FEATURE: The Digital Mixtape: Emma Bunton at Fifty

FEATURE:

 

 

The Digital Mixtape

PHOTO CREDIT: Mark Hayman

Emma Bunton at Fifty

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I have to mark…

IN THIS PHOTO: Emma Bunton alongside her fellow Spice Girls, Geri Halliwell, Mel C, Victoria Adams and Mel B, in 1996/PHOTO CREDIT: Universal Music Group

the upcoming fiftieth birthday of a music giant. One-fifth of the legendary Spice Girls, Emma Bunton has also released some incredible solo music. Though people will know her best for her work alongside her fellow Spice Girls. There is hope that the quintet will reform one day. Do some more live work. I am not sure what it will take for them all to be on the same page, but you feel something might happen soon. The group’s debut single, Wannabe, was released on 8th July, 1996, so there may be some thirtieth anniversary celebration. As Emma Bunton turns fifty on 21st January, I have assembled a mixtape of some of the best Spice Girls moments and some solo cuts. Before that, AllMusic provide a biography of Emma Bunton and her fascinating career:

“English singer/songwriter Emma Bunton is best known as one fifth of the turn-of-the-century pop group the Spice Girls. After capping a whirlwind global takeover with their blockbuster late-'90s albums, the members pursued various solo paths that fit their personalities and musical upbringings. For the former Baby Spice, this meant a focus on bright dance-pop inspired heavily by 1960s French pop and Motown. Bunton issued her debut A Girl Like Me in 2001, following with a pair of efforts that carried her into 2006 with Life in Mono. Working behind the scenes with other artists and participating in various Spice Girls-related reunions and activities over the years, she released her first official album in over a decade, My Happy Place, in 2019.

Emma Lee Bunton was born on January 21, 1976, in Barnet in north London. She kept busy with extracurricular activities such as modeling and doing commercials. Bunton's time spent at St. Theresa's Roman Catholic primary school was typical, yet her passion for her hobbies turned full scale as she spent her formal theater years at Sylvia Young Theatre School. Already a natural in front of the camera, she left secondary at 16 and began studying drama at Barnet Technical College. It would be several years later that she met the group that would make her a star.

Bunton was still a young, bubbly teenager when she was christened Baby Spice in 1994. The rest of the decade was a whirlwind of winning the world over with the Spice Girls' infectious pop energy. Five years spanned a career in entertainment, and at the dawning of the new millennium, Bunton had other ideas. She was now a woman in her twenties with a bright mind full of creative ideas. Her soul sisters were already moving on with solo projects and Baby Spice wouldn't be left behind.

Free Me

She guested on Tin Tin Out's "What I Am" in 1999, but two years later, a fresh-faced Bunton returned with her debut album, A Girl Like Me. Its first single, "What Took You So Long?," shot to number one on the U.K. Singles Chart during its first week of release in mid-April, sustaining a two-week reign. Bunton became the only Spice Girl to have a solo single stay at number one for more than one week. Her chart success continued into 2003 with "Free Me" and "Maybe," two singles from her second effort, Free Me. The sophisticated pop sound caught on with fans and earned Bunton her third hit, "I'll Be There," in 2004. Free Me was released in the States in early 2005, and her third album, Life in Mono, in 2006.

Greatest Hits

The Spice Girls re-formed in 2007, releasing a Greatest Hits album and embarking on a sold-out worldwide tour. They later launched a musical, Viva Forever, based on their songs, and performed at the 2012 London Olympic Games. A second reunion tour, sans Beckham, was announced for 2019; in the months preceding it, Bunton launched her own fourth solo album, My Happy Place. Produced by Metrophonic and heralded by the '60s-style single "Baby Please Don't Stop," it was composed almost entirely of cover versions of some of Bunton's favorite songs by the likes of George Harrison, the Bee Gees, and Norah Jones”

Many happy returns to Emma Bunton for 21st January. Part of this historic group that were a massive part of the 1990s and inspired so many other artists, let’s hope there is more music from her at some point. My Happy Place was in 2019, so you would imagine there are some new songs ready to be put onto an album at some point. Because this fantastic artist turns fifty on 21st January, below is a mixtape of some standout solo and Spice Girls songs. Few have had a career more illustrious and successful…

THAN Emma Bunton.

FEATURE: A Masterpiece of a Title Track: Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love at Forty

FEATURE:

 

 

A Masterpiece of a Title Track

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush and Gow Hunter in the video for Hounds of Love/PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush

Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love at Forty

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WE had…

some incredible Kate Bush celebrations last year. Hounds of Love, her fifth studio album, turned forty on 16th September. It did garner a lot of new interest in this masterpiece. There are two singles from the album that are forty this year. I will look at The Big Sky closer to its fortieth on 21st April. However, Hounds of Love’s title track turns forty on 17th February. There is a lot to note about the song. Kate Bush wrote the title track at her house early on in the recording process for Hounds of Love. It reached eighteen on the U.K. singles chart. It seems incredibly low for such a remarkable song. Many critics see it as her greatest song. Hounds of Love has this remarkable video that Bush directed. The first time she directed herself, though she did co-directed and assist on videos before this. I have written about this song quite a few times. I am going to repeat some information that I have used in other features. Kate Bush discussing the song and what influenced it. However, as it turns forty on 17th February, there are new things to bring in. Thanks to the Kate Bush Encyclopedia. We get some interview archive about this astonishing song:

“[‘Hounds Of Love’] is really about someone who is afraid of being caught by the hounds that are chasing him. I wonder if everyone is perhaps ruled by fear, and afraid of getting into relationships on some level or another. They can involve pain, confusion and responsibilities, and I think a lot of people are particularly scared of responsibility. Maybe the being involved isn’t as horrific as your imagination can build it up to being – perhaps these baying hounds are really friendly.

Kate Bush Club newsletter, 1985

The ideas for ‘Hounds Of Love’, the title track, are very much to do with love itself and people being afraid of it, the idea of wanting to run away from love, not to let love catch them, and trap them, in case the hounds might want to tear them to pieces and it’s very much using the imagery of love as something coming to get you and you’ve got to run away from it or you won’t survive.

Conversation Disc Series, ABCD012, 1985”.

I do wonder why Hounds of Love was not considered as the first single from the album. As strong as Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God) is, I wonder if Hounds of Love would have got a stronger chart position is it was released first. I think the video is one of Kate Bush’s very best. Although Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God) was the first song Kate Bush wrote for Hounds of Love, its title song led to that album title. It is such an interesting idea for a song. That idea of portraying love in this way. I wonder how many other artists before that used animals as metaphors for love. If you look at the album cover – shot by her brother, John Carder Bush -, Bush is lying down and embracing her two hounds, Bonnie and Clyde. They are sleepy and non-threatening, so it maybe offers an opposite take on the title track. The connection between the cover and the track. Maybe the cover shot is Bush taming those chasing hounds. Although we do not see dogs chasing Bush in the video, there is that suggestion that something in the dark is chasing her. Perhaps not literal hounds, there is this spirit or psychological shadow that seems like hounds baying for blood. Instead of talking about heartbreak and doubts in a traditional or cliché way, Kate Bush took this different approach. The fear of commitment and being committed was something preying on her mind. Rather than run from these chasing hounds, perhaps they are friendly and are not scary. It is this idea that I have not really heard other artists exploring. Such a clever angle from Kate Bush! As much as I love other title tracks, there is something about Hounds of Love that stands aside. Bush seemingly running away from love but also towards it. She was dating Del Palmer at the time she wrote the song. Perhaps, a point in life when others her age might have been getting married and having children, that might have been looming in her mind. Bush maybe committed to music and work and putting her relationship aside. It is wonderful to pick Hounds of Love apart and what compelled her to write the song.

I will round things off soon. When MOJO ranked Kate Bush’s fifty greatest tracks for their feature, they put Hounds of Love at number one. I think a lot of journalists today would share that love and opinion. From its writing, performance and production, this is a masterpiece that will always be relevant. Themes and thoughts that so many people can identify with. There are so many takeaways from the lyrics. I shall come to that:

“No matter how refined the circumstances of its creation – built at leisure in Bush’s new 48-track studio – or how newfangled its production – still tangible in the hi-tech stabs and pads of Fairlight, and the crispness of Jonathan Williams’ cello – Hounds Of Love is red in tooth and claw, its breathless, atavistic fear of capture mixed with almost supernatural rapture. Love is thundering through the psychosexual woods, hunting down somebody terrified of what it means to surrender to another person. The song opens with a quote from British horror film Night Of The Demon but that’s the only moment it feels like theatre. From then on, Hounds Of Love maintains a dizzying emotional velocity, the relentless double drumming of Charlie Morgan and Stuart Elliott stamping down on the accelerator. Bush’s voice might dip and soften, but those drums are merciless, while the strident backing vocals, like a hunting horn call, goad her on if introspection threatens to slow her down. It never lets up, every line heightening the pitch, closing the distance between song and listener. It ends with a suddenness that makes it seem like she’s hit the ground and you’ve hit it with her, breathlessly waiting for an answer to the question: “Do you know what I really need?” The uncertainty, however, is not reflected in the confidence – the perfect, dazzling completeness – of the song’s execution. On Hounds Of Love, Kate Bush is going at full pelt, chasing the horizon, running her vision to ground. Not really the hunted, but the hunter all along”.

In terms of lines that stay I your head, there are so many: “Among your hounds of love/And feel your arms surround me/I’ve always been a coward/And never know what’s good for me”. Also: “Take my shoes off/And throw them in the lake/And I’ll be/Two steps on the water”. The poetry in those lyrics. Whilst other artists would offer something more basic and ordinary, Kate Bush’s choice of language is fascinating. More cinematic and visual than anything. Writing a song that she definitely wanted to see visualised. It is a shame that I could not get a ticket for 2014’s Before the Dawn and see Kate Bush perform this live. It is one of those songs that is not talked about as much as others, yet it is perhaps her crowning achievement. I might pick apart the lyrics for another feature. When it comes to a lyric I just referenced, Bush explained its meaning to Doug Alan in 1985: “In the song ‘Hounds Of Love’, what do you mean by the line ‘I’ll be two steps on the water’, other than a way of throwing off the scent of hounds, or whatever, by running through water. But why ‘two’ steps? Because two steps is a progression. One step could possibly mean you go forward and then you come back again. I think “two steps” suggests that you intend to go forward. But why not “three steps”? It could have been three steps – it could have been ten, but “two steps” sounds better, I thought, when I wrote the song. Okay”. I did not know about the 12” version of the song and how it is different to the album version. I prefer the version we hear on the album, though it is really interesting hearing this other version. Even though I do not like their take, Futureheads covered it in 2004. I said this when discussing the song last year for a run of features around the fortieth anniversary of Hounds of Love. How the band suck all the power and drama out of the song and turn it into this weird versions that is more dancey and jokey. Quirky and just odd. I am not sure why people love this cover! Listen to the only version that matters: the one Kate Bush recorded. Turning  forty on 17th February, I wanted to spend some time with this incredible song. One that is always going to hold this amazing resonance and gravity. It send shivers down the spine when you play it! Whilst some might argue, there are many who consider this iconic title track…

HER finest work ever.

FEATURE: Kate Bush in 2026: How Do We Keep Potential Fans Engaged Without Any Big Anniversaries?

FEATURE:

 

 

Kate Bush in 2026

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in a promotional photo from 1989

How Do We Keep Potential Fans Engaged Without Any Big Anniversaries?

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NEXT year…

IN THIS IMAGE: And If I Only Could I’d Make a Deal With God by Susie Hamilton

is going to be very different to this one when it comes to Kate Bush. As I have said in another feature, this one has been pretty busy in terms of album anniversaries. We have celebrated forty-five years of Never for Ever, forty years of Hounds of Love and twenty years of Aerial. Kate Bush gave an interview earlier in the year about the animated video for Little Shrew (Snowflake). She has posted updates and there has been a lot of activity. Bush put out Best of the Other Sides. This was released because of fan demand. There was War Child Presents Sound and Vision and Kate Bush bringing together fifty-two artists to interpret a lyric from Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God). I have missed some stuff out. The point is, there has been a lot happening this year. In 2027, it will be the forty-fifth anniversary of The Dreaming (her fourth studio album) and fifty years since she signed with EMI. 2028 is going to truly huge. However, what comes next year? I have written a feature about the fortieth anniversary of Hounds of Love’s fortieth anniversary. The Dreaming’s Sat in Your Lap turns forty-five. No big album anniversaries. Kate Bush cannot really remaster anything more. In terms of other anniversaries, I guess there is some stuff from 1976. Apart from Kate Bush taking her driving test twice in 1976, there is not too much we can celebrate from that year. However, that EMI deal is a milestone: “Kate finally settles a recording deal with EMI. The contract is for four years, with options at the end of the second and third year. Kate receives a 3,000-Pound advance [and 500 Pounds for publication rights]. EMI are content for Kate to take time to write songs, sharpen her lyrics, train her voice and generally have time to "grow up". Kate pursues her dancing, first at the Elephant and Castle, South London. But after seeing Lindsay Kemp perform in Flowers, she attends his classes at the Dance Centre in Covent Garden. After Kemp goes to Australia, Kate trains with Arlene Phillips, choreographer of Hot Gossip. [It is probably at this time that Kate's association with Gary Hurst and Stewart Avon-Arnold, her longtime dancing partners, begins.]”. This year has provided us some treats. I do like Best of the Other Sides, so I wonder whether there could be any reissues or compilations that could satisfy fan demand.

After Stranger Things used Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God) and its streaming numbers were given another boost – something I will focus on in another feature -, there is building interest in Kate Bush. More and more fans coming her way. We cannot know for sure whether Bush will release a new album next year. She may wait until 2027. Of course, there will be opportunities for Kate Bush to post to her official website. I am sure that there will be stuff happening. Maybe another project like she did with artists creating images based on some famous lyrics. That was tied to Hounds of Love turning forty or Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God) very much being in the spotlight. I can see nothing coming next year that would provoke celebration and a lot of new fan interest. Journalists tend to tie any celebration and specials around album anniversaries. Rarely spotlighting albums and work unless there is a big anniversary or something like the Stranger Things boom. 2026 is going to be a bit sparse in that sense. Kate Bush is aware that a lot of new listeners have discovered her work, so they will need to look back and do their own research and digging. Will Kate Bush give any interviews and will there be any news coming? Maybe not. I think there will be a lot of requests from filmmakers to use her music, though I don’t feel we will get any big viral moments where one of her songs has this new lease because it is used on the small or big screen. I don’t know if any Kate Bush books will be published, so it is all up in the air at the moment. Unless there is new music released, will there be a bit of an issue keeping new fans engaged or recruiting new ones?

I guess it is not a major concern. The momentum Kate Bush’s music has at the moment and the fact many modern-day huge artist are inspired by her and cite her as such means that this will keep some heat on her. However, next year is one where there are few natural and notable opportunities to keep her music in the spotlight. I am sure that Kate Bush will be active in other ways. I did get the impression, when she spoke with Emma Barnett at the end of last year, that she was done when it comes to retrospection and anything other than new music. That keenness to do something new and engage in the recording process. If we don’t get an album until, say, 2027, what fills the gap in 2026? I would say it is a perfect opportunity to remind people about Kate Bush’s music in general and how we do not need to peg everything to big anniversaries or wait for these viral moments. I do hope there is more exploration of songs and albums not talked about as much as others. I have been looking more closely at The Sensual World and how fascinating that period was. In 1989, as we headed to the end of a decade where Kate Bush released four albums, Bush was releasing some of her most remarkable work. I do hope that we get a documentary or two. Kate Bush is probably not keen to feature in any of them, but I know for a fact one that I am involved in comes out next month. Maybe there will be books about her. Perhaps another entry in the 33 1/3 series (after Leah Kardos’s Hounds of Love book from last year). It is vital that we keep hooked those who may have discovered Kate Bush through Stranger Things. Or younger listeners that have discovered her in other ways. Also, hook in those who do not know about her. 2026 is not going to have many anniversary opportunities and these projects where Kate Bush’s name will be out there. It is going to be hard to follow…

SUCH an eventful 2025.

FEATURE: Butterfly Kisses: Exploring the Possibility of Mastered Version of Kate Bush’s Early Demos

FEATURE:

 

 

Butterfly Kisses

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush as a child was photographed by her brother, John Carder Bush. This photo would appear in his book, Cathy (first published in 1986)

Exploring the Possibility of Mastered Version of Kate Bush’s Early Demos

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PERHAPS this could never happen…

but I think the early recordings and demos from Kate Bush should be remastered and given a layer of gloss. Kate Bush has remastered her studio albums and recently brought out Selections from the Other Sides. I wonder how many people know about these earliest recordings. Maybe going back as far as 1972. There is a sense of privacy about them. Bush never wanting them to be heard by the public. There have been some unauthorised and bootlegged albums with Kate Bush demos and early recordings. As Kate Bush Encyclopedia say in this article, Alone at My Piano was released in 1988. It is fascinating thinking about these tracks. Maybe hit and miss in terms of quality, I do feel like there is a case to make some available more widely. Perhaps Kate Bush would not want this to happen. Think about all the artists coming through that are inspired by Kate Bush, I feel like having access to these early recordings would be really inspiring. It gives us insight into this incredible artist as a teenager or child. There have been so many bootlegs through the years. This article is about another 1988 compilation. This time, concerning live performances. Also, in this article, we learn more about the first volume of the Cathy Demos. I would love to hear a remastered version of A Rose Growing Old. Such fascinating lyrics: “Slipping past the chimney-pots/Down among the ashes, away from old times/Why must I self-indulge in memories?/I should be celebrating to a moving melody/But it hurts me, it hurts me/Honey, honey, it hurts me/And I’m feeling like a rose growing old/Old, old, old, old”. This demo from 1976 might have been considered for Kate Bush’s debut album, The Kick Inside, though it was never realised officially.

I am not sure whether Kate Bush would be as against the idea of releasing her demos as she might have been a few years ago. Even if they are scratchy and a little lo-fi, most are out there anyway. People can access them. Wouldn’t it be better to have these available in a better form? I guess it would technically not be a remaster, as these are demos and not studio recordings. Kate Bush’s videos have not be upgraded to HD or 4K, so it might be a leap to think she would go back fifty years and bring out a compilation of her demos. The fact we are talking about 1976 means that a fiftieth anniversary retrospection next year would be desirable. You can read more about the history of her demos here. We can go back as far as 1972. This was when Kate Bush was thirteen/fourteen. She was probably not be referred to as ‘Kate#. More likely her full name, Catherine, or Cathy. This school-aged child putting to tape her very earliest ideas. 1976 is when we are talking about the fifth recordings. You can read more about them here. Discogs have some tracklisting here. Maybe an odd anniversary to mark, it is worth exploring 1976 and significant events happening then. Bush signed with EMI in 1976. These are all really important moments. In 2011, Record Collector examined the cutting room floor. The demos and early recordings that many fans might not know about. They look at, among other things, the pre-fame, post-signing period between 1976 and 1977:

“A four-year contract was signed in 1976 and Kate was given time out by EMI to develop. She explained on the BBC’s Tonight show in March 1978, “I signed the contract and there was just feelings that we weren’t sure how to handle it. I myself felt I was very young and not capable of handling the business… And I think they were also worried that I was too young, and that they were looking on it as a long-term project.” Kate moved to London, where she shared a house with her brothers and continued to develop her vocal style at the honky-tonk piano she had bought with some of her EMI advance. She studied dance in Covent Garden under Bowie’s former mentor Lindsay Kemp, and would later recall her daily schedule. “I’d get up in the morning, I’d practise scales at my piano, go off dancing, and then in the evening I’d come back and play the piano all night. And I actually remember well the summer of ’76… we had such hot weather I had all the windows open. And I just used to write until, you know, four in the morning. And I got a letter of complaint from a neighbour who was basically saying ‘Shut up!’, because they had to get up at like five in the morning, they did shift work, and my voice was being carried the whole length of the street I think, so they weren’t too appreciative.”

In 1989, a batch of demos from this period surfaced, representing the first significant leak of Kate’s demo material. Initially dubbed the Phoenix collection, they went under this moniker as the recordings were originally broadcast on Phoenix radio station KSTM by former EMI employee John Dixon, who had been instrumental in plugging The Kick Inside to America. Confusingly, the broadcast seems to have taken place some seven years prior to the leak, so it seems uncertain as to why the tapes took so long to reach wider circulation. It consisted of 22 piano demos including five songs that turned up in more developed form over her first three albums: The Kick Inside and Oh To Be In Love, on The Kick Inside; Hammer Horror and Kashka From Baghdad on Lionheart; and Violin on Never For Ever. Three tracks from The Early Years tape also appeared in more refined form – Something Like A Song, The Gay Farewell and Disbelieving Angel – while the other 14 remain unique to this collection. There has been some debate over the correct titles of these tracks and they have circulated under a bewildering variety of names. Fortunately the titles were read on air during the Phoenix broadcast, presumably from the original tape box, and we present those titles here as they are, most likely, the titles as written by Kate: The Kick Inside (Brother)/Hammer Horror/It Hurts Me/Stranded At The Moonbase/Kashka From Baghdad/Surrender Into The Roses/Oh To Be In Love/Rinfry The Gypsy/On Fire/Inside A Snowball/Dali/Where Are The Lionhearts/Violin/ The Craft Of Love/The Gay Farewell/Something Like A Song/Frightened Eyes/The Disbelieving Angel/Nevertheless You’ll Do/Come Closer To Me Babe/So Soft/The Rare Flower/While Davy Dozed. The set first appeared in cassette form and suffered from major quality degradation: the tracks ran too slowly and the levels were muddied. However, a series of bootleg EP releases titled The Cathy Demos – issued in five 7” volumes over the following few months – had clearly been pressed from the master recordings as they had a remarkably clear sound and none of the speed issues horribly clear on the tapes. As a final surprise, the fifth volume debuted a song titled Organic Acid, a lengthy piece consisting of Kate singing and playing to accompany brother John’s reading of one of his poems.

It wasn’t present on any recordings from the Phoenix broadcast. It’s unfortunate that bootleg CDs of this collection – issued under many titles such as Cathy’s Home Demos, Practise Makes Perfect, Alone At My Piano, Shrubberies, If You Could See Me Fly, Passing Through Air – have all been sourced from inferior quality tapes, all of which run far too slowly and are compromised by audio deterioration. The best, Alone At My Piano, comes from a fairly acceptable version of the Phoenix tape. The worst are taken from bad vinyl pressings of the inferior tape sources. More than 21 years from their appearance, the best source remains the five 7” Cathy Demos EPs. In December 1993, Kate was questioned at length about the possible official release of the demos on the Toronto radio show Modern Rock Live. Her response: “Um, no.” Having mastered her vocal style and with a clutch of finished songs at her disposal, the next step was public performance, so with the help of her brothers, Kate recruited a group, The KT Bush Band. Their pub sets mostly comprised standards from the Stones, The Beatles, Marvin Gaye et al, but James & The Cold Gun, a track which appeared on The Kick Inside and which presumably exists as a piano demo, was debuted at these gigs. We can be confident that some of the shows were recorded because in 2009, Del Palmer posted a recording of the band performing Come Together in surprisingly good quality on his MySpace page. And while Kate isn’t at her best covering The Beatles, a greater insight into the brief live history of The KT Bush Band would be more than welcome and evidently possible”.

I do love the demos and things that she did before her first professional recordings. However, so many of these songs are in such a basic format. It is a shame that there is not this desire to master/remaster them. You could say that most artists have early demos and they do not make them publicly available. However, there is such this fascinating body of work before her professional career that I think are really important and could be made more widely available. A fifty year loom back at those Cathy Demos and those songs. In terms of the quality and endurance of these songs, there are some that maybe are a little similar and will pass you by. However, there are some real diamonds. Kate Bush might be totally against the notion. She has remastered her albums and has no issue looking back. These demos are a vital part of her legacy, and there are so many people that would love to hear these home-recoded songs in better condition. These are remarkable recordings and show where Kate Bush would soon head. A glimpse into…

WHERE this genius began.

FEATURE: The Original Red Shoes… Will We See a Kate Bush Memorabilia Auction in 2026?

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The Original Red Shoes…

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

Will We See a Kate Bush Memorabilia Auction in 2026?

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THERE are a lot of questions…

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 2011 in a promotional for 2011’s Director’s Cut/PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush

and theories I am going to put forth when it comes to Kate Bush in 2026. I shall not expand on this here, as I am will do so in another feature, but next year is going to be a quieter one regarding Kate Bush. In terms of album anniversaries and big events, there is not as much potential as there was this year. However, I have been thinking of non-album events and anything connected with Kate Bush. I have written about Kate Bush in terms of an exhibition or museum. How you should have this exhibition that celebrates her work. Kate Bush is a big David Bowie fan and has been since she was a child. Bowie has had this V&A exhibition and celebration. Spotlighting this icon and his incredible legacy. Maybe she would find that too exposing. However, I do think there is scope to have a photo exhibition or something bigger. However, I don’t think it is the case that there is nothing in the vaults. Kate Bush has ac auctioned stuff before, though it tends to be signed stuff. Occasionally, you get rarities and things that have not seen the light before. In terms of memorabilia, you can go to auction sites and find signed things and rarities too. Not a lot that would really stand out. I mean like set designs from The Tour of Life (1979) or anything from her video shoots. I can’t believe that everything has been destroyed or given away. I do feel like there is this archive or artefacts and incredible things that could raise much-needed money for charity. I am thinking more in terms of costumes and possessions that appeared during her career but that time has passed. Perhaps Kate Bush would see this too as exposing, but as it would be for charity and she could make money for incredible causes, I am curious why this has not been done before.

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1979 during The Tour of Life/PHOTO CREDIT: Rob Verhorst/Redferns

In a previous feature, I have asked whether outfits from photoshoots or things that appeared in The Tour or Life were kept. You imagine they must be somewhere. Look at the music videos through the years, and you can see all of these amazing visuals. Whether it is the set or what Kate Bush is wearing, has everything been given away? Most artists have relatives or estates that do keep stuff like this. Rarer recordings or things that have not been announced. It is great that Kate Bush will sign albums and that can raise money, though fans would probably bid more for something more oriignal and deeper. It would not be this lurid thing, fans vying for outfits and costumes. As Kate Bush will probably not have enough in storage where there could be this Bowie-like exhibition, surely there are a few things that she has kept aside that could raise money. For me and so many others, it is a chance to own a piece of Kate Bush history. She has remastered and reissued albums. Perhaps the priority is on that side of things. However, Kate Bush has not really given much away when it comes to anything personal outside of music. The average fan might not be able to afford many of the artists that would be auctioned. However, we have this visual and audio archive on Kate Bush and you sort of wonder whether anything physical remains. If there is nothing in the vaults regarding unheard music or outtakes, does Bush have a similar attitude when it comes to memorabilia and artefacts? Not wanting to put anything out there that is not authorised or complete.

Kate Bush is a huge supporter of charities like Crisis and War Child. She has raised money for the latter recently, and I believe she will want to keep this going into next year. How will she do that? She could sign some albums, though I feel like this has been done enough and it seems a bit basic. Also, and maybe I am alone, but I do not find an autographed album that exciting. It is a lot of money to spend on something with a squiggle on it. However, a unique piece of clothing, set or anything related to Kate Bush is much more tantalising. If next year is going to be a very quiet one, I think that Kate Bush will think about charity and something bigger. Maybe this has been done before, though I have been looking on search engines and trying to find something. Maybe back in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, there were these times when fans could get their hands on some Kate Bush memorabilia. Beyond the T-shirts, albums and signed things. I don’t have a specific list, yet there are items I hope exist that I would love to bid on. I mentioned The Tour of Life, so any of these costumes or, better, designs or even original programmes would be really amazing. I love the hat Bush was wearing in the Them Heavy People video. I think it is a fedora. As that was nearly fifty years ago, you would imagine that has been disposed. You hope that Bush had foresight that she needs to keep some of this stuff but has never talked about it. A lock-up or somewhere these items have been stored. Even as recent as 2014’s Before the Dawn. For those who were not there – including me -, there are items from that residency that would be great to own. I do wonder where it all goes, and my fear is that a lot has been destroyed. However, Kate Bush is full of surprises and you can never say for sure that she would not have kept things that could be auctioned. War Child would benefit hugely if there was this memorabilia auction. Let’s hope, next year, that some of these wonderful items…

COME to light.

