FEATURE: Sexism, Discrimination, Abuse and Misogyny in the Music Industry: Will We See a Turn Towards Change Soon?

FEATURE:

 

Sexism, Discrimination, Abuse and Misogyny in the Music Industry

IN THIS PHOTO: Haim (from left): Alana, Este and Danielle/PHOTO CREDIT: Drew Le Fore Escriva/The Guardian

Will We See a Turn Towards Change Soon?

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IT might seem like music has gone…

PHOTO CREDIT: @marvelous/Unsplash

into a state of hibernation, as not many gigs are happening, and there is a very strange feel about things at the moment. Plans are being made for next year and, recently, the nominations for this year’s Mercury Prize were announced. The most positive thing to come out of the shortlist was the fact that, for the first time in the award’s history, women outnumbered men on the list – either as solo artists or the lead of a band. We should be at a place where it is seen as normal that women are equal or outnumbering men in terms of award nominations, but it is still a big surprise as disparity continues. Though music has slowed and things are not as they were before, that is not to say that issues such as misogyny and sexism have gone away. Alongside continuing misogyny and sexism, women are still on the receiving end of harassment at festivals. I have read a couple of stories recently relating to sexual assault and toxicity at music festivals and, for years it has been a huge issue. One of the music world’s biggest names, Hayley Williams, recently talked about her experiences and those of her friends:

“Hayley Williams opened up about the stories of sexual assault and abuse she's been reading from friends and peers in the music industry lately in a lengthy tweet on Monday night (July 20) in which the Paramore singer and solo star sent her love and support to those who've suffered while revealing her own experience as a frontwoman in the emo scene.

"It makes my stomach hurt and my eyes turn red," Williams said about unspecified stories of sexual and other forms of abuse at the hands of men in bands or in other parts of the music industry. "It's so crazy to me how frontwomxn can be such powerful inspiration to so many young people, who see us as very much 'in control' of ourselves and our immediate surroundings when we're up on a stage."

Williams wrote that she knows that powerful feeling, which is very real for her, transcending "any notion of gender" and, for her, is more than the sum of her parts when she's on stage. "But the truth is, all us 'music people' are first and foremost human beings," she wrote, adding that female lead singers are vulnerable and feel shame just like any other young person.

While Williams did not specify which stories she's been reading, her post came amid recent reports of alleged sexual abuse and misconduct leveled at musicians and record labels and it found her thinking out loud about the vulnerability of young male rock performers that can transform due to the ingrained toxicity in the scene. "They are most definitely vulnerable too and unfortunately -- whether consciously or not -- wrapped up in the toxicity of a culture that has existed long before most of us became a factor in it," she wrote”.

IN THIS PHOTO: Hayley Williams/PHOTO CREDIT: Natasha Moustache/Getty Images

This year has been a challenging one for the industry – more so than usual -, and there is no certainty regarding gigs next year and whether a lot of our venues will still be standing. That is fair enough, but I would hope that, among these recovery plans, there is going to be discussion regarding new frameworks and protective measures in place that protects women across the industry. I will talk about sexism in a minute but, in terms of talking about assault and abuse against women, the figures do not seem to improving - the reality is bleak, and recent stories involving Ian Svenonius and The Killers’ touring crew is bleak! I am aware that music festivals are hard to police but, as next year’s festivals will be the busiest and most-anticipated ever, it is going to cause extra strain, and it also means that there will be countless cases of harassment and assault against female festival-goers. I would recommend people investigate this recent article from Louder Sound, as it talks about the ongoing issues at festivals and wider afield:

“In recent years, the wider #MeToo movement has prompted women who have been the victims of assault and abuse at the hands of musicians to speak up. A wave of allegations against prominent musicians, like Brand New’s Jesse Lacey in 2017, encouraged women to come forward with their stories.

However, as the root causes of that abuse have not been stamped out, and the perpetrators not held properly accountable, little has changed.

PHOTO CREDIT: @globelet/Unsplash

There are a few factors that make abuse more endemic within alternative scenes – like hardcore, emo, pop punk and metal – than other areas of the music industry. One, an overwhelming percentage of musicians and fans in alternative music are male. Two, the age gaps between artists and their teenaged fans is often broad. Three – and this is key – artists hold power over their female fans. In many cases, the reverence that fans have for their favourite singers and musicians makes it difficult to realise that they’re being taken advantage of”.

I wonder whether there will be a #MeToo movement for music. Compared to Hollywood, I would imagine sexual abuse, sexism and assault is just as common, and most women in the music industry would have experienced some form of sexism. I have brought the subject up now as, a) I felt that this year would be a year for change and progression. COVID-19 has sort of put a spanner in the works, but the fact women are still speaking about sexism and abuse so frequently is worrying. Also, b), I feel that the fact women are dominating and producing the best work around is not been reflected in terms of opportunities, equality and a wider platform. I hope that next year will not only see a resurgence in live gigs and security for the industry, but greater rights for women, whether this begins with discussions or funding. In the U.K., a lot of money has been pledged to help our arts scene survive this tough time.

PHOTO CREDIT: @mihaisurdu/Unsplash

I would like to imagine that a small chunk of this money would be earmarked to bring about parity, improvement and new measures that means women are not only better safeguarded and protected when it comes to sexual assault, but their talent, importance and voices are heard – from female producers and songwriters through to artists and everyone in between! As this article explores, female artists alone have to deal with so much scrutiny, double standards and sexism:

“All singers are constantly being judged and scrutinized under a magnifying glass every second of their every day, but female artists are known to always get the short end of the stick. In fact, any aspect of their lives is the subject of discussion and careless rumors, with their stories being constantly paraded on the covers and headlines of flashy gossip magazines.

Their body is continuously judged – as it never seems to be ‘thin enough’ or ‘curvy enough’. Their fashion sense is picked apart by wannabe fashionistas – as it is either ‘too boring’ or ‘too sexy’. Their love life and behavior are analyzed by cheap press reporters who act like part-time psychologists, and who feel like they are entitled to have an opinion on a stranger’s life. In the public eye, female artists are either never enough or just way too much, and that must be incredibly frustrating for them.

Therefore, it is no wonder why there are so few women who actually make it into the entertainment industry, as according to a study from 2017, 16.8% of artists are female, whereas 83.2% are men.

PHOTO CREDIT: @henmankk/Unsplash

Even women who work behind the scenes in music face an abundance of misogyny, however different it may be from what female singers experience.

Women who work as record producers, composers or songwriters face incredibly tough challenges every day, trials that can be compared to what women in STEM fields (i.e. science, technology, engineering, and math) go through: they are not respected or taken seriously by the public, and they are always the second choice, after their male colleagues. Female producers need to be the best of the best to be recognized for their talent, and even then, that doesn’t happen very often”.

 Although the Mercury Prize has seen equality for the first time, and Glastonbury’s intended 2020 bill was gender-equal, big award shows like the BRITs still have a problem with gender. The fix is not going to be overnight and easy, but I am looking on social media and seeing daily tweets from women relating to sexism and their negative experiences. Whether that is a new artist being overlooked on radio playlists or reading derogatory comments in press articles, it is appalling! Big artists, too, are not immune from sexism. Haim have delivered one of this year’s best albums in Women in Music: Pt. III, and one would imagine they not have to shout for attention or struggle to be appreciated.

As this article from Music News outlines, the band tackled the issue of sexism on their current album:

“Haim have opened up about the sexism they've encountered in the music industry on their new album.

The all-female sibling trio, comprised of Este, Danielle, and Alana Haim, are one of the hottest Los Angeles pop-rock outfits, but in a chat with Variety, they revealed interviewers were fixated on their gender up until recently.

Admitting that they would constantly be asked, "What it's like to be...?" in "every single interview", Danielle said: "We haven't gotten asked the question this record cycle, which is also another reason why we wanted to call the album Women in Music. So it's actually great."

The new record, titled Women in Music Pt. III, appears to tackle sexism from the outset, with the cover art portraying The Wire hitmakers behind the counter at their beloved Canter's Deli in Los Angeles, posing in front of a sea of sausages.

Danielle, the group's main songwriter and lead vocalist, confessed the title is "mostly funny. But we also thought, 'Why don't we just put it into our music and tell our fans some of the experiences that we've had?'"

IN THIS PHOTO: Dua Lipa/PHOTO CREDIT: Hugo Comte

Maybe the root cause of sexism, misogyny and ignorance comes from the fact that men still dominate when it comes to positions of power. It may seem terribly naïve of me to say that quality and talent should be recognised, and that men need to stop ignoring and objectifying female artists. The more artists who speak out, the more the discussion continues. Another world-class album from this year arrived in the form of Future Nostalgia from Dua Lipa. Again, Lipa is an artist who has faced various forms of discrimination and sexism. I think one of the common threads is the way women are viewed and how there is this standard for men – where they are not criticised and told how to dress -, and a different one for women. NME explained more in an article from earlier this year:

“In a new interview with The Sunday Times, Lipa discussed ‘Boys Will Be Boys’ – a new track from her ‘Future Nostalgia’ album – which explores men’s treatment of women, saying she hoped the song would start a “conversation” because these were “real things [she has] gone through.”

“There is a lot less scrutiny of male pop stars,” Lipa said, adding: “…the way women are described compared to men, it’s, like, she is wearing shorts? ‘She puts on a leggy display!’ I just feel I’m here because I do music, but when people write articles like that about me, it takes it away from my talent and makes me a thing. An object. People like to just objectify women”.

In a year where the music industry has suffered shockwaves, one would hope that, when we are out the other side, there will be a reappraisal of the way women are viewed! There have been small improvements in the last couple of years, but things seem so painfully lopsided still regarding women’s rights and balance. The last female artists I want to bring in is Beyoncé. As one of the most influential women in music, she knows how important she is to many other women out there - and it seems like she has also had enough. When she delivered a graduation speech earlier in the year, she discussed sexism:

“She also touched on the sexism that is still prevalent in the music industry and how she had to carve her own path to success. Although the process was “terrifying” in her own words, building her own company was a major turning point in her life, “I know how hard it is to step out and bet on yourself.”

“The entertainment business is still very sexist. It’s still very male-dominated and as a woman, I did not see enough female role models given the opportunity to what I knew I had to do — to run my label, and management company, to direct my films and produce my tours that meant ownership, owning my masters, owning my art, owning my future and writing my own story. Not enough Black women had a seat at the table. So I had to go and chop down that wood and build my own table. Then I had to invite the best there was to have a seat. That meant hiring women, men outsiders, underdogs, people that were overlook and waiting to be seen,” she said.

She touched on how race and gender played a part in music corporations overlooking some talented candidates.

“Many of the best creatives and business people, who although supremely qualified and talented, were turned down over and over as executives at major corporations because they were female or because of racial disparity. And I’ve been very proud to provide them with a place at my table. One of the main purposes of my art for many years has been dedicated to showing the beauty of Black people to the world, our history, our profundity and the value of Black lives. I’ve tried my best to pull down the veil of appeasement to those who may feel uncomfortable with our excellence,” she said”.

From Beyoncé’s impassioned speech to Taylor Swift’s video for The Man taking shots at everyday sexism, Janelle Monáe attacking the misogyny that is rife, it seems that some serious work needs to happen! One area where sexism and gender imbalance is rife is to do with songwriting and production credits. In this L.A. Times article, there are some concerning statistics:

“In the Grammy Awards arena, females have fared best as new artist and song of the year contenders, averaging 36.9% and 24.6% of nominations over eight years studied. Come Sunday, 44.4% of the song of the year nominees are women, and 46.2% of new artist contenders are female.

By contrast, among nominations for overall record of the year (which recognizes vocal performance, production and engineering) and album of the year categories, an average of 8.2% have gone to females since 2012, and just 2.5% for producer of the year, in the form of a single nomination in 2019 for producer Linda Perry.

IN THIS PHOTO: Beyoncé

Looking more broadly to the recordings that have fared best on the Billboard Hot 100, the numbers become significantly more skewed: Last year just 14.4% of the 3,874 songwriters responsible for the most popular 800 songs over the study’s eight-year span were women, a statistically insignificant blip above the eight-year average of 12.5%. That figure has remained nearly static over time: in 2012, 11% of songwriters who crafted the top 100 songs that year were female.

The disparity in the world of record production is even more staggering: 5% of 2019’s top 100 recordings were produced by a woman; the eight-year average is 2.6% women to 97.4% men.

“The music industry has virtually erased female producers, particularly women of color, from the popular charts,” Smith said. “As producers fill a leading creative role, it’s essential to ensure that women from all backgrounds are being considered and hired throughout the industry. Moreover, the industry itself must continue to expand its commitment to representing the voices and talent of women in all aspects of the business”.

I have thrown a lot of information in the mix, but all of this is recent. Nothing new is being revealed here. Although, as I said, there have been changes in some areas, overall, the music industry has a huge problem with sexism and misogyny! As we are in a period of relative quiet regarding gigs, it would be a good time for festival organisers to ensure that next year’s festivities are aimed at keeping women as safe as possible – the same goes for venues.

PHOTO CREDIT: @dole777/Unsplash

I think there has been a change whereby people are being activated and motivated through social media, and there is a definite desire for evolution. I feel the problem is now as it has been: those in power are normally men, and they are not often incentivised to change things. If they perceive everything is okay, then they will not do much to upset the apple cart. The fact we have testimony from big artists and countless social media post from women in the industry sharing their experiences shows that doing nothing is not an option! Whilst there are very few gigs right now, that only briefly stops one problem among myriad ones. From a lack of exposure for female producers and encouragement for women to get into the studio, to media and record label scrutiny and sexist attitudes towards female talent, this could be a time for new pledges and a change in attitudes! I do think a bit of money would help set up bodies and organisations – aside from the ones that are there – that exclusively deal with making the music industry much safer and fairer for women. I do think a #MeToo movement is needed, and it could flourish and effect change. I think those in power need to take accountability, and reports regarding sexual assault at festivals and artists like Haim speaking about their struggles should open eyes. From the amazing albums released this year to record labels, venues and every corner of the music industry, women are essential and hugely important! It is tragic that, in 2020, we still need to have these conversations. Change and true progress needs to happen now but, to be fair…

IT should have happened years ago!

FEATURE: Shape of You: Ed Sheeran on Addiction and the Early Pressure of Fame: The Expectations Artists Face

FEATURE:

Shape of You

IN THIS PHOTO: Ed Sheeran

Ed Sheeran on Addiction and the Early Pressure of Fame: The Expectations Artists Face

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A few things have occurred in the music world…

that have compelled me to write a feature. I will explore the legacy of Denise Johnson this weekend, but I was caught by a story that appeared online concerning Ed Sheeran. I can’t count myself as one of his fans and, when it comes to his music, I have been unkind in the past. Whilst I am not a lover of his music, I have always respected him as a person, as it seems like he had a pretty long road to acknowledgment and, when his music did get out there and started to become popular, the pressure would have been immense. Now, he seems to have a comfortable life with his wife Cherry Seaborn, and he is able to be more selective regarding the gigging he does, as he has amassed quite a fortune. He has worked hard for it and, whatever you think of his music, one has to feel sympathy towards him, as we do not really think about these artists that are capitulated to fame. I think back to the 1990s when artists like Britney Spears burst through, and what things were like behind the scenes. One assumes that stardom and success would be nothing but a blessing for an artist like Ed Sheeran but, when you consider all the touring and exposure, it would have been a real struggle. Sheeran has talked about his issues with addiction and binge eating. This BBC article explains more:

 “Ed Sheeran has revealed how his "very addictive personality" led him to binge on food and alcohol during the early days of his success.

Speaking at an online summit on anxiety and wellbeing, the star said he had suffered panic attacks and hated the way he looked after becoming famous.

He hit a particularly rough patch during his 2014-15 world tour.

"I felt, 'What was the point?' In a dark way, like, 'Why am I around? What is the point?'" he said.

The star said credited his wife, Cherry, and a more healthy lifestyle for helping him turn his life around.

"She exercises a lot, so I started going on runs with her. She eats quite healthily so I started eating quite healthily. She doesn't drink that much so I wasn't drinking," he said. "I think that all changed things."

Sheeran said the 180-date world tour to promote his 2014 album X, was his lowest point.

"I would stay up and drink all night and then sleep on the bus," he said. "The buses would park underneath the arenas and I'd sleep on the bus all day, then wake up and then come out, do the show, drink, get back on the bus and I didn't see sunlight for maybe four months.

"It's all fun and games at the start. it's all rock and roll, and then like it starts getting sad. That was probably like the lowest that I've been and I kind of ballooned in weight."

Sheeran was signed to Elton John's management company at the start of his career - and he said that reading his mentor's autobiography had prompted a few realisations about his own lifestyle.

"There are so many things that he did that I do," the star explained.

"He would be like, 'I would just go on an ice cream binge and eat four desserts until I threw up', and I was like, 'I've done that before'.

"Or his martini binges, where he sees how many martinis he can drink. And I'm like, 'I've done that before too'.

"With addiction, its very hard to moderate but moderation is the key".

I am glad that he is more stable now, and things could have been very different considering the levels of his addiction and the fact that he would have been touring and making music at the same time – the energy this would have taken out of Sheeran is startling! Hearing about Sheeran’s experiences has made me look at modern music now and how there are so many upcoming and promising artists who might be in the same position. Not all will have addictive personalities like Sheeran but, as I have written about mental-health in music before, I think there are going to be a lot of artists out there who can identify with Sheeran and his struggle. I am not placing the blame on any one area of the music industry but I think, at a time when social media and streaming figures are as important as gigs and radio play, there is an awful lot for artists to take in and deal with. I think streaming figures and numbers is one huge reason why a lot of artists suffer from mental-health issues and do, like Sheeran, turn to some form of excess and addiction. This interesting article argues why numbers don’t reflect the value of musicians: 

“Listeners often look to the numbers to choose which music to listen to and to measure an artist’s success. “If a song has a lot of streams, it must be good”, conventional thinking says. But when musicians put too much stock into the numbers associated with their own music, it can limit their creativity, usher negativity into their careers, and distract from their music.

PHOTO CREDIT: @morningbrew/Unsplash

Because numbers in music can easily be interpreted as indicators of status, many musicians get wrapped up in endless quests to boost their streaming and social media standings. This is where an earnest desire to share music with people can morph into an unsatisfying game of points where the definition of creative success is narrowed down to whether your numbers go up or not. It’s the opposite of creating authentic, meaningful music, which is what your focus should be as a musician.

Streams, album sales, and Instagram likes can’t tell you your value and potential as a musician, (or a person in general for that matter). You absolutely should strive to reach as many people as you can through your music if that’s your goal as a musician. But believing a song has value because it’s streamed a lot (or that another has less because it isn’t) misses the point. Myriad human-related factors like your unique fanbase and the way you promote your music as well as things out of your control like algorithms and trends typically determine whether audiences latch on to new music or not”.

I did not want to make this a huge feature that focuses on every possible stress and pressure on young artists, but I have been thinking about life post-COVID-19 when artists get back to touring and full-on promotion. At any other time, promotion and touring is quite exhausting, but that will become worse when we are all seeing live gigs again, as there is a sense of catching up on lost time and trying to regain momentum.

IN THIS PHOTO: James Blake/PHOTO CREDIT:  The1point8

Not only do a lot of artists have to face financial loss and anaemia right now, but they are not able to get out there and play. That being said, the touring life can be a big weight, as artists are carried from pillar to post and undergo gruelling schedules. Last year, James Blake spoke to NME and shared his experiences of touring and how it has impacted his mental-health:

“As he subsequently opened up on his mental health battles, the Mercury Prize-winning producer admitted that it’s often harboured by long periods of time on the road.

“There are a lot of musicians just starting out now who might not be aware of the pitfalls of touring, and the pitfalls of a musician’s life. Mental health on the road is something which has generally been left until this generation to really deal with”, he explained.

“I think we’ve seen the effects of the artist’s life laid out for us in previous generations, and I think we’re just starting to go, ‘Maybe I shouldn’t use these methods to cope with it, maybe I should talk to somebody.’”

