FEATURE: Spotlight: Olive F

FEATURE:

 

 

Spotlight

PHOTO CREDIT: Matt Moorhouse for HUNGER 

 

Olive F

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IT is hard not to be…

completely besotted with Olive F (full name Olive Firth). The Manchester-based D.J. and artist is someone who has this incredible talent and passion and yet is so grounded and down to earth. Effortlessly cool and seemingly so personable and warm in interviews, you want her to achieve everything she dreams of and take the world! Someone who is hugely respected and deserves to top bills around the world, I am going to drop in interviews. Although she is based out of Manchester, Olive F was born in Blackpool, Lancashire. I am eager to get to some interviews so that we can get to learn more about this exceptional D.J. Before that, here is some brief background about someone who has this deep and life-long love of music. You can feel and hear her passion and knowledge in her sets. An exceptional D.J. and artist that is one of the best in the U.K., you definitely need to follow her and spread the word:

“A muso through & through, Olive’s progression into music production and DJing has been entirely organic, following several summers in Ibiza and years of record-collecting. Refusing to conform to the norm, Olive lets her music do the talking, quickly established herself as one of the main residents of Darius Syrossian’s Moxy Muzik parties and leaving a big impression via recent sets at fabric and ADE. Following a period of dedicated and focused studio time, Olive now has a stacked release schedule of productions, forthcoming on Moxy Muzik and Seven Dials, with collaborations with some of the scene’s big-hitters including Phil Weeks and Darius Syrossian, and plenty more action to come in the months ahead”.

A D.J. queen and a woman who will no doubt inspire other women to step into the profession, I did not know that she is relatively new to the D.J. world. However, she is a complete naturel. Though she has worked really hard. There are three interviews to cover off. One she has highlighted on her Instagram page and she is rightly proud of, HUNGER spoke with her back in the summer. There are some exerts that I found particularly interesting:

“Two and a half years ago Olive Firth — or Olive F, as she’s since become known — had never been behind a DJ booth (except when partying in her spiritual home of Ibiza). Now, the Blackpool-born artist has already played three shows of Ibiza’s 2025 season, is putting out records under Dftd and has a brand deal with Topshop. When we chat on Zoom, the thirty-two year old has just touched down in the party mecca once again to headline one of its most iconic venues, Pacha. That’s just scratching the surface of Firth’s new jet-set lifestyle, though — she’s been on a whistle-stop tour of Madrid, Dubai, London, Paris, London and Bali this week alone to perform. “I’ve been here three times already and it’s not even the end of May,” the DJ says. She’s sitting in a palm-tree-laden park, getting some fresh air after a spontaneous night out the evening prior. “I said, no one invite me out,” she laughs, “but I ended up going out last night and I’ll probably end up going out tonight.”

When music is involved, Firth can’t say no — she’s been an avid record collector since her childhood and recalls road trips to France listening to her stepdad’s Daft Punk records. She’s also spent many summers “around the music” since her first Ibiza season at nineteen. A career in DJing, however, was never on Firth’s radar. “I never had the balls to do it,” she tells me. When it did happen, though, Firth describes the career pivot as happening “on a whim”. “I had a bakery before,” she explains. “And I broke up with an ex-boyfriend and my friend was like, why don’t you start DJing? And I was like, nah.” At this point, Firth had never tried her hand at the craft, even as a hobby. But after the same friend put her on the line-up at a Moxy club night, she started gaining momentum, and fast. “ It’s just gone crazy,” she says. I never expected it to be this — I just thought I’d be doing the odd show. And look at me now. It’s mad.”

PHOTO CREDIT: Matt Moorhouse

Scarlett Coughlan: So where did your love affair with Ibiza begin?

Olive Firth: I did so many seasons here for Paradise on the PR team. I basically was trying to entice people to go on Wednesdays. Now I’m playing the shows and it’s just like, what! And Ibiza is like my home. You know when you land somewhere and you just think, oh my God? There’s no better feeling than when I get here. This is where I’m supposed to be. And to see my name on billboards and stuff — what the hell?

SC: Where are you based now?

OF: I live in Manchester at the minute. I went to uni in Manchester to study film and media because I wanted to be a Sky Sports presenter. Don’t ask. You know when you’re like, what am I doing with my life? The only thing I enjoyed was film and I wanted to study horror films. But then I thought, maybe I could be a presenter because they just have to stand there and look pretty. Little did I know you actually need to know about sports, so that went out of the window. And, basically, I went to uni for four years and didn’t get a degree.

SC: Oh, wow. What happened?

OF: I quit two weeks before I was supposed to hand in my dissertation. I never went to my lectures. I remember going to one once and the woman — it was literally at the end of the year — was like, are you even in this class? I was like, oh God, that says everything. I literally just went to uni to party. But I do not regret anything. I know it’s ridiculous — I’ve got four years worth of uni fees to pay, but you know what? I had the best time.

SC: Other than the partying, what was your introduction to music like?

OF: I grew up around amazing music. We used to drive to France when I was a kid and my stepdad would play the Daft Punk album on repeat. He used to buy me the latest iPod every year for Christmas and it was just kind of instilled in us, which is amazing and I’m so grateful. Then I started coming to Ibiza and that just intensified everything.

SC: How do you describe your sound?

OF: It’s got inspiration from disco always, because I’m a disco and hip-hop girl. I always take samples from disco tracks — there’s something just so feel-good about it. I just want groovy, feel-good music basically.

SC: Is that your vibe in real life, too — go with the flow?

OF: Go with the flow is exactly the way to describe me. Just taking every day as it comes. Not thinking about much. Just living life”.

Maybe a little scattershot in terms of my interview selection and what I am quoting, I did pick up Mixmag Caribbean and their interview from back in March. In terms of Olive F’s love of vinyl. I guess most D.J.s do go for that tactile feel and prefer to work with vinyl. However, in an age where you assume D.J.s are on laptops and they are stuffing songs onto a USB or they have this Mixcloud or Spotify playlist they are using, we forget that this is a corner of music where vinyl is still pivotal and what people want to see and hear. I know some D.J.s do everything electronically. However, Olive F has long had this love of and fascination with vinyl:

“As she grew older, Olive’s love for vinyl only intensified. She began to build her own collection, scouring record shops and online marketplaces for rare finds. For her, each record was a treasure, one that carried its own story. She wasn’t just searching for music to play—she was searching for music that would resonate with her on a personal level. Her growing collection became a reflection of her evolving taste and her desire to connect with music on a deeper level.

“As I got older, I started building my own collection, searching for records that felt special—ones with a unique groove, an unexpected sample, or a sound that stood out. I didn’t just listen to music; I studied it, breaking down what made certain tracks hit harder or feel more alive.”

The influence of vinyl can still be heard in Olive’s music today. Her productions are filled with warm, analog sounds that evoke the same feeling she had when she first discovered the magic of records. The imperfections inherent in vinyl—its crackles and pops—are often present in her work, adding a layer of authenticity and rawness that connects her sound to her roots.

“The imperfections, the warmth, the little nuances you can’t replicate digitally—all of that feeds into how I shape my own sound.”

As Olive continued to hone her craft, one album remained a constant source of inspiration:‘Intro’ by Alan Braxe and Fred Falke. This groundbreaking record, with its genre-defying sound and emotional depth, became the blueprint for Olive’s approach to electronic music. It wasn’t just about the beats—it was about the emotion behind them. Daft Punk showed her that electronic music could be just as expressive and intimate as any other genre, and this became a guiding principle for Olive’s music.

“That album was a game-changer. It blurred the lines between disco and electronic music, between nostalgia and the future. Tracks like Something About Us and Digital Love had this raw emotion that made me realize electronic music could be just as personal and expressive as any other genre. Even now, it’s a record I go back to for inspiration, a reminder of why I fell in love with music in the first place.”

Olive F strikes me as an artist whose journey reflects both passion and evolution. Her deep dive into electronic music and vinyl culture, sparked by her discovery of Daft Punk, sets the stage for a story that blends personal growth with musical exploration. It's evident that her love for music isn’t just a passing interest but a lifelong relationship that has continuously shaped her as an artist. Her story resonates with anyone who has had to confront their own insecurities and self-doubt, as she found the strength to push through those moments and grow, both personally and professionally.

What I find particularly compelling about Olive F is her ability to translate her life experiences into her music. From her early days of finding herself in the world of electronic beats to her transformative time on the island of Ibiza, it’s clear that her music is more than just performance; it’s a form of expression and connection. The way she talks about her time in Ibiza suggests that the island itself became a backdrop for her own personal and artistic evolution, helping her move from an uncertain newcomer to a confident artist in her own right.

Her ability to weave narrative into her work speaks to a deeper understanding of music’s role in society. Olive F’s journey is not just about creating tracks; it's about connecting people, about crafting moments where listeners can lose themselves in sound, much like she did when she first fell in love with Daft Punk. She recognizes the power of music to bring people together and unite them in shared experience, a theme that runs through her work. That ability to see music as a collective experience, something that bridges the gap between artist and audience, is what makes her stand out”.

I am going to end with this interview from Electronic Groove. I am trying to include as much as I can so that we can get a rounded picture of Olive F. How she started out, where she is heading and what she hopes to achieve. I do feel like next year is going to be her biggest yet. In terms of success, opportunities and also personal happiness and fulfilment:

“EG: What has been your favorite part of the journey so far? And the hardest?

Olive F: It’s hard to pick just one favorite part, but honestly, it’s those moments of connection – when you’re behind the decks and the crowd is completely with you, feeling every beat. That shared energy is pure magic. Seeing people react to your music, especially tracks you’ve created, is something I’ll never take for granted.

Another highlight has been the support from peers and other DJs — whether it’s someone you admire dropping your track in their set or just a message saying “this tune bangs,” it means the world. That sense of community and encouragement has been such a driving force and keeps you going, especially on the tougher days.

And yeah, the hardest part? Probably dealing with self-doubt and learning to stay confident in your sound. This journey isn’t always smooth — there are quiet moments, knock-backs, and times where you question your path. But those challenges build resilience. They’ve helped me grow, stay humble, and stay hungry.

EG: How would you describe your music? Are you making the same music you thought you’d be making when you first started out, or has that shifted?

Olive F: I’d describe my music as groove-driven, high-energy, and full of character — something that makes you move but also makes you feel. It’s got that blend of house, tech, and a bit of spice — a cheeky rhythm here, a soulful vocal there — always with dancefloor intention.

When I first started out, I had a rough idea of the sound I wanted, but like anything creative, it’s evolved over time. At the beginning, I was experimenting a lot, just soaking everything in. Over the years, I’ve found more confidence in my style and started trusting my instincts more.
The core feeling is still the same – I want to make people dance and connect – but the way I get there has definitely shifted. I think that’s part of the journey: letting your influences shape you, but carving out your own voice along the way.

EG: Given your experience, what are some of the biggest challenges artists will face in the near future?

Olive F: One of the biggest challenges artists will face – and are already facing – is cutting through the noise. With so much music being released every day and algorithms driving a lot of what people hear, it can be tough to get your sound noticed, even when the quality is there.

There’s also the pressure to be constantly visible – posting, performing, producing – it’s easy to burn out if you’re not careful. Finding balance between creativity, career, and personal wellbeing is going to be key moving forward.

That said, there’s also a lot of opportunity. The tools and platforms available now mean artists can connect directly with their audience, build their own lane, and stay independent if they want to. It’ll be about staying authentic, building community, and playing the long game. Resilience, originality, and a solid support network will matter more than ever.

EG: What’s next for Olive F? What milestones are you looking forward to now? Where can your fans catch you next? Any tours planned?

Olive F: There’s a lot in the pipeline, and I’m really excited for what’s coming next. Right now, I’m focused on finishing up some new music – a couple of collabs and solo tracks that I can’t wait to test out on the dancefloor. The goal is to keep evolving my sound while staying true to what makes it me.

Milestone-wise, I’ve definitely got my eye on more international gigs and hopefully my first full EP release with a label that really aligns with my vibe. It’s about pushing forward creatively while staying connected to the people who’ve supported me from day one.

Next up, fans can catch me at Paradise in the City at Boston Manor Park on August 2nd — it’s going to be a big one! There are also a few more dates in the works for later this year, both in the UK and hopefully beyond… so stay tuned. Tour announcements are coming soon, and I can’t wait to bring the heat to new places!”.

I have been including female D.J.s in this Spotlight series more recently as I interviewed Carly Wilford last month, and she shouted out this amazing queens that she respects. As a D.J., producer and artist herself, she talked about gender inequality that women face as D.J.s and how there needs to be change and more conversation. Women like her and Olive F are hugely inspiring and deserve massive recognition! I hope that the industry adapts and improves. I am not sure exactly what is in store for Olive F next year, but one thing that is certain is that you will want to…

KEEP your eyes peeled.

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Follow Olive F

FEATURE: Spotlight: Bria Salmena

FEATURE:

 

 

Spotlight

 

Bria Salmena

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AN album that I missed…

when it was released in March, I have since acquainted myself with the debut from Canadian artist, Bria Salmena. Big Dog is such a vibrant, energetic and big album, yet there is also a lot of emotional depth and nuance. You do need to listen to the album a few times to get to the bottom of it. I wanted to salute Bria Salmena here, so that anyone who is not yet aware of her music will find her. There have been a nice selection of interviews with Bria Salema this year. I am going to highlight a few. Someone who wants to put Canada and Canadian music at the forefront, she actually ends the interview by reminding people that Big Dog is Canadian. In terms of the scene that birthed it. Many Toronto artists contributed and assisted Salemna. This is revealed through The Line of Best Fit’ interview from March:

“I have so much pride in Canadian DIY,” Salmena tells me, speaking passionately about the DIY ecosystem from which her first band, FRIGS, emerged and which continues to inform her work. “We’re top drawer, but we kind of get overlooked.”

It’s via these nurturing scenes that Salmena became a revered artist who has covered a lot of ground over a relatively brief time period. Whether she’s putting out an album like 2018’s widely lauded Basic Behaviour with her frenetic post-punk band FRIGS or playing with alt-country icon Orville Peck, Toronto has been the centre of her musical universe, as it has for her long-time collaborator Duncan Hay-Jennings. However, based in LA since the pandemic, she and her modus operandi have had to adapt.

Salmena’s new album, Big Dog, belies the sonic expectations established by her previous records. Cinematic and atmospheric, it places Salmena’s soulful, characterful voice at its centre. There are shades of Kosmische music and the spirit of Hole and Sonic Youth records that soundtracked Salmena’s formative years (indeed, Lee Ranaldo plays guitar on “See’er”!). Big Dog is a modern, idiosyncratic pop record that assimilates its influences beautifully and tastefully – and, unsurprisingly for a record of such creative scope, it percolated over a protracted development period.

The record reflects this in both a sonic and a thematic way. The Neu!-informed pulse of songs such as “Drastic”, married to a consistent reference to place, transport the listener, and movement means the record zips past like a train – vibrating with energy to natural points of entropy, like the gorgeous, dejected closer “Peanut”. Irrespective of how beautifully the whole record hangs together, Salmena admits that, for both herself and Hay-Jennings, gut-feeling dictated direction.

“When we decided on the groupings of songs, it was more about a feeling rather than an obvious thematic thread. At that point we didn’t even know what the record was going to be called – we didn’t know what we were doing,” Salmena shares.

Happily, the record has clearly stimulated a sense of momentum, and Salmena and Hay-Jennings have been writing consistently since the completion of Big Dog, despite now being separated by two-and-a-half-thousand miles (Salmena in LA, Hay-Jennings in Toronto). For both, writing and production have become similar processes, with the distance dictating that they now write remotely. From “playing songs over and over again on guitar so I didn’t forget them” to “recording everything for fear of forgetting,” Salmena reflects on the ways that her artistic practice has changed.

“The way we work now, it’s like receiving a package in the mail every once in a while – you get excited about it in the same way,” she says. “We’d talk so much about the intention of it. I would send him shit – I wouldn’t be sure if it was good or not – but every time he would send it back, 99% of the time it would feel true to whatever it was I was feeling. We’re really lucky like that. Of course there are instances where something isn’t working, but we’re both completely open to everything and we allow ourselves space and time. As long as it’s organic to us”.

There is a recent interview that I will move to. However, just before, I want to bring in some of this interview from The Rodeo. Bria Salmenda has worked in bands and collaborated with others, through Big Dog is her solo project and her stepping out. It must have been difficult to create the album and block out the noise. However, this is what she did. In the process, she recorded one of this year’s best debut albums. Go and follow Bria Salmenda on social media and listen to Big Dog:

“Big Dog comes out kicking and screaming. Opening tracks like ‘Drastic’ and ‘Backs of Birds’, transition to the contrast of ‘Radisson’ and ‘Twilight’. On her sequencing process, Salmena loosens the reigns, feeling “far too involved” to complete the sequencing herself. There is surely some workload to be found in the sequencing a record like Big Dog with Salmena describes as consisting of “a lot of colours” which she ultimately left her collaborator Duncan and her manager to construct.

“With this record because there was such an array of tempos, heavy to fast to mid to then quite slow, it was really difficult for me to think of the sequencing. A large portion of the process is that I wanted to take a step back, and I wanted to, in the spirit of collaboration, bring people in and have their interpretation.”

A debut spanning altering energies from track to track, Salmena finds frenzy on ‘Drastic’ and encounters contemplation on ‘Radisson’. The sheer contrast of Big Dog’s tracks, each fully formed, creating their own world is the product of several years of work. Contemplative ‘Water Memory’ was written long before a debut record was even a concept: “[Water Memory] was written at the end of 2020, beginning of 2021, when I was in a mandatory travel quarantine, locked in a house over Christmas by myself.”

“The actual creating and recording and playing these songs is the easiest. Not easy, but it feels the best… And it feels cathartic and natural.”

Not jumping at the chance to hear Big Dog live would be criminal. The wild energy on tracks like ‘Drastic’ and ‘Backs of Birds’ are destined to be erratically danced to in a room full of strangers. Salmena shares this excitement. “[It] feels like the best way to showcase a really vulnerable record, I guess. It feels safe.”

On her upcoming tour the singer tells me of the close comraderie she found with her on tour family, getting to play music with her Big Dog collaborator Duncan Hay Jennings as well as his partner Jamie and best friend Lucas. “It’s just like I get to be on stage with my family and travel with my family, and that”.

Prior to finishing with a review for Big Dog, there is another interview to cover off. Ticketmaster Discover spoke with Bria Salmena last month. Prior to supporting Wolf Alice on tour (where she talks about her friendship with the British band, she chatted about her debut album, “her steely stage presence, finding her voice as a solo artist”. Salmena played The Great Escape earlier in the year. Having completed some dates with Wolf Alice, she plays across Asia, Australia and New Zealand in January and February. Her next U.K. date is on 29th March at the Royal Albert Hall for the Teenage Cancer Trust:

“Why did Big Dog feel like an appropriate title for the album?

Truthfully, I didn’t want to call it Big Dog. At the time we were completing the recording, I was going through a lot of personal crap. My band mates said this album was me taking back autonomy and doing things for myself. They said “you should call it Big Dog” as that was the original title for the song ‘Hammer’. I guess they convinced me to do it. They helped me take my power back, in terms of being proud of what I was doing. It felt like the final step for me to go and deal with what I was dealing with, to jump out of it.

There’s a real sense of momentum and intention throughout Big Dog, but the album feels to me like a document of you pulling away or leaving something behind.

A lot of artists have to do that as a coping mechanism. In that way, for me, there’s a barrier of protection from the situation via the songs.

What artists were important to you becoming a musician yourself?

If I’m being completely honest…. The real reason I even started playing guitar was because of Brody Dalle, from The Distillers. It’s not something to be embarrassed by. But that was the beginning. I’d been singing for a long time, but when you’re growing up in the 90s you’re either pop or soul. Or like 50s crooner classics. If you’re a girl you’re a pop singer. When I was seven that’s what I thought I was going to be. When I was about twelve a friend gave me a Distillers record and it blew my mind. I hadn’t heard a woman express themselves like that before. It was eye opening. It opened so many doors to Hole, Patti Smith. Then it unravelled and I just wanted to play guitar. Brody was the reason I started playing guitar. I’m interested in anybody that’s really expressive as a singer, women especially. I’m more drawn towards female voices. I’m very fucking picky when it comes to male singers. She was it for me.

You’re about to tour with Wolf Alice. But you’d befriended Ellie long before you were announced as their tour support. What’s the story there?

I first met Wolf Alice – well Ellie and Theo first – through a really good friend of theirs Cal McRae, who was the band’s first manager. He introduced us. It was purely because we were in London so much [with FRIGS]. I forget why they asked us to tour. We toured with them in the States, when Cuntry Covers Vol.1 came out. I think Joff actually had a hand in that. Obviously we were friends, but I was like ‘why do you want me to open?’ That’s the fun of being in bands, you get to pick who you want to be on tour with.

Ellie’s a dear friend. They were in LA a lot last year recording The Clearing. I knew a lot of the lore but hadn’t heard any of the tracks until they released it. I feel like this record, the songwriting is crazy. Every record they get so much better.

They always pull out some surprises. ‘Bloom Baby Bloom’ is wild.

When ‘White Horses’ came out I was like ‘wow’, plus having Joel sing. It feels like they went into this recording with a clear idea of what they wanted out of it, and it shows”.

I shall finish up with a glowing review for Big Dog. A tremendous debut album, I am coming back to The Line of Best Fit and their opinions. Hailing a voice that, in their words, can cut through the noise and either “cure or inflict”, I do think that there is a lot of positive energy on Big Dog. However, there is some reflectiveness, sadness and yearning. It all blends together in this accomplished debut from the Canadian artist:

“Some of the best breakout contemporary voices, like those of Caroline Polachek, Weyes Blood, or SPELLLING swirl and enchant. For Bria Salmena, it can communicate something deadly, a gnawing and insatiable hunger.

On “Stretch The Struggle”, the most striking song off her enchanting debut album Big Dog, she starts solidly, but then wavers as her desire turns visceral and raw. “I just need it, need it, need it,” she repeats, but instead of a person she’s after, it’s a wound: the hurt of someone leaving her, the pain of “something to suck on.” With the screaming comes freedom – it’s there you realize Salmena’s game isn’t purely simplistic.

It’s not the only unconventional choice on Big Dog, but it’s one of the most tantalizing. Salmena, originally frontwoman of the band FRIGS, shapeshifts almost unrecognizably to diversify her sonic palette. There’s the lightness of indie rock cut “Backs Of Birds”, where there’s a freedom on the chorus before tilting into the pitched-down chant leading to the final minute, a grittiness returned to on “Rags.” The playfulness of “Hammer” and melancholy of “Water Melancholy” contrast with “See’er”, a dramatic and often haunting alt-country cut where Salmena moans, creaks, and improvs her way through murky terrain. Often it feels much longer than its 4-minute runtime, and could easily find a home amongst the depths of Ethel Cain’s Preacher’s Daughter.

Salmena complements up her vocal chords with a pretty powerful pen. She has the grit of Cain with the romance of Lana Del Rey, along with a knack for the beauty of a simple moment. “Words are just things to say / Just sounds his mouth makes / I didn’t get on the plane / I just stared at the runway”, she sings with hope on the opener “Drastic.” Best of all, she isn’t one to overcomplicate things; many songs rely on a few cutting lines, repeated, chopped, and amplified: You are a hammer, you are a big dog, you are the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen, writing in twilight again – some of the key loops on Big Dog plead, reaching out towards you through repetition, like a wake-up call.

We don’t learn who Salmena is through pieced together narratives, but through fleeing, intense feelings, almost as a call-out to the rising confessional genre that praises wordy, detail-laden tracks. “You contain memories / I’d like to consume,” she sings on “Hammer”, knowing it’s better to leave the blanks empty rather than constrain the moment to her experience. She’s amorphous on “Rags”, reckoning with her intertwined desires, begging to be dressed in shoddy clothes, but wearing pearls. “Treat me like I’m putty, treat me like I’ll slip away,” she sings, disarmingly simple.

Her softer moments might be more staggering than when she really lets loose. The opening lines of “Peanut” are pretty simple – “You’re on a train to Japan / I’m forgetting who I am” – but when paired with the bare piano, it takes on a devastating tone. The guitar loop on “Twilight” too, soft and nostalgic, is killer along with her reflective singing, like a doubly effective combo: “By the time the spring came, I was well on my way / Count your blessings, but it means nothing to me.” And “Water Memory” takes it back to the source – it’s vague and lilting, along with some salient images. “The hand reaches / For hollow cheeks”; “Be still, he calls now / Be still, you stay”, she sings, like a horror film.

Big Dog is often hypnotic and always entertaining. It’s a record that never asks for permission before lashing out, just springs the moment on you. Unruly and raw, Salmena’s debut has a killer instinct and a romantic eye. It’s one to sit with for a while”.

An artist that is rightly being championed, hailed and highlighted, Bria Salmena is someone who should be on your radar. Make sure you familiarise yourself with Big Dog. It is one of the best albums of this year. I am excited to see what comes next for Salmena. I will try and catch her live next year. This is a very special artist who is going to have a huge solo career. On the strength of her debut album, Bria Salmena should prepare herself for…

A very long career.

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Follow Bria Salmena

FEATURE: My Artist of the Year 2025: ROSALÍA

FEATURE:

 

 

My Artist of the Year 2025

PHOTO CREDIT: Inez & Vinoodh for ELLE

 

ROSALÍA

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EVEN though…

there are many new artists who I have followed this year and have done amazing work, just because of the weight of LUX and the impact it had on me (and so many others), ROSALÍA is my artist of 2025. I can’t remember if I did one of these features last year but, in 2023, Iraina Mancini was my artist of the year, and I got to interview her around that feature. However, I do not have access to ROSALÍA, so I have to rely on other interviews. I may bring in some text I have used in other features. However, I am such an admirer of ROSALÍA and LUX. I am going to end with a review for the album, as it gained so much love. Fervent and impassioned praise for an album I feel is the very best of this year. ROSALÍA is my artist of 2025, not only because of the album. The interviews she has been involved with and how she talks about her music and career. Her words and work has made such an impression on me this year. It is going to be so fascinating to see what comes after LUX. I don’t think that she will repeat this album. Instead, there might be this whole new revelation and reinvention. I am going to start off with an interview I have not sourced so far. LUX was released on 7th November, so it has made this very fast impact. ELLE spoke with ROSALÍA in August, as she was back in the studio. Little did they know what would come! ELLE talked to her about filming a new role in Euphoria:

“In L.A. last summer, paparazzi caught Rosalía outside Charli XCX’s 32nd birthday party wielding a bouquet of black calla lilies filled with cigarettes, sparking a microtrend. (“If my friend likes Parliaments, I’ll bring her a bouquet with Parliaments,” Rosalía says. “You can do a bouquet of anything that you know that person loves!”) She also made frequent stops at the local farmers market, where she says she tapped into her primordial gatherer spirit.

“Many times, the more masculine way of making music is about the hero: the me, what I’ve accomplished, what I have…blah blah blah,” she says. “A more feminine way of writing, in my opinion, is like foraging. I’m aware of the stories that have come before me, the stories that are happening around me. I pick it up, I’m able to share it; I don’t put myself at the center, right?”

It is a method she cultivated as an academic, which directly informs her approach to composition. Like works of found-object art, her songs are assemblages of sounds with seemingly disparate DNA, brought together by her gymnastically limber voice. In her 2018 single “Baghdad,” she interpolated an R&B melody made famous by Justin Timberlake; in her 2022 smash “Saoko,” she rapped over jazz drum fills and pianos with sludgy reggaeton beats.

PHOTO CREDIT: Inez & Vinoodh

The visual culture of Rosalía’s work is executed with similarly heady intentions, inspired by TikTok videos and the fractured nature of her own presence on the internet. A staple of her Motomami world tour was the cameraman and drones that trailed her and her dancers across the stage. One of my most lasting memories from her shows was just the internal frenzy of deciding whether my eyes would follow Rosalía, the real live person on stage, or Rosalía, the image replicated and multiplied on the screens behind and around above her.

“In a cubist painting, which part do you choose?” says Rosalía of her concept. “Everything is happening at the same time, right? So you just choose what makes sense for you, where you want to put the eye and where you want to focus your energy.”

She’s gone mostly offline since her last project. “Björk says that in order to create, you need periods of privacy—for a seed [to] grow, it needs darkness,” she says. She has also shed some previous collaborators, including Canary Islander El Guincho, the edgy artist-producer who was her main creative copilot in El Mal Querer and Motomami. She says there is no bad blood, though “we haven’t seen each other [in] years. I honestly love working with people long-term. But sometimes people grow apart. He’s on a journey now, he’s done his [own] projects all these years. And yes, sometimes that can happen where people, you know, they grow to do whatever their journey is. Right now, I’m working by myself.”

Going it alone poses a new challenge for Rosalía, who, in true Libran fashion, derives inspiration from the synergy she experiences with others. She has famously collaborated with past romantic partners, like Spanish rapper C. Tangana, who was a co-songwriter on El Mal Querer. In 2023, she released RR, a joint EP with Puerto Rican singer Rauw Alejandro, to whom she was engaged until later that year. She does not speak ill of her exes, if at all, but simply says, “I feel grateful to each person with whom life has made me find myself”.

