FEATURE: Spotlight: she’s green

FEATURE:

 

 

Spotlight

 

she’s green

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THE best way…

to discover more about the Minneapolis band, she’s green, is to get to some interviews from last year. 2025 is when they released their latest E.P., Chrysalis. That came out in August. I want to highlight some interesting interviews with them. FADER spoke with a quintet about their “muscular-yet-soft anthems ahead of the release of their upcoming EP Chrysalis and U.S. tour”. The group consists of Zofia Smith (vocals), Liam Armstrong (guitar), Raines Lucas (guitar), Teddy Nordvold (bass), and Kevin Seebeck (drums):

“The band, who are based in Minneapolis, write about adolescent self-discovery, ecological disaster, and purging repressed memories with a mixture of vulnerability and power. Songs such as "Graze" feel muscular yet soft to the touch, while the soaring "Willow" is densely layered with Zofia Smith's graceful vocals pushed to the front. The music has drawn comparisons to, and remind of me of, bands like The Sundays and Alvvays.

Over the past few months She's Green have been on the road with fellow rising shoegazers Glixen plus the Canadian grunge duo Softcult. This fall they will be opening for Slow Pulp, as well as headlining their first-ever shows in the U.S.

Ahead of Chrysalis and their upcoming tour, get to know She's Green as they discuss a bonding trip to see Ween, the advice they swear by, the sad ant meme they love, and more.

Describe the first show you ever went to as fans.

As a band, the first show we went to together was Ween. The energy was immaculate, the air was temperate, and the sound… The sound was paradise. It was outside at a brewery in the summer, which was the perfect Ween setting. Lots of laughs and a surplus of beer, just a real party.

Give a short review of the last movie you watched.

We watched this black and white movie, The Juniper Tree. Björk is the little sister in a family of witches in Iceland. It’s a very strange but beautiful, poetic film. It’s the type of film to hold you in a dream-like trance during its quiet moments. It feels heavy but light-hearted at the same time.

What’s a motto that you think everyone should live by?

Live, Laugh, Love.

What’s the best advice you’ve ever received?

Just move through life with honest intentions, and it will all pan out

What’s the worst advice you’ve ever received?

You should have your life planned out at a young age. “Where will you be in five years?” and all that. The world moves too quickly.

What’s your favorite song to play live right now and why?

Our song "Figurines" has been really fun. It starts very lowkey, but grows into this crazy ending. The energy is always up for us at the end of that song. It takes us on an emotional journey; we hope it does the same for listeners.

Describe the best show you’ve played this year so far.

Playing Bowery Ballroom in New York with Softcult was incredible. It was a dream venue for us and hitting that milestone was surreal. The crowd was super engaged, too, which made us feel more comfortable on a big stage like that”.

Maybe there will be some repetition in terms of questions asked and answers given from interviews. However, I think we discover new things about she’s green from this interview from Still Listening. The band discuss the new E.P. in addition to nature and transformation. Though they are new to me, they already have a growing and dedicated fanbase:

“For those unfamiliar with your music, can you tell us who you are, where you’re from and about the music you make?

We’re she’s green from Minneapolis, Minnesota. We make textural music revolving around introspection and nature. We started making music with no expectation to be anything but as an emotional outlet for us and to have fun.

What was the inspiration behind the title of your latest EP, Chrysalis, and how does it reflect the music within?

A Chrysalis is a caterpillar before coming out of its cocoon as a butterfly and it seemed to be a perfect theme for the songs since we’ve been going through such a period of transformation as a band. We’ve gone through a lot these past few years from finishing up school, to relationships changing, and developing our sound as a band, playing a ton of shows on the road. Each song is reflecting on the journey in its own way.

Do you typically start with lyrics, melodies, or a particular concept in mind?

We have always started with a guitar part and worked from there. The melodies normally come next, singing gibberish and then the lyrics come from the images in my head, sometimes coming to fruition right away or over some time meditating on it. Our process has always been very natural. There hasn’t been a lot of thinking about concepts first in order to achieve this thing specifically, it’s just spewed out.

Can you share a memorable moment from the studio while recording Chrysalis?

We recorded Graze and Figurines with Henry Stoehr from Slow Pulp at his studio space in Chicago back in the summer of 2024. It was such a fun and rewarding experience, but had its share of silliness too. A lot of takes had to be abandoned because a hardcore band was practicing really loud just a couple rooms down the hall. While it may have been difficult to get clean takes, I can’t lie, that band sounded awesome. I wish I figured out what their name was.

Did anything unexpected happen that shaped the final product?

There’s always a lot of things that come up when you’re recording. Zofia was sick and had to record vocals for hours on end, Raines fractured his thumb a few days before tracking guitars, and we had to finish in a short time period between tours. All those things make recording hectic but also a unique experience.

Your music often incorporates themes of nature. How does your environment in Minneapolis shape your artistic vision and sound?

The Midwest has an almost feminine nature to it with bushy, soft hills and small trees. You drive about an hour away to farmlands with glowing cornfields at twilight and prancing deer. We have gorgeous blooming flowers on trees in the spring and summer, and bright colored leaves in fall. Winter is filled with days of fluffy snow covering everything you see, reminding you how pretty streetlights can be. The softness of our nature has impacted our love for lush textures in music and our love for cinematography as well”.

PHOTO CREDIT: Liam Armstrong

There are a couple of other interviews that I want to cover before finishing off. Chatting with the band as they were on their first tour ever, The Lunar Collective noted how she’s green already had this cult following. If you have not listened to she’s green and experienced their wonderful music then I would strongly urge you to check them out:

“LUNA: What is the shoegaze presence like in Minneapolis?

NORDVOLD: It’s definitely on the come-up right now. I feel like there’s a lot of newer bands that are toying with those kinds of sounds. Some really good friends of ours, like this band called 12th House Sun’s killing it right now…Shoutout Another Heaven, that’s a really, really cool shoegaze band that’s been in the game for a long time from Minneapolis.

LUNA: When you guys were first making music as she’s green, were you intentionally making stuff that was shoegaze, or were you just jamming and seeing what happens?

ARMSTRONG: We were making a lot of different stuff at the time. I mean, I was working on some indie stuff. I started making hip hop beats and stuff. I think I definitely wanted to try to make shoegaze for a few of the songs that we have out, or I was just drawing a lot from inspirations like that. I guess it’s just how it worked…It wasn’t like, we want to be a shoegaze band. It was just like, we want to put out music that reflects the kind of music that we really enjoy. [Zofia] wrote “Mandy”...

SMITH: I just had very raw, like, no pedal, very basic, straight  guitars and vocals in a demo. I feel like that’s how a lot of the songs have started—very raw and baseline. When we come together, we just gravitate towards shoegaze because it adds that element of emotion and extra texture that really enhances those feelings. I would say the first couple songs that Liam and I made, we were definitely in a shoegaze phase…like what we were listening to when we were really diving into the ‘90s music at the time. But now, we’re really finding our own sound, which is great.

LUNA: How do you feel about the shoegaze label for the band?

LUCAS: We’ve all had that shoegaze phase, but I would speak for all of us when I say it’s probably like ten percent of what we’re actually listening to, even though we love the music. We’re never, ever making music for the shoegaze listener. We’re never like, “Shoegaze people will really dig this.” You know, if they do, that’s awesome, but that’s not the focus at all.

LUNA: One thing I like about the shoegaze community is that, when people are into a band, they’re really into the band. I feel like you guys have those sorts of fans already. After you released Wisteria and your other singles, what has the past year been like?

NORDVOLD: One of the coolest things is like… sometimes, name-searching is kind of fun on social platforms. I’m just like, I wonder if anyone is posting about us or something. I’ll find a Turkish channel on Youtube that posted a lyric video for “smile again” with the lyrics translated into Turkish. I’m like, yo, this is so, so cool. I’ll hit up Google Translate and I’ll try to write a thank you in whatever language it is… It’s been completely mind-blowing to see these songs that came together in your basement talked about by people in all the far-reaching corners of the world. It’s beautiful.

SMITH: Everyone has been so kind and supportive. I don’t know, it’s overwhelming. I’m excited. It’s unreal, for sure.

LUNA: How did you guys end up getting signed to Photo Finish Records?

LUCAS: The guy who works there, his name is Shane, he flew out to see us at a basement show in Minneapolis. I think that was very special and cool that he flew all the way from New York to do that. He got to see us in our element, too.

ARMSTRONG: He was really excited about us, and I think that’s what drew us in.

SMITH: He’s just so genuine. There’s no bad energy.

LUNA: Any other plans once you guys wrap up this tour?

ARMSTRONG: Definitely going to be working on new stuff.

NORDVOLD: We’re trying to record some stuff soon.

ARMSTRONG: We have a lot of stuff written. I think it’ll be a good time to just hop in the studio and record once we get back.

LUNA: Did you guys want to mention anything I didn’t bring up already?

NORDVOLD: I want to make it clear that we don’t hate shoegaze and we don’t hate the shoegazers [laughs]. We got a lot of love for them and we got a lot of love for the genre.

LUCAS: “Shoegaze band she’s green denounces shoegaze.”

LUNA: That’ll be the headline when this goes live.

NORDVOLD: They’re gonna tear us apart on Reddit.

SMITH: I love the genre. We just don’t wanna be in a box.

NORDVOLD: There’s definitely going to be music in the future which is very different than a lot of what’s come out so far, which I’m excited for”.

This is the final interview I want to bring in. Quite a lengthy one, there is a lot of interesting takeaways from the interview. I do think that this band are primed for a long career. The group have a run of dates in the U.S. coming up.  I am really looking forward to seeing what they deliver this year. An amazing quintet that I think deserve a lot more love and focus here in the U.K. I hope that they come and play here at some point too:

“There’s so much natural imagery in your work, even your name is evocative of nature; what influence has it had on your music-making?

Liam: Growing up in the Midwest, we’re all deeply entwined with nature. I grew up in a town in Wisconsin where I would go down to this river a lot. When I make music, I want to translate those emotions I get from spending time outside.

Zofia: Liam’s cinematography in nature also adds to our sound. It adds a theatrical element.

Teddy: Like they were saying, we have these Midwestern backgrounds where we spend a lot of time in the woods, or camping, or hiking. There’s something impactful about being in really beautiful natural landscapes. It’s interesting to try translating that into a sonic medium rather than just a visual one.

Zofia: We have really gorgeous, blooming summers. Those memories that we make going camping and just doing outdoor activities are really special, especially since we have such isolating winters.

Teddy: Brutal winters…

Zofia: It’s still really gorgeous with the snow and stuff, but our summers are really special compared to other places.

Liam: The winter helps us write music that longs for the outside.

Teddy: It longs for greener pastures.

I see a lot about the negative side of the Midwest, but you all talk so beautifully about it. Is there anything you want to add to the Midwest discourse?

Teddy: The winters are a trial, but it makes the warmth and green foliage and humid air so much more appreciated.

Liam: We all really enjoy the winter, too. There’s something magical about being outside where everything’s blanketed. It’s so quiet.

Teddy: Yeah! We all live in the Twin Cities, Minneapolis and Saint Paul, so it’s a loud city environment. But whenever it’s snowing hard, everything’s so quiet and pretty.

Zofia: It’s also lighter, like when you go on a fresh snow walk. When the moon is out, everything is brighter because it’s reflecting on the snow. The sky has this really gorgeous color, too.

Teddy: It’s lustrous, almost.

Raines: I don’t know how I’d assess the passing of time if it wasn’t for the four seasons, so the change is really important, too. It makes my life feel more full than if I were in a consistent temperature, even though sometimes it sounds pretty nice.

Your first two singles were recorded at home; where was Wisteria made?

Liam: A lot of it was recorded at home, and the drums we recorded at our student radio.

Teddy: I knew the code to the college radio at The U, and…well, I don’t go there anymore, I can’t get in trouble.

Raines: Oh, you're gonna get expelled for sure.

Teddy: Hey, anyone who’s used that computer knows there are files of old students doing the same thing going back, like, 15 years. I’m far from the first. But it was a better drum recording setup than anything I had access to. Other than that, it was all home-brewed.

Liam: Secret’s out.

Were y’all sitting on the EP for a while?

Zofia: I feel like it just gracefully came together. We had those songs, and they all fit so well together.

Raines: I do remember the posts like, “EP soon!” And then nine months later, like “EP coming soon, I swear!”

Liam: We wanted it to be polished and stay true to what we’ve been dreaming after.

Zofia: We also wanted it to sound good. There are so many textures on there, and it was a lot to work with, so we struggled with that a bit. But once our friend Henry got in to mix everything, it was really good.

Teddy: Henry was the catalyst that we needed to focus the songs, make them cohesive, and have a sonic definition to them. So big thank-you to Henry Breen, love you.

What was the songwriting process like?

Zofia: All over the place. The boys usually come in with a riff or a rhythm, and we’ll throw bass and drums. I’ll start with melodies and write later. Just to serve the instrumental.

Liam: Sometimes we write as a group, too. Zofia had “Mandy” already fully written.

Zofia: “Purple” is also just Liam and me hanging out; It just happened. We wrote it in, like, an hour.

Teddy: Sometimes stuff emerges out of nowhere. There’s an unreleased track that we’re still honing that came from a jam. Just going back and forth between chords, like “there’s something there, but what?”

Raines: We have a new one we’ve been playing that came from Kevin warming up with some song he liked. I just started playing chords I’d never played before, and so did he. 30 minutes later, we had a song. Sometimes it comes like that, but “Graze,” the single that just came out, was a long time coming.

Big question: What are you making music for?

Liam: I want to make something that makes people want to continue enjoying their life. Make the world better.

Raines: This guy’s on a big mission. I didn’t know we were doing that, pressure’s on.

Teddy: A noble cause.

Zofia: I went into it as a self-exploration thing, with zero expectations. Now it’s turned into something that connects us to other people. Like people can relate and find it meaningful. Meeting people on tour has made that connection more of what I’m doing it for now.

Kevin: I’ve always enjoyed playing and being around music. One thing led to another, and now I’m in she’s green. I love to contribute. And make stuff that makes people…wanna continue enjoying their lives.

Raines: We don’t wanna put too much pressure on it either. You could just make music because you like making music.

Teddy: Exactly. I actually had a cool conversation with someone in Dallas last night. We were talking about how they recently picked up bass guitar. I hope I communicated it effectively, but the most rewarding aspect of all of this has been going into it with the intent of having fun. That’s why I started jamming with them in the first place. It’s such a good time, and being on the road has been the most amazing, rewarding experience. Just having fun. And gaining the satisfaction from the process of creation.

Liam: It’s a win-win situation when you get to do something that’s really cool and people are affected by it.

Teddy: One quick addendum I’ll make to my answer: when I listen to music that really clicks with me or I’m at a live show that I’m really immersed in, there’s a feeling. This process is just chasing that metaphorical dragon. I want to find that indescribable feeling. That inner connection with the music. I’ve had that feeling at least once at every show so far.

Zofia: I completely agree.

Liam: Materialized essence of the dream world.

Raines: How I interpret what Teddy is saying is that our main criteria for songwriting is that it has to make us feel something. If it doesn’t, we have to change something. I don’t think we’ll ever release a song that didn’t make us feel anything strong”.

Chrysalis came out last August, so many people might expect a new E.P. or music soon. However, you can’t rush artists and they have been pretty busy the last year or so. Building their name and gaining traction, I feel we will be talking about she’s green for years to come. This is a very special band that you…

NEED to know.

__________

Follow she’s green

FEATURE: Shortlist: Reacting to the Academy Awards 2025 Nominations: Saluting Amazing Women and Highlighting Ongoing Gender Divides

FEATURE:

 

 

Shortlist

IN THIS PHOTO: Chloé Zhao is one of only three women - the others are Kathryn Bigelow and Jane Campion - who have won the Best Director Academy Award. She won in 2021 for Nomadland and is the second women (the first is Jane Campion) to get two Best Director nominations/PHOTO CREDIT: Pat Martin


Reacting to the Academy Awards 2025 Nominations: Saluting Amazing Women and Highlighting Ongoing Gender Divides

__________

I will tie this to music…

IN THIS PHOTO: Emma Stone has picked up her seventh Academy Award nomination. She is nominated for Best Actress for Bugonia

because there is an incredible songwriter who has been nominated again for an Academy Award but has never won one. You do hope that she finally gets one after being overlooked for so long! The nominations can be seen here. There are some takeaways from the shortlist. Hosted by Conan O’Brien (after his triumphant debut hosting last year) on 15th March, the best and brightest from Hollywood will be in attendance. Some truly stunning cinema is represented at this year’s ceremony. The Best Picture category divided people. Popular choices like Bugonia, Hamnnet and Marty Supreme alongside less obvious choices like F1 and Frankenstein. Although these films have female producers, they are still outnumbered by men. It is great that amazing actors like Jessie Buckley (Hamnet), Rose Byrne (If I Had Leg’s I’d Kick You) and Emma Stone (Bugonia) are up for Actress in a Leading Role. It is going to be a wonderful night! In terms of nominations, there are some new and younger actors sitting alongside legends of the screen. One of the most incredible things is seeing Emma Stone nominated once more. She is the youngest woman ever to earn seven Oscar nominations in her career. At age thirty-seven, she received two nominations for Bugonia, one for Best Actress and one as a producer on Best Picture, bringing her total to seven. Winning the Actress in a Leading Role for 2017’s La La Land and 2024’s Poor Things, there are many feeling she will win her third Academy Award. One of the world’s greatest actors, I feel like Stone is going to be nominated multiple more time through her career!

I am going to end with the Directing category which, every year, throws up the same problem. It is one that is not improving. In terms of huge gender inequality. Almost tokenistic to include one woman in the category a year! However, before getting there, it is worth concentrating on the music side. I will include an album from the Music (Original Score) category for a feature. However, look at Music (Original Song). One of the lesser-highlighted and discussed categories, it is notable because it once again features Diane Warren. The song Relentless from Dear Me has lyrics and music by Warren. This is a songwriter who is an Ivor Novello Award-winning genius who has written huge hits for the likes of Cher and Aerosmith. In terms of the Academy Awards, this is someone who is a fixture. This Billboard feature spotlights the Diane Warren-written Academy Award-nominated songs. Not to say it is sexism, but is it telling that someone as wonderful as Diane Warren has not won an Academy Award. It seems strange that someone who has been nominated so often has been ignored. Maybe it is just bad luck. In any case, I think this year is the one where Warren is richly deserving and should get that allusive award:

“Diane Warren is now way up there on the all-time list of top Oscar nominees for best original song. Her nod this year for “Dear Me,” sung by Kesha in the documentary Diane Warren: Relentless, is her 17th — a tally equaled by only two other songwriters in the 92-year history of the category. Sammy Cahn leads with 26, followed by Johnny Mercer with 18.

Moreover, this is the ninth year in a row she has been nominated, which enables Warren to set a new record for the most consecutive nominations in the history of the category. She surpasses Cahn, who was nominated eight years running from 1954 to 1961.

If you’re looking for a common denominator among Warren’s best original song nominees — besides quality — good luck. Three of them reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100, but several others didn’t even crack the chart. Three are from blockbuster action films, but several others are from smaller indie films that barely made a dent at the box office.

She’s rarely been part of an Oscar-magnet film that racked up multiple nominations. “Dear Me” is her 12th nominated song that originated in a film that received no other nominations besides hers”.

The biggest reason for writing this feature is to note that, as of this ceremony, only eleven women have been nominated for the Best Director in the history of the Academy Awards. Out of these nominations, only three women—Kathryn Bigelow, Chloé Zhao, and Jane Campion—have won the award. I think over 260 directors have been shortlisted in its history. It took until 2010 for Kathryn Bigelow to win the award for The Hurt Locker. Nominated for Hamnet, Chloé Zhao makes Oscar history for her second Best Director nomination. In 2021, Nomadland won Zhao her first Academy Award/Oscar. She could well receive her second, though I have seen sites tipping other directors this year. Hollywood Reporter ran a feature where the running order for each category was predicted. In terms of Best Director, Chloé Zhao was placed third behind Paul Thomas Anderson for One Battle After Another and Ryan Coogler for Sinners. With many also agreeing that Paul Thomas Anderson will win, it means that possibly it will be another year where men dominate. Although Zhao won an Academy Award five years ago, we are not far from the one-hundredth Academy Awards. In 2028, when that historic ceremony occurs, will it be the case that only three women would have won the coveted Best Director award?! It seems shocking that there is this continued gender inequality. Rather than these statistics reflecting quality and merit, it is misogyny. Women across the cultural sector are paid less than men. From music to cinema, women are dominating and producing, I think, the best and most enduring work. However, there is still this sexism. Whilst the gatekeepers are men and there are not enough men across these industries calling for change then nothing will! Whilst there have been improvements since the bleakest days, it is insane we live in a time when there are any pay gaps in any creative industry. Not to lame men for this, but you do not often read of actors protesting or asking for a pay cut in order for their female counterparts to be paid equally.

Although women are nominated more in mixed-gender categories, there are still gulfs across many categories. The most glaring one is Best Director. This is arguably the most important category. The director is the person who brings out the wonderful performances from the actors that are nominated. They create these pictures that get nominated too. Of course, films are a collaborative effort, though the director is key. What we see year in and year out if this assumption that men are far exceeding women. As I say, it almost seems tokenistic or an afterthought to include women. Like they need to include one to not be accused of being all-male and misogynistic. Nobody can defend or rationalise the astonishing gap. One could say that there is limited room in that category. Here’s the thing: widen the category, then! Best Picture includes ten films. It is insane that the Actor and Actress categories only have five names in each, as you would think ten is more suitable. Even if you have five, you cannot say it is a case of eighty percent of the best films each year are directed by men. Look at articles such as this, that highlight great films of last year directed by women. How about If I Had Legs I'd Kick You?! Directed by Mary Bronstein, the fact that she directed such a commanding and mesmerising performance from Rose Byrne – who is nominated for Best Actress -and the film holds a 92% rating on Rotten Tomatoes shows that it is acclaimed. I know many say that site has a bad metric and is not reliable. Okay. Look at this review, or this or this, that commend the film and or Mary Bronstein. The performance of Rose Byrne, one of the most lauded in many years, is in many ways down to Bronstein’s direction and instincts. When Greta Gerwig was not nominated for 2023’s Barbie – she was twice-nominated for Best Director but never won -, it was a baffling snub. Kelly Reichardt’s The Mastermind is another award-worthy film. When people talk of the most notable Academy Awards snubs, it is about men not nominated or films directed by men. How many are looking at this year’s Best Director category and asking why only one woman was nominated?!

Even if you (wrongly) assume there are not enough talented female directors in the industry that warrant nominations, that reflects shockingly on an industry that is to blame. Even if the Academy Awards are not as all-male as they used to be when it comes to Best Director, this 2018 article from The Guardian asks questions relevant in 2026. How can this bias – let’s just call it what it is: misogyny – be fixed? It is a subject once again under the spotlight:

“The numbers haven’t changed significantly for the last two decades because at the highest levels of the business, people do not hire women to direct movies,” says Melissa Silverstein, founder/publisher of Women and Hollywood. “Studies have shown that when people in the industry think about a director, they picture a white male with greying hair – basically Steven Spielberg. That’s the default because that is what people have seen.

And it may be what voters are seeing, too. Greta Gerwig’s film Lady Bird picked up the Golden Globe for best motion picture (musical or comedy) as well as best actress (musical or comedy) for Saoirse Ronan. But who won the all-male best director category? Guillermo del Toro, for The Shape of Water. “A film like Lady Bird can have an almost perfect critical response, yet not get nominations,” laments Silverstein.

While it’s true that the best picture and director winners aren’t always awarded for the same film, for Gerwig not to be even nominated for an acclaimed feature speaks volumes. Del Toro’s fellow nominees demonstrate Silverstein’s point clearly: Ridley Scott, Christopher Nolan, Martin McDonagh and yes, Steven Spielberg, for a film (The Post) that went home empty-handed, and wasn’t even nominated for a Bafta.

Spielberg, diplomatically, has since made optimistic comments about the chances for a female director nominee when the Oscar contenders are announced on 23 January. “This is a pretty incredible year, and I think you’ll be seeing some nominations, I’m predicting at the Oscars this year for a woman director, if not several.”

Silverstein says steps have been put in place that may help redress the imbalance. “Over the last two years, the Academy have completely remade the directing branch and have added many more women directors from all across the world. This will give women directors a fighting chance, one they really didn’t have previously when the branch was pretty much all men.”

Other less high-profile awards ceremonies have also offered hope: Gerwig has already won best director at numerous critics’ awards, while Dee Rees, the director of the racially charged Mudbound, has also been honoured, though less resoundingly than pundits predicted. Other awards are finding different ways to honour female film-makers. The Los Angeles Online Film Critics Society recently decided to split the best director award into male and female categories, but segregation can’t really be the answer. While it may have been done with the best of intentions – to give credit to talented women – might it not seem a little patronising to put them in a different category, as if they can’t compete with the big boys? Surely the way to show the industry that great directors can be any gender is to nominate them alongside each other.

What we need is an industry that welcomes all applicants for crew positions, whether they’re in sound, editing, cinematography or directing; and whatever their gender, race or sexuality. The Time’s Up campaign is raising awareness of the imbalance of power in every industry, and let’s hope film is making up for lost time by leading the way. Says Silverstein, “As a culture we need to shift away from our stories being about white men and by white men. That is how more women will receive the deserved honours.” Let’s hope the Academy takes note”.

In 2023, Sarah Polley, Gina Prince-Bythewood, Maria Schrader and Charlotte Wells were snubbed but, as Variety highlight, they were worthy. This article from 2024 talks of the long and complicated history of the Academy Awards and ignoring female directors. Women were shut out in 2020, and whilst two women were nominated in 2021, they still made up only forty percentage of the nominees. It is like a festival such as Glastonbury. The first time they included two female headliners on the Pyramid Stage was 2024 when Dua Lipa and SZA were booked. The festival had been running over fifty years before they booked more than one female headliner! It should not be news that two women are nominated for Best Director at the Academy Awards. It should be common. However, if Hollywood and award ceremonies continue to overlook women and fewer women are being hired to direct, then how is the issue going to be rectified? I feel there are genuinely one or two female directors alongside Chloé Zhao who could have made the shortlist. women directed only 16% of the top 250 grossing films in 2024. Gender gaps seem to be widening. Even when you have a director like Mary Bronstein who should have been shortlisted this year, her name is left out. This article from 2017 asks how to fix Hollywood’s toxic gender exclusion in Hollywood. Barely any progress in nearly a decade! This 2015 article that reveals 99% of women – again, 99%! – in film and T.V. have experienced sexism. It is not only an issue with women not being nominated for awards as directors or having progress thwarted. Think about films in general and speaking roles for women. How this article from last year highlights the following:

“The discussion over women in films, it turns out, was only beginning to gather steam in the industry, and the numbers that have turned up are damning.

In a survey of movies from 2007-2012, the New York Film Academy (NYFA) found that only 31 percent of all speaking characters in film are women. Nearly 30 percent of all women in movies wear revealing clothes or become partially naked, versus less than 10 percent of men. Women characters tend to be younger than men and ancillary to them.

Gena Davis, star of "Thelma and Louise" and other female-driven films, points out that in family films the percentage of speaking female roles is even lower (28 percent) and the female roles are often stereotypical.

In animated films, in which the production company can include as many females as desired, women compose only 17 percent of crowd scenes! Are they that much harder to draw?

Black women have particularly difficult problems getting roles or visibility. By overwhelming numbers, black women in films are homeless, powerless, abused, or alone. Even when they achieve recognition, it’s often for a menial position. Two of the six academy awards won by black females in 88 years were for servant roles, Hattie McDaniel in 1941 and Octavia Spencer in 2011.

The lack of roles for women translates into a lack of leverage for paychecks. NYFA found that men took home the top 16 biggest paychecks in Hollywood. The highest salary for a woman, Angelina Jolie, was equal to the lowest two salaries for men on the list.

Nancy Myers, the acclaimed director of movies about women, said in a New York magazine interview in Sept. 2015 that, except for a “couple” of bankable female stars, most women are fighting over the same small number of roles. This gives them less negotiating power than men. She also said it’s hard to get male movie stars to play in a movie if a woman is the lead”.

Whilst this year’s Academy Awards is a celebration of golden talent across the film industry, it also has to be held responsible for once again excluding women largely from the Best Director category. In terms of all the categories and the extend of gender exclusion, you can see the figures here. It makes for distributing reading! The film industry needs to really take a long look at the statistics coming out and work hard to address issues and why women are excluded, not provided opportunities in terms of directing; being given important roles. Underpaid and undervalued. It is a paramount concern that they…

NEED to answer.

FEATURE: Spotlight: Red Ivory

FEATURE:

 

 

Spotlight

 

Red Ivory

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THERE are some really…

PHOTO CREDIT: Addy Nzerem

promising bands coming through at the moment who we will see grow this year. Among them are the incredible Red Ivory. The London four-piece consist of Eiliyah Redha (vocals/guitar), Frida Olaberria (guitar), Berenice ‘Berry’ L'étrange (bass), and Ivy Adams (drums). Please Leave, I Want to Wake Up Now, is their latest E.P., that was released in November (their 2023 debut E.P., Façade, is not available on streaming sites). I will end with a review of that incredible E.P. There are not too many interviews with the band. However, there are a couple from late last year worth bringing in. I am starting out with Still Listening and their chat with the brilliant quartet. These amazing women need to be on your radar:

“For those unfamiliar with your music, can you tell us who you are, where you’re from and about the music you make?

We are Berry, Frida, Eiliyah and Ivy from south east London, and as Red Ivory we write and perform music inspired by grunge, post punk and alternative rock. We started playing together in 2021 when we were 14.

What inspired the title Please Leave, I Need To Wake Up Now and how does it reflect the themes within your EP?

The title came about in conversation while we were discussing how the EP was made — over such a long time and during so many environmental and interpersonal changes. It reflects the ideas of change, dependence and identity within the project.

What’s been the biggest challenge you’ve faced as a band since forming, and how has it influenced your music?

One of the biggest challenges we faced as a band was definitely our age up until this year or the end of last year. We weren’t able to play in a lot of venues, or had to do so sneakily, which especially at the start meant that we really had to focus on our songwriting over our live set if we wanted to be taken seriously rather than passed off because of how young we were. This was also the reason we initially recorded and released an EP in 2023 in a pretty rushed way, because we felt like we needed to prove ourselves in order to bypass the age thing.

What role does visual art play in your music, whether it’s in music videos, artwork, or your social media presence?

We have definitely started being more specific with our visual output lately, whereas before none of us considered it too much to be honest. Berry has always done all of our artwork though, so it has definitely always been really directly reflective of where we were as a band. Social media presence is obviously insanely important for new bands, and luckily in going about that we have managed to be really creative and have loads of fun, like during a photo shoot with Addy Nzerem (who did our EP promo photos) in Peckham or in creating the single artworks amongst ourselves and with our friends Ethan Holt and Rosalie Salkeld. We have done a couple of music videos with friends, and are definitely wanting to do more of that kind of thing in the campaign for our new EP.

Name an album you’re still listening to from when you were younger and why it’s still important to you?

“I’m still listening to Heaven or Las Vegas by Cocteau Twins because it made me feel really cool when I was 14. And Plastic Beach by Gorillaz because it was one of the only CDs we had in my car when I was growing up.” – Ivy

“Lush’s Lovelife album because it was the first album that made me love rock music when I was like 14.” – Eiliyah

“I still listen to Barton Hollow by The Civil Wars because it was an album that all my older siblings used to sing to me most nights. – Berry

When someone hears your music for the first time, what do you hope sticks with them?

