FEATURE: Vinyl Corner: John Grant - Pale Green Ghosts

FEATURE:

 

 

Vinyl Corner

John Grant - Pale Green Ghosts

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BECAUSE there is some…

John Grant news and future album action, I wanted to include his second solo album, Pale Green Ghosts, in Vinyl Corner. His album, Boy from Michigan, arrives on 25th June. He unveiled the title track on 24th March and, after one listen, it is clear that Grant is on peak form! I want to return to 2013 and the brilliant Pale Green Ghosts. One should buy the album on vinyl, as it is a wonderful thing:

“Pale Green Ghosts is the second solo album by former The Czars frontman John Grant, released on March 11, 2013 on the Bella Union label. Pale Green Ghosts was recorded in Reykjavík, Iceland with Icelandic electronic musician Birgir Þórarinsson (a.k.a. Biggi Veira) of electro-pop group Gus Gus, and also features a range of local musicians on the album as well as Sinéad O'Connor singing backing vocals.

The title refers to the Russian olive trees that stand along the I-25 highway near Grant's family home in the small town of Parker, Colorado”.

I am going to bring in a couple of positive reviews for Pale Green Ghosts in a minute. First, I want to bring in some snippets from an interview from The Guardian. We learn about Grant’s HIV diagnosis, life after The Czars, and what it was like recording his new album:

“As soon as he landed in Sweden, Grant had to find a doctor. A week later the test results confirmed his fears: he was HIV positive.

"I was in shock," he says, falteringly, sitting on a couch in his west London hotel room, clutching a cushion to his chest. "It was a really, really dark time." With his strong brow and heavy beard, the burly 44-year-old has the face of a melancholy Viking.

The diagnosis comes up within the first 10 minutes of the interview, in response to a simple question about why making his new album, Pale Green Ghosts, took longer than expected. I would be taken aback by Grant's candour had I not already seen him break the news on stage last summer, to the immense surprise and confusion of the audience, while performing at London's Meltdown festival with New York disco act Hercules and Love Affair.

Even though he recorded the new album in his adopted Reykjavik, with Biggi Veira of electro-pop group GusGus, it's a record consumed by his past. "It's about putting a puzzle together," he says. "You're trying to figure stuff out." The title refers to the Russian olive trees that stand along the I-25 highway near his family home in the small town of Parker, Colorado. "They have these pale green leaves with a silvery back, so they're sort of luminescent in the moonlight," he says, enraptured. "And at the end of May every year, like clockwork, they grow these tiny little yellow flowers that exude the most beautiful fragrance I've ever smelled."

In 2004, after a decade of good reviews and poor sales, the rest of the Czars abandoned Grant, and he doesn't blame them. He joined AA, moved to New York and quit music to become a hospital interpreter. It was with great reluctance that he finally accepted an invitation to join the band Midlake in Denton, Texas to work on Queen of Denmark in 2009. It turned out to be a joyous and transformational creative experience, but other areas of his life were in chaos.

Only after his HIV diagnosis has Grant accepted that he hadn't conquered his addiction but simply transferred it from substances to sex. "If I can't go out and do fat rails [of cocaine] off the bathroom floor at a club, I want to at least have my sex, because sex is natural. Nobody's going to deny me that, right? But that's just cheating. I was out there fucking for a purpose, to hurt myself, to punish myself for not being good enough. And when I realised I had to deal with that too, I was just so tired. I was like, Are you kidding me? I can't relate in a normal way to anything! I mean, it's enough to make you despair."

There has been so much drama in Grant's life that one can't help but dwell on it, which makes him seem more serious and self-obsessed than he is. Give him the option and he will talk eloquently about gay rights, the Pussy Riot case or the confounding complexity of Icelandic grammar, which challenges even a polyglot "language freak" like Grant. But he keeps getting sucked back into mysteries even more unfathomable”.

I really love his fourth studio album, Love Is Magic, of 2018, though I feel his first couple of solo albums are his best. Queen of Denmark is his phenomenal debut. I think Pale Green Ghosts is a worthy and very solid follow-up.

Pale Green Ghosts accrued some love and positivity from critics. I will quote from a deep review in a second but, now, a briefer one from NME:

“Three songs in, former Czars singer John Grant brands himself “the greatest motherfucker”. You can kinda see what he’s getting at because, for his second album, he’s all but ditched the ’70s soft-rock sound of debut ‘Queen Of Denmark’ in favour of dark ’80s electro. The risk pays off. Grant’s rich voice dovetails beautifully with the silvery synths of ‘GMF’ and ‘Vietnam’, and he gets away with channelling The Human League on ‘Black Belt’. His lyrics are brave, too – see ‘Ernest Borgnine’, where he wryly references his HIV-positive status. He said it best himself: this is audacious stuff from one talented motherfucker”.

In another review, Alex Pedtridis of The Guardian had a lot of kind things to say about one of the strongest albums of 2013:

“As anyone who's spent an evening nodding understandingly while a friend bangs on and on and on about their ex will attest, there are more enjoyable and rewarding ways to spend your time. It says something about Grant's confounding brilliance as a songwriter that it's hard to imagine a more enjoyable and rewarding hour of music being released this year than Pale Green Ghosts. Whether detailing the agonising death throes of a relationship – or rather, his relationship – on You Don't Have To, or enumerating his multiple personal failings on GMF, his lyrics are frequently astonishing, filled with vivid metaphors and perfect comic timing. Depression, he suggests at one point, is like "a cold, concrete room with fluorescent lighting", adding: "Which, as you know, makes everything look bad".

The album's closer, Glacier, offers what you might conceivably describe as seven minutes of inspirational messages for teenagers who find themselves in the position Grant was once himself in, growing up gay in a religious household. But that makes it sound awful, and Glacier is variously funny, wise, foul-mouthed with rage and impossibly moving. "This pain that's moving through you is like a glacier," he sings, "carving out deep valleys and creating spectacular landscapes, and nourishing the ground with precious metals and other stuff." There's something about that vague, dismissive "and other stuff" that both leavens the mood and makes the song's emotional punch even more winding.

A collaboration with Birgir Thórarinsson of Icelandic electronic experimentalists Gus Gus, it's undoubtedly a darker and harsher-sounding album than its predecessor. Some of the soft-rock lushness the Texas band Midlake brought to Queen of Denmark has been stripped away and replaced by sparse electronics and occasionally rather ominous-sounding string arrangements: the words of Ernest Borgnine address Grant's HIV diagnosis with a combination of black humour and stoical determination, but the music tells a slightly different story. It swims around his voice, dislocated and presageful; the opening synth riff sounds as if it's falling apart as it plays. But Grant's way with a melody never fails him, even when his lyrics are at their most dyspeptic. In fact, you sometimes get the sense that the more likely the song's words are to tie your stomach in knots, the more likely they are to come couched in a warm, gorgeously lulling tune. If our old chum TC thinks his depiction in It Doesn't Matter to Him errs on the unfair side, he can always console himself with the fact that he inadvertently inspired an exquisite piece of music. In fact, he's inadvertently inspired a genuinely remarkable album: self-obsessed but completely compelling, profoundly discomforting but beautiful, lost in its own fathomless personal misery, but warm, funny and wise. It shouldn't work, but it does”.

In preparation for new John Grant material, I have been revisiting some of his previous work. I think that Pale Green Ghosts is one of his very finest releases; an album that offers so much to the listener. One of the most original and popular voices in music, go and buy this album in vinyl if you can. Ahead of the release of Boy from Michigan, revisit the wonderful…

PALE Green Ghosts.

FEATURE: Brief Return: Kate Bush and the Q Interview of 2001

FEATURE:

 

 

Brief Return

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush with John Lydon at the Q Awards in October 2001 

Kate Bush and the Q Interview of 2001

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THIS is the final feature…

that I will take from the MOJO edition that came out recently. Among the Kate Bush features that were in there, one that really struck me was a great and memorable interview that she provided to Q in 2001. To mark twenty years (almost) since Bush briefly returned to the media spotlight, I wanted to provide some reflections on that interview. There is a great photo in the magazine with Bush at the Q Awards in October 2001 with one of her heroes, John Lydon. I remember that time and, as it was a month after the terrorist attacks in the U.S., the atmosphere must have been less jovial and celebratory than unusual. John Hazelwood writes for MOJO and he started off the article by asking why Bush sort of came out of a wilderness and spoke to Q. Her last album was 1993’s The Red Shoes; it would be another four years before she came out with the double album, Aerial. As that album was in her mind in 2001, maybe she was keen to talk about music or, knowing the album might not come out for a while, show the public that she was still about! In 1998, Bush became a mother. The public were informed of that through newspaper stories and rumours. I can understand why Bush would have wanted to engage with a magazine and make an appearance.

Bush said herself that it was weird that she was giving an interview when she had no work out. I suppose that is the way we have been conditioned: that actors, musicians and anyone in the creative industries only conducts interviews when they have something to sell; the fact that they would agree to an interview without that motivation seems strange. Regardless, Bush was doing something very rare in music (especially for someone as popular as her) and there were clear nerves from her. Q was MOJO’s sister magazine (it sadly came to an end last year). I love how Hazelwood describes his meeting with Bush. She wanted to control her nerves by taking control of the in interview. Having the setting as one of the Harrods restaurants might not be the most obvious location for an interview but, as he says, she was hiding in plain sight – nobody clocked her or made a fuss. Indeed, Hazelwood wondered if he would recognise Bush when he walked in! The fact that she looked like a slightly older version of her younger self meant that, instantly, any potential embarrassment was averted. There was a mix of the extravagant and homely – just what you would expect from Kate Bush! She was in quite a posh setting but, rather than being flanked by a team and creating a tense environment, she was on a shopping trip with her family.

With Danny McIntosh and her young son, Bertie, she could kill two birds with one stone by getting some shopping done and doing an interview (as one does!). I am not sure whether she would have seen it as a massive deal. So many years after her last interview and round of promotion, few would have expected any word from her! Bertie and his dad departed, so it was left to Bush and Hazelwood to chat. In chronological terms, I suppose the short film, The Line, the Cross and the Curve was one of the most recent and discussion-worthy jumping-off points. Bush stated how she regretted doing it: “I was so tired. I’m very pleased with four minutes of it, but very disappointed with the rest”. Bush stated (perhaps unfairly) how she blew the chance to make something big and important. To be fair, she was biting off a lot by writing, directing as well as appearing in the film. If she had let someone else direct then that might have resulted in a better product. Bush was directing videos and fully involved in the creative process, so I can appreciate why she was determined to take on all these duties. She wanted the film to resemble, as closely as possible, what she had in mind. As she had recorded The Red Shoes and things were pretty hectic; maybe her quality control and concentration was not at a high level.  

I really like The Line, the Cross and the Curve, though the gulf between expectation and the final result must have been quite extreme. Bush explained how she was seen in a negative light at that point, much like she was when The Dreaming arrived in 1982 – “It dissipated my energy severely and threw me into a state of exhaustion. You just get worn down”. The fact that her mother, Hannah, died in 1992 and she had this couple of years of negativity and depression resulted in her stepping away from the limelight. Many people ask why Bush ‘disappeared’. She was not being reclusive or quitting music. Instead, she was still mourning her mother’s death and having to process some of the most negative press of her career. She also broke up with her long-time boyfriend, Del Palmer, around this same period. It was a devastating and hard time where she felt detachment was a way to cope. Watching, as she said, a lot of rubbish T.V. and not being motivated to work, it is as bit of a blessing that Bush was able to recover, be inspired to work and not retire from music. The fact she found new love and meaning is a big reason why she wanted to be interviewed in 2001. As she told Hazelwood: “…I look at him and I know it does”. She was referring to a belief in magic after the birth of her son.

Clearly, Bush was in a much better headspace and she had recovered a lot of purpose and happiness since 1993. Bush was asked whether she would want her son to follow her into music. She explained how she wants him to be happy; she knows how tough the industry can be. Asked whether her own music made her happy, Bush answered with “Yeah, sort of…”. Hazelwood raced ahead in time and noted how Bertie would become Albert. He would study Physics at Oxford University and join her on the stage for 2014’s Before the Dawn. Bush was giving an interview, I guess, to say to fans and her label at the time (EMI) to be patient and she was still very much around. She had bought herself time with Bertie and being in a family. That familial setting and happiness inspired a lot of Aerial and, with that, she would go on to undertake new interviews. As we look ahead to twenty years since that interview, there has almost been as long a gap as the seven or eight years between The Red Shoes and the 2001 Q interview. She did some interviews in 2016 to promote the live album of her Before the Dawn residency but, since then, there has been very little. Maybe we will not see a similar interview where Bush speaks with a magazine or newspaper a few years before a new album comes out. A lot has changed since 2001. She has a grown-up son and there is probably not the same expectation for her to come back. After a bad year in 1993 and some bad press, the fact she started a new family meant, to me, an album was inevitable. Maybe she will follow 50 Words for Snow soon but, with so many magazine features and books about her being released, we have plenty to keep us occupied! I love the MOJO spread regarding the Q interview. Who else but Bush would hold an interview at a Harrods restaurant and talk about her past work just after her family has left to do some shopping?! Thinking about it and it…

 IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush during her Before the Dawn residency in 2014/PHOTO CREDIT: Ken McKay/Rex Features

COULD only be her!

FEATURE: One Love: Massive Attack’s Game-Changing Debut Album, Blue Lines, at Thirty

FEATURE:

 

 

One Love

Massive Attack’s Game-Changing Debut Album, Blue Lines, at Thirty

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I am going to lean heavily…

on other writers and features because, when it comes to an album as important and scene-shifting as Massive Attack’s debut, Blue Lines, I cannot do it full justice! I just want to nod to an album that has made such an impact on so many people’s lives through the years. Whilst we were seeing incredible Hip-Hop and Rap emerge from the U.S. in the late-1980s and early-1990s, there was this movement in the U.K. that was very much our own. Whether you see Massive Attack as pioneers of Trip-Hop or a British form of Hip-Hop, it was an exciting time for music! I associate 1991 with being all about Pop and Hip-Hop, yet there was this movement forming in Bristol that was incredibly inventive and fresh. Massive Attack formed in 1988 in Bristol, by Robert ‘3D’ Del Naja, Adrian ‘Tricky’ Thaws, Andrew ‘Mushroom’ Vowles and Grant ‘Daddy G’ Marshall. Although Blue Lines (released on 8th April, 1991) is a monumental record, the band did put out other genius albums – including 1994’s Protection and 1998’s Mezzanine. I think that Blue Lines is not only one of the biggest Trip-Hop albums of all-time. It is one of the greatest albums full stop. I am bringing in a couple of Blue Line reviews to end this feature. I want to borrow heavily from a feature on the Albuism website from 2016, as they marked twenty-five years of a classic. The story behind Blue Lines is fascinating:

“The trio of Robert “3D” Del Naja, Grant “Daddy G” Marshall, and Andrew “Mushroom” Vowles is most commonly regarded as one of the driving forces behind the emergence of trip-hop, the musical style that developed in the early-to-mid 1990s, predicated upon the confluence of electronic, hip-hop, reggae, dub, bass, R&B, funk, and jazz music, among other sonic inspirations. However, the media-constructed term itself didn’t formally enter the musical lexicon until June 1994, when Mixmag journalist Andy Pemberton coined it in reference to “In/Flux,” one of DJ Shadow’s earliest singles. By that time, Massive Attack’s career had already been evolving for a handful of years, so the trip-hop label was subsequently bestowed upon them and retroactively applied to their initial recordings.

From their earliest days to their aforementioned recent recordings, Massive Attack have avoided succumbing to narcissism and the celebrity spotlight, as their mugs have never appeared on any of their albums or singles’ front covers. It would seem, then, that the group prefers for their music, and not their faces, to define their artistic identity whilst preserving their professional integrity. Moreover, their reputation as ambassadors of the so-called Bristol Sound has always seemed to make the group a bit uneasy. “There’s this Bristol myth,” a dismissive 3D insisted during an April 1991 NME interview. “Everyone talks about a Bristol sound, but half our album was done in London and the video for ‘Unfinished Sympathy’ was shot in LA.”

Geographical contextualization aside, Blue Lines, their debut long player from which the masterful “Unfinished Sympathy” originates, was a landmark achievement at the time of its release. Together with Soul II Soul’s Club Classics Vol. One (1989), The KLF’s White Room (1991), LFO’s Frequencies (1991), The Orb’s The Orb's Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld (1991), and Primal Scream’s Screamadelica (1991), Blue Lines proved a vital blueprint for the proliferation of British dance music as the end of the 20th century approached. Its mellifluous mélange of various inspirations characterized by assorted hip-hop breakbeats, expertly selected samples (Billy Cobham, Funkadelic, Al Green, Isaac Hayes, etc.), dense dub rhythms, cerebral rhymes, and soulful guest vocals is unabashedly reverential to the past, but still represents a fresh and novel sound imitated by no one at the time.

Recorded in Bristol and London in 1990 into early 1991 and released on their own Wild Bunch imprint by way of Virgin/Circa, Blue Lines was the outcome not just of Massive Attack’s musical vision, but also a fair amount of coaxing by one of the group’s most devoted champions. “We were lazy Bristol twats,” Daddy G conceded to The Observer in 2004. “It was Neneh Cherry who kicked our arses and got us in the studio. We recorded a lot at her house, in her baby's room. It stank for months and eventually we found a dirty nappy behind a radiator. I was still DJing, but what we were trying to do was create dance music for the head, rather than the feet. I think it's our freshest album, we were at our strongest then.” Executive produced by Cherry’s musical collaborator and husband, Cameron “Booga Bear” McVey, the album was co-produced by the group and the late Jonny Dollar. (As a side note, due to assumed sensitivities concerning the Persian Gulf War raging at the time of the album's completion and per McVey's urging, the initial pressings of Blue Lines and the "Unfinished Sympathy" single were adorned with the temporarily abbreviated band moniker "Massive." A ceasefire was declared on February 28, 1991, and "Attack" was then reincorporated for all subsequent LP pressings and singles.)

Album opener and third single “Safe From Harm” offers one of the album’s most dramatic and foreboding arrangements, largely built around the sample of the revered jazz fusion composer Billy Cobham’s “Stratus” (1973). The track’s subdued, swirling sonics provide the perfect backdrop for Nelson’s defiant voice to shine, as she vows to protect her “baby” amidst the inevitable madness of the world and convincingly admonishes “if you hurt what's mine / I'll sure as hell retaliate.”

Though Nelson casts a wide spell across Blue Lines, the same can absolutely be said for the prolific, sweet-voiced reggae crooner Horace Andy, who features on three tracks with the geopolitically charged album closer “Hymn of the Big Wheel” the most memorable of the bunch. Andy assumes a paternal tone throughout the track, as he reflects on life (“the wheel”) and the human struggle to preserve one’s innocence in the midst of the world’s destructive forces. He laments the environmental impact of industrialization across the song’s most poignant verse:

We sang about the sun and danced among the trees / And we listened to the whisper of the city on the breeze / Will you cry in the most in a lead-free zone / Down within the shadows where the factories drone / On the surface of the wheel they build another town / And so the green come tumbling down / Yes close your eyes and hold me tight / And I'll show you sunset sometime again

Despite its plaintive lyrics, “Hymn of the Big Wheel” concludes with a redemptive refrain, as the sanguine Andy surmises “The ghetto sun will nurture life / and mend my soul sometime again.”

In the twenty-five years since Massive Attack dropped Blue Lines, the group has persevered through inter-band turmoil, departures, and reunions to cultivate one of the most indispensable discographies of the past few decades, with Protection (1994) and Mezzanine (1998) completing their trio of transcendent album masterpieces. For better or worse, they will likely forever be regarded as the patriarchs of trip-hop, with Blue Lines the natural precursor to other esteemed debut LPs with parallel sonic pedigrees and structures, such as Portishead’s Dummy (1994) and their long-time comrade Tricky’s Maxinquaye (1995).

With no pun intended, trip-hop is a tricky term, a la the equally contrived “neo-soul.” Particularly so when artists’ musical identities are more broadly associated with a genre or movement, which unfairly obscures the merits of their specific works.  Indeed, such media-driven, cookie-cutter categorization risks diminishing the uniqueness and dynamism of a band like Massive Attack. But those able to cast such superfluous labels aside recognize Massive Attack’s music for what is fundamentally is. Quite simply, great music”.

It is no surprise that such a bold and brilliant album got critics talking in 1991! I want to bring in a couple of retrospective reviews that show, no matter when critics approach Blue Lines, it resonates and leaves a mark. This is what AllMusic said in their review:

“The first masterpiece of what was only termed trip-hop much later, Blue Lines filtered American hip-hop through the lens of British club culture, a stylish, nocturnal sense of scene that encompassed music from rare groove to dub to dance. The album balances dark, diva-led club jams along the lines of Soul II Soul with some of the best British rap (vocals and production) heard up to that point, occasionally on the same track. The opener "Safe from Harm" is the best example, with diva vocalist Shara Nelson trading off lines with the group's own monotone (yet effective) rapping. Even more than hip-hop or dance, however, dub is the big touchstone on Blue Lines. Most of the productions aren't quite as earthy as you'd expect, but the influence is palpable in the atmospherics of the songs, like the faraway electric piano on "One Love" (with beautiful vocals from the near-legendary Horace Andy). One track, "Five Man Army," makes the dub inspiration explicit, with a clattering percussion line, moderate reverb on the guitar and drums, and Andy's exquisite falsetto flitting over the chorus. Blue Lines isn't all darkness, either -- "Be Thankful for What You've Got" is quite close to the smooth soul tune conjured by its title, and "Unfinished Sympathy" -- the group's first classic production -- is a tremendously moving fusion of up-tempo hip-hop and dancefloor jam with slow-moving, syrupy strings. Flaunting both their range and their tremendously evocative productions, Massive Attack recorded one of the best dance albums of all time”.

