FEATURE: Lord Only Knows: Beck's Odelay at Thirty

FEATURE:

 

 

Lord Only Knows

Beck's Odelay at Thirty

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IT is exciting…

IN THIS PHOTO: Beck in 1996/PHOTO CREDIT: Martyn Goodacre

marking the thirtieth anniversary of one of the best albums of the 1990s. There is no doubting that Beck’s Odelay holds that title. In terms of its reviews and how it was received. How it endures to this day. Odelay was released on 18th June, 1996. The fifth studio album from Beck, it contains classics such as Devil’s Haircut and Where It’s At. I want to bring in a few reviews/features for this extraordinary album. Although Odelay only just made the top twenty in the U.K. and U.S., it received a lot of positive reviews. One of those albums that has gained this incredible legacy. I am not sure why it was not a top ten in 1996. However, there is not denying the impact it has made on artists since its release. In 2008, Rolling Stone spoke with Beck about the newly reissued classic. He provided a guide to each track. I cannot get the full version of the feature, though I can provide a taster:

“I thought Odelay might be the last time I got a chance to make a record,” Beck says of his 1996 album. “I was acutely aware that I was thought of as a one-hit wonder.” But almost twelve years later, Odelay is the definitive Beck album, full of funk, noise and sliced-up jokes. It’s now receiving the deluxe reissue treatment, with an edition that adds nineteen outtakes, remixes and B sides.

Beck reminisces about his landmark disc at the Hollywood studio where he’s quickly recording a new one with a producer he declines to name. “We’re not going to get sidetracked,” he says. “This one might be coming out sooner than people would think – definitely this year.” Today, he’s working in a modern facility full of expensive blond wood; back in 1995, it was the smallest room in the Silver Lake, L.A., house of the Dust Brothers (Mike Simpson and John King), the production team behind the Beastie Boys ‘ Paul’s Boutique. “It was tiny,” Beck says. “And one wall, floor to ceiling, was all records.” Although Beck emphasizes that “a lot of Odelay was played, not sampled,” many of those records were called into service, from Them’s version of “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” (the organ part became the backbone of “JackAss”) to a sex-ed. album called Sex for Teens (Where It’s At), which provided the funniest bits of the single “Where It’s At.”

The reason they had so much time to listen to records? The trio was using an early version of Pro Tools: After every take, the computer required about a half-hour to compile the data. Technology aside, Beck says he doesn’t feel like much time has passed: “When I go back to it, not a lot feels different. I’m into the same things, you know what I mean?”

“RAMSHACKLE”

The last track on Odelay was salvaged from an earlier set of sessions. “It was a whole record’s worth of stuff, somewhere between Big Star, Pavement and Nirvana.” That lost disc was almost finished when Beck first hooked up with the Dust Brothers. “ Odelay was very informal. I just showed up one day with the slide guitar and a couple of harmonicas, and we started working.”

“.000.000”

This Sabbath -style freakout, originally a B side to “Devils Haircut,” was recorded at the Beastie Boys’ L.A. studio. “It had a big skate ramp in it,” Beck recalls. He isn’t sure how one would pronounce the song’s title and can’t even decipher the words anymore. “There were definitely lyrics, and they were very meaningful. I think.”

“DEVILS HAIRCUT”

The recording of the album was split in half by Beck going on the 1995 Lollapalooza tour. “Everything we did before was very complex — we would spend weeks on each track. When I came back, we did a bunch of songs really quick in two weeks. We did ‘Devils Haircut’ and ‘New Pollution’ back to back in two days.”

“THE NEW POLLUTION”

Odelay’s third single had some of its most inscrutable lyrics, like “She’s got a cigarette on each arm.” “Most of the vocals on the record were scratch vocals,” Beck says. “We just grew attached to them.”

“GOLD CHAINS”

A previously unreleased track featuring the chorus “I’m going back home with my gold chains swinging.” “We went back and mixed that. It was never a serious album contender — we were just fucking around one day.”

“BURRO”

This “Jack-Ass” B side was a Spanish translation of the song, rerecorded with a mariachi band from an L.A. Mexican restaurant. “I tried to sing it straight, but I got carried away. I ended up sounding like Mario Lanza”.

There are a couple of other features I want to come to before finishing off. In 2016 (twenty years after its release) XS Noize spent some time with Odelay. Even though 1994’s One Foot in the Grave was well-received, there were many who doubted Beck’s chances of survival. An artist that they thought would not last much longer. Odelay silenced through doubters and confirmed Beck’s status as this unpredictable and always-shifting artist. Odelay was a major breakthrough:

“There are two elements to “Odelay” that reflect the times it was recorded within. The album rode the peak wave of the sampling trend with 28 different samples that were culled from numerous genres; Schubert, Grand Funk Railroad, Sly Stone, Lee Dorsey, Rare Earth and Edgar Winter are just some of the credited samples. In addition there were a significant number of contributors: Beck of course played everything you can think of and in addition; Joey Woronker, Mike Millius, Mike Boilo, David Brown, Greg Leisz, Charlie Haden and Ross Harris all made worthy and significant contributions. The utilization of sampling and the various musicians and contributors made for an approachable recording loaded with infectious ebullience. It showcased Beck in all his smart-ass glory as he shamelessly genre bent throughout the record.

Although the label placed no pressure on Beck in studio, when the album was delivered to the label Beck was haunted by the feedback. His greatest nightmare was realized when a record executive said,” Odelay was a large mistake for Beck’s career.” Beck spent months thinking he had blown his music career forever. Thankfully the record executive was wrong. The album was embraced by radio and fans. It reached #16 on Billboard in the US and become the first hit album for Beck in the UK reaching #17. There were five singles released; Where it’s At, Devil’s Haircut, The New Pollution, Sissyneck and Jackass. “Odelay” was nominated for Grammy’s Album of the Year in 1997, and won the Grammy for Best Alternative Music Album; additionally Beck won the Grammy for Best Male Rock Vocal Performance for Where it’s At. The success of “Odelay” put to rest the opinions of many in the industry that Beck was a lightweight novelty cult act.

On “Odelay” Beck jumps immediately into the deep end with Devil’s Haircut which was written in a day. It is a perfect display of defying logic; where things went perfectly together even though they should not. The cranking gritty guitar and the familiar beat meld for a grand accompaniment to this surreal walk through the Post Modern end of the century. The song should have come with a warning because it lodged itself in your brain and you could not get it out. It displayed the brilliance of Beck’s off the cuff quicksilver brain. This song will always reside within the pantheon of spectacular Beck tracks.

In contrast Hotwax took six months to create. Here the genres switch quickly careening from folky blues to psychedelic and then into hip hop. That neck snapping switch up should be unsettling but this is Beck we are talking about and he ends up producing another winning track. The lyrics are stream of conscious but unforgettable with my favorite still being, “silver foxes looking for romance in the chain smoke Kansas flash dance ass pants.” … and epic catchphrase “the enchanted wizard of rhythm”. The song is a bridge from Mellow Gold into “Odelay”.

Lord Only Knows provided even more catchphrases as the protagonist of the song laments the inevitable craziness of the world. Here Beck fully utilizes a world weary blues and gospel undertone to emphasize his gleeful abandoning of all hope in making sense of the nonsensical. The song is jam packed with ironic truths that became instantly quotable.

The album shape-shifts again with The New Pollution and it’s off kilter marriage of Brit wave 60’s pop and Day-Glo irony. The surface of this song is squeaky clean and innocent but lyrically is actually quite disturbing. Punctuated drums, Hammond organs and the distorted drum loop act as a time machine taking us back decades in sound. It is a whip crack crisp pop song. Where The New Pollution is an irony laden pop confection of sorts, Derelict delivers something completely different. Once again Beck messes with conventions blending an Asiatic feel with psychedelic and produces a feeling of madness with world beat percussion. The song attempts to portray a beggar/derelict exploding into a word salad of thoughts with no edit. “Novacane” delivers a hard edged ballsy hip hop attack. The bassline sets the platform for a song that explodes into a hip hop/P funk fest. The title of the song is apt as it conveys the deadened feel of the analgesic drug. This song sounds simply spectacular coming out of the speakers as Beck creates another unique collage that would become his trademark.

Where It’s At was another intentional bridge from Loser. It truly is the song to point to when explaining the genius of Beck. There are so many catchphrases including the epic, “Two turn tables and a microphone” that have stood the test of time are still being used 20 years later. The amazing thing about the song is that there is a little something here for everyone; even a total square could totally buy into the vibe Beck was laying down. On the track Beck takes us for another trip through the bizarre yet none of it seems strange. The real brilliance is Beck weaving the disparate sections of the song into one unified massive track with throbbing bass and Hammond organ bring the selection home.

Minus Is another nonsense poem that becomes something wondrous in Beck’s capable hands. Here a post punk garage band feel pervades. The track utilizes insistent drums and LoFi crunch production to perform its dirty work. The selection bounces along and then there is that slo mo tempo shapeshift before it returns to a hellbend beat. The track is like a bad LSD trip, with Beck yelling the word “frogs” at the end as the song grinds to its cacophonic end.

Sissyneck is a spectacular blending of funk, R&B and country rock providing one hell of a groove. Presented is another hard luck Joe trying to make rational the irrational. The chorus is priceless, “I got a stolen wife and a rhinestone life and some good ol’ boys. I’m writing my will on a three dollar bill in the evening time.” The pictures painted with the lyrics are at once classic and disturbing as we meet various dodgy characters. The Hammond organ and stuttering drums deliver a locomotive feel to the accompaniment.

Readymade is a wonky track with the marriage of Mexicali influence with techno. It portrays a fly blown traveler as he passes through life. Illuminating the track are lyrics like, “and my bags are waiting for the next life”, as if Beck is saying I’ll be waiting for the karmic paybacks for the wrongs done in this life. The electronic effects of the track punctuate the intentionally tawdry feel of the song.

High 5 (Rock the Catskills) is an ebullient rocking hip hop song, in which the Dust Brothers were channeling their Beastie Boy experiences through Beck. The mind meld between producers and artist are at their most obvious on this track. It is a blast of a song that is totally shambolic and should not work but is a great piece of music.

The final listed song on the original release is Ramshackle which was the only song to survive the original recording sessions. It draws the album to a close with a beautiful folk feel. It also gives hints to the beauty that will surface on later releases, Sea Change and Morning Phase.It is a poetic melancholy rambling illuminated by sage advice and insight, calling to mind the works of Woody Guthrie. The song is made more poignant by the not quite on key loose string acoustic guitar. The song ends at the 2:45 mark and runs silent until the hidden 45 second wonky tech track with a repeating robotic vocal. Again a straight forward song is meddled with in order to meet the requirements of being messed around.

With Odelay Beck was able to slay the doubts many had about his prospects for longevity in popular music. Many musical experts at the time made the mistake of assuming because Beck makes what he does look so easy and does it with a happy go luck journeyman’s approach that he was not trying or working very hard. Those people could not have been more wrong. Beck’s output looks effortless because he is that gifted. The brilliance of Odelay is Beck’s almost supernatural ability to weave immense texture and genre shapeshifting together on the release and come out with so many beloved hits. Beck would move on from “Odelay” continuing to follow the twists and turns of his own unique musical inklings. He secured his career with “Odelay” making sure his future ventures would get the notice they deserve. If you want to introduce the younger generation to an ambitious musical adventure “Odelay” is an excellent way to start”.

I am going to finish off with Albumism. There will be new features published for Odelay when it turns thirty on 18th June. I was thirteen when Odelay came out. It was a period in music when things were changing. Especially in the U.K. This enormously inventive album came out in a time when Britpop was fading away and there was this sense of shift and different sounds and genres coming to the fore:

“Following the pervasive success of “Loser” and the lo-fi major label debut LP Mellow Gold (1994), the invariable backlash materialized, with Beck being unfairly accused of one-hit wonderdom and embracing kitschy artifice over musical substance. Two years later, however, he silenced the haters in convincing fashion with the release of the ambitiously conceived and masterfully executed Odelay, which formally established him as a bona fide artiste with an unconventional and imaginative musical vision.

The album that Beck originally began recording as the follow-up to Mellow Gold was a notably more acoustic-driven, maudlin suite of songs. He ultimately scrapped most of the material, and started fresh with a new sonic direction, aided in large part by hooking up with the L.A. based production duo of E.Z. Mike (Michael Simpson) and King Gizmo (John King), more affectionately known as the Dust Brothers. Renowned for their studio wizardry on the Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique (1989), Young MC’s Stone Cold Rhymin’ (1989), and Tone Loc’s Lōc-ed After Dark (1989), among other projects, the Dust Brothers brought a seasoned hip-hop sensibility and penchant for innovative sampling to their recording sessions with Beck.

Crafting the intricately woven songs that would ultimately constitute Odelay was an organic, liberating process replete with new sonic adventures for the kindred musical spirits involved. “We’d always been forced to sample from records,” Dust Brother Mike Simpson explained to MusicRadar in 2011. “Whereas with Beck he’d say, ‘I’ve got some ideas,’ and plug in his guitar and just start riffing. He’d play a bar or a measure and we’d take that and loop it up and he’d be like, ‘Oh, that’s incredible. Wow, I don’t even remember playing that!’ We were of like minds, had the same goals, and were looking to make the same kind of music.”

Indeed, the kaleidoscopic, multi-layered Odelay—named after the phonetic spelling of the Spanish expression “órale,” the equivalent of “right on” or “word” in English—reflects the convergence of a vast expanse of unorthodox ideas, musical inspirations, and bold experiments across its thirteen songs. However, to the credit of its creators, the album is a coherent and cohesive one, never descending into hodgepodge territory from the weight of its grand ambitions. This is progressive music, to be sure, but it’s also one of the most insanely catchy and vibrant albums you’ll ever have the pleasure of hearing.

From a lyrical perspective, Beck has been forthright about his preoccupation with ensuring that his words are, first and foremost, compatible with the sonic structures of his songs. Hence why the lyrics featured throughout Odelay are more akin to wistful streams of consciousness than calculated messages with profound underlying meaning contained therein.

“I didn't want to be pretentious or pompous in the way some songwriters suddenly decide, ‘OK, now I'm a poet; I'm going to turn these lyrics into poetry,’ Beck confided to Rolling Stone in 1997. “For me, the words still have to be funky. Especially in the area of music I'm working in: It's not art music; it's not conceptual. The words have got to feel good, and they have to sound good; they have to fit the rhythm. That's the hardest thing. You got a melody, you got this thing that's musical, and you want to stick words on it. Words can really weigh something down. And if you put in the wrong words, I'm telling you, it'll ruin the music; it'll ruin the melody.”

Beck would subsequently refine and streamline his songwriting approach beginning with the follow-up effort Mutations (1998) and more noticeably on Sea Change (2002), but here, his words defy intuitive comprehension, and instead exist in a surreal, dreamlike state that commands listeners to exercise their imaginations.

Five singles were officially released from Odelay, with the hypnotic “Where It’s At” the first and most memorable among these. Propelled by a cacophony of distorted melodies, oddball vocal snippets, and the unforgettable chorus chant of “Where it’s at! I’ve got two turntables and a microphone,” with a robotic echo lifted from Mantronix’s 1985 single “Needle to the Groove,” Beck gives you little choice but to wholeheartedly accept his invitation to the “destination a little up the road.”

Though less ubiquitous than “Where It’s At,” the four other singles are all unequivocal standouts. The rollicking, breaks-driven “Devil’s Haircut” and buoyant “The New Pollution,” which samples the horns of saxophonist Joe Thomas’ 1976 composition “Venus” to stunning effect, are the album’s most exhilarating, pop-friendly fare. On the more subdued tip, the sprawling “Jack-Ass,” presumably an ode to listlessness in life and love, and “Sissyneck,” a countrified exploration of the free-ramblin’ existence, are both irresistible gems.

A commercial and critical triumph that went double platinum and secured countless accolades, including the 1997 GRAMMY Award for Best Alternative Music Album alongside a nomination for Album of the Year, Odelay proved the album that convinced listeners, and the music industry at large, to finally give Beck the credit he so rightfully deserved.

“Odelay was expected to be such a failure,” Beck admitted to Pitchfork in 2011. “I remember the record company having some kind of party right before there was a big merger when everyone got fired. It was after Odelay had sold 2 million copies and I remember the head of the record company giving this speech in which it was obvious that he was very confused about its success. I think everyone felt that way. So pretty much everything since has been a bit of a retreat from that kind of success”.

The mighty Odelay turns thirty on 18th June. Possibly Beck’s best-known and most extraordinary statement, it still strikes hard today. As uDiscover Music wrote last year, Odelay turned the Californian artist into an internationally-recognised name: “Hansen was named Best International Solo Male at the BRIT Awards, won similar accolades from the NME, Rolling Stone and others, and Grammys for Best Alternative Album and Best Male Rock Vocal Performance for “Where It’s At.” Beck had far more than two turntables and a microphone: now the world was at his door”. This classic still shines and radiates…

THREE decades on.

FEATURE: Kate Bush: The Whole Story: Kate's KBC article Issue 12 About The Dreaming

FEATURE:

 

 

Kate Bush: The Whole Story

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

Kate's KBC article Issue 12 About The Dreaming

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THIS second part…

of Kate Bush: The Whole Story continues looking at articles/writings from Bush for the fan club. I started by discussing an interview and article I think was from 1983. That was when she was writing Hounds of Love. I am skipping back to 1982. That was when she released The Dreaming. In the third part, I will probably break away from the Kate Bush Club and Bush’s entries. However, I will come back to it, as it is a really engaging and insightful resource. What she was going through during the recording of her albums and how she was feeling. Here, for the twelfth issue of the Kate Bush Club, we got some updates from the icon. I love how there was this period where Kate Bush was writing to her fans and keeping them abreast of all the progress and happenings. After finishing her most demanding and detailed album, it must have been a kind of relief to get the album out:

“It's been a very long time since I spoke to you. It was last year--can time really keep going faster? I would like to apologise for the long gap since the last magazine and fill you in on what's been happening. It seems that every time I do something, it takes me longer to do. This album has taken one year to record and I have never done anything so involved before. After all this time, I do feel happy with the results and I just hope that you will too.

I have had a lot of help with this album. I never could have done it alone, and each person has contributed something very special.

We worked between several studios, getting time where we could at the studios with the facilities we required, eventually settling in at Advision Studios, where we finished all the overdubs and mixed the tracks. We also worked at The Townhouse and The Odyssey, and at Abbey Road Studios, where all the backing tracks were recorded.

I used several engineers, working with Hugh Padgham, Nick Launay, Haydn Bendall and Paul Hardiman. All of them were very important and all played major parts in how the album has ended up sounding.

Hugh worked on Sat In Your Lap, Get Out of My House, and Leave It Open. Hugh was a lot of fun to work with and as the first engineer on the album, he started it off in a very productive and positive way. I met Hugh when I had the pleasure to sing some backing vocals for Peter Gabriel, and I was very impressed with the sounds and the creative atmosphere. Hugh has worked with The Police, Genesis and XTC, just to mention a few.

We felt very pleased with the backing tracks and were excited at the results; however, Hugh was too busy to continue, and so I worked with Nick Launay, who had been trained by Hugh. Nick worked on Houdini, All the Love, There Goes a Tenner, The Dreaming and Suspended in Gaffa. The majority of the backing tracks were recorded with Nick at The Townhouse.

We were working through the warm summer last year, and much dedication was required from all to stay in the studio all day without succumbing to the sun.

Nick is a very young engineer and has already worked with Public Image, Phil Collins and John Martyn. Again there was a great working relationship and we were all sad that Nick was too busy to continue and that the time at The Townhouse had run out.

I moved on to Abbey Road, working with Haydn Bendall. I met him on the last album when I was working with Jon Kelly. Haydn was co-producing Sky and I found him a very patient and understanding engineer. Haydn also engineered Roy Harper's last album and among many other artists, helps up and coming writers to get their ideas securely on to tape, often securing record contracts at the same time. Haydn worked on Night of the Swallow and Pull Out the Pin. Our assistant engineer Danny Dawson, affectionately known as Dan-Dan, became part of the working team on the two tracks, and it was really enjoyable. It always is fun when you work with nice people.

The two tracks are finished and Haydn's time runs out too, so...I find Paul Hardiman, with a lot of help from Hugh Padgham.

Paul has worked with a great variety of acts, from Slade to Keith Emerson and Soft Cell. We worked at Odyssey Studios up until Christmas [1981], and by then Paul and I had a great working relationship. I felt I could communicate with him very easily and he could get the sounds I needed to hear, very quickly. We ran out of time at Odyssey and Paul suggested Advision, studios he knew from experience. He took me around there one afternoon on a Sunday. The studio was deserted and we went down to a small control room that proved to have a brilliant sound. We were sitting listening to tapes at full blast and I was falling in love with the room when the door slowly opened and a rather anxious looking studio manager edged around the door. He saw Paul and sighed with relief, and explained how he'd expected a gang of thugs to be tearing up the studio while listening to tapes of their choice-- as far as he had known, the studio was empty. We asked him if there would be any time for us to use the studio, and the three weeks we booked were to turn into more like three months. Paul and I were very excited about settling in to one studio, and Paul had some wonderful effects for sounds that he'd put away for a rainy day. I'm pleased there was a lot of rain to come.

Although all the engineers were invaluable, Paul was of special value. He became a constant companion during the album and I would often ask he advice, knowing I would get an honest answer. He is also a very funny man, so he kept us all laughing-- donning silly hats and pulling funny faces.

At Advision we met Dave Taylor--he was the assistant engineer, and he worked with us for months until the album was finished and mixed. Dave was also the maintenance engineer, and on quite a few nights, when we went home to bed, he would be up all night twiddling inside machines or trying to figure out why the digital machines weren't working. Every night we ate take-away food, watched the evening news and returned to the dingy little treasure trove to dig for jewels.

Now it's all finished, I think of the beginning. Twenty demos, ten of which became the album. In these demos all the moods and sounds were captured, and all the way through the album these demos were referred to. Often the session would stop, we'd dig out the 1/4 inch tape of the track we were working on, and with the original flavour and sounds strong in our heads, the session would begin again. In many ways it would have been interesting to have used the demos as masters, they were so spontaneous.

Del Palmer engineered all the demos and every night he would sit up in the cramped little control room, getting different sounds for each track. He sat through hours of harmonies and takes of lead vocals, replying "I'm not bored" as many times as there were cups of tea, and nodding "Yeah, Kate, I think it sounds great!", a phrase to be echoed by Hugh, Haydn, Paul--Bless you all.

Perhaps I could now walk you through the album, track by track, starting with:

Sat In Your Lap

I already had the piano patterns, but they didn't turn into a song until the night after I'd been to see a Stevie Wonder gig. Inspired by the feeling of his music, I set a rhythm on the Roland and worked in the piano riff to the high-hat and snare. I now had a verse and a tune to go over it but only a few lyrics like

"I see the people working,"
"I want to be a lawyer," and
"I want to be a scholar,"

so the rest of the lyrics became "na-na-na" or words that happened to come into my head. I had some chords for the chorus with the idea of a vocal being ad-libbed later. The rhythm box and piano were put down, and then we recorded the backing vocals "Some say that knowledge is..." Next we put down the lead vocal in the verses and spent a few minutes getting some lines worked out before recording the chorus voice. I saw this vocal being sung from high on a hill on a windy day. The fool on the hill, the king of the castle... "I must admit, just when I think I'm king."

The idea of the demos was to try and put everything down as quickly as possible. Next came the brass. The CS80 is still my favourite synthesizer next to the Fairlight, and as it was all that was available at the time, I started to find a brass sound. In minutes I found a brass section starting to happen, and I worked out an arrangement. We put the brass down and we were ready to mix the demo.

I was never to get that CS80 brass to sound the same again--it's always the way. At The Townhouse the same approach was taken to record the master of the track. We put down a track of the rhythm box to be replaced by drums, recording the piano at the same time.

As I was producing, I would ask the engineer to put the piano sound on tape so I could refer to that for required changes.

This was the quickest of all the tracks to be completed, and was also one of the few songs to remain contained on one twenty-four track tape instead of two!

There Goes a Tenner

"Everybody synchronize watches. Remember there's only half an hour to do the job. We've been rehearsing for weeks, so nothing should go wrong. Let's run through it one more time:

"I go in and distract the guard,
Frank's out the back in the getaway car,
The sign on the door turns from open to shut,
We keep them all covered, you blow the safe up,
We grab the cash, make a hasty retreat,
And tear across London using the backstreets.
Remember, be careful, give nothing away,
The arm of the Law is as long as they say."

Pull Out the Pin

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.

Suspended in Gaffa

Whenever I've sung this song I've hoped that my breath would hold out for the first few phrases, as there is no gap to breathe in.

When I wrote this track the words came at the same time, and this is one of the few songs where the lyrics were complete at such an early stage. The idea of the song is that of being given a glimpse of "God"--something that we dearly want--but being told that unless we work for it, we will never see it again, and even then, we might not be worthy of it. Of course, everybody wants the reward without the toil, so people try to find a way out of the hard work, still hoping to claim the prize, but such is not the case. The choruses are meant to express the feeling of entering timelessness as you become ready for the experience, but only when you are ready.

Leave It Open

Like cups, we are filled up and emptied with feelings, emotions-- vessels breathing in, breathing out. This song is about being open and shut to stimuli at the right times. Often we have closed minds and open mouths when perhaps we should have open minds and shut mouths.

This was the first demo to be recorded, and we used a Revox and the few effects such as a guitar chorus pedal and an analogue delay system. We tried to give the track an Eastern flavour and the finished demo certainly had a distinctive mood.

There are lots of different vocal parts, each portraying a separate character and therefore each demanding an individual sound. When a lot of vocals are being used in contrast rather than "as one," more emphasis has to go on distinguishing between the different voices, especially if the vocals are coming from one person.

To help the separation we used the effects we had. When we mastered the track, a lot more electronic effects and different kinds of echoes were used, helping to place the vocals and give a greater sense of perspective.

Every person who came into the studio was given the "end backing vocals test" to guess what is being sung at the end of the song.

"How many words is it?"

"Five."

"Does it begin with a 'W'?"

It is very difficult to guess, but it can be done, especially when you know what the song is about.

I would love to know your answers.

The Dreaming

We started with the drums, working to a basic Linn drum machine pattern, making them sound as tribal and deep as possible. This song had to try and convey the wide open bush, the Aborigines--it had to roll around in mud and dirt, try to become a part of the earth. "Earthy" was the word used most to explain the sounds. There was a flood of imagery sitting waiting to be painted into the song. The Aborigines move away as the digging machines move in, mining for ore and plutonium. Their sacred grounds are destroyed and their beliefs in Dreamtime grow blurred through the influence of civilization and alcohol. Beautiful people from a most ancient race are found lying in the roads and gutters. Thank God the young Australians can see what's happening.

The piano plays sparse chords, just to mark every few bars and the chord changes. With the help of one of Nick Launay's magic sounds, the piano became wide and deep, effected to the point of becoming voices in a choir. The wide open space is painted on the tape, and it's time to paint the sound that connects the humans to the earth, the dijeridu.

The dijeridu took the place of the bass guitar and formed a constant drone, a hypnotic sound that seems to travel in circles.

.

Women are never supposed to play a dijeridu, according to Aboriginal laws; in fact there is a dijeridu used for special ceremonies, and if this was ever looked upon by a woman before the ceremony could take place, she was taken away and killed, so it's not surprising that the laws were rarely disobeyed. After the ceremony, the instrument became worthless, its purpose over.

It's interesting how some songs attract lots of ideas--this was definitely one of them, and because of the amount of ideas in this song, it made me concentrate on others, so they would not be neglected or left behind. Percy Edwards was among the ideas for this song, and he too was a real pleasure to work with. He really is the only man who imitates the voices of animals to the extent that he does, and is greatly respected for his talents. It is so beautiful to watch him burst into birdsong in a studio in the middle of London. I had images of him waking with the dawn chorus, taking part with blackbirds, the sparrows, the thrushes... but we were in the studio with Percy, and there was work to do, so he became sheep, dingoes and Australian magpies. The light grew dim and we were out in the bush on a warm windy night by the light of Percy, our fire.

Percy is a true professional, and he kept us all in awe with his wonderful ways. He was, however, a little upset by the treatment of the kangaroos, but after Paddy and I explained it was the only way to get the sound we wanted, he completely understood the situation and tried to communicate to the kangas what they had to do. The only problem was he couldn't remember the kanga word for "Dang" so he worked on "Boing" with a "D".

Night of the Swallow

Ever since I heard my first Irish pipe music it has been under my skin, and every time I hear the pipes, it's like someone tossing a stone in my emotional well, sending ripples down my spine.

I've wanted to work with Irish music for years, but my writing has never really given me the opportunity of doing so until now. As soon as the song was written, I felt that a ceilidh band would be perfect for the choruses. The verses are about a lady who's trying to keep her man from accepting what seems to be an illegal job. He is a pilot and has been hired to fly some people into another country. No questions are to be asked, and she gets a bad feeling from the situation. But for him, the challenge is almost more exciting than the job itself, and he wants to fly away.

As the fiddles, pipes and whistles start up in the choruses, he is explaining how it will be all right. He'll hide the plane high up in the clouds on a night with no moon, and he'll swoop over the water like a swallow.

Bill Whelan is the keyboard player with Planxty, and ever since Jay [Kate's eldest brother John Carder Bush] played me an album of theirs I have been a fan. I rang Bill and he tuned into the idea of the arrangement straight away.

We sent him a cassette, and a few days later he phoned the studio and said, "Would you like to hear the arrangement I've written?"

I said I'd love to, but how?

"Well, Liam is with me now, and we could play it over the phone."

I thought how wonderful he was, and I heard him put down the phone and walk away. The cassette player started up. As the chorus began, so did this beautiful music--through the wonder of telephones it was coming live from Ireland, and it was very moving.

We arranged that I would travel to Ireland with Jay and the multi-track tape, and that we would record in Windmill Lane Studios, Dublin. As the choruses began to grow, the evening drew on and the glasses of Guiness, slowly dropping in level, became like sand glasses to tell the passing of time. We missed our plane and worked through the night.

By eight o'clock the next morning we were driving to the airport to return to London. I had a very precious tape tucked under my arm, and just as we were stepping onto the plane, I looked up into the sky and there were three swallows diving and chasing the flies.

All the Love

Although we are often surrounded by people and friends, we are all ultimately alone, and I feel sure everyone feels lonely at some time in their life. I wanted to write about feeling alone, and how having to hide emotions away or being too scared to show love can lead to being lonely as well.

There are just some times when you can't cope and you just don't feel you can talk to anyone. I go and find a bathroom, a toilet or an empty room just to sit and let it out and try to put it all together in my mind. Then I go back and face it all again.

I think it's sad how we forget to tell people we love that we do love them. Often we think about these things when it's too late or when an extreme situation forces us to show those little things we're normally too shy or too lazy to reveal.

One of the ideas for the song sparked when I came home from the studio late one night. I was using an answering machine to take the day's messages and it had been going wrong a lot, gradually growing worse with time. It would speed peoples' voices up beyond recognition, and I just used to hope they would ring back again one day at normal speed.

This particular night, I started to play back the tape, and the machine had neatly edited half a dozen messages together to leave "Goodbye", "See you!", "Cheers", "See you soon"... It was a strange thing to sit and listen to your friends ringing up apparently just to say goodbye. I had several cassettes of peoples' messages all ending with authentic farewells, and by copying them onto 1/4" tape and re-arranging the order, we managed to synchronize the "callers" with the last verse of the song.

There are still quite a few of my friends who have not heard the album or who have not recognised themselves and are still wondering how they managed to appear in the album credits when they didn't even set foot into the studio.

Houdini

The side most people know of Houdini is that of the escapologist, but he spent many years of his life exposing mediums and seances as frauds. His mother had died, and in trying to make contact through such spiritual people, he realized how much pain was being inflicted on people already in sorrow, people who would part with money just for the chance of a few words from a past loved one.

I feel he must have believed in the possibility of contact after death, and perhaps in his own way, by weeding out the frauds, he hoped to find just one that could not be proven to be a fake. He and his wife made a decision that if one of them should die and try to make contact, the other would know it was truly them through a code that only the two of them knew.

His wife would often help him with his escapes. Before he was bound up and sealed away inside a tank or some dark box, she would give him a parting kiss, and as their lips met, she would pass him the key which he would later use to unlock the padlocks that chained him.

After he died, Mrs. Houdini did visit many mediums, and tried to make contact for years, with no luck--until one day a medium called Mr. Ford informed her that Houdini had come through. She visited him and he told her that he had a message for her from Houdini, and he spoke the only words that meant for her the proof of her husband's presence. She was so convinced that she released an official statement to the fact that he had made contact with her through the medium, Ford.

It is such a beautiful and strange story that I thought I had very little to do, other than tell it like it was. But in fact it proved to be the most difficult lyric of all the songs and the most emotionally demanding. I was so aware of trying to do justice to the beauty of the subject, and trying to understand what it must have been like to have been in love with such an extraordinary man, and to have been loved by him.

I worked for two or three nights just to find one line that was right. There were so many alternatives, but only a few were right for the song. Gradually it grew and began to piece together, and I found myself wrapped up in the feelings of the song--almost pining for Houdini. Singing the lead vocal was a matter of conjuring up that feeling again and as the clock whirrs and the song flashes back in time to when she watched him through the glass, he's on the other side under water, and she hangs on to his every breath. We both wait.

Get Out of My House

The Shining is the only book I've read that has frightened me. While reading it I swamped around in its snowy imagery and avoided visiting certain floors of the big, cold hotel, empty for the winter. As in Alien, the central characters are isolated, miles (or light years) away from anyone or anything, but there is something in the place with them. They're not sure what, but it isn't very nice.

The setting for this song continues the theme--the house which is really a human being, has been shut up--locked and bolted, to stop any outside forces from entering. The person has been hurt and has decided to keep everybody out. They plant a "concierge" at the front door to stop any determined callers from passing, but the thing has got into the house upstairs. It's descending in the lift, and now it approaches the door of the room that you're hiding in. You're cornered, there's no way out, so you turn into a bird and fly away, but the thing changes shape, too. You change, it changes; you can't escape, so you turn around and face it, scare it away.

"Hee Haw"

"Hee Haw"

"Hee Haw"

Lots of love,

Kate
xxxx”.

It is huge thanks to Gaffweb that we have these entries and archives. Testament to their dedication and passion that they have transcribed all of this for us fans to enjoy. I shall return to this site for the fourth part perhaps but, next, I might take us back before her debut and look at some of the artefacts and writings from pre-1978. For this Kate Bush: The Whole Story, I did want to drip into the treasure trove that is her thoughts and recollections for the Kate Bush Club. Those fan club entries that must have been so thrilling and fascinating to read. This one from October 1982 is deep and gives us a window into recording The Dreaming and details about the tracks. Commitment and real love for the fans from an artist who still..

HAS no equals.

FEATURE: You Always Taught My Right from Wrong: Madonna's Papa Don't Preach at Forty

FEATURE:

 

 

You Always Taught My Right from Wrong

IN THIS PHOTO: Madonna in 1986/PHOTO CREDIT: Herb Ritts

Madonna's Papa Don't Preach at Forty

__________

ONE of the most…

iconic Pop songs of the 1980s – or of all-time – turns forty on 11th June. In terms of her fashion, look and songwriting, Papa Don’t Preach is peak Madonna. The second single from her True Blue album, that turns forty on 30th June. I am doing more anniversaries around that. Papa Don’t Preach was a real breakthrough for Madonna. In terms of the maturity of the lyrics. Co-writing the lyrics with composer Brian Elliot, Papa Don’t Preach tell the story of a teenage girl who becomes pregnant and chooses to keep her baby, despite her father's objection. A huge number one success around the world, it is arguably that Papa Don’t Preach truly cemented Madonna’s reputation as one of the most innovative and evolving artists of her generation. As a modern icon. Only a few years from her eponymous debut album, she had done so much and her sound changed and her talent grew. Papa Don’t Preach is a masterpiece. There are some features that I want to get to. As we mark forty years of Papa Don’t Preach, it is worth remembering that Madonna has announced a new album, Confessions on a Dance Floor: Part 2. It comes out on 3rd July. She has barely slowed since she broke through. One of the hardest-working and consistently brilliant artists. Still very much the Queen of Pop! I want to first come to American Songwriter and their feature that tells the story behind the classic:

“Meaning Behind the Song

The song’s origins begin outside of Elliot’s recording studio where he allegedly overheard gossip on the street from girls at a nearby high school. Elliot would often see students standing outside the front window of his studio that they’d use as a mirror and hang-out spot, sharing gossip and stories from school. Elliot used this as inspiration for the song about a teenage girl who winds up pregnant, begging her father for compassion and assistance as opposed to judgment.

“I saw it as a sensitive plea for compassion and understanding about a young girl who found herself at a crossroads in life and didn’t know where to turn,” Elliot explained to the Los Angeles Times in 1986, describing “Papa” as “a love song, maybe framed a little bit differently.”

Elliot intended for the song to be recorded by another artist he was producing at the time, Cristina Dent. But when Michael Ostin, the A&R executive at Madonna’s label Warner Bros., heard the song, he asked to pitch it to Madonna instead. The superstar says that she was drawn to the confident nature of the song, as the young woman stands up to her father and friends, making it clear that the choice about what to do about the pregnancy is her own. Papa don’t preach I’m in trouble deep/Papa don’t preach, I’ve been losing sleep/But I made up my mind, I’m keeping my baby, she sings in the chorus.

The Message

”’Papa Don’t Preach’ is a message song that everyone is going to take the wrong way,” Madonna told Rolling Stone in 1986. ”Immediately they’re going to say I am advising every young girl to go out and get pregnant. When I first heard the song, I thought it was silly. But then I thought, wait a minute, this song is really about a girl who is making a decision in her life. She has a very close relationship with her father and wants to maintain that closeness. To me, it’s a celebration of life. It says, ‘I love you, father, and I love this man and this child that is growing inside me.’ Of course, who knows how it will end? But at least it starts off positive.”

The singer’s predictions were right. The song drew critical acclaim, while also having a polarizing impact at the time, as some critics felt like she was supporting teen pregnancy, while anti-abortion groups felt as though the song was in line with their views. “It just fit right in with my own personal Zeitgeist of standing up to male authorities, whether it’s the pope or the Catholic Church or my father and his conservative, patriarchal ways,” Madonna said to Rolling Stone in 2009 about why the song was a natural fit in her repertoire. “There have been so many fallouts, they all get confused. But for ‘Papa Don’t Preach,’ there were so many opinions, that’s why I thought it was so great. Is she for “schma-smortion,” as they say in Knocked Up? Is she against abortion?”

Regardless of the polarizing opinions, the song shot to the top of the charts around the world, including the Billboard Hot 100, and has solidified itself as one of Madonna’s career-defining hits”.

There are some features and interviews to get to. A couple of archives from New York Times. The first discusses how Papa Don’t Preach is a fantastic song and this memorable Pop song. Though its messages and themes rankle and has caused division and controversy. Although Madonna liked to challenge and cause controversy, Papa Don’t Preach is this growing Pop artist putting in deeper themes into Pop music. Not just being flippant about pregnancy, it was a superstar redefining the genre and traditional narratives:

“Madonna's new song ''Papa Don't Preach'' hit the top of the pop charts a few weeks ago and all around the city her voice is heard, singing of adolescent pregnancy. It drifted through Kathie Peters's headphones on a recent afternoon as she made her way to a pizza parlor in Queens, and the 18-year-old broke into a sidewalk boogie:

''Papa don't preach, I'm in trouble deep Papa don't preach, I've been losing sleep But I made up my mind, I'm keeping my baby.. . .''

Later that day, she took part in a ''sexuality rap session'' at an adolescent services center in Manhattan, The Door, at 618 Avenue of the Americas at 18th Street. When a social worker leading the group mentioned ''Papa Don't Preach,'' Kathie Peters shook her head and said: ''Too many kids are getting pregnant. They don't know what they're getting into. I don't like the message.''

''But,'' she added with a sheepish smile, ''I do like the beat.''

Many young people like the beat. The song is the second single from Madonna's third album, ''True Blue,'' currently one of the best-selling records in the United States. In the popular video, the rock star portrays a pregnant teen-ager who begs her father to bless her decision to keep the baby. Song Gets Criticism and Support

As its popularity has increased, so has the criticism and support the song has received from groups concerned with pregnancy and abortion.

''The message,'' said the executive director of Planned Parenthood of New York City, Alfred Moran, ''is that getting pregnant is cool and having the baby is the right thing and a good thing and don't listen to your parents, the school, anybody who tells you otherwise -don't preach to me, Papa. The reality is that what Madonna is suggesting to teen-agers is a path to permanent poverty.''

However, groups opposed to abortion see ''Papa Don't Preach'' as a positive, ''pro-life'' song. ''Abortion is readily available on every street corner for young women,'' said the president of the California chapter of Feminists for Life in America, Susan Carpenter-McMillan. ''Now what Madonna is telling them is, hey, there's an alternative.'' Lace Gloves and Rosaries

Mr. Moran remembers how his agency's clinics were filled last year with girls wearing fingerless lace gloves and rosaries around their necks, in imitation of Madonna's fashion style.

''Everybody I've talked to believes she has more impact on young teen-agers than any other single entertainer since the Beatles,'' Mr. Moran said. ''That's what makes this particular song so destructive.''