We hope that the drive within our music sticks with people, because we feel like that’s a constant presence in our tracks and one that we aim to maintain. We also hope that the ease and smoothness of the writing process comes through the tracks and sticks to them”.

Prior to getting to a review of the sensational Please Leave, I Need to Wake Up Now, CLASH included Red Ivory in their Next Wave series. They are definitely a band to watch. I would love to see them live, as they seem like such an eclectic and powerful stage act. They have had a couple of January London dates. Paper Dress Vintage on 16th; George Tavern on 20th. Tomorrow (2nd February) they play Shackwell Arms. Although they are playing small spaces at the moment, it is not going to be long until they are playing major venues:

“Red Ivory is done with being hidden.

For the South London four-piece, music began initially as a curious outlet. “I guess because my family’s really religious, they think music’s a sin,” vocalist Eiliyah deadpans. “But then when I started doing it, they were like, ‘Okay, whatever.’” Stealing CDs from her dad’s collection, she taught herself how to sing and play the guitar. Ivy first picked up a guitar during lockdown, as more of a side hobby. Berry “did not know what the bass actually was”, as she claims, but came into possession of a five-string instrument somewhat accidentally. Ivy, whose only instrument was the piano, learned to play the drums after joining Red Ivory.

The self-taught musicians trace their proper musical roots back to their school days—which aren’t too far behind them. Eiliyah, Berry and Frida went to secondary school together, and linked up with Ivy, a friend of Berry’s from childhood, at school when they were 13. “We were known as a collective,” Ivy says, with their schoolmates often teasing them for being attached at the hip. In year 10, while studying their GCSEs in music, their writing teacher suggested they write as a band. From that day forward, their mutual ambitions became bound together. Now a band of 18-year-olds, they’re just scratching the surface.

“We knew what we wanted from the start; it wasn’t by accident,” Ivy says. “[We were] very intentional in wanting to achieve what we’re doing and what we still want to achieve now.” Officially starting Red Ivory at 14 years old, their age was never a personal deterrent; if anything, it drove them forward. At the motivation of Frida’s mum, who worked in events, Red Ivory became a staple in their local South London scene. For the young musicians, its community of venues was like entering a foreign post-punk and alternative world. “When we would tell people that we were from South London, they’d respect us a little bit more,” Eiliyah explains, though this did not eradicate their issue of being underage. The band would have to evade speculative eyes and, when asked their age by interviewers, would vaguely reply, “We’re in uni.”

“We were kind of an enigma for a while because it was like, ‘They can’t know how old we are, they can’t know who we are,” Ivy says. “We’d literally have to leave a venue as soon as we played.” Enduring getting kicked out of venues for being underage more than once, as Berry recalls, “We’ve always kind of been hidden… we couldn’t exactly show ourselves. Now, it’s like, ‘See us!’”

Red Ivory became nearly trapped in their own creation, their talents threatening to burst their cage open. When they weren’t spending their days under the confines of academia, they spent time writing together, bleeding themselves dry of every frustration that was brewing within. The resulting EP, ‘Please Leave, I Need To Wake Up Now’, recorded in the midst of preparing for their A Levels, immerses the listener into the teenagers’ mental state. Each song feels “like sections of a nightmare”, as Eiliyah describes. “Us being at school was just an absolute nightmare. Obviously, we had each other, but everything else around us was like…” She trails off with a shake of her head. In contrast, Berry explains, the EP’s title “feels like it came to us in a dream. All the songs were about claustrophobia and that kind of vibe”.

Across the EP, Red Ivory evolves into increasingly self-assured territory, gaining power in every note. ‘My Mind’ channels both anger and apathy, while ‘Interlude’ operates as a space for each musician to jam in their own worlds. For Eiliyah, an introspective love song like ‘Hate The Way’ allowed her to explore her vocal talents that were concealed by an innate shyness. “I would never find out what I could do more,” she explains, “and ‘Hate The Way’ was the first one where, in the end, I start belting. So, I think that song reflects vulnerability, but also growing out of it a lot more.” Any given Red Ivory song is rooted in a slight dissonance, like leaning into imperfection in favour of a radical honesty. Notes of grunge seep into them, and fittingly so. A mutual love of Sonic Youth guided Red Ivory in their early days, while nods to the Breeders, the Pixies and Fugazi exist in their chords. “It was just such a cool time, like Kim Deal and all of her different experimentations and bands,” Berry says. “That’s kind of what we want, you know? To be ever-changing.” Now, with bands like Mannequin Pussy, Wolf Alice and Pretty Sick to look towards, Red Ivory are emerging with a reimagined DIY energy that sparks a much-needed enthusiasm”.

I will wrap things up with a glowing review of the Please Leave, I Need to Wake Up Now E.P. Silent Radio had this to say about a work from a group that I can see enjoying a very long and successful career. It is clear, right from the off, they have this incredible and distinct sound. One that is winning them a lot of fans. If you are unfamiliar then make sure you connect with them:

“Twiddling your thumbs after finishing your A levels? Not if you’re Red Ivory. The South-London teenage four-piece released a new EP, Please Leave, I Need to Wake up Now instead. It’s gritty indie rock that hits you in the face – and the gut – offering confrontation rather than escape.

The first notes of opener “12 October” make it clear that the young women – Eiliyah Redha, Frida Olaberria, Berry Stuttard, Ivy Forbes Adam – are not interested in sleek production or sing-along choruses. Instead, they channel anxiety and rebellion, and the track would not be out of place on Nirvana’s Bleach. It’s scruffy and abrasive, filled with the kind of restless energy teenagers tend to be bursting with. “Can’t you see it’s no good for me / I don’t wanna feel but you make me”, Redha sings, sounding moody and petulant. A bit like a teenager, you might say, if it wasn’t for the fact that her voice has the primal rawness of PJ Harvey at the peak of her powers.

On “Crashing Down,” the band even manages to up the ante and plunge into the claustrophobic anxiety you may experience under the influence, which the song addresses. The distorted guitars create a dark, nervous atmosphere, and the song is the kind of masterclass in push-and-pull dynamics that Sonic Youth perfected over their career. When the manic collapse finally arrives and everything comes, well, crashing down, you feel like you could use a bit of a rest to regroup.

Thankfully, Red Ivory show some kindness in the form of “Hate the Way”, more jangly indie pop than in-your-face rock for the most part, not unlike Hole’s softer, melancholic offerings. Wistful and bittersweet, it’s proof that creating chaos isn’t Red Ivory’s only forte, and though the lyrics are anything but happy-go-lucky – “I hate the way I feel about you / But I can’t change anything” – the track shows the emotional nuance that stops the music from feeling one-dimensional.

At 1:12 minutes, “Interlude” may be the EP’s shortest song but it’s also the most ominous-sounding, keeping you guessing as to whether it’s going to turn into a full-on heavy metal assault. It doesn’t, segueing into closer “My Mind” instead, a song that somehow manages to bring to mind all those female or female-fronted acts that made ‘90s guitar music such a thrill. L7? Check! Veruca Salt? Check! Sleater-Kinney? Check!

Red Ivory pick up the mantle some 30 years later, and like all those artists as well as the ones mentioned earlier, they aren’t offering comfort but truth. It’s fierce, ragged, at times uncomfortable, the way truth tends to be. Here’s hoping that adulthood will not blunt their edge”.

There is no doubt that Red Ivory are worth all the buzz they are getting. I feel they should get some space on sites like Rolling Stone UK, NME and beyond. Some of the biggest and most influential websites and publications showing love for this band. Eiliyah Redha, Frida Olaberria, Berenice ‘Berry’ L'étrange and Ivy Adams are going to make some big strides. Although this year is young, you just know that they are going to accomplished…

SO much very soon.

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Follow Red Ivory

FEATURE: Bigger Than The Beatles: Celebrating the Record-Setting Robbie Williams

FEATURE:

 

 

Bigger Than The Beatles

IN THIS PHOTO: Robbie Williams celebrates his sixteenth chart-topping album, BRITPOP, and holds the record of scoring the most chart-topping albums in the U.K. Williams surpasses The Beatles, who set the tally in 2000 with their 1s album

 

Celebrating the Record-Setting Robbie Williams

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THOUGH he himself…

 PHOTO CREDIT: Jason Hetherington

(I hope) would not claim to be better than The Beatles – no artist who has ever lived is as good! -, he has claimed the honour of setting a record that sees him overtake the band. Robbie Williams’s BRITPOP has gone to the top of the charts and is another major success for one of our greatest artists. There are a couple of interesting anniversaries to tie this moment to. Thinking of The Beatles, John Lennon’s "more popular than Jesus" quote was originally published in The London Evening Standard on 4th March, 1966, in a profile written by Maureen Cleave. Almost sixty years ago, there was this massive controversy. Not to wander off course too much, but the point of Lennon’s quote was that The Beatles were more relevant than Jesus and religion. That they were affecting and influencing young people more. It is hard to sympathise with Lennon and the band, as there are some effective and really horrible quotes in that interview. However, as Robbie Williams has toppled The Beatles in terms of number one albums, I did want to bring that in. Also, his former band, Take That, had their own unfortunate and ‘controversial’ moment almost thirty years ago. On 13th February, they announced their split to the world. Fans were distraught and it was this huge event. Williams departed from Take That in 1995. He released his amazing debut album, Life Thru a Lens, in 1997. It will be interesting seeing what he does to mark its thirtieth anniversary next year. I wanted to celebrate this record-breaking moment from Williams with a career-spanning playlist. Some of his very best solo cuts. I will end with a positive review for BRITPOP. An album that got a lot of critical praise. First, The Guardian highlighted this massive moment for a legendary Pop artist:

“Robbie Williams has scored his 16th UK No 1 album, surpassing a tally set by the Beatles in 2000 to become the all-time chart record holder.

Britpop, Williams’ homage to the lairy and zeitgeist-setting guitar music of the mid-1990s, went straight to No 1 in its first week of release. All but one of his studio albums have now reached the top – except 2009’s Reality Killed the Video Star, kept off the top by boy band JLS – plus three greatest hits compilations and his soundtrack to the biopic Better Man. Not counted in that tally are two other No 1 albums Williams recorded as a member of Take That.

Williams had clearly longed to break the record, moving the release date of Britpop back from its intended date of October after realising it was going to compete with – and inevitably lose out to – Taylor Swift’s The Life of a Showgirl. With Britpop then lined up for a 6 February release, he suddenly brought the release forwardto the relatively uncompetitive week of 16 January.

He has described Britpop as “the album that I wanted to write and release after I left Take That in 1995”. The Guardian’s chief pop critic Alexis Petridis praised it, writing: “There’s a swagger and sparkle to the melodies that shift these songs past the realm of pastiche, and the results are hugely enjoyable.”

The Beatles set the previous record with their greatest hits album 1, one of four chart-topping albums released since the band split. They have come close to adding further No 1s on numerous occasions, reaching No 2 or No 3 a total of 10 times.

Pop fans will debate whether Williams is truly “greater” than the Beatles, though he certainly reached his record tally quicker: 29 years versus the 37 years it took the Beatles’ to notch up their 15 No 1s”.

Regardless of whether you think Robbie Williams is more enduring, relevant and better than The Beatles or it is just this notable and impressive feat, the fact is that his latest album not only shows his enduring and enormous critical and commercial appeal. He also shifts and evolves. BRITPOP is really about him making the kind of music he could not in the 1990s. It evokes some of the sounds of the mid-1990s and that heady time of British Pop dominance. However, he adds something modern and unique into the mix. It is an epic and wonderful album from an artist who has had this incredible career. Take That’s debut single, Do What U Like, turns thirty-five in July. That fresh-faced and unknown artist has accomplished so much since then. Had quite the ride!

I do hope that we get a lot more music from Robbie Williams, as everything he releases is fascinating and excellent. Even albums that some are a bit mixed towards have their moments. I will get to a playlist very soon. However, before that, Rolling Stone UK published a four-star review of BRITPOP:

“By Robbie Williams’ own admission, his 13th studio album sees the national institution and now firmly mellowed hellraiser offer up the sound he wishes he had released upon notoriously leaving Take That in 1995. He’s bigged up the fact that guitar god Tony Iommi makes an explosive cameo on the lead single ‘Rocket’, while claiming it to be “raw – there are more guitars and it’s even more upbeat and anthemic than usual.”

All of this is true, and the result is a record which sees Robbie sounding more liberated and delivering some of his best songs in years. It’s unrepentantly mad, as illustrated by the swirling guitars on ‘Rocket’, but this constant sense of unpredictability is a strength. Here’s Robbie leaning into what he’s always done best: not giving a fuck and dancing to the beat of his own drum.

On ‘Spies’, he offers a swaggering, guitar-driven anthem that shares sonic DNA with fan-favourite ‘Monsoon’, but it touchingly comes from the perspec-tive of this zen family man reflecting on a misspent youth. “We used to stay up all night / Thinking we were all spies / Praying that tomorrow won’t come,” comes Robbie’s salvo on the chorus.

Elsewhere, the bolshy edge of ‘Cocky’ sees him boast that “you get to talk to Jesus, I get to talk to God” and – funnily enough – offers a bold guitar line which doesn’t sound a million miles away from Depeche Mode’s ‘Personal Jesus’. He’s yet to confirm if he’s started a war of words with the 80s icons, but it’s something we’d certainly be here for.

If you thought that was weird, you haven’t heard anything until encountering ‘Morrissey’, which sees Robbie team up with old pal/sparring partner Gary Barlow for a song written from the perspective of someone who is “completely obsessed and in love” with The Smiths icon, so takes to stalking him. It’s ironic, then, that this maddest of premises actually turns out to be one of the record’s best songs – a glittering synth pop banger indebted to Erasure.

And by the time things wrap up with ‘Bite Your Tongue’ (let’s conveniently ignore ‘Desire’, the misfiring FIFA anthem which closes the record), Robbie’s talk of guitars and anthems has largely rung true. It’s unrepentantly bonkers and will do little to win over his detractors, but who cares when the rest of us are having this much fun?”.

Robbie Williams plays Glasgow’s Barrowlands Ballroom on 4th February. I am sure there will be a lot of live dates this year. The next steps from him will be incredible. BRITPOP is an album he always wanted to make so it seems like the closing of a chapter and this look back. What will his next album contain? We will wait and see. In honour of Robbie Williams besting a chart record held by The Beatles, I am focusing on his solo work (sorry Take That fans!) and the brilliance he has produced since the 1997 debut, Life Thru a Lens. Now in his fifties, this amazing artist still has this energy, creativity and relevance. Long may he reign! Robbie Williams is an artist that I…

ALWAYS love to see succeed.

FEATURE: An Imperfect Moment: Why the Charli xcx Mockumentary Is an Overdue Treat

FEATURE:

 

 

An Imperfect Moment

 

Why the Charli xcx Mockumentary Is an Overdue Treat

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WHEN it comes to music…

PHOTO CREDIT: Hailey Benton Gates

bring represented on the small of big screen, there is not a lot in the way of visibility. There are music biopics and the odd film/series where music is at the heart, but it is not as visible and discussed as other genres and areas of cinema and television. When artists do appear on the screen, it is usually in a biopic. Big artists like Lady Gaga appearing in films. I have said how there are so many artists who would naturally translate to the screen and would make brilliant actors. Someone who has appeared in smaller roles but you can see doing big film roles is Charli xcx. She is an artist who has this screen presence. I would love her to appear in a range of films. The Moment is a mockumentary she is starring in. This is a genre of film that is always interesting. We are going to see this exaggerated version of Charli xcx. I think that something like this is overdue. Maybe because it offers a sense of levity at a very bleak time. Or that we rarely get to see major artists do something like this. So hallowed and revered by the press, we usually see all this gloss and shine. So much spotlight, focus and praise. It is wonderful, of course, but it can be a bit too much. It is hard to say why, but I do find myself looking for something a little scrappier or deeper. In terms of seeing an artist in a new light or them taking a different direction. This is a film that really accompanies her 2024 album, BRAT. One reason why The Moment is refreshing is because it is not the usual concert film you get. The big documentaries where you see the huge crowds and all the glamour and rapture. A much more interesting angle, The Moment will spotlight a more extreme version of Charli xcx, but also has this comedic tone. One could compare it to a film like This Is Spinal Tap. Variety spoke with Charli xcx recently about a film whose original pitch was too label-focused. She also discussed the recent Oscar nominations:

“Charli xcx is taking Sundance by storm ahead of the world premiere of “The Moment,” a concert mockumentary in which a fictionalized version of the pop star mounts an ambitious tour for her “Brat” album. The singer joined the Variety Studio presented by Audible hours before the film’s premiere and got honest about its origins, which included turning down her label’s original pitch.

“I was approached to make a more traditional tour film around the ‘Brat’ shows I was doing,” Charli explained. “It kind of felt like a way to elongate the life span of the album for my record label. I was just not really into that. I was only interested in flipping the form of something quite traditional.”

“I was thinking of how I could put a spin on a long-form film about what I had experienced throughout the album cycle. This is where I landed, this satirical take not only on the music industry but myself. It felt like a way into talking about pop culture, fame and the loss of art the second you put something out. This felt like a rich ground to breed ideas.”

Joining Charli in the film are Rosanna Arquette, Kate Berlant, Jamie Demetriou, Hailey Benton Gates, Rachel Sennott, Isaac Powell and Alexander Skarsgård. Some actors play fictionalized version of themselves (Sennott), while others play fictionalized versions of real people on Charli’s team (Berlant is her make-up artist, for instance). The film is directed by Aidan Zamiri, one of Charli’s close collaborators during the “Brat” era as the helmer of her “360” music video and more.

“How cool and rewarding that ‘Brat’ was the most successful thing she’s ever done — something that she felt was such a true expression of her,” Zamiri told Variety in a pre-festival interview. “And then it’s interesting to see something like that become so global and so mass consumed that it became a commercial output for various brands.”

Elsewhere during her Sundance interview, Charli was asked by Variety’s Matt Donnelly about this week’s Oscar nominations. Charli is an outspoken cinephile, and her Letterboxd ratings often go viral across social media platforms like X and more.

“I haven’t looked at the nominations. I don’t know! I don’t know anything,” Charli admitted, although she was surprised to find out that Ariana Grande was snubbed in the best supporting actress category for “Wicked: For Good.” Grande and Charli worked together on the “Sympathy Is a Knife” remix off Charli’s “Brat and It’s Completely Different but Also Still Brat.”

“Oh, Ari! She is amazing,” Charli said. “She goes full force. I literally do not know who is nominated or not, but that’s a surprise to me that she wasn’t.”

“The Moment” opens in theaters January 30, following its Sundance premiere”.

I do hope that The Moment reignites interest in BRAT. The biggest album of 2024, Charli xcx’s new album is out on 13th February. It is the soundtrack for Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights. It is this new direction and an artist stepping into writing for film. I do wonder how she will follow this and what the next album will contain. I have seen some mixed reviews for The Moment. However, there is this generational divide. Slightly older reviewers not aware of or fans of Charli xcx shrugging and writing it off. Whilst not perfect, Charli xcx is always engaging and eminently watchable. It is a brilliant concept. It is hard to ignore comparisons to a well-known music mockumentary. However, they are rare these days. You would like to see some major artists almost send themselves up like this. Lady Gaga, Taylor Swift or Harry Styles doing something like this. It would have been easy for Charli xcx to do a tour concert film for BRAT and follow everyone else. It would have been popular and well-received. However, The Moment offers something unexpected. A way to support the album but also move on. If some are not convinced by the plot, tone and highlight some drawbacks – I saw one review that said The Moment needs to be more broadly entertaining -, it allows Charli xcx to adopt an acting role rather than just being the artist. If contemporaries like Dua Lipa have stepped into film but it has not really ignited like you’d hope, I do think that Charli xcx will do a lot of huge film roles very soon. The Moment is fascinating. How people are reviewing and perceiving it. It is overdue because it departs from the usual concert film. They can be revealing and emotion, though it is very much the artist at their best. The celebration of massive tours and all the adulation. Here, there is something less perfect and almost self-deprecating. I want to bring in a review for The Moment. The Playlist provided their take on this wonderful new mockumentary:

“PARK CITY – In no manner of speaking can you prepare yourself for “The Moment.” Sold as a mockumentary centered on Charli XCX’s BRAT tour, the movie only hints at a narrative heading in that direction. It’s not a full-fledged comedy, and the only musical performance, if you want to call it that, comes under the opening credits. Instead, think of Aidan Zamiri’s feature directorial debut as a dramatic reenactment of an alternate timeline. A world where the pop dance superstar made choices out of fear instead of a cool, artistic confidence that is seemingly her calling card.

The film begins in a manner that the marketing has been selling audiences so far. Charli (Charlotte Emma Aitchison) has three weeks of rehearsals until the launch of her 2024-2025 BRAT tour. She’s just wrapped a crazy “BRAT summer,” after the release of her self-produced album BRAT, which became a pop culture phenomenon. Flanked by her manager Tim (Jamie Demetriou), her social media manager Lloyd (Isaac Powell), and assistant Ana (Trew Mullen), she films a Vogue “What’s My Bag” segment. Interview Magazine Editor-in-Chief Mel Ottenberg plays himself as a stylist for the shoot, having her sewn into a corset that will make her the first “bag” subject who participates standing up. This is played for laughs and hints at the movie you think you’ve signed up for.

Back in London, Charli’s record label, Atlantic, is visited by their American boss, Tammy (Patricia Arquette), who is preoccupied with a major credit card tie-in and concert movie for the tour. Tammy is thrilled to discover that the U.K. staff have already lined up the super-commercial director Joannes (Alexander Skarsgård, properly disturbing) to make sure the movie is a hit. Of course, no one asked for Charlie’s sign-off on any of this. She arrives at rehearsals to work with her assigned show director and creative collaborator, Celeste (Hailey Benton Gates), the woman responsible for the BRAT aesthetic (in reality, the tour was conceived by Jonny Kingsbury).

When Joannes, who has a difficult reputation, shows up at rehearsals, it sets up a confrontation with Celeste, the record company, and Charli that becomes progressively tense. Yes, this film, which is occasionally funny, becomes a slow burn of genuine tension. History tells us that the tour’s creative, created by “Celeste,” was at the center of the show. As “The Moment” moves forward, there is an increasing sense of dread surrounding the proceedings and Charli’s choices. And that’s because, in this script written by Zamiri and Bertie Brandes, this isn’t a celebration of BRAT, it’s a deconstruction of it. This is a movie about a public figure who begins to question all the bold choices she made to reach this peak in the first place. Like her record label, she feels an inordinate amount of pressure to keep this era alive. She’s spent over a decade trying to reach the top, and she doesn’t want to crash now.

Granted, that’s not to say there aren’t funny moments. Rachel Sennott, who appeared in the “360” music video Zamiri directed, wonderfully pokes fun at herself running into Charli at a Paris after-party. Even Kylie Jenner, who also plays herself, isn’t afraid to let the audience know she’s in on the joke, or at least whatever Charli and Zamiri think of the Kardashians. For the most part, everyone else surrounding this incarnation of Charli is only there to raise her anxiety. She’s even afraid of getting sick from the kooky makeup artist Molly (Kate Berlant, who deserved more screen time). Decidely, Celeste is the only character in the film attempting to keep her friend, Charli, on track, whether it personally benefits her own career or not.

Without spoiling much, when things come to a head, Aitchison delivers a monologue as this version of Charli that is borderline heartbreaking. She’s essentially justifying her actions in the third act to the audience. Choices that would shock her fans and peers in the real world. She’s startlingly good. Even if she’s playing “herself.” Perhaps this is “The Moment,” the movie’s title refers to.

The fact that Aitchison approved this script will leave many in the music industry with some big questions. Even if the movie is sold as a fictional exercise. Is Tim, a deceptive manager you could never envision Charli having in her close circle, representing a previous manager/agent in her life? Despite her success on the charts, does she have genuine disdain for he record labe Are there really moments where Aitchison feels as isolated as this Charli? Were there moments here where there was no one to trust? (It should be noted that this Charli doesn’t have a longtime partner or future husband to turn to as she does in this timeline).

It goes without saying that Zamiri has taken a very big swing with “The Moment.” So, frankly, has Aitchison. The legacy of BRAT and Charli’s contributions to this particular era of pop culture are on the line (and so is her relationship with her fanbase). And while it’s not a complete home run – it is a wee bit too long and certainly not as funny overall as it should be – in the end, it delivers. Because, love it or hate it, this film will linger with you. You certainly won’t forget Aitchison’s stirring performance. And for someone who has become wonderfully astute in the history of cinema, Aitchison couldn’t ask for anything more”.

PHOTO CREDIT: Hailey Benton Gates

I actually want to bring in a December interview from A Rabbit’s Foot. Charli xcx discussed her film ambitions, being inspired by cinema, and she also talked about The Moment. Her goal seems to show less Charli xcx in her performances. Maybe feeling too exposed or like there is too narrow a spotlight on who she is, cinema allows her to be different people and explore completely different sides. I think it is an interesting interview that ties into The Moment and where Charli xcx might head. Such a compelling and fascinating talent. A definitely natural and powerful screen presence:

“Prior to our interview, Charli had spent all day being photographed by director (and her friend) Hailey Benton Gates, and was courteous with her time, despite how demanding we were with it. But there’s a meta quality tied to this shoot, she explains, that makes it more fun. “I wanted Hailey to photograph me because she plays my creative director in The Moment and here she is now directing me in real life,” Charli grins. “Everything I do is meta.”

Perhaps that’s why the transition to acting has seemed so effortless. She already lives in cinema’s spiritual heartland Los Angeles, a city that she loves but is steadily falling out of love with (“the scene was better in 2015”). She’s spending a lot more time in New York, where many of the BRAT Pack reside. London remains special to her too, she smiles.

Charli recently published an essay on her Substack, explaining, “… As some of you may know I’m currently feeling more inspired by film than I am by music. Film is where my creative brain seems to be gravitating.” It follows acclaimed acting performances in 100 Nights of Hero (2025), Pete Ohs’s Erupcja (2025), and the announcement of a Tokyo-set series by the legendary provocateur Takashi Miike. That came about after she watched Miike’s Imprint (2006) and decided to call the Japanese filmmaker on a whim. “I never thought he’d respond but he did, we had a Zoom and are now on this project,” she says. “I just want to make the movies I love watching.”

The same day as the shoot, her video for the sweepingly romantic, kind-of-heroic new song ‘Chains of Love’, for Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights adaptation, was released. It’s a prolific start.

But most personal is The Moment—a satire mockumentary directed by the talented Aidan Zamiri. It is a story borne from Charli’s experiences following the surreal phenomenon of BRAT and what followed, with characters inspired by the very real people in Charli’s environment at that time (there are cameos by Sennott, among others). “It’s a 2024 period piece,” she explains. It’s also, perhaps, the ultimate meta role. “The Moment is on the nose, but the last thing I want is to play a version of myself,” she insists, referring to the Charli xcx “It girl” persona—an incarnation of post-internet sass, sunglasses, and cigarettes (the Charli in front of me is unlike that; rather, more kind and grounded). Other directors—big directors—have tried to typecast her but Charli is a natural shapeshifter. “My biggest goal is to disappear, for people to not see Charli xcx in my performances. Like Tom Waits in Jim Jarmusch’s Father Mother Sister Brother (2025).” She pauses at my reaction. “You don’t feel the same about Tom Waits?”

“I did,” I replied. But looking back, I’m not sure I was being entirely honest. Time will tell if Charli will, indeed, blend in how she wants to; nor is she being naive about the switch—she’s already been at the apex of one industry, and is doing her best to navigate a film career without making some of the mistakes a younger actor would. “I’ve paid the price for some decisions in music and I don’t want to do that with film—because I love film much more than music,” she says. It’s a relief, a chance to escape. Cinema offers new worlds and possibilities, and acting allows Charli’s inner chameleon to be free to create unbound. There is also the potential for humiliation, she explains—a thrill she hasn’t felt for a while now. “I’ve been on the same hamster wheel since I was 15. I don’t feel the danger with music anymore,” she continues. “I’m in control of every aspect of my music—the sound, my image, the performing. But with cinema, I have to surrender myself to someone else’s vision.”

Since seeing her on stage in that musty room in 2011, I’ve watched the evolution of Charli xcx: the femme fatale persona—not the mind behind the shades, the cigarette smoke, and the dynamic songwriting. But she has been telling us who she really is all along. When I compliment her recent essay and the insight it gave me into her practice, she half-frowns as though suggesting that I have underestimated, or at least misunderstood, her. Filmmaker Ariel Schulman, a friend of hers, told me after: “Charli’s one of the most published poets in the world right now if you think about how many people are listening to her lyrics. She knows how to say what she wants like no one else.”

Charli concurs. “I’ve always been open in interviews about my art. People just haven’t listened… or I’ve been taken out of context. Writing publicly lets me create the context.” The Moment serves the same purpose. It’s Charli speaking directly to the world about the surreal aftermath of BRAT. She thought the album would be niche—something for her fans. Instead, it became a global phenomenon, reshaped and meme-ified far beyond her control. “I didn’t know if I’d make music again. Everything I did would be compared to BRAT.” The fallout sent her into a creative fog. And for Charli, creativity is not optional; it is existential. “Look, you might think I’m being dramatic, but I talk to my husband about this all the time. I want to feel life on overload, at full speed. If I couldn’t create, I would die. Someone might say, ‘She’s over the top,’ but the past five years I’ve been frustrated with my music rollout. I hate going on tour—it’s monotonous. I like to be in the throes of creation constantly. This is honestly what keeps me alive”.

Available in the U.S. from 30th January and 20th February in the U.K and Ireland, you can stream it here. In terms of artists doing anything similar, I cannot see anything around. St. Vincent’s The Nowhere Inn of 2021 has a similar feel, but you don’t really get artists doing mockumentaries. There are so many great acts I would love to follow Charli xcx. In a wider sense, this is an artist who is exploring cinema. Her Wuthering Heights soundtrack is another example. I feel we will see a lot more Charli xcx on the screen. Maybe composing scores for films too. Whilst Charli xcx the artists will always record music, at the moment, she seems to want to see less of herself out there. In the sense of being this artist that we all know and love. Go beyond that and perhaps escape more into characters or versions of herself. The Moment will be so interesting to see, even if you do not know her music that well. The latest chapter from…

THIS modern-day music icon.

FEATURE: Modern-Day Queens: Poppy

FEATURE:

 

 

Modern-Day Queens

 

Poppy

__________

I have talked about…

PHOTO CREDIT: T-bone Fletcher

Poppy before, though never in this feature. I know she is not a fan of journalists that note she likes heavy music and then get her to name bands. Instead of being this basic, I am going to select some interviews from last/’this year from Poppy. She released her new album, Empty Hands, on 23rd January. Boston-born Moriah Rose Pereira followed up her acclaimed sixth studio album, Negative Spaces, with another tremendous album. I am ending with a review of Empty Hands. In May last year, CLASH spoke with Poppy. Noting how she survives on defiance, it is a really fascinating chat:

“Poppy is a child of the digital age. After being bullied into homeschooling due to her shy demeanour in public school, Poppy was weaned by the 2000s web. Though her love of the internet has declined in recent years (“it’s too cluttered”), it’s where she’d find her voice. From ASMR-esque videos of her silently eating cotton candy, to adverts for gravity-defying shoes, the early days of Poppy were ludicrously absurd. The Lynchian genesis of the project could have been deemed an act of AI in the modern age, with instalments taking the form of ten minute montages of the singer asserting “I’m Poppy” on a loop. “The internet was the Wild West,” Poppy says, an air of whimsy in her voice. “There were no rules.”

