FEATURE: Kate Bush: Something Like a Song: Warm and Soothing (B-Side of December Will Be Magic Again)

FEATURE:

 

 

Kate Bush: Something Like a Song

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1979

Warm and Soothing (B-Side of December Will Be Magic Again)

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THIS is a Kate Bush track…

IN THIS PHOTO: Abbey Road Studio 2/PHOTO CREDIT: tagvenue

I am highlighting for a couple of reasons. It was the B-side of Bush’s 1980 Christmas single, December Will Be Magic Again. Recorded in 1979 at Abbey Road Studios, as we are nearing Christmas, it made me think of the B-side of December Will Be Magic Again: the wonderful and undervalued Warm and Soothing. Also, Abbey Road Studios celebrated its ninety-fifth birthday on 12th November. Kate Bush recorded and worked out of the studios a lot through her career. She may well still use the studios. Warm and Soothing is significant, as it was the first song that she recorded and worked on there. It did feature on the 2019 compilation from Kate Bush, The Other Sides, though that album is not available on streaming services. Whilst she may have dismissed it as a demo-quality off-cut or something that was basically laid down to test the equipment and space, it has grown in relevance and stature since 1979. I want to come to a recent article from Spectrum Culture. I have been keeping abreast of their rundown of every Kate Bush song. They were highlighting some of the songs a bit lower down the list. Not Bush’s least essential songs, but not ones that are her very best. Warm and Soothing given a rare nod. Before that, here is what Bush said about Warm and Soothing when speaking with Peter Swales in 1985: “’Warm And Soothing’ was a demo-tape which we did basically just to see what Abbey Road sounded like. We wanted to work there, and we went into Studio Two, and really the only way we could tell if it was going to sound good was if I went and did a piano vocal. So I did, and it sounded great”. Reading the lyrics, and you get this sense of it being an old Jazz number. Sung in a smoky or seductive way. A song maybe someone like Nina Simone or Billie Holiday could have performed. I think Bush’s mention of the word ‘great’ refers to the sound and acoustics of Abbey Road Studio 2 rather than Warm and Soothing. However, there is so much to explore with this song.

Amazing to think that this song was recorded more or less right alongside December Will Be Magic Again. The songs are so different. I love the images Kate Bush paints on Warm and Soothing: “Abrupt, too moody/You making our party list/I remember sulking/On the sofa/For most of the winter/We were strangers”. How the song turns into this idea of being old and trapped in a relationship. Not that warm or soothing. Though it begins with memories of home and childhood that does the title justice: “Warm and soothing/That’s how I remember home/Walking into arms/Through the back door/Hearing voices I know well/And long for”. I was pleased that Spectrum Culture recently looked at Warm and Soothing. Declaring it 112 when ranking Bush’s songs, this is what they said:

“There’s not much to “Warm and Soothing,” a spare piano ballad and demo-dweller that Bush supposedly set to tape in order to test out the room sound of Abbey Road, where she was recording her third album, Never for Ever. Just Bush and a piano, it begins with a piercing two-note alternation on the high keys and Bush indulging in some basic nostalgia: “Warm and soothing/ That’s how I remember home.” It would seem to pair naturally with its A-side, the likewise ambiguously wholesome “December Will Be Magic Again,” with visions of an idyllic childhood refuge just a-poppin’ up in the singer’s memory. But the harmonies and melody never settle into the simple joys that Bush describes, instead slipping between keening clarity and cloudy, minor-key complications. So it’s no surprise when the lyrics alter course as well, with Bush moving from the comfort of the past to a present that’s decidedly less reassuring and unquestionably more despondent: “Cold and boozy/ Our holiday in the Alps/ Sitting in the lobby, mostly smoking/ choking in the woozy afternoon.” Bush then lurches from forlorn piano ballad to cocky drinking anthem in the chorus, declaring “I’m reeling in the music/ But I’ve only had a few” in a savory purr. While a full-album version might have leaned too hard into the cabaret element, this stripped-down, off-the-cuff presentation suits the song’s gentle whiplash perfectly—it’s a shame that the next line, “I’m afraid at the way we grow old,” feels like stock filler, as does the turn to dramatic Elton John-style phrasing. Still, for what is essentially a tossed-off test run, “Warm and Soothing” has a tense electricity that points both to Bush’s natural musical gifts and her growing command of craft. – Reed Jackson”.

I would have actually loved to have seen Warm and Soothing appear on an album. I guess it would have been out of place on 1980’s Never for Ever. Yet, it would have emboldened her sound and would have been an intriguing listen. The song that we do hear is pretty amazing. Even if it was seen as nothing more than a way to see what Abbey Road Studio 2 sounded like, I do feel that we need to shine more light on it. As Abbey Road Studios turned ninety-five, it made me think of Bush’s first moment there. Well, the first time she laid down a song there. It was a big moment for her. If Warm and Soothing is a curio that has not had much life beyond its B-side status, I do think it is an interesting comparison to her Christmas single. This is what Dreams of Orgonon wrote in 2019: “The trite-and-true model of Bush playing her piano without a backing band or further instrumentation was a solid testing ground for recording at Abbey Road. Bush sounds at ease singing a fairly standard song of hers about the warmth of her old home vanishing into past as she returns to it, poor memories returning and getting buried under unpleasant new ones. “And I’m afraid by the way we grow old, darling,” says Bush. The further away she gets from her childhood in East Wickham, the most anxious her music gets. As the world moves forward, so does she. Nostalgia is a poison, but sometimes a revelatory one”. Similar to December Will Be Magic Again, you can hear the song on YouTube, though it would be great to see it on streaming services. Warm and Soothing might be seen as disposable or average. Yet I feel that it is very important and has its place. I am not sure if it has ever been played on the radio. We definitely need to…

HEAR it more often.

FEATURE: Kate Bush: The Tour of Life: The Divine and Beautiful A Coral Room

FEATURE:

 

 

Kate Bush: The Tour of Life

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

The Divine and Beautiful A Coral Room

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I have written about…

this song from Aerial before. Kate Bush’s 2005 double album, I am compelled to revisit the track as I have been reading Tom Doyle’s Running Up That Hill: 50 Visions of Kate Bush. It is a perfect Christmas gift for the Kate Bush fan in your life. There is a section on A Coral Room, so it gives me an excuse to write about it once more. People do discuss Aerial, though it is one of those albums that is not as exposed and investigated as others from Kate Bush. If we think of Aerial being this epic and sweeping album with lots of layers and all these musicians coming together, there are moments that are quite sparse or more stripped. I think Hounds of Love has more in the way of consistent layers. Not too many songs that are bare. I guess And Dream of Sheep and Mother Stands for Comfort, though this is an album where most of the songs have a lot of detail and are cinematic. Aerial is cinematic too, yet there are these songs that are perhaps less busy or dense as some on Hounds of Love. Mrs. Bartolozzi is Bush at the piano. It does feel like a live recording in a way. Although Michael Wood provides a solo vocal on A Coral Room, for the most part, it is Kate Bush and the piano. I love how we have songs like this that sit alongside these fuller epics such as Aerial, Nocturn, or even How to Be Invisible. The more I think of Aerial, the more I notice how it is this album that is huge and expansive, and yet quite a few songs are impactful and huge because of the power of the vocal and piano, rather than there being a lot of instrumental elements. Such is the case with A Coral Room. Tom Doyle writes in his book how some of Bush’s greatest recordings were completed in a single take. Wuthering Heights – her 1978 debut single – among them. A Coral Room is another. Before moving on, I am turning to the Kate Bush Encyclopedia and interview archive where Kate Bush talked about A Coral Room:

“There was a little brown jug actually, yeah. The song is really about the passing of time. I like the idea of coming from this big expansive, outside world of sea and cities into, again, this very small space where, er, it’s talking about a memory of my mother and this little brown jug. I always remember hearing years ago this thing about a sort of Zen approach to life, where, you would hold something in your hand, knowing that, at some point, it would break, it would no longer be there.

Front Row, BBC4, 4 November 2005”.

As Tom Doyle notes, A Coral Room was a track Bush almost didn’t release and include on Aerial, as she felt it too personal. Those without intimate knowledge of Aerial will not necessarily understand the significance of A Coral Room. So little written about this song. Even if there are bigger ideas and non-personal themes explores, Bush’s late mother is at the heart. Hannah Bush died in 1992. Even so, over a decade after her death, Kate Bush very much had her in her heart. I think Aerial signalled a return to how Bush used to work early in her career. Rather than build tracks from beats and keyboards and sort of layering as she goes, a lot of Aerial was Bush working alone at the piano. I think Aerial is very much one of Bush’s most intimate and personal albums. I have said before how family past and present are featured through Aerial. Bush’s then-young son Bertie the focus of more than one song. You do get a sense of the past affecting some of the musical moments. In the same way Bush sung about her mother on The Red Shoes’ Moments of Pleasure, at a time when she was ill and would not live too much longer, on A Coral Room, there is this sense of immersing herself in her childhood home. I have stood outside of East Wickham Farm more than once. Where Bush lived as a child. A Coral Room seems to place itself back there, maybe in the 1960s, when Kate Bush was very young. She would have been referred to as Cathy or Catherine then. I can understand why Bush was a little hesitant about putting A Coral Room out into the world. Warm and Soothing, as Doyle writes, is another song that is set at East Wickham Farm. That is the B-side of her 1980 Christmas single, December Will Be Magic Again. Unintentionally, as Bush told Doyle when he interviewed her in 2005, featuring similar scenes in both songs was by accident. A Coral Room’s larger theme and vision is about a cataclysmic event. A submerged city. A vision of the world centuries on. It makes me think of the cover of Donald Fagen’s 2012 album, Sunken Condos. Submerged houses. Kate Bush is a fan of Steely Dan, Fagen’s band, so maybe that is why I connect the two.