FEATURE: No Nostalgia Here: Why Talk '90s to Me Strikes a Personal Note

FEATURE:

 

 

No Nostalgia Here

IMAGE CREDIT: Podmasters

Why Talk '90s to Me Strikes a Personal Note

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ONE of the best new podcasts…

IN THIS PHOTO: Miranda Sawyer/PHOTO CREDIT: Sophia Evans/The Observer

out there is Talk '90s to Me. You can see the podcast on YouTube and listen to it on Audible. Follow it on Instagram and TikTok. It is hosted by the brilliant Miranda Sawyer, whose brilliant book, Uncommon People: Britpop and Beyond in 20 Songs is out now. I have listened to the audio version. Sawyer interviewed a lot of Britpop/1990s artists, though her most notable and talked-about one might be when she spoke with Oasis’ Liam Gallagher in 1995. Gallagher said he hoped Blur’s Damon Albarn and Alex James would die of AIDS. That quote made front-page news. Her new podcast is really incredible. I was a teenager in the 1990s, and I think that there are misconceptions about the decade (Miranda Sawyer was a guest on this recent podcast, answering the question around how we remember the '90s). Rather than it being a nostalgia podcast or a show like Fearne Cotton’s Sound of the 90s, this is one that examines and explores different aspects of '90s culture. It is a shame not that much is written about it. The Guardian did select it as one of their picks ahead of the first episode of the podcast in August: “Miranda Sawyer gets into full-on nostalgia mode in this series dedicated to the days of Cool Britannia, Girl Power, Trainspotting and much more. If you’ve not had your fill of Oasis yet, her first episode is a loving deep dive into fandom and how one Mancunian outfit went where no 90s band had gone before. Says former Q editor Ted Kessler, it all came down to the Gallaghers’ undeniable strain of “electricity … chaos and anarchy”. Miranda Sawyer is an incredible journalist, and she wrote about Cool Britannia earlier in the year for Tatler, as Oasis reformed and hit the road. For Talk '90s to Me, Sawyer spoke with Blur’s Dave Rowntree, and we do get some perspectives into Britpop and that time. The podcast does correct some misconceptions and mis-impressions. Rather than guests talking fondly about the time and there being no depth, we get this wider examination of the decade.

From musicians to comedians and authors, the range of episodes already out there is incredible. Aside from music, Miranda Sawyer and her guests have talked about iconic films, culture moments and T.V. shows. Sawyer is a brilliant interviewer and dives really deep. Incredible research and this amazing rapport with her guests, I do hope that the podcast lasts for a very long time. I do think that I get a bit nostalgic about the 1990s and what it was like. I hope a future episode explores what it was like for women and the realities for them. In terms of the tabloids and the imbalance and discrimination that was rife through the decade. I have been thinking about festival headliners and how few women were headlining. It is clear that the 1990s was a blast and a hugely memorable time. In terms of pop culture especially, it was monumental. The music was particularly fine and influential. I have blocked out a lot of the '90s and what was happening. Getting insights into events like the KLF burning a million quid, the different boybands that were around in the decade, to the significance of shows like Seinfeld, I have reassessed the decade and connected with things I had forgotten. I wonder if there is a book that looks more generally about these topics. A wider look at the 1990s. I want to move to The Times and their four-star review of Miranda Sawyer’s Talk '90s to Me:

“If you’re my age, listening to people talk about the 1990s is rather like being forced to endure a conversation about a legendary party you weren’t invited to. You might term the affliction generational fomo. Look, I’m glad you all had a marvellous time taking Ecstasy and voting for Tony Blair, but do you have to rub it in? I find myself assuming a glazed expression. “A pervasive sense of cultural optimism, you say? Oh, [wincing] that sounds wonderful … and the music was brilliant too? How nice for you. And low house prices as well? [grimacing now] … well I’m glad you had such a good time … but if you’ll excuse me I have to wail despairingly to myself in that corner over there.”

I would very much like to believe the Nineties were not all they were cracked up to be. Maybe the reasonably priced houses and inexorable spread of liberal democracy had a downside? Alas, the journalist Miranda Sawyer’s brilliant (but upsettingly joyful) new podcast Talk ’90s to Me confirms it was indeed a blast. Damn it.

“There is an optimism throughout the Nineties,” she observes to her second guest, the Trainspotting author Irvine Welsh (what Nineties podcast would be complete without him?). Welsh suggests the decade “really started in ’87 [or] ’88”. The crucial factor was rave. “People just started dancing in fields and factories.” Sawyer suggests that in the rave scene “you got that mix of characters that wouldn’t have met … spotty students, football hooligans”. That discovery of unexpected unity among different kinds of people led to “a certain optimism that kick-started that decade”. Unity …? Optimism …? Truly, the past is another country. We millennials prefer to subsist in ever tinier cultural niches while using the internet to abuse anyone even slightly different from ourselves.

At least I can console myself with the thought that I would have loathed raving and taking drugs in fields. Blissfully dancing outside experiencing a sensation of ecstatic oneness with thousands of my fellow human beings sounds like hell on earth to me. It’s one aspect of Nineties fun I’m glad I missed out on. In some ways I suppose it’s nice to belong to a generation for whom introversion and social incompetence are de rigueur. And compared with that of your average pasty, porn-addled, bed-bound, TikTok-hypnotised Gen Z misanthropist my social life looks like something out of The Great Gatsby.

Welsh is rather stern on the dullness of the young. “I was at a festival outside of Dublin at the weekend,” he says. “And I’m thinking, I’m having a good time and I’m … I’m dancing. But the drug intake, the alcohol intake compared to how this would have been 20 odd years ago is just, it’s practically nothing.” It’s a weird unnatural inversion of the old days when puritanical elders used to chide the young for their fast-living ways. Instead, Welsh thinks young people should “be getting out and having a bit of fun and causing a bit of mischief, you know?” Have fun? Cause mischief? Absolutely not.

I liked Welsh’s semi-mystical explanation for why the decade was so enjoyable. “The Nineties was the last party,” he says. In the same way that before a “tsunami the animals know that something’s coming”, people had an intuitive sense that “the internet was coming”, with the impending tyranny of algorithms, AI, big tech and the hollowing out of the cultural industries. So people thought, “Let’s take everything from every era we’ve enjoyed … because it might be a long time before we can have it again.” Nonsense, of course, but a compellingly eerie thought”.

Not that I have any cache to talk about anything from the 1990s but, for me, it was the music and the physical media. The magazines and the tangible nature of music and how that fostered my love of music. So much of what has already been covered on the podcast has really hit me on a personal level. In terms of the music episodes, my favourites have been around Madonna and George Michael. Guests John Sizzle and Jack Guinness sharing their expertise and insights. I am going to wrap up in a minute. I want to bring in this review before I wrap up:

“Journalist and broadcaster Miranda Sawyer had a front seat to the various cultural machinations that defined the ’90s. She has recently captured this time perfectly in book form with her fantastic Britpop book, Uncommon People, and so she is uniquely placed to provide a fresh viewpoint on a decade that has already been poured over ad nauseum across several mediums. And so, it makes sense for Sawyer to return to the decade again with her new podcast, Talk ’90’s To Me…

While many of the topics covered so far are well worn touchstones by now (Oasis, Princess Diana, Nirvana etc), Sawyer also shines a light on some of the darker, less well-travelled corners of the ’90s with episodes on George Michael, The Prodigy and Madonna, and while some of the topics she chooses are clearly alien to her (she must be the only person of her generation not to have an in depth knowledge of Friends), the addition of various guests ensures that there is always at least one expert on hand to provide compelling insight.

The guests cover the full gamut of ’90s pop culture with musicians (Dave Rowntree from Blur), writers (Ted Kessler, Andrew Harrison) and fashionistas (Plum Sykes) and this holistic view is what ensures that Talk ’90s To Me never feels like a podcast that is treading over the same old ground. While there is definitely an absence of working class voices (Sawyer herself sounds almost comically posh – her pronunciation of ‘Blur’ as ‘Blurrrrrrrrrgh’ is particularly jarring), this is also a reflection of the lack of the working class representation in the arts in general, although the ’90s was a lot more diverse in terms of class within the arts than the cultural landscape we find ourselves in now.

Talk ’90s To Me works for both grizzled ’90s survivors such as myself and for newcomers alike. I can’t wait to see where it goes from here. It has the potential to become the most essential ’90s podcast since Quickly Kevin, Will He Score?”.

I do think that there are these deep-rooted impressions of the 1990s. Maybe we get too misty-eyed or nostalgic. Whilst Talk '90s to Me is positive and we do get to hear guests talk about amazing films, shows, music and events from the decade, there is a deeper side. Some of the darker elements. The podcast has this rolling playlist (which I am including at the bottom), where a guest selects their '90s track. Mine would be Charles and Eddie’s Would I Lie to You? If you have not heard or seen the podcast then do go and check it out, as I really love it! Rather than this blast of empty nostalgia, Talk ‘90s to Me is, in its own words, a podcast that is about “Diving deep into a wild decade of chaos, creativity and hedonism – from Oasis to ‘Friends’, from grunge to girl power, from Kate Moss to alcopops to ‘Trainspotting’ and beyond. Join award-winning Observer journalist and Smash Hits graduate Miranda Sawyer as she meets the people who were really there for the decade of Cool Britannia, Cantona and the Chemical Generation”. Spend some time in this wonderful decade celebrating….

THESE common people.

FEATURE: Spotlight: Absolutely

FEATURE:

 

 

Spotlight

PHOTO CREDIT: Emily White for NOTION

Absolutely

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EVEN if I do not like…

 PHOTO CREDIT: Emily White

her musical moniker, there is no denying the fact Absolutely is a remarkable talent who is going to have a massive 2026. I am new to her, so I wanted to include Absolutely here. Before getting to a new interview, I want to go back to 2024. In 2023, Absolutely released her debut album and supported RAYE on her 21st Century Blues World Tour. NOTION spoke with Absolutely about her incredible rise and debut album, in addition to her love of fantasy and sci-fi:  

“In a universe where genres collide together and innovation sparks, Abby Keen, known by her stage name Absolutely, creates music that seems to transcend time itself. Her other-worldly R&B melodies echo as if journeyed from a distant future, before gracefully landing at their rightful destination: Earth.

Absolutely has previously worked behind the scenes, co-writing hits for big name artists like Normani, Saweetie, David Guetta, Anitta, and Tinashe, to name a few. But now, she boldly steps into her own celestial spotlight as a solo songwriter. Her debut album, Cerebrum, released in 2023, pushes back against conventional music, elevating her creativity to new heights.

Growing up in a musical household with her Ghanaian-Swiss mother and English father, Absolutely and her older sister, global star Raye, developed a deep love for gospel, soul, jazz, and church music. Inspired by her upbringing and guided by her profound connection to God, spirituality and the cosmos – Absolutely is light-years ahead, creating her own distinctive world of experimental beats and bold dreamy soundscapes. 

Congratulations on the release of your debut album, Cerebrum. You described each track on the album as corresponding to a different room or chamber of your mind. What inspired you to take this conceptual approach?

Although the thirteen songs on Cerebrum are all sonically and lyrically very different, they all co-exist in the same world. I view the songs as an artistic translation of everything that goes on in my mind. They all inspired different feelings in me and so each song is my expression of that particular feeling. I find it difficult to express myself verbally, but speaking in music comes naturally to me – I always say that music is like my first language. I speak through melodies and the words come after.

Do you draw inspiration from any other sources, such as in literature, film, or personal experiences?

I love everything about sci-fi and fantasy. I’ve always had quite a big imagination and I grew up loving fairy–tales and fictional stories. I even used to make my own little story books. I think that childlike imagination never left me, it’s just expanding and evolving. I love to create new worlds, visually and sonically, into something that doesn’t already exist so that I can escape. My friends and family have always said that I’m a big daydreamer and I space out a lot, that is probably because I mentally run away to these places in my head, places that nobody else can see but me. I’m excited now that the more I create, I’m able to share these worlds with fans.

Could you describe the emotions you hope your listeners will feel as they immerse themselves in your musical journey?

A huge goal of mine, for the music I’m creating, is that I want it to wake up every cell in our bodies so that we snap out of the trance that life has us caught in. It’s so easy for us to take for granted the beauty within the small details of the world and I believe that we were created to immerse ourselves in the many wonders of God’s creation. However, the leaders of this world want us to be stuck in a system that benefits them, where we are numb to our surroundings and we go through the motions in a version of the world where everything is grey and where every day feels the same. I want my music to make us remember that we are here to enjoy our lives and to spark something in people that they may have forgotten ever existed. Through my music, I hope people can feel seen and free to just be”.

There are a few more interviews that I want to cover off before closing. CLASH chatted with Absolutely in August about sisterhood, All Points East and maintaining honesty. Even though she released her debut album in 2023, I think 2026 is going to be the biggest year for her yet. I believe she is going back on the road with RAYE for her new tour:

“A self-expressed introvert, it took Absolutely – Abby-Lynn Keen – some time to truly find herself onstage. It took a disastrous support slot with FLO – when myriad technical difficulties forced her offstage – and a pep talk from her loving father for Absolutely to come into her own. “Oh I was so scared!” she recalls. “But then my Dad took me to one side, and just said: look, what’s the worst that can happen? And I just let go. I let go of all those thoughts, and realised that I’m just here with people.”

It’s this everyday girl-next-door charm which makes Absolutely such a riveting figure. She’s writing as much for her peers, her friends, as herself and this lets her lyrics resonate with honesty. Take ‘I Just Don’t Know You Yet’ – an undoubted breakout moment, it came from a daydream at home.

“I was in my bed thinking really heavily about my future husband,” she laughs. “It was just really on my heart, and I had this spiritual connection to him somehow, without knowing who he was or why I was thinking about him… so it was really strange.”

When she went to the studio with Dave Hamelin, the two clicked into this emotion, and the song “just poured out… it honestly came together really easily.”

“I feel like he’s not like chasing anything,” she says of her studio comrade. “A lot of producers I’ve worked with feel like they’re trying to chase something that sounds like a hit. But he’s led by his freedom of creation. And it’s really fun, because I love creating whatever I feel like.”

Reflecting on her 2023 debut, she notes that “I wasn’t paying too much attention to the story and the lyrics. I just went, well alright… and whatever came out, came out. But now I’m focussed on what I want to say on each song – which takes longer, but the songs are deep, and intentional.”

With a flurry of live shows – and a fashion week event with her sisters – coming up Absolutely is itching to get back into the studio. “I’m gonna try and make more music,” she says firmly. “I feel like I’ve been in a space for the first time where I haven’t been creating as frequently. Usually, I’m prolific, so I want to get back to that space.”

As a kid, Absolutely adored the vocal range of Ariana Grande, but more recently she’s been vibing with Imogen Heap and Caroline Polachek, in addition to mainstays like Stevie Wonder. This is what soothes her, and inspires her – these are the people who she views as embodying success.

“Success is me being able to be 100% myself and not compromising that,” she notes. “And sometimes I feel like I have to do a little bit of that… you know, to play the game of the industry. But I want to get to a place where I can just do me whenever I want to”.

This interesting interview from PRINCIPLE that I want to drop in. Next year is a really busy one for Absolutely. She is supporting RAYE and Reneé Rapp. There is also possibility of a second studio album. The Tooting-born artist is one that everyone needs to listen to. She is a major talent who is rightly being seen as someone to watch closely:

“Despite no headline shows yet, you’re still very booked and busy. Next year, you are supporting RAYE and Renee Rapp in huge venues across Europe and North America. Does the aspect of performing to crowds that big now just excite you? You had the taste of an arena show last year when you supported RAYE at The O2. Now you’ll be playing there six times!

I’m honestly really excited. I feel like the O2 Arena show felt like my music belonged there. I feel like my music is so anthemic and huge that when I performed it at The O2, it was like, ‘Oh, okay, this is where my music’s meant to be.’ And I felt oddly really comfortable on that stage more than in the theatres. I’m excited to do an arena tour. I’ve been wanting to do that for a long time.

Your new single, “I Just Don’t Know You Yet,” went down a storm at All Points East. It’s quickly become your biggest song to date and has introduced your music to a new audience who are now probably going back and listening to your catalogue. What’s it been like seeing the song grow?

It’s been pretty crazy. I was on tour with BANKS when the song started getting a lot of attention. It was really surreal. I was just seeing millions of likes, millions of views, all happening so fast. And then even seeing in real life when I would go into a random gas station in the middle of America, where people would be like, ‘Oh my gosh, you’re Absolutely!’ Like, that is so crazy and random. It happened so quickly. Within a week of teasing it, everybody demanded that I release the song. I was kind of in a tough situation with my team, trying to get everything done. But yeah, it was surreal and it is still surreal, but exciting.

What is it about the song that you believe has captured people’s attention?

Well, for me, when I was writing it, it was so pure and honest. And I think it was one of the first times that I had written a song based on a concept that I had, which was my future husband. I had him really heavy on my heart for some reason. That was like the first time where I had that feeling of really wanting to talk about it. The message is just so pure and authentic. I think a lot of people relate to the feeling of wanting that true partner. It’s also just a really big power ballad that’s very emotional. It’s a good song to scream in the car.

You mentioned a new album there, which you have talked about in other interviews. Is it done and ready to go?

I have all the songs. There are maybe two songs that I have to tweak and add a couple of things, but it’s pretty much done. I have to decide which couple of songs I’m gonna have to let go of, which is very difficult. It’s a couple of songs too many right now, but I’m very close.

How many songs do you have right now, and what is the number you want to whittle it down to?

I think I have 15 now, and I want to get it down to 13. It costs a lot of money, and I have top dog producers now, so I’ve got to get them paid right. 15 might just be a tiny bit too much.

Now that your career is reaching new heights, have your goals shifted?

I think even at the end of this album stage, like finishing this album, I’m now in a different space, which is that I want to not cover my voice so much. I feel like a lot of the music I’ve made previously has a lot of vocal effects. I’m not gonna get rid of that because that’s part of my sound, but I wanna make sure that my voice is cutting through because I think my voice is what really connects with people and not just the busyness and the production. I think the next phase after this second album is gonna be a lot more upfront vocals that are less busy with great songwriting”.

Let’s end with a brilliant new interview from Rolling Stone UK. Absolutely (Abby-Lynn Keen) talks about her second studio album, Paracosm. “For Keen, the album is a reminder, a motto to not lose sight of your child-like imagination. “I realised that I needed to reignite that wonder again and I think I managed to do that,” she recalls. As she scribbled down lyrics and slotted in studio sessions around a busy schedule, Keen started to notice her album come together. Her lead sin-gle, ‘I Just Don’t Know You Yet’ amassed a cult following online, with fans asking her to release a studio version, as well as a live one. She became more confident with developing new skills, like production, and putting her twist on her music”:

“Your first album, CEREBRUM, came out in 2023. How has the world-building and creative process been different for your upcoming record? 

The process of creating it was very different to the first one. [CEREBRUM] kind of made itself. I would go to the studio, do melody passes, write lyrics, and later I’d come back one day to finish it. We made the whole album in a few months, but with this second album, I definitely paid way more attention to detail. It’s been two years since I started making it, and it has been so many different versions of itself. I have a whole [record’s worth of songs] that didn’t make the album that’s sitting in my untitled folder. I spent a lot more time making sure that everything was intentional. I spent multiple sessions going back in and seeing how many layers could be added and reinterpreted. 

Albums are expensive, and touring is costly as well. Little Simz famously talked about the difficulty of financing tours and new projects. What have been your biggest industry obstacles? 

There’s a lot of pressure, but I think my love for music just overrides everything. I love making music so much. I love songwriting. I love the whole art of putting a song together and creating visual worlds. There are some difficult aspects – of being in the public eye and doing interviews. 

You’ve got an album on the way and a new single, ‘No Audience’, out very soon. What are you hoping fans will take away from your next project? 

I hope people hear the album, because I spent so much time on it, I would just love lots of people to be able to hear it. I’d like it to help people reignite their imagination again. I don’t know if I’m hoping for anything in particular, because everything that I want is already happening, like the tours. I’m really excited about my album coming out. Everything’s already mapped out”.

I am going to end there. Anyone who is unfamiliar with Absolutely needs to seek her out. Ahead of the release of her second album, go and check out what has come before. 2026 is going to be her year. After laying down these foundations, support RAYE and establishing herself as this incredible and distinct artist, the future is looking very bright. Be certain to put Absolutely…

ON your radar.

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Follow Absolutely

PHOTO CREDIT: Frank Fieber for PRINCIPLE

Instagram:

https://www.instagram.com/the.absolutely

TikTok:

https://www.tiktok.com/@the.absolutely

Spotify:

https://open.spotify.com/artist/4ellgkPyhbJetngXmHX5Zh?si=h9-uPgfWSpqQ3-Q8Mg_TGw

YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/@the.absolutely

FEATURE: The Digital Mixtape: Selections from NME’s 50 Best Songs of 2025

FEATURE:

 

 

The Digital Mixtape

IN THIS PHOTO: Chloe Qisha/PHOTO CREDIT: BLACKSOCKS for NME

Selections from NME’s 50 Best Songs of 2025

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THERE are polls coming out now…

IN THIS PHOTO: Sam Fender/PHOTO CREDIT: Press

and more we will see this month that collate the best songs and albums from the year. I will not cover all of them, though I was intrigued by NME and their top fifty songs of the year. There are tracks in there from the likes of Chloe Qisha, Sam Fender, and Florence Road. It is a brilliant selection of the best cuts from this year. I would agree with a lot of the selections, so that is why I am including them here. Rather than all fifty, I have whittled them down to my favourites from the list. However, do go and check out their article and the fifty songs. It is an amazing representation of one of the strongest years for music for years. I am excited to see what new and existing artists offer up…

IN THIS PHOTO: PinkPantheress/PHOTO CREDIT: River Callaway

IN 2026.

FEATURE: Kate Bush: The Tour of Life: The Novembers and Decembers of the Music Icon: 1978-1986

FEATURE:

 

 

Kate Bush: The Tour of Life

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush on 28th November, 1979 at The Melody Maker Pop Awards at the Waldorf Hotel, London/PHOTO CREDIT: Arthur Sidey/Mirrorpix via Getty Images

The Novembers and Decembers of the Music Icon: 1978-1986

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UNSURE if I had…

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1979

covered this before, I wanted to spotlight the Novembers and Decembers of Kate Bush during some of the busiest years of her career. Going from 1978 through to 1986, Kate Bush was not necessarily given a lot of time to rest at the end of the year. As we are in December, many of us are winding down and thinking about Christmas. However, for an international star like Kate Bush, the final two months of the year still saw her very engaged and busy. Maybe not entirely her own decision, I do feel a lot of sympathy for her. However, there were some interesting events that happened during these months. Thanks to Gaffaweb for their chronology information:

“November, 1978

Julie Covington, who has known Kate and her family for many years, releases an album including her own cover version of The Kick Inside.

Kate promotes Lionheart in the Netherlands, German and France [although I have no record of any television appearances dating from the trip].

November 7, 1978

Hammer Horror enters the British singles chart at the unexpectedly low place of number 73. [Contrary to usual record-company theory, saturation of the market place with new, rushed product nearly immediately after the success of a debut album is more often than not a poor business move, and usually does as much damage as good to the artist's budding popularity. The commercially mediocre sales of Lionheart should not have surprised anyone.]

Lionheart has its international launch at the 14th-century Ammersoyen Castel, two hours' drive from Amsterdam. 120 guests, from EMI Europe, Canada and the UK, and including disk jockeys Tony Myatt and Kenny Everett, as well as Dr. and Mrs. Bush, attend the reception. After dinner, in the grounds of the castle, Leo Bouderwijas, the President of the Association of Dutch Phonographical Industries, presents Kate with the prestigious Edison Award for the best single of 1978. Kate is also presented with a platinum disc for sales of the album in Holland.

November 8, 1978

Kate flies back to the U.K. for a private buffet at The Venue for the presentation of the Melody Maker 1978 Poll Awards. In the first year of her public career Kate has been voted Best Female Vocalist and Brightest Hope of 1978.

November 10, 1978

The international release of Lionheart.

November 17, 1978

Kate performs Don't Push Your Foot on the Heartbrake on The Leo Sayer Show, on BBC TV. She is off on a personal appearance tour of British record shops.

The first professional year for Kate Bush was very busy. We can see, even before reaching December, is that she was not given too much chance to unwind in November 1978. Barely a moment since she wrapped up promotion for The Kick Inside, she had released and was releasing Lionheart. Not much time to breathe and reflect after putting out this incredible and hugely popular debut album.

November 21, 1978

Hammer Horror reaches its chart peak, number 44. Lionheart enters the album chart at number 36.

December, 1978

Kate is off to promote in the U.S.A. for the release there of The Man With the Child in His Eyes.

December 9, 1978

Most importantly, she performs two songs on the U.S. NBC-TV programme, Saturday Night Live. [This is the only live entertainment programme on U.S. television, and is the most influential programme for the pop music market, as well the most important American showcase for "alternative" music. Kate performs The Man With the Child in His Eyes, seated on a piano, to the accompaniment of veteran rock keyboardist Paul Shaffer; and Them Heavy People, in a raincoat and Fedora hat. Nothing remotely like it has ever been seen on American television before.]

She is invited by Eric Idle, who is host of that edition; and she is visited by Mick Jagger. Paul Simon drops in to watch her performance.

Kate does press and radio promotion and moves on to Canada for more of the same. She is known to have made no other North American television appearances during this trip, however.

Back in England the Kate Bush Club, the official fan club, is formed.

November 18, 1979

Kate participates in the concert to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the London Symphony Orchestra, with Cliff Richard. Kate gives the first (and to date the only) public performance of Blow Away, the song she dedicated to Bill Duffield.

"Miss Bush was in breathtaking form...She emerged as the only star." (Simon Kinnersly, Daily Mail.)

November 28, 1979

Kate attends the Melody Maker Annual Poll Awards dinner at the Waldorf Hotel. For the second year running she is presented with the Best Female Singer award.

During November Kate records a track called December Will Be Magic Again, which she wants to release as a Christmas single. [For undisclosed reasons the release is postponed.]

November 30, 1979

A new recording of Lesley Duncan's Sing, Children, Sing is released, with Kate, Pete Townsend, Joe Brown and Vicki Brown on backing vocals. (Kate's voice is indistinguishable.) All profits from the single are to go to the U.N. Year of the Child fund.

December 21, 1979

The Winter Snowtime Special is aired on BBC TV. This is the second of two films for which Kate had contributed performances on February 18, 1979. However, the original film of Kate singing Wuthering Heights while walking barefoot in the snow is not included. Instead, a hastily filmed video for December Will Be Magic Again is aired on the programme.

It is interesting how she wound down 1978 and 1979. In 1978,t here was that U.S. promotion and her only appearance on Saturday Night Live. Kate Bush records her only Christmas single in 1979 and that would come out in 1980. I did not know that Bush recorded this version of Wuthering Heights with her walking in the snow. It would have been amazing to see that! I love how Bush performed Blow Away (For Bill) in November 1979. One of the best tracks from 1980’s Never for Ever, it was perhaps a good chance to break away from promotion and the interview treadmill and do something more interesting. It is a shame that this gem of a song was not performed live more. However, we can also see how, in 1979, she was still busy at the end of the year. In the run-up to Christmas, Bush was not really spared that much. That need to keep her in the public eye and ensure that she was very visible.

December 28, 1979

Kate, a forty-five-minute television special, is screened on BBC TV, featuring songs old and new. Some of these were filmed during live television-studio performances, others were videos prepared in advance and featuring studio recordings in more or less the same form as their album counterparts. Among the songs performed are Violin, Egypt, and Ran Tan Waltz (which would emerge as the b-side of Babooshka in 1980). In addition, one or two small pieces of incidental music are recorded specifically for the programme, which includes a guest appearance by Peter Gabriel, and a duet by Gabriel and Kate of Roy Harper's song, Another Day.

November, 1980

Kate writes an article for the magazine Woman's World, entitled How Can You Eat Dead Animals?

Meanwhile she returns to the studio to record the single version of December Will Be Magic Again.

November 17, 1980

December Will Be Magic Again is released. No promotional video is made for this single.

Kate is working with Peter Gabriel. They record a new version of Roy Harper's song Another Day, for a projected single. They also attempt to co-write a song for the b-side, and a song called Ibiza results. (Note: PFM spells this "Ibizza", but this is probably an error. "Ibiza" is the spelling for the Spanish coastal resort island.) They are not satisfied with it, however, and the project is shelved.

November 25, 1980

Kate appears on the BBC TV chat programme The Russell Harty Show for an edition dedicated to the composer Frederick Delius. She is interviewed with the cellist Julian Lloyd Webber and Delius's assistant and collaborator Eric Fenby. Following a screening of part of Kate's Dr. Hook video of Delius, Fenby suggests that the composer would have seen it as "a very gracious tribute."

December, 1980

Babooshka, which, outside the UK, has been the lead single from Never For Ever, is an international hit, reaching "top ten" status in most countries in Europe, as well as Australia and Canada. Kate's music has still made little impact in the United States, however. Her second and third albums have not even been released there, although a small but fiercely devoted cult following cause a vigorous trade in imports.

Meanwhile Kate tapes an extensive interview at her home for a Canadian television production company which is preparing a series of programmes entitled Profiles in Rock, with interviewer Doug Pringle, to be aired on CITY-TV, Toronto.

I did not know the record schedule for December Will Be Magic Again. I always assumed that the 1979 version recorded was the single version. I know there is more than one version, though I was unfamiliar with the fact she returned to record December Will Be Magic Again in November 1980. That Profiles in Rock interview is one of the standouts. I have watched that conversation several times. Bush so relaxed throughout. It is an extraordinary interview and one where we learn new things. One of the few from that time period where she is not patronised or subjected to sexism or endless questions about her personal life.

katebushnews.com · BBC Radio 1 Paul Gambaccini Kate's Favourite Folk & Classical 30th December 1980

December 30, 1980

The first of two special forty-five minute programmes is broadcast on BBC Radio 1, in which Kate plays and discusses with DJ Paul Gambaccini some of her favourite music by other artists. This programme is devoted to traditional and classical favourites.