Mr. Moran and others in the family planning field fear that the song will undermine their efforts to promote birth control among adolescents and that it will encourage teen-age pregnancy. More than a million American teen-agers become pregnant each year, according to the Alan Guttmacher Institute, a New York-based national research organization.

A campaign to discourage teen-age pregnancy began earlier this week, from the Mayor's Office of Adolescent Pregnancy and Parenting Services. Subway posters, television and radio spots will carry the slogan ''Be Smart About Sex,'' and L.L. Cool J., a rap artist, has recorded a ''Smart Sex Rap'' for radio.

''We're using the same medium to put across a very different message about being smart and avoiding teen-aged pregnancy,'' said Alice Radosh, the office's coordinator. ''The timing of the Madonna song concerns us.''

Mr. Moran said his Planned Parenthood chapter is sending a ''critical memo'' to radio and television stations in the metropolitan area urging them to ''think carefully about playing this song to young audiences.'' He added that his chapter is asking Warner Brothers Records, the parent company of Madonna's label, to donate at least 25 percent of earnings from the song to programs that promote responsible sexual behavior. Teen-Agers React Positively

Teen-agers do react positively to the song, said Ms. Carpenter-McMillan, who recently took a television crew to a Los Angeles maternity home where she played the music video for an audience of teen-agers. ''These were young girls, 14, 15, 16, living through tough times, going against parents and boyfriends,'' she said. ''Knowing someone like Madonna is in their corner, saying, 'All right! Go for it!' was so uplifting.''

For the most part, Madonna has avoided the debate. The singer will not comment on the song's use as an anti-abortion statement, according to a spokesman, Liz Rosenberg. ''She's singing a song, not taking a stand,'' Ms. Rosenberg said. ''Her philosophy is people can think what they want to think.''

Shortly before the record's release, however, in an interview with a New York Times music critic, Stephen Holden, Madonna described it as ''a message song that everyone is going to take the wrong way'' and predicted she would be accused of ''advising every young girl to go out and get pregnant.''

The song, written by Brian Elliot, with minor lyrical revisions by the singer, tells of ''a girl who is making a major decision in her life,'' Madonna said in the interview. ''To me, it's a celebration of life.''

In Washington, Tipper Gore, a founder of the Parents Music Resource Center - a group that a year ago spurred Congressional hearings on the issue of sex and violence in rock music lyrics and has criticized Madonna's songs in the past - has spoken out in favor of ''Papa Don't Preach.''

''To me,'' Mrs. Gore said, ''the song speaks to a serious subject with a sense of urgency and sensitivity in both the lyrics and Madonna's rendition. It also speaks to the fact that there's got to be more support and more communication in familiies about this problem, and anything that fosters that I applaud.'' Papa Don't Preach Papa I know you're going to be upset 'Cause I was always your little girl But you should know by now I'm not a baby You always taught me right from wrong I need your help, daddy please be strong I may be young at heart But I know what I'm saying The one you warned me all about The one you said I could do without We're in an awful mess And I don't mean maybe -- please Chorus: Papa don't preach, I'm in trouble deep Papa don't preach, I've been losing sleep But I made up my mind, I'm keeping my baby I'm gonna keep my baby, mmm... He says that he's going to marry me We can raise a little family Maybe we'll be all right It's a sacrifice But my friends keep telling me to give it up Saying I'm too young, I ought to live it up What I need right now is some good advice, please Chorus Daddy, daddy if you could only see Just how good he's been treating me You'd give us your blessing right now 'Cause we are in love We are in love, so please Chorus”.

This interview shows Madonna in relaxed mood. True Blue an album more varied and perhaps more heartfelt than her previous work, not only were the compositions different. I think there is this new maturity. Her lyrics also exploring subjects like teen pregnancy. I can understand why some parents in America might have felt like Madonna was glamorising it. However, it is this song of defiance and protest:

''I like challenge and controversy - I like to tick people off,'' Madonna boasted, tossing her head and flashing a mischievous half-smile. The 27-year-old pop star was sipping a diet cola in a conference room at the New York offices of Warner Bros. Records. She appeared almost demure in a pink-and-blue flowered dress and a very short haircut inspired by the late-50's gamine look of Jean Seberg, Audrey Hepburn and Leslie Caron. Gone along with most of her hair was the heavy makeup and jewelry that made last year's Madonna resemble a contemporary street version of Marilyn Monroe in ''Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.''

''After awhile I got sick of wearing tons of jewelry - I wanted to clean myself off,'' Madonna said flatly. ''I see my new look as very innocent and feminine and unadorned. It makes me feel good. Growing up, I admired the kind of beautiful glamorous woman - from Brigitte Bardot to Grace Kelly - who doesn't seem to be around much anymore. I think it's time for that kind of glamour to come back.''

If Madonna's new upscale look represents a dramatic swing away from the provocative sex symbol who wore lingerie as outerwear and crucifixes like diamonds, it does not signal an end to her courting of controversy. ''Papa Don't Preach,'' the second single from her third album, ''True Blue'' (Sire 25442; LP, cassette, compact disk), is bound to rile some parents of teen-age girls. The protagonist of the song, which was written by Brian Elliot, is a pregnant adolescent who begs her father to bless her decision to keep the baby and marry her boyfriend. Madonna sings it in a passionate, bratty sob that makes the plea immediate and believable.

The song has also been turned into a compelling slice-of-life music video. Filmed on location in a working-class neighborhood of Staten Island, with Danny Aiello playing the father, it features a virtuoso performance by a waifish, saucer-eyed Madonna, who looks all of 15 as she quivers anxiously, awaiting her father's response. Like Michael Jackson's ''Billie Jean,'' the song and its video have an iconographic resonance that could push Madonna's career to an even higher plateau than the household-word status she attained last year with her 6 1/2-million-selling second album, ''Like a Virgin.''

'' 'Papa Don't Preach' is a message song that everyone is going to take the wrong way,'' Madonna proudly predicted. ''Immediately they're going to say I am advising every young girl to go out and get pregnant. When I first heard the song, I thought it was silly. But then I thought, wait a minute, this song is really about a girl who is making a decision in her life. She has a very close relationship with her father and wants to maintain that closeness. To me it's a celebration of life. It says, 'I love you, father, and I love this man and this child that is growing inside me.' Of course, who knows how it will end? But at least it starts off positive.''

''Papa Don't Preach,'' for which Madonna contributed a couple of minor lyrical revisions, is the only song on the album that Madonna didn't have a strong hand in writing. The song was sent to her by Michael Ostin, the same Warner Bros. executive who discovered ''Like a Virgin.'' Most of the album's eight other songs Madonna co-wrote with Patrick Leonard, the musical director for her 1985 tour, or with her sometime songwriting partner, Stephen Bray. The three also co-produced the LP”.

I am going to end with Stereogum and their feature from 2020. The Number Ones celebrates chart-topping singles from throughout the years. Regardless of what you think of its messages and whether it is harmful or empowering, there is no doubting the credentials of this song. It is a masterfully written and produced song. One that is the standout from True Blue:

“Those strings on the intro are an announcement, an almighty flex. Madonna's True Blue was her third album, but it was the first one she made when she was already a massive star, a foundational pop-music figure. Up until then, Madonna had been associated with a particular sound. Madonna made club music, post-disco dance-pop. Even her ballads nodded to that sound. So it must've been at least a little jarring for people to hear the fussy, rococo strings that open "Papa Don't Preach" -- or, for that matter, to hear those strings fade into a story-song about a pregnant teenager desperate for her father's approval. The strings nod to classical, to baroque, and to the Beatles-style psychedelia that had made a big deal about incorporating strings like those a couple of decades earlier. Madonna was doing what she felt like doing, and the things she felt like doing were working.

"Papa Don't Preach" wasn't the first single from True Blue; that was " Live To Tell," Madonna's previous chart-topper. But "Live To Tell" was a movie-soundtrack ballad, and it came out months before the album. Masterful as it is, "Live To Tell" didn't announce a great leap forward the way "Papa Don't Preach" did. "Papa Don't Preach" signaled that Madonna had enough juice to make a social-issue song that was also a stylistic left-turn. And for all its gutsiness, "Papa Don't Preach" still worked as post-disco dance-pop. Its strings faded into jittery, propulsive synth-bass and big, mechanized drums, and this story about a girl begging her father to accept her big life decision somehow became escapist club fare. That's a magic trick. That's cowboy shit.

"Papa Don't Preach" wasn't supposed to be a Madonna song. A decade earlier, the songwriter Brian Elliot had tried to become a pop star himself, but his self-titled Warner Bros. debut hadn't gone anywhere. By 1986, Elliot was producing demos for a singer named Christina Dent, who never really went anywhere either. Elliot had written "Papa Don't Preach" for Dent, and he'd played the song for the Warner A&R executive Michael Ostin. Ostin liked "Papa Don't Preach" enough to play it for Madonna, and she loved it. Ostin talked Elliot into giving "Papa Don't Preach" to Madonna, and she turned the song into a whole other thing.

Madonna is credited as the co-writer of "Papa Don't Preach," but her contribution is apparently limited to a few added-on lyrics. And yet "Papa Don't Preach" means more coming from Madonna than it would've meant from an artist who wasn't yet established. Part of it is the production. Madonna co-produced "Papa Don't Preach" with her old friend and collaborator Stephen Bray, who she'd known since before dropping out of college. (Around the same time as he was working on True Blue, Bray joined a reconstituted version of the Breakfast Club, the band that Madonna had been in before she got famous, and they peaked at #7 with 1987's " Right On Track." It's a 7.) But part of it is also the way "Papa Don't Preach" plays into the persona that Madonna had already established.

On Like A Virgin, Madonna had weaponized her own sexuality, finding a transgressive lane within mainstream pop stardom and becoming a target of parents' watchdog groups like the PMRC. But on "Papa Don't Preach," Madonna sang about a possible consequence of that sexuality. Her narrator is a teenager girl who is scared but determined. She's not thrilled about the fact that she's pregnant, but she's made up her mind. She's keeping her baby.

Naturally, "Papa Don't Preach" became a political football. Anti-abortion groups claimed "Papa Don't Preach" as an anti-abortion song. Tipper Gore, co-founder of the PMRC and pop-music boogeywoman, loved "Papa Don't Preach," calling it "an important song, and a good one, which discusses, with urgency, a real predicament which thousands of unwed teenagers face in our country." The feminist lawyer Gloria Allred, meanwhile, said that Madonna should "make a public statement noting that kids have other choices, including abortion."

Madonna never made that statement. At the time, she didn't say anything for or against abortion rights. The song never mentions the word "abortion." When Madonna's narrator sings that her friends are telling her to give the kid up, you don't know if they're talking about abortion or adoption. Maybe, for Allred, that was the problem. At the time, Allred said, "Pop songs have an enormous impact on kids today. They get their messages from music much more than from what they learn in school or in church. It becomes almost a religious message -- a code or part of their belief system." That's pretty much what Tipper Gore had been saying, too.

It gets weird when people talk about pop music as messaging rather than as pop music. I do that shit all the time. Everyone in my line of work does. Maybe, if I'd been a professional critic in 1986, I would've had some kind of take on whether "Papa Don't Preach" was an implied anti-abortion cop-out of a song. And maybe that's how Brian Elliot meant it. (At the time, he said, "If Madonna has influenced young girls to keep their babies, I don't think that's such a bad deal.") But "Papa Don't Preach" isn't a sweeping polemic about kids and sex. It's a pop song -- a great one.

For me, the strength of "Papa Don't Preach" is in how limited and specific its scope is. Madonna's narrator is one overwhelmed kid with a romantic idea in her head. It's hard to imagine things turning out well for her and her boyfriend. You can hear the doubt in her voice when she's imagining her own possible future: "He says that he's going to marry me/ We can raise a little family/ Maybe we'll be all right; it's a sacrifice." Her friends are telling her to go have a life instead, but she's not listening. That stubbornness almost feels admirable, even if it means she's going to have a hard future ahead of her.

I hear "Papa Don't Preach" as being in the tradition of the girl-group songs of the early '60s. (Elsewhere on True Blue, Madonna pays more direct tribute to that sound.) The best of those songs laid out storylines and situations. The point isn't the resolution, and it certainly isn't what that situation says about things happening in society. Instead, the point is the fear and love and anxiety and hurt that someone might feel in that moment. Madonna nails all of it.

"Papa Don't Preach" is one more example of how Madonna, a technically limited singer, could always capture the feeling of the song. On the first verse, when she's telling her father that she needs help, her voice is tremulous and hesitant. As the song goes on, her voice becomes stronger, but it keeps an anguish and a desperation. When she says that she and her boyfriend are in love, she sounds like she's melting. When she pleads for her father's blessing, she's in agony. It's a raw, messy conversation, and Madonna lets all those conflicting feelings bubble right up to the song's surface. Her voice says more than the words do.

For all the pathos of its story, though, "Papa Don't Preach" still works as pop music. The beat is steady, but all the song's flourishes -- the strings, the quasi-Spanish guitar solo, the coos of the backup singers -- float around that narrator, as if they're consoling or encouraging her. (One of the backup singers, Siedah Garrett, will appear as a featured guest in a future column.) "Papa Don't Preach" has hooks, too. It's dainty and insistent and urgent, and it glues itself right into your brain the first time you hear it. If "Papa Don't Preach" had been simply a message song, it would've aged like fine milk. But it's not a message song. "Don't Preach" is right there in the title. Instead, the song is a marvel of craft.

The video is pretty expertly crafted, too. Madonna made the "Papa Don't Preach" video with director James Foley, the filmmaker who'd just directed her then-husband Sean Penn in At Close Range. Foley had directed Madonna's "Live To Tell" video, but that one is really just Madonna close-ups and At Close Range clips. The "Papa Don't Preach" video, on the other hand, is a whole mini-movie. Madonna tries out a couple of different styles -- the hyper-styled dancer of the performance clips and the tough tomboy of the narrative scenes. But the video is way more of a showcase for Madonna's acting than for her ever-evolving persona.

The "Papa Don't Preach" video also probably did good things for Alex McArthur, the extremely handsome young man who played the one Aiello warned Madonna all about. A year later, McArthur played a serial killer in William Friedkin's Rampage. That was pretty much his entire run, though. Watching the "Papa Don't Preach" video today, it's weird to think that Danny Aiello became way more of a star than Alex McArthur. McArthur has the kind of face that seems to demand Tiger Beat covers. Aiello does not. But Aiello could act, and he had personality. Sometimes, those things matter.

The "Papa Don't Preach" video is made with style and grace, but it's the song that really does the heavy lifting. "Papa Don't Preach" rules, but it isn't one of my favorite Madonna songs. There's an intensity to her best tracks that I don't really hear in "Papa Don't Preach." Maybe there's just a bit of distance because I know she's singing in character, or maybe I just prefer my dance-pop catharsis raw and uncut. But "Papa Don't Preach" is still a masterful piece of pop craftsmanship -- one more great entry in an all-time run. We will see Madonna in this column again”.

The majestic Papa Don’t Preach turns forty on 11th June. It is one of Madonna’s most popular and celebrated songs. I think this period of her career is the most fascinating. In terms of her looks, fashion, sound and her cultural impact. Papa Don’t Preach proved – if that was ever needed in 1986 – that Madonna is…

A Pop genius.

FEATURE: Spotlight: Ella Langley

FEATURE:

 

 

Spotlight

PHOTO CREDIT: Caylee Robillard for Rolling Stone

Ella Langley

__________

I do wonder whether…

PHOTO CREDIT: Eric Ryan Anderson for Billboard

the incredible Ella Langley will tour in the U.K. at some point. She has a huge run of U.S. dates, ahead. The Alabama-born Country singer-songwriter is known for her candid storytelling and Rock-infused Country sound. Langley has been based in Nashville since 2019. Her phenomenal new album, Dandelion, was released this month. I am going to end with a couple of reviews for this incredible album. I am going to start out with some interviews. Billboard spent some time with an artist who is shouting out women in Country. How they are taking over. The massive success of her single, Choosin’ Texas, breaking records “Billboard's Women In Music Powerhouse has her sights set on Saturday Night Live and stadium sellouts”:

“This record feels like a more mature version of my artistry,” she says. “I was walking into every [writing session] with vision boards and a 100-song reference playlist. A lot of Johnny Lee, Ronnie Milsap references. Think summer nights, fireflies, a bonfire lit. I love to dance. I grew up dancing, so I wanted something where, when I listen to songs, I listen to the instrumentation.”

Langley will bring those songs to life with her trademark rock star swagger and Stevie Nicks-meets-Jessi Colter style when she embarks on an arena tour behind the album in May — just part of a busy 2026 itinerary that also includes opening shows for Morgan Wallen and Eric Church.

Who do you think of when you think of a powerhouse artist?

Dolly Parton. She acts, sings, and every day she leaves the house looking incredible. I aspire to try; I’m in sweats most of the time. Miranda [Lambert], Reba [McEntire], Jo Dee Messina, Gretchen Wilson, Stevie Nicks, Joan Jett. What I’m drawn to with strong women is their ability to be trailblazers. They’re not afraid to take risks. Just explore your artistry and have fun with it.

How have you dealt with your newfound fame?

I’m still figuring it out. I graduated [high school] with 32 kids [in my class] and I guess that benefited me, mainly because everyone is famous in a small town. It’s odd to view yourself like that. When I think of another artist, I view them as an artist. But when I view myself, it’s weird to think so many people out there that know me, that I don’t know them. But the fan experiences I’ve had — people come up and talk about what the music means — have been cool.

What is on your career bucket list right now?

[Saturday Night Live] — to be a musical guest and then one day, maybe host. Sell out stadiums, that’s always been my goal. I want to start acting in the next year. I like thrillers but also love comedy. I’m not a big romantic movie lady, so probably something funnier or a little more intense.

“Choosin’ Texas” made history at No. 1 on the Hot 100 at the same time that Megan Moroney’s Cloud 9 debuted atop the Billboard 200. How do you think these simultaneous milestones might affect other women country artists who are trying to break through?

Seeing women at the top of the charts together is incredible. It’s a testament to the stories we’re telling and how they’re resonating with fans. I do hope it keeps opening doors for female artists in the future who’ve been waiting for their turn.

Do you feel a responsibility to mentor other women artists who are coming up?

Absolutely, and there’s so many talented women coming up right now. I’m so excited for what music’s going to look like in the next two to three years. Women are about to take over, I’m telling you that right now. It’s cool to be, hopefully, someone that someone else looks up to in that way”.

I am moving on to an interview from Rolling Stone. Rather than this being an artist with an ego or feeling the need to be hyper all the time, Ella Langley seems much more chilled out and modest. Grounded and instantly relatable, this is someone who will make music history time and time again and go down as one of the greatest Country artists ever:

“Whatever inspires Langley’s easygoing brand of country music, it’s working. Ear­lier this year, she made history when “Choosin’ Texas” hit Number One on Billboard’ s Hot 100, Hot Country Songs, and Country Airplay charts at the same time. Morgan Wallen, Post Malone, and Shaboozey are the only other artists to ever achieve the feat; Langley is the first woman. To date, “Choosin’ Texas” has spent five nonconsecutive weeks atop the Hot 100. When she conceived the song, with country star Miranda Lambert and the songwriters Luke Dick and Joybeth Taylor, Langley says she was thinking about a tall tale she had heard involving Lambert, a kangaroo, and a traffic stop.

“We were at this writers retreat, and I just asked her,” Langley says, laughing. “She had a dog in the back and a kangaroo in the passenger seat, and got pulled over. I said randomly, ‘I’m sure [the police officer] was like, She’s from Texas, I can tell.’”

That line ended up becoming the hook of “Choosin’ Texas,” the song that knocked Harry Styles’ “Aperture” out of the top spot and catapulted Langley into the mainstream. She says its theme of unrequited love — a cowboy returns to his cherished Lone Star State, leaving Langley alone at a bar sipping Jack Daniel’s — is universal. “Everyone can relate to wanting something that doesn’t want you back, whether it be a relationship or a job,” she says. “I’m giving my heart to people a lot. And that’s scary to constantly do, because no one wants their heart broken.”

‘She lives life in a big way’

Langley reunited with Lambert when it came time to record Dandelion. They sing together on “Butterfly Season,” and Lambert co-produced the album with Langley and Ben West. The women have a bond forged before they ever met at that writers camp. When Langley was only a teenager, her family suffered a serious financial crisis, and she took solace in “The House That Built Me,” Lambert’s hit ballad about returning to where you were raised many years later. “We lost our house to the bank the day after my 14th birthday,” Langley recalls. “I heard that song for the first time around then. I was like, ‘Whoa, she’s singing about my life.’”

“Ella has a fiery spirit,” Lambert says. “She lives life in a big way and on her own terms. With this record, I wanted to honor her vision every step of the way.… It felt important to help her make choices that stayed true to who she is as an artist.”

Dandelion also includes a nod to another strong-willed woman from country music’s past: a faithful cover of Kitty Wells’ 1952 track “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels,” the first song by a solo woman to ever top the country charts. Langley loves the song and its message of empowerment so much that she uses it as the alarm on her smart speaker at home. “She had some balls on her, you know?” Langley says.

This spring and summer, Langley will play stadiums with Wallen and perform at festivals in California and Kentucky; in May, she’ll kick off her headlining Dandelion tour. “Putting on the live show has been the number-one dream for me,” she says.

Thanks to “Choosin’ Texas,” she’s also become a Number One pop songwriter, which makes perfect sense when you consider the full range of her listening tastes. “My biggest influence was Stevie Nicks, and the symbolism in songs,” Langley says. “Sometimes I’ll put in words like ‘Drinking Jack all by myself.’ That can mean a lot of things. Yes, literally, I’m sitting here drinking Jack, but what it’s also saying is ‘He’s gone!”.

Dandelion is undoubtably one of the best albums from this year. It is a masterpiece. I want to lead with a five-star review from Independent. Anyone who does not know about Ella Langley or is new to her work really needs to investigate her and listen to the magnificent Dandelion:

“In February, Ella Langley became the first woman ever to simultaneously top the Billboard Hot 100, Hot Country Songs and Country Airplay charts with her tangy, twangy country rock single “Choosin’ Texas”. It’s the mainstream success that the 26-year-old Alabamian farm girl’s been chasing all her life. “Did anything and everything to get where I’m at, and damn if it don’t feel good!” she sings on her second album, Dandelion. But later on the same song, “Somethin’ Simple”, she concedes that while “living the dream” she still cherishes the basics: “A house on the hill, horse in the yard, a dog at my feet, pickin’ my guitar, supper on the stove, hard-workin’ man taking off his dirty work clothes…”

So – although Langley first found fame singing covers on TikTok – there’s no reinventing the wagon wheel on this rich and accomplished record. There’s a classic feel to her assured blend of polished Nashville radio sounds, rootsier strumming, barbecue soul and 1970s rock arrangements (complete with the odd swirl of strings and hand claps). Langley’s a confident old-school songwriter with a great, straight-shootin’ voice: it recalls peak Shania Twain in an ability to bounce from fun to heartbreak, pure notes with a dusty little husk. When Langley saddles up, she takes a song by its reins. In recent interviews, she’s said she fought her label hard to keep the spoken sections they hated on the Riley Green duet “You Look Like You Love Me” – which turned out to be the breakthrough single from her 2024 debut album, Hungover. “If I go in and cut something, it's because I believe in it,” she said. And these 15 new songs are delivered with the head-held-high spirit of a woman who’s just shown The Man that her instincts are right.

Dandelion nails its colours to a traditionalist mast with bookending snatches of the old folk tune “Froggy Went a Courtin’” (which she used to sing with her paternal grandfather) and a swaggeringly good cover of Kitty Wells’s feminist country classic “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels”. Dandelion’s title song is a brand statement in which Langley sings over a mellow sway of pedal steel and thumped drums that she’ll always have “The Bible in my blood, and the ’Bama in my veins”.

Langley’s love songs find her yearning for cowboys to love her “from the bottom of your boots to the top of your hat”. On the mellow, organ-backed “Me and You Time” she just wants a break from her busy schedule. “Gotta Quit” is a line dance bop that sees her trying to shake the memory of “that night on your grandpa’s farm – scram!” When she’s unlucky in love, as on the Miranda Lambert co-write “Choosin’ Texas” (with its Eaglesesque highway guitars and flecks of mandolin) she’s always reaching for a glass of “Jack”. If you made a drinking game of taking a shot every time she mentions her favourite whiskey, then you’d be loaded by the end. Although on the breezy “Be Her” she also longs to be the kind of woman who “drinks wine by the glass, not by the bottle”.

Her work leans so heavily on the standard barroom furniture of the genre that, on the page at least, it seems formulaic. It’s Langley’s assured craftswomanship and intentional delivery that keep her from slipping into cliche. Even when it’s “Last Call for Us”, Langley’s still standing. This is a solid, saloon-door-slammer of a country classic”.

I am ending with a positive review from NME. The incredible Ella Langley is an artist that needs to be known by everyone. I do really hope that she comes and plays in the U.K. She is going to headline huge festivals very soon. I wonder if she has dreams of sharing the stage with music legends. One of the greatest songwriters of her generation. Dandelion is an unforgettable album:

“In case you’d missed the memo, country music is having a moment. In the past two years, massive popstars like Beyoncé and Post Malone have spurred the movement internationally, eschewing their established sounds to commercial success, so much so that country music’s share of the UK singles market has doubled, reflecting a growing enthusiasm for all things Americana.

As Ella Langley releases her second album, ‘Dandelion’, she’s sitting pretty on the top of the Billboard Hot 100 courtesy of the album’s lead single, ‘Choosin’ Texas’. Sprouting from the sweet spot between country and pop that has struck a chord with die-hard fans and casual listeners alike, the song captures the pang of rejection from a lover “two steppin’” from life with her in Tennessee to put stakes on a girl from the “Lone Star state” over the twang of bittersweet guitar and a toe-tapping beat.

While Langley herself can’t figure exactly why this particular ode to star-crossed love has connected with fans in such a powerful way, there is a warming, Shania Twain-like charm to her storytelling that both empathises with and bolsters the young women in her audience. Take, for example, the ache of forbidden dalliances on the lovelorn ‘Low Lights’, wistful connections not made to last with the inevitable doom of ‘We Know Us’ and the tender resignation of ‘Last Call For Us’.

However, taking the loss on matters of the heart meanders between tales of Langley brushing herself off and ploughing forth anew, as she flits between possibilities as a career-driven go-getter and the small-town life she left behind. “When days are long, I drift away / I play the song I used to play,” she sings of the memories that keep her grounded on the comforting expanse of ‘Loving Life Again’; meanwhile the easy-breezy ‘Somethin’ Simple’ recounts her bewilderment at her high-flying dreams becoming reality, and the soft-life yearnings that have replaced them.

There is a poignant question mark around the 26-year-old as she attempts to pin down who she is now, following the two years since her debut album ‘Hungover’ and the extensive touring that followed. The infectious hooks of ‘Be Her’ quip Langley’s introspective frustration of wanting to be the self-composed independent woman who invokes respect – not that she’s not striving in the right direction on the Miranda Lambert duet ‘Butterfly Season’: “Don’t even know her, that girl from last October. / Right now I’d like to show her who we’ve turned into.”

Despite recurring allusions to spreading her wings, starry-eyed title track ‘Dandelion’ courts the realisation that, no matter how far her career takes her from home, she is proud of and will never escape her roots. “Bible in my blood and ‘Bama in my veins,” Langley says, while quipping how no amount of fame can make her switch Jack for champagne. Because, if we’re being honest, her wildcard authenticity and fiery free spirit is the reason all eyes are on her now”.

You may not know much about Ella Langley. That will all change. Perhaps more celebrated and spotlighted in the U.S., there are publications and sites here in the U.K. celebrating her work and highlighting her brilliance. Ella Langley will one day be seen as one of…

THE all-time greats.

___________

Follow Ella Langley

Official:

https://www.ellalangley.com/

Instagram:

https://www.instagram.com/ellalangleymusic/

Facebook:

https://www.facebook.com/ellalangleymusic

TikTok:

https://www.tiktok.com/@ellalangleymusic1

Twitter:

https://x.com/ellalangleymsic

Spotify:

https://open.spotify.com/artist/6BRxQ8cD3eqnrVj6WKDok8?si=eugkzuqyRGCRxVOn5h5ohw

YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCo80hok0dbQapOH6dJl9Hqw

FEATURE: Spotlight: The Anchoress

FEATURE:

 

 

Spotlight

PHOTO CREDIT: Talie Eigeland

The Anchoress

__________

I may have spotlighted her before…

but, as a new album has been announced, I did want to talk about the wonderful The Anchoress. The moniker of Catherine Anne Davies, I have written about her a lot and reviewed her work. However, it is a perfect time to reconnect with a phenomenal artist and producer. One of our very best producers and musical minds, I think I first connected with her over our shared love of Kate Bush, especially her gifts as a producer. I would urge everyone reading this to listen back to her previous work, as she is one of the most talented artists this country has produced for decades. Work that is so nuanced and layered. Important, urgent, beautiful, potent and fascinating, I can attest to her brilliance as a live performer, having seen a The Anchoress show a few years back. Featuring her fellow Welsh queen, Gwenno, The Anchoress’s new single, I Had a Baby Not a Lobotomy, has a title that makes you smile but also makes you ask questions. Knowing that particular phrase holds power to The Anchoress. As a mother herself, what compelled her to write that song. I am going to come to a very recent NME interview where she discussed that single. I am going to pick a physical copy up over the weekend, though I felt it important to source it now to provoke and move others to do likewise. The Anchoress has also announced a date in London to promote her forthcoming album. Though I shall also come to that very soon! I am rushing this out, as a lot has dropped at once, and it is very exciting for fans of hers. Prior to getting to an interview from last year, prior to getting to that NME intervbiew, I feel it is worth highlighting. You can actually read details of the forthcoming album, As We Once Were. I will bring in another Substack feature from her, though The Anchoress talked about the vanishing music press and how valuable they are.

At a time when so many new artists need coverage and there is this jostle to be seen and heard, music journalism is as essential and required now more than any time in history. Social media, people sharing recommendations does not equate to the depth and passion, and knowledge, of music journalism! Especially independent sites like mine. Before that, some news on an album that will stand up beside the best of this year:

“If you just tuned in to my live interview with Steve Lamacq on BBC 6 Music then you will know that the cat is now out of the bag (or the first single at least…) and you can now preorder my new album, As We Once Were.

It will be released via Last Night From Glasgow this Summer and there’s lots of limited edition goodies on offer so don’t sleep on this. The first 100 copies of the double LP and first 100 CDs sold by LNFG will also be signed by me. There’s also lots of bundle discounts if you want multiple formats and even the option to include a rare test pressing: Preorder the album here.

We’ve also just announced a one-off special album launch show at London’s legendary 100 Club – the oldest independent venue in the world – on Saturday August 22nd with a parent-friendly early curfew of 10pm. Tickets are very limited and go on sale on Tuesday 14th April at 10am here.

BBC 6 MUSIC PREMIERE & NME FIRST INTERVIEW
Thanks to everyone who tuned in live tonight to BBC 6Music with Lamacq playing the first single from the album, ‘I Had A Baby Not A Lobotomy’ and chatting about all my exciting news! If you missed it, you can listen back to the show here.

ALBUM FORMATS

SO… what will you be getting? 14 tracks and around 58 minutes of brand new music. Formats wise, the album will be released on 2LP vinyl (in two colour options: coral and linen) with a leopard print etching on side 4 which I’m very excited about. Apparently this is the closest you can get to actual leopard print vinyl. Yes I did ask.

The standard gatefold CD will come with a lovely 24 page lyric booklet, while for the completists, the ltd edition deluxe 2CD hardback media book edition will include a 48 page hardback book with exclusive artwork, unseen photos, extended liner notes, scans from my studio notebooks + 1 additional CD featuring original demos, alternative mixes, and writing demos. All for just £25

A strictly limited edition cassette album will also be available to conceptually complete the beautiful back cover art, which has been lovingly created again by Simon Morse at Standard Designs in homage to the lost cassette tape of my grandmother’s voice that inspired much of the album. No spoilers on that just yet as it will give away some of the very special guests that appear on the record that I will be teasing you all with over the coming weeks…

SO WHY PREORDER?

So why part with your money now? Well, preordering makes a HUGE difference to me, the artist.

Not only does it give us the best chance of another UK Top 40 chart placement, it also signals to a wider network of shops and retailers that the demand is there. That The People (YOU) have spoken with enough notice. We don’t want to have a repeat of 2021 where we run out of stock in release week because it wasn’t clear that so many folk would want a CD!

Preordering also helps to finance the huge manufacturing costs involved and also makes sure that we can fulfil demand, as stock has to be made many months ahead of the release date, especially with vinyl.

So what’s it all about?

As We Once Were is my third studio album and the long-awaited follow-up to the UK Top 40 album The Art Of Losing, which scooped up a rack of Album of The Year nods from The Sunday Times, to Prog, to the Mail on Sunday. With Sir Elton John naming it “one of my favourite records of the year” and Caitlin Moran calling it “the inadvertent, beautiful and truthful soundtrack to this moment”, it went on to sell over 10,000 physical copies via the power of word of mouth.

I created this new album at my very own Black Lodge Studios, while being given access to Pete Townshend’s collection of vintage analogue synthesisers to produce an epic 14-track widescreen exploration of the nature of time and transformation.
Against the backdrop of the birth of my daughter (after the multiple losses documented on The Art Of Losing) and the discovery of my grandmother’s voice on a long lost cassette tape in her mother’s attic, I found myself asking the question: “What can we build out of the past? Are we destined to be held down by it? Can we ever return to these past versions of ourselves?”

This is As We Once Were.

I really think it’s my best work to date. And you know what a perfectionist I am…

Preorder it now and be part of this new chapter.

PREORDER HERE”.

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I would suggest you subscribe to The Anchoress’s Substack, as the posts are really enlightening and thought-provoking. Also, a window into the creative process and experience of an exceptional talent. Her production alone should be discussed a lot more though, as many women in the industry can attest, they are not seen as producers. The statistics around opportunities for women and the number in professional studios is shocking! An industry that needs to embrace female producers and create an environment for them. Women often discriminated against for wanting maternity leave, for example. Perhaps relevant to The Anchoress’s new single. Though I need to focus. I want to draw from an interview The Quietus published, where The Anchoress discussed her favourite albums. I will bring in sections about The Smiths’ Strangeways, Here We Come, Fiona Apple’s When the Pawn…, and, naturally, Kate Bush’s The Dreaming. I am hoping to be part of an event for the album in June (before the forty-fifth anniversary of its lead single, Sat in Your Lap). I wonder if The Anchoress would speak or provide her take on one of the songs from the album (my favourite is Houdini, but she may have her own standout!):

“The idea that you can interweave – in a very different way to the Manic Street Preachers – your educational pursuits and your more intellectual interests into your music was a real revelation to me. As somebody who was a quintessentially camp person, Morrissey’s mode of speaking and approaching lyrics felt very like home to me. I feel really conflicted about Morrissey now with his right wing nonsense. There’s still a special place in my heart for a lot of The Smiths’ music, although I do find it impossible to separate the art from the artist and I don’t really put them on anymore.

The dynamic between Morrissey and Johnny Marr was certainly something that informed the way I worked with Bernard Butler on our collaborative album. As someone who tends to usually work alone, writing and producing without any interference, I definitely took on the Morrissey-Marr model. We found a very fruitful and quick way of working where he was creating these beautiful musical landscapes and I would write the music and lyrics on top.

This is a really important record to me because it’s Fiona Apple who basically taught me how to play piano. I never had piano lessons in my life, my parents couldn’t afford to send me and it wasn’t an option for us. When I finally got to university, I used some of my student loan to buy a small keyboard from Argos. It was probably way more than I should have spent on something that wasn’t food but I was harbouring this secret plan that I wanted to be a songwriter and a producer and knew that I needed to play more than guitar, something that I’d already taught myself to play.

There weren’t many piano equivalents of the guitar tab books that were around at the time, but Fiona Apple did have this music book for Tidal, her first record. I bought that and was just thinking ‘Fuck! I’m never going to be able to do this!’ She has quite complex jazz chords – and that’s not the kind of thing you want to be tackling when you first start playing. I remember the girls in my halls – many of whom had grade eight piano – were taking the piss out of me, trying to teach myself. Here I was, trying to play ‘Pale September’ by Fiona Apple as my first attempt on the piano!

But there was something about this record that opened everything up. It was a very kind of rhythmic way of writing, almost rapping – I know Kanye West has gone on to say it was a massive influence on him – in terms of his metrical rhythms. For me, it hugely influenced my approach to the instrument in that her music taught me how to play that instrument so I guess it finds itself seeping into my playing because the chords she used are the ones I taught myself. It’s the same way I taught myself to play guitar with Radiohead, you’ll find all those sounds in my music too.

This album for me kind of goes hand in hand with Vespertine in that it’s the other record that made me think it’s possible for me to make music in the way that I wanted to, which was to write and play and produce everything myself. I remember when I was first doing demos for some major labels. They would invite me into the studio and I would just, every time, every day, come out crying because of how terrible the experiences were in terms of me having zero agency. I just wanted to go back and work in a shop like I did when I was a student. Nothing about the experience made me happy. It made me realise that the thing that did make me happy was the process of making a record and being a producer was inherent to that.

Kate Bush’s The Dreaming showed me that it was possible. It was the first record she did where she got to be the sole producer – she’d co-produced on the previous ones. This is the first record where she has full control and it’s brilliantly, batshit, bonkers. For me, it’s the first time you really get to experience the full breadth of her brilliance and her sonic eccentricity. In the same way that I constantly reference Vespertine, The Dreaming is another, with all its incredible sound collage, the spoken word voices, the theatricality, its multi-genre leanings – the jukebox style record that it is – if you listen to my first album, it’s very much influenced by that. It changed my way of thinking about music entirely – thinking that it’s okay to have a ballad alongside a kind of screamo metal song!

Once that clicked with me, I stopped making music for a year because I thought if I can’t do it on my terms, I wasn’t doing it at all. Those experiences in the studio certainly made me not want to go back to that in a hurry, as did how I was treated as a woman. Like many, I had terrible experiences with men in the industry and I ran away from it for a time: I didn’t want to be anywhere near an industry that made women feel like this. I was also constantly asked what school I went to, making me realise few people from backgrounds like mine were here. I was so naive about the industry: I had no idea what it was like and frequently legged it out of meetings.

I went to America and just accepted that I was giving up because trying to have that control in the music industry that I found myself in as a young woman, felt impossible: the labels wouldn’t let me play anything, let alone produce or develop anything. I was staying in far Northern California and after a good few months away from it, I slowly started to find the confidence to play again after those terrible experiences. Very gradually, I started writing music again, but on my own terms, with no label, learning how to play things myself, how to put a record together from scratch. Eventually, my debut album emerged on my terms and I’ll always credit this record with showing me that was possible, and for finding my way back to music”.

I am going to end with that NME interview. However, as The Anchoress wrote after speaking with Steve Lamacq on BBC Radio 6 Music, radio has always been an influential and powerful presence in her life. As an artist and a music lover. Out on the Last Night from Glasgow label on 7th August, go and pre-order As We Once Were:

“Growing up listening to the radio was an integral part of the daily thrum of my house.

We weren't really allowed to watch much TV but there was always music: my parents' vinyl collection and the constant hum of Radio 2 in the background. Terry Wogan in the morning, the chart countdowns of yesteryear at the weekends. A musical education by osmosis, as it were.

As I got older, listening Steve Lamacq and Jo Whiley on the radio of an evening was a hugely formative part of shaping my music taste. And it was the first place that I ever heard my beloved Manic Street Preachers; a moment that truly changed everything for me.

I have no doubt that I would not have become the first in my family to go to university had I not tuned in at that precise moment, with open ears and an open mind, to hear that litany of literary names — Miller, Mailer, Plath, Pinter — that I would go on to make a reading list of so that I could take it to my local library and begin my path of self-education. A twelve-year-old girl from South Wales, scribbling names into a notebook she didn’t yet have the books to fill.

Fast forward a few decades and I remember meeting Steve Lamacq for the very first time when my debut album was released and I was a guest on his Roundtable show, breathlessly thanking him for playing ‘Faster’ and changing my life path.

He was characteristically gracious about the whole thing. I, characteristically, was not cool about it at all…

The importance of public service broadcasting has never been more vital, and never more under threat. A real human hand-picking the songs that they think will move you, change you, shape you, rather than a soulless algorithm making its best statistical guess at what you probably already like.

I can’t imagine a computer deciding that a 12-year-old girl, who was previously obsessed with Kylie Minogue and Karen Carpenter, would be so strangely moved and excited by the aggressive and angular tones of the Manics. And yet, it was just what my brain and ears craved.

That’s the whole point. You don’t know what you need until someone who cares points you towards it.

I’ve been prompted to think about this as I stand on the brink of sharing something new, live on the radio next week.

If you tune in to Steve Lamacq on BBC 6 Music from 4pm this Monday 13th April, I’ll be joining him to talk about my new single and unveiling other exciting news!

You can listen live on BBC Sounds and online here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002tr0l”.

