FEATURE: Life’s What You Make It: Talk Talk's The Colour of Spring at Forty

FEATURE:

 

 

Life’s What You Make It

Talk Talk's The Colour of Spring at Forty

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IF some feel that…

1988’s Spirit of Eden is the best and defining album, from Talk Talk, I think that The Colour of Spring is their peak. Released on 17th February, 1986, it was the third studio album from the band. Led by Mark Hollis, who we sadly lost in 2019, The Colour of Spring is a masterful album that should be heard by everyone, so important and phenomenal is it. Life’s What You Make It, the lead single from The Colour of Spring, one of the all-time best Talk Talk songs. There are some features and reviews that I want to get to. I am starting out with this excellent and compressive feature from Classic Pop from last year. Even though they get the release date wrong – they say it was released in March 1986, but it was 17th February -, it is interesting reading how Talk Talk followed 1984’s It’s My Life:

“The band took a year out to record the next album and a welter of session players were drafted in, such as Steve Winwood, guitarist Robbie McIntosh, bassist Danny Thompson and harmonica player Mark Feltham. The result would be a far more organic sound, with a sonic direction that would come to dominate their music from that point on.

Hollis and Friese-Greene spent the first four months of 1985 writing the songs, with the band then joining them in the studio to start laying down parts.

“At first, we were spending 12 hours a day, six days a week in the studio,” Hollis told the Glasgow Evening Times in February 1986, “then towards the end we gave ourselves the weekends off. Trying to stay fresh is the most difficult thing on such a long project.”

During recording, Hollis was listening to music by impressionist classical composers such as Satie, Debussy and Milhaud. Bartok in particular had a profound influence on the album. “Bartok’s string quartets… I’d never imagined something so beautiful existed,” he said. “Bartok has an impact on the arrangements on The Colour Of Spring.”

Instrumentally, acoustic piano and Hammond organ would prove the mainstay of the keyboard work on the album, with the highest-profile guest musician on the album, Steve Winwood, contributing some stunningly atmospheric parts on the Hammond.

Some more obscure instruments would also feature, such as the Variophon, an electronic instrument invented in 1975 by researchers at the University of Cologne. As the band worked on the album, they employed an eclectic range of keyboard instrumentation, such as Mellotron and melodica. But they resolutely drew the line at modern synth technology.

“In terms of the first two albums and the live field, synths are simply an economic measure,” Hollis told Electronics And Music Maker magazine in 1986. “Beyond that, I absolutely hate synthesisers… if they didn’t exist, I’d be delighted.”

It was a view reinforced by Friese-Greene, who was vehement on the subject of digital music technology. “To me, the idea of MIDI’ing up a piano is just plain sick. MIDI is a four-letter word, I can’t take it seriously at all. There’s really nothing printable I can say about it.”

In the year preceding the recording of The Colour Of Spring, Talk Talk spent nine months on tour. Hollis always highlighted the enjoyment that the band got from the “immediacy and excitement” of playing live. But he stressed that recording remained paramount.

“We’re not interested in dashing off a few tracks which will be forgotten in a couple of months,” he said. “When you’re trying to achieve subtlety and depth in what you do, it takes time…”

The Colour Of Spring was released in March 1986 to widespread critical acclaim from all corners. For those who had already written the band off as bandwagon jumpers and derivative synth-pop has-beens, it was an unexpected revelation.

Here was a genuine landmark release, ethereal and enigmatic with a haunting, fragile melancholy. Powerful, spacious rhythms combined with rich instrumental textures, all topped by Hollis’s pained and deeply moving vocals.

Talk Talk had created a sound that defied genres, drawing on jazz, classical, folk and pop, yet without ever falling into one distinct style.

The Colour Of Spring went on to become the band’s biggest-selling album, reaching No.8 in the UK charts. Life’s What You Make It, with its rolling piano riff, was the album’s sublime highlight, and became an international hit, expanding the band’s global fanbase and earning Talk Talk their third US hit single.

Commercially, The Colour Of Spring would prove to be Talk Talk’s most successful album, but for all its stellar achievements, their creative peak was yet to come. They would go on to release Spirit Of Eden and Laughing Stock, critically lauded works that many regard as their finest creative achievements.

Talk Talk disbanded in 1992 and Mark Hollis retired from music, choosing instead to live quietly with his wife and family in Wimbledon. Save for a self-titled debut album and a handful of appearances over the years, that’s precisely what he did.

In an interview in 1982, Hollis remarked that: “I want to write stuff that you’ll be able to listen to in 10 years’ time”. With The Colour Of Spring, and the two albums that followed, he produced a breathtaking body of work, one that will endure for a great deal longer than that.

Like all the best artists, Mark Hollis understood instinctively that what you leave out is often far more important than what you put in. “In some ways, I like silence more than I like sound,” he said. He also recognised that technical proficiency is overrated. “To me, feel is the most important thing, not technique. Take all that soul and gospel stuff; that’s got incredible feel, but it’s not necessarily good musicianship”.

I want to move to a feature from 2019 that goes deep with Talk Talk’s The Colour of Spring. I am especially interested in the section where it discusses the legacy of this album. It is interesting hearing how Talk Talk very much took against the fashion of using synthesisers. Pretty dominant in terms of the sound of the mid-1980s, they would very much eschew that in terms of something more natural-sounding and acoustic:

“In terms of the first two albums and the live field, synths are simply an economic measure,” Hollis told Electronics And Music Maker magazine in 1986. “Beyond that, I absolutely hate synthesisers… if they didn’t exist, I’d be delighted.”

It was a view reinforced by Friese-Greene, who was vehement on the subject of digital music technology. “To me, the idea of MIDI’ing up a piano is just plain sick. MIDI is a four-letter word, I can’t take it seriously at all. There’s really nothing printable I can say about it.”

Meaningful Legacy

The Colour Of Spring was released in February 1986 to widespread critical acclaim from all corners. For those who had already written off the band as bandwagon jumpers and derivative synth-pop has-beens, it was an unexpected revelation. Here was a genuine landmark release, ethereal and enigmatic with a haunting, fragile melancholy. Powerful, spacious rhythms combined with rich instrumental textures, all topped by Hollis’s pained and deeply moving vocals.

Talk Talk had created a sound that defied genres, drawing on jazz, classical, folk and pop, yet without ever falling into one distinct style.The Colour Of Spring went on to become the band’s highest-selling album, reaching No. 8 in the UK charts. Life’s What You Make It, with its rolling piano riff, was the album’s sublime highlight, and became an international hit, expanding the band’s global fanbase and earning Talk Talk their third US hit single.

‘It gets tiring to listen to the Duran Duran comparisons’

Commercially, The Colour Of Spring would prove to be Talk Talk’s most successful album, but for all its stellar achievements, their creative peak was yet to come. They would go on to release The Spirit Of Eden and Laughing Stock, critically lauded works that many regard as their finest creative achievements.

Talk Talk disbanded in 1992 and Mark Hollis retired from music, choosing instead to live quietly with his wife and family in Wimbledon. Save for a self-titled debut album and a handful of appearances over the years, that is precisely what he did.

In an interview in 1982, Hollis remarked that, “I want to write stuff that you’ll be able to listen to in 10 years’ time”. With The Colour Of Spring, and the two albums that followed, he produced a breathtaking body of work, one that will endure for a great deal longer than that”.

I am going to end with a feature from last year that argues The Colour of Spring is the best Talk Talk album. I don’t think that it is talked about and played as widely as it should be. For anyone who has not heard the album, I would recommend that you listen to it. Talk Talk are one of the best bands ever. Mark Hollis a genius songwriter:

“Talk Talk fans often praise Spirit of Eden and Laughing Stock as the band’s masterpieces and regard The Colour of Spring as a transitional effort with signs of their later post-rock mastery.

The last two Talk Talk albums are brilliant, with moments of genius like ‘New Grass’, ‘Ascension Day’, and ‘I Believe In You’. But The Colour of Spring is an amazing record in its own right, a unique work that balances the sonic experimentation of Talk Talk’s later work with poppy song-craft.

Bands like Bark Psychosis and Godspeed You! Black Emperor have built upon the template Spirit of Eden, but I can’t think of a single record that sounds like The Colour of Spring – the blend of pop hooks, great musicianship, textural experimentation, yearning vocals, and bright 1980s production is unique.

The Colour of Spring was so strong that it spawned three excellent out-takes, released as b-sides: ‘It’s Getting Late in the Evening’ and ‘For What It’s Worth’ are sparse and beautiful, while ‘Pictures of Bernadette‘ is a pop masterpiece with a chaotic guitar solo.

Mark Hollis passed away earlier in 2019; his career wasn’t prolific, but he blessed music fans with four trail-blazing albums. While Spirit of Eden, Laughing Stock, and 1998’s solo effort Mark Hollis are all terrific, The Colour of Spring is a unique blend of pop smarts and textural experimentation”.

On 17th February, it will be forty years since The Colour of Spring was released. I wonder whether there will be any vinyl reissue or anything special around the anniversary. Let’s hope that the music press salutes forty years of a classic. New pieces that highlight why The Colour of Spring is so brilliant. I must have first heard it when I was in my twenties, though I have been listening to it a lot recently, and marvelling. Even though it is only eight tracks, they are all simply wonderful. I think, my favourite is Life’s What You Make It, though I love deeper cuts like Chameleon Day. 1986 saw so many extraordinary albums released, though few could match the heights of Talk Talk’s…

THE Colour of Spring.

FEATURE: So Tell Me What You Want… The Recording of Spice Girls’ Wannabe at Thirty

FEATURE:

 

 

So Tell Me What You Want…

PHOTO CREDIT: Universal Music Group 

The Recording of Spice Girls’ Wannabe at Thirty

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ON 8th July…

there will be massive celebrations, as that marks thirty years since Spice Girls’ Wannabe was released in the U.K. A number one single and one of the most important and successful debut singles ever, it was actually released on 26th June in Japan. However, people might not know that Wannabe was recorded in December 1995. The final version at least, I think. The earliest versions go back to earlier in 1995. I want to mark thirty years of that important moment of Pop history. Melanie C recently hinted that there might be a thirtieth anniversary tour in the summer to mark that Wannabe anniversary. It would be great to see the group together. Geri Halliwell left the group whilst they were still recording, whilst Victoria Beckham did not tour with the group in 2019. It would be great to have all five members performing together. Glastonbury is not on next year, so they will not get a chance to headline. However, some shows around the U.K. would be amazing. As it is thirty years since Spice Girls recorded Wannabe, I want to mark that seismic occasion. Closer to the thirtieth anniversary of its release, I will revisit the song. It is amazing how quickly Wannabe came together. I shall come to its incredible one-shot video and how exciting that is. Including on their debut album, Spice (1996), Wannabe’s vocals were laid down in a single day. In fact, less than an hour. So fresh, fast and alive, you can feel that energy and excitement from the studio come through on the record. The solo turns on Wannabe were divided between Melanie Brown, Emma Bunton, Melanie Chisholm and Geri Halliwell. Victoria Adams was not available so communicated with the group through a mobile phone. She reflected in her autobiography about her regret at missing out and having to give approval and opinions down the line – rather than being in the flesh with the other Spice Girls.

Although the finished version is a groundbreaking Pop song and one that introduced the world to a group who would be among the most-covered of the 1990s and are considered one of the best girl groups ever, the earlier mixes and versions were seen as weaker and lacklustre. Virgin executives dismissed them. Geri Halliwell has said how the Spice Girls were marketed as an R&B group early, perhaps to get broader appeal or stand out as being more distinct and edgier than most commercial Pop. There were Jungle and Hip-Hop mixes of Wannabe. Halliwell hated them. Simon Fuller, Spice Girls’ manager, handed the track to Mark Stent. He remixed Wannabe – which he saw as a weird Pop record – in six hours. Making it tighter and making sure the vocals popped, the rest is history! I love the fruition and background. Even if the initial vocal session was quick, it was not the case that what was bottled initially, earlier in 1995, was what we hear on record. The earliest versions with producers Matt Rowe and Richard Stannard were promising and different, though the version on Spice, I believe happened in December 1995. That is why I am marking it here. Recorded at the Strongroom Studios in London. The studios are still operating today. Let’s go deeper with this iconic Pop song. One that instantly made an impression. Going to number one in the U.K. and multiple countries, it did change Pop in the mid-'90s. Perhaps more Britpop and male-dominated, the lyrics of female solidarity and that distinct sound of Wannabe was a revelation and revolution. It helped to usher in this Spicemania era and what would become Girl Power. Whilst it seems gimmicky, it did inspire so many other women in music and created this ardent and passionate fanbase. Even if December 1995 is important because of that recording at Strongarm Studios in London, it is worth charting its progress and earliest days. The Telegraph told the story of Wannabe in 2021. The writing sessions and activity in early-1995 laid the groundwork:

“People who worked with the Spice Girls use all the same adjectives to describe them, often breathlessly, and in quick succession. Loud, full-on, vivacious, determined, energetic: five young women pushed together into a girl group with a shared ambition of being “more famous than Persil washing powder”. They went on to change pop music forever.

In the beginning of 1995, that force of oestrogen and ambition was squeezed into a small room in Shoreditch. Not yet the Spice Girls, still going by the name of Touch, they came up with a song in four hours. Unlike the output from US-influenced RnB all-female groups such as Eternal, this was a fierce, crudely constructed anthem that set out their manifesto in under three minutes.

When the Spice Girls signed to a record label, executives didn’t want to release it as a first single. Its songwriter doesn’t reckon it would even make the cut today. But it was voted the most recognisable pop song of the past six decades in 2014, and has this week been proclaimed the best-selling single in the UK by a girl band, with 1.7 million copies sold across physical, download and streaming platforms.

February 1995: The first writing session

The writing session that produced Wannabe and 2 Become 1, a future Christmas number one, happened two months after songwriter Richard “Biff” Stannard was physically dragged by Melanie “Mel B” Brown into the Spice Girls’ first showcase. It was the product of months of campaigning by Brown and her bandmates Melanie “Mel C” Chisholm, Emma Bunton, Victoria Adams and Geri Halliwell.

The girls, then aged between 17 and 21, had been kept in a house in Maidenhead by Bob and Chris Herbert, the father-and-son team behind Heart Management who had brought them together after rounds of nationwide auditions. Chris, their day-to-day manager, who at 22 was older than the girls, described the showcase as “one of the main cornerstones of my plan”. It was a chance to impress the industry’s best writers and producers, and convince them to  give the group pop’s next big hit.

Herbert didn’t want to mess the opportunity up: the girls had been practicing the same four songs daily for a year. There was singing tuition and dancing lessons – essential for Halliwell, who didn’t have the stage school training of the other girls – as well as evenings spent acting out Take That dance routines, eating toast and imagining life in the fast lane. The showcase was scheduled for December 1994, but the girls, who were still unsigned by the Herberts and keen for success, were ready far sooner than that.

“Leading up to the showcase,” Herbert remembers, “Geri was very insistent that by then we should have issued the girls with management contracts.

“They had probably had that realisation: ‘Actually, we’re really quite good, and we’re not part of someone else’s experiment, we’re good in our own right now. We’re a unit. Girl Power.””

The hard work paid off: the showcase was a phenomenal success. “It was a bit of love at first sight,” Stannard recalls. “They were just fantastic straight away.”

“Pretty much all of the writer/producers came back to us and said, ‘we want to work with them, these girls have got something magic’”, Herbert recalls. “The girls put on the most amazing performance. They held court and turned it back on the writers and producers – it was as if they were auditioning them to be writing for the girls. That was a switching point – the band were becoming in charge.”

But while Herbert managed to land his “dream team” of Stannard, who had been responsible for East 17’s hit Steam, and his co-writer Matt Rowe, the band had witnessed life outside of Maidenhead. Wannabe would become the soundtrack of their fly-by-night departure from the men who made them, and into the limelight.

“About three weeks after the showcase I went back to Matt Rowe and said, ‘Oh my god, I’ve met this amazing band.’ We were complete pop freaks, and I remember saying, I think this band is really interesting.”

Stannard and Rowe were based in the pre-gentrified Curtain Road in the early Nineties. Sandwiched between electronic artists on the floor below Alexander McQueen’s studio in Strongroom Studios, they hosted Halliwell, Brown, Chisholm and Bunton – Adams couldn’t make it, and sent in contributions via SMS – in a “box room with a piano and a drum machine”.

