FEATURE: Modern-Day Queens: Kehlani

FEATURE:

 

 

Modern-Day Queens

 

Kehlani

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SO far this year…

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

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

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

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

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

PHOTO CREDIT: Sophia Wilson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ON your radar.

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Follow Kehlani

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

FEATURE:

 

 

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

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

 

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

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I am running…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE next edition.

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

FEATURE:

 

 

Kate Bush: The Tour of Life

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

 

The Pianistic Purity of Her First Three Albums

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SOMETHING that Stuart Maconie…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SO special to me.

FEATURE: Spotlight: Julia Cumming

FEATURE:

 

 

Spotlight

PHOTO CREDIT: Sacha Lecca for Rolling Stone

 

Julia Cumming

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I am already a firm fan…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PHOTO CREDIT: Brendan Wixted

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

WHAT she does next.

__________

Follow Julia Cumming

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

FEATURE:

 

 

Home to Us

IN THIS PHOTO: Ringo Starr

 

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

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I will bring in new interviews…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FOR years more.

FEATURE: The Digital Mixtape: Noddy Holder at Eighty

FEATURE:

 

 

The Digital Mixtape

 

Noddy Holder at Eighty

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IT is a pity…

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

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

 

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

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

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

EXPERIENCE the brilliance.

FEATURE: Spotlight: Revisited: Suki Waterhouse

FEATURE:

 

 

Spotlight: Revisited

 

Suki Waterhouse

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ABOUT four years…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A divine talent.

___________

Follow Suki Waterhouse

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

FEATURE:

 

 

Bliss

 

Muse’s Origin of Symmetry at Twenty-Five

__________

IF many feel Muse…

PHOTO CREDIT: Benedict Johnson/Redferns

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

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

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

Show me it’s real

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

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

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

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

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

Peace will arise

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

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

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

Hyper-music

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Give me the peace and joy in your mind.

Everything about you is how I’d wanna be.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A mighty revelation!

FEATURE: The Great American Songbook: Kacey Musgraves

FEATURE:

 

 

The Great American Songbook

 

Kacey Musgraves

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IT is quite timely…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A staggering artist.

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

FEATURE:

 

 

Who Kept the Dogs Out?

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

 

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

__________

THERE is a recent story…

PHOTO CREDIT: Jessie Morgan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DESERVE so much better.

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

FEATURE:

 

 

Fourth Time Around

  

Bob Dylan's Blonde on Blonde at Sixty

__________

IN terms of the…

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mississippi blues

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FINEST of them all.

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

FEATURE:

 

 

Flyin’ High (In the Friendly Sky)

  

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

__________

MAYBE people don’t feel…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

EVER will.

FEATURE: Some Grey and White Matter: Kate Bush’s Sat in Your Lap at Forty-Five

FEATURE:

 

 

Some Grey and White Matter

  

Kate Bush’s Sat in Your Lap at Forty-Five

__________

EVEN if I have written…

about this song a bit recently, I need to come back to it, so forgive any repeats when it comes to information included. However, on 21st June, Kate Bush’s Sat in Your Lap turns forty-five. This is such an important song in her career. For a little background, Never for Ever was released in September 1980. That was her third studio album. Many expecting Bush to release an album soon after. It would be September 1982 when Kate Bush put out The Dreaming. Even though it is only two years, I feel there was pressure from EMI that she would follow up a number-one album with something sooner. That is not how inspiration works! Today, I do think that artists – especially major ones – are expected to put music out constantly. I guess Bush would have wanted music to arrive before 1982. Though she did get struck by inspiration and released this amazing single out on 21st June, 1981. Amazing that there was a gap of over fourteen months between Sat in Your Lap and The Dreaming! Sat in Your Lap is one of the most percussive-driven songs Bush ever released. It departed from Never for Ever and it gave a window into what The Dreaming would contain. Is Sat in Your Lap the most radio-friendly or commercial song on The Dreaming? It was successful as a single and reached eleven in the U.K. I will come to its amazing music video. It is worth dropping this archive from the Kate Bush Club Newsletter of October 1982. A music icon that kickstarted inspiration during a bit of a dry spell for Kate Bush:

“I already had the piano patterns, but they didn’t turn into a song until the night after I’d been to see a Stevie Wonder gig. Inspired by the feeling of his music, I set a rhythm on theRolandand worked in the piano riff to the high-hat and snare. I now had a verse and a tune to go over it but only a few lyrics like “I see the people working”, “I want to be a lawyer,” and “I want to be a scholar,” so the rest of the lyrics became “na-na-na”‘ or words that happened to come into my head. I had some chords for the chorus with the idea of a vocal being ad-libbed later. The rhythm box and piano were put down, and then we recorded the backing vocals. “Some say that knowledge is…” Next we put down the lead vocal in the verses and spent a few minutes getting some lines worked out before recording the chorus voice. I saw this vocal being sung from high on a hill on a windy day. The fool on the hill, the king of the castle… “I must admit, just when I think I’m king.”
The idea of the demos was to try and put everything down as quickly as possible. Next came the brass. The CS80 is still my favourite synthesizer next to the Fairlight, and as it was all that was available at the time, I started to find a brass sound. In minutes I found a brass section starting to happen, and I worked out an arrangement. We put the brass down and we were ready to mix the demo.
I was never to get that CS80 brass to sound the same again – it’s always the way. At The Townhouse the same approach was taken to record the master of the track. We put down a track of the rhythm box to be replaced by drums, recording the piano at the same time. As I was producing, I would ask the engineer to put the piano sound on tape so I could refer to that for required changes. This was the quickest of all the tracks to be completed, and was also one of the few songs to remain contained on one twenty-four track tape instead of two!

Kate Bush Club newsletter, October 1982”.

Among the many things to admire about Sat in Your Lap is the musicians. Preston Heyman and Paddy Bush dealing with percussion and sticks. I really love the backing vocals from Ian Bairnson, Gary Hurst, Stewart Arnold and Paddy Bush. Kate Bush on piano and Fairlight CMI. It is this wonderful blend of sounds. Kate Bush producing the song. That idea of people wanting knowledge and saying they will do these things to be better and get knowledge but not doing anything about it. This really interesting idea for a song! Perhaps some irony in the lyrics. Or what is the word? Kate Bush had writer’s block and could not solve it. Steevie Wonder unlocked something. I want to move to an article I have included before. Published by Dreams of Orgonon in 2020,  I would love to see more articles like this that dissect the lyrics and themes of Kate Bush’s songs. Not that many people go that deep. A book that covers all of her tracks and goes into detail. We have the 33 1/3 book on Hounds of Love by Leah Kardos. Yet, other albums have not been covered. By reading this kind of analysis, I feel we get a greater appreciation of Kate Bush:

“Sat In Your Lap” conveys both frantic motivation and fearful inaction — it is enticed by the busy and productive activities of people and intimidated by the energy exerted in them, perhaps suggesting a character outwardly compelled to be a productive adult too soon (it’s possible Bush could relate). It is at once rapid, careening at 146 BPM, and petrified with fear. The music video (Bush’s first without director Keef Macmillan) swerves between stillness and freneticism. During the verses, Bush is mostly seated in a white dress, while the refrains see her cavorting with dancers in dunce caps. Former “gifted and talented” children drained by adults’ external compulsion to excel may encounter a kindred spirit in “Sat In Your Lap.” Yet even in its inertia lays a search — despite the emotional shutting down, the desperate need for knowledge and truth is genuine and constant.

The incessant refrain, consisting of Bush screaming (with occasional variations) “some say that knowledge is something sat in your lap/some say that knowledge is something that you never have,” makes the preoccupation with knowledge clear. Holy shit, says Bush, look at all this cool stuff adults do! And all these neat religious and philosophical paths! “Some say that heaven is hell/some say that hell is heaven!” Is anyone right? The sheer quantity of faiths can be incredibly disorienting to an adult. The comparable power that spirituality can have over a child is often formative.

Another animating tension of “Sat in Your Lap” is its emotional fluidity while nominally discussing knowledge: “some say that knowledge is something sat in your lap,” or knowledge is “something that you never have.” These are largely apophatic definitions of knowledge, defining it as an elusive force. The rampant emotiveness pervades a search for knowledge. “In my dome of ivory/a home of activity/I want the answers quickly/but I don’t have no energy” sees a desire for knowledge colliding with aporia and sensory overload. Without a clear path forward, sometimes the only trajectory is acceleration and exhaustion.

As the only answer to the unanswerable is sublime incoherence, the song’s coda is hermetic descent into sensory overload. Iconography blurs (“Tibet or Jeddah,” “to Salisbury/a monastery”) in a tendency that’s strong in the last couple verses, as Bush inverts Psalm 23 (“my cup, she never overfloweth”), dabbles in desert-dwelling, monasticism, cathedrals, and with “some grey and white matter,” the human brain (grey and white matter oversee the brain’s connection to the spinal cord). “Sat in Your Lap” concludes with inconclusiveness: its dance is in the terrifying glory of befuddlement. Asceticism is a cerebral process as well as physical: the brain responds to the body’s state. Bush is engaging with some genuinely fascinating systems of thought here: for all the approaches to the mind/body problem that have been formulated, responding to it with “isn’t scholastically-caused sensory overload a kind of asceticism?” is new”.

You can sense her videos and sound becoming more ambitious. In terms of the cast of characters and visuals, they became bigger and more filmic from Never for Ever onwards. Sat in Your Lap is so busy and eye-opening! It is one of Kate Bush’s best videos. The iconic Abbey Road Studios was the location for Sat in Your Lap’s video. More and more, I sort of lament the fact that Kate Bush never toured after The Dreaming. In the sense that a 1982/1983 tour could have featured tracks from The Dreaming. Seeing Sat in Your Lap performed on the stage as part of a larger concept. So many songs from The Dreaming would have been amazing on the stage! The video for Sat in Your Lap is an astonishing concept. In terms of what was done with it. Directed by Brian Wiseman, more people need to discuss this video. Here is some more information about Sat in Your Lap’s video:

“According to Kate, The video was filmed over two days, one part at a video studio, the other at the audio studios. The former provided the quick, easy technical sides to be performed, the latter provided the space and presence. The large parquet floor was to be a feature, and Abbey Road’s past, full of dancing and singing spirits, was to be conjured up in the present day by tapping feet to the sound of jungle drums – only to be turned into past again through the wonder of video-tape. The shots were sorted into a logical order: all long shots were audio studio, all others were video studio”.

I do think that all the technical details about Kate Bush’s song are compelling. Where songs were recorded and what instruments went into the mix. This behind the scenes thing. I wanted to draw from Classic Pop and their article from last year. Going inside the making of The Dreaming, the unorthodoxy of Kate Bush was producing genius results:

“She opted to self-produce, (Tony Visconti, who’d written her a Lionheart-inspired fan letter during Bowie’s Lodger, was briefly considered). In a Denmark Street demo studio, drummer Preston Heyman was introduced to Bush’s new methods. Sat In Your Lap’s piano riff reminded him of Dave Brubeck’s Take Five, he played along accordingly. She then removed his cymbals, then his snare.

It morphed into a tom-tom pattern more akin to the Warrior Drums of Burundi (used on Joni Mitchell’s The Hissing Of Summer Lawns). Eager to get the tribal, drum-heavy sound onto tape she headed to Townhouse Studios, specifically it’s ‘stone’ room. This was where engineer Hugh Padgham had created the colossal ‘gated reverb’ drums on PG3 with drummer Phil Collins.

Bush had been equally impressed with In The Air Tonight (a ‘masterpiece’). Padgham worked on Sat In Your Lap, Leave It Open and Get Out Of My House, giving Bush the rhythmic oomph she required, aided by the studio’s Solid State Logic console with its gates and compressors.

A hard, driving core aside (Rainbow’s Jimmy Bain played bass), these tracks weren’t ‘rock’ or ‘normal’ and Padgham was bewildered by Bush’s unorthodoxy. For Heyman, though, it was exactly this “weirdness that we rejoiced in”. For Sat In Your Lap, the drummer and brother Paddy Bush stood ten feet apart, swooshing bamboo sticks (a cracked one stayed in the mix too).

Space was found for one Chinese opera cymbal suspended from a rope, “throttled” periodically by Heyman. Struggling to replicate the demo’s CS80 parts, Buggles’ Geoff Downes supplied a Fairlight brass section (he was busy working at Townhouse on Asia’s debut).

In June 1981 Sat In Your Lap hit the shelves, unveiling Bush’s new direction in a white sleeve, ballet-dunce Bush glancing quizzically at a globe. Inside was a torrent of avant-garde pop; rumbling rhythms, philosophical head-scratching and a startling vocal ferocity.

Bush fretted, initial feedback was dumbstruck silence. But critics raved (“a superb blast of energy”), as did BBC’s Roundtable guest reviewers, Linx’s David Grant, and Rick Wakeman. It climbed to No.11, a year later it sat atop Trevor Horn’s all-time top ten, one of three Bush selections.

Meanwhile, The Dreaming’s sessions had steamed ahead. The in-demand Padgham left for Genesis’ Abacab, replaced by Nick Launay. His CV, including PIL’s The Flowers Of Romance, aligned the young engineer with Bush’s new almost post-punk edge”.

Sat in Your Lap turns forty-five on 21st June. It is one of Kate Bush’s finest songs. It was the introduction to The Dreaming. Nothing else on the album sounds like Sat in Your Lap. The remaining singles from the album (The Dreaming, There Goes a Tenner, Suspended in Gaffa and Night of the Swallow) did not fare well. However, that is not to take away from the brilliance of The Dreaming. A masterpiece album. Sat in Your Lap was sort of this bridge between her Never for Ever era and the start of the new one. The song proved what a hugely innovative songwriter and producer Kate Bush was. In June 1981, so few artists making songs like Sat in Your Lap. In 2018, when ranking Kate Bush’s singles, The Guardian placed Sat in Your Lap at four: “Even in a pop climate where the Associates’ Party Fears Two could become a hit, this sounded thrillingly unhinged: three and a half minutes of screeching vocals, frantic PiL-influenced rhythms and Fairlight-driven sampling overload”. We all have to salute this…

ICONIC song.

FEATURE: Murder on the Dancefloor: Will We See a Shift in Terms of the Sounds of Modern Pop?

