FEATURE: In Your Eyes: Peter Gabriel’s So at Thirty-Five

FEATURE:

 

 

In Your Eyes

Peter Gabriel’s So at Thirty-Five

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BEFORE getting to a couple of reviews…

 PHOTO CREDIT: Anton Corbijn

I want to bring together articles that look back at the incredible So. Released on 19th May, 1986, it was Gabriel’s fifth solo studio album. I think So was a more commercial move from Gabriel. Quite a sonic shift. His fourth eponymous album was put out in 1982. It completed a run of these quite experimental albums. On So, we can still hear some of that - though I think the fact he collaborates with artists (including Youssou N'Dour and Kate Bush) opened his music to a new audience. Producing alongside Daniel Lanois, I feel So is one of Gabriel’s finest albums. So turned Peter Gabriel from a cult artist to someone who was a mainstream star. It is his best-selling album, having been certified fivefold platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and triple platinum by the British Phonographic Industry (BPI). It is an album that is absolutely packed with songwriting genius. I don’t think the album has really dated at all. I want to first bring in an article from Ultimate Classic Rock. In the article (among other things) they look at Gabriel’s life pre-solo career and what So did for his career and status:

“Between his years as the freaky frontman for Genesis and his early solo outings, Peter Gabriel was already a rock star before making So. But the 1986 album transformed him into something entirely different and completely unexpected — a full-fledged pop star.

After leaving Genesis in 1975, Gabriel reinvented his art-rock approach in a new context, incorporating influences from the burgeoning New Wave and world music scenes over the course of four self-titled albums between 1977 and 1982. But while the funky single “Shock the Monkey” from his fourth album had made the Top 40, it still didn’t prepare him for the heights he would reach next time around.

So was the first album to which Gabriel had ever given an official title. But he gave people a lot more than that to hang onto. Gabriel’s fifth solo record turned out to be his most accessible and radio-friendly without sacrificing an ounce of the artistry he’d displayed on his earlier outings. It earned not only the admiration of the masses and the critics alike, but also four hit singles.

Gabriel had been a soul fan since his youth, but this was the first time he really brought an R&B influence to bear in his music in an overt way. “Sledgehammer,” the first single from So, is a sassy, soulful strut that finds Gabriel with tongue firmly in cheek delivering a series of not-so-subtle sexual metaphors. Heavily informed by his love of Otis Redding, Gabriel drafted erstwhile Redding trumpeter Wayne Jackson of the Memphis Horns to add some old-school soul cred to the track, which still managed to sound completely contemporary. Besides becoming an enormous hit, the song had a distinct Claymation video that became one of the most-played music clips on MTV.

“Big Time,” another ironic hit single, deals with the materialistic, acquisitive more-is-more philosophy so prevalent in the mid-‘80s. It’s less retro-minded than “Sledgehammer,” having more in common with Prince or Robert Palmer than anybody from the Stax stable. The churning, funky groove is driven by bassist Tony Levin’s unconventional “drumstick bass” (a bass struck with sticks rather than plucked).

Though Gabriel would never reproduce the phenomenal success of So on any of his subsequent albums, the record turned him from a rather cultish thinking-man’s rock star into a bona fide celebrity. In addition to occupying the pages of music magazines, he started turning up in celeb gossip rags that dished out details about his romance with actress Rosanna Arquette. The media suddenly noticed that when he wasn’t hiding behind weird makeup and creepy album covers, Gabriel was quite the photogenic character”.

I love Gabriel’s eponymous albums, though there is something both accessible and experimental regarding So that makes it a more satisfying and enduring listen. I don’t think Gabriel consciously set out to make a record to crack America or one that was overly-mainstream. As we can see from his official website, some people assume that, as So is his most successful album, that was his attention when putting it together:

“The first of Peter’s studio albums to have a proper title So was a watershed release in his career. Its marriage of the artistic and the commercial made for an indisputable success, with the album quickly sitting atop the album charts on both sides of the Atlantic. Aside from some intriguing collaborations – with Laurie Anderson on This Is The Picture, Kate Bush on Don’t Give Up and Youssou N’Dour on In Your Eyes – it was the unity of singer, band and producer that made So such a crucial record in the Gabriel canon.

“There is always wisdom from hindsight. And because ‘So’ was my most successful record, I think that a lot of people, particularly in America, think that it was designed to be that.

You know certain songs have a better chance of getting on the radio when you do them, for sure, but I think part of the reason that ‘So’ works so well was that the band was really firing off each other and we had a great sound and production team. It was compact in the process and the way it was put together.

One of the things I learned with Daniel Lanois is a total respect for the magic of the moment. When you have some spine-tingling event musically, you’ve got to capture it. I remember talking to Brian Eno about the Talking Heads record ‘Remain In Light’ and ‘The Great Curve’, I believe, is a track which was recorded on cassette from a band rehearsal because the band were really cooking at that point. They tried it again and again in the studio and never got it to feel as good. I think all musicians know that process, and you never really know when it’s hitting and when it isn’t, and I think one of the things that makes Dan’s records very strong is that there’s a real consciousness of when the performance is good. It’s quite difficult to spot because, you sort of hear what’s good in any particular thing and you forget whether the one before was actually a lot better or a lot worse. Holding all that emotional memory is quite hard.

‘Red Rain’ is one of my favourite tracks from that record. It’s a good example of a band playing together with a lot of energy and again, I think from Daniel Lanois’ input, there’s a respect for the moment. So many times in studios you see people desperately trying to get the best possible sound, but they let the moment go because they want to get something right or fixed, or they know that this bit can be improved, but the moment is something instinctively that you feel and if you get that great performance everything else will bow to it. And you can fix a lot of things afterwards. But, if you get the best sound but you don’t get the great performance, you have nothing. And it’s so easy to forget that in the studio”.

 PHOTO CREDIT: Trevor Key

I am going to wrap up in a bit. I have written about So before and its recording/legacy. Rather than tread over that ground, I thought it was important to nod to the album ahead of its thirty-fifth anniversary on 19th May, in addition to coming at it from a slightly different angle. Before finishing up, a couple of positive reviews are required. This is what AllMusic observed in their review:

“Peter Gabriel introduced his fifth studio album, So, with "Sledgehammer," an Otis Redding-inspired soul-pop raver that was easily his catchiest, happiest single to date. Needless to say, it was also his most accessible, and, in that sense it was a good introduction to So, the catchiest, happiest record he ever cut. "Sledgehammer" propelled the record toward blockbuster status, and Gabriel had enough songs with single potential to keep it there. There was "Big Time," another colorful dance number; "Don't Give Up," a moving duet with Kate Bush; "Red Rain," a stately anthem popular on album rock radio; and "In Your Eyes," Gabriel's greatest love song, which achieved genuine classic status after being featured in Cameron Crowe's classic Say Anything. These all illustrated the strengths of the album: Gabriel's increased melodicism and ability to blend African music, jangly pop, and soul into his moody art rock. Apart from these singles, plus the urgent "That Voice Again," the rest of the record is as quiet as the album tracks of Security. The difference is, the singles on that record were part of the overall fabric; here, the singles are the fabric, which can make the album seem top-heavy (a fault of many blockbuster albums, particularly those of the mid-'80s). Even so, those songs are so strong, finding Gabriel in a newfound confidence and accessibility, that it's hard not to be won over by them, even if So doesn't develop the unity of its two predecessors”.

Everyone is going to have different highlights from So. I love all the tracks, though I think Sledgehammer and Don’t Give Up, as obvious as it might seem, are the best tracks. There is not a weak moment on the album! It is testament to Gabriel’s consistency and talent that he was producing music of this quality nine years after his solo debut. Pitchfork were very positive in their review:

“In Your Eyes” is the moment where Gabriel fully fuses the personal, spiritual, and global impulses in his music. “On two recent trips to Senegal,” he told Spin, “it was explained to me that many of their love songs are left ambiguous so that they could refer to the love between man and woman or the love between man and God.” But on a platinum-selling album circulating through a global, billion-dollar pop industry, the primary reference of any song is always the star, and “In Your Eyes” is, at root, about Gabriel’s global voyage of self-discovery.

In 1986, N’Dour was already a living legend in his own country. A decade earlier, he was a primary force driving the creation of Mbalax, of the first truly Senegalese pop music. More recently, he’d shown his own willingness to engage in a trans-Atlantic dialogue, adapting the Spinners’ “Rubberband Man” into his own voice. But outside of West African music aficionados, N’Dour was still unknown. After So, that changed: Gabriel saw himself as not just N’Dour’s musical collaborator, but his promoter. He took N’Dour on tour with him and they collaborated several more times. There is no question that Gabriel made N’Dour a bigger star. The thornier question is what did N’Dour do for Gabriel? Was their relationship another example of pop and rock’s long legacy of colonialist absorption? An instance of music business market expansion exemplified by Gabriel starting his Virgin-distributed Real World label/studio in 1989? A simple act of earnest musical dialogue between kindred spirits? Yes. “I’m pleased to see that in most record stores…you see an African section now,” Gabriel said in 1986. “Maybe in another decade there’ll be a world-music section.”

In the mid-1980s, the intertwined forces of rapidly advancing communication technologies and the ever-expanding interests of capital had ushered in the era of “globalization.” To optimists like Gabriel and his pop peers Byrne, Sting, and Paul Simon, it was the dawn of a borderless, utopian era of cultural creativity and fluid identity. To critics, world music forwarded a notion of increased cultural diversity as a garish cover for the increasing centralization of Western economic power and expansion of global economic inequality. Like any popular music form that seeks to make a political statement, world music was founded on a contradiction. It was at once a marketing category designed to sell non-Western music to Western audiences, that also, at its best, could function as a form of cross-cultural diplomacy.

Gabriel fully understood his limits he was working within. “I don’t think we can change the world as directly as many people thought was once possible,” he told Spin. “What we can do is provide information and then let people make up their minds.” Gabriel’s focus on the individual’s role in global change reflected So’s twin fixations: psychological transformation and global communication. So became a blueprint for pop music do-goodery, a political statement executed through self-reflection, collaboration, and the best audio-visual experience money can buy”.

To honour one of the best albums ever turning thirty-five, I was keen to give a bit more information and some context. I wonder whether Gabriel will release another studio. 2011’s New Blood consists of orchestral re-recordings of various tracks from his career. I am sure he is keeping busy, though there are many who would love to hear another album from him (including me). It only leaves me to wish a happy thirty-fifth anniversary to…

A sensational and genius album.

FEATURE: Too Good to Be Forgotten: Songs That Are Much More Than a Guilty Pleasure: Morrissey - Suedehead

FEATURE:

 

 

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

Morrissey - Suedehead

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THE reason why I am including…

Morrissey’s Suedehead in this feature is that some might feel embracing a Mozzer song is a bit controversial - what with his political views and the fact he divides people. I can understand that, though he has written some genius tracks (both with The Smiths and solo). Taken from his excellent debut album of 1988, Viva Hate, Suedehead was Morrissey’s first single. I think it is one of the best tracks in his catalogue. I like the fact that Suedehead is the seventh track on his debut album. It is quite unusual to release a debut single that is so far down the running order. I really love early-Morrissey. Whilst his stock and reputation has taken a hit through the years, I do not think people should see listening to his music as a guilty pleasure or something quite conflicting. I want to bring in a couple of articles regarding the song – one that discusses the symbolism and visuals in the song’s video. Before getting to the first one, a little overview on Suedehead from Wikipedia:

“Suedehead" is the debut solo single by English singer Morrissey, released in February 1988. The track was featured on Morrissey's debut album, Viva Hate, and the compilation album Bona Drag, the latter of which also featured the B-side "Hairdresser on Fire". The artwork of the single features a photo taken by Geri Caulfield during a Smiths gig at the London Palladium.

"Suedehead" charted higher than any of the singles released by Morrissey's former band the Smiths, peaking at No. 5 on the UK Singles Chart and reaching the top 10 in Ireland and New Zealand. The music video, directed by Tim Broad, features Morrissey walking through the streets of Fairmount, Indiana,[3] the hometown of actor James Dean, including shots of the school where Dean studied and the Park Cemetery, where he is buried. Other allusions to Dean in the video include a child (played by Sam Esty Rayner, Morrissey's nephew, who went on to direct the video for "Kiss Me a Lot" in 2015) delivering to Morrissey a copy of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's The Little Prince, Dean's favourite book”.

The first feature that I want to spotlight is from Radio X. They remark that, whilst the lyrics are quite personal, Morrissey was not going to be too revealing and open at such an early stage of his solo career:

“The debut solo single by Morrissey was released on 27 February 1988. Suedehead was the warm up for the singer’s first post-Smiths album, Viva Hate, which hit record shops on 14 March that year. The video sees Moz touring the streets of Fairmount, Indiana where his hero James Dean grew up.

Suedehead was a make-or-break moment for Morrissey. The demise of the Smiths the previous autumn had caused ripples in the music industry and within fandom.

He needn’t have worried: his first release for major label EMI made Number 5 in the UK charts, which was higher than any Smiths single had achieved at that point.

One of their songs was Suedehead, which was to be the first glimpse of the post-Smiths Morrissey. The lyrics were obscure, apparently written about someone in Morrissey’s teenage years, but as he told the NME in February 1988 “I'd rather not give any addresses and phone numbers at this stage.”

The “suedehead” of the title refers to an offshoot of skinheads - the late 60s counterculture that was given a boost in the 1970s with the arrival of punk. They drew bad press by being associated with violence and racism, but the roots of the culture lay in music and fashion.

Suedehead was the title of a 1971 novel by Richard Allen, the follow-up to the successful Skinhead. However, Morrissey claimed that the song had nothing to do with the book: “I did happen to read the book when it came out and I was quite interested in the whole Richard Allen cult. But really I just like the word 'suedehead’.”

The song ends with the lines “It was a good lay, a good lay” - a very un-Morrissey sentiment at the time, for a man who claimed celibacy as a way of life: “ was never a sexual person,” he once said.

With sublime lyrics, a top Morrissey vocal and composition by producer Stephen Street, I think that this was a remarkable debut single. I know that some feel odd about liking Morrissey now. Do we separate the artist from their public persona? If some of his more recent albums have lacked his edge and humour, Viva Hate is a wonderfully quality-filled and rich album. Alongside Everyday Is Like Sunday, Suedehead is a classic! I really love the video for the track. It is so cinematic, simple and lush. I came across an interesting feature that talks about some of the scenes and nods in the video:

“Morrissey sits pensively in a bathtub, a poster of James Dean and Richard Davalos rising above him and the accoutrements of a writer—a typewriter, a fountain pen, a volume of Byron—about him. Lest there be any doubt about the subject of Moz’s contemplation, shots of a handwritten note signed “Jim {Brando Clift} Dean” and a 1955 copy of The Fairmount News bearing a report of Dean’s death flash by. All of this set the scene for Morrissey’s video for “Suedehead,” his 1988 debut solo single; and fitting for a song about obsessive love, it offers a portrait of the singer-songwriter in his element as a devoted, unqualified fan.

Moz’s existence as a fan began early, and ran deep and unabashed. His adolescence, when not spent in thrall to the transformative music and magic of T.Rex and David Bowie, and presiding over the England chapter of the New York Dolls fan club, saw him firing off letters to editors of music magazines, praising and defending his favorites from Sparks (“Today I bought the album of the year”) to The Cramps (“Back to the Cramps or perish”). His 2013 Autobiography, recounting his teenage fandom, contained swooning passages on Andy Warhol and Patti Smith, and unleashed rapturous homages to pop culture. “Loudly and wildly the music played,” went one, “always pointing to the light, to the way out, or the way in, to individualism, and to the remarkable if unsettling notion that life could possibly be lived as you might wish it to be lived.”

Appropriately, since he professed to be “more impressed with [Dean’s] life off the screen,” the video, directed by Tom Broad, sees Morrissey making a pilgrimage to his hero’s birthplace, Fairmount, Indiana. There, the singer walks the town’s snow-blown streets, snaps pictures, and visits Dean’s old hangouts from a cafe to a drugstore to his now-abandoned high school. “To [the town’s] locals, I must seem like a bit of nonsense from Montague Square,” he later wrote in Autobiography. He calls on the farm owned by Dean’s surviving relatives, Marcus and Ortense Winslow, and in the barn, does a bit of light reading—as a young Jimmy Dean used to do—before surveying the handprint and initials his idol left in the cement floor. (The film crew later departed the farm under some awkwardness, after Dean’s cousin Markie discovers Morrissey’s hand in James Dean is Not Dead.)

The film culminates with a beautifully shot segment at Park Cemetery, where Moz visits—and apparently, wept at—the graves of the fictitious Cal Dean (Dean played Cal Trask in East of Eden) and the real James Dean. As the video fades out, an image of Dean appears, floating above the proceedings, handsomely brooding over Moz’s vigil by his grave.

The subject of the “Suedehead” video, though, seems less James Dean than the act of homage itself. Note all the meditative gazes, for one. Here, Morrissey doesn’t just underscore his obsession with the actor right down to the minutest detail (Byron is Dean’s middle name; The Little Prince, which Morrissey brandishes, is Dean’s favorite book), but literally walks in his hero’s footsteps, reliving his “magnificently perfect” life. At one point, he’s pictured astride a motorbike, in a pose not at all different from Dean’s stance as depicted on the cover of “Bigmouth Strikes Again”.

If you have avoided Morrissey’s music because of his views and political allegiances, then I would say that you are missing out on so much great music. Rather than it being a guilty pleasure, Suedehead is a beautiful, witty and fascinating song that introduced the post-Smiths song to the world. One could forgive Morrissey for taking a while to get going after The Smiths split. There was no danger with his debut single. Suedehead is a confident and incredible track. It is one of those songs that you can listen to once and it will come back to mind…

OVER and over again.

FEATURE: Inspired By… Part Ten: Joy Division

FEATURE:

 

 

Inspired By…

 Part Ten: Joy Division

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FOR the tenth part…

 PHOTO CREDIT: Collection Christophel/Alamy Stock Photo

of Inspired By…, I wanted to feature a legendary band who has influenced a generation of artists. Formed in Salford in 1976, I also wanted to mark forty-five years of Joy Division. In the playlist at the bottom of this feature, I have put together songs from artists either influenced by Joy Division or that have followed on from them – just to get a view of the range and depth of the band’s legacy. Prior to that, I wanted to bring in a biography of Joy Division from AllMusic:

“Formed in the wake of the punk explosion in England, Joy Division became the first band in the post-punk movement by later emphasizing not anger and energy but mood and expression, pointing ahead to the rise of melancholy alternative music in the '80s. Though the group's raw initial sides fit the bill for any punk band, Joy Division later incorporated synthesizers (taboo in the low-tech world of '70s punk) and more haunting melodies, emphasized by the isolated, tortured lyrics of its lead vocalist, Ian Curtis. While the British punk movement shocked the world during the late '70s, Joy Division's quiet storm of musical restraint and emotive power proved to be just as important to independent music in the 1980s.

The band was founded in 1976, soon after the Sex Pistols had made their first appearance in Manchester. Guitarist Bernard Albrecht (b. Bernard Dicken, January 4, 1956) and bassist Peter Hook (b. February 13, 1956) had met while at the show and later formed a band called the Stiff Kittens; after placing an ad through a Manchester record store, they added vocalist Ian Curtis (b. July 15, 1956) and drummer Steve Brotherdale. Renamed Warsaw (from David Bowie's "Warszawa"), the band made its live debut the following May, supporting the Buzzcocks and Penetration at Manchester's Electric Circus. After the recording of several demos, Brotherdale quit the group in August 1977, prompting the hire of Stephen Morris (b. October 28, 1957). A name change to Joy Division in late 1977 -- necessitated by the punk band Warsaw Pakt -- was inspired by Karol Cetinsky's World War II novel The House of Dolls. (In the book, the term "joy division" was used as slang for concentration camp units wherein female inmates were forced to prostitute themselves for the enjoyment of Nazi soldiers.).

Playing frequently in the north country during early 1978, the quartet gained the respect of several influential figures: Rob Gretton, a Manchester club DJ who became the group's manager; Tony Wilson, a TV/print journalist and owner of the Factory Records label; and Derek Branwood, a record executive with RCA Northwest, who recorded sessions in May 1978, for what was planned to be Joy Division's self-titled debut LP. Though several songs bounded with punk energy, the rest of the album showed at an early age the band's later trademarks: Curtis' themes of post-industrial restlessness and emotional despair, Hook's droning bass lines, and the jagged guitar riffs of Albrecht.