I want to end by sourcing from an extensive Pitchfork review from 2012 (they reviewed the box-set of Blue Lines):

“In fact, those Raw Like Sushi credits (Vowles' for programming, Del Naja's for co-writing "Manchild") were the only real music-industry bona fides any of the principal contributors to Blue Lines had going into it, aside from vocalists Shara Nelson and roots reggae veteran Horace Andy. But somehow the group realized a remarkable and seamless sonic identity. That's clear from the arresting opener "Safe From Harm", which spins an aggressive drumbeat, Del Naja's rap, Nelson's soulful vocals, and a mist of sustained minor-key synths around an intimidatingly muscular bass loop. From that moment, every major part of the Massive Attack profile is already present, from the collaging of genres to the spacious, nocturnal sonic environment to the heavy dose of paranoia that permeates it all.

They spend the rest of the album exploring variations on these themes. "One Love," with Andy on vocals, has a digital dancehall feel, a creepy-funky electric piano riff, and a scratched sample of a blaring horn section that predates Pharoahe Monch's "Simon Says" by almost a decade. "Daydreaming", with its scratchy breakbeat drums, is more directly hip-hop than most of the rest of the album, but the layers of atmospheric synthesizers and Tricky's felonious near-whisper make it clear that Massive Attack was up to something entirely different from what every other rap producer at the time was doing.

Blue Lines brought producers around to its unique vision. By the time Massive released Protection three years later, the group's renegade approach had been copied enough times to become a full-on movement. They'd go on to produce their masterpiece, Mezzanine, a couple of years after, but by then the project had already started to splinter. Tricky split from the collective after Protection to follow his own solo vision, while the core trio behind it would eventually burn out acrimoniously, with Vowles and then Marshall leaving Del Naja to produce increasingly less rewarding music under the group's name. Meanwhile, trip-hop in general had its edges polished off by genteel musicians who transformed it into soundtracks for fashionable hotel lobbies.

Still, that doesn't change the fact that Blue Lines was a startling record when it came out, and it remains one now. For this reissue it received a new mix and a new mastering job straight from the original tapes. It's available as a CD, in digital form in standard and high fidelity formats, and as a set of two LPs and a DVD of high resolution audio files. There aren't any bonus tracks, and aside from a reproduction promo poster in the vinyl edition there aren't any add-ons either. Frankly they'd just be a distraction from the underlying theme that becomes clear once you get absorbed into the music, which is that Blue Lines is still Blue Lines, and most of the world is still trying to catch up to it”.

I should have put Blue Lines in Vinyl Corner (I might have already done so thinking about it). That said, I would encourage people to own Blue Lines on vinyl as it such a phenomenal album that sound great on that format! From the epic and peerless Unfinish Sympathy to the phenomenal and intense opener of Safe from Harm, Blue Lines is a masterpiece! Ahead of its thirtieth anniversary on 8th April, I wanted to pay my respects and give my thanks to…

MASSIVE Attack’s spectacular debut.

FEATURE: The Lockdown Playlist: The Best of Pharrell Williams

FEATURE:

 

 

The Lockdown Playlist

PHOTO CREDIT: Brian Bowen Smith/NBC/NBCU Photo Bank via Getty Images 

The Best of Pharrell Williams

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IN this Pharrell Williams…

birthday Lockdown Playlist, I am not including songs that he has performed and written as the main focus (though he does appear on some of the tracks). As a tremendous and broad producer, this is a collection of songs where Williams is credited as a producer. If you are not familiar with him, here is some information:

“Pharrell Lanscilo Williams (/fəˈrɛl/; born April 5, 1973) is an American singer, songwriter, record producer, fashion designer and entrepreneur. Alongside close friend Chad Hugo, he formed the hip hop and R&B production duo The Neptunes in the early 1990s, with whom he has produced songs for various recording artists. In 1999, he became lead vocalist of the band N.E.R.D., which he formed with Hugo and Shay Haley.

Williams released his debut solo album, In My Mind, in 2006. In 2013, he was featured on the song "Blurred Lines" with Robin Thicke and T.I., and his song "Happy" was the lead single for the soundtrack of the film Despicable Me 2. In the same year, he was featured on Daft Punk's single "Get Lucky", which won Record of the Year and Best Pop Duo/Group Performance at the 56th Grammy Awards.[6] His second album, Girl, was released in 2014.

Williams has received numerous accolades and nominations. He has won 13 Grammy Awards, including three for Producer of the Year, Non-Classical (one as a member of The Neptunes). He is also a two-time Academy Award nominee: in 2014 for Best Original Song, for "Happy" (from Despicable Me 2); and in 2017 for Best Picture, as a producer of Hidden Figures”.

To nod to and honour some of his incredible production skills, this Lockdown Playlist salutes Pharrell Williams ahead of his birthday on 5th April. Much respect to a…

TREMDNOUS and hugely influential talent.

FEATURE: I Want to Tell You: The Seven Best Tracks from The Beatles’ 1966 Album, Revolver

FEATURE:

 

I Want to Tell You

The Seven Best Tracks from The Beatles’ 1966 Album, Revolver

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AS 6th April…

 IN THIS PHOTO: The Beatles in Washington D.C. on 13th August, 1966

marks fifty-five years since the first session of what would become The Beatles’ album, Revolver, started, this feature commemorates that. The iconic foursome started in the evening at Abbey Road Studios, with the recording of the basic track of a new John Lennon song, Tomorrow Never Knows. In terms of ambition, they were going in with the most complex and highly-regarded song! Here is some more information regarding a hugely important date:

“Recording 'Mark I' (working title of `Tomorrow Never Knows')(takes 1-3). Studio 3. Abbey Road.

"John showed up with a song after we'd had a couple of days off. I remember being in Brian Epstein's house in Chapel Street in Belgravia. We met up and John had a song that was all on the chord of C, which in our minds was a perfectly good idea.

I was wondering how George Martin was going to take it, because it was a radical departure; we'd always had at least three chords, and maybe a change for the middle eight. Suddenly this was John just strumming on C rather earnestly - 'Lay down your mind…' And the words were all very deep and meaningful - certainly not 'Thank You Girl'; a bit of a change from all that.

George Martin took it very well. He said, 'Rather interesting, John. Jolly interesting!' So we got in and recorded it as a fairly straightforward rock'n'roll band thing." - Paul, from The Beatles Anthology”.

The fourteen-track album is not only one of the best from The Beatles; it is one of the very best albums that has ever been released. To mark the first Revolver recording session, I have selected the seven best tracks from the album. It is hard to cut the album in half like that, such is the quality throughout! Here are my seven favourite cuts from a hugely influential album. On 6th April, it will be fifty-five years since The Beatles started work on…

A timeless masterpiece.

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Eleanor Rigby

Main Songwriter: Paul McCartney

Recorded: 28th–29th April and 6th June, 1966

Length: 2:07

Paul McCartney: vocals

John Lennon: harmony vocals

George Harrison: harmony vocals

Tony Gilbert, Sidney Sax, John Sharpe, Jurgen Hess: violin

Stephen Shingles, John Underwood: viola

Derek Simpson, Norman Jones: cello

“Paul McCartney came up with the initial idea in the music room in the basement of Jane Asher’s family home in Wimpole Street, London.

I wrote it at the piano, just vamping an E minor chord; letting that stay as a vamp and putting a melody over it, just danced over the top of it. It has almost Asian Indian rhythms.

Paul McCartney, Many Years From Now, Barry Miles” – The Beatles Bible

Here, There and Everywhere

Main Songwriter: Paul McCartney

Recorded: 14th, 16th and 17th June, 1966

Length: 2:25

Paul McCartney: vocals, acoustic guitar, bass, finger clicks

John Lennon: backing vocals, finger clicks

George Harrison: backing vocals, lead guitar, finger clicks

Ringo Starr: drums, finger clicks

“Interestingly, McCartney claims to have had a demo version in March 1965, while The Beatles filmed Help! in Obertauern, Austria.

John and I shared a room and we were taking off our heavy ski boots after a day’s filming, ready to have a shower and get ready for the nice bit, the evening meal and the drinks. We were playing a cassette of our new recordings and my song ‘Here, There And Everywhere’ was on. And I remember John saying, ‘You know, I probably like that better than any of my songs on the tape.’ Coming from John, that was high praise indeed.

Paul McCartney, Anthology” – The Beatles Bible

Yellow Submarine

Main Songwriter: Paul McCartney

Recorded: 26th May and 1st June, 1966

Length: 2:39

Ringo Starr: vocals, drums

John Lennon: backing vocals, acoustic guitar

Paul McCartney: backing vocals, bass

George Harrison: backing vocals, tambourine

Mal Evans: backing vocals, bass drum

Neil Aspinall, George Martin, Geoff Emerick, Pattie Harrison, Brian Jones, Marianne Faithfull, Alf Bicknell: backing vocals

“Released as a double a-side with ‘Eleanor Rigby’, ‘Yellow Submarine’ has become a divisive song among Beatles fans. To many it’s a charming singalong for all ages; for others, it’s one of the band’s weakest moments, and an unnecessary bout of whimsy on the otherwise flawless Revolver.

I don’t actually know where they got the idea for it; I just felt it was a really interesting track for me to do. I’d been doing a lot of covers. At that time I did either covers or something they wrote specifically for me.

Ringo Starr, Anthology

I remember lying in bed one night, in that moment before you’re falling asleep – that little twilight moment when a silly idea comes into your head – and thinking of ‘Yellow Submarine’: ‘We all live in a yellow submarine…’

I quite like children’s things; I like children’s minds and imagination. So it didn’t seem uncool to me to have a pretty surreal idea that was also a children’s idea. I thought also, with Ringo being so good with children – a knockabout uncle type – it might not be a bad idea for him to have a children’s song, rather than a very serious song. He wasn’t that keen on singing.

Paul McCartney, Anthology” – The Beatles Bible

She Said She Said

Main Songwriter: John Lennon

Recorded: 21st June, 1966

Length: 2:36

John Lennon: vocals, rhythm guitar, Hammond organ

George Harrison: backing vocals, lead guitar, bass guitar

Ringo Starr: drums, shaker

“The final track recorded for Revolver, ‘She Said She Said’ was inspired by an LSD-influenced conversation between John Lennon and actor Peter Fonda.

During The Beatles’ US tour in the summer of 1965, they rented a house in Los Angeles’ Mulholland Drive. On 24 August they played host to Roger McGuinn and David Crosby of The Byrds, and the two parties, apart from Paul McCartney, spent the day tripping on LSD.

The actor Peter Fonda arrived at the house, also on acid. He attempted to comfort Harrison, who thought he was dying.

I told him there was nothing to be afraid of and that all he needed to do was relax. I said that I knew what it was like to be dead because when I was 10 years old I’d accidentally shot myself in the stomach and my heart stopped beating three times while I was on the operating table because I’d lost so much blood.

John was passing at the time and heard me saying ‘I know what it’s like to be dead’. He looked at me and said, ‘You’re making me feel like I’ve never been born. Who put all that shit in your head?’

Peter Fonda

Lennon recounted the incident in 1980 in one of his final interviews, speaking to a journalist from Playboy magazine.

It’s an interesting track. The guitars are great on it. That was written after an acid trip in LA during a break in The Beatles’ tour where we were having fun with The Byrds and lots of girls. Some from Playboy, I believe. Peter Fonda came in when we were on acid and he kept coming up to me and sitting next to me and whispering, ‘I know what it’s like to be dead.’

He was describing an acid trip he’d been on. We didn’t want to hear about that! We were on an acid trip and the sun was shining and the girls were dancing and the whole thing was beautiful and Sixties, and this guy – who I really didn’t know; he hadn’t made Easy Rider or anything – kept coming over, wearing shades, saying, ‘I know what it’s like to be dead,’ and we kept leaving him because he was so boring! And I used it for the song, but I changed it to ‘she’ instead of ‘he’. It was scary. You know, a guy… when you’re flying high and [whispers] ‘I know what it’s like to be dead, man.’ I remembered the incident. Don’t tell me about it! I don’t want to know what it’s like to be dead!

John Lennon, All We Are Saying, David Sheff” – The Beatles Bible

And Your Bird Can Sing

Main Songwriter: John Lennon

Recorded: 20th and 26th April, 1966

Length: 2:00

John Lennon: vocals, rhythm guitar, handclaps

Paul McCartney: backing vocals, lead guitar, bass, handclaps

George Harrison: backing vocals, lead guitar, handclaps

Ringo Starr: drums, tambourine, handclaps

“Written primarily by John Lennon, ‘And Your Bird Can Sing’ is notable mainly for its cryptic lyrics and the twin guitar riffs – played by Paul McCartney and George Harrison – that drive the song.

While Lennon never revealed the inspiration behind the song, it is believed to refer to the rivalry between The Beatles and The Rolling Stones. Although the two groups were friends, Lennon saw the Stones as Beatles copyists, and the titular ‘bird’ may have been Marianne Faithfull.

Like ‘Rain’, ‘And Your Bird Can Sing’ hinted at knowledge denied to all but the enlightened, showing the influence of LSD. It is also likely that the oblique lyrics were an attempt at writing something akin to the wordplay of Bob Dylan, whose songs Lennon greatly admired.

Lennon was later dismissive of ‘And Your Bird Can Sing’, describing it as “a horror” and “throwaway”. Paul McCartney claims to have helped Lennon write the song.

‘And Your Bird Can Sing’ was John’s song. I suspect that I helped with the verses because the songs were nearly always written without second and third verses. I seem to remember working on that middle eight with him but it’s John’s song, 80-20 to John.

Paul McCartney, Many Years From Now, Barry Miles” – The Beatles Bible

For No One

Main Songwriter: Paul McCartney

Recorded: 9th, 16th and 19th May, 1966

Length: 2:00

Paul McCartney: vocals, bass, piano, clavichord

Ringo Starr: drums, tambourine, maracas

Alan Civil: horn

“‘For No One’, Paul McCartney’s meditation on the end of a love affair, was one of the highlights of the Revolver album.

The song was written in March 1966 while McCartney was on holiday with Jane Asher in Switzerland. It was originally called ‘Why Did It Die?’

I was in Switzerland on my first skiing holiday. I’d done a bit of skiing in Help! and quite liked it, so I went back and ended up in a little bathroom in a Swiss chalet writing ‘For No One’. I remember the descending bassline trick that it’s based on, and I remember the character in the song – the girl putting on her make-up.

Occasionally we’d have an idea for some new kind of instrumentation, particularly for solos… On ‘For No One’ I was interested in the French horn, because it was an instrument I’d always loved from when I was a kid. It’s a beautiful sound, so I went to George Martin and said, ‘How can we go about this?’ And he said, ‘Well, let me get the very finest.’

Paul McCartney, Anthology” – The Beatles Bible

Tomorrow Never Knows

Main Songwriter: John Lennon

Recorded: 6th, 7th and 22nd April, 1966

Length: 3:00

John Lennon: vocals, organ, tape loops

Paul McCartney: lead guitar, bass guitar, tape loops

George Harrison: guitar, sitar, tambura, tape loops

Ringo Starr: drums, tambourine, tape loops

George Martin: piano

“‘Tomorrow Never Knows’, the monumental closing track on Revolver, was also the first song to be recorded for the album.

While the title, like ‘A Hard Day’s Night’, was a Ringoism particularly liked by John Lennon, the lyrics were largely taken from The Psychedelic Experience, a 1964 book written by Harvard psychologists Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner, and Richard Alpert, which contained an adaptation of the ancient Tibetan Book of the Dead.

Lennon discovered The Psychedelic Experience at the Indica bookshop, co-owned by Barry Miles. On 1 April 1966 Lennon and Paul McCartney visited the bookshop.

John wanted a book by what sounded like ‘Nitz Ga’. It took Miles a few minutes to realise that he was looking for the German philosopher Nietzsche, long enough for John to become convinced that he was being ridiculed. He launched into an attack on intellectuals and university students and was only mollified when Paul told him that he had not understood what John was asking for either, and that Miles was not a university graduate but had been to art college, just like him. Immediately friendly again, John talked about Allen Ginsberg and the Beats, laughing about his school magazine the Daily Howl: ‘Tell Ginsberg I did it first!’ Miles found him a copy of The Portable Nietzsche and John began to scan the shelves. His eyes soon alighted upon a copy of The Psychedelic Experience, Dr Timothy Leary’s psychedelic version of the Tibetan Book of the Dead. John was delighted and settled down on the settee with the book. Right away, on page 14 in Leary’s introduction, he read, ‘Whenever in doubt, turn off your mind, relax, float downstream.’ He had found the first line of ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’, one of the Beatles’ most innovative songs.

Many Years From Now, Barry Miles” – The Beatles Bible

FEATURE: Lioness: International Treasure: Was Amy Winehouse the Last Great Original Voice and Icon?

FEATURE:

 

 

Lioness: International Treasure

PHOTO CREDIT: Phil Griffin (2006)

Was Amy Winehouse the Last Great Original Voice and Icon?

___________

SOME people might contest that question…

 PHOTO CREDIT: Paul Bergen/Redferns

and argue that there have been artists since Amy Winehouse’s passing who are iconic or have a more striking voice. Others might claim that Winehouse was a little overrated. I am writing this feature because 2021 marks two anniversaries. In October, it will fifteen years since her second studio album, Back to Black, was released. Before then, on 23rd July, it will be a decade since we lost one of the most extraordinary voices we have ever heard. Even though Winehouse struggled with addiction (alcohol abuse led to her untimely death at the age of twenty-seven) and there was controversy through her life, the legacy she has left and the music she released is so important and amazing. From her style and realness through to her unique voice, I think that Winehouse was one of the last true stars and icons – in the sense that so many artists look up to her and she has such a following. There are those who may say that Winehouse’s voice is a mix of influences like Billie Holiday and Sarah Vaughan. A documentary film, Amy, directed by Asif Kapadia and produced by James Gay-Rees, was released on 3rd  July, 2015. The film covers Winehouse's life, her relationships, her struggles with substance abuse both before and after her career blossomed. It is one of the most honest and memorable documentaries.

You are amazed by Winehouse’s talent but feel sad at the same time that she is not here. I think that the media villainised her and they projected this image that she was a wayward woman who courted trouble - whilst overlooking her immense talent. Not every media outlet, but certainly quite a few should hang their heads.. In actuality, Winehouse was a very down-to-earth and shy person who, I think, became overwhelmed by the pressures of fame and media intrusion. Fortunately, to coincide with the tenth anniversary of Winehouse’s passing, a new film will show her in a new light:

“A new Amy Winehouse film is set to air on BBC Two, marking 10 years since the singer’s death.

Amy Winehouse: 10 Years On has been commissioned by BBC Two and BBC Music to explore Winehouse through the people who knew her best.

According to a press release the film will be “shining a light on parts of her life that have, to date, not been heard about”.

The film is set to be told primarily from the perspective of Winehouse’s mother, Janis, whose perspective “often differs from the narrative we have been told before”.

“I don’t feel the world knew the true Amy, the one that I brought up, and I’m looking forward to the opportunity to offer an understanding of her roots and a deeper insight into the real Amy,” Janis said.

Other family members and friends will also contribute to the documentary, which is being described as a “female-driven interpretation of her life, her loves and her legacy”.

Before giving some biography about Winehouse and focusing on her two studio albums (a posthumous album, Lioness: Hidden Treasures, was released in 2011), I want to bring in something that has been brewing for a while now. Come this July it will be heart-breaking, as we mark a decade since Winehouse died. A daughter of Camden, London, I am sure we will see people congregate and pay tribute to a magnificent artist. There has been talk of an Amy Winehouse biopic for a few years. Last year, as NME reported, there has been some progress:

“A biopic about Amy Winehouse‘s life will be released in “a year or two”, her father Mitch has revealed.

Mitch has said the film will offer an truthful portrayal of the singer’s life after he previously hit out at Asif Kapadia’s 2015 documentary Amy for its “misleading” portrayal of the relationship between him and his daughter.

He told Paul Danan’s ‘The Morning After’ podcast: “We’ve got a lovely movie, a lovely Broadway show coming, and that’s how we’ll get our own back, by portraying Amy the way she was.”

He added that a script was currently in the works.

“The movie is gonna be in a year or two. We’ve gone beyond talks, we’re at script stage. The film is going to be a biopic,” he explained”.

I want to bring in some biographical information about Winehouse. She had this modest start with the debut album, Frank, in 2003 before becoming international with 2006’s Back to Black. In addition to addiction and personal struggles, she did receive awards and huge plaudits:  

“Amy Jade Winehouse was born on September 14, 1983, in the suburb of Southgate in London, England. Her father, Mitch Winehouse, worked as a cab driver, while mother Janis was employed as a pharmacist. In her early years, Winehouse was immersed in music; many of her uncles on her mother's side were professional jazz musicians, and her father sang as a child with his family. Winehouse's paternal grandmother was also once romantically involved with British jazz legend Ronnie Scott. Winehouse grew up listening to a diverse range of music, from James Taylor to Sarah Vaughan. At the age of 10, she was drawn to listen to American R&B and hip-hop acts, including TLC and Salt-N-Pepa, and she founded a short-lived amateur rap group called Sweet 'n Sour.