The videos and initial singles came as a perplexing search for meaning. Poppy’s sonic debut, ‘Everybody Wants To Be Poppy’, would blend squeaky-clean pop hooks into social commentary on mass-produced popstars. Yet there would also be cuts like the reggae fusion of ‘Lowlife’ and EDM-inflected ‘Interweb’ down the line. After luring in the masses as a family-friendly pop-bot, Poppy would eventually tear the rug out from under her fans. “I’ve always known where I’ve wanted to go,” she explains. 2018’s ‘Am I A Girl?’ threw in a burst of raw heavy metal right at the very last second, closing track ‘X’ an utter shock to the system. Poppy’s response to the blood-thirsty riffs? A giddy, butter-wouldn’t-melt exclamation of “ooo – heavy!”

Ever since slamming the brakes on her term as a plastic-fantastic popstar, Poppy has retained her discordant title and femininity as a badge of defiance. Poppy floats onstage in flouncy dresses like a fairytale, before channelling gutturals straight from the depths of hell. Her softer side has never hindered her success. In fact, Poppy has become the metal world’s favourite collaborator, previously hopping on tracks with Bad Omens, HEALTH and Fever 333.

2024’s ‘Negative Spaces’ is the culmination of this juxtaposition. It’s candy floss dissolved in engine oil, offering tar-smeared anthems with sugary-sweet centers: ‘vital’ feels like pop-rock cuts from the Avril Lavigne playbook, and ‘crystallized’ glistens with an ‘80s synthwave sheen, positively melting in your mouth. But that’s all before ‘the centre’s falling out’ absolutely rips the record to shreds, delving into cold, hard metallic hardcore in the same vein of Converge – a frazzled wall of guttural wails, scraping riffs and booming drums.

It’s a bittersweet meeting point of Poppy’s conflicting sides; gentle introversion melding with abrasive fury. “I never want to be predictable,” Poppy asserts. It’s why she’s always mixing things up, pushing out more unique content, like her Improbably Poppy TV series and comic books alongside her music. “If something I’m creating becomes unexciting, I’m no longer fond of it. When it comes to a record, every one should feel brand new.” On ‘Negative Spaces’, Poppy proudly claims she feels “uncharted” yet again. Aided by ex-Bring Me The Horizon producer Jordan Fish, Poppy was able to rediscover herself on track. “It honestly feels like my true debut,” she explains. “The saccharine is there, the aggression is there, and I’m sitting somewhere in between it all. It’s incredible to feel like your sixth record is just as exciting and expressive as your first release.”

PHOTO CREDIT: T-bone Fletcher

Poppy notes that ‘Negative Spaces’ is an effort to understand her “relationship with darkness” and comprehend the “unexplainable things” in life. “Of course, things don’t always make sense,” she’s quick to note. “We’re spinning in space on a rock, and that doesn’t really make any sense. You have to strike a balance, and allow yourself to have a fantastical, surface-level relationship with certain things. Sometimes the depths might be too heavy to handle.” The record is also a “very confrontational” dose of self-reflection. It’s a girl coming to terms with the sum of all her parts, even the more challenging fragments. “I accept myself for who I am now, but it’s interesting how you reflect on the past as you mature,” she muses. “You re-examine things you didn’t like when you were younger, consider the negative environments you’ve been in, and realise that they’re the things that make you unique today.”

As Poppy has evolved, she’s started to feel less alien than she felt as a young girl. “It was quite lonely when I was small,” she reflects. “I used to dream of having the friends I have now. So, I’ve gotten softer and more compassionate towards humans in recent years. But I’m still standing my ground, defending what matters to me.” While Poppy has finally “found her voice”, happily speaking out about shitty record labels and predatory industry men, she’s aware the space she exists within doesn’t take kindly to outspoken women. “I’ve become a lot more aware of my femininity, being in this industry,” she admits. “It can be a tricky balancing act because you’re expected to be soft but you need to be aggressive. Sometimes I get asked about being a ‘female in music’, and I always hope it’s a genuine desire to learn; to allow me to voice the disgust that I may possess, rather than a way of tricking me into complaining about being a woman in this industry.”

“I chose this path for a reason,” she affirms. “I want to write authentically about my experience, through my own eyes. I just make sure my aggression is targeted. Anger should never be misdirected or it loses its power. As a female, there are lots of things that I disagree with along the way.” It’s a statement that can be linked back to 2020’s ‘I Disagree’; a testament to how Poppy has grown into her voice, no longer afraid to speak up for herself. “There’s a power in saying it,” she declares. “Sometimes, when I get into debates with people, I’ll just say: I disagree. Not even politely or respectfully. That’s it. And I love meeting other women in the industry that disagree with what they’re witnessing as well”.

Empty Hands is one of the best albums of this year so far. The stunning Poppy is an artist I am surprised has not been asked to headline a major festival like Glastonbury. Maybe in 2027? There are a couple of interviews from this year that I want to get to. When speaking with Kerrang! earlier this year, Poppy said how she was like an explorer who has not yet found her place. Navigating all these territories, having played over a hundred shows last year, this artist knows all too well that there is a whole world out there. As Kerrang! say in their headline, Poppy is “digging into fresh territories with her music, she is adventurous, curious and thrillingly unpredictable. Is imminent new album Empty Hands any different?”. Another compelling interview with a remarkable artist who will be in the industry for decades more:

“Perhaps the jewel in the crown of Poppy’s year, however, was forming a power trio of sorts with Evanescence’s Amy Lee and Spiritbox’s Courtney LaPlante for a scene-shaking collaboration in the form of End Of You. It was Poppy who instigated the idea, writing with Amy at her house before Courtney added her parts remotely.

“I think it’s exciting when there are certain obstacles with it, but then it’s also exciting when you check your inbox for an updated version of what the other artist had done, and you’re like, ‘Wow!’” she says.

While she’s never been one to concern herself with external appraisal, she did get a slant of a sense that what they did was going to be received feverishly.

“I know three women in heavy music coming together to be on a song like this hadn’t been done before in this capacity.”

It would be easy to join the dots between these collabs, each connected to a tour entirely made up of female and non-binary artists, and see Poppy as someone helping to tip the scale in metal towards a more egalitarian future. The notion of women selling out arenas and headlining festivals becoming more of a normality than a novelty is closer to being a reality than ever. Yet, for Poppy, it’s always been more important for her to be seen as she is, on her own terms rather than on gendered ones.

“I just focus on what I have to say and what I’m creating,” she reasons. “And if that’s inspiring to others to want to join, then that is inspiring to me back, so it’s a little bit of a circle and a share. Some people will focus on the gender element of it because it’s easy and topical, but there’s more to offer than just that perspective, of course, at least for me. It’s nice to see more females in and around the space, but I think it’s a little bit low hanging to only focus on that as a fact. I hope that people look beyond just the gender to actually see what I’m saying.”

Poppy’s methods of ideating are tactile and analogue. She favours journalling, drawing and scrapbooking, pooling inspiration from photos and colours as she constructs her stories.

“Certain songs I will see as a collective of different colours, but not in a way that some people have synaesthesia,” she says. “I don’t know if that’s something more to it, just how I feel the song reflects a colour palette to me or the album.”

Without rhyme or reason, Empty Hands felt like a pastel blue album – it’s why it’s so prominent on the cover. It certainly suits the record’s tender moments, such as the courageous, loving sentiment of Guardian, a song whose melody couldn’t leave Poppy alone after she wrote it, to the point where she’d sing it in funny accents around the house. It seems a paradoxically soft shade for an album that often spikes to eye-widening levels of aggression. There’s the slamming Dying To Forget, on which she corrosively screams: ‘Rot in your piss in your shallow grave / I’ll watch your kingdom fall / I’ll cut the brakes so your car can’t stop,’ while the title-track’s lacerating heaviness shares some DNA with the sound of Knocked Loose.

PHOTO CREDIT: Megan Winstone

Even when she applies a more melodic touch, her tone is at times more acerbic than she’s ever been. ‘You’re celibate but no-one wants to fuck,’ she sneers on the energetic blast of Eat The Hate, while on the eerily theatrical opener Public Domain, she slips into a mocking, robotic register to eviscerate materialistic people: ‘Can you bottle it? Will you sell it for food? Would you sleep with it? Tell me who’s using who.’ There’s nothing placid about the pastel blue on the cover – instead, it’s more like the colour of ice.

Poppy is visceral and cynical when it comes to the record’s primary theme of greed. “The sentiment of Empty Hands has a couple of layers to it, depending on how you take it in, or what it means to you,” she explains. “A few of them are obvious and a few of them are a little bit more coy. The message that is pertinent to me in relation to this is when there are a lot of people that are trying to grab and take, what is all of it for? Because when we leave, none of it is ours anyway – whether it’s money or recognition or anything superficial. Why are you being so greedy when it’s not coming with you into the afterlife?”

After all, when you remember greed is futile, the world becomes more absurd. The lust for power, status, achievements and material gains becomes unjustifiable, whether it’s a follower count ticking up or world leaders threatening wars over oil reserves. And, of course, social safety and agency can be bought – but not happiness.

“Everything means nothing and nothing means everything,” Poppy muses. “You can have everything in the world and still be unhappy, or you can have nothing and be the most fulfilled”.

Empty Hands is produced by Jordan Fish. A collaborator she is close with, you can feel that sense of trust throughout the album. Before getting to a positive review for Empty Hands, I want to bring in part of an interview from NME that was published this month. She discussed the analogue approach that helps navigate touring life, in addition to this restlessness. This sense of discontent that she has. One that “drives the exploration”. Again, this artist who is always searching and navigating new musical terrain. Trying to find that golden spot, perhaps:

“Habitually cryptic and often coy around her lyrics, it was not too long ago that Poppy used to conduct interviews in character. Over the course of today’s conversation, she becomes increasingly candid and descriptive, as we get closer to figuring out what makes the human behind the rockstar tick. We probe her on one particular line, “I am constantly nowhere / On the roam”, which creates an intriguing duality alongside Poppy’s apparent ethos of everything, everywhere, all at once.

“When my friends would call to check in on me on tour, they would say, ‘Where are you?’ – I’m nowhere today,” she begins. “With the way that the internet is, information is out there – it’s everywhere – but it’s also nowhere, and you can detach from it by closing the computer. I remember at one point, making videos, I would say, ‘If it’s on the internet, it’s real,’ and it was a bit of a joke, because the internet used to be fake, and then it became real. Being able to detach from it and exist in your own head is really important.”

Poppy finds the in-between aspects of non-stop touring life difficult, a challenge she insists has prevailed “since the beginning of performing arts”. “I have to be offline when I’m on tour,” she explains. “It’s helpful for me to read books, write in journals, make collages and find expressive avenues that way. It feels a little bit dysregulating to be far away and looking at things through a screen where there’s a lot of fear, uncertainty or aggression online. I can’t look at that stuff. I’m too sensitive for that, so I have to go a bit more analogue on tour.”

Back home, you’ll find Poppy hibernating indoors for weeks, making up for lost time with her cat, who will accompany her on the road when she next tours North America. But this pace, this purple patch, is entirely on her terms. “I always have something to say,” she grins. “I’m always working… and when I don’t enjoy it anymore, I stop.”

This year marks one decade of Poppy, the musician. Her latest headline shows have heavily leant on material from ‘Negative Spaces’, 2019’s industrial effort ‘I Disagree’ and recent collaborative singles – effectively abandoning her other four albums. “I don’t really see those albums as much more than soundtracks to what I was doing at that time, and they’re not inspiring enough to me to bring into my present-day live show,” she elaborates.

That sky-high threshold remains Poppy’s driving principle. Teasing other projects “that will require my attention” imminently, she continues to quench any boredom with creativity, maximising that feeling of excitement that she craves. A workaholic, but first and foremost, a roamer – in the literal sense of globetrotting and the figurative sense of her imagination.

“The discontent drives the exploration, and I feel like that’s all I have, to continue to pose the question and ask myself what I want to do next. It’s not an open narrative with the outside; it’s about what I want to see myself do. If that is something that inspires or excites other people, then that’s exciting to me, and it works in a circular way, but quieting the noise to ask yourself those questions is really important”.

PHOTO CREDIT: Paris Mumpower

I will wrap up in a minute. However, I think I will sneak in another interview before a review. For Revolver, Poppy talked about her wildest album yet. An artist excited about what is to come for sure. She is proud of what she has created and produced in the past, yet the future is very much on her mind. If you have not heard Empty Hands then I would recommend that you do so:

“Was there a certain point where you actualized that power of saying no, or was it a more gradual shift?

I think it was gradual, and then all at once. There were a couple shifts that come to mind: One of them was around 2020, and then maybe another one was around 2022. Then I feel it again — being able to do this and release my seventh album. I think it’s my fourth or fifth record deal. I’m still excited about making music and doing this. Early on, I didn’t have a lot of tools to know how to trust certain people, how to not trust certain people. I was just thinking the best of everyone, then got served a reality that was pretty brutal, and then adjusted accordingly. I’m proud of what I’ve done in the past, but I’m excited about what’s happening now.

Were you afraid of not being liked?

I don’t think it was that, because I’ve always felt like I didn’t belong. I accepted that really early. I wanted to make friends. I had not very great friends for a while and not a very great team for a while. Most people have that because it’s part of growing up and learning about yourself.

Do you remember the first time some faceless commenter said something super toxic towards you online?

I don’t re­member the first time. But I know there’s some pretty horrific things out there, and people have horrific things to say. But I’m smiling. I’m smiling big. I’m dancing hard. I’m playing loud music. So you can keep saying it.

PHOTO CREDIT: Paris Mumpower

You came up in what i think was kind of the golden era of YouTube. What do you think of that world now

It’s not fun anymore. I thought YouTube at the time — before people knew how to use it — was so fun and uncharted. I feel very removed from the internet lately, actually. Every single time I go on tour, I try to not do the internet. I go analog and write and read books and draw… What I can hold. No screens — other than Animal Crossing. I will do that before bed. I will play Animal Crossing for at least an hour to get my Nook Miles up.

Back to the record — I like the way you say “Motherfuck­er” in “Dying to Forget.” You sound super pissed off but it’s also extremely over-the-top. Are those moments fun to do in the studio?

Absolutely. Yeah. Especially in the room. I think sometimes when Stevis [House of Protection singer-guitarist Stephen “Stevis” Harrison] and I are working on music together, I’ll read them something I wrote, and if I’m looking for the smile or the laugh, that makes me excited.

That one has the breakdown… Jordan bounced me the first demo, and it didn’t have the instrumental breakdown. I said, “Oh, we should just keep it vocal-only when I’m saying, ‘I want both eyes and your lying tongue.’” And he’s like, “No, we can’t do that.” I said, “It’s so hard, we should.” We went back and forth about it.

I don’t get the sense that you ever Googled how to scream properly. Your style always sounds really raw, emotional and real. And it always fits the song.

Yeah, I don’t watch YouTube tutorials for screams. I go based off emotion. I think it’s really corny when people have debates about technique. That’s the least hardcore-metal-punk-rock thing to do: worry about your technique. What happened to feeling anything and responding to it? I think it’s so corny. I hope you print this in bold letters: I think it’s so corny when people think about technique at the microphone, and they’re nerds.

“Ribs” feels particularly emotional. I’ve noticed that the way you write about feelings is often in relation to the body.

I’ve had this image in my mind for a while about keeping something pro­tected, and what’s the closest place to do so, and where it would land. And then what it’s like when you’re parting with someone, or there’s the end or dissolve of something. You still hold onto the experience — or the faintness of the memory of the experience — emotionally.

Or maybe someday if the weather is the right way, and the sun is shining, and it catches you off guard, and it kind of throws you back, and there’s that moment of this melancholy feeling that you can’t entirely place, but it’s been so many years, and it’s just a fragment now. It’s still in you somewhere. So, I was thinking about that”.

There are not a great deal of reviews for Empty Hands. That is a shame, as it is one of the finest albums from a modern-day queen. Someone who should be talked about a lot more. Having interview Poppy for Kerrang!, Emma Wilkes provided her take on the brilliant Empty Hands. It is a phenomenal album that I can imagine will sound epic on the road. You can see Poppy’s tour dates here. Poppy is in the U.K. next week. As part of her Constantly Nowhere Tour, she will get a lot of love here:

“On her last album, 2024's Negative Spaces, Poppy set a new bar for herself, but she’s evidently undaunted by the thought of clearing it. Rarely concerned with numbers and milestones, she’s chasing what excites her, which right now is the raw, unfettered energy that she finds when she unleashes her emotions live. It certainly helps that she’s got a huge well of rage stored, specifically for those in life who take and hoard and pile their trophies up with little regard for its impact, or how long it might last.

Stylistically, Empty Hands isn’t wildly removed from Negative Spaces, especially as alternative mega-producer Jordan Fish is at the helm once again. It both builds on its strengths and irons out its weaknesses, particularly where Jordan’s production style is concerned. Instead of crowding out Poppy’s own style with his, their palettes coalesce better, such as on the volcanic yet melodic Bruised Sky and the skyscraping sweetness of Guardian.

It’s varied but cohesive, never sagging even with a 13-song tracklist, with glints of some of Poppy’s most exciting ideas yet. Chief among them is opener Public Domain, a juddering industrial number flowing from mocking, robotic vocals – ‘Fuck your ignorant opinions / Maybe you ain't got a reason to live,’ she sneers – into something almost theatrical, representing Poppy at her most individual.

Some of the most attention-grabbing moments here will inevitably be the heavier songs – and they are incandescent on a level you've not quite heard from Poppy before. Dying To Forget’s shrapnel-like riffs are as merciless as its lyrics – ‘I resent the fact you’re living / Now the hate will keep me warm’ – while the scathing title-track is a seething finale bristling with visceral hatred, as well as a brilliant climax offering some truly eye-watering screams. Elsewhere, she twists that hatred into some acerbic sass across Eat The Hate’s jiving rhythms – ‘Eat the hate ’cause I'm the judge / God will throw an uppercut / You're celibate ’cause no-one wants to fuck.’

This is what it sounds like when Poppy is properly in her element. When she’s got something that lights her on fire, she’s unstoppable, and this is how she’s been able to write possibly her best songs yet.

Verdict: 4/5”.

I am going to end here. A fabulous, raw and memorable album from Poppy, everyone needs to follow her. Always fascinating reading interviews with her. An artist that I would love to interview one day, I feel this year is going to be one of the biggest years for Poppy. When it comes to the Boston-born artist, she is truly…

A modern great.

_________

Follow Poppy

FEATURE: You’re Taking the Fun Out of Everything… Blur’s There’s No Other Way at Thirty-Five

FEATURE:

 

 

You’re Taking the Fun Out of Everything…

 

Blur’s There’s No Other Way at Thirty-Five

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EVEN if the track…

IN THIS PHOTO: Blur in May 1991: Alex James, Dave Rowntree, Graham Coxon and Damon Albarn/PHOTO CREDIT: DPA Picture Alliance/Alamy Stock Photo

only has a few different words that are repeated throughout, there is something effective and timeless about Blur’s There’s No Other Way. Having released She’s So High in October 1990, There’s No Other Way was released on 15th April, 1991. I wanted to mark thirty-five years of this phenomenal single. Many don’t place it high in terms of the best Blur songs, though I feel that it is one of their best. The Leisure album does not get much admiration. That arrived on 26th August, 1991. The debut from Blur, it contains many incredible songs. I feel There’s No Other Way is the highlight. I am going to go into a bit more depth about this song. The first feature I want to come to is from Popmatters that was published in 2010. I was seven when this Blur track came out so I don’t really remember it first time around. When I became aware of Blur’s music around 1994/1995, I was listening to There’s No Other Way then. It is this fascinating song that was really unlike what was in the mainstream in 1991:

“Throughout the course of its storied career, Blur more often than not seemed to be playing a role. While the Britpop group’s incarnations as faux-Cockney punters (circa Parklife) and as the British Pavement (Blur) are most often hailed as the band’s high water marks, Blur’s early dabbling in the top trends of the British indie scene at the start of the 1990s—Madchester and shoegaze—on its 1991 debut Leisure is often referred to in less affectionate terms, if at all. In spite of the lack of love for that period, consensus is clear that the record yielded at least one top tune, “There’s No Other Way”, a groovy genre workout that outdid some of the better attempts at crafting danceable Madchester singles by actual Mancunian bands.

Surprisingly for a tune that unashamedly leapt onto the baggy bandwagon, the star of Blur’s second single (and first pop hit) is not any component of the rhythm section, but Graham Coxon and his deliriously sinewy guitar lines. If you ever wondered why some diehard metal musicians and even arch Blur-hater Noel Gallagher will wax enthusiastically about Coxon’s talents, here’s one of the best examples of why. Spooling out indelible riffs like they’re going out of style, Coxon’s playing is quite lyrical, sliding up and down the neck of the instrument with hammer-ons and pull-offs galore adding flair. Some of my favorite moments include Coxon pulling back tastefully after Damon Albarn sings “All that you can do is watch them play” in each chorus, his backward-sounding guitar solo, and the flurry of high-pitched licks that end the track with an ecstatic rush.

Not that the rest of the band are slouches. Listening to how well bassist Alex James and drummer Dave Rowntree groove together here, their efforts on Blur’s 1994 dancefloor-conquering megahit “Girls & Boys” sounds relatively staid. True, Damon Albarn’s lyrics from this period were maddeningly lacking in substance (this being a time before the future Gorillaz mastermind started immersing his work in the quirks and quandaries of the quintessentially English lifestyle), but this was also before he began acting (and singing) like his own exaggerated idea of a working-class football hooligan, which makes him far more bearable here than he is on much of the group’s mid-period material. Albarn is definitely cocky on “There’s No Other Way”, yet he also keeps a distance with his wispy phrasing, teasing the listener into submitting to the tune’s allure with his come-hither delivery.

Comparing this song to, say, the Charlatans’ 1990 hit “The Only One I Know” (which I love, by the way) or pretty much anything by Inspiral Carpets, and “There’s No Other Way” totally outshines those exercises in wedding rock stylings to acid house dance beats. In fact, it synthesizes the (to diehards on both sides of the fence) diametrically-opposed genre elements in a way that few others have matched. And to think, there are still people out there who maintain you can’t dance to guitar music”.

In years since its release, Damon Albarn has branded Leisure as awful. I think he puts distance from it as it was Blur starting out Maybe too much pressure from the label, Food, to release a single. There’s No Other Way the compromise. However, there is something enduring about Leisure. This post argues that there are some diamonds to be found on an album that deserves some new inspection and discussion:

“You’ve got the opener, ‘She’s So High’, the group’s very first single. ‘Sing’ is the somewhat experimental jam and one that people may know from Trainspotting. But the standout, least to me, is one of the album’s other singles, today’s subject, ‘There’s No Other Way’, which I think the band are proud ’cause they usually play it live at every opportunity.

My first experience with the song? Well, it’s a bit like a few others. One of those times when I saw the music video (above) for it on TV, but it was ending, so I wasn’t really aware of what was going on. If you want to what happens in it, Blur sit in with a family at the dinner table and have a three-course meal. Damon Albarn plays, I think, a moody teenager role, making death stares into the camera lens while sporting a ridiculous bowl haircut. Things get freaky when the massive trifle is brought out for dessert. And then the video ends. Probably afraid that the video was just a bit too British-looking, someone convinced the band to do another music video for the song specifically for American audiences. Which one’s better, I’ll let you decide. The original UK video would show up here and there every now and again, and the track’s chorus is repetitive enough that it’ll get stuck in your brain anyway. I got the band’s Best Of compilation, the song’s the third on there, and I’ve been able to listen to it whenever I wanted ever since.

I think I read that the track was written to appease either their record label owner David Balfe who was demanding they write a single to be included on the album. So, in response, the band wrote this upbeat, Madchester-inspired track with a chorus that’s repeated to death. The first line, “You’re taking the fun out of everything”, sums up Albarn’s feelings about this constant pressure forced upon him. He just wants to breathe without this presence breathing down his neck. It wouldn’t be the last time they’d write a tune made to wind Balfe up too. I think Graham Coxon is the real MVP of the entire thing. His riff starts it off, he brings in another riff during the verses, then there’s that little lick that plays after the choruses – all of which I find myself singing along to, sometimes more than Albarn’s vocal. They all go hand in hand. Plus, there’s the backwards guitar solo, which must have taken some time to figure out when writing it the right way round. And away from his guitar skills are his higher harmonizing backing vocals, “There’s no other way, ahhhh ahhhh ahhh” and others. You’ll know when it’s him singing. A very fun song, overall. It’s always a good time”.

Blur’s lyrics definitely became more sophisticated and observational. Maybe Damon Albarn feels There’s No Other Way is the band at a more simple and shallow level. They would shift their sound and improve, though it is unfair to dismiss classics like There’s No Other Way. I am going to finish with this article. The extract is from lengthy interviews conducted in May 1995 with Damon Albarn, Graham Coxon, Alex James, Dave Rowntree, Stephen Street, Dave Balfe and Andy Ross:

“Blur’s intended second single, ‘Bad Day’, had been shelved after an unhappy session which saw Graham play bass in place of Alex, at the behest of the producer Steve Power. Stoned, ‘baggy’ beats were in the ascendant, and the period’s other main genre, ‘shoegazing’ (a term coined by Andy Ross), while commercially redundant compared to Madchester, was a cause celebre in the London-based music mafia, and at ‘indie’ establishments such as the Thursday-nights club Syndrome in Oxford Street.

To compete, Blur were pushed into an area midway between Madchester and shoegazing – where they could hear both trenches but see nothing – and encouraged to go easy on their art-school leanings, going instead for the floating voter with their upbeat ‘indie dance’ songs. ‘There’s No Other Way’ was a single that would unite both dance and indie factions. Yet Blur were, in truth, aligned to neither.

The band’s first recording session with ex-Smiths producer Stephen Street (still Blur’s producer of choice) was at Maison Rouge Studios in Fulham in the first week of January 1991. The session also yielded ‘Come Together’, which they held over for the first album. ‘There’s No Other Way’ had been written quickly by Damon and demoed by the band as a fairly throwaway, non-groovy prototype – until Street bolstered Dave Rowntree with a ‘Funky Drummer’-esqye loop.

Despite being a straightforward dance-pop number with meaningless lyrics, ‘There’s No Other Way’ is enjoyably dumb. Vocally, it recalls Syd Barrett when he was still enjoying himself, circa ‘See Emily Play’, 1967. Like Barrett on that song, Damon and Graham’s harmonized voice almost smile on the choruses, as if in a secret druggy joke. (The fascination of young bands with the 49-year-old, reclusive Roger ‘Syd’ Barrett is easily explained. Barrett – Pink Floyd’s founder, singer-songwriter and guitarist – was an attractive genius who lost his mind in 1967, aged 21. He is thus a sexy, mildly dangerous role model for easy-going, artistic, well-educated, white, English males. Also, trippy. Barrett-like music is fun to write and play.)

As well as the arresting, funky intro, Graham contributes another backwards guitar solo, for added trippiness, and Damon adds a two-note organ part. Alex, contemptuous of the bassist’s role of adhering to the root of hte relevant chord, soars out in counterpoint and has enourmous fun.

‘There’s No Other Way’ reached number 8, but its life is now over. It will never be played live again by Blur. Damon’s prosaic writing songwriting vocabulary, a key offender here, would be cruelly exposed later that yeat on the inner sleeve of ‘Leisure’. In 12 songs, the word “you” appeared 82 times; he used “day”/”say”/”play” rhymes on a shameless 35 occasions. His hazy, lazy, nihilistic thoughts were delivered in a Syd-like twang or a souped-down, southernised Ian Brown whisper. As for their performances on ‘There’s No Other Way’, while by no means disgracing themselves, Blur were about to marginalise themselves perilously on the ‘baggy’/FX-pedals cusp. With their next single ‘Bang’, they would come to be perceived as shallow and limited. In reality they were anything but”.

It is hard to believe There’s No Other Way is thirty-five on 15th April! Such a magnificent song and one of the standout tracks from a year that saw Nevermind by Nirvana released, I do have a lot of affection for Blur on their baggy, Manchester-inspired debut album. Things changed for 1993’s Modern Life Is Rubbish. We should not overlook Leisure and its importance. There’s No Other Way is this stunning song that I have heard hundreds of times and never tire of! The phenomenal second single from one of the…

GREATEST bands ever.

FEATURE: The Modern Queens of Pop: Reacting to the BRIT Awards Nominees

FEATURE:

 

 

The Modern Queens of Pop

IN THIS PHOTO: Olivia Dean received five BRIT nominations, including Pop Act, and Album of the Year for The Art of Loving

 

Reacting to the BRIT Awards Nominees

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WHETHER you see it…

IN THIS PHOTO: Lily Allen is nominated for several BRIT Awards, including Album of the Year for West End Girl/PHOTO CREDIT: Nieves González

as one of the more important and major music award ceremonies of the year or not, you cannot deny the importance of the BRIT Awards in terms of celebrating the best of British music. There are always takeaways and positives. One of the most interesting thing is that Jarvis Cocker attends an award ceremony that, thirty years ago, stirred controversy when he invaded the stage during Michael Jackson's performance and got a lot of heat from the press. Fortunately or not, there will be nothing as interesting or controversial this year. It will be a more muted affair, though it must be strange marking the thirtyish anniversary of a strange moment for the Pulp lead. In terms of the categories, there is gender balance in most of them. Group of the Year sees long-serving legends like Wolf Alice and Pulp set against newer acts like Wet Leg and The Last Dinner Party. There are snubs here and there – which is what happens when you have to narrow things down -, but there is also nothing particularly controversial. However, as The Guardian note in this feature, there is still an issue. If the Group and Artist categories have addressed huge gender and there is a step forward, this observation caught my eye: “Of the 116 albums eligible for British album of the year – those that reached the UK Top 30 – only 41 were by female acts or mixed-gender groups, and of those 41, only 25 were solely female”:

“Olivia Dean and Lola Young have cemented their breakthroughs to the front rank of British pop by topping the nominations for the 2026 Brit awards.

The singer-songwriters earned five nominations each. Dean is nominated for artist and album of the year, pop act, and has two chances at winning song of the year for Man I Need and Rein Me In, the latter thanks to a guest spot with Sam Fender.

The 26-year-old Dean already had a good measure of success from her 2023 debut album Messy, but the follow-up The Art of Loving – featuring songs about the confounding and joyous business of being in love, in a sophisticated range of styles from bossa nova to neo-soul – has been a global sensation, topping the UK charts and currently sitting at No 3 in the US. Lead single Man I Need has barely been out of the UK Top 10 since its release in August and reached No 1.

Dean is the first announced performer at the awards ceremony, held for the first time in Manchester, at the city’s Co-op Live arena on Saturday 28 February and broadcast on ITV, with Jack Whitehall hosting.

Young, 25, is up for artist of the year, breakthrough artist (renamed from best new artist) and appears in two of the genre categories, for alternative/rock and pop, reflecting her deft grasp of different styles on 2025 album I’m Only F**king Myself: a charismatic and magnificently sweary portrait of addiction, romantic frustration and more. She is also nominated for song of the year for Messy, which was released back in May 2024 but continued its commercial success right through the awards’ eligibility period: it spent four weeks at No 1 and 60 weeks on the chart in total. Both Young and Dean are up for best new artist at next month’s Grammy awards.

