FEATURE: Inside the Actor’s Studio: Kate Bush’s Director’s Cut at Ten

FEATURE:

 

 

Inside the Actor’s Studio

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

Kate Bush’s Director’s Cut at Ten

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THIS is the penultimate feature…

I will put out regarding the tenth anniversary of Kate Bush’s Director’s Cut. The ninth studio album from Bush, it was released on 16th May 2011. I have covered various different aspects of the album and chosen a few songs from it that I especially like. The album consists of re-recorded songs that originally appeared on the albums The Sensual World (1989) and The Red Shoes (1993). Whilst a few elements of the originals remain, Bush stripped out these songs in order to give them more room. She felt that those albums were maybe a little too busy, lacking in room and not as she would have liked. Eighteen years after The Red Shoes came into the world, Bush set to work ‘retuning’ these songs. Rather than see Director’s Cut as an album of reversions or Bush covering her own tracks, one can almost view it as a new album. There is one particular aspect that I want to focus on for this Director’s Cut feature: the sound quality and how Bush’s high-tech studio gives these songs new clarity and quality. Rather than the studio creating a polished and too-clean sound, I think they sharpen the tracks. The original albums, to an extent, suffered because of the sound quality. Before coming to an interview Bush conducted with Pitchfork, I want to highlight a review from AllMusic.

Not only do they discuss the ways in which various songs on Director’s Cut differ from their original form; they also note how Bush’s home studio benefited the album and recording of these well-known songs.

“During her early career, Kate Bush released albums regularly despite her reputation as a perfectionist in the studio. Her first five were released within seven years. After The Hounds of Love in 1985, however, the breaks between got longer: The Sensual World appeared in 1989 and The Red Shoes in 1993. Then, nothing before Aerial, a double album issued in 2005. It's taken six more years to get The Director's Cut, an album whose material isn't new, though its presentation is. Four of this set's 11 tracks first appeared on The Sensual World, while the other seven come from The Red Shoes. Bush's reasons for re-recording these songs is a mystery. She does have her own world-class recording studio, and given the sounds here, she's kept up with technology. Some of these songs are merely tweaked, and pleasantly so, while others are radically altered. The two most glaring examples are "Flower of the Mountain" (previously known as "The Sensual World") and "This Woman's Work." The former intended to use Molly Bloom's soliloquy from James Joyce's novel Ulysses as its lyric; Bush was refused permission by his estate. That decision was eventually reversed; hence she re-recorded the originally intended lyrics. And while the arrangement is similar, there are added layers of synth and percussion.

Her voice is absent the wails and hiccupy gasps of her youthful incarnation. These have been replaced by somewhat huskier, even more luxuriant and elegant tones. On the latter song, the arrangement of a full band and Michael Nyman's strings are replaced by a sparse, reverbed electric piano which pans between speakers. This skeletal arrangement frames Bush's more prominent vocal which has grown into these lyrics and inhabits them in full: their regrets, disappointments, and heartbreaks with real acceptance. She lets that voice rip on "Lilly," supported by a tougher, punchier bassline, skittering guitar efx, and a hypnotic drum loop. Bush's son Bertie makes an appearance as the voice of the computer (with Auto-Tune) on "Deeper Understanding." On "RubberBand Girl," Bush pays homage to the Rolling Stones' opening riff from "Street Fighting Man" in all its garagey glory (which one suspects was always there and has now been uncovered). The experience of The Director's Cut, encountering all this familiar material in its new dressing, is more than occasionally unsettling, but simultaneously, it is deeply engaging and satisfying”.

I have talked about the reviews for Director’s Cut. Overall, the album scored better than The Red Shoes; perhaps fewer glowing reviews than The Sensual World accrued. Many were impressed with how the songs sounded and what Bush had done. In releasing the Director’s Cut album, Bush wasn’t disregarding The Sensual World or The Red Shoes. At the time of recording those albums, she was doing her best as a producer - and she would have been happy with the results. I think a lot of artists look back at various albums and feel that, given another shot, they could have made improvements.

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

It is interesting learning about why Bush wanted to approach these two specific albums and her views on digital vs. analogue. I wanted to do a feature around the fact that Bush, alongside over one-hundred-and-fifty other musicians put their signature to a letter asking the Government to address how artists are paid on streaming sites. I might cover that in a week or two. Although Bush would rather people buy her albums and get them on vinyl, she understands how important the digital market is. Even an artist like her will not earn too much from streams. The situation is much bleaker for smaller acts. I digress. I am interested in Bush recording songs from Director’s Cut in her home studio. As the album title implies, having more control and being able to ‘cut’ the songs in a better way provided benefitial. I shall bring in that Pitchfork interview:

“Pitchfork: If you hadn't really listened to The Sensual World and The Red Shoes at all, how did you even know that you wanted to remake the songs?

KB: For a few years, I've wanted to pick tracks off both albums and make them sound the way I would want them to if I made them now. At the time, I was really pleased with them; I wouldn't have put them out if they weren't the best I could do. I thought the odd tracks that I did hear from The Red Shoes had a bit of an edgy sound, which may be due to the digital equipment that everyone was using then and that a lot of people still use now. But I've always been a big fan of analog, and I wanted to try and warm up the sound of the tracks from that album. Then again, it was interesting actually hearing the whole of Red Shoes-- it actually wasn't as bad as I thought.

I mean, I could find faults with all my albums because that's just a part of being an artist-- it's hard being a human being, isn't it? [laughs] With both albums, there were a lot of ambitious ideas as well, so I was working on top of work that had already been done. I didn't have to start from scratch, so it was really something I did for myself as a kind of exercise. Although the songs are old, it's like a new record to me.

Pitchfork: The Red Shoes came out in 1993, the heyday of the compact disc. Were you recording specifically for that format?

KB: Yeah, that's absolutely right. It probably was my first album that was specifically a CD as opposed to vinyl. Red Shoes was a bit long-- which was also a part of this whole problem with the change from vinyl to CD. I think that put a lot of strain on artists, actually. With CDs, you suddenly didn't want to let people down so you tried to give them as much as possible for their money. [laughs] I didn't really feel that there were any filler tracks on The Red Shoes, but if I were to do that album now, I wouldn't make it so long.

The great thing about vinyl is that if you wanted to get a decent-sounding cut, you could really only have 20 minutes max on each side. So you had a strict boundary, and that was something I'd grown up with as well. Also, you were able to have different moods on each side, which was nice.

Pitchfork: It kind of worked out because by the time you followed up The Red Shoes with Aerial in 2005, people were buying vinyl again.

KB: [laughs] I don't know about that. There was a resurgence, but it's certainly not the main format that people buy music on. In 2005, it was still CDs. I guess you're lucky if people actually buy a CD now.

Pitchfork: So you're still in the studio on a day-to-day basis?

KB: Yeah, I have been for a while now, because [Director's Cut] has been ready for quite some time. Although there were a lot of ongoing loose ends with this album, like the mastering and artwork, I went straight into making a new record when I finished it. I'm really enjoying working on new material. Director's Cut is kind of a one-off rather than a continuous revisiting of old stuff.

Pitchfork: You mentioned preferring analog to digital recording, but "Deeper Understanding" has a very modern-sounding vocal effect on the chorus. As a producer, do you keep track of what's going on now as far as tools and advancements?

KB: I try to. My studio is a fantastic combination of old and new, and that's how I've always liked to work. But now, the new is newer, and old remains old. I like to work with a combination of analog and Pro Tools. I love the sound of analog tape, but there's so many things you can do with Pro Tools that would be incredibly difficult and very time-consuming with analog.

When I originally did "Deeper Understanding", I wanted the computer program to have a single voice so that it was a single entity, but at the time, there was only a pretty basic vocoder so I had to use backing vocals to make the words audible. This time, I could use a truly computerized voice that would stand alone. This album would've been possible to do entirely analog, but it would've been really difficult”.

Whilst 2005’s Aerial would have been recorded largely at Kate Bush’s home, I think Director’s Cut was the first where she utilised her own studio and had that greater autonomy - the fact she had her own label by that point would have helped and provided comfort and a sense of authorship. I feel Bush establishing her Fish People label was a move designed to allow her further independence - not having to answer to a label or studio. Although The Sensual World and The Red Shoes are great albums, I think of Bush at Abbey Road Studios (The Red Shoes) and Wickham Farm Home Studio and Windmill Lane Studios (The Sensual World) and things being quite hectic and intense. The vision of Bush working with her small group of musicians – Paddy Bush – mandola, flute, whistle, backing vocals, Steve Gadd – drums, John Giblin, Eberhard Weber, Danny Thompson – bass guitar, Danny McIntosh, Eric Clapton – guitar, Gary Brooker – Hammond organ, Albert McIntosh – programming, backing vocals, Brendan Power – harmonica, Ed Rowntree, Mica Paris, Jacob Thorn, Michael Wood, Jevan Johnson Booth – backing vocals – and feeling comfortable and inspired in her home studio is wonderful!

PHOTO CREDIT: EMI/Fish People

Ahead of its tenth anniversary, I was keen not to ignore an album that many others might. Whether you see it is part of her cannon and a new studio album or an inessential listen, Director’s Cut warrants some focus and investigation. I listen to the eleven tracks on the album as a fresh project. I think Bush sequenced the tracks very well (maybe Rubberband Girl is not the best way to end the album; This Woman’s Work seems like a stronger finale), and her vocals throughout are tremendous! In terms of sound, I feel she produced an album that sounds both vintage and modern. She achieved her goals or stripping back the songs and making them seem less cluttered. Overall, Director’s Cut is an album that was conceived for a good reason and delivers some great results. Not every reworked track hits the mark (Bush has said Rubberband Girl could have been taken out; despite Deeper Understanding being fine, I don’t think the computerised vocals improve on the original or sounds too good). I think Kate Bush’s ninth studio album is a satisfying, fascinating and fulfilling edition to her catalogue. It is one that gained some much-deserved positive reviews. I hope that, on its tenth anniversary on 16th May, people spend some time with…

THE superb Director’s Cut.

FEATURE: Spotlight: Stalk Ashley

FEATURE:

 

 

Spotlight

Stalk Ashley

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IT can be hard keeping on top…

of all the talent and great artists coming through! One artist who has caught my ear recently is Stalk Ashley. Based in Kingston, Jamaica, I think that she is a name to watch closely. Creating this confident, sexy and compelling music, it is small wonder she has been causing a lot of buzz and excitement! I think that, in the years to come, Stalk Ashley will be a major international star. I want to bring in a few interviews – so that we get to know the rising artist a little better. In August 2020, NOTION introduced an artist who is primed for major things:

“Singer-songwriter Stalk Ashley may have only been releasing tunes for two years, but her sound is highly polished and confident.

Based in Kingston, Jamaica, Stalk Ashley’s style of R&B is blended effortlessly with strands of dancehall and reggae to create a concoction that is uniquely hers. Making her mark with addictive melodies and a self-assured delivery, Stalk Ashley’s lyrics are honest and often pretty steamy. On her track “Sin Sex” she sings: “By anything me mean anything/ See I’m flexible me can do many things, devil tings/ Put you Pon another level things.”

The young artist’s open and honest musical approach to female desire and independence is welcome and refreshing, and it’s something that’s attracting her attention from around the world as her success builds. At the start of “Young” she makes herself clear: “Me so young just a girl having fun sorry fi the misunderstanding jah/ Know mi just a forward mi no ready fi settle down.”

Last year, Stalk Ashley was recruited by Stormzy to cover Beyonce’s “Brown Skin Girl” alongside him at BBC Radio 1’s Live Lounge back in September. Recently, Stalk Ashley teamed up with “In2” hitmakers WSTRN for the song “Deserted”, as well as dropping “Open.” The songs are her first releases this year, following a trio of singles last year and a debut in 2018.

We spoke to the up-and-coming musician to hear about the way her relationship with music has changed over the years, the song that makes her smile, and what she’s planning next.

Growing up, what was your relationship with music like? Has it changed since then?

When I was growing up I didn’t really get to make my own decisions on the music I listened to, I just listen to what people around me were listening to I never had the opportunity to really build my own taste until I was much older mainly because I grew up in a really religious household. So my relationship has most definitely changed I have a much closer relationship with music now, I listen to music every single day. I’ve had the opportunity to discover music on my own and find sounds that I love.

If you could, how would you summarise your journey to becoming a musician?

I’ve been singing since I was really young, so I always believed in myself but I could have never guessed I’d be where I am today. I literally just took a leap of faith. I didn’t know anyone in the music industry, I didn’t have any advice from anyone. I just moved to Kingston (Jamaica) when I was 19 and just started to work, I met my team shortly after I arrived. I quickly started to learn more about writing songs and I practised my craft as best as I could, I just did that wholeheartedly. With that, I’ve met some amazing people and have been presented with some incredible opportunities. I’m still at the beginning of my journey I have so much more to do and learn, oh and I definitely want to learn to play instruments.

What are some of the best and worst things about the music industry – from your experience?

Best things about the music industry for me is being able to put out music that represents me and then seeing how people react to it. I love being able to connect to people and grown my supports. Also being able to travel and make and perform music in different places and meet people from different cultures. I’m very much a recluse so I’m cautious about the situation I put myself in and so I don’t really have a situation where I have necessary had any bad experience yet”.

I have not heard of many new artists being based out of Kingston. Many of the artists I feature in Spotlight are based in the U.K. or U.S. It would be interested to explore modern Jamaica and the potential superstars who are making incredible music there. I am not sure whether Stalk Ashley has plans to relocate in the future. It seems that Kingston is suiting her very well at the moment! In their interview from December, THE FACE asked Stalk Ashley about her sound and finding confidence:

“20%: What’s a piece of advice that changed your life?

A piece of advice, from me to me, that changed my perspective was that people are going to talk about you no matter what you do. There’s no way to escape criticism, fuck opinions and live your life the way you see it fit.

60%: When did you find your confidence as an artist?

I found my confidence when I found my voice and learnt its capabilities. I’m most confident about what I’m able to create with whatever resources I have, like making magic every time with just a basic set up in my room. My confidence continuously grows when I see the way people react to my music, and when fans religiously listen to my songs and feen for more.

100%: What kind of emotions and experiences influence your work?

Every single thing that happens in my life influences my work and work rate somehow, this is why I am very mindful of what I indulge in and is the very reason why I protect my energy the way I do. Everything translates into the music. This year has been an emotional rollercoaster for me, I’ve experienced everything from pain and sadness to disappointment with sprinkles of happiness in the midst of it. It’s influenced every song, every beat, every lyric that I have composed”.

I am going to round off things. Even though she is relatively new into her career, Stalk Ashley has admirers in Jorja Smith and Stormzy. It is clear that her music is resonating with fans and fellow artists alike. I wonder whether she has plans to tour this year when things get better. I know there are many in the U.K. that would love to witness her music up-close and personal. I will wrap up by bringing in NME’s recent spotlighting of the fantastic Stalk Ashley. Among other things, she talks about the rise of Dancehall:

“Mandeville-born Stalk Ashley is about to go global. Her reggae-infused tunes have already landed her on BBC Radio 1Xtra’s coveted Hot for 2021 list, while the likes of Jorja Smith and Stormzy have professed their love for the vocalist, the latter inviting Ashley to cover Beyoncé’s ‘Brown Skin Girl’ with him for Radio 1’s Live Lounge.

Kicking off her career with 2019’s hot and heavy ‘Sin Sex’, Ashley has been picking up momentum ever since. Last year she teamed up with fellow Kingston resident and dancehall heavyweight Alkaline on ‘Incognito’, as well as Shepherd’s Bush’s WSTRN on the slow-burning ‘Deserted’. She’s more than capable of going it alone too, releasing solo stand-outs ‘OPEN.’ and ‘TIP (The Party)’.

How did you find moving from the suburbs of Mandeville to Kingston?

“It’s a lot more fast-paced and that’s definitely how I operate and create music now. My mind is fast-paced.”

Are you proud of dancehall culture being on the rise?

“I am really proud. I think a lot of people are doing a lot of different things, which is nice. I like to see it because dancehall is usually some people following the books, and their mixes kind of sound the same. But it’s always nice to see new things like me. There’s nothing more exciting to me than when I’m listening to a playlist or when I’m just hearing music and it’s just so fresh. I get really excited. I like to see different things that people are doing right now. People are kind of bending the rules.”

What’s your contribution to Jamaican culture?

“I am just hoping for the best and wishing for the stars. And that’s as much as I can say, you know – I’m doing it for real. I hope I make a great impact. I want to leave my imprint on the world.”

In dancehall there’s a lot of overt sexiness – how do you feel about that kind of hypersexuality?

“It’s one of those genres where people are very forward with sex and I think it’s always been like that. You love it or you hate it. Personally, I feel that people should be able to express themselves. If you want to sing about that – great.”

What are your aspirations for the years ahead?

“I don’t think we can ever predict what’s going to happen, but in five years I really want to be in a different place. I would really hope that my music reaches its potential. I’m just looking forward to expanding and bettering myself. I feel like I could be an actor as well. I’ve always been interested in the arts. I feel like there’s a lot of things that I could do but the focus is music, totally. That’s my priority”.

These are early days, though there are signs Stalk Ashley is shaping up to be a huge name! Her music is hard to ignore and is very much her own – one cannot easily link her to anyone else (maybe there are hints of Rihanna here and there). A salute and nod to one of the most exciting and promising new artists around. If this is the first time you are hearing about Stalk Ashley, then get involved with her music and…

DON’T let it pass you by.

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Follow Stalk Ashley

Instagram:

https://www.instagram.com/stalk.ashley_/

Twitter:

https://twitter.com/stalk_ashley

YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC69OX2oRgC-v7SIZxXh5S4Q

 Spotify:

https://open.spotify.com/artist/6VCt6Dh7TaZF330ZFeNHv5?si=h_YSlIhZQ6KzjrIXSUgsMg

FEATURE: The Lockdown Playlist: Step 3 in England’s Roadmap

FEATURE:

 

 

The Lockdown Playlist

PHOTO CREDIT: @emergeartistry/Unsplash

Step 3 in England’s Roadmap

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FROM 17th May…

 PHOTO CREDIT: Carlo Buttinoni/Unsplash

the next step of lockdown easing in England occurs. Among steps being brought in is that cinemas can open; weddings will be allowed a limit of thirty people. This will be the earliest date at which international holidays could resume. Indoor venues such as the inside of pubs and restaurants, hotels and B&Bs, play centres, cinemas, museums and group exercise classes will reopen. Also, indoor mixing will be allowed – there are one or two other relations that will be introduced. Because of this, this Lockdown Playlist combines songs that can score those relaxations. I know it is quite brought but, as there are a few different restrictions being eased, I wanted to do a wide playlist; songs that tip to cinemas, indoor mixing, weddings, and holidays etc. It ensures that the playlist is quite eclectic! Ahead of England’s next step in the roadmap, this Lockdown Playlist is a selection of songs that…

 PHOTO CREDIT: @ewitsoe/Unsplash

SCORE some further lockdown easing.

FEATURE: Modern Heroines: Part Forty-Seven: Jessie Ware

FEATURE:

 

 

Modern Heroines

Part Forty-Seven: Jessie Ware

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ONE of my favourite albums…

of last year was Jessie Ware’s What’s Your Pleasure? The fourth album from Ware, she described the album as being one of escapism and groove. The tracks mix House, Disco ad Pop to magnificent effect! As she released the single, Please, on 28th April, it is timely to include Ware in this feature. I think that she will definitely be an icon of the future. As an artist, she has not put a foot wrong – in my estimation -; her albums are all brilliant. Her 2012 debut, Devotion, was a brilliant introduction to a fine British talent. Since then, Ware has explored her sound and crafted some of the best music of the past decade. I am going to focus on her current album. Though, as I always do in this feature, I will end with a career-spanning playlist. I am keen to get to a couple of reviews for What’s Your Pleasure? Just before, it is worth sourcing some interviews that Ware conducted around the time. Before getting to interviews specific to What’s Your Pleasure?, I wanted to drop one in from The Guardian. Ware, among other things, discussed her long-running podcast, Table Manners. We got a glimpse (in the interview) into Ware’s family and early life:  

“We talk over her life, her work and how she got here. She grew up the middle child of three in a busy, noisy, secular Jewish household in south London. “So Jewish, we put up our tree in November,” Ware said, recently. The household was dominated by her mother Lennie, a social worker, home cook and general mensch who gave as good as she got in boisterous conversations at the family dinner table.

Her father, John Ware, is a reporter for BBC Panorama. (Last summer he presented an episode about antisemitism in the Labour Party that made a lot of news.) “This is not to say my dad was a bad person,” Ware begins, carefully, “he just wasn’t the most present parent because he was working a lot. My mum made up for it in leaps and bounds.”

Her parents separated when she was 10, and there was a period when she and her father were estranged. “That lasted a long time. We do have a relationship now. It’s getting better and better. It’s that feeling of, life’s too short. And when he’s not being annoying he can actually be quite funny and informative.”

She went to Alleyn’s, a private school in south London, where she became friends with an Oasis-obsessed crowd that included Felix White and Jack Peñate, both of whom would become prominent musicians. Florence Welch was in the year below – the only one, in Ware’s memory, who looked destined for some sort of stardom. For herself, Ware could pick her way through a jazz standard. She was a good bet for the third- or fourth-best part in school musicals. Beyond that, she didn’t have much in the way of industry ambitions. “I was a scaredy cat. I didn’t write songs. Four albums in, it still seems odd that I make music like them.”

The foodie streak, the ravenous appetite, was always there, first evident publicly in the 1990s when Ware appeared with some school pals on a short-lived ITV children’s quiz show called Eat Your Words. As her friend White has recalled, the rules were such that if a contestant answered a question incorrectly, they could still get a consolation point by forcing down a plate of horrid food. (Boiled carrots and custard was one.) As White remembered it, Ware made a series of elementary mistakes, fluffing her counting and her alphabet… but ate her way out of trouble and won. It wouldn’t be the last time.