December 31, 1980

The second forty-five minute programme is aired over BBC Radio 1, this one including some of Kate's favourite tracks by "popular" artists.

November 12, 1981

Kate attends a party at Abbey Road Studios to celebrate the studios' 50 years of operation. She cuts the celebration cake with Helen Shapiro.

November 21, 1981

Kate appears on the commercial TV programme Friday Night Saturday Morning, a new chat show, at the invitation of the host, zoologist Dr. Desmond Morris, to talk about her music and expressive dance.

December 22, 1981

Kate takes a break from recording to tighten melodies and lyrics.

November 1982

Kate is in Germany promoting album and single. [She gives a lip-synch performance of Suspended in Gaffa, known as the "puppets" or "marionettes" version.]

November 2, 1982

There Goes a Tenner is released in the U.K., and Suspended in Gaffa is released in all other territories. There Goes a Tenner is the "lost single". It is not promoted and gains no airplay on radio. It is the only single of Kate's not to enter the official chart. Suspended in Gaffa is, however, a great success, going top ten in most European countries and in Canada [? Top ten?] and Australia.

It seems that December 1982 was quieter than previous years. Though it was a quieter month for her compared to November, she did have commitments right at the end of the year. However, for The Dreaming, it does seem there was a bit of a break in December 1982. It was a commercial success but not as big-selling as The Kick Inside. However, there were singles released from it and Bush was very busy. Suspended in Gaffa is one of those Kate Bush songs that I think should have been released as a single in the U.K., as it would have charted quite high. It is one of best songs from The Dreaming. One of the best from her entire discography, in fact.

November 13, 1982

EMI-America releases The Dreaming album, which enters the Billboard Top 200, the first of Kate's albums to do so. The album begins to get a crop of very good U.S. reviews praising its creativity. The album is pushed by spots on U.S. college radio, and towards the end of the year airplay begins to pick up. Kate begins to expand her small cult following in the U.S. to attract a wider audience.

November 21, 1983

Night of the Swallow is released as a single in Eire.

December 1983

The Single File video compilation is released. Kate makes personal appearances in Kingston and Holborn.

November 17, 1985

Kate flies on the Concorde to New York (via Washington, D.C.) to promote the album and single. She makes a personal appearance at the Tower Record Store in Greenwich Village for which the queue extends for hundreds of yards around the block. She appears on the local New York news programme Live at Five, and tapes an interview for later airing on the cable programmes Night Flight, Heartlight City and Radio 1990. She also visits the MTV studios to tape a brace of short interviews. She is also interviewed by Love-Hound Doug Alan.

A track from the new album, Hello Earth, is featured as background music for a scene in the then-top-rated U.S. TV series Miami Vice.

From New York, Kate travels to Toronto where she tapes at least five more interviews (all from the same studios). These will appear on various Canadian programmes, including the national evening news, Much Music, The New Music, Good Rockin' Tonite, and various local news reports.

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush at Tower Records, New York in 1985 promoting Hounds of Love

November 30, 1985

Running Up That Hill peaks at number 30 in the U.S. Billboard chart.

Meanwhile Kate goes straight from Canada to Holland (taping an interview for Count Down), France, and Germany (where she gives a lip-synch performance of Running Up That Hill on the programme Extratour), and still manages to return to England in time to attend the first Convention organised jointly by the Kate Bush Club and Homeground. This is held at the Dolphin Centre in Romford. Approximately 400 fans attend. At the convention Kate is presented with a Platinum Record for the U.K. sales of Hounds of Love. [All of Kate's family and Del Palmer are present, as well.]

December 14, 1985

Hounds of Love reaches its peak position of number 30 the U.S. Billboard album chart.

December 23, 1985

In the annual Record Mirror poll Hounds of Love is voted Best Album, and Running Up That Hill is voted Best Single.

November 1986

Kate directs the video for Experiment IV, which is made on location at a disused military hospital in South East London and a street in the East End. The film features the Comic Strip regulars Dawn French and Hugh Laurie.

November 9, 1986

Kate interrupts the shooting of the Experiment IV video to attend a party at the Video Cafe organised by the Kate Bush Club and Homeground.

November 10, 1986

The Whole Story, the first Kate Bush compilation album, is released. It is promoted by the most expensive TV advertising campaign EMI has ever mounted. Sales are massive”.

What we do get a sense of is how her year panned out. Even though November and December saw little in the way of promotion, there was still a lot in terms of activity. Things are different now. However, through 1978 to 1986 (and beyond), Bush was not given a lot of time to take her foot off of the gas. However, there were some really interesting events and happenings at the end of the years. The end of 1985 was especially interesting. Bush seeing Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God) doing well in the U.S. and her doing well with Record Mirror and their readers. Possibly the peak of her powers. I did not mark the thirty-ninth anniversary of The Whole Story, but that was an important release. Her only greatest hits album. Given the success she had experienced the previous year, she was more malleable to the idea of a greatest hits album. It went to number one. I love how there was this party on 9th November that Bush went to in the middle of shooting a video! I would loved to have been there. The end of 1986 provided her chance to relax and reflect. We think about Bush and her albums and singles. This year, Bush has focused on her Little Shrew (Snowflake) track. The animated video (which Bush directed) appeared in cinemas with World War II German resistance feature film, From Hilde, With Love. Bush gave an interview to Animation Magazine and she posted updates to her website. There was the fortieth anniversary of Hounds of Love in September. Twenty years of Aerial in November. It has been an interesting year. We are not sure what next year holds, but we will soon get a Christmas message from Kate Bush, where she will reflect on the year. Even though we might not see a new album, I am sure there will be surprises and great stuff. The always-mysterious Kate Bush definitely will…

KEEP us on our toes.

FEATURE: Golden Year: David Bowie’s Station to Station at Fifty

FEATURE:

Golden Year

David Bowie’s Station to Station at Fifty

__________

I was going to use this feature…

IN THIS PHOTO: David Bowie in 1976/PHOTO CREDIT: Andrew Kent

to discuss David Bowie and the fact that it has been ten years since he died. On 10th January, we will talk about David Bowie. It was a huge shock in 2016 when we heard the news. I know that people have written about that anniversary and will write about it. Instead of writing about that, later this month, one of his classic albums turns fifty. That is Station to Station. Released on 23rd January, 1976, it was David Bowie’s tenth studio album. In terms of dynamic and stylistic shifts, perhaps this was one of the biggest. 1975’s Young Americans was influenced by American R&B and Soul. Bowie's performance persona the Thin White Duke, Bowie kept the Funk and R& of his previous album but drew in Electronic and Krautrock. In terms of Bowie’s mindset during the time, he was heavily into drugs and could not recall most of the production. Exceptional gaunt and thin, it is amazing that he managed to make such an extraordinary album! In terms of its format and length, Starting out with the extraordinary title track, it then moves into Golden Years. Ending with Wild Is the Wind - lyrics by Ned Washington and music by Dimitri Tiomkin -, there are fewer tracks than previous albums but they are more expansive and some would say experimental. Before getting to some features and retrospectives about Station to Station, MOJO revisited David Bowie’s masterpiece. It is amazing thinking about cohesive and nuanced Station to Station is considering how David Bowie was living at the time:

“In August 1975, after the filming of The Man Who Fell To Earth had finished, Bowie rented a house at 1349 Stone Canyon Road in Bel Air, a secluded 1950s-built property with a mock Egyptian interior. From here, he pulled together a team to record his next album: Harry Maslin, who’d worked on the Fame session in New York, was recruited as producer, while guitarists Carlos Alomar and Earl Slick, plus Fame drummer Dennis Davis, and bassist George Murray, provided the core of the group. After two weeks’ rehearsals, the group checked into Cherokee studios in Hollywood. One of the first songs to emerge was Golden Years, a sinuous soul groove that took up where Young Americans had left off. It was premiered on November 4 on ABC TV’s Soul Train, reflecting David’s new kudos within the US soul community.

By now, Bowie was surviving on a diet of milk and cocaine, with the odd vegetable thrown in, and regularly went without sleep. Though only six songs emerged from the sessions, they amounted to some of Bowie’s finest work. The title of the book of short stories he’d begun writing while shooting TMWFTE, titled The Return of The Thin White Duke, made its way into the opening line of Station To Station, an epic 11-minute piece that moved through a series of moods – sometimes dark, melancholy and mysterious, elsewhere funky and euphoric – with allusions to the Kabbalah, cocaine and, in its title, the Stations of the Cross, the popular representation of Christ journeying towards his crucifixion.

The beautiful Word On A Wing, meanwhile, explored a more conventional Christian, or perhaps Buddhist, theme; Stay was a trippy funk-out with soaring psychedelic soul guitar; and TVC15 fused New Orleans piano and futuristic soul, telling the tale of a woman devoured by a television set. The final track, a cover of Wild Is The Wind, the 1954 film theme memorably covered by Nina Simone in 1966, bookended the album in magnificently contemplative and dramatic style, completing a record exuding strangeness and imbued with layers of mystery. Perhaps it was all a lucky accident: David later admitted he had few recollections of recording the album, bar shouting his idea for a feedback part to Earl Slick. Regardless, in an almost peerless run of late 70s albums, Station To Station is still one of the most beguiling stopovers. Next stop, Berlin”.

In a fascinating essay from The Quietus, they looked back on Station to Station on its forty-fifth anniversary. The 2020 feature is a great read. I have selected some segments from it. I am sure that there will be quite a lot of fiftieth anniversary features about this extraordinary album:

“More than on any other Bowie album in a career built on exploring the theme from any number of angles, the idea of decadence is at the heart of Station to Station. If Young Americans, his previous album, had examined the post-Watergate rottenness infecting the once-great nation he’d recently adopted as his home, then on Station to Station he turns his gaze fully inward upon his own condition, and finds the creeping decay at work there too. It’s a pre-punk album, not just chronologically (recorded in ten days at the end of 1975), but in recognising the hollow, bloated state of the rock aristocracy of which Bowie was a part, especially in contrast to the social upheaval and economic recession going on in the real world, wherever that was. Punk was a response from the kids on the street, but Bowie was part of the problem, and he knew it, tall in his room overlooking the ocean, staring out through a blizzard of coke and knowing it was all coming crashing down.

Ah, yes: cocaine. The proverbial Peruvian is all over this record, but not in an over-produced, airbrushed Rumours way. Station to Station is shiny but spare, harsh; it captures the jagged edge, the exquisite balancing act between the high and the comedown, and the sense of feeling hugely emotional at the same time as feeling completely numb and detached that is a typical symptom of fast white drugs (speed, E, coke). Similarly the intellectual grandstanding, paranoia and occultism, barely masking an inner desperation; having made a career out of wearing masks, inventing personas, analysing his emotions from a distance and then acting them out, Bowie seems desperate for a way out of his situation. Early in his career, under the influence of Lindsay Kemp, he made a short film called The Mask, in which a mime artist puts on a mask that then takes him over. By 1975 for Bowie the parable had come true. Lauded, wealthy, trapped in the social whirl of an affluent and fashionable Los Angeles jet set, reputedly existing on a diet of cigarettes, orange juice and cocaine and immersing himself in mysticism, conspiracy theories, the occult and an increasing fascination with right-wing ideologies, Bowie was fast becoming the epitome of the Decadent Man. Yet Station to Station is far from the work of an artist in decline. Rather, it extends the Philly funk of Young Americans into weirder, colder territory, and marks the beginning of the period of radical musical reinvention and rigorous introspection that would continue through the Berlin period and the more celebrated Low and "Heroes" albums.

 

Like the Duc Des Esseintes- the original Thin White Duke? – in Huysman’s 1884 novel A Rebours, Bowie has become jaded beyond belief, too numb and sated to be moved by any but the most extreme sensations. So far gone, so alienated from his own feelings is he that what he craves more than anything else is an authentic experience. Eventually he would realise this by stripping away all artifice and moving to Berlin, but here he still attempts to contrive genuine emotion, to convince himself by dint of a bravado performance. As if acting on ‘Young Americans’ celebrated line, "ain’t there one damn song that can make me break down and cry?" Bowie constructs the most grandiose of love songs, the most overblown, epic ballads, mouthing hollow romantic clichés as if, by saying the lines with enough simulated passion, he will actually come to feel them. And yet, of course, all of this is just a construct, too- he knows exactly what he’s doing. It’s not a cynical act, because the desire to feel remains genuine- in its way, this is as stark and troubled a record as anything from Neil Young’s contemporaneous ditch trilogy, the musical polish and role-play only thinly veiling a soul on the edge, battling with addiction and paranoia and with what he, at least, genuinely believed were dark mystical forces just waiting to drag him forever into the abyss. "It’s the nearest album to a magical treatise that I’ve written," Bowie has said, though perhaps a ritual spell of protection would be a more accurate description.

The album opens with the sound of a train. An old-fashioned steam train, chuffing from speaker to speaker and which always makes me think of Mr Norris Changes Trains by Christopher Isherwood- leaping ahead to Berlin, again – and then suddenly it isn’t a train anymore, but something far more warped and alien, and here come those flat, clip-clop piano notes, the spidery beat and Earl Slick’s strafing guitar feedback out of which a dragging, leaden riff slouches, some rough beast waiting to be born… But Bowie’s vocal is anything but rough: silken, demanding, ridiculously theatrical yet eerily convincing. ‘Station to Station’ isn’t about trains, despite being written while the notoriously aerophobic Bowie was touring America and Europe by rail; instead, it refers to the fourteen Stations of the Cross, which Bowie also equates to the eleven Sephirot of the Tree of Life in the Jewish Kabbalah- hence, "one magical movement from Keter to Malkuth," the songs most enigmatic lyric, which refers to the descent from the Crown of Creation to the Physical Kingdom, or from one end of the tree to the other.

This first section ends with a cryptic reference to Aleister Crowley’s early, poetic fusion of pornography and occultism, White Stains. A classic of decadent literature, Crowley himself later justified this short work as follows: "I invented a poet who went wrong, who began with normal innocent enthusiasms and gradually developed various vices. He ends by being stricken with disease and madness, culminating in murder. In his poems he describes his downfall, always explaining the psychology of each act." It’s not hard to imagine Bowie identifying with such a project, but before we have time to digest this, the whole song suddenly switches gear: not once, but twice, into hard, urgent funk with a proggy chord sequence, and then again, finally hitting that glorious plateau of a chorus and somehow staying there, like a never-subsiding orgasm, held impossibly aloft by Roy Bittan’s driving piano, just so long as you don’t look down- "It’s too late!" –Slick kicks in with a wired, fiery solo, and then, "it’s not the side effects of the cocaine- I’m thinking that it must be love," and we’re still up there, somehow- it’s a sustained, smooth-jagged coke high of a song, just keeping going, always up and on the one until it finally, inevitably fades out…

‘Golden Years’ is one of Bowie’s finest middle-of-the-road moments, a mainstream soul-funk ballad with mass appeal but a seriously weird core. It comes on like a love song, but what is it actually about? "Nothing’s going to touch you in these Golden Years (run for the shadows in these golden years)." It’s opaque, impenetrable, all mirrored surfaces and shifting moods. Again, the incessant, almost proto-rap delivery, listing things to do, balancing aggressive positivity ("Don’t let me hear you say life’s taking you nowhere") with brittle paranoia ("run for the shadows…") is pure coke babble, riding on the bright mellow glide of the groove and the dark empty spaces beneath… nothing’s gonna touch ya, move through the city, stay on top, all night long…”.

I am going to get to some features, where David Bowie’s studio albums are ranked. First, there are a couple of retrospectives I want to cover off. Moving to Albumism and their take on Station to Station, forty-five years after the album was released. It is my favourite David Bowie album. I have a lot of love for it. For anyone who has never heard Station to Station, do take some time to investigate it, as it is one of Bowie’s most compelling works:

“Bowie managed to fit in almost every aspect of the human condition with the first three songs on Station to Station. Side two opens with "TVC 15" featuring a Professor Longhair-styled piano riff by Roy Bittan, which plays throughout the song. For the last 45 years, I had no idea what the hell this song was about. Through an internet deep dive and a couple of Kindle purchases, I finally discovered the origins of "TVC 15." An occurrence inspired the song at Bowie's home where a hallucinating Iggy Pop believed that a TV set swallowed his girlfriend. Bowie took this incident and created "TVC 15,” where the protagonist's girlfriend crawls into a TV, and he decides to go in after her. This strange but delightful tune is a great open to side two and one of the more underappreciated songs in Bowie's catalog.

"Stay" is arguably the funkiest tune on Station to Station and could also have been on the Young Americans album. Earl Slick's guitar work is the co-star of this song, along with Bowie's vocals. "Stay" remained a staple of Bowie's live performances throughout his career.

Rounding out Station to Station is "Wild is the Wind," a hauntingly beautiful song initially recorded by Johnny Mathis in 1958 for a movie of the same title, but later flawlessly covered by Nina Simone in 1966. Bowie struck up a friendship with Simone after meeting her at a private club called Hippopotamus in 1974. As she was leaving, he called her over to his table, and they chatted and exchanged numbers. For about a month afterward, they spoke on the phone daily and talked about what it meant to be an artist who was different from everyone else. He gave her the encouragement she needed at the time, and she saw him for who he was. In her biography What Happened, Miss Simone, she is quoted as saying, "He's got more sense than anybody I've ever known," she said. "It's not human—David ain't from here." This friendship led Bowie to record "Wild is the Wind" as an homage to his friend. It is one of the most moving songs in his discography and a great end to Station to Station. Check out the incredible version he performed at the Yahoo Internet Awards in 2000.

Considering all of the personal turmoil Bowie was enduring when he recorded Station to Station, it's miraculous that this six-track album remains one of the most important and influential albums recorded in the last 50 years”.

Following David Bowie’s death in 2016, Medium argued why Station to Station matters. If some feel that it is not David Bowie’s very best album and contains few songs, it is definitely one of his most important albums. A lot of people focus on David Bowie’s physical and emotion state. How he was an addict and was exhausted, yet still managed to turn in this wonderful and rich album:

“Generally speaking, Bowie had not pumped both exuberance and noirish angst into a given song before 1975. But on Station to Station, every track contains both sides of the dichotomy. The epic songs on Springsteen’s Born to Run, released mere weeks before work on Station to Station began, also encapsulated this paradox, which is possibly why Bowie poached Springsteen’s pianiste extraordinaire, Roy Bittan.

The Thin White Duke, Bowie’s new persona for Station to Station, is no Ziggy Stardust: he’s naked and comparatively defenceless. The apocalypse is not coming from without, but from within. Ziggy was Bowie — prelapsarian in reality — pretending to personify rockstar royalty in decline/sublimation, achieving rockstar royalty ‘in real life’ in the process. The Duke is Bowie — having becoming rockstar royalty — in precipitous physical and mental decline, and not hiding it very well. “Does my face show some kind of woe,” he says, not phrasing it like a question. Cracked actor indeed.

***

(Mis)communication and confusion pervade the album; even when clarity and confidence burst through, doubt is waiting in the wings. Everyone praises Bowie’s vocal on album closer ‘Wild is the Wind’, but ‘Word on a Wing’, which builds on his references to angels in ‘Golden Years’ (and to the Stations of the Cross alluded to in the title track), really is a vocal powerhouse. Ending Side 1 of the LP, it sums up the Manichean dichotomies at the album’s centre — darkness/light, rational/religious, doubt/belief — in an act of desperate faith. “A protection,” he would say of the song in later years. “Something I needed to produce from within myself to safeguard myself against some of the situations that I felt were happening.” An inelegant explanation of one of Bowie’s most elegant compositions, the statement nonetheless contextualises Bowie’s six-minute plea to be rid of the “grand illusion” (or “grand delusion”, but the effect of a fickle, faithless world is the same) that surrounds him.

Even when clarity and confidence burst through, doubt is waiting in the wings

“Does my prayer fit in with your scheme of things?” he asks God politely, seeming to eschew his own erstwhile flirtation with the Nietzschean superman idea only to claim loudly, in the song’s bridge, to be “ready to shake the scheme of things”. So — is he praying? Or is he asserting his own “scheme”? Does he even know? The song seems to end in prayer, borne out by the choral organ and the angelic backing vocals.

But Side 2 kicks off with the decidedly secular ‘TVC 15’, most of whose lyrics are indecipherable without a lyric sheet, which doesn’t matter too much when the music’s this enjoyable. It resumes the album’s key theme of communication. The music and lyrics of Station to Station probe the very concept and (f)utility of communication; c.f. Young Americans, which was simply a committed attempt at communicating volumes — about black music, about white music, about the exultations and limitations of each as well as the irrelevance of said limitations when you’re having fun — through generally impenetrable lyrics.

Ultimately, the album presents the problem of progression and momentum (hinted at by the album title, the breathless typography on the album cover, the chugging pistons on the title track that “drive like a demon”, the vast majority of the music itself) counterposed against the stasis, confusion and miscommunication explored in the lyrics. In other words, it presents the problem of life itself. ‘Stay’, the Earl Slick / Carlos Alomar showcase, again exemplifies Bowie’s frustrations with communication. “I really meant it so badly this time,” he pleads. “You can never really tell when somebody wants something you want too.”

***

Bowie appears to have achieved some sort of temporary peace in the final track, seeking refuge in another’s work, which makes sense — his own five songs have been too dense, intense and difficult to afford Bowie (and us) a breather. The song may feel at first like a misfit, but it coheres with the album: the opening lyric (“Love me love me love me love me, say you do”) suggests that the communication is as important as, if not more important than, the sentiment itself.

We are feeling, rather than just understanding, Bowie’s loneliness

The wildness of the wind (Bowie’s romance with his addressee) is something he’s wishing for, not something he has. Throughout the album, he’s seemed so alone, so uncomfortable in his own skin, that by ‘Wild is the Wind’ not only does it sound like he has no lover, it sounds like he’s never had one. The album’s tone begins to make sense, and for the first time we feel, rather than simply understanding, his loneliness. The backing vocals are no longer there. “It’s not the side effects of the cocaine | I’m thinking that it must be love”, he sang on the title track, and although the non sequitur about the “European cannon” seemed to make a nonsense of this line at the time, his audible terror that “it must be love” now slides into focus: Bowie is too far gone to be anything other than panicked at the prospect of real intimacy. Which might be why he’s hiding in someone else’s song.

“Don’t you know you’re life itself? | Like the leaf clings to the tree | Oh my darling, cling to me | For we’re like creatures of the wind | For wild is the wind”. Why do I find his delivery of this soppy line so poignant? Maybe because the whirlwind of his imagined love is a world away from the whirlwind of confusion and cocaine that’s been swirling ‘round his desolate isolation for the last 35 minutes.

“The man who knows not how to smile”

Why does any of this matter?

Partly because Bowie expressed profound loneliness without having to spell it out, which makes the album one of the most subtle, captivating pictures of loneliness (and therefore of humanity) we have.

Partly because few other albums, if any, have tackled the theme of communication (with oneself, with another, with God) so concisely, so catchily and so cathartically.

Partly because it’s worth trying to unpack why certain albums are so listenable.

Partly because the album is one of Bowie’s unmitigated successes, which makes it notable for obvious reasons.

Partly because the album doesn’t get enough press, coming between two more prominent records.

Partly because despite (or perhaps thanks to) the obfuscations, the obscure lyrics, the confusion and the chaos, the album offers a piercingly clear portrait of David Bowie circa 1976, and such a jolt of poignant clarity is how many of us are trying to plug the gap in the wake of his death.

Partly because it’s fun”.

In 2013, Rolling Stone asked its readers to choose the best David Bowie album. Rolling Stone ranked Station to Station third: “It's possible to do so much cocaine over a long period of time that you enter into a state of "cocaine psychosis," meaning you suffer from intense paranoia and memory failure. That explains why David Bowie claims to have no memory of recording Station to Station. He was doing shocking amounts of the drug, and not sleeping for days at a time. This disc was recorded largely long after midnight in a Los Angeles studio. E Street Band keyboardist Roy Bittan was sober, but most everyone else in the studio was high as a spaceship. This usually leads to horrible music, but by some miracle it produced some of the greatest songs of Bowie's career. On the epic title track Bowie even sings about the "side effects of the cocaine." It's 10 minutes and 15 seconds of absolute madness. You can almost smell the drugs when you listen to it. The disc wraps with a cover of "Wild Is the Wind," featuring some of the greatest singing of Bowie's career. This is a deeply weird album that just gets better with age”. Back in September, GQ placed it in sixth: “One of the most indelible lines in Bowie’s biography is that he had a period consuming only red and green peppers, milk and cocaine (which also coincided with a couple of pro-fascist statements). This is the album that came out of that period – and for all the havoc the drugs wreaked on his mind, his music held up. Station to Station has a bit of everything, particularly the “plastic soul” of Young Americans, with intimations of his forthcoming experimental period too. “Word on a Wing” is a shining but structurally tricksy ballad; the 10-minute title track, his longest song, is a style-shifting odyssey with a catchiness that belies the sinister, rather mystical lyrics”.

Last year, Rough Trade placed it in sixth too: “Saving your piss in the fridge so the witches don't steal it? No? Then clearly you've not huffed as much coke as 1976 Bowie while he trail-blazed through an album that simply put, he couldn't remember making. Icy funk, complex art rock and if we're being real here - his best vocal take (Wild Is The Wind) are all present and correct. Earl Slick absolutely wails throughout, his guitar textures unteachable and unreachable”. This is what Classic Rock observed last year when highlighting which David Bowie albums you should listen to: “Bowie’s herculean mid-’70s drug intake meant he claimed not to remember making Station To Station. For anyone less addled, this 1976 benchmark ranks amongst his most memorable albums. Comprising six lengthy tracks whose raw emotions hold up a mirror to Bowie’s mindset (at this point, he was trading as the problematic Thin White Duke), Station was a marked fork left from the rug-cutting soul of Young Americans, and implied the electronic leanings that the Berlin trilogy would soon explore. For instant gratification, it has to be Golden Years, but the album demands headphones and full focus”. We remember David Bowie on 10th January, ten years after he died. Instead of reflecting on that, I wanted to look ahead to 23rd January and the fiftieth anniversary of Station to Station. It is a stunning and timeless classic from…

A much missed genius.

FEATURE: Kate Bush’s Wuthering Heights at Forty-Eight: The Live Performances and Legacy

FEATURE:

 

 

Kate Bush’s Wuthering Heights at Forty-Eight

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

The Live Performances and Legacy

__________

I am already looking ahead…

 IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush preforms Wuthering Heights on RTÉ’s The Late Late Show in Ireland on 25th March, 1978/PHOTO CREDIT: Eve Holmes

to its forty-eighth anniversary, and that is not until 2018! However, I will hold back for now and, instead, mark forty-eight years of Kate Bush’s Wuthering Heights. Her debut single was released on 20th January, 1978. It was initially due to be released late in 1977 but, for a number of possible reasons, it was held back. By this time, the song had been heard and played on the radio. EMI were perhaps keen for it to be kept under wraps until its official release, but it had been heard and played prior to its release, so there was this anticipation when it was officially out as a single. Despite the fact it started life outside of the top forty in the U.K., Wuthering Heights did get to number one. Kate Bush became the first female artist to have a self-penned number one song. That sounds amazing to consider but, in the forty-eight years since, there have not been a huge amount of women who have topped the singles charts here with a self-written song. One where they are the only writer. As I noted in a previous anniversary feature, there is contention as to what inspired her to write the song. I had always assumed Bush watched the final ten/fifteen minutes of a 1967 BBC adaptation of the Emily Brontë novel. That she raced to her room and started to pen the song, rather than there being a gap. She did eventually read the novel to get context and more depth before the single came out. However, it was that moment of a T.V. adaptation that stayed in her mind and then she wrote it over the course of a few hours on the night of 7th March, 1977. A late contender for inclusion on The Kick Inside, it was not viewed by EMI as a natural single.

Kate Bush argued that it should be her debut, and the tensions got hot and charged. Though Bush was not crying, she was definitely emotional and resolute. She won the battle and was proven right. Had the more conventional James and the Cold Gun had been her first single, it would not have reached number one. The Kick Inside might not have sold as hugely. I shall come to discuss the legacy of Wuthering Heights. I will get to the live performances. Not the very first times Kate Bush had performed live, it was her first time on T.V. Prior to that, with the KT Bush Band, she played at clubs and pubs around London and the south east of England. Building up this name and reputation, that experience did give Kate Bush some foundation and understanding of what it would be like on this promotional trail. However, Bush could not have anticipated just what it would entail promoting Wuthering Heights. Nineteen when the song was released, she was thrown straight into this whirlwind! There is a lot to explore when it comes to Wuthering Heights, and I will discuss it again when marking twenty years of The Kick Inside ahead of its anniversary on 17th February. However, the live performances fascinate me. With Kite as its B-side, Wuthering Heights was this amazing single that proved Kate Bush was so different to her peers. Prior to getting to those live performance, the Kate Bush Encyclopedia brought together interviews where Kate Bush discusses the single. For her fan club newsletter in January, 1979, Bush discussed the origins of writing this iconic and incredible debut single:

“I wrote in my flat, sitting at the upright piano one night in March at about midnight. There was a full moon and the curtains were open, and every time I looked up for ideas, I looked at the moon.