As well as the nod for Rein Me In with Dean, Sam Fender is nominated three more times, including for artist and album of the year, thanks to his social-realist portraiture on UK No 1 album People Watching which won the 2025 Mercury prize.

Lily Allen caps one of the most remarkable re-entries into British pop with three nominations, including artist and album of the year. After four albums which had earned nine Brit nominations between them (including a 2010 win in the now-defunct British female solo artist category), she stepped away to focus on acting and podcasting, but returned in 2025 with West End Girl: a portrait of a failing open marriage, including huge resonances with her own personal life. The ultra-candid lyrics – featuring sex toys, hook-up apps and heartbreakingly toxic relationship dynamics – ensured it became massively discussed, and a commercial hit.

Also with three nominations each are two of the brightest talents in British rap. Dave is up for artist and album of the year, after releasing the typically self-searching The Boy Who Played the Harp in October, which went to No 1, as did its single Raindance. One of Dave’s regular collaborators rises out of the underground to join him: Jim Legxacy, a rapper, singer, songwriter and producer who co-produced Dave and Central Cee’s huge Brit-nominated hit Sprinter in 2023, and returned to work with him on The Boy Who Played the Harp. He is nominated for his own work, the mixtape Black British Music (2025), earning nods in th rap, R&B and breakthrough artist categories.

Rockers Wolf Alice round out the album of the year nominations on their way to three nods overall, and dance star Fred Again, who had a major hit with Skepta and PlaqueBoyMax collaboration Victory Lap and continued his sweatily received live sets, was also nominated three times.

Also in the running for artist of the year are Jade, Little Simz, PinkPantheress and Self Esteem: one demonstration of how well represented women are in this year’s nominations. There has been consternation in previous years at how male-dominated the Brit awards could be, including as recently as 2023 when all the artist of the year nominees were men. But this year, 70% of nominees are female or non-binary, or mixed-gender groups”.

What is clear is that there have been improvements. It has taken long enough, but I do think that a few things remain clear. The Hip-Hop/Rap/Grime category is still hugely male-dominated. It shows that the genre is very much guarded by and open to male artists. There are some incredible female British acts who should have been included, though for some reason there is only one female nominee of the four: Little Simz. The BRIT Awards is also not a ceremony that is going to dig dep or spend too much time with rising artists or name coming through. It is pretty mainstream for the most part, so all of the nominees for Hip-Hop/Rap/Grime are pretty established. Well, maybe Jim Legaxcy is the only exception. In terms of Pop, it is entirely comprised of female acts. One might say that this is as bad as a male-heavy category but the fact is that women have dominated Pop for years. The last year or two has been the first time when gender imbalance has changed and the BRIT Awards have addressed so many problems – though not all. I am excited that both Olivia Dean and Lola Young have five nominees each. Olivia Dean’s The Art of Loving was one of the best of last year. Dean set records by becoming the first female solo artist in U.K. chart history to have four Top 10 singles simultaneously (late-2025) and the first British solo female artist to top the UK Albums and Singles charts together since Adele in 2021. Lola Young’s Messy has surpassed a billion streams on Spotify and is a huge song that continues to touch people. She is one of our best talents! The Album of the Year category is especially strong. Included is Lily Allen’s West End Girl. Lily Allen, JADE, Lola Young, Olivia Dean and RAYE are in the Pop category. Even if RAYE and Lola Young have not released a load of music in the past year, I guess their impact and popularity remains strong. It is a category that could have easily included a lot of other amazing women. It shows women are leading Pop and making the best music of the most commercial and popular genre.

It is a shame that there is still some gender imbalance here and there, though the BRIT Awards have done better. They had to! The categories are really strong, though I think that – quite rightly – most of the conversation will be around the women nominated. Especially Olivia Dean, RAYE, Lola Young and Lily Allen. I like how PinkPantheress, Self Esteem, JADE and Little Simz are also in the Artist of the Year category. Some of the finest artists in the world right now. We will find out who wins what on 28th February. I don’t think that we will get anything special at the ceremony in terms of controversy or any trouble. I am surprised that the BRIT Awards have not widened to include more categories. Especially when it comes to new artists and those coming through. Also, live performances and the best tours. Given how an Oasis nomination would have been huge, it is a shame there has not been expansion and consideration. However, I am sure Oasis will be nominated when NME host their awards. However, it is a positive year in terms of the calibre of artists and the fact that there is less gender imbalance. One hopes that 2027 is one where genre like Grime and Rap see more women nominated. It will be remarkable seeing these British and international artists honoured. In terms of International Artist, CMAT and ROSALÍA are in the mix. Such strong competition! I think the Breakthrough category is interesting, as some of thew artists can’t really be seen as breaking through – including Lola Young. It would have been nice to include more genuinely newer artists. However, I feel Skye Newman will win the award, as she is one of the best artists we have and is a star of the future. I am looking forward to the ceremony next month and especially keen to celebrate great Pop queens like Lily Allen, Lola Young and Olivia Dean. Steps forward being made, there is still a way to go. However, the nominations announced today show that British artists are very much producing some of the…

BEST music in the world.

FEATURE: Then Work Came and Made Us Free: Manic Street Preachers’ A Design for Life at Thirty

FEATURE:

 

 

Then Work Came and Made Us Free

 

Manic Street Preachers’ A Design for Life at Thirty

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THIS is undoubtably…

IN THIS PHOTO: Manic Street Preachers’ Nicky Wire (left), James Dean Bradfield and Sean Moore in 1996, shot for the cover of Melody Maker/PHOTO CREDIT: Tom Sheehan

one of the most important songs of the 1990s. The lead single from Manic Street Preachers’ fourth studio album, Everything Must Go, this was the first without Richey Edwards. He went missing in February 1995. It was a huge shock for the band. Not only Manic Street Preachers’ lyricist and rhythm guitarist, he was also a dear friend. You can feel the stress and tragedy of his loss on Everything Must Go. Some of his lyrics appear, whilst other songs talk about the Welsh band making changes and dealing with this loss. On 15th April, A Design for Life was released. It is one of Manic Street Preachers’ greatest songs. This towering with the trio (James Dean Bradfield, Sean Moore, Nicky Wire) credit as songwriters, it reached number two in the U.K. Everything Must Go was released in May 1996 and was a massive critical and commercial success. Its lead single is one of the best lead singles ever. Not only announcing this new direction and sound – a slightly shift from 1994’s The Holy Bible -, it is a song that is widely played to this day. Such stunning lyrics that are so thought-provoking. As this stunning song turns thirty on 15th April, I want to explore it and understand the background/history of the song. I am starting out with a 2014 article from God Is in the TV:

“Libraries gave us power/Then work came and made us free/What price now for a shallow piece of dignity?!” Hollers James Dean Bradfield impassioned with eyes closed, above a backdrop of tumbling arpeggios, cavernous drums and Spector-ish widescreen production that’s steepling strings sway, crescendo and sigh with sadness. This is the unforgettable intro to  ‘A Design for Life’ the Manic Street Preacher‘s definitive 90s statement. Tackling the theme of working class identity bassist(lyricist and chief dress wearer) Nicky Wire delivers a staunch defence of the community where he grew up and a belief in the importance of resilience, self-improvement and solidarity as political power attempts to oppress you at every turn– ‘libraries gave us power’ indeed. The memorable video is intercut with quotes and scenes like fox hunting and Royal Ascot to represent what the band saw as class privilege.

This was set against a backdrop of the decimation of their hometown Blackwood, as Thatcher destroyed its mining industry in the 1980s and the economic decline of the early 1990s and many think the miners scars are referenced here with the lines: “I wish I had a bottle/Right here in my dirty face to wear the scars/To show from where I came”.

The bizarre sight of friends arm in arm singing along to its key line ‘We don’t talk about love / We only wanna get drunk’ is an ironic one – are the Manics highlighting the hypocrisy of a working class that only wants to drink and fight, or are they defending its right to do so? I’ll leave that up to you. Regardless, it’s a powerful first statement from the band as a three piece and a epic first single with a elegantly bombastic rock chorus that at the time represented a surprising shift from a band who had musically up until that point dealt only in politically charged glam rock and incendiary proto post punk. It was rather like the shift from Joy Division to New Order…

ADFL bursts to number 2 in the hit parade in 1996, and broke the three Welsh fellas’ album (Everything Must Go) into the mainstream at their time of heaviest loss. Their lyricist and childhood friend Richard James Edwards went missing in 1994 and remains unfound.

In a scene dominated by slogans, crowd like chants and sometimes cartoonish flag waving, Carry on imagery, The Manics were in contrast a band plugged into their surroundings, the working class and their own mythology ‘A Design for Life’ was an epic political statement and stands toe to toe with Pulp‘s superlative ‘Common People’ as the most socially conscious statement of the era. Nicky Wire explained the song’s meaning in an interview with Q magazine April 2011: “It was originally a two-page poem. One side was called A Pure Motive and the other A Design For Life. The song was inspired by what I perceived as the middle classes trying to hijack working-class culture. That was typified by Blur’s Girls and Boys,” the greyhound image on their Parklife cover. It was me saying, ‘This is the truth. GET IT.'”

Drenched in magnificent strings arranged by Martin Greene, and shot with a regret, defiance and a kind of redemption of somehow getting through a tragedy so close to home, the Mike Hedges-produced Everything Must Go recorded in a Normandy Chateaux, was warm and cocooned in its own orbit and quite unlike any other release that year, yet for a very short period the Manics became mainstream, Nicky draped his amp in the Welsh flag at the Brits which was surprising given his views on Wales prior to that, they played a the classic Hillsborough tribute show and rubbed shoulders with Oasis and the like. James Dean Bradfield went onto produce the likes of Northern Uproar and Kylie lending this anthemic string tinged pop sound to them both,  the outsiders had become establishment.

The long player Everything Must Go was their most immediate work and struck a chord with a wider public in a way none of their previous albums had. Yet it was tinged with tragedy, regret and a new found functionalism(C&A jeans and t-shirts now replaced feather boas and eye liner)artwork now minimal, as they bravely soldiered on despite still dealing with the grief of the loss of their friend and creative driving force Richard James Edwards”.

There are a couple of interviews I am going to end with. Where Manic Street Preachers speak about A Design of Life and why it is so important. It is a song that must have been emotional to see released into the world after the disappearance of Richey Edwards the year before. I am going to move to this blog post and their examination of the sweeping, epic and wonderful A Design for Life:

“The song’s lyrics are usually thought to be themed around working class solidarity, and make specific reference to the value of libraries, which have historically allowed poorer people to learn on their own terms through books – by contrast, owning books has historically been the preserve of the educated rich (and books of course remain expensive today, particularly factual ones). This line was directly inspired by the band’s time in public libraries when they were young. The lines “we don’t talk about love / we only want to get drunk” are a play on upper class assumptions about poor people – the idea that the lives of “the proles” are dominated by idle pursuits like drinking and that they ostensibly don’t have a capacity for philosophy or independent thought. Naturally, the Manics rail against this narrow-minded idea. By contrast, the song was famously misunderstood by some at the time, who saw the song as a kind of laddish drinking anthem.

Like ‘Motorcycle Emptiness’ before it, ‘A Design For Life’ began as two songs – one written under that title designed to play up the positive aspects of working class life and another, named ‘The Pure Motive’ which was about the darker side and was inspired by ‘To Be A Somebody’, a 1994 episode of Jimmy McGovern’s crime series Cracker. In the episode, Robert Carlyle plays a killer working to avenge the deaths of those who died in the Hillsborough disaster in 1989. This event would itself be the inspiration for a later Manics track, ‘S.Y.M.M.’, the closing track on This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours. Parts of ‘The Pure Motive’ were absorbed into ‘A Design For Life’, resulting in the final version.

Owing to its major impact on popular culture, ‘A Design For Life’ was memorably referenced in the final track of The Man Who, the very successful 1999 album by Scottish band Travis. The song, ‘Slide Show’ refers to the song in the first line of its chorus, which also alludes to ‘Wonderwall’ by Oasis (which it is actually musically based on to some extent) and ‘Devil’s Haircut’ by Beck. Musically, ‘A Design For Life’ was also reflected in the Manics’ own much later single ‘Indian Summer’ – the band initially hesitated to release the song due to it sounding similar, but eventually decided to release it for exactly that reason.

Although it is arguably a little harder to enjoy now due to the enormous airplay it has received over the years, ‘A Design For Life’ is still undoubtedly one of the key Manics singles, a live staple, and a significant touchpoint in their discography”.

Before ending with a 2021 interview from the BBC, I want to flip to 2016 and this interview from The Quietus. They spoke with Manic Street Preachers in 2016, twenty years after the release of A Design for Life. I recall when the song came out. I was familiar with Manic Street Preachers at that point. I bought Everything Must Go and was completely fascinated by A Design for Life:

“I was really struck by seeing the video for ‘A Design For Life’ during the Royal Albert Hall gig, with the footage of Last Night Of The Proms, filmed in the same place, and thinking, ‘Here we are’, in the actual place…

“Here we are!” Wire smiles. “Entertain us… Yeah, the first time we played the Albert Hall, in 1996, I hated it. I was in a right old fucking mood, and I did not enjoy it one bit. But I loved it this time. The gig in Liverpool was amazing, really special, and we invited all the families of the Hillsborough 96. From the very first gig, in Tallinn in Estonia, it’s been spot-on, right through.”

A lot of the songs on the album have been in or around the setlist for years, of course.

“Yeah,” concedes James, “but there’s stuff like ‘The Girl Who Wanted To Be God’, ‘Removables’ we haven’t played that much, or ‘Interiors’, and we haven’t played ‘Australia’ much since the late Nineties, and ‘Further Away’ we haven’t played much. But you’re right, stuff like ‘No Surface All Feeling’, ‘A Design For Life’, ‘Everything Must Go’, ‘Kevin Carter’, ‘Small Black Flowers’, we’ve played the hell out of.”

“That album just breathes, sonically and lyrically,” says Wire. “It’s a communal intake with less intensity than some Manics gigs, if you know what I mean. But we ramp it up so much in the second set, with the production and the visuals which are fucking stunning. It has the scale that we always wanted. And knowing you’ve got that second set in your back pocket, doing ‘You’re Tender And You’re Tired’ which we haven’t done for fucking ever. and… ‘NatWest Barclays Midlands Lloyds’…”

When I saw ‘NatWest’ on the setlist for the second half of the gig, I thought ‘Really?!’ Of all the songs on Generation Terrorists, I’d never have chosen that one. But in the flesh, it properly rocks. I was surprised.

“I actually feel really proud doing that, as well,” says Wire. “Because you still get all these fucking idiots in the broadsheets saying ‘Oh it’s clunky…’ It IS clunky, because we’re dealing with a massive topic (the banking system’s ruinous effects on people’s lives), which we foresaw, and you didn’t!”

The choice of Mike Hedges as producer was crucial to the album’s sound. “We’d been through the thing of Richey’s disappearance,” James remembers, “and subsequently deciding that we needed to do something, so we wrote the song. ‘A Design For Life’, which started the ball rolling. Then we got in touch with Mike Hedges, who came to Cardiff with us. We’d wanted to work with him on The Holy Bible, but he wasn’t available. Meeting him was so brilliant, because he’d done so many records I loved. ‘Swimming Horses’ by the Banshees – what a fucking record that is! I remember there was a kid at school who was, let’s say, not unhinged but definitely on edge. And he’d gone goth-punk, and he brought a copy of ‘Swimming Horses’ 12 inch to school and I sat on it by mistake. And he wanted to kill me. And I remember thinking ‘You really care about that record. I’m gonna have to chase that record down…’ And Mike had also done the Associates and ‘Story Of The Blues’ by Wah!, I’m talking about the records he’d done with strings on. So it was a no-brainer that we wanted him to do Everything Must Go”.

In 2021, BBC spoke with Manic Street Preachers’ lead, James Dean Bradfield, about A Design for Life. How the song saved the band. It would have been incredibly tense releasing a single from an album that was released after the disappearance of Richey Edwardsd. How it would be received and whether long-term Manic Street Preacher fans would bond with it:

“We were just coming out of our own trauma at that point," Bradfield continues. "Design for Life was proving to be something that kept us going as a band, that validated us, that took us past the procedure of not knowing whether we could be in the Manics any more.

"It kind of solved a lot of really awkward emotional riddles for us. We were on our way to something, reaffirming ourselves and staving off having to think about really serious, damaging things with regards to Richey and his family."

'Snow globe moment'

A Design for Life is what Bradfield describes as a "Trojan horse Manics" tune - using epic radio-friendly rock to carry a political message.

Using similar tactics, they managed to subsequently smuggle If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next and The Masses Against the Classes to the top of the UK singles chart. (The former tackled the Spanish Civil War, while the latter contained quotes from both Noam Chomsky and Albert Camus.)

On their 14th and latest album, their trademark big guitar sound has been largely replaced by Abba-inspired, piano-driven pop melodies. Bradfield, the band's main musical force, learned to play piano properly in lockdown after inheriting one from another Edwards - a 105-year-old Mrs Edwards in Cardiff, external.

"It felt like a special gift being stowed upon us", he says. And he soon began to find new joy in the old chords.

"I had that lovely experience on the piano of just tooling around and going, 'Oh my God, I have to call Billy Joel. If the band don't want this he will!'" he laughs.

A Design for Life for was only narrowly kept off top spot by Mark Morrison's Return of the Mack”.

On 15th April, it will be thirty years since A Design for Life came out. Though it should have reached number one, the fact it was kept off the top of the single chart by Mark Morrison is no shame. However, I do think that A Design for Life is a better song than Return of the Mack. A more important one. Released a month before Everything Must Go, a hugely acclaimed album, this song still stirs the soul and holds this incredible power. 1996 found Manic Street Preachers rebuilding and recalibrating after the disappearance of Richey Edwards. The trio figuring just…

HOW to move on.

FEATURE: Stuck Inside These Four Walls… Inside the Paul McCartney: Man on the Run Documentary

FEATURE:

 

 

Stuck Inside These Four Walls…

  

Inside the Paul McCartney: Man on the Run Documentary

__________

IT is always great when…

a new Paul McCartney-related project comes along. There seems to be one every year. That is a good thing. Most of the focus is on The Beatles. We have a big album anniversary later this year when the masterpiece that is Revolver turns sixty. I am sure there will be more Beatles documentaries and things from the archives released. Maybe new books and all sort of things. I feel this is going to be the case for many years to come. In terms of Paul McCartney’s solo career, there has not been a new album for five years, though you get reissues and there is always discussion. I do really hope that we see another Paul McCartney solo album at some point, as it is always a treat when he puts music out. The greatest songwriter ever always brilliant and different. However, there is probably less discussion around Wings. Forming the band must have been monumentally emotional. I think McCartney was the most dedicated and devoted to The Beatles. John Lennon perhaps a little more detached. Same with George Harrison. Ringo Starr speaks proudly about the band. However, you feel Paul McCartney is the biggest fan of the group. So going to a new group when The Beatles broke up would have been devastating and hugely challenging. On 7th December, their debut album, Wild Life, turns fifty-five. Perhaps not their most acclaimed and popular album, I think it is an amazing album. I am ending with a Wings playlist, and I will feature some songs from Wild Life. The seventh and final album was 1979’s Back to the Egg. About the same lifespan as The Beatles – in terms of their recorded output -, McCartney must have been bereft once more when the band split. However, he continued his solo career and released McCartney II in 1980.

There have not been that many documentaries and books around Wings. Most of the focus comes on The Beatles. However, the importance of Wings cannot be overstated. 1973’s Band on the Run is one of my favourite albums ever. Although the documentary premiered at the Telluride Film Festival on 30th August, 2025, Paul McCartney: Man on the Run will be released on Prime Video on 25th February with a limited theatrical release preceding it. I will come to the documentary soon. Though I would recommend people to pick up the book. Wings: The Story of a Band on the Run. You can order it here. Here’s what you need to know about a must-read for any fans of Wings and Paul McCartney:

“I’m so very happy to be transported back to the time that was Wings and relive some of our madcap adventures through this book. Starting from scratch after The Beatles felt crazy at times. There were some very difficult moments and I often questioned my decision. But as we got better I thought, ‘OK this is really good.’  We proved Wings could be a really good band. To play to huge audiences in the same way The Beatles had and have an impact in a different way. It was a huge buzz.”—Paul McCartney

As the Sixties came to a close, Paul was faced with the daunting prospect of being a solo artist for the first time. Wings’ ascension to the top of the charts with classic albums including Band on the Run, Venus and Mars and At the Speed of Sound, along with the band’s stadium-filling live shows would prove to critics and fans that not all great acts are impossible to follow. Wings:The Story of a Band on the Run is a rousing, stereophonic celebration of the songs, collaborations and performances that would shape the soundtrack of the late 20th century.

Drawn from over 500,000 words, based on dozens of hours of interviews with Paul and numerous key players in the band’s orbit, Wings: The Story of a Band on the Run weaves together the improbable trajectory of Paul McCartney and his newly formed band (featuring co-founding members Linda McCartney and Denny Laine) across the technicolor 1970s until their dissolution in 1981.

Edited by the prize-winning historian Ted Widmer and organized around nine Wings albums, the oral history sheds new light on the immediate aftermath of the seismic global impact of The Beatles’ break-up, as the musical landscape and tastes began to splinter and diverge along with societal views. The narrative follows the various incarnations of the band as they survive a mugging in Nigeria, appear unannounced at UK university halls, tour in a sheared-off school bus with their children, while producing some of the most indelible and acclaimed music of the decade, including: “Mull of Kintyre,” “Live and Let Die,” “Band on the Run,” “My Love,” “Jet,” “With a Little Luck,” “Silly Love Songs,” “Let ‘Em In,” “Junior’s Farm” and more.

With more than 100 black-and-white and color photographs, many never seen before, Wings: The Story of a Band on the Run is part of a larger reexamination and appreciation of the group and their catalog, including the 2024 theatrical release of the rare Wings live-in-studio performance film One Hand Clapping and its accompanying album; 50th anniversary editions of the Wings albums Band on the Run (released February 2024) and Venus and Mars (releasing March 2025); and a forthcoming documentary on Paul McCartney’s solo and Wings-related musical work of the 1970s from Academy Award-winning filmmaker, Morgan Neville”.

There will be a lot of new reviews when the documentary is released on 25th February. I want to move next to a review from IndieWire from last year. Though they do note it is a drawback that we do not see Paul McCartney sat down discussing the band – it is done in voiceovers -, it still manages to be for diehard fans and causals alike. It is fast-paced, informative but something that will definitely appeal to a wide spectrum of fans:

“But just as the Beatles loomed over everything McCartney did — a montage in the film features a succession of press audio snippets of “Beatles,” “The Beatles,” “Beatles” — “Man on the Run” can’t quite escape but be about the Beatles in its own way either.

We open in 1969, just five short years after the Sullivan performance, the band on the fritz, all off on their own. Speculation of a breakup is rampant but the news is not yet public. In this opening moment, McCartney’s voiceover recounts how he internalized the blame for the band’s breakup. We never see McCartney or any other contemporary interviewee onscreen as a talking head, a decision which opens up the wealth of archival footage from the era to take center stage. McCartney is seen in this footage, holed up on a remote farm in Scotland with his wife Linda and their kids along with some sheep and horses. An archival news report on the property highlights how strange a sight that one of the most famous and beloved pop stars of the ’60s now spends his days in a modest cottage with various structural elements in mild disrepair.

McCartney eventually bites the bullet and publicly acknowledges that the Beatles are in fact over. Expectedly, this leaves him with the lion’s share of the blame (“Don’t shoot the messenger” is an adage due to the frequency of prior shootings.) McCartney — who sat down for seven interviews with Neville for the film — mostly blames bandmate John Lennon as the actual instigator for the breakup, citing how Lennon privately told the bandmates in 1969 that he was leaving. However, he is clear to mention at any opportunity that he loves him as a brother, and also that when they fought, which was frequently, it was also as brothers.

The first act of “Man on the Run” takes its time laying the seeds for this breakup, a major part of which involves McCartney’s reticence about Allen Klein takin over as manager for the deceased Brian Epstein. McCartney recalls Lennon telling him that while “he is a son of a bitch, he’s our son of a bitch.”

McCartney was unmoved. Later, Lennon is seen publicly admitting on camera to press that McCartney was right about Klein all along — a clip you can’t help but sense McCartney feels vindicated is included in the final cut. But this realization came too late, and so each member embarked on their own solo musical journeys.

McCartney says he initially thought he’d never pick up a guitar again after arriving in Scotland at this moment when the future of the Beatles was in serious jeopardy. But, after a brief stint drowning his sorrows in scotch — a rare moment of darkness in the film — McCartney began noodling around on an old four-track (the lo-fi machine also makes an appearance in fellow Telluride world premiere, “Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere”), recording each instrument himself. His first solo album, made in collaboration with his wife Linda, quickly follows. Linda was a photographer, not a singer, but her lack of musical training intrigued him. Her voice felt raw and real to him. But fans could only view Linda as a direct replacement of Lennon, and she was mistreated in the press and by fans, showcasing an open misogyny that calls to mind Yoko Ono’s mistreatment.

McCartney views songwriting as the “ultimate therapy,” and this first album allowed him to process his complicated feelings at the time. Festival programs often contain loose thematic throughlines, and fellow Telluride world premiere “Hamnet” also examines artmaking as therapy — in that instance it works to alleviate grief.

The limited footage shown of an unfortunate Wings TV special from 1973 is more than enough to elicit second-hand embarrassment for all involved. McCartney and Linda’s “Ram” from 1971 was initially panned by critics, including by future Springsteen manager Jon Landau, whose particularly harsh words in “Rolling Stone” are splayed across the screen. Over time, the album has been reassessed as a masterpiece, and in an ironic twist, is even now included on “Rolling Stone”’s Greatest Albums of All Time list.

Archival movie clips illustrate a stark shift from the 1960s into the harsher realities of the 1970s. The times changed and McCartney’s “conservative” demeanor, as one interviewee describes him, was simply no longer in vogue. Meanwhile, Lennon’s willingness to be political endeared him to the press throughout his career. But McCartney’s inherent uncoolness affords his discography a timelessness, which accounts for that eventual “Ram” reassessment.

The chief draw of “Man on the Run” is the copious amounts of archival footage it delivers from this era, much of it being seen for the first time. Linda was a photographer, which meant scores of beautiful 35mm photos to feature, and McCartney always seemed to be wielding a 16mm camera himself. McCartney also took his own photographs and their similarity in photographic styles is presented as evidence of their unbreakable kinship. Every big moment in McCartney’s life from this period on seems to have been captured on film: Wings’ first rehearsal, their first scrappy college tour, their final show in 1979, recording sessions in a barn with a horse milling about, and so on. Documentaries often “cheat” by using archival or movie clips from an era to fill space where no footage of actual events exist, but “Man on the Run” need not lean on this technique for the most part, because they simply have the footage.

A documentary veteran, Neville’s Best Documentary Feature Oscar win for “20 Feet from Stardom” is now over a decade in the past. In the time since, the prolific documentarian has bounced from profiling Anthony Bourdain to directing an animated Lego documentary on Pharrell Williams (which, like “Man on the Run,” also premiered at Telluride). Made over four years, “Man on the Run” is made with a patience that allowed Neville to sit down with McCartney so many times, and it also leads to a final cut that is as well-made and polished as documentaries come. This sheen and attention to detail elevates it above your traditional music biodoc.

One question a post-Beatles film must answer is how much context a viewer requires on the Beatles. Truth be told, if you find yourself watching a Wings-era Paul McCartney documentary, you’re more than likely carrying a rudimentary knowledge of preceding events. “Man on the Run” still chooses to briefly tackle their history, not in some “let’s get this out of the way” perfunctory manner, but with real verve and invention. An animated montage consisting of collage photographs takes us through the broad strokes in rapid succession: Ed Sullivan, India, Sgt. Pepper’s rebrand, Yoko, and so forth. It’s a clear highlight early in the film, promising plenty more visual flair.

“Man on the Run” works best as a linear accounting of these post-Beatles McCartney years more than it does as a portrait of McCartney. More than once — so you know it’s a theme — McCartney reiterates the unusual circumstances of his life journey, which lead him to rural Scotland with his family. After his schooling, he joins a band which quickly ascended to the top of the world, and now at 27, that band is no more. He feels lost and is forced to finally “grow up” he repeats. Yet “Man on the Run” misses out on the opportunity to interrogate deeply just how he was forced to grow up. The presentation of his relationship to his wife and kids is seen as wholesome and genuine. That heavy drinking in the early days of the breakup is briefly discussed but not lingered upon. And while Wings went through a succession of different lineups over the years, the reasoning for members leaving is touched upon but only somewhat satisfactorily.

Despite having what one assumes is the pick of the litter with A-list celebrities willing to lend their insights on McCartney, Wings and the Beatles, Neville wisely chooses to keep the outside voices to a minimum. Mick Jagger pops up and lends a few thoughts. Lennon’s son, Sean Ono Lennon, lets McCartney off the hook for a rare bad press moment in which McCartney appears nonplussed discussing Lennon’s murder to the media. Like Nick Dunne’s poorly timed smile in “Gone Girl,” one imagines McCartney now regrets wildly chomping on gum while commenting on camera on the death of his best friend and former band mate. McCartney reflects that one of the “greatest blessings” in his life was that he and Lennon made up shortly before Lennon’s murder. The details of that reconciliation are disappointedly not included. But with otherwise such strong access to McCartney alongside this wealth of archival clips, the omissions or glossed over subjects — one assumes at McCartney’s behest — while present, never feel glaring.

Music documentaries often come with the promise of salacious, tell-all revelations, a trend which might be a lingering byproduct of VH1’s influential “Behind the Music” series. But that is largely absent in “Man on the Run,” for a few possible reasons. One is that McCartney is too guarded and media savvy to ever say something to the effect of: “Yeah, I broke up the Beatles! So what?” The Beatles were always experts at managing the press, even in their early days. And the other is that by all accounts, McCartney mostly appears to be a normal guy. His family-first Scottish farm-life doesn’t appear performative. This does not seem to be a man with skeletons in his closet and those hunting for them here will leave disappointed. It does lead to a documentary lacking a certain edge, and the pacing likewise begins to drag late in the film as Wings’ albums are covered, one by one.

The central question in a musical documentary of this nature is whether it is for the real “heads,” or if a casual fan can follow along. “Man on the Run” successfully satisfies both demographics. Longtime Beatles and McCartney fans will eat up the wealth of intimate footage of McCartney and Linda’s working and domestic life, and casual fans can track his career throughout this period with a newfound curiosity, coming out better informed on McCartney’s ethos more so as a musician than as a man. But when this man is Paul McCartney, one of, if not, the greatest songwriters of all-time, it’s a compromise that will certainly do”.

It is an important year. Fifty-five years since Wings released Wild Life, this documentary takes us inside the band and their career. I keep coming back to that time after The Beatles split and when Paul McCartney was lost. Stuck inside four walls. Like a bereavement, it must have seemed impossible to record new music, let alone with a whole new band! It is why Wings’ success, however brief, is amazing. This new project that was not The Beatles and there was not the same expectation and dynamic. I don’t think that Wings get the credit and attention they deserve. It is clear that Paul McCartney: Man on the Run will be…

FASCINATING to see.