Tom Doyle writes how A Coral Room is a sequel to Moments of Pleasure. That song is lush and orchestral. It is this stirring and grand song that remembers a lot of Bush’s friends and collaborators no longer with us. It is a sad and beautiful song. That idea of yearning for those gone. The spirits and images of these people are with her in spirit, yet they have passed. Bush loved the idea in A Coral Room of someone being in a boat and putting their hand into the water and being able to touch the top of a city. Maybe a nightmarish vision of the climate crisis and what could be. Not that Bush cited a particular book, though several have written about sunken civilisations and cities. H.P. Lovecraft’s 1936 book, The Shadow over Innsmouth, is a Horror novella about a decaying Massachusetts seaport connected to a hybrid fish-humanoid cult and a submerged or amphibious deep-sea mythos. Also, in Moments of Pleasure, the video (directed by Kate Bush) ends with her twirling whilst there is a blizzard. These figures she sings about twirling but barely visible. Being buried and obscured by weather. If there is the drama and heaviness of snow separating Bush from these departed loved ones in Moments of Pleasure, the stillness and drama of floods and masses of water can be found of A Coral Room. I am also fascinated in how Hannah Bush speaks or has a part in both songs. Kate Bush sings “And I can hear my mother saying/"Every old sock meets an old shoe". Bush wrote this song when her mother was still alive. She said that lyrics to her and she found it hilarious. Hannah Bush represented by Kate Bush and Michael Wood reciting the drinking ditty, Little Brown Jug. Written in 1869 by Joseph Eastburn Winner. A song about alcoholism, as Tom Doyle observes, becoming something more childlike. A song that may well have featured in the Bush household. The jug that was in her mother’s hand falls in slow-motion and shatters.

It is a heartbreaking scene and one that Bush sees ion Zen-like terms. She likened it to the Zen idea of broken glass. At some point everything breaks. It is the inevitability of life. Nothing can remain unbroken and in its original state. Even humans. We all die at some point. The little spider that crawls out of the broken jug is this spider of time. Maybe it crawled into the jug when it was in the Bush household and then left. Forward a bit and to the broken jug, the spider returns and crawls out. The years go by and the house is submerged and overrun by coral. This idea of not being able to live in the past. Even though these moments remain in the memory, their actual physical form is gone. Replaced and sunken. The spiritual side of Kate Bush. Appreciating what you have now as it will be gone one day. It would have been great to see a video for this song. An animated video that would have been beautiful. I do love the connection between this Aerial song and Moments of Pleasure. Tom Doyle wrote how this spider is like the spider of time. It connects the past and present. This spider moving through time and keeps on moving as this house and childhood memories is replaced by ocean and coral. In Moments of Pleasure, we have this thought: “Every old sock meets an old shoe/Here come the Hills of Time”. The Spider of Time and the Hills of Time. A Coral Room is about a city submerged. In Moments of Pleasure, a huge U.S. city is blanketed in snow: “The buildings of New York/Look just like mountains through the snow”. Bush in the 1990s thinking of her ailing mother and those in her life who are gone. “And these moments given/Are a gift from time/Just let us try/To give these moments back”. A Coral Room sees Bush with her new son. I have sourced this when article from The Guardian before. In 2023, Darren Hayes (Savage Garden) explained why A Coral Room is perfect and provided a roadmap for his own life: “It just speaks to me about how precious time is, and how precious the tiny moments are that we have with each other. I think so much about my own mother who I’m very close to – she lives in Brisbane and I live in Los Angeles – and I see my own life in A Coral Room’s cinematic vignettes. A Coral Room is one of many songs on Aerial where Kate really looks at motherhood – both her relationship to her own mother and her experience of having her child, Bertie, and how that changed her. It profoundly touches me”. Reading back through Tom Doyle’s wonderful Running Up That Hill: 50 Visions of Kate Bush. His take on A Coral Room and what Bush said about it when he interviewed her around the release of Aerial in 2005. That connection with a 1993 song. Both tracks feature Bush’s mother. In different situations and with different perspectives, it is right that A Coral Room is the sequel to Moments of Pleasure. A fascinating thought that shines a light on a pearl from Aerial. An evocative and cinematic vision of sunken cities and the tenderness and intimacy of a little brown jug and the Bush household. A typical work of genius from…

THE staggering Kate Bush.

FEATURE: Life in the Fast Lane: Eagles' Hotel California at Fifty

FEATURE:

 

 

Life in the Fast Lane

Eagles' Hotel California at Fifty

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THERE are not many…

classic albums that were released in December. Artists tend not to release in December, as things are winding up and attention turns to Christmas. It is a bit of a risk of being overlooked by people not really thinking about new albums and the proliferation of Christmas music. However, there is a notable exception. On 8th December, 1976, Eagles released Hotel California. It is one of the best-selling albums ever. It has been certified 28× Platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) in the U.S. From 13th November to 23rd January, the band are playing at Sphere in Las Vegas. I do wonder if they are playing tracks from Hotel California? I wanted to mark fifty years of this world-conquering album. The title track, which opens the album, has been streamed more than two billion times. I know it may be a bit late, but it would have been great for a few new videos to be commissioned to mark fifty years of Hotel California. Whether animated or live action, Hotel California, Life in the Fast Lane, and New Kid in  Town getting these great videos. There will be features about the album closer to the anniversary. I wanted to sort of get in there early, as it will be exciting to see how Hotel California’s fiftieth anniversary is marked. Because there was a fortieth anniversary reissue of Hotel California, I am not sure if anything will be done for the fiftieth. I am writing this on 7th November, and there has not been anything announced. Some people wrote features earlier in the year. Marking fifty years a bit prematurely. A new book by Sean Egan explores aspects of the recording, and the album’s legacy. How there was conflict and divisions within the band at the time. One of those classic albums that was made during a bad time. Like Fleetwood Mac and Rumours – which turns fifty next year -, you do wonder how Eagles made a masterpiece when they were not in harmony and completely happy! I guess The Beatles did it too. Not that drama and tension defines Hotel California. If anything, you get this impression of a band at ease and at a creative peak.

For such a huge and historic album, there is precious little written about it. In terms of extensive features that analyses the recording and legacy, there is really not as much as there should be. Perhaps will get something like that soon. Such a phenomenal and huge-selling album should get more words written about it. I did want to come to Ultimate Classic Rock and a feature they published in 2016 to mark forty years of Hotel California:

“Hotel California, the Eagles' layered and frank meditation on the price of fame, is a reflection of where they were in life in the mid-'70s. The band was beset by the trappings of celebrity, wrestling with personal issues, moving toward a harder-edged sound, slowly falling apart – and all of that can be found deep in the grooves of their best album.

They got there by looking with steely focus into “the darker side of paradise – sort of what we were experiencing in Los Angeles at that time," the late Glenn Frey once said. There were powerful forces at play, including – but not limited to – stardom, cocaine, egos, love lives and a small fortune.

All of it went into Hotel California, which produced two consecutive No. 1 singles in the Frey-sung "New Kid in Town" and the title track. "Life in the Fast Lane," which drew the most direct line from their current excesses to their newly formed art, also reached the Top 20.

“We were getting an extensive education – in life, in love, in business," Don Henley said in 2004's To the Limit: The Untold Story of the Eagles. "Beverly Hills was still a mythical place to us. In that sense it became something of a symbol, and the ‘Hotel’ the locus of all that L.A. had come to mean for us. In a sentence, I’d sum it up as the end of the innocence, round one.”

Meanwhile, their sound was in a state of flux. Joe Walsh's recent arrival forever shifted the Eagles away from the rootsier influences of their early years with multi-instrumentalist Bernie Leadon – and that started here.

"One reason Leadon didn’t last in the band was that he was so contrary," Henley later remembered. "Success freaked him out a little; he was always worried about our success, about coming from a ‘pure’ bluegrass background and making it in rock ’n’ roll. He thought we were selling out from the very beginning. To me, the point was to reach as many people as possible."

Things were no more settled at home. Henley, for one, was involved in an emotionally draining relationship that emerged as a topic in both Hotel California's title track and "Wasted Time." But they were such a gifted group, with each member working at a creative peak, that the pieces somehow fell into place anyway.

"What we did in that band, it was a very unusual circumstance to have five guys and each one brought such an abundance of talent," guitarist Don Felder said in 2012. "Everybody in that band would write, sing and play. Anyone in the Eagles could, and did, front their own band. So, it was unusual to have so much talent in one band. We took everyone’s strongest suit, in order to make the best records we could."

That concept is best understood through the prism of "Hotel California," which began as a Felder demo before being completed by Henley and Frey – and then improved upon through a striking group performance that concludes with extended guitar interplay between Felder and Walsh.

Released on Dec. 8, 1976, Hotel California quickly shot to No. 1 on the Billboard album chart and was reportedly selling 500,000 copies a week at one point. More than 14 million copies later, it's one of the Top 10 best-selling albums of all time – a testament to how timelessly relatable it remains.

"People tend to think the album is about California,” Henley later noted. “But I think it was about the dark underbelly of American culture at large.” Particularly, there seems to be just as much reporting on Hotel California – real truth-telling about the band members' personal foibles – as there was narrative myth-making, and that gives the album continuing resonance”.

“You can’t argue with success. And when it comes to popular American albums, Hotel California –with two #1 Billboard hit singles and 32 million (and counting) in worldwide sales — certainly qualifies. So it’s no surprise that this is the first Eagles album to receive the deluxe reissue treatment, just in time for Christmas shopping, circa 2017, more or less its 40th anniversary (it was first released October, 1976).

Hotel California arrived, seventeen months after One of These Nights, with a substantial personnel change: the substitution of Bernie Leaden who, as a former member of the Flying Burrito Brothers, had lent the Eagles authenticity and a connection to the country world. Filling that slot was hard rocker Joe Walsh (on guitar and keyboards), initially an unusual choice, but one that history has shown to be wise, especially for the tougher, more arena rock oriented sound the band was aiming for.

Little more needs to be written about the music, although it’s worth noting that for all of its lyrical exploration of excess in the Golden State, neither of the Eagles’ primary songwriters Don Henley or Glenn Frey, was born or raised in California. Regardless, with songs such as the thrill ride slide guitar rocking of “Life in the Fast Lane,” the bittersweet, string enhanced, cinematic ballads “Wasted Time” and double entendre titled closer “The Last Resort,” along with the incisive, reggae/Spanish-styled title track, the songwriting team along with help from others in their orbit such as J.D. Souther, nailed the dark underbelly of fleeting success with memorable melodies and committed performances. Even Randy Meisner’s yearning “Try and Love Again” and Walsh’s poignant “Pretty Maids All In a Row,” both composed without either Frey or Henley, slot nicely into the general concept. Producer Bill Szymczyk’s input isn’t often credited, but he effectively captured the organic nature of the music while providing the scope and heft that shifted the Eagles from a popular roots rock act to a worldwide household name.