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I am going to source that NME interview. Apart from committing the cardinal sin that all press and radio do when an artist does not release music every week, The Anchoress has not ‘returned’. She is, and always will be, an active producer and artist. This idea she retired or spent years away. In fact, she has been steadily releasing music for so many years. However, NME are not the only ones culpable of using that horrible word. Andrew Trendell asked the questions and spent time with the amazing The Anchoress. It is a fantastic interview. Go and pick up a copy of NME:

“So much of this record was born out of the early years of my daughter’s life, and I really wanted to collect together and call out all of the clichés, stereotypes and dumb shit that people say to women who’ve had babies that I had encountered myself,” Davies told NME. “I started a note in my iPhone, just writing down each thing I heard pop out of people’s mouths: from the assumption that I would no longer be touring, to the assertion that I would no doubt ‘mellow out’ and have some kind of personality transplant.

“Quite the contrary: motherhood radicalised me. And I know I’m not alone in this.”

Davies continued: “So many friends have spoken about labouring under the false assumption that we had somehow reached a place of gender equality, until they became mothers and discovered how regressive so many of the systems still are around parental leave, maternity pay, and the practicalities of rearing children when it now takes two full-time wages just to exist.

“When I put it all together, it really felt like a litany of misogyny and lazy bias but it also revealed the utter inanity of most of what we are told or assumed about as a result of choosing to procreate. I’ve spent a lot of time following brilliant campaigners online who are working towards equal flexibility in the workplace and shared parental leave for freelance workers – and no, we are not entitled to it, unlike those who are employed, which still shocks people when they find out.”

PHOTO CREDIT: JJ Eringa

What can you tell us about your relationship with Gwenno and what she brings to the track?

“Gwenno is just extraordinary, as an artist, as a person, as someone who has quietly and determinedly shown that there is absolutely no reason why any of this has to stop when you become a parent. She gave me so much good, practical advice when I was first trying to navigate touring post-pregnancy. I took my daughter on tour with the Manics two summers ago (including taking her to Glastonbury) and was genuinely nervous about how to manage it all, and Gwenno really set me straight.

“She was an absolute lifesaver. I’ve looked up to her enormously, just watching her get on with it and do an incredible job of proving that it can be done. So when I was making this record, she felt like the only person I wanted on this song. The authenticity of her voice adds something I couldn’t have anticipated and was just perfect for what the track needed.”

How representative is this of the album to come?

“It captures the energy and the refusal to be quiet but I’d also say it’s one of the more overtly combative moments on the record. Think of it as kicking the door open rather than the whole room. But the album as a whole has a much broader emotional range than this first single might suggest. There are a few songs that go to some genuinely dark and tender places. There’s a song I wrote crumpled on the floor that I’m still not sure I’ll ever be able to play live. There’s a queer anthem inspired by the love letters between Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West (which features a special guest on vocals and guitar).

Can we expect any other guests on the album?

“Ssshhh! Apart from Gwenno, I can’t tell you about all that quite yet, but there is quite a star-studded cast of collaborators on there. Some familiar faces and voices, and also a couple of people who might genuinely surprise. I’m very proud of who came to the table and what they brought. To paraphrase Tori Amos, I had a big loan from the ‘girl zone’ and the conversations I got to have in the making of this record were as nourishing as anything that ended up on tape -and quite a lot of it did end up on tape.”

When can we see you on tour?

“I’ll be playing a one-off album launch show at London’s legendary 100 Club – the oldest independent venue in the world – on Saturday August 22, with a parent-friendly early curfew of 10pm to make it more accessible to all. No more worrying about getting the last train home or arranging childcare until midnight.

“I wanted to make it something people could actually come to, whatever their situation – which is why I’m also working with The Ticket Bank to make some tickets available for those on benefits. Beyond that, more dates are coming – and I promise they’ll be planned with the same thinking. Watch this space”.

I am going to end things there. I hope to interview The Anchoress soon and go to that gig at the 100 Club in London. I love everything she does; whether that is solo work, collaborating with the Manic Street Preachers or anything else. This phenomenal voice, not just musically, but in a wider social context. In terms of raising issues around gender inequality, misogyny in music and how women like her (as a new mother) are seen and how the situation for pregnant women and new mothers is worse than other women in the industry. We are at a point when there needs to be this seismic shift and massive overhaul. How realistic that is remains to be seen. Follow The Anchoress, pre-order As We Once Were, and go see her live. As of publishing this feature (15th April), there are tickets available, so get in there quickly! I wanted to show some new love for…

AN amazing queen who I respect hugely.

___________

Follow The Anchoress

PHOTO CREDIT: Talie Eigeland

Official:

https://www.theanchoress.co.uk/

Instagram:

https://www.instagram.com/theanchoressofficial/

Facebook:

https://www.facebook.com/theanchoress

YouTube:

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

Spotify:

https://open.spotify.com/artist/2Z4qmyxotDkAbZ0TpXyZyw?si=W5KicktPT2GFw-4YMUS_DA

FEATURE: Spotlight: Avery Cochrane

FEATURE:

 

 

Spotlight

Avery Cochrane

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A lot of people are talking…

about Avery Cochrane as a star of the future. A terrific voice in music. It is hard to disagree. Listen to her extraordinary E.P., Male Validation and Other Drugs, and you can this is someone who is going to have an enormous career! The music has a familiarity to it, yet this is distinctly her voice. Music that you listen to and get caught up in, rather than being passive and it washing over you. I want to get to some interviews with Avery Cochrane, as she is someone you really need to know about. I want to go back to September and an interview from The Luna Collective. They spoke with Avery Cochrane around the release of her then-new single, Shapeshifting on a Saturday Night. A song that advocated for the introverts and overthinkers, as Luna write:

“LUNA: How did you get into music?

COCHRANE: I started singing in choir. In middle school and high school, I had a jazz choir. I think jazz specifically was such a great genre to start with, because so much of it depends on improvisation and making mistakes and coming up with things as you go. I've taken a lot of what I've learned in jazz choir into my songwriting today. Then I went to school, and I kind of put music on the back burner a little bit. But when COVID hit, which was my freshman year, I was kind of, like, forced to do something other than school or do something to fill the time of being locked away in quarantine at 18 years old. I rediscovered my love for music and singing, and I've always written songs, but I started writing them to be released and recorded during COVID. That’s when I started a little less than five years ago, and it's just been non-stop ever since. I've been trying to do as much as I can, as often as I can since I started releasing.

LUNA: Was there a specific event that inspired “Shapeshifting on a Saturday Night?”

COCHRANE: No specific event, just a combination of a lot of different events that I've experienced over the last 24 years. I think the concept of shapeshifting can can be done in any context, starting from an early age - you do it on the playground to fit in with other kids, whether that's like being a mean girl or something because you think you want to fit in that way, or wearing something that you don't really want to wear. I feel like shapeshifting begins at a very early age to adapt into what you think society or your surroundings want. I just chose the concept of a Saturday night because I personally don't like going to the club at all; I hate it. But when I was in the college setting, or frat parties or the club, or whatever your friends are doing, I would feel like, I don't want to do this at all, and everybody's having a great time, what's wrong with me for not having a great time or not wanting to do this? And I like the alliteration of Shapeshifting/Saturday Night.

LUNA: This release follows your single “Corporate Ladder,” which is also a very vulnerable track. Do you ever get worried about sharing these emotional songs with people?

COCHRANE: Honestly, not really. I think I used to, but the first song I ever released was a pretty vulnerable track, a pretty emotionally-charged track about somebody I literally met on Tinder. And, like, that's pretty embarrassing [laughs]. But it’s human and, I don't know. I just find comfort when people say, I relate to this so hard. And these lyrics are so relatable, it makes me feel better, because I know I'm not alone in feeling these things. I know I'm not the only one that's wanted to quit her day job and has been frustrated with corporate America, or has shifted on a Saturday night, or has crashed out about somebody they knew for three months. I know that these are common experiences, at least that's what I tell myself. So surprisingly, I don't get that worried about it, being vulnerable.

LUNA: Yeah, honestly, music connects people. So having songs like these is really special. It's reassuring to know that other people go through similar experiences to what we go through. I also want to talk a bit about your single “The Executioner.” I really like the line, “God, help me. I am female.” We all have our interpretation of being a woman, but what does it mean to you?

COCHRANE: It’s a beautiful question. That one is tricky, because I guess when I wrote it, it was one of those things where I felt it really strong, but I wasn't really thinking about what it could mean. And whenever I play it live, I encourage the audience to sing along at the end of the song, and some men will come up and be like, As a cis, straight guy,I felt a little weird singing along at the end. I understand that, but it's a song for everybody. I think everybody has a balance of masculine and feminine in them, and I do think the feminine are the traits of people that get exploited or taken advantage of the most. And that can be in a cis, straight man, it can be in a trans woman, it can be in a trans man, it can be in a cis woman, like it can be in literally anyone. Everybody has divine femininity, and I think that, like your kindness or your sensuality, for example, I feel like those are feminine traits, and I think those things get exploited the most. So I think that the softer, nurturing, emotional qualities of someone is, is the God, help me. I am these things, and I think these are beautiful things, but somebody's taking advantage of them.

LUNA: There's such a refreshing honesty in your lyricism. How do you achieve that? What is your writing process like?

COCHRANE: It honestly kind of feels like I take lines from my journal. I try to journal every day, because I read “The Artist’s Way” a couple times. It's by this woman named Julia Cameron. She wrote it in the ‘80s or ‘90s, I think, so it's pretty dated, but it's all lessons that you can apply 40 years later. And one of them is to write every day, and that's really hard to do with short attention spans and technology at our fingertips. Sometimes I'll do a voice memo journal or something, but I think it's just a matter of being in touch with what's going on, how you're feeling. Being emotionally self aware of how you're feeling, and then just not being afraid to turn those into lyrics”.

There is another interview around the single that you should check out. The Seattle-born artist among the best-kept secrets in music. Someone who can take anxieties and relatable stresses and turn them into anthems. No wonder that she resonates with a wider and adoring fanbase! I am going to mangle this interview from Teen Vogue slightly, but I would encourage you to read the entire thing. I wanted to select a few sections from it. So many fans of her music spending time with Avery Cochrane and going deep. It is fascinating learning about her background and path into music. It is clear that Cochrane is going to elevate to the same heights as the biggest modern Pop artists. This L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.+ icon and superstar-in-waiting released potentially the best E.P. of the year with Male Validation and Other Drugs:

“It feels like it’s building to something,” says 24-year-old singer-songwriter Avery Cochrane, sitting in the high-ceilinged studio at Artist House, a publishing and recording studio in New York City’s SoHo neighborhood. Producer Benzi Edelson (who has worked with Noah Kahan, John Legend, and more) is fiddling with a drum rack, twisting the nobs on his setup while the instrumental they scaffolded together on a Leslie baby-grand piano plays on a loop. Cochrane wants a “big pop cinema sound.”

Six months ago, Cochrane left the same golf course job where she’d been working since she was 14 and moved to Los Angeles on the back of the success of her biggest hit to date, the euphoric “Shapeshifting on a Saturday Night,” which has over 3.8 million plays on Spotify. The comments sections on her videos are filled with things like “here before it blows up,” and “the people aren’t here yet… but they will be,” and “this is my proof i was here before the stadium tours.” Her second EP, Male Validation and Other Drugs, dropped March 27, and in seven smartly written, well-crafted songs, it communicates something clear: This is an artist who can hold her own in an exciting class of pop upstarts who are on the rise after the Sabrina/Chappell breakout wave.

IN THIS PHOTO: Avery Cochrane on stage at Nightclub 101/PHOTO CREDIT: Charlie Bahama

Cochrane grew up as the baby of the family with an older brother. Her mom helps rich people organize their belongings before a move. (A plus: They often want to discard designer clothes, leaving Cochrane with a sizable collection.) Her dad works at a small health care publishing company in Seattle and is a baseball coach. They were not a musical family, but she stumbled into it anyway. She journaled obsessively and wrote songs in secret so as not to seem “weird” at the age when you just want to be cool. In high school, she played softball, sang in jazz choir, and dabbled in theater. She was Troy Bolton, she jokes, except she was just in the ensemble of Hairspray.

Cochrane left Seattle to study journalism at San Diego State University in 2019, then ditched the journalism major once the pandemic hit and moved back in with her parents, realizing she didn’t know what she wanted to do yet. During those 2020 months, she wrote songs and began recording them. She didn’t re-enroll at SDSU, and instead took some production and music-theory classes at a local community college, while working customer service jobs and writing more songs. But in spring 2022, she went back to SDSU; she finished her degree in 2024, this time in political science.

Cochrane is in a speed-dating era as she continues to develop her sound, which currently draws on a lot of ’70s and ’80s pop. (Her new EP has six lead producers across seven songs.) She does see the appeal of working with just one or two producers, a la Taylor Swift and Jack Antonoff, or Chappell Roan and Dan Nigro, especially when diving into really emotional, personal material.

The breakup, for example, is on her mind as she works on this next record. “Losing Streak” captures some of the falling apart between Cochrane and her ex-girlfriend, who she calls her "first serious queer relationship.” (Cochrane uses bisexual or pansexual for herself, but isn’t too pressed about labels.) That four-year relationship shaped many of the ideas on Male Validation and Other Drugs that she could see coming to some kind of resolution on the full-length album.

“I think after historically mostly being with men, there was a lot I had to learn and go through and unlearn,” Cochrane says. “That's why I was motivated to make my project about the male gaze, because that continued to seep into my actions and thoughts and behaviors, even in a sapphic relationship.”

As Cochrane figures out the sounds to go along with her lyrics, she’s developing her pop star aesthetic and performance style, which, she says, has felt overwhelming in the past. “I never really had an idea of what I wanted to be visually,” she shares. With a team behind her now, including a creative director for her music videos, it’s easier. She’s learning what she likes and doesn’t. “I want it to be campy. I want it to have queer themes, but not super overt,” she says. “I want it to be feminine, but I'm open to it changing and expanding. I want to look good.”

She already has a theatricality to her approach: At Nightclub 101, she wears a big black faux-fur coat and sunglasses as she wades through the crowd to get to the stage, phones flashing in her face, conjuring the image of a beleaguered celebrity as she begins singing “Griever.”

Cochrane drops the coat to reveal a shiny silver bodysuit, flips her hair, winks at the audience. Suddenly, she is not Avery, a regular 24-year-old in leggings and flats, hunched over a laptop. She is a Pop Star. She wins over the crowd, cracking jokes and introducing new fans to bits of lore, including a nonsense word—"intricities” instead of “intricacies”—she recorded for her song “Losing Streak.” Onstage, she has a fan flip a coin to decide which word she’ll sing live in the performance”.

I am going to end with a new interview from Atwood Magazine that was published earlier this week. They spent time with an artist who is not only making some of the best music out there, but she is also bringing so much strength and joy to so many people’s lives. Maybe she would not want to be seen as an idol, though it is clear that she is! The next few years will see her continue to grow and play some huge stages around the world. I would love to see her in London when she is next here:

“The exploration of stark contrasts and their inevitable chasms of turmoil are well shouldered on the EP, wherein the song “Loneliness in Numbers” is perhaps the best example of Cochrane’s satire skills.

A commentary on the vapidness of social media’s preoccupations amidst the darkness of current events, it’s the track I was most excited to be able to stream once the EP dropped. So I got pumped with the plastic front to back, cause I gotta look good for the nuclear blast, she sings facetiously in the lyrics. “You’re scrolling and you’re seeing all these beautiful, unobtainable women, and then you see like, you know, breaking news, drone strike here! And you’re like, oh my gosh, how am I being fed this much information about two completely unrelated things? Like, OK, product placement here, borderline pornography here, and political violence here,” explained Cochrane of what she unravelled in the lyrics.​​

The track reminds me in many ways of Lily Allen’s hit song, “The Fear,” released way back in 2008, as well as Marina’s lyrics on “Oh No!” from her 2010 breakout album, The Family Jewels, which have held onto a timelessness that I believe Cochrane’s work is also destined for.

In the weeks leading up to the EP release, Cochrane released one final single, “Losing Streak,” which immediately landed on 5 Spotify editorial playlists, including All New Pop, which used Cochrane’s photo as the playlist cover for the week. The track is centered on a growing divide between two lovers, and the release included a music video which opens with Cochrane arriving at a house with a boombox. Despite still being unreleased at the show where I interviewed Cochrane, the crowd knew the chorus well and sang along with fervor.

PHOTO CREDIT: Aaron Sinclair

“We left the session with just the chorus,” Cochrane explained of working on the track. “Then I posted it on TikTok and it did really well. So I was like, God, I need to go back and write these verses, but it was really hard to lock in and write these verses about this relationship that I was still in, that was kind of on the rocks. It was painful to write about, to be so honest about it in real time. I like to write a lot of my songs in hindsight, so this one is very fresh.”

Pushing herself in this regard has paid off – while Cochrane met fans at her merch table, I meandered down the line and spoke to those waiting, surveying them on which song they’re most looking forward to being able to stream once the EP is out. “Losing Streak,” said Bellise Sachetto, as she held onto Cochrane’s set list, standing in line with fellow concert goer, Grace Brummel. “Same,” said Brummel, nodding adamantly. “We’re in agreement,” they said in unison. The two of them drove 45 minutes from Orange County to come to the show; another fan flew into San Diego from Colorado. I asked Sachetto where she would put the set list once she got home. “With my Taylor Swift one, from the Eras tour,” she said immediately.

When I asked Cochrane what the “other drugs” are on the EP – aside from male validation – it seemed like every answer was both a description of a release and a trap, proving the precision of her writing to send listeners into frenetic loops of joy and deep thinking.

“Antidepressants, like sertraline. Sex, but that kinda falls into the male validation of it all,” she said as she counted on her fingers how many things she’d listed. “And then, approval, wanting approval, and shapeshifting – that feels like a drug to me, going out and partying and trying to fit in. Anything that’s trying to fill some void that you haven’t filled in yourself.”

As I wrapped up the interview with Cochrane, I asked her for thoughts during the final stretch of the EP release, and what she was most looking forward to. “I’m really excited to release the rest of the songs and give context to what these existential crises are,” she said, referring back to our discussion of her soft spot for tarnished narratives of the gilded age. “I’m excited to give context to the politics behind the music. Because I feel like my music isn’t overtly political,” she described. “I like to give subtle nods. I hope people can feel that and hear that in the music and the lyrics”.

I will leave things there. Having gifted us with the Male Validation and Other Drugs E.P. and some great new interviews out there, more and more people are discovering the music of Avery Cochrane. She is simply extraordinary, and we are going to be hearing about her for years (and perhaps decades) to come. You need to connect with this extraordinary artist, because it is very clear that she is…

GOING to be a Pop supernova before long.

___________

Follow Avery Cochrane

PHOTO CREDIT: Rachel Bennett Photography

Instagram:

https://www.instagram.com/avercc/

TikTok:

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

YouTube:

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

Spotify:

https://open.spotify.com/artist/2I0aPV0zqzG1LKhsMaKFDR?si=n1Drojf7TaONKjTNqWh4WQ

FEATURE: Rolling the Ball… From Seiko to Fruitopia: Kate Bush and Commercials

FEATURE:

 

 

Rolling the Ball…

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1978 for a print advert for Seiko in Japan/PHOTO CREDIT: Flashbak

From Seiko to Fruitopia: Kate Bush and Commercials

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IT is not an extensive list…

PHOTO CREDIT: Flashbak

but there have been a couple of occasions where Kate Bush did enter the world of commercials. Not especially in a committed ways, mind. However, there was a small bit of vocalisation from Kate Bush. It takes us back to June 1978 and Kate Bush’s trip to Japan. I guess what many artists would do in the U.S. at the start of their career, Kate Bush did in Japan. She was never concerned about America. They did not get her music or understand her. Bush had better success in Japan. A few of her singles doing very well there. Them Heavy People was renamed Rolling the Ball and reached number three. It was released as a single in September 1978. That was a couple of months before Kate Bush’s second album, Lionheart, was released. However, Bush was still promoting The Kick Inside towards the end of 1978. There are not many examples of Bush lending her music and voice to advertising. She would in the 1990s, though only her voice and some compositions. For Seiko, Kate Bush did a spot and Rolling the Ball figured in. I am not sure whether there was a deal that the song would be used in the advert before being issued as a single, or EMI issued it after her visit to Japan and that connection. It is quite an odd association, though almost unique in Bush’s career. She would not revisit the country after 1978 as far as I know. Indeed, I am also unsure how she agreed to the advert. Whether it was a quick shoot and she earned quite a bit and thought it would be good exposure. She did not have much association with Seiko or is synonymous with them. Dreams of Orgonon talked about Kate Bush’s June 1978 trip to Japan. The cover to The Kick Inside features Bush in this Eastern setting. This slightly unusual and inexplicable connection with the East. A girl from Kent, who mostly listened to British and European music, it did seem like a slightly random step. However, you cannot deny the unusualness of Bush’s hectic and eventful visit to Japan:

“Bush’s relationship with Japan is slightly vexed. She’s… well, Bush is a bit rough on the issue of cultural appropriation. The cover of The Kick Inside is famously orientalist, and we’ll have lots to talk about when we talk about The Dreaming. Bush certainly has respect for other cultures, but takes the European artist’s path of lifting cultural touchstones rather than delicately conversing with their creators — indeed, she slightly flubs her one English TV interview discussing Japan when she refers to Japanese people as “not saying how they feel.” It’s a cryptic moment and some of the messages it sends aren’t great.

Even Bush’s performances, the primary record for this period, aren’t terribly well documented. There are low-quality recordings of them, but seeing as Bush’s usual bandmates didn’t accompany her to Japan and interviews in which she discusses the trip are nigh on impossible to come by, it’s hard to find any behind-the-scenes insight into this period, which renders Bush’s work in Japan ever stranger. In addition to “Moving” and a performance of “The Man with the Child in His Eyes,” she stages the most bizarre dance number rendition of “Them Heavy People” ever on a TV show called Sound in S, with co-lead vocalists and a host of dancers. It looks nothing like any other performance of the song ever — it’s genuinely bizarre a song that mentions G. I. Gurdjieff would be treated like this. Sure, Bush has a poppy edge, but this is showbiz, not her own brand of pop.

The most jarring moment of all comes in the form of… Kate Bush doing Japanese watch commercials. That’s not a shitpost, that is a thing that literally happened. Twice. And they use “Them Heavy People,” which didn’t seem to catch a break in Japan (as it was released as a Japan-exclusive single and reached #3 on the charts, this is understandable). “We have many varieties of mood within us, but it’s up to you to choose,” Bush enunciates possibly the most animistic commercial slogan ever. It’s a strange pair of adverts, and there’s probably a reason Bush did commercials so sparingly her next foray in the business wouldn’t be until the Nineties”.

I am not sure how Kate Bush reflects on the adverts now. I forgot there was a pair of adverts. However, I love everything to do with 1978 and what Kate Bush did. She must have tired of the traveling even at that point. In 1978 alone, Bush was fly to America and New Zealand. A brief Japan visit was probably necessary but it would have sapped her. Not many people discuss the Seiko promotion, though I feel it is interesting it is not her only exploration into commercials. So much intrigues me about that first hook-up. Bush recording a tagline in the studio. Her heart not completely in it, through it was for a Japanese audience, so providing her directions would have been difficult. I think that was an issue that manifested itself in the spots. How there probably wasn’t a director or producer who spoke great English. Trying to muddle through. You can see some of the translation barriers when she was at that Song Contest and doing some live work in Japan. Quite awkward by all accounts and measures.

That seemingly weird connection between Them Heavy People and Seiko. A Seiko logo appears on the insert's back side of the Rolling the Ball single, which makes it Bush's only commercial release featuring any kind of product endorsement. Bush also appeared in print ads for the brand in Japan. I wish there were crisper and cleaner photos of those print adverts, as the ones out there are a little blurry or scratchy. However, there are a few articles that looked at these Seiko adverts. You can see the photos here. She looks pretty cool and very beautiful. The adverts not too bad. She gives it all she can, though it must have been quite a confusing and strange environment for her! In 2022, Classic Rock talked about Kate Bush in Japan and her Seiko collaboration:

“Moving had been released as a single in Japan four months earlier, with Wuthering Heights as the b-side, and while soul legend Al Green won the contest, Bush's success – she shared the festival's silver prize with Chicago soul act The Emotions, whose Best Of My Love single had topped the US chart the previous year – meant that local label EMI Music Japan were eager to capitalise.

The answer? Seiko Watches. The company produced a series of print ads featuring Bush wearing their timepieces, while the September release of new single Them Heavy People saw the singer wearing another watch on the cover with a Seiko ad appearing on the back. The same song was used in a TV spot, in which Bush engaged in some freeform dance moves before offering a short, somewhat profound voiceover.

“We have many varieties of mood within us," she says. "It’s up to you to choose.”

The single was success, reaching number three in the Japanese chart. It was backed by The Man With The Child In His Eyes, a song Bush famously wrote when she was just 13, although a super-rare, promotional-only double vinyl 7" was also produced, with the second disc featuring the two tracks released in February, Moving and Wuthering Heights. Own a copy? It's worth a small fortune.

Quite why the famously independent Bush got involved with the commercial behemoths at Seiko hasn't been made clear. And it remains the only time she's leant her face to such an campaign, although she was commissioned to write some music for the adverts that launched Coca Cola's Frutopia drink in 1994 (other ads were soundtracked by the Cocteau Twins and The Muffs).

Maybe she just fancied some free watches”.

I forgot to mention Kate Bush had traction and footing in Japan with the Moving single release. This brief spell of Japanese appreciation and commercial success. I do have a fondness for her print and T.V. adverts for Seiko in Japan. Not a lot of people talk about it, though it was this bizarrely charming part of a whirlwind and exhausting visit to Japan. Little over three months after her debut album was released and she was still unknown largely, Bush was performing in front of thousands of people in Japan and appearing on T.V. and in print. It must have blown her mind!

There was a gap when Bush did not do advertising. She did radio adverts where she had to say her name and that she loved that station/D.J. People still do it now. Probably not something that she enjoyed. However, it was part of the intervbiew circuit. In 1993, she released The Red Shoes album and the short film, The Line, the Cross and the Curve. It was another exhausting time and Kate Bush was not getting the critical love she deserved. Feeling less committed to plotting another album or promotion after that, little risk taking on an advertising commission. To give a little background, and sourcing from Graeme Thomson’s Under the Ivy: The Life and Music of Kate Bush. The Line, The Cross and the Curve for a cinematic release in April 1994. The video went on sale in October. The world, as Thomson rites, “shrugged”. In 1994, her cover of The Man I Love for a tribute album to George and Ira Gershwin and entered the chart in July. It was a fantastic song and allowed her to take her voice in a direction that we had not seen in her studio albums. Bush donated a couple of pieces of original artwork for War Child for a charity auction in September 1994. Bush appeared on Top of the Pops in November 1994. It was in promotion of the final single from The Red Shoes, And So Is Love. There was a strange amount of activity from Bush that nobody talks about. As British music was exploding with Britpop and all these new sounds and bands, Kate Bush was doing her own thing and broadening her horizons. This was a $30 million campaign  to accompany the U.S. T.V. campaign for a new Coca-Cola drink, Fruitopia. Liz Fraswer of The Cocteau Twins was the voice for the U.K. adverts. Whether the producers through the two were similar and interchangeable?! Ever since that 1978 advert for Seiko, Kate Bush would have been approached so many times for various companies and products.

You can understand why she did it in 1978, as it was the start of her career and there was the commercial exposure, financial reward and a way of getting her new music to a new audience. In 1994, she had released seven studio albums and it would not be until 2005 that she would release another album (with Aerial). I feel like it was quite lucrative for Bush. Even though The Red Shoes did alright on the U.K. chart and reached number two, it was not a massive-selling album. It did well in the U.S., but she was not shifting what she did with The Kick Inside and getting the reviews she was for 1985’s Hounds of Love. Perhaps a bit of a downturn, getting a chance to compose some short instrumental pieces for this interesting range of different-flavoured drinks allowed her to spread her wings and do more in the way of composing rather than songwriting. Graeme Thomson muses that the little scraps and musical ideas that had not made it onto albums could be used for the adverts. She had full control. It was a series of thirty-second snippets where each piece of music had their own titles: Solstice, Some People, Nice, Skin, Soul, What If, Thirsty, Person, and Fighting Fruit. I think my favourite title is Fighting Fruit. What we do get is a little bit of a nod back to 1982’s The Dreaming. In terms of the experimentation. Something different from the mainstream. Hard to put a finger on. Bush not constrained by Pop conventions and what was expected. Not that Aerial was a fuller realisation of the musical ideas she produced for Fruitopia, though you can feel that these short pieces could have been strung together into something longer. Maybe a conceptual suite around the drinks or a concept that involves the making of the Fruitopia adverts.

I have often wondered whether Kate Bush considered film composition. Being given this lease to orchestrate cinema. I can imagine she was approached at some point, though she might have been busy or felt constrained by a lack of vocals. This piece form the Kate Bush Encyclopedia provides more details. A total of eleven different adverts. Titles that differed to what Graeme Thomson noted: Fighting Fruit, Nice, Passion, Raspberry, Message of Love, Soul, Where Were You?, Teaser, Summer Solstice, Some People, and What If? You can see this list of the adverts with descriptions. It was this fascinating project. You can understand why Kate Bush was attracted:

“When Kate Bush took the assignment to do the music for Coca-Cola’s Fruitopia ads, it was indeed free rein for her. Chiat/Day, New York, creative director Marty Cooke and executive producer Andrew Chinich were overjoyed when Bush agreed to do not only one, but all nine of the spots in the Fruitopia campaign. Perhaps the fact that they told her she could do anything she wanted with the scores had something to do with it. In any case, Cooke and Chinich were just glad to get Bush on the job, which she did from London with a bunch of hand-picked musicians. “She said she was interested in providing a lot of variety, from Japanese drummers to Moroccan music… and she came through in spades,” Cooke says”.

The “odd, rhythmic, electronic pop she was making around the time of The Dreaming” is what Graeme Thomson writes in his book. You can sort of hear it. I have included a few of the adverts in here, just so you can see what she was coming up with. Really interesting. The Red Shoes was quite varied in terms of the instruments used and mixing genres, cultures and continents. However, she had to reign things in slightly for an album. Not so for the Fruitopia adverts, so you get this wider and more eclectic blend. This is what Dangerous Minds wrote when they revisited Kate Bush’s Fruitopia adverts last year:

“Rewatching the Fruitopia ads now, it’s hard not to smirk at how earnestly trippy they are. Think teenage poetry meets an acid comedown, all swirling colours, slow-motion fruit, and vague cosmic guff. But Bush’s music gives them real bite—just enough weirdness to stop it all feeling like a total piss-take. It’s classic ‘90s advertising hubris: slap some Cocteau Twins on a juice ad and call it deep. Still, there’s something charming about how over the top it all is. For a soft drink campaign, it went surprisingly hard on the vibes”.

Since 1994, Kate Bush has allowed her music to be used in adverts. However, she has done nothing like the Seiko and Fruitopia adverts. It would be amazing if Bush completed the trilogy, though you feel she does not need to and adverts do not have the same spark and allure. Instead, we can remember fondly two very different advertising campaigns. Fruitopia Bush more the composer, whereas Seiko features her in print adverts and we get to see her. There is still that lingering at the as to whether Kate Bush will…

EVER do it again.

FEATURE: Before Today: Everything But the Girl’s Walking Wounded at Thirty

FEATURE:

 

 

Before Today

Everything But the Girl’s Walking Wounded at Thirty

__________

I’LL finish up on a review…

IN THIS PHOTO: Everything But the Girl (Tracey Thorn and Ben Watt) in 1996/PHOTO CREDIT: Juergen Teller

of one of the best albums from the 1990s, Walking Wounded. From the incredible Everything But the Girl, it turns thirty on 6th May. I did not realise that this was their ninth album. Amazing consistency and stamina from an astonishing duo. Also, the fact that that they were hitting a new peak nine albums in! I will get to a few articles that revisit this brilliant record. Walking Wounded is one of my favourite Everything But the Girl albums. I am going to lead off with Albumism and their great twenty-fifth anniversary retrospective of Walking Wounded from 2021. I remember when it came out in 1996 and I loved it. It was a time when I was still in the thrall of Britpop and its aftermath. Everything But the Girl provided something different and somewhat deeper:

“Though critical darlings for two decades on the strength of their early-career solo albums—Thorn’s A Distant Shore (1982) and Watt’s North Marine Drive (1983)—and string of seven albums as a duo beginning with 1984’s Eden through 1992’s Acoustic, it was their 1994 album Amplified Heart that initiated the transformation of their career.

More precisely, though Amplified Heart is a stellar affair all around, one remixed single from the LP proved game-changing for the group. When the original album version of “Missing” was released in August 1994, it made only minor ripples across the airwaves and within the record shops.

Fast forward fourteen months to October 1995, and the revered house DJ/producer Todd Terry reinvigorated the single by layering in more dancefloor-friendly beats, and the single quickly became a massive worldwide hit, one of the most universally beloved dance anthems of all time. After experiencing a career lull in the early ‘90s, Thorn and Watt were suddenly propelled to newfound heights of global popularity and commercial acclaim that at long last rivaled the critical recognition they’d garnered to date.

Coupled with the unanticipated success of the “Missing” remix, Thorn’s stunning vocals on Massive Attack’s “Protection” single a handful of months prior, and Watt’s continued exploration of the London drum and bass circuit, Everything But The Girl’s sound was destined to evolve from their more acoustic and jazz-indebted blueprint.

Upon its release in May 1996, Walking Wounded, the pair’s ninth studio effort, represented the most fully realized manifestation of their career rebirth to date. Though the group’s sonic adventurism also posed creative and professional risks. “This next step in our musical career was exciting,” Thorn declares in Bedsit Disco Queen. “There were no certainties involved in any of it, no sense of treading familiar ground; rather, a strong feeling of heading out into unchartered waters. Just before Walking Wounded came out, I remember thinking that it could go either way. We might triumph or we might fall flat on our faces. We worried that we would annoy some of the drum-and-bass underground by making a pop version of a sound that was still so new, but in the end even that never really happened.”

Masterfully produced by Watt, Walking Wounded marks the formal expansion of Everything But The Girl’s musical palette, through the adoption of more electronic, drum and bass, and house flavored soundscapes. Yet despite this new direction, the group’s arrangements are still comingled with their signature emotive songwriting & dazzling melodies. Thorn’s reassuring vocals and contemplative lyrics about the vicissitudes of life and love are perfect complements to Watt’s lush, beat-driven soundscapes.

Opening the album with a riveting rush of melodic drum and bass, “Before Today” is not your prototypical love song. And this is a good thing. A very good thing. When Thorn seductively demands “I want your love / And I want it now,” the immediacy of love and her determination to have it could not be more palpable.

Released as the second single, the shimmering stunner “Wrong” examines the “little give and take” that defines love founded upon reciprocity. More than any track on Walking Wounded, “Wrong” is most reminiscent of “Missing” and augurs the house-blessed stompers that would feature on the group’s follow-up and final album Temperamental (1999). Like its precursor, “Wrong” gets the Todd Terry remix treatment here as well, though while the beats are more pronounced, Terry’s redeux is admittedly not much of an eye-opening expansion upon the original.

A shining example of an album that exquisitely merges the cerebral, emotional and physical, Walking Wounded is the culmination of Thorn and Watt’s unparalleled devotion to songcraft and fearlessness in taking the bravest of chances with their music. Virtues that have continued to characterize their respective post-EBTG solo careers. Twenty-five years on, Walking Wounded still sounds as sublime as ever”.

It is worth getting to a review or two, just to see what critics make of this album. However, I do want to source what Rhino said in 2017 for their feature on an album that went to number six in the U.K. and scored some stunning reviews. It was a groundbreaking release from a duo who were raising the bar twelve years after their debut album, Eden. Tracey Thorn and Ben Watt would release two more Everything But the Girl albums. Temperamental came out in 1999. Apart from NME giving it 1/10 (some sh*t who clearly didn’t bother listening to it!), it did get some great reviews. Not to say 2023’s Fuse is their final album together, though it was a great album and featured highly in the year-end lists. Making the top ten in so many. One can argue Walking Wounded is not only one of the last big peaks from Everything But the Girl but maybe the best album they ever released:

“The overarching sound of the British duo Everything but the Girl (singer Tracey Thorn and instrumentalist Ben Watt) had after years settled into a pleasant, melodic pattern—keyboards and acoustic guitars laying the melodies over a mix of live and electronic percussion, with Thorn’s contralto providing the main focus and finishing touch. Something odd happened with 1994's AMPLIFIED HEART, though—a Todd Terry club remix of the song "Missing" became a massive worldwide hit, and it suddenly became apparent how ripe EBTG's music was for such aural reassessment. Heretofore unrecognized space in many of their songs' mixes could be filled with beats, echo and other accoutrements of dance music. In the right hands, a track that might have provided an agreeable diversion on the radio or in a dorm room CD player could be positively deadly on the dance floor.

Turns out the best person to take advantage of this development was Ben Watt himself, and on EBTG's next record, 1996's WALKING WOUNDED, he blew their sound wide open. The change is evident from the first notes one hears, on "Before Today"—a dreamy keyboard sample, looped several times before Thorn's voice is heard, trailed by a synth bass and hi-hat. The beats get more frenetic, paddling furiously as the song slowly slinks along. One realizes immediately how well the sound ushered in by the "Missing" remix fits EBTG's songs.

Watt plays with drum 'n' bass beats on the title track, as its skittering percussion is molded with the melody and Thorn's haunting denouement for a relationship ("Nothing can replace the us I knew"); there's a stillness that cuts through the busy undercurrent. A great contrast is "Flipside," probably the most accessible up-tempo track on the record, with a big beat contrasting the intensely inward-looking lyric. The breakdown in the middle of the song is perfect, and the slightly out-of-phase vocal provides just enough unsteady energy throughout to keep the listener engaged and moving. And longtime fans put off a bit by the club trappings will be comforted by "Mirrorball," on which an acoustic guitar provides the melodic base, lifted up in the mix, with the electronic beats dropped down. It's the most "traditional" of the album's many fine offerings.

Some might claim that Thorn and Watt were merely glomming onto a fad or three by making WALKING WOUNDED such a club record, and while acts like Massive Attack and Portishead had all but pioneered this kind of sound, EBTG proved themselves quite capable of thriving in the same space. Unfortunately, they weren't long for the world—1998's similarly structured TEMPERAMENTAL is the last we've heard from them as a band—but they certainly left a mark”.

In 2019, Pitchfork featured Everything But the Girl in their series where they revisit a great album from the past. They spend some time with a stellar and magnificent 1996 album that still sounds utterly engrossing to this day. I don’t think it has aged at all. I wonder whether Tracey Thorn and Ben Watt will mark thirty years of Walking Wounded somehow:

“In spring 1995, Thorn returned to New York with Watt, where they spent a couple of months working on more ideas for Walking Wounded. During that trip, they learned that Terry’s remix had blown up in Miami and, in fact, across the States, breaking out of the clubs and into the charts. Worldwide, it went on to sell 3 million copies.

In the months before “Missing” mania hit the UK, Watt had dived headfirst into London’s drum ‘n’ bass scene. He heard DJs like Fabio and Doc Scott at atmospheric drum ‘n’ bass pioneer LTJ Bukem’s night Speed, and connected with the freeform flow of the sound that Bukem has compared with jazz. His enthusiasm eventually convinced Thorn to join him at the club night. “It wasn’t a rock gig, and it wasn’t a rave—it felt like something new again,” she wrote in her memoir. “Strange and yet familiar, it felt possible.”

The mental space that these new encounters cracked open can be observed in the clarity with which both Thorn and Watt approached their songwriting on Walking Wounded. On the breezy “Flipside,” which features lyrics by Watt and scratching by Scottish producer Howie B, the moment Watt’s life got turned upside down is directly referenced: “London, summer ’92/I think I’ve changed a lot since then, do you?” In the next verse, Watt writes that he is “blasted land,” comparing himself to a coastline that’s constantly shifting at the mercy of the sea. It’s a poetic reminder that the processing of trauma can shape you as much as the incident itself.

In Thorn’s mouth, the lyrics serve to underline that Watt’s near-death experience left them both reeling, questioning everything they used to know. The flipside to “Flipside” comes in the form of a slo-mo drum ‘n’ bass number called “Big Deal.” Written by Thorn, she uses the titular phrase sarcastically in an attempt to deliver a reality check. With an air of frustration, she seems to sing of Watt’s search for answers in the club: “You say you wanna get cured, you wanna turn off your head/Oh and you say it hurts, and you feel unsure/First you doubt yourself and then you doubt her/Big deal, that's the way we all feel.” Everyone goes through trauma in some form or other, the song suggests, what matters is giving one another the space to work through it.

The strength of Walking Wounded lies in exactly that. Each Everything But the Girl album has its own style and story, but the one on which Thorn and Watt’s individual gifts shine brightest is the one on which they stripped everything back. They shared their knottiest feelings, created dialogue with skeletal new sounds, and made the record in a much more insular way than they ever had previously. Its timely sonics and emotionally wrought themes spoke as much to teenagers, myself included, as it did the band’s adult contemporaries (Bristol drum ‘n’ bass head Roni Size gave it thumbs up). Walking Wounded remains Thorn and Watt’s biggest-selling album with worldwide sales of 1.3 million. It did the kind of well that prompted U2 to ask them to be their tour support, something they ended up turning down because, well, they needed some space. Thorn and Watt’s relationship had been tied to their career from the very beginning, and it was time to listen to the cries for independence that Walking Wounded so clearly contained. Instead of going on tour, they started a family, and set the wheels in motion for their separate careers to come”.