I think that ROSALÍA is this visual artist. In terms of her music, she thinks about the lyrics and music, though there is also this cinematic aspect. Bringing her songs to life in a visual way, through music and social media. The interviews with her from this year have such incredible photos. ROSALÍA is this artist who is so engage and hypnotic! Her music moves and changes you. Her words do the same. Seeing her in photoshoots, you are stunned by her connection with the camera and how she is ss engaging. Sao stylish and individual too. You can see that in this interview from Billboard that was released early last month:

“This record takes you on a complete journey; the singing on it is just astounding,” says Jonathan Dickins, who runs September Management, home to Adele, and who began representing Rosalía in June. “I think she’s a generational artist. I’m lucky enough to have worked with one, and now I’m lucky enough to work with another. She is an original.”

To make Lux, Rosalía relied on several of her longtime collaborators — producers Noah Goldstein and Dylan Wiggins and engineer David Rodriguez among them — and tasked them with taking a new approach. “The whole process helped me grow as a musician, as a producer, as a sound engineer,” says Goldstein, who has also worked with Frank Ocean, Jay-Z and FKA twigs. “That’s one of my favorite things about working with Rosalía: I’m always learning things from her.”

She also tapped new collaborators such as OneRepublic singer and decorated songwriter Ryan Tedder (who spent three years DM’ing Rosalía, hoping to eventually work together) and urged them to push their boundaries. “For an artist to give me the freedom to just express myself in that way, God, that is the most fun I’ve ever had,” says Tedder, who has worked on mammoth albums by Adele, Beyoncé and more throughout his career. “I’ve been asked by everybody, ‘What does the new Rosalía stuff sound like?’ And I literally say to everybody, ‘Nothing that you possibly would imagine.’ ”

PHOTO CREDIT: Alex G. Harper

For Rosalía, challenging preconceptions about the type of music she, or anyone, can make is part of the point — thinking outside the box, following her inspiration and constantly learning, finding and creating from a place of curiosity and openness to new experiences and ideas. “I think that in order to fully enjoy music, you have to have a tolerant, open way of understanding it,” she says. “Because music is the ‘4’33” ’ of John Cage, as much as the birds in the trees for the Kaluli of New Guinea, as much as the fugues of Bach, as much as the songs of Chencho Corleone. All of it is music. And if you understand that, then you can enjoy in a much fuller, profound way, what music is.”

When did you start working on this album?

I don’t think that it’s easy to measure when something like this happens or starts. The album is heavily inspired by the world of mysticism and spirituality. Since I was a kid, I’ve always had a very personal relationship with spirituality. That’s the seed of this project, and I don’t remember when that started.

How did you approach Lux differently?

This album has a completely different sound than any of the projects that I’ve done before. It was a challenge for me to do a more orchestral project and learn how to use an orchestra, understand all the instruments, all the possibilities, and learn and study from amazing composers in history and say, “OK, that’s what’s been done. What can I do that feels personal and honest for me?” And also the challenge of having that inspiration in classical music and trying to do something that I haven’t done before, trying to write songs from another place. Because the instrumentation is different from all the other projects I have done. But also the writing, the structures, it’s very different.

You’ve said Motomami was inspired by the energy of L.A., New York, Miami. What was your mission in making Lux?

It’s made from love and curiosity. I’ve always wanted to understand other languages, learn other music, learn from others about what I don’t know. It comes from curiosity, from wanting to understand others better, and through that I can understand who I am better. I love explaining stories. I like to be the narrator. I think as much as I love music itself, music is just a medium to explain stories, to put ideas on the table. So that’s what this project is for me. I’m just a channel to explain stories, and there’s inspiration in different saints from all across the world. So you could say it feels like a global thing, but at the same time, it’s so personal for me. Those stories are exceptional. They are remarkable stories about women who lived their lives in a very unconventional way, of women who were writers in very special ways. And so I’m like, “Let’s throw some light there.”

What I know is that I am ready, and this is what I needed to do. What I know is that this is what I was supposed to write about. This is my truth. This is where I am now.

The album is so operatic and orchestral. How did you begin to immerse yourself in those styles and find the people that you worked with to deliver that?

They’re the people I feel comfortable with, so I love sharing time with them in the studio. For example, I worked on [Lux song] “Mio Cristo” for months by myself in Miami and L.A., and I delayed the moment when I would share it. I wanted to make a song that was like my version of what an aria could be. So I remember just going to the studio after so much work, after so much back and forth with an Italian translator, and I [had been] improvising on the piano, trying to find melodies, to find the right chords and notes. I went to the studio and I shared it with Dylan [Wiggins], with Noah [Goldstein], with David [Rodriguez], and I remember they were like, “Yes. That’s the song. There it is.” So it’s been a lot of isolation on one side — a lot of writing — and then on the other side a lot of collective effort in the studio.

In releasing this album, what would success look like for you?

Success, for me, is freedom. And I felt all the freedom that I could imagine or hope for throughout this process. That’s all I wanted. I wanted to be able to pour what was inside, outside. And those inspirations, those ideas, make them into songs. I was able to do that, and I will not ask for more”.

Before getting to a review of LUX, I am want to include this interview from Rolling Stone en Español. There are a range of interviews to choose from, but I think that this one is especially important. There may be some people who have not yet heard LUX. It is not just a brilliant album. I think that it is groundbreaking in terms of how it will impact artist going forward. We will see it transform the music scene:

“LUX doesn't seek to be understood on the first listen. It's a work that demands attention and dedication, that requires time and reflection. Every detail seems to have been carefully considered, and every emotion feels sincere. Centuries of history resonate within its layers, diverse genres and styles, verses in fourteen languages. All interwoven with absolute intention, with the desire to make music a vehicle for the transcendent. In an era where pop is consumed at breakneck speed, Rosalía chooses to stop time and look upwards.

'Lux' means light in Latin. It has a super orchestral palette and is very inspired by spirituality. It's not the first time spirituality has been present in your music, but it's certainly very, very present in 'Lux'. Why did you feel that creative need?

I think it's true that spirituality has always been very present in my music, but I'd never dedicated an entire project to it. Perhaps I simply felt it; it was like, "Come on, now's the time." I feel capable of developing something like this, of composing from this place. I also really wanted to understand how others have written about God. There are many women who are an inspiration on this album, nuns who were poets, who wrote and wrote incredibly, and they've been a reference for me and have also allowed me to understand that there's this possibility of writing from devotion. I was excited to do a project like this. I think God has blessed me greatly, and what better way to show my gratitude than to make an album for Him?

Yes, that depth is very noticeable. The first ray of 'Lux' that you presented to the world is 'Berghain'. Absolutely insane, breathtaking. In that universe, Snow White, Da Vinci's Lady with an Ermine, the techno section of Berghain, and the irreparable heart all coexist. I've seen many interpretations people make, but something I've noticed is that they all talk about a duality between innocence and passion. Does that interpretation resonate with you?

It could be, but I think everyone has to make their own journey. Perhaps 'Berghain' is ultimately the most violent or aggressive passage on the album. On one hand, there's that tension between the divine and the inanimate, the mundane and the otherworldly, light and darkness. We tried to explain it through the video in this way, with these images, with this imagery, but in the end, people have to have their own experience, their own interpretation. I wouldn't want to limit the journey others need to take when they watch the video. That's what it's for. Ultimately, that's what symbols are for.

Yes, everyone interprets them. And they certainly have. I've seen several very interesting interpretations.

Yes, yes, yes. That's the beauty of it. That's where the beauty lies. That they are participants in the work. By giving it meaning or interpreting it, they are participating. That's what interests me, reclaiming the listener as a producer, as a composer. It's part of it.

Yes, absolutely. From the evolution of the work, right?

Exactly. Very well said, yes.

Listening to the album, the phrase "I was made to divinize " immediately came to mind. Are you talking about empowerment, self-belief, or where does that come from?

To divinize. It's a verb I learned while working on this project, and I loved how it sounds, I loved what it means. When you're centered, I think you can let light through. We all have the potential to be creative. In our daily lives, in the little things, in so many contexts, we can be creative. Creation, in the end, is something divine. Creation is connected to divinity. So, that's why I think we're all capable of divinizing. Of allowing something to pass through you, of being able to shed more light. And that's why that phrase is there”.

I am going to end with a review of LUX from PASTE. They note how she is reinventing Pop and confronting the divine. On her fourth album, we witness “her usual genre-smashing instincts to create an ambitious, masterful classical avant-pop work exploring the confounding mysteries of love, God, and the divine feminine”. The Catalan artist is at the peak of her brilliance, though you feel we may hear another album from her even more astonishing:

“To make LUX, ROSALÍA began by reading hagiographies of female saints. “Making albums for me is like excuses to do what I actually want to be doing,” she told the The New York Times earlier this month, and for the 33-year-old Catalan superstar, that simply meant reading. She studied up on saints such as Hildegard of Bingen, Joan of Arc, Claire d’Assise, and Rosalie de Palerme; she pored through the lives of Olga of Kyiv—an Eastern Orthodox saint who slaughtered thousands of men from the tribe responsible for her husband’s death—and the Buddhist nun Vimala, who was a prostitute before eventually becoming a poet and a nun. These were women—totally unconventional, often tragic—that challenged ROSALÍA’s ideas of sainthood and offered an unorthodox view of holiness.

And unorthodoxy, of course, has always been ROSALÍA’s modus operandi. Her 2018 breakout album, El Mal Querer, catapulted her onto an international stage by reinventing flamenco with slinky electronic production. 2022’s MOTOMAMI, meanwhile, broke the mold by collaging and remixing an eclectic array of Caribbean genres, from reggaeton to dembow to bachata. LUX, ROSALÍA’s fourth album, continues this trend of constant artistic transformation. Rife with strings as stormy as Vivaldi’s and vocal performances as dramatic as Carl Orff’s cantatas, this ambitious avant-pop work could be categorized as classical above all else. Yet, in the lineage of artists such as Kate Bush, FKA twigs, and Björk—who features on the track “BERGHAIN” and can be seen as a patron saint for this type of pop experimentation—ROSALÍA appears uninterested in these cumbersome musical boundaries, soaring instead towards a far more elusive, fearless vision of what pop can be. Yes, she’s working with the London Symphony Orchestra, but she’s also calling on producers like Noah Goldstein (Yeezus, Blonde) and Dylan Wiggins (SZA, Justin Bieber). Divided across four movements and sung in 13 different languages, LUX is an explosive, experimental album that demands a lot from its listeners, but not without offering resplendent gifts of beauty, drama, and grace.

LUX’s themes float around love, God, faith, and the divine feminine, and the album’s cover—ROSALÍA in a skin-tight habit, eyes closed in sensuous devotion, hitting that Sade Love Deluxe pose—should give good indication of its preoccupation with what is both bodily and holy. During the leadup to LUX, ROSALÍA devoured the works of cult feminist writers including Simone Weil, Clarice Lispector, and Chris Kraus. Much like these women, ROSALÍA is concerned with questions of the mystical and the erotic, and here in LUX, desire—despite all its chaos and brutalities—is undeniably divine. On the glistening and ghostly “Divinize,” ROSALÍA whispers over pulsing kick drums, “Through my body, you can see the light” and “Pray on my spine, it’s a rosary.” And “Reliquia,” which opens with jaunty strings, sees ROSALÍA losing parts of herself across the world—her tongue in Paris, her time in LA, her heels in Milan, her smile in the UK—much like saints’ relics; yet ultimately, she offers her own heart for both love and veneration: “But my heart has never been mine, I always give it away, oh / Take a piece of me, keep it for when I’m gone / I’ll be your relic.”

The album’s soundscapes are lush and symphonic, for sure, but ROSALÍA continues to draw from her entire artistic repertoire, making LUX seem less like the classical antithesis to her oeuvre and more like the synthesis of everything that’s come before. MOTOMAMI-esque electronic production—from the scuzzy bassline and AutoTune-crunched vocals of “Porcelana” to the scrambled, glitchy breakdown at the end of “Reliquia”—grounds the operatics, fusing the hedonistic with the heavenly. Other tracks borrow from the flamenco world of El Mal Querer: “La Rumba Del Perdón” places ROSALÍA alongside legends Silvia Pérez Cruz and Estrella Morente, and on “Madruga,” charging strings find their opposing force in palmas and heavy panting as ROSALÍA spins a tale of revenge and divine fury.

Despite all the symphonics and electronics, the album’s theatrics never overshadow its most tremendous instrument: ROSALÍA’s voice, which shines over this lush backdrop. She intones from the heavens over a thunderous cloud of choir and strings on “Mio Cristo Piange Diamanti,” declaring the power of God’s grace. And on the beautiful piano ballad “Sauvignon Blanc,” her pristine soprano soars as she promises to relinquish everything—Jimmy Choos, a Rolls-Royce, pearls and caviar—for love. The song draws from the story of Teresa of Ávila, who gave up her earthly possessions to follow God. It feels like the pious older sister to MOTOMAMI’s horny “HENTAI,” yet the two tracks are perhaps surprisingly similar, matched both by their yearning balladry and the depth of their devotion. Then there are all those other delightful details throughout the album: ROSALÍA’s harmonizing alongside Portuguese fado singer Carminho on “Memória,” her plaintive melismas in “Magnolias,” and even her witchy Latin rapping on “Porcelana”.

On “La Yugular,” ROSALÍA samples a 1976 Patti Smith interview, where the punk rocker and poet says, “Seven heavens—big deal! I wanna see the eighth heaven, tenth heaven, thousandth heaven. You know, it’s like, break on through the other side.” Smith was discussing how important it was for artists not to merely rest on their laurels but to instead push themselves to keep evolving and searching for more. It’s no wonder ROSALÍA clipped those lines; their message feels fitting for LUX, an album that is so insistent in its demands for more, more, more of everything: more reinvention, more pop, more devotion, more heavens, more love”.

LUX is my favourite album of the year. ROSALÍA is my artist of the year. Despite the fact the album came out very recently, it did hit me so hard and I feel LUX has shaken so many people. In the best possible way. Go and listen to the album if you have not done so already. Even though she has released this masterpiece, I think there will be even greater curiosity to see…

WHAT comes next from ROSALÍA.

FEATURE: Spotlight: Linska

FEATURE:

 

 

Spotlight

 

Linska

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ALONGSIDE Spotlight features…

where I look at more traditional artists, I am also keen to spend some time with some amazing female D.J.s. The reason for this is that I interviewed the amazing Carly Wilford earlier in the month, and she shouted out some fellow queens. I am going to select a few of them for deeper consideration. I knew about the majesty and talents of Linska prior to that interview, however, I have been compelled to explore her work more. Many might recognised her face, as Linska is the pseudonym of Ella Balinska, a British actor known for Charlie's Angels and Resident Evil. However, she is also this captivating D.J. and producer. I want to drop in some more detailed biography before I get to the first interview with the supreme Linska:

“Linska is solidifying her place as one of electronic music’s most exciting new forces. With a signature sound rooted in dark, driving tech house/techno, and undeniable magnetism, the London-born & LA-based producer continues to captivate global audiences. Her breakout single “Bad Boy” stormed past 15 million streams and claimed the #1 spot on Beatport’s Melodic House & Techno chart, and #2 overall, announcing her as a bold new voice in the scene.

Following that momentum, she reunited with acclaimed Irish producer Rebūke on “Choose Life,” a track that reinforces her ability to blend emotion with danceability. Most recently, Linska delivered a standout remix of Emmit Fenn’s “I WON’T LET YOU DOWN,” showcasing her versatility and expanding her sonic reach.

Inspired by her roots in gaming and the UK underground, Linska fuses immersive soundscapes, powerful vocal work, and relentless energy to craft music that feels both raw and elevated. With every release, she pushes boundaries—proving she’s not just part of the new wave of producers, she’s helping define it”.

I know that there will be new interviews with Linska next year. One of the best D.J.s in world (in my view), she released the incredible track, Bad Boy, last year. Last December, Beat Portal caught up with this superstar D.J. and incredible producer about the track. I have not caught a Linska D.J. set myself, though I am keen to see her in the flesh next year. This is one of our finest D.J.s, artists and producers:

“Linska’s solo debut, Bad Boy, has made a significant impact on the electronic music scene, quickly gaining support from some of the genre’s biggest names, including Solomun and Adam Beyer. The track’s origins were far from glamorous. Linska shares that the idea came to her during a sleepless, jet-lagged night in a hotel room in London, which, much to her disappointment, was “super dodgy and nothing like the pictures on the website.” “I was pretty much just sitting awake jet-lagged and organizing my rekordbox. I was putting my playlists together, and I realized there was a vibe of track I was missing,” she recalls. That’s when inspiration struck. “I haven’t heard something like this in a while when I’ve been in the crowd at shows. So I just had a wave of inspiration to pen it myself and actually ended up pulling an all-nighter and finishing the track in one night.”

Despite facing challenges in her makeshift studio, Linska pushed through. “The real challenge for me was probably getting past my own perfectionism. When I look at a project in Ableton, my eye immediately looks for repetition and patterns; regular intervals between certain elements of the track, but often what you see doesn’t translate to how it sounds. So I had to push my want for it to be ‘mathematically’ correct and be free with it.” Working in the hotel with thin walls meant that she had to rely entirely on headphones. “I couldn’t play the track out loud because the walls were paper thin, so I produced the whole track in my headphones.” Yet, despite these obstacles, the track emerged with a pulsating bassline, infectious rhythms, and intricate details that showcase her dedication to the craft.

Looking back at her rise, Linska acknowledges the challenges of building her career in such a competitive industry. “There are 100% better, wiser, more experienced people to ask this question to than me, I’m still learning myself. But my two cents would be; The hardest thing has been being confident in my own brand and what I want to do. There is so much access to information now; it is so easy to be swayed into thinking you should be doing something else or you need to be making music that sounds more like this producer or playing tracks like that DJ,” she says. But for aspiring producers and DJs looking to make their mark, she has some straightforward advice: “Finish the music. Nothing gets put out if it’s not finished. When it comes to DJing, play music for yourself and the audience. Keep the indulgence to the afters with your mates. When it comes to asking the question, ask it. The worst response you’ll get is ‘no.’ And when it comes to growing, you are the only person in your own way. This industry is competitive but it can be so fun and rewarding... I truly am grateful”.

It is interesting reading that full interview, as Linska talks about future collaborations. Consider a lot of the female D.J.s Carly Wilford recently highlighted, it would be great if they came together and there was this album from them where they fuse together on track. Or one that purely showcases their work. In an industry where sexism and gender imbalance pervades, showing how exceptional these women are would, one hopes, lead to conversation and steps towards change. Before moving along, I want to get to a review from PAN M 360 regarding Linska’s set at this year’s Off Piknic:

“Last Saturday, Jean-Drapeau Park pulsated to the beat of British club sounds during a themed evening organized by Realm Records. If you’re not yet familiar with this record label, it was founded in 2018 by English duo Gorgon City, who headlined this OFF-Piknic event, accompanied by Linska, Riordan, and Dennis Ferrer. Although Ferrer is not affiliated with Realm, but rather with Defected Records, his presence added a touch of legend to this already exciting evening.

To kick off the event, Linska delivered a set rooted in dark and driving tech house/techno. Her thick, rumbling textures evoked the golden age of British house in the 1990s, while drawing on the electro-house of the 2010s, a formative period of her adolescence. Sample choices such as Gorillaz’s Dare transported us to a decidedly British universe—a sound imprint that would mark the entire evening. Linska’s infectious energy behind the turntables, under the bright July sun, contrasted nicely with the nocturnal tones of her music. The sustained rhythm of her set drew festival-goers to the modular wooden dance floor set up in front of the stage. In the final minutes of her set, Bad Boy, her best-known track with melodic techno sounds, clearly announced that this promising artist of the new generation is only just getting started”.

I am ending with a terrific interview from NYLON. I guess interviewing Ella Balinska rather than ‘Linska’, we do get this sense that music is the true passion for this actor. However, we will be seeing Balinska in more acting roles. It is important for her to fulfil her music ambitions and record and play as much as humanly possible. I think that next year will be a huge breakthrough one for her. Chasing her bliss, being a D.J. allows the London-born queen to cut loose and be truly set free:

“Most people know Balinska, 28, for her starring role in the 2019 Charlie’s Angels reboot (alongside Kristen Stewart and Naomi Scott) or Netflix’s Resident Evil series in 2022. But Hollywood actors, even successful ones, know there’s only so much they can control about the business. “It was amazing to have that zero-to-100 launch that I had into my acting career, but there’s a level of anxiety that comes with that," she says. "Because what legs am I standing on? It was quite stressful to feel like I had to maintain that.”

“You know how sometimes you go to a festival and there’s a random child just running around? That was me.”

She sees music, on the other hand, as a vehicle for unrestricted creativity. “I just feel so myself and free and uncensored,” she says. “I’ve arrived at this point where I’m like, ‘You know what? Let me reintroduce myself: ‘My name is Linska, and that’s who I am, and that’s my art.’”

Getting behind the decks is a classic move in the It Girl playbook. Balinska, however, was practically raised with a deep appreciation for the craft. Her mom is Lorraine Pascale, the British TV food personality, and her father is Polish businessman Kaz Balinski-Jundzill, who would partner with event organizers to throw music festivals around Ireland. “You know how sometimes you go to a festival and there’s a random child just running around?” Balinska says. “That was me, with little earmuffs walking around. I think that rave culture — the dance culture — has always been part of who I am.”

PHOTO CREDIT: Amber Asaly

Balinska isn't leaving Hollywood behind, of course. She’s just expanding her creative horizons — in both fields. “I think I have earned my stripes in the genre film world,” she says. “I was told that if there’s ever an action female character, I am almost always on the list to be considered [for the role]. But there are a couple of projects I’ve been reading which feel like a nice bridge between genres.”

She’s got a new song on the way, too: “Choose Life,” another team-up with Rebūke, drops in late February and has spoken word drawing inspiration from the iconic opening monologue in Trainspotting. “I looked at it, and I was like, ‘Well, people are either gonna love this or hate it,’” she says.

But she loves it — and that’s all that matters to her. “I’m coming from a truthful place,” she says. “There’s no ulterior motive here. I just wanted to do it. I think art for other people is super important, but [art for] yourself is really important too”.

An undeniably major talent who I was keen to spend some time with, I am excited to see what 2026 holds in store for Linska. I hope there will be more music and perhaps an E.P. or album. A couple of Australian dates just after Christmas and some dates already in the diary for next year, do go and see Linska if you can. She is this amazing D.J. queen and incredible artist who has so many years ahead of her. Golden days and glorious moments…

LIE ahead.

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Follow Linska

FEATURE: When I Think of You: Janet Jackson’s Control at Forty

FEATURE:

 

 

When I Think of You

 

Janet Jackson’s Control at Forty

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ONE of the best albums…

IN THIS PHOTO: Janet Jackson in 1986/PHOTO CREDIT:  Bill Lovelace/ANL/REX/Shutterstock

by Janet Jackson turns forty on 4th February. Control was the follow-up to 1984’s Dream Street. Control was the first album of this golden run that continued with Janet Jackson’s Rhythm Nation 1814 (1989), janet. (1993) and The Velvet Rope (1997). One of the most fascinating sequence of albums ever released, Control was the start of it. I think it is underrated and deserved to be talked about more. Because it turns forty on 4th February, I want to spend a bit of time with Control. Reaching number eight in the U.K. and number one in the U.S., Control features the huge singles, What Have You Done For Me Lately, Nasty and The Pleasure Principle. I want to start out with Classic Pop and their assessment of Control. If there was a sense of Janet Jackson living in the shadow of Michael Jackson in terms of success and recognition, Control contains so many anthems and boasts this sense of independence and self-worth. A terrific production team and these amazing performance, Control is without doubt one of the best albums of the 1980s:

“The years since 2019 have seen Janet Jackson’s career undergo something of a major reappraisal thanks to an induction into the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame, a Las Vegas residency, a Glastonbury performance and a vinyl reissue of her most successful albums, giving long overdue credit to a woman whose legacy has been unfairly overshadowed during the past two decades by the Super Bowl and a sibling scandal.

While the general consensus from retrospective reassessment of her work has deemed 1989’s social commentary Janet Jackson’s Rhythm Nation 1814 her magnum opus, Janet wouldn’t have been qualified to address the state of the world had she not got her own house in order first, which is exactly what she did on 1986 breakthrough, Control.

Although she kicked off her music career at the insistence of her father/manager Joe Jackson four years earlier (her eponymous debut album was released two weeks before her brother unleashed the biggest-selling LP of all time), her first two records were unremarkable, indistinct and unsuccessful, leaving Janet still known primarily as a TV actress from shows such as Good Times, Diff’rent Strokes and Fame, and as the youngest member of pop’s royal family rather than for her musical output.

That was all to change in 1985 when Janet, having eloped with singer James DeBarge a year earlier, annulled the problematic marriage (allegedly due to his voracious drug habit), and took stock of her life and career to establish herself as successful recording artist in her own right. The Janet Jackson and Dream Street albums had proven that the public wouldn’t shell out for something just because it had her name on the front, so Janet was intent on creating her own sound and identity.

It was the brainchild of John McClain, A&R executive of A&M Records, to team Janet with Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis. The duo had previously been members of Prince protégés The Time and had gone on to achieve great success writing and producing hits for the SOS Band, Alexander O’Neal and Cherrelle among others. They’d originally been scheduled to work with former Atlantic Starr singer Sharon Bryant, but when that failed to happen, were offered any other artist from the A&M roster by way of recompense. They chose Janet.

“Nobody was checking for Janet at that point,” Jimmy Jam later explained to Red Bull Music Academy. “We just felt something. First of all, she had talent. She had a great voice, but she also had a great attitude and we thought that the attitude was never being brought out of her. We thought as producers and writers, we could do that.”

Jam & Lewis met with Janet, her dad Joe and label bosses to play them their previous record, the strings-laden The Heat Of Heat by Patti Austin, a collaboration with Quincy Jones. Janet baulked at the idea of using strings on her songs while Joe Jackson was concerned that the pair would douse Janet in the ‘Minneapolis Sound’ and make her sound too much like Prince.

Although Janet was excited by the opportunity to be working with Jam and Lewis – she had been a big fan of The Time and had seen them in concert when she was 15 years old – she wanted to make her album in Los Angeles. Jimmy and Terry refused on the basis that they always made their records in their own Flyte Tyme Studios.

Realising that the message she wanted to convey was one of growing up and doing things without the help of her family, Janet agreed to swap the sun and security of the Jackson estate in California for the cooler climes of Minneapolis, an experience which turned out to be something of a culture shock for the sheltered superstar.

Arriving in Minneapolis with eight suitcases and her best friend Melanie, Janet’s first surprise came when she was met at the airport, not by the expected limousine, but by a rental car Jam and Lewis had arranged for her. Forced to be self-sufficient, Janet relished the challenge and rose to it.

“She came to Minneapolis, no bodyguards, no nothing… she brought a friend of hers, Melanie,” Jimmy recalled to RBMA. “We required that they put her in our hands, far from the glitter and distractions of Hollywood and the interference of her manager/father. We rented her a car – a little Chevy Blazer – and she had to find her own way around; this was before GPS. There were maps and all kinds of Stone Age stuff, and she had to find her way to the studio, the hotel, all those kinds of things. It had to be on our turf, with no bodyguards, no star trips and none of Joe Jackson’s people hanging around making suggestions.”

“They told me that they didn’t want me to have somebody doing everything for me and I told them that wasn’t how I lived anyway,” Janet later told Rolling Stone. “I told them my whole story, what I wanted to do. I spoke about things that happened in my life and what I really wanted this album to be about. I said, ‘I need you guys to help me express how I feel, to help me put my feelings out”.

In 2016, The New York Times argued how Control is underrated. I would agree with that. Not talked about as much as other great albums of that decade and maybe not viewed as highly as some of her other work. This article observes that we need to reconsider Control more and discuss it because Jackson’s worth as an artist does not get enough oxygen:

“Control” is a work of confidence, cleverness and justifiable irritation. It’s also full of weird, amazing sounds that, 30 years later, it’s easy to take for granted as the way latter-day pop music has always been: polished in a factory to a gemlike gleam. But most of the nine songs on this album — nine songs! — weren’t just factory-generated; they were performed by almost entirely aggressive, attitudinal heavy machinery that was new for both Top 40 and the outer limits of mainstream R&B. Meanwhile, for any number of reasons (that Super Bowl scandal, the long shadow of other stars, our cultural amnesia), the woman behind the wheel has been demoted to the back seat. And that, of course, warrants a correction.

Ms. Jackson was around 20 when she entered the recording studio after a stint as a sitcom star (poor Penny on “Good Times,” richer Charlene on “Diff’rent Strokes”), an annulled marriage and a split from her notoriously oppressive father, Joe. So a decree was in order: “When it’s got to do with my life/I want to be the one in control.” That’s from the opening song, “Control,” which begins with a spoken proclamation of self-emancipation: “This is a story about control.” Jimmy Jam and Mr. Lewis orbited Prince, and that opening has always sounded like a counterpoint to the mania of “Let’s Go Crazy,” which had just completed devouring America the year before. In the face of collapse, Prince demanded chaos. Ms. Jackson’s idea of anarchy was, well, control.