The album should have been hailed as a punk classic, but when a studio engineer added synthesizers to several tracks -- believing that the punk movement had to move on and embrace new sounds -- Joy Division scrapped the entire LP. (Titled Warsaw for a 1982 bootleg, the album was finally given wide issue ten years later.) The first actual Joy Division release came in June 1978, when the initial mid-1977 demos were released as the EP An Ideal for Living, on the band's own Enigma label. Early in 1979, the buzz surrounding Joy Division increased with a session recorded for John Peel's BBC radio show.

Unknown PleasuresThe group began recording with producer Martin Hannett and released Unknown Pleasures on old friend Tony Wilson's Factory label in July 1979. The album enjoyed immense critical acclaim and a long stay on the U.K.'s independent charts. Encouraged by the punk buzz, the American Warner Bros. label offered a large distribution contract that fall. The band ignored it but did record another radio session for John Peel on November 26th. (Both sessions were later collected on the Peel Sessions album.).

During late 1979, Joy Division's manic live show gained many converts, partly due to rumors of Curtis' ill health. An epilepsy sufferer, he was prone to breakdowns and seizures while on stage -- it soon grew difficult to distinguish the fits from his usual on-stage jerkiness and manic behavior. As the live dates continued and the new decade approached, Curtis grew weaker and more prone to seizures. After a short rest over the Christmas holiday, Joy Division embarked on a European tour during January, though several dates were cancelled because of Curtis. The group began recording its second LP after the tour ended (again with Hannett), and released "Love Will Tear Us Apart" in April. The single was again praised but failed to move beyond the independent charts. After one gig in early May, the members of Joy Division were given two weeks of rest before beginning the group's first U.S. tour. Two days before the scheduled flight, however, Curtis was found dead in his home, the victim of a self-inflicted hanging.

CloserBefore Curtis' death, the band had agreed that Joy Division would cease to exist if any member left, for any reason. Ironically though, the summer of 1980 proved to be the blooming of the band's commercial status, when a re-release of "Love Will Tear Us Apart" rose to number 13 on the British singles chart. In August, the release of Closer finally united critics' positivity with glowing sales, as the album peaked at number six. Before the end of the summer, Unknown Pleasures was charting as well.

Here is a playlist of songs from artists who are similar to Joy Division or have been inspired by them in some form. As you can see and hear, they cover quite…

A wide spectrum of sounds.

FEATURE: Station to Station: Part Ten: Zoe Ball (BBC Radio 2)

FEATURE:

 

 

Station to Station

Part Ten: Zoe Ball (BBC Radio 2)

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TAKING this feature into double digits…

 PHOTO CREDIT: David Gubert for Red

I am including the legendary Zoe Ball. The first female host of both BBC Radio 1 Breakfast and the Radio 2 breakfast show for the BBC, she also presented the 1990s children's show, Live & Kicking, alongside Jamie Theakston from 1996 to 1999. In 2018, Ball was announced as the Radio 2 Breakfast Show host. She replaced Chris Evans in January 2019. I think that The Zoe Ball Breakfast Show is one of the best of radio. Ball is a national broadcasting treasure and someone that we will hear for many years. There are a couple of features/interviews that I want to bring in soon. You can follow Ball on Instagram and Twitter. Such a funny, warm and talented broadcaster, I think that Zoe Ball is one of our very best. I want to first talk about Ball’s appearance on Desert Island Discs prior to the pandemic kicking in last year. I love listening to her BBC Radio 2 breakfast show. One can learn a lot about her from that. With relatively few interviews online, I think things like Desert Island Discs is useful when it comes to discovering more. Among things discussed with host Lauren Laverne, as this article from Stylist outlines, the sad loss of her partner, Billy Yates, was covered:

“There’s no right or wrong way to grieve the loss of a romantic partner, but listening to the experiences of other people who have been through it can offer comfort and understanding. That’s why Zoe Ball’s recent podcast interview about how she grieved for her partner Billy Yates – who died by suicide in 2018 – are such an important listen to anyone who relates.

Speaking to Lauren Laverne on Desert Island Discs, Ball explained the part that music can play while grieving, and how it helps to celebrate the lives of those who have passed.

After picking Frank Wilson’s Do I Love You as one of her discs, Ball told Laverne: “I wanted to play something for Billy. Billy was my partner, we’d been friends for a few years and we got together. He suffered with depression for a huge chunk of his life. And it’s so hard to sit and watch someone you love and care for struggle with mental health.

“Losing him was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to deal with in my life.

“I think something that’s really important to share, having spoken now to lots of people who work within mental health support networks or people trying to make a difference, is that there is hope. There is help available. There are ways. We’re still learning.”

She then went on to describe depression, saying: “For some people the drugs work, for some people that isn’t the case. But it’s so isolating to be trapped like that, where you doubt everything you’ve ever known. You doubt if your family love you, you doubt that your friends care for you.”

She continued: “I think something else that happens if you lose someone in a situation like this is that I don’t want people to remember him for how he died. I want people to remember him for how he lived his life. He was so full of love. He would help anyone in need. He was always there for all his friends. He brought so much into my life, so much into his family and friends’ lives.

“And I wanted to play a piece of music that reflected him for who he was. He loved to dance and he loved to laugh. And this track will always remind me of him.”

After selecting another track, Kamasi Washington’s Truth, Ball went on to explain how listening to music has helped with her grief.

“It moved me to tears,” she said. “That’s something else I learned through grieving is how music can play such a role in that. And I’ll take some photographs, and pieces of music, and I can listen to that and help that little process. Sometimes you can make those tears come and think of somebody and take yourself through that little process and I think that’s really good for you. And you come out of the other side of that and you feel a little bit stronger again”.

I have been following Zoe Ball’s career since the 1990s. She is such an exceptional broadcaster and a hugely influential figure. I am not sure how many more years she will be in her current slot at BBC Radio 2 - though she has commanded a loyal and large audience. Ball definitely sounds very comfortable and happy at breakfast.

I shall wrap things up in a bit. Go and follow Ball and listen to her BBC Radio 2 show. Alongside her broadcasting career, she was a contestant in the third series of Strictly Come Dancing. Following this, in 2011, she took over from Claudia Winkleman as host of the BBC Two spin-off show, Strictly Come Dancing: It Takes Two. There was an interesting interview of quickfire questions published in The Guardian late last year. I have selected a few questions from it:

“What is your earliest memory?
My dad wrapping me up in his coat on a cold, rainy night in the 1970s when our car broke down and we had to wait by the road for help.

Which living person do you most admire, and why?
All the NHS workers, care home staff and teachers who are the real superheroes of 2020.

What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?
Telling people the ending of films, books or plays. I have to stop myself from letting slip spoilers on the radio.

What was your most embarrassing moment?
Having a menopausal hot flush while interviewing Al Pacino and Robert De Niro last year. My glasses steamed up and slowly slid down my nose.

What is your guiltiest pleasure?
Eating Christmas pudding when it’s not Christmas. Everything seems to taste better when you aren’t allowed it yet.

What do you owe your parents?

A strong back and gallows humour.

What is the worst job you’ve done?

The failed attempt at a home perm on myself in the 80s. I wanted to look like Kelly McGillis in Top Gun.

How do you relax?

Watching Gardeners’ World in front of the fire on a Friday night. There is nothing better than an evening with Monty Don and the gang. It’s pure “warm hug” TV.

What do you consider your greatest achievement?

Being mum to my awesome children, Woody and Nelly. They make my day, every day. I do joke with them that I’m happy to pay for the therapy they’ll inevitably need in later years due to my terrible parenting.

How would you like to be remembered?

As Naughty Grandma – you know, the one who is always causing mischief at Christmas.

What is the most important lesson life has taught you?

To hold those you love close, as we’re never sure how long we’re going to get on this crazy, beautiful planet.

Where would you most like to be right now?

At Glastonbury, singing and dancing with my kids and best friends. I have everything crossed for 2021”.

I shall leave things there. I am a big fan of Zoe Ball, and I think that she is one of our most enduring and popular broadcasters. She is inspiring so many people to get into radio - and, as the years go by, I feel Ball will take on new responsibilities and receive huge honours. The Zoe Ball Breakfast Show is the perfect way to wake up weekdays. She is an amazing and passionate host; someone people regard in high affection. I have so much respect and praise for…

A broadcasting legend.

FEATURE: “Judas!” Dylan Goes Electric

FEATURE:

 

 

“Judas!”

IN THIS PHOTO: Bob Dylan in 1965 with the Fender Telecaster owned by legendary guitarist Robbie Robertson (Dylan played this extensively as he ‘went electric’ in 1965)

Dylan Goes Electric

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ON 24th May…

 IN THIS PHOTO: Bob Dylan at the Free Trade Hall, Manchester, on 17th May, 1966 (the night an audience member shouted “Judas!”)/PHOTO CREDIT: Mark Makin

the legendary Bob Dylan turns eighty. It is a big moment for the music world. We get to celebrate a songwriting genius who has inspired so many through the decades. I thought it would be interesting to go back fifty-five years to 17th May, 1966. During a tour of the U.K., at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester, an audience member shouted “Judas!” - unhappy that the songwriter was seemingly abandoning his Folk roots. We wouldn’t get anything like that today is an acoustic artist like Laura Marling suddenly went electric! People wouldn’t have any issue – in fact, that sort of evolution and range is commonplace. For an artist who, perhaps, made his name as an acoustic artist who had built a fanbase on it, there would have been many who took a while to accept that, by 1966, Dylan was changing as an artist. In June 1966, Dylan put out Blonde on Blonde. There were songs in albums prior to that there used electric guitar (1965’s Highway 61 Revisited used one for sure), though it was becoming more common by 1966. One cannot say that, even as Dylan was going electric, it was the majority of his sound. This being said, Dylan’s hostile audience member in Newcastle was not the first time Dylan faced backlash. In 1965, as this article explains, Dylan went electric - and those at the Newport Folk Festival were not all on the same page:

“When Bob Dylan appeared at the Newport Folk Festival on the night of July 25, 1965, he had a Fender Stratocaster electric guitar around his neck. Three of his five backup musicians also took up electric instruments. Minutes into the first song, “Maggie’s Farm,” roughly a third of the 17,000 people in the audience began to boo. The media covered the rude reaction the next day.

Mr. Dylan couldn’t have wished for a better outcome. In the months ahead, the 24-year-old singer-songwriter was transformed from folk’s boy wonder into the poet equivalent of Elvis Presley. His newly released single “Like a Rolling Stone” would reach No. 2 on Billboard’s pop chart, while the album on which it appeared, “Highway 61 Revisited,” would climb to No. 3. For rock musicians, Mr. Dylan’s uncompromising lyrics and stripped-down delivery were a creative wake-up call.

By year’s end, the Beatles responded with “Rubber Soul,” and Mr. Dylan’s influence went viral. After 1965, the Beatles, Brian Wilson, Paul Simon, the Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, Lou Reed and dozens of other ’60s rock musicians found the courage to write songs that reflected their own perspectives and aesthetics. By plugging in, Mr. Dylan had put a pin in pop and started rock’s singer-songwriter revolution.

Fifty years later, it’s hard to imagine what all the fuss was about at Newport. In recent years, folk fans and artists who were there have insisted, almost out of embarrassment, that the boos were in response to the sound system’s high volume and distortion, not Mr. Dylan’s electric band. But in truth, the outrage was more complicated and deeply rooted in folk’s anti-materialism, the music’s orthodoxy, and a snooty belief that pop-rock of the early ’60s was mindless.

As evidenced in the 2005 documentary “No Direction Home,” Mr. Dylan was shaken when he left the Newport stage after cutting his set short after three songs. But months later, he shrugged off the reaction, telling a print interviewer, “I think there’s always a little boo in all of us.” Nevertheless, for many in the Newport audience, Mr. Dylan “going electric” was an act of betrayal by a misguided schemer trying to pass himself off as a British invader”.

A week before Dylan’s twenty-fifth birthday, in Newcastle, he had to face this unexpected year from an audience member. I think it is a fascinating incident that carries this significance. The fact that the audience member called Dylan by the name of a traitor from The Bible gives it extra sting and weight – like it was a betrayal of the highest order!

Five years ago, the BBC looked back on the incident. We get to learn about the man who shouted at Dylan that night on 17th May, 1966:

“Fifty years ago, Bob Dylan was at the centre of a storm, with arguments raging on both sides of the Atlantic about whether his decision to play electric sets meant he had sold out his folk roots.

The controversy began at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival in the US, where he was booed when he played electric and it came to a head, unexpectedly, towards the end of his 1966 world tour at a concert in Manchester on 17 May.

Frustrated by what he was hearing, one man decided to vent his fury as the sound ebbed before Dylan's final song of the set with a heckle that has become one of the most famous in musical history.

He shouted a single word - "Judas".

Musician and author Dr CP Lee was in the crowd that night and has since written a book about the world tour

He says it has been "reckoned to be one of the pivotal moments in popular music in the 20th Century, on a par with the riot at Stravinsky's Rite of Spring in Paris”.

At the time, he was a 16-year-old schoolboy, eager to see Dylan after missing his concert in the city the year before.

He says from the start, the gig had a distinct atmosphere and - with no pun intended - it was "electric".

"That night, standing outside, there were people arguing, lots of speculation and quite a sense of an impending event.

PHOTO CREDIT: Mark Makin 

"We'd read in 1965 about booing at Newport and the impression we got was that Dylan had come back on with an acoustic guitar and everything was alright.

"The side door opened and in we went. We could see amplifiers and a drum kit on the stage and people were going 'oh no'.

"Some of us had read Melody Maker that week, which said there had been booing in Dublin and people wondered what Dylan was going to do."

'Bewildered, shell-shocked'

Mark Makin, who "by chance" took the only known photographs of the show, remembers the sense of "trepidation" but adds that it "wasn't as if people didn't know what was about to happen".

"We had all read that this was going to be electric. They were all just hopeful that it might not."

The gig had two halves: the first saw Dylan taking the stage alone and acoustic, while in the second, he played with the backing of his band, The Hawks.

Makin, who was in the fourth row with his school friends, says the audience was "delighted" with the acoustic set.

"Everybody was whisper quiet. These days, everyone roars with the recognition of the first line. It never happened then. You didn't dare miss a second of it.

"I suppose there was an expectation that he might not [play electric], he just might carry on - because we had such a good first half, he might just do more of the same."

Makin points to a problem with the sound as the reason for the abuse Dylan received, an issue which it has also been claimed was behind the discord in Newport too.

"I think the problem was the Free Trade Hall's total lack of musicality - it was a square-sided building and when the sound was projected from a PA like that, it hit the wall at the back and came straight back at you with an echo and a reverb.

"All you could hear was this mush of sound. I think that was what hurt people.

"It wasn't that we didn't expect him to be electric, but if if he had just come in at three quarters of the decibels, it might have worked."

It is not known whether it was the electric set or the sound quality that vexed the famous heckler - in fact, as Lee explains, it is not even known for certain who shouted.

"Andy Kershaw and myself made a documentary for BBC Radio 1 in 1999 and were contacted by a guy who had emigrated to Canada called Keith Butler, who said 'yes, I shouted Judas'.

"But there was always an element of doubt. He had shouted something but I think he was confused about whether he had shouted that.

"After the broadcast, we got a call from a very irate person who said 'my husband shouted Judas and here he is now'.

"He was called John Cordwell. Andy and I met John and he had a lot of people who were with him who said 'yes, he shouted it out and we all applauded and thought he was great for having done it”.

There have been articles and investigations that go back to 1966 and ask why that incident happened. Whilst it was one man who shouted “Judas!”, it was clear other audience members ion Manchester were displeased with what their hero was doing and how he was undergoing this shift. I think that, in the same way The Beatles became more experimental and changed their sound by 1966, Dylan was growing as an artist and did not want to be limited. Since 1966, he has pushed his music even further but not completely abandoned that early acoustic sound. Fifty-five since a pretty memorable and big event in Dylan’s career, I wanted to look back on it. I wonder how Dylan reacts to it now and whether it impacted him in any way. I suppose artists get heckled from time to time, though Dylan was probably not expecting any trouble when he toured the U.K. in 1966 - though he had faced animosity in the U.S. the year previous. If there were some who were unhappy with Dylan’s sonic evolution in 1965/1966, there are many who were embracing what he was doing. Listen to his incredible albums since 1965 and…

 PHOTO CREDIT: Mark Makin

FEW others could have any complaints!

FEATURE: Do Bears… Kate Bush and the Comedy Connection

FEATURE:

 

 

Do Bears…

IN THIS PHOTO: The late and iconic Terry Jones (Monty Python) appeared in the artwork to Kate Bush’s 2011 album, Director’s Cut, sitting beside Hazel Pethig and Remi Butler on a mysterious train journey/PHOTO CREDIT: Tim Walker

Kate Bush and the Comedy Connection

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I have talked about…

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush at the Evening Standard Theatre Awards in 2014/PHOTO CREDIT: David M. Benett/Getty Images

how Kate Bush is such a great actor in her videos. I often wonder what it would have been like if, like Madonna, Bush embarked on acting to go alongside her music. Maybe, like Madonna, there would have been some bad films; that might have affected her musical output negatively. She was offered a part in the 1986 film, Castaway, alongside Oliver Reed. Bush did appear in Les Dogs - it was a 1990 television film written by Peter Richardson and Pete Richens (directed by Peter Richardson), and part of The Comic Strip Presents... series of programmes. I feel that Bush could have had a successful career as an actor given the fact that she comes across so powerfully in her video. Her range is excellent as well. Some felt that her acting in 1993’s The Line, the Cross and the Curve was not great (though it did feature a fine comedic actor, Miranda Richardson). I think that was a case of Bush taking on too much directing it. Under the guidance of a director, I reckon she could have turned in some great acting performances! I mention this because, as I have also alluded to before, Bush has a connection with the comedy world. I will bring in the 2014 documentary, The Kate Bush Story: Running Up That Hill, later. In it, several comedians paid their respects to Bush and her music – among them was Jo Brand. I think Bush’s sense of humour and her comedic touches is a reason why many comics love her. I am trying to think whether Bush recorded anything comedic on one of her albums. Not an album track, though maybe Ran Tan Waltz comes close.

 IN THIS PHOTO: Comedian Jo Brand is a big fan of Kate Bush (and she contributed to the 2014 documentary, The Kate Bush Story: Running Up That Hill)

In certain T.V. appearances and interviews, Bush has this natural and deft comedic touch that catches you by surprise. I love the way she can go from quite serious to laidback and funny. There seems to be this connection between Kate Bush and the world of comedy. I am going to come to Bush’s love of Monty Python. One example of Bush singing comedically is when she performed for Comic Relief alongside Rowan Atkinson in 1986 on the song, Do Bears… The Kate Bush Encyclopaedia explains more:

“Song written by Richard Curtis and Rowan Atkinson.

On 4, 5 and 6 April 1986 Kate Bush performed live for British charity event Comic Relief, singing 'Do Bears... ?', a humorous duet with comedian Rowan Atkinson, and a solo piano version of Breathing. The performances were filmed for a special edition of the BBC programme 'Omnibus', broadcast on 25 April 1986.

The song was eventually released on an LP called Utterly Utterly Live at the Shaftesbury Theatre: Comic Relief, which contained many songs from the live shows, including the two Kate Bush songs mentioned above”.

I do love how Bush performed at events like Comic Relief and she showed how she could do comedy. Bush supports a number of charities and has always had this altruistic and charitable nature. It is no surprise that she would lend her time and profile for such an important cause.

I will get to a couple of modern comedians who have a love of Kate Bush. In terms of who the songwriter adores herself, I think Monty Python is near the top of her list of comedy greats. Perhaps it is a stretch, but I think that Bush’s theatricality and her reinventions can be linked to comedy. This idea of adopting different guises, looks and characters. Of course, literature and cinema was hugely influential to her. I feel the accessibility and joy of comedy has aided and motivated her as a songwriter too. It definitely would be curious to explore that notion in greater detail. Bush has said in interviews how she has a love of Monty Python. The comedy troupe was very important to her. She got to work and interact with two members: Terry Gilliam and Terry Jones. As this article from the Kate Bush Encyclopaedia highlights, there is an important connection between Bush and Gilliam:

“Kate Bush recorded the classic standard Brazil for Terry Gilliam's movie of the same name. For the music video of Cloudbusting, Gilliam put Kate in touch with Julian Doyle, who directed the video, and provided some assistance. Gilliam also offered support and technical assistance on Kate's own directorial efforts, including The Line The Cross And The Curve.

