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

FEATURE:

 

 

You Gotta Get with My Friends…

Spice Girls’ Wannabe at Thirty

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IT is not an exaggeration to say…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ABSOLUTELY perfect.

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

FEATURE:

 

 

Empire State of Mind

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

__________

I have written about…

PHOTO CREDIT: cottonbro studio/Pexels

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Behind-the-scenes roles where women are virtually erased

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

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

The collaboration problem in male-dominated genres

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

IN THIS PHOTO: Lady Gaga

Gender assumptions about technical abilities

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

The lack of role models and visibility

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

How stereotypes prevent women from entering the field

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

Industry gatekeepers and antiquated practices

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

PHOTO CREDIT: Anna Pou/Pexels

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

EVER take notice?!

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

FEATURE:

 

 

Get Up Off Our Knees

The Housemartins‘ London 0 Hull 4 at Forty

__________

I think that…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

GRADED ON A CURVE:
A-“.

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

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

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

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

STILL sounds so utterly compelling.

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

FEATURE:

 

 

Everything’s Just Wonderful

Lily Allen’s Alright, Still at Twenty

__________

IT must be weird…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IS hugely impressive.

FEATURE: The Wedding List: A Dream Celebration of Huge Kate Bush Fiftieth Anniversaries

FEATURE:

 

 

The Wedding List

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush

A Dream Celebration of Huge Kate Bush Fiftieth Anniversaries

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I am pretty sure that…

IN THIS PHOTO: Margot Robbie shot for Vogue Australia in January 2026/PHOTO CREDIT: Lachlan Bailey

2028 is going to be a great year. Maybe not for world events, though when it comes to music, I think that there will be some decades-best albums released. Pop evolving and other genes coming to the forefront. Also, Sam Mendes’s Beatles films will be released. I feel there will be some sort of movement or event like the Summer of Love. At a period in history when there is such brutality and violence, a reaction to what is happening around the globe. Also, there will be important anniversaries. In terms of albums turning thirty, a few to note: Madonna’s Ray of Light, Fatboy Slim’s You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby and Ms. Lauryn Hill’s The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill. There are going to be things to celebrate, for sure. As this is a Kate Bush feature, there are several dates that are hugely significant. I am essentially trying to manifest a dream of mine. I said I would do this when I publish my 10,000th feature, though Squarespace doesn’t tell you how many features you have published, so I am guessing. I reckon I will not hit that number until the end of this decade. However, there is something that I would love to do ahead of that. Kate Bush would not want a big fuss made around her seventieth birthday. That is on 30th July. That is fair enough. However, inevitably there will be features run and maybe a podcast or audio documentary made. People wanting to show their appreciate and respect. Her debut single, Wuthering Heights, turns fifty on 20th June. Her debut album, The Kick Inside, turns fifty on 17th February.

Either flying out to Los Angeles or New York (the former probably because of the fact many of the people live out there who I want to speak to), it would be great to write a piece for The New Yorker. I have always wanted to do this. Being unknown to them, perhaps it is somewhat far-fetched. I do feel that a celebratory feature about Kate Bush’s debut single/album would be a popular one. Draw people to it. The idea would be uniting artists and others in the entertainment industry/culture – authors, actors, directors etc. -, who would talk about Kate Bush. When they heard her music, what it means to them, and their favourite song/line. Either working with the same photographer for each interview or one that each interviewee selects, it would combine maybe ten or fifteen people. I am thinking how Margot Robbie recently talked about how Kate Bush is important to her. She recreated the dance to Wuthering Heights whilst she was on the set of Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights”. In terms of U.K. artists (who could be interviewed from London), Charli xcx and Florence Welch seem like they would have some great insights and words to say about an artist that has influenced them. In the U.S., Olivia Rodrigo, Billie Eilish, Lady Gaga and Hayley Williams are among those who are inspired by Kate Bush. And Big Boi. Björk is a massive Kate Bush fan. She is based in Iceland, though an interview could be coordinated there or in the U.K./U.S. (if she is visiting). Mainly, it would be those in music I would love to interview. Perhaps one or two actors/directors. ROSALÍA and Lily Allen also fans. It would be amazing to either recreate Kate Bush photos for the shoots and work alongside John Carder Bush, Guido Harari, Gered Mankowitz, Trevor Leighton and others who have photographed her through the years, or have these exciting and Kate Bush-influenced shots captured. I have never been to L.A. or New York, though going there for a couple of weeks and conducting these interviews would be amazing. I guess it would have to start in the summer of 2027, as it would take a lot of preparation, editing and work to get it published at the start of 2028.

Things could change between now and then. We hope that Kate Bush releases another studio album. That could heighten the chances of a commission happening. Making her more relevant ad visible somehow. As long as Bush herself was okay with it and had no objections, it would be a way of marking a date(s) that are very significant. I feel Kate Bush is one of the most influential artists of today. In terms of the artists who are influenced by her and the phenomenal albums released through the years that have elements of Kate Bush in them. A few years ago, or before Stranger Things used Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God) and Kate Bush’s music reached a whole new audience, perhaps there was less widespread knowledge of Bush and appreciation of her music. Finally, in 2022, America embracing Kate Bush! Some might say that artists do not usually get afforded this sort of honour when their debut album or single turns fifty. But think about Bush’s significance and how comparatively little has been written about her. A woman who undoubtably helped change the sound of modern Pop and inspired so many artists and people around the world, it would seem like a fitting tribute. It also could bring together newer artists/well-known fans with those who have been with her for many years. Having an assignment to interview these people and there being these great photographs taken and appearing in a special for The New Yorker in January/February 2028 would be a dream! Of course, this is wishful thinking on my part, and it couldn’t happen without them and there being this generous budget. And what they would get out of it. They run long-read interviews with artists, though if I was in the U.S. and speaking with someone like Billie Eilish or Florence Welch in London, that would cost time and money.

IN THIS PHOTO: Greta Gerwig photographed in 2023 for Vanity Fair/PHOTO CREDIT: Norman Jean Roy

I know that there will be articles published to mark fifty years of the sublime Wuthering Heights and The Kick Inside. I am not sure how many and where from, though quiet a chunk of the music media here and the U.S. will do something. Again, maybe an audio documentary or radio celebration. But nothing massive I would imagine. Perhaps the only time – or the most fitting – this could happen, this unique opportunity to unify a range of Kate Bush fans. The BBC did that in 2014 for their documentary on her but, in the twelve years since, so many other major names and incredible artists have expressed their love of Kate Bush. So we need to update things. How would Bush herself feel?! If she was to approve it, I can imagine she would be flattered. After all, nobody is asking her to take part of say anything, as I is unlikely she would want to be photographed or interviewed. Though it may not be totally impossible to get some written words from her as an introduction. Her memories recording Wuthering Heights and The Kick Inside. How she feels knowing so many incredible creatives and important people have her to thank (in part) for their success and talent. A dream guest list is taking shape but, as mentioned, maybe keeping it to fifteen tops would not make it an unwieldy read and something that costs too much. Perhaps eight or so artists then having the remainder be taken from the worlds of film, T.V., literature, art and theatre. Or politics. I know Greta Gerwig is a Kate Bush fan. Alongside Margot Robbie, maybe uniting them again (Robbie starred in Gerwig’s 2023 film, Barbie). Marking fifty years of the arrival of a life-changing artist. This incredible feature run in The New Yorker. Even if it is two years away, it will take a while to put together and finalise. It would be a dream I would…

LOVE to see realised.

FEATURE: Finalising the Deal… Kate Bush and the Summer of 1976

FEATURE:

 

 

Finalising the Deal…

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush on holiday in Kent in 1972/PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush

Kate Bush and the Summer of 1976

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I feel a fiftieth anniversary…

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1977/PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush

is very important, so I am especially keen to mark any that applies to Kate Bush. Last June, I wrote about her recording The Man with the Child in His Eyes and The Saxophone Song (known as Berlin at the time) at AIR Studios. In June 1975, those two songs, alongside Maybe, were recorded and overseen by Executive Producer, David Gilmour. The tracks appeared on her 1978 debut album, The Kick Inside. I am once more turning to Gaffaweb and their invaluable timeline for assistance when it comes to celebrating fifty years of Kate Bush fundraising a record deal with EMI. The broader summer of 1976 was very important. In August, she passed her driving test on the second attempt. That allowed her freedom and this independence important for such a budding and ambitious young artist. In July, just after her eighteenth birthday, there was this hugely important event: “Kate finally settles a recording deal with EMI. The contract is for four years, with options at the end of the second and third year. Kate receives a 3,000- advance [and 500 Pounds for publication rights]. EMI are content for Kate to take time to write songs, sharpen her lyrics, train her voice and generally have time to "grow up”. Earlier in the year, the EMI deal begins to take shape. A publishing contract is settled first. However, in that summer of 1976, Kate Bush signed a major record deal and passed her driving test. Although the former is more significant than the latter, I feel that both are very important. There was discussion with EMI before 1976, though Bush turned eighteen, so it was probably deemed she was an adult and could navigate a record desal and the demands on her. She would step into AIR Studios tie record the remainder of The Kick Inside in the summer of 1976.

Almost a year to the day since that deal with EMI was finalised, Bush was in the studio and recording one of the most extraordinary and important debut albums in music history. It would have been hugely exciting for her. That idea that there were options at the end of the second and third years of that four-year deal. An option is a clause allowing a record label to extend the agreement for additional periods or albums. It allows the label the exclusive right to require the artist to produce more music, without the label being obligated to do so, usually used to keep an artist signed while limiting the label's risk. £3,000 in 1976 is roughly around £28,000 to £33,600 today. That was quite a lot for a teenage artist. It did give her some flexibility to record or go to dance classes. Use that money towards things that would help her career. Buy instruments or whatever she needed. I think that by this time, Bush was living at 44b Wickham Road, Brockley. Her brothers, Paddy and John, occupied the below and above flats (though I am not sure whom lived in each). It is quite cute having three siblings living above and below one another. Closer to London and now good to drive, the summer of 1976 was an unusual but important one. Other women her age were probably going to university or more likely the world of work. Instead, Kate Bush was looking ahead to realising a dream that she had. To make an album. Rather than being famous or chasing any sort of wealth, she wanted to complete an album and have that in her hand. It seems so strange that we are marking fifty years of that EMI deal. Such a significant moment, I am not sure if anyone else will write about it. I want to discuss something else that she did in the summer of 1976 that is mentioned in the text I am dropping in. It is from a 2022 feature that Classic Rock published. Discussing Kate Bush’s long road to Hounds of Love (her 1985 album):

“In this most open of households, her earliest explorations were encouraged. By 13 she had already set her poems – including The Saxophone Song and The Man With The Child In His Eyes – to primitive piano chords. “I could sing in key but there was nothing there,” she told Trouser Press. “It was awful noise, it was really something terrible. My tunes were more morbid and more negative… they were too heavy.”

By the following year she had recorded several cassettes’ worth of demos and song sketches on her dad’s Akai reel-to-reel tape machine. Impressed, her family enlisted Ricky Hopper, a record plugger friend of John Bush’s, to hawk them around the labels in the hope of getting a publishing deal.

After all the majors had turned them down as “uncommercial”, Hopper contacted his old Cambridge University buddy David Gilmour. The Pink Floyd guitarist was sufficiently impressed to invite Kate to record a demo at his Essex home studio, backed by him and the rhythm section from Unicorn, a band he was also nurturing. “I was convinced from the beginning that this girl had remarkable talent,” Gilmour later said.

After that didn’t work either, Gilmour decided the only way forward would be to record three properly arranged songs. Putting up the money himself, he booked time at London’s AIR Studios in June 1975, bringing in arranger friend Andrew Powell, who had worked with Cockney Rebel, Pilot and Alan Parsons. They recorded The Saxophone Song, The Man With The Child In His Eyes and Maybe, with members of the London Symphony Orchestra (the first two songs would appear on her debut album, The Kick Inside).

Gilmour played the demo to Bob Mercer, then head of EMI’s pop division, who was impressed enough to sign her up. A deal was eventually sealed by July 1976. Having left school with 10 ‘O’ Levels, Bush set up a company to manage her affairs – a precocious glimpse of the total control that would come later in her career.

EMI were willing to give the young singer time to craft her songwriting and performance. Ever the maverick, she began to study with Lindsey Kemp, the provocative mime artist who had been a mentor to the young David Bowie. Under Kemp’s tutelage she began to imbue her music with character and movement – magic extra ingredients in her presentation”.

Alongside that deal being finalised, there was also this developing of her dance talent. Dance so important to Kate Bush, the summer of 1976 was a time when she took some big steps regarding training. Going back to Gaffaweb and their chronology from July 1976: “Kate pursues her dancing, first at the Elephant and Castle, South London. But after seeing Lindsay Kemp perform in Flowers, she attends his classes at the Dance Centre in Covent Garden. After Kemp goes to Australia, Kate trains with Arlene Phillips, choreographer of Hot Gossip. [It is probably at this time that Kate's association with Gary Hurst and Stewart Avon-Arnold, her longtime dancing partners, begins.]”.

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1978/PHOTO CREDIT: Brian Aris

That switch in terms of the locations around London. How important Lindsay Kemp was. However, she stuck with dance and studied under Arlene Phillips. I do like that Kate Bush had such a productive and interesting summer of 1976. Especially that July. I also appreciate how tough it would have been to find the energy in the summer of 1976. July 1976 was exceptionally hot, forming part of a brutal heatwave with an average temperature of approximately 18°C to 18.2°C. The summer (June-August) was one of the hottest in over 350 years. Temperatures in southern England regularly exceeding 32°C (90°F) for fifteen consecutive days, peaking at 35.9°C (96.6°F) on 3 July in Cheltenham. It must have been quite scary in a way! Regardless, Kate Bush had a music career to focus on. She was still developing her piano playing and singing. As we learn, her late-night practising ruffled the feathers of her neighbours: "I'd practice scales and that on the piano, go off dancing, and then in the evening I'd come back and play the piano all night. And I actually remember, well, the summer of '76 which was really hot here. We had such hot weather, I had all the windows open. And I just used to write until you know four in the morning, and I got a letter of complaint from a neighbor who was basically saying "Shuuut Uuuup!" cause they had to get up at like five in the morning. They did shift work and my voice had been carried the whole length of the street I think, so they weren't too appreciative”. I have used a photo of Kate Bush as a girl for the main image, as this is something that she would have thought about at this age. Maybe not knowing what a record deal was. I mean, getting to a point where her curiosity of music and expressing herself through that medium was realised in this way. The summer of 1976 was such a transformative time for her, so I wanted to celebrate fifty years of this pivotal and significant time. The biggest event being the finalisation and completion of the record deal with EMI. Truly, no looking back. It was a moment Kate Bush as the artist, debatably, was born and started. From here, she could realise…

THE kick inside.

FEATURE: Good Girl: The Subject of Hypersexualisation and the Male Gaze in Pop Music

FEATURE:

 

 

Good Girl

IN THIS PHOTO: Paris Paloma recently appeared on Woman’s Hour and talked about creating feminist anthem, labour, her incredible new single, Good Girl, and how modern music (or Pop) is still very much expected to conform to the male gaze

The Discussion and Subject of Hypersexualisation and the Male Gaze in Pop Music

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MANY might say I am…

not qualified to discuss this subject. However, I think that this subject is worth discussing. I was listening to Paris Paloma on Woman’s Hour. She was telling Anita Rani how she was not seeking validation at all. That she didn’t care if people – the industry; men – found her attractive or not. Discussing her anthem, labour, and new single, Good Girl, she also touched embracing  body positivity. You can listen here. I still feel there is so much emphasis on woman in music being seen as attractive and desirable. I will come to this, but is there this prerequisite that women are there for the male gaze. That they should show flesh and if they are not deemed attractive or sexy, then they are not worth anything. There was a period when body positivity was being discussed and celebrated. Perhaps less common now. Artists such as Lizzo very much at the forefront of that. Paris Paloma is an artist who, like so many of her female peers, has been valued and judged on how she looks. Rather than what is important: the music that she is making. It can be risky lashing back against that demand and desire. The fixation with women’s bodies. Not only stigmatising and misogynistic, there has always been this push from the industry. That woman’s bodies should be deemed ‘attractive or ‘sexy’. That is the way they get respect. Paloma said that women should be able to express themselves freely, but they should not have to flaunt their bodies to conform in order to be seen as attractive or valued. She lamented the loss of that body positivity movement and how now there is this Ozempic-fuelled reverse. That women are thinner or there is this pressure for women to be thinner, so that they are seen as attractive. This is something that is not discussed much in music.

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Maybe, yes, men might not have the best perspective or sense of understanding, though I have seen few male journalists ever condemn this standard and sexism that has been rampant for decades. It ties into hypersexualsiation in music vs. body positivity. It is brilliant that women can feel confident and comfortable and there is this healthy image. That they do not have to slim and be a certain shape/size. That women can feel comfortable in their skin and talk about it. Paris Paloma does not care if people find her attractive. Someone who wants to feel safe and comfortable in her vessel. How it is so tragic that women still have to be moulded to fit the male gaze. Paris Paloma is not here to be a male fantasy or expose herself. How there is so much pressure on women to be slim. If they are not, then that criticism and attack against them. Paris Paloma saying that is not empowering for women to act, dress or look a certain way when that is pretty much what they are expected to do in order to conform to the male gaze. It was a powerful interview and statement that does raise that question. Will attitudes in music ever change?! I love the crop of modern female Pop artists. In terms of what they are producing. Artists like Sabrina Carpenter, I feel, are modern-day queens and incredible artists who will be remembered for decades to come. However, there is still this hypersexualisation. That question as to whether women are being free and expressive and it is positive writing sexualised songs and performing in a provocative and sexual way. That it is liberating and empowering other women. Or whether it is what the industry expects and what they have to do to be noticed. That it sets a bad example to young girls. Not something men are judged on. They are not sexualised and do not need to dress a certain way to sell records or get opportunities. I was reading a post on Instagram – I forgot to save the link so can’t remember who posted it -, but it asked whether there is needless hypersexualisation and whether women should be doing this. Using Ed Sheeran as an example of a male artist who is not expected to be sexual to sell music. Men not held to this standard or defined by their bodies.

This has been happening for decades. Think about a legendary icon like Madonna. Although she was very much someone who was comfortable in her body and used her sexuality to her advantage and was very open about sex and desire, you do wonder how much of that was expected. That she felt she needed to sell records. Madonna might argue that she was empowering herself and others. You can definitely argue this! Facing such abuse and misogyny during her career, songs like Human Nature struck back against critics who condemned Madonna for being evocative and talking about sex. Today, as she prepares to launch Confessions on a Dance Floor: Part II, you could say that she is still as bold and brilliant as ever. However, she still has to face misogyny and ageism. So many female Pop artists influenced by Madonna. There is this argument as to whether she and so many others are body positive and expressing their sexuality in a positive way or whether it is what women are expected to do. Tow this line. Last year, Belinda Carlile talked about hypersexualisation in Pop and cited Dua Lipa as an example of a hugely talented artist who was performing in this very sexual and charged way. How it was embarrassing and not empowering. One might say there is a distinction between hypersexualisation and conforming to the male gaze and sex-positivity. In general, there has been a reversal in terms of attitudes to sex. Perhaps there is more judgement when artists discuss sex. Decades ago, especially in the '00s, so much of modern music was about sex. Much more at the forefront. Sabrina Carpenter is a wonderful artist who very much should talk about her sex life and be sex-positive. However, like Madonna a few decades ago, she is judged and faces condemnation for being seen as risqué, as the BBC wrote last year:

“Carpenter's breakthrough came last year with the song of the summer, Espresso, and her Grammy-nominated album – amazingly, her sixth – Short n' Sweet. By then she'd long shed her Disney roots and embraced a coquettish, 50s bombshell look and overtly sexy persona. "I'm so [expletive] horny," she sang on Short n' Sweet's Juno. She made an eyebrow-raising play on the word "camaraderie" on Bed Chem. Things got even filthier when she toured the album, acting out sex positions and simulating sex with a male dancer. Outraged parents have decried her as a bad influence on their daughters.

A blonde bombshell pop star causing moral outrage with her overt sexuality? It all felt quite familiar. Carpenter certainly isn't shy about her love of Madonna, paying homage to the singer's Blonde Ambition era on a Vogue cover (shot by Steven Meisel, the same photographer behind Madonna's book) and wearing the star's 1991 Bob Mackie Oscars dress to last year's VMAs.

IN THIS PHOTO: Sabrina Carpenter/PHOTO CREDIT: Red Light Management

Whereas Madonna's overt sexuality felt radical, Carpenter's has a more tongue-in-cheek feel – to the point where some have questioned whether it's a marketing ploy. Criticism intensified in June when she unveiled the cover for Man's Best Friend, featuring the singer on her knees as a man grabs her hair. It drew ire from several quarters – some feminists, women's charities and fans thought it was degrading to women. Conservatives thought it was overtly sexual. Others defended the singer, calling the reaction puritanical and suggesting the image was satire. Carpenter later revealed an alternative "approved by God" cover – and this week said the original image was about deciding "when you want to be in control".

It all ramped up anticipation for the album's release, fuelling speculation on whether this might be Sabrina's Erotica, a daring and subversive, sex-positive album. In fact, the album has turned out to be, as one critic for The Times described, "surprisingly vanilla". Despite the provocation prompted by the cover – and nine out of the 12 tracks being labelled as explicit – there is nothing especially radical in either the music (perfectly pleasant, occasionally great '90s-and-Abba-inspired pop, with no hooks to quite rival Espresso) or the lyrics. Sure, there are plenty of lines that would make your grandmother blush, but Carpenter's album doesn't reveal anything that shocking – just a young woman exploring her sexuality and writing smart, funny and sometimes smutty lyrics about the realities of modern dating. So why all the fuss?”.

Not that sex is a controversial subject. Music cannot be too sanitised or purified. However, rather than this being a case of artists honestly talking about sex and doing so in a healthy way, there is still this feeling that so many women feel they can only get a toehold and be seen if they are hypersexual. That they are invisible. If they look a certain way and dress in a manner not seen as sexy and commercial, then they will be side-lined and buried. Whilst Sabrina Carpenter, Dua Lipa and so many of their peers are phenomenal artists who are inspiring so many girls and women, are they performing and writing in a way that fits into the male gaze? Do they feel they need to do that to stand out and get recognition?! They are hugely talented artists, and it may be them being very real and empowering. Being confident in their bodies. Though there is a connection between modern mainstream Pop artists getting buzz and attention and the nature of their music and performances. Not with every major female Pop artist. Though it applies to so many. Last year, Annie Lennox spoke with The Independent about her new memoir. Among other subjects, Lennox discussed how music is and always has been hypersexualised and misogynistic:

“Lennox, who went on to have an extremely successful solo career in the 1990s, has resisted reductive labels all her life. She has also always resisted the pop industry machine that tends to regard young female stars as bait. In 2013, she spoke out against the oversexualised state of the music business, condemning in particular “pornographic pop videos”. What does she think about the landscape now, which has arguably become even more sexualised thanks to the explicit provocations of artists such as Sabrina Carpenter and Charlie xcx? “I was originally objecting to the fact that [it was the] record companies [who] were promoting this hypersexualised look,” she says. “They were like, ‘Whoa, we’ve got soft porn with a musical background. That’ll make a ton of money.’ And it did.

“Now these artists, the ones you’ve referenced, they’ve found their niche, and I’m not saying it’s all soft porn. But hypersexualisation has become so normalised. I would say that if you want to do that, then you just have to live with whatever comes from it. That will be your life experience.”

Lennox and Dave Stewart met in a health food restaurant in Hampstead in 1975, where she was a waitress – and formed The Tourists and later the Eurythmics (Lewis Ziolek)

Lennox herself found the music industry in the late 1970s to be very “male-led”. “They certainly would have wanted to exploit my female side more,” she says. “And that was never said explicitly, but it was there. And so doing things in the way we did was always like a bit of a rebuff.” In 1986, she famously took off her top to expose a red bra while performing “Missionary Man” at a Eurythmics concert in Birmingham. “That had less to do with exploiting my sexuality than sticking a middle finger to the male gaze. I was saying, ‘I will do what I like on my terms”.

It is a complicated debate. If we tell modern Pop artists to be less sexualised and change things, that is telling them what to do with their bodies. Also, you can say it is expressive and empowering for women to discuss sex and have this confidence. Even so, there is a double standard in music and this idea still that women are not judged on talent and their words. More, they have to also be sexy and attractive to get ahead. Whereas men do not. This article from 2024 examined female sexuality in Pop and discussed the dangers of hypersexualisation and what that message says to young girls:

“Can you even imagine the uproar if a little boy were to be dressed in a nude coloured bodysuit, dancing with very adult-like moves to a song about one-night stands and alcoholism, or writhing around a cage with nearly nude adult? And yet Sia did this with two of her hit videos and very little was said about it. Because the child in question was a girl.

A Devastating Impact On Girls

Such explicit videos of female sexuality in pop are certainly exerting a negative influence on little girls. Even back in 2007 the American Psychological Society issued a report on the sexualisation of young women. They found “virtually every media form studied provided ample evidence of the sexualisation of women”. And since then, things have only gotten worse. One word, my friends: WAP.

In study after study, women – and increasingly, young girls –  are portrayed in overtly sexualised ways. Vastly more than men. Unlike films, music videos are available for young children to watch without restriction. But some are getting so raunchy, there is a warning of ‘Adult Content’ before them. For example? Miley Cyrus’s MTV Music Awards performance where she ‘ejaculates’ smoke and glitter. Since the music video was originally created for youth culture, it’s a sad day when MTV has to carry warnings of ‘adult content’.

It’s About Safety, Too

The hypersexualisation of women in pop is more than a morality issue. It is one of women’s safety and equality. Studies show that girls who are exposed to sexualised content are more likely to endorse gender stereotypes and place attractiveness as central to a woman’s value. Boys who are exposed to this content are more likely to sexually harass females, and have inappropriate expectations of them. A shocking one in three girls in the UK say that they are ‘groped’ at school, or experience other unwanted sexual contact. Sexual harassment is practically routine at work, on public transport and other public spaces

Following  a series of reviews, most recently the Bailey Review on the Commercialisation and Sexualisation of Childhood, the UK Government has decided to enact  a series of measures to tackle sexualisation, including tighter guidelines on outdoor ads containing sexualised imagery, age-ratings on video games, restricting children’s access to online pornography.

A  new project, Rewind and Reframe, has been set up by leading women’s groups in the UK. The End Violence Against Women Coalition, Imkaan and Object aim to provide a platform for young women to speak out about sexism and racism in music videos by blogging and sharing their experiences on a new website”.