It makes sense to admire “Control” as an album about independence. It’s a compelling tale of freedom in which Ms. Jackson liberates herself from the demands of suffocating men to make her own demands. She granted herself permission to define her sexiness. Even now, the excitement of “When I Think of You” is the sight of a cherubic Janet Jackson dance-walking across a soundstage in a silky, tricked-out jacket and bustier, matching pants, heels, that hoop earring with the key on it, and the mane of three lions. That was also the summer of Madonna’s “Open Your Heart” video, in which she seduced with just the bustier, some fishnets and a peep show. Despite, or more likely because of, all those clothes, Ms. Jackson’s dancing seemed all the freer.

One reason to revisit “Control,” aside from its general excellence and a milestone anniversary, is to consider Ms. Jackson’s value as a pop artist, which doesn’t happen often enough. Her most recent album, “Unbreakable,” hit No. 1 last fall, but the gleam of her stardom never recovered from that evening in 2004 when Justin Timberlake ripped open her costume, exposing her breast at the Super Bowl. The logistics and intent of the moment are still ambiguous; Ms. Jackson publicly apologized. It didn’t matter. The stain had set. She went from a steady maker of big hits to some kind of postlapsarian has-been, seemingly overnight. But it still feels less like she’s fallen and more like she was pushed.

Thirty years of “Control” is a useful, if contrived, excuse to argue for Ms. Jackson’s necessity, especially as someone who knew the power of an image. Take that hoop earring with the key. It was as iconic as L L Cool J’s Kangols, George Michael’s stubble and Steven Tyler’s scarves. It was the perfect symbol for both a project called “Control” and a woman whose guard has gone down and up over the decades. People thought that key was a potential invitation, something sexy. But what if it was just self-affirming? What if she was never looking for someone to give it to? What if she was her own lock?”.

I will end with a couple of features. Albumism celebrated thirty-five years of Control in 2021. I am not bringing in the whole thing. I want to start by dropping in a quote from producer Terry Lewis, who makes a very good point as to why Janet Jackson’s Control endures and is so extraordinary. This is an album that still sound incredible forty years later:

“I think Control is timeless, because it was basically the coming out of a budding flower,” Lewis reflected during a 2015 conversation with Idolator. “That was when Janet found her voice. Prior to that record, people just gave her songs to sing. But on Control she really had the opportunity to figure out who she was musically and what she wanted to say. That was the beginning of everything, in terms of success.” Effectively her declaration of creative freedom and independence, Control is a fierce, self-assured and vibrant record that laid the groundwork for what has proven to be one of the most durable and dynamic pop music careers of the past thirty-five years.

Balancing its undeniable urban appeal with its unmistakable crossover-friendly foundations, Control is the whole package, the epitome of a pop album masterpiece. Jam & Lewis’ big, bold, and powerfully percussive soundscapes, coupled with irresistible melodies that completely envelop the senses, were innovative within the context of mid ‘80s R&B, and directly influenced the sonic blueprint of the new jack swing era that emerged a few years later.

Of the album’s nine tracks, seven were released as official singles—a sure-fire testament to the album’s broad accessibility and an incredulous ratio by today’s standards, whereby the majority of albums, including the most successful ones, yield three to four singles tops.

The album kicks off with the propulsive wallop of the high-octane title track, which explores Janet’s transition from adolescence to adulthood. It’s an unequivocally empowering message of reclaiming ownership of her life that, as Jimmy Jam once explained to the BBC, “turned out to become an anthem for young women who were striking out on their own.”

Most notably evidenced on a trio of unforgettable tracks, the theme of self-empowerment pervades the entire album. A not-so-thinly-veiled message to her ex-husband, the GRAMMY-nominated first single “What Have You Done for Me Lately?” calls out a lazy lover who refuses to pull his share of the weight in their romance-depleted relationship. A similar biting, “I’m done taking your shit” tone is heard on the danceable “The Pleasure Principle, as Janet laments “It's true you want to build your life on guarantees / Hey, take a ride in a big yellow taxi / I'm not here to feed your insecurities / I wanted you to love me.” Featuring the notorious refrain “No, my first name ain't baby / It's Janet...Ms. Jackson if you're nasty,” the anti-chauvinism paean “Nasty” finds Janet aggressively asserting her will to repel the more patronizing elements among the male species.

Other standout moments include the ebullient, synth-horn soaked love song “When I Think of You,” which is arguably the most dancefloor-friendly track of the set. The two ballads that close the album are top-notch. The sweet, sincere serenade “Let’s Wait Awhile” extols the virtues of patience and level-headedness when it comes to matters of love and lust, with Janet committing herself to “saving more for later so that our love can be greater,” while confidently explaining in the song’s closing moments that “I promise, I’ll be worth the wait.”

Sampled nearly a decade later by hip-hop duo Camp Lo for their chilled-out 1997 single “Coolie High,” the lush torch song “Funny How Time Flies (When You’re Having Fun)” concludes the album on a smoothly subdued note. The remaining non-singles are passable-enough fare, with the buoyant groove and youthful yearning of “He Doesn’t Know I’m Alive” the slightly more worthwhile listen than “You Can Be Mine.”

Nominated for Album of the Year at the 1987 GRAMMY Awards (Jam & Lewis won for Best Producer), the many-times multi-platinum Control solidified Janet’s musical identity and set the stage for even greater commercial and critical success, beginning with the release of Rhythm Nation 1814 three and a half years later in 1989. Whereas her brother ruled the pop music world for the first half of the ‘80s, Janet—together with Madonna—asserted her female pop star power in the decade’s latter half, providing inspiration to the next generation of pop prodigies, from Mariah Carey to Mary J. Blige to Beyoncé to Rihanna and beyond.

Nearly three decades after Control’s arrival, Janet released Unbreakable (2015) her eleventh and most recent studio LP, the eighth featuring production by Jam & Lewis. The stellar album is yet another dazzling effort in an amazing career that was destined to endure, due in large part to its creator seizing Control thirty-five years ago and never looking back”.

I am going to finish with a review from AllMusic. If Janet Jackson’s first two albums are largely overlooked – her debut, Janet Jackson, was released in 1982 -, Control was the moment when she truly arrived. A stunning work from a legend-in-the-making. As I opened with, Control started this run of incredible albums that saw Jackson’s status and star rise:

“Although Janet Jackson had released two records in the early '80s, they were quickly forgotten, and notably shaped by her father's considerable influence. Janet's landmark third album, 1986's Control, changed all that. On the opening title track, Jackson, with passion and grace, declares her independence, moving out of the gargantuan shadow of her brother Michael and on to the business of making her own classic pop album. The true genius of Control lies in the marriage of her extremely self-assured vocals with the emphatic beats of R&B production wizards Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis. The duo was already well established in the music industry, but the practically flawless Control showcased Jam and Lewis' true studio mastery. For the better part of two years, Janet remained on the pop chart, with two-thirds of the album's tracks released as singles, including the ever-quotable "Nasty," the assertive "What Have You Done for Me Lately," the frenetically danceable "When I Think of You," and the smooth, message-oriented ballad "Let's Wait Awhile." Jackson achieved long-awaited superstar status and never looked back”.

I am going to leave things there. On 4th February, we celebrate forty years of Control. A politically-driven feminist album that was the breakthrough for Janet Jackson, Control is now viewed as one of the defining albums of the 1980s. Even so, I do feel it is underrated, so do go and listen to the album. Control is the earliest glimpse of genius from…

A music icon.

FEATURE: Light It: J Dilla’s Donuts at Twenty

FEATURE:

 

 

Light It

 

J Dilla’s Donuts at Twenty

__________

I think I have noted this before…

IN THIS PHOTO: J Dilla in the studio/PHOTO CREDIT: B+

but two genius albums were released by artists a matter of days before their deaths. Earlier this month, we marked ten years of David Bowie’s Blackstar. He released his final album on 8th January, 2016, and he died two days later. J Dilla’s Donuts was released on 7th February, 2006. He died three days later. Two masterpieces from artists who left us too soon. It does make marking the anniversaries sadder or stranger, perhaps. Knowing that these albums were completed when they were ill and released just before their deaths. However, Donuts is this astonishing album that has influenced so many artists. As it turns twenty on 7th February, I want to look inside this sample-heavy album consisting of thirty-one songs, most of which are under two minutes. Also, in the case of J Dilla and David Bowie, these albums were released on their birthdays. Bowie’s on his sixty-seventh. J Dilla’s on his thirty-second. A magnum opus of instrumental Hip-Hop and one of the most influential albums of the genre, it was lauded because Dilla took these incredible and often well-known samples and transformed them into something new and original. Whilst it is harder to sample now, that sonic and production innovation left its mark on the scene. Artists such as Nas and Drake have used instrumentals from Donuts. I will come to a couple of reviews for Donuts to end. However, I want to include features that explore the legacy of the Detroit-born innovator. Not to mangle this incredible feature, but Red Bull Music Academy assessed J Dilla’s legacy in 2016. Ten years after the release of Donuts, you could see its then-recent impact on some truly genius albums:

“We never hear his voice, but the first thing he does is tell us his name: J Dilla. Then come the sirens, and we’re off. For 43 minutes across the 31 tracks of Donuts, released ten years ago this week, J Dilla breaks and rebuilds samples in a way that breaks and rebuilds the way you hear music. While the music is sample-based, the sources aren’t so much looped as they are transformed into molecules of sound. Dilla’s production turns tracks into convection currents, samples roiling in and out of the mix. And unlike any other instrumental hip hop album you’ve heard, you never once want, miss or even expect a single bar from an MC, let alone 16. Without question, it’s the high point of instrumental hip hop. It was also the last album Dilla would make.

Likely, if you know one thing about this album, it’s that Donuts is Dilla’s swan song. Second thing: that the album itself is about death – that Dilla worked ideas about mortality into the sample set. Jordan Ferguson makes a compelling case in his 33 ⅓ book on Donuts that multiple levels of the album reflect Dilla coming to terms musically, stylistically, and personally with his death. It’s in the songs Dilla chose: “He gravitated to songs with titles like ‘You Just Can’t Win,’ ‘I Can’t Stand to See You Cry,’ ‘Sweet Misery,’ and the almost too on-the-nose, ‘When I Die.’” There’s the manipulation of the material in an effort to stop time: slowing down then re-cueing the guitar line on “Time: The Donut of the Heart” and momentarily pausing the track “Stop” when Dionne Warwick says so.

The sequencing: “Hi” and “Bye” coming just before “The Last Donut of the Night.” Ferguson goes on to quote Questlove’s explanation of the coded samples: “He really wasn’t able to communicate. Which really makes Donuts that much creepier for me to hear because all of those [samples], I’m now certain beyond a shadow of a doubt, were actually messages from him.” Less convincing is how Ferguson compares this artistic sensibility of continuing to work in the shadow of death to Sisyphus with the boulder, claiming: “Dilla’s life was absurd in the extreme, but how he lived it despite that absurdity was heroic. If his illness was Sisyphus’ rock, the descent was his music, the thing that made it bearable, even if it started mortality in the face.”

While death was clearly on the horizon, and acknowledged in the album, Dilla still worked to stay in the moment. And work never seemed an absurdity in Dilla’s music. In fact, it might even be the central theme of his prolific, era defining career. Donuts opens with “Workinonit,” and later come “Lightworks” and “Airworks.” His previous album was called Rough Draft. Long-time collaborator Frank Nitt said in a Stussy-produced documentary about Dilla that “I think what bothered him the most, people could call him about something he did three months ago, and he’d be like ‘Aw man, they want this old ass beat, I don’t even fuck with this beat right now.’” He always foregrounded the work. What the hospital production story illustrates is that the album thinks about more than just death. It’s there, but the album does not fixate on it. It’s also about Dilla working to be in the moment. The album’s not haunted, it’s full of life – explicitly so.

Two more albums reflect and extend the neo-soul sound that Dilla helped crystallize during his second-wave work with the Soulquarians. After a hiatus so long that folks started to doubt it would ever end, D’Angelo released the stellar Black Messiah. In the stuttering drums and the distorted, propulsive bassline of album highlight “1000 Deaths” it’s easy to imagine a DJ kicking out of that song and into the midsection of “Lightworks,” “Workinonit,” or nearly any track from Welcome to Detroit. The album, of course, is more than the sum of its Dilla influence, but it certainly extends the sonic palette that Dilla worked with D’Angelo to codify 15 years prior.

Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly, released in March 2015, married that neo-soul sensibility with G-funk, heard in the bouncing harmonies of “These Walls” that follow the knock of “King Kunta.” You hear more Dilla in the former than the latter, but there’s much to connect in the album. TPAB begins with a loop of Boris Gardiner’s “Every N---er is a Star,” transitioning from a simple loop to a compounding series of vocalized intervals and landing on a different inflection of the first line, a touchstone late Dilla sampling technique. On “Momma,” the hiccups and adlibs of the beat amid the swirling instrumentation harness the lo-fi sample-based production of Donuts with the expansive palette of his earlier days.

The last track, however, “Mortal Man,” is the most powerful echo of Dilla’s ethos. On it, Kendrick chops it up with a resurrected Tupac in a conversation that spans poverty, revolution, race, hustle, youth, faith, the fatigue wrought by institutional racism and rap legacies. Kendrick tells Pac that sometimes he feels like “the only hope we have left is music, vibrations... sometimes I get behind a mic and I don’t know what type of energy I’mma push out.” To which Pac responds: “We just letting our dead homies tell stories for us”.

Last November, DJ Mag reflected on the incredible Donuts. It was an album born out of struggle and in the grips of illness. However, it is such an inventive album where J Dilla shows his love of the craft and Hip-Hop. With the aid of his brother, Illa J, they revisit this extraordinary and benchmark album from 2006:

“Created using Tony Stark levels of drive, the album is bittersweet. Born from the depths of struggle, the LP is a triumph crafted amid the unrelenting grip of illness. By the time of its creation, Yancey’s health had deteriorated to the point of hospitalisation. Dilla was ravaged by thrombotic thrombocytopenic purpura and lupus. Publicly, he initially downplayed the severity, even as whispers circulated online. By late 2005, reality set in: Dilla was touring Europe in a wheelchair, battling mounting medical debt.

In this fragile, hospital-bound state, it was long said that Dilla crafted the final piece of music completed in his lifetime. With an aux cord serving as his audio lifeline, legend told that he fashioned 29 of the album’s 31 tracks during this period, transforming physical limitations into a creative sandbox. The result was a collection defined by fractured loops, off-kilter rhythms, and jittery transitions that felt profoundly human. However, the romanticised narrative of Dilla producing ‘Donuts’ entirely from a hospital bed — a tale woven with themes of struggle and resilience — has since been challenged. Dan Charnas’ 2022 biography, Dilla Time, reveals a perhaps more grounded truth, where the beats were primarily crafted in 2005 for other rappers before Dilla’s hospitalisation and were later sequenced into an album.

Threads of this beat-batch-turned-album narrative echo across rap’s terrain. Ghostface Killah’s superb ode to childhood memories, ‘Whip You With a Strap’, and The Roots’ ‘Can’t Stop This’ — from 2006’s ‘Fishscale’ and ‘Game Theory’, respectively — draw from the instrumental frosting of the aptly-titled ‘One for Ghost’ and ‘Time: The Donut of the Heart’. While the fabled story endures in the collective imagination, the reality underscores Dilla’s relentless artistry — whether in moments of adversity or not.

Released on LA-based independent label Stones Throw, ‘Donuts’ isn’t just a collection of 30 or so beats; it is a lush vortex of creativity guided by samples, rhythm, and a deafening lack of vocal sonnets. The influence of ‘Donuts’ ripples far beyond its release and the sounds that leak from any of its CD, vinyl or digital dispensaries. ‘Donuts’ became the zenith of loop-based hip-hop production. Arguably, records like Kenny Beats’ LP ‘Louie’, Knxwledge’s ‘1988’ or BadBadNotGood’s numbered album saga wouldn’t exist without Dilla or ‘Donuts’. But it’s deeper than that. Despite not a word uttered into a mic, Dilla was able to craft a world with the album. A hazy, grin-riddled wanderlust — filled with tasty audio treats, doughnut motifs, and a message. Not one of grand theatrics or cryptic intent, but an unwavering love letter to his craft.

Dilla’s humanity is right at the core of ‘Donuts’, both in its creation and reception. In Dan Charnas’ aforementioned biography, he observes, “The Yanceys were not a family that expressed love by saying, ‘I love you.’ They expressed love by being together.” This sentiment bleeds into every corner of the album, which feels like Dilla’s final expression of love, not just to his family and friends but to the music itself. A case in point is the song ‘Bye.’, the prelude to his posthumous D’Angelo and Common collaboration, ‘So Far to Go’. With vinyl crackle hissing at the listener, Dilla flips The Isley Brothers’ ‘Don’t Say Goodnight: It’s Time for Love (Parts I & II)’, changing the lyrics from “I want to feel you” to “I feel you”, showcasing his ability to interweave interpretive messaging into his doughnut-shaped constellation, where sound, space and sentiment are constantly in flux”.

I would suggest people do some more reading around Donuts and J Dilla. Though not his only work, it is the album and work that everyone associates him with. Such is the impact of Donuts, it is hard to underplay its influence. You can feel it impacted Hip-Hop to this day. In 2011, BBC reviewed an album where J Dilla found his Midas touch. This timeless album that must have been a labour of life, it is staggering that it got made. And that it sounds as brilliant as it does:

“I’ve never been one for Golden Eras of art – especially when it comes to pop music, a form ever-morphing beside technological innovation and fluctuations in the human condition. To say that a select few years encapsulated everything that’s ever been great about a continuing movement is, typically, madness, as what the near-or-far future holds, nobody can say.

But if one was to look at production in hip hop, they might view the years 1997 to 2006 as a period of considerably rich pickings: from Timbaland breaking through with Missy Elliott’s Supa Dupa Fly in 97, via Pharrell Williams’ work for Kelis and Clipse in the late-90s, to Kayne West’s desk-manning genius until The College Dropout. And with credits on releases by De La Soul, Busta Rhymes, Talib Kweli, Common and Mos Def, Detroit-based James ‘J Dilla’ (or ‘Jay Dee’) Yancey was also a major mover, his talents massively in-demand.

The former Slum Village member never attained the mainstream profile of the aforementioned trio of producers-turned-solo-talents, though, as he died of the blood disease TTP in February 2006, just three days after his 32nd birthday. That day also saw the release of his first solo album proper as J Dilla, the sprawling, psychedelic, borderline-bonkers 31 tracks of slippery beats and sepia soul that is Donuts.

While sold as an instrumental affair – no featured rappers here, and Yancey doesn’t take the microphone despite past MC form – Donuts is much more than a collection of compositions without lyrical focal points. Motifs both superbly weird and instantly recognisable rise and fall, vocals snatched from a genre-spanning variety of sources acting as pivots for Dilla’s original contributions to see-saw atop of. In the first five minutes the listener will hear 10cc, the Beastie Boys, 1970s R&B singer Shuggie Otis, and a double-dose of Mantronix (whose King of the Beats is repeatedly referenced). Later, Kool & The Gang, The Jackson 5, Stevie Wonder and Smokey Robinson have their catalogues raided for slivers of inspiration, but whether the listener spots them or not is another matter.

It’s the seamlessness of Dilla’s productions that really became his calling card after 2003’s Jaylib release, Champion Sound – how samples were incorporated as if they’d always been there, like these were the originals and, somehow, James Brown had beamed himself into the future (and back again) for his My Thang single of 1974. And Donuts’ success – it was named among the best albums of its decade by several publications – has led to it informing many a song since its maker’s death. Ghostface Killah has taken One for Ghost – though its title is a clue to its original purpose: to be used by the Wu-Tang man at a later date – and Drake lifted Time: The Donut of the Heart for use on his Comeback Season mixtape, an act acknowledged on his 2010 album Thank Me Later when he states: "I came up in the underground though / So I’mma spend another 10,000 for Dilla." Dollars well spent, sir.

One of hip hop’s finest sets of truly singular ability, Donuts is a record that will – due to its enduring influence and the fate of the master craftsman behind it – likely remain timeless. Whether it can be held aloft as a truly golden example of its kind will be determined not by the here-and-now, but by what follows next; but something that can’t be doubted is that Dilla had a unique Midas touch which has reached well beyond his own, tragically short lifetime”.

I am going to end with a review from Stereogum. Well, the final third of their review! Published ten years after the release of Donuts (not long after we were still mourning the loss of David Bowie), they show proper love and respect for this iconic and seismic album. One that blows my mind to this day! Testament to the genius of J Dilla. I don’t think anyone since has matched him in terms of what he did on Donuts:

“Donuts' sampling aside, Dilla also did some ingenious things with drums. He was certainly a pioneer in introducing unquantized (also known as de-quantized) drums -- drums without timing correction for manual error -- along with Madlib and MF Doom among a few others. His slightly off-kilter drum hits, most notably on kick and snare patterns, fused warm, organic human imperfection with already evocative soul, funk, and emotion he extracted from his samples. This purposeful error stands out to those with finely tuned ears, and adds to the swing he already introduced from his off-count samples. Questlove describes how he was frozen in astonishment the first time he heard Dilla's artful unquantization in his book Mo' Meta Blues: The World According To Questlove:

I could hear vibrations coming from the back of the club. The Pharcyde had just taken the stage. I paused by the van, because the only thing I could really hear, amid all the rest of the noise and music, was a crazy discrepancy in the kick drum. It was almost like someone drunk was playing drums -- or, more so, that a drunk, brilliant four-year-old had been allowed to program the kick pattern. I had to see what I was hearing. I left the van and ran to the front of the club to listen, and when I got there, the band was playing the first cut from Labcabincalifornia, "Bullshit," and Dilla was just going crazy on the kick pattern. At that moment, I had the same reaction I do to anything truly radical in hip-hop. I was paralyzed, uncertain how to feel.

The moments on "Waves," "The Diff'rence," and "Glazed" where you have a little more time to add some extra flavor to your head bobs on the 2 and 4; or on "Two Can Win" when you have a little less time which ever so slightly throws you off -- that's that Dilla swang at work. Purely from manual technical innovation, he was able to alter the listener's movement and mood, often without their awareness of the minuscule time manipulations.

Even without all that obsessive, geeky knowledge, Donuts is still a dope-ass beat tape to jam (or write shitty bars) to. It doesn't take a technically savvy producer or super-enthusiast to just nod their head to the rhythms, or be moved by the emotive soul samples. Unfortunately, that easy groovability and a much-more-than-you-know feeling led to the co-option of his legacy a bit with more mainstream recognition and feigned understanding. In 2010, hundreds of die-hard fans, mourners, and posers alike lined up at clothing brand Stussy's LA storefront for their first annual Dilla Day to purchase limited edition T-shirts with a silk-screened graphic of Dilla reaching for a vinyl record, and listen to his Stones Throw musical family spin his records. And though the fam signed off on Stussy's genuine gesture, those T-shirts cloaked some fake posturing in an authentic costume, and the true heads could feel it. I recall a particularly heated exchange almost exploding into an all-out ass-whooping after some clown asked "Who is this?" as J. Rocc spun "Lightworks."

In the immediate years following his death, everyone and their mom wanted to claim a connection to Jay Dee. Even in the genuinely heavy-hearted LA underground scene (he died in the City of Angels after living there for two years) it was far too cursory to hear something to the effect of "This some unreleased Dilla shit" or "Shouts to J Dilla on the beat, R.I.P." from any rapper that could work the muscles required to grip a microphone. Many a concert was cast with an air of palpable judgment, with crowds trying to discern whether or not artists were true Dilla stans. Outside of LA, cats threw Donuts beats all over their projects: A more lyric-centric Drake used "Time: The Donut Of The Heart" on his 2007 Comeback Season mixtape; then-promising up-and-comer Charles Hamilton made a mixtape titled And Then They Played Dilla, spitting over tracks from Donuts and remixing some its instrumentals; prematurely anointed hip-hop savior Jay Electronica used "Gobstopper" and several other Dilla beats on his Victory mixtape. Whosampled.com pegs 130 total samples of J Dilla tracks with Donuts accounting for 33 of them.

While usage of Dilla's Donuts and other beats were well-intentioned, it was a huge headache for Ma Dukes and the executor of his estate at the time, Arthur Erik. Dilla partly left so many works behind because he had to take out government loans to help fund his exorbitant medical bills. When artists and producers sampled his works, or used entire beats on mixtapes and other unofficial releases, the estate could not collect that revenue. This led to a reorganization of his estate, naming probate attorney Alex Borden the executor as a means of "Preserving and enhancing the legacy of the legendary artist and secur[ing] a means of future prosperity for his mother, Maureen 'Ma Dukes' Yancey, daughters Ja-Mya Yancey and Ty-Monae Whitlow, and brother, John 'Illa J' Yancey." The estate is now much more strict on the use of Dilla's music.

It seems the fam is eating pretty well now. In the latter half of the decade since Donuts' initial release, Dilla's legacy has been met with the proper respect. In 2012, Montpellier, France dedicated a small street "Allée Jay Dee" in his honor. In 2014, Ma Dukes donated his Akai MPC 3000 and custom-made Moog synthesizer to the Smithsonian Institute's National Museum of African American History and Culture. His former group Slum Village did nine previously unreleased Dilla beats justice on last year's Yes!. Dilla's Delights is rumored to open its own storefront some time this year after selling plenty of donuts at other Detroit locations. The shop/bakery will be run by his uncle Herman Hayes. Stones Throw is releasing a 10th anniversary vinyl with an excerpt from his 33 1/3 on the making of the album. He's dropped 10 posthumous solo projects from his seemingly infinite reserve in addition to the licensed beats on other artists works. His techniques are alive and thriving, even hitting the mainstream with tracks like Kendrick Lamar's "Momma," where LA producer Knxwledge employs Dilla's swing sensibilities on the drum pattern and sample.

One can only imagine how Dilla would have adapted with more technologically advanced musical equipment hitting stores, keeping pace with a technological industry that seemingly grows exponentially. But something tells me he would have kept doing him regardless. I'm starting to get a bit teary-eyed, so I'll end this quickly the only way I see fit: Rest In Beats, big homey”.

On 7th February, 2006, James Dewitt Yancey gave the world this masterpiece. Few people knew that, three days later, we would lose him. It is one of those tragic and bittersweet examples of artists working on a work of greatness whilst gripped by serious illness. However, what we should take from Donuts is its phenomenal invention and passion. Thirty-one wonderful tracks that showcase this master at his peak. An album that revolutionised and transformed Hip-Hop. An instrumental ground breaker that was lauded hugely upon its release, it still sounds magnetic and utterly phenomenal today. If you have not experienced this album, then do go and listen to…

THE wonderful Donuts.

FEATURE: The Continuing Issue of Ageism: Why Are Women Not Afforded the Same Acceptance and Respect As Men?

FEATURE:

 

 

The Continuing Issue of Ageism

IN THIS PHOTO: Catherine Zeta-Jones at Netflix's Wednesday FYC Event at Netflix Tudum Theater on 9th November, 2025 in Los Angeles. She was criticised by many because of her appearance, sparking conversations around age-shaming and misogyny/PHOTO CREDIT: Steve Granitz/FilmMagic

 

Why Are Women Not Afforded the Same Acceptance and Respect As Men?

__________

ALTHOUGH this is not strictly music-related…

IN THIS PHOTO: Lady Gaga has spoken out against ageism in music, and how women in their mid and late-thirties are often disregarded and side-lined/PHOTO CREDIT: Greg Swales for Rolling Stone

or tied to any specific news story from that world, it is something that can be applied to music too. How there is still this massive issue of ageism. I have written about this multiple times. Figures in the music industry constantly scrutinised because of their age. Though it does not apply to men as much as to women, men do face it. However, think about the music industry and the opportunities available to women over the age of forty or even younger, and compared that to younger women and men. I did note in a post how festivals are especially ageist when it comes to women. Even though Glastonbury is terrific, among the very small (and inexcusable) number of female headliners, only one has been forty or older (Marcella Detroit of Shakespears Sister). Even this year when you think Kylie Minogue should have been booked, the only female headliner on the bill, Olivia Rodrigo, was in her twenties. To be fair, she slayed it and was the best headliner. Even so, festivals tend not to make visible women who are deemed to be less relevant. Ageism is very much present. Radio stations playing few songs by women in their thirties, forties or older. Whilst not a conscious bias in some cases, there is an issue that needs to be tackled. Lady Gaga address ageism in music earlier in the year when she collected an award: “The US singer, 38, who recently topped the UK album charts for a fifth time with her latest album Mayhem, said she is “just getting warmed up” even though “the world might consider a woman in her late 30s old”. The Abracadabra singer picked up the innovator award and also won the best collaboration gong, along with US music star Bruno Mars, for their hit single Die With A Smile, which features on her new record. “I don’t know totally how to think about this, because winning an award honouring my entire career at 38 years old is a hard thing to get my head around,” she said, while accepting the innovator award. “On the one hand, I feel like I’ve been doing this forever, and on the other hand, I know I’m just getting started. “Even though the world might consider a woman in her late 30s old, for a pop star, which is insane, I promise that I’m just getting warmed up”.

Maybe radio stations, labels and even fans do not feel like the lyrics written by women in the late-thirties or forties are not relevant. That they cannot relate to it. This article from The Boar from October notes how ageism is still silencing artists. I am going to move to an article that was published last week that angered me. However, it is clear ageism is a huge problem in music:

“Is this 2015? Both the media and the public slated Taylor Swift for the first 10 years of her career for being a serial dater, and now she’s happy and settled down, they’ve found something else to complain about. Even the Swifties are calling Swift out for her so-called immature lyricism on new album, The Life of a Showgirl. The song ‘Wood’ has been the worst offender, focusing on the 35-year-old’s private life with fiancé Travis Kelce.