Terry Gilliam about Kate

 Kate called me to direct the video and I said, ‘No, how about Julian (Doyle)?’ They had a great time shooting, but somewhere in the editing a conflict developed and I became the mediator. Kate knows exactly what she’s doing, she knows what she wants. She’s the sweetest person on the planet but she’s absolute steel inside!”.

IN THIS PHOTO: Terry Gilliam/PHOTO CREDIT: Getty Images 

Terry Jones did play a small role in Bush’s career. It is sad that he is no longer with us. It is no surprise that Bush had a love of the great comedy legend. When Jones died last year, Kate Bush News revealed how Bush and he are connected:

“Sadly, today we say goodbye to a British comedy legend; actor, writer, comedian, screenwriter, film director and historian, Terry Jones, best known as a member of the Monty Python comedy team. As we all know, Kate has had close friendships and collaborations with many luminaries in British comedy over the years and, rather delightfully, Terry appeared in the artwork to her 2011 album, Director’s Cut, sitting beside Hazel Pethig and Remi Butler on a mysterious train journey. He is credited as portraying “Professor Need”. Terry attended Kate’s Before the Dawn show in September 2014, but had been battling dementia in recent years. Rest in Peace, Terry – thank you for all the laughter!”.

This takes me to modern comedy. I think that Bush was subject to parody and teasing early in her career. In fact, Not the Nine O’ Clock News sent Bush up when Pamela Stephenson performed the song, England, My Leotard – a reference to Bush’s 1978 track, Oh England My Lionheart (from Lionheart). At the time, it might have been quite cruel and needless - though Bush has looked back on that with a degree of good humour and fondness. One genuine and compassionate nod to Bush was when Noel Fielding performed a version of Wuthering Heights for Comic Relief in 2011. Kate Bush News posted about this in the same year:

“A personal dream come true for me, the wonderful comedian Noel Fielding (The Mighty Boosh) has danced to Wuthering Heights in the BBC charity programme “Let’s Dance for Comic Relief.” The studio panel has rightly voted Noel’s performance as Kate through to the final on March 12th! We will be providing voting links for the final when they happen. There’s not much more to say except: enjoy the clip and please consider donating to Comic Relief, one of Kate’s favourite charities, here”.

I am going to finish by dropping in a song, 50 Words for Snow, that featured one of Kate Bush’s favourite people, Stephen Fry. It is another example of the comedy world bonding with the incredible Bush. In another comedic salute to her music, Steve Coogan performed a medley of Bush songs as Alan Partridge back in 1999. As the Irish Examiner reported in 2014, Coogan spoke fondly about Bush in the BBC documentary:

“Enigmatic star Kate Bush has remained tight-lipped about her reasons for her stage return 35 years after her only tour, but a new documentary reveals an unlikely possible inspiration – Steve Coogan’s comic creation Alan Partridge.

The actor, who performed a medley of the singer’s hits in character as the delusional DJ for Comic Relief and later incorporated the sketch into his stage show, revealed the Wuthering Heights singer was impressed by his performance.

Appearing on a BBC documentary, he said: “It was fun to do. People laughed and Kate Bush came to the last night of my show to see it when we performed in the West End, she said ’It’s so nice to hear all those songs again’.”

Coogan, who described Bush’s eccentric style as “a gift for satirists”, revealed he had tried to tempt her back to performing years ago but failed.

He said: “She rang me to tell me why and it turned into a long conversation about performing on stage, how terrifying it can be, and how she hadn’t done it for a long, long time and she felt just a bit scared by the prospect of going out there again.”

The tickets for Bush’s August comeback sold out in less than 15 minutes as fans went online in their thousands to buy them”.

It may sound like a minor and insignificant thing when we consider Kate Bush, though I am interested in how Bush has bonded with comedy through the years - and how her love of comedy has been reciprocated. As I said, I think Bush could have been a great actor with a comedy flair. Many of her routines and videos have comedic elements. She does raise more than a smile in many of her interviews. Legendary and modern comedians and comic actors love her work and can identify with her – many have been inspired by Kate Bush in a serious and affectionate way. I do love exploring Kate Bush from a number of different angles. Her relationship with comedy is one that fascinates me. She has a love of comedy and figures form the genre. In turn, the world of comedy…

LOVES her back.

FEATURE: A Design for Life: Manic Street Preachers’ Everything Must Go at Twenty-Five

FEATURE:

 

 

A Design for Life

Manic Street Preachers’ Everything Must Go at Twenty-Five

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I am always keen to mark big album anniversaries…

 PHOTO CREDIT: Mitch Ikeda

so it is only natural that I would mark twenty-five years of the Manic Street Preachers’ Everything Must Go. The actual anniversary is on 20th May. I will come to mentioning the twentieth anniversary reissue that came out in 2016. Released two years after the acclaimed and extraordinary The Holy Bible, the follow-up came out when Britpop was raging in this country. Despite that, the album reached number-two in the U.K., and it earned the band awards at the 1997 BRITs. Everything Must Go is often ranked alongside the best albums of all-time. I think that it is a very powerful and moving listen. The fact their lyricist Richey Edwards disappeared before the album was completed means that Everything Must Go is the Welsh band having to adapt to the terrible news and processing life without their bandmate. Although No Surface All Feeling features Edwards on rhythm guitar and a few of his lyrics feature (including Small Black Flowers That Grow in the Sky, Kevin Carter and Removables), one can feel his absence. Other bands might crumble and release an album that is weak or aimless. Conversely, Manic Street Preachers delivered a sublime and accomplished album that acknowledge the loss they were feeling but also pushed them forward. The title track, Kevin Carter, A Design for Life and Australia are my favourite tracks from Everything Must Go. In spite of the fact I have heard the album the whole way through dozens of times, I still never tire of it.

  PHOTO CREDIT: Mitch Ikeda

I want to bring in a fascinating feature from The Line of Best Fit. They wrote about the twentieth anniversary reissue of Everything Must Go and provide background and context about an absolute classic:  

“Everything Must Go began its curious gestation in January 1995, when the band spent five industrious days in the House In The Woods studio near Surrey, in the south east of England. They had recorded demos for their debut record there some four years previous and it offered a comforting sense of familiarity. Their time together was fruitful, with early versions of "Elvis Impersonator: Blackpool Pier" and "Small Black Flowers That Grow In The Sky" emerging and Edwards in good spirits. The claustrophobic intensity of the music eased a little, especially pleasing Bradfield, who would later recall, “after The Holy Bible, I worried that I couldn’t write any music that would please Richey and therefore this would have been an impasse in the band, for the first time born out of taste.”

As the brief sessions came to an end, Edwards distributed gifts to his three accomplices. James received a CD, Sean an unspecified personal item and Nicky was presented with a Daily Telegraph and a Mars bar. They were signs of gentle affection that have since taken on totemic significance, much like every little detail that is known about the days between that point and the discovery of the band’s silver Vauxhall Cavalier at the Aust motorway services just across the Severn Bridge from Wales on 14 February, 1995.

 In advance of a string of small American dates, designed to generate interest in a turbo-charged remix of The Holy Bible crafted for international audiences, Bradfield and Edwards were to head out early to undertake a round of interviews. An overnight stop at the Embassy Hotel in London on the final day of January provided whatever tipping point, opportunity or impulsive scenario the latter needed and, in withdrawing £200 of cash each day for the previous two weeks, had clearly been anticipating. At 7am the following morning, Richey Edwards exited reception and vanished. For months thereafter, generating bizarre sightings the length and breadth of the globe was a veritable cottage industry and the tabloid newspapers seized upon the chance to churn out some sensationalist headlines.

This is not the story of his disappearance though. It is the story of the aftermath and how three people used music to make sense of the most ambiguous grief imaginable. He still has a sizeable part to play in events, not least because five of the songs on Everything Must Go feature his lyrics, but idle speculation about his whereabouts shall be left to others.

The record’s first single, the song with which the band chose to step out into the public gaze once again, "A Design For Life", is built around only ten lines. That’s ‘only’ in the sense of size alone, for their impact is not to be underestimated. The boozy culture of Britpop had birthed an asinine notion that the working classes were stupid and driven by simple desires. The reclaiming of their status as those capable of intellectual insurgency resulted in the subsequently slightly misappropriated rallying cry of “we only want to get drunk.” Originally intended to highlight the media’s characterising of that section of society, even the band themselves later admitted that the quest for oblivion when eloquence alludes was a feeling with which they were all too familiar of late. It remains the final song in the band’s live sets, twenty years later.

Its title track remains one of the most grandiose and beautiful ways to tell people to fuck off politely, Nicky Wire conveying the band’s feelings that there was nothing more they could say to those who felt Manics mark 2 represented a betrayal. As for "A Design For Life", “everything had always been really theoretical with the Manics,” explains Wire, “there had always been an idea behind it, which had been great but could hold you back as well. I know it’s a terrible cliché, but it did seem for the first time that music was some kind of salvation.” The moment when Bradfield played it down the phone to Wire, they knew they had their starting point. It had emerged fully formed but now they had to do it justice in the studio and they surely couldn't have imagined what longevity it would possess. Listening back now, their elevation makes perfect sense. In the guitar fetishising Nineties, how could they fail? Even so, it came as something of a surprise. As Nicky Wire put it ten years later, “I don’t think we’d ever been comfortable being loved before, but for those twelve months we were.”

What is hard to imagine, listening to all of this stately, majestic music is the backlash that dominated the letters pages of the music weeklies. “I’m trying not to be elitist in this Manics debate,” wrote one fan at the time, before demonstrating that they weren’t trying all that hard, while another simply proclaimed that “the Manics are dead.” The aforementioned casual crowds may have altered the dynamic a little at the gigs but the transformation was not absolute. History doesn't record whether those irate scribblers returned to the fold, but it's hard to imagine those fans couldn't have found something to love even as recently as 2014’s Futurology”.

I don’t expect there will be any new releases of the album to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary. There will be a lot of conversation and celebration on 20th May. I am going to finish up with a couple of reviews. The first is from AllMusic. It relates to the original 1996 version of Everything Must Go:

“Months after the release of the harrowing The Holy Bible, Manic Street Preachers guitarist Richey James disappeared, leaving no trace of his whereabouts or his well-being. Ultimately, the remaining trio decided to carry on, releasing their fourth album, Everything Must Go, in 1996. Considering the tragic circumstances that surrounded it, Everything Must Go is the strongest, most focused, and certainly the most optimistic album the Manics ever released. Five of the songs feature lyrics Richey left behind before his disappearance, and while offering no motivation for his actions, they do hint at the depths of his despair. Nicky Wire wrote the remaining lyrics, and his songs give the record its weight and balance, confronting the issue of Richey's disappearance in a roundabout way, never explicitly mentioning the topic but offering a gritty dose of realistic optimism offering the hope that things will get better; after the nihilism of The Holy Bible, the outlook is all the more inspiring. Furthermore, the Manics' musical attack has become leaner; their music still rages, but it's channeled into concise, anthemic rock songs that soar on their own belief. Above all, Everything Must Go is a cathartic experience -- it is genuinely moving to hear the Manics offering hope without sinking to mawkish sentimentality or collapsing under the weight of their situation”.

You can buy Everything Must Go at 20. It contains a lot of extras and goodies. Drowned in Sound sat down and provided their impressions about the anniversary release:

“Try to imagine yourself in the position in which Nicky Wire, James Dean Bradfield and Sean Moore found themselves in 1995. Your entire adult life (and a bit before that) has been spent making music with your best mates. You’ve just made a gut-wrenchingly personal, career-defining album which tears open the soul and brain of your creative figurehead, leaving it bleeding all over a slightly bemused public’s headphones. And now, as sudden as it is cruel, this person is suddenly taken from you - Richey Edwards disappears, never to be seen again, leaving the remaining three Manic Street Preachers in the awful situation of having to grieve their lifelong friend and eventually figure out what the fuck to do next.

Of course, you probably know what they went on to do. Carrying on as a trio brought them a sustained period of commercial success, and at the time of writing they’ve made three times as many albums without Richey as they made with him. For the hardcore Manics fan it’s weird to consider the fact that he actually had a direct hand in a relatively small part of their discography. His shadow, however, unquestionably looms heavily over the band’s entire history.

More than enough has already been said about the first recorded taster of the Manics after Richey’s disappearance, but that’s simply because ‘A Design For Life’ is one of the most significant pieces of music that any British band has ever produced. Even 20 years on, it’s still jaw-dropping that their first piece of music after such unimaginable personal trauma could be this triumphantly undulating hymn to the working class, still one of the most gorgeous pieces of pop music in history.

Understandably, there’s nothing on Everything Must Go to quite match its wonder, but that’s not a denigration of the album. Indeed, it houses not only some of the best post-Richey music the Manics ever made, but some of their best songs full stop. The title track in particular is an exercise in pure catharsis, a painfully honest cards-on-the-table lyric about coming to terms with your past wrapped in a bombastic pop song, accompanied by an all-too symbolic video.

‘Enola/Alone’, meanwhile, is a pretty standard chunk of Everything Must Go musically, driven by some textbook melodic riffing, but it stands out primarily for some of Nicky’s most naked and affecting expressions of loss. The lines “I’ll take a picture of you / To remember how good you looked” place him in front of his wedding photos looking at two loved ones who are no longer in his life (Richey, of course, and the band’s former manager Philip Hall who died in 1993). The theme of defiance in the face of heartbreak is one which permeates the entire album, and it’s never more powerfully embodied than when James sings “All I wanna do is live / No matter how miserable it is”.

It’s not all late Nineties rock thrills, though. One of Richey’s five lyrical contributions to Everything Must Go, ‘Small Black Flowers That Grow In the Sky’ sticks out like a sore thumb at the album’s centre. A densely concise treatise about a caged animal is juxtaposed with a gorgeous harp arrangement to make one of the saddest songs the Manics ever produced. It’s without parallel as the darkest moment on Everything Must Go, and serves as something of a precursor to the macabre lyrics which would emerge in 2009 on Journal For Plague Lovers, the album which would make full use of the notebooks Richey left behind.

To paraphrase Everything Must Go’s title track, Manic Street Preachers have never been a band to escape from their history. As such, as galling as repeated reissues of records can sometimes be, at least this one brings some kind of new material to the table. A remaster of the studio recordings of the album is packaged with the full 20-song recording of their 1997 show at Manchester Nynex, including seven which didn’t make the cut of the gig’s VHS release Everything Live”.

Twenty-five years after it was released and Everything Must Go is still being discovered by new people. Whether you know the history of the band and the circumstances around Richey Edwards’ disappearance or not, you can put the album on and instantly connect with it. The songs that feature Richey Edwards are different to those written by bassist Nicky Wire. I like the fact that we get very Edwards-esque songs and Wire’s exceptional songwriting. Although there is a sense of tragedy about Everything Must Go, the songwriting and band performances are superb and timeless. On 20th May, the world will mark twenty-five years of…

A titanic and hugely important album.

FEATURE: The May Playlist: Vol. 3: The Orwellian Worrier

FEATURE:

 

 

The May Playlist

IN THIS PHOTO: Manic Street Preachers/PHOTO CREDIT: Alex Lake

 Vol. 3: The Orwellian Worrier

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THIS is another sizzling week for music…

 IN THIS PHOTO: St. Vincent/PHOTO CREDIT: Richie Davis

where there is a new track from the incredible Manic Street Preachers. Also in the mix is St. Vincent, Laura Mvula, Sleater-Kinney, Wolf Alice, Liz Phair. TORRES, Paul Weller, Leon Bridges, The Vaccines, Katy Perry, Crowded House, and Greentea Peng. Throw in some awesome Jorja Smith, Elton John/Years & Years, The Black Keys, Sylvan Esso, Olivia Rodrigo, and LAUREL, and there is something in there no matter what your tastes! It is a really solid week so, if you need that extra push to get you into the weekend, then I think this Playlist should do the job. Investigate these songs and I am sure that they will give you…

 IN THIS PHOTO: Sleater-Kinney

A real boost.   

ALL PHOTOS/IMAGES (unless credited otherwise): Artists

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Manic Street Preachers – Orwellian

Sleater-Kinney – Worry with You

Laura Mvula - Got Me

St. Vincent – The Laughing Man

PHOTO CREDIT: Jordan Hemingway

Wolf Alice - No Hard Feelings

Liz Phair – In There

TORRES - Don’t Go Puttin Wishes in My Head

The Vaccines - Headphones Baby

Crowded House – Playing with Fire

Katy Perry – Electric

Greentea Peng – Dingaling

Leon Bridges – Motorbike

Elton John, Years & Years – It’s a sin

The Go! Team - Pow

PHOTO CREDIT: Gabriela Herman for The New York Times

Sylvan Esso – Numb

Martha Wainwright - Love Will Be Reborn

Paul Weller – In Better Times

Jorja Smith – Bussdown (ft. Shaybo)

The Black Keys - Poor Boy a Long Way From Home

Olivia Rodrigo - good 4 u

easy life - have a great day

Sugarbabes – Run for Cover (MNEK Remix)

Keaton Henson – Limb

LAUREL – Let Go

Pip Millett (ft. Ghetts) - Running

Oscar Lang – Are You Happy?

Wallice - Off the Rails

Au/Ra – Bite Marks

Priya Ragu - Forgot About

Millie Turner – Pull Me Under

Tones and I – Won’t Sleep

Margo Price - Long Live the King

Cautious Clay – Wildfire

Eli & Fur – Wild Skies

AUDREY NUNA – Blossom

Greta Isaac – How to Be a Woman

Alaina Castillo - Pocket Locket

Bella Poarch - Build a B*tch

FEATURE: Spotlight: Martha Skye Murphy

FEATURE:

 

 

Spotlight

Martha Skye Murphy

___________

THERE are a few good interviews…

 PHOTO CREDIT: Ben Murphy

that I want to bring in when it comes to spotlighting the wonderful Martha Skye Murphy. She is a multidisciplinary talent who is among the most interesting and engaging artists in our midst. Having released two E.P.s last year, Heal and Yours Truly, I am keen to get Murphy’s thoughts and words on them. In 2018, she released her debut E.P., Heroides. It is a wonderful release, and one that signalled an incredible talent. There are a couple of interviews from 2019 that I want to source from first. When speaking with Fred Perry, a few questions in particular caught my eye:  

“What’s the best gig you’ve ever been to?

Daniel Johnson at the Hollywood Bowl, L.A. I didn’t realise what I was going to see at the time, I didn’t know who he was. Instantly I was so completely enamoured by his songs, by him, his humble truth, his flamboyant unexpectedness. The memory still bewitches me. That I was in his presence fills me with joyous awe.

If you could be on the line up with any two musicians in history?

Delia Derbyshire and Tom Waits.
Delia Derbyshire’s contribution to experimental music is monumental yet, she remains a sort of unsung pioneer of electronic music. I like the idea that she has seeped into so many people’s childhoods with her original 1963 theme tune for Doctor Who.
Tom Waits’ theatricality is spectacular. I love the stubborn yet tender eccentricity of his stage character, his style, his voice, his wisdom, his honky tonk piano playing, him…

A song that defines the teenage you?

'Bonnie and Clyde' - Serge Gainsbourg

A song lyric that has inspired you?

"I’m In Love with a German Film Star"
'I’m In Love with a German Film Star' - The Passions

A song you wished you had written?

'Is That All There Is?' - Peggy Lee”.

In an interview with Loud and Quiet, we learn more about her debut E.P. There is a particular part of her musical life that I want to highlight soon. Before then, we understand more about an accomplished musician and actor:

“Despite the clear lines of sight these experiences gave her into the world of music, there’s still a refreshing absence of pressure in Martha’s approach to writing. She’s unhurried, and the vast expanse is a space that her songs are inhabiting beautifully, with an assured but skeletal confidence. “I think pace is – who cares? I mean, everyone has different methods of working. But I really respect people like Jason Spaceman from Spiritualized – you know, you’re lucky if you get an album in a decade. I really like that commitment to only releasing something once it’s ready.”