After graduation, White became part of a band, the Maccabees, while Peñate forged his way as a solo artist and Welch found the stardom they had all predicted. Meanwhile, Ware interned at the Jewish Chronicle. She had a degree in English literature and thought about training as a lawyer. Around 2010, Peñate asked her to join him on tour as a backing singer. Then a series of providential encounters led to Ware singing guest vocals for rising producers such as SBTRKT and Disclosure. She had been accepted on to a law conversion course when PMR Records, Disclosure’s label, offered her a deal. Devotion came out in summer 2012 and – impossibly, it seemed to her – was nominated for the Mercury within a month. “Everything was magical and romantic around that record. I guess I thought, this is just what it’s like!”

The new single, Please, and the What’s Your Pleasure? album shows that Ware has shifted direction since her debut. In fact, I think that her latest album is a huge transformation. I am interested to see if she will continue this sound and sensation into another album. Not that her previous work is weaker in comparison, though I really love the songs on What’s Your Pleasure? In this interview from The New York Times, we discover that, like quite a few artists in 2020, Ware drew inspiration from Disco. It is an interesting move that has resulted in some terrific albums. Will we see a lot more of this through 2021? The New York Times also spoke with James Ford – one of the album’s producers – about a musical highlight of 2020:

“That effusive personality did not exactly come across in Ware’s early music, which was minimalistic and icy-smooth. Her voice — at once muscular and vaporous, soulful and cool — first started drifting through the ether about a decade ago, as a featured guest on tracks by British electronic acts like Disclosure and SBTRKT. An excellent debut solo album, “Devotion,” followed in 2012; it went to No. 5 on the British album chart and was nominated for the esteemed Mercury Prize. Smith, a fellow breakout guest vocalist from Disclosure’s 2013 album “Settle,” described Ware’s music as “the soundtrack of my 20s.”

PHOTO CREDIT: Ana Cuba for The New York Times 

Until she didn’t. After “Tough Love,” Ware experienced what she now refers to as her “weird ol’ time in the industry.” Her third album, the sleek, ruminative and highly personal “Glasshouse,” also hadn’t sold as well as her debut; the phrase “adult-contemporary” cropped up (though not necessarily derisively) in several reviews. An ensuing U.S. tour that she admits “hadn’t been planned well” put her an ocean away from her young daughter for nearly a month and left a dent in her own finances. Her fan base — which skews hip and indie-adjacent, especially in the U.S. — was geographically lopsided.

“I’d sell out two shows in Brooklyn,” she said, “and then I’d be in, where was I? Was it Kansas? And you had, like 25 people. Wicked, amazingly funny people, but it was very weird and varied and confusing.”

“This is not me getting my tiny violins out at all,” she added, “but I was losing a lot of money. It’s really expensive to tour. It was just a bit of a mess. I was like, Why am I doing this? It was a big old soul-searching moment.”

Ware made the entirety of “What’s Your Pleasure?” with James Ford, a member of the British electronic duo Simian Mobile Disco and an acclaimed producer for acts like Arctic Monkeys and Florence + the Machine.

“I definitely got the feeling that she wanted to make a record for herself, rather than trying to please other people,” Ford said over FaceTime, after providing a tour of his cozy, synth-filled attic studio where most of “Pleasure” was made. At the time, Ware lived within walking distance of Ford’s house, which gave their sessions a casual ease. Because Ford and Ware both have small children (Ware got pregnant shortly after starting work on the record), they recorded mostly during the day. Family life didn’t impede on the process so much as put it in perspective.

“What’s Your Pleasure?” is a sparkling highlight in a year that has found pop artists from Lady Gaga to Dua Lipa (a recent “Table Manners” guest) reimagining disco for the 21st century. Ford and Ware wanted to pay homage to what they lovingly call “wedding jams,” along with Minnie Riperton soul and “weirdo New York boogie/underground disco.” But “Pleasure” pulls from a varied palette: “Soul Control” has the kinetic energy of Minneapolis funk; “Ooh La La” struts like a long-lost ESG B-side.

“I wanted the sophistication that disco offers, and the melodrama,” Ware said. “It just felt like a bit of a fantasia, and a step away from my real life. Not because I was miserable in my real life — I love my life and my family. But I’d already said all that on my last record. I wanted instead to be a storyteller of these imagined, heightened moments that maybe I wasn’t being able to take part in, in that very moment.” (She and Burrows have been together since they were 18, which she admits does not always make for the most exciting autobiographical songwriting: “Not much salacious hardship. It’s pretty dull. I love it.”)

“It’s a time where people should be able to listen to music that can help them fantasize and move away from reality,” she added. “And that’s the record I made”.

I am going to finish off soon. The last couple of weeks has seen some huge music came out. From Billie Eilish to Self Esteem, the women of music have, as you’d expect, been leading the way and putting out the very best sounds! Jessie Ware, I feel, is among the greatest women in music we have. I do think that we will see so many albums from her - plenty more brilliance is to come. Moving away (slightly) from music, and Ware spoke with Glamour about balancing motherhood with music. We also hear from an artist who is not courting the spotlight and huge stardom:

“Add in the birth of her first child in 2016, and the huge pressure she was putting on herself came to its peak. “I worked way too hard when my daughter was born. I felt I needed to prove that I could do everything, I could balance everything. In hindsight, I absolutely was at breaking point by the end of her first year.”

Nevertheless, she still agreed to tour her third album Glasshouse, which despite giving her another Brit Award nomination for Best British Female and becoming her third top ten album, did not fare well sales-wise. It wasn’t until she performed at Coachella in 2017 for the second time, she reached a turning point in her life and career.

“That Coachella gig was disastrous. Everything that could've gone wrong went wrong. No one turned up to watch me, and to think that a few years before I’d had this heaving tent,” Jessie confides. “I felt like I was in this weird kind of Instagrammy, very immature popularity contest that I was very much losing. So I thought, OK, well, if no one wants to watch me, they're not interested in the music, I should probably sack this in. Why would I want to be in this world? I don't need to do this,’” she says, exasperated at the memory.

Since then, Jessie has shown little interest in courting attention and popularity. “I don't always play the game per se. I'm pretty private. My life is pretty dull,” she says before correcting herself. “No, it's not, it's wonderful, but you know, it's very domesticated. I'm with the same partner that I've been with since I was 18. There are no salacious things that happened to me as a popstar. I don't go to the opening of an envelope.”

I agree, if I was talking to a male star, we would never be having a conversation about how a working father copes with childcare and a career. Jessie thinks sexism is still rife in the music industry and beyond. “They don't ask men how they're going to tour with their children, do they? But you get used to it, you take it with a pinch of salt, and it's also something that I struggled to work out. I once got told that I was being really emotional (in a meeting), and I was being really not-emotional, and I wonder whether they would have said that to a bloke. I didn't rise to it, and I was very calm,” she states. “But you know, it happens. I definitely think there's more of a shelf life for women. I don't want to sound negative because actually I'm able to make the music I want to make, but I'm madly thought of as relatively old and I'm 35!”

I am rounding things off with a couple of reviews for the excellent What’s Your Pleasure? It is a stunning album that received positive reviews right across the broad. This is what AllMusic wrote in their 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”.

One of the most glowing reviews for What’s Your Pleasure? came from The Guardian. They were impressed by the album’s focus and the fact that Ware could mix the sleek and fun with something quite deep and substantial:

“Rare for a modern major-label pop album, What’s Your Pleasure? focuses on one sound. It feels more modern than Ware’s references to Earth, Wind & Fire and US R&B staple Teena Marie – closer to Moloko, or indeed Róisín Murphy in contemporary disco mode. It’s sleek yet intensely physical: Spotlight vibrates with momentum; the bell-like synths of Adore You are as cool as pond ripples. It also probably couldn’t exist without Robyn’s Honey, another grown-up disco album. (That album’s core personnel, Metronomy’s Joe Mount and Adam Bainbridge, both pop up alongside main producer James Ford.) In very Robyn fashion, Mirage (Don’t Stop) teases its own remix potential, as synth lens-flare, background party chatter and Ware’s silk drape of a voice melt into a juicy reverie. There’s a wealth of great Ware remixes, and What’s Your Pleasure? demands the full club revamp treatment.

Those idiosyncratic textures earn Ware her cheeky pastiches. The skittish Ooh La La is so brazenly rooted in early 80s New York that its insouciant funk not only echoes Rapture and Wordy Rappinghood, but its synth speckles wriggle like Keith Haring art works come to life. Last track Remember Where You Are jumps back earlier into the city’s music history, all velveteen disco gospel, golden vocal harmonies and crackling instrumentation. It’s the curtain call, Ware’s lyrics shifting from sex to comfort as the fantasy fades. “Why don’t you take me home?” she sings.

It’s a poignant final note. Home life, as in domesticity, doesn’t feature here as it did on Glasshouse: Ware has questioned whether people “want to hear about struggling mothers”. Pop should make room for such subjects, although given the industry’s confusion about what to do with older female artists, that feels a long way off. But the superb What’s Your Pleasure? makes a case to reimagine so-called comfort zones as potential lanes of expertise: free pop’s women from the pointless commercial burden to reinvent, let them hone their craft, and you get assured marvels like this”.

I will end things there. One of the best artists in modern music, I am excited to see where Jessie Ware heads. After the magnificent What’s Your Pleasure? last year, many are going to be eager to see Ware on the road – I am sure that we will see gigs soon enough. If you have not heard What’s Your Pleasure? then go and…

SEEK it out now.

FEATURE: Groovelines: Oasis - Champagne Supernova

FEATURE:

 

 

Groovelines

Oasis - Champagne Supernova

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NOT that one needs much of a reason…

to discuss Oasis’ Champagne Supernova…though there is one. Released as a single in the U.S. on 13th May, 1996, it is twenty-five year since the anthemic song was released in a country the band were trying to crack - though it never truly happened for them there. The final track (and single) from the Manchester band’s second studio album, (What's the Story) Morning Glory?, it is one of those songs that everybody can sing along to and bond with – despite the fact that the lyrics don’t make too much sense! In the way that they mean nothing; they mean everything! It would be good to think that the divided band could get back together one day and we could hear Liam Gallagher belting the song out to the festival masses. Written by Noel Gallagher and produced by Owen Morris and Noel Gallagher, Champagne Supernova, to me, is one of the best album closing-tracks ever. At just show of seven-and-a-half minutes, it truly is an epic! Normally, for this feature, I dissect a song that is treasured and has a very interesting story and background. One of the most interesting things about a song as good as Champagne Supernova is that its origins are not that clear. Certainly, the meaning behind the lyrics is not obvious to Noel Gallagher. Looking at this Wikipedia article, there does seem to be a little bit of mental mistiness:

“Noel Gallagher claimed in 2005 that he had still not made up his mind as to what the song actually is about, having previously told an NME interviewer in 1995:

It means different things when I'm in different moods. When I'm in a bad mood, being caught beneath a landslide is like being suffocated. The song is a bit of an epic. It's about when you're young and you see people in groups and you think about what they did for you and they did nothing. As a kid, you always believed the Sex Pistols were going to conquer the world and kill everybody in the process.

Bands like the Clash just petered out. Punk rock was supposed to be the revolution but what did it do? Fuck all. The Manchester thing was going to be the greatest movement on earth but it was fuck all. When we started, we decided we weren't going to do anything for anybody, we just thought we'd leave a bunch of great songs. But some of the words are about nothing. One is about Bracket the Butler, who used to be on Camberwick Green or Trumpton or something. He used to take about 20 minutes to go down the hall. And then I couldn't think of anything that rhymed with "hall" apart from "cannonball" so I wrote, "Slowly walking down the hall, faster than a cannonball." And people were like, "Wow, man." There's also the line, "Where were you while we were getting high?" because that's what we always say to each other. But the number of people who've started clubs called Champagne Supernova is fucking unbelievable. And the album isn't even released yet.

In a 2009 interview, Gallagher told the following anecdote:

This writer, he was going on about the lyrics to "Champagne Supernova", and he actually said to me, "You know, the one thing that's stopping it being a classic is the ridiculous lyrics." And I went, "What do you mean by that?" And he said, "Well, Slowly walking down the hall, faster than a cannonball — what's that mean?" And I went, "I don't know. But are you telling me, when you've got 60,000 people singing it, they don't know what it means? It means something different to every one of them".

Even though, to be fair, Champagne Supernova, is a little nonsensical and head-scratching, it is a song where one does not need to have any precise meaning and clarity. Its chorus is one of the most compelling and crowd-unifying of the 1990s. Maybe due to its length, the band did not put the song out here. There are many who say that Champagne Supernova should have been released as a single in the U.K. It may have needed an edit to get on the radio though, considering it went to the top of the Modern Rock chart, it looked like Oasis was going to break through in the U.S. Although, I think, Radio X get the release date wrong by a day in this feature, there are some good insights and recollections. I like how the song makes Paul ‘Bonehead’ Arthurs (rhythm guitar, melodica) cry:

“Champagne Supernova is one of the many, many Oasis tracks that "should have been a single". It was released as one in the United States on 14 May 1996, but for Britain it remained as one of the highlights of the mammoth (What's The Story) Morning Glory? album.

The song was part of the embarrassment of riches that was Noel Gallagher's songwriting catalogue in the mid-90s. He could afford to stick tracks like Half The World Away and Acquiesce on the b-sides as he was writing instant classic after instant classic.

Noel unveiled the song when the band were touring Europe in November 1994. He explained in 2006: "Just before we went in to record Morning Glory, we were sat on the tour bus in Germany. We'd got to the hotel early, so we sat in the car park.

"Somebody says, have you got any tunes for the new album. So I said, I'll play them for you if you want. I played Cast No Shadow and all that. I played Champagne Supernova in its entirety on acoustic guitar. At the end, I looked up and Bonehead was crying. He said, 'You've not just written that have you?' I was looking at him thinking, you f**king soft lad. Either that or its sh*t."

Ever since the release of the song in 1995, fans have wondered about the lyrics. What exactly is a Champagne Supernova? What does it all mean?

"Some of the lyrics were written when I was out of it," he told the NME in September 1995. "That's probably as psychedelic as I'll ever get. It means different things when I'm in different moods. When I'm in a bad mood being caught beneath a landslide is like being suffocated."

But other inspirations came from Noel's childhood. The memorable couplet "Slowly walking down the hall / Faster than a cannonball" was a memory from kids' TV.

"[It's] about Brackett the butler who used to be on Camberwick Green, or Chigley or Trumpton or something," Noel revealed. "He used to take about 20 minutes to go down the hall. And then I couldn't think of anything that rhymed with 'hall' apart from 'cannonball'.

"So I wrote 'Slowly walking down the hall/ Faster than a cannonball' and people were like, 'Wow, f**k, man'.

As for Bonehead, Champagne Supernova still makes him cry. When the guitarist join The Charlatans' Tim Burgess for one of his Twitter listening parties for (What's The Story) Morning Glory, he re-told the tour bus anecdote and revealed: "I'm crying now. Pure stress," before adding: "I can cry to order you know”.

 IN THIS PHOTO: Oasis playing at Knebworth in 1996/PHOTO CREDIT: Press Association

I shall leave things there. Oasis played their legendary two nights at Knebworth on 10th and 11th August in 1996. These are some of the best gigs ever; ones where the band maybe should have quit whilst they were on top in terms of quality and popularity. It would not be inconceivable for something to be done around that anniversary in terms of a reunion – even if it were for a single gig. Noel Gallagher has confirmed a documentary is being released to mark twenty-five years of the iconic gigs. I think that there are other Oasis songs fans hold up as being superior to Champagne Supernova. I don’t think there are many as timeless and crowd-pleasing as the closer of (What's the Story) Morning Glory?. It is a track that, as I said, means so much without revealing anything clear or personal. Just hearing the song played now elicits fond memories and shivers. One of those tracks that we will never hear the likes of again, it seemed to capture a moment in time. With Britpop still bubbling in the U.K. and Oasis being on top of the world, many people can relate to a sense of joy and confidence - I guess one had to be around in the 1990s to get the full hit and flood of memories. At twenty-five, the song has lost none of its charm and brilliance. It leaves me to end things by wishing Champagne Supernova…

A very happy twenty-fifth anniversary.

FEATURE: Too Good to Be Forgotten: Songs That Are Much Than a Guilty Pleasure: Taylor Swift - Shake It Off

FEATURE:

 

 

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

Taylor Swift - Shake It Off

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THIS is a feature…

where I want to quote a lot from other people. I keep saying how there is no such thing as a guilty pleasure song. There are many who would disagree. Taylor Swift is an artist who can divide people. She has a huge fanbase of loyal fans, that is for sure. I have turned onto her work over the last few years. I think that last year’s folklore (the surprise album she released) is phenomenally accomplished and memorable. I think that her albums before then have highlights, though I sort of dip in an out. 1989 is considered to be one of her greatest works. The lead single from her fifth studio album, Shake It Off, was released on 18th August, 2014. Some consider it to be a bad choice for a lead single. Shake It Off is the sixth track on 1989 - so it did seem unusual to announce the album with a song so far down the order! I am keen to bring in some critical reaction to show what a strong song it is. There are many who think Shake It Off is among a collection of Taylor Swift songs that are very much in the guilty pleasure category. I am going to use some Wikipedia information to give more context about a hugely popular track:

“Shake It Off" is a song by American singer-songwriter Taylor Swift. It was written by Swift and its producers, Max Martin and Shellback. "Shake It Off" is an uptempo dance-pop song featuring a saxophone line in its production. The lyrics are about Swift's indifference to her detractors and their negative view of her image. The song was the lead single from her fifth studio album, 1989, which Swift marketed as her first pop album. It was released for digital download worldwide on August 19, 2014, by Big Machine Records.

Contemporary critics found the song's dance-pop production catchy, but some believed the lyrics were weak. Retrospectively, critics have considered "Shake It Off" an effective opener for the 1989 era, which transformed Swift's sound and image from country to pop. The song featured on 2010s decade-end lists by NME and Consequence of Sound. In the U.S., the single spent 50 weeks–including four weeks at number one–on the Billboard Hot 100, and received a Diamond certification from the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). "Shake It Off" also topped charts in Australia, Canada, Hungary, New Zealand and Poland”.

I shall conclude by defending a song that many see as one that you should not admit to loving. Renowned for Sound gave their impressions of Shake It Off:

“Shake It Off begins with a kicking drumbeat, almost like a cheerleading chant; Toni Basil’s famous one-hit wonder Hey Mickey springs to mind. Before too long Swift’s vocal kicks in, with the steady beat and brass to back her up; she addresses issues commonly talked about in regards to her love and social life. “That’s what people say”, repeats Taylor in the first verse as she speculates about people’s speculations of her. The chorus is a fun, repetitive hook that you’ll learn easily so that soon you can sing along and hum to it without realising; you’ve heard Taylor do pop before, but not like this people!

In the second verse, Taylor tells us some of the things she’s great at and how people don’t notice those abilities because they’re too busy focusing on putting her down; the pre-chorus assures us twice that Miss Swift won’t stop being herself because the music in her head says so. The bridge kind of lost the meaning behind the song; it went from being about shaking off the disses to dissing her ex-boyfriend’s new girlfriend, only to call on the “boy over there with the hella good hair”, at least it’s still catchy so in the world of pop she’s forgiven. The accompanying music video is just as fun as the track itself.

Shake It Off will be popular amongst existing Taylor Swift fans and should make her some new ones, its catchiness soon develops an addiction that you just can’t shake. Just when you thought songs about the ‘haters’ were getting really old, Taylor comes out to reinvent herself once again and puts them in their places swiftly in less than four minutes. It will be interesting to hear what else is in store with the new album, bring on 1989!”.

 PHOTO CREDIT: Sarah Barlow

It is not just fans of Taylor Swift who have had a lot of good things to say about Shake It Off. Coming back to Wikipedia, and there has been critical acclaim. Some, mind, feel that Shake It Off is not as strong as other songs on 1989:

“Shake It Off" received mixed reviews from music critics. While some deemed the production catchy, others found the song repetitive and lacking substance compared to Swift's previous album Red, which was perceived to be her artistic peak. Critic Randall Roberts from the Los Angeles Times's lauded the song's energetic production, which they described as "perfect pop confection". Roberts, however, found the lyrics shallow, calling the song insensible to the political events at the time: "When lives are at stake and nothing seems more relevant than getting to the Actual Truth, liars and cheats can't and shouldn't be shaken off." Writing for The Daily Beast, Kevin Fallon described "Shake It Off" as "woefully depressing". While calling it "a great pop song", he criticized it as a generic song that failed to showcase Swift's well-known narrative songwriting.

The Guardian's Molly Fitzpatrick similarly lauded the song's music, but felt that the lyrics fell short of Swift's songwriting abilities. Giving the song a three-out-of-five-stars score, Jeff Terich from American Songwriter regarded Swift's new direction as "a left-turn worth following". While Terich agreed that the lyrics were dismissive, he felt that critics should not have taken the song seriously because it was "pretty harmless". In a positive review, Jason Lipshutz from Billboard wrote, "Swift proves why she belongs among pop's queen bees ... the song sounds like a surefire hit." In a review of the album 1989, Alexis Petridis praised the lyrics for "twisting clichés until they sound original". In the words of Andrew Unterberger from Spin, while "Shake It Off" was musically a "red herring" that feels out of place on the album, it thematically represents Swift's new attitude on 1989, where she liberated herself from overtly romantic struggles to embrace positivity. Swift herself acknowledged the song as an outlier on 1989, and deliberately released it as the lead single to encourage audiences to explore the entire album and not just the singles.

Retrospectively, Hannah Mylrae from NME considered "Shake It Off" an effective opener for Swift's 1989 era, which transformed her image to mainstream pop. While saying that "Shake It Off" was not one of the album's better songs, Rob Sheffield from Rolling Stone applauded it for "serving as a trailer to announce her daring Eighties synth-pop makeover". Nate Jones from New York agreed, but described the song's bridge as "the worst 24 seconds of the entire album". In his 2019 ranking of Swift's singles, Alexis Petridis ranked "Shake It Off" third—behind "Blank Space" (2014) and "Love Story" (2008), lauding its "irresistible" hook and "sharp-tongued wit". Jane Song from Paste was less enthusiastic, placing "Shake It Off" among Swift's worst songs in her catalog, writing: "Swift has a pattern of choosing the worst song from each album as the lead single".

One of the unfortunate things about Shake It Off is that it has been part of a lawsuit. One that has raged for quite a while now. This NME article explains more about a high-profile case that seems to exist on the flimsiest of pretences:

“A court case regarding Taylor Swift‘s 2014 song ‘Shake It Off’ is to go ahead, a Los Angeles judge has confirmed.