Wannabe was written after working on a ballad called Feed Your Love, which was rejected for being too adult. The group were half-way through their three-day writing session and, after hours of effervescent chat about boys, trends and dreams, Stannard had managed to extract a theme. “I was quite intimidated by them,” Stannard recalls. “We needed to write something about that.” Brown would later call it a “sudden creative frenzy”.

“I think the only pre-planned thing with Wannabe was wanting to represent them as a band as well as the essence of what they were: that fearless, headstrong, fantastically intimidating essence. They were outspoken, right from the start.”

Amid the noise, Stannard caught the lyric, “If you wanna be my lover, you’ve gotta get with my friends”, and honed it to make a chorus that distilled the Spice Girls’ ethos of wanton independence. Brown’s rap was spun from her shouting during the session. As Halliwell later wrote in her autobiography, If Only, “we started off simply mucking about with chords and raps. Right from that moment, I think we all realised that this was something special. It happened so naturally that the song seemed to symbolise what we were about.”

The song was recorded in the same day, the only later addition being the tap of Brown’s footsteps as she ran up to the mic – a sound that Spice Girls fans will recognise as the opening of their debut album.

But Wannabe was a far cry from a traditional pop song. “It’s quite anarchic,” says Stannard. “There are a lot of critics who consider it a punk record because it’s quite wild, and the way it was recorded and written was like a punk song.

“It was in no way a contrived, crafted pop masterpiece that we sat down and specified. It was nothing like that – just a case of ‘these girls are bonkers and I love them. Let’s just record and listen and write a song and see what happens.’”

Try to unpick the lyrics of Wannabe and you’ll get stuck. The rap was stitched together to make sure each of the girls were briefly introduced; it’s a jumble of in-jokes and catchphrases, born out of living and working together for 12 months.

But read as a statement of ambition, rather than a fierce open letter to a potential lover, and Wannabe would turn out to be prescient: here were five girls from ordinary backgrounds, making the song that would define a staggering, if short-lived, career. “Now don’t go wasting my precious time / Get your act together we could be just fine,” they teased – just weeks before abandoning the men who brought them together and running off to forge their future”.

There are some other features I want to get to. Music Week ran a feature in 2020, where one of Wannabe’s songwriters, Richard ‘Biff’ Stannard recalled making the song. What is was like. It must have been so exciting working with this group who would very soon change the world and explode. Wannabe is one of the most exhilarating introductions in music history. The pairing with that infectious video, which sees the group causing trouble and ruffling feathers at the posh hotel and stuffy environment, instantly cemented this legacy. It was clear Spice Girls were something very special:

“The road to Wannabe is interesting. The song I had out at the time was Steam by East 17 and I was at a studio to see, of all people, Jason Donovan. When I got there I bumped into Chris Herbert who was the Spice Girls’ original manager. Next thing I know, Mel B was there, like, ‘Who are you?’ and she jumped on my back, and that was it! I mentioned I’d done Steam and the girls all sang it, dragged me into a room and did a three-song set just for me [Laughs]. It was love at first sight. As a gay man, too, what I saw in them wasn’t sexual, which I think was refreshing for them.

When it came to recording Wannabe, me and Matt Rowe had the backing track before they came in. At the time I was obsessing over Summer Nights from Grease and I wanted to do something like that. We were all in this tiny room with the Spice Girls sitting on the floor, and we wrote about six songs in three days – and Wannabe was the second one. With all the hits I wrote with them, the writing was really easy. All my biggest hits have taken under two hours.

I never work to a brief, but the one thing I did know beforehand was that I wanted to write about how ‘force of nature’ they were. It is quite anarchic. It was all done in one frenzy, the energy would just rise in the room whenever we did the up-tempo things. I just had to listen, observe, and help them piece it together. I heard ‘zig-a-zig-ah’ and was like, ‘Let’s put that in!’ It does mean something, but we’re never going to tell anyone what. I’ll say one thing: it’s quite rude [Laughs].

One of the myths of Wannabe – and I don’t want to knock Simon Fuller because he is a genius – is that them all being ‘individual’ was manufactured. That’s the biggest misconception about the Spice Girls. It was always there from day one, so, it was easy for me to go, ‘Well, Emma can sing the sweet bit’ and, ‘You two noisy ones do this!’ They co-wrote and sang everything. That’s where the ‘Girl Power’ thing came from – they were writing about what it was like to be five girls at that age, at that time. That’s also something I have, quite unintentionally, done throughout my career with Kylie, Marina And The Diamonds and Ellie Goulding. It’s all about empowerment because I just find that strength in women so inspiring to write about. And I always have since I was a kid, I’ve got a strong mother, so that’s where it comes from.

I don’t think the label understood Wannabe, they wanted something else as the first single but the Spice Girls’ deal meant they had creative control. That’s quite a profound bit of information that I don’t think has been mentioned an awful lot. But I always loved Wannabe. I’m always eternally proud of it, but I ended up worrying I was going to be defined by it. For a few years, I was literally having A&R people say, ‘We want Wannabe 2’ – that’s not A&R! What they meant was they wanted something unique and special.

It was life-changing on all levels. All of a sudden the whole music industry wants a piece of you. It was crazy and brilliant, but everything has a yin and yang. Obviously, for the girls it was more severe, but it’s still difficult. I was 25 or 26 at the time, which is a young age to have that happen. Suddenly you’re travelling all over the world. I started to take more risks because I could. I got drunk and started talking to Bono – his quote on Wannabe was, ‘It sounds like a night out!’ which is my favourite quote ever about the song – and I ended up working with him. I still work with all kinds of different people.

The gift Wannabe gave me was a lifetime doing what I love. It’s soppy, but true. It’s gone way beyond the money and blah blah blah. It’s about how it’s engrained in people’s lives”.

Prior to discussing the video, Stereogum spotlighted Wannabe for their The Number Ones series. There is some debate as to when we can chart Wannabe back to. Do we mark the anniversary of the writing session and the demos from earlier in 1995, or do we go to December 1995? Maybe the summer of 1996 when the song was released? I wanted to celebrate thirty years of that December recording session. I think that we will see some activity next year when Wannabe’s single release turns thirty. It would be amazing:

“The Spice Girls might've been an expertly marketed pop product, but "Wannabe" is not an especially slick song. That's its charm. The Spice Girls were dedicated to the fine art of pop-music gibberish, and "Wannabe" has plenty of that. There have been all sorts of theories about the meaning of the phrase "I really really really wanna zig-a-zig-ah," but the real correct interpretation is that it's just some goofy, fun shit to say. There's plenty of non sequitur in the "Wannabe" lyrics. The Spice Girls all howl out to slam your body down and wind it all around, and the line comes out so fast and garbled that it sounds like they're talking about bodies all around. There's also a fun little bit in the quasi-rap verse where Melanie Brown and Melanie "Sporty Spice" Chisholm indulge in the great British tradition of cheekily referencing ecstasy in pop songs: "We got G, like MC, who likes it on an..." (They cut themselves off before saying "E" -- just barely avoiding admitting that both Geri "Ginger Spice" Halliwell and Chisholm like sex on MDMA.)

But the naughtiness was beside the point. In my high school, everyone made jokes about how the "Wannabe" hook -- "If you wanna be my lover, you gotta get with my friends" -- was about some kind of reverse-gangbang situation. Maybe the Spice Girls left that implication in there intentionally, but the implication wasn't the point. The point was that the Spice Girls held their own friendship up above all, that no Spice Girl would date anyone who didn't get along with the other four Spice Girls. In pop music, that might even qualify as a message. "Wannabe" is a fun, chaotic, all-over-the-place piece of music, but it's also a statement of female solidarity.

The Spice Girls, as you doubtless already know, had a name for that female solidarity. They called it "Girl Power," and they made it a key part of their whole image. The Spice Girls didn't invent Girl Power, and the phrase had its roots in music a lot more anarchic than "Wannabe." The great American punk band Bikini Kill used "girl power" in multiple song lyrics, and Geri Halliwell first encountered the phrase when the UK duo Shampoo used "Girl Power" as the title of a 1996 single. The Spice Girls made it into a mantra, and they used Girl Power to sell a whole lot of stuff. But those commercial implications didn't make Girl Power any less potent to the kids who needed to hear about the concept.

I'm a little hesitant to speak on Girl Power as a phenomenon because I have never been a girl, but it's pretty clear that Girl Power mattered to a lot of people. I forget who, but someone has pointed out that the Spice Girls offered up an idealized version of young adulthood to the little kids who bought their records. They made it seem like all this romantic business might not be so scary if you went into it with your friends supporting you. The Spice Girls didn't exactly sing about sex or drugs, and they didn't exactly deny the appeal of sex or drugs, either. For them, friendship was the greatest state that anyone could achieve. Everything else was secondary.

Friendship is on full display in the "Wannabe" video, which is a total blast. The Spice Girls filmed the clip with Johan Camitz, a Swedish TV-commercial director who'd never made a music video. Camitz staged the clip to look like a single tracking shot, though it was really two shots spliced together. In the clip, the Spice Girls bum-rush their way into an upper-class party at a fancy hotel. They drink. They sing. They scandalize some of the older society folk and delight others. Sporty Spice does a handspring on a tabletop. Posh Spice seems like she'd ordinarily hang out at parties like this, but even she seems ecstatically out-of-place. We get a few synchronized dance steps on the staircase, but mostly, the Spice Girls work as a hurricane of happy disorder. Then, just as the cops are showing up, they flee, jumping on a bus and cackling together. The video shows exactly who the different girls are. None of them emerge as clear stars. The real star is the camaraderie that the five of them share.

Camitz, incidentally, only made one more music video: Eagle Eye Cherry's clip for his 1997 single "Say Tonight," which is also made to look like one long take. ("Say Tonight" peaked at #5. It's a 5.) In 2000, Camitz was killed when a speeding SUV hit him while he was crossing a street in New York. The SUV's driver had just been shot, and he was speeding away from his attackers. The driver died, too.

"Wannabe" came out in the UK in the summer of 1996, and it was an immediate smash. The Spice Girls' first four singles all went straight to #1 in the UK, and they were the first act ever to pull off that chart feat. When Spice came out in the UK, the album sold millions of copies, even though the UK is small enough that selling millions of records is very difficult. A British pop phenomenon might've been a hard sell in the US at the time, but the Spice Girls got a big push here, too. "Wannabe" got its US release in January of 1997, and it debuted at #11, jumping all the way to the top a few weeks later. For a few months, I heard it all over the place”.

Before discussing the original Wannabe video, in 2016, it worth highlighting this BBC article, which discussed a remake that was designed to tackle inequality for women. It was such a clever and effective idea. If the 1996 video was perhaps not as deep and was more fun and frivolous, there was a more serious and political tone to the 2016 version. Spice Girls’ members giving it their seal of approval:

“But Wannabe by the Spice Girls has been given a makeover to highlight and tackle inequality for women across the world.

It includes ending poverty, fixing climate change and tackling inequality.

The hope is that the project will catch the attention of the United Nations, which promotes international co-operation, at a meeting in September.

And it has received the seal of approval from most of the band, with Victoria Beckham calling the video "fabulous".

The new video shows female dancers from diverse communities dancing and singing along to the Spice Girls' first number one hit.

Its key messages include, "end violence against girls", "quality education for all girls", "end child marriage" and "equal pay for equal work".

Organisers say it sends out a powerful messages to girls and women everywhere and helps bring the phrase "girl power" into the 21st Century.

The video was commissioned by Global Goals, external, an organisation working to promote the UN's 17 goals, and directed by rising British talent, MJ Delaney.

The organisation has also launched hashtag #WhatIReallyWant, encouraging women to share what they hope to see achieved for women on social media.

"We've received such an overwhelming response and this is just day one," Piers Bradford, managing director of Project Everyone, tells Newsbeat.

"When world leaders gather in New York in September for the UN General Assembly, we'll be making sure they hear what people really (really) want for these goals - particularly for girls and women”.

I did not know that the initial idea for the Wannabe video was going to be set in Barcelona. Instead, it was moved to London. This article explains how there was an issue getting permission to film in Barcelona. I think it was probably a blessing, as knowing the video was shot in London gives it more of a sense of the group being at home. This British band basing their debut video in the capital. At a time when Britpop was taking off, Spice Girls offered the same euphoria and uplift, though it was distinct and different to Britpop:

“The music video for "Wannabe" was the first for director Johan Camitz. His original concept for the video was a one-take shoot of the group arriving at an exotic building in Barcelona, taking over the place, and running riot—the same way they did when they were looking for a manager and a record company. A few days before the shoot on 19 April 1996, Camitz was unable to get permission to use the building, and the shoot was relocated to the Midland Grand Hotel in St Pancras, London.

The video features the group running, singing, dancing, and creating mischief at an eccentric bohemian party. Among their antics is Chisholm's back handspring on one of the tables. Because the video needed to be taken in one shot, the group rehearsed the routine several times through the night, while a steadycam operator followed them. About the experience, Halliwell wrote: "The video I remember as being very chaotic and cold. It wasn't very controlled—we didn't want it to be. We wanted the camera to capture the madness of the Spice Girls". Virgin's executives were horrified with the final result: "the girls were freezing cold, which showed itself in various different ways", Ashley Newton recalled”.

I really love Wannabe and how it is regarded as one of the all-time great Pop songs. Even if some of the interviews with the group in 1996 were condescending and patronising, the impact the Spice Girls made on the world and especially British music was prefound. It was such an exciting time. In July 2026, when Wannabe turns thirty (in terms of the U.K. release date), there will be new celebration. I hope the group get back together and there are live dates. I wanted to mark thirty years of that recording at Strongarm Studios in London. A pivotal moment for sure. Even though the single would not be released for a while, what was recorded in December 1995 would result in a single release…

THAT changed music forever.

FEATURE: Leaves That Are Green: Simon & Garfunkel's Sounds of Silence at Sixty

FEATURE:

 

 

Leaves That Are Green

Simon & Garfunkel's Sounds of Silence at Sixty

__________

EVEN though…

IN THIS PHOTO: Simon & Garfunkel in 1966/PHOTO CREDIT: Douglas Gilbert

the gap between their first and final album together was six years, Simon & Garfunkel released some of the best music of the 1960s. I guess The Beatles were active for a similar period of time. In the case of Simon & Garfunkel, every one of their six studio albums was superb. Such a cosnsiatr4ny and rich body of work from Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel. They released two albums in 1966. I am going to talk about the first one, released on 17th January. As Sounds of Silence turns sixty very soon, it is worth reflecting on this album. The U.S. version is terrific, however, the U.K. version features the sublime Homeward Bound, which is one of the very best Simon & Garfunkel tracks. The song had earlier been released in an acoustic version on the album Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M., and it later featured on the soundtrack to the movie, The Graduate. Unfortunately, without the knowledge of Paul Simon or Art Garfunkel, electric guitars, bass and drums were overdubbed under the direction of Columbia Records staff producer Tom Wilson. I Am a Rock is the final track on the U.S. release and is another masterpiece. The songwriting of Paul Simon at its peak. However, he would continue to write brilliant music for the duo until 1970’s Bridge Over Troubled Water. Simon, of course, has this incredible and decades-long solo career. Garfunkel has a solo career too, and his most recent album, Father and Son, was released in 2024. It was made with his son, Art Garfunkel Jr.

Perhaps not seen as the best album from the duo, they did distance themselves from it. Paul Simon released acoustic versions of the songs in 1974. However, Sounds of Silence is a landmark album and one that contains these incredible compositions by this exciting new duo that helped transform the Folk scene in the 1960s. If we associate the glory days of Folk music (largely coming out of New York) with people like Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan, I think Simon & Garfunkel are not talked about quite as much. I am going to start out with a feature from Consequence of Sound from 2016. They celebrated fifty years of Sounds of Silence. They spoke with the writing duo of Goble and Bray to get these thoughts about the album:

“Sounds of Silence rode the folk-rock wave to exciting highs, with commercial slickness unrealized in the duo’s previous efforts, and it’s lasted in a curious way for its pop cultural second life in comedy.

For this latest anniversary edition of Dusting ‘Em Off, Consequence of Sound has assembled a fresh-faced new duo by the name of Goble and Bray. They haven’t expressed frustrations over differences in their art, so their partnership is a rock, not an island.

Blake Goble: Yes, yes, this is a little memetic at this point, but let’s really take a moment to listen. The simple back-and-forth of a guitar. And then the whispery calm voices open up in unison.

Fascinating, huh? How a single tune, no, the beginning of one, can conjure up a million different connotations, feelings, and vivid images. Whether it’s the soft-spoken stylings of folk-rock’s most finely harmonized duo, the jaded angst of a whole decade, or the existential dread of the oldest Bluth brother, that song is still talked about and fascinating to this day. That’s probably 83% of why we still reference the Sounds of Silence and the sounds of Simon and Garfunkel.

