FEATURE: The Lockdown Playlist: A Spooky Halloween Mix

FEATURE:

 

 

The Lockdown Playlist

PHOTO CREDIT: Paige Cody/Unsplash 

A Spooky Halloween Mix

___________

BECAUSE it is Halloween today…

 PHOTO CREDIT: Colton Sturgeon/Unsplash

I had to assemble an appropriate playlist. Things will be different this evening in terms of trick and treating. Maybe not quite as common as a couple of years back, there is still a lot of Halloween ephemera and decoration around. I have heard some Halloween-inspired songs on the radio recently. There are some great tracks that are perfect for a special Halloween mix. Because of that, the Lockdown Playlist below contains songs that are either spooky, ghoulish, or they nod to Halloween in some form or the other. Whether you are throwing yourself into Halloween or are taking a more relaxed approach, the songs below are definitely going to get you into the spirit. Immerse yourself in all things dark, spooky and Halloween-y with…

 PHOTO CREDIT: Luke Southern/Unsplash

SOME awesome tracks.

FEATURE: The Case of Wuthering Heights and a New Vocal: Kate Bush’s The Whole Story at Thirty-Five

FEATURE:

 

 

The Case of Wuthering Heights and a New Vocal

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in an outtake from The Whole Story shoot/PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush  

Kate Bush’s The Whole Story at Thirty-Five

___________

I am going to start with…

the album broadly before moving on to the case of Wuthering Heights. Turning thirty-five on 10th November, The Whole Story was the first greatest hits collection for Kate Bush. There had been The Single File of 1983. That was a collection of her singles that, whilst you can technically think of it as a greatest hits package, I don’t feel that was what it was marketed as. A collection of Bush’s music videos, the original U.K. version of Wuthering Heights was on that release. My first exposure of Kate Bush was the VHS of The Whole Story. I think, seeing her videos rather than hearing the music first, gave me a bigger hit and greater impression of her talent. That visual aspect was key. Before moving to a bit about Wuthering Heights, the Kate Bush Encyclopaedia gives some details regarding The Whole Story:

“The album was released on LP, CD, tape and - in 1998 - on Minidisc. The LP came in a gatefold sleeve.

A 180 gram vinyl edition was released by Simply Vinyl on 30 October 2000.

In 2005, a so-called 'mini LP replica' version was released on CD in Japan.

There was also a video version of 'The Whole Story', released on VHS video and Laserdisc, containing the videos for all the tracks, plus one bonus video: The Big Sky. A Video CD version was released a few years later, entitled The Whole Story '94.

Critical reception

Roger Holland in Sounds (UK): "Over the last nine years and five albums, Kate Bush (...) has matured into quite the most sensual, expressive, and creative artist this country can now boast". Colin Irwin, Melody Maker (UK): "This glorious retrospective collection... she's playing a high-risk game, and more often than not her irrepressible flair, her instinct for a hook, and her gift for unusual and gripping arrangements carry her through." John McReady, NME (UK): "More useful and more enjoyable than the constipated jangling of a hundred and one little lads with big mouths and even bigger clothes allowances. Such people are not worth a carrot. Meat or no meat, Kate Bush is streets ahead." Andy Strickland, Record Mirror (UK): "A monumental tribute to this craziest, coziest girl-next-door. (...) One of the most refreshing compilation LPs it would be possible to put together."

Kate about 'The Whole Story'

Yes, I was [against the release of a compilation album] at first. I was concerned that it would be like a "K-tel" record, a cheapo-compo with little thought behind it. It was the record company's decision, and I didn't mind as long as it was well put together. We put a lot of work into the packaging, trying to make it look tasteful, and carefully thought out the running order. And the response has been phenomenal - I'm amazed! (Kate Bush Club newsletter, Issue 22, December 1987)

It wasn't chronological because we wanted to have a running time that was equal on both sides, otherwise you get a bad pressing. In America, where I'm not very well known, they didn't realise it was a compilation! ('Love, Trust and Hitler'. Tracks (UK), November 1989)”.