The case, brought forward by songwriters Sean Hall and Nathan Butler in 2017, alleges that Swift copied lyrics from the pair’s 2001 song ‘Playas Gon’ Play’, which they wrote for girl group 3LW.

The case was originally dismissed in February 2018, but the decision was then overturned last October by an appeals court.

Now, LA judge Michael Fitzgerald says that Hall and Butler “have sufficiently alleged a protectable selection and arrangement or a sequence of creative expression” and that the relevant parts of ‘Shake It Off’ that the pair have identified are “similar enough” to ‘Playas Gon’ Play’ for a court case to proceed.

The lawsuit concerns the chorus of ‘Shake It Off’, in which Swift sings: “Players gonna play, play, play, play, play” and “haters gonna hate, hate, hate, hate, hate,” while ‘Playas Gon’ Play’ reads: “Playas, they gonna play, and haters, they gonna hate.”

Hall and Butler are seeking a share of profits from the song. In a statement shared with Billboard upon the reopening of the case last October, Hall spoke for the pair and said: “We are happy the court unanimously sided with us. We simply refuse to sit still and have our creative work be culturally appropriated as if it never existed. This case is giving voice to all of those creatives who can’t afford to stand up and protect their work in the face of well-financed Goliaths.”

Representatives for Swift then replied: “Mr. Hall is incorrect, the court did not unanimously side in their favour, the court sent the case back to the lower court for further determination.”

The singer’s team also said that they considered ‘players gonna play’ and ‘haters gonna hate’ as “public domain cliches”. “These men are not the originators, or creators, of the common phrases ‘Players’ or ‘Haters’ or combinations of them,” a representative for Swift said”.

It is a shame that, in some ways, Shake It Off has been a little tarnished by legal issues. I admit that there are better Taylor Swift songs. For those who are uninitiated or have never bonded with her music, Shake It Off is a song hard to dislike. Swift has grown as an artist since 2014’s 1989 - though I feel songs like Shake It Off are the type that will endure and influence others for years to come. Last year, as Forbes write, Shake It Off received quite an honour:

“Taylor Swift is no stranger to critical and commercial accolades, and on Friday, she collected one that few artists ever achieve: a diamond certification from the RIAA for her smash hit “Shake It Off.”

A diamond certification represents sales and streams exceeding 10 million units in the United States. “Shake It Off” is Swift’s first single to reach this milestone, and it’s her second diamond certification overall behind her 2008 sophomore album, Fearless. The RIAA’s latest award makes Swift the first female artist in U.S. history to have both a diamond-certified single and album, per Chart Data.

Swift released “Shake It Off” as the lead single off her 2014 album, 1989. The song rocketed to No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100, consummating the singer’s shift from country darling to global pop superstar, which she had begun on her previous album, Red. Its music video has also earned more than 2.8 billion YouTube views. 1989 spawned two more No. 1 singles, “Blank Space” and “Bad Blood,” which are certified 8x platinum and 6x platinum by the RIAA, respectively”.

If you are someone who feels Taylor Swift is a guilty pleasure artists and her music is for a teenage audience or has restricted appeal, then have a listen back through her albums. There is no denying her success, quality and popularity. Maybe ‘coolness’ is a factor that influences many when it comes to music. The much-streamed and loved Shake It Off is a pretty decent track that…

SHOULD be played loud.

FEATURE: Dreamtime: Going Beyond the Obvious: The Ultimate Kate Bush Interview Ambition

FEATURE:

 

 

Dreamtime

PHOTO CREDIT: Koh Hasebe/Shinko Music/Getty Images 

Going Beyond the Obvious: The Ultimate Kate Bush Interview Ambition

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MAYBE I have punted this out before…

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

but, like all superfans of Kate Bush, an interview with her would be the ultimate dream! I am not sure whether there is another album coming along and what her plans are regarding promotion in the future. One hopes that there is going to be a follow-up to 2011’s 50 Words for Snow. The likelihood of someone like me being able to score a prestigious interview is very slim indeed – in fact, I would say that it is virtually impossible! Rather than bury that dream or feel that it is not worth thinking about, I do often cast my mind to the scenario that would involve me speaking with Kate Bush. I am not sure how many interviews she has conducted since 1978. I would imagine we are talking triple-digits. It must have been exhausting when she first started out and having to adapt to the pressure and huge workload! I am going to drop a couple of interviews in (in video form) in this piece. There are a couple of print interviews that I really like. What I tend to find is that, when it comes to people interviewing her about an album, the same questions crop up. This is especially true for 50 Words for Snow. Maybe not quite as marked with interviews outside of the BBC; a lot of the BBC radio interviews comprised the same questions.

Whilst the interviewers had a lot of respect for Bush, I do wonder whether posing the same questions was the best idea when it came to eliciting information and something interesting. Of course, with an interview, you want to make sure that you are asking pertinent questions; not wandering too far from what she is promoting. Bush was generous with her time on her last album, so we did get to learn a few interesting things – beyond what she had to tell pretty much everyone who spoke with her. Lauren Laverne (BBC Radio 6 Music) got her to reveal the fact she (Bush) likes the film, Source Code, and is a fan of a good explosion. In other interviews, we learned how Bush was working on the album’s title track mere minutes before Stephen Fry came to record his vocal part – the 50 Words for Snow track is Fry (playing the part of Professor Joseph Yupik) reciting fifty made-up words for snow. I am going to bring in an interview Bush conducted to promote that album. Later, I want to quote from an interview that, I feel, should be considered by those who speak with Bush for any future albums. There were quite a few similarly-structured interviews for the 50 Words for Snow campaign. There were one or two that really caught my eye. I will wrap up by talking about how I would – if I was ever given such an incredible opportunity – approach an interview with Kate Bush.

  IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in a promotional photo for 2011’s 50 Words for Snow

For The Quietus, John Doran was invited to chat with Bush. What I like about this interview is the fact that Bush and Doran are quite warm and casual with one another. I feel Bush is very inviting and open when she is interviewed. One always gets something interesting and memorable. I feel quite a few people, for 50 Words for Snow, approached with unimaginative questions. This naturally resulted in identikit responses. I will not drop in the entire interview. There was a particular segment that I wanted to show people:  

“I think that if I lived outside of London, maybe in the countryside where it doesn’t turn to a mixture of slush and hazardous black ice, I might like it more. Also, I’m very tall and for whatever reason I just fall over when it’s icy, I always have done. It’s very dangerous I think.

KB: [laughs] Are you a kind of glass half empty kind of guy?

My glass used to be completely dry. Now it’s half empty but I’m working on making it half full… No, I’m joking, of course I like snow, it’s simply marvelous stuff. But obviously there’s been a great thematic shift between Aerial and this album.

KB: Yeah.

So Aerial is full of images of clear skies, still water, warm days and it’s full of the bustle of family life and an easy domesticity. 50 Words For Snow is a similarly beautiful album but there is a chill to it - it lacks the warmth of its predecessor. I wondered if it represented another switch from an autobiographical to a narrative song writing approach?

KB: Yeah, I think it’s much more a kind of narrative story-telling piece. I think one of the things I was playing with on the first three tracks was trying to allow the song structure to evolve the story telling process itself; so that it’s not just squashed into three or four minutes, so I could just let the story unfold.

I’ve only heard the album today so I can’t say I’m completely aware of every nuance but I have picked out a few narrative strands. Would it be fair enough to say that it starts with a birth and ends with a death?

KB: No, not at all. Not to my mind anyway. It may start with a birth but it’s the birth of a snowflake which takes its journey from the clouds to the ground or to this person’s hand. But it’s not really a conceptual piece; it’s more that the songs are loosely held together with this thread of snow.

Fair play. Now some of your fans may have been dismayed to read that there were only seven songs on the album but they should be reassured at this point that the album is 65 minutes long, which makes for fairly long tracks. How long did it take you to write these songs and in the course of writing them did you discard a lot of material?

KB: This has been quite an easy record to make actually and it’s been quite a quick process. And it’s been a lot of fun to make because the process was uninterrupted. What was really nice for me was I did it straight off the back of Director’s Cut, which was a really intense record to make. When I finished it I went straight into making this so I was very much still in that focussed space; still in that kind of studio mentality. And also there was a sense of elation that suddenly I was working from scratch and writing songs from scratch and the freedom that comes with that.

I really like that interview! It would have been good to be a fly in the room – or listening into the phone conversation – and to have heard the chat first-hand. For me, it is the way Bush is very patient, polite and engaging – not that interviewers would do anything to incite ire!

 IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in a promotional photo for 2011’s 50 Words for Snow/PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush

What I feel is missing from a lot of interviews is a bit of fun and something outside of the box. Lauren Laverne sort of touched on it when she asked Bush about any films or T.V. she had been watching (after and around the time of recording and releasing 50 Words for Snow). Maybe people feel hesitant to be that loose; afraid, perhaps, that they will offend Bush. I think she has an amazing sense of humour and would welcome some slight playfulness. She had to deal with quite a lot of ignorance and sexism in interviews early in her career (and a bit later, to be honest). Perhaps a reason why she was not always overly-keen on interviews was the way some questions deviated from music and focused on her looks or private life. There is a little of that in the Q interview from 1993. What I will say about that interview is that the cover for Q bore the quote: “Booze, fags, blokes and me”. That seems to be very tabloid and misrepresentative of what Bush was discussing or like – as thought she was very wild and had entered a phase where she was pretty heady! She was promoting The Red Shoes at the time. there are some really interesting questions that allows for more general conversation and some intriguing revelations. Reaching Out have the interview on their site and say the following:

“Although she does briefly respond to questions about drinking and smoking, she never uses any of the above language, making the quotation marks completely unfair. The interview, which appears below, is however not bad. The photos also shows what may or may not be a Bush-owned property; there is no explicit identification of the locale for the photos (the interview is described as having taken place in a dubbing studio). Certainly Kate herself is making new statements, ones which in some cases wholly contradict things she has said in dozens of earlier interviews; and the general tone she manages to transmit (in spite of the journalistic filter) is fascinatingly different from that which has characterized her speech heretofore. Enjoy”.

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1993 

“Would you make a good therapist?

"I really don't know. When I was little, I really wanted to be a psychiatrist. That's what I always said at school. I had this idea of helping people, I suppose, but I found the idea of people's inner psychology fascinating, particularly in my teens. Mind you, it's probably just as well I didn't become one. I would have driven all these people to madness. I'm better off just fiddling around in studios."

What newspapers and magazines do you read?

"I don't, really. I find them all slightly biased and angry in their own ways, and generally I prefer the radio or the television, especially where news is concerned. I know the television is biased too, but it doesn't seem as sort of characterised as the press. And magazines I don't read at all, I'm afraid. I did for a while and found them quite boring and slightly manipulative. I thought a lot of magazines were trying to -- or if not trying to, then ending up, making you feel inadequate. I didn't think a lot of healthy things were going on in them. I had friends who got magazines regularly and they were getting more and more concerned about them, more and more obsessed with the articles and the quizzes. It took me a long time to grow out of The Beano, though, so perhaps I'm just not grown up enough for magazines."

Could you manage on a croft in the Outer Hebrides?

"Yeah, I think I probably could. There'd come a point when I'd have to come up for air, but a lot of my ways would suit that kind of life quite well, particularly if you wanted to do some writing. You can quite handle a very introverted lifestyle, but when that's finished, it's nice to get out. Do something different. But I'd love to end up somewhere quiet in the country."

Maybe it is to do with the way journalism has changed or, as Bush was in her Thirties when that Q interview was conducted, perhaps people feel the questions need to be safer, more ‘mature’ and a little less personal. It is a shame there cannot be a mix. It would be good to see some quick-fire or random questions in the mix for new interviews. Perhaps one feels they need a closer relationship with Kate Bush before they can take such liberties. I don’t think it would be unprofessional to ask questions such as what is she binge-watching and what her favourite novels are. An exploration of how film and literature has influenced her through her career would be interesting. Perhaps a question around all the musicians and people she has worked with and, if she could compile a dream team in the studio for an imaginary album, who would she select. Broadcaster Geoff Lloyd – I may have mentioned this before – has interviewed Paul McCartney several times. Because Macca has been interviewed a fair bit and is asked broadly the same sort of questions, Lloyd thought he would mix it up for one interview and brought in a copy of The Sun. He got McCartney to guess the Dear Deidre (she is the in-house agony aunt who solves readers’ personal problems) answers. I am looking forward to a new Kate Bush album and having two questions answered: How many interviews will she conduct? Who is she going to speak with? I think interviewers can learn from the past and bring something fresh and a little offbeat to a discussion. If I had the chance to speak with Kate Bush, then I would splice in some album-specific questions (about the recording and various tracks), though I would also drop in some research and knowledge in order to provide a blend of fun questions and those that she has not been asked before. One usually only gets one shot with Bush, so I think a more memorable and less routine interview is the best tactic! Whoever she is talking with and whatever album she is being asked about, an interview featuring Kate Bush is…

ALWAYS a delight.

FEATURE: Bob Dylan at Eighty: His Albums in the 1980s

FEATURE:

 

Bob Dylan at Eighty

His Albums in the 1980s

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ONE cannot deny that…

 PHOTO CREDIT: Keith Baugh/Redferns

Bob Dylan enjoyed some incredible periods where he would release amazing album after amazing album. I think his output in the 1960s was beyond anything anyone else was offering. He had fertile periods in the 1970s and, in the last decade or so, he has released some of his best work. Ahead of Dylan’s eightieth birthday on 24th May, I am highlighting a decade that, maybe, was not among his best. Dylan did put out some great songs in the Eighties; there are clear and definite highlights.  I am going to source a couple of articles that discuss Dylan’s work during the Eighties and how his career went through this dip. Rather than use this opportunity to underline a rough period for him, I think it is important to assess and address various angles of his career. In future features, I am going to talk about my favourite Bob Dylan album; in addition to his lyrical genius. I think Dylan during the 1980s is a really interesting period. Dylan in the Seventies is a really fertile period. Blood on the Tracks (1975), The Basement Tapes (1975), Desire (1976), Street Legal (1978) and Slow Train Coming (1979) boast many of his greatest tracks. He began a ‘Christian trilogy’ of albums that started with Slow Train Coming. He continued this with 1980’s Saved – many people regard this as the start of a bit of a downward turn. By 1997’s Time Out of Mind, Dylan was back in fine form. As I said, the master has produced some of his best work in the past decade or so. It is interesting thinking about the 1980s and what it was about the decade that meant that his work was not as its usual genius level.

I guess all prolific artists experience weaker runs. Think about David Bowie in the mid-‘80s to the mid-‘90s and Prince’s albums during the 2000s. I think it is important to looks at the 1980s and examine Dylan’s output in closer detail. I want to source from a 2014 article Ultimate Classic Rock published. Rather than paste the entire thing, there are some illuminating sections that are noteworthy:

“Dylan's religious fervor produced some of his less-beloved albums, but with 1983's Infidels, he seemed to shake off the creative doldrums. Sadly, that respite would prove to be short-lived; in fact, that album presaged a period of profound creative drift that drove his recording career into a seemingly irreversible slump even as he managed to mount some of his more financially successful tours. To this point, new Dylan records had always been an event; by the time he eked out 1988's Down in the Groove, they were hard to even look forward to.

Part of the problem, he acknowledged, was simply coming up with new songs that could stand alongside all the towering classics in his back catalog. "There’s still things I want to write about, but the process is harder," he told the Sunday Times in 1984. "The old records I used to make, by the time they came out I wouldn’t even want them released because I was already so far beyond them."

He expanded on this problem in a 1985 interview with Bill Flanagan, saying, "When I'm making a record I'll need some songs, and I'll start digging through my pockets and drawers trying to find these songs. Then I'll bring one out and I've never sung it before, sometimes I can't even remember the melody to it, and I'll get it in. Sometimes great things happen, sometimes not-so-great things happen. But regardless of what happens, when I do it in the studio it's the first time I've ever done it. I'm pretty much unfamiliar with it. In the past what's come out is what I've usually stuck with, whether it really knocked me out or not. For no apparent reason I've stuck with it, just from lack of commitment to taking the trouble to really get it right. I didn't want to record that way anymore. ... About two years ago I decided to get serious about it, and just record."

"There’s never really been any glory in it for me," he insisted during his conversation with the Sunday Times. "Being seen in the places and having everybody put their arm around you, I never cared about any of that. I don’t care what people think. For me, the fulfillment was always in just doing it. That’s all that really matters."

A noble outlook, but one Dylan seemed to lose sight of during the drawn-out sessions for his 'Infidels' follow-up. Released on June 10, 1985, Empire Burlesque stitched together a patchwork of new songs that had been recorded in a variety of studios with a long list of session players – all of which were then polished by Arthur Baker, a prolific producer and DJ who'd risen to prominence as a house producer for the rap label Tommy Boy Records before branching out into 12" remixes for rock artists like Bruce Springsteen and Hall and Oates. Needless to say, many fans were taken aback by the album's polished sound.

As Dylan started working on what would become 1986's Knocked Out Loaded, he seemed to be searching for a way to recreate the jam-sparked sessions he'd had with the Band, with recent tourmates Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers initially serving as a sort of house band that could be augmented with session guests as Dylan saw fit. But that old spirit seemed to elude him on a more and more frequent basis; for instance, when Waterboys frontman Mike Scott peeked in on the process, he came away somewhat less than impressed.

"It was basically a free-for-all," Scott recalled. "Dylan turns around and says, 'Listen, you can play your heart out, just keep playing. It doesn't matter if you overplay, it doesn't matter what you do, just keep playing and we'll keep the best bits and we'll dump the other bits." As for what they were playing? "He had a verse, a chorus, a middle eight, and that was the structure," observed Scott. "Maybe he'd be humming along to himself, but he didn't actually stand at the mic and sing."

What proved most frustrating for fans and observers during this period was the perception that Dylan was still capable of periodic flashes of brilliance – it was just that, as often as not, he'd toss out his best material before anyone else could hear it. Journalist Mikal Gilmore recalled sitting in on several days of sessions for Knocked Out Loaded, and he described some of what he heard as "pretty wondrous," adding, "Sitting there in a studio, it didn't sound to me like he was somebody with a studio problem – he was working very fast, moving from track to track, and really directing the sound."

"There was enough stuff cut on Knocked Out Loaded to have put out a great album," agreed session player Al Kooper. "There was some really wonderful things cut at those sessions, but I don't think we'll ever hear 'em."

Whether or not they lived up to the expectations he'd created with his best work, the songs on Down in the Groove were what he had to offer at the moment – covers and all. "There's no rule that claims anyone must write their own songs," he reasonably argued in Bob Dylan: Performance Artist 1986-1990 and Beyond. "And I do. I write a lot of songs. But so what, you know? You could take another song somebody else has written and make it yours. I'm not saying I made a definitive version of anything with this last record, but I liked the songs."

More importantly, said Dylan, his own songs weren't flowing as freely as they used to. "Every so often you've got to sing songs that're out there," he noted. "Writing is such an isolated thing. You're in such an isolated frame of mind. You have to get into or be in that place. In the old days, I could get into it real quick I can't get to it like that no more”.

It is worth reading the whole piece. I feel that, when Dylan joined The Traveling Wilburys (a supergroup also consisting of George Harrison, Jeff Lynne, Roy Orbison and Tom Petty) and their released their first album in 1988, he had regained his spark and was writing some incredible material!

I think one solid album from the 1980s came with 1983’s Infidels. In 2014, The New Yorker re-examined Dylan’s 1980s and stated that, whilst there were some overlong or unfocused albums, there were some genuinely great moments. I think Infidels is an album where we saw a little more of the ‘old Dylan’:

“On closer inspection, Dylan’s work from the eighties isn't lacking in good material; rather, it suffers from a deficit of direction and distillation. Dylan’s eighties seem like three or four decades rolled into one: the early years represent the tail end of his Christian period, the middle is a mix of bracing returns to form and tossed-off roots rock that sounds like dispatches from a lazy wasteland, and the end is a retrenchment that paved the way for his full renaissance in the nineties and beyond. At the time, the period seemed like a mess. At a distance, it seems like a delirious mess, equal parts honest devotion to the songwriting form and cynical experimentation bordering on a perverse rejection of success.

Fans trying to make an argument that reclaims the decade usually start with “Infidels,” from 1983. It's the most traditional Dylan album of that decade, in the sense that its songs are melodic, structurally sound, and loaded with mysterious imagery. The tribute devotes two of its first four slots to “Infidels,” to great effect: Built to Spill covers “Jokerman,” and Craig Finn, from the Hold Steady, tries his hand at “Sweetheart Like You.” Both versions succeed wonderfully, in large part because they’re founded on unimpeachable source material. “Jokerman” remains a marvel: beautiful, scriptural, and surprisingly violent. “Sweetheart Like You” contains some of Dylan’s most vivid writing (“You know you can make a name for yourself / You can hear them tires squeal / You can be known as the most beautiful woman / Who ever crawled across cut glass to make a deal”)”.

It would be harsh to blame Dylan’s songwriting and more faith-based direction for a slight decline in quality and critical affection. Having released his debut albums in the 1960s, he underwent an electric shift by 1965’s Bringing It All Back Home. Dylan was ahead of his time, but he was also perfectly in keeping with the sounds of the times. His modern work marries his 1960s acoustic material and sharper and more fiery electrics. Listen to the music of the 1980s and there was a tendency for big synths, layers of sound and over-produced tracks. I really love the decade but, for someone like Dylan, were producers going to keep things stripped and pure - or would they try to update his sound to fit in with the tastes of the 1980s? Vanity Fair examined this point in a 2013 article. They highlighted a mid-‘80s album where the worst traits of the decade were all over Dylan’s music:

“That decade, alas, was the shoal upon which so many classic rock acts ran aground. Dylan, Paul McCartney, Neil Young, Stevie Wonder, the Rolling Stones—all released arguably their worst-ever music in the 80s. Why? I blame the unfortunate confluence of baby-boom artists reaching their mid-life crisis years at the precise moment popular music was staggering through one its most vapid eras. Surely it didn’t help that record producers were just learning how to use new digital technologies while they and musicians were simultaneously ingesting mountains of cocaine. And would you have had the courage to tell voices of their generation with declining record sales that they shouldn’t try to compete with Duran Duran and a-ha?