And yet Sounds of Silence remains fascinating for its popularity, its genesis, and its differences from Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M. This album was secretly mainstreamed by Columbia Records with electric guitars and studio sounds, unbeknownst to the pair. It featured re-hashed material, and spoke awkwardly to the creative differences of the duo (especially when considering how Simon wrote much of it while living in London). And yet, the album plays on, having just been added to the Library of Congress in 2013, while the catchy title track remains a popular hit.

Ryan Bray: I wish I could sit here and come up with a cool story about how I discovered Simon and Garfunkel, but I’d be lying. The Graduate is such a classic inroad to the duo, and Sounds of Silence in particular, and I’m just one of the film’s many victims. For the sake of context, I fell pretty hard for ‘60s and ‘70s film during my freshman year of high school. Many hours were spent wading through classic chestnuts of American cinema’s golden age, so it was only a matter of time before I found my way to The Graduate.

Blake Goble: However, when I’m listening to Sounds of Silence, the album proper, I’m very much in the poppy, folky, and, at times, even corny ‘60s vibe of that very particular moment for Simon and Garfunkel.

This is the album with the jollity of youthful expressiveness, as heard on “I Am a Rock”. Or the snappy guitars and bass on top of “Richard Cory” and “Blessed”, not to mention the former’s over-produced sound of soft organs, which comes across like something eerily similar to the Monkees. See also: “We’ve Got a Groovy Thing Goin’. You can almost imagine some geeky guy in mod hair and Austin Powers boots playing tambourine to that one”.

There are a couple of reviews that are worth highlighting. Not as celebrated as the albums that would follow – 1966’s Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme, 1968’s Bookends, and 1970’s Bridge Over Troubled Water -, I do think that Sounds of Silence is a masterpiece that deserves recognition ahead of its sixtieth anniversary. This review writes how this album still sounds fresh. Sixty years after its release, you can feel and hear how so many artists have been influenced by Sounds of Silence:

“Mr. Tambourine Man” by The Byrds was released in April of 1965. It quickly became the number one song in the country and helped popularize the sound known as folk/rock. Tom Wilson, who had produced Simon & Garfunkel’s first album, had an idea while listening to this song.

His inspiration led to the birth of a legendary career. Wilson took an obscure Paul Simon acoustic folk tune from the Wednesday Morning 3 A.M. album and added an electric guitar, bass and drums. What emerged from these additions was the number one song, “The Sounds Of Silence.”  Simon and Garfunkel quickly returned to the studio to record their second album.

Sounds Of Silence would be a commercial coming out party for the duo and a transitional album for their career. They were now poised between folk and pop but more importantly Paul Simon had begun to write the type of songs that would propel him into the upper echelon of writers.

This release is propelled by the two great and memorable singles that serve as bookends for the album. The lyrics of the title tune are equal to any that were being produced at the time as Paul Simon emerged as a rare master of imagery and story telling. It is also one of those rare songs that defines a period of time and is instantly recognizable by its first few notes. “I Am A Rock” continues this use of imagery. This sensitive and thoughtful song of loneliness is poetry set to music. The subtle up-tempo nature of the song only served to increase its impact.

Paul Simon did not leave his folk roots completely behind. “Richard Corey” and “A Most Peculiar Man” are two of the darkest songs that he would write, yet they would be musically upbeat enough to throw the listener off guard. “Richard Corey” was about a man who has everything and one who works in a factory and hates his life. Yet it is the man with the perfect life who puts a bullet in his head, which the other cannot understand. “A Most Peculiar Man” is a song of a person’s life and death which didn’t matter to anyone.

“Kathy’s Song” is one of the great forgotten tunes in the Simon & Garfunkel catalogue. This sensitive and thoughtful song of love and longing may be a very personal glimpse into the life of Paul Simon.

There were several other highlights to the album. “We’ve Got A Groovy Thing Goin'” is about as close to rock ‘n’ roll as the duo would get. “April Come She Will” is a short song in the folk tradition of love’s growing old with the seasons. “Blessed” is an early socially conscious song. There is biblical imagery (beatitudes) that form the lyrical foundation.

Sounds Of Silence has held up well over the years and still sounds fresh despite the fact that Simon & Garfunkel would quickly supersede it with their future releases. Still, it remains a very good and relevant album”.

I am going to end with a review from AllMusic. One cannot deny that some of the songs on Sounds of Silence are genius. The vocal blends of Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel. It is a majestic album that has so many highlights. Even if the du quickly followed their second album, I do think we need to acknowledge the impact and brilliance of Sounds of Silence:

“Simon & Garfunkel's second album, Sounds of Silence, was recorded 18 months after their debut long-player, Wednesday Morning, 3 AM -- but even though the two albums shared one song (actually, one-and-a-half songs) in common, the sound here seemed a million miles away from the gentle harmonizing and unassuming acoustic accompaniment on the first record. In between, there had been a minor earthquake in the pop/rock world called "folk-rock," which resulted in the transformation of their acoustic rendition of "The Sound of Silence" into a classic of the new genre, complete with jangling electric guitars and an amplified beat that helped carry it to the top of the charts. The duo hastily re-formed, Paul Simon returning from an extended stay in England with a large song bag (part of which he had already committed to vinyl, on his U.K. album The Paul Simon Songbook). Simon & Garfunkel rushed into the studio in the fall of 1965 to come up with a folk-rock album in a hurry: fortunately, they'd already recorded two sides, "Somewhere They Can't Find Me" (actually, Simon's rewrite of their first album‘s title track) and "We've Got a Groovey Thing Goin'," both featuring a band accompaniment. Davy Graham's bluesy "Anji," a rare instrumental outing by Simon, filled another slot, and "Richard Cory" filled another. The latter, Simon's adaptation of poet Edwin Arlington Robinson‘s work, was a sincere effort at relevance -- Richard Cory has every material thing a man could want but still takes his own life, a hint at one aspect of middle-class teenaged angst of the mid-'60s; high school English teachers were still using it to motivate students in the '70s. Though a rushed effort, this was a far stronger album than their debut, mostly thanks to Simon's compositions; indeed, in one fell swoop, the world learned not only of the existence of a superb song-poet in Paul Simon, but, in Simon's harmonizing with Art Garfunkel, the finest singing duo since the Everly Brothers. But it also had flaws, some of which only became fully apparent as their audience matured: the snide, youthful sensibilities of "I Am a Rock" and "Blessed" haven't aged well. And the musical concessions, on those tracks and "Richard Cory," to folk-rock amplification have also worn poorly; even in 1966, the electric guitars, piano, organ, and drums, sounded awkward in context with the duo's singing, like something grafted on, though in fairness, those sounds did sell the album. The parts that work best, "Kathy's Song" and "April Come She Will," two of the most personal songs in Simon's output, were similar to the stripped-down originals Simon had cut solo in England, and among the most affecting (as opposed to affected) folk-style records of their era; similarly, Simon's rendition of the folk-blues instrumental "Anji" is close to composer Davy Graham's original, just recorded hotter, while "Leaves That Are Green" is pleasantly if unobtrusively ornamented with electric harpsichord, rhythm guitar, and bass”.

I have a lot of love for Sounds of Silence. Turning sixty on 17th January, I wonder if anyone will provide an anniversary take on it. Reassess an album that, as I said, is not as revered as other work from Simon & Garfunkel. This is an album that I would recommend to everyone. So enduring and fantastic, go and play this brilliant album. Six decades on from its release, and its incredible beauty…

STILL shines.

FEATURE: Groovelines: R.E.M. – Losing My Religion

FEATURE:

 

 

Groovelines

  

R.E.M. – Losing My Religion

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THERE is…

an anniversary-related reason why I am including R.E.M.’s Losing My Religion in this Groovelines. One of the legendary band’s best-loved and most popular songs, it was released on 25th February, 1991. I am looking ahead to its thirty-fifth anniversary. Losing My Religion was the first single from R.E.M.’s seventh studio album, Out of Time. This was an incredible period for the group. A year after Out of Time was released, in 1992, they released perhaps their most important album, Automatic for the People. Their music in 1991 and 1992 up there with any other artist. Automatic for People is my favourite R.E.M. album, though I really love Out of Time. It remains underrated. Losing My Religion is a masterpiece song with a wonderful video. I am curious if there will be any recognition of its thirty-fifth anniversary. Losing My Religion reached four on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100. It got to nineteen in the U.K. Everything came together perfectly on the lead single from Out of Time. Get Up was the final single from the previous album, 1988’s Green. I think Losing My Religion was this shift that was unexpected. I was six when Losing My Religion came out, and I can faintly remember the song being played. It is a remarkably entrancing song. Michael Stipe’s vocal. Confessional, emotional, strong and timeless. I hear the song now and, hundred of listen later, Losing My Religion still holds this power and sound amazing and fresh. There are some features I want to get to, including some regarding its truly iconic video. I am starting out with Give to Rock and their article regarding the story behind one of the most astonishing tracks R.E.M. ever produced. It is a song that I have loved since I was a child and can listen to endlessly:

“Contrary to popular belief, Losing My Religion is not about losing faith or becoming an atheist. In fact, the phrase "losing my religion" is an old Southern expression that means "losing one's temper" or "being at the end of one's rope". As lead singer Michael Stipe explained in an interview: "It's just a classic obsession pop song. I've always felt the best kinds of songs are ones where anybody can listen to it, put themselves in it and say, 'Yeah, that's me.'" The song is about unrequited love and the frustration and desperation that comes with it. The narrator is obsessed with someone who doesn't reciprocate his feelings, and he feels like he has said too much or not enough to win them over. He imagines hearing them laugh or sing or try to reach out to him, but he knows it's all in his head. He is losing his grip on reality and his sense of self.

The Music of Losing My Religion

One of the most distinctive features of Losing My Religion is its mandolin riff, played by guitarist Peter Buck. Buck had bought a mandolin at a local music store and taught himself how to play it by listening to records. He came up with the riff while watching TV one day and recorded it on a cassette tape. He brought it to the band's rehearsal studio and played it for Stipe, who immediately liked it. The rest of the song was built around Buck's mandolin part, with bassist Mike Mills adding piano chords and drummer Bill Berry playing tambourine instead of drums. The band wanted to create a folk-rock sound that was different from their previous work. The result was a unique blend of acoustic instruments and electric guitars that created a rich and atmospheric sound”.

I am going to move to a fascinating article (one that is paywalled/subscription-blocked) about a brilliant and alternative (perhaps with a capital A too) number one. Stereogum provided their take on a song that has been discussed and dissected for thirty-five years now. Even though R.E.M. are no longer together, Losing My Religion has taken on a life of its own. It has affected so many people in different ways:

“For six weeks in spring 1990, Sinéad O'Connor's I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got was the #1 album in America. After that, the country went through more than a year without a rock LP on top. Instead, newer forms of popular music held the album charts in thrall, as MC Hammer, New Kids On The Block, Vanilla Ice, and Mariah Carey traded off the top spot. Finally, in May of 1991 -- the last week before Billboard started using SoundScan to keep track of album sales -- something funny happened. R.E.M., longtime heroes of the American college-rock quasi-underground, found themselves on top of the Billboard 200 for the first time ever.

The first week that Billboard started using SoundScan, Michael Bolton booted R.E.M. out of the #1 spot. A week later, however, Out Of Time was back on top again -- proof, if you needed it, that lots and lots of people were buying R.E.M. records. "Losing My Religion," the chiming and elliptical lead single from Out Of Time, became the sort of thing that I heard whenever my parents drove me to little league practice. This was the moment just before the fabled grunge takeover started, a time when self-serious folk-rock couldn't have been further from the American mainstream. Again, I must ask: How?

The answer is the same as always: "Losing My Religion" was the right song at the right time. R.E.M. started off pretty hot a decade earlier, and they grew steadily in the years that followed. They'd made two top-10 pop hits already, and they'd graduated to arenas when they toured behind their first major-label album, 1988's Green. R.E.M. built an audience on the road, and the music press in both America and the UK sold their legend to the world.

R.E.M. played the game while giving the impression that they were not playing the game. The band embraced some parts of the music business enthusiastically, doing tons of interviews and dropping by radio stations whenever they had product to push. But they avoided other parts -- opting not to print Michael Stipe's hard-to-discern lyrics in their liner notes, refusing to lip-sync in videos. They carved out a niche as a mainstream version of an underground band, and for a little while, they were one of the few bands that fit that definition.

And then there was "Losing My Religion." In some ways, the song was perfectly in keeping with the style that R.E.M. had already developed over six albums. In others, the track was a weirder, quieter move for a band that was already plenty weird and quiet. R.E.M. wrote "Losing My Religion" on largely-unfamiliar instruments, and Michel Stipe sang lyrics that hinted broadly at big subjects without ever lapsing into literalism. For the first time in their careers, the group made a big-budget music video for the clip, and Stipe even consented to lip-sync. The song itself was good, too. That helped.

In the world of modern rock radio stations, the one that I write about in this column, the release of Out Of Time was always going to be an event. R.E.M. were the saints of college radio. Green came out shortly after Billboard started running the Modern Rock chart, and two of its singles, "Orange Crush" and "Stand," have already been in this column. Modern rock programmers were so in love with R.E.M. that even the band's wackiest side projects got some radio play.

IN THIS PHOTO: R.E.M. in 1987: (from left) Peter Buck, Michael Stipe, Mike Mills, Bill Berry/PHOTO CREDIT: Chris Carroll/Corbis via Getty Images

In 1987, for instance, all four R.E.M. members worked on Warren Zevon's Sentimental Hygiene album. During those sessions, Zevon and R.E.M. resurrected the Hindu Love Gods, a just-for-laughs group that played a few live shows in Athens. During those sessions, Zevon and the R.E.M. guys got drunk one night and recorded a bunch of covers, mostly of blues standards. In 1990, Warner Bros. released that session as the Hindu Love Gods' self-titled album, and it was mostly ignored -- except on the Modern Rock chart, where the band's cover of Prince's "Raspberry Beret" made it to #23. It wasn't a hit by any stretch, but you have to be at a certain level when even your drunken larks make the charts.

After touring behind Green, R.E.M. took a little time off. Michael Stipe toured Europe with his friends Billy Bragg and Natalie Merchant, while the other guys played on other people's records. R.E.M. kept releasing one-off singles, usually covers, for members of their fan club. That's the kind of break that most big-deal bands need to recuperate when they're finishing up their exhausting cycles. But R.E.M. reassembled relatively quickly, and the non-Stipe band members started putting together instrumental backing tracks, keeping their core chemistry intact even as they messed around with instrumentation.

During those Out Of Time sessions, drummer Billy Berry played a lot of bass, bassist Mike Mills mostly stuck to keyboard, and guitarist Peter Buck got excited about mandolin. Buck had been trying to teach himself mandolin for a while; he brought an acoustic one with him when R.E.M. toured behind Green. Buck didn't want to make a loud rock record. Instead, he got into the idea of chamber music and lush instrumentation. The band also had another musician along for those sessions: Peter Holsapple, formerly of the dB's, a cult-favorite New York power-pop group that broke up in 1987. Holsapple was a touring member of R.E.M. for years, and he played on a bunch of Out Of Time tracks, but he eventually split with the group when he got upset over how much he was being paid.

After his bandmates worked on backing tracks for a while, Michael Stipe came in and figured out lyrics, and then the four of them figured out how they wanted the album to come together. The four of them collectively decided beforehand that they wouldn't tour behind Out Of Time, which opened up the sense of what they could do in the studio. They brought in the B-52's' Kate Pierson to sing on a couple of songs and Stipe's friend KRS-One to rap on the weird album opener "Radio Song." (Apparently Stipe and KRS used to get together and talk about the environment? I have a very difficult time picturing this.) They added in strings and horns and other instruments, and they took their time recording everything with longtime producer Scott Litt before mixing the tracks at Prince's Paisley Park studios.

Peter Buck came up with the "Losing My Religion" riff one night while he was watching TV and noodling with his mandolin. He kept his tape recorder running, and when he listened back, he heard something that he could use. Mike Mills landed on a bassline that, at least to him, sounded like something from a Fleetwood Mac record. (He had to go back to those records to make sure he didn't unintentionally steal something.) Peter Holsapple played acoustic guitar. Buck later claimed that the music took maybe five minutes to write and that Michael Stipe took less than an hour with his lyrics. The band was just in that kind of flow-state, operating on momentum and expertise.