It takes me back to Paris Paloma and what she was saying. How she does not care if people find her attractive. She is making music on her terms and wants to feel comfortable in her body without feeling the need to exploit herself or be exposing. It is sad how the male gaze still dictates how female Pop artists write and perform. Will that ever change? What can change that? Women in Pop are fully entitled to do what they want. Though one feels there is this pressure on them to be sexual. One could say most of their fans are women, so this sexualisation is empowering and not for men and their gaze. However, so many videos are directed by men and labels run by them. The industry still sexist and geared towards men. These Pop artists are so amazingly talented, you sort of feel that women run this risk of being forgotten or even dropped by a label if they act and say they are not going to do this. That they want to make music their way and it does not matter if they are seen as attractive and desirable. So many of the new weave of brilliant women in Pop are phenomenal songwriters. You read interviews and they are so compelling, compassionate and admirable. Incredible women who are so strong and empowering in what they say. But when you look at videos, listen to songs and see them live, there is that sexualisation/hypersexuality. Wil the industry ever truly respect women?! Can they make music and be popular without their bodies being on the line? People will point to artists who have succeeded and not do so whilst being very sexualised. However, those are perhaps rare cases. The male gaze still driving sales and demand. Body-positivity perhaps gone. Now, there is a standard that says women in Pop need to be super-thin and need to conform. I hope that anyone who reads this and is a woman in music forgives any missteps or ill-informed opinion. Though I am very much moved by what Paris Paloma said to Anita Rani recently on Woman’s Hour. How women’s bodies are commodities and they are judged on their looks and figures seemingly more than their brains, words and talent. Or that so many women have to be very sexualised to sell music. Nothing new (sadly) in the music industry you wonder if this is something…

THAT will ever change.

FEATURE: Beneath the Sleeve: Joni Mitchell - Blue

FEATURE:

 

 

Beneath the Sleeve

Joni Mitchell - Blue

__________

THIS is not the first time…

IN THIS PHOTO: Joni Mitchell Performing at the Isle of Wight Festival in 1970/PHOTO CREDIT: Tony Russell/Redferns/Getty Images

that I have spotlighted Joni Mitchell’s Blue. The fourth studio album from the Canadian icon, it was her most acclaimed album to that point. In fact, it remains her most revered album. That one that has endured and is talked about often. In terms of the all-time greatest albums, Blue is always in the conversation. It was released on 22nd June, 1971, so I did want to mark its fifty-fifth anniversary. Go deep with this true classic. I will get to some features and reviews around Blue. However, from Joni Michell’s official website, we get some insight, background and explanation of Blue’s creation and brilliance from Rob Hughes:

“Commercial success didn’t sit easy with Joni Mitchell. Clouds had gone gold and brought with it a level of popular appeal that took away some of her everyday liberties. Having finished Ladies Of The Canyon in 1970, she vowed to take a year off, ostensibly to recharge her jaded batteries, but also to escape what she felt was an increasing sense of claustrophobia. “I was being isolated, starting to feel like a bird in a gilded cage,” she explained to Rolling Stone’s Larry LeBlanc. “A certain amount of success cuts you off in a lot of ways. You can’t move freely. I like to live, be on the streets, to be in a crowd…”

In many ways, it signalled the start of Mitchell’s conflicted relationship between art and celebrity. Now that the “black limousine” and “velvet curtain calls” of “For Free” had narrowed into the reality of her own life, she needed to regain her peripheral vision, restore a degree of clarity. Mitchell came to despise show business, declaring fame “a series of misunderstandings surrounding a name”. Not for nothing did David Geffen once tell her: “You’re the only star I ever met that wanted to be ordinary.”

There were major upheavals in Mitchell’s private life, too. Her intense love affair with Graham Nash, which had coincided with an accelerated spurt of productivity from both parties, was nearing its end, resulting in a series of petty squabbles. Against this backdrop, Mitchell decided to head for Europe, where she travelled around Greece, Spain and France. Her main seat of exile was the island of Crete, where she took up residence in a cave amid a hippy community in the fishing village of Matala. It was from here that she sent Nash a telegraph home. He was busy laying a new floor in Mitchell’s kitchen when it landed, it read: “If you hold sand too tightly in your hand, it will run through your fingers. Love, Joan.” “I knew at that point it was truly over between us,” Nash recalled, disconsolately, in his memoir, Wild Tales.

Mitchell was introduced to the Appalachian dulcimer on Crete and adjusted to the unhurried rhythm of local life. The experience brought her into contact with a number of characters, who in turn helped reignite her creativity. One such figure was Cary Raditz, a wild-haired American chef who was blessed, in Mitchell’s words, with “fierce-looking blue eyes” and “the mark of Cain on his brow”. The pair began a relationship, sealed by a song she’d written in honour of his birthday: “Carey”.

As more musical ideas started to flow, Mitchell noticed the formation of certain recurring themes – love, loss, escape, a quest for some kind of indefinable spiritual truth. And for all the delicious scenery, food and ready company, she was homesick. Shifting from one continental base to another only amplified the feeling. While in Paris, she poured her longing for her adopted West Coast into another fresh tune, “California”.

She returned to her native Canada in late July, playing Toronto’s Mariposa Folk Festival alongside James Taylor. Mitchell and Taylor had met a year earlier, at the Newport Folk Festival, but now they became romantically involved. A month or so later, she visited him on the set of his Hollywood road movie, Two-Lane Blacktop, where they wrote together and, as Taylor told Uncut in 2015, “had some of the most outrageous good times”. By October, they were sharing a stage at London’s Paris Theatre, recorded for BBC Radio One’s In Concert series, with Mitchell unveiling a handful of new compositions.

She returned to London at the end of November to perform at the Royal Festival Hall, where the new songs were met with unanimous approval by reviewers, among them the NME and Melody Maker. The latter’s readership was similarly smitten with Mitchell, voting her 1970’s Top Female Performer in its year-end poll (ahead of Aretha Franklin, Grace Slick, Sandy Denny and the recently departed Janis Joplin), despite her paucity of live shows.

Back home by early ’71, Mitchell and Taylor were viewed by the American music press as Hollywood’s golden couple; two young, photogenic singer-songwriters whose liaison embodied the free-spirited ambience of Laurel Canyon. Both set about preparing their respective solo albums, with Mitchell singing backing vocals on what would become Mud Slide Slim And The Blue Horizon – most notably on his cover of Carole King’s “You’ve Got A Friend” – and Taylor repaying the compliment by adding guitar to “California”, “All I Want” and “A Case Of You”. They also accepted an invitation from King to appear on a reworked version of “Will You Love Me Tomorrow” for Tapestry, then being cut in the same A&M studio that Mitchell had booked.

The relationship quickly turned sour, however. Apparently devastated by Taylor’s decision to call it off, Mitchell funnelled her pain into the other songs she was recording for the appositely named Blue. The album duly became a document of a life in flux, a diary of physical and emotional displacement set against a backdrop of restless travel and doomed love affairs.

Short of the affectations of Clouds or the airy folk-pop of Ladies Of The Canyon, Blue was almost uncomfortably direct. Mitchell again refused to coat the songs in fussy arrangements, preferring to place her voice front and centre over spare guitar, dulcimer and piano, her vulnerability plain for all to hear. She later told Rolling Stone that “at that period of my life, I had no personal defences. I felt like a cellophane wrapper on a pack of cigarettes. I felt like I had absolutely no secrets from the world, and I couldn’t pretend in my life to be strong. Or to be happy. But the advantage of it in the music was that there were no defences there either.”

She was to use a more curious, semi-grotesque analogy in 2014’s Joni Mitchell: In Her Own Words, telling interviewer Malka Marom that she’d dreamed she was watching “a bit fat women’s tuba band. Women with big horns and rolled-down nylon in house dresses, playing tuba and big horn music, and I was a plastic bag with all my organs exposed, sobbing on an auditorium chair at that time. That’s how I felt. Like my guts were on the outside. I wrote Blue in that condition.”

The implication here is that Blue is an unwavering litany of distress and despair, an inventory of misfortune with no light relief. But it’s actually a counterweight of ecstasy and agony, of the best and worst of times. Nash is supposedly the subject of the piano-led “My Old Man”, Mitchell riding the climatic extremes of romantic love in breathy soprano. “He’s my sunshine in the morning/He’s my fireworks at the end of the day/He’s the warmest chord I ever heard” she sings at her sunniest, her voice adopting the shifting cadences of jazz. It’s in direct contrast to the clouds that descend in his absence: “But when he’s gone/Me and them lonesome blues collide/The bed’s too big/The frying pan’s too wide.”

The exquisite “A Case Of You”, also rumoured to be about Nash, finds her trying to absorb the lessons of a failed love affair that refuses to let her move on. As if to measure the depth of its impact, Mitchell addresses her quandary in religious terms: “Oh, you’re in my blood like holy wine/You taste so bitter and so sweet.” The sensitivity of her lyrics is echoed in the deft accompaniment of Taylor’s acoustic guitar and in the poignant tones of Mitchell’s dulcimer, the latter providing much of Blue’s graceful fragility. As testament to its enduring pull, “A Case Of You” became one of her most-covered tunes, siring versions from as far afield as KD Lang, Nancy Wilson, James Blake, The Decemberists’ Colin Meloy and Prince (as, naturally, “A Case Of U”).

Of the trio of songs considered to be inspired by Taylor, “All I Want” alludes to the jalousies and insecurities that appear to have undermined their relationship from an early stage. All Mitchell wants, she sings, her fluted voice rising and dipping over silvery dulcimer, “is to bring out the best in me and in you too”. But it feels like honest delusion rather than realistic hope. Her opening lines give a truer indication of her emotional condition: “I am on a lonely road and I am travelling/Travelling, travelling, travelling/Looking for something what can it be/Oh I hate you some, I hate you some, I love you some.”

As she explained to Cameron Crowe some years later: “In the state that I was at in my enquiry about life and direction and relationships, I perceived a lot of hate in my heart… I perceived my inability to love at that point. And it horrified me some.”

The title track follows a similar line of confession. A sombre lullaby that finds Mitchell alone at the piano, the song appears to directly address Taylor’s heroin addiction – “Ink on a pin/Underneath the skin/An empty space to fill in” – while attempting to strike a note of optimism. Yet the prospect of self-destruction is too enticing to ignore out of hand: “Everybody’s saying that hell’s the hippest way to go/Well I don’t think so/But I’m gonna take a look around it though.” Arguably the most affecting moment on the entire album occurs halfway through “Blue”, when Mitchell sings “lots of laughs” with such forlorn resignation that it’s almost impossible not to well up.

Stephen Stills is on board for the more sprightly “Carey”, bringing a quasi-calypso rhythm to a tune that details Mitchell’s sojourn in Matala. Despite revolving around her activities with Raditz – another devilishly “mean old Daddy” to whom she’s helplessly drawn – it’s essentially a conflicted piece of travelogue that contrasts the simple hedonism of Cretan nightlife with homesickness for California. Mitchell can’t seem to decide what she wants more – the wine, laughter and scratchy rock ‘n’ roll of the Mermaid Café or the comforts of the Canyon. “Oh, you know it sure is hard to leave here Carey/But it’s really not my home,” she declares, double-tracking herself on harmonies, with Russ Kunkel adding tactful percussion. “My fingernails are filthy, I got bleach tar on my feet/And I miss my clean white linen and my fancy French cologne.” Raditz also features in the equally fidgety “California”, in which Mitchell’s loneliness and dislocation are all too apparent.

For all its thwarted romance and soul-stripping, it’s this question that sits at the heart of Blue. Mitchell is ultimately trying to reconcile her life with her art, compressing an elusive search for personal contentment into a grand artistic statement. Blue is sad, funny, poetic, revelatory and often achingly candid. And such an intensive experience that it feels much longer than it’s relatively slight 35 minutes.

Issued in the summer of 1971, Blue did brisk business both at home and abroad, cracking the Billboard Top 20 and peaking in the UK Top 3. It quickly became a landmark against which the work of all confessional singer-songwriters would be measured. Graham Nash says he still has a hard time listening to it. Mitchell herself has called it a turning point in her career.

It was also the album that finally established the 27-year-old as an American superstar. A situation that would once again test her ambivalence towards her own fame”.

In 2021, to mark fifty years of Blue, Ultimate Classic Rock hosted a roundtable with its writers discussing this masterpiece and what it means. In 1971, it firmly established Joni Mitchell as one of the songwriting greats. Even if the attention perhaps made her feel uncomfortable, today, she is surely proud of the impact of Blue:

“As Blue turns 50, we asked UCR’s writers to answer four questions about the album and its legacy.

Is Blue Joni Mitchell’s best album? Why or why not, and if not, what is?

Michael Gallucci: It's not only her best album, it's one of the best, and most influential, albums of all time. There were singer-songwriter albums before Blue; there were even singer-songwriter albums by women before Blue. But after that record, everything changed as far as artists opening a little more of themselves to listeners. It's one of the most personal albums up to that time. Fifty years later, it's still one of the most open, and candid, albums ever made.

Allison Rapp: Yes. There's no doubt that Mitchell's first three albums (Song to a Seagull, Clouds, Ladies of the Canyon) showcase quite a lot of her talent as a lyricist and arranger, but Blue is her most intimate, personal and vulnerable statement as a songwriter. There's an element of wisdom and experience to Blue that wasn't necessarily present on her earlier records, plus the distinct sense that Mitchell, usually fiercely independent, is letting her guard down in a way she had never done before and didn't do as intensely on subsequent albums.

Annie Zaleski: Most definitely. She transformed what folk-rock could be and sound like. Along with Judy Collins, she provided a much-needed female perspective to what was going on at the time in the lives of the post-Beatles generation, voicing with confidence how a rich inner life intersects with a tumultuous outer life.

Gary Graff: It's her best, but not necessarily the first album I'd refer to new listener. Its virtues - the raw intimacy, the vein-spilling vulnerability, the subtle instrumentation and those no-punches-pulled vocals - make for a tremendous song cycle but not always a comfortable listen. I'd probably send folks to Court and Spark, For the Roses or Ladies of the Canyon as more accessible gateways and then steer them to Blue once they're in the door.

What’s your favorite song on Blue and why?

Gallucci: "A Case of You" is breathtaking in its near simplicity. Mitchell's dulcimer and James Taylor's acoustic guitar are the musical bedrock here, and her lovely lyrics - "I could drink a case of you and still be on my feet" - pretty much disguise a breakup song in some of the most romantic lines ever written. The entire album plays along a similar path, but "A Case of You" is the standout moment.

Rapp: Every song on Blue seems to fit in perfectly with the others and tells its own unique short story, but "Case of You" will always be my favorite, if not just for its lyrics: "Part of you pours out of me in these lines from time to time." "Little Green" is a close second - Mitchell wrote it in 1966, two years before her debut album, after giving her daughter up for adoption, but the song was on the back burner for several years. It's an even more poignant listen knowing the weight the song must have carried for that long.

Zaleski: I know it's a cliche but "River." The more I listen and analyze the origins of the song, the more brilliant it becomes: It's a song full of contradictions - loneliness vs. being around others, feeling stuck vs. dreaming of a better life, solace vs. feeling bereft - but never feels chaotic, just the heartfelt musings of someone trying to figure it all out. Plus, using "Jingle Bells" as a tease for the song is brilliant; it conveys but also subverts the idea of sentiment.

Graff: "California" is a happy respite from the Blue fray. Love the way it personalizes the Golden State as a state of mind and being, and dresses it up with so many details it feels like you're hearing a movie. Plus, how can you argue with any track that has Jim Keltner, Sneaky Pete Kleinow and James Taylor playing on it, albeit quietly?

Is it the beginning of a new era for her? Or is it the end of her first era as a recording artist?
Gallucci: In some ways, it's both. She was slowly building to this moment since her 1968 debut, Song to a Seagull. That's a tentative record, but Mitchell's songwriting showed great promise, and she developed her voice on her next two albums, Clouds and Ladies of the Canyon. While Blue marked the end of this initial growth period, it also gave her the creative freedom and confidence to move on to the next stage of her career with the more jazz- and classical-minded For the Roses and Court and Spark. Every Mitchell album, really, from 1969-76 is a transitional one.

Rapp: Blue, overall, feels like the closure of one door and the opening of another, as though Mitchell had things she needed to get off her chest before moving onward both sonically and emotionally. There were new avenues to discover in terms of arrangements, instrumentation, chord structures and collaborations, but none of it really seems feasible without the definitive statement that Blue was.

Zaleski: I think it kicks off her imperial phase - Blue's creative structures and lyrical vulnerability opened up her songwriting and creativity and empowered her fearlessness.

Graff: I'd call it the latter and ending that first era on a high note. The albums that awaited - For the Roses, Court and Spark and beyond - brought in more instrumentation, a different sense of arrangement, different voices, most notably Tom Scott's, to accent the vocals that laid so bare on Blue and its predecessors. It's very much Mitchell reaching a (very satisfying) peak and moving beyond.

Because they're so intertwined with real (and famous) people, do the songs sound and feel too personal? Or do they strike a universal chord?

Gallucci: The first time I heard Blue, I had no idea the songs were connected to real people. It was only after a few years and countless listens that I found out that Graham Nash, James Taylor and others were the inspirations for these songs. I just assumed Mitchell, as other songwriters had done in the past, had pulled these songs from collective experiences and sources. So, I don't think they're too personal at all. Knowing the backstories now certainly gives the album more perspective, but in no way do they alter my first impressions of the album: I loved the album then, and it's still one of my favorites.

Rapp: Anyone who's ever loved someone can recognize and relate to the themes in these songs. Her lyricism is sharply specific in many spots on the album, but it's also the palpable emotion Mitchell's vocal delivery that really resonates with others. Of course, the songs are tailored to her life, but in this case, vagueness wouldn't have served the album justice. There's actually a lot of common ground between Mitchell and her listeners when it comes to personal romance and loss, which is a large part of why Blue has stood the test of time. There will always be love and heartbreak, and there will always be Blue to encapsulate that mood.

Zaleski: Not at all too personal; if anything, because they draw from her own life, they have extra passion and meaning. Of course, Mitchell's gift as a songwriter (well, one of them) is channeling real-world experiences into songs that are universal but also applicable to a variety of situations or life experiences. That's because she avoids the trap many lyricists fall into: She's not myopic but able to have some perspective on what she's been through and articulate her life experiences with clarity.

Graff: Boy, that's a toughie - especially since we know in retrospect (and did, to a degree, then) what was going on in her life. These are songs, sometimes explicitly, about very specific people (Graham Nash, James Taylor, Carey Raditz) and travels, with defining details in every one. But Mitchell writes in such a way that invites the listener to find themselves in her stories, and who hasn't felt like they're "on a lonely road ... looking for something to set me free" at some point in their lives?”.

There is this interview that I want to come to next. First published in two parts in Acoustic Guitar magazine (August 1996 and February 1997), Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers recalls sitting down with Joni Mitchell in 1996. Her recollections and reflections about Blue are particularly interesting.

“Even today, Blue stands out for its intensely personal storytelling and emotional transparency. I asked Mitchell whether, at the time she wrote these songs, she was prepared for sharing her interior life with the audience in this way.

I was opened up. As a matter of fact, we had to close the doors and lock them while I recorded [Blue], because I was in a state of mind that in this culture would be called a nervous breakdown. In pockets of the Orient it would be considered a shamanic conversion.

It begins with a sense of isolation and of not knowing anything, which is accompanied by a tremendous panic. Then clairvoyant qualities begin to come in, and you and the world become transparent, so if you’re approached by a person, all their secrets are not closeted. Like a Gypsy, you get too much of a read on who a person is. It makes you see a lot of ugliness in people that you’d rather not know about, and you lie to yourself and say something nice about them to cover it up. It gets very confusing. In that state of mind I was defenseless as a result, stripped down to a position of absolutely no capability of the normal pretension that people have to survive.

When [Blue] first came out, I played it for Kris Kristofferson, who said, “God, Joan, save something of yourself.” He was embarrassed by it. I think generally at first that people were embarrassed by it, that in a certain way it was shocking, especially in the pop arena. People [usually sing], “I’m bad, I’m bad, I’m great, I’m the greatest.” It’s a phony business, and people accept the phoniness of it. It’s fluff, it’s this week’s flavor and it gets thrown out, and it isn’t supposed to be anything really more than that.

By the time I made the next albums, I had stabilized psychologically, I would say, to a degree where, like we all do, I had some defenses. But that descent cracked me wide open, and I remain wide open to this day. I don’t want to develop too many defenses. I’m a kind of experiment, a freak of nature. I’m going through the world in an open way trying to trust in a time when human nature is so mangled and corrupt, probably more so than it ever was, where there is no honor, and greed is fashionable. I know the world is wicked; it doesn’t shock me anymore. As a matter of fact the thing that stuns and shocks me is human kindness; I see so very little”.

The Times also marked fifty years of Joni Mitchell’s Blue in 2021. They talked about the pain that went into the album. Learning about Mitchell’s bravery in putting all these difficult and painful struggles and heartaches into her music. An album that inspired generations of confessional singer-songwriters:

“While Blue expressed disillusionment with the trappings of success, it also came in the wake of Mitchell’s break-up with Graham Nash. A year previously they had been the golden couple of the Laurel Canyon scene. He wrote Our House about their groovy life together. She responded with Blue’s My Old Man, a far more troubled love song on which she admits to having the blues when he’s gone, but also not feeling ready to commit. “I believed in that relationship and suddenly it was over,” Mitchell said. “I also lost most of my Los Angeles friends. When I left him, they took his side.”

Mitchell escaped to Greece, and in early 1970 she was in the fishing village of Matala in Crete when she heard an explosion. She turned round to witness a man being blown out of the doors of a restaurant after the stove he had been lighting exploded. So began her brief affair with Cary Raditz, immortalised on Blue’s Carey in the line: “You’re a mean old daddy but I like you.” Raditz was a true hippy, living in a cave on the coast and refusing to be impressed by the presence of a celebrity in his midst.

Mitchell wrote about their primitive life together on Carey, including her confession that she did actually quite like clean white linen, fancy French cologne and other aspects of bourgeois life. “Cary watched all his friends go kind of gaga over me,” Mitchell told Crowe. “He resented me for that. He was always trying to put me in my place in front of his friends.”

One way or another, these experiences fleshed out Blue. Mitchell really was sitting in a park in Paris reading about the Vietnam War in a newspaper and concluding that peace was just a dream some of them had, when she began to tire of Europe’s old, cold ways and longed for the freshness and optimism of LA, as recounted on California. On The Last Time I Saw Richard she paints a scene of being in a bar at closing time with a folk singer friend called Patrick Sky, who warned Mitchell that hopeless romantics like her end up as cynical drunks. It was rare for singer-songwriters of the time to write so directly from life without hiding behind metaphor.

Back in her native Canada for a Toronto festival, in July 1970 Mitchell hooked up with James Taylor, for whom she wrote All I Want, a beautifully simple expression of not needing anything when you’re with the right (or, in this case, wrong) person. “I want to wreck my stockings in some jukebox dive,” she confessed. Taylor took Mitchell back to his parents’ house in North Carolina for Christmas, where beside the living room fireplace she sang A Case of You, one of the cleverest love songs written. “I could drink a case of you, darling, and I would still be on my feet,” sounds like a challenge as much as a declaration of passion. It has been speculated that Mitchell wrote River about that time, but River is about feeling lonely at Christmas. Perhaps Mitchell was drawing on her feelings for Nash, even as she spent Christmas with Taylor.

Mitchell once compared her state of self during the making of Blue to “a cellophane wrapper on a packet of cigarettes”, although it is only in hindsight that we know just how much she was giving away. At the time Rolling Stone magazine’s Timothy Crosse concluded that the cryptic words of Little Green were “so poetic that it passeth all understanding”. When the daughter she gave up for adoption in 1965 surfaced in the late 1990s, the real meaning of lines like “a child with a child pretending”, a reference to Mitchell being so young and unprepared for motherhood when she became pregnant, was revealed.

Counter to the spirit of a time when stars would drop in on each other’s sessions — and with Carole King recording the equally influential album Tapestry down the hall — Mitchell made Blue with the door of her room at LA’s A&M Studios locked. Taylor contributed some guitar parts shortly before their relationship petered out. “James was a walking psychological disaster anyway,” Mitchell said of their lack of suitability.

After the album was made Mitchell retreated to a cabin in Canada and didn’t play live for a year, but in the process of exposing herself so entirely she helped an entire generation to deal with their own emotional realities. With its cover photograph of Mitchell bathed in a blue light, harsh but tragic, Blue was her unguarded triumph. She concluded in her interview with Crowe, expressing amazement that Blue still means so much to people: “Truth and beauty. That’s what I hope to deliver.” And in a rare video post this week she added: “Fifty years later people finally get it. That pleases me”.

I am going to end with this review, that argues that Blue might be a perfect album. There are few that can truly be called that though, when it comes to this 1971 release, you would be hard pressed to find any weaknesses – or anything less than perfect:

“What makes an album perfect?

Maybe it's lyrics, composition, the music itself, or the emotion that it sparks. Maybe, it’s critical acclaim, the meaning that it brings, or something special yet undefinable that only the artist themselves can bring to the table. Whatever one may consider it to be, Joni Mitchell's solo 1971 album 'Blue' meets all of these requirements as a masterpiece of performance, production, and song-writing that is without a single weak spot. A decade prior, labels had still seen albums as receptacles for already popular songs. This was until the first half of the 1970s changed the music industry entirely, bringing the idea of the album as a medium to the forefront. Blue epitomises this - its songs all have a gravity of their own, yet still come together as a cohesive work of art greater than the sum of its parts. The perfect record, that, once finished, compels its listener to start it over, without hesitation.

Released over 50 years ago, the album is inspired by Mitchell's travels throughout Europe, where she left the traditional domestic comfort of Los Angeles with a one-way plane ticket to immerse herself in new experiences and pursue freedom on her own terms. Blue reflects the archetypal 'hero's journey' as she brought it to her experiences, travels, retrospective thoughts on the men in her life, her poetic observations and her relentless self examination. Perhaps as a result of this inspiration, 'Blue' gives us the sense that it was crafted to be consumed whilst in motion, immediately opening with the idea of travel, with the line, "I am on a lonely road and I am traveling, traveling, traveling, traveling". Mitchell's clear, yet haunting soprano takes us on an emotional rollercoaster throughout the album - for example, immediately after the beautifully elegiac “River”, a song about loneliness and heartbreak, comes the album's most unabashedly cheerful song, "A Case of You". In the hands of many other artists, this progression would be jarring, upsetting the integrity of the album. However with Joni, it just works.