Empire Burlesque, 1985.

What Rolling Stone thought: “Affords Dylan more pure street-beat credibility than he has aspired to since . . . well, pick your favorite faraway year.”

This is the album where Dylan most fully engages the 1980s, in a sonic sense: processed drums, synthesizer washes, a pop-reggae beat on one song, electro squiggles and old-school hip-hop textures throughout. The producer was Arthur Baker, known for his work with Afrika Bambaataa and New Order, and for his club remixes of decade touchstones such as “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” and “Dancing in the Dark.” One might argue that everything horrible about 80s pop is encapsulated in the notion that Dylan or anyone else felt he required “street-beat credibility” in the first place. It sort of worked, though: the album was generally well-received by critics though sales were lackluster. Needless to say, Baker’s sonic frosting hasn’t aged well. Underneath it, committed fans have detected a handful of first-rate songs and strong performances. To my ear, Empire Burlesque is best enjoyed as a clever parody of what it might have sounded like if Dylan had tried to cut a commercial album in 1985”.

I feel Bob Dylan produced a lot of great material in the 1980s. Entering his forties in 1981, I guess it was a period where was no longer a young man looking at the politics and events of the 1960s and 1970s. He was approaching middle-age and, with it, his music adapted. I feel Dylan in his sixties and seventies has produced some truly mesmeric and thought-provoking music. I will touch on this in future features. Ahead of the songwriting legend turning eighty, I wanted to address the Eighties themselves and why it was quite a ‘difficult’ decade. That said, a compilation album was released years ago that shed new light on a maligned decade. Perhaps we need to reappraise Dylan in the ‘80s and give his albums their due! There were definite flashes of genius in even his most ordinary records from that decade. Fans needn’t have worried too much. Before too long, the chameleon-like and hugely prolific Bob Dylan would…

BOUNCE right back!

FEATURE: Station to Station: Part Nine: Zane Lowe (Apple Music 1)

FEATURE:

 

 

Station to Station

Part Nine: Zane Lowe (Apple Music 1)

___________

FOR the ninth part…

 PHOTO CREDIT: Michael Schmelling for The New York Times

of my Station to Station feature – where I highlight and celebrate inspiring broadcasters and D.J.s -, I am focusing on someone who has had a long and successful career in radio. Many might have first encountered Zane Lowe on BBC Radio 1. The Auckland-born broadcaster is one of the most respected and influential people in radio – and the wider media for that matter. Following an early career in music making, production and DJing in New Zealand, Lowe moved to the U.K. in 1997. He made a name for himself presenting on XFM and MTV Europe (MTV Two), going on to host a new global music show on BBC Radio 1 from 2003–2015. Now broadcasting on Apple Music 1, Lowe has come a long way. One feels he has a lot more to give; so many other opportunities will come his way. I would advise people to check out The Zane Lowe Interview Series, as there is a fascinating array of guests to be found! The plethora and quality of the guests Lowe interviews is amazing. I will come to a couple of different interviews that Zane Lowe has been involved in. One is from 2019 when he was at Beats 1 (now Apple Music 1). He was discussing how he was putting Hip-Hop in the spotlight. The second, from 2020, is with The New York Times. On Apple 1, there is a lot of talent and diversity to be heard. I think that Lowe is among the very finest. The interview with The New York Times is all about how Lowe is the sort of unofficial Pop therapist; how he can get so much from those he interviews (the station was still Beats 1 at the time of the interview, hence the mention of it throughout).

Before getting to that first interview, here is a bit of bio/information from the Apple Music 1 page regarding Zane Lowe and what he brings to the table:

“On his namesake show and New Music Daily, Apple Music 1’s flagship shows, host Zane Lowe brings users unparalleled music knowledge with headline interviews, breaking news, and emerging music from around the globe every day. It’s become the world’s go-to for the best brand-new music, sure, but it’s also popular music’s premier confessional booth: Day after day, Zane—who’s also Apple Music’s global creative director and co-head of artist relations—gets the biggest, most elusive superstars, from Justin Bieber to Taylor Swift ** to Kanye West, to let their guards down—laughs, tears, and news-making quotes are the norm”.

I want to drop in an interview with Music Business Worldwide, where Lowe talked about Beats 1/him getting exclusive interviews; how streaming music/sounds creates this sort of meeting place:

“Lowe, Apple Music’s Global Creative Director, says 24/7 radio station Beats 1 sets out to create a “club room” environment for artists; a place where they can hang out and express themselves – whether “on cycle” with a record or not.

It’s a pretty smart strategy: Build genuinely meaningful relationships with the world’s biggest artists, give them a platform to say and play whatever they want, and drive the global conversation around music in the process. And you only need look at Beats 1’s schedule from the past week to see the impact it’s having.

Case in point: On Saturday (October 19) Frank Ocean released his new single DHL on a new episode of his Beats 1 radio show, blonded, which aired for the first time in two years. The track marked the artist’s first new music since 2017.

And then, yesterday (October 24), Beats 1 grabbed the world’s headlines via Lowe’s two-hour long interview with Kanye West. It was the rapper’s first interview in over a-year-and-half, in which he discussed the making of his new album Jesus Is King  – released today.

This past week has also seen the launch of the first Beats 1 Rap Life Radio show with Ebro Darden, centered around Apple Music’s popular Rap Life playlist. In addition, there’s been a Gucci Mane interview, plus today’s debut of Lowe’s new, weekly New Music Daily show with guest appearances from Taylor Swift, Selena Gomez, and Chris Martin, bringing to life Apple’s New Music Daily playlist launched last month.

Says Lowe: “We are just trying to create lots of depth and lots of opportunities and not just be a conduit for one experience. We want artists to be able to do whatever they want, ultimately. That’s always been the dream.”

Here, MBW catches up with Lowe to find out about the new playlists, live shows and how Apple Music and Beats 1 are committed to super-serving artists and fans…

WHY ARE APPLE MUSIC AND BEATS 1 GETTING THESE EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEWS AND PREMIERES? AND WHY ARE SOME OF THE WORLD’S BIGGEST RADIO STATIONS… NOT GETTING THEM?

I can’t speak for anyone else. I know that we’ve really spent, coming up on five years, trying to build up what I would consider to be a deep and valued experience. We opened our doors from day one. We really relinquished as much of the control over the experience as possible, in terms of [not] asking artists to do things that benefited us more than them.

We were very, very transparent from the beginning in terms of wanting artists to be able to use Beats 1 as a function on Apple Music to be creative; to do what they want to do. To make radio shows or take over the station or play their projects in full or interview each other.  Or do one-off our specials about subjects or causes that mean something and mattered to them.

I hope there isn’t an artist, we’ve worked with, certainly when it comes to them making their own shows and seasons and content and creative, that would say that we’ve kind of put our own ideas or our own interests before theirs.

In terms of the distribution and the way that music reaches an audience now, streaming is the meeting place. It’s the club room, where artists and fans come together and share that really precious thing. The fact that we built this kind of environment within a streaming service, ultimately just kind of ticks a lot of boxes.

It creates a more eclectic experience and it actually fosters individuality more than, I think, driving individuals to a place where the brand is the star. I want to get away from a place where artists are [considered] lucky to be a part of a brand. It’s like, No. We are lucky to be around you.

And now we’re at a point where that idea of being able to distribute your own music, reach your fans, to DM artists and ask them for collaborations or ask them to support you, and just be very much in control ultimately of your environment, is so exciting.

I love it when an artist signs a record deal and they are happy about it. I love it when an artist finds a lawyer or a manager, an agent, or does an interview with me and they’re happy about it. More than ever, artists are in a position whereby they can do what they want, when they want, and decide how they want to expand their business model and who they want to work with.

We’re living in a time where the artists have so much more control over their own destiny. And [Apple Music is] in a space where we’ve been so artist-orientated from day one. I look at a streaming service like TIDAL and I respect them for the same thing. They came out very artist-orientated.

We’ve been quite exemplary at that. We’ve been very artist-focused, very supportive of their creative identity, and not really tried to compromise that for our own benefit.

We have a lot of space and an increasing amount of tools, playlists, shows, ideas, and creative that is there to support the artists and connect them to the audience because their audience are our subscribers. I am their audience, I am a subscriber. When I go on Apple Music, I want to have the best experience as a subscriber, not just because I work here. I want to have a deeper experience because that is the kind of music fan I am”.

It is interesting hearing what Zane Lowe had to say in that interview. Since then (2019), he has spoken with some of the biggest names in music and brought some incredible new music to the people. I like how passionate he is about music after so many years in the business! One of the great things about Lowe, besides his drive and restless curiosity, is how he communicates with musicians – how his interviews differ from other people’s.

When he spoke with The New York Times last year, we got a sense of Lowe’s gifts and how he can bring so much from his guests. It is an illuminating and fascinating interview:

“Justin Bieber cried. Hayley Williams too.

Sitting in a studio in Culver City, Calif., opposite Zane Lowe, the grey-stubbled Beats 1 host and Apple Music honcho, musicians tend to unspool, even shed a tear. They talk about their albums, but also their divorces and regrets, their influences and coping mechanisms. It’s therapy, but for an audience of millions, and with a propulsive, ever-enthusiastic host who also helps shapes the narrative, and the placement, of the songs we hear.

As one of the largest digital music services, Apple is a must-visit for musicians pitching a record, and Lowe — who, as Apple Music’s global creative director and co-head of artist relations, helps oversee programming for its radio station Beats 1, and anchors several shows — is its cheerleading emissary. With major artists increasingly eschewing interviews with traditional journalists, he still manages to reel in big names.

“I’m not really promoting,” Lady Gaga said when she stopped by recently to discuss “Chromatica,” her latest album. “I view this conversation as something that I would want to do anyway. You know how I feel about your perception of music and how it affects people and the world.”

Since 2014, when Lowe, now 46, was recruited from London and the BBC to join Apple in California, he has emerged as a trusted figure — a hyped-up fan stand-in who artists also view as a peer and a pleasure to talk to. But over the past year, Lowe’s role has shifted. His conversations started veering into how the creative process intersects with mental illness or emotional stability, and he leaned into it, using himself as an example: He has anxiety, he will freely tell you, and obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Lowe’s hourlong daily interviews are a promotional stop, for sure, but they don’t feel that way for performers. “Never once have I felt like I was selling myself or even selling an album while doing promo with Zane,” Williams said. “Thank God for that. There’s genuine curiosity in his voice, and the allowance for vulnerability means that nobody has to walk away feeling misrepresented.”

Lowe’s friend Mark Ronson, the musician and producer, said: “He’s extraordinarily perceptive. He’ll mention something to me or notice the way I’ve been acting the past month — just kind of notice something that I didn’t even notice in myself.”

Another friend, the country star Keith Urban, wrote in an email, “He knows I don’t wanna just be interviewed. I want a conversation.”

Talking with Lowe, said Trent Reznor, who helped bring him to Beats radio, “you feel safe.”

If a Beats 1 interview is a release valve for artists, it functions the same way for Lowe, especially lately. “I have these voices that I’m trying to bury through work and productivity, just like everybody else,” he said. In the past, “the simple thing for me was to go really deep into music — just pull the thread and go deep, deep, deep.”

He was introduced to music broadcasting early, courtesy of his father, Derek, a founder of Radio Hauraki, New Zealand’s pirate radio. (In the ’60s, “They fought the government for the right to broadcast and play rock ’n’ roll,” Lowe said, “and they won! It’s the kind of stuff Richard Curtis makes movies about.”)

One of his earliest memories — “I must’ve only been like 2”— is seeing a large cardboard cutout of the prismatic triangle from “Dark Side of the Moon” at his dad’s station. Then there was the rifling through his older brother’s record collection, where he discovered the Cure, and the influence of his mother, Liz, a career counselor, who introduced him to Joni Mitchell and Tom Petty.

Lowe has been broadcasting from the Hollywood home he shares with his wife, Kara Walters, and two sons, ages 11 and 14 — like all of us searching for the room with the most robust Wi-Fi and best angle for a video chat. (In his case he’s trying to position himself to block out an air vent: “I’m talking to Future the other day, he’s so intense and so amazing when he talks — he’s like jazz improv, like Charlie Parker — and I’m thinking, like, air vent! Jesus Christ, get your head in front of the air vent!”)

When Reznor, the Nine Inch Nails frontman, began working on Beats 1 with Jimmy Iovine, he had a vision for a radio show that was almost entirely cribbed from Lowe’s BBC program, on which he’d been a guest — “something that feels live, and it feels global,” Reznor said. “Let’s see if it’s possible to have a monoculture in this world.”

“He very much lived up to what I hoped for in that capacity,” Reznor added.

For Lowe, discovering that artists might be going through the same hurdles he had — and that they might be ready to share it with him, and his audience — changed his perception of their work. “I just started to listen to music differently,” he said, searching beneath the lyrics, “the melody and the energy — there were other things buried in there.” And, he realized, he was adept at excavating them”.

I think that Zane Lowe is one of the most important figures in modern radio. He commands a lot of respect and, with many years ahead of him, I am interested to see what is next. I know he will be at Apple 1 for a long time, and he will continue to interview fantastic artists and bring us terrific music. If you have not heard his show or checked out his interviews, then go and check them out and see…

WHY he is so revered.

FEATURE: Spotlight: Bleach Lab

FEATURE:

 

 

Spotlight

Bleach Lab

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HERE is another band that I really like…

 PHOTO CREDIT: Isy Townsend

and should have spotlighted a bit sooner! On 19th March, Bleach Lab released their five-track E.P., A Calm Sense of Surrounding. It is a brilliant collection of songs that marks the band out for bright things. I will wrap up this feature with a review for that E.P. Comprising guitarist Frank Wates, bassist Josh Longman, vocalist Jenna Kyle and drummer Shawn Courtney, Bleach Lab are a great London-based band a very particular and excellent sound. This is a group that will be dying to get touring when venues reopen. With a growing fanbase, there are plenty who want to catch them live! There are a few interviews/features that I want to bring in - so that we can get a better impression of Bleach Lab. Earlier in the year, PRS for Music introduced a stunning young band:

“Bleach Lab originally hail from Buckinghamshire and released their debut single back in 2019 – a simpler time for many of us. The sense of loss and change that permeates much of their music seems rather poignant in today’s world, evoking a sense of reflection that has become familiar to many.

19 March will see the release of the band’s new EP, which explores the feelings of grief associated with the loss of a close family member and the dissolution of a long-term relationship. Their new single, Old Ways, explores the sense of anger that loss can entail. On the track, singer Jenna Kyle’s sorrowful yet elegant vocals take centre stage amongst a soundscape of intricate drumming and yearning guitar lines.

This band are not to be missed, so discover more below.

Who?

Bleach Lab

What?

Delicate yet impactful hook-laden guitar pop.

From where?

South-London based, Buckinghamshire-formed.

What’s the story?

Scouring their discography, it’s clear that the members of Bleach Lab arrived on the scene with a distinct intention for the direction the band’s sound. That sound marries Marr-esque, jazz-tinged guitar playing with the mournful vocal phrasing of singers like Hope Sandoval and Julia Jacklin. Though there’s certainly a dreamlike quality to Bleach Lab’s output, their stories of heartbreak and loss are firmly placed within reality, the band unafraid of laying it all on the line with honest, direct lyricism and fuss-free production.

Last year, the band released Never Be, the first single taken from their forthcoming EP to widespread acclaim from publications such as DIY, So Young and Gigwise, amongst many others. Speaking of the EP, Bleach Lab write, ‘The EP melds together two traumatic experiences of grief: the death of bassist Josh Longman’s father and the breakdown of singer Jenna Kyle’s long-term relationship.’

Subverting the model of the five stages of grief, with lyrics written jointly by Kyle and Longman, the EP explores the vast spectrum of emotions experienced during the grieving process. The next single to be released from the EP, Old Ways, explores feelings of anger, as Kyle explains, ‘Old Ways explores the angry side of the grieving process at the end of a relationship. Anger towards the way in which they treated you but also towards oneself for still missing them regardless”.

This year is a particularly tough ones for promising artists who were hoping to gig and get their music out there to people. No doubt Bleach Lab can get some dates under their belt later in the year. I have heard their music on BBC Radio 6 Music. I have checked out their Bandcamp page too, and I really like that they are doing. I think they are among the most-promising and interesting bands of this year. CLASH highlighted Bleach Lab as part of their Next Wave feature:

“Their debut EP ‘A Calm Sense Of Surrounding’ is set for release on March 19th. Fusing a myriad of musical influences from Mazzy Star to Wolf Alice, Frank Wates’ Telecaster provides much of the sonic backdrop for the EP while Kyle and Longman’s collaborative lyrical work enhances the record’s depth of character with each track offering a personal exposé around the five stages of grief - anger, denial, bargaining, depression and acceptance. “It’s not just the words for me that describe the world that a song is in… I think the music around it is just as important,” says Longman, while Wates adds that their “backwards” songwriting process involving rhythm first then melodies last plays an integral part to their sound.

Longman goes on to explain how the sea was subconsciously explored as a recurring metaphor within the EP’s varying and vivid soundscapes: “People can see water in many different ways; it takes so many different shapes and forms. You can be comforted by it but you can also be drowned by it.” Kyle also theorises that her regular long walks by the seafront may have played a part in the theme of water slipping into the EP and combined with its lyrically grief-stricken essences, these two elements make for a powerful musical combination.

“A lot of the content in the EP is very personal and of course you do question whether you want to put all of that out there in all its glory,” mentions Kyle. But having sat on the material for a while, being able to now let it out in the world, she feels, has offered her a sense of closure from the experiences and emotions she expresses on the record. “It’s important that we have that personal connection with our music for sure… I do feel like I’ve been able to put my thoughts to bed and let them go. It is closure in a sense.”

Bleach Lab’s debut EP, in many ways, is exactly what many of us need in our lives right now – to escape from the uncertainty and chaos of the pandemic and bask in a calmer sense of surrounding. Clearly, this is also resonating with an ever-growing listener base as the band recently sold out a socially distanced show at London’s Moth Club within a mere four hours of its announcement. “I think things are becoming increasingly more positive,” mentions Kyle on the current state of our lockdown-ridden world, and as anticipation for freedom looms ever larger on the horizon, so too, it seems, does Bleach Lab’s likelihood of future success”.

Although the entire band are terrific and have a very close bond, I especially love Jenna Kyle’s vocals. She has this dreaminess and smokiness that gives the tracks so much beauty, mood and atmosphere. I also really love the compositions. They have so much depth and colour, one keeps coming back time and time again. They sort of remind me of a Dream-Pop/Indie group of the 1990s; albeit it one with a modern twist.

  PHOTO CREDIT: Isy Townsend

The penultimate interview I will quote from is by Far Out Magazine. I learnt something about their writing process and the vocal dynamic of Bleach Lab:

“Bleach Lab’s music carefully uses emotional topics for currency, and each song has an underbelly of sentiment in it. This method of writing can be both a cathartic and heartbreaking experience as Langman can attest to: “I found elements of the lyrics hard to write, as parts of the EP are about me dealing with the death of my dad when I was younger,” he says to Far Out.

“I found it raw to talk about as this is never something I usually have done, so to share it with the band members, let alone whoever will stumble across this EP, was a daunting thing for me,” the bassist added. “But I found it really therapeutic, and I found it helped me a lot looking back at the experience creating this EP.”

The band democratically write tracks, and even though Kyle is the vocalist in the group we hear on the record, all their voices are etched into the words. The kindship that the band have built over the last few years has benefitted their songwriting process, forging an unbreakable bond that allows them to connect with intricate personal stories that are tackled on the EP.

While a lot of bands often claim that their song’s don’t carry a significant amount of meaning, Kyle’s view on the subject is entirely on the contrary: “I really struggle to write unless I am 100% emotionally involved in what I’m writing,” she explained. “It took an awful lot of strength to allow myself to go to the places that I had to go to, to write some of these lyrics. I’m glad I did though, it was hugely grounding and allowed me to look at things from new perspectives and let things go”.

In terms of some nice additional information, this interview from March is pretty neat. Bleach Lab were asked ten questions. I have selected a couple that struck my eye:

“What encouraged you to want to get into music?

Jenna – I used to be obsessed with SingStar on PS2. Not to brag but I was really good at it (especially my rendition of Bonnie Tyler’s Total Eclipse of the Heart) so my mum offered to send me to singing lessons when I was about 11. I never had much interest in any other subjects going through school so it’s always been my one thing.

Frank – I just really love playing guitar. I wanted to have a reason to justify to my friends why I spent so much time playing. Also, I think reverse psychology played a big part. Everyone I spoke to told me not to get into music and I think that just made me want to try it even more.

Josh – I got into playing an instrument later in my life and was playing around in the music rooms when I was in 6th form. I loved it so much I bunked all my classes with my friend to play guitar and bass for 6 hours a day. I got a C,D,E,U if you were wondering …… Mum was not impressed.

Kieran– My parents were always very musical. Both my dad and stepdad played in bands so going to gigs was a fairly regular thing for me. I got my first drum kit at around 7 and started picking up things from my incredibly talented stepdad, and my first gig quickly followed when I played a couple songs with his blondie tribute band. I wore an incredible flame shirt that night and absolutely smashed a rendition of teenage kicks (not a blondie song I know. Idk why that was in there), but it immediately made me want to do it more.

Best venue you’ve ever played and why?

Jenna- Bleach Lab’s gigging experience has been very limited thanks to covid, so I will go with blackbird leys shopping centre. I performed in a competition and lost- the crowd went wild! (not really).

Frank – Not in Bleach Lab but I played at the Kentish Town Forum once and it was wild and terrifying in equal measure. We had our own room backstage all to ourselves as well which was a delight.

Josh – Not in Bleach Lab but when I was about 10 I got to play the royal albert hall playing African drums with my class. Safe to say I stole the show. I am the mop head at the back in a yellow shirt.

Kieran- before Bleach Lab, I have previously played at the Camden Assembly. It was hands down one of the best gigs of my life, everyone loved us and then a couple of weeks later I went to see my favourite band at the time, the 1975, on the same stage. That experience was just insane and I’d love to be able to play there again, hopefully in the not too distant future”.

