FEATURE: Spotlight: Cortisa Star

FEATURE:

 

 

Spotlight

PHOTO CREDIT: Diego Urbina

 

Cortisa Star

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THERE are some new interviews…

PHOTO CREDIT: Voltoio

with Cortisa Star that I am eager to get to. She is an artist that has already been tipped as one of the names to watch this year. Her E.M.O. (EVIL MOTION OVERLOAD) extended E.P. confirms her as a supreme talent to watch. The American teenage rapper is awe-inspiring. I am going to start out with an interview from NME. A rising artist whose debut E.P. (it is more of an album in terms of length but is being labelled an E.P.) is about being “young, lit and turnt”, she has gone from being this TikTok sensation to walking the catwalk at Paris Fashion Week:

“It’s only taken three years for Cortisa Star to go from making messy beats in her bedroom to teetering on the edge of being music’s next “it” girl. The 19-year-old artist first started making her blown-out, distorted internet rap as an escape from the isolation of rural Delaware, a place where she felt like “the most different person in the room 90 per cent of the time”.

Seeking solace in the internet’s limitless realms helped Star construct the person she is today. It wasn’t long before she was mining samples from looperman.com and uncovered a world of female underground rappers like Skypearleddat, whose fuzzy distortion and bratty aggression informed her own delivery. “Her song ‘SHE AIN FWM!!!’, that really just woke me up,” she tells NME. “I was like ‘wait, I’m a girl, I’m angry, and I can rap: let me do that’.”

Hot off her track ‘Fun’ blowing up on TikTok in 2024, Star has since dropped five singles and is determined to bring permanence to this nebulous virality. Cosigns from Charli XCX, Doechii, Kim Petras and Lil Nas X – with whom she is manifesting a collaboration – have increased her velocity and determination tenfold. “I’m an outcast in this scene,” says Star. “There’s no trans rappers nowhere out front, and having the support is just so important, especially cuz they’re so open about it.”

Chatting with NME shortly after her runway debut for luxury brand Miu Miu’s AW25 show at Paris Fashion Week, she still can’t quite believe that it happened at all. In true Star-style, she topped it off by dropping her own hype track inspired by the moment. “[‘Paris’] was very much a ‘I’m here bitch’ type of song – I’m not going anywhere.”

PHOTO CREDIT: Voltoio

One of the lyrics on ‘Paris’ is “don’t like the track, so I had to adjust.” How did this sentiment inform the creation of your EP, ‘E.M.O. (Evil Motion Overload)’?

“It was pretty spontaneous. My team set up a six-day recording trip in New York and I recorded 12 songs and was like, ‘This could make a cute little EP’. I had this random vibe because it was the first time I was in the studio that I could scream and be as loud as I could, musically.

“I worked with a lot of producers. Getting to see how everybody works differently and how everyone – even my friends – put their inputs on the beat and how something should be changed is so beautiful. There was boys from Jersey, trans girls who love hyperpop. MsChickenSandwich made ‘Bad AF’, so she was there the whole time. And this is a very umru EP.”

The EP feels like a real homage to being a club kid.

“Just being young and going through this crazy shit and living my life, that was what I was really pouring out onto [‘EMO’]. I’m just young, lit and turnt – and that’s a lot of people. Everybody young and turnt, even the 50-year-olds.”

“I love creativity so much and artistry will always be my centrepoint”

Your song ‘Fun’ blew up on TikTok last year. Did you find people on your wavelength off the back of that song?

“I got more followers the second I started posting my music, because I used to just post dumb videos of me trying to be funny, and then the music got so serious. It’s such a random array of people that like my music, people from everywhere.

“Social media is awesome. I was basically raised on the internet because I grew up in a small town of Sussex County, Delaware which was farmland, beach. So, the internet was a beautiful escape, like my fantasy world.”

‘Misidentify’ is a track that is especially queer-affirming. As a transgender woman in the music industry, how has your journey shaped your artistry and the messages you convey through your music?

“I was gender-fluid, non-binary when I was in high school… I really, truly did believe that gender did not benefit a single person on this Earth, not even my dog. Just realising that my identity and how I am perceived by others, and even how I perceive myself, it does not matter when it comes to the cleaner’s process. I love creativity so much and artistry will always be my centrepoint. Once I realised that, I could just focus on that.

“It came to a point where I literally can no longer conceptualise the perception of myself from other people’s view, because it just does not matter to me. It is [liberating]. People tell me all the time, ‘If I got your comments or if I got the same DMs you would have, I’d kill myself’. And I’m like, you don’t have to do that. You can turn off your phone and go outside. It’s OK.”

As a trans woman and a rapper in a genre that has been historically misogynistic and discriminatory to the queer community, what has your experience been creating music in that genre and community, as well as a young person navigating that?

“It’s been crazy because, even when older people jam me and they’re like ‘You’re a pioneer’, ‘You inspire me so much’. This is a crazy life we live because I don’t even feel like I’m inspiring anybody. I’m just moving, I’m just doing what I feel like I want to do every day.”

“I used to have the worst social anxiety. Now, I’m in New York yelling in the deli for my sandwich”

Your lyrics are often confrontational and sexual, meanwhile your delivery is relentless. How does each of these things help with your freedom of expression?

“I like to put the thoughts [from] the backest part of my mind on the song, but also the ones at the front – never the ones in the middle. I don’t really care about anything anymore, anything anybody says. I used to have the worst social anxiety. Now, I’m in New York yelling in the deli for my sandwich”.

I am going to move to an interview from FADER. A star of Rap’s underground, Cortisa Star is undoubtably a role model to so many out there. With very few transgender rappers being spotlighted, Star’s rise and projection is going to give strength and voice to so many people out there. I am really interested to see where she heads next. Once she bursts into the mainstream, I can see Cortisa Star changed the scene and starting conversations:

“Her rave-ready raps position Cortisa as a perfect after-hours MC, dictating the terms of the moment: no lore, no future, just the present throbbing at 160 BPM. Her charisma oozes through speakers in frenetic, ecstatic bursts, like on combustible 2023 cut “Menace” or 2024’s “choke” by skaiwater, where Cortisa’s guest verse catapults #gigi to a delirious peak.

Swag you can hear is a prerequisite for any rapper, but Cortisa’s charm is extra apparent on LCDs and OLEDs, ideally blasted on Friday night minutes before the Uber arrives. A December 2024 From The Block performance of her single “Fun” immediately went viral, racking up thousands of enthusiastic and disparaging replies overnight. The initial comments were mostly confused and focused on her complexion and bleached fro to label her a knockoff Ice Spice. But as the footage continued to trend, hip-hop social media aggregators began reposting the video as transphobic outrage bait, honing in on one bar from the song: “Hundreds of bands put that bitch in my panty/ He like my body he know I’m a tranny.”

Though Cortisa’s upbeat, I get the sense she’s had to develop a thick skin from an early age. Born in Baltimore, Cortisa mostly grew up in a small town in Sussex County, Delaware, where the nearest fast food place is 30 minutes away. She started recording music in late 2022, sometime after dropping out of school due to bullying. “I posted a little TikTok saying I’m pretending to be the rap princess and people grabbed it and started running.”

Her early songs were punched in over type beats from YouTube or loops she would add drums to herself. These tracks were recorded into BandLab on her Chromebook, either in the basement or her bedroom surrounded by her sisters and best friend. They quickly garnered the young rapper a seriously invested 250K+ TikTok following.

Over 2023, Cortisa steadily built her skills, developing her flows and honing her lyrics. She says she’s inspired by Rico Nasty and Chief Keef (she calls “Bitch Where” “diva-coded”), but is also quick to cite Valee and Skypearleddat as inspirations for their flows and intensity. Even with her vocals pitched up and layered over themselves (“I like them pretty punchy, more extreme”), her outlandish personality was conspicuous from the get-go: “Feeling really crazy I’ma stalk her with a drone,” she warbles on “100Cherries.” “It's taking your deepest thoughts, and putting it all out,” she says of her verses. “That's the menace side of me that I never got to express.

“My whole thing was, I don't care about how people perceive me, I'm gonna do whatever I want.” she adds of her first songs. “What's changed is definitely the mixing and organizing and just making it more clean-cut, because the mixes was crazy, I can't lie.”

Cortisa is otherwise coy with details about the new songs she’s recording for her debut EP. She teases collaborations with hyperpop producer Umru — “a generational talent. He was cooking something very serious y’all,” she says — though when I ask about guest verses, she demurely deflects. “There’s some girls on there.” Over email, Umru tells me he wanted to make sure the sound of “recording on a Chromebook in Bandlab… wasn’t totally lost in the music even though it was recorded in a studio,” adding that he “loved her energy.”

She enjoys making music in a space where she can be really loud and more freely experiment. On the new project, she says she sings, has a “little R&B moment,” experiments with tempo, and switches up her flow and cadence. “I never knew I could do that before,” she says. “Just trying to make things a little different for me and the bitches.”

Her vocals are still raw and intense, but deliberately so. On the new single “MISIDENTIFY,” Cortisa’s Auto-Tuned flow surges and soars over a roiling sea of bass. The midtempo instrumental focuses attention on Cortisa’s flow, “mastering rap high up in the mountains with a samurai.” The shift from self-recording has helped her bars land harder and punchier: “Call me man but I don’t give a fuck / ‘Cause I’m that fucking guy,” she flexes on the bigots.

“At the end of the day, trans people are always going to be here,” Cortisa says. “We’re never going to leave. And I just want to stay close with my community, and make sure everybody knows what resources you have, where you can go and be safe, where it’s not safe.”

I am going to end with an interview from W Magazine from March. That is when Cortisa Star made her Miu Miu debut in Paris. Someone who is very stylish and has their own look, it is interesting knowing more about their outfits and favourite spots to shop. For anyone who has not discovered Cortisa Star yet then I would advise you to check her out:

“Much of Star’s charisma lies in her uniqueness; her personal style, which she describes as “maximalist junk,” is influenced by everything from rave culture to digital mood boards, plus the hyperpop world of which she’s part. After her appearance on a freestyle video series went viral a few months ago, Star experienced a barrage of fickle online takes (she tweeted, “Straight people found out about me, and they are losing their damn minds, OMG?”). Despite backlash from those who couldn’t wrap their heads around a trans rapper, Star also received lots of encouragement, including cosigns from the likes of Charli xcx and Doechii.

She credits growing up with a sense of alienation for her current bombastic style. “It really started when I was younger, in high school,” she tells W. “I was an outcast, and I was just like, I need to really show that off.” The experience also gave her a sense of humor that’s apparent in her playful lyrics. “You could say I was a class clown growing up,” she says. “The mug wasn’t always there, so I had to be funny.”

Now working on her “very dramatic” debut EP, Emo—which includes a secret feature—Star says it’s going to be “a very big year for Cort.” Below, she talks walking in Miu Miu, her favorite places to shop, and why people’s opinions of her just don’t matter:

How has life changed since you first went viral?

I still feel the same, but yesterday I was eating at a pizza place, and someone knocked on the window and was like, “Hi, I love you so much.” It’s awesome meeting so many new people.

How did your Miu Miu moment come about?

I went to the casting with Ashley Brokaw, and once I got confirmed, obviously I was gagging so bad. It was my first time out of the country in Paris. I got to walk around and shoot a little music video. And everybody at the show was so nice: all the makeup artists, hairstylists, nail artists, and other models.

When you’re putting an outfit together, what’s the inspiration?

It’s really about where I am and who I’m around. I take a lot of inspiration from my friends, my sisters, the Internet. A good Pinterest board always helps me.

Where are some of your favorite places to shop?

I’m a real thrifting enthusiast. In Baltimore, I love to go to Savers or any local thrift store. I like finding those creepy shops that you’re a little scared of.

Do you have a style pet peeve or something that you hate to see?

Honestly, I like to see everything. With the right mind-set, you can make anything beautiful.

Now that you’ve walked in Miu Miu, are there other designers you’d like to work with?

I really love classic ones, like Ed Hardy and New Rock. And of course, now that we’re up in that realm, I love me some Valentino, some Chanel.

You’ve gotten some big shoutouts from artists like Charli xcx. Has anyone else reached out that made an impression on you?

Yes, Arca is the sweetest girl in the world. That’s the one thing I learned: all these girls are so sweet, and they love seeing people win.

Might you be working with any of them soon...?

If God is good and the universe is willing.

How are you staying grounded now that your career is blowing up? How do you manage all the feedback, good and bad, you get online?

Ever since I was younger, the way I conceptualize people’s perception of me, I just put it completely aside. Unless you’re in my spaces or you have a direct input on my life, whatever these people say, I just do not even think about it. It doesn’t even see me”.

I will end there. A remarkable and powerful artist who I was moved by the first time I heard her, I would recommend that everyone check her out. Maybe still coming through, it is not going to take too long until she is at the forefront. I am going to sign off, but I would compel people to seek out Cortisa Star. This amazing artist is going to be a major star…

VERY soon.

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Follow Cortisa Star

FEATURE: Brothers in Arms at Forty: Inside Dire Straits’ Money for Nothing

FEATURE:

 

 

Brothers in Arms at Forty

 

Inside Dire Straits’ Money for Nothing

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ON 17th May…

it will be forty year since Brothers in Arms was released. On 28th June, Money for Nothing came out. A huge single that went to number four in the U.K. and number one in the U.S., I wanted to focus on it ahead of the fortieth anniversary of the album. One that will get a lot of new celebration and praise. I am going to come to a few features about Money for Nothing. One of the divisive things about the song is the lyrics. The homophobic slur that is used in the song might not be coming from songwriter Mark Knopfler. Although he was writing from the point of view of a character, it has not aged well. Not that it was acceptable in 1985, though there was perhaps less stigma and censorship then. Now, it is one of the unfortunate things about Money for Nothing. However, in terms of the song’s impact and importance, that cannot be understated. There are features that discuss the song’s meaning and background. I am going to start with a feature from American Songwriter and a video that both celebrated and attacked MTV:

“The band and its management decided they wanted something bigger. And writing a song that would make for a good MTV video was the best way to do it. Dire Straits weren’t exactly the types that stepped out into the spotlight like that. They didn’t appear on album covers, and their live performances were more about capturing their outstanding roots-rock chemistry and Knopfler’s virtuoso guitar-slinging than raising the Q ratings of the band members.

Luckily, Knopfler stumbled into an appliance store one day, and the song that would do the trick was laid out for him on a platter. He explained it all in an interview with Bill Flanagan, which was included in the book Written in My Soul: Conversations with Rock’s Great Songwriters:

“The lead character in “Money for Nothing” is a guy who works in the hardware department in a television/custom kitchen/refrigerator/microwave appliance store. He’s singing the song. I wrote the song when I was actually in the store. I borrowed a bit of paper and started to write the song down in the store. I wanted to use a lot of the language that the real guy actually used when I heard him, because it was more real. It just went better with the song, it was more muscular.”

The Police-Man and the Video

Knopfler took those overheard words and crafted the track, which he then turbocharged with one of the fiercest guitar riffs of the era. Since the song mentioned MTV several times, he decided that a sarcastic refrain of I want my MTV, the network’s catchphrase, would be appropriate. Sting was contracted to deliver the line throughout the song. Because he delivered it with a melody that somewhat resembled The Police hit “Don’t Stand So Close to Me,” he was awarded a songwriting credit, even though he had nothing to do with writing any other parts.

To further court MTV, even with a song that was questioning the whole notion of video stars, the band went all-out with a video that featured novel (for its time) computer animation depicting the TV movers from the song, with cutaways to the band in performance. To their credit, MTV got the joke, and helped turn the song into Dire Straits’ first and only No. 1 hit in the US. (Brothers in Arms, the album that contained the song, also topped the charts.)

What Is “Money for Nothing” About?

Some would point out the irony of the title of the song and the fact that Knopfler didn’t have to do a lot of composing (lyrically anyway) to create a smash that helped his and the band’s financial status more than a little. However, discovering those words is one thing. Turning them into coherent, affecting lyrics is another.

The key to the success of the song is the juxtapositions. The narrator/appliance-store worker has to keep interrupting his complaints about the rock stars who play the guitar on the MTV with his own workday drudgery of installing, delivering, and moving TVs and refrigerators. I should have learned to play the guitar, he moans, implying he could have enjoyed a more benign fate.

But Knopfler isn’t afraid to suggest that the store worker is a bit of a lunkhead, with shortsighted beliefs about what goes into the music. Not to mention that he’s somewhat hypocritical: That ain’t working, he whines, all while he’s taking a little break to watch the TVs instead of move them.

Knopfler manages to take the stuffing out of the myth of rock star genius, while also suggesting that maybe it isn’t quite as easy as it looks to the untrained eye. After all, a lot of folks can play the guitar, but few can turn out the pyrotechnics he turns out on “Money for Nothing,” the song where Dire Straits both encapsulated MTV’s golden era and mocked it”.

I will move to a feature from The Guardian. In a very recent chat, we get some fresh insight regarding Money for Nothing and its aftermath. Ahead of the fortieth anniversary of the globe-straddling Brothers in Arms, I have been thinking about a hit that is still played to this day. Even though it needs an obvious radio edit, it has endured forty years. The video is dated and looks rubbish, though the song itself has endured and reaches new generations:

“Mark Knopfler, guitar/vocals/writer

I was in an appliance shop in New York and there was a big bonehead in there delivering gear. All the TVs were tuned to MTV and I overheard this guy sounding off about the rock stars on the screens. He had an audience of one – the junior at the store – and some of his lines were just too good to be true.

Things like: “That little motherfucker’s got his own jet airplane!” And: “He’s banging on the bongos like a chimpanzee!” And: “That ain’t working!” That was just the way he spoke – and in that New York accent too. The bells were going off in my head but I didn’t have a pen with me, so I borrowed one, got a bit of paper and I actually sat down in the window display area of the store and started writing out the lines to Money for Nothing as he said them.

The guitar lick is just a stomp, a two-fingered boogie. It comes from the clawhammer style and it’s got its own rhythm. It was just fun to do. But there were a whole bunch of fortunate incidents that collided with each other to create the song. For instance, I’d seen the Police on the MTV channel saying the phrase: “I want my MTV.” But they also had a song called Don’t Stand So Close to Me, so I put “I want my MTV” to that melody and included it at the start.

While we were recording the Brothers in Arms album at Air Studios on Montserrat, I remember thinking: “Wouldn’t it be great if I could ask Sting to sing that line?” We were on this tiny speck in the middle of the ocean but suddenly someone said: “Sting’s here on holiday! He’s on the beach!” So he came up to the studio and when he walked in, the first thing he said was: “What’s wrong?” I said: “What do you mean?” And he said: “Nobody’s fighting …” [unlike in the Police].

Brothers in Arms was huge. So many people wanted to see the band live. After we played Live Aid at Wembley Stadium, we ran across the car park to Wembley Arena where we were playing that night. In fact, one of the reasons why it felt like I had to scale things back was going into catering and not recognising the crew. That’s when I realised the size of it.

John Illsley, bass

We’d already had four successful albums, so the expectations for Brothers in Arms were pretty high. Thankfully Mark’s writing was sharp as a tack. At that point, we’d convene in a mews house in west London, just with guitars, an acoustic bass and a keyboard, and run through material Mark had been working on.

The Money for Nothing chords and lyrics were already there – and obviously there was Mark’s riff, which was pretty extraordinary. It’s funny: when other guitarists try that riff, they play all the right notes but don’t get the feel. We took our time, and it went from being a Mark Knopfler song to a Dire Straits song. I played the bass in a simple way, happily sitting on the chords, putting down that engine room.

Its title is ironic, because we’d been working solidly for years to get to that point. But everybody viewed us from the outside. Like: “Oh, look at them, that ain’t working, that’s just money for nothing – and they get the chicks thrown in for free.” But it was a bit like Picasso, when he’d do a quick drawing for someone and people would say: “That only took you 10 seconds.” And he’d say: “No, it took me 40 years.”

Brothers in Arms was the first record we’d made with Guy Fletcher, who was a very technical musician. He knew how to work these modern keyboards, while Alan Clark was a wonderful piano player. The two of them created that Money for Nothing intro, and Terry Williams played the most explosive drum solo I’ve ever heard. Then the riff comes in. The guitar tone you hear on the record happened by accident: a microphone got knocked to the floor in front of the speaker and it changed the sound completely”.

I am going to end with an extensive and in-depth analysis of Money for Nothing from Stereogum. Even if the features cover similar ground, it is interesting reading different perspectives and quotes about this giant song. One I remember hearing when I was a child. One of the standout songs of the 1980s, it might have younger listeners wondering what MTV was. Very much of its time in terms of the allure and popularity of that channel, one cannot deny the catchiness of the track and that incredible introduction:

“One day, Knopfler was at a New York appliance store, where a wall of TVs was showing MTV. One of the store’s employees was watching those TVs and talking shit about what he was seeing. As Knopfler saw it, that appliance-store guy had a sort of grudging admiration for the rock stars he saw on that TV. Talking to Rolling Stone after “Money For Nothing” blew up, Knopfler said:

The singer in “Money for Nothing” is a real ignoramus, hard hat mentality — somebody who sees everything in financial terms. I mean, this guy has a grudging respect for rock stars. He sees it in terms of, well, that’s not working, and yet the guy’s rich. That’s a good scam. He isn’t sneering.

When Knopfler heard that guy talking, he grabbed a pencil and a sheet of paper and wrote down everything he was hearing, an impulse that Knopfler has credited to his days as a reporter. Knopfler has said that many of the lines on “Money For Nothing” came verbatim from what he heard in that appliance store. The appliance-store guy never got a songwriting credit. If you’re ever talking shit and you see someone taking note of what you’re saying, pay attention. I wonder if that appliance-store worker ever found out how much money his money-for-nothing rant earned for other people.

But here’s the question: Did Mark Knopfler agree with the appliance store guy? Did he sympathize? I’m not sure. Knopfler has said that “Money For Nothing” is satire, that it’s him writing from the point of view of a character and not his own. He’s said that people take the song too literally, that people smart enough to write about the song should understand that he’s clowning the stupidity of the narrator. But Knopfler also hated music videos. You never saw him with an earring or makeup. There’s a real generational divide between Knopfler and most of the musicians who were benefitting from MTV. Maybe Knopfler had a problem with younger artists who, he might’ve thought, didn’t have to work as hard as he had.

There are a lot of divides at work in “Money For Nothing” — between the appliance-store worker and the people on MTV, but also between the appliance-store worker and Knopfler, and between Knopfler and the people on MTV. There are class divides and generational divides. There might be racial divides, too. (Knopfler has never mentioned the race of the guy working in the appliance store.) And then, of course, there’s the divide caused by the use of one particular word — an anti-gay slur that I don’t really feel like typing out here.

I’ve been wrestling with the idea of how to address this side of the song. Even if you’re just singing in character, that word isn’t really the type of thing that a straight white rocker should play around with. This isn’t a case of 1985 being a different time; plenty of people were mad about the “Money For Nothing” lyrics in the moment. Using that particular lyric, in character or not, is a dick move. (A bunch of early-’00s rap hits that I really like also use that slur, and those ones definitely can’t make the argument that the word’s use is satirical, but I guess I’ll wrestle with those ones when this column gets to them.)

I keep talking about the lyrics because they’re so striking — a huge MTV hit comprised of nothing but a guy complaining about MTV hits. But the lyrics aren’t the only thing striking about “Money For Nothing.” Musically, the track is a pretty amazing example of mid-’80s studio-rock excess. The intro — the falsetto “I want my MTV,” the eerie synth pulses, the shattering drum noises, the way the riff enters the song and kicks everything over — is enough to blow your hair back.

That riff rips. Most of the time, Mark Knopfler was more of a tasteful guiter-hero type — a guy who liked doing flowery and lyrical finger-picked solos. But the “Money For Nothing” riff sounds like a dial-tone coming to life and attempting to eat your face. It’s monstrous, and it kicks ass. I love it, and I love the way Knopfler surrounds it with expensive, discordant synth noises. Production-wise, “Money For Nothing” is grimy and futuristic at the same time, like one of the broken-down spaceships from Star Wars.

Knopfler co-produced “Money For Nothing” and the rest of the Brothers In Arms album with Neil Dorfsman, the engineer who he’d worked with on the Local Hero score. At the time, Knopfler was obsessed with ZZ Top, the baby-boomer blues-rockers who’d somehow figured out how to tap right into the MTV zeitgeist. ZZ Top were sillier than Dire Straits, and they had a more indelible image, but they also figured out a way to convey processed grit with their ’80s guitar sound. ZZ Top frontman Billy Gibbons has said that Knopfler once called him up to ask him how he got that guitar tone. Gibbons didn’t tell Knopfler anything, but Knopfler figured it out anyway. That dog-howling bit late in the track is a total ZZ Top move, too. (ZZ Top’s two highest-charting singles, 1984’s “Legs” and 1985’s “Sleeping Bag,” both peaked at #8. “Legs” is a 8, and “Sleeping Bag” is a 7.)

Dire Straits recorded the Brothers In Arms album on the Caribbean island of Montserrat. While they were recording, Sting was on vacation, windsurfing on the island. He came to the studio and had dinner with Dire Straits, and they played him “Money For Nothing.” Sting loved it, and he jumped into the booth to sing backing vocals. Sting’s a great addition to the track. He sings the high-falsetto “I want my MTV” intro, and his more melodic voice makes a great counterpoint to Knofler’s in-character shit-talk.

Sting recorded his vocal in about an hour, and he ended up getting songwriting credit on the song. When he sang the “I want my MTV” bit, he did it to the tune of the Police’s 1980 single “Don’t Stand So Close To Me.” (“Don’t Stand So Close To Me” peaked at #10. It’s a 6.) Sting later told Dire Straits that he didn’t actually want songwriting credit but that his label insisted on it. You might even say that Sting got his money for nothing. In any case, there was no beef. Sting sang the song with Dire Straits at Live Aid in London. (As a solo artist, Sting will eventually appear in this column.

The people at Warner Bros. thought MTV might be upset about “Money For Nothing,” but MTV loved the song and wanted a video. Knopfler had to be talked into making one. Steve Barron, the early-MTV titan who’d already done the clips for hits like the Human League’s “Don’t You Want Me?” and Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean,” wanted to use new computer-animation toys, and he convinced Knopfler that it could work. A few years ago, Rob Tannenbaum and my former boss Craig Marks wrote an early-MTV oral history book called I Want My MTV — there’s that catchphrase again — and they got Steve Barron talking about the video’s intent:

The song is so damning to MTV in a way. That was an ironic video. The characters we created were made of televisions, and they were slagging off television. Videos were getting a bit boring, and they needed some waking up. And MTV went nuts for it. It was like a big advertisement for them.

In the same book, Adam Ant complains about the “Money For Nothing” video, saying that it changed the MTV landscape. Dire Straits were a visually boring band, but they had the budget for computer animation. If an act had enough money, then, they could get away without putting much work into their performance. They could get over on flash. I don’t know if that’s true or not; visual flash was always important to music videos, regardless of budget. But it’s true that MTV went nuts for “Money For Nothing,” ironic or not. When MTV Europe launched, “Money For Nothing” was the first video it aired. (Adam Ant’s highest-charting US single, 1982’s “Goody Two Shoes,” peaked at #12.)

