalls. “I sat down at the electric piano, and we worked out where everything should go. The joy of it was it didn’t sound like anybody else.”

Jones reveals that one original working title for the song was Cow And Gate... as Robert Plant had recently bought a farm.

“John Paul and I worked on it before getting with John Bonham,” says Page. “A lot of the music precedes John coming in. It’s a slow reveal. But the whole time, Robert was listening and writing. Then he started singing and had most of the lyrics written… it was an inspired time for everybody”.

Turning fifty-five on 8th November, Led Zeppelin IV still sounds like nothing else. So fresh and revelatory. I have heard it a lot, but I get something new each time I listen. It is an album that everyone needs to own. An essential masterpiece that has few equals, I do hope that the surviving members share some thoughts on this seismic album…

AFTER fifty-five years.

FEATURE: Refuge of the Roads: Joni Mitchell’s Hejira at Fifty

FEATURE:

 

 

Refuge of the Roads

Joni Mitchell’s Hejira at Fifty

_________

I just twigged…

IN THIS PHOTO: Joni Mitchell captured listening while backstage at the Civic Center in Providence, RI in February, 1976.  This image was taken during her North American Tour that year and was chosen for the front cover of her Woman of Heart and Mind DVD/PHOTO CREDIT: Joel Bernstein

that the Deacon Blue song, Fergus Sings the Blues, must have taken its name from Joni Mitchell’s track, Furry Sings the Blue. That track appears on Hejira. Many consider this to be her greatest album. Mitchell turns eighty-three on 7th November. You can see Hejira as the beginning of a more experimental/Jazz-influenced period that would lead to 1977’s Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter and 1979’s Mingus. I especially love Hejira’s cover. I will come to some features and reviews of Hejira. As it turns fifty on 21st November, I wanted to mark that. Many people do not put it up there with her best work. Many look at 1971’s Blue or 1970’s Ladies of the Canyon as being her prime releases. I think that Hejira is one of her very best. Linking to the Joni Mitchell website and information about Hejira, we get a beautiful article from Laura Snapes that provides this background to the album. The changes that were happening in Mitchell’s life and career:

“The women of The Hissing Of Summer Lawns were always trapped in somebody else's frame. Joni Mitchell only used the first person once on her seventh album; instead, she sang of women as seen through men's eyes, assessed according to their suitability for motherhood, sex and deference. Similarly, Mitchell found herself made into an adjunct when she briefly joined the Rolling Thunder Revue in 1975, opening for male artists who were her equal. She approached the tour as a research trip, "an amazing experience, studying mysticism and ego malformation like you wouldn't believe", as she told journalist Timothy White. "Everybody took all of their vices to the Nth degree and came out of it born again, or into AA."

Where these acts were tilting towards the mainstream, by the mid-‘70s, Mitchell was keenly following Marvin Gaye in "moving away from the hit department, to the art department", keen to forge her own rhythms away from rock. In the wake of her split from drummer John Guerin, she was ready to give life the slip for a while.

After the end of the Hissing tour, Mitchell was sojourning at Neil Young's beach house. She she wanted to travel, but didn't know where, or who with. By chance, two friends invited her to drive cross-country. Her answer: '"I've been waiting for you; I'm gone,"' she recounted to Rolling Stone's Cameron Crowe. They travelled together for a while before Mitchell went off alone. It was one of three road trips she took between 1975 and 1976, which led her from Los Angeles to Maine, then California via Florida and the Gulf Of Mexico. On the road, Mitchell stayed in lighthouses along the Gulf Coast and wore wigs to disguise herself in New Orleans. "Meanwhile, nobody knew where I was," she told White. "I'd do those disappearing acts. I'd pass through some seedy town with a pinball arcade, fall in with people who worked on the machines, people staying alive shoplifting, whatever. They don’t know who you are: 'Why you driving hat white Mercedes? Oh, you're driving it across country for somebodyelse.' You know, make up some name and hang out. Great experiences, almost like the prince and the pauper."

Mitchell had no license for her flashy car, so she drove behind truckers, who would signal when the police were approaching. She was living out of bounds, but hadn't, as the folk song goes “fallen by the wayside”. By the mid-‘70s, Walden and On The Road were archetypal male quests, but there were still few cultural precedents for women travelling alone. Eighteenth-century "girl stunt reporter" Nellie Bly circled the world in 72 days to prove that she could. Simone De Beauvoir’s America Day By Day (1947) was more journalistic, intended to convey the reality of America's culture and mores to the French. Released in 1976, the same year as Mitchell's travels, Tom Robbins' absurdist novel Even Cowgirls Get The Blues followed the giant-thumbed Sissy Hankshaw as she encountered various countercultural avatars, But although just as geographically far-reaching, Mitchell's trip was defiantly insular- the kind of story that hadn't yet been written.

Living between her car and anonymous motels, Mitchell wrote songs on her acoustic guitar since pianos were seldom available. She thought of naming the collection of material "Travelling", but that implied a fixed destination. Instead, she chose a reference to the migration of the prophet Mohammad from Mecca to Medina in 622 AD, which she later summed up as "leaving the dream, no blame".

"'Hejira' was an obscure word, but it said exactly what I wanted," she told Crowe. "Running away, honourably." She continued, referencing her split with Guerin. "It dealt with the leaving of a relationship, but without the sense of failure that accompanied the breakup of my previous relationships. I felt that it was not necessarily anybody's fault. It was a new attitude."

A new attitude required a new musical approach, furthering Mitchell's quicksilver mid-‘70s evolution. "For a long time, I've been playing in straight rhythms," she had told friend Malka Marom in 1973. "But now, in order to sophisticate my music to my own taste, I push it into odd places that feel a little unusual to me, so that I feel I'm stretching out." After 1974's richly melodic Court And Spark, the jazzy abstractions of Hissing were perceived as an ornery career-killer. On Hejira, Mitchell pared percussion back to the faintest patter, ditched choruses, and created nine fairly similar tone poems from her guitar (mostly electric on the recordings) and Jaco Pastorius' fretless bass. (Only lounge-jazz pastiche "Blue Motel Room" veers from the form.) Their rippling instruments evoke the uncanny surface of the pools in Hockney's California paintings, and the scant reliance on hooks encourages a sense of forward motion. (The New York Times' reviewer called it a -Los Angeles version of Kraftwerk's autobahn'.") This minimal backing lets Mitchell’s voice loose, as she sings in a meditative, instinctual fashion. "The poet took over the singer "' he said in 1998. "It's more like jazz melody, it's conversational improvisation."