But on top of the production and performance of the album, it's Mitchell's gift for sophisticated, beautiful melodies coupled with her lyrical language that makes Blue reach the height that it has. From the Ginsburgian imagery of Blue to the exultant "California", to the gentle yet mellow "Little Green", the album contains great range, yet still works as a cohesive whole, with diminished chords capturing the sound of nostalgia throughout the album, as various songs are interspersed with motifs from each other.

Perhaps because of its title; “Blue” has a reputation for being morose, with a certain vulnerability and weariness in Mitchell's voice making it hauntingly yet eloquently vulnerable as it captures moments of intense loss and sadness - making it a great album to cry to! But it would be a mistake to limit the album by perceiving it only in this way. It displays a vast array of emotion, part of what makes it so great, and from the opening moments of “All I Want” Mitchell is full of energy - “Alive, alive," she wants to "get up and jive.”

However all the while, she often links her lyrics back to her past, with the idea of her home in California always somewhere in the back of her mind. The album is highly personal, with many songs alluding to a handful of famous ex-lovers and musicians. And while Mitchell never tried to disguise these experiences, focusing too finely on who a song is 'about' diminishes its power and misses the point of its art - the context surrounding the album is merely a surface concern, distracting from its craft and its oceanic force of emotion.

"Blue" has always had a strong legacy of critical acclaim, winning countless accolades and repeatedly placing in the 'top albums of all time' for multiple music publications, featuring in The Rolling Stone's '500 Albums of All Time' and receiving a perfect score on Pitchfork, going on to inspire the likes of Prince, Bjork, Bob Dylan, and even Taylor Swift. As a New York Times tribute writes, "half a century later, Mitchell’s “Blue” exists in that rarefied space beyond the influential or even the canonical" as "the story of a restless young woman questioning everything — love, sex, happiness, independence, drugs, America, idealism, motherhood, rock ’n’ roll."

The wonder of Mitchell's writing is its seamless blend of personal and public, the mundane converted to the universal. Blue is a dynamic album that cannot be pinned to any specific genre - it isn't a specific album so much as a precise one, an intricate tapestry of ambiguity as her voice combines with her music in a faultless intersection of song-writing, production and performance in a way that reflects true artistry, coming together to make Blue an album that I, at least, consider to be perfect”.

As Blue turns fifty-five on 22nd June, it was important to include it for this Beneath the Sleeve. One of the most influential albums that has ever been released, it was a turning point and pinnacle of 20th-century music. Blue will be discussed for generations to come. Its author last performed live a couple of years ago. I do hope that we see Joni Mitchell on the stage again. So much love out there for her. Blue, fifty-five years after its release, remains this…

PEERLESS album.

FEATURE: Modern-Day Queens: Kehlani

FEATURE:

 

 

Modern-Day Queens

Kehlani

__________

SO far this year…

we have received some truly wonderful albums. In terms of the absolute best, there are few that match Kehlani. The eponymous album from the Californian-born artist is incredible. They have released this album that everyone needs to hear. I wanted to include Kehlani in this Modern-Day Queens, as I have been a fan of their music for a long time now. I will end with a review of Kehlani. However, it is important to first come to a few recent interviews with Kehlani. I am starting out with an interview with Wonderland. Even they use the pronouns ‘she’ and ‘her’, I am using ‘they/them’. Kehlani has said they prefer ‘they’, as it reflects their non-binary identity. Wonderland. spent time with the sensational Kehlani. They say how “she’s done justifying herself in public. Her new album speaks for itself. So stop asking questions and listen – she’s about to have you “Folded”:

“Kehlani herself couldn’t have predicted the magnitude of the record. “Honestly, it feels like [the film] Inception,” she says of the response. “There were songs I feel like I really put my foot into – “Folded” for sure – but there was nothing about the creative process that made me logicise, ‘Oh, this is the song that’s going to do it for everyone.’ I’ve gone in with so much intention before, thinking, this is it, and it wasn’t. So for this to have been such an easy process – I made a song with my friends and thought, ‘Maybe I’ll tease it, maybe I’ll put it out’ – and now it’s doing its thing, felt indicative of something bigger happening in my life right now. It’s changing everything in a positive way. When I think about the success of the song, I see it as part of something larger in my personal legend.”

Inspiring TikTok challenges that invite “medium singers” to the table, and embraced by R&B fans longing for a return to the genre’s roots, “Folded” became Kehlani’s first Billboard Hot 100 Top 10, peaking at number six, and her first-ever US R&B/Hip-Hop number one. The past year for the 30-year-old singer has felt kismet; the seeds she’s been planting are now in full bloom.

Her fifth studio album – and ninth project overall – is slated for release at the end of March. In the meantime, she’s intentionally focusing on her wellness, getting rest in rare pockets of time between final touches, incoming features, and the mastering process.

Kehlani spent her twenties grinding, releasing four albums and three mixtapes that cemented her as one of R&B’s most promising young talents, distinguishing herself with resounding swag and emotional intelligence. From the jump, her songwriting stood out because she goes there – equally vocal about love when it’s blissful and tender, and when trust erodes and turns toxic, leaving nothing but disappointment, rancour, and a migraine. It’s not all heartbreak, though. The singer-songwriter also has a knack for writing bops that are s-e-x-y, from the declarative “What A Girl Wants” to the entendre-laced “8”.

PHOTO CREDIT: Sophia Wilson

Discernment, she notes, is the greatest lesson she learned during this decade. “Discernment, all around: people, places, things, opportunities. Discerning what it feels like when you’re being healthy, discerning what it feels like when you’re not, not letting anything cloud your relationship with God. Discerning my own behaviour – whatever is solely in my control – and making that my responsibility. I think I learn everything as a crash course, and it’s on display for the world, so I’m always learning this double lesson: the super personal one, and the lesson that comes with the intense magnifying glass of my career and so-called celebrity. So I’m always getting the double ass-whoop. I’m used to it at this point,” she guffaws.

Raised in Oakland, Kehlani was sonically shaped by the Bay Area’s rich and eclectic music history. She jokes that you’d think her family was from Philadelphia, given the amount of neo-soul she was raised on. The late D’Wayne Wiggins of Tony! Toni! Toné! – who worked with everyone from Alicia Keys to Destiny’s Child – acted as a mentor during her formative years. R&B runs deep in Kehlani’s veins; she is not only a devoted student of the genre, but one of its fiercest keepers.

Kehlani knew it wasn’t if but when this record would happen. “Basically,” she says, “I will say this, I always have such a macrocosmic view of everything. I know there are times in art and history when it’s finally time for certain things, things that couldn’t exist before. People have been making this R&B complaint for so long, but there were still so many people doing it. There was also this complaint from the public: ‘We don’t want you guys to oversing, and when you guys dance it’s too much movement, and these songs are too long, and we won’t make these types of songs pop.’ For a while, the standard had been set by listeners. I watched plenty of artists stick to the R&B route, and people were just like, ‘Okay.’”

“Missy Elliott once tweeted that there was a moment when labels stopped asking her to do R&B albums with R&B artists because they didn’t want people to sing anymore – because people weren’t purchasing or supporting that kind of music. I just think there’s something happening in history where people in art are demanding real shit. They want better-quality shit, and for the first time, I think they mean it. They’re ready to support it. Maybe we’re in a renaissance where I feel like, ‘Okay, let me come out and peek around, and I can do what I really want to do.’ I don’t have to focus on people saying, ‘It has to be so different, so cool.’ I think there was a barrier placed on R&B for so long – it had to be so alternative, kind of cool, become a ‘genius’ thing for people to realise it’s best. A lot of traditional R&B records got ignored, so it’s fun to be able to return to the genre”.

A couple more interviews to cover off before rounding off with a glowing review for Kehlani. Their fifth studio album, Kehlani follows 2024’s Crash. They have some tour dates coming up, including a trip to Sunderland on 24th May for BBC Radio 1's Big Weekend. That is going to be an incredible gig! Let’s move to another interview. I think I will then finish with two album reviews instead. It is worth noting how Kehlani won two GRAMMYs this year for their song, Folded. They won in the categories of Best R&B Performance and Best R&B Song. Billboard actually put that song at the core when they spoke with Kehlani earlier this month. A huge international success, perhaps the moment where everything is clicking for them:

“In 2017, you received Billboard’s Women In Music Rulebreaker honor, and in your acceptance speech you said, “My entire career I’ve been very outspoken … I can’t help it.” How have you held true to that?

I’ve learned a lot about what it means to carry your ­morality and your humanity and be under a microscope for it. I’ve learned a lot about what that expectation of perfectionism looks like … what kind of pressure that comes with. I learned a lot about how to handle it correctly — and I’ve learned a lot of it through mishandling it and being contradictory and hypocritical, and it’s something everybody goes through when there is something you’re passionate about that involves two very opposing opinions. I think the most important thing for me was to learn how to be called in and let people teach me, but also to really just trust that I know my heart and trust that even in the instances when I can’t explain to millions of people why I’ve done something or what this meant, that there was a good reason because that’s who I am.

How has “Folded” shifted the tides in your career?

When you’ve experienced a lot of resistance that you are ­acutely aware is resistance … like, “Wow, nothing is working out … No matter which direction I turn, everything feels like pulling teeth. Making photo shoots happen is impossible. Getting people to call me back is impossible,” all of this is just like, “Wow.” I’m having these conversations and I’m like, “Wait, really? That’s it? You’re down?” I’m in a period of the least resistance. And it’s a really nice place to be.

“Folded” will appear on your upcoming fifth album, Kehlani. What impact do you hope this album will have?

I want to do this album at Carnegie Hall with an orchestra. I really want some of these songs to make it into movies … and ultimately just have a really historical personal moment for me, and hopefully keep adding to the genre because that’s the coolest thing that “Folded” has done beyond anything — I’m watching the conversation change and I’m a part of it”.

The first review I am including is from NME. They write how Kehlani has drawn from every era of their past. Kehlani is the sound of “the unshakeable R&B titan ushers in a new era and finds security in her own skin”. I really love the album and feel that it will stand as one of the best of the year when we near the winter. Few albums can match it:

“Music has always been a safe space for Kehlani. Over the past 17 years, across four albums and four mixtapes, the singer has been in pursuit of her truest self, navigating personal relationships, her gender and sexuality, and embarking upon motherhood along the way. Despite experimenting with her sound in recent years, with the reggaeton-inflected 2024 release ‘Crash’ and more understated 2022 album ‘Blue Water Road’, underneath it all, old school R&B is where Kehlani flows naturally.

Her biggest hits prove this fact: from ‘Nights Like This’ to ‘Toxic’ to ‘After Hours’, her proficiency in creating sultry slow jams is unmatched. Making good on the success of last summer’s hit single ‘Folded’, which amassed over 800million global streams worldwide plus a collection of remixes featuring Toni Braxton, JoJo, Mario, and Ne-Yo, Kehlani’s self-titled fifth album is a satisfying time capsule of R&B which leans into nostalgia and celebrates how far the singer has come.

Opening with crashing cymbals and Lil Wayne, lead track ‘Another Luva’ is a mid-2000s throwback that has Kehlani doubling down on her ride-or-die, before segueing into the laidback hip-hop shuffle of ‘No Such Thing’ featuring Pusha T and Malice under their collaborative moniker Clipse. The album’s long list of features also serves as an amalgamation of the singer’s influences: ’90s R&B titans Brandy and Usher, the inimitable rap of Missy Elliott and Lil Jon, and the 2000s nostalgia of T-Pain and Big Sean all make an appearance. Despite the impressive array of collaborators, there are times when ‘Kehlani’ feels unnecessarily long.

While the Cardi B-featuring ‘Pocket’ acts as a feel-good intermission for a collection that often lingers on love that has gone awry, as an album, ‘Kehlani’ is devoted to undulating matters of the heart. Smooth and sultry, ‘I Need You’ captures the earnest physicality of longing for a lover; meanwhile ‘Back and Forth’ shows a more toxic side of when suspicion enters the chat, as ‘Out The Window’ pleads for a partner to return: “Check your insecurities,” says Kehlani in the former. “Leave ’em at the door of our home.”

As forthcoming and blunt as she has been about love, sex, and heartbreak, it is this soul-bearing storytelling and relatability that has always set Kehlani apart. Lusty yet vulnerable, ‘Ooh’ encapsulates desire, peaking with dramatic guitar riffs and dextrous coos. With shimmering production, soaring harmonies and melodramatic conviction, the intimate self-reflection of ‘Unlearn’ outlines her commitment to growth and willingness to “do the work if you still believe”. And while growth may not appear pretty at first, finding security within your own skin and knowing who you are manifests a glow that is unshakable. This is who she is now and, as she says, simply, at the top: “I am Kehlani”.

The final review is from Variety. They salute a triumphant album. Perhaps a moment when Kehlani has figured out who they are and there is this moment of clarity and realisation, I do wonder how they will follow this album. This modern icon has put out an album that is hard to forget or ignore. Signalling Kehlani as one of the most important artists of their generation:

“Nearly a decade after releasing her debut “SweetSexySavage,” Kehlani has finally arrived at the self-titled album. An eponymous project this deep into a career is no small proclamation — it’s traditionally a one-time event that’s meant to suggest a body of work is so emblematic that it speaks for itself, or it reflects the artist in such a way that it summarizes their creativity in the most complete way possible.

That feels appropriate for Kehlani, whose 2024 album “Crash” was perhaps the most unfocused she has been on a record, grabbing across genre lines for a project whose broad scope created imbalance. “Kehlani,” her fifth studio album, course-corrects the spaghetti-against-the-wall approach of “Crash” by centering the sound in one specific arena: millennium R&B at the intersection of pop.

The project is a love letter to her influences, from the litany of era-specific guest appearances — Lil Wayne, Usher, Brandy, T-Pain, Lil Jon — to the instrumentation and references permeating through the music, like the Pharcyde flip on “No Such Thing” with Clipse (a very rare feature, it should be noted) and the unmistakable bass thumps of Busta Rhymes’ “Put Your Hands Where My Eyes Could See” on “Back and Forth” featuring Missy Elliott. (In case you were wondering, yes, there’s an Aaliyah reference on there, too.) If the self-titled is a way to translate your artistic intention into sound, Kehlani shows that she’s at her best when she embraces the building blocks that made her, subsuming herself in the aesthetic and conventions of her influences while adapting them into one of her most powerful mission statements to date.

Nostalgia has become a de facto crutch for many contemporary artists looking for a genre to carry an era, yet Kehlani’s deep dive feels as much an appreciation as it is a retrofitting. Kehlani is clearly a student of the game, and here, the devil is in the details. If “Anotha Luva” featuring Lil Wayne recalls the summer breeze of Amerie’s “Why Don’t We Fall in Love,” it’s because she managed to track down Rich Harrison, the song’s producer, to deliver an instrumental in its lineage. “Oooh” touts a writing credit from Keri Hilson because the song was originally a demo from one of Hilson’s late ’00s albums. Lead single “Folded” sounds like a country cousin of Faith Evans’ “I Love You.” Closing ballad “Unlearn” is a spot-on sequel to JoJo’s “Never Say Goodbye,” right down to the horn blasts at the end of the chorus. (No surprise there, as songwriter Antonio Dixon worked on both songs, decades apart.)

But what keeps “Kehlani” from slipping into pastiche is the artist herself, who radiates a confidence and frankness that only comes with age. At 31, Kehlani has experienced the grip of love and its occasional demise, several times in the public eye, yet here she frames the rollercoaster of romance with clarity and intent. You can picture her lying awake at night, pining for a love long gone, on “I Need You,” a traditional R&B ballad featuring Brandy and produced by Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis. A few songs later, she’s right back where she started, “laying here next to you,” even though she didn’t intend to on the feel-good “Shoulda Never” featuring Usher. Inevitably, she finds stasis in being on her own with “Cruise Control,” a celebration of freeing yourself from the tumult of a relationship — the type of growth that takes real experience to spark.

At the core of “Kehlani,” like all of her projects, is her vocal talent, which she wields to great effect across this album. Part of Kehlani’s charm is the effortlessness of her voice, which is so powerful and distinctive that it helps maintain momentum even when a song is a little too on the nose (the fingersnapped “Call Me Back” featuring T-Pain and Lil Jon). It’s what helped push “Folded” into mainstream ubiquity in an era where the R&B crossover hit faces diminishing returns, a testament to how she’s refined her performance over time.

To that effect, the timing couldn’t be better for the self-titled album. Kehlani is at the peak of her artistic powers — she just took home her first pair of Grammys for “Folded” in February — and she says as much on the album’s intro: “You’re about to hear a heart that’s been stretched, healed and reborn, a voice stepping into its truth with no fear, no filter and no apologies.” Knowing who you are can be a lifelong struggle, yet Kehlani seems to have it finally figured out”.

I am wrapping up now. Full respect and love to Kehalni. They are an artist I have been liostening to for years, but I feel the latest album is the very best. From here, I feel they will continue to put out incredible music and work with some amazing people. Maybe a Kehlani and Mariah Carey collaboration soon? That would be amazing! If this is someone new to you, then make sure that Kehlani is…

ON your radar.

__________

Follow Kehlani

Official:

https://www.kehlani.com/

Instagram:

https://www.instagram.com/kehlani/

Twitter:

https://x.com/kehlani

TikTok:

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

YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/user/kehlanimusic

Facebook:

https://www.facebook.com/Kehlani

Spotify:

https://open.spotify.com/artist/0cGUm45nv7Z6M6qdXYQGTX?si=He5IEb1gQuWb_5fhwEbkfA

FEATURE: Kate Bush: Them Heavy People: The Extraordinary Characters in Her Songs: Bertie (Bertie)/Bing Crosby/Old Saint Nicholas/Mr. Wilde (December Will Be Magic Again)

FEATURE:

 

 

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

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in a promotional image for Aerial in 2005/PHOTO CREDIT: Trevor Leighton

Bertie (Bertie)/Bing Crosby/Old Saint Nicholas/Mr. Wilde (December Will Be Magic Again)

__________

I am running…

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush shot in December 1980/PHOTO CREDIT: Patrick Lichfield

out of characters for this series. I have maybe four or five to go before I have to put it to bed. This is where I paid character’s from Kate Bush’s albums. Or B-sides and rarer songs. There is this huge difference between the songs I am focusing on here. The first one mentions Bertie. That eponymous song from Kate Bush’s 2005 double album, Aerial. I will raise some themes relating to that song soon. I will then move to a track that is seasonal. Kate Bush’s sole Christmas single, December Will Be Magic Again. I cannot wait until later in the year to discuss it. As it has quite a few diverse characters in it, it is worth exploring for this series. Let’s start with a very special person who is the focus of Bertie. There is a lot to unpick and examine. However, I will move to an interview from 2005 and that very special album. I also want to think about how people view Aerial. Also, how that affection and open love for a child in a song is quite rare still. My first conversation point relating to Bertie is the boy behind the song. Born Albert McIntosh in 1998, Bush’s only child has been the subject of more than one song. He has been a big part of her career. Bertie is the first time that we realise huge affection for her song. Think about some of the lyrics: “Here comes the sunshine/Here comes the son of mine/Here comes the everything/Here's a song and a song for him”. That idea of her young son being this immeasurable sense of joy and fulfilment. When Aerial came out in 2005, Bertie was seven. I feel that Bertie is one of the most underrated songs in Kate Bush’s catalogue.

Some reviewers felt the song was too cloying. In terms of that sentimentality and sweetness. Bush delightfully singing about sweet Bertie. Almost hymnal in its importance. “The most willful/The most beautiful/The most truly fantastic smile/I've ever seen”. Bertie (Albert) is in his twenties now. I am curious how he views this song. His mother singing with such passion about her new son. There are other moments through Aerial where her son features. Maybe not named directly, new motherhood and domestic duties seep through many of the songs. Bertie is the most naked declaration to her son. One of the most common lines in Bertie is “You bring me so much joy”. Not only is Bertie obviously about her son and how he changed her life. His birth affected how Bush recorded and conducted her career. Now, she realised that the balanced shifted and how beneficial it was. Before, she would record and work tirelessly and not have too much free time. With a young child that needed her time and energy, recording definitely did not dominate like it did before. The task of being a mother the upmost importance. In an interview to promote Aerial, this is what Kate Bush said of Bertie and her son’s impact and place:

“He’s such a big part of my life so, you know, he’s a very big part of my work. It’s such a great thing, being able to spend as much time with him as I can. And, you know, he won’t be young for very long. And already he’s starting to grow up and I wanted to make sure I didn’t miss out on that, that I spent as much time with his as I could.
So, the idea was that he would come first, and then the record would come next, which is also one reasons why it’s taken a long time (laughs). It always takes me a long time anyway, but trying to fit that in around the edges that were left over from the time that I wanted to spend with him.
It’s a wonderful thing, having such a lovely son. Really, you know with a song like that, you could never be special enough from my point of view, and I wanted to try and give it an arrangement that wasn’t terribly obvious, so I went for the sort of early music… (Ken Bruce show, BBC Radio 2, 3 November 2005)”.

It gets me thinking about artists and bringing their children directly into the music. How many others have done something similar to what Kate Bush did with Bertie?! I guess it is nothing new artists talking about their children. However, in terms of putting their name in and the way Bush was so unfiltered. So much modern music, especially Pop, is about love or themes around relationships. Parenthood is not as common in music as you’d like. I do wonder whether there is any sort of stigma or commercial barrier. An artist I wrote about fairly recently, The Anchoress, released a song called, I Had a Baby Not a Lobotomy. The Anchoress (Catherine Anne Davies) describes it as “a tongue in cheek litany of all the stupid things people said to me when I had a baby… an anthem for anyone who has ever been written off for daring to procreate”. Whereas many women talk about the highs and joys of love, the lows of break-up and are very independent and defiant, they rarely talk about children, motherhood and that desire. There are modern greats that are mothers, though I am curious whether their fans would engage with songs about their children. Would a major Pop artist release a song where they solely sing about their new child?! One of the things that makes Bertie so powerful and unusual is that it was not necessarily common to write paens to your children. Over twenty years since Aerial arrived, it is still not as routine and widespread. I will end this side by reacting to how people felt about Aerial and where it sits in Kate Bush’s cannon. However, I do want to loosely discuss Aerial and Bush talking about it. Bertie, this jewel in a spectacular double album. In 2005, Tom Doyle interviewed Kate Bush in her home. There are sections I want to highlight that discuss her new domestic routine and how she has recalibrated and focused following a very difficult period. After 1993’s The Red Shoes, she has something similar to a nervous breakdown. Bertie’s arrival giving her new lease and energy:

“You release The Red Shoes in 1993, your seventh album in a 15-year career characterised by increasingly ambitious records, ever-lengthening recording schedules and compulsive attention to detail. You are emotionally drained after the death of your mother Hannah but, against the advice of some of your friends, you throw yourself into The Line, the Cross & the Curve, a 45-minute video album released the following year that - despite its merits - you now consider to be "a load of bollocks". You take two years off to recharge your batteries, because you can. In 1996, you write a song called King of the Mountain. You have a bit of a think and take some more time off, similarly, because you can.

Two years later, while pregnant, you write a song about artistic endeavour called An Architect's Dream. You give birth to a boy, Albert, in 1998 and you and your guitarist partner Danny McIntosh find yourselves "completely shattered for a couple of years". You move house and spend months doing it up. You convert the garage into a studio, but being a full-time mother who chooses not to employ a nanny or housekeeper, it's hard to find time to actually work in there. Bit by bit, the ideas come and a notion forms in your mind to make a double album, though you have to adjust to a new working regime of stolen moments as opposed to the 14-hour days of old. Your son begins school and suddenly time opens up and though progress doesn't exactly accelerate ("That's a bit too strong a word"), two years of more concentrated effort later, the album is complete. You look up from the mixing desk and it is 2005.

If the completion of Aerial put paid to one set of anxieties for Bush, then its impending release has brought another - not least, a brace of newspaper stories keen to push the "rock's mystery recluse" angle. It seems the more she craves privacy, the more it is threatened. "For the last 12 years, I've felt really privileged to be living such a normal life," she explains. "It's so a part of who I am. It's so important to me to do the washing, do the Hoovering. Friends of mine in the business don't know how dishwashers work. For me, that's frightening. I want to be in a position where I can function as a human being. Even more so now where you've got this sort of truly silly preoccupation with celebrities. Just because somebody's been in an ad on TV, so what? Who gives a toss?"

Kate Bush begins to tidy up the plates and cups and get ready for Bertie's arrival home from school with his dad”.

I want to move on shortly. However, Kate Bush must have been nervous how the public would receive the album. Aerial this ambitious double album. It was her biggest undertaking since 1985’s Hounds of Love. Both albums affected and infused by and with family and home. Twenty years after that masterpiece, Kate Bush producing another masterpiece. It could have been a disaster. Messy. Some reviewers picked songs they felt were a bit weak, though most of the reviews were ecstatic. Kate Bush being hailed as a true great and genius. Songs like Bertie showcase her endless invention and experimentation. The instrumentation and arrangement of the song. Viols: Richard Campbell, Susan Pell. Renaissance guitar: Eligio Quinteiro. Percussion: Robin Jeffrey. Keyboards: Kate Bush. String Arrangement: Bill Dunne. The sheer scope of Aerial is staggering. I have a few more characters from the album to cover off. Songs including A Coral Room and An Architect’s Dream.

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in a promotional image for Aerial in 2005/PHOTO CREDIT: Trevor Leighton

I am now fondly moving to Kate Bush’s only Christmas single. I am not even including the unnamed lovers that are mentioned in December Will Be Magic Again. However, among the traditional and expected Christmas imagery – the snow falling and bells playing -, Kate Bush does combine some names. Bing Crosby/Old Saint Nicholas/Mr. Wilde. Bush discusses and mentions Father Christmas. That is not unexpected. However, it is beautiful that he made it into a Kate Bush song. There is something child-like about her gorgeous Christmas song. I am going to drop in lyrics that mention the brilliant characters. However, I think my favourite lines are these ones: “Ooh, dropping down in my parachute/The white city, she is so beautiful/Upon the black-soot icicled roofs”. Two of the main characters in December Will Be Magic Again are mentioned early on: “December will be magic again/Take a husky to the ice/While Bing Crosby sings White Christmas/He makes you feel nice/December will be magic again/Old Saint Nicholas up the chimney/Just a-popping up in my memory”. That choice of Bing Crosby and that Christmas classic tune. I forgot to mention that December Will Be Magic Again was released on 17th November, 1980. I will talk about critical reaction and the fascinating characters. I also want to mention Abbey Road Studios. However, the performances of December Will Be Magic Again are amazing: “Kate performed ‘December Will Be Magic Again’ on television twice: the first performance took place during the Christmas Snowtime Special, broadcast by BBC television (UK) on December 22, 1979. In it, Kate, dressed in a red suit, sits in a large wicker chair with red velvet upholstery. She uses some imitation snow to emphasize a few lines from the song. The second performance, during the Christmas Special called Kate, broadcast on December 28, 1979, features Kate on piano and Kevin McAlea on keyboards and electric piano”.