Amy Winehouse broke into the music business when, at age 16, a classmate passed on her demo tape to a record label. She signed her first record deal as a jazz vocalist, and her music later blossomed into an eclectic mix of jazz, pop, soul and R&B. Winehouse won five Grammy Awards connected to her 2006 album Back to Black, and earned acclaim for songs like the title track, "Rehab" and "Love Is a Losing Game."

Regardless of personal setbacks, 2009 proved to be another strong year for Winehouse. In 2008, her album Back to Black was declared the second-highest selling album in the world, and in 2009, she earned entry into the Guinness Book of World Records for "Most Grammy Awards Won by a British Female Act."

Aside from her music and the fact that she was grounded and relatable, I think Winehouse’s style and fashion is another reason why she is so revered and influential. Her love of 1960s girl groups might have led to her famous beehive hair. The  Cleopatra makeup look came from The Ronettes. Like icons such as Madonna and Prince, I think that Amy Winehouse had so many sides that makes her much more than an ordinary songwriter. It would have been interesting to hear where Winehouse headed after Back to Black had she recovered from addiction struggles and recorded more music. Although most people will agree Winehouse’s greatest album is Back in Black, I think that Frank is a marvellous debut. More indebted to her Jazz icon heroines, there is plenty of brilliance and promise throughout. This is what AllMusic wrote in their review:

“If a series of unfortunate comparisons (like the ones to follow) cause listeners to equate British vocalist Amy Winehouse with Macy Gray, it's only natural. Both come on like a hybrid of Billie Holiday and Lauryn Hill who's had a tipple and then attempted one more late-night set at a supper club than they should have. Despite her boozy persona and loose-limbed delivery, though, Winehouse is an excellent vocalist possessing both power and subtlety, the latter an increasingly rare commodity among contemporary female vocalists (whether jazz or R&B). What lifts her above Macy Gray is the fact that her music and her career haven't been marketed within an inch of their life. Instead of Gray's stale studio accompaniments, Winehouse has talented musicians playing loose charts behind her with room for a few solos. Instead of a series of vocal mellifluities programmed to digital perfection, Winehouse's record has the feeling of being allowed to grow on its own -- without being meddled with and fussed over (and losing its soul in the process). Simply hearing Winehouse vamp for a few minutes over some Brazilian guitar lines on "You Sent Me Flying" is a rare and immense pleasure. Also, like Nellie McKay (but unlike nearly all of her contemporaries), Winehouse songs like "Fuck Me Pumps," "Take the Box," and "I Heard Love Is Blind" cast a cool, critical gaze over the music scene, over the dating scene, and even over the singer herself. With "In My Bed," she even proves she can do a commercial R&B production, and a club version of "Moody's Mood for Love" not only solidifies her jazz credentials but proves she can survive in the age of Massive Attack”.

I do think that Back to Black was quite a big leap. More varied in terms of its themes and sounds (she retained producer Salaam Remi from Frank and joined up with Mark Ronson), I think that the mix of producers and Winehouse growing as an artist contributed to this strength and nuance. I am not going to go into depth regarding tracks from Back to Black, as I am ending this feature with an Amy Winehouse playing. I am going to finish by offering some conclusions. Before then, there is an interview that I want to source. In terms of the press for Back to Black, there was so much praise and love. This is how The Independent judged the album:

“That directness applies equally to her lyrics, whose sexual frankness and pottymouthed articulation leaves no room for misunderstanding. Lines such as "He left no time to regret/ Kept his dick wet/ With his same old safe bet" act like turbochargers on the emotion, bringing an unmistakable modern slant to the loping Fifties R&B of songs such as "Back to Black" and "Me & Mr Jones", an ironic Noughties equivalent of Billy Paul's affair anthem. When the same candid attitude is applied to female sexual obsession in "Wake Up Alone", the result is like Millie Jackson crossed with Peggy Lee, a blend of unashamed assertiveness and languid vocal power.

The lack of shame is probably the album's defining characteristic. From the opening "Rehab" to the closing "Addicted", there's none of the blame-shifting or hand-wringing apologia that American singers routinely employ. In the former - all fat horns, R&B feel and tubular bells punching up the lines - she refuses flip, therapeutic explanations for her melancholy and drinking ("There's nothing you can teach me/ That I can't learn from Mr Hathaway" - Donny, presumably); and in the latter, she gives equally short shrift to a flatmate's lover who smokes up all her stash without offering to replace it. If a man has treated her badly, as in "Tears Dry On Their Own", she doesn't whinge, just chides herself for placing too much faith in him: "I should just be my own best friend/ Not fuck myself in the head with stupid men"; and it's clearly hard for her to feel too guilty, in "You Know I'm No Good", about keeping two lovers on the go.

Productions, split almost equally between Salaam Remi and Mark Ronson, are perfectly sculpted to reflect the updated soul mode, with Motown-like grooves, Otis-style horn arrangements, and a rich, smoky Southern soul feel. But, for all its musical purchase on the past, what sets Winehouse's album apart from those of her peers is its rejection of genre clichés”.

Before concluding my discussion of her legacy, I want to source from an interview Paul Du Noyer conducted in 2004. Winehouse, at that point, was virtually unknown. For that reason, I think she is less guarded and we get a look at an artist who, through massive success, would be affected more by attention and fame:

“This year’s girl sits in a Camden Town tapas bar. She’s a young pop star in waiting with a record that everyone loves. But she endures the WORD photo shoot with a show of martyred patience. Amy Winehouse does not look as happy as you might expect, and I settle in for the interview thinking this one could be heavy going. But when our small talk turns to London her mood magically brightens.

“Oh, I love this city! I love it. Wherever I go in the world, to land back in London is the best feeling. I get to see so many amazing places when I’m working, like Miami, and I think, I could live here. But then I go, Yeah, but I wouldn’t be in London.”

Last year Amy Winehouse made a great London album. Frank was her diary of a torrid adolescence –she was just 19 when it was recorded – sung with the funky melisma of a jazz veteran and the glottal stops of a mouthy schoolgirl on the Piccadilly Line. It’s a great piece of modern British R&B: for all its vintage American stylings, Frank could not have been made anywhere but in London, in the 21st century. 

“Thank you so much!” she beams. “That is the best compliment you could pay to me. The city is really important to me. I’ve always been a really independent girl. From the age of 13 or so I’ve always found my own way in the city and there’s nothing I like more than to find another part that I didn’t already know. It really fascinates me. It’s a really English album but I guess I’m a typically English girl.”

So we’re getting along OK, this year’s girl and this morning’s interviewer. She has a striking, exotic look. Being curvy and with a pronounced bone structure Winehouse looks Amazonian in some photographs, but is actually petite in person. Yet she has a cold stare that you guess she could deploy to deadly effect. She is very bright, though not in a systematic way, as if she has learnt so much so quickly that the patterns have not yet come together in her head. She seems a forthright young woman, and her conversational manner is confrontational. By the interview’s end, however, she looks preoccupied by private anxieties.

She already has a reputation for moodiness. Overnight success seldom makes people easier to get along with. But some reports suggest that Amy Winehouse has gone from nought to Van Morrison. Sauntering over to Camden Town I felt like one of those brave chaps in bomb disposal, who crawl up to unexploded devices. With perspiring brow they manipulate the delicate, deadly wiring: one false move and – KA-BOOM! – there goes the neighbourhood. But Amy is now under pressure from her minders to curb her enthusiasm for controversy. Gone are scathing comments about her record company, and the criticisms of her album and the sideswipes at Dido. (Well, almost. Like a recovering smoker she can’t resist a sly one now and then.)

Frank was released last October to great reviews: it was often called the debut of the year. But Top 20 action had to wait until this year: after a couple of Brit nominations Frank began to settle into the charts. The soul/jazz hybrid of Amy’s style won deserved praise, but most commentators were struck by the songs’ autobiographical tone. There are graphic accounts of her sexual infatuations and star-crossed romances. You would not want to be the former paramour who is rubbished in Stronger Than Me (“feel like a lady but you my lady boy”); an infidelity of her Dad’s is resurrected in What Is It About Men? and In My Bed commemorates a waning relationship: “The only time I hold your hand / Is to get the angle right”.

Frank is a story-teller’s album, in the way that great country & western records used to be. If she seems self-absorbed, she’s refreshingly observant, too. Another track, called Fuck Me Pumps, paints a merciless portrait of women who prowl the clubs of London on their primal hunt for alpha males: “You can’t sit down right / Cos your jeans are too tight… Your dream in life / Is to be a footballer’s wife.” In a certain light, Amy Winehouse could pass for a hip hop Jane Austen.

So, Amy. The Frank album. Are you happy with it?

“Yes and no. If I’d been 100 per cent satisfied then I could have relaxed and gone on holiday for six months. But it’s a constant thing for me to better myself. I’ve got a clear ambition now, to make a record of what I hear in my head. Like Stevie Wonder did. It was a learning curve. I always thought I would do music, but I certainly didn’t expect to have a record deal by the time I was 19.”

Winehouse was raised in the north London suburb of Southgate. Her mother is from Brooklyn and her father, a taxi driver, is an East Ender. Her parents separated when Amy was nine, though her father remains in close touch. “He’s a great man, my Dad,” she says. “I love him. I love my Mum, but me and my Dad are two peas in a pod. We’re really impulsive people. It’s good that my Dad moved out when I was growing up, or we would have had some terrible clashes.”

On her American mother’s side of the family she has relatives in Miami and Atlanta, though she rarely had the chance to visit: “We didn’t have that kind of money. I’m sure the family would have paid for us, but we’re proud people.”

It’s the norm now for young musicians to be weaned on their parents’ record collections. But Winehouse denies her jazz buff Dad was a formative influence. “Not really. There was what he had in his car. And there were tapes at home. I would go to sleep listening to things like Sinatra and James Taylor. But that’s as far as my parents went. You discover music the most when it’s music that no one tells you to listen to, that you find out for yourself.”

So you weren’t sat down and told, Listen, this is good for you?

“Ha! I’d have told them to fuck off. I’ve always been a rebellious person. The only music that truly spoke to me was jazz and hip hop.”

It’s often said that first novels are autobiographical. People use up their life’s experiences. Did you do that with your first album? Could that be a danger for the second?

“Yeah but… I dunno. Life is inspiring, regardless. I don’t want to make a second album talking about record companies and stuff. The thing that always drove me with Frank was human interaction and that will always drive me. Relationships and how fucked up they can get. I guess that’ll always inspire me.”

If you had to give up either singing or songwriting, which would it be?

“I’d cut my throat out. Singing is singing. If I couldn’t sing a song, and express it, which – ” (her expression darkens) “ – which I haven’t been able to for the past five months but that’s OK it comes from me, I understand that – if I couldn’t do that, I’d be fucked. Singing and writing go hand in hand for me, it comes from one place”.

I think that Amy Winehouse is the last iconic artists we have seen. There will be others in the future but, since her death in 2011, nobody has come along that has the same attraction and gravitas! Her influence is huge. In terms of the artists that she has inspired, there is a long and impressive list:

“Adele has credited Winehouse's success in making her and fellow British singer Duffy's journey to the United States "a bit smoother." Lady Gaga credited Winehouse with paving the way for her rise to the top of the charts, explaining that Winehouse made it easier for unconventional women to have mainstream pop success. Raphael Saadiq, Anthony Hamilton and John Legend said "Amy Winehouse was produced by people who wanted to create a marketing coup. The positive side is that it reacquainted an audience with this music and played an introductory role for others. This reinvigorated the genre by overcoming the vintage aspect."

Other artists that have credited Winehouse as an influence and/or for paving the way for them include Bruno Mars, Tove Lo, Jessie J, Emeli Sandé, Victoria Justice, Paloma Faith, Lana Del Rey, Sam Smith, Florence Welch, Halsey, Alessia Cara, Estelle, Daya, Jorja Smith, Lauren Jauregui and Billie Eilish.

After the release of Back to Black, record companies sought out female artists with a similar sound and fearless and experimental female musicians in general. Adele and Duffy were the second wave of artists with a sound similar to Winehouse's. A third wave of female musicians that has emerged since the album was released are led by V V Brown, Florence and the Machine, La Roux and Little Boots. In March 2011, the New York Daily News ran an article attributing the continuing wave of British female artists that have been successful in the United States to Winehouse and her absence. Spin magazine music editor Charles Aaron was quoted as saying "Amy Winehouse was the Nirvana moment for all these women," "They can all be traced back to her in terms of attitude, musical styles or fashion." According to Keith Caulfield, chart manager for Billboard, "Because of Amy, or the lack thereof, the marketplace was able to get singers like Adele, Estelle and Duffy," "Now those ladies have brought on the new ones, like Eliza Doolittle, Rumer and Ellie”.

It will be tragic to think that, very soon, it is ten years since the music world lost one of its greatest stars. Although Winehouse’s influence is wide and we can see it in artists of today, her inimitable personality (the shyness and realness mixed with a more controversial edge) and stunning music will live forever. Not only would I suggest people buy her studio albums but, from 7th May, you can get Amy Winehouse at the BBC. Resident describe the two discs like this:

“this will be the first time that the two discs ‘a tribute to amy winehouse by jools holland’ and ‘bbc one sessions live at porchester hall’ are available as audio-only.

the set features tracks from later with jools across the years, notably amy’s first performance on the show in 2003 with ‘stronger than me’, as well as two performances from the mercury prize – take the box in 2004 and love is a losing game in 2007”.

I will close it there. I really wanted to pay tribute to a simply amazing and peerless artist. The amazing Amy Winehouse was a lioness with a huge voice and an amazing lyrics book. The unforgettable Winehouse, in so many senses, was…

VERY much one of a kind.

FEATURE: Sounds and Visions: Creating a Central Hub for BBC Podcasts, Shows and Video

FEATURE:

 

 

Sounds and Visions

IMAGE CREDIT: BBC 

 Creating a Central Hub for BBC Podcasts, Shows and Videos

___________

THIS is going to be a short one…

 IN THIS PHOTO: Fearne Cotton/PHOTO CREDIT: Stephanie Sian Smith/Kintzing

but the point of this article is not just an issue reserved to the BBC. The Sounds section of their website is great. I also love the music options that you can get on the iPlayer, in terms of documentaries and shows. Fearne Cotton’s Sounds of the 90s turned one recently. This is a show that provides some much-needed nostalgia for those who were around in the 1990s. To be fair, one can spend a lot of time navigating Sounds and checking out all the great stuff that is on there. I am bringing this up for a couple of reasons. I love Cotton’s series but, as I am a little late the party, I have not heard many of the earliest episodes. I know they are repeated on Sounds but, like all new episodes, one can listen for about a month and then they disappear. Maybe it is a cost thing but, at a time when so many of us are relying on podcasts, radio and great video, I do wonder whether there could be a central hub or website where all of the shows could go. I am not sure whether Sounds of the 90s with Fearne Cotton will be repeated in-full and all the episodes will be made available at a later date. The same goes for Top of the Pops and great music television shows. I have written about that before and why we can only see a few episodes on the BBC iPlayer.

Like Later… with Jools Holland, having that archive material would be brilliant! Holland’s show is still going, yet there are some great performances in the vaults through the years that I would love to revisit. If it is an issue of space, I wonder whether a website could be created. BBC Radio 6 Music had its yearly festival last week. It was different this year, whereby there were archive performances and some specially-recorded sets. I am not sure how much of the previous festivals is available on the BBC Radio 6 Music website. I love classic Glastonbury performances and, as we miss live music and are not sure exactly when it is coming back, having an arsenal of great live material from Glastonbury, festivals and shows like Top of the Pops would lift many people. The Sounds app and site is full of great stuff and, with limited room, they have to make way. I am not sure of the exact reason behind the thirty-day storage time, though one suspects that it is to do with costing a lot of money. I love how there is a load of new stuff on there but, for those who want to go back through the locker and listen to older podcasts and watch some shows that were new month ago, being able to access these for an unlimited time is a dream. I am not sure whether it is possible at all or too costly. Even if it were BBC-centric, it could be organised so that you could search for podcasts and shows and have all the episodes.

Either that or there would be categories so that a series like Later… with Jools Holland would come under ‘Music T.V.’. A podcast like Sounds of the 90s with Fearne Cotton could be ‘Music Podcasts’, and there would be menus whereby you could get the latest episodes and go as far back as possible. It is the live music side of things that would prove particularly enriching and popular. Having T.V. show performances and Glastonbury sets; some live videos that are not available on YouTube. Perhaps it would be a case of moving a lot of this onto YouTube but, if there were no huge costs involved and the logistics were not too head-spinning, it would be more logical to combine everything to one site. Taking advantage of the wonderful music, podcasts and shows available has really kept away the boredom. It has been a bummer missing the start of great series or not being able to get on top of everything that I would enjoy. I am sure there are some podcasts and documentaries that would be fantastic but, with so much on offer, it can be challenging getting on top of everything! A new website could make it easier to search or make more suggestions regarding the stuff I/people would enjoy (I know BBC Sounds does that, but this would mix audio and visual into one). The combination of historical series, the best new audio and live music in a portal/hub that is always being updated would be…

 PHOTO CREDIT: Mother Design

A bonanza for music fans.

FEATURE: Second Spin: George Michael - Older

FEATURE:

 

Second Spin

George Michael - Older

___________

I will move out of the 1990s…

for the next album in this feature, as I am aware that I have included a lot of music from the ‘90s lately. I also feel bad for including George Michael twice in recent weeks for, maybe, the wrong reasons. I recently wrote about Wham! and their hit, Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go, arguing how it is not a guilty pleasure (some people feel it is). Now, I am trying to get people to look at George Michael’s 1996 album, Older, in a new light. I might do him justice one day and include his phenomenal 1987 debut, Faith, in Vinyl Corner. The reason I am including Older is because it is such a fine album that not only had some mixed reviews (though many were positive); many of the songs on the album are not played. Even the biggest hits are not spun as much as they should be! I think Older is one of these albums where the non-singles are really strong, and the singles are timeless. If some critics were not completely on board with George Michael’s third solo album, the success it accrued speaks for itself:

“Older was a huge commercial success, especially in the European markets. In the UK the album was largely anticipated, and debuted at No. 1 with an impressive 281,000 copies, becoming one of the biggest debuts ever in British history (it currently ranks as the 23rd fastest-selling album in the UK). It is also Virgin's fastest-selling album of all time. It became Michael's biggest-selling album in his homeland, achieving over 1.8 million copies sold, and receiving a 6× Platinum certification by the BPI on 5 December 1997. In the UK, it spent a total of 147 weeks inside the top 200, 99 of them on the top 75, and 35 of them on the top 10 (including 23 consecutive weeks).The steady sales of the album were the result of good promotion market and the release of six hit singles throughout a two-year period”.

If you need some songs to remind you of Older, I am sure you are familiar with Jesus to a Child and Fastlove. Older and Spinning the Wheels are also big songs from the album. Whilst my favourite George Michael tracks do not appear on Older – Faith is from the album of the same name; Outside was the first single from his 1998 greatest hits album, Ladies & Gentlemen: The Best of George Michael -, I really love Older. It is a shame that some feel the album only has a couple of brilliant moments. This is what AllMusic wrote in their review:

“Older is the album that many observers initially believed Listen Without Prejudice, Vol. 1 to be -- a relentlessly serious affair, George Michael's bid for artistic credibility. It's an album that makes Listen Without Prejudice sound like Faith. Michael has dispensed with the catchy, frothy dance-pop numbers that brought him fame, concentrating on stately, pretentious ballads -- even "Fastlove," the album's one dance track, lacks the carefree spark of his earlier work. Although Michael's skills as a pop craftsman still shine through -- several songs are well-constructed ballads that rank with his best material -- his earnestness sinks the album. It is one thing to be mature and another to be boring. Too often, Michael mistakes slight melodies for mature craftsmanship and Older never quite recovers. When melodies do pop up, he doesn't deliver them with enough force to make an impact, and the album slowly disappears as a result”.

I will wrap it up soon but, before then, I want to bring in a positive review from NME. It is interesting reading their thoughts on, what I think is one of the stronger albums of the 1990s:

“Lyrically, George is still fighting off maturity with all (young) guns blazing. "My friends got their ladies/They're all having babies/But I just want to have some fun!" he declares on the impeccable 'Fast Love'. On 'Move On' he even invokes the chinking-glass intro of 'Club Tropicana', but makes sure that it leads into a gorgeous, jazz club schmooze, just what his audience are after these days. No more passing out under tables at Club 18-Dirty, George seems to be saying. Let's do it the classier way; dining out at Mezzo, a cool-eyed seduction at his place and then, well, breakfast at Tiffany's.

Upbeat the rest of it is not. 'Jesus To A Child' we know about, while the eerily arabesque 'The Strangest Thing' and 'To Be Forgiven' find George lost in a flood of distant, mystical flutes and even the faint twang of sitar. Cool.

He has his customary dig at the fame game in 'Star People' ("Who gives a f­­ about your problems, darling?" George growls cattily, the victim of one too many glittery ligs) while the final track, 'Free', shimmers to a close wordless, before George, the sweetie, whispers, "It feels good to be free" in its dying seconds.

What more could you ask for? Simply Red may go for the jugular every time with their unnervingly upbeat pop razzle, but George is just too much of an old soul boy smoothie for that. He knows that the art is to never look like you're trying; no matter what the provocation, no matter how frustrating the six-year hiatus might have been.