GRADE: 8/10”.

Because Dire Straits’ Brothers in Arms turns forty on 17th May – though some sites say 13th May -, I wanted to return to Money for Nothing (a song I write about a while ago). I cannot forgive or overlook the homophobic lyrics. However, because it is a song that I love and was a huge commercial success, I felt it important to discuss it. If you have never heard the song then listen to it now. From that epic introduction on, you are hooked in. An epic moment in music history that will be played and loved…

DEACDES from now.

FEATURE: Spotlight: Viagra Boys

FEATURE:

 

 

Spotlight

PHOTO CREDIT: Fredrik Bengtsson

 

Viagra Boys

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GO and see this band…

PHOTO CREDIT: Fredrik Bengtsson

if they are playing near you. For this Spotlight, I am highlighting a band I thought I have covered before. It is a bit of omission on my part. However, I am rectifying that now. Viagra Boys are a group that you need to follow. A phenomenal Swedish punk band formed 2015. Their current line-up consists of lead singer Sebastian Murphy alongside Linus Hillborg (guitar), Elias Jungqvist (keyboards), Henrik Höckert (bass), Tor Sjödén (drums), and Oskar Carls (saxophone). Viagra Boys’ lyrics are known for using satire and dark humour to criticise hypermasculinity and far-right conspiracy theories. I am taking that off of their Wikipedia page. I think I avoided them for a bit because there was not a load of current interviews. However, they have just released their fourth studio album, viagr aboys. I am going to get to some recent interview with the band. However, for the first one, I am going back to late last year and an interview from NME:

“Viagra Boys have revealed to NME that they have a new album on the way, with its release expected “maybe next year”, according to frontman Sebastian Murphy.

The Swedish post-punk band met NME backstage at Reading Festival, with Murphy joined by the band’s bassist Henrik ‘Benke’ Höckert.

Viagra Boy’s previous album, 2022’s ‘Cave World’, saw them incorporate electronic elements into their sound, while its predecessor, 2021’s ‘Welfare Jazz’, bore a distinct country flavour. This time, explained Murphy, the band will include “a little bit of everything, hopefully”.

He added: “We’re gonna see where it ends up. I think there’s a little bit of all sorts of genres in there, hopefully – excluding maybe R&B and stuff like that.” With a laugh, he clarified: “There’s a lot of rock.”

When NME commented that it seems the Viagra Boys sound could go anywhere, Murphy replied: “Yeah, that’s kind of the vibe we want. We want people to not really expect what’s coming.

“And who knows? Maybe it does sound exactly like it has before, but in my head it doesn’t. Hopefully there are new sounds in there and we’ve definitely taken different approaches to songwriting.”

Höckert, describing the record, said: “It’s like the older stuff, but just a little bit better.”

In an interview earlier this year, Kings of Leon told NME that their latest recent album ‘Can We Please Have Fun’ was inspired by post-punk bands including Viagra Boys. Informed of this, Murphy exclaimed: “What! No way! That’s insane.”

Asked if Viagra Boys are KOL fans in return, Murphy replied: “I listened to them growing up a little bit. I mean, when I was 13, 14 – they were getting huge on radio and stuff like that. I didn’t know they were still making music.”

He added: “But that’s cool! That’s awesome. I can’t believe that, really. I wanna hear their new album and see if it sounds like Viagra Boys.” He then imitated his band’s signature guitar sound: “Der-ner-ner-ner-ner-ner-ner-ner!”

Last month, it was reported that Viagra Boys had engaged in a jokey online war of words with fellow Swedish band The Hives. On Instagram, the Hives dubbed Viagra Boys “punk rock losers”. In response, Murphy’s band shared a clip in which they called their supposed rivals “corporate suit rock”.

The joke was a means of publicising their appearances at Sthlm Fields Festival, which was held on July 6. In our interview, Murphy joked, “Fuck those guys!” before confirming: “I don’t wanna keep going – the beef is squashed!”

Conversely, ‘Cave World’ featured ‘Big Boy’, a collaboration with Sleaford Mods frontman Jason Williamson. Murphy told NME that Williamson is his “spirit animal – my British spirit animal”.

He added: “He’s very wise and I just look up to him a lot. I loved what he’s done with his music and his life, and I love how articulate he is and how angry he is. I just love the guy.”

Murphy teased ‘Cave World’ in a 2021 interview with NME, telling us that the band had recorded the album in “six days”. Now, though, he confessed this was untrue: “I must have been lying, trying to flex. Definitely not. There was a lot of back and forth, but everything changed substantially along the way. The whole process was probably over a year.”

Lana Del Rey is scheduled to release her country album, ‘Lasso’, next month, while Post Malone released his own country album, ‘F-1 Trillion’, on August 15. When NME pointed out to Viagra Boys that country music is having a moment and they were ahead of the curve with ‘Welfare Jazz’, Murphy replied: “Yeah, it is, right? That’s why we’re not doin’ it anymore!”

He then discussed his love of the genre, which was apparent in the band’s cover of John Prine’s ‘In Spite of Ourselves’, a collaboration with Amyl and the Sniffers’ Amy Taylor that appeared on ‘Welfare Jazz’.

“I’ve always been a huge country fan,” he said. “I listen to country every day. I wanted to incorporate it into our music before and then it’s like, ‘Oh, we’re kinda: ‘Been, there done that.’ We’ll see – it might come back [to us] someday”.

Although it may sound like I am pretty late to this particular party, the point of this feature is to highlight artists who might not be known to everyone. That deserve to be better know. Viagra Boys have a footing in the U.K. and are played by stations such as BBC Radio 6 Music. I really love what they are doing. Their latest album is among their best work. I am going to move to an interview with Viagra Boys’ Sebastian Murphy and Henrik Höckert:

“Waterboy’ – You’ve got the lyric in this song which says, “Congratulations on your new job.” What’s the worst job you’ve ever worked?

S: I worked at a Quiznos. It was like kind of like a Subway sandwiches place in California. It was my first job and it was absolutely horrible. Now, I can’t even go into a subway. It’s just the smell.

Did you quit or were you fired?

S: Fired, thank God

What did you do?

S: I was just bad at my job. I think I was bad at every job I’ve ever done. I’m just lazy and I’m a daydreamer. I’m just the worst employee. I’ve always been. I’ve had several people tell me this. The first tattoo shop I worked at, the guy told me I was the worst shop assistant he’d ever had.

B: I had a job here

S: In London?

B: In London, sorting mail in the night time.

Did you quit or were you fired?

B: I quit, yeah (laughs)

‘Store Policy’ – Tell me something you’ve stolen from a shop before that you still have? Or your biggest heist?

S: I used to steal all my clothes and then I got caught and I stopped doing it. But me and my buddies would just walk in places and get a big old pile of clothes. I don’t think I have any of those clothes anymore ‘cause I’m much fatter than I used to be. I used to be a small. Now I don’t really steal things anymore, to be honest, but you know.

Are you just saying that because it’s on record and you’re like, “I don’t steal anymore”.

S: I’m actually a lovely little boy. No, I’ll steal, I’ll steal an apple maybe.

Like scrumping!

S: Is that what it’s called? Is that why it’s called Scrumpy?

Yeah! What about you Benke? What’s your stealing stories?

B: I’d steal candy, that kind of stuff, candy and food and spray paint like graffiti. We’d take the spray cans.

Yeah, see, spray cans, that’s a cool answer.

S: I used to go to house parties in high school, and the first thing I would do was go to someone’s medicine cabinet and just steal all their medicine hoping that it would be something I could get high off. But once, I’m pretty sure it was my buddy Nick Hinman (he lives here in London). I’m pretty sure it was at his house, but I stole somebody’s dog’s cancer medicine and I don’t remember it. I was blackout drunk and then I woke up at my house and I had a bunch of missed calls and there was this guy like, “Hey man, did you steal my dog’s cancer medicine?”

I checked my jacket pockets and was like, “Ah yeah, that was me” (laughs). I hope the dog survived.

Shit. Did you give it back?

S: I gave it back for sure. I do care about dogs a lot.

B: Our friend stole a dog (laughs). On his way home, there was a car with a dog in it so he took one of the dogs. Then he came home as he lived outside Gothenburg and the police were already there.

S: The police knew it was him? (laughs)

B: Yeah, they knew it was him (laughs).

‘Medicine for Horses’ – At surface level, this song’s about a horse breaking your neck. What’s the worst injury you’ve ever had/have you ever broken any bones?

S: Yeah, I got I got ran over by a rollerblader in a skate park once and I broke both my wrists and I got a concussion and it was pretty bad. I squealed like a pig. Other than that, I’ve never had any real injuries, probably broken a rib. But I did that on purpose so I could, you know (laughs). No, but, yeah, just broken my wrist. What about you Benke?

B: Nope. Nothing!

Touch wood! ‘You Need Me’ – What’s one thing you need (recreationally) that you will never give up?

S: Beer. No, actually I need to give up beer! What do you mean by recreationally?

Something you can technically live without but you chose to do/take?

S: Video games. Or fast food.

Like Max’s in Sweden?

S: Eurgh, no. I like McDonalds. It’s one of the finest establishments.

B: I’d give up working out.

‘Best Show’ – What’s one TV show you love or loved?

B: Game of Thrones or The Wire.

S: I couldn’t watch The Wire. I thought it was boring, but I like this new show called Silo.

‘River King’ – If you could be king for a day, what is the first thing you’d change about the world or do?

S: I think I would hang a lot of politicians probably. Public hangings.

I think you’d have a lot of support with that as well.

S: And then I would probably introduce a strict socialist regime.

B: Put women in charge.

S: Yeah, and no one over 60 is allowed to be in office”.

I am going to end with a review of viagr aboys. Before that, The Guardian spoke with Sebastian Murphy last month. A band very much getting all this deserved buzz and hype, I do hope anyone who does not know about them checks them out. They are a fantastic band that continue to build on an army of fans:

“Viagra Boys’ 2018 debut single Sports was an addictively funny satire of hypermasculinity (their name drew from similar inspiration); their debut album Street Worms, released that year, railed against Sweden’s growing rightwing populism with wit and muscle. But the band’s steady rise has been built chiefly on relentless, riotous touring. Murphy, shirtless and tracksuit-trousered, stokes the crowd into rising levels of derangement – at their 2023 Glastonbury set, someone in the crowd was tossing their toddler into the air – as saxophone player Oskar Carls writhes around the stage in outrageously short shorts.

In an uptight world, a group dedicated to getting loose like this – so loose Murphy has the word tattooed on his forehead in Swedish – has major appeal: last year Viagra Boys played US arenas supporting Queens of the Stone Age. Their biggest world tour yet began this month at Coachella and will end 60 dates later at London’s Alexandra Palace. Murphy surmises that a lot of the fans “are just freaks, you know. Freaks recognise freaks. It’s freeing for a lot of people to see some dude that has clearly no muscles and is just letting his gut hang out have a good time.”

There was a time when Murphy wouldn’t get on stage without taking amphetamines first. But as his bandmates started having kids and settling down, the pace had to slow to remain sustainable. Murphy credits bassist and de facto bandleader Henrik “Benke” Höckert with gradually tightening things up. “I would always be so pissed off at him if he decided to stay sober for a tour,” Murphy says. “I was busy with doing drugs and thinking about myself; he was busy planning shit. Making it work as a viable source of income. Which would not be possible if we were fucked up every day.”

At the same time, the crippling hangovers and attendant anxiety started to become too much. “I still know how to party for sure,” says Murphy. “But I definitely know my limits now.” Drugs will never be entirely off the menu – “I can’t really help it when I’m on tour,” he admits – but these days he mostly sticks to beer (just the 30 or so a week). He goes to the gym and plays squash to try to stay in shape. He’s even stopped getting tattoos because he says he can’t take the pain any more. “These days if I stub my toe I’ll be crying for a week.”

In 2021, the band’s founding guitarist Benjamin Vallé died aged 47, shaking them all hard. They supported each other through the loss: where some men struggle to discuss difficult emotions, Viagra Boys have no such problem. “We talk to each other about everything,” says Murphy. I ask him if a newfound respect for death prompting him to change his lifestyle. He prefers to think of it as not wasting a good thing. “I’ve got a great fiancee, I’ve got an apartment,” he says. “I can afford things. Life is really easy and really good. I don’t want to fuck it up.”

His visual artist fiancee Moa Romanova, who did the artwork for their third album, 2022’s Cave World, has a studio next door to Shrimptech. At one point she drops in with their dog Uno – both are subjects of songs on Viagr Aboys. Uno II is a strange tale of conspiratorial anxiety seen through the eyes of an Italian greyhound with chronic dental problems. River King is a piano ballad in which Murphy croons with charming imperfection about Chinese takeaways and calming domesticity. It’s a disarmingly gentle end to the album: have Viagra Boys finally gone soft? Murphy smiles a gold-toothed grin. “We’ve always been soft. That’s been the problem all along”.

I am ending with a review for viagr aboys. One of the most urgent and incredible albums of the year, I would encourage everyone to listen to it. I am relatively new to Viagra Boys, but I feel like I have made up for some lost time. I will try and catch them live if I can at some point. They are simply phenomenal and they are getting all this success at the moment. Let’s hope that this continues for years to come:

“Viagra Boys’ previous full-length ‘Cave World’, a hyperactive and hilarious takedown of incels and conspiracy theorists, closed with enthusiastic instructions, courtesy of ‘Return To Monke’: “leave society, be a monkey.” While the track satirises the regressive worldviews of the aforementioned lost souls, in typically nuanced Viagra Boys fashion, it also acknowledges the widely felt appeal of abandoning society in a world where “everybody’s worried about the future”.

The Stockholm band’s latest album ‘viagr aboys’ sees them attempt to follow their own advice. According to frontman Sebastian Murphy, their fourth LP is a “simple and stupid” album, led from the off by the title’s linguistic chaos. He explained that “the whole political thing was exhausting”, implying that these 11 new tracks represent his lyrical voice turning inwards, away from socio-political madness and onto the simple stupidity of day-to-day existence.

However, much like how life today all-too-often feels, Viagra Boys’ new album is unable to ignore contemporary anxieties. Numerous tracks see Murphy set up a mundane, first-person situation, such as a trip to the vets on ‘Uno II’, or a health scare on ‘Pyramid of Health’, but digress into thoughtful, always-funny musings on western privilege and social media health fads, respectively.

Opening track and album highlight ‘Man Made Of Meat’ encapsulates Murphy’s contradictions. The punk-funk anthem features extraordinary lyrics that oscillate between hilarious and serious, arch and honest, and even personal and political. References to “your mum’s OnlyFans” are laugh-out-loud funny, but matched by lucid insights into modern-day malaise such as “if it was 1970, I’d have a job in a factory”.

Matching Murphy’s career-best lyrics are some of the rest of the band’s most eclectic compositions. The likes of the spacious ballad ‘Medicine For Horses’, the anthemic electro-rock of ‘Waterboy’ and indescribable jazz-punk of ‘Best In Show Pt.IV’ are evidence of a band as curious and contradictory as Murphy’s lyrics. They’re constantly searching, with similarly admirable zeal, for new ideas, but sometimes revert back to what they know best; manic, bass-lead, post-punk pit-starters in the form of ‘The Bog Body’ and ‘You N33D Me’.

The lush ‘Medicine For Horses’ surmises the very human complexities of ‘viagr aboys’. “Kiss my wife, tell her I love her,” Murphy croons, before confessing that “tell her she was the only thing that made me stop thinking about the plains, the great plains of North America.” Perhaps this is the simple and stupid philosophical truth that Viagra Boys are getting at: love is the only thing that will stop us losing our minds in the face of reality’s horrors”.

I am going to end it there. Go and check out Viagra Boys. A stunning band who are in a league of their own, viagr aboys is an album that everyone should have. I am a little late spotlighting the band, though there are people who have not heard of them, so I was keen to get this feature out now. Even if they are strong and have a solid fanbase, you know that Viagra Boys will continue to get…

BIGGER and better.

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Follow Viagra Boys

FEATURE: The Digital Mixtape: Mick Hucknall at Sixty-Five

FEATURE:

 

 

The Digital Mixtape

 

Mick Hucknall at Sixty-Five

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I will come…

to a 2022 interview from Classic Pop very soon. It is relevant because the person they interviewed, Mick Hucknall, turns sixty-five on 8th June. The lead of Simply Red, his voice is like nobody else’s. Such an evocative and consistently brilliant songwriter, he is one of the most soulful and spellbinding voices the U.K. has produced (this feature about his favourite albums is especially illuminating when it comes to Hucknall’s influences). I will end with information about a cinematic experience that has just passed. One that marked forty years of Simply Red. Their debut album, Picture Book, was released in October 1985. Before then, I want to highlight some sections from that 2022 interview:

“Mick’s earned the right to kick back. At a time when music biopics have never been so popular, his story has a Hollywood flavour to it. Abandoned by his mother, aged three, brought up by his dad, the working class lad falls in love with soul music as a teenager, but goes to that infamous Sex Pistols Manchester concert and forms his own scratchy punk band, The Frantic Elevators.

Aged 17, he writes Holding Back The Years, a personal cri de coeur which takes five years to be released by the Elevators, then another four to become a transatlantic hit for his next venture, Simply Red.

“It was the first thing I wrote that felt real, you know?” he remembers. “I didn’t know at the time it was going to be important, it was just very sincere. It was about me, being on that cusp of leaving home and yet being slightly fearful of going away – ’cos at 17 you’re still effectively a child in many ways.

“But it really set me off. It was there in the background with all these other songs that I was writing. I’ve known Neil [Smith, the Elevators guitarist who got a co-credit on the song] since I was three years old.

“We used to hang out every Friday night before going down the pub. We’d get together in my bedroom – he’d show me a song that he’d written and I’d show him one of mine. We’d work on them and then go down the pub. Then we would spend the rest of the evening talking about Beatles songs, analysing every chord and endlessly talking about music.”

Mick Hucknall (centre) with Simply Red

Fame, initially, was problematic for him. “I have to confess I don’t think I handled it well. I’m better at it now, but I wasn’t then. I’ve always been musically ambitious and stardom and all that business is something that is part of that, but I didn’t know really how to deal with it.

“I’m a working class boy from East Manchester, had been on the dole for four years and all of a sudden I’m standing on a stage with some of the biggest artists in the world and it was all a bit of a shock, to put it mildly.”

Nevertheless, fame did open doors. For Simply Red’s second album, 1987’s Men And Women, Hucknall wrote a couple of songs with Lamont Dozier; a dream come true for the young Motown devotee. “That was just fantastic. I love Lamont. He’s very different to me in how he approaches writing in that he’s very workmanlike.

“He’ll sit down and write pretty much every day, just sitting in front of the piano. Whereas I just wait until a song comes into my head. But I feel very honoured to have written with him. We did four together – two each for Men And Women and A New Flame. It was a great experience.”

A peak you reach

In his homeland, Mick’s big album was Stars, which shifted some nine million copies worldwide and was the UK’s best-selling album of both 1991 and 1992, spawning no less than five hit singles.

This was the band’s commercial peak: it’s no exaggeration to say that during those in-between years, post-acid house but pre-Britpop, Simply Red were the sound of Middle England. Mick, though, seems unable to put his finger on why that album, more than any other, connected with so many people.

“I don’t know, I think it’s one of those things with an artist’s career you build up to that point – The Beatles built up to Sgt Pepper. Each artist has their own individual moment – Van Morrison had it with Astral Weeks. Each one has this moment where everything comes together at the right time and I guess Stars was that one for me.”

He admits that following it up wasn’t easy and even though 1995’s Life included their first (and so far only) UK No.1 single, Fairground, it didn’t fare anywhere near as well commercially.

“You just think, ‘Well, I’m just going to do the best I can’, and that’s all I’ve ever really done. We did enjoy success with Life – it sold a lot of copies, but well, you know I don’t think ’The White Album’ is as good as Sgt Pepper.

“But I think the one thing that we have had across the decades is consistency. Every album we’ve ever made has gone Top Five and that’s the thing that stays in my mind more than anything.” Indeed, even when the band went independent after 1999’s Love And The Russian Winter, releasing via their ‘simplyred.com’ label, their core audience still remained loyal.

“We had the biggest independent album in the world for two years running. It wasn’t the same as being with a major ‘cos we couldn’t get the distribution in the same way, but we did enjoy success with it. It was a great thrill.”

Family comes first

In 2007, Mick appeared to draw a line under Simply Red and ‘retire’ the band. He claims it was for one reason only: his family.

“I had a father who, when I was growing up, completely dedicated his life to me and that had a major impact on me. When my daughter was born I was very much aware that if I signed a deal with a record company I would be obliged to make an album every two years and go out on the road; I’d be one of those dads who were never at home.

“I just thought, ‘I’m not going to do that.’ So I told my manager I was going to stop. I wanted to be at home bringing up my kid. It was one of the best decisions I’ve made. I’ve been there every day in her life and I’m sure it’s had a positive impact on her to have both of her parents around to help and support her as she learns how to deal with this world.”

For a few years, Mick’s only musical activity was a pair of solo covers albums – one a tribute to the soul legend Bobby Bland and a short tour with the reformed Faces.

Then in 2015 he revived the Simply Red name and signed once more to a major, BMG.

“I had been writing songs and my daughter was old enough to understand that this is my job. Also I have to remember that I am an artist with a career – I gotta go out and work! I just feel that I’ve been lucky to have been able to stop.

“Most people, even very successful people, work their arses off every day. And most dads don’t even get to see much of their kids, except at the weekends and maybe a couple of hours when they come home from work.”

So, with no original members left other than the frontman, is Simply Red now just a brand for whatever he’s doing musically? He sidesteps the question. “Well, I’ve always been the principal songwriter. Nobody else has – in any formation – consistently come up with any songs!

“I, like many people, had a very romantic vision of what a band should be, growing up with The Beatles. But then again these bands are all acrimonious – they’ve all fallen out! They all sue each other, they all hate each other and, you know, I get on great with the guys I work with so… what’s the problem? I never did get to have my Paul or my John.”

Mick insists he has no musical ambitions left – there’s not a duets album or memoir lurking uncrossed on his bucket list. But one wonders how he feels about Simply Red’s status as a band these days. Apart from a brief period around their debut album Picture Book, they have never exactly been trendy.

Fashions come and go but it’s hard to think of another multi-million selling British act that remain so resolutely unheralded, at least by critics.

Put it like this: their records don’t often crop up on those ‘100 Best 80s/90s Albums’ lists. They’ve yet to be the subject of a BBC4 documentary. That biopic will, in all probability, never be made. Does he feel they’re undervalued in 2019?

“Sometimes I do,” he admits. “And then other times I think, ‘I’ve done stuff on my own terms and been in control of what I do.’ The industry itself wants to be in control of the artist and when they don’t have that control they don’t like it.

“When you consider the control that we’ve had over the years then I’m happy with our success – we’re still selling records and we’re still putting bums on seats whenever we do a tour. If people don’t regard us in the same way as other acts, well that’s up to them! But really I don’t have any complaints,” he insists, sounding utterly serene and at ease, both with himself, and the world”.

I am going to end very soon. Before that, and from the Simply Red website fans recently had the opportunity to watch something very special on the big screen. A group that have endured for forty years, this screened performance was quite an experience by all accounts! Even though I am not a diehard, I recognise their brilliance. How distinct and talented Mick Hucknall is. Someone whose political voice is just as important as his musical one. I hope we see and hear more work from Simply Red:

“We’re thrilled to announce that Simply Red’s spectacular performance from their recent 40th Anniversary Tour will be coming to cinemas worldwide from May 15, 2025.

“Holding Back The Years: 40 Years of Simply Red – Live from Santiago” captures the band’s electrifying performance at the Movistar Arena in Chile, where they played five consecutive sold-out shows to rapturous audiences as part of their Latin American tour leg, which saw them perform to over 140,000 fans.

This special cinema event will give fans the opportunity to experience the energy and emotion of Simply Red’s 40th Anniversary Tour on the big screen, featuring stunning performances of their greatest hits and fan favorites spanning their entire career – from their 1985 critically acclaimed debut ‘Picture Book’ right through to their latest releases

Mailing list members will receive exclusive early access to tickets 24 hours before general release – watch your inbox for the presale link!

The concert film showcases why Simply Red remains one of the UK’s most successful and beloved bands, with Mick Hucknall demonstrating why he’s still considered one of the great vocalists in contemporary music. As the band continues their global tour throughout 2025, playing almost 50 arena shows including two nights at London’s O2 Arena and one night at Wembley Arena in October, this cinema event offers the perfect opportunity to celebrate their remarkable 40-year journey.

Don’t miss this chance to see Simply Red’s spectacular performance on the big screen”.

On 8th June, the incredible Mick Hucknall turns sixty-five. A titan of the music industry, his music has influenced so many people. It has touched hearts and souls! A phenomenal live performer, I wanted to take a moment to recognise his talent with a Simply Red mixtape. Featuring their best-known songs and some deeper cuts, this is the iconic Mick Hucknall at his best. Settle back for a….

SPECIAL Simply Red experience. 

FEATURE: The Digital Mixtape: Nadine Coyle at Forty: A Girls Aloud Playlist

FEATURE:

 

 

The Digital Mixtape

  

Nadine Coyle at Forty: A Girls Aloud Playlist

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I am flipping ahead…

IN THIS PHOTO: Nadine Coyle with her Girls Aloud bandmates (left-right) Kimberley Walsh, Nicola Roberts, Sarah Harding and Cheryl Cole

to 15th June and the fortieth birthday of Nadine Coyle. A member of Girls Aloud, alongside Cheryl Cole, Nicola Roberts, Kimberley Walsh and the late Sarah Harding, she has been responsible for a string of anthemic and iconic songs. One of the best girl groups of their generation, I hope we may see another album from them. Even though Sarah Harding is no longer with us, I would like to think the quartet could honour her and continue. To mark Nadine Coyle’s fortieth birthday, I am ending with a mixtape of great Girls Aloud singles and some deeper cuts. Before I get there, here is some biography from AllMusic:

“Nadine Coyle followed in Cheryl Cole's footsteps to become the second member of the hugely successful group to launch a solo career. Born in Derry, Northern Ireland in 1985, Coyle began singing at an early age and, encouraged by her parents, recorded a demo tape that she sent to Boyzone manager Louis Walsh. In 2001, she auditioned for the Irish series of Popstars, where she landed a place in the boy/girl band Six. However, she was replaced when it was discovered that she was 16, two years younger than the minimum age limit for contestants.

Encouraged by Walsh to try out for Popstars: The Rivals, a show that aimed to manufacture both a successful boy band and girl group, she reached the live stages, where her performances of "Fields of Gold," "When I Fall in Love," and "Show Me Heaven" made her a favorite to land a place in the band. Surprisingly, she was only the third member to be selected in the final, but two weeks later, the newly formed Girls Aloud scored a number one hit with "Sound of the Underground," beating the show's other creation, One True Voice. The group became one of the biggest pop acts of the noughties, scoring 20 consecutive Top Ten hits and two number one albums and winning a Brit Award for Best British Single for "The Promise."