I am going to finish up with the Entertainment Weekly and their hugely positive review of Walking Wounded. When we talk about the best albums of the 1990s, I don’t  think Walking Wounded is mentioned enough. Musical brilliance from Everything But the Girl. Anyone who has never heard it really does need to do so as soon as possible:

“Savvy songwriters can make even the edgiest music go pop. Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain won the world’s ardor by distilling a decade’s worth of mangy underground American rock into an embraceable new sound. Madonna scored a doubleplatinum success by shaping the subterranean gay dance style known as ”sleaze” into 1990’s Erotica. And now Everything But The Girl stand poised to take the sounds best loved by today’s hipsters to Everymall U.S.A.

On Walking Wounded EBTG infuse the swank of neo-lounge music, the whir of ambient-dance, and the spaciness of trip-hop with the sweetest pop melodies these genres have ever encountered. The groundbreaking result seems at once abstract and immediate, untamed and accessible — Julie London updated to the age of Bjork.

Not that the group’s pop-friendly brand of lounge ranks as coldly opportunistic. No act has better earned the right to bring this music to the masses.

Fourteen years ago, this English duo first matched the cool elan of Peggy Lee (courtesy of singer Tracey Thorn) to the bossa nova beat of Burt Bacharach (via musician Ben Watt). Not since the Carpenters last nailed a hit in the mid-’70s had the pop world heard so exalted a sound. While bands like The Style Council and Swing Out Sister also mined marimba’d beats, none did so with the commitment, variety, and depth of EBTG. If their seven studio albums had twee and mannered moments, the group still managed to provide the broadest possible influence for today’s neo-lounge acts, from Portishead to Stereolab.

After years of attracting only the cognoscenti, EBTG finally cracked the pop charts this year when a house remix of their 1994 song ”Missing” became a surprise top 10 hit. With that encouragement, EBTG opted to set all of Walking Wounded‘s 11 tracks to dance beats. Yet, in choosing beats more radical and complex than those featured on ”Missing,” they’ve created something far more unexpected and new.

For an aural blueprint, the duo clearly drew on two key recordings — both from U.K. trip-hop pioneers Massive Attack. Throughout Walking Wounded one can hear echoes of Thorn’s memorable cameo on the title track of Massive Attack’s last LP, Protection, and a 1995 collaboration between Massive and Madonna on a cover of Marvin Gaye’s ”I Want You.”

Expanding on those revolutionary records, Walking Wounded floats Thorn’s wan vocals over a soundscape of sputtering, hissing, and clacking beats. A clutch of eccentric rhythms turn up, from the funk rumblings of ”Single” to the ambient sway of ”Big Deal.” Watt’s sparse and spacious production lets all these sounds sparkle in air, creating a dizzying 3-D effect.

Watt also coaxes an incredible range of textures from his synthesizers — from the trampoline-bounce bass of the title track to the bedspring explosion of drums in ”Good Cop, Bad Cop.” Such sonic gymnastics comprise their own new subgenre in the U.K., called drum ‘n’ bass, a form whose celebrated ace, Spring Heel Jack, collaborated on some tracks here.

To help ground the sound, Watt and Thorn offer an array of gorgeous melodies. All undulate with a sensuality perfectly suited to Thorn’s burgundy voice. In her lilting style, Thorn recalls the sophistication of Dionne Warwick at her peak; she comes across as both haunted and aloof. By juxtaposing her woozy cadences with the brusque clatter of the beats, EBTG create a great counterpoint — the musical equivalent of manic depression.

This excited sense of melancholy fleshes out the group’s pining lyrics. Every song follows a ruinous love. ”I’m eating less and drinking more,” moans Thorn in a song that recalls the aftermath of a particularly bad affair. Another love proves painful enough to reduce her to childhood, causing the singer to plaintively ask, ”Is this as grown-up as we ever get?”

Coupled with the probing and pulsing music, these torchy sentiments achieve a psychological resonance, putting EBTG way above the campiness of most neo-lounge acts. In fact, their synthesized whooshes and bleats provide modern pop’s first corollary to the weird sounds cooked up by the early ’60s’ most avant-garde lounge stylists: Esquivel and Martin Denny.

By marrying such musical leaps to their sterling pop sensibilities, Everything But The Girl provide a classic service: They offer an ideal conduit between today’s chic underground and pop fans everywhere. A”.

On 6th May, it will be thirty years since Walking Wounded was released. A masterpiece I feel is still underrated. Not discussed as much as it should be. I do hope too that we hear more from Everything But the Girl, as that musical chemistry between Tracey Thorn and Ben Watt (who are married) always yields such wonderful results. More than evident through their…

1996 album

FEATURE: The Great American Songbook: Jack White

FEATURE:

 

 

The Great American Songbook

IN THIS PHOTO: Jack White playing at Coachella on 11th April, 2026

Jack White

__________

THE great Jack White…

is embarking on a run of tour dates that will keep him busy the rest of this year. He is coming to the U.K. in the summer, and he is going all around the world. I have never seen him live, but I really should so, as I have been a fan of his work for decades. On 3rd July, The White Stripes’ third studio album, White Blood Cells, turns twenty-five. Even though Jack and Meg White broke up years ago, that album is so important and I wonder if Jack White will mark that anniversary. As a solo artist, White is flourishing. His latest studio album, No Name, was released in 2024. Though he has put out some new singles. I am featuring him in this The Great American Songbook and will end with a twenty-song mix of his solo material. Before I get there, I want to bring in this AllMusic biography of one of the most inventive and consistently original and dazzling Rock artists ever:

“Jack White is one of the great rock conceptualists of the 21st century. He came to fame as the leader of the White Stripes, the Detroit-based garage-punk duo who were unexpectedly one of the biggest rock acts of the 2000s. The White Stripes established White as a roots rocker -- he made sure they covered blues chestnuts from Son House -- to such a degree that his modernist art instincts were somewhat overshadowed during the band's peak. These dueling, sometimes complementary instincts, fueled White's myriad artistic pursuits both within and without the confines of the White Stripes. He started stepping out on his bandmate Meg almost immediately after White Blood Cells gave the group a blockbuster in 2001, producing Loretta Lynn's Van Lear Rose and forming the Raconteurs with Brendan Benson, then the Dead Weather with Alison Mosshart of the Kills. His voracious musical appetite and strict work ethic flourished once the White Stripes called it a day in 2011, as he divided his time between his Third Man Records empire, the Raconteurs and Dead Weather, and a solo career that grew increasingly idiosyncratic with each new album. Blunderbuss and Lazaretto veered close to territory he covered with the White Stripes but the proggy oddity of Boarding House Reach didn't prove to be a detour, as the twin 2022 albums, Fear of the Dawn and Entering Heaven Alive, proved: the noisy rock of the former was complemented by the quiet, introspective adventure of the latter. 2024's Grammy-nominated No Name saw him reconnecting with no-nonsense, yet rocker-fueled blues rock. He collaborated with Eminem for a live appearance at Detroit's Ford Field, and continued experimenting with the lo-fi single "G.O.D. and the Broken Ribs."

John Anthony Gillis was born in Detroit on July 9, 1975. The youngest of ten siblings, he began playing drums at an early age and took inspiration from the world-weary blues of Son House and Blind Willie McTell. A fascination with guitar followed in his teenage years. After launching his own upholstery business in Detroit, White began to infiltrate the city's music scene as the drummer for Goober & the Peas, a local cowpunk band that split in 1995. While continuing to play drums for other groups, he crossed paths with a bartender named Meg White, and the two were married in 1996. Jack took Meg's surname, and the pair formed the White Stripes after a Bastille Day jam session showed promising results.

With their color-coded image and raw, punky sound, the White Stripes became a key component of the garage rock revival of the late '90s. In addition to their music, the bandmembers stirred public interest by claiming to be siblings, a declaration that seemed slightly less incestuous when Jack and Meg White divorced in 2000. Despite the split, the White Stripes only grew in popularity as the decade progressed, eventually winning three consecutive Grammy Awards and issuing several platinum-certified albums.

Following the release of Elephant in 2003, Jack White took a break from the group to produce Loretta Lynn's Van Lear Rose. A critical smash, the album helped endear Lynn to a new generation of fans, thanks in part to White's credibility as a rock artist. He then returned to the White Stripes for the release of Get Behind Me Satan, which saw him expanding his instrumental range with piano and marimba. Shortly thereafter, he launched a concurrent group, the Raconteurs, with friend Brendan Benson and two members of the Greenhornes (who, incidentally, had served as backing musicians on Van Lear Rose). The Raconteurs made their debut with 2006's Broken Boy Soldiers and toured in support of the album, while White publicly stressed that his work in the band should not be seen as a side project or a diversion from the White Stripes. Thus, he began juggling his responsibilities to both groups, partnering with Meg White once again for the White Stripes' 2007 release Icky Thump before returning to the Raconteurs for 2008's Consolers of the Lonely.

While touring in support of the latter album, White suffered from bronchitis and often lost his voice, prompting singer Alison Mosshart (from the Raconteurs' touring partners the Kills) to climb on-stage and contribute her own vocals. The chemistry between Mosshart and the Raconteurs proved alluring, and the musicians opted to form a separate group named the Dead Weather. With Jack White now handling drums, the band retreated to the studio and recorded an energetic debut, Horehound, in a matter of weeks. Released in 2009, the album was well-received on both sides of the Atlantic, cracking the Top Ten in America and peaking at number 14 in the U.K. Encouraged by such success, the Dead Weather began working on a second album during the fall, with the intention of previewing several new songs during an Australian tour in early 2010. In the meantime, White secured enough free time to appear in a movie -- the guitar-themed It Might Get Loud -- and produce an album for his wife, songwriter Karen Elson.

The first solo outing from White, the bluesy, typically idiosyncratic Blunderbuss, named for a muzzle-loading firearm that was a precursor of the shotgun, arrived in April of 2012. It promptly debuted in the American charts at number one, the first White-associated album to do so. Blunderbuss also earned several Grammy nominations, including Album of the Year, Best Rock Album, and Best Rock Song for "Freedom at 21." White's second solo album, Lazaretto, followed in June 2014, preceded by the single "High Ball Stepper." It debuted at number one on the pop charts and earned positive reviews. The Dead Weather released their third album, Dodge and Burn, in September 2015, and a year later White issued Acoustic Recordings 1998-2016, a double-disc compilation of acoustic numbers from his various projects. In April 2017, he released a surprise instrumental single called "Battle Cry." A lifelong baseball fan, it was announced that the song would be used as the walk-up music for Detroit Tigers infielder Ian Kinsler, with whom White co-owns the baseball bat company Warstic. In March 2018, the strange, sprawling Boarding House Reach was released, peaking at number one on the Billboard 200. The following year, he was back with the Raconteurs for the group's third album, Help Us Stranger.

In November 2021, White returned with "Taking Me Back," a single released in two versions: a noisy, gnarled rock incarnation and a softer acoustic variation. The rock spin on "Taking Me Back" heralded the April 2022 release of Fear of the Dawn, a nervy, noisy record that found White experimenting with digital effects. The jaunty acoustic revision anchored Entering Heaven Alive, a quieter but still restless record that followed in July while White was in the middle of a lengthy and eventful tour that saw him getting married onstage and playing Saturday Night Live for the fifth time.

After a period of little discernable activity, White surprised fans on in July 2024 with the release of a bares-bones, blues-influenced album titled No Name. It was packaged like a white-label promo with only the words "No Name" stamped on the sleeve and was given away to customers at Third Man records locations for free. It topped the U.K. Independent Albums chart, cracked the Billboard 200, and finished the year with a Grammy nomination for Best Rock Album. A pair of concert EPs, No Name Live and Live at Ford Field, appeared in 2025, the latter one featuring a collaboration with fellow Detroiter Eminem during the Detroit Lions halftime show. In April 2026, ahead of his sixth appearance on Saturday Night Live, White released the singles "G.O.D. and the Broken Ribs" and "Derecho Demonico”.

I am excited to see what comes next from the great Jack White. After his busy diary is through, I am sure that there will be a new album coming. He is still raising the bar this many years after he started out. It has been hard whittling down his solo material to twenty songs. However, the below represents the best…

FROM the mighty Jack White.

FEATURE: Spotlight: Elmiene

FEATURE:

 

 

Spotlight

PHOTO CREDIT: Tamiym Cader for NME

Elmiene

__________

I am going to end this feature…

with a review for his brilliant debut album, sounds for someone. I am a little late in spotlighting Elmiene, as so many people have mentioned this artist for future greatness. One of the most astonishing British musical talents, everyone needs to listen to Elmiene’s music. With a string of big tour dates ahead of him – including a load of amazing North American gigs -, it is a busy time for this artist. If you are in a position to see him live, then do go and grab a ticket. This phenomenal British-Sudanese singer-songwriter is known for his modern, poetic Neo-Soul and R&B blend. I want to start out by getting to some interviews with Elmiene. There is not a great deal of recent promotion, despite the fact he has released a new album. I wonder why there have not been new interviews published with him. I am writing this on 12th April. There might be some news one online before I share it. In 2024, THE FACE spoke with Elmiene after the release of his E.P., Marking My Time. Speaking with him in early-2024, the E.P. was released the previous October:

“Yeah, so I feel pretty cool right now,” Elmiene confirms. Having completed his music degree at Bournemouth University, the 22-year-old moved to the English capital just a few weeks ago and he’s now based in Shepherds Bush. ​“London’s good if you can find a slow pocket,” he says. ​“West London feels in that world.”

Despite his relaxed attitude, Elmiene is quickly finding success. Since posting a video of himself covering D’Angelo’s track Untitled (How Does It Feel) in 2021, he’s been cosigned by Missy Elliott and Pharrell Williams, had an original song used in Virgil Abloh’s final Louis Vuitton show and released two EPs in 2023 alone: El-Mean and the aforementioned Marking My Time.

With his buttery blend of neo-soul and R&B, it’s no surprise that hearing D’Angelo’s classic album Voodoo for the first time changed Elmiene’s life. ​“I was like, whatever this is, it’s nuts. I think I was 14 at the time,” he remembers. ​“I knew it was over. It was like BC and AD for me.”

Still, Elmiene never thought much about pursuing music professionally, though he wrote poetry in his free time. But then his housemate encouraged him to post covers online – the rest, pretty much, is history. ​“After that D’Angelo video went viral, I thought, this is the moment for me to make my own music. It felt like the logical next move,” he says. ​“It was a pretty seamless transition.”

Where El-Mean is Elmiene’s own prologue to his career, Marking My Time is a deeper exploration of genres he’s always loved, coupled with a generous amount of soul-searching.

“The best thing I could hope for in my music is for it to raise questions in people and for them to find answers there,” he says. ​“I always say that the one thing about music is this: if I can’t make you cry, I’ve failed. Then there’s no point, because it’s soul music and that’s what it’s all about. Now I’ve got my crew, like Syd and Lil Silva, and we’ve built the well, what else can we explore? How deep does it go?”

Where were you born, where were you raised and where are you now based?

I was born in Frankfurt, Germany. My parents moved down there from Sudan in the late ​’90s. From there, when I was about five, we moved to Oxford as we had a lot of family there. It was chill – I think that’s where I get my slow mentality from. I moved to London in November, which has sped me up against my will.

What kind of emotions and experiences influence your work?

A lot of my experiences involve searching for my place in life, my responsibilities. I love relationships in any form. Like, your relationship with your dad requires different things from you than your relationship with your mum or a lover or a friend. You have to be good at separate things for each person. But it’s all bound together somehow. That’s what I do.

What’s the most memorable DM you’ve ever received?

A good friend of mine sent me a DM the other day – we were gonna work at a studio in LA, which was in Pasadena. She lived in South LA, so it was a two-hour trip for her and also not a very convenient place to work. It’s like someone here being like, come work in Kent. I sent her the address and she sent me a voice note like, ​“Pasadena?! Who got you working there?” I don’t know the geopolitics of LA, but that cracked me up. She was like, ​“I ain’t going.” We didn’t make it work, either. I ended up doing the song with someone else”.

In 2025, TRENCH spoke with Elmiene. I hope that some new interviews pop up, as this is a musician really coming through. Even though he started in 2021 and might not be considered a rising or new artist, he put out one of the best albums of this year with sounds for someone and has a busy rest of the year:

“Sounds Like: “I make soul music. Still, I have my own beliefs about what the genre of soul really is. I’ve always appreciated the word ‘soul’ when describing Black music more than ‘R&B’, because soul could really be anything. To me, soul is just a reflection of your soul: it doesn’t box you into a genre. The irony is, even though I’ve called myself a soul artist, I don’t think anyone can hammer down what’s ‘soul’ and what’s ‘R&B’ because of the overlap, the context around the artist and, to be honest, just the fact that music is a reflection of the person. I might make a song that needs a Coldplay guitar or a piano you’d associate with a gospel record—it doesn’t matter.”

First Music That Inspired Him: “D’Angelo’s Live in Stockholm concert lit a spark for me. Sade, Omar and Craig David come to mind, too. Craig really bridged the gap between the two nations, which was really unheard of at the time. We don’t give him enough credit for that. 2Pac’s Makaveli album had a huge impression on me when I was younger as well. And I can’t forget about The Cure; my best friend, Jack, was really into Pulp, U2, Jeff Buckley and those guys back in the day. I actually did a cover of Jeff Buckley’s ‘Lover, You Should Have Come Over’ a couple of years back. You can pin a lot of my weirder influences on my upbringing in Oxford.”

There is an obscure children’s show from the 2000s called D.I.C.E (DNA Integrated Cybernetic Enterprises), set in the fictional Sarbylion Galaxy. The anime follows a crimson-haired kid called Jet Siegel who pilots a chromatic, mechanical suit to ride atop a scorching red dinosaur that transforms. Over here, on planet Earth, singer Elmiene transports himself to magical worlds via his Nintendo Switch 2, morphing into the likes of Mario, Kirby or Crash Bandicoot in a few button taps. Ever the one to separate his personal experiences, the 24-year-old talent is sort of like Jet Siegel in his own way—part regular guy, part larger than life. Instead of a molten-transforming dragon as a vehicle, Elmiene whips up fiery, emotive songwriting (à la Raphael Saadiq and Stevie Wonder) often spawned from third-person anecdotes and eye-level observations of his surroundings. Then, he’ll go back to watching an anime like One Piece. It’s that simple for him.

“Abdala Elamin and Elmiene aren’t that different,” he tells TRENCH. “The only thing Elmiene is better at is being outside, because I don’t like to be outside very much. Normally, I’m inside playing my Nintendo Switch 2; I was literally playing that before this interview. I don’t mean to talk about myself in third person, but it really feels like there’s a separation. Elmiene is kind of the only thing that’s brought me outside, in general. I wouldn’t have seen half the countries I’ve seen now since being this new person. Still, when it comes to the creative side of things, I’m super in-tune with both sides of myself.” Naturally, Elmiene veers the conversation towards his latest project, Heat The Streets. Surprisingly, he reveals that Heat The Streets was recorded by chance: “A friend of mine, [Grammy-nominated producer] Jeff ‘Gitty’ Gitelman and I knocked out tracks like ‘Different Too’, ‘Dull Jewellery’ and ‘Useless’ in a week. It’s funny because I grew up just after the mixtape era, but a mixtape for these tracks made so much sense. I would have just put them up on SoundCloud, but the label thought they were way too good for that.”

In just four years, Elmiene has mastered the art of fusing the personal with the cinematic. For every Rising Star BRIT nomination, BET Awards performance or BBC Sound Of… nod, there’s a track like “Mad At Fire”—tender and passionate—encased in Def Jam Vendetta for PS2-style artwork, a nod to a childhood favourite. That balance between soul and spectacle, the lived and the imagined, threads directly into his faith. “My faith plays a significant role in all of this,” he says. “It’s a crucial part of my journey, one that many other artists may not experience. I often grapple with the conflict between my identity as a Muslim and my career in music, which I know will be a struggle throughout my life. It’s always on my mind. The life I’m leading now takes me far away—both literally and figuratively—from Mecca. I find myself in places like LA and Paris, instead of Egypt or home. The more I pursue this music career, the more I feel I'm drifting away from my family and my faith. It’s like trying to hold onto two parallel lines that are moving farther apart from each other”.

Before moving to a review for sounds for someone, I will bring in extracts from a recent interview for Remixd Magazine. It is amazing to think that someone who produces this hugely passionate music that touches the human heart has never been in a relationship. However, Elmiene is a wonderful listener and seems to connect with people because he absorbs what they say and takes it all in. I wonder if a relationship or heartache might affect his music:

“Sitting down in Los Angeles, the UK-born singer is in a moment of transition. I sat down with Elmiene ahead of his Sounds for Someone album release (which is out now) and discussed the mindset he’s in this time around. Elmiene is stepping into a new chapter both creatively and personally. But I was surprised to learn that what makes his music feel so lived-in, so emotionally precise, is not necessarily a reflection of his own romantic history.

“I’ve never been in a relationship,” he admits mid-conversation, almost casually. It’s the kind of statement that stops you in your tracks, especially coming from an artist whose music feels steeped in heartbreak, longing, and intimacy. But for Elmiene, the source material has always been something broader.

“I’m a really good listener. I listen to people,” he explains. “I take their experiences and put it into my music.”

That ability to absorb and translate emotion is what has set him apart early on. Before the co-signs, before the move to Los Angeles, there was a viral moment that shifted everything. What started as a simple performance quickly became the catalyst for a career he never planned. “It was kind of against my will,” he says. “A video went viral and suddenly I was like, well, you’ve got to do it.”

That moment was him singing a cover of D’Angelo’s “How Does It Feel,” which quickly spread across social media like wildfire.

Now, that decision has taken him across continents, into rooms with some of the most respected names in music, and closer to the creative environment he feels he needs to thrive in. “For R&B and soul, the greatest musicians are here,” he says of Los Angeles. “Being close to everything just feels good.”

Still, despite the momentum, Elmiene is intentional about how he moves. Comparison is not part of the process. In fact, he has actively removed himself from it. “I deleted a lot of my socials,” he says. “There’s no time to be looking at anything else but what I’m doing.”

That focus shows up in the music, particularly on his newest project, which he describes as more personal than anything he has released before. Centered in part around his relationship with his father, the album leans into introspection over imitation. It is less about performing emotion and more about understanding it.

For Elmiene, that pursuit is ongoing. He speaks about growth not as a destination, but as a requirement. “If I ever stopped learning, I would stop doing it,” he says. “It wouldn’t be fun anymore”.

I will finish with a review of sounds for someone from NME. Before that, this interview from January captures an artist on the verge of his debut album. Someone who is writing what his soul guides and tells him too, this is an unignorable voice. Those are NME’s words, that it is completely true:

“After years spent nailing down his sound and expanding his mind as a musician, Elmiene is on the precipice of his debut album, ‘Sounds For Someone’. Last year, he previewed the LP with ‘Crying Against The Wind’, a heart-tugging two-part ballad shaped by his father’s death that has become the backbone for the record. Here, Elmiene is on a “search for completeness”, as if he’s reordering his life in front of the world with this newly honed version of himself.

Elmiene’s signature yearning for introspection and stillness can often be misread as melancholy. Even his mum tells him he “sounds really sad” on his debut album – a contrast to the funny, nerdy “I think of everything in terms of One Piece” personality he displays in real life. On closer listen, he’s singing with a smile in his own dreamy world. “I guess the lyrics are saying sad things,” Elmiene explains, “but I didn’t feel sad writing them. Sometimes when I listen back, I just have to shut up and go: ‘I like the groove, I like the bassline, I like the drums.’ Don’t notice the sadness too much.”

‘Reclusive’, his latest offering from ‘Sounds For Someone’, shows off this Trojan horse-like duality. “For the first time, it felt like I was actually telling people how I really am,” he says. “Like: ‘Break my routine… wake up, play video games…’ This is what I actually do.” The feel-good song alchemises a debilitating bout with sickness that trapped him in his house for 14 days. One morning at 5am, he just got up and walked “a long walk” – from Shepherd’s Bush to Alexandra Palace – in the pouring rain because he simply “missed the outside”.

He told this story to producer Jeff “Gitty” Gitelman, who was adamant Elmiene mine it for “an autobiographical song” because he’s “a weird guy, man – you need to tell the world. You need to let them know what it is to be you”. That’s the selling point of soul for Elmiene. To him, it’s the world’s “most honest genre ever”: “You’re not confined by what you’re supposed to talk about. I’m just writing what my soul is telling me to write.”

And he’s well aware of the deep history behind it – how Black music holds everything at once: desire, doubt, grief, humour, ego, tenderness, faith – and its start with legends like James Brown, Stevie Wonder, Otis Redding, Nat King Cole and more. His appreciation for the genre encompasses the Britons that crossed over too: Sade’s restraint, Soul II Soul’s futurism, Craig David’s “underrated” melodic instinct. He jokes that his “neeky” obsession with canonised main characters of the genre – and the lesser-told underdogs that influenced them – flavours the “secret sauce” he uses every day. That history comes full circle on ‘Sounds For Someone’, with the guidance of decorated producer No I.D. and soul OG Raphael Saadiq – the latter also playing bass across the record, including on ‘Light By The Window’ and ‘Special’.

Now, Elmiene is ready for his turn, and as part of the new class of British R&B take on the global scene. For him, that’s something he can’t do by himself: “I feel like that’s why R&B and soul haven’t really had a moment in the last 12 years or so – because it’s been people trying to fight the fight alone. You need a movement to make a movement – or else, what’s the point?”.

The mesmeric sounds for someone received so many incredible reviews. On his debut album, Elmiene has truly arrived. NME awarded the debut album five stars and said how he manages to turns small life moments into monumental music. If you have never heard Elmiene or are quite new, then you really need to listen to sounds for someone. This is someone who will be making music for decades and will be named alongside some true music legends. An astonishing songwriter who gets into the soul. If he plays in London when he is back in the U.K. then I would like to see him live. It must be a transcendent experience:

“After viral covers, acclaimed EPs and a growing reputation as one of Britain’s most naturally gifted R&B vocalists, Elmiene’s moment has arrived. The British-Sudanese singer doesn’t go for a grand statement to prove his greatness, instead his debut album ‘Sounds For Someone’ does something more: it maintains his status as the flawless technician when it comes to soul-stirring R&B. Across 12 carefully sculpted tracks – guided by neo-soul innovators No I.D and Raphael Saadiq – Elmiene treats soul as a vehicle to drive home life’s most taken-for-granted moments.

Marrying his God-given abilities with vivid storytelling and invigorating instrumentals, Elmiene creates cinematic moments on ‘Sounds For Someone’, making everyday emotions move like fully formed characters. He showcased as much with the album’s first two singles: the deeply pensive ‘Cry Against The Wind’ (coloured by grief for his late father) and the jovial loner anthem ‘Reclusive’ – he proves that his sonic stoicism has evolved well into something grander and more commanding. He alludes to this duality on the latter, singing: “I get low then I get high / I get joy sometimes I cry / I just wanna get by.”

But, no other songs feel more like watching a motion picture than the Sampha-produced ‘Special’. Elmiene zooms into love with a microscope – no grand gestures, no milestone dates, “just celebrating all of the ways” love has made him feel special – creating a sultry everyday ode to love that rivals ‘Anniversary’, the 1993 love classic Saadiq co-wrote for his group Tony! Toni! Toné!. This track is where Elmiene finally graduates from being a student of soul to its newest professor, with lived-in devotion that recalls Al Green, lingering intimacy that nods to D’Angelo and unhurried delivery that traces back to Stevie Wonder and beyond.

That same lineage runs deep on ‘Light By The Window’, where Saadiq’s magical basslines live in the details you can feel before you can hear, rolling through like a wave with the glinting guitar lines, sinking into a slinky groove that moves like sunlight across a room. Elmiene plants himself in that light, waiting, voice tracing the edges of hope and doubt as he repeats the image of being “right by the light by the window”. In a powerful tag-team moment, Saadiq passes the baton to the protégé.

Closing song ‘Told You I’ll Make It’ brings the album full circle. Written to a chopped-up reworking of ‘Untitled (How Does It Feel?)’, Elmiene rebuilds the song with a steady, hard-earned assurance – a world away from the unassuming talent who first arrived on the scene. Elmiene has had the talent since his first viral moment, but ‘Sounds For Someone’ marks the arrival of soul’s newest custodian, one who’ll no doubt create classic Sunday songs that will be played for generations to come”.

There are few artists as talented and consistent as Elmiene. An artist who always puts out the absolute finest music, sounds for someone is going to win awards and will be ranked alongside the best albums of this year. I imagine more interviews will come along. For now, absorb and experience the music of the astonishing Elmiene. I really love what he is doing and cannot wait to see where his career takes him. It is very clear that we have a modern-day great…

IN our midst.

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Follow Elmiene

Official:

https://el-mean.com/

Instagram:

https://www.instagram.com/elmiene/

Twitter:

https://x.com/_elmiene_

TikTok:

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

Spotify:

https://open.spotify.com/artist/2CLclpIC43fLzsYq6LQvlL?si=aZB-CqnYQW6vzJRdPVy0-g

YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCgQRAf-8VuCeX4qaJ2J7ONA

FEATURE: Back Into the Habit: Kate Bush and Her Captivating Shoot with Brian Griffin in 1983

FEATURE:

 

 

Back Into the Habit

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1983/ALL PHOTOS: Brian Griffin

Kate Bush and Her Captivating Shoot with Brian Griffin in 1983

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I have written about this previously…

IN THIS PHOTO: For the cover of Depeche Mode’s 1982, A Broken Frame, Brian Griffin transposed Soviet social realism to a cornfield off the M11 in East Anglia/ALL PHOTOS: Brian Griffin

but it is worth coming back, as this photoshoot is one of the best of Kate Bush’s career. In 1982, Depeche Mode released an album called A Broken Frame. It was released a matter of days after Kate Bush’s The Dreaming. There was something about this cover that caught her eye. It is an iconic shot by the late Brian Griffin. A Broken Frame’s cover depicts a woman harvesting grain in a field. It was inspired by Socialist Realism and German Romanticism, and it was later featured by Life Magazine as one of the best photographs of the 1980s. Brian Griffin sadly died in 2024 at the age of seventy-five. It is always sad when we lose someone in Kate Bush’s universe. Anyone connected to her or has appeared in her world. Whether a dance, musician or photographer, what makes it sadder is a lot of people do not know about this photopaper. We associate Kate Bush with photographers like Gered Mankowitz, Guido Harari and her brother, John Carder Bush. There are others, like Anton Corbijn, Brian Aris, and Trevor Leighton who have made their impact at various stages, that might not be as discussed as ‘the big three’ as I call them. The huge connection and vital work of Mankowitz, Bush and Harari. A lot of the shoots that we see from these photographers is related to albums. Part of the promotion and something relevant. However, this photoshoot seems to have had no commercial impetus or been tied to an album. I think Brian Griffin said on his website how he had a bit of a crush on Kate Bush and he was a bit smitten (him and everyone who photographed her). By all accounts, she was verry keen and so professional. It was said how Kate Bush was driven to Griffin’s location. Brian Griffin recalled how Bush was waiting at 6:30 one morning on the pavement outside of his studio in Rotherhithe Street. Being so close to where Bush lived (she would have split her time between South London and her family home in Kent). Griffin described Bush as this extraordinary and unforgettable personality to work with. Bush loved his work on The Broken Frame and she commissioned him for a similar, rustic, and scenic shoot in 1983 near his home in High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, involving a full creative team.

You can see some of his other photos here. Such an incredible talent, it was amazing to see him hook up with Kate Bush. There is a double meaning to calling the shoot ‘Into the Habit’. I am not sure if that was an official title at the time, but it has come to be known as that. The habit being a nun’s headdress. However, it also is Bush engaging in movement and dance. You can see her moving and so physical in the shoot. There was a period between The Dreaming and Hounds of Love where she stopped dancing, had a poor diet and was suffering exhaustion. By 1983, she was very much recommitting to dance. Also, in terms of photos, this was Kate Bush with a new energy. The Dreaming did take a lot out of her. She produced the album and was working all hours. It was such a tiring and intense time. It is no surprise that she needed bedrest and time off. That did not last too long. She has to promote The Dreaming from September 1982 pretty much until the end of the year. By 1983, there were changes in Bush’s life. One of her happiest years. She and her boyfriend Del Palmer bought a cottage in Kent and there was this rural retreat. I am not sure whether that was before or after this shoot. However, in the summer of 1983, bush was gardening and spending time with family and friends. Going to the cinema and planning her next moves. She would have built a bespoke studio right by her family home at East Wickham Farm and start demos and the framework for Hounds of Love tracks. It was a great year all things considered. Perhaps in this happier and more relaxed frame of mind, Bush did not need to do the photoshoot. This was not to promote a single or anything tied to Hounds of Love. What is interesting is most critics felt Kate Bush sort of disappeared after The Dreaminmg. Just before Hounds of Love came out, wondering where she was. Did they see the 1983 shoot?! Perhaps 1984 was a quiet year for her, though Bush was keeping pretty busy.

I am not sure whether there have been modern examples of artists loving an album cover and asking the photographer to do something similar for a separate photoshoot. So inspired and struck by this Brian Griffin image, Kate Bush contacted him and wondered if he could recreate that cover but have her at the front. I have not seen many people talk about this photoshoot. It is also extraordinary seeing Kate Bush as this nun in a field. In 2017, Brian Griffin discussed some of his iconic 1980s shoots and memories of them. This is what he said of working when Kate Bush when chatting with i-D - https://i-d.co/article/photographer-brian-griffin-interview/: “Kate had seen A Broken Frame by Depeche Mode and really liked the image in the cornfield. She saw that and she wanted something in a similar category. So therefore I found a field that we could work in, which was near my home in High Wycombe. We drove up there with the location person, make-up, hair, stylists, assistants, lights and did it in a field. She’s an amazing woman, just extraordinary. That’s all you can say, really. Extraordinary. A personality that you’ll never forget. Just to spend a day with her…”. It is a shame that the photos were not used for something wider. A Kate Bush E.P. or project. Brian Griffin did show the photos at an exhibition, though you sort of feel they are too good to be hidden now. I have said how we need a Kate Bush exhibition and a lot of the brilliant photos of her displayed. The ones she took with Brian Griffin in 1983 are among the best of her. Seeing her in this particular guise. I guess someone very pious or devout could ask if it is blasphemous or sacrilege having Bush dressed as a nun. Rather, this is Bush influenced by a Depeche Mode album cover and loving that image. Bush looks beautiful in the photos. For anyone driving near that field and seeing Kate Bush in the se poses must have got quite a surprise! In a massive year for Kate Bush where she was sowing the seeds for Hounds of Love and was in a happier headspace, there was this wonderful photoshoot that she did because she loved the cover for A Broken Frame. More people need to discuss these…

SIMPLY phenomenal images.

FEATURE: Kate Bush: Them Heavy People: The Extraordinary Characters in Her Songs: The Kid (Ran Tan Waltz)/The Beekeeper (You Want Alchemy?)

FEATURE:

 

 

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

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1980

The Kid (Ran Tan Waltz)/The Beekeeper (You Want Alchemy?)

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THIS is the first time in this series…

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush, in 1993, rehearses The Red Shoes while the crew are setting up lights and camera/PHOTO CREDIT: Guido Harari

where I am heading away from Kate Bush’s studio albums and including a couple of rarer songs. I shall come to You Want Alchemy, which appeared as an extra track on the European and Australian C.D.-singles for Eat the Music. The first song I am bringing in is Ran Tan Waltz. Most non-Kate Bush fans do not know this song. In fact, many people who love Kate Bush do not know about this song. It is a rarity. If you watched her 1979 Christmas special, Kate, then you would have seen it. In terms of the outfits and staging, it was a little peculiar! Gender-switching, Kate Bush was dressed as what looks like a chimney sweep. It is worth reflecting on that as a point. I am looking at The Kid from that song. The baby of this couple whose mother is out philandering, Bush does switch gender roles for this song. Normally, it would be the man out having sex and leaving his wife/girlfriend. Instead, Bush puts sympathy with the man and the child. This is something that Bush has done through her music. Not to say Bush lacked sympathy for women and could not be seen as a feminist. Earlier in her career, she would refute that term. Not sure what a feminist entailed to an extent, she was one without proclaiming it. However, when it came to her music, she did write a lot about men and placed sympathy with them. The usual narrative for Pop artists might have been to pour scorn on the opposite sex or write songs of break-up and dissolution. Tense and angered, Kate Bush was rare in that sense. I have written about this before. Bush having this fascination with men. The Man with the Child in His Eyes about men who retain a child-like wonder. Something women do not do as much. Wuthering Heights portraying Catherine Earnshaw as this ghoulish evil. A ghost trying to get through the window to grab the soul of Heathcliff.

Through her career, we saw cases of Kate Bush not criticising men. Ran Tan Waltz is comical and Bush being playful. It was the B-side of Babooshka in June 1980. Perhaps understandable. That A-side is about a wife not trusting her husband. Thinking her is being unfaithful, she lures him into this trap and is proven wrong. I am going to come to that song in a future feature. Ran Tan Waltz a more extreme and explicit version of that. In both songs, the woman coming off worse. Is Ran Tan Waltz making the wife/woman look loose and immoral? I think a lot of Rock songs glamourise men sleeping around and having sex with anyone. It was no doubt a staple of music when Bush wrote Ran Tan Waltz. This idea that men would be out bedding women and their other halves would be at home. It is interesting how there is this baby. The Kid. Not sure how old they are, though it is interesting that this relationship has this air of infidelity. A new mother not satisfied with her man. Out and about every night getting with someone new. Is Bush rare in the sense of not only sympathising with men but also somewhat showing a bit of bite towards women? She wrote about women and put them at the front of some of her songs, though there are occasions where she is painting them as either hugely flawed or bad. Does this impact her legacy as a trailblazer? I don’t think so. It is not Kate Bush being anti-women. Instead, she is changing things up and being balanced in her music. Female artists often writing about men in a negative way. Bush not wanting to do that. When we think of Ran Tan Wlatz, it is clear that this is not based on personal experience or Bush trying to turn the tables on women. Instead, rather than repeating what has gone before in respect of men being cheats, Bush reverses that. Women also cheat and are unfaithful. The Kid that is referred to in the song is left crying: “Where is she/When the little thing cries?/She lies in a bed/With a friend of mine”. Although it is a slight song in Bush’s cannon, it is notable because it is perhaps her most sexual and explicit. Lines like “If she picks on a dick/That’s too big for her pride” are not what you would expect from someone like her. Perhaps trying to show that she was not as the press saw her. A hippy-dippy or soft artist who was writing these weird songs. Bush showing some edge and bawdiness here.

Ran Tan Waltz is about this wife ‘ran-tanning’ – I guess having sex – all night and then being bent double over the sink after drinking too much. “And the key’s in the lock/And she’s been on the win/And she’s stinking of drink”. I do love the comical nature of the song. Many do not credit Bush as being humorous. A few of her songs have this side to them. It seems like this young marriage was ideal and there was hope. They had a baby, The Kid, and it was looking promising. It is not said why things went sour. Perhaps they were too young and it was misguided. Ran Tan Waltz was covered by Baby Bushka and I do love that the sole live performance by Bush was during a Christmas special. You can’t imagine a song less appropriate for Christmas! Again, it shows the humour and cheekiness of Kate Bush. People have noted how Bush dressed as a man in the video is quite progressive. In terms of gender-swapping in music, a lot of male/female artists did that, though I am trying to think of female artist before Kate Bush that did. Whether you see this as genuinely pioneering and a nod to the L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.+ community of Kate Bush merely adopting a persona without thinking about its wider significance, Ran Tan Waltz does need to be discussed more. I am going to come to an article that does look at the song. The most words written about a rack that virtually nobody knows about or discusses! What I wanted to explore is the variety of her B-sides. She did often have album tracks as B-sides but, as her career progressed, she wrote tracks specifically as B-sides. With Babooshka in mind, Ran Tan Waltz is this odd pairing. You have all this sympathy for The Kid. Whether a new-born or a couple of years old, little do they know what their mum is up to. The husband lamenting the fact that he has been exploited: “She saw me coming for miles/She saw me open wide”. Going back to B-sides, there was this amazingly broad collection. Some rather forgettable ones, but I am going to get to another great B-side for thew second half. Under the Ivy as the B-side for Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God) the best example of her genius. Passing Through Air the B-side to Army Dreamers from Never for Ever. Warm and Soothing the B-side of December Will Be Magic Again in 1980. 1980 an especially fertile year for Kate Bush. In terms of the depth and brilliance of B-sides. Not many people will rate Ran Tan Waltz as a great Bush B-side, though I think that they should.