Actually, it came quite easily. I couldn’t seem to get out of the chorus – it had a really circular feel to it, which is why it repeats. I had originally written something more complicated, but I couldn’t link it up, so I kept the first bit and repeated it. I was really pleased, because it was the first song I had written for a while, as I’d been busy rehearsing with the KT Band.

I felt a particular want to write it, and had wanted to write it for quite a while. I remember my brother John talking about the story, but I couldn’t relate to it enough. So I borrowed the book and read a few pages, picking out a few lines. So I actually wrote the song before I had read the book right through. The name Cathy helped, and made it easier to project my own feelings of want for someone so much that you hate them. I could understand how Cathy felt.

It’s funny, but I heard a radio programme about a woman who was writing a book in Old English, and she found she was using words she didn’t know, but when she looked them up she found they were correct. A similar thing happened with ‘Wuthering Heights’: I put lines in the song that I found in the book when I read it later.

I’ve never been to Wuthering Heights, the place, though I would like to, and someone sent me a photo of where it’s supposed to be”.

I am going to return to this source when exploring the legacy of Wuthering Heights. It is forty-eight on 20th January. Of course, as the single became more played and popular, Kate Bush was expected to perform it live. Perhaps not the song she has performed live the most, she did have to get used to performing this regularly. For 1979’s The Tour of Life, it was part of the encore. A song that so many people came to see, her T.V. performances were perhaps less comfortable and amazing. It is hard to make a song like Wuthering Heights came alive live. For The Tour of Life, she did have this space to create her own set and backdrop. More natural and personal, the T.V. apparencies were a mixed bag.

Prior to a mortifying first performance on Top of the Pops – where Kate Bush said it was like watching herself die -, there were a couple of T.V. appearances. The second time Wuthering Heights was performed was on Magpie, though it would have been between 9th and 16th February. 9th February, 1978 was the first time the single was performed. Oddly  It was for German T.V. and Bio’s Bahnhof This was an entertainment show hosted by Alfred Biolek, which was broadcast by ARD in Germany from 9th February, 1978 to 28th October, 1982. Being a German T.V. show, they did not know what Wuthering Heights was about and the connection to Yorkshire and the Moors. Instead, Bush was backed on stage by a volcano! A bizarre and ill-fitting visual for the song, it was a mimed performance. Top of the Pops would be when she got to perform it live. However, as solo artists could not perform with a band and they had to be accompanied by a BBC orchestra, Bush was completely dumbfounded. She hoped that she would be able to perform with her band for moral support. However, she had to go on stage and perform backed by a pre-recorded and awful orchestral backing. She did not really have the luxury of making it a one-off. I guess, to help the single climb the charts, she could not just send a video in place. A video was made especially for Top of the Pops, though she did perform the song on Top of the Pops a further couple of times. If the performance became more comfortable and less awful, that first appearance was quite galling. On 2nd and 23rd March, Bush played again on Top of the Pops. A red and white dress version of the video was shot. The red dress version is considered the most iconic. Though the video (the white dress version I think) was shown on Top of the Pops for a Christmas edition, due to Musicians Union rules, Bush had to perform the song live. Whilst it would have been amazing to hear and see the late Ian Bairnson’s iconic electric guitar on Top of the Pops, Bush did not have the luxury of bringing the song to life in the way she would have liked. Not until The Tour of Life when she got to right this wrong. For The Tour of Life, KT Bush bandmate and old friend Brian Bath was on electric guitar. A shame we did not get to see Bairnson play this on stage with Kate Bush.

The two final T.V. performances of Wuthering Heights were interesting: 19th May, 1978 on Szene (Germany), and 9th September, 1978 for Festivalbar (Italy). The countries where she played the songs live were receptive. The song charted well there. Germany, Wuthering Heights reached eleven. In Italy, it went to number one. Another nation where it hit the top spot and Bush played the song live there is Ireland. The nation her mother, Hannah, was born, Bush played for RTÉ ‘s The Late Late Show, hosted by Gay Byrne. Bush looked amazing and it was another case of her not being able to bring in a full band. The chat between Byrne and Bush was awkward. Somewhat patronising and sexist, Bush would deal with a lot of awkward, ill-informed and old-fashioned male hosts and interviewers who she was always professional around. 25th March, 1978 is when Bush was on the Irish chat show. That was a few days after the final Top of the Pops appearance. No volcano for when Bush appeared on Rendez-vous Du Dimanche in France on 7th May, 1978! It was a brown/blurry background. Perhaps not quite knowing what to do, it was another simple, mimed performance. On the same day as her appearance on The Late Late Show in Ireland, Bush performed Wuthering Heights on Toppop in the Netherlands. I have checked this and wonder how it was managed. I am sure both were live performances, but maybe she performed on Topop earlier in the day or it was broadcast on 25th March, 1978, and then she was in Ireland live for the Late Late Show. It is amazing, right from the off, how far she was sent. Artists today would not be sent across Europe and the U.K. to perform their debut single on T.V. It is a monumental ask. However, the song went to number three on the Dutch chart. France and Germany were among the lowest-charting countries, though fourteen in France and eleven in Germany is respectable! Australia, Italy and New Zealand also made Wuthering Heights a number one. Bush would promote in New Zealand and Australia in 1978.

I think that the most fascinating pre-The Tour of Life performance of Wuthering Heights was a De Efteling TV Special. Thanks to the Kate Bush Encyclopedia again for details about the special. Wuthering Heights was one of several songs from The Kick Inside that Kate Bush performed. Though mimed again, there was more in the way of set design and concept. Though quite strange and gothic. Though, thinking about it, totally appropriate for Wuthering Heights at least! That amusement park performance is the most charming and remake of the T.V. spots:

“On 12 May 1978 at 7.12pm, the Dutch broadcaster TROS broadcast a 20 minute Kate Bush television special, recorded at the Dutch amusement park Efteling. On 10 May 1978, Efteling was ready to open the Haunted Castle, the most expensive attraction it had ever constructed, and they wanted to promote it as much as they could. Ton van der Ven, who designed the castle, appeared in a popular talk show and in April a documentary featuring the Haunted Castle was made by filmmaker Rien van Wijk, who was eager to shoot in the latest attraction before it officially opened. Kate, who just had a big hit with Wuthering Heights, was approached for a television special that would promote both Efteling and her songs. The special was filmed in April, a month before the official opening of the castle.

The special consists of six songs, each filmed in different locations:

Moving was filmed on the square in front of the castle.

Wuthering Heights has Kate dancing around inside the main show of the castle. A smoke machine is used for added effect.

Them heavy people was filmed on three locations: inside the main show in the attic; at the entrance of the main show with the oriental ghost; and outside before the entrance of the cave which is part of another attraction, the Indian Waterlillies.

The Man With The Child In His Eyes was recorded at the side of the lake with the gondolettas

Strange Phenomena has Kate walking around in the dark passages of the castle

The Kick Inside was filmed on the lake, with Kate lying in a death-barge. At the end of the song, she sails slowly down a placid river, evoking images of Elaine and The Lady of Shalott, classic poetical figures of Arthurian legend”.

Eleven T.V. performances between 9th February and 9th September. Between these dates, Bush was performing other songs in other countries. Moving was released as a single in Japan. Wuthering Heights was the B-side. However, Bush did undertake promotion in Japan in June 1978. Considering all the countries she visited and the fact that she had to make these distinct songs translate must have been head-spinning and odd! However, one cannot overlook the instant impact and popularity of Wuthering Heights. Returning to that first link from the Kate Bush Encyclopedia, and Kate Bush talked about the reaction to Wuthering Heights in its first year or so:

One thing that really pleases me is the amount of positive feedback I’ve had from the song, though I’ve heard that the Bronte Society think it’s a disgrace. A lot of people have read the book because of the song and liked it, which I think is the best thing about it for me. I didn’t know the book would be on the GCE syllabus in the year I had the hit, but lots of people have written to say how the song helped them. I’m really happy about that.

There are a couple of synchronicities involved with the song. When Emily Bronte wrote the book she was in the terminal stages of consumption, and I had a bad cold when I wrote the song. Also, when I was in Canada I found out that Lindsay Kemp, my dance teacher, was in town, only ten minutes away by car, so I went to see him. When I came back I had this urge to switch on the TV – it was about one in the morning – because I knew the film of Wuthering Heights would be on. I tuned in to a thirties gangster film, then flicked through the channels, playing channel roulette, until I found it. I came in at the moment Cathy was dying, so that’s all I saw of the film. It was an amazing coincidence”.

ILLUSTRATION CREDIT: Steve Smith

On 30th July, 2018 – Kate Bush’s sixtieth birthday – The Telegraph wrote how Kate Bush reinvented Pop with her debut song. A piece of music that has changed the life of so many people, the fact it has been covered so many times means that it connects with other artists. CMAT recently performed the song. Though the original has a distinct vocal performance, other artists have provided their takes:

“In 1978, Bush cited Patti Smith, Johnny Rotten and The Stranglers as major influences. Good music, she said, “is like an interrogation, it really puts you up against the wall, and that’s what I want to do. I’d like my music to intrude. I think that anything you do that you believe in, you should club people over the head with it. Not many females succeed with that. Patti Smith does.”

Orton says that by being fearless and “not answering to anyone”, Bush embodied the attitude, if not the sound, of punk. In this sense, the softness of Wuthering Heights was a red herring.

“Everyone said ‘Ooh isn’t she ‘crazy’’, but no, she was really profoundly strong. Anyone who can hold that energy has to be incredibly focused. She’s got a punk spirit. It takes incredible strength to hold your own, especially at that time, as a woman who looks like her, writes like her and sounds like her,” Orton says.

Paranoid about being labelled, Bush strove to keep changing after Wuthering Heights. She said she wanted people to “chase after her”, to find out what she’d do next. “If I really wanted to, I could write a song that would be similar to Wuthering Heights. But I don’t want to. What’s the point?” she said in 1978.

This explains why over 40 years, it’s been impossible to anticipate her next move. She’s constantly created extraordinary musical netherworlds that have, in turns, taken in mainstream pop, Philip Glass-like minimalism and Balearic house, to name just three. To this day, Bush remains one of pop’s last great eccentrics. Her sold-out and critically lauded run of 22 shows at Hammersmith Apollo in 2014 showed what a force she remains.

But it was the uniqueness of Wuthering Heights that gave her this licence to experiment. Its release announced the arrival of an honest, unusual and fearless performer, rather than the arrival of a singer of piano ballads based on Victorian gothic literature.

As all truly great performers would, Bush used her unforgettable and idiosyncratic debut as a springboard rather than a template. And it is sadly unimaginable, in our more homogenised pop climate, with its fragmented listening patterns and lack of must-see TV music shows, that a song such as Wuthering Heights would have such a national impact if released today”.

I would point people to this article from Dreams of Orgonon when it comes to exploring the inspiration for Wuthering Heights, why it is so effecting, original and enduring. I am going to end with this article from Steve Pafford, who ranked it third when considering the greatest debut singles of all time. I don’t think anything like Wuthering Heights has come along since:

“A doctor’s daughter, Kate began playing piano at age 11, writing songs at 13, and making a demo tape with Pink Floyd‘s Dave Gilmour at age 16. EMI signed her and gave her two years to develop her songwriting and that otherworldly four octave range voice. Oh, and the dancing. Those “self-expression” lessons with Bowie‘s former mime mentor Lindsay Kemp had certainly paid off, as the landmark track’s engineer Jon Kelly would attest:

“In the case of Wuthering Heights, she was imitating this witch, the mad lady from the Yorkshire Moors, and she was very theatrical about it. She was such a mesmerising performer — she threw her heart and soul into everything she did — that it was difficult to ever fault her or say ‘You could do better.’”

Kate’s handwritten lyrics. Yup.

Everything But The Girl’s Tracey Thorn takes up the story…

“In 1978, when Kate Bush released Wuthering Heights, I was too immersed in my punk records to like it. More than the fact that it featured piano – drippy – and referenced a novel – swotty – I struggled with the singing. That melodramatic, all-over-the-shop approach to vocal melody just screamed “hippy” at me, and seemed to be the aural equivalent of shawls, beads, headdresses and candles, all of which I suspected Kate Bush was wearing or surrounded by while she recorded the vocal.

It was this very flamboyance that imprinted itself on people’s minds and made it so appealing to the amateur performer (still imprinted on my eardrums, eyeballs and indeed damaged psyche, is the memory of two friends’ moving rendition at a Christmas karaoke party), but singing in that way, in that voice, steered the song close to the ridiculous.

You could contend that the novel itself is somewhat manic and hysterical, so Kate Bush’s vocal is true to the tone of her source material, and yet, what a gamble to take. It paid off, of course – four weeks at No 1 for a debut single about a Victorian novel isn’t bad going – and proved once again that with rock and pop singing it’s probably safe to say that you can never go too far in your quest to find a distinctive voice for yourself.”

At the time people assumed Bush would be a one hit wonder. The single certainly sailed close to being a novelty hit (“Sounds like a bag of cats!” John Lydon‘s mam told him when the Sex Pistol brought the 45 home), but 40 years on here we are. Incredibly, Kate, who’d spent her childhood in the Kent countryside “immersed in English folk music, and Irish jigs and sea shanties,” was just 19 when Wuthering Heights topped the British charts, knocking off Abba‘s Take A Chance On Me and spending four weeks weeks at the summit, holding off a cheeky challenge from Blondie’s Denis.

It also reached the top spot in Ireland, Australia, New Zealand and Italy, and was a smash right across the world. Except the US. Go figure.

While Debbie Harry and her auto-American boys only had to wait a year before going that one step further in with Heart Of Glass and a succession of other UK chart-dominators, Wuthering Heights remains KB’s only No.1 single to date – the closest she’s come since being 1985’s Number 3-peaking Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God), the trailer for her undisputed masterpiece, the epic dreamscape that is the Hounds Of Love.

If we can talk an earlier album for a second; Amazingly, in the pre-Madonna, pre-Adele days of 1980, Bush’s third set, Never For Ever, was the first ever long-player by a British female solo artist to top the UK album chart. Bolstered by a triumvirate of memorable hits – Breathing, Babooshka, Army Dreamers – it was also the first LP by any female solo artist to enter the chart at No.1. In 2014 she was still setting new records.

Thanks to the hardly surprising hoo-ha surrounding Before The Dawn, her first live shows in 35 years, Kate became the first woman to have eight albums in the Top 40 simultaneously. Indeed, at the end of that August every one of her eleven (11!) albums made an reappearance in the Top 50, a pretty staggering achievement for a living artist.

Remix fix? In 1986 Kate inexplicably re-recorded the song’s vocals for her only singles collection, The Whole Story because “It sounded dated. I think if we’d had more time I probably would have done the same with a couple of other songs.” Wow, just wow.

Wow, what a career, what a startlingly original talent. Kate’s had so many brilliant and unique songs course through her veins – Cloudbusting, The Man With The Child In His Eyes, This Woman’s Work, Under The Ivy, The Sensual World, Moments Of Pleasure to reel off just a few – and all of them self-penned. What vision, what self-possession. She really is the closest any country has got to producing a female Bowie.

But unlike the grand old Dame, she was never interested in that ghastly word celebrity, and never flinched from her bloody minded refusal to present her affecting art on her own terms. This is why we love her – those admirable qualities to never compromise, never play the game and to do what the fuck she wants.

Cherish the genius. Cherish that cultural legacy. Cherish the Bush.

Long may she reign.

Released on 20th January, 1978, Kate Bush, EMI or anyone in the world could quite have anticipated how Wuthering Heights would explode. That is would be discussed, performed and played forty-eight years after its release. One of the most staggering debut singles ever released, it was during 1979’s The Tour of Life, when she could really bring something out of it. Playing life to audiences around the U.K. and Europe, Bush would slightly detach herself from the song in years since. Perhaps not a fan of her original vocal, many critics attacked it and ridiculed her for being hitch-pitched and witch-like. Many associating everything Bush did after with Wuthering Heights and that sound. However, Kate Bush should be immensely proud of her masterpiece! The fact that she wrote it when she was eighteen is still something I cannot comprehend! Proof that, from the very start, Kate Bush was this…

SONGWRITING genius.

FEATURE: Kate Bush: Something Like a Song: Love and Anger (The Sensual World)

FEATURE:

 

 

Kate Bush: Something Like a Song

Love and Anger (The Sensual World)

__________

SOME might see this song…

as the opposite of what one would associate with The Sensual World. Kate Bush’s sixth studio album was released in 1989. Many would associate the album with something sensual, romantic and positive. Songs that are of a particular vibe. However, it is a varied and complex album where Kate Bush addresses a number of different themes and stories. However, in terms of love and romance, Kate Bush is notable for being very positive. Love and Anger is a song that suggests recriminations, doubts and the actual realities of a relationship. A sense of loss and defeat (“If you can't tell your sister/If you can't tell a priest/'Cause it's so deep you don't think that you can speak about it/To anyone/And you tell it to your heart?/Can you find it in your heart/To let go of these feelings/Like a bell to a Southerly wind?/We could be like two strings beating/Speaking in sympathy/What would we do without you?”). If not the first time a love song from her was more negative or balanced, it was a window into her romances and relationships of the time perhaps. It is a fasting song. I want to take a closer look at Love and Anger. It is one of the standouts from The Sensual World, though it is not often talked about. There are some features/reviews that I am going to drop in. It is a fascinating song. One of the most-streamed from The Sensual World, I think that its popularity is more the fact it is the second track and follows The Sensual World’s title track, more than the fact people go after the song and know it. I never hear this song played on the radio, and it is really not discussed much. In terms of sequencing, I would have thought Love and Anger would be fourth or fifth down, though Bush put this song right near the top. The third and final single from the album released on 16th October, 1989, Love and Anger was released on 26th February, 1990 and reached thirty-eight in the U.K. More notably, Love and Anger charted on the US Billboard Modern Rock Tracks chart that December at number one - it was Bush's only chart-topper on any U.S. chart until 2022 (when Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God) was revitalised and reintroduced to a new audience after appearing In Stranger Things).

We forget how we’ll-received The Sensual World was. It has received so many positive reviews and love, in spite the fact it came out at a time when other genres were popular. It was sort of Rave, Club music and the second Summer of Love (1988-1989). U.S. Hip-Hop was taking hold and bands like Pixies, Nirvana and New Order were more popular. In terms of female solo artists, U.S. giants such as Madona and Janet Jackson were more in vogue. The Sensual World was like nothing else around in 1989, which is perhaps why it charted so well and was acclaimed. Audiences wanted something genuinely alternative at a time when Alternative bands were perhaps not; Pop somewhat too stagey, showy or commercial. I love how the B-sides of Love and Anger include Ken, One Last Look Around the House Before We Go, and The Confrontation. Walk Straight Down the Middle on the U.S. cassette version. Be Kind to My Mistakes for the Canadian cassette. The first single on the U.S. label, Columbia Records, it is great that audiences there connected with the song. It was a period where she was getting more recognition in America. Hounds of Love was perhaps her first album to properly get some love and respect there – even if reviewers were mixed and interviewers occasionally clueless -, even though The Dreaming got some focus. However, The Sensual World and 1993’s The Red Shoes were a success. The latter reached twenty-eight on the Billboard 200. Love and Anger’s success is all the more amazing, as it is a track that Kate Bush was not sure what she was trying to say. A hard and inorganic writing process, I do wonder why it was chosen over a single over, say, Never Be Mine, Rocket’s Tail or even The Fog. The U.S. reaction was genuinely more effusive than the homegrown critics’.

Consider the range of reviews and how there was a sole U.K. moment of praise; U.S. critics much more tuned in and aware of a brilliant song when they heard it. Thanks to the Kate Bush Encyclopedia for providing these useful resources. Baffling why U.K. press were so unkind and nasty to Love and Anger I suspect they were much more into what they thought was cool at the time: Grunge, Alternative and even Dance and Rave. Something with more sophistication, depth and beauty sort of passed them by and went over their heads:

“Is it too late to take back all those gushing hymns of praise we wrote in homage to Kate’s recent LP? [This is] pretty dispensable, fairly orthodox pop-rock listening.

Paul Lester, Melody Maker, 3 March 1990

Kate seems to have lost the plot… all middle without a beginning or an end… lost in an unfocused mire…

Tim Nicholson, Record Mirror, 3 March 1990

Dynamic understanding and depth that is quite untouchable. Bloody fantastic.

Phil Wilding, Kerrang!, 3 March 1990

Remarkably, US reviews were much more positive:

Bush recalls her ‘Big Sky’ in this lively introspective number from the hit album… already a no. 1 smash with modern rock programmers.

Bill coleman, Billboard (USA), 9 december 1989

This bristles with vigour electricity and life… fuelled by cascades of crashing guitars and a huge chanting chorus of background vocals… captures the power and sweetness of Kate Bush’s voice and music.

College Music Journal (USA), November 1989”.

Kate Bush spoke to U.K. and U.S. journalists/broadcasters about Love and Anger. Sometimes in exasperated tones! This challenging song, the fact again it was a single meant that she either felt it would be successful or EMI were pushing to put it out. I have dropped this information in before, but I want to come back to the Kate Bush Encyclopedia and their great work including these interesting interviews:

“It’s one of the most difficult songs I think I’ve ever written. It was so elusive, and even today I don’t like to talk about it, because I never really felt it let me know what it’s about. It’s just kind of a song that pulled itself together, and with a tremendous amount of encouragement from people around me. There were so many times I thought it would never get on the album. But I’m really pleased it did now.

Interview, WFNX Boston (USA), 1989

I couldn’t get the lyrics. They were one of the last things to do. I just couldn’t find out what the song was about, though the tune was there. The first verse was always there, and that was the problem, because I’d already set some form of direction, but I couldn’t follow through. I didn’t know what I wanted to say at all. I guess I was just tying to make a song that was comforting, up tempo, and about how when things get really bad, it’s alright really – “Don’t worry old bean. Someone will come and help you out.”
The song started with a piano, and Del put a straight rhythm down. Then we got the drummer, and it stayed like that for at least a year and a half. Then I thought maybe it could be okay, so we got Dave Gilmour in. This is actually one of the more difficult songs – everyone I asked to try and play something on this track had problems. It was one of those awful tracks where either everything would sound ordinary, really MOR, or people just couldn’t come to terms with it. They’d ask me what it was about, but I didn’t know because I hadn’t written the lyrics. Dave was great – I think he gave me a bit of a foothold there, really. At least there was a guitar that made some sense. And John [Giblin] putting the bass on – that was very important. He was one of the few people brave enough to say that he actually liked the song.

Tony Horkins, ‘What Katie Did Next’. International Musician, December 1989”.

Whilst people have reviewed the song, there is a bit of a mixed reaction. However, I want to bring them in, as I really admire Love and Anger and think it was a worthy single. One that should have done better in the U.K. Maybe genres popular in the U.S. fitted the song and so the press connected better – and, in turn, people were inspired to buy the single. It was a different sound in the U.K., so maybe critics were cynical and more jaded here. I am going to get to a more mixed reaction of Love and Anger. This Substack is an interesting read:

“Lyrically, the song matches a lot of Kate Bush’s themes of love, friendship, deep thoughts and introspection. In “Love and Anger,” she reflects on how difficult it can be to express one’s innermost thoughts or concerns if you don’t know for sure who you can rely on to be a confidant. She talks about how she has something buried so deep, she “doesn’t think she can speak about it.”

It could take me all my life
But it would only take a moment to
Tell you what I'm feeling
But I don't know if I'm ready yet

My kids are like this. Granted, not everything they keep to themselves is a deep, introspective thought unwilling to be dredged up to the surface; sometimes it’s because they felt bad about breaking something or forgetting to do something. But the point of the song is, regardless of what it is you might be holding inside, you need to be sure you’re ready to release it, and that you can confidently express that emotion to someone willing to listen.

After that struggle, Kate Bush’s narrator conceded that yes, eventually, you should be able to connect with that person or people:

You might not
Not think so now
But just you wait and see
Someone will come to help you

We’re all built like that. There’s no one alive that can get through their days without finding an outlet for their emotions and feelings, but it’s the risk of being hurt that creates the confusion. Kate Bush infuses an intensity to that moment in her performance, coupled with a wide range of musical influences coming together to create that sense of simple chaos. It’s a well-arranged piece of music.

Despite the success of this song on the MRT charts, it never made it on to the Hot 100 and ultimately faded from the U.S. charts entirely in the early weeks of 1990. It took another 15 years for Kate Bush to reach the top 10 of the British charts, hitting #4 with “King Of The Mountain” in 2005. It did not chart in the U.S.

Kate Bush might not be your cup of tea artistically. I know her songs, even “Running Up That Hill,” are not really in rotation on my typical playlists. But she is definitely an interesting and talented artist, with a very unique and powerful voice. “Love And Anger” wouldn’t have been a legacy hit for her even before her resurgence in 2022, but it’s a decent part of her extensive catalog.

Rating: 6/10”.

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1989/PHOTO CREDIT: Kevin Cummins

In 2023, for their Alternative Number Ones feature, Stereogum provided a passionate and very positive analysis of Love and Anger. If the U.K. press were somewhat cold and distant, Love and Anger has got this retrospective admiration and intrigue. People looking at deeper cuts after the resurgence with Stranger Things and Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God). Love and Anger feels more relevant or fits in better today than 1989’s U.K. music scene:

“In The Alternative Number Ones, I'm reviewing every #1 single in the history of the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks/Alternative Songs, starting with the moment that the chart launched in 1988. This column is a companion piece to The Number Ones, and it's for subscribers only. Thank you to everyone who's helping to keep Stereogum afloat.

A couple of weeks ago, Kate Bush was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame, and she surprised exactly zero people by neglecting to show up. Kate Bush doesn't show up to things. It's a key part of her mystique. Bush has toured exactly once, in 1979. She's performed in the US exactly once -- musical-guest duties on a 1978 Saturday Night Live episode with Eric Idle as the guest host. Whenever Kate Bush leaves the house for any reason, it's a five-alarm story in the music press. She wasn't going to no damn Hall Of Fame induction ceremony. I wonder if she even watched Big Boi give her induction speech and St. Vincent cover "Running Up That Hill."

"Running Up That Hill," as you probably already know, is the reason that the Hall Of Fame inducted Kate Bush after all of her years of eligibility. In 2022, that song caught a sudden and glorious surge of attention after being featured heavily on the most recent season of Stranger Things. (Winona Ryder, one of that show's stars, says that she pushed for the song's inclusion, which absolutely tracks.) "Running Up That Hill" suddenly became a global smash, topping charts around the planet and coming very close to the apex of the Billboard Hot 100. It was one of the most beautiful feel-good stories of the past few years of pop music, and Kate Bush didn't have to do a single thing to set its wheels in motion. "Running Up That Hill" was already her biggest hit before Stranger Things, and the song was just sitting there, waiting for entire new generations to notice.

Pre-Stranger Things bump, Kate Bush was already a creature of legend. In her homeland, Bush was a giant pop star from jump street, finding huge success before she was even out of her teens. She built a career entirely on her own terms, producing her own records and directing her own videos. Then, she essentially disappeared, going off to live in her castle and only reemerging for bafflingly weird and reliably fascinating projects at irregular intervals. Her absence is central to her mystique, and it's never stopped her music from resonating. Before the Stranger Things thing happened, my daughter discovered Bush's batshit 1980 single "Babooshka" via TikTok. I have to imagine that there will be more Kate Bush resurgences, and that Bush herself won't need to do anything to spur them on.

Kate Bush songs tend to sound like they're echoing up from some hidden, mystical cavern. She's been a ghostly presence for so long that it's almost hard to remember the period when she was an active recording artist who was trying and mostly failing to break into the American market. (Admittedly, she wasn't trying that hard. She doesn't like to fly, so she wasn't going to physically come over here.) In 1989, Kate Bush had only made a few minor inroads on the Billboard charts, partly because there was no radio format where her music made a ton of sense.

Kate Bush didn't even entirely make sense on Modern Rock radio, though her lush sonics and romantic maximalism weren't too dissimilar from the arch and mopey British rock bands who were all over those playlists at the time. Her flowery, indulgent orchestrations had more to do with prog and art-rock than with the punk that influenced most of the other acts on those stations. But Bush had taken a long break after Hounds Of Love, her most successful album to that point, and her return was an event. That event was enough to turn "Love And Anger," the wild and twisty and gorgeous single from her album The Sensual World, into Bush's only #1 hit on the Modern Rock chart. I'm glad it was enough, since it means that I get to write about an extremely cool career.

Catherine Bush, the daughter of an English doctor and an Irish nurse, grew up in an ancient farmhouse on the outskirts of London. She was an artistic kid who taught herself to play piano and violin, and she started writing songs very young. Her parents paid for her to record a 50-song demo tape when she was 16. No labels were interested, but a family friend connected Bush with Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour, who became a regular collaborator over the years. Gilmour paid for a new demo tape, and Bush recorded it with big-deal producer Andrew Powell. That was enough to convince EMI to sign Bush, who was still a kid.