I have written about The Whole Story a few times. I have not really focused too much on the new vocal that Bush recorded for Wuthering Heights in 1986. Then, she would have been about twenty-seven/twenty-eight. The original, for her debut album, The Kick Inside, was recorded when she was eighteen. The reasoning behind doing a new vocal for her greatest hits collection, I guess, was her putting a modern take on her best-known song. Her debut single, she wanted to give the song a womanlier take. The vocal for the original is higher-pitched and teenage. Perhaps feeling the track was a bit too immature or strange the first time around, the 1986 version is sort of similar - but there is a distinct difference in terms of the pace of the vocal. This is something that has split critics through the years. When singling out her number-one track in previous features, I have looked at the original and what it means. Watching the video on The Whole Story when I was a child means that the original is favourite and the one I recall fondly. I am not against the re-recorded vocal, though I think the original was flawless.

I have touched on this before. From Bush’s perspective, I feel she distanced herself slightly from her first couple of albums. The vocal on Wuthering Heights was an effect that she did to make it sound more ghostly and dramatic. Wanting to calm things down and put a slightly deeper vocal on the song, one can forgive that decision (and the original is always available). I wonder whether I would have had the same fascination with Wuthering Heights and Kate Bush if my first experience had been with that new vocal. Maybe not. I reckon there could have been a place on The Whole Story for both versions of Wuthering Heights. The 1978 original is so iconic, it did seem a little strange to put the new version on. I do like both versions. I just feel the original carries something extra in terms of beauty and power. I wonder whether, nearly thirty-five years since The Whole Story came out, Kate Bush would ever think about doing a new version of Wuthering Heights. A now-Bush recording the song would sound fascinating! I would urge people to go and listen to The Whole Story and see, by 1986, what a collection of awesome songs Bush had released1 Three is no doubting the importance of Wuthering Heights. Its vide opened my eyes and ears to an artist that is very important in my life. I have warmed more to the new vocal recording of the song. It has its strengths. The fact she did it at all means she knows how important the song is. She has affection for it but wanted it to sound more like her in 1986 than the teenage self of 1978. A happy thirty-fifth anniversary to The Whole Story on 10th November. Fans and critics have been divided since 1986 as to whether such a huge song sounded better originally or with a new vocal. To me, nothing can beat the spine-tingling version of Wuthering Heights…

FROM The Kick Inside.

FEATURE: Groovelines: Adam and the Ants - Prince Charming

FEATURE:

 

 

Groovelines

Adam and the Ants - Prince Charming

___________

THIS might be the first time…

that I have included Adam and the Ants on my blog. If I have, I definitely do not feature them often enough! I want to spotlight Prince Charming for this Groovelines. Undoubtedly one of the best-loved songs, it was released in September 1981. Written by Adam Ant and Marco Pirroni, and featuring on the Prince Charming album, it was Adam and the Ants' second number-one single (after Stand and Deliver earlier in the year) in a row. It was the fifth-biggest hit of 1981. I love Adam and the Ants and, between this song and Stand and Deliver (which is from the same album), it is impossible to dislike them! I have been listening to songs like Prince Charming since I was a child in the 1980s. I think the music still sounds so fresh and exciting! Nothing like Adam and the Ants exists today. There will be debate among fans as to which of their songs is best though, for me, Prince Charming is the standout song. Its sense of flamboyance, drama and excitement is electric! I want to bring in a couple of features which discuss the legacy and importance of Prince Charming. In a Classic Pop article from earlier in the year, producer Merrick/Chris Hughes (who produced the Prince Charming album and drummed under the Merrick moniker) reflected on a very special time for the band:

“Although the Ants split shortly after touring Prince Charming, by 1981 they were the biggest deal in town. Everything Adam Ant had dreamed of when turning his band from the arty punks of 1979’s Dirk Wears White Sox into proper pop stars had been achieved at an incredible speed.