Kate Bush often gets inspiration from poems, literature or T.V. I sort of wonder if there was anything Bush was watching or reading that influenced Ran Tan Waltz. How this new song made it into the Christmas special. As that was broadcast at the end of 1979, it was the premier of a track that would not be heard on a single until the following year. Those who bought Babooshka not expecting Ran Tan Waltz on the other side! I do think it is a clever and eccentric song that has a good composition. In Ran Tan Waltz, is Bush portraying herself as a man and stepping into his shoes or switching the narrative or a lot of songs? It is a fascinating thing to discuss. Some could argue, at a time when Bush was being criticised for not being political, Punk or edgy, this was her showing a middle finger to snobs in the Rock press who thought she was this silly girl. Dreams of Orgonon examined this song for a feature in 2019:

“There’s a lot to this. This is a blatantly negative song about relationship dysfunction, which is in part the bread and butter of Never for Ever, which has tracks like “All We Ever Look For” and “The Infant Kiss.” It deals with a marriage break in a material way: sex is referred to entirely as a rough act, one that’s driving a family apart rather than keeping a relationship’s magic alive. The husband is getting nothing at home: he is, in Internet fuckboy lingo, getting cucked.

The mother is a playgirl while the father stays home and takes care of the baby. This is Bush’s model of desire-from-a-distant played through a Feydeau farce: everything becomes dirty and obscene, even romantic relationships. Kate Bush is doing an anti-Kate Bush song. The magic of the universe has been lost to these characters. There’s not enough sex in their lives”.

It does seem that there was not a lot of sex in this relationship. The woman looking for excitement and something better than she has. Again, you think about the loss that this child faces. The Kid is being held by the father but knows nothing of the disintegration of a new family. One of the criticisms I have seen of this song is the music video. How Bush chose to visually represent this song. I think Graeme Thomson dismissed it in his biography, Under the Ivy: The Life and Music of Kate Bush. Indeed, it is probably the oddest thing Bush ever filmed. Showing just how unpredictable, cool and out-there she was and is, Ran Tan Waltz has a lot more depth than people credit for, as the article continues. It does note how unusual it is too:

“Ran Tan Waltz” has one of the strangest videos of Bush’s career. It’s a three-dancers-on-one-stage setup that’s not atypical of Bush in this era, but the costuming tips it into what-the-fuck-are-we-looking-at territory. Bush is decked out in Tevye-like garb, boasting a chinbeard, waistcoat, and bare feet, an exemplary sample of how middle-class English girls think the working class looks (à la some cabaret). To her left and right are dancers Stewart Avon Arnold and Gary Hurst dressed respectively as an upper class woman in purple and, I swear to God I am not making this up, a fucking baby in a diaper”.

Bush is tapping into modes of working class theater to touch on how sex locks into struggle. To be sure, it’s a romanticized vision of the working class, but it’s not a judgmental one. Beneath the surface, there’s some genuine probing of proletariat circumstances and how it shapes people’s sex lives. It’s not the optimistic romanticism that underpins The Kick Inside, but it’s more mature and wide-reaching”.

You listen to a song like Ran Tan Waltz and you can connect it with major Pop artists of today. Those that are accused of being too sexual or revealing. The boldness in their music. However, could you ever see Sabrina Carpenter, Addison Rae, Chappell Roan or even Lady Gaga filming a video that is like Ran Tan Waltz?! It would be attacked or met with such confusion. You could look at it and say it is Kate Bush being wacky and the video is stupid and weird. Look more closely and there is a lot more depth and nuance. What could have been this throwaway song is instead a gem that people need to discuss more. Who do you emphasise more with in this song? The wife could be seen as villainous and bad. Doing what men glamorise in songs and is celebrated, can we attack the character without being seen as sexist and having double standards?! Maybe the man at home should get pity, though you don’t know the domestic situation and whether it is justified. If a relationship is not working then it can be a two-sided thing. He might not want sex or is a boring partner. Even so, that does not justify someone cheating, but you do feel the woman did not get to liv her youth and got married too young. The most helpless and innocent person in the situation is The Kid. A young observer who might learn about this explosion and sordidness years later. Dreams of Orgonon noting how Ran Tan Waltz is part of a “loose trilogy” of songs that follows Coffee Homeground (from 1978’s Lionheart) and The Magician (a song written by Paul Webster and composed by Maurice Jarre for the film, The Magician of Lublin. Kate Bush recorded vocals for this song in February 1979 with music performed by the London Symphony Orchestra). The fact that Ran Tan Waltz has this gloomy nature of a Kurt Weillesque waltz. The fascinating insight that “Bush’s interest in this aesthetic is grounded in musical theater rather than Marxist class consciousness, but there’s still a latent political base to it, consisting of warped gender politics and domestic life”. Whereas we often see Kate Bush’s B-sides as good or not as substantial and layered as her singles and album tracks, Ran Tan Waltz has long been dismissed and seen as this empty sex farce with a crazy video. A song that need to be given some new love.

In terms of the next B-side, there is a dramatic shift in terms of its tone and mood. If Ran Tan Waltz stinks of booze, deceit, sex and lies, then You Want Alchemy? Smells of honey and the wild. Something far more pleasant and pleasing. Highlighting Kate Bush’s broad musical asnd lyrical palette when it came to her B-sides. was written and recorded after the completion of The Red Shoes and The Line, The Cross and the Curve in 1993. Quite a while after Ran Tan Waltz, can we say that it was a B-side? Technically, You Want Alchemy? appears as an extra track on the European and Australian C.D.-singles for Eat the Music. Last year, Kate Bush put out Best of the Other Sides. This is what Bush said of the song: “You Want Alchemy? was meant to be one of the tracks on The Red Shoes album, but because there was already so much material, it ended up as a B Side. I love Michael Kamen’s orchestral arrangement in this song. It really takes us to that lovely afternoon, up in the hills with the mad beekeeper”. In terms of this song, the character in focus is The Beekeeper. The alchemy of honey. This is what the Kate Bush Encyclopedia say: “She doesn’t get it, this fascination with bees. She seems to take a tender step into this man’s private world, to open herself and feel and respect this lonely man’s joys. She approaches with sympathy, and for a brief moment, she can share his vision, and see the alchemy”. This is another song where Bush shows sympathy for a man. In this case, someone seen as eccentric and weird. You could read this as someone criticising an artist for being odd or unusual when they are actually making something wonderful and golden. Bush was receiving a lot of criticism and being dismissed around The Red Shoes and The Line, the Cross and the Curve. Although not writing about herself, I sort of see Bush as this beekeeper that people had this impression of. In fact, they are a compelling and kind character that is doing a lot of good. The Beekeeper is a wonderful character.

In the first verse, Kate Bush not only referencing one of her own songs – which appeared on 1985’s Hounds of Love -, but also The Beatles: “What a lovely afternoon/On a cloudbusting kind of day/We took our own ‘Mystery Tour’/And got completely lost somewhere up in the hills”. Ran Tan Waltz with its odd smells, vomit, cheating, scandal and debauchery. Here, we get flowers, the sunshine and the beauty and tranquillity of the open air. I think about this song as being set somewhere in England. Bush perhaps the protagonist who is wandering along and sees this man on the hills. She happens upon this beekeeper. You may think they are a loner or this eccentric. However, there is this form of natural alchemy happening. “And he said, “Did you know they can change it all?”. Bees blessing the flowers and making honey. Something wonderful is happening: “They turn the roses into gold/They turn the lilac into honey/They’re making love for the peaches”. It seems that there is a group of people around that goes up to The Beekeeper. Whilst he does not have a name in the song, that is the title that I am giving him. Thinking that he is some kind of nut, The Beekeeper says “ZzzzZzzzz… Sun’s gone down/“When’s my cloud of bees coming home?”. Bringing this man so much pleasure, You Want Alchemy? Is one of Bush’s most splendidly pleasing and evocative tracks. One that I think would have made a great single. You do wonder whether she considered that. It would have been amazing to see a video for You Want Alchemy? “Making love for the peaches. (what they gonna do…?)/Daaaaaamaaaaakiiiiindaaaaa honey/(they do it for you)/They do it for you”. What this track proves is how broad Kate Bush is as a songwriter. I started by discussing a song that was about a wife cheating and having sex with a man’s friends and leaving a kid at home with the husband. Here, we go as far from that as possible. It is about this man who might be seen as odd but has this passion for bees and the wonder they can create. Classic Pop called the song “a breathy reverie, a delirious exhalation of joy” when they reviewed Best of the Other Sides last year.

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in a promotional photo for Eat the Music in 1993

What is notable is how this song was a B-side for a couple of singles. Whilst it did feature as a B-side on Eat the Music, it was also a B-side on The Red Shoes, the 1994 title track. On the 7” and cassette single, this was the B-side. It does make me think about B-sides and how these various songs made their way to where they did. In the case of songs from The Red Shoes, it was a bit weird and random. The first single, Rubberband Girl, had Big Stripey Lie as its B-side. That is an album track from The Red Shoes. Depending on the territory, Eat the Music had Candle in the Wind, Big Stripey Lie, You Want Alchemy?, Eat the Music (12” mix) and Shoedance (The Red Shoes dance mix). Moments of Pleasure has, among the B-sides, Home for Christmas and Show a Little Devotion. The Red Shoes has This Woman’s Work as one of the B-sides. And So Is Love includes Eat the Music (US Mix). Quite scattered and unusual in terms of some of the songs included as B-sides. However, this golden original, You Want Alchemy?, deserved more life than being buried. Bush did give it a new lease when it was included on Best of the Other Sides. UNCUT said this when they reviewed Kate Bush’s Remastered in Vinyl I-IV in 2018. That is when many heard You Want Alchemy? for the first time: “You Want Alchemy”, the B-side of “The Red Shoes” single, reveals the very soulful capabilities of Bush’s voice in its delicious hook: “You want alchemy/You turn the roses into gold”. Remastered in Vinyl IV contained all these rarities and B-sides and does also include Ran Tan Waltz. I do love the power of You Want Alchemy? It does share characteristics with Prince music of that time. Bush was a fan of Prince and the two did work together on Why Should I Love You? from The Red Shoes. I love The Beekeeper. This misunderstood hermit. Someone who is dedicated to his bees and does not meet many people. Bush is so sensual and captivating through this track. Sort of tipping to 2005’s Aerial. You could see this song appearing quite appropriate in the second disc, A Sky of Honey. It would slot right in that conceptual suite of the course of a summer’s day.

The strings are amazing. The late Michael Kamen creating something shimmering, grand and romantic. This is one of Kate Bush’s best vocal performances. Think about the near-orgasmic noises she makes. Almost contorting her face to get those sounds, it would have been amazing watching her sing it in the studio! Such a great noise that she makes! If Bush was unhappy with some of the production on The Red Shoes, thinking it was tinny, over-compressed or lacking warm and depth, then she must have been happy with You Want Alchemy? I don’t think it suffers from any of that. Instead, you get this rich and hugely atmospheric song that would have made a successful single. It does make me yearn for something I have pitched before. Videos being made for Bush songs that were never singles. Maybe casing actors in them or doing animated videos, it would be terrific having You Want Alchemy? come to life. You listen to the song and imagine yourself in this scene. Changing upon this beekeeper that is maligned or seen as a creep. Instead, when you get to talk to him and discover more, you realise that the judgemental people are the ones wrong. They lack his curiosity and passion. It perhaps is a wider commentary on how we judge people. The joy of nature and appreciation of insects like bees. So much to unpack regarding You Want Alchemy? Away from the tracks we find on her studio albums, there are these fascinating characters on B-sides. I am going to bring in a few more in future parts. Maybe also look at Lyra from the single of the same name. That was including on The Golden Compass Soundtrack in 2007. Before that, I am coming back to her albums. When it comes to the variety and depth of the characters she weaves into her songs, Kate Bush really is an artist…

LIKE no other.

FEATURE: Bigmouth Strikes Again: The Smiths' The Queen Is Dead at Forty

FEATURE:

 

 

Bigmouth Strikes Again

The Smiths' The Queen Is Dead at Forty

__________

ALTHOUGH this is not…

IN THIS PHOTO: The Smiths in 1986/PHOTO CREDIT: Stephen Wright/Redferns

my favourite album from The Smith (that would be their final album, Strangeways, Here We Come), The Queen Is Dead is seen by many as their best. The band, Johnny Marr, Morrissey, Andy Rourke and Mike Joyce, released a masterpiece. On 16th June, 1986, The Smiths put out their third studio album, The Queen Is Dead. 1985’s Meat Is Murder did well and has some great songs, though The Queen Is Dead elevated the band and was a real step up. It spent twenty-two weeks on the UK Albums Chart, peaking at number two. One of the greatest albums of all time, there are some features I will bring in ahead of its fortieth anniversary. Containing There Is a Light That Never Goes Out, The Queen Is Dead, I Know It’s Over, Cemetry Gates and The Boy with the Thorn in His Side, it is a timeless album from a band at their peak. The lyrics of Morrissey and Johnny Marr’s compositions perfectly fused. Before getting to something more positive, it is worth sourcing this from The Quietus that was published in 2021. Marking thirty-five years of The Queen Is Dead, Simon Price writes how there are classic tracks on the album, though a few weak ones too. Though, you could definitely say that about their other albums. Strangeways, Here We Come has a run of several songs at the end which are quite poor. Meat Is Murder is spotty in places. Are those less-than-genius moments to be overlooked, or do they make The Queen Is Dead what it is ? A flawed classic perhaps:

“The making of the album, at Jacob Studios in Farnham, was by all accounts a troubled time. It had been delayed by unforeseen factors which included bassist Andy Rourke’s heroin addiction and a legal dispute with the band’s label Rough Trade.

Nevertheless, it starts phenomenally well. ‘The Queen Is Dead’, well over six minutes long (though the original unedited take was seven or eight), carries the sense of a State Of The Nation address, but it evokes William Blake’s nation of dark satanic mills rather than some Wordsworthian daffodil idyll. A snatch of Cicely Courtneidge’s recording of First World War music hall number ‘Take Me Back To Dear Old Blighty’ from Bryan Forbes’ 1962 film The L-Shaped Room conjures a reverie of nostalgic patriotism before a squeal of feedback from Johnny Marr’s guitar and Mike Joyce’s you’re-gonna-get-your-fucking-head-kicked-in drums, sampled, looped and pushed high in the mix by Stephen Street, pummel us screaming into the dystopian present.

The name of the album – actually taken from Hubert Selby Jr’s much-banned novel Last Exit To Brooklyn, where it is used in the effeminate homosexual sense, but employed with deliberate ambiguity here – had already incurred the wrath of The Sun, who branded Morrissey a sicko. (He originally considered Margaret On The Guillotine, but ended up saving that for a track on his first solo album.) And that was before anyone had heard him advocating regicide in the first verse of the title track: “Her Very Lowness with her head in a sling/ I’m truly sorry but it sounds like a wonderful thing…” A staunch Republican who had already expressed a wish to “drop my trousers to the Queen” on the previous album’s ‘Nowhere Fast’, he was raising his game by daydreaming of having her executed.

Morrissey’s lyric is scattershot, unfocussed and rambling, but burning with rage as he contemplates vignettes of contemporary life such as “some nine-year-old tough who peddles drugs, I swear to god, I swear I never even knew what drugs were!” (his voice breaking into an adolescent yodel on the word ‘were’). But the dominant narrative consists of imagined conversations with the monarch, echoing the recent break-in to Buckingham Palace by Michael Fagin, and with her heir, cajoling him to publicly out himself as a transvestite. Meanwhile, Marr channels the more fucked-up end of the Sixties (MC5, VU), his wah-wah guitars conjuring the psychedelia not of flowers and trees but of black smoke and city grime (and matched perfectly by Derek Jarman’s accompanying film). “Life is very long when you’re lonely”, Morrissey repeats as Rourke’s bass comes to the fore in its closing conflagrations. It was the heaviest, most physical piece of music The Smiths – often wrongly derided as effete weaklings – had recorded (‘How Soon Is Now’ included), and one which, even with 30 years’ familiarity, still has the power to stun you in your tracks.

‘The Boy With The Thorn In His Side’ is one of The Smiths’ lightest, most flyaway moments, but a real beauty of a pop song with an irresistibly infectious easy charm. The boy of its title is, once again, a third person who is actually a poorly disguised first person: it is Morrissey himself who, despite his hatefulness, harbours “a murderous desire for love”. A feeling of social exclusion is a common thread throughout Morrissey’s lyrics, but on this occasion he keenly wishes to be involved: “And when you want to live, how do you start? Where do you go? Who do you need to know?”

Things were going so well, with just that ‘Shankly’ monstrosity to skip over, when another howler heaves into view. An otherwise perfectly acceptable, if somewhat slight, rockabilly number ‘Vicar In A Tutu’ is, as the title makes plain, a flimsy tale of clergical cross-dressing in which Morrissey expects the listener to chuckle indulgently to the alliteration ‘monkish monsignor’ and the rhyming of ‘canister’ with ‘banister’”.

I will come to a review for The Queen Is Dead. Before that, Classic Album Sundays spent some time with the 1986-released gem. I agree that not everything on the album is great, yet the strongest moments – and there are many of them – outweigh that. There is no denying the brilliance and legacy of The Queen Is Dead:

“Morrissey struggled with people of power in many ways, mostly because he desired to hold a position of high influence himself. When the singles leading up to The Queen Is Dead, ‘Shakespeare’s Sister’, ‘That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore’, and ‘The Boy With the Thorn In His Side’ failed to chart, he took it to the music press to make his opinions known. The singer’s pretty-boy face frequently appeared on magazine covers with extravagant headlines and costumes mocking himself as a sell-out or fraud in the eyes of mainstream media. In interviews, he accused radio DJs as fascists and Rough Trade for not caring and underselling their work. He felt nobody was listening to what he had to say about the world, and these loudmouthed statements were meant to grab the attention of his doubters to think again. Even though these statements were outlandish in many ways, it proved The Smiths were different and more human than these popular systems.

Contrary to the public’s distaste for these risky statements, bad press turned into great press for the band. The Queen Is Dead is the band’s most prolific musical statement both instrumentally and lyrically, especially for Morrissey and Johnny Marr as a team. They diverted from what was comfortable, transformed their styles to be more accommodating and confident, and ultimately reached a larger audience. The band picks apart society from the perspective of a self-aware human and native of Great Britain and accommodates it within their music without forgetting their roots with every song.

The Queen Is Dead starts with perhaps its most profound statement with the album’s self-titled song, thanks to Morrissey’s hilarious but bleak lyrics. In 1986, animosity arose between north and south Britain, and Margaret Thatcher had implemented many changes to the nation’s government. Morrissey saw her actions as negative contributions to the country’s environment, art, and leading industries, like manufacturing, and he was infuriated by her manipulation of the country’s livelihood. The songs introduction of ‘Take Me Back to Dear Old Blighty’ references The L-Shaped Shaped and states a wish to be taken back to a better Britain, one not led by Thatcher.

When his voices enters the mix, Morrissey cracks jokes of Prince Charles’ weakness to his mother (such as appearing on the Daily Mail wearing his mother’s bridal veil), being a very distant descendant of a past royal, and wishes to “go for a walk where it’s quiet and dry and talk about precious things” with The Queen. His imaginative wit would eventually lead him to kill The Queen, but he feels alone in his celebration of it — why doesn’t anyone else see the fulfillment of his rage? Statements like these makes the album’s previous working title, Margaret on the Guillotine, appropriate.

This mix of humor and seriousness makes for a interesting thought experiment. When you listen to the album and focus on the lyrics, it’s hard not to explore an emotional spectrum of reactions. With songs like ‘Frankly, Mr. Shankly’ and ‘Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others’, it is hard not to laugh. Your heart may burn after listening to ‘I Know It’s Over’ imaging Morrissey being buried alive. For the first time, he hands out blatant insults towards the government, music industry, and society and stands by them, which is something you might not have expected from someone who is consistency heartbroken. The Queen Is Dead may stand as Morrissey’s greatest lyrical venture of his career.

Johnny Marr stretches his instrumental muscle most on The Queen Is Dead. He took advantage of the studio to twist an assortment of wah-generated guitar feedback with producer Steven Street to build his parts for ‘The Queen is Dead’ and blended guitar tracks with multiple tunings to compose ‘Bigmouth Strikes Again’. He introduced the acoustic guitar to many of its songs, giving the album great texture and driving rhythm. He builds many of the melodies with his mastered chucking guitar-picking method but creates his most memorable moment with ‘Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others’, with an angelic riff that never gets old.

The Queen Is Dead made The Smiths’ dreams come true — to become a legendary rock band that is still an integral part of the conversation of modern music. They broke their own comfortable barriers to make grand statements about music and the world around them, and in return, they were passionately embraced and still are today. Morrissey may always be on a search for love, but when he feels the soil falling on his head, he can smile knowing that he and his band were heard”.

I want to head back to 2016 for the final feature. Annie Zaleski writing for Salon about an album, thirty years after its release, still shone bright. She wrote in detail about the lyrical genius of Morrissey. Coming into his own as a singer too. Johnny Marr’s compositions are guitar work at their most varied, inspiring and strong. Andy Rourke and Mike Joyce at their peak. The Smiths built on Meat Is Murder and broadened their palette and horizon:

“The trick is, he improved upon the stridency of “Meat is Murder”—a record with a graphic condemnation of animal slaughter and a thinly veiled account of school abuse, among other things—by embracing more sophisticated commentary. Frequently, this was tethered to the byproducts of fame. “I Know It’s Over” is self-flagellating and frustrated by a nagging perception of low self-worth (“‘That’s why you’re on your own tonight/With your triumphs and your charms'”), while “Bigmouth Strikes Again” is equally angst-ridden over things that shouldn’t have been said. “Frankly, Mr. Shankly,” meanwhile, drips with condescension and sarcasm—”Oh, I didn’t realise that you wrote poetry/I didn’t realize you wrote such bloody awful poetry, Mr. Shankly”—which supports the rumor it referred to Rough Trade label founder Geoff Travis, with whom the band was feuding. By toning down the hyperbole—and upping the incisiveness and nuance—Morrissey was more effective at getting his point across.

Yet he was smart enough to realize that the downsides of fame are only interesting to a small segment of the population, which is why much of “The Queen Is Dead” had a personalized (and politicized) slant. Instead of wallowing, he crafts a mythology around himself—or the character he’s playing on the album—bit by bit: He fashions himself a permanent outsider on “Cemetry Gates” (“Keats and Yeats are on your side/While Wilde is on mine”), identifies with the Shakespearean romantic trope of death-from-love (“There Is A Light That Never Goes Out”) and tackles the one-two punch of persecution and feeling misunderstood (“The Boy With The Thorn In His Side”). Plus, “The Queen Is Dead” has its levity: “Vicar In A Tutu” reads like a Shel Silverstein poem (despite the serious subject matter: a man of the cloth who favors dance wear), while the title track features a wry gag about lack of musical talent.

The song “The Queen Is Dead” ranks up there with the Smiths’ finest moments. On the surface, it’s a song conflating criticism of the royal family with expressions of abject loneliness and despair. Dig a little deeper, and it’s an elegy for England itself, and all the ways the country’s ingrained power structures—church, pubs, state—destroy individuals. This assertion is supported by Tony Fletcher’s meticulous Smiths bio, “A Light That Never Goes Out,” which notes that in the mid-’80s, England was facing “catastrophic levels” of unemployment, unions losing power, and a society where “minimum-wage labor replace[d] former job security for those who could even find the work.” In addition, “multiculturalism, sexual permissiveness, gay rights, and progressive education were all under attack,” while “locally elected left-wing councils were being abolished, spending on the welfare state reduced, [and] government-owned industries privatized.” In conclusion, “‘The Queen Is Dead’ made almost no reference to any of this, and yet it somehow acknowledged all of it, and that was no small achievement.” What Morrissey didn’t say, in other words, made the song a triumph.

Still, it’s a mistake to think that Morrissey was the only one steering this record to greatness. In fact, “The Queen Is Dead” is the most cohesive musical statement put forth by the Smiths’ instrumentalists: guitarist Johnny Marr, bassist Andy Rourke and drummer Mike Joyce, as well as studio compatriot/engineer Stephen Street. (Remarkably, this happened although Rourke was dealing with a heroin addiction that ended up causing him to get kicked out of the band for a spell after the album was done.) “The Queen Is Dead” feels slightly phase-shifted from then-trends (cf. well-wrought pop with a manicured ’60s influence) and unapologetically nostalgic. For example, the strings and flute on “There Is A Light That Never Goes Out,” courtesy of an Emulator sample keyboard, are delightfully syrupy.

Morrissey too comes into his own as a vocalist. Although “Cemetry Gates” contains vestiges of his youthful yelp, he settles into a dynamic, adult singing approach: a Rat Pack croon steeped in conspiratorial desperation, anguished gnashing of teeth and impertinent bite. Above all, “The Queen Is Dead” possesses exquisite sonic balance, where no one part or person (yes, even Morrissey) dominates. Rourke’s cowboy-loping bass lurking below “Never Had No One Ever” and the burbling backbone of “Cemetry Gates” fit like a glove, while Joyce proves himself a versatile drummer adept at cheeky swing (“Frankly Mr. Shankly”) and rockabilly (“Vicar In A Tutu”), as well as torchy ballads (“I Know It’s Over”). And after the guitar turbulence of “Meat Is Murder,” Marr finds his comfort zone by carving out sturdy-but-delicate riffs—as heard on the galloping strums of “Bigmouth Strikes Again,” the oceanic, ornate “Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others” and especially the wistful “The Boy With The Thorn In His Side”—edged with a chiming, lighter touch. It’s a style he’d refine and perfect in the subsequent years and with other artists”.

I am going to end with one review from Pitchfork. In 2017, they reviewed the album, as a boxed set edition was released. Awarding it a perfect ten, they wrote how The Queen Is Dead “still stands as an enduring testament to England in the ’80s, the complex relationship between performer and fan, and the ecstasy of emptiness”. I am not sure if is relevant, but this is the first big anniversary of the album since our Queen died. She died in 2022. It gives the album’s title new weight and potency:

“From Prince’s “Controversy” to Taylor Swift’s “Look What You Made Me Do,” it’s always perilous when pop stars start to address their own position as public figures. Where “The Queen Is Dead” is the sort of Big Statement a band makes when it acquires a sense of its own importance, “The Boy With the Thorn in His Side” is one of a group of full-blown meta-songs on the album. Morrissey appeals to the sympathy of his disciples by lamenting the far larger number of indifferent doubters out there: “How can they hear me say those words still they don’t believe me?” There is a hint of reveling in the martyr posture in “Bigmouth Strikes Again” too, what with its references to Joan of Arc going up in flames. It doubles as both a relationship song and a commentary on Morrissey as the controversialist forever getting in trouble for his caustic quips and sweeping statements.

“Frankly, Mr. Shankly” is petty as meta goes: At the time, nobody but a handful of music industry insiders could have known that it’s a mean-spirited swipe at Rough Trade’s Geoff Travis. What’s more interesting now is Morrissey’s admission of his insatiable lust for attention—“Fame fame fatal fame/It can play hideous tricks on the brain”—but nonetheless he’d “rather be famous than righteous or holy.” Couched in a jaunty music-hall bounce, the song also serves as a preemptive justification of the Smiths’ decision to break with Rough Trade for the biggest major label around, EMI.

The cleverest of the meta-pop Smiths songs of this period, though, can be found on this reissue’s second disc of B-sides and demos. Originally the flipside to “Boy With the Thorn,” “Rubber Ring” gets its name from the life-preservers you find on ships. Although his songs once saved their lives, Morrissey anticipates his fans abandoning him as they grow out of the maladjustment and amorous ineptitude in which he will remain perpetually trapped. The empty young lives will fill up with all the normal sorts of happiness, he predicts, and the Smiths records will be filed away and forgotten. “Do you love me like you used to?” Morrissey beseeches, as if he’s actually in a real romance with each and every one of his fans, acutely aware of the perversity and impossibility at work in pop’s psycho-dynamics of identification and projection.

Two other loose categories could be formed out of the songs on The Queen Is Dead: Beside the meta, there’s the merry and the melancholy. Despite the morbid (and misspelled) title, “Cemetry Gates” is sprightly and carefree. Even though they’re strolling among the gravestones quoting poetry at each other to show how intensely they feel the sorrow of mortality, the life-force is strong in these precocious youngsters. As so often with Morrissey, the frissons come with the tiny quirks of unusual word-choice or phrasing—the little jolt of the way he pronounces “plagiarize” with an incorrect hard “g,” for instance. Featuring the album’s second instance of cross-dressing, “Vicar in a Tutu” is a slight delight with just a casual twist of subversiveness in a passing reference to the priest’s kinky antics being “as natural as rain”: This freak is just as God made him. Almost cosmic in its insubstantiality, “Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others” seemed at the time an anticlimactic ending to such an Important Album. Now I think the understatement is just right, rather than the obvious curtain-closer, “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out”—the glide and glisten of Marr’s playing on “Some Girls” is that never-fading light.

And then there’s the life-and-death serious stuff. Both songs of unrequited love, “I Know It’s Over” and “There Is a Light” make a pair: The first spins majesty out of misery, the second transcends it with a sublime and nakedly religious vision of hope-in-vain as an end in itself. The writing in “I Know It’s Over” is a tour de force, from the opening image of the empty—sexless, loveless—bed as a grave, through the suicidal inversions of “The sea wants to take me/The knife wants to slit me,” onto the self-lacerations of “If you’re so funny, then why are you on your own tonight?” and finally the unexpected and amazing grace of “It’s so easy to hate/It takes strength to be gentle and kind.” Not a strong or sure singer by conventional standards, Morrissey gives his all-time greatest vocal performance, something ear-witness Johnny Marr described as “one of the highlights of my life.”

As for “There Is a Light”—if you don’t tear up at the chorus, you belong to a different species. The scenario involves another doomed affair, a love (and a life—Morrissey’s) that never really started. But here Morrissey hovers in an ecstatic suspension of yearning that becomes its own satisfaction, an emptiness that becomes a plenitude. The greatest of his many songs about not belonging anywhere or to anyone, it so very nearly tumbles into comedy (and there are those who’ve laughed) with the melodramatic excess of its image of the double-decker bus and the romantic entwining-in-death of the not-quite-lovers. But the trembling sincerity of “the pleasure, the privilege is mine” keeps it on the right side of the gravity/levity divide in the Smiths songbook.

Marginally more robust and shiny than the last time it was remastered, this new Queen comes with a couple of extra discs and a DVD that contains a promo directed by British filmmaker Derek Jarman. The demos contain differences that will interest the diehards. “Never Had No One Ever,” the album’s one real dud, is enhanced by an unlikely trumpet solo and some strange moaning from Moz. Elsewhere, you hear the singer trying out different word-choices and phrasings: The demo of “I Know It’s Over” lacks the “oh, mother” address and its bed is “icy” not “empty.” For those who like that sort of thing, there’s a live album, recorded in Boston in August 1986. Having seen them twice in their quasi-imperial prime, I never thought the Smiths were that potent as a live band: The delicate flower of Marr’s playing fared better in the studio, Morrissey’s voice strained to compete with amplified music, and the electricity came mostly from the audience’s ardour.

Being a Smiths fan during the band’s actual lifetime felt like an aesthetic protest vote signaling your alienation from both the ’80s pop mainstream and the political culture it reflected. As that context drops away with the passage of the decades, what endures is the peal of exile in Morrissey’s voice, a timeless plaint of longing and not-belonging. Without Morrissey’s tart wit and strange mind, Marr can be merely pretty, as shown by the instrumental B-sides of this era. Equally, without Marr’s beauty, Morrissey can be unbearable (as much of his post-Smiths career bears out). But when Morrissey’s sighs are caressed by Marr’s serene, synthesized strings on “There Is a Light,” or when the singer’s wordless falsetto flutters amid the guitarist’s golden cascades in “Boy with the Thorn,” there’s something miraculous about the way their textures mesh. It’s a great musical tragedy that barely a year after releasing The Queen Is Dead, this odd couple went their separate ways, for reasons that still feel not fully explained. These boys were made for each other—and surely deep down they still know it”.

I will end it there. As The Queen Is Dead was released on 16th June, 1986, there will be fortieth anniversary features shared soon enough. The final album where they seemed connected and in harmony, there would be splits and fractures by the time Strangeways, Here We Come arrived in 1987. I confess that not everything works on The Queen Is Dead (Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others is a stain on their career; it is a song that you could never put on an album now and get away with it), it features some of the greatest songs ever written and recorded. After forty years. The Smiths’ masterpiece still elicits tis incredible power and beauty. An album that I…

WILL never tire of.

FEATURE: Spotlight: SALIMATA

FEATURE:

 

 

Spotlight

PHOTO CREDIT: Skylar Rochon for GROWN

SALIMATA

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EVEN though she does not have…

an extensive online portfolio, it is still hard to miss the wonderful SALIMATA. The alias of Brooklyn rapper and songwriter Salma Calhoun, I want to get to some interviews with this amazing artist. SALIMATA put out her latest album, The Happening, last year. She is being tipped for greatness. And it is fully warranted! Last year, Nina chatted with SALIMATA about her new music and the Brooklyn scene:

“Growing up in Brooklyn, do you have any formative memories of listening to rap music?

SALIMATA: Very few, I remember a lot of 50 in my house growing up. We loved his videos, me, my brother, and my mom. I remember my mom was listening to a lot of Lil Wayne when most moms were bumping R&B ‘cause she was going through a break up and didnt wanna hear any love songs. I was maybe like 9 or 10. I was like wtf Lil Wayne is FIREEE, but I never really listened to what he was saying at the time. Then another time in middle school, my friend's step dad was dropping me home and “They Reminisce Over You” came on and it was the first time a rap song made me really feel something.

Let’s talk beat selection: What kind of things do you tend to gravitate towards? It seems like you can appreciate a good jazz flip.

I guess I do, I didn't know for a while the different genres in music but as people made comments on my beat selection I found out I'm really into jazz, and drumless shit. I like funky shit too, I love grime and house as well. I really just write to what forces me to write. But I really appreciate weird shit, something challenging to approach, the jazz and drumless is a little too predictable. But some chaos, some distortion makes my brain so happy. I love when a beat got me drunk or high ‘cause I'm trying so hard to figure it out. Or it just controls me. And that can be any genre, just depends on the beat.

If you could collaborate with anyone, who would it be? What kind of song would you make?

It’s really hard to say ‘cause it depends on chemistry more than anything when it comes to collabing, but I'd love to do a song with The Internet. If I could scream with Show Me The Body that would be sick. If I could be Dolly and sing with Yves Tumor or Triathlon I’d shit myself.

What NYC artists are you excited about right now?

I’m excited for myself, nah lemme stop. Hmmm Duendita is phenomenal, the world must know, so for that I am excited. Also for Brooklyn’s princess Laila!, baby genius fr. Then my good sis Kelly Moonstone, all around talent, beauty, and brains. She impresses me so much and I know she can reach so many people. Lmao he already big but I’m just happy for Cash Cobain, my son really got motion. Nkiru, my sis, is on her own shit an I fuck with her heavy”.

A couple of other interesting interviews to come to before rounding things up. An advocate for health and movement, and someone who is unapologetically vulnerable and open in her lyrics, SALIMATA spoke with GROWN about being back in Brooklyn after spending some time overseas. It is evident that she is a rare talent that is going to ascend to incredible heights very soon:

“What does it feel like to perform back in Brooklyn after spending time away overseas?

SALIMATA: Oh, my gosh. I mean, it’s so weird because the best thing about New York is that it never changes. But you change. So you get to observe the same thing from a different perspective. And of course, there’s something different going on—the atmosphere changes, the people change. I know there’s definitely not a lot of New Yorkers here no more.

Somehow the music led me there (overseas). I’ve been working a lot with Fada Records—they helped me with my last album. I’m like f*cking European now at this point. It’s crazy.

But being back. It’s just been like a breath of fresh air for me. And just to be surrounded by people who get me you know? And I don’t mean that in like any specific way, but it’s been so nice just to have very simple interactions. People just get you.

I’m happy that this is my first show back. I’m mad excited. It’s a lot of new music. I’ve been rehearsing since the second I found out about the show.

I noticed a lot of people in the TikTok comments saying that ‘conscious rap is making a comeback.’ Do you feel that’s an accurate description of your work?”

SALIMATA: Oh, yeah…off rip. And I have no, there’s no insult in that whenever anyone feels like they should say, I feel like it’s such a sketchy thing for people to label someone as. Like, a lot of people don’t like that or the sound of it, because it’s very easy to be corny when you’re conscious. But, I definitely consider myself a conscious rapper. But It’s more than that too, you know? That’s one dimension. Yeah, that’s definitely one spot, but I have different pockets for sure.

In rap, especially for Black women, people try to box you. How do you sidestep that?
SALIMATA:  I really don’t care. Everything I do is honest to who I am, so no matter what form it takes, it’s still me.

When people get introduced to you, you can either let them put you in a box or intentionally present yourself in a way that shapes how they see you. People are multi-dimensional. Whatever I do is going to feel like me, so that’s all that matters.

What do you want Black women to feel when they press play on your music?
SALIMATA:  I want them to not give any f*cks—about anybody or anything. To feel comfortable in themselves, powerful. Almost like…a nice bully, if that’s possible. Nice and strong. I just want people to celebrate being themselves, how they are. Whatever that is.

At GROWN, we’re for women who are grown but still growing. How are you grown & how are you still growing?

SALIMATA: For me, it’s about emotions—how you handle life. Being grown is being able to handle things..because you don’t even know you’ re growing until you look back. Like some sh*t will just hit you and you’ll just be like wow. the way I would have handled that six months ago, a year ago.. Different. Crazy. And I’m really proud of myself ’cause I grew so much. When you grow, you attract better things”.

I was under the impression that SALIMATA was still based out of Brooklyn. However, as we learn from CABBAGES from their interview published at the end of last year, she was based in Marseille. I wonder whether that is still the case. If you have not heard this stunning artist, then you really do need to check her out. I wonder if SALIMATA will be coming to the U.K. anytime soon:

“You're Brooklyn through-and-through, but sometimes artists go to a new place, they get so caught up in that place that they close their sense of self on record. Do you feel that being in Marseille of had its own impact on the way The Happening came together?

My first project, OUCH, in my mind it's super hardcore, super rough–and not just technically, but the energy I'm bringing to the tape. For my project after that, Wooden Floors, I'm still in New York, but I'm trying to make a more sunny side version of what I did with OUCH. Now that I'm in Marseille and I made a lot of the music here, I can see how it thawed me out a little bit, even in terms of beat selection and fluidity. I'm from a city; I'm from a very hard place and our buildings are very tall, so everything's going to be very rough. I feel like, on this project, there's a lot more melody. It's just softer to me. My song "9-5" just has more of beachy vibe. I didn't realize it until everything was coming together like, alright, we're actually moving on to some softness. I'm still going to be aggressive and surprising, but there's definitely an element that comes naturally with your environment.

One of my favorite songs on The Happening is "Foil." It's just under two minutes, with this intentional fadeout, but it feels like you could rap over that beat forever. Why aren't you giving the us whole thing?

I don't be asking producers, can you extend the beat? I just take it as what it is and if it's a long beat, I be like, are you cool with me using less of it? I don't know what the rules are, but whatever I deliver is what it is. I was writing to the beat and it ended and I was like, that's kind of cool. I've always loved short songs and I know now people like short things more, for replay. You want to play it back. I think I said everything I had to say. I don't need to say nothing more. Nobody wants to feel like they're being lectured. It's hard to be conscious and not corny, so you got to be cute about it”.

I am going to wrap up now. SALIMATA put out Supastar Livin earlier this year and I can sense that more new music is coming along. I am not sure what her gig plans are, but I can’t see anything announced on her Instagram at the moment. It would be nice to get more out there about her in terms of new interviews. What her gig schedule is. I wonder if she will set up her own TikTok and get a Facebook page, as there are many out there who have not discovered her work yet. One of the names to watch this year, when it comes to SALIMATA, it is exciting to think…

WHAT comes next.

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Follow SALIMATA

PHOTO CREDIT: Ryosuke Tanzawa

Instagram:

https://www.instagram.com/eet_it_off_me/

YouTube:

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

Spotify:

https://open.spotify.com/artist/7jS2ex4JC0DiFtMfh417jD?si=lMTqGrJhTpK8gJSlM14shg

FEATURE: Temperature Check… Some Early Mercury Prize Shortlist Predictions

FEATURE:

 

 

Temperature Check…

IN THIS PHOTO: Holly Humberstone released her new album, Cruel World, on 10th April, and it is one that I feel is worthy of a Mercury Prize nomination/PHOTO CREDIT: Silken Weinberg via NME

Some Early Mercury Prize Shortlist Predictions

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I do this around this time of year…

IN THIS PHOTO: Lauren Laverne (BBC Radio 6 Music and BBC Radio 4) presented last year’s Mercury Prize in Newcastle/PHOTO CREDIT: Jonty Davies for Good Housekeeping

as the Mercury Prize takes place on 22nd October. The ceremony returns for a second consecutive year to the Utilita Arena in Newcastle. The award celebrates the best albums from British and Irish artists. We have many contenders to come before the ceremony but, in terms of eligibility, albums must be released by British or Irish artists between roughly mid-July 2025 and mid-July 2026. I am going to talk about some of those that I feel will be included. As there are three months between me publishing this feature and mid-July, I will revise this after that date. However, there have been some strong releases that I feel will be among the shortlisted. Not only was the Mercury Prize held in Newcastle and outside of London for the first time. It was also won by an artist outside of London: Sam Fender for his album, People Watching. The artist who hails from North Shields was a worthy winner. A dozen albums are shortlisted every year. There have been winners from outside of London, those most of the wins in the past decade have been from artists based in London or born there. Will 2026’s prize go to an artist outside the capital? You can follow the latest developments from this year’s awards on the Mercury Prize Instagram page. I am publishing this on 11th April, so I am aware that some contenders might slip through before I share this. However, I will share a review of each album that I feel is up for Mercury shortlisting this year. Let’s start with Lola Young’s I'm Only F**king Myself. Released on 19th September, it was one of the best albums of last year. This is what DIY wrote:

“Far from a reinvention though, Lola’s sound has never stuck anywhere near the formulaic. Her debut album’s opener and notably a pre-release single, ‘Stream Of Consciousness’ fittingly threw structure right out the window. That her third full-length opens then with the guitar-led ode to pre-rehab hedonism ‘FUCK EVERYONE’ proves a further statement of intent, in-keeping with ‘Messy’’s middle-finger to the socially acceptable and a riotous introduction to her most vibrant sound yet. For every ‘One Thing’ - the still-excellent multi-million streamed lead single - there’s a ‘SPIDERS’, one of the year’s most affecting rock ballads with driving distortion gliding into Lola’s obvious pain. In it, she deals with the notion of womanhood, identity and relationships; another staple that has emerged from one of the UK’s most exciting songwriters, presenting emotion and vulnerability with a raw swagger that have underpinned the careers of Amy Winehouse and Adele. In style, of course, she welcomely sits separate.