Assuming everyone who wants the original set already owns it since its release four decades ago, this reissue needs to up the ante. It boasts remastered sound both in stereo and 5.1 (the surround mix is apparently unchanged from its initial 2001 appearance), ten live tunes culled from three October 1976 dates oddly before the record was released (only including two of its selections), and some extraneous swag with rare pictures, poster and a replica tour book. That’s in hopes of justifying the wallet wincing $99.98 list price (slimmer single and double packages are also available for the budget conscious). The most frustrating aspect of the expanded edition is the abbreviated 50 minute live set since there is audio of the same tour floating around with at least an hour of additional music. Fans hoping to hear demos or early versions of the songs, a natural inclusion for a pricy edition of this type, will also come away empty handed”.

I will end with a review of Hotel California. There is this interview from 1976, where Don Henley and Glen Frey talked about Joe Walsh joining Eagles. They also discussed their soon-to-be-released masterpiece, Hotel California. It is well worth a read. I did want to come to this feature, that takes us inside the timeless songs from Hotel California. I have chosen the three biggest/most popular tracks, but I would advise people to have a read of the whole thing:

“By late 1976, the American Dream was beginning to fray at the seams, and the Eagles were on hand to document the dishevelment. Having established themselves with four albums of breezy country-rock, Don Henley, Glenn Frey and co. exchanged Laurel Canyon vibes for a sound that was darker, sleeker, and infinitely more cynical.

The result was Hotel California, a lavishly produced monument to 1970s decadence, paranoia, and the ugly side of fame. With new recruit Joe Walsh's guitar giving the band a sharper edge, it remains a masterpiece of stadium-sized storytelling. Here's our track-by-track breakdown.

Take evocative lines stuffed full of images (‘mirrors on the ceiling’, ‘the Mercedes bends’); a ‘Mexican reggae’ rhythm, the immortal Bm-F#-A-E-D-G-Em-F# chord sequence, the guitar duel to end all guitar duels, and a glimpse inside a place where you are trapped eternally, and you have history in the making.

Asked what it’s actually about, Henley mused: “[These are] the same themes that run through all of our work: loss of innocence, the cost of naiveté, the perils of fame, of excess; exploration of the dark underbelly of the American dream, idealism realised and idealism thwarted, illusion versus reality, the difficulties of balancing loving relationships and work, trying to square the conflicting relationship between business and art; the corruption in politics, the fading away of the sixties dream of ‘peace, love and understanding’.”

Pretty much what you thought, right?

New Kid In Town

After the epic dimensions of Hotel California and its six-plus minutes of decayed magnificence, some downtime is required, and New Kid In Town is that. As mellow as Peaceful Easy Feeling and as warm as Tequila Sunrise, it takes your pulse down to manageable levels.

A JD Souther co-write, this track was released as this album’s first single and topped the Billboard Hot 100 chart. The public had been yearning for one of their heroes’ mellower hits for some time, and with New Kid In Town they got one, no matter what its theme was. It’s still a precision-engineered song of great beauty.

Life In The Fast Lane

Supposedly based on something Frey said to his drug dealer while powering along the freeway in a highly tuned car, Life In The Fast Lane represents the other side of the Eagles – the take-no-prisoners buccaneers of rock’n’roll who lived life at a frenetic pace. The finger-twisting guitar riff that Walsh busts out at the beginning says it all.

As Henley remembered: “I said: ‘What in the hell is that? We’ve got to figure out some way to make a song out of that!’ But we really couldn’t sing over that riff, so Glenn came up with the idea of what is a traditional blues or R&B staple – the ‘one chord’ song.”

That makes the song sound simple, but it’s actually far from simple. The Henley/Meisner rhythm section delivered a slinky performance here. As Henley noted succinctly: “It was a real bitch for me to learn how to do that syncopated bass-drum part and sing the melody at the same time”.

In July, Classic Rock published this feature. Don Henley and producer Bill Szymczyk revisit the making of the Eagles' most successful album. It is an illuminating feature. I know that there will be a lot of younger music fans who may not know Eagles and Hotel California. What an important album it is. I heard it when I was a child, but I am still amazed every time I listen. A truly timeless album that will never fade in terms of its brilliance and importance. I am not sourcing the whole article. I am picking it up here:

“Meanwhile, in the world outside the studio, the United States was basking in its bicentennial. On the surface, the country’s 200th birthday was all stars and stripes, but that was tainted by a Watergate hangover and relentless dark stories in the news.

“The ‘peace and love’ idealism of the sixties had faded by the beginning of the decade,” Henley says. “The so-called counterculture, due in part to its own excesses, had disintegrated. The US was trying hard to focus on the bicentennial, but the Cold War continued, and the Boomer generation had slowly realised that the same corporate forces that had always been in charge were still, in fact, in charge, and there was an air of capitulation. There were now the realities of jobs and families to consider. Gone was the dream of a new kind of America; gone was the appetite for rebellion. ‘We haven’t had that spirit here since 1969.’”

One of Hotel California’s standout tracks was about appetite with a capital ‘A’. Both a celebration and a critique of LA’s decadence and the band’s own excesses, Life In The Fast Lane could have been subtitled ‘Nervous, Edgy Feeling’.

“There are a great many of our songs that could be retitled ‘Note To Self’,” Henley says. “Excess – too much of a bad or good thing – was a subject we examined, both from a personal perspective and an American cultural standpoint.”

The song’s classic riff began as what Walsh called his “co-ordination drill”. “I had this lick that I played that I would warm up for a show with,” he told Paul Shaffer on Plus One. “It’s an exercise between your right and left hand, faster and faster. I was playing, warming up for the show, and Glenn comes busting in my dressing room and says: ‘What the hell’s that?’ ‘I don’t know, it’s just this lick I warm up with.’ He said: ‘No, that’s an Eagles song, dude!’”

On In the Studio With Redbeard, Frey said the title came one day after a crazy car ride with a drug dealer nicknamed The Count. Driving at 90mph, Frey asked the dealer to slow down, and the answer came: “It’s life in the fast lane”! With that title, he and Henley wrote the lyrics and melody together.

“We knew it was going to be the most rock’n’roll thing the Eagles had attempted so far,” Walsh said. “They turned me loose on that one.”

And what guitar was he using?

“That’s a Strat,” Walsh told Total Guitar. “And the amplifier was probably this little orange Roland Cube I was using a lot back then. I found it to be a pretty darn good little amp for recording with a Strat, by turning it up pretty good to make it work.”

The killer riff doubled with guitar and bass, cliff-hanging power chords, and trademark four-part vocal harmonies on the chorus. This was a classic Eagles record, yet one that sounded like nothing they’d ever done before. And as sonic icing, Szymczyk employed a Jimi Hendrix trick – the “Electric Ladyland two-track flange technique” – to add a whooshing sound to the song’s offramp exit.

“When I suggested phasing at the end of the song, Henley and Frey were sceptical,” he says. They thought it might sound too much like the Small Faces’ Itchycoo Park – which Szymczyk says was the inspiration. “I just wanted listeners to feel the rush of the wind in their hair!”

An ocean breeze was in Don Felder’s hair on the afternoon he got the idea that would become the title song of Hotel California. In his Malibu beach house, noodling on a 12-string Martin acoustic guitar, he hit on a Spanish-sounding chord progression. He put it down on a reel-to-reel four-track, then layered on syncopated electric guitars and a samba beat from a drum machine. He sent it to Henley and Frey on a cassette with another dozen snippets. They liked what they called “the matador in Mexico” vibe of it, and experimented with lyrical and melody ideas.

Henley took the cassette in the car, which was his favourite place to write. “I think it has something to do with movement and a constantly changing view,” he says. “Just sitting in a room and trying to find inspiration can be stifling. It’s a static situation. Driving, if you’re not in heavy traffic, creates a feeling of flow that can free the imagination and call up memories and images while the music’s playing.”

After a week or two, the song took shape.

“The hotel concept came first, and then the melody,” Henley says. “Some time in May of ’76, Glenn and I had gone to see Neil Simon’s play California Suite in Los Angeles. But that was after we had come up with the hotel concept. Seeing the play was a ‘field research’ trip, just to see if it would help us to flesh out our initial idea. But it wasn’t very helpful; [it wasn’t] dark and spooky enough for what we were after.”

Or maybe the title influenced them, because their spooky inn became the Hotel California, and in turn a metaphor for everything from the mythmaking of the American Dream to an artist’s search for the muse and spiritual meaning.

The recording of the song required some searching, too.

“We cut the track several times, first at Criteria Studios, shortly after Felder had given me the demo,” Henley recalls. “The Miami recording was a rough arrangement with the working title ‘Mexican Reggae’. The second time we cut it was at the Record Plant in LA, after Glenn and I had come up with some ideas for lyrics and melody, but that recording turned out to be in the wrong key, at least for singing.

"There was often a schism between what key was best for the guitars and what key was best for the lead vocal. At the end of the day, though, the vocal has to take precedence. There are workarounds on the guitar – tunings, capos, etc – but you can’t capo a voice. Or at least you couldn’t then. So we ended up cutting the final track in Miami in the key of B minor with the choruses going to G major.”

Szymczyk recalls that the final version of the track consisted of “thirty-three separate tape edits from five different takes”.

Apart from being the album’s thematic centrepiece and the Eagles’ best song, it also rode out on one of rock’s most iconic guitar duels, with Felder and Walsh trading sizzle and sting, one-upping each other, then finally merging in triumphant two-part harmony.

“We worked really well together,” Walsh told Guitar World in 2012. “It was competitive. We brought out the best in each other. We liked to kick each other in the butt! He would play something, and I’d get an attitude, like: ‘Oh yeah? Listen to this.’ And he’d go: ‘Wow. Listen to this!’”

“For two days, we wood-shopped the hell out of that,” Szymczyk says. “We had amps out in the studio, but Felder and Walsh were in the control room with me, one to the right, one to the left, like gunfighters! Felder was the ultimate technician, always a tad on top of the beat. Walsh was the ultimate ‘feel’ guy, always a tad behind it. Together they were phenomenal. Those two days were one of the high points of my career.”

“There are at least half a dozen guitar tracks on the original recording,” Henley says. “In live concert settings, this required Felder to play a double-neck guitar, with the twelve-string neck being capo’d on the seventh fret for the intro and the breakdown, and the six-string with no capo for the single-line phrases and the tag solos. One of the unique things about the song is that it ends with extended dual guitar solos. Skynyrd had done something like that a couple of years earlier.”