There are a lot of fans and media eyes turned the way of Bleach Lab. In a busy sea of new bands, I think they stand out and have the promise to endure and grow for years to come. It will be interesting seeing how they progress and grow as time goes on. A Calm Sense of Surrounding is an appropriately-titled E.P. It is one that got a lot of positive press. I will finish up by bringing in Riot Mag and their review:

“Bleach Lab‘s A Calm Sense of Surrounding was written as a collaborative effort, documenting two experiences of grief: the death of bassist Josh Longman’s father and the breakdown of singer Jenna Kyle’s relationship. The two work through the five stages of grief with intimate candour, each song on the EP representing one of the stages.

Opening track ‘Old Ways’ presents Kyle in the final moments with her partner. “Before you say it, I think I already know/ I never said it, you made it up on your own,” she sings, all the frustration and anger coming through the chorus like a transcription from their last argument. Guitarist Frank Wates quietly does a lot of heavy lifting in forming the atmosphere of the EP, creating calm lakes or raging white waters in the hypnotic soundscape of every track.

Even at a short 20 minutes, A Calm Sense of Surrounding still has the space to build upon its sound, ramping up tension and culminating in the dynamic ‘Flood.’ This is Bleach Lab at their darkest, dealing with the penultimate stage of depression. The rippling reverb from Wates’ guitar now conjures images of murky, ominous water. Kyle’s voice here is crystal clear and alluring, like a siren drawing you deeper and deeper into the unknown where Longman’s emotive, rip current of a bass line sweeps through the track. Bleach Lab form a harmonious relationship on ‘Flood,’ moving together almost effortlessly, each instrument complimenting the natural ebb and flow of the others. Kyle sings “I’m in his words, I’m in his mouth,” losing all sense of herself in the aftermath of her broken relationship, drowning into the song’s turbulent, enveloping climax.

Mazzy Star’s bluesy, country-rock influence on Bleach Lab is most clearly displayed in ‘Scars,’ closing out the EP with melancholic acceptance. Wates dials down the guitar effects, bringing a stripped-back and necessary clarity to this song. “I don’t want to hurt anymore,” Kyle sings, just waiting for time to heal her wounds. The stage of acceptance is not about restoring happiness — or even finding complete closure — for Bleach Lab. It’s about learning lessons and using them to move forward, forging a new path in life”.

Go and follow Bleach Lab and check out their music. I love what they are throwing out, as do so many other people by the look of things! Although they are really just starting out at the moment, I think Bleach Lab have the promise and talent to go..

SO far in music.

_____________

Follow Bleach Lab

Facebook:

https://www.facebook.com/bleachlab/

Twitter:

https://twitter.com/bleach_lab

Instagram:

https://www.instagram.com/bleach.lab/

YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCj_-iLy9ZF2hi8N11DDq-4A

Bandcamp:

https://bleachlab.bandcamp.com/

Spotify;

https://open.spotify.com/artist/2B70zWgfCAGQ8o2ImS2bH8?si=VMebMncjRz6bHXkeDZk3ow

FEATURE: Never Give Up on the Good Times: Will We See a Sequel of the Spice Girls’ 1997 Film, Spice World, and a Full Reunion?

FEATURE:

 

Never Give Up on the Good Times

Will We See a Sequel of the Spice Girls’ 1997 Film, Spice World, and a Full Reunion?

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EARLIER in the week…

 PHOTO CREDIT: Alamy

news was circulating that there may be a sequel of the Spice Girls’ film, Spice World. Released in 1997 (the same year the Spice World album came out), it is a film that resonated with fans but received some negative critical feedback. Directed by Bob Spiers, the film was in the same vein as The Beatles' films in the 1960s such as A Hard Day's Night. Although it has some comedic moments and fun, maybe it was more about the relationship of the Spice Girls (Emma Bunton, Geri Horner (née Halliwell), Melanie Brown, Melanie Chisholm, and Victoria Beckham (née Adams). Released in December 1997, the film was a hit at the box office, taking in over $100 million worldwide. The film was panned by critics – though there has been reappraisal since 1997. As a minor fan of the group, I definitely listened to their music and was caught up in a lot of the popularity and tsunami. Their debut single, Wannabe, was released on 26th June, 1996. I do like a lot of their catalogue and play their music a fair bit. I think there were some really strong girl groups in the 1990s. I also think that, if there is a planned sequel to the Spice World film, then the earliest it will arrive is next year. That would tie in with the twenty-fifth anniversary of the group’s second album. Bringing in a Movie Web article, we get more details about a potential sequel to Spice World:

“According to a new report, The Spice Girls have approached an unnamed but "renowned" screenwriter to pen the sequel. Geri Horner, aka Ginger Spice, is said to be the one heading up the proposed project. An unnamed source with knowledge of the situation had this to say about it.

Are the Spice Girls getting ready to make a big screen comeback? Though it has yet to be confirmed by the members of the group, a new report suggests that the immensely popular musical act is gearing up to make Spice World 2. If this goes according to the alleged plan, the movie could be timed to line up with the 25th anniversary of the original next year.

According to a new report, The Spice Girls have approached an unnamed but "renowned" screenwriter to pen the sequel. Geri Horner, aka Ginger Spice, is said to be the one heading up the proposed project. An unnamed source with knowledge of the situation had this to say about it.

"The girls have been talking about how to mark the film's anniversary and are actively considering making a tongue-in-cheek sequel. They have approached a screenwriter who is considering working on the project and making tentative steps forward. It is still in the early stages but they are talking to established names in the business, which proves they are taking a big screen comeback seriously."

Melanie Chisholm (Mel C), Emma Bunton and Melanie Brown (Mel B) are said to be "tentatively" on board already. But the big question mark is Victoria Beckham, aka Posh Spice. She has been the big holdout in recent years, sitting out The Spice Girl's sold-out reunion tour in 2019. Beckham has stated that she is more focused on her family and business, as opposed to revisiting the past.

"It took me a lot of courage not to go on tour with the Spice Girls again, but to be the one who says, 'You know, I'm not doing it because things feel different now than they used to.' I'd rather concentrate on my family and my company."

Spice World was released in 1997 and was directed by Bob Spiers. Despite largely negative critical reviews, it earned $56 million at the global box office, making it the highest-grossing movie ever made by a musical group at the time. It featured high-profile cameos from other musicians such as Elton John and Meat Loaf. Meanwhile, all five members of the Spice Girls are going to reunite in animated form for a superhero feature being produced by Paramount. The movie was originally expected to arrive in 2020 but last year interrupted every Hollywood studio's plans in a big, bad way. We'll be sure to keep you posted as any further details on the possible sequel are made available”.

I have looked back at Spice World since its release. It is definitely modelled around The Beatles’ films and capturing the friendship of the band and the way their career took off. Less A Day’s Night and a bit more Magical Mystery Tour, there are highlights in Spice World. One can feel the warmth between the group members. The film itself is very much of its time. Those who disliked the Spice Girls took against the film. There has been enough time and distance since 1997 to allow re-evaluation. I think the film is a lot stronger than many gave it credit for. Each of the group turns in a good performance and, with comedic actors like Stephen Fry, Jennifer Saunders and Richard E. Grant popping up, there was a strong cast. I wonder how a second film would happen. It could not be the same sort of vibe and plot as the original. As it has been nearly twenty-five years since the original film came out, the group have gone past their peak and entered a new phase. Perhaps the project will be a more of a documentary – a sort of reunion piece, similar to the upcoming Friends reunion. Rather than Spice World 2 being madcap, bright and the group coping with fame and the rush of success, it might be something calmer and more grounded. I do like the idea of a sequel.

There will be a lot of anniversary features this year regarding the Spice Girls’ debut single and album (Spice). If anything, the Spice World album was even bigger. Having a new film would be interesting. The biggest question remains whether the current four-piece would reunite with Victoria Beckham. Before the group’s final/current album, Forever, was released in 2000, Geri Horner left the band. She came back to the group and toured with them in 2019. I think Victoria Beckham did not feel the need to tour and try and recapture the past. If there was a one-off film to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of Spice World, I could see her coming on board. The reason for me covering these rumours is that the Spice Girls were huge back in the day - and I think that they did get more stick than they deserved. I think their music was a lot wider-reaching than a demographic of young and teenage girls. Listening back now and so many of their songs pop and get you singing along! Spice World is a film that has some great moments that hang together. One is definitely captured by the energy and fun of the film if nothing else. It is intriguing to see whether anything goes ahead. The bigger question would be whether the original five-piece come together for the first time (in a big thing like a film) in the first time in over two decades. Maybe Spice World 2 (or whatever it would be called) would be a modern-day look at the group and how they have progressed. That said, and for those who want a return to the 1990s and the peak of Girl Power, it would be a refreshing and vivacious…

BLAST from the past.

FEATURE: Inspired By... Part Nine: Aretha Franklin

FEATURE:

 

 

Inspired By...

PHOTO CREDIT: Michael Ochs/Getty Images

Part Nine: Aretha Franklin

___________

IN the next edition…

 PHOTO CREDIT: Fred A. Sabine/Getty Images

of Inspired By…, I may bring in a band and concentrate on artists influenced by them. For this part, I am featuring the sorely-missed Queen of Soul, Aretha Franklin. I am keen to get to a playlist containing songs from artists who have cited Franklin as important – or those who have some of her sound and majesty in their own music. Before then, I think it is important to source some biography:

“By the age of 14, she had recorded some of her earliest tracks at his church, which were released by a small label as the album Songs of Faith in 1956. She also performed with C. L.'s traveling revival show and, while on tour, befriended gospel greats such as Mahalia Jackson, Sam Cooke and Clara Ward.

Children

But life on the road also exposed Franklin to adult behaviors, and at the age of 12, she became a mother for the first time with a son, Clarence. A second child, Edward, followed two years later — with both sons taking her family's name. Franklin would later have two more sons: Ted White, Jr. and Kecalf Cunningham.

Albums and Songs

'Aretha'

After a brief hiatus, Franklin returned to performing and followed heroes such as Cooke and Dinah Washington into pop and blues territory. In 1960, with her father's blessing, Franklin traveled to New York, where after being courted by several labels, including Motown and RCA, she signed with Columbia Records, who released the album Aretha in 1961.

Though two tracks from Aretha would make the R&B Top 10, a bigger success came that same year with the single "Rock-a-bye Your Baby with a Dixie Melody," which crossed over to No. 37 on the pop charts.

But while Franklin enjoyed moderate results with her recordings over the next few years, they failed to fully showcase her immense talent. In 1966 she and her new husband and manager, Ted White, decided a move was in order, and Franklin signed to Atlantic. Producer Jerry Wexler immediately shuttled Franklin to the Florence Alabama Musical Emporium (FAME) recording studios.

"I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You)"

Backed by the legendary Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section, Franklin recorded the single "I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You)." In the midst of the recording sessions, White quarreled with a member of the band, and White and Franklin left abruptly.

But as the single became a massive Top 10 hit, Franklin re-emerged in New York and was able to complete the partially recorded track, "Do Right Woman—Do Right Man."

'Respect'

Hitting her stride in 1967 and 1968, Franklin churned out a string of hit singles that would become enduring classics, showcasing Franklin's powerful voice and gospel roots in a pop framework.

In 1967, the album I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You) was released, and the first song on the album, "Respect" — an empowered cover of an Otis Redding track — reached No. 1 on both the R&B and pop charts and won Franklin her first two Grammy Awards.

She also had Top 10 hits with "Baby I Love You,'' "Think," "Chain of Fools,'' "I Say a Little Prayer," "(Sweet Sweet Baby) Since You've Been Gone" and "(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman."

Dubbed the 'Queen of Soul'

Franklin's chart dominance soon earned her the title Queen of Soul, while at the same time she also became a symbol of Black empowerment during the civil rights movement.

In 1968 Franklin was enlisted to perform at the funeral of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. during which she paid tribute to her father's fallen friend with a heartfelt rendition of "Precious Lord." Later that year, she was also selected to sing the national anthem to begin the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

In 1987 Franklin became the first female artist to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and was also awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Detroit. That same year, she released the album One Lord, One Faith, One Baptism, which won the Grammy for Best Soul Gospel Performance.

Following another relatively quiet period in her career, in 1993, Franklin was invited to sing at the inauguration of Bill Clinton, and the following year she received both a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award and Kennedy Center Honors. She would also be the focus of multiple documentaries and tributes as the decade progressed.

'A Rose Is Still a Rose'

Nearing its conclusion, Franklin reprised her former role in Blues Brothers 2000, released the gold-selling "A Rose Is Still a Rose" and stood in for Luciano Pavarotti, who was too ill to accept his Lifetime Achievement Award, with her rendition of "Nessun Dorma" commanding stellar reviews.

'So Damn Happy'

In 2003 Franklin released her final studio album on Arista, So Damn Happy, and left the label to found Aretha Records. Two years later, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom and became the second woman ever to be inducted into the UK Music Hall of Fame.

In 2008 she received her 18th Grammy Award for "Never Gonna Break My Faith" — a collaboration with Mary J. Blige — and was tapped to sing at the 2009 presidential inauguration of Barack Obama.

With 18 Grammys under her belt, Franklin is one of the most honored artists in Grammy history, ranked among the likes of Alison Krauss, Adele and Beyoncé Knowles. In 2011 Franklin released her first album on her own label, A Woman Falling Out of Love.

To support the project, she performed several concerts, including a two-night stint at the famed Radio City Music Hall in New York. With fans and critics alike impressed with her performances, she successfully proved that the Queen of Soul still reigned supreme.

'Aretha Franklin Sings the Great Diva Classics'

In 2014 Franklin underscored that point with Aretha Franklin Sings the Great Diva Classics, which reached No. 13 on the pop charts and No. 3 R&B.

In February 2017, the 74-year-old Queen of Soul told Detroit radio station WDIV Local 4 that she was collaborating with Stevie Wonder to release a new album.

“I must tell you, I am retiring this year," she said in the interview, adding: "I feel very, very enriched and satisfied with respect to where my career came from and where it is now. I’ll be pretty much satisfied, but I’m not going to go anywhere and just sit down and do nothing. That wouldn’t be good either.”

Death

On August 12, 2018, it was reported that a "gravely ill" Franklin was bedridden in her Detroit home, surrounded by family and friends. As news of her condition spread, more luminaries paid a visit to express their well wishes, including Wonder and Jesse Jackson.

Four days later, on the morning of August 16, Franklin succumbed to her illness, which her family revealed to be pancreatic cancer.

A public viewing was held later that month at the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History in Detroit, with fans camping out overnight for the chance to pay their respects to the iconic singer. Her televised funeral was set to be held at the city's Greater Grace Temple on August 31, with Wonder, Khan and Hudson among the scheduled performers, and Jackson, Clinton and Smokey Robinson highlighting the list of speakers.

Movie

In January 2018, it was announced that Franklin hand-picked singer and actress Jennifer Hudson to play her in an upcoming biopic. After being pushed back several times, Respect will be released on August 13, 2021”.

Because an Aretha Franklin biopic is arriving later this year, and the late singer is so respected and revered, this Inspired By… is all about her. Listen to songs from artists who count the simply amazing Queen of Soul…

AMONG their influences.

FEATURE: The May Playlist: Vol. 2: Animal/Woman

FEATURE:

 

 

The May Playlist

IN THIS PHOTO: LUMP 

Vol. 2: Animal/Woman

__________

IT is good that…

 IN THIS PHOTO: Little Simz

the incredible LUMP (Laura Marling and Mike Lindsay) are back with a new track in the form of Animal. Also in the mix this week is new music from Little Simz (ft. Cleo Sol), Bobby Gillespie/Jehnny Beth, Coldplay, Frank Turner, Weezer, Inhaler, L’Rain, and Gracie Abrams. P!nk, Squid, J. Cole, Jake Bugg, Empress Of, The Black Keys, RAY BLK, and Fickle Friends are also in the mix. It is another busy and exciting week for music. If you require some additional energy and motivation to get you into the weekend, then I think that these tracks should do the job. As you can hear, there is quite a broad…

 IN THIS PHOTO: Squid

AND good assortment!

ALL PHOTOS/IMAGES (unless credited otherwise): Artists

__________

 PHOTO CREDIT: Steph Wilson

LUMP – Animal

PHOTO CREDIT: Natasha Duursma

Little Simz (ft. Cleo Sol) – Woman

Bobby Gillespie, Jehnny Beth - Chase It Down

Coldplay - Higher Power

Squid – 2010

Weezer – All the Good Ones

Frank Turner — THE GATHERING

Inhaler - Who's Your Money On? (Plastic House)

L’Rain – Blame Me

Gracie Abrams - Mess It Up

Baba Ali – Black Wagon

Dayglow – Balcony

Ashe - Me Without You

Mabes – Sugarush

P!nk – All I Know So Far

J. Cole - i n t e r l u d e

Cosha - Run the Track

RAY BLK - Dark Skinned

Rag'n'Bone Man - Talking to Myself

Fickle Friends – Won’t Hurt Myself

Saweetie - Fast (Motion)

PHOTO CREDIT: Jade Ang Jackman

YONAKA – Call Me a Saint

Alfie Templeman - Wait, I Lied

dodie – Special Girl

PHOTO CREDIT: Pooneh Ghana

HARD FEELINGS - Holding on Too Long

PHOTO CREDIT: David Reiss

DELPHii – Lilac

Hayley Mary – Young & Stupid

Saint Sister - Oh My God Oh Canada

FLAVIA – Time Is Running Out

Conan Gray – Astronomy

Sophia Kennedy - I'm Looking Up

The Black Keys – Going Down South

PHOTO CREDIT: Dorian Lopez

Empress Of – One Breath

Hurry – It’s Dangerous

Matilda Pearl - Linger

Jake Bugg - Lost

Janette King - You Don’t Love Me

She Drew the Gun - Cut Me Down

Pillow Queens - When You’re Gone

FEATURE: The Lockdown Playlist: Philip Bailey at Seventy

FEATURE:

 

The Lockdown Playlist

Philip Bailey at Seventy

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THIS is another birthday-related Lockdown Playlist…

 IN THIS PHOTO: Maurice White and Philip Bailey of Earth, Wind & Fire perform during the inaugural Grammy Jam Fest at the Wiltern Theatre on 11th December, 2004 in Los Angeles, California/PHOTO CREDIT: Carlo Allegri/Getty Images

where I get to celebrate a great artist. Today (8th May), it is the seventieth birthday of the legendary Philip Bailey. Before rounding up with a playlist, it is worth bringing some biography for those who are not aware of who Bailey is and what he has achieved:

“Philip James Bailey (born May 8, 1951) is an American R&B, soul, gospel and funk singer, songwriter and percussionist, best known as an early member and one of the two lead singers (along with group founder Maurice White) of the band Earth, Wind & Fire. Noted for his four-octave vocal range and distinctive falsetto register, Bailey has won seven Grammy Awards. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the Vocal Group Hall of Fame as a member of Earth, Wind & Fire. Bailey was also inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame for his work with the band.

Bailey has released several solo albums. Chinese Wall from 1984, which received a Grammy Award nomination for Best R&B Vocal Performance, Male, included the international hit, "Easy Lover", a duet with Phil Collins. "Easy Lover" won an MTV Video Music Award for Best Overall Performance in a Video in 1985 and was Grammy nominated for Best Pop Performance by a Duo or Group With Vocals.

In May 2008, Bailey was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Music from Berklee College of Music at Berklee's Commencement Ceremony where he was the commencement speaker”.

I love his work with Earth, Wind & Fire, but I also really like his solo work. To honour him on his seventieth birthday, here is a selection of some incredible Earth, Wind & Fire tracks (where Bailey is either on lead or backing vocals), in addition to some of his best solo cuts. Many happy returns to…

A true legend.

FEATURE: Second Spin: Billy Joel - Glass Houses

FEATURE:

 

 

Second Spin

Billy Joel - Glass Houses

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I realise that I have…

PHOTO CREDIT: Express Newspapers/Hulton Archive/Getty Images 

featured Billy Joel a few times on the blog. I would not usually put out another Joel-related feature so soon to the last one. As it is his birthday tomorrow (9th May), I thought that I would include an album of his that has not received the acclaim and airplay that it deserves. When we consider classics from Billy Joel, we think of 1977’s The Stranger and its follow-up, 52nd Street (1978). Arriving after that album is 1980’s Glass Houses. At ten tracks-long and with Phil Ramone producing once more (he produced Joel’s albums from The Stranger to The Bridge in 1986), it is an album that has plenty of quality. One of the reason why some have been mixed towards Glass Houses is because it is top-heavy. The opening five tracks are, debatably, the best. With It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me and All for Lenya in its top half, there are not many songs that reach the same sort of heights in the second half. That being said, the entire album is a satisfying listen. I do not think there are any weak tracks. There is a nice mix of obscure tracks and instant winners on Glass Houses. The album more of a Hard Rock tone than Joel's previous albums. The cover shows Joel poised to throw a rock through the two-story window of his real-life waterfront glass house in Cove Neck. I have seen a few negative reviews of Glass Houses (one was from Rolling Stone).

Whilst some saw Joel’s move into Rock territory to be quite uncool and weak, there are those who can recognise the value of the album. I will finish with a review from AllMusic. Before then, I wanted to source from a feature The A.V. Club published in 2014:

“For one thing, you could probably count Joel’s subtle lyrics on one ham-fisted hand, and even those are likely rife with clunky metaphors, clichés, and pretentious allusions. But somehow, those shortcomings—to us fans, anyway—seem earned. Maybe it’s the monstrous record sales, or maybe it’s the fact that Joel, even at his most awkward, rarely phones it in. His gaffes, like the Boomer-baiting “We Didn’t Start The Fire,” have some balls to them. He goes for his mistakes.

Which brings us to Glass Houses. Not because it’s a mistake, but because Joel was making what he thought was his ballsiest move yet. Released in 1980 after nine years of records (the two most recent of which, The Stranger and 52nd Street, had won a combined four Grammys and respectively reached No. 2 and No. 1 on the Billboard 200), Joel saw Glass Houses as a way to change his reputation from a soft-rock guy to something else entirely.