‘I’m Only Fucking Myself’ is an exploration of anger, written in the wake of huge success and addiction. Much here deals with external relationships and a recognition of personal worth, such as the gliding sunshine pop of ‘Walk All Over You’, paired with more personal introspection, including the momentary return to soul on ‘why do I feel better when I hurt you?’ or the emotional downfall on the acoustic ‘who fucking cares?’. Combined it paints a picture of a leading songwriter with even more to come, one that can piece together exceptional art from personal turbulence and insecurity, effortlessly reaffirming her position at the top of UK pop… if we can even call it that”.

One album that is pretty much guaranteed shortlisting is The Art of Loving Olivia Dean. Released on 26th September, this award-winning and hugely acclaimed album might scoop another honour at this year’s Mercury Prize. It has won more than its fair share of impassioned reviews. Her 2023 debut, Messy, was shortlisted. Ezra Collective won for Where I'm Meant to Be:

“While you wouldn’t describe it as a complete reinvention, it certainly constitutes a noticeable rethink. It expunges most of the cliches of Dean’s debut album – or rather quarantines them on a track called Close Up – and instead looks for inspiration to music that emanated from recording studios in 70s LA. The Art of Loving dabbles in both Rumours-adjacent soft rock – you’re never far from a sun-dappled electric piano line or a breezy acoustic guitar; Baby Steps offers up slick, yacht rock-y funk – and, on So Easy (To Fall in Love), Carpenters-style MOR pop that would once have been considered entirely beyond the pale.

It’s a sound that’s familiar without feeling hackneyed or self-consciously retro: Something Inbetween is powered by a muffled rhythm that sounds like someone playing a techstep drum’n’bass track with a duvet over the speakers; lurking in the depths of Nice to Each Other there’s a wash of shoegaze-y guitar noise and gusts of ambient synth drone. Airy and inviting, it suits Dean’s sweetly understated vocals – mercifully lacking affectation, either of the post-Winehouse “jazzy” variety or the weird, consonant-mangling “indie voice” that’s supposed to connote intimacy in 21st-century pop – and adds a cinematic gloss to her lyrics. Dean is big on diaristic detail as she navigates ex-related angst and tentative new relationships: “I don’t know where the switches are, or where you keep your cutlery.”

Perhaps more importantly, Dean and her co-authors – including Tobias Jesso Jr, and Matt Hales, who once plied his trade as singer-songwriter Aqualung – have significantly upped their game. Every chorus has been polished until it catches the light (Baby Steps offers a particularly gleaming example), while one suspects that an enormous amount of effort has been expended on making the melodies of Nice to Each Other and I’ve Seen It sound as effortlessly charming as they do.

So the album breezes past. It’s exceptionally well made but feels entirely natural; it’s mainstream commercial pop, but laudably devoid of obvious cliches. If Dean’s debut seemed like an artist trying to find their place in the landscape by ticking relevant boxes, The Art of Loving seems like someone finding their own voice. The sight of Olivia Dean battling a cartoon K-pop band in the charts’ upper echelons is proof that pop in 2025 is a business you can’t really predict, but still, The Art of Loving’s success seems a foregone conclusion”.

Another artist who was recently shortlisted for the Mercury Prize and will be again this year is Lily Allen for West End Girl. This is another hugely successful album from an artist who has produced her very best work. She is touring the album and I feel is an early frontrunner for Mercury inclusion. Released on 24th October, I want to spotlight one review for one of 2025’s best albums. Here is what Pitchfork noted about West End Girl:

“Despite unavoidable comparisons to Lemonade or 30, West End Girl is much leaner and more brutal. Unlike those records, Allen’s album is too concerned with honoring moment-to-moment feelings of hurt and betrayal to really reach for a mature overview of the breakup. But what the songwriting lacks in conceptual development, it makes up for in raw emotion and narrative thrust. Allen’s truth bears out in a blow-by-blow account of coming to grips with a partner’s infidelity and gathering the resolve to leave for good. “Never get your sympathy/I don’t think you’re able,” she sings on “Let You W/In,” “But I can walk out with my dignity/If I lay my truth on the table.” There are plenty of pop songs about love as a drug, but I don’t think I’d ever heard one about heartbreak as a threat to sobriety until “Relapse.” Going through the motions of an unwanted open relationship would be painful enough, but throwing motherhood into the mix on “Nonmonogamummy” and “Dallas Major” is simply excruciating.

The record is a relief map of broken boundaries and abandoned commitments and Allen colors it in hellacious, knife-twisting detail. On “Pussy Palace,” she reveals that Bluebeard’s dungeon is actually a West Village bachelor pad stocked with sex toys, butt plugs, and lube. The perfectly paced reveal of “Madeline” (“But you’re not a stranger, Madeline”) is stomach-churning in its implication, even as it veers into cringe comedy with an unsettling Allison Williams impersonation. One of the truest West End moments occurs in “Sleepwalking,” when Allen tries desperately to re-kindle the spark with one of the funniest inversions of Oliver! put to record: “I know you’ve made me your Madonna/I wanna be your whore/Baby, it would be my honor/Please, sir, can I have some morе?” Occasionally she strains to sell the horror. “4chan Stan” has an edgy title but a faulty premise: No one who spent extended time there has ever been worth losing sleep over. That song also suggests Allen went to the Whitney Houston school of amateur sleuthing: “Never been in Bergdorf’s/But you took someone shopping there in May ’24.”

The turntablism on “Dallas Major” feels canned and anonymous, and the sunny soft rock of “Tennis” is too nondescript to hold any tension, but for the most part the production on West End Girl acquits itself pretty well. The emotional freefall of “Ruminating” feels like a cleaned-up Farrah Abraham cut, dislodging an avalanche of conflicting thoughts over unstable dance music. The medicated lullaby of “Sleepwalking” is perfectly suited to the bad daydream of fresh heartbreak. That song and “Just Enough,” about being slowly poisoned by a lover’s refusal to share the whole truth, just barely contain her aching vulnerability. They represent an evolution of Lily Allen’s signature style, so that the lightness isn’t a foil for her irony, but a vehicle for her hurt.

Nearly a hundred years ago, the writer Ursula Parrott covered shockingly similar terrain in her 1929 novel, Ex-Wife. Parrott’s Patricia is left slowly, then suddenly by her husband, with an open relationship sealing the end of their marriage. “He grew tired of me; hunted about for reasons to justify his weariness; and found them,” Patricia wryly laments. After describing all the ways she’d bent over backwards to keep her partner in her life, Allen finally realizes that she’s been left screaming in an empty room. “Wish I could fix all your shit, but all your shit’s yours to fix,” she sings with biting clarity on “Fruityloop.” Having recovered herself from the wreckage, West End Girl is a testament to how remarkable Allen is on her own”.

I think that women will dominate the 2026 shortlist. Maybe eight out of the twelve albums. One group that I feel will be in the running is The Last Dinner Party for From the Pyre. Perhaps it has been out for long enough that it might be overlooked, though I feel From the Pyre was one of the best albums of last year. It was released on 17th October. There were a lot of positive reviews for the band’s second studio album. I want to include parts from what When the Horn Blows said:

“The band leaves no breathing room between track one and two as Count The Ways sets off with a stanky riff that will have listeners screwing their faces up in approval. The dark, angsty riff is the backdrop to the yearning lyrics that cry out in pain against the story of someone struggling to move on from an ex-lover. The Last Dinner Party has certainly taken an entirely darker turn with this album and it perfectly suits their romantic maximalist aesthetic; if Tess of the d’Urbervilles wrote a song, I’m sure this is what it would sound like.

As we move into the latter half, the project becomes filled with meditative pieces on womanhood. A Woman Is A Tree and I Hold Your Anger explore the divine relationship between nature and femininity, reflecting the female energy that courses through the veins of Mother Earth herself, as well as through every woman whilst also confronting the generational pain and love that flows down from women of the ages. Aurora Nishevci, the band’s pianist/keyboardist, leads the vocal for I Hold Your Anger bringing a welcome earthy counterpart to Morris’ ethereal rock voice.

Sail Away deals with similar ideologies but through the contemporary lens of a modern relationship. The outro of this track is a well built up crescendo which combines all the band’s voices into a hymn-like ascension which could bring a tear to any listener's eye.

The penultimate track uplifts the pace and thematically sums up the whole project with ideas of love, death and reincarnation:

Don't cry, lie here forever

Let life run its course

I'll be here in the next one

Next time, you know I'll call

Coming just at the right time before the audience is suitably mellow, The Scythe arrives to breathe a new balls-to-the-wall energy into your bones assuring you that life and all its ups and downs are a part of something bigger. The level of philosophy explored throughout The Last Dinner Party albums is enough to fill a library. Musically the song draws on more stringed instruments than the album as a whole which gives the song a strongly cinematic feeling.

Finally rounding off the album is the jaunty yet empowering, Inferno which feels like a strongly bittersweet closer. While upbeat and led by a perfectly jovial piano, the lyrics remain poetic and thoughtfully sincere and what better image could end an epic album more than a scorching blaze of fire.

From The Pyre, is a ruminative and exciting step up from Prelude To Ecstasy, and the achievement it represents cannot be understated. It feels more meaningful, and to every fan it’s clear to see the natural progression and growth The Last Dinner Party have made as a band, exploring their unique and inspiring aesthetic through sharper imagery and tighter yet bolder musical arrangements”.

Fifteen more albums to get to, so I shall try and keep it brief. One of our very best artists, Cat Burns’s How to Be Human was released on 31st October. There are a couple of omissions from this feature. Charli xcx’s “Wuthering Heights” soundtrack album might not be eligible. I am also not including Reckonwrong’s extraordinary How Long Has It Been? EUPHORIA. said this in their four-star review:

“Cat Burns’ sophomore album How To Be Human is chock full of life experiences that are so sharp it’d crack through even the thickest armor. Let’s just say that she promised to deliver on the emotional content, and she did.

Speaking on the inspiration behind the project, the British singer-songwriter said: “I left a very big piece of me on this project, going through grief and heartbreak at the same time really rewired my brain chemistry, and I noticed when people try and give uplifting messages about getting through the hard times they never really go into detail about how they got to the end of the tunnel or even what the tunnel looked like, so I REALLY wanted to do that with this album and document the trenches of processing your emotions.”

Prior to the album’s premiere on October 31, she released singles such as “Something About Her,” “All This Love,” and “Please Don’t Hate Me,” all of which I had listened to. So naturally, my hopes were high going into the album, and I was also of the mind that I’ve got a sort of grasp on her musical style.

She opens with “Come Home” – no preps, no instructions, just right smack in the middle of the battlefield and left to fend for yourself. The spoken intro more or less clued me in on what the song would be about, but it still was not enough to stop the waterworks. “It was a rainy, rainy day in Wales / And the hospital ward was blocking the sky / When you were layin’ there with such love in your eyes / Did you know it then? Or did you think you had more time?” she sings. The spoken intro and outro are from Burns’ grandfather, John Burns, who passed away last April. According to Burns, this song was written to reflect the world views her grandfather held in life.

The one song that massively tears away from this is “GIRLS!” Apart from broadcasting some x-rated thoughts, the song also doubles as a confidence-boosting feminist anthem. “That I get to talk about girls, talk about girls, talk about / I only wanna talk about girls, talk about girls, all about,” she sings in the synth-driven pop track. From there, we go to “There’s Just Something About Her,” a sort of sister track to “GIRLS!”

The closing and title track, “How To Be Human,” is a soulful track about the masks we often wear to fit into society. Some of us may find it relatable, some of us may not. In general, whether it’s an acoustic ballad, or supported by melodic piano chords or gossamer strings, the production is kept minimalistic because the lyrics are always meant to be the star attraction, and they are”.

I was going to include Robbie Williams’s BRITPOP, though I am not sure that it will be shortlisted. It is a great album, but I don’t think the judges will consider it. One that they will consider is James Blake’s Trying Times. Released on 13th March, it is one of the most recent albums in this feature. It is also one that has received so much critical acclaim. In their five-star review, DORK wrote this about Trying Times:

“Seven albums in, James Blake sounds newly unburdened. 'Trying Times' carries all the elements that have defined his music for more than a decade: spacious production, ghostly electronics and that unmistakable voice, capable of turning a single line into a moment of heft. This time, though, it feels lighter, painting a portrait of an artist standing firmly in his own space, steering the whole thing exactly where he wants it to go.

That feeling runs through the album's bones. After years navigating the machinery of major labels, Blake has returned to London and rebuilt his creative world on his own terms. 'Trying Times' reflects that shift immediately. The songs feel instinctive, unfolding with openness.

Across its thirteen tracks, Blake moves through a wide emotional spectrum without ever losing his centre. Songs like 'Death Of Love' and the wonderful 'I Had A Dream She Took My Hand' capture the strange emotional weather of the present moment, tracing feelings of overload while still reaching toward empathy and connection. His writing remains deeply introspective, now carrying a warmth that's both grounded and generous.

There's also a playful spark running through the record that gives it extra lift. Guitars wander into the mix, rhythms stretch and bounce, and Blake's arrangements leave space for small surprises to bloom. Even with the meticulous precision that has always defined his production, there's a looseness in how these songs move.

By the time 'Trying Times' draws to a close, that freedom proves irresistible. Blake sounds energised by the room he has carved out for himself, following ideas wherever they lead and completely at ease in his own creative universe”.

I may cut one album from this feature, as it is going to be quite overloaded. However, when we think about locks for Mercury inclusion, you obviously have to mention RAYE’s THIS MUSIC MAY CONTAIN HOPE. One of this year’ best albums, it was released on 27th March. A fair few five-star reviews for this modern classic. I want to include Rolling Stone UK and their review of an album that they highlight is “life-affirming”:

“This Music May Contain Hope is a concept album about overcoming self-doubt, heartbreak and hollow Romeos – the fourth track is titled ‘The WhatsApp Shakespeare’ – but one loose and sprawling enough to allow for musical detours. RAYE pulls off crackling funk on ‘Skin & Bones’, recruits Al Green for the silky soul ballad ‘Goodbye Henry’, and reminds us with ‘Life Boat’ that she can still write a club banger when she wants to. Her latest single, ‘Click Clack Symphony’, features beats that mimic the thwack of high heels on a hardwood floor and crashing instrumentation from Oscar-winning composer Hans Zimmer. It’s a girls’ night out bop in the same way that a croquembouche is just a pastry.

And like a croquembouche, this album gives you a lot to digest. There are extended spoken word sections, tracks that switch tempo midway through, and ear-snagging flourishes like the brief snippet of chipmunk vocals on ‘Winter Woman’. Throughout, RAYE displays a great ear for detail – “His lips were thin and beer-stained and tear-stained,” she sings on ‘Nightingale Lane’ – and a deft turn-of-phrase. “I can’t shake this, I can’t fake this, I should just pay to rearrange this,” she sings on ‘I Hate the Way I Look Today’. It’s a reference to facial filler, perhaps, on a song that definitely isn’t musical filler.

There are bits destined to be skipped, not least the four minutes of contributor credits that RAYE recites at the end, name by name, but her warmth and generosity paper over moments that could feel de trop. The euphoric disco of ‘Joy’, which features RAYE’s younger sisters Amma and Absolutely, is every bit as infectious as her recent chart-topper ‘Where Is My Husband!’

Besides, given how creatively constrained RAYE felt during her major label days, when she was encouraged to stay in her lane as a mainstream dance-pop artist making bops for All Bar One and Love Island, it feels mean-spirited to quibble with the odd moment of over-indulgence. This Music May Contain Hope is an exciting, life-affirming listen that reminds you it’s never too late to turn things around. In a way, it’s the RAYE story writ large, with absolutely killer choruses”.

There will be some bands included in the dozen Mercury albums shortlist. Maybe three or four tops. One that I feel is possible is Gorillaz for their phenomenal album, The Mountain. Last year saw legends Pulp shortlisted (for More). I feel Gorillaz are worthy, even though they have been together over twenty years. Released on 27th February, The Mountain is the strongest Gorillaz album in some years. UNCUT gave four-and-a-half stars to this wonderful album:

“Even the most English-sounding track here – the drunken, clanking, Jerry Dammers-inspired ska of “The God Of Lying”, featuring a deadpan vocal by Joe Talbot from Idles – comes wreathed in tablas and bansuri flute, like a Bollywood take on “Clint Eastwood” from the first Gorillaz album.

The ecstatic Arabic blip-hop of “Damascus” sees Syrian singer Omar Souleyman and Yasiin Bey (the artist formerly known as Mos Def) trading verses over the pulsating percussion of Viraj Acharya. “The Manifesto” started off with a simple Latin preset on one of Albarn’s vintage home organs and it would have worked perfectly if set to a dembow-style reggaeton beat, but it piles on so many Indian rhythms that it morphs – quite brilliantly – into a piece of heavy bhangra.

And the pulsating synth pop of “The Shadowy Light” is transformed by Bollywood legend Asha Bhosle, now aged 92, with a lyric that sees her welcoming the process of death (“come, oh boatman, lower my boat into still waters/And take me, finally, to the other side”, she trills, in Hindi).

Just as this threatens to look like gap-year fetishisation of brown spirituality, the Kraftwerkian “The Plastic Guru” serves as a welcome rejoinder – an account of Albarn and Hewlett’s Beatles-like visit to an ashram in Rishikesh, where they quickly grew suspicious of their assigned swami (“starring in your own show and selling your snake oil”).

Bleepy analogue synths and a jabbering four-to-the-bar piano are slowly drenched in multi-tracked sitars and the massed ranks of an Indian ceremonial band, as if to desperately assert the guru’s credentials. False idols also dominate the infectiously catchy “The Happy Dictator”, where Ron and Russell Mael from Sparks invoke the spirit of insane autocrats, like Kim Il-sung, whose rule is eternal, even after their death.

Albarn has, of course, explored grief on many occasions – Gorillaz’s “Andromeda”, Blur’s “The Ballad” and the title track to his solo album The Nearer The Fountain… are all mournful elegies to departed friends and loved ones; countless other Blur and Gorillaz songs mourn the death of relationships. You would expect an entire album with death at its central theme to be similarly hymnal, sombre and funereal, but The Mountain somehow manages to be none of these things. Its 15 tracks are filled with cheery major-key singalongs, sitar-soaked synth-pop bangers and whimsical waltzes that serve as ecstatic celebrations of life, rebirth and reinvention”.

Based in Manchester, Mandy Indiana are a band who I think are deserving of award recognition. Perhaps URGH will correct that. It was released on 6th February. Doubling down on the abrasive assault, which is what The Skinny said in their review, URGH might have passed some people by. The Mercury Prize judges would have been all over it:

“From the first serrated riff on Sevastopol it's clear that Mandy, Indiana aren't softening up on their first album for Sacred Bones. Written in an “eerie” studio house outside Leeds doesn't give the same enigmatic appeal as the crypts and caves where they recorded their 2023 debut, but the results are just as frenetic and punishing.

Simon Catling's synths are used to constant disconcerting effect, even when conjuring something resembling a club beat as on Cursive and Magazine. But don't get too comfortable as the electronics are generally subsumed into a vortex of noise or choked-off cries. Most songs strike with intensity from the off, but even in quieter moments the band know how to put you on edge; take A Brighter Tomorrow which drops its sirens in favour of a foreboding trip-hop drumbeat and disembodied vocals.

All songs are sung, rapped or screamed in French so you might not always know exactly what's going on, but the pervasive mood of pain and suffering makes it perfectly clear (and the odd word that doesn't require a translation like 'mortalité' or 'génocide'). The exception is the closing I'll Ask Her, which features a frantic spoken-word takedown of misogynistic culture over gripping noise (reminiscent of aya).

Whether shouting over martial drums, whispering behind thick, smoky synths or rapping against a razorwire guitar, URGH is an exercise in harrowing noise; unapologetically visceral and all the better for it”.

The photo at the top of this feature is of Holly Humberstone. She is a wonderful artist whose latest album, Cruel World, is going to be one of my picks for Mercury Prize glory. The Nottingham-born artist released Cruel World on 10th April. In their glowing review, this is what Under the Radar said about one of this year’s best albums:

“Opening with a brief instrumental that evokes an orchestra tuning up, it morphs into “Make It All Better,” a moody, atmospheric track that seamlessly forms the bridge between her earlier work and this new chapter.

The previous single, “To Love Somebody,” aches with longing yet still bursts with euphoric pop energy, its premise timeless: it’s better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. Meanwhile, “Lucy” finds Humberstone in more stripped-back territory, its sparse arrangement and whispery vocals working beautifully, before the title track, “Cruel World,” a song Humberstone counts among her personal favorites, strikes the perfect balance between an irresistible, fun hook-laden pop song and one that carries real emotional weight.

On a thematic level, Humberstone turns her attention outward as well as inward, examining how rivalry between women, rather than being innate, is conditioned by a wider patriarchal structure as she looks to embrace something more compassionate and supportive.

What further elevates Cruel World is Humberstone’s emotional intelligence. Even in the album’s darker moments, there is care and understanding in how she navigates her feelings, distilling messy, chaotic experiences into piercingly honest reflections.

The result is her most complete and compelling work to date, a bold, cohesive album that showcases Holly Humberstone as an artist at the height of her songwriting powers, fully in command of her craft and vision”.

Dove Ellis is an Irish artist who is one of the most talked-about artists of the moment. Someone whose debut, Blizzard, is guaranteed toe be on the Mercury shortlist, it could well walk away with the award – and it would deserve to. Not often an Irish artist wins the award. Blizzard is a remarkable album that was released on 5th December. Lots of positive reviews to choose from, but I will go with CLASH and their assessment of the best debut album of last year:

“But the music is never too trapped in nostalgia, even during moments of introspection, such as “I’ll be gone by Christmas” or “I’ll still lift up my feather / That’s how far I will go”. This makes ‘Blizzard’ gorgeous and tangible, open-hearted and unmasked, its warmth and ache laid bare on the surface.

Released together, ‘Pale Song’ and ‘Love Is’ are a double window into Ellis’ songwriting philosophy. ‘Pale Song’ contemplates the deceptive weight of the past, warning listeners not to dwell on it whilst ‘Love Is’ emerges as a manifesto, a mantra and an anthemic celebration of love in its subtleties, “(Love is) A whispered smile and it’s got nothing to lose”, anchored by expansive piano, drums, and fluttering strings.

The joy doesn’t finish there; it grows even more on ‘Jaundice’, whose driving, communal rhythm likens Titanic’s dance scene in ‘An Irish Party in Third Class’, featuring jigs and polkas played by Gaelic Storm. Effervescence continues in full flow, drifting into the warmth of ‘Heaven Has No Wings’, a soft-rock piano track with shades of the 70s.

As a final meditation, everything falls away but Ellis’ heavenly tone and the circling of sparse guitars on ‘Away You Stride’. In loss and lament comes clarity as he reveals, “I shoot at clouds / I stab at lights / I’m ducking in a crowd / I saw you in the absence of light”. The album’s final exhale feels like a quiet wound, leaving listeners suspended in wistful grace.

The release of ‘Blizzard’ is a culmination of the years Galway-born Thomas O’Donoghue has spent honing his craft in Manchester’s live scene and beyond. Fresh from touring with Geese and selling out headline shows, Dove Ellis’ debut translates his quietly magnetic presence into something much larger, one that barely scratches the surface of what he’s capable of. We’re just at the start”.

Cardinals are a sensational bands from Cork. I do think that at least a couple of Irish albums will make it into the 2026 dozen. Masquerade could well be in there. It was celebrated and definitely put the band’s name far beyond their native Cork. Released on 13th February, Masquerade got a lot of love. This is what No Ripcord noted:

“As the first half winds down, Cardinals’ flair for a sullen ballad reveals itself more clearly. Nowhere on the album is this better demonstrated than in the plainly titled “I Like You,” where lead guitarist Oskar Gudinovic adds a slow-paced fingerpicked arrangement set against an endearing accordion accompaniment. “You can have most of me/just don’t stand so close to me,” he passionately declares, grappling with the fleeting glory and confusion of young love.

There is an underlying sense of melancholy to Euan’s lyricism, which the band consciously matches with a sombre mood as the album progresses—a stark difference to the brighter sheen they juxtapose early on. The smoldering delivery of “Anhedonia,” one of the more punk-driven tracks here, has Euan leaning into his storytelling abilities by detailing a tragic character burdened by sin: “Then I stabbed him/I opened up his world/as it spun.” While the contrasts they play with are marked, they’re not necessarily jarring, maintaining a rhythmic pace that sounds forceful yet grounded. Even the heavier, politically charged track “The Burning of Cork,” which veers into post-hardcore territory, adds depth beyond mere anger before it fizzles in two minutes flat.

Masquerade is the type of vital debut that unspools with an unrefined beauty, attracting the opinion of listeners who might think that they're still figuring out their true sound. Whether Cardinals possess the talent to evolve past this fiercely passionate statement remains to be seen, but considering who they’ve been matched against, the band has tapped into a formula that sounds arguably more defined from the outset. Cardinals would be the first to admit that it’s a daunting first step, but it sure is exciting to hear them aim this high”.

In terms of other guaranteed shortlisted albums, The Boy Who Played the Harp is definitely going to be in there. A masterpiece from Dave, it was released on 24th October. Heralding a master storyteller, DIY showed a respect and love for a staggering work from one of our greatest artists:

“This is God’s plan,” begins Dave on ‘History’ – a plan he’s in the process of making happen. He’s got a strong case, too. At 27, with three critically acclaimed LPs under his belt, it feels like the world is running out of superlatives with which to describe him. What more can you say about arguably the UK’s leading rapper? It’s been four years since 2021’s ‘We’re All Alone In This Together’, but Dave hasn’t been totally quiet since then, with standalone Central Cee collab single ‘Sprinter’ becoming a massive global hit in 2023. But it’s been long enough that it’s difficult not to savour every second of ‘The Boy Who Played the Harp’.

Across its ten tracks, Dave is found in an equally introspective and outward-looking mood, with faith also playing a major part in his narrative. ‘175 Months’, named for the length of time his brother has been in prison, is a confession, while on ‘My 27th Birthday’, he questions whether he should speak out about the world’s ills while also enjoying the luxuries that come with stardom. But he’s perhaps at his best here when he has company. James Blake’s presence is a strong one, while Jim Legxacy is a dream on ‘No Weapons’, and Tems brings a lighter tone to the flirtatious ‘Raindance’. The album’s crowning moment, meanwhile, comes with the Kano-featuring ‘Chapter 16’. Alluding to the biblical story of Samuel anointing David as king, it plays out as a conversation over dinner in which Dave gives Kano his flowers and the grime grandee responds in kind. It’s deserved. It all goes to confirm that Dave has grown from hot young talent to a true master storyteller”.

I really love Joy Crookes’s work. I have been a fan for years. Juniper is a fantastic album. It may sound like an outside shot for Mercury inclusion, but I think it should be on the shortlisted twelve. Juniper was released on 19th September. I am going to come back to DORK, as they awarded Juniper five stars:

“Juniper’ is an album borne of one of the toughest times Joy Crookes has ever experienced. Falling in love whilst also falling into an anxious spiral that threatened to ruin all she’d worked for, it is a record with identity embedded into its fabric and explored with Joy’s now trademark delicate yet hard-hitting style.

Sonically and vocally, you’d never know that Joy was going through one of the most unsteady times of her life. Her forthright delivery on delectably domineering ‘Pass the Salt (ft. Vince Staples)’ represents a woman reborn and ready, underlined by unbelievably catchy soulful pop tune ‘Perfect Crime’ and the rich, deep palette of jazz-slash-RnB anthem ‘Mathematics (ft. Kano)’ which allows Joy’s vocal to soar. Meanwhile, explosive brass sections on ‘I Know You’d Kill’ and the hazy, syncopated rhythm of ‘Paris’ transport you to a sleek, smoke-filled jazz club where Joy holds all the cards and owns every inch of the room.

Elsewhere, her softer, more vulnerable side shines through. Whether it’s in the pleading frustration of Western beauty double standards in ‘Carmen’, or in the swirling, off-kilter album opener ‘Brave’, Joy reinforces her ability to show the nuanced and often unsettling nature of simply being human. Equally, ‘First Last Dance’ sees her eyes full of stars as love fills her heart, while ‘Mother’ powerfully paints a picture of someone determined to rise above generational trauma. She’s never been afraid of feeling, no matter how scary it might seem, and she’s commanding that steely, resolute conviction with untold ease.

Joy’s debut album, ‘Skin’, was so good that it won her a Mercury Prize nomination. Somehow, though, ‘Juniper’ might be an even better record, cementing Joy Crookes as one of the world’s most prodigious talents”.

Another album that you may think would be shortlisted but I don’t think will be is Arlo Parks’s Ambiguous Desire. She won the Mercury Prize for her debut, Collapsed in Sunbeams, and she won the Mercury in 2021. However, this album I feel is going to be in the mix. JADE’s THAT’S SHOWBIZ BABY was released on 12th September and was met with critical and commercial success. It is a truly exceptional album, and I hope that JADE is recognised for her incredible debut. This is what DIY wrote in their five-star review:

“Lyrically, too, she always seemed one step ahead: between the sex-positive, feel-good bangers were vulnerable admissions of insecurity amidst the fickle fame machine and eviscerating asides about exploitative industry types (well, one high-trousered, Dayglo-toothed exec in particular). Hers was a run of singles of such consistent quality that you couldn’t help but think - has JADE already played all the best cards in her hand?

In a word: no. The latter half of ‘THAT’S SHOWBIZ BABY!’ is a dizzying journey through genre, era, and Jekyll and Hyde dynamic shifts that more than lives up to the vitality of its previews. ‘Headache’, for example, has all the attitude of a heat-warped Pharrell 7”; ‘Natural At Disaster’, meanwhile, offsets earnest crooning with choral BVs and glitchy, video game-like effects, a Frankensteined collage of the shredded pop ballad blueprint. The album’s only slight stalls come with ‘Self Saboteur’ and ‘Lip Service’ - a pair of shimmering synth-led cuts which, while not bad by any stretch (both recall Caroline Polachek at best, The 1975 at worst) feel frustratingly safe next to the balls-to-the-wall experimentation of the rest of the record. Because, clearly, JADE thrives most when she’s throwing curveballs: namely, the gloriously ‘80s guitar pop of ‘Unconditional’ - which could sit shoulder to shoulder with Pet Shop Boys and Depeche Mode - and The Supremes-sampling ‘Before You Break My Heart’: an impossibly catchy instant-classic that casts her as the natural successor to Diana Ross’ girl-group-to-solo-superstar trajectory. After a career’s worth of constricting, prescriptive pop formula, she’s now finally concocted a recipe for success on her own terms - and it’s anything but vanilla”.

I am writing this before Jessie Ware’s Superbloom is released (17th April), so this might be one album that makes it into a revised feature. For the time being, I will leave the album out. My New Band Believe by My New Band Believe is an album that I do think warrants a Mercury Prize salute. Another incredible debut, it was released on 10th April. It was formed by Cameron Picton, formerly of black midi. NME declared My New Band Believe a masterpiece. Even though the band’s name – and debut album’s title – is pretty dumb and annoying, you cannot deny their album is flawless:

“It’s the kind of ambition that could result in a mess. Thankfully, by imposing the limitation that almost everything on the record should be acoustic, with the smallest possible amount of reverb, Picton ensures that the maximalism is tightly controlled. The way it constantly tries to press against those self-inflicted cast-iron boundaries – like the orchestra in that room – is one of the reasons it’s so thrilling.

Then, there is Picton himself, a dazzling instrumentalist. On ‘Heart Of Darkness’ alone, he flits between serpentine finger-picked guitar and blissed-out soul, envisaging a transatlantic communion between English folk great John Renbourn and American soul legend Otis Redding. To longstanding Black Midi fans such chops will come as no surprise. What’s intriguing, though, is how much he shines as sole frontman.

Lyrically, too, there’s brilliance at work, Picton skipping between the perspectives of different characters, drawing out the intense moments of desire, lust, anger, bliss and despair that exist in intimate spaces. Sometimes these emotions dovetail with the music – the gentle domestic portrait on ‘Love Story’ set to strings that border on saccharine; the skittering rhythms that heighten the paranoid self-consciousness on ‘In The Blink of an Eye’ – and sometimes they’re set in uneasy juxtaposition. There is a simmering violence under the quirky surface of ‘Target Practice’, for instance, a meditation on the ethics of assassination.

Like its name that emerged within that 2023 fever dream, My New Band Believe’s debut is an open-ended record, as ambitious as it is ambiguous. In less skilled hands it could easily fall apart under its own weight. In Picton’s, however, it’s a masterpiece”.

Three more albums to include. Elmiene is an artist who is rightly being talked about as a future legend. A rare talent that comes along every so often. He is a British-Sudanese musician from Oxford. He placed fifth in the BBC Sound Of 2024 poll. His sounds for someone is an immense debut. It was released on 27th March. This is what Shatter the Standards wrote in their review:

“Almost every song on sounds for someone asks for something. “Honour,” with Baby Rose’s voice winding around his in the low end, requests the simplest thing imaginable—believe in me. “I’ve always been the one to doubt myself/Convinced I don’t deserve a ‘someone else,’” he admits, and then spends the rest of the song trying to earn what he’s afraid to expect. “Don’t Say Maybe,” the album’s most rhythmically insistent cut (Ghost-Note and No I.D. supplying a snapping, uptempo groove that breaks from the album’s prevailing warmth), takes the same impulse and strips the patience out of it. “I always hated when you treated me like a child,” he opens, and the chorus is blunt. Just say yes, just say no, don’t say maybe. That directness sounds different for Elmiene. The songs addressed to his father plead and circle. This one draws a line.

Not everything on the album bleeds. “Reclusive” is probably the most fun anyone’s ever had admitting they don’t want to leave the house. Elmiene has credited Biz Markie’s ability to make the mundane memorable, and you can hear that in the way the song zooms into the tiniest details of inertia: wake up, play video games, think you need a change, don’t change. “I ain’t even gonna lie/Not a social butterfly” is as self-aware as this album gets, and the Gitelman production (piano and drums that gradually widen into a busier arrangement) treats his reclusiveness as a fact of life, not a problem to solve. The romantic songs carry more weight than they might on a less emotionally loaded album. “Lie With Me” makes a painful request. Fake it, lie, make me believe what you don’t, just until I can move on. He knows it’s over. He’s asking for one more night of pretending. “Light by the Window” puts Elmiene in a locked room with an empty glass and a double bed, hiding for days by the window, wondering if leaving would make any difference. Saadiq’s presence brings a weight to the arrangement that Elmiene meets without strain, and this section (“Detrimental to my vision/Without my glasses you’re far away with no precision”) is the kind of odd, specific image that separates a good lyricist from someone filling bars.

Ghost-Note and OzMoses Arketex handle the majority of the album’s back half, and their production keeps to a steady, mid-tempo pulse that gives Elmiene room to phrase long. The consistency pays off when the songwriting justifies it (”Lonely People,” a mutual codependence anthem where two people agree to stay small together, gains from the controlled simmer) and drags mildly when it doesn’t (”Special,” a sweet ordinary-day love song, sits comfortably in the same tempo and register as three or four songs around it). But Elmiene’s tenor is a remarkable instrument for this kind of sustained quiet. He dips into falsetto when the lyric needs air and drops to a low murmur when it doesn’t, and neither gear sounds forced. Raised in Oxford by his Sudanese mother, the son of a poet grandmother and a musician grandfather, he sings like someone who grew up in a house where expression wasn’t optional but volume was negotiable. On “Told You I’ll Make It,” he reaches his father’s house, puts the key in the lock, and it won’t turn. “How much have I changed?/Do you hate me now?” He promised he’d be there, and he’s making good. The door is still closed”.

The penultimate album I am including is from Dry Cleaning. Secret Love. The London band released their third album on 9th January. Produced by Cate Le Bon, Secret Love could see them nominated for a Mercury Prize. God Is in the TV awarded it eight-out-of-ten and made some insightful observations:

“Can you, should you judge an album by its artwork? Their previous album, Stumpwork, had a front cover that featured a photograph of a bar of soap decorated with pubic hair spelling out the album title. This time round, the album’s cover artwork features a painting by the Scotland-based Canadian artist Erica Eyres, which shows the band’s frontwoman Florence Shaw having her eye washed by someone largely out of frame, holding Shaw’s eyelid open. Of course, if you only tend to stream or download, this may be a mute point, but is it her eyes that are being opened, or ours?

Quite possibly both, and that should be ears too;  artwork showing ears being syringed would have been way too obvious, and the reality is that Dry Cleaning are not an obvious band. Having made two successful albums, they’ve taken their time with this one, and it’s paid off in spades.

That should have been obvious from the release of the opening track last year ‘Hit My Head All Day.’ For those who have yet to hear it, this six minute track served as a call to arms: we’re back, we’ve developed and we’ve moved up a gear or two. Its baseline is as funky as anything (think prime LCD Soundsystem or Tina Weymouth on either Talking Heads or Tom Tom Club records), and the lyrics that take in the mundane but also reach the surreal on a par with The Sugarcubes’ Here Today, Tomorrow Next Week.

There are some things that haven’t changed. Sure, there are still tracks you might not want to play in front of your more prudish relatives. Also (while it would be weird to simply love a group because of what they don’t sound like), it’s impressive that whilst they’ve made their most accessible and best album so far, in this case it is most definitely not a way of saying that they’ve shed their edges that made them so interesting and have become bland enough for mainstream acceptance. Both the band and Shaw have started singing (occasionally), but these are not songs to soundtrack your local beige indie disco. Frankly, it’s all the better for that.

It’s pointless to simply describe this as the first great album of 2026 when we’re not even two weeks in. It is, however, a record that will reward repeated playing, and one that will certainly win them new fans, and rewarding those long-term fans with how much they’ve developed. How long it will be to the next record is anyone’s guess, but we’ve got this and it’s brilliant. For best results, listen to with your eyes closed and just focus on one aspect at a time…”.

People might have their own thoughts about which albums released so far – or between last autumn and now – will be in contention for the Mercury Prize. I am not sure who is hosting this year’s ceremony, though it is likely to be Lauren Laverne. She hosted last year, so I am pretty sure she will host this year’s. The final album I am suggesting is possibly going to be shortlisted is Knucks for A Fine African Man. Released on 31st October, Knucks is a London-born rapper. A hugely acclaimed talent. A  fine place to end. I feel this album is a hot favourite to be among the golden twelve that will be in contention on 22nd October at Newcastle’s Utilita Arena. We have a way to go, though the eligibility window closes near the end of August. I will publish another feature nearer the time. Who else can be in contention when we look at the albums already confirmed? Kneecap for FENIAN, Maisie Peters for Florescence and Paul McCartney for The Boys of Dungeon Lane. It would be amazing if Paul McCartney was shortlisted! Also, Ringo Starr releases Long Long Road on 24th April. Two Beatles shortlisted! Neither needs the award, though it would be possibly the last time this is possible. Let’s get back to Knucks, and NME’s review for A Fine African Man:

“Throughout ‘A Fine African Man’, Knucks’ verses move with the rhythm of spoken poetry – like diary entries, all lived-in and unfiltered. But the album’s most tender moment comes on ‘Yam Porridge’, where he recalls his younger self, alone at a Nigerian boarding school, finding home in the solace of a dinner lady who made the best bowl around. Tiwa Savage’s voice drifts in sweetly (“Anything you want, I’m here / Full confidence, no fear”), providing the blissful warmth of motherly comfort. ‘Yam Porridge’ is the clearest evidence that Knucks is one of this generation’s sharpest storytellers – real rap doesn’t need to be lyrically complex or super conceptual: sometimes, simple words work too.

Although this album is a new sonic exploration for Knucks, you can still catch glimpses of the foundation he made for himself. Since his 2014 debut mixtape ‘Killmatic’, Knucks has always favoured groove and rhythm, perfecting the balance between mood and meaning – making the ordinary feel cinematic. On ‘A Fine African Man’, that instinct has matured beautifully. ‘Are You Okay?’ is full of neo-Afrofusion sultriness, all bass warmth and glossy keys, but with depth beneath its glow. ‘Pure Water’ calls back to the sombre drill production that first built his legend, embodying the relentless grind that defines Knucks: always moving with purpose, chasing something real.