Many have compared ‘Wood’ to the work of Sabrina Carpenter, known for her sexual innuendos and performances, arguing there is something uncomfortable about someone of Swift’s age writing songs reminiscent of her contemporaries’ work. However, The Life of a Showgirl was marketed as having the lyrics of Swift’s eighth studio album folklore, so perhaps fans are just surprised at the seemingly shallow songwriting. And they aren’t wrong, as “And you can aim for my heart, go for blood/ But you would still miss me in your bones” (‘my tears ricochet’, Taylor Swift) doesn’t scream “His love was the key that opened my thighs” (‘Wood’, Taylor Swift) to me.

Despite this, ageism is clearly an issue in the music industry. Madonna, 67, has been called out by the press endlessly for not ‘aging gracefully’, many arguing this led to her fall from grace as one of the world’s best popstars. Janet Jackson, 59, headlined the Super Bowl in 2022, yet her epic performance was overshadowed by comments about her age and suggestions that a younger artist should’ve filled the slot. The industry evidently has something against older artists, and – in particular – women.

So, is there an unfair misogynistic standard in place, or do female artists pave their own path to ambiguity? Perhaps it’s both. It could be argued artists aren’t helping themselves. Sabrina Carpenter’s latest album, Man’s Best Friend, is essentially ten sexual innuendos disguised as songs. Given her repertoire so far, she isn’t particularly building a career to last – older artists are entitled to write about all facets of their life, but Carpenter will have to diversify at some point, not due to age, but simply to maintain relevance.

Ageism has necessitated the reinvention of female artists. Kylie Minogue, for example, has delved into different facets of her identity throughout her discography to maintain popularity. Saying this, artists are expected to change and develop with age, so Minogue’s shape-shifting stage presence isn’t wholly forced – people want to see reality reflected in art. Reinvention, however, creates a sense of freshness, female artists unfortunately forced to play into innocence to stay relevant”.

Whilst that article does try and push some of the blame onto women – it was written by a man, so I am not surprised that the narrative is not as wholly supportive to women as it should be! -, there are key points raised. A double standard that does not really apply to men. As the BBC report, actor Catherine Zeta-Jones was recently subjected to ageist remarks and insults regarding her appearance when she attended an event:

“Women are rallying behind Oscar-winning actor Catherine Zeta-Jones after she faced criticism on social media over her looks at a recent red carpet event.

Zeta-Jones, 56, attended a Netflix event in Los Angeles on 9 November where a TikTok interview about her role in the latest Wednesday series was overshadowed by comments about her appearance.

Laura White, 58, and this year's winner of Miss Great Britain Classic, called the backlash "complete nonsense", adding that "men don't have this sell-by/use-by date that women do".

Beauty journalist Sali Hughes, 50, said unlike men, women were unfairly judged for ageing and Mumbles-born Zeta-Jones should be free to look however she liked.

In the video, which was also posted on Facebook and had more than 2.5m views, Zeta-Jones, who is married to actor Michael Douglas, talked about how much she enjoyed exploring her character, Morticia Addams, in season two.

But many of the hundreds of comments focused on her age and were disparaging about her appearance.

Women have defended the actor after she faced criticism over her looks.

The online backlash sparked widespread defence of Zeta-Jones, including a viral video from one Facebook user which said: "You bully women when they get too much work done and bully them when they don't have enough."

Commenters also came to her defence, with one writing: "It's called ageing naturally and she looks beautiful."

Others described her as "gorgeous" and "so pretty", while someone else said that "she looks her age - that's called reality".

Laura White says "men don't have this sell-by/use-by date that women do"

Ms White arrived for her interview at BBC Radio Wales Breakfast on Thursday makeup-free to "prove a point" and to show there was no set "template" for what a woman in her 50s should look like.

Like many women her age, she said she "takes care of herself", not to look younger but to feel "better" and look "healthy".

"Ageing is a privilege and if we can do it the best we can, that's what really matters," she added”.

I do agree that men in music and bands can face barriers regarding their age. However, consider the dynamic and make-up of modern Pop. The mainstream. When it comes to women, it is dominated by those under forty. Perhaps thirty-five and younger. Very few stations playing women of a certain age. Even music magazines do not regularly put on their cover women over the age of forty. As Lady Gaga said, when you are thirty-five or forty then you are just getting started. Your most important life events are at that age or still ahead. Having lived longer and possessing this experience and knowledge should be embraced and demanded. Instead, youth is equated to popularity and importance. As Catherine Zeta-Jones experienced, women’s looks and bodies are very much at the centre of this. It is ageism, though it is also misogyny. Women judging older women in addition to men. Zeta-Jones looks amazing and is stunning. She is an incredible actor and someone who deserves endless respect. However, for her and many women in their fifties (and younger), they are scrutinised and judged. Is social media making the situation uncontrollable?! Perhaps so. This age-old perception that women over thirty or forty are past it, irrelevant and somewhat ugly or undesirable. It is a maddening and vile mindset that needs to end. If women in music are defiant and hit back at those who marginalise them because of their age, it shouldn’t have to be that way. Why are women not afforded the same dignity – or a lack of disrespect and ageism – as men?!It does seem horrifying that women music have to encounter it. The story involving Catherine Zeta-Jones reignited this anger in me. I hope there are these new conversations where we tackle ageism and ask why women are still widely valued because of their youth and looks, whereas men are not seen in the same way. Women over thirty, forty and fifty are vital, incredible, amazing, inspiring, beautiful and hugely relevant and important. It is true across all fields of society, and especially so in music. This insulting and misogynist ageism runs rife and shows no sign or ending. The women who are subjected to this horrible judgement, criticism and sexism should be treated…

WITH greater respect.

FEATURE: How to Be Devisable: How Kate Bush’s Lyrics Mark Her Out As a Poet

FEATURE:

 

 

How to Be Devisable

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 2005/PHOTO CREDIT: Trevor Leighton

 

How Kate Bush’s Lyrics Mark Her Out As a Poet

__________

THERE is a thing with songwriters…

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1981/PHOTO CREDIT: Clive Arrowsmith

where they do not like talking about their lyrics and what they mean. I guess it is a cliché question and something that can seem reductive. The idea of songs, for many, is for the listener to get what they want from them. If you are told what the lyrics are about then it can take away the mystery. In many cases, artists do not want to reveal what the lyrics relate to, as it sort of defeats the purpose of writing songs. Having to explain what they are about. However, there are artists whose lyrics are so compelling and they write these rich and fascinating stories. Kate Bush is an artist whose lyrics are so fascinating. I was going to do an entire series where I explored the lyrics to various songs. Analysing them like poetry. Going through the lines and interpreting them. Maybe I will t a future date, though I want to frame Kate Bush as a poet. I think calling her a songwriter or artist is a disservice. In early interviews, people asked how she would like to be labelled. I think she said she was a dancer. Balking against being called an artist or a songwriter. I think of her as a director and producer. A creator and innovator. In terms of her songs, I do feel they are poems. You look at various lines and are blown away. Bush might not object to that, as her brother John wrote poetry and opened her eyes to it. Often quite dark or sexual, she was exposed to this extraordinary poetry. So advanced and powerful, she wrote poetry when she was at school. Even if some of her early attempts were not great, she definitely had a gift. That translated naturally into songwriting.

One might say that all songwriters are poets. I would disagree. There are a select few that have this ability to create these potent and tangible words. Write in such a way that you are transported into the song and the lines stay with you for so long. I feel I might expand on this, however, I have been spotlighting some of her songs in various features and am always struck by the words. You can buy her lyrics book, How to Be Invisible. This is a selection of Kate Bush’s songs, where you really get to focus on the lyrics. We do not discuss Kate Bush’s lyrics enough. The Guardian wrote a feature in 2018, where writers chose their favourite Kate Bush lyrics. There are some great examples. I love this one from Aerial’s A Coral Room: “My mother/And her little brown jug/It held her milk”. In terms of my favourite, or the one I think is most poetic, it is very hard to narrow it down. However, I have been thinking about her most recent album, 2011’s 50 Words for Snow. Seven beautiful tracks whose words are so powerful and stunning, I especially love what Bush writes on the final track, Among Angels. Going beyond the realm of songwriting and what her peers were producing, consider these lines: “And they will carry you o’er the walls/If you need us, just call/Rest your weary world in their hands/Lay your broken laugh at their feet/I can see angels around you”. My wider point is, rather than narrow down or define her, we must consider these different aspects of Kate Bush. I feel very strongly that she is a poet.

Like a truly great poet, Kate Bush touches the heart and soul. Even when she is being personal, there is something that is universal or can be understood by readers. Bring them into the poems, if that makes sense?! I have been thinking about these lines from All We Ever Look for from Never for Ever: “The whims that we’re weeping for/Our parents would be beaten for/Leave the breast/And then the rest/And then regret you ever left”. Not only do you dissect the lines and are fascinated by them. I think there is also a very strong visual hit. How you imagine scenes or images. How to Be Invisible is a wonderful book. However, there are so many examples beyond that you could examine. The final song from Aerial, the title track, is euphoric and epic. These lines are so striking: “Oh the dawn has come/And the song must be sung/And the flowers are melting/What kind of language is this?”. I am so keen to look inside the lines and explore deeper meanings. In a future feature, I am going to write why we need a podcast series where the songs and albums of Kate Bush are covered in more detail. There are one or two out there that relate to her music but, when it comes to taking apart songs, talking about events around particular songs and albums and that sort of thing, there is not too much out there. In 2018, The Guardian reacted to the news of Kate Bush releasing a book of lyrics. They argued that the songs and lyrics lose their magic and impact when written down:

“Not all of it does. The best way to test what sort of pop qualifies is to publish a book of your lyrics. Neil Tennant has a Faber volume on the way, entitled One Hundred Lyrics and a Poem. Ian Curtis had his immortalised as part of the same series. Now, Kate Bush is to join them with her own anthology: How to Be Invisible, published in December, with an introduction by David “Cloud Atlas” Mitchell.

Bush named her first hit after a school set text, which is a great way to get everyone to think you’re some kind of poet, the sort of person who reads for fun or something. She also wrote a lot of songs that need to be written down to be seen for their full oddness. Cloudbusting, don’t forget, is about a man struggling to recollect the time that his father was arrested for trying to build a rain-making machine. Yes. Breathing is written from the perspective of a foetus during nuclear war. Hounds of Love is about that picture of dogs playing poker. It isn’t, but you get the point. Even then, lines that work on record don’t always seem the same when written down. Her Mrs Bartolozzi is a deft sketch of the drudgery of the housewife, with dabs of Mrs Dalloway. But on the page, it’s hard to justify charging us £19.99 to read: “Slooshy sloshy slooshy sloshy / Get that dirty shirty clean / Slooshy sloshy slooshy sloshy”.

The difference is that once they’re presented on the page, you are forced to read the words top-to-bottom, whereas most good pop songs aren’t end-to-end pieces so much as elegant compilations of slogans”.

I would disagree with all of that. Even that slightly silly section from Mrs. Bartolozzi compels various thoughts, angles and views. You are affected by the way Kate Bush sings the lines on the record, through when you see the lyrics written down, there is this unmoving and static quality. You are seeing it as poetry rather than music. It allows you to think more widely and deeply about a song and its line. It creates this incredible power. Whereas a lot of Pop lyrics are hollow and generic, Bush is a writer who is a poet or screenwriter. Rich with characters and incredible and imaginative thoughts, Kate Bush did say in a 1980 interview how she admired Captain Beefheart and felt he was this natural poet. Something she has brought into her work. This fascinating and thought-provoking article from The Poetry Society from 2018 makes a case that Kate Bush is a poet. Or that her work feels like poetry:

“I’m going to make a rash assumption that you find the ‘are lyrics poetry’ debate as tedious as I do. In which case, that musicians P.J. Harvey and Florence Welch have both published books that feature their poetry may not have excited you all that much. Welch’s Useless Magic, published this summer, combines her lyrics and poetry with sketches and artwork. The Hollow of the Hand, a collaborative work of poems and photography by P.J. Harvey and Seamus Murphy, appeared in 2015. Now Kate Bush has published the first collection of her lyrics, How To Be Invisible. Unlike the other two books, Kate Bush’s is not explicitly positioned as poetry, though there is plenty to support the argument that that’s what it contains: list poems, blackbird song re-imagined in language, repetition and rhyme, even VisPo. My position is that lyrics need the music to reach their magic. My position is that Kate Bush has boundless magic.

How To Be Invisible takes its title from a song on Kate’s 2005 album Aerial. When the album was released, a review in the Observer described it as “an incantation to female self-effacement”, with the witches’ eye of newt speech from Macbeth rewritten as a spell for invisibility. ‘How to be Invisible’ was my spur: I took Kate’s “Stem of wallflower / Hair of doormat” lyric as the title for a woozy poem (published in The Poetry Review and in my recent collection). Kate’s incantatory lyrics became my own spell for super-heightened senses – a provocation for how you might experience the world free from a male gaze. More recently, Kate made her way into another of the poems in my book, where I found the lyric “Diving off a rock, into another moment” eking its way into the speaker of the poem’s mind. What might this “diving off a rock” be, if not a plunge into senses?

How To Be Invisible reveals the strange patterns of imagery and recurring motifs you’d notice in a poet’s collected works. One of my favourite of Kate’s lyrics, from the thrilling ‘Cloudbusting’, is: “You’re like my yo-yo / That glowed in the dark // What made it special / Made it dangerous / So I bury it and forget.” The invisible, the inexplicably arcane, is what scares, and delights, Kate most: in ‘The Ninth Wave’ sequence on Hounds of Love she’s “under ice”; on Aerial she magics herself invisible. There is the mercurial weather of her imagery: her sky and sea of honey, her fog, her thunder, her clouds busting into rain and a whole album musing on snow.

Then there is the role of colour in her songs. On the cover of Hounds of Love Kate is swathed in shades of violet (an almost glow-in-the-dark violet) which has my brain reaching for Sappho’s “violets in her lap”. The colours recall a scene from the film The Red Shoes (which inspired Kate’s 1993 album of the same name) in which ballet dancer Vicky Paige appears in a Hounds of Love-coloured jacket, her hair the deep autumn of Kate Bush’s. In one of her most tender songs, ‘A Coral Room’, Kate sings of her mother and her little brown jug: “Little brown jug, don’t I love thee?” she sings to a nursery rhyme melody. A popular poetry workshop exercise is to write a poem inspired by an object; I imagine a poem called ‘The little brown jug’. As I dream of a poet singing that line, the melody as an interruption to a poem, I feel a cascade of blood in my heart”.

Rather then me, yes, arguing tediously that music can be poetry, when it comes to Kate Bush, I am suggesting her music goes far beyond the page. Labelled as eccentric, weird and pigeonholed by so many, just listen through her studio albums and you have such a diversity of sounds and words. The way she writes lyrics is much more akin to poetry than traditional songwriting. In that you are arrested by her words and want to go deeper. When it comes to Kate Bush’s lyrics, I find them…

SO startling and spellbind.

FEATURE: The Great American Songbook: Otis Redding

FEATURE:

 

 

The Great American Songbook

PHOTO CREDIT: The Everett Collection

 

Otis Redding

__________

I have written about…

PHOTO CREDIT: Getty Images

Otis Redding before, but more in the context of specific albums. Now, I am including him in this The Great American Songbook. Before getting to a mixtape of twenty Otis Redding songs, I want to bring in an article from The New Yorker. They note how, even though he died at the age of twenty-six, Redding was beloved and regarded as one of the greatest and most important singers of his generation. He created a revolution in his brief life:

“In an age of pop culture replete with African-American superstars like Michael Jackson, Prince, Usher, Kanye West, and Jay-Z, it is hard for modern audiences to appreciate how revolutionary the self-presentations of soul singers like Otis Redding were when they first came on the scene. Prior to the mid-fifties, it had simply been taboo for a black man to perform in an overtly sexualized manner in front of a white audience in America. (Female black entertainers, by contrast, had been all but required to do so.) In the South, especially, the social psychology of the Jim Crow regime was founded on a paranoid fantasy of interracial rape that was institutionalized by the press and popular culture in the malignant stereotype of the “black brute,” which explicitly sexualized the threat posed by black men to white women and white supremacy. Born in Georgia in 1941, the same year as Emmett Till, Otis Redding grew up in a world where any “suggestive” behavior by a black male in the presence of whites was potentially suicidal.

This dire imperative began to change with the proliferation of black-oriented radio stations, in the nineteen-fifties, which enabled rhythm-and-blues singers like Fats Domino, Little Richard, and Ray Charles to sell large numbers of their records, sight unseen, to white teen-agers. Yet it was significant that these early black crossover stars were piano players, who performed behind keyboards, and whose sexuality was further qualified, in Domino’s case, by his corpulence; in Charles’s case, by his blindness; and, in Richard’s case, by the effeminacy that he deliberately played up as a way of neutering the threat of his outlandish stage presence. It was no accident that the one black crossover star of the nineteen-fifties who made no effort to qualify his sexuality, the guitarist Chuck Berry, was also the one black star to be arrested, convicted, and imprisoned, in 1960, on a trumped-up morals charge. By that time, a new contingent of black singers led by Sam Cooke and Jackie Wilson was making its mark on white listeners with a more polished style of self-presentation that became the model for Berry Gordy’s carefully choreographed Motown groups.

Otis Redding was something else again. When he came up, in 1962, he was a completely unschooled performer who stood stock still onstage as he sang the pining, courtly ballads that brought him his first success. Over time, however, as his repertoire broadened to include driving, up-tempo songs, Redding found a way to use his imposing size and presence as a foil for his heartfelt emotionality, eschewing the conventions of graceful stagecraft in favor of a raw physicality that earned him comparisons to athletes like the football star Jim Brown. Marching in place to keep pace with the beat, pumping his fists in the air, striding across stages with a long-legged gait that parodied his “down home” origins, Redding’s confident yet unaffected eroticism epitomized the African-American ideal of a “natural man.” White audiences of the time had never seen anything like it. The effect was so powerful that Bob Weir, of the Grateful Dead, said, of Redding’s performance at the Monterey Pop Festival, “I was pretty sure I’d seen God onstage.”

And then he was no more. Redding’s sudden death thrust him into the ranks of a mythic group of musical performers that included Bix Beiderbecke, Robert Johnson, Hank Williams, Charlie Parker, Buddy Holly, Patsy Cline, and Redding’s own favorite, Sam Cooke––artists whose careers ended not only before their time but in their absolute prime, when there was every reason to expect that their finest work was yet to come. (Eerily, within a few years, he would be joined in this company by two of his co-stars at Monterey, Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin.) Redding’s record labels, Stax and Atlantic, culled enough material from the unmixed and unfinished tracks he recorded in the fall of 1967 to release a series of singles and albums in the years ahead. Some of these records, such as the singles “Hard to Handle,” “I’ve Got Dreams to Remember” (co-written with his wife, Zelma), and “Love Man,” stood with his very best work. But, inevitably, they still only hinted at what might have been. The informality of the Stax studio had afforded Redding the freedom to function, uncredited, as the producer and arranger on the records he made there. There is no question that he would have continued in this vein, blazing a path that musical auteurs like Sly Stone, Marvin Gaye, and Stevie Wonder would follow with the self-produced albums that established them as mainstream pop stars, in the late nineteen-sixties and early seventies.

In 2007, forty years on, a panel of artists, critics, and music-business professionals assembled by Rolling Stone ranked Otis Redding eighth on a list of the “100 Greatest Singers of All Time.” This placed him in a constellation of talent that included his contemporaries Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles, Sam Cooke, Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, and James Brown, who together represented the greatest generation of church-bred African-American singers in the history of popular music. What distinguished Redding in this august company was the heartbreaking brevity of his career. In his five short years as a professional entertainer, his incomparable voice and vocal persona established him as soul music’s foremost apostle of devotion, a singer who implored his listeners to “try a little tenderness” with a ferocity that defied the meaning of the word. His singular combination of strength and sensitivity, dignity and self-discipline, made him the musical embodiment of the “soul force” that Martin Luther King, Jr., extolled in his epic “I Have a Dream” speech as the African-American counterweight to generations of racist oppression. In the way he looked and the way he sang and the way he led his tragically unfinished life, this princely son of Georgia sharecroppers was a one-man repudiation of the depraved doctrine of “white supremacy,” whose dark vestiges still contaminate our world”.

Inspiring generations of artists through multiple genres, Otis Redding’s legacy is immense and unending. Most of you will probably know about Redding and his bigger hits. However, I shall bring in a couple of lesser-known songs. Even though we lost this great man nearly six decades ago, it is clear that his…

LEGEND lives on.

FEATURE: Leaving It Open: Kate Bush and Technology Changing Her Voice and Opening Possibilities

FEATURE:

 

 

Leaving It Open

PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush

 

Kate Bush and Technology Changing Her Voice and Opening Possibilities

__________

ALTHOUGH Kate Bush…

changed her voice naturally and did move away from the tones and styles of her earliest albums, The Dreaming is the first album where you can really feel Bush’s voice shift. I think that technology was responsible for that to an extent. In this interview from Electronics & Music Maker published in October 1982, there was this discussion about Bush’s vocal style and how technology helped shape that. I do love how there was this greater experimentation and depth. I wonder whether Bush’s greater fascination with percussion and technology such as the Fairlight CMI meant that her voice naturally lowered. Even if there are moments where her voice is higher, for the most part, you can feel a shift from 1980’s Never for Ever:

“How did you get on with rhythm machines?

It took me quite a while to get used to working with them because they seemed very limiting. I like rhythms to 'move', especially in the ballad songs where the tempo would ebb and flow with the words, stopping and slowing down as necessary. Suddenly, having to work with a very strict rhythm, I found it almost impossible at first to tie myself down to the rigid beat. Once I had got used to this, I found that I could work 'in between' the beats.

Do you work up from the root and then add the third and the fifth?

No, I never work that way — I just go for what sounds right, and never think technically about thirds and fifths, because very often I think fourths and sixths could be better. I like to use parallel movement for a more medieval feel and I also sing unrelated notes against the harmony, say dropping semitones, which help to create a lot of tension. But I do try to avoid thinking about the technical things when I'm working — it's afterwards that I like to think about those aspects.

For the male voice parts, I just sing to them what I want them to do and I tell them the particular phraseology and timing, then they go out and do it, while I oversee it in the mixing room. I'm lucky in that they're not really session singers but more friends with good voices.

Your vocal melodies are very original and there's a recognisable style of swooping pitch glissandos, acciaccatura vocal decoration plus a preference for 3rd/root jumps. Then of course you have an extremely wide pitch range.

In fact, I've stretched the pitch range over the years. What I used to do in my earlier performing was to go for notes higher than I could reach easily in the song, so by the time I'd written the song and played it for a good few days I could actually reach those notes. By making my writing more acrobatic than I was, I was stretching myself to it — it's something that's grown over the years. Definitely my voice has got stronger in the last two years, because on 'The Dreaming' I was so aware of the difference in my voice. Not only is it much stronger, but it is also more controlled

It has been frustrating for me in the past because my voice has never sounded the way I wanted it to and so whenever I was listening to the albums it was unbearable for me. It was not just the weakness but the style of it. I've always tried to get my voice the way it's starting to be now. Because the songs always controlled me, they were always tending to be in a higher range — it sounds strange but I think that when you write songs, very often you don't have control of them. You can guide them, but they have their own life force really.

My use of decorative notes probably comes from Irish music — my mother's Irish — and in my childhood my brothers were very into traditional music and we could hear it in the house all the time. The airs and inflections are beautiful and I love Irish singing. On the 'Night of the Swallows' Liam O'Flynn plays the Uillean pipes and the penny whistle, to give this track an Irish flavour.
I think my use of thirds is because in a lot of songs there are times when I want it to sound like someone actually talking rather than singing. There are things that you say that often people don't put into songs and I quite like to use those lines. Quite often when people speak they naturally use the 'third to root' pitch change in their voices — little tension marks that take it up a couple of tones.

Another interesting aspect of your singing style is the way you change your voice tone.

I purposely try to do that because I do feel that every song comes from a different person really, so this is one way of making something different about it. I like to 'create' voices — I've been trying this over the years. I often find that I do 'word painting' without realising and my singing/speech style probably comes from the Irish influence again.

Sometimes I don't think the words are important and I'll just use sound shapes, which establish the mood. The lyrics of the lead vocal are awfully important to me while the backing vocals are very often just trying to create a picture (as in 'The Dreaming', with "na na - cha chan cha cha -") I hardly ever use the Vocoder — only once for a tiny effect on 'Babooshka' (Never For Ever LP) to make the drum sound like the title.

We've been experimenting a lot with effects units — particularly the flanger, to get different textures with the voices. In several of the songs there are at least four or five layers of voices. In order to have them not sounding like one clump, we've had to try and separate them by treating them and playing them carefully in the stereo field. Some have more reverb or more echo than others too”

As producer on The Dreaming and having all this technology at her fingertips, Kate Bush did have more creative flexibility. Not just in terms of giving her voice more dynamic range and adding different textures. The interviewer noted how The Dreaming is an album with a much stronger vocal feel. Bush said how vocals have always been important, though they are more at the forefront here. Maybe it is not only her vocal range that was strengthened and widened by technology. In terms of how she could manipulate her voice and create this cast of characters. Not that Bush used the Fairlight CMI to manipulate her voice too much. However, she was able to manipulate, process, and layer her vocals in innovative ways, treating her voice as an instrument for experimental soundscapes and theatrical effects. Also, when thinking about the kit Bush was using and the effects available to her, it did give her music greater diversity and nuance. It was present on Never for Ever but also strongly continued on 1985’s Hounds of Love. Technology did give Bush license to distort, loop, reverse, and manipulate her vocals. Creating these new characters and conjuring all these different emotions and angles, she had a lot more freedom than on previous albums. Bush did naturally give her voice a lower and more masculine energy. Something more percussive and edgier. The Dreaming was the first album where Bush got her voice to where she wanted it to be. In that Electronics & Music Maker interview, Bush did say “It has been frustrating for me in the past because my voice has never sounded the way I wanted it to and so whenever I was listening to the albums it was unbearable for me”. The Dreaming has her largest cast of characters to date.

Rather than her pushing away from the personal, I think that Bush might have been trying to affect a style on her first few albums. Even if she was younger and had a higher pitch to her voice, I do feel like Bush was maybe expected to be more feminine to fit in. Few female artists in the mainstream who had the sort of vocal tones and range we hear on The Dreaming. Being piano-based, the vocals then suited the style of the songs. However, pushing more away from the piano and utilising the options electronic technology afforded was greatly beneficial to Bush’s songwriting. In terms of what she could write. Broader and more experimental, I do feel like the vocals on The Dreaming are fascinating. Maybe technology allowed Bush to find peace in herself. Definitely when it came to her voice. As this article from, Classic Pop explains, “She even, finally, liked hearing her own voice. Often “consciously aggressive”, Bush’s themes, ever-darkening since Lionheart with their “grotesque beauty” and “sad humour,” were matched by the sound”. Bush definitely did stop working with musicians and leaned entirely on technology. Instead., she had at her fingertips this arsenal of sounds and effects. Combined with that was this determination from Bush to push her voice and break from the past. In September, Classical Music discussed The Dreaming. How Bush was more like an actor in terms of how she wrote and performed.

She inhabited all these characters and, with it, there were more accents, inflections and a broader range. Consider how different Leave It Open sounds compared to Get Out of My House:

“Where her earlier albums often centred on piano-led songs embellished with lush orchestration, The Dreaming was built from snippets of manipulated sound: didgeridoos, processed percussion, donkey brays, glass smashing, and voices twisted into strange new forms. It wasn’t just music – it was sound design as pop art.

Bush’s songwriting on The Dreaming was equally audacious. Each track functions like a self-contained movie, often narrated by unusual characters. 'There Goes a Tenner' channels the wide-eyed panic of a botched bank heist. 'Pull Out the Pin' adopts the perspective of a Vietnamese soldier confronting an American invader, with the refrain “I love life” snarled against pounding drums. The title track merges Australian Aboriginal mythology with a claustrophobic sonic landscape of didgeridoo drones and samples that crash like thunder.

Bush uses her voice like an actor uses a costume, morphing from character to character: shrieking, whispering, laughing, or breaking into exaggerated accents. It’s a record less concerned with melody or polish than with total immersion”.

That idea of total immersion. I had never really considered that. How Bush wanted to create a soundscape or this aural experience, rather than a traditional album. I do feel Bush approached her albums like films. The Dreaming is her first huge leap. A conscious shift in her vocal tone to a lower register, technology did help facilitate this. It also meant that Bush could manipulate and bend her voice. I have spent quite a bit of tiume with The Dreaming recently. Rather than speak about the brilliance of the album, instead, I wanted to explore the technology and how Bush’s voice deepened and widened. It is a fascinating change. Maybe inspired by artists like David Bowie and Peter Gabriel for different reasons, The Dreaming was an album that established Bush as a true innovator and one of the most distinct artists of her generation. If critics were baffled by The Dreaming in 1982, in years since, there has been more love for the album. The masterpiece deserves…

ALL the love in the world.