This intimate, personal voice is key to Hejira, where Mitchell isolates herself from familiarity in order to confront her true nature. "In our possessive coupling/So much could not be expressed/So now I'm returning to myself /These things that you and I suppressed," she sings on the title track, as if taking her first deep breath in a long while. Hejira contains Mitchell's starkest and most sensitive examinations of the apparent incompatibility of love and work, belonging and freedom. Hejira lets Mitchell's duelling ideologies and impulses coexist at the same scale within each song, avoiding extremes of crisis or revelation, an idea reflected in the artwork. Mitchell used a Camera Lucida to edit together 14 different photos of varying perspectives - including an imposing Norman Seeff portrait - and then hired an air brusher to blend in the edges. "If I had done the cover as a collage, it would've looked much more primitive," she told Rock Photo. "This way it's so polished, as if it's exactly one photograph."

If art and love are in conflict, Mitchell's lucid relationship with that bind is unparalleled. "I suppose a lot of people could have written a lot of my other songs," she told The Ottawa Citizen in 1996 [ed: actually, 2006], "but I feel the songs on Hejira could only have come from me." Marrying Hissing's observational approach to the personal nature of Mitchell's earlier records, Hejira contains some of her most expansive and idiosyncratic writing, each song filled with unanswered questions about the definition and contradictions of fulfilment. Sometimes, that satisfaction is immediate. To be a solo travelling woman requires a heightened sensitivity to the environment, and Mitchell vibrates at the frequency of her gorgeous, sensory landscapes. There are towering pinewood trees and vivid blue skies streaked with vapour trails that look like "the hexagram of the heavens", or the strings of her guitar. Snow "gathers like bolts of lace waltzing on a ballroom girl" in the spacious "Hejira", where Mitchell sighs with gratitude at her synchronicity with her surroundings. "There's comfort in melancholy/When there's no need to explain/It's just as natural as the weather/In this moody sky today. "Her world is so vivid, it almost feels surreal at time.

As she acclimatises to the road, she clocks on to the behaviour of the characters she encounters. The dewy "Coyote" details a tryst with a philandering rancher (who may be Sam Shepard in disguise)- Mitchell knows that he has "a woman at home and another down the hall", but she enjoys their brief affair, and revels in his palpable consternation about whether to run away the next morning. "Coyote's in the coffee shop/He's staring a hole in his scrambled eggs/He picks up my scent on his fingers/While he's watching the waitresses' legs," she sings, high on intimate power. "You're not a hit-and-run driver, no no," she reassures him, having played him at his own game. Sex is purely pleasure on Hejira, Mitchell writing without shame or qualification as she steps outside of society's expectations. "All I reallywant right now/Is to find another lover," she confesses at one point, and she succeeds. She may have reservations about the "foolish and childish" protagonist of "A Strange Boy", but rationality barely matters out here. "We got high on travel/And we got drunk on alcohol/And on love, the strongest poison and medicine of all," she rhapsodises, sounding barely tethered to the earth. "See how that feeling comes and goes/Like the pull of moon on tide/ Now I am surf rising/Now parched ribs of sand at his side."

Supposedly alone in the world and enjoying "the sweet loneliness of solitary travel", as she would describe it, Mitchell forces herself to reckon with the part her that still craves contact, and comfort. "I'm porous with travel fever/But you know I'm so glad to be on my own/Still somehow the slightest touch of a stranger/ Can setup trembling in my bones," she sings on "Hejira". The alternating keys of "Amelia", a tribute to the lost pilot Amelia Earhart, underscore Hejira's most poignant and uneasy interrogation of a woman's ineffable need to wander, and the sacrifices that entails. "Maybe I've never really loved/I guess that is the truth/I've spent my whole life in clouds at icy altitude/And looking down on everything/I crashed into his arms," she rues.

No matter how far she gets from home, she can't escape her mind. "Oh radiant happiness/It was all so light and easy/'Til I started analysing/And I brought on my old ways/A thunderhead of judgement was gathering in my gaze," Mitchell sings on the melty, hiccuping "Refuge Of The Roads". Hejira offers no resolution between love and independence, both of which lead to a measure of isolation that Mitchell elucidates beautifully. Being tethered to someone means always being seen in reflection: "White flags of winter chimneys/Waving truce against the moon/In the mirrors of a modern bank/From the window of a hotel room," she sings on "Hejira". But a similarly desolate image in "Refuge" suggests that being alone means barely being seen at all. In a service station, she sees "a photograph of the earth/Taken coming back from the moon/And you couldn't see a city/On that marbled bowling ball/Or a forest of a highway/ Or me here least of all."

In The Rolling Stone Book Of Women In Rock, Lisa Kennedy writes that Mitchell's work up until Court And Spark was influenced by the prairie, and that what came after drew from the city. It's true of Hissing, Mingus and Don Juan's Reckless Daughter, but Hejira is a psychological bridge connecting the two territories and all that they represent. The closest she comes to defining that irreconcilable pull between a woman's duty and desire is on energetic highlight "Song For Sharon". (It's the only song here written on cocaine, which may explain the pace.) "And the power of reason/And the flowers of deep feeling/Seem to serve me/Only to deceive me," she ruminates. It's no wonder, as she sings on "Refuge ... ", that her journey "made most people nervous/They just didn't want to know/What I was seeing in the refuge of the roads."

To this day in popular culture, most women on the road are doomed figures, fated to die or disappear. In 2013, the cultural critic Vanessa Veselka wrote an essay for The American Reader titled "The Lack Of Female Road Narratives And Why It Matters". "We recognize that, in our world, a woman on the road is marked," she writes. "She has been cut from the social fabric, excised at such an elemental level that when she steps onto the road, she steps into an abyss. And whatever leads up to that choice inspires in us a primal fear. A man on the road is solitary. A woman on the road is alone."

Hejira remains one of the few counterexamples to this deficit - a restless rejection of what satisfaction and success is meant to look like for women as lovers and artists, and a fearless confrontation of the consequences that stem from rejecting the norm. It's perhaps the great feminist record: "Leaving the dream, no blame," indeed”.

It is clear was a change. Prior to coming to a couple of reviews, it is worth getting some words from Joni Mitchell. Hejira is an album that could not have come from anyone else. In 2006, for the Ottawa Citizen, Doug Fisher spoke with Joni Mitchell about a classic album that turned thirty. How she reflected on it then. I wonder if she will share any words on its fiftieth anniversary. It was such an important album in her career. One that she is clearly very proud of:

“Whenever Joni Mitchell had trouble sorting out her life, she took to the road. But in early 1976, with a turbulent love affair on the rocks and too many drugs in her body, she hit the highway almost with a vengeance.