Another thing it shared with Skynyrd’s Free Bird was a length – six and a half minutes – that wasn’t exactly radio friendly. “The label wanted us to do a single edit, and we all said no way,” Szymczyk says. “Obviously we were right to.”

After seven months of off-and-on recording, the album finally completed in October.

The cover artwork, designed by John Kosh (who also handled Who’s Next and The Beatles’ Abbey Road), featured a photo of the Beverly Hills Hotel at dusk, taken from a cherry picker 60 feet above Sunset Boulevard. Built in 1912 in a Mediterranean Revival style, the pink stucco hotel had hosted famous A-list guests such as Marilyn Monroe and Frank Sinatra. A month after the album came out, when the hotel learned that the Eagles had used the image without permission, they threatened a lawsuit. They dropped it when they realised that the hotel’s bookings had tripled because of the record’s success.

The Hotel California album was released on December 8, 1976, and was certified platinum in its first week. It went to No.1 on the Billboard 200, where it stayed for eight weeks. Reviews were glowing. Creem said there were “no weak tracks; the music flows majestically every step of the way”. Phonograph praised its “peerless harmonies” and said it was “pretty and punchy, as the best albums of fellow troubled hedonists Steely Dan and the Beach Boys are”. NME said: “There’s no laurels-resting, and a lot has gone into its meticulous crafting.”

While Szymczyk calls the record a “quantum leap forward”, Henley’s opinion is more modest. “I don’t know if I’d call it a ‘quantum leap’; One Of These Nights had three big hits on it,” he says. “But in terms of growth and consistency and range, I’d agree that Hotel California was an improvement.”

The 10-month, 72-date world tour that followed was gruelling. So much so that the band’s road crew nicknamed it The Prison California. Everyone travelled with their own little entourage. Walsh and Felder had their faction, briefly entertaining the idea of forming their own band. In History Of The Eagles, Henley said: “Glenn and I saw ourselves as the leaders, but other people saw us as dictators. You just cannot have five leaders in a band. It doesn’t work.”

But according to To The Limit: The Untold Story Of The Eagles, even the two leaders had stopped talking and would only communicate through others. There were also cocaine-induced physical ailments. Stomach ulcers all around. Henley suffered back pain. Frey’s nasal lining was shot (he would have two surgeries before getting his nose repaired with Teflon). By the end of the tour, Meisner had become persona non grata after drunkenly refusing to sing Take It To The Limit at one show. He left the band shortly after”.

I will end with Stereophile and their review of the 40th Anniversary release of Hotel California. There are going to be new takes and dissections of this album closer to 8th December. I wanted to bring together some features on this gigantic and juggernaut album. For anyone who has never heard the album, you really do need to listen to it. A truly masterful offering from Eagles:

“Not so long ago, you could not wander the halls of any High End Audio show and not hear The Eagles' Hotel California. To say it was an audiophile favorite is to grossly understate the obvious.

Produced by Bill Szymczyk and tracked between March and October 1976 at Criteria Studios in Miami and the California branch of the Record Plant, it was the group's fifth and ultimately one of the album-sales blockbusters of all time. Its current sales number is somewhere near 35 million copies sold. Late last year Rhino Records released a Hotel California 40th Anniversary Deluxe Edition CD boxed set edition of this rock landmark that comes complete with a hardbound book of photos, a tour posters and other assorted paper goods.

Given some of my previous utterances on The Eagles and the vociferous responses that they've elicited I need to clear the air once and for all. For the record (and hopefully the last time), even though I am a Gram Parsons fan (if not a full-fledged member of the Gram cult), the Eagles occupy a cherished place in both my teenage hood and my overall musical education. Besides the endless cruising in cars and fruitless scheming about girls that went on whilst the One of These Nights album was playing on an 8-track car stereo, I also bought all the records and saw the band a number of times, both pre and post Joe Walsh joining the band. While I prefer the self-titled debut, On The Border (their first album to be released in a quadraphonic version), and One of These Nights, I pretty much loved them all including The Long Run. With the mustachioed and rakishly handsome Glenn Frey as the front man and Don Henley, one of the few drummers outside Levon Helm who was a genuinely great lead vocalist—both of whom could also write memorable, hooky songs—they were a powerhouse. I have always marveled that Frey, a guy from Detroit, the land of the MC5, Iggy Pop and CREEM magazine, became an icon of soft, sweet SoCal country rock.

The band's supporting cast was equally strong. In fact, I like the band best when the voices of Bernie Leadon and Randy Meisner and the slide and double-necked guitar heroics of Don Felder were all still aboard. Leadon, who'd played with Gram Parsons in the Flying Burrito Brothers prior to the Eagles, wrote "My Man" for the On The Border album to pay tribute after Parsons OD'd in 1973. Losing Randy Meisner's high voice was a definite blow and noticeable sonic alteration change to the band's sound. As far as later additions are concerned, there's no doubt, however, that Joe Walsh's guitar, which upped the band's overall musicianship, and then his songwriting both became welcome infusion of new energy into the band's live shows and the last two studio albums prior to their 1980 breakup.

For me, a show during the On The Border tour (or was it during the One of the These Nights tour . . . the memory wobbles) and one show during the triumphant 1977 Hotel California tour will always rank among my favorite live music experiences of all time.

Now for the inevitable provisos. As a live act, before and after Walsh entered, they did tend to scrupulously stick to the script, essentially playing their studio albums note for note including replicating guitar solos. If you dislike bands that make changes from the studio albums when they play live, then The Eagles were your kind of act. I would have preferred a little stretching, a different vocal arrangement here and there, and a new guitar solo now and then. Seeing them live, I always wanted to see what they actually had musicianshipwise—see them kick out the jams and blow away the old saw about how they were essentially a studio-only band.

And then there's the oversaturation issue. Today, when I listen to the band's albums I tend to lift the needle over the hits and play the inner cuts—the deep tracks that the radio forgot. Because the band owed much of its massive success to 1970s commercial radio who, along with Steve Miller and Fleetwood Mac, played their singles and album cuts—OVER AND OVER AGAIN—I do not go back to Hotel California much. That and it's constant presence at High End Audio shows, where those famous opening chords to the title track that usually sent me drifting back into a hallway, have combined to give me a little ear and brain fatigue.

With that as my overlong prologue, I approached the 40th Anniversary Deluxe Edition 2-CD/1-Blu-ray reissue box ($99.98), primarily curious about three things: the original album remastered, the hi-rez and 5.1 mixes and finally the ten previously unreleased live recordings from 1976.

According to Rhino, the surround mix by Elliott Scheiner and the 24-bit/192kHz stereo mix were originally released on a DVD-A in 2001. Neither have ever really impressed me much. While the Eagles camp were early 5.1 adopters, surround was still a new toy then. These mixes could perhaps be improved upon today. While what you hear is the band all around you, at sort of the halfway point between the ceiling and the floor in whatever room you are listening in, I still prefer the standard two-channel mix—you standing in the audience and the band in front of you. Again via Rhino, this new remastering, which was done a few years back when the album was remastered for HD digital download, is here on CD for the first time. The results are not dramatic, but the overall sound is a mite clearer and like virtually all-new remasterings, a touch brighter.

As for the live tracks, they are taken from the band's three=night stand in 1976 in The Forum in LA, a gig that also supplied five tracks for the band's official live recording, Eagles Live. That album, the last Eagles album, was cobbled together to fulfill their contract with the Elektra/Asylum record label. The fact that is has an 86 on the front cover, and record labels that feature a bird's nest filled with eggs and hand grenades were seen at the time as hint that the band was over. The album was mixed and released after the famous backstage near- fisticuffs between Don Felder and Glenn Frey that occurred in Long Beach in July 1980. Frey refused to participate in postproduction. He stayed in Los Angeles while the band went to Miami to work on the album. This led to producer Szymczyk's famous quote: "We were fixing three-part harmonies courtesy of Federal Express."

All that fixing led to a live album that was overdubbed to the point of being a studio album. The sound is suspiciously clean and groomed. It's no secret that many '70s live albums were in fact sweetened in the studio before release—clams were fixed, harmonies were added, guitar solos re-recorded and dropped in. On Eagles Live and the live tracks here on the 40th Anniversary boxed set, any and all warts, both in sound and performance are scrubbed and what's left are impossibly perfect performances with vocal harmonies that are mostly dead-on. What's best about the live tracks here is the selection of tunes, which cherry picks the best tracks from On The Border, One of These Nights and Hotel California.

One mystery here is why extra material from the original sessions—alternate takes or unreleased tunes—was not included. The band's near obsession with recorded perfection, with not exposing loose ends or anything but fully assembled takes, may be the reason. While picture books are nice, more extensive notes would have been a better choice for collectors. And while there have been numerous LP reissues previously, heavy, quiet, premium-quality LPs would have been a welcome addition. Overall, though a must have for Eagles fans and the first of what I suspect will be more tributes to come to one of the most iconic albums in all of pop music recording history”.

On 8th December, it will be fifty years since Hotel California was released. Given the name, you’d think Eagles would release it in the summer, rather than the more oppressive winter! Though that may have been planned. Given the fact the title is not all about sunshine and warmth. Few classic albums were released in December, so it is a treat we get to talk about Hotel California. One of the greatest albums in music history. Some may contest this, but I would say Hotel California is…

A perfect album.

FEATURE: In the Flesh: Blondie's Eponymous Debut Album at Fifty

FEATURE:

 

 

In the Flesh

Blondie's Eponymous Debut Album at Fifty

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EVEN if people…

think Blondie hit their peak with 1978’s Parallel Lines, there is no denying how important their 1976 debut is. Blondie was released in December 1976. It is one of these anniversary features that is marred by the fact nobody seems to know exactly when an album was released. It is not like we’re talking about something that is hundreds of years old. However, there does not seem to be an available release date for Blondie, other than the fact it came out in December 1976. I did want to celebrate fifty years of an album that introduced this legendary bands. They are still releasing music and High Noon, their twelfth studio album, comes out on 26th February, 2027. Let’s go back fifty years to this incredible debut. Featuring the singles, X Offender, In the Flesh, and Rip Her to Shreds, it was a masterful and stunning debut. The band line-up consisted of Debbie Harry, Chris Stein, Gary Valentine, Jimmy Destri and the late Clem Burke. Even if Blondie did not hit their stride until a couple of albums later, there is no denying that their eponymous debut of December 1976 was underrated at the time. Some critics calling it dumb and uninspired. It has gained more love later on, considering its legacy and how influential it is. Earlier in the year, Classic Rock provided a buyer’s guide to Blondie’s albums. This is what they said about their eponymous debut: “A scene had formed around NYC’s CBGB, comprising Blondie, Television, Ramones, Talking Heads and the Heartbreakers. Blondie played a show every week while they lived on the breadline in a nearby loft space with bullet holes in the windows and homeless bums dying outside in the snow. But they practised daily, and their passionate debut came out of that destitution, connecting their love of retro pop with the emergent punk scene. Bassist Gary Valentine wrote their debut US single/album opener X-Offender with Harry, while she and Stein wrote the Velvet Underground-influenced Rip Her To Shreds”.