FEATURE: Dancing Shoes: Arctic Monkeys’ Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not at Twenty

FEATURE:

 

 

Dancing Shoes

 

Arctic Monkeys’ Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not at Twenty

__________

THIS must rank alongside…

the best, most influential and important debut albums of the past twenty years. On 23rd January, Arctic Monkeys’ Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not turns twenty. Led by the brilliant Alex Turner – a genius poetical mind whose lyrics offer this relatable and compelling glimpse into everything from modern youth to faded dreams -, the Sheffield band released this complete and astonishing debut. Preceded by two incredible singles, I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor and When the Sun Goes Down, Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not went to number one in the U.K. The quartet of Alex Turner, Jamie Cook, Andy Nicholson and Matt Helders released this ageless masterpiece. The songs still sound so engrossing and playable. The nuance of the compositions and the beauty and wit of Alex Turner’s lyrics and vocals. Named Album of the Year by, among others, Time and NME, it also won awards at the BRITs and GRAMMYs. It also won the 2006 Mercury Prize. Proof that this album was something very special. The astonishing accolades and incredible commercial is wholly justified! However, whereas some bands would crumble under the pressure and rush-released a follow-up, Arctic Monkeys put out an equally brilliant but different album, Favourite Worst Nightmare, in 2007. They are still together today, and they headlined at Glastonbury in 2023. 2022’s The Car is their most recent album, though you feel they may release another this year. There are few bands as consistent and intelligent as Arctic Monkeys.

As Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not celebrates twenty years on 23rd January, I want to explore the album through features and reviews. I want to start with a feature from 2016. A decade after one of the greatest debut albums of modern times, we learn how Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not started life. It was not the case the band came onto the scene and were instantly brilliant. There were a few years of them finding their feet and honing their craft:

“They were rubbish,” friend and fellow musician John McClure remembered when asked how the Arctic Monkeys were during their early years. “But you knew they had something… It was pretty shambolic, but at the same time there was an x-factor there. You could tell they had something going on.”

Incredibly, at the beginning of this year their debut Whatever People Say I Am That’s What I’m Not turned ten years old. It would be an album which arrived amongst almost rabid fever pitch, as fans and media alike all wanted a piece of British music’s next ‘big thing.’

The quartet had spent the previous few years firstly learning how to play their instruments, and then travelling around the country performing at any pubs or clubs that would have them. From there, they gradually stumbled upon a sound and identity which would go on to see them release a generation-defining and chart-topping debut. But just how did the four teenagers from Sheffield do it?

All four members; Alex Turner, Matt Helders, Jamie Cook and Andy Nicholson had agreed to commit a year, before they went off to university and full-time work, to try and make it as a band. Early on their set lists were littered with covers of The White Stripes and Jimi Hendrix, alongside a few of their originals. But it wasn’t until one chance night in Turner’s local pub where he found himself watching punk poet John Cooper Clarke that things really began to come together. A self-professed tipping point for the aspiring singer, it was from here where he began to emulate the poet’s unique literary style within his own burgeoning lyric writing.

“One night it was The Fall playing, and Johnny Clarke was opening. He came on with a plastic bag full of these scraps of paper. His hair was branching off, and he had these little blue glasses and drainpipe pants,” Turner told Spin. “It was like, ‘What is that?’ And it just blew my mind, I couldn’t stop watching. Guinness was overflowing all over my hand. It was just one of those moments.”

Around this time the band began to record their first demos, which they funded themselves as they all held down regular part-time jobs in the meantime. It was these which gained them the attention of manager, Geoff Barradale, who signed them after only their third gig together. And finally it was through him and his industry connections that they were able to make a string of other demos which then catapulted them into the public’s attention.

The album made an instant connection as it was the sound of youth distilled into music. There was angst, enthusiasm, mistakes, obnoxiousness, excitement, trouble, arguments and naivety almost at every turn. It captured the zeitgeist of those adolescent moments so well in fact, that Turner has admitted at times throughout his career he and the band have struggled to perform the songs live.

“It certainly feels like we’re doing a cover version to some extent. But it’s the best cover version anyone’s going to get,” he told Billboard. “The thing that gave that first record its oomph was the fact that we were playing to the very limits of our abilities from the moment the album starts. All that enthusiasm and naivety cannot be replicated.”

After their first single I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor went straight to number one in the UK, it was clear that the band were about to live up to the hype. The NME championed them as “our generation’s most important band” and the mad scramble to find out anything and everything about them got underway. However, the one story that emerged out of the hype fully-formed was that they were the first band from the Internet to make it big. They were dubbed as a ‘Myspace band’ and their success was seen as either a novelty or a danger to the entire music industry, depending on who you believed”.

I am going to come to a feature from Far Out Magazine from 2021. Marking fifteen years of Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not, I do wonder how people will reflect on this album for its twentieth anniversary. How Arctic Monkeys look back on that time now. It was clear that the band made a huge impact on a generation. They were speaking for them and gave them a voice. I think that is still happening today:

“For those who were gladly awoken and swept up in this new wave of indie rock, it suddenly not only made sense of the working-class adolescence that lay ahead but coloured it with the fluorescent palette of piled-up passions. The visceral imagery in Turner’s early trademark tirades of snarling slack-jawed tongue-lashings was not just the sort that you could easily absorb and cast into a movie-of-the-mind, it was more so the prose material for an auteur director to tell the very tale of the life you were living. It certainly wasn’t dull realism either; it held all the power of a punch-up and all the drama that the fateful crossroads a coming-of-age proves to be. Those burly bothersome bouncers and weekend rockstars were not just people you could imagine, but gals and guys you, unfortunately, knew by name. Turner took-up where his hero John Cooper Clarke had left off, who in turn had been inspired by the soot-covered sonnets of Baudelaire, making Al just the latest in a long line of loveable reprobate reveller’s from the demimonde to propagate the poetry of the street, his wordplay very much the ingrained language of youth culture.

They were a band that only five years earlier had first picked up their instruments and in that short time curated the competency in musical craft to concoct thunderous crescendo’s like ‘A Certain Romance’ and race through the power chords and pentatonic that gives ‘Dancefloor’ its rhythm, yet still exudes the green-as-grass enthusiasm of lads very new to the field. From that very first drum blasting blitzkrieg of ‘A View From’ the romping energy never lets up, but beneath the blood guts and vitriol, there’s a reverie of melody that seems to capture the in-house nostalgia of memories not yet made, that sepia-toned sanguine feeling, that seemingly abides through youth until those wistful daydreams never matched, crystalise as the real thing in the lines around the eyes of adulthood. It is an album that smacks of adolescence, like an uppercut of post-pubescent exuberance to the jaw, ringing out a lyrical verse from the always wet but never rainy nights under the streetlight glow.

Not only was it relatable, but it was also this infectious feel that made it resonate with so many. It vibrates on the same frequency as those first furious fistfuls of goodtime snatched in the booze-fuelled bliss of weekends cathartically contrasting to all the unsalvageable memory-less days of unaccounted for deadtime in the Monday-to-Friday hours of moments passing but seemingly bereft of life. It’s not just the soundtrack inexorably woven into these weekends but in some mad way the very raucous echo of all that fuck-about fun. The album was far from a mournful forecast of the adult life the average working-class youth had to look forward to, but rather a more hopeful race to the next weekend. The songs smell of menthol cigarettes and taste of near-poisonous 2-for-1s, without ever being crass or cringe-inducing like the cheap imitations that would follow, stinking of too much antiperspirant and put-upon swagger.

The legacy of Whatever People Say I Am seems not only to be the arrival of a new generation but also the departure of the last of its kind. The scene now seems so devoid of a mainstream conquering voice that connects with youth or a coherent trend for the kids to cling to.

This may partly be owing to the industries reluctance to invest in self-fashioned scoundrels, in favour of more reliable engines of income, but this current lack of a culturally synonymous music scene has uniquely permeated the era as a whole. After all, it would seem since the advent of pop culture and history has ostensibly been defined much more so by music than politics or world events. You hear ‘the sixties’ and one of the first words brought to mind is ‘swinging’ – running alongside the apocalyptical tragedies of that decade is the great jaunt of peace and love, high on war surplus and psychedelics. And so on… all the way up to 15 years ago with the hair-bear-bunch of swept fringes, skinny jeans and fuzz-pedalled production. Following that, it seems to be a lot harder to identify prevailing music cultures, simply because there doesn’t seem to have been one”.

I am going to end with a feature from MOJO, where we hear about the making of a classic. Matt Helders from the band looks back at their 2006 debut. How it took off and was this huge sensation. But the band wanted to move on, as they had been living with the songs for over a year at that point. I will move to The Guardian, and their 2006 five-star review for Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not:

“Their debut album suggests there is plenty more that is remarkable about Arctic Monkeys. In recent years, British rock has sought to be all-inclusive, cravenly appealing to the widest audience possible. Oasis started the trend, hooking mums and dads with familiar-sounding riffs and "classic" influences, but it has reached its apotheosis with Coldplay, who write lyrics that deal only in the vaguest generalities, as if anything too specific might alienate potential record buyers. Over the course of Whatever People Say ..., you can hear the generation gap opening up again: good news if you think rock music should be an iconoclastic, progressive force, rather than a branch of the light entertainment industry.

Alex Turner can write lyrics that induce a universal shudder of recognition: Britain's male population may grimace as one at the simmering domestic row depicted in Mardy Bum ("You're all argumentative, and you've got the face on"). For the most part, however, anyone over 30 who finds themselves reflected in Turner's stories of alcopop-fuelled punch-ups and drunken romantic lunges in indie clubs should consider turning the album off and having a long, quiet think about where their life is heading.

Meanwhile, Arctic Monkeys' sound is based entirely on music from the past five years. The laconic, distorted vocals bear the influence of the Strokes. The choppy punk-funk guitars have been filtered through Franz Ferdinand, the frantic rhythms and dashes of ska come via the Libertines. Turner's refusal to tone down his dialect probably wouldn't have happened without the Wearside-accented Futureheads. Thrillingly, their music doesn't sound apologetic for not knowing the intricacies of rock history, nor does it sound wistful for a rose-tinted past its makers were too young to experience. Instead, Arctic Monkeys bundle their influences together with such compelling urgency and snotty confidence that they sound like a kind of culmination: the band all the aforementioned bands have been leading up to.

You could argue that, musically, there's nothing genuinely new here. But you'd be hard-pushed to convince anyone that Whatever People Say ... is not possessed of a unique character, thanks to Turner, who comes equipped with a brave, unflinching eye for detail (in Red Light Indicates Doors Are Secured, a taxi queue erupts into violence amid anti-Catholic invective), a spring-loaded wit (Fake Tales of San Francisco advises hipsters to "gerroff the bandwagon, put down the 'andbook") and a panoply of verbal tics that are, as he would put it, proper Yorkshire: the words "reet", "summat" and "'owt" have never appeared in such profusion outside of the Woolpack.

He's also capable of more than one-liners. A Certain Romance is an insightful, oddly moving dissection of the chav phenomenon. It keeps spitting bile at a culture where "there's only music so there's new ringtones", then retracting it a few lines later - "of course, it's all OK to carry on that way" - as if the narrator is torn between contempt and class solidarity. Eventually, the latter wins out: "Over there, there's friends of mine, what can I say, I've known them for a long time," he sings. "You just cannot get angry in the same way." It certainly beats guffawing at chavscum.com.

At moments like that, Whatever People Say ... defies you not to join in the general excitement, but it's worth sounding a note of caution. We have been here before, a decade ago: critics and public united behind some cocky, working-class northern lads who seemed to tower effortlessly over their competition. The spectre of Oasis lurks around Arctic Monkeys, proof that even the most promising beginnings can turn into a dreary, reactionary bore. For now, however, they look and sound unstoppable”.

Speaking with MOJO, Matt Helders (Arctic Monkeys’ drummer) told how this new and loyal; Internet following and two incredible singles helped propel Arctic Monkeys and their debut album to these incredible heights. Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not became the fastest-selling debut album in U.K. history. You can see why people fell for the band and connected with the album so hard in 2006. Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not arrived at the prefect time and captured the imagination of millions:

“The first thing we released ourselves was Fake Tales Of San Francisco and From The Ritz To The Rubble. That’s when I remember thinking that the lyrics had stepped up a bit. I knew exactly what Alex was referring to because we were all experiencing the same thing. Now it’s more ambiguous, and in some ways more personal, but then he was writing for us and our friends. When we first recorded them and heard them back that’s when I realised, ‘Oh wow, he can really put some words together!’ A song like A Certain Romance was so personal to us, but Alex articulated it in a way that I could never have done.

Much like when the internet stuff took off for us, it wasn’t this master plan or a stroke of genius. Writing about what we knew seemed like the natural thing to do. We were all into American hip-hop at the time and that’s what the American rappers we were listening to would do. We had other influences like The Smiths and Elvis Costello so fortunately we didn’t go too much in that direction and end up being a really terrible nu-metal band.

We had nothing to do with the whole MySpace thing, a friend of ours just stuck ripped the MP3 and stuck them up on this site. We had no clue. People talked about us making it outside of the music industry, but we just thought that’s how you did it. We didn’t know anyone else in a band.

I didn’t feel any pressure going in to record the debut album, but I don’t know if, again, that’s because we were in the eye of the storm. I remember we had a friend who came into the studio and he said, ‘I bet your first single goes top 10’. We were like, there is no way that will happen, we’re just an indie band. I said to him, ‘If we ever get to Number 1 I’ll play a gig in just my football shorts and nothing else.’ It comes out and goes straight to number one. I did it, I kept my end of the bargain up.

We were just focused on what we were doing and had no expectations of what that album would become. It was hard to comprehend what it meant. We were all on tour and together and it felt like the whole country was buzzing about this thing. None of us expected it. We put out an EP three months later [Who The F*** Are The Arctic Monkeys?], we were just keen to move on. We’d lived with the songs on the first record for over a year and were writing new ones. We had the conversation to move straight on to the second album. Even if we never made an album that was as successful as that ever again, we needed to leave it where it was and move on. We could have made the same thing again or toured that album for three years, but for us it was more exciting to try something new.

It is funny when people get annoyed when you do something new or different. ‘Oh, they’ve changed, they don’t do this anymore!’ All those old records still exist, they’re still available to listen to and we’ll play some of them. If you want to come along with us on this journey then great, if you don’t that’s fine too”.

I am going to leave things there. On 23rd January, we celebrate Arctic Monkeys’ Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not twentieth anniversary. Without doubt one of the greatest albums ever released, it is still widely played and discussed today. If you have not heard it, then do go and seek it out. So many iconic songs. Aside from I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor and Fake Tales of San Francisco, there is the amazing opener, The View from the Afternoon. The epic When the Sun Goes Down. Astonishing deeper cuts like Still Take You Home and Dancing Shoes. The wonderful Mardy Bum. In a year when so many exceptional albums were released, nothing in 2006 could match Arctic Monkeys’…

SEISMIC debut album.

FEATURE: Truly, All the Love! Why The Dreaming Is the Most Influential Kate Bush Album of 2025

FEATURE:

 

 

Truly, All the Love!

 

Why The Dreaming Is the Most Influential Kate Bush Album of 2025

__________

ONE may naturally assume that…

IN THIS PHOTO: Florence + The Machine’s Florence Welch/PHOTO CREDIT: Autumn de Wilde

Hounds of Love is always the most influential album from Kate Bush. In terms of its prominence and genius, it is her best-known and most successful album. So many artists cite it as an influence. There is no doubting that it is a masterpiece. It turned forty back in September and, with it, a fresh wave of appreciation. I previously talked about artists today who are very much inspired by Kate Bush. How some of the best albums of this year in fact were made by artists who are fans of Kate Bush. Maybe The Last Dinner Party look more to Kate Bush’s earlier albums when it comes to influence from her, though I think the album I am about to mention is on their radar. The same goes for Florence + The Machine. You might think Hounds of Love or even The Kick Inside (her 1978 debut) would be the go-to. Even though Taylor Swift’s The Life of a Showgirl was not great and got mixed reviews, the cover definitely tied to Hounds of Love. Specifically, the back cover, which was shot by John Carder Bush. Taylor Swift very much replicating that. I stated how, late in 2023, Dua Lipa released a song called Houdini, which shares its title with a song by Kate Bush. That is from an album which I think is the most influential of this year. It is 1982’s The Dreaming. In fact, one that has inspired by Dua Lipa. She has been performing this year, and one feels there might be another album next year. I suspect that we will get shades of The Dreaming on that album. Houdini appeared on The Dreaming. It is my favourite song from Kate Bush, and one that I could study and dissect endlessly. It is a fascinating track. The album itself is only ten songs long. Some might say that this is a perfect length.

In spite of the fact The Dreaming has fewer tracks that some of Kate Bush’s albums – Hounds of Love included -, I do think that it has exerted more influence the past year than any other. We can look back to 2023 and Dua Lipa definitely incorporating parts of it. That song title and, as I have noted before, the promotional image/cover for it, where she holds a key on her tongue. That is taken from the cover of The Dreaming. Another photo by John Carder Bush. Kate Bush imagery, in addition to the music, providing guidance and influence. In some cases explicitly so, and others more abstract, I do feel that the experimentation, drama, darkness, violence, beauty and variety on The Dreaming has fed its way into one of the very best music of this year. Not to repeat the same artists I name-checked in the previous feature regarding Kate Bush’s influence this year. However, they did release exceptional albums. I mentioned The Last Dinner Party. From the Pyre is one of the best of 2025. An album noted for being experimental, dense and focusing on something more dramatic rather than going for melody and the accessible, you can very much link this to The Dreaming. Baroque but also gothic, this is what The Line of Best Fit noted – that could be applied to The Dreaming : “Love, heartbreak, deception, necromancy, passion that leads to fulfilment (transformation), and passion that leads to devastation (hubris): the epic themes are present. The instrumentation, as mentioned, is perhaps slightly tamed, the band’s everything-and-the-kitchen sink impulses somewhat corralled, but make no mistake: Pyre is high drama”. From the Pyre sounds The Dreaming-motivated in places though you can hear hints of other Kate Bush albums. That push to something more experimental and denser reminds me of Bush moving from 1980’s Never for Ever to 1982’s The Dreaming. Retaining her core but creating an album that is denser and layered. This is what Rolling Stone UK noted about From the Pyre: “ It’s ironic, however, that ruminations on death and darkness have allowed this band to sound more alive than ever”.

People might be able to apply other 2025 albums to The Dreaming. Maybe Perfume Genius’s Glory and Lily Allen’s West End Girl. Elements of FKA twigs’ EUSEXUA. Hayley Williams released one of the year’s defining albums with Ego Death at a Bachelorette Party. Frequently compared to Kate Bush because of (Williams’s) thematic depth, unique artistic vision, and dramatic flair, even if the sonic textures on Williams’s new album are not directly comparable to The Dreaming, I do think there are links. The emotional vulnerability you get on a couple of tracks from The Dreaminmg. Exploring emotional landscapes and some of the more revealing moments on Ego Death at a Bachelorette Party put me in mind of The Dreaming, and even tracks like All the Love. A general feeling and spirit from The Dreaming, I feel has influenced Hayley Williams. Even if Florence + The Machine’s Everybody Scream seems to evoke Wuthering Heights-era Kate Bush, I do think The Dreaming is more visible. Spiritual magic, darkness, witchcraft, personal revelation, life, death, rebirth and catharsis run through the album. Tip in some Hounds of Love and Never for Ever but, when I think of the energy of Everybody Scream and some of its standout moments, I bring to mind Kate Bush’s The Dreaming. Consider this review from The Guardian: “Amid the stuff about paganism, witchcraft and the references to 14th-century mystic Julian of Norwich, this appears to be the central theme of Everybody Scream: the push and pull of fame, a compulsive desire to perform that overwhelms everything in ways that seem unhealthy…But there’s more light and shade here than you might expect, a greater desire to set the volume low than crank it up to 11”. So much of that relates to The Dreaming, I feel. Florence Welch also incorporates elements and aspects of The Kick Inside or even Never for Ever, Hounds of Love and The Sensual World. Consider too these words from NME: “Though informed by Wicca history and classic literature (the Brontë sisters and Mary Shelley named as specific inspirations), ‘Everybody Scream’ is still an unmistakably timely record, expertly treading between folk and mysticism observations on the disconnect of a chronically online generation clutching at new age practices for relief”. Definite The Kick Inside vibrations, though some of the more gothic or darker elements of Everybody Scream can be connected to The Dreaming.

Even though it is a single and not an album, I feel Charli xcx’s House is directly alluding to Get Out of My House from The Dreaming. In fact, Charli xcx has said that herself I feel. THE FACE wrote this in their review: “When you hear the screeching strings on House – which appears on the soundtrack for Emerald Fennell’s potentially-shocking adaptation of Wuthering Heights – you immediately think of John Cale’s unsettling viola on Venus in Furs, or The Black Angel’s Death Song. After the 83-year-old Welshman himself orates a poem with gravelly delivery, Charli jumps in to scream ​“I think I’m gonna die in this house,” her warped voice building into a tidal wave of distortion which crashes against the drums. Charli says she’s been inspired by Cale’s comment that VU’s music needed to be both ​“elegant and brutal”. Mission accomplished”. Red Brick provided these thoughts: “The first half of the track begins with an unnerving, dissonant string quartet, all the whilst being narrated by avant-garde legend John Cale of Velvet Underground fame. It’s the kind of collaboration you would imagine happening in some disorienting dream, but his narration and Charli’s subtly auto-tuned vocals intertwine to create such a dark atmosphere. This atmosphere drastically changes in the second half with a wall of distortion that rips through the vocals. The recurring line ‘I think I’m gonna die in this house,’ which Charli belts out in one of her most vulnerable and raw vocal performances – creating these perfectly imperfect vocals that reminds me of some of the most chilling moments in the Ethel Cain discography. Wuthering Heights gives Charli XCX a chance to reinvent herself, and to prove that her artistry moves beyond pop music. ‘House’, whilst being a short track clocking in at 3 minutes, gives us great insight into where her innovative sound may take fans next”.

IN THIS PHOTO: John Cale and Charli xcx/COMPOSITE: Kayla Oaddams/FilmMagic, Madeline McManus

It would be intriguing to think that Charli xcx’s next album away from the Wuthering Heights soundtrack would be more influenced by The Dreaming. There is no denying the fact that House brings in at least a couple of songs from The Dreaming. I feel another song, Chains of Love, has some The Dreaming DNA. I have bemoaned how Get Out of My House has never had a video made. I do think that Charli xcx could so naturally nail that song. I would love to hear her cover it! Maybe quite a faithful trace. House is one of this year’s best tracks. Again, this is an artist reinventing and pushing from something lighter and perhaps more accessible to embracing denser, darker, more gothic sounds. Kate Bush did that on The Dreaming, so I feel artists who do this too – and are Kate Bush fans – have this 1982 masterpiece in their minds. It would not be wholly unexpected to hear a Charli xcx album soon that is very similar to The Dreaminmg. There are albums I have not yet mentioned, or do not know about, where The Dreaming is at its core – or has some impact. I am going to move on to the year’s best album and how I feel it is influenced by The Dreaming. However, let’s go back to an album which is in the top three of 2025. West End Girl. Lily Allen is a big Kate Bush fan, and she was there for Bush’s 2014 residency in Hammersmith.

Even if West End Girl is deeply personal and you cannot compare that to anything on The Dreaming so much in terms of lyrics, the rich production and raw emotion, together with unconventional songwriting and storytelling can be applied to The Dreaming. in recent music reviews and discussions. The comparison often highlights a shared touchstone for ‘strangeness’ or unique, unconventional artistic approaches in their respective works. Think about the sonics and effects on West End Girl and the technology and effects on The Dreaming. The songwriting is mature, brave, bold, sharp but also revealing and raw. Words I can very much associate with The Dreaming. Boundary-pushing, unconventional and exposing, Lily Allen has also stepped away from the sound of her previous album. So many artists have this year. Again, think of Kate Bush in the early-1980s. Less conventional and taking greater risks and exerting more control, I feel The Dreaming is this touchstone for so many artists today. For Lily Allen and West End Girl, there are unconventional instruments, varied vocal techniques (including demented, double-tracked vocals), and intricate vocal phrasing. These components are present in The Dreaminmg. CLASH reviewed West End Girl. There are some words that stood out: “There’s also a sense of an artist both reclaiming and out-pacing her past” and “making imposing shapes out of the rubble”. That idea of out-pacing her past and changing the narrative or stepping into a bold new territory, you can match Kate Bush and Lily Allen. The intensity in The Dreaming comes more from its production and non-fiction, whereas it is more present with the real-life experiences for Lily Allen. Even so, there are more than a few comparable notes for West End Girl and The Dreaming. It is also great that Lily Allen is considering turning West End Girl into a play.

This is me focusing on the very best albums and songs of the year. I can appreciate there are other possibilities and connections. Chappell Roan has not released an album this year, though the use wide vocal ranges, exploring unique themes, and the theatrical styles of Roan can be connected to Bush and specifically The Dreaming. If fans debate the influence of The Dreaming on Chappell Roan, I feel that album will make an impact on Roan next year. The experimental percussion, diverse inspirations in terms of themes, together with that theatricality and her diverse vocal stylings and delivery seems to be inspired by The Dreaming and Hounds of Love. This review mentions a Chappell Roan Manchester gig from last year and mention how “she embraces unashamed Kate Bush cosplay during the guttural bridge of Good Luck, Babe, throwing herself to the floor for extra dramatics”. If we are also going back to last year, Billie Eilish’s HIT ME HARD AND SOFT put me in mind of The Dreaming. That was one of the best albums of 2024. Eilish is a big fan of Kate Bush and has been compared to her. I think her later work has more in common with The Dreaming than any other Kate Bush album. Another masterpiece of this year that is in the top three is CMAT’s EURO-COUNTRY. CMAT is a huge Kate Bush fan and, pleasingly, adores The Kick Inside.

When I celebrate fifty years of The Kick Inside in 2028, I will see if CMAT is free. She has covered Wuthering Heights and mentioned how the album was a favourite in her childhood – and now. CMAT has said how she saw Kate Bush as someone who paved the way for "cuntrifying" music. There are elements of camp, kitsch culture clash on EURO-COUNTRY one can link to The Dreaming. Actually, seeing Drowned in Sound’s list of the best albums of 2025 made me ask think about some albums on there that I did not naturally think of when considering Kate Bush’s The Dreaming. Heartworms and Glutton for Punishment? Anna Von Hausswollf’s ICONOCLASTS? Ethel Cain’s Perverts? Their words about the later seems to resonate with The Dreaming: “Across Perverts' 90 minutes, you're gently caressed, in the dark, by warm hands and pressed against cold surfaces. At times you will feel as if you've wandered into a dustbowl village where you're not meant to be”. MARINA’s Princess of Power has aspects of The Dreaming in it. MARINA's 2010 single, Mowgli's Road, borrows heavily from The Dreaming. However, I also think that she retains that fascination with the 1982 album. Princess of Power is one of this year’s best albums.

The genre-bending and experimental nature of Kate Bush that ROSALÍA admire, I feel, is personified by LUX and its brilliance. An album that is a complete shift from came before, again, here is an artist pushing boundaries and doing this incredible left (or right?) turn. Operatic and dramatic but also light, I have previously written about how I feel LUX is influenced by The Dreaming. Again, there is madness, eccentricity, experimentation and real groundbreaking stuff that seems so alien to the modern landscape. LUX has shades of The Dreaming and what Kate Bush was doing; even if the two artists plough their own furrow and have different lyrical perspectives and characteristics. That said, there are some takeaways from reviews where these words could apply to 1982’s The Dreaming. This from Pitchfork: “It’s not a dopamine machine like MOTOMAMI, but it rewards listeners who ache for more from pop artists: more feeling, more risk…Rosalía’s voice remains at its centre. With her as its lodestar, LUX advances like a crusade to conquer the mysteries of human existence”. The Guardian discusses the fact LUX is not like the algorithmic-driven Pop of today. More conventional and commercial, ROSALÍA, they say, is asking a lot from her fans. How she has radically changed between albums. Her past three albums are all different and this is her biggest to date. That is also true when we think of The Dreaming and look back on Never for Ever and Lionheart (1978). These words make me think of The Dreaming: “So Lux demands the listener abandon preconceptions and submit themselves to its author’s way of doing things. There’s no question that this is quite a big ask”. Granted, LUX is a much longer album than The Dreaming and it celebrates female saints and has a specific dynamic. The Dreaming is tighter and broader in terms of its lyrics. These words from NME seem ready-made for The Dreaming and what was being said about Kate Bush at that time: “But give it what it demands, and it will reward you many times over. It is an astonishing record – one that continuously stops you dead in your tracks, encourages curiosity, and builds a new world for you to dive into, while connecting to the sounds of all of Rosalía’s previous releases. “The more we are in the era of dopamine, the more I want the opposite,” she recently told the New York Times’ Popcast podcast. This album reinforces that – there are no easy hits or quick highs, no addictive loops to get trapped in, and it’s all the more divine for it”.