"I was getting away from a romance, I was getting away from the craziness and I was searching for something to make sense of everything," she says. "The road became a metaphor for my life."

And it inspired the album many of her fans and music critics consider her masterpiece.

Released 30 years ago this week, the nine songs on Hejira form the remarkable personal journal of a nomadic, romantic dreamer whose aural notebook is filled with the stories of doomed love, late night roadhouse dance floors, wedding gown fantasies, lost chances and a deep yearning to escape and start over.

Mitchell is not convinced Hejira is the best of the 22 albums that made her among the most influential singer-songwriters, male or female, of the past 40 years. She won't attach that label to any of her albums.

'Hejira could only have come from me'

But she concedes Hejira is probably her one album that could not have been made by anyone else.

"I suppose a lot of people could have written a lot of my other songs, but I feel the songs on Hejira could only have come from me," she said an interview with the Citizen.

The stories they tell are so vivid, their observations so naked and the landscapes so haunting that Kris Kristofferson famously urged her in a letter to be "more self-protective ... to save something of yourself from public view."

But Mitchell says self-confession, no matter how risky and revealing, was essential to her writing during that era.

"My songs have always been more autobiographical than most people's," she says. "It pushes you toward honesty. I was just returning to normal from the extremities of a very abnormal mindset when I wrote most of the songs (on Hejira).

"When life gets interesting I get very alert, and life was very interesting. I think that took the writing to another level."

Mitchell talked about the album by phone from her home in Los Angeles, where she revealed she's recording her first collection of new songs in nearly a decade. More wary of public scrutiny these days, the Canadian singer agreed to a Citizen request to discuss Hejira because, she said, the album recalls an "interesting transitional" time in her life and her career.

Musically, Hejira certainly marked a departure from the two jazz-tinged but radio-friendly albums that preceded it. Gone were the hummable melodies, conventional formats and jaunty horn sections she used as Top 40 flirtations on 1974's Court and Spark and '75's The Hissing of Summer Lawns.

In their place, Mitchell offered seductively sparse rhythms, lush swirling guitars and the brilliant spark of Jaco Pastorius's fretless bass to create an unceasing musical motion that is as mesmerizing as the highways she travels in her songs.

The album is also a departure lyrically. Using the music's structural looseness to her advantage, Mitchell gives her words a simple directness and poetic polish seldom seen in her music before and rarely found again.

"To me, the whole Hejira album is really inspired," Mitchell says. "There is a rootlessness to it, for sure, but also discovery along the road."

Despite good reviews, Hejira did not sell as briskly as the more accessible albums Mitchell released during the first half of the 1970s. Although exact numbers are hard to get, there are indications sales of Hejira are stronger today than ever.

Voting on jonimitchell.com, an excellent fan-driven website, ranks Hejira as Mitchell's most popular album. A critics' poll done in the late 1990s placed the album in a first-place tie with the Blue, a moody collection of love songs she recorded in 1971.
Mitchell says Hejira's songs were written during or after three journeys she took in late 1975 and the first half of 1976.

The first was a concert tour cancelled amid turmoil after six weeks in February 1976 when Mitchell and her drummer boyfriend John Guerin ended their on-again, off-again relationship, this time seemingly for good.

Soon after, Mitchell signed on with Bob Dylan's Rolling Thunder Review, a ragged, drug-soaked circus that also variously included Joan Baez, Mick Ronson, Roger McGuinn, Ronee Blakely, Allan Ginsburg and members of the Band. She soon became a frequent cocaine user.

"I realized you couldn't stay on that thing straight -- you'd be the only one," she explains. "It was just insane." Looking back, she says, the drugs had both "great and disastrous" effects: "I had terrible insomnia but I wrote a lot of epic poems," including Song for Sharon, for many the masterpiece around which Hejira orbits.

In danger of losing her equilibrium, Mitchell fled for home in Los Angeles. She was only back a few days when two friends, one of them a former lover from Australia, showed up at her door proposing they drive across the country to New England.

Mitchell eventually dropped them in Maine before heading alone down the coast to Florida, around the Gulf of Mexico and across the southwest back to California.

"I was driving without a driver's licence," she remembers. "I had to stay behind truckers because they signal you when cops are ahead. I had to drive in daylight hours only to stay out of harm's way."

In the South, where hard rock and country music dominated the airwaves, Mitchell was a virtual unknown. "It was a relief. I was able, like The Prince and the Pauper, to escape my fame under a false name and fall in with people and enjoy ordinary civilian status."

The cross-country sojourn resulted in six of the songs on Hejira, which Mitchell says was originally called Travelling -- "that wouldn't have been very memorable," she jokes.

While looking through a dictionary, Mitchell came across the word "hejira," an Islamic term for exodus or breaking with the past. It became a song title -- and against the will of her record company, which wanted something less cryptic -- the name of the album.

"I'd been struggling with a title for the song," she says. "The idea of departure with honour captured the feeling I was after very well”.

Two reviews to come to before wrapping up. Culture Sonar showed love for an album that they felt was underappreciated. You could argue that. The last thing I will bring in is features where Joni Mitchell’s albums are ranked. Showing where Hejira comes:

“Everyone has albums they come back to again and again, albums they would take to their proverbial desert island. Such albums have made a deep connection to the heart, and to life experience, sometimes in ways we barely understand, or only slowly unpack as we grow older. For me there’s no contest. The album I never tire of, which speaks to me instantly and always, whose meaning has evolved and deepened for me over time: Joni Mitchell’s Hejira.

A bit of brush-clearing first:

I have many friends who simply can’t get past some aspects of Mitchell’s performances. There’s a prickliness in some of her work (and most definitely in her public statements), which I believe was well-earned through the struggle of navigating the classic rock boys club, but which can be confusing and off-putting at times. Her voice is a frequent focus of criticism, many finding it “pretentious” or “mannered.” I see the truth in these critiques, but at least on her best work (and I consider this album the best of her best), the rewards far outweigh the obstacles.

With that out of the way: if you haven’t heard Hejira, go right now and do that. It’s on YouTube in its entirety, though I strongly recommend buying it. Nothing I say can do it justice, but I can highlight some of what is so powerful about it in my view.