In 2021, to mark forty-five years of Blondie, Pop Matters reflected on a powerful debut. One that brought together genres as wide-ranging as Disco, Punk and Surf Pop. A lot of people do not discuss Blondie’s debut when they think of their greatest work. I think that Blondie is one of the most significant debuts of the 1970s. Maybe not as exciting and fresh as it would have sounded in 1976, I do feel that it gets less admiration than it deserves:

“In the early ’70s, Blondie went through various incarnations and name changes before settling on the five-piece lineup of Debbie Harry (vocals), Chris Stein (guitar), Gary Valentine (bass), Jimmy Destri (keyboards), and Clem Burke (drums). Destri was the last to join in the fall of 1975. After playing regular gigs at CBGB for the better part of a year, the group started work on their debut album in August 1976. They had signed with a production company called Instant Records, co-owned by Richard Gottehrer (who would produce the LP and its 1977 follow-up, Plastic Letters).

Blondie was recorded at Plaza Sound, a capacious studio built in the 1930s in the same building as Radio City Music Hall. With Gottehrer at the helm, the band recorded the songs they’d been honing for two years onstage. One day, legendary Brill Building veteran Ellie Greenwich visited the session. Greenwich wrote “Out in the Streets”, a song popularized by the Shangi-Las in 1965 and later recorded by Blondie as a demo. She’d also penned such hits as “Be My Baby” and “River Deep – Mountain High”, so the group were thrilled when her trio sang backup on “In the Flesh”. With the women’s tight harmonies and the ringing chimes in the bridge, the composition emulates the girl group sound so well that it could have been a Shingdig Pick of the Week (if it weren’t for the sexual double entendre).

“In the Flesh” would also prove to be the band’s first number-one single—in Australia anyway—after it was played on Molly Meldrum’s Countdown, a popular music TV show. As for Blondie’s original demo of “Out in the Streets”, it was eventually released on the 2001 Blondie CD re-issue.

In Face It, Harry writes about the subversiveness of Blondie’s music: “We felt that we were Bohemians and performance artists, avant-garde. And when you add to the mix this very New York DIY street-rock attitude that we had, you got punk.” Blondie hardly sounds like a punk record, though. The album is full of catchy, mid-tempo melodies and hooks, but the band’s pop sensibilities are undercut by their lyrics. The wry innuendos of “X Offender”, “In the Flesh”, and “Look Good in Blue” were no doubt partly fueled by adolescent prurience, but they can also be read as an attempt to subvert gender norms.

Harry’s stage presence and persona are part of the stratagem. Fully aware that sex sells, she nevertheless tried to challenge double standards by “being a cartoon fantasy onstage”, as she puts it. “The Blondie character I created was sort of androgynous. Even when I was singing songs that were written from a man’s point of view… I had to be kind of gender-neutral, so it seemed that I wanted (the girl)”. On songs like “Kung Fu Girls”, that neutrality is convincing, as Harry sings: “Kung Fu, Cindy Sue / Oh, I want to get close to you / You’re my Kung Fu girl.”

Unfortunately, much of Harry’s cultural commentary is lost on the listener. “Rip Her to Shreds”, for example, is supposed to be about gossip columnists and their callous criticisms of women in the public eye. Harry’s not singing “rip her to shreds”; she’s saying that’s what the media does. But the nuance is obliterated by the jubilant, sing-along chorus that only seems to encourage mob mentality misogyny. Still, it’s one of the LP’s stand-outs, with a driving beat, raunchy organ, and Harry’s campy delivery.

Speaking of camp, before 1976 disco was still mostly played in underground clubs frequented by gays and minorities. In only a few years, though, it began to infiltrate the establishment, with traditional rock bands incorporating disco elements into their music. In fact, “Silly Love Songs” is an early example (just listen to McCartney’s bass line). Yet, a backlash came quickly, and by 1979, anti-disco sentiment reached a fever pitch with the infamous Comiskey Park “Disco Demolition Night” spectacle.

The conventional narrative, then, is that punk came along and saved music from the wretched pablum of disco. But, that interpretation is rooted in misogyny and homophobia. Punk’s raw energy was seen as earnest and masculine, while disco was perceived as frivolous, pre-fab music enjoyed mostly by women and queer people. The gap between disco and punk wasn’t as wide as it would appear, however, and Blondie managed to embrace both. Each form, in its earliest iteration anyway, bucked convention and promoted inclusion.

Before coming to a review of Blondie, there is another feature I want to highlight. It is amazing how quickly things started for Blondie. In terms of signing a deal with the New York label, Private Stock, and recording their debut album with producer Richard Gottehrer. I would love to see a Blondie biopic that starts when they were playing Punk clubs like CBGB, that takes us up to the release of their debut album. In 2021, Albumism discussed Blondie on its forty-fifth anniversary:

“The album kicks off with the bouncy, rhythmic, organ-fueled “X Offender,” a perfect example of a new wave pop-punk song, filled with catchy melodies, rapid beat, Debbie Harry’s undeniable vocals, and idiosyncratic chord progression that characterizes Blondie’s trademark sound.

A leading classic rock electric guitar line, distinctive bass section, upbeat tempo accompany the lyrics of “Little Girl Lies.” In the song, Debbie Harry delivers the words with clever humor and sarcasm, warning an unnamed boy not to disregard his girlfriend, because “She'll be talking and laughing with six other guys / Flirtatious and cute, she'll take you the route.”

The retro-flavored “In the Flesh” is the album’s first mid-tempo doo-wop ballad, adorned with enticing harmonies, prominent drumbeat, syncopated staccato piano chords, and lush vocals expressing the melancholia of an unpropitious love story.

The ingeniously crafted speed-up tango “Look Good in Blue” is perhaps one of the catchiest pieces on the album, presenting a dynamic rhythm and thumping piano, jazzed up by electro-synthesizer and electric guitar solo.

Like “X Offender,” “In the Sun” is an up-tempo, cheerful track with peppy prominent drum and legato electric guitars layering the leading harmonies, switching for keyboards during the chorus.

“A Shark in Jets Clothing” is a nod to West Side Story’s rival gangs: The Jets and The Sharks. The song is a blend of a poppy beat, electric guitar solos, fresh synthesizer, and keyboard flourishes, showcasing Debbie Harry’s impressive range stretching from lower to higher notes on the vocal register.

Next, “Man Overboard” is the most spirited, danceable tune on the album. The track, filled with a speed-lightning psychedelic keyboard section, hypnotic reggae-kissed basslines, and sizzling percussions, which accompany the lead singer’s—speaking from experience—reprimanding tone as she tells the story of a man who wore his heart on his sleeve and got it broken eventually “sinking in a sea of love.”

Harry and guitarist Stein collaborated on “Rip Her to Shreds,” bringing together new lyrics for the song’s pop-rock melodies. Across the track, Harry—with her typical ironic sense of humor—addresses the issue of misogyny, posing as a gossip columnist making sexist remarks about a woman and inciting the public to “rip her to shreds.”

The spaghetti western-nuanced guitar riff and keyboard chord progressions of “Rifle Range” make up the central harmonies of the song. The slick drumbeats and Harry’s charming delivery—perhaps hinting at her love story with a woman—complete the piece.

The infectious opening of “Kung Fu Girls,” with full-blown electric guitar lines, perfectly soundtracks the singer’s sweeping vocals.

On “The Attack of the Giant Ants” the band explores Latin-influenced rhythms, merging them with a goofy sci-fi horror story, rife with mock-apocalyptic cinematographic sound-effects in the middle section of the piece, and Debbie Harry singing the same riff repeatedly”.

I will wrap things up with Treble Zine and their thoughts on Blondie. It is a brilliant album that captures the New York City band right at the start. I do wonder if the band will post anything to their Instagram on the anniversary. We do not know the exact date the album was released, though we know it was some time in December:

“Punk” is surely one of the most widely abused words in the English language—though I will grant that a lot of that is due to discussions between misanthropic teenagers, barley old enough to draw a line between Good Charlotte and The Clash. But back in the mid-70s, before The Ramones overshadowed the much-maligned word, it became the amorphous title to an entire burgeoning scene. And while it seemed like every band in the five boroughs had its own take on the evolution of rock, the members of Blondie decided to walk the well-tread path of pop.

While the etymology of that last word has left it on par with “punk,” it shouldn’t induce any cringing. There’s nothing wrong with good pop, and Blondie aspired to the best of it. Though their sound would later evolve and crystallize into the well-known, radio-friendly gems on Parallel Lines, their self-titled debut tends to get overlooked as a masterpiece in its own right. The former album guaranteed the band’s commercial success by hopping on the musical bandwagon, adding a slicker bent toward New Wave, and even delving into disco with “Heart of Glass.”

Blondie, however, planted its roots in the all-American rock of yesteryear. Debbie Harry’s mellifluous lament on the intro to “X Offender” harkens back to the days when melodramatic teen dialogue opened songs like “Leader of the Pack.” Just listen to the twangy, surf-guitar solo, or Harry’s lilting sighs—this is what American Bandstand would have played if synthesizers were more popular in the mid-60s and Dick Clark had taste.

Chances are, America’s most elderly teenager would have had an early stroke watching the vampy, pouty-lipped Harry calling herself a “sex offender” or offering “some head and shoulders to lie on,” as she does on the feisty “Look Good in Blue.” A former Playboy bunny, Harry could have been another lovely face waiting to become a marketing tool if not for her actual talent. The difference lies in her personality: She can play the cute poster girl, crooning out doo-wop ballads like “In the Flesh,” the sultry seductress eyeing her prey on “Man Overboard,” or a vicious bitch on “Rip Her to Shreds.”