FEATURE: Plastic Roses: The Continuing Issue of A.I. Artists and the Problems They Cause

FEATURE:

 

 

Plastic Roses

IN THIS PHOTO: Sienna Rose has been flagged as a probable A.I. artist by Deezer (many of her songs and albums are suspected to be A.I. music)

 

The Continuing Issue of A.I. Artists and the Problems They Cause

__________

I guess you can detect an A.I. artist…

if they do not have a lot of photos or there is little in the way of promotion. However, a lot of new artists might be in that situation. Especially on Instagram, if there are very few photos or something looks suspicious, then alarm bells would ring. I was following an A.I. artist myself and found out through a comment from an Instagram user. Rather than her being this rather fake or A.I.-sounding artist, there was a rawness and authenticity to her voice that had me – and many others – fooled. It was embarrassing but also angering. At a time when so many real artists are struggling for attention and have their music on streaming sites and hardy get paid anything, there are A.I.-generated artists that are getting more attention and payment. This brings us to the case of a fake and plastic musical flower. Sienna Rose. As Rolling Stone U.K. reveal in their article, it is more problematic than her being inauthentic and almost hoodwinking artist. A Black artist who was gaining traction and being seen as this great new R&B/Neo-Soul hope revealed to be a fake:

“These days, artists don’t even need to be real to become a sensation. At least, that seems to be the case for neo-soul “musician” Sienna Rose. This week, the “singer” became a topic of discussion as listeners and observers online debated the high possibility that Rose is, in fact, an artist created by artificial intelligence. They are likely to be correct.

In a statement to Rolling Stone, the streaming platform Deezer confirmed “that many of Sienna Rose’s albums and songs are detected and flagged as AI on Deezer.”

Sienna Rose has been the subject of this debate for about a year now. But it all got reignited after the Golden Globes awards ceremony when Selena Gomez posted an Instagram carousel from the event, using Rose’s “Where Your Warmth Begins.” (The song has since been removed from Gomez’s post.) Since then, folks on the internet have turned their attention on the musician with a critical eye.

Cannot overstate how deeply insidious this is, especially considering that we recently lost D’Angelo (a true artist who revolutionized the very genres that “Sienna Rose” is a stolen generic ass patchwork of)
“Sienna Rose” is a modern iteration in a long history of Black artists… https://t.co/T8MLKoySdZ

— Caroline (@carolinekwan) January 13, 2026

Sienna Rose’s Spotify profile was the greatest point of speculation. For starters, Rose’s biography describes her as “an anonymous neo-soul singer whose music blends the elegance of classic soul with vulnerability of modern R&B.” The operative word here being “anonymous,” a strange move for an artist in the 21st century when visibility feeds into fame. Despite Sienna Rose’s anonymity, the singer has 2.6 million monthly listeners on Spotify. On top of that, she’s also managed to get three songs (‘Into the Blue,’ ‘Safe With You,’ and ‘Where Your Warmth Begins’) on Spotify’s Viral 50 – USA playlist.

Then there’s the music of it all. Sienna Rose’s AI-generated music seems to be inspired by real artists like Olivia Dean and Alicia Keys with lush vocals and delicate pianos. But some listeners have noted the “generic” sound of the music. One X user posted about their listening experience: “Started listening to Olivia Dean (fantastic). Within two days Spotify recommended Sienna Rose, who has a similar, but more generic sound. Took me a few songs to realise she’s AI. Is this how Spotify plans to maintain leverage over artists? Cloning sound and stealing listeners?”

Another user on Threads had similar complaints. “Sienna Rose is the ultimate case study in AI music finally becoming good enough. It’s not just about the tech anymore, it’s about the fact that it can now pass the test for the average listener & Spotify algo[rithm],” they wrote, adding, “When a track is polished enough to fool someone like Selena Gomez and millions of daily listeners, the algorithm stops being a tool for discovery. It becomes a delivery system for statistically perfect sound.”

On the other hand, another X user seemed to enjoy Rose’s songs. “I just discovered Sienna Rose?! 10/10 ma’am come and get your flowers! Such beautiful music, my goodness,” they wrote. Still, one X user was skeptical about any praise on the social media platform, noting, “Don’t fall for these blue checks attempting to legitimise Sienna Rose.”

Additionally, Sienna Rose also doesn’t have a social media presence — she’s anonymous, remember? Some users on Reddit found this component suspicious. “I couldn’t find her on any socials — or just any info on Google in general,” wrote one user. “I was just thinking how soothing this sounded but then found it weird I couldn’t find this ‘artist’ on socials…I’m cooked LOL,” wrote another.

Sienna Rose is the latest artist to make listeners online and beyond debate the issue of AI-generated music and artists. Last summer, the Velvet Sundown sparked debate and extensive media coverage when they debuted on popular Spotify playlists and insisted they were not AI-generated. Finally, the band’s Spotify bio clarified that they were indeed “visualised with the support of artificial intelligence”.

If the likes of Bandcamp have banned A.I. artists from their platform, Deezer, Spotify and others have not. It does show that there is this massive issue in terms of controlling A.I. artists. They are also becoming more sophisticated in terms of being able to convince people. It is a worrying trend. Velvet Sundown another case of an artist/band who have earned a lot of conversation and there is debate as to whether they are real music and what their worth is. Although they are not a huge streaming success and there is never going to be this longevity where their music endures, it does all seem rather creepy and pointless. In terms of Sienna Rose, a lot of the backlash comes when you consider she is a Black artist and a sort of anticipation and excitement around her. In an industry where there are fewer Black artists at the forefront and there is still inequality, there is more sting and disappointment with the realisation that she is A.I.-generated. It does seem to be insulting and toxic. Part of the problem with A.I. artists is that they will get found out. They cannot tour and there will be publicity from them. Fans are unlikely to stick with an artist long-term if all they get are A.I.-generated tracks and there is nothing else. However, with more and more of them being spawned, it does make it difficult for genuine artists to stand out at times. Some A.I. artists appear authentic and gain this press, only for it to be revealed their music is not genuine. If A.I. artists cannot produce the sort of real and human emotions that defined so many of last year’s best albums, it is this thing of artist royalties and existing music being used to make A.I. music. Even if it can mean more royalties, many artist and record labels are worried. I shall come to an article that explores that. However, in December, Alexis Petridis for The Guardian argued how 2025’s best was defined by grief, loss and resilience. This is something A.I. can’t, or ever will, be able to feel and replicate:

“The most acclaimed albums of 2025 make for impressively eclectic listening. Surveying them does not reveal much in the way of obvious musical trends. There’s very little similarity between Rosalía’s heady classical approach to pop on Lux and Lily Allen’s conversational disclosures on West End Girl. You could broadly group CMAT’s Euro-Country, Bon Iver’s Sable, Fable and the Tubs’ Cotton Crown together as alternative rock but they don’t sound anything like each other. And the year’s best-of lists are sprinkled with albums that brilliantly defy classification: Blood Orange’s Essex Honey leaps from old-fashioned indie to Prince-y funk; on Black British Music, Jim Legxacy sees no reason why UK rap can’t coexist with distorted guitars, pop R&B and acoustic bedroom pop.

But it’s hard not to notice how similar they are thematically: a large swathe of the Guardian’s albums of the year seem consumed by loss. There are straightforward explorations of failed relationships: for all its religious imagery, there’s a prosaic breakup at the heart of Rosalía’s Lux, while West End Girl’s lurid detailing of the collapse of Lily Allen’s marriage kept the tabloids in headlines for weeks. There are albums about more literal grief: a mother’s death informs Blood Orange’s Essex Honey and the Tubs’ Cotton Crown; Jim Legxacy references his late sister, while the brothers in august rap duo Clipse have seldom sounded as vulnerable as they do describing the deaths of their parents on their rightly heralded comeback Let God Sort ’Em Out. Euro-Country both memorialises a close friend on Lord, Let That Tesla Crash, while its title track examines the wave of suicides provoked by the Irish financial crisis of 2008.

In September, a US label reportedly paid $3m to sign Xavia Monet, an AI-generated R&B singer; Timbaland’s latest project is AI pop star TaTa Taktumi. By November, two AI-generated tracks had topped different US charts: Breaking Rust’s Walk My Walk made No 1 on the country digital song sales chart, while the equivalent gospel chart was topped by Solomon Ray’s Find Your Rest. The UK singles chart has also fallen victim. I Run by Haven began life with an AI-generated vocal seemingly designed to mimic that of R&B star Jorja Smith. It was banned by streaming services and removed from the UK chart after a week when record industry bodies issued takedown notices, but a new version with a re-recorded vocal was No 14 in the UK Top 40 at the time of writing.

This is all clearly the thin end of the wedge: there’s evidently plenty more to come. But if AI can make a fair copy of an old disco track, or a country record or a Jorja Smith song, the one thing it can’t do is experience the kind of human emotions that power the albums above. (The notion of an AI gospel track in particular seems to spectacularly miss the point.) These were not albums that people listened to just because they sounded nice, or had catchy hooks, but because they bought into the stories behind them, or felt moved by the feelings they expressed and the evident passion that had gone into making them, or saw their own lives reflected in the lyrics”.

There will be fallout from Sienna Rose. The latest artist to be outed as A.I., I do wonder what the long-term impact will be. Will people get better at detecting A.I. artists? Even if they do, Sienna Rose is still being listened to and streamed.  If a potential promising artist is revealed as a fraud, that will not stop people listening to the music. Royalties going to someone who is not a real artist. I think it is the tackiness of the visuals and music. What is the point of it all?! No A.I. artist will ever be able to enjoy any long-term success or have any sort of career. They cannot do the human part of music when it comes to tours and promotion. Will we see A.I.-generated artists streamed performing ‘live’, and will there be this fake interviews with these A.I. acts? It is a bit unsettling. Another thing is how some major labels are embracing A.I. and what this means for artists. Artists’ work being used to train A.I. In another article from The Guardian they write why there is division in the music world about the purpose and value of A.I. If it is a good or bad thing:

“But what do musicians actually think of the prospect of their work being used to train AI, and reworked by the general public? “Everybody should be selling or licensing their voice and their skills to these companies,” Dave Stewart of Eurythmics argued to me this week. “Otherwise they’re just going to take it anyway.” That view is directly countered by the major labels and AI companies, who have insisted artists and songwriters get to opt in to have their music made available, and if they do, get royalties when their music is used to train AI, or manipulated by users on platforms such as Udio, Suno and Klay.

Others take a grimmer view about how these companies might reshape the industry. Irving Azoff, legendarily forthright artist manager and founder of the Music Artists Coalition in the US, responded to the Universal/Udio deal with biting cynicism. “We’ve seen this before – everyone talks about ‘partnership,’ but artists end up on the sidelines with scraps,” he said. In the wake of the same deal, the Council of Music Makers in the UK accused the major labels of “spin” and called for a more robust set of artist-label agreements. And the European Composer and Songwriter Alliance says there is a disturbing “lack of transparency” around the deals (though more detail is likely to emerge on what users can do with any music they create, and any potential commercial uses of it).

Catherine Anne Davies, who records as the Anchoress and also sits on the board of directors at the Featured Artists Coalition (FAC), has many reservations here. “Most people don’t even want their work to be used for training AI,” she says. “I’m on the dystopian side, or maybe what I call the realist side of things. I’m interested in the way that AI can be assistive in the creative process – if it can make us more efficient, if it can streamline our processes. But generative AI for me, in terms of creative output, is a big no-no at the moment. I’m yet to be convinced.”

Musician Imogen Heap feels that AI itself is not to be feared as a tool – she uses an AI she calls Mogen to listen to every aspect of her life, with a view to it being a creative partner (as explored in a recent Guardian article). To help address some of the issues, she has created Auracles, an artist-led, non-profit platform she hopes will be the place where the rights and permissions around AI are set out. It’s not enough to say you’re happy with your music being used by AI, she says – instead, what’s needed are “permissions that grow and evolve over time”.

It is distressing that A.I. artists exist and they can seemingly get traction and a fanbase before they are rumbled. Even after that, some people have no issues supporting an A.I.-generated artist. Whilst it can never replace actual artists, I find it both creepy and damaging. The fact that there is not an actual human behind the music (well, not an artist anyway). And how I feel it has made people sceptical of new artists and whether they are real. New artists too having to compete with A.I. versions. Artists divided over whether A.I. is a useful tool and beneficial or dystopian and detrimental. The case of Sienna Rose is both shocking and disappointing. I have dropped in some of ‘her’ music to show that it is being listened to and, frankly, its popularity will wane and die. Authenticity and purity of human emotion will always resonate with listeners, but as long as A.I. artists can fool people or seem a sufficient alternative to real artists, I feel we all...

HAVE something to worry about.

FEATURE: The Digital Mixtape: Este Haim at Forty

FEATURE:

 

 

The Digital Mixtape

PHOTO CREDIT: Ian Gavan/Getty Images 

 

Este Haim at Forty

__________

THE amazing bass player and guitarist…

PHOTO CREDIT: Lea Garn

with  HAIM, I wanted to mark the upcoming fortieth birthday of a remarkable musician. Este Haim plays alongside her two sisters, Danielle and Alana, and she turns forty on 14th March. The Los Angeles trio are one of my favourite groups. They released their acclaimed debut album, Days Are Gone, in 2013. Their most recent album, I quit, came out last year. I have never seen HAIM live, though when they come to London, I shall try and get along, as I really love their music. Este Haim is also a fantastic and revered composer. Before coming to a mixtape featuring some of her compositional work and some brilliant HAIM tracks, I want to feature an interview from Spitfire Audio that was published in 2023:

“It's not all industry accolades and ice-cold limoncello though. Today Este is not on tour with Taylor Swift, recording a track for the Barbie soundtrack, or writing the fourth Haim album. She is in her living room in LA, drinking orange juice and recovering from a bout of low blood sugar brought on by her type 1 diabetes. In 2013, she fainted on stage at Glastonbury. Now she wears her condition on her sleeve, ready to educate anyone interested in finding out more. Including you, dear reader.

“We can wax philosophical about type 1 diabetes,” she continues. “I can give you all the info you want about blood sugar and glycemic index, but I don’t know if the Composer Magazine audience would want to hear about that.” In a way, she’s right. What I wanted to talk to her about was drum machines. And self-doubt. And archery.

Despite the morning setback, it hasn’t taken long for Este to hit full stride. She is gregarious and funny - a little sarcastic, a little self-deprecating, and generous with both her time and her stories. “I'm a real sucker for sonics,” she admits with characteristic pith, of the non-citrus variety. “If I could, I would go through snare tones for weeks.”

Hunched over a synthesiser or playing the guitar with a paintbrush are not images one might immediately associate with the rambunctious live performances of Haim’s resident bassist and self-avowed cheerleader. Este Haim is bridging worlds that don’t often look one another in the eye, but listen to tales from her childhood and it’s clear she always had a proclivity to break the mould. Her favourite Disney films are The Little Mermaid, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty … and Robin Hood. More on him later. For now, a little history.

Drum machines may not have run in the family, but music did. Este’s father was a drummer, her mother a guitarist, and it was something of a given that one-by-one the Haim sisters would have instruments pressed into their young hands. On the drums from age two, and upstaged by Danielle on guitar by age eight, Este (or “Depressed-y”, as her father called her at the time) was initially against the idea of playing the instrument she’d go on to make her own.

“My dad was like, ‘Why don’t you try playing the bass?’ And I was like, "Girls don't play bass. What girls play bass?" And he was like, ‘I know just the thing.’” Hours later they were at Blockbuster renting Talking Heads’ 1983 concert film Stop Making Sense. “I watched it and I saw Tina Weymouth play and I was mesmerised, transfixed, as an eight-year-old,” she enthuses. “I think partly because I thought she looked like Princess Peach from Super Mario. She was having the best time and I was like, that’s what I want to be.”

Throughout our interview, Este’s cultural references bounce between high and low like a vintage synth, just as happy to discuss Real Housewives as she is the work of Wim Wenders. In a matter of minutes, she’s run the gamut from her fated soccer career (“Sport? Not my thing! Performance? Absolutely”), her love of E.T. (“I wanted to be best friends with Elliott”), playing Brazilian carnival drums (she says there’s a video on YouTube, but I couldn’t find it), classical music (“I was really big into like Tchaikovsky”) and the joy of foley (“it looks like being a kid in a sandbox”).

At one point she jokes that “other than the drums, I think the cello is like the most beautiful, sexy instrument ever.” Especially in the hands of Arthur Russell, I offer. “Oh my god, the Arthur Russell of it all,” she exclaims. “The sound that he got out of his cello, and the textures and the timbre...” She trails off. “I wasn’t hip to Arthur Russell until late. I got to the party around 18 or 19. It blew my head off.”

It is a truth generally acknowledged that people conscientious enough to think they’re late to the party are usually bang on time. With almost a decade of band experience already to her name, Este took a degree in ethnomusicology with the intention of “studying the beginnings of music and where music came from”. She played sitar, she played tabla, she played gamelan, she sang in a Bulgarian choir. “I decided to look at it from an anthropological and sociological standpoint and learn how music worked,” she explains. Because why not?

The pop covers performed in charity concerts with her family may have grounded Este in the mechanics of a certain kind of songwriting, but there was something about Arthur Russell and Kate Bush, who she also became obsessed with at college, that flipped her interest towards production. “The world is your oyster in the studio,” she says. “Drum sounds, synth sounds, bass tones, those three things are my strong suits.” Sonics, atmosphere, levels, and mixing; are all concepts she now draws on more than ever in her work for film

There’s a lightness to Este’s manner which could be misinterpreted for frivolity, a charge that has been levelled at Haim in the past from the music industry’s largely male vibe police. It should really come as no surprise that an artist of her stature has such a wealth of musical knowledge, but pop stars are rarely afforded the luxury of complexity, let alone vulnerability. Este Haim is comfortable with both.

In 2021, Este was approached to score a Netflix drama Maid, about a woman rebuilding her life after an abusive relationship. Housebound by lockdown and unable to tour Haim’s third album Women in Music, Pt. III, Este jumped at the chance to try something new, despite the risks involved.

“I was like, I've never done this before. I'm a musician, I know I love music, I know I love music in film, I've hung out with Ludwig Göransson a couple of times, sure [she laughs], but the truth of the matter is I don’t know whether or not I'll be good at it. I'm going to put my best foot forward, and I’m going to work hard at it. I went on YouTube and tried to find every video on music composition for TV and film as I possibly could. I remember day one before meeting Stray [collaborator Christopher Stracey], I was like “OK Este, come on Haim, you gotta brush up!”.

It’s safe to say that as far as Haim is concerned, she has succeeded. When it comes to composing, however, Este is the first to admit that she is still finding her feet and was initially just pleased to discover how much she enjoyed the process. It’s also possible that being a rock-musician-turned-film-composer is, in its own way, something of a radical move.

“I think with time people have become more accepting of the idea that you can do both, or just do what you want,” she reflects. “Like, who gives a shit? This isn't a dress rehearsal. I don’t want to be on my deathbed and be like ‘fuck, I wish I'd done that’. That's kind of how I've always lived my life. I'm pretty fearless in that way.”

If Este Haim makes it sound easy, that’s because she has had to work for it. “I feel like I got my ten thousand hours by the time I turned eleven,” she says. “Every artist goes through bouts of self-doubt and imposter syndrome, but I like to think that as time goes on those voices get quieter,” I ask her whether being a beginner again in the world of film composition has allowed her to approach the task with something like intuition. I mention a book I was given recently on Zen Buddhism. To quote its author, Shunryo Suzuki: “In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few”.

When I write about HAIM in the future, I will discuss i quit and how their music has changed. The brilliance of their work and what acclaimed players they are. However, this is all about Este Haim, as she turns forty on 14th March and I wanted an excuse to write about her. A truly exceptional musician, composer, songwriter and human, this mixtape is her brilliant work as a composer and as one-third of HAIM. It shows that she is a truly staggering…

MUSICAL talent.

FEATURE: Tell Me How Have You Been? Peter Gabriel’s Sledgehammer at Forty

FEATURE:

 

 

Tell Me How Have You Been?

 

Peter Gabriel’s Sledgehammer at Forty

__________

I am casting forward…

to 14th April. That date marks forty years since Peter Gabriel’s Sledgehammer was released. The lead single from his fifth studio album, So, it was a number four success in the U.K. It reached number one in the U.S. People talk about Sledgehammer as much for its iconic video as they do for the song itself. Directed by the late Stephen R. Johnson, it won nine MTV Video Music Awards in 1987 and is considered one of the greatest music videos ever. In terms of its brilliance and innovation, I would say it is the greatest achievement in music video-making ever. Forty years later and it still looks mind-blowing. This stop-motion video that must have required a lot of patience from Peter Gabriel, I wanted to explore the song and video ahead of its fortieth anniversary. I am starting out with Sound on Sound in 2014. Sledgehammer was produced by Daniel Lanois and engineered by Kevin Killen and David Bascombe. Killen discussed the background of the track. How it came together and the technology and equipment used. I have selected sections from the interview:

“The words to Peter Gabriel's most commercial song and biggest international hit aren't exactly subtle. Sonically drawing on some of his previous numbers, like 'Games Without Frontiers' and 'Shock the Monkey', as well as 1960s American soul records by the likes of Otis Redding, 'Sledgehammer' is chock full of sexual innuendo: a steam train, an aeroplane, a big dipper, a bumper car, you name it.

Still, thanks to its infectious groove, contributions by the likes of legendary Stax house musicians the Memphis Horns and an iconic music video, it topped the American chart in July 1986 and climbed to number four in the UK.

'Sledgehammer' was the second track on So, Gabriel's fifth solo studio album and the biggest seller of his career, hitting the top spot in his native Britain where it was certified triple platinum and number two in the US where it went five-times platinum. Produced by Canadian musician Daniel Lanois, it melded Gabriel's world-music sensibilities and love of experimentation with Lanois' own ambient leanings to create a stone-cold classic.

"Peter would immerse himself in anything rhythmic, whereas Dan was very soulful as a producer,” says Kevin Killen, who took over as the album's engineer after David Bascombe — who'd recorded the basic tracks — left the project to work with Tears For Fears. "Beforehand, they'd worked on the soundtrack of the Alan Parker film, Birdy, re‑purposing and overdubbing on existing material that Peter had in his catalogue, and this had given them an interesting view into how they might work on So, enabling things to unfold naturally”.

"The basic tracks had mostly been recorded in long form, so the arrangements that we now hear weren't necessarily on the multitracks when I got involved. Some of them were almost the same, but others were really elongated; 'Sledgehammer' was close to 10 minutes, as opposed to the five minutes that ended up making it onto the single and the five minutes, 16 seconds on the album version. When they were tracking, they'd do these extended sections and extended vamps, because at the time Peter just had basic chord arrangements that he'd wanted to pursue. That also allowed the musicians freedom to explore new ideas, which sometimes ended up in the next take of the song.

"Lyrically, Peter likes to ponder his choices over a long period of time and he will play around with various ideas. Initially, he would come up with sounds for the basic track and try to fit key words into those sounds — he describes this process as Gabrielese — and then the lyrics would develop from there. When people came in to record overdubs, they might be playing to something that was still only partially formed or completely blank vocally. As a result, even if they came up with a great part, there was no guarantee it would stand the test of time. Peter was constantly upgrading his ideas, and so original parts would have to be replaced to accommodate the new arrangements.”

Unique Sounds

"The first song I heard on my arrival was 'Sledgehammer'. The drums, bass, guitar and keyboards had been recorded in their most basic form. Peter was working on a lyrical idea and he was trying to cement a melody for those lyrics. There was no lead vocal, no backing vocals, no horn parts, no organ. Even the bass part changed, going from a slightly different tone to what it became with Tony Levin's Boss octave pedal. In its extended version, it sounded like a really cool track that needed to be edited down into a more manageable form so that its great ideas could be presented in a more concise fashion, possibly with a view to being a single.

IN THIS PHOTO: Daniel Lanois and Kevin Killen in the Ashcombe House control room

"Peter recorded complete takes of the vocal and then we compiled. That wasn't true for all songs, but for 'Sledgehammer' we created a comp track. Shortly after I arrived, we'd started setting up for vocals and he had told me he normally sang through an SM57. Dan said, 'OK, we'll set up an SM57 but let's set up other microphones as well and do a blindfold test.' Peter was game enough to do that, so we had about six different mics set up in the control room, he put on the blindfold outside and walked in. He wasn't allowed to touch the microphones, and all the gains were set the same so that he couldn't tell which was which in terms of level. He went through each one, walking from one to the other, and the one he ended up picking was the Neumann U47.

"This particular Neumann had a really great, silky high end, but it didn't have as much bottom as Dan and I had expected. It had an unusual tone, and Peter has that lovely little rasp in his voice as well as a certain airiness. We thought the U47 sounded really good on him and then, just before we ready to record, our tech Neil Perry said something was shorting out in the cable connecting the mic to the power supply. After fixing the cable, we had Peter step back up to the microphone and it sounded different; much more full‑bodied. We liked that, but we pined for the airiness of the pre‑modified version. We asked Neil , 'Is there any way of mimicking that response? He did by removing the shield on a patch cord. Then he said, 'We should plug the microphone's input into a mult on the patch bay, take a regular patch cord out of that mult into a fader, and mult the dropped shield patch cord into a secondary fader. You'll have the normal 47 response with the modified 47 response on separate faders. You can use that to balance between the airiness and roundness of Peter's voice.'

"That became the way in which we approached the vocals. Peter likes to sing in the control room and to not be totally isolated with headphones. We had small NS10 monitors and a pair of Tannoys as well. So, we'd flip the phase on them, placing the U47 at the apex position from the speakers while monitoring at a moderate level, and then Peter would sing with a pair of Sennheisers around his neck. Afterwards I'd record a track at the same monitoring level of just the backing track minus the vocal. Then I'd comp with that backing track out of phase with the vocal to see if we could get it to cancel.

"In terms of vocal performances, Peter would usually take three, four, five passes to get a great end result. He's an incredibly great vocalist. It's rare that Peter sings out of tune and he's really got the most soulful sounding voice. It might take him a long time to arrive at a finished lyric that he's comfortable with, but once he gets there his delivery is impeccable...

"Personally, it was a life‑changing experience. Dan was gracious to invite me onto the project, and the challenges it presented allowed me to grow exponentially as a person and as an engineer. Meanwhile, Peter was incredibly gracious both as a person and as a performer, and he made me feel welcome from the first day. We were a competitive group, and this manifested itself in our daily games of boules, as well as our runs to Solsbury Hill with David Rhodes, PG and myself. There was exceptional humour and compassion, and enough creative tension to help maximise our contributions. I cannot imagine my life or career without that experience and the friendships that ensued”.

It is worth discussing the video for Sledgehammer. One wonders if this song would have such a huge and important legacy were it not for the video. Would it have charted as high, especially in the U.S. if the video were different? There is no doubting the brilliance of the song itself, yet the video tips it over the top. Music Radar reproached Sledgehammer last year. Peter Gabriel recalling how it was quite an intense process. He had to lie under glass for sixteen hours in one section of the video. However, the dedication and patience paid off. It is a masterpiece visual:

“Directed by Stephen R. Johnson and featuring the animation talents of the Brothers Quay and Aardman Animations, the video makes for compelling yet sometimes uneasy viewing - with Gabriel singing the track in a disjointed, frame-by-frame style as a whole manner of objects such as an orange and a model train orbit his head.

Shot one frame at a time, this required Gabriel to lie under glass for a total of 16 hours.

“It took a lot of hard work,” Gabriel recalled. “I was thinking at the time, ‘If anyone wants to try and copy this video, good luck to them’.”

In many ways, the Sledgehammer video is a fitting reflection of the song it sets out to evoke – striking, innovative and, as ever with Peter Gabriel, wholly unique.

Sledgehammer is the song on which the former Genesis singer shifted from prog to pop, albeit with left-field sensibilities to the fore. It’s also a track that would become his most commercial song and his biggest international hit.

Sledgehammer is the second track on Gabriel’s fifth studio album, So, and was the last one to be recorded.

The album was produced by Daniel Lanois and recorded at Gabriel’s home, Ashcombe House, near Bath.

The musicians on the album were actually packing up their gear to leave when Sledgehammer was presented to them. Drummer Manu Katché had just ordered a taxi on his return journey to Paris when Gabriel coaxed him back into the studio.

Katché nailed his drum part in one take and Tony Levin recorded his part on a fretless bass with a pick.

Soul music was a huge influence on Gabriel when writing the song, particularly the music that had come out of Stax in Memphis.

He recalled having seen Otis Redding in London and remembered the passion and excitement of Redding’s performance and his trumpet player that night, Wayne Jackson, a member of the Stax house band and one of the Memphis Horns.

“I began as a drummer, a pretty bad drummer,” Gabriel told Ray Hammond of Sound On Sound magazine in January 1987. “I used to play in a soul band and we used to do a lot of this type of material. It's still very exciting for me.

“The best gig of my life was when I went to the Ram Jam Club in Brixton to see Otis Redding in 1967. That hasn't ever been surpassed for me, it was an amazing night.”

Almost 20 years after that night, Gabriel contacted Wayne Jackson and asked him to assemble a horn section to play on Sledgehammer. Jackson recruited Mark Rivera on saxophone and Don Mikkelsen on trombone.

Gabriel wanted Jackson and the horn section to capture some of the intricacies of brass playing that were not possible to achieve on a synth. He highlighted as an example the slow brass swells in the second verse as the kind of feel that he required.

For Gabriel, the inclusion of musicians such as Wayne Shorter and Manu Katché was integral to Sledgehammer.

“I think there's still something magical that happens when you get the interaction between live players,” he said. “No amount of good programming can replace that.”

Lyrically, Sledgehammer is rich in sexual innuendo. As Gabriel sings: ”You could have a steam train/If you'd just lay down your tracks".

The euphemisms were acknowledged by Gabriel and he noted that many of the ’60s soul and R&B songs that inspired him also feature such references in the lyrics. “Sometimes sex can break through barriers when other forms of communication are not working too well,” he is quoted as saying, on the Songfacts website”.

Before getting to some critical reviews and impressions of how Sledgehammer is viewed, Stereogum wrote about this 1986 single for their The Number Ones feature. Even though it was number one for a single week in the U.S., its popularity and success was immense. One of the defining singles and videos of the 1980s. Perhaps Peter Gabriel’s most revered and loved song, it still sounds fresh forty years later. The video is not dated at all. How many artists would commit to a video like this in 2026? Even though So has other classics on it – Don’t Give Up, and Big Time among the others -, Sledgehammer is the standout:

“Before making that "Sledgehammer" video, director Stephen R. Johnson had made the similarly wild clip for the 1985 Talking Heads song "Road To Nowhere." That video, in particular its stop-motion sequences, were what attracted Gabriel to Johnson. Johnson, in the oral history I Want My MTV: "I didn't even like ['Sledgehammer'], frankly. I thought it was just another white boy trying to sound Black. But Peter Gabriel took me to dinner, got me drunk on wine, and I agreed to do it." With the "Sledgehammer" video, Johnson just went nuts, and Gabriel did everything necessary to bring Johnson's visions to life.

In making the video, Johnson enlisted the help of the groundbreaking experimental stop-motion animators the Brothers Quay. At Gabriel's behest, he also brought in Aardman Animations, the British production house that would later make the Wallace & Gromit films. Nick Park, who went on to create Wallace & Gromit, personally animated the bit in the "Sledgehammer" video where the two chickens dance. Park used real chicken carcasses, and they started to rot and stink while he was working on them. (Later on, Park co-directed the 2000 hit Chicken Run, so the experience apparently didn't put him off working with chickens.) In working on the video, Gabriel himself had to spend 16 hours laying underneath a sheet of glass, and he got a bunch of electric shocks while wearing a Christmas tree costume. It all worked out. Gabriel, Johnson, and all their collaborators made something immortal.