Michael Stipe has given a few different explanations for his cryptic "Losing My Religion" lyrics, but he's always been clear to point out that the song isn't about religion as such. On the song, the band certainly plays around with churchy iconography. The music has a strange and ritualistic grace, and Stipe does have that line about choosing his confessions. But Stipe has always pointed out the Southern expression "losing my religion" -- meaning blowing your top, losing touch with your politeness -- when describing the song. (I live in the South, and I've never heard anyone use the expression that way. But maybe it's a regionally specific thing, or maybe that's just a symptom of living in the South after "Losing My Religion.")

Early on, Michael Stipe said that "Losing My Religion" was about unrequited love and obsession. In 1991, he told Rolling Stone that he wished he'd sung "that's me in the kitchen" instead of "the spotlight," and he later claimed that the kitchen line was the original lyric. From that standpoint, "Losing My Religion" is about being attracted to someone but being too nervous and unsure of yourself to say anything. You're at a party by yourself, trying to fade into the background. You're just watching someone, analyzing them, overthinking every laugh and whisper, worrying that you've said too much. Been there, brother.

"Losing My Religion" shot straight to the top of the Modern Rock chart and stayed there for eight weeks, tying a record that R.E.M. set with "Orange Crush" two and a half years earlier. "Losing My Religion" also crossed over to the Hot 100, peaking at #4 in June. (It's still R.E.M.'s highest-charting single on the big chart.) Soon, Out Of Time became R.E.M.'s first #1 album in the UK and then in the US. The album and single were huge all over the world, and the "Losing My Religion" video stayed in heavy MTV rotation for months. That September, "Losing My Religion" swept the VMAs, winning six trophies, including Video Of The Year. R.E.M. did not perform at the ceremony. Tarsem Singh became pretty famous on the strength of that clip, and he went on to a career directing big-budget commercials and visual-feast movies like The Cell and the now-lost film The Fall”.

I will come to the video for Losing My Religion soon. However, I want to get to a 2022 articles from Loudwire, where we get revelation from Michael Stipe that the song is not about him. I am not sure whether I totally buy that! However, it is interesting what Stipe says about the song, over thirty years since it was released. If you are not familiar with R.E.M. or missed them first time around then I would say that Losing My Religion is a great starting point:

“I changed one lyric, I remember... [Instead of] 'that's me in a corner, that's me in the spotlight,' [it previously was] 'that's me in the corner, that's me in the kitchen,'" stated Stipe.

He continued, "So, what I was pulling from was being the shy wallflower who hangs back at the party, or at the dance, and doesn't go up to the person that you're madly in love with and say, 'I've kind of got a crush on you. How do you feel about me?' So there's this whole relationship that's happening only in the person's mind. And he doesn't know whether he's said too much or hasn't said enough. So he's like, in the corner of the dance floor, watching everyone dancing, watching the love of his life, on the dance floor dancing with everyone, 'cause that's the most exciting person. Or he's in the kitchen, behind the refrigerator."

It appears as though Stipe was more basing the wording around a character idea, but as he reveals, "I changed the 'kitchen' to 'spotlight' and instantly, of course, the song became about me, which it never was, I don't think. I mean, I'm pretty self-aware. But the video with Tarsem [Singh] is what really pushed it over the edge. And that was probably the queerest video of all time. And that was kind of nice."

Though R.E.M. had toiled as college radio favorites for years in the '80s and were starting to see some mainstream attention over their two previous albums, it was "Losing My Religion" from Out of Time that catapulted them to the biggest success of their career.

"When 'Losing My Religion' hit - you know, I'm not a person who has ambitions; if they're there, they are unconscious or subconscious, but I did always want to be really famous," said Stipe. "And I didn't realize what that really entailed. Looking at it from the other side, it's nice to be anonymous again - I'm on the subway and nobody knows who I am. They don't look at me, anyone under the age of 30 does not even look at me because they just register old. And I'm fine with that. It's totally amazing."

"But 'Losing My Religion' was when I went from being someone that was recognized by people in my age group who love a certain type of music to being universally, wildly, insanely famous. And on the street, I couldn't go anywhere. And I was okay. It was kind of charming... But 'Losing My Religion' really changed it for me. And the one thing - if I ever had an ambition, it might be to have a song of the summer, and 'Losing My Religion' became R.E.M.'s song of the summer. And that was thrilling”.

A few features about the video. This Rolling Stone spoke with the video’s director Tarsem Singh in 2016. In terms of the concept and feel of the video, it must have been quite daunting for a director to get it right. However, what we get from Losing My Religion is perfect. The imagery of the video has created conversation and debate for years. It is so fascinating to watch. Michael Stipe so hypnotic throughout:

“Twenty-five years ago, R.E.M. released Out of Time, which eventually sold over four million copies in the United States and transformed longtime college radio darlings into a mainstream concern. It was the album’s first single “Losing My Religion” that definitively turned the group to artistic and commercial leaders of the burgeoning alternative rock movement. Up until this point, the group’s singer Michael Stipe had directed their music videos, or had entrusted them to people rooted in the art world like Robert Longo, James Herbert and Jem Cohen. Stipe had also stated publicly that he would never lip sync in a video — a claim he backed up in every video during the band’s first ten years.

Though the band and their label sensed that this was their potential crossover moment, they selected Tarsem Singh to direct “Losing my Religion.” Singh (credited as just Tarsem) was finishing up film school at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena while nearing the age of 30 and selling cars in the summer to afford tuition. He had previously directed only two videos for record labels — for Suzanne Vega and En Vogue — but the young director managed an artistic triumph. “Losing My Religion” would go on to win six MTV Video Music Awards, including Best Video and Best Direction as well as the Grammy for Best Short Form Video.

After “Losing My Religion” Singh would quickly depart from videos to produce commercials and visually stunning films including The Cell and Mirror Mirror. Here Singh tells the story of how the captivating and confounding video for “Losing My Religion” came to be.

Tarsem Singh: I had done a Suzanne Vega video [for “Tired of Sleeping”], I really liked the song and I wanted to do something in the style of the photographer [Josef] Koudelka. The Czech Republic was just opening up. My college professor at the time was from the Czech Republic and I told him, “You want to go there for a week? We can shoot this thing in the countryside. They don’t seem to have a working currency. We can sleep in a bus and do it.” He said, “OK.” That landed with the R.E.M. guys and Stipe was a fan of Koudelka. They approached me to see if I was interested in doing a music video.

The reason I only did [a small number of music videos] was I never really was a very good music video person. I’m quite the opposite from people like Mark Romanek and David Fincher. They always had a team of people and did it correctly. I never wrote [a treatment] for a song, ever. I would just have this idea and I would assume that when the right song comes along, I’ll do the music video. Later it kind of created not-so-friendly situations where bands that I love and adore would know that I liked their music and would send me a song. I would hear it and go, “That’s great.” Then I would spend some time and go, “Oh, it doesn’t fit into any of my ideas.” And everybody would say, “It’s supposed to be the other way around”.

Before ending with a brilliant feature about the video and some of the iconography, American Songwriter covered a music video that actually caused quite a bit of consternation and controversy. As it was seemingly alluding to faith and the video featured references to homosexuality, of course it was seen as outrageous and blasphemous from select idiots. What should have been a celebration was marred by the prejudicial and pious ignorance of certain groups and nations. Maybe confirming its brilliance and importance in the meantime! Giving Losing My Religion and its video more attention:

“R.E.M. is one of the most iconic bands of the 80s and 90s, given that they did not fall into the boy band and pop music fads of the decade. They were unique, subversive, indie, and appealed to music fans who disliked groups such as Duran Duran and The Cure. The songs that helped R.E.M. score such individualistic success include “Everybody Hurts”, “The One I Love”, “Shiny Happy People”, and the controversial Top 5 hit single, “Losing My Religion”.

Needless to say, the single garnered a lot of attention, and so did the music video for it. However, the attention brought on by the music video wasn’t necessarily positive. Certain Christian religions detested the video for its sacrilegious imagery. As a matter of fact, the Irish government actually banned the video from the entry country for this reason.

Why the Irish Government Banned R.E.M.’s Disruptive Video

R.E.M.’s music video is clearly controversial, but that was seemingly their intention. While the lyrics of the song do not articulate a loss of faith, the music video arguably does. This is primarily due to the fact that R.E.M. depicts several contrasting religions simultaneously. They feature religious figures such a Saint Sebastian, Thomas’s Incredulity, and several Hindu deities. Furthermore, one of the more controversial aspects is the featuring of homosexual angles, and this is where the Irish government (possibly) took the most offense.

While the depiction of homosexual angels has never been confirmed, the masses interpreted the scene as such. Aside from that interpretation, the Irish government viewed the entire video as sacrilegious. Consequently, the Irish government and its strong Catholic values banned the video from Irish television.

The song itself was not banned from the Irish airwaves, and despite this ban, the single still became a monster hit worldwide. Following the song’s 1991 release, the single peaked at no. 4 on the Billboard Hot 100 and reached the Top 20 in the UK, Canada, and Australia”.

Last year, Songs that Saved Your Life provided some fascinating details and interpretations. Reasons both personal and widespread why the song is so meaningful. They asked: “Is “Losing My Religion” a song about reconciling religious beliefs alongside unrequited queer love? Well, no. But also, of course it is”. R.E.M. created this masterpiece. The first single from Out of a Time, an album that never got all the respect it deserved, it was a seismic moment in their already successful and notable career:

“For queer fans who interpreted “Losing My Religion” to be about the turmoil of coming out, these lines are frequently cited as evidence. “Losing religion” feels familiar  to any queer person who’s been forsaken by the church. And in the early ‘90s, that was all of us. Stipe had refused to address his sexuality, so when “Losing My Religion” came out, people assumed that Stipe had as well. Stipe has never acknowledged this interpretation. In fact, he’s said he doesn't write narrowly biographical songs.

When Stipe came out three years later, the queerness and religious context of the music video that accompanied “Losing My Religion” affirmed people’s suspicions.

Up until this point, Stipe had directed most of the band's music videos or had entrusted them to visionaries rooted in the art world like Robert Longo and James Herbert. For “Losing My Religion,” Warner Brothers hired Tarsem Singh to direct. Singh said he was inspired by religious imagery, Caravaggio, and queer photography.

“I told him (Stipe) there’s a story by Gabriel García Márquez called A Very Old Man With Wings in which this freak angel arrives and nobody knows quite what to do with it,” Singh told Rolling Stone. “So it’s that story, told abstractly through the style of these guys called Pierre et Gilles, who are these iconic gay photographers that take how Indians do their gods and goddesses, then they do that to the Western gods.”

All of Singh’s references to Christian iconography are obvious. Caravaggio’s portrait of St. Thomas doubting the validity of Jesus’ resurrection is blatantly depicted  throughout the video. Except in Singh’s version, Jesus is replaced with the angel from A Very Old Man With Wings who fell to Earth and is mocked by humans. The video’s mocking might’ve struck a nerve with bullied or ostracized queer teens, even if this version of the art wasn’t supposed to be about them either.

Singh speaks to them again, though, by mixing queer and religious iconography in the style of photographers Pierre et Gilles, as he depicts androgynous angels and a very feminized version of Saint Sebastian.

The story of Saint Sebastian is itself decidedly queer. As a Christian, Sebastian was sentenced to death by a Roman archer firing squad. The image of him tied to a tree, his body pierced by arrows, has become iconic in art history — but also in queer history. Queer people have long interpreted Sebastian's persecution as a coming-out narrative, in which the martyr reveals his truth and is punished by mainstream society. In 1976, queer artist Derek Jarman interpreted the story of Saint Sebastian through a homoerotic lens in his film Sebastiane. British painter Keith Vaughan similarly depicted Sebastian.

One of the most famous paintings of St. Sebastian was by Guido Reni in the 17th century. In 1877, Oscar Wilde visited the Palazzo Rosso to see the painting.

Wilde later wrote in “The Grave of Keats,” “The youngest of the martyrs here is in lain / Fair as Sebastian, and as early slain.” Wilde would liken himself to Sebastian as a countercultural figure, even changing his own name to Sebastian Melmoth when he was imprisoned and then exiled for being queer.

Then there’s the fact that Sebastian is also known as the protector against plague, which felt in the ‘90s like another of the music video’s nods to the queer community fighting the AIDS pandemic.

Whether the music video’s interpretation for “Losing My Religion” had Michael Stipe’s papal blessing for being about religion, queerness and the reconciliation between the two, is irrelevant. Art is always subject to interpretation. Closeted people might think the song is about coming out. People having a crisis of faith might think the lyrics sing their pain. When realizing the context of the song being written by a closeted queer man, the interpretations aren’t so far-fetched”.

Losing My Religion turns thirty-five on 25th February, which seems staggering! 1991 is undoubtably one of the greatest years for music ever, and R.E.M. were a big part of that. So many people discovered the band after hearing this song and watching the stunning video. In 2011, Rolling Stone ranked it as their best song: “Whenever the mandolin was brought onstage by a roadie at R.E.M. concerts, the place would explode because everybody knew they were about to play this song. This is the one on karaoke machines. This is the one that your mom knows. The huge success of this unlikely hit catapulted the band to the next level and led to the most successful period of their career. Some longtime fans were turned off when "Losing My Religion" hit big, but the band didn't care. "The people that changed their minds because of `Losing My Religion' can just kiss my ass," Peter Buck told Rolling Stone in 1991”. In 2023, The A.V. Club placed it in second.

If confirmation were needed of Losing My Religion’s superiority, in a feature from Uncut from last November, they revisit a 2003 edition where Peter Buck, Mike Mills and Michael Stipe chose their favourite major label R.E.M. songs. Over twenty years since the band discussed the song, I know they will still see it as a favourite. It is clear their careers changed significantly in 1991 when the single came out:

“1 LOSING MY RELIGION
From the 1991 album Out Of Time.
Released: February 1991. Chart positions: UK No 19, US No 4

REM’s music has always been marinated in irony and here was the supreme example. Following Green’s several attempts at ostensibly big, dumb, self-consciously pop songs, the single that finally pushed them way over the top commercially wasn’t a ‘please-buy-me’ capitulation to mass sensibilities but one of their most ‘natural’ and personal testimonies, the mandolin and melody running as clear and as beautiful as spring water. There’s none of the forced extroversion that occasionally characterised REM at this time – rather, it sees Stipe agonising over the pressures and compromises of fame, the potential loss of integrity and privacy. “I don’t know if I can do it,” he declares, tottering along the fine line that has always defined REM: “I’ve said too much/I haven’t said enough.” Yet rather than REM putting on make-up and seeking out the commercial spotlight, for “Losing My Religion” it was the spotlight that sought out REM in their own dark, quiet corner, doing their own thing. And the world fell in love with them for it. That, and Stipe’s silly dance. Perfection.

PETER BUCK: I bought the mandolin at the end of 1989 and I wrote the song, the music, in about 1990, so I hadn’t been playing it that long and didn’t play very well – I still can’t really. I only pick it up to play “Losing My Religion”.

MIKE MILLS: The record company were using it as a warm-up to “Shiny Happy People”. They didn’t expect it to be a hit.

MICHAEL STIPE: “The One I Love” was the song that had established us on radio. So, after that, we consciously put out singles prior to the album that would totally challenge radio. The idea was, let’s blow the gates wide open, knowing that radio would play whatever we did and whatever the record company threw at them, because they had six weeks before the album. So we had this clout to release these incredibly strange songs that they’d then play on the radio, which in our minds would open up radio, open up formatting, would make it available to the Grant Lee Buffalos of the world. We were being altruistic but a little cocky as well. I mean, “Losing My Religion”? There’s no chorus, there’s no guitar, it’s five minutes long, it’s a fucking mandolin song. What kind of pop song is that?