“Rip Her” ravages the rabid fashion-sense of hipsters in a feast of crunchy guitar and pounding synth notes, but it’s the lyrics that really sting. “Her nose job is real atomic,” Harry spits, “all she needs is an old knife scar.” Even when she’s taking jabs at the shallow, there’s an underlying humor that propels every song, lending a general sense of fun to the whole album.

Two songs probably capture that playfulness perfectly: “In the Sun” and Blondie‘s closer, “The Attack of the Killer Ants.” The first is possibly the greatest song ever written for summer, surf and sand. After opening with a cascade of drum rolls, Chris Stein’s guitar does its best Ventures impersonation, twisting and rushing over James Destri’s synthesizer warblings while Harry calls for her “paka lola luau love.” I’m not exactly sure who or what that is, but I do know this song makes me want to do the Watusi at the beach with Gidget.

“Killer Ants” has a similarly infectious rhythm section, and you’ll find yourself wearing the largest grin an apocalyptic tale about giant insects can inspire (which is pretty damn wide, if you’re like me). “Giant ants from space / waste the human race / then they eat your face / never leave a trace!” Cheerful, no? There’s even an interlude that includes sirens, bombings, and some rather unsettling roaring that could only be issued from the maws of fire-breathing space ants.

The fact is, Blondie does sound a little dated now—and, outside of a few grating keyboard solos, it’s supposed to. It’s a send-up and tribute to everything old-school pop offered us, but modern enough to cut whatever schmaltz was packaged in the genre. It may not be the hardcore thrashings or artsy experimentalism we’ve come to expect from “legitimate” punk, but creating an amalgamation of modern stylings and pop didn’t dilute Blondie’s originality, either. And if that’s not punk, I’m not sure what is”.

I do hope that there are new features written about Blondie as it turns fifty next month. The first salvo from the legendary group, you can feel that many bands who have come since have been influenced by that album. Debbie Harry’s vocals particularly are so memorable and make the album what it is. Sure, they may have recorded better albums, yet Blondie is where it started. It is a brilliant album in its own right. A 1976 missile from…

THE brilliant Blondie.

FEATURE: Groovelines: Buffalo Springfield - For What It's Worth

FEATURE:

 

 

Groovelines

Buffalo Springfield - For What It's Worth

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BECAUSE this classic song…

IN THIS PHOTO: Buffalo Springfield photographed at Ghirardelli Square, San Francisco in 1967/PHOTO CREDIT: Jim Marshall

has a big anniversary coming up, I wanted to spotlight it. There is a generation (or two) who have never heard Buffalo Springfield’s For What It’s Worth. It was recorded on 5th December, 1966, so we mark sixty years of this classic. Written by Stephen Stills (of Crosby, Stills & Nash), the track is tied to the Vietnam War. Although it was a single in 1966, it was not until March 1967, when it was included on the second pressing of the debut album from Buffalo Springfield. It is one of these songs where the title does not feature in the lyrics. Buffalo Springfield were a band that released three incredible albums but only operated for a short period of time. Though they left a huge legacy. Formed by Canadians Neil Young, Bruce Palmer, and Dewey Martin and Americans Stephen Stills and Richie Furay, For What It’s Worth is one of the greatest and most important songs ever. It is hard to mark the exact release date of For What It’s Worth as it was rush-released as a single. So I will mark its recording. I have been researching the story behind For What It’s Worth. In 2016, Rolling Stone took us inside the story of a song that was motivated by anti-curfew protest on the Sunset Strip in Hollywood. A song that captured a Sixties malaise, it still resonates sixty years later:

“Fifty years ago this Saturday, Stephen Stills, then in Buffalo Springfield, was on his way into Hollywood to hear live music on the Sunset Strip. But in one of those defining rock & roll moments, what he encountered was a rally: hundreds, if not thousands, of kids protesting a new curfew and the imminent closing of one club, Pandora’s Box, by way of a fake “funeral” for it.

“The commercial merchants on Sunset Boulevard in a certain area decided that the element of young people on the street every night was not conducive to commercial enterprise,” Stills said in a 1971 interview. “A bunch of kids got together on a street corner and said we aren’t moving. About three busloads of Los Angeles police showed up, who looked very much like storm troopers. … And I looked at it and said, ‘Jesus, America is in great danger.'”

Within weeks, Stills had written – and Buffalo Springfield had recorded – a song inspired by that night, “For What It’s Worth.” With its emphasis on Stills’ spooked voice, drummer Dewey Martin’s ominous snare drum and Neil Young‘s warning-bell two-note guitar part in the verse, the track became the band’s only hit, peaking at Number Seven in the spring of 1967. Yet equally striking was its sound: The eerily quiet song captured the uneasy mood of the moment that extended beyond Los Angeles to Vietnam, and lyrics about “a man with a gun over there” and “young people speaking their minds/Getting so much resistance from behind” were the sound of the rock counterculture cementing its socially conscious voice.

“For What It’s Worth” has transcended its origin story to become one of pop’s most-covered protest songs – a sort of “We Shall Overcome” of its time, its references to police, guns and paranoia remaining continually relevant. The Staple Singers were among the first to cover it, in 1967, but since then, it’s been recorded by a mind-bendingly diverse number of acts: Ozzy Osbourne turned it into a grim stomper, Lucinda Williams into a ghostly ballad, Kid Rock into a classic-rock homage, Rush into a swirling soundscape, Led Zeppelin (in live bootlegs) into languid blues. (Robert Plant also cut a version with his pre-Zep band, Band of Joy.) Public Enemy even sampled it on 1996’s “He Got Game.”

According to BMI, the song’s publishing house, “For What It’s Worth” been played 8 million times on TV and radio since its release. In 2014, it came in at number three on Rolling Stone‘s readers poll of the best protest songs. “The way it’s written, it’s so open to interpretation,” says Heart’s Ann Wilson, who released a cover last year on her first EP with side project the Ann Wilson Thing. “It’s so open that it’s brand new today. The main hook, ‘Everybody look what’s going down’ – you can apply that, to say, the current election. The song is going, ‘What the hell is this?’ You can apply the song to any situation in any decade.”

By 1966, the situation in Los Angeles was tense. An increasing number of clubgoers was descending on the Strip, irritating area residents and upscale boutiques, and the LAPD instigated a 10 p.m. curfew for anyone under 18. On the night of November 12th, a local radio station announced there would be a protest at Pandora’s Box. According to reports, a fight broke out for reasons having nothing to do with the curfew; a car carrying a group of Marines was bumped by another vehicle. Egged on by that fight, the protesters (some of whom carried placards that read “We’re Your Children! Don’t Destroy Us”) trashed a city bus and threw bottles and rocks at storefronts.

“It was really four different things intertwined, including the war and the absurdity of what was happening on the Strip,” Stills later told The Los Angeles Times. “But I knew I had to skedaddle and headed back to Topanga, where I wrote my song in about 15 minutes.” The folk-blues feel of the song harked back to Stills’ days in the Greenwich Village folk scene.

As anyone who’s heard it knows, the phrase “for what it’s worth” appears nowhere in the song. According to one legend, Stills played it for one of the group’s managers, prefacing it with, “Let me play you a song, for what it’s worth.” Springfield singer-guitarist Richie Furay recalls he, Stills, and Young playing new material for Atlantic’s Ahmet Ertegun, a major supporter of the Springfield. “Ahmet had come to Los Angeles and we were at Stephen’s house,” Furay recalls. “At the end of the day, Stephen said, ‘I have another one, for what it’s worth.'”

On December 5th, only a few weeks after the Strip mayhem, the Springfield went into an L.A. studio to lay down the song in a one-day session. Young credited engineer Stan Ross with the song’s spare, almost sinister arrangement. “Stan came in and said, ‘You gotta do this one thing to the drum, the snare,'” Young said in Jimmy McDonough’s Shakey. “Took a broom, a guitar pick and mixed that in so it’s got that sound – of a guitar pick going through a broom, on the straw. That was it.” Added Stills later, “Neil came up with the wonderful harmonics part with the vibrato. The combination of the two guitar parts, with my scared little voice, made the record.”

Furay admits he didn’t hear anything special in the song at first: “I was more into the electric work, like ‘Bluebird’ and ‘Rock & Roll Woman,’ that phase of where we were,” he says. “I didn’t hear it, but Stephen felt the pulse of it and there you go.”

Everyone else knew the song was special, and the single was rush-released with an amended title, “(Stop, Hey What’s That Sound) For What It’s Worth,” at Ertegun’s suggestion. The song was also added into new pressings of the band’s first album, replacing another Stills original, “Baby Don’t Scold Me”.

There is not a lot written about this song. It is a shame. Aside from the odd feature, you would think that more would approach the track. If it was relevant to riots in the U.S. in 1966, cast forward sixty years and we can see the corruption and dissent. Even if President Trump is seeing people turn and America voted in the Midterms vastly in favour of the Democrats, we can still see how For What It’s Worth applies to the U.S. It has resounded through the decades. There was a resurgence in the summer of 2020 where there were protests in the U.S. These protests rose from police brutality and the murder of George Floyd. Rather than it being co-opted or used out of context, the lyrics perhaps had more relevance and potency then compared to 1966. Some of the lines struck with a punch that definitely connected with those in 2020 protesting police violence and corruption: “A thousand people in the street/Singing songs and a-carrying signs”. Since 2020, For What It’s Worth continues to feature in public consciousness. In 2025, Dawes (a Los Angeles Rock group) performed the song alongside Stephen Stills and Mike Campbell. It was performed for FireAid, in order to help with relief efforts for the January 2025 Southern California wildfires. In June, CBS News included For What It’s Worth in their list of the 250 essential American songs of the past 250 years. There are protest songs from the 1960s that remain there and have not been adopted, adapted and given new lease. For What It’s Worth is not one of them. On 5th December, it will be sixty years since this track was recorded. Little did Buffalo Springfield know that it would be performed and discussed six decades later. It’s sense of calm and composure makes it so powerful. Rather than it being this fast and angry protest song, it has this air of restraint. The lyrics allowed to seep into the mind. It is epic in its concision and brevity. One of the most stirring songs ever written. Sixty years later, and the stunning and moving For What It’s Worth…

HAS lost none of its meaning.