The real return of the mack then, despite the beardy haircut and the fact he's still so touchy about bad press, NME had to buy their own copy of 'Older' to hear it.

He really needn't have worried”.

As it comes up to its twenty-fifth anniversary in May, I think that people should give George Michael’s Older another listen. It is a tragedy that he is no longer with us (Michael died in 2016) as his voice is one of the finest of his generation. It seems like Older was an important album for George Michael. I found a piece published on the GM Forever website.. They quoted from his final interview that Red Line posted in 2017:

“GM: I sat at a keyboard in some studios in Notting Hill which was where I’d recorded a lot of Faith. And I sat at keyboard, played a very simple string part, added a very, very gentle guitar part. My way of making music is very strange; it’s very strange. Generally, I put my backing tracks together very simply on keyboards. In this case, I think I’d added a little guitar. But the moment I think there’s something coming, there’s something important coming, I shove everybody out of the room. I go in; I know how to work the vocal recorder that we use and then I just sing on repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat. I sing and I sing and I sing and it’s all total stream of consciousness rubbish that people would laugh their heads off if they heard what I was singing. And then I sang “Like Jesus to a Child” – simple as that.

GM: And I thought, “Oh my God, that’s him! That’s him and me, like Jesus to a child.” And within probably a day, the track was almost finished, which is REALLY unusual for me. And within a week, I was singing it in front of the Brandenburg Gate because I was so excited I was writing again. I could write again and not only that but I’d written probably the most personal song I’d ever written in the space of a day, day and a half, and it was all systems go. It was all systems go from that point on.

I wrote Older within about I suppose eight months, and months I think I wrote the best most healing piece of music that I’ve ever written in my life with that album”.

I shall leave it there but, for those who have shrugged off the 1996 album or only listened to the big hits, I would urge them to have a deeper listen. With some big hits and excellent deeper cuts working alongside one another, Older is a terrific and hugely varied and likeable album that…

GROWS stronger with age.

FEATURE: Modern Heroines: Part Forty: Jane Weaver

FEATURE:

 

 

Modern Heroines

Part Forty: Jane Weaver

___________

THERE is a timelessness…

 PHOTO CREDIT: Andy Votel

to including Jane Weaver in Modern Heroines, as she released her album, Flock, last month. I am going to introduce some interviews with Weaver and reviews of Flock soon. This is an album that you will want to own:

“Flock is the record that Jane Weaver always wanted to make, the most genuine version of herself, complete with unpretentious Day-Glo pop sensibilities, wit, kindness, humour and glamour. A consciously positive vision for negative times, a brooding and ethereal creation.

The album features an untested new fusion of seemingly unrelated compounds fused into an eco-friendly hum; pop music for post-new-normal times. Created from elements that should never date, its pop music reinvented. Still prevalent are the cosmic sounds, but Flock is a natural rebellion to the recent releases which sees her decidedly move away from conceptual roots in favour of writing pop music. Produced on a complicated diet of bygone Lebanese torch songs, 1980's Russian Aerobics records and Australian Punk.

Amongst this broadcast of glistening sounds is The Revolution Of Super Visions, an untelevised Mothership connection, with Prince floating by as he plays scratchy guitar; it also features a funky whack-a-mole bass line and synth worms. It underlines the discordant pop vibe that permeates Flock and concludes on Solarised, a super-catchy, totally infectious apocalypse, a radio-friendly groove for last dance lovers clinging together in an effort to save themselves before the end of the night.

The musician’s exposure to an abundance of lost records served as a reminder that you still feel like an outsider in this world and that by overcoming fears you can achieve artistic freedom. Jane Weaver continues to metamorphise”.

Flock is Jane Weaver’s eleventh studio album, so she is someone who has been in the industry for a little while. Even though she has a large fanbase now, I feel she will go on to become an icon whop inspires so many artists. She seems not to have lost any quality and power since albums like Seven Day Smile in 2006. I want to bring in a 2018 interview from The Skinny (Weaver released Modern Kosmology in 2017 and Loops in the Secret Society in 2019):

“Hailing from the fringes of the north-west indie/alt-rock scene, Jane Weaver is a prolific, resilient artist – if not a central figure, an important outlier working consistently in an industry and genre that can at times be outright hostile to women. Having fronted acts Kill Laura and Misty Dixon in the 90s and early 00s respectively, and after earning such famous fans as John Peel, Lauren Laverne and Jarvis Cocker, Weaver noticed a distinct decline in a certain subsection of her musical counterparts. “A lot of my male peers were going from strength to strength and a lot of my female peers were just dropping off and I thought, 'What’s going on here?' And it’s not because everybody who was female was rubbish, there just weren’t the places to go, there just weren’t the paths available.”

Weaver reacted by carving out her own space in the music industry for women and others who maybe struggled with traditional paths. In 2002, she launched her own independent label, Bird Records. “I started [the label] to be open to people who wanted to release a single, like a small single, and then go on somewhere else, and it was also to release my own music. I’d had several record deals that hadn’t gone well and my manager at the time just said to me, even though I had an album to go, 'I can’t get you arrested, it’s just boy guitar bands here.' And I thought it was ridiculous. It’s not that I didn’t have good songs or good ideas or a good work ethic, it was just the fashion for the boy guitar bands. It’s always been the predominant thing and it still is now. It’s upsetting.”

Weaver is cautiously optimistic about change in an industry that can be conservative and misogynistic. “[Festivals] have signed that Keychange pledge” in an effort to battle gender disparity in music festival bookings, “where they say by 2022 there’s going to be more of a balance. I think it will take a long time, I don’t know why, but it’s probably to do with financial issues, probably big festivals will go for the men with guitars for some reason, I don’t know!” she laughs.

Weaver has been touring tirelessly with her band of late, playing her most recent and perhaps best-received album yet, 2017's Modern Kosmology. Her new Loops in the Secret Society tour, which kicks off on 17 October at Edinburgh’s Pleasance, is a solo audiovisual reworking of both Modern Kosmology and her 2014 album The Silver Globe, a record Weaver endearingly considers “a mini breakthrough” because it had her phone ringing off the hook with gig and press offers. Loops in the Secret Society is her first solo tour in over five years and comes with its own unique set of challenges. “It just means that I’m under more pressure to play stuff live and do it on my own. I can manage everything, it’s fine, it’s just the brain pressure of knowing that you have to do it. It’s like a one man band having to do so many things at once, where I’m not just like walking about the stage and pointing and stamping on the floor and singing. It’s maybe a little more. And maybe I won’t have two drinks before I go on stage, I’ll maybe just have half of one!”.

There are not too many interviews available online for Flock. I did see a good one that she conducted for Louder Than War, where we learn some good insight regarding the album’s themes and inspiration:

“The very word “Flock” conjures up the same things the album does at times: collectiveness, nature. What’s the significance of it as an album title/the album’s title track?

I didn’t want the record to be conceptual like others I’d done, but I did have this idea about the first track and that it would be a dramatic opener entering a sonic wood and surrounded by nature and birds! But yes, Flock is a collection of pop songs that I don’t think lend themselves to just one thing, I just went with the flow and looked at each song individually. The artwork features me in a peacock chair surrounded by birdboxes waiting for the flock to return.

The way you deal with “the revolution” as a supernatural force has a somewhat Jungian undertone. How do you think these plague years have affected our collective unconscious – especially in music and the arts?

I can’t help thinking that musicians and artists and the supporting industry feel very undervalued at the minute, it’s understandable that gigs had to stop but we follow the rules and we still have rent to pay, a lot of people have had zero support, and Brexit rules are now another thing to navigate. Digital streaming is a great invention but lockdown has highlighted the problem that streaming for a lot of artists is unfair, the combination of all of these is quite a lot to deal with in a short space of time especially living in a pandemic. I think there is a strong collective energy and I’m hoping something positive will come out of this when we return!

You talk on the album about wanting to smash the patriarchy and the nature of the industry. In the wake of Me Too, where do we go from here?

Keep promoting equality and calling out bad behaviour, its inspiring to see bold moves from successful female artists who’ve been faced with an abuse of power from those they’ve worked with closely and they once trusted, the threat of someone deliberately trying to undermine and dismantle your career is hideous, just because they can. Taylor Swift and Kesha continue to fight back and empower themselves after the experiences they’ve been through, and its also highlighting what actually goes on in the world and exposing sexism and the dark side of the music industry”.

I am going to end with a playlist of some of her best tracks through the years. As Flock is new and it has won big critical praise, I thought it would be useful to bring in a couple of examples. This is what AllMusic said when they spent time with Flock:

“Throughout the second half of the 2010s, Jane Weaver hit her musical stride, releasing two albums that combined shimmering synths, alternately propulsive and languid tempos, and Weaver's trilling vocals into something magical. 2014's Silver Globe and 2017's Modern Kosmology are both mini-masterpieces of dream-meets-synth pop and showed that she basically had mastered that style. After a digression into experimental electronics on 2017's Loops in the Secret Society and a record of avant-garde indie rock with her band Fenella, Weaver set out to make a more diverse-sounding album that reflected a wider range of her musical interests. Where her work in the 2010s flowed from song to song like a masterful DJ set, 2021's Flock comes across more like a greatest-hits album as she bounces from style to style. Thumping post-Goldfrapp electro-glam ("Stages of Phases") jostles with laid-back summer jams ("Sunset Dreams"); loopy electro ballads ("All The Things You Do") rub against future funk that sounds like Prince and Broadcast fighting it out ("Pyramid Schemes"); and tracks like "Modern Reputation" that have the wibbly, synth prog feel of Dots and Loops-era Stereolab -- right down to channeling the celestial vocal interplay of Laetitia Sadier and Mary Hansen -- nestle nicely alongside more traditionally Weaver-esque offerings ("Heartlow"). Only "The Revolution of Super Visions" stumbles just a bit due to it being a touch too naggingly catchy, but the sheer beauty of the album's closing track makes up for that. On the truly radiant "Solarised," she does a one-woman Saint Etienne impression, matching a pulsing disco-house rhythm with synths warm enough to melt the ice on a bleak winter sidewalk and a melody that reaches the heights of emotion thanks to the truly lovely vocals. The song is a highlight on an album full of them; Weaver's artistic progression continues to be stunning. She could have kept making the same wonderful dream pop albums over and over until the world ended and that would have been fine. For her to take the template she had perfected and apply it to slightly different styles of music is a daring move and it works out very well, to say the least. Flock is the work of a daring artist, a crafty writer and performer, and someone who is always worth following to see what kind of great things she might do in the future”.

In another glowing review, The Line of Best Fit were keen to provide plenty of positivity and praise for a terrific album:

“Perhaps the irrepressible hooks and rejoicefully juicy grooves that characterize Flock – best of which bring up vivid impressions of Funkadelic jamming with Tangerine Dream, or Prince developing a Hawkwind habit - are an inevitable development. 2015’s The Silver Globe and 2017's Modern Kosmology stood out amongst a procession of Can and Neu! aficionados due to Weaver’s blanket refusal to give in to the usual stoned noodling of artists who spend their disposable income on rare 1970’s German vinyl and malfunctioning vintage kit. Having found a comfortably fitting sound after earlier dabbles with psych-folk and indie-rock, Weaver stood pretty much alone in her ability to combine motorik momentum-building with dense, synth-saturated atmospherics with soaring songcraft.

If the recent one-woman live reinterpretation of those albums’ material (Loops in the Secret Society) leaned heavy on its abstract and experimental potential, Flock represents the sweet revenge of the melody: dancefloor-friendly pop music, but of a variety that remains intoxicatingly unmoored to the conventions and codes of the earthly realm.

Take first single “The Revolution of Super Visions” as an example. Blessed with plenty of fresh wide open spaces between the sparingly administered notes, the track’s chicken-scratch funk guitar strokes and rubbery bass bubbles bring to mind something George Clinton might have cooked up in the early 80’s, had Parliament ever directed the mothership to Can’s studio: maximalist funk-pop with minimalist ingredients. “Pyramid Schemes” is an even more successful example of Weaver’s brave new method of stripping away dense layers of sound to expose the full bounce of the tunes and the grooves.

It’s not all mirror ball-hugging disco queen moves, however (and even when it is, Weaver’s ear for the unusual places this particular dancefloor somewhere on the furthest and headiest fringes of the cosmos): the flute-saturated, gently galloping title track resembles the pastoral prog-funk of Dungen, whilst the majestic upward trajectory of the synth-heavy dream-pop closer “Solarised” defies categorization while it floats weightlessly amidst the cosmos, as heartwarming as a beautiful sunrise”.

I have been listening to Jane Weaver’s music for a number of years now and it is amazing that she is so consistent and incredible. I think that we will see a lot more music come from one of the finest artists in Britain. If you are fairly new to Weaver, take a dive into her back catalogue and experience an artist who released one of this year’s best albums with Flock. One would forgive an artist for dropping some quality and originality after eleven studio albums. That is not the case with Jane Weaver! Keep an eye on her Twitter account, as it seems like rehearsals are taking place for live music. That will be exciting to see! I love Jane Weaver’s sound, so I am very interested to see…

WHAT arrives next.

FEATURE: Inspired By… Part Four: Run-D.M.C.

FEATURE:

 

 

Inspired By…

PHOTO CREDIT: Lisa Haun/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images 

Part Four: Run-D.M.C.

___________

FOR this outing…

 PHOTO CREDIT: Frank Micelotta/Getty Images

of Inspired By…, I am shining a light on one of the most influential Hip-Hop acts of all-time, Run-D.M.C. They have influenced so many artists and, whilst the playlist below is not necessarily going to collate songs that sound like Run-D.M.C., they are from artists who have cited them as influences. Here is some more information about the legendary group:

“Run-DMC was an American hip hop group from Hollis, Queens, New York, founded in 1983 by Joseph Simmons, Darryl McDaniels, and Jason Mizell. Run-DMC is regarded as one of the most influential acts in the history of hip hop culture and one of the most famous hip hop acts of the 1980s. Along with Beastie Boys, LL Cool J and Public Enemy, the group pioneered new school hip hop music. The group was among the first to highlight the importance of the MC and DJ relationship.

With the release Run–D.M.C. (1984), Run-DMC became the first hip hop group to achieve a Gold record. Run-D.M.C. was followed with the certified Platinum record King of Rock (1985), making Run-DMC the first hip hop group to achieve this. Raising Hell (1986) became the first multi-platinum hip hop record. Run-DMC's cover of "Walk This Way", featuring Steven Tyler and Joe Perry, charted higher on the Billboard Hot 100 than Aerosmith's original version, peaking at number four. It became one of the best known songs in both hip hop and rock. Run-DMC was the first hip hop act to have their music videos broadcast on MTV, appear on American Bandstand, be on the cover of Rolling Stone, perform at Live Aid and be nominated for a Grammy Award.

In 2004, Rolling Stone ranked Run-DMC at number 48 in its list of the 100 Greatest Artists of All Time. In 2007, they were named The Greatest Hip Hop Group of All Time by MTV and Greatest Hip Hop Artist of All Time by VH1. In 2009, Run-DMC became the second hip hop group to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. In 2016, the group received the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2018, Raising Hell was inducted into the National Recording Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or artistically significant".

This is a salute to the amazing and hugely influential Run-D.M.C. and the artists that they have inspired. It is amazing (but no surprise) to see how far…

 PHOTO CREDIT: Peter Kemp/AP/REX/Shutterstock

THEIR brilliance spreads.

FEATURE: The Lockdown Playlist: Chocolate-Related Tracks

FEATURE:

 

 

The Lockdown Playlist

PHOTO CREDIT: @foodess/Unsplash 

Chocolate-Related Tracks

___________

EVEN though Easter is about more…

 PHOTO CREDIT: @anniespratt/Unsplash

than chocolate, it is one of the main things we associate with the day! Easter Sunday is tomorrow (4th April) so, to mark that, this Lockdown Playlist is all about songs that relate to chocolate. There are a couple of Easter-named/related songs so, in the mix, there is going to be quite a variation. It is a very different Easter this year, but many of us will still be able to speak with our families and enjoy some of the traditions we usually have. From the food (including hot cross buns) and being together (as much as is possible this year), it is a time of year many of us look forward to. Enjoy this sweet and tasty selection of tracks that, whilst not as delicious and moreish as Easter eggs and the copious amount of chocolate many of us will consume tomorrow, they are definitely…

 PHOTO CREDIT: Hello I’m Nik/Unsplash

A sonic treat.

FEATURE: Diamonds: Ranking Rihanna’s Eight Studio Albums

FEATURE:

 

 

Diamonds

 Ranking Rihanna’s Eight Studio Albums

___________

WITH talk that there is…

 PHOTO CREDIT: Instagram/Fenty Beauty

a ninth studio album could be coming from Rihanna very soon, I have been looking through her albums and hearing how she has changed and progressed through the years. The Guardian recently marked potential album news with a ranking of her singles. I am taking a different direction as I am placing the studio albums. I think that Rihanna is one of the greatest modern R&B/Pop artists - many of her albums remain underrated and under-played. From 2005’s Music of the Sun through to her most recent release, Anti, of 2016, I am deciding which are the ultimate Rihanna albums. I don’t think that the Barbados-born superstar has released a poor or average album, so it is hard deciding which are going to be in the lower placings – that is the challenge I have set myself. If you are a big fan of Rihanna or coming to her new, you might have your own say regarding the albums and which should be where. In each case, I am picking the key tracks from each album, where you can stream the album, which track is best, plus a sample review. Here are my placings of the albums of a modern-day Pop icon who remains…

 PHOTO CREDIT: Craig McDean for The New York Times Style Magazine

SO loved and influential.

__________________

8. A Girl Like Me

Release Date: 10th April, 2006

Labels: Def Jam/SRP

Producers: The Conglomerate/Don Corleon/Mike City/Poke and Tone/Jonathan ‘J.R.’ Rotem/Evan Rogers/Stargate/Carl Sturken

Standout Tracks: SOS/We Ride/Break It Off (with Sean Paul)

Review:

“Hip-hop and mall rock have all but replaced dance pop on American airwaves, but every once in a while a Euro-style club mash-up breaks through. Barbados-born emigre Rihanna's huge dancehall pop hit last year, "Pon De Replay," was savvy and sexy, and her new smash, "SOS," is even more so. Singing a snaky Destiny's Child-like melody around synth riffs and machine beats from Soft Cell's Eighties classic "Tainted Love," Rihanna proves America still appreciates clever pop when it hears it. Like her filler-packed debut album, this similar but superior follow-up doesn't deliver anything else as ingenious as its lead single: Lightweight dancehall and R&B; jams lack the single's ear-bending boldness. But the burning rock guitar of "Kisses Don't Lie" and haunted strings of "Unfaithful" help make A Girl Like Me much more likable” – Rolling Stone

Key Cut: Unfaithful

7. Music of the Sun

Release Date: 29th August, 2005

Labels: Def Jam/SRP

Producers: Dernst Emile/Full Force/Vada Nobles/Poke and Tone/Evan Rogers/Stargate/Carl Sturken

Standout Tracks: If It's Lovin' that You Want/You Don't Love Me (No, No, No) (ft. Vybz Kartel)/Music of the Sun

Review:

“Given the proliferation of young and beautiful urban dance-pop divas dominating the radio and music video airwaves in 2005, it initially was tempting to discount Rihanna as yet another Beyoncé-Ciara-Ashanti cash-in. But like her Def Jam labelmate Teairra Mari -- another young and beautiful urban dance-pop diva who emerged out of nowhere in 2005 -- Rihanna is winsome rather than wannabe, thanks in no small part to her producers. Just as Teairra Mari benefited greatly from irresistibly shrewd beat-making on her debut album, Rihanna benefits from the knowing production work of Syndicated Rhythm Productions, aka Evan Rogers and Carl Sturken, who together produced a laundry list of contemporary teen pop sensations during the prior decade. What these guys do that's so irresistibly shrewd is synthesize Caribbean rhythms and beats with standard-issue urban dance-pop: Caribbean-inflected urban, if you will. So while a song like "Pon de Replay" -- to pick the most obvious exhibit -- is driven by booming dancehall-lite beats and a reggae vocal cadence (and title spelling), it's a simple dance-pop song at its core, with standard English-language singing as well as a can't-miss singalong hook (and a glitzy, urban-style MTV video to boot). The best songs on Music of the Sun follow this appealing template, including the similarly catchy few songs that follow the aforementioned album-opening smash hit: "Here I Go Again," "If It's Lovin' That You Want," and "You Don't Love Me (No, No, No)." As with most albums of this ilk, Music of the Sun descends into faceless slow jams after a while, overall consistency not being among its attributes, but thankfully it picks up the pace toward the end of its 13-song run and concludes on a fun note, with a remix of "Pon de Replay" featuring Elephant Man. The result is one of the more engaging urban dance-pop albums of the year (and one of the most infectious summer jams, for sure), as well as a nice Caribbean primer for those not ready or willing to jump on the increasingly trendy dancehall and reggaeton bandwagons concurrently sweeping through America's more fashionable cities” – AllMusic

Key Cut: Pon De Replay

6. Loud

Release Date: 12th November, 2010

Labels: Def Jam/SRP

Producers: Alex da Kid/C. ‘Tricky’ Stewart/Ester Dean/Mel & Mus/Polow da Don/The Runners/Sandy Vee/Sham/Soundz/Stargate

Standout Tracks: S&M/What's My Name? (ft. Drake)/Man Down

Review:

“After releasing five albums in as many years, the singer is closer than ever to becoming the complete pop package Jay-Z envisioned when he signed her the same day she walked into Def Jam during his tenure as president. Though gifted with runway-ready looks, Rihanna has improved in other areas through sheer perseverance. Her voice-- once fragile and shrill-- is now robust enough to take on songs like the delightfully Eurotrash pounder "Only Girl (In the World)" not only on record but at high profile awards-show performances. Her semi-scripted dance moves are sultry and spontaneous. She can be kinda funny (or at least genuinely excitable) in interviews. She'll never be as boldly talented as Beyoncé or freakishly engaging as Gaga, but there's still charm to be found in her (relatively) everyday affability. She recently said Loud was the first album she wasn't nervous about releasing, which makes a lot of sense. She's worked hard to get to this point.