FEATURE:

 

 

Murder on the Dancefloor

IN THIS PHOTO: Charli xcx/PHOTO CREEDIT: Rafael Pavarotti

  

Will We See a Shift in Terms of the Sounds of Modern Pop?

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PERHAPS it will not affect…

IN THIS PHOTO: Demi Lovato recently released the sultry Dance-Pop track, Low Rise Jeans/PHOTO CREDIT: Deanie Chen

every major Pop artist, though there has been this run of albums that are primed for the dance floor. From Kylie Minogue and TENSION (2023) to Charli xcx and BRAT (2024), there have been these amazing album that have definitely brought people together. Not that it has been completely dominated by women, though I think most of these Dance and Pop albums have come from female artists. Bringing in Disco and Electronic music into the Pop cauldron, the scene has been busy with these great albums that get you dancing and up. Will we see a shift towards other sounds and directions? I am intrigued by Madonna and her upcoming album, Confessions on a Dance Floor: Part II. That is out on 3rd July. This is a Dance album, though perhaps slightly different in terms of the sound of the 2005 Confessions on a Dance Floor. One of the reasons for bringing up this topic is that Charli xcx says her next album will be Rock-inspired. That album, xcx8, will probably be out later this year or next year. Speaking with British Vogue recently, Charli xcx proclaimed that the dance floor is dead. Instead, it seems like she will go in a harder and different direction:

“Making xcx8 in a fresh setting made music feel alive again: working in a tight unit and preserving a rough demo-like quality to her voice – her trademark Auto-Tune is all but gone – and Cook’s guitar. “We were doing our version of analogue, which is so silly and funny,” she says lovingly, “but putting it through our lens, and making sure that nothing felt too macho, was important.”

At this point, a good number of Charli fans may be screaming: “Guitar? Guitar???” It’s a shock: of all her albums, the one Charli likes least is 2014’s punky Sucker. Her idea of hell is watching a band (apologies to George). Real Music Bores who think guitars are authentic and synthesisers are fake had a field day when Charli headlined Glastonbury 2025, laying into her processed vocals and lack of live band. (She enjoyed the discourse, writing on X: “The best art is divisive and confrontational.”) With his label PC Music, Cook pioneered what became known as hyperpop: proudly synthetic, extreme and famously divisive. Charli started working with Cook’s crew a decade ago, when the futurist haute bubblegum of her 2016 EP Vroom Vroom neutered Sucker’s child’s-play rebellion and catalysed Charli’s bond with her ride-or-die LGBTQ+ fanbase.

The new album’s creators are all well aware of the tension that comes with going guitar-centric. Charli sees humour in it, a quality she needs in art. “For me, it’s fun to flip the form. We know there’s gonna be people who are bothered by it, but that’s fine.” The song about the dance floor being dead is going to spark some really boring thinkpieces, though, I tell her. “I know,” she says, grimacing.

Last year, accepting the Ivor Novello songwriter of the year award for Brat, Charli said: “I’m sure you all agree, I am hardly Bob Dylan, but one thing I certainly do is commit to the bit.” Her brusque observations mean any reinvention is never a whole-cloth pop star rebirth, but remains intrinsically her. “I’d always rather have a style than be vague,” she says now. “Which is the biggest crime, in my opinion.” The album’s existence embodies that commitment. “It’s looking for this intensity,” Cook says. “It’s not just this flex of, ‘Oh, I did this other album.’ She’s really responding to a feeling that a lot of people have in 2026 of there being so much, almost too much. What do you hold onto? I’m inspired by seeing how she’s so ready to do that rather than take it easy”.

I don’t think that we will ever see a death or complete reversal. However, like Britpop in the 1990s, there was this period when this type of Pop was in the zeitgeist and leasing. That then sort of got replaced by Rock and Alternative. Dance-Pop has been in vogue for a long time. Major artists like Dua Lipa putting out phenomenal albums. Legends like Madonna coming back to the dance floor (or dancefloor as one word, if you prefer?). I do feel like there is going to be a slight dimming. I don’t think Charli xcx feels Dance and Dance-Pop is dead. However, she has done that already and wants to do something different. Maybe there is a slightly exhaustion when it comes to dancefloor-primed music. When it comes to women in music, many don’t feel they are Rock artists. Still a sound and genre that is male-dominated and there is sexism. Women with guitars subjected to misogyny and sexism. I am not sure what xcx8 will contain, though Charli xcx is an artist always moving forward and trying new things. That idea of the dancefloor being dead. A big statement. I have not seen anyone else discuss it. Have we come to a period when everything has been said and done?! Jessie Ware’s latest album, Superbloom, has its heart set towards the dancefloor. Though perhaps there were few bangers or club-ready songs compared to That! Feels Good! of 2023. Perhaps there was this feeling during the pandemic that Dance music was a way of cheering us. A lot of release once restrictions has been lifted and we could get together. A moment in popular music when there was a lot of Dance-Pop and so many major artists were primed in that direction. However, I do wonder whether things are beginning to go in a different direction. Many would argue that the dancefloor is as alive and burning as ever.

Charli xcx did not want to do a BRAT 2 or say what she has said before. I get the feeling she senses something in the air is changing. An urgency or need for something rawer. I do feel cxc8 will have more punch and grit than BRAT. However, with very little known, we have to speculate at this point. Though that British Vogue interview is fascinating to read. She just needs a reset and to go in a completely separate direction: “She stresses that the next album – with its insular focus and tight-knit creation – is the reset she needed after the hype around Brat strayed so far beyond the music. “It made me crave something opposite. Getting back to something more internal is really nice,” she says softly, “and really sort of quiet”. Although it might have been Charli xcx distancing herself from recent work and not wanting to be associated with one thing, perhaps the heat of Dance-Pop has passed. Although great recent singles from artists like Demi Lovato suggest otherwise, I feel more major artists who were writing Dance-Pop are going to employ other sounds and move away from it. Not that the dance floor could ever be seen as truly dead. Madonna’s Confessions on a Dance Floor: Part II will keep that sound and genre alive. However, it might be one of the last big albums that takes us to the dance floor. It will be interesting seeing what Charli xcx does and what her Rock era will sound like. To her, a trip back to the dance floor might not be something she desires, yet there is an appetite for it still, at a time in history when things are as bleak as they have been in a very long time. If not dead then starting to lose a little bit of its heat and lustre. Music goes in cycles. A lot of big artists releasing Country albums. In years to come, we might see a new wave of Dance-Pop albums or a new form of Disco. Although you know, before too long, albums that entice us to the dance floor will be…

BACK in force.

FEATURE: Spotlight: Revisited: Brooke Combe

FEATURE:

 

 

Spotlight: Revisited

 

Brooke Combe

__________

A truly special…

artist who I spotlighted back in 2023. Brooke Combe released Dancing at the End of the World last year. It is a brilliant album. In terms of singles, How Can I Tell You? (To Love Me More) and Tears Won’t Lie have come out this/last year. Combe has a string of U.K. dates ahead, including slots at Camp Bestival in July and August. There are some international dates afterwards. I want to get to some fairly recent interview with Brooke Combe to give you a sense of why she is so amazing and should be followed. I have never seen Brooke Combe live, though I will correct that soon enough. The interviews I am coming to are from last year. However, as Combe has released new music, I am sure there will be other interviews coming. Prior to coming to them, here is some background to a truly spectacular musician: “Scottish soul singer Brooke Combe is best known for her breakthrough debut album, Dancing at the Edge of the World and her latest release, How Can I Tell You? (To Love Me More). Her music traces a journey from small-town Midlothian to the forefront of British soul, driven by a lifelong passion for sound rooted in Motown and early musical experimentation. With a magnetic voice and candid storytelling, Combe has risen from posting anonymous online covers to opening for major artists, all while navigating heartbreak, identity, and the pressures of rapid success. Her work confronts resilience, heritage, and self-discovery with striking honesty, shaped by her experiences growing up as one of the few Black faces in a predominantly white Scottish community”.

Naturally, there was a lot of interest around Brooke Combe last year when Dancing at the Edge of the World was released. I do want to take us back to last year and a couple of interviews around that album. CLASH spoke with an artist who puts all her emotions out there. Dancing at the Edge of the World is an “absolute stormer – vintage styled soul that feels totally refreshing, Brooke Combe isn’t satisfied with retreading old ground, instead finding her own unique place within an R&B lineage”:

“This album feels like a reintroduction for you – when did work begin on it? Did you know what you wanted to achieve from the outset?

I think when I parted ways with Island Records, the album pretty much wrote itself. For months prior to this, I was so in my own head, being sent to various songwriting sessions with amazing credible producers and songwriters really knocked a lot of my own confidence in my abilities, which instantly I knew was not a good feeling.

I had a couple of old ideas from like five years ago on my phone that ended up on the album. We probably made a conscious start to the album in about 2022 though.

How does songwriting work for you? Do you tend to get ideas down quickly, or is it laboured? What’s the root of it all, do you think?

I’m not usually someone that has the ability to say, “okay right, I’m gonna write about this specific idea I’ve got”, I’m someone who needs to feel a feeling that makes me want to write. Or be moved by a chord structure. I’m trying to get better at the storytelling side of things now, however.

You’ve said Liverpool is like a second home for you! What is it about the city that you vibe with?

I vibe with a lot of things in this city. First of all, the people make me feel at home because they’re always merry and happy to help, like the Scots and they’re misunderstood, like the Scots too. The scran in the city is another thing… wow. There are some seriously good Mexican scrans which is my go-to. I love seeing the culture as well in Liverpool. That’s one of the things that made me feel at home more straight away. I’m from the outskirts of Edinburgh, and sometimes when I’m walking around I just feel like I stick out like a sore thumb due to lack of diversity.

There’s a lot of subtlety to the arrangements – the acoustic guitar on ‘Guilt’ or the organ on ’If I Could Only Be Yours’ – did you experiment in the studio? Or did you have a clear idea of what you wanted to achieve?

We were under a bit of a time constraint whilst making the album so really didn’t want to waste a lot of time trying lots of different ideas. So, the organ on ‘If I Could Only Be Yours’ we pretty much knew it would be that sort of sound because of our demo. Same with ‘Guilt’. Fun fact, when Danny and I went to LA, we worked with a guy called Paul Butler from The Bees, on ‘Guilt’. Paul actually inspired most of the direction of the album due to his arrangement of ‘Guilt’. We all really liked the style and sound so decided to go with that.

How do you feel now the album is complete? The feedback from fans and critics has been amazing!

I’m so happy it’s finally out! It’s been a really long time coming for me. I’m sure the fans would agree. It’s nice to now sit in my lane comfortably and know what it is as a whole. Whereas my previous mixtape was just a load of unreleased songs I’d recorded really… there was no theme or coherency to it. It didn’t sum me up correctly. Well, it did for the time being but now we’re evolving”.

Prior to coming more up-to-date, The Line of Best Fit were in the company of Brooke Combe last year. Championing this rising artist (whether she would like to be referred to as such?), she is steering away from that ‘Indie’ tag that was applied to her earlier in her career. Dancing at the Edge of the World is her embracing Soul. “Raised on her grandparents’ collection of classic Motown albums, as well as the ‘90s neo-soul and R&B loved by her mum and dad”, Coombe was adding her own touch and voice to those influence, though not departing too much from that pure and classic Soul sound:

“This album has been written from someone else’s perspective,” she explains. “It's less about me and what I'm going through, and more about what somebody else, who I love, has been going through.” Writing in this different way has given her “a totally different frame of mind,” she says. “To be honest, I'm quite happy in my life at the minute, so I'm glad it wasn't a heartbreak album again.”

The recording, too, was done in a completely different way to Black is the New Gold. This time she worked with a live band in the studio and recorded to tape, allowing themselves just three takes for each song. “We only had two or three full weeks to do the album, so time was really of the essence,” she says. “For a while we were also hemming and hawing on getting strings for the record. They’re quite expensive, but for my first sort-of-debut album, I wouldn't have had it any other way.”

Another standout moment, “Lanewood Pines” feels the furthest from the indie-veering sound of Combe’s earlier releases, and celebrates youth, love, and fun as opposed to the darker, pleading themes veined through Black is the New Gold. Written in less than 20 minutes, together with Murphy, the song is named after the apartment complex where the two were staying while in Los Angeles for songwriting sessions after performing at SXSW in 2023.

“One of the producers phoned us one day and said, ‘Would you mind coming to the studio a little bit later today?” says Combe, explaining how they used the extra time to write something new for the session. “I remember it so clearly! Danny was sitting on the couch and started playing these chords and I heard this melody, so I pulled up a little keyboard on my phone and tried to find it. Once I’d figured that out, the words came to me instantly. It reminded me of that feeling when you've had a boss night out and you're with somebody you love, and then you part ways and you're just lying in your bed, buzzing about the night, and you just want to speak to them on the phone about it.”

Dancing at the Edge of the World feels like a massive step forward in confidence for Combe, and she attributes that partly to her experience of touring with Miles Kane, who she describes as “really charismatic and a good frontman.” “My confidence was through the roof afterwards,” she says. Her indie roots haven’t been completely discarded though. Last year, she featured on Courteneers’ melodic album opener “Sweet Surrender” after receiving a last-minute call from Skelly who was producing the record. “I just said ‘I’ll be there in 10 minutes,’ and it was very in-and-out,” she says. “Honestly, I was done within 30 minutes.”

She’s also a fan of rising Liverpool indie-pop band Keyside, who featured on the playlist of songs she’d listen to during the making of Dancing at the Edge of the World. Other artists in the mix were Michael Kiwanuka and Raye (“she’s smashing it”), The Beatles, and Sabrina Carpenter. “People probably wouldn’t think that I’d be really into her, but I can’t deny it. She’s just too catchy!”

Perhaps it’s not so surprising. Combe has a similarly irresistible charm, it seems, and it’s that fizzing energy that she’s bringing with her into 2025 and to the rollout of Dancing at the Edge of the World. “We're going full throttle,” she says. “So tell your mates, tell your grandparents, tell your aunties and uncles, the lot”.

Tears Won’t Lie is a phenomenal track. I wonder whether it will form part of an upcoming E.P. or album. Such a consistently remarkable artist whose music stays in the mind and heart, CLASH highlighted the track earlier this month. Since I spotlighted Brooke Combe a couple of years ago, she has done so much and has risen from this newcomer or promising artist to someone firmly established. A true great who I think we will be hearing about for a very long time:

“The singer takes soulful tropes from the 60s and 70s and interprets from a fresh angle, with Brooke’s debut album ‘Dancing At The Edge Of The World’ winning huge acclaim last year.