“I was taking quite a critical pasting by 52nd Street because of the commercial success that I had,” said Joel in a 2010 interview on the syndicated radio show In the Studio. “I was aware that there had been a great deal of, I guess we could call it, ‘Billy Joel Saturation’ for close to three years… Now I could have come out with a record that would have guaranteed a certain amount of sales. Just by repeating either The Stranger album or the 52nd Street album, by doing something similar… Frankly, I would have been bored to do that. I would have been a dead duck, career-wise. You have to discard an audience to pick up another one.”

In his excellent profile of Joel in last week’s New Yorker, Nick Paumgarten theorized that his lack of coolness (and critical respect) was due to a combination of factors. “His default expression was a kind of petulant scowl. Onstage he could be enthralling, but he had the disadvantage of sitting at a piano. He often wore a jacket and tie—in earth tones.” As for sex appeal, he quotes Joel himself as “look[ing] like the guy who makes pizza.”

So: decidedly not cool, trapped, bored, tired of being treated as faceless, meaningless, and unattractive. What’s interesting about Glass Houses is that it doesn’t sound like the record someone in that position would make; it doesn’t sound like a reinvention. Maybe it’s just the benefit of years of radio-filled hindsight, but it sounds very much like Billy Joel. His rock “edge” is here (“All For Leyna”), as is his panache for a ballad (“Don’t Ask Me Why”). In many ways, Glass Houses is his most Billy Joel record. Sure, he’d never tried out the new wave stylings of “It’s Still Rock And Roll To Me,” the power-chord-fueled “Sometimes A Fantasy,” and “Close To The Borderline” before 1980, but the lyrical tics and affected accents, the crooned “oooooh”s and saxophone solos, they’re all here.

And they’re great. Simply put, Glass Houses is Billy Joel’s best collection of songs, even better than the hit-laden The Stranger. The aforementioned hits sound better in context than on his many best-of compilations (or on classic-rock radio), and the more obscure cuts are excellent. “Sleeping With The Television On,” with its propulsive pop edge, may be the most underrated Billy Joel song. “I Don’t Want To Be Alone”—with mic pops that make Joel sound like the bar-band singer he strove to be on Glass Houses—is a charmingly self-deprecating chronicle of loserdom.

And for a guy so concerned about shedding his balladeer image, Joel continued to write some damn excellent ballads. The Beatles-esque “Don’t Ask Me Why,” especially its sharp bridge, stands as one of Joel’s most offhandedly winning songs, and “C’Etait Toi (You Were The One),” though Joel’s French is undisputedly terrible (a fact that has since made him disown the song), is lovely. Album closer “Through The Long Night” is another fine McCartney workout; it wouldn’t sound out of place on Revolver alongside the similarly forlorn “For No One.” The production by Phil Ramone (who produced every Joel record from 1977’s The Stranger to 1986’s The Bridge) is clear and, refreshingly for Joel, straightforward”.

There is a lot to love and discover when it comes to Glass Houses. One of the positive reviews out there is from AllMusic. This is what they noted in their review:

“The back-to-back success of The Stranger and 52nd Street may have brought Billy Joel fame and fortune, even a certain amount of self-satisfaction, but it didn't bring him critical respect, and it didn't dull his anger. If anything, being classified as a mainstream rocker -- a soft rocker -- infuriated him, especially since a generation of punks and new wave kids were getting the praise that eluded him. He didn't take this lying down -- he recorded Glass Houses. Comparatively a harder-rocking album than either of its predecessors, with a distinctly bitter edge, Glass Houses still displays the hallmarks of Billy Joel the pop craftsman and Phil Ramone the world-class hitmaker. Even its hardest songs -- the terrifically paranoid "Sometimes a Fantasy," "Sleepin' With the Television On," "Close to the Borderline," the hit "You May Be Right" -- have bold, direct melodies and clean arrangements, ideal for radio play. Instead of turning out to be a fiery rebuttal to his detractors, the album is a remarkable catalog of contemporary pop styles, from McCartney-esque whimsy ("Don't Ask Me Why") and arena rock ("All for Leyna") to soft rock ("C'etait Toi [You Were the One]") and stylish new wave pop ("It's Still Rock and Roll to Me," which ironically is closer to new wave pop than rock). That's not a detriment; that's the album's strength. The Stranger and 52nd Street were fine albums in their own right, but it's nice to hear Joel scale back his showman tendencies and deliver a solid pop/rock record. It may not be punk -- then again, it may be his concept of punk -- but Glass Houses is the closest Joel ever got to a pure rock album”.

If you have not heard the album then go and give it a spin. Glass Houses divided some people back in 1980. Over four decades later, I think that it sounds amazing and packed with great songs! A lot stronger than many reviews would suggest, I would recommend Glass Houses to those who are fans of Billy Joel and those who are not. I shall end it by wishing Billy Joel a happy birthday…

FOR tomorrow.

FEATURE: Songs for Whoever: Paul Heaton: The Last Truly Great Pop Songwriter?

FEATURE:

 

 

Songs for Whoever

Paul Heaton: The Last Truly Great Pop Songwriter?

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THERE are a couple of reasons…

as to why I am bringing in a feature regarding the excellent Paul Heaton. His birthday is on Sunday (9th May). I share a birthday with the legend. Not only do I love his music with The Housemartins and The Beautiful South. His albums with Jacqui Abbott, who used to be in The Beautiful South, are terrific. I think his songs with The Beautiful South are among the smartest and most memorable Pop songs ever written (if you could call the Hull-formed band ‘Pop’). I think that 1989’s Welcome to the Beautiful South is one of the most impressive debut albums of that decade. Whilst Heaton dealt with lyrics, Dave Rotheray handled compositions (though Heaton probably inputted when it came to the music). It was one of the most successful partnerships in British music. I have said it before but, when we think of the great British songwriters, we talk about Paul McCartney and John Lennon; Ray Davies of The Kinks is also named. Some would say Morrissey (The Smiths), though his reputation has taken a battering over the last few years. I think that Paul Heaton is one of the finest lyricists and observers of modern life that we have ever seen. He has some of the acerbic wit of Morrissey and the observational powers of Davies, yet he is very much different to both.

The Beautiful South’s debut single, Song for Whoever, is one I fell in love with when I was a child. The wit and cleverness of Heaton’s lyrics is amazing. Although Heaton can be heard in the chorus, it is his bandmate, Dave Hemingway, that handled the lead vocal. In a band that had three lead vocalists – how many others can say that?! -, Heaton’s soulful voice was an essential ingredient in the blend. Alongside Dave Hemmingway and Briana Corrigan (who was the first female singer with the band), Jacqui Abbott (who stepped in when Corrigan left) and Alison Wheeler (who sang with the band until they split), Heaton showed that his vocals were as impressive as his words! The Beautiful South split in 2007 citing “musical similarities”. They sold fifteen-millions records in their successful lifetime. The compilation, Carry on up the Charts: The Best of The Beautiful South, was the second-biggest-selling album of 1994! Even though Heaton’s band, The Housemartins, released two studio albums, I think they are both classics! London 0 Hull 4 of October 1986 contains classic Heaton lyrics in the from of Happy Hour, Flag Day and Sheep – Heaton co-wrote most of the songs with the band’s vocalist and guitarist, Stan Cullimore. The Housemartins’ final album, 1987’s The People Who Grinned Themselves to Death, is another collection of wonderful songs. Me and the Farmer and Five Get Over Excited are my favourites. I know the title track caused controversy because of its portrayal of the British royal family. Heaton, as a lyricist, could be political, jabbing, warm, humorous, touching and ingenious. Few other lyricists of that time (the 1980s) had his gifts and range.

Although The Beautiful South was a different project than The Housemartins, they endured for longer and put out a lot more material. Although a few albums in their career did not get massive critical acclaim (such as 1998’s Quench, 2000’s Painting It Red, 2003’s Gaze, and the covers album, Golddiggas, Headnodders and Pholk Songs), the band put out some hugely enduring albums. I think that 1990’s Choke perfectly showcases Heaton’s hallmarks and strengths across a selection of diverse, distinct and remarkable tracks. It is testament to his talent and the connectivity of the band that The Beautiful South’s final album, Superbi (which turns fifteen on 15th May), is so strong! When I come to mention his latest album with Jacqui Abbott, I will bring in a couple of reviews. Thirty years after Heaton welcomed The Housemartins into the world, he closed the book on The Beautiful South. In spite of that, 2006’s Superbi showed that Heaton was still as sharp and original as always; showing that he is one of the world’s very best writers. I am going to source an interview Heaton conducted in 2019 to promote the compilation, The Last King of Pop (2018). If the lyrics of The Housemartins (largely but not exclusively) mixed socialism with Christianity, The Beautiful South was a little broader. I think that Heaton created another evolution when he paired with Jacqui Abbott for their first album together, What Have We Become?

 IN THIS PHOTO: Paul Heaton with The Beautiful South’s Dave Hemmingway and Briana Corrigan

Some may have noticed I glossed over Heaton’s solo work! He released Fat Chance under the moniker, Biscuit Boy, and put out further albums: The Cross Eyed Rambler of 2008 and 2010’s Acid Country. I want to quote from the BBC’s review of The Cross-Eyed Rambler. They noted how Heaton was both offering some new (compared with The Beautiful South)…though there was still his reliable mix of themes and trademarks – all of which resulted in a fantastic album:

“Finally throwing in the hat with the Beautiful South in 2007 has seen Paul Heaton really have a proper think about a solo career it seems. Whereas his previous album under the Biscuit Boy (a.k.a. Crackerman) alias suffered from a lack of focus (and too many producers) Cross Eyed Rambler has no such problems. The album can only be described as displaying Heaton in rude health. Following the faintly creepy 78 crackle of the title track opener, I Do bursts out of the traps like a band led by someone half his age. Maybe he's finally getting sick of all these Northern whelps stealing the thunder he raised back in the good old real days of indie.

Sure, there's a hint of nostalgia fitting to his increasing years (the a capella days of The Housemartins gets a little reprise on the chorus of The Pub), but overall the new band (and it is a band, called The Sound Of Paul Heaton) of Tom Chapman, Brian Edwards and Steve Trafford makes Cross Eyed Rambler a boisterous bag of real rock. It may not be the 'new direction' that many have talked of - it's still jaunty enough to avoid any full-on Stooges comparisons here - but it's certainly ballsier than we had any right to expect.

There was always a touch of young fogyism to Heaton's work. Here it's given full throat on the loping Everything Is Everything. A suitably grumpy coda to a fine record. Elsewhere, subject-wise, Heaton's not straying from the things close to his spiritual heart. Small town attitudes (A Good Old Fashioned Town), political leftism (God Bless Texas) and love in the REAL world (The Ring From Your Hand), but buoyed up by such irrepressible grooves it's all very palatable. Not only does it signal a proper fighting chance for a solo career for 46-year-old Heaton, but it's also good news for those who found The Beautiful South's material a little too sweet and soft round the edges. And while there's even room for a south-of-the-border twang and torch on Deckchair Collapsed, in the end this is local music for local people: Intelligent, humorous and adult but ultimately quintessentially English. And all the better for it too”.

It is impressive that Heaton, technically, has been in four different outfits (The Housemartins, The Beautiful South, solo, and with Jacqui Abbott) and has been able to adapt and write such memorable songs in each phase. His work with Jacqui Abbott is among his very best! The acclaimed What Have We Become? arrived in 2014. Wisdom, Laughter and Lines was released in 2015 (Heaton co-wrote many of the tracks with Jonny Lexus); they followed that with their third album together, Crooked Calypso, in 2017. Actually, I think it is worth dropping in a review for this album. This is what AllMusic noted:

“Returning for a third dip into the well of smart pop, former Beautiful South members Paul Heaton and Jacqui Abbott offer Crooked Calypso, a robust marriage of plucky wit, confidence, and heart. Since rekindling their musical partnership in 2014, the two singers have turned out a distinctive brand of musical merrymaking that has resonated with U.K. audiences. There's something refreshingly organic about their big productions, which layer strings and horns over a whip-tight rock combo that sways nimbly between Motown, R&B, and old-fashioned rock & roll within the breadth of just a few notes. As ringleaders, Heaton and Abbott make a winning and surprisingly egoless duo swapping lyrics, harmonizing, and keeping their party buoyant with the effortless grace of lifelong entertainers. Approached with any less skill, the effect of songs like "I Gotta Praise" and "The Fat Man" would come off as uncouth or corny, but the two manage to walk a perfect line of tone that successfully delivers their often barbed witticisms while conveying an underlying sense that they're not only in on the joke, but are also at the butt of it. It's this crafty togetherness that has made their first two records chart successes and helps Crooked Calypso succeed on the same level. From the heartfelt Irish folk tribute "Blackwater Banks" to the unstoppably hooky "People Like Us," this is an engaging and fun listen that is easy to repeat again and again”.

I think that last year’s Manchester Calling is another triumphant album. Just shy of fifty-eighty when that album came out, Heaton was showing every other writer in the country how it is done! At sixteen tracks, Manchester Calling proved that Heaton was in no short supply of inspiration! I love the music Heaton wrote with Dave Rotheray for The Beautiful South. I think his work with Jacqui Abbott proves that he is a fine composer in addition to being a world-class lyricist. Heaton wrote the songs in various locations in North Holland and Belgium. He composed the music between a hotel in Puerto Rico, Gran Canaria in the Canary Islands, and in Limburg an der Lahn, Germany. It is great picturing Heaton writing in all these locations. I think a lot of the material for The Beautiful South was written in the pub(s). There is something slightly more glamorous about the writing for Manchester Calling. One big reason why his work with Jacqui Abbott is so strong is because the two are so close. Abbott’s voice is as fine as ever, and the fact that they seem like an old married couple gives the songs real conviction, realness and power! This is what The Guardian observed in their review:

“Paul Heaton recently remarked that if he’d known how well his songs would resonate with ordinary people up and down the country, he’d have written more. He’s hardly been slacking. His eighth solo album (and his fourth with former Beautiful South singer Abbott) is trademark stuff, which will be familiar to fans of that band and Heaton’s previous outfit, the Housemartins. There are richly observed, gently acerbic vignettes about the vagaries of British life, delivered over a mix of steadily uptempo pop, folk, ska and soul. Heaton’s bittersweet delivery propels songs about sex (The Only Exercise I Get Is You), love (You and Me [Were Meant to Be Together])and depression (Somebody’s Superhero).

Abbott takes the lead on If You Could See Your Faults – the diary of a long-suffering spouse and one of the pair’s loveliest tunes – and House Party 2’s superb demolition of tiresome would-be suitors. She brings empathy to the symphonic soul of The Prison’s tale of premature motherhood and “woman’s overriding right to fuck her life right up”. A certain cosiness produces fillers So Happy and New York Ivy, but abandoning the comfort zone delivers some of the best things here. Over a grime/hip-hop-informed soundtrack, MCR Calling accompanies a collage of Mancunian narrators on a love-hate tour around Heaton’s adopted city, where “gangsters ride on tricycles” and “they’re pulling down the last building that anybody liked”. My Legal High is almost Beautiful South-go-Cramps, a riff-rocking paean to the idea that love is the greatest drug of all. Heaton really should play less safe more often”.

This takes me to the compilation, The Last King of Pop. It features twenty-three of the songs written by Heaton from throughout his career in the Housemartins, The Beautiful South, his solo years, and his collaboration with Jacqui Abbott. It is a smorgasbord of golden Heaton songs from his earliest offerings to his current work. When speaking with Classic Pop, he discussed his pleasure of working with Jacqui Abbott - in addition to how (the compilation) is a chance for people to discover and take seriously the incredible songwriting the world has been lucky enough to receive since the mid-1980s:

“He’s only half-joking in calling his new compilation The Last King Of Pop. Collating 22 singles from The Housemartins, The Beautiful South and Heaton & Abbott, plus sparkling new song 7” Singles, its title is a pointer that this most principled of pop stars feels troubled by pretenders to the throne. “People have been let down so badly by figures in pop authority, I’m easily able to claim the crown,” Heaton attests. His home is one of the key reasons for his monarchy: “I live like a king should live.” Gesturing to his modest garden, he insists, “This should be monarchy: an ordinary person enjoying life.” Heaton’s family moved to Surrey when he was a teenager but otherwise, he’s never lived away from the north, saying, “A king should remain in his kingdom.” Morrissey is thus instantly disqualified. “A good pop singer and writer, but he’s gone out of the country. And when he comes back, he slags Britain off for being neighbourly. You couldn’t fucking write him, could you?”

It’s this freewheeling levity that has stopped critics – if not the public, time and again – from realising just what a golden talent Paul Heaton has been ever since The Housemartins’ Flag Day first played by John Peel in 1985. Despite his playfulness around its title, Heaton hopes the compilation will make people appreciate the quality of his songwriting. “I can’t take myself seriously for longer than a couple of minutes,” he smiles. “It’s a fault of mine, because I should be more serious, a bit. Lauren Laverne interviewed Paul Weller on 6 Music recently, and it was perfect, because he is able to talk seriously about his music. If it was me, it’d just break down into fart jokes.”

It’s not that Heaton isn’t able to analyse his songwriting in detail – he’s passionate about the importance of music in people’s lives. But he also grew up loving Spike Milligan and longtime Beano cartoonist Leo Baxendale, so absurdity is Heaton’s default setting. At the start of his career, he says he was a singer who wrote songs… now it’s the other way round.

Such candour aside, Heaton is delighted that reuniting with former Beautiful South co-vocalist Jacqui Abbott

has led to three Top Five albums. The Last King Of Pop features seven of their songs, compared to just one – the celebratory Manchester – from the final three Beautiful South albums, and none from either of Heaton’s two solo albums. He admits he “withdrew into myself” in his solo career, making “smaller” albums because their impact had lessened.

“When I left The Beautiful South, I didn’t realise that my name doesn’t really mean anything,” he concedes. “People around me were saying ‘You’ve had all these hits, you’ve had 20 years at the top. How can they not play your new song?’ I was more philosophical about all that. And when I was in my shell, I did some good things.” He cites his musical The 8th and twice touring round Britain by bicycle, playing at pub venues – Heaton would love to formally establish the pubs which invited him to play as a nationwide circuit for up-and-coming musicians to learn their live craft.

Heaton is first to admit he was lucky The Housemartins arrived when they did, at a time when, “Once you got played by John Peel, there was a 50% chance at Radio 1 that, unless your records were totally mad, then Janice Long might play you, too. And if she did, then Bruno Brookes probably would. There was a framework for getting success. There are probably just as many great young bands out there now as ever, they just don’t have the chances we did.” As king, he’s therefore forgiving of new acts that allow their songs on adverts.

Heaton is also pleased that his children don’t especially share his musical tastes – his eldest daughter is into drum ‘n’ bass and grime, his middle daughter prefers “really dark hip-hop”. Apart from his in-car Radio 2 addiction, Heaton only listens to new music. For decades, he’s kept monthly Top 20 charts of his favourite new songs in notebooks. He shows me his latest, a range of reggae, folk, hip-hop, R&B and pop as entertainingly freewheeling as the contents of his kitchen. At the end of our interview, he offers up a banana and an apple for the journey home. A passing Linda points out, “There’s all this fruit. You’ll notice none of it is in the fruit bowl.” She’s right – it’s too full of stuff. But that’s how a king should be: entertained by all of life’s diversions, living among his people. Paul Heaton deserves his crown”.

Ahead of Paul Heaton’s fifty-ninth birthday on Sunday, I wanted to spotlight not only one of the greatest British songwriters ever; I feel Heaton can rub shoulders with any songwriter from any era! We have some great songwriters around at the moment, though how many of them are in Pop? I think that Laura Marling is one of the best songwriters in the country. Arlo Parks is a very promising songwriter. I look around the rest of music and the Pop mainstream and we rarely highlight songwriters as opposed the artists. Many popular artists have others writing for them. In that way, I feel Paul Heaton is still head and shoulders above many others. A legendary and hugely respected songwriter who has lost none of his genius and observational prowess, many should be looking up to him! I think that Heaton is one of the last truly great Pop songwriters. Maybe The Arctic Monkeys’ Alex Turner is someone who can sit alongside Heaton. The Sheffield-born lead proves that the finest and most highlight-worthy lyrics are coming from the North! I have respect for a great songwriter who can not only widen their palette and yet have their own identity; being able to endure and continue to release consistently brilliant songs is something that warrants respect! This is why Paul Heaton is such an inspirational writer and hero to the next generation. If you need an example of a legendary songwriter whose lyrics are among the best we have ever seen, then look towards Paul Heaton: a songwriting giant…

WITH very few equals.

>

FEATURE: Back Inside the Rainbow: John Carder Bush’s Must-Buy Kate Bush Photobook

FEATURE:

 

 

Back Inside the Rainbow

 PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush/Brown Book Group 

John Carder Bush’s Must-Buy Kate Bush Photobook

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I have already…

  PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush/Brown Book Group

done a feature about the photobook that was originally released in 2015. This year will see at least a couple of new photo collections. Finding Kate is a crowdfunded book that is coming out in December. It is intended to “visually and textually celebrates the genius and the music of Kate”. A book from Max Browne collates photos he took during Bush’s 1979 The Tour of Life. Her only tour was a groundbreaking event. Browne’s photos capture a then-twenty-year-old wowing audiences around the U.K. and Europe. I am not betting against other photobooks being released in 2021! There has been so much activity regarding Kate Bush this part year or so. I have bemoaned the fact that not many photobooks are out there. I would still like to see a more general assortment of press photos and those that chart Bush through her career. I am intending to buy Finding Kate (from Michael Byrne and Marius Herbert); I will also check out Max Browne’s book. I think the best photobook so far – not taking into account the new releases – is John Carder Bush’s KATE: Inside the Rainbow. This book is a prized possession. The fact that the photos were shot by her brother lends the book an intimacy and sense of trust that Bush did not have with other photographers. Although photographers like Guido Harari and Gered Mankowitz – both of whom have released books of their Bush photos (they are priced in the hundreds, hence the reason I do not own them) – worked with Bush and they snapped some iconic shots, I feel John Carder Bush took some of the most enduring and phenomenal shots of his sister.

 PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush/Brown Book Group

If you are a Kate Bush fan but are not familiar with the book, then here is some more detail about a collection of photos that move the heart and imagination:

“KATE: Inside the Rainbow is a collection of beautiful images from throughout Kate Bush’s career, taken by her brother, the photographer and writer John Carder Bush. It includes outtakes from classic album shoots and never-before-seen photographs from sessions including The Dreaming and Hounds of Love, as well as rare candid studio shots and behind-the-scenes stills from video sets, including ‘Army Dreamers’ and ‘Running Up that Hill’.