Mitchell’s rhythm guitar playing is unique and gorgeous. As elsewhere in her work, she relies on a wide range of bespoke tunings to achieve distinctive and rich voicings. On the opening track, “Coyote,” for example, she tunes to CGDFCE, a very odd setup which makes the hooky, haunting, chugging rhythm part quite easy to play.

Hejira is in some sense a concept album, documenting a long road trip across the country and back, after a tour which ended early in recrimination and romantic disappointment. There is a strong sense of place in every single song, and Mitchell evokes conversations and situations effortlessly and compellingly, giving other people in her life and travels a voice, telling fragments of their stories in ways which make them feel like people I have known myself. This kind of lyric writing is just plain hard to do well, and she makes it sound easy.

Mitchell has said that she found the “dead, distant” bass sound of 70s recordings very unsatisfying, and was told she should talk to Jaco Pastorius. If all this album accomplished was to give us the glory of the parts Jaco overdubbed on four of the songs, it would be a treasure. But it goes beyond the sheer beauty of those bass parts…Jaco seemed to understand Mitchell’s music intuitively, and everything he does makes the rest of her conception shine more brightly. The interplay between his bass and her guitar and voice feels like a playful but serious conversation between old friends.

And it wasn’t just Jaco who Mitchell gave scope to here. John Guerin on drums and Larry Carlton on electric guitar deliver some their best, most tasteful work, with just the right amount of assertiveness, skirting a line between folk-pop and jazz in a way I’ve never heard matched.

I can’t know what Hejira’s deeper meaning is to Mitchell, beyond the narrative elements she is playing with, but to me it evokes a deep longing, and serves as a somewhat sardonic but heartfelt elegy for failed dreams and broken promises, personal and social.

The atmosphere on this album sticks to me like glue, gets in everywhere, and every musical and production choice supports that effect. Mitchell and her producer Henry Lewy achieved great variety between tracks without once violating the sense of a continuous and encompassing world – it is a spectacular achievement.

And what is atmosphere on an album but the result of sound? So finally, that’s what makes Hejira what it is, more than any of the aspects I have discussed. It is a sound which envelops and caresses, teases and reveals, soothes and surprises, gently prodding the listener to offer attention to the story of “this hitcher…this prisoner, of the fine white lines, of the white lines on the free free way.”

Mitchell’s overall body of work has its issues, and her relationship with fame and the business of music has been…challenging. But no accounting of the history of modern songwriting and recording is complete without consideration of this kaleidoscopically beautiful album”.

In 2022, Pitchfork reviewed Hejira. It is, as they write, “an iridescent meditation on solitude, a masterpiece in her catalog and across all of music”. If anyone has not heard this Joni Mitchell masterpiece then you really need to. Whilst Ladies of the Canyon is my favourite album from her, I do really love Hejira and will always have respect for it:

“On “Hejira,” Mitchell interrogates her 32 years. She had made profound sacrifices for the sake of her art, which perhaps accounts for the music’s intensity: When you feel you’ve sacrificed everything for your work, you bring everything to it. She looked for answers in every corner of the country her car could reach. She poured in every reserve and inexhaustible query. What are the uses of solitude? How close to nerves and bone can you get? Is art worth the sacrifice? Could she ever fully be seen? Her music stretches into a dissolving horizon suggesting the questions are unanswerable. Its unresolved charge suggests that life will be a cycle of finding meaning in the questions. In the spartan space, Mitchell invites us to complete the picture.

Staring at headstones on “Hejira,” “those tributes to finality,” pondering death, she considered her life. “I looked at myself here,” she sings, “Chicken scratching for my immortality.” Even Joni Mitchell must sometimes feel meaningless, at the top of the mountain, wondering what everything is worth. She always said she embraced granular details in her autobiographical art songs because it made a better story, and people should “know who they’re worshiping.” Here she offers a metaphysical magnification of her most atomic truths.

We’re only particles of change
Orbiting around the sun
But how can I have that point of view
When I’m always bound and tied to someone

Two other of Hejira’s songs illustrate as much. “Song for Sharon” is Mitchell’s reckoning with her position as single and childfree in her 30s, subverting the status quo in subject and in form. She’d addressed this reality before, like on For the Roses’ “Woman of Heart and Mind.” But in this nine-minute letter to her long-lost friend back home, Sharon Bell—who took a conventional path, “a husband and a farm”—she went further, surveying the advice she’d received from other women about how to give her life meaning: “have children,” “find yourself a charity.” With unbothered resolve and an even-handed tone—not innate for Mitchell—she situates herself between these two pathways of womanhood, seeking the common ground between herself and Sharon, or maybe between herself and all women, like her mother and grandmother who suppressed their dreams. “Song for Sharon” blows up the myth of the pop renegade with no direction home. Staring the past in the eye, Mitchell admits (in a call back to Blue’s “All I Want”), “All I really want to do right now is find another lover,” the last word drifting like smoke.

The most significant of its 10 verses was inspired by the actress Phyllis Major, who died by suicide in March of 1976. “A woman I knew just drowned herself,” Mitchell sings about the wife of Jackson Browne, who she herself had also dated, and whom she despised. (Her 1994 song about domestic violence, “Not to Blame,” was written in the wake of accusations against Browne, too.) “It seems we all live so close to that line,” Mitchell sings, “And so far from satisfaction.” “Song for Sharon” becomes a multifaceted song of solidarity with a diversity of women seeking dignity and respect. Its length illustrates the endlessness of such a task.

Hejira built a new sound to match the feminist paradigm it presented for being a woman in the world, with autonomy, adventure, and pleasure all as virtues. In the mid-’70s, the trope of the solo male traveler seeking enlightenment in meandering solitude was well-defined by tales like Walden and On the Road, even Siddhartha. Women travelers were unknown. Mitchell’s position “made most people nervous,” she sings on the beautiful, gently loping album closer, “Refuge of the Roads,” which describes her meeting with Tibetan Buddhist spiritual teacher Chögyam Trungpa. But her role brought others to life. In 1949, Simone de Beauvoir had posited, in The Second Sex, that “the free woman is just being born,” and when she arrived so would her poetry. Hejira is evidence, a shapeshifting aesthetic to voice a still-emerging mode of being female.

“Here’s the thing,” Mitchell told Rolling Stone in 1979. “You can stay the same and protect the formula that gave you your initial success. They’re going to crucify you for staying the same. If you change, they’re going to crucify you for changing. But staying the same is boring. And change is interesting. So of the two options, I’d rather be crucified for changing.”