Embraced by the Northern Soul scene – her seven inch releases now fetch tidy sums on Discogs – Brooke Combe heads out on tour this week.

Playing London’s KOKO venue, she’ll then link with fellow modern soul figure Jalen N’Gonda for a series of European support dates.

New single ‘Tears Won’t Lie’ contains a scorching vocal, with Brooke seeming to bite down on the visceral meaning of each word.

Produced by The Coral’s James Skelly at Kempston Studios in Liverpool, ‘Tears Won’t Lie’ is another sign of her irresistibly soulful flair.

Brooke comments…

“’Tears Won’t Lie’ is a song that explores the truth that surfaces after a relationship falls apart. It’s about someone who has spent years hiding their pain behind a smile, only to be confronted with the emotional reality they can’t suppress anymore. Sort of like the moment grief, self-awareness and reality meet, and you’re suddenly awake and won’t lose yourself to love again”.

I may well write about Brooke Combe again later down the line. I wanted to revisit her music because she has put out new material and she has some exciting tour dates ahead. Someone you definitely should go and see if you can, Coombe is one of our brightest talents. Even if she is influenced by Soul greats and records she heard during her childhood and youth, she is a true original that will inspire other artists coming through. When it comes to the incredible Brooke Combe, it is clear that there is nobody quite…

LIKE her.

____________

Follow Brooke Combe

FEATURE: Kate Bush: Them Heavy People: The Extraordinary Characters in Her Songs: Jesus (Why Should I Love You?)/My Silver Buddha (Pull Out the Pin)

FEATURE:

 

 

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

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1993

 

Jesus (Why Should I Love You?)/My Silver Buddha (Pull Out the Pin)

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IN this series…

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush with the Trio Bulgarka

I combine characters from Kate Bush’s song. Usually selecting different albums (or B-sides), today I am uniting The Red Shoes and The Dreaming. I feel I have united these two albums before, though here are two different songs that take me in all sorts of directions. The reason for these two tracks is because they use religious figures in contrasting situations. I also want to include the Trio Bulgarka, as their lead singer, Yanka Rupkina, died on 7th April. I will start out with Jesus. Kate Bush used God’s name (not in vain) to ask that, if men and women could trade places and put themselves in each other’s shoes, then we could get a greater and more empathetic understanding. Although Jesus is not pivotal to Why Should I Love You?, it does allow me opportunity to come back to The Red Shoes. Rather than retread what I wrote last time out, it is worth noting the collaborations and this song that could have benefited from just having the Trio Bulgarka. In Why Should I Love You?, these are the credits: Drums: Stuart Elliott; keyboards, guitar, bass, vocals: Prince; vocals: Lenny Henry; tenor saxophone: Nigel Hitchcock; trombone: Neil Sidwell; trumpet, flugelhorn: Steve Sidwell; vocals: Trio Bulgarka; Keyboards: Kate Bush; arrangements by Prince and Kate Bush. I do like the fact Lenny Henry was on the song. However, I feel the most powerful moments where the Trio Bulgarka feature – Rocket’s Tail from The Sensual World (1989) and Deeper Understanding from the same album – should have been the standard. I think The Song of Solomon from The Red Shoes uses them well, though they seem buried in the mix on Why Should I Love You? Before moving to their role and what they brought to Kate Bush’s music, this is the lyric that mentions Jesus: “Have you ever seen a picture/Of Jesus laughing?/Mmm, do you think/He had a beautiful smile?/A smile that healed”.

This was a bit of a troubled song, as the Kate Bush Encyclopedia note: “Bush asked Prince to contribute background vocals to ‘Why Should I Love You’ in 1991. She sent him the track, which she had recorded at Abbey Road Studios (Studio Number One), London, England, and Prince added vocals, but also added many instrumental parts to the song, at his Paisley Park Studios. When Kate Bush and Del Palmer listened to Prince’s returned track, they weren’t sure what to do with it. They worked on it on and off for two years to try to “turn it back into a Kate Bush song”. I did mention Prince in the context of this song when writing anniversary features. He died ten years ago. I feel there are two many layers and voices in Why Should I Love You? A transatlantic collaboration that would have benefitted from Kate Bush and Prince being in the same studio and working closely. It was almost like playing chess by mail. Or making moves very slowly. Prince’s instinct to overload the song, whereas Bush wanted something more stripped. I thought she would have rearranged and de-cluttered Why Should I Love You? for 2011’s Director’s Cut. Maybe she loved the Trio Bulgarka vocals and did not want to record a new version without them. I shall look at those particular lyrics in a minute. Where she mentions Jesus. However, Bush always had this curiosity of sound and influences from beyond the U.K. Her brother, Paddy, introduced the music of the Trio Bulgaraka around the time of Hounds of Love. Bush was spellbound by the power and beauty to their voices.

Related to Why Should I Love You?, Far Out Magazine recalled how Bush really wanted to use the Trio Bulgarka. I have covered Rocket’s Tail in this feature and mentioned how they transformed it. You can feel their influence on Why Should I Love You?, though I crave to hear a version where some of the musical layers are taken out. Production warmer and richer. Just Kate Bush and the Trio Bulgarka combined:

“Sometimes known as the “Three Golden Coins”, Trio Bulgarka was a Bulgarian vocal ensemble that had a spell of popularity in the 1980s. All three members, Stoyanka Boneva, Yanka Rupkina, and Eva Georgieva, each came from different Bulgarian regions, and their varied backgrounds allowed each to bring a unique texture to their sound. After being signed to Bulgaria Balkanton and Hannibal in 1987, Kate Bush came across their work, which resulted in a series of collaborations.

1988 marked the release of the trio’s debut, The Forest Is Crying. English radio presenter John Peel first heard them through the Hannibal label recordings and played some of their music, which had a boost of exposure after their session on Andy Kershaw’s radio show.

Their string of successes continued to have a wide reach after being sampled on Belgian New Beat band Morton Sherman Bellucci’s ‘Musica’. At some point, Kate Bush came across their debut, as well as Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares, a collection of modern arrangements of traditional Bulgarian folk melodies they had performed.

Bush was desperate to use the trio on her upcoming album, 1989’s The Sensual World – and they soon appeared on three of its tracks: ‘Never Be Mine’, ‘Deeper Understanding’, and ‘Rocket’s Tail’. The latter was loosely inspired by her cat, Rocket, but as she once told the NME, actually “written for the Bulgarian girls.”

“Suddenly, there I was working with these three ladies from a completely different culture,” she recalled in an LA Times interview. “I’ve never worked with women on such an intense creative level, and it was something strange to feel this very strong female energy in the studio. It was interesting to see the way the men in the studio reacted to this. Instead of just one female, there was a very strong female presence”.

There are a few other elements I want to think about when discussing Why Should I Love You? The structure of the song is fascinating. I wonder who Kate Bush is referencing. Whether it is Del Palmer (who she was in a relationship with for many years; they were probably split when this song was written), or someone else. Bush never really wrote about specific men. However, you have to feel there was something or someone in her mind when she wrote this song. In terms of the lyrics, I do love these lines: “The fine purple/The purest gold/The red of the Sacred Heart/The grey of a ghost/The “L” of the lips are open/To the “O” of the Host/The “V” of the velvet”. The Red Shoes deals with raw emotion and heartache. There are also songs that are so colourful and full of life. This track, Eat the Music. Eat the Music is where Bush lists all these fruits and there is this urge to pull them apart; vulnerability, intimate connection, and revealing one’s true inner self in relationships, often using fruit-based metaphors to illustrate emotional consumption. Here, we get these colour. There is broad palette of colours and flavours on The Red Shoes. One of her liveliest and brightest albums. The title track also is very energised and vivacious. The verse about Jesus is intriguing. Bush dropped religion and religious figures into her music, though rarely in praise or as an act of devotion or repent. Instead, it is almost throwaway or cute. Someone possibly in love or considering love and asking if this suitor has seen a photo of Jesus laughing. That idea of Jesus depicted as laughing might seem sacrilegious. He always is drawn as serious. The idea of a smiling Jesus seems somewhat absurd! That is Kate Bush bringing humour into the song. What does it means when she asks if the man has seen a picture of Jesus smiling?! I always assumed it was a romantic situation and Bush was asking if she should love him. However, it might be something else. The way Kate Bush draws her characters and the variety in her songs. As I shall explain when talking about a silver Buddha in Pull Out the Pin, there is so much fascination about that particular choice. Although she was raised Catholic, I don’t think she can be considered a religiously-minded artist. Even through she did say her career was a mission from God, I don’t think she prayed or was a devoted church-goer.

I am moving to the second side in a minute. However, I did start by discussing collaborations. Did this aid Kate Bush or hinder her work? Her most celebrated songs are the ones where she is solo. Obviously other musicians in the mix. However, when it comes to singers, did that work at all? On Why Should I Love You?, her and the Trio Bulgarka would have been fine. Having more voices sort of makes it too dense and scattershot. You are trying to follow too many different threads and layers. However, it is the fact that Prince and Kate Bush were on a record together that is great. This feature talks about the time when the sorely missed Purple One and Kate Bush united for a song that I feel is underrated and undervalued still:

“Perhaps it was the sheer distance between their headspaces at the time that led to what happened. Bush asked Prince to contribute a few background vocals to a song called “Why Should I Love You”, which she had just recorded in full at Abbey Road Studios. But when Prince received the track, he ignored the intructions and dismantled the entire thing like a crazed mechanic taking apart old cars on his backyard. He wanted to inject himself into the very heart of it, weaving his sound amongst her sound, giving it a new soul entirely. As Koppelman explains, “We essentially created a new song on a new piece of tape and then flew all of Kate’s tracks back on top of it… Prince stacked a bunch of keys, guitars, bass, etc, on it, and then went to sing background vocals.”

Despite being the lovechild of two of humanity’s greatest music minds, the resulting track is not often mentioned on your average BBC3 pop retrospective presented by Lauren Laverne. It’s startlingly brilliant, with sometimes bizarre, musical depths. It begins as a typical Kate Bush creation; her stratospheric vocals rising across a strange organ melody and tumbling drums. But then, about a minute through, it mutates like an unstable element being dropped into boiling water. Prince invades in a huge wave of gospel sound, the pair singing in unison: “Of all of people in the world, why should I love you?” By the time it reaches the 2-minute mark, it has been completely permeated with that Paisley Park flavour; smatters of electric guitar and rich walls of vocals spilling over its borders. The purple sound arrives like a tsunami, seemingly too vivid to suppress.

Even today, the track is divisive, with some heralding it as a slice of profound art, and others filling fan forums with long rants that essentially boil down to: “It’s tripe.” But two decades later, we can look upon the final version with something resembling objectivity. It’s an endlessly fascinating creation that continues to sparkle with strangeness, forever flitting between blissfulness and an almost painful sadness upon every listen. Even the lyrics reveal an inner turmoil: “Have you ever seen a picture of Jesus laughing? Mmm, do you think he had a beautiful smile?” Kate Bush’s soaring voice wavers, as if she’s asking Prince to convince her”.

I will return to Why Should I Love You? again. There are one or two others songs from The Red Shoes I want to explore for this series. I will definitely come to Moments of Pleasure, as there are a few names mentioned in that song. Perhaps finish the series by pairing it with Them Heavy People from The Kick Inside? However, The Dreaming still has a couple of songs to offer up. Houdini is an obvious one. However, although we have this song about war and conflict, many people might not have noticed My Silver Buddah. Maybe a totem or something to protect a soldier during war, it is a striking image. However, regarding this song, this is what Kate Bush said:

“I saw this incredible documentary by this Australian cameraman who went on the front line in Vietnam, filming from the Vietnamese point of view, so it was very biased against the Americans. He said it really changed him, because until you live on their level like that, when it’s complete survival, you don’t know what it’s about. He’s never been the same since, because it’s so devastating, people dying all the time.
The way he portrayed the Vietnamese was as this really crafted, beautiful race. The Americans were these big, fat, pink, smelly things who the Vietnamese could smell coming for miles because of the tobacco and cologne. It was devastating, because you got the impression that the Americans were so heavy and awkward, and the Vietnamese were so beautiful and all getting wiped out. They wore a little silver Buddha on a chain around their neck and when they went into action they’d pop it into their mouth, so if they died they’d have Buddha on their lips. I wanted to write a song that could somehow convey the whole thing, so we set it in the jungle and had helicopters, crickets and little Balinese frogs.

Kris Needs, ‘Dream Time In The Bush’. Zigzag (UK), November 1982

I saw a programme with a camera man on the front line in Vietnam. The Vietnamese were portrayed as being very craftful people who treated their fighting as an art. They could literally smell the Americans coming through the jungle. Their culture of Coke cans and ice creams actually made them smell. Anyway, I learnt that before the Vietnamese went into action they popped a little silver Buddha in their mouths. I thought that was quite beautiful. Grotesque beauty attracts me. Negative images are often so interesting.

Robin Smith, ‘Getting Down Under With Kate Bush’, 1982”.

I do wonder about the significance of the silver Buddha. Writing for the Kate Bush Club in October 1982, Bush did say this: “This soldier is under a tree, dozing with a faint smile and a radio by his side. It’s a small transistor radio out of which cries an electric guitar. I’d swear it was being played by Brian Bath, but how could that be, way out here on our stereo screen. I pop the silver Buddha that I wear around my neck into my mouth, securing my lips around his little metal body. I move towards the sleeping man. A helicopter soars overhead, he wakes up, and as he looks me in the eyes I relate to him as I would to a helpless stranger”. The symbolic significance of Buddha. This is from Wikipedia: “Siddhartha Gautama,[e] most commonly referred to as the Buddha (lit. 'the awakened one'), was a wandering ascetic and religious teacher who lived in the eastern Indo-Gangetic Plains during the 6th or 5th century BCE and founded Buddhism”. We associate Buddha with peace and spirituality. However, Pull Out the Pin is set in the Vietnam War. This is not Kate Bush being political. However, the Americans seen as these pigs. They stank of Cologne and cigarettes. Coke and food and God knows what. The Vietnamese could smell them! The Vietnamese had Buddha around their necks and pop them in their mouths so, if they died, they would have Buddha on their lips. Maybe offering them salvation or they would be seen as peace-makers who were killed. When speaking with Keyboard in 1985, Kate Bush said this: “It was strange the sort of irony that these Vietnamese who were fighting the Americans were Buddhists and they'd pop a silver bullet that they wore on a chain around their necks into their mouth before they went into battle. So if they died, they would have Buddha on their lips. This is the whole irony throughout history between religion and war. "Breathing" is about human beings killing themselves. I think that people smoking is one of those tiny things that says a lot about human beings. I mean, I smoke and enjoy it, but we smoke and we know it's dangerous. Maybe there's some kind of strange subconscious desire to damage ourselves. It would seem so if you looked back through history, wouldn't it?”.