These stunning images will be accompanied by two new essays by John Carder Bush: From Cathy to Kate, describing in vibrant detail their shared childhood and the early, whirlwind days of Kate’s career, and Chasing the Shot, which vividly evokes John’s experience of photographing his sister.

A beautiful, full-colour coffee-table hardback with a quarter-bound linen cover and head and tail bands

Includes more than 250 stunning rare and unpublished black and white and colour photographs, taken between 1964 and 2011”.

At just £40 (which is what I paid for it), KATE: Inside the Rainbow is amazing value for such a handsome and passionate collection of photos and words from John Carder Bush! There is some good news for those who do not have a copy.

  PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush/Brown Book Group

Maybe due to popular demand, it is very hard to find a new copy of KATE: Inside the Rainbow. As Kate Bush News reported recently, you will be able to buy a copy in June:

“Kate’s brother, John Carder Bush, has let me know that his stunning book of photographs of Kate throughout her career, Kate: Inside the Rainbow (currently out of print) will be reprinted by Little, Brown and made available again from June 2021. We will have ordering links for you when it is available. This is great news for anyone put off by the ever-increasing prices the book is being sold for on the used book market these days.

Kate: Inside the Rainbow includes outtakes from classic album shoots and never-before-seen photographs from sessions including The Dreaming and Hounds of Love, as well as rare candid studio shots and behind-the-scenes stills from video sets, including ‘Army Dreamers’ and ‘Running Up that Hill’.

These stunning images are accompanied by two new essays by John: ‘From Cathy to Kate’, describing in vibrant detail their shared childhood and the early, whirlwind days of Kate’s career, and ‘Chasing the Shot’, which vividly evokes John’s experience of photographing his sister. Kate personally helped John to choose the final selection of shots. A limited signed boxed edition of 500 copies with three fine-art prints sold out rapidly when the book was first released in October 2015”.

  PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush/Brown Book Group

I want to round things off by bringing in an interview John Carder Bush conducted with Attitude back in 2015. It is fascinating hearing his thoughts on his sister and why he put out KATE: Inside the Rainbow:

“Kate: Inside The Rainbow is a collection of beautiful images from throughout her career, from her early days pre-Wuthering Heights right up to her most recent album, 2011's 50 Words For Snow. It includes outtakes from classic album shoots, rare studio shots and behind-the-scenes stills from video sets, plus many other candid shots from John's years turning the camera on his sister. Basically, Kate Bush fans: here's your new bible. John Carder Bush himself tells Attitude about this amazing project, some 40-odd years in the making... John, Kate - Inside The Rainbow is just gorgeous. Why did now feel like the right time to put a book like this together?  I think the timing of this book was dictated by the reprint of Cathy [last year]. So many people had shown an interest in that book long after it went out of print, and it seemed logical to see what would happen if I brought it up to date. Originally, when I published Cathy back in 1986, I had planned to do three books – Cathy, Catherine and Kate, but like so many ambitious plans, it never happened. 

 PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush/Brown Book Group 

Let’s start with those earliest photos you took of your sister, the ones that formed the book Cathy. Was it a case of your little sister being an easy subject to practice on, or were you aware even in those early days that there was a 'star quality' to her?  In those days I had only just started to feel that the camera could evoke something I wanted to express about childhood and the world of the imagination that so many children live in. I was also excited by my personal discovery of the pre-Raphaelites and had started collecting illustrated books of the turn of the century, which nobody was interested in in the early sixties and could be bought for next to nothing. My little sister was the perfect model, and although I was pleased with the results, I don’t think I detected star quality – we were a long way away from the her future career; when you know someone so well and see them every day of your life, you just don’t notice that kind of thing, although looking at them now it is quite clear she had something special.

This feels about as close to an ‘official’ retrospective book of Kate’s career as we might get. What are her thoughts on it? I first discussed the book with Kate back in the summer of 2014. The live shows then swept her away for a few months. When I had done a preliminary selection of photos and written the text, I showed them to her for her comments and I then worked with her final selection of images for the rest of the project. As I remember, she pointed out that she had ten ‘O’ levels, when I had put nine. 

When you look through the images in the book, do you see changes develop as the years go on? There’s a sophistication that seems to really develop in Kate’s imagery from Hounds of Love onwards… Yes, I agree. You can see the development in the sense that she becomes more expert at conscious projection, more confident in knowing what works and what does not, and I think the same thing applies to my photography. One thing that strikes me, looking through the book, is her willingness to try different things - poses, props, costumes etc - in the pursuit of a great shot. Did either of you take the lead in those situations, or was it quite a 50/50 partnership? I think this is dictated by two different things. With album and single shots, there is a very specific intention to project a persona that matches the songs; with promotional shots, variety becomes very important otherwise every session would have looked the same. With album and single sessions, Kate always had a very definite idea of what she wanted before she stepped in front of the camera and it was a question of trying to realise that in a photographic context.

I loved reading your thoughts on Before The Dawn - it was the sort of thing fans couldn’t really have imagined would ever happen. Do you have any idea where Kate’s headed next? New music, or a continuation of Before The Dawn perhaps?  The silence that usually surrounds Kate between projects in a ‘golden silence’, and out of that ‘golden silence’ always comes a golden nugget of creativity, like Before the Dawn. Let’s wait and see… 

Before the Dawn was really the first big opportunity for many Kate Bush fans to interact, to feel part of a community. Have you had much interaction with Kate Bush fans over the years? There has always been a very active and fertile fan scene around Kate and her music even when there has not been any new product for a few years. Kate fans are very dedicated people, and the depth and originality of her work has allowed them to maintain an ongoing dialogue with each other that is quite unique. Certainly, Before the Dawn was a wonderfully dynamic coming together of that energy, and sitting in the audience I could feel their love for her as an overwhelming presence. Over the years, I have developed some friendships with a few of her fans that I value highly”.

I have been compelled to look back through KATE: Inside the Rainbow. It makes me curious whether we will see any more photos from John Carder Bush. He shot some promotional images for 2011’s 50 Words for Snow. If there is another album from Bush, I do hope that we get some more photos from her brother. Every page and photo has a story behind it - and it is remarkable looking through KATE: Inside the Rainbow and all the different guises and looks from the iconic Kate Bush. When the book is back in print in June, do maker sure that you…

 PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush/Brown Book Group

GRAB a copy.

FEATURE: Vinyl Corner: The Libertines - Up the Bracket

FEATURE:

 

 

Vinyl Corner

The Libertines - Up the Bracket

___________

I have been thinking a lot…

about the debut from The Libertines, Up the Bracket. The band are still going, and I know they are planning some tour dates for later in the year. Although their eponymous album of 2004 is remarkable, I think they were at their finest and most original straight out of the gate. Released in October 2002, Up the Bracket was a British response to American bands like The Strokes. Mixing something quite dirty and scuzzy with wit and intelligence, there is such a fascinating blend of the accomplished and urgent on Up the Bracket. It is an album I can happily listen to the whole way through and never get bored of. I will bring in a couple of American reviews for the album quite soon. I would urge people to get the album on vinyl, as it is one of the greatest albums of the ‘00s. I think there was a lot of interesting Indie and guitar music around the first five years of the ‘00s. I think Up the Bucket is an album that inspired and captivated a lot of other bands. Starting with the dizzying Vertigo and ending with the jumping I Get Along, we get moments of real emotion and calm (Radio America) and real electricity (Horrorshow). With Pete Doherty and Carl Barât supplying the incredible songs and vocals, their brotherhood and incredible talent shines through. I think that, almost twenty years since its release, Up the Bracket still sounds quite fresh. Maybe that is something to do with the no-thrills production of Mick Jones (The Clash).

With lyrics that mix modern Britain, poetry, romance, violence and tenderness, there is so much to love and digest through Up the Bracket. I want to bring in a review from AllMusic. This is what they wrote in their assessment:

“The first British band to rival the garage rock revival sparked by the Strokes and White Stripes in the U.S., the Hives in Sweden, and the Datsuns in, er, New Zealand, the Libertines burst onto the scene with Up the Bracket, a debut album so confident and consistent that the easiest way to describe it is 2002's answer to Is This It. That's not just because singer/guitarist Pete Doherty's slurred, husky vocals sound like Julian Casablancas' with the added bonus of a fetching Cockney accent (or that both groups share the same tousled, denim-clad fashion sense); virtually every song on Up the Bracket is chock-full of the same kind of bouncy, aggressive guitars, expressive, economic drums, and irresistible hooks that made the Strokes' debut almost too catchy for the band's credibility. However, the resemblance is probably due more to the constant trading of musical ideas between the States and the U.K. than to bandwagon-jumping -- the Strokes' sound owes as much to Britpop sensations like Supergrass (who had the Libertines as their opening band on their 2002 U.K. tour) and Elastica as it does to American influences like the Stooges and the Velvet Underground. Likewise, the Libertines play fast and loose with four decades' worth of British rock history, mixing bits and bobs of British Invasion, mod, punk, and Britpop with the sound of their contemporaries.

On paper it sounds horribly calculated, but (also like the Strokes' debut) in practice it's at once fresh and familiar. Mick Jones' warm, not-too-rough, and not-too-polished production both emphasizes the pedigree of their sound and the originality of it: on songs like "Vertigo," "Death on the Stairs," and the excellent "Boys in the Band," the guitars switch between Merseybeat chime and a garagey churn as the vocals range from punk snarls to pristine British Invasion harmonies. Capable of bittersweet beauty on the folky, Beatlesque "Radio America" and pure attitude on "Horrorshow," the Libertines really shine when they mix the two approaches and let their ambitions lead the way. "Did you see the stylish kids in the riot?" begins "Time for Heroes," an oddly poetic mix of love and war that recalls the band's spiritual and sonic forefathers the Clash; "The Good Old Days" blends jazzy verses, martial choruses, and lyrics like "It's not about tenements and needles and all the evils in their eyes and the backs of their minds." On songs like these, "Tell the King," and "Up the Bracket," the group not only outdoes most of its peers but begins to reach the greatness of the Kinks, the Jam, and all the rest of the groups whose brilliant melodic abilities and satirical looks at British society paved the way. Though the album is a bit short at 36 minutes, that's long enough to make it a brilliant debut; the worst you can say about its weakest tracks is that they're really solid and catchy. Punk poets, lagered-up lads, London hipsters -- the Libertines play many different roles on Up the Bracket, all of which suit them to a tee. At this point in their career they're not as overhyped as many of their contemporaries, so enjoy them while they're still fresh”.

Ahead of its twentieth anniversary next year, I wonder if there will be a reissue of Up the Bracket with some extras and demos. Given its legacy and how it shaped the music scene in Britain in the early-2000s, it definitely warrants new inspection and spotlight. Before wrapping up, I want to quote from a Pitchfork review of 2003:

“And so it's come to pass: the great wheel of revivalism spins, dredging up the next phase of music history to be paraded about-- it was only a matter of time before we came around to The Clash. But just as calling The Clash "punk" belittles how their sound had evolved by the movement's curtain call, it would be unfairly dismissive to brand The Libertines Clash knock-offs. You'd have to throw in a line or two about singer Pete Doherty sounding uncannily like an English Julian Casablancas to be more dismissive. British Strokes for British folks, as they say.

All cards on the table, though: Up the Bracket does emulate, thanks in no small part to production care of ex-Clash founder Mick Jones, but it never truly imitates. Like The Clash before them, The Libertines draw primarily from decades of rock tradition-- blues, dub, a healthy whiff of the English countryside, and a few gorgeous rock riffs straight from the brainstem of Chuck Berry-- and fuse them into an unruly and triumphant monster of an album. The band burns through a range of emotions with fearless abandon, and just when one track seems about to split into pieces, they pull it all together only to threaten glorious collapse again on the next song. From their plaintive anthems to fuck-all barnburners, this is some of the most fun I've had with a CD in ages. Rarely does a band approach such a wide array of attitudes with equal proficiency.

"Boys in the Band" traverses miles of territory in four short minutes; funk-fused riffs lend a dangerous swagger to Doherty's ultra-confident vocals before, curiously, the whole thing pulls a 180 into barbershop-style harmonies. It's not as crazy as it sounds, but it's twice as fun. Later, the band find themselves in the throes of a token heartfelt ballad-- even one that delivers unexpected quaintness and delicate folk sensibilities-- as old-time cymbal washes make such an obvious track better than it has any right to be. But before the glow fades, they take us right back to hook-laden rock with the title song, recalling The Clash's finest moments, complete with vocals lifted from Joe Strummer's back pocket.

There's an almost indescribable wealth of rock lurking on Up the Bracket, and rarely is it less than blissfully entertaining. In just thirty-odd minutes, The Libertines pretty much do it all. Call it calculated, call it derivative-- hell, there's so much to this album, you can call it just about anything you like and probably not be too far from the truth-- but if you don't hear it, you'll be the one missing out”.

Go and get Up the Bracket on vinyl if you can. It is a tremendous album from a band that entered music with such a huge statement! It is such a remarkable piece of work filled with so many incredible stories, lines, characters and riffs. Although many bands today can be traced back to The Libertines, I don’t think there are any that sounds quite like them or have their set of talents. Up the Bracket is a simply stunning album from…

THE boys in the band.

FEATURE: Bob Dylan at Eighty: Ten of the Best Albums

FEATURE:

 

 

Bob Dylan at Eighty

Ten of the Best Albums

___________

BECAUSE the genius that is Bob Dylan…

turns eighty on 24th May, I am going to put out a couple of features to mark that occasion. Today, I am thinking about the very best albums by Dylan. Everyone has their own thoughts on this. As he released his thirty-ninth studio album, Rough and Rowdy Ways, last year, there is more than enough to choose from! I realty love his stuff from the 1960s and 1970s, though some prefer some of his more modern albums. Here, like A Buyer’s Guide, I am selecting albums that you need to check out. I will also select the best tracks from each album, in addition to a link where you can buy that album. Ahead of the eightieth birthday of one of the greatest songwriters the world has ever seen, here are the ten albums that I feel…

 PHOTO CREDIT: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

EVERYONE should check out.

___________

The Times They Are a-Changin'

Release Date: 13th January, 1964

Label: Columbia

Producer: Tom Wilson

Standout Tracks: With God on Our Side/North Country Blues/The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll

Buy: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Times-They-Are-Changin-VINYL/dp/B00005OAES

Stream: https://open.spotify.com/album/7DZeLXvr9eTVpyI1OlqtcS?si=S3XxwwPeRXCTRCuAKZks1g

Review:

“If The Times They Are a-Changin' isn't a marked step forward from The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, even if it is his first collection of all originals, it's nevertheless a fine collection all the same. It isn't as rich as Freewheelin', and Dylan has tempered his sense of humor considerably, choosing to concentrate on social protests in the style of "Blowin' in the Wind." With the title track, he wrote an anthem that nearly equaled that song, and "With God on Our Side" and "Only a Pawn in Their Game" are nearly as good, while "Ballad of Hollis Brown" and "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll" are remarkably skilled re-castings of contemporary tales of injustice. His absurdity is missed, but he makes up for it with the wonderful "One Too Many Mornings" and "Boots of Spanish Leather," two lovely classics. If there are a couple of songs that don't achieve the level of the aforementioned songs, that speaks more to the quality of those songs than the weakness of the remainder of the record. And that's also true of the album itself -- yes, it pales next to its predecessor, but it's terrific by any other standard” – AllMusic

Choice Cut: The Times They Are a-Changin

 

Bringing It All Back Home

Release Date: 22nd March, 1965

Label: Columbia

Producer: Tom Wilson

Standout Tracks: Subterranean Homesick Blues/Mr. Tambourine Man/It's All Over Now, Baby Blue

Buy: https://www.roughtrade.com/gb/bob-dylan/bringing-it-all-back-home

Stream: https://open.spotify.com/album/1lPoRKSgZHQAYXxzBsOQ7v?si=IYhP7jd0QKyavNMUWWyx2Q

Review:

“As cynical as the previous tracks are, “Love Minus Zero/No Limit” completely pivots in the opposite direction, almost like an extremist love song. The very title (a mathematical equation which results in “absolutely unlimited love”) indicates the complete offering of one’s existence to a significant other, in this case Dylan’s future wife Sara Lowndes. Another complete departure for Dylan is “Outlaw Blues”, a rollicking, bluesy and about as heavy as rock and roll came in 1965. In fact, this song could, at once, be a true ancestor to bluesy jam bands as well as the hard rock and heavy metal which arrived a half a decade later. With “On the Road Again”, Dylan takes a large step forward both musically and lyrically. This strong rock/blues track with especially potent drums by Bobby Gregg, contain lyrics written in the spirit of Kerouac’s novel On the Road but with a definite original edge;

Well, there’s fist fights in the kitchen, enough to make me cry / The mailman comes in and even he’s gotta take a side / Even the butler, he’s got something to prove / Then you ask why I don’t live here, Honey, how come you don’t move?”

The album’s first side ends with a bit of levity in the false start of “Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream”. Once the song really kicks in, it employs a true stream-of-consciousness and may have the most surreal lyrics on the album. The song’s title alludes to the track “Bob Dylan’s Dream” from his 1963 album The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, but as an almost satirical sequel to that serious folk song.

Upon its release, Bringing It All Back Home reached the Top Ten on both sides of the Atlantic and has continued to grow in stature and importance in the half century since its release. Later in 1965, Dylan would record and release another masterpiece, Highway 61 Revisited, an album Classic Rock Review will examine on August 30th, the 50th anniversary of that album’s release” – Classic Rock Review

Choice Cut: It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)

Highway 61 Revisited

Release Date: 30th August, 1965

Label: Columbia

Producers: Bob Johnston/Tom Wilson

Standout Tracks: Ballad of a Thin Man/Queen Jane Approximately/Desolation Row

Buy: https://www.roughtrade.com/gb/bob-dylan/highway-61-revisited

Stream: https://open.spotify.com/album/6YabPKtZAjxwyWbuO9p4ZD?si=HuxgIM5nQOyYN4ket9qrRA

Review:

“However, Like a Rolling Stone is often described as the best song ever, not Desolation Row. Like a Rolling Stone is definitely deserving of the title. The chord progression ascends up in an absolute perfect way, showcasing Dylan’s mastery of chord progressions. Never does Dylan refer to a weak link between chords or an imperfect cadence. With the aesthetically pleasing chord progression in place, the mix of guitar, bass, harmonica, and organ make a catchy blend of fantastic, bluesy music. The organ, most noticeably in the chorus, is by far the catchiest part of the music, playing a fantastic counterpart to Dylan’s voice. While the rest of the band grooves on this, Dylan crafts catchy vocal hooks with his longing question of “How does it feel?” His rhyme patterns, again, are perfect all the way throughout. Despite the song revolving around two main progressions, the song goes over 6 minutes, once again never tiring. The Beatles song Help! was the only song that eclipsed Dylan’s song on the charts, mainly because Beatlemania already began its infestation on American society.

In between the brilliant album opener and closer, Dylan makes some undeniably great songs in Ballad of a Thin Man and Tombstone Blues. Ranging from just as they say, a ballad to a blues, Dylan shows his many different voices well. Each song on this album is enjoyable to listen to, although some definitely stand out among others. However, there is no doubt that this album is a classic, and certainly one of the best from one of the greatest artists, in every sense of the word, of all time” – Sputnikmusic

Choice Cut: Like a Rolling Stone

Blonde on Blonde

Release Date: 20th June, 1966

Label: Columbia

Producer: Bob Johnston

Standout Tracks: Rainy Day Women No. 12 & 35/Visions of Johanna/I Want You

Buy: https://www.roughtrade.com/gb/bob-dylan/blonde-on-blonde-f1e99196-5186-4473-8da9-64fe8b1518a9

Stream: https://open.spotify.com/album/4NP1rhnsPdYpnyJP0p0k0L?si=QjHc6UkeTaKK_PmGPuPuFw

Review:

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

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

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

Choice Cut: Just Like a Woman

Blood on the Tracks

Release Date: 20th January, 1975

Label: Columbia

Producer: Bob Dylan

Standout Tracks: You're a Big Girl Now/Idiot Wind/If You See Her, Say Hello

Buy: https://www.roughtrade.com/gb/bob-dylan/blood-on-the-tracks-ac12f518-f8a2-4218-bbda-0fcf5f24e270

Stream: https://open.spotify.com/album/4WD4pslu83FF6oMa1e19mF?si=ylzel3VIQBODmN4j6c__mA

Review:

“Imagining Dylan as a simple songwriter, the template of Blood on the Tracks—sad boy with an acoustic guitar and a handful of chords—might seem basic, until one tries to replicate anything about it, or even just strum the songs at home. Blood on the Tracks lives alone in Dylan’s catalog, that open “E” tuning (which Dylan refused to explain to his musicians) often preventing the songs from sounding exactly right in the hands of others. It lives on in its own peculiar way. Dylan has seemed to keep “Tangled Up In Blue” in particular to himself, rewriting the song several times, both casually (playing fast and loose with the pronouns), and more formally, including a near-total rework released on 1984’s Real Live. One of the few older songs Dylan has performed consistently in recent years, even newer verses have emerged over the past half-decade. Nobody covers Dylan like Dylan either, apparently.

Though the albums on either side of Blood on the Tracks both made it to #1 and contained hints of the same songwriting territory, via Planet Waves’ “Going, Going, Gone” and *Desire’*s “Sara,” especially, they were only just hints. Some of Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks persona remained visible via the two legs of the Rolling Thunder Revue, but the original open tuning never returned, and Dylan would soon bury his vulnerability, too. The surrealism would resurface in full force for 1978’s Street-Legal, but the musical appeal didn’t. It took another few decades for Dylan even to return to the warm string-band sound of Blood on the Tracks, coming closest on his two 21st century albums of standards, Shadows in the Night and Fallen Angels. For a restless musician, it was a combination of factors that only came together once, locking together to transmit themselves through the years.