If it’s hard to imagine a similar career progression now, it was just as unlikely in 1981. Even David Bowie needed a few years before and after Space Oddity to get it together.

For Chris, it was the intense bond between Adam and his writing partner/co-conspirator Marco Pirroni that propelled them onto the nation’s bedroom walls.

“Adam and Marco’s belief that the Ants would happen was very powerful and prevalent,” recalls Chris from his home studio near Bath. “They were like Mick‘n’Keith, those two. They were unbreakable and totally held up each other’s opinion. Adam and Marco were so tight you couldn’t pick either of them off, and their forward motion was unstoppable. It was ‘Yeah, I want this and I’m going to get this’ all the time.”

The unbeatable singles Stand And Deliver and Prince Charming were exactly what was needed to seal the Ants’ regal period as perfect colourful pop stars. Chris, albeit under his nickname, was cemented in 80s folklore in the chorus of Ant Rap”.

It must have been amazing being in Adam and the Ants and producing an album like Prince Charming. The thrill and catchiness of the title track is insatiable. It is a shame that the band would split so soon after Prince Charming was released. I look back at the very best music from the late-1970s/early-‘80s and Adam and the Ants ruled. 1980’s Kings of the Wild Frontier must go down as one of the best albums ever! One could still hear a real spark on 1981’s Prince Charming.

I am going to round things off soon enough. I want to source Louder Than War. They revisited the Prince Charming album back in February. They remarked how Prince Charming was different from Kings of the Wild Frontier:

“On release, Prince Charming was a big hit slamming into the charts at number 2 but compared the astonishing success of the number one for months of the Kings Of The Wild Frontier album it felt like a flat success, the reviews were lukewarm and the band’s younger fan base were starting to move on to less interesting pop pastures. There was still enough petrol in the tank though to propel the band’s to two preceding single releases and album cuts to massive number hits with Prince Charming and Stand And Deliver but the album has spent years being looked on as a disappointment.

The pop genius of Adam was still there though and years later like a team of archeologists discovering a golden city under the ruins of a rubbled ancient settlement decades later we find an album that is as bizarre, brilliant and beautiful as Kings.

Prince Charming has moved on from Kings whilst retaining some of its hallmarks. It’s full of odd rhythms, strange songs and a perfect art-house pop that needs to be celebrated and makes it one of the great lost albums of the period despite its then big chart status.

We have already the staggering moment when Adam And the Ants went from underground freaks to mainstream Antmania and it was always going to be difficult to replicate that shock of the new value.

It’s still quite staggering how such a strange band managed to turn themselves into pure pop with a thrilling dark undertow, sex and an art school obliqueness. That whiff of cordite danger is what makes the greatest of great pop and Adam understood that and that fine line between the weird and the toppermost of the poppermost has stood his music in good stead for decades.

The narrative is now set in stone…his debut Dirk album was a monochromatic cult oddity beloved by his kung fu slippered Ant fans and the remnants of the freak fierce punk scene who gathered around the band after the Sex Pistols imploded.

Adam was the sound of the early punk squats and the freak scenes up and down the UK – those strange post-punk dark disco songs of sex and violence and post-modernism were perfect for the time. His breakthrough album Kings Of The Wild Frontier was a glorious technicolor masterpiece that was the gateway album for a whole new generation of fans.

In that early eighties pomp Adam, like Bowie, was the gateway artist who opened the doors for all kind of underground artists, musicians and authors that Adam was referencing. Goth would never have been as big with Adam or even industrial and even Britpop and beyond with many of the later generations of musicians retaining a huge affection for him. Dealing his fantastical pop and an esoteric culture hinterland he took his fans on a trip. Kings was huge and it glorious Burundi pop was carved into shape by his band of merry like the wonderful Marco and into one of the great British pop records.