EMI actually kept Kate Bush on the shelf for a couple of years, and she used that time to study interpretive dance and mime. She also formed a group called the KT Bush Band and played London pubs; anyone who saw them back then can now drop this anecdote at a party and make everyone else violently jealous. Finally, Bush released her debut album The Kick Inside in 1978, a few months before her 20th birthday. Her debut single "Wuthering Heights" went all the way to #1 in the UK. It was the first time that a female artist topped the singles chart over there with a song that she'd written herself. In the UK alone, The Kick Inside sold a million copies, which meant that something like 2% of the population bought the record.

"Wuthering Heights" didn't do any business in America, but another single from The Kick Inside, "The Man With The Child In His Eyes," scraped the bottom of the Hot 100, peaking at #85. It would be seven years before Kate Bush landed on the Hot 100 again. Bush rushed her sophomore album Lionheart out a year after The Kick Inside, and it wasn't anywhere near as successful as her first. In 1979, she developed a theatrical, elaborately choreographed spectacle, and she took her Tour Of Life out on the road. Except for a few televised single-song performances here and there, Bush wouldn't play another live show for 35 years.

Kate Bush recorded her first two albums with Andrew Powell, the same guy who'd produced her demo. For 1980's Never For Ever, Bush started to take over as producer, sharing credit with audio engineer Jon Kelly. After that, Bush produced every one of her albums on her own. 1982's The Dreaming is the first LP that Bush produced entirely by herself, and it's a wild ride. Bush got really into drum machines and into Fairlight synthesizers, but she didn't use them for the mechanical rhythms and sleek textures of that era's synthpoppers. Instead, Bush let those sounds unlock some strange, expressionistic new textures. Her voice had always been wispy and eccentric, but parts of The Dreaming are downright freaky, in the best way. She sounds delightfully unconstrained, free to yelp and howl and screech about her undying fascination with Victorian femininity.

Kate Bush followed The Dreaming with her masterpiece. 1985's Hounds Of Love uses the experimental electro-organic textures and proud indulgence of The Dreaming in service of alternate-universe pop songs -- some of which worked, and continue to work, as pop songs in this universe. In the UK, "Running Up That Hill" was Bush's biggest hit since "Wuthering Heights." Other Hounds Of Love songs, like the title track and "Cloudbusting," immediately entered the music-nerd canon. In the US, "Running Up That Hill" was a bit of a fluke hit, going all the way to #30 on the Hot 100. The whole album is absolutely astonishing, and I would encourage anyone to carve out some time and just disappear into it.

From the very beginning, Kate Bush won the admiration of her peers, especially among veteran British art-rock types. David Gilmour was an early fan, and so was Peter Gabriel; Bush learned about the magic of Fairlight synths while singing backup on his self-titled 1980 album. (Gabriel, who will eventually appear in this column, has a bunch of self-titled albums, but this was the melty-face one. She's the echoing trill on "Games Without Frontiers.") In 1986, Gabriel wrote a beautiful song called "Don't Give Up," and he hoped to record it as a duet with Dolly Parton, which would've doubtless been cool. Dolly passed on the track, so Gabriel recorded it with Kate Bush instead. I love the idea that he heard some similar serene tenderness in those two radically different voices.

Peter Gabriel's So album became a gigantic hit, and "Don't Give Up" went top-10 in the UK. "Don't Give Up" also made it to #72 on the Hot 100 -- Bush's third time on that chart. After Hounds Of Love and "Don't Give Up," there must've been a ton of anticipation for another Kate Bush record. Bush didn't release The Sensual World until four years after Hounds Of Love. Bush worked hard on The Sensual World, and she followed her muse to some unexpected places. The title track’s lyrics are a reworked version of Molly Bloom's speech from Ulysses. (The Joyce estate wouldn't let her use his words verbatim.) She sings another song, "Heads We're Dancing," from the perspective of a woman who spends a romantic 1939 evening dancing with a dashing stranger who turns out to be Hitler. Any label execs who hoped that she'd go fully pop after Hounds Of Love must've been pounding their heads on their desks.

A year before The Sensual World came out, John Hughes used a remixed version of Bush's then-unreleased song "This Woman's Work" to soundtrack a montage from his movie She's Having A Baby. (Kate Bush, incidentally, has some random-ass soundtrack songs on her resume, including one for the the 2000 CGI cartoon Dinosaur and another for 2007's leaden YA-fantasy flop The Golden Compass.) These days, "This Woman's Work" is by far the most popular song from The Sensual World, thanks in part to a stunning version that her fellow art-pop enigma Maxwell sang on his 1997 MTV Unplugged EP. (That Maxwell cover did better on the Hot 100 than almost any actual Kate Bush song. It peaked at #58.) But the Sensual World song that took off on American alt-rock radio was the song that Bush had the hardest time writing.

In her all-too-rare interviews, Kate Bush never even liked to talk about "Love And Anger"; she evidently regarded the song as a massive pain in the ass. Bush had the music for "Love And Anger" first, and it took a year and a half for her to figure out the lyrics that she wanted to write. After the song came out, Bush said that she still didn't know what it was about. Bush's lyrics are often deliberate and exacting, rife with literary references. With "Love And Anger," she just wanted to get the damn thing done. But I like the idea that her frustration forced her to work on sheer instinct.

I don't know what "Love And Anger" is about, either, but its vast and overwhelming swirl of emotions is powerfully evocative. Since Bush can't or won't say what the song is about, you can come up with your own reading. I hear a lot of pain and regret in "Love And Anger," and also hear a certain nurturing warmth. Bush seems to be encouraging someone to stay strong through a painful period, much as she did on "Don't Give Up." There's a lyric that I hear as a reference to childhood abuse -- "If you can't tell your sister/ If you can't tell a priest/ 'Cause it's so deep you don't think that you can speak about it to anyone/ Can you tell it to your heart?" Maybe that's not what Bush meant, but authorial intent isn't everything, and that shit hits me hard.

The sound of "Love And Anger" is certainly self-indulgent -- all those drums and massed backup vocals and hammering pianos and flinty guitar notes swirling and building, without anything resembling a stick-in-your-head hook. But Kate Bush is the kind of artist who can turn self-indulgence into a strength rather than a liability. Bush said that she had a hard time recording the song, getting the musicians to play the right things, but her perfectionism paid off. "Love And Anger" plays out like a gathering storm, and I love the way the sheer sound of the thing can swallow a room.

Kate Bush's old buddy David Gilmour played guitar on "Love And Anger" and gets a few guitar-face close-ups in the video. Plenty of the bands on the late-'80s Modern Rock charts had some level of Pink Floyd influence, but none of them had access to actual Pink Floyd guys. That's just a Kate Bush thing. The wheedly, choppy guitar bits at the end of "Love And Anger" have a bit of late-'80s studio cheese on them, but they still come out rough and sharp, and I love the power chords that Gilmour plays early in the track. But despite the superstar guest, the guitars don't really overwhelm "Love And Anger." Instead, they're simply part of the whirlwind, along with the busy pianos and thrumming bass notes and some kind of zither, maybe? And the drums. There are so many drums on "Love And Anger," booming and whapping and crunching and bubbling and thundering.

Over all that music, Kate Bush sings about the need to let go of your feelings, and she sounds like she's letting go of hers. She starts off soft and welcoming, but pretty soon, she's yowling and trilling and yipping with efflorescent exhilaration. She turns her multi-tracked voice into a reverb-soaked choir on the backups. She also does this wobbling-hum thing that I just love. At the end of the track, she whispers "yeahhhh" and then laughs uproariously. She's just gotten through all this emotional heaviness, and she sounds positively exultant.

All of Kate Bush's self-directed videos are strange and singular, and the "Love And Anger" clip is a total hoot -- gold-dust showers, whirling Sufis, glowing scepters, a phalanx of ballet dancers, Bush staring straight into the camera with a playful sort of pride. As the clip ends, Bush is up on a soundstage with her band, showing the kind of dance moves that she almost never bothered to attempt in front of a paying audience. Bush's dancing has a drunk-aunt-at-the-wedding quality, and I love it. It's not terribly graceful, but she is in it. She's fully focused, man.

"Love And Anger" never crossed over to the Hot 100, but The Sensual World eventually became Kate Bush's biggest-selling album in the US, going gold four years after its release. (That's still Bush's only RIAA certification, though "Running Up That Hill" has probably done multi-platinum numbers by now.) In 1990, the title track of The Sensual World reached #6 on the Modern Rock chart. (It's an 8.) Then, in 1990, Bush covered Elton John's "Rocket Man" on the Elton John/Bernie Taupin tribute album Two Rooms, and her version of the song reached #11. It slaps.

It's pretty wild to try to figure out Kate Bush's reputation in the late '80s and early '90s. Bush was never an overwhelming critics' favorite, though both Hounds Of Love and The Sensual World did decently on the Village Voice Pazz & Jop critics' poll. (Critics put The Sensual World at #26 for 1989 -- not great, but still a few steps up from Rhythm Nation 1814 and Disintegration.) SPIN’s review of The Sensual World gets stuck on Bush's "kitteny stuff": "Her father-fixation, her little giggles and mews, and her hairdos are the stuff Playboy reps scout college campuses for" -- exactly the sort of terribly sexist and dismissively snarky tone that rock critics work hard to avoid today. (In fairness to writer Don Howland, of the garage punk bands Bassholes and Gibson Bros., that review also contains this phrase: "She likes to stretch her voice into the sort of Minnie Riperton-esque tweets that tend to appeal to people who like cats more than dogs but otherwise have good senses of humor." That's just good writing.)

Kate Bush followed The Sensual World with a record that critics definitely did not like. 1993's The Red Shoes was about a sleek and commercial as a Kate Bush record could be, and it wasn't really suited to the alt-rock moment in which it came out. In America, grunge was ascendant, but Kate Bush was collaborating with Prince and Eric Clapton, artists who were nowhere near that zeitgeist. Lead single "Rubberband Girl" peaked at #7 on the Modern Rock chart, and the Bush didn't return to that chart for another 29 years. ("Rubberband Girl" is an 8.)

After The Red Shoes, Kate Bush became a mom, and she left music behind entirely until returning with the 2005 double album Aerial. Great record. Since then, there's only been one more Kate Bush studio album: 2011's bugged-out 50 Words For Snow, which has an eight-minute Elton John duet and a 14-minute song about a night of passion with a snowman. Wild shit. That's a great record, too. In 2014, Kate Bush returned to the stage for Before The Dawn, a three-week London residency that might mark the last time that she ever performs live. If you got to see one of those shows, I congratulate you. Good job. You handled that situation well.

GRADE: 9/10”.

I will leave it there. I have included the B-sides for Love and Anger, as I feel they are also important and show that Bush had all these incredible songs that were not well-known or big hits. A modest success in the U.K. but a much bigger one in the U.S., Love and Anger is a Kate Bush song that should be played and talked about more. The third single and second track from The Sensual World, it turned thirty-five earlier in the year. After all of these years, it still…

SOUNDS truly fantastic.

FEATURE: Spotlight: Kenshi Yonez

FEATURE:

 

 

Spotlight

PHOTO CREDIT: Yohji Uchida

Kenshi Yonezu

__________

THIS artist might not be…

PHOTO CREDIT: Jiro Konami

on your radar, but Kenshi Yonezu is one of the biggest Japanese artists in the world. His music combines J-Pop, Rock and Electronic. He is also noted for composing the theme songs to the Academy Award-winning animated feature, The Boy and the Heron. I must admit that I am somewhat new to him but I can identify that Yonezu is going to make headway in 2026 and will definitely get his music played further and wider. His most recent album is last year’s LOST CORNER. I am starting out with an interview from Forbes from April:

“Though he may be one of the biggest Japanese artist in the world, he doesn’t want to talk about it, but rather use his music to speak for him. It may be one of the many reasons why he’s reached domestic and international success, creating experimental Vocaloid songs as Hachi in 2009 and, later, his own music, which includes the theme songs to the Academy Award-winning animated feature film The Boy and The Heron and the popular anime series Chainsaw Man.

Known for his eclectic blending of J-pop, rock, and electronic sounds, Yonezu’s music has been said to pull “listeners into a unique and dynamic musical journey" with his captivating melodies, masterful visual concepts, and deep, thoughtful lyrics. His music has been his gateway of expression, as the 34-year-old “shy” artist admits he finds it difficult to have a conversation, often leading him to second-guess his responses. But, when he’s on stage and in the studio, he becomes a different person – one where he feels the most “open and free.”

“When I’m performing music, that’s music I’ve created and been playing for a long time,” Yonezu says through an interpreter over Zoom. “I had this time to work out my feelings as I’m [making] music. [My music is] very honest in terms of how I feel because I know that it comforts me.”

Sirikul: Your music sound has changed throughout each project – from pop to R&B to rock to a bit of jazz. How do you define your sound and music taste?

Yonezu: I’m not really interested in pursuing my own style per se or one fixed style. Since the beginning, I’ve always been more of the type to pursue what I’m interested in. What I feel is fun for me at the moment [is] the type of music I’ve always loved: alternative rock. That was what I loved initially. There was a time when I was in a band, but unfortunately, being in a band wasn’t really for me. When I started working on my own was when I really released myself from thinking about one particular style. When working on your own, there are no restrictions about what you have to do. I was free to do anything. If I had to define myself, I do believe I am pursuing J-pop.

We have seen a wave of Japanese influence come in and out of American culture—the popularity of Japanese anime and films and the increase of Japanese musicians and artists. Being involved with both music and [your music in] popular animations, how have you seen this shift in appreciation in Japanese culture and content from the West?

I do sense the change and shift [in the West] very strongly. The COVID pandemic was the catalyst for Japanese anime to expand even more in the global scene. That helped a lot. When I started, it was the Vocaloid scene. So the internet was huge in that respect, serving as a way for cultural exchange between my music and people from other countries. That was part of it. The internet isn’t always good, but it can be used for good purposes, [despite] some negative aspects to it. However, the fact that people overseas listen to my music makes me very happy.

Sirikul: You’ve been involved with many beautiful anime series and films, including Hayao Miyazaki’s Academy Award-winning film The Boy and the Heron. You’ve also beautifully illustrated your album and single covers. Recently, there has been a rise of artificial intelligence copying artwork, including Studio Ghibli’s work. What is your take on this growing trend of using A.I. to create art?

Yonezu: In terms of A.I., it’s a huge problem or theme for people working in music. I've heard songs on the internet where people have used A.I. to imitate me. They're really well crafted. When I listen to these songs, they're supposedly my voice- sometimes I really think that was me. Did I actually sing that? Perhaps there might not be a need for myself because A.I. can take over. Of course, when most people come across something beneficial or easy to access, they'll use it because it's there. So, why wouldn't you use it? But my generation of people [has] an aversion towards things created by A.I.. Eventually, there will be generations to come who will accept it wholeheartedly. You might not feel the same way we do at the moment. Of course, when I started in the Vocaloid scene, [many] people used to say,' these aren't songs [and] you're demeaning songs' [in a trivial way.] It [was] silly. Nowadays, for young people at the time in my generation, it was fascinating. You can't equate A.I. with Vocaloid. They're totally different things, and you can't speak of them in the same terms, but it's not exactly the right way to go. But in culture, what we accept as natural now or [what they're used to] becomes a form of habit- it depends on the age you're living in”.

I want to finish with a couple of interviews. Billboard spoke with Kenshi Yonezu on the ‘unconscious’ links between IRIS OUT/JANE DOE, reconnecting with ChainsawMan, and the influence of Kiraru Utada. Yonezu also talked about his day-to-day life following an important and busy world tour. As I am new to this artist and a little unfamiliar with his sound and world, I have been learning a lot reading these new interviews. I am going to follow Kenshi Yonezu as we head into next year:

“First off, tell us about how you’ve been doing. Since wrapping up the Kenshi Yonezu 2025 TOUR / JUNK in April, you’ve likely spent much of the past few months focused on creating. After completing such a large-scale tour, including overseas performances, has there been any changes in your mindset?

Experiencing concerts in countries I’d never been to before on the world tour, in Korea, the U.S., and various cities in Europe, was huge for me. I don’t want to sound disrespectful to those who’d already been listening to my music outside Japan, but since I hadn’t really thought about it much before, I was surprised by the realization that, “So many people have been waiting for me.” I was welcomed so warmly, and even heard voices calling out “Hachi,” a name I haven’t been addressed by in years, which made me genuinely happy. It left me with a very strong feeling of refreshing clarity.

After going through that, I feel like I’ve started aiming for a more productive way of living this year — something I’d always struggled with before. Looking back on my life, if I hadn’t been accepted through music, I think it would have been terrifying. I wasn’t someone who could function socially, just spending all my time making music or drawing at home, neglecting everything else. But now I feel like I’m gradually moving away from that kind of life. It’s very ordinary stuff, but I’ve started doing simple things like keeping a daily routine and paying attention to my health. For most people it might sound like, “Really? Only now?” But for me, it feels like my way of living has shifted a lot. I can’t say for sure whether the concerts were the direct reason, but I do feel they’ve had a big influence.

Having written “KICK BACK” for CHAINSAW MAN before, were you mindful of any links between that song and the new ones?

From the start, I felt strongly that I didn’t want it to turn into something like “KICK BACK Part 2.” I never really felt that risk with “JANE DOE,” but with “IRIS OUT,” I sensed that if I let my guard down, it could easily end up becoming “KICK BACK Part 2.” So I placed a lot of importance on how to differentiate it from “KICK BACK.” It’s a song with a complex and eccentric structure, full of dynamism, so if that’s like a rollercoaster, then I wanted “IRIS OUT” to be more like a free-fall ride — starting with a jolt, racing straight ahead, and ending abruptly. I was very conscious of giving it that kind of decisiveness.

Hikaru Utada is an extremely multi-faceted artist, and throughout their career they’ve given form to many different expressions. With “JANE DOE,” it feels like the sense of loss that often appears in their work is being drawn out. What are your thoughts on that?

Two of my personal Hikaru Utada favorites are “FINAL DISTANCE” and “Dareka no Negai ga Kanau Koro.” I first heard those songs in junior high, and they were the starting points for Utada-san’s presence becoming a big part of my life. I went to one of their concerts recently, where they performed the original “DISTANCE” in a remixed version. It was presented with a happiness and overflowing sense of euphoria that stood in contrast to “FINAL DISTANCE.” They were singing “hitotsu niwa narenai” (though we can’t be one) while dancing joyfully, and I thought it was wonderful. This is just my personal impression, but I feel that kind of duality, ambiguity, and kind of helplessness is something that lives strongly in their music. I felt there was something in common with what Reze embodies. Of course, I’m not saying Utada-san is like Reze”.

PHOTO CREDIT: Yohji Uchida

In an NME interview from last month, we get to hear from an artist who has a distinctly Japanese quirk to it. Something he is very proud of. Kenshi Yonezu discusses his “contributions to ‘Chainsaw Man – The Movie: Reze Arc’: the “free-fall ride” of ‘Iris Out’ and his massive, melancholic collaboration with Hikaru Utada”. I am not sourcing the entirety of the interview. However, there are sections that caught my eye that I wanted to include here:

“‘Iris Out’ captures Yonezu’s ability to plunge into a work and create something apt for it while retaining his musical flair, here capturing the topsy-turvy electronic sound found in many Vocaloid songs. On the other end is the plaintive ‘Jane Doe’, Reze Arc’s closing number and a passing-of-the-torch moment of sorts. On it, Yonezu – one of the biggest names in Japan’s current Reiwa Era – collaborates with Hikaru Utada, who is arguably the biggest J-pop performer of the preceding Heisei Era (1989 to 2019).

“I reflected on the times I spent alone in my bedroom making music and tried to recapture that pure, childlike enthusiasm I had back then”

“At first, I thought it probably shouldn’t be me singing. My male voice didn’t feel at all appropriate for the ending of the movie. I had a strong sense from the start that the song needed to be led by a female voice to work properly,” Yonezu says of ‘Jane Doe’. “I really like the duet ‘I’ve Seen It All’ by Björk and Thom Yorke from Dancer in the Dark. I felt that kind of nuance would fit perfectly, and started creating the song with that in mind.”
Yonezu knows something about duality, having changed the fabric of J-pop in the last decade as the first prominent Vocaloid creator to go from an internet space to the mainstream. He brought the unpredictability and sonic curiosity of that online world to a greater audience, and helped pave the way for the likes of Ado and former NME Cover act YOASOBI – among others who got their start in Vocaloid or grew up with Yonezu. Those acts, too, have broken through to become central names in 2020s Japanese music, an era that has also seen them head out further into the world thanks to tie-ups with popular media franchises and stand-alone global jaunts. Earlier in 2025, Yonezu completed his first world tour, performing sold-out shows across Asia, Europe and North America.

Yonezu is beloved internationally as an eclectic maestro able to veer from rip-roaring rock built for hyper-violent franchises to contemplative ballads such as ‘Spinning Globe’, used in the end credits for director Hayao Miyazaki’s purported swansong, The Boy And The Heron. Reflecting that range of collaboration, he is the rare artist in fragmented times to connect with his country’s full demographic range, to the point he’s also the writer of one of this century’s biggest Japanese kids’ songs”.

I am excited to learn more about Keshi Yonezu. Maybe different to other artists I have featured on my site, I have been struck by his work. IRIS OUT is this amazing song and piece of work that I was instantly stunned by. Compelled me to dig deeper and find out about Yonezu. I look forward to a potential album or further work next year from this incredible Japanese composer and artist. I would compel everyone to allow yourself to fall…

INTO his incredible sonic world.

____________

Follow Kenshi Yonezu

Instagram:

https://www.instagram.com/hachi_08/

TikTok:

https://www.tiktok.com/@kenshiyonezu_08

Spotify:

https://open.spotify.com/artist/1snhtMLeb2DYoMOcVbb8iB?si=F30xFOj1Tn6A4iQ2WAJ1pA

YouTube:

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

FEATURE: And So Is Love: How Kate Bush Can Affect and Influence Relationships and Human Understanding

FEATURE:

 

 

And So Is Love

PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush

How Kate Bush Can Affect and Influence Relationships and Human Understanding

__________

MAYBE it is obvious…

PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush

but I sort of feel like there is this natural attraction when you discover that someone loves the same artist as you. Not to say there should be a Kate Bush dating club but, as she is a big part of my life and someone very important to me, I do gravitate towards people who have a similar affection for her. Not that it is a deal-breaker at all, though I do sort of getting miffed when someone says they have never heard of Kate Bush or they sort of muddle and think where they have heard her from. Not that I would ever distance myself from someone who does not know who Kate Bush is or does not like her. However, those who know Kate Bush and dig her music understand why she is so important and why her complete and incredible catalogue should be heard. People have definitely fallen in love over their mutual respect for Kate Bush. I don’t think there is any website or club specific enough that would bring Kate Bush fans together. However, as someone who is single and music and Kate Bush are major parts of my life, I do think that someone I end up will at least understand Kate Bush. Not that they would be as obsessive necessarily. It is interesting considering people who get together based on their love of particular artists. Or just form friendships. I live in London and do not know many people who know that much about Kate Bush. Where I work, most of my colleagues have a tiny bit of knowledge. Wider afield, it can be a bit hit-and-miss. There is that mixed blessing of being able to talk about her and maybe introduce her but also that thing that people do not know about Bush. Even with Stranger Things giving Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God), there is a feint moment of recognition but not much beyond that. No memories of her wider work.

This is not a feature about a quest to date someone who loves Kate Bush. More broadly, I am fascinated by Kate Bush’s music and how it approaches love. How she writes about it. I do think her songs about relationships and love can affect people and their relationships. I am writing another feature about how her music is largely positive. How there are very few of her songs that are negative or attack people. In a 1989 interview with NME, Kate Bush suggested that pretty much everything she wrote was a love song:

“To Kate Bush, sensuality is obviously a positive, receptive, natural experience, far removed from Happy Mondays-style chemistry-set hedonism. Check that video, "walking through these woods, with the weather changing, the elemental energies of the earth, wind, pollen, sunset, bite of hail, continually walking through the same environment with that sense of the changing world".

To the believer this is real sensuality, communion with nature, oneness with the earth. To the cynic it’s a load of hippie shit in any language. And predictably, at the centre of the whole philosophy, there’s the doctrine of, yes, love. So choose your path carefully, children…

"Love is a wonderful powerful thing," trills Kate, without a hint of Fotherington-Thomas. "In many ways nearly every song I’ve ever written is a love song. It’s very important to try and learn to love people as much as you can. But we all get so scared. It’s only when people are at points in their lives when they get such shocks that they take it as it really should be. The rest of us just seem to piss about”.

I think her songs of love and desire go beyond the commercial and traditional. I do think that nearly everything Kate Bush has written is about love and relationships,. However, unlike most artists, Bush adds something deeper and more interesting. Cinema, literary and fantasy run through songs that are also very human and emotional.

The lyrics and vocals in these songs can affect relationships. I think they make us think about love and connections in different ways. The way in which she writes about people and the observations she makes. You can say this applies to so many artists but, when I think of Kate Bush, her hugely expressive voice conveys a wide range of emotions; creating a sound that is both unique and personally resonant for listeners. I have changed the way I form friendships and view people after listening to Kate Bush’s music. I would like to think I feel more deeply about the world and appreciate the complexities of people. Even though Kate Bush’s songs are largely positive, it is not like she sugar-coats or glosses over things. She does spotlight darker realities and elements. In terms of personal relationships, even though I am single, I think I am less depressed and down about it. Kate Bush was in a long-term relationship with Del Palmer and had some shorter relationships, She had these close friendships too. Where she would write about these now and then, for the most part, I feel Bush was keener to turn the focus to other people. I don’t think any other artists writes as arrestingly and interestingly about love as Kate Bush. I am someone who struggles a bit with social cues and can find it intimidating being in social situations. Maybe it is her voice or how she delivers her songs, though I think I have become braver and less timid because of her. Also, where I used to stress and blame myself for being single, Bush has made me realise a number of things. Complexities of relationships and people. Their good nature too. I think I have discovered more about the human condition and the nuances of human beings through Kate Bush’s music. Her songs of love and desire have given me so much. Maybe made me a kinder and more patient person. One might ask how that is possible. I think it is her use of language and the way she sings these songs that I carry around with me.

In terms of the way I approach people in terms of temperament and tolerance, I often draw from Kate Bush’s music. Maybe not her love songs. However, it is the imagination and intelligence in her lyrics that has released something deep inside of me. In terms of specific examples, I often refer to Hounds of Love’s title track. I am writing about that soon as it turns forty in February. How there is this self-confession of timidity and cowardice. Such a brave thing to reveal in a song. I am more honest with myself and less ashamed to reveal things like flaws and cowardice. I think I am more world-conscious because of Kate Bush. Thinking more deeply about other people and those less fortunate. Perhaps more affectingly, putting myself in someone else’s shoes. Not only nodding to Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God), there are many examples of where Kate Bush sings about patience, understanding and tolerance. Psychologically and emotionally fascinating, there are entire articles you could write about her lyrics and human relationships. When Kate Bush is being personal about love and loss, there is not this aggression or blaming. Tender but heartfelt, this has definitely affected me. Maybe her music does not have the ability for me to find a relationship and overcome psychological issues that affect me. When Pete Paphides wrote about his experience of seeing Kate Bush live for Before the Dawn, a couple of his thoughts struck me: “Few musicians are more adept at conveying a sense that something good is going to happen than Kate Bush”; “Once again, we’re reminded that, almost uniquely among her peers, Kate Bush goes to extraordinary lengths in search of subjects that hold up that magic of living up to the light for just long enough to think that we can reach it”.

There is a lot in that. I feel I am less pessimistic and catastrophising because of Kate Bush and her positive nature. It is not only her music. Listening to interviews, she is always so warm, kind and accessible. That sense of making us feeling something good is going to happen undoubtably has impacted my relationships with other people. From the potential of being in a relationship one day to being kinder and more patient with others, I have Kate Bush to thank to a degree. We all fall in love with Kate Bush for different reasons. In 2022, The Guardian spoke with various artists about their experiences. Something Rae Morris said is very true: “Her music is all about combining small details with spiritual, otherworldly, wider cinemascape stuff: a really grand, imaginative to-the-moon-and-back scale, but also the sound of the blood running through your veins”. I also think I understand that love and a true relationship cannot be rushed. That maybe it is not the most important thing. By learning to think about people more positively or patiently, maybe it makes me less desperate to be in a relationship so I have that ally and can sort of escape. However, there is escapism in Kate Bush’s music that means, when the worst of humanity and people drags me down, I can cope and immerse myself in her unique and welcoming universe. Her music is so enriching and inspiring. Maybe circling back to my first thoughts. It would be cool if I met a woman who was a fan of Kate Bush and there was this club or website where you could meet people like-minded. I am not going to stress about it. When thinking about who I am as a person, how I interact with people and how I view independence and love concurrently, Kate Bush’s music has affected and changed me so much. In positive ways. This incredible artist, in so many ways, has given me…

SO much.