A spectacle as outsized and surreal and popular as the "Sledgehammer" video makes for a fitting peak of Peter Gabriel's career. Gabriel had been building to something like that for a long time. Gabriel, in his mid-thirties when he scored his one #1 hit, grew up in the English town of Surrey, and he became one of the founding members of Genesis as a teenager. From the very beginning, Gabriel was an unconventional frontman. On Genesis' early albums, he played flute and oboe. Later on, he started wearing outlandish costumes onstage, something that he never cleared with his bandmates beforehand. Gabriel was the one who had the big ideas that led to absurd, ambitious concept albums like the 1974 album The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway.

While Genesis were working on that album, William Friedkin, director of The French Connection and The Exorcist, approached Gabriel about working on a a screenplay, and he temporarily dropped out of the band, pissing off his bandmates in the process. After Genesis finished touring behind the LP, Gabriel announced his departure from the band, kicking off the chain of events that would lead Genesis drummer Phil Collins to unlikely global pop stardom. Soon afterward, Gabriel started off a solo career, releasing his first album in 1977. On his early albums, Gabriel played around with synths and textures and ideas.

All of Gabriel's first four solo albums were self-titled -- not exactly the kind of decision you make if you're aiming for pop stardom. Still, Gabriel's early singles did pretty well on the UK charts. In the US, Gabriel was less of a presence. A couple of tracks charted: 1977's "Solsbury Hill" at #68, 1980's "Games Without Frontiers" at #48. But Gabriel was more of a culty, esoteric figure until the advent of MTV made him harder to ignore. 1982's "Shock The Monkey" reached #29, largely on the strength of its memorably freaked-out video. Still, a song like "Sledgehammer" represented a real and self-conscious turn towards the pop mainstream.

Gabriel co-produced his 1986 album So, his first album with an actual title, with Daniel Lanois, a producer whose work will appear in this column again. Lanois and Gabriel had worked together on the soundtrack of the 1984 movie Birdy, and they made So together at Gabriel's Bath studio. Gabriel obsessed over the record's sound, spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to painstakingly put it all together. For "Sledgehammer," he had an unlikely inspiration: Previous Number Ones artist Otis Redding.

In 1967, Gabriel had seen Redding play the London club Ram Jam, an experience that made him want to become a full-time musician. (Imagine how much confidence it must take for a 17-year-old white British kid to look at Otis Redding and think to himself that he could do that.) "Sledgehammer" is Gabriel's conscious attempt to salute Redding and his '60s soul contemporaries. That's why "Sledgehammer" is basically nothing but clumsy sex metaphors. Gabriel figured that he was working within a lineage. In the So press release, Gabriel wrote that the song was his attempt to replicate "the spirit and the style" of '60s soul: "The lyrics of many of those songs were full of playful sexual innuendo, and this is my contribution to that songwriting tradition. It is also about the use of sex as a means of getting through a breakdown in communication." (Gabriel's first marriage would end in divorce a year later.)

Judged as a '60s soul song, "Sledgehammer" is an abject failure, a total boondoggle. In its lyrics, Gabriel essentially compares the following things to his dick: a steam train, an airplane, a big dipper, and a bumper car. (I'll admit: I am now very curious what Peter Gabriel's dong looks like.) Gabriel also sings that you should show him 'round your fruit cage because he will be your honeybee. He wants to be your sledgehammer. Won't you call his name? It's all very dumb and silly, mostly in an endearing way.

As a singer, Gabriel is obviously no Otis Redding, but he's still pretty effective. His voice is a strained, chesty baritone grumble, and he pushes it hard on "Sledgehammer." Purely as a vocalist, Gabriel never had the effortless grace of his old bandmate Phil Collins, but that works out fine for him, since a song like "Sledgehammer" should be effortful. I like the interplay between Gabriel and the backup singers at the end of the song. He's not a soul singer, but he tries.

But "Sledgehammer" doesn't work because it's a soul song. It works because it's a slick, loud, fun '80s club song. The mix is huge and overwhelming, full of noises and tones that drop in out of nowhere. The opening flute-tootle has an uncanny sort of echo on it; it's an intro that lets you know you're about to be swept away. The sound came from an E-mu Emulator II sampler; Gabriel took it from a sound-test demo. Much of "Sledgehammer" is just as digital as the sample: The airless sheen, the giant drum sound, the Fairlight and Prophet synths that Gabriel plays on the song. But there's a nice mix of the electronic and the tangibly organic.

For the song, Gabriel brought in Wayne Jackson, the great Memphis trumpeter who played on tons of Stax Records tracks and who backed up Otis Redding that night that Gabriel saw him at the Ram Jam, along with Jackson's group the Memphis Horns. Gabriel has dismissed the notion, but it seems likely that Gabriel had noticed how much success his old bandmate Phil Collins was having when making records with Earth, Wind & Fire's Phenix Horns. On "Sledgehammer," the Memphis Horns do the same kind of work that the Phenix Horns had done on Collins' "Sussidio" the year before, and they give the song a similar adrenaline charge.

Gabriel has acknowledged that "Sledgehammer" owes much of its pop success to the video. It's one of those songs that's impossible to hear on its own, without visions of that video dancing across your brain. But on its own, "Sledgehammer" is a charmingly goofy dance-pop song with production that makes it sound fucking huge, like a spaceship taking off. Even without the video, it would've been a hit. Even without the video, it's a lot of fun.

"Sledgehammer" is by far Gabriel's biggest chart hit. Only one other Gabriel single, the ironic yuppie-clowning dance-funk follow-up "Big Time," even made the top 10. ("Big Time" peaked at #8. It's an 8.) Other Gabriel songs have lingered longer in the popular consciousness, though, mostly because they also pair nicely with other images. "Solsbury Hill" was in so many movie trailers that it became a meme in the early-YouTube days, while the So ballad "In Your Eyes" earned teen-movie immortality when Cameron Crowe used it in the climactic scene of 1989's Say Anything... ("In Your Eyes" peaked at #26, but it's by far Gabriel's best-known song today.)”.

There is a great and fascinating blog post that I want to highlight, which analyses the musical structure of Peter Gabriel’s Sledgehammer. I would urge people to read it, as it unpicks the track. Many might see it as a simple song that is all about the video. However, the sounds and musical elements of Sledgehammer are so unusual for the time. I am going to end with this 2022 article about the genius Sledgehammer. A song about sex that has all this depth and a truly awe-inspiring video, I am going to be interesting to see how people approach it close to its fortieth anniversary on 14th April:

“One of the things – among many – that make the song so uniquely fascinating was the use of a synthesized shakuhachi flute (a Japanese and ancient Chinese longitudinal, end-blown flute made of bamboo), generated with an E-mu Emulator II sampler. Gabriel said that the “cheap organ sound” was created from an expensive Prophet-5 synth, which he called “an old warhorse” sound tool. (Wikipedia) The great backing vocals were sung by P. P. Arnold, Coral “Chyna Whyne” Gordon, and Dee Lewis, who also sang backup on “Big Time”.

Ironically, “Sledgehammer” (which was Gabriel’s only song to reach #1 in the U.S.) replaced “Invisible Touch”, by his former band Genesis, at the #1 spot on the Billboard Hot 100 (which was their only #1 hit in the U.S. as well). In a 2014 interview with The Guardian, Phil Collins remarked “I read recently that Peter Gabriel knocked us off the #1 spot with ‘Sledgehammer’. We weren’t aware of that at the time. If we had been, we’d probably have sent him a telegram saying: ‘Congratulations – bastard.'”

You could have a steam train

If you'd just lay down your tracks

You could have an aeroplane flying

If you bring your blue sky back

All you do is call me

I'll be anything you need

You could have a big dipper

Going up and down, all around the bends

You could have a bumper car, bumping

This amusement never ends

I want to be - your sledgehammer

Why don't you call my name

Oh  let me be your sledgehammer

This will be my testimony

Show me round your fruitcage

'Cos I will be your honey bee

Open up your fruitcage

Where the fruit is as sweet as can be

I want to be - your sledgehammer

Why don't you call my name

You'd better call the sledgehammer

Put your mind at rest

I'm going to be - the sledgehammer

This can be my testimony

I'm your sledgehammer

Let there be no doubt about it

Sledge Sledge Sledgehammer

I've kicked the habit, shed my skin

This is the new stuff, I go dancing in, we go dancing in

Oh won't you show for me and I will show for you

Show for me, I will show for you

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I do mean you, only you

You've been coming through

Going to build that power

Build, build up that power, hey

I've been feeding the rhythm

I've been feeding the rhythm

Going to feel that power build in you

Come on, come on, help me do

Come on, come on, help me do

Yeh, yeh, yeh, yeh, yeh, yeh , yeh, yeh, you

I've been feeding the rhythm

I've been feeding the rhythm

It's what we're doing, doing

All day and night”.

The stunning and world-conquering lead single from So, Sledgehammer turns forty on 14th April. Few songs are talked about mainly because of their video. So groundbreaking and innovative was the Stephen R. Johnson-directed video that we are still talking about it today. Few videos since 1986 have matched the brilliance of Sledgehammer. However, you can play the album and listen to Sledgehammer without the video and be swept away. The big vocal and incredible horns. The catchy and memorable chorus. The joy that it brings. That entire So album is so rich, varied and astonishingly nuanced and stunning. A masterpiece album from…

A songwriter in his own league.

FEATURE: You Say We’re Fantastic? Kate Bush’s Wow at Forty-Seven

FEATURE:

 

 

You Say We’re Fantastic?

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

Kate Bush’s Wow at Forty-Seven

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WHEN thinking about…

one of Kate Bush’s best singles, I am not going to repeat what I said before. I am going to include some resources I have used before but, in terms of framing, there is another direction I want to go in. Wow was the second single from Kate Bush’s second studio album, Lionheart. Released on 9th March, 1979, it turns forty-seven soon. It is important to learn a bit about the song. I have discussed aspects of this song for a recent feature. One where I explore characters in her songs, I mentioned Emily and The Actor from this song. Their roles and importance. However, stepping away from that, there are others things to spotlight. It was a number fourteen single in the U.K. I will talk about that. And critical reaction. However, here we get some interview archive from the Kate Bush Encycloepdia, where Kate Bush discussed one of her best songs:

“I’ve really enjoyed recording ‘Wow’. I’m very, very pleased with my vocal performance on that, because we did it a few times, and although it was all in tune and it was okay, there was just something missing. And we went back and did it again and it just happened, and I’ve really pleased with that, it was very satisfying.

Lionheart Promo Cassette, EMI Canada, 1978

‘Wow’ is a song about the music business, not just rock music but show business in general, including acting and theatre. People say that the music business is about ripoffs, the rat race, competition, strain, people trying to cut you down, and so on, and though that’s all there, there’s also the magic. It was sparked off when I sat down to try and write a Pink Floyd song, something spacey; Though I’m not surprised no-one has picked that up, it’s not really recognisable as that, in the same way as people haven’t noticed that ‘Kite’ is a Bob Marley song, and ‘Don’t Push Your Foot On The Heartbrake’ is a Patti Smith song. When I wrote it I didn’t envisage performing it – the performance when it happened was an interpretation of the words I’d already written. I first made up the visuals in a hotel room in New Zealand, when I had half an hour to make up a routine and prepare for a TV show. I sat down and listened to the song through once, and the whirling seemed to fit the music. Those who were at the last concert of the tour at Hammersmith must have noticed a frogman appear through the dry ice it was one of the crew’s many last night ‘pranks’ and was really amazing. I’d have liked to have had it in every show.

Kate Bush Club newsletter, Summer 1979”.

The first single and taste of music from 1979, it was an interesting period. Kate Bush released two albums in 1978. The Kick Inside, her debut, was a huge success. It spawned some incredible singles and sold over a million copies. There was not quite the same success and impact for Lionheart. Sort of rushed By EMI to capitalise on success Bush has accrued, Lionheart came out in November 1978. I think it is interesting the first single from Lionheart is Hammer Horror. The final track on the album, one would imagine that would be the second or third single. It is not a conventional lead single. Maybe Bush felt it was the biggest departure from The Kick Inside and it would be a more interesting release than anything else. Her chart positions were not great at this point. The Kick Inside was a big success. Wuthering Heights and The Man with the Child in His Eyes were released and were high-placing singles. International singles like Moving were also successful. The whole package of album and singles showed that Bush could be critically acclaimed and commercially viable. Few artists this original were selling as many units and seeing their singles do well in the charts. Maybe there was something about Lionheart that was different. Not to say the singles were a failure. Wow did pretty well, though it was not as big as what she saw on The Kick Inside. 1980’s Never for Ever would see some resurgence in terms of chart positions. Even though critics were sexist and insulting towards Kate Bush from the start, there did seem to be more love for The Kick Inside than Lionheart. Wow is an amazing song that deserved more respect. I did source it in the feature where I looked at the character in Wow, but reviews were pretty bad. Even the more positive ones came with a note of disappointment. Some of the reviews were plain misogynistic. Sounds included this in their review for Wow: “I realise that a lot of people would like to go to bed with her, but buying all her records seems a curious way of expressing such desires”.

There was this interesting shift in terms of critical appreciation. The Kick Inside got Kate Bush praise and affection, though there was sexism and mockery in some quarters. Lionheart was less well-received and many were cold towards it. Then 1979’s The Tour of Life was acclaimed and rapturously received by crowds. Never for Ever was her first number one album, yet the reviews were not universally positive. 1982’s was less commercially successful and the reviews were mixed. Then 1985’s Hounds of Love saw her embraced once more. With every new phase and shift, there was a new take on Kate Bush. Wow is a distinct, incredibly interesting and strong song. Yet, as 1978 and 1979 were years when Bush was a prime target for comedians and satirists, Wow played right into their hands. One of the last singles where Bush was very much in the mould of this hippy-dippy artist, Never for Ever’s first single, Breathing, was maybe a way of her to get away from some of that mockery. Even then, she could not escape press disapproval. In spite of some good reviews, Breathing was still dismissed by some. However, it is curious why Wow did not chart higher. Did press impressions of Bush affect the buying public? You could say Wow is not as strong as Wuthering Heights or The Man with the Child in His Eyes. Hammer Horror was perhaps not the right first single from Lionheart. However, Wow is Bush at her brilliant best! Maybe if Wow came out first it would have been a top ten. It was a top twenty single, so you can’t say it was a disaster at all. I do feel like the conversation around her was still dismissive. Looking at Wow now and we can recognise it is a brilliant single and one of her best. However, back in March 1979, there was not sure this positivity and appreciation. I think that Bush was given a bit of a rough ride for Lionheart. Some of it was to do with the hurried nature of the album. Even so, there are some great songs on the album. Wow is one of them. As it tuns forty-seven on 9th March, I wanted to revisit it. If you have not heard the song or haven’t in a while, then do go and check it out. It is one of Kate Bush’s best moments. If there has been more kindness towards the single in years since it was released, there was some critical coldness in 1979. Forty-seven years after its release and this Kate Bush single…

STILL sounds wonderful and entrancing.

FEATURE: Take Two: Imagining a Musical Life for Beloved Actors

FEATURE:

 

 

Take Two

IN THIS PHOTO: Rachel Zegler/PHOTO CREDIT: Diego Bendezu for Allure

 

Imagining a Musical Life for Beloved Actors

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THERE are plenty of examples…

IN THIS PHOTO: Jessie Buckley/PHOTO CREDIT: Nathaniel Goldberg for ELLE

of artists stepping into acting. Straddling those worlds. Charli xcx has a mockumentary coming out. Lady Gaga is an acclaimed artist. This has been the case for decades. Maybe seen as quite a natural move, I have written about artist appearing in films and on T.V. Although some are a little elitist when it comes to artists and preferring them to stay in their lane, most people embrace them. However, what about the other way around? Perhaps it seems less natural that actors would go into a music career. I will apply this to men but, for this feature, I have been thinking about a few women who are truly tremendous actors you would love to see embark on music careers. I have written about her before, and she will probably tire of it, but the national treasure that is Florence Pugh has a wonderful voice. This is not me manifesting these opportunities and trying to get these incredible women into music. Rather, it is recognising the talent they have and why perhaps there is a bit more reluctance for actors to jump into music compared to artists going into acting. It is great that actors like Kate Hudson have music careers. Whether they have been going for a while or are just releasing music, it is fascinating. You can say Will Smith and Jennifer Lopez were actors before they became artists. Keanu Reeves, Zooey Deschanel and Donald Glover have enjoyed music careers or varying success and notoriety. To me, I think actors step into music because they love it and not because of ego or using their fame to sell records. It is their first love but, for some reason or the other, they went into acting. With Florence Pugh, this is someone who I think has suggested an album. Something she was considering. One of the prolific and in-demand artists, I do hope that we hear music from her this year. In the few occasions where we have seen her sing on screen, she has been transfixing. Early SoundCloud recordings and cover versions displayed this early talent. I would love a Florence Pugh album of originals, as I don’t think there is anyone in the mainstream quite like her. As a versatile actor, she would not be confined by genre. She is masterful at accents, so she could be this artist that can shift between sounds but be completely herself.

I am holding out hope that we get some music offering from Pugh soon. Maybe she has other priorities at the moment. Building her acting career. Or starting a family at some point. However, it is clear that music is a huge love for her, and she clearly has a natural talent. Maybe there are some who turn their noses at famous actors releasing music. Like it is a hobby. However, why should their incredible voices and this passioned by confined to the screen or their own homes?! If an artist wants to act then they have the opportunity and lots do it. I have watched a bit of The Night Manager. The BBC series features in its cast the incredible Camila Morrone. The Los Angeles-born actor and model appeared in the 2023 series, Daisy Jones & The Six. It featured incredible performances. Singing from the amazing Riley Keogh. Another cast member is artist Suki Waterhouse. Someone I have covered before. The series is based on the titular Rock band in 1970s Los Angeles. Perhaps a touch of Fleetwood Mac to them. Rather than this being an acting job for Camila Morrone, you feel like this was a real passion. Someone who has expressed an interest in a career in music, she also has a fantastic voice. It would be amazing to hear her record an album. Again, many might see this as another actor trying to go into music. Instead, it is trying to uncover a potentially brilliant artist. Looking around at modern music, like Florence Pugh, you know that Camila Morrone would offer something different. There are these disciplines and skills actors acquire that translates into music. When it comes to performances and delivery. How they write and how they approach songs. I loved seeing Morrone in Daisy Jones & The Six, and I feel that all of the cast could have a successful music career. Suki Waterhouse has. Riley Keogh has performed songs before but not recorded an album. She is the granddaughter of Elvis Presley, so it would be so phenomenal hearing music from her. Such a wonderful cast from that short-lived series, I have been thinking about what Camila Morrone could give to the music world. Maybe this is not on her mind at the moment, though I do feel like she would be an incredible songwriter and singer. Far beyond the samey Pop that dominates a lot of current conservation.

PHOTO CREDIT: Carin Backoff for Interview Magazine

Before moving on, there is a 2023 interview with Glamour, where Camila Morrone talked about her character in Daisy Jones & the Six, Camila Dunne. She is the wife of the titular band’s frontman, Billy Dunne (Sam Claflin). As someone who builds a career as a photographer and is not just someone who dates a Rock star, it sort of reminds me of Paul and Linda McCartney in a sense. Linda as this amazing photographer but also a great singer and artist. Camila Morrone also expressed a hope of releasing music one day – never saying never:

“What was your relationship like with Riley? On the show, as Daisy, she’s your fellow creative but also maybe coming for your man.

Well, the problem with Riley is that she’s the cutest, sweetest person on earth. It’s kind of hard to hate her. She brought that element to Daisy too, because no matter what Daisy does in the series, she’s always lovable in her own tortured and broken artist kind of way. There’s not really any crazy scenes between Camila and Daisy, which I like, because what I liked about the writing was they didn’t pit these two women against each other. It wasn’t based in jealousy or rivalry or competition.

There was this underlying respect between Daisy and Camila that makes it all just even more painful, because these women love each other in a weird way. They both admire certain qualities that the other person has that they don’t contain. I think for Camila, watching Daisy be this incredible artist who’s sensual and passionate and talented and wild is an attribute that she doesn’t feel she can bring to Billy’s life.

And I think for Daisy, Camila’s got this grounded centeredness, put togetherness, motherhood…kind of everything that Daisy doesn’t have. It’s very interesting. They both were polar opposites but had this common theme of loving this man and respecting each other through it as much as they could.

How do you feel about the time period?

I had a very rudimentary understanding of the style and a basic textbook understanding of what was going on in the world. When I got the job, I dove deeper into the politics of the time to understand the world they were living in. But I’m also so familiar with the LA kind of hippie scene. I mean, I’ve lived around Laurel Canyon and am so familiar with these spots. So I think for me, the homework and history came from getting to know the music of that era.

I know that you’ve dabbled in guitar. Are you a musician yourself?

I definitely wouldn’t call myself a musician, but in the pandemic, I set a goal of learning one new thing and that happened to be guitar. I was looking at videos yesterday, and I was actually kind of getting good. I stopped in the last year because I was filming so much.

Now I’m sad that I've given it up, because there was a moment when I was definitely flowing with it. I love music. It’s a really big part of my life. I like anything in the arts, anything that’s creative. So I never say no to anything. I would totally be open to doing something in music one day.

What are you listening to right now?

I really love Rosalía. I just went to see her show in London. She’s so incredible. She’s got this flamenco…she incorporates tango. I’m Argentinian, and all her songs are in Spanish. So I’ve been having a really good time listening to her album”.

This is not a slight on male actors. However, I am thinking about some of the queens of the acting world and those who love music but have not had the same crossover as those like Jennifer Lopez or Lady Gaga. Emilia Clarke is someone whose acting I adore. One of the best actors in the world. Like Florence Pugh, another British treasure. I did post it on social media a while ago. How Emilia Clarke has sung on screen and there are recordings. She is this wonderful singer! Again, I feel she could just have this incredible music career. In 2020, for the My Life in a Mixtape for the BBC, Emilia Clarke talked about her favourite music and songs/albums important to her:

“An album that reminds me of my dad:

The Beatles - 'Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band'

The Beatles are Emilia's one musical "true love" and their masterpiece of an eighth LP was "the most important album" to her growing up.

She explains: "It was the one that I found first in my dad’s collection and the one that me and my brother would listen to the most. The cover was so beautiful and had that pull-out [sleeve]. I learnt all the words to all the songs."

These days, it's a record that reminds Emilia of her late father, who sadly passed away four years ago. "I’ve listened to this a lot for him," she says, "but also to relive all of those beautiful memories."

The song I know all the words to:

Coolio - 'Gangsta’s Paradise'

"You might not be expecting this next one," Emilia warns before playing Coolio's Grammy-winning 1995 rap hit, adding that the song was the second song she remembers discovering as a kid.

While she can't quite recall who introduced her to the song ("My brother tells me that it was his CD, but my dad had a really amazing record collection"), she doe have vivid memories of learning the lyrics secretly in private "because I didn’t want my mum to shout at me, as I think there are a few rude words".

"I thought I was the only person who knew all the words to this song, and then realised that everyone knows all the words to this song," Emilia adds. "It was my introduction to rap and hip-hop and the music that I adore completely."

The song that reminds me of friends:

Kings of Leon - 'The Bucket'

Kings Of Leon's first records will always remind Emilia of her three years spent at drama school, she says. And there's no other music that brings her back so quickly to the place that she first heard it.

The Nashville band remain "a band I love so much" and was the first time she "discovered music that wasn’t encouraged by my brother".

Their song 'The Bucket' especially was the soundtrack for "the birth of some of my most treasured friendships", a time that also saw Emilia get really into the likes of LCD Soundsystem (“I had never heard anything like it”).

My newest music discovery:

Little Simz - '101 FM'

Glastonbury Festival is a place, for Emilia, where she is at "peak happiness". She says wholeheartedly: "My happiest time in life is at Glastonbury."

Everyone has their own stories of acts they've seen at the Worthy Farm fest that just stick with them and Emilia says that one big highlight for her came at last year's event, when she was surrounded by "all my dearest friends" while watching London rapper Little Simz.

"We had discovered her album prior to going to Glastonbury, saw that she was going to be there and it became the gig that we focused our whole [festival] experience around," Emilia says. "She did not disappoint. She’s the coolest girl I’ve ever seen."

An all-time favourite:

Bob Dylan - 'Don't Think Twice'

After an eclectic mixtape, Emilia wanted to end things with one of her all-time ultimate songs and artists. "This is an incredibly important song for me. It’s my past, my present, my future - the whole shebang," she said.

Liking Bob Dylan to olives ("When I was a kid, I didn’t like olives and now they’re my favourite food. But it took me a while to get there"), Emilia recalled how her father and brother loved the folk icon when she was younger but that she simply "didn't get it".

Things eventually clicked though, Emilia says. "The beauty of Bob Dylan is that when you do discover him, you don’t want to listen to anyone else. I’ve learnt in my later years that if you have any questions, if there’s anything you’re worried about, if you’re unsure as to where you’re going in life, you just need to ask Bob and he will come up with a very good answer. This is the one [song] that wins every time”.

This is someone who does have a remarkable voice and I genuinely feel would be this awesome and unique artist. Another very busy and desired actor who has a packed diary, could the supreme Emilla Clarke gift us with an album at some point?! She is right up there with those who I would really love to see release music.

There are two more actors to spotlight. Someone whose musical talents have been music more on show during her time performing Evita in London, Rachel Zegler is primarily known as an actor, even though she has recorded. Rather than defining her as someone who is operatic and theatrical, she has this much broader on-screen musical experience. I am going to bring in a 2023 interview from Variety, where Zegler discussed singing live on-set for Hunger Games: Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes and why that was important. She also appeared in West Side Story in 2021. Steven Spielberg’s version. It is clear that she has an incredible talent that I think could be adapted into an album. I shall discuss that a bit in a second:

“Regarding the power of live on-set performance, Zegler states that it simply “adds something audiences miss when it’s gone. Singing in a film and singing live onstage are two different types of performances, sure, but you should be able to demonstrate both in your art when you’re working in the world of both musicals and film. Singing live for every take five days a week is not easy. But it brings something alive to the world of a film.”
Pointing to the force of capturing “The Ballad of Lucy Gray Baird” on set, Zegler wanted badly to have its live element last all throughout the movie. “Dave’s music is like another character, filling in the gaps where dialogue does not do Lucy Gray justice,” she says. “And there’s a rawness to the music that truly fits in District 12— solace in the midst of the pain and suffering in a post-war society. Singing live added layers to a performance that canned vocals cannot.

“I was so moved singing ‘The Old Therebefore’, which is Lucy Gray’s last-ditch effort to survive snakes in the arena,” Zegler continues. “I had to pretend that where these venomous, neon-colored snakes were climbing up my dress while singing Suzanne’s beautiful words, and staring straight down the barrel of the lens. I had never felt so powerful or sure of myself on a set before. And that’s partly due to Francis being one of the best directors in the game, but also because I was able to bring a craft I have been training for half my life. That’s what it truly means to show up to work”.

Rachel Zegler does appear on Spotify, but on albums from films and theatre Whether as part of Evita, The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes or singing Waiting on a Wish from Disney’s Snow White last year, maybe people would pigeonhole her. Her performances more theatrical and musical rather than anything that might naturally slot into the modern music mainstream. All the actors I have covered so far might be easily defined and labelled, though they could easily sing in any genre or in any way. The point is that they all love music and have this talent for performance and singing. If their songwriting potential is less visible or explored, I feel this would be something people would be fascinated to see realised. I really love Rachel Zegler, and she is this stunning actor. I feel she could have this concurrent music career. Perhaps this is something in the pipeline or being recorded at the moment. A debut studio album from the U.S. actor. Such a wonderful vocalist, could this be brought into the studio for original recordings? I feel it would be less exciting having these actors sing covers and approach music that way. However, a mix of covers and originals would be intriguing. I also said previously how Hannah Waddingham would also record a wonderful album. Like Zegler, she might be seen as someone more suited to Opera, show tunes or the theatre. That it might be a niche music career or she would not slot alongside what is in the mainstream. She did release Hannah Waddingham: Home for Christmas in 2023. It is a magnificent and magical album. She is another actor that would have a great career in music. Waddingham might not have that desire to be an artist or do that. However, considering what a stunning singer she is and how every time she has sung people’s jaws have dropped, it would seem like such a waste if that 2023 Christmas album was her sole offering. I do conceive her writing personal and revealing songs that could work their way intro an album. Maybe something sultry, smoky or Jazz-influenced, I am thinking of classic Jazz and Blues singers with a bit of Amy Winehouse in there. However, Hannah Waddingham is another busy actor and this might be at the back of her mind.

Finally, here is an award-winning actor who just picked up a Golden Globe for her role in Hamnet. She is also Academy Award-nominated for Best Actress. Jessie Buckley has a music career. She was in the 2018 film, Wild Rose. She plays Rose-Lynn Harlan, an aspiring Country singer. A single mother from Glasgow, it is her path and quest at becoming a professional artist. In the film, we see Rose-Lynn perform original song at Celtic Connections titled Glasgow (No Place Like Home), receiving raucous applause. In 2022, she recorded an album with Bernard Butler that was nominated for a Mercury Prize. For All Our Days That Tear the Heart is a phenomenal album that is not this case of an actor doing an album to show she can. It is someone who is as natural an artist as actor. That was four years ago. I do feel like Jessie Buckley has another album in her. Whether another collaboration or a solo, I want to end with a 2022 interview from The Guardian. Jessie Buckley and Bernard Butler talking about their musical unity and working together:

“Two years ago they were strangers, paired together by Buckley’s manager who sensed they were kindred spirits. They barely knew each other’s work: Buckley had loved the Butler-produced album Old Wow by the folk singer Sam Lee, Butler had loved Buckley’s mesmerising performance, on an American chatshow, of the song Glasgow from Wild Rose, Buckley’s Bafta-nominated starring role as a Glaswegian ex-con country singer with fierce dreams of Nashville glory.

Since then, she has been a galactically soaring star, an unconventional presence in often-disturbing dramas: traumatised wife in Chernobyl, confused student in I’m Thinking of Ending Things, murderous nurse in Fargo. In 2021, she thrilled as Sally Bowles in the London West End revival of Cabaret (alongside Eddie Redmayne as Emcee, the pair winning best actor and actress at Sunday’s Olivier awards), and a sexually charged Juliet in Sky Arts’ Romeo and Juliet alongside good pal Josh O’Connor. The Lost Daughter then brought this year’s Oscar nod, with Buckley stunningly authentic as a suffocated and sensual young mother, playing the younger version of Olivia Colman’s character.

The spotlight threatens to eclipse even as luminous a collaboration as Buckley and Butler’s, and when we are finally alone, we are off to a shaky start. Earlier, among her colleagues, Buckley had openly discussed this year’s Will Smith Oscars incident (consensus: a sad night for all concerned) but now, on the record, she won’t go there. “I don’t want to give it any more weight,” she says, warmly but firmly, loth to create music-obliterating headlines: “It’s sensationalist.”

She had a great night anyway in her pink satin frock, predominantly spent “in the bar”; she was so star-struck when Colman introduced her to Bill Murray, “who I love”, that she couldn’t speak. “I totally bottled it!” She would prefer an Oscars night where “we could all just wear tracksuits, have pizza and beer, that would be a great party”.