Where do you go from there? Prince Charming was the swift follow-up after the brief regal reign of the banD and is yet another gem that needs revisiting. If it lacks those thrilling Burundi drums of songs like Kings Of The Wild Frontier and Dog Eat Dog off the preceding album it was because it had moved on into yet another brave and exotically strange collection of rhythmical pop perfection”.

I will finish off here. Forty years after this remarkable song came out, Prince Charming has lost none of its dandy swagger! It is a song that has influenced so many artists. Bands like Nine Inch Nails are inspired by Adam and the Ants. I feel the impact and relevance of songs like Prince Charming will reverberate for decades to come. If you have not played this song in a while and need a lift, what better time than to spin…

 PHOTO CREDIT: Scope Features

THE remarkable Prince Charming?!

FEATURE: I'm Not a Pandora: Kate Bush’s Suspended in Gaffa

FEATURE:

 

 

I'm Not a Pandora

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush with her mother, Hannah, in the video for Suspended in Gaffa 

Kate Bush’s Suspended in Gaffa

___________

THE last time that…

I spent some time with Suspended in Gaffa, it was late last year when I was writing about it being released as a single. Part of Kate Bush’s The Dreaming, there was this case of releasing two very different songs as singles in different parts of the world. There Goes a Tenner was a disaster when it was released as a U.K. single. In Continental Europe and Australia, Bush put out Suspended in Gaffa. I can understand why There Goes a Tenner was seen as a single. I am surprised that it did not do better in the U.K. – maybe the unconventional nature and sound of the song (it not being commercial) put people off. After the equally different and unique The Dreaming, another track that was far from the mainstream might have contributed to a lowly chart performance. I think that, instead, Suspended in Gaffa should have been released as a single in the U.K. too, to be followed by another song, Get Out of My House, as a single in other parts of the world. I think that Suspended in Gaffa would have been more successful in the U.K. than in Europe (where it didn’t do overly-well), where Get Out of My House has that urgency and atmosphere that would have resulted in a bigger impact on the charts. As Suspended in Gaffa turns thirty-nine on 2nd November, I wanted to come back to it. It has beautiful musicianship from Bush, Del Palmer, Stuart Elliott, Paddy Bush and Dave Lawson. Kate’s mum, Hannah, also appears in the song’s video!

There are some Bush anniversaries I am overlooking so that I do not post too much – such as writing about The Sensual World’s thirty-second anniversary recently -, but I am fascinated by The Dreaming and the sheer variety of sounds and sights throughout. Suspended in Gaffa is one of the underrated gems that should have been given a wider release as a single. In terms of its inspiration, the Kate Bush Encyclopaedia  quotes interviews where Bush discussed the song and what compelled it:

“Whenever I've sung this song I've hoped that my breath would hold out for the first few phrases, as there is no gap to breathe in. When I wrote this track the words came at the same time, and this is one of the few songs where the lyrics were complete at such an early stage. The idea of the song is that of being given a glimpse of 'God' - something that we dearly want - but being told that unless we work for it, we will never see it again, and even then, we might not be worthy of it. Of course, everybody wants the reward without the toil, so people try to find a way out of the hard work, still hoping to claim the prize, but such is not the case. The choruses are meant to express the feeling of entering timelessness as you become ready for the experience, but only when you are ready. (Kate Bush Club newsletter, October 1982)

I could explain some of it, if you want me to: Suspended in Gaffa is reasonably autobiographical, which most of my songs aren’t.  It’s about seeing something that you want–on any level–and not being able to get that thing unless you work hard and in the right way towards it. When I do that I become aware of so many obstacles, and then I want the thing without the work. And then when you achieve it you enter…a different level–everything will slightly change. It’s like going into a time warp which otherwise wouldn’t have existed. (Richard Cook, 'My music sophisticated?...'. NME (UK), October 1982)