But while Blake believes that the stigma on mental health is lessening, he think that musicians have never been under more pressure.

“Coming up at a time when the internet destroyed any chance of selling lots and lots of records meant there was a lot of pressure to tour, and you couldn’t really stop without taking a huge financial hit,” Blake said”.

IN THIS PHOTO: Kehlani

Ed Sheeran also remarked how he has stepped away from social media because, though it is a great tool to market music and connect with fans, there is that downside. So many musicians live with mental illnesses and, when that is revealed online, sometimes the reaction is not particularly positive or empathetic:

“When you're working in a field that opens you up to public discussion, or even ridicule, you learn to harden yourself against criticism that comes both from journalists and the sort of people whose only avatars are dogs, cartoons or the gauzy Twitter head-and-shoulders icon (RIP the egg). But it's important to note the line between criticism and vitriol. Artists like Kehlani, Fifth Harmony's Normani Kordei and most recently Arcade Fire's Win Butler have stepped away from Twitter, often citing hateful language as the reason why. Kanye West and Sinead O'Connor have had their struggles with mental illness mocked. None of this counts as productive criticism. It's being a prick, and doing so when your comments can be carried around on a screen in someone's back pocket.

"Social media allows fans to feel an authentic connection to artists, which creates more of a psychological bond and sense of relationship," says Dr Pamela Rutledge, a media psychologist based in California. "It feels close. But that closeness also makes negative remarks and harassment seem all the more hurtful." Anyone who's waited for their crush's name to pop up on the list of people who watched their latest shaky Instagram Story will already know how craving validation on social media can lead to dependence. If that validation disappears, it can trigger unfounded feelings of isolation or inadequacy”.

IN THIS PHOTO: Normani Kordei

At the moment, artists need to be protected regarding streaming income, and many are facing a very lean 2020 and an extremely packed and frantic 2021 ahead. Even if you are a very small artist starting out, that polar extreme is going to take its toll. I do hope that live music can restart properly soon enough, but I am concerned that underground and mainstream artists alike will face their toughest challenge yet regarding maintaining a work-life balance and ensuring that they take some time out and rest. I am not predicting a load of artists will speak out like Ed Sheeran and go through the same struggles, but there will be additional pressures and problems on the shoulders of artists everywhere. There are great charities and resources that are there for musicians during this very challenging time. In a more long-term sense, I do wonder whether there needs to be a shake-up regarding the life of an artist and how many hours they spend on the road and online. One might say this is all part of being a musician, but so many do not take time off, and the uncensored and vast pit of social media means that artists are exposed to all sorts of comments and criticisms – making them less likely to be open about their problems or want to speak out at all. I do hope that the industry and labels put something in place when things get back to normal, as it will be a very tough transition, and Ed Sheeran’s revelations will open quite a few eyes. Whilst we all want to hear as much new music as possible and get back into venues and see artists climb back onto the stage, I hope that, when that is possible, we all take a bit of time out to consider the wellbeing and happiness of…

PHOTO CREDIT: @ricardonunes_fotografo/Unsplash

THE people behind the music.

FEATURE: Oh to Be in Love: The Ongoing Impact of Kate Bush’s The Kick Inside on Me

FEATURE:

 

Oh to Be in Love

The Ongoing Impact of Kate Bush’s The Kick Inside on Me

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I would not normally put out…

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1978/PHOTO CREDIT: Chris Moorhouse/Evening Standard/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

three different Kate Bush-related features in a week but, as it is her birthday today (30th July), I wanted to add an extra one to return to my favourite album ever, The Kick Inside. It turned forty-two in February, and it is a record that I am deeply enamoured of. I wanted to focus on the album as, in my view, it is the best thing Bush put out and, even though it is her debut, it is the thing I love the most. There has been news recently that Bush might be collaborating with Big Boi on a project of his but, until it can be confirmed, there is no solid news as to when we might hear her on record again. Until we do, it is a great time to look back on her incredible back catalogue. Before I move on, this article provides the background to Kate Bush’s debut album:

“By 1975 Kate Mush had recorded several cassettes’ worth of demos and song sketches on her dad’s Akai reel-to-reel tape machine. Impressed, her family enlisted Ricky Hopper, a record plugger friend, to hawk them around the labels in the hope of getting a publishing deal. After all the majors had turned them down as “uncommercial”, Hopper contacted his old Cambridge University buddy David Gilmour. The Pink Floyd guitarist was sufficiently impressed to invite Kate to record a demo at his Essex home studio, backed by him and the rhythm section from Unicorn, a band he was also nurturing. “I was convinced from the beginning that this girl had remarkable talent,” Gilmour later said.

After that didn’t work either, Gilmour decided the only way forward would be to record three properly arranged songs. Putting up the money himself, he booked time at London’s AIR Studios in June 1975, bringing in arranger friend Andrew Powell, who had worked with Cockney Rebel, Pilot and Alan Parsons. They recorded The Saxophone Song, The Man With The Child In His Eyes and Maybe, with members of the London Symphony Orchestra (the first two songs would appear on The Kick Inside.

Gilmour played the demo to Bob Mercer, then head of EMI’s pop division, who was impressed enough to sign her up. A deal was eventually sealed by July 1976. Having left school with 10 ‘O’ Levels, Bush set up a company to manage her affairs – a precocious glimpse of the total control that would come later in her career.

The Kick Inside was recorded at AIR studios over six weeks in July and August 1977 with producer Powell. Like Mick Jones of The Clash diligently soaking up Sandy Pearlman’s laborious realisation of his group’s second album so he could co-produce their masterpiece London Calling, Bush watched Powell work, absorbing the ropes to use when she struck out on her own a couple of years later”.

I will put out a podcast relating to The Kick Inside one day, because it would be great to dissect and examine the album with other people. I adore the sheer beauty of the songs and how, even though piano is at the centre, Bush manages to add as much texture and variation with her vocal phrasing and lyrics. The songs have their own skin, and the breadth of subject matter is amazing.

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in a promotional shot for Wuthering Heights in 1978/PHOTO CREDIT: Gered Mankowitz

There are links where one can hear Bush’s early demos, and there are great playlists and sites where one can hear the buds of The Kick Inside. I would encourage people to listen to the demos as it shows, even before Bush’s first recordings for the album, she was this prodigious talent! Maybe there was a perception that Bush was being marketed as a female body rather than a songwriter on her debut. Bush referenced that herself in 1982, and there were grey areas. There were photographs where Bush’s physique was more important than her expression, and some media sources were more concerned with her body than her music. I think a lot of the shoots from 1978 are very expressive and memorable, and they do stray from the more sexualised. From Kate Bush’s first T.V. appearance on 9th February, 1978 to  the end of 1978, The Kick Inside kept her very busy indeed! Of course, prior to February 1978, the world was introduced to her remarkable debut single, Wuthering Heights. Like so many people, this was the first experience and taste of Bush’s music, and it might be one of the reasons why the album remains my favourite. I saw the video for Wuthering Heights as a child – at the same time I saw the video for Them Heavy People (which appears on The Kick Inside) -, and it was a revelation! I do not think I had ever discovered an artist through a video rather than the music itself, and the impact of that video changed everything.

I know I have written about The Kick Inside a fair bit through the years, but it is album that consistently intrigues me. Of course, Wuthering Heights is what most people associate with the album. This article from The Skinny, goes into more details:

“The song that gets the most attention on The Kick Inside is, of course, Wuthering Heights. Now a bona fide classic, endlessly gushed over as an exemplar of 70s art pop (against the grain of the then-ubiquitous disco and punk). It's also destined to be forever remembered for its equally famous visual of Bush dancing in a white dress with cheesy post-production effects (or the 'red dress' American version, with equally theatrical dancing on some real-life moors), still a few years before MTV would make the music video a mainstream creative medium.

Wuthering Heights was the first self-penned number one for a female artist in the UK, written when Bush was 18 (released a year later). Bizarrely, EMI had decided that James and the Cold Gun would be the first single from the album, but Bush was determined that Wuthering Heights should be the first release and – amazingly for a young woman in the music industry in the 70s – she got her way. This imperturbable drive towards her own creative vision is something that Bush would continually exhibit throughout her career.

Lyrically, the song deals with the ghost of Catherine (Cathy) Earnshaw – from Emily Brontë's novel Wuthering Heights – pleading to be released from her purgatory and let back in from her post-death wandering on the moors. Despite the novel's ambiguity when it comes to Cathy's affections (for either Heathcliff or Edgar), Bush asserts that Cathy longs for Heathcliff, 'I'm coming back to his side to put it right / I'm coming home to wuthering, wuthering, wuthering heights' – i.e. the wild, passionate side of her character that she supressed during her lifetime. As a mission statement for an artist unmoored from conformity, social mores or traditional expectations, it's more or less perfect”.

If one wants a start point for Kate Bush, then starting at the beginning is the way it should be done. There is so much to love about The Kick Inside. From the beautiful opener, Moving, to the title track at the end, there are so many beautiful stories and layers that beckon you in and keep you coming back for more. I think the boldness and confidence through the album is especially impressive! As Bush was a teenager when the album was written, it is all the more impressive that the songs tackle themes that stray away from the traditional boy-meets-girl. From menstruation and synchronicity of Strange Phenomena, to incest and suicide on The Kick Inside, there is this blend of more traditional songs of love and passion together with more challenging themes.

Though Bush’s voice would develop and widen as her career progression, I do really love her in the higher range. It is not everyone’s preferred sound, but I think it is what makes the album so entrancing and gorgeous! I still think The Kick Inside is seen as a promising debut, and there is almost this shared feeling (among critics) that she would do better. That is subjective, but it is the way The Kick Inside is brushed aside by some that bothers me. In recent years, there has been more of a positive and constructive approach to the album but, even so, there is more attention paid to albums like The Dreaming, and Hounds of Love. Today, there will be a lot of tribute paid to Bush, and many people will share their memories of her music and the songs/albums that mean the most to them. I love everything she has put out, but The Kick Inside will always be the album I come back to the most. I wanted to put out this feature, not only to have my say on Kate Bush’s birthday, but to, hopefully, turn more people onto The Kick Inside. It is a remarkable work that has provided me with so much strength and joy during the hard times we find ourselves in. It remains for me to wish Bush a happy birthday and, for anyone who is unfamiliar with the sensational The Kick Inside, to go out and buy it and…

IN THIS PHOTO: On 9th February, 1978, a 19-year-old Kate Bush experienced her first T.V. appearance, performing the A and B-sides of Wuthering Heights (Kite) on the West German T.V.’s Bios Bahnhof (Bio’s Station)

FALL for its many charms!

FEATURE: A Year Like No Other: The Twelve Best Albums from American and Canadian Artists in 2020 (So Far)

FEATURE:

 

A Year Like No Other

IN THIS PHOTO: Fiona Apple/PHOTO CREDIT: Kevin Hayes

The Twelve Best Albums from American and Canadian Artists in 2020 (So Far)

___________

IN September…

IN THIS PHOTO: Moses Sumney/PHOTO CREDIT: Eric Gyamfi

we will get to see which artist walks away with the Mercury Prize. The award is handed to the best album from a U.K. or E.I.R.E. artist over the past year. This year’s shortlist is brilliant and diverse but, whilst British and Irish artists have produced some incredible work this year (the Mercury Prize also includes albums from July 2019 onwards), I think American and Canadian artists have topped us in terms of sheer wonder and genius - as unpatriotic as that might sound! That may seem contentious, but I think many of the biggest albums of 2020 have arrived from the U.S. and Canada. Rather than do another feature that collects the best albums of the year so far, I want to focus on the best of the U.S. and Canada. From established masters like Bob Dylan, through to young mainstream stars like Taylor Swift, there have been phenomenal albums from every corner. Here, as a sort of alternative to the Mercury shortlist, are twelve musical…

IN THIS PHOTO: Haim

WORKS of brilliance.

_________________

Taylor Swift – folklore

Release Date: 24th July

Label: Republic

Producers: Aaron Dessner/Jack Antonoff/Taylor Swift

Standout Tracks: the last great american dynasty/illicit affairs/mad woman

Sample Review:

“Despite the centre-stage given to lyricisms and songwriting on this album, it would be reductive to call this a return to her roots – even when she was embracing full-on bombastic pop a-la Reputation the songwriting was always there. It always has been, Swift trading on stories and quick turns of phrase even on her now infamous red-herring singles. On Folklore this runs deeper, the lyrics once more given space to move and breathe, the music fitting around the story being told instead of succinct pop hooks. On this record Swift is enjoying the huge discography that trails behind her, even when she's trying on other people's tales: on "the 1" we get a glimpse of witty and unlucky-in-love Swift, (it would've been fun / if you would've been the one") whilst Bon Iver collaboration "exile" brings to mind "The Last Time", a collaboration with Gary Lightbody found on her Red album.

In an interview with Mark Sutherland for The Telegraph in 2015, Swift hoped that: "if I ever find some sort of meaningful relationship, I’ll be able to still find inspiration, just through the everyday ups and downs." Folklore is proof that she can, she can, she can – and beyond just writing about her own love story. This is an album of Swift at her most knowing, pushing away the tabloid fodder that has often surrounded her artistry and magnifying the talent she's been honing her entire life. The melodies are full of warmth and round-edges, moving and twinkling on her whim as she indulges in one of the most most human and timeless past-times we have” – The Line of Best Fit

Buy: https://shop.virginemi.com/taylorswift/

Stream: https://open.spotify.com/album/0xS0iOtxQRoJvfcFcJA5Gv?si=mRuv3sXwTO-g94yae6VpTA

Key Cut: cardigan

Bob Dylan – Rough and Rowdy Ways

Release Date: 19th June

Label: Columbia

Standout Tracks: I Contain Multitudes/Black Rider/Murder Most Foul

Sample Review:

“"I Contain Multitudes" is a meditation on a life yet unfolding; historic figures -- Anne Frank, William Blake, the Rolling Stones, etc. -- jostle against archetypes of gunslingers: "…What can I tell ya? I sleep with life and death in the same bed…." "False Prophet" is a jeremiad disguised as blues house rocker. The protagonist testifies; he's a witness who confronts evil in history and real time. "Goodbye Jimmy Reed" celebrates the bluesman in his own house-rocking style to equate religion, sin, and redemption with romantic obsession and sex. "Crossing the Rubicon" is a roadhouse blues with the afterlife riding shotgun: "Three miles north of purgatory/One step from the great beyond/I pray to the cross/I kiss the girls/and I cross the Rubicon…." Dylan's band are loose and joyful; their raucousness carries his swagger and joy. The suspenseful, loungey "My Own Version of You" features grave robbing as it employs the inspiration of the Bride of Frankenstein to seek truth in taboo. "I've Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You," caressed by marimbas, and brushed snares, finds Dylan blurring distinctions between carnal and spiritual love. Conversely, "Black Rider" whistles past the graveyard, with a nasty caution: "… Don’t hug me, don’t turn on the charm/I'll take a sword and hack off your arm…." In the Celtic gospel of "Mother of Muses," he's a grateful supplicant, a servant who humbly requests transformation knowing full well he may not be entitled: "… wherever you are/I've already outlived my life by far…."

The album's final half-hour contains only two songs. The nine-plus-minute "Key West (Philosopher Pirate)" is a rambling dirge guided by a soft accordion in a stripped-down journey of longing and weariness; an acknowledgment of mortality with the ghosts of the Beats, Buddy Holly, and Jimi Hendrix alongside him. It stands with his best work from the '70s. That gentle sojourn prepares listeners for "Murder Most Foul," a sprawling, 17-minute lyrical, labyrinthian closer that moves through history, metaphor, and culture with JFK's assassination as its hub. It will be decoded for generations. Rough and Rowdy Ways is akin to transformational albums such as Love and Theft, and Slow Train Coming. It's a portrait of the artist in winter who remains vital and enigmatic. At nearly 80, Dylan's pen and guitar case still hold plenty of magic” – AllMusic

Buy: https://www.roughtrade.com/gb/bob-dylan/rough-and-rowdy-ways

Stream: https://open.spotify.com/album/1Qht64MPvWTWa0aMsqxegB?autoplay=true

Key Cut: False Prophet

BC Camplight – Shortly After Takeoff

Release Date: 24th April

Label: Bella Union

Standout Tracks: Back to Work/Shortly After Takeoff/Angelo

Sample Review:

“Brian Christinzio’s fifth album as BC Camplight is a marvel, in which currents cut across each other in a half hour or so that roils with anxiety, stuns with beauty and, occasionally, provokes laughter. The whole uneasy tone – is it wrong to take so much pleasure in something so plainly the result of turmoil – is set with the opening to the second track, Ghosthunting, in which Christinzio delivers a parody standup routine to bilious audience laughter: “For the whole first half of this record, I thought I had a really bad disease. It turns out I’m just mentally ill. I called an attorney to get my affairs in order and everything. He said, ‘You know I’m a personal injury lawyer, right?’ He asked me, ‘Have you fallen?’ I said, ‘Boy have I ever.’”

Christinzio has previously spoken of his reluctance to dwell on pretty melodies or memorable choruses. That’s not the case here: he’s still not one for hammering a hook down your throat until it’s so caught it becomes irritating, but he lets them hang around long enough to sink in, and allows them to return. It’s more that the passages of disruption serve as palate-cleansers for the next piece of sweetness. It’s funny, too. Born to Cruise – whose opening minute or so is a grand, four-to-the-floor road trip banger, which makes you want to wind your window down and hammer the steering wheel, begins with the perfect bathos-laden lyric: “I’ve had my indicator on since leaving Crewe / That explains the gestures in my rearview.” This album is a masterpiece” – The Guardian

Buy: https://bellaunion.ochre.store/release/167312-bc-camplight-shortly-after-takeoff

Stream: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3hAhEoDACSr25dnJcov5eb?Smoke_=

Key Cut: Born to Cruise

Haim – Women in Music Pt. III

Release Date: 26th June

Labels: Polydor/Vertigo Berlin/Columbia

Producers: Danielle Haim/Rostam Batmanglij/Ariel Rechtshaid

Standout Tracks: I Know Alone/3 AM/Leaning on You

Sample Review:

“They sound intimately familiar with depression in all its states, whether they're turning away from the wearying, pointless challenge to prove themselves to men in media and the music industry on "Man from the Magazine," sinking into isolation on the oddly comforting standout "I Know Alone," or emerging from the darkness on "Now I'm in It," a slow-building anthem that could be the album's statement of purpose. Women in Music Pt. III's creative process echoes its feeling of growing agency. For the first time, Danielle took on production duties alongside Rechtshaid and Rostam Batmanglij, and impressionistic touches like the seagulls and alarm clocks that embellish "Up from a Dream" or the way the guitar and saxophones drift through "Los Angeles" echo Batmanglij's dreamy musical memoir Half-Light. HAIM let each song and each mood be exactly what it needs to be, making for a collection of moments that are more interesting and real than if they'd attempted a more uniform sound across the album. The band's love for the '90s is as strong as ever on the Roxette-like "Another Try" and "3 AM"'s flirty homage to the era's R&B. Their singer/songwriter and folk-pop roots get their due on "Hallelujah" and the gorgeous "Leaning on You," a pair of songs that unite the sisters' voices and struggles in perfect harmony. The lightness HAIM use to combat the heavy things going on in their lives reaches its peak at the album's end: Written in the wake of Rechtshaid's diagnosis, "Summer Girl," taps into memories of the good times to get through the bad ones and borrows the effortlessness of Lou Reed's "Walk on the Wild Side," but trades that song's aloofness for unconditional love. Sprawling and intimate, breezy and affecting, Women in Music Pt. III is a low-key triumph” – AllMusic

Buy: https://www.roughtrade.com/gb/haim/women-in-music-pt-iii

Stream: https://open.spotify.com/album/6NtEjhPWfZcvJQuvjGX4bk

Key Cut: The Steps

Thundercat – It Is What It Is

Release Date: 3rd April

Label: Brainfeeder

Producers: BadBadNotGood/Flying Lotus/Mono/Poly/Sounwave/Steve Lacy/Taylor Graves/Thundercat

Standout Tracks: Black Qualls/Dragonball Durag/Fair Chance

Sample Review:

“What’s impressive is how Thundercat makes this music, with its complex structures and zigzagging rhythms, so human. “Dance away the pain,” he sings on “Miguel’s Happy Dance”. “It’s gonna be alright… just do the f***ing dance.” The bass skirts around his airy falsetto like a car dodging traffic, punctuated by bursts of Eighties-style synths. “How Sway” is the dance itself, a jittery burst of energy that disappears as quickly as it arrives.