I think December Will Be Magic Again has a great cast of characters. You can imagine children and adults by the tree in the warm. Celebrating Christmas or waiting for the big day. However, Bush has this charming traditional approach in the song. The scenery and backdrop quite stereotypical, but in a good way. White Christmas as that song of choice. Perhaps an artist that has a difficult legacy – Bing Crosby accused of being a domestic abuser and assaulting his children -, when Bush wrote December Will Magic Again, that song would have been a staple. Now, White Christmas seems a bit old-fashioned. But you can feel Bing Crosby coming out of the radio. A family sitting in their living room and listening to that classic coming on. Rather than refer to him as Father Christmas or Santa, Old Saint Nicholas. That is not what you often hear in Christmas songs. Though there is evidently that child-like curiosity of this mythical (sorry!) figure. I will come to the third character in a minute. However, Bush was at a stage in her career where she was commercial successful. December Will Be Magic Again was released shortly after her third studio album, Never for Ever, went to number one in the U.K. However, Bush was still not seen as a serious artist by many in the press. Writing for NME, Andy Gill said this: “Kate is “cute”… and no doubt you’ll be force fed, as you will with turkey”. Melody Maker offered this feedback: “Lush, sentimental, extravagantly produced… destined to become a Christmas irritation; and airwave itch you won’t be able to scratch”. I have argued How December Will Be Magic Again is hugely underrated and did not deserve criticism. Sexism still in the industry. Bush being dismissed and belittled. It was not until Hounds of Love in 1985 when there was the respect that Kate Bush deserved. Still being seen as this irritating or unusual artist. I feel December Will Be Magic Again should have been celebrated and shown more love. I want to discuss the significance of Abbey Road Studios.

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush at the 1980 British Rock and Pop Awards/PHOTO CREDIT: Mirrorpix/Getty Images

I have seen articles saying the original version was recorded at AIR Studios. However, Kate Bush wrote and recorded December Will Be Magic Again at Abbey Road Studios. She recoded Never for Ever at Abbey Road Studios and AIR Studios. December Will Be Magic Again was one of the earliest songs she recorded there. Very much settling into the space, I think that the iconic nature of the studios very much infuses into the song. Abbey Road was this hallowed space where Kate Bush always wanted to record. She would do so on a number of occasions. In terms of AIR Studios set against Abbey Road Studios, I feel the latter offered her more space and options. In terms of technology and what she could do there. The history of the studios. It would have been expensive recording December Will Be Magic Again. However, it is brilliant that it was recorded there. I wonder what compelled Bush to write it. Maybe there was a feeling she needed a Christmas single. Or she may have been inspired to put pen to paper because she was thinking about Christmas. The selection of Oscar Wilde to drop into a Christmas song might seem unusual. Kate Bush sings these words: “Light the candle-lights/To conjure Mr. Wilde/Into the Silent Night/Ooh, it’s quiet inside/Here in Oscar’s mind”. I am curious that those lines mean. Is Kate Bush evoking Oscar Wilde in this Christmas fantasy? Quite intriguing lines. The emptiness inside Oscar Wilde’s mind. Why would that be? I do love the unique insertion of a playwright great in a Christmas song and why Kate Bush decided to use him. Also, how all these characters weave and interact. You envisage this very busy nighttime scene. The lovers being blanketed by snow. People in their homes listening to Bing Crosby or gathered around the tree. Old Saint Nicholas going down chimneys. Where Oscar Wilde fits in interests me the most. Why Kate Bush decided to use him. Kate Bush might have been reacting to a quote from Oscar Wilde: “I think after Christmas would be better for publication: I am hardly a Christmas present”. That sourness about the season. Using him in a song almost to kill the mood. Or someone who takes against Christmas in a scene filled with Christmas cheer.

Before wrapping up (no pun intended!), something occurred that I had not thought about. Dreams of Orgonon noted this when they wrote about December Will Be Magic Again in 2019. In terms of this single ending a particular period of Kate Bush’s career: “Yet with “December Will Be Magic Again,” we see the end of a certain kind of Bush song. It’s her last track that can be feasibly reimagined as hailing from her pre-Kick Inside years, with its relish for childhood delights and simple attributes of a domestic environment. That approach has reached a breaking point. From now on her quiet songs will be more adult and introspective. She’s going to do silly songs in the future, of course — but even the silly stuff often carries plenty of weight. Bush’s earlier work is an ambitious testament to what youthful artistry can accomplish. Few songwriters are particularly mature early in their career. With Bush, a lot of her recurring themes from across her career are already in place on her first couple albums. For all its shortcomings, “December Will Be Magic Again” signals the end of Bush as prodigy as she moves into the era of the Fairlight, global conflict, and becoming a masterful singer to rival Peter Gabriel. Farewell, last of the Phoenix tradition. You’ve carried us far”. That idea of this being the last novelty or ‘silly’ song. She would record other sillier songs, though there is a playfulness and a comedic side that she explored up until 1979/1980 that was not as common afterwards. Bush wanting to be seen as a serious artist and shed a particular image that the press had. I said how December Will Be Magic Again is child-like and has this innocence. Bush was only just in her twenties when she wrote the track, so one could appreciate why it had this slightly childish quality. Also, I feel Bush also wanted to appeal toa young demographic with a Christmas song. A day that she maybe associated more with children. But this idea of her. A sad transition. December Will Be Magic Again being one of the last songs that could be perceived as a little immature or juvenile. Her songwriting more serious and adult after that. You could say December Will Be Magic Again lacks real meat or any huge substance. I feel it light and slightness is one of its charms. It is this familiar and traditional Christmas song with some interesting edges and inclusions. That selection of characters. Oscar Wilde cropping up with Bing Crosby. From Kate Bush’s son, Bertie, in the song of the same name from Aerial to a trio of characters from a 1980 Christmas single, demonstration of her songwriting brilliance and breadth. I will bring you more examples of this in…

THE next edition.

FEATURE: Kate Bush: The Tour of Life: The Pianistic Purity of Her First Three Albums

FEATURE:

 

 

Kate Bush: The Tour of Life

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1978/PHOTO CREDIT: Gered Mankowitz

The Pianistic Purity of Her First Three Albums

__________

SOMETHING that Stuart Maconie…

said on his BBC Radio 6 Music weekend show with Mark Radcliffe recently struck a chord with me. He said that he prefers Kate Bush’s first few albums because of their pianistic priority. That barer and perhaps more emotionally raw quality. There are a few distinct phases to Kate Bush’s career. 1978’s The Kick Inside, 1978’s Lionheart and 1980’s Never for Ever did see developments and evolution. Although piano is key and core to those albums, Bush did incorporate the Fairlight CMI on 1980’s Never for Ever. She was already friends with Peter Gabriel. He joined her on stage as part of her 1979 The Tour of Life for a benefit gig. That was to remember Bill Duffield, who was part of her team, and was killed after the warm-up gig in Poole. From then, Bush and Gabriel did work together. She was on his album and Gabriel took part in Bush’s 1979 Christmas special, Kate. Peter Gabriel was already using the Fairlight CMI in his work, and he opened Kate Bush’s eyes to its possibilities. So progressive and advanced, it could produce so many different sounds and effects. However, I still associate Never for Ever with a certain delicate and romantic nature. Songs like Delius (Song of Summer), Blow Away (For Bill) and The Infant Kiss could have fitted on her first couple of albums. Whilst there are elements of Lionheart that are bolder and different from The Kick Inside, both are very piano-led. Never for Ever is a little more experimental in terms of the technology and electronic influence of the Fairlight CMI. The next phase was from 1982’s The Dreaming and 1985’s Hounds of Love. Both albums emboldened and heightened by the Fairlight CMI. Bush as solo producer, these are very different but ambitious. Extraordinary and layered. 1989’s The Sensual World and 1993’s The Red Shoes could be seen as the next phase, whilst her work from 2005’s Aerial onwards marks a new phase and chapter.

You can isolate The Kick Inside, Lionheart and Never for Ever. Bush going from being produced by Andrew Powell on her debut, assisting him on Lionheart, then working with Jon Kelly on Never for Ever. Each album a step on from the previous. The Kick Inside is my favourite album ever, and I think one reason is because of the piano. The beauty of Bush’s playing. Her phrasing, expressions and style. Critics were comparing her with Joni Micthell and Carole King in 1978. Bush respected those artists, though she was very different. Less confessional. Her playing, I feel, broader and lighter. There is drama and sadness in some songs, though there is also delight, flights of fancy, joy, seductions, curiosity and wide-eyed wonder too. Such a broad palette. Kate Bush underrated as a pianist. I can see why Stuart Maconie loves the pianistic quality of those first three albums. Some see that purity as a negative. Hounds of Love and The Dreaming more respected and loved because they are fuller and more experimental. In the sense you get more genres and sounds blended. Bigger productions and perhaps more musical depth. The range of instruments gave Bush license to expand her horizons and what she was writing. Perhaps that natural nuance when you experience these layered and deep songs. That takes something away from the beauty of her playing. I have seen some who say the arrangements are basic or her playing developed and got better. I can appreciate that she is phenomenal on later albums like Aerial and 50 Words for Snow (2011). I feel the piano on her first three albums perfectly compliment her vocals. Think about all thew characters Kate Bush inhabits and how she was so distinct from her contemporaries. The reason I come back to her first three albums, especially The Kick Inside, is the piano. Her favourite instrument and her passion, you can sense her heart and soul in every performance.

If you had to ask which Kate Bush ‘period’ or run of albums were their favourites, most would go from The Dreaming to The Sensual World inclusive. I have not really seen anyone else discussing this. The importance of her first three albums. Why the piano is so essential and effective. Kate Bush herself distanced herself a bit from those albums. She was not producing on her own, so she had limitations to what she could include and how much control she had. I do think that from The Dreaming on, she was happier as an artist, as she was producing so got the final say. She was not having to compete or compromise. Perhaps she feels her songwriting was not its best. I would say The Dreaming and Hounds of Love are more masculine albums. Bolder and more percussive. Bush might have felt the first few albums were a little lacking in gravel and punch. That an effete or slightly unambitious or undercooked musical element was there. A single dimension when you focus on the piano. Elton John was and is an idol of Kate Bush’s. You feel like her love of the piano was because of him. When she became more experimental, artists like Peter Gabriel, Frank Zappa and David Bowie more in her consciousness. One cannot overstate the importance of her earliest songs and Kate Bush on the piano. How they captured the attention of her mentor, David Gilmour. Last year, Music Radar discussed The Man with the Child in His Eyes. Included on The Kick Inside, we learn about Kate Bush’s early life and how the piano spoke to her:

“Catherine’s work demonstrated a distinctive, albeit quirky, voice, yet there was something more broadly resonant about this early tranche of songs. Perhaps there was somebody out there who could market her music.

Using an Akai tape recorder, Catherine and her brothers taped over fifty of her original compositions. Next, Paddy and John hit-up an array of music industry-adjacent contacts, met via their own folk scene adventures, with the aim of eventually shopping Catherine’s demo to the big labels.

A few A&Rs did hear the demo, but some were daunted by either her youth, or the jarring oddness of Kate’s high-register vocal and distinctly intellectual musical universe. Sadly, everybody passed.

Catherine’s story might well have ended there, were it not for the interjection of John Bush’s good friend Ricky Hopper.

Hopper, a close Cambridge University chum of Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour, had been trying to help John get his sister’s music heard to no avail.

Upon hearing that Gilmour (then riding high after the release of Floyd’s 1972 opus The Dark Side of the Moon) was on the look-out for new artists to nurture, Hopper decided to pay Gilmour a personal visit.

“A friend of mine [Ricky], (that was) a friend of her brother arrived on my doorstep one day with rather squeaky demos of her,” Gilmour told the BBC’s Tracks of my Tears in 2006.

Enamoured by what he heard, and excited at the prospect of what she might be able to achieve with the right backing, Gilmour knew Kate was worth his time.

But David also knew that the business-minded execs would likely not share his enthusiasm for a teenager who clearly needed a fair amount of development work.

“The songs were too idiosyncratic,” David told The New Statesman in 2005. “It was just Kate Bush, this little schoolgirl who was maybe 15, singing away over a piano. You needed decent ears to hear the potential, and I didn’t think there were many people with those working in record companies. Yet I was convinced from the beginning that this girl had remarkable talent”.

I think about Kate Bush in the summer of 1976. PROG published a feature last year about The Kick Inside and the making of that. We learn how Bush got up early, practiced her scales, wet off to dance class and then played piano late into the night: “I’d get up in the morning, practise scales at my piano, go off dancing, and then in the evening I’d come back and play the piano all night,” she told VH1, recalling the remarkably hot summer of 1976. “I had all the windows open and I used to write until four in the morning. I got a letter of complaint from a neighbour who was basically saying, ‘Shut up!’ They got up at five to do shift work and my voice carried the length of the street”. Going back to where we started, and Stuart Maconie showing his love and appreciate of Kate Bush’s first few albums. I would agree with him in terms of their superiority and the purity of the piano. The pianistic beauty and enduring wonder of them. Like him, those albums are…

SO special to me.

FEATURE: Spotlight: Julia Cumming

FEATURE:

 

 

Spotlight

PHOTO CREDIT: Sacha Lecca for Rolling Stone

Julia Cumming

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I am already a firm fan…

of the marvellous Julia Cumming. Her debut album, Julia, is out now. I am going to end with a review of that. On 12th May, at Moth Club in London, Cumming has her London album release and debut solo show. I am tempting to go along, as this is someone who is getting so much love right now. Julia is a remarkable album from a singular talent. Instantly one of the most expressive, memorable and astonishing songwriters and singers I have heard in a very long time. Perhaps best known as the lead vocalist and bassist for the indie rock band Sunflower Bean, the New York-based artist is stepping out on her own. I want to get to some new interviews with Julia Cumming. Julia I think is one of the best albums of this year. Getting some huge critical respect. I am chopping up this Rolling Stone interview slightly. So we learn about Julia Cumming’s early life. But also working on Julia. It was produced by Chris Coady (Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Beach House) and recorded over six weeks in Los Angeles with collaborator Brian Robert Jones:

“With its sleek Seventies singer-songwriter sound, carrying strong echoes of Carole King and Carly Simon, this album marks the beginning of an exciting new chapter in Cumming’s rock & roll story. “The songs came to me and they told me that they were ready,” she says, “and I was like, ‘Shit. I have to change course.’”

A few weeks ahead of the album’s April 24 release on Partisan Records, Cumming is explaining this surprising development in her career over a thin-crust pepperoni pizza on New York’s Avenue B. It started just a few blocks north of here, in the downtown Manhattan apartment she still calls home (though she spends nearly as much time in L.A. these days). She was sitting at a piano in between Sunflower Bean tours, feeling frustrated with the industry and what she calls “the pageantry of cool,” wondering why she made music at all.

Suddenly, she had her answer: “I sing these words for me/To hear the sound/To let them ring/To drown you out,” she says, reciting the opening lyrics of “My Life,” the defiant statement of purpose that became her lead single from Julia. “It felt really radical in the moment,” she says.

Those words turned out in time to be the beginning of something big — a story full of emotional highs and lows, and a search for something to call her own. But right then, she just knew she had a new song to write.

LIKE MANY GREAT musicians, Cumming began life as something of a misfit. “My mom was a very working mom,” she says. “She didn’t necessarily even have time to brush my hair, so she would take me to the men’s barbershop on 14th and First, where they have pictures on the wall and you point to the picture. And I had, seriously, for the entirety of my childhood, a little boy’s haircut.”

After a brief spell in Miami, where she moved at age 13 for her mom’s job and found an even less forgiving social environment than the one she’d left behind, she returned to live with her dad in New York and got down to the serious business of starting a band. “My mom let me go, and she really did not want to, but she said that she wasn’t going to be the person that got in the way of this dream,” Cumming says. “That was huge. That was when I stopped being a kid, really.”

WORKING CLOSELY WITH multi-instrumentalist Brian Robert Jones, a skilled sideman who became a trusted collaborator, Cumming explored new ideas without worrying about how they would be received by the world. (For a glimpse of what Jones can bring to a song, catch him shredding on tour this spring and summer in Hayley Williams’ band.) Later, in sessions at the historic EastWest Studios with producer Chris Coady, she kept going, building up a lush, multi-track pop sound with roots in Burt Bacharach and Brian Wilson’s mid-century masterworks. Songs like “Revel in the Knowledge,” “Ruled by Fear,” and “Forget the Rest” feature radiant arrangements that show off her most expressive vocals ever.

So does “My Life,” the song that kicked it all off. “Being able to say, ‘I don’t do music to impress you. I don’t wear what I wear because I want you to fuck me. I do it because it’s fun and it’s who I am’— in a Seventies easy-listening style?” she says. “It felt like the most rebellious, punk-rock song I ever wrote.”

The music was flowing forth in a heady, exhilarating rush of creativity, but there were times when she felt herself getting carried away beyond her control. “I started having these thought patterns that were really, really crazy,” she says. The song “Please Let Me Remember This,” where she got stuck on the idea of writing about a moment in time, became a focal point. “I was like, ‘How small can I think? Could I write a song about a second?’ I drove myself into some kind of mania about this song, talking to myself, pretty intense… It was a wake-up call.”

Cumming has dealt with mental health challenges on and off since her teens. “I’ve been attempting to get help medically for depression since I was 13 or 14 years old,” she says. “Many different meds, never found anything that really worked.” Now, a new diagnosis of OCD brought clarity. “It has this fun, sexy name — they call it Pure O,” she says. “I ended up seeing a psychiatrist, and I got some good medication that I’m still on.” She also ended up finishing “Please Let Me Remember This,” one of the highlights of the album once she got her head around it. “I’m so happy that song made it on the record, because I’m like, ‘This song nearly killed me.'”

She spent some time shopping the album around before signing with her new label. “I had to do a lot of pitching, I had a lot of rejection,” she says. “Sometimes major labels would be like, ‘You should start teasing it, get it successful, and then we’ll think about it.’ Partisan is like, ‘You can make good art that is exactly what it’s supposed to be, and we can sell it.’ And you’re like, ‘Oh!'.

PHOTO CREDIT: Brendan Wixted

I want to move to Wonderland. and their recent conversation with the wonderful Julia Cumming. A fully-realised, hugely nuanced and phenomenal debut album, Cumming is working outside of Sunflower Bean and “reflecting on identity, misfit energy, and the New York upbringing that shaped her”:

“If home is where the heart is, then New York City native Julia Cumming has finally synced to its beat. Just a few years ago, inside the apartment she grew up in, she found herself at the piano, confronted with the lyrics that would awaken her self-titled debut solo album. ‘I sing these words for me,’ she declares on the opening track, “My Life”: a swan song for liberation, an act of self-actualisation, and a tune that lingers long after it’s taken up residence in your head. She had finally found the rhythm she’d been longing for – “but wasn’t particularly looking for,” the singer-songwriter tells me over Zoom, dialled in from the Chelsea Hotel’s outdoor terrace, a daring choice for a brisk January afternoon. In that moment, Julia realised what she’d been searching for had been there all along.

After that breakthrough – which she likens to “the Matrix” (“it was like I busted through a wall that I didn’t know I had put up,” she elaborates) – life did what it does best and kept moving. It wasn’t until Sunflower Bean, the band she forms one third of alongside guitarist Nick Kivlen and drummer Olive Faber, wrapped their 2022 album Headful of Sugar that Julia could no longer ignore the calling she’d stirred within herself.

“This voice,” she says, “was a combination of all these parts of me that had never spoken to me in that way.” Going solo, at that point, felt inevitable – perhaps even necessary. And while band drift might unnerve some, Nick and Olive met the shift with encouragement instead. “For them to see me bring this work to life, and to know how personally fulfilling it is – it’s all been part of a joyous musical world we share.” With a mission and a support system firmly in place, it was time to start assembling her team.“

Everything was very serendipitous,” she recalls of making Julia. Brian Robert Jones– the musician and producer whose CV includes Paramore, Gwen Stefani, and MUNA, and who would become her creative home base – entered the picture as an unlikely gift, met at a friend’s birthday party. “It was a very rewarding relationship for both of us.”

Intimidated at first, Julia’s solo live sessions quickly became sacred ground for candid confession. ‘A prisoner in my own mind,’ she clamours on the anxiety-ridden, honky guitar–laced “Ruled By Fear”, articulating a struggle familiar to countless young women. “This feeling of never being enough, of having to perform for everyone,” she explains, can land as a direct hit to one’s sense of identity. And yet, just a few tracks later, “Do It All Again” arrives as a moment of hard-won acquiescence –unapologetic, unflinching.

True to rock-star form, Julia was adamant that the album be recorded without judgment: nothing off the table, nothing overthought. A renewed surge of confidence – one she partly credits to Nick Zinner of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, who contributed to the record – helped her let go of inhibition altogether. That freedom courses through “I Dream of a Fire That Stays Burning When Nobody Tends It”, a feature track whose deliberately unwieldy title feels like bait for any hawk-eyed executive itching to slash it down to something more marketable. Julia doesn’t budge. “I don’t care if this chord change sounds like it’s from 19-fucking-70,” she shrugs. “I like it, and that’s what’s important. I never fit in anywhere anyway, so who gives a fuck?”.

What you get in a Julia Cumming interview is honesty and openness. Someone who is such a wonderful interviewee, there are also these stunning photos. As a model too, you get this sense of connection with the camera that many other artists do not possess. NYLON spoke with Julia Cumming this month about an artist done with being cool. Someone reintroducing themselves on their own terms:

“When you’ve spent your formative years forming your sense of self based on the opinions that’ve been projected onto you by the music and fashion industries — two of the most damaging industries to a young woman’s psyche — you can’t help but internalize those beliefs as your own. “I don't just blame the world,” she says. “It's easier to take on what someone puts on you if it's in a shape that you wish you were, especially if that shape is cool.” Julia is her way of reclaiming the public image that, up until now, she has never fully had control over. “[This album is] the version of myself that I'm choosing,” she says.

Cumming’s reclamation arc and sonic about-face may piss some people off, especially those who worry about what her Julia era could mean for the future of Sunflower Bean. But before you decry her solo career, know that the group isn’t going anywhere. In fact, her bandmates have been incredibly supportive throughout this journey, with bassist Nick Kivlen making multiple in-studio appearances during the recording process. “Sunflower Bean is a huge part of who I am,” says Cumming. “My dream is that we'll be like Sonic Youth or like Pixies, and we'll be able to tour forever.”

Cumming stresses this new artistic venture is simply just a “different alchemy” that exists in tandem with the band. “The solo project is not a side project, it’s a whole new way of interacting with the world,” she explains. “But at the same time, Sunflower Bean is still very much a part of how I want to continue interacting with the world.” It’s a symbiotic relationship we’ve seen work many times over: Julian Casablancas has The Voidz, Thom Yorke has The Smile, and now, Julia Cumming has Julia Cumming.

If Sunflower Bean built its psychedelic rockist sound upon the backs of Black Sabbath, The Velvet Underground, and Pink Floyd, then Julia borrows from the lush, feel-good music of The Beach Boys, Carole King, Simon & Garfunkel, and Burt Bacharach. “I'm going [for] all my dorkiest influences [on this album]” Cumming says. “All the things that I thought people would hate, all the things I thought people didn't want me to do, all the things that I was afraid to do, all of the sides of myself that I was afraid to show… Your dad doesn't even like this.”

Even as she wears this new anti-cool identity on her sleeve, Cumming always finds her way back into the conversation. “[Making this record is] the coolest thing I could do, because everyone's f*cking faking it anyway,” the singer says. Therein lies the true genius of Julia: it’s not anti-cool, it’s cool on Cumming’s terms”.

Finishing off with a review for Julia. All of the ones I have read have been extremely positive. That is no surprise, as Julia is from a songwriter whose words get under your skin and into your heart. Such an amazing voice. That combination results in music that warrants repeated listens. Stephen Thomas Erlewine crowned Julia his album of the week this week:

“The first solo album from Sunflower Bean frontwoman Julia Cumming is a quintessential breaking away from the band album, right down to how the record begins with her singing “I sing these words for me.” Cumming abandons her trio’s barbed rock for a supple, stately pop that hearkens back to the golden era of AM radio; its shimmering haze is caught somewhere between Bacharach’s Hollywood and Topanga Canyon. Steeped in the pop past, she’s not a revivalist. She’s too earthy, too profane, too eager to subvert her anxieties with the bright colors and effervescent rhythms, as she does on “Ruled By Fear.” Every time she slides into the Monday morning pop of Carole King (”Do It All Again”), she counters the uncut soft-rock with something as deft and clever as “Revel in the Knowledge,” which percolates with a loungey pulse reminiscent of Stereolab. Even with these indie accents, Julia plays like an old-fashioned singer/songwriter album, one where the craft camouflages the idiosyncrasies upon the first listen, but those eccentricities are what make it linger in the imagination”.

We are going to get many more albums from Julia Cumming. Her London gig at the Moth Club next month is going to be one you will definitely want to get along to. Julia is a remarkable album from a songwriter who most know as the lead of the successful Sunflower Bean. However, I think we hear something freer and less inhibited on Julia. Such a revelatory and important debut album. I am so interested to hear…

WHAT she does next.

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Follow Julia Cumming

PHOTO CREDIT: Meka Boyle

Official:

https://www.juliacumming.com/

Instagram:

https://www.instagram.com/juliacumming/

TikTok:

https://www.tiktok.com/@juliacumm1ng

Facebook:

https://www.facebook.com/people/Julia-Cumming/100067910722396/

Twitter:

https://x.com/juliacumming_

Spotify:

https://open.spotify.com/artist/7hIHeaaT8TkaHpFDT9QZfR?si=FUpVIVoaS6ifkzA5igIXOg

YouTube:

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

FEATURE: Home to Us: Why We Are So Privileged to Have New Music from Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr

FEATURE:

 

 

Home to Us

IN THIS PHOTO: Ringo Starr

Why We Are So Privileged to Have New Music from Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr

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I will bring in new interviews…

IN THIS PHOTO: Paul McCartney/PHOTO CREDIT: Mary McCartney

concerning both artists. However, I was motivated to write this feature as it has struck me how so fortunate we are to have Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr with us. Not to be morbid, but as both are in their eighties and putting out new music, who would have thought that?! There are legends of music around that age who are still releasing music and delighting fans. Though a lot younger, Madonna releasing new music and very much being the Pop queen she has always been is such a pleasure! Paul McCartney turns eighty-four in June, whilst Ringo Starr is righty-six in July. The two have released their own solo albums in the same year before. However, I think 2026 is particular emotional and important. There is so much new conversation around The Beatles. The films directed by Sam Mendes will be out in 2028. Both artists, especially Paul McCartney, still talking about the band. How painful the break-up was. Ringo Starr recently released Long Long Road. A Country album, there is a sense of Starr nodding to his youth. He has said how U.K. Country originated in Liverpool (where he was born). Although Starr lives in the U.S., you can feel him remembering his home and the Country music he would have heard as a youngster. Paul McCartney released The Boys of Dungeon Lane late next month. That album very much about his younger years. Dungeon Lane is in Speke area of Liverpool, and the album is generally inspired by McCartney's childhood memories in the area. In different ways, both artists thinking about their childhood and earlier years. I do wonder if the two will be in the same city when they tour the albums, so that they can share the stage.

Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr will duet on McCartney’s Home to Us. It would be amazing if both albums, Long Long Road and The Boys of Dungeon Lane, were nominated for awards. Maybe the Mercury Prize judges would overlook the albums of feel Starr and McCartney do not need the recognition. However, how amazing would it be if both albums got shortlisted! I think Starr is eligible, even though he is based in the U.S. – and has been for many years. In any case, how these former Beatles are putting out albums and very much in each other’s lives is such a treat and blessing! I have never seen McCarney and Starr play live, so that is something I definitely need to do. It is awesome that they have new albums out. USA TODAY spoke with Ringo Starr recently about Long Long Road, being on tour, and what he thinks about the new Beatles biopics:

“Question: Do you consider yourself a country artist primarily now? Or is this a detour?

Ringo Starr: Right now, that's all I am is a country artist. I think just “artist” is enough, you know? We play pop, we play rock, and we got back very strongly into country because of T Bone.

Your tour runs right up to your 86th birthday (July 7). Do you intend to play as long as you're physically able?

No, I just intend to play this year. That's as far down the line as I'm going. We'll see what happens at the beginning of next year or the end of this year. For the last five years, I've told my kids, “That's it, I can't go on anymore." (And they say), “Oh, Dad, you said that last year.” I'm just doing the 12 gigs. But in my head, at least twice a day, (I’m thinking), “Nah, we should do September as well.” But so far, I'm holding up.

You've joked that the secret to your fantastic health is blueberries and broccoli. What have you learned over the years about taking care of yourself?

I have a trainer still three times a week. And the gym's just there (points off camera). I go in on my own at least one day, usually two days, when she's not there. Just to get my heartbeat (up) and get on the treadmill, do a bit of running and weights. I’ve been doing it so long, it's just like, “Oh, I'll go over to the gym.”

Paul has a new song out (“Days We Left Behind”) in which he’s reminiscing about The Beatles. Have your memories of the band changed over time?

No, no, I love that band. I love the front line. That’s why I left Rory (Storm and the Hurricanes, his pre-Beatles band). But what made them make the phone call, I don't know.

Do you think Barry Keoghan, who's playing you in the four Beatles’ biopics, looks like you?

In a way. You've got to say yes. You know what I mean? He's got the gig. And he came up one afternoon before they started shooting. We just hung out and let him get the vibe of what I am. And he was a really kind, good guy. And he's a fine actor. We can't doubt that. So I'm going to look great.

I was blessed because last summer-ish, I went to the set. And I saw the guys who were playing John and Paul (Harris Dickinson and Paul Mescal). And they were great. It was one of those days where they were having an argument. I'm waiting for the documentary because, “Oh, that didn't happen. That happened there.” No, it's a film. Let it go. It's hard to talk about it because you're going to give it away”.

This is a unique moment. Not that Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr are releasing music at the same time. I just feel their individual albums are so meaningful and important. They are very close friends and will appear on record together. The Beatles broke up fifty-six years ago, though there is still this closeness between the two surviving members. Maybe we take for granted what a privilege it is that these two are still with us and making such excellent music. And that they are talking about The Beatles with openness and fondness. Not that there are interviews around The Boys of Dungeon Lane yet. However, I did want to reference an interview from Paul McCartney’s official website. Not only has Paul McCarney announced a new album. Recently the Man on the Run documentary came out. About McCartney’s post-Beatles life with Wings. A book also available. I might have referenced this before but, as this is a feature where I want to get an insight from Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr in 2026, it is worth bringing it back in:

“The Wings renaissance continues, as Paul revisits this remarkable era once more and this time on the silver screen. The new feature documentary, Paul McCartney: Man on the Run, arrives globally on Prime Video on Friday 27th February, offering an intimate, emotional, and often surprising look at his journey after The Beatles.

So, with Man on the Run on the horizon and fans buzzing with excitement, we sat down with Paul to talk films, documentaries, and what it feels like to watch this chapter of his life unfold on screen.

PaulMcCartney.com asks: Man on the Run is emotional, funny, reflective and overall a real journey. What is it like for you watching it back?

Paul: It’s crazy; like a period of my life flashing before my eyes. It’s wonderful because it’s full of different emotions and facets. One of the big things for me is seeing so much of Linda, which is great for me and the kids.

There are parts that are embarrassing. I even asked Morgan Neville if we should take some of those bits out; like me doing ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’ with a red nose on, and the band in silly outfits. I thought maybe we didn’t need that. But he said, no, that it works, and that the ups and downs make the ending feel more earned. I think he’s right.

Overall, it’s a success story. The big question after the Beatles was: How do you follow that? Do you not bother? Or if you try, how? I think we did it in a particularly madcap way, and that’s what’s good about the film, it shows how we pulled it off.

PaulMcCartney.com: Are there any documentaries you’ve seen recently or at any time that really made an impression on you?

Paul: I do like documentaries; I tend to watch movies and documentaries more than long series. I’ve seen some good ones recently and some older ones too. One that really stuck with me is Cow, it’s pretty hardcore, but very good. It reminded me of Linda’s song of the same name which is equally as powerful.

PaulMcCartney.com: There is an app for movie lovers called Letterboxd. It’s where you can review, rank and share your favourite films. On people’s accounts they have a Letterboxd Top 4, these are the four films that represent them: their favourite films, or the film that brings them comfort or ones they feel represent them. What would be your Letterboxd four favourites?

Paul: The Girl Can’t Help It, I always love that one and watch it again and again. On the Waterfront, with Marlon Brando, fantastic film. Get Out, I think Jordan Peele did a great job with that. And The Last Waltz - that’s a nice one to round it out”.

I am so thrilled that the phenomenal Ringo Starr and Paul McCartney are bringing us new music. Starr’s Long Long Road is fantastic. I cannot wait to hear both of them together on McCartney’s Home to Us. A year when these fond friends are gifting us with incredible music. Let’s hope that they continue to do so…

FOR years more.

FEATURE: The Digital Mixtape: Noddy Holder at Eighty

FEATURE:

 

 

The Digital Mixtape

Noddy Holder at Eighty

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IT is a pity…

that there is not a fuller and more detailed biography of Noddy Holder than we have out there. Such a revered and accomplished musician, the Slade lead deserves more than it is out there! I really love Slade and have been a fan since I was a child. As Noddy Holder turns eighty on 15th June, I wanted to compile a playlist of Slade cuts. A celebration of the brilliant work he has been a part of. Their debut, Beginnings, was released in 1969 as Ambrose Slade. In 2023, Holder gave an interview to Big Issue about how he received a cancer diagnosis and was only given six months to live. Although we might not see any new music from Noddy Holder or Slade, we need to salute his brilliance ahead of his eightieth birthday. One of the most beloved artists who has ever lived, the playlist below contains some Slade gems. Even if you do not know their work well, there will be songs in there you will recognise. Defining the 1970s Glam Rock era, you can buy the book, Whatever Happened to Slade?. It is a must-read for all fans:

“Slade were one of the most iconic groups of the 1970s and have influenced countless bands throughout the ages, from Oasis to Quiet Riot and beyond. Although the original quartet (Dave Hill, Noddy Holder, Jim Lea, and Don Powell) ceased working as a unit in the nineties, memories of the group remain strong, thanks largely to their festive single, 'Merry Xmas Everybody'. But Slade were always about more than just one song”.

Whatever Happened to Slade? charts their emergence and groundbreaking success through to their dissolution and post-Slade careers, considering the strength of their influence on music and popular culture.

Drawing on hours of new interviews and meticulous research, with a foreword by Bob Geldof and an afterword by Jim Moir, Whatever Happened To Slade? reassesses a band that won hearts and perforated eardrums across four incident-filled, bittersweet decades”.

A tremendous artist who I have loved for so many years, many happy returns to Noddy Holder for 15th June. A true legend who has made such an impact on the music scene and influenced so many artists, take a listen to the mixtape below and…

EXPERIENCE the brilliance.

FEATURE: Spotlight: Revisited: Suki Waterhouse

FEATURE:

 

 

Spotlight: Revisited

Suki Waterhouse

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ABOUT four years…

after spotlighting Suki Waterhouse, I want to come back to her music, as she has a new album coming out. I will lead up to some new interviews with Suki Waterhouse. However, this DIY article discusses an album that will be among the standouts from this summer:

“Singing and acting extraordinaire Suki Waterhouse has announced plans to release her brand new album later this summer.

The star has confirmed details of her third album - and the follow-up to her breakout 2024 album ‘Memoir of a Sparklemuffin’ - ‘Loveland’, which is due for release on 10th July via her new label home of Island Records.

Set to feature her previous single ‘Back In Love’, as well as new cut ‘Tiny Raisin’ - which you can check out below - the 14-track album has seen her work with a host of talented musicians including songwriter Amy Allen, The National’s Aaron Dessner, Joel Little, and Dan Wilson, as well as her longtime collaborators Jules Apollinaire and Natalie Findlay.

Speaking about her forthcoming full-length, Suki has said: “‘Loveland’ to me lives in the distance between a former self who felt most alive in romance, fantasy and momentum, and a present self reaching for something steadier, more intimate and more true. That split is deepened by motherhood, and by the strange feeling of becoming someone new while still carrying the shape of who you were before.”

Commenting on her new single, she adds: “‘Tiny Raisin’ is a love song at its core. It’s a song that stands by the fact that real love in its truest essence can be chaotic, ridiculous, and imperfect, while still being something that is absolutely worth choosing over and over again at the end of the day”.

Even though she has some tour dates coming in the U.S. that start in July, Waterhouse will be busy up until then. Making sure that everything is ready when her album comes out. There will be a lot of promotion to do but, for now, we are getting these incredible singles and insights into Loveland. I feel that it will get some huge reviews. One of those albums that will not get the same focus as mainstream artists’ work. However, Suki Waterhouse is such an incredible songwriter.

Before getting up to date, I do want to look back at a couple of older interviews. I will start out in 2024. NME spoke with Suki Waterhouse about her remarkable new album. They say how, on “Memoir Of A Sparklemuffin’, the British musician is more confident and fearless than ever – and ready to write a new chapter of her tale”:

“Although she’s been writing her own music since she was 16 – the same age as when she was put on the path to it girl stardom after being scouted by a modelling agency in London – she was too scared to share her songs for years.

Instead, she focused on acting, scoring roles in rom-com Love, Rosie and Pride And Prejudice And Zombies, although she is now best known as Karen in 2023’s Daisy Jones & The Six adaptation. Eventually, she started drip-feeding tracks in 2016 with ‘Brutally’, but it wasn’t until 2021 that she really stepped into the spotlight as an artist with the double threat of ‘Moves’ and ‘My Mind’ – and a Sub Pop record deal.

Her 2022 debut album, ‘I Can’t Let Go’, was a big step forward in the process of claiming authorship over her life, its incredibly personal songs exhuming old relationships and their effects on Waterhouse. Even so, she still had a way to go – a journey that she perhaps completes on her second record, ‘Memoir Of A Sparklemuffin’, released earlier this month.

More confident, more fearless and more resilient, the new record contains songs she’s said that she would previously have been too scared to write – like ‘Lawsuit’, which details a group of women bonding over the same shitty man – and others that knowingly, cheekily nod to her past work and the preconceptions that people could form from it. Her latest single, ‘Model, Actress, Whatever’, falls into the latter camp, but in it, Waterhouse also embraces her whole path as part of who she is today. “Call me a lover, disaster, whatever,” she shrugs. “Other half of my story is with me forever.”

Now 32 and, recently, a new mum, the artist points to her baby as another factor in her feeling more at home with herself. “There’s something about having a daughter of my own that has allowed me to feel less…” She trails off and restarts on a slightly different thought. “I can look around at my life and absolutely love what I do and be so dialled in and want to be over ever single detail. I’m really in love with my project and my family and it’s been a very special time of feeling like both things are very nourishing.”

Then-impending motherhood had a big impact on ‘Memoir Of A Sparklemuffin’. Waterhouse had already finished the record and was ready to hand it in, leaving a couple of months for her to sit back, enjoy the remainder of her pregnancy and get ready to welcome her daughter. Or so she thought. When she listened to the original ten-track album again, she realised it wasn’t done. Instead of being able to faff about, she knew it needed to be finished before she gave birth. So she built a makeshift studio in her home in Los Angeles, knuckled down and turned it into the 18-track double LP that’s out in the world now”.

Although ‘Memoir Of A Sparklemuffin’ feels like the work of the artist who made ‘I Can’t Let Go’ – just evolved and elevated – it also bears a striking difference. That debut album often spoke of darker experiences in love; this record sweeps you away with stories of beautiful, world-beating romance. “Now I found myself this kinda love, I can’t believe it,” Waterhouse sings over the Mazzy Star jangle of ‘To Love’. On ‘Big Love’, she traces her path from shadowier times to the present: “Thought I would die, but my body resisted it / Stared at the sun til I found it / Big, big love.”

The latter is the song she’s currently most excited for people to hear. “That one is probably one of my favourites on the record,” Waterhouse says, getting distracted for a second. “Sorry, my baby just walked out,” she explains, turning back to the camera. “I love the idea of that song – going through all this treachery to find a person I really love. I really love the imagery”.

Another interview to get to before coming to this year. DIY spent time with Suki Waterhouse in 2024 and spoke about the stunning Memoir of a Sparklemuffin. The new mother and extraordinary actor, model and artist. This exceptional talent that can do it all, DIY spotlighted and celebrated someone “who’s negotiating the fame game her own way”:

“Waterhouse says the idea of writing autobiographical songs is “very appealing”, but she often has to change details to create a protective layer of ambiguity: a trick that must have been necessary when writing ‘Lawsuit’, a melancholy, mid-tempo gem from her new album. “I heard all about you from the girls in line in the bathroom,” Waterhouse sings over ringing guitar chords. “If what they say is all true, good luck with that lawsuit, baby.” Given the rarefied worlds Waterhouse has moved in – she and Pattinson attended the Met Gala last year – it’s a song that will surely make people speculate about its protagonist. “It’s not my lawsuit, but it’s definitely about a dark underbelly and the things that go on,” she says, choosing her words carefully. “It’s about something I’d probably never be able to discuss in public, but it’s more than just, ‘Fuck this guy!’ It’s about a bunch of women connecting who’ve had a similar experience. And there’s this feeling of, ‘Yeah, everyone’s really got each other’s back’.”

For Waterhouse, writing songs is about more than catharsis - it’s also about self-knowledge. “I wrote my first album in a very specific state of mind and I called it ‘I Can’t Let Go’ because I felt like I was doomed to feel a certain way forever,” she says. “But writing that album really did change my life. Maybe it was writing the songs, maybe it was releasing them and singing them live, but it was like I was needling myself. I was almost able to see myself as a viewer, which changed my perspective a lot. I was able to see my own faults and see where I was [mentally]. And that was really healing.”

When it was released in May 2022, ‘I Can’t Let Go’ saw Waterhouse stride out as a melodic and evocative miner of gloomy glamour; a fully-fledged singer-songwriter after more than half a decade of baby steps. Her musical journey had started in 2016 when she dropped debut single ‘Brutally’, a tender acoustic ballad about a relationship that was “always on borrowed time”. It was clearly intended as a soft launch, but because of Waterhouse’s celebrity, the tabloids pounced on the track’s supposed lack of commercial success, trying to bring the project down before it had even begun.

Eight years later, Waterhouse is enjoying the last laugh. Her second single ‘Good Looking’ - a swooning dream-pop tune originally released in 2017 - blew up on TikTok a couple of years ago thanks to footage of Waterhouse dancing hypnotically while performing it live. Today, she “still can’t really process” the fact it’s racked up 425 million Spotify streams, particularly because ‘Good Looking’ was initially greeted with a shoulder shrug. “I used to show it to [potential] labels and managers when I was trying to break down doors, and no one ever gave a shit,” she says. “And then when I signed [to Sub Pop in 2021], they were like: ‘Can you delete that song and all of your old stuff? We want to have a clean slate’.”

Thankfully, Waterhouse defied their advice and ‘Good Looking’, a highlight of her live sets, now “feels like a wave to the past when I was kind of putting out one song a year”. Waterhouse isn’t overstating her initial cautiousness: she released just five songs between 2016 and 2020 before signing with Sub Pop, the iconic indie American label that gave us Nirvana and Sleater-Kinney. Being cast as laser-focused Karen Sirko in Daisy Jones & The Six, and then spending a year learning to play piano for the role, however, was “pivotal” in building up her confidence. “I had all these songs [written] but booking that show made me think: ‘I’m gonna put out a record myself,” she says”.

I will finish off with a new interview from Vogue. You can pre-order Loveland here. This is an album that you will want to get. I have been following her career for years now. It is always wonderful when a new album comes out and you get to hear fresh stories from Suki Waterhouse. I do feel that everyone needs to follow this wonderful artist:

“I can’t put out a record that doesn’t have truth on it,” Suki Waterhouse says.

The 34-year-old British model, actor, and musician is at home in Los Angeles, just three weeks shy of announcing her third album, Loveland, out this summer. “And I definitely can’t put out something that’s just like, ‘Oh, every day of my life is just this magical, fantastical dream.’”

When she recorded the new album, she was in New York, where she braved one of the harshest winters the city had seen in years. “I did find it really fun, though,” she says of being caught in not one but two historic nor’easters. “All the power shut down in the apartment, and we had to move out. It was fun to be actually in the elements.”

That attitude perfectly aligns with the mix of romance and stark reality at the heart of Loveland. “I’m talking about dreams coming true for my partner and me and also having a baby in the middle of that,” she says. “There are some moments on the record where I went into the studio and it was very much just writing down exactly what I felt, word for word, and dealing with those feelings of, Everything is so great, and we’re both having dreams come true, but that takes us really far away from each other. We have a new baby. We’re not always at home together for long periods. We’re moving every few months. There are those moments on the record as well as these very joyful moments.” 

Indeed, a lot has changed for Waterhouse over the last five years. Of course, she’s had a child, but music has taken a front seat in her life too. In 2022, she released her first full-length album, I Can’t Let Go, before touring for three years, opening for Taylor Swift, releasing another record, and doing the festival circuit.

With Loveland, she was looking to expand. She worked with her longtime collaborators Natalie Findlay and Jules Apollinaire of Ttrruuces again, but this time around she also tested the waters with new partners. Ever the romantic, she likens this process to dating and seeing if you fall in love—which she ultimately did with The National’s Aaron Dessner at his famous Long Pond Studio in upstate New York.

Waterhouse was “going through quite a tough time” in the middle of her last tour when she drove up to work with Dessner, but there she and her collaborators wrote “Seasons,” an atmospheric pop song that blends her soft-rock vocals with Dessner’s signature melodic-pop sound. “I think [‘Seasons’] opened us up to a new sonic palette,” Waterhouse says.

Of the whirlwind that is being on tour, Waterhouse says that “when it’s approaching, I yearn for it, and I also am terrified every time.” Onstage, she’s earnest, often wearing big Penny Lane–style coats with chunky boots and bralettes, harkening to a ’70s California aesthetic with a 2000s indie twist. “It’s about so much more than just your performance,” she reflects. “It’s also where all the people who love it come, make friends, and find something in common. And that’s such a beautiful part of it to me, seeing how these communities grow through music”.

Anyone who has not discovered Suki Waterhouse needs to follow her now. I do hope that there are some U.K. tour dates. Four years since I spotlighted her, she has had this amazing period. Incredible Acting projects and music that grows stronger and stronger. I don’t think she gets all the recognition that she deserves. When it comes to Suki Waterhouse, she truly is…

A divine talent.

___________

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FEATURE: Bliss: Muse’s Origin of Symmetry at Twenty-Five

FEATURE:

 

 

Bliss

Muse’s Origin of Symmetry at Twenty-Five

__________

IF many feel Muse…

PHOTO CREDIT: Benedict Johnson/Redferns

released stronger albums, there is no denying that Origin of Symmetry was a major breakthrough. It contains some of their biggest songs. Their cover of Feeling Good. New Born and Plug in Baby these huge songs. Released on 18th June, 2001, I wanted to mark twenty-five years of this immense album. Led by Matt Bellamy, this was the follow-up to 1999’s Showbiz. It was a big leap. Like Radiohead going from Pablo Honey in 1993 to The Bends in 1995. That confidence and gulf in terms of quality. Perhaps 2003’s Absolution another step on. However, I wanted to look inside Origin of Symmetry ahead of its twenty-fifth anniversary. I had just finished sixth-form college when the album came out and was aware of Muse. I think 2006’s Black Holes and Revelations was the moment I really connected with them. That turns twenty on 3rd July, and I will write about that nearer to the time. I will end with a couple of reviews. At this point, Muse were being compared a lot to Radiohead and Jeff Buckley. Matt Bellamy seen as very similar to Radiohead’s lead, Thom Yorke. I want to start with Guitar.com, and their twentieth anniversary spotlight of Origin of Symmetry from April 2021. They say that the album was Muse “Demonstrating gigantic ambition and a musical finesse that would lead the trio to global ascendancy, Origin of Symmetry was a compelling mission statement, and one which brought Matt Bellamy’s ingenious guitar approach to the fore”:

“Muse’s gargantuan ambitions were first clearly revealed on 2001’s Origin of Symmetry, their second record following the muted and somewhat confused reception that met their debut. Contemporary reviews of 1999’s Showbiz heavily emphasised Matt Bellamy’s vocal similarity to Thom Yorke, and were hasty to write them off as Radiohead-wannabes (a perception underlined by the fact it was helmed by The Bends producer, John Leckie).

Critical uncertainty aside, Showbiz sold moderately well and, for many of those who listened, the debut’s grounding in small-town malaise and hormonal obsession was relatable while others recognised the precocious talent of the 21-year-old Bellamy as both inventive guitarist and virtuoso pianist. A mere two years on, Muse re-emerged with both a sharper focus – and sharper teeth.

Show me it’s real

On the heels of extensive touring, Bellamy, along with bassist Chris Wolstenholme and drummer Dominic Howard, decided to record a batch of new tracks with Tool producer Dave Bottrill, namely a song that the band had been performing live for a while. This growing favourite was driven by a propulsive, classically-inspired riff. The productivity of these sessions would result in – as the band would later state – the backbone of their second record.

A newly discovered appetite for magic mushrooms had swerved Bellamy’s songwriting into more vivid directions, and Plug In Baby’s lyrics abstractly alluded to both sex toys and a futuristic vision of computerised, synthetic love. When pressed on the song’s meaning in an interview with Channel [V] HQ’s James Mathieson in 2004, Bellamy muddied the waters further; “It’s all random, it just comes out, I’ve got no idea what I’m singing about at all, It does mean something! Trust me. But I can’t work it out myself. ‘Cause I’m subjective, you see. So I can’t actually quite work it out, that’s for you lot to work out.”

Plug In Baby was undoubtedly the strongest piece of music that Muse had written to date. Bellamy’s centrepiece riff feverishly jogged around the B minor harmonic scale with a fluidity that spotlighted his burgeoning guitar hero potential, snapped to a solid, funky rhythm section provided by Wolstenholme and Howard. The band’s regular wallowing in heartbroken angst had taken a hard right turn into sci-fi surrealism. It was a tantalising portent of what was to come.

During the sessions with Bottrill, the band laid down three more new tracks, two of which would grow into further singles – and setlist staples for the ensuing decade. The transcendent Bliss and ambitious album opener New Born alongside the moody Darkshines. The band set up live to capture the intensity of their live performances raw, overdubbing additional parts later in the process.

Though the bedrock of four of the album’s key tracks were down, Bottrill wasn’t charged with finalising the record, leaving due to a commitment to helm Tool’s Lateralus. Once more, Muse sought the wisdom of John Leckie to see through the remainder of album number two. As time was on their side, and facing considerably less label pressure following the relative success of Showbiz, The rest of the material was worked up and captured at a range of studios. The band returned to Sawmills studio in Fowey, Cornwall, ventured out to Ridge Farm Studios in Surrey before jaunting across to Real World Studios in Box, Wiltshire. On their travels, a brief spell was also spent aboard Dave Gilmour’s Astoria houseboat studio, moored on the Thames.

Peace will arise

Bellamy’s guitar arsenal was considerably smaller in 2001, with his main guitar of the Showbiz-era being a slimline double-cut Gibson Les-Paul which included a Roland MIDI pickup. Unfortunately, due to a particularly exuberant show in Dublin in 2000, this guitar was no longer workable. With a little cash in his wallet – Bellamy sought a new guitar that merged two different worlds in one unique shape, as he told Guitar.com in an interview last year: “I was torn between an SG and the Telecaster-type shape, feel, sound and everything. Those Fender-type sounds can be too thin to fill the space in a three-piece band. Having said that, I don’t play powerchords that much – I try to play lead parts or single note parts a lot, so you need a sound that’s thick in tone and broad, and not plinky and thin.”

Sketching a rough concept, Bellamy sought out the respected Exeter-based luthier Hugh Manson to realise his vision, as Manson recalled in Total Guitar “Matt came to the shop and asked me to make a guitar for him. He had a definite idea of what he wanted it to sound like. We reached the body design through a combination of me drawing and him pointing and we got there pretty quickly, I think there was just a slight alteration on the top horn.” Bellamy’s new axe, the DL-1 (dubbed ‘The Delorean’) was clad in aluminium on the front, back and sides and sported a spectrum of pickups, with a Seymour Duncan P90 in the neck and a Kent Armstrong Motherbucker at the bridge with a Roland GK2a MIDI pickup. The Delorean was also equipped with an in-built Z.Vex Fuzz Factory.

Now brandishing a guitar tailor-made for effervescent sonics, coupled with a new spiked-up hairstyle, Bellamy was carving a distinctive silhouette. The Delorean marked the beginning of an ongoing, fruitful partnership with Manson, which culminated in 2019, when Bellamy became the majority shareholder of Manson Guitar Works.

Hyper-music

Befitting Bellamy’s sparkly space-age rig, were some astounding new songs. As the Origin of Symmetry sessions continued, tracks such as the explosive electro-funk of Hyper-Music, the schizoid mania of Space Dementia and sublime album centrepiece, Citizen Erased, were revealing that the record would be both louder and more texturally adventurous.