After the group members announced they were taking a hiatus in 2009, Coyle began working on her own solo material and recorded as yet unreleased tracks with Boyz II Men and Jay Sean. She made her first solo appearance a year later, when she performed "Love Me for a Reason" at a TV tribute show to Stephen Gately. Despite initial reports that Coyle had signed with Geffen Records, she announced an unexpected deal with grocery chain Tesco's new record label, which would see her debut album sold exclusively in their stores, a tactic that had worked earlier for Faithless and Simply Red. Insatiable, which features contributions from Lucie Silvas, Tiësto, and William Orbit, and includes the Guy Chambers-penned title track, was released at the end of 2010. Coyle also created her own label, Black Pen Records; owns a pub, Nadine's Irish Mist, in Los Angeles; and appeared in the video for Natasha Bedingfield's "I Wanna Have Your Babies”.

I am going to end things there. An amazing artist and part of this hugely influential and important group, ahead of Nadine Coyle’s fortieth birthday I am going to celebrate with a great Girls Aloud mix. The hits you know but some deeper cuts thrown in there. Whether you are a huge fan of Girls Aloud or only know a few of their songs, this playlist should give you a great overview of this legendary band. Nadine Coyle very much at the centre. A fitting tribute to…

THIS incredible artist. 

FEATURE: Spotlight: Revisited: Samia

FEATURE:

 

 

Spotlight: Revisited

PHOTO CREDIT: Sawyer Brice

Samia

__________

HAVING recently…

stopped off in the U.K. for some dates, the brilliant Los Angeles-born Samia is someone I want to revisit. Initially including her in Spotlight in 2022. As she has released two studio albums since then, I thought it was worth coming back. Her news album, Bloodless, was released on 25th April. It is one of the most acclaimed albums of the year. I am going to end with a couple of reviews for that album. Before that, I will feature some interviews with this phenomenal artist. I am going to start off with an interview from i-D. They write about an artist who imagines “herself as a canvas for other people’s projections”:

“The first time I met Samia Finnerty––that’s her government name––she was with an old actor boyfriend in London in 2017. We were taking photos of him, while she spent time, perfectly pleasantly, on the periphery. We maybe exchanged niceties but I didn’t know who she was beyond, well, being His Girlfriend. Then several years later, she wrote one of my favourite debut records: a piercing and anxious piece of work about the need to be coddled in fear of falling apart. It was called The Baby. I spoke to her about it at the time, and remember, most of all, that she rejected the idea of her songs belonging on ‘Badass Women’ Spotify playlists. “I don’t often write from a place of empowerment,” she said, 23 and already very smart. “Usually, when I’m writing it’s from a place of desperation.”

On 2023’s Honey, critics caught up (The Guardian: “raw, deliciously sad, five stars”). It was an album that opened with a lethal acoustic offering “Kill Her Freak Out,” about watching an old flame meet someone new, and hating the prospect so much that you want to “fucking kill her” and “fucking freak out.” The album was a hit, as far as indie records go, carrying a kind of unexpected buoyancy to balance out its lyrical melancholy. But after it was out there, Samia’s proverbial shit hit the fan. “Everyone warned me about second albums, and I didn’t obviously want to believe it, but it was tough,” she says. The good thing? “It ended up giving me a little bit of a metamorphosis.”
When Samia gets into a pit of depression, she temporarily becomes a new person. After the whirlwind of Honey hit hard, “I developed this really spontaneous, sort of like open minded, reckless personality.” She started saying yes to hanging with strangers, took four-hour flights to rural forests for friends’ birthdays, whereas before, she would have stayed at home. “I went swimming a lot. In, like, bodies of water.” That inspired a lyric on “Bovine Excision,” the album’s lead single, which hearkens back to moments spent “picking leeches off white underwear.” 
She had tested out living in Los Angeles, where she was born, after spending time in New York and Nashville, but found the city too steered by the music industry. “There are people who make LA feel like living out the back of a truck somewhere,” she says. But she knew she wasn’t one of them. So Minneapolis came calling, where many of her friends and collaborators lived, and she found it to be a “wellspring for song stuff.”

PHOTO CREDIT: Sawyer Brice

“My instinct is full-on bridge troll, Rumpelstiltskin, riddles and rhymes, you know?”

samia on writing lyrics

Like The Baby, Bloodless started with poems that she’d take to the piano and try to figure out the melodies for, helped by her allies in life and music, the artist Raffaella, Caleb Wright, and Jake Luppen of the indie rock group Hippo Campus. She has worked with other songwriters and producers before, but “I was sitting on their couch, worried about the clock ticking, so I didn’t write what I wanted to,” she says. This trio knew her well enough to call out her bullshit with her lyrics; telling her when the surgical, somewhat submissive energy of the music, these grandiose reckonings with a higher power, had slathered itself too thickly over the songs. “My instinct is full-on bridge troll, Rumpelstiltskin, riddles and rhymes, you know?” Samia says, laughing. “And I wouldn’t want to lose that, because I know it’s true to me––but between the three of them, they can be like: we can find another word there that people know and use.”
The “unsolved mysteries” that make up the tapestry of Bloodless started to make sense to Samia when she wrote “Proof,” about a year after Honey had come out. On the record, it’s maybe the most conventional Samia song: acoustic guitar and her voice, speaking words simultaneously fatalistic––“The girls bleed and drape over the recliner”––and almost comically plain, the constant refrain of “You don’t know me, bitch.” 
The album is laden with gorgeous, enduringly colourful takes on standard singer-songwriter self reflections like this––simultaneously profound and disarmingly simple. On “Pants,” the video for which features The White Lotus star Fred Hechinger dancing in a tent, Samia contemplates the time spent trying on a different personality through the trousers she wears on a flight. “Who was I when I bought these pants?” she questions, following it up with the quip: “They’re non refundable”. 
It’s music for the feral, for the nuisances. For the type of person who’s willing to embarrass themselves. It also––despite cutting through its big questions with wistful, loose-living imagery: think drinking piss, flirting with the idea of ruining parties, and Lime-flavoured Lays––feels like the work of a grown up.

Samia thinks that’s a new-found confidence. “I’ve always had this problem where I won’t say anything with my chest unless it could be argued in a court of law,” she says. Her songs have gotten her in trouble with her subjects in the past; at least that way she knew she was right. “I play the tape all the way through, [getting] everyone’s perspective. But on this record, I was like, I don’t know if that’s the best thing for art, you know?” So she just said it this time. “There’s a really crazy, almost surprising theme of acceptance and acquiescence on this album that I didn’t see coming”.

PHOTO CREDIT: Shervin Lainez

I am going to move to a fascinating and illuminating interview from The Line of Best Fit that was published in April. Having followed her music for years now, I can see how she has evolved. One of the most remarkable songwriters in the world. A sound that is so distinct. Bloodless is an album that Under the Radar said was “angrier, stranger, and more ambitious—less a diary and more a myth, refracted through elliptical metaphors, religious allusions, and a theatrical distance that skilfully enhances the album's raw intimacy”:

“For Finnerty, songwriting has always been a form of therapy. “I started writing because I was angsty and upset as a pre-teen. It was a puberty outlet, and that’s how I learned to process my feelings,” she explains. That tone earned her a cult following and critical acclaim. Audiences came to love her cutting, honest, and masterful vignettes. Her debut, The Baby, now sits in the indie coming-of-age canon; the follow up, Honey, a formidable companion. But if those first two records saw an adolescent become an adult, Bloodless sees an adult become themself.

“I was thinking about a tendency I had to try to make myself incredibly small, or to give as little information about myself as possible so that I could become whatever someone else wanted to project onto me,” Finnerty says. This album was born of trying to unpack and unlearn that tendency, one she says she’s carried most of her life. “I tried to sustain an existence as an idea. Whether that be their dream girl or their worst nightmare, I would just be whatever anyone wanted me to be at all times. And I was like: That’s gotta stop. It’s good for connection. It doesn’t foster real relationships.”

Album-mode for Finnerty is all encompassing. She’s the type, she says, to pull her hair out over every word, flicking through each song line by line to make sure she’s saying exactly what she means at every turn. Early on in the Bloodless process, she adopted an intensive writing routine, treating it like a nine-to-five and not allowing herself to stop writing until the end of her workday. Every day, for a month, she’d sit down for hours on end and not let herself stop. “It was pretty torturous, but I think it actually helped a lot,” she says. “I’d do it again.”

Her supplementary reading diet – in addition to Butler – included Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, Roxanne Gay, Margaret Atwood, Joyce Carol Oates, and Andrea Dworkin. She searched their texts like scriptures, explaining her journey as an endless seeking that she thought might make her feel whole. I follow up on this and ask if she’s religious at all – the album’s spiritual and metaphysical otherworldly underpinnings might lend themselves to theological interpretation. I wonder also about this connection she’s described wanting with some greater purpose or path or meaning. She shakes her head no. She reiterates: “But, I’m a seeker.”

PHOTO CREDIT: Shervin Lainez

Bloodless itself oscillates between emptiness and completeness. If “North Poles” is two halves joining together in a chaotically perfect union, “Hole In A Frame” is its foil, exploring what’s left when there isn’t even a singular whole but a celebrated lack thereof. Inspired by a framed hole that Sid Vicious punched in the wall of Cain’s Ballroom in Tulsa, Finnerty mythologizes emptiness. Or, more accurately, riffs off a famously already-immortalised emptiness. “When I was trying to write about being complicit in my own emptiness and trying to be as barely there as possible, I was like: Oh, I feel like a framed whole. A framed absence. It’s like a celebrated thing that’s gone,” she says. The song was the last track she wrote for the record, and it’s maybe the most complete articulation of the concepts she was trying to parse through at the time.

“I think with this album, I tried to let myself be angry,” Finnerty continues. To date, much of her catalogue has leaned unfettered into sadness, making her a standard bearer for the somewhat patronisingly-titled ‘sad girl’ genre. Sadness, especially for women, is often more palatable, easier to accept for listeners and critics. But writing anger – allowing yourself to feel it – requires coming to the table from a place of strength, one that’s often harder to tap into and one that’s also often discouraged. Bloodless, for Finnerty, was about unshackling herself from those ideological chains.

“I have this thing where I won’t get angry unless it could be justified in a court of law,” she tells me. “I go through the whole thing in my brain and I measure everyone else’s opinions and I won’t open my mouth until I’m absolutely certain I’m right. But with this one, I tried to let some things fly. And I listened to a lot of Fiona Apple, so that helps.”

In the end, after grappling with it all, she arrived at acceptance. The record’s closer, “Pants,” isn’t some triumphant overcoming but instead a higher form of self-understanding. This, Finnerty tells me, proved to be all she really needed in the first place. “I’m always going to be a little bit all of these behaviours,” she says. “I think all you can really do is look at it and try to have awareness.”

As she wrote, Luppen helped her bring her visions to life in studios across Minnesota and North Carolina. In Minnesota, their space was set up in a distillery, which Finnerty says gave her a constant headache that helped motivate her to actually finish the record. She’s the type, she tells me, to spend months tweaking, often coming back to songs months later when she’s finally processed the events they’re about. While this gives her writing expansive perspective, it’s not always helpful for knowing when to put the pen down. That’s where the alcohol-smell-induced daze stepped in. Intermixed with those sessions were trips down to North Carolina, where Wright recently moved with his family. There, they stayed a Betty’s, a studio space built by Sylvan Esso in the woods near Chapel Hill.

“I think we really figured out what the album was in North Carolina,” she says of one of the early pilgrimages out there for Bloodless. “We did a bunch of mushrooms and figured out the North Star.”

Sonically, Bloodless escapes genre. For every finger-picked guitar there’s a whirring synth, autotuned vocal embellishment, or blissed-out drum. If there’s any production throughline, Finnerty tells me, it would just be “eerie.”

“I hate genres,” Finnerty says. “It feels really restrictive. So, I like trying to push that a bit. And working with Jake and Caleb, their palettes are so complicated and even contradict each other, so it’s fun to see what that creates”.

Before getting to some reviews, there is an interview from Rolling Stone where they note how she “searched for her true self, shook off sexist expectations — and made her boldest album yet”. Bloodless is a truly remarkable album. If you have never heard Samia and are not sure whether to commit or not, there are few artists I rate as highlight. Someone I was really keen to return to for this Spotlight: Revisited:

“For Bloodless, Samia realized she had to turn away from the need for outside approval. “It doesn’t come naturally for me. I’m not one of those people who’s like, ‘Fuck what you think,’” she says. “I was really on a mission to shed that part of myself, because I thought, ‘The only way I’ll ever be happy is if I learn to believe in my choices and ideas.’”

Since this past December, Samia has lived in Minneapolis with her boyfriend and fellow musician Briston Maroney. Before that, the couple spent time in Los Angeles, where she was born to actor parents Kathy Najimy and Dan Finnerty, and in Nashville, where Maroney was based. But she says the new album’s Americana feel and folk-pop leanings came into focus on a pivotal recording trip that she took in August 2023 to western North Carolina. “I think the spirit of it was born there,” she says. “That’s when I sort of understood what I was trying to say.”

Samia had begun formulating the poems that would become Bloodless earlier that year, starting with a concept revolving around historical muses like Kiki de Montparnasse, an early-20th-century artist’s model for surrealist painter Man Ray and others. But she found herself changing course to write about how she, herself, was perceived by the world.

It started with the party Samia sings about on “Lizard” — a night that was ruined by the presence of a “no-contact person in my life,” she says. “We had a conversation to try to remedy the situation, and the next day, we had to go to a party together with all of our mutual friends, mostly his friends, and it was horrible.”

Samia says that painful encounter helped her tap into one of the new album’s central themes. “When you don’t talk things through, there’s just a lot of fantasy being created,” she says. “I was feeling the consequences of being made into a fantasy and not being able to have a chance to explain myself and be a human being.” She felt like a mythologized monster, and it pissed her off

Samia soon realized her frustration extended beyond that specific conflict. “I started thinking about my experience with womanhood on a larger scale,” she says. “I had so much shame about being worried about men and maybe having altered myself in some way because of it.”

That’s a theme she’s been working through for years: Some of her earliest singles, like “Someone Tell the Boys” and “Lasting Friend,” boldly called out mansplainers and handsy young men, cementing the singer-songwriter as a feminist voice.

As she continued writing Bloodless, Samia saw how universal her feelings were, and how often women have to shape and contort themselves to appease men. “Even if you don’t like boys, you just have to make men not kill you,” she says. “You have to appeal to men in some way.” Samia makes sure to clarify that she’s not talking about one man in her life: “I keep calling it this conglomerate, patchwork, abstract idea of a man.”

Throughout the LP, Samia deals with the horrific realities of a patriarchal society by poking fun at the unattainable expectations put on women. “Picking leeches off white underwear … I want to be impossible,” she sings on the lead single, “Bovine Excision,” subverting the idea of virginity by claiming she’s so incredibly, unrealistically pure that even leeches sucking on her skin wouldn’t draw a drop of blood.

On album highlight “Hole in a Frame,” Samia finds there can be power in being an empty vessel for other people’s ideas of what you represent, using a piece of music history as a metaphor: the framed spot in Cain’s Ballroom in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where Sid Vicious punched a hole in the wall in 1978. “It was just the most perfect fucking metaphor … the frame around nothing,” she says. “It was this absence that he created.”

The six-minute spiral of an album closer, “Pants,” explores a similar idea as Samia contends with her identity. “Who was I when I bought these pants?/They’re nonrefundable/Now I’m questioning everything I am,” she sings breathlessly over a steady drumbeat before the track transforms into a moody meditation. “Wanna see what’s under these Levi’s?/I got nothing under these Levi’s,” Samia repeatedly taunts as the song ends. Get it? “There’s no woman under the pants,” she tells me, laughing”.

I will come to a couple of the positive reviews for Bloodless. NME. There is a lot to love about this breathtaking album. I think the lyrics are the standout. Nobody writes like Samia. This is an artist that is going to continue to  release these year-best albums. There is no doubting the brilliance of Bloodless:

“Since the release of her debut album ‘The Baby’ in 2020, Samia has become known as a songwriter with a knack for the diaristic and the vulnerable; an artist who is profoundly relatable by being highly personal, distilling the complexities of young womanhood into lines that sear. Second record ‘Honey’, released in 2023, only reinforced that notion, infusing more dark humour into songs full of pain and poignancy.

On ‘Bloodless’, she takes all that and applies it to her loftiest topics yet – the idea of the dream woman as an unsolved mystery, whether our true selves are just a social construct and the emptiness that’s left when you remove all the experiences that have shaped you, how she’s constructed herself in response to what she thinks men want. Those all combine on opener ‘Bovine Excision’, Samia desiring to be “drained bloodless” like the titular unexplained phenomenon of cattle being found mutilated, but not one drop of blood spilt; an urge to remove everything but remain inscrutable.

At the opposite end of the record, she uses a pair of jeans to dissect who she is now, who she once was and who, beneath it all, she really is. “Who was I when I bought these pants?” she ponders. “They’re non-refundable / Now I’m questioning everything I am.” Later, she reveals her conclusion over discordant twangs: “Wanna see what’s under these Levi’s? / I got nothing under these Levi’s.” It’s not a flirty come-on, but a concession that, perhaps, the idea of a true self doesn’t really exist.

“You don’t know me, bitch,” she sings just above a whisper on ‘Proof’, but ‘Bloodless’ at least gives us glimpses at Samia as she dismantles her character song-by-song. On the whirring ‘Lizard’, she fights the urge to be destructive and cause a scene; ‘Craziest Person’ finds her seeking out those messier than her so she can look better. And on ‘Fair Game’, she’s dazzling – a firefly with “no shortage of brilliance / If you can catch me in a clear cup”.

‘Bloodless’ doesn’t just signal huge growth in Samia’s lyrics, but in her music too. It’s an album that’s grand, warm and rich, whether in its most stripped-back, stark songs – like ‘Proof’, which features just the 28-year-old’s voice and a finger-picked guitar – or the thundering eruption of ‘Carousel’ that borders on claustrophobic. It’s also stuffed with ideas. ‘Pants’ could be three different songs, morphing from melancholy indie-rock atmospherics to experimental fragments to a shuffling, Americana outro.

With all that going on, it would be easy for the album to collapse under its own weight; its ambitions proving to be its own downfall. Impressively, though, Samia sorts ‘Bloodless’ into something that not only keeps it together but thrives on its complexities and intricacies. We already knew Samia was a sublime songwriter, but on her third album, she sets a new bar – and then some”.

I am going to finish off with a review from DIY. I am so excited to see how her career blossoms. When I first heard her several years ago, I knew that Samia is an artist we’d be talking about for many more to come. That definitely seems to be the case. Bloodless is an album you will listen to but be compelled to listen to and over and over:

“A delayed shuffle kicks in after the first chorus of ‘Bovine Excision’, the opening track of Samia’s third album ‘Bloodless.’ A simultaneous guitar stab and drum hit highlights the drum’s previous absence, and - akin to the first verse of its opener - ‘Bloodless’ finds comfort in absence, whether it’s referencing cattle mutilation or Sid Vicious’ framed fist print in ‘Hole in a Frame’. Seemingly, Samia has never been one to shy away from a complex theme or a darkly- outlined metaphor: her 2023 breakout and award-winning record ‘Honey’ touched on themes of nihilism and murder. Sharp, vivid songwriting is central to Samia’s craft, and with ‘Bloodless’, her superpower lies in her curiosity for the unknown, and an ability to turn herself inside out, facing the raw, uncomfortable, and deeply human parts of herself head on.

On ‘Lizard’, she compares the likes of men and God and how both are bolstered by uncritical acceptance, noting “peace is a double-locked door, I’m the whore with the extra key”. Then, turning love into indifference like the flip of a switch, ‘Sacred’ concisely describes the emotional whiplash of a breakup (“you never loved me like you hate me now”). In terms of production, the album mostly takes a no-frills approach, often just vocal and acoustic guitar lending itself to the album’s overall message; if you give less of yourself, you’ll appear bigger. Consequently, Samia’s words have never been so profound”.

Go and follow Samia. Listen to Bloodless and revisit 2023’s Honey and 2020’s The Baby. I hope that Samia comes back to the U.K. soon and plays some more dates. I really love her music and would recommend it to everyone. If you do not know about her yet then go and check her out. An artist who is going to be putting out wonderful albums for years to come. A hearty and impassioned salute to…

THIS Los Angeles genius.

_________

Follow Samia

 

FEATURE: The Digital Mixtape: Ivor Novello Nominees

FEATURE:

 

 

The Digital Mixtape

IN THIS PHOTO: Lola Young/PHOTO CREDIT: Ashley Osborn for NME

 

Ivor Novello Nominees

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I am slightly delayed coming to this…

IN THIS PHOTO: Liang Lawrence

but, as the Ivor Novello Awards take place on 22nd May in London, I wanted to recognise that with a playlist featuring most of the artists and songwriters and composers nominated. Before getting to that playlist/mixtape, I will drop in an article from The Guardian that gives us the lowdown and lists the nominees. Recognising the most outstanding and notable songwriting. When it comes to the Ivor Novellos, it is the only accolade in the industry judged by songwriters and composers, for songwriters and composers. Because of that, there is something special about the nominees. The Very best of the best. All of the nominees so richly deserving:

“Lola Young, breakthrough hitmaker with Messy, tops Ivor Novello songwriting nominations

London singer-songwriter picks up three nominations, with her collaborator Conor Dickinson earning two alongside Ghetts and Raye

Singer-songwriter Lola Young tops the nominations for the 2025 Ivor Novello awards, which recognise the best in British and Irish songwriting and composition for the screen.

She receives three nominations in her first year of recognition by the Ivors Academy: best album for This Wasn’t Meant for You Anyway, best song musically and lyrically for Messy, and the rising star award.

The Brit School alumna released Messy in May 2024, but after going viral on TikTok it eventually reached No 1 in January, spending four weeks at the top. Messy also topped charts in Australia, Ireland and beyond and peaked at number 14 in the US.

It has been streamed more than 500m times on Spotify, with listeners drawn to Young’s frank assessment of her own failings, and her compelling (and quite sweary) tale of a toxic relationship: “And I’m too perfect ’til I show you that I’m not / A thousand people I could be for you and you hate the fucking lot,” the chorus concludes.

Despite the east Londoner’s seemingly overnight success, she has been in the UK music scene for years, performing gigs around the capital since around 2018. Her soulful sound caught the attention of Nick Shymansky, Amy Winehouse’s former manager, and Nick Huggett, who first signed Adele – the two became her managers.

Her cover of Together in Electric Dreams was featured in the 2021 John Lewis Christmas advert, and she also featured on Tyler, The Creator’s 2024 Chromakopia album.

Young’s collaborator Conor Dickinson earns two nominations for his contributions to her work.

Also nominated for best song musically and lyrically is Orla Gartland with her first nomination at the awards (for Mine), Laura Marling (Child of Mine), Fontaines DC (In the Modern World) and Raye, last year’s winner of songwriter of the year (Genesis).

Up for best album this year alongside Young is Charli xcx for her cultural phenomenon album Brat, which reached No 1 in the UK, Australia and Ireland and No 3 in the US. It dominated summer 2024, leading to the trend of “Brat Summer” and a viral dance craze to its song Apple. Other best album nominees are Berwyn (for Who Am I), Jordan Rakei (The Loop) and Ghetts (On Purpose, With Purpose), the latter also nominated in the best contemporary song category for that album’s Sampha collaboration, Double Standards.

Rap is well represented in that category, with Pa Salieu and Bashy joining Ghetts, plus singer-songwriter Sans Soucis and pop star Jade, who won the Brit award for pop act at 2025’s awards.

Nominees for most performed work, acknowledging commercial success, are Harry Styles (As It Was, which won two years ago and is in its third year of nomination), Dua Lipa (Houdini), Cassö, Raye & D-Block Europe (Prada), Myles Smith (Stargazing) and Wham! (Last Christmas) – 21 years after George Michael was last nominated in that category.

Music from The Substance, Kneecap, Rivals and The Casting of Frank Stone has been acknowledged in the film, TV and video game categories.

The awards are celebrating their 70th year on 22 May at Grosvenor House in London.

The Ivors 2025 nominations

Best album
Charli xcx – Brat (written by Charli xcx, AG Cook and Finn Keane)
Ghetts – On Purpose, With Purpose (written by Ghetts and TenBillion Dreams)
Jordan Rakei – The Loop (written by Jordan Rakei)
Lola Young – This Wasn’t Meant for You Anyway (written by William Brown, Conor Dickinson, Jared Solomon and Lola Young)
Berwyn – Who Am I (written by Berwyn)

Best contemporary song
Pa Salieu – Allergy (written by Felix Joseph, Alastair O’Donnell and Pa Salieu)
Jade – Angel of My Dreams (written by Pablo Bowman, Jade, Steph Jones and Mike Sabath)
Sans Soucis – Circumnavigating Georgia (written by Sans Soucis)
Ghetts – Double Standards (ft Sampha) (written by Ghetts, Emil, Sampha Sisay and R-Kay)
Bashy – How Black Men Lose Their Smile, written by Bashy, Toddla T and Linton Kwesi Johnson

Best song musically and lyrically
Laura Marling – Child of Mine (written by Laura Marling)
Raye – Genesis (written by Rodney Jerkins, Raye and Toneworld)
Fontaines DC – In the Modern World (written by Grian Chatten, Conor Curley, Conor Deegan, Thomas Coll and Carlos O’Connell)
Lola Young – Messy (written by Conor Dickinson and Lola Young)
Orla Gartland – Mine (written by Orla Gartland)

Most performed work
Harry Styles: As It Was (written by Kid Harpoon, Tyler Johnson and Harry Styles)
Dua Lipa – Houdini (written by Caroline Ailin, Danny L Harle, Tobias Jesso Jnr, Dua Lipa and Kevin Parker)
Wham! – Last Christmas (written by George Michael)
Cassö, Raye and D-Block Europe – Prada (written by D-Block Europe, Obi Ebele, Uche Ebele, Jahmori “Jaymo” Simmons and Raye)
Myles Smith: Stargazing (written by Peter Fenn, Jesse Fink and Myles Smith)

Rising star award
Bea and Her Business
Liang Lawrence
Lola Young
Lulu.
Nia Smith

Best original film score
Fly Me to the Moon – Daniel Pemberton
Hard Truths – Gary Yershon
Kneecap – Michael “Mikey J” Asante
The Substance – Raffertie
The Zone of Interest – Mica Levi

Best original video game score
Empire of Ants – Mathieu Alvado and Mark Choi
Farewell North – John Konsolakis
Flock – Eli Rainsberry
Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II – David Garcia Diaz
The Casting of Frank Stone – Boxed Ape

Best television soundtrack
Black Doves – Martin Phipps
Mary & George – Oliver Coates
Rivals – Jack Halama and Natalie Holt
True Detective: Night Country – Vince Pope
Until I Kill You – Carly Paradi”.

It is a stellar list of songwriters and composers. The absolute best of the best, it will be interesting seeing who walks away with an Ivor Novello on 22nd May. Such a competitive field, they will be competing for a sought-after award! I was keen to include as many of the nominees possible. You may have heard many of these artists/composers. If not, there will be some nice surprises. Sit back and enjoy…

MUSICAL excellence.