MIKE MILLS: Musically, it’s very straightforward, but there’s something satisfying about that song, in the sense of the way the sound of the mandolin combines with the chords, the appealing, evocative nature of the lyrics – and a fabulous video. I have to admit, I’m not really a great fan of videos, but there’s something about the video for that song which made its success. And you put that together and it’s kind of a fluke, but thank goodness. I’m not even sure if that song could be a single now, if it would even be selected. But it came out at the right time, the right place…

MICHAEL STIPE: They said I stole the dance for the video to “Losing My Religion” from David Byrne in “Once In A Lifetime”. But that’s not true. I actually stole it from Sinéad O’Connor. The director of that video had a very clear idea of what it was going to be. My performance took a lot from Bollywood, Russian constructivist posters and so forth – he wore his references very clearly and openly. He wanted my performance to be complete Bollywood, where I’m sitting facing the camera like Cleopatra on the fainting couch, with my legs wrapped around each other and flowers all around me and then turning in this contorted way and delivering my line. And he worked about half a day with me doing all these poses. Then after half a day he came up to me and said, “I feel really uncomfortable.” And he went to the bathroom and vomited his guts out. Then he came back and said, “I don’t know what to do.” He had this budget, all these actors, this very expensive set and it wasn’t working. I was giving everything that I had but it wasn’t working. So I said, “Turn on the camera and let me do what I do, let me sing my lines the way I would sing them.” And I didn’t have a mic stand – so I had to do something with my hands. And I thought of “The Last Day Of Our Acquaintance” by Sinéad O’Connor – and her performance in that video was fucking beautiful. So I did my version of Sinéad. And it worked.

PETER BUCK: For Out Of Time, we’d decided to turn our back on touring, even though we assumed it was going to kill our career stone dead. We had a big meeting, in which we considered if we were going to have to cut our salaries, collect on insurance for not touring. And following the success of “Losing My Religion”, the album sold 10 million copies. So we were like, “Whatever.” But I was quite prepared for it to go the other way. My feeling was that if we can’t be successful being who we are then I just don’t want to be successful. There’s nothing worse as a fan than when you see a band with a unique identity who will then give it up just to have a hit. Because what are you giving it up for? Money? Well, hey, I have a middle-class attitude towards money, I assume I can always work or something. But to sell your soul – or sell your soul and then not sell records – think about how bad that would be. And I know people that’s happened to and now, they’re like, “What was I thinking?”.

I shall leave if there. I needed to take this time to truly get to the bottom of not only one of the best songs of the 1990s and R.E.M.’s career. Losing My Religion is one of the greatest songs ever. Almost hymnal and gospel in its power and soulfulness, whether you see it as a song about alienation or loss of faith or struggle with revealing feelings for someone and having that desire that is not required, the sense of mystery and open-to-interpretation-intrigue that makes it such a classic. Ahead of its thirty-fifth anniversary, I wanted to show my praise for a song that is almost like a religious experience. Spiritual and divine, it is a track that will be…

DEAR in the hearts for so many people.

FEATURE: Kate Bush: Them Heavy People: The Extraordinary Characters in Her Songs: James (James and the Cold Gun)/Joan of Arc (Joanni)

FEATURE:

 

 

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

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

James (James and the Cold Gun)/Joan of Arc (Joanni)

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THIS series…

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush performs James and the Cold Gun during 1979’s The Tour of Life/PHOTO CREDIT: Peter Still/Redferns

finds me exploring characters from Kate Bush’s music. In this part, I am going to 1978 and 2005. In future features, I am going to look at other albums. For now, I want to select one (of the many) character from her debut, The Kick Inside. Also, one real-life character from her 2005 double album, Aerial. I am starting out with the titular character from a song that was going to be the lead single from The Kick Inside. If EMI had their way, James and the Cold Gun would have been the debut single. I think it would have charted in the top twenty in the U.K., though it would not have been a number one like Wuthering Heights. That was Kate Bush’s choice. She fought to have Wuthering Heights as the single. However, James and the Cold Gun is significant. It is the first side from the second side of her album. Though there was no music video for it, Bush did perform it multiple times. When she was with the KT Bush band prior to completing The Kick Inside, she and her bandmates (Del Palmer, Brian Bath and Vic King) played that song. Bush campaign it up and being theatrical. Imitating gunfire and shooting the audience. A standout and staple from those sets, she did also perform it for The Tour of Life in 1979. When Bush was performing around the U.K. and Europe for The Tour of Life, the set would typically be about twenty-four songs. Some occasions when there were fewer songs, though it was a mammoth set Prior to the encore, James and the Cold Gun was performed. Originally, there was the idea of having fake blood and making it more authentic. However, staining the stage and having to clean it would have been too much. What you do get is Bush dressed in this sort of catsuit or sleek outfit and wielding a fake gun.

Perhaps problematic is an artist did that today, it was Bush being this killer. Shooting down those on the stage in this big number. A heightened and more dramatic version of what she and the KT Bush Band did in pubs and clubs. She would also wield a gun for The Wedding List. She performed that live for her 1979 Christmas special, Kate. Regarding James and the Cold Gun in that earliest incarnation, this is what the late Del Palmer said: “She was just brilliant, she used to wear this big long white robe with coloured ribbons on or a long black dress with big flowers in her hair. She did the whole thing with the gun and [the audience] just loved it. She’d go around shooting people”. This Western cowgirl. It must have been extraordinary! In terms of the live version, guitar was played by Brian Bath. Del Palmer on bass. Preston Heyman behind the kit. The studio version, which some say is weaker and lacks that punch and spectacle, has Stuart Elliott on drums, David Paton on bas and phenomenal guitar from the late Ian Bairnson. I love the album version. Even if it is not considering one of her best songs, I think it is a perfect way to open the second side of The Kick Inside. This is what Dreams of Orgonon noted in their feature:

“The song itself is a rollicking ballad, staying in B flat minor for its entirety. “James” is one of the sillier Kick Inside tracks, and ostentatiously lacks depth. This isn’t a flaw as such — it’s a perfectly serviceable explosive number. Bush sings a Western pastiche, telling of “Genie, from the casino,” who’s “still a-waiting in her big brass bed.” The song is jokey in tone, with Bush urgently warning the hero James “you’re running away from humanity/you’re running out on reality!” She describes a Western that’s been abandoned by its hero. Her strategy of putting self-awareness into genre characters has been lightly subverted. In “James and the Cold Gun” she presents a genre that’s fallen apart in the absence of a protagonist. In his absence, Bush comes to both use his genre as a playground and mourn his departure”.

Kate Bush was approached to provide the title song for the 1979 James Bond film, Moonraker, but declined as she was busy with The Tour of Life. It would have been fascinating seeing what she did. I could have imagined an all-time great Bond theme. However, Bush has explicitly said the James in James and the Cold Gun was not James Bond. It is forgivable to read into it, as it does seem like a spy song. Bush was hugely inspired by T.V. and film from the start. Wuthering Heights influenced by her seeing a T.V. adaptation of the novel. However, James and the Cold Gun might be more fantasy that reality. “You're a coward James/You're running away from humanity/You're running out on reality/It won't be funny when they/Rat-a-tat you down”. Everyone will have their image of who the titular James is.. This song was always going to be included on The Kick Inside, as it was this standout of the early live shows. Translating it into the studio was a little tricky. Vic King thought he would be playing on The Kick Inside. When there were some four-track demos laid down at De Wolfe studio in London, where James and the Cold Gun was included, Bush had a heavy cold and it gave her voice a deep or more mature sound. That notion to have the tempo slowed to half-speed at the end and then have the guitar solo was from King. Maybe there was discussion in those demo sessions that the KT Bush Band would feature on The Kick Inside. However, producer Andrew Powell went for more experienced players from bands like Pilot. Those with more studio experience. It is interesting what Graeme Thomson says in Under the Ivy: The Life and Music of Kate Bush about The Kick Inside and where it slotted. In 1978, Punk was all the rage in the U.K. Similar sounds and energy in the U.S. Disco was on its last legs and Pop was perhaps less important or relevant than it would become. Kate Bush did not really fit in with what was around in 1978. Thomson notes how Punk went Pop in 1978. The Kick Inside is a bit Sex Pistols: “a bit flared, a bit hairy, weed rather than speed, a little bit prog-rock, even, with its floating melodies, classically influenced piano, shifting time signatures, tight musicianship and poetic, occasionally cosmic lyrics”.

Thomson goes on to theorised that the “big brass bed” in James and the Cold Gun is “part of the furniture in (Bob) Dylan’s ‘Lay, Lady Lay’”. One other thing Thomson comments on is the link between The Wedding List and James and the Cold Gun. Bush’s fascination with guns, outside of their deadly purpose, and a link between death and sex. If The Wedding List is loosely inspired by François Truffaut’s 1968 film, The Bride Wore Black, James and the Cold Gun seemingly did not stem from the screen or page. Bush and her relationship with guns is perhaps underdiscussed and known. She has described them as beautiful and fantastic, though not for violent reasons. Maybe a glamour or danger. There has been more than one publicity photo of her brandishing a gun, each time taken by her brother, John Carder Bush. One at East Wickham Farm. Another where she is posing like a spy posing with a gun. There might be more examples, but I feel Bush’s connection with guns is more about sex than death. James and the Cold Gun is not romanticising guns or espionage even. It is almost about this confused, tortured, washed-out and cowardly spy: “Where lies your heart?/It's not there in the buckskin baby/It's not there in the gin that makes you laugh long and loud”. I have not even mentioned a heroine in the song, Genie (“Remember Genie, from the casino”), who seems to be the love interest. One who is “still a-waiting in her big brass bed”. If Bush disagreed passionately with EMI about James and the Cold Gun, I do think that it is a fantastic song. EMI thinking its commercial appeal would make it a perfect first single. Bush wanted something more personal, unusual and enduring. Not that she is against James and the Cold Gun. It is obviously a very special song for her. It was one of four songs for the 1979 On Stage E.P. Bush produced that with her co-producer on Never for Ever (1980), Jon Kelly. In terms of its subject, even if I think it is nodding to James Bond, Bush refutes this. The mystery makes it this alluring and intriguing song. The listener can picture who James is and what he looks like. What happened to him. He is cast in this film, though not one as exciting and flawless as a James Bond film in the late-1970s. Instead, this is a messy, dirty, drunk and almost anti-Bond take. It is interesting that Wuthering Heights and James and the Cold Gun are paired together on The Kick Inside. The album’s first single beautifully closes the first, whilst EMI’s (losing) choice opens the second.

The second character I want to talk about is another ‘J’. Featuring on an album released twenty-seven years after The Kick Inside came out, Joanni is based around Joan of Arc. If James and the Cold Gun is seen as one of the less essential and impactful songs from The Kick Inside (wrongly), then Joanni has been highlighted by several critics as a forgettable cut on Aerial. Going back to Graeme Thomson and his excellent Kate Bush book. He feels Joanni struggles to engage and is not a song that would naturally be a favourite. However, if critics in 2005 dismissed Joanni, then many would eat their words in 2014 when it featured as the third song – after Lily and Hounds of Love – during Before the Dawn. Bush opening the residency sets with Lily. This prayer and mantra that would guide the audience on this ‘journey’ they were about to have. Then one of her biggest songs, Hounds of Love. Two big and epic songs that very much get the audience excited, engaged and enthralled. Joanni could have been left out or featured low down in Act II. Instead, it was the third song. A pitch and dynamic shift, its prominent position suggests Bush has love for the song and feel that perhaps it could better come to life on the stage. I was not at any of the Before the Dawn shows at Hammersmith in 2014, so I am not sure how she staged Joanni. Graeme Thomson, talking about this “middling, somewhat hesitant song” actually “gained vigour in this context”. He was there to see Bush and her band perform this song. One that has “the sampled peal of the bells of Rouen cathedral chimed as Bush hummed and declaimed in French”. Its inclusion was to showcase the power of feminine power and spirit. Aerial’s second disc, A Sky of Honey, and Hounds of Love’s conceptual second side, The Ninth Wave, were the focal points. Bush mounting both of these incredible suites on stage for the first time. Other songs from Hounds of Love and Aerial featured alongside the odd cut from The Red Shoes and even 2011’s 50 Words for Snow.

IN THIS IMAGE: Joan of Arc

However, I would have loved How to Be Invisible or A Coral Room to feature. Bush inhabiting Mrs Bartolozzi fully – a song I will focus on for another part of this feature -, and seeing that song brought to life with washing lines, clothes blowing in the wind, maybe a washing machine projected on a screen and there being this fantastical and erotic imagery (Disney meets French New Wave cinema). It would have been incredible, though she had to drawn the line somewhere. Joanni’s inclusion feels more important and personal. That highlighting of the strength and courage of a historical woman seems to mirror something about her. Maybe how she was overlooked and criticised a lot in her career. Mocked and subjected to misogyny. Joanni goes beyond the pages of history and seems to speak more widely. A song The Quietus paired with π – called “textural mood pieces” from Aerial, I do think this is an underrated song. Whereas James and the Cold Gun makes one discuss Kate Bush and her love for film and how that inspired her, Joanni is more about her exploration of historic characters and older days. Many might think a lot of Kate Bush’s songs were about decades and centuries past. Wuthering Heights was written by Emily Brontë and released in 1847. Joan of Arc lived between 1412 and 1431. Burned at the stake aged nineteen for Rouen, Normandy, I think back to The Kick Inside. Bush was nineteen when that album was recorded. Early interviews were often sexist and patronising. I think Joanni also might nod to how Bush in her early career or how women are often beaten and ostracised. Subjected to misogyny and huge sexism. Seen as inferior, evil or witch-like. Joan of Arc was canonized as a saint by Pope Benedict XV on May 16, 1920. Her canonization in 1920 officially recognized her as a saint, following a posthumous retrial that cleared her of heresy charges from her 1431 execution. Maybe Bush’s critical acceptance and wider acclaim around 1985 for Hounds of Love was her version of being canonised.

I don’t think Bush’s connection with periods of history and historical characters is discussed enough. When hearing Joanni and the time period it is inspired by, I think about Oh England My Lionheart from 1978’s Lionheart, and how it seems to be this vision of England that is perhaps romanticised and vision of the past. Images of countryside and the open. Classic culture and historical images. mythical, idealized past and national identity. But is also referencing Richard the Lionheart (Richard Cœur de Lion) who died in 1199. Earlier than Joan of Arc, it is interesting how Bush has woven history into some of her songs. I might feature Oh England My Lionheart in one (of the many) parts of this series. I love the evocative nature of Joanni’s lyrics: “Who is that girl? Do I know her face?/Who is that girl?/Joanni, Joanni wears a golden cross
And she looks so beautiful in her armour/Joanni, Joanni blows a kiss to God/And she never wears a ring on her finger/Joanni, Joanni, Joanni, Joanni blows a kiss to God/And she just looks beautiful in her armour/Beautiful in her armour”. The fact that she switches to French (as Joan of Arc was French). Not the first time. She sang in French for her 1983 single, Ne t'enfuis pas (Don’t Run Away); the French-language version of The Infant Kiss (from Never for Ever), Un baiser d'enfant. Let’s not forget her brief but hugely impactful “Jeux sans frontières” from Peter Gabriel’s Games Without Frontiers from 1980. I wanted to feature Joanni in this character-focused feature series, as it is a case of Bush spotlighting a real figure. A vastly significant one.

Joan of Arc is important because she was a peasant girl who, claiming divine guidance, became a teenage military leader, turning the tide for France in the Hundred Years' War by lifting the siege of Orléans and leading to King Charles VII's coronation, making her a powerful symbol of French national identity, courage, faith, and female leadership, despite being burned as a heretic at nineteen. Her story transformed French morale and consciousness, inspiring generations and solidifying her status as a French national heroine and saint. There are reasons why the Maid of Orléans made history:

“Whether or not Joan of Arc was truly guided by angelic voices it remains utterly remarkable that a teenage peasant girl from a small town would be able to have an audience with a king – let alone convince him be allowed to lead his armies into war. Women in the 1400s could only hold power through their royal or religious standing, and with neither of these Joan of Arc required help in order to make her way into the court and onto the battlefield. Several fellow women rose to her assistance, including King Charles VII’s mother-in-law, Yolande of Aragon, who helped her to see the king. Joan of Luxembourg supported her when she was captured, and Anne of Burgundy insisted that Joan of Arc was a virgin at her trial. The first female court writer for Charles VII, Christine de Pizan (who was herself defying traditional gender roles as a court-employed widow), compared Joan of Arc to female emancipators in the Bible, and claimed she ‘had a heart greater than any man’s’. Despite Joan of Arc’s achievements, both her friends and enemies would see her powers supplied by either divine or evil forces, rather than by the equal abilities of her gender”.

If James and the Cold Gun was a song featured three songs from the end of Kate Bush’s 1979 tour and is more about fantasy and imagination but also compels deeper thought about Kate Bush’s connection and association of guns and danger to sex. A whole psychological side that is wonderfully fascinating. Joanni was featured, conversely, three songs from the start of her 2014 residency, Before the Dawn, and I think should make us think more deeply of one of the most important women in history. Two disparate and very different characters, they featured on albums twenty-seven years apart, yet they both showcase Kate Bush’s unorthodox approach to characters and songwriting. I am not sure of many other artists who pull together such a wide-ranging cast of characters. And it is a ‘cast’. In that, with these two examples, Bush is a filmmaker and auteur. Someone who writes songs with a more filmic lens that a narrow, personal or commercial one. If James and the Cold Gun and Joanni are seen as minor works in her staggering and peerless catalogue, pick them apart and examine them, and I feel you get something richer, more substantial and layered than critics have given them credit for. I think the title character from these extraordinary songs should lead people to re-discuss the original songs…

WITH fresh eyes and ears.