Bellamy’s penchant for riff-craft fully flowered during the making of the Origin…, with the aforementioned album opener New Born dramatically lurching from an esoteric piano arrangement into a dirty but massively infectious riff. When released as a single, the potency of New Born’s fuzzed up riffing caught the ears of many youngsters then in-thrall to in-vogue heft of nu-metal. It was now a clear statement of fact that the Teignmouth three-piece could now stand shoulder-to-shoulder with some of the loudest bands in the world.

Fuzz Factory-soaked riffs aside, the range of Bellamy’s mastery of the guitar was illustrated; The twinkly, emotive arpeggios at the heart of Citizen Erased’s multi-section arrangement were precise and subtle. Recalling the building of this fan favourite behemoth, Bellamy remembered, in Guitarist magazine, that “Dom came in one day with this funky James Brown beat and Chris just started playing along. I then applied the chord structure that I already had and it suddenly became a full-on metal track out of nowhere. Because it was so heavy for so long we decided to add another song on to the end of it.”

Elsewhere, the delicate Spanish-tinged acoustics of the gloomy Screenager displayed a restrained nuance, while the euphoric power-chord pound of Bliss, helped to shape it into, as was later determined by Bellamy, as “Probably the most positive track – the most truly embracing song. It’s almost in awe of the situation I’ve been given, because it’s a state of mind where you give out everything you have without any need for return.” (Rock Sound, 2001)

Though the band’s more recent works have found Muse pushing their ambitions to a place that some consider the height of pretension, it’s undeniable that the enduring identity of Muse was cemented during the making of Origin of Symmetry. Its epic scope, thrilling music and emotional intensity mean that – after twenty years – Origin… is as fresh a listen as the day it was birthed”.

Prior to getting to some reviews, a feature from Indiependant and their love letter to Muse’s hugely acclaimed second studio album, Origin of Symmetry. It was an album that was a big success in the U.K. and did well on the charts around the world. Even though it didn’t make a big dent in the U.S., Origin of Symmetry did well in other countries:

“Loved by fans and critics alike—even ranked 74 on Q’s ‘Best 100 Albums of All Time’ list in 2006—it is bittersweet to revisit the album twenty years on, since this Muse, dazzling in symphonic metal, has left us. No longer do we hear the fateful tones of Tom Waits’ ‘What’s He Building’ before the first frantic arpeggios of ‘New Born’; we are rarely treated to Matt Bellamy’s vocal stratospherics in ‘Micro Cuts’, and not since that 2011 weekend has a bellowing organ transported us to the musical dystopia of ‘Megalomania’.

Yet, within Origin of Symmetry, we can see the origin of Muse’s rise to the status of rock deities. The suspenseful, Rachmaninov-inspired piano intro to ‘Space Dementia’—before the track explodes into utter frenzy—finds relatives in ‘Butterflies and Hurricanes’ (2003) and the band’s three-part ‘Exogenesis: Symphony’, which rounds off 2009’s The Resistance. Meanwhile, the anthemic ‘Plug in Baby’, which has survived best the twenty-year cull, paved the way for groove-driven hits such as ‘Assassin’, ‘Hysteria’ and ‘Time is Running Out’. Running throughout the record too is constant experimentation with synths; this indeed reached its climax in their most recent LP, Simulation Theory, which saw the band ditch their usual sounds for a deep dive into 80s synth-pop revival.

But what’s so special about Origin of Symmetry, then? Fundamentally, the record represents this era of ‘Early’ Muse—the typical label which fans use when trying to justify their favourite bands, only to see the sour reactions their opinions receive. Yet, it allowed the trio to escape the constant ‘Radiohead 2.0’ moniker which had bedraggled their debut, Showbiz, with a concept album which explored for just under an hour all their musical upbringings—from Bellamy’s classical piano and operatic studies to bassist Chris Wolstenholme’s penchant for metal. True, the second half of the record may veer slightly into more experimental zones (such as the flamenco/soft rock mashup ‘Screenager’) but stick to it and listeners will be treated to a multidimensional musical world.

But don’t just explore the album itself. Live recordings and concert videos give added depth to what the band were trying to achieve. The tracks are best experienced live and in-the-flesh; only a stage of such proportions can do justice to an album intended to push all the limits of drama. A snippet of ‘Bliss’ at Leeds 2017 was enough, though we might dream of another entire live rendition sometime soon.

For now, the record speaks for itself. Twenty years on, Muse’s revered sophomore effort stands the test of time and audiences can only wait for it to find its proper place on a platform among its devoted fans. Until then, we are left to imagine it—and imagine it I shall”.

Moving to a brilliant 2021 Pitchfork review from Jazz Monroe. This was an in-depth and passionate dive inside a Muse masterpiece. Revisiting the “grandiose British rock band’s second album, a supranatural space odyssey powered by all-too-human emotion”. I wonder if new features will be shared to mark twenty-fifth years:

“In 2001, on a Saturday-morning show with celebrity guests and a slime tank, a rakish man appears onstage with hair spiked into dyed black blades. The man is a little scary, a little sinister, like anyone cool. He wears dark shades and wiggles his arms, conjuring a lullaby from the keyboard like a hired magician. Then the guitar swings around his neck and he summons a perfect squall of distortion.

The song, introduced as “New Born,” begins to overwhelm him. He throttles the guitar, hops about the stage, barely pretends to sing and play. You know he is miming, but he also performs the artifice of mime—that is, he is miming miming—and as the credits roll another man bursts in and inexplicably breakdances. What are you watching? A satire of an empty TV spectacle, perhaps. Unless you are nine years old. At nine, you are witnessing genius.

By this point, Matthew Bellamy’s heavy rock laments had already won Muse a global cult, gripped by his softness and oddness. But that is not how the British trio got to be stars. For that, they were shipped out to studio sets for Live & Kicking and The Pepsi Chart Show, learning to peddle the shamelessly real while embracing the shamelessly fake. By the end of it, Bellamy could fluently translate his grandiose, pentatonic misery into four minutes of thrillingly throwaway pop. Stuff would get smashed, but most of the time he was freakishly good at the job.

To straddle the sincere and absurd, the real and fake, was never a stretch for a man who did not resemble his straight-faced Britrock contemporaries so much as the swaggering peacocks of ’70s glam. Before his myriad quirks congealed into lovable schtick, and arena floodlights greeted Muse’s rebirth as prog-pop conspiracists, the band released a pair of fascinating LPs: 2003’s pop opus Absolution and their 2001 space odyssey, the formidable Origin of Symmetry.

Origin of Symmetry depicts life as the school-friend trio of Bellamy, bassist Chris Wolstenholme, and drummer Dom Howard saw it: a war zone where tyrant guitars and drums vie for space with balletic miniatures and stargazing synths. Muse were playing melodrama as teenage realism, an extremely, ridiculously honest noise. My sense they were overblown—that scaling the heights of psychic tumult might not require galactic pomp and an actual jetpack—would take a few years to kick in. In the meantime, I listened to Origin of Symmetry as if to a documentary. “Space dementia in your eyes/And peace will arise and tear us apart,” Bellamy sang, machines clipping his voice to a slithery alien rasp. Wow, yes, I thought, frowning seriously into my lunchbox.

Formed in the seaside town of Teignmouth, Muse signed their first deal in 1998 in Los Angeles, before amassing a giant fanbase in continental Europe. Their province back home transpired not to be London (too jaded and skeptical) but rather in pockets of smalltown and middle Britain, where latent ambition and stifled bombast can thrive among thwarted romantics. Where Is This It, released two weeks later, garnered the Strokes a coalition of hedonists and neurotics drawn to the big city, Origin of Symmetry positioned Muse as an outpost of Radiohead’s broad church of the alienated.

The album soundtracked a pipeline out of outsiderdom for suburban students and scruffy skate kids—the next generation of techno gourmands and bong-ripping metalheads, math-rock nerds and hardcore loyalists. For at least the next decade, slapdash “Plug in Baby” covers blasted from provincial pub stages, anointing a new mainstay on the popular front of radio rock. To legions of longhair disciples, Origin of Symmetry sounded a final alarm before the tractor beam of domesticity beckoned, promising annual trips to Download Fest and pet cats curled up in Korn hoodies. The album’s cult has endured not so much by converting new fans as by presenting a pungent memory box.

Muse themselves never stopped being teenagers, happiest whipping up us-versus-them screeds and epic expansions of boyish obsessions. But nor would they nail adolescence with such panache as they do on their second LP. Origin of Symmetry romanticizes a time when pop was primal, titanic, and camp. By combining goth vulnerability with sci-fi scale and hard-rock drama, it captures a paradox of young romance: On one hand, Bellamy sounds wracked with despair, but he proclaims his heartbreak with the glee of an ecstatic preacher. Origin of Symmetry’s mercurial range honors those dueling emotions: in “Space Dementia”’s barbarian opera, “Feeling Good”’s benevolent vaudeville, “Bliss”’s Nintendo-prog fantasia, “Plug in Baby”’s widdly licks.

Their radio A-list forebears were the mannered realists of kitchen-sink Britpop, whose fetish for authenticity had awakened an everyman army of Coldplays and Travises. Across the pond, grunge had transformed goofball rock into lucrative torment, unloosing a glut of disaffected Nirvana clones. Muse’s debut, Showbiz, tried the self-serious angst thing, too. But Bellamy, emboldened by nu-metal’s reign, was nudging it into the hyperbolic. He sang with real pain—Muse are ruthlessly unironic—and channeled Berlioz and Mahler, minting a sound so ludicrously over-the-top it broke the serious/piss-take binary.

Despite little retrospective attention, Showbiz had been a commercial success, outselling higher-profile late-’90s records by bands like the Offspring and Korn. From a backwater filled with “a load of old biddies” (as Wolstenholme put it), the debut had flung Muse into orbit—playing arenas with the Foos and the Chilis and prancing about at their backstage parties. As his ego played catch-up, Bellamy dubbed Showbiz “a bit faffy and bollocks.” He had reacquainted himself with the mischievous Russian composer Rachmaninoff: both traditionalists in accelerating worlds, fond of naive melodies that sweep and lurch into sudden turbulence. Inspirited, Bellamy delayed the second album sessions to dispense with faff and bollocks.

Finally, in a rural English studio abutting a field of magic mushrooms, Muse and Tool producer Dave Bottrill recorded “New Born,” “Bliss,” “Darkshines,” and “Plug in Baby”—the latter while tripping. (They wound up “naked in a jacuzzi,” with Bellamy “deaf in one ear from falling asleep in the sauna,” he told the writer Ben Myers.) The earthy energies lingered when they reunited with Showbiz producer John Leckie, who filled their studios with percussive animal bones, llama-claw necklaces, and wind chimes for ceremonial clanging, as well as introducing the band to madcap bards Tom Waits and Captain Beefheart.

By then, their songwriting had already transformed, sometimes subtly and sometimes not. The riff and chorus of “Hyper Music” could have come from the debut, but not the flirty flair of the pinball-bumper bassline, nor the playful, fuzzy jangle that drops us into the verse. The vocal production sensationalizes the falsetto that writhes loose from Bellamy’s body—his revelry in every wet gasp before he belts out another battle cry.

At the same time, amid the clamor, Bellamy oozes sensuality. He groans like a four-poster bed, elongating “ooh”s with erotic decadence. It is possible for the casual listener to imagine the frontman a meat-and-potatoes rocker, conjuring women as shallow conduits of lust and disdain. Then he tickles you with a quietly odd lyric like the ones that pepper “Bliss”:

Give me the peace and joy in your mind.

Everything about you is how I’d wanna be.

That second one in particular, innocuous as it sounds, strikes me as wonderfully offbeat. Bellamy identifies not with the conquest but with the object of desire. It is a sentiment closer to sexually ambivalent goth (as in “Why Can’t I Be You?”) than downtuned, guitar-slinging rock.

Bellamy uses operatics to act out gender transgression, albeit while taking equal relish in what makes rock machismo click. The desire to be “over-the-top,” he said in 2001, “is inside every human being on the planet, but sexism has said that that was female….None of us are embarrassed about expressing [our] feminine side.” In lyrics delivered with enough falsetto and tremolo to shatter a mirror, his submissive “Space Dementia” narrator practically begs for emasculation. “I love all the dirty tricks and twisted games you play,” he snarls, quivering with hammy deviance. The tension lies in his tightrope walk from the sub- to the super-human, balancing claims of being a lowly worm with flashes of the sublime.

Where other virtuoso bands would marry rock with opera, Muse present the two in the midst of a messy divorce. The obliterating power of “New Born” derives from the contrast between its devilish riff and its intro, the saintly piano lullaby. “Citizen Erased,” a metallic storm, concludes with a piano coda drenched in post-apocalyptic bliss. In downtime throughout the record, where others would merely solo, Bellamy ferrets away glitzy cadenzas and sanctuaries of stillness. Muse’s sadness, like their ecstasy, is always joyfully lavish.

In press around the release, an increasingly inscrutable Bellamy outed himself as a conspiracy theorist, perhaps playing the media the same way he had played the keyboard on Live & Kicking. Aliens had planted ancient star charts on tablets in Middle Eastern catacombs. The U.S. government was performing mind control with radiation and electronics. All this made his zeal for advanced science hard to parse. Pinched from the physicist Michio Kaku, Origin of Symmetry’s title alludes to an outcrop of string theory describing an apparent symmetry of matter in a mooted 11th dimension. To find its origin, as Bellamy understood it, could lead to a sort of god. In the frontman’s personal universe, the source of stability—the origin of symmetry—was the act of creating music, he said. “Plug in Baby,” then, is as much an ode to his mythic guitar as a riff on dystopian tech.

Hallucinatory themes aside, the tone of the lyrics is painfully human, laced with spite. Lies are exposed, bitterness festers, toxic relationships crumble. (Bellamy’s endless press digressions about science and tech may have been, in the end, another bit of misdirection. It sounds to me like a breakup album.) Whatever the cause, antagonism suits him. He sings best in the role of a man possessed: so wretched and pained that histrionics seize him unbidden, expelling bile from his lungs.

In the calm that falls near the album’s end, Bellamy struggles for gravitas. Finale “Megalomania” takes a big plunge into gothic balladry but slightly bungles the landing, overestimating the depth of its existential lyric and stately organ soundscape. “Feeling Good,” as made miraculous by Nina Simone, wants to meander and kick its heels but here feels overcooked, a show tune stiffened with jazz-lounge starch. For now, at least, Muse’s powers would wane the further they ventured from their trademark gaudy discord.

But for six or seven songs—before the side-B slump, before the rock monoculture collapsed and they blasted off into stadium bluster—Muse were briefly the mightiest band in the world. Origin of Symmetry’s endurance, if nothing else, humiliates their former U.S. label Maverick, which reportedly buried the record upon Bellamy’s refusal to re-record “Plug in Baby” with manlier vocals. (The band left their contract as the album hit the UK Top 3, before a belated U.S. release in 2005.)

This year’s impressive new mix and remaster, billed as the XX Anniversary RemiXX, is even more colossal and timeless. It smooths out period giveaways like “New Born”’s dustbin-lid drums and scratchy rhythm guitar, while amplifying the baroque grandeur of the irrepressibly mad “Micro Cuts.” “Space Dementia”’s puny strings become Hollywood symphonic. Bonus track “Futurism,” initially cut over fears of flubbing it live, assumes its rightful place as a second-half pick-me-up. The reissue is definitive.

“If it wasn’t for Muse,” Bellamy once said, “I think I’d be a nasty, violent person.” And if rock is the space reserved for that rage—where bottled-up people (particularly people presented as men) can reach a new emotional tenor—then he may be right: The greatest achievement of bands like Muse is preventing literal murder. To take a humbler view, Origin of Symmetry is propaganda for self-indulgence. In a precarious adolescence, music like this can awaken a brewing madness, summon it up like a haunted shipwreck from a lake and say, “Come take a look—this is actually pretty cool!” Muse’s ilk will always be saving lives in this way or that, looking to mollify teenage mania. But few insist so persuasively that the mania, too, is a gift”.

I want to come to a 2001 review from NME. It is interesting how reviews have changed through the years. In 2001, critics knew Muse as this new band that took a big leap from their debut album. Years later, we can see all the other albums they released and how important and influential Origin of Symmetry was:

“The inner sleeve of Muse’s second album contains an illustration by Darrell Gibbs depicting humans marching into a giant white cube. In tiny lettering above the door, a sign reads ‘CHAOS’. Welcome indeed to the beautiful nightmare world of the most distorting, cartoon intense, baroque’n’roll band that Britain has ever produced.

Here comes their razorblade stuffed-toy singer Matt Bellamy, hanging from the chandelier of his overblown musical ability, electrodes screwed into his brain, singing like a harpy on fire, playing the funeral mass organ with his toes. Here’s bassist Chris Wolstenholme and drummer Dominic Howard sounding like Edvard Munch’s backing band. And here unfolds the profane, expressionist, hyper-thrilling vista feared by all those hoping the band were just Radiohead with a Freddie Mercury complex.

In two years of public life Muse have accumulated a high-pressured mythology. Half a million copies of their debut ‘Showbiz’ and one iMac advert down the line, they’ve strewn a totemic trail of destroyed equipment, confessed to a taste for mushrooms, seances and Hector Berlioz’s ‘Grande Messe Des Morts’, and announced, “If I couldn’t do this I would not want to live”.

The stakes were high. Their reinvention of grunge as a neo-classical, high gothic, future rock, full of flambéd pianolas and white-knuckle electric camp, is a precarious venture. Yet as the bloody abattoir riff kicks in on ‘New Born’, colliding with Bellamy’s fairy dreamtime piano, it’s apparent that Muse can handle their brutal arias.

Almost everything on ‘Origin Of Symmetry’ is overstated, but with Matt reined in by the constraints of a dirty rock three-piece, the operatic stuff is devastatingly channelled. ‘Bliss’ is all carnage riffs and a pleasingly corrupt lyric about innocence envy. ‘Space Dementia’ sets Bellamy’s grand piano mastery up against vaulting rock. ‘Hyper Music’ burns with a genuinely new, art punk rage.

Given the ultra-vivid tones of Muse’s palette – purity, insanity, corruption, virtual consciousness, Bach, metal and barking madness – it’s not surprising they overstep their overstepping. A happy Bellamy singing (literally) to the butterflies on ‘Feeling Good’ sits oddly, and the organ fugue finale is somewhat Hammer horror, even if the track’s called ‘Megalomania’. But relentlessly, on ‘Dark Shines’, ‘Screenager’, particularly ‘Micro Cuts’ and of course ‘Plug In Baby’, they add vicious, original serrations to the hysterical edge of extreme rock. It’s amazing for such a young band to load up with a heritage that includes the darker visions of Cobain and Kafka, Mahler and The Tiger Lillies, Cronenberg and Schoenberg, and make a sexy, populist album. But Muse have carried it off. It’s their ‘Siamese Dream’. Now begins the psychoanalysis.

Thom Yorke’s least favourite word is ‘angst’; Matt Bellamy’s is about to become ‘psychotic’. We’re the lucky ones who get to look at the pretty shapes as the blood hits the wall”.

Origin of Symmetry turns twenty-five on 18th June. It remains one of Muse’s most significant and loved albums. In 2018, when ranking Muse’s studio albums, NME placed Origin of Symmetry in second: “The dedicated Muse fan’s favourite album, ‘Origin Of Symmetry’ sounded monumental when laid to rest at Reading 2011 and has a peerless first half that takes in Muse’s best singles in the shape of ‘New Born’, ‘Bliss’ and their masterpiece ‘Plug In Baby’. Initially I found it a little too sprawling and disjointed, perhaps as a result of visiting the band in the studio during the recording and finding them full of stories of making the record while whacked off their gourds on magic mushrooms. But these days I can find more coherence in the daring and adventurous triptych of ‘Micro Cuts’, ‘Screenager’ and ‘Darkshines’ and recognize ‘Citizen Erased’ as one of Muse’s greatest achievements, the centerpiece of a grand ambitious album that they probably would’ve insisted reviewers previewed while skydiving out of space, if they’d thought of it first”. In 2023, Louder also put Origin of Symmetry in second: “Well, who saw this coming? For those who had Muse pegged as timid, mannered Radiohead-copyists on the basis on Showbiz, and let's be honest, that was most of us, the band's second coming, heralded by the astonishing alt.prog thunderbolt Plug In Baby and its equally startling follow-up New Born, was nothing short of a revelation. With the handbrake off, and Matt Bellamy given free rein to indulge his wildest Queen-meets-Rage Against The Machine-meets-King Crimson fantasies, Origin Of Symmetry was an adrenaline spike slammed into the heart of the British music scene. Even better, Bellamy now talked like a proper rock star, telling this writer, “What’s big in England is mostly simplistic bollocks." Such was the singer's new-found confidence, that he cheerfully told the band's US label, Madonna's Maverick Records, to get fucked when they demanded he re-record his vocals with less falsetto. “I was pretty aware that this album was difficult to swallow compared to Showbiz and I thought we were taking a bit of a risk," he admitted, "but our success has given me the confidence to push things further. Muse would never look back”. Following the promising but indistinct Showbiz of 1999, Muse followed it up with…

A mighty revelation!

FEATURE: The Great American Songbook: Kacey Musgraves

FEATURE:

 

 

The Great American Songbook

Kacey Musgraves

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IT is quite timely…

putting out a feature collecting the best work from Kacey Musgraves. As she releases Middle of Nowhere on 1st May, I wanted to look back at the amazing music that she has released so far. The Texas-born artist released her acclaimed and astonishing debut album, Same Trailer Different Park, in 2013. Before I get to that playlist, I will bring in some extensive biography from AllMusic:

“An award-winning, multi-platinum singer/songwriter, Kacey Musgraves bends country tradition to her will, writing songs that evoke the sound of classic country but are infused with progressive ideas reflecting her millennial perspective. "Merry Go Round" and "Follow Your Arrow," the big singles from her 2013 major-label debut, Same Trailer Different Park, crystallized this gift and established Musgraves as a major voice in country music who could cross over to a rock audience without playing pop. By the end of the decade, she'd expanded her musical horizons so they mirrored her expansive lyrical stance, a shift showcased on the critically acclaimed 2018 album Golden Hour, which was distinguished by how she blended retro-pop affectations with atmospheric modern electronics. Golden Hour unexpectedly won the Grammy for Album of the Year in 2019, turning Musgraves into a cross-genre superstar in the process, a status she consolidated with its melancholy and stylish 2021 sequel, Star-Crossed. After a pop chart-topping duet on Zach Bryan's 2023 hit "I Remember Everything," Musgraves returned early the next year with the folky and somewhat inward-looking Deeper Well, which included the Grammy-winning single "The Architect." 2026's "Dry Spell" was the first single from her sixth LP, Middle of Nowhere.

Born and raised in the East Texas town of Golden, Kacey Musgraves began writing songs when she was just eight years old, not long after she picked up a mandolin. By 12, she knew how to play guitar and began to write her own songs, teaming with Alina Tatum as Texas Two Bits for a self-released album called Little Bit of Texas in 2000. Throughout her adolescence, she'd write, sing, and play, performing at local festivals on occasion and releasing a series of independent albums -- Movin' On (2002), Wanted: One Good Cowboy (2003), and Kacey Musgraves (2007) -- along the way.

After graduating high school, Musgraves moved to Austin, where she would sing on songwriting demos while working on music of her own. She also took a stab at the televised musical competition Nashville Star, appearing on the fifth installment of the CMT series; she was eliminated four weeks into the season, placing seventh overall. Her appearance, along with her independent recordings, eventually attracted the attention of major labels, and she signed with Mercury Nashville in 2012. By the end of the year, she had supported Lady Antebellum on tour and released a debut single, "Merry Go 'Round." In March 2013, the song peaked at number ten on Billboard's Country Airplay chart, setting up the release of her full-length debut, Same Trailer Different Park -- which also arrived that March -- quite nicely.

Produced by Shane McAnally, Luke Laird, and Musgraves, Same Trailer Different Park debuted at number two on Billboard's Top 200, earned positive reviews, and spawned two additional hit singles ("Blowin' Smoke," "Follow Your Arrow") on its way to a gold certification. The album snagged the Academy of Country Music Award for Album of the Year, and Grammy Awards for Best Country Album and Best Country Song ("Merry Go 'Round").

The success of Same Trailer Different Park helped position Musgraves as one of the hottest stars in country music, raising expectations for her second album, Pageant Material. Arriving in June 2013, the album debuted at number three on the Top 200, but the record stalled out on the country charts; its lead single, "Biscuits," peaked at number 41 on the Country Airplay chart, and "Dime Store Cowgirl" never made that chart.

Musgraves released the cheerfully retro A Very Kacey Christmas in October 2016, then set to work on her third album of original material in 2017. Produced by Daniel Tashian and Ian Fitchuk, 2018's Golden Hour boasted a sleek, modern sheen that sounded more contemporary than either of its predecessors, capturing fans in the pop and indie realms. The critically acclaimed crossover set went on to top numerous year-end lists and, in early 2019, won Album of the Year at the 61st Grammy Awards. In addition to that top honor, she also won for Best Country Album, Best Country Song ("Space Cowboy"), and Best Country Solo Performance ("Butterflies"). In the wake of her wins, "Rainbow" was pulled as the fifth single from Golden Hour; it made it to 33 on Country Airplay and 98 on the Billboard Hot 100.

At the end of 2019, Musgraves celebrated the holiday season with The Kacey Musgraves Christmas Show, a tongue-in-cheek television special for Amazon Prime that also had its audio track released as an album. The Kacey Musgraves Christmas Show album peaked at 120 on Billboard.

During 2020, Musgraves indulged in a number of cameos, appearing on American Head by the Flaming Lips and on Shape & Destroy, the second album by her husband, Ruston Kelly. The pair fell in love during the creation of Golden Hour and married in October 2017. By the time Shape & Destroy saw release in August 2020, the couple filed for divorce. Musgraves chronicled the dissolution of their marriage on Star-Crossed, the follow-up to Golden Hour. Released in September 2021, Star-Crossed found Musgraves reuniting with Ian Fitchuk and Daniel Tashian, the co-producers of Golden Hour, for a contemplative, atmospheric record that expanded upon the genre-bending aesthetic of her Grammy-winning breakthrough. It topped the country charts and reached number three on the Billboard 200. Musgraves scored another hit in 2023, dueting with Zach Bryan on his platinum-selling hit "I Remember Everything." The song won a Grammy Award for Best Country Duo/Group Performance. She also collaborated with Noah Kahan on his single "She Calls Me Back" and in early 2024 contributed a cover of Bob Marley's "Three Little Birds" to the 2024 Marley biopic One Love. During this time, she had been recording at Electric Ladyland studios with Fitchuk and Tashian, working on songs that delved into folkier, more introspective territory than in the recent past while also making space for the occasional glittering moment of modern pop. Titled Deeper Well, the record was released in March of 2024, after which she embarked on a world tour that would last throughout the year. It became her third consecutive country chart-topper and just missed the top position on the pop chart, peaking at number two. Its single, "The Architect," netted Musgraves her eighth Grammy. After offering an expanded edition called Deeper Well: Deeper Into the Well, later that year, Musgraves surprised fans in April 2025 by releasing "Sounds from the Heart of the Woods," an experimental 20-minute ambient track of tranquil guitar playing and nature sounds. She also covered the Hank Williams classic "Lost Highway." With 2026's playful "Dry Spell," Musgraves kicked off the album cycle for her sixth full-length, Middle of Nowhere, a record that incorporates classic Texas dancehall music, norteño, and Zydeco, all threaded with her A uniquely modern sensibility”.