FEATURE: We Know All Her Lines So Well… The Impact of Kate Bush on Directors

FEATURE:

 

 

We Know All Her Lines So Well…

  

The Impact of Kate Bush on Directors

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IT is perhaps not surprising…

IN THIS PHOTO: Greta Gerwig/PHOTO CREDIT: Norman Jean Roy

that Kate Bush, as a visual and imaginative songwriter, would have an impact on the film world. Apart from directors who have used her music in their films to those who are inspired by her music and work that into their films, it is hard to tell exactly how far and wide her influence spreads. Kate Bush herself has been influenced by films. Building these cinematic and original songs that go beyond the ordinary, that has been reflected when it comes to filmmakers through the years. I was interested reading an article from Far Out Magazine, where they look back at a 2015 interview where Greta Gerwig mentioned Kate Bush. A particular song that she was moved by and affected her:

“In a 2015 interview, the director gushed over the song ‘Hounds of Love’, taken from Bush’s 1985 album of the same name, and said: “I find her lyrics mysterious and evocative – almost like poetry – and there is a real spaciousness to her music that feels cinematic to me. But specifically with this song, ‘Hounds of Love’, I had really been obsessed with it for a long time.”

Reflecting on the tune’s theatricality, Gerwig explained how it bore relevance to her own work, continuing: “I did a play last summer – it was called The Village Bike – and in the play a women is taken over by irrepressible, destructive lust and there was something about this song that really tapped into that for me.” But on the whole, the filmmaker also felt that Bush’s songbook is permeated with an element that lends itself so easily to the screen.

She added: “I’m a person who lives with very vivid emotions that feel like they often can only be expressed in heightened states of either music or poetry or films or theatre, and I think that she makes the kind of music that feels like she is always at a ten, emotionally. That level of just sheer emotion and excitement, and it taps me into probably the reason why I make art.”

While Bush is no stranger to her music having inspired a litany of other pop and rock stars who have followed in her ethereal wake, the palpable influence it also has on Gerwig in the filmic realm speaks to its transcendental quality across the breadths of creative output in the world, branching across forms to cast her spell in every possible corner of the world.

There’s no denying that for Gerwig, whenever the cameras start rolling, music is still never far from her mind. It is the pace and depth and heartbeat of every movie and, in many ways, her filmmaking would be nothing without it. With the electric current of Bush’s back catalogue spurring Gerwig on to new heights, there’s really no telling where the end point is – because in everything she has ever done, the singer has never known the meaning of a boundary”.

Greta Gerwig is perhaps my favourite filmmaker. Even though she has not brought a Kate Bush song to her films yet, reading what she had to say about Kate Bush is so interesting. Rather than a song being used to heighten a scene or create this viral moment, there is an essence or emotional aspect to the music that Greta Gerwig channels. As a director and writer, Kate Bush’s music has pushed her to new levels. I can see one of Bush’s songs appearing in a Gerwig film soon. However, what Far Out Magazine say about the transcendent impact of Kate Bush’s music. It is clear that Gerwig is not the only acclaimed director who acknowledges the importance of Kate Bush. Bush herself cites an admires directors like Alfred Hitchcock, Nicolas Roeg, Terry Gilliam, Stanley Kubrick, Werner Herzog, Francis Ford Coppola and Francois Truffaut. When we think of Kate Bush, we look at her influence among musicians. It is clear that authors and actors are as influenced by Kate Bush as artists. The difference is that we can hear and feel something different through music. Perhaps a more direct link to Kate Bush, Greta Gerwig is not alone in commending Kate Bush. The emotions and energy she puts into her music. The sheer scale of her brilliance and imagination. Many songs that are short films or epic scenes. Much more compelling that ordinary and commercial Pop songs, I would be fascinated to compile a list of modern films that definitely have some of Kate Bush’s D.N.A. running through them. From films in Horror through to smaller independent productions and big-budget epics, one can look at various scenes and moments and draw that to Kate Bush. Directors such as Taika Waititi have been mentioned when it comes to Kate Bush and having similar styles and storytelling aspects – or are simply fans of her music.

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1993/PHOTO CREDIT: Guido Harari

Not much has been written about the way Kate Bush has impacted cinema. From record-setting directors like Greta Gerwig to those rising or less well-known, I would love to see more filmmakers coming out and expressing their love of Kate Bush and how her music has guided them. We can understand how various films and directors have affected Kate Bush. Nothing really the other way around. Though you can feel and see her essence and genius making their way through various genres and decades of cinema. The dramatic way Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God) was used in Stranger Things in 2022 is a contemporary example of how Bush’s music came alive and defined not only a scene but went deeper. It wasn’t just a case of a song being used because it was recognisable. The lyrics and meaning of that track playing a wider role. Among those projects that have yet to be realised, it would be fascinated and overdue to see not only directors and filmmakers but actors talking about Kate Bush and how her music has challenged and changed them. There are going to be so many examples in contemporary and classic cinema. Think about the way Bush’s music continues to reach new generations. Artists coming up who name-check Kate Bush. Authors and writers sharing their love of Kate Bush. Thinking about some of the brilliant films I have seen this past few years, I can see Kate Bush on the screen. In these scenes. It speaks to her ongoing and multi-dimensional influence. How the way she works and writes resonates with a range of filmmakers. I would love to hear testimony and feedback from filmmakers who bring a bit of Kate Bush…

INTO their work.

FEATURE: The Digital Mixtape: A Modern Club Mix

FEATURE:

 

 

The Digital Mixtape

IN THIS PHOTO: Carly Wilford/PHOTO CREDIT: Abby Cohen

 

A Modern Club Mix

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FOR most of my…

PHOTO CREDIT: Isabella Mendes/Pexels

mixtapes, I tend to focus on mainstream artists or particular types of music. In terms of going beyond that, what about songs played at the club? Whether that is a club in the city, by the beach or a great D.J. mix at a small club, I do not spend enough time exposing that type of music. For this Digital Mixtape, I am going to source some modern-day bangers. Those that get the body moving or bring us together. A few songs that are a little darker and cooler. It has been interesting researching for this playlist and listening to some of the tracks out there. Maybe people can guide me in the direction of others. Whether for a late-night club-night or something in the afternoon heat surrounded by wonderful views and the sea, this mixtape should get the blood running. Get this mixtape started and…

IN THIS PHOTO: Georgie Riot

TURN the volume up.

FEATURE: Alanis Morissette's Jagged Little Pill at Thirty: Inside the Iconic Ironic

FEATURE:

 

 

Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill at Thirty

IN THIS PHOTO: Alanis Morissette in 1995/PHOTO CREDIT: Kevin Cummins/Getty Images 

 

Inside the Iconic Ironic

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THERE is a whole…

Wikipedia section, that argues whether the lyrics in Alanis Morissette’s Ironic are, in fact, ‘ironic’. You know the scenarios: rain on the wedding day; a free ride when you’ve already paid; a cutlery conundrum. Taking away from the brilliance of the song, this argument and quibble has not really done a lot to emphasise the brilliance of Ironic. Alanis Morissette herself knows that the situations are ironic – though people didn’t quite grasp the type of irony and how clever the lyrics are. I will address some of that debate but, as the album the song is from, Jagged Little Pill, turns thirty on 13th June, I wanted to focus on its – in my opinion – most popular and known song. Released as a single on 27th February, 1996, it was the fourth (of six) singles released from the album. I want to actually start out with something from Wikipedia. In terms of the reaction the linguistic debate. That was all people talked about when the song came out. Rather than discuss the quality of the music, they were talking about whether Ironic has any irony in it:

“The song's usage of the word ironic attracted media attention; according to Jon Pareles of The New York Times, it gives a distinct "unironic" sense in its implications. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, irony is "a state of affairs or an event that seems deliberately contrary to what was or might be expected; an outcome cruelly, humorously, or strangely at odds with assumptions or expectations". From a prescriptivist perspective, lyrics such as "It's a free ride when you've already paid" and "A traffic jam when you're already late" are thus not ironic.

Morissette said: "For me the great debate on whether what I was saying in 'Ironic' was ironic wasn't a traumatic debate. I'd always embraced the fact that every once in a while I'd be the malapropism queen. And when Glen and I were writing it, we were not doggedly making sure that everything was technically ironic." In 2014, Michael Reid Roberts wrote a defense of the song for Salon, saying that it cites situational ironies: the "state of affairs or event[s] that seems deliberately contrary to what one expects and is often wryly amusing as a result". Michael Stevens of the YouTube channel Vsauce devoted time to the discussion of irony in the 2014 episode "Dord". In this video, Stevens considers the difference between the typically cited "situational" irony, versus "dramatic" irony. According to him, the irony of the song may not necessarily be in the situations themselves, but rather in the dramatic irony – when someone is unaware of the significance of the event while others are: the situations aren't ironic themselves, but life itself is ironic”.

I am going to end with a couple of features that, for once and all, write why Ironic is actually filled with situations that are ironic. The fact people have misinterpreted the song and falsely taken against it. Is that ironic?! It is hard to find a feature about the song that does not solely focus on its lyrics and whether they are ironic. I guess it is important to highlight them. Before that, I want this review of Ironic:

“One of the things that surprises me most on returning to it with fresh ears is Morissette’s tuning, which is wayward enough that I’d expect almost any producer these days to correct it almost by reflex. However, the reason why it never bothered me at the time, and why a knee-jerk corrective impulse would have been particularly misguided in this instance, is that I really think that the tuning supports the performance. The unvarnished vagueness of the pitch centres in the ‘hai-ai-ai’ introduction and verses really cements the mood of whimsical cynicism there, for instance. Highlights in this respect include the wobbly pitch-rise of “Chardonnay” (0:26), the mocking exaggerations of “afraid to fly” (1:05), and the tetchy meandering of “cigarette break” (2:23). Furthermore, I think her general tendency to drift sharp in the choruses works well too, because it’s something many singers (and indeed instrumentalists) naturally do when they’re pushing the volume into straining territory, so I’d argue that it significantly reinforces the emotional intensity in this context.

Such beautifully judged manipulation of pitch is only one aspect of what is quite simply a phenomenal vocal performance. Just the variety of vocal deliveries used is tremendous, from the softest of head voices through to hard-edged belting, with moments of speech, whispers (“don’t you think” at 0:36), a fatalist half-laugh (2:37), sudden falsetto switches (1:08), and that trademark turbulent, whistling exhalation at the end of “thought” (1:48) thrown in for good measure. She even turns a breath into a hook, for heaven’s sake, when her big lungful at 2:43 mugs you into thinking the last chorus is coming two bars earlier than it actually does.

There’s some interesting panning during the first verse, with the lead vocal well to the right — solo the individual stereo channels and you’ll hear she’s at least 12dB down on the left side. However, given that the only other instrument in the mix is the acoustic guitar, which is panned in opposition, the only real casualty in terms of mass-market translation would be anyone hearing only one side of the mix. Even under those circumstances, though, mix engineer Chris Fogel’s sensible decision to avoid hard panning means that the left-side listener doesn’t lose the lyrics entirely. And the scheme isn’t without its pop-sensibility benefits either, because the sudden movement to the centre of the panorama for the first “It’s like rai-ee-ain…” flags up the switch to Alanis’s more powerful vocal delivery for stereo listeners, while single-speaker listeners get an additional level hike at the same point by virtue of the stereo-to-mono conversion”.

It is interesting how Alanis Morissette was not especially attached to Ironic. She did not want to put it out. This happens with many artists. They get this huge hit and then years later recall how they were not keen and wanted to leave it off an album. In a 2020 Rolling Stone Music Now episode, Morissette talked about Ironic and her feelings towards it at the time:

“In the latest episode of Rolling Stone Music Now, Alanis Morissette discusses her powerful new album, Such Pretty Forks in the Road, 25 years of Jagged Little Pill, and much more, including a moment when she laughingly addresses years of “shaming” over those dubious examples of irony (a black fly in your Chardonnay?) in her hit song “Ironic.” To hear the entire episode, press play below or download and subscribe to the podcast on iTunes or Spotify.

In the hit Broadway musical version of Jagged Little Pill (now shuttered indefinitely due to the current health crisis), the show’s characters echo years worth of mockery of the song: “That’s not irony,” one says. “That’s just, like, shitty.” Morissette says Diablo Cody, who wrote the show’s book, “nailed it” in that scene. The songwriter is hopeful that the musical will finally put the topic behind her: “Until the next generation kicks my ass! Until the next onslaught of shaming!”

In any case, Morissette was never particularly attached to “Ironic,” which largely stood apart from the autobiographical narrative of the Jagged Little Pill album. “I didn’t even want it on the record,” she explains. “And I remember a lot of people going, ‘Please please, please.’ So I said, OK. That was one of the first songs we wrote, almost like a demo to get our whistles wet. But people wound up really liking the melody, and I wasn’t that precious about it. And I came to realize later that perhaps I should have been,” she admits, laughing. “Whoops!”

“I guess one of the things that is the scariest for us in terms of our collective shame is being [seen as] stupid or uneducated or ignorant,” Morissette adds. “I can embrace, ‘I’m stupid,’ I can embrace that I’m really brilliant. It just depends on when you catch me!”.

I am going to finish with a couple of interesting features around the lyrics for Ironic. A classic written by Alanis Morissette and Glen Ballard, it was a huge chart success. Number one in her native Canada, it was a big success in the U.S. and U.K. I am going to move to the first of two features from Salon. Last year, they dissected the philosophy of Alanis Morissette:

“We don’t know whether Alanis read or cared about the Greeks, but she’s made hundreds of mentions of Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung and how his pioneering theories of analytical psychology deeply influence her songwriting. Jung died in the early '60s before irony began trending as a fundamental human relation. Although he had no explicit definition of irony, he theorized that humans are strongly influenced by symbols expressed through myths and dreams or other cultural touchstones. In his emphasis on the gap between our surface words or actions and their deeper psychological meanings or feelings, Jung would probably say that irony questions and subverts normative cultural narratives. He would understand irony as an archetype drawn from our collective unconscious.

This is the way in to grasping how Alanis does effectively utilize irony. She has a deep understanding of and a postmodern comfort with cognitive dissonance, with lyrics that describe the affective landscape of the gap between our gestures and expectations. Sadly, one of the best defenses of “Ironic” comes to us from Vince Vaughn. The opening sequence of the 2013 film "The Internship," which Vaughn wrote and starred in, has “Ironic” blasting in a convertible with the top down as Vaughn and Owen Wilson head out for a night on the town. Wilson is dismayed that this song is on Vaughn’s “get psyched” playlist and they debate it. “I defy you to crush this chorus and not get psyched,” Vaughn says. Wilson does so and then is indeed psyched. One hundred percent of the examples given in “Ironic” are bummers, and yet the lyrics close with a reminder that life has a funny way of helping you out.

"Irony does not involve the simple substitution of the opposite for the literal meaning."

That’s Barthesian irony. Roland Barthes was a French literary critic who worked in semiotics, the study of signs and symbols, just as Jung did. Compared to the Greeks’ understanding of it, Barthesian irony is less concerned with opposites. He simply defined it as a rhetorical device involving a double meaning. The discrepancy between the two meanings generates ambiguity and this ambiguity can push a listener to interpret the lyrics of “Ironic” in a new way. You can sing about all the bummers in “Ironic,” but do so joyfully, embracing even the hard parts of life as inevitable or necessary. Our struggles help us out. Framing something bad as somehow yielding something good is a subversive move when it allows multiple, conflicting interpretations of a song at the same time. It offers ten thousand spoons instead of one knife. This multiplication of meaning is a form of linguistic play, a turning to imagine what one might do with the unexpected bounty of ten thousand spoons. When critics dismiss “Ironic” as made up of a failed set of literal opposites, they miss the point: irony is a rhetorical whirlwind that disrupts language and undermines normativity.

Dualistic dismissals of “Ironic” foreclose its vivacious, nonbinary complexity. “Irony does not involve the simple substitution of the opposite for the literal meaning,” said Barthes in "Elements of Semiology." “It is a form of semantic pivot which overturns the hierarchy of language, bringing into play the signified and the signifier, the explicit and the implicit, the internal and the external, the present and the absent.” By Barthesian standards, “Ironic” is ironic. This is especially true when Alanis questions whether life can be a little too ironic. The Greeks conceived of irony as pass/fail, but Alanis considers irony to be a spectrum, and she slides from side to side across the examples in the song in a manner that is definitely akin to Barthesian play. The most critics can really claim is that she didn’t do so on purpose.

Diablo Cody knew she wanted to directly address the decades of controversy about “Ironic,” especially given that Alanis consistently has a playful attitude about the criticism. Cody writes that Alanis was “always open” to poking gentle fun at the song and “there is such a discourse around the inaccuracy of that song.” The use of “inaccuracy” here is telling, as if a rhetorical device could be objectively correct or not. She set the debate in an English class because it absolutely does belong there. “I would not have taken that meta approach unless I had felt that the song demanded it,” she wrote. Rather than make fun of the song, Cody forthrightly admits she wanted to “make fun of the song’s critics.”

Celia Rose Gooding relates to the way criticism is deployed against her character, to shut her up in a grand sense just as critics tried to quiet Alanis. “People don’t like it when women speak their truth,” Gooding says in the musical book. “When you can find a little piece of something almost fractionally incorrect, it’s so easy to just say, ‘You’re wrong. You’re stupid. You don’t know what you’re talking about, girl.’” There’s the feminist seedling. We’ve covered why the broader French mode of irony that makes space for “Ironic” is superior to the Greek mode that excludes it, but we have not yet tied the irony issue to a larger conversation about sexism in the dismissal of Alanis’ work.

For this, we turn to the work of Lauren Berlant. Berlant was one of the most influential 21st century American cultural critics, known for pioneering the field of affect studies. Though they didn’t build upon Jung directly, their examination of how emotions are socially constructed is well aligned with Jung’s notion of how archetypes format human experience. Berlant theorizes that women’s feelings are simultaneously expressed and constrained by sentimentality. The portrayal of intense emotional states tied to women’s experiences is certainly a main mission of Alanis’ body of work and could also be considered a Jungian archetype. "Jagged Little Pill" is exemplary of the psychological landscaping Berlant is interested in as a cultural expression operating at the intersection of emotion, gender and power in public life. To silo or deride the mission of Alanis is to file it away as “female complaint”.

I am going to end with an earlier Salon feature. One that came a decade before the previous one. If some feel Ironic’s lyrics contain no irony, then retrospection and examination has proved otherwise. This is what Salon wrote in 2014. A song I first heard in 1995, I have loved it ever since. It never gets boring or loses any of its brilliance:

“First, let’s get this out of the way: calling Alanis Morissette’s lyrics unironic is wrong. From “irony” in the Oxford English Dictionary:

3. A state of affairs or an event that seems deliberately contrary to what was or might be expected; an outcome cruelly, humorously, or strangely at odds with assumptions or expectations.

This accurately and uncontroversially describes almost all of the song’s situations. For everyone I know, rain on one’s wedding day would indeed be cruelly, humorously, and strangely at odds with expectations. This sort of irony is usually called “situational irony,” and while I’m usually opposed to breaking irony apart into discrete kinds, the phrase works pretty well here to describe the many ironic examples that Alanis describes. Both that 98-year-old-man and Mr. Play-it-Safe possess fates that are truly ironic; they struggle to create a meaningful narrative in the face of a world that thwarts their intentions. The only moment in the song that doesn’t easily fit into this definition of irony is one of the last, with the “man of my dreams” and “his beautiful wife.” There is certainly a contrast there, but it doesn’t seem to be one of expectations; I’ll get to that later. In general, though, the song evokes the disparity of meaning that comes from the difference of expectation and actuality. Just because no one is being sarcastic doesn’t mean the song isn’t ironic.

But let’s not stop there. The more I think about it, the more I am convinced that in writing this Alanis has a much deeper, more radical, and philosophical concept of irony. It seems to me that Ms. Morissette is remarkably well versed in the theories of irony from Erasmus to Paul de Man; if she hasn’t read their works herself, then she has certainly internalized much of the theory of irony not only as a trope but as a question of philosophy.

Take, for example: “It’s the good advice that you just didn’t take.” This is the vaguest line in the song, and it seems to pose a challenge to the ironist. Presumably the situational irony here is that the listener didn’t expect the advice to apply, whereas it did indeed. But why didn’t “you” take the advice? It’s possible that you thought the advice-giver was being ironic, and didn’t intend for you to heed the advice. Or you simply thought that the advice wasn’t “good” when it was; either way you don’t take it “seriously.” In fact that word, “seriously,” haunts the end of the lyric; the irony here is one of (mis)interpretation. Paul de Man addresses this difficulty of interpretation in his essay “The Concept of Irony” (not to be confused with Kierkegaard’s book of the same name): “what is at stake in irony is the possibility of understanding, the possibility of reading, the readability of texts, the possibility of deciding on A meaning or on a multiple set of meanings or on a controlled polysemy of meanings.” Doesn’t Alanis provide the perfect example of living in a world where we’re unsure of what to take seriously, and what not to? And who, really, would have thought it figures?

A more global question: what is “Ironic” really about, anyway? I turn to the bridge/outro: “Life has a funny way of sneaking up on you / Life has a funny, funny way of helping you out” What is she talking about here? How is life helping her out? It seems to me that this song, like so many songs on Jagged Little Pill, is describing the wistful emotional reflection that a Gen-Xer feels when distanced from her own life experience. Think Daria, think Reality Bites. It’s telling that the music video features three Alanises taking a road trip: Alanis sees herself from the outside. A friend once described this popular 1990s attitude as “the meaningfulness of meaninglessness.“ Come to think of it, that describes the poetry of T.S. Eliot pretty well too.

Or, put another way, Alanis is describing the affect of Kierkegaardian irony. From the philosopher’s book The Concept of Irony:

In irony, the subject is negatively free, since the actuality that is supposed to give the subject content is not there. He is free from the constraint in which the given actuality holds the subject, but he is negatively free and as such is suspended, because there is nothing that holds him. But this very freedom, this suspension, gives the ironist a certain enthusiasm, because he becomes intoxicated, so to speak, in the infinity of possibilities…”.

It is a shame more people have not properly talked about Ironic. As a piece of work and how it sits alongside other songs from the 1990s. Most of the features zone in on the debate around Ironic’s actually irony. I think Ironic is one of the standouts from Jagged Little Pill. As that album turns thirty on 13th June, I was keen to spotlight its biggest track. I may do another feature around the album but, for now, I am sticking with Ironic. A superb track that continues to be played around the world, I think it is important everyone…

SHOWS it some love.

FEATURE: Feminist Icons: Caitlin Moran

FEATURE:

 

Feminist Icons

PHOTO CREDIT: Mark Harrison 

 

Caitlin Moran

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SOMEONE who I have…

PHOTO CREDIT: Jay Brooks/The Guardian

discussed a fair bit recently, I am including Caitlin Moran in my Feminist Icons feature. You can find her books here. I am going to bring some interviews with her. Finishing off with promotion around her latest book, 2023’s What About Men?, I want to start out with some interviews from an interview from 2012. Apologies if this is a little scattershot and random. What I aim to do with this series is introduced people to feminist writers and provide links to their work and drop in a few interviews. Published in 2012, Caitlin Moran spoke with NPR. They write how Moran “says that most women who don't want to be called feminists don't understand the term”. This is a writer, author and feminist whose words and work has really inspired me:

“GROSS: (Laughter) OK, great.

MORAN: (Reading) So here is the quick way of working out if you are a feminist. A - do you have a vagina? And B - do you want to be in charge of it? If you said yes to both, then congratulations. You're a feminist, because we need to reclaim the word feminism. We need to reclaim the word feminism real bad.

When statistics come in saying that only 29 percent of American women would describe themselves as feminist, and only 42 percent of British women, I used to think, what do you think feminism is, ladies? What part of liberation for women is not for you? Is it the freedom to vote, the right not to be owned by the man that you marry, the campaign for equal pay, "Vogue" by Madonna, jeans? Did all that stuff just get on your nerves, or were you just drunk at the time of survey?

These days, however, I am much calmer, since I realize that it's actually technically impossible for a woman to argue against feminism. Without feminism, you wouldn't be allowed to have a debate on a woman's place in society. You'd be too busy giving birth on the kitchen floor, biting down on a wooden spoon so as not to disturb the men's card game, before going back to hoeing the rutabaga field.

GROSS: Thank you for reading that. That's Caitlin Moran, reading from her new book "How To Be A Woman." So why do you think so many people, so many women, don't want to be associated with the word feminism?

MORAN: I think it's simply because they don't know what it means. When - one of the reasons that I wanted to write a whole book about feminism, rather than just endlessly wanging on about it in a bar - which had previously been my technique in order to spread the word for the sisterhood - it was because I was meeting a lot of younger women. And I would kind of confidently say oh, well, you know, we're all feminists here.

And they would, with a look of horror, as if I had just banged them on the knee with a fork, go no, I'm not a feminist. And you go, what do you mean? And, you know, you kind of - you run through kind of, you know, what being a feminist means, sort of like voting and, you know, rape being illegal and not being a legal possession of your husband.

And they go, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, no, we're into all of that. I said, well, you are a feminist then. Women are feminist by default. And you live in a feminist world. The first world is feminist. You are educated equally to boys. You're expected to go into equal employment with boys. In a marriage, you are legally equal. So, you know, you cannot deny we live in a feminist world.

GROSS: What made you realize that?

MORAN: I never didn't realize it. I was, I mean, I was brought up in a kind of, you know, very hippie, liberal family. And it was just always automatically assumed that men and women were equal and indeed superior. I mean, when you've got a mother who's given birth to eight children, you know, often without any kind of medical intervention - just she gave birth to one of my brothers sort of on the bedroom floor in front of all of us -you know, you see that women are fairly capable.

So that was why it was always weird kind of, you know, whenever we did have a television - our possession of a television was sporadic because we were quite poor, and they would often be repossessed. But whenever we did have a TV, and you'd see the women on television, you'd be like, why are these women kind of pretending to be stupid or just kind of - just being all blonde and giggly and kind of only operating as an adjunct to the male characters? You know, why aren't the women as important as the men?”.

The mother of teenage daughters, in 2020 for The Guardian, Caitlin Moran wrote how she marvels at some of the things she got wrong in How to Be a Woman. However, there is a lot she got right! I guess things changed and shifted in the years after that book was released (2011). I would urge everyone to read all of her books. Even if some observations are not quite accurate or Moran things they it is dated, they are essential reading. Moran speaking about her experiences as a woman:

“What are the key changes since I wrote How To Be A Woman? Mainly, they are incredibly positive: when I see what my teenage daughters are listening to, reading or watching, whether it’s Michaela Coel in I May Destroy You staring at a menstrual blood clot on her bed, Lizzo singing about body positivity, the Broad City girls hustling for their dollar in NYC, Jameela Jamil showing off her stretch marks, Janelle Monae singing about bisexuality, or Queenie hitting the clubs, living her best life and surviving the asshats, I think, with great satisfaction, how this is the the best era for joyous, mainstream feminist role models young women have ever had. In 1985, I had the choice of Margaret Thatcher or Miss Piggy. Back then, young women really had to make do.

The only thing I would do, as someone who is now officially an Old Crone – these are my Hag Years, and I am proud of them – is caution all these amazing, strident young maids: don’t eat your sisters. While feminism’s online call-out culture stems from good intentions – to accelerate progress, to hold people to account – it is noticeable that there is barely a feminist of the last 10 years, whether it be a pop star, comedian, academic, businesswoman, politician or activist, who hasn’t, at some point, been brutally hauled across the social media coals for getting an aspect of feminism “wrong”.