If anything, the record sounds too easy at times. "California King Bed" is a "I Don't Want to Miss a Thing"-type power ballad genetically engineered to soundtrack a bi-coastal Kate Hudson rom-com. "Raining Men" is a shameless Beyoncé rip-off that would be quickly dismissed if not for the fact that it's a pretty-damn-good Beyoncé rip off with a characteristically scene-stealing guest verse from Nicki Minaj. Meanwhile, "Fading" copies Rihanna's own lightweight R&B formula so much it's redundant.

On the flip, "Man Down" takes her violent side to its logical conclusion as it finds her on the run after killing a poor guy dead, its reggae bounce matching perfectly with Rihanna's mesmerizing cadence. And "Skin" is her sexiest song yet, a haunted, near-dubstep stunner that wouldn't sound totally out of place on Massive Attack's Mezzanine. Her laissez-faire attitude toward hit-making on Loud can result in too-safe moves or semi-experiments that come off surprisingly great, but, at this rate, by the time she runs out of singles from this record there will be another one ready to go. More than a stocking stuffer but less than an idol, Rihanna has grown into one of the most reliable pop stars we've got” – Pitchfork

Key Cut: Only Girl (In the World)

5. Good Girl Gone Bad

Release Date: 31st May, 2007

Labels: Def Jam/SRP

Producers: Carl Sturken/Evan Rogers/Neo Da Matrix/J.R. Rotem/Stargate/Christopher ‘Tricky’ Stewart/Shea Taylor/Timbaland

Standout Tracks: Don’t Stop the Music/Shut Up and Drive/Rehab

Review:

“The difference is, Rihanna’s now got three albums under her sequined belt, and her latest, Good Girl Gone Bad, finds the Barbadian singer perfecting the formula she’s been working out publicly over the last 18 months. In other words, she’s finally figured out that she’s a dance artist and the majority of the album is comprised of uptempo dance-pop numbers in the vein of her biggest hit “SOS.” “Don’t Stop The Music” is most closely related to that 2006 smash, a track that borrows heavily from a song that itself borrowed heavily from something else (this time it’s Michael Jackson’s “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’,” which took its “Mama-se, mama-sa, ma-ma-coo-sa” refrain from Manu Dibango’s “Soul Makoosa”). The ‘80s is also the jumping off point for “Push Up On Me,” which draws on freestyle and post-disco Moroder for its concoction of “Planet Rock” laser beams and “Flashdance” synths.

That Good Girl is being led instead by the more urban “Umbrella,” which features Jay-Z, speaks to Def Jam’s desire to maintain Rihanna’s R&B status. That the song is just plain good, regardless of genre, proves that Jay and Rihanna, who’s already scored hits across several formats with a string of singles that couldn’t be more different from each other, are dedicated to producing quality hits—however frivolous they may be. This time around, the ballads are better suited to Rihanna’s limited vocal talents and age than the more adult-skewed material of her first two releases. It’s just too bad that Ne-Yo, who co-wrote and produced three tracks here, keeps writing the same two songs over and over: Unlike the cat-being-skinned-alive “Unfaithful,” “Hate That I Love You” and the title track maximize Rihanna’s range, and both could be formidable hits, but they’re lazy carbon copies of “So Sick” and “Irreplaceable,” respectively. (Not to be outdone, Timbaland, also a producer on the album, is quickly proving himself to be a repeat offender too.)

Lyrics are once again an Achilles’ high heel for Rihanna—something that should be a non-issue considering her contributions are minimal. When I first heard “Rehab,” I joked that it wasn’t any worse than a Justin Timberlake track. And then I found out he wrote it. Aside from the fact that nobody should even try to write a song called “Rehab” so closely following Amy Winehouse’s, the track is further evidence that JT is better off penning lyrics about sexy backs or dicks in boxes. Good Girl might have the most consistently hilarious song titles of the year (“Breakin’ Dishes,” “Shut Up And Drive,” “Sell Me Candy,” just to name a few), but the songs themselves just don’t live up to their campy names. Good Girl Gone Bad is far from a great album, but it guarantees Rihanna, who’s unequivocally a singles artist, at least a few more shiny hits to tuck under her belt” – SLANT

Key Cut: Umbrella (ft. JAY-Z)

4. Talk That Talk

Release Date: 18th November, 2011

Labels: Def Jam/SRP

Producers: Alex da Kid/Mr. Bangladesh/Calvin Harris/Chase & Status/Cirkut/Da Internz/Dr. Luke/Ester Dean/Gareth McGrillen/Hit-Boy/No I.D./Rob Swire/Stargate/The-Dream

Standout Tracks: Where Have You Been/Talk That Talk (ft. Jay-Z)/Birthday Cake

Review:

“Rihanna's sixth album is a blast of obnoxious, filth-fuelled pop. Coming only a year after Loud, everything has been turned up, then up again, from its steroidal Ibiza synths to the smutty innuendo – clearly she's decided that S&M's whips and chains were a little on the tame side. So there are exhortations to eat her cake (she doesn't mean cake!) and to lick her persuasion (she doesn't mean persuasion!), although sometimes the metaphors disappear with a laughable shrug, as on Birthday Cake: "Ooh, I want to fuck you right now." It works best when the music hall bawdiness is left aside in favour of bleak euphoria, of which there's plenty – the xx-sampling Drunk on Love and the absurdly banging Where Have You Been are particularly fiery, and show exactly why she's at the top of the pop game” – The Guardian

Key Cut: We Found Love (ft. Calvin Harris)

3. Unapologetic

Release Date: 19th November, 2012

Labels: Def Jam/Roc Nation/SRP

Producers: Benny Blanco/Brian Kennedy/Carlos McKinney/Chase & Status/David Guetta/Elof Loelv/Flippa123/Future/Giorgio Tuinfort/Justin Parker/Labrinth/Luney Tunez/Mex Menny/Mike Will Made-It/Mikey Mike/Mikky Ekko/Naughty Boy/Nicky Romero/No I.D./Oak/Parker/ Ighile/Andrew ‘Pop’ Wansel/Stargate/Terius ‘The-Dream’ Nash

Standout Tracks: Pour It Up/Jump/Stay (ft. Mikky Ekko)

Review:

“And so, Unapologetic rolls out with the grimy neck-snapper “Phresh Out the Runway” then gets to the radio killers — the stately Sia-assisted single “Diamonds” and chilly, Eminem-featuring “Numb.” Riri and Slim’s previous smash team-up “Love the Way You Lie” probed the impact of domestic abuse; this one features the line, “I’m the butt police, and I’m looking at your rear rear rear.”

Elsewhere, Rihanna sings about her unapologetic love of money (the moody, murky “Pour It Up”), her unapologetic love of love (slow-jam “Loveeeee Song,” featuring a gushy, Auto-Tune-warbling Future), her unapologetic love of living in the moment (winning David Guetta thumper “Right Now”), and most controversially, her unapologetic love of Chris Brown. Her onetime beau pops up on the record’s most gleeful groove, “Nobody’s Business,” a breezy throwback that interpolates Michael Jackson’s “The Way You Make Me Feel.”

That the duo decided to inject their obstinate anthem with music by a man who was the victim of, and accused perpetrator of, physical abuse during his tormented 50 years on Earth is almost too much to unpack. But emotional baggage has become the key instrument in Rihanna’s arsenal, right next to her flat, thin, nimble, expressionless voice. As hard as Unapologetic tries to cast Riri as a Beyoncé-like balladeer on the dramatic “What Now” and “Stay,” the younger star’s vocals will never have the curvy fullness of her mentor Jay-Z’s wife. She isn’t a full-bodied diva; she’s a pointy provocateur. Her voice’s unadorned nakedness is its greatest strength. She can slither over a grinder like “Jump” (shout-out to Ginuwine’s “My Pony”), or perk up her patois for a reggae tune like “No Love Allowed.”

The now-24-year-old’s voice may be simple, but it’s distinctive — and as defiant as her album titles. “What’s love without tragedy?” she demands on the excellent, “Message in a Bottle”-esque “Love Without Tragedy/Mother Mary” as Unapologetic winds down, sounding at once like a petulant teen and a world-weary woman. Everyone profiting off her ultra-successful career — including Rihanna herself — doesn’t seem to want to find out. Especially when going bad has been such good business” – SPIN

Key Cut: Diamonds

2. Rated R

Release Date: 20th November, 2009

Labels: Def Jam/SRP

Producers: Chase & Status/Terius ‘The-Dream’ Nash/Chuck Harmony/Brian Kennedy/Stargate/C. ‘Tricky’ Stewart/Rob Swire/will.i.am/The Y's

Standout Tracks: Hard (ft. Jeezy)/Russian Roulette/Cold Case Love

Review:

“The cover of the new Rihanna album features a severe black-and-white head shot of the star. She has her hand clapped over her right eye; her left eye, surrounded by a raccoon ring of mascara, glares back at the viewer. The context here is no secret: It is impossible to look at those eyes without remembering the images of Rihanna’s bruised face in the aftermath of her beating in February by ex-boyfriend Chris Brown. Until recently, the singer has been quiet about the incident. Songs like “Russian Roulette” — a domestic-violence victim’s confession whipped into soaring melodrama — tell us why: She was busy saying her piece in the studio.

If by some accident of fate, or maybe record-company cynicism, the new Chris Brown album has arrived at the same moment as his ex’s. The resultstempt a reviewer to talk in terms of moral victories, but the real triumphhere is artistic. Chris Brown has made a bland, occasionally obnoxious, proforma R&B album. Rihanna has transformed her sound and made one of the best pop records of the year.

Brown mostly ignores the elephant in the room, churning out punchy dance-pop songs full of club-ready beats and Casanova gestures. He gloats about “the cars and the girls and the cribs.” He promises ecstasy (“Gonnamake you bloom like a flower,” he tells the girl in “Take My Time”). There are also lost-love ballads, delivered by Brown in his nasal wisp of a singing voice. But as unfair as it sounds, the Rihanna incident has made it impossible to hear him in the same way; the sweetness that animated songs like 2008’s “Forever” is now a hard sell.

With Rihanna, singing has never been in doubt. The question has always been personality: Is there a flesh-and-blood woman lurking beneath the big voice and model looks? On Rated R, she answers the question emphatically. There are a couple of engaging up tempo tunes. (The Star Gate-produced “Rude Boy”is smutty fun, with a Caribbean bounce.) But this is an album with a grim theme: love gone horribly wrong. “What you did to me was a crime,” Rihanna sings in the slow-boiling “Cold Case Love.” Elsewhere, she is bent on vengeance. “I lick the gun when I’m done,” she cries in “G4L,” “because I know that revenge is sweet.” The songs are etched in somber shades and minor chords, with Rihanna belting over synths and booming beats. The results are a musical match for the black-on-black CD cover — goth R&B.

No single song approaches the grandeur of Rihanna’s 2007 megahit,”Umbrella.” But even the most sprawling power ballads here have an intimatequality. In the plaintive “Stupid in Love,” Rihanna turns the blame inward.”My new nickname is ‘You Idiot’ . . . /That’s what my friends are calling mewhen they see me yelling into my phone.” Such introspection is evidently beyond Brown. On “Lucky Me,” he turns his troubles into an occasion for self-congratulation: “Even when my world’s falling down/I still wear a smile.” A simple sorry might have made a better song – or at least made Brown a better guy” – Rolling Stone

Key Cut: Rude Boy

1. ANTI

Release Date: 28th January, 2016

Labels: Westbury Road/Roc Nation

Producers: Boi-1da/Brian Kennedy/Chad Sabo/Daniel Jones/DJ Mustard/Fade Majah/Fred Ball/Hit-Boy/Jeff Bhasker/Kevin Parker/Mick Schultz/Mitus/No I.D./Robert Shea Taylor/Scum/Timbaland

Standout Tracks: Kiss It Better/Desperado/Love on the Brain

Review:

“Anti existed as an album cycle before it existed as an album -- arguably long before Rihanna knew what form her eighth album would take, either. Work on Anti began in the autumn of 2014 and proceeded in semi-public, progress being measured in Instagram posts and tweets, along with intermittent singles, each released to white-hot anticipation but none metamorphosing into massive hits. When Anti finally appeared in January 2016 -- three years after Unapologetic and months later than expected -- it bore none of these 2015 singles, a move that suggests a tacit acknowledgment that neither the curiously muted Kanye West and Paul McCartney collaboration "FourFiveSeconds" nor the unrestrained roar of "Bitch Better Have My Money" functioned as appropriate anchors for the album. Then again, neither would've felt at home on the cloistered Anti, the first of Rihanna's records to feel constructed as a front-to-back album. Such a sustained sensibility distinguishes Anti from its predecessors, records where album cuts often felt like afterthoughts. That's not the case with Anti. This is an album whose heart lies within its deep cuts. Mood matters more than either hooks or rhythm: it's a subdued, simmering affair, its songs subtly shaded yet interlocked to create a vibe caught halfway between heartbreak and ennui. The latter has always been a specialty of Rihanna -- her distance from her material was at once appealing and alienating -- so hearing her lean into "Love on the Brain" and "Higher" is something of a revelation: her voice is hoarse and ravaged, yet she's also controlled and precise, knowing how to hone these imperfections so her performance echoes classic soul while feeling fresh. These songs come at the end of the album, after a series of songs that drift and wonder, the sound of an artist trying to figure out not only what her album is but who she is. By the end of Anti, Rihanna may not arrive at any definitive conclusions about her art but she's allowed herself to be unguarded and anti-commercial, resulting in her most compelling record to date” – AllMusic

Key Cut: Work (ft Drake)

FEATURE: Hello, I Know That You've Been Feeling Tired: Kate Bush’s Director’s Cut Version of Deeper Understanding at Ten

FEATURE:

 

 

Hello, I Know That You've Been Feeling Tired

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

 Kate Bush’s Director’s Cut Version of Deeper Understanding at Ten

___________

I have been so busy thinking about…

50 Words for Snow turning ten in November that I forgot about Director’s Cut! The album, came out on 16th May, 2011, so it is important to look ahead to that anniversary. This is an album where Bush reworked songs from The Sensual World (1989) and The Red Shoes (1993) that she felt could be stripped back and improved. I guess there is a fuller and, at times, cluttered production sounds on those album. One can understand why Bush wanted to re-approach these tracks and give them a new spin. Before I get to the single from Director’s Cut that is about to turn ten,  I want to do a complete detour and mention a news story regarding one of 50 Words for Snow’s tracks that is being included in primary school music curriculum in England. The Kate Bush News website provides more details:

“In England, an expert panel of musical specialists have chosen Wild Man, Kate’s lead single from her 2011 50 Words for Snow album, to be included in a new list of 37 musical works that every primary school child (ages 5-11) should listen to. Ed Watkins, director of music at the West London Free School, who sat on the panel, said: “The list we have ended up with has music from the major world traditions, traces the history of popular music and celebrates British and European art music.” As well as works from ‘the Western Classical tradition’ – including Mozart’s Rondo all Turca, Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 and Mussorgsky’s Night on a Bare Mountain, the list also features music from major world traditions including Brazilian Samba, Bhangra from Punjab and Argentinian Tango, as well as English folk sea shanties.

The Model Music Curriculum document explains how the song can be explored in the classroom: “From Bush’s acclaimed 50 Words for Snow, Wild Man tells of the sightings of the mythical Yeti in the Himalayas and of efforts to hide and protect him. The use of sound effects, riffs and spoken words will all be points to bring out as well as getting to grips with the words and imagery before/while listening to the music”.

It is pretty cool that a late-career recording is being taught at schools. It goes to show that Bush’s music is as striking on her current album as it was on her earliest albums. I want to concentrate on a song whose reimagining split people. Deeper Understand appeared originally on The Sensual World and, in 1989, it was precinct and powerful that Bush was talking about computers taking over lives. I may have quoted this before, but here is an interview exert where Bush talked about the original track:

“It's like today, a lot of people relate to machines, not to human beings, like they hear telephone [Makes ringing noise] and think "Is that for me?" I guess it playing with the idea of how people get more and more isolated from humans and spend a lot more time with machines. I suppose America's a really good example where there are some people who never go out, they watch television all day, they're surrounded by machines, they shop through television, they speak to people on the phone; it's just distant contact. The idea of the computer buffs who end up going through divorce cases because their wives can't cope with the attention the computer gets. They have an obsessive effect on people, and this track's about one of those types.

I was playing with the juxtaposition of high tech and spirituality. I suppose one inspiration was a program I saw last year about a scientist called Stephen Hawking who for years had been studying the universe, and his concepts are like the closest we've ever come to understanding the answer. But unfortunately he has a wasting-away disease, and the only way he can talk is through voice process. It was one of the most moving things I've ever heard. He was so close to the answers to everything, and yet his body was going on him - in some ways it was the closest I'd ever come to hearing God speak! The things he was saying were so spiritual, it was like he'd gone straight through science and come out the other end. It was like he'd gone beyond words, and I do think that there is this possibility with computers that we really could learn about ourselves on levels that could take us into much deeper areas. With my music, I like to combine both the old and the new, the high tech and the compassion from the human element, the combination of synths and acoustic instruments.(Will Johnson, 'A Slowly Blooming English Rose'. Pulse, December 1989)”.

I like the original very much so, on 5th April 2011, I had the chance to hear this fantastic track updated. The original song has been celebrated and ranked high by the media when it comes to Bush’s best songs. I think the combination of it being so relevant and eye-opening and its incredible production made it stand out. I am not sure whether Deeper Understanding is one of those songs that sounded too edgy or needed improvements. It has a warm sound and, when you listen to the chorus, you are blown away by the richness of the vocals and how you get this sort of voice coming from a computer.

By 2011, the grip and reliance on technology was even more pronounced. Although some critics feel the new recording sounds less important and it doesn’t have the same quality and impact as the original, it is a wonderful song that is clearly important to Bush. She spoke about the 2011 update to The Irish Times when promoting Director’s Cut:

“When we finally speak, Bush is late, and profusely apologetic. Her day has been taken up with a short film she has directed for Deeper Understanding. It’s the first single to be taken from Director’s Cut, a new album of reworked songs culled from The Sensual Worldand The Red Shoes. Six years after the release of her last album, Aerial, Bush had multiple motivations in going back to these songs. Technological and production limitations were a factor, but artistic doubt also lingered in the back of her mind.

“I’ve wanted to do this for a while, and I think some of my more interesting songs are on those two albums. You look back on your work and often feel there’s something wrong with all of it, but that’s just part of being a human being as much as an artist. I tried to make some of those songs sound like I’d want them to sound now, but this time I wanted it to be more about the songs than the production. I also approached them in a lower key, because my voice is lower now.”

Ah yes, that voice. The multiple octaves of childlike coos and sibilant sensuality that can go from gothic whisper to oscillating scream. In 1977, when Wuthering Heightsmade her the first woman to reach No 1 in the UK charts with a self-written song, audiences didn’t know what to make of her. She had been singing and – crucially – writing her own songs since she was 13. EMI snapped her up”.

Bush has also been quite prophetic in her attitude to technology, from being one of the first musicians to use a Fairlight digital synthesiser to foreseeing (in 1989’s Deeper Understanding) the central role computers would play in our lives. It’s also the first single from Director’s Cut, and one of the most radically reimagined.

“I was trying to get across the idea of a computerised voice,” says the singer, “so back then, even with a Vocoder used as part of a group of voices, it was difficult to hear. I also wanted a single voice to convey that the computer is a single entity. We just couldn’t get the effect, but nowadays it’s so easy to computerise a voice.”

The voice in question on the song is that of Albert, aka Bertie, her 12-year-old son. Bush is famously guarded of her private life, but is effusive when speaking about him. “I thought it was more poignant to have a child as this bringer of compassion in a cold technological world. I asked him if he would sing on it, and he thought it was great fun”.

“ Director’s Cut took a long time. It’s funny, every time I start a new album I say to myself ‘this one’s going to be really quick’, and of course it ends up going on and on. But it was great to go straight into the new songs, while I was still in focused, studio mentality. With Aerialand this new album I feel there’s a greater space. They’re a bit different to my other work, but then I feel that about everything when I start it, and I don’t want to keep making the same album all the time. It’s hard to talk about work when it’s in progress, because it’s always an evolving process”.

To mark ten years since Bush re-released Deeper Understanding, I wanted to mark the anniversary and dive deep into the Director’s Cut single. Whether you prefer the original version from The Sensual World or appreciate what she did On Director’s Cut, it is a song that, to me, seems more relevant than ever. I would say that, since 2011, we rely on technology even more. She could almost record the song again but, on Director’s Cut, I think Deeper Understanding sounds great. At a time when we have been speaking to people through computers and have not been able to have that human touch, Deeper Understanding has…

A whole new meaning and importance.