FEATURE: Wishing I Was There: Revisiting Natalie Imbruglia’s Left of the Middle

FEATURE:

 

 

Wishing I Was There

Revisiting Natalie Imbruglia’s Left of the Middle

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THIS is not tied to an anniversary…

PHOTO CREDIT: RANKIN

but one of my favourite albums of the 1990s turns thirty next year. There are artists who started their careers in the 1990s who are either not recording anymore or trading on their past work. Very few who are still going strong and entering this new phase of their career. I do wonder whether there will be a thirtieth anniversary release of Natalie Imbruglia’s Left of the Middle. This is an album that received positive reviews at the time, but I do feel that it has gained more respect and traction in years since. Many will associate the album with Torn. A huge single that turns thirty on 27th October next year. I am not sure if Imbruglia is looking ahead to that anniversary. Not that I have been in nostalgia mode, but I am thinking about albums I was a fan of when I was growing up. There was something different about Natalie Imbruglia. I do remember when Torn was released. This was not the case of a one-hit wonder coming along. Her take on this song is incredible, though there is a lot more to Left of the Middle than that single. Big Mistake, Smoke, and Wishing I Was There are amazing. I also like deeper cuts such as One More Addiction, and Impressed. Many associating Natalie Imbruglia as being a Pop artist, though there are a few more Rock-orientated songs. She naturally inhabited that space. In terms of comparisons, I would put her up there with Alanis Morrisette. In terms of their voice and sound. If anything, Imbruglia had a bit more range when it came to her voice. I think that Left in the Middle is a fabulous album that doesn’t quite get enough credit. As a bit of a sidenote, I would encourage people to watch this Davina McCall interview Natalie Imbruglia, where she talks about (among other things) her early career and her experiences at the time. I am sure there will be celebration next year. It would be great to see a thirtieth anniversary reissue. Whether there are outtakes or demos that could feature on a reissue. Natalie Imbruglia’s most recent album, Algorithm, gained widespread praise. Arguably her best album to date, it shows what talent and longevity she has.

This is an artist who has been releasing incredible music for three decades. I would urge people to listen to Algorithm, as it is one of the best albums of the year. I know that it will feature in many lists of the best albums of this year. It is hard to overlook the major success of Left of the Middle. It reached the top ten in the U.K. and U.S. It reached number one in her native Australia. It has been certified 4× Platinum in Australia, 3× Platinum in the U.K., and 2× Platinum in the U.S. There were those in 1997 who were not too kind. A case of an album being a major commercial success, but one some critics piled onto. I do think that it requires retrospection. Even if one or two tracks are not up there with the best on Left of the Middle, it is a terrific album that I hope people listen to ahead of its thirtieth anniversary. Natalie Imbruglia no doubt has fond memories of recording the album, though she was subjected to sexism and criticism. Like so many of her female peers, it would also have been a pretty tough time. What I love is how she released the brilliant Algorithm. It is a fresh and brilliant album where she is at her peak. Not trading on past glories or repeating what came before, obviously there is still a lot of interest around her 1997 debut. I wanted to highlight Left of the Middle now, as I feel it is one of those albums that warrants reappraisal. Imbruglia being compared to other artists. I know I paired her with Alanis Morrisette. Not a case of Imbruglia mimicking anyone, she had the same power and quality as the Canadian icon. AllMusic did provide a positive take on Left of the Middle:

“Expectations for Natalie Imbruglia's debut album, Left of the Middle, were high because of the runaway success of the pre-album single "Torn" during 1997-1998. Fans of the single will be pleased to hear that the album is quite similar in approach and sound to the breakthrough single: laid-back alt-pop with sweetly melodic vocals. Admittedly, some of the material will be seen as pop fluff by certain listeners, but fans of popular latter-day female artists like Paula Cole, Sheryl Crow, and Meredith Brooks will find Imbruglia's debut most enjoyable. What separates Imbruglia from the aforementioned artists is her willingness to experiment with electronic sounds, no doubt courtesy of mixer Nigel Godrich (of Radiohead fame), which can be heard on such tracks as "Smoke." "Torn" proves to be the best song on the album, with its bouncy acoustic feel, but the pop/rocker "Big Mistake" is almost as good”.

Left of the Middle did get a twenty-fifth anniversary release in 2022. It came out on blue vinyl. I am not sure whether there will be new celebration next year for Left of the Middle. There was a twenty-fifth anniversary tour in 2022. It is clear that Imbruglia has a strong connection to her debut. If some were unkind in 1997, there are plenty of people who adore the album. I think that it is one of the strongest debuts of the 1990s. Just before wrapping up, eonmusic highlighted celebration of a tremendous album:

“Two and a half decades after the release of her iconic debut 'Left of the Middle', Natalie Imbruglia is celebrating the milestone with 'London - Live', recorded on the anniversary trek at Shepherds Bush Empire on 12th October, 2022, as part of her ‘Left of the Middle 25th Anniversary Tour’. A fantastic snapshot of a deserved victory lap, it's available on CD, streaming, and vinyl formats.

"Can you believe that it's been twenty-five years since 'Left of the Middle?! Yeah, we're that old", says a scarcely-believing Natalie Imbruglia, letting out gasp of laughter, as 'London - Live' kicks off.

She's right; it is hard to believe that it's been that long since she began her  music career. Released in 1997, the former Neighbours star did a Kylie, and turned her focus away from acting, towards music, with the resulting platter - her debut album - proving a huge success, racking up over a million sales in the UK, and charting in the top ten in the US, Italy, Sweden, and Australia - where it reached No.1.
'Left of the Middle' was a major triumph, repositioning Imbruglia as a credible artist, on an album that produced four top-twenty singles, and in 'Torn', a major global smash hit. Celebrating its 25th anniversary in 2022, Natalie took to the road for a string of dates to mark the milestone, and recorded during that tour at Shepherd's Bush Empire, 'London - Live' takes in the full eighteen-track show.

As part of the tour, the album was performed almost in its entirety, with only the angsty electro dirge 'Don't You Think' missing. That's a whopping eleven songs from her best-loved album, but there's more to Natalie than that admittedly towering release, and the set kicks off with 'What if Feels Like', the first of five from 2021 comeback 'Firebird'.

With that out of the way, 'Wishing I Was There' is the must succinct indication of what the songstress is all about. This is late '90s edgy pop at its finest; angsty, tuneful, electro-infused sounds that perfectly recall the later part of the decade.  ​

Talking about the "bookends" of her debut and latest albums which frame this release, the British-Aussie star confesses; "I feel like a lot of you have grown up with me", with the likes of earworm 'Wrong Impression' (2001) and the melancholic 'Shiver' (2005) charting the territory in between.

It's 'Left of the Middle' though, that is the centrepiece, and where single 'Smoke' remains achingly beautiful - perhaps her finest moment - 'One More Addiction' is a '90s rock gem, 'Leave Me Alone' is Portishead's 'Glory Box' in all but name, and 'Big Mistake' - with its starts, stops and samples - is the Garbage song they never wrote.

Of course the song that blew the barn doors wide open, 'Torn' garners the biggest reaction, and like the rest of the album it's recreated with precision, with the band on point, reproducing every minite nuance. Natalie's voice meanwhile, hasn't aged a day, and all the while, the singer seems to be having as much fun as the audience, relishing in looking back on the album that changed the trajectory of her career. 

Produced by the singer, Imbruglia says of the release; “The experience I had on the ‘Left of the Middle 25th Anniversary Tour’ is one I will treasure forever. The whole tour was really special, and much of that came down to the audience each night. They were singing their hearts out at every show. I was watching people have their own connection with different songs throughout the set. It was very nostalgic for all of us. Throughout the process of working on this album I got to relive that all over again”.

On 24th November, Left of the Middle turns twenty-nine. This time next year, we will be looking ahead to its thirtieth anniversary. I did want to shine a light on an album that captured so many hearts. The fact it was a major chart success and has sold massive amounts. I wonder whether Natalie Imbruglia has any plans for it next year, or whether the 2022 tour was her way of closing a chapter. Algorithm is one of this year’s best albums. I can see her releasing loads more albums. I have not seen her live before, but I will need to correct that, as I have been a fan of hers since the start. When it comes to artists, Natalie Imbruglia is up there…

WITH the absolute best.

FEATURE: Spotlight: Arabella Lucia

FEATURE:

 

 

Spotlight

Arabella Lucia

_________

I did want to spend time…

with an artist who has had a terrific year. Releasing singles such as Unpretty and Steal My Shimmer, I do think that there is going to be this momentum carried into next year. I will bring in some interviews with Arabella Lucia so that we can discover more about her. I will end with an interview where Arabella Lucia discusses her new E.P. I am writing this on 7th November. The E.P. comes out on 13th November. She also tackled TLC’s Unpretty and talks about that. Before coming to that interview, METAL discussed an artist who is among the most promising coming through. Steal My Shimmer is her latest single. One that tackles sexism and people who try to shrink you:

“After meeting a male musician who apparently struggled to accept her guitar-playing skills, Lucia found herself dealing with comments questioning whether her Gibson SG actually belonged to her father, alongside attempts to undermine her talent. “Not everyone will celebrate your wins, recognise your skills or acknowledge your merit,” she explains. Instead of letting the experience discourage her, she decided to write about it.

The result fits naturally into what Lucia calls her Rockstar Princess universe, where feminine aesthetics coexist with a punk attitude. It's an approach that reflects both her musical identity and her determination to challenge expectations within a traditionally male-dominated scene. She's also been taking that energy to the stage, performing at events including The Alternative Escape, Bludfest and Gibson Garage London's Acoustic Sessions.

The single follows her recent reinterpretation of TLC's Unpretty and Hostage You Call Baby, two releases that have already introduced different sides of her songwriting. Both will feature on her upcoming five-track EP, a project that promises to explore personal experiences and the complicated process of finding your own voice.

For now, Steal My Shimmer makes her position quite clear. “It's an anthem of defiance dedicated to anyone who's ever been told to shrink their spirit to accommodate the insecurities and limiting projections of others,” she says”.

Original Rock spent time with Arabella Lucia earlier in the year. She also talked about TLC’s Unpretty and her take on it, but she spoke about recording her E.P. In addition to that E.P. coming out on 17th November, she is also working on a debut album. This is an artist that you need to know about:

“What’s it been like finding your feet in London, releasing your first music and starting to make your mark on the city? How are you finding the music scene around you?