A sensational and hugely consistent songwriter, I am excited to hear what comes from Middle of Nowhere. I am a fan of Kacey Musgraves and always look forward to new music from her. What we discover from this playlist for The Great American Songbook is that Kacey Musgraves is…

A staggering artist.

FEATURE: Who Kept the Dogs Out? Why Lambrini Girls’ Phoebe Lunny Recent Story of Harassment Raises Urgent Questions

FEATURE:

 

 

Who Kept the Dogs Out?

IN THIS PHOTO: Lambrini Girls (Phoebe Lunny, right)/PHOTO CREDIT: Jessie Morgan for Kerrang!

Why Lambrini Girls’ Phoebe Lunny Recent Story of Harassment Raises Urgent Questions

__________

THERE is a recent story…

PHOTO CREDIT: Jessie Morgan

that I think is a personal outrage and something that should never have happened, though it also raises wider questions. I want to come to the story first of all. It involved Phoebe Lunny of Lambrini Girls. NME report how she called a male musician out, or she emailed some promoters to warm them of this artist. Knowing that they should not be involved with them, instead of being thanked or that artist being blocked or not associating with promoters, she faced a harassment charged and possible jail time:

“The singer opened up about the case during an appearance on the A View From A Bridge online show, on which people share personal stories as they talk into a red telephone on a bridge somewhere in a public space. Previous guests have included Shame’s Charlie Steen, Biffy Clyro‘s Simon Neil, Cynthia Erivo, Riz Ahmed and Niall Horan.

Lunny’s episode premiered earlier today (April 20), and it saw her speak about a harassment case that was brought against her after she opted to call out a “really dodgy” male musician, but found herself being arrested and facing six months in jail.

“I was on a run, and I get a call from a blocked ID and it’s the police, and they told me that I had a harassment case against me and that I had to come into the police station to be interviewed,” Lunny began. “So obviously, I didn’t know what the fuck they were talking about, so I got in an Uber and when I got to the police station, they arrested me on the spot.”

“This happened because I took the liberty of emailing a handful of promoters, saying, ‘hey, I’ve just seen you’ve got this band on your bill, there’s a guy in it, he’s known to be really dodgy, if you want your gig to be a safe space for women, take him off the bill’.”

Lunny went on to explain that the musician found out about her actions and reported her. “I just got put in a cell, and I was just crying because I was so confused and obviously, I didn’t even think that something like that could happen from sending a couple of emails,” she continued. “Like it’s fucking insane.”

She said the case was eventually dropped, but she was made to write a letter of apology to the man as part of ‘community resolution’, stating “how I was wrong, stating that I had no idea what I was doing, and how selfish I was.”

“What I think it’s a really good example of is how even laws which are there in place to protect women can be exploited and used for a man’s benefit,” she added. “And I think this is also part of the hugely misogynistic rhetoric which is used by the manosphere, and how they are constantly whining and victimising themselves about the system being stacked up against them, and it’s women’s fault.”

“Which is bullshit, because the system is there to aid and to protect dangerous men, and what I think you see a lot, especially after that Louis Theroux documentary came out, is guys online actively condemning this misogynistic viewpoint, which is amazing and we need that, but if they could put the same amount of passion into actually advocating for women, instead of being like, ‘I’m not like him!’ – what if you actually did something about it? Instead of just letting women be the ones who have to fucking deal with it.”

“Because the system does work for men and I think there are a lot of men out there who do call themselves an ally, but if they could actually just use their privilege, that’s gonna make way more of a change than us just all kind of wagging our fingers at Andrew Tate because he’s got mummy issues.”

She suggested that practical ways that men can be better allies include “not laughing at rape jokes” and speaking to friends if they are “watching weird fucking incel videos on Discord.”

“It’s 2026 and women are still having to scream at the top of their lungs. One out of three women have been sexually assaulted or will be sexually assaulted in their lifetimes, and we’re all focusing and centering the men still,” she concluded”.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by A View, from a bridge (@aview.fromabridge)

There is a lot to unpack and unpick. You think, if the gender roles were reversed and a male artist warned promoters about a woman that they feel they should not work with, there would not be the same result. The police would not arrest that man for harassment. Instead, the woman would be cautioned and arrested. We are still very much in a time when the system is run by men for men. What Phoebe Lunny said about men being allies and how there are some appalled by misogyny but, really, in terms of being proactive and helping improve things, they do not advocate for women. The effort is put to defend themselves. Men saying they are not like others. That is one of the most common things we see now: people (usually men) saying “it’s not all men”, when we hear about sexual assault and abuse. Rather than helping make women safer, advocating and being more useful allies, they are trying to say that they are not abusers. Which is not a high bar! They are not exactly shining examples of morality and really decent people. They are saying they are not like Andrew Tate and incels. I think this is the case in the music industry. Women, artists, fans and those through the industry, facing sexual assault and misogyny. Rarely do you hear men throughout the industry that are speaking about it and doing something. Also, that idea of the law being set up for men. So when someone warns promoters of a dangerous or ‘weird’ person, they are subjected to penalty and arrest. The man walks away and nothing is done. You wonder what those promoters did. Did the man that was named in the email booked and continues to walk free?

Phoebe Lunny replied to the post after the episode (A View From A Bridge ) was shared: “Please take my experience as a reflection of the systematic issues women face daily. Thank u for all the amazing messages of support xxxx”. It is something to discuss widely. In terms of how women through every sector; in every nation and corner are not protected by the law. They will always scream for justice themselves without very much support. I have said before how music never had its #MeToo movement. Rather than that, there has been little in the way of a movement. Addressing the rise in abuse women face and how the industry is still sexist and misogynistic. I have written about it before. There are very few men in music speaking about it. As a whole, you wonder what can be done. Earlier this year, the Women and Equalities Committee chair called for change: “The Women and Equalities Committee (WEC) chair Sarah Owen MP has called for stronger legislative protections to tackle misogyny and the silencing of victims in the music industry and the creative sector in general. Owen’s letter to the Business and Trade Secretary and Culture Secretary follows the WEC’s February evidence session with Jen Smith, CEO of the Creative Industries Independent Standards Authority (CIISA), and Zelda Perkins CBE, chief executive and founder of Can’t Buy My Silence. The session was part of the Committee’s inquiry into Misogyny In Music”. So much focus still on men and men defending themselves. Nothing about the women affected. Documentaries about incels and toxic influencers but little from women and how this impacts them. In the music industry, there is still this real lack of protection, change and awareness. The government here not doing enough. Men in the industry not using their platforms and voices to call this out. There are practical ways that men can be better allies. It must be so heartbreaking and infuriating for women throughout music (and female music fans) who have to talk about their experiences and the harsh realities and nothing happens. The industry and government not doing enough. Male voices silent or a hugely small minority. We are having the same conversations every year, and yet nothing changes. As I always say when I end these features. Women throughout music…

DESERVE so much better.

FEATURE: Fourth Time Around: Bob Dylan's Blonde on Blonde at Sixty

FEATURE:

 

 

Fourth Time Around

Bob Dylan's Blonde on Blonde at Sixty

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IN terms of the…

definitive Bob Dylan album, is there one single that which stands out from the rest?! He is a genius who has released multiple phenomenal albums. However, many would say that Blonde on Blonde is his peak. Or the album where his songwriting genius is in every song. More so than on any other album by him. It was released on 20th June, 1966. This was a year when more than a few all-time great albums came out. The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds and The Beatles’ Revolver. It was an incredible year for music. Like The Beatles, this was an incredible run for Dylan. Not only did he release two hugely acclaimed albums in 1965 – Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited -, he followed up Blonde on Blonde with John Wesley Harding. Four very different albums but all incredible. If you had to argue which artist had the best three-album run, there is competition to say Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde and Blonde takes the honour. For years, there was confusion and contention as to the exact release date of Blonde on Blonde. 16th May became the assumed release date for a while. It changed to early-July but it has been confirmed as 20th June. Speaking with Playboy in 1978, Dylan said this of Blonde on Blonde: “The closest I ever got to the sound I hear in my mind was on individual bands in the Blonde on Blonde album. It's that thin, that wild mercury sound. It's metallic and bright gold, with whatever that conjures up”. It is almost impossible to do justice to the full brilliance of Blonde on Blonde. Its background and creation. Its legacy and influence. As it turns sixty on 20th June, I want to bring in some retrospective features and reviews. There are other features I want to get to. However, as it is paywalled and I could not get the whole article, I will source a bit of this Rolling Stone feature from 2016. Published on what was assumed to be the fiftieth anniversary – 16th May, 2016 -, Rob Sheffield was a month premature with his retrospective on this masterpiece. He discussed how “Shakespeare, Smokey Robinson and Nashville session pros fueled singer-songwriter's revolutionary double LP”:

“Blonde on Blonde is full of that “not around” chill – Dylan mixes up the Texas medicine and the railroad gin for a whole album of high-lonesome late-night dread, blues hallucinations and his bitchiest wit. Still only 24, writing songs and touring the world at a wired lunatic pace that would come crashing to a halt in a couple of months, Dylan was on a historic roll, dropping this double-vinyl epic just 14 months after going electric with Bringing It All Back Home in March 1965 and Highway 61 Revisited in August. He was moving too fast for anyone to keep up, and writing masterpieces faster than he could release them. Yet Blonde on Blonde still feels like it came out of nowhere, with a sound he never attempted again, and neither Dylan nor the rest of the world has ever quite figured out how it happened. As organist Al Kooper put it, “Nobody has ever captured the sound of 3 a.m. better than that album. Nobody, even Sinatra, gets it as good.”

If you want to argue that Blonde on Blonde isn’t as perfect as Highway 61 Revisited or Bringing It All Back Home, you may have a point. It’s a wide-ranging double album with some lightweights on Side Three and one profoundly annoying novelty song – which happens to be the leadoff track and hit single. “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35,” man – it’s like if the Beatles decided to begin Revolver with “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” or “Hello Goodbye.” But it’s his greatest album anyway, creating a sustained 68-minute spell unlike any other listening experience in rock & roll. Hearing Blonde on Blonde puts you in the position of the night watchman who clicks his flashlight at all the losers and freaks and neon madmen and wonders if it’s him or them that’s insane. In these songs, it’s probably both”.

In 2021, Guitar.com argued for the genius of Blonde on Blonde. Not that you have to make much of an argument! It is undeniable the work of a poet in full flight at the top of his game. This music maestro and revolutionary was joined by a “cast of stellar session players and completed an imperial trilogy. For many fans, it’s the ultimate Dylan record”:

“Biographer Robert Shelton wrote that Blonde On Blonde starts with a joke and ends with a hymn. Accounts differ over the order in which the songs were recorded, but McCoy believes the majestic 11-minute album closer Sad-Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands, with its streetcar visions, Arabian drums and memories of Cannery Row, came first, in the early hours of 16 February 1966. “I was playing one-handed, looking at my watch,” recalled drummer Kenny Buttrey. “It kept on and on”. It was the longest pop song ever recorded, cut in a single take, and Dylan would later proclaim it “the best I’ve ever written”.

The February sessions also yielded Visions Of Johanna and Stuck Inside Of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again, which later featured on the soundtrack to Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas. Dylan returned to Tennessee in March, these sessions culminating in a party at which everyone was encouraged to “get stoned” before recording the opening Rainy Day Women #12 & 35. “He said ‘I’m not going to do this with a bunch of straight people. We’ll send out for something’,” recalled Moss in Howard Sounes’ Down The Highway biography. The musicians, high as kites, swapped instruments and Dylan demanded the sound of a marching band, with trombonist Wayne Butler called in. Recording kicked off at midnight, Henry Strzelecki laid on the floor pushing Kooper’s organ pedals and laughing maniacally.

Mississippi blues

Announcing the album with a wonky ode to getting high was textbook uncompromising Dylan, and despite its overt drug references, when released as a single it reached No. 2 in the Billboard chart. From there, Blonde On Blonde is a bluesy masterwork, refining the blueprint established on Highway 61 Revisited. Robertson is in incendiary form throughout. He remembers the Nasvhille musicians falling silent as Dylan handed him his first opportunity, on Obviously Five Believers. “Bob and I wailed like we were at a blues bar in Mississippi,” Robertson wrote in his biography Testimony. “My extreme bending and quivering of notes wasn’t in any of these guys’ arsenals, so I wasn’t taking anybody’s job.”

The slow-shuffling Pledging My Time nods to Robert Johnson’s Come On In My Kitchen, while Most Likely You Go Your Way (And I’ll Go Mine) recalls Buddy Holly’s It Doesn’t Matter Anymore. Visions Of Johanna, with its fine opening line of “ain’t it just like the night to play tricks when you’re trying to be so quiet?” is a stunning literary love song, Kennedy playing the lead on his ES-335. One Of Us Must Know is a classic fork-tongued Dylan apology, splashed with Kooper’s swirling organ playing and jubilant piano ornamentation, bettered by the sprightly and devotional I Want You, Moss’s Chet Atkins-style intro and lyrical phrases responding to Dylan’s yearning vocal. Robertson then returns with a stinging lead part on the Chicago blues Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat, captured at the 22nd attempt.

Just Like A Woman’s “fog, amphetamine and pearls” are widely believed to refer to Edie Sedgwick, Fourth Time Around with its elegant fingerpicking in drop C tuning, is Dylan’s response to The Beatles’ Norwegian Wood, before Robertson takes his bow on Obviously Five Believers and Dylan signs off with one of the most absorbing love songs he ever crafted – Sad-Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands, written for his wife Sara Lownds. Despite stretching to an hour and 12 minutes, there isn’t a weak song on Blonde On Blonde.

“Nobody has ever captured the sound of 3am better than that album,” said Kooper after the dust had settled. Crawdaddy! editor Paul Williams called Dylan a “1960s bard with electric lyre and colour slides”. Blonde On Blonde was high art, simultaneously surreal and achingly romantic, a towering landmark in the middle of pop’s greatest decade. It reached No. 9 in the US charts and No. 3 in the UK, silencing critics who’d demured at Dylan’s electric rebirth. Melody Maker’s review was surprisingly lukewarm, underplaying a “more than competent blues rock band” and a collection that “may not be as startling as The Freewheelin’ or Highway 61 Revisited”. By 1974, NME was placing the album second in its list of the greatest records ever made. Dylan scholar Tim Riley wrote in 1999: “A sprawling abstraction of eccentric blues revisionism, Blonde On Blonde confirms Dylan’s stature as the greatest American rock presence since Elvis.”

Dylan’s first Nashville record sent a trail of bands to record in a city hitherto overlooked by musicians from both coasts. He returned for the following year’s John Wesley Harding before closing the decade with Nashville Skyline, yet while it represented a beginning in one sense, Blonde On Blonde feels more like the end of an era. One month after its release came the mythologised motorcycle accident that saw Dylan withdraw from public life and embark on a new chapter”.

Prior to coming on to a couple of reviews for Blonde on Blonde, I will source Vanity Fair and their 2016 feature on Blonde on Blonde. If an album can be considered a work of literature. Dylan did win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2016. Just over fifty years after the release of one of his greatest display of poetic brilliance and why he is an untouchable wordsmith, could a single album be seen as a great work of literary? A case for Blonde on Blonde being this great '60s novel:

“Does Bob Dylan deserve the Nobel Prize in Literature? That’s a question some casual fans and detractors are asking now that the prize has been awarded to the 75-year-old singer, songwriter, tour-horse, author, broadcaster, and inveterate shape-shifter. Dylan’s oeuvre is vast—there are entire albums that even I, a fan well on the obsessive side of the scale, have never listened to in full—but pieces of it stand out as timeless monuments, however eager some may be to dismiss them as “dad rock.” And while his stark, haunting protest songs are what vaulted him into the uncomfortable role of “Voice of a Generation,” it’s the double album Blonde on Blonde, released in 1966, that provided the fullest indication yet of what an ambitious, unruly artist he truly was.

The album is a plea, a curse, and a benediction all wrapped in one. Affection, derision, worship, and betrayal all vie for the upper hand in one sonic and poetic masterpiece after another. Fifty years after its release, it’s still hard to figure out exactly what was eating Bob Dylan when he recorded Blonde on Blonde, but it’s not hard to see why it will be remembered as one of the greatest rock ’n’ roll albums of all time. Only a 24-year-old at the top of the world could sound this precocious, this romantic, this world-weary, this incorrigible.

When Dylan and his backing band, then known as the Hawks, convened in New York for the first recording session, he had just married the model Sara Lownds. Before decamping to Nashville for additional sessions, Dylan paused for the birth of his and Sara’s first child, Jesse. But Dylan’s fraught relationship and painfully awkward breakup with Joan Baez, who had vouched for him with the folk community and helped launch him to superstardom, was not far at all in the past, nor was his complicated friendship with the troubled Warhol acolyte Edie Sedgwick.

That jumble of relationships left a tangled imprint on the lyrics on Blonde on Blonde, which veer back and forth between loving and lacerating. We know (or think we know) that “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” is about Sara (because an enraged Dylan will later say as much in the lyrics to 1976’s “Sara”), but who is the object of, say, “I Want You”? Is it a love song to Sara, or a song of lust, consummated or otherwise, aimed at Edie—or someone else entirely? 

Dylan’s wild imagination only adds to the confusion. For every clear image drawn from real life, there are a dozen animated by silly word play, absurdist scenarios, and walk-on characters worthy of Cervantes and Chaucer—or, for that matter, Jack London and the hobo memoirist Jim Tully. Even “Visions of Johanna,” which begins with cinematic specificity inside a New York apartment with coughing heat pipes and country music on the radio, eventually erupts into a mad hallucination involving a peddler, a countess, a fiddler, and a fish truck. (Those shifts in perspective make “Visions of Johanna” one of Dylan’s most famously literary songs; chances are, the Nobel committee had it in mind, along with 1975’s “Tangled Up in Blue.”)

Still, even if much of this symbolism isn’t possible to fully pin down (despite the misguided efforts of countless “Dylanologists”), it’s easy enough to get a feel for what Dylan was struggling with. There is an emotional truth to these songs, even when the literal truth keeps scurrying around the corner before you can get a good look at it. “Pledging My Time” describes taking a chance on a new relationship, despite the knowledge that the odds are stacked against success. (“Somebody got lucky / But it was an accident.”) “Leopard Skin Pillbox Hat” is a parable of sexual betrayal. (“I don’t mind him cheatin’ on me / But I sure wish he’d take that off his head.”)

“Temporary Like Achilles” and “Absolutely Sweet Marie,” like “Maggie’s Farm” before them, are about being at the mercy of a much stronger woman. (“Is your heart made out of stone, or is it lime / Or is it just solid rock?”) “Fourth Time Around” is about tormenting such a woman through sheer stubborn lousy male behavior. (“I stood there and hummed / I tapped on her drum and asked her, ‘How come?’”)

Again and again, Dylan adds layer after layer of color, plot, and character without ever fully obscuring a song’s emotional meaning. You don’t quite know what he means when he says, “Now people just get uglier and I have no sense of time,” but there’s no mistaking the import of “Your debutante just knows what you need, but I know what you want.”

And then there are the songs where Dylan lets the dealer see his cards. “One of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later)” is both boorish and weirdly tender, depicting with unflinching frankness one of those lopsided relationships that bring nothing but misery to everyone involved. The narrator isn’t in love—far from it—but he wants the person whose heart he’s breaking to know that it’s not her fault. It’s not even personal. “I didn’t mean to make you so sad / You just happened to be there, that’s all.” He describes multiple misunderstandings, one of them leading to an unexpected argument: “An’ I told you, as you clawed out my eyes / That I never meant to do you any harm.” This is charmless but recognizable behavior—the kind that rarely shows up in poetry or Hollywood movies but occurs in real life more often than we’d like to admit.

“Most Likely You’ll Go Your Way and I’ll Go Mine” tells a similar story, except this time the narrator is the one who’s in too deep. After being jerked around one too many times, he’s finally cutting bait. “You say you got some other kind of lover / And yes, I believe you do / You say my kisses are not like his / But this time I’m not gonna tell you why that is / I’m just gonna let you pass.” This, too, will strike anyone who’s spent time on the dating circuit as an entirely familiar scenario: falling for the wrong person, getting sucked in by his or her games, then forcing yourself to quit chasing that person around despite the undeniable temptation. Is Edie the object of this song? That would be my guess, but it’s hard to know.

“Just Like a Woman” sometimes feels more like a generational critique (“Nobody feels any pain”) than a first-person tale of woe, but clearly it’s rooted in some deep romantic disappointment. “But when we meet again / Introduced as friends / Please don’t let on that you knew me when / I was hungry and it was your world”—is there any human over the age of 20 who can’t relate to those words? Those same words point to Joan Baez as the target of this tune—she was, after all, the world-famous folk singer who called a largely unknown Dylan onstage during her headlining performance at the Newport Folk Festival in 1963. And anyone who’s seen D.A. Pennebaker’s documentary Don’t Look Back and witnessed Baez’s quiet agony as Dylan passive-aggressively blows her off two years later can imagine him zapping her with those lines about aching just like a woman but breaking just like a little girl.

When Blonde on Blonde was released on vinyl, it became the first double album in rock ’n’ roll history. And the entire fourth side was dedicated to “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands,” a strangely mournful ode to Dylan’s new wife whose sheer duration surprised even the band. (“I mean, we peaked five minutes ago. Where do we go from here?” drummer Kenny Buttrey later remembered thinking.) Of all the songs on the album, this one hides its meaning most thoroughly, burying whatever real-world scenario that may have inspired it under an avalanche of hallucinogenic images, from “The kings of Tyrus with their convict list” to “Your sheet-metal memory of Cannery Row.” Even the chorus is willfully opaque: “My warehouse eyes, my Arabian drums / Should I leave them by your gate / Or, sad-eyed lady, should I wait?” It doesn’t have quite the same ring as the Clash’s “Should I stay or should I go?,” but after five or six repetitions, you start to understand what he means.

Writing for the aptly named Highbrow Magazine in 2012, Benjamin Wright cites the cultural critic Ellen Willis’s theory that Dylan’s operating principle is taken from the French symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud: “Je est un autre.” “I am another.” Dylan is constantly playing hide-and-seek with his own image, his own legend, the expectations he himself has set. It’s an emphatically literary way to approach writing and life. The poet William Butler Yeats espoused a “Doctrine of the Mask,” whereby a poem should project the opposite of the poet’s personality. The work is better that way, he believed, and he was probably right”.

It is worth finishing off with some reviews for this flawless album. The greatest double album ever? I would argue that it is Kate Bush’s Aerial (2005), though that might be biased! However, Bob Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde is a towering masterpiece that has lost none of its incredible power. I have used that sentence when speaking about a few albums. However, it is the best way to describe what I need to say. Boundless genius? Hard exactly to put into words, so do forgive me! It is hard to find that many critical reviews online for Blonde on Blonde. Ones that you can access and read! However, in 2015, In Review Online provided an interesting take on the magisterial Blonde on Blonde:

“The boozy, bloozy, cacophonous conclusion to Bob Dylan’s mid-60s “electric” trilogy, Blonde on Blonde feels every bit the culmination of…something. A wild fever dream of an album, owing as much to Fellini and T.S. Eliot as to Woody and Leadbelly, it’s the sound of Dylan’s imagination pushed to the edge, perhaps even to a breaking point. The record sounds so unencumbered, so liberated, so kinetic in its energy that it’s difficult to imagine how the man could have pushed this particular sound any further; better to leave everything he had on wax and then change directions completely for the follow-up, the spare and economical John Wesley Harding. But if Blonde on Blonde represents the end of something, it also stands very much as its own world of endless possibilities, each song representing a particular rabbit trail Bob might have followed. Taken together, these songs have an effect that is initially bewildering, ultimately intoxicating, and completely paradigm-shifting. Even following the course-altering creativity of Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited, Blonde on Blonde still shocks; still rocks and rolls with a swagger that sounds like it ought not be allowed; still feels, even after all these years, like Dylan’s getting away with something, and he knows it.

The record sounds so unencumbered, so liberated, so kinetic in its energy that it’s difficult to imagine how the man could have pushed this particular sound any further

Part of the shock comes from the sound of the record, which is thick and hazy, the edges blurring together; it has more heft to it than either of the previous albums, more density than anything Dylan ever made. Its density is not impenetrable, even if it is initially overwhelming, and — working largely with Nashville session cats, their professionalism grounding Dylan’s flights of fancy — the record shakes, swings, and rumbles with more verve and vigor than anything Dylan ever made. Its garage rock mayhem is rooted in country-blues but not particularly reverential to it. The songs perfect everything Dylan tried to do with his electric albums; they are elliptical but not elusive, open to interpretation but never aloof or alienating; no one but Bob could so handily channel universal experiences through such idiosyncratic imagery, such dense and layered poetry. “I Want You” is a blur of pictures, lovestruck and dizzy, but the chorus is simple and precise: “Honey, I want you.” The naked desire in its refrain is made all the more potent by the harried storytelling in the verses. “Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again” is a tipsy account of bewildered homesickness, evoking a disorientation that eludes linear description. You could almost imagine the song flying off the rails, were it not for the nimble, in-the-pocket rhythm section. “Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat” seethes and snarls with indignation, though the narrator sounds like he’s rather enjoying his own condescension, his anger turned to bemused pity. It’s not the only blues song here — “Pledging My Time” sounds like it just stomped out of the juke joint. There are quieter moments, too, but none are as simple as they first seem. “4th Time Around” is quiet but prickly; “Just Like a Woman” has been covered many times over, sometimes sounding romantic and sometimes sounding condescending, but Bob’s own reading is perfectly open-ended; and “Visions of Johanna” may be the album’s true masterpiece. The opening line is gloriously mysterious: “Ain’t it just like the night to play tricks when you’re trying to be so quiet?” Then for seven minutes the narrator rhapsodizes about the most wonderful-sounding woman, though if you’re really paying attention you’ll note that’s not even who he’s so crazy about. It’s still kind of amazing to hear him get away with it”.