Rolling Stone UK talk about the “lyrically opaque” nature of LUX. How “Lux isn’t a record that’s bogged down in its own seriousness despite its grandeur and scale”. These The Dreaming-esque sentiments: “Though the release of Lux is undoubtedly an anti-commercial move on Rosalía’s part…”; “Considering the hours she must have put in on Duolingo, lending a close, curious ear to the most unique album of the year – the anti-easy listening – is the least we could do”. Its also the work rate of ROSALÍA and how intensely she slogged on the album. How grand and detailed it is compared to her extraordinary work previously. This seems like Kate Bush’s mindset and life producing The Dreaming. I think about the operatic and unorthodox on The Dreaming. How different it was to her female peers in 1982. ROSALÍA standing very much on her own when it comes to taking risks and the sounds she employs. If Bush’s The Dreaming was forward-thinking in terms of the production or it being very uncommercial compared to other female Pop artists, LUX is forward-looking because it is the antithesis to the streaming Pop: the quick and easy-to-understand and absorb songs. How so much modern Pop s unchallenging and geared to the lowest level of concentration. LUX demands attention and damns any commercial gain in favour of truth, depth and something truly important. Again, I think of The Dreaminmg. For this reason, and for everything I have written above, I feel The Dreaming is the most influential Kate Bush album of this year. One that I feel will shape and inform the best musical moments…

WE hear next year.

FEATURE: Eponymously Yours: Exploring the ‘Kate Bush’/’Kate’ Projects Through the Years

FEATURE:

 

 

Eponymously Yours

 

Exploring the ‘Kate Bush’/’Kate’ Projects Through the Years

__________

I must give thanks…

IMAGE CREDIT: The World of Kate Bush

to Kate Bush Encyclopledia for their resource. I was interested to discover the eponymous Kate Bush projects. Those that use her name or part of it. There has been a variety of things through the years. I am not including those by Kate Bush herself. Any E.P.s, Christmas specials or anything else, instead, I am looking at Kate Bush-tiled things by other people. This year is a quiet one when it comes to Kate Bush anniversaries or anything big. Of course, things can pop up and there might be an occasion when one of her songs blows up. However, I think it will be less busy than last year. It would be good to see something arrive like a new book or some documentaries. I wanted to look at a selection of Kate Bush projects from throughout the years. I am starting out with the below, which concerns the Kate & I pop-up museum:

“Pop-up museum devoted to Kate Bush, created by Luna van der Horst (who was 15 years old at the time) in Zaandam (Netherlands) in December 2016. The museum started as a project for school. Luna decided she wanted to make something that didn’t feel like work.

The museum was officially opened on December 2, after which it was open to visitors for free on December 3, 4, 10 and 11. Besides official memorabilia, records and magazines, the museum showed art created by Dutch artists Bregtje Zitman-Deelen (portrait). Buket Albayrak (engraving art), Edgar van der Woude (couture), Esther Hans (painting), Eveline Heijkamp (beamer art), Gea Zwart (painting), Gerben Valkema & Eric Hercules (cartoon), Joost Pielkenrood & Katrine van Klaveren (installation), Lousanne Schuuring (glass art), Marja Eshuijs (bags), Martijn Couwenhoven (drawing), Michel Teunen (PU-foam), Panda Gielen (digital art), Stefana Caramanica (photography), Willem Moeselaar (graphics) and famed Dutch artist Rob Scholte with a special creation”.

IMAGE CREDIT: The World of Kate Bush

Even though there is not a lot of detail about it, I do love that a special issue of Rock & Roll Comics focused on Kate Bush. You can read more about it here, and there is a page here, where you can see artwork from the comic:

“Issue 58 of the Rock ‘n’ Roll Comics series, published by Revolutionary Comics in the USA on 1 April 1993, is devoted to an unofficial biography of Kate Bush, with uncredited writer and artist. It tells the story of the beginning of Kate’s career up until the release of The Sensual World”.

I do think that there should be more about Kate Bush in graphic and comic form. She is a fan of science fiction, fantasy and horror, so it would be great if there was something more modern. I tend to find a lot of eponymous Kate Bush projects sort of stopped in the 1990s. When she was still quite active or releasing new music. I am shocked that not too much has been done recently. I guess there is the occasional documentary, though not too much when it comes to books, comics, exhibitions or anything like that. I am going to include a couple of eponymous Kate Bush songs, as she has also not been immortalised in song for a while. It is interesting to hear what artists did when using Kate Bush’s name. It is a bit annoying that there has not been a tribute album where major artists take on her songs. Consider how many modern-day artists cite her as an influence, having Charli xcx, The Last Dinner Party, CMAT, ROSALÍA, Björk and even Big Boi do something with her music would be amazing. However, as this article explains, there was a great Kate Bush covers album in the 1990s:

“Kate Bush Covered is a compilation album of cover versions of Kate Bush songs, as performed by fans and professional musicians. The album came together in the first half of 1997 when Kate Bush fan Marcel Rijs used the Kate Bush mailing list Love-Hounds (also known as the newsgroup rec.music.gaffa) to get recordings from fans all over the world.

Contributions were sent in on tape, CD and DAT from Australia, Canada, Sweden, UK and USA. The album was released on 1 August 1997”.

A Kate Bush fan club is something that we need this year. Maybe something too oldskool, many people are hankering for something by gone in terms of maybe a physical fanzine or magazine and conventions. Opportunities for Kate Bush fans to get together. I am going to mention a great Kate Bush tribute act to finish. However, the Kate Bush Fanclub is something we need to revive:

“Dutch fanclub, based in Breda (Netherlands), which started in 1980. The club was founded by Joshja Brans. He was soon joined by Rob Assenberg, Arie den Draak and Eric Vermeer. In 1987 Theo Haast also joined the fanclub board. Joshja’s wife Laila and Arie’s wife Diana also helped out. In the beginning their relationship with EMI Records in the Netherlands was virtually non-existant, but by the end of the 1980’s that had improved. The club’s membership usually hovered around the 200 mark.

The fanclub published its own magazine called ‘Kate’, which appeared irregularly between 1981 and 1996. The fanclub folded by the end of the 1990’s when the internet became the go-to medium for Kate Bush fans”.

There have been some relatively recent projects using Kate Bush’s name, including a documentary and a book. One from the 1980s that would be good to see reprinted is Kate Bush: A Visual Documentary. I do think that we will get some Kate Bush books this year. An encyclopaedia or huge reference book would be incredible to see and has not yet been published. Kate Bush: Song by Song was published in 2021 and is worth buying:

“Kate Bush: A Visual Documentary is a book written by Kevin Cann and Sean Mayes. Published by Omnibus Press on 5 December 1988, this 96 page book was presented as “the first book to present a major study of Kate as a serious and exceptional recording artist”.

The book features photographs (both in colour and in black & white), a chronology, a discography and videography, as well as 12 chapters in which her career is described in some detail”.

One book that is quite well-known and recent is 2016’s THE KATE INSIDE by Guido Harari. Someone who photographed her for many years, it is something that I hope to own one day. A little out of my price range, I am also hopeful there will be more Kate Bush books with photos of her. Maybe another volume from someone like Guido Harari or her brother, John Carder Bush:

“Book published in March 2016, featuring photographs of Kate Bush by Guido Harari. Guido photographed Kate between 1982 and 1993, while she was involved in her albums Hounds Of Love, The Sensual World and The Red Shoes and the film The Line, The Cross & The Curve.

The book was limited to 3000 copies worldwide. The deluxe edition was limited to just 350 copies, all personally signed by both Guido and Lindsay Kemp, who has also written a special foreword for the book. The deluxe edition had a full leather cover and featured extra pages. It also included a 24x30cm (10”x11”) signed/numbered fine art pigment print and a set of 8 replica Polaroids (10x15cm/3”x5”, unsigned and non editioned). These are replicas of the actual Polaroids used by Guido with Kate on the 1985 and 1989 shoots”.

Before ending with a terrific Kate Bush tribute artist, there is a great booklet, Kate Bush: Before the Dawn that I was not sure existed. I would love to get a copy or see the contents, if anyone knows where to look. I did not get to see Before the Dawn, so it would give me insight into what the epic and adored residency was like:

“Booklet released by Paul Sinclair from the website SuperDeluxeEdition.com on 14 September 2019. The A4 sized, 20 page booklet describes Paul Sinclair’s experiences seeing the Before The Dawn live shows in 2014: reflecting all aspects of them; the surprise announcement, the press frenzy, the build up, the anticipation, the expectation, and finally the concerts themselves; what it was like to actually be there and see Kate perform many of her best songs live, for the very first time.

Additionally, the booklet includes the full interview by Sinclair with David Rhodes, conducted only a few weeks after the series of concerts were completed. The front cover was created by Helen Green”.

There have actually been recent documentaries about Kate Bush: L'odyssée musicale de Kate Bush (The Musical Odyssey of Kate Bush): A fifty-minute documentary available on the ARTE channel's website in France; Kate Bush: The Timeless Genius: A program that aired on Sky Arts/NOW in the UK in late-2025, celebrating her enduring appeal; BBC Archive on 4: Kate Bush: The Power of Strange Things: A BBC Radio 4 program exploring her impact, referencing Stranger Things and her unique creative journey. 2014’s Kate Bush at the BBC was released to coincide with her residency. Great moments when Bush performed for the BBC. Some performances that many people have not seen:

“TV special, produced for BBC Four and originally broadcast on 22 August 2014. The special is a compilation of performances by Kate Bush in various BBC programmes.

Track listing

  1. Wuthering Heights (Top Of The Pops, 23 March 1978)

  2. Them Heavy People (Saturday Night At The Mill, 25 February 1978)

  3. Moving (Saturday Night At The Mill, 25 February 1978)

  4. Don’t Push Your Foot On The Heartbrake (Sounds Like Friday: Leo Sayer, 17 November 1978)

  5. Wow (Abba Easter Special, 21 April 1979)

  6. Hammer Horror (Nationwide, 3 March 1979)

  7. The Wedding List (Kate, 28 December 1979)

  8. The Man With The Child In His Eyes (Kate, 28 December 1979)

  9. Babooshka (Dr. Hook, 20 March 1980)

  10. Running Up That Hill (Wogan, 5 August 1985)

  11. Hounds Of Love (Top of the Pops, 6 March 1986)

  12. Experiment IV (Wogan, 31 October 1986)

  13. The Sensual World (music video, 1989)

  14. This Woman’s Work (Wogan, 6 December 1989)

  15. Rocket Man (Wogan, 16 December 1991)

  16. And So Is Love (Top of the Pops, 17 November 1994)”.

Another 2014 BBC documentary is The Kate Bush Story: Running Up That Hill. It has not been shown on the channel for a while but, given a resurgence and new interest, it is time to show it again. Though it is not that authoritative or deep, it is a good introduction for new fans:

“Documentary about Kate Bush, originally broadcast on 22 August 2014 on BBC television on the occasion of her then upcoming Before The Dawn live shows. It explores her career from January 1978 to her 2011 album 50 Words for Snow, through the testimony of some of her key collaborators and those she has inspired.

Contributors include the guitarist who discovered her (Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour), the choreographer who taught her to dance (Lindsay Kemp) and the musician who she said ‘opened her doors’ (Peter Gabriel), as well as her engineer and ex-partner (Del Palmer) and several other collaborators (Elton John, Stephen Fry and Nigel Kennedy)”.

The Guardian reviewed the documentary. It is important because of the incredible contributors, including the late Del Palmer. A portrait of an artist who is unique and original yet has this wide and diverse fanbase. Someone whose influence is huge and continuing. Nobody else out there like Kate Bush:

“When Kate Bush got her £3,000 record deal from EMI at 16, she used some of it to pay for dance classes with the legendary choreographer Lindsay Kemp. In last night's The Kate Bush Story: Running Up That Hill (BBC 4), a documentary about the singer-songwriter broadcast on the near-eve of her first tour in 35 years, he remembered how he had to coax her forward from the back row – . "She was as timid as hell … but once she started dancing, she was a wild thing" – and a few months later found an LP pushed under his door.

It was Bush's first album, The Kick Inside, released in 1978, with the song Moving dedicated to Kemp. "I didn't know she had any aspirations to be a singer," he says. "She never talked about herself." Fellow contributor Elton John called her "the most beautiful mystery", and recalled how at his A-lister-stuffed civil partnership ceremony she was the only person anyone wanted to speak to.

Guests, contributors and soon even formerly ignorant viewers like me were in awe of the talent displayed and then intelligently discussed and dissected by John, Kemp and other respected experts, such as David Gilmour, Peter Gabriel, John Lydon, Tori Amos and Del Palmer, Bush's bandmate and partner from the 1970s to 1990s. Neil Gaiman was on hand to hymn her fearlessly literary inspirations and lyrics, from – of course – Wuthering Heights (from which she derived her first single, in March 1978) to Molly Bloom's soliloquy from Ulysses in the title track of her 1989 album, The Sensual World.

Bush herself appeared only in old interview footage – so young, so fragile, so shy, but full of the sureness and certainty that only talent brings – but what emerged was a wonderful, detailed portrait of that talent. Although it gave her precocity its full due (she had written The Man With the Child in His Eyes by the time Gilmour came to listen to her when she was 14), it also gave proper weight to her evolution and her later, less commercial, still astonishing work. Why it chose to close on a stupid jarring joke by Steve Coogan, I do not know. But the rest of it succeeded in making Bush and her work less of a mystery but no less beautiful for that”.

I might re-explore Kate Bush tribute acts later in the year. Maybe not a tribute act in the strict sense, Sarah-Louise Young is different in that sense. It is more of a production and theatrical experience that a straight concert where she covers Kate Bush songs. An Evening Without Kate Bush is a worldwide sensation:

“A self-described ‘chaotic cabaret cult’, An Evening Without Kate Bush is created by performer Sarah-Louise Young and director Russell Lucas. The idea is to celebrate Kate Bush’s songs with a unique show.

The show debuted in August 2019 at Edinburgh Fringe festival, and continues to this day. Regular tours in the UK followed, as well as a tour of Australia and New Zealand in 2025”.

You can discover more about An Evening Without Kate Bush here. I am going to finish up with this review from 2024 for An Evening Without Kate Bush. I have not seen it yet, though I have interviewed Sarah-Louise Young about it, and she is amazing. I think she lives up in Manchester, though she is going to be travelling a lot this year:

“If you know anything about Kate Bush (other than her song was recently in Stranger Things) you may know she’s an artist who rarely tours. A decade ago she took on a residency at the Hammersmith Apollo for a month. Aside from that and a handful of gigs at the end of the 1970s, she doesn’t play live. She’s never gigged in Nottingham and sadly it’s likely she never will.

However, Kate’s lack of public appearances has opened the door to a shadow industry of tribute acts; Cloudbusting, Kate Bush-Ka, Baby Bushka etc. What we see tonight is at times a bit like one of those, but it’s also quite a lot more – a tribute act crossed with a comedy show and an academic thesis on the artist. This show is created by Sarah-Louise Young and Russell Lucas and stars Young as the principal and only cast member. It’s charming, funny, emotional and at times quite moving.

The first thing that we should probably say about Sarah-Louise Young is that she’s got an amazing voice on her. Quite a lot of Kate's notes can be hard to hit and she’s basically note perfect all night. This despite the fact that during some songs she’s also running, clowning, doing gymnastics and quite a lot more. She works her way through all the songs you’d expect; Cloudbursting, Babooshka (sung entirely in Russian), This Woman’s Work, Hounds of Love, Hammer Horror, Wuthering Heights and more.

She gets the crowd involved and up on stage with her, accompanied by the kind of suitcase full of props and costume changes you’d expect to belong to a 1970s Butlins comedian. She’s also constantly spouting facts about Kate Bush that even the most-hardened ‘Fish People’ (apparently what a collective of Kate Bush fans is known as) may not know.

At the beginning of the show Young states that she wanted to create a show that can be enjoyed by both enthusiasts and also for people who don’t know much about the artist. I’m probably somewhere between both of those and I completely loved it. Entertaining from start to finish, when it finished I wanted to see more. The only shame is that Kate herself wasn’t there to see it”.

I was curious about some of the Kate Bush-titled projects, whether eponymous or semi-eponymous. Most of them are way in the past, though some recent documentaries have used Kate Bush’s name. I wonder what the rest f this year offers and whether anything Kate Bush-titled will come. An interesting selection I have featured above, from documentaries and books through to a comic book and a tribute act. All proudly representing Kate Bush in their own way. Giving their love and salute…

TO one of the most important artists ever.

FEATURE: Something Good…Again: The Idea of an Iconic New Kate Bush Sample or Remix

FEATURE:

 

 

Something Good…Again

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush on the set of Cloudbusting (a single from her 1985 album, Hounds of Love) 

 

The Idea of an Iconic New Kate Bush Sample or Remix

__________

THE thought came to me…

that we do not really hear Kate Bush mixed or sampled into songs. Maybe that is a cost thing or she has been approached but has not given permission. However, she has granted permission for her music to be used on screen. People cover her songs. However, when it comes to music and use of Kate Bush’s own music, that has not really happened. I am not really a fan of a lot of the cover versions of her songs. However, there was an interpolation from 1992 that stands out. That is Utah Saints and Something Good. In 2022, the brains behind Something Good spoke with The Guardian about their iconic track:

“Tim Garbutt, DJ/producer

Jez and I met in Harrogate in a club called The Mix. I DJ’d house on Friday, and he played funk and disco on the Saturday. One night, Jez brought a rough copy of What Can You Do for Me on cassette. I played it and the place went mad, so we began working together.

As with all Utah Saints tracks, the tune for Something Good was written before we decided on any samples. It’s generally easier to build tracks the other way around, but our back-to-front method meant any borrowings were used in a different context rather than taking someone else’s creativity, and making it the essence of our track.

For Something Good we recycled a line from Kate Bush’s 1985 hit Cloudbusting. We are super honoured that we’re the only act she has officially cleared a sample for and we hope it’s because we created something new out of her singing. We used it in such a way that Something Good stood up as a song in its own right. We still see tweets now from people who hadn’t realised it was Kate Bush on the track. She is such an enigma, superstar and an all-round great person. We did send her a letter to say thank you, but I’m not sure if she ever saw it.

The song was made on limited equipment – old Akai samplers and Atari computers – and saved on to floppy disks. It took more than two weeks of fine tuning to make it all work.

We were buzzing when the track was used over the highlights of the ’92 Barcelona Olympics coverage by the BBC: you don’t forget moments like that. When we performed it on Top of the Pops, health and safety powered down my mixer during the recording – they were set up for a lead guitarist, not a lead DJ, and I had to work fast to make our performance look natural. Luckily, I was spending eight hours a day practising. It was one of six times the show had us on.

After the first album we spent a lot of time touring, and doing remixes for lots of different acts, from Blondie and the Osmonds to Hawkwind. We were about to start recording another LP, but then got a call to do the Zooropa stadium shows with U2, so we went off and did that. And then a load more shows after that.

That’s why the gap between our first and second albums was a long one. Not as long as the gap before our next one, though. We’re working on tracks now.

Utah Saints video for Something Good

Jez Willis, producer/DJ

Tim and I had been DJing since school. He was way cooler, becoming a DMC World DJ finalist when he was 17. He’s still that good now. We always wanted to do music full-time, but never expected hits – we just tried to make interesting tunes that we thought were good.

As a DJ, you constantly think about which tracks work together, and that helped when choosing samples. The Kate Bush vocal came straight off the CD. Hardware in 1992 was very basic, and getting all the elements to sync was tricky. We had to pitch-bend the first part of Kate’s vocal to keep it in time, which is why it goes “oo-oo-aye”.

We threw the kitchen sink at Something Good. There was so much happening, and Guy Hatton, the ace studio engineer mixing it, managed to keep everything together.

Pete Tong was our A&R man at the time, and we were lucky to have such a legend in our corner. He would always input something really helpful, and was confident in Something Good being a hit – in fact, the whole record company thought it was a No 1, which it would have been if it had come out earlier or later that year, based on how much it was selling [the single got to No 4].

When it was rereleased in 2008 we had to rebuild everything on the original track from scratch, and then send it to Van She Tech, the remixers in Australia. We then finished it on a laptop in our Leeds studio. It still has the DIY elements, and when it became Radio 1’s most played track of that year, we were really honoured. Just as we were when it was recently voted the ultimate Ministry of Sound track.

Our music has been used on a number of soundtracks, everything from Mortal Kombat to FIFA to Ridley Scott’s Raised By Wolves. Recently, Olly Alexander from Years and Years posted a video of him hula-hooping to Something Good, which was amazing. What a legend”.

In 1992, a year before Kate Bush released her only album of the 1990s, The Red Shoes, this helped bring her back into public consciousness. Not that she had ever gone away. However, they reimagined Cloudbusting from 1985’s Hounds of Love and gave it this Rave spin. That was over thirty years ago now. Since then, we have not seen anything like this. I was thinking a huge summer hit with a Kate Bush song interpolated would be timely. You cannot recreate the sound of Something Good and the era in which it was released. However, as I have stated in previous features, you do not really get Kate Bush remixes or samples. I am sure Bush would allow it and be intrigued. Covers are fewer than you’d hope and there is that real lack of music interrogation. The biggest viral moment happened in 2022 when Stranger Things gave another Hounds of Love cut, Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God), a spotlight. The song was sort of remixed and was not in its original form. However, that was quite dramatic and dark. Showing how people can reinterpret and experiment with these songs. Whether it was a third dip into Hounds of Love or a long-overdue look at one of her other studio albums, I would love to hear this modern-day Something Good. I am not sure what is holding people back. Maybe Rave is not a thing anymore. Pop artists provide Rave and Trance-like songs, though Dance and Rave are not at the forefront as much as they were in the 1990s. I am thinking who in the current landscape could do something like that. Take a sample of incorporate one of her songs into a banger. Maybe waiting until this summer. However, we are due something like Something Good.

It does confuse me why there is this real absence of Kate Bush sampling. I don’t think she is anymore expensive or restrictive than any major artist. The expense of using a sample compared to writing oriignal music. However, back in 1992, I don’t think Utah Saints were expected to pay thousands to use Cloudbusting. Now, as Kate Bush is pretty comfortable financially, she is not going to extort an artist or D.J. who wants to use one of her songs. In terms of the joy and rush of a song like Something Good, what other Kate Bush track could be used? There are plenty of options to choose from. Anything from The Kick Inside, like Wuthering Heights, or a Never for Ever cut like Babooshka. How about something tense from The Dreaming given a bit ofg light and a Rave backdrop?! Think about The Red Shoes and songs from there. There are even songs on 2005’s Aerial that are already Balearic and Dance-like, such as Nocturn or Aerial, that could be heightened. Bringing Kate Bush back to the clubs. Her music has been on the screen more emphatically the past few years than it has in music itself. Artists nodding to her but there not being too many huge covers or moments. The Last Dinner Party and CMAT have covered her and there has been airplay of her catalogue. Even so, I feel more could be done. I have pitched endlessly for a Kate Bush tribute album or even someone high-profile including a Kate Bush cover on their album. When was the last time this happened?!

The heady and euphoric Something Good might seem nostalgic and a dated throwback. However, it was a real revelation in 1992. At a time when Kate Bush as more influential than she has ever been, where are the producers and artists doing something as inventive? Whether you like Something Good or not, there is no denying that is was a smash and a rightful chart success. In 2022, Rolling Stone Australia named Something Good among their favourite 200 Dance tracks ever: “Long before Stranger Things, an earlier electronic generation discovered Kate Bush through this song by Brit duo Tim Garbutt and Jez Willis, who sampled Bush’s “Cloudbusting” and made a stadium-rave anthem out of it. “We’ve taken a lot of flak about that sample,” Willis admitted, “but we’ve always been very open and honest about it. Still, I’m surprised how many people didn’t know it was Kate Bush. When we were on tour, in South Carolina, the program director of this radio station had never heard of Kate Bush!”. Something Good was remixed in 2008 and went back on the charts. A number four success in the U.K. back in 1992, that does seem like an age ago, A definite gulf to fill! I hope that this year sees a lot more activity. I am sure that Kate Bush is played at D.J. sets but, when it comes to the mainstream, there is not a lot of representation there. And there should. I feel Bush would like it and it. You could say that other major icons are not represented either. David Bowie, Prince or even The Beatles. Joni Mitchell or anyone you can name. Perhaps too expensive to get clearance or sample culture being a thing of the past. I hope not. It is clear that we need to make something good happen…

ONCE more.

FEATURE: I Know That I’ve Imagined Love Before… Massive Attack’s Unfinished Sympathy at Thirty-Five

FEATURE:

 

 

I Know That I’ve Imagined Love Before…

 

Massive Attack’s Unfinished Sympathy at Thirty-Five

__________

RELEASED as the second single…

from the band’s second studio album, Blue Lines, Massive Attack’s Unfinished Sympathy turns thirty-five on `11th February. Written by members Robert ‘3D’ Del Naja, Andrew ‘Mushroom’ Vowles and Grant ‘Daddy G’ Marshall, the track’s vocalist Shara Nelson and the group's co-producer Jonathan ‘Jonny Dollar’ Sharp were also writers. It is a classic that is the standout from Massive Attack’s 1991 album. In July, Music Radar told the story of Unfinished Sympathy. A title that started as a joke, it was kept because it fitted the song perfectly. Massive Attack writing a song for the heart rather than the feet, Unfinished Sympathy was a perfection fusion of chilled-out and euphoric. Something that propelled the Bristol music scene to the world:

“The musical climate that forged the Bristol sound can be traced back to 2 April 1980, when police raided the Black and White Cafe in the heart of the St Pauls area of the city. The heavy-handed tactics of the police became a flashpoint, sparking a riot, fuelled by community grievances, racial tensions and the government’s controversial ‘sus’ laws.

The outpouring of anger from the St Pauls community took the police by surprise and they were soon outnumbered. In the aftermath of the riot, the police gave St Pauls a much wider berth and this created a climate where communities would come together through impromptu street parties, with custom-built sound systems.

These sound systems provided the musical backdrop to inner city Bristol and would become a unifying force for young people, regardless of their skin colour.

“Sound system culture was all about DIY,” said Roni Size in a 2016 BBC documentary Unfinished: The Making Of Massive Attack. “It was about learning how to string up amps, how to cut the wood, how to load the speakers onto the van properly, even [learning] how to drive a big HGV lorry down the narrow roads in St Pauls.”

The sound system culture shared a DIY ethos with punk and there was one seminal post-punk Bristol band, The Pop Group, that would have a huge influence on development of the Bristol sound.

The Pop Group’s sound was aggressive and avant-garde, incorporating elements of funk, free jazz, and dub. Their tours took them to New York, where they became entranced by the emerging hip-hop culture.

“We were virtually living in New York,” recalled former singer and founder Mark Stewart in the Unfinished documentary. “Suddenly, somebody says there's a really cool radio show on this thing called Kiss FM and WBLS.

“We used to have big ghetto blasters of double cassette machines back in the day. We copied these tapes, brought them back to Bristol. Copied, copied, copied.

“3D would draw on them. Suddenly, everybody was getting into hip-hop in Bristol. London was not even aware of it.”

By the mid-’80s, the Bristol scene was thriving and its epicentre was the now legendary Dugout club, in the city’s Park Row, where the Wild Bunch performed a regular slot and dominated the Bristol club scene.

In 1988, Massive Attack was created as a spin-off group from the Wild Bunch and featured Daddy G, Mushroom, 3D and, in the early days, Tricky.

3D had been a co-writer on Neneh Cherry’s song Manchild.

Along with her husband, singer, songwriter and producer Cameron McVay, Cherry would help Massive Attack to record Blue Lines, which they started work on in 1990.

“One of the things that made Massive Attack into the phenomenon they were was meeting and knowing Neneh Cherry and Cameron McVay,” said Sheryl Garratt, former editor of The Face. “They supported them financially and gave them lots of resources and really encouraged and nurtured their talent.”

Cherry also injected the drive necessary to cut through the chilled-out languor of the Bristol scene.

For all their talent, Massive Attack were not driven by ambition or any desire to be celebrities.

“We were lazy Bristol twats,” Daddy G told writer Ben Thompson of The Observer in 2004. “It was Neneh Cherry who kicked our arses and got us in the studio.

“We recorded a lot at her house, in her baby's room… what we were trying to do was create dance music for the head, rather than the feet. I think it's our freshest album, we were at our strongest then.”

By then, the sound that music journalist Andy Pemberton would define as ‘trip-hop’ in the June 1994 issue of Mixmag magazine was taking shape, a melding of New York hip-hop with homegrown dub, soul, funk, jazz and electronica, and all imbued with an achingly melancholic and laid-back feel.

This was the sound that would distinguish Blue Lines and would first come to prominence on Unfinished Sympathy, released as a single two months before the album.

“Blue Lines kind of had this impact where they recognised Bristol having a sound,” recalled Roni Size in Unfinished. “It was that underlying sub-bass from the dub. It was the breaks from hip-hop and the two gel together. It just summed up the culture and I think Massive Attack really tapped into that.”

Once Mushroom, Nelson and producer Dollar had worked up the basis of Nelson’s vocal melody and lyric, Massive Attack worked on the song during a jam session.

The song’s title, Unfinished Sympathy – a pun on Franz Schubert's 1822 Unfinished Symphony No.8 in B minor – was decided that same day.

“I hate putting a title to anything without a theme,” said Robert Del Naja in Select magazine in 1992. “The title came up as a joke at first, but it fitted the song and the arrangements so perfectly, we just had to use it.”