These days, there is hypervigilance around talking about being a woman that makes “being a woman” feel like something a bit effortful, and perilous, and something you could publicly fail at – which is a miserable climate to be young in. One enduring aspect of being young is believing in moral absolutism. We’ve all done it: I remember thinking I would never be friends with someone who preferred the Stone Roses over Happy Mondays. But this is, undeniably, a far more inflexible and judgmental era than when I was a teenager, or young woman.

So many young feminists I meet are in such a state of anxiety about accidentally saying the “wrong” thing – so terrified of making a mistake on social media, despite wanting, desperately, to be kind and good – that they would prefer to remain silent on various subjects. This puts the future of feminism in a risky position because online activism is, like love and care, unpaid work. And when women shame each other for free, for months on end, the patriarchy simply sits back smoking a big cigar, touching its genitals, and murmuring, “Yes, ladies, yes, keep fighting. Could some of you – the younger, sexier ones – maybe put on a bikini? And do it in this pool of jelly?”

From my 45-year-old Witch Throne, where I have seen feminism ebb, flow and ebb again, I feel I should croakingly remind everyone, once more, about the most crucial, brilliant, sometimes frustrating thing about feminism: it’s really not a science. It has no rules. It’s still just an idea, created by millions, over centuries, and it can only survive if the next generation feels able to kick ideas around, ask questions, make mistakes and reinvent the concept over and over, so we can build the next wave of feminism. And the next. And the next.

Feminism is at its best when it looks like freedom. When it remembers that you must never underestimate the importance of progress looking like it could, among other things, be fun. When it’s the place where women can feel relaxed, and hopeful in their bones. When they feel so connected with each other that, sometimes, they can go up to strangers on a train at 10am on a Tuesday, happily shouting about how they have just discovered another new, brilliant thing about being a woman”.

Caitlin Moran has started new conversation about feminism. For What About Men?, she turned her focus on men. Realising how there isn’t a positive men’s movement. It is a really fascinating book that got a lot of unfair backlash and criticism – mostly from men. I want to move to an interview with GQ. Again, I am quoting various bits from interviews to give you a broad overview of Caitlin Moran. I would urge people to read further and definitely seek out her books:

“One of the tricky things Moran has to navigate is that her talking points about why men are in peril put her in strange company with those bogeymen currently stalking our classrooms: Tate, Jordan Peterson and a thousand imitators of their psuedo-intellectual schtick who ooze down TikTok’s FYP like an oil spill, coating our teenage boys’ brains with muddled convictions about “body counts” and the “proper” role of women alongside dubious advice about stock trading and how to bench press. Anyone who has been longing to read a proper, funny takedown of either charlatan will find much to enjoy in What About Men?; Peterson in particular brings out the ferocious best in Moran’s writing.

"Whenever Peterson hits on a truth, it’s usually someone else's" In this exclusive extract from her new book What About Men, Caitlin Moran takes aim at the Canadian author and his 12 Rules for Life

“I didn’t go to university, but when Time magazine is calling [Peterson] the most important intellectual of our time, I’m reading his book going: ‘No! This is either stuff pulled from other people or stuff your Mum would say!’” she says, “undercut with the fact that he's a very depressive, fundamentalist Christian whose Twitter feed just tells you where he's at now – it's all climate denial, rampant, really awful transphobia and this belief that Justin Trudeau is somehow the Antichrist.”

We return to her original point, about who has paid the price while the conversation around men has soured. “The stakes in this are teenage boys. To men and women of my generation, it’s a recent corrective that feminism is so positive – women are the future! Beyoncé! Feminist clubs and vagina merchandise on Etsy! We don’t realise that for 15-year-old boys, that’s all they’ve grown up with. For them, they’re going ‘When was the last time anyone said anything good about boys?’”

Nothing visits misery upon the world like a young man who hates himself. In the end, if there’s a self-esteem crisis developing among men, people of all genders will bear the load of it. In the suicide epidemic, for example, which is the biggest killer of men under 50, it is often female relatives who are left to pick up the pieces. Over the past decade, it has sometimes felt like we’ve lost sight of how interconnected our fates are. Men have benefitted hugely from women becoming more empowered over the past decade. It’s resulted in better conversations, stronger workplaces, plenty of great art. If we can find a positive narrative for men – a way to make just being a man something to celebrate, without leaning into the regressive cruelty of Tate – maybe we can start to return the favour.

For what it’s worth, the dog line made me laugh out loud

Moran suggests the answer isn’t to reverse feminism but to be inspired by it: for men to get our own adjacent little thing going. “Feminism isn’t a set of rules about women,” she says. “It's a set of tools for understanding gender. So if we want to reinvent men, you go and look at these tools that we invented that allow you to go: is this because of my gender? Why is this a problem? I don't like these clichés about my gender.”

Moran’s attempts to kickstart this positive narrative around men make up the bulk of the book. While some sections feel more aimed at providing eureka moments for middle-aged mums – chapters on “The Cock and Balls of Men” and pornography cover ground we’re pretty familiar with, thanks very much – What About Men? ends with a list of characteristics she has decided, with the help of her Twitter followers, are typical of men when they are at their best. It includes things like “nonjudgmental”, “protective”, “brave”, “joyous” – before Moran realises she’s been describing a dog.

This passage – which recently ran as an extract in The Times – has already attracted a backlash to the book, an early sign of the choppy water Moran is about to swim into. For what it’s worth, the dog line made me laugh out loud, and realise how much we’ve desperately needed some levity in the conversation around masculinity. It’s all become so loaded, so tense, so joyless.

Since How To Be A Woman, Moran has, in her own words, been “cancelled 20 times”, her politics found wanting by younger generations. Others this week have already pointed out that not all well-meaning men have spent the past decade sitting on their hands – many have started organisations and charities aimed at tackling the crisis facing young boys. Moran is not inventing the idea of a positive conversation around men any more than she invented feminism in 2011. But what her book does, I think, is give a green light for the discourse to get a little lighter, a little more human, a little less po-faced and uptight and – frankly – scared.

“Women are at peak ‘Don't give a fuck’ at the moment,” Moran says. “You are so richly rewarded if you find a taboo and bust it. Women have found the perfect tone to that, which doesn’t hurt anyone. Men haven’t found that yet”.

PHOTO CREDIT: Tim Lane

I am going to end with an interview from TIME. I am going to write more about Caitlin Moran in future features. Do her proper justice. However, as a modern feminist icon and one of our most important writers, I did want to revisit her work. In terms of where she goes next, I am fascinated to see what she will cover. I think Moran will focus on positivity and serotonin. Writing about women and their experiences but bringing joy into the mix:

“How worried should women be about plight of modern men? What with overcoming the imbalance in leadership, eliminating the gender wage gap, and figuring out how to address sexual assault, women have quite a lot on their plate already. Then again, it's hard to deny that men are struggling. They are more likely to be imprisoned, to be homeless, and to be unemployed and less likely to graduate from college. Recently a new (and unexpected) champion added her name to the list of people officially concerned about men's predicament: the feminist writer Caitlin Moran.

“You just described something as feminism which feels more like just women being supportive of each other. Are they the same?

The feminist movement goes, "Let's collectively not just change our own lives and solve our own problems, but let's change legislation. Let's change business. Let's change the structure." Each chapter in my book is a problem that men face that is specific to their gender. About half of their problems are things that could just be solved by brotherhood, you know, talking to each other and helping each other. But the other half do need some kind of systemic change, whether it be an education, in employment, in medical care, in mental health.

Moran's Rule No. 2 is that the patriarchy is screwing over men as hard as it's screwing over women. Is it patriarchy or is it changes in technology and global trade?

I think all men presume they're in the patriarchy, and they're winning. And it's like, no, no, no. There's 10 guys at the top of this tree, who are doing OK, but you're being f-cked over as well because you're the guy that’s scared he’s about to be punched when you go to school. You're the one that's been told not to cry. You're the one that doesn't have paternity leave. The advantage women have is that we talk about the patriarchy, and we know how it disadvantages us. Men haven't yet started the conversation. So they're only about 50 years behind us in terms of talking about gender.

Did writing this book you change your mind about men?

If you're a 15-year-old boy, in the last 10 years, [female empowerment] is all you will ever have heard. Their dads know that this is a very recent and mild corrective to 10,000 years of patriarchy because they can remember a childhood of rampant sexism everywhere. The boys just don't have that perspective. And so they are angry.

I'm wondering what you think your chances are, as a noted feminist, of getting young men to read your book?

My favorite thing is to find an area that's taboo, shameful, dark, difficult, and awkward, anything that's usually hard to start a conversation about, and to find a way of starting a conversation about that, where you can basically blame me. Mums can read this and they can find a sort of modern, relaxed, humorous, realistic way to talk to their sons about things like violence and extreme online pornography, which would otherwise be a difficult topic to raise in the middle of Christmas Day”.

Someone whose work I really love and someone whose books I think everyone should own. If you are not familiar with her work then go and seek her out. I am going to end things there. An incredible writer whose work has touched and inspired so many girls and women, I also think many men have connected with her words – I most definitely have! I cannot wait to follow her career going forward. Even though she is a journalist who writes regularly for The Times, there is something about her books that is especially compelling. I love the way she writes. For those with very little Caitlin Moran in their collection, go and…

ADD her to your bookshelf.

FEATURE: The Digital Mixtape: A Selection of the Best Singles from 2025

FEATURE:

 

 

The Digital Mixtape

IN THIS PHOTO: HAIM 

 

A Selection of the Best Singles from 2025

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I recently…

IN THIS PHOTO: Lorde

shared a mixtape of songs from the best albums of the year so far. Even though we are four months into the year, I wanted to do a bit of a temperature check and look back. It has been a terrific year for music. One of the best years in recent memory. In terms of the album that have come out, there have been some gems that will go down as classics. Be talked about for years. The same goes for singles. I cannot recall all the terrific singles that have come out this year. Instead, I have assembled many of the best. Again, like songs from the best albums, there might be some omissions. Other people might have their own views of which are the best singles of 2025. It would be interesting to hear some feedback. However, below is a range of the wonderful singles from this year. It goes to show that the music of this year is…

IN THIS PHOTO: Father John Misty/PHOTO CREDIT: Ward & Kweskin

PRETTY damn incredible.

FEATURE: From Under the Waves: The Modern-Day Introduction to Kate Bush

FEATURE:

 

 

From Under the Waves

 

The Modern-Day Introduction to Kate Bush

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RETURNING to a subject…

that I have covered before. That concerns discovery of Kate Bush. In terms of music discovery and who is being highlighted by the press, it is new artists. Unless there is a bit of news relating to an established and legacy artist, you only really discover them if you hear them on the radio or through streaming. Although a lot of the youngest generation do listen to radio, most of their new music information is through streaming and online. They are not necessarily listening to mainstream stations or have that desire to connect with classic artists. That might sound all-sweeping. Things are different from when I was young. Born in the 1980s, my music education was a mixture of my parents’ collection, radio and browsing through albums at record shops. Physical music sharing was a big thing. Whether that was a new artist or something our parents owned. Now, that dynamic and trend has changed. My path to Kate Bush was – as I have said multiple times – a VHS copy of her greatest hits collection, The Whole Story. It made me think about Kate Bush and how she is being discovered by teenagers, children; adults in their twenties perhaps. It is a huge event when a Kate Bush song is used in film or T.V. and that reaction grabs a lot of new fans. Even if there is a new album coming from Kate Bush, if someone is not aware of her already, how do they discover her? Unless they follow particular music websites or are in the right place at the right time, it would be pretty easy to miss out. I guess it is an issue with any artist. However, there has been some groundswell and vibrations remaining from Bush’s success and new relevance following the Stranger Things phenomenon in 2022. However, as I am someone who has been a Kate Bush fan for decades, I can still see this issue.

One of the good things about the modern age compared to my upbringing is social media. Even though it has many faults and flaws, when it comes to music sharing and awareness, it is easier to find artists. TikTok videos that have Kate Bush music. Whatever the official/unofficial name of the Kate Bush fan community is – think we are settled on Fish People?! -, they are doing great work. Sharing videos, posts and images, you can feel their influence. However, when it comes to capturing a whole generation, Generation Alpha, you do wonder how many that sort of thing will recruit. Streaming sites are very much about the major artists of today. Whether that is Lorde, Taylor Swift, Bad Bunny or wherever, it is not really set-up to lead younger listeners to older artists. Maybe they are not seen as relevant. If they are not putting out new music, then are they are as valuable as modern acts who are producing new stuff? Also, as Kate Bush is in her sixties, she is not going to get the same sort of focus and platform as a younger artist.  There is a debate as to whether Kate Bush is known by those in their teens or twenties. It depends where you live and whether you know a lot of exiting Kate Bush fans. If you did stop a hundred people on the streets of London let’s say, maybe half would be sure who Kate Bush is. However, I suspect they may know her for the only song – most likely Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God). A small percentage might be able to name a few songs. That is something I guess. However, if you only know or hear the one song then you are far less likely to bond and stick with that artist. I discovered Kate Bush as a child but then there was conversation about her. People my age knew about her. My parents’ generation also discussing her. Now, when we want to win some new Fish People, what is the best way of undertaking that?! When the blessed Kate Bush does release another album, many will instantly pass it by. Assuming, as it is from an artist in her sixties, it is not contemporary and cool enough for a young audience. Assuming that children and teens only like modern Pop and artists like Charli xcx. It is a form of discrimination, stereotyping and ageism that needs to change. Sure, this is true of some of that age. However, Bush’s music crosses genre and age barriers.

I do wonder how many non-initiated to the joy of Kate Bush’s music see a song of hers on a TikTok video or shared on Instagram and are compelled to dig deeper. If a big celebrity posts an Instagram reel or story and they use a Kate Bush song. On the strength of that single track, are they likely to commit to a deeper dive?! It is hard. Maybe people like me are subjective. Huge fans of Bush, maybe we are a little out of step with a more objective viewpoint. What I mean is that it is perhaps hard for very young listeners to discover legacy artists when there is so much out there and they are subjected to so much information and music. However, I don’t think films and T.V. shows should do a lot of the heavy lifting. There needs to be a consistency and easier access for younger listeners. I do worry that a certain disposability and ephemeral aspect of music means that few are able to commit and concentrate. Objectively, Kate Bush is a fascinating and pioneering music. Her sounds can be traced to artists of today. She cannot be defined by genres and you cannot lazily pigeonhole her. She has so many different aspects to her brilliance. As a producer, lyricist, technological innovator and vocalist, there is so much to discover and admire! I wonder if there is an easy solution. When I last discussed this subject last year, I asked how easy/hard it is to spread the gospel of Kate Bush the the younger generation. It is very hard in a modern world where there is emphasis on the new – and the young. I guess we Kate Bush fans have to keep writing about her, discussing her work and sharing her music. We can only hope that her brilliance reaches young listeners…

FOR generations to come.

FEATURE: The Digital Mixtape: Tracks from the Best Albums of 2025 So Far

FEATURE:

 

 

The Digital Mixtape

IN THIS PHOTO: HotWax/PHOTO CREDIT: Derek Bremner

 

Tracks from the Best Albums of 2025 So Far

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WE are not even half-way…

IN THIS PHOTO: Sam Fender

through this year, yet there have been so many incredible albums released. Some year-defining greats that will mark 2025 out as one of the strongest and most diverse years for musical excellence. I have compiled a mixtape of songs taken from the best albums of the year so far. I am likely to (accidentally) miss a few, so apologies there are some that have not made the cut! Regardless, from wonderful bands through to pioneering and world-class solo artists, this year has already produced an embarrassment of riches. I am going to assemble another playlist featuring the best singles of 2025. I will do updates to both around July and December. Try and capture as much of the year-best music as I can. Checking in as we end April, it has been such a tremendous year for albums. Here are songs from the…

IN THIS PHOTO: FKA twigs

VERY best of 2025.

FEATURE: Groovelines: Aaliyah - Try Again

FEATURE:

 

 

Groovelines

  

Aaliyah - Try Again

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THIS phenomenal track…

turned twenty-five on 26th March. Aaliyah’s Try Again was a single taken from the soundtrack of Romeo Must Die. That film, where Aaliyah starred alongside Jet Li, was not especially well received. However, Aaliyah was a fine actor and there was this huge promise. You could have imagined future roles that saw her act in coming-of-age stories, Black comedies and socially gritty films that would have made her this esteemed actor. Unfortunately, Aaliyah died in a plane crash on 25th August, 2001 on her way from The Bahamas following filming of the music video for Rock the Boat. That single was included on her eponymous album – released just over a month before she died. Try Again was included as a bonus track on international editions of Aaliyah. Losing such an amazing artist at the age of twenty-two, it was a huge shock! Redefining contemporary R&B and Hip-Hop, Aaliyah was dubbed the ‘Princess of R&B’ and ‘Queen of Urban Pop’. Her legacy was enormous. Artists including Beyoncé inspired by her. Try Again is one of her most popular songs. Produced by Timbaland and written by Timothy Mosley and Stephen Garrett, the song was a huge international chart success. I am going to get to some features around Try Again. First, here is some information about the reception for Try Again:

“Robert Hilburn from the Los Angeles Times gave a mixed review of the song saying, Toni Braxton "would have brought more vocal presence to this smash from the Romeo Must Die soundtrack, but Aaliyah does express the youthful optimism of co-writer-producer Timbaland's gently taunting ode to romantic resilience".[42] In his review of Romeo Must Die: The Album, Christopher O'Conner from MTV News said "It's been a long time/ We shouldn't have left you/ Without a dope beat to step to, Timbaland proclaims in his murky voice as the electronica fuzz bass of "Try Again" kicks off the album. He's not bold. He's not out of line. He's just honest. And he's right". Music Week labeled the song as a "funky uptempo workout" and highlighted its early on radio support. Stephen Dalton from NME mentioned that the songs production was "veering increasingly close to the far fringes of left-field electronica", and that it wouldn't "sound out of place in an underground German techno club".

Renee Bell from Radio & Records said "Try Again" "shows a more mature Aaliyah", and explained that its "positive and encouraging lyrics move the single up the chart, and it continues to receive much love from radio. Who says sex sells? Not all the time". Bell's colleague Rob Neal felt that Aaliyah "hasn't missed a beat" and that her "smooth vocals, along with Timbaland's trade-mark production, are a hit for the urban audience. Neal also praised the song's lyrical content saying, "An encouraging message with clean lyrics and an uptempo beat make this song a winner in three different areas". While reviewing Romeo Must Die: The Album, The Ledger said that Aaliyah steals the show on the soundtrack and that she "makes 'Try Again' and 'Are You Feelin' Me?' soft and sexy" Writers from Variety concluded that Aaliyah "demonstrates her confidence in love" on the song”.

I would advise people to read about Aaliyah. Such an incredible artist who has inspired so many others, I would point you in the direction of this article and this. This article from 2012 discusses how Aaliyah’s influence is everywhere. Before getting to some more in-depth analysis of Try Again, in 2023, producer Timbaland revealed that Try Again – or its incredible sound – was sort of a ‘mistake’:

“Timbaland has revealed one of his biggest hit records, Aaliyah’s “Try Again,” was made by mistake.

During his sit-down conversation with the I AM Hip-Hop podcast, Timbo explained how playing around with his keyboard led to creating the hit 2001 record, which served as a bonus track off Aaliyah’s self-titled third and final album. It was also released as the lead single off the soundtrack to the 2000 film Romeo Must Die.

“I was playing with the keyboard and it was a mistake, and my engineer Jimmy Douglass caught it,” he said. “I said ‘Jimmy did you catch that lil rhythm?’ [and] he said ‘I sure did. So [after] he caught it and played it back, I put the beat on it. I said ‘Ooo chop it right there,’ and he chopped it right there.’”

The Virginia native also revealed the late Static Major wrote Aaliyah’s verse and that Jay-Z told him the record was a hit. However, it took Timbo some convincing as he wasn’t sure of the track’s success at the time.

“When Jay-Z came in the studio he was like ‘Oh my God,’ and then I was like, ‘yeah we got one,’” Timbaland said.

Timbaland surely did have “one” with the song as it rose to the top of the Billboard Hot 100 chart, the first track to do so strictly off airplay as it wasn’t commercially released in the United States. It also peaked at No. 1 on Billboard’s Hot 100 Airplay, No. 3 on the Mainstream Top 40 and No. 4 on the Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs charts.

If that weren’t enough, “Try Again” was also nominated for Best Female R&B Vocal Performance at the 43rd Annual Grammy Awards, and the accompanying Wayne Isham-directed music video won two MTV Video Music Awards in 2000”.

I want to move to a very in-depth feature from Stereogum. Try Again was a number one in the U.S. in June 2000. This feature explores the background and lead-up to Try Again and beyond that: the legacy Aaliyah left. She changed so much in her short life. Such a distinct and instantly memorable song, Try Again is still played widely to this day:

“The coolest person in the world. In the last few years of her way-too-short life, that was Aaliyah. I can’t think of any other way to describe her. Aaliyah made futuristic brain-scramble music, and she did it on a huge stage, helping introduce wild and psychedelic new sounds to the mainstream. But Aaliyah never made a big deal about the way that she updated the pop-music vocabulary. Instead, she found ways to float effortlessly over non-Euclidian alien soundscapes, making them sound as natural as a shrug or a sigh.

Aaliyah could sing, and she could sing in ways that most of her ’90s R&B peers never even attempted. While the rest of the R&B landscape was locked in a melisma arms race, everyone competing to see who could sing the most notes, Aaliyah flattened her delivery out into a pillowy glide. There was never any sweat in her sound. Instead, her voice was an ethereal flicker that fully internalized the twists and turns of the strange new tracks that she chose.

Aaliyah’s cool went far beyond her power as a musician. She was beautiful enough to stop your heart, and she did interesting things with her beauty, carrying it with a sense of adventurous poise. The people who worked with Aaliyah have always remarked on her lack of ego, her collaborative verve. She seemed to enjoy her fame, even though she’d been exploited in every way that a person could be exploited. When Aaliyah died, she’d already left a deep impact on pop music, and she was standing on the precipice of movie stardom, too. There’s no telling what she could’ve become if she hadn’t boarded that overloaded plane in 2001.

tatic Major and Timbaland wrote “Try Again,” and Timbaland produced it. Static’s original lyrical idea was that “Try Again” should be about the importance of persistence. But Barry Hankerson, still managing Aaliyah, told him that it had to be a love song, so Static reworked the lyrics. You can kind of tell. The chorus, presumably unchanged, riffs on the old cliché about trying again if at first you don’t succeed. The verses make vague allusions to some kind of romantic situation, and they’re a little slapdash. Aaliyah still sells them. Her narrator is into somebody, but she’s not willing to give in to her feelings fully. She wants this other person to keep courting her, but she won’t commit to anything: “This ain’t a yes, this ain’t a no/ Just do your thing, we’ll see how we go.” Maybe she’s stringing this other person along. Maybe she just hasn’t made up her mind yet. Either way, it seems totally plausible that this other person would want to keep trying.

On a song like “Try Again,” though, the lyrics are entirely secondary. It’s the sound that hooks you. When Timbaland made the “Try Again” track, he was in a whole other zone, seemingly reinventing his style from one song to the next. On the “Try Again” intro, Tim lays out his intentions: “It’s been a long time; we shouldn’t have left you without a dope beat to step to.” With that line, Tim paraphrases something that rap god Rakim had said on Eric B. & Rakim’s 1987 single “I Know You Got Soul.” (Eric B. & Rakim’s only charting Hot 100 single, 1992’s “Juice (Know The Ledge),” peaked at #96. They also guested on Jody Watley’s 1989 hit “Friends,” which peaked at #9. That’s an 8.) With that quote, Timbaland paid tribute to a rap elder, and he also made sure to point out the dopeness of his own beat.

Tim actually hadn’t made anyone wait a long time without a dope beat to step to. He was making dope beats all the time in the late ’90s and early ’00s. But if Tim wanted to draw attention to what he’d done on “Try Again,” then fair enough. The “Try Again” beat is something special. It starts out with echoed-out hi-hats coming in from all sides, as extremely synthetic strings and horns recall the burnished-steel gleam of Brad Fiedel’s Terminator score. The drums come in from odd angles — some sounds seemingly played backwards, others hitting at irregular intervals. Tim layers his own murmured, echoing hypeman vocals all over the beat, making himself a part of his own textured track. When the beat kicks in, it’s driven by the same kind of wriggling 909 bassline that drove so many Detroit techno and acid house classics.

There are sonic ideas all over “Try Again”: ghostly wandering sitars, eerie synth whistles, Tim doing the “vicky-vicky” DJ-scratch imitation that he always loved so much. Given all that, you’d think that “Try Again” was a domineering dancefloor track, but that’s not really what it is. Instead, “Try Again” is all insinuating atmosphere. It winds and wafts its way through the air like incense smoke. Timbaland and Aaliyah’s vocals are narcotically understated. Aaliyah breezes through Tim’s sound effects. She’s an island of self-assurance in all that nervous rhythmic play. She’s fully locked in with Timbaland; I love the blithe ease of her “you don’t wanna throw it all away” bit.

The other night, I got high, threw “Try Again” on in my headphones, and took my dogs out for a walk. It might’ve been the highlight of my week. “Try Again” casts a spell. It wiggles and worms and darts and hiccups. Sometimes, the track sounds like it’s breathing, with all sorts of gasps and sighs from both Tim and Aaliyah showing up everywhere. But the groove never dominates the melody. Instead, melody and groove support each other, blurring into one another until it’s hard to tell where one ends and the other begins. “Try Again” doesn’t really have a bridge, and it repeats its chorus a whole lot of times. In most cases, that would come across as lazy songwriting. With “Try Again,” it’s different. Every new chorus repetition is just an invitation to bask in that sonic world for a few seconds longer. It’s a strange, striking, beautiful song. I loved it in 2000, and I love it now.

Wayne Isham, the veteran glam-rock director, made the “Try Again” video. Nothing much happens in the clip. There’s a room full of mirrors and floating platforms, and Jet Li and Aaliyah dance with each other via Hong Kong wire-work. But Aaliyah, rocking an extremely sparkly bra/choker situation, brings her strange angular star power to every frame she’s in. She’d come a long way from the baggy leather jeans and skullies that she’d been rocking a few years earlier. Here, her swagger comes across as pure glamor.

When “Try Again” reached #1, it became a significant pop-chart first. At the time, “Try Again” hadn’t come out commercially as a single. Billboard had always used a combination of single sales and airplay to figure out the Hot 100. Through most of the ’90s, the magazine wouldn’t list songs that weren’t available as singles. Even after that rule changed, songs that weren’t singles were at a distinct chart disadvantage. “Try Again” still broke through to become the first-ever airplay-only #1 hit. (After the song reached the top, Virgin pressed up a vinyl single.)

More importantly, though, “Try Again” is the first Timbaland production to reach #1. Tim had made plenty of hits, but his imitators, producers like Rodney Jerkins and Kevin “She’kspere” Briggs, had broken through on the Hot 100 first. (Those Timbaland ripoffs were mostly pretty great, too. That’s just how cool that sound was.) “Try Again” proved that Timbaland wasn’t just a sonic pioneer; he was also a guy capable of making the biggest song in the country. Timbaland will appear in this column again, both as producer and lead artist. But “Try Again” was the only #1 hit from Tim’s true heyday as both a craftsman and an experimentalist.