I do think she was not really a political writer. Everything was more emotional than political. Breathing and Army Dreamers from Never for Ever could be seen as political songs. Rather than choosing a side or commenting on violence, Bush was instead more motivated by the loss of individuals. Not the sheer volume of deaths. Drilling down to the induvial. The humans affected. Army Dreamers is about young soldiers dying, though it is more a commentary on the loss of life and the general futility of violence. How death affects so many people and why it is such a tragedy. Not calling out governments or doing these Punk-type political songs. Using this idea of Buddha as a character and expanding to discuss Pull Out the Pin. The unique nature of the song and its lyrics. I think that so few artists were writing like Kate Bush. Even now, when there is genocide and war, few modern artists talking about the violence directly or in a less political way. By which, I mean they are discussing the effect the violence has rather than attacking regimes and having that sort of angle. Pull Out the Pin is a prime example of Kate Bush writing like no other, as Medium noted in their review of The Dreaming: “Pull Out The Pin” — What could be more diametrically opposed to “There Goes A Tenner” than this song, a nightmarish account of war, as seen from the perspective of a Viet Cong warrior stalking an American soldier through the jungle, almost mocking how out-of-place and unfamiliar the American is in such an environment (seriously, who else would ever even think of such a scenario for a song?)Kate’s blood-curdling refrain, “I Love Life! (pull out the pin)” raises the tension up to an almost unbearable degree”.

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1982/PHOTO CREDIT: Pierre Terrasson

It is worth exploring that idea of the images and visuals Kate Bush brings into Pull Out the Pin. The way she writes and how she paints pictures through songs. It is also amazing to hear the production on Pull Out the Pin. Other producers could have overloaded the song with affects and instruments. There is something about Pull Out the Pin that sounds sparse and haunting but also quite epic and busy. You immerse yourself in the song and get this real sense of being pulled into the action. It is a classic Kate Bush deep cut. We are in a time when many people do not know about songs like Pull Out the Pin. The Dreaming an album that is acclaimed but not dissected and discussed as much as Hounds of Love for example. I do wonder why we do not explore Kate Bush more. Well, fans like me do, though there is not that wider fascination. How many people beyond those devoted Kate Bush fans realise that The Dreaming has such treasures?! Pull Out the Pin is a remarkable song that everyone needs to hear. Just researching for this feature makes you more connected to the song. How Kate Bush discussed the inspiration for it. I love that inclusion of the silver Buddha. Or My Silver Buddha, as it is told in the lyrics. A symbol of peace around the neck of Vietnamese soldiers. They would then put the Buddha in their mouth so, if they were shot, they would have that with them. Maybe bless them or ensure they are safe in battle even. It takes us back to that subject of Kate Bush and whether she was political. Pull Out the Pin is not as explicitly anti-war as Army Dreamers, though both of these songs document the horrors of warfare. She was always more invested in the emotion of war and the toll it took. Buddha, as this figure of spirituality and calm, transposed into a battle. The way Bush describes the sights and smells. How the Vietnamese could smell the America soldiers because of what they wore and ate. It is such an interesting angle! Such an intelligent writer, it has been great bringing together two religious figures from…

TWO amazing albums.

FEATURE: Modern-Day Queens: Zakia Sewell

FEATURE:

 

 

Modern-Day Queens

PHOTO CREDIT: Buster Grey-Jung

 

Zakia Sewell

__________

HERE is someone…

PHOTO CREDIT: Suki Dhanda/The Observer

who I would consider one of the best broadcaster and D.J.s in the U.K. I love Zakia Sewell. As Zakia, she is part of the BBC Radio 6 Music family, and she was on air earlier this month for their Vinyl Weekender. Such an incredible depth of knowledge and passion for music, she also has one of the best ‘radio voices’. That may sound weird, but in terms of its tone and effect, you could listen to her all day! I want to bring in some biography from her official website, so that we can glean some knowledge about an extraordinary broadcaster, writer and podcaster:

“I'm a broadcaster, writer and DJ from London with a passion for music, arts, mental health and history. I regularly produce and present radio documentaries and podcasts for platforms including BBC Radio 4, BBC World Service, Tate, and Boiler Room, covering varied topics, from British folk culture, to my mother's experience of schizophrenia, to Sabar drumming in Senegal, and was the recipient of the silver award for 'Best New Voice' at the Audio Production Awards in 2021, and Radio Presenter of the Year in the UKAN Awards in 2024.

I host Dream Time on BBC 6 Music on Sunday nights, and hosted The NTS Breakfast Show, and Questing w/ Zakia on NTS Radio between 2016-2024. I spent several years working behind the counter at Honest Jons Records in West London, and I DJ regularly at clubs and festivals in London and abroad, and have played for esteemed venues and festivals including Corsica Studios, XOYO, Berlin Atonal, HORST, We Out Here and Dekmantel.

My forthcoming book Finding Albion explores British national identity, folk culture and myth and will be published by Hodder Press in 2026. I've also written articles for publications such as Weird Walk and Resident Advisor, and have an essay published in a collection of essays by and about women in music called This Woman's Work. ​I also regularly lead radio workshops offering advice and support to aspiring radio makers and have worked on creative research projects with archives and arts institutions such as Timespan, the Stuart Hall Library and the George Padmore institute.

When I'm not doing the above, I'm singing, playing guitar, taking long walks in nature and reading weird books about pagans”.

Definitely suitable for inclusion into this Modern-Day Queens feature, there is no denying Zakia Sewell is a hugely important voice and role model. I have long talked about the incredible female D.J.s who are so incredible. Raising the bar and changing the game. However, there is still huge discrimination and gender inequality. This needs to change. An industry that relies on their talent and passion. However, still, things set up to benefit men. I am going to bring in some interviews with Sewell. She curated service95’s Sunday List earlier in the year. I am championing and spotlighting her as a broadcaster and D.J. However, she did write Finding Albion: Myth, Folklore and the Quest for a Hidden Britain. You can purchase it here:

“Zakia Sewell is on a quest for another Britain. Traversing the length and breadth of our island from Somerset to Scotland, she's seeking out a different story - one that lies beyond divisive national myths and symbols.

In Finding Albion, Zakia uncovers an alternative spirit of Britain that is vividly alive today. It is found in otherworldly folk songs, ancient legends, Celtic seasonal rites and mystic stone circles that punctuate our landscape. Her journey begins as the sun rises on the spring equinox over Glastonbury Tor, where she meets neopagans reclaiming traditions from our pre-Christian past. At summer's peak at Notting Hill Carnival she hears cultural echoes that passed along the slave trade routes from the Caribbean. On All Hallow's Eve she encounters the ghosts of Empire that are still haunting the nation, and in the depths of a Cornish winter she asks if today's new folk revival could unite our increasingly divided country?

Finding Albion brings a hopeful story of Britain out from the shadows, giving us a deeper sense of who we are, and heralding the promise of a brighter future”.

There are some great older interviews such as this that I want to dip into very quickly. I feel it is important to come to the 2018 interview with Brainchild Festival. This was at a time when Zakia had a show on NTS Radio:

“I had quite a rich and diverse musical upbringing”, Zakia explains.  But growing up in Hounslow, West London, this is not the easiest thing to come by.  “It’s not exactly a hub of cultural activity”, she laughs.  “My mum moved to Ladbroke Grove when I was about 15, so that was quite an important turning point for me because it suddenly meant I was plunged a bit closer into the city: Portobello Market, and shops, and music, and just a more vibrant, lively atmosphere.”

“I felt a bit more like it was a place that reflected me and my interests, and what I wanted to do.  The other thing is that both of my parents are musicians and I grew up around a lot of music, gigs and rehearsals.”

Mildly overwhelmed after graduating university, Zakia set out looking for a break from “intellectual activity” and stumbled upon a job at Honest Jon’s Records on Portobello Road, just two minutes away from her mother’s house.  “It was the best job ever. Two whole days a week of just pure listening, but also getting recommendations, listening to what customers were listening to.  I was getting more interesting in collecting music, so I started collecting vinyl.  Through that, I started thinking, ‘I’d quite like to share to this somewhere’”.

She started working at NTS as a production intern but never dreamed of having her own show, admitting that had she been left to her own devices, she might not have had the courage to put herself out there.  “I didn’t see myself as necessarily worthy of having a show, but it’s kind of blossomed.  And in terms of the work, again, it was just kind of by accident.  I was doing some research and ended up getting into production.”

NTS Radio has indeed been credited with “revolutionising digital airwaves” in the wake of the destruction that streaming services have brought upon the medium.  It repeatedly stays true to its tagline, “Don’t Assume”, through its consistently dynamic programming and steady influx of diverse, underground talent.  As Zakia knows, “NTS is really challenging the boundaries of what can be played on the radio.  I feel like I can do whatever I want on there; I’ve got such freedom and I really like that”.

PHOTO CREDIT: Abigail Holsborough

I will bring things up to date. However, The State of the Arts spoke with Zakia (I will refer to her using only her first name when referring to her D.J. and broadcasting work). In the conversation during lockdown, she spoke about the “healing power of music to heritage and mental health which feature prominently and poignantly throughout her work”:

“NTS radio occupies a space that has revolutionised radio and lured music aficionados back to a medium that has been in decline, due to the rise of streaming platforms such as Spotify. The station provides a treasure trove of experimental, diverse global music and is brimming with DIY spirit. From Japanese psychedelia and New wave to Bessie Jones and the Georgia Sea Island Singers, it showcases past and present but also nurtures future underground music scenes. “I feel really proud and grateful to be part of the NTS family, not only because of their incredible, varied and daring music output, but also the people, who are at the nucleus of NTS, are honest lovely people, and that is transmitted through each and every show”.

For regular listeners, QUESTING W/ZAKIA is sacrosanct to the ephemeral beauty of Saturday mornings. Zakia commenced her NTS passage as a Production Intern and never dreamed of having her own show, a “happy accident”, which started with an 8am Wednesday slot, and has bloomed into a weekly Saturday show. “They’ve really supported me and allowed me to find myself and do my own thing, I can’t imagine I would get away with what I get away with on NTS anywhere else… like the rambling”. The personal nature of Questing, the shout-outs, the tracks played to “thrash around your bedroom” (a very welcomed feature during lockdown), immerses listeners week on week, especially the impromptu moments, which make the show even more intimate.

“I feel like it’s an honest reflection of who I am and the music I love and hope this resonates with people, I’ve felt that even more strongly during this lockdown period, there is a connection between where I’m at, the music that’s healing me and what other people need”. Zakia explains to me that she compiles track-lists intuitively, following her own mood but also considers the collective atmosphere. This was evident in a recent show which addressed the shocking, racist killing of George Floyd. It was powerfully and thoughtfully curated and described as “a musical meditation on grief, rage, resilience and resistance”. The sounds and spirits of the civil rights and black power movements, free jazz and jubilant sounds of resistance were played, and it clearly illustrated Zakia’s intrinsic talent to positively channel a wide range of emotions, activism and meditative sounds through the airwaves.

Zakia’s personal heritage has provided her with a huge source of inspiration, from the ethereal field recordings played on her NTS show to radio documentaries, Big Drum on Little Carriacou, Speaking Sabar and My Amey and Me. Eloquently, she expounds “As a mixed- race person, there is a bit of soul searching to do about how two rivers meet in you, whether they blend and flow together or whether they come into conflict. Music is one way of trying to understand that and helps me to navigate and find the meeting places. When I listen to a field recording of my grandparents speaking in their rhythmical Welsh accent, and then I hear someone from the island that my mum’s parents are from, and hear the lovely Carriacou accent, there is something comforting in finding the parallels in the rhythms, sounds and music”. This is something that resonates with many of us, tracing and connecting with our heritage through art forms – be it music, literature or film. For me, music, especially that of my Indian heritage, has the ability to spiritually encompass my entire body in an otherworldly way, something that Zakia relates to: “music hits you, there is a body memory with music, and it cuts through the am I aren’t I, should I shouldn’t I, you just feel it.”

With the recent surge in activism towards fighting racial injustice, sparked by the case of George Floyd and powerfully led by the Black Lives Matter movement across the globe, essential and long-pleaded-for conversations around structural racism and legacies of colonialism within the UK have been re-ignited. The Art of Remembering podcast, produced by Zakia last year for Tate, is an incredibly timely, informative and important listening experience. Led by artists, poets and activists, it explores how art can be used to address the erasure of important events that has led to a history of ‘misremembering’ and gives thoughtful background to the campaign to decolonise Bristol – the Countering Colston movement. “I hope, through the podcasts and documentaries that I make, that I can contribute a little to unearthing stories that are often unheard and overlooked in mainstream narratives. I’m very privileged to have access to platforms like the BBC and Tate and so try my best to use those platforms to centre the voices, experiences and perspectives of people of colour”.

There is this interview that I would direct people to check out. I want to go back to this Observer interview from last year. Making the move from NTS Radio to the BBC, Zakia Sewell talked about respecting your elders (she is someone who champions older female artists), and the intimacy of radio. She talked about why radio is always going to be superior to playlists on streaming sites:

“What’s been the biggest change moving from NTS Radio, one of the coolest stations in the UK, to the BBC?

I’ve always been drawn to music from the past, like the folk revival of the 1950s and early 1960s and the spiritual jazz of the 1960s and 1970s, so it was great to do an archival show on NTS – an anything-goes, totally free space, where it was wonderful to grow and find my voice. A big change at 6 Music has been the sense of duty you get to support and nurture new artists as a BBC broadcaster. You suddenly tap in to that responsibility. It’s exciting to think of relationships you can build with artists over the years.

Which new artists are exciting you?