Time had another idea. For years, the prevailing Mitchell narrative positioned Blue as her creative peak, Court and Spark as her commercial apex, and everything else a fascinating slow fall. This is, of course, incorrect. Creatively, if not commercially, Mitchell’s entry to jazz—the second half of what biographer Michelle Mercer calls “her Blue period” from 1971 to 1976—was more akin to Dylan going electric and cresting on an upward stride. She had adapted a new language for her trio of albums leading to Hejira like Dylan’s triptych leading to Blonde on Blonde.

Hejira’s influence remains as boundless as the music. Along with inspiring the Rolling Stones, Hejira is among the Mitchell albums that a young Björk held in the highest esteem. In recent years, Danielle Haim, Weyes Blood, and St. Vincent have anointed it as their favorite. In 2019, pop experimentalist Jenny Hval wrote a song about the act of listening to “Amelia.” Hejira created a precedent for the pantheon of art about women alone in motion that now includes Agnès Varda’s Vagabond and Patti Smith’s M Train.

The month of Hejira’s release, in November of 1976, Mitchell played “Coyote” as part of the Band’s Last Waltz. She herself didn’t tour for three years after, living “in exile from a mainstream audience,” as Rolling Stone put it when she resurfaced with her Charles Mingus collaboration in 1979. She either understood her staggering achievement or lost what little remained (had it existed) of her faith in the “star-maker machinery” of highly commercial music. She knew “no one’s going to show me everything,” as she sings on the title track, so she fulfilled her dreams herself. She wished for a river to skate away on. Hejira became one”.

Hejira doesn’t do too bad when we see ranking lists of Joni Mitchell’s albums. Earlier this year, Rough Trade ranked it first and said this: “You find yourself hanging on every word, wondering just how Joni will tie up every story in a deeply interesting arrangement. It is one of those albums that will change your life if you let it. I know it has changed mine”. In 2019, The Guardian placed it third: “This is definitely one for the road, evoking a hunger for movement, a sense of yearning and restlessness, that permeates every track. According to Mitchell, the album was written driving across the United States between Maine and Los Angeles. Amelia reflects upon the juxtaposition of concrete and skies after a break-up (an ode to the wild wings of Amelia Earhart – the urge to belong, the impulse to break free), whereas the album’s title track redirects us inwardly with the haunting, spine-tingling work of jazz bassist Jaco Pastorius”. On 21st November, the supreme and endlessly brilliant Hejira turns fifty. I wants to show love for a Joni Mitchell classic that is…

ARGUABLY her greatest album.

FEATURE: The ‘Yes’ Painting: 7th November, 1966: When John Lennon Met Yoko Ono

FEATURE:

 

 

The ‘Yes’ Painting

IN THIS PHOTO: Yoko Ono and John Lennon captured together at their apartment in The Dakota building in Manhattan, New York City, on 8th December, 1980 (just five hours before Lennon was killed)/PHOTO CREDIT: Annie Leibovitz

7th November, 1966: When John Lennon Met Yoko Ono

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NEXT year is…

quite a big one for fans of The Beatles. You can debate when The Beatles was formed, though I think it was the moment when Paul McCartney met John Lennon at the Peter's Church Hall fete in Woolton on 6th July, 1957. Next summer, we mark seventy years of this seismic moment. You feel McCartney and Lennon would have met regardless, but it was this magical meeting and discovery at a fete that began this songwriting partnership. I can understand that John Lennon meeting Yoko Ono was not happy for everyone. He was married to Cynthia Lennon when he entered the Indica Gallery in London and his life changed forever. Before spotlighting sixty years since John Lennon and Yoko Ono met and then fall in love, it is worth thinking about Ono. The world owes her a massive apology for the misogyny and hate she received. How people said she broke up The Beatles. She didn’t. She was this incredible force of good for John Lennon. An amazing artist in her own right, she is still recording and active at the age of ninety-three. I wonder if she ever thinks back to 7th November, 1966. This was at a time when The Beatles were massive. They had sort of wound down touring by the end of 1966. Revolver came out earlier in the year. You do feel for Cynthia Lennon and how hard it was. Though you can tell that John Lennon and Yoko Ono were just right for each other. She was so important to him. Opened his mind and made him a better person. Even now, we do not give Ono credit and love for what she did in terms of Lennon’s music. How amazing she is. In Sam Mendes’s four Beatles film that will come out in 2028, Anna Sawai will portray Yoko Ono. Harris Dickinson plays John Lennon. I hope that Ono is portrayed affectionately and that her story is told. That she is not just a minor character or portrayed as someone who was meddling and disruptive.

I think that is the impression that many people have. However, one fateful day in November 1966, John Lennon walked into the Indica Gallery. Lennon met Ono ahead of her solo exhibition, Unfinished Paintings and Objects. I think about Lennon being encountered by the gallery co-owner, John Dunbar. Lennon climbed a ladder, looked through the magnifying glass, and read the word ‘YES’. I am not sure if this was the moment that Lennon knew that Yoko Ono was someone he wanted to spend his life with. It was definitely an eye-opening experience. Lennon said of Yoko Ono: “I’d never met a woman I considered as intelligent as me. That sounds big-headed, but every woman I met was either a dolly-chick, or a sort of screwed-up intellectual chick. And of course, in the field I was in, I didn’t meet many intellectual people anyway. I always had this dream of meeting an artist, an artist girl who would be like me. And I thought it was a myth, but then I met Yoko and that was it”. This article takes us inside a fateful and incredible meeting that changed the lives of John Lennon and Yoko Ono:

“John Lennon met Yoko Ono at her 1966 art exhibit Unfinished Paintings and Objects, at London's Indica Gallery. She was an avant-garde artist, and he was the most famous pop star in the world. Lennon previewed the show the night before its opening, and Yoko later claimed she didn't know who he nor the Beatles were—which seems unlikely, although it is likely that she didn't care. One piece at the exhibit, Apple, was just a real apple on a plexiglass stand. Lennon picked the apple up and took a bite out of it. Ono later recalled: "He just grabbed it and bit it and looked at me like 'There!' I was so furious, I didn't know what to say. How dare this person mess around with my work?" Lennon said of the incident, "I thought it was fantastic—I got her work immediately...it was two hundred quid to watch the fresh apple decompose" (Lennon Remembers: The Full Rolling Stone Interviews from 1970).