Few songs make it past the three-minute mark: the album’s mid-section is three skits, including “Funny Thing”, where the squelchy bassline is a continuation of Drunk’​s boozy, carefree sentiment. Songs such as “How I Feel” or the freewheeling “Innerstellar Love” (on which Kamasi Washington offers a brief but intricate sax solo) speak more to the space-y grandeur of 2015 album The Epic; synths blink and whirl like constellations and Thundercat’s vocals take on a psychedelic tone.

“Fair Chance”, which directly addresses Mac Miller’s death, feels raw with grief. The acceptance that runs through the album is still here, but Thundercat sings in a softer register – almost a whisper – as the “tik-tok” of the hi-hat marks the passage of time. “Everything’s so strange,” Ty Dolla $ign, who has a surprisingly soulful voice when it isn’t bogged down with autotune, sings. “Too hard to get over it,” Thundercat admits, before uttering the album’s title. He acknowledges he cannot change things, but at the same time legitimises his own struggle to accept that. Not all things are meant to be understood” – The Independent 

Buy: https://thundercat.bandcamp.com/album/it-is-what-it-is

Stream: https://open.spotify.com/album/59GRmAvlGs7KjLizFnV7Y9

Key Cut: King of the Hill

Fiona Apple – Fetch the Bolt Cutters

Release Date: 17th April

Labels: Epic/Clean Slate

Producers: Fiona Apple/Amy Aileen Wood/Sebastian Steinberg/Davíd Garza

Standout Tracks: Shameika/Newspaper/For Her

Sample Review:

“About a minute into "I Want You to Love Me," the opening cut on her fifth album Fetch the Bolt Cutters, Fiona Apple holds a note a few seconds longer than you'd expect, then a few seconds more. It's the first time Apple veers away from the expected course on Fetch the Bolt Cutters and it's hardly the last, but it's telling that the shift occurs within a song, not in a transition between tracks. Apple spent the years after the 2012 release of The Idler Wheel sculpting the songs and sounds of Fetch the Bolt Cutters, working at her home studio with a band featuring drummer Amy Aileen Wood, bassist Sebastian Steinberg, and multi-instrumentalist David Garza, using their interactions and interplay as a suggestion of where the finished track should head. Everything on Fetch the Bolt Cutters seems restless: overdubbed harmonies don't quite jibe, rhythms are cluttered, narratives turn inside out, and Apple treats her own voice as a rubber instrument, stretching it beyond comfort. As pure sound, it's exhilarating. It's rare to listen to a pop album and have no idea what comes next, and Fetch the Bolt Cutters delivers surprises that delight and bruise at a rapid pace. The density is dizzying but melodies and certain lyrics make an immediate impression, such as the jolting denouement of "For Her." Apple wrote "For Her" in the wake of the contentious Brett Kavanaugh hearings and while its fury is palpable and by no means an anomaly on Fetch the Bolt Cutters, the album isn't defined by anger. Rage sits alongside heartache and humor, the shifts in mood occurring with a dramatic flair and a disarming playfulness. The unpredictable nature feels complex and profoundly human, resulting in an album that's nourishing and joyfully cathartic” – AllMusic

Buy: https://www.roughtrade.com/gb/fiona-apple/fetch-the-bolt-cutters

Stream: https://open.spotify.com/album/0fO1KemWL2uCCQmM22iKlj

Key Cut: Under the Table

Neil Young – Homegrown

Release Date: 19th June

Label: Reprise

Producers: Neil Young/Elliot Mazer/Ben Keith/Tim Mulligan

Standout Tracks: Separate Ways/Mexico/White Line

Sample Review:

“Of its 12 songs – recorded in late 1974 and early 1975 – seven have never been released before, including heartfelt opener ‘Separate Ways’. Over Levon Helm’s solid but minimal drum line comes a chorus up there with Young’s best, as melodic as it is thoughtful, as pensive as it is powerful. A sonic red herring, it’s perhaps the most downbeat moment on the record, which is overall a pretty chipper thing. The upbeat Try follows, a sweet little shuffle with Emmylou Harris on backing vocals and Young at his most positive, crooning: “We’ve got lots of time / To get together if we try.

The first recordings of songs that would appear on later albums from 1975 to 1980 boost the record into something not just of niche interest to Neil Young diehards, but something with universal appeal. Here the sugary ‘Love Is A Rose’ – first released by the majestic Linda Ronstadt in 1975 – sees Young being just about as cute as he’ll ever be (“I wanna see what’s never been seen / I wanna live that age old dream”) while the sparse ‘White Line’ and devastating ‘Little Wing’ prove his masterful way with deceptively simple balladry.

The hip-shakin’, joint-rollin’ title track – which would first be aired on 1977’s ‘American Stars ‘N Bars’ alongside ‘Star of Bethlehem’ – is proof, too, that Neil Young has always known how to have fun, but – as with the drawn-out release of ‘Homegrown’ – it will always be on his terms” – NME

Buy: https://www.roughtrade.com/gb/neil-young/homegrown

Stream: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5zPtFuFrZs4IKuCEKNVJla

Key Cut: Love Is a Rose

Waxahatchee – Saint Cloud

Release Date: 27th March

Label: Merge

Producer: Brad Cook

Standout Tracks: Fire/Hell/Ruby Falls

Sample Review:

“There’s always something tempering the beauty of Waxahatchee’s music. I mean that as a compliment: on the American singer-songwriter’s fifth album, Saint Cloud, luscious melodies are undercut by a lingering unease, sentimentality by steeliness.

The glorious “Fire”, which starts with plaintive keyboard strains, might have been described as “lovely” were it sung down an octave. As it is, with Waxahatchee (real name Katie Crutchfield) stretching to the upper limits of her range, her voice sounds like a match being struck. Her lolloping delivery on “Lilacs” – “and the lilacs drank the water/ and the lilacs die/ and the lilacs drank the water/ marking the slow, slow, slow passing of time” – is Bob Dylan by way of Lucinda Williams” – The Independent

Buy: https://waxahatchee.bandcamp.com/album/saint-cloud-2

Stream: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/7icLwE6vs6umiO7MrCy6XJ

Key Cut: Lilacs

Moses Sumney - Græ

Release Date: 21st February (Part One)/ 15th May (Part Two)

Label: Jagjaguwar

Producers: Moses Sumney/Adult Jazz/Ben Baptie/John Congleton/FKJ/Daniel Lopatin/Matthew Otto

Standout Tracks: Cut Me/Polly/Me in 20 Years

Sample Review:

“The 2014 arrival of Moses Sumney’s soaring soul voice attracted fans from Solange Knowles to Sufjan Stevens and led to a record-label bidding war. The Ghanaian-American’s 2017 debut Aromanticism was a beautiful collection of essays on romantic attachment, and Græ picks up on this theme from its opening spoken-word passage on the subject of isolation.

Released in two parts (Part One in February), the album branches into themes of masculinity, encapsulated by the propulsive “Virile”, where a satisfying contrast of textures incorporates a growling drone, soft flute and his angelic vocals. When the album shifts into its second part, and turns inwards with a slower pace to match its vulnerable introspection, there’s no jolt: Sumney’s voice ensures that his soundscapes melt together.

It’s here that the emotional heft is to be found, particularly in “Two Dogs”, “Bless Me” and the heart-wrenching apex, “Me in 20 Years”, in which he imagines himself alone in the distant future. The song swells with an arpeggiating harp, male choral backing and delicate splashes of cymbals, until his voice is flowing so freely of rhythm that you feel him yearning, painfully, for an answer to “I wonder how I’ll sleep at night/ With a cavity by my side/ And nothing left to hold but pride.

When pinned down, Sumney defines his music as “experimental folk-soul-jazz”, but it’s more complex than that. Under his masterful production, it sounds as though there are 20 musicians in the room with him. Flourishes of jazz flute and brass add warmth to “Two Dogs”, which showcases the acrobatics of his vocals as they glide effortlessly from falsetto vibrato to rich baritone. And the euphoric dreaminess of “Bless Me” – could there be a more heavenly gospel-cloaked crescendo on which to wrap up this astonishing feat?” – The Independent

Buy: https://www.roughtrade.com/gb/moses-sumney/grae

Stream: https://open.spotify.com/album/35CHoLB0GEwYlOomriifC6

Key Cut: Virile

Run the Jewels – RTJ4

Release Date: 3rd June

Labels: Jewel Runners/BMG

Producers: El-P/Josh Homme

Standout Tracks: yankee and the brave (ep. 4)/ooh la la/JU$T

Sample Review:

“‘Walking In The Snow’, the album’s sixth track features a guest appearance by one time Three 6 Mafia member Gangsta Boo. The beat is heavy and the lyrics are eerily all too close for comfort as Mike takes us back to the 2014 death of Eric Garner at the hands of the police: “And every day on evening news, they feed you fear for free / And you so numb you watch the cops choke out a man like me / And 'til my voice goes from a shriek to whisper / ‘I can't breathe’ / And you sit there in the house on couch and watch it on TV / The most you give's a Twitter rant and call it a tragedy.” Such lyrics are hard to listen to, especially in the wake of the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis at the hands of a police officer.

‘RTJ4’ is a must listen. It is diverse enough to appeal to even the hardest crowds. Many genres are represented here, but lyrical hip-hop is at the forefront of all that Run The Jewels is. They stand out from the crowd, whilst invoking the people to stand up for themselves. There is not a bad song on the entire album and the production and features are second to none. I kept rewinding the tracks, not just from a reviewer’s perspective, but to hear the how well combined Mike and El-P are.

As the album’s finale builds up with a saxophone crescendo, the track fades out before we are once again introduced to the mock TV show Yankee And The Brave. As I pressed play once more on the album, I realised I cannot wait to hear what Run The Jewels 5 will bring” – CLASH

Buy: https://www.roughtrade.com/gb/run-the-jewels/rtj4

Stream: https://open.spotify.com/album/6cx4GVNs03Pu4ZczRnWiLd

Key Cut: pulling the pin

Perfume Genius – Set My Heart on Fire Immediately

Release Date: 15th May

Label: Matador

Producer: Blake Mills

Standout Tracks: Describe/Your Body Changes Everything/Nothing at All

Sample Review:

“It feels like he’s rewriting musical history in his own image, usually by making it more oblique. Hadreas is a really good lyricist, who has an eye for detail – as when the grim, youthful one-night-stand in Jason plays out to the sound of “the Breeders on CD” – and a way with a striking line. Moonbend, the one track that recalls his early work, with its sparse sound, tape hiss and the audible creak of chairs, features a description of sex that keeps shifting from erotic to dissonantly medical: “carving his lung, ribs fold like fabric.” But it frequently feels as if he’s adapting the music here to express feelings he can’t quite articulate. Describe is punchy until it cuts dead halfway through, the rest of the song given over to ghostly synthesisers and mumbled, indecipherable voices; the beautiful harp arpeggios on Leave are set against a vocal that’s distorted and mumbled until it’s only half-comprehensible.

Whatever he’s doing, the results are uniformly fantastic: rich, fascinating and moving, packed with gorgeous melodies and arrangements that feel alive, constantly writhing into unexpected new shapes. For an artist frequently characterised by his miserable backstory of bullying, addiction and chronic illness and his lyrical empathy for human failure and frailty, it feels astonishingly assured and confident in its approach, which perhaps explains the cover image and supporting cast: an expression of power and focus, like the album itself” – The Guardian

Buy: https://www.roughtrade.com/gb/perfume-genius/set-my-heart-on-fire-immediately

Stream: https://open.spotify.com/album/6daEdTBi1hyFQgmsnR7oRr

Key Cut: On the Floor

Phoebe Bridgers – Punisher

Release Date: 18th June

Label: Dead Oceans

Producers: Tony Berg/Ethan Gruska/Phoebe Bridgers

Standout Tracks: Garden Song/Kyoto/Chinese Satellite

Sample Review:

“When Bridgers drops down to breathily lament “I know you had to go”, it carries a heartbreaking power before the song explodes into a surprising noise-rock coda. The epic, free-form conclusion includes contributions from iconic 1970s singer-songwriter Jackson Browne on piano, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ Nick Zimmer on guitar and top session drummer Jim Keltner, alongside a choir featuring Conor Oberst and many other Americana contemporaries, while Bridgers screams at the top of her lungs. It’s evidence of how much regard Bridgers is held in by the music world, and a finale that leaves you wondering where the woman of the hour will go next.

A take-no-prisoners penchant for cutting to the savage kernel of truth is something that has been at the essence of the singer-songwriter genre since its earliest days. Bridgers’s modernity is actually a kind of timelessness, yet delivered in an emotional and lyrical lexicon that speaks directly to this moment. Punisher is an album stretched between depression and recovery, laughing at the world to stop from crying, on a set of songs exploring Bridgers’s emotional self-isolation, yearning for places and people that she can no longer reach, and might not want to even if she could.

And what could be more timely than that?” – The Daily Telegraph

Buy: https://www.roughtrade.com/gb/phoebe-bridgers/punisher

Stream: https://open.spotify.com/album/2xECuqnvvmVktV7UO8Dd3s

Key Cut: Punisher

FEATURE: Queen of the Mountain: The Legacy and Influence of Kate Bush: A Time for Fresh Revision and Examination

FEATURE:

 

Queen of the Mountain

PHOTO CREDIT: Mike Prior

The Legacy and Influence of Kate Bush: A Time for Fresh Revision and Examination

___________

WITHOUT stepping on the toes…

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush during her Tour of Life in 1979

of articles I have written before, I wanted to write a feature about Kate Bush ahead of her birthday tomorrow (30th July). Recently, I wrote how there is no modern equivalent to Bush and, whilst that is very true, there are many who have been inspired by her; so many talk about her music, and her impact extends beyond musicians and songwriting. A few years back, I heralded the continuing influence of Bush and how extraordinary her legacy is – not that she has retired or will ever be forgotten. In this feature, I wanted to look at some of the artists/sounds she has impacted, and how her personality, music and essence has made big changes – and why she is still, in some ways, overlooked. If you have not watched the 2014 documentary, The Kate Bush Story: Running Up That Hill, then give it a watch. Ahead of her sixty-second birthday, and over forty-five years since Kate Bush recorded her first songs for the debut album, The Kick Inside, she is being referenced by artists. From modern artists like The Anchoress and Taylor Swift (on her new album, Folklore) and longer-serving acts like St. Vincent and Tori Amos, Bush’s impact has been huge. In fact, and quoting from Bush’s Wikipedia page and one can see her legacy:

 “Musicians who have cited Bush as an influence include Beverley Craven,[129] Regina Spektor,[130] Ellie Goulding,[131] Charli XCX,[132] Tegan and Sara,[133] k.d. lang,[134] Paula Cole,[135] Kate Nash,[136] Bat for Lashes,[137] Erasure,[138] Alison Goldfrapp of Goldfrapp,[139] Rosalía,[140] Tim Bowness of No-Man,[141] Chris Braide,[142] Kyros,[143] Aisles,[144] Darren Hayes[145], Grimes,[146] and Solange Knowles.[147] Nerina Pallot was inspired to become a songwriter after seeing Bush play "This Woman's Work" on Wogan.[148] Coldplay took inspiration from "Running Up That Hill" to compose their single "Speed of Sound".[149] In 2015, Adele stated that the release of her third studio album was inspired by Bush's 2014 comeback to the stage.[150]

IN THIS PHOTO: Bat for Lashes/PHOTO CREDIT: Observer New Review

In addition to those artists who state that Bush has been a direct influence on their own careers, other artists have been quoted expressing admiration for her work including Tori Amos,[151] Annie Lennox,[152] Björk,[153] Florence Welch,[154] Little Boots,[155] Elizabeth Fraser of Cocteau Twins,[156] Dido,[157] Sky Ferreira,[158] St. Vincent,[159] Lily Allen,[160] Anohni of Antony and the Johnsons,[161] Big Boi of OutKast,[162] Stevie Nicks,[163] Steven Wilson,[164] Steve Rothery of Marillion,[165] and André Matos.[166] According to an unauthorized biography, Courtney Love of Hole listened to Bush among other artists as a teenager.[167] Tricky wrote an article about The Kick Inside, saying: "Her music has always sounded like dreamland to me.... I don't believe in God, but if I did, her music would be my bible".[168] Suede front-man Brett Anderson stated about Hounds of Love: "I love the way it's a record of two halves, and the second half is a concept record about fear of drowning. It's an amazing record to listen to really late at night, unsettling and really jarring".[169] John Lydon, better known as Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols, declared her work to be "beauty beyond belief".[160] Rotten once wrote a song for her, titled "Bird in Hand" (about exploitation of parrots) that Bush rejected.[170] Bush was one of the singers whom Prince thanked in the liner notes of 1991's Diamonds and Pearls.[171] In December 1989, Robert Smith of The Cure chose "The Sensual World" as his favourite single of the year, The Sensual World as his favourite album of the year and included "all of Kate Bush" plus other artists in his list, "the best things about the eighties".[172]

It is almost impossible to calculate how many modern artists have been inspired by Bush and are, in their way, incorporating some of her essence in their music. From Ellie Goulding recently name-checking Bush in an interview with The New York Times, to some flavour of Kate Bush in Jess Cornelius’ new music, through to connections between a heavy band like Aurium, and a very different-sounding artist like Katie Wood vibing from Bush, we can see that so many modern artists are moving to the beat of the icon – her music was even covered during lockdown. When Kate Bush celebrates her birthday tomorrow, there will be an outpouring of love, not just from artists old and new who count her as an inspiration, but from every corner of the world. Although Bush’s latest studio album, 50 Words for Snow, is almost nine years old, I am seeing so many articles and posts on social media extolling her passion, unique music and magic. Last year, I asked how long it will take Kate Bush to become a Dame, and I stand by that – if ever there was anyone who deserves that honour, it is her! Bush is a national treasure but, more than that, she is enormously relevant today, whereas so many established or iconic artists have lost a lot of their magnetism and importance. When Kate Bush took to the stage in 2014 for her residency in Hammersmith between 26th August and 1st October, a whole swathe of celebrities from film, T.V., music and all areas flocked to pay tribute. There is something in the music that has endured through the years and resonated far and wide.

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush signing copies of Hounds of Love in 1985 at Tower Records in New York City

What is it about Bush’s music that means she has such a strong legacy and phenomenally wide fanbase? I have investigated her love of cinema and literature, and how Bush often dipped into her favourite films and novels when seeking inspiration. When talking of desire and passion, Bush approaches the subjects in a very varied and fascinating way and, when it comes to her albums, no two sound the same. I think it is the bold originality and constantly evolution that has meant artists through all genres have been spellbound by her music. In this New Yorker article from 2018, journalist Margaret Talbot made some interesting observations when trying to explain her love of Kate Bush: 

“Yet, with this listen, I discovered that I really liked the animalistic cacophony of “Get Out of My House”—for all it suggested about how few fucks Bush gave when it came to getting radio play or charming people in any conventionally girlish way, and for its brazen strangeness. And I loved a song called “Suspended in Gaffa.” It starts with a tinny music-hall bounce that swells into a rich, chunky rhythm, accented with a chirping, distorted vocal that sounds trippy and modern. The lyrics, about seeing God or achieving some creative peak, only to have the vision snatched away, were inspired by Bush’s Catholic upbringing. The title is a reference to sticky black gaffer tape—a metaphor for frustrating ensnarement. But it also sounds, marvellously, like a geographical location in which a character from a Paul Bowles novel might be immured.