FEATURE: Groovelines: Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five - The Message

FEATURE:

 

 

Groovelines

Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five - The Message

___________

MANY people might not…

recognise the song that I am featuring in this Groovelines. Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five’s The Message is seen by many as being the most influential Hip-Hop record of all time. Released in 1982 on the group’s debut album, The Message, this is a song worth getting deep over. Rolling Stone ranked the song as number-one in their list of the best Hip-Hop tracks back in 2012:

“The Message” was a total knock out of the park,” says Chuck D. “It was the first dominant rap group with the most dominant MC saying something that meant something.” It was also the first song to tell, with hip-hop’s rhythmic and vocal force, the truth about modern inner-city life in America – you can hear its effect loud and clear on classic records by Jay-Z, Lil Wayne, N.W.A, the Notorious B.I.G. and even Rage Against the Machine. Over seven minutes, atop a creeping rhythm closer to a Seventies P-Funk jam, rapper Melle Mel and co-writer Duke Bootee, a member of the Sugar Hill Records house band, traded lines and scenes of struggle and decay: drugs, prostitution, prison and the grim promise of an early death. There was a warning at the end of each verse: “Don’t push me, ’cause I’m close to the edge/I’m trying not to lose my head,” each word enunciated like a gunshot.

Flash, born Joseph Saddler, grew up in a neighborhood that closely resembled the song: the South Bronx during the worst of the Seventies urban blight. He and the Furious Five had become the number-one DJ crew in the borough – pushing aside early pioneers like Kool Herc and Pete “DJ” Jones – with a mix of party-hearty showmanship and Flash’s groundbreaking turntable skills. (Among other things, he invented the scratch.)

In a 1983 interview, Flash claimed “The Message” showed that he and the Five “can speak things that have social significance and truth.” But when Flash and the Furious Five first heard Bootee’s original demo (a track the latter called “The Jungle”), they worried that hip-hop clubgoers would not dig the subject matter and slowed-down beat, unusual for an early rap record. As Melle Mel remembered, he was the group member who “caved in” and agreed to record it; Sugar Hill boss Sylvia Robinson got him to write and rap more lyrics to Bootee’s track, and Sugar Hill studio player Reggie Griffin added the indelible synthesizer lick. Despite the credit on the record, Flash and the rest of the Five appeared only in a closing skit, in which they’re harassed and arrested by police.

“The Message” was a commercial success, peaking at Number Four on Billboard‘s R&B-singles chart, but its messy birth was fatal to Flash and the Five, who split into factions. Their most notable reunion would finally come in 2007, when they became the first rap group inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame”.

Like all classic records, it can make an impact now and has not lost any of its significance and power. I have been listening to it when researching it for this feature. One can see other Hip-Hop acts and songs that came in its wake; inspired by its sheer significance. Maybe it was quite a bold and unusual record in 1982 but, looking back nearly forty years later, and one can see how it has shaped so many great Hip-Hop albums since!

I love the background and story of The Message. In 2019, Rhino spent some time outlining the importance of an iconic Hip-Hop record:

“Formally credited to Edward G. Fletcher, Melle Mel, Sylvia Robinson, and Clifton “Jiggs” Chase, “The Message” arrived when rap was still in its infancy as a musical genre (at least as far as mainstream audiences were concerned, anyway), but it nonetheless stood out from the pack by featuring lyrics which tackled a serious issue – inner city poverty – rather than being a bunch of self-congratulatory boasts. In fact, Melle Mel admitted in an NPR interview that the group originally didn’t want to do the song because it wasn’t what they were used to rapping about.

Thankfully, the group changed their mind: “The Message” went on to be one of the most influential songs of all time, and writer Cherese Jackson explained the reasons for its importance in a March 2019 article for Liberty Voice:

The reality in 1982 was that millions from the projects in Brooklyn, New York to the ghettos of Watts in California were given very little in the way of choices or opportunities in how they could live. Contrary to what the White House was saying or the news media were reporting, black and brown people were not just these unsavory characters addicted to drugs, crime, and unwedded pregnancies. They were children born into abstract devastation and were desperately looking for a way of escape.

Often mistaken for a threat, “Don’t push me because I am close to the edge,” was actually a cry for help…or at the least, an acknowledgment. People who felt trapped in these inhumane circumstances were lamenting that life was not all good in the “hood.” The hood had become the place were dreams and people were forgotten. Tucked away neatly out of the line of sight of America, the government could easily throw money, subsidized housing and food stamps at them in hopes they would kill themselves and keep it quiet. But out of those concrete streets grew a restlessness that would not be quilled. There was a story that needed to be heard, and hip-hop became the vehicle in which that was possible.

Mind you, the chart success of “The Message” wasn’t nearly as impressive as its history would lead you to believe: while it climbed to #4 on the Billboard Hot Black Singles chart, it topped out at #62 on the Hot 100. The UK, on the other hand, was far more receptive to the song, sending it to #18 on their singles chart. But in the long run, it doesn’t really even matter how it did on the charts. What matters is the seismic change it caused in music, one which continues to ripple to this day”.

Since its release, The Message has been lauded and ranked high in the lists of the greatest Hip-Hop songs ever. This Wikipedia article shows the song has been celebrated and honoured through the years:

“The song was ranked as number 1 "Track of the Year" for 1982 by NME.

Rolling Stone ranked "The Message" #51 in its List of Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Songs of All Time, (9 December 2004). It had the highest position for any 1980s release and was the highest ranking hip-hop song on the list. In 2012 it was named the greatest hip-hop song of all time.

It was voted #3 on About.com's Top 100 Rap Songs, after Common's "I Used to Love H.E.R." and The Sugarhill Gang's "Rapper's Delight".

In 2002, its first year of archival, it was one of 50 recordings chosen by the Library of Congress to be added to the National Recording Registry, the first hip hop recording ever to receive this honor.

"The Message" was number 5 on VH1's 100 Greatest Songs of Hip Hop.

"The Message" is number 1 on HipHopGoldenAge's Top 100 Hip Hop Songs Of The 1980s”.

I think that the album, The Message, is an incredible listen. One that everyone should seek out and spend some time with. I think that the Hip-Hop scene was fairly new then. We often associate the Golden Age as being between 1986 and 1991 (roughly) - so this was one of the very earliest Hip-Hop records. I can imagine upcoming artists being blown away by it and knowing that they witnessed a moment of history!

To close, there is one more article that I want to borrow from. It states that, whilst the Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five’s reign was fairly short-lived, songs like The Message were hugely transformative and crucial:

“The eponymous Grandmaster Flash was more at home behind the turntables, and although socially-conscious lyrics might not have been something he was closely involved with, he did perfect and popularise several seminal scratching and mixing styles which laid the foundations for the generations of hip-hop music to come.

As a creative force, Grandmaster Flash and The Furious Five didn’t last much past “The Message”. Their follow-up, “White Lines”, by this time without Grandmaster Flash himself, was credited to Grandmaster and Melle Mel, and after that, the occasional attempt at re-grouping apart, Grandmaster Flash and The Furious Five lived on as part of music history, but no longer released records under that name.

Not long after “White Lines”, Sugar Hill Records closed down amidst a blizzard of lawsuits and the record label which took hip-hop mainstream was no more.

In its brief existence, though, co-founders Sylvia and Joe Robinson brought a new art form to the ears of the listening public.

And they brought us one of the most important songs in music history, “The Message”.

If only we’d listened more closely to what Grandmaster Flash and The Furious Five told us 40-odd years ago, and acted on the concerns they raised at the time, the world might not be in the mess it’s in today.

But the question for us here and now isn’t why haven’t we put right what they sang about 40 years ago. The time for that has gone.

The question for us all is what are we going to do differently in the next 40 years…”

I shall close things off here. I am going to go back even further in time for the next Groovelines. I guess a lot of people are aware of The Message but, for anyone who is not, I hope that this feature has provided necessary information and story behind a hugely important Hip-Hop work. It still move you and sound fresh in 2021. I wonder whether we have learned lessons in the time since the song was released or, in years to come, The Message will still serve as a lesson to people around the world. The significance and influenced of The Message is likely to last…

FOR decades more.

FEATURE: The April Playlist: Vol. 1: HOT HOT in the Melting of the Sun

FEATURE:

 

 

The April Playlist

IN THIS PHOTO: Bree Runway 

Vol. 1: HOT HOT in the Melting of the Sun

__________

IN this week’s Playlist…

 IN THIS PHOTO: St. Vincent

there are great new tracks from Bree Runway, St. Vincent, Garbage, Du Blonde (ft. Andy Bell), Courtney Barnett (ft. Vagabon), Bobby Gillespie/Jehnny Beth, Drug Store Romeos, and Olivia Rodrigo. There is also some quality from Demi Lovato (ft. Ariana Grande), Working Men’s Club, Nasty Cherry, and The Snuts. If you require some energy and inspiration to get you into this Easter weekend, then I think that the songs in the Playlist should do the job. Whilst it is not as busy as previous weeks, there is still enough in the mix that should keep you busy. As the weather looks to get colder over the next day or two, these songs will definitely be able to provide…

 IN THIS PHOTO: Demi Lovato

SOME much-needed heat.   

ALL PHOTOS/IMAGES (unless credited otherwise): Artists

__________

Bree Runway – HOT HOT

PHOTO CREDIT: Zackery Michael

St. Vincent - The Melting of the Sun

Garbage - The Men Who Rule the World

Du Blonde (ft. Andy Bell) - All the Way

Courtney Barnett (ft. Vagabon) - Don't Do It

PHOTO CREDIT: Henry Kamara/The Guardian

Bobby Gillespie, Jehnny Beth - Remember We Were Lovers

PHOTO CREDIT: Melanie Hyams

Drug Store Romeos - What's On Your Mind

Olivia Rodrigo - déjà vu

Demi Lovato (ft. Ariana Grande) - Met Him Last Night

Working Men’s Club - X

Nasty Cherry – What’s the Deal

Dry Cleaning – Unsmart Lady

PHOTO CREDIT: Udoma Janssen

Sons of Kemet (ft. Kojey Radical) - Hustle

#

Dinosaur Jr. - Garden

The Snuts – Glasgow

PHOTO CREDIT: Luka McGhie

Foxes – Dance

Gary Numan - Saints and Liars

Willy Mason – Youth on a Spit

Squirrel Flower - Hurt a Fly

Fickle Friends - Not in the Mood

PHOTO CREDIT: Jen Krause

Varley – Bubble Up

Throwing Snow - Brujita

Iggy Azalea, Tyga - Sip It

Olivia Holt – love on you.

PHOTO CREDIT: Ellyn Jameson

Johanna Samuels - All Is Fine

Idris Elba (ft. Wavy Boy Smith)  - Light Work - From the Netflix Film, Concrete Cowboy

girl ultra – rosas (dímelo)

TrueMendous, Masta Ace – Emmett Till

Jordan Rakei - Imagination (Late Night Tales: Jordan Rakei)

PHOTO CREDIT: Sequoia Ziff

Bess Atwell – Time Comes in Roses

PHOTO CREDIT: RCA Records

BROCKHAMPTON – COUNT ON ME

PHOTO CREDIT: Graham Tolbert

Flock of Dimes - One More Hour

The Fratellis – Strangers in the Street

Lucy Hayes - Growing Pains - Demo

PHOTO CREDIT: Kirk Cedric

Rosie Darling – Coping

Shaybo - Streets

Jessica Wilde - BODY

Nicole Atkins & Marissa Nadler - Mr. Blue

PHOTO CREDIT: AJ Incammicia

oddCouple (ft. Jamila Woods) - Reflections

FEATURE: The BRIT Awards 2021: My Predictions

FEATURE:

 

 

The BRIT Awards 2021

IN THIS PHOTO: Little Mix are nominated in the British Group category

My Predictions

___________

I have held back a little bit…

 IN THIS PHOTO: Arlo Parks is nominated in the Mastercard Album (for Collapsed in Sunbeams), Female Solo Artist, and Breakthrough Artist categories

as it has been a few days now since the nominees for this year’s BRIT Awards. This year’s ceremony occurs on 11th May and, whilst it will be a different-looking ceremo0ny to year’s past, the nominees are very strong. Although the BRITs is not my favourite ceremony, I like to cover a lot of music award shows as they combine so many different artists and albums. As The Guardian reported, there is greater gender (and sonic) balance this year:

“After last year’s male-dominated Brit awards entrenched the clear gender disparity in British pop, this year’s nominations go some way to redressing the balance.

Dua Lipa, Arlo Parks, Celeste, Joel Corry and Young T & Bugsey lead this year’s awards with three nominations apiece. The British album category also features four out of five female nominees for the first time in Brits history, with the aforementioned women joined by Jessie Ware and J Hus – a marked improvement on 2020, when the category featured no women.

“Women have always made great music and wonderful albums, but this is the first time in the entire Brits history that we have dominated the best album category,” said Jessie Ware. “The time is now – albeit long overdue – to start respecting and appreciating the vital role women, and their music, play in the British music industry.”

Out of 176 eligible albums, 121 were made by men or all-male groups, 55 by women or groups featuring women, and one by a non-binary artist, Sam Smith.

Ten British female artists were recognised across 25 slots in mixed-gender Brit categories, up on last year, when only one – Mabel – featured.

More than half the nominees for British album, female solo artist, male solo artist, breakthrough artist and single are non-white, reflecting the enduring dominance and evolution of British rap and R&B, as well as the diversity of the Brit Academy. With approximately 1,500 members, including artists, managers, promoters, media figures and label staff, this year’s voting body achieved gender parity and 26% Black, Asian and minority ethnic representation”.

With each of the categories boasting some great talent, I am running down each category and predicting who I think will win on 11th May. I am usually okay when it comes to predicting winners, through the BRITs this year could throw in some surprises! Here are my picks regarding BRIT Award winners: one of the most important ceremonies…

 IN THIS PHOTO: BTS are nominated for International Group

ON the British music calendar.

__________________

Mastercard Album

Arlo Parks - Collapsed in Sunbeams

Release Date: 29th January, 2021

Producer: Gianluca Buccellati

Label: Transgressive

Standout Tracks: Hurt/Caroline/Black Dog

Review:

“With each song shrouded in a mist of melancholia and coming-of-age confessions, Arlo’s breathy vocals soften, and make palatable, the often harsh and uncomfortable realities of life. The use of metaphors and images of nature, nourishment, filmography and friendship offer vignettes of reality that is so near-perfect, you can almost taste it.

From feel-good ’90s R&B which is used to disguise the reality of what it’s like being with someone who is in denial about how they feel about you (‘Too Good’) to the hazy neo-soul in ‘Bluish’ and a multitude lo-fi indie bangers that dive into the friction and dark side of companionship, and with a healthy dose of spoken word littered throughout, ‘Collapsed in Sunbeams’ is testament to Arlo’s mission statement of not pigeonholing herself so early on in her career.

As a debut, it is a sublime body of work from the kind of artist who is meticulous in all aspects of her craft. To put it simply — in the artist’s own words — she is “making rainbows out of something painful”, and we’re just so lucky enough that everything she touches turns to gold” – DORK

Key Cut: Hope

Celeste - Not Your Muse

Release Date: 29th January, 2021

Producers: Jamie Hartman/John Hill/Josh Crocker

Labels: Both Sides/Polydor

Standout Tracks: Strange/Love Is Back/A Little Love

Review:

“Most of the record’s emotional beats come from the raw, husky voice of Celeste herself -- it’s why 2019’s “Strange” is still so affecting over a year later. The single -- which ultimately propelled her to win BBC’s Sound Of and the Brits Rising Star award last year -- is sparse and reserved, held through a rasping curiosity for a failed relationship. In “Tell Me Something I Don’t Know,” Celeste exemplifies her anxieties with booming instrumentation. “Everyday it gets so loud / Everyday I can’t turn around,” she wails over a crescendoing big band, pinpointing her struggles through an auditory lens.

Elsewhere, Celeste croons and sighs through pleas to damaged connections, desperate to make her feelings known on songs like “A Kiss” (“Bit your lip and left you swollen”) and “Beloved” (“If I had my way / You’d be here to stay”). On the sultry “Love Is Back,” she flirts with the idea of diving “head first” into a new crush. Even though her sense of self seems diminished here, there is still power to be had in taking charge of romantic fervor, whether it be healthy or not.

Coming as a high point, the titular track is where the ethos of Celeste’s body of work shines through. Starting quietly on whispers and plucked guitar strings, she admonishes a lover for not accepting her true self. “I’ll let you know when I need you to liberate me” she knowingly sings, as if she’s held this power inside her for a lifetime. The track creeps to a frightening crescendo, ethereal screeching surrounding the might of her confidence. “I’ll hold my pose / But I’m not your muse,” Celeste proclaims, rising high above a wave of criticism and judgement, showcasing the truest form of herself, and the care that it deserves” – The Line of Best Fit

Key Cut: Stop This Flame

J Hus - Big Conspiracy

Release Date: 24th January, 2020

Producers: J Hus (exec.)/Jae5 (also exec.)/IO/Levi Lennox/Maestro/Nana Rogues/Scribz Riley/Sunny Kale/TSB

Label: Black Butter

Standout Tracks: Big Conspiracy/Repeat/No Denying

Review:

“Big Conspiracy is more introspective and subdued than its predecessor. The distorted vocals on Fortune Teller snarl, but there’s nothing here quite as upfront and raw as Common Sense’s Clartin. The lyrics, too, frequently suggest a man who’s had a considerable amount of time on his hands with not much to do but think. There’s a lot of contemplative stuff about knowing yourself – “how do you live your life when your life’s a facade?” he ponders, backed by melancholy piano chords, on Deeper Than Rap – and references to a grab-bag of spirituality that ranges from the aforementioned juju to Rastafarian ideas about the “Babylon system”. Then again, not everything on Big Conspiracy deals with an ascetic life of contemplation. There’s a fairly phenomenal amount of shagging involved too, not least on Play Play, his collaboration with Nigerian star Burna Boy.

What hasn’t changed is his ability to switch between an array of musical styles – the Afrobeats-flavoured Love Peace and Prosperity; Repeat’s collaboration with current dancehall queen Koffee; the mesh of live guitar and bass that underpins Helicopter. More impressive still is that the album’s musical transitions never jar. As on his debut, they feel natural and unforced, an expression of growing up in London surrounded by an array of different cultural influences, tied together not just by J Hus’s flow, but his pop smarts – he has an unfailing ability to come up with earworm choruses. The latter skill is among his more overlooked, but it means that no matter how sombre his meditations on race, crime and identity get, virtually everything here feels like a single. The latest one is No Denying, and the ability to make something radio-friendly out of samples of high-tension soundtrack strings, scrabbling sax improv and divebombing bass is not to be sniffed at” – The Guardian

Key Cut: Must Be

Jessie Ware - What's Your Pleasure?

Release Date: 26th June, 2020

Producers: Benji B/James Ford/Joseph Mount/Kindness/Morgan Geist/Matthew Tavares/Midland

Labels: PMR/Friends Keep Secrets/Interscope/Virgin EMI

Standout Tracks: What's Your Pleasure?/Ooh La La/Mirage (Don't Stop)

Review:

“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. Stylistic deviations are few, well-placed, and maintain lyrical continuity with references to the senses as they relate to emotional and physical connection. "In Your Eyes" recalls Massive Attack's "Safe from Harm" with its hypnotizing bassline, subtly theatrical strings, and aching (if less desperate) vocal. Moving in gradually intensifying and similarly slow motion, "The Kill" enables Ware to let down her guard for an unassured lover. "Remember Where You Are," a stirring finale, takes a little trip to cherish the daybreak in Minnie Riperton and Charles Stepney's chamber folk-soul garden, replete with a goosebump-raising group vocal in the chorus. One can almost smell the baby's breath” – AllMusic

Key Cut: Remember Where You Are

My Pick

Dua Lipa - Future Nostalgia 

Release Date: 27th March, 2020

Producers: Jeff Bhasker/Jason Evigan/KozIan Kirkpatrick/SG Lewis/Lindgren/The Monsters & Strangerz/Stuart Price/Take a Daytrip/TMS/Andrew Watt

Label: Warner Records

Standout Tracks: Don’t Start Now/Physical/Levitate

Review:

“You’ve probably already heard singles “Don’t Start Now” and “Physical” – the new single that drop-kicks the Lycra-bounce of Newton-John’s 1981 hit of the same name into the 21st century. Back in the day, Newton-John was understandably uncomfortable about how her song’s unabashed sexuality – “There’s nothin’ left to talk about unless it’s horizontally” – would affect her good-girl image. Today, Lipa stares straight down the camera at us as she takes charge in her exercise video. “Hi. I’m Dua, and I’ll be your instructor today…” The husky mezzo that kept her out of the school choir (there were tears) is muscular with authority and doesn’t stand for any melismatic shilly-shallying. Each note gets down and gives her 20.

She keeps a leather-driving-gloved command over the wonky synths of “Levitating” and “Hallucinating” and the spacey spangle glitter gel noises of “Cool” – on which she sings of “burning up on you/ In control of what I do/ And I love the way you move.”

It’s invigorating to hear her use samples like barbells – lifting and flexing with them, not dancing around them like ornamental handbags. Best is her use of White Town’s 1997 “Your Woman” on “Love Again” – perhaps the most romantic song we’ve heard to date from a woman whose name actually means “love” in Albanian. White Town’s bedroom-made chart-topper (which itself sampled a 1930s song) was one of the first to flip the singer’s gender (a man sang he would “never be your woman”), and Lipa adds to the sense of head-messing by stirring strings into the mix while confessing she’s sinking her “teeth into disbelief”.