Clarissa Connolly, who brings ancient-sounding folk melodies into the present with her productions, and her incredible voice. Then there’s Cameron Winter – even with just his voice and piano, I sense he’s going to become some kind of superstar. And Sharada Shashidhar, who’s got this kind of Kate Bush style of singing, then draws in Indian classical music and jazz.

How are radio shows better than playlists made by algorithms?

The storytelling. I could be playing a field recording from West Africa in 1959 and then something contemporary by an ambient producer – my job then is to weave together these worlds and create a narrative through the sequencing of the tracks and the elements I choose to connect them. You can really help people to enter into the music through stories. Late at night, when I broadcast, it’s like you’re whispering to someone, or you’re in the act of listening together. There’s a real intimacy in radio that people long for.

You’ve DJ’d extensively around the world. What’s been your best gig so far?

At an arts festival in Iceland, where I was beaming out dub reggae through this incredible sound system into an amazing landscape. I felt so far away geographically from the origins of dub, but that moment captured for me the power and the beauty of music. The idea that something could find its way from Jamaica through to this moment by a fjord with the sun out... I love thinking about the kind of journeys that music takes, when you can be there in the moment, and witness that magic”.

Whilst I am most interested in her hosting Dream Time on BBC Radio 6 Music. I am going to end with a recent interview from The London Magazine. She talked about the remarkable Finding Albion: Myth, Folklore and the Quest for a Hidden Britain. In terms of her literary career, I do wonder what comes next:

“How would you describe your intellectual formation? You previously made a programme on Stuart Hall for BBC Radio 3, and you mention Raymond Williams at one point in the book, alongside Jeremy Deller, Dylan Thomas, and others. Who are you into?

It’s a weird book in a way, because it brings together things that aren’t usually brought together. Brit(ish) by Afua Hirsch is a book about mixed identity and empire that finds its way into Finding Albion without being discernibly there. I suppose in some ways my book is a kind of follow up to Hirsch. David Olusoga’s work revealing the black history of Britain was a massive influence too. Georgina Boyes’s The Imagined Village was one of the first books to really scrutinise Cecil Sharp’s legacy and the ways that folk culture has been romanticised and fictionalised by collectors throughout the centuries. I don’t mention Stuart Hall in the book but his memoir Familiar Stranger is interesting because in that book all of his theory is synthesised into this very personal story about his upbringing in Jamaica. I found that useful for thinking about the relationship between the personal and the political. I think he’s really brave because usually in academia there’s this divide between the lived experience and the theory, but he marries those things together and says, absolutely, my ideological, philosophical output is completely rooted in my personal, subjective experience. I really value and respect that. So he’s in the ether. Akala’s Natives is far more polemical in a way that my book isn’t, but he’s in there too, in the mix. All About Love by bell hooks was also an influence, in the way that she talks about the relationship between the personal and the political and healing, ultimately, and this book is about healing the nation. It’s about what we need to do in Britain in order to heal from the sins of our past. In the book I write about Gabriele Schwab’s idea of opening up the crypt and facing the spectres within. We can understand that on a personal level in terms of psychoanalysis, but what if we apply that to the collective?

In the book you stage a distance between the personal and the collective by performing a kind of embarrassment or cynicism towards the events you’re witnessing or taking part in. In the first chapter, set on the Glastonbury Tor, you ‘cringe a little at the idea of hand-holding so early in the morning’ and then decide to leave after reaching your ‘“woo-woo” quota for the day’. How important is embarrassment in all of this?

Traditional symbols of Britishness and particularly Englishness are so haughty. They are symbols of power and might and success and ruling the waves. I love that folk culture punctures that a little bit. Yes, okay, we may have been the ‘great’ nation who ruled the waves, but then you go and see Morris dancing on May Day morning and it’s a bunch of blokes with beer bellies sloshing around with tankards of ale. It’s amazing and it’s fun and the costumes are incredible, but it’s a bit ploddy and a bit silly and you just think, this is real Englishness. It’s so much more appealing, at least to me. It’s infectious and joyful and eccentric and mischievous and playful. I feel like these are all the aspects that are completely sidelined or eclipsed by these grand imperial narratives that are so dominant when we’re thinking about identity in this country.

I think that embarrassment is important because the reaction that a lot of people have to folk culture is that it’s cringe or uncool. If people have been fed this vision or idea of the English as a superior, ultra-civilised nation, then it is going to be confronting or humbling perhaps to see these silly, slightly ploddy, strange events happening all around the country and realise that this is the real culture of the people. It was only in 2024 that the government opted to protect Britain’s folk culture under UNESCO’s convention on intangible heritage. UNESCO set that scheme up over twenty years ago and Britain is one of the last countries to opt in to protecting their intangible heritage. What’s that about? Why wouldn’t we? Why would we be one of the last? I wonder if that embarrassment is part of it, that there’s something about these aspects of our culture that undercut or challenge the dominant view of who the British are. That sense of embarrassment is important because in a way it brings us back down to Earth.

You said earlier that we are experiencing a folk revival. Where do you think that comes from? Why is folk culture so big at the moment?

It’s interesting because we talk about a ‘revival’ but that suggests that it ever went away. There are these ripples or surges where folk rises up in moments of great change or uncertainty as something that represents a rootedness or groundedness. It makes sense that throughout the ages, whether it’s the industrial revolution, post-war or now, when things are feeling out of control people start to yearn for the traditions of the past, for old tales or songs that feel rooted in the ground. I think there are multiple layers to it. On one level, it is a response to exclusionary visions of Britishness that are becoming more commonplace. There’s a yearning in people to be able to feel proud of where they’re from without being drawn into the toxic visions of nationhood that are conjured by the far right. But it also taps into a wider longing. There’s this broader trend of people becoming more interested in astrology and spirituality and crystals, and Gen Z predominantly identify as spiritual. People are searching for alternative ways of understanding our position in the cosmos and the world around us. We’re seeing a collective leaning-in to the woo-woo. People need anchors, especially in the tumultuous times in which we live.

Another big thing is the environment. Following the Wheel of the Year or attending rituals on May Day morning or the winter solstice satisfy a desire people have to be more connected to the seasons and cycles and wider system of nature, as opposed to being separate from it. In a way it’s undoing or reclaiming many of the ways of knowing or ways of being that were obliterated or banished to the sidelines by the Enlightenment way of thinking that has structured the world in which we live. There’s a yearning to reclaim some of these discarded elements of culture that for so long were looked down upon, and perhaps now people are seeing there’s value in them.

Folk culture also resists the certainty of atheism, especially the swaggering, masculine atheism of figures like Christopher Hitchens or Richard Dawkins, which is so popular online.

It goes back to what we were saying about nuance and the in-between. Maybe this pagan ritual will bring about a good harvest. Maybe it won’t. Does it matter? Do we need to know? Do we need to find out the science of how much of an impact people gathering together on the summer solstice to ring bells and sing songs might have on the environment? Folk is an embrace of the mystery, the not needing to know. It’s flexible and porous, so you can add a bit of Celtic ritual in with a bit of Malaysian folk practice. The vagueness of it appeals to people. Maybe that says something about where we’re at collectively. People are wanting to embrace the in-betweens and the unknowns.

Do you think there are any limits to this folk revival? In the last chapter you pay nearly thirty pounds to visit Stonehenge, with its ‘mega-modern visitor centre rendered in glass and steel, where pagans in cloaks stand queueing for their lattes’. At the May Day celebrations in Oxford, you watch a ‘sea of glowing iPhones hover above the crowd’. How has the internet shaped things, for better or worse?

The contemporary revival is very much an online phenomenon. It’s a wonderful thing because it means lots of different types of people have been able to partake in this folk surge. It doesn’t matter if you didn’t grow up in a rural village where there’s a seasonal custom that happens every year. People have been able to find and connect with each other and that’s one of the reasons, apart from the demographic shift, that this contemporary folk revival is a lot more diverse than the revivals of the past. I was a weird, folk-obsessed, mixed-race kid and I didn’t have anyone else around me, as far as I knew, who looked like me and was interested in folk, until I started seeing people on social media and connecting with people like Angeline Morrison, who’s just set up the Black British Folk Collective. All of these things are happening and only possible because of the internet. But then of course there is the instagramification and tiktokification of it all, where brands see it trending and want to get their mitts on it. It’s very hard to define what folk is, but one of the defining aspects of folk culture is that it has nothing to do with institutions or corporations. The purity of it means that it tends to be local people raising funds among themselves and spending their money on keeping these things alive”.

I will end there. An incredible author and a phenomenal and established broadcaster and D.J., I have talked about her book. However, for this blog, she is perhaps more relevant as a world-class D.J. and a proud member of BBC Radio 6 Music. A truly wonderful voice, this is a queen of the decks and airwave. Someone who I have…

SO much love for.

FEATURE: Spotlight: Revisited: Lime Garden

FEATURE:

 

 

Spotlight: Revisited

  

Lime Garden

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I feel Lime Garden…

are one of the absolute best British bands in circulation. I spotlighted them in 2022. Their second studio album, Maybe Not Tonight, was released earlier this month. A stunning quartet of Chloe Howard, Annabel Whittle, Tippi Morgan, Leila Deeley, the Brighton band played a homecoming gig at the Green Door Store on 19th April. They return to Brighton 14th May for The Great Escape 2026. They have European and British dates coming through this year. A growing and loving fanbase throwing their weight and love behind Lime Garden. I will finish with a couple of reviews for Maybe Not Tonight. I am going to bring in a couple of recent interviews. NME spoke with Lime Garden’s frontperson, Chloe Howard, about their second studio album. In the conversation she explores “why “it's important to show the realistic side of self-destructive fun behaviour":

“Another single that’s been dominating indie radio airwaves is ’23’ – a devastating self-reckoning about life in your 20s not being quite as you’d imagined as Howard mourns: “At 17 I had the world in my hands and at 23 I just lost it/Something about the fact I’m losing my edge I’m getting further away from a profit.”

“I had a nightmare where I was talking to my 17-year-old self and she was giving me a hard time about where I was in life,” she told NME. “I thought that would be a fun situation to write about, but in general I am quite hard on myself.”

And what did her 17-year-old self expect of her?

“I think she thought I’d have a Lamborghini and a stable income by now, but hey – it’s 2026!”

Fair enough. After all, the anxiety and fear of your mid-20s is hard enough without being heightened by modern pressures.

“Every 23-year-old would say it’s the hardest for them,” she added. “When you’re in your early 20s you think the world revolves around you, and that’ll be the same for every generation ever. But I do think with social media, the element of comparison is stronger than ever. We’re all insane at that age.”

The work to be creative while constantly being judged online, as well as what already comes with everyday life, also fed into the album. “I hate the way my body looks too, if that helps, but it won’t,” Howard sings on ‘Body’. “I hate the way I’m looking at you, you look so beautiful…I’m jealous, and I blame you for it.”

“We’re in a weird position because we’re in a band,” said Howard, explaining the song. “We see way too many photos of ourselves. No human should see that many photos of themselves. We’re young women and people are mean online.

“It’s about being open about that and being a bit more vulnerable. Our conversations about that definitely bled into the lyrics.”

‘Maybe Not Tonight’ was also written during a period of collective “mass breakup” among the band, feeding into the ethos of tracks like ‘Body’, ‘Lifestyle’ and ‘All Bad Parts’ facing up to uncomfortable truths to make sense of of the world.

“We have a studio in Peckham and we’re there every Tuesday and Wednesday,” Howard said. “Our writing time became a therapy session for each other. It was very cathartic. We would scream and cry together, and then we’d go out together. The whole album and writing process was fuelled by those emotions.”

Ultimately, the album is a process of working through anxieties, fears, traumas and one’s own choices and mistakes, or as Howard put it, “You have to actually face up to yourself”.

I shamefully overlooked Lime Garden when I published a feature predicting which artists and albums will be shortlisted for a Mercury Prize later this year. I do feel like Maybe Not Tonight could be among the dozen shortlisted. DIY spent some time with Lime Garden recently. 2024’’s One More Thing was a fantastic debut. Since that came out, the quartet has shared tour vans, bar rounds and highs and lows. Now, Lime Garden have “distilled the irresistible alchemy of their best mates/band dynamic into new LP ‘Maybe Not Tonight’ - a riotous ode to the glorious chaos of a good night out”:

“Maybe Not Tonight’ is an album poised on a knife-edge. Following the narrative arc of a similar such night out, it starts with ‘23’ - a look at the running-out-of-time existential crisis that anyone in their mid-twenties is familiar with - before we find our protagonists hitting the self-destruct button, exploding a perfectly innocent pre-drinks (‘Cross My Heart’) into an unhinged swirl of dwindling self-awareness (the title track) and wronged romance (‘Undressed’).

Anyone vaguely familiar with Lime Garden will know that one album which dominated their playlists over the last four years was a certain lime green club-pop behemoth. Its exploration of the millennial experience through the lens of letting life get a bit messy is clearly weaved into the fabric of ‘Maybe Not Tonight’, but in a way that speaks less to trips to Berghain and more to impromptu meets in The Hope and Ruin. Chloe ponders the parallels: “I think with albums like ‘brat’, that’s a very one-sided view on going out. Charli xcx is a gorgeous, rich, 33 year old woman, and we’re a bunch of skint 24-year- olds, so it’s a very different experience for us. We were channelling that to an extent, but we wanted it more to feel like you’d bumped into us in the smoking area and we were just baring our souls to you, then regretting it the next day!”

Cue Annabel shyly explaining how the opening night of a European tour in Amsterdam near-perfectly coincided with her relationship ending. Ideal. “We’d all been feeling angry and chaotic across that summer,” she recalls, “but I’d had a break-up one week before the tour started and venues treat you so nicely in Europe, so we got given so much free beer that we were out until probably five or six in the morning. Obviously, I threw up everywhere; it was the best start to a tour you could hope for!” 

Chloe then unfurls another story of some French festival antics: “Me and Annabel stayed out watching Hot Chip until the festival shut down and we were thrown out, basically. We had to walk the whole way back to our hotel, which we didn’t realise was about two hours away from the site. We were just running through fields of crops trying to get back; we have so many stupid stories like that!”