Another piece, Ceiling Painting/Yes Painting, was a ladder leading up to a picture frame on the ceiling, and a magnifying glass hanging on a metal chain. Within the frame, in tiny print, was the single word YES. Lennon described being impressed with the positive message: "I climbed up and got a look in this spyglass on the top of the ladder... you feel like a fool... and it just said, 'Yes.' Now, at the time, all the avant-garde was smash the piano with a hammer and break the sculpture and anti-, anti-, anti-. It was all boring negative crap" (Playboy Interview with David Sheff, September 1980).

There was also a blank white canvas on the wall with a bucket of nails and a hammer beside it, entitled Painting to Hammer a Nail. Lennon asked if he could hammer a nail in, but Yoko said no because the show wasn't opening until the next day. The gallery owner told her to let Lennon do it because he was a millionaire and might buy it. When Yoko finally agreed he could hammer a nail in for five shillings, John replied, "Well, I'll give you an imaginary five shillings and hammer an imaginary nail in." Lennon later reflected: "And that's when we really met. That's when we locked eyes and she got it and I got it and, as they say in all the interviews we do, the rest is history" (Playboy, 1980)”.

It was not like their love story necessarily began on 7th November, 1966. The second meeting was on 22nd November, 1966, at the Robert Fraser Gallery,  on 69 Duke Street, London. That was at an exhibition by American sculptor Claes Oldenburg. Lennon arrived with Paul McCartney. Lennon recalls how shy and nervous he was. So it took a while for that ice to be broken. The cultural differences and language barriers. They came from different worlds in a way. However, it is clear that Yoko Ono definitely stirred something in John Lennon. You can feel her brilliance affecting his work with The Beatles and his solo material. Though not everything was great, their earliest collaborative albums are pretty inaccessible, and there were moments of vitriol in songs, especially one aimed at Paul McCartney (How Do You Sleep?), that don’t paint them in a good light, but it was the start of something beautiful. They married and were together until Lennon’s death in 1980. Ono was with him when he was shot by Mark Chapman in New York. How horrifying it would have been to witness someone she had been with for fourteen years taken away. We do need to start acknowledging how important Yoko Ono was to John Lennon and many sides of his career. His activism. Bringing out a more experimental side. An intellectual and spiritual match, Ono helped him transition from the madness and messiness of The Beatles' breakup to becoming this solo artist and family man. Far from being someone who broke up The Beatles, she offered Lennon this stability and love at one of the worst moments in his life. Though Lennon was not completely transformed and rehabilitated – in terms of some of his choices, comments and musical decisions -, Ono’s presence and love were invaluable and transformative. I do think about that first meeting in 1966 and how it changed things. Maybe not as instant as Lennon approaching songwriting differently and Yoko Ono being instrumental. Though she definitely affected many of his songs after 1966. There are events in the history of The Beatles that are hugely important and impactful. 1957, when John Lennon and Paul McCartney met. I do feel John Lennon meeting Yoko Ono for the first time is as important as anything. In terms of their connection and how connected they were right away. It is so clear that Yoko Ono influenced John Lennon’s life…

FOR the better.

FEATURE: What Is Life: The Essential George Harrison

FEATURE:

 

 

What Is Life

IN THIS PHOTO: George Harrison in 1975/PHOTO CREDIT: Sunshine/Rex Shutterstock

The Essential George Harrison

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I am doing quite a few…

IN THIS PHOTO: George Harrison inventing the selfie in India in 1966

mixtapes for various artists. I am thinking about George Harrison. He died on 29th November, 2001. He had such a terrible last couple of years. At the end of 1999, he and his wife Olivia were attacked at their home in Friar Park. George Harrison suffered multiple stab wounds and was lucky to have survived. He died of cancer less than two years later. It was an unimaginably difficult and unfair end to the life of one of the greatest artists ever. The youngest member of The Beatles, he was part of the greatest group ever. Often seen as the quiet one, I think he was among the most interesting. So fashionable and cool, he could have a moan now and then. He was very spiritual but also had a sharper edge. Very funny and personable, Harrison often had to struggle to get his songs heard. John Lennon and Paul McCartney the dominant forces and songwriters. Although his earlier contributions to The Beatles were great, his two masterpieces arrived on the final album the band recorded together, Abbey Road (1969). Something and Here Comes the Sun are two of the most popular Beatles songs. The latter is the most-streamed on Spotify. After the band split, Harrison enjoyed a successful solo career. He was also part of Traveling Wilburys alongside Jeff Lynn, Bob Dylan, Roy Orbison and Tom Petty. I am putting together solo songs, some of his Beatles tracks and Wilbury cuts as we remember Harrison twenty-five years after his death. I know that Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr will pay tribute to him on the day. They miss him very much. There is a new book, The Third Way, that collects all these never-seen-before photographs by George Harrison. Olivia Harrison provides the foreword and has been talking about the book and George Harrison. I may have used this before, but I will end with AllMusic and their biography of George Harrison:

“Something" provided a launching pad for Harrison's solo career, but he'd already been dabbling in solo projects since 1968. That year, the Beatles launched their Apple Corps collective of businesses, one of their enterprises being an experimental label called Zapple. George released Wonderwall Music that year, becoming the first Beatle to release a solo album, and this collection of Indian music was followed in 1969 by Electronic Sound, an album where Harrison experimented with synthesizers. A better indication of the sound George chose to follow once he officially went solo in 1970 came with his on-stage cameos during Delaney & Bonnie's 1969 British tour. Along with Bob Dylan and the Band, these American blues-rockers had an influence on All Things Must Pass, a sprawling triple album produced by Phil Spector that functioned as a spectacular introduction to George Harrison the solo artist. Bolstered by "My Sweet Lord," a single that hit number one throughout the world, and the Top Ten "What Is Life," All Things Must Pass topped the charts in the U.S. and U.K., elevating George above John, Paul, and Ringo's stardom. His rise was not without controversy -- Bright Tunes Publishing sued Harrison for copyright infringement in 1971, claiming "My Sweet Lord" plagiarized the Chiffons' 1963 "He's So Fine"; George lost the case but, in a byzantine turn of events, he wound up with the publishing to both songs after his then-manager Allen Klein purchased the rights to "He's So Fine" -- but there was no question Harrison came into his own.