The song’s arrangement incorporates scratching and drum programming from Mushroom.

Chilled hip-hop beats set the tone and there is a percussion break sampled from jazz trombonist, composer and arranger JJ Johnson’s 1974 instrumental Parade Strut.

One major decision taken in the early stages of the song was to use a real orchestra on the track.

“The synth sounded too tacky,” Mushroom told writer John Robb of Sounds in 1991. “So we thought we may as well use real strings.”

Dollar contacted the music producer Wil Malone (who had worked on Iron Maiden’s debut album in 1980) to arrange and conduct the strings, which were recorded in Studio Two at Abbey Road Studios, London.

A 42-piece orchestra was hired to perform the surging string arrangement. Dollar had instructed Malone to “do what you feel like” with the string arrangement.

“My approach for Unfinished Sympathy was that it’s a really open track,” Malone told Uncut magazine. “Basically it’s just a groove – keyboards, and a great vocal by Shara Nelson – so you just let it drift, just let it chill.

“With most string arrangements that I do, the strings are ‘put back’ in the mix. In other words they are so quiet you don’t really hear them, or they’re mixed up, so that you can just hear the top lines.

“But on Unfinished Sympathy, the strings are exposed. You can really hear them and I think that makes soething different.”

Vowles told John Robb of Sounds that the orchestra “were really good [but] it took them about five takes to do it because they were slightly behind the beat”.

The orchestra is a haunting and enigmatic addition to the song.

Unfortunately, as Massive Attack never set out to use a full orchestra on the album, they hadn’t budgeted for it. Mushroom had to sell his car – a Mitsubishi Shogun – to cover all the hiring costs for the orchestra.

One surprising aspect of Unfinished Sympathy is that there is no actual bassline on the original album version of the song.

The bass is provided by the orchestra.

Unfinished Sympathy was released on 11 February 1991, in the midst of the Gulf War.

On the advice of their record company and management, the group dropped the word ‘Attack’ from their name, to allegedly prevent the song being banned by the BBC, releasing the track simply as ‘Massive’.

Unfinished Sympathy was groundbreaking and hugely influential, a unique blend of electronic and orchestral elements that is both melancholic and uplifting.

The song is justifiably considered a masterpiece, one that set the template for the trip-hop genre, with its ethereal strings, dub-heavy bass and shuffling beats”.

There are a few more features that I want to bring in an article. Thirty years on, Abbey Road explored how Massive Attack did not budget for an orchestra for Unfinished Sympathy. the group’s Mushroom was forced to sell his car to cover the costs:

“Wil Malone is a musician, producer and responsible for the string arrangements of Massive Attack’s Unfinished Sympathy. He explains his story below of how the arrangement came to be:

“With Unfinished Sympathy it was the band and the producer who asked me to do the string arrangements for the song. I remember, the track was originally eight minutes long and they let me hear many demos of the song; all sorts of constructions and different ways of doing it. I asked them what they had in mind for the string arrangements of the track and it was Massive’s producer Jonny Dollar – he was highly responsible for putting together the track – who said: ‘do what you feel like’.

“The reason for inclusion of the string arrangements was to be supportive. In my view, in pop music, strings have to be supportive to the vocal, although they also have to give a boot and a sense of tension. If you have a rough track, it’s good to have the strings as a classical contrast sound so that you create a tension, a suspense going on all the time between the roughness of the track and the purity and classical feel. In pop music you’re usually working on a track with bass, drums, guitar, synthesizer, vocals and the strings have to blend with all that. My approach for Unfinished Sympathy was that it’s a really open track: basically it’s just a groove – keyboards, and a great vocal by Shara Nelson – so you just let it drift, just let it chill.

"With most string arrangements that I do, the strings are ‘put back’ in the mix. In other words they are so quiet you don’t really hear them, or they’re mixed up, so that you can just hear the top lines; but on Unfinished Sympathy, the strings are exposed. You can really hear them and I think that makes something different”.

"The string arrangements were played by 42 session players in Abbey Road Studio One. I wanted to make the sound rich so that it vibrates in your chest and stomach, but to also keep it cool, so not so much vibrato – hit the bar lines very accurately. When you are writing, descriptively, in classical music there are emotions that you want the orchestra to have or play, but in pop music that isn’t true. There is no point in writing instructions like ‘dolce’ unless it really means something; basically it is a different way of writing for strings in pop music as you’re writing to a mix, you’re trying to blend your sound into the sound that is on the track."

Former Abbey Road chief engineer, Haydn Bendall, adds: "I think the song is wonderful and everything on that album so well defined. Including the cover! The session was just a normal string session in Studio Two, nothing terribly remarkable in that I think; but it seems there have been numerous attempts to re-create that “sound”! It’s just a string section playing with minimal vibrato!".

In 2021, Culture focused on a masterpiece from 1991. Evoking, as they say, “the urban soundscape of a lost era”, I do hope that there is new focus on this track thirty-five years later. I was seven when it came out, so I don’t really remember it. I did hear it when I later first heard Blue Lines:

“Gender heterogeneity was a hallmark of trip hop, as was racial heterogeneity. The three creative forces behind Massive Attack during that time—Robert “3D” Del Naja, Andrew “Mushroom” Vowles, and Grant “Daddy G” Marshall—were two Black men and a white man who, as DJs and producers, ceded the vocal spotlight to women. “Unfinished Sympathy” is sung by the resplendent Shara Nelson, with the accompanying video featuring her walking down a busy street in Los Angeles. “Protection,” the melancholy title track from the group’s follow-up album, is sung by the shy and introspective Tracey Thorn, who starred in a whimsical Michel Gondry–directed video set in a crowded English housing block. The former vocalist is Black and the latter white, prompting a viewer to wonder: Is this white music or Black music? Well, it is both.

“Unfinished Sympathy” is an especially good example of Massive Attack’s both-ness. The track’s various elements—a relentless dance beat, a swelling orchestral arrangement, a crooning soul singer—should not really work together, but they do, magnificently, producing a music that is somehow both modern and classic. It feels like a jump into the future, into what would become the sound of the nineties, epitomized by the string-laden, dance-inflected albums of Bjork (who dated Tricky and whose first album was produced by Bristol DJ Nellee Hooper). Yet it is also an old-fashioned lover’s lament:

I know that I’ve imagined love before
And how it could be with you
Really hurt me, baby, really cut me, baby
How can you have a day without a night?
You’re the book that I have opened
And now I’ve got to know much more

This is the song I’ve returned to time and again during this pandemic year, on solitary treks across New York that self-consciously mimic Shara Nelson’s lonely walk in the video for “Unfinished Sympathy.” Watching her on that bright evening in Los Angeles, so full of longing, has also inverted my adolescent experience of this music: It is she who is perpetually moving through the golden light of summer while I, like everyone else here, am stuck in a cold and wet city. The music, just as it did back then, serves as a consolation, reminding me that this is what a city is supposed to feel like, and what I am supposed to feel like, too: urgent, alive.

It is also a reminder of what the music of a genuine urban culture sounds like—what distinct ooze bubbles up from a place that is not like other places. It is ironic that trip hop itself is just the sort of mood music—soft percussion, swooning strings—that might now play in a hotel bar in a downtown area that looks like every other downtown area on the planet. But for that, like so much else, I blame the homogenizing impact of the internet. Our music these days could come from anywhere; our cities could be anywhere. I still have never been to Bristol, but at least I know where I can find it”.

“Jim Arundel from Melody Maker wrote, "It'll be the "When a Man Loves a Woman" of its time, mark me well." Barbara Ellen from NME named it Single of the Week and called it "an intense, warmblooded dance track that boasts more fire in its balls than the Pixies ever dug for", a reference to the Pixies' recently released single "Dig for Fire". Another editor, Mandi James, expanded, "Lush and extravagant, plied with rich strings and roving keyboards, this is music with depth and grace. Massive aren't afraid to indulge their imaginations and let themselves go. Plaintive vocals that smack of Randy Crawford, smart samples liberated from the Mahavishnu Orchestra and all the romanticism of the Pet Shop Boys without the clipped, camp edge. Those not completely smitten by this record have no soul."[“. The reaction to the song was understandably positive. In years since, Unfinished Sympathy is seen as one of the greatest songs of all time. This timeless song is…

A divine symphony.

FEATURE: The Pink Floyd Influence… Inside a ‘Lost’ Kate Bush Interview from 1985

FEATURE:

 

 

The Pink Floyd Influence…

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1985/PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush

 

Inside a ‘Lost’ Kate Bush Interview from 1985

__________

I have explored some…

‘lost’ interviews before, but I am not sure that I have covered this. I have included 1985 interview where I ran some features to mark forty years of Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love in September. Now, I have found an interview online that has not been seen by most Kate Bush fans. In an interview for Cash Box in a Manhattan hotel room in December 1985, Paul Iorio spoke with an artist who, at this time, was possibly at the peak of her career. Kate Bush did travel to America for promotion, though she was not there often:

“Iorio: You write about that emotional exhaustion on the second side [of "Hounds..."], with waves being almost an emotional metaphor for drowning.

Bush: It's very personal -- and we're sort of getting into psychiatry here! I'm sure there are all kinds of levels here like that. Actually my attitude in writing this album is a very positive one... I wanted the music to launch us all into the next era rather than be an emotional dark thing.

I think each album does have a different energy, otherwise you'd be doing the same thing again and not experimenting anew... Albums are such autobiographical material, not in the material but as an expression of what you're like at the time. And I was feeling kind about mankind and how nice people were rather than the demon side of things...

Iorio: Now that you've come out into the world and are doing appearances and interviews, has your view changed on mankind in general?

Bush: [Laughs] No, I still feel pretty positive, actually. It's really great for me that the album is being accepted...You would like people to enjoy it, but obviously you can't force them to. I feel very happy...

Iorio: In '78, you actually got your contract because of David Gilmour --

Bush: Yes.

Iorio: And this was a period when a lot of punk bands were being signed. How did you ever get a contract?

Bush: When I was signed, that was before the punk thing even happened. Punk was happening at the time of my first single.. Yes, I agree it was completely different than what was happening with punk music but perhaps that's why it works... I think that music is something that surpasses trends, fashions; music is something much deeper...

Iorio: How about concept albums? What were some of your influences?

Bush: ...The only concept for me that I thought worked was [Pink Floyd's] "The Wall." I think the third side of that is just brilliant, the best thing Floyd has ever done. So good. I mean, "Comfortably Numb" is perhaps the classic Floyd song. And Roger Waters' production and the sense of him being in there I found really fascinating... I was surprised at how many people kept referring to [The Who's] "Tommy" and "The Wall." And, really, they are very different. And I wonder if it's because they're concepts that they get labeled together. Do you think?

Iorio: Who do you like now? If you were home, who would you put on the turntable?

Bush: I listen to very little music, particularly contemporary. If I listen to it, it's going to be my own music, some arrangement or something. I spend so much time listening that the way I relax is by watching things, a comedy, that's my way to wind down.

Iorio: What comedy?

Bush: I don't know if you have it here [in the U.S.]: "The Young Ones."

Iorio: No.

Bush: Really good stuff. "Fawlty Towers," you must have that don't you here? 

Iorio: No, we don't.

Bush: Oh, no! You don't know what you're missing! You know John Cleese.

Iorio: Oh, yeah!

Bush: He did this whole sit-com that was about someone called Basil Fawlty, one of the funniest things. I'm so surprised you don't have that here. You don't know what you're missing, you poor people. It's brilliant stuff. [Monty] Python is great, but this has made John Cleese beyond Python. Whenever John Cleese appears, they consider him Basil Fawlty.

Iorio: What are your favorite [films]?

Bush: "Don't Look Now"... I think is one of the best films ever made... You have so many things you don't understand, but by the end of the film, one of those has been tied up neatly. I really love Hitchcock; I think he was a complete genius, to me one of the best directors. Such a sense of how to put things together. I really like Terry Gilliam's work. Do you remember "Time Bandits"?

Iorio: That was a big one...

Bush: He's made three films, one before that, and one, actually, "Brazil," that, as far as I know, wasn't released here [in the U.S.], which is crazy, because it's such a good film and was released everywhere else. Neil Jordan. Have you heard of his stuff? [I nod.] He did a very interesting film called "Angel." He's Irish and his work has a great sense of the Irish culture, the whole rural sense of Ireland. And I love Kurosawa's films. And comedy films. "Young Frankenstein." It's funny but it's also an incredibly beautiful film, it's so well done. I think [Mel Brooks] was one of the first people, too, to play with black and white, when color was what everyone was using. Beautiful. Gene Wilder is so funny.

Iorio: How about Woody Allen?

Bush: I really like Woody Allen, but there are a lot of his films I haven't seen. My favorite one is "Play It Again, Sam." I thought that was so funny. But there's a lot I haven't seen.

Iorio: You mentioned Irish cinema. How about Irish music? You have Irish [music] on the second side of the ["Hounds of Love"] LP. How did you get into Irish folk?

Bush: I think it's probably the biggest influence musically that I've ever had. My mother's Irish. And when I was very young, both my brothers were very into traditional music, English and Irish. They were always playing music, so I was always brought up with it. And they were playing instruments. And I think when you're a kid, you're very open to all things musical...It's only in the last couple of albums that I've been able to express my influences in Irish music through my work.

It's funny when you write a song -- it's easy for me now -- but there's almost a second stage where you take control of the song. You start writing it, and if you're not careful, it just finishes itself and it might not be what you wanted. It's very strange, it takes over itself. It has its own life.

I've just never really been able to write something where I could present the Irish music in a very obvious way. And I think the second side of the album, it was a perfect vehicle to involve the Irish musicians I worked with on the last album in a more involved way, to use them to create that atmosphere...

Iorio: What songs have you written that wrote themselves?

Bush: That's a difficult question.

Iorio: Some must have taken some time. Others probably took off automatically.

Bush: Oooo. Yes, that's right. A lot of songs are like -- wolllaahhh! And that's it. And other songs -- it's like stages. It maybe takes three or four days to get the song structurally together. But then I could spend a couple weeks finishing off the lyrics. Each song is so different...It has its own personality. Some are really grumpy. Some are really quite easy. It's extraordinary. You can put some things on a track, and it will just reject them, it just won't work. And you can put them on another track, and it works really well.

[Bush offers me an Irish cigarette.] Do you want one of those?

Iorio: Oh, I was dying for you to ask! [I read from the pack:] "Cigarettes can seriously damage your health." So in Britain you have the same warnings?

Bush: You have them here, too, don't you?

Iorio: We have modified ones. There are rotating warnings. They have, like, "[Cigarettes] can cause complicated pregnancy." Another says, "Quitting now can seriously increase your chances of having a normal life." They have rotating warnings. But yours are standardized ones?

Bush: Absolutely. They're on every packet. That's an interesting idea, actually: putting different [warnings]....Maybe you'll listen to one of them! [laughs]

Iorio: The headline: Kate Bush -- Candid on Cigarettes"!

Bush: [laughs] Oh, God.

Iorio: Suppose this becomes a number one hit in America. What's the first thing you're going to do?

Bush: Buy an SSL. Get back to the studio!...An SSL is the best mixing console you can get. I'd get one of those. And change the room a but and get some more equipment in”.

I wanted to spotlight this interview, as it is one that I have not included on my site before. Kate Bush gave a lot of interviews in 1985, but this one is particularly interesting. Hounds of Love is this masterpiece that was a worldwide success. If some of Bush’s albums have not endured and are not talked about too much, Hounds of Love is a remarkable work that still sounds utterly wonderful…

AFTER all of these years.

FEATURE: Chips of Plutonium Are Twinkling in Every Lung: How Criticism Against Her Endless Positivity Affected and Changed Kate Bush’s Music

FEATURE:

 

 

Chips of Plutonium Are Twinkling in Every Lung

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1980/PHOTO CREDIT: Getty Images

 

How Criticism Against Her Endless Positivity Affected and Changed Kate Bush’s Music

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NOT to say that…

Kate Bush’s music dramatically shifted after one encounter, though there was this awkward clash in the late-1970s and 1980s where a lot of the music press saw her as too optimistic and lacking any depth. One could say that it not only motivated her to include more political and socially conscious songs. In terms of her production and the scope of her work, maybe she was proving to the dismissive and misogynistic critics that she was serious and was not this slight and empty artist. I have included the interview before, but on 20th October, 1979, Danny Baker interviewed Kate Bush for NME. This was not long after she completed The Tour of Life and whilst she was recording 1980’s Never for Ever. To this point, the singles that had been released were quite theatrical in a way. Different to what was being offered by artists of the time, I guess publications like NME were more favourable to Rock bands and Punk artists. To them, Kate Bush must have seemed slightly ridiculous. Though Danny Baker has since regretted his attitude and tone in this interview – though this is no excuse as he was disgraceful and hugely unprofessional! -, there was something in it that provoked Kate Bush to shift. Not going from nice to sharp. If some quarters of the press saw her as too optimistic and shallow in a way, a few of the tracks on Never for Ever was an answer to those who asked if she could be serious. The entire interview is a hatchet job and car crash. Bush, only twenty-one at the time, is incredibly professional (much more so than Danny Baker) and navigates perhaps the most insulting, sexist and worst interview she has been involved with.

There are some segments of the interview that are especially galling and significant. Even if Danny Baker is an inexcusable misogynistic and completely unprofessional in every respect, there are some positives that did come from the aftermath:

“Hey Kate. Do you feel obliged to sing like that these days?

"What? You mean…"

Y'know, like you could age the nation's glassblowers.

"Oh, yeah, sure. I mean, I don't feel obliged – that is me. See, like in a recording studio, when it's all dark and there's just you and a couple of guys at the desk, well, you get really so involved that to actually plan it becomes out of the question. It just flows that way. As a writer I just try to express an idea. I can't possibly think of old songs of mine because they're past now, and quite honestly I don't like them anymore."

Have you still got people around you who'll tell you something's rubbish?

"My brother Jay, who's been with me since I was writing stuff that really embarrasses me – he'd let me know for sure… Yeah, there's a few I can really trust."

She smiles again and I was warm to her. Mind you, she speaks my language, so I could be sympathetic because she's one of the south London rock mafia. I ask her what it's like to be paraded in the Sun and suchlike as the Sex Goddess of POP!

"Hmmm. You see, you do a very straight interview with these people, without ever mentioning sex, but of course that's the only angle they write it from when you read it. That kind of freaks me out, because the public tend to believe it…"

Asking a few more questions, I begin to realise that this isn't the kind of stuff that weekloads of Gasbags [NME letters page] are made of. I'm searching for a key probe, but with Kate Bush – well, there's not likely to be anything that will cause the 12-inch banner-headline stuff, is there now? I recall Charlie Murray's less than enthusiastic review of her Palladium shows, which were apparently crammed with lame attempts to "widen" the audience's artistic horizons – y'know, lots of people dressed as violins and carrots an' that. CSM reckons it was one of the most condescending gigs in the history of music. Kate had read the review, but she didn't break down.

For a start I have cut about a hundred "wows" and "amazings" from her speech. She talks at length about how important she feels it is to be "creating" all the time, and when I asked her if she looked to the news for any song inspiration I got this curious answer:

"Well, whenever I see the news, it's always the same depressing things. War's hostages and people's arms hanging off with all the tendons hanging out, you know. So I tend not to watch it much. I prefer to go and see a movie or something, where it's all put much more poetically. People getting their heads blown off in slow motion, very beautifully."

She grins broadly again. Kate is an artist through and through, seeing the world as a crazy canvas on which to skip. Her outrageous charm covers the fact that we are in the midst of a hippy uprising of the most devious sorts. I approach her on the question of being a woman in pop music once more. How do her workmates treat her?

"Well, when I started, I felt really conscious of being female amongst all these fellows. But these days I feel like one of the lads”.

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

Something Graeme Thomson notes in Under the Ivy: The Life and Music of Kate Bush is how Danny Baker felt Kate Bush was hippy-dippy and pampered. Someone who was perhaps a spoilt rich girl, Bush did not go from writing about one thing and completely concentrated on another. Rather than the nature of the music that came from that October 1979 interview, there was a sensibility and determination that grew. However, two hugely politically and powerful songs were written for Never for Ever. Early on the morning of 9th November, 1979, four American command centres received signals that a full-scale nuclear attack by the Soviet Union was on its way. This was the time of the Cold War. A terrifying time when nuclear destruction was a constant threat and possibility, Kate Bush would have been well aware of it, however, she kept it out of her music. Making her first two albums similar in nature when it came to the themes addressed (alongside songs of desire and love was the fantastical, sometimes gothic and fantastical; always unique but never really political), Never for Ever consciously ended with two songs that could be deemed ‘political’. However, as Graeme Thomson notes, neither as potent and cohesive perhaps as artist like Elvis Costello and her peers. However, Breathing was very much an observation of potential nuclear holocaust. A foetus protected by her mother’s womb, this unborn child is breathing in their mother’s nicotine. “We're the first and last, ooh-ooh-ooh/After the blast/Chips of plutonium are twinkling in every lung”. Army Dreamers is perhaps more of a reaction to numerous casualties of young men in numerous conflicts in 1979 and 1980. Maybe The Troubles in Northern Ireland were moving Bush. Or the Iran-Iraq War.

Rather than her music being entirely positive – or at least neutral and not really having too much anger or political drama -, there was a change. Bush co-produced Never for Ever and you can tell that she wanted her music to be much more in her control. Bigger and more diverse. Moving her voice slightly from the high-pitched impression people had of her, you can hear growl and grit in Breathing. Army Dreamers’ narrator is quite high-pitched, though I think Bush is using her mother’s voice. This idea of a mother losing a young son. Bush acting as this mother figure. The Irish accent makes me think Bush is focusing on The Troubles. I do think there was an issue with critics writing Bush off as nice and naïve. Perhaps someone who was prancing and leaping around without saying anything significant, I feel the likes of Danny Baker forced Bush to put distance between her and her first two albums (1978’s The Kick Inside and Lionheart) and almost apologise. Even if she did not compromise her vision and sound because of idiots in the press, I do think a fire was lit. Actually, more politics did come into her music. You can hear it on 1982’s The Dreaming. Pull Out the Pin is one example. I feel Bush’s vocal style changed because she no longer wanted to be diminished and infantilised in the press. A more masculine energy and harder percussive sound would come in. Never for Ever hardly contains anything that thematically could be linked to her first two albums. In terms of talking about love, most of Never for Ever looks at characters and other people and not so much Kate Bush herself. The strangeness of The Infant Kiss. The revenge drama of The Wedding List. The deceit and mistrust of Babosohka. Regarding All We Ever Look for, Bush said in a 1980 interview this: “Our parents got beaten physically. We get beaten psychologically. The last line – “All we ever look for – but we never did score”. Bush definitely evolving. In terms of getting more serious in a way. Darker too in some ways. Being labelled a sex symbol, there were no lustful or sensual songs. Nothing you must hear on The Kick Inside or ever Lionheart. It is a shame in a way.

However, maybe Bush did force herself to kick against those who wrote her off. Never for Ever went to number one. Bush became the first British female artist to have an album reach the top spot in the U.K. The Dreaming, whilst not a chart-topper, was so much more experimental and darker than what went before from her. Integrating different influences and embracing technology like the Fairlight CMI and influences like Peter Gabriel. Maybe her first two albums were more feminine and female. Perhaps neutral for Never for Ever and this transition. Definitely more masculine for The Dreaming and 1985’s Hounds of Love. 1989’s The Sensual World a definite shift back to the more female. I wonder how influential negative and sexist critical attack was, not only in terms of Bush addressing politics, conflict, violence and breaking away from this idea she was a caricature or hippy. Indeed, as a producer and songwriter, there was a transmutation. One can say that motivation, wherever it came from, resulted in some of Kate Bush’s best music. Many will argue that critics had nothing to do with that and it was Bush naturally evolving and building. That is fair. What is clear how a 1979 NME interview directly impacted Never for Ever which, in turn, was a bridge to a new era or a departure and disconnection from the past. A past that I am very fond of. What hurts most is how this criticism and sexism was seen as normal or cool. Baiting an artist that was so inventive and original because she didn’t’ seem to fit their impression of what music should be. Kate Bush definitely had the last laugh. Her music and influence far outweigh the words or reputation of any of those journalists who attacked or mocked her! If she is seen as this genius and one of the most influential and important artists ever today, that sadly was not the case (in the eyes of some)…

IN 1979.

FEATURE: Spotlight: Revisited: Eliza Rose

FEATURE:

 

 

Spotlight: Revisited

 

Eliza Rose

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A terrific D.J. and artist…

I spotlighted back in 2023, I wanted to come back to her now. Although there has not been an album from Eliza Rose yet, there have been some terrific singles released this year, including Too Slow (All Night). I do think that next year is going to be a huge one for her. “This success has been in the works ever since Eliza began working at Shoreditch’s Flashback Records aged 15, coming to circle East London’s clubs and festivals as a DJ. Inspired by vocal icons including Nina Simone and Amy Winehouse as well as golden age R&B such as Aaliyah and Destiny’s Child, plus the sketchy garage raves she started going to when underage, her love of vinyl found her amassing a collection of her own, digging for gems old and new that she knows will make the dancefloor go off. Now armed with a hybrid DJ-plus-vocals show that pays homage to queer culture’s importance in dance music, and new productions that she’s working on, Eliza is ready for the next chapter. With MOBO and Brit nominations, plaques, magazine covers and a world tour under her belt, she’s straddling both the underground and global superstardom”. That is some biography from Resident Advisor from a couple of years ago or so. I am going to bring things up to date, as there have been some interviews from this year that I think are worth highlighting. If you have not heard Eliza Rose and experienced her incredible music, then do go and follow her and check out her socials.

Before coming to this year and some illuminating interview with Eliza Rose, I want to go back to last year. I think we will get some amazing new interviews and features in 2026. Eliza Rose taking her exciting next big steps. I am going to start out with an interview with COMPLEX that was published last December. They spoke with the phenomenal Eliza Rose about her “No. 1 hit single, “B.O.T.A. (Baddest Of Them All)”, working with Calvin Harris, fame and more”:

“Eliza is a product of her East London upbringing, from a fateful work experience stint at a local record store at the age of 15—where she would delve headfirst into a love of vinyls that would then inform her work as both a DJ and producer—to playing at and frequenting the underground basements of Hackney clubs such as Visions and The Alibi, gems that no longer exist as a result of gentrification.

Ahead of her set at Circoloco x The Warehouse Project in Manchester this weekend, we caught up with Eliza Rose to talk newfound fame, staying authentic, and the importance of community.

COMPLEX: Congrats on the release of your new single, “Body Moving”, with Calvin Harris! I understand it all started from a DM Calvin sent you last year, but it’s a big indicator of your fame and popularity—which is a stark difference to the underground scene you were operating in before. How are you finding it all?

Eliza Rose: Acclimatising was difficult at first because, all of sudden, you have all these eyes on you, with all these expectations. In the past few months, I’ve taken back full control of my output with the view of making music that I can look back at in my sixties or seventies and be proud of.

What influences your sound? It has a distinctly London feel to it, for sure.

My parents weren’t really big music heads so I had to go out and find the music I liked. Soul and jazz influences came from the record shop I worked at when I was 15 and stayed at for over a decade. I got into all of this because I loved Amy Winehouse and wanted to delve into her influences, so I got into Nina Simone, Billie Holiday and Esther Phillips. The dance element of my sound was shaped mostly by raving at the age of 15 at places like the Opera House and Rudolph where they were playing garage music in its prime. The fact that garage uses a lot of soulful R&B samples anyway just ties into it. That uniquely London garage sound, fused with soulful vocals, has shaped my artistry in all its facets: how I sing, how I play, and how I produce.

Underground scenes nurture a lot of community in a way that isn’t sustainable in commercial spaces—why is community important to you and your work?

The underground scene, by virtue of it being so much smaller, is easier to hold people accountable in. The people are more open-minded and it’s easier to find pockets of people and communities that align with your morals and values as well as your music taste. Community is important because my music and my shows are all about celebrating authenticity and spreading joy. An Eliza Rose show is an experience for people to feel included and joyful, and community is intrinsic in allowing that authenticity to flourish. I try to live and express myself authentically every day, which is a privilege that I want to enjoy and create in my output.

Although your music taps into ‘90s house and ‘00s garage, it feels more future-facing than nostalgic.

Lady Miss Kier is one of my major inspirations in style and music, who has similar values that I express—it’s just that mine are repackaged through a modern lens. CASISDEAD’s storytelling is so amazing it’s almost cinematic in the drama he creates. Honey Dijon is true to herself and is somebody I always reference when it comes to being an example of authenticity. Doja Cat and Megan Thee Stallion are also an inspiration, in that they’re women doing what they want irrespective of what anybody thinks”.

Just before wrapping up with an interview from July, perhaps her biggest moments was when the single, Weekend, was released in the summer. I do hope that there are more chats with the sensational Eliza Rose next year. Before moving on, CLASH covered Weekend prior to its release:

“Cutting her teeth on London’s club scene, Eliza Rose has an innate gift for translating dance tropes into impeccable club moments. Viral smash hit ‘B.O.T.A. (Baddest Of Them All)’ was a breakout moment, a soaring No. 1 success that saw Eliza paired with Intergalactic Criminal.

Since then she’s scored a run of incredible singles, with Eliza Rose pushing herself to the forefront of UK club culture.