Somewhere between the duality of her life as a musician and her other life as an actor, Murphy’s also considering a job offer here. She teaches English and History of Art as a tutor and sells vintage clothes at trade fairs, if only to ease her own addiction to buying clothes. “Any job is kind of a compromise on everything else that you’re about,” she says, struggling with some of the social politics behind the various worlds she enters, “like, I don’t feel fully comfortable helping privileged children get into Oxbridge, but you’ve got to play the game somehow.”

Her debut EP, Heroides, was released last year on Slow Dance. A tolling piano grounds the heart of each track for Murphy’s ethereal vocals to dance with. It was recorded at Abbey Road, but she really doesn’t like The Beatles (“I mean, saying you like The Beatles literally means nothing”). It’s a world away from the music she made when she was 15, she tells me, all of which accidentally included the digital metronome in the back of GarageBand. Her work sits in good company with the likes of Amanda Palmer and PJ Harvey; there are hints of ‘Cloudbusting’-era Kate Bush on the melodramatic vocals of ‘Soaked’. There’s a dark theatricality to everything that makes it feel like you’re being toyed with slightly – laughed at in a teasing way, similar to Aldous Harding’s Paganist contortions on a song about a party, or Jessica Pratt’s heavy-lidded dirge about just how fucking in love she is. You’re compelled to keep coming back, if just to prove yourself worthy. Take Murphy’s cover of Bill Callahan’s ‘Rock Bottom Riser’, which accentuates the line “I bought this guitar to pledge my love to you,” as she plays it on piano.

It’s not ironic, though. You can hear her characters shifting deftly from the interior to exterior while still resonating with Amanda Palmer’s philosophy: stop pretending art is hard, just limit yourself to three chords and don’t practice daily”.

Just to jump ahead slightly. In this interview, Murphy was discussing the (at the time) forthcoming E.P., Yours Truly. I want to bring in this interview now because it is interesting learning about her collaborations with Nick Cave and Warren Ellis:  

“Martha Skye Murphy was just 9 years old when she first collaborated with Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, recording vocals for the soundtrack to John Hillcoat’s 2005 Western The Proposition. In 2013, she contributed backing vocals to Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ spacious and contemplative Push the Sky Away and accompanied them on their subsequent tour. These early experiences had a profound influence on Murphy, who grew up in an artistic environment in South East London before going on to study History of Art at Cambridge University. Like Cave, the singer-songwriter and actor has a penchant for combining a dark sense of theatricality with pure emotional expression, two creative modes that are often seen as mutually exclusive. Inspired by classical literature, and specifically Ovid’s Heroides, her 2018 debut EP of the same name showcased her ethereal vocals as they coiled around dramatic piano and string arrangements, while her first EP of 2020, Heal, is more minimal and abstract, invoking the haunting soundscapes of a Grouper album. She casts these hypnotic qualities in a new light on her forthcoming EP, Yours Truly, whose strikingly potent title track brims with slow-burning intensity before culminating in a hair-raising crescendo.

About your new EP, you’ve said that you found yourself resorting to the voice of a child as a way to “confront the topic of ‘dishonesty’.” What do you feel you took away from channelling that voice, and how do you think it might influence your songwriting process going into the future?

Children have a conflicting relationship to deception and truth. They can be excellent liars yet also have a profound skill in telling you how it is! On the one hand I was interested in how childish behaviour manifests and on the other, in how by adopting the voice of an innocent I was able to explore a method of expression that exemplified the human’s capacity to feel such an extreme range of contradictory emotions. When people play at being adults it’s interesting to spot when they’re suppressing, modifying or hiding behind a veneer of ‘self’; one that is projected and dishonest. This partly comes from an enforced societal expectation for people to ‘grow up’. So without parenting, disciplining or taming myself within the songs, writing instantaneously and not labouring over them too much, the unpredictable structures and sometimes incomplete and abstract narratives came to life.

In addition to being a musician, you’re also an actor. What role does that kind of multidisciplinarity play in your work?

It means that the music is both a parasite and a feeder, it’s a database and also a portal to access other mediums of expression and interests for me. The multidisciplinary approach is just part of my nature, I look for meaning, inspiration and art in everything around me whether it’s real or imagined.

Both of the E.P.s Martha Skye Murphy released last year are fantastic. I especially love Heal. It is an E.P. that I would recommend people investigate and spend some time with. Not only do we hear more about the E.P. from a 2020 interview from The Line of Best Fit; Murphy’s early life and childhood musical loves are explored:

“Nestled in Herne Hill, Murphy remembers her childhood as one of great creativity and artistic stimulation – one where music “was never dormant”; speaking with real verve reliving her early obsessions with Shirley Bassey, Diana Washington, and Nancy Sinatra and her insistence that her mother buys her Dare! by The Human League for her 10th birthday.

During secondary school, Murphy submerged herself in the post-punk of Josef K, PiL, Gang of Four, and The Gun Club and began worshipping at the altar of Serge Gainsbourg. All of this was to the eternal bafflement of her peers who scrolled through her iPod before asking: “Why do you listen to old music? Why don’t you listen to Drake?”

As Murphy further descended into music’s cavernous vaults (Drake included), Nick Cave continued to encourage her musically, and their paths would cross again when he invited her to record vocals for three tracks on his 2013 album Push the Sky Away. At this point, Murphy was only 17.

Heal, her freshly released second EP that is already casting ripples in London’s musical pond continues this chthonic conjuring: “Heal is meant to make you realise how the past makes you feel incredibly present. How the things in the past can haunt you and linger like leeches.”

The record, made up of three songs, unfurls like a sacred procession to a waiting chamber with Murphy’s vocals luring you along. It radiates a distinctly Egyptian otherness nestled within a Tricento trance echoing Dante’s Divine Comedy.

During the opener “Dung Beetle”, Murphy tempts us to become lost in her forest of hieroglyphics: “I have spent my day travelling and waiting / when I was lulled into a hazy boredom / stuck on a platform / I received a beetle / a sticky dung beetle / with nothing but juice to give”.

The centrepiece of the EP, the 7-minute track "Heal" is almost ceremonial with its gentle drumming guiding the listener forward; with Murphy’s equally airy and screeching vocals coaxing epiphanies through the looped ouroboros-like repetition of a handful of slippery koans embedded in meditative soundscapes like insects in amber.

Murphy is adamant that she wants the listener to emerge into the wondrously strange closer “Augustine” clutching onto their own singular revelations: “When I write lyrics, I want them to be able to be heard and read with many meanings. I am using the words to get people to think about truth and stories and lies and how lies and deception can reveal truth in many ways”.

I’d like to challenge the multi-disciplinary aspects of the work much further”.

  PHOTO CREDIT: Ben Murphy

I am going to wrap up with an interview from earlier this year. In her chat with God is in the TV, Murphy looks back on her second E.P. of 2020, Yours Truly. Every interview with the songwriter reveals something memorable and amazing:

“She released her excellent EP ‘Yours Truly’ at the end of 2020. It came off the back of the ‘Heal’ EP, and cemented a reputation for wonderful spectral and slightly unsettling songwriting invested with the kind of majestic, peeling back of the curtain of reality that the likes of PJ Harvey and Joanna Newsome can conjure. These sparse, piano-led arrangements ripple with Murphy’s exquisitely artful tone, sitting on the razor’s edge of beautiful and sinister.

Murphy describes her ‘Yours Truly‘ EP as “a children’s book for adults.” The narrator on ‘Yours Truly’ oscillates between the vocal character of a child, ruminating on the vulnerability of being an adult. Normalising the fluctuating emotions an adult’s perspective might deem unstable; and a thoughtful protagonist who alludes to Russian politics, Greek legend, the Mafia, contemporary psychoanalysis, digital ethics, profiling and surveillance capitalism.

She says, “The best way of disguising yourself is through the appearance of truth. These songs are my exploration of that. They are the raw skin underneath a scab”.

She describes a starkly ascending piano motif across ‘Outis’ as her ‘analogue inversion of a Shepard tone’.

“Shepherd tones are amazing. It’s that moment in a pop banger, or like a drum and bass song where it escalates and seemingly keeps going up and up and up, and up and up, and up and up.”

Above this Martha emotes surreal, existential fragments of poetry, her voice is reminiscent of Kate Bush or Jenny Hval in its artful improvisatory, hushed style that sounds like a whisper in the ear.

Murphy doesn’t want to be prescriptive. She doesn’t want to explain exactly what the songs are about. To allow the listener to sort of make up their own whatever their impression is.

“Well, I think the intention is really to engender meaning for someone else. Yeah. So for me to explain to you what I was thinking or writing specifically about is almost kind of pointless, because really, the point of my work is to trigger as many interpretations and ultimately kind of make people reflect on their inner sanctums”.

“It’s not necessarily me that I’m writing about. I write very briefly, using snippets of conversations that I’ve had, in a kind of cut-up fashion, like Bowie but hopefully not as cruelly as him,” she explains”.

I am going to round things up there. I would encourage people to follow Martha Skye Murphy on social media. She is a phenomenal young artist who has been in the industry since she was a child. That said, her best years are very much ahead. I think we are going to see a lot more amazing music from Murphy. Having recently appeared on the Squid single, Narrator, she is proving herself to be someone who can collaborate with a wide range of artists and produce her own unique music. Such a versatile talent should be recognised. I know we will hear this golden and brilliant music…

FOR many years more.

___________

Follow Martha Skye Murphy

 PHOTO CREDIT: Ceidra Moon Murphy

Facebook:

https://www.facebook.com/MarthaSkyeMurphy/

Twitter:

https://twitter.com/martha_skye

Instagram:

https://www.instagram.com/marthaskye/

Spotify:

https://open.spotify.com/artist/4riGlB4lkpPDgJscJid8FA

YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCpYBePjrEPWKIdAIXuwU7ww

Bandcamp:

https://marthaskyemurphy.bandcamp.com/

FEATURE: Second Spin: Ocean Colour Scene - Moseley Shoals

FEATURE:

 

 

Second Spin

Ocean Colour Scene - Moseley Shoals

___________

FOLLOWING their somewhat…

underwhelming eponymous debut came the confident and brilliant Moseley Shoals. Ocean Colour Scene’s terrific album of 1996, it celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary last month. This is an album I bought when it came out. As a twelve-year-old, it was quite an exciting album to get! Epic hits like The Riverboat Song and The Day We Caught the Train are among the very best of the 1990s. I have been writing a piece or two about Britpop lately. I am not sure whether one could say whether Birmingham’s Ocean Colour Scene were part of the scene’s elite - though Moseley Shoals was definitely part of the Britpop conversation. Even though, in 1998, Q magazine's readers voted Moseley Shoals the thirty-third-greatest album of all-time and it was ranked at forty-two in Pitchfork's 2017 poll of The 50 Best Britpop Albums, I think that many people have overlooked the album. In terms of critical response, it has certainly divided them. In 1996, maybe Ocean Colour Scene were viewed as being outsiders or not as strong as other Britpop bands. Some since have said the album is a little dated and only worthy because of its two biggest and best-known singles. I am going to bring in a couple of contrasting reviews. The first, from NME is from 1996:

“Ocean Colour Scene, the lucky buggers, are one of the chosen few (the others include the late (?) Stone Roses, Primal Scream and Cast, obviously. The main policy committee will be meeting to discuss the merits of The Bluetones shortly). OCS are in the firm because they sound like a mod Free with paisley shirts instead of stretch denim, because they make real blues explosion music that exists in a timewarp between '66 and '75, and because guitarist Steve Cradock is Weller's right-hand session man and bassist Damon Minchella has also done time with the Modfather. Actually, that's all a little unfair on OCS. You don't have to work in a guitar shop or rehearsal studios to dig their 'Scene (although it probably helps). There's plenty to be admired on 'Moseley Shoals', their follow-up to '92's House-Of-Love-gone-slightly-wonky eponymous debut. The musicianship, especially Cradock's fluid guitar, is immaculate. Simon Fowler sings with a rich and powerful, if overly-mannered, voice, and songs like 'Fleeting Mind', which sounds like Arthur Lee from Love in charge of an acoustic Cream, and the epic psychedelic finale 'Get Away' soothe with a warm, soft beauty.

But too often the push for musical authenticity grates. Why the repeated solos, why obscure decent tracks by shoving a dozen different guitar sounds into one song just to prove you can, why the constant preening and showing-off? We know you can play. It was the songwriting that people doubted.

Still, if you're looking for a progressive blues band in 1996, then rest assured that OCS would've punched their weight in the late-'60s when this stuff was regarded as almost cutting-edge.

Free and early Chicago (oh God, who's sadder? Those who imitate early Chicago, or those who notice it?) would've been proud to have produced 'Moseley Shoals', and for those still fascinated by the genre - Wellah! Wellah! - then this must represent some modern-day epitome. But, please, if you're playing with this stuff at home, remember there's more to excite you from music's vast canyon than '60s psychedelia and old rockin' blooze”.

It does seem a little unfair that Moseley Shoals received tepidness and some criticism. I think that it is a really solid and interesting album from a band who have split critics through the years. Go and listen to Moseley Shoals and I know that there is plenty in there for everyone.

There are those who hold love and time for Moseley Shoals. I’ll bring in another point of review. In their more considered, fairer and positive review, this is what AllMusic had to say a few years ago:

“By the time Ocean Colour Scene released their debut album in 1992, they were already considered has-beens. The band had formed during the height of Madchester, but they never released their first album until the scene was already dead, which left them without a following. But between their debut and their second album, 1996's Moseley Shoals, a strange thing happened -- the band was taken under the wings of two of Britain's biggest pop stars, Paul Weller and Noel Gallagher. The band suddenly catapulted back into the spotlight because of its superstar connections, but the music actually deserved the attention. Ocean Colour Scene had spent the time between their two albums improving their sound. On Moseley Shoals, they are looser, funkier, and have a strong, organic R&B vibe that was inherited from the Small Faces and Weller's solo recordings. They sprinkle Beatlesque and Stonesy flourishes throughout the album, as well as the odd prog rock flair, adding an even more eclectic flavor to their traditionalist pop/rock. Ocean Colour Scene are still developing their songwriting skills -- the sound is more impressive than the songs throughout Moseley Shoals -- but their second album is an unexpectedly enjoyable record”.

Moseley Shoals is by no means a perfect album. I would not rank it as one of the best of 1996, though it is far stronger and more appealing than it has been given credit for. I want to actually wrap up with an article from The Guardian. Published in 2016 (to mark the album’s twentieth anniversary), it is clear Ocean Colour Scene did not deserve so much flak:

“Today marks 20 years since Ocean Colour Scene’s Moseley Shoals entered the British charts. It was the band’s second stab at success: their self-titled 1992 debut sunk without trace and they’d been honing the follow-up for four penniless years. “We knew it was good,” said guitarist Steve Cradock. “We spent a lot of time working on it.” Championed by Radio 1’s Chris Evans – who loved The Riverboat Song so much he made it the theme tune to TFI Friday – it screamed in at No 2 and stayed in the top 10 all summer, buoyed by support from Paul Weller and Noel Gallagher. The real reason for its success, though, was simpler: it was an absolute gem of a record, by a brilliant group of musicians.

Nostalgia aside, though, how does Moseley Shoals stand up in 2016? Playing it again, I found the answer was: surprisingly well. There are a few obvious flaws. Some tracks, such as bangy piano rocker 40 Past Midnight, feel like filler, and I’ve never liked the droney You’ve Got It Bad. Then there are the lyrics, which – thanks to frontman Simon Fowler’s writing method of improvising into a cassette player – can be cryptic, to say the least. “Like a king who stalks the wings and shoots a dove and frees an eagle instead,” he sings on Riverboat. Quite! When the lines do make sense, they tend to reach for regulation Britpop images of suns, shadows, shoes and roads. Just thankfully no keys to any doors.

Musically, though, the album still prompts an all-out assault on nearby drummable surfaces. The Riverboat Song’s scalding riff – “It came from me being really pissed off one day,” says Cradock – still makes me lip-bite like David Brent and reach for my air Gibson. The Circle is a flat-out masterpiece, all the way from its feedback fade-in to its lovely, shredding outro. There’s depth, too: beyond encore favourite The Day We Caught the Train there’s the sorrowing One for the Road, the sweetly complex It’s My Shadow and Lining Your Pockets, with its pertinent lyrics about greed. Fowler’s achingly tuneful croon is light years ahead of anything his contemporaries offered: less laddy than Liam, less hammy than Damon, more sincere than Jarvis. This is still, I realise, an album I’d sooner put on than many of the others I loved in that era, including Different Class, Expecting to Fly, All Change, and even possibly Definitely Maybe.

On the 20th anniversary of this brilliant album, it seems a perfect time to pay tribute to a group who took more flak than they really deserved, and whose chief crime was probably only that they were a little too normal. “There is an edge missing from the band’s material that could perhaps be provided if these four unassuming guys hated each other more, or were suffering a bit more,” wrote one Telegraph journalist in 1998. Mmm. By way of contrast, I’ll leave you with a comment from a YouTube user, Andy, who wrote under the video for The Circle: “Brilliant song. Nothing fancy. Nothing pretentious. Nothing over the top. Just simple, beautiful music with lyrics that conjure up a thousand thoughts and situations”.

I have been reacquainting myself with Moseley Shoals after I saw a lot of social media posts on its twenty-fifth anniversary last month. I love the album in 1996 and, despite a few weaker tracks, there is plenty to appreciate and be captivated by on the band’s second album. In spite of some critical backlash and others who were not bothered, I think that the excellent Moseley Shoals…

WARRANTS a new look and listen.

FEATURE: Dutch Courage: Looking Back at the 1978 Efteling T.V. Special

FEATURE:

 

Dutch Courage

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush at The Efteling, The Netherlands, in 1978

Looking Back at the 1978 Efteling T.V. Special

___________

FOR this feature…

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush on the Dutch T.V. show, TopPop, in 1978

I am going back to 1978. I write a lot about The Kick Inside and Kate Bush’s amazing debut of that year. The reason for going back to 1978 was to highlight a T.V. appearance from Bush that, I think, too quite a lot of courage. Although she did a series of T.V. interviews and performances around the world that year, I think that her appearance from the Efteling amusement park in The Netherlands was one of her biggest. Quite a long live performance and concept, maybe it planted the seeds for her 1979 extravaganza, The Tour of Life. Whilst the production values and sets are not as professional and exciting as we saw in that tour, I am interested in the TROS broadcast. Before going on, the Kate Bush Encyclopaedia gives us some details and breakdown:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The special starts with a tombstone bearing the name Kate Bush. This tombstone was the subject of a lot of speculation among Dutch Kate Bush fans, since it disappeared from view between 1978 and 2003. The tombstone suddenly resurfaced in 2003 at the 25th anniversary of the Haunted Castle, and stood there at the entrance. Since 2007 the tombstone can be seen in the catacombs of the main show in the castle.

Light designer Bert Klos recounted about the recording of the special in 2014. "They were very heady days. There were so many different locations and I wanted to support the actions of Bush as well as possible with light. She was a short woman with a thin voice, but very professional. That woman couldn't be stopped, she just kept on going. When we wanted to sit down for a while, she already stood up and said: 'come on guys!'. I can even recall a soundman tripping across his own feet from sleep at 1am!" Henk Gulikers, who did camera during these days, recalled: "We didn't sleep until 3am and at 6.30am we were back around the table with Kate and a cup of tea. We stayed in Hotel De Swaen in Oisterwijk. I got an LP from her, on which she'd written: 'For dear Henk, the one who is very much alive behind the dead camera.' Very nice, I liked that. Apparently she felt very much at ease”.

I might do a feature down the line of Bush’s T.V. live appearances in 1978. She stopped performing on television many years ago. She featured on Top of the Pops through the years, though the last time was when she did a lipsynch performance of And So Is Love (The Red Shoes) in 1994, dressed in black, together with two female backing singers. I think that Bush probably tired of T.V. long before the 1990s - so I think that it is interesting looking back at the 1970s and 1980s.