FEATURE: Spotlight: AZZECCA

FEATURE:

 

 

Spotlight

AZZECCA

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I have put out a few features…

 PHOTO CREDIT: Nat Goldie

celebrating incredible D.J.s. These amazing women who everybody needs to know. I interviewed Carly Wilford last month, and she talked about her work as a D.J., producer and artist. I also asked about gender inequality and whether things have improved for women. Whereas there was progress at one point, perhaps there have been steps back in the last few years. The first interview with AZZECCA. I want to bring in revolves around an amazing REALM Records release in 2023. Even though the interview is a couple of years old, it is a good introduction to this talent. She is also asked about imbalances and inequality for women (as D.J.s and artists) and whether things have improved. When We Dip asked the questions:

“Chicago’s hottest talent Azzecca has been making an international name for herself in the last year. A cracking release schedule including tracks on REALM, Higher Ground, a remix of TIBASKO on Another Rhythm, on top of a whirlwind touring schedule (inc. upcoming global shows like EDC Vegas, Halcyon (SF), Hard Summer (LA)) has seen the fiery DJ/producer rocketing to the top of exciting emerging stars you need to know. On top of this, Azzecca still keeps it real in her hometown with her Dirty Disco female-focused events, the most recent with Carlita last month at Smoke and Mirrors. We chatted to her about her latest track ‘Ego Death’, out now on REALM, and just ahead of her next track on the label ‘Mantra’, dropping May 19th

WWD: Can you tell us a bit about the tech process behind this one? Did it come together quite easily or take a bit of time?

Honestly, this one came together pretty quickly. I was traveling through Europe over Christmas and all of my luggage was lost, so I was stuck in a remote village in England with only one pair of pyjamas, my laptop and my headphones. I spent about 3 days working on this at my Airbnb kitchen table while I waited for my luggage to arrive. I found the vocal samples first, made the bassline, structured the track out and all of the other elements just came together. I sent it to my manager as soon as I finished it and we were both immediately super excited about it.

WWD: As well as producing and touring, you also run your own ‘Dirty Disco’ parties. These started off in Chicago, first online in lockdown, then at Spybar and Smoke and Mirrors, and you’re planning on expanding into other locations right?

Yep! Dirty Disco began in Chicago and that will always be the home of the party, but we are now looking to expand the brand a bit. I love the vibe and the message that I’ve been able to create through Dirty Disco and I can’t wait for the opportunity to bring it to other cities. We had a boat party planned in Miami during music week that was unfortunately cancelled at the last minute due to new rules placed by the city, so I’m looking forward to the next opportunity to travel with the party.

WWD: What sort of things do you think events should implement generally to make sure that everyone feels safe and welcome?

I think it all begins with messaging surrounding the club/party. Promote inclusivity, promote safety. Train door staff and security to have a zero-tolerance attitude towards predatory behaviour. Listen to people when they tell you there’s an off vibe on the dance floor. Encourage people to look out for each other.

WWD: Where do you think the scene is at right now with regards to gender equality?

I think it’s definitely moving in the right direction. There is still obviously a pretty big gap in minority representation in the industry, but there are so many amazing collectives pushing for change. Defected, He.She.They, and Femme House are all doing incredible work to bridge that gap. I think it’s still a bit difficult to be a woman in the scene, because there is a frustrating amount of misogyny – from openly discrediting women, to simply refusing to stand up for them, play their music, book them at parties or give them the set times that they deserve. It’s still there and it doesn’t go unnoticed, but I do think it’s improving”.

AZZECCA is this incredible talent who I am quite new to. I am listening to some of her sets and stuff on Soundcloud and really amazing features like this, where she spoke about her current favourite tracks and remixes. I am going to wrap things up when it comes to AZZECCA (real name Allie DeCastris). I am going to move things forward in a minute. However, I will stay in 2023 and EDM IDENTITY. One reason is because it highlights a wonderful and fascinating Dirty Disco series that I wonder whether it is still going and if it is coming to the U.K. A female-driven and safe space that is much-needed and would be favoured here. I know there will be similar events around the country, though I do not hear them talked about too much:

“First things first, we have to touch on the fact that your Other Side EP has been crushing it! With nearly two million streams on Spotify alone, what avenues have this package of tunes opened up, and can you talk about how its success has driven you creatively?

Honestly, the response to Other Side has been super overwhelming. When I finished that song, I sort of convinced myself it wasn’t even good enough to release. I thought maybe it was a bit too dry and quirky. But, seeing how well it has been received has really given me a big boost in confidence in my style and taste, and in the music I’m making. I feel like that release really pushed my career forward and now I’m getting opportunities I wouldn’t have even dreamed of before, so it’s really exciting.

Now, with an eye to the future, you’re getting ready to drop your remix of TIBASKO’s “Still Rushing.” Can you talk about what the original means to you, as well as what we can expect from your rendition?

I absolutely love the original so I was really excited when the TIBASKO guys reached out to have me remix something from this recent EP. I think they’re such a sick act and they’re making big waves, especially in the UK, so it was an honor to get to work with them. The original has this sick rave vibe to it that I love, but with my remix, I wanted to make it into something that would fit a bit more seamlessly into one of my sets. I changed their breaks into more of a 4×4 rhythm and added a pretty aggressive, acid bassline just to give it that dark vibe that you’d expect from one of my tracks.

Speaking of being in tune with the scene, your Dirty Disco event series has a reputation for being a particularly female-friendly space. Can you give us some insight into what makes these events special, especially for women?

I created Dirty Disco because I realized that most clubs had become extremely male-dominated in the city. So many of my female friends and acquaintances had stopped going out to clubs, not because they didn’t like music (they all love dance music), but because they no longer felt comfortable and safe in the clubs. I wanted to change that.

Dirty Disco has really strong female energy and I’ve been very clear through my messaging and marketing since the beginning that this is a night where I want everyone to feel comfortable. Women want to be able to feel sexy when they go out without worrying about predatory behavior, and I want the Dirty Disco dance floor to be that safe space.

I’m incredibly proud of the community I’ve built with Dirty Disco and I think my mission to eliminate problematic behaviors on the dance floor has really worked thus far. I receive so many thank yous and amazing messages after each party we throw… and not just from women. It’s more fun for everyone if the dance floor is full of all different types of people. Women and the LGBTQ+ communities are part of what has always made dance music so special, and I think no party is a success unless everyone feels like they can be themselves and let loose.

In your opinion, what can club owners, managers, and promoters be doing better in order to curb the sexual harassment and assault problems that often occur?

I honestly think the work starts before anyone even enters the doors. Messaging should be clear that no club will tolerate predatory behavior. It trickles down from there. Security should be trained to look out for signs of over-intoxication, distress, etc. Security should also be approachable and should always take people seriously when they say they’ve seen or been involved in an unsafe situation. I’m no professional, but as someone who has spent a lot of time in the crowd and behind the booth, you can just tell when there’s something off and employees at clubs should be keeping an eye out for it”.

I think most of the interviews are from 2023. It is a shame there have not been many (or any) print or online interviews since then. I do hope that there are more for 2026, as AZZECCA is an amazing creator, artist, D.J. and someone who I would love to see play in the U.K. An incredible talent and one of the world’s best D.J.s, she spoke with NOCTIS about her post-lockdown transformation and changes. How many of her female friends stopped going to clubs because they were too male-heavy and unsafe for women. How it compelled AZZECCA to do something about. As a D.J. who would have been exposed to the worast side of club-goers, her female-focused club nights have been so sorely needed. Hopefully compelling the industry to make these spacesm safer for women:

“Inclusivity seems to be a big focus for you, especially with ‘Cosimea’ being a safe space for all communities. Why is this important to you, and how do you see the role of club culture evolving in the future?

House music began as a space for marginalized communities to escape. As the dance music industry has grown and become a massive capitalistic monster, it seems like the core of the industry has been lost in many cases. I want to do my small part in bringing those values back to the dance floor. I want my parties to feel like a safe space for all. It’s also just a fact that non-diverse dance floors aren’t fun. Sharing a collective experience with people from all walks of life is what makes dance music beautiful, and I think we should all be doing our part to create those environments.

Your latest remix of Mindchatter’s ‘Corporate Shakespeare’ is a belter! How do you approach remixing a track, and what can we look forward to with your upcoming remix of Confidence Man?

I love remixes because I get a little peek into another artist’s mind and then get to morph their art into something of my own. I usually decide whether or not I can do a remix based on whether something about the track immediately stands out to me / I get an idea quickly of where I can take the song. Corporate Shakespeare already had a really cheeky, psychedelic vibe so I knew I could do something with it. I switched around the vocals to take on a slightly different meaning from the original and threw a bit of acid in and it was done. Was honestly an easy one to do as the original had so many fun elements to play with. My ‘Confidence Man’ remix was another really fun one and I’m so excited to get that out in January. I took a small part of Janet Planet’s iconic vocals and changed it into a really groovy slightly melodic track. There are moments of hard bassline groove and some really euphoric bits that I always try to incorporate into my songs.

PHOTO CREDIT: Nat Goldie

Your new track ‘IDK’ on Higher Ground has this amazing acid-fuelled vibe. Can you tell us about the creative process behind it and what kind of headspace you were in while producing it?

I wanted to make something really cheeky and fun with this track. I’ve been experimenting with different synths and acid processing and trying to hone in on what exactly I want my sound to be as I work towards making an album. ‘IDK’ was my first attempt at making something that has all of the weird cosmic sounds that I love, while also being accessible enough to exist in the commercial sphere. It’s a tricky balance trying to make really weird things sound normal. I think my next few releases will probably lean a bit more underground so it’s great to have a nice sing-along track out to play in my sets.

Arguably your breakthrough track ‘Other Side’ on Higher Ground blew up with over 13 million streams! What was it like to see that track take off, and how did it change things for you as an artist?

The success of ‘Other Side’ continues to blow my mind. Call it beginner’s luck I guess. This was the first track I finished without using a well-known sample. It came from a place of pure creativity and I guess that’s why it has been so wildly successful. There’s no formula to the structure and I wasn’t thinking about what people wanted me to be making, I just made it because I thought it was fun and weird. I wish I could go back to the days of making music with absolutely no expectations or deadlines. I feel like I spend most of my studio days trying to get back to where I was mentally when I made Other Side.

With so many platforms and ways for artists to get discovered, what’s your take on breaking through in the music industry? Any advice for up-and-coming producers trying to make a name for themselves?

I would say the most important thing is to be authentic. There is such an over-saturation of the same sounds in this industry. I feel like a lot of people currently coming up or trying to break through are following too closely in others’ footsteps instead of just figuring out what they love about music and sharing it. The success that comes from copying what others are doing will be so short-lived. If you want to be an artist in this industry I would assume you really love sharing music with people, and if that’s the case you should want to share something new and fresh. It feels so much better to have your own sound than to try to replicate others.

You’ve got some exciting releases lined up, can you give us a sneak peek of what’s to come and any collaborations you’re excited about?

My next single will be out on DGTL in October – this has been a track that I’ve been playing out for years and it feels really good to finally be releasing it. Making music this year has been a challenge with a really full-on touring schedule, so I’ll be using the next few months to replenish my demo folder and hopefully get some stuff signed to some cool labels. I’m working on a bunch of remixes and collaborations right now as well that will hopefully be released in 2025. There’s also a plan to get an album out next year but we will see – I don’t necessarily feel a ton of pressure to get that finished as I want my debut album to feel really really good and want to take the time I need to finish it”.

This is a mix of slightly older interviews with some new music. As I say, I hope there is a lot of press attention for AZZECCA next year. After one of the busiest and best years of her career, a lot more people have experienced the brilliance of this Chicago D.J. and artist. I love her tracks and I have watched some of sets and she is absolutely sensational. Perhaps the greatest achievement so far was from July 2024 and COSIMEA. Otherworldly club sounds and a chance to spotlight emerging talent – with a ‘cosmic’ vibe – in an all-inclusive space. For that alone, we all have to…

SALUTE this queen.

____________

Follow AZZECCA

Official:

https://www.azzeccamusic.com/

Instagram:

https://www.instagram.com/azzecca/

TikTok:

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

YouTube:

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

Spotify:

https://open.spotify.com/artist/2k5DY2QDU3kBi5DX7OQlWj?si=tn-wzu03R3CBT0RIEWAdDQ

FEATURE: And Let My Body Catch Up: The Importance of Dance and Movement When It Comes to the Extraordinary Legacy of Kate Bush

FEATURE:

 

 

And Let My Body Catch Up

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1993, readying herself for some trampoline work in the video for Rubberband Girl (from The Red Shoes)/PHOTO CREDIT: Guido Harari

The Importance of Dance and Movement When It Comes to the Extraordinary Legacy of Kate Bush

__________

MAYBE this has been specifically covered…

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1979/PHOTO CREDIT: Gered Mankowitz

but I think that people take various aspects of Kate Bush’s talent for granted. We often talk about her music, lyrics and her extraordinary voice. How so many artists have been influenced by her. We frame that around her innovation and sound. Rather than chart the history of Bush’s connection to dance and movement, I wanted to write why the physical side of Bush’s music is so important. When it comes to her legacy and explaining why she is so adored for her originality and brilliance, I do think that dance and movement is crucial. Not only how integral it is to her music and how she brings that out in her music videos. Think about the diversity of movement and the exceptional routines. Whether inspired by our choreographed by Anthony Van Laast, Robin Kovac or Lindsay Kemp, it always differed to what her contemporaries were doing. You can say that there are icons who were also phenomenal dancers and movement was a huge part of their work. Maybe Madonna? There is not a long list. Most of the best-loved musicians are remembered for their music and the routines and videos not so much. It may seem axiomatic to say Kate Bush id as phenomenal dancer, though we do not discuss and dissect the range of movements and how she brought something different to each video. Having such a broad catalogue, Bush could not replicate any Pop artist and do something basic and commercial. Think about her debut video for Wuthering Heights and that exceptional routine. Theatrical, intense but also quite alluring and sensual, I think a major reason why the song is so indelible and the video so lauded is because of the choreography. A routine that was devised by Robin Kovac, I think in collaboration with Kate Bush.

As a teenager, Bush did study mime and dance. She was guided formerly by Lindsay Kemp and more latterly Arlene Phillips. As Bush’s production and sonic world broadened and strengthened, you could see that come through in her videos. It is not only the videos where you feel this incredible sense of physicality and movement. Even in her photoshoots, often there was quite a lot of movement. Incredible and interesting poses. Early on, especially when promoting The Kick Inside, Bush saw herself primarily as a dancer, so that would come out in the photos. Think about some of those photos with Gered Mankowitz and how prominent movement was. Presenting this artist who was as much as a dancer as a musician. Consider the videos for Lionheart and Never for Ever. Hammer Horror and Wow both distinct and almost theatrical. Matching the songs, maybe that is a reductive word. They are both incredibly interesting routines and you can feel how important it was to Kate Bush to make sure the choreography brought something new from the song. If the video for Breathing and Army Dreamers (from Never for Ever) were less about movement, that is not to say the physical nature of the videos were not engaging and astonishing. I think a lot of Kate Bush’s legacy and her endurance stems from her bringing dance and movement into her music so prominently and inventively. Maybe Hounds of Love and The Sensual World’s videos are thew most astonishing and distinct examples of how these unique visuals and how captivating Kate Bush is hold as much power as the music itself. Suspended in Gaffa and Sat in Your Lap from The Dreaming. The latter starts with Bush on the floor and almost like a ragdoll on the floor, frantically rocking side to side. Hard to describe what she is doing. It is one of her most fascinating videos. So physical.