'Suspended In Gaffa' is, I suppose, similar in some ways to 'Sat In Your Lap' - the idea of someone seeking something, wanting something. I was brought up as a Roman Catholic and had the imagery of purgatory and of the idea that when you were taken there that you would be given a glimpse of God and then you wouldn't see him again until you were let into heaven. And we were told that in Hell it was even worse because you got to see God but then you knew that you would never see him again. And it's sorta using that as the parallel. And the idea of seeing something incredibly beautiful, having a religious experience as such, but not being able to get back there. And it was playing musically with the idea of the verses being sorta real time and someone happily jumping through life [Makes happy motion with head] and then you hit the chorus and it like everything sorta goes into slow mo and they're reaching [Makes slow reaching motion with arm] for that thing that they want and they can't get there. [Laughs] (Interview for MTV, November 1985)”.

Ahead of the anniversary of There Goes a Tenner and Suspended in Gaffa being released as singles – do artists put out different singles for different continents these days?! -, I was eager to spotlight a song that I don’t think gets a lot of radio focus. Suspended in Gaffa boasts some of Bush’s finest lyrics. Right from the off, we are entranced and spellbound: “Out in the garden/There's half of a heaven/And we're only bluffing/We're not ones for busting through walls…”. The moment in the video where Bush is comforted by her mother is really touching. The production and performance on the song is phenomenal! Perhaps a little too deep and serious for single-buyers in 1982, the song sort of got overlooked. The Dreaming was not an album that boasted a lot of obvious singles and enjoyed great chart success (that was rectified on 1985’s Hounds of Love, where Bush released hugely popular songs like Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God) and Cloudbusting). I love Suspended in Gaffa and hope that people who have not heard it before spend some time with it. Distinctly the work and sound of Kate Bush, it is one of the jewels of The Dreaming. Nearly thirty-nine after the song was released into the world (well, Europe and Australia), the charms of Suspended in Gaffa are still…

VERY much evident.

FEATURE: Spotlight: Flo Milli

FEATURE:

 

Spotlight

PHOTO CREDIT: Brandon Bowen 

Flo Milli

___________

ONE can say that…

PHOTO CREDIT: Joelle Grace Taylor

like some artists I have included in Spotlight, I am a tad late to the party again! Flo Milli is an artist with a massive fanbase. I am not sure whether she is as well-known in the U.K. as she is in the U.S. The Alabama-born twenty-year-old (whose real name is Tamia Monique Carter) is an artist with an incredible future. I am going to combine a few interviews, where we get a sense of who Flo Milli is and what her music is about. One of last year’s best releases was Ho, why is you here ? The mixtape is really incredible and hugely accomplished! Having released singles from the mixtape - and appearing on other artists’ songs since 2020 -, it has been a busy past year or so for Flo Milli. Before I come to some of the interview out there, it is worth highlighting a review for Ho, why is you here ? This is what Pitchfork observed when they sat down to review the mixtape:

“Her constant barbs are bolstered by her subtly spry cadences. Her flows are conversational and loose despite being strictly metered. The record is largely devoid of melody, but Flo Milli doesn’t need to sing to emote. She has an intuitive sense of when to throttle flows for emphasis, as on “Pussycat Doll,” which is full of tiny pauses that set up her punchlines. “Make a nigga blow a check on me/Save his number under ‘We gon see,’” she jokes. Her performance on “Weak,” a J White Did It production, is fleet and buoyant, flipping SWV’s “Weak” on its head yet preserving the song’s warmth. “These niggas weak/They been texting me all week/Just let me be,” Flo Milli huffs with exasperation.

The production isn’t always as spirited as Flo Milli’s performances. “Scuse Me” is an outright dud; it sounds like a parody of a JetsonMade beat and Flo Milli’s hook is uncharacteristically strained. Otherwise, a current of self-discovery runs through the beats. “Like That Bitch” and “Not Friendly” embrace the minimalism of snap music, which has long been a testing ground for experimenting with flows without sacrificing bounce. (Incidentally, “Not Friendly” interpolates Soulja Boy’s “Gucci Bandana.”) And the bouncy bass and bright keys on “In The Party” and “Send the Addy” evoke the charm of bubblegum trap, which tapped into the joy of a subgenre often characterized by stress and struggle.