During such an intense promotional campaign – The Kick Inside was released in February 1978 -, it is wonderful that she gave so much of her time in the middle of a tiring whirlwind of T.V. and media interviews. Whilst she was there to promote the Dutch amusement park, it was a chance for new audience members and viewers to discover Bush. I think that, in terms of ramping up the promotion of Bush and her debut album, the Efteling special was the first big step. That was in May 1978. On 18th June, Bush performed Moving to an audience of 11,000 people at the Nippon Budokan for the seventh Tokyo Music Festival. For someone who was not a fan of travelling and would have been exhausted come June, I think that Bush is captivating during her Efteling special. I am fascinated by the year 1978 and everything Kate Bush undertook! There must have been this tussle between wanting to get out to her fans and promote her music and the demands and intense itinerary of EMI. Keen to show off their young star and get her music to as many nations as possible, Bush is remarkably committed and professional through a hectic year – considering she turned twenty in July 1978, she was still incredibly young! Although the video quality is not overly-great, I have watched her ‘set’ from Efteling. It is one that is, in equal parts, fantastic, odd and entrancing! If you have not seen it then go and check it out. Her time in The Netherlands in 1978 definitely resulted in…

A really interesting television appearance.

FEATURE: Spotlight: Japanese Breakfast

FEATURE:

 

 

Spotlight

PHOTO CREDIT: Jackie Lee Young 

Japanese Breakfast

___________

FOR this round of Spotlight…

I get to discuss one of my favourite artists right now. I have been following Japanese Breakfast for quite a while now.  Japanese Breakfast is the solo musical project of the U.S. musician Michelle Zauner. Zauner has released two studio albums: Psychopomp (2016) and Soft Sounds from Another Planet (2017) - with a third, Jubilee, announced for release on 4th June. I am going to come to that album in a bit. Before anything musical, as Pitchfork recently wrote, Zauner’s (I shall refer to her by her real name just for this one article) memoir achieved a huge honour:

“Michelle Zauner, aka Japanese Breakfast, just released her memoir Crying in H Mart. Today it debuted at No. 2 on The New York Times’ Hardcover Nonfiction Best Seller List. “NOW I’M JUST CRYING,” Zauner wrote on Twitter. The book was outsold in its category only by George W. Bush’s art book Out of Many, One. Zauner wrote: “God damn George Bush and his dumb ass paintings!!!!”

Zauner will discuss the book at a virtual talk for Harvard Book Store tonight at 7 p.m. Eastern with Alyse Whitney. “I will be very drunk and happy at this event tonight,” Zauner tweeted.

The new Japanese Breakfast album Jubilee is out June 4 via Dead Oceans. It features “Be Sweet” and “Posing in Bondage.” She recently announced a tour”.

I am really looking forward to Jubilee coming out, as I have heard Japanese Breakfast’s previous two albums and I really love what she is doing.

I am keen to bring in a Pitchfork profile of Japanese Breakfast from back in March. I am not going to put the whole feature in this one. There are a few interesting sections and observations that I wanted to mention:

“Recorded in 2019 and initially slated for release last year, Jubilee was delayed again and again as the world stopped and then slowly came to terms with a new reality, one without touring. Zauner had imagined recruiting string and horn sections in every city, and for a long time, she couldn’t bear to sacrifice this dramatic vision for grainy, acoustic live-stream performances. She’d spent the previous few years studying music theory and piano. Encouraged by her bandmate and co-producer Craig Hendrix, she helped compose the string and horn arrangements for the first time.

Japanese Breakfast has always been good at simultaneous forms of musical homage, and Jubilee is reminiscent of multiple eras of indie touchstones: the regal arrangements of mid-’oos indie-folk groups; the dreamy chillwave of Wild Nothing, who co-wrote the first single, “Be Sweet”; a touch of pop extravagance à la Kate Bush, one of Zauner’s main influences; the extended, windswept indie-guitar-hero moment we’ve come to expect in the genre, that feels somehow indebted to Nels Cline. Through it all, she emanates an outward electricity and deep interiority. The dazzling opening number, “Paprika,” signals a new age, bursting open like the ripest of fruits. “How’s it feel to stand at the height of your powers/To captivate every heart? Projecting your visions to strangers who feel it, who listen, who linger on every word,” she wonders on the song, before proclaiming what that sensation feels like: “Oh, it’s a rush!”

Neither of the first two Japanese Breakfast albums, 2016’s Psychopomp and 2017’s Soft Sounds From Another Planet, aspired to quite these heights. Written in the wake of her mother’s death in 2014, both records sound insular compared to Jubilee. On the new album’s cover, Zauner sits in a cloud-like, duckling-colored gown surrounded by dangling persimmons, symbols of bitter fruit maturing into something sweet.

“Soft Sounds was about disassociating to preserve my mental health,” she explains. “After writing two albums and a book about grief, I feel very ready to embrace feeling.” She points to songs like “Kokomo, IN,” which finds a midwestern teenage boy “passing time just popping wheelies” as he waits for his young lover’s return, or the wistfully funky “Slide Tackle,” which imagines physically forcing mental darkness into submission. “I wanted to just explore a different part of me: I am capable of joy and I have experienced a lot of joy,” she says. “All the songs are different reminders of how to experience or carve out space for that.”

She lived in Seoul for her first year of life, until her parents relocated to Eugene, Oregon, which she describes as “a hippie town where everyone wears Birkenstocks and makes nut butter.” The Pacific Northwest was in the midst of yet another indie rock boom during Zauner’s childhood in the ’90s, and by her teenage years, she was a devout fan of artists like Modest Mouse, Joanna Newsom, and Mount Eerie. (Among her many tattoos is a drawing from Phil Elverum’s book Dawn, depicting the eternal struggle of social anxiety vs. loneliness.) She also discovered the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ Karen O, whose onstage theatrics and Korean-American heritage hugely inspired her. “The art that resonates with me the most is someone who feels so much just putting it all on display,” she says.

Under the name Little Girl, Big Spoon, a teenaged Zauner played her songs at school benefits, open-mic nights, and, eventually, legitimate venues around Eugene. In Crying in H Mart’s accounts of these early performances, she never once mentions being nervous, and she has no memories of shaky legs or forgetting the words to her sensitive songs. When I point this out, it’s almost as if the impulse to be frightened in front of a crowd has never registered to her. She explains that nerves are not really in her nature, before calling herself a lifelong “disruptive clown—I just loved to be the center of attention and make people laugh.”

Zauner has long harbored writerly ambitions, but she always figured that if she pursued a writing career, it would be in journalism. “I took every single creative writing course that was offered in college except for nonfiction,” she says. “I never felt like I could write about my own experiences because I would have to preface it with my identity and race. I couldn’t just be this neutral body. Suddenly, there was an urgency to tell this story largely as a way to figure out what I was feeling.” Writing from dressing rooms, tour vans, and an extended stay in Korea, Zauner excavated lost memories, like the way her mother lovingly broke in a pair of stiff leather cowboy boots before mailing them to her at college.

 Looking back now, Zauner’s workaholic tendencies intensified following her mother’s death. She suspects that she was unconsciously leaning into the version of herself that her mom had always encouraged. But on a more immediate level, she needed to throw herself into work to not fall “into a very dark place, one I wouldn’t be able to get out of.”

The side projects during the four years since Soft Sounds have spanned wide. Zauner’s been writing the soundtrack to Sable, an upcoming open-world video game about a young girl’s rite-of-passage quest, for the past three years; she describes her contributions as “sprawling, ambient-chill tracks.” Last September, she released an EP of pop songs with Crying’s Ryan Galloway, under the name BUMPER. She even dabbled in television, hosting her own Vice food series and appearing in an episode of the absurdist sitcom Search Party, in which she plays a wedding guitarist cursed to perform Boyz II Men’s “I’ll Make Love to You” for a comically long time. “She’s always had a clear vision of what she wants,” says longtime friend Adam Kolodny, who’s worked with Zauner on every Japanese Breakfast video. “Michelle will eventually direct a feature film”.

Before ending up and looking ahead to the release of Jubilee next month, I wanted to take a quick glance back at the previous Japanese Breakfast album, Soft Sounds from Another Planet. It is an album that ranked alongside the very best of 2017. If you have not heard that album then I would urge you to have a listen to it.

I want to quote one positive review of that album – just to give a sense of how critics reacted to Soft Sounds from Another Planet. This is what AllMusic had to offer in their extensive review:

The first Japanese Breakfast album Psychopomp was the best kind of bedroom pop record; fragile, intimate, and slightly weird. It drew from various indie pop tributaries and was built around Michelle Zauner's achingly pure vocals and her unique pop vision. On Soft Sounds from Another Planet, she and producer Craig Hendrix take the project out of the bedroom and aim for something larger. Much slicker and less wonky, the songs have a spacious, expansive sound that envelops the listener in warmth (even when the synths get a little chilly.) In less capable hands, the jump to a more professional sound could have been a disaster. Zauner and Hendrix don't sacrifice much of the idiosyncratic appeal of the first album; it still comes across as Zauner's vision and not a bid for indie chart success. She doesn't tamp down on the wild edges of her voice, she still writes very personal lyrics, and even when the songs veer toward the same '80s synth pop territory in which everyone else seems hellbent on staking a claim, the album doesn't lose its distinct charm. What the duo add to the mix is greater than anything that was lost in the transition; the walls of fuzzy guitars, the Spector-sized echo, the impact her voice makes now that it is clearly recorded. While there are songs on the previous album that had some real emotional impact, there was some odd stuff that failed to connect. Now everything hits like a knockout punch. Tracks like the guitar-heavy, almost shoegaze "Diving Woman," the soft focus, soft rock lament "Til Death," and the epic girl-group-in-space "Boyish" are wonderful combinations of lyrical insight, evocative arrangements, and stunning vocal performances that show Zauner can go big and still sound down to earth. The slick synth pop of "Machinist," the acoustic folk balladry of "This House," and the rock & roll waltz of the title track prove that Zauner has range, too. Soft Sounds from Another Planet is a giant leap forward for Japanese Breakfast; the move to a bigger sound results in a sure-handed modern pop record full of memorable songs, heart-wrenching vocals, and bottomless emotional depth.

With a lot of eyes on Japanese Breakfast at the moment, I feel that we are going to get a cracker of an album with Jubilee. I also feel this is an artist that we will be hearing a lot more from in years to come. I would recommend people pre-order Jubilee. This is what Rough Trade have to say:

“From the moment she began writing her new album, Japanese Breakfast’s Michelle Zauner knew that she wanted to call it Jubilee. After all, a jubilee is a celebration of the passage of time—a festival to usher in the hope of a new era in brilliant technicolor. Zauner’s first two albums garnered acclaim for the way they grappled with anguish; Psychopomp was written as her mother underwent cancer treatment, while Soft Sounds From Another Planet took the grief she held from her mother‘s death and used it as a conduit to explore the cosmos. Now, at the start of a new decade, Japanese Breakfast is ready to fight for happiness, an all-too-scarce resource in our seemingly crumbling world.

Jubilee finds Michelle Zauner embracing ambition and, with it, her boldest ideas and songs yet. Inspired by records like Bjork’s Homogenic, Zauner delivers bigness throughout - big ideas, big textures, colours, sounds and feelings. At a time when virtually everything feels extreme, Jubilee sets its sights on maximal joy, imagination, and exhilaration. It is, in Michelle Zauner’s words, “a record about fighting to feel. I wanted to re-experience the pure, unadulterated joy of creation...The songs are about recalling the optimism of youth and applying it to adulthood. They’re about making difficult choices, fighting ignominious impulses and honouring commitments, confronting the constant struggle we have with ourselves to be better people.”

Throughout Jubilee, Zauner pours her own life into the universe of each song to tell real stories, and allowing those universes, in turn, to fill in the details. Joy, change, evolution - these things take real time, and real effort. And Japanese Breakfast is here for it”.

I shall leave things there. The multi-talented Michelle Zauner is an artist that I have so much respect and time for. Keep your eyes out for her - and also listen to the work she has put out so far. In Japanese Breakfast, we have this extraordinary and rising artist who is going to be a big...

NAME of the future.

___________________

Follow Japanese Breakfast

PHOTO CREDIT: Jackie Lee Young  

Official:

http://japanesebreakfast.rocks/

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https://michellezauner.bandcamp.com/

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FEATURE: Behind the Velvet Rope: Janet Jackson at Fifty-Five: Her Five Essential Albums

FEATURE:

 

 

Behind the Velvet Rope

Janet Jackson at Fifty-Five: Her Five Essential Albums

___________

THIS is sort of like A Buyer’s Guide…

but I feel, ahead of Janet Jackson’s fifty-fifth birthday on 16th May, it was a good idea to point people in the direction of her five finest albums. Her eleventh studio album, Unbreakable, was released in 2015. I am hopeful that we get another album from the brilliant and awe-inspiring Jackson. Before getting to the albums, it is worth bringing in some biography:

“Janet Jackson, in full Janet Damita Jo Jackson, (born May 16, 1966, Gary, Indiana, U.S.), American singer and actress whose increasingly mature version of dance-pop music made her one of the most popular recording artists of the 1980s and ’90s.

The youngest of nine siblings in Motown’s famed Jackson family, Janet Jackson parlayed her family’s success into an independent career that spanned recordings, television, and film. She appeared as a regular on the 1970s television comedy series Good Times and later as a teenager in the dance-oriented series Fame. Following an unremarkable recording debut in 1982 and a 1984 follow-up album, Jackson took control of her career, moved out on her own, and developed her own sound and influential style.

She reemerged in 1986 with her breakthrough record Control, which featured five singles that topped the rhythm-and-blues charts, including two Top Ten pop hits, “What Have You Done for Me Lately” and “Nasty.” Her fierce independence struck a chord with the youth of the day, and Jackson rose to a level of stardom that rivaled that of Michael Jackson, the most famous of her brothers. Her collaborations with the production team of Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis (based in Minneapolis, Minnesota) produced bold, beat-heavy, catchy songs that defined the punch and power of 1980s dance and pop music. Jackson returned in 1989 with her most diverse work, Janet Jackson’s Rhythm Nation 1814. The album delivered seven pop Top Ten hit singles, including “Miss You Much,” “Escapade,” and “Love Will Never Do (Without You).

Jackson continued to enjoy worldwide popularity and critical acclaim in the 1990s with the albums janet. (1993), Design of a Decade (1995), and The Velvet Rope (1997). Between the release of All for You (2001), which continued in the sensual vein of janet., and Damita Jo (2004), Jackson was at the centre of a debate on decency standards on television, when a “wardrobe malfunction” (that some argued was accidental and others said premeditated) caused a scandal during her live performance at halftime of the 2004 Super Bowl. Her later albums included 20 Y.O. (2006) and Discipline (2008). Unbreakable (2015), billed as a comeback album, used contemporary electronic arrangements to bolster the velvety vocals that had established Jackson as an R&B star. In 2019 Jackson was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame”.

To mark the upcoming fifty-fifth birthday of one of music’s legends and icons, I think people should dig into the catalogue of Janet Jackson. Do a deeper dive if you can but, if you need to drill to the essentials, I think the five below should give you a lot of gold and genius Jackson. I think that her more modern music is incredible - showing how consistent she is as an artist and creative force! Jackson keeps producing such awesome albums. Let’s hope that this does not stop…

ANYTIME soon.

______________

Control

Release Date: 4th February, 1986

Label: A&M

Producers: Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis/Monte Moir

Standout Tracks: Control/Nasty/The Pleasure Principle

Buy: https://www.discogs.com/sell/release/250716

Review:

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

Choice Cut: What Have You Done for Me Lately

Janet Jackson's Rhythm Nation 1814

Release Date: 19th September, 1989

Label: A&M

Producers: James ‘Jimmy Jam’ Harris/Terry Lewis/Janet Jackson/Jellybean Johnson

Standout Tracks: State of the World/Escapade/Black Cat

Buy: https://www.discogs.com/sell/list?master_id=92699&ev=mb

Review:

“That some dismissive critics then thought the politics were separable from the love songs was an incorrect reading. Jackson’s further assertion of self was as personal-as-political as the era demanded, reflecting in part her relationship and eventual marriage to René Elizondo, done in secret to keep both the press and her former dadager at bay. She was fully growing into herself as a human, exploring her internal territory and reconciling it with the world outside, while pushing herself musically more than ever. “Black Cat,” which she wrote entirely herself, was the fully manifested example of this internal and external congealing. She threw down a slinky, sexy snarl over a rock guitar shred that was also wildly jiggy, making an unlikely dive-bar banger that spoke to both gang members and the wronged women who loved them. Another nod to history—topically, the bad boy lament could be traced back to Big Mama Thornton, the black blueswoman who invented rock’n’roll—Jackson was proving to the world she was as versatile as any other chart-topper of the day, and no move she made was without substance. Perhaps by presenting her self-made utopia, she also envisioned that the real-life dystopian one would recognize her not for what it wanted her to be, but for who she was” – Pitchfork

Choice Cut: Rhythm Nation

janet.

Release Date: 18th May, 1993

Label: Virgin

Producers: Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis/Janet Jackson/Jellybean Johnson

Standout Tracks: You Want This/Because of Love/Whoops Now (hidden track)

Buy: https://www.discogs.com/sell/list?master_id=92705&ev=mb

Review:

“Dignity firmly in pocket, Jackson is ready to try anything. You can view her various styles as a plethora of different positions. Janet. touches R&B, hip-hop, soul, funk, rock, house, jazz and opera with the singer’s pop sensibility. The mix may lack purity, but the ambitious choices and flexibility leave a bold impression.

Bold indeed are the juxtapositions of Jackson with opera star Kathleen Battle and Public Enemy’s Chuck D. Battle’s voice soars and sounds like an instrument imitating the human voice on “This Time,” while “New Agenda” finds Jackson gliding over hip-hop-inspired beats as Chuck bursts through. The lyrics of “Agenda” follow that same pattern: It fits a Jackson to write a song demanding a new program and leave the rapper to propose the plan.

On Control and Rhythm Nation, Jackson’s collaborators, producers Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, were hotter than a flame’s bright yellow center. Those albums are exemplary late-Eighties state-of-the-art R&B. But the Jam and Lewis fire no longer cracks and roars as it once did. Predictably, Janet shares the bill this time as coproducer, resulting in a less groundbreaking sound but a wider-ranging album.

The seventy-five minutes of Janet. are less long than long overdue. A significant, even revolutionary transition in the sexual history and popular iconography of black women — who have historically needed to do nothing to be considered overtly sexual — is struck as the what-have-you-done-for-me-lately? girl declares herself the what-I’ll-do-to-you-baby! woman. The princess of America’s black royal family has announced herself sexually mature and surrendered none of her crown’s luster in the process. Black women and their friends, lovers and children have a victory in Janet” – Rolling Stone

Choice Cut: That’s the Way Love Goes

The Velvet Rope

Release Date: 7th October, 1997

Label: Virgin

Producers: Janet Jackson/Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis

Standout Tracks: Velvet Rope (ft. Vanessa-Mae)/Got 'til It's Gone (ft. Q-Tip and Joni Mitchell)/Go Deep

Buy: https://www.discogs.com/sell/list?master_id=100041&ev=mb

Review:

“If Janet Jackson made much ado of janet. being the Let’s Get It On to Rhythm Nation’s What’s Going On, then 1997’s The Velvet Rope is clearly her I Want You, respectively Jackson’s and Gaye’s best and least-heralded albums. (Both incidentally recognized at the end of their creators’ respective marriages.) The chief difference between The Velvet Rope, the least “perfect” album of Janet’s increasingly careful career and the one that most threatens to collapse at each turn, and all the albums that Janet has released since is that all the subsequent albums have been cheery, forcedly carefree collections of would-be singles without any cohesiveness behind them; they’re kiddie cocktails by someone old enough to know better. The reason none of them sound particularly convincing—like Jane Adams’s Joy from Happiness gamely grinning “I’m doing good” seconds before peeling into miserable, anti-cathartic tears—is because of The Velvet Rope, an album by a still very inexperienced person attempting to convey maturity and worldliness.