FEATURE: Modern-Day Queens: Jessie J

FEATURE:

 

 

Modern-Day Queens

PHOTO CREDIT: Ashley Osborn

Jessie J

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I am eager…

to get to an exceptional interview from The Guardian in a second. With her new album, Don’t Tease Me with a Good Time, Jessie J has been speaking about her career. She also talks about “Endometriosis, miscarriage, failed relationships, suicide and gaslighting”. Subjects that make their way onto her new album. I have selected parts of the interview to highlight, but it is a long and fascinating read. Born Jessica Cornish, many might know her best for her earliest singles like Price Tag, and Domino (2011). This year has seen some incredible women in music release these hugely open and brave albums. Bold, fearless, funny, frank and ambitious, I have already commended albums by Lily Allen, Florence + The Machine, and Hayley Williams. However, Jessie J has released possibly the most powerful album of 2025. I will come to a review for Don’t Tease Me with a Good Time. It is an album that has plenty of joy and positivity, though it does have its challenging and personal moments that take you aback. I want to get to that interview with The Guardian. Starting with a moment that changed Jessie J’s life:

“Cornish was preparing for an appearance at the Baftas when she found a lump. “I immediately went to get it looked at, had an ultrasound, and they were, like, ‘It looks like nothing; you’ve got really good dense breast tissue.’ And I was, like, ‘But I can feel it. I’ve got an achy arm and pins and needles in my hands whenever I wake up.’ And they said, ‘Well, let’s just do a biopsy.’ That was 28 March, the day after my birthday.” It was a Friday. The doctor told her if it was bad news she’d call on the Monday. By then Cornish had convinced herself it was nothing. The way she tells it, it was simply too inconvenient to get cancer when she had so much on.

“We’re two weeks away from launching this thing after eight years without an album and four years without a single. And she [the doctor] texted and said, ‘Are you free at six?’ And I was, like, ‘Oh, it’s a Zoom, it won’t be anything.’ So I jump on the Zoom thinking it’s all going to be good, and she goes, ‘Are you sitting down?’ You know that sad tone they use? And she says, ‘I’m so, so sorry, but your test results have come back as high-grade cancer cells.’” How did you respond? “I said, ‘Oh, that’s not ideal, is it? That’s not fucking great timing.’ The first thing I thought was, ‘I can’t die because my son needs me.’”

PHOTO CREDIT: Felicity McCabe

She found the surgery terrifying and absurd. “I hate being put under. They walk you down. You know when you have emergency surgery you roll down in a bed, but this time I just strolled down with a gown on and my bum hanging out. You feel like you’re in an episode of Black Mirror.” But, Cornish says, she’s been lucky. No chemo, no radiotherapy, just the op. “Cancer sucks, man, but you know what? Thank fuck I found it early. I had the mastectomy four months ago and my right breast now looks like a grapefruit under a tight bedsheet.” Another grin. “I got to keep the nipple, though.”

The next operation is both medical and cosmetic. Her boobs, she notes, are now “different sizes. They didn’t do an implant as small as my original. How rude! I thought, no need to bully me, I’m already having a rough time. So rude! It’s funny because I said I’d never get my boobs done because I’ve got OCD, and I know they’d never be perfect. Cancer ruined that plan.”

Cornish is no stranger to illness. She thinks her perspective on the cancer has been so positive because she’s familiar with health crises. They have often coincided with career highs, serving as a tap on the shoulder, or punch in the stomach, to remind her not to take anything for granted. “Honestly, I feel life goes, ‘You having a good time? Sit down.’ Ever since I was a child, it has always gone alongside moments of success for me; something severe or obscure has happened to my health.”

PHOTO CREDIT: Felicity McCabe

Last year, she moved back to Britain with her partner, the Danish-Israeli basketball player Chanan Colman, and Sky. “I just felt the new chapter was going to be here. It was the day that Trump got elected that I left. It was the day we planned to leave, so it felt aligned.” Did she want to be far away from him? “As far away as possible, please. I feel awful for the people who are still there. So many of my friends are struggling mentally with America right now. It actually scares me that I can’t even get into that mindset to try to understand what he does. It’s the polar opposite of what I believe in, which is equality and love and everybody having the freedom to enjoy the life they want to.” Does she think Trump is stopping them from living that life? “Of course he is, yeah. So many of my friends in America are scared because they’re not what he wants them to look like and be like and feel like.” And what is that? “Him!”

Two of the songs on the album are about the death of loved ones. Comes in Waves addresses the baby she lost, with Cornish singing: “I hate how much I miss the future we never made.” In 2021, when she didn’t have a partner, she got pregnant by IVF, and miscarried after 10 weeks. Was it a tough decision to become a single mother? “No, I wanted to be a mum, and I wasn’t in a relationship. I had endometriosis and I’d done all these tests, and they said, ‘Your egg count is low and if you don’t get pregnant in the next year it’s highly unlikely that you will be able to conceive naturally.’

Obviously, that wasn’t true, because I did in the end.” The lyrics to Comes in Waves are so raw, Cornish wearing her vulnerability like gossamer armour. But it’s also a song of defiance that anticipates the birth of Sky, promising “Next time you come to me I’ll make a place for you to stay”. Again, she sings the line for me. “And I did. I fucking did it. I’m so proud of myself. I went full term. I had a C-section, which I didn’t want, but it didn’t matter.” Does she feel the baby she lost is still with her? “Always. Always. They say the DNA of a baby stays within you, so the bit of that DNA will be in Sky and in me for ever. But I do feel it didn’t happen because I wasn’t meant to do it on my own.”

The song I’ll Never Know Why is equally painful. Here she berates herself for not seeing that an unnamed friend was “lost and hopeless”, and she asks him: “How could you say goodbye without saying goodbye?” In 2018, soon after she won Singer, her bodyguard and close friend Dave Last died unexpectedly. I ask her if this song is about him. She nods. Silence. Did he take his own life? Again, she nods, struggling for words. “I miss him so much, man. He was my guy for seven years. He was like my big brother. It makes me so sad that there was a loneliness there that meant it got to that before he would call me. I hope it’s a song that can help people who are left behind. And I also hope it helps people who are thinking of doing it to see a different perspective of what they would leave behind and how much they’re loved and wanted.”

Cornish kept herself together while talking about her miscarriage and cancer, but now the tears come. “He was one of my favourite people in the world,” she says. When they were on tour, he was the first and last person she saw every day. “After every show we’d go for a walk and he’d always ask, ‘Have you got your hoodie?’ I’m performing the song at the Royal Variety Show and I’ll be wearing a hoodie.”

She calls the album her journey through grief. Although it concludes on a positive note (with songs Living My Best Life and H.A.P.P.Y), it ends before the giddy high of having a baby with Colman. Cornish can’t wait to write about this on her next album. She says she’s never loved in the way she loves Colman. “Birthing someone’s child is so unique. It’s for ever engraved in our relationship because I’m looking at my son and it’s literally his and my face mashed together. That’s a different kind of love.”

And doubtless she’ll be reflecting about the cancer on her next album. She’s been given the all-clear, but she knows there’s a chance of it returning. Life’s too short to worry about that, though, she says. There’s so much to be getting on with – motherhood, touring, writing, recording, standup comedy. “I’ve just got to hope it doesn’t come back,” she says. “And if it does, then we’ll fucking deal with that when we get to it”.

Not to be downbeat or morbid, but Jessie J’s cancer diagnosis is a big part of her life now and obviously impacts her music too. I want to bring in The Times and their interview from August. Jessie J discussed how devastating the diagnosis was. Now, she is in a place where she needs to heal. I did not know that Jessie J was diagnosed with ADHD after the birth of her son. There has been turbulence and challenges along the way. However, you hope that next year is going to bring nothing but success and happiness:

“But, as anyone who’s been through cancer treatment knows, emotions can veer wildly between being able to cope one minute and crying uncontrollably the next. “The other night,” she says, “Mum was massaging my boob for me, because I can’t touch the scars. And I started sobbing, ‘I can’t believe this has happened.’ She was like, ‘I wish it was me,’ and then I’m crying, she’s crying …” She pauses, pulling herself together, then adds, “I’m so glad it’s not her.”

Shortly after Sky was born Cornish was diagnosed with ADHD. “No one was surprised,” she says, smiling. “I’ve got no filter. I was asked to do Big Brother and my whole family said, ‘No way!’ I would just tell everybody everything.”

She talks fast, pivoting in random directions. Her mum is staying with her, and they’ve been having a clear-out. Tidying calms her brain. “Some people run, some people draw, I shed,” she says with a laugh, before suddenly announcing: “Every time there’s a full moon I want to shave my head so bad! Mum has to stop me.”

In 2018 Cornish took part in the sixth season of Singer, a Chinese TV singing competition. When the offer came she was feeling low. “I was about to turn 30 and didn’t know what to do with my life,” she remembers. “I love China, so I said yes, and my manager said, ‘Do you want to know what this actually involves?’ I was like, ‘Nope! I’ll do it.’”

She turned up in Changsha, Hunan, not realising that she was a contestant. “I thought I was going on as a guest,” she admits. “It was a plot twist — but it turned out to be one of the best experiences of my career.” Impulsively agreeing to such a thing feels very ADHD — and arguably quite brat. In any case, Cornish went on to become the first non-Chinese contestant to win the series, with about a billion viewers watching the live final.

PHOTO CREDIT: Ashley Osborn

It’s a long way from hunkering down to recover from breast cancer surgery, which has delayed the release of her sixth album to later this year. The pathology report after her mastectomy showed that the surgeons had got all of the cancer, so she’s feeling cautiously confident. “People think, once you’ve got the all-clear, now it’s done,” she says. “But I’ve got another surgery [to improve the symmetry of her implant with her other breast] and I need to heal, so I have to figure out the rest of this year.” As for worrying about the cancer returning, she’s pragmatic. “There’s a one in two chance,” she says, quoting the statistic that is true for all of us in the UK.

Part of her thinks that the cancer came along to remind her to look after herself as she emerges back into the high-pressure world of pop. “Maybe this has happened to go: slow your roll, girl, let’s have a little reassessment,” she says. Serendipitously her new music seems to speak to what she’s going through. “It’s weird,” she says, nodding. “The next song is called Believe in Magic and I wrote it in 2022 when I was pregnant. But the lyrics resonate so much with now: ‘If I die today/ wanna know that I made it/ such a waste being jaded/ see all the little things that fix a broken heart.’”

Cornish is enjoying being Jessie J again. Performing for 80,000 people at Capital’s Summertime Ball in London — a week before her mastectomy — was a highlight, and she’s looking forward to a big show in September, performing at Radio 2 in the Park in Chelmsford.

But she also loves the smaller gigs where she can really see and speak directly with her audience. “Ever since I was a child I’ve loved connecting with people,” she says. “Everything I’ve been through, whether it’s a miscarriage or breast cancer, is deepening my experience, to connect with more people.” As we wrap up she tells me with characteristic frankness that she’s off post-mastectomy bra shopping. When she says that more career success doesn’t matter, I’d usually be inclined to be cynical, but I believe her.

“It’s obviously great to achieve stuff,” she says, shrugging. “But if I die tomorrow, it won’t matter where my songs have charted. What matters is how I’ve made people feel”.

Apologies if the order is a bit scattered, but the final interview I want to source is from Elle from April. Jessie J released NO SECRETS. A song that references a brutal period where she suffered a miscarriage, “‘I lost my baby, but the show must go on’ - the opening line from No Secrets cuts straight to the heart of it all. Jessie is not here to pretend – not about fame, not about motherhood and certainly not about pain”. I do love this interview. Jessie J is so honest and open. Having to recall some traumatic moments, she is such a strong and inspiring person:

“’This doesn’t feel like a comeback,’ she muses. ‘It feels like a celebration of everything I’ve done up to this point. I don’t feel like I’ve had a hiatus from success. I’ve just had a hiatus from putting out an album in the UK and worldwide. People kept saying to me today, “You know you’re legendary?” And I’m like… I don’t feel that way.’

She doesn’t say it with false modesty – more like someone still learning how to live inside their own legacy.

If you were around in the early 2010s, you didn’t hear Jessie J, real name Jessica Cornish, so much as feel her – usually through the soles of your feet or the back of your skull, depending on how loudly Domino was playing at your local Topshop.

Do It Like a Dude was her swaggering, bisexual, take-no-prisoners debut. Price Tag made her an overnight international star - and bought her her first house. And by the time Bang Bang dropped with Ariana Grande and Nicki Minaj, she was pop’s resident power belter, known for making every note sound like it had something to prove.

PHOTO CREDIT: India Fleming

‘Bang Bang still haunts me because I always have to sing it, and it’s so high,’ she interludes. ‘As much as it’s wonderful to have that success, it’s also complicated. I don’t want it to be misconstrued that I dislike the song or the experience – it’s been one of the most joyful times of my career - but with big hits, you always feel like you’re fighting them.’

‘I think it’s my best work,’ she says. ‘It’s been a long journey with lots of people in and out, but me being the main thread. I wrote all of it. It really represents the layered human. We’re all happy, sad, grieving, joyful. We all want a dance. We all want to cry. I feel so lucky to hold people’s hands through moments they’re struggling in.’

‘I lost my baby, but the show must go on’ - the opening line from No Secrets cuts straight to the heart of it all. Jessie is not here to pretend – not about fame, not about motherhood and certainly not about pain.

“A product of the BRIT School - the South London comprehensive/pop breeding ground of Adele, FKA Twigs, Amy Winehouse and RAYE (who quit after two years due to feeling ‘confined’) - she was one of the few who blew up worldwide overnight. Watching RAYE dominate the BRITs last year - seven nominations, six wins, and a long-overdue industry embrace - she felt something snap into focus.

‘I saw it happening to her and it reminded me of 2010,” says Jessie. ‘Honestly, it’s even bigger for her. But that same feeling, that whirlwind, I recognised it.’

So she did something quietly lovely: she messaged RAYE offering her support. ‘I said, if you ever want advice or just a chat, I’m here. I get so protective, really protective of artists, because I know what that feels like – to be young and swept up in something massive. It’s amazing, but it’s a lot.

There’s a connection you have with other people who do this job that just get it.

‘I think there’s an understanding and a respect when you communicate with other artists – whether it’s on text, in person, or DMs – there’s a connection you have with other people who do this job that just get it. That’s really lovely, especially with women. And I have a lot of those kinds of connections that I wouldn’t say are friendships, but they’re respectful and very open. Like, they know they can come into my world and talk to me, and I can talk to them. But obviously, a lot of the time, we’re all just travelling so much.’

It’s this sense of understanding that makes her recent shift away from the structure of major labels even more significant. Her 2023 split from Republic Records was a conscious decision to pursue something more authentic.

‘It was amicable,' she says. 'I think I’ve realised I like things to be personable. I’m not a chain restaurant. I’m home-cooked! Do you know what I’m saying?’ I had major success, but I also got into a lot of debt. I just think, for who I am – I wake up at 5am, I cook, I do housework, I do my own socials - I’m very micromanaging and I’m quite controlling. I’m like a Duracell Bunny.’

Now, after years of living in Los Angeles, Jessie has returned to the UK, where she’s raising her son and embracing a different kind of rhythm. ‘The first year of my son’s life, I was super hands-on,’ she says. ‘Now it’s just us – me and my boyfriend – with help from my mum and his, who lives in Denmark.’

And her homecoming has been grounding. ‘I missed the honesty, the sarcasm,’ she grins. ‘It’s so different here. I’m still adjusting but I'm ready – personally, mentally, energetically – to come back and face the music. Literally”.

I am going to wrap with a review for Don’t Tease Me with a Good Time. Shatter the Standards gave a four-star review to an album from an artist no longer chasing the charts. Balancing themes around loss, illness, motherhood and independence, I have seen some criticising women like Jessie J and Lily Allen for what they refer to as ‘airing their dirty laundry’. Whether talking about break-ups and not holding back when it comes to their former partners or being very open about their struggles, it is wonderful that we have these artists in our midst. Music that will give so much strength and solace to countless people:

“In the past few years, Jessie J has lived publicly through events that would flatten most people. She told fans on her Instagram page she had suffered a miscarriage in November 2021 and wrote bluntly about how the grief still overwhelmed her nine months later. She details lying on the floor after the scan and feeling lonelier than ever, then choosing to perform anyway because she needed the distraction. Not long after, she was diagnosed with Ménière’s disease, and at the end of 2020, she was temporarily deaf and unable to walk in a straight line, had to stay silent, and admitted she had to put her voice on hold. The year after, she developed nodules and acid reflux that made singing painful, as doctors told her the nodules would return if she kept performing. She went public about her diagnosis of obsessive‑compulsive disorder and ADHD last year, saying motherhood exposed the conditions and that talking about them helped her feel less alone. Fast forward to the present, she publicly announced her breast cancer diagnosis, cancelled tour dates, and underwent surgery; she later told fans that the cancer was all gone, but she was still healing.

During all of this, she left Republic Records after seventeen years, explaining that being signed no longer felt right and that she wanted to release music on her own terms. Against that backdrop, a new Jessie J record is not just a “return.” It’s an artist refusing to be defined by catastrophes or by the industry’s narrative about her. That refusal shapes Don’t Tease Me With a Good Time. Instead of front‑loading big guest features or showy vocal runs, the album is built from blunt writing and personal confession. The central song, “No Secrets,” shows Jessie J’s decision to share her miscarriage and other traumas rather than let tabloids package them. She starts by recounting losing her baby and immediately having to perform: “I lost my baby/But the show must go on, right?/No if, ands or maybe/Can I cry for just one night?/I’m standing here naked, but I chose the spotlight.” The rhetorical question “Am I addicted to the honey?” hits as a genuine self‑interrogation: does she stay online because she wants to, because she wants to be seen, or because she’s been conditioned to perform transparency?

The first song, “Feel It on Me,” doesn’t bother with a commercial hook. It opens with the lines “Falling from my eyes/Have to heal this in the darkness, so turn off all the lights.” The chorus flips the common pop motif of someone carrying your love by complaining about how a partner’s unresolved mess spills back onto her: “It was okay when I could feel it on me/But it ain’t okay if you can feel it on me.” The dynamic is less about production than behavior: verses linger over shame and co‑dependency, then the rhythm snaps into a stiff bounce when she recognizes that she won’t be someone’s emotional sponge. “I Don’t Care” continues the theme of separation. She delivers a speech to anyone who’s been manipulated by gaslighters or abusers, toasting those who leave and warning any future aggressors not to “tease me with a good time.” It’s a bracing moment that refuses to sugarcoat pain. There is no attempt to make her story universal because she addresses them directly and raises a glass with survivors.

When she turns outward, the results range from striking to forgettable. “If I Save You” is an effective look at rescuing people at the cost of your own life. “Boundaries have come and gone/My empathy was strong, I was in the wrong, by doing too much,” she admits over a minimal groove, then asks, “Are you gon’ learn how to swim?/If I save you, I save you,” as if bargaining with herself. The chorus is wordy but purposeful, with scattered questions (“Do you, can you, will you, come through?”) that mimic the frantic inner voice of someone who can’t stop worrying about another person’s growth. The repeated line “We’re both keeping us down” is an elegant summary of codependent cycles. By contrast, “Believe in Magic / Joy,” an interlude, operates in airy platitudes about listening to Sade, being “tired of the detox, tired of the talking,” and seeing “all the little things that fix a broken heart.” It’s sweet but feels like a reprieve rather than essential writing. The “Joy” segment, a brief lullaby telling someone they are joy, doesn’t develop the idea beyond the line “I didn’t write this song for me.” As an emotional breather, it works, but its lyrics don’t carry the weight of the surrounding songs.

With the help of Jessie Boykins III (who seems never to get credit for his sleeper contributions), he helped co-write most of Don’t Tease Me With a Good Time, the album’s grief songs are its strongest. “Comes in Waves” is startlingly direct about a pregnancy loss: “It comes in waves, like I’m drowning in a love I crave that you gave to me, and I hate/How much I miss the future that we never made.” Jessie J apologises to a child she never met and vows not to forget them. When she sings, “Next time you come to me I’ll make a place for you to stay,” it’s an arresting moment of hope and superstition. “I’ll Never Know Why” shifts from her own grief to that of losing someone else to mental illness or suicide. She confesses she never walked in their shoes and won’t pretend to understand, but still wonders, “How could you say goodbye without saying goodbye?” She casts herself as a flawed witness rather than a martyr. The song ends without resolution, reflecting the reality that some losses remain mysteries.

Produced by Ryan Tedder, “Complicated” is the album’s autobiographical linchpin. It takes the form of a timeline: she talks about singing loudly and insecurely in 2010, breaking up with a girlfriend in 2012 while the press dismissed it as “a phase,” being told she couldn’t have children in 2015, taking 2016 off to grieve, and meeting a Magic Mike (oops, Channing Tatum) in 2018. She also mentions a particularly cutting comment from a colleague: “Katy told me that they all hate me, that I do too much.” The songwriting here isn’t subtle, but it’s vivid. She names the years like chapter headings and collapses a decade of public embarrassment and private heartbreak into a couple of verses. The chorus (“Ooh, that’s life for you/A rollercoaster not everyone rides with you”) lands as a shrug rather than a big chorus, and it doesn’t have to be. The purpose isn’t catharsis so much as refusal to apologize for being “too much.”

Motherhood and love lighten the narrative. “Sonflower” is a cute corny pun on sunflower and son, but the writing is earnest: “I’m me when I’m with you/It’s everything you do/You keep me in my truth/I’m winning when I lose.” The track’s behaviour is unhurried, radiating contentment without the usual big‑note theatrics. “California,” a mid‑album pivot, is a hustler’s anthem about surviving the state’s ups and downs. She wants to be somebody, not the person who merely knows somebody; she sings about swaying palm trees, bills that won’t get paid by showbiz glamor, and dreams that “burn hotter than the fireplace.” It’s not profound, but it’s specific enough to feel lived‑in. “Living My Best Life” could have been trite, yet the writing is anchored by the acknowledgement that turning pain into “deeper love” is work: “You taught me how to turn it around and kiss away the fear/No looking down as long as I’m here.” The declaration, “No more tears, I’m not wasting time being sad tonight,” is a choice to take joy where she can. “H.A.P.P.Y” is essentially a children’s chant (“Laugh till I cry, dance, I know why, ‘cause I’m H‑A‑P‑P‑Y”), but she precedes it with the line “I can’t take it, tired of faking my smile,” hinting at the work behind the cheer. Still, the spelling‑out hook is simplistic and diminishes the track’s emotional potential.

Some records feel disposable. “Colourful” lists moods and slang like a mood board: “Happy, sad, sassy, mad/Bougie, angry /Shady, fast, stackin’ up this cash/Hangry, class, put your hands on my (ass).” The track leans on the “you are my sunshine / so I’ll be your rain” cliché, and repeating color names (“Blue, red, orange, yellow”) doesn’t add meaning. A similar thinness hampers “Threw It Away,” whose entire premise is summarized by its title. Jessie J recounts being welcomed to Los Angeles, being called “honey,” giving her heart, and having her love tossed aside; she makes a Beauty and the Beast joke and warns that karma will come for her. The lack of detail means the song could be about anyone. “For This Love” is at least vivid in its lust. “Drop to my knees for this love” and “Prove to my body you know what to do” make no attempt at coyness. The second verse tries to conjure a larger story—“Playing pretend in this lost happy home/Breaking all curses, how you haunt my soul”—but doesn’t develop beyond a string of romantic clichés. When she demands not to be teased with foreplay and wants the guilt and glory, the directness is refreshing, but the writing lacks the specificity that powers the album’s best songs.

The record ends with “The Award Goes To,” a song that flips the award‑show trope into a personal send‑off. Over an exiguous accompaniment, she sings, “I’ve been fighting my wars/But I’m weighing my words/I’m good to lose, the award goes to you.” The repeated “You, you, you” is delivered with a mix of exhaustion and sarcasm. The second verse clarifies that she’s giving the award to someone who felt her pain and then got in her way. It’s a formal declaration that she’s done performing for them. The song’s chorus is simply the word “You” repeated over and over, emphasizing her need to point a finger without embellishment. There’s humor too: after telling someone with a bruised ego that they’re through, she says she dares to breathe “not for you but for me.” Ending on this anticlimactic note is deliberate. She refuses to provide a rousing finale or moral. She’s handing the trophy off and walking away.

What materializes over the album’s sixteen tracks is a writer who has stopped trying to prove she can sing, where she knows she can and chooses to use that instrument to say things she once shied away from. The emotional core sits in the intersection of grief and resilience, giving voice to experiences many people carry quietly, while the rest charts the years of public scrutiny that led to this moment. Outside of so-so writing in certain tracks, when the writing is specific, the songs land with force. There’s snark too—naming the album after a warning to abusers is equal parts humor and threat. Jessie J may still crave applause, but she’s less interested in playing along with the narratives others have written about her. She’s releasing music on her own terms and talking plainly about the fallout of fame, illness, and loss”.

I will leave it there. If not the most structured feature ever, I did want to include some recent interviews with Jessie J. An artist I have been following for many years and have boundless respect for, Don’t Tease Me with a Good Time is an album that easily sits with the best of this year. It is another one of these albums that will hit you the first time you hear it! A shame that more people have not reviewed it, as it truly stunning. One of the finest singers, songwriters and performers in the world, I wanted to show love for the amazing Jessie J. As I said earlier, I hope that next year delivers her…

NOTHING but success, happiness and peace!

____________

Follow Jessie J

Official:

https://jessiejofficial.com/

Instagram:

https://www.instagram.com/jessiej/

TikTok:

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

Facebook:

https://www.facebook.com/jessiej/

Spotify:

https://open.spotify.com/artist/2gsggkzM5R49q6jpPvazou?si=BMwBHCwBQ_6MEdIVfDm6BA

YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC4pEp0mo54WhEBCTYvjVDJA

FEATURE: Groovelines: Dolly Parton - Jolene

FEATURE:

 

 

Groovelines

Dolly Parton - Jolene

__________

ONE major reason…

why I am featuring Dolly Parton’s Jolene in Groovelines is because the icon turns eighty on 19th January. One of our most beloved artists, I hope there will be a lot of celebration around that birthday. Reinvestigation of her work; articles and features about her enduring popularity and influence. Her philanthropic and charitable side. How she is this decades-enduring artist who continues to shine bright and put out incredible music. As she enters her ninth decade, let’s hope there is more work to come from Parton. Rather than put out a mixtape, I wanted to use the opportunity spotlight one of Dolly Parton’s best-known and popular songs, Jolene. Released on 15th October, 1973, it was not a major chart success upon its release. However, it is one of the most popular and greatest songs ever written. Penned by Dolly Parton and produced by Bob Ferguson, Jolene is seen as one of the most representative songs of the Country genre. It was ranked 217 on Rolling Stone’s list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time in 2004; that was elevated to 63 in their revised list of 2021. I want to dive inside this heartbreaking song that has been covered by, among others, The White Stripes and Beyoncé. I am going to drop both of those versions in, as it shows what each artist did with them and how this song has endured and inspired through the years. However, we must celebrate and highlight the 1973 original. Dolly Parton’s husband, Carl Dean, died earlier this year. He was the inspiration behind Jolene, after a bank teller caught the eye of Dean. Its messages and sentiment is something universal and hard-hitting. The New York Times published a feature about Jolene in March:

“In the early years of her nearly six-decade marriage, Dolly Parton noticed that her husband was spending a lot of time at the bank, where he had developed a crush on a teller. She told him to knock it off.

She later channeled her feelings into “Jolene,” a hit 1973 song. Her fans have been singing its haunting chorus ever since.

Jolene, Jolene, Jolene, Jolene
I’m begging of you please don’t take my man
Jolene, Jolene, Jolene, Jolene
Please don’t take him just because you can.

The song is one of several that Parton’s husband, Carl Dean, an asphalt paver who died on Monday at 82, inspired in the decades after they met outside a Nashville laundromat in 1964. It never reached No. 1 on Billboard’s main singles chart, but it topped the Billboard country chart, earned a Grammy nod and became the most-recorded song of any Parton has written.

In interviews over the years, Parton attributed the song’s staying power to a variety of factors, including the simplicity of its chorus and its “kind of mysterious” minor key.

She said many women had told her that they found its story — a woman acknowledging Jolene’s beauty while pleading with her to not steal her husband “just because you can” — relatable.

When the song appeared, “Nobody had been writing about affairs from that side of it — to go to the person who was trying to steal your man,” she told the entertainment news site Vulture in 2023.

“There’s a certain amount of fear that you hope to be able to hang on to them and you don’t want to take anything for granted,” she said. “All of that is summed up within that one song, and it’s a singable song on top of that.

She came up with the title after meeting a girl named Jolene while signing autographs, she recalled in a 2020 interview with the music site Pitchfork. But she said the woman the song describes is the “beautiful redheaded, long-legged” bank teller who caught her husband’s eye.

“I knew we didn’t have the kind of money for him to be spending that kind of time at the bank,” she told Pitchfork with a laugh.

Over the years, she told Vulture, fans told her that they doubted anyone would actually take her man.

“Look, there’s always somebody more beautiful than you,” she said she would reply. “There’s always somebody more special than you, and you’re going to always feel a bit threatened and insecure when it comes to someone you love”.