Even roughly 40 years later, Blood on the Tracks broadcasts hurt and longing so boldly it has become a stand-in, the type of shorthand a song licensor would deploy at the push of a button if it wasn’t so expensive and maybe too predictable. It manages a balance of old pain resolved and wounds so fresh they seem as if they might never heal, brutal personal assessment and doubt, unnecessary cruelties and real-time self-flagellation. While Blood on the Tracks can be a constant companion to listeners during periods of initial discovery, it (and Dylan’s whole catalog) has also become something to be lived with over a long period and put away for special occasions. Functioning like a literal album, the density of the passed time and pressed memories in “Tangled Up in Blue” grow richer with each passing year. As with the narratives of the songs themselves, Blood on the Tracks continues to absorb yesterday, today, and tomorrow, promising it can sustain new listeners as much as new meanings, should it ever have to be called back into service” – Pitchfork

Choice Cut: Tangled Up in Blue

Desire

Release Date: 5th January, 1976

Label: Columbia

Producer: Don DeVito

Standout Tracks: Hurricane/Isis/One More Cup of Coffee

Buy: https://www.roughtrade.com/gb/bob-dylan/desire-29fd5bed-328c-4fd7-af30-06231ee0255f

Stream: https://open.spotify.com/album/1T8usYsiGEMPMQOLFgJEbE?si=VIWxRFEmRdqg_YqXGjsBiw

Review:

“If Blood on the Tracks was an unapologetically intimate affair, Desire is unwieldy and messy, the deliberate work of a collective. And while Bob Dylan directly addresses his crumbling relationship with his wife, Sara, on the final track, Desire is hardly as personal as its predecessor, finding Dylan returning to topical songwriting and folk tales for the core of the record. It's all over the map, as far as songwriting goes, and so is it musically, capturing Dylan at the beginning of the Rolling Thunder Revue era, which was more notable for its chaos than its music. And, so it's only fitting that Desire fits that description as well, as it careens between surging folk-rock, Mideastern dirges, skipping pop, and epic narratives. It's little surprise that Desire doesn't quite gel, yet it retains its own character -- really, there's no other place where Dylan tried as many different styles, as many weird detours, as he does here. And, there's something to be said for its rambling, sprawling character, which has a charm of its own. Even so, the record would have been assisted by a more consistent set of songs; there are some masterpieces here, though: "Hurricane" is the best-known, but the effervescent "Mozambique" is Dylan at his breeziest, "Sara" at his most nakedly emotional, and "Isis" is one of his very best songs of the '70s, a hypnotic, contemporized spin on a classic fable. This may not add up to a masterpiece, but it does result in one of his most fascinating records of the '70s and '80s -- more intriguing, lyrically and musically, than most of his latter-day affairs” – AllMusic

Choice Cut: Sara

Time Out of Mind

Release Date: 30th September, 1997

Label: Columbia

Producer: Daniel Lanois

Standout Tracks: Love Sick/Trying to Get to Heaven/Highlands

Buy: https://www.roughtrade.com/gb/bob-dylan/time-out-of-mind-90bdafd2-1a75-4141-bd7b-075ba8a746cc

Stream: https://open.spotify.com/album/185DHT5SvszXRrezx3lOjt?si=bqris7TGThKDlAnSIvLriA

Review:

“Time Out of Mind — alternate title: One Headlight Gone Dead — is produced by Daniel Lanois, who, as he did on Oh Mercy, keeps Dylan’s crypt-keeper rasp prominent while surrounding it with eeriness. Lanois gives ”Cold Irons Bound” a herky-jerky shuffle beat, for example — a rhythm that skeletons might dance to in a graveyard, using a few discarded bones for percussion. (Speaking of which, the secret hero of both Time Out of Mind and Bridges is drummer Jim Keltner, who pops up regularly to yank his fellow geezers in the direction of the beat.)

Dylan’s songwriting is at once blissfully assured and gleefully uneven throughout, containing some of his most evocative lyrics and one of the worst couplets written since the death of Sylvia Plath: ”When the wind is blowin’ in your face/And the whole world is on your case.” For all his addled talk of imminent departure (”I’m breathin’ hard, standin’ at the gate/But I don’t know how much longer I can wait”), Dylan sounds lively, even playful — in no way is this album a downer. It sounds as if, at 56, he can’t wait to be a full-fledged old codger.

A decorated codger, to be sure: In December, he’ll be a Kennedy Center honoree, along with Charlton Heston, Jessye Norman, Edward Villella, and Lauren Bacall. (At the State Department dinner, will he dedicate ”Cold Irons Bound” to Al Gore?) Where Mick Jagger holds a six-shooter to the nose of a deceitful lover, Bob Dylan turns one on himself, and, under the gun — to prove himself, to make music while facing mortality — ends up with a great album” – Entertainment Weekly

Choice Cut: Not Dark Yet

Love and Theft

Release Date: 11th September, 2001

Label: Columbia

Producer: Bob Dylan

Standout Tracks: Lonesome Day Blues/Moonlight/Sugar Baby

Buy: https://www.roughtrade.com/gb/bob-dylan/love-and-theft

Stream: https://open.spotify.com/album/4BcfuxQ4EO07Y53yr6YhAJ?si=gBrFOsn5SdKubBH-007MTQ

Review:

“The groove of the band gives the leader room to kick back and play around with his vocals, and one of the hardest things to get used to about Love and Theft is how funny it is. But the crackpot grin you can hear in his vocals only highlights the emotion of electric blues stomps like “Cry a While,” the pained ballad “Mississippi,” the rockabilly raver “Summer Days,” the banjo-and-fiddle lilt of “Floater (Too Much to Ask).” In “High Water (For Charley Patton),” he revisits the ruined landscape of “Down in the Flood” thirty years later; this crash on the levee sweeps up Charles Darwin, Robert Johnson and Big Joe Turner into an acoustic Delta-blues nightmare while Dylan turns to his traveling companion and calmly suggests, “Throw your panties overboard.” “Don’t reach out for me,” the woman in “High Water” says. “Can’t you see I’m drowning, too?” Cracked and ruined love affairs abound on Love and Theft, finding a mirror in the cities and countrysides Dylan wanders through. “Your days are numbered/So are mine,” he sings in the ravaged love travelogue “Mississippi.” “I need something strong to distract my mind/I’m going to look at you till my eyes go blind.” None of these heartaches can be put to rest. “You can’t repeat the past,” another woman says in the jumper “Summer Days,” to which Dylan replies, “You can’t? What do you mean you can’t? Of course you can.” In the mournful album closer, “Sugar Baby,” Dylan stands with his back to the sun (“because the light is too intense”) to sing to a woman who won’t open her eyes to his love. “You went years without me,” he says. “Might as well keep going now.”

But there is not just heartbreak here, there is also a tenacious clinging to love’s promise, and the strangest and most seductive surprises on Love and Theft come with the easygoing romantic ballads “Bye and Bye” and “Moonlight.” Dylan raised eyebrows a few months ago by covering Dean Martin’s “Return to Me” for The Sopranos, and he pays similar tribute to pre-rock pop all over Love and Theft. He connects the dots between folk, blues and the Forties and Fifties schmaltz standards he loved when he was growing up in Hibbing, Minnesota, as a devotee of Johnnie Ray and Nat “King” Cole. He’s been playing with these old-timey pop moves for years — think of “If Not for You” or “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight” — but his theft has rarely betrayed so much love. In “Po’ Boy,” he pushes the borscht-belt humor to heroically absurd extremes, jumping over a light acoustic jingle to bite Groucho Marx: “Poor boy in a hotel called the Palace of Gloom/Called down to room service, says, ‘Send up a room.’ ” And that’s even before he gets to the knock-knock joke (“Freddy or not, here I come,” oy gevalt). It’s funny as hell, but it’s no parody: Dylan digs into these antique styles and milks them for all the romance and mystery he hears in them. In “Bye and Bye,” he wears the mask of the song-and-dance man to sing, “The future for me is already a thing of the past.” But the remarkable achievement of Love and Theft is that Dylan makes the past sound as strange, haunted and alluring as the future — and this song-and-dance man sings as though he’s drunk too deeply of the past to be either scared or impressed by anybody’s future, least of all his own. And he sounds like he’s enjoying the ride” – Rolling Stone

Choice Cut: Mississippi

Modern Times

Release Date: 29th August, 2006

Label: Columbia

Producer: Bob Dylan

Standout Tracks: Thunder on the Mountain/Rollin' and Tumblin'/Workingman's Blues #2

Buy: https://www.roughtrade.com/gb/bob-dylan/modern-times/lp-x2

Stream: https://open.spotify.com/album/6y2WHyqRUCeHrjMXvjnRmD?si=zWVARvvISL-HipaQ1iw5Zg

Review:

“It's easy to take the title of Bob Dylan's latest album, his first since 2001's "Love And Theft," as a joke. There isn't anything particularly modern about Modern Times' songs; their influences stop with the rock and roll of Dylan's youth. The sound also isn't particularly modern, thanks to the clean, plug-in-and-play approach favored by producer "Jack Frost." (Dylan, of course.) But then there's Dylan expressing lust for—or at least a keen interest in—Alicia Keys on the first song, "Thunder On The Mountain." He follows that up by name-dropping Ovid's The Art Of Love, describing an apocalyptic, abandoned Washington D.C., and closing with the desire to go "up north" to work the land. It isn't exactly modern, but the jumble of eternal themes and contemporary references is as much a product of its times as anything Dylan has ever done.

In "Workingman's Blues #2," there's even a near-retreat to Dylan's protest days, though it sidesteps the protest by dismissing the folks that "never worked a day in their life" and touting the simple virtues of marital bliss and a diet of rice and beans. The album is filled with sentiments as sweet as they are hard to take at face value, thanks to Dylan's raspier-than-ever delivery and wry-as-ever sense of humor. It's also filled with hate for love gone wrong. On the blues tune "Someday Baby," for instance, Dylan promises to wring his baby's neck (he rhymes it with "I'll make it a matter of self-respect"). The tension never gets resolved, and the album-closing "Ain't Talkin'," a rambling mystery song in the mold of Time Out Of Mind's "Highlands," answers no questions” – The A.V. Club

Choice Cut: When the Deal Goes Down

Rough and Rowdy Ways

Release Date: 19th June, 2020

Label: Columbia

Standout Tracks: False Prophet/Black Rider/Murder Most Foul

Buy: https://www.roughtrade.com/gb/bob-dylan/rough-and-rowdy-ways/lp-plus-x2

Stream: https://open.spotify.com/album/1Qht64MPvWTWa0aMsqxegB?si=wtX4iYMxT_yvkgOuDYFQjA

Review:

“These are musical areas in which Dylan has worked for years. What sets Rough and Rowdy Ways apart from Tempest or 2006’s Modern Times is the sheer consistency of the songwriting; there’s nothing here that sounds like dashed-off filler, nothing that doesn’t hit home. Dylan nuts have a great line in telling you how hilarious lyrics that seem capable of raising at best a wry smile are – “Freddie or not, here I come”, “I’m not dead yet, my bell still rings” etc – but My Own Version, in which the protagonist turns Frankenstein and builds himself a lover out of bits of corpses, is packed with genuinely funny lines amid the references to Shakespeare, Homer’s Iliad, Bo Diddley and Martin Scorsese, as well as a curious interlude during which Freud and Marx are depicted as “enemies of mankind” burning in hell: “All through the summers into January, I’ve been visiting morgues and monasteries … if I do it right and put the head on straight, I’ll be saved by the creature that I create.”

This is obviously humour of a dark hue: if Tempest’s prevalent mood was one of murderous fury, then here it’s brooding menace and imminent doom. It’s there in the music – the weird tension in Crossing the Rubicon’s muted R&B shuffle and the way the backing on Black Rider keeps lapsing into ominous silence. You lose count of the lyrical references to judgment day and Armageddon, of the mysterious characters that keep cropping up with malevolence on their minds: “I can feel the bones beneath my skin and they’re trembling with rage, I’ll make your wife a widow, you’ll never see middle age,” he sings on Crossing the Rubicon. Of course, grouchily informing the world that everything is turning to shit has been one of Dylan’s prevalent songwriting modes for a quarter of a century – it’s the thread that binds Not Dark Yet, Things Have Changed, Ain’t Talkin’ and Early Roman Kings, among others – but this time the message seems to have shifted slightly: if you think everything has turned to shit now, Rough and Rowdy Ways keeps insisting, just you wait.

This isn’t perhaps the most comforting communique to issue in the middle of a global pandemic, but then the man behind it has seldom dealt in soothing reassurance. And besides, it doesn’t matter. For all its bleakness, Rough and Rowdy Ways might well be Bob Dylan’s most consistently brilliant set of songs in years: the die-hards can spend months unravelling the knottier lyrics, but you don’t need a PhD in Dylanology to appreciate its singular quality and power” – The Guardian

Choice Cut: I Contain Multitudes

FEATURE: Modern Heroines: Part Forty-Six: Princess Nokia

FEATURE:

 

 

Modern Heroines

Part Forty-Six: Princess Nokia

___________

WHEN it comes to women in modern music…

 PHOTO CREDIT: Phil Knott for NME

who have the promise to become icons and inspire the next generation, Princess Nokia comes to mind. Destiny Nicole Frasqueri is the woman behind Princess Nokia. She is a New York rapper of the highest order. Princess Nokia released her debut studio album, Metallic Butterfly, in 2014. That was by the 2015 mixtape, Honeysuckle. As Princess Nokia, she put out the 2017 studio album, 1992 Deluxe. She released a further mixtape, A Girl Cried Red, in 2018, followed by the release of two studio albums, Everything Sucks and Everything Is Beautiful, in 2020. I am going to bring in a review for those albums to end with. As I always do with Modern Heroines, I shall have a playlist at the bottom of the feature – a selection of the best tracks from a superb talent. I also want to bring in a critical review for the superb 1992 Deluxe. I am fascinated to see where Princess Nokia’s music heads this year and what direction her next album takes. I feel she is going to be an icon of the future. She is most certainly a hugely fascinating artist whose music and image evolves and continues to venture into new ground. Before I bring in some reviews, I want to source from a recent NME interview. It is a deep dive that spotlights and goes deep with a terrific artist:

“It’s the beginning of a new era for Princess Nokia. The star, who first appeared on the cover of NME back in 2017, has spent nine years releasing and navigating the industry as an independent artist. International tours, a consistently jam-packed release schedule and masses of critical acclaim later, Princess Nokia has now inked her first ever major-label deal with Sony Music at the age of 28. This was marked by the release of her stellar latest single ‘It’s Not My Fault’ (“It’s not my fault / That I’m that bitch”), a no-nonsense anthem that offers no apology to the haters.

In 2021, Princess Nokia 2.0 is making an unmistakable play for the commercial rap scene. “I think my mission and goal in this business was always to be a representation of strong independent ownership and creative legacy,” she says. Preparing and writing her next record already, after releasing two full-length albums – ‘Everything’s Beautiful’ and ‘Everything Sucks’ – on the same day early last year, Destiny Frasqueri is ready to up the stakes once again.

Born and raised in the birthplace of hip-hop, New York’s Bronx, the 28-year-old has been immersed in the culture of the genre since before she can remember. She describes her parents as ‘nuyoricans’, a term used to represent the Puerto Rican/New York hybrid community, and as a result her Latinx heritage is also a huge part of her identity too. But from a young age, she was also drawn to the fringes in the form of punk, rock and the queer club scene on the city’s Lower East Side.

“I think hanging out at raves, at skate parks, at clubs – all of those experiences allowed me to be a more experimental, fully-fledged artist that consciously wanted to do a lot of different types of music,” she reflects. And that’s precisely what she did.

And Nokia went on to defy all expectations. ‘1992 Deluxe’ – an extended studio version of a mixtape she released for free the year before – was her very own kick-your-teeth-in brand of classic hip-hop meets NYC nightlife. Standouts ‘Tomboy’ and ‘Kitana’ established her as a force within the rap scene, referencing her androgyny and nerdy gamer habits with an unabashed confidence, “My little titties and my fat belly” becoming the mantra of a generation determined to love themselves fully even when the world didn’t.

“Growing up with the night life of the queer folk in New York City, it all just made me more OK with myself and more at peace with being different,” Princess Nokia says, “[and with] maybe being misunderstood or not immediately accepted.”

“I think it’s really special that there’s less pressure for people of colour to fit into a mould,” Princess Nokia beams. “And that’s all that any individual deserves to have: a chance at having a little bit more peace, a little bit more fun, a little bit more room… I know what it is to have people raise eyebrows at you for certain ideas or thoughts or set identity. I know what it’s like to feel confined. It’s a beautiful thing that art has transcended and young people get to be themselves and to explore themselves.”

Alongside her outlandish versatility, there’s another key aspect that kept Princess Nokia’s name and the forefront of industry lips: her independence. Since she began to make serious waves around 2016, Princess Nokia has never been without major-label offers. But up until 2020, she declined them all and continued to create, release and tour independently, even directing the majority of her own music videos. Of that arduous but rewarding task, she notes: “I have a very resourceful spirit, that’s the most helpful and apparent thing… a survivor’s spirit.”

It was a decision she made precisely so that she was only accountable to herself and whatever fulfilled her at any given moment. “I just really wanted to be creative without feeling pressure,” she explains.

As she works on her next album, and more major label releases, Nokia’s sights are set as high as they’ve ever been. “I’m in this part of my life where I’m just continuing to create new music in a new way. The signing, making the project, uncovering new levels, it’s all been really cool and I’m just excited to elevate as an artist and continue to inspire through music with storytelling and colourful narrative.”

And with the meteoric rise of women in rap – with Cardi B, Megan Thee Stallion and Saweetie emerging as some of the biggest names in music right now – the scene is bursting with creativity and charisma, as well as hugely broad commercial prospects. There’s no time like the present for Nokia to stake her claim”.

I wanted to quote quite a big chunk of that interview as it is a compelling and arresting read. I love when you get these extensive and immersive interviews! Although Everything Sucks and Everything Is Beautiful did not score the same huge reviews as 1992 Deluxe, I think they are terrific albums with many highlights. I992 Deluxe was met with huge acclaim. In their review, Drowned in Sound noted the following:

“1992 Deluxe is much more than just a cheap re-release of her breakout 2016 mixtape, it’s a complete reimagining. The record features 8 brand new songs that help to cement Princess Nokia as one of the key voices in modern hip hop. Of these new tracks “ABCs of New York” stands out, the track is a love letter to her city of birth, and sounds like the musical equivalent of a sunny day in the city, spent with plenty of orange juice, ice cream and pizza. On the song Nokia covers pretty much everything of musical value that has happened in the Big Apple since the turn of the twentieth century, delivering verse after verse of alphabetised facts that would make Blackalicious proud.

Nokia delves into the past, present and future of hip hop, jumping from sub-genre to sub-genre with relative ease. The wild southern tinged trap of 'Tomboy' and 'Kitana' meld seamlessly into the almost, whisper it, commercial beats of 'Saggy Jeans', proving that when you do something with confidence, you can pretty much do whatever the hell you want.

Grand Finale 'Chinese Slippers' haunted house synth drawls and bouncy beats initially feel like a strange choice for the last track on the record, but after a few a few rounds of the almost painfully catchy “Kentucky fried chicken and a pizza hut” you can’t help but want to visit her weird world of irony, rainbows and funky bass lines just one more time.

The most exciting thing about 1992 Deluxe is that it can clearly get so much better for Princess Nokia. This is only the beginning. With more time and space to create, who knows what she could be capable of? World domination? I wouldn’t put it past her”.

I do love it when artists put out a double album or two different albums close together. It is ambitious and really interesting. It is wonderful to hear the differences between Everything Sucks and Everything Is Beautiful. Although some were mixed about the albums, I think that Pitchfork were able to find some strengths:

“Everything Sucks was made primarily in the span of one intense week in New York, with friend and producer Chris Lare (aka owwwls), and that tight turnaround is evident. Its 10 songs are a locust swarm of angst, restless and frantic, as one can become in a city so densely populated. The first four tracks are zealous fight songs with lyrics like, “I’m the monster under your bed/I’m the goblin from the dead” and “Who dat, who dat, who dat?/The bitch is back/Who dat, who dat, who dat?/I will attack.” You can practically see a moshpit forming while a devil circles her left shoulder. There’s a preemptive, almost B.Rabbit-esque listing of her flaws: she’s crazy, she’s gross, she’s generally a mess, and what of it? The closer “Just a Kid” is an exception to the aggression, an awkwardly delivered but vulnerable story of the traumas of her early years, including a stretch in foster care.

Nokia finds more success on Everything is Beautiful, which, in comparison, is warm and expansive. Made over a span of two years, including some time in Puerto Rico, it has the optimism and groundedness of being in a place where you can occasionally look up and see a wide sky. The production, with beats primarily by Tony Seltzer and 1-900, are peppy and bright, and the themes spiritual and forward-looking, like an antidote to the hellishness explored on Everything Sucks.

The jazzy sounds that have shown up in segments of New York’s reinvigorated independent rap scene offer a welcome complement—via the downtown crew Onyx Collective and Los Angeles saxophonistTerrace Martin—to Nokia’s experiments with effective but technically imperfect vocal styles. One song, the gentle and self-deprecating “Heart,” is ready-made for a sync on a future season of Insecure: “I hate social media, I wish it all would end/I’m not like those other girls, in fact I’m fucking worse,” she raps. This is Nokia at her best, a relatable, unpretentious narrator of her own growth.

For someone proud to have resisted the industry machine, both albums show that Nokia is adept at making music that fits neatly within its bounds. There are familiar flows and familiar sounds throughout: she out-Chances Chance the Rapper with a version of his signature sing-songy delivery, snarls in Cardi B’s clipped flow, and resuscitates the plonking piano that gave OG Maco a hit some years back. It’s easy to grow tired of her insistence that she’s a misfit, until you consider that scores of artists have built careers on similar narratives with far less self-awareness. And yet the album’s best moment comes in the form of a poem on an outro track: “I survived from trauma and I’m living out my purpose/And I’m sure you are too, we’re really not that different”.

I will end things there. Although I have not included a few other interesting interviews and reviews, I feel what I have included gives one some story and detail regarding Princess Nokia. I think we are going to hear a lot more from this tremendous artist. Go and follow Princess Nokia, as she is a definite superstar of the future. She is most definitely an inspiring artist who will compel…

THE next generation of rappers.