As much as there is a rich vein of fun running right through the middle of both the band and this new record, liberation also comes balanced out by discussions of self-doubt (‘Body’), jealousy (‘Lifestyle’), and the general sense that the release partying can provide is something of a coping mechanism in a world which feels constantly on the verge of tearing itself apart. Reflecting on why the dancefloor is now the lingua franca for new acts (Fcukers) and established artists (Harry Styles, Arlo Parks) alike, Chloe posits: “We were all like 17 or 18 when Covid started, and we missed out on quite a lot of the partying era of our lives. As soon as we were let out, we went fucking nuts!”

While not a complete departure from the sights and sounds they made their name with, ‘Maybe Not Tonight’ finds Lime Garden with the shackles off, refusing to play by any rules. To paraphrase Annabel’s beloved Daft Punk: it’s bigger, better, faster, and stronger.

After two years sat on a record that took them about six months to complete, Chloe is already raring to go for Album Three: “[‘Maybe Not Tonight’] made us less afraid to take risks, which is all I’ll say about the next record”, she quips. But for the time being, the quartet are basking in a sea of their own success. “The longer we do this, the more I’m grateful to keep doing it,” Chloe beams. “I think my dream is just to keep rocking out until we’re 70 year old ladies or something.” Annabel agrees - sort of - before adding “world domination” to their list of desires. If Lime Garden continue at this pace, we’d challenge anyone to stand in their way”.

Before getting to a couple of reviews for Maybe Not Tonight, DORK spent time talking with Lime Garden. They chatted about how “Tuesdays spent writing, crying and screaming became the backbone of their second album”. An exhilarating, hugely talented and original young band bringing Rock back into the conversation – Charli xcx recently said how she was moving from the dance floor and her next album will be a Rock one -, here is a musical sensation who dreams of playing Glastonbury’s Pyramid Stage. And that wish will be granted in 2027 I feel:

“As a group, making 'Maybe Not Tonight' marked a shift in confidence. Priorities changed, boundaries strengthened, and musically, the band allowed themselves more freedom. For Leila, that meant embracing bolder guitar parts and sharper textures. “The guitars are so much more free, bolder, chunkier, more feedback, and more brash and spikey on this record, which I love,” she says. That confidence was tied closely to personal growth. “I was in a place of really trying to learn to embrace the positives of anger and learn to stick up for myself more at the time. I like that this comes through in the record.”

The album is also built around a concept that revealed itself almost accidentally. During sessions, drummer Annabel Whittle drew a bell curve mapping the emotional arc of a night out, placing tracks along it. “It blew our minds,” Leila says. Side A captures anticipation and excitement, while Side B spirals into insecurity and emotional fallout. “Seeing your ex with someone else at said party, bringing up all of your insecurities and crying on the way home, wondering if you’ll ever be able to love anyone else again,” she explains, before laughing at the drama of it all. “A painful yet very relatable experience, we hope.”

If there is one thing no one warns you about your mid twenties, according to Lime Garden, it is how suddenly lost you can feel. “The cockiness from adolescence wears off,” Leila says. “You go through one breakup and are like, where am I, who even am I, and what am I even doing?” Experiencing that confusion simultaneously brought the band closer. “We could understand each other very well, and maybe not feel as insane through sharing our similar experiences.”

Balancing that emotional intensity with touring and day jobs proved to be the biggest challenge. “Definitely figuring out the message we wanted to convey all the while balancing it with working and touring,” Leila says, laughing at the realities of indie band life. But the end result feels worth it. She hopes the album surprises people. “Lyrically and musically it’s bolder, wiser, braver,” she says. “Annabel has really added a harder, braver electronic flavour which has levelled up our sound to the max.” Chloe’s performances, she adds, were often goosebump-inducing. “It makes you feel like you’re hearing all of her secrets, perhaps ones you shouldn’t have overheard.”

Looking ahead, the ambitions are big but heartfelt. Tokyo remains a dream. Glastonbury Pyramid Stage, naturally, is on the list. In the meantime, the band are deep in unexpected obsessions, from beekeeping to ice hockey. “I can’t stop researching beekeeping,” Leila says. “There’s something so interesting about how those little guys instinctually work together in community; it’s genius.” As a band, though, their current fixation is firmly elsewhere. “Ice hockey is well and truly on the mind,” she laughs. “We went to a game in London the other day for Chloe’s surprise birthday, it was epic. They even played ‘Welcome to the Jungle’ by Guns N’ Roses at one point. It all felt very theatrical and dramatic and showbiz, which we of course enjoyed.”

What Lime Garden want most right now is simple. They are touring extensively this year, and they want people in the room. “We will be very tired, very satisfied and proud and tired,” Leila says. “Come see us play. Rock is alive”.

Getting back to NME for their take on Maybe Not Tonight. Showing their love for a reckless soundtrack to life in your twenties, Lime Garden's second album “wears its messiness on its sleeve, Lime Garden’s second is figuring life out, track by track”:

“As Brighton quartet Lime Garden were beginning work on the follow-up to their 2024 debut ‘One More Thing’, their four members went through what they’ve described as “a mass break-up”. A somewhat unfortunate act of sisterly symbiosis, each split with their respective partners in tandem “like dominoes”. Rather than sit and wallow in their collective misfortune, however, vocalist/guitarist Chloe Howard, guitarist Leila Deeley, bassist Tippi Morgan and drummer Annabel Whittle chose chaos – and now blazing, brilliant second album ‘Maybe Not Tonight’ lands as a slice of victorious closure.

Loosely structured across a big night out, the reckless spirit of the album might stem from a period of personal disarray but it also lends itself extremely well to the famously difficult junction of a second record. Where many bands overthink themselves into a corner, trying to turn out something slicker and more serious, there’s a hedonistic, ‘fuck it’ energy to the first half of ‘Maybe Not Tonight’ that practically fizzes out of the speakers. Lime Garden’s playfulness has always led to their best work, but here they sound fully unleashed: experimenting with cheeky, wonky synths on ‘All Bad Parts’ and deadpan slacker delivery on ‘Downtown Lover’.

When Charli XCX appeared on the Tape Notes podcast, she walked listeners through the messy trajectory of ‘365’, from owning the club to overdoing it in the toilet cubicle. ‘Maybe Not Tonight’ takes this idea and transposes it for twenty-somethings with a maxed-out overdraft, a pouch of rollies and a dream. Opener ‘23’ sees Howard take a deep breath and step into the mix; the aforementioned ‘All Bad Parts’ is probably the most mischievous song about the crutch of alcohol that we’ve heard in a long time, while ‘Maybe Not Tonight’’s title track rages through the night, landing like a lost indie sleaze classic.

By the album’s second half, we’ve hit the self-lacerating part of the evening when the demons kick in. ‘Body’ seethes jealously at another woman across the room (“I hate the way I’m looking at you / You look so beautiful”), while ‘Undressed’ shrivels at the sight of an old flame over Deeley’s Strokes-esque guitars. But even when the internal monologues are dark, the band’s innate knack for an indie hook stops these thought spirals from ever killing ‘Maybe Not Tonight’’s vibe.

On ‘Always Talking About You’, Howard admits her secret fantasies: ”I want to be famous / I want to be rich / I want everybody to say that’s that bitch”. The first two points might remain in question, but when it comes to getting over your exes, Lime Garden are those bitches that have come out the other side, all guns blazing”.

I am finishing up with Song Bar. They had some insightful and warm words for an album that I feel is going to win the band awards. Lime Garden embarking on these tour dates at the moment. All of this experience on the road will strengthen their shout at headline slots. They are talked about as a phenomenal live band. Go and see them if you can:

“Zesty, fresh, infectiously catchy, smash-and-grab synthy indie-pop-rock by the Brighton quartet, packed with fabulous riffs and melodies and droll, tongue-in-cheek lyrics that engagingly chart the highs and lows, the joys and insecurities of a big night out. As lead singer Chloe Howard describes: “The album is about a night out, from start to finish. As the night progresses, you’re having a great time, until your ex walks in with someone else. You hate the way you look but rather than going home, you press the big red button and get even more drunk. Eventually, you take yourself home full of melancholy, chaos and anger.” The instantly hooky opener 23 is perfect pop with a choppy guitars and a simple, insistent, deep bass-y boing, and the line: “When I was 17 I had the world at my feet; and at 23, I just lost it.” Cross My Heart has faint echoes of the rousing synth-pop La Roux’s Bulletproof, but also distinctive Lime Garden guitar funk energy, the band unafraid to capture the feel of energising pop from anywhere from the 80s to 2000s and add something of their own. Downtown Lover is noisy brasher guitar indie, Howard’s bright assertive vocal across chaotic fuzz guitars. All Bad Parts is eccentrically squiggly synth pop and funk disco, the title track a splashy piece of syncopated indie undulating between brief uncertainty and voluminous dance joy. Every track explodes with a fresh, vital energy, from the darker feedback tones of Body to the thrum of Undressed to the tender-to-brash ebb-and-flow tones and insecurities and sounds of Do You Know What I’m Thinking About? A fabulous release that moves between stop-start clever asides and explosions of sound when in full throttle, they are also hugely entertaining live prospect. Out on So Young Records”.

With the extraordinary Maybe Not Tonight out there collecting rave reviews and Lime Garden having this busy diary. It is going to be an exceptional remainder of the year. From there, they will get U.S. dates, big festival bookings and grow into one of the most revered bands in the world. That is why I wanted to come back to…

THIS astonishing Brighton quartet.

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Follow Lime Garden

FEATURE: Dead Flowers Still in Bloom: The Rolling Stones' Sticky Fingers at Fifty-Five

FEATURE:

 

 

Dead Flowers Still in Bloom

  

The Rolling Stones' Sticky Fingers at Fifty-Five

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IT does seem strange…

IN THIS PHOTO: The Rolling Stones photographed in 1971/PHOTO CREDIT: Peter Webb

when marking a big anniversary of a classic album from a legendary artist and also mentioning they have new music coming out. That is the case with The Rolling Stones. Whether trading as The Cockroaches or their own name, there has been excitement around that. I am writing fortieth anniversary features for Madonna’s True Blue, also celebrating the fact she is going to released Confessions on a Dance Floor: Part II in July. It is great that these amazing artists continue to release music decades after they put out these incredible albums we all still talk about! In the case of The Rolling Stones, this album is considered their best by many. Either this, Exile on Main St. (1972), Let It Bleed (1969) or Beggars Banquet (1968). It is clear that the band had this golden run from 1968 to 1972. You can say it extended to 1973 with Goats Head Soup. Nestled in that golden streak is 1971’s Sticky Fingers. It was released on 23rd April, 1971, so I am marking fifty-five years. One of those albums with no weak tracks, you have Brown Sugar, Wild Horses and Sway, stacking up against Sister Morphine and the sublime, underrated Dead Flowers. Sticky Fingers was inducted into the GRAMMY Hall of Fame in 1999 and is considered one of the greatest albums ever released. I want to come to some features and retrospectives as we prepare to mark fifty-five years of one of the defining albums of the 1970s. I want to start with GRAMMY, and their feature from 2021. Marking the fiftieth anniversary of Sticky Fingers, they note how it is “essential and dangerous rock and roll project that marked a rebirth for the iconic band”:

“The succession of high-profile drug busts and tragedies that shadowed the Rolling Stones in the late 1960s came to a head with the 1971 release of the band's 11th U.S. album, Sticky Fingers.

Recorded amid the disastrous Altamont concert aftermath and between famously debauched concert tours of the U.S. and Europe, Sticky Fingers is every bit as raw as the band's lives were at the time. The smoky barroom swagger of "Sway," the twitchy riffs and raspy vocals of "Bitch," and the grooving yet grimy "Brown Sugar" reflect just how wild the rock and roll ride had become for the band.

A drug bust in 1967 that ensnared Mick Jagger and Keith Richards was a prelude to the years that followed. Rolling Stones co-founder Brian Jones drowned in his swimming pool two years later, less than a month after the Stones fired him for excessive drug use, which had led to dwindling involvement with the group; he barely showed up to sessions for Let It Bleed, the band's 10th U.S. album, which was released in the months following his death.

Eager for a fresh start and desperate for cash, the Stones played a now-legendary concert at Hyde Park in London and hit the U.S. for their first tour in two years during the latter half of 1969. Chaos followed the band, culminating in a free concert at the Altamont Speedway in the hills between Livermore and Tracy, California. Billed as a sort of West Coast Woodstock, with a lineup featuring Jefferson Airplane, Santana and the Grateful Dead, the concert instead punctuated the end of the hippie peace-and-love era.

Clashes between members of the Hells Angels motorcycle club, which was hired as concert security at the event, and audience members created an atmosphere so charged, the Grateful Dead chose not to perform, even though they had helped organize the event. One biker assaulted Jefferson Airplane singer Marty Balin while others took aim at concertgoers like Meredith Hunter, who was stabbed to death in front of the stage during the Stones' performance.

The tragedy followed the triumph of the first recording sessions for Sticky Fingers, which had begun four days earlier at Muscle Shoals Sound Studio in Florence, Alabama.

Opened earlier that year by a group of session musicians known as the Swampers, who had backed Aretha Franklin on "Respect," the studio was hungry for its first hit. With the Rolling Stones, they got two: "Brown Sugar" and "Wild Horses," the album's two singles, were tracked at Muscle Shoals, alongside a faithful cover of Mississippi Fred McDowell's "You Gotta Move," between December 2-4.

"Brown Sugar" has the distinction of being one of the most controversial songs to hit No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100, where it peaked in May 1971. Musically, the song is a Stones master class that builds on a signature Richards guitar riff. By the time Bobby Keys blows his climactic saxophone solo, the guitars are playing off each other, percussion and piano are clanging away underneath, and Jagger is howling his head off.

The song's lyrics, however, are another matter. Although Marsha Hunt, a British actress of African descent, with whom Jagger fathered a child in 1970, is credited as the muse behind "Brown Sugar," the song is rife with allusions and outright explicit references to slavery, sex and drugs that were indefensible even half a century ago. In a 1995 interview with Rolling Stone, Jagger called the lyrics "a mishmash" that combines "all the nasty subjects in one go." He appears to have cooled on his lyrical concept over the years, though; in the same interview, he said he "never would write that song now."

At the other end of the spectrum, the country-tinged "Wild Horses" and the album-closing ballad "Moonlight Mile" show a more introspective Jagger, wistful and longing on the former and road-weary on the latter. Acoustic guitars provide the foundation for both songs, as well as "Dead Flowers" and "Sister Morphine," while tremulous guitars and ascending horns accent the otherwise sparse, pleading soul of "I Got the Blues."