In every conceivable way the most “adult” album of Janet’s career, The Velvet Rope is also the most naïve. Its vitality owes almost nothing to its stabs at sexual frankness. Because, truthfully, a lot of the “naughty” material doesn’t exactly seem that much more convincing than the Prozac-fuelled aphorisms of the follow-ups, nor is it more politically intriguing than her advocacy of color-blindness in Rhythm Nation. The bisexuality of her cover of Rod Stewart’s “Tonight’s the Night” never manages to convince that Miss Jackson has ever been so nasty as to even consider loosening pretty French gowns. “Rope Burn” isn’t so ribald that Janet doesn’t have to remind listeners that they’re supposed to take off her clothes first, though producers Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis’s Chinese water torture beat does approximate sonic bondage. It’s hardly surprising that when Janet uses the word “fuck” in “What About,” she’s not talking about it happening to her. For a sex album that also seems to aim at giving fans an unparalleled glance behind the fetish mask (literally, in the concert tour performance of “You”), Janet’s probably never been more cagey.

But behind the sex is something even more compelling, because it gradually dawns on you that Janet’s use of sexuality is an evasive tactic. That it’s easier for her to sing about cybersex (on the galvanizing drum n’ bass “Empty,” one of Jam and Lewis’s very finest moments, maybe even their last excepting Jordan Knight’s “Give It to You”) and to fret about her coochie falling apart than it is to admit that it’s her psyche and soul that are in greater danger of fracturing. Soul sister to Madonna’s Erotica (which, in turn, was her most daring performance), The Velvet Rope is a richly dark masterwork that illustrates that, amid the whips and chains, there is nothing sexier than emotional nakedness” – SLANT

Choice Cut: Together Again

Unbreakable

Release Date: 2nd October, 2015

Labels: Rhythm Nation/BMG

Producers: J. Cole/Dem Jointz/Missy Elliott/Janet Jackson/James ‘Jimmy Jam’ Harris/Terry Lewis/Thomas ‘Tommy McClendon’ Lumpkins

Standout Tracks: BURNITUP! (ft. Missy Elliott)/Dammn Baby/Black Eagle

Buy: https://www.discogs.com/sell/list?master_id=892999&ev=mb

Review:

“Despite the shadow cast by her brother Michael, Janet Jackson has always been her own artist. And over 10 albums, most notably 1989’s Rhythm Nation 1814, the singer (along with production from fabled duo Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis) has fused a unique version of R&B, dance, and pop that’s succeeded independently of Michael’s career.

But since the King of Pop’s premature passing in 2009, the press-shy Janet has largely avoided speaking out about him. So it’s a surprise that on her first album since his death—produced once again by Jam and Lewis—the 49-year-old delivers her most MJ-sounding release. There aren’t just a few nods, either—Michael has worked his way into all corners of his sister’s sound. She matches the timbre of his croon on multiple tracks (especially “Unbreakable”) and drops many of his signature breathing tics into “Broken Hearts Heal.” Janet, who has always flaunted her sexuality, is also more lyrically guarded here, eschewing confessions about relationships in favor of Michael-inspired pleas for peace and togetherness.

Janet makes up for that lack of intimacy with her most sonically diverse set since 1997’s quirky, hypersexual The Velvet Rope. She rounds all the R&B bases, and there’s a healthy dose of club adrenaline, particularly on the Missy Elliott-assisted “BURNITUP!” and the heady house jam “Night.” But perhaps the most thrilling aspect of Unbreakable is her willingness to experiment. “Gon’ B Alright” is a Sly Stone-style funk bomb, and “Well Traveled” swoops with stately arena-rock flourishes. Unlike contemporaries like Mariah Carey, Janet strikes a solid balance between innovation and dependability, bridging past and future better than most—including her legendary sibling. B+” – Entertainment Weekly

Choice Cut: Unbreakable

FEATURE: A Mid-Sixties Masterpiece: Bob Dylan at Eighty: The Majesty of Blonde on Blonde

FEATURE:

 

 

A Mid-Sixties Masterpiece

Bob Dylan at Eighty: The Majesty of Blonde on Blonde

___________

IT is quite timely…

 IN THIS PHOTO: Bob Dylan in London in 1966/PHOTO CREDIT: Barry Feinstein

that I mention Bob Dylan’s seventh studio album, Blonde on Blonde, ahead of the master’s eightieth birthday on 24th May. It was released as a double album on 20th June, 1966 by Columbia Records – its approaching fifty-fifth anniversary is one to celebrate. Recording sessions startyed in New York in October 1965. There were numerous backing musicians, including members of Dylan's live backing band, the Hawks. Only one track from the sessions made its way onto Blonde on Blonde: the terrific One of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later). Taking a different approach producer Bob Johnston, Dylan, keyboardist Al Kooper, and guitarist Robbie Robertson relocated to the CBS studios in Nashville, Tennessee. It was then that the remaining tracks were laid down and completed. I think Blonde on Blonde is one of the great Dylan masterpiece. It arrived during a golden run of albums; the final of a trilogy of incredible albums from that time - Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited were released in 1965. Not only is Blonde on Blonde one of the best albums ever; it was one of Rock’s first double albums. Dylan’s lyrics range from the personal to the widescreen and fantastical. In terms of the compositions, I think it was Dylan’s broadest and most wide-ranging to that point. After introducing the electric guitar into his music from 1965, he was moving further away from the acoustic sound of his earliest albums. Three of my favourite Dylan songs appear on Blonde on Blonde. Visions of Johanna, I Want You and Just Like a Woman are classics. In fact, each of the fourteen tracks is superb and without fault! I am going to bring in a couple of reviews and articles regarding Blonde on Blonde – finishing with a section about the album’s legacy and importance.

Not to mangle it too much, but Rolling Stone produced a great article in 2016 ahead of the fiftieth anniversary of an iconic album from a songwriting genius. I am interested in the early sessions and how things started to come together in terms of pace and productivity:

“I was going at a tremendous speed… at the time of my Blonde on Blonde album,” Bob Dylan told Rolling Stone editor and publisher Jann S. Wenner in 1969. On Blonde on Blonde, all the tension and angst of Highway 61 Revisited and Bringing It All Back Home were blown wide open to reveal pure freedom. It’s rock’s first double-album monument, where the distance between Dylan’s imagination and his music collapsed entirely: “The closest I ever got to the sound I hear in my mind,” he famously said, “that thin, that wild mercury sound.” With its chain-lightning mix of rock & roll, novelty music, surrealist ballads, Chicago blues and psychedelic country, its peels of lyrical invention and epic song lengths, Blonde on Blonde might seem like the kind of work that involved long-term contemplation.

In fact, most of the album was knocked out between stints on the road during a historically intense bout of touring. In the fall of 1965, Dylan wanted to continue pushing his new sound, and tour with an electric band. A decision was made to split a series of upcoming concerts between an acoustic set and a plugged-in performance. At the suggestion of his manager Albert Grossman’s secretary, Dylan checked out Canadian band the Hawks, who had cut their teeth backing rockabilly singer Ronnie Hawkins. Dylan was especially impressed by Robbie Robertson, the band’s 22-year-old guitarist, and asked the Hawks to play two shows, one in New York and one in L.A. At the New York show, held in front of a crowd of 14,000 at the Forest Hills tennis stadium in Queens, fans sat patiently through Dylan’s acoustic songs and then commenced booing during his electric set (some people sang along to “Like a Rolling Stone” and then booed when it was over). After they completed their West Coast date, the Hawks (soon to be renamed the Band) were hired for a year of shows that began in Texas in September 1965.

That October, just as the tour was beginning, Dylan and the Band went into Columbia Studios in New York and recorded the single “Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?” a curt blast of “Like a Rolling Stone”-style acrimony Dylan was so pleased with that he once kicked folk-scene grandee Phil Ochs out of a limo for saying he didn’t like it. Surprisingly, though, more attempts by Dylan and the Band throughout the fall and winter produced only one song that made it onto Blonde on Blonde, “One of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later),” a swirling haymaker that took 24 takes and had to be finished with the help of other musicians. “Oh, I was really down,” Dylan told writer Robert Shelton.

Salvation came from a surprising place. The previous summer, during the end of the at-times-difficult sessions for Highway 61 Revisited, producer Bob Johnston had introduced Dylan to multi-instrumentalist Charlie McCoy, a seasoned musician from Nashville who’d played with everyone from Elvis to Perry Como. After McCoy sat in on the recording of “Desolation Row,” Johnston suggested Dylan might like recording in Nashville. “See how easy that was,” Johnston said”.

When Dylan arrived in Nashville with his new wife, Sara,
 and their one-month-old son, Jesse, he had a few songs ready
 to go.” The elegant “Fourth Time Around” was a direct (albeit never acknowledged) reference to the Beatles’ Dylanesque classic “Norwegian Wood,” with the lyrics “I never asked for your crutch/Now don’t ask for mine” possibly serving as a warning to John Lennon to stop ripping him off. “Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat” was a hilarious snatch of 12-bar Chicago blues that has long been rumored to be about Edie Sedgwick, reigning starlet of Andy Warhol’s Factory scene, who Dylan had been spending time with recently (when asked about the song in 1969, Dylan said he “mighta seen a picture of one in a department-store window”).

The album’s first session would produce the epochal “Visions of Johanna,” which Dylan first debuted in 1965 at a Berkeley concert attended by Allen Ginsberg and Joan Baez (who insisted the song was about her). With Kooper’s organ and Robertson’s trebly guitar shadowing Dylan’s lyrics, which go on for five image-stuffed verses, the song turns a recollection of a hazy New York night into a liquid meditation on carnal obsession and spiritual desire. At seven minutes long, it also suggested this wasn’t going to be just another series of recording dates.

“It was really … ‘far out’ would be the term I would have used at the time,” said Bill Aikins, who played keyboards on the song. “And still today, it was a very out-there song.” As Dylan later said, “I’d never done anything like it before.”

The song set the tone for the rest of the sessions. Dylan got down to writing new songs and called the musicians in when it was time to record. For the crack team of players, this was an entirely new experience. Accustomed to Nashville’s sharp standards of professionalism and tight budgets, where a musician was rewarded for working quickly and the most efficient players might record a song an hour, they now found themselves being paid to be on call waiting for genius to strike. “There were some days when he would sit in the studio for six hours and work on the lyrics,” says Kooper. “We ended up getting there at 12 noon and going home at, like, five or six in the morning. We’d get there at 12 and wouldn’t record anything until four or five”.

IN THIS PHOTO: Bob Dylan in Scotland in 1966/PHOTO CREDIT: Barry Feinstein

When they were summoned, the songs that awaited were unlike anything they’d ever played on. The day after recording “Visions of Johanna,” Dylan laid down another landmark epic, “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands,” which ended up stretching out past 10 minutes in the studio and took up the entire final side of Blonde on Blonde. An ode to Sara Dylan, it “started out as a little thing,” as Dylan later recalled, “but I got carried away somewhere down the line.”

“We started ‘Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands,’ a 14-minute ballad, at 4 a.m.,” McCoy recalls. “And concentration is tough at four in the morning, when you’ve been up all night, waiting to play, and nobody wanted to be that guy that messed up. But we did it, and then after that, everything went much smoother.”

With his creativity peaking, Dylan began entertaining the idea that the album might become a double LP. He left Nashville for some more concert dates and returned in mid-March to finish the record. The songs recorded during the March session were shorter and flowed faster than ever, with Dylan working on a piano in his hotel room and Kooper playing musical director, taking Dylan’s ideas to the session musicians to prep them so that when Dylan finally arrived with the finished song they’d be ready”.

I think it is worth bringing in a critical review for Blonde on Blonde. In their write-up, this is what AllMusic remarkable about one of Bob Dylan’s most-celebrated albums:

“If Highway 61 Revisited played as a garage rock record, the double album Blonde on Blonde inverted that sound, blending blues, country, rock, and folk into a wild, careening, and dense sound. Replacing the fiery Michael Bloomfield with the intense, weaving guitar of Robbie Robertson, Bob Dylan led a group comprised of his touring band the Hawks and session musicians through his richest set of songs. Blonde on Blonde is an album of enormous depth, providing endless lyrical and musical revelations on each play. Leavening the edginess of Highway 61 with a sense of the absurd, Blonde on Blonde is comprised entirely of songs driven by inventive, surreal, and witty wordplay, not only on the rockers but also on winding, moving ballads like "Visions of Johanna," "Just Like a Woman," and "Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands." Throughout the record, the music matches the inventiveness of the songs, filled with cutting guitar riffs, liquid organ riffs, crisp pianos, and even woozy brass bands ("Rainy Day Women #12 & 35"). It's the culmination of Dylan's electric rock & roll period -- he would never release a studio record that rocked this hard, or had such bizarre imagery, ever again”.

Before rounding off with a Wikipedia article that outlines the legacy and popularity of Blonde on Blonde, there is another article that I want to source from. Americana UK looked back on Blonde on Blonde in their feature from last year:

“But what about Dylan and Americana? Back in the Sixties practically nobody really spoke, considered, or tried to combine genres into something that currently bears that name. Practically nobody, except Dylan. And that is where one of his (and everybody else’s) masterpieces ‘Blonde on Blonde’ comes in.

No, it is not the fact that it was what quite a few critics considered the third part of his ‘electric’ trilogy, nor that it was one of the first double albums in modern music ( in some countries, Frank Zappa and his Mothers of Invention beat him to the punch with their ‘Freak Out’ album). It is the fact that on this 72-minute epic Dylan actually brought to the main music scene a combination of musical styles that was simply more than just what was named country rock, but moreover an intricate combination that now bears the name(s) of roots music and Americana.

Let’s mention a few facts here. Dylan began writing and demoing the songs that comprise ‘Blonde on Blonde’ at the time when he started rehearsing and playing live with a band that was then called The Hawks, later to become his staple (live) band – The Band. The cooperation came through Robbie Robertson, then Hawks guitarist instrumental on his previous two ‘electric’ albums (‘Bringing It All Back Home’ and ‘Highway 61 Revisited’), but it was also the moment when one of the musicians also instrumental for that electric Dylan sound, keyboardist Al Kooper, decided not to tour live with Dylan anymore. After ‘Blonde on Blonde,’  ‘New Morning‘ was the last studio album on which Kooper was to appear.

The problem was that Dylan and The Hawks gelled so well on stage, but the studio sessions not so much. Of course, that seemed to change when they went into a basement. But Dylan was always a restless character, who kept on immersing practically anything he would hear and liked and shaping it into not just something personal, but also unique and – magical.

To try and revitalize the sessions, then Dylan producer Bob Johnston sent Dylan, Kooper, and Robertson to Nashville, where they were joined by stellar session musicians, harmonica player, guitarist, and bassist Charlie McCoy, guitarist Wayne Moss, guitarist, and bassist Joe South, and drummer Kenny Buttrey. Kooper represented the link with the electric sound, Robertson was shaping himself into the link between rock and roots music, and the seasoned session musicians turned out to be that salt and pepper that gave the album the character of a true combination of rock, roots, country, blues – and you can add a few more genres there easily.

What we get is a set of truly sublime songs, both musically and lyrically. Take, just three as an example. The opening ‘Rainy Day Women No. 12 & 35’ was probably a shock not only to his old folk fans but his relatively newly acquired rock fans. It plays out like a drunken Mardi Gras band walking down the streets of New Orleans at five in the morning (with a piano being pulled on one of the carts), but still being able to keep their composure, while Dylan, in a manner, that only he has, combines and weaves drug and Biblical metaphors into a unified whole.

Or, consider ‘I Want You.’ The session musicians, driven by Wayne Moss’ (later of Area Code 615 and Barefoot Jerry) guitar picking set into a slightly mutated bluegrass groove with Dylan crams in a list of at least seven characters into song’s three minutes.

And then there’s the concluding 11 minutes or so epic ‘Sad Eyed Lady of The Lowlands’. With its cyclical melody, that gains in intensity, Dylan spins an Appalachian -style fairy tale about a mystical woman, whoever she was. And it certainly does sound like Appalachia, but with a timeless quality – there’s no chance any listener can clearly say when this song or any on this album were recorded – in 1966, any decade that followed, or yesterday. A true classic in every sense of that word”.

Many of us know about how good Blonde and Blonde sounds and what its highlights are. This Wikipedia article outlines the cross-pollination of Blonde and Blonde and how it has been celebrated since its release:

“Dylan scholar Michael Gray wrote: "To have followed up one masterpiece with another was Dylan's history making achievement here ... Where Highway 61 Revisited has Dylan exposing and confronting like a laser beam in surgery, descending from outside the sickness, Blonde on Blonde offers a persona awash inside the chaos ... We're tossed from song to song ... The feel and the music are on a grand scale, and the language and delivery are a unique mixture of the visionary and the colloquial." Critic Tim Riley wrote: "A sprawling abstraction of eccentric blues revisionism, Blonde on Blonde confirms Dylan's stature as the greatest American rock presence since Elvis Presley." Biographer Robert Shelton saw the album as "a hallmark collection that completes his first major rock cycle, which began with Bringing It All Back Home". Summing up the album's achievement, Shelton wrote that Blonde on Blonde "begins with a joke and ends with a hymn; in between wit alternates with a dominant theme of entrapment by circumstances, love, society, and unrealized hope ... There's a remarkable marriage of funky, bluesy rock expressionism, and Rimbaud-like visions of discontinuity, chaos, emptiness, loss, being 'stuck'."

That sense of crossing cultural boundaries was, for Al Kooper, at the heart of Blonde on Blonde: "[Bob Dylan] was the quintessential New York hipster—what was he doing in Nashville? It didn't make any sense whatsoever. But you take those two elements, pour them into a test tube, and it just exploded." For Mike Marqusee, Dylan had succeeded in combining traditional blues material with modernist literary techniques: "[Dylan] took inherited idioms and boosted them into a modernist stratosphere. 'Pledging My Time' and 'Obviously 5 Believers' adhered to blues patterns that were venerable when Dylan first encountered them in the mid-fifties (both begin with the ritual Delta invocation of "early in the mornin"). Yet like 'Visions of Johanna' or 'Memphis Blues Again', these songs are beyond category. They are allusive, repetitive, jaggedly abstract compositions that defy reduction."

Blonde on Blonde has been consistently ranked high in critics' polls of the greatest albums of all time. According to Acclaimed Music, it is the 9th most ranked album on all-time lists In 1974, the writers of NME voted Blonde on Blonde the number-two album of all time. It was ranked second in the 1978 book Critic's Choice: Top 200 Albums and third in the 1987 edition. In 1997 the album was placed at number 16 in a "Music of the Millennium" poll conducted by HMV, Channel 4, The Guardian and Classic FM. In 2006, TIME magazine included the record on their 100 All-TIME Albums list. In 2003, the album was ranked number nine on Rolling Stone magazine's list of "The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time", maintaining the rating in a 2012 revised list. In 2004, two songs from the album also appeared on the magazine's list of "The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time": "Just Like a Woman" ranked number 230 and "Visions of Johanna" number 404. (When Rolling Stone updated this list in 2010, "Just Like a Woman" dropped to number 232 and "Visions of Johanna" to number 413.) The album was additionally included in Robert Christgau's "Basic Record Library" of 1950s and 1960s recordings—published in Christgau's Record Guide: Rock Albums of the Seventies (1981) - and in critic Robert Dimery's book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die. It was voted number 33 in the third edition of Colin Larkin's All Time Top 1000 Albums (2000). It was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1999”.

Nearly fifty-five years since its release, Blonde on Blonde has moved and blown away so many people! At such a rich and fertile period for Dylan, it is perhaps no surprise he was so ambitious and productive on this double album. Many can argue which Dylan album is the best. I think Blonde and Blonde is right near the top! As the great man turns eighty on 24th May, I wanted to highlight one of his crowning achievements. There is no doubting the fact that Blonde on Blonde is...

A real masterpiece.

FEATURE: Lay All Your Love on Us: Might We Get Some New ABBA Music in 2021?

FEATURE:

 

 

Lay All Your Love on Us

IN THIS PHOTO: ABBA in 1974 (left to right) Benny Andersson, Anni-Frid Lyngstad, Agnetha Fältskog and Björn Ulvaeus/PHOTO CREDIT: Olle Lindeborg/AFP/Getty Images

Might We Get Some New ABBA Music in 2021?

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EARLY this week…

there was some tease that ABBA would be releasing new music later this year. There has been this rumour going around for a long time now. It has been forty years since the iconic Swedish band released an album. NME reported the welcome news:

“It will be the first time the Swedish group have released new music in 40 years. The last album the group released was ‘The Visitors’ in 1981.