IN THIS PHOTO: Jessie Buckley and Bernard Butler/PHOTO CREDIT: Eva Vermandel

Sitting alongside her, sliding ever-downwards, Butler’s silent demeanour is set to thunderingly bored, tolerating what he clearly thinks is irrelevant showbiz nonsense. I invite him in, and ask if he’s ever worked with an Oscar nominee before. This isn’t the right question either. “I don’t usually ask,” he scoffs. I wonder if he finds the multi-talents of his latest, exceptionally gifted collaborator, verging on the outrageous? This jovial notion is, it seems, even worse.

“Honestly?” he considers. “We meet, we write songs, we judge each other on what we can create, in the purest way. We don’t sit writing lists of talents and ticking them off thinking: great, I think we’re there now, shall we write a song? We never talk about any of this stuff. We just didn’t. Don’t.” Jessie: “And it’s great!”

I wonder if they, too, think no one sings like Buckley does any more. They are both bewildered. “I have no idea,” says Buckley, while Butler says: “We just didn’t discuss it: again, it’s about the magic in the moment. I’m not thinking: is Jessie’s voice up to the standard of Ella Fitzgerald?”

To my ears, For All Our Days That Tear the Heart might be the most affecting musical collaboration of Butler’s life, sumptuously orchestral but so intimate you can hear the very fingerprints on acoustic guitar. This brooding soundscape is both haunting and joyous, from its opening echoes of Joni Mitchell on The Eagle and the Dove, to the rousing male choir in Footnotes on the Map, to the closing, delicately yearning Catch the Dust. Buckley’s lyrics tell human stories through visions of birds, beasts and water, stories of loneliness, regret and resolution, of skins shed, buttons undone and the madness of being alive.

Their connection was instantaneous. Buckley, from Killarney, south-west Ireland, the eldest of five in a boisterous and creative household (dad a part-time poet, mum a vocal coach/harpist), had no idea that Butler’s parents are Irish, from Dún Laoghaire. Inspiration ignited not only through music (notes swapped on Nina Simone, Beth Gibbons, Talk Talk, Patti Smith, Gram Parsons, Pentangle), but painting, poetry, flamenco dancing, caravan holidays in Ireland and one book in particular, Maurice O’Sullivan’s 1933 memoir 20 Years A-Growing, an ode to remote living on the Blasket islands, off the coast of County Kerry, a favourite book of Butler’s for 15 years and the all-time favourite of Buckley’s gran.

Buckley had rarely worked like they did, creating something new from nothing – the Wild Rose soundtrack mostly featured covers, and her interpretations of musical theatre numbers go back way beyond Cabaret to her 2008 breakthrough on Andrew Lloyd Webber-helmed talent show I’d Do Anything. “I was scared, it was raw, exposing,” she says of her start with Butler. “I was sitting on a man’s floor who I’d never met. I never thought we’d even make a song, let alone an album.”

“You ask for an awful lot of trust,” adds Butler, of his lifelong collaborative process. “I’m afraid, too. If [there’s] not fear, then you’re just jogging, aren’t you?”

It’s a wonder Buckley had the time to make music at all (she is, she laughs, a “do it all” person), also completing two intriguing films last year, back-to-back: Men, a high-concept horror movie populated by menacing male protagonists (all played by Rory Kinnear), and Women Talking (with Frances McDormand, Ben Whishaw and Claire Foy), the story of a Mennonite colony bedevilled by sexual assault. Instead of being tormented for months by scenes of toxic masculinity, she says she saw opportunities to learn, and has been drawn throughout her working life to dark and even frightening stories.

“Well, there’s frightening things happening,” she notes, ruefully. “I’m a pretty joyful person but when I want to understand something more, I’m not afraid to go wherever it requires me to go. There’s so much hoodwinking going on around us that I want to know the belly of the beast. It’s in all of us.”

Butler was a sensitive young man who found much of the 90s toxically masculine: to him a boorish, boozy, druggy celebration of what he called earlier this year the “rock’n’roll caricature”. A prodigious guitarist, he joined the fledgling Suede, and frontman Brett Anderson, at 19 and stormed away at 24. After some bombastic, peaks-and-troughs solo releases he finally found his identity in his 30s as a creative foil, working as a producer, songwriter or guitarist with artists ranging from Duffy and Sophie Ellis-Bextor to the Libertines and the Cribs.

“I had a very heightened experience when I was young,” he says. “People always said, ‘You’re too sensitive’ and I was, ‘Sorry, no I’m not’. Now I say, ‘Yeah, I’m fucking sensitive, yeah I’ve got senses!’ I feel them, express them and I wouldn’t be doing this for 30 years if people weren’t picking up on them. I’m happy that element is respected more now. I teach young people as well and that’s one thing I look out for, introversion and sensitivity, and really protect people who have that. Because I … wasn’t [protected]. But fuck it. I did all right. I’m incredibly lucky. To be here right now with Jessie, doing this. And anyone from that generation, who stamped down that expression and is now not getting that, more fool them. I win”.

These are just a few incredible actors who could offer something phenomenal to music. Each has experience of recording music, though each could record wonderful albums. Whether Jessie Buckley, Hannah Waddingham, Rachel Zegler, Camilla Morrone, Emilla Clarke and Florence Pugh have plans or not, it will be wonderful to see. I do think that these wonderful actors, who have added so much brilliance to the screen, could take that into the studio. There are no firm plans from any of them, though who knows what could come from them…

LATER in the year.

FEATURE: In Praise of Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend: Seeing Artists in a New Light

FEATURE:

 

 

In Praise of Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend

IMAGE CREDIT: Team Coco

 

Seeing Artists in a New Light

__________

A slight diversion…

IN THIS PHOTO: Conan O’Brien speaking with Tom Holland for The Rest Is History podcast in 2025

before getting onto a topic that is a little left-field, I guess. I recently wrote a feature where I said how it would be amazing to book an event in a great and iconic space like Abbey Road Studios. In 2031, it will be a century since they opened. I said how cool it would be if Beatles Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr took part and had a special role in the celebrations. I know Conan O’Brien is a massive fan of the band and I would advise checking out his chat with Peter Asher from 2023. He was recently at Abbey Road Studios to talk all things Beatles for The Rest Is History podcast. It would be amazing if O’Brien was part of the centenary celebrations. It is a long way off but, given the history of the studios and what could occur, it is exciting to look ahead to November 1931. However, I am sticking with Conan O’Brien. Follow Team Coco on Instagram, as this is his little empire. His brand. I wanted to shine a light on the brilliant Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend podcast, in the context of musicians. Hosted with Sona Movsesian and Matt Gourley, it is fantastic. Not only brilliantly funny and interesting, there is such a bond between the three. And the wonderful team. I love the interview on the podcast, though some of the most fascinating are with artists. Jack White sat down with them a while ago and it was this deep and funny conversation. I love music journalism and that is obviously something I do. However, it rare you get podcasts and YouTube channels where artists are interviewed regularly. Hearing different sides to them. A more humorous direction. We have The Adam Buxton Podcast, and he chats with artists, but not many visual ones.

Sticking with The Beatles, I am not sure whether Paul McCartney or Ringo Starr will appear on the podcast. One reason why I think we need more podcasts like this is because I think you get to discover new things about artists. I guess O’Brien interviews more actors than musicians for Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend, though he has interviewed musicians, and it is always incredible. These long-form discussions where he will talk about the music, but it also goes off on tangents. I do tend to find a lot of interviews with musicians are quite dry or formulaic. Too much about the music and not especially original. Obviously, the music press is wonderful and you get these terrific interviews. However, it is rare when I listen to an interview or see a podcast where you see these new or established artists in the same setting as you get with Conan O’Brien, Sonia Movsesian and Matt Gourley. Obviously, from a practicality standpoint, it is not convenient for some artists to get their studios in California. They have done some remote interviews, though most of the chats are face-to-face. I am trying to think of British equivalents. Some cool podcasts here, though nothing has the same sense of wonder, occasion and high comedy than Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend. I do hope this year sees them chat with some incredible artists. There are so many I would love to see on there. The ones who have appeared have given me a whole new appreciation of them. I know O’Brien has interviewed Paul McCartney before, though I am not sure he has ever spoken with Ringo Starr. Not to be totally obsessed with The Beatles, but it is infectious when he talks about the band. Indeed, his interest in his guests is another highlight. I am not a big chat show fan, as you get this sofa with guests and it is all very, I don’t know, cloying. Lots of cheering, sycophancy and interviews that are not especially deep or worth listening to. It can feel hollow and grating. Especially with some U.S. chat shows. A podcast like Conan O’Brien’s offers something more intimate, focused and genuine. Less about stroking egos or it being part of the interview circuit. Not to take against British-based chat show hosts like Graham Norton, but I find the whole thing a bit too sickly.

When it comes to artists, they are not really featured on chat shows as much as actors. They are the music guests mostly rather than being the actual guests. If they do appear, I tend to find the line of questioning is too narrow. We have great stations in the U.K. like BBC Radio 6 Music where you get artists interviewed, though the podcast format lacks something here. It is hard to put into words. Maybe it is my love of Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend and what he does. People might have suggestions of filmed podcasts that offer something similar to what Conan O’Brien, Sonia Movsesian and Matt Gourley deliver. To be fair, little can match the idyllic surroundings of Larchmont in California. It seems perfect there! Before finishing off, I want to bring in an interview from Variety from 2019. The early days of the podcast, we get some insights about what makes it special and why guests love doing it:

“Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend” is an irresistible mixture of philosophical discussions about art and life and pure zaniness. It’s a program from the late-night host turned podcasting ringmaster that defies easy characterization, and a show that manages to move seamlessly from moments of hilarity to unexpected instances of confession

What do celebrities like about doing the show?
It’s a chance for them to come in and have this intimate conversation. I remember Lisa Kudrow said to me, “Wait, no hair. No makeup. I’m there.” People can roll in on the way to pick up their kids or right after they’ve had a colonoscopy. That’s the secret: Interview them about two hours after their colonoscopy, when the twilight drugs are wearing off and they’ve been told they’re polyp-free.

You ask your guests a lot of questions about what drives them to achieve at a high level. Why does that interest you?
None of us really knows ourselves. Part of my obsession is I’ve always wanted to know what’s my deal? What’s my problem? If you could get in a time machine
and go back and look at me when I was 10 years old, you’d see a pretty intense kid. Why? Some of these people were really hard on themselves when they were kids, and they’re really hard on themselves now, except now they have Emmys and Oscars and Grammys. That’s remarkable, and maybe it will be helpful to people listening”.

I do think a lot of focus is on actors when it comes to podcasts and interviews. Or the most attention. Series where actors interview one another. Chat shows book them more over artists. Even through we have the music press, I don’t think there are enough platforms where artists are interviewed in a way that is both funny/zany and deep. It is a pity, as we see revealed new layers and aspects. That is why I wanted to shine a light on Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend. A decades-running masterful interviewer and former chat show host, it is a shining example of what podcasts should be. The importance of Sonia Movsesian and Matt Gourley and how they bounce off of one another. I feel this year is going to be another terrific one for the podcast, and I am excited to see what guests are included. More than anything, I am interested in the musicians booked. Not often considered to be as entertaining or worthy a guest as actors, comics or those in other areas of culture and the arts, I find artists to be incredible guests. We get to see them and their music in a new light. Watch some of the interviews that Conan O’Brien has done with musicians and you see that in full force! An absolutely wonderful podcast, I am a big fan of Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend. An essential and engrossing podcast…

LONG may it continue.

FEATURE: The Digital Mixtape: David Gilmour at Eighty

FEATURE:

 

 

The Digital Mixtape

PHOTO CREDIT: Anton Corbijn

 

David Gilmour at Eighty

__________

AS the extraordinary…

IN THIS PHOTO: Pink Floyd (David Gilmour is pictured second right) at Hakone Aphrodite, Kanagawa on 6th August, 1971/PHOTO CREDIT: Koh Hasebe/Shinko Music/Getty Images 

David Gilmour turns eighty on 6th March, I couldn’t pass that important date by. One of these titanic musicians and songwriters, many might only associate him with Pink Floyd. However, he has written for and worked with other artists and also released his own music. I am going to end this feature with a playlist of Pink Floyd songs he co-wrote/wrote and also played on, in addition to his solo material. Before that, AllMusic provided this extensive biography about the incredible David Gilmour:

“One of rock's pre-eminent guitarists, David Gilmour is known for his incisive, lyrical playing both as a member of British art-rock giants Pink Floyd and as a solo artist. After replacing Pink Floyd's founder, Syd Barrett, as singer/guitarist, Gilmour contributed heavily to landmark albums like The Dark Side of the Moon (1973) and Wish You Were Here (1975). Following a contentious fallout with chief songwriter Roger Waters, Gilmour assumed leadership of Pink Floyd in 1987 and guided them through a massively successful second act that involved several world tours and albums like 1994's The Division Bell. In addition to producing and doing session work for a range of acts from Kate Bush and the Dream Academy to Paul McCartney, Gilmour has also enjoyed a successful solo career with chart-topping albums like On an Island (2006) and Rattle That Lock (2015). His fifth album, 2024's Luck and Strange, featured collaborations with his family including wife, lyricist Polly Samson, and daughter, singer/harpist Romany Gilmour.

David Gilmour was born in Cambridge, England on March 6, 1946; his parents were both involved in education -- his father was a lecturer in Zoology at Cambridge University and his mother was a teacher -- and as a schoolboy, Gilmour struck up a friendship with a boy who attended the same grade school, Roger Barrett, who later gained the nickname Syd. Gilmour became re-acquainted with Barrett while they were studying at the Cambridgeshire College of Arts and Technology; both were interested in music and began learning to play guitar in their spare time, as did Barrett's friend Roger Waters. In 1963, Gilmour joined a rock group, Jokers Wild, which specialized in R&B covers; in 1965, he and Barrett took the summer off and spent several months busking and traveling through France, though the adventure didn't pay off financially. After returning to England, Gilmour played with a group called Flowers for a while, as well as a revamped version of Jokers Wild called Bullitt; meanwhile, Barrett and Waters teamed up with keyboardist Richard Wright and drummer Nick Mason to form a group called the Tea Set, which was later renamed Pink Floyd. In 1967, Pink Floyd was the toast of London's burgeoning psychedelic scene on the strength of the singles "Arnold Layne" and "See Emily Play," and the album Piper at the Gates of Dawn

However, Barrett's mental had declined and he became increasingly unstable, sometimes becoming catatonic on-stage or playing different songs than his bandmates. As his ability to perform was compromised, Gilmour was invited to join the group to help with guitar and vocals when Barrett was having trouble. However, after a few shows it became evident that Gilmour's reassuring presence wasn't enough to rescue Barrett, and the group's leader was let go. Gilmour became the band's new lead guitarist by default, though he would produce and play on Barrett's two solo albums before his friend retired from music.Gilmour made his recording debut with Pink Floyd on 1968's A Saucerful of Secrets, and over the next several years, the group's sound evolved from pop-friendly psychedelic to ambitious progressive and experimental rock. Gilmour's guitar became a key part of Pink Floyd's aural signature, and he played a larger role in the group's songwriting; their evolving approach culminated with 1973's The Dark Side of the Moon, which became a massive international hit and firmly established them as one of the biggest British acts of the day. Pink Floyd's success continued with 1975's Wish You Were Here, but as Waters began to dominate the group's songwriting and conceptualizing, Gilmour began looking for other opportunities to express himself. He'd already made guest appearances on albums by Roy Harper and Hawkwind, and during the recording of 1977's Animals, Gilmour began work on his first solo album, released in 1978 simply as David Gilmour. In 1978, he also co-produced Kate Bush's debut album, The Kick Inside, and he contributed guitar work to Wings' 1979 release Back to the Egg. 1979's The Wall became another massive success for Pink Floyd, and Gilmour co-wrote the stand-out track "Comfortably Numb," but tensions within the group grew during the recording of the album and after the long sessions which produced 1983's The Final Cut, Pink Floyd briefly fell apart.

Following the band's splintering, Gilmour released his second solo album, 1984's About Face, and he lent his talents as a guitarist to a number of projects, including albums by Paul McCartney, Bryan Ferry, Pete Townshend, and Supertramp, and produced the debut album for the Dream Academy. Waters made his solo debut with 1984's The Pros and Cons of Hitch Hiking, and he filed a lawsuit to dissolve Pink Floyd's legal partnership. However, the court found in favor of Gilmour, Wright, and Mason, and in 1987, Gilmour became Pink Floyd's new leader and principal songwriter as he relaunched the band with the album A Momentary Lapse of Reason. The band supported the album with a successful extended tour -- their first since a small handful of elaborate shows following The Wall -- and a live album from the shows, Delicate Sound of Thunder, was released in 1988. After coming off the road, Gilmour stayed busy with session work, making guest appearances with acts as diverse as Warren Zevon and Elton John, while writing material for the next Pink Floyd effort. While a few new pieces appeared on 1992's La Carrera Panamerica, a video documenting Gilmour and Mason's participation in an auto race in Mexico, Pink Floyd's next full album, The Division Bell, didn't arrive until 1994. Once again, a major international tour followed, and on many dates they performed The Dark Side of the Moon in its entirety, along with other material from their catalog; one such concert was documented on the 1995 live album Pulse. An archival album drawn from Pink Floyd's performances of The Wall in 1980 and 1981 appeared in 2000, but no new material was forthcoming. Gilmour reunited with Waters, Mason, and Wright for a one-off Pink Floyd performance at the 2005 Live 8 concert in London (a benefit to promote solutions to global poverty), but the band turned down lucrative offers for a new tour. Gilmour performed a critically lauded series of acoustic shows in London in 2002, and in 2006 he released a new solo album, On an Island. The album was followed with a major concert tour; Gilmour's London concert was videotaped for a 2007 DVD release, Remember That Night: Live at the Royal Albert Hall, while a show at the Gdansk shipyards with a full orchestra appeared on the 2008 album Live in Gdansk. In 2010, Gilmour teamed up with acclaimed ambient electronic act the Orb for a collaborative album, Metallic Spheres.

Following the 2008 death of bandmate Richard Wright, Gilmour decided to close the books on Pink Floyd in 2014, working with Nick Mason and producers Phil Manzanera, Youth, and Andy Jackson to complete tapes originally recorded in 1994. This project turned into The Endless River, an album released in November 2014. Next, Gilmour recorded his fourth solo album, reteaming with Manzanera for Rattle That Lock, released in September 2015 and peaked in the top spot in the Top 200. Outside of his musical pursuits, Gilmour has devoted much of his time to charitable causes, and when he put his London home on the market in 2003, he donated the 3.6 million pounds realized from the sale to Crisis, a group benefiting the homeless.

45 years after Pink Floyd filmed Live at Pompeii in the historic Roman Amphitheatre, Gilmour returned for two shows in July 2016, which were part of the year-long tour in support of Rattle That Lock. The performances were the first-ever rock concerts for an audience in the stone Roman amphitheater. The show was an audio-visual spectacle, featuring lasers, pyrotechnics, and a huge circular screen on which specially created films complemented selected songs. The music included selections from throughout Gilmour's career -- solo and with Pink Floyd, including "One of These Days," the only tune that was also performed at the 1971 Pink Floyd show. The program also included six songs from Rattle That Lock, and two from 2006's On an Island. Both concerts also saw performances of "The Great Gig in the Sky" from The Dark Side of the Moon. These shows were filmed in 4k by director Gavin Elder with art direction from Gilmour's wife, award-winning novelist Polly Samson. They were released in the fall of 2017 in various audio and video packages.

During the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown in 2020, Gilmour released a series of intimate livestreams that featured he and his family playing acoustic covers of songs by Syd Barrett, Leonard Cohen, and others. A few months later, the standalone single, "Yes I Have Ghosts," was released, featuring his daughter, Romany Gilmour, on harp and vocals. Two years later, he and Mason briefly revived Pink Floyd for a one-off charity single, "Hey, Hey, Rise Up!," in support of the Ukraine after it was invaded by Russia. After this, he began recording his next solo album with producer Charlie Andrew. His first LP since 2015 and fifth overall, 2024's Luck and Strange was a highly collaborative affair featuring lyrics from Samson and contributions from his children Romany and Gabriel Gilmour. Also notable is a posthumous keyboard appearance by Wright on the title track, which was first recorded back in 2007”.

6th March is when we celebrate David Gilmnour’s eightieth birthday. This genius musician who I do hope records some new music at some point, I have compiled some Pink Floyd and solo tracks at the bottom of this feature. A true legend who I have probably not done proper justice to here, I wanted to wish David Gilmour…

MANY happy returns.

FEATURE: Groovelines: Janet Jackson – All for You

FEATURE:

 

 

Groovelines

 

Janet Jackson – All for You

__________

ONE of Janet Jackson’s…

biggest songs turns twenty-five on 6th March. All for You is a classic. A stunning song from one of the greatest artists ever. I am focusing on it for this Groovelines. The All for You album turns twenty-five on 16th April. The lead single from Jackson’s seventh studio album, there are a few different versions of the song. The L.P. version is over six minutes. The C.D. album version is 5:29.  The radio edit and single mix are around 4:29. So you do get these different takes depending on which version you hear. I will come to some reviews for All for You. Written by Janet Jackson, James Harris III, Terry Lewis, Wayne Garfield, David Romani and Mauro Malavasi, it reached number one in the U.S. and was a big chart success around the world. It is no surprise given how instant the song is. One of those tracks that hits you right away. In their The Number Ones feature, Stereogum explored Janet Jackson's All for You in 2022. Even though they hinted at some drawbacks and were balanced, there were positives from their review:

“As a new century dawned, Janet Jackson was still thriving. She'd just divorced her second husband René Elizondo Jr., but that divorce hadn't pushed her toward making heavier or more maudlin music. Instead, with the first single from her seventh album, Janet dug deep into the history of upbeat, joyous, forget-your-troubles dance music. The lyrics to "All For You" probably would've been too horny to fly in the late '70s or early '80s, but the music could've sprung straight from her brother Michael's classic Off The Wall. In the summer of 2001, Janet's flirty club-jam kept a kung-fu grip on the top of the Hot 100. At the time, nobody knew that something was ending.

When Janet Jackson came out with her All For You album, it had been nearly four years since her previous record, the deep and exploratory artistic triumph The Velvet Rope. Janet had spent a long time touring in between albums, and she'd also starred in Nutty Professor II: The Klumps, scoring another chart-topper with the soundtrack song "Doesn't Really Matter." She'd never really stopped being busy, even during her divorce. When Janet got to work on the next album with her regular collaborators Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, she wanted to leave behind the introspection of The Velvet Rope. She wanted to make something fun.

The song "All For You," like many of the hits from that era, started with a sample. When Janet Jackson was planning out the All For You album, she got together with Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, and they all listened to older songs for inspiration. Jimmy Jam pulled out a record that was new to Janet: "The Glow Of Love," a 1980 single from the Italian disco project Change. In Fred Bronson's Billboard Book Of Number 1 Hits, Jimmy Jam says, "She didn't know that song, and I was really shocked. I was DJing at the time that record was out, so that was a huge song in my life and one that I have always wanted to sample and bring back for people to hear."

Change was essentially a studio project. A group of producers based in Bologna had the idea to put together a rotating cast of musicians. They would write the songs and record the instrumental tracks in Italy, and then they would go to New York and find American singers to record the lead vocals. For "The Glow Of Life," the title track from Change's debut album, the lead singer was a not-yet-famous Luther Vandross, who was still singing commercial jingles and doing session backup vocal work at the time. "The Glow Of Love" didn't chart, but it still marked a breakout moment for Vandross, who released his debut album Never Too Much a year later. (Change's highest-charting single, 1980's "A Lover's Holiday," peaked at #40. Luther Vandross didn't sing on that one.).

Janet Jackson hadn't heard "The Glow Of Love" before Jimmy Jam played it, but she knew Luther Vandross. They'd worked together. In 1992, Janet and Luther recorded the duet "The Best Things In Life Are Free" for the soundtrack of the Damon Wayans movie Mo' Money. Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis produced it, and Bell Biv DeVoe and Ralph Tresvant sang backup. ("The Best Things In Life Are Free" peaked at #10. It's a 7. Luther Vandross' highest-charting single is the 1994 version of "Endless Love" that he recorded with Mariah Carey. That one peaked at #2, and it's a 5.) Janet also trusted her instincts, and "The Glow Of Love" made her want to dance.

Change might've been an Italian disco project, but they didn't belong to the mechanized, synth-heavy subgenre known as Italo-disco. Instead, Change were shooting for the same funky, limber live-band disco-funk sound as Chic. Their whole style was essentially a high-level Chic ripoff, and that's not a complaint. Chic were fucking incredible, and Change did a good job ripping their sound off. Janet Jackson co-produced "All For You" with Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, and they really just embellished on the groove from "The Glow Of Love." "All For You" has extra synths and harder-hitting drum machines, but Janet kept the playful sonic back-and-forth from "The Glow Of Love" -- the scratchy guitars, the strutting bassline, the great little descending piano riff. But Janet didn't keep the "Glow Of Love" melody or the mystical woo-woo lyrics. She had something else in mind.

Janet Jackson was dating for the first time in nearly a decade. She'd been famous before she met René Elizondo Jr., but that was nothing new. Janet had been famous since she was a little kid. As a newly single woman in her mid-thirties, though, Janet was a whole lot more famous than she'd been the last time around. She'd noticed that men were shy about approaching her. You can only imagine, right? How do you hit on a global superstar? What's your opening line? Janet wrote most of the lyrics for "All For You," and the whole point of the song is that you, the person being addressed, need to stop overthinking things and shoot your shot. Janet wants to have fun, and if you don't say anything to her, you'll miss out on that fun.

The line from "All For You" that everyone remembers is the raunchiest one: "Got a nice package, all right/ Guess I'm gonna have to ride tonight." You don't really need me to explain this one, do you? Janet Jackson is horny. She wants to fuck. She's out here evaluating dudes' crotches and then proceeding accordingly. I like how casual that line is; it's almost a shrug. At the time, it was pleasantly shocking to hear a pop star just straight-up singing about a man's dick size on a #1 hit, not cloaking it in any kind of innuendo. But why should it be? This column has covered plenty of songs that involve men lovingly describing women's asses. Janet Jackson should get to do her version of that, too.

The "nice package" line definitely stands out on "All For You." In mixing and arranging the track, Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis put that line right up front, a cappella, working under the assumption that a new Janet Jackson song should really announce itself when it comes on the radio. But the "nice package" line isn't really the point of "All For You." Instead, "All For You" is a lighthearted, flirty song -- more about the exhilaration of being out in the world, looking for connection, than about the physical sensation that comes with that connection. On the first verse, Janet is almost teasing the guy: "I see you staring out the corner of my eye/ You seem uneasy, want to approach me, throw me a line/ But then something inside you grabs you, says, 'Who am I?'/ I know exactly 'cause it happens with all the guys." Your whole bashful act is nothing new to Janet Jackson. She's seen it all before.

Janet Jackson laughs a lot on "All For You." She might have the all-time greatest on-record laugh, a weightless and joyous sound about halfway between giggle and cackle. When she's not laughing, she's still smiling. "All For You" is a sort of fantasy wonderland of a song. The track doesn't admit to any possibility of darkness. Instead, it's Janet inviting you into a magical experience: "Tell me I'm the only one/ Soon, we'll be having fun." She's just waiting for you to let her know that you're into her”.

When assessing and reflecting on the album in 2021, this feature discussed the title track of All for You. Even if they see it as slightly lightweight, it was this essential Janet Jackson track. Ahead of its twenty-fifth anniversary, I wanted to look inside this classic:

“Right from the start, “All for You” transports fans back to the ‘80s when acid-washed jeans were all the rage, having a My Buddy doll was less creepy than today, and MTV played actual music videos all day.

The upbeat come-on is staged on opposite ends of the dance floor of a late-night spot, where Jackson has locked eyes with a timid romantic prospect. Her frothy and sunny tone here stirred as much interest in the pop sphere as popular teen sensations at the time, while her youthful appearance in the music video was akin to them, if not better.

Hearing the nostalgic beckon now, Jackson was doing everything imaginable to get this shy boy-toy, who is allusively well-endowed, to get him over to her side and back to her place for a bedroom rodeo. But she couldn’t blanket her celebrity status enough to break down the imposing walls of intimidation.

She tried to lessen his coyness on the second verse, singing, “Don’t try to be all clever, cute, or even sly / Don’t have to work that hard / Just be yourself and let that be your guide.”

The Dave Meyers-directed video opens with a shot of Jackson and a male passenger on a superficial train headed nowhere fast. At the next stop, Jackson, styled in trendy denim and a multi-colored halter top, joins a troop of female commuters on the railway platform to dance in unison.

The fashion and choreography evolve in other scenes like outside a 2D boardwalk and a resemblance of downtown Hollywood where a billboard of her showing her almost bare derrière is in lights. She spots the male transit once again in the club, getting a final wave in before she disappears in the night.

By the looks of it, the clean-cut specimen never found his way across the club and in the section of the smoking hot Jackson, but the pop phenom found herself immersed in acres of unrivaled accolades and success for “All for You.”

In March 2001, Jackson had the highest-debuting single (No. 14) on the Hot 100 since Billboard amended its rules for tracks without retail value to chart, thanks to airplay from an early leak in February.

Out the gate, the album’s title track had cross-format appeal, proving itself when it simultaneously controlled radio formats as diverse as pop, rhythmic and urban in one week. According to radio veteran Kevin McCabe, this was the best airplay move for a song of any kind, dubbing her as the Queen of Radio at the time.

Two weeks before retailers across the world stocked their shelves with the album All for You, the single unseated Crazy Town’s “Butterfly” from the Hot 100 hilltop, making it Jackson’s tenth chart-topper. It also headed other charts like the Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Singles & Tracks and the Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Sales after tallying close to 30,000 in sales at core retailers.

Jackson enjoyed a jubilant seven-week run at the Hot 100 summit, sending her in the Billboard history books that year as the longest-running hit. She was the first solo female artist to lead the chart since Christina Aguilera’s “Come On Over Baby (All I Want Is You)” in October 2000”.

I am going to end with a Wikipedia and their article of All for You. Their section where they spotlight the critical reaction. It is clear that there was a lot of love for this song. One of Janet Jackson’s very best. One that I remember coming out in 2001, it has lost none of its spark and brilliance. Always wonderful watching live versions where Janet Jackson performs the song:

“All for You" was described by Chuck Taylor from Billboard as a "veritable vitamin shot in the arm for the airwaves", and "as playful and joyous as the best from Jackson's deep uptempo catalog". He also wrote that the song "audaciously ignores top 40's current trend toward strict R&B inflection" and was "mainstream party pop at its best". Laviea Thomas of Clash commented that "from the funky bass plucks to her smooth vocal delivery", the song was one of Jackson's signature up-tempo tracks. Mark Lindores from Classic Pop wrote that the track was part of the "feelgood songs which are the beating heart of the album". Rolling Stone's Anthony DeCurtis praised the song for "swirl[ing] on the dizzying energy of a disco-era sample". Ethan Brown from New York opined that Jackson was at her best "riding great samples" from the disco era, while Wall of Sound's Gary Gruff wrote that it employs "old-school conventions without lapsing into retrograde". According to Cragg of The Guardian, the track "luxuriates in its post-disco influences, while lyrically it's Jackson at her cheeky best". For Cyd Jaymes from Dotmusic, "All for You" was a "dreamy slice of supremely steamy R&B", as well as "the soundtrack to some sweaty summer lovin'". Bianca Gracie, writing for Grammy.com, noted that Jackson's joyride was "near-tangible" on the song, and was "pure sunshine captured in a song". Stephen Thomas Erlewine, senior editor for AllMusic, said that the song would maintain Jackson and her producers' reputation as the "leading lights of contemporary urban soul". Piers Martin of NME called the song a "faultless funk affair”.