George followed All Things Must Pass with something equally grand: a benefit concert for the refugees of war-torn Bangladesh. Upon the urging of his friend Ravi Shankar, Harrison arranged a star-studded benefit held at Madison Square Garden on August 1, 1971, enlisting his friends Starr, Dylan, Eric Clapton, and Billy Preston to play; it was the first all-star charity show, setting the template for those to follow. Although there were problems dispersing funds, the concert was a success, as was the album, which went gold in the U.S. and won the 1973 Grammy for Album of the Year. Also in 1973, Harrison released Living in the Material World, his second studio album and his second number one, assisted by the single "Give Me Love (Give Me Peace on Earth)," a number one hit in the U.S. that topped out at eight in the U.K. He supported the record with an extensive series of North American concerts, the first tour launched by a Beatle. Upon its conclusion, he released his next album, Dark Horse (his tour shared the same title), a record greeted with mixed reviews and softening sales; it failed to chart in Britain, although it did peak at four in the U.S., where the title track went to number 15.

Harrison closed out his contract with EMI and Apple in 1975 with Extra Texture (Read All About It), an album that fared better in the U.K. and performed respectably in the U.S., due to the single "You." He quickly launched his own Dark Horse label in 1976, inaugurating the imprint that November with Thirty Three & 1/3. (Apple released The Best of George Harrison, containing solo and Beatles cuts, almost simultaneously.) Supported by the modest hits "This Song" and "Crackerbox Palace," the slightly slicker Thirty Three & 1/3 wound up a bigger hit than its two predecessors, thereby starting Harrison's Dark Horse years off on a slight rebound. This continued through 1979's eponymous album, a record highlighted by the soft rock hit "Blow Away," a single that peaked at number 16 in the U.S. but went no further than 51 in the U.K.

Harrison rebounded with 1981's Somewhere in England, thanks in no small part to the hit "All Those Years Ago," a song fashioned as a tribute to the murdered John Lennon and featuring contributions from Ringo Starr and Paul and Linda McCartney. Despite this hit -- which went to two in the U.S. and 13 in the U.K. -- the record failed to go gold in either America or Britain, and Gone Troppo, released just a year later, sank from view quickly. George slid into a relatively quiet phase, concentrating on raising his son Dhani -- he was born in 1978, the first and only son of George and Olivia Harrison, who also married in 1978. Harrison concentrated on his film company HandMade Films, a company started in 1978 with the intent of financing Monty Python's silver-screen debut Life of Brian but gained momentum in the early '80s thanks to the release of 1980's Bob Hoskins gangster drama The Long Good Friday and Terry Gilliam's 1981 fantasy Time Bandits; the company would also release the acclaimed Mona Lisa (1986) and Withnail and I (1987), before becoming mired in money problems surrounding the runaway production of the 1986 Sean Penn and Madonna vehicle Shanghai Surprise. George stayed involved in music largely through live guest appearances, popping up at charity concerts and tributes, but he also appeared on Dave Edmunds' oldies-inspired soundtrack for 1985's Porky's Revenge.

Eventually, Harrison began work on his ninth studio album, hiring Jeff Lynne of Electric Light Orchestra as co-producer. Lynne brought a lush, glossy sheen to 1987's Cloud Nine, a sound that was instrumental to the record's success. Preceded by a bouncy rendition of James Ray's forgotten chestnut "Got My Mind Set on You," a single that turned into a number one hit in the U.S. and reached two in the U.K., Cloud Nine was an undeniable comeback, reaching the Top Ten on both sides of the Atlantic and earning a platinum certification in the U.S., assisted in part by its second single, "When We Was Fab." In the wake of its success, Harrison and Lynne returned to the studio to record a B-side with the assistance of Bob Dylan, Roy Orbison, and Tom Petty. This session turned into a full album with the superstars calling themselves the Traveling Wilburys. Accompanied by the single "Handle with Care," their record, The Traveling Wilburys, Vol. 1, appeared in October 1988 and it was selling well prior to the December death of Orbison. Its second single, "End of the Line," helped cement its success and it wound up being certified platinum three times in the U.S., reaching a peak of three; it wound up in the Top Ten in every major country around the world, save the U.K., where it topped out at number 16. The Traveling Wilburys released a second album, Traveling Wilburys, Vol. 3, in the fall of 1990. While it didn't sell as well as its predecessor, the record nevertheless went to number 11 in the U.S., where it also went platinum.

Following the 1992 release of Live in Japan and some live appearances that year, Harrison once again receded from the spotlight, reuniting with the surviving Beatles to assemble their 1994 archival Anthology project, an effort that also included working two existing Lennon demos into a finished project with the assistance of Lynne. After Anthology wrapped, Harrison produced Ravi Shankar's 1997 album Chants of India, but his output slowed further following a 1997 diagnosis of throat cancer. Over the next few years, Harrison dealt with several different health issues (he also suffered a serious knife attack by an intruder in 1999), and in 2001 his lung cancer spread to his brain. On November 29, 2001, Harrison passed away from lung cancer.

After his death, his son Dhani and Jeff Lynne completed Harrison's unreleased recordings and they were released as Brainwashed in 2002. George was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2004 and, over the next decade, there were several archival projects, including a 2004 box set of his Dark Horse recordings and the 2009 compilation Let It Roll. In 2011, his life was the subject of a documentary film from Martin Scorsese called George Harrison: Living in the Material World; it was accompanied by a collection of rarities called Early Takes: Vol. 1. George's Apple recordings were remastered and released in 2014 as a box set called The Apple Years 1968-75. A hefty, handsome collection of LP reissues -- aptly titled "The 50th Anniversary Edition" -- of All Things Must Pass was commemorated by a series of deluxe reissues of the landmark album, each featuring a new mix supervised by Dhani Harrison and Paul Hicks. The Super Deluxe editions also contained a wealth of demos and outtakes”.

I will end here. Rather than feel sad that George Harrison is no longer with us, we need to celebrate the incredible music he left. As important as any artist who has ever lived. On 29th November, it will be twenty-five years since this amazing human left us. But his spirit and legacy lives on. Harrison will never be forgotten. Compiling a mixtape of his solo and band work has been…

A real delight.