Sticky Fingers also marked several key personnel changes in the Rolling Stones universe. The ouster and subsequent death of Brian Jones led them to hire guitarist Mick Taylor, of John Mayall's Bluesbreakers, who refueled the band's energy.

Taylor stepped into the role fully on Sticky Fingers, providing nuances like the chiming harmonics on "Wild Horses" and setting the jam-band template with his extended guitar solo on the seven-minute "Can You Hear Me Knocking" over a single-chord vamp. He played all the guitars on "Moonlight Mile" after an increasingly unreliable Richards failed to show up to sessions at Stargroves, Jagger's English countryside home, and often nodded off while high on heroin when he did. Taylor would have to step up more in the coming years as his bandmate's habit grew.

The end of the group's relationship with record label executive Allen Klein and his ABKCO label also gave lift to the band and began the modern era of the Rolling Stones. Sticky Fingers was the first album released on Rolling Stones Records, which debuted the iconic lips-and-tongue logo, designed by John Pasche.

Despite landing right in the middle of what many fans consider their golden era—the four-album run from 1968-1972 that also included Beggar's Banquet, Let It Bleed and Exile on Main St.—Sticky Fingers marked a rebirth for the Rolling Stones; the album's legacy and impact would continue to evolve in the decades to come”.

I am going to move to a Medium article that discusses the iconic cover for Sticky Fingers. Often cited as one of the very best album covers ever, it has endured through the decades and still has this cool to it. How would you describe it?! Controversial or sexual?! It provokes so many different reactions. It perfectly reflects what lies within Sticky Fingers:

“No other Stones album cover would express the band’s decadence so well. According to 100 Best Album Covers: The Stories Behind the Sleeves by Storm Thorgerson and Aubrey Powell (themselves legends of album cover design), Warhol suggested the idea of using a real trouser zipper to Mick Jagger at a party in 1969. Jagger, intrigued, asked Warhol to do the design.

Warhol’s former manager Paul Morrissey was quoted in 100 Best Album Covers thusly: “Andy was sensible enough to know not to be pretentious when doing album covers. This was a realistic attempt at selling sex and naughtiness. It was done simply and cheaply, without the pretensions that seem to go with other covers.”

The stark black-and-white close-up of a man’s crotch captured the cheap, simple approach. “It was a cheap camera and cheap film,” said Morrissey. “I have no idea what brand.”

The red rubber stamp design of the album title and band’s name added to the gritty look.

Artist Craig Braun was responsible for translating Warhol’s design into a functional album cover. As told in a 2015 New York Times article, Mick Jagger insisted that the zipper needed to work, and it had to reveal something when you pulled it down.

“[The Rolling Stones] knew if they put jeans and a working zipper that people were going to want to see what was back there,” Braun said.

Braun obtained a photo of the Andy Warhol model in his white underwear to slip behind the zipper. (Contrary to popular belief, it’s not a close-up of Mick Jagger’s crotch you see when you pull down the zipper.)

Realizing Warhol’s vision was a chore. The zipper damaged some of the initial pressings when the albums were stacked and shipped to record stores. The zipper literally dented the vinyl inside the sleeves pressed against it. Removing the zipper would ruin its effect. The solution was for each zipper to be manually pulled down just far enough that the tip of the zipper would no longer rub against the vinyl of any other albums in shipment. As Braun told Joe Coscarelli of the New York Times:

“I got this idea that maybe, if the glue was dry enough, we could have the little old ladies at the end of the assembly line pull the zipper down far enough so that the round part would hit the center disc label,” he said. “It worked, and it was even better to see the zipper pulled halfway down.”

As famous as the cover is, the artwork inside is also notable for the debut of the Rolling Stones’s iconic tongue logo, designed by John Pasche. The tongue logo would become as famous and recognizable as the Nike Swoosh logo, which also appeared for the first time in 1971.

If the album cover reminded us of the Stones’s dirtiness, then the rolling tongue recast the band in a new light: a rock and roll brand, and eventually a lucrative one, gaining revenue streams from touring and merchandising, and corporate deals that few, if anyone, envisioned in 1971. And that tongue retains its power as an icon used in co-licensing deals between the Stones and businesses such as Lucky Brand”.

In 2021, Vanity Fair also ran a feature about that cover. Craig Braun collaborating with Andy Wrahol when it came to the packaging and cover of Sticky Fingers. A cover that stands out and is timeless in its simplicity. It says so much without it being this busy, packed cover. Pitchfork reviewed Sticky Fingers in 2015. If ever there was an album that was The Rolling Stones as the greatest Rock band in the world, then this was it:

“Brown Sugar" launches the record with its quintessential blues-rock riff and lyrics that get more questionable the closer you listen (Jagger has since said it was a bit of a wind-up, "all the nasty subjects in one go"). But words were secondary for the band at this point— Sticky Fingers is about melody, and playing, and style. The Stones were always fascinated with American music, but after the death of Brian Jones in 1969 and their move away from psychedelia, their connection to blues, R&B, and country music grew even more intense. From the loping country-folk of "Wild Horses" and the tongue-in-cheek honky tonk of "Dead Flowers" to a Mississippi Fred McDowell cover ("You Gotta Move") to the swelling Otis Redding-style R&B of "I Got the Blues" to the crunchy boogie of "Bitch" to the Latin-flavored Santana jams of "Can't You Hear Me Knocking", Sticky Fingers is a love letter to these forms, the culmination of obsessions these musicians had had since childhood. But where they once sounded like English boys doing their version of the blues, now their songs felt as lived-in as their inspirations.

By this point, the Stones were so convincing playing rootsy American music it made little sense to compare them to their British peers. Musically at least, the Rolling Stones of 1971 had more in common with the Allman Brothers than they did the Who. Along with the barrelhouse piano, pedal steel, and Stax-like horns, Sticky Fingers was also only the second album to feature the guitar work of Mick Taylor, and his clean, fluid, and highly melodic leads bear a strong resemblance to Duane Allman's playing from this period.

But ultimately, this is Mick Jagger's album, the same way Exile is Keith's. Of all the iconic vocalists in '60s and '70s rock, Jagger remains the hardest to imitate, at least without sounding ridiculous. That's partly because he himself never minded sounding ridiculous, and he turned his almost cartoonish swagger into a form of performance art. Jagger's voice never sounded richer or fuller than it does here (Exile mostly buried it, to artful effect), but he's doing strange things with it, mimicking and exaggerating accents, mostly from the American South, with an almost religious fervor.

When the Stones were coming up, the line on British singers is that they sounded American because they grew up listening to those records; on Sticky Fingers, Jagger pushes that kind of mimicry to places that run just short of absurd. His twang on "Dead Flowers" is obviously played for laughs, but "You Gotta Move" is harder to get a bead on, partway between homage and parody and delivered with abandon. "I Got the Blues" is utterly sincere, with Jagger flinging every ounce of his skinny frame into it. Wherever he stands in relation to the material, Jagger is selling it, hard, and by extension selling himself as a new kind of vocalist. "Sister Morphine" and "Moonlight Mile" are the two songs that stray furthest from American music reverence, and they are highlights, showing how well the Stones could convey weariness and a weird kind of blown-out and wasted beauty.

With reissue culture in overdrive, we're seeing which classic bands kept the most in their vaults. The Stones, like Zeppelin, didn't keep much. The 2010 version of Exile on Main St. pretty much cleaned out the vault as far as music from this era, so what we have here are alternate mixes, an inferior but still interesting different take of "Brown Sugar" with Eric Clapton, the one true rarity that has long circulated but never been officially issued. There's also, depending on which version you get, a good deal of vintage live Stones, which is the main thing to get their fans excited. Selections from two 1971 gigs, both recorded well, capture the band in a peak year.

To my ears the Stones' live prowess has never quite translated to recordings. The best live records are about more: more heaviness, more jamming, more crowd noise, more energy. And their music didn't necessarily benefit from increasing any one of those things. Their songs were about a certain amount of balance between all of the elements, which is why their recordings sound so platonically perfect. With their live records, you can focus on the grooves and the riffs and the collective playing, but it's easier to notice moments of sloppiness and mistakes. Still, as far as live Stones on record, the material here is about as good as you will get.

The Stones entered the '70s still young and beautiful, but they'd have their share of problems just like everyone else; they got into disco and then in the '80s they dressed like they were on "Miami Vice" and then finally they fully understood what nostalgia for them was really worth and they discovered the power of corporate synergy. Given the weight of history behind it and its centrality to the story of both the Rolling Stones and rock music as a whole, it can be difficult to put on Sticky Fingers and try and hear it for what it was: the highly anticipated new album from one of the biggest bands in the world, a group that at the time hadn't released a new one in two years (in 1971, that was an eternity). They were called the World's Greatest Rock'n'Roll Band for entirely too long, but if that designation ever applied it was here”.

I am going to end in a minute. In 2007, the BBC shared a review of Sticky Fingers. Reaching number one in the U.S. and U.K. in 1971, some say this was a revival for The Rolling Stones. Others the tip of their peak or part of this incredible run of perfect albums. Even if some of the songs remain controversial – Brown Sugar is one that has problematic elements and would not be accepted now if it was released new -, Sticky Fingers is a stunning album of focus and ambition:

“By 1970 the Stones had earned the right to take a little time to turn out their next album. Bedding in new boy, Mick Taylor, on their well-documented tour of the States the year before had also involved a little studio time at Muscle Shoals studio. The results of these sessions and songs held over from Beggars Banquet were also brought to the table when they reconvened, still a little bruised from the apocalyptic events at Altamont. These were now grown-up men with families, demons and more to cope with who assembled at Jagger’s Stargroves mansion with their mobile studio in the summer of 1970.

In the topsy-turvy world of success they’d had more than their share of recent ups and downs. Sticky Fingers was destined to be the triumphant first release from their self-owned label but this success was leavened by the fact that they’d signed over their back catalogue to previous manager Allen Klein and had to give him the royalties from Brown Sugar and Sway to boot. The incessant touring meant that the band were now world citizens, but they still moved closer to their American roots. Using the usual support cast of Bobby Keys, Ry Cooder and Nicky Hopkins they turned their experiences into ten tracks of narcotic misery and sexual frustration. All wrapped in a very louche Andy Warhol sleeve.

Narcotics are a major theme, of course, but also loss, frustration and incredible world-weariness. Reviews at the time complained that Sticky Fingers lacked the bite of previous releases like Let It Bleed or Beggars Banquet, but it’s this very quality that makes the album special. Like Neil Young’s Tonight’s the Night, the sense of a wake creeps through tracks like Dead Flowers and Sister Morphine.

Elsewhere, the Delta serves as a touchstone for some of Jagger’s most heartfelt wailing as on I Got the Blues and You’ve Gotta Move, while he’s never bettered his letchery on Brown Sugar. Taylor’s arrival is keenly felt on Can’t You Hear Me Knocking?, with its Santana-esque coda. Sway and Bitch are hard-bitten rockers that couldn’t exist without Charlie’s taut snare.

Eventually the whole thing collapses in on itself with Moonlight Mile. A coked-out, somnambulant drift through an era’s last days, and a beautiful end to a beautiful journey. While many hold their next album, Exile On Main St., as their zenith, Sticky Fingers, balancing on the knife edge between the 60s and 70s, remains their most coherent statement”.

Because this landmark and astounding album is fifty-five on 23rd April, a chance to learn more about it and why it is considered such a classic. An album passed through the generation. With one of the most discussed and arguably best covers ever, I feel we will talk about Sticky Fingers decades from now. As the band are looking at releasing new music and are still on the road, I wonder how they feel…

ABOUT their 1971 album.

FEATURE: Lord Only Knows: Beck's Odelay at Thirty

FEATURE:

 

 

Lord Only Knows

 

Beck's Odelay at Thirty

__________

IT is exciting…

IN THIS PHOTO: Beck in 1996/PHOTO CREDIT: Martyn Goodacre

marking the thirtieth anniversary of one of the best albums of the 1990s. There is no doubting that Beck’s Odelay holds that title. In terms of its reviews and how it was received. How it endures to this day. Odelay was released on 18th June, 1996. The fifth studio album from Beck, it contains classics such as Devil’s Haircut and Where It’s At. I want to bring in a few reviews/features for this extraordinary album. Although Odelay only just made the top twenty in the U.K. and U.S., it received a lot of positive reviews. One of those albums that has gained this incredible legacy. I am not sure why it was not a top ten in 1996. However, there is not denying the impact it has made on artists since its release. In 2008, Rolling Stone spoke with Beck about the newly reissued classic. He provided a guide to each track. I cannot get the full version of the feature, though I can provide a taster:

“I thought Odelay might be the last time I got a chance to make a record,” Beck says of his 1996 album. “I was acutely aware that I was thought of as a one-hit wonder.” But almost twelve years later, Odelay is the definitive Beck album, full of funk, noise and sliced-up jokes. It’s now receiving the deluxe reissue treatment, with an edition that adds nineteen outtakes, remixes and B sides.

Beck reminisces about his landmark disc at the Hollywood studio where he’s quickly recording a new one with a producer he declines to name. “We’re not going to get sidetracked,” he says. “This one might be coming out sooner than people would think – definitely this year.” Today, he’s working in a modern facility full of expensive blond wood; back in 1995, it was the smallest room in the Silver Lake, L.A., house of the Dust Brothers (Mike Simpson and John King), the production team behind the Beastie Boys ‘ Paul’s Boutique. “It was tiny,” Beck says. “And one wall, floor to ceiling, was all records.” Although Beck emphasizes that “a lot of Odelay was played, not sampled,” many of those records were called into service, from Them’s version of “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” (the organ part became the backbone of “JackAss”) to a sex-ed. album called Sex for Teens (Where It’s At), which provided the funniest bits of the single “Where It’s At.”

The reason they had so much time to listen to records? The trio was using an early version of Pro Tools: After every take, the computer required about a half-hour to compile the data. Technology aside, Beck says he doesn’t feel like much time has passed: “When I go back to it, not a lot feels different. I’m into the same things, you know what I mean?”

“RAMSHACKLE”

The last track on Odelay was salvaged from an earlier set of sessions. “It was a whole record’s worth of stuff, somewhere between Big Star, Pavement and Nirvana.” That lost disc was almost finished when Beck first hooked up with the Dust Brothers. “ Odelay was very informal. I just showed up one day with the slide guitar and a couple of harmonicas, and we started working.”