But I also love her use of the sexy-stuttering riff from INXS’s booty-call classic “Need You Tonight” on “Break My Heart”. You can picture whole families dancing to this together as kids’ and parents’ musical coordinates intersect” – The Independent

Key Cut: Break My Heart

Female Solo Artist

Arlo Parks

Official: https://www.arloparksofficial.com/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/arloparks

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/arloparks

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/arlo.parks/

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCwXHNRJSgQ9CTimLYOpRWJg

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/4kIwETcbpuFgRukE8o7Opx?si=pahnrMIUSwKPjzkkVPK68A

Celeste

Official: https://www.celesteofficial.com/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/celeste

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/celeste/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/celeste/

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCry6nkgqYYSfk_nrwbEF9Ow

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/49HlOY4gkHqsYG9GCuhkcc

Jessie Ware

Official: https://www.jessieware.com/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/jessieware

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/JessieWare

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jessieware/

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCisgqJFEjW68P8GdxZNP5aA

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/5Mq7iqCWBzofK39FBqblNc

Lianne La Havas

Official: https://www.liannelahavas.com/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/liannelahavas

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/LianneLaHavas

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/liannelahavas/

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCDU7Bc8TwxsO2XwIgc3lfaA

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/2RP4pPHTXlQpDnO9LvR7Yt

My Pick

Dua Lipa

Official: https://www.dualipa.com/studio2054-encore/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/dualipa

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/DuaLipa/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dualipa/  

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-J-KZfRV8c13fOCkhXdLiQ

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/6M2wZ9GZgrQXHCFfjv46we

Male Solo Artist

AJ Tracey

Official: https://www.ajtracey.co.uk/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/ajtracey

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ajtrcy

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ajtracey/

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCPOW9rO7SqJBfikRKEvbI3Q

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/4Xi6LSfFqv26XgP9NKN26U?si=eCBDoj9ESCqcbPteA7GdCA

Headie One

Official: https://www.headie.one/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/HeadieOne

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/officialheadieone

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/headieone/

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGXZoW3-CUuyfO3nWSLfFrw

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/6UCQYrcJ6wab6gnQ89OJFh?si=JRxmiIViRZOg08UIB206xw&nd=1

Joel Corry

Official: https://www.joelcorry.com/bed/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/JoelCorry

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/JoelCorry/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/joelcorry/

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCr-yZBBIzqOkcHjmAF7YR7A

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/6DgP9otnZw5z6daOntINxp

Yungblud

Official: https://www.yungbludofficial.com/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/yungblud

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/yungblud/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/yungblud/

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCd3Llj2WWJh8ItfYl32eJ4Q

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/6Ad91Jof8Niiw0lGLLi3NW

My Pick

J Hus

Official: https://www.jhusmusic.com/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Jhusmusic

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCpUBh7qelVwXS_m2ZH46kjg

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/2a0uxJgbvvIRI4GX8pYfcr?si=xmFiMOQdQ6yvEGoBfFfQLg&nd=1

British Group

Bicep

PHOTO CREDIT: Sam Mulvey

Official: https://www.bicepmusic.com/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/feelmybicep

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/feelmybicep

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/feelmybicep/

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCreSupkPVEJoDjoIV-9GG5w

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/73A3bLnfnz5BoQjb4gNCga?si=cDOzkqKWSkiB7PmyCHvvZQ

Biffy Clyro

Official: https://www.biffyclyro.com/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/biffyclyro

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/biffyclyro

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/biffy_clyro/

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC66Uan5Ezzs0pWbFI3wF-Tw

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/1km0R7wy712AzLkA1WjKET?si=qnDF1Al-RN6fH1FQEnxGlA&nd=1

The 1975

PHOTO CREDIT: Mara Palena 

Official: https://the1975.com/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/the1975

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/the1975/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the1975/

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_LfW1R3B0of9qOw1uI-QNQ

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/3mIj9lX2MWuHmhNCA7LSCW?si=_XL-ob9nSsaokIt22YzmKg

Young T & Bugsey

Twitter: https://twitter.com/YoungTandBugsey

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/youngtandbugsey/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/youngtandbugsey/

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCH7vIVv_zTTSDw23orBmbDw

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/6M6XXCcO5gI68XpIlrUL3Z?si=-cm2gaErTF63VJQms76QIw

My Pick

Little Mix

Official: https://www.little-mix.com/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/littlemix

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/LittleMix

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/littlemix/

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCIvqWqjC4aLvp7zI8hzARrA

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/3e7awlrlDSwF3iM0WBjGMp

Breakthrough Artist

Bicep

PHOTO CREDIT: Dan Medhurst

Official: https://www.bicepmusic.com/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/feelmybicep

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/feelmybicep

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/feelmybicep/

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCreSupkPVEJoDjoIV-9GG5w

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/73A3bLnfnz5BoQjb4gNCga?si=cDOzkqKWSkiB7PmyCHvvZQ

Celeste

PHOTO CREDIT: Adama Jalloh for The New York Times 

Official: https://www.celesteofficial.com/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/celeste

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/celeste/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/celeste/

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCry6nkgqYYSfk_nrwbEF9Ow

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/49HlOY4gkHqsYG9GCuhkcc

Joel Corry

Official: https://www.joelcorry.com/bed/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/JoelCorry

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/JoelCorry/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/joelcorry/

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCr-yZBBIzqOkcHjmAF7YR7A

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/6DgP9otnZw5z6daOntINxp

Young T & Bugsey

Twitter: https://twitter.com/YoungTandBugsey

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/youngtandbugsey/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/youngtandbugsey/

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCH7vIVv_zTTSDw23orBmbDw

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/6M6XXCcO5gI68XpIlrUL3Z?si=-cm2gaErTF63VJQms76QIw

My Pick

Arlo Parks

Official: https://www.arloparksofficial.com/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/arloparks

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/arloparks

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/arlo.parks/

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCwXHNRJSgQ9CTimLYOpRWJg

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/4kIwETcbpuFgRukE8o7Opx?si=pahnrMIUSwKPjzkkVPK68A

British Single with Mastercard

220 Kid & GRACEY - Don't Need Love

Aitch & AJ Tracey feat. Tay Keith – Rain

Dua Lipa – Physical

Headie One feat. AJ Tracey and Stormzy - Ain't It Different

Joel Corry feat. MNEK - Head & Heart

Nathan Dawe feat. KSI – Lighter

Regard & RAYE – Secrets

S1MBA feat. DTG – Rover

Young T & Bugsey feat. Headie One - Don't Rush

My Pick

Harry Styles - Watermelon Sugar

International Female Solo Artist

Ariana Grande

Official: https://www.arianagrande.com/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/ArianaGrande

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/arianagrande

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/arianagrande/

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9CoOnJkIBMdeijd9qYoT_g

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/66CXWjxzNUsdJxJ2JdwvnR

Billie Eilish

Official: https://www.billieeilish.com/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/billieeilish

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/billieeilish

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/billieeilish/

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCiGm_E4ZwYSHV3bcW1pnSeQ

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/6qqNVTkY8uBg9cP3Jd7DAH?si=Xii9Rw3lQAGC2sBrD6A99g

Cardi B

PHOTO CREDIT: Interview Magazine 

Official: https://www.cardibofficial.com/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/iamcardib

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/therealcardib

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/iamcardib/

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCxMAbVFmxKUVGAll0WVGpFw

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/4kYSro6naA4h99UJvo89HB?si=qbL4UcwGS9KoKY7qenvYkA&nd=1

Miley Cyrus

Official: https://www.mileycyrus.com/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/MileyCyrus

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MileyCyrus/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mileycyrus

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCn7dB9UMTBDjKtEKBy_XISw

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/5YGY8feqx7naU7z4HrwZM6?si=CYZ1JPTLRiCKpiT5YcGbhA

My Pick

Taylor Swift

PHOTO CREDIT: Beth Garrabrant 

Official: https://www.taylorswift.com/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/taylorswift13

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TaylorSwift

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/taylorswift/

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCqECaJ8Gagnn7YCbPEzWH6g

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/06HL4z0CvFAxyc27GXpf02?si=wqz9-8AQSraDAEvFzpSwGw

International Male Solo Act

Bruce Springsteen

Official: https://brucespringsteen.net/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/springsteen

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/brucespringsteen

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/springsteen/

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCcu7ANuD9J7hnTQCREqIc4Q

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/3eqjTLE0HfPfh78zjh6TqT?si=S1XlKV5hRO6mIFjCwav8Xg

Burna Boy

Official: https://www.onaspaceship.com/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/burnaboy

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Officialburnaboy/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/burnaboygram/

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEzDdNqNkT-7rSfSGSr1hWg

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/3wcj11K77LjEY1PkEazffa?si=C9gWqN9nS_aqdjXMsJGrjg

Childish Gambino

Official: https://donaldgloverpresents.com/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/donaldglover

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/donaldglover

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/childishgambino/

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC20LoHy2mX0LQODrkUalxVQ

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/73sIBHcqh3Z3NyqHKZ7FOL?si=YqpucyuDQ1KGn6A-Gzp49Q

Tame Impala

PHOTO CREDIT: Neil Krug

Official: https://official.tameimpala.com/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/tameimpala

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/tameimpala

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tameimpala/

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCdI8MAC5HoPJSJ4zrgDDI-Q

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/5INjqkS1o8h1imAzPqGZBb?si=CKR0BEvZRn-cN8qfGQXaEA

My Pick

The Weeknd

 Official: https://www.theweeknd.com/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheWeeknd

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/theweeknd

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theweeknd/

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCF_fDSgPpBQuh1MsUTgIARQ

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/1Xyo4u8uXC1ZmMpatF05PJ

International Group

BTS

 Official: https://ibighit.com/bts/eng/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/BTS_twt

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/bangtan.official

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bts.bighitofficial/

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/ibighit

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/3Nrfpe0tUJi4K4DXYWgMUX

Fontaines D.C.

Official: https://www.fontainesdc.com/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/fontainesdublin

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/fontainesband/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/fontainesband/

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCVtO4Hc3qiKScQBad51RAIQ

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/3SXwqSqAoBz9WCI9PDQzY6?si=OyaBvtKzQTiMbrJkQ2Q9qQ&nd=1

Foo Fighters

Official: https://www.foofighters.com/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/foofighters

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/foofighters/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/foofighters/

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCi2KNss4Yx73NG0JARSFe0A

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/7jy3rLJdDQY21OgRLCZ9sD?si=hiWKCFcgRJ6gyG21aLsF9A

Run The Jewels

Official: https://runthejewels.com/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/runjewels

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/therealrunthejewels

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/runthejewels/

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCeveumRTn2o--9j1Xz2KUCQ

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/4RnBFZRiMLRyZy0AzzTg2C?si=cfHbjDOzTpSwIdJacgSdFQ&nd=1

My Pick

HAIM

Official: http://haimtheband.com/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/haimtheband/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/haimtheband/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/haimtheband/

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9Dln8col-vr7GB1UTR789w

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/4Ui2kfOqGujY81UcPrb5KE?si=rIZJal-gRimI_5OS22jWWQ

FEATURE: A Buyer’s Guide: Part Forty-Nine: Pet Shop Boys

FEATURE:

 

 

A Buyer’s Guide

 Part Forty-Nine: Pet Shop Boys

___________

I almost forgot about Pet Shop Boys…

 PHOTO CREDIT: Trevor Leighton

when continuing with this feature. As they formed in 1981, the duo are celebrating forty years together. If you need some guidance and biography regarding an iconic act, here is some assistance:

“Pet Shop Boys are an English synth-pop duo, formed in London in 1981 and consisting of Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe.

“Pet Shop Boys have sold more than 100 million records worldwide, [better source needed] and were listed as the most successful duo in UK music history in the 1999 edition of The Guinness Book of Records. Three-time Brit Award winners and six-time Grammy nominees, since 1984 they have achieved 42 Top 30 singles, 22 of them Top 10 hits in the UK Singles Chart, including four UK number ones: "West End Girls" (also number one on the US Billboard Hot 100), "It's a Sin", a synthpop version of "Always on My Mind", and "Heart". Other hit songs include a cover of "Go West", and their own "Opportunities (Let's Make Lots of Money)", and "What Have I Done to Deserve This?" in a duet with Dusty Springfield. With five US top ten singles in the 1980s, they are associated with the Second British Invasion.

At the 2009 Brit Awards in London, Pet Shop Boys received an award for Outstanding Contribution to Music. In 2016, Billboard magazine named Pet Shop Boys the number one dance duo/group over the 40 years since the chart's inception in 1976. In 2017, the duo received NME's Godlike Genius Award”.

To celebrate Tennant and Lowe and the terrific music they have released through the years, this A Buyer’s Guide concerns their very best albums, an underrated gem and a Pet Shop Boys book. Have a look and listen of the best work of…

 PHOTO CREEDIT: Pelle Crépin

A genius duo.

______________

The Four Essential Albums

 

Please

Release Date: 24th March, 1986

Labels: Parlophone/EMI America

Producer: Stephen Hague

Standout Tracks: Opportunities (Let's Make Lots of Money)/Suburbia/Violence

Buy: https://www.discogs.com/sell/release/107872

Stream: https://open.spotify.com/album/0AwBxVtsvLVwmaVwwe5beS?si=ZkU687LURE2-KILgj1ZUdw

Review:

“A collection of immaculately crafted and seamlessly produced synthesized dance-pop, the Pet Shop Boys' debut album, Please, sketches out the basic elements of the duo's sound. At first listen, most of the songs come off as mere excuses for the dancefloor, driven by cold, melodic keyboard riffs and pulsing drum machines. However, the songcraft that the beats support is surprisingly strong, featuring catchy melodies that appear slight because of Neil Tennant's thin voice. Tennant's lyrics were still in their formative stages, with half of the record failing to transcend the formulaic constraints of dance-pop. The songs that do break free -- the intentionally crass "Opportunities (Let's Make Lots of Money)," the lulling "Suburbia," and the hypnotic "West End Girls" -- are not only classic dance singles, they're classic pop singles” – AllMusic

Choice Cut: West End Girls

Actually

Release Date: 7th September, 1987

Labels: Parlophone/EMI America

Producers: Stephen Hague/David Jacob/Julian Mendelsohn/Pet Shop Boys/Shep Pettibone/Andy Richards

Standout Tracks: What Have I Done to Deserve This? (with Dusty Springfield)/It’s a Sin/Heart

Buy: https://www.discogs.com/sell/list?master_id=27976&ev=mb

Stream: https://open.spotify.com/album/7hkIf8sKiJKRjADB2xan74?si=EJcOoOuBRsWK1XQAJJv0tw

Review:

“For Tennant especially, Actually was a landmark release, as wry observation became auto biography on ‘Its a Sin’, the words a castigation of the brutality of his religious upbringing, both at the hands of peers and superiors at a catholic school. Elsewhere ‘Shopping’ bore the same intrinsically playful approach to structure as Please’s ‘Two Divided By Zero’, albeit together with a laugh out loud chorus which pegged the nihilistic pursuit of consumption that would become known as retail therapy.

It wasn’t all clipped social commentary however, as their duet with Springfield demonstrated. Stories of the former sixties’ icon cast her as an irascible diva, but ‘What Have I Done To Deserve This?’ more than justified the pursuit, a warmly humanist love song stamped with devotion. Amongst all the loneliness, lust, and loss however its Actually’s prescience that leaves the greatest impression.

To many Northerners, London’s King’s Cross station is a place of entry and exodus, the embarcation point for all those seeking to run away from secrets and regrets in equal measure. Those expecting streets paved with gold soon get the rudest of awakenings in the surrounding area, a twilight world of vice and poverty which Tennant evokes lyrically with skill and chagrin. With Lowe’s technology shrilling with melodrama, the song which bears the station’s name is both desolate and heart-breaking, even more so when only three months after the album’s release a stray match caused the fire there which resulted in the deaths of 31 people.

With the benefit of hindsight, it’s easy to see how immaculately the duo’s high concept was pulled off, one where Tennant and Lowe both lived the dream but successfully corroded its envelope. Actually was a time bomb, set to explode the moment you woke up realising that your townhouse and BMW were only yours because you were bought and sold just like everything and everyone else. Face value didn’t give this up. But then again this was a record could soundtrack a disco or a riot with equal elegance. And not even London Calling can do that” – The Voice of Unreason

Choice Cut: Rent

Introspective

Release Date: 10th October, 1988

Label: Parlophone

Producers: Trevor Horn/David Jacob/Stephen Lipson/Lewis A. Martineé/Julian Mendelsohn/Pet Shop Boys

Standout Tracks: Left to My Own Devices/I’m Not Scared/It’s Alright

Buy: https://www.discogs.com/sell/list?master_id=28151&ev=mb

Stream: https://open.spotify.com/album/5rV1l8OgNRlryYfEzJ2IER?si=_6spR5JFR7CgJ_q7gc9T0Q

Review:

“Featuring a mere six tracks, most of them well over six minutes in length, Introspective was a move back to the clubs for the Pet Shop Boys. Over the course of the album, they incorporated various dance techniques that were currently in vogue, including Latin rhythms and house textures. The title isn't entirely an arch joke, however. Like Actually, Introspective was an exploration of distant, disaffected yuppies, which naturally resulted in a good deal of self-analyzation. Melodically, the essential song structures were as strong and multi-layered as the previous album, yet that was hard to hear beneath the varying rhythmic textures that composed the bulk of each track. Nevertheless, the mixes are more compelling than the remixes on Disco, and the songs include several of their best numbers, including "Left to My Own Devices" and "Domino Dancing," as well as the reconstruction of "Always on My Mind" and a cover of Blaze's club classic, "It's Alright” – AllMusic

Choice Cut: Always on My Mind

Very

Release Date: 27th September, 1993

Label: Parlophone

Producers: Pet Shop Boys/Stephen Hague/Brothers in Rhythm

Standout Tracks: Can You Forgive Her?/I Wouldn't Normally Do This Kind of Thing/Liberation

Buy: https://www.discogs.com/sell/list?master_id=28399&ev=mb

Stream: https://open.spotify.com/album/6isi41U6Wdh0JBglB26rKX?si=zDk53RA8Tgy-x48bMTU2_A

Review:

“But that's very typical of Very. It isn't simply that there's more to these songs than sly wit and catchy choruses (although there are plenty of both); this time around, the Boys appear to have a few axes to grind. Some are obvious enough, like the spiteful satire of musicpress vipers and record-biz sycophants in "Yesterday, When I Was Mad." Or "The Theater," which describes how the well-dressed crowds on their way to the latest Andrew Lloyd Webber hit blithely ignore the street kids crowding the sidewalks of London's East End ("We're the bums you step over as you leave the theatre," spits Tennant's chorus).

Others, though, require a fair amount of interpretation. Take "Dreaming of the Queen," for example. On the surface, it's about a dream in which Tennant takes tea with Queen Elizabeth and Princess Di and ends up realizing that he's forgotten to put on any clothes. But beneath that surface drollery is a touching elegy to the toll AIDS has taken, leaving us trapped in a world where love has died because "there are no more lovers left alive/No one has surprised."

That's not to say that Very is all seriousness and no fun – these are the Pet Shop Boys, after all. But as fun as it is to wade into the tuneful exuberance of pop fare like "One in a Million" or "I Wouldn't Normally Do This Kind of Thing," there are deeper pleasures to be had in the mixed emotions conveyed in "To Speak Is a Sin" and "Can You Forgive Her?" And it's that sort of depth that makes Very worth hearing again and again – Rolling Stone

Choice Cut: Go West

The Underrated Gem

 

Bilingual

Release Date: 2nd September, 1996

Label: Parlophone

Producers: Pet Shop Boys/Chris Porter/Paul Roberts/Danny Tenaglia/Andy Williams

Standout Tracks: Single/Electricity/Before

Buy: https://www.discogs.com/sell/list?master_id=28327&ev=mb

Stream: https://open.spotify.com/album/7x4QGVpvnb3NKPdGQzDcsM?si=4RFGTKAVR9ydY4iIXBYlng

Review:

“For the first four seconds of Bilingual, I was convinced it was more of the same synthetic, electroid waste that we're so accustomed to hearing from the Boys. And that's when the strings came in. Of course, they're not real strings, but all the same, the chords played are not your standard danceable, major key chords. It's much darker than that. The drum loops begins its aggressive pounding, and you slowly begin to realize that something's changed with these guys. The song is "Discoteca," and though British dance music doesn't usually keep me interested, this stuff is pretty remarkable. It's the perfect song for a rainy night drive.

"Discoteca" leads nicely into the title cut from the album, which is a great song (if somewhat similar to "Discoteca") except for the chorus which comes along every ten seconds and irritatingly proclaims "I'm single / Bilingual," one of the worst lyrics of all time.

The disc goes all over the place, covering some virtually unexplored territory, and occasionally returns to the mid- '80s vein of hellmusic we love to hate these days. The songs even out pretty well, and I have to say, Bilingual is better than I thought it would be. It's embarrasing to admit to liking this record, but somebody's got to do it. I feel pretty confident there are others just like me out there” – Pitchfork

Choice Cut: Se a vida é (That's the Way Life Is)

The Latest Album

 

Hotspot

Release Date: 24th January, 2020

Label: x2

Producer: Stuart Price

Standout Tracks: You Are the One/Dreamland (featuring Years & Years)/Burning the Heather

Buy: https://www.discogs.com/sell/list?master_id=1671997&ev=mb

Stream: https://open.spotify.com/album/3Ap37NIDZhcgORhznOgSmG?si=UZrNI3kiTXOh0LGqulPOXw

Review:

“While the defining sound is electronic as ever, each track is coloured with a subtly different shade of electro giving a pleasingly diverse dynamic to the record. ‘Will O The Wisp’ is as imposing an opener as they have ever managed with it’s heavy pulsating beats soundtracking an ode to evergreen hedonism in the ‘Left To My Own Devices’ mode. It even features a trademark low key hilarious spoken word bridge that marks it out as a PSB classic. Immediately following is the twinkling beauty of ‘You Are The One’ and it’s this contrast of light and shade that makes ‘Hotspot’ so compelling.