It’s been incredible so far! Moving from Montreal, Canada, to London was a dream come true, and starting to release the music I’ve been working on has been so rewarding, thanks to the incredible and overwhelming response. I love how vibrant the grassroots music scene is in London, and it’s quickly become home to experiences, lifelong friends, and opportunities that are at the center of a city I now call home.

You’ve described your music as a ‘Rockstar Princess’ world with a punk attitude. What inspired that aesthetic, and what does pairing femininity with a rebellious edge mean to you?

Just before moving to London, I was working as a kids’ party princess. It was quite a contrast to simultaneously making guitar-driven music. This created “Rockstar Princess”, which quickly caught on with fans and became such a big part of my artistic identity. It represents the duality and multifacetedness that’s always resonated with me. Ever since I was a 7-year-old singing Led Zeppelin at open mic nights and seeing the pure shock on people’s faces, I’ve been inspired to embrace standing out rather than conforming to expectations. Challenging what punk looks like is part of what punk means to me. By making room for femininity in rock, we invite more women into a male-dominated space that often dismisses and rejects traditionally feminine traits. Rockstar Princess proves you don’t need to fit into a box; create your own.

You’ve described your music as a ‘Rockstar Princess’ world with a punk attitude. What inspired that aesthetic, and what does pairing femininity with a rebellious edge mean to you?

Just before moving to London, I was working as a kids’ party princess. It was quite a contrast to simultaneously making guitar-driven music. This created “Rockstar Princess”, which quickly caught on with fans and became such a big part of my artistic identity. It represents the duality and multifacetedness that’s always resonated with me. Ever since I was a 7-year-old singing Led Zeppelin at open mic nights and seeing the pure shock on people’s faces, I’ve been inspired to embrace standing out rather than conforming to expectations. Challenging what punk looks like is part of what punk means to me. By making room for femininity in rock, we invite more women into a male-dominated space that often dismisses and rejects traditionally feminine traits. Rockstar Princess proves you don’t need to fit into a box; create your own.

Following the release of your upcoming debut EP on November 13th, You’re currently recording your debut album at Eastcote Studios. Can you give us a glimpse into the creative process and what you’re learning along the way?

It’s been such an incredible and fun process. We wrote these songs in intimate sessions with the same team, so it’s easy to start with a good chat and write about something that feels vulnerable and real. Having a safe space to do that is really special. From there, it’s a mix of playing around with chords or riff ideas (usually on an acoustic guitar), jotting down lyrical phrases in a Google Doc, and keeping the voice-memo app on hand to capture any improvised melody worth remembering. With a 10 am start, we usually have a full song written with a one-take vocal demo by 6 pm. That said, the refining, rewriting, live instrument tracking, vocal takes, harmonies, etc. that go into the rest of the process shouldn’t be overlooked. I’ve learned so much through these experiences, but most of all, I’ve learned the power of collaborative songwriting. These were my first times writing in an environment beyond my bedroom, and I’ve grown significantly as a songwriter in turn”.

I am going to finish off with Fierce & Fabulous. I am new to Arabella Lucia. I am not sure if there are tour dates booked for next year already. I can see her having a pretty busy year. With a new E.P. out – by the time you read this -, there is going to be a lot of focus on her. In terms of her sound, I don’t think there is anyone quite like Arabella Lucia. She is an extraordinary artist:

“Hey Arabella, thank you so much for this interview. Can you start by introducing yourself to readers who might be unfamiliar with your music?

Arabella: Hey Fierce & Fabulous! Thank you so much for featuring me!

I’m Arabella Lucia, the Rockstar Princess. I’m an Armenian-Canadian pop/rock musician based in London. I’m all about guitar-driven, catchy tunes that tell a story, and energetic performances that captivate audiences and get them singing with me!

When did you first discover your passion for music and realise it was something you wanted to pursue?

Arabella: I feel so lucky that I was exposed to music and the arts at a very young age. I was communicating through melody ever since I could speak, and I actually learned to read through my family’s old karaoke machine at home. Going to Armenian school, at age 4 I began singing traditional choir songs and was exposed to important cultural artforms like poetry and dance. My love for the stage grew and led me to starting violin, ballet, and finally discovering at age 6 that voice lessons and guitar were what I wanted to pursue and work at for the rest of my life. Music being so embedded in how I learned to express myself very quickly led me into songwriting, and my participation in The Voice Kids Canada solidified the passion within me that still keeps me going fearlessly down this path today.

You recently shared your take on TLC’s “Unpretty”; how did the idea for this come together?

Arabella: I’ve always loved covering iconic hits and switching the vibe and genre up to make it my own. Unpretty is such an incredible song with a truly timeless message that rings so true in today’s world of social media. From the moment the idea to cover this song was brought up, I knew this would be a special cover and there was no looking back.

How did you decide what tempo and emotional context to develop your version in compared to the original?

Arabella: I definitely had to hone in on myself and have a really clear idea of what makes a song undeniably Arabella Lucia in sound and in essence. Live performance with my band was a large consideration in the development of my version of Unpretty and thinking about the energy and tempo that would feel the most seamless amongst a setlist of my original music. In addition, giving myself the space to relate to the song and understand what it means to me helped me capture a version emphasizing empowerment and rebellion alongside the vulnerability that lays the foundation for the emotional context.

What does this EP personally mean to you?

Arabella: To me, this EP really marks the start of a big chapter. It’s the culmination of work from my first years in London and the first glimpse into hours of dedication, hard work, life experience, growth and honesty. Each song is an important story of agency and survival that I really look forward to sharing with people”.

I am going to finish off here. It is an exciting time for the remarkable Arabella Lucia. You can feel that she is going to have a very long and exciting career. A tremendous young artist whose singles so far mark her out as a distinct and unique talent. After her E.P., the debut album will come out (though no release date has been confirmed). It is exciting to see…

WHAT comes next.

_________

Arabella Lucia

Instagram:

https://www.instagram.com/arabellaxlucia/

TikTok:

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

Facebook:

https://www.facebook.com/arabellaxluciaa/

YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=arabella+lucia

Spotify:

https://open.spotify.com/artist/2f9NnCunV7fzHc0pciHG7f?si=umHLqOGUQEWE4g1Zaad81g

INTERVIEW: Chris Tavener

INTERVIEW:

PHOTO CREDIT: Explore With Brendan

Chris Tavener

_________

THIS is someone who…

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

ON your playlist.

___________

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I was told by a member of the audience in Chester last week that they appreciated how I dealt with heavy subjects without really talking about them directly. I was really pleased to get that feedback. It's what my favourite artists do and it's what I'm always trying to achieve. Whether I get it right or not!

“But humour is a great weapon against injustice”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PHOTO CREDIT: Explore With Brendan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I think there were also some themes and a structure that I wanted to explore, so that had an affect on the final line-up and tracklist.

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

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

In case there are any bookers reading!

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

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

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

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

It's so punk and rock ‘n’ roll.

FEATURE: Spotlight: Mulaa Joans

FEATURE:

 

 

Spotlight

Mulaa Joans

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HERE is an artist…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

A modern icon.

_________

Follow Mulaa Joans

Official:

https://www.mulaajoans.com/

Instagram:

https://www.instagram.com/mulaajoans

Facebook:

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

TikTok:

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

Spotify:

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

YouTube:

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

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

INTERVIEW:

POSTER DESIGNER: Mark McGillivray 

Lara St. John and Patrick Hamm (Dear Lara)

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THIS is one of the…

PHOTO CREDIT: Annie Jeeves

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

EVERYONE needs to see.

_________

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PHOTO CREDIT: Sanjana Bhambhani

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FEATURE:

 

 

This Is Your Big Debut…

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

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A few classic albums…

PHOTO CREDIT: Anna Pou/Pexels

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

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

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

INTO the modern day.

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

FEATURE:

 

 

Such Great Heights

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

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NOT related to any…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE greatest film soundtracks ever.

FEATURE: Modern-Day Queens: The Big Moon

FEATURE:

 

 

Modern-Day Queens

PHOTO CREDIT: Melanie Lehmann

The Big Moon

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THIS is one of my…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IT continue.

__________

Follow The Big Moon

PHOTO CREDIT: Jessie Morgan

Official:

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

Instagram:

https://www.instagram.com/thebigmoon

Twitter:

https://x.com/thebigmoon

Facebook:

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

TikTok:

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

Spotify:

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

YouTube:

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

FEATURE: Spotlight: UCHE YARA

FEATURE:

 

 

Spotlight

PHOTO CREDIT: Tom J. Johnson for NME

UCHE YARA

_________

BACK in September…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A name to remember.

__________

Follow UCHE YARA

Instagram:

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

TikTok:

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

Facebook:

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

Spotify:

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

YouTube:

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

FEATURE: The Great American Songbook: Beck

FEATURE:

 

 

The Great American Songbook

PHOTO CREDIT: Mikai Karl

Beck

_________

I do feature…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FOR decades.

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

FEATURE:

 

 

Just a-Popping Up in My Memory

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

_________

THERE may be a lot…

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

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

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

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

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

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

-Kate Bush, “December will be magic again”

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

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

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

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

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

WORTHY of praise and love.

FEATURE: Spotlight: Radie Peat

FEATURE:

 

 

Spotlight

PHOTO CREDIT: Dave Smith

Radie Peat

_________

I did write about …

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IN THIS PHOTO: Lankum

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PHOTO CREDIT: The Observer

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

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

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

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

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

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

THIS treasured artist.

___________

Follow Radie Peat

PHOTO CREDIT: The Observer

Official:

https://www.radiepeat.com/

Instagram:

https://www.instagram.com/radiepeat

YouTube:

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

Spotify:

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

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

FEATURE:

 

 

Kate Bush: Something Like a Song

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

Pull Out the Pin (The Dreaming)

_________

I am revisiting …

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A music innovator.

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

FEATURE:

 

 

I Use the Enemy

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

_________

IN terms of songs…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SO relevant and fresh.

FEATURE: Groovelines: Queen – Somebody to Love

FEATURE:

 

 

Groovelines

Queen – Somebody to Love

_________

I wanted to look…

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

“The Shadow of “Rhapsody”

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

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

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

Queen and the Queen of Soul

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

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

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

What is the Meaning of “Somebody to Love”?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE late great Freddie Mercury.