On 6th March, the lead single from All for You turns twenty-five. Its amazing tittle track is a gem. In 2021, The Guardian ranked it twelfth and said this: “Keen to return to the dancefloor after the introspection of The Velvet Rope, All for You feels like a throwback to the effortless, loved-up optimism of her 80s imperial phase. Dismissed by some critics as “frothy”, it luxuriates in its post-disco influences, while lyrically it’s Jackson at her cheeky best, not least when she shrugs at a guy with “a nice package” and says “guess I’m gonna have to ride it tonight”. Royalty Exchange placed it fifth in 2024: “With its upbeat and playful vibe, "All for You" became a summer anthem in the early 2000s. The song’s infectious groove and carefree lyrics made it a massive hit, earning Janet a Grammy Award for Best Dance Recording. It marked a new era of Janet’s career, further cementing her pop legacy”. Although there might not be celebration or spotlight of this track, All for You deserves applause ahead of 6th March. It is a true classic from…

A music icon.

FEATURE: The Digital Mixtape: Saluting the Brilliant Harry Styles

FEATURE:

 

 

The Digital Mixtape

 

Saluting the Brilliant Harry Styles

__________

AN artist who always…

releases really interesting work, earlier this week, it was confirmed Harry Styles is releasing a new album. Although the title suggests something romantic or Disco-themed/tinged, I was curious whether he was going to bring other artists in. A lot of major Pop artists collaborate with their peers. Usually their younger peers. I would have loved Styles to work with Stevie Nicks, Joni Mitchell and some true legends. However, I feel like his first album since 2022 might feature him pretty much solo. However, there might be a few guests in the mix. To celebrate the announcement of a new album from the incredible Harry Styles, I am ending with a career-spanning mix of his wonderful solo work. The regarded and known songs alongside some phenomenal deep cuts. However, before getting there, The Guardian published an article reacting to news of an album so many people are excited about. So much buzz and speculation on social media:

“Harry Styles announces fourth solo album, Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally

After a series of cryptic billboards teasing fans, the As It Was singer reveals the title and release date of his first record since 2022

After a brief teaser campaign in which billboards around the world promised “we belong together” and “see you very soon”, Harry Styles has announced his fourth solo album.

Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally will be released on 6 March. It was produced by Kid Harpoon, the British songwriter and producer who has worked on all of Styles’ previous albums. The artwork shows the 31-year-old pop star wearing sunglasses and ducking beneath a disco ball seemingly suspended from the night sky.

The 12-song track list has not been shared – nor any music – but Styles’ web store offered packages including vinyl, cassettes, T-shirts, what appears to be an analogue camera and a bum bag. The site seemed to immediately crash on the announcement.

The long-awaited album news followed Styles sending a voice note of him singing “we belong together” to fans who had signed up to a WhatsApp promo line earlier in the day.

It has been reported that Styles will give a second residency at Madison Square Garden in New York after playing 15 sold-out shows at the venue in 2022. It is also rumoured that Styles will hold a residency at the Co-op Live in Manchester, in which he is an investor. He has been tipped by bookies as a potential headliner of Glastonbury 2027 after the festival takes a fallow year this summer.

Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally comes four years after Harry’s House, which reached No 1 around the world and was certified triple platinum in the UK with more than 900,000 certified sales. It won the coveted album of the year at the 2023 Grammy awards in addition to two other categories. It was also named album of the year at the 2023 Brit awards and spawned the hit single As It Was, his most-streamed song on Spotify with 4.2bn streams.

The last new music Styles released was Forever, Forever, an eight-and-a-half minute instrumental song played on piano that he previously performed on the final date of his 2023 tour. Each of Styles’ previous albums was co-produced by Kid Harpoon and Tyler Johnson.

The album will be Styles’ first since the death of his former One Direction bandmate Liam Payne in October 2024 at the age of 31. Payne fell from the third-floor balcony of a hotel in Buenos Aries. In a statement released at the time, Styles said that Payne’s “greatest joy was making other people happy, and it was an honour to be alongside him as he did it”. One Direction were active from 2010 to 2016 after being formed on The X Factor.

Outside music, Styles has made headlines as a marathon runner. He finished the 2025 Tokyo marathon in three hours and 24 minutes in March, but blitzed his own time at the Berlin marathon in September, achieving a coveted sub-three-hour finish in two hours and 59 minutes. His lifestyle brand Pleasing also made the news last year when it launched a sex toy and lube, complementing the line’s apparel, accessories and beauty products.

In May, he was, mysteriously, spotted in Rome awaiting the announcement of the new pope, Leo XIV, wearing a cap emblazoned with “techno is my boyfriend”. If his new record contains religious themes, he will be in good company, after Rosalía’s Lux: released in November, the Catalan star’s fourth album referenced numerous saints from across history”.

I am sure that we will get a first taste of the new album. I really loved 2022’s Harry's House. From its stunning cover through to the brilliance of the music, there is going to be a lot of speculation as to what will be included on the fourth album. It is a year when Pop music will once again rule. You feel Harry Styles will release one of the year-best albums. Because of this, below is a mixtape of the biggest Harry Styles tracks…

AND some terrific deep cuts.

FEATURE: Remember the Days: In Celebration of Nelly Furtado

FEATURE:

 

 

Remember the Days

 

In Celebration of Nelly Furtado

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THIS is not especially tied…

to a big anniversary, though I am looking ahead to 25th April. That is when Nelly Furtado’s single, Promiscuous, turns twenty. The second single from her third studio album, Loose, is was a big shift from her previous album, Folklore. I think Furtado’s albums are hugely underrated considering how successful they are and how wonderful an artist she is. I am going to include a playlist featuring songs from her seven studio albums. I am going to come to her 2000 debut album, Woah, Nelly!, and why it is so important to me. Drop in some videos from the album too. I will start off by talking about the main reason for covering Nelly Furtado. Many might know her only from early singles like I’m Like a Bird (from Woah, Nelly!), but she had this varied and hugely exciting career. It is such a joyful and enriching experience listening to her music, I was compelled to spotlight her. I am not sure whether she has in mind a follow-up to 2024’s 7. Although critically acclaimed, it did feature quite a few other writers. Previous albums more streamlined, with Furtado’s songwriting voice much more central. However, perhaps after some slightly mixed reviews from critics for previous albums, there was a shift. However, Nelly Furtado’s albums are all fantastic. The way she shifts and grows between them and explores different themes and sounds. Promiscuous was one of the standouts from an album that saw her release something bolder and more sexual. A beautiful and hugely interesting album, Promiscuous certainly got a lot of coverage. I remember when the single came out. I had been a fan of Nelly Furtado for almost six years to that point and did not expect what she dropped with Promiscuous.

Last year, this incredible article told us the story behind Promiscuous. It was a new era for the amazing Canadian artist. With production from Timbaland, this track still sounds phenomenal nearly twenty years later. Though Woah, Nelly! Is my favourite album from her, I really love Loose. I will come to an interview with Furtado from 2006 before going back to her debut:

“Nelly Furtado emerged at the turn of the millennium, standing out by opting out of 2000’s dance-pop, nu-metal, and neo-soul trends. Rather, the Canadian-born singer’s debut album Whoa, Nelly! was a chilled fusion of pop, folk, Latin, and trip-hop. Featuring Top 10 singles “I’m Like a Bird” and “Turn Off The Light” (the former earning a Grammy award), Furtado was a refreshing alternative to the bubblegum pop princesses of the time.

The singer followed up with 2003’s Folklore, an exploration of her Portuguese heritage. It ultimately proved to be a sophomore slump compared to the double-Platinum success of Whoa, Nelly!. So she called on music’s secret weapon – producer/artist Timbaland – to re-launch her career. The result was 2006’s Loose, a celebration of female sexuality that meshed electronica, pop, hip-hop, reggaéton, and R&B. Its title is inspired by the off-the-wall ideas Timbaland, Danja (Timbaland’s protégé at the time), and Furtado conjured inside the studio.

The trio created hits like the electropop-inspired “Maneater,” the Grammy-nominated No. 1 “Say It Right,” and the introspective ballad “All Good Things (Come to an End).” But the album’s standout is lead single, “Promiscuous,” which set the tone for Furtado’s musical reinvention.

“Promiscuous” was a departure, swapping folk for in-your-face sex appeal. It’s a flirtatious duet between herself and Timbaland, both trading naughty one-liners atop a pulsating rap melody. And for the Director X-helmed video, Furtado took it to the nightclub. Along with the director himself, Justin Timberlake and Keri Hilson (frequent collaborators of Timbaland) make guest appearances.

“I remember being a bit shy to put it out. That was probably the content, the fact that it’s called ‘Promiscuous.’ I hadn’t done anything wrong but women are always judged,” Furtado told FADER in 2016. “I’ve since changed my mind about that. By the time ‘Promiscuous’ came out, I was super happy. I always felt like the male and female voices were equals. It was created in that tradition of a TLC or a Salt-N-Pepa song, where the women are assertive and just like, ‘I’m okay with my sexuality.’”

Furtado’s willingness to experiment led to her first No. 1 hit on Billboard’s Hot 100. The song was on top for six consecutive weeks. The single also earned a Grammy nomination for Best Pop Collaboration with Vocals and won a Billboard Music Award for Pop 100 Single of the Year. “Promiscuous” had a resurgence in late 2020, entering Billboard’s Global 200 chart thanks to its popularity on TikTok”.

In June 2006, Entertainment Weekly spoke with Nelly Furtado about Loose. As they write, Furtado “talks about Paris Hilton, music contracts and touring with a baby”. Released on 7th June, 2006, I wonder whether Furtado will mark twenty years of Loose. Like all of her albums, I am so engrossed by its tracks. Other standouts such as Maneater and Te Busqué:

“After a debut CD, 2000’s Whoa, Nelly!, that sold 2 million copies and made her a worldwide star at 22, Furtado’s follow-up, Folklore, failed to click with listeners and sold just 500,000 units. ”It had a lot of cynicism,” she admits. ”People were wondering, ‘Where’s Nelly? Where’s the butterflies?”’

Nearly three years later, there’s still no sign of butterflies, but Furtado has emerged from her cocoon with the aptly named Loose (out June 20), a confidently sexy mix of party anthems and slow jams. As the first single, ”Promiscuous,” and its follow-up ”Maneater” (a song so hot a speaker caught fire while she was recording it) show, the 27-year-old isn’t beholden to fans of her airy breakthrough hit, ”I’m Like a Bird.” ”It’s not about how big my audience is,” she explains. ”It’s about having an audience that understands what I’m doing. I’m not faithful to one style? I’m a musically promiscuous girl.” And with the soaring popularity of ”Promiscuous” and its steamy video featuring Justin Timberlake, Furtado is proving an old maxim: Getting around can do a career good.

”To me, Nelly’s like Pat Benatar or Fleetwood Mac,” says rapper-producer Timothy ”Timbaland” Mosley, who co-piloted the making of Loose. ”She’s timeless and can do different kinds of styles.” That’s been evident since Whoa, Nelly!‘s quirky amalgam of pop, folk, bossa nova, and Latin sounds. Still, that album collected dust for several months before ”I’m Like a Bird” took flight up the charts and thrust Furtado into the spotlight. ”It was like being thrown into a circus,” she says of the experience. ”I matured really quickly. I think that’s why you see a lot of young entertainers getting engaged or settling down — they mature hyper-fast.”

Sure enough, Furtado soon fell in love with Jasper ”Lil’ Jaz” Gahunia, a DJ, and got pregnant in Dec. 2002. She wanted to keep recording, but the timing was curious: Furtado started work on Folklore five months into her pregnancy. ”Everyone — including my mother — thought it was ridiculous,” she says.

Even as her somber sophomore effort was confounding fans, the singer ”was in the coolest mood,” she says. ”Three weeks after I had my daughter, I had a fitting for The Tonight Show and I fit into like a size 14 pants, but I didn’t care. I had that glow.” With Folklore faring better abroad than in the U.S., Furtado decided to tour with baby — and daddy — in tow. ”I was breast-feeding Nevis and traveling like a gypsy,” Furtado recalls. ”Japan, France, Germany — we have lots to tell her when she’s older.”

Afterward, the Victoria, B.C., native retreated to Toronto and quiet domesticity. She could afford to idle in perpetuity, thanks to financial foresight. When she landed her first deal at age 20, Furtado sacrificed a one-time windfall to retain her publishing rights. “I’ve watched a lot of Behind the Music specials,” she says. “I didn’t want to be Elvis — you know, sign a record deal for a Cadillac.”

Still, a contractual cloud hung over her: She owed her label another album. But Furtado was in no rush to record, until she ended her four-year relationship with Gahunia. As she explains, “When you break up, this overwhelming rush of individualism comes over you — it can be very inspiring.” At the time, Furtado was being prodded by Interscope Records chief Jimmy Iovine to go upbeat. Once she relocated to Miami to write and record, that was a foregone conclusion. “I played with Nevis in the sunshine every day until 7 or 8 p.m., and then I’d hit the studio,” Furtado says.

Working with Timbaland was equally carefree. The two collaborated on the 2001 remix of Missy Elliott’s “Get Ur Freak On,” so Furtado trusted his ability to meld genres with syncopated rhythms and melodic stabs. “[Loose] has an ’80s feel with a new twist,” Timbaland says. “It’s old-school new-wave sounds with heavy beats”.

I am going to bring things more up to date. First, I am going to take things back to 2000. After 2006’s Loose and before 2024’s 7, we had a run of three wonderful albums in the form of 2009’s Mi Plan, 2012’s The Spirit Indestructible and 2017’s The Ride. With all of these albums, Furtado refused to play to type and repeat herself. Perhaps what confounded some critics. With everything, she released this incredibly rich music that warranted repeated plays. I especially like The Ride. The last video I will bring in is from 2024. I will get to an interview around that album. I would urge people to check out the three albums I have just mentioned and the videos. The videos are always so memorable! What struck me about the ones from 2000’s Woah, Nelly! is that sense of joy. Furtado singing and dancing in mud and then going to this bright and vibrant neighbourhood where she dances with people there. That was for Turn Off the Light. That single turns twenty-five on 2nd July. The lead single, I’m Like a Bird, has a lot of CG, but it is wonderful! Nelly Furtado dreamy and smiling throughout. Just delightful to watch her emote and sing. A beautifully shot video that stays in the mind. Shit on the Radio (Remember the Days) is bright and neon. Lots of quick cuts, that is quite different to I’m Like a Bird. Not only showing different sides to her sound and lyrics, the aesthetics and visual dynamics shifted. Furtado wrote solo many of the songs on her debut and co-wrote the remainder.

Actually, as there is not a lot in the way of press interviews from 2000, I will instead bring a review in for Woah, Nelly! I would urge people to watch this clip from 2024, where Furtado discussed with Woman’s Hour taking some time out from music and releasing the new album, 7. There is a bit to cover from 2024, as I think it marked a new era. In terms of her direction and where she was in life. However, Woah, Nelly! is one of my favourite albums ever. I was seventeen when it came out and I remember it being a big fixture in my life in 2000 and through 2001. I listen to the album now and it still blows me away! It is such a wonderful album with so many different sounds. Such an exceptional writer and vocalist, I had never heard anyone like her to that point. At a time when mainstream Pop was very samey, Woah, Nelly! was a huge breath of fresh air. In 2018, Flood Magazine wrote why Nelly Furtado's debut album was more radical than you thought – and was a sign of things to come:

“When Nelly Furtado’s Whoa, Nelly! came out in 2000, I was a fourth grader who still had the capacity to be shocked by swear words. That’s one of the first things I remember when I look back on the album’s release and its excellent second track “Shit on the Radio (Remember the Days).” I was one of millions who purchased the album—in my case, begging my mom to buy it for me from a Strawberries sometime after my tenth birthday—and listened to it over and over again, trying to wrap my head around the reaches of her voice, soaring at one point, scatting at another. Each song was sung with the subtle sort of smirk that proved Furtado, as vulnerable as she is in her work, can never really be pegged down.

Whoa, Nelly! is an aughts-era classic that signalled a shift in the kinds of pop stars radio listeners were willing to embrace. Nevertheless, it is often eclipsed in our public memory by Loose, Furtado’s third studio album, largely produced by Timbaland. For many, that album’s hit singles, “Promiscuous” and “Maneater,” marked the arrival of a sexier, more easily digestible Furtado, whom they found incompatible with the artist as they first came to know her. “They sound unlike Furtado not because they’re danceable or sexy—her first two albums were those things—but because they’re about dancing and fucking,” wrote Pitchfork of her new tunes at the time. Audiences loved this album even more than her first two, and Loose remains a critical favorite that has been increasingly appreciated and examined over time.

Contrastingly, the love for Whoa, Nelly!, recorded when Furtado was only twenty-one years old, is hard to come across on its eighteenth anniversary, even with our pervasive cultural nostalgia. That lack of admiration can’t be divorced from the fact that the Furtado we first met was hard to label. She was a pop star, but not a Christina or Britney analogue. Her debut was eclectic, drawing on her roots—her quavering, emotive voice evoking the pathos of traditional Portuguese fado music—among other pop, rock, and hip-hop influences collected from studying music and growing up in Victoria, British Columbia.

But Furtado wasn’t in the same sultry, exotic world Shakira exemplified with her 2001 English-language breakthrough single “Whenever, Wherever.” Furtado was too pop to be an indie music darling (she didn’t play guitar on stage), too eclectic and intriguing to be a pop starlet (she didn’t dance), both talented and unique, but not enough so to be remembered alongside ingenues like M.I.A. or Amy Winehouse. She’s not a Personality, having never been one for tabloids or reality shows, boasting an Instagram account with 126,000 followers and 0 pictures, whereas Shakira is a Guiness record-holder for her massive Facebook following. Her low-key style of fame is, by design, a feminist statement that can be traced directly back to the self she exposed on Whoa, Nelly!: an artist who stands firm in the belief that no person should be reduced to a one-dimensional front.

Listening to the album when I was still in grade school, its view of love, relationships, and individuality seemed to come from another world I was only just beginning to understand, far beyond the simplified schoolyard version of romance that flowed from the mouths of other Top 40 artists. “I’m Like a Bird” is a certified bop about fear of commitment and the threat of losing one’s self to loving another person. “Shit on the Radio” tells of dealing with a partner or friend too insecure to handle Furtado’s career success. “Turn Off the Light” covers the fallout after a breakup, the kind of self-questioning that happens after you lose someone you never even fully opened up to.

The album is a takeoff of the girl-power ethos that started with riot grrl and was co-opted by another group of idols from my youth—the Spice Girls. As Furtado explored specific interpersonal intricacies, she also marked a new era of empowering music by women that was as emotionally unguarded as it was danceable. There was something inherently political in the narratives Furtado weaved across the album, too. The line “I don’t want to be your baby girl” on the track “Baby Girl” was as much a statement to the music promotion machine as it was, within the song, directed at a patriarchal lover.

When I unearthed the CD from my parents’ basement a few years ago, I gave the album a relisten (via a streaming app on my phone) to see if it could enchant me again. And while it sounds less deliciously alien to me with eighteen years’ worth of broadened listening tastes, its expression of the complications inherent in being entwined with another person—how it’s almost never as clear-cut as “I love you” or “Now I don’t”—still feels like a revelation.

Today, pop feels less gatekept than it used to. Calling someone “pop” no longer relegates them to the realm of boy bands and J-14 magazine. Lady Gaga is pop. Mitski is pop. Even Cardi B is pop, now that hip-hop is the most popular genre in the country. But women in music are still burdened with pushing back against oversimplified media categorizations, particularly in a time where pithy headlines get more attention than whatever nuanced set of words will follow them.

Eighteen years later, Whoa, Nelly!’s subversiveness is easier to parse. Its influence has come into clearer focus, as female artists, queer artists, and genre-defying iconoclasts pummel expectations of how a popular artist should look and sound. Unlike Furtado, they have a safety net in the Wild West of the Internet that did not exist back when labels still dictated who became famous or didn’t. With her 2017 independent album The Ride, Furtado continues to be every bit as ungraspable as she was in 2000, veering away from the artist we knew on Loose, and embracing sounds as disparate as stripped-down indie rock and industrial-tinged dance music. Critics praised the effort, with Billboard going so far as to call it “the most slept-on release of 2017.” But that ability to experiment was truly honed at the turn of the century with her debut. Whoa, Nelly! may never be celebrated as the work of feminist rebellion that it is—but as Furtado expresses on the album, she wasn’t vying for our approval anyway”.

I am going to throw forward to 2024. I love 7 and the fact that Furtado did bring out new material seven years after The Ride. It is forward-looking and modern but also, as critics noted, an album that nodded back to her early-2000s sound. Nearly twenty-five years after her magnificent debut album, 7 sort of blended some of those early threads with where Nelly Furtado was in 2024. Looking and sounding truly incredible, this was a new phase and peak for the hugely inspiring artist. EUPHORIA. put out an amazing cover story for Furtado in 2024. They rightly noted how she turned heads in 2000 with a debut album that was so different to what was expected. Far removed from the homogenised and manufactured Pop of the time. Trip-Hop, Latin, Folk and Worldbeat all combined to magnificent effect:

“As her career evolved with albums such as the hip-hop-infused Loose, her first Spanish album Mi Plan, and the most recent, low-key indie release The Ride, Furtado continued to leave fans gripped for where she might take her sound next. And because of that motive, her artistry has been able to leave a long-lasting impression. That said, after laying low for many years, and her last album released in 2017, many wondered when or if Furtado would ever return to the scene. Explaining that her absence from the spotlight was necessary for her well-being and that she needed a break from the industry side of things, Furtado notes that it was never music itself that she shied away from.

“Never music,” she says enthusiastically. Furtado talks to EUPHORIA. via a video call while at home in Canada. “Music is like my medicine, without sounding cliche. It’s just what I do. It was always my form of escape. As a child, we had a piano and I would sit there and just zone out and go to another world. It is healing for me to make music and it feels so good.”

Fans’ prayers for new material were answered in the spring of 2023 when Furtado began to exhibit her comeback with the gritty club banger, “Eat Your Man.” Collaborating with Dom Dolla for the track, the singer came to know of the Australian DJ and producer after she saw his name on the poster for her first festival booking in six years. “He was on this poster for Beyond The Valley in Australia and immediately the name struck me. I was like, ‘Oh, who’s Dom Dolla?’ Then I listened, I was on vacation at the time, to a couple of records, and I was like, ‘Oh my God, I love this!’ Then I reached out for him to send me some music and the relationship was born,” Furtado says.

While Furtado’s breakthrough song, “I’m Like A Bird,” came in the form of a folk-pop ballad, some might be unaware that her roots started in the electronic music sphere during the ‘90s. “I started off making a lot of electronic music when I was in my late teens,” she says. A hit song wasn’t the only thing that came out of the link-up with Dolla. The opportunity also opened her eyes to how much the genre has evolved. “I think Dom had a really big impression on me, just meeting him and being around him and seeing what DJs are doing today. We met in 2023, but I’m a fast student. First of all, Dom films everything. His videographers are with him 24 hours a day, they’re always creating these magical moments online because the magic is also happening in real-time.”

The immediacy of electronic and DJ culture has also heavily impacted Furtado’s mindset. “The fact that you can remix something and put it out tomorrow and play it during your show for 20,000 people. And guess what? If they like it, it’s already churning. I’ve been really inspired over the past 18 months by that,” she says.

PHOTO CREDIT: Sami Drasin

Keeping things moving, Furtado arrived at the end of the summer with another joint effort. This time with close industry friends Timbaland and Justin Timberlake for the head-bopping “Keep Going Up.” The trio previously had fans in a chokehold when they dropped the diss track “Give It To Me” in 2007 and topped the charts globally. 16 years later, they were still able to capture the same allure listeners were hoping for. “He is one of my magical collaborators. We just vibe on a whole other level when we’re together,” Furtado says about Timbaland. “We really understand each other musically. Like our brains, it’s weird. We’re kind of cut from the same cloth on some frequency. It’s so beautiful when we’re together. It’s really elevated. And Justin, I’m so proud of. I’m really loving all the new music he’s putting out and it just feels really genuine and beautiful.”

Furtado’s latest single, out March 28, “Gala y Dali,” marks her first release of 2024 and sees her participate in another reunion with Latin star Juanes after they previously struck gold with the ballads “Fotografía” in 2002 and “Te Busque” in 2006. The third time’s a charm for Furtado and Juanes as nearly two decades later they team up again with a summery, sing-a-long song perfect for the beach. “We just have this remarkable history together and the first song we did together [‘Fotografía’] was so well received. It’s just such a loved song and I love putting it in my shows. Of course, we’ve performed it together several times, but it doesn’t end there. We’ve also performed other songs together live from his repertoire and then we did ‘Tu Busque’ and it just kind of took it to a whole other level,” she says.

The origin of how “Gala y Dali” came to life is a fascinating story. Furtado reveals that Juanes had the song over 20 years ago but had previously lost it in a backpack and hadn’t heard it since. “A friend had his backpack sitting around at his house all these years and he finally gave it back to him. Inside the backpack was this brilliant song. It wasn’t completed, so he asked me to record on it,” she explains. After helping develop the song, the pair went into the studio to record. “We recorded it in the same studio that we recorded ‘Te Busque’ as well, so it was a bit like a time warp,” Furtado adds. “There’s just so much nostalgia. We reference ‘Fotografía’ in the song, so we’re self-referencing, which I’m having so much fun with.”

Now, we know what you’re all thinking. After teasing listeners with three collaborations, when will fans finally get to hear Furtado’s long-awaited seventh studio album? The expected answer to that question is: Soon! But no, seriously. The lead single is said to be released in May while the cover art for the album is being shot next month. “That I’m excited about,” Furtado teases. “I can’t reveal too much, but it’s gonna be elevated.”

Having created over 200 songs for the project, Furtado is whittling down which will make the final cut. “We’re currently in the mixing space,” she says. Club bangers can be expected, as well as ballads. No stranger to a bilingual moment, Furtado will also be singing in Spanish. “This current version, it’s about 10 to 20 percent Spanish,” she insists. The motive she’s setting out this time around? Getting shit done. “We’re doing it right. We’re doing all the things,” Furtado says. “We have big plans and I’m so excited about it because I’m in a better head space than ever. I’ve never loved being an entertainer more. I feel like I’m really owning it.”

Her new-found admiration for the job has her enjoying every aspect that she may have previously doubted. “I’m a mom too, and so, as fun as it is being a mom, it can also be stressful. The moment you get to the studio, sometimes my kids come with me and it’s just so beautiful when you can be making music. Immediately, I feel more calm. I feel more myself. I realize that my brain makes so much more sense in the studio. I was officially diagnosed with ADHD a couple of years ago and in the studio, my ADHD feels like a superpower,” she says. The way the industry now navigates during the digital age is also something Furtado prefers. ”Art and commerce, they’ve never gone together,” she says before laughing. “I mean, we’ve done pretty well with it and we have come a long way. In today’s world, it’s all just one thing now.”

Reflecting on her come-up, Furtado states that “the world was a different place back then.” She continues: “The way we promoted records, the way we marketed them, it’s almost like the way we market music now is much more suitable to my personality because it’s way more about just instant moments, you know? Because I have ADHD, it’s like, ‘Okay, great. That’s over. What’s next?’ It’s perfect for me. Before you had to kind of just pick how you were gonna bring your music to people and then stick with it. You couldn’t switch it up or pivot. We have so much more control over how we promote things, which is so cool”.

I have been thinking a lot about Nelly Furtado’s music and the hugely uplifting effect it has on me. How she has released seven very different and magnificent albums. Let’s hope an eighth album comes along. She is differently in this new era. One that is among her very best. I will finish with a review for 7. This GRAMMY interview around the release of 7 is really interesting. How her daughter helped her get back to music. The importance of Furtado’s ADHD diagnosis and why she is having more fun than ever. I will stick with EUPHORIA. and their four-star review of 7:

“Nelly Furtado returns with her first album in seven years. Aptly titled 7, she arrives at a time when we need her the most. With Y2K nostalgia at an all-time high, the Canadian music maker delivers a modern-sounding record that still captures the essence of what we loved about her 2000s discography with a few nods to her fellow pop queens.

Setting the tone nicely with the moody dance anthem “Showstopper,” Furtado keeps up in the clubs with the bilingual “Corazón,” featuring Bomba Estéreo. Infused with Latin beats, reminiscent of 2006’s Loose, Furtado lets herself be free, singing, “We, we lose control / That’s how we are / De corazón, no puedo parar,” during the chorus. For the tasty collaboration with SG Lewis and Tove Lo, “Love Bites,” Furtado gets frisky on an electropop, house-inspired tune that wouldn’t sound out of place on Madonna’s Erotica.

Slowing the pace with multiple mid-tempos and ballads, Furtado knocked it out of the park with “Floodgate.” While barely over 2-minutes long, the dreamy, mellow song is escapism at its best. “Floodgate, open up the well / Full throttle, that love in the front seat / Back seat like it’s champagne drippin’ all over me,” she sings.

For the stripped-back piano ballad “All Comes Back,” Furtado pulls at the heartstrings as she and her collaborator Charlotte Day Wilson detail returning to something they originally walked away from. “Funny how we run to the danger / Like we got a lesson to learn / And we don’t think we deserve it / When happiness ain’t served.” Learning from her mistakes, Furtado recognizes her self-worth as she reveals she’s never been better after healing from past trauma on “Better Than Ever”: “I’m better than ever, you changed the weather / But you made me treasure that we’re not together / All of this pain, I went halfway insane / But I learned from the pain, put myself back together / I’m better than ever, not forever / But I’m better than ever, I’m better than ever.”

Despite a tracklist that is arguably all over the place, Furtado keeps us dancing in between the raw numbers with the Kylie Minogue-esque “Ready For Myself,” yodeling production of “Take Me Down,” which feels like a subtle reference to peer Gwen Stefani and her 2006 single “Wind It Up,” and the album’s third single, “Honesty,” which serves as a 2024 version of Madonna’s “Holiday.”

All in all, 7 is a testament to how diverse, unexpected, and fun Nelly Furtado albums can be. She could have easily sorely banked on nostalgia and asked Timbaland to produce the whole thing for old-time’s sake. Instead, she’s stayed true to the young woman who once sang “I’m not a one-trick pony” two decades ago by continuing to evolve and explore”.

I am a big fan of Nelly Furtado and I wonder what she has in store for this year. It is a shame that Furtado announced an indefinite break from live performance after she was body-shamed last year. This article reacted to that. Furtado looks absolutely fantastic but, as we still live in a horrible and disgusting world where artists, especially women, are expected to be this idea, thin or not be natural or themselves, the comments received have led to this. I do hope that she does perform again, as she is a remarkable live artist. Another album would definitely be incredible. I really love Nelly Furtado and wanted to celebrate her here. From 2024’s incredible 7, back to an album that is among my favourites 2000’s Woah, Nelly!, to 2006’s Loose. Promiscuous, its most-noted single, turns twenty in April. An artist always changing and releasing this stunning music, when it comes to Nelly Furtado, there are few…

AS phenomenal as her.