And then there was the extraordinary “Hounds of Love.” Bush’s voice is deeper and more resonant than on earlier records, the use of the synthesizer is more assured, and the experiments are never awkward, as Bush’s sometimes can be. When “Hounds of Love” came out, in 1985, I was in graduate school, at Harvard, and my mother had just had a stroke that robbed her of most of her speech. I’d soon be leaving school for a year to help take care of her. But, in the meantime, I’d walk home from Widener Library every day in a pen-and-ink drawing of a Cambridge November, the metallic smell of incipient snow permanently in the air, and when I got to my apartment with the sloping floors in Central Square—sometimes before I’d removed my winter coat or said more than hello to my boyfriend—I’d put “Hounds of Love” on the turntable, turn it up very, very loud, and wait for the galloping drum loops and the salty-sweet emotional rush of Bush’s vocals to comfort and exalt me. When it got to the end of the first side, I’d lift the needle up and put it right back at the first track, “Running Up That Hill,” the song with the pounding beat and irresistible synthesizer hook about “making a deal with God” so that men and women might “swap our places” and feel what it was like to be one another”.

In 2016, The Observer wrote a fascinating article that compartmentalised various aspects of Bush’s music and artistry and, when investigating the huge breadth and variety of artist who imbue something of Kate Bush in their own work, we can make an argument to say that she remains overlooked and under-exposed. I will move on soon, but I want to quote a section from that article, as they talked of Bush’s influence on artists who include sexual and gender identity issues in their music:

“These three artists—who grapple with issues of sexual and gender identity—all bear the hallmarks of Bush’s influence.

Mike Hadreas, the brainchild behind Perfume Genius, uses his glammed-up image and music as tools of both attraction and repulsion. The vocal/piano compositions that first brought Perfume Genius notice show that art-school flair works across the chromosomal divide.

Despite his love of opera and theatricality, Wainwright possesses less of an obvious connection to Bush. However, the Montreal-born singer/songwriter has both piano chops and humor to spare—both very much in keeping with Bush’s template.

Anohni, singer and focal point of Antony and the Johnsons has one of those rare voices, like Bush’s, which evokes an emotional response through its timbre alone. Words become secondary to Anohni’s delivery, which softly commands attention”.

Kate Bush’s fearlessness and openness in her music not only resonated with female songwriters at the time and those who have followed; as seen above, her music has made a big impact on the L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.+ community.

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush during filming of The Line, the Cross and the Curve in 1993/PHOTO CREDIT: Guido Harari

I will not quote from too many other articles – as I am keen to put as many original thoughts in as possible -, but Attitude discussed Bush as a gay icon in 2018.

“Queer people identified with Kate Bush because of that otherness, because of her bravery and defiance, her fearless examination of previously ‘taboo’ themes, and her often high-camp performance style. As Rufus Wainwright told The Guardian in 2006: “She is the older sister that every gay man wants. 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 magnificent, lushly exotic 'Kashka from Baghdad' from 1978’s Lionheart, is one of the prime examples of Kate’s celebration of the joy of the outsider status. “Kashka from Baghdad,” she sings over sensual piano chords, “lives in sin, they say, with another man – but no one knows who.”

Her frank openness and recognition of a gamut of gender norms and of the reality of sexual fluidity became a recurrent theme in her work; 'Wow', a biting satire of the theatrical business, finds Kate singing “He’ll never make the scene / he’ll never make the Sweeney / be that movie queen / he’s too busy hitting the Vaseline.” If we were in any doubt as to her underlying meaning, her performance in the video removes all doubt as she taps her buttock on the payoff line.

Kate Bush is an LGBT icon for several reasons, not least because she built a successful career, without compromise, on her own terms, with thorough originality, ingenuity, and, crucially, trueness to herself. She did, and continues to do, things her own way, and is undaunted in her distinctiveness and navigation of the peculiarities of life”.

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1989/PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush

Before Madonna was being talked about as an ally to the L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.+ community, Kate Bush was a role model herself – albeit it in a different manner. I am only going to really be able to scratch slightly beneath the surface in this feature, as Bush’s legacy and influence extends beyond the imagination and perception of most people – whether subtle or overt, Kate Bush has changed so much through her music, videos and pioneering change. The last article I want to grab from dates back to 2010, and it illuminates how Bush has opened doors for female artists, and why so many artists we know and love today can help trace their roots back to Bush’s music:

 “Then a wave of solo female artists followed – from Florence Welch to Fever Ray – all happy to namecheck Bush as an influence. Before Florence and the Futureheads, however, Deborah Withers, guitarist with Bristol's Drunk Granny, began a study of Bush's music, exploring themes that were perhaps obvious to a female fanbase but invisible to some male listeners. We're talking about "the polymorphously perverse Kate, the witchy Kate, the queer Kate, the Kate who moves beyond the mime". Withers develops these ideas in her new book, Adventures in Kate Bush and Theory, published on her own imprint Hammeron Press.

Drawing from feminism and contemporary philosophy, Withers attempts to unlock the secrets of Bush's oeuvre. She argues that Bush liberated female creativity as much as punk did; it's essential reading for 21st-century grrrls. It wasn't just that Bush wrote and produced her own material, breaking barriers in a male-dominated industry, or the way she sang about subjects that women were not supposed to touch.

Bush's music seems to have a womb-like function, providing incubation for artists, at least for a while. Björk has spoken of her teenage years spent under the covers listening to Kate Bush, and Bat for Lashes' Natasha Kahn acknowledges her influence on her first album, although she now feels she has found her own voice. "It's important to have visible and creative examples that you can draw inspiration from," says Withers, "otherwise it's really difficult to express yourself. Women found it a lot more difficult to be cultural producers, but Kate Bush changed that".

Kate Bush has empowered so many people, and her legacy and importance will continue for an awful long time to come. It makes me wonder, as I have mused before, whether there should be an updated and expansive documentary. Maybe it would not take the form of the 2014 BBC effort, but I do think that, in that instance, there was room for improvements – a longer running time than one hour; a broader look at her career, and something that did her full justice. Whether it happened on radio or T.V., I do think that there is so much to explore and celebrate, in addition to paying tribute to someone who, since 1978, has put her unique footprint on the scene. I do feel there is room now to put together a proper, multi-part, career-spanning documentary or piece that drills deep into Kate Bush’s work, and studies her from various different perspectives. One cannot really define Kate Bush by her music alone, as there are so many layers and facets to her being. Perhaps there will be a new documentary when Wuthering Heights, her debut single, turns forty-five in 2023, but that is quite a long way away – my hope is that something comes along sooner! A few days before her birthday, I wanted to paying fitting tribute to an artist whose legacy will continue to grow strong…

FOR many decades to come.

FEATURE: Spotlight: JGrrey

FEATURE:

 

 

Spotlight

JGrrey

___________

WHEN looking around for artists…

who can provide something new and exciting in 2020, I take into consideration a variety of things: the originality of the music, the nuances on offer, and whether the artist has longevity and appeal. I think JGrrey is an artist providing something stunning and new. It is hard to categorise her music, but the Neo-Soul flavours are hard to ignore. It is sort of a mix of artists like Erykah Badu and India Arie combined with modern-day production values; a sense of dreaminess envelops the tracks, but there is something quite personal and serious in the lyrics. Like many artists, JGrrey investigates love, mental-health and other subjects that, at times, can make the heart skip and force one to stop. Around these incredible songs is a voice that is both steeped in embers of icons and known artists, with a sense of the individual that is hard to ignore. I love tracks such as Half Full, and Ain’t So, and JGrrey is an artist whose music could easily slot on any radio station – as it is not limited in terms of tastes and demographics like so many artists of today. The new iPhone visualiser video for Ain’t So is amazing, and I wonder what plans JGrrey has for the rest of 2020. Like her peers, this is not how she expected the year to go and, as such, touring and bigger plans have been curtailed. Before I look at the here and now, I want to pick from a few interviews that introduce us to this amazing artist.

Last year, The Line of Best Fit selected JGrrey as an artist to watch – and they talked about her start and early life:

“The story of Jennifer Clarke - better known as - JGrrey has fast become something of urban legend. From gaining her moniker because the Instagram handle for Grey was already taken to the phenomenal success of her now COLORS session, her whole journey to date has been a fortunate series of what she calls happy accidents. The 25-year-old - who great up in South London before moving to Edgware aged six her with her adoptive parents - didn’t even know she could sing for most of her young life. It was only when she started jamming with friends that her talent started to become clear: “I’d never wanted to be a singer, but I always wrote songs," she tells me, "but never listened to them. But now I’m happy that I wrote songs, it’s like second nature to me. But it was never planned.”

It was around that time when JGrrey realised that if she wanted to do anything with her music, then she was going to have to work it out on her own terms and give herself the space to grow. Recalling her first experience of actively going into the studio with a friend, she tells me, “I heard my voice on a track and started cringing because I didn’t like the sound of it and that was the point of me deciding that I needed to get my own studio; I needed to set it up myself and I need to be able to grow so when people hear it, I could be happy with what I made. I had to be happy with that experience and then I just started to fucking love it. I could say anything that I wanted to say and you know and tell any story that wanted to tell and people would listen to it”.

The melting of R&B and Neo-Soul is an amazing brew that is parts slinky and soft, but there is that energy and fire that raises the heat. The Grrey Daze E.P. was released last year and, whilst it did not get the sort of attention and widespread focus it deserved, it is a brilliant release. I would urge people to go to JGrrey’s official website and Spotify and listen to the E.P. When she spoke with CLASH last year, she broke down the tracks on the E.P. It was clear that CLASH were impressed by what they heard:

 “Each new release from the vocalist has that relaxed feel, a laid back approach that turns her gilded slow jams into heavenly R&B.

New EP 'Grrey Daze' is her boldest statement yet, full of gorgeous production, nuanced songwriting, and those stellar vocals.

Out now, it opens with 'Feelings', a song JGrrey tells Clash she finds "comfort in, I remember writing to it and thinking that I didn’t feel rushed, it could just take its own time, it’s laid back an honest, two traits I pride myself in also."

Those are traits that keep on occurring on the EP. Take her recent single 'Pretty Insane', which was "a free-style, just an instrumental I liked and myself singing obscure truths about how I felt... I do it all the time, this one just worked out well".

When considering an artist, I sort of think it is great having appealing music at your fingertips, but one craves something more. Maybe it is a personality that speaks to you or a spark that you do not get from other artists. Having read up about JGrrey, I connected with her instantly. Maybe it is the fact that we share a love of similar artists – like Amy Winehouse and Nelly Furtado -, but it is the experience of discovering music and how she approaches songwriting that connected with me. When she was interviewed by Stylist last year, JGrrey discussed her early exposure to music:

 “The first record I ever bought…

Wasn’t technically bought, I never really bought records for myself. My dad was and still is a DJ so I wouldn’t need to buy any records because he had them all. I would just steal whatever he was listening to or whatever I liked that I knew he had because he would always be the first person to have it.

I think the first record I got from my Dad was a Nelly Furtado song, but I couldn’t tell you what single it was. I remember falling in love with her, she was one of those artists that really resonated with me.

My first source of inspiration…

I remember listening to Nelly Furtado’s music and her lyricism and thinking I totally get it. Even though everything she writes about is so obscure, I definitely think that it subconsciously inspired me.

Alongside Nelly Furtado, there are all the obvious names as well like Lauren Hill, Erykah Badu, Jill Scott and Amy Winehouse.

To be honest music is a new thing for me. I’ve only really been an artist properly for three years and even now I’m still working that out - to me it’s still kind of crazy that this is something I am genuinely doing. So, when I was younger and watching all of these people, I was just watching these people and thinking they were amazing. I wasn’t necessarily taking note of them, at the time, as sources of inspiration.

Despite that though Amy Winehouse has always stuck out in my mind as a person who I think is beautiful. Her music, her style and what she created was obviously amazing but as a person, she was just so cool”.

I am going to conclude things soon enough, but I have seen JGrrey’s name shared by various sources as one to watch this year. I am definitely going to keep my eyes and ears open to see where she goes next, as I really love her music and attitude. I will bring in a couple more interview snippets, as I think it gives more colour and shows different side to the songwriter. In terms of influences, this interview from Fred Perry highlights a few sounds and sonic directions that have resonated with JGrrey:

“A song that defines the teenage you?

'I Luv U' by Dizzee Rascal.

One record you would keep forever?

Amy Winehouse's.

 “A song lyric that has inspired you?

“I don’t need nobody telling me the time”

From 'Certainly' by Erykah Badu.

The song that would get you straight on the dance floor?

'Beige 70' by Cola Boyy.

A song you wished you had written?

'Thinkin Bout You' by Frank Ocean”.

Things have been pretty busy for JGrrey the past year or so. From a relatively unknown artist, she has risen and captured the attention of many. I think JGrrey has a big future ahead, and I feel that debut album will be the real test. Her latest E.P., UGH, is another fabulous release, and it is clear that JGrrey is a prolific and hungry artist that is always looking ahead. CLASH caught up with her earlier this year, where she talked about the E.P., in addition to what music means to her:

 “New EP ‘UGH’ (it stands for Understanding Greater Highs) is outstanding, with JGrrey capable of cutting right to the bone. Working with a dizzying array of guests - production comes from Cadenza and Kadiata, amongst others - it’s held together by a palpable sense of purpose.

“It all comes from something I said, and something I felt,” she insists. “It’s weird: I’ve never seen something through. Like, I’ve never held down a job, or done well at something. So when I do hear a project that I’ve made, in it’s entirety like a body of work, that sense of completion is great for me.”

JGrrey writes continuously, almost relentlessly - spending time in LA following a tour with Billie Eilish, she returned to London and went straight back to work. “Without sounding ungrateful or lazy or anything,” she adds, “I wasn’t putting much thought into ‘UGH’. It’s like, if it works, it works.”

It’s a constant sense of forward momentum, this perpetual drive that pushes JGrrey into daring new places. “I’m learning a lot about myself,” she comments. “Music is literally therapy for me. I’m talking about a lot of shit I wouldn’t talk about with anyone, but I’m putting it in songs and releasing it to thousands of people”.

The fact JGrrey is already touring with Billie Eilish – one of the music world’s biggest new names – shows that, soon, she will be touring bigger stages herself. I would advise people to check out JGrrey’s music, as it is fantastic, and the future is very bright! There are few out there who have the same power to hook the listener in as JGrrey, and I think next year will be especially important for her. Right now, investigate a truly incredible artist whose music will only get…

BETTER and better.

_________________

Follow JGrrey

Official:

https://jgrrey.com/

Facebook:

https://www.facebook.com/JGRREY/

Twitter:

https://twitter.com/JGrrey13

Instagram:

https://www.instagram.com/jgrrey/

YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmhJoUvS8YinODthaNsyaTA

Spotify:

https://open.spotify.com/artist/66rDbD3tWR3M1uNuIaDAGx

FEATURE: Vinyl Corner: Green Day - Dookie

FEATURE:

 

Vinyl Corner

Green Day - Dookie

___________

IF one considers the classic albums…

of the 1990s, then they have to think of Green Day’s Dookie. I celebrated the album’s twenty-fifth anniversary last year, and it is an album I would encourage people to get it on vinyl . There is a lot of debate as to which Green Day album is best but, when it comes to the critics, I think Dookie wins – though Nimrod, and American Idiot are pretty brilliant. Released on 1st February, 1994 – a year that is practically synonymous with legendary albums! – Dookie was the biggest release from the Californian band. Apologies if I repeat some of the things I said in my article from last year, but Dookie was a massive leap from the band’s second studio album, Kerplunk. Working with producer Rob Cavallo – who produced their albums up until 2009 -, I feel Dookie is one of the defining albums of the 1990s, as it arrived in a year when Grunge was undergoing a lot of change; it was definitely not as vibrant as it was in the first couple of years of the 1990s. I think the Pop-Punk/Punk-Rock of the album sort of bridges the sound of Grunge with the more accessible sounds of the mainstream, though Dookie is never watered-down or too commercial. A lot of labels were trying to snap up Green Day following Kerplunk, but it was Reprise representative Rob Cavallo who connected with the band. One can imagine the scores of labels trying to get Green Day to sign, and the sort of offers they would have been presented with. Green Day felt Cavallo understood them as a band and would serve them well, and it is no surprise the band stuck with him for so long. With frontman Billie Joe Armstrong writing most of the track by himself, one feels a lot of soul-searching and nakedness on songs such as Basket Case, Longview, and When I Come Around.

The band embarked on international touring following Dookie’s release, and the critical acclaim that met (the album) was humongous!  Though Green Day had their detractors back then, I remember the album coming out in 1994 and so many people talking about it. I am not sure whether I bought the album, but many people I knew did, and I feel Dookie sound just as incredible today as it did in 1994. The mix of the well-known singles and album tracks that are almost single-worthy – including Burnout, and Coming Clean -, there is nothing but brilliance to be found. Whilst 1995’s Insomniac was a success and garnered positive reviews, it did not make the same splash as Dookie. Since its release, Dookie has been included in many lists compiling the best albums of all-time/the 1990s. It is no wonder, because I think Dookie reached behind cliques and certain camps. I do feel that, in 1994, there were those who liked Britpop, those who were into Grunge; there were acts that could unite and appeal to those who rarely strayed from their comfort zone. I knew people in school who were mad about mainstream Pop that connected with Dookie; those who refuted everything but Grunge and Alternative music that were taken by Green Day’s third album. It was a big moment, and Dookie definitely had an impact on the scene and musicians who were around at the time – in ways, one can hear shades of the album in artists of today.

In their review, AllMusic had this to say about Dookie:

“Green Day couldn't have had a blockbuster without Nirvana, but Dookie wound up being nearly as revolutionary as Nevermind, sending a wave of imitators up the charts and setting the tone for the mainstream rock of the mid-'90s. Like Nevermind, this was accidental success, the sound of a promising underground group suddenly hitting its stride just as they got their first professional, big-budget, big-label production. Really, that's where the similarities end, since if Nirvana were indebted to the weirdness of indie rock, Green Day were straight-ahead punk revivalists through and through. They were products of the underground pop scene kept alive by such protagonists as All, yet what they really loved was the original punk, particularly such British punkers as the Jam and Buzzcocks. On their first couple records, they showed promise, but with Dookie, they delivered a record that found Billie Joe Armstrong bursting into full flower as a songwriter, spitting out melodic ravers that could have comfortably sat alongside Singles Going Steady, but infused with an ironic self-loathing popularized by Nirvana, whose clean sound on Nevermind is also emulated here. Where Nirvana had weight, Green Day are deliberately adolescent here, treating nearly everything as joke and having as much fun as snotty punkers should. They demonstrate a bit of depth with "When I Come Around," but that just varies the pace slightly, since the key to this is their flippant, infectious attitude -- something they maintain throughout the record, making Dookie a stellar piece of modern punk that many tried to emulate but nobody bettered”.

I didn’t want to quote from scores of reviews, but I think it is useful to bring in a couple from different sites and gauge their opinions. This is what Pitchfork remarked in 2017:

 “What set Dookie apart from the grunge rock bellowers of its day was Armstrong’s voice, foggy and vaguely unplaceable. “I’m an American guy faking an English accent faking an American accent,” he teased at the time. Though Armstrong’s tone was bratty, his phrasing had that lackadaisical quality that left room for listeners to fill in their own interpretations. On Dookie, Armstrong channeled a lifetime of songcraft obsession into buzzing, hook-crammed tracks that acted like they didn’t give a shit—fashionably then, but also appealingly for the 12-year-old spirit within us all. Maybe they worked so well because, on a compositional and emotional level, they were actually gravely serious. Sometimes singing about the serious stuff in your life—desire, anxiety, identity—feels a lot more weightless done against the backdrop of a dogshit-bombarded illustration of your hometown by East Bay punk fixture Richie Bucher”.

I have very fond memories of Dookie, and it is an album I myself need to grab on vinyl when I am in a record shop next. It is a fantastic work from a band who are still going strong today. If you have not heard the album before, I think now is a pretty good time to become acquainted. It is a record that most certainly…

BLOWS the cobwebs away.