Aaliyah wouldn’t get a chance to repeat what she’d done with “Try Again.” After Romeo Must Die, she flew to Australia to film her second movie, the vampire flick Queen Of The Damned. While working on the movie, she also recorded her third album, the self-titled LP that came out in July 2001. As far as I’m concerned, that album is Aaliyah’s masterpiece. It’s even spacier and slinkier than her past records, and it sounds more grown, more confident. Timbaland only produced three of the tracks on Aaliyah, but the feeling of those Aaliyah/Tim collabs is all over the LP”.

I want to end with an extract from an interview from Vanity Fair from 2021. Kathy Iandoli, author of Baby Girl: Better Known As Aaliyah, wanted to dispel myths around Aaliyah and flip the narrative. This is an artist that should be talked about more. There is one particular question and response that I wanted to highlight:

“What do you think it is about her as an artist and a person that has made her so continuously beloved and revered?

I think that she and her collaborators, like Missy, Timbaland, Static, they created a sound that wasn’t built for that decade. You can play that music now and it’s still relevant because what they were doing was so futuristic; it was eons ahead of what was going on. So I think sonically, there’s that. There is the whole allure, this mystique where you’re not able to access her music without actually burning it, and I think a lot of these kids, especially Gen Z, they’re not used to being told no. So keeping that in mind, they will go the extra mile to discover her because of that curiosity, because of that mystique. It brings on this curiosity for this new fan base. The other thing is, she passed away so young. Fans are discovering her while other fans have grown up with her. And then her fashion sense. Kudos to her eye but also Derek [Lee]. Everything Aaliyah wore then is still relevant now. Again, she was just years ahead of herself”.

The stunning Try Again is a song that I heard first around the time it came out in 2000. It still sounds fresh. Maybe it is that Timbaland production. I think it is the charisma, energy and cool that Aaliyah brings to the track! A once-in-a-generation talent, she has inspired so many – though few match her brilliance. Try Again is a moment of genius from…

A music icon.

FEATURE: The Digital Mixtape: Tom Jones at Eighty-Five

FEATURE:

 

 

The Digital Mixtape

 

Tom Jones at Eighty-Five

__________

ONE of one the…

true legends of the music scene turns eighty-five on 7th June. Because of that, I am going to end this feature with a selection of his best tracks. If you are not overly-familiar with the work of Tom Jones then I hope that the mixtape gives you a good introduction. Before I get to that mixtape, I am going to introduce some biography about this icon. Below is some biography from AllMusic:

“Tom Jones is one of the most popular vocalists to emerge from the British Invasion. From the mid-'60s on, Jones has sung nearly every form of popular music -- from pop, rock, show tunes, and country to dance, techno, and more -- while his vocal style, a full-throated, robust baritone with little regard for nuance or subtlety, remained a swaggering constant. Mid-'60s songs like "It's Not Unusual" and "What's New Pussycat" registered on the charts, as did inimitable readings of country classics such as "Green, Green Grass of Home" later in the decade. As his career rolled along, Jones became a favorite in Las Vegas, had a hit with an Art of Noise-produced cover of Prince's "Kiss" in 1988, and released albums that ranged from the slick dance-pop of 1994's The Lead and How to Swing It to 2010's Praise & Blame, a collection of covers that paved the way for a string of releases that found Jones digging into the modern American Songbook. His taste for exploration led him to cover songs by relatively obscure artists like Billy Joe Shaver and the Milk Carton Kids, while 2021's Surrounded by Time showed the influence of Radiohead. No matter the style or song, Jones' powerful, one-of-a-kind voice is instantly recognizable and his passion for performing has never dimmed.

Born Thomas John Woodward in Wales, Jones began singing professionally in 1963, performing as Tommy Scott with the Senators, a Welsh beat group. In 1964, he recorded a handful of solo tracks with record producer Joe Meek and shopped them to various record companies to little success. Later in the year, Decca producer Peter Sullivan discovered Tommy Scott performing in a club and directed him to manager Phil Solomon. It was a short-lived partnership and the singer soon moved back to Wales, where he continued to sing in local clubs. At one of the shows, he gained the attention of former Viscounts singer Gordon Mills, who had become an artist manager.

Mills signed Scott, renamed him Tom Jones, and helped him record his first single for Decca, "Chills and Fever," which was released in late 1964. The track didn't chart, but "It's Not Unusual," released in early 1965, became a number one hit in the U.K. and a Top Ten hit in the U.S. The heavily orchestrated, over-the-top pop arrangements perfectly meshed with Jones' swinging, sexy image, guaranteeing him press coverage, which translated into a series of hits, including "Once Upon a Time," "Little Lonely One," and "With These Hands." During 1965, Mills also secured a number of film themes for Jones to record, including the Top Ten hit "What's New Pussycat?" (June 1965) and "Thunderball" (December 1965).

Jones' popularity began to slip somewhat by the middle of 1966, causing Mills to redesign the singer's image into a more respectable, mature, tuxedoed crooner. He also began to sing material that appealed to a broad audience, like the country songs "Green, Green Grass of Home" and "Detroit City." The strategy worked, as he returned to the top of the charts in the U.K. and began hitting the Top 40 again in the U.S. For the remainder of the '60s, he scored a consistent string of hits in both Britain and America. At the end of the decade, Jones relocated to America, where he hosted the television variety program This Is Tom Jones. Running between 1969 and 1971, the show was a success and laid the groundwork for the singer's move to Las Vegas in the early '70s. Once he moved to Vegas, Jones began recording less, choosing to concentrate on his lucrative club performances. After Gordon Mills died in the late '70s, Jones' son, Mark Woodward, became the singer's manager. The change in management prompted Jones to begin recording again. This time, he concentrated on the country market, releasing a series of slick Nashville-styled country-pop albums in the early '80s that earned him a handful of hits.

Jones' next image makeover came in 1988, when he sang Prince's "Kiss" with the electronic dance outfit the Art of Noise. The single became a Top Ten hit in the U.K. and reached the American Top 40, which led to a successful concert tour and a part in a recording of Dylan Thomas' voice play, Under Milk Wood. The singer then returned to the club circuit, where he stayed for several years. In 1993, Jones performed at the Glastonbury Festival in England, where he won an enthusiastic response from the young crowd. Soon, he was on the comeback trail again, releasing the alternative dance-pop album The Lead and How to Swing It in the fall of 1994; the record was a moderate hit, gaining some play in dance clubs. Jones enjoyed an even bigger hit with 1999's Reload, which featured duets with an array of contemporaries and those he influenced.

Three years later, he worked with Wyclef Jean to produce Mr. Jones, and in 2004 issued another collaboration, Tom Jones and Jools Holland, before 2006 saw the Queen award him a knighthood. In 2008, he released another commercial and critical success, 24 Hours, which featured Jones' classic sound backed by contemporary productions from Future Cut, Nellee Hooper, and Betty Wright. His 2010 release Praise & Blame went in a completely different direction, filled with a stripped-down sound from producer Evan Johns and American Songbook material from the likes of Bob Dylan, John Lee Hooker, and Billy Joe Shaver, along with some traditional gospel and blues numbers. Johns would return to produce 2012's Spirit in the Room, but this time the material was more contemporary, with songs coming from Tom Waits, Paul Simon, Leonard Cohen, Paul McCartney, the Low Anthem, and others. Both Praise & Blame and Spirit in the Room earned Jones some of the best reviews of his career. This, in turn, paved the way to a new phase of regular prime-time U.K. TV exposure for the Welshman when he joined will.i.am, Jessie J, and Danny O'Donoghue on a panel of judges for the debut season of The Voice UK in 2012, and held his position on the show through 2015's season four. In October of that year, the U.K.'s Michael Joseph published Jones' autobiography, Over the Top and Back: The Autobiography, with its U.S. arrival coming via Blue Rider Press a month later. A companion album, Long Lost Suitcase, was also released that autumn. It continued in the vein of his prior two efforts in drawing on influences, this time with songs by Hank Williams, Willie Nelson, the Rolling Stones, and the Milk Carton Kids, among others, and was again produced by Johns.

Following a five-year break from recording after the passing of his wife of 59 years, Linda, Jones again managed to find new ways to express himself upon his return to the studio. The resulting record, 2021's Surrounded by Time, was co-produced by Johns and Jones' manager and son Mark Woodward. Its track list featured writing credits from Bob Dylan and Yusuf alongside a collaboration with Michael Kiwanuka and a Radiohead-esque cover of Todd Snider's "Talking Reality Television Blues." It also contained a cover of Bobby Cole's 1967 ballad "I'm Growing Old" -- the jazz singer had given it to Jones in 1972. Jones loved the song but felt he was too young to record it. He promised the composer he would cut it when he reached 80”.

On 7th June, we celebrate Tom Jones’s eighty-fifth birthday. He has been responsible for some classics through the years. One of the greatest and most distinct voices we have ever produced, I am ending this feature with a mixtape of many of his standout songs. Fans will know these very well, though some might be unfamiliar. Tom Jones has a voice and gravitas…

LIKE nobody else.

FEATURE: In Plain Sight: Inside Self Esteem’s Extraordinary Album, A Complicated Woman

FEATURE:

 

 

In Plain Sight

PHOTO CREDIT: Scarlett Carlos Clarke

 

Inside Self Esteem’s Extraordinary Album, A Complicated Woman

__________

HAVING just released…

PHOTO CREDIT: Jennifer McCord for DORK

perhaps the most urgent, acclaimed and important album of her career, I wanted to take another look inside the feminist masterpiece, A Complicated Woman. Even though there are other themes and layers to the album, it is feminist. Female. Revealing, angered, raw and empowered. I have seen a few three-star reviews for the album with people not really getting it. Or not connected with it. However, there have been plenty of five-star reviews. No doubt one of the best albums of the year. Self Esteem (Rebecca Lucy Taylor) has recently staged. A Complicated Woman. Many of the more mixed reviews – and a few of the positive ones – say that Self Esteem’s real power and pizzaz comes from the stage. An album that comes alive and is properly realised there. However, take one listen through A Complicated Woman and is it a masterpiece that everyone needs to hear! Rather than do a dissection of its songs and themes and look at it – which I might do at another stage -, I wanted to look at some recent interviews with Self Esteem. A couple of the impassioned reviews for A Complicated Woman. Go and get the album now. I want to start out with an interview from The Times. Although A Complicated Woman tackles cycles of misogyny, feminist anxieties and societal pressures, it also addresses confidence, societal expectations and feminism:

“Taylor, who lives in east London, where she recently bought a two-bedroom flat that she has yet to move into, has frequently spoken about the sea of privileged musicians that seems to surround her and the unfair advantage that having wealthy parents gives artists trying to break through. Her father worked in a Sheffield steel plant as a health and safety officer and her mother as a secretary. She has an older brother who is a history teacher in France. Her mother has warned Taylor not to pretend that she grew up poor, but money remains a constant worry for the singer.

“The reason I get depressed and stressed about the music industry is safety — and that means money,” she says. “All I want is to no longer rely on anyone. To know that the rug cannot be pulled out from under me, the way it has been so many times.

“That’s partly why I’m desperate to diversify. Not that acting is a sturdy career, but it’s another string to my bow that makes me less reliant on the music industry — ‘Oh please, sir, give me a TikTok hit.’ Actually, my label just sent me a bunch of TikToks to approve. Ahhh, I just feel stupid. That shit kills me … and it’s starting all over again.”

A Complicated Woman is out next week and there are high hopes for it to hit No 1. Taylor was given a bigger budget, which she almost wholly blew on vast choirs and sumptuous strings. The first single, Focus Is Power, is a gorgeous gospel banger about bouncing back, but it is the near five-minute-long masterpiece I Do and I Don’t Care that will become Self Esteem’s next signature song.

A swelling, spine-tingling choir, an operatic interlude and swathes of Rotherham-rich spoken word (“We’re not chasing happiness any more, girls/ We’re chasing nothing,” Taylor sings, deadpan) lead to a rousing, all-hands-on-deck chant about the dichotomy of being an outspoken woman: “If I’m so empowered/ Why am I such a coward?”

“That line sums up a big theme of the album,” Taylor says. “I am political and outspoken and I really mean what I say. At the same time I’m shitting my pants that I get it wrong.

“Since becoming more visible, I’m terrified all the time. People are foaming at the mouth for women to make a mistake, especially confident women. Look, I have a laugh most of the time. But walking on eggshells makes me overthink and gets me depressed.”

A Complicated Woman is a statement-maker but, fear not, it’s also great fun. Guests include the former Coronation Street actress Julie Hesmondhalgh, a former Slow Club fan whom Taylor has been friends with for a decade. Hesmondhalgh’s rallying speech on If Not Now, It’s Soon was recorded in her kitchen in Manchester. There are also appearances from the indie musicians Nadine Shah and Sue Tompkins, both of whom Taylor says will appeal in particular to her older, male fans. “I call them my 6 Music daddies,” she says, laughing. “I’ve even had merch made for them. Men in their fifties who’ve had kids but still like cool stuff seem to love me.”

A dance track on which Taylor ranks the sexual positions she likes and loathes, called 69, includes a sample from a podcast by the Los Angeles-based drag queen Meatball. Performing it live should cause quite a stir. “I expect so,” Taylor says. “Everyone’s told me how brave the song is. I realised, shit, so it is. Then I panicked about how the hell I’m going to perform it.”

The Curse is a glorious, strings-soaked, swearword-strewn ode to the power of alcohol that has split Taylor’s team. “I’ve been told not to expect another Tanqueray gin advert,” she says of a previous collaboration with the company that gave fans the opportunity to rent two Self Esteem stage outfits, including the white suit she wore at Wembley Stadium supporting Blur two summers ago. “I do and I don’t care. Ha ha!”

The cover of A Complicated Woman shows Taylor screaming, her blonde hair in braids, sporting a Crucible-style bonnet made from a man’s shirt. “It’s my nod to women being hanged for having opinions,” she says. “History has no empathy for everything women go through. I’ll always scream about that.”

She mentions her hang-up-free boyfriend, a member of the Cabaret cast; she won’t name him, but says his identity isn’t hard to work out. Her previous long-term relationship was with a woman — one new song, Logic, Bitch, is about her ex.

Taylor has frozen her eggs — she can’t make up her mind about having kids — and is hoping to soon move into her new home. The fairytale ending? “Maybe,” she says. “Let’s see first if I can afford it”.

IN THIS PHOTO: Self Esteem, centre, and dancers at the Duke of York’s in London in April 2025/PHOTO CREDIT: Aaron Parsons

I will come to an interview from the BBC. I have not seen the theatre production of A Complicated Woman. However, the reviews for it are exceptional. The more I listen to the album and read about it, the more powerful it becomes. It is this incredible experience. I can see how people are reacting to the album. How difficult at times it was for Rebecca Lucy Taylor. Quite isolating or frustrating. However, A Complicated Woman is an album that will affect so many people. I know I referred to it as a feminist album. It definitely is. However, there is also self-awareness, self-laceration and empowerment:

“She hasn't just made a new album - she has also created a daring, jaw-dropping theatrical experience to go with it.

It's set in a sparse recreation of the community centre where eight-year-old Becky from Rotherham learned to tap dance.

"You just wanted to sing / You didn't know what that would bring," recalls an older, more cynical version of that child – as she assesses her life at the age of 38.

"This really is all there is, and that's what you've got to get comfortable with."

As the show opens, 10 dancers line up on either side of her, dressed in austere outfits that recall The Handmaid's Tale.

Initially, their movements are stiff and restricted but, as Taylor describes suffocating relationships with emotionally-stunted men, they start to thrash and jerk their bodies.

"We start in that world where we're shackled, and then we exorcise it," Taylor explains.

"Over the course of the show, it all unravels and everyone ends up being themselves instead of conforming to these societal norms."

The show runs for four nights in London, but the singer hopes to take a scaled-back version on tour

A four-night theatre residency is an unusual way to launch an album. The audience is unfamiliar with most of the songs, and no-one's sure whether to absorb the performance attentively, or sing along and dance.

Several times, laughter ripples through the theatre as the singer's more acerbic observations hit home. The following morning, she's not quite sure what to make of the reaction.

"Every time people laugh, my heart sinks," she says. "But then I'm like, the lyrics are funny, aren't they?

"And I love changing the laughter into emotion. It feels like people are laughing because it's uncomfortable."

PHOTO CREDIT: Aaron Parsons 

In the end, the audience members mirror the on-stage narrative. Shaking off their discomfort, they rise out of their seats and start making an almighty racket.

The music becomes a soundtrack to solidarity - which, it transpires, was Taylor's intention.

A Complicated Woman might be as cutting and powerful as its predecessor, but the melodies were designed for stadiums.

"Do you remember the Elbow song One Day Like This?" she asks. "The one that goes, 'Throw those curtains wii-iide'?

"I went mad for that song when it came out and, honestly, I played it over and over in the studio and said, 'I want to do this'."

"I was very inspired by trying to make it onto World Cup montages. That's a genre of music that I really, really enjoy."

As the show continues, the music (and the staging) move from darkness into light

That's only half the story, though. The album is all about capturing the complex and contradictory impulses of a woman in her mid-30s.

Recent single 69, for example, is a thumping house track on which Taylor talks with withering candour about her sex life. Imagine Madonna's Justify My Love, if she was really being honest.

"It's an idea I had for ages, of listing sex positions and scoring them so that there's no grey area [for prospective partners]," the singer laughs.

"But there's a more political element, which is that women still aren't saying what they want in the bedroom. And I'm like, I can't bear this any more. Please let us just enjoy having sex.

"It's not exactly going to win an Ivor Novello Award for lyrics, but I think it stands on the album with moments that are more emotional and deep."

Those moments include The Curse, a rousing ballad about using alcohol to dull her anxiety, which is possibly the best song Self Esteem's ever written.

In keeping with the album's themes, photoshoots and artwork higlight the different sides of the singer's personality

Her personal favourite, however, is called In Plain Sight. A collaboration with South African musician Moonchild Sanelly, it's a response to the criticism they've both received for speaking their minds.

"The world is saying who I am, but I thought I knew myself all these years," says Sanelly in a semi-improvised rap.

"I shrink to keep the peace, hoping I don't shake my purpose."

It's a feeling Taylor immediately recognised.

As excitement built around Prioritise Pleasure in 2021, she started getting "nasty messages" on social media, which shook her up.

"I was really shocked the first time I got grief, because no-one's ever been that bothered about what I'm doing," she says.

"People say you should ignore it, but if you went to a wedding and had a nice day and one person called you an [expletive], who would you go home thinking about? It's just human nature."

Eventually, the criticism took its toll.

"There were moments where I considered giving up, which shocked me because I've been this defiant, angry thing for so long," she says.

"But over the last few years, especially with the world being like it is, I've definitely had feelings of protecting myself and shutting up.

"That's the saddest part of the album, really. But I found a way through.

"And if I can, then I hope the rest of the world can too, you know?"

The theatre show ends with a show of female solidarity, as Self Esteem and her backing singers perform as equals - before doing a conga line off the stage

That realisation is the connecting tissue of A Complicated Woman.

Life is never easy, she says. No-one is ever truly satisfied. Relationships are hard work. You can't please everyone. But that's OK. You're OK. Trust your gut.

She sums it up on Focus Is Power, held aloft by the sound of a gospel choir: "And now I see it clear with every passing of each year / I deserve to be here."

On stage in London, she sings those final lines a capella with her dancers and backing singers, arms wrapped around each other in a display of female solidarity.

It's a cathartic moment after the bruising process of putting the album together.

"There's so much joy in being a woman and just being yourself can be beautiful," she says. "You've just got to find a way to do it."

With that, she's off to make tweaks for the show's second night. After that, she has to find a way to scale down the West End production for a UK tour.

"I'll do what I can to make it continue, but it's a huge risk because there's so little revenue from anything else," she says.

Ultimately, though, her ambition is undimmed.

"I want to make 20 albums, I want to do bigger theatre shows," she says”.

I am going to move to a new Big Issue interview, where Self Esteem spoke with actor and activist, Julie Hesmondhalgh. The latter features on If Not Now, It's Soon. We hear Hesmondhalgh deliver a spoken word passage. It is very moving and memorable. One of the highlights of A Complicated Woman. I think this is an album that will be talked about for years to come. It will be exciting seeing where Self Esteem heads next and what her next album contains. Every album she releases leaves impressions. Even though I like everything she has released, I think this might be her finest work to date:

“If I was smart, after Prioritise Pleasure, I’d make quasi-empowerment advert music for like, a Dove advert. Make some brand deals,” she jokes. “But I couldn’t. The new album, I hope, sort of emancipates me from this idea that I’m this really binary, happy-with-myself woman that is going to empower you and make you feel like “Here Come the Girls” every day. A bit of me can, and a bit of me feels dreadful about all the things we all feel dreadful about.”

“If Not Now, It’s Soon” – the song on the new Self Esteem album that features Hesmondhalgh – reflects such feelings of self doubt, and overcoming them. It’s based on the difficult post-Slow Club years, when she was “spiralling”, living in Margate and trying to work out her next steps:

“When you just wanted to sing / You didn’t know what that would bring”, Taylor sings. Shortly after, Hesmondhalgh’s voice cuts in: “Something will happen because it’s got to / It’s not just perseverance we need, it’s patience.”

“I mean, the whole album is about me giving up,” explains Taylor, sipping her tea. “And then it’s almost like, I need you to come in and tell me not to, on that song.”

“It’s personal and political, because personally, you have to wait and one day you’ll get somewhere less painful. But the world will hopefully get somewhere less painful too.”

‘Dark and dystopian times’

It’s now, by the way, that things start getting political. The kitchen-table-at-the-house-party chat has begun.

“Originally, the bit [in “If Not Now, It’s Soon”] that Rebecca samples was a bit from an actual rally that I did back in 2017,” Hesmondhalgh says. 

“Things felt a bit cuspy, things felt like they could change. It was post-Brexit, but it was still kind of like, ‘Oh, actually, people are becoming politicised. People are actually using their voices.’”

It was a time of volatility for the left. Brexit was a recent, painful decision – but disillusionment with austerity and centrism was prompting record youth engagement with Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour. A staggering 63% of 18- to 29-year-old electors voted for the party’s radical 2017 platform, endorsing social democratic policies such as free higher education and the renationalisation of key industries. This unprecedented turnout helped deny the Conservatives a majority at the 2017 election.

For a moment, real change seemed possible: “Lots of young people were joining the Labour Party,” Hesmondhalgh recalls, “there was a sense, I suppose, of change, of possibility.”

We all know what came next. Labour descended into infighting and accusations of antisemitism, and Boris Johnson swept into parliament on his “Get Brexit Done” slogan. Labour retreated to the centre, leaving activists to mourn a moment that had felt so full of promise.

“When it came to actually making the album it was like, you can’t use that [sample from the rally] any more because that moment has passed,” Hesmondhalgh says. “We’ve gone into a darker, more dystopian time now.” 

The direction of the sample had to pivot, Taylor says. “We had this conversation about how it didn’t feel right any more. And then together, we sort of wrote what it is now.” 

We need plenty of patience and perseverance in modern Britain. 

“Because of old membership, I get the Labour Party’s Facebook posts,” Hesmondhalgh says. “God knows who’s in charge of PR. They’re pretend WhatsApp conversations, like” – she pauses, puts on a deeper voice – ‘Hey, did you know? That the Labour Party has managed to deport 19,000 people in the last week?’”

“And then some people are commenting, ‘You’re lying, vote Reform’ underneath. And the other half of the people are saying ‘How is this OK? How are you the Labour Party? This is not what I voted for, I will never vote for you again.’ So on every single level it’s not working as a policy.”

“It’s lose, lose, lose, lose, lose,” says Taylor. 

“That’s what happens when you try and mould yourself into some sort of populist ideal. And the disability cut [Labour’s £6 billion cut to welfare payments, announced last month] the heating allowance – all of it is just really depressing.

“But I will not be depressed, because there’s a whole swathe of young people that are coming up and taking matters into their own hands.” 

Things can change for the better – same-sex marriage, she points out, was illegal a little over a decade ago.

“Life is this long thing,” Taylor adds. “And I’m trying to be like – if we stay, if we fight, if we try, surely something will come back.” 

IN THIS PHOTO: Self Esteem with Julie Hesmondhalgh/PHOTO CREDIT: Olivia Richardson

Why the arts still matter

What does activism look like right now? Well, the usual: marching, letter-writing, volunteering – but also, taking stock, finding solace in community. And that’s where the arts come in.

Engagement in art makes people more altruistic, a growing body of research shows: according to a 2017 study, people who “embrace the arts” are statistically more likely to help others by giving to charity or volunteering. A 2019 Arts Council England report found that 68% of participants felt arts events strengthened community spirit.

But the benefits of the arts cannot be wholly captured in statistical analysis. They are, however, self evident to anyone who has ever seen a killer live show. 

“It was one of my favourite gigs ever in my life,” Hesmondhalgh says, describing watching Self Esteem
perform. Taylor looks pleased, and maybe slightly embarrassed. 

“I went on my own, my mate had Covid. I was right at the front. This group of 20-something year-old women completely adopted me. They had no idea who I were, it wasn’t like that, we were just sort of singing our hearts out at the front, weeping. That’s what it’s about, that feeling of community, of sisterhood, and I mean sisterhood in an inclusive sense.

“I feel like that’s what you’ve created, Rebecca.”

“That’s what I needed, though!” Taylor says. “Everything about my career until I was Self Esteem was so exclusionary – music has always felt so exclusionary, and being a woman has felt exclusionary. Now, I enjoy it too, I really feel it too, when I’m up there.”

It’s this kind of community – found on the dance floor, or in the audience – that the pair hope will see us through “dark and dystopian times”. 

“[The idea of “If Not Now, Then Soon”] is like, OK, what now? and this idea of patience about waiting it out, working always, working together towards a common goal,” Hesmondhalgh explains. 

“That’s what we’re feeling in Self Esteem gigs, you know, this feeling of togetherness. It’s togetherness… You just have to keep banging the drum. Or else people will get away
with everything”.

I am going to end with a couple of reviews for A Complicated Woman. The first one that I want to source is from When the Horn Blows and their verdict on a work that seems as personal to Self Esteem/Rebecca Lucy Taylor then anything else. It is disappointing that there were some less-than-emphatic reviews. That will happen with any album, but for one as incredible as this, it feels like a disservice! However, there is plenty of love out there for this incredible release:

“Three years after the release of her game-changing album, Prioritise Pleasure, Self Esteem, a.k.a Rebecca Lucy Taylor is back. There is no one quite like Self Esteem, whose art is a mix of gut-felt feminism, emotional complexity, lusty humour and a deep appreciation for the power of drag. Releasing her first album, Compliments Please in 2019, and Prioritise Pleasure, which was nominated for a Brit Award and a Mercury Music Prize, in 2021, Self Esteem has been on a trajectory that has only ever been pointing up. Now, she’s set to release what could be her best album yet, A Complicated Woman, which is out this Friday, April 25th via Polydor records.