Speaking to The Herald Sun, Ulvaeus said: “There will be new music this year, that is definite, it’s not a case anymore of it might happen, it will happen.”

He also went on to reveal more about the group’s time back in the studio.

He added: “We’re really, really good friends. The four of us stand in the studio for the first time in 40 years and there’s just something in knowing what we’ve been through. It’s hard to describe, but there are such strong, strong bonds between us.”

Back in April, Ulvaeus gave more information about the band’s forthcoming avatar tour, promising that it “still sounds very much ABBA”.

In 2017 it was announced that the band would reunite in digital form in 2019, performing as “Abbatars” for the first time since they split in 1982.

When the reunion tour was then delayed, the Swedish pop icons announced in 2018 that they would be sharing two new tracks: ‘I Still Have Faith In You’ and ‘Don’t Shut Me Down’, which was then expanded to five new tracks as a reward to fans waiting even longer for the reunion tour due to COVID-related delays”.

ABBA are one of these groups one cannot help but avoid loving! Their music is timeless and has such an infectious spirit about it. I love classics such as Lay All Your Love on Me, Super Trouper and The Winner Takes It All. Dancing Queen is a true classic! Whilst one would not expect ABBA to release anything like they did back in the 1970s and early-1980s, one also would not really feel a softer and more laidback sound is coming. Given the fact that there has been a resurgence of Disco over the past few years – with everyone from Jessie Ware and Kylie Minogue getting involved -, I feel many have been inspired by ABBA and it is only right that the originators show everyone how it is done! It is strange for any band coming back after so long. I think it is extra-odd for ABBA, as they have not really performed since they split - and there has been very little from them until relatively recently. They live quite private lives and, whilst ABBA Mania is coming back to London’s West End, there has not been many public appearances from all four members. This is quite a short feature, as I feel there will be buzz and development over the coming weeks. For those who grew up listening to ABBA or those who are coming to them fresh, the possibility of music – whether they are brand-new recordings or older songs that have not been heard – holds huge excitement and curiosity! I think the return of the Swedish legends is…

WHAT we all need to see and hear!

FEATURE: Family, Secrecy and a New Vocal Sound: Kate Bush’s Director’s Cut at Ten

FEATURE:

 

 

Family, Secrecy and a New Vocal Sound

Kate Bush’s Director’s Cut at Ten

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EVEN though…

 PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush

Kate Bush’s Director’s Cut does not turn ten until 16th May, this will be my final feature about it – I will post songs/links closer to the anniversary to make people aware of it. This feature sort of rounds things up and ties up any loose ends. I do want to quote from a review for the album, in addition to a segment of an interview Bush conducted to promote Director’s Cut. There are a few things that I specifically want to talk about. Some say that Director’s Cut is inessential and unnecessary in many ways. Bush reworked songs from 1989’s The Sensual World and 1993’s The Red Shoes. Why listen to an album where she re-recorded these songs when we can hear them in their original form?! That is a point, though Bush managed to transform a lot of the songs we hear on Director’s Cut. I think that both of the albums that she revisited have moments where they are slightly cold or intangible. Graeme Thomson noted, in his biography, Under the Ivy: The Life & Music of Kate Bush, that songs on The Red Shoes sound a little tinny. This was the 1990s, so Bush moved from analogue to digital recording. Although Bush, in 2011, was mixing digital and analogue, the songs that she reworked from The Red Shoes are warmer and much more physical in a sense – in that a listener feels part of the song and you are beckoned in.

Those who disliked The Red Shoes or felt that it was a little insubstantial will find new layers and improvements on Director’s Cut. That reason alone validates its existence – not that Bush would need approval or a reason to undertake the album, aside from the fact that it is something she had been meaning to do! Whilst The Sensual World did not suffer the same problems as The Red Shoes – in terms of the digital sound meaning the music was a little cold and tinny -, I think Bush’s voice in her fifties gave the tracks new insight, wisdom and maturity. Every singer’s voice undergoes change as they get older. When 2005’s Aerial arrived, one could not help but notice that Bush’s voice was noticeably different to what we heard in 1993 with The Red Shoes. In a weird way, as she was tackling older songs of hers, one focuses on the vocals more through Director’s Cut. Some reviewers picked up on the deeper tones and this ‘new’ vocal sound. My favourite album ever is The Kick Inside: an album where Bush’s voice, as a then-teenager, was quite high. I have a lot of affection for her vocals on Director’s Cut. It is the first complete album, in my view, where there is very little of the higher register and acrobatics. There is still some – Top of the City has plenty of kick; Lily is raucous and electrifying! -, though hearing Bush with a deeper voice makes these familiar songs sound completely new. I think her voice as it was in 2011 gives these tracks new depth and resonance. We would hear more of this in 2011’s 50 Words for Snow.

Director’s Cut had a smaller cast of musicians than her previous albums. First, Bush transferred the digital recordings to analogue tape. Bush had Pro-Tools in her studio, so she had the modern touches and convenience to ensure that she could record quite quickly and efficiently. Taking out the drum parts by Stuart Elliott and Charlie Morgan, she also took away the lead vocals and most of the backing. As Thomson notes in his biography, some songs required a little work; others had keyboard parts, bass lines and string arrangements removed. Now, she had all this space and much barer frameworks. Inviting hordes of musicians into the studio would risk her compromising her original vision regarding making these songs warmer – too many cooks in the kitchen could create overcrowded and dense tracks. Instead, she selected a few musicians and backing vocalists to help realise her vision. The recruitment of the legendary drummer Steve Gadd is crucial. He is someone who can be minimal and un-showy, yet he adds so much professionalism, feel and skill to a song. Gadd was contacted back in 2009, where Bush explained she wanted to revisit two older albums and did not want him to hear the originals. Thomson notes that, as usual, Bush was using a skeleton crew in the studio. However, look at the personnel for Aerial, The Red Shoes or The Sensual World, and one can see a lot of musicians, vocalists and technical staff listed in the credits. Director’s Cut was barer and more concise in terms of the people we see listed on the album. Del Palmer was there as usual. Her trusted engineer and friend, he was a key member of the team.  Danny Thompson and John Gilblin provided new bass lines; her partner, Danny McIntosh, laid down guitar.

I shall come to the backing vocals – in addition to an observation regarding Bush’s vocals – in a bit. I think it is great that her family were so involved! Her son, Bertie (who is credited as Albert), could be heard as a young child on Aerial. He provided backing vocals and programming for Director’s Cut - and he would appear on 50 Words for Snow. Her brother, Paddy, provided mandola, flute, whistle and backing vocals. He had played on his sister’s albums since the start…so it really was a family affair! One issue Bush faced was with her voice. It was deeper but less versatile than it once was. She found it hard to re-enter these songs with this new vocal sound. The key to unlocking that issue was to lower the key. Singing as she was then, in other words, rather than as she would have sounded in the 1980s and 1990s. Her new band and vocal approach gave all of the songs new skins and possibilities. The rhythm parts are more important and pronounced and, as she hoped, there is a lot more space to be heard on Director’s Cut. I do love how there was secrecy around the album. Bush has always been private about her work and did not want it announced. By 2011, social media and the Internet were much more powerful tools for spoilers and promotion as they would have been in 2005 (for Aerial). One of the backing vocalists, Mica Paris, was sworn to secrecy by Bush. Paris, alongside Ed Rowntree, Jacob Thorn, Michael Wood, Jevan Johnson Booth, add so much to the songs they appear on.

If there are one or two songs on Director’s Cut where the new vocal is throwaway or not as one would expect, Bush lowering her voice a tone or semitone really brought some songs to life. One example is Lily. Mica Paris is on backing vocals for that track and recounts – as I am still referencing Under the Ivy: The Life & Music of Kate Bush -, how Bush had this sharing energy and was open to suggestions. That said, she knew what she wanted and worked closely with Paris. Bush had already recorded her part so, when Paris arrived in 2010 for her day in the studio, it was a case of Bush working alongside Paris to get the backing nailed. There was also this sense that nobody could know about the album. Bush knew that information could easily slip regarding Director’s Cut, so Paris was very much asked not to say anything! Two particularly great reworkings came in the form of Moments of Pleasure and This Woman’s Work. The former was a song Bush had not played for twenty years. She wanted the song to be more of a narrative. A more snow-inflected and wintery song, the strings arrangements were gone. Now, the track was this tale of loss – something very different to the original. For This Woman’s Work, Bush extended the song and turned into something ambient and wintery. This sense of winter, as Thomson notes in his book, cleared a path for 50 Words for Snow. He also notes that, by revisiting older tracks, Bush sort of planted the seeds for her 2014 residency, Before the Dawn – another big reason why Director’s Cut is so important and undervalued!

It is debatable whether Bush would have returned to the stage in 2014 were it not for the experience of recording Director’s Cut. This is the first time she sat down with old material since, arguably, 1979. It would have been interesting if Bush brought these reworked songs to the stage in 2011 for, as Thomson moots, a one-off show for prosperity. There is a clear link between Director’s Cut and Before the Dawn. Thomson argues that Director’s Cut is not a classic. It has some flawed moments and cannot entirely be seen as a new collection of songs – as some are not great and Bush didn’t always succeed in her objectives. He did note how rare it was for Bush to wrestle with his legacy and revisit old material. Director’s Cut is a fascinating album. I think, as I have said a number of times, it is underrated and warrants new inspection and deliberation ahead of its tenth anniversary. Before bringing in a review for Director’s Cut, I want to quote a couple of question from a Pitchfork interview I have used before. I did not even mention how Bush set up her own label, Fish People. Director’s Cut was the first album released on the label (alongside EMI):

“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: Director's Cut is being released on your new imprint, Fish People. Why did you decide to start your own label now?

KB: Previously, I wasn't in a position to do so, but now I'm delighted with my own label because it means that I have more creative freedom, which is really what I want. Although I've always had a lot of creative freedom since my third album. But now, I don't have to refer to people at the record company for certain decisions that I might have before. In many ways, it's probably quite a subtle change. But with something like [the new "Deeper Understanding"] video, I really wanted to direct it without being in it and make it like a short film as opposed to a music video. That might have been something the record company would have questioned before”.

I will end with a review from The Guardian. Director’s Cut found some a little mixed; others were keen to praise various songs. There were more than enough wonderful and hugely positive reviews for the album. It is hard to place Alexis Petridis’ review – though I feel it makes for interesting reading:

“In 2011, with the whole nonpareil musical genius/dippy woman who says "wow" issue firmly sorted out in most people's minds, her behaviour seems to grow more inscrutable still. Her new album, which admittedly took only half as long to make as its predecessor, isn't actually a new album, despite Bush's insistence to the contrary: it consists entirely of new versions of songs from 1989's The Sensual World and 1993's The Red Shoes. In fairness, you can see why she's chosen to point them up. They tend to be overlooked in her oeuvre, more because they separate her twin masterpieces Hounds of Love and Aerial than because of their content, although The Red Shoes is perhaps more muddled than you might expect, given her legendary perfectionism. Nevertheless, the decision seems to have bamboozled even her diehard fans, whose trepidation was not much mollified by the single Deeper Understanding. Again, you can see why she wants to point it up: its lyric about abandoning social interaction in order to hunch over a computer seems very prescient in the age of Facebook and Twitter. But the new version's decision to overwhelm the haunting vocals of Trio Bulgarka with Kate Bush doing one of her patented Funny Voices through an Auto-Tune unit seems questionable at best.

In fact, it's the only moment when you can honestly say the rerecording pales next to the original. At worst, they sound as good as their predecessors, which leaves you wondering what the point is, even as you succumb to their manifold charms. It was obviously a bind that the Joyce estate refused permission to use Molly Bloom's concluding soliloquy from Ulysses as the lyrics to The Sensual World, but whether it's a vastly better song for finally having them in place of Bush's facsimile is rather a moot point. Song of Solomon, on which Bush finally abandoned her apparently bottomless store of metaphors for female sexuality in favour of a direct demand for a shag – "Don't want your bullshit," she cries, "I'll come in a hurricane for you" – is a fantastic song whether the rhythm track features pattering tom-toms or a lightly brushed snare. Occasionally, the changes genuinely add something, usually by taking things away. The force of The Red Shoes' depiction of Bush's troubled relationship with the creative impulse was always a little blunted by its presentation as a kind of perky Irish jig: with the Celtic pipes shifted to the background, it sounds sinister and more urgent. Moments of Pleasure's rumination on death is more introverted and affecting stripped of its dramatic orchestration, while This Woman's Work – the rerecording of which caused the most unease among fans – is amazing: emptier, darker and quieter than before, it's even more heart-rending. Given that the original was heart-rending enough to soundtrack a charity campaign against child abuse, that's no mean feat.

Is it worth spending six years making an emotionally wrenching song slightly more emotionally wrenching? Hmm. If Director's Cut really was a new album, if you were hearing these songs for the first time, then it probably would be considered among Kate Bush's masterpieces: certainly, the sheer quality of the songwriting makes every recent female artist who has been compared to her look pretty wan by comparison. But you're not, which means the Director's Cut ultimately amounts to faffing about, albeit faffing about of the most exquisite kind. Still, as anyone who's watched her putting up with Richard Stilgoe will tell you, Kate Bush has earned the right to do whatever she wants”.

I shall leave things there. Ahead of its tenth anniversary on 16th May, I wanted to do one more feature about something that, whilst not a new album in a sense, is full of wonderful moments. It is definitely fascinating to read about. From the musicians and vocalists she brought in, to the fact that she had her brother, son and partner on the record, it is a real treasure trove of an album! I love Bush’s deeper voice - and, as she lowered the key and could tackle these songs afresh, nearly all of the songs sound very different to the originals. She completely transformed Lily. On Flower of the Mountain, she got permission from the Joyce estate to use words from Ulysses that she was denied when she recorded The Sensual World’s title track (I am not sure why she renamed The Sensual World to Flower of the Mountain for Director’s Cut - maybe a sign of triumph that she had gained writes to use Joyce’s words, thus she felt this was a totally new song?). Hearing her finally using Molly Bloom’s soliloquy on Flower of the Mountain is a great highlight. There are other big Bush anniversaries I will mark later in the year. Sat in Your Lap (from The Dreaming) is forty in June. The greatest hits collection, The Whole Story, is thirty-five in November. 50 Words for Snow is ten the same month. It is hard to believe Director’s Cut has been out a decade! I remember Bush promoting it so clearly and the excitement I felt when it came out. Though some find flaws on the album, Bush wanted to re-record songs that she felt were a little compacted or lacked necessary space. In that sense, she achieved her aims - and, with it, she was open to revisionism and reinspection in the form of 2014’s Before the Dawn. Not to mention how some of the arrangements and vocals on 50 Words for Snow were inspired by Director’s Cut – her tenth studio album is hugely celebrated and considered one of her best releases. Tasking all that into consideration, few people can…

ARGUE with that.

FEATURE: The Lockdown Playlist: The Amazing Lorraine McIntosh: Deacon Blue Gems

FEATURE:

 

 

The Lockdown Playlist

The Amazing Lorraine McIntosh: Deacon Blue Gems

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NOT that I need much of an excuse…

 PHOTO CREDIT: Laura Sturrock (Electrify) 

to include Deacon Blue in this feature, but there is a special reason to do so now. On 13th May, it is the birthday of Deacon Blue vocalist, Lorraine McIntosh. In my opinion, she has one of the greatest voices. I think her vocals are essential when it comes to elevating and underlining the brilliance of Deacon Blue’s music. As much as I love Ricky Ross’ lead vocals and songwriting (he and Lorraine McIntosh are married), I think the current band - Ricky Ross – lead vocals, piano, James Prime – keyboards, piano, Lorraine McIntosh – backing and lead vocals, percussion, Dougie Vipond – drums, percussion, Gregor Philp – guitar, Lewis Gordon – bass - are sensational. One of the reasons why I latched onto them so young and was hooked was McIntosh’s voice. Songs such as Twist and Shout, Real Gone Kid and Dignity are made stronger and more soulful because of her! Not only is McIntosh an incredible singer and musician. She is also an accomplished actor. She took a break from music to play the character Alice Henderson in the Scottish soap opera, River City. Her character first appeared in 2002 and was written out during May 2010. She has also appeared in a few films - including Ken Loach's My Name Is Joe. Not only that. McIntosh is also a campaigner. She is someone I find very inspiring. To mark the birthday of the amazing Lorraine McIntosh, I wanted to put together a selection of Deacon Blue songs. Following on from this year’s Riding on the Tide of Love, I hope that we see a lot more from the Scottish band. In this playlist, you will hear many examples of how McIntosh’s rich and beautiful voice shines through and stays in the head. A very happy upcoming birthday to…

A magnificent artist.

FEATURE: Vinyl Corner: Big Brother & The Holding Company - Cheap Thrills

FEATURE:

 

 

Vinyl Corner

Big Brother & The Holding Company - Cheap Thrills

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I have not included many albums…

 PHOTO CREDIT: Columbia/Legacy Recordings

from the 1960s in this feature. I was going to do a Janis Joplin solo album for this feature, though I could not find Pearl (her 1971 album) affordably on vinyl. Together with the band - Sam Andrew – guitar, bass on Oh, Sweet Mary, vocals, James Gurley – guitar, Peter Albin – bass, lead guitar on Oh, Sweet Mary, lead acoustic guitar on Turtle Blues, Dave Getz – drums -, Joplin is terrific through Cheap Thrills. The 1968 from Big Brother & The Holding Company is one of the best from the decade. It was their last album with Janis Joplin as lead before she started a solo career. On Cheap Thrills, the band and producer John Simon incorporated recordings of crowd noise to lend the impression of a live album – many assumed that the album was live! Go and get the album on vinyl, as it has some terrific songs and incredible vocals from Joplin. Released in summer 1968, Cheap Thrills arrived a year after the band’s debut. It stayed at number-one on the Billboard charts for eight weeks. Maybe the huge success of the album is one reason why Janis Joplin soon pursued her solo career. With songs such as Summertime, Piece of My Heart and Ball and Chain given a fresh and fascinating interpretation by Big Brother & The Holding Company, Cheap Thrills sounds both classic and modern. I think one of the album’s highlights, the Joplin-penned Turtle Blues, is one that many people overlook.

I am going to round things off with a couple of reviews. The first thing that I want to bring in is from AllMusic. They provide some history and background regarding the band - in addition to why the album is so strong:

“Cheap Thrills, the major-label debut of Janis Joplin, was one of the most eagerly anticipated, and one of the most successful, albums of 1968. Joplin and her band Big Brother & the Holding Company had earned extensive press notice ever since they played the Monterey Pop Festival in June 1967, but for a year after that their only recorded work was a poorly produced, self-titled album that they'd done early in their history for Mainstream Records; and it took the band and the best legal minds at Columbia Records seven months to extricate them from their Mainstream contract, so that they could sign with Columbia. All the while, demand continued to build, and they still faced the problem of actually delivering something worthy of the press they'd been getting -- Columbia even tried to record them live on-stage on the tour they were in the midst of when the new contract was signed, but somehow the concert tapes from early March of 1968 didn't capture the full depth of their work. So they spent March, April, and May in the studio with producer John Simon and, miraculously, emerged with something that was as exciting as anything they'd done on-stage.

When Cheap Thrills appeared in August 1968 -- sporting a Robert Crumb cover on its gatefold jacket that constituted the most elaborate album design ever lavished on a rock album from Columbia Records, as well as a pop-art classic rivaling the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's jacket -- it shot into the charts, reaching number one and going gold within a couple of months, and "Piece of My Heart" became a Top 40 hit and helped to propel the LP to over a million sales. Joplin, with her ear- (and vocal cord-) shredding voice, was the obvious standout. Nobody had ever heard singing as emotional, as desperate, as determined, or as loud as Joplin's, and Cheap Thrills was her greatest moment. Not that everything was done full out -- there were relatively quiet moments on the album that were as compelling as the high-wattage showcases; her rendition of George Gershwin's "Summertime" was the finest rock reinterpretation of a standard done by anybody up to that time (though, in an incident recalled in his autobiography Clive, when Columbia Records president Clive Davis played it to Richard Rodgers to give him an example of some of the sounds that younger audiences of the late '60s were listening to, the 66-year-old Rodgers stomped out of the Columbia corporate offices in fury, vowing never to write another song); and Joplin's own "Turtle Blues" showed that she and the band could turn down and do credible acoustic blues, in something like an authentic period Bessie Smith (or, more properly, Memphis Minnie) sound. Big Brother's backup, typical of the guitar-dominated sound of San Francisco psychedelia, made up in enthusiasm what it lacked in precision. But everybody knew who the real star was, and Joplin played her last gig with Big Brother while the album was still on top of the charts. Neither she nor the band would ever equal it. Heard today, Cheap Thrills is a musical time capsule and remains a showcase for one of rock's most distinctive singers”.