The song has been covered by a long list of artists, including Keith Urban, the White Stripes, Laura Marling and Miley Cyrus, Parton’s goddaughter. Parton herself used the melody for a ditty about receiving a coronavirus shot, changing “Jolene” to “vaccine.”

“Jolene” has also directly inspired other songs. In “You Can Have Him Jolene,” a 2021 tune by the country band Chapel Hart, a narrator washes her hands of her husband.

A country singer, Cam, had a 2018 hit called “Diane,” in which the narrator confesses an affair to an unsuspecting wife:

Diane, I promise I didn’t know he was your man
I would’ve noticed a gold wedding band, Diane
I’d rather you hate me than not understand
Oh, Diane

“It’s the apology so many spouses deserve, but never get,” Cam told Rolling Stone magazine.

In Beyoncé’s 2024 take on “Jolene,” the narrator adopts a more assertive position by warning, rather than pleading with, the would-be mistress to leave her man alone:

I can easily understand why you’re attracted to my man
But you don’t want this smoke
So shoot your shot with someone else

Parton told Vulture that some people assume she hates some covers of the song. Her answer is always no.

“I’ll say back, ‘No, I love to hear all the ways that people choose to interpret them,’” she said. “It never changes it for me because I know what I was saying and writing about”.

Heading back to 2008 and an article from NPR. Jolene is a song that still haunts singers. Since then, RAYE wrote a song based on Jolene called Natalie Don't. I will move to a BBC article from 2020 where we learn how Dolly Parton’s most-covered song compelled and influence one of Britain’s finest modern Pop artists:

“When Parton released "Jolene" in 1973, it became one of her first hit singles. The song has only 200 words — and a lot of those are repeated. But Parton says that that very simplicity, along with the song's haunting melody, is what makes the character of "Jolene" memorable.

"It's a great chord progression — people love that 'Jolene' lick," Parton says. "It's as much a part of the song almost as the song. And because it's just the same word over and over, even a first-grader or a baby can sing, 'Jolene, Jolene, Jolene, Jolene.' It's like, how hard can that be?"

"Jolene" has been covered by more than 30 singers over the years, and in several languages around the world.

Jack White's emotional rendition of "Jolene" has been a staple of The White Stripes' concerts for years.

"I thought to take the character and change the context and make this red-headed woman my girlfriend, and that she's cheating on me with one of my friends," White says. "Then, that would be what I could really get emotionally attached to."

White says that the character of Jolene has fascinated him for a long time.

"I love the name, first off," he says. "I thought that was an interesting name when I started hearing that song as a teenager. And I guess later on, as a songwriter, I started to think about names starting with 'J,' like that could be used almost accusatory, like Jezebel... Jolene."

"Jolene" launched country singer Mindy Smith's career five years ago, when Parton said that it was her favorite version of the song.

Smith says she could relate to the vulnerability of the woman pleading with Jolene.

"I think the main character is really the person singing about Jolene," Smith says. "Jolene's a mess. She just steals things."

A Universal Character

Parton says that Jolene is so popular because everyone can relate to her feelings of inadequacy-- competing with that tall redhead in the bank who was after her husband.

"She had everything I didn't, like legs — you know, she was about 6 feet tall. And had all that stuff that some little short, sawed-off honky like me don't have," Parton says. "So no matter how beautiful a woman might be, you're always threatened by certain... You're always threatened by other women, period”.

Jolene is much covered and has been approached from different angles by a variety of artists. I think that the 2024 version from Beyoncé is the best. However, I want to introduce a BBC. Mark Savage spoke with RAYE about her music. However, the fact that Jolene inspired a song that helped RAYE find her voice stands out. I know that artists today in the mainstream have written songs that have Jolene at their heart. You feel that major stars like Sabrina Carpenter and Chappell Roan have affection and respect for Dolly Parton:

“Whether it results in the bruised desperation of Sinead O'Connor's Nothing Compares 2U, or the righteous fury of Adele's Rolling In The Deep, nothing lights the spark of creativity faster than the flames of love flickering out.

At this point, there aren't many fresh approaches to the topic - but Dolly Parton's Jolene takes a more unusual approach. Instead of shedding tears or vowing revenge, Parton's song is about two women: The mistress who holds the power, and the wife who is begging her to relinquish it.

The song's been covered more than 30 times, including a fantastically messy version by The White Stripes, but the storyline has rarely been imitated... until now.

Last year, pop singer Raye found herself in the same situation as Parton and the red-headed bank clerk who flirted with her husband in the 1960s. There was just one difference: The Queen of Country got her man back. Raye wasn't so lucky.

"Somebody came along and whisked him away from my grasp," she tells the BBC. "My heart was broken for a hot little second."

Heading into the studio, she tried to capture "that feeling of panic you have when you know you're losing someone" in a song.

The result is Natalie Don't - a funky, modern successor to Parton's classic. Jolene even gets a namecheck in the bridge, while the music makes subtle nods to I Will Survive and Unbreak My Heart.

Despite the subject matter, Raye is buzzing about the single.

"This is the reason I love music - because every negative thing becomes something beautiful," she says. "Making the song I just remember jumping around the studio like a kangaroo on Red Bull.

"It's really light and fluffy. A sad concept over a really funky bassline. I feel I've stumbled on a sound."

That last statement is surprising, because Raye isn't exactly short on hits.

The singer, born Rachel Keen in 1997, scored her first top five single in 2016 with You Don't Know Me, and has gone on to work with everyone from Stormzy and David Guetta to Beyoncé.

Last year, she won a prestigious songwriting honour at the BMI Awards; and she's currently in the top 10 with the Regard collaboration Secrets.

But the 22-year-old has been on a steep learning curve since her first EP came out six years ago.

In an early interview, she told BBC 1Xtra that she "had to evolve and compromise in order to find an audience" - but that meant straying from the Lauryn Hill and Jill Scott albums that inspired her towards a more club-orientated sound.

As a "young, vulnerable, inexperienced woman" in the music industry, she says, "you are guided by everyone around you, maybe unintentionally, to look at everything that is successful and be like it".

"People are scared behind the scenes to do something different. Because it's a business, risk is negative. And I was swayed left and right trying to keep those people happy.

"I went through a lot of different hairstyles, a lot of different clothes, a lot of different stylists going, 'I don't know what I am. Where do I fit in?'

"My label said I needed to have a look, I needed to have something consistent. And then I found it. It's just me."

You can not only hear the transformation in her music - which now combines her love of dance music with those classic soul influences - but you see it in her appearance. Over the last year, Raye has ditched the hoodies and bleached curls that characterised her early press shots, in favour of vintage dresses and short brown hair that's swept back into Hollywood waves.

"I feel like I'm ready and the music's ready," she smiles. "It's been a long time coming”.

I am finishing with a feature from American Songwriter from 2023. It reacts to an interview from Vulture, where Dolly Parton discussed the enduring popularity of Jolene. How it is singable and humble. How she revealed there is always someone more beautiful for you and perhaps that is a threat when it comes to relationships. However, you feel like Jolene is a character who would not steal a man. Maybe paranoia or unjustified fears by the heroine/Dolly Parton. However, this feeling of insecurity is one that resonates. A big reason why Jolene has been covered so often. The title track from her 1974 album, Jolene is a masterpiece that will endure for generations:

“Recently, Parton sat down with Vulture to look back at her long and iconic career. During the conversation, she talked about what makes “Jolene” a special song.

“With ‘Jolene,’ I remember hearing so many people say, ‘That’s such a humble song. It’s a true song,’” Parton said. “For a woman to say, ‘I can’t compete with you. I’m not as beautiful as you, I’m never going to be that beautiful. Your beauty is beyond compare, but I don’t have all that going for me.’ It was unusual at the time in songwriting,” she added. Parton went on to say that many women have told her how much they relate to the song.

More than being relatable, “Jolene” takes a unique approach to the classic cheating song format. Instead of being angry and fighting with or leaving her man, the song’s narrator pleads with his mistress. It’s really about “loving him enough to understand how he would fall in love with someone else because they’re that beautiful,” Parton said.

“People thought it was a very honest, open, and humble kind of song about the subject. Nobody had been writing about affairs from that side of it—to go to the person who was trying to steal your man,” Parton added.

Over the years, many people have wondered what Jolene could possibly offer that Parton couldn’t. After all, the Tennessee native has been a bombshell since she stepped onto the stage on The Porter Wagoner Show. She addressed that in the interview as well. “Look, there’s always somebody more beautiful than you. There’s always somebody more special than you, and you’re going to always feel a bit threatened and insecure when it comes to someone you love,” she said. “There’s a certain amount of fear that you hope to be able to hang on to them and you don’t want to take anything for granted.”

Parton added that she summed up those complicated feelings with “Jolene.” She added, “It’s a singable song on top of that”.

Because Dolly Parton turns eighty on 19th January, I wanted to shine a light on Jolene. This incredible track that is one of the most expressive and emotionally raw Country songs ever. It has frequently featured on lists of the best songs. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the New Zealand government put the country in lockdown. A newspaper summary listing essential things to know states that washing one's hands with soap should take "as long as it takes to sing the 'Happy Birthday' song twice or the chorus of Dolly Parton's hit song 'Jolene”. Even though it was a modest chart success upon its release, this is a classic song of a song being taken to heart and showing just how enduring and brilliant it is. Celebrating its songwriter and wishing her a happy eightieth birthday for 19th January, I wanted to show my affection…

FOR the immense Jolene.

FEATURE: The Best Albums of 2025: Geese - Getting Killed

FEATURE:

 

 

The Best Albums of 2025

Geese - Getting Killed

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I want to start out…

IN THIS PHOTO: Max Bassin, Emily Green, Cameron Winter and Dominic DiGesu/PHOTO CREDIT: Lewis Evans

with an interview from DIY concerning Geese and their album, Getting Killed. One of the best of this year, I want to take you inside of this album. The Brooklyn band is made up of Cameron Winter, Dominic DiGesu, Emily Green, and Max Bassin. A band that are proving they are worthy of all the hype around them right now, it is fascinating learning how they first emerged “in lockdown with their brand of restless, chaotic rock and roll, through to playing frenzied secret shows and shutting down streets in Brooklyn just a few years on, New York’s Geese are very much the band of the hour right now”:

“Winter is characteristically understated when talking about the show, and the album release as a whole. “Yeah… pretty good,” he says, in a tone almost entirely devoid of enthusiasm. It’s probably worth noting at this point that Cameron isn’t known for being the most straightforward of interviewees. He treats press as an extension of his bizarre lyrics, sometimes outwardly lying (he has claimed that a five-year-old played bass on ‘Heavy Metal’) and pausing for minutes on end whilst working out what he wants to say. Speaking over Zoom today, sat outside a café, he explains that his perception of his solo album having failed (“because it took a little while for it to get off the ground”) informed ‘Getting Killed’ in that it made him think, “‘Alright, I’m gonna do [it] better, I’m gonna do a fixed version with the band that’s louder and less… sleepy’.”

Regardless, he’s totally bemused by not only his solo success, but also his band’s. “I don’t know how or why, but people started liking it more, and I think that let people give me the benefit of the doubt more than ever before, you know?” he says, looking into the middle distance. “Before, when we were to do certain things, people would [say], ‘these guys don’t know what they’re doing!’, but now they’re willing to jump on the bandwagon more easily, maybe.” It seems that Geese are fairly immune to external views of their work, and are their own critics first and foremost. “I guess we get bored, we’re just overly self-conscious about some things. We don’t want to make the same stuff, because it’s embarrassing for us.”

So what exactly were the band chasing on ‘Getting Killed’? “A lot of what we were trying to do was focus on groove,” notes Bassin, perhaps not unsurprisingly for a drummer. “We all got really into free jazz, and some funk. Everything went a little full-circle; we were listening to a lot of proto-punk stuff, which is really influenced by a lot of funk stuff, which is influenced by a lot of jazz stuff. It all kind of went backwards in that direction.” It’s true that much of the album - such as the insistent pulse of ‘Islands of Men’ - has an almost circular feel, more indebted to jazz structures than a traditional verse-chorus-bridge. Max describes it as “playing around some sort of groove that feels almost like it doesn’t end.”

Both Cameron and Max separately use the word ‘fix’ to describe their approach to writing, perhaps belying their relentless push to reinvent themselves. “We hold ourselves to a very high standard, but then also, sometimes it’s tough to see when it’s just too much,” explains Max. “But then, to fix it is just to find the place where it clicks for all of us, where all of us get really excited about it. Because [when] we’ve let songs sit, and re-recorded them in a totally different way, it’s been like, ‘oh, that’s how it’s supposed to sound, perfect’.”

This restlessness also seems to mean that they take nobody else’s opinion on their music seriously. “When stuff comes out, I don’t believe anybody,” says Cameron. “[Regarding] the people who are speaking negatively about it, I just think ‘well, you just don’t get it, you stupid idiot!’” He grins: “‘just give it a minute - you should listen to it seven more times at least before you take a stupid opinion like that!’ And then, with the people who love it to death, I’m just like, ‘oh, these bandwagon-jumpers, they don’t even know why they like it, they’re just lying to themselves, they’re trying to spin a narrative’. I just don’t believe anybody. I don’t know what would make me… I don’t know what would satisfy me in that regard.”

‘Getting Killed’ concludes with ‘Long Island City Here I Come’, an extraordinary closing moment featuring a relentless piano line and Winter’s fraught crooning, which reaches fever pitch as he incants “here I come, here I come” over and over. “It was pretty obvious once we recorded it that none of the other songs would make as much sense as the last one,” he says. “It was a solo song first, and then just on a lark we tried it as a full band, and I thought ‘wow, this is way better’. So there it was.”

Winter’s voice feels, at times, like a character itself on the record - truly one of those strange, virtuosic singing voices that feels entirely unlike anyone else. When asked how it came about, Winter seems puzzled by the question. “I don’t know. I’m just not very self-conscious about it, and that can lead to some weird places, and that’s kind of just how I sing. I’m really not trying an effect or anything.” This, really, gets to the heart of his appeal as a songwriter – he seems totally disconnected from how his work might be perceived, and is just making something completely off the wall. “It’s a weird mix of being totally unself-conscious, and also being pretty disciplined, too. A lack of self-consciousness doesn’t mean you should be lazy or anything. [You shouldn’t be] so unself-conscious that you put out something terrible, that sort of just flops over and dies.”

At this point, it doesn’t seem like that’s a concern for Geese. It also appears that, at least according to other interviews, ‘Getting Killed’’s follow-up could already be recorded. Cameron groans at the mention of this. “That’s overblown. I want to put that to rest, because I feel so bad, everyone’s getting so excited about it. That’s not really what’s happening - we’re just kind of dicking around,” he says, shaking his head. So, no new Geese album come Monday? “No, no, no… Tuesday at least. I’m breaking the news in DIY, that that’s basically a rumour that GQ has propagated.”

As ever with Geese, it’s hard to know where exactly we are in the grey area between the truth as Cameron sees it and the truth as the rest of the band see it, given their frontman’s penchant for fibbing for sport. Max smirks when asked if a new album exists: “Maybe.” After a pause, he leans in, smiling. “I don’t know, actually. To be entirely honest, I want to say maybe, but also then I’ll talk to Cameron and he’ll say ‘it’s not done. It’s not even anywhere done, we’ve got to cut half of these songs’. So we’ll see.”

If this ambiguous follow-up is anything like ‘Getting Killed’, then we’re in for a treat. But for the moment - much like everyone else - we’re at the whim of Cameron Winter”.

Prior to getting to a couple of reviews for Geese’s Getting Killed, there is another interview I am highlighting. I spotlighted the band earlier in the year, so I am trying not to repeat anything I included back then. THE FACE spoke with Brooklynite Alex Winter. Hailed as one of the greatest songwriters of his generation, you can’t argue with that claim when you listen to Getting Killed. If you have not heard of Geese, then go and seek out this amazing band:

“Winter is cautious of how transient the noise around a work of art is, how it’s inversely proportional to its potential staying power. ​“It really ruins it when you talk about anything,” he says. ​“I cringe whenever I say anything about my music, it feels gratuitous.” If you spend enough time with Winter’s music, you might understand where he’s coming from. The heart-in-throat folk and lonely soul of Heavy Metal and the omnivorous experimental rock of Getting Killed have been distilled from recording sessions so stuffed with ideas the songs sound as though they’re constantly on the verge of bursting.

Winter’s writing is dense with allusion, from Hellenic odes like Heavy Metal​’s Nausicäa (Love Will Be Revealed) and Getting Killed​’s Sisyphean Husbands, to the cocksure pantomime of American imperialism on 100 Horses and Au Pays du Cocaine. One of his trademarks is the deftness of his rock references. On Heavy Metal​’s The Rolling Stones, he nods to the keening Midwest emo of Tigers Jaw, folding a fragment of their soul-bearing refrain, ​“But my emotions ran unopposed /​I felt just like Brian Jones,” into his tumbling folk dedication to trying and failing to write the perfect song. At times it’s both sillier and more subtle. Try singing, ​“I came up here to sleep in your infamous kitchen,” from Cancer of the Skull in your best Bob Dylan voice. Now, think of Dylan as you hear Winter sing the line, ​“Songs are meant for bad singers.”

Winter closes Getting Killed by calling out to Buddy Holly, Don McLean and folk legend Pete Seger on the epic Long Island City Here I Come, while the rest of Geese furiously careen through a crumbling wall of sound. ​“It’s a human thing to copy other people,” he says. ​“It’s how you learn to speak, it’s how you learn to walk, you copy, so when people don’t copy at all it feels like a rejection of the fact that they’re just flesh and blood.” Winter is no exception. ​“A lot of stuff I make starts too derivative and then I just cringe at it listening back, so I have to find a different way until I stop cringing,” he levels. ​“The question is always: how much allusion can I tolerate?’

Winter is aware of the pitfalls of wanting to sound like the greats. Though it’s hard not to hear Van Morrison’s 1968 classic Astral Weeks in Heavy Metal, he deflects the comparison. ​“In about 40 years I’ll have my anti-vax magnum opus, a triple album about government overreach will be hitting the shelves,” he quips, referencing Morrison’s spate of lockdown protest songs in 2020. ​“It would be funny if I really sped through my recording career like that, being the grumpy old man on stage right now,” he adds, grinning.

To make a great song, he says, ​“it has to grab ya, without you grabbing it. It has to be mutual and most of the time it’s not.” When it’s not, Winter is quick to rebuke his more perfectionist tendencies, confessing, ​“I tweak more than I record” on a Reddit AMA the day of Heavy Metal​’s release. ​“Being perfectionist is dishonest, in a way,” he says. ​“Your ass ain’t perfect! I like music that doesn’t have its guard up all the time.” On that subject, Winter praises New York rap experimentalist Xaviersobased (“there’s very few people who are really just saying fuck the rules as much as he is”) and London’s fakemink (“he can really run with it”), citing their perfectly fried production and prolific release schedules as something to strive for. ​“They’ve got the right idea,” he smiles. ​“I want that to be Geese and me eventually, to break free of the freaking album cycles and just put it out the moment it’s done. To pick a thing off your camera roll and kick it out there”.

The Line of Best Fit opened with lines about how Geese were debuting songs off their third album over the summer, and there was a projection behind them that read “Geese: A real band”. It makes you wonder why they did that and whether they were being seen as a novelty or insubstantial:

“When Geese toured their last album, 3D Country, the projection read "An American Band" because that’s what they were then, a group of incredibly forward-thinking classic rock revivalists. If there’d been a projection for their first album, Projector, it would’ve said "A New York Band" due to their debut's mix of CBGB’s post-punk with the math rock it inspired. But Getting Killed is the work of "a real band" or at the very least a band not hiding behind pastiche. It’s Geese at their most honest and sincere, and as a result, their most brilliant, creative, and manic.

While the release of his much-acclaimed solo debut Heavy Metal has clearly left lead singer Cameron Winter even stronger in both vocals and lyrics than before that record's success, it hasn’t caused Geese to play backup to him. Rather, the rest of the band has grown with him. Producer Kenny Beats has brought the rhythm section to the forefront, revealing them to be Geese’s strongest element. Dominic DiGesu’s basslines are more prominent than ever, combining a delirious boogie funk with a raw and enticing tone. While drummer Max Bassin has always appeared to be of a higher class than most, Beats really lets him shine. On “Trinidad”, he makes the kit sound like an imploding submarine as it rattles against Winter’s explosive vocals. Yet to view the players separately is to reduce their impact. Getting Killed is an album built around a band; their unity creates its best moments.

The band is operating tighter than ever, their core style now a sort of motorik-funk, with Winter’s gospel vocals combining with rhythms that lie somewhere between Can and Funkadelic. On tracks like “Bow Down” and “100 Horses”, they unite into a marching stomp that recalls the grizzled trample of the Bad Seeds and the junkyard blues of Tom Waits. Yet the band really reaches its peak when it extends these jams past the four-minute limit. Title track “Getting Killed” is close to their finest work ever, with its initial crunch giving way to guitar interplay and a heartbreaking coda of chanted vocals as Winter howls the track and album’s title.

Yet the two other big jams come close to dethroning its excellence. “Islands of Men" starts as a piece of swaying boogie rock before reforming into something ethereal, a slice of dream rock grounded by a flurry of horns and percussion that gives way into chaos. But the real pinnacle is the album's closer “Long Island City Here I Come”. It’s initial ripple of drums and keys combine with Winter’s ramblings about "God having many friends" and "Microphones hidden under your bed" to seem like a surreal reimagining of Patti Smith’s "Piss Factory". Yet rather than switching tactics like the others the groove simply continues. A thrush of additional instruments compliments Winters vocals as they reach new apexes. His lyrics contort a series of absurdist tales into a bizarrely inspirational message of desperate youth and hope as he cries out "Long Island City, here I come."

But these moments of magnitude aren’t what make Getting Killed a masterpiece. Rather, it’s the way they fit together. The way a line as tender as "Baby let me dance away forever" can feel appropriate after the neo-no-wave car wreck of “Trinidad”. The way that “Au Pays du Cocaine” sways on such a tender breeze. It’s how all those Winter’s lyrics, their delightful mix of tender love calls, historical anachronism, and biblical imagery, all come together to turn the joyous heartland ballad "Taxes" crushingly tragic when he says, "I will break my own heart from now on." Like the band that made it, Getting Killed is an album of insane synchronicity, its individual elements rocketing one another into new stratospheres. If Geese are a real band, then Getting Killed is a real album. One that cements them as no longer excellent imitators of the bands they once tipped their hats to, but worthy equals”.

In another 9/10 review, CLASH shared their opinions about an album that will rank alongside the best of the year. Getting Killed is definitely going to be a hard act to follow through, with Geese, you feel like they will top it with something even more extraordinary:

“It’s usually pointless to predict when a band might ascend to stardom, but if you placed your bets on Geese this year, the odds are certainly in your favour. The New York indie-rock band have made a dizzying ascension, buoyed by the critical acclaim that followed the release of frontman and lead vocalist Cameron Winter’s debut solo record ‘Heavy Metal’ last year. So uncertain were its commercial odds that it got slated with a December release date, which slowed initial pickup but has had the intriguing effect of creating consistently growing streams for the best part of 2025, creating a halo of interest that’s reflected back onto Geese’s new offering ‘Getting Killed’. 

Even before ‘Heavy Metal’, Geese were already a growing force to be reckoned with, as their 2023 concept-record-that’s-not-a-concept-record ‘3D Country’ proved. In ‘Getting Killed’, the band only benefits from Winters’ solo turn. It’s not just his voice that feels stronger, but the work of his bandmates too: Dominic DiGesu, Emily Green, and Max Bassin. They’ve also benefited from the production support of Kenneth Blume (Kenny Beats), with whom they recorded the album in a month-long stretch. It’s a collaboration that’s led to a sound that’s cleaner, still heavily layered but a more clearly defined sum of its parts.

In ‘Getting Killed’, there’s points of lyricism that are wildly obscure, like when Winters sings “All the horses must go dancing” in ‘100 Horses’, or the defining refrain “There’s a bomb in my car” of opening single Trinidad. But there’s also a return to the teenage earnestness of their first album ‘Projector’, newly refracted through ‘Heavy Metal’, a record that’s defined by catharsis and longing. In ‘Half Real’, Winters’ trembling voice soars through lyrics spanning heartbreak and uncertainty, while ‘Husbands’ gestures to the feeling of being weighed down by the city that you love.

It’s certainly not an easy-listening album, and sometimes it can sound downright unpleasant, like in opening stomper ‘Trinidad’, which teeters on the verge of a disconcerting chaos. Like ‘3D Country’, it’s music that rewards re-listening: each play reveals something new. Whether it’s the complexity with which Bassin commands the drums in ‘100 Horses’, a choice use of backing vocals in titular single ‘Getting Killed’, a perfectly steady bassline in ‘Islands Of Men’, Winters’ receding voice in ‘Long Island City Here I Come’, there’s a constant attention to detail throughout the course of the record.

This isn’t to say that there’s not standout singles as well: ‘Taxes’ is a catchy and cathartic rock hit, and ‘Cobra’s nostalgic guitar melodies are deeply compelling. But ‘Getting Killed’ is an album designed for the dedicated listener over the passerby, better experienced in its whole than in individual parts. It’s a bold proposition and one that places the band firmly within the future of the rock canon. That’s what makes Geese’s work so exciting: uncompromising, they look steadily forwards, pushing at the seams of what their sound can do”.

One of my picks for album of the year, Getting Killed is a masterpiece from Geese. I am interested to see what steps they make next year. From January, they are on tour, and they have some amazing dates in the diary. They start a run of U.K. dates from 20th March and play the Eventim Apollo on 25th. Make sure you catch them if you can. Getting Killed proves that this quartet are…

THE real deal.

FEATURE: Beneath the Sleeve: Buena Vista Social Club – Buena Vista Social Club

FEATURE:

 

 

Beneath the Sleeve

Buena Vista Social Club – Buena Vista Social Club

__________

MANY people might not…

IN THIS PHOTO: Cuba's Buena Vista Social Club band, (L-R, top) Guajiro Miraval, Israel 'Cachao' Lopez, Barbarito Torrez, Juan de Marcos, Ibrahim Ferrer, (L-R, bottom) Compay Segundo and Omara Portuondo in Mexico City, Mexico on 26th February, 2003/PHOTO CREDIT: Jorge Uzon/AFP/Getty

know about this album, but it is one that I really love. For this Beneath the Sleeve, I am going to spend some time with 1997’s Buena Vista Social Club. Buena Vista Social Club are an ensemble of Cuban musicians directed by Juan de Marcos González and American guitarist Ry Cooder. Produced by Cooder, Buena Vista Social Club was recorded at Havana's EGREM studios in March 1996 and released on 23rd June, 1997. Even though the album did not chart high when it was released, it was acclaimed by critics and has this incredible legacy. Before getting to features about its legacy, I want to start out with a review from Record Collector about the twenty-fifth anniversary reissue of this amazing album:

“Every once in a while, an album comes along that confounds expectations and skyrockets out of its supposed niche market to become a global phenomenon. It happened in 2000 with the archaic Americana soundtrack to the Coen brothers’ film O Brother Where Art Thou? (few could have predicted its worldwide sales of 10 million or haul of five Grammy awards), but the fruits of a group of veteran Cuban musicians just a few years earlier was perhaps an even more surprising success.

Buena Vista Social Club was a loose collective brought together by Havana-born bandleader Juan de Marcos Gonzalez and American guitarist-producer Ry Cooder to celebrate the island nation’s indigenous rhythms. The aim of its paymasters, the British-based World Circuit record label, was to promote the sounds of Cuba on a global stage, and it ended up doing that at an extraordinary level; aided by an award-winning documentary by filmmaker Wim Wenders, the album went on to sell eight million copies.

The Latin American ensemble’s own intentions were perhaps more humble, many of the players just happy to have a paying gig during lean times for the country’s music industry. Much of the album’s contents, however, hark back to more salubrious days, of a pre-revolution, pre-Castro-era Cuba when dozens of clubs and ballrooms across Havana echoed to the persuasive joy of mambo and jazz.

Numbers such as De Camino a la Verada, written and sung by the then 77-year-old Ibrahim Ferrer, and the traditional “danzon” dance of Pueblo Nuevo had been staples of the Cuban music scene since the early 50s, but given a fresh lick of paint and renewed sonic vitality by Cooder’s atmospheric production. Having said that, the track chosen as a curtain-raising single, Chan Chan, was a near enough contemporary song, written and first recorded by “trova” guitarist Compay Segundo in 1984, the tale of a couple thrilled by the simplicity of dancing to rhythms made by shaking makeshift instruments containing beach sand.

One of the keys that unlocks the thrills of the album is its blend of frivolity and more sober reflections on a nation often weighed down by the upheavals of its past. If Buena Vista is a postcard, it’s one of bright, dazzling colours but with frayed edges and corners – a party where the rum is served with a splash of paradox.

It all proved irresistible to a certain stripe of record buyer, but far beyond the frequently sneered-at musical tourists accused of embracing distant cultures as a kind of hipster boy scout badge. The album’s impact was felt everywhere, not just on the expected shelves of “world” music aficionados; its place in the context of a wider conscious is evident by its mention in Fury, Salman Rushdie’s 2001 novel about globalisation.