Moving through Hounds of Love, you can see another change. If The Dreaming was mor physical, intense or ‘quirky’, then Hounds of Love might be noted more for something more romantic or classic even. The beautiful routine and dance for Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God). Bush in incredible form for The Big Sky. Even right from the start, Kate Bush was not an artist whose videos and the routines for them were about strictly matching the music or trying to copy what was around her. Most of the Pop artists I loved as a child and love now seem to pale into insignificance when put alongside Kate Bush. In the respect they don’t have that same intrigue, electricity and allure. Allure in the sense that you are drawn into the choreography and what Bush is doing. Also, a lot of Pop videos are about looking great and the aesthetics. For Bush, I think her videos were more performance pieces and filmic. Consider also the range of looks, costumes and stories. The Dreaming’s title track bears no connection to Hammer Horror, Babooshka, Rubberband Girl or Wuthering Heights. I did not even discuss Babooshka. The second single from Never for Ever, it is perhaps one of the finest examples of how she can use minimal movement but create something enormous. There is intensity in the chorus when she bursts to life as this sword-wielding warrior queen. Or someone liberated and fierce. The chorus is Bush in a black and veiled pretty much with a double bass. Using that as a prop or partner. It is fascinating. The white dress version of Wuthering Heights is spectral and classy all at once. So much happening with her eyes. The simple-yet-brilliant routine replicated every year for the Most Wuthering Heights Day Ever. Watch Them Heavy People. Whilst it may seem goofy and parody-worthy, it is so full of charm. You cannot help but adore Kate Bush! It is a live video, so the performance and chorography had to be bigger. However, it is never overblown. It is beautiful and bizarre watchable. Bush’s facial expressions and the eccentricity almost of what she and her dancers are doing!

I love Bush almost being more an actor than a dancer for videos such as Hounds of Love. Even so, it is the way she moves and perhaps a more subtle performance. The perfect combinations of her outfits, the set and routines for songs where there is more energy and frenzy. Eat the Music from The Red Shoes or Love and Anger from The Sensual World. Again, compare them to Moments of Pleasure or King of the Mountain. I love some of her more eccentric live performances where she was on international T.V. and the backdrop was quite odd and didn’t for the song. How that side of things added yet another layer and dynamic. The incredible routines for 1979’s The Tour of Life and 2014’s Before the Dawn. For The Tour of Life, Bush would often have to be carried off stage at the very end because of exhaustion. The physical demands of what she helped conceive all contribute to this respect and endless admiration people have for her. She no doubt inspired other huge Poop artists who followed. I do want to bring in a few features that add to my argument. Or provide different takes. This is what AnOther observed in a 2017 feature:

“Bush’s appreciation for dramatic flair where her music was concerned spilled over into her sartorial choices, often to stunning results. Far from existing as separate entities, Bush’s musical and sartorial experimentation were in constant conversation, resulting in the creation of her very own visual universe. Her striking features paired with her pre-Raphaelite curls served as the template to an ever-shifting array of eclectic looks: she never shied away from bold colours (think blood reds and electric blues), extreme silhouettes (she frequently donned kimonos and gender-bending pantsuits), and a healthy dose of pure theatricality. It’s not hard to see why designers – from the late Alexander McQueen to Gucci – have frequently turned to Bush for inspiration over the past few decades, whether by setting their runway shows to her music or by referencing her surreally romantic ethos in their collections”.

Bush taking creative control of her career early on and wanted to guide the videos, aesthetic and so many different aspects. She could create and craft this world of her own, without being directed by T.V. stations, the label or what was expected of a Pop artist of her time. Even if she danced less at certain times in her career and let that slip, that is not to say there was a lack of mobility and movement. However, it is when Bush was bonding with dance and exploring her physicality in unique ways that endures to this day. This is what Far Out Magazine wrote in their feature from last year:

“At every turn, Bush’s career has gone hand in hand with movement. At the start, it was all on stage as her early tours were never just concerts; they were experiences with dancers surrounding her for full choreographed sections. Even during her comeback in 2014 for the Before The Dawn shows, they were elaborate performances that were more theatre than anything else. After the touring was done, Bush’s music videos became so essential to her legacy, with dance routines always being at the heart of it as the singer displayed her incredible skill in that world, a skill she’s honed just as carefully and passionately as her musical ability.

It is impossible to untangle the two as movement informs her output at each step. But when tracing right back to the start, to that moment right before the world knew her name when that £3000 was in her hand, it feels like the decision to walk into Kemp’s studio and hand it over to him was the making of the Kate Bush the world knows as those classes taught her how to perform and how to present herself, unlocking the vision for the star she would become to match the music she’d made”.

Dancer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui wrote an article for The Guardian and explained why he loves Kate Bush. Look around today and you can see so many different artist across multiple genres inspired by Bush and her dance and movement. How she could release these very different-sounding singles and have these routines and choreography that are so special, unforgettable and visceral. Far beyond the ordinary:

“You hear most pop musicians sing, and there's a kind of detachment. But with Kate, you feel she's completely present. She's a storyteller: her songs are full of characters, almost like small novels. There's humour in them, too – she's funny as well as sensual. She can sound like a seductress, a mother, a man, or Elvis. Some people laugh at her because it all seems so bizarre, but I always felt she was magical. There's such pressure in pop for people to behave or look a certain way, an endemic sexism; there's not much room for female performers to be who they really are. But with Kate, you feel that's exactly what she is.

I wasn't really into dance when I was younger. It's partly because of her that I began to care about it. I found out she studied with Lindsay Kemp and was influenced by many different kinds of choreography. When I was 17 or 18, I improvised a lot of dance to her work and, in college, set some choreography to a section of Waking the Witch. I realised that the way she moves helps her to be in touch with her voice – she can't stand still when she's singing. Voice is a kind of movement: you're moving the space inside of you, releasing certain things with your breathing. She made me aware of that, and it's something I've used in my own work”.

I don’t think we talk about Kate Bush’s legacy and her incredible influence in terms of dance and choreography. Whether it is the shifts in terms of budget and scope between the early videos and later ones. I think the simplicity of some of those early videos is actually more powerful and impactful! The phenomenal live performances and how that has inspired artists to this day. Even photo shoots, where you might see her in full flight or adopting these interesting moves and poses. All blended together through the decades, you can see how important and instrumental movement and dance was and is to Kate Bush. I wanted to show my love, affection and respect for…

THE Rubberband Girl.

FEATURE: Spotlight: Eaves Wilder

FEATURE:

 

 

Spotlight

Eaves Wilder

__________

I am doing a lot of…

Spotlight features, where I highlight exciting artists to watch I have not covered before. I thought I had written about Eaves Wilder, but it seems like this is an omission. I am correcting that now! Even though she has been putting out music for a few years now, she is being tipped for success in 2026. Since her Hookey E.P. in 2023 – which is when I first heard her, I think -, there have been some singles. There was a bit of a gap since 2023, but Wilder released Everybody Talks in November. An incredible new single that could form the basis of another E.P., it is a great time to dive deeper into the work of this brilliant young artist. I am going to get to a fairly new interview. However, I want to first head back to 2023. DIY spoke with the Secretly Canadian-signed nineteen-year-old about her music and how she would describe it. I was really excited discovering Eaves Wilder in 2023, and I am so glad that she continues to put out incredible music:

“Describe your music to us in the form of a Tinder bio.

Hyper-femme, fuzzy dream-rock.

What’s your earliest musical memory?

I was a Doctor Who obsessive, so Murray Gold who wrote the score was like Elvis to me for a while. Every Saturday I used to just freak out on a swing in my garden to the whole score and call it my circus, which I found some deeply haunting footage of recently.

Is there a visual world to what you’re trying to create? If so, how would you describe it?

I love music that builds worlds, that’s why I love Gorillaz. Riot Grrrl taught me the idea of reclaiming my girlhood. We all grow up really quickly, especially in London. I went to a music production college where there were only four of us girls on the course, and I realised I was dressing and acting masculine to be more respected, but I was still disrespected. So I gave up trying to do that and started leaning into the extreme opposite. Pink, lace, ribbons, stickers, toys - that’s the world I’m interested in at the moment.

Describe the vibe of one of your gigs in three words.

Joyful. Sweaty. Lispy.

Musically or otherwise, what are you most looking forward to this year?

Festivals!!! I grew up on them, wishing I could play and we’re playing loads this summer!!! I also really wanna have some under-18 gigs because I write my lyrics for teenage girls and I haven’t been able to sing them to them yet. But mainly, I got a banjo for Christmas and I need to learn it in time for the summer so I can sit on a hay bale and jig.

Which track of yours should a first-time listener start with, and why?

To quote the Sound of Music, the beginning is the very best place to start! ‘Won’t You Be Happy’ is the song where I figured out how I sing and where I figured out what my sound was gonna be”.

As Eaves Wilder’s parents are author and journalist Caitlin Moran and author and music writer Pete Paphides, there is that love and knowledge of music in the household. People who would naturally foster their daughter’s dreams and ambitions, but also provide insight and experience into the music industry and what it is like for artists. One more 2023 interview before moving things more up to date. The Line of Best Fit spoke with an artist inspired and strengthened by artists like Courtney Love and Kathleen Hanna. These incredible and vibrant women who helped lift her (Wilder) out of her sadness – or liberate her form it:

“Finding her voice wasn’t quite so painless. Overwhelmed by shyness, Wilder took to filling secret notebooks with scrawled lyrics and singing only when the house was empty. “I was very much the kid with the toy microphone, stomping around the place and shouting lyrics, but as I got older the whole thing just became super embarrassing to me,” she admits. “I joined my school choir when I was ten – mainly because we got a free trip to Disneyland – but I just mimed the whole time.”

Her bedroom was a sanctuary where Wilder evaded the social horrors of school and silently honed her craft. Like many timid teens, she also found solace on the microblogging platform turned internet hellscape Tumblr - a discovery she credits with the volant decline of her mental health. “It was full of these totally unrealistic, glamourised ideas about mental illness and I grew up on that,” she muses.

By the age of twelve, the young musician was losing her identity to a struggle with anorexia and found her bedroom refuge traded for cold, empty consultant rooms and underfunded hospital wards – a scene described in Moran’s memoir, More Than a Woman, as “a tiny rescue boat in a sea filled with drowning children.”

PHOTO CREDIT: Zachariah Mahrouche

“When I became mentally ill myself and started going to Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS), I realised how wrong that all was," Wilder tells me. "Everything about it was so ugly and horrible. It’s not pretty or cool, at all. Eating disorders are all about being as small as possible and I don’t mean just physically – but taking up as little space as you can in a room and not drawing any attention to yourself.

"And the smaller you get, the smaller your life gets. And because your life gets so small, it becomes only what you’re going through.”

Desperate to cling to a semblance of self beyond her illness, Wilder penned lyrics on these dark disparities and set musical goals to help her pull through: “When I decided to recover, music was my North Star. My mum found some of my old CAMHS reports a few weeks ago and between all the fucked-up stuff, I’d written goals like ‘practice the My Sweet Lord riff on guitar' and 'learn the solo from Uncertain Smile by The The.’"

Wilder might have grown up with parents in the industry, but making it on her own terms was always on the agenda: “From the start, I didn’t want to use my parents as a way to weasel in,” the young musician affirms, “I really wanted to make it of my own accord.”

When she turned 16, behind an anonymous email, Wilder got to work reaching out to labels, managers, and producers from the hallowed music directory. “I remember my rule was to send five emails a week,” she laughs, “and by probability, someone should reply… That’s how I made contact with people like Stephen Street, and eventually my label”.

All the new articles highlighting Everybody Talks – Eaves Wilder’s new single – say how it is this ‘return’. People who read my work know how much I hate that return, as it implies an artist has disappeared or retired and then come back to music. It is never true for newer artists. In the case of Eaves Wilder, she needed time to focus on herself and prioritise other things. She did not leave music nor tell anyone she was done – so it seems like a stupid word to apply to the single! I keep thinking I have written about Eaves Wilder, though apparently not. A bit shameful on my part! Before coming to this year, there is an interview from Under the Radar from February last year. Eaves Wilder reacting to a year (2023) of growth and new experiences:

“She also worries about living a life online for the next young generation who have grown up not knowing a time before the internet. “Social media can encourage you to have fewer hobbies and not look at different ways of expressing yourself; constantly posting all your thoughts unfiltered publicly doesn’t always lead to a positive experience. I enjoy writing songs because I spend hours and hours obsessing over them so that they say exactly what I want them to say within three minutes. I don’t really do ‘trains of thought;’ I like to think things out properly before I put them out into the world.”

Another track on the Hookey, “I Stole Your Jumper,” which centers around female revenge, took a couple of rewrites before Wilder was happy with the energy and tone of the song. “I had a lot of dark things I wanted to talk about and had initially approached them in a kind of sad girl way, but it just didn’t feel cathartic, so I tried to write in a super aggressive riot grrrl, badass way about this guy. But that didn’t feel right because all I’d done was take his clothes and burn them rather than confront him. And I’d also just watched Thelma and Louise with my sister and thought—well, my revenge story was burning his clothes, so that’s what I should write about. It actually felt more cathartic singing about that because it was completely true. It’s the song I really get lost in the most when I perform it live.”

Wilder’s previous single “Freefall” was framed as a kind of companion track to “I Stole Your Jumper,” in that it deals with coming to terms with trauma. “A lot of girls who have had a bad experience of assault, become celibate for a few years as a way of coping with the trauma,” Wilder explains. “That’s what ‘I Stole Your Jumper’ was about, and ‘Freefall’ is like the follow-up—it’s meant to sound quite sloppy and drunk. And it was when I was at a house party; it’s about the realization that you are kind of over it enough to go out again.”

PHOTO CREDIT: James Loveday

Wilder’s balance of soaring pop hooks and witty incisive lyrics, often dealing with weighty subject matters, have certainly connected with people, including the “BBC6 Music Dad” demographic that appreciated her recent cover of the Blur classic, “She’s so High” (from their 1991-released debut album, Leisure).

“I’ve always loved Blur,” she enthuses. “And Leisure especially. Graham [Coxon] loves My Bloody Valentine, and I can always hear that influence on a lot of their songs. Blur was like a gateway drug for me; they got me into Elastica which, in turn, got me into PJ Harvey, so I’m forever indebted to them. I always loved how British they were, the fact that they never put on that fake American accent style of singing, which always grates. And I think every girl wants to be that girl Damon [Albarn] is singing about. It’s also the song that when I play it live, always gets the 6 Music Dads going too, which is great fun.”

Looking back on 2023, Wilder reflects it has been a year of growth, and development as well as some incredible and unexpected moments

“It’s been a real learning curve; some amazing things happened like playing Glastonbury on the “BBC Introducing Stage.” After their impressive performance, Wilder got a call to play Glastonbury’s iconic “The Other Stage,” when an artist had to drop out. “That was crazy,” she laughs. “Some of us had only just got back to our tents from the night before when we got the call saying if we could make it we could have the slot. We only had like an hour, and our gear had already been taken from the site; we had no manager or tour manager on-site. And we were running around the site trying to borrow some equipment so we could play, but it was such fun. Another one was playing the Green Man festival, as that’s such a special place for me; I’ve gone every year, so to play there felt like a full circle; it was incredible, and it was off the back of our slot on the Other Stage that they saw us and booked us. In 2024 I’ll be going back in the studio and writing songs which will be informed by knowing what it’s like to play live, 2023 really was an amazing year!”.

Actually, I thought there was a new interview with Eaves Wilder, though it seems more coverage of her new single. I think we will get some new interviews next year. I will end with a review/feature about Everybody Talks. Just before getting there, in an interview for Music Week’s Women in Music Roll of Honour 2025, Big Life Management’s Kat Kennedy tipped Eaves Wilder as an artist to watch. She said this: “I’m really excited for the world to get to know Eaves Wilder. She’s had a couple of great EPs out already but I’ve heard some new music that’s in the pipeline and it is brilliant. She’s both fierce and adorable, with a unique voice and bucketloads of great ideas. My colleague & friend Ros Earls at 140db manages her. Ros is another massive inspiration to me in my career, and I’d love to see the two of them have some well-deserved success together”. It is exciting that there is new music from Eaves Wilder, as she is someone to watch closely. This feature gives us more insight into and background behind a wonderful new song from an artist everybody should know:

“Born from an intense moment of on-stage dissociation—a reaction to intrusive and loud audience chatter—the song harnesses a "queasy cocktail of emotions" and transforms it into a powerful, cathartic explosion. Wilder went straight to work, crafting a piece of music designed to mirror this sense of chaos and the "rising waterline of punishing intrusive voices."

‘Everybody Talks’ is built on fast, driving rhythms and artfully unrelenting, chant-like vocals, with a structure that continuously escalates in size and volume. The track's energy is deliberately relentless, echoing the feeling of an overstimulated, overwhelming modern world. As Wilder herself states, the song is a "big, dirty mantra" for when you need to "drown everything else out."