For her next move, Eliza Rose is tapping up an iconic name in British dance music – Defected.

“I finally feel like I’m opening a new chapter and entering a really exciting new era…”

‘Weekend’ was built alongside The Trip, and the rave production duo lift Eliza’s voice to the uppermost of the heavens.

“I’m super excited about the release of this track! It’s such an important moment for me in many ways, it’s been a while since I’ve been able to put out music on my own terms and I finally feel like I’m opening a new chapter and entering a really exciting new era, exploring the sounds I love. I am so so happy to share ‘Weekend’ with the world, it’s a song about being able to let go of inhibitions as the weekend approaches once again. I was trying to embody that exciting feeling of freedom, of heady anticipation about what shenanigans me and all my fellow party people will get up to on Friday, Saturday, summer, festivals and those long summer nights that turn into days”.

I have recently spoken to incredible D.J. queens, Rowena Alice and Carly Wilford, and I would love to interview Eliza Rose next year. She has had such a busy 2025 and played some incredible festivals. I wonder what she has planned for 2026. There will be huge worldwide demand to see this modern-day icon. Someone who is going to grow in stature and influence. A queen (or the) of underground Club culture, HUNGER interviewed Eliza Rose back in the summer:

“You’ve previously talked about how you find your position in the industry as a Black woman. Are there any fellow Black women in the scene that you can’t wait to see blow up?

Oh, loads. OK Williams is an incredible DJ, my friend Amaliah, Bambi is a great producer and artist. Introspekt was actually one of the first people to put something out on Rosebud [Recordings]. We’ve still got a long way to go, and it feels like we’ve gone a bit backwards — people are not as cautious about making line-ups fair, but there are more and more amazing Black female electronic music artists. There is more space to learn and more female communities. We just have to make sure we’re keeping the lineups there.

In your own journey, where do you see your label, Rosebud Recordings, moving towards?

Really, I just want to keep that DIY ethos. It means I have control over my music and it lets me put out my own weird little shit without worrying. It was never a money thing for me, even if B.O.T.A. came out on it, at first, I didn’t ever expect it to blow up.

‘B.O.T.A.’ was absolutely huge when it came out. How much has your life changed since you hit that viral status?

It catapulted me — meteoric rise and all that malarkey. But it was really like being on a rollercoaster. It really opened my eyes to the fact that music is a business and many people treat it as such. I think the song became bigger than me and I do love it, I’m grateful for it, but I now want people to see Eliza Rose the artist, not just the singer of ‘The Baddest of Them All’.

After playing Glastonbury, what other giants are on your bucket list?

I would really like to put my own events on, maybe a small-cap club somewhere in Hackney, go back to those Plastic People days where it was all about the music. I also want to start touring my live shows, somewhere like Primavera, or do a whole album live at Glastonbury, which is like a spiritual home for me.

Talking festivals, your style is very much mood-board material. What is your fashion inspiration?

I really love the ’60s, ’70s and ’90s, they are key eras for me. Lady Miss Kier has always been an influence to me, but I’m definitely moving into a more grown and sexy era. This Black Kylie Minogue is the realm I want to touch on now, and I feel like my style has really grown a lot. I say, while wearing an acid green adidas top”.

It would also be great to read a detailed interview where Eliza Rose discusses her musical heroes. Those she idolised as a child and when she was growing up. The songs that hit her and why she followed those artists. However, earlier this month, The Guardian spoke with Eliza Rose about the songs that have influenced her. It is interesting discovering the wide array of artists that she selects:

“The first single I ever bought

Aaliyah, Rock the Boat. My nan sent me and my cousin to pick up some bits in Dalston and there was some change left over so I went into HMV and bought this CD for £1.99. I shouldn’t have been stealing my nan’s change but I felt so grownup. If my Jamaican dad had found out, he wouldn’t have been happy. I would have got a couple of licks.

The song I’ve streamed the most

Witness (1 Hope) by Roots Manuva. It’s an island track that suits any occasion. If I’m feeling a bit down it gives me some bad girl energy and reminds me to come correct. It also gives me a good adrenaline hit on a run.

The song I can’t help singing
Genius of Love by Tom Tom Club. They had a real influence on my sound and the newer stuff I have coming out soon. I love funky, electronic dance and I also love soulful stuff.

The song I tell people is my favourite

Billie Holiday’s I’m a Fool to Want You. When I started working at a record shop age 15, Billie Holiday was my introduction into music that wasn’t so commercial. I feel like if you say you like Billie Holiday, you sound a bit bougie.

My karaoke go-to song?

Amy Winehouse, You Know I’m No Good. I’m bussing out Amy on any occasion, I’m a diehard fan. This was my anthem at Stoke Newington School where I went. We even had an Amy Winehouse concert. It was an amazing school with a lot of funding for the arts. A plethora of great artists have come out of that school”.

Ever since I spotlighted Eliza Rose in 2023, I have been keeping an eye on her career. Seeing how she continues to grow and is releasing some of her best work. I think next year will see her play some of her biggest festivals sets. Maybe there will be an album or mixtape. Definitely some worldwide touring and incredible collaborations. Someone I know many will tip for success in 2026. A phenomenal artist that everyone should seek out, the fabulous Eliza Rose is…

ONE of our finest talents.

__________

Follow Eliza Rose

FEATURE: Groovelines: George Michael – Jesus to a Child

FEATURE:

 

 

Groovelines

 

George Michael – Jesus to a Child

__________

I may write…

a thirtieth anniversary feature about Older closer to 13th May. However, I did want to spend time with perhaps its most beautiful and heartbreaking song, as it as released as a single on 8th January, 1996 - so its thirtieth anniversary is not too far away. Jesus to a Child was premiered at the MTV Europe Music Awards in Berlin in November 1994. The third studio album from George Michael, I think Older is one of his most overlooked and under-loved works (it was reissued in 2022). Its sublime and gorgeous lead single is so spellbinding. In terms of George Michael’s vocal and his lyrics. I will drop in what the critics said about this song. On an album that contains Michael classics like Fastlove and You Have Been Loved, I think Jesus to a Child is the standout. I did not know that Michael had secretly donated all of the single's royalties to ChildLine. Money that helped save thousands of children, he wanted to keep it secret. However, after his death in 2016, Esther Rantzen, founder of the charity, revealed this fact. George Michael’s generosity extended beyond the charity. He donated to much to so many causes and people, often without it being made public. It gives Jesus to a Child this extra level of importance. It is a stunning song. It is heartbreaking learning about the song and its inspiration. Jesus to a Child is a tribute to Michael’s Brazilian lover, Anselmo Feleppa. The two met whilst George Michael was performing in Rio de Janeiro in 1991. Feleppa tragically died in 1993 from an AIDS-related brain haemorrhage. Michael could not discuss the song’s subject and inspiration as his homosexuality was not publicly known at that time. It was not until he was very publicly outed by a Los Angeles police officer in 1998 that he could more openly talk about the song. The fact Michael wrote this song but could not talk about his sexuality. Also, when Feleppa was dying, Michael could not travel to e with him through fear of being outed and the backlash that would incur..

I want to move to an article from The Telegraph that was published shortly after George Michael’s death on Christmas Day 2016. We learn about the tragic story behind Jesus to a Child. It starts by recalling what George Michael said to Kirsty Young when he appeared as a guest on Desert Island Discs back in 2007:

“It was a strange, strange thing. There have only been three times in my life when I’ve really fallen for anyone. And each time, on first sight, something has clicked in my head that told me I was going to know that person. And it happened with Anselmo across a lobby. So, I met him in that lobby and I didn’t understand why the click happened. This was a man in a Brazilian hotel, I’m never going to see him again, why did that happen? I didn’t understand what was going on. This was the first love of my entire life, this was the first person I ever shared my life with.”

It took Michael until he was 24 to fully realise he was gay, but Feleppa helped him to accept his sexuality: “It’s very hard to be proud of your sexuality when it hasn’t given you any joy,” he told The Huffington Post in 2011, “but once you have found somebody you really love... it’s not so tough.”

Feleppo and Michael embarked upon a freewheeling affair. The Brazilian was a couple of years older than the singer, and more worldly-wise – he showed Michael, who had been brought up by two hardworking, self-made parents, how to enjoy spending his money. He recalled on Radio 4 that he was “still quite afraid, still not knowing how to spend money, I was terrified of my lifestyle removing my ability to connect to what I did.”

They cruised the Caribbean in a yacht, went dancing in New York and Los Angeles’s most glamorous gay clubs, Michael reportedly gave his lover a Mercedes, a Cartier watch, an apartment.

“Anyone who knew me before I met Anselmo would tell you that he opened me up completely – just in allowing myself to trust my intuition,” Michael told The Mirror. “To say to myself, this isn't going to hurt. Life is not going to hurt you if you just open up to it a little bit more. And I am so grateful for that."

"I really believe that he changed the way I look at my life. And I think he changed it because he was such an incredibly positive person. He had a love of life that we just can't grasp in this country. I think he took away that slightly puritanical, Victorian aspect of my upbringing.”

The fug of grief and marijuana rendered Michael creatively dormant. He didn’t write for 18 months, until he did –conjuring up Jesus to a Child in less than an hour. The lyrics, "I'm blessed I know / Heaven sent and Heaven stole / You smiled at me  Like Jesus to a child", seemed oblique at the time, but were actually the first reference Michael made in song to falling in love with a man.

From there tumbled an album, Older, inspired by and wholly dedicated to Feleppa – as he had written in the album sleeve: “This album is dedicated to Anselmo Feleppa, who changed the way that I look at my life."

As Feleppo had shown Michael how to fully embrace his sexuality, so Michael was unashamed in naming his muse: “I made it so clear on that album that I was not going to run away from all the Press reports about Anselmo," he told The Mirror. "Not to put a dedication to him would be ludicrous because so much of it was about him. Bereavement tinges the whole album. It had to be in everything I wrote at the time because I write directly about what has just happened to me."

However, the album – and its tell-tale sleeve – wasn’t released until 1996. Michael wouldn’t come out publicly until 1998, and, while he wasn’t unambiguous about his sexuality, the press were still wary to label his and Feleppo’s relationship as anything more than “close friends”.

Jesus to a Child received its first public airing at the MTV European Music Awards in 1994, when Michael performed during the ceremony in Berlin. It took another two years to be released as a single, Michael’s first in nearly four years, and initially critics were underwhelmed.

“This doesn’t sound like a very inspired start to the next phase of his career”, bemoaned David Sinclair in The Times in December 1995. “A long, maundering ballad, it suffers from a lack of direction and presence. The bittersweet lyric has a certain romantic appeal, but the message of hope comes swathed in layers of introspection and self-pity: "And what have I learned from all this pain?/I thought I'd never feel the same about anyone or anything again."

Jesus to a Child topped the charts instantly once it was released, in the cold new dawn of 1996. Older hit the record shelves five months later, bringing with it speculation about the Brazilian listed in its small-print. At nearly seven minutes long, it remains the longest song to ever grace the top of the UK Top 40”.

Before wrapping up with some critical reviews of Jesus to a Child, there is this interview archive from when George Michael spoke with 8 Days magazine in 1996 about this return into the spotlight. He had not gone anywhere but, fickle as the music press is, they felt like this was a comeback. Published in May 1996, George Michael discussed, among other things, the first single from Older:

“His first single off it, ‘Jesus to a Child’ is, he says, the best thing he’s ever done.

“It’s a special song. It was one of those songs that just felt like it was handed to me. I didn’t have to try very hard. It came naturally. It was recorded over five days but written in just a couple of hours.”

The single is a tribute to a close Brazilian friend, Anselmo Feleppa, who died suddenly from brain haemorrhage two years ago.

“Yes, it’s a sad song but I hope it has a positive message too – I didn’t want it to be all ‘woe is me, woe is me’. It is a song about bereavement. But also about hope.”

And hope has been important to the singer in recent years. For the longest time, there was always someone ready to write him off. They did it when he was with Wham! They did it when he went solo. And they have done it on a regular basis the past few years as the singer fought a long and bitter legal battle to free himself from Sony, his record company, which he claimed treated him like a piece of faulty software”.

PHOTO CREDIT: Brad Branson

I am going to finish with a selection of the critical reviews for Jesus to a Child. If some felt it was too slushy and not a naturally commercial hit, there is no denying the popularity of the song. A number one in the U.K. and multiple countries, I think it has not aged in three decades. Still so poignant and moving. I am also including some retrospective reviews, to show how it is seen so many years after its release:

“Barry Walters from The Advocate wrote that on the song, "Michael compares the emotion of a now-deceased lover to that of the Lord, who was, after all, a man. The tone is intensely elegiac, and it doesn't take a stretch of the imagination to consider this a love song to a boyfriend who has died of AIDS."  Larry Flick from Billboard complimented it as a "gorgeous, quietly insinuating pop ballad." He noted that the words "are, by turns, melancholic and romantic and are delivered with delicate ease", adding that "musically, Michael layers light, shuffling percussion with mild acoustic guitar lines and sweetly understated strings." Steve Baltin from Cash Box declared it as a "lush ballad", adding that "he's never sounded more Adult Contemporary than he does here. 'Jesus to a Child' is a hit as surely as some sport will strike this year." Daily Mirror named it "George's 'best-ever' song". Sarah Davis from Dotmusic remarked that in the context of the album, "Jesus to a Child" "sets the scene for Michael's current direction—brooding, mature, reflective but not so downbeat as to disallow the good times." Entertainment Weekly gave it a C−, calling it a "dispirited, tortoise-paced ballad, which drags on for nearly seven minutes". The writer added that "there's only one retort—bring back Andrew Ridgeley!" Caroline Sullivan for The Guardian felt it is "the best thing on the album" and named it Single of the Week. She said, "The tune itself is a Michael ballad in excelsis. The likes of 'Careless Whisper' (1984) and 'A Different Corner' (1986) can now be seen as trial runs for this one, which incorporates every GM hallmark from anguished upward vocal inflections to tasteful acoustic guitar."

Swedish Göteborgsposten concluded that here, Michael "showed that he still mastered the craft." Jan DeKnock from Knight Ridder praised it as a "mesmerizing ballad" and a "stunning effort". Paul Lester from Melody Maker said it is "all bossa nova rhythms and Spanish guitar over which George softly whispers a requiem for his departed lover”.

Victoria Segal from NME viewed it as "irresistibly maudlin." In 2017, Dave Fawbert from ShortList named it "one of the most beautiful songs ever written". Eric Henderson from Slant Magazine wrote, "'Jesus to a Child' is among the most haunting of Michael's ballads, and one whose meaning could only fully emerge after his coming out. A slow-motion flamenco cry, written following the death of his lover, Anselmo Feleppa, 'Jesus to a Child' still remains supernaturally clear-eyed about what it means to love and to lose. "I've been loved so I know just what love is/And the lover that I kissed is always by my side/The lover I still miss was Jesus to a child".

On 8th January, it will be thirty years since Jesus to a Child was released. The first single from George Michael’s third studio album, Older, I think that we all need to give the album more of our attention and time. Jesus to a Child is one of Michael’s most beautiful and important songs. Considering its story, what Michael did with the profits from the song and how it has endured through the years, I have loved it since I first heard it in 1996. A typically astonishing song from a masterful artist…

WHO is very much missed.

FEATURE: Oh, Sister: Bob Dylan’s Desire at Fifty

FEATURE:

 

 

Oh, Sister

 

Bob Dylan’s Desire at Fifty

__________

DESIRE is the incredible…

 IN THIS PHOTO: Bob Dylan performs at the Rolling Thunder Review Concert on 8th December, 1975 at Madison Square Garden in New York City/PHOTO CREDIT: Ron Galella, Ltd./Ron Galella Collection/Getty Images

seventeenth studio album from Bob Dylan, released on 5th January, 1976. It is one of his more collaborative efforts. One associates Bob Dylan’s albums with him being at the forefront pretty much on every song. Not quite the case in terms of the cast of musicians he employed for Desire. All songs were written by Bob Dylan and Jacques Levy, except Sara and One More Cup of Coffee, which were solo Dylan compositions. To mark fifty years of a classic, I am going to come to some features and reviews. So that can better understand and appreciate an album that reached number one in the U.S. There were legal disputes between Dylan and Levy’s estate. The estate argued that they were entitled to compensation over the 2020 sale of Dylan's song catalogue. That was against Universal Music Group. It was ruled that Levy’s estate were entitled to royalties only and no further payments. Not a black mark against the album, it does at least add additional context and layers to Desire. I am going to start off with Classic Rock & Culture and their 2016 examination of Desire:

“Coming off the comeback success of the recently released Blood on the Tracks, the greatest singer-songwriter of his generation ushered a huge band into the studio to record its follow-up in July 1975. More than two dozen musicians were initially gathered – a violin player, an accordion and mandolin player, even Eric Clapton at one point – to work on Desire, but by the time it was released on Jan. 16, 1976, its scale had lessened by quite a bit.

But it's still one of Dylan's most ambitious records, built around two sprawling narratives (co-written with Jacques Levy, a New York-born psychologist who also was a theater director in addition to being a lyricist). If that wasn't enough, Dylan framed three of the record's other songs around a screenplay based on a forgotten Joseph Conrad novella. After the highly personal Blood on the Tracks, Desire was a return – concerted or not – to the type of songs he was writing back when he was building his legend more than a decade earlier.

The album's centerpieces were rooted in real-life drama. The album's opening track and highlight, "Hurricane," was based on the plight of boxer Rubin Carter, who was charged with three murders in 1966. A decade later, his case was protested by activists, who claimed that racism drove both his arrest and trial. Dylan picked up on Carter's story and wrote an eight-and-a-half-minute song about him, which was both controversial and eye-opening. (In 1985, Carter was released after a judge found that he didn't receive a fair trial 20 years earlier.) It also – surprisingly, given its subject matter and length – became a Top 40 hit, Dylan's second-to-last ("Gotta Serve Somebody" went Top 25 in 1979).

The other track, "Joey," which opened side two, told the story of mobster Joey Gallo, who was murdered in 1972. And like he did on "Hurricane," Dylan paints a compassionate portrait of his subject. But this one was a bit more troubling, given Gallo's violent past. Still, Dylan lays out a defense over 11 winding minutes, and like some of his songs from an earlier era – most notably "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll" – he lets his vivid storytelling set the scene.

It helped that the band – stripped of its huge origin to a quintet that included Dylan, singer Emmylou Harris and violin player Scarlet Rivera, who gives the album its distinctive sound – locked into the grooves. The nine-song set – which also features the great "Mozambique" and the album-closing "Sara," a love letter of sorts to his crumbling marriage – ended up being his last great album before a period of mediocre shrugs, slight rebounds and embarrassing disappointments left him dangling until a career resurrection at the end of the '90s.

Like the two albums before it, Blood on the Tracks and Planet Waves, Desire hit No. 1. It would be his last chart-topping record until Modern Times reached the spot in 2006. Shortly after recording the album, Dylan took most of the group, along with many of his friends and other guest musicians, on the road for the Rolling Thunder Revue, a caravan of sounds that picked up Desire's gypsy troubadour aesthetic. It would be a while, a long while, before his music would contain this much spirit again”.

Prior to coming to a review for Bob Dylan’s Desire, I want to source a Rolling Stone article from 2016. It frames Desire as this exotic masterpiece, it is an album that contains “a gangster, a boxer, and one of Dylan's most personal songs”. I am not as familiar with this album as other Dylan works, but I have been listening a lot to it recently:

“Dylan thrived on chaos and chance while making Desire, a process that was a far cry from the heavily labored recording of his prior LP, 1975’s Blood on the Tracks. One night, Dylan was walking around Greenwich Village and was approached by Jacques Levy, a playwright and director who had previously written songs with Roger McGuinn of the Byrds. Dylan invited Levy to hang out that night at the Other End, a long-standing folkie haunt; later on, at Levy’s apartment, they wrote “Isis.” “He said these magic words, ‘I’d like you to write some stuff for me,'” Levy recalled before his death in 2004. They continued work at Dylan’s summer home in the Hamptons, writing songs with a much different flavor than the reflective tone of his last album. “I guess I never intended to keep that going,” Dylan said. “Sometimes you’ll get what you can out of these things, but you can’t stay there.”

Instead, these were sprawling narratives of outlaws and wanderers, with clearer storylines than anything Dylan had written in more than a decade. They included the cowboy-on-the-run tale “Isis” and “Joey,” the 11-minute saga of fallen gangster Joey Gallo. “I thought ‘Joey’ was a good song,” Dylan said in 1981. “I know no one said much about it.” Perhaps it was overshadowed by “Hurricane,” the story of former boxer Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, who had been convicted of triple murder in 1966. “I read his book and it really touched me,” said Dylan. “I felt that the man was innocent.” Though Dylan and Levy’s lyrics were riddled with factual errors (as was “Joey”), the song helped turn public attention to Carter’s case; his conviction was overturned in 1985.

The album’s atmosphere was also affected by a trip Dylan had taken to the South of France, where he had gone to a “gypsy festival” on his birthday. The gypsy imagery marked songs like “One More Cup of Coffee” and “Durango.” “I think ‘exotic’ is a good word to put on it,” said Levy. The only personal song on Desire is perhaps his most personal ever: “Sara,” a plea to his then-estranged wife, Sara Lownds, to return to him. According to Levy, Lownds showed up at the studio the night they recorded the song. “You could have heard a pin drop,” said Levy. “She was absolutely stunned by it.”

During recording, Dylan kept several studios going at once, filled with musicians (including Dave Mason and Eric Clapton) and non-musicians. Says bassist Rob Stoner, “They had opened up all the adjacent studios to accommodate all these hangers-on and buffet tables. It was just like a huge party. And it wasn’t conducive to getting any work done.”

Eventually, the rooms were cleared and a core group cut the entire album over two long nights. “There was just a level of excitement,” says Stoner. “Sessions were called for 7 p.m., and we only stopped at seven in the morning because that’s when they tow your car on that street. We didn’t want to lose the vibe. No drinking, no drugs, no nothing. It was pure adrenaline”.

Last year, Pitchfork wrote this extensive and incredible review of Desire. Revisiting a “wild slice” of Bob Dylan, Desire is “an album whose air of magic and misdirection remains utterly unique in his catalog”. It is arguable it would be a while until Dylan followed something as brilliant as Desire. Blood on the Track in 1975 and Desire in 1976. Two masterpieces. Arguably, it was not until 1989’s Oh Mercy when he regained some of that form:

“Desire is not a subtle album, and it does not commence on a subtle note. “Hurricane”—an audacious eight-and-a-half minute recounting of the 1966 arrest and conviction of the middleweight boxer Rubin “Hurricane” Carter on charges of triple homicide—begins with the interweaving and insinuating strains of Dylan’s acoustic guitar and Rivera’s violin. One of seven songs on Desire co-authored with the playwright Jacques Levy, it employs stage directions to set its scenery: “Pistol shots ring out in the barroom night/Enter Patty Valentine from the upper hall.” Intentional or not, the effect of the dramaturgy is to suggest a not-strictly-speaking-literal recounting of events, introducing the queasy sensation that we are being carried along by storytellers whose commitment to the facts is secondary to their impulse to thrill and desperation to deliver a higher truth.

Indeed, Dylan and Levy take considerable liberties with Carter’s biography and the case against him. He was never the “number one contender for the middleweight crown”; by the time of his arrest, he was circling boxing’s drain toward journeyman status. Neither did his long history of violence outside the ring comport with the beatific “Buddha” portrayed in the lyrics. Still, the song is one of Dylan’s greatest. The story’s grim particulars take root in your imagination: the ultra-violent crime, the summer heat and police lights, the racist cops and all-white jury sealing his fate. The band rolls along, a runaway sea of conga fills and furious energy. By the end no reasonable person could doubt Carter’s innocence, questionable though it may be.

Desire follows one epic with another: “Isis,” a bluesy slow-burn odyssey that considers the relative plusses and minuses of stealing from the dead for a living, like Marty Robbins’ “El Paso” by way of Leonard Cohen’s early frozen-song landscapes. Its account of a two-man grift gone wrong and the women caught in between post-dates Humphrey Bogart and pre-dates Better Call Saul, making for a perfect mid-point in that continuum of heroic losers.

Then the weirdness starts in earnest. “One More Cup of Coffee” and “Oh, Sister” are solemn and prayerful, filled with Old Testament dread and the echoes of an antiquity reaching further back still. “One More Cup of Coffee” seems to describe the morning after a confused night of romance, the narrator asking his erstwhile paramour for a shot of caffeine before he disappears into “the valley below.” “Oh, Sister” is one of several tracks on Desire sung in haunting harmony with Emmylou Harris. With its passionate interpolation of sibling and spiritual mandates, it’s one part Freudian fever dream and one part plea for familial oneness—Neutral Milk Hotel invented in four gorgeously unsettling minutes. “Oh sister, when I come to lie in your arms,” goes the first verse, “You should not treat me like a stranger.” I’m no psychologist, but it’s clear Dylan is dissociating here. The music’s leisurely grandeur only heightens the creeping horror.

[Scene 2: Marin County, CA, 1987. The legendary songwriter, now at a commercial and creative low point, rehearses with an iconic group from his 1960s heyday for a joint tour.]

The union of Dylan and the Grateful Dead was auspicious, but the context was strange. Riding an improbable wave of commercial excitement following their MTV hit “Touch of Grey,” the Dead were playing to the largest crowds of their career. Following a run of desultory ’80s-era albums, Dylan was decidedly not. Without the Dead as his backing band, there was no chance he would be playing stadiums at this dysfunctional juncture. During practices, the Dead requested old Dylan songs they might want to try their hands at playing. Dylan, for once in his life, wasn’t in much of a position to refuse. Preposterously, perfectly, and for all to hear on 1989’s live LP Dylan & The Dead, Jerry Garcia requests “Joey.”

A straggling Gemini-twin to “Hurricane,” Desire’s most indulgent composition whinges on interminably and borderline incomprehensibly about the gangland slaying of an objectively psychotic mafia figure named Joey Gallo. Dylan famously coined the aspirational phrase “to live outside the law you must be honest,” a formulation that “Joey” undermines in every way possible. If you wanted to make the case for “Joey” as his worst song, you might begin with the demented portrayal of Gallo as some manner of saint, whose ahistorical indulgences might be more persuasive had Dylan bothered to string them together with a shred of narrative logic. You might move on to the torpid melody, one of the least memorable he’s ever written. But hey, at least it’s 11 minutes long. The twist is, in the nimble, gleefully amoral hands of the Grateful Dead, this dismal composition became supple and agreeable. Somehow the Dead brought “Joey” back to life. There’s your graverobbers right there.

Desire’s final third leans further into Dylan’s obsessions with love, death, ecstasy, and the liminal spaces between. “Hot chili peppers in the blistering sun!” he exclaims on the opening line of “Romance in Durango,” a legitimately goose-skin inducing Tex-Mex boogie replete with the thrill of adventure and the promise of violence, an invigorating update to his 1973 soundtrack to Sam Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid. Its lyrics cross the distance between total fantasy and something like a true accounting of events. By the time of the lead cowboy’s inevitable sacrifice-by-desperado, he is so discombobulated that he begins interrogating the libretto itself: "Was it my hand that held the gun?” and “Can it be that I am slain?”

“Black Diamond Bay,” another long story song on an album full of them, is remarkably tuneful, ruefully ominous, and utterly batshit. I have been listening to it for two decades, and I still have no clue what is happening. There is a Greek man, a woman in a Panama hat, a soldier, a tiny man, a volcano. Portends of suicide and disaster percolate: scheming gamblers and sunken islands, betrayals and broken bonds, the kind of Book of Revelation stuff Dylan would get into full-time soon enough. Through some mysterious alchemy, its incoherence yields real beauty, abetted by an incredibly committed performance from his ace backing band—led by bassist Rob Stoner, another musician who figured prominently in Dylan’s career and then seemed to disappear. Try to grasp the details of “Black Diamond Bay,” or just let the imagery carry you away. Like everything on Desire, it’s all misdirection and magic anyway.

[Scene 3: Columbia Records recording studio, midtown Manhattan, 1975. An estranged wife watches her husband sing the song that he thinks will make all the difference. Will it matter?]

Album closer “Sara” is by orders of magnitude the most explicitly biographical song the notoriously private Dylan has ever released. He recounts in forensic detail the fraying of his union to Sara Lownds, his longtime wife and the mother of his children. Even by the contemporary standards of full-frontal psychic nudity, its oversharing is extremely uncomfortable. He conjures their babies playing on the beach. He marinates in his own mythology: “Stayin’ up for days in the Chelsea Hotel/Writin’ ‘Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands’ for you,” name-checking the sprawling closer of 1966’s Blonde on Blonde. He howls her name again and again: “Sara, Sara/Whatever made you want to change your mind?” Talk about blood on the tracks”.

I do hope that there are plenty of retrospective features about Desire ahead of its fiftieth anniversary on 5th January. Undeniably one of Bob Dylan’s greatest albums, it has this cinematic, surreal and sometimes personal narrative. A slight shift in terms of sound and direction, perhaps the greatest moments come from the collaborations with Jacques Levy. Black Diamond Bay and Isis being particular standouts. Fifty years later, and Desire still stands out as one of Bob Dylan’s most distinct and extraordinary albums. For those who feel it is one of Dylan’s lesser or less significant albums, I would say to you that Desire is…

WORTH a listen.