FEATURE: The Lockdown Playlist: The Best Album Closing Tracks

FEATURE:

 

The Lockdown Playlist

PHOTO CREDIT: @alexiby/Unsplash

The Best Album Closing Tracks

___________

AS the new working week…

PHOTO CREDIT: @priscilladupreez/Unsplash

hoves into view, I thought it was time to put out another Lockdown Playlist that should give you an extra kick of energy and motivation that you need. I recently compiled a playlist that collected together the best album openers ever. I thought I would go down the other end of the album, and unite those fantastic finales – tracks that close albums in absolute style! I hope there are songs in the playlist that tickle your fancy, and you recognise the songs in the list – thought there may be a few that are fresh and take you by surprise. Whether you like the albums these tracks come from, there is no denying that the songs themselves ended the albums…

PHOTO CREDIT: @lensinkmitchel/Unsplash

WITH a huge bang.

FEATURE: One for the Record Collection! Essential August Releases

FEATURE:

One for the Record Collection!

IN THIS PHOTO: Glass Animals/PHOTO CREDIT: Pooneh Ghana

Essential August Releases

___________

NOT withstanding any surprise releases…

there are some great albums slated for release next month – that could be added to and, to be fair, some artists might delay their albums because of the lockdown situation. If you are in need of some guidance regarding the albums to own in August, then I have a few suggestions. Glass Animals’ Dreamland is out on 7th August, and I would encourage people to pre-order the album. The album was due earlier in the year because of various issues – the COVID-19 situation, and the band wanted to delay the album to support Black Lives Matter -, but is coming very soon. It seems that Dreamland will be a very different record to their last, How to Be a Human Being, of 2016. Dave Bayley of the band spoke with NME earlier in the year and talked about revelations from their previous album:

“The last album saw me digging into other people’s lives and asking them quite heavy questions – quite probing stuff that I probably shouldn’t have asked,” Bayley says. “The people I spoke to were amazingly open and at the end of all that, I thought it wasn’t fair I was asking them to do this and not myself.” Only one song on the album was personal to Bayley – the emotive closer, ‘Agnes’, which tells the story of a close friend who died from suicide. It received a staggering response from fans.

“The fan response to ‘Agnes’ was totally unexpected,” Bayley says. “I’ve always been really, really afraid to write about myself. I always thought it was selfish”.

Looking ahead to 14th August, and Biffy Clyro will release A Celebration of Endings. Go and pre-order a copy, as Biffy Clyro always bring something incredible. When Simon Neil spoke with NME, he revealed how Biffy Clyro are putting a lot of urgency into their next album:

“Lyrically, the record is a rallying cry. Having battled with depression and fought his way back to self-confidence for the band’s previous album, 2016’s freewheeling ‘Ellipsis’, frontman Simon Neil looked outside himself for the first time to find inspiration in society’s ills. A whirlwind on stage, Neil has never been a shrinking violet in person – but he’s also never allowed his politics to spill into the music before.

“I feel like I’ve investigated myself more than I probably should – more than is probably healthy!” Neil told NME as he talked us through the new tunes. “When you’re younger, you think that you can keep the personal and the political separate, but I really don’t think that we can now in this world that we’re living in. The world needs to change in the right way. It’s just been bad news for years”.

Turning in another direction and Pop superstar Katy Perry is releasing Smile. 2017’s Witness was one of her more divisive albums, so it will be interesting to see what comes from her upcoming sixth studio album. Singles like Daisies, and Smile show new lease and life in Perry, and I think the album will be met with more acclaim that previous works. You can pre-order the album, and it will be a record that Perry’s fanbase will snap up.

Although August is a quieter month in terms of big releases than July, there are a few other great albums arriving before the end of the month. On 21st August via Dead Oceans, Bright Eyes release Down in the Weeds Where the World Once Was. It is going to be an album you will want to own, and it is clear there are very few bands like Bright Eyes around:

“Sometimes it feels like you hear a Bright Eyes song with your whole body. From Conor Oberst’s early recordings in an Omaha basement in 1995 all the way up to 2020, Bright Eyes’ music tries to unravel the impossible tangles of dissent: personal and political, external and internal. It’s a study of the beauty in unsteadiness in all its forms – in a voice, beliefs, love, identity, and what fills up the spaces in-between. And in so many ways, it’s just about searching for a way through.

The year 2020 is full of significant anniversaries for Bright Eyes. Fevers and Mirrors was released 20 years ago this May, while Digital Ash in a Digital Urn and I’m Wide Awake It’s Morning both turned 15 in January. The latter, a singer-songwriter tour-de-force released amidst the Bush presidency and Iraq war, wades through incisive anti-war rhetoric and micro, intimate calamities. On the title track and throughout the record, Oberst sings about body counts in the newspaper, televised wars, the bottomless pit of American greed, struggling to understand the world alongside one’s own turmoil. In its own way, I’m Wide Awake It’s Morning carved out its place in the canon of great anti-war albums by being both present and prophetic, its urgency enduring 15 years later.

And while 2020 is a year of milestones for the band, it’s also the year Bright Eyes returns, newly signed to indie label Dead Oceans. Amidst the current overwhelming uncertainty and upheaval of global and personal worlds, Oberst, Mogis, and Walcott reunited under the moniker as both an escape from, and a confrontation of, trying times. Getting the band back together felt right, and necessary, and the friendship at the core of the band has been a longtime pillar of Bright Eyes’ output. For Bright Eyes, this long-awaited re-emergence feels like coming home”.

Erasure’s The Neon is another key release coming next month, and I would suggest the album to people, whether there are a fan of the band or not. The legendary English Synth-Pop duo, consisting of singer and songwriter Andy Bell and songwriter and keyboardist Vince Clarke, are preparing their eighteenth studio album. It does seem like The Neon is going to be something pretty special:

“The Neon is a place that lives in the imagination, that we – you and me – put in the real world. It could be a night club, a shop, a city, a cafe, a country, a bedroom, a restaurant, any place at all. It’s a place of possibility in warm, glowing light and this is music that takes you there.

Written and produced by Erasure, the album’s initial sessions saw the Vince and Andy reunited to work on the follow up to 2017’s World Be Gone with a fresh optimism and energy, in part born from their own recent personal projects. Vince goes on to explain, “Our music is always a reflection of how we’re feeling. He was in a good place spiritually, and so was I – really good places in our minds. You can hear that.”

Taking inspiration from pop music through the decades, from bands Andy loved as a child through to the present day, he explains, “It was about refreshing my love – hopefully our love – of great pop. I want kids now to hear these songs! I wanted to recharge that feeling that pop can come from anyone”.

There are a few more albums that I want to push people’s ways. Not everyone is a fan of The Lemon Twigs, but I really like the band, and, on 21st August, they release Songs for the General Public. It comes out on the 4AD label, and it is going to be an album you’ll want to own. I think a lot of music sounds very samey but, with The Lemon Twigs, you get something genuinely inventive and different. They are so young and prodigiously talented so, for a sense of sheer wonder, their upcoming album is worth investment and time:

“The D’Addario brothers return with their third Lemon Twigs album, Songs For The General Public - written, recorded and produced by the D’Addarios at their home studio in Long Island, Sonora Studios in Los Angeles and Electric Lady in New York City.

The prodigiously-talented brothers first emerged as The Lemon Twigs in 2016 with their debut LP Do Hollywood, whose showstopping melodies mined from every era of rock quickly earned fans in Elton John, Questlove, and Jack Antonoff. Go To School, the ambitious 15-track coming-of-age opus, followed in 2018 and solidified the band’s reputation for building grand walls of sound around an audacious concept”.

Two great albums come out on 28th August that will be worthy of your money. One of them is Inner Song from Kelly Lee Owens. She is an incredible talent, and the Welsh artist spoke with The Guardian earlier in the year. It seems that, even during lockdown, she is finding some positives:

“Owens is keen to find positives everywhere she possibly can. She recently tweeted the definition of the word “apocalypse”, to mean “revelation – an unveiling or unfolding of things not previously known”. Does she think, then, that there could be tiny positives to the pandemic at all? “I do, and that’s just because I’m in a very privileged position to say it,” she says. “I’m hyper-aware of how you can come across when you say: ‘This is good for the planet.’ But it also is important to point out the duality of consciousness, and raise awareness of what can happen when we are apathetic.”

The track on her album, Wake-Up, points to this idea, too. “One of the things [it questions],” she says, “is never pausing to take it in, always avoiding your sense of dread.” A world-changing event like this “forces us to ask important questions. Globally, we are connecting now. That’s what’s important”.

Disclosure’s ENERGY is the last album that I want to recommend for August, as it is going to be a huge one, and Disclosure are another one of these acts that deliver incredible albums:

“Disclosure return with a their most direct album Energy. A global spectrum of talented artists grace the record – and for the first time this includes rappers. Appearances from Mick Jenkins, Channel Tres, Aminé and slowthai sit comfortably alongside the legend that is Common. Other features include the inimitable Kelis who opens the album and Fatoumata Diawara who the boys have also linked up with previously. Cameroon’s Blick Bassy brings his own flow to the table while a powerhouse team of Kehlani and Syd ease the pace with their contribution.

Every track was written really quickly. Through an epic process of creation and distillation the path to producing their shortest, most direct album - 11 songs, 39 minutes - ran through around 200 tracks: everything from drum loops to fully realised songs. Since live touring has been paused during the global pandemic and their own plans for 2020 now being put on hold, Guy (and sadly not Howard as they isolated in different countries) found an outlet for his desire to give people a good time no matter what the circumstances by doing a regular run of their popular Kitchen Mix parties via live stream, a set for Boiler Room and a one off special to celebrate Earth Day”.

Those are the albums that you will want to own through August and, whilst there are others that are worthy of investigation, the ones I have outlined are the best. As we are still sort of in lockdown, I think music is going to be very important, and what better way to get through these tough times than stock up on some terrific sounds?! Even if there are not quite as many blockbusters out next month, there are still some golden records due that are bound to…

IN THIS PHOTO: Katy Perry

KEEP you entertained.

FEATURE: For Your Pleasure: The New Post-Disco Wave and Much-Needed Escapism in 2020

FEATURE:

For Your Pleasure

IN THIS PHOTO: Jessie Ware

The New Post-Disco Wave and Much-Needed Escapism in 2020

___________

THIS will be a fairly short feature…

but, as this year has been a pretty hard one, there is a collective of artists who have provided music with something thrilling, body-moving and energised. There have been great Pop albums from Georgia (Seeking Thrills), and Charli XCX (how i'm feeling now) that has taken the genre in new directions. They have both been nominated for a Hyundai Mercury Prize, and I think it is clear that people – and the Mercury judging panel – are embracing music that is not only interesting and original, but also has a positive edge. I think last year’s best was defined by a more political edge, but 2020, to me, feels more about musicality and something warmer. Certainly, there have been some great albums that are personal and rich, but there is an emphasis on movement and physicality. I recently wrote a feature that reacted to the news that Pop music is getting happier and faster. This has been long-overdue, and I feel lockdown and COVID-19 has changed music in so many ways. One other thing that is apparent is how Post-Disco is burning strong. It is said that Disco died on 12th July, 1979 - rock D.J. Steve Dahl donned a combat helmet to blow up a crate of disco records, a stunt now known as Disco Demolition. Of course, Disco kept going, but it was definitely not too long for the world.

At a time when Punk and more political music was dominating, Disco was losing some of its lustre. Post-Disco sort of describes the period between 1979-1984, where an underground movement of Disco music of stripped-down vibes and radically different sounds came through on the East Coast of the U.S. Getting to my point, and the spirit of that period lived on, and many artists in 2020 are shaping Post-Disco in their own vision. I think one of the most pleasing and satisfying musical breakthroughs this year has been from the likes of Jessie Ware, Dua Lipa and Kylie Minogue. Minogue releases her new album, DISCO, on 4th November. Minogue is no stranger to Disco sounds, and albums like Light Years (2000), and Fever (2001) mixed Synth, Pop and Disco to incredible effect. Minogue shared her new single, Say Something, this week, and it is almost futuristic Disco; it has an edge of her earlier work, but there is something unique working away. I am looking forward to hearing her fifteen studio album and what it offers up. Jessie Ware’s incredible album, What’s Your Pleasure?, was released in June. Although I have not mentioned the amazing Róisín Murphy – who is masterful when it comes to serving up Post-Disco treats -, I think Ware has borrowed (as a tribute or nod) some of Murphy’s wardrobe for What’s Your Pleasure? Although there are moments where Ware puts her heart on her sleeve and goes deep, I think the best moments are when the lights come up and she surrenders to the pull of the dancefloor.

I just want to quote AllMusic’s review to see what they said about the album:

“Rhapsodic dancefloor intimacy became a new specialization for Jessie Ware with "Overtime," the first in a wave of tracks the singer released from 2018 up to the June 2020 arrival of What's Your Pleasure?, her fourth album. Other than "Adore You," a chiming glider made with Metronomy's Joseph Mount, each one in the series was either produced or co-produced by James Ford, consolidating and rerouting a partnership that started during the making of Tough Love. Unlike Ford and Ware's collaborations on that 2014 LP, the new material didn't merely simmer. Hottest of all, "Mirage (Don't Stop)" worked a ripe disco-funk groove with Ware's opening line, "Last night we danced, and I thought you were saving my life" -- sighed in a Bananarama cadence -- a sweet everything if there ever was one. The loved-up energy was kept in constant supply with the dashing "Spotlight," the Freeez-meet-Teena Marie-at-Compass-Point bump of "Ooh La La," and the sneaky Euro-disco belter "Save a Kiss." All but "Overtime" are included here. That makes the album somewhat anti-climactic, but there's no sense in complaining when the preceding singles keep giving and the new material is almost always up to the same standard. Among the fresh standouts, the bounding Morgan Geist co-production "Soul Control" and the dashing "Step Into My Life" recontextualize underground club music with as much might and finesse as anything by Róisín Murphy”.

Also in the Post-Disco mix is Dua Lipa. Her Mercury-nominated album, Future Nostalgia, is different-sounding compared to Jessie Ware, and I wonder whether the term ‘Post-Disco’ would fit the bill. I wonder whether the original Disco pioneers or those who kickstarted Post-Disco would have believed that some forty years later, artists would be carrying on their legacy. In a way, I think we call almost say artists like Kylie Minogue, Jessie Ware, Róisín Murphy and Dua Lipa are Post-Post-Disco! I love Dua Lipa’s album, as there are so many hypnotic songs that beckon movement, but they also make you think. I think the current movement has a dichotomy of emotional resonance and depth, combined with compositions and jams that cast one’s mind back to the heady Post-Disco days. I guess it is not something that has become more prominent this year, but I guess it is more noticeable considering the challenging times, and one would forgive artists if they were a bit more downbeat and downcast. I would not say that Post-Disco in 2020 exclusively has to be defined or narrowed. I think one can say that the genre/movement is more of a spirit, and there are other albums that fit the category. Pet Shop Boys’ fourteenth studio album, Hotspot, fuses Disco, Post-Disco, Synth-Pop and Electropop. It is one of their best albums of the past couple of decades, and it is guaranteed to lift the spirits. NZCA LINES’ Pure Luxury is another album that can splice more affecting lyrics with an outer shell that is more extrovert, colourful and glistening:

“Written and produced almost entirely by Lovett, yet featuring a wide range of collaborators, Pure Luxury revels in both the insular – the sound of one man processing anxiety-inducing world events - and the communal. It is a record of diverse styles, voices and textures, expanding the musical universe of Lovett’s previous albums whilst cementing his own playful voice with an inescapable sense of joy and excitement.

Tired of the now over-familiar sound of Big Analog Synths and words like glacial, austere, and wistful, he set out with one clear intention: to be Extra. Extra is the governing musical direction on Pure Luxury, accepting that we live in a world of dwindling attention spans whilst acknowledging that traditional notions of accessible musical form are fast becoming irrelevant in a world of online streaming”.

This has been a year like no other, and there was a worry that so many artists would react with music that was quite fearful and depressive. Sure, there is still some of that, but I do love how these big and bold albums have been released; allowing one to escape somewhat or, at the very least, lose some of their anxiety. I love Disco and Post-Disco, and it is encouraging to see new strands and offshoots in 2020. It makes me wonder whether we might enter a new phase where a more traditional and old-skool Disco sound emerges in the mainstream. I know there are D.J.s and artists on the fringes that are doing it, but I would love to see more of its at the forefront! Pop itself is reshaping and lightening its mood, and I do feel that, more often than not, the compositions and production of so much mainstream Pop is quite soulless and predictable – even if it is trying to be lighter and optimistic. Adding in a sprinkle of Disco brings some stardust that has more flair and panache than Pop.

I was not a huge fan of previous albums by Jessie Ware and Dua Lipa, for instance, but I do love their current work, as I think they have both hit peaks. It will be interesting to see whether Kylie Minogue steps back in time twenty years – or thirty -, and gives us some of her best work, and other great albums from this year have projected some Disco moments of bliss, including Tame Impala’s The Slow Rush and Lady Gaga’s Chromatica. I do hope, post-COVID-19, that there is this summation of increasingly upbeat Pop and the brilliant Post-Disco swathes that retains some pains in the heart and shows the scars, but there is this light shining; a desire to get the blood pumping. For those who feel modern music has lost its smile and is becoming more depressing, they need to listen to some of the best albums of this year and realise that there is a sense of reversal and encouragement. Perhaps it is the natural response to a traumatic year, or a moment where music is evolving and entering a new phase. I know we are not going to return to the flares, Studio 54s and anthemic sounds of the 1970s, but a modern-day equivalent would not be too bad! I would urge people to keep their eyes open to see what comes next, as I am sure there are going to be a few big Post-Disco/Pop albums that will get people moving! After everything that has happened – and for everything that lies ahead -, this variegated and edifying music is…

IN THIS PHOTO: Dua Lipa

JUST what we need.

FEATURE: A Buyer’s Guide: Part Twelve: Patti Smith

FEATURE:

 

A Buyer’s Guide

IN THIS PHOTO: Patti Smith in 1976/PHOTO CREDIT: Lynn Goldsmith

Part Twelve: Patti Smith

___________

IN this edition of…

PHOTO CREDIT: Steven Sebring

A Buyer’s Guide, I am recommending the essential albums of one of music’s greatest songwriters, Patti Smith. Nearly forty-five years since the release of her debut album, Horses, she has produced some of the greatest work the world has ever seen and, as her eleventh studio album, Banga, was released in 2012, I wonder whether we will see another album from the iconic Smith. I really love her albums, and there are some that are definitely underrated and warrant fonder appreciation. We are very lucky to have an artist like Patti Smith and, if you are a little new to her work, I hope the recommendations below help out. Have a look and I am sure you will become closer acquainted with…

A staggering artist.

______________

The Four Essential Album

Horses

Release Date: 10th November, 1975

Label: Aritsa

Producer: John Cale

Standout Tracks: Redondo Beach/Free Money/Land (Part I: Horses; Part II: Land of a Thousand Dances; Part III: La Mer(de)

Buy: https://www.discogs.com/Patti-Smith-Horses/master/40109

Stream: https://open.spotify.com/album/4AEKf48nR2rvEt4I5HBuUP

Review:

“It isn't hard to make the case for Patti Smith as a punk rock progenitor based on her debut album, which anticipated the new wave by a year or so: the simple, crudely played rock & roll, featuring Lenny Kaye's rudimentary guitar work, the anarchic spirit of Smith's vocals, and the emotional and imaginative nature of her lyrics -- all prefigure the coming movement as it evolved on both sides of the Atlantic. Smith is a rock critic's dream, a poet as steeped in '60s garage rock as she is in French Symbolism; "Land" carries on from the Doors' "The End," marking her as a successor to Jim Morrison, while the borrowed choruses of "Gloria" and "Land of a Thousand Dances" are more in tune with the era of sampling than they were in the '70s. Producer John Cale respected Smith's primitivism in a way that later producers did not, and the loose, improvisatory song structures worked with her free verse to create something like a new spoken word/musical art form: Horses was a hybrid, the sound of a post-Beat poet, as she put it, "dancing around to the simple rock & roll song” – AllMusic

Choice Cut: Gloria

Easter

Release Date: 3rd March, 1978   

Label: Arista

Producer: Jimmy Iovine

Standout Tracks: Till Victory/Privilege (Set Me Free)/High on Rebellion

Buy: https://www.discogs.com/Patti-Smith-Group-Easter/master/40121

Stream: https://open.spotify.com/album/1p6cWoueuunhpgy6131zAd

Review:

“But Smith’s version of “Because the Night” was an absolute monster of a hit. What she forged lyrically out of Springsteen’s unfinished, unwanted demo was an anthem of frank and unapologetic desire. In 1978, a woman wasn’t allowed to be an overtly sexual being in public unless she met the standards of the male gaze; if she did, there were always repercussions, and there would be constant attempts to diminish her power and/or her legitimacy. The fact that it went to No. 13 on the Billboard Hot 100 and was on every FM radio station, especially the ones who never played her before, was righteousness incarnate, as would be Easter’s eventual ascension to #20 on the Billboard 200.