FEATURE: Nothing Compares 2 U: Sinéad O'Connor at Sixty

FEATURE:

 

 

Nothing Compares 2 U

PHOTO CREDIT: Jane Bown/The Observer 

Sinéad O'Connor at Sixty

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ALTHOUGH it is a little way off…

I am thinking to 8th December and the sixtieth birthday of Sinéad O'Connor. We lost this icon 2023 at the age of fifty-six. Rather than this being mournful, I wanted to highlight her incredible catalogue. My mind is in 1966 at the moment. Talking about artists born in that year or events that occurred then. Though the brilliant Sinéad O'Connor is no longer with us, you can feel her influence today. Artists such as John Grant, Tori Amos and Fiona Apple have cited her music as an inspiration. Like I do with similar features, I am ending with a mixtape. The best from Sinéad O'Connor. There are a few biographies out there, but I wanted to bring in this one from Factory International. They provided one around The Surge: An Ode to Sinéad O’Connor. It is a bold contemporary dance production directed and choreographed by Tony Award winner Sonya Tayeh. It acts as a theatrical wake and meditation celebrating the life, spirit, and legacy of Irish singer-songwriter and activist Sinéad O’Connor. It had its world premiere in Manchester in June. It had its New York run in September. It is moving to Los Angeles in January:

“Beginnings

Born in Dublin in 1966, Sinéad O’Connor’s early life was marked by instability and violence. Her parents separated when she was young, and she later described her mother as a physically and emotionally abusive figure who shaped both her fear and her defiance.

At odds with her mother, Sinéad was placed in Catholic reform institutions as a teenager. Constantly under strict supervision, the young Sinéad learned that authority was something to be survived, not trusted. These experiences would shape how she saw authority, religion and power.

In her childhood, music stood out as a place to seek solace, as noted in her memoir, Rememberings where she recalls an encounter where she was drawn to her grandmother’s piano, treating it like a person to be cared for. From an early age, music was something Sinéad felt deeply connected and called to – and it would become her way out of the reform institutions she loathed.

While at the An Grianan Training Centre – a former Magdalene Laundry – a nun recognised Sinéad’s talent for singing, encouraging the teenager and buying her a guitar. This led to her singing at a wedding reception where she met members of the Irish band Tua Nua. At just 15 the band thought her too young to join officially, though she co-wrote and recorded their first single for Island Records, Take My Hand.

It wouldn’t be the first band Sinéad joined – after cutting her teeth busking and gigging in Dublin, Sinéad formed the group Ton Ton Macoute with Colm Farrelly, meeting through an advertisement in Hot Press magazine.

Finding her own voice

In 1985, at just 18 Sinéad O’Connor signed to Ensign Records after Nigel Grainge, one of the labels co-founders, was impressed by her vocals while watching Ton Ton Macoute (he was less impressed by the band’s overall sound). She moved to London and began work on what would become her 1987 debut album – The Lion and the Cobra.

While recording her first record, Sinéad became pregnant. Accounts from the time describe pressure from her label to prioritise her career over having a child – to terminate the pregnancy, to reconsider motherhood. She refused.

This moment set the tone for what followed – Sinéad would not separate her life nor her morals from her work to fit industry expectations.

At the 1989 Grammys, she protested the Recording Academy’s refusal to televise the Best Rap Performance category by painting Public Enemy’s logo in her hair – and also wore her baby son Jake’s onesie attached to her jeans during her performance of Mandinka, representing her identity as both a mother and a musician.

Nothing Compares

By the early 1990s, Sinéad had become internationally renowned. Her 1990 album I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got sold millions worldwide. With her definitive version of Prince’s Nothing Compares 2 U, Sinéad’s voice and image became instantly recognisable – her shaved head, direct gaze and a single tear rolling down her face spurred on by the lyrics reminding her of the passing of her mother five years earlier.

But with that level of fame came scrutiny. Sinéad was celebrated as a monumental talent, while also being questioned for how she looked, spoke and behaved.

She defied industry expectations again by boycotting the 1991 Grammys despite having one of the most successful singles that year – fed up with how the industry prioritised commercial success over artistic integrity.

Fight the real enemy

In 1992, during a live performance on Saturday Night Live, Sinéad made a gesture that would come to define her public life.

After singing an acappella version of Bob Marley’s War, she held up a photograph of Pope John Paul II and tore it into pieces, saying “fight the real enemy.”

The act was a protest against child abuse within the Catholic Church – something she connected to her own experiences and to broader, institutional violence.

The response was immediate and hostile. She was banned from performing on NBC and even called a ‘she-devil’ in headlines. Hundreds of her CDs, tapes and records were destroyed by a 30-tonne steamroller outside her record label's US headquarters at the Rockefeller Center in New York. Yes, really. And all of this happened when she was just 25 years old.

At the time, the systemic abuse within the Catholic church was not yet widely acknowledged. Years later, her actions have been re-evaluated for what they were – an early and public challenge to institutional abuse, far ahead of its time.

The media circus

Sinéad O’Connor’s relationship with the media was often difficult. She was frequently described as controversial, rather than being taken seriously on her own terms.

Her appearance, beliefs and outspokenness were often used to define her, overshadowing her music and message. She famously shaved her head in a rejection of femininity after being told to present a more conventional image – but the media weaponised this as something to evidence her being unstable.

The SNL incident was the pinnacle of this treatment – but not the only time she was grossly misunderstood. Post-SNL, Sinéad was condemned, mocked and, in many spaces, erased. Her commercial success never recovered – but that didn’t matter for someone who wanted to live on their own terms.

Always searching

Sinéad continued to make music throughout her life, exploring different styles and collaborations while also speaking openly about her personal struggles – maintaining a commitment to truth-telling about abuse, religion, mental health and survival.

In 2011, she performed with us at Manchester International Festival – calling it “one of my favourite nights of all time”.

In 2018, she converted to Islam, taking the name Shuhada’ Sadaqat. For Sinéad, it was part of an ongoing spiritual journey and search for peace rather than a sudden change.

In 2023, she passed away at the age of 56, leaving behind her three children and an incomparable catalogue of songs.

The Surge

Throughout her career, Sinéad’s voice captured listeners with its emotion and restraint – but it also challenged authority and refused to fit expectations. Now her voice and life will be celebrated through a new dance work directed by the Tony Award-winning choreographer and director Sonya Tayeh.

The Surge: An Ode to Sinéad O'Connor is a meditation on voice, protest and the courage to live a life that defies the norm. Set to her songs and narration from her memoir, Rememberings, The Surge is inspired by Sinéad’s uncompromising spirit.

Revisiting her work a quarter of the way through the twenty-first century, her words are as vital as ever. Sinéad O’Connor was ahead of her time, and the world is still playing catch up”.

It is true that Sinéad O’Connor was a trailblazer. Such a distinct artist. I look around the world today and wonder what O’Connor would make of it. You know she would be writing about what is happening in the world. Genocide in Gaza and the corruption of leaders around the world. Her voice lives on in artists that she has inspired. On 8th December, we mark Sinéad O’Connor’s sixtieth birthday. A chance to reflect on everything she gave us. How her brilliance lives on. She is so sorely missed. The world is a lot poorer without this music giant…

IN it.