“.000.000”

This Sabbath -style freakout, originally a B side to “Devils Haircut,” was recorded at the Beastie Boys’ L.A. studio. “It had a big skate ramp in it,” Beck recalls. He isn’t sure how one would pronounce the song’s title and can’t even decipher the words anymore. “There were definitely lyrics, and they were very meaningful. I think.”

“DEVILS HAIRCUT”

The recording of the album was split in half by Beck going on the 1995 Lollapalooza tour. “Everything we did before was very complex — we would spend weeks on each track. When I came back, we did a bunch of songs really quick in two weeks. We did ‘Devils Haircut’ and ‘New Pollution’ back to back in two days.”

“THE NEW POLLUTION”

Odelay’s third single had some of its most inscrutable lyrics, like “She’s got a cigarette on each arm.” “Most of the vocals on the record were scratch vocals,” Beck says. “We just grew attached to them.”

“GOLD CHAINS”

A previously unreleased track featuring the chorus “I’m going back home with my gold chains swinging.” “We went back and mixed that. It was never a serious album contender — we were just fucking around one day.”

“BURRO”

This “Jack-Ass” B side was a Spanish translation of the song, rerecorded with a mariachi band from an L.A. Mexican restaurant. “I tried to sing it straight, but I got carried away. I ended up sounding like Mario Lanza”.

There are a couple of other features I want to come to before finishing off. In 2016 (twenty years after its release) XS Noize spent some time with Odelay. Even though 1994’s One Foot in the Grave was well-received, there were many who doubted Beck’s chances of survival. An artist that they thought would not last much longer. Odelay silenced through doubters and confirmed Beck’s status as this unpredictable and always-shifting artist. Odelay was a major breakthrough:

“There are two elements to “Odelay” that reflect the times it was recorded within. The album rode the peak wave of the sampling trend with 28 different samples that were culled from numerous genres; Schubert, Grand Funk Railroad, Sly Stone, Lee Dorsey, Rare Earth and Edgar Winter are just some of the credited samples. In addition there were a significant number of contributors: Beck of course played everything you can think of and in addition; Joey Woronker, Mike Millius, Mike Boilo, David Brown, Greg Leisz, Charlie Haden and Ross Harris all made worthy and significant contributions. The utilization of sampling and the various musicians and contributors made for an approachable recording loaded with infectious ebullience. It showcased Beck in all his smart-ass glory as he shamelessly genre bent throughout the record.

Although the label placed no pressure on Beck in studio, when the album was delivered to the label Beck was haunted by the feedback. His greatest nightmare was realized when a record executive said,” Odelay was a large mistake for Beck’s career.” Beck spent months thinking he had blown his music career forever. Thankfully the record executive was wrong. The album was embraced by radio and fans. It reached #16 on Billboard in the US and become the first hit album for Beck in the UK reaching #17. There were five singles released; Where it’s At, Devil’s Haircut, The New Pollution, Sissyneck and Jackass. “Odelay” was nominated for Grammy’s Album of the Year in 1997, and won the Grammy for Best Alternative Music Album; additionally Beck won the Grammy for Best Male Rock Vocal Performance for Where it’s At. The success of “Odelay” put to rest the opinions of many in the industry that Beck was a lightweight novelty cult act.

On “Odelay” Beck jumps immediately into the deep end with Devil’s Haircut which was written in a day. It is a perfect display of defying logic; where things went perfectly together even though they should not. The cranking gritty guitar and the familiar beat meld for a grand accompaniment to this surreal walk through the Post Modern end of the century. The song should have come with a warning because it lodged itself in your brain and you could not get it out. It displayed the brilliance of Beck’s off the cuff quicksilver brain. This song will always reside within the pantheon of spectacular Beck tracks.

In contrast Hotwax took six months to create. Here the genres switch quickly careening from folky blues to psychedelic and then into hip hop. That neck snapping switch up should be unsettling but this is Beck we are talking about and he ends up producing another winning track. The lyrics are stream of conscious but unforgettable with my favorite still being, “silver foxes looking for romance in the chain smoke Kansas flash dance ass pants.” … and epic catchphrase “the enchanted wizard of rhythm”. The song is a bridge from Mellow Gold into “Odelay”.

Lord Only Knows provided even more catchphrases as the protagonist of the song laments the inevitable craziness of the world. Here Beck fully utilizes a world weary blues and gospel undertone to emphasize his gleeful abandoning of all hope in making sense of the nonsensical. The song is jam packed with ironic truths that became instantly quotable.

The album shape-shifts again with The New Pollution and it’s off kilter marriage of Brit wave 60’s pop and Day-Glo irony. The surface of this song is squeaky clean and innocent but lyrically is actually quite disturbing. Punctuated drums, Hammond organs and the distorted drum loop act as a time machine taking us back decades in sound. It is a whip crack crisp pop song. Where The New Pollution is an irony laden pop confection of sorts, Derelict delivers something completely different. Once again Beck messes with conventions blending an Asiatic feel with psychedelic and produces a feeling of madness with world beat percussion. The song attempts to portray a beggar/derelict exploding into a word salad of thoughts with no edit. “Novacane” delivers a hard edged ballsy hip hop attack. The bassline sets the platform for a song that explodes into a hip hop/P funk fest. The title of the song is apt as it conveys the deadened feel of the analgesic drug. This song sounds simply spectacular coming out of the speakers as Beck creates another unique collage that would become his trademark.

Where It’s At was another intentional bridge from Loser. It truly is the song to point to when explaining the genius of Beck. There are so many catchphrases including the epic, “Two turn tables and a microphone” that have stood the test of time are still being used 20 years later. The amazing thing about the song is that there is a little something here for everyone; even a total square could totally buy into the vibe Beck was laying down. On the track Beck takes us for another trip through the bizarre yet none of it seems strange. The real brilliance is Beck weaving the disparate sections of the song into one unified massive track with throbbing bass and Hammond organ bring the selection home.

Minus Is another nonsense poem that becomes something wondrous in Beck’s capable hands. Here a post punk garage band feel pervades. The track utilizes insistent drums and LoFi crunch production to perform its dirty work. The selection bounces along and then there is that slo mo tempo shapeshift before it returns to a hellbend beat. The track is like a bad LSD trip, with Beck yelling the word “frogs” at the end as the song grinds to its cacophonic end.

Sissyneck is a spectacular blending of funk, R&B and country rock providing one hell of a groove. Presented is another hard luck Joe trying to make rational the irrational. The chorus is priceless, “I got a stolen wife and a rhinestone life and some good ol’ boys. I’m writing my will on a three dollar bill in the evening time.” The pictures painted with the lyrics are at once classic and disturbing as we meet various dodgy characters. The Hammond organ and stuttering drums deliver a locomotive feel to the accompaniment.

Readymade is a wonky track with the marriage of Mexicali influence with techno. It portrays a fly blown traveler as he passes through life. Illuminating the track are lyrics like, “and my bags are waiting for the next life”, as if Beck is saying I’ll be waiting for the karmic paybacks for the wrongs done in this life. The electronic effects of the track punctuate the intentionally tawdry feel of the song.

High 5 (Rock the Catskills) is an ebullient rocking hip hop song, in which the Dust Brothers were channeling their Beastie Boy experiences through Beck. The mind meld between producers and artist are at their most obvious on this track. It is a blast of a song that is totally shambolic and should not work but is a great piece of music.

The final listed song on the original release is Ramshackle which was the only song to survive the original recording sessions. It draws the album to a close with a beautiful folk feel. It also gives hints to the beauty that will surface on later releases, Sea Change and Morning Phase.It is a poetic melancholy rambling illuminated by sage advice and insight, calling to mind the works of Woody Guthrie. The song is made more poignant by the not quite on key loose string acoustic guitar. The song ends at the 2:45 mark and runs silent until the hidden 45 second wonky tech track with a repeating robotic vocal. Again a straight forward song is meddled with in order to meet the requirements of being messed around.

With Odelay Beck was able to slay the doubts many had about his prospects for longevity in popular music. Many musical experts at the time made the mistake of assuming because Beck makes what he does look so easy and does it with a happy go luck journeyman’s approach that he was not trying or working very hard. Those people could not have been more wrong. Beck’s output looks effortless because he is that gifted. The brilliance of Odelay is Beck’s almost supernatural ability to weave immense texture and genre shapeshifting together on the release and come out with so many beloved hits. Beck would move on from “Odelay” continuing to follow the twists and turns of his own unique musical inklings. He secured his career with “Odelay” making sure his future ventures would get the notice they deserve. If you want to introduce the younger generation to an ambitious musical adventure “Odelay” is an excellent way to start”.

I am going to finish off with Albumism. There will be new features published for Odelay when it turns thirty on 18th June. I was thirteen when Odelay came out. It was a period in music when things were changing. Especially in the U.K. This enormously inventive album came out in a time when Britpop was fading away and there was this sense of shift and different sounds and genres coming to the fore:

“Following the pervasive success of “Loser” and the lo-fi major label debut LP Mellow Gold (1994), the invariable backlash materialized, with Beck being unfairly accused of one-hit wonderdom and embracing kitschy artifice over musical substance. Two years later, however, he silenced the haters in convincing fashion with the release of the ambitiously conceived and masterfully executed Odelay, which formally established him as a bona fide artiste with an unconventional and imaginative musical vision.

The album that Beck originally began recording as the follow-up to Mellow Gold was a notably more acoustic-driven, maudlin suite of songs. He ultimately scrapped most of the material, and started fresh with a new sonic direction, aided in large part by hooking up with the L.A. based production duo of E.Z. Mike (Michael Simpson) and King Gizmo (John King), more affectionately known as the Dust Brothers. Renowned for their studio wizardry on the Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique (1989), Young MC’s Stone Cold Rhymin’ (1989), and Tone Loc’s Lōc-ed After Dark (1989), among other projects, the Dust Brothers brought a seasoned hip-hop sensibility and penchant for innovative sampling to their recording sessions with Beck.

Crafting the intricately woven songs that would ultimately constitute Odelay was an organic, liberating process replete with new sonic adventures for the kindred musical spirits involved. “We’d always been forced to sample from records,” Dust Brother Mike Simpson explained to MusicRadar in 2011. “Whereas with Beck he’d say, ‘I’ve got some ideas,’ and plug in his guitar and just start riffing. He’d play a bar or a measure and we’d take that and loop it up and he’d be like, ‘Oh, that’s incredible. Wow, I don’t even remember playing that!’ We were of like minds, had the same goals, and were looking to make the same kind of music.”

Indeed, the kaleidoscopic, multi-layered Odelay—named after the phonetic spelling of the Spanish expression “órale,” the equivalent of “right on” or “word” in English—reflects the convergence of a vast expanse of unorthodox ideas, musical inspirations, and bold experiments across its thirteen songs. However, to the credit of its creators, the album is a coherent and cohesive one, never descending into hodgepodge territory from the weight of its grand ambitions. This is progressive music, to be sure, but it’s also one of the most insanely catchy and vibrant albums you’ll ever have the pleasure of hearing.

From a lyrical perspective, Beck has been forthright about his preoccupation with ensuring that his words are, first and foremost, compatible with the sonic structures of his songs. Hence why the lyrics featured throughout Odelay are more akin to wistful streams of consciousness than calculated messages with profound underlying meaning contained therein.

“I didn't want to be pretentious or pompous in the way some songwriters suddenly decide, ‘OK, now I'm a poet; I'm going to turn these lyrics into poetry,’ Beck confided to Rolling Stone in 1997. “For me, the words still have to be funky. Especially in the area of music I'm working in: It's not art music; it's not conceptual. The words have got to feel good, and they have to sound good; they have to fit the rhythm. That's the hardest thing. You got a melody, you got this thing that's musical, and you want to stick words on it. Words can really weigh something down. And if you put in the wrong words, I'm telling you, it'll ruin the music; it'll ruin the melody.”

Beck would subsequently refine and streamline his songwriting approach beginning with the follow-up effort Mutations (1998) and more noticeably on Sea Change (2002), but here, his words defy intuitive comprehension, and instead exist in a surreal, dreamlike state that commands listeners to exercise their imaginations.

Five singles were officially released from Odelay, with the hypnotic “Where It’s At” the first and most memorable among these. Propelled by a cacophony of distorted melodies, oddball vocal snippets, and the unforgettable chorus chant of “Where it’s at! I’ve got two turntables and a microphone,” with a robotic echo lifted from Mantronix’s 1985 single “Needle to the Groove,” Beck gives you little choice but to wholeheartedly accept his invitation to the “destination a little up the road.”

Though less ubiquitous than “Where It’s At,” the four other singles are all unequivocal standouts. The rollicking, breaks-driven “Devil’s Haircut” and buoyant “The New Pollution,” which samples the horns of saxophonist Joe Thomas’ 1976 composition “Venus” to stunning effect, are the album’s most exhilarating, pop-friendly fare. On the more subdued tip, the sprawling “Jack-Ass,” presumably an ode to listlessness in life and love, and “Sissyneck,” a countrified exploration of the free-ramblin’ existence, are both irresistible gems.

A commercial and critical triumph that went double platinum and secured countless accolades, including the 1997 GRAMMY Award for Best Alternative Music Album alongside a nomination for Album of the Year, Odelay proved the album that convinced listeners, and the music industry at large, to finally give Beck the credit he so rightfully deserved.

“Odelay was expected to be such a failure,” Beck admitted to Pitchfork in 2011. “I remember the record company having some kind of party right before there was a big merger when everyone got fired. It was after Odelay had sold 2 million copies and I remember the head of the record company giving this speech in which it was obvious that he was very confused about its success. I think everyone felt that way. So pretty much everything since has been a bit of a retreat from that kind of success”.

The mighty Odelay turns thirty on 18th June. Possibly Beck’s best-known and most extraordinary statement, it still strikes hard today. As uDiscover Music wrote last year, Odelay turned the Californian artist into an internationally-recognised name: “Hansen was named Best International Solo Male at the BRIT Awards, won similar accolades from the NME, Rolling Stone and others, and Grammys for Best Alternative Album and Best Male Rock Vocal Performance for “Where It’s At.” Beck had far more than two turntables and a microphone: now the world was at his door”. This classic still shines and radiates…

THREE decades on.