The other love songs may not be as legendary as “Because the Night,” but their complexity is vital to the story being told on the album. The first line of “We Three”—“Every Sunday I would go down to the bar where he played guitar”—speaks absolute volumes. It is Smith’s history, it is rock’n’roll history, it is a quiet sentence whispered with a veneer of the innocence of early love, then immediately contrasted with a torch ballad, decisive and resolute, the expression of unresolved ardor, the saga of her relationships with Tom Verlaine and Allen Lanier. It’s not tragic so much tinged with the sadness of resignation, but it’s not the type of love song women had been writing” – Pitchfork

Choice Cut: Because the Night

Gone Again

Release Date: 18th June, 1996

Label: Arista

Producers: Malcolm Burn/Lenny Kaye

Standout Tracks: About a Boy/Summer Cannibals/Wicked Messenger

Buy: https://www.discogs.com/Patti-Smith-Gone-Again/master/115513

Stream: https://open.spotify.com/album/70BHwvG9ikXsffsWfHrWzi

Review:

“The Smith who returns on Gone Again after another prolonged absence is a changed woman once more. In the past seven years, a devastating number of her family and friends have died, including husband Fred ”Sonic” Smith, a brother, a former band mate, and her most celebrated intimate, photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. Gone Again is, not surprisingly, an album that dwells on loss. ”I don’t know why/But when it rains/It rains on me,” she sings in ”Farewell Reel,” one of several songs about her husband. She even mourns Kurt Cobain (yes, another Cobain tribute song) in the elliptical ”About a Boy,” which builds to a feedback-grating mantra, rekindling memories of Smith’s boho-outta-control work on bristling records like Easter. In each case, death is treated less as a horror than as an escape to a better, more serene place.

As insensitive as it might be to say, the succession of tragedies has lent a much-needed focus (and terseness) to Smith’s work. Death becomes her — and not merely in her lyrics. Reunited with guitarist and longtime coproducer Lenny Kaye (whose absence was felt on Dream of Life), Smith has set most of the songs to plaintive arrangements that resemble nothing so much as contemporary variations on Appalachian death ballads. Songs are structured with the roundelay melodies of folk songs, and Smith’s voice has the throaty cragginess of a woman coal miner. She sounds and looks like an extra in a John Sayles movie. The album’s second half — heavy on stark, strummed ballads like ”Wing” and ”Ravens,” which both employ images of flying above the sorrow — is particularly powerful. ”Dead to the World” even finds her having a little fun with the Grim Reaper by adopting a hillbilly twang” – Entertainment Weekly

Choice Cut: Gone Again

Trampin’

Release Date: 27th April, 2004

Label: Columbia

Producer: Patti Smith

Standout Tracks: Stride of the Mind/My Blakean Year/Radio Baghdad

Buy: https://www.discogs.com/Patti-Smith-Trampin/master/181779

Stream: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6Ks8jCJfXjZETFYBzHS2eb?nAi=

Review:

“A lot of this is due to Smith's current band. Now also approaching their third decade as her sidemen, old hands like Lenny Kaye and Jay Dee Daugherty along with second guitarist Oliver Ray (Smith's partner) provide a bedrock that's equal parts garage and tight professionalism. Not only is the playing accomplished, but Smith's vocals haven't lost the ability to glide between ballad and rant with ease. This adds a humanity that stops a song like the opener, ''Jubilee'' ('We will never fade away. Doves shall multiply. Yet I see hawks circling the sky, Scattering our glad day') becoming too anthemic. Yet she's still able to do the extended stream of invective stuff on ''Gandhi'' (a rather simplistic take on the man of peace) and ''Radio Baghdad''. The latter is a chilling, 12 minute condemnation of US foreign policy that focuses on the cultural heritage being tramped (ho ho) all over by Bush and his ilk. It also contains the sounds of Iraqi children at play.

But, for someone who's made her reputation as a somewhat scary, hard-hitting advocate of individual freedom and a woman's place in the phallocentric world of rock, this album drips with a sensitivity that makes all the worthiness infinitely more palatable. ''Mother Rose'' and ''Peaceable Kingdom'' (an optimistic song of solace for a country still traumatised by the loss of the twin towers) both beguile as much as move, and the title track's touching combination of Smith and her daughter on piano reminds us of her unquenchable belief in the human spirit over tyranny. In an age of apathy and irony Smith still wants to give power to the people -and that in itself is a reason to love this album...” – BBC

Choice Cut: Jubilee

The Underrated Gem

Dream of Life

Release Date: June 1988

Label: Arista

Producers: Fred Smith/Jimmy Iovine

Standout Tracks: Up There Down There/Dream of Life/Looking for You (I Was)

Buy: https://www.discogs.com/Patti-Smith-Dream-Of-Life/master/40263

Stream: https://open.spotify.com/album/3TxNFi3uBnjDBFlfnbmIPe

Review:

“The big difference between Patti Smith's four 1970s albums and this return to action after nine years lies in the choice of collaborator. Where Smith's main associate earlier had been Lenny Kaye, a deliberately simple guitarist, here her co-writer and co-producer (with Jimmy Iovine) was her husband, Fred "Sonic" Smith, formerly of the MC5, who played guitar with a conventional rock competence and who lent his talents to each of the tracks, giving them a mainstream flavor. In a sense, however, these polished love songs, lullabies, and political statements are not to be compared to the poetic ramblings of Smith's first decade of music-making -- she's so much...calmer this time out. But you can't help it. Where the Patti Smith of Horses inspired a generation of female rockers, the Patti Smith of Dream of Life sounds like she's been listening to later Pretenders albums and taking tips from Chrissie Hynde, one of her spiritual daughters. Dream of Life is the record of someone who is simply showing the flag, trying to keep her hand in, rather than announcing her comeback. Not surprisingly, having made it, Smith retreated from the public eye again until the '90s” – AllMusic

Choice Cut: People Have the Power

The Latest/Final Album

Banga

Release Date: 1st June, 2012

Label: Columbia

Producers: Patti Smith/Tony Shanahan/Jay Dee Daugherty/Lenny Kaye

Standout Tracks: Amerigo/Banga/After the Gold Rush

Buy: https://www.discogs.com/Patti-Smith-Banga/master/443906

Stream: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/00w8oLfAbJhENcGgkEhCOt

Review:

“Patti Smith has returned to the poetic-punk format of 1975's Horses, which the Polar prize committee recently described as "Rimbaud with amps". Four of Horses' personnel – Smith, guitarist Lenny Kaye, drummer Jay Dee Daugherty and Television' Tom Verlaine – are present here. It's a mixture of pop songs and poetic explorations, aided by the instantly resumed chemistry between Kaye's shimmering hooks and Smith's sensual vocals. While she has never sung better, the pop songs hit home first: the dreamy Amerigo, the reflective Maria and sublime April Fool, a headrushing tale of outlaw lovers who "race through alleyways in our tattered coats". The more esoteric monologues demand – and reward – perseverance, especially the 10-minute Constantine's Dream, a passionate defence of her other great love, art, complete with fantasy sequences set in the Garden of Eden. The collision of sound and language is exhilarating; if it is also occasionally impenetrable, that's down to her death-or-glory manifesto to "let me die on the back of adventure, with a brush” – The Guardian

Choice Cut: April Fool

The Patti Smith Book

Year of the Monkey 

Author: Patti Smith

Publication Date: 1st September, 2020

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC

Synopsis:

“A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER From the National Book Award-winning author of Just Kids 'Magical' GUARDIAN 'A gripping tale of the search for meaning in times of turbulence - expressed with Smith's signature poetic flair' VOGUE 'Extraordinary ... A tense, teasing mix of reality and dream' Sunday Times 'A melancholy mood and poetic language distinguish Smith's third memoir' BBC 'Her willingness to look closely at life's closing chapters makes for a magical book' WASHINGTON POST, 'The 10 books to read in September' Following a run of New Year's concerts at San Francisco's legendary Fillmore, Patti Smith finds herself tramping the coast of Santa Cruz, about to embark on a year of solitary wandering. Unfettered by logic or time, she draws us into her private wonderland, with no design yet heeding signs, including a talking sign that looms above her, prodding and sparring like the Cheshire Cat. In February, a surreal lunar year begins, bringing with it unexpected turns, heightened mischief, and inescapable sorrow. In a stranger's words, "Anything is possible: after all, it's the year of the monkey." For Patti Smith - inveterately curious, always exploring, tracking thoughts, writing the year evolves as one of reckoning with the changes in life's gyre: with loss, aging, and a dramatic shift in the political landscape of America. Smith melds the Western landscape with her own dreamscape. Taking us from Southern California to the Arizona desert; to a Kentucky farm as the amanuensis of a friend in crisis; to the hospital room of a valued mentor; and by turns to remembered and imagined places - this haunting memoir blends fact and fiction with poetic mastery. The unexpected happens; grief and disillusionment. But as Patti Smith heads toward a new decade in her own life, she offers this balm to the reader: her wisdom, wit, gimlet eye, and above all, a rugged hope of a better world. Riveting, elegant, often humorous, illustrated by Smith's signature Polaroids, Year of the Monkey is a moving and original work, a touchstone for our turbulent times” – Waterstones

Pre-order: https://www.waterstones.com/book/year-of-the-monkey/patti-smith/9781526614766

FEATURE: The July Playlist: Vol. 4: According to Folklore

FEATURE:

 

The July Playlist

IN THIS PHOTO: Kylie Minogue

Vol. 4: According to Folklore

__________

THIS week…

IN THIS PHOTO: Taylor Swift/PHOTO CREDIT: Beth Garrabrant

is a really huge one for new music. Two of music’s biggest stars, Kylie Minogue and Taylor Swift have released music – a single from the former, and an album from the latter. Taylor Swift’s folklore has been met with huge acclaim, and Kylie Minogue’s Say Something is among her best work. There is also music from Catherine Anne Davies & Bernard Butler, Katy J Pearson, Gorillaz (ft. ScHoolboy Q), and The Avalanches (ft. Jamie xx, Neneh Cherry, CLYPSO). Throw into the mix The Rolling Stones with Jimmy Page, The Flaming Lips, Sinead O Brien, and Biig Piig. It is a busy and eclectic week, with enough in the pack to excite every music lover. If you require some fizz and kick for the weekend ahead, then have a listen to the best of the week’s releases and…

IN THIS PHOTO: The Rolling Stones/PHOTO CREDIT: Kevin Westenberg

IT will do the job.!

ALL PHOTOS/IMAGES (unless credited otherwise): Artists

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Kylie Minogue – Say Something

Taylor Swift – cardigan

Catherine Anne Davies & Bernard Butler - The Breakdown

Gorillaz (ft. ScHoolboy Q) - PAC-MAN (Episode Five)

Little Mix – Holiday

Katy J Pearson – Fix Me Up

IN THIS PHOTO: Neneh Cherry/PHOTO CREDIT: Vogue España

The Avalanches (ft. Jamie xx, Neneh Cherry, CLYPSO) - Wherever You Go  

PJ Harvey – Oh My Lover (Demo)

PHOTO CREDIT: Kevin Winter, Getty Images

The Rolling Stones, Jimmy Page - Scarlet

Sinead O'Brien - Strangers in Danger

PHOTO CREDIT: George Salisbury

The Flaming Lips - You n Me Sellin’ Weed

Courtney Marie Andrews – Together or Alone

Kero Kero Bonito - It’s Bugsnax!

PHOTO CREDIT: Enda Bowe

Shirley Collins – Wondrous Love

Hannah Georgas - Just a Phase

Logic – Perfect

Nadia Rose - Bad N Boujee

PHOTO CREDIT: Parri Thomas

Native Harrow - If I Could

Another Sky – All Ends

Biig Piig – Don’t Turn Around

Fenne Lily – Berlin

Jaga Jazzist - Tomita

Madeline Kenney – Picture of You

Lola Lennox - Back at Wrong

Sylvan Esso – Ferris Wheel

Creeper - Poisoned Heart

PHOTO CREDIT: Steve Gullick

The Wytches - A Love You’ll Never Know

BLOXX – Off My Mind

IN THIS PHOTO: Bree Runway

Bree Runway, Maliibu Miitch – Gucci

Thin Lear - Netta

Charlotte Lawrence - Slow Motion

FEATURE: Second Spin: Paul McCartney – McCartney II

FEATURE:

 

Second Spin

Paul McCartney – McCartney II

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WHEN it comes to albums that…

IN THIS PHOTO: Paul McCartney in 1980/PHOTO CREDIT: Hulton Archive, Getty Images

have divided people, not many have done it as extremely as Paul McCartney’s McCartney II. Some write the album off as experimental workings with only a few decent moments; too many weird songs that should not have been released. It was McCartney second solo studio album and, following the dissolvement of his band, Wings, he was keen to keep busy – Wings ended in 1981 and the recording of McCartney II occurred in 1979. Regardless, McCartney was reacting to the split of Wings in 1979 like he did with the split of The Beatles when he released the original McCartney in 1970. Released on 16th May, 1980, the album is much-underrated. Apart from Linda McCartney providing some backing vocals, Paul McCartney did everything himself, and the album was a radical departure from his work with Wings, or what we heard on his debut solo album – in fact, I don’t think McCartney put out anything as radical and unexpected since McCartney II! With some serious synthesiser work and experimentation, McCartney was taking from New Wave and Electronica and doing things his own way! I love how McCartney always reacts to what is happening in music and never really rests on his laurels. With little more than a 16-track recorder and some microphones, there is this delightful lo-fi sound to the album that very much differs to his work with The Beatles, and what was around in 1980 for that matter.

It is amazing to think about the story behind McCartney II, and what could have happened if events had worked out differently. Wings’ final album, Back to the Egg, of 1979 must have been quite emotional for McCartney, who must have known that the band were on their final legs. He went home to his farm in north Scotland, and he started working on some private recordings in July 1979. To him, there was no intention to release an album, but McCartney wanted to keep busy and was not quite sure what to do with himself. McCartney had up to twenty songs completed, and he then looked ahead to Wings’ U.K. tour of November and December. McCartney was allowed back into Japan after years of Visa issues, and this was his first trip to the country after performing with The Beatles there in 1966! When he arrived in Japan, customs searched him and found a massive amount of weed in his possession. McCartney was arrested and spent nine days in jail; Wings had to cancel the tour, and it was a major blow, as there was huge anticipation in the Japan for Wings’ arrival. Maybe Wings would have continued if the tour had gone well; McCartney might have had this new urge to write and record with them but, returning home, he pondered his future and this is where his shelved solo recordings came in.

It was inevitable McCartney would want to record and release an album after such a difficult period, and a new Wings album was not really on the cards. Some people wonder why McCartney did not rework the songs for McCartney II, as there are a few sketches that are not really complete or that appealing. I think a lot of contemporary reviews were very unfair, and critics wanted to attack McCartney or could not accept anything that wasn’t Beatle-esque. Yes, there are some songs that never resonate or sound that great – such as Frozen Jap, and Bogey Music -, but there is plenty to like in an album that, since 1980 has received greater positivity. I still think many critics are overly-harsh towards the album, but consider the fact that bands like Hot Chip are inspired by McCartney II; the album was forward-thinking and unlike anything around in 1980. With Coming Up, and Temporary Secretary opening the album, here are two great McCartney cuts – the former found a fan in his Beatles brother, John Lennon (who very rarely dished out compliments to McCartney, and was not that impressed by the rest of the album). Waterfalls, and Nobody Knows are great tracks, the first half is really eclectic and strong. I do love the weirdness and synth sounds on Temporary Secretary, and the sheer brilliance of Coming Up, and how he does naked and emotional with Waterfalls – even if the track does suffer a little from under-production.

On the second side, Front Parlour, and One of These Days provides gold, but there are a few weaker tracks that mean McCartney II is top-heavy/front-loaded. Tracks that did not feature on the album such as Blue Sway, and Check My Machine are excellent, and I think the album would have got more love if they replaced two of the inferior songs on the second side. The fact McCartney was so prolific and inventive should be commended. So many people have just taken a track or two from the album and dismissed the rest. As it has been forty years since McCartney II’s release, the musical landscape has changed, and I think one can look back and actually see how many people were influenced by that album! I think there is an argument to suggest that some songs would have been stronger without vocals – Darkroom, and Bogey Music are prime examples. Faults and all, I think McCartney II is a really interesting and strong album that boasts at least five or six truly awesome tracks. The fact McCartney released it all, put it all together by himself and merely plugged microphones into the back of a recorder and was not using a mixing desk is amazing – and I really do like the homemade feel of the album. AllMusic are one of the sites that have given it a retrospective review, and I disagree with their almost casual dismissal of McCartney II:

“Entitled McCartney II because its one-man band approach mirrors that of his first solo album, Paul McCartney's first record since the breakup of Wings was greeted upon its release as a return to form, especially since its synth-heavy arrangements seemed to represent his acceptance of new wave. In retrospect, the record is muddled and confused, nowhere more so than on the frazzled sequencing of "Temporary Secretary," where McCartney spits out ridiculous lyrics with a self-consciously atonal melody over gurgling synths.

Things rarely get worse than that, and occasionally, as in the effortless hooks of "Coming Up," the record is quite enjoyable. Nevertheless, the majority of McCartney II is forced, and its lack of memorable melodies is accentuated by the stiff electronics, which were not innovative at the time and are even more awkward in the present. At least McCartney II finds Paul in an adventurous state of mind, which is a relief after years of formulaic pop. In some ways, the fact that he was trying was more relevant than the fact that the experiments failed”.

This 2011 review from Pitchfork offers more positives I feel:

“Elsewhere on the album, McCartney remains similarly difficult to pigeonhole. If I told you the instrumental "Front Parlour", with its tinny drum machine and sunny keyboard melody, was a 2009 blog hit by a lo-fi synth act, you'd likely believe me. And then there's "Temporary Secretary", a frankly irritating but still interesting song that combines frenzied synth programming with a self-consciously bizarre vocal-- McCartney sings as nasally as possible on the refrain, and tweaks it to sound robotic. Other songs turn away from this type of maximalist approach. "Summer's Day Song" is pretty and sparse, featuring just McCartney and a few keyboards. TLC-presaging single "Waterfalls" is even more bare, only McCartney and an electric piano, with a tiny dollop of synth and acoustic guitar.

Two other songs stand out on McCartney II, and they're as distinct from each other as this record is from McCartney. Album closer "One of These Days" is simply great, benefiting from a rudimentary approach that strips away the synths and drum machines that dominate McCartney II. Bonus track "Secret Friend", included on the second disc of this reissue, is also pretty jaw-dropping-- a 10-minute, beat-driven synth opus that shares plenty in common aesthetically with dance music a decade its junior. Though relegated to the B-side of the "Temporary Secretary" single, "Secret Friend" is among the most forward-looking things McCartney has recorded in his post-Beatles career”.