Sonically, the single is ambitious. The press release draws smart parallels to the frenzied final ascent of Pulp’s ‘Common People’ and the urgency of The Walkmen’s ‘The Rat’. Its panoramic climax, featuring back-to-back guitar and piano solos, is said to possess a gravity-defying release reminiscent of modern classics like Slowdive’s ‘Star Roving’, highlighting a sophisticated grasp of dynamic songcraft.

Lyrically, a quote from the track captures the anxiety and defiance of the modern musician: "Everybody takes. But they never give. I am running off of pure fear and adrenaline”. This raw, honest perspective is what makes Eaves Wilder feel so rooted and current, possessing a sister-energy to artists like Wet Leg and Wolf Alice.

‘Everybody Talks’ is a high-voltage statement. It’s a track that doesn't just ask for attention; it demands it with a sonic tidal wave of urgency and fury. This single solidifies Eaves Wilder not just as a talented songwriter, but as a genuine music connoisseur capable of sketching a rich new landscape influenced by dreamtime pop (Cocteau Twins, Lush) and full-on rock blast (Jane's Addiction).

The central lyrical theme of ‘Everybody Talks’ is a powerful and candid expression of overstimulation, intrusive anxiety, and defiant self-preservation in the face of modern overwhelming noise.

The song’s inspiration is highly specific yet universally relatable: an on-stage experience where the artist was confronted by loud, invasive chatter from the audience, leading to a feeling of dissociation and chaos”.

It is no surprise that Eaves Wilder is being selected as an artist to watch next year. Indie Is Not a Genre included her as one of their names to look out for: “Eaves Wilder has become a standout figure in the next wave of British indie thanks to her sharp wit, understated charisma and a knack for turning personal chaos into melodic gold. Her sound sits somewhere between grunge-tinged melancholy and crisp, hook-heavy pop, delivered with an honesty that feels both youthful and wise. Having already earned a loyal cult following, Wilder is rising fast, and her ascent shows no sign of slowing”. I would love to interview Eaves Wilder one day, as she is a fascinating artist I would love to know more about. What she wants to accomplish next year and what her creative drive has been like since 2023. How her life and experiences the past couple of years have impacted her new single and thoughts for the future. I know we will hear a lot more from her in 2026. If she is new to you, then make sure you play the music of the wonderful Eaves Wilder. She is a mega-talented and fascinating artist….

YOU cannot sleep on!

___________

Follow Eaves Wilder

PHOTO CREDIT: Dora Paphides for NOTION

Instagram:

https://www.instagram.com/eaveswilder/

TikTok:

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

Spotify:

https://open.spotify.com/artist/41NfVLegTOApdhejdXt4jQ?si=vGNAje-QQz6MEbMhdGX5fg

Facebook:

https://www.facebook.com/eaveswilder/

YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNxLHp-sS2KfwVVtH1-fCrg

FEATURE: Light Years Ahead: The Relevance, Importance and Influence of Kylie Minogue in 2025

FEATURE:

 

 

Light Years Ahead

The Relevance, Importance and Influence of Kylie Minogue in 2025

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THERE is no denying that…

this year has been huge for Kylie Minogue. In terms of chart success, her new Christmas album has reached the top of the charts in the U.K. (she could also score a Christmas number one single with XMAS). Even though there are fewer albums out in December, it is clear that Minogue is hugely popular and adored. No question why she would be a number one success. It is also the quality of the music and consistency. Kylie Christmas (Fully Wrapped) is phenomenal. The Guardian reported on the news of a huge feat for one of the greatest Pop artists ever. One of the most influential too. I shall come onto that deceleration and expand:

“Kylie Minogue has scored her 11th UK No 1 album, putting her level with David Bowie and Eminem in the league of all-time album chart-toppers.

The album, Kylie Christmas (Fully Wrapped), will sound familiar to her fans: it’s a reissue of her 2015 album Kylie Christmas (which only reached No 12), containing four newly recorded tracks and an altered tracklisting. It had already been reissued once before, in 2016, as the Snow Queen Edition. Nevertheless, the Fully Wrapped version counts as a new album in chart terms, and so continues a non-consecutive run of No 1s that began in 1988, when Minogue’s self-titled debut spent six weeks at the top.

Overtaking Abba, Coldplay, Michael Jackson, Elton John and Queen in the chart-topper list, she also draws level with Rod Stewart and U2, but is still some way off joint leaders the Beatles and Robbie Williams, who both have 15 No 1 albums to their names. Williams will be hoping to become the all-time leader in February with the release of his forthcoming studio album, Britpop.

Minogue is also in the singles chart this week with Xmas, one of the retailer Amazon’s now yearly exclusive Christmas songs. Xmas is at No 16, though will undoubtedly rise during next week’s race for the Christmas No 1 as CD and vinyl editions are released today, sales of which contribute greatly to chart positions in the streaming era”.

I grew up listening to Kylie Minogue, and she helped shape my understanding of Pop. I was listening to her earliest albums, and it is hard to believe that her debut single, The Loco-Motion, was released on 27th July, 1987. I wonder if Minogue will mark that anniversary in 2027?! Nearly four decades after that debut, Minogue remains so relevant and important. I am not seeing any articles published exploring how Minogue’s influence today is present on the Pop landscape. I am going to come to a review with Kylie Minogue from earlier in the year. If artists like Madonna and even Kate Bush – who I obviously write about a lot and know is hugely influential – are name-checked and get credit, I think that Kylie Minogue is left out of the conversation. In terms of how her career progressed. How she had this split from factory-produced Pop and created an Indie album with Impossible Princess in 1997. Then reinvented herself several times since then, this can be seen in most of the biggest Pop artists of today. I definitely think Sabrina Carpenter and Taylor Swift draw influence from Kylie Minogue. Not only in terms of their sound and mix of genres. Also, their stagecraft and live performances. I will come to two Minogue albums that are particularly influential this year. However, think about how Minogue has enjoyed some of the biggest suycecss of her life in the past five years or so. In an industry where there is huge ageism, especially towards women, Minogue has released chart-topping albums and gained a lot of press respect. DISCO, released in 2020, is partly an incorporation of 1970s Disco, Minogue’s early-2000s albums and modern-day Pop. 2023’s TENSION was another slight move forward and embraced Electronic-Dance more. When many female artists in their forties and fifties are being marginalised and are expected to produce quieter, calmer and less ‘youthful music’, artists like Kylie Minogue and Sophie Ellis-Bextor are releasing this incredible upbeat and energetic music that is the equal of what any other Pop artists are doing.

Kylie Minogue is influencing artists of today in so many ways. Putting our Christmas music and it being a chart success will give artists impetus to become more engaged with that side of things next year. Also, as we will see in this interview from 2023 from Numéro Magazine, an artist who has sold millions of albums and is this huge superstar has no ego and is very grounded. Earlier this year, they revisited their 2023 album, as Minogue released Tension Tour//Live 2025, a new album recorded during her latest tour. Minogue constantly exploring new ground and not being easy to define is something that has affected so many huge artists today:

“The flamboyant 55-year-old Kylie Minogue may be one of the greatest musical icons of the last three decades, with 80 million records sold, yet the Australian singer never stops reinventing herself. After one country and another disco one albums, she released Tension on September 22nd, 2023. This dance, house, synthpop and electro opus is tinged with the muggy atmosphere of nightclubs.

What was your mindset when you recorded that album?

I started working on Tension with my long-time producer Richard ‘Biff’ Frederick Stannard, who produced so many amazing songs for the Spice Girls, among others. We started our creative collaboration years ago and our songs are still relevant today. We started this album in a casual way. I wasn’t going to the studio every single day. It was just a couple of sessions from time to time and seeing what happened. Three months later, I felt I was ready for a new project. I got closer to writers and received several demos, like Padam Padam, Green Light, or 10 out of 10. I’m very open to that modus operando – if there’s a good song out there, give it to me! But I also love being in the studio and creating songs from scratch.

Could you tell us more about the recording process?

I record a lot by myself at home, in hotel rooms, on coffee tables, anywhere I can plug in cables, crawling around and trying not to make any mistakes. It’s the opposite of glamorous, but it’s something I love doing on my own now. It offers me so much. Not just in terms of ownership of my creations, but because it gives me a better understanding of what I’m doing and how I can explore my voice and my relationship with a microphone. Because there’s a big difference between your everyday speaking voice and your singing voice. I tend to record myself straight away, and I have no idea how many hours I’m going to spend on each single track. It’s often a very long process. The number of times I would redo a take could be pretty extreme. I am always under pressure to some extent, either because they need the track quickly or because I want it done quickly. But that’s my process and it is what it is.

How would you define this album?

This project is very different from my previous albums… My previous records had a clearly defined theme and sound – country and disco. I approached this new album like a white beach, without any definite theme. Creating Tension has given me a deep sense of freedom. It was great to make an album without a real central theme and it helped me get through difficult times and celebrate the present moment. If I had to choose one word to define it, it would be “surprise”. Every track is different. One moment you think you’re in one place, but next thing you know, you’re in a different location. I’m at a point in my life where I’ve been through a lot. I’ve been through difficult times in the making of the album, like Covid, and also personal things.

How do you explain your longevity in the music industry?

If I knew the secret, it would be a lot easier (laughs). I don’t have the answer, but I do know that I always feel inspired by multiple things. I’m always curious, and maybe that’s my destiny too. I think I’ve tried to stay relevant in my music and to look at what’s happening around me. So, in the 1990s, I drew my inspiration from the indie scene, and then, from the futuristic pop music of the 2000s. I feel like I’m naturally versatile. I like to be adaptable and to transform myself. Maybe that’s why I’ve been able to navigate through different musical genres”.

I wonder why there is very little written about a Pop queen and her undeniable influence. She has won over a whole new generation. There is so much focus on young artists today and how amazing and inventive they are, though virtually nothing about some of the legends who paved the way and have undeniably influenced them. As I said, Kylie Minogue can be heard and felt in the music of some of today’s most respected and brilliant Pop artists. Whilst her reinventions and constant curiosity is a big drive for many other artists, in terms of the sound of Pop today and a lot of the mainstream best, I do think that 2000’s Light Years and 2001’s Fever are most important. Light Years turned twenty-five earlier in the year. Perhaps Minogue’s best album, Fever, is twenty-five on 1st October. Its lead single, Can’t Get You Out of My Head, is twenty-five on 8th September (quite random, but hard to believe that was three days before the atrocities of 9/11; Pop joy and this ecstatic song’s impact soon dampened by this awful day). Maybe it has been the case for a few years, though I can really feel the spirit and brilliance of these two stunning Kylie Minogue albums in modern Pop. This regency and real golden period, I think Light Years and Fever are two of the most fascinating, important and simply stunning albums of the past few decades! I do feel like Kylie Minogue should have headlined Glastonbury this year. I am not sure if she got the call and was busy or the budget would have been too much though, twenty years after she was meant to headline but had to pull out due to a cancer diagnosis, it would have been fitting. She was owed that headline slot! Also, as I have said many times, only one woman over the age of forty has headlined the Pyramid Stage since Glastonbury started – well over fifty years ago.

It would also have been great to have two female headliners this year, as having one (the standout, Olivia Rodrigo) seemed like a step back for a festival with a real issue when it comes to booking women to headline its main stage. Also, after such a successful five years with this new highs and some of her best work ever, tied to the fact her 2025  live shows have been heralded and world-class, a Saturday night Kylie Minogue Glastonbury headline slot, where she plays 1980s early hits and a career-spanning mix of bangers, would have been among the best Glastonbury sets ever! One can only imagine what sets would have been unveiled and what would have gone down. It is a shame on this festival, and all other major ones, that Minogue was not asked to headline. Still this big issue with age and booking younger artists to headline. Also, it would highlight and cement her reputation as an innovator and godmother of modern Pop. In terms of the women (and men) who look up to her and have clearly been inspired by her. Minogue will not mind too much, as she has ended 2025 with a massive success.

A number one album and wrapping up one of the most successful half-decades of her life, she will enjoy this peaceful Christmas: “Reflecting on her Christmas plans, Minogue said: "I will be with my family. I will be very quiet compared to the year, just some stillness. "I say that but family Christmas is a whole different version of hectic … Let’s get through Christmas day and get to Boxing Day. I’m just looking forward to some really good and much-needed family time”. It is disappointing that there is little discourse, discussion and dissection when it comes to Kylie Minogue and the incredible influence she has on modern music. Not only Pop. Much wider afield. Her impact is not restricted to motivating and firing up young Pop artist. Also breaking barriers and smashing an ageist industry. In terms of her quality, constant ability to reinvent and remain relevant, together with her boundless energy and joy, it shows that women over forty deserve much more representation, respect, opportunity and airplay! There should be essays and think-pieces about Kylie Minogue and how she has shaped and affected modern music. A deep interview with her when Minogue discusses her musical influences and what she thinks of the current crop of Pop artists who are no doubt indebted to her in some form or the other. In so many ways, the iconic and peerless Kylie Minogue is…

HELPING shape the best Pop music of today.

FEATURE: Spotlight: Olive F

FEATURE:

 

 

Spotlight

PHOTO CREDIT: Matt Moorhouse for HUNGER 

Olive F

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IT is hard not to be…

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

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

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

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

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

PHOTO CREDIT: Matt Moorhouse

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

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

SC: Where are you based now?

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

SC: Oh, wow. What happened?

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

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

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

SC: How do you describe your sound?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

KEEP your eyes peeled.

____________

Follow Olive F

Instagram:

https://www.instagram.com/olivef__/

TikTok:

https://www.tiktok.com/discover/olive-f

Spotify:

https://open.spotify.com/artist/58ELqEa08lx83Qh49jOFJn?si=xz0LrXlGQca6ZGUj_W_NMQ

YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCeJr66HpIC6q6UkZgAhCrAA

FEATURE: Spotlight: Bria Salmena

FEATURE:

 

 

Spotlight

Bria Salmena

__________

AN album that I missed…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What artists were important to you becoming a musician yourself?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A very long career.

____________

Follow Bria Salmena

PHOTO CREDIT: Matthew Tammaro

Official:

https://www.briasalmena.com/

Instagram:

https://www.instagram.com/briasalmena

TikTok:

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

Spotify:

https://open.spotify.com/artist/5OlCrYhc9fZxibnKwahGr8?si=zfneFHOrTT6H5ABkAO1eDw

YouTube:

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

FEATURE: My Artist of the Year 2025: ROSALÍA

FEATURE:

 

 

My Artist of the Year 2025

PHOTO CREDIT: Inez & Vinoodh for ELLE

ROSALÍA

__________

EVEN though…

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

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

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

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

PHOTO CREDIT: Inez & Vinoodh

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PHOTO CREDIT: Alex G. Harper

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

When did you start working on this album?

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

How did you approach Lux differently?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Exactly. Very well said, yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

WHAT comes next from ROSALÍA.

FEATURE: Spotlight: Linska

FEATURE:

 

 

Spotlight

Linska

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ALONGSIDE Spotlight features…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PHOTO CREDIT: Amber Asaly

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

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

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

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

LIE ahead.

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Follow Linska

Instagram:

https://www.instagram.com/linska

TikTok:

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

Spotify:

https://open.spotify.com/artist/5f7jxYF5js7lD5lMyIPUBq?si=qAv9q1x3T4Wv6PKD7WWmhg

YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCL1o8kQgu3rL7--XvyjcZDg

Facebook:

https://www.facebook.com/linskamusic

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

FEATURE:

 

 

When I Think of You

Janet Jackson’s Control at Forty

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ONE of the best albums…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A music icon.

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

FEATURE:

 

 

Light It

J Dilla’s Donuts at Twenty

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I think I have noted this before…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE wonderful Donuts.

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

FEATURE:

 

 

The Continuing Issue of Ageism

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

 

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

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ALTHOUGH this is not strictly music-related…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

WITH greater respect.

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

FEATURE:

 

 

How to Be Devisable

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

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

__________

THERE is a thing with songwriters…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SO startling and spellbind.

FEATURE: The Great American Songbook: Otis Redding

FEATURE:

 

 

The Great American Songbook

PHOTO CREDIT: The Everett Collection

Otis Redding

__________

I have written about…

PHOTO CREDIT: Getty Images

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LEGEND lives on.

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

FEATURE:

 

 

Leaving It Open

PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush

Kate Bush and Technology Changing Her Voice and Opening Possibilities

__________

ALTHOUGH Kate Bush…

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

“How did you get on with rhythm machines?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ALL the love in the world.

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

FEATURE:

 

 

Dancing Shoes

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

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THIS must rank alongside…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SEISMIC debut album.