This reissue, to mark the upcoming 25th anniversary, contains an additional 12 tracks left off the original album, most of which meet the same exacting high standards. It’s as fresh as it was during the seven short days it was committed to tape, inviting us to take our places on the dancefloor one more time.

Q+A:

Buena Vista bandleader Juan de Marcos Gonzalez recounts how the record changed his life.

Buena Vista Social Club was originally planned as a much different album to how it ended up, wasn’t it?

The intention of Nick Gold of the World Circuit label was to make a record combining Cuban and African musicians, so I enlisted many local players to go into the Egrem studios in Havana to perform with musicians from Mali. There is a shared heritage between the two countries, you can draw parallels between the musical roots of both, so the idea was for a hybrid of that. But there were difficulties in obtaining visas for the Africans and they never made it over. We Cubans went ahead anyway, seeing as the studio time had already been booked.

Were you familiar with Ry Cooder prior to the making of the album?

Yes, I had known of Ry and his music for a long time, going back to him appearing on records by Paul Revere & The Raiders in the 1960s. For a long time it was hard to hear American music in Cuba, but there were two AM radio stations I was able to pick up; one from Little Rock, Arkansas, that played serious rock music, and another from Key West in Florida that was much more of a pop station. I have always admired Ry as a musician and for the many varied influences in his music. His soundtrack to the film Crossroads has always been a favourite of mine, and it was an honour to be working with him. I’d like to think we learned a lot from each other during Buena Vista.

Your fellow musicians were well-known in Cuba, but is it fair to say they were struggling at the time the album was made?

That’s right, because of the state of the country’s economy the music industry was suffering and there were not many opportunities. Ruben Gonzalez [pianist, who died in 2003] was in his 70s when we recorded the album, but he didn’t have many possessions. He would walk four
miles every day from where he lived to a friend’s house just so that he had a piano to play. Ibrahim Ferrer [singer, died in 2005] was doing menial work to get by; he was shining shoes when we made the record.

The album’s success must have been life-changing.

Certainly. When I was in London promoting it early on, because it was doing so well outside of Cuba, one of the first things myself and Nick Gold did was go to the instrument shops in Denmark Street and buy Ruben an electric piano of his own! There was a great history between his family and mine, he had played in a band with my father in the 40s. When he next made a record of his own, he used a photograph of my 13-year-old daughter on the sleeve. She’s a grown woman of 38 now, and whenever I look at that picture it reminds me just how special Buena Vista Social Club was to all of us”".

In a music year (1997) when nothing like Buena Vista Social Club was in the mainstream and being discussed widely, perhaps it is not a surprise that this album was not a huge seller. However, it is this incredible work that we need to revisit. Let’s actually go back a bit and discover the story. Even though many of its ageing singers are no longer with us, the legacy and influence of this album remains. A huge wave of Pop that came through in the late-1990s and 2000s can be traced back to Buena Vista Social Club:

“As Cuban revolutions go, it was an entirely peaceable uprising – but its impact could not have been more profound. On the release of the Buena Vista Social Club™ album in 1997, few outside the specialist world music audience initially took much notice of the record’s elegantly sculpted tunes and warm, acoustic rhythms. Then something extraordinary occurred. The album was spectacularly reviewed by a few discerning critics, but although their words of praise did Buena Vista’s cause no harm, they cannot explain what subsequently happened. Good reviews create an early surge in sales, but unless it’s a big pop release sustained by an expensive TV advertising campaign, the established pattern is that interest then slowly tails off. Instead, Buena Vista’s sales figures kept steadily rising week by week, building almost entirely by word-of-mouth until it achieved critical mass: all who heard the record not only fell in love with Buena Vista’s irresistible magic, but were then inspired to play or recommend the album to everyone they knew. It was one of those rare records that transcended the vagaries of fad and fashion to sound timeless but utterly fresh. Once you heard it, you had to have a heart of stone not to be swept away by the music’s romantic impulses and uninhibited exuberance.

That its impact had made waves, far beyond the specialist world music audience was soon self-evident. Buena Vista went on to win a Grammy and its crossover success persuaded the acclaimed director Wim Wenders to make an award-winning feature film about the phenomenon. Nick Gold, whose World Circuit label released the record, put it:

“Buena Vista was a once-in-a-lifetime thing. We knew we’d made a special record but nobody could have imagined how it would take off.” The record’s success launched what can only be described as Cuba-mania, helping to inspire a thousand salsa dance classes and Cuban-themed bars on every high street. At its peak, it seemed that you couldn’t move without hearing Buena Vista’s potent, captivating soundtrack.

Today the album’s global sales stand at over eight million, making it the biggest-selling Cuban album in history. As one critic put it, Buena Vista has become “world music’s equivalent of The Dark Side of the Moon.”

The veteran pianist Rubén González, who didn’t own a piano at the time had been persuaded out of retirement by Juan de Marcos for the All Stars album. Not that it took much coaxing: despite his years of inactivity, his playing was on fire and so eager was he to get to the piano that every morning when the janitor turned up to unlock the studio doors, he was already waiting outside. The singer Ibrahim Ferrer, who was scraping a living shining shoes and selling lottery tickets, was also rescued from obscurity – and proceeded to sing his heart out. Eliades Ochoa the great guitarist and singer provided the rural roots from Santiago. Omara Portuondo was recruited as the company’s leading lady and the rich, resonant voice of the 89 year-old Compay Segundo provided a link with Cuba’s deepest musical past. “He knew the best songs and how to do them because he’d been doing it since World War One,” as Ry Cooder noted.

Yet this stellar line-up of singers was only part of the story. Behind them were some of the finest musicians Cuba had to offer, including the bassist Orlando ‘Cachaíto’ López, who provided the heartbeart, trumpet player Manuel ‘Guajiro’ Mirabal, who added the flair, and Barbarito Torres the virtuoso laoúd player. In the space of two weeks World Circuit’s Havana recording blitz produced not only the Afro Cuban All Stars and the Buena Vista Social Club™ albums but also the debut solo album by Rubén González.

When they had finished recording, Ry Cooder knew that he had been privileged to be part of a unique musical experience. “This is the best thing I was ever involved in,” he said prior to Buena Vista’s release in June 1997. “It’s the peak, a music that takes care of you and nurtures you. I felt that I had trained all my life for this experience and it was a blessed thing.”

In Cuba, Ry noted, he had found the kind of deeply rooted musical context that he had been searching for all his life. “These are the greatest musicians alive on the planet today,” he enthused. “In my experience Cuban musicians are unique. The organisation of the musical group is perfectly understood. There is no ego, no jockeying for position so they have evolved the perfect ensemble concept”.

I want to bring is some segments from a conversation between critics of The New York Times from 2021, where they discussed the impact and legacy of the extraordinary Buena Vista Social Club, twenty-five years after it was released. I would urge anyone who has never heard the album to play it today. I am going to end with a review that puts into words why it is such a remarkable album:

“JON PARELES Indulge me with an anecdote. In 2000, I visited Cuba for an utterly amazing festival of rumba. It was three years after the release of “Buena Vista Social Club,” well into the album’s commercial explosion. A typical Havana tourist, I wandered through the old city center, where it seemed like there was a bar with live music on every corner. What I remember vividly was a host outside one club, who knew an American when he saw one. “We have old guys!” he announced.

ISABELIA HERRERA I like your anecdote, Jon, because it captures how the concept of nostalgia is key to understanding the legacy of “Buena Vista Social Club.” The aura around the project (as well as the images in the reissue’s packaging) evokes these “old guys” smoking cigars in black-and-white photos, or playing instruments on the street near colorful vintage cars — a particular, antiquated image of pre-revolutionary Cuba in the American public consciousness.

It’s a notion that almost fetishizes the idea of isolation: one that suggests that Cuban musicians and listeners are totally separated from contemporary popular culture, frozen in time during the so-called “golden era” of the 1940s and ’50s. Notably, the liner notes of this anniversary edition open with a quote from Cooder: “The players and singers of the ‘son de Cuba’ have nurtured this very refined and deeply funky music in an atmosphere sealed off from the fall out of a hyper-organised and noisy world.”

Framing “Buena Vista” within the context of isolation diminishes its achievements and those of Cuban music before and after it. As the scholar Alexandra Vazquez has written, the uptick in compilations of and guides to Cuban music that followed “Buena Vista” helped generate plenty of myths about the island. They contributed to the fantasy that Cuban musicians ceased to innovate after the 1940s and ’50s, and proliferated the idea that you have to visit the island and immerse yourself in its vintage culture “before it changes forever” — as though Cuba is some kind of hidden paradise to be discovered, rather than a place that people call home.

I say this as someone who grew up in a household that adored “Buena Vista Social Club.” I have fond memories of my father singing “Dos Gardenias” in the evenings after dinner and a glass of wine, and returning to the album brings me back to a special part of my childhood. But I do think it’s worth pushing against that nostalgia, because the mythology of Buena Vista Social Club has tended to eclipse the actual music and its history. This is especially true in the way that it presents its musicians as being “rediscovered” or “saved” from erasure, when singers like Omara Portuondo enjoyed plenty of international success before this project (for one, she toured the United States with the group Cuarteto D’Aida and performed with Nat King Cole in the 1950s).

HERRERA Jon, you asked earlier if “Buena Vista Social Club” pointed a way forward. It is hard to avoid the reality that the project follows in a long line of musical projects that ended up “reintroducing” or “summarizing” musical cultures for foreign ears — even if the recording initially emerged as a happy accident. Ultimately, I am so glad these musicians achieved the success they did, and that new markets were opened to them, because they were well-deserving of compensation.

Today, there is such a vibrant community of Cuban hip-hop, and dozens of other Cuban musicians that I hope get a similar level of recognition on an international scale. At the very least, “Buena Vista Social Club” offered more curious, thoughtful listeners an entire new musical world. But a more ideal way forward would undo the colonial logic that underpins the legacy of “Buena Vista Social Club” — the requirement for Western support in order for “foreign” music to be valued — so these artists could be appreciated on their own terms”.

I will end with a review from AllMusic. It is a shame that there was not another album from the ensemble. One of those rare moments in music where you get this single album that just takes on a life of its own. You look around the music landscape today and can see which artists and genres can be traced back to Buena Vista Social Club:

“This album is named after a members-only club that was opened in Havana in pre-Castro times, a period of unbelievable musical activity in Cuba. While bandleader Desi Arnaz became a huge hit in the States, several equally talented musicians never saw success outside their native country, and have had nothing but their music to sustain them during the Castro reign. Ry Cooder went to Cuba to record a musical documentary of these performers. Many of the musicians on this album have been playing for more than a half century, and they sing and play with an obvious love for the material. Cooder could have recorded these songs without paying the musicians a cent; one can imagine them jumping up and grabbing for their instruments at the slightest opportunity, just to play. Most of the songs are a real treasure, traversing a lot of ground in Cuba's musical history. There's the opening tune, "Chan Chan," a composition by 89-year-old Compay Segundo, who was a bandleader in the '50s; the cover of the early-'50s tune "De Camino a la Verada," sung by the 72-year-old composer Ibrahim Ferrer, who interrupted his daily walk through Havana just long enough to record; or the amazing piano playing on "Pablo Nuevo" by 77-year-old Rubén González, who has a unique style that blends jazz, mambo, and a certain amount of playfulness. All of these songs were recorded live -- some of them in the musicians' small apartments -- and the sound is incredibly deep and rich, something that would have been lost in digital recording and overdubbing. Cooder brought just the right amount of reverence to this material, and it shows in his production, playing, and detailed liner notes. If you get one album of Cuban music, this should be the one”.

The 25th Anniversary Edition is available, and this is an album I would encourage everyone to get. Such a wonderful and enriching listen, you will come back to it time and time again. I am a big fan of it and wanted to explore it more here. I hope it gives you the background and details that encourage you to investigate further. It is almost thirty years since it came out, yet Buena Vista Social Club has lost none of its brilliance and passion. I am going toff to listen to this brilliant album…

RIGHT now.

FEATURE: The Great American Songbook: Lana Del Rey

FEATURE:

 

 

The Great American Songbook

PHOTO CREDIT: Steven Meisel for W Magazine

Lana Del Rey

__________

I have featured…

Lana Del Rey a fair few times through the years. As she has a new album, Stove, out in January, it is a good time to feature her in this series. The New York-born artist is one of the greatest of her generation. With such a distinct sound and having released some of the best albums of the past decade or so, I am focusing on her now for this The Great American Songbook. A twenty-song distillation might seem a bit tough, but I hope it compels others to dig deep. I have never seen Del Rey perform live, but she is an artist that I definitely want to see at some point. She has released so many incredible albums. They are quite cinematic and sweeping. Until I discovered Lana Del Rey about a decade or so ago, I don’t think that I had heard anyone like her. She is someone who I have so much respect for. In terms of her consistency and brilliant songwriting. Her incredible and acclaimed live performances. I am ending this feature with a mixtape of her best twenty songs. Or the ones that I connect to most. Though it scratches the surface of her talent. It is a salute and admiring nod to…

A modern icon.

FEATURE: Over the Lights, Under the Moon… Looking Ahead to the Fiftieth Anniversary of Kate Bush’s The Kick Inside

FEATURE:

Over the Lights, Under the Moon…

Looking Ahead to the Fiftieth Anniversary of Kate Bush’s The Kick Inside

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EVEN though…

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1978/PHOTO CREDIT: Brian Aris

we are talking about 2028, I think that this celebration needs preparation and some planning. In terms of celebrating big Kate Bush album anniversaries, next year is a fallow year. 2027 is when The Dreaming turns forty-five. 2028 is a big one. Kate Bush turns seventy on 30th July. The Red Shoes turns thirty-five. However, the biggest two anniversaries happen at the start of the year. On 20th January, Bush’s debut single, Wuthering Heights, is fifty. I know there will be a lot of celebration. Magazine articles and maybe some repeats. Kate Bush on the BBC or Top of the Pops. I am sure the song will get a streaming boost and there will also be something new. It would be great if there were podcast episodes or even  something more in-depth, such as a book. However, on 17th February, The Kick Inside celebrates fifty years. It is the first fiftieth anniversary for any of her albums, so it is this big event. When Hounds of Love turned forty back in September, there were a few events but nothing huge. However, when an album turns fifty, it means more and I feel there will be more fuss. It is unlikely we will get any reissue of the album where Kate Bush reveals unheard songs or takes. Any rarities or anything incomplete. Even though I am excited to mark forty-eight years of The Kick Inside. However, I feel the fiftieth is too huge to ignore! There is a book from Laura Shenton that only costs a few quid. It takes us inside this album and provides a lot of depth and detail. As yet, there are no other books about the album. No entry in the 33 1/3 series. It is tempting to pitch it myself, because I am not sure anyone else will write it.

The Kick Inside is my favourite album ever. I am going to end with a couple of pieces about the album. Alongside side magazine features and some celebratory podcasts and the like, we do need an event and listening party. Wuthering Heights will get a lot of buzz on 20th January, 2028, and a few weeks later, there will be renewed fascination. I love events in small venues but, for an album like The Kick Inside, you need something bigger where loads of fans can get together. Inspired by a fiftieth anniversary panel of The Beatles’ eponymous album in 2018, I feel like there should be an event where there is a panel. I would not be at the centre but, with people in mind – such as journalist Laura Snapes (who I will quote soon enough), Kate Bush News and some mega fans of her work – and an opportunity to combine this with a listening party and musicians performing songs from The Kick Inside and providing their own stamp, it would be a wonderful evening. I think that somewhere as big as Alexandra Palace would be too expensive. This was a venue I think Kate Bush was scouting for potential live work. I can’t remember if it was for The Tour of Life in 1979 or 2014 for Before the Dawn, but she did consider this for performance. Even if the venue does not connect with The Kick Inside, it would be a great location. However, it may be too pricey. Union Chapel or The Roundhouse are alternative London venues. In terms of demand, you know that the fiftieth of Hounds of Love will get people flocking in. However, for a less popular album, is there going to be that demand? I feel, if there was a packed night where artists performed, there was a playback, discussion and some special guests, then it would make it worthwhile. In terms of those who I would love to involve, they include Gered Mankowitz (who photograpohed Bush between 1978 and 1979), Andrew Powell (who produced The Kick Inside), Duncan Mackay and David Paton (who played on the album) and family. Paddy Bush played on the album and John Carder Bush would be amazing to talk to!

think we will see something huge for Hounds of Love’s fiftieth, but that is a whole decade away now! The Kick Inside turns fifty in just over two years, but there is a lot to plan. It is going to be expensive getting a venue and people together. Also, it is asking a lot for people to brave a cold February night to go to an event, so it has to be something worth the trip! We can’t let such a huge anniversary go by with some articles and podcasts – as great as that would be. There are a couple of features/reviews that I want to source. To show why the album is so special and it deserves celebration on its fiftieth anniversary. Stereogum dived into The Kick Inside on its fortieth anniversary in February 2018. An album that helped change music forever:

“Released when Bush was 19 in 1978, it included songs she had written as early as age 13 and introduced the world into Bush’s wild imagination. Arriving in a year otherwise dominated by disco and punk (“Wuthering Heights” replaced Abba’s “Take A Chance On Me” as the UK’s #1 single) this imagination felt “strangely out of time” and singular. The album’s focus on female sexuality, its use of voice as an instrument, and Bush’s unique storytelling techniques -- particularly her exciting use of fluid narrative identity, in which she changes identities and narrative point of view with every song -- created a new, unprecedented model for women in music. The Kick Inside (referred to as TKI from now on) made the world a safer place not just for women musicians but also for freaks and outcasts everywhere, and its anniversary is well worth celebrating.

Beginning with its title, which describes the sensation a pregnant woman feels as her fetus kicks, TKI is an album about bodies: the way they move (“Moving,” “Kite”), the desires they express (“The Man With the Child in His Eyes, ”“Feel It,” “L’Amour Looks Something Like You”), the way they both die and generate new life (“Room for the Life,” “The Kick Inside,”), and the way they sometimes return to haunt their lovers (“Wuthering Heights”). The album opener, “Moving,” invites listeners to move in order to free their minds: “As long as you're not afraid to feel… Don't think it over, it always takes you over/And sets your spirit dancing.” The importance of movement and the body is crucial to TKI, especially because Bush herself trained in dance prior to its release and performed elaborate, endearingly earnest dance routines in her performances and videos. Bodies and movement are an unusual focus for any album, much more so from one by a teenage British girl in 1978.

TKI is also revolutionary because it establishes Bush’s narrative style as fluid and multiple; her songs are short stories each written from a different narrator’s perspective rather than from her own point of view. This writing style stands in stark contrast to the traditionally personal style of music focusing on love and heartbreak that continues to dominate the charts. “I often find myself inspired by unusual, distorted, weird subjects, as opposed to things that are straightforward. It's a reflection of me, my liking for weirdness,” she said in 1980. Unlike the majority of pop/rock artists, The “I” in Bush’s music is rarely Bush. Her songs are not confessional, but are rather short stories told from the points of views of a diverse range of narrators. From Bush’s songs, we can know about themes that interest her, but Kate Bush herself rarely speaks in her work; her narrators, who occupy multiple genders, races, and historical times, do instead. This is a deeply radical break from traditional “confessional “ songwriting, especially for women up to that point. Consider that the most acclaimed female musician of the time, and probably of all time, Joni Mitchell, is most-lauded for her confessional album, Blue.

“That's what all art's about -- a sense of moving away from boundaries that you can't in real life,” Bush said, explaining her writing technique. “Like a dancer is always trying to fly, really -- to do something that's just not possible.” As a result, Bush’s ever-changing but always unusual topics on this and all her albums enraptured many outcasts, weirdos, and freaks, and created space to, as she sang on her later album The Dreaming’s “Leave it Open,” “let the weirdness in” to popular music. Rufus Wainwright summed up her appeal for outsiders when he said, “She connects so well with a gay audience because she is so removed from the real world. She is one of the only artists who makes it appear better to be on the outside than on the inside.”

The song that perhaps best captures what makes TKI revolutionary is its title track, which merges all the aforementioned topics: use of voice as instrument, feminine agency, and Bush’s fluid, narrative-story writing technique on unusual topics. “The Kick Inside” is based on the English folktale “The Ballad of Lucy Wan,” in which a brother impregnates and then decapitates his sister. Bush’s take on the story is sneakily radical, especially from a feminist perspective. In the folktale, the sister only speaks briefly before her brother kills her, but Bush rewrites the story from the sister’s point of view, literally giving voice to a history of women silenced by male violence, and changes the story so that the sister actively chooses her own death instead of being her brother’s victim. Bush said in 1978, “The sister becomes pregnant by her brother. And because it is so taboo and unheard of, she kills herself...The actual song is in fact the suicide note.” While the death is still tragic, the fact that Bush re-envisions a violent narrative passed down through centuries of patriarchal generations from a woman’s point-of-view and places the story’s narrative action in the woman’s hands is a subversive act.

One might say that this act of feminist re-visioning parallels the narrative of Bush’s own career. Instead of drawing from normalized, “feminine” confessional-based musical forms, she created odd, polarizing sounds with her voice to tell stories of “Strange Phenomena”, and later took complete sonic control over her work as a producer and multi-instrumentalist in a still-predominantly male-dominated industry where women are often denied agency or forced to compete with one another (Britney vs. Christina, anyone?). Bush co-produced 1980’s Never For Ever, which was the UK’s first #1 album by a British female solo artist, and started producing her work completely on her own for the rest of her career starting with her 1982 masterpiece The Dreaming. Over the course of her career she has continued to break records: in 2014, she became the only artist besides the Beatles and Elvis Presley to have had eight albums simultaneously on the UK’s top 40 chart, and her 2014 Before the Dawn live shows -- her first live performances since 1979 -- sold out in minutes.

Perhaps most importantly, beginning with The Kick Inside she has inspired a wide array of artists to “let the weirdness in.” Lady Gaga covered Bush’s duet with Peter Gabriel, “Don’t Give Up,” because she wanted to “make something that young people would hear and learn something about Kate Bush”, and her theatricality has its roots in Bush’s so-bizarre-they’re-brilliant live performances. Björk frequently cites Bush as a pivotal influence on her musical “form”, saying "I remember being underneath my duvet at the age of 12, fantasising about Kate Bush," and even sent Bush of a demo of herself covering Bush’s “Moving” in 1989. Lorde played “Running Up That Hill” before the shows on her Melodrama tour, and Bat For Lashes’ Natasha Khan said of Bush, “As an artist myself, [she’s] helped me to not be frightened to put my vulnerability as a woman [in my work] and in that, be powerful.” Bush’s influence is also felt in hip-hop, especially due to her early use of sampling, best seen in her sampling of the Gregorian chanting from Werner Herzog’s film Nosfertu The Vampyre in Hounds Of Love’s “Hello Earth.” One of her biggest champions is OutKast’s Big Boi, who has repeatedly called her “my favorite artist of all time,” and Tricky from Massive Attack said of Bush’s song “Breathing,” which features the line “breathing my mother in,”: “I’m a kid from a council flat, I’m a mixed-raced guy...totally different life to Kate Bush, but that lyric, ‘breathing my mother in,’ my whole career’s based on that.” Even Chris Martin “admitted” that Coldplay’s “Speed Of Sound” “was developed after the band had listened to Kate Bush”.

Before getting to a conclusion, I want to bring in parts of Laura Snapes’s 2019 review/retrospective for Pitchfork. Perhaps one of the most female albums ever released, you can read other features that take us inside the making of The Kick Inside. It always lows me away that Kate Bush, aged nineteen when the album was released, was writing in such a mature way. Much more fascinating, insightful and fearless than so many of her peers. We do not discuss the influence of this album enough, in terms of how it empowered and ignited generations of artists that followed:

“That Kate Bush named her debut album The Kick Inside might make it seem like her music is the product of a maternal wellspring. Women artists likening their work to their children is one culturally accepted way for them to discuss creativity; it implies a reassuring process of nurture. Another is as a bolt from the blue, a divine phenomenon which they just happened to catch and transmit to a deserving audience; no need for fear of a female genius here. But Bush’s debut, released when she was 19, says “Up yours” to all that.

Yes, the song “The Kick Inside” is about childbearing, but the young woman is pregnant by her brother and on the cusp of suicide to spare their family from shame. Subverting the folk song “Lucy Wan” (the brother kills his sister in the original), it shows the depths of Bush’s studies and her everlasting curiosity for how far desire can drive a person. She was signed at 16 but her debut took four years to make, during which she engaged multiple teachers in a process of spiritual and physical transformation. She pays tribute to their lessons alongside rhapsodies on unexplained phenomena, delirious expressions of lust, and declarations of earthbound defiance. Rather than feminine function or freak accident, these are the cornerstones of creativity, she suggested: mentorship and openness, but also the self-assurance to withstand those forces. Her purpose was as strong as any of them.

Besides, Bush had always felt that she had male musical urges, drawing distinctions between herself and the female songwriters of the 1960s. “That sort of stuff is sweet and lyrical,” Bush said of Carole King and co. in 1978, “but it doesn’t push it on you, and most male music—not all of it, but the good stuff—really lays it on you. It’s like an interrogation. It really puts you against the wall and that’s what I’d like my music to do. I’d like my music to intrude.” (Evidently, she had not been listening to enough Laura Nyro.) That reasoning underpinned Bush’s first battle with EMI, who wanted to release the romp “James and the Cold Gun” as her first single. Bush knew it had to be the randy metaphysical torch song “Wuthering Heights,” and she was right: It knocked ABBA off the UK No. 1 spot. She soon intruded on British life to the degree that she was subject to unkind TV parodies. 

What made Bush’s writing truly radical was the angles she could take on female desire without ever resorting to submissiveness. “Wuthering Heights” is menacing melodrama and ectoplasmic empowerment; “The Saxophone Song”—one of two recordings made when she was 15—finds her fantasizing about sitting in a Berlin bar, enjoying a saxophonist’s playing and the effect it has on her. But she is hardly there to praise him: “Of all the stars I’ve seen that shine so brightly/I’ve never known or felt in myself so rightly,” she sings of her reverie, with deep seriousness. We hear his playing, and it isn’t conventionally romantic but stuttering, coarse, telling us something about the unconventional spirits that stir her.

And if there is trepidation in the arrangement of “The Man With the Child in His Eyes,” it reflects other people’s anxieties about its depicted relationship with an older man: Will he take advantage, let her down? This is the other teenage recording, her voice a little higher, less powerfully exuberant, but disarmingly confident. Her serene, steady note in the chorus—“Oooooh, he’s here again”—lays waste to the faithless. And whether he is real, and whether he loves her, is immaterial: “I just took a trip on my love for him,” she sings, empowered, again, by her desire. There’s not a fearful note on The Kick Inside, and yet there is still room for childish wonder: Just because Bush appeared emotionally and musically sophisticated beyond her years didn’t mean denying them.

“Kite” unravels like a children’s story: First she wants to fly up high, away from cruel period pains (“Beelzebub is aching in my belly-o”) and teenage self-consciousness (“all these mirror windows”) but no sooner is she up than she wants to return to real life. It is a wacky hormone bomb of a song, prancing along on toybox cod reggae and the enervating rat-a-tat-tat energy that sustained parodies of Bush’s uninhibited style; still, more fool anyone who sneers instead of reveling in the pure, piercing sensation of her crowing “dia-ia-ia-ia-ia-ia-ia-mond!” as if giving every facet its own gleaming syllable.

The Kick Inside was Bush’s first, the sound of a young woman getting what she wants. Despite her links to the 1970s’ ancien régime, she recognized the potential to pounce on synapses shocked into action by punk, and eschewed its nihilism to begin building something longer lasting. It is ornate music made in austere times, but unlike the pop sybarites to follow in the next decade, flaunting their wealth while Britain crumbled, Bush spun hers not from material trappings but the infinitely renewable resources of intellect and instinct: Her joyous debut measures the fullness of a woman’s life by what’s in her head”.

There is so much to discuss and dissect. I think the biggest pull will be finding artists who are inspired by the album. Maybe few directly as influenced compared to albums like The Dreaming, Hounds of Love or The Sensual World (I know Charli xcx is a fan of this album), that will be a challenge, as The Kick Inside is not as referenced as other albums from Kate Bush. However, there is a hunger from fans. There has not been a massive gathering of any significant size since 2014’s Before the Dawn. There might never be another Kate Bush concert and fan conventions are not really a thing in music anymore. I do think it is a perfect opportunity to go beyond The Kick Inside and talk about Kate Bush’s influence now. What’s to say massive artists like Charli xcx or Björk would object? Having them as part of the night would be amazing. Starting out with a discussion about Wuthering Heights, its video and the Top of the Pops appearance. Then listening to the album in full. A panel where there would be a couple of breaks for watching videos and live performances, before a couple of special guests (pre-recorded words from Kate Bush would be incredible!), before a final live performance would end a wonderful celebration. It will cost thousands of pounds to book a venue and bring it all together, so I am thinking a crowd-funding campaign would be needed. Fans could get reward for donating. Kate Bush’s influence is as strong today as it has ever been. We can trace it all back to her debut album, released on 17th February, 1978. No artist who cites Kate Bush as an inspiration can overlook The Kick Inside. To me, it is one of the most influential albums…

EVER released.