I have a lot of love for McCartney II, but I can see why some people overlook it, as there are songs that seem half-finished, and others that would have benefited from more time and thought. The classics from the album – Coming Up, Temporary Secretary, and Waterfalls among them – show that one cannot call McCartney II bad. I think it deserves a second spin, and, forty years after its release, I feel critics might be a bit kinder to it. Like all of Paul McCartney’s albums, it is clear that one could…

NEVER predict what he’d do next

FEATURE: The Lockdown Playlist: The Hyundai Mercury Prize 2020 Shortlist

FEATURE:

  

The Lockdown Playlist

IN THIS PHOTO: Kano

The Hyundai Mercury Prize 2020 Shortlist

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ON Thursday…

IN THIS PHOTO: Charli XCX

the shortlist for this year’s Hyundai Mercury Prize was unveiled. The ceremony will take place in September but, at the moment, nobody is sure what form it will take. The past year has been a strong one for British and E.I.R.E. music, and the shortlist is a broad and interesting one. There has been some criticism that not many albums from the fringes has been included; perhaps too little in the way of anything heavier-sounding but, as only twelve albums can be included, it is difficult to please everyone! The Hyundai Mercury Prize shortlist this year consists:

Porridge Radio - Every Bad
Dua Lipa - Future Nostalgia
Laura Marling - Song for Our Daughter
Sports Team - Deep Down Happy
Kano - Hoodies All Summer
Anna Meredith - FIBS
Georgia - Seeking Thrills
Lanterns on the Lake - Spook the Herd
Moses Boyd - Dark Matter
Charli XCX - how i’m feeling now
Stormzy - Heavy Is the Head
Michael Kiwanuka - KIWANUKA

To honour the announced shortlist, I have put together a playlist featuring three songs from each of the nominated dozen albums. I am sure that there is enough in the playlist to get your weekend kicking. No matter what your music tastes are, one has to concede that the shortlist this year, all things considered, is actually… 

IN THIS PHOTO: Lanterns on the Lake

PRETTY damned good.

FEATURE: Tantalising Lines and Divine Rumours: Might a Collaboration Between Kate Bush and Big Boi Happen?

FEATURE:

 

Tantalising Lines and Divine Rumours

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

Might a Collaboration Between Kate Bush and Big Boi Happen?

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THIS will be genuinely short…

IN THIS PHOTO: Big Boi

because I have another Kate Bush feature to put out on Wednesday! A lot has happened this week in the music world. Taylor Swift put out an unexpected/’surprise’ eighth studio album, Folklore, that is a completely different direction for her - and it gathering its fair share of five-star reviews! The nominations for this year’s Mercury Prize were announced on Thursday, and Kylie Minogue released a brilliant new track, Say Something, too. It seems that good news is coming in more, and we are being treated to these great releases! I just had to react to the news that maybe, perhaps…there might be a collaboration between Kate Bush and Big Boi. CRACK were among several sources to report the news:

“Big Boi has hinted that Kate Bush may feature on his upcoming Big Sleepover project with Sleepy Brown.

Speaking toSiriusXM Volume, Big Boi listed Bush as his second favourite artist of all time and spoke about meeting her following a performance in London during her 2014 sell-out 22-date residency at the Hammersmith Eventim Apollo.

“And at the end of the show, she invited me and my wife back to the dressing room to have a glass of wine.” Big told the host. He then revealed that three years later they met up again. When asked whether we might hear a collaboration soon, Big Boi answered, “Stay tuned, stay tuned. Just stay tuned. I can’t even talk about it right now!”

Did you know @BigBoi is a MASSIVE @KateBushMusic fan? Hear him tell #VolumeWest's @lyndseyparker about finally getting to meet her and how that meeting could soon turn into a collaboration...

Check out the full interview via @SIRIUSXM on-demand here -> https://t.co/8SWIlge1nl pic.twitter.com/Q7LFXG2MoE

— SiriusXM VOLUME (@siriusxmvolume) July 23, 2020

Of course, there is every chance that this could all be tease and, in fact, the Kate Bush we could hear in a Big Boi recording is pre-existing – maybe a sample from one of her classic hits. It would seem strange to be asked the question about a Kate Bush collaboration and then, rather than deny it, sort of give a cheeky grin and tell people to stay tuned. The potential hook-up has been met with a lot of curiosity and excitement. There is no telling when we might see (the) The Big Sleepover project, as Big Boi says that he wants the album to arrive when there is greater movement and we can all get together. As he is in the U.S., this might be a fair few months away! Of course, as we all have to realise, it that there has been no announcement made officially by either Big Boi or Kate Bush. I just thought that it was worth writing about, as there has not been a huge amount of musical activity from Kate Bush since 50 Words for Snow came out in 2011. As a super-fan of Kate Bush, I am not going to wrestle Big Boi for the title of The World’s Biggest Kate Bush fan, as that title is hotly-fought and contentious! It is evident Big Boi is an enormous fan, and he contributed to a documentary about Kate Bush in 2014 that was broadcast on the BBC (Big Boi appears from 37:02).

Big Boi’s last studio album, Boomiverse, arrived in 2017, and I am excited to hear new music from him. Of course, if we do get some new music from him this year and there is no hint of an original Kate Bush vocal, then there will be an air of disappointment – though, there is nothing to say Kate Bush herself is quiet and not preparing to announce something. I love the image of the two of them sitting down for dinner in 2017, as they are very different people but, in reality, they share a lot of musical D.N.A. and passion. Some say a collaboration might sound a bit mis-matched, but think about the collaborations Kate Bush has had through the years. Though she has not performed with anyone quite as different as Big Boi, she collaborated with Peter Gabriel multiple times (on backing vocals for No Self Control, and Games Without Frontiers on Peter Gabriel III: Melt, and the duet, Don’t Give Up, from 1986’s So); she had Roy Harper provide backing vocals on her single, Breathing (from Never for Ever, 1980), and she provided vocals for his track, You, from his 1980 album, The Unknown Soldier) Kate Bush sung with the Trio Bulgarka – they are a Bulgarian vocal ensemble - on her albums, The Sensual World (1989), and The Red Shoes (1993). Kate Bush had Lenny Henry perform on a track from The Red Shoes, Why Should I Love You? Mica Paris provided some backing vocals for Kate Bush’s 2011 album, Director’s Cut, and there have been many other cases of different musicians and singers entering Bush’s world. She has been all over the musical map since her career began. I might do a separate feature on her collaborative nature but, from incorporating unconventional instruments in her songs, to her unique vocal phrasings and incredible lyrics, Bush has always strayed from the boringly conventional and embraced something much more interesting and original – so it would not be a shock is she was to trade lines with the OutKast legend (though one doubts Bush will be rapping!).

The slightest whiff of any new Kate Bush news and music is cause for great celebration and, though many would like the arrival of a new album from her, the potential of a collaboration would be fantastic. We shall have to wait and see because, whilst the rumours were out of the bag on social media yesterday – and there followed a few articles documenting a possible Big Boi-Kate Bush song -, it might be a long while before we get anything substantiated. In the meantime, one can only imagine what Kate Bush and Big Boi together would sound like and, if she is in the mix of a new project, whether she provides piano, vocals, or is sampled in some way. I am ramping up my Kate Bush writing ahead of her birthday on Thursday (30th July), and I couldn’t wait a few days to put out my thoughts regarding the Big Boi tease. Kate Bush fan sites and Twitter feeds have seen people post comments and theories, and Big Boi himself has sort of augmented that possibility by retweeting a post from someone who said that, finally, a Kate Bush and Big Boi link-up is happening. Whether you thought you needed it or not, 2020 could provide the world with one of the most unexpected collaborations in recent years! We shall keep an eye and ear out to see what, if anything, comes about, but I cannot help thinking that two musical giants (if very different) like Big Boi and Kate Bush together…

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1978/PHOTO CREDIT: Richard Young/REX/Shutterstock

WOULD be something to witness!

FEATURE: Those Who Are Cool, Spool: Nostalgia, Rarity or a Reaction Against the Digital: What’s Behind the Revival of the Cassette?

FEATURE:

 

Those Who Are Cool, Spool

IMAGE CREDIT: Freepik

Nostalgia, Rarity or a Reaction Against the Digital: What’s Behind the Revival of the Cassette?

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EARLIER in the week…

PHOTO CREDIT: MenKind

a report came out – which I shall quote in a minute – that showed cassettes sales are increasing. I looked at various music sites’ social media pages, and they asked people whether they listen to cassettes now and have boomboxes/tape players. Many have cassettes still but, of those people asked, not too many played theirs. Maybe it is an age thing, but I fondly remember cassettes when I was discovering music in the late-1980s and 1990s, and I have a few hanging around. I will talk about that more, but the ‘revival’ of cassettes is not a new thing. Last year, The Guardian reported the comeback:

“Pause. Stop. Rewind! The cassette, long consigned to the bargain bin of musical history, is staging a humble comeback. Sales have soared in the last year – up 125% in 2018 on the year before – amounting to more than 50,000 cassette albums bought in the UK, the highest volume in 15 years.

It’s quite a fall from the format’s peak in 1989 when 83 million cassettes were bought by British music fans, but when everyone from pop superstar Ariana Grande to punk duo Sleaford Mods are taking to tape, a mini revival seems afoot. But why?

“It’s the tangibility of having this collectible format and a way to play music that isn’t just a stream or download,” says techno DJ Phin, who has just released her first EP on cassette as label boss of Theory of Yesterday”.

PHOTO CREDIT: @jontyson/Unsplash

Although the growth of cassette sales cannot hit the heights of vinyl, it seems that many people are embracing the cassette in 2020. In this NME article, we can see that the decades-lasting music format still has a place in the modern world:

“New figures from the Official Charts company have revealed that cassette sales have more than doubled in 2020.

Describing the cassette as “the unlikely comeback kid of music formats”, the Official Charts Company said there was a 103% increase on cassette sales in the first half of 2020 compared to the same period in 2019.

65,000 cassettes were purchased in the first half of 2020 and the figures are on course to top 100,000 for the first time since 2003.

The best selling cassettes of 2020 were largely in the pop genre, with 5 Seconds of Summer, Lady Gaga, The 1975, Selena Gomez and Dua Lipa taking the top five spots.

5 Seconds of Summer’s ‘CALM’ sold 12,000 in the first week making it the fastest selling cassette in 18 years.

Last month (June 22), it was revealed that vinyl sales soared after record stores re-opened for the first time since lockdown.

According to data from the Official Charts Company, sales in the first week since re-opening reached the highs of pre-COVID-19.

Vinyl sales surged by 27.57% week-on-week to a total of 88,486 units, while CDs also experienced a rise of 11.09% to 253,779 units”.

IMAGE CREDIT: Freepik

What are the reasons behind the continuation and rise of cassette sales?! I think, right now, there is a real drive among music fans to support new artists. I think cassettes are becoming more readily available than they used to. So many artists are releasing their albums on various different format and, more often than not, this will include a cassette option. The COVID-19 pandemic has hindered a lot of progress for artists in terms of touring and revenue, so I do feel like people are buying music to help aid artists. More than that, there is an increased feeling that streaming platforms are not compensating artists adequately, and physical sales are increasing because of that. Even though C.D.s have stalled during lockdown, vinyl sales are doing well, and people are really keen to experience music in a physical form. It is strange how cassette sales are increasing whilst compact discs are struggling a little. Many feared that streaming services would eliminate and replace physical formats, but music lovers of all ages still want the experience you cannot get with digital music. I love the fact cassettes are doing well; even if you do not own a cassette player, I think it is nice to own albums on cassette as a keepsake. Many might say that defeats the object of buying an album – and this is why I do not like people buying vinyl for that reason -, but many people will amass cassettes and, down the line, procure a suitable device on which to play them.

PHOTO CREDIT: @laimannung/Unsplash

Another reason why cassettes are continuing their incline in sales might be a sense of nostalgia. I do not think that people are buying albums from their childhood on cassette to get a sense of the past. I think many are buying new albums, but they want it on cassette to, maybe, get a sense of what it felt like to buy music when they were younger. Certainly, I feel people of my age (in their thirties) misses the portability of cassettes and the tangible experience where one can read the insert and have that experience of flipping the tape halfway through an album. One can definitely not claim cassettes are a perfect format. The all-too-regular experience of tapes jamming and having to remove them carefully; often using a pencil to put the spooling back in the cassette where, inevitably, you’d play it again and it wouldn’t work! The sound quality is not as great as vinyl, and it can be easy to damage cassettes because they are pretty small. In an article from last year, the Los Angeles Times explored the faults with the cassettes, in addition to explaining why they are making a comeback:

“The hissing cassette was never music lovers’ first choice. The only reason these things were popular throughout my childhood and adolescence in the 1970s and ’80s was their portability: You could play them on a boom box, in a car, on a Walkman when they appeared 40 years ago. The CD killed them off more ruthlessly than it did vinyl records: There was simply no reason to compromise so deeply on sound quality anymore.

IMAGE CREDIT: Freepik

Many people perceive music through stories, both personal and invented, but always emotionally resonant. Sometimes the story is attached merely to a piece of music. Few people can remember what device played the song to which they first danced with their partner. Sometimes, though, the specific gadget or technology is important too.

As Goran Bolin of the Södertörn University in Stockholm wrote in 2014, people “develop specific, sometimes passionate, relationships with reproduction technologies such as the vinyl record, music cassette tape, comics and other now-dead or near-dead media forms.” The passion, as Bolin put it, “is activated by the nostalgic relationships with past media experiences, the bittersweet remembrances of media habits connected to one’s earlier life phases.” That means an attachment not just to a record but to a specific record, which hiccups in a specific place and has a specific rip on its sleeve; not just to a song but to the cassette on which it was recorded as an afterthought.

There’s also something about the tape revival that recalls the radicalism of the 1980s cassette culture: Tapes were cheap, and people used them to copy and share music from expensive records, an early form of piracy. In the Soviet Union, when I grew up, the state record company wouldn’t put out the music we listened to — so bands and underground entrepreneurs distributed them on cassettes.

“Today’s cassette culture, by eschewing contemporary media forms for more esoteric ones, is building on the older cassette-culture tradition of rejecting dominant industry formats,” audio producer Craig Eley wrote in a 2011 essay”.

PHOTO CREDIT: @helloimnik/Unsplash

I do hope that the cassette holds firm but, as only one firm in Europe still makes cassettes, the survival of the format is precarious! Whilst you can buy a pretty cool boombox like this for not a lot of money, I think the increased portability of a Walkman is favoured by many. They cost a pretty penny, but there is this desire to strike against the emptiness of digital music and its disposability and actually spend money ensuring that we listen to music with our full attention on a format that, to be honest, is flawed. Despite its downsides, I like a cassette because you listen to the album the whole way through, and you have this immersive experience. Can the cassette boom continue through this year? Last year, the feeling was that cassettes were being bought because they were fashionable, but I think things are a little different this year with people reacting to COVID-19 by buying more physical music than they might have. More new albums are being offered on cassette, so I don’t think it is just nostalgia. Whilst the rise in cassette sales might be relative – the total figures are not huge -, and the revival might not last too long for various reasons (the scarcity of facilities that make cassettes for example), there is clearly an appetite! In spite of the limitations of the cassette market, I hope that this upward trend continues. Most artists, when they offer an album on cassette, might a limited run because of the lack of cassettes compared with compact discs, and a lot of record shops do not stock cassettes at all – and one would be hard-pushed to find too many on sites like Amazon!

PHOTO CREDIT: @laurenkashuk/Unsplash

I found an interesting article from Goldmine Mag that talks about used cassettes and their boom:

“And so on, because what this all adds up to is, there is currently a very buoyant market in used cassettes, and it’s probably not going anywhere. Again, the generation that grew up spending its pocket money on cassettes feels exactly the same way about their old purchases as their older siblings do about vinyl: the thrill of opening the case for the first time, the ritual of pressing the buttons and adjusting all the switches — depending, of course, on whether your player had any: chrome, metal or normal; MPX in or out; Dolby on or off, autoplay, Megabass. This isn’t a cassette player, it’s Cape Canaveral!

Sitting on the subway into work, with Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music playing through your Walkman, while everyone else is listening to Phil Collins and Dire Straits. Compiling the ultimate 90-minute Rolling Stones collection, and then having to redo it because you forgot the song you wanted in the middle. And then accidentally taping over it because someone just loaned you the new Yes LP and, though you know that home taping is piracy, because there it says so on the inner sleeve (alongside a very smart cassette skull and crossbones cartoon), what difference will one fewer copy really make to their fortune?”.

Who would have thought that, in 2020, we’d be looking at the (relative) health of the cassette market?! It is great to see and, though the sales increase is not exactly a revolution, one cannot say that physical formats are only bought by a single demographic, as it seems buyers of all tastes and ages are buying cassettes – whether it is because of their retro value, or they like the feel and experience of putting a cassette into a player. Personally, I really love the cassette and feel that it has a future ahead of it. Now that I have been thinking about cassettes, it has got me thinking about the albums I want to buy on that form and, though it is going to be an expensive quest, I feel that the expense is…

IMAGE CREDIT: Freepik

MORE than worth it!

FEATURE: Back to Paradise City: Slash at Fifty-Five: His Finest Works

FEATURE:

 

Back to Paradise City

PHOTO CREDIT: Gene Kirkland

Slash at Fifty-Five: His Finest Works

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I like putting together a birthday playlist…

IN THIS PHOTO: Guns N’ Roses/PHOTO CREDIT: Ross Halfin

as it gives me a chance to collate the essential cuts from a popular artist. As Slash is fifty-five today (23rd July), I have compiled a playlist of the best work from the Guns N' Roses legend. I am a big fan of his guitar work, and I think he has one of the most distinct styles ever. Not only is Slash synonymous with his Guns N' Roses riffs; he has worked with a lot of other artists. In this article from The Guardian that was published last year, Slash selected his favourite tracks/moments and, when talking about his work on Lenny Kravitz’s Always on the Run, this passage stood out:

 “The story goes that Slash took the riff of Always on the Run to Lenny Kravitz because Adler wasn’t a funky enough drummer to play along with it. “I don’t recall ever saying that,” Slash says with a raised eyebrow. “It was a riff that I came up with that I didn’t present it Guns N’ Roses because it didn’t seem appropriate.” The truth is that Kravitz heard Slash playing the riff while working on his second album, Mama Said, and asked if he could have it. “It was a free piece of property, so …”

The list of artists who have asked Slash to play on their records reads like an awards ceremony lineup: Bob Dylan, Michael Jackson, Iggy Pop, Motörhead, Carole King, Rihanna. Sometimes, though, it didn’t work out as expected. Such as when he went to record Wiggle Wiggle with Bob Dylan in 1990. “I go in and I did what I consider to be a really good one-off in my own style,” he says. “A couple days later I asked Don [Was, the producer], ‘Can you send me a rough of what it what it sounds like?’ I’d done an acoustic rhythm track through the whole song. I’m listening – it’s Bob Dylan, cool!” But Slash’s solo hadn’t made the cut. “Bob said it sounded a little bit too much like Guns N’ Roses. So he just took it off”.

In honour of the great man turning fifty-five, I wanted to tip my cap and salute his brilliant. I am going to wish Slash a happy birthday and end with a playlist which proves why…

HE is such an iconic musician.

FEATURE: Turn Back the Pages: Reflecting on the Sad Loss of Q Magazine

FEATURE:

 

Turn Back the Pages

ALL IMAGES: Q Magazine

Reflecting on the Sad Loss of Q Magazine

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VERY few people were expecting…

the news that arrived on Monday (20th) regarding Q Magazine. After thirty-four years, a giant of the music press has had to make the sad notice that they are closing. I have loved Q Magazine since I was in school, and it was an essential part of my music magazine-buying existence; a new edition each month was a real highlight for me!  This BBC article provides more details regarding Q’s closure:

“Q Magazine, a cornerstone of rock journalism in the UK, is to close after 34 years.

"The pandemic did for us and there was nothing more to it than that," said the editor Ted Kessler in a tweet.

He also shared the editor's letter for the final issue, due on 28 July, in which he said: "I must apologise for my failure to keep Q afloat."

The magazine's circulation had fallen to 28,000 per month from a peak of 200,000 in 2001.