All this is done with great Nigerian pride, manifested through bravado. ‘No Shaking’ sees Knucks link up with Phyno, trading bars in their mother tongue over a warping grimetrap-like beat that fuses London grit with Lagos swagger. Then there’s ‘Nkita’ with UK trap disruptor Fimiguerrerro – an aggressive, braggadocious track about being top dog that adds some bite to the mostly mellow record. By the time we get to songs like the chirpy amapiano-style ‘Container’ and the groovy ‘Palm Wine’, it’s a full-blown celebration stretching into the far-flung corners of the diaspora.

‘A Fine African Man’ shines as a vibrant depiction of Igbo culture through the eyes of someone both belonging and (once) an outsider. Using love, struggle, and growth as his colour palette, Knucks paints from memory and discovery alike. If ‘Alpha Place’ reflected London, here, Knucks turns his mirror toward Nigeria, watering his roots through sounds and customs from his motherland. No longer the boy from Kilburn, Knucks stands tall as a fine African man whose talent will never be forgotten”.

A late and final addition for this feature is Jessie Ware. I have to include Superbloom, as it is possibly the best album of the year, and it is my favourite of 2026. Ware has been nominated for the Mercury Prize before. Twice, in fact: first in 2012 for her debut album, Devotion, and in 2023 for her fifth studio album, That! Feels Good! I think she will earn her third nomination. I want to bring in a five-star review for Supetbloom from DIY.

”When Jessie Ware first announced details of her newest, sixth full-length earlier this year, its title begged for warmer days and lighter nights, for a sense of joy to grow and blossom from the darkness of recent months. With ‘Superbloom’ - plus an impeccably well-timed bout of springtime sunshine - the South Londoner has managed to channel exactly what was promised. Building on the disco-tinged, funk-flecked foundations of her previous records - 2020’s ‘What’s Your Pleasure?’ and 2023’s ‘That! Feels Good’ - Jessie continues her journey to becoming a modern, soul-pop legend with a set of songs so palpably feel-good that it’s impossible not to start shoulder-shimmying at any given moment.

From its hazy, sun-drenched introduction in ‘The Garden’ through to the star-filtered lead single ‘I Could Get Used To This’, via a range of technicolour, Studio 54-esque offerings, ‘Superbloom’ is a luscious environ in which to get lost, where romance, flamboyance and flirtation take centre stage. And while this kind of delicious, opulent cosplay has come to feel rather familiar for Ware over recent years, ‘Superbloom’ feels even richer, glossier, with her vocals sounding their strongest yet. Throughout, she glides through styles effortlessly; one moment, channelling Annie Lennox (‘Sauna’), the next, Shirley Bassey (‘Don’t You Know Who I Am?’), all with a lick of Grace Jones’ empowered attitude (perhaps strongest on the NYC Downlow-inspired, queer classic ‘Ride’). A remedy to the darkness of life as we currently know it - and a timely reminder that love and joy should still be celebrated and sought after - ‘Superbloom’ is a glorious ode to connection, and Jessie’s most evocative work yet”.

Rather than include the entire album for each of my selections, I am instead popping in a song from the album. I would encourage people to check out the albums, but I didn’t think people who read this would listen wholly to every single album, so I thought it was better putting a song in instead. Such a varied collection of artists, my current top-five of sure-fire Mercury nominees would be Dove Ellis, Dave, Olivia Dean, JADE, RAYE and Holly Humberstone. I do think a female artist will win, and the Mercury is not guaranteed to go back to London. In 2024, a female-fronted band English Teacher, won for This Could Be Texas, but Little Simz won in 2022 for Sometimes I Might Be Introvert. English Teacher and Sam Fender from northern England, so two years running it has been awarded to artists outside of London. I think, so far, I would put Holly Humberstone against Olivia Dean and Jessie Ware as the favourites - though every album I have included is deserving. The Mercury Prize always throws up surprises and you can never predict. We will see who is nominated in September. In terms of albums that could be in the running, there is…

MUCH more to come.

FEATURE: One for the Record Collection! Essential May Releases

FEATURE:

 

 

One for the Record Collection!

IN THIS PHOTO: Tori Amos (In Times of Dragons is released on 1st May)

Essential May Releases

__________

MAY is what I would say…

IN THIS PHOTO: Paul McCartney (his album, The Boys of Dungeon Lane, will be released on 29th May)

is the start of the busiest and most exciting time for new releases. I think artists tend to wait until May through to August or September to release albums. In terms of lining up with festivals and maybe it is a better time to put them out. Although there have been some year-best contenders already out, next months sees a few albums that could challenge that. I am recommending the albums from May you will want to pre-order. You can see a fuller list here. There are eight albums alone due on 1st May that you should have on your radar. Let’s start out with Ana Roxanne and Poem 1. This is an artist I am aware of but have recently got more into her. You can pre-order it here:

"I wanted to travel / Home into somewhere,"Ana Roxanne breathes across an eerie suspended drone on "The Age of Innocence". "I wanted to try / And go very far." These are the first words we hear on Poem 1 and reintroduce an artist who's in a conspicuously different phase of her life than she was when her debut album, Because of a Flower, sprouted nearly six years ago.

Heartbroken and reflective, Roxanne surveys the transformations that followed and displays a new-found boldness. Her voice is naked, vulnerable and alive, no longer shrouded in tape noise or looped and echoed beyond recognition beneath layered electroacoustic textures.

Throughout the course of Poem 1, Roxanne displays her skill as a singer and songwriter in the classic sense, using the limited instrumentation simply to accent her exposed tones. Muted piano phrases and plucked bass notes languidly trail her anguished siren song on "Berceuse in A-flat Minor, Op. 45", making each word count.

On "Keepsake" meanwhile, she sounds as if she's alone in an abandoned bar, stroking the dust off the piano's keys as she inventories her emotional scars. There's a smell of old whisky in the air, but Poem 1 is a remarkably sober album; never wallowing in self pity, Roxanne finds catharsis in the logic of her expressions, twisting out the edges of her memories into surreal, cinematic asides. "Untitled II", the album's pronounced, uninhibited centerpiece, delivers on the Lynchian promise that's been present since her first EP, 2019's ~~~. "

And when she interprets the Robert Schumann's lied "Stille Tränen" on "One Shall Sleep", she turns Justinus Kerner's words into a whispered echo of her own grief, narrating the 19th century poem over syrupy synthesizers and strings. There's a light emerging on the horizon, though; burying her past on the choral standout '"Cover Me", Roxanne shifts the pace and the mood on 'Atonement', lifting her voice into a gentle lilt”.

I am excited to see what the brilliant Jesca Hoop offers up with her new album, Long Wave Home. I really love her music and have seen her perform live. Such a compelling, lovable, talented and fascinating artist. This is an album that you definitely need to pre-order. There is not a tonne of information about the album available, so I will drop in what there is. Artists like Jesca Hoop will never receive the sort of acclaim and focus as bigger Pop artists. I think that her music is more arresting and interesting than most of what it is out there. It does definitely warrant a lot more conversation and exposure. She is a brilliant artist:

“Jesca Hoop releases her new album Long Wave Home. Staying true to her folk roots, though never purely, Hoop delivers strikingly original songwriting showcasing her innovative vocals augmented by imaginative arrangements. Long Wave Home is energized and rings with the promise of a fresh new chapter for the artist”.

An album that is definitely going to get a lot of love and huge reviews is Kacey Musgraves’s Middle of Nowhere. This is an album from one of the true greats of modern music. A superb songwriter, again, there is very little from Rough Trade regarding what we can expect from this album. However, do go and pre-order it, as Musgraves is superb. Middle of Nowhere follows 2024’s Deeper Well. Not as celebrated as albums like 2018 Golden Hour, it was seriously underrated. I think that Musgraves might win back a bit of critical traction with Middle of Nowhere. Its lead single, Dry Spell, is a wonderful taste of what is to come:

“Middle of Nowhere is the sixth studio album from eight-time Grammy Award winner Kacey Musgraves, and is made for two-stepping. The collection draws from a love of Texas dancehall classics, humorous takes on the human condition, and the space where traditional Country borders many sounds including Norteño and even Zydeco. Fresh yet familiar, and classically Kacey: honest, fearless, immersive, and always ready to wink at life’s twists and turns”.

Another terrific and anticipated album from 1st May is Melanie C’s Sweat. There has been a lot of promotion and talk around this. Some of the very best work from Melanie C, this album is going to get some massive reviews I think. It is phenomenal and one you need to pre-order. Its cover alone marks it out as a great album. You are captured by that image. The music released from the album is wonderful, so I feel this is an album that you cannot afford to miss out on. I am going to source from the start of an interview from The Times published back in January. Melanie C (Chisholm) discussing her new work and personal life. A revealing and amazing interview from this incredible artist:

“Melanie Chisholm has never looked hotter than she does in the video for her comeback single, Sweat, an ultra-camp tribute to Jane Fonda workouts and Eric Prydz’s Call on Me. Chisholm — 52 years old and ripped to the heavens: abs, quads, biceps, glutes, all of it, honed beyond belief — frolics and cavorts on an exercise bike and bench presses barbells surrounded by admiring trainer dudes clad in Union Jack budgie-smugglers. She donkey kicks in ankles weights, spike-heeled booties and outrageously saucy unitard. The song, a dance track that could be about training, but — guess what? — could also be about sex (“I’ll make you, I’ll make you sweat” etc), is fun and silly and compulsive, and while Chisholm definitely does not take herself too seriously, the whole effect is, nonetheless, outrageously sexy. Sporty Spice — but absolutely not as you know her.

“I think this is the most courageous I’ve ever been in a video,” she tells me. What made her so courageous, I ask. “I think it’s because I’m 50. I look like this — and it’s powerful”. 

I love Lip Critic, so I am going to listen to Theft World when it comes out on 1st May. This is a fantastic U.S. Electro-Punk group that you really need to connect with. Go and pre-order this album. Hex World is an incredible album, though Lip Critic are not going to repeat themselves for Theft World. It is going to be this tremendous album that will get lots of praise:

“Lip Critic’s 2024 Partisan debut Hex Dealer was one of the most-hyped experimental releases of that year (“Like the B-52s on ketamine” -Paste) and signaled the Brooklyn band’s arrival as a borderline-batshit creative force. Theft World is their next chapter, built again from the chaos of two drummers locked in psychic combat, a sampler that sounds like it was struck by lightning, and frontman Bret Kaser’s paranoid preacher energy. But where Hex Dealer leapt from one absurdist vignette to the next, Theft World plays like a fully locked-in transmission. Themes orbit around the concept of theft, not just as a political force or digital dilemma, but as a surreal, emotional constant. Club rhythms and hardcore breakdowns pull as much from Tyler the Creator’s ‘Igor’ and Korn as they do Skrillex and Soul Coughing, coming together to soundtrack a world that’s constantly being striped apart and resold”.

A few more albums from 1st May to cover off before moving to 8th. I have talked about Maya Hawke and Maitreya Corso in a recent feature. Not only is she this phenomenal actor who is among the best of her generation. Hawke is this singular artist with such an incredible voice. A wonderful songwriter. Her upcoming album is one you should pre-order if you can.  A busy time for Maya Hawke, her fourth studio album will sit alongside this year’s best:

“For the past couple of years, Maya Hawke has been busy in the acting world, wrapping the final season of Stranger Things and taking on a role in The Hunger Games franchise. The American singer is now returning to music, unveiling her upcoming fourth album, ‘Maitreya Corso’, and sharing its lead single, ‘Devil You Know’.

‘Devil You Know’ is a stripped-back and honest track with folk influences. Speaking about the song, she says “‘Devil You Know’ is about trying to keep ambition and greed out of the creative process. This album is about learning to protect the precious from the poisonous. Protect creation from pride. Protect love from control. Protect collaboration from jealousy.”

For her highly anticipated fourth album, set for release on May 1st, charts Hawke’s experiences of a life-changing relationship. For ‘Maitreya Corso’, Hawke has created a persona and fantasy world to allow her to explore complex feelings with more depth. Speaking about the character she has crafted, she describes her as a “magical misfit, whose sheer inability to adapt to the surrounding world allows her to create a world of her own, and to explore the positive and negative power of the ego.”

Hawke enlisted the help of regular collaborators, singer-songwriter (and new husband) Christian Lee Hutson, multi-instrumentalist Benjamin Lazar Davis, and producer Jonathan Low to bring her stories to life on ‘Maitreya Corso’.

The news of the upcoming release was accompanied by the announcement of a slew of live shows, which will be her first US tour in three years”.

The next album I will recommend is The Black Keys’ Peaches! I really like the U.S. duo, and I have been following them for years now. I would say, even if you have not heard of them or are quite new, to invest in Peaches! You can pre-order the album here:

“The Black Keys Peaches! is the Akron duo’s fourteenth studio album (their sixth since 2019), a visceral and raw 10-song collection described by singer Dan Auerbach as the band’s “most natural record” since their 2002 debut, The Big Come Up. In similar DIY spirit, the album was recorded with all musicians playing in the same room with few overdubs, and is the first record mixed entirely by the band themselves since 2006’s Magic Potion. The songs chosen reflect Auerbach and bandmate Patrick Carney’s obsessive record-collecting habit, which in recent years has escalated into an ongoing series of Record Hang DJ-set dance parties where they spin vintage 45s for packed, high-energy dancefloors in the coolest spots across the globe.
The cover art for Peaches! is based around an iconic image from Memphis-born photographer, William Eggleston, and marks the return of Patrick’s brother, Michael Carney, overseeing the art direction”.

One more album from 1st May. Another music legend to highlight. Tori Amos’s In Times of Dragons will be one you’ll have to pre-order, as she is a genius who always releases wonderful music. This is no exception. In a recent interview with The Times, Tori Amos discussed In Times of Dragons:

“As we walk round the site we bump into crew members, some of whom are staying here. Amos describes her team as “a lady pirate ship”, pointing up at a pink Jolly Roger fluttering on a mast. If that sounds eccentric, wait until you hear the new album. In Times of Dragons is a blend of southern gothic drama, pick-and-mix mythology and Game of Thrones-style fantasy that is a critique of “the cabal of puppeteering billionaires”.

Smokily sung by Amos over end-of-the-world piano, it features “angel sharks”, gay witches and an alternate Tori who, instead of marrying Hawley in the Nineties, got hitched to an evil American tycoon who is also a lizard demon. She flees from him and reunites with her daughter — whose part in the album is beautifully sung by Amos’s daughter, Natashya — before growing wings and turning into a dragon queen. Ed Sheeran this ain’t.

It all came to her, Amos says, via a selection of muses including the wizard Merlin, an Egyptian goddess by the name of Setmuk and a Celtic deity called Lugh of the Long Arm, with whom she says she had a love affair. Her husband doesn’t mind, she says. “Lugh is in a different dimension so Mark’s OK with that.”

Not everyone will believe this stuff, I suggest. “I began to learn, particularly in the Nineties, when I wanted to share the magic of music and how it came, that there were some journalists that unfortunately had stepped into cynicism,” Amos says. We have been known to do that. “They circumcised their imagination,” she adds.

Her own gifts, she insists, came through those muses. That is why, she says, “I never had to learn how to play and why I can’t teach.” Away from music, she says, “I can’t do a whole lot. I’m virtually unemployable. Some of the builders that have been building the rehearsal shed, they can do all kinds of things.” And her husband is practical. “Very practical.” All of which is just as well because “the lady pirate ship is rolling” and it needs a big and dedicated crew. “The muses barely wait for me. If I don’t show up, they’re going to go find Björk”.

I want to move to a few albums from 8th May that should be on your radar. The first you need to check out is Aldous Harding’s Train on the Island. Harding is a terrific artist that I really love. I would urge people to pre-order Train on the Island. You can have a dig for recent interviews where Aldous Harding talks about the album, but here is a little bit of information about it:

“Aldous Harding releases her fifth studio album, Train On The Island. The 10-track Train On The Island was co-produced by long-time collaborator John Parish (PJ Harvey, Dry Cleaning) at Rockfield Studios in Monmouth, Wales, where the pair recorded the New Zealander’s previous bodies of work, Party (2017), Designer (2019) and Warm Chris (2022). Joining Harding and Parish on Train On The Island are pedal steel player Joe Harvey-Whyte, harpist Mali Llywelyn, synth artist Thomas Poli, drummer Sebastian Rochford (Polar Bear) and Huw Evans (H. Hawkline) on bass, vocals, acoustic/electric guitar and organ”.

I have been a fan of girli for quite a long time now, so it is always exciting when she releases an album. Everyone needs to keep an eye out for it’s just my opinion. You can pre-order the album here. The moniker of London-based Amelia Toomey, GIRLI is an artist that does not get as much love as deserved. A hugely talented artist that I feel everyone needs to listen to. You will instantly get hooked:

“With her third record, girli steps fully into her most honest era yet.


The album is sharp, cohesive, and rooted in who she's always been. Growing up in North London, she absorbed the chaos and hooks of the indie sleaze scene, and now she channels that restless energy into songs that feel alive, pulsing like a sweaty gig in Camden or Shoreditch. It's classic girli alt-pop - nostalgic, chaotic, and fearless, but sharpened with a bold new edge.

girli has been teasing the new era since the end of 2025, sharing 'Better Undressed' and the powerful recent single 'Slap on the Wrist'.

Known for her shimmering, high-concept production and fearless commentary, girli now pivots toward a more grounded, girl-next-door energy, trading gloss for grit, and polish for raw, intimate expression.

Since emerging with her breakthrough sophomore album, Matriarchy, girli has carved a space in the alternative scene for bold, boundary-pushing storytelling. Her ability to merge pop essence with underground energy has earned her a tight-knit and dedicated fanbase.



As an openly LGBTQ+ artist and advocate for social change, girli continues to intertwine her personal journey with broader cultural conversations. Her past work has touched on themes of identity, politics, mental health, and more - and this new chapter builds on that same spirit of activism, but through a softer, more human lens”.

Actually, two more 8th May albums that I need to cover off. Lykke Li’s The Afterparty is the first of them. Again, I have been listening to Li for a long time and always love what she puts into the world. You can pre-order The Afterparty here. Another case of there being scant information about the album, I am including what there is to know:

“Lykke Li’s The Afterparty is a journey through the night, turning the collective feeling of hopelessness into a celebratory revenge. With hooky choruses, maximalist arrangements and “apocalyptic bongos,” The Afterparty asks the eternal question. It’s 4am: can we have one last euphoric dance before the hangover crushes us? Featuring a limited vinyl with a transparent printed outer sleeve and exclusive stunning 20-page insert, it’s as much a visual artifact as it is a sonic one”.

Quite a few more albums to cover off. However prior to getting to those out on 15th May, one more from 8th. MUNA’s Dancing on The Wall is worthy of recommendation. Such a brilliant group, they are comprised of Katie Gavin, Josette Maskin, and Naomi McPherson, they are signed to the Saddest Factory label. Founded by Phoebe Bridgers, this is a label housing artists that you need to know. You can pre-order Dancing on the Wall here:

“Muna’s journey has always been about holding space for the complex, messy, ecstatic realities of life, and with their fourth album, Dancing On The Wall, they’ve never been sharper, darker, or more exhilarating. Emerging from the sparkly, confetti-strewn heights of their 2022 self-titled record, Muna now channel the anxious, uncertain energy of living in a Los Angeles defined by political tension, environmental decay, and the quiet pressures of millennial precarity.

The result is a record that feels both intimate and spectacular, a pop world built with teeth, wit, and emotional resonance, a soundtrack for hearts simultaneously on fire and observing the chaos around them. Across the record, Muna explores desire, intimacy, and connection against a backdrop of a world in flux. There’s a quiet reckoning throughout the album with how to keep living, loving, and reaching for one another while bearing witness to political brutality and systemic violence and how joy survives without denial.

The record is produced by Naomi McPherson, with their trademark attention to detail blending effortlessly with bandmate Josette Maskin’s  well-honed behind-the-scenes pop technique to create living, breathing worlds for lead singer Katie Gavin’s incisive lyricism and signature voice. Dancing On The Wall blends euphoric sonic landscapes with sharp, human storytelling. The album reflects a fiercely self-directed creative process, one shaped by instinct, trust, and total artistic control. It feels lived-in, urgent, and cinematic, a reflection of a generation navigating uncertainty while refusing to let go of joy.

With this album, Muna proves once again that pop can be daring, intimate, and socially conscious all at once: a record that doesn’t just capture the moment, but distills it into a world you want to inhabit”.

Two albums from 15th May I want to bring to your attention. The first is Dua Saleh’s Of Earth & Wires. You might not know about her work, though she is such a special artist that you need to listen to. You can pre-order here album here:

“Sudanese-American artist Dua Saleh continues their boundless ascent with Of Earth and Wires, a resolutely warm, spiritual, and frenetic album exploring notions of home, humanity, and renewal.

Featuring contributions from Justin Vernon (Bon Iver), aja monet, Gaidaa, and more, Saleh threads and deconstructs indie, R&B, and electronic pop with flashes of Sudanese folk, UK dance, and reggaeton, sounds intrinsic to their story, all held together by ambitious, future-facing production and clear-eyed lyricism.

Saleh’s soulful, gritty, shape-shifting style has found fans from The New York Times to NME, alongside their breakout role in the Netflix series Sex Education, making 2024's Ghostly International debut, I Should Call Them, a proper arrival. The highly anticipated Of Earth and Wires responds to the moment as both a watershed in their career and an urgent dialogue with struggles faced on a universal level.

In addition to their musical endeavors, Dua is a rising actor with a breakout role in the well-loved Netflix series Sex Education, where they starred as Cal Bowman for three seasons”.

An album that I can see being in line for awards and sitting with the best of 2026 is Maisie Peters’s Florescence. I am writing a feature about albums that might get shortlisted for the Mercury Prize. This one is coming a bit late for me to include in that, though I will revisit the feature, as I think Fluorescence could be a contender. Here is where you can order your copy:

“Chart topping British singer-songwriter Maisie Peters returns with much anticipated third studio album Florescence, co-produced with 2x Grammy Winner Ian Fitchuck with collaborators including Marcus Mumford and Julia Michaels. Florescence reflects on how the right love can help heal the wrong ones. It’s an album about perspective, self-realisation, healing, and ultimately, learning how to flourish. This lands as Maisie’s first new LP since she became the youngest solo British female artist in almost a decade to land a UK No.1 album with The Good Witch back in 2023. Since then, she’s had the A-list co-signs via Phoebe Bridgers, Sam Smith and Olivia Rodrigo. She’s had a fiercely devoted fandom flock to headline tours around the world. And she’s played shows from Wembley Arena, to Glastonbury, to stadium slots with Taylor Swift and Coldplay.

“Florescence means ‘the process of flowering, of developing richly and fully’ and to me, this album describes exactly that. These 15 tracks depict a blossoming of myself from ages 23 to 25 and a blossoming of a true real love that anchors both me and this record. It tells the story of the last few long winters, with all of their villains and thorns, heartbreaks and rains, and it leads you, by the end, into a perfect English spring, into the hope and catharsis that comes when the first wildflower blooms. It’s a true representation of healing, of finding hope and peace and strength not just in somebody else, but in yourself. It is clear skies, cherry pits on the grass, windows flung open - it is Sussex country roads and London corner shop wine that leaves a stain when you kiss. It is the feeling of flying, then falling, then flying again. It is knowing that there was a point to all the sadness of before, and the point is the woman you see in this mirror now, and the person you see by her side. Love is weaved into every strand of every song on this album and for good reason - love is timeless, love is pure, love is organic and simple and effortless and real. I hope you find this album to be that as well”.

There are three albums from 22nd May that are well worth pre-ordering. I know that people cannot get all of the albums I recommend, so this is more of a suggestion. Though May features so many great albums. Alela Diane’s Who's Keeping Time? is one you will want to pre-order:

“In circles and ever changing, Who’s Keeping Time? is a musing on life’s seasons—fleeting truths of beauty and chaos.  For 10 days in August of 2025, we made this record in the attic of my 1892 Victorian home in Portland, Oregon, where all the songs were written.  The scene felt kindred to a mouse house: a cozy world built of antique quilts,  musical instruments, sound baffles, relics, marigolds, great-grandma’s dolls, old photographs, paintings and brightly colored rugs.  Sunshine poured through the skylights as Maggie the cat slept atop the pre-amps and inside guitar cases. We played these songs together in one room: no click tracks, no tricks, and no fuss. This is music from the hearts and breathing bodies of human beings, imperfect as we may be.

I hope we can all take pause, and remember what is real — thanks for listening”.

Let’s move to Bleachers’ everyone for ten minutes. You might not know this band or have heard one or two of their songs. However, they are brilliant and they are worthy of fonder investigation. You can pre-order their forthcoming album here:

“Bleachers return with their latest album everyone for ten minutes, continuing the project’s evolution under the direction of acclaimed singer, songwriter, musician, and producer Jack Antonoff, an eleven-time Grammy Award winner. Over the past decade, Bleachers have cultivated a passionate global fanbase, celebrated for high-energy live performances and a strong sense of connection with their audience. Their previous self-titled fourth studio album marked a major milestone for the band, highlighted by a sold-out Madison Square Garden performance and widespread critical recognition, further solidifying their place in modern pop rock”.

One more album from 22nd May that I want to highlight. It is Ed O'Brien’s Blue Morpho. Guitarist in Radiohead, his solo work is fabulous. You should pre-order Blue Morpho. I am looking forward to it. People always expecting band members to repeat what they do in their solo work, though Ed O’Brien’s solo work is detached and distinct from Radiohead:

“Ed O'Brien, the acclaimed guitarist and singer-songwriter known for his role in Radiohead, announces Blue Morpho, his absorbing, second solo album and first under his own name.

Named for the iridescent butterfly, Blue Morpho was written during lockdown and recorded at The Church Studio, London and Seven Sound in Wales. The tranquil Welsh countryside proved inspirational, capturing a sense of reflection, healing, and acceptance. Musically the album blends a collage of hypnotic psych-folk, jazz, trip- hop, radiant guitars and rhythm sections. Blue Morpho marks a fresh and deeply personal chapter in O'Brien's musical journey.

Produced by Paul Epworth (Adele, Coldplay), with additional production from Riley MacIntyre (Ezra Collective), and mixed by Ben Baptie (Sault, Little Simz). The album features an array of musicians, such as Shabaka Hutchings (flute), Dave Okumu (guitars, bass), Philip Selway (drums), and The Tallinn Chamber Orchestra”.

The first of three albums from 29th May that you should get is Iceage’s For Love of Grace & the Hereafter. You can pre-order the album here. Not a lot out there about the album. However, this is an incredible band that people need show support for. Here is what is out there for the incredible Love of Grace & the Hereafter:

“For Love of Grace and the Hereafter is the sixth studio album from beloved Danish quintet Iceage. Across the sprawling, twelve song arc of the album, a universe of love variously expands and contracts in an eternal tango, Elias Rønnenfelt’s lyrics burn with apocalyptic intimacy while the band masterfully maneuvers within their shape-shifting scenery of feral post-punk”.

It is going to be hard to top Paul McCartney’s The Boys of Dungeon Lane when it comes to the biggest albums of the year. Still such a genius, the first single from the album, Days We Left Behind, is emotional and classic Macca. His modern albums are really great, though some were not sold on McCartney III from 2020. I do feel like The Boys of Dungeon Lane will get better reviews. It seems like it going to be one of his most personal albums. You can pre-order the album here:

“The Boys of Dungeon Lane is a collection of rare and revealing glimpses into memories never-before shared, along with some newly inspired love songs, from one of the most culturally significant figures of our time. These extraordinary new songs find Paul writing with rare openness about his childhood in post-war Liverpool, the resilience of his parents, and early adventures shared with George Harrison and John Lennon long before the world had ever heard of Beatlemania”.

The final album from May that I want to recommend is from Violet Grohl. Be Sweet to Me is her debut. You can pre-order it here. This is going to be one of the best albums of 2026. I say that about quite a few, though this might top the list:

“Be Sweet To Me is the debut album by Violet Grohl. Featuring 11 tracks, including the single, “THUM.”

The first years spent entering adulthood come with a lot of big life decisions, and for Violet Grohl, that Be Sweet To Me.was seeking producers and collaborators for her debut album,

“Going into the studio and recording felt like the path that I was supposed to be on,” the 19-year-old says. Grohl immediately clicked with producer Justin Raisen (Kim Gordon, Yves Tumor,Angel Olsen). “My first impression was that she’s beyond her years. She has a golden voice, and she’s unapologetically herself,” says Raisen.

Be Sweet To Me was recorded from late 2024 into early 2025 at Raisen’s Los Angeles home studio alongside musicians assembled in the spirit of the Wrecking Crew session players in the ’60s and ’70s. The first song Violet wrote with her collaborators, a fuzzy ripper called “Thum,” was influenced by the old-school packaging of anti-nail-biting polish that Grohl brought into the studio. “Self help me/Self help myself/Chew my bitter fingers,” she snarls in a honeyed voice over ecstatic squall.

Like “Thum,” the songs on Be Sweet To Me were conjured from the immediate present and tend to be impressionistic, colored by Grohl’s love of film, particularly the work of David Lynch. Inspired by a vintage t-shirt advertising a phone sex line, “595” is a sly and sexy slasher filled with jolts of noise and a killer chorus: “I'll be your 1-900 G spot, baby/595 I'm on the line/You won't last.” The slippery and melodic “Bug In A Cake” recalls the paranormal activities surrounding Grohl’s recent move into the home of her late paternal grandma, a beloved “guiding force” in her life. “Turn the TV off so it turns back on/Come on, grandma, play me your favorite song,” Grohl roars.

“Everything was written in the studio,” Grohl says. “I would come in with an inspiration playlist, we would hang and listen for a little while, and then start writing.” “Violet is so well-versed in all styles of music; every playlist was different,” says Raisen, describing trip hop, new wave, Scandinavian black metal, ’70s acoustic folk, and vocal jazz. “She showed me a number of things that I wasn't familiar with; her encyclopedic knowledge of music is crazy,” he continues.

Alternative music from the late ‘80s and early ‘90s is a perpetual influence. “There’s something so powerful about that period of music, from the messaging to the visuals, it’s authentic and raw.” Pixies, Soundgarden, Cocteau Twins, The Breeders, PJ Harvey, The Muffs, Björk, Alice in Chains, L7, Juliana Hatfield: “I've listened to that stuff since I was a kid,” Grohl says. “That's what my dad was playing in the car on the way to school.”

“Music, whether it’s making it or just loving it, is a key thing that connects my family,” Grohl says, noting her father, Dave Grohl of Foo Fighters, and her paternal grandparents, who played flute and sang in local groups. Grohl has been singing and playing music as long as she can remember, teaching herself how to play ukulele, and later guitar, hauling the instruments around on both school and tour bus. “Around the time I was 12, it clicked for me that I love watching other people make music, and maybe I could too,” she says. "I had been writing poetry as well, and it kick-started the drive to want to turn painful experiences into art.”

Previously, Grohl’s songwriting practice had been shy and solitary, often taking place in the privacy of her bedroom. “Working in a collaborative space helped me open up to sharing stuff lyrically,” she says. “But it also opened up the possibility to experiment with different genres and instrumentations that maybe I wouldn't typically choose.”

Mid-way through recording the energy of the Be Sweet To Me sessions shifted. “The vibe I had originally intended no longer felt authentic to how I was feeling,” she says. “I needed sludge, droning guitars, and crazy reverb. It felt really good to be able to transmute whatever pain and sadness I was feeling into something tangible.” “Applefish” is a grungy slowcore ballad that slips beneath the surface, weighed down by the heaviness of mortality, while the swirling shoegazer “Last Day I Loved You” describes “losing touch with my sense of self,” per Grohl. Meanwhile, “Cool Buzz” is about “poking fun at moral inconsistencies in punk guys who preach progressive politics, but then in their own musical spaces won't let women have a chance,” says Grohl. “Shoot my favorite arrow/Through the mind that's narrow,” she coolly taunts over music worthy of windmill kicks and circle pits.

The phrase Be Sweet To Me is an inside joke amongst Grohl and her friends, a white flag of surrender when teasing becomes too much. It’s a fitting title for a record and artist unafraid to face life’s more raw moments while still embracing tenderness with elegance and grace”.

Plenty to choose from when it comes to albums out next month that you’ll want to own. Big artists like Melanie C and Paul McCartney alongside Iceage and GIRLI. A great selection and variety that should suit all tastes. The start of a really productive time of the year when so many huge albums will drop, I think things will get even better as we move int June and July. In terms of albums, it is going to be…

A hot summer.

FEATURE: We Think You Are Really Cool…? Does Kate Bush Have the Necessary Pull to Appeal to Young Music Fans?

FEATURE:

 

 

We Think You Are Really Cool…?

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush shot at Worx Studios, London for the stunning ‘Birdfish’ photo in 1989/PHOTO CREDIT: Guido Harari

Does Kate Bush Have the Necessary Pull to Appeal to Young Music Fans?

__________

IN this Kate Bush feature…

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush performs Suspended in Gaffa on the French T.V. show, Champs Elysees, in October 1982/PHOTO CREDIT: Araldo Di Crollalanza/Rex Features

there are a few things that I want to cover off and explore. The first thing to look at is this recent tweet from Kaleidoscope Eyed Girl: “kate bush doesn't have the ‘cool factor’ that björk, david bowie, madonna, fiona apple, and pj harvey have with young music nerds and musictwt in particular. she's too outdated for many of them”. This did cause some reaction and interesting discussion. I recently published a feature, discussing Kate Bush as this fashion icon. Maybe more under the radar or less extravagant than a Bowie or Björk, I argue that she is more versatile and inventive than most artists who have lived. From comfy and high street looks through to sexy, stylish and unusual, her repertoire, wardrobe and portfolio is as colorful, inventive, influential and standout than any. I do wonder about that cool factor. Today, I feel a lot of the major Pop artists, consciously or not, are cool. That sense that they break through and connect with young listeners if they have a certain element to them. Whether that is their clothing or how they present themselves on social media, there is still an emphasis on style and looks. The industry also still a bit exploitative when it comes to women and sex appeal. Marketing female artists in a different way to men. Though many women are reclaiming their autonomy and are body-positive in their approach. I was talking with someone recently about Kate Bush, who said that she become cool again when Stranger Things launched Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God) back into the consciousness. A 1985 song that had new lease in the 2020s, there was this insinuation that Kate Bush was not cool before.

Arguably, like some of her peers, Bush had her decade. A time when she was cool. You could say that was the 1980s. In the 1990s, like Bowie in fact, she was not talked about or seen as relevant or at her best. However, like all the best artists, she regained footing and relevance. That tweet struck me. Artists like Fiona Apple, Madonna and Björk are cool with young music listeners in part because of how they dress and that they are visible. Fiona Apple less so, arguably, but still undeniably cool in terms of attitude and how her music has translated and resonated with a new generation. Can we say that Bush, through lack of prolific output and public visibility, is seen in a particular way? Hounds of Love is a cool album, though do we narrowly define her and is there this feeling that she was relevant in the 1980s and outdated now? Listen to 2005’s Aerial and 2011’s 50 Words for Snow and they may be considered more middle-aged, for a BBC Radio 2 audience or lacking edge or modern significance. The former album was released in 2005; the latter in 2011. You can say that Madonna is on trend and very much innovating. Bowie produced one of his best alums, Blackstar, before his death in 2016. Fiona Apple released Fetch the Bolt Cutters in 2020. A masterpiece. Björk has new material coming out and is still a fashion icon. A style of her own. Regardless of age, these artists are fresh and still relevant. It would be worrying to think that Kate Bush is dustier and less important. However, you can appreciate why some younger listeners might not instantly attach themselves to her work. I feel that young listeners are discovering Kate Bush and loving her because of her originality and legacy. The fact that everything is in the music. I know she might not have that visual aesthetic and resonance that some icons do, though that is purely aesthetic and fashion. In an Instagram age, can music alone connect? What I mean is that artists like Madonna are on platforms and they have this updated, visual engagement. They can be considered more fashionable and cooler. Kate Bush does not seemingly have that advantage.

IN THIS PHOTO: PinkPantheress/PHOTO CREDIT: Simon Albert Khan for Interview Magazine

I would say that she is definitely hugely relevant and influential. That may not be equivalent to cool and an ingredient that cuts through to young audiences, though think about artists today who are inspired by her. Major Pop artists such as Charli xcx and Chappell Roan are fans. Young listeners learn about Kate Bush because artists are talking about her, and you can detect Bush’s influence in their work. It is curious whether an artist has a cool aspect and that special something is what is needed to truly captivate the young. Kate Bush has not released an album since 2011, and she has not been photographed in public for over a decade. Her music is played on radio, but there is a narrow selection of songs. That tweet that I started out with seems to associate the outward and visible with an artist’s endurance and cool. It might suggest a shallowness in terms of young listeners and what appeals to them. Or that we live in an age where photos, the visual and cool are currencies stronger than anything else. However, one cannot deny Kate Bush is cool through her association with modern artists shouting her out. In an interview with fellow artist Clairo, artist and producer PinkPantheress talked about Kate Bush. Maybe this contradicts my point somewhat, but this is what PinkPantheress said: “I value mystery above all else. It's really beautiful to be someone who hides away and then emerges when a musical moment arises. Like Kate Bush. She's also one of my inspirations”. You can see the interview here. Maybe you would not think so, though I would say that Bush remaining popular and relevant without being out in public and showing her face is incredibly cool. The brilliance of her music and her sheer genius does not require her to dress a certain way or be a fashion icon – even though she is. Bush can go away and then release an album after many years and then explodes. Today, artists have to grind, constantly promote and post photos of themselves. That is what is required. The suggestion too that this is cool. Lots of photos get lots of likes. Less to do with the music and more to do with what the artist looks like. Bush is from a different time and is more traditional. I can appreciated how Madonna might speak to young listeners because she is out there releasing music seen as more accessible and nearer the mainstream – or what is popular and common. Kate Bush more niche or outside of that.

Do young generations require certain things from legacy artists for them to be picked up and appreciated en masse? Perhaps there is an argument in that. I don’t think it is a fault of Kate Bush. She is not going to change herself and kowtow to modern demands and be all on Instagram and change her music direction. I think that the issue lies with what people value in an artist and how there is this dependence on visuals and the aesthetic of an artist. Unless you are cool and all over social media then you are not worth that much. Kate Bush might not seem the coolest out there, but the more you delve and read about her, you realise that is not the case. The weird and wonderful details. Look at her photoshoots and some things she has done through the years. Shot with a fake/toy crocodile (maybe an alligator, I am not sure) in the 1970s when in Amsterdam. Smoking weed and getting a slight telling off from Donald Sutherland when he filmed with her. How she released these videos that were so unusual and ahead of their time. Not allowed to play In the Warm Room on Ask Aspel in 1978, as it was deemed too sexual and inappropriate for a young audience. She instead performed Kashka from Baghdad – a song about two gay men! Also, how she was often bold and risqué. Her music brought in styles and sounds from around the world. She was confident and forceful when needed. Dealing with constant sexism and misogyny with professionalism. How incredibly kooky and wonderful odd she was at times. She was doing this long before many artists who followed who are seen as cooler or more popular with young audiences. I have been talking about how Bush’s music videos need to be upgraded to HD and that visual side needs to be clearer and shared again. I think this would help. It can be hard to keep a momentum or simply start a new trend and appeal to young listeners if there is not something visual out there. Or a gravitational pull. People not necessarily playing her videos. I wrote how The Beach Boys and The Beatles had special videos. New ones for older songs. The Beach Boys’ ones are especially great. Other artists have this too. I would love to see some of Kate Bush’s singles or album tracks given a brilliant new video. I previously wrote how Mrs. Bartolozzi from Aerial should have a video for it. She might not be a Kate Bush fan, but I am a fan of Carla Woodcock.

She is a tremendous actor and one of Britain’s greatest talents. I listen to Houdini – my favourite Kate Bush song, it is the final track from 1982’s The Dreaming – and how she would be perfect in that video. Playing Harry Houdini's wife, Bess. You can read more about the track here. Although I think dark-haired, I feel that Carla Woodcock would make a great fit. I am spit-balling, but bringing in modern and brilliant actors to appear in Kate Bush videos would help a connection. Make her seem ‘cooler’. This is a topic I might not be doing full justice to. That feeling that Kate Bush might be outdated. When she does release a new album, it will be similar to her more recent work and there will be no T.V. appearances, live work or much in the way of visuals. Think about how David Bowie has exhibitions, reissued material and documentaries. Madonna very much still going strong. Fiona Apple one of the coolest artists around, still breaking ground decades after she started making music. For Kate Bush, and taking Stranger Things out of the equation, what is going to be the thing that keeps her firm in the conversation and ensures she is relevant to modern listeners? It is not incumbent on her to do that. We need to talk about her more and stop defining her by one song or image. She is one of the most innovative and brilliant artists ever. A genius producer. The sheer number of modern queens she has influenced. Dig deeper and you not only realise Kate Bush is one of the coolest artists ever. She has set records, broken ground and paved the way for so many others. Fans and newcomers alike need to do more. Perhaps be less fashion/image-focused and listen to the full spectrum of her music. Then, I do feel that Kate Bush will not seem outdated or someone only cool or worthy in the 1980s. This is the very least that is owed to…

THIS music queen.