What Self Esteem is about - well, it’s in the name. Her songs have always been almost overwhelmingly empowering, moving, a hand on your shoulder in solidarity, a light in the dark. Rebecca Taylor has a gift when it comes to writing about complex emotions and her songs often feel like a form of confrontation. Accompanied by a soulful, joyful choir made up of mostly female voices, A Complicated Woman sees Taylor effortlessly exposing the complex feelings that women often keep hidden, with the unique and distinctive sound that is entirely Self Esteem.

Opening with I Do & I Don’t Care, the album is an on-the-spot goosebump raiser. The choir creates an immediate sense of overwhelming power before Taylor comes in with spoken word - “this really is all there is, and that’s the thing you’ve got to get comfy with / we’re not chasing happiness anymore girls we’re chasing nothing / the great big still, the deep blue okay, and we’re okay today”. It feels like a punch in the gut. Rebecca Lucy Taylor doing what she does best - forcing you to confront yourself head on, address and tackle emotions you probably were not even aware you were feeling -  “if I’m so empowered, why am I such a coward, if I’m so strong, why am I broken.”

A Complicated Woman feels primarily about sitting, both comfortably and uncomfortably, in the natural ambivalence and uncertainty that one feels in life, which can be heard in tracks like The Deep Blue Okay, and In Plain Sight. However, it’s also an album focusing on taking control of your own life and the paths you take. The second track, which was also the first powerhouse of a single to be released off the album, Focus Is Power, is the perfect example of that. The track is joyous, soul-lifting, “You see, it wasn’t up to me but now it could be, but now I see it clear with every passing of each year, I deserve to be here…” Shared between a choir of women, lines like this become an incantation.

If Not Now, It’s Soon follows a similar theme. It’s once again the gentle hand on the shoulder, encouraging, keeping you steady. It is Self Esteem’s version of the old saying “whatever is meant for you won’t pass you by” - “whatever is right for you will guide you through.” You must persevere and push for what you want but also have the patience and the trust that it will happen. The music, the orchestral strings in the background - they are constantly building, lifting as the song progresses - the ultimate uplifting track.

A Complicated Woman is certainly not short of dance tracks - Mother, Lies, Cheers To Me and the delicious pièce de résistance 69 are all songs that will make you want to be at an underground club, or a festival with a pint in hand, sun shining. Mother, a deep house track, sheds light on how people often end up mothering their romantic partners and how draining it is: “I am not your mother /I am not your therapist.” While Cheers To Me is a pick yourself up of the floor track, a dance around with your friends, shouting it at the top of your lungs kind of pop track “let’s toast each and every fucker that made me this way / cheers to you but mostly cheers to me.”

The hilarious, ridiculously catchy 69 feels almost satirical, listing and rating various sex positions, but in true Self Esteem fashion, it is not. It’s the truth, hidden in humour. Taylor said of the track “I like the idea of clearly communicating your needs in one quick, three-minute house song. It is also political – women still are expected to cater to others sexually; I can’t hear another discussion about ‘faking it’, it upsets me too much! There’s enough inequality in the male/ female dynamic as it is. Our bodies go through so much more pain and suffering, please god let us get the pleasure where we can!” It’s nothing short of brilliant. Those who loved Chari XCX’s Guess will no doubt be a fan, and it also features the beloved Drag Queen, Meatball.

In Plain Sight, perhaps one of the most poignant tracks of the album, starts off gentle, almost hauntingly so, with Taylor’s stunning vocals accompanied by the plucking of guitar strings. Written with Moonchild Sanelly, Self Esteem’s collaborator on the 2024 standalone single Big Man, who also features on In Plain Sight, the track focuses on the criticism women face when they stand up for what they believe in in the public sphere. It’s harrowing, haunting, bone-chilling in the way that it builds. Moonchild Sanelly adds a flawless spoken word, “Scared to speak. I shrink to keep the peace / what will be of me, if I speak my mind.” A chorus of women come together for the shiver-inducing finale of the track as they scream/sing “what the fuck you want for me - in saving you, you’re killing me.”

The final track of the album, The Deep Blue Okay, which was referenced in the opening song I Do & I Don’t Care, feels like a full circle moment. It opens with a simple piano key which is repeated, fast, insistent, urgent - symbolising the importance of the track, the meaning behind it. It is vulnerable, but also pulsing with excitement, hope. Capturing the essence of the album in its entirety. As Taylor sums it up herself, “acceptance of life’s grey areas leads to a new lease on life.” The Deep Blue Okay feels like an ascension into whatever heaven is - the orchestra building and building to the grand crescendo at the end “It’s still hard out here, but fuck I’ll just keep going/ you’ll always work it out.”

Self Esteem is the definition of empowerment, and strength flows rapidly through A Complicated Woman. With this new album, Self Esteem once again makes us look inward, forces us to confront ourselves and proves that there is a fountain of strength deep within us all”.

PHOTO CREDIT: Scarlett Carlos Clarke

I am finishing up with Rolling Stone UK and their five-star review of A Complicated Woman. If you have not heard the album or only the singles so far, then you really need to hear the entire thing. One of the most inspiring and emotional albums I have heard in years. That is one reason why I wanted to shine a light on it now:

“If I’m so empowered, why am I such a coward / If I’m so strong, why am I broken?” asks Self Esteem, aka Rebecca Lucy Taylor, on ‘I Do and I Don’t Care’, the opening track on her third album A Complicated Woman. Hopeless though the outspoken pop diva may sound, these contradictions are an invitation into the spectacularly more interesting grey area where two things can be true at once.

Paradoxical thinking is nothing new to Taylor, who cut a choppy path to liberation on her widely acclaimed second album Prioritise Pleasure, having gone solo from indie duo Slow Club in 2017. Lamenting cycles of misogyny, feminist anxieties and societal pressures, it was a brave, bolshy portrayal of all her knotty complexities, delivered with a refreshing dose of her trademark irreverence. Now, after some time spent honing her theatrics with a turn playing Sally Bowles in the West End Revival of Cabaret, Taylor returns just as conflicted, but a great deal more enlightened.

A Complicated Woman presents its titular thesis as Taylor finds fun and freedom in life’s eternal incompleteness. There’s no cheeky subterfuge or smirking ulterior motives here; it’s all out on the table, her lyrical realism as relatable as ever. “How many trains can I cry on in a lifetime?” she asks plainly atop a sun-splashed dance-pop groove on ‘Cheers to Me’. Elsewhere, she admits to a tricky relationship with alcohol on the gospel climax of ‘The Curse’: “I wouldn’t do it if it didn’t fucking work.” 

Still, there’s an on-brand absurdity that such uplifting instrumentals — in the realm of “montage music for the World Cup”, as she put it recently — could soundtrack an inspirational monologue about following your dreams. Such blatant clashes of sound and subject matter shouldn’t work as well as they do here; one moment Taylor is running through a checklist of her sexual dos and don’ts on smouldering electronic dance track ‘69’, featuring the drag queen Meatball, and the next she’s leading a choir at megachurch-level decibels on ‘What Now’. 

But it’s the hyperpop bombshells that signal the biggest shake-up, from the whirring electronic bassline and lashing snares on ‘Lies’ (featuring Nadine Shah) to the early 2010s-indebted ‘Mother’, on which she bemoans the inequality of emotional labour set to a ping-ponging beat. Like all her best songs, there’s still plenty of sincerity, particularly on the choral-led ‘Focus Is Power’, which features a female empowerment mantra we can all get behind: “My focus is powerful.” 

Then there’s the guest contributions from Life Without Buildings vocalist Sue Tompkins (‘Logic, Bitch!’), former Coronation Street actor Julie Hesmondhalgh (‘If Not Now, It’s Soon’) and former collaborator Moonchild Sanelly (‘In Plain Sight’), which invite their own moments of quiet contemplation.

Ultimately, though, what we’re left with is a message of hope. “You’ll always work it out,” Taylor resolves on jubilant closer ‘The Deep Blue Okay’. After all, it’s the trying among the mystery of it all that makes us human, and here Taylor shows us just how spectacularly that can be done”.

Self Esteem is one of my favourite artists. Many release albums that might be personal or they are just for fun. She tackles societal expectations and feminism but there is also this inward investigation. Lyrics that are often funny and sharp but some that genuinely move or shock you. Songs that seem like statements or mandates. It is fiercely feminist and empowering but it is also tender and playful at times. No doubting the fact that A Complicated Woman is…

A work of wonder.

FEATURE: Spotlight: Yazz Ahmed

FEATURE:

 

 

Spotlight

PHOTO CREDIT: Alex Bex

 

Yazz Ahmed

__________

ONE of the good things…

about the Spotlight feature is getting to feature a range of artists. I am quite new to Yazz Ahmed. I am very keen to explore the wonderful music of a musician, composer and artist who I feel should be getting more exposure on mainstream radio. This British-Bahraini trumpet player aims to blur the lines between Jazz and Electronic sound design. I am going to start out with an interview from 15 Questions. Although I am not including all of the questions and responses, there were a few that caught my eye:

“Name: Yazz Ahmed
Occupation: Trumpeter, flugelhornist, composer, improviser
Nationality: British-Bahraini
Current release: Yazz Ahmed's new album A Paradise In The Hold is slated for release on February 24th 2025 via Night Time Stories. The second single off the album, “Into the Night,” is out now. The LP features her longtime band as well as a cast of collaborators, including vocalists Natacha Atlas, and Brigitte Beraha as well as percussionist Corrina Silvester.

Just like you, I grew up in between two cultures and always thought it had a huge impact on almost every aspect of my life. What was this like for you – how, would you say, did your bicultural background affect your views on life, art and music in particular?

I moved from Bahrain at the age of nine to South London with my mum and sisters. It took a long time to adjust to this new culture and I didn’t feel as if I belonged, so much so, I hid my identity for most of my childhood and into my teens.

It wasn’t until a reached my early 20s that I became more aware of my identity and started to embrace my mixed heritage. I became curious about the music I had left behind and began to regret that I had not been taught to speak Arabic. I felt detached. However, once I started to explore Arabic scales and rhythms, fusing them with elements of jazz, I began to feel whole.

One thing I was hungry for was to connect with other female instrumentalists with a Middle Eastern heritage who were embracing jazz. It was difficult enough finding women trumpet players to aspire to, but it seemed that Arabic jazz musicians simply did not exist. This made me feel insecure as to whether it would be possible to make a success of myself.

Art and beautiful artifacts are everywhere in Arabic culture, but being an expressive artist, or a creative musician, is not really considered a respectable career. This meant it was a struggle for my Bahraini family to appreciate the path I had chosen.

On my mother’s side of the family, it was very different. I come from a line of bohemian artists, musicians and dancers, so they were very supportive in allowing me to follow my heart.

A Paradise In The Hold deals with your heritage through music. After finishing the album, what would you say is universal in music – and what may, conversely, be very specific?

You don’t need words to convey your message or to spell out the narrative behind the music. Music has that unique ability to evoke deep emotions, on a primordial level, and this is what I hope to achieve – to be genuine, to compose and perform from the heart and leave the listener free to interpret their experience in their own way. I love listening to songs in a language I’m unfamiliar with, because it lets my imagination paint pictures.

However, on A Paradise In The Hold I do utilise some elements that are very specific to Bahrain. When a Bahraini listener hears certain rhythms, certain instruments or vocal timbres in my music, these will resonate in a very specific way, compared to how a listener from outside the culture will react. There are also Arabic lyrics in this album which to a non-Arabic speaker will be evocative, beautiful sounds, but which do carry an intentional meaning, which again will give listeners from different cultures their own experience.

I do include translations of all the text in the album booklet and in fact on one song, Waiting For The Dawn, we hear both Arabic and English versions of the lyric sung in counterpoint.

What was the starting point for A Paradise In The Hold?

In 2014 I was nominated to apply for a Jazzlines Fellowship in collaboration with Birmingham THSH, funded by the Jerwood Foundation. As part of this process, I had to present a concept for an extended composition to be researched and developed over the course of a year, culminating in a live performance at the CBSO Centre in Birmingham.
My idea was to create a suite, based around the folklore and folk music of Bahrain and happily I was awarded the commission. The first stage was a research trip to Bahrain from which I returned full of inspiration, bringing home books of poetry and songs, histories of Bahraini music and instruments, DVDs of performances and my own notebooks and field recordings.

Paradise In The Hold still has many characteristics of jazz, but it plays with and expands on them. As of today, what does the term jazz mean to you?

There are many sub-genres in jazz and hundreds of individual voices who bring their own stories to this ever-evolving music, perhaps more so than ever. To me, jazz is an ancient oak with deep roots, sprouting hundreds of branches. New shoots emerging all the time.

However, I do feel that some artists have lost touch with the essence of jazz, where it springs from, the history and the human struggle at its heart. But of course, there are those who are fully aware of the legacy and highlight social inequality and make protest through their compositions and improvisation.

Saxophonist, Matana Roberts, for example, is a leading light in amplifying this message through the power of jazz.

One of the instantly notable expansions of your sound are the vocal pieces. Since both the voice and the trumpet are inherently connected to the breath – how do you see and feel the connection between your instrument and your voice?

I do see them going hand in hand.

I actually composed many of the vocal lines by singing to myself and then perfecting the melodies on my trumpet. I hope this made the vocal lines feel natural to the singers who recorded on the album

What kind of vocalists do you personally prefer and what were some of the criteria for whom to include on A Paradise In The Hold?

I appreciate all kinds of singers, from Björk to Fairuz, or from D’Angelo to Donald Fagin. What I like is authenticity, a feeling that the singer is revealing something of themselves.

When planning the recording I knew I needed to find artists with great passion, a deep musical understanding of many styles and a clarity of tone. I had to convey to them that the written vocal parts were integral to the composition. These are not songs in which the band is just accompanying the singer. All the parts are equally important.

I also enjoy working with vocalists who will surprise me with sounds I would never have imagined. Brigitte Beraha and Randolph Matthews proved to be perfect choices in this regard. At the end of “Mermaids’ Tears” for example, you hear them engaging in an improvised duet where Randolph conjures up sub aquatic sounds of the ocean’s swell whilst Brigitte seems to be channelling some long-lost dolphinesque language of the mermaids.

The title track, released as the first single off the album, is astounding, a ten-minute composition unfolding like a fantasy. How did it come together?

I began by processing short fragments of ceremonial sounds from my field recordings of the Pearl Divers and morphed them into an undulating beat which emulates the rise and fall, the breathing of the ocean and the creaking of the boat’s timbers. By repeatedly listening to this groove on loop as an inspiration, I was able to compose the melodies and bass lines which suggested themselves to me.

With all my compositions, I begin by writing down between five and ten short ideas - melodies, chords, patterns, forms – and then sift through these structural cells, choosing the ones I’m drawn to, the ones with potential for development. I sometimes have to write a lot of ‘bad stuff’ to get to the good! I then develop my ideas and often the piece transforms into something very different to what I imagined when started.

With this track, the whole piece is a gradual development from the initial statements with new elements being added throughout. All my ideas come together in the final passage but along the way I sort of break things down and show the listener exactly how the piece is constructed by dissecting the ensemble into its individual parts”.

I am going to move to an interview with Bandcamp. Talking around her extraordinary album, A Paradise in the Hold, I would advise everyone to seek it out. Even if Yazz Ahmed might be reserved more for Jazz stations or independent stations, I can see her being more of a mainstream on more eclectic digital stations like BBC Radio 6 Music. An artist that has created this incredible sound:

“For anyone else, the task of conveying a country’s rich culture through a run of albums would be daunting. For British-Bahraini trumpeter and composer Yazz Ahmed, it’s something that summons more hope than anxiety. “It gives me confidence to carry on,” Ahmed says. “I wouldn’t say I feel any pressure. It just fills me with inspiration. I feel like I’m on the right path.” Ahmed’s fourth album, A Paradise in the Hold, tells stories of her home country Bahrain, drawing for inspiration on wedding poems and the songs of pearl divers.

The record first began taking shape back in 2014, when Ahmed was given a fellowship by Birmingham Town Hall and Symphony to research for her Alhaan Al-Siduri suite. Over the course of her weeklong study, she attended private concerts with Bahraini musicians, pored over academic research by a Norwegian music professor who’d visited the island many years ago, and had a “lovely exchange of music” with a fellow artist serving on the Ministry of Culture, who presented her with one of his own compositions on sheet music.

Two years later, with the support of the British Council and Bahrain’s Ministry of Culture and Antiquities, Ahmed returned to Bahrain and performed the finished piece before a live audience. It was a success, and her bass player Dudley Phillips encouraged her to record it for an album. At the same time, Ahmed’s career was starting to get hectic; she was hard at work crafting two other albums, La Saboteuse and Polyhymnia, simultaneously. “[I was] putting things in my diary, making sure to dedicate one week to one project and another week to another project,” she recalls. With her schedule packed, the suite fell by the wayside until 2020, when she finally got an opening—and then the pandemic struck, bringing everything to a halt yet again.

The delays provided an opportunity for Ahmed to rethink the work. “Before the end of 2020,” she says, “I revisited the compositions and went through all the takes. It gave me inspiration and a clearer idea of how to complete the album. Piece by piece, step by step, I started editing and rearranging the parts, because I had given myself so much time to reflect and forget about what happened. I came back with fresh ears, which gave me opportunities to try out new things.”

A Paradise in the Hold’s biggest highlights are the results of this period. On album opener “She Stands on The Sea Shore,” legendary Egyptian-Belgian singer Natacha Atlas’s intense voice crashes against cymbals like waves on the coast. London-born jazz singer Randolph Matthews (on “Mermaids’ Tears,” “To the Lonely Sea”) and Croatian singer Alba Nacinovich (on “Dancing Barefoot,” “Though my Eyes Go To Sleep, My Heart Does Not Forgive You”), who Ahmed met through a cultural exchange many years ago, are among the other dazzling collaborators who lent their efforts to the record.

The album’s lyrics—which borrow from Ahmed’s daydreams as well as folk songs—showcase her knack for storytelling. On the captivating “Dancing Barefoot,” George Crowley’s piercing bass clarinet and Ralph Wyld’s dissonant prepared vibraphones underscore the taboo themes of which Turkish vocalist Brigitte Beraha sings; in this song’s case, a hesitant bride gets dolled up for her wedding only to run off into the night. Elsewhere, “Though My Eyes Go To Sleep My Heart Does Not Forget You” is a reworking of a traditional folk song about a woman who yearns for her lover—a pearl diver—to return home. As an artist dedicated to changing negative mainstream perceptions of the MENA region, Ahmed gravitates toward the stories from the region that often go untold; the end goal, she says, is “a modern take on Bahraini music, which a lot of people have no idea about”.

I am going to end with a review for the transcendent A Paradise in the Hold. Jazzwise spoke with Yazz Ahmed earlier in the year. Someone who has always wanted to write about the rich tradition of Bahrain, this is such a compelling, spellbinding and evocative album. I do hope that her music gets much more love across multiple stations and media sources. Some of the bigger music websites and papers:

“Over the past 15 years, trumpeter and composer Yazz Ahmed has been using her music to connect with her Bahraini heritage. Finding her melodies in quarter-tone Arabic scales and her grooves in complex polyrhythms, Ahmed’s three albums (2011’s Finding My Way Home, 2017’s La Saboteuse and 2019’s Polyhymnia) have produced a distinct blend of jazz improvisation with the echoes of music from her homeland, providing a sonic trace of her ongoing relationship with a cross-cultural identity.

Yet, throughout the span of this recording career, Ahmed has also been working on another project that delves further into her personal history than ever before. Featuring recordings of her family, reinterpreted Bahraini folk music and high-energy ensemble compositions, her latest album, A Paradise in the Hold, has been more than a decade in the making, with versions reworked and honed during live performances across the globe. Now finally ready for release, it shines a new light on Ahmed’s British-Bahraini jazz fusion to produce some of her most expansive and exciting music to date.

“I left Bahrain in 1992 when I was nine years old to move to London and once I did, I left my culture behind so I could fit into Britain,” Ahmed says over a Zoom call from her Bedfordshire home. “I would keep my identity hidden because having an Arabic Muslim father, I didn’t feel accepted – there were so many negative perspectives of Middle Eastern people and Muslims at the time. It was only when I was older that I started to rediscover my mixed heritage and I felt a deep homesickness and hunger to learn about that culture I abandoned. Ever since, my music has been my way of bridging that gap.”

In 2014, following the acclaimed release of her independent debut Finding My Way Home, Ahmed travelled to Bahrain on a research trip to reconnect with these roots.

“I’ve always wanted to write about the rich tradition of Bahrain, which includes the music sung by the pearl divers, as well as women’s drumming groups that would sing at festivals and celebrations,” she says. “People from other parts of the world often assume that Bahraini women are oppressed but I wanted to shine a light on the strong, incredible women who are forging new creative paths in the country.”

During her trip, Ahmed discovered traditional poems and lyrics used by female drumming groups in local bookshops, as well as listening to her grandfather singing the songs performed at his own wedding and attending a concert of pearl diving music from the pearl divers of Muharraq, her family’s hometown.

“It was a beautiful, entrancing experience,” she says with a smile. “The singers silenced the whole room with their melodies and I found it so inspiring. I recorded the performance on my phone and when I came back home, I began separating sections of their songs into loops that would eventually form the ideas on A Paradise in the Hold.”

“Being a female bandleader and instrumentalist, inclusivity and equality is an issue that has always been close to my heart,” Ahmed explains. “When I was starting out, I had no one to look up to who looked like me and it instantly made me assume that maybe women weren’t good enough to play this music. Now, organisations such as Tomorrow’s Warriors, PRS Foundation and Women in Jazz are making a real difference, working with communities of women to develop their voices, but we still have a way to go. It will always be an issue I will champion in all of my work.”

Ultimately, with her decade-long passion project finally released, Ahmed is carving out a distinct path not only as a woman in jazz, but also as a British-Bahraini musician aiming to express the many facets of her heritage.

“I feel more whole now with my identity, like I can embrace both sides of my culture, since the music has been a healing process,” she says. “It brings me a lot of joy and when I go back to Bahrain the feedback is wonderful too. It’s a real privilege to keep shining a light on this music and to do it through my own lens. All that’s left is for people to listen and to lose themselves in the songs”.

I am going to finish off with a review of A Paradise in the Hold from The Guardian. If anything shared above does not sound like your kind of music or artist then I would say to listen to A Paradise in the Hold. You will connect with and fall under the spell of Yazz Ahmed very quickly. Someone who I was unfamiliar with until recently.

“Since the release of her 2011 debut album, Finding My Way Home, British Bahraini trumpeter Yazz Ahmed has been exploring her heritage through jazz improvisation. Using Arabic quarter-tone scales with guitar, horns and traditional percussion such as the darbuka drum, Ahmed’s music is a fiery blend of instinctive soloing with melodic lyricism. While 2019’s Polyhymnia took inspiration from formidable women such as Saudi Arabian film-maker Haifaa al-Mansour, Ahmed’s fourth album turns towards folk traditions to produce 10 tracks of atmospheric intensity.

Drawing on the polyrhythmic Arab sea-music fijiri and wedding poetry, the album marks the first time Ahmed has collaborated with other singers. On opener She Stands on the Shore, vocalist Natacha Atlas’s warm tenor interweaves seamlessly with Ahmed’s plaintive trumpet melody, swelling over bowed bass to evoke the undulating waves, while Randolph Matthews’ lower register on To the Lonely Sea artfully embodies an eerie sense of hard winds and crashing waves.

Some features are less effective, with the droning bass of Though My Eyes Go to Sleep, My Heart Does Not Forget You jarring against Alba Nacinovich’s keening melody, and the group vocalisations of Al Naddaha struggling to be heard amid Ahmed’s doubling trumpet lines. Instead, Ahmed excels when her compositions play fast and free. The fierce polyrhythms of wedding song Her Light spiral into an ecstatic dance, while the joyous Into the Night features Ahmed’s extended family performing traditional ululations and hand-clapping to continue the sense of celebration.

The 10-minute title track is another highlight. Pearl-diving music is an a cappella vocal tradition for guiding ship workers by blending rhythmic droning with high-register melody, and Ahmed uses a processed sample of one such performance to build a vamping groove alongside bass clarinettist George Crowley’s expressive solo and percussionist Corrina Silvester’s extended darbuka break. The effect is infectiously jubilant, drawing the listener into Ahmed’s distinct and modern imagining of Bahraini tradition”.

Go and experience the wonderous Yazz Ahmed. Not only is A Paradise in the Hold a sublime and moving listening experience. After reading interviews from Ahmed where she talks about that desire to connect with Bahrain and her heritage, it made me think more widely about the country and the music from it. Few albums and artists get you to think beyond the music and open your mind to new cultures and countries. That should be reason enough for you to seek out…

THIS incredible talent.

____________

Follow Yazz Ahmed

FEATURE: Spotlight: Myles Smith

FEATURE:

 

 

Spotlight

 

Myles Smith

__________

A rising artist…

PHOTO CREDIT: Brennan Bucannan

who probably doesn’t need my kudos, and has had far bigger and more influential sites give him a thumbs up, I have overlooked Myles Smith until now. He is a really promising artist who of course you need to see on the road if you can. The recipient of four awards at this year’s BRITs – including Rising Star -, his E.P., A Minute…, was released late last year. There will be a lot of excitement and anticipation around a debut album. With a couple of E.P.s and a string of great singles under his belt, there is this growing and loving fanbase. I think he is going to be one of those artists who keeps getting bigger and better. Growing and expanding as he releases album after album. I want to move to some brilliant recent interview with Myles Smith. It is worth noting that Smith was recently included as one of TIME’s 100 Most Influential People. A boy from Luton, as he posted on Instagram, it must have been a huge honour and shock – though richly deserved. Let’s get to some of those interviews with Myles Smith. I am going to start out with the end of an interview that The Line of Best Fit published in February. This twenty-six-year-old artist enjoying a meteoric rise, I think the next year or two are going to be among the most successful and memorable for Myles Smith:

“Last year, Smith released two EPs – February’s River and November’s A Minute… – that represent the culmination of these early efforts. Working with the iconic producer Peter Fenn – whose other credits include cuts with Laufey, Fred again.., Valley, and Ava Max – he tracked some of his most intimate moments. Connecting with Peter, he says, helped bring out the best in his artistry simply since the two got along as friends so well. A Minute.., after all, is centered around those life-altering moments that can change everything, whether those moments be with a partner, a friend, or simply ones spent trying to make sense of your own mind.

And yet, in Smith’s songwriting exists an exciting contrast. He manages to take these vignettes and dial them up to anthems, creating stadium-ready singalongs out of his highest highs and lowest lows. “I’m delusional into thinking one day I’ll be playing in stadiums, and so I always write like I’m already there,” Smith says with a smile. “My songwriting approach is always starting from the point of I want a song to live forever and in a big way.”

If the pace Smith is keeping seems dizzying, that’s because it is. In the first half of 2025 alone, he’s set to trot across North America and Europe. “Finally, I feel like I’ve reached a point now where the stages are big enough and the audiences are big enough that I can really put on a show. Being able to delve into creating a solid show that people come and enjoy is super exciting,” he tells me.