I will end with this review from the BBC and their words about not only one of the best albums of the 1960s. There is a lot of weight behind the view that Blonde on Blonde is among the greatest ever released. Bob Dylan responsible for more than one album that you can say that of. His 1966 double album is hugely influential. One that cemented him as a cultural icon:

“The world is divided into those who think double albums are a really only single albums weighed down by too much filler and the over-indulgence of their creators, and those who treasure every minute, revering the range afforded by the extra space the format provides. As someone who has yet to hear a double album that couldn’t be trimmed to single figures, I confess a bias when it comes to Blonde On Blonde. Regularly spied in orbit around heavenly bodies such as Pet Sounds, Revolver in those stellar “best album ever” lists, side one is a golden run of songs that are about as perfect as you could want.

Even a cursory glance at the highlights would be enough to confirm this first disc’s classic status: the rambunctious stomp of “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35”, the shrill punctuation of Dylan’s harp on the surly rant of “Pledging My Time”, a riotous neck-wrung blues soloing on “Leopard Skin Pill-Box Hat”, opulent, elegiac verses on “Visions Of Johanna”, the popish affectations and beautiful detail of “I Want You” and “Just Like A Woman.”

Consolidating what he’d begun on Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited, the recording of Blonde On Blonde was part of an intense, fertile outpouring for Dylan. One can understand why Dylan and producer Bob Johnston were keen to present as much of it as they could. As a result however, the taut energy of the first disc become somewhat elasticised across the second, “Sad Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands”, whose eleven minute length even caught the backing musicians by surprise, being the chief culprit. Of course one person’s prolix poetry is another’s visionary epic.

One point which both sceptics and believers can all agree on however is the extent to which Dylan is utterly at ease with himself here. Credit also, should go to the crew backing him up. And if their backing is at times a little hurried or patchy, the improvisatory nature of their trying to keep up with the man at the microphone is also a part of this album’s overall charm”.

20th June marks sixty years of Blonde on Blonde. Almost like this great work of literature, you are immersed and invested in this phenomenal album. I can only imagine what those people who bought the album in 1966 thought! Knowing the lyrical wonder of Bob Dylan, it ascended to new heights on Blonde on Blonde. In a year that produced a few all-time works of genius. Blonde on Blonde possibly the...

FINEST of them all.

FEATURE: Flyin’ High (In the Friendly Sky): Marvin Gaye's What's Going On at Fifty-Five

FEATURE:

 

 

Flyin’ High (In the Friendly Sky)

Marvin Gaye's What's Going On at Fifty-Five

__________

MAYBE people don’t feel…

that Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On is a concept album. The narrative is told from the point of view of a Vietnam veteran returning to his home country to witness hatred, suffering, and injustice. It is staggering to think the Vietnam War lasted for twenty years. Running from 1955-1977, it must have been such a frightening time in history. Pitting North Vietnam (backed by communist allies) against South Vietnam (backed by the U.S. and allies), the conflict ended with the fall of Saigon. Around the time of the release of What’s Going On, hatred, racism and violence in the U.S. A turbulent time abroad and at home, Marvin Gaye asking for peace and understanding. Gaye also talking about the destruction of the environment too. An album with a social and moral compass that is striking and relevant today, What’s Going On is one of the most important albums ever released. People talk about What’s Going On, Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology) and Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler), yet I don’t think we discuss Flyin' High (In the Friendly Sky), Right On or Wholy Holy. Such deep and thought-provoking songs. Moving and extraordinary powerful, I wants to mark fifty-five years of What’s Going On. Released on 21st May, 1971, this landmark recording should be taught in classes. Marvin Gaye raises awareness of the climate energy. Drug abuse, racism, prejudice and corruption, What’s Going On, sadly, applies a lot to modern-day America. Wars and violence raging. A dictatorship and terrorist, Gaye would have been eighty-seven if he had lived. He sadly died in 1984. What is the impact of the genius What’s Going On? In a post-pandemic world where there is a monster in the U.S., murder in the streets and inept governments around the world, it is debatable What’s Going On is more appropriate and timely than it was in 1971. Steve Pafford addressed and assessed What’s Going On earlier this year:

“It goes without saying that Gaye’s social consciousness should not be downplayed, either; it should, in fact, be celebrated, for its relative novelty at the time and for the musical skill with which he advanced it. What’s Going On was the first long-player after Sly And The Family Stone’s Stand! to attempt to challenge and illuminate the political mood of the era.

And a disturbing update on the state of things as it was. The candid blend of sorrow and awareness of injustice gave the set an invigorating sense of immediacy. But coming as it did a few long hard years after the ‘love’ movement had peaked and deflated in the face of ongoing indifference and hostility, it has an understandably mournful tone.

One gets the overriding sense that a spirit as seemingly resilient as a cash-cow “celebrity” like Marvin Gaye’s can crumble in the face of encroaching urban despair. But it would be a mistake to interpret What’s Going On as simply an angry cry from the inner city. It is that, aye, but also much more: a truly heartfelt cry for compassion, for sympathy, for common understanding, and, above all, for love. Indeed, it’s all over the album, kicking off on the immortal title track, where Gaye practically begs, “We have got to find a way/to bring some loving here today.”

The soldier, struggling to find work for himself, nonetheless finds time to look at the chaos around him and ask, “When will people start getting together again?” As the world has weathered isolation, inequality and endless political protest, it’s a question that feels enormously resonant right now.

Marvin may have departed to that great Hitsville in the sky, but What’s Going On has only gained in stature since its release, and remains largely untouched in the canon of great pop landmarks. When Rolling Stone asked “271 artists, producers, industry executives and journalists to pick the greatest albums of all time” in 2003, What’s Going On landed at number six, making it the only entry by an African-American artist to crack the top ten. Then in 2020 the same magazine declared What’s Going On was actually the best album of all time. Of course, rankings are entirely subjective but it’s hard to deny its immense lyrical and musical merit, not to mention its constant political and cultural relevance.

And guess what? America is still in a hard place, as is the world. It can often seem crass, cruel and pitiless, and much of our struggles seem to have arisen from the feeling that too few of Marvin Gaye’s concerns have been addressed in 55 years. We could use some of the things he called for today. With a little luck, and a little lurve, maybe the Master could still help us get through to better things to come”.

I am ending with reviews for What’s Going On. The first feature talked about the modern relevance of What’s Going On. In terms of its political and social messages, it was so urgent and eye-opening in 1971. However, have we learned lessons from what Marvin Gaye was singing about?! If anything, we have gone backwards. Not only was Gaye innovating in terms of his lyrics and the power of is vocals. What’s Going On changed the face of R&B, as Variety wrote in 2021:

“At the beginning of the 1970s, mainstream Black music was a massive singles scene. A handful of Motown acts, including the Supremes and the Temptations, had managed to score Top 10 albums during the ‘60s, but with the exception of Aretha Franklin’s Atlantic Records releases post-“Respect” and Ray Charles’ run of early ‘60s hits on ABC, Black artists weren’t typically creating classic album-length artistic statements on par with The Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” and Bob Dylan’s “Blonde on Blonde.”

Then along came Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On,” a 1971 game-changer that turns 50 on May 21. It would become the first Top 10 LP for Gaye, a major recording artist who’d had many hit singles but hadn’t reached higher than number 33 on the Top 200 album chart. In one fell swoop, it completed his transition from Motown heartthrob to the poet of soul music while helping to reshape the entire genre. The album was unlike anything previously released by a Black superstar: Written and produced by Gaye (a first for any Motown artist not named Smokey Robinson) and clocking in at just over 35 minutes, it secured his spot as one of music’s leading Black auteurs of the decade.

He wasn’t the first Black artist to produce challenging music after assuming complete creative control — James Brown had done it and so had former Impressions leader Curtis Mayfield — but Gaye, who butted heads hard with Motown in order to pursue a new artistic direction (he was signed to the Motown imprint Tamla), was the first to do it with such a thematically and musically cohesive statement. The nine tracks on “What’s Going On” are connected without pauses, like a stream-of-consciousness contemplation. These aren’t catchy three-minute pop confections but rather, songs with the musical sophistication of a classical suite, featuring strings, woodwinds, lyrical and musical motifs, and experimental production that blended psychedelic soul with a Phil Spector-ish wall of sound.

Inspired by social unrest in the U.S. and his brother’s three-year stint fighting in Vietnam, “What’s Going On” — whose title is a pointed statement, not a question — wasn’t just a smooth soul crooner arbitrarily taking a sharp left turn into social consciousness. If he had wanted to, Gaye probably could have spent years coasting on the 1968 success of “I Heard It Through the Grapevine,” a chart-topping smash that, at one point, was Motown’s best-selling single of all time. That probably would have helped Motown head Berry Gordy, who has said that he was “terrified” when Gaye first said he wanted to make a “protest album,” sleep easier at night.

But instead of caving to creative expectations, Gaye decided to challenge himself and his audience by embarking on a stunning music reinvention that rivaled what The Beatles had done a half-decade earlier with “Rubber Soul.” Gaye, who had once harbored aspirations to be the Black Frank Sinatra, thoroughly transformed his sound and image, creating a new chameleonic musical persona that would carry him through the ‘70s. From “What’s Going On” to “Let’s Get It On” to “I Want You” to “Here, My Dear,” no Gaye album would sound quite like the one that preceded it.

In addition to repositioning and rebranding Gaye decades before “rebranding” became a thing, “What’s Going On” blended the political and the religious in a way no singer had managed to do since Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come” seven years earlier. Looking both inward and outward, Gaye ventured into areas like social justice, environmental awareness, drug addiction, war, and faith. The singles “What’s Going On,” “Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler),” and “Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology)” all went Top 10, while “Wholy Holy,” became an enduring inspirational classic. Aretha Franklin covered it the following year on her landmark gospel album “Amazing Grace,” and one week before the 50th birthday of “What’s Going On,” “Wholy Holy” turned up in the third episode of “Moonlight” director Barry Jenkins’ new Amazon Prime miniseries “The Underground Railroad.”

“What’s Going On” wasn’t just a singular artistic achievement; it opened up other Black artists (and some White ones) to new creative possibilities. Later the same year, Isaac Hayes dropped “Black Moses” and Sly and the Family Stone released their own most-enduring musical statement, “There’s a Riot Goin’ On,” an album whose title was directly inspired by “What’s Going On.” John Lennon recorded “Imagine” about a week after the release of “What’s Going On,” and although the former Beatle had already been tackling political themes in his solo work, it’s easy to imagine him being influenced and inspired by Gaye’s foray into social consciousness”.

Of course, there was a lot of examination of What’s Going On in 2021, on its fiftieth anniversary. Every time we mark a big anniversary for this album, we talk about the brilliance of the music, but also how we should have addressed concerns Marvin Gaye tackled. He meant every word on that album and you could tell how angry he was. Why, fifty-five years after its release, have we learned so little from this opus?! We do need to look around and ask why such senselessness and ignorance rules the world. How we need to overturn and overthrow. However, as he preaches non-violence, how easy is it to quickly change the system and the modern world without violence? Are we always doomed to repeat the mistakes of history? What’s Going On will teach generations of where we were and how things need to change. The Guardian also noted how this masterpiece cuts as hard today as it did when it was released:

“No one is wrong, of course, to say that Gaye’s album cuts as deeply today as it did in 1971. A divinely inspired work driven by social rage – one that braided doo-wop harmonies, jazz and the hymns Gaye had loved as a child – What’s Going On was also Gaye’s declaration of creative independence from Berry Gordy’s Motown machine. After a decade of polished pop hits, Gaye, now in his early 30s, revealed there was a lot on his mind: the outrage of the war in Vietnam (What’s Happening Brother?); the strangulation of the natural world (Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology)); the strategic enforcement of urban poverty and police violence (Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler)). The insurgent subject matter was accompanied by a change in Gaye’s personal style: he stopped wearing ties and grew a beard. “Black men weren’t supposed to look overtly masculine,” he told his biographer David Ritz: “I’d spent my entire career looking harmless, and the look no longer fit. I wasn’t harmless. I was pissed at America.”

What’s Going On remains vital, above all, for how it turns away from that “America” and instead addresses the title question to a closer-knit group – those people gathered at the house party Gaye stages in the album’s opening moments; the “mother, mother” and “father father” he calls out to (and that the party setting might embolden him to candidly address). “Are things getting better like the newspapers say?” the speaker asks in What’s Happening Brother?, checking the claims of those in power against the authority of everyday Black people.

It is one thing to celebrate Gaye’s enduring and prescient mode of creation; another to applaud the continued resonance of his album’s concerns. We should not be sanguine, for instance, that Gaye’s understated blues critique of “trigger-happy policing” has stayed so relevant; or that anti-Black violence has so persisted over the last 50 years that it remains necessary for Black artists and everyday people to approach the task of surviving and thriving in America with the energy, elegance and grace that Gaye modelled in this landmark work. He might have hoped it would be more occasional, that his efforts might by now appear more dated. This, in any case, is the impression I get when watching Gaye introduce the title track at the Montreux jazz festival in the summer of 1980. Maybe he was tired – it was the last song of a long set – but the 40-year-old Gaye, in his frilled white shirt and sequinned red suit jacket, appears to not just work the crowd but pander to it with some contempt: “This was our very first No 1 record ever in the world, ladies and gentlemen. We were so proud. Thanks to you – you made it so. Hope you still enjoy it!”

He would be dead just four years later, shot by his own father in his parents’ house in Los Angeles. In the decades since, Black artists have continued to treat the lasting relevance of What’s Going On as both problem and promise. “I’m tired of Marvin askin’ me what’s going on,” Janelle Monáe sings in her 2013 track QUEEN.

This is precisely the kind of galvanising work that Gaye was doing with What’s Going On, for his own people in his own time – a historical point that is often obscured when we fixate on the record’s timelessness. Gaye’s critique of the Vietnam war, for example, which was informed by his brother Frankie’s experiences of the conflict, was disarmingly distinctive. So, too, was Gaye’s growing maturity, in which Black fans heard both his commitment to Black life and their own potential. “Beyond the brilliance of the string arrangements and the improvised basslines by James Jamerson, he was making power moves to give us what we needed,” music historian Rickey Vincent recently told me. “It was motivation music. Because we could tell Marvin was motivated.”

Vincent sees Gaye’s actions as “the driving force” behind Stevie Wonder’s political turn at Motown, as well as the rigorous funk of Sly and the Family Stone and the righteous soul of Aretha Franklin’s 1972 album Young, Gifted and Black. These stars, along with countless session musicians, were “doing their best work ever at this crucial moment in time” – setting the standard, in the case of Gaye and his collaborator David Van De Pitte’s meticulous string, conga, bass and vocal arrangements – for what Vincent calls “soul music as high art”.

To be sure, What’s Going On is an impeccably composed suite. Sonic recurrences are choreographed across the course of the LP: “What’s happening, brother?” one man asks another in the opening moments – a query that becomes the title of the next track, where the first song’s background harmony emerges as the foreground melody. But there is also a sense in which the sounds remain jarring and strange. So-called “timely” music often arrives before you know you need it, and is in that sense quite untimely: outrageous, out of joint, ill-fitting. Listen to how Gaye cranks the volume back up just as the title track starts to fade out – a sign of resilience as well as a petty refusal to let a track that Gordy hated end without a fight. Or how one man in the opening party scene greets another and then asks, “What’s your name?” Here is a conviviality you make just by showing up, where you don’t have to know someone to be glad they came.

What I listen for now are moments like these, which, despite repeated plays, cover versions and samples of Gaye’s songs, still sound discordant and unresolved. There are the searching chromatics of Save the Children: “Live life for the children! (oh, for the children),” Gaye sings, making his way up a haunting and halting musical scale, as if toward a future just out of reach. In this portion of the record, timing and melody come unmoored, as Gaye makes room for hard, even despairing questions: is it possible to “save a world that is destined to die?”.

Prior to getting to a couple of reviews, I did want to get to a 1971 interview between Marvin Gaye and Phil Symes from Disc and Music Echo. It ends on a sad note. Marvin Gaye told how he would not work with female singers again as he was so affected by the death of Tammi Terrell (she died in 1970 at the age of twenty-four). Gaye ended by saying, “But I won't be doing any more interviews”:

“Disc called Gaye's Detroit home, caught him halfway through a hamburger and a new song, and he agreed to break his lengthy silence to talk about his career, which is on the up again following the success of What's Going On. He quashed rumours that he'd quit, explained why he's been hiding out for three years, and what he's been doing.

"It wasn't a case of being big-headed or temperamental that kept me from doing interviews during the last three years. I was terribly disillusioned with a lot of things in life and life in general, and decided to take time out to try to do something about it.

"In a sense the rumours suggesting I had quit were true; I had retired, but only from the personal-appearance end. I did that because I had always felt conspicuous onstage and I'm not the sort of person who likes to be an exhibitionist.

"I spent the three years writing, producing and reflecting. Reflecting upon life and upon America especially – because that's where I live – its injustices, its evils and its goods.

"Not that I'm a radical – I think of myself as a very middle-of-the-road sort of person with a good sense of judgment. I think if I had to choose another profession I'd like to be a judge because I'm very capable of determining what's right and what's not."

The main result of his period of semi-retirement was the single What's Going On and an album of the same title.

"The album and single show the sort of emotion and personal feelings I have about the situations in America and the world. I think I've got a real love thing going. I love people, I love life and I love nature and I can't see why other people can't be like that.

"I can remember as a child I always kept myself to myself and I always dug nature. I used to fool around with worms, beetles and birds, and I used to admire them while the other kids were playing sports. It was like some strange force made me more aware of nature. Those kids playing sports were also showing love – love for sport. And if we could integrate all types of love into one sphere we'd have it made."

Marvin's genuine love for his fellow man was the reason behind his recording of Abraham, Martin And John, which was a British hit last July. So totally uninvolved with the music scene is Marvin that he didn't even know until Disc told him during this conversation that Abraham, Martin And John had been a single here, let alone a hit!

"The people over there dug that? Hey man, I didn't know that. I'm glad because I really dig it over in Britain. The last time I was there was five, maybe six years ago and my visit was probably one of the more memorable experiences of my life. I love Britain.

"Nobody told me that song was a hit. And I don't go around seeking out news like that; I don't get the charts or anything. To me it's so commercialised and that's not where my head is. It doesn't matter to me whether people dig my stuff or not."

However, despite that statement he does have positive feelings about the recent American success of What's Going On.

"I feel very good about it. I wasn't sure what would happen to it. But I don't feel good for myself – I didn't have much to do with the song; I feel it all came from God. He drew me into it."

He speaks of his new album in the same way – "I musn't get into ego tripping, because I didn't have much to do with it. But I'm only human and when you get a lot of pats on the back for something it makes you go on trips. I was only the instrument in the album – all the inspiration came from God himself. It's one that should be listened to.

"The material is social commentary but there's nothing extreme on it. I did it not only to help humanity but to help me as well, and I think it has. It's given me a certain amount of peace."

Following his return to the charts, Marvin has been forced to think again about his retirement from personal appearances, but he's resolute and won't appear on stage again – in America.

"But I'd certainly consider a European tour. I'd love to come back some day and say hi to the people, see the country and groove there. It's been a long time and I'm beginning to feel like an old man. I feel that people in Europe are different from Americans – I think your soul is a little deeper. What a helluva thing I'm saying! There you seem to understand my blackness, my forcefulness and my earthiness. I feel you understand and I get the vibration that you care a little more."

Marvin approaches his career with a disarming take-it-or-leave-it attitude. He will admit he only released What's Going On because "there seemed to be nothing else to do. My life, destiny and fate weren't pointing in any direction, so I thought maybe that would bring it all together a little more."

He has no plans for the future – "I don't have any plans at all. I never plan anything. I never have and I never will”.

The fact that some of that disillusion and influence On What’s Going On stemmed from Terrell's death. How Marvin Gaye never got over it. The first review I want to bring in is AllMusic and their high praise. I wonder whether an artist who would ever release an album like this today. You feel like this is a gap in music. Soul, R&B and Rap artists not tackling these themes as much as they should:

“What's Going On is not only Marvin Gaye's masterpiece, it's the most important and passionate record to come out of soul music, delivered by one of its finest voices, a man finally free to speak his mind and so move from R&B sex symbol to true recording artist. With What's Going On, Gaye meditated on what had happened to the American dream of the past -- as it related to urban decay, environmental woes, military turbulence, police brutality, unemployment, and poverty. These feelings had been bubbling up between 1967 and 1970, during which he felt increasingly caged by Motown's behind-the-times hit machine and restrained from expressing himself seriously through his music. Finally, late in 1970, Gaye decided to record a song that the Four Tops' Obie Benson had brought him, "What's Going On." When Berry Gordy decided not to issue the single, deeming it uncommercial, Gaye refused to record any more material until he relented. Confirmed by its tremendous commercial success in January 1971, he recorded the rest of the album over ten days in March, and Motown released it in late May. Besides cementing Marvin Gaye as one of the most important artists in pop music, What's Going On was far and away the best full-length to issue from the singles-dominated Motown factory, and arguably the best soul album of all time.

Conceived as a statement from the viewpoint of a Vietnam veteran (Gaye's brother Frankie had returned from a three-year hitch in 1967), What's Going On isn't just the question of a baffled soldier returning home to a strange place, but a promise that listeners would be informed by what they heard (that missing question mark in the title certainly wasn't a typo). Instead of releasing listeners from their troubles, as so many of his singles had in the past, Gaye used the album to reflect on the climate of the early '70s, rife with civil unrest, drug abuse, abandoned children, and the spectre of riots in the near past. Alternately depressed and hopeful, angry and jubilant, Gaye saved the most sublime, deeply inspired performances of his career for "Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology)," "Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler)," and "Save the Children." The songs and performances, however, furnished only half of a revolution; little could've been accomplished with the Motown sound of previous Marvin Gaye hits like "Stubborn Kind of Fellow" and "Hitch Hike" or even "I Heard It Through the Grapevine." What's Going On, as he conceived and produced it, was like no other record heard before it: languid, dark, and jazzy, a series of relaxed grooves with a heavy bottom, filled by thick basslines along with bongos, conga, and other percussion. Fortunately, this aesthetic fit in perfectly with the style of longtime Motown session men like bassist James Jamerson and guitarist Joe Messina. When the Funk Brothers were, for once, allowed the opportunity to work in relaxed, open proceedings, they produced the best work of their careers (and indeed, they recognized its importance before any of the Motown executives). Bob Babbitt's playing on "Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler)" functions as the low-end foundation but also its melodic hook, while an improvisatory jam by Eli Fountain on alto sax furnished the album's opening flourish. (Much credit goes to Gaye himself for seizing on these often tossed-off lines as precious; indeed, he spent more time down in the Snakepit than he did in the control room.) Just as he'd hoped it would be, What's Going On was Marvin Gaye's masterwork, the most perfect expression of an artist's hope, anger, and concern ever recorded”.

I am going to finish with Uncut. In 2021, they reviewed a fiftieth anniversary vinyl reissue of What’s Going On. The only thing that doesn’t change is the lack of change. That is the most sobering, angering and baffling aspect. How we react to an album like this but those in power do not take stock and rethink. The world goes on as it always has. Music does have the power to change things, though perhaps not as big as violence, corruption and abuse. The men in power putting their own desires, ego and aims above the people they serve:

“The urgency of that deadline feeds into the record. The album plays like a deep dive into the themes of the title track, mining Gaye’s malaise. It glides from beginning to end. It grooves. Arguing for its significance, the critic Nelson George compared it to Sgt Pepper, but that is more a matter of canonical significance than musical style. The Beatles never approached the intense spirituality achieved by Gaye on What’s Going On.

The flow of the album also disguises its extremities. The conversational call and response of “Save The Children” is gently rendered. The singer sounds almost defeated, until strings and sax usher in his cries of “Save the babies!/Save the babies!” Such is the mesmeric quality of the music that the apocalyptic tone of the lyrics seems incidental, but Gaye is mired in biblical pestilence. “There’ll come a time when the world won’t be singing,” he croons, “flowers won’t grow… bells won’t be ringing”.

Without Gaye’s vocal command, such sentiments might sound cranky, but relief comes quickly in “God Is Love”. The album returns to earth with “Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology)”, a solo composition by Gaye which describes a world of polluted air and poisoned seas, of overpopulation and radiation. Musically the celestial sweetness is foregrounded, while the turbulence of the saxophones offers a disturbing undertone, and the song ends with a psychedelic whimper. “Right On” takes the mood forward, though its roll call of contradictions (peace versus hatred, “enjoying ourselves” versus drowning in “the sea of happiness”) is given full expression before Gaye offers resolution with a vision of pure love which is, by the sound of his voice, both a sexual and an ecumenical matter. The album closes with the sublime “Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler)” with lyrics about the “have-nots” written by James Nyx, who also worked as a janitor in Motown’s offices. Nyx was inspired by a newspaper headline about the troubles of inner city Detroit, and when paired with Gaye’s sublime melody the song offers some relief in its crisp expression of political grievance, before giving way to a final reprise of the title track.

As an LP, What’s Going On is perfect. It is both sublimely mellow and full of jagged extremes. The urge to pull it apart and appreciate the mechanics of its peculiar subtleties is understandable. This vinyl edition adds an extra LP: a side of mono singles and B-sides, and four bonus tracks, three of which offer different mixes of “What’s Going On”. There is an unplugged intimacy when the horns and strings are removed, but when Gaye’s voice is absent, so is the song’s soul. The ‘stripped’ version of the song is previously unreleased and sits alongside “Symphony (Demo)” as a means of scratching into the lush surface of Gaye’s masterpiece. Reduced to a voice and the minimum of finger-snapping percussion, the religiosity of the singing is clear. Instructive as it is, ultimately the track is no more than half of a sandwich. “Symphony” appeared on the deluxe version of Let’s Get It On, but the improvised lyrics find Gaye still under the spell of What’s Going On. There is no great harm in these small acts of vandalism, but the adding and subtracting doesn’t achieve a great deal precisely because the original album is a carefully constructed collage of contradictions. The personal is political, the sense of history is eternal, Gaye’s analysis of world affairs is as depressing as his prescription is uplifting. Nothing has changed. Everything is the same, especially the need for change”.

It is so sort of strange celebrating an album like What’s Going On. It almost seems like a betrayal! Marvin Gaye wanted change and the world to take notice. However, fifty-five years after his eleventh studio album was released, what have we actually achieved? The same things he was crying out for us to stop are still going on. If ordinary people have absorbed his messages, those in power clearly have not. This far after 1971, you wonder whether they…

EVER will.