FEATURE: Spotlight: Hannah Peel

FEATURE:

 

 

Spotlight

PHOTO CREDIT: Rachel McCarthy

Hannah Peel

__________

THIS is one artist/composer…

that I would love to see live as I can imagine her shows are truly spectacular! Hannah Peel plays London’s Barbican in October, so I may have to go along to that show. It seems weird putting her in my Spotlight feature, as she is an established artist. However, it offers me a chance to shine a light on her new work. Peel is one of the world’s greatest composers. In terms of what she has created. In terms of the soundtracks she has created, including Bring Them Down, Insomnia, Silent Roar and Bring Them Down. Midwinter Break is her latest soundtrack. She has also released studio albums such as 2021’s Fir Wave. I wonder if there will be another studio album from Peel. I am going to pop in a playlist of her best work to date. There are a couple of interviews that I want to come to. Here is a little bit of background to the amazing Hannah Peel: “Mercury Prize, Ivor Novello and Emmy-nominated, RTS and Music Producers Guild winning composer, with a flow of solo albums and collaborative releases, Hannah joins the dots between science, nature and the creative arts, through her explorative approach to electronic, classical and traditional music From her own solo albums to composing soundtracks like Game of Thrones: The last Watch, or to orchestrating and conducting for artists like Paul Weller, her work is ambitious, forward-looking, always adapting and re-inventing new genres and hybrid musical forms Hannah is a regular weekly broadcaster for BBC Radio 3’s Night Tracks”. Born in Northern Ireland but now based in northern England, this Ivor Novello award-winning composer, producer and broadcaster is incredibly talented. I would advise everyone to listen to Night Tracks, as it is this gorgeous, calming and incredible blends of music. It is “An adventurous, immersive soundtrack for late-night listening, from classical to contemporary and everything in between”. Hosted alongside Sara Mohr-Pietsch, I do really love this series.

I think what is so amazing is how adaptable and versatile Hannah Peel is as a composer. Artists do shift between albums, though many of them do not evolve so greatly between albums. Composers like Hannah Peel do not get the attention they deserve. The majesty and consistent brilliance of her work. Peel is one of the truly great composers. Classical music is an area where men still dominate. There is sexism and sexual abuse that is not discussed enough. Gender inequality remains significant, with men dominating, holding over 90% of orchestral performance slots as of 2024. Despite some  progress, women composers receive minimal representation, often less than 10% of programming, while female musicians face structural barriers, including gendered pay gaps and a sharp decline in visibility. These are shocking statistics. Last summer, this article shows that there has been no real improvement. No huge efforts by the music industry to overturn sexism and inequality. I want to come to a couple of recent interviews. It seems like a new album is coming. It is amazing how prolific Hannah Peel is. 15 Questions spoke with Peel recently. Peel said how “I prefer scores that don’t tell us how to feel, that support the narrative and characters and allows us viewers to escape without thinking about it”:

“Hannah Peel's new album The Endless Dance, a collaboration with Chinese percussionist Beibei Wang, is out May 22nd 2026 via Real World.

Current event: Hannah Peel appears at the Film Composers Panel with the Alliance for Women Film Composers (12 April, 11am at Royal College of Music, London) as part of the 2026 edition of the London Soundtrack Festival – London’s first-ever festival dedicated to celebrating the music of film, TV and games. You can check out the full line-up at https://londonsoundtrack.com/whats-on/.

Recommendations for Bangor, Northern Ireland: My favourite place to eat and take time out, is a café restaurant on the coast called ‘The Starfish’. It overlooks the sea and the house the café is in, is like a Victorian traveller’s treasure trove. The food is the best around too. On a warm day, you can drink your coffee in the garden whilst dreaming of where the sea might carry you.

Shoutouts: Follow positivenewsuk on insta for nice world things … and for an alt news outlet I’m loving The Nerve (fearless independent journalism) and those that are leading it. Good on them, we need it.

Which composers, or soundtracks captured your imagination in the beginning? What scenes or movies drew you in through their use of music?

In the very beginning …The score to Michael Nyman's The Piano. Wow that got played everywhere, everyone I knew had bought, borrowed or stole the book. If you had a piano you played it. Pretty addictive as a youngster to play music that was in an actual film!

But when I heard the score to Hable Con Ella by Alberto Iglesias, it was the first to actually tune my ears into something different. Sombre and obsessively romantic.

How would you rate the importance of soundtracks and film music for the movie as a whole? How do you see the relationship between image and sound in a movie?

That’s such a fascinating question.

You know films like The Taste Of Things (2023), the choice to not have music is such an integral part of the film. It’s just not needed at all. The sounds evoke the smells and a score might have taken away from the deep realistic connection of the chef and her food.

And yet, some need music so much they would be lost without it. I can’t imagine Star Wars with no music! It paints the whole world instantly and is completely integral.

I’m not sure that answers your questions directly, but I do know I prefer scores that don’t tell us how to feel, that support the narrative and characters and allows us viewers to escape without thinking about it. The composer is there and magically they are not, without anyone noticing!

Can you take me through your process of composing a soundtrack on the basis of a movie that's particularly dear to you, please?

Always, it’s so different but as the documentary film Underland has just been released after 5 years of making the score (a few years longer for the filmmakers).

It’s one of my favourites because I had read the book, way before I’d known about the film and just somehow fell into the job after contacting the author, Robert MacFarlane.

The project can change so much over that length of time, and to be honest, my scoring abilities had definitely improved by the time we recorded it all! There was a lot of music by the end …

Read the script (or in this case the book)

A list of instruments that could suit that sound world

Exploring that palate with no footage to begin with

Building up enough demos that feel comfortable with the films narrative and fit with the director’s conversations with you

Start to play with the ideas with early footage.

Record some instruments to help the process. In this case it was an explorative session with ancient horn player John Kenny. The sounds he created suited us needing this ‘voice’ of the underworld
More footage, more music and edits.

Many thoughts of “whose music stem is this? Okay, it’s mine, I don’t remember writing this.”

Once the final film edit is coming together; like a giant puzzle, start piecing all the stems together and pieces over 5 years

Picture lock arrives – work alongside the sound designer, start finalising the music and get cues signed off!

Orchestrate – choir, string ensemble, percussion.

Prep for mixing and then send all to be mixed.

Visit the dub and make some notes

Music edit a little more, suggest any extra ideas whilst in the room with everyone
Celebrate with a drink in the present moment, before running for a train or starting on the next score.

Different composers could potentially approach the same scene with strikingly different music. Would you say there can be 'wrong' and 'right' musical decisions for some scenes? In which way can some film music be considered 'definitive'?

The music can change everything! So yes on that basis there can definitely be choices to what is best suited.

For example, in Debrah’s childhood scene in ‘Once Upon A Time In America’ … I just can’t imagine anything other than the utterly perfect Morricone orchestral music as she dances”.

I am going to end with Focus Features and their interview around the soundtrack for Midwinter Break. Hannah Peel discussing her composing this incredible, powerful and hugely impressive score. Truly, Peel is one of the world’s great music talents. She has so much passion and commitment for everything that she does:

“In Polly Findlay’s Midwinter Break, when Stella and Gerry (Lesley Manville and Ciarán Hinds), a long-married couple living in Glasgow, take an impromptu getaway to Amsterdam, the postcard scenery and time away invite both to reflect on their life together and the mysterious tragedy that forced them to leave Belfast years before. Adapted from Bernard MacLaverty’s acclaimed novel by the author and screenwriter Nick Payne, the film creates an almost musical arrangement of internal meditation, comfortable chatter, shared moments, and ineffable loneliness. The Associated Press wrote, “This is a relationship that’s all about the small moments and what’s left unsaid.”

To score the film, Findlay turned to the innovative composer Hannah Peel, having heard her innovative score for a theater piece. The award-winning Northern Irish composer has worked in TV, film, and theater creating scores noted for the way they cross boundaries between electronic, live instrumentation, and sound design. Her thoughtful approach in Midwinter Break created an intimate conversation with Findlay’s cinematic style. “Findlay keeps things as elegant as possible in the director’s chair, going in for close-ups wherever she can to let the actors’ faces tell the story and sparingly utilizing the potent emotionality of Hannah Peel’s score,” write Next Best Picture.

How did you get involved in scoring Midwinter Break?

I was the composer on a National Theatre staging of Brian Friel’s Dancing At Lughnasa in London and Polly had heard the music. She and the team then asked if I was interested in being part of the film. I hadn’t read the script or seen a cut at this point, but after the first few minutes of our meeting, I knew I wanted to be involved.

What did you see as your biggest creative challenge in scoring the film?

It wasn’t necessarily a challenge, but being from Northern Ireland and having to leave when young after witnessing bombs, I could personally understand some of the underlying trauma of the main characters. So, my instinct was mostly about honing in on that—figuring out how and what that would sound like; asking questions like what role does tradition play and how that is affected or changed when you leave your home.

What sort of instrumentation did you use for the score?

Aside from myself on piano and Alice on cello, I recorded a string quintet, harp, clarinet, and soprano voice. We wanted an intimate quartet sound but the quintet was essential for the rich addition of a double bass. The playing style was also important, having a breathiness to bow styles meant that the strings could sit within intimate moments of the movie. The harpist, Esther Swift, is a wonderful folk singer and classical harpist so she instantly understood how I was approaching the parts.

What do you hope people take away from Midwinter Break?

Polly’s work is focused on detail and finding space between the noise. I hope people will see and enjoy the beauty in this and recognize how compassion and love for each other can continuously grow, no matter what age”.

I have loved Hannah Peel’s work for years now. I wanted to spotlight her again because she has new work out and live dates. I will try and see her at the Barbican later this year. I would love to interview her one day. She is a staggering talent. Go and follow Hannah Peel. A wonderful broadcaster, composer, producer and artist, Peel will continue to produce the most spellbinding and original work for…

MANY years to come.

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Follow Hannah Peel

Official:

https://www.hannahpeel.com/

Instagram:

https://www.instagram.com/hannahpeelmusic/

Twitter:

https://x.com/Hanpeel

Facebook:

https://www.facebook.com/HannahPeelMusic

YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/user/hannahpeelmusic/videos

Spotify:

https://open.spotify.com/artist/3LRldYGJpCAQT5cZKQyi7o?si=xq_UhkMsRSuOUitrXiNx4Q

FEATURE: I Begin to Wonder: Will There Be New Music from the Amazing Dannii Minogue?

FEATURE:

 

 

I Begin to Wonder

IN THIS PHOTO: Dannii Minogue shot for Attitude in 2025/PHOTO CREDIT: Mark Cant

Will There Be New Music from the Amazing Dannii Minogue?

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THIS year is quite…

PHOTO CREDIT: Pedro Alvarez/The Guardian

a significant one for Dannii Minogue. One half of possibly the most famous musical sibling pairings ever, she turns fifty-five in October. Whilst Kylie Minogue continues to put out incredible albums and go on these acclaimed tours, there has not been as much music from Dannii Minogue. I am a big fan of Kylie Minogue and have been since a child, and I also listened to Dannii Minogue’s music growing up. That brings me to her first international album, Love and Kisses. This was released on 3rd June, 1991. It has its thirty-fifth anniversary coming soon, so I wonder whether Dannii Minogue will celebrate it. Love and Kisses went to number eight in the U.K. and did receive some positive reviews. On 30th July, 2025, production for the Australian/U.K. co-commissioned series, Imposter, announced that Minogue had been cast to the series, in her first major television role since Home and Away. Minogue is busy with television work at the moment, though I wonder whether she will bring out new music. I would love to see the Minogue sisters take to the stage together or even combine on record. The two albums she has released this century have been terrific. That makes the albums sound ancient, but they were both released in the first decade of this century. Neon Nights came out in 2003 and won Dannii Minogue some of the best reviews of her career. Seen as a cult classic and lauded because of its seamless blend of genres and styles, Dannii Minogue then followed that with 2007’s Club Disco. Arguably her best album, it was this great duo of albums. Not to compare Dannii Minogue to her sister, but Kylie released Light Years in 2000 and Fever in 2001. A remarkable couple of albums seen as a reinvention, there was this comparison when Dannii Minogue released these two magnificent albums, Neon Nights and Club Disco. Although those albums did not get the true credit they deserve.

I do feel like that was the start of a new chapter for Dannii Minogue. Love and Kisses has that big anniversary coming later in the year. I wonder whether it will spark something in Minogue and she is thinking of another album. There would definitely be call for it. I want to bring a couple of fairly recent interviews in with Dannii Minogue. A hugely important artist who I feel has material up her sleeve. I do want to come to a 2023 interview with The Guardian. Dannii Minogue was being interviewed about the new show, I Kissed a Boy. Minogue is this L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.+ champion, and she won huge praise for her presenting on this show. She did mention how she has been asked about music:

“Minogue’s coronation almost certainly took place some time between the early 90s, when she was one of the first bona fide pop stars to play G-A-Y nightclub in London, and this February, when she delighted crowds at Sydney WorldPride with her surprise duet with her sister, Kylie. Maybe it was when she sang at Pride in London in 1997, or when she posed naked except for a red ribbon on World Aids Day in 2004.

“This has been a part of my life since I started working, since I was a child,” she says. Now 51, Minogue began her career on Young Talent Time, a popular Australian variety show. “I knew there were people that I worked with who were gay, and I just thought that was completely normal.”

In the 90s, the media were not so progressive. “Artists were terrified,” she says. “Outing people was a thing.” For many, performing at gay bars wasn’t an option: gay artists didn’t want to be outed and straight artists were worried they would be deemed gay by association. “I’ve heard so many stories of people who were told: ‘No, you can’t be visible … that is gonna kill your career.’ I just thought: ‘Stuff it – say what you want about me, because you do anyway!’”

This is how a glammed-up Minogue finds herself in a photography studio to promote BBC Three’s new gay dating show, I Kissed a Boy. “I can’t believe we’re in 2023 saying it’s Britain’s first gay dating show ever. When those words spill out of my mouth, I’m in shock,” says Minogue. She loves being back in the UK, but is struggling with the separation from her 12-year-old son, Ethan. Still, she says: “It’s great for his growth … And mine!” I am about a foot taller than the 5ft 2in (1.57m) Minogue, and a lot less striking (she is wearing a black, off-the-shoulder evening gown), so it’s hard not to feel like Shrek next to her on the sofa.

Her recording career bounced back, with a trio of albums showcasing a more mature, electro-dance-pop sound. But after the release of Club Disco (2007), Minogue was ready to step back. That decision was confirmed in 2010 when she had her son with her then-partner, the former rugby player Kris Smith. “It takes a toll on your body, touring. Now, I get asked a lot about music and I’m like: it’s incredibly hard for me to do that the way I want to do it and be a mum the way I want to be.” It is impossible, she says, not to think about bath time and bedtime on stage. “It’s really oil and water.”

Still, she did manage nine Top 10 UK singles. Does she feel her music career is underrated? “It’s always been and always will be compared with Kylie’s success,” she says. “But all I can do is be happy with what I’ve done. If I look at that on its own: amazing. But I also don’t compare myself with Beyoncé or Mariah Carey”.

Maybe Dannii Minogue sees music as something in the past. The legacy she has left. What is notable is how what an impression her music has made. I will end with Classic Pop and their 2025 interview. Speaking with Dannii Minogue fifteen years after Neon Nights was released – an album compared to Kylie Minogue’s Fever and Madonna’s Confessions on a Dance Floor -, Minogue reflects on a career turning point:

“Neon Nights was, in a sense, validation for Minogue, who, in contrast to her older sibling, Kylie, has had a bit of a raw deal from the media over the years. Her close friend, author Kathy Lette, has referred to the perception that Dannii was: “The B-side to Kylie’s A.” Not only is this an unfair perception, it’s also inaccurate. Dannii, after all, made it big before Kylie, rising to prominence in the early 80s in the Australian television talent show Young Talent Time.

“I was the one who invited Kylie on the show to come and sing with me. I was proud of my sister and we did a duet of Sisters Are Doing It For Themselves. I wanted to show everyone, this is my sister and she sings, too. Then she came on tour with us and I was just so happy to be up there with her. Years later, she invited me to do a duet of Kids with her in concert. Then we did the 100 Degrees Christmas song. When we bring each other into our world, it is like: ‘This is my sister and I’m proud.’ We had fun doing stuff together. Don’t forget, we were dancing around and annoying our family for many years before we were allowed to do it on stage. I think our parents were relieved that they didn’t have to sit through it anymore!”

She insists Lette’s description didn’t bother her. “I think what was harder was people saying: ‘Oh, you decided to go into singing because your sister does’. But I had sung for years and years, and there’s so much out in the public domain, that it was just unbelievable to me that people would say that. I’ve done it my whole life, and invited my sister to come and do it with me. But I’m just continuing to do what I do, to the best of my ability. I do stuff that I enjoy and I don’t want anyone to try to take that away from me.”

The tabloid press, of course, delights in creating division, and so it was with the Minogue sisters. Over the years, Dannii has found it alternately amusing and annoying, but mostly difficult.

“Exhausting is probably the best word because it went on for so long, no matter what either of us said or did, or who we were or what happened. I couldn’t face being asked about it anymore. Answering the same thing when nobody hears the answers – so, stop asking me the questions! But I guess social media changed everything, when artists could be in control of their story and translating that through to, not just their fans and friends, but to everyone. Communicating who they are and what they’re doing without things being twisted. When that happened, it got rid of that so quickly, and it never came back. Then it was like: ‘Okay, I literally exhausted myself answering that question so many times… and for what?’”

It’s clear the two enjoy a close relationship and that Dannii is full of admiration for Kylie.

“As she’s grown, I’ve seen an inner strength that I never knew… She’s always been a fighter and really fiery, working hard to get what she wants, but she does everything with a lot of kindness. Her whole thing is to make people happy. That’s all she wants to do. I’ve had some incredible moments, as her sister, to see how she is with people. I think her fans know that and can share that together. I’ll go and see her in concert and I can stand by the side of the stage and look down on the audience and see everyone’s faces – she’s doing exactly what she went on stage to do. Everyone has smiles on their faces and the love is reciprocal. She’s managed to sustain that for a long, long, long time, regardless of the challenges that she’s had to go through.”

What’s perhaps surprising is that the pair haven’t collaborated as much as either they – or we – would like them to have done. There was a live duet of Kids during Kylie’s 2006 Showgirl: The Homecoming Tour in Melbourne, and 100 Degrees on 2015’s Kylie Christmas. Surely, there are more expansive plans to work together? Well… disappointingly not.

“There’s nothing in the pipeline at the moment, but there will always be stuff. We’re just connected and we love getting together and sharing ideas, thinking about what we can do. And there’s a lot of stuff that makes us giggle, that we talk about doing but we know we’ll never do! It’s good to just explore it in our minds. It’s there and it will definitely keep popping up.”

Meanwhile, Dannii – who became a mum to Ethan in 2010 – is involved as executive producer and host on a new Australian TV reality show, Dance Boss, and suggests she may return to the studio at some stage.

“I’ve got a couple of tracks that I’ve worked on. I’ve got plans for them and if it happens, it happens. If there’s no stress involved, then I’m all for it. But I guess my life has taken a shift in balance, being a mum. It was a mch easier project to be obsessed about for much longer when I wasn’t a mum. But since it’s so much easier now to release music, why not?”

For now, she can’t wait for her own copy of the Neon Nights vinyl. “We’ve worked really hard on putting everything together, going through all the photos again. I listened to every song over and over and over and over. I’ve checked every lyric and corrected stuff that wasn’t right! I wanted this to be something I am so proud of, and I’ve got the time. I didn’t get that finicky about that sort of stuff back when I was releasing it the first time. I was on the road, doing shows and promoting. Yeah, I’m really excited about the vinyl. I’m going to frame it!”

I am going to wrap up. I do love Dannii Minogue’s music, so I’d like to think that there is more coming from this legend. I would also urge people to look at this interview with Attitude last year. Dannii Minogue was “reflecting on the empathy that has shaped her connection with the LGBTQ+ community as she's honoured with the Ally Award at the 2025 Virgin Atlantic Attitude Awards, powered by Jaguar”. Even though she has T.V. work and is a mum, many of her fans would love to see another album. Love and Kisses turns thirty-five on 3rd June. Minogue did suggest ion that interview that she has a few tracks done/written. Hope that we could get another album from this incredible artist. That really would be…

AN incredible gift!

FEATURE: Beneath the Sleeve: Olivia Rodrigo – SOUR

FEATURE:

 

 

Beneath the Sleeve

Olivia Rodrigo – SOUR

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BEFORE I look at…

PHOTO CREDIT: Laura Jane Coulson for British Vogue

the incredible debut album of Olivia Rodrigo, there is a third album coming soon When speaking with British Vogue recently, Rodrigo did give some details about her much-anticipated new album. It did not have a title then, though we know it arrives on 12th June. It will be called you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love:

“Fans have been decoding clues about “OR3” in her every move. Teasers are on the way, but for now they’re sure it’ll be love songs and have a new colour theme (a shift from the purple that has been her signature) and another four-letter title (bets are on Luck). As she enters this new fashion era, Rodrigo reveals “my Pinterest is all babydoll dresses and ’70s necklines. I want it all to feel fun and laid-back.” As a magpie for unique vintage pieces, her stylists, LA-based sisters Chloe and Chenelle Delgadillo, write to tell me that they are “always on the hunt for special finds [for Olivia]. When we travel, we make a point to visit local vintage dealers.” Rodrigo is a personal fan of Lovers Lane and Vault Vintage when in Notting Hill, and Chloe and Chenelle add that, “Lately, we’ve been drawn to archive Miu Miu and Marc Jacobs.” They look to modernise the vintage references and create a style that is “effortless, feminine, with a slightly undone feel”.

There are still two or three songs to write. “It was a creative challenge to write from a joyful place,” she says. “When you’re experiencing that you’re connected to someone, or feeling really good, you’re not in your head thinking about bittersweet poems!”

We stop to sit on a bench. It’s time to hear for myself. “Gosh, I’m scared. I’m scared to play [it for] you,” she mutters, fiddling with her phone. This is the first reaction from outside her tightest circle. Her best friend, Madison Hu, heard most of OR3 in an In-N-Out parking lot. (Rodrigo “believes the sound system is the best in [her car]”.) Hu’s excited by its freshness, “And how honest she is!” she tells me over Zoom. “I’ve always been very in awe of how willing to spill to the world she is with her music.” To her ear, it’s about how “love is complicated. I think that’s what she learnt this year.”

Rodrigo hands over wireless headphones. “I’ll play three.” The winter sun shines bright and, from this vantage point, it feels like the city is at your feet. She presses play. The songs are instantly transporting, cinematic and so intimate that I can’t bring myself to look at her while I listen. She puts her hands in her pockets as I focus on the view and scrawl notes in my tiny Moleskine”.

I want to spend some time with this album. Released on 21st May, 2021, SOUR turns five soon. I will end with some reviews of one of the most exceptional debut albums of recent years. Speaking with Vogue in 2021, Olivia Rodrigo discussed her breakout album and brand-new album. It was a hectic time for an artist coming out with a debut album. What made it more difficult was being quarantined because of COVID-19. A  tough time to get music out there:

“It’s been pretty non-stop,” says Rodrigo. When we speak, she’s quarantining in the British countryside—“somewhere near Oxford”—ahead of her performance at the Brit Awards in early May. “It’s actually my first performance ever, so it’s crazy that it’s at the Brits,” says Rodrigo. “I’m just so excited to see people in real life, you know? All of the success of ‘drivers license’ happened in a bubble. I was able to see the numbers on my phone, all the people who were streaming it and all that, but I never actually got to meet anyone who was actually affected by the song. So it’s gonna be so cool to see people singing along to it. I’m really stoked for that.” (Despite these nerves, Rodrigo’s powerful rendition of “drivers license”—performed in a red Valentino batwing gown and choppy middle parting that gently recalled Kate Bush’s “Wuthering Heights” video—brought the house down.)

Rodrigo’s natural ear for the epic balladry that characterized “drivers license” might be in full force across the record, but it’s the edgier moments that leave the strongest impression. The album’s opener, “brutal,” erupts into a thunderous guitar riff that sits somewhere between Elastica’s “Connection” and a song you might expect from a Warped Tour headliner circa the year 2000. “I’m so sick of seventeen / Where’s my fucking teenage dream?” Rodrigo wails. “If someone tells me one more time / ‘Enjoy your youth,’ I’m gonna cry.”

Not all the songs are about heartbreak: the album’s closer, “hope ur ok,” pays tribute to lost connections with old friends—a boy with an abusive father, and a gay friend with homophobic parents—whose triumph in the face of adversity continues to inspire Rodrigo. Still, the terrain of romantic torment feels most natural, recalling some of the greatest alt-rock records of the ’90s, from Alanis Morrissette’s Jagged Little Pill to PJ Harvey’s Rid of Me to Fiona Apple’s Tidal. “I wish I could be a teenager in the ’90s, because that’s my favorite music ever,” says Rodrigo, namechecking both Apple and Morrissette as influences for Sour. “I just feel like it’s so raw. I remember the first time I heard Jagged Little Pill and I turned to my mom and was like, ‘Oh my gosh, wow, she really just said that.’ It’s so brutally honest to the point it’s almost shocking—they were things that I’d genuinely never heard before in a song. And that was super inspiring to me. That’s what really got me going and what made me excited to write my own story.”

For all its angst-riddled teenage catastrophism, though, the positive response to the album has been very much universal, with many noting its uncanny ability to transport you right back to the thick of the emotional turbulence of that life stage. “I work really hard to be specific in my songwriting, as I feel like specific songs are the most meaningful,” Rodrigo says. “I'm just so obsessed with really story-driven songs. I grew up listening to a lot of country music, and country music is really specific and vivid, and I think I always was attracted to that as a young girl, which translated over into my songwriting.” It’s a formula that clearly works, and has had its own, reciprocal benefits for Rodrigo too. “I always say you put out songs in hopes of making people feel more understood, but it also works in the reverse,” she continues. “All these people have said to me, I feel the exact same way, or this thing happened to me too. It makes me feel a lot less alone.”

On the subject of the relentless promotional cycle accompanying the album, Rodrigo is endearingly enthusiastic. “It’s been very go, go go, but in the best way possible,” says Rodrigo. “I literally feel like I’m living my dream every day. I feel so grateful.” Still, I hope she will be able to find some time to put her feet up soon? “I think after the album comes out, I’m going to take a vacation somewhere on the beach with a lot of sun. I think that’s super important, too. I was talking to somebody the other day, and they were like, 50% of our jobs is writing songs and the other 50% is living a life to write songs about, you know what I mean? You can’t just spend all of your time in the studio or on tour, because what are you going to write your songs about? You sort of become out of touch with reality. So I’m definitely trying to keep that in mind as I’m going into my second album”.

PHOTO CREDIT: Heather Hazzan for Variety

The last interview I am including is from Variety. From her Disney days to her debut single, drivers licence, Olivia Rodrigo was on course for becoming the voice of her generation. It was incredible seeing how SOUR blew up and the reaction it got:

“Rodrigo grew enamored with songwriting through country music, and it quickly became a much-needed emotional outlet. She proudly calls herself a “fangirl for life” and has cited Taylor Swift as a songwriting idol — nods to Swift’s lyrical style and knack for big bridges can be heard all over “Sour.” The artist also was one of Rodrigo’s early champions on social media.

“It’s so nice to be welcomed into the music industry and so great to be supportive of other women,” Rodrigo says. “She wrote me a letter a while ago, and she wrote something about how you make your own luck in the world, and how you treat other people always comes back to you.”

Most of the tracks on “Sour” came from Rodrigo’s deep arsenal of songs, many of which were written during the COVID-19 quarantine that began in March 2020. During that period, Rodrigo says she wrote a song every day for four months, ultimately sharing writing credits on all but three of the album’s tracks with her key collaborator, songwriter-producer Dan Nigro.

“She’s so effortless when it comes to lyric writing it’s pretty incredible to witness,” says Nigro. “Sometimes she’ll run a line by me, and I’ll help her tweak it to make it stronger. But most of the time she’s just running with it.”

Released on April 1, “Deja Vu” added more of an alt-rock sensibility to Rodrigo’s lyric-driven songwriting with fuzzy guitars and saturated drums, courtesy of Nigro. Recounting the sneaking suspicion that an ex is now repeating history with someone else, “Deja Vu” references Billy Joel, “Glee” and strawberry ice cream.

PHOTO CREDIT: Heather Hazzan for Variety

“I think specificity is one of the most important things you can do as a songwriter,” Rodrigo says. “I love songs where you can listen to them and sort of feel like you’re in another world… and the way you do that is through imagery and details.” 

Indeed, though the sonic diversity of “Sour” is impressive, what really stands out is Rodrigo’s brutally honest lyrics, especially when recounting the all-too-familiar pain of a relationship gone wrong. Even on upbeat cuts like “Good 4 U,” the words cut like a knife: “Maybe I’m too emotional / But your apathy’s like a wound in salt,” she snarls in the song’s bridge.

“I definitely talked about my deepest, darkest secrets and insecurities on ‘Sour’ — which is sort of strange to be like, ‘Here, you guys can have this. Anyone who wants to listen to it can listen to it,’” Rodrigo says. “But it’s really empowering when it comes out, and it’s been really awesome for me to see people resonate with that vulnerability and relate to it.”

Rodrigo credits Nigro’s background as the former lead singer and guitarist of indie rock band As Tall as Lions with helping her find the pop-punk sound for “Good 4 U.” She says she came up with the track’s hook — “Good for you / You look happy and healthy / Not me / If you ever cared to ask” — in the shower. “I didn’t want the entire record to be sad piano songs,” Rodrigo says. “But then again, I didn’t want to write a poppy, happy, ‘I’m in love’ song, because that was so far from how I was truly feeling at the time. So writing ‘Good 4 U’ was really satisfying because the song is upbeat and high energy and people can dance to it, but I didn’t have to sacrifice being honest and authentic in order to write it.”

Though “Sour” is heavy with heartbreak ballads, its edgier tracks bolster Rodrigo’s genre-shifting abilities – most of all, opener “Brutal,” which smacks you in the face with angst and ferocity. Other album highlights include “Traitor,” Rodrigo’s belted manifesto on how emotional affairs can hurt just as much as physical ones, which she initially wrote off as not being relatable enough. Little did she know, the result would be the opposite.

“I wrote it on my bed while I was crying,” Rodrigo says. “I never really thought that it was going to be a song that resonated with so many people. I thought that it was a very specific situation that I was going through, and it’s so funny that that’s the non-single song that’s the most successful. So many people have been like, ‘How did you know? This is exactly what happened to me!’.

GUTS, Olivia Rodrigo’s second album, was released in 2023. It also was a massive success and received incredibly positive reviews. There are a couple of reviews to include before wrapping up. Pitchfork and said how SOUR was a “nimble and lightly chaotic collection of breakup tunes filled with melancholy and mischief”:

“The matter of failed romance is central to Sour, a nimble and lightly chaotic grab bag of breakup tunes, filled with both melancholy and mischief. Rodrigo’s first trick: Seconds into the lugubrious strings that open the record, she and her producer, Dan Nigro, abruptly switch to grunge guitar and distortion. Abandoning both the gossamer falsetto and the emotive belt that power “drivers license,” Rodrigo adopts a wry sprechstimme on “brutal” to rattle off her grievances: self-doubt, impossible expectations, her inability to parallel park. “Where’s my fucking teenage dream?” she snarls, wisecracking about the way pop culture romanticizes youth. It’s not particularly elegant—it’s not meant to be. Bucking expectations about the kind of sounds she might gravitate toward? That’s just part of the fun.

When she was little, Rodrigo and her mother made a habit of grabbing records indiscriminately from the thrift store, exposing her to the mistiness of Carole King and the muscle of Pat Benatar. Born two years post-Napster, two years pre-YouTube, Rodrigo grew up with music of all varieties at her fingertips. The range of her taste, and her disinterest in choosing a lane, animate Sour; queue up a track at random, and you might hear pop-punk fireworks à la Paramore (“good 4 u”), dewy-eyed soft balladry à la Ingrid Michaelson (“1 step forward, 3 steps back”), or alt-rock squall à la the Kills (“jealousy, jealousy”). Like any teenager, Rodrigo is trying on identities. The fluidity of her approach creates a sense of play that balances out the record’s more sullen moments—the self-righteous sprawl of “traitor,” for example, or the sinister extended metaphor of “favorite crime.”

Of Rodrigo’s many influences, she’s most obviously styled herself after Taylor Swift, whose work she praises often and emphatically. Like her idol, Rodrigo treats emotional turmoil like jet fuel, and laces her lyrics with specifics—a Billy Joel song she and her ex listened to together, the self-help books she read to impress him. She’s said that the shouty bridge in Swift’s “Cruel Summer” directly inspired her own in “deja vu”; “1 step forward, 3 steps back” interpolates the reputation song “New Year's Day.” And publicly inveighing against a heartbreaker, then sauntering off with the last word? How very Swiftian.

But there’s more to Rodrigo’s writing than revenge; Sour gives her occasion to examine her own insecurities. “I wore makeup when we dated ’cause I thought you’d like me more,” she sings over fingerpicked guitar on the tearful “enough for you.” It’s a shot at her ex for underappreciating her, but also a hard lesson about not making concessions. On “happier,” a sweet-and-sour ballad that appeared in demo form on Rodrigo’s Instagram in early 2020, she grapples with the faulty narrative of female rivalry: “And now I’m picking her apart/Like cutting her down will make you miss my wretched heart.” It was this song that captured the attention of Nigro, a former emo band frontman who’s written with Carly Rae Jepsen and Conan Gray. It’s easy to hear what he heard in the homemade snippet: a gently tumbling melody, Rodrigo’s flute-like lilt, a winning balance of pettiness and wisdom.

Meanwhile, Rodrigo is still very much a part of the Disney ecosystem, reprising her role in the second season of HSM:TM:TS, which debuted just last week. To anyone familiar with the history of Disney darlings and the morality clauses that typically bind them, the profanity that peppers Sour will stand out as a break from type. This minor subversion of expectations has given Rodrigo a low-key rebel status. Like her seeming newness, her earnestness, the heartbreak baked into her ascent, it’s one of the qualities that make her easy to root for. In a way, the flattening effect of the internet has worked in her favor, allowing her—someone who has been on TV for roughly a third of her life and is signed with the biggest record company in the world—to slip into the role of the underdog.

Rodrigo avoided the major-label treatment when Universal left her and Nigro largely to their own devices to make Sour. But the effort to preserve the authenticity of Rodrigo’s voice also leaves her shortcomings more exposed. The flatness of the melody on “traitor” is especially noticeable alongside the movement of “drivers license”; “enough for you” is oversung. On a record largely centered around a single story, Rodrigo can fixate on select plot points (like the amount of time it took her ex to move on), rather than seeking out new angles. She sometimes settles for simple rhymes and self-evident phrasings: “You betrayed me/And I know that you’ll never feel sorry.” In moments like these, she seems more invested in content than in craft.

Of all the songs on Sour, “hope ur ok” feels most connected to her Disney lineage. Over a twinkly instrumental, Rodrigo sings directly to a victim of child abuse, a queer girl rejected by her family, and to outcasts more broadly. In its message of love and acceptance, the song calls to mind the empowerment anthems churned out by a previous generation of Disney stars. But as Sour’s closer, “hope ur ok” is limp. An outward-looking loosie tacked on to 10 songs about the world inside Rodrigo’s head and heart, it reads as a last-minute effort to demonstrate perspective and maturity. Someone out there might feel genuinely comforted by Rodrigo’s words, and that matters. But, as the success of “drivers license” shows, there’s a certain magic to be found in embracing your own mess”.

I am going to finish with this review from The Guardian. Cathartic rage set against teenage heartbreak, as it is said. A hugely important moment for a teenage artist “that metabolises anger, jealousy and bewilderment into pop euphoria”. For anyone who has not heard Olivia Rodrigo’s debut, it is a perfect time to get into SOUR:

“Even in a world where streaming’s rise means chart records are broken all the time, the debut single by Disney star Olivia Rodrigo is an anomaly. Upon the release of Drivers License in January, it had the biggest first week for any song ever on Spotify – then hit the 100m streams mark faster than any other track on the platform had before. It debuted at No 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 and stayed there for eight weeks – only the seventh song ever to do so. In the UK, it topped the charts for nine weeks and broke the record for the highest single-day streams ever for a non-Christmas song.

And yet, both the song and the album it is taken from are propelled by an energy that’s about as far from cold, number-crunching rationality as it is possible to get. Drivers License – a portentous power ballad backed by plummeting drones and minimalist percussion – was written among the ruins of first love. At 18, Rodrigo, sentimental, furious, mired in self-pity, is staggered at the way her ex-boyfriend has moved on (“I just can’t imagine how you could be so OK now that I’m gone,” begins the chorus crescendo). This isn’t just about romantic rejection: for Rodrigo, reality has been irrevocably ruptured, and she is deeply disturbed. No wonder. The realisation that somebody you once knew and loved can unilaterally revert back to being a complete stranger – and by doing so seemingly erase all the time you spent together – is among the biggest and most unpleasant shocks of adulthood.

In a satisfying mirroring of form and content, almost every single song on Sour –written entirely by Rodrigo and producer Daniel Nigro – deals with the enormity of this development baldly, bluntly, and with none of the meaningless word salad that popstars often hide behind. Rodrigo imagines her ex recycling dates with his new squeeze over the Taylor Swiftian pop of Deja Vu (“Don’t act like we didn’t do that shit too”). The seething pop-punk of Good 4 U has her incredulous at the irony of everything: “I guess that therapist I found for you, she really helped.” She uncovers yet more hypocrisy on the sad and stately Traitor - “Remember I brought her up and you told me I was paranoid?” - and is fundamentally bruised on Enough for You: “I don’t want your sympathy, I just want myself back.” Rodrigo uses the album as a way to do that, by setting down the terms of her own reality, over and over again.

And if she sounds like a broken record, that’s the point: what makes Sour such a great album is that its maker is unafraid to make a nuisance of herself. In an interview with the Guardian earlier this month, Rodrigo said she was proud the record revolved around emotions that “aren’t really socially acceptable especially for girls: anger, jealousy, spite, sadness”. Even the title is a reclamation of the word “sour”, with its connotations of bitter, undesirable women. Considering that women are told to feign disinterest in men lest they scare them off, writing a whole album about how furious and devastated you are that your ex has forgotten you seems like the sort of thing any good friend would strongly advise against. But the shades of cringeworthiness that run through the whole enterprise is the reason why it is so cathartic, and so charming.

Of course, the emotions Rodrigo mines are not exclusive to adolescence, but Sour is still a gloriously teenage album. Vulnerability has recently become a watchword for a generation of young (and youth-oriented) musicians who are keen to open up about tumultuous inner lives that revolve around anxiety, low self-esteem and romantic rejection. Rodrigo’s emotional palate is not restricted to that: there is much rage here and the generic grammar to match. The brilliant opener Brutal starts with elegiac strings before Rodrigo insists things get “like, messy” and the song swiftly morphs into anthemic 90s alt-rock with pregnant pauses suggestive of a droll eye-roll, in the vein of the Breeders’ Cannonball. Good 4 U, meanwhile, channels a more recent strain of rock: a slice of electro-tinged pop-punk, it shares perhaps slightly too much DNA with Paramore’s Misery Business – but it’s hard to care when it metabolises spitting fury into infectious euphoria so expertly.

A couple of songs have Rodrigo singing over fingerpicked guitar figures in sweetly folky style (Enough for You, Favorite Crime), while Deja Vu plays with fuzzy, crashing percussion and a mosquito synth-line. The majority of Sour, however, is rooted in the style of its breakout hit: Adele meets Taylor, lovely and unadventurous, thoughtful but hardly breaking new ground. Which isn’t quite the same as calling it basic or staid. From the way the seatbelt alarm sound births the opening piano line to the gut-wrenching drones of doom that sporadically appear low in the mix, the other heritage fuelling Drivers License is the precise, sparsely furnished production pioneered by the xx that now forms the basis for a huge amount of modern pop. Rodrigo carries the baton with class and mass appeal, even if things do get a bit samey after a while.

Miraculously, the subject matter never seems over repetitive, but Rodrigo loses her nerve right at the end. On closing number Hope Ur Ok, she turns her gaze outwards to sing about people she once knew who have experienced hardship in their lives. It’s as close to a palate cleanser as a song with such a cloying sentiment can get, but thankfully doesn’t overshadow the glorious myopia of Sour: a collection of polished, precociously accomplished pop that doubles as one of the most gratifyingly undignified breakup albums ever made”.

Whilst it has been almost five years since SOUR was released, Olivia Rodrigo has done so much in that time. Huge tours, a celebrated second album, and a third that is coming in June, she is one of the leasing voices of her generation. A five-star Glastonbury headline slot last year, I do feel that Rodrigo will releasee so many albums and continue to be talked about as one of the greatest Pop artists we have ever seen. A lot of exocomet around you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love. It is going to be the biggest album of this year. On 21st May, we will mark five years of SOUR. I think that it is one of the best debut albums that…

WE have ever seen.