Smith is not daunted by the task, nor does he see a break coming anytime soon. Instead, he just wants to do what he knows best and what he loves: writing and playing. That, after all, is what keeps him going. “Whether I’m on tour or off the road, I always try my hardest to put pen to paper,” Smith admits. “That’s the lifeblood of everything we do as musicians. Music drives everything”.

At the end of February, The Guardian interviewed Myles Smith. During his BRITs acceptance speech (for Rising Star) to call on the Government to use their platform and power to protect grassroots venues. Their sustainability is under threat. Without them, we would not have artists like Myles Smith. So many big artists started out playing at smaller venues. Their survival is essential:

“With abundant emotional intelligence as well as a keener political acumen than most pop singers his age, the 26-year-old Smith is sharp and engaging company on a video call as he tours the UK. Born and raised in Luton, he casts himself as a small-town oddball. “I grew up in a working-class neighbourhood, in a Jamaican family – so my interest in rock and screamo, and not being able to play football and rugby, instantly put me in a different category to my peers,” he says. “In all walks of life I’ve felt a little bit different.”

His parents’ marriage fell apart when Smith was between the ages of nine and 13, “a critical period in anyone’s life when they’re forming relationships,” he says. Introducing a song to his 1.6m TikTok followers recently, he wryly said: “Anyone else’s parents divorce and then your dad leaves and then your whole perception of love and relationships is completely screwed up and you don’t know how to trust anyone in your adult life?”

“A lot of my personal development has been off the back of that [divorce] experience,” he says now. “I definitely had trust issues for a while.” He has had therapy – “such a beautiful tool” – to come to terms with it. “At the time [as a child] you’re never really aware – most of the learning comes when you’re an adult and you start to unpack the ways you think and feel. There’s a weird beauty to it – while it is painful and traumatic, and having to relive so many experiences is difficult, it also gives you this key to unlock a whole new side to yourself, when you do understand yourself better. And I’ve got a lot of [the trauma] to thank for being a good songwriter!”

Smith left Luton for the University of Nottingham to study sociology, and founded his own fast-growing business management company after graduating. But he’d been playing pub gigs since the age of 11, and decided to pivot to music, “knowing that if it all went wrong I could reactivate my LinkedIn and get back into the working world,” he laughs. “But those initial months were petrifying, stepping from a stable income to absolute uncertainty.” He started posting songs to TikTok in 2022, where his manager discovered him, and was signed to a major label deal with Sony the following year.

‘I never want to put a false sense of myself into the world, where I am this saviour. I push air – that’s my job’ … Smith performing in Dublin in February. Photograph: Debbie Hickey/Getty Images

But I can hear the sociology student still coming through when he discusses the systemic issues that can hold people like him back in the music industry. “For anyone from a working-class town, the opportunities to get into music are few and far between,” he says. “There’s a huge disadvantage when it comes to access to musical equipment, and even music lessons, at state school level.”

Smith benefited from Building Schools for the Future, an investment scheme brought in by Labour in 2005, then shuttered in 2010 by Michael Gove – who later regretted doing so – as the Tories’ austerity programme began. “I had access to GarageBand, iMacs, musical equipment,” Smith remembers. “And though the costing could be questioned, [the scheme] was very quickly pushed out the window. We’ve now seen years and years of austerity, and it’s not just the arts that have taken a hit – it’s anything that sits on the periphery of the mainstream route to work. There do need to be questions asked about how we’re valuing the arts in this country.”

Exacerbating the problem are the hardships faced by grassroots venues, which have been knocked hard by the Covid lockdowns and then the cost of living crisis. “Suddenly the gap between music being a hobby and being a career is wider than ever. In order to pay for a first show an artist might need to sell 500 tickets [at a medium-sized venue]. Whereas the bands and shows I used to see when I was younger was someone down the pub playing to 20 people, but those don’t exist any more.” And he sees a “dual burden” for people of colour, who as well as being statistically more likely to be working class, “are also not being seen for the amazing cultural value that they bring to this country, and what they add to one of our biggest cultural exports” – namely the arts. “More work needs to be done both on a class basis and a race basis.”

His music tends to be much less political, and is written in a way that allows listeners to map their own troubles and breakthroughs on to his songs. They frequently contact him to tell him so, and on social media, Smith recently reminded them: “It wasn’t my music that saved you – it was you.”

“A lot of people – and I really do appreciate it – will message me when they’re going through troublesome times,” he explains. “They’re dealing with mental health issues – or much further. I could take it as an ego lift: ‘Wow, I’m saving lives!’ But the reality is that those people are doing the hard work to really understand themselves. As an artist, I never want to put a false sense of myself into the world, where I am this saviour. I push air – that’s my job.”

As he hones his craft, Smith says he’s mindful to “take breaks from writing for a few months at a time, so I can go out and experience life, otherwise I’ll have nothing to say,” and also avoiding “external [musical] influence – I’m trying to find who I am, what I’m trying to say.” But time with Sheeran has been useful, seeing how “he has full confidence over his initial ideas. For me and many other songwriters, you can get stuck going over one line for 45 minutes. But he’s of the mindset that if it’s good, it’s good – why are we wasting time?”

After the Brit awards, Smyth has 37 gigs to play across Europe, the US and Australia – all before the end of May, when he starts 29 European stadium shows with Sheeran. It sounds exhausting, but he is clearly exhilarated. “I wrote a song recently about simply feeling good,” he says. “On the surface that could seem super cliched. But it’s taken a long time to just feel great, and not feel burdened with anything. That’s a byproduct of doing the thing that I love. Feeling good – that’s something I’ve been feeling recently!”.

I am going to finish off with a recent interview from Music Week. This is just a taster in terms of the press and interviews. I would urge people to do a bit more digging and listen and read as much as they can about Myles Smith. He is someone who is primed for many successful (and busy) years ahead in the music industry. If you do follow him already then make sure that you do:

“The UK industry's hottest new property Myles Smith has lifted the lid on his stunning breakthrough, signing to RCA and why he's in no hurry to release his debut album.

The Luton singer-songwriter, who covers the March edition of Music Week, has already notched up two UK Top 10 singles in Stargazing (1,147,392 sales, OCC) and Nice To Meet You (240,911 sales) and named winner of the BRITs Rising Star award for 2025, in addition to being crowned BBC Introducing Artist Of The Year.

Moreover, the 26-year-old, who will perform and is also up for Best New Artist, Song Of The Year and Pop Act at next month's BRITs, is adamant he is in it for the long haul.

“Having two Top 10 singles in my first year has been a real highlight,” he said. “It’s been such a good feeling, not just proving it to myself but also to the people who have trusted and invested so much time in me. This is not just a moment that will come and go, it’s the start of something real and long-term."

Indeed, despite his rapid progress to date, Smith indicated that he is taking his time with his first LP.

“I’m not sure when it’s going to come,” he said. “It’s all about carving out the time and making sure I’m in the right place. But when I get there, I want it to push the boundaries of what I’ve already put out, maybe be a bit closer to my heart, baring my soul a bit more.

“I don’t want to make music that’s just cool. I want to make music that I feel in my heart and soul could outlive me.”

Smith is currently on a headline run in the UK and Europe, including sold out London shows at O2 Shepherd’s Bush Empire (February 26) and Hammersmith's Eventim Apollo (March 26), and has 21 million monthly Spotify listeners, led by Stargazing's 666m global streams and counting.

He described the track, which peaked at No.4 in the UK and cracked the US Top 20, as “a beautiful song and a beautiful moment”.

“For people to have a song that explains such a grand emotion in such a simple way, it ticks the boxes,” he said. “It just gives me reassurance that I can write good music. Of course, I’ve sat there thinking, ‘Can I do it again?’ But then I’ve had to snap myself out of it and go, ‘I’ve done it, of course I could do it again.’ I wrote it not thinking I needed to write a smash song, more that I was going to write something that I love. I enter every session with that mindset.”

Initially coming to prominence after posting cover versions on TikTok – where he has 1.6m followers and 34.5m likes – Smith became a viral sensation with his renditions of Amber Run’s I Found and The Neighbourhood’s Sweater Weather.

“It started to go stratospheric,” he recalled. “I quickly started to gain tens of thousands of followers and then hundreds of thousands of followers, all within a really short space of time."

Smith signed to Sony Music UK’s RCA label in 2023, and has a high-ranking supporter in Sony Music UK & Ireland CEO & chairman Jason Iley.

“I’m delighted for Myles that he is doing so well, he deserves it!” Iley told Music Week. “It always comes down to the songs and he is a great songwriter. He had a very successful year globally in 2024 and there are no signs of that slowing down.”

The appreciation is mutual, with Smith expressing his gratitude for Iley's endorsement.

“He knows my weekly schedule and he’s a true believer in what I’m doing,” said Smith. “He’s always had the same mindset from the start, that the songs matter and the music you make matters, so create as much time as you can to truly invest in making great music, because you can become known for other things, who you date, where you go, scandals... He was like, ‘If your music speaks the loudest, that’s what is most important.’”

“One, it was music first. But two, they really cared about me as a person behind the artist, staying authentic, wanting to have my music reach millions but in the right way and in a way which is true to me,” he said

“A big part of the issues I was going through at the time, and still face somewhat right now, is that a lot of the world can box me in as being almost like an exception to the rule of a Black artist making pop music, and that could sometimes be made into a novelty or a spectacle.

“The RCA team really understood that, yes, I am a Black artist, and yes, I do have things to say about my culture and where I come from, but that shouldn’t be the focal point of who I am and what I represent. Not that that wasn’t said in other meetings I’d had, but it was something that they had actively considered. That was a real turning point for me”.

I am going to leave things there. A really important voice in music, do go and show Myles Smith support. Even though I sort of half-joked he does not need my assistance or spotlighting, I think any attention that comes his way is good! Someone whose music should be heard by as wide an audience as possible. He may be only a boy from Luton – not my words but you feel Myles Smith thinks along those lines -, he is now someone whose music belongs to the world. This amazing artist has come a long way. You know he has…

A lot more to say.

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Follow Myles Smith

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FEATURE: Modern Queens: Victoria Canal

,

FEATURE:

 

 

Modern Queens

PHOTO CREDIT: Francesco Zinno

  

Victoria Canal

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THE last time…

that I properly spotlighted Victoria Canal was back in 2023. I have talked about her since but, for this Modern Queens, I wanted to discuss one of the most important artists around. I am going to start off with some interviews from earlier in this year and will end with some reviews for her incredible debut album, Slowly It Dawns. I would advise people pick up a copy of her album. Canal is currently undertaking some U.S. tour dates. For their Class of 2025 feature, DIY spoke with an artist who had a phenomenal 2024. Including playing with Coldplay at Glastonbury and a second  Ivor Novello award win, the Spanish-American was being tipped by many to be the sound of 2025. Her debut album won huge acclaim:

“Set for release in January, ‘Slowly, It Dawns’ is not just the culmination of three years’ work for the singer, but a record that shows a wider breadth of her talents than ever before. “Definitely going on tour with Hozier was the catalyst for that,” she explains of her new, expanded sonic scope. “I think seeing just how varied his music is and how huge it could be, and experiencing those fans that are young, queer and very sentimental, I was really inspired by what my show could become and what my music could sound like. I took the pieces of what inspired me about his show in terms of the grandiosity and used it as inspiration for my own recording process and songwriting.

“I definitely wanted to keep the more intimate, singer-songwriter, bedroom style stuff that is so close to my heart, but I think the album is split into two sides,” she notes. “Side A is this much more confident, unhinged side, which did take a lot of inspiration from that time, and then Side B is the much more introverted, wounded, wiser side.”

Keying into the old school approach of splitting a record into two distinct sides, the album begins with the more carefree fun of ‘June Baby’ before moving into the sultry flirtation of ‘California Sober’ and the hedonistic rhythms of ‘Cake’ which, Victoria explains, represent the earlier phases of life. “To me, the flirty, sort of overconfident, naive side is emblematic of younger life. You know, you’re 18 or 19, you’re going out, you’re trying things for the first time, you’re trying to discover who you are and maybe overshoot.

“I think the main thing is that I just had fun,” she says of her approach when writing those songs in particular. “Music is mostly such a brooding, sorta weepy experience for me – and that is where my heart lies, but I just wanted to test myself and see if I could genuinely have fun and not restrict myself in any way. All the songs on Side A, I felt like they were just a result of me being like, ‘Fuck it, I’m going to make whatever I want today’, and yeah, it did kind of flow; particularly the music and production elements. I think we were just having so much fun, so it felt easy.”

It’s in the album’s second half – around the existential lullaby-esque ‘Vauxhall’ – that things shift to a more reflective, introverted space. “I really liked the idea of bookending the album with ‘June Baby’ as Track One and ‘swan song’ as Track 12, sort of from beginning to end of life and basically a coming-of-age story,” she explains. “There does come a point where you wake up and you’re 24 or 25 and you’re like, ‘Oh jeez, what was all that?’ and ‘I should probably get serious now’. The rest of the album from there becomes more wise and more reflective and self aware, which is much more how I feel in my life now.”

While her debut mostly explores new territory for the songwriter, there are a few familiar faces within the track listing. “Those songs, they’re sisters and they deserve a long life,” she says of the record’s final two tracks, ‘Black Swan’ and ‘swan song’, which previously featured on her 2023 EP ‘WELL WELL’ and 2022 release ‘Elegy’ respectively. Did she always plan to include them on her full-length? “I did, yeah. I just felt like I didn’t want to leave them behind and they’re so representative of who I am and the deepest part of my soul. I wanted to make sure that they got their moment again; it feels really right to me.”

There’s something poignant about the fact that, through the writing of the album, it’s still the songs she wrote some years ago that speak to Victoria most now. “I think that’s part of the concept behind the album too,” she agrees, “that it’s cyclical. You’re born and you live and you die and you’re born again. Even within your life; maybe it’s not a literal death, but it’s an ego death or it’s the death of an idea of yourself. That’s also part of the reason I called the album ‘Slowly, It Dawns’, because it feels like a sunrise and eventually the sun sets but it will rise again. It is interesting, and it really is based on where I am in my life that I feel more like ‘Black Swan’ and that Side B energy versus like, confident, loud, unhinged Side A energy.”

An album of intense honesty that also celebrates the multitudes of the human experience – whether foolish and loud, or meditative and quiet – ‘Slowly, It Dawns’ aims to move away from the highly-curated snapshots of life that society seems so intent on projecting, to showcase it for the contradictory muddle that it can actually be. “I think that’s one thing that I just don’t see too much of online, particularly with really established artists that I follow, for example,” Victoria offers up. “It’s like, they can be this one thing, all the time, and it’s always energetic and it’s always happy and it’s always lively and they’re always performing and whatever,” she says.

“But, for me, I just find that there’s like… I call it the God and goblin complex.” Two halves of the same emotional coin, much like the two sides of the album. “I’m a fan of music and I feel like I’ve been searching for an artist to admit that they are both this and that, you know what I mean?” she asks. “I’ve decided I can basically be that person”.

I am going to move to an interview with Brick Magazine. For anyone who does not know Victoria Canal, I would urge you to seek her out. I think this is an artist that is going to climb to huge heights. Someone who will be headlining big festivals soon enough. Her music is like nothing else. Brick Magazine stated that Slowly, It Dawns is a “defiant yet delicate reflection on the life-long lead-up to her debut album”. It is one of the best albums of the year:

“The record is imbued with memories of her international upbringing. Born in Munich to Spanish and American parents, she grew up mostly in Madrid, but – thanks to her dad’s job in medical tech – she had resided in Shanghai, Tokyo, Amsterdam and Dubai all before adulthood. Her genre-spanning sound has also been the result of abundant creative collaboration, as she was inspired to formally start the album while on tour with Hozier in 2023. “Seeing Hozier up-close and working with Coldplay, I was exposed to bands and artists that make many kinds of music and really stretch themselves in terms of genre and songwriting,” she explains. “I felt inspired to stretch myself, to lean into the pop side of myself, lean into the more brooding, folky singer-songwriter side, and everything else in between.”

She pauses. “At the same time, it is true that your debut album takes your whole life to make,” she adds. To roll out the album’s singles and accompanying visuals, she used the allegory of a house party, embracing the same teenage innocence that once painted Friday nights as the most important times of your life.

The first track and lead single, ‘June Baby’ opens to glittering piano chords and Canal’s soft whispers, as if you’re being awoken by a light breeze as the sun pours in and the hope of a new day rises. The mood heats up on ‘California Sober’ as she flirts with new desires amid sizzling Cuban-inspired guitars and mariachi backing vocals. The deliciously dangerous ‘Cake’ hears Canal descend further into her hedonism, delaying her inevitable return to reality through self-destruction, singing “Fuck the cake, let’s go straight to the vodka.”

She enlisted creative director Abbie Coombs to aid in crafting a universe where ‘Cake’ and the diaphanous ‘swan song’ end up on the same record. Canal discovered that ‘June Baby’ and ‘swan song’ worked best as bookends, saying they felt like “a beginning and an end of a life” that she could then piece together.

“When you grow up, you’re overconfident, you’re naive, you’re really loud about your opinions and convinced about the way the world should be, but you also don’t know anything at all. Then there reaches a point in life where everything flips on its head, and you question: who am I?” she remembers. She asks this on ‘15%’, the album’s keystone track. “It’s looking back and thinking, ‘Oh my God, why did I say those things? Am I amazing? Or does everyone hate me?‘ This social anxiety kicks in but there’s also an understanding that it’s just the way the brain works, and you can’t control it.”

Slowly, It Dawns’ second half reckons with this discomfort and reflects on agency, accountability, and acceptance. On ‘Vauxhall’, Canal speaks to her lover and fantasises of their escape away from responsibilities and repercussions – singing “I wish it was that easy / trading in my dreams for peace of mind” – before realising that she can’t escape her problems as she can’t escape herself. The song is another stand-out from the album, building with discontent until she bursts from frustration, hollering “I wish I had a choice” until it fades to silence.

Meanwhile, the agonising ‘Totally Fucking Fine’ starts out as sarcastic and resentful as its name might suggest, capturing her growing self-belief like weight being lifted from her chest, before transitioning to a meditative instrumental, creating a space to stop and breathe among the chaos. This introspection has undoubtedly been aided by her meticulous commitment to journaling – she’s been writing them since she was six years old, and admits she can get through one every few months.

Canal explains the magic of songwriting, for her, is in its development process and trusting in an idea’s evolution. She needed to create a space “where there are no bad ideas” to sharpen her thoughts, cultivating this with renowned songwriter Eg White who contributed to half the record’s tracklist. “Part of my process – since 2020, when it felt like the world was ending – is to make music where I don’t care if anybody ever hears it. I’m making exactly what I want to make and that’s what matters to me. Then when people hear it and connect with it, that’s an amazing reward,” she explains.

Not caring about what others think is a well-practiced perspective for Canal, who was born without her right forearm due to amniotic band syndrome. Navigating her rise in an industry that “loves to turn you into one thing”, she expresses her mixed feelings towards visible representation and being seen as a spokesperson. “Honestly, if I think about it too much, it’ll give me a headache because it is so conflicting,” she begins. “I feel a responsibility to manage it a certain way, and as I’m becoming more public, I want to get it right. I want to represent without overly identifying with my disability, as it’s just one part of me.”

Looking ahead, Canal is starting the year back on the road, celebrating the album’s release with two Rough Trade performances in London and Bristol, before embarking on a seven-stop US tour, including a stop at Hollywood’s infamous Troubadour. Reflecting on it all, she shares: “The lesson I’m learning in life is that everything will go wrong, but the question is: how do you respond to it? I think success isn’t just things going right in your life, it’s learning how to handle when things go wrong. That’s what success is to me, and that’s something that I’m still working on and finding the strength to live up to.”

To add to her ever-expanding to-do list, the musician has set herself a new goal: to improve the accessibility of music venues on her tour. “There are many venues that some of my fans couldn’t access because they weren’t wheelchair accessible which is so disappointing and something that I think needs to be worked on, particularly for medium-sized and smaller venues,” she explains.

She reaffirms that creative careers are never linear paths to “a Grammy, or 100 million streams, or a million followers” – behind the alluring heights of pop stardom are the stresses of merch shipments getting lost, overbudget tours, and the perpetual fear of flopping. After spending years shrouded in her own uncertainty, Canal has shed her adolescent anxieties to uncover what matters most to her: protecting her peace. She asserts, “I’m really grateful for all the difficulties I’ve faced because I’m learning so much about what it means to feel satisfied and accomplished and purposeful”.

I want to finish off with a couple of reviews. I am going to come to one from When the Horn Blows and their assessment of a remarkable and distinctly original debut album. For those who are looking for an artist who is going to endure for years and continue to put out music of the highest quality, you need to look in the direction of Victoria Canal. I have been a fan for years now and will continue to follow her:

“Victoria Canal’s ‘Slowly, It Dawns’ is a debut album years in the making, but the graft pays off with a dazzling set of self-empowerment pop gems.

The road here was not always pretty, and more convoluted than the German-born, Spanish-American artist, singer, songwriter, actor and manifester’s story sounds. The finished product was made over three years and recorded in London and LA – with Victoria recently posting support on social media for those affected by the ongoing wildfires in the latter. The final product is universal, effortless and refined, reflecting life in your twenties, a time that is usually anything but.

The first half of the album is a pop girl brimming with creativity, beginning with last summer’s single ‘June Baby’. The vulnerability is visibly present in a sunshiny track written with The 1975’s Ross MacDonald, with fellow band member George Daniel on co-production. Victoria sings: “You saw me naked, totally freaking out. Afraid to say it, I think I love you now.” When she repeats the line “I am falling apart, I am falling apart,” it morphs into an anthemic juggernaut.

The glorious “some kind of euphoria” continues with ‘Talk’, about an inconvenient crush over a driving vibe. It has all the hallmarks of another summer smash with her delivery: “We don’t need to talk about it, we don’t need to talk at all.”

‘California Sober’ is big and bold, dripping with confidence and a little Latin sweat. It’s where VC, raised for most of her life in Spain, lets that side in after years admiring Anglo-American acts. Written with Låpsley, the feeling of romance is underpinned by exotic sounds and queer liberation. She sings: “Baby beg for it, lay in it, so close that you can taste it. Be my guest, be my guest” with more beauty than beast. It is crying out for dancing and hot as hell all-night vibing.

‘Cake’ has dramatic undertones and cinematic desperation. There’s a sense of escapism despite strong almost-dystopian electronics, all wrapped up in three minutes. The key line -  “Fuck the cake! Let’s go straight to the vodka. We don’t ever have to think about the cracks in the machine” – sums up some of the contradictions at the heart of the album, and the world. Meanwhile, ‘15%’, about the yin and yang of life, gives the album its title. “Slowly, it dawns, I’m a pain in the ass. Is everyone happy I’m leaving?” Victoria seeks reassurance despite ongoing doubt in a delicate and sombre track. There is also another nod to her mixed heritage, briefly flitting between tongues: “Depende¿ De que depende? It depends on you. It depends on me.”

Side A ends with ‘Vauxhall’ - not the area in south London, but the thought of trading her music dreams for the suburbs with an overly assertive man in a naff car: “I could use your confidence, and your shitty Vauxhall.”  It has full-blown popstar energy with another Bond-esque sound, and rounding off by singing “I wish I had a choice”.

The second half shows a more “self-aware” Victoria Canal in another, slightly less chaotic world. ‘How Can I Be A Person?’ is 165 seconds of calm glory, drifting pleasantly on the idea of recollection with few words, before the meditative sound of Totally Fucking Fine’, which fuses an explicit title with a mellow centre. The bracing and honest piano ballad was delivered in one go, in which she asks: “What good is a holiday if you’re already bored?” It is the track where the girl born without a lower arm most talks about the concept of the body, repeating “that body’s not mine” before declaring the title line again. It has a soft ending, before coming back for a final line of heart-wrenching vocals.

In ‘Hollow’, Victoria questions: “How did I end up here? Guarded and insincere, walking on tippy toes. Nobody knows.” She fears being fake, but the result is 115% real: “There’s no morning glory, no bible or moral of the story to follow. Beneath it all, we are hollow.” In ‘Barely’, VC delivers the lyric “We’re all solar systems, we’re so fucking small. Centres of existence, barely here at all” with beauty and calm, despite the words having a punk energy which a different band would blister through in seconds. It is one of the myriad ways that Victoria changes and subverts ideas, capable of doing things in splendid and unusual ways.

The final songs are a twinset from previous EPs. Coldplay’s Chris Martin, a mentor to Victoria and a key figure in getting her signed to the band’s label Parlophone, described ‘Black Swan’ as “one of the best songs ever written”. It also won the Ivor Novello Best Song Musically and Lyrically last year.  In it, she sings: “Mama, turn me blonde, take my final form. Black swan, black swan”. Meanwhile ‘swan song’ is stylishly crafted, as Victoria ends by contemplating: “Who knows how long we’ve got? As long as I am breathing, I know it’s not too late to love.” It is a sentiment that runs throughout every part of ‘Slowly, It Dawns’.

In a crowded field of female singer-songwriters, Victoria Canal is unique in many ways. The vulnerable and introspective piano art is sometimes at odds with the bravado of Side A, but it is the feeling of being human. She won’t be defined by her limb difference, instead turning to universality which is in the strong songwriting and beautiful harmonies found on this album. Victoria has finally found clarity as her own artist – sometimes wholesome, sometimes sexy, and always showing there’s unlimited potential in her career.

‘Slowly, It Dawns’ is an impressive benchmark jammed with well-executed songs and a strong pop performance. For a woman who begins her album singing “I am falling apart, I am falling apart”, it’s all come together. It’s taken a while, but this is Victoria Canal’s moment”.

I am going to end with a short review from DIY. A 2025 masterpiece, the coming years are going to be really exciting. I have high hopes for an artist who should be on everyone’s radar:

“For anyone familiar with Victoria Canal’s earlier discography - which, after sharing her first EP all the way back in 2016, is already plentiful - the opening chimes of ‘June Baby’ might come as a bit of a surprise. Where her most recent releases (2022’s ‘elegy’ and last year’s ‘WELL WELL’ EP) dwelled in the more introspective corners of life, there’s a sunny warmth to the opening track of her debut full-length ‘Slowly, It Dawns’ that feels unexpected but still well-worn. It’s this spirit that’s carried into the first half of the record via the flirtatious strut of ‘California Sober’ and the thrumming, hedonistic vibrations of ‘Cake’, proving Canal has many more strings to her pop bow. For those more enamoured with her intimate, stripped back songwriting, never fear; ‘Slowly, It Dawns’’ second half is as powerful and devastating as ever, with ‘Barely’ standing out as a particularly raw but striking highlight (“We’re all solar systems,” she sings, in an almost whisper, “we’re so fucking small”). That she chooses to close proceedings with the one-two of her previous stand-out singles ‘Black Swan’ and ‘swan song’ makes perfect sense in context, too; the tracks that helped introduce her to the world now become the poignant final notes of her newest era. A gorgeous debut”.

There are few artists who leave as big an impression on me as Victoria Canal. Slowly, It Dawns is a tremendous album that rightly won impassioned reviews. The future is very bright for Canal. I have never seen her perform live, though that is something that I need to do at some point if she plays London in the future. If you are not following this amazing artist then you need to do so…

RIGHT away.

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Follow Victoria Canal