All the hallmarks of prime Pet Shop Boys are present and correct and they have lost none of their wit and piercing lyrical eye. You could imagine the wistful ‘Hoping For A Miracle’ as a subtly damning takedown of the flawed Brexit dream while ‘Dreamland’ in collaboration with Olly Alexander from Years & Years is the kind of up-tempo empowering conscious anthem that they excel at.

The defining characteristic of ‘Hotspot’ is of a more lyrical album and, indeed, the more diverse musical palette including acoustic guitars provided by Bernard Butler and horn solo on single ‘Burning The Heather’ allow for a more ruminative melancholy approach. After every big night on the dancefloor you always need a comedown to reflect. The HI-NRG fevered pop of tracks like ‘Happy People’ and the playful ‘Monkey Business’ though show that Tennant and Lowe have lost none of their capacity for dancefloor exuberance but with this album they’ve perfected their journey of the last decade of connecting with their musical past while pointing a way towards the future” – CLASH

Choice Cut: Monkey Business

The Pet Shop Boys Book

 

Pet Shop Boys, Literally

Author: Chris Heath

Publication Date: 19th March, 2020

Publisher: William Heinemann

Synopsis:

“The Pet Shop Boys are one of the most successful and unusual bands of the last five decades. They are the pop duo that proves pop music can be modern, ecstatic and playful as well as serious and intelligent, winning them legions of devoted fans throughout the world.

In 1989, Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe invited journalist Chris Heath and photographer Lawrence Watson to shadow them around Hong Kong, Japan and the UK as they embarked on their first-ever tour. This book is the result: an immersive portrait giving access into the duo’s inner sanctum, showing them in brilliantly observed detail as they work, relax, gossip, argue and occasionally try to make sense of what they do.

‘As clear a picture as could be wished for of the seething mass of elegant contradictions that is the

Pet Shop Boys’ on-the-road experience.’ Independent on Sunday

‘This superbly reported book transcends tired rock journalism cliché. It’s about what it means to be a pop star, what it means to be a Pet Shop Boy… how to love pop, hold it to a higher standard and subvert its expectations.’ Laura Snapes” – Penguin

Order: https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/111/1118506/pet-shop-boys--literally/9781785152368.html

FEATURE: Too Good to Be Forgotten: Songs That Are Much More Than a Guilty Pleasure: Journey - Don't Stop Believin'

FEATURE:

 

 

Too Good to Be Forgotten: Songs That Are Much More Than a Guilty Pleasure

Journey - Don't Stop Believin'

___________

I have seen this song appear…

on more than one list that names so-called ‘guilty pleasure’ songs. I am not someone who feels any song should be viewed as a guilty pleasure. Whilst I am not a massive fan of Journey’s 1981 hit, Don’t Stop Believin’, it is a track that has more than its fair share of fans! Despite some feeling it is a little embarrassing embracing a song like this, I think that it is an anthem of the 1980s. Even though I am not enamoured of it, it has gained quite a legacy. Here is some details about a huge track:

“Don't Stop Believin'" is a song by American rock band Journey, originally released as the second single from their seventh album, Escape (1981). It became a number 9 hit on the Billboard Hot 100 on its original release after entering the chart at position 56 on October 31, 1981. In the United Kingdom, the song was not a top 40 hit on its original release, but it reached number 6 in 2010 following the popularity of a cover version by the cast of the American comedy-drama Glee.

Mike DeGagne of AllMusic has described "Don't Stop Believin'" as a "perfect rock song" and an "anthem", featuring "one of the best opening keyboard riffs in rock." It is the best-selling digital track from the 20th century, with over 7 million copies sold in the United States”.

Taken from the underrated 1981 album, Escape, I think one of the reasons Don’t Stop Believin’ has acquired a bit of a bad rap is that it has appeared on shows like Glee and The X Factor. The song is perfect for a Pop wannabe to belt during an audition. I guess it is a shame that, in some ways, the track has been associated with certain shows – though they themselves are popular, so I can’t knock them too much. Maybe it was good to get the song heard again, as Journey’s biggest hit has dipped in and out of popular culture through the decades. In 2010, The Guardian talked about a power ballad that has refused to die:

“When was the last time you heard Don't Stop Believin'? Was it on the radio or in the pub? At a festival or a wedding? Was it sung by Journey themselves, the cast of Glee, a fan on YouTube, a choir of schoolchildren or a drunk friend on a karaoke machine? Boxfresh pop songs such as Tinie Tempah's Pass Out might have a decent claim on being the sound of Britain in 2010 but nothing has wriggled its way into every corner of the culture quite like a slow-burning power ballad that's about to celebrate its 30th birthday.

It was a song inspired by failure. Journey started life as a jazz-rock band in San Francisco in 1973, but they were floundering and hitless when, four years later, they recruited singer Steve Perry, who was having little luck himself. Their fortunes drastically improved, but the sentiments of Don't Stop Believin' harked back to the lean years. Before keyboardist Jonathan Cain joined in 1980, he was also struggling while living on LA's Sunset Boulevard. Each time he called home in despair, his dad would tell him: "Don't stop believing or you're done, dude."

INTHIS PHOTO: Journey photographed in 1979/PHOTO CREDIT: Michael Putland/Getty Images

The song was written backwards. Cain had nothing but the climactic chorus when he brought the stub of a song to Perry and guitarist Neal Schon, and they worked together on how to get to that moment. They all liked the concept of two lovers fleeing their hometowns by train (a reverse homage to Gladys Knight's Midnight Train to Georgia), and Cain told Perry about his time in LA, hence the "strangers waiting up and down the boulevard" line. "I [saw] that every night in Hollywood," Cain told The Mix magazine. "People coming to LA looking for their dream. We felt that every young person has a dream and sometimes where you grow up isn't where you're destined to be."

In Britain, Don't Stop Believin' flopped, despite being Kerrang!'s single of the year for 1982. In the US, however, it was a substantial hit, the first of many from 1981's multi-platinum Escape album. "Everyone in an American high school in the early 80s probably had a Journey cassette," says Brian Raftery, author of Don't Stop Believin': How Karaoke Conquered the World and Changed My Life. "But then in the early 90s all the cheesy 80s music got rejected and it basically disappeared. Journey were seen as the kind of overblown arena act that grunge and hip-hop were meant to obliterate."

According to Will Byers, a music teacher and former host of the Guardian's School of Rock blog, the structure is the key. Yes, Cain's opening piano chords are potent – as Australian comedy trio Axis of Awesome have demonstrated in a much-watched clip, it's the same chord sequence (I, V, vi, IV) that appears in Take On Me, Under the Bridge, You're Beautiful and Let It Be, the minor vi adding just a touch of yearning. And yes, as Byers points out, each new guitar chord appears on the last quaver of the bar, giving the song an extra push. But these are common strategies. It's the slow burn that makes Don't Stop Believin' so unusually compelling.

"Over time, we learn to appreciate these songs that don't offload all they've got in the first minute – Elton John's Tiny Dancer being another one," says Byers. "You invest some emotion in bothering to listen all the way through”.

I think that Don’t Stop Believin’, like so many tracks at the moment, has lyrics and a general feel that can help and comfort people. That sense of self-belief and hope is a powerful tool at a very difficult time! One can see why it has been used to soundtrack good and positive change. In an article from 2019, NPR highlighted some positives; how the song has been used widely over the years:

“Thirty-eight years after it debuted on the album Escape, "Don't Stop Believin'" is the go-to anthem for perseverance that has itself persevered, successfully riding wave after new wave of media. Though born in the era of rock radio and cassette mixtapes, the song found its real glory at the dawn of binge TV and the smartphone, and it has woven its way into weddings, bar mitzvahs, graduations, the 2005 World Series, The Sopranos and Glee.

By the late 1990s, Perry had left Journey, and the band's career was in the wilderness. But the requests for "Don't Stop Believin'" kept coming.

Charlize Theron roller-skated to the song in her Oscar-winning turn as a serial killer in 2003's Monster. Four years later, The Sopranos ended its pioneering six-season run on HBO with — spoiler alert — a tense sequence involving a diner and parallel parking, soundtracked by "Don't Stop Believin'." Downloads of the track on iTunes soared. In 2009, the earnest high school show choir on Glee covered the song for the first of several times throughout the series' run, sending its download numbers through the roof again.

 "Don't Stop Believin'" has been heard on Scrubs, South Park and Family Guy. A string ensemble played it in the Adam Sandler comedy The Wedding Singer. It was the rally song for the Chicago White Sox in the team's 2005 World Series run, and it was the climax of the hit Broadway jukebox musical Rock of Ages. On social media, you can find plenty of photos of stop signs playfully defaced with the title exhortation.

In 2007, Journey flew him to the U.S. for a tryout and hired him — a fairy-tale story chronicled in the 2009 documentary Don't Stop Believin': Everyman's Journey.

Pineda told CBS News in 2012, "Even before I discovered 'Don't Stop Believin,' it has been my motto — you know, to never stop believing in myself. The life that I've gone through, all those hardships, I never stopped believing that someday there is something magical that will happen in my life."

As for Frost — the critic who originally panned Escape in Rolling Stone — she tells NPR that four decades later she's still not a fan but that maybe those streetlight people might — might — have a point.

"You know, I think maybe it helps them celebrate their high school years — or their hopes," she says. "And if it does, what can I tell you? Good for them”.

I think that Don’t Stop Believin’ is one of those songs that will divide people but, far from being a guilty pleasure, it has provided guidance and positivity to many people. The fact it has been used on T.V. shows and films proves it has currency and cultural appeal. I wonder how people will mark forty years of the song at the end of October. I might warm to it by then but, whilst it is not among my favourite tracks, it definitely delivers energy and a catchy chorus! I suppose we do not have bands like Journey anymore; the song is very much a product of the 1980s. Perhaps it is not a song that can age brilliantly because of that but, as we are living through a dark time, the open and no-specific lyrics can be applied to the way we can break through and find some hope at the end of the tunnel! Simply because of that, Don’t Stop Believin’ deserves some respect. Even if you think the song cannot burrow its way into the brain, you only need to spin it once or twice before its big chorus and riffs…

GET stuck in your head.

FEATURE: Now THAT’S What I Call Music! Why the Decades-Running Compilation Series Still Fascinates Me

FEATURE:

 

 

Now THAT’S What I Call Music!

Why the Decades-Running Compilation Series Still Fascinates Me

___________

ALTHOUGH this is not the first time…

 IN THIS PHOTO: Dua Lipa appears three times on the latest NOW That's What I Call Music

I have talked about the NOW That's What I Call Music series, I love the fact that  it has been nearly thirty-eight years since the original compilation arrived. For music lovers who were around then, seeing an advert for that first compilation must have been exciting:

“Now That's What I Call Music (also simply titled Now or Now 1) is the first album from the popular Now! series that was released in the United Kingdom on 28 November 1983. Initial pressings were released on vinyl and audio cassette. To celebrate the 25th anniversary of the album and series, the album was re-released on CD for the first time in 2009. Alternative longer mixes of "Only for Love", "Double Dutch" and "Candy Girl" were included in place of the original shorter single mixes from 1983.[1] A double vinyl re-release followed for Record Store Day on 18 April 2015. In July 2018, the album was newly remastered and re-released on CD, vinyl and cassette to commemorate the release of the 100th volume of the series.

In December 1983, the compilation debuted at number seven on the UK Albums Chart and reached number one a week later, staying at the top for five non-consecutive weeks”.

I will come onto the latest incarnation in the long-running series in a minute. I think one of the beautiful things about a now NOW That's What I Call Music album is that there is a nice spread of music; some of the best tracks from that year can be heard. Whilst, perhaps, the series leans towards Pop, I don't think that is always the case.

I have been a little out of the loop regarding NOW That's What I Call Music over the past few years. I have got back into this in the past week because of a tweet I saw from Mark Savage. Dua Lipa appears on the latest  NOW That's What I Call Music three times. Not only is she well represented but, in terms of the quality of music on it, I think it is very broad and interesting. Have a look at the great tracks on the latest album and go and buy it if you can. I am so interested in NOW That's What I Call Music because it a snapshot of a year, and it is curious to look at how the series has progressed through the years and how tastes have changed. Whilst the series might not be for everyone, I think we all have a number in the series that is particularly good. For me, number twenty-four of 1993 is the very best. I recall buying that album on cassette when it came out and marvelling at all the chart hits packed together! I feel that it can be hard to get in top of what is popular and all the great Pop around. There will always be detractors who dislike the mainstream sound of the compilation series and the fact that it rarely touches on genres like Rap, Hip-Hop, Rock and Indie.

Two albums in one day! 🌟
NOW 108 and NOW 8 are both out now. Who’s already gotten hold of a copy? pic.twitter.com/HEJGYcYTMG

— NOW That's What I Call Music (@NOWMusic) March 26, 2021

I do think that the series offers a lot to music fans, though I feel that there is opportunity, like there has been in the past, to do genre-specific NOW That's What I Call Music albums. At a time when music is so broad and inventive, maybe focusing on Pop is to restrictive. That being said, the names on the one-hundred-and-eighth NOW That's What I Call Music cover a wide spectrum - and there are plenty of tracks to get your teeth into! One important thing to note is that, alongside the current NOW That's What I Call Music is being offered with an older album in the series. This article explains more:

“Music has remained a constant in these rollercoaster times, continuing to be played loudly and proudly. The pandemic has seen growth in the recorded music industry and NOW That’s What I Call Music! 108 features the biggest chart-topping hits the nation just can’t get enough of.

As a bonus, NOW That’s What I Call Music! 8 is being re-released for the first-time since 1986, full of classic sing-along hits, still as popular today as they were 35 years ago.

Included in NOW 108, the first numbered compilation of the year, is Disney star Olivia Rodrigo with her chart-topping single drivers license, the longest running UK number 1 debut single in 15 years; Dua Lipa’s We’re Good and Harry Style’s Golden both 2021 Grammy winners for Best Pop Vocal Album and Best Pop Solo Performance respectively. Joining them on this jam-packed compilation is Billie Eilish’s Therefore I Am, Miley Cyrus’ Midnight Sky along with Anne-Marie x KSI x Digital Farm Animals’ Don’t play.

Now That’s What I Call Music! 8, first released in 1986, is a time capsule of some of the finest eighties tracks to sing along to, it captures a time when the chart was a musical mix and legends were born. Taking us on a journey back to the eighties the compilation includes, Duran Duran’s Notorious, RUN DMC feat. Aerosmith’s Walk This Way and Grace Jones’ I’m Not Perfect (But I’m Perfect For You), as well as; The Communards With Sarah Jane Morris’ Don't Leave Me This Way, Peter Gabriel & Kate Bush’s Don't Give Up and Cameo’s classic hit Word Up!

Whether your preference is for Miley Cyrus, the Pet Shop Boys, Kim Wilde or Harry Styles NOW That’s What I Call Music has the perfect soundtrack for spring days and Easter holidays!”.

The fact that people will be able to experience brand new hits and then travel back in time and match that against some classics is a good idea. I know one can buy most of the NOW That's What I Call Music on C.D., but I wonder whether many exist on tape. Many of the older compilations on that format must be worth a fortune now! I actually think that launching them all on cassette (and maybe vinyl) would spark a lot of interest. I could handpick a few in the series that I’d keep on cassette as a memento and then have a couple of vinyl I played regularly. You can listen to most of the series on streaming services – in most cases, someone has produced the playlist rather than it being an official release -, but I think that the listening experience one can only get with physical formats means the songs come alive more! Many wonder why a series like NOW That's What I Call Music is still popular when we stream so much…and the charts don’t have the same impact as they used to. I think people have an appetite for complications because it is broader than a normal album, plus you get all of these great tracks in one place. You could stream them all, sure. Having them on album means you can revisit and keep that album for years to come! I hope that those who produce NOW That's What I Call Music will think about releasing all of the series on cassette and vinyl. I think you can get most of the series via Amazon, though an official store with all of them available would be better. After all of these years, the phenomenal NOW That's What I Call Music series…

CONTINUES to burn bright!

FEATURE: My (Your) Song: The Hit Songwriters Asking Pop Artists to Stop Taking Credit for Tracks They Did Not Write

FEATURE:

 

 

My (Your) Song

IN THIS PHOTO: Victoria Monét is among a group of hit-making songwriters who have signed an open letter asking artists to stop taking credit for songs they didn't write

The Hit Songwriters Asking Pop Artists to Stop Taking Credit for Tracks They Did Not Write

___________

I was intrigued by an article…

IN THIS PHOTO: Songwriter Justin Tranter/PHOTO CREDIT: Timothy Hiatt/Getty Images

that I saw on the BBC website on Wednesday. I have been thinking a lot about musicians and how hard the pandemic has been for them with no gigs and limited revenue. When it comes to streaming payment, it is harder than ever to get what is ‘owed’ and make any sort of living from it. I think that songwriters have it even harder. Not only are they some of the great names behind big artists; they are often not credited for their work and have to live in the shadows. That might be about to change:

“Some of pop's biggest hitmakers are asking artists to stop taking credit for songs they didn't write.

In an open letter, the writers behind songs like Dua Lipa's New Rules and Ariana Grande's 7 Rings said "a growing number of artists" were demanding a share of publishing royalties, even if they had contributed nothing to a song.

"These artists will go on to collect revenue from touring, merchandise [and] brand partnerships," they said, but "songwriters have only their publishing revenue as a means of income"

They added that composers were often subjected to "bully tactics and threats" by artists and executives who wanted to take a share of the songwriting royalties.

The letter was organised by a new advocacy group calling itself The Pact. Signatories included Justin Tranter, Emily Warren, Ross Golan, Amy Allen, Savan Kotecha, Joel Little and Victoria Monét.

Between them, they have created hit records for the likes of Lady Gaga, Britney Spears, One Direction, Michael Bublé, Lorde, Shawn Mendes and Selena Gomez - although the letter was not directed at any specific artists.

IN THIS PHOTO: Shawn Mendes 

"Over time, this practice of artists taking publishing has become normalised; and until now, there has been no real unity within the songwriting community to fight back," they wrote.

"That is why we have decided to join together, in support of each other, and make a change."

The letter addresses a music industry practice that dates back to Elvis Presley, whose manager Colonel Tom Parker often insisted on his client receiving a co-writing credit on the songs he recorded.

Many composers acquiesced, using the logic that the money earned from 50% of an Elvis record would be higher than 100% of the same song, recorded by a less well-known artist.

Over time, the idea became so commonplace that it spawned a phrase: "Change a word, get a third" (as in, one slight tweak to the lyrics can get you a third of the royalties).

Until now, writers have been reluctant to speak publicly about the issue, in case it harms their careers”.

There is this notion that, when it comes to certain artists, there is this army of songwriters. There are a lot of tracks where an artist has a writing credit when they didn’t do much, or else there is an army of writers when fewer could have done. I have a lot of sympathy for songwriters who have been afraid to speak out or have had to struggle for credit. I can see why artists would want publishing royalties at a time when there is no touring revenue available. I don’t think that is what is happening. Rather than it being greed, I feel a lot of artists want to be seen as songwriters and being part of the mix - maybe so they can be taken more seriously. In other cases, there is a lack of respect and the feeling that the songwriters are a tiny cog in the machine.

 IN THIS PHOTO: Fiona Bevan

Not only has this watershed moment come when songwriters are demanding their just dues; many songwriters are struggling to make ends meet. Another BBC article that appeared late last year gave us an insight into how pronounced the problem is:

“The songwriters behind some of the UK's biggest hit singles "are driving Ubers" to make ends meet, MPs have been told.

Fiona Bevan, who has written songs for One Direction, Steps and Lewis Capaldi, said many writers were struggling because of the way streaming services pay royalties.

Bevan revealed she had earned just £100 for co-writing a track on Kylie Minogue's number one album, Disco.

"The most successful songwriters in the world can't pay their rent," she added.

"Right now, hit songwriters are driving Ubers. It's quite shameful."

Bevan was giving evidence to a digital, culture, media and sport select committee inquiry into the economics of streaming, which now accounts for more than three-quarters of music industry income in the UK.

MPs heard from musicians including Chic's Nile Rodgers and saxophonist Soweto Kinch, as well as music managers Maria Forte and Kwame Kwaten.

Rodgers said he hadn't looked into his streaming income before the Covid-19 pandemic "because my tour revenue has been so substantial that I could support my entire organisation".

After looking into the figures this year, he was "completely shocked".

Not only should streaming sites change their models so that songwriters get a bigger slice of revenue and are in the conversation. I think that this issue where artists are taking credit and songwriters are having to voice their concerns means that there needs to be a change. I wonder how often many of us think about the people who write some of the biggest hits and a lot of the songs we love. They only have publishing revenue so, when one thinks that this is being taken away to an extent, it does make for shocking reading. It looks like things could change. This is a good thing, as it would allow these important songwriters to get the…

 PHOTO CREDIT: @fotografierende/Unsplash

FULL credit and income they deserve.