Founded in 1986 by Smash Hits writers Mark Ellen and David Hepworth, Q arrived at the same time as the CD revolution took off - and its glossy, aspirational format chimed perfectly with the times.

Its hefty and comprehensive reviews section not only covered new releases, but the copious re-issues that were starting to appear as record labels plundered their archives to bolster the new format.

More recently, the magazine had rediscovered its voice under Kessler, who was appointed editor in 2017, and promoted revealing, in-depth interviews with the likes of Lana Del Rey, Tame Impala and The Streets; alongside deep dives into the back catalogues of The Specials and the Beastie Boys.

However, in May, Q's owner Bauer Media put the title under review, along with a number of others in its portfolio, as sales and advertising revenues diminished during the coronavirus pandemic.

The penultimate issue of the magazine read like a eulogy, with writers past and present recalling their most memorable interviews of the last 34 years”.

Many people knew that Q was struggling, and there were hopes that it would be able to ride the COVID-19 black spell but, alas, it has not been able to survive. I think it is just people not getting out there buying physical copies and, with avenue opportunities reduced, the cost of running the magazine was too high. It is a shame that the Government could not bail the magazine out as, unfortunately, the print press is declining. This report from May forecast the struggle ahead for music magazines and, invariably, we were going to see casualties – though the impact of Q Magazine’s loss is being felt around the world. I will come to my feelings regarding Q but, when reacting to the news, Alexis Petridis wrote a feature for The Guardian where he predicted Q’s demise is the beginning of the end for the music press of old:

“And so Q – its name a play on the act of “cueing up” a CD – rushed into the vacuum. Its early issues featured McCartney, Rod Stewart, Paul Simon, Elton John, Genesis and Eric Clapton on the cover. None of them exactly at their artistic zenith in the late 80s, but all still hugely successful, and all with richly entertaining histories to talk about. The interviews were respectful, but never fawning or hagiographic. Its founders had helmed Smash Hits in its early 80s purple patch, and something of that magazine’s irreverence, its belief that finding pop music hugely thrilling and completely ridiculous wasn’t contradictory, clung to Q’s tone.

You could sneer at Q as uncool and lacking edge (“The magazine that says ‘Hey kids, it’s alright to like Dire Straits’,” chuckled the NME’s Steven Wells) but Q was sharper than the caricature suggested. It was smart enough to realise that soul veteran Bobby Womack had a hell of a story to tell – his name was emblazoned across the cover early on. And it occasionally bared its fangs, as in Tom Hibbert’s “Who the Hell Does ______ Think He Is?”, a series of virulent, pomposity-pricking interviews.

In its final iteration, under editor Ted Kessler, Q became something like the opposite of the magazine it started out as: it was wide-ranging and hip, closer to one of the now-vanished inkies than the Q of old – one recent cover flagged up features on Waxahatchee, US Girls, Låpsley and veteran dub producer Mad Professor – and promoted female writers in a realm that had once been almost exclusively male. As a one-stop digest of what was happening in music, it was hard to fault, but it wasn’t enough to save Q.

Without wishing to sound melodramatic, its closure seems to signal the final passing of the music press as we once knew it. What’s left are specialist titles, small operations surviving on small circulations and magazines that concentrate largely on the past. The latter suggests that the only people who still buy music titles in quantity are old enough to remember the music press at its height”.

I know that there are corners of the music press that will be able to survive this time. Some magazines have been boosted by new subscriptions and donations; others have been able to exist online but, for everyone, COVID-19 is going to be a real test! I do worry that other big magazines like MOJO might be unable to exist post-COVID-19, but let’s hope that we will not see all of our favourite music magazines die. We always knew that the Internet would threaten the music press, but I never thought the damage would be so great! I guess, when people can get music news and information for free online, there is less incentive to buy a magazine. It is a shame, because I grew up reading magazines like NME, and Q Magazine. I loved NME because it is a slim edition, and there was this coolness when buying a copy; it was more aimed at Indie and Rock, whereas Q Magazine was always a little broader in terms of the mainstream. Getting both of a month provided all the information and guidance I needed regarding my music purchases and what was happening. I always loved   Q Magazine because of the glossiness and the thickness – one got great value for money with so many beautiful pages and a variety of articles. If you wanted the latest reviews or interviews with the big stars of the day, I would always turn to Q Magazine!

For me, perfection was grabbing a copy of Q, going to a local coffee shop, and devouring the pages as I drank – and then taking it home and re-reading as much as possible! Though I admit I did not buy the magazine as much post-2000 as I did between, say, 1994-1999, I have bought the magazine steadily, and I have also looked at editions from the 1980s and can only imagine how exciting it would have been working for the magazine back then! Even though the Internet and streaming services changed Q Magazine in terms of its popularity and the sort of artists they were featuring, I don’t think there were radical changes from the 1990s/early-2000s to now. Q has always been about covering Pop, Rock and other genres, and it is not quite as cutting-edge as NME or as deep as MOJO. I think some of the best work the magazine has produced has occurred in the past few years, and I have discovered so many new acts through them. The loss of Q Magazine will be felt more by the smaller acts rather than the cover stars, as the latter can make it onto pretty much any magazine or website. It is the smaller artists who get a huge boost from featuring in Q that will be hit hardest. Also, the talented and committed team who have lost their jobs will be bereft!

The final edition of Q Magazine arrives on 28th July (Tuesday), so make sure that you buy it, as it will be a historic item that will be looked back on decades from now. Whether Q’s premature end signals the fold of the music press as we know it, I am not so sure. I do feel other magazines will close in the coming years, but I do think that things are not entirely bleak. It has been a very sad week, and it seems strange that Q will not be on the newsagent shelves anymore. Even if I did not buy the magazine one month, I would always gaze at the cover and smile. Since 1986, Q Magazine has been a staple of the British music press, and there are countless iconic covers that stand in the mind; in edition to some more-recent ones – I have tried to put a few of the best in this feature. So many people like me who grew up reading the magazine will feel the loss hard, but the memories and good times Q has given us all cannot be taken away! Without them, I don’t think I would have been as fascinated in music, and I sort of got my first taste of music journalism reading the pages of the magazine. I wish that we could go back in time and preserve Q but, after thirty-four years, it bows out. Q Magazine was more than a monthly fix: it was almost an institution that, whilst slightly less relevant in the last decade, has provided a platform for new acts, and has it has given so much joy to so many people. As the final edition of Q Magazine is about to make its way to us, it is clear that we will…

NEVER see their like again.

FEATURE: “That Cloud, That Cloud/Looks Like Ireland!” The Development and Brilliance of Kate Bush’s The Big Sky

FEATURE:

 

“That Cloud, That Cloud/Looks Like Ireland!”

The Development and Brilliance of Kate Bush’s The Big Sky

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NOT that I need a reason…

but there are a few that has motivated me to write this feature. Not only, as I have said, is Hounds of Love approaching its thirty-fifth anniversary – in September -, but I am fascinated in the idea of Kate Bush’s singles and why many of them did not chart higher. I will not go into too much depth – as I have already written about this topic – but The Big Sky is a classic case of a fantastic single not getting its just dues. As Hounds of Love reached the top spot in the album charts, I wonder why the singles did not do better. Running Up That Hill hit number-three, and none of the singles after that hit as high. Cloudbusting went to twenty; Hounds of Love reached sixteen, whilst The Big Sky only got to thirty-seven. Maybe it was a sense that, as The Big Sky was the fourth single from Hounds of Love, people knew the song and it was familiar and people did not feel the need to get the single. It is a shame because, even now, not that many people select The Big Sky as a highlight of Hounds of Love. I saw a social media post on BBC Radio 6 Music that asked what people’s favourite track from Hounds of Love was – it was connected to as rebroadcast of a Richard Skinner interview with Kate Bush where she discussed Hounds of Love.

Lots of people selected the album’s second side, The Ninth Wave, and that is a fascinating result; I will need to reexplore that in the coming weeks. When it came to the singles on the first side (and Mother Stands for Comfort), The Big Sky was rarely picked! Maybe few people have heard it on the radio – I have not heard it played in many years -, and, to me, the song is the best thing from a wonderous album! With fantastic B-sides, Not This Time, and The Morning Fog (on the 12" only), The Big Sky deserved a lot more love and chart success than it received when it was released on 28th April, 1986. There is so much to unpack when it comes to The Big Sky. Directed by Bush herself, it was filmed on 19th March at Elstree Film Studios. The visuals for the video are spectacular! This was a period when Kate Bush was delivering these incredible, cinematic videos, and this was Bush’s second directorial outing follow Hounds of Love. She had already adopted her own style but, in terms of concepts, the two videos are very different. For The Big Sky, we see Bush adopt a variety of guises as she watches the skies and the clouds passing by. From a sailor/pirate to her wearing a cool jumpsuit, there is an eclectic and large cast that dances and moves alongside her, including air pilots and Superman! The video is a real feast, and we see a studio audience in the video that consisted of fans/followers of the HomeGround fanzine that was operating at the time – two coaches took the fans to set, where they would appear in a fantastic video!

The Big Sky is a track that took a long time to get together. Not to say everything on Hounds of Love was completed quickly, but there were no songs that took as long to realise and coalesce as The Big Sky. Listen to the finished version and it is a big song. The chorus is uplifting and swelling, and there is a lot going on. I get a feeling the lyrics came together quicker than the rest of the song, which must have started life very differently. As a side note: grab a copy of the HomeGround book and you can read about the shoot of the video and how much fun (and hard work at times) it was to put together, and the number of people involved! I wish there were demos online of the songs from Hounds of Love, as it would be illuminating to see how the song began and what the first few versions sounded like. Maybe Bush did not record too many takes prior to entering the studio, and it as just a case of her working through the song in stages at home. Listening to The Big Sky, and it is not a surprise that it took a lot of negotiation, experimentation and time to realise. Although the song’s musicians – including her brother Paddy Bush on didgeridoo – help realise this incredible vision, I think it is Bush herself that delivers the most stunning results.

Her vocal performance on the song is one of her all-time finest, and the final seconds – where she delivers these incredible screams – is exhilarating! You hear the song and cannot imagine any stress: Bush sounds completely free, organic, and fresh. Bush has talked about the song a number of times, and it is clear that The Big Sky was a problem child of Hounds of Love. This articles from the Kate Bush Encyclopaedia sources a couple of interviews where Bush talked about The Big Sky’s issues:

“'The Big Sky' was a song that changed a lot between the first version of it on the demo and the end product on the master tapes. As I mentioned in the earlier magazine, the demos are the masters, in that we now work straight in the 24-track studio when I'm writing the songs; but the structure of this song changed quite a lot. I wanted to steam along, and with the help of musicians such as Alan Murphy on guitar and Youth on bass, we accomplished quite a rock-and-roll feel for the track. Although this song did undergo two different drafts and the aforementioned players changed their arrangements dramatically, this is unusual in the case of most of the songs. (Kate Bush Club newsletter, Issue 18, 1985)

'The Big Sky' gave me terrible trouble, really, just as a song. I mean, you definitely do have relationships with some songs, and we had a lot of trouble getting on together and it was just one of those songs that kept changing - at one point every week - and, um...It was just a matter of trying to pin it down. Because it's not often that I've written a song like that: when you come up with something that can literally take you to so many different tangents, so many different forms of the same song, that you just end up not knowing where you are with it”.

In September, Hounds of Love will get a lot of honour and coverage to celebrate thirty-five years. Although a lot of focus will be on the biggest singles – Running Up That Hill, and Cloudbusting -, and the brilliant second side, The Ninth Wave, I feel The Big Sky deserves some fresh investigation. It is a brilliant Pop song, and I feel it is the jewel of Hounds of Love. Even though the song did not chart too high in 1986, that is no reflection on its quality and appeal. I do feel more radio stations need to play the track as, when Hounds of Love’s songs are featured on radio, it is often Hounds of Love, Running Up That Hill/Running Up That (A Deal with God), and Cloudbusting that are played – maybe And Dream of Sheep gets played from The Ninth Wave, but what about Waking the Witch, Jig of Life, or Hello Earth?! It is a shame that Bush’s most-celebrated and treasured album is defined by a few songs, and gems such as The Big Sky rarely make it onto playlists. From its gleeful and hugely memorable video, to the rumbling chorus and those brilliant screams at the end, The Big Sky is in my top-five Kate Bush songs, and I wanted to write about as it is overlooked. I feel many people should check out the song before Hounds of Love’s anniversary. I am glad Bush stuck with the song and didn’t scrap it, as she could easily have brought Under the Ivy (the B-side for Running Up That Hill) in as track three. Even though Under the Ivy is quite tender and passionate, and The Big Sky keeps the momentum rolling before the more haunted and tense Mother Stands for Comfort, Bush was in no small supply of great tracks at that time! The Big Sky might have started as a stormy and cloudy struggle, but it ended up a warm, bright and…

BRILLIANT masterpiece of a song.

FEATURE: Spotlight: Do Nothing

FEATURE:

Spotlight

Do Nothing

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AS I normally do…

PHOTO CREDIT: Adrian Vitelleschi-Cook

there are going to be some interviews and various bits quoted, as it gives a bigger impression of the act that I am recommending than I could on my own. Nottingham’s Do Nothing are among a wave of new bands coming through that are primed for big success in the future. Their E.P., Zero Dollar Bill, was met with positive reviews, and I will bring one of them in near the end of the feature. I have been aware of the band for a while, and their single, LeBron James, is still bouncing around my head over seven months since I heard it! I love what the guys are doing and, last year, they were being tipped by various sources for success in 2020. NME spoke with the band’s lead Chris Bailey, where it was revealed that the singer has a unique approach to performance: 

“With plenty of room for listener interpretation and grey areas, the music and performance of Do Nothing isn’t to be taken at face value. “I hate when singer-songwriters are so obviously trying their best to make you feel something,” Chris says. “I sit there like ‘No! I refuse to feel the thing that you want me to!’ I like when things allow you to feel that yourself rather than trying to tug your heartstrings the whole time.” It’s firmly clear that they’re not ones to patronise their audience.

Chris is also heavily influenced by stand-up comedy when thinking about his onstage persona, and towing the line of acceptability. “It’s definitely an influence on the music and me as a person, in terms of delivery and timing and the set-up of a lot of onstage comedy,” he affirms. “A good comparison is with Stewart Lee. He has an onstage persona which is, again, an exaggerated version of himself, and a cynical, angry version of himself, which is sort of a similar thing to what I am trying to do. He describes it as quite a ‘high-risk strategy’, because he basically berates the audience half the time, and tries very hard to make them not enjoy the show, and within that are the ingredients for them actually enjoying the show. It’s an interesting way to potentially take it”.

I found, last year, that there were a few bands hitting my ear, but very few that were making a genuine impression. I was aware of Do Nothing in 2019, and I felt they were a lot stronger than most of the bands out there – even if I do think last year was defined by solo acts. Many sources were attuned to the brilliance and promise of Do Nothing. In their excellent Class of 2020 feature, DIY caught up with Chris Bailey, as they were eager to laud the Nottingham band:

“In London there's bands everywhere, whereas in Nottingham you can wriggle away in the shadows before anyone notices, just being a little Nottingham band,” nods the singer. “We took a year off, and then it took another year even to find a name for this [project]. We wrote a whole bunch of songs, and then scrapped songs.” “The benefit of being from a small town is you can truck along and make all of those really important mistakes, and learn the lessons from them without it being spotlit in front of everybody,” Andrew picks up, before Chris continues: “A lot of that old material was very meandering and trying to be clever, but now we're just trying to be dumb. Trying to be dumb, dumb men...”

However, with breakthrough single 'Gangs' colliding The Fall's knack for sardonic storytelling and LCD Soundsystem's leftfield dancefloor sensibilities, and 'Handshakes' allowing a slower, more unsettling side to unfurl, Do Nothing's early teasers actually strike a far artier chord than their assertions might suggest. Piecing together a collage of strange, intriguing lyrics (“I phone home fast to get a hold of my provider/ I eat every single thing I own and then catch fire”), Chris might play dumb, but there's a lot of thought not-so-secretly going on behind the scenes. “I watch loads of stupid shit on the internet, and [the lyrics] all seem abstract because they're just little phrases smashed together, but they're actually all really laboriously thought out. I do it on my computer so I can cut and paste it all. People are always on about, 'Oh I only write with a pen and paper',” he continues, adopting a snooty voice and an eye-roll. “Fuck off! Why?! The lyrics all make complete sense to me, but they wouldn't make any sense to anyone else. It's sort of pointless for anyone else to listen to them”.

I want to stick with press from 2019, as it is great to see how Do Nothing were being hailed, and how far they have come since then. They were brilliant in 2019 but, with an E.P. out, I think they have grown in stature and potential. That said, there are some fantastic articles around that gives us some different sides to the band and what they are about. I want to bring in some words from Loud and Quiet who spoke with Chris Bailey; they remarked how the band have complexity and depths that some might miss:

“Chris Bailey has figured out how to be himself. The frontman of Nottingham band Do Nothing, who are set to release their debut EP early in 2020, might have taken the long route to arrive at this point, but the British guitar music firmament had better steel itself for his impact.

“In the past I’ve tried to be something else, I’ve always tried to emulate something that I like,” he tells me. “But there came a certain point when I just started doing exactly what is me. We used to play quite complex music, but I just wanted to do something a bit more minimalist, that just had the ingredients that it needed and left a bit of space. And then later on you can add some fucking bells and flowers and shit when you’ve run out of simple things to do.”

If ‘LeBron James’, the lead track from the EP, is anything to go by, then Do Nothing are not quite the simple band that he makes out. Kasper Sandstrom’s guitar is clipped and chirrupy, slick and abrasive in alternating turns, grounded by the devious post-punk groove of Charlie Howarth’s bass and Andy Harrison’s drums, over which Bailey scatters a flurry of spoke-sung attack lines, a stream of non-sequitur exclamations. It is a wry, knowing track that side-steps the obvious confrontations of punk, detouring with unexpected left turns just when you feel you are getting a grasp on their character. As breakout songs go, it is a slam dunk”.

I will wrap things in a moment, but I wanted to show how great Do Nothing are by dropping in some songs and interview clips. It is clear that, in Chris Bailey, the band have a passionate, unique and excellent frontman who is taking the band to new levels. If you missed their Zero Dollar Bill E.P., then check out their Bandcamp page – the link is at the bottom of this feature -, as it is one of the best from this year. When NME reviewed it, they had this to say:

 “‘Contraband’ will likely be the release’s defining moment, though. It’s a dropping of the guard where their signature absent delivery eases off, and the guitars and lyrics coalesce into something flecked with a gripping sadness and agony. The confusion and anger from those early singles remain on ‘LeBron James’, a sinister track and witty lyricism where Bailey ends up bemoaning that he got “all dressed up for nothing”, like a moody child mid-tantrum. ‘Fits’, penned about the emotions of drifting away from the things that meant a lot to you when you were younger, delivers a final thrilling sucker-punch.

PHOTO CREDIT: Adrian Vitelleschi-Cook

If you’re faced with a sense of confusion or boredom at the state of things in life right now – then Do Nothing are the people providing your anthems. After all, the band have said they deal in such currencies. It might have taken some working out, but this EP has all the makings of a legendary first statement. They’re a voice that we should be immensely thankful for right now”.

I am excited to see where Do Nothing head in the next year or so. I am not sure how many of their planned live dates can go ahead this year, but I know they will be back in force next year! I love their Zero Dollar Bill E.P., and I think that the band are going to be festival darlings soon enough. The whole band market is very healthy right now, and there are some great acts coming from the Nottingham area. Follow Do Nothing, and go and support them any way you can. Maybe it is early days for them and, whilst they have made some smaller impression at the moment, the boys in the band are primed to leave…

A huge footprint.

_________________

Follow Do Nothing

Facebook:

https://www.facebook.com/TheBandDoNothing/

Twitter:

https://twitter.com/donothingband

Bandcamp:

https://thebanddonothing.bandcamp.com/

Spotify:

https://open.spotify.com/artist/73N7cGNNww6Uod1d3IiBKP

YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsEvr7uvOG8sRNI92TuHtwg

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