There’s certainly a disparity between Flo Mill the cocksure persona and Flo Milli the budding artist, but even when Flo Milli is spitballing ideas trying to see what sticks, she’s a force of nature. She once described her catchphrase “Flo Milli shit” as the mantra for “My alter ego, which is what I am most of the time,” and Ho, why is you here ? sells that odd dynamic. She’s still figuring out her music, but she knows exactly what she wants it to be”.

The first interview that I want to bring in and mention is from VICE. They spoke with Flo Milli last year. Whilst her mixtape and music dominated and put her on the map, she didn’t expect that level of success and resonance:

“For the last three summers, women have dominated rap. In 2017, just when it seemed like "Bodak Yellow" was the biggest song of the season, Cardi B released Invasion of Privacy extending her reign another year. In 2018, the City Girls caused everyone to "Act Up," and last year was scorched by the warmth of Megan Thee Stallion's "Hot Girl Summer." Flo Milli, the ringleader of this summer, isn't a fast-talking rapper from a big city, and she isn't old enough to drink legally. But her bossy raps have permeated outside of her hometown of Mobile, Alabama, causing the world to latch on to her monstrous confidence, which she shamelessly plugs in ad-libs and song titles as "Flo Milli Shit.

"I really didn't expect all the attention [the mixtape] got," she tells me over a Google Hangout, batting eyelashes bigger than the animated personality that comes through on her records. We talk briefly about the industry's tendency to rally around women in rap while they're profitable, only to abandon them when they need support. She's still getting used to the fame but hopes that the Flo Milli Summer transitions seamlessly into a lifestyle. "I've had this dream since I was little, so for me, it's long term."

Over the last year, she released a string of loose songs that found popularity on TikTok with "Beef (FloMix)" and "In the Party," building anticipation for her debut mixtape Ho, Why Is You Here? Her mixtape cover is a modern take on 90s nostalgia: Her squat is a modest version of Lil Kim's 1996 album Hard Core, and she's dressed similar to Halle Berry's character in the film B.A.P.S., blonde wig and all.

Flo Milli's music straddles two worlds. Her tone is polite, with traces of southern hospitality, but her lyrics are Regina George-level petty. She flips beats from her male peers, as she did on the aforementioned singles, and puts her feminine touch on it, completely refreshing songs that once were associated with Playboi Carti ("Beef") and NLE Choppa ("In The Party"). Most importantly, Flo Milli's music finds her at the intersection of Gen Z and Millennials, using her beat selection and nods to pop culture as a bridge between two audiences.

The 20-year-old credits watching BET's video countdown show, 106 & Park, growing up as an inspiration for her rap ambitions. The show was a conduit for emerging talent and premiered in 2000, the same year Flo Milli, known to her inner circle as Tamia Carter, was born. She and the show grew in tandem, and at 11, she became enamored by the charismatic Queens rapper Nicki Minaj during her Pink Friday era. By the time she got to high school, 106 & Park's reign was over, but it wouldn't be long before she would embark on her own journey as an artist. But school wasn't exactly a fun time for the Mobile rapper.

"I could just tell girls didn't like me type shit," she says. Flo says she wasn't bullied, but teen drama kept her skin thick and her confidence high. It was the first iteration of the unshakeable confidence fans have come to love in her music. "I had to deal with that for four years," she says. "I kinda looked at school like jail. We're put into this jail, and we're here for years, and you just have to deal with it. [Rapping] became a coping mechanism, and I just started not giving a fuck”.