WITH her incredible voice and energy.

FEATURE: You Still Believe in Me: The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds at Fifty-Five

FEATURE:

 

 

You Still Believe in Me

The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds at Fifty-Five

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ON 16th May…

one of the greatest albums of all-time turns fifty-five: the sublime Pet Sounds. The eleventh studio album from The Beach Boys, it is amazing to think that it was initially met with a slightly tepid raft of reviews and commercial performance! It peaking at number-ten on the U.S. Billboard Top LPs chart – this was lower than the band's preceding albums. It is strange how some albums fare better in different counties. Maybe it was the fact that The Beatles and other bands were experimenting and producing these similar albums that Pet Sound was taken to heart in the United Kingdom. The reviews were more favourable. Pet Sounds reached number-two on the album chart. One of the most progressive and astonishing Pop albums ever, the reception and reaction to the album has drastically shifted since 1966. Pet Sounds is now seen as one of the most important albums in music history. There are some parallels between The Beach Boys and The Beatles. As The Beatles quit touring largely by 1966/1967, they immersed themselves in the studio and challenged themselves. Produced, arranged, and almost entirely composed by Brian Wilson (with guest lyricist Tony Asher), he wanted to release the greatest album ever - one you could listen to and not encounter any weak tracks. I have written about Pet Sounds a lot through the years. I am going to bring in a couple of reviews and articles that helps give a sense of how important and groundbreaking the album is.

Just look at the tracklisting and it is wall-to-wall gold! God Only Knows ranks alongside the greatest songs ever. Wouldn’t It Be Nice (which Mike Love co-wrote with Wilson and Asher) is a perfect opener that still sounds so magnificent and spellbinding after all of this time! There is this wonderful balance between the more experimental and sunny songs and those that are more emotional and tender. Opening with the bright Wouldn’t It Be Nice and ending that first side with the effusive Sloop John B, there is this perfect start and end. Don't Talk (Put Your Head on My Shoulder) appears in the middle of the first half and is one of the most moving songs in The Beach Boys’ catalogue. After the spirited close of the first half, God Only Knows opens the second half. I think there is this brilliant sequencing so that you get these emotional hits and joyous rushes in equal measures. A great balance and blend, everything is in its right place! The vocal harmonies from Brian Wilson, Al Jardine, Bruce Johnstone, Mike Love, Carl Wilson and Dennis Love are rich, dreamy and reliably heavenly. Brian Wilson Wall of Sound orchestrations and layered vocals had never been heard in mainstream Rock/Pop prior to 1966. Mixing together so many interesting sounds and textures – including a bicycle bells and flutes -, one has to listen to Pet Sounds over and over to fully grasp and absorb it!

Before getting to the reviews, I would advise people to look at the Wikipedia page for Pet Sounds to get a sense of its background, recording and legacy. There are a couple of interesting articles that I feel are worth bringing in at this point. Last year, udiscovermusic. argued why Pet Sounds remains a work of art.

“When Pet Sounds was released in the UK, Capitol Records ran adverts in the music press calling it “The most progressive pop album ever! It’s fantastic!” Then, like now, it sometimes seems that British Beach Boys fans “got” the band – and, in particular, where Brian Wilson was trying to take his music – maybe more so than fans at home in America. It has so often been the case that no man is a prophet in his own land, and that old adage certainly applies to musicians and their music.

In the summer of 1966 there were some fans who were confused by The Beach Boys’ 11th studio album – where were the striped shirts and the surfboards? In the intervening five decades, however, Pet Sounds has been acknowledged as a masterpiece, a record that has topped countless polls of the greatest albums ever made, and is revered by musicians and fans alike as the pinnacle of Brian Wilson’s songwriting, production and all-round creative genius.

Brian began seriously working on his masterpiece on Tuesday, 18 January 1966, at Western Recorders, and continued for 27 sessions spread over three months at four separate Los Angeles studios. This was an unprecedented amount of studio hours to be devoted to one album, but Brian was in pursuit of perfection. Just take a listen to any of the tracking sessions released on the various reissues of Pet Sounds: Brian was totally focused and demanded nothing less from everyone who worked on the project.

‘Let’s Go Away For Awhile’ was recorded that first day, with Take 18 of what was then called ‘Untitled Ballad’ the master. Among those in the studio were guitarists Al Casey and Barney Kessel; saxophonists Jim Horn and Plas Johnson; Carol Kaye on bass; and the ever-present Hal Blaine on drums. The rest of The Beach Boys were over 5,000 miles away, in Sendai, Japan, on tour with new man Bruce Johnston, who had replaced Brian in The Beach Boys’ road band, but was also becoming an integral part of the studio group.

By 9 February, eight sessions had taken place, and on this day the remainder of The Beach Boys joined Brian in the studio for what proved to be a difficult day for all concerned. Brian was frustrated that they could not seem to handle some of the complexities of the vocals he was demanding from them, and some of the band thought this new music was too radical a departure from their “sound” – a hit-making concoction no better illustrated than on ‘Barbara Ann’, which had been released as a UK single that same week, having already been a No.2 hit to The Beatles’ chart-topping ‘We Can Work It Out’ on the Billboard Hot 100.

By the end of the month they were over halfway through the Pet Sounds sessions, including working on a song that a Capitol Records memo refers to as “‘Good, Good, Good Vibrations’, the preliminary track from the album”, though, in the end, the song was not included on Pet Sounds. The final session for the album was held on 11 April, when the vocals for ‘Wouldn’t It Be Nice’ and ‘God Only Knows’ were finally completed to Brian’s exacting standards.

Brian mastered the album five days later, and it was released in the US exactly a month after that. The album’s title was chosen by Mike Love, in reflection of the fact that the music on the record was very much made up of Brian’s “pet” sounds. Despite all the effort, the beauty of the record, its innovative nature and the brilliance of Brian’s creative genius, it stalled at No.10 on the Billboard album chart. Brian was mortified.

On Monday, 16 May 1966, the day of Pet Sounds’ US release, Bruce Johnston arrived at London’s Heathrow Airport carrying a copy of the album. The following day, in his suite at the Waldorf Hotel, Bruce played the album in its entirety for John Lennon and Paul McCartney – not once, but twice. After the two Beatles left the Waldorf they went straight back to Paul’s house and there, inspired by Brian’s incredible music, they worked on the introduction to their song ‘Here, There And Everywhere’, which later appeared on Revolver.

“Pet Sounds blew me out of the water,” Paul recalled in 2003. “First of all, it was Brian’s writing. I love the album so much. I’ve just bought my kids each a copy of it for their education in life – I figure no one is educated musically ’til they’ve heard this album.”

Just what is it that makes Pet Sounds so amazing? The vocals include Brian’s most poignant ever performance, on the sublime ‘Caroline No’; Mike Love shines on ‘Here Today’; and Carl Wilson turns in a heart-stopping tour de force, ‘God Only Knows’. If you get a chance, listen to the a cappella mixes of the songs included on the most recent box set reissue of the album. The complexity of the arrangements are staggering, and yet the band were all so young. Brian himself was still only 23; Mike, the oldest member of the group, had turned 25 during its recording; Carl Wilson was still only 19, Dennis Wilson was 21 years old; and Bruce Johnston and Al Jardine were also both 23”.

  IN THIS PHOTO: Brian Wilson in an outtake from the Pet Sounds cover shoot at the San Diego Zoo

I want to highlight an article from Vox that was published in 2016. There are various sections that interested me greatly. The fact there was this production race between The Beach Boys and The Beatles is fascinating! After Pet Sounds, The Beatles tried to up the ante with 1967’s Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Depending on what side you on, you could say that The Beach Boys bested The Beatles and produced the best album with Pet Sounds – though Revolver must come pretty close in terms of the best albums of that time. The incredible songwriting and blend of sounds/emotions on Pet Sounds is still influencing artists today:

“Wilson also used better-known instruments in weird ways. For the intro to "You Still Believe in Me," Tony Asher, Pet Sounds' primary lyricist, helped Wilson get the sound he wanted by plucking the strings inside Wilson's piano as Wilson held down the notes on the keyboard. "I Know There’s an Answer" uses a harmonica as a bass instrument and for a solo — unheard of at the time.

And remember that eerie sound of the electric theremin in science fiction movies of the '50s and '60s? Its haunting wails turn up near the end of "I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times."

It’s impossible to say for sure where Wilson got his ideas for instrumentation, but what motivated his endless experimentation is unmistakable: his desire to beat the Beatles.

So when the Beatles began work on 1967's Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Pet Sounds was at the forefront of their minds. "Without Pet Sounds, Sgt. Pepper never would have happened. ... Pepper was an attempt to equal Pet Sounds," Sgt. Pepper producer Martin wrote in the liner notes for the Beach Boys' outtakes collection The Pet Sounds Sessions, released in 1997, a year after Pet Sounds’ 30th anniversary.

Paul McCartney himself has echoed that sentiment. "If records had a director within a band, I sort of directed Pepper," McCartney said in an interview he did in 1990. "And my influence was basically the Pet Sounds album." Sgt. Pepper marked a huge production leap over Revolver, and went on to win the Beatles a Grammy for Best Album.

That's essentially where the production race ended. While the Beatles were busy with Revolver and Sgt. Pepper, the Beach Boys' Wilson had been trying to up the ante even more with SMiLE, his intended follow-up to Pet Sounds.

SMiLE was an ambitious, high-concept undertaking; Wilson was recording everything in pieces, effectively experimenting with a physical version of digital editing about 20 years before the technology arrived. But due to the huge amount of effort involved and a breakdown in Wilson's mental health, SMiLE was not to be. The project famously collapsed and wasn't released — until decades later, when it was released officially in two different versions.

What’s remarkable, though, and what has seemingly been forgotten in the decades since, is the strong possibility that by the end of 1966, Wilson had finally managed to fight the Beatles to a near draw in terms of popularity — at least when considering the two groups' chart performance in the US and the UK.

Of the many themes and subjects Pet Sounds touches upon and tackles, the album is united by a sadness it never shies away from; at its core, Pet Sounds is about young, failed love.

"God Only Knows," like most of the songs on the album, functions differently as a standalone work than within the context of the album. By itself, the song explores a person longing for her romantic partner who has died. But in the context of the album as a whole, it feels like a pivot, signifying that point in a relationship when you suspect you’re falling out of love or can begin to imagine life without the person you’re involved with.

"Caroline, No" is Pet Sounds’ piercingly vulnerable finale. Far in the future, and thus much older, our teenage ex-partners meet once again. Expanding upon the premise of how people change as they get older, the song wonders if the love these teenagers once felt for each other could ever be reignited or felt again. But its tone implies it cannot, and mourns the loss of that first love.

The conclusion of "Caroline, No" can seem bewildering, especially to first-time listeners. The sound of an oncoming train accompanied by barking dogs might be confusing in the moment, but as the train approaches and accelerates, the barking dogs chasing after it, the metaphor becomes clear: It represents the loss of innocence after your first heartbreak.

What’s heartening to see, however, is that even though the production race between the Beach Boys and the Beatles ended nearly 50 years ago, in some ways it’s still going on. Both groups have charted among the top 10 on the Billboard 200 within the past four years — pretty good for 50-year-old bands. And it's common, on lists of the best albums of all time, to see Pet Sounds jockey with a Beatles album (like Sgt. Pepper or Abbey Road) for the top spot.

But to my mind, the Beatles never topped Pet Sounds. For all the Fab Foursome's admirable achievements, they never managed to wield an album so deftly united in subject matter, theme, production, and song-to-song quality”.

 IN THIS PHOTO: The Beach Boys in a further outtake from the Pet Sounds cover shoot

I am going to round this off with a couple of reviews. It seems almost surplus to requirement, as I have not seen anyone give anything less than a glowing five-star review! That said, each critics has a different interpretation and angle. This is what AllMusic said in their review:

“The best Beach Boys album, and one of the best of the 1960s. The group here reached a whole new level in terms of both composition and production, layering tracks upon tracks of vocals and instruments to create a richly symphonic sound. Conventional keyboards and guitars were combined with exotic touches of orchestrated strings, bicycle bells, buzzing organs, harpsichords, flutes, Theremin, Hawaiian-sounding string instruments, Coca-Cola cans, barking dogs, and more. It wouldn't have been a classic without great songs, and this has some of the group's most stunning melodies, as well as lyrical themes which evoke both the intensity of newly born love affairs and the disappointment of failed romance (add in some general statements about loss of innocence and modern-day confusion as well). The spiritual quality of the material is enhanced by some of the most gorgeous upper-register male vocals (especially by Brian and Carl Wilson) ever heard on a rock record. "Wouldn't It Be Nice," "God Only Knows," "Caroline No," and "Sloop John B" (the last of which wasn't originally intended to go on the album) are the well-known hits, but equally worthy are such cuts as "You Still Believe in Me," "Don't Talk," "I Know There's an Answer," and "I Just Wasn't Made for These Times." It's often said that this is more of a Brian Wilson album than a Beach Boys recording (session musicians played most of the parts), but it should be noted that the harmonies are pure Beach Boys (and some of their best). Massively influential upon its release (although it was a relatively low seller compared to their previous LPs), it immediately vaulted the band into the top level of rock innovators among the intelligentsia, especially in Britain, where it was a much bigger hit”.

I am ending with a review from SLANT. They note that, whilst critics usually have something bad to say about an album or do not understand it, it was the rest of The Beach Boys who were not buying the buzz for Brian Wilson’s masterpiece:

“Whenever pundits, critics, and intelligentsia decide that some work of art or other is worthy of being designated “the absolute greatest painting/recording/novel/lint collection of all time,” there’s always someone with claws out, waiting to pounce on the pronouncement and rip the accolades to so many adjective-laden shreds. Oddly enough, in the case of Beach Boy Brian Wilson’s compositional masterwork Pet Sounds, it was the rest of his band who couldn’t figure out what all the fuss was about. Sure, the other Boys (Mike Love, Brian’s brothers Carl and Dennis, and Al Jardine) sang their parts (as written by Brian) beautifully, even if they were singing gobbledegook about “hanging onto your ego.” But these lush, symphonic, and baroque pieces were as far removed from the good-time surf ditties the band was known for as they could possibly be. For all the band knew, these tunes could’ve been beamed into Brian’s brain from another planet. And for all we know, they probably were.

Still, even with stiff resistance from his bandmates, his record label, and potentially even his fans, Brian soldiered on, pulling these pet sounds from his head and painstakingly putting them to tape. And we’re a much better world for it. Imagine a world without Carl Wilson’s sublime, gentle reading of “God Only Knows” (the first song to include the word “God” in the title, according to folklore). A world without the impossibly gorgeous vocal harmonies stacked sky-high in the closing of “You Still Believe in Me.” A world without the giddy, heart-bursting optimism of “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” or the silly musical mischief of “Sloop John B.” I can’t imagine living in such a world, and thank God (and Brian Wilson) we don’t have to.

So while his band thought he was bonkers, and the American public didn’t quite get it right away, Pet Sounds did find an eager audience in the U.K., and in particular with those shaggy mustachioed mop-tops the Beatles, who proceeded to nick various aspects of the album for their own orch-pop opus Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band. Wilson would hear that album and be tempted to recoil in defeat, and the Beach Boys’s days as summertime chart-toppers grew limited. But as time has crept on, the hosannas for Pet Sounds are still fervently sounded (hell, even Mike Love likes it now), you can buy several versions of the collection (including a lavish box set containing alternate versions, a cappella takes, and other goodies), and it’s widely regarded as perhaps the greatest pop album ever made. And still, somewhere on planet Earth, someone is experiencing the euphoria of these songs for the first time. To that person, I say welcome to a new and lovelier world”.

Ahead of its fifty-fifth anniversary on 16th May, I was keen to reinvestigate Pet Sounds and state why it remains this hugely important and peerless work. Go and buy the album on vinyl if you can, as this is an album that will be talked about for decades and decades to come! Whilst it has inspired so many artists – from Prog Rock acts in the 1970s to Indie bands of the 1990s and beyond -, I do not think anyone has managed to match the genius and gravity of Pet Sounds. I am not sure that anyone ever will! When it comes to albums, you can’t get higher praise than that. It is s staggering achievement and work of brilliance…

THAT moves all the senses.

FEATURE: The Lockdown Playlist: Alison Goldfrapp at Fifty-Five

FEATURE:

 

 

The Lockdown Playlist

IN THIS PHOTO: Alison Goldfrapp shot for Vogue in 2006/PHOTO CREDIT: Mario Testino

Alison Goldfrapp at Fifty-Five

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I am keen to get to the music…

 PHOTO CREDIT: Alison Goldfrapp

but, as Goldfrapp’s Alison Goldfrapp is fifty-five on 13th May, I feel it is important to know a bit about the incredible musician and producer. I am going to end with an essential selection of Goldfrapp (the duo consists of Alison Goldfrapp on vocals and synthesisers and Will Gregory on synthesiser) tunes – where we will hear and experience the beauty, power and breadth of Alison Goldfrapp’s voice. Before that, and bringing in some Wikipedia, a little bit about her career development and trajectory:

“In 1994, she featured on the Orbital album Snivilisation and recorded songs "The Good" and "The Bad" with trip reggae outfit Dreadzone, for their 'best of' album The Best of Dreadzone – The Good The Bad and the Dread. Performing with them live resulted in two songs on the limited edition Performance album released in 1994. In the same year Goldfrapp featured on trip hop artist Tricky's 1995 song "Pumpkin" and collaborated with Stefan Girardet on two songs on the soundtrack to the 1995 film The Confessional.

Goldfrapp was introduced to composer Will Gregory in 1999 after he had listened to her vocal contribution for "Pumpkin", they then formed Goldfrapp and signed to Mute Records.

In 2000 she was a featured vocalist on the songs "The Time Of The Turning" and "The Time of the Turning (Reprise)/The Weaver's Reel" from the release OVO, Peter Gabriel's soundtrack album to the London Millennium Dome Show.

The pair began recording their debut album over a six-month period, beginning in September 1999, in a rented bungalow in the Wiltshire countryside. The band's debut album Felt Mountain was released in 2000 and featured Goldfrapp's synthesized vocals over cinematic soundscapes. Goldfrapp released their second album Black Cherry in 2003. The band recorded the album in Bath, England. This album focused more heavily on dance music and glam rock-inspired synths than its predecessor. Black Cherry peaked at number nineteen on the UK Albums Chart and sold 52,000 copies in the US. Supernature, Goldfrapp's third album, was released in 2005. The album comprises pop and electronic dance music prominently featured on Black Cherry, but focuses more on subtle hooks instead of the large choruses that made up its predecessor. It has sold one million copies worldwide and earned the duo two nominations at the 2007 Grammy Awards for Best Electronic/Dance Album and Best Dance Recording for the song "Ooh La La". Seventh Tree, Goldfrapp's fourth album, was released in 2008 and debuted at number two on the UK Albums Chart. The album is a departure from the pop and electronic dance music featured on Supernature, featuring ambient and downtempo music. The band were inspired by an acoustic radio session they had performed, which led the duo to incorporate acoustic guitars into their music to create "warm" and "delicate" sounds.

In 2009, she was awarded an Honorary Doctor of Music degree by the University of Portsmouth.

Goldfrapp have released seven albums, most recently Silver Eye in 2017. Hits include "Strict Machine", "Ooh La La", "Lovely Head" and "A&E". The multi-platinum selling band have been nominated for the Mercury Prize, multiple Grammy Awards and won an Ivor Novello for "Strict Machine”.

Ahead of the fifty-fifth birthday of the iconic Alison Goldfrapp, below are a selection of tracks from the amazing duo (their latest album, Silver Eye, was released in 2017). In my mind, there are few vocalists who have the same pull and potency as…

THE amazing Alison Goldfrapp.