Coming to a great interview from REFINERY29 from earlier in the year, we discover more about her confidence and incredible talent. It was interesting reading about her childhood and what it was like for an aspiring musician in rural Alabama:

“Then, there was Flo Milli—skilled, irrefutable, and not one to f*ck with. Her confident take on Playboi Carti's "Beef" ("Beef FloMix") took TikTok by storm, leading up to the release of her landmark debut EP. The 12-track, 30-minute mixtape was featured in multiple Best of 2019 lists — including The New York Times, NPR, and Complex — and has racked up 500 million plus streams and video views across the world. “In The Party” is now RIAA gold certified. Flo was also nominated for Best New Artist at the 2019 BET Hip-Hop Awards. But while she may have gained momentum through viral fame, Flo quickly (and graciously) corrects me when I allude to her as an internet sensation.

“I never was a viral internet star. I just used my internet platform to my advantage, but I’ve always been an artist first,” she tells me. If anything, Flo considers, the attention she garnered through TikTok taught her how to use her social media platform to market herself as an artist. This skill would prove beneficial amidst a global pandemic, when many people were quarantined and scrolling on their phones at home. I ask her if she feels the circumstances of the pandemic slowed her down at all, if things ever became tough for her to navigate despite all her success. “The best thing to do in the music industry right now is to take advantage of your circumstances,” she says.

Born Tamia Monique Carter in 2000, Flo is part of the last in a generation of kids raised on MTV and BET, when music video countdowns still reigned over the airwaves. She cites shows like BET’s 106th & Park as inspiration. “I swore up and down I was gonna be number one on that top 10,” she says. “I swear I used to always say that.” The artists she was introduced to back then served as notable influences. “Nicki Minaj was somebody I was heavily inspired by watching her on 106th & Park. I thought [she] was dope,” she says. “Nicki was everywhere when I was growing up. She very much inspired me in my era and she still does.”

Flo says there weren’t many artists breaking from Alabama when she was growing up, though Rich Boy, whom she admires, immediately comes to my mind. When I mention him, I hear her voice brighten.“I still have mad respect for him for doing the things that he did do and getting the respect that he did get. That’s the only person I really knew. And then after that it was just kind of like, you know.” She pauses, and I feel like she may be taking a moment to reflect.

She remains short when I ask her about what her life was like when she was growing up, which doesn’t surprise me, since there isn’t much mention of her family life in her other interviews. But what she does share (she cites navigating a “rocky road,” alluding to an overcoming of odds) further solidifies her destiny to be where she is today. She performed at school talent shows, at restaurants, and even started her own rap group (Real & Beautiful, later renamed Pink Mafia). “[I did] anything I could do to get my name out there. It was really kind of like a little girl with a dream from a small town.”

Making it out of Mobile, AL is no easy feat, Flo shares with me. “I was the first girl out of Mobile. All the other rappers were boys.” Her story points to the trajectory of the hip-hop industry as a whole, in which male rappers are magnified while women are marginalised. “I think it’s very empowering to see women dominate a male sport.”

As a breakout star, Flo is as focused on being a source of inspiration for her fans as she is being a successful artist. But, as she’s noted in multiple interviews, she especially wants to be a champion for Black women—a crucial mission within an industry where misogynoir continues to leave Black women on the back burner. “I’ve always felt like a strong Black woman. We’ve always been the strongest even over time. We should just continue to know our power and our worth, and that’s what’s gonna allow us to stay strong.”

And in terms of keeping her momentum going, she has no worries.

“People fell in love with me because I was always myself, so I’m gonna continue to be myself and they’re gonna continue to love me. What’s for me is for me and what isn’t isn’t”.

 PHOTO CREDIT: Munachi Osegbu

The reaction to Ho, why is you here ? was hugely positive and impassioned. The songs are so confident and stunning. One cannot casually listen to the mixtape or have it playing in the background: one needs to dedicate their full attention to a masterful work! CLASH echoed some of those sentiments when they interviewed Flo Milli in August:

“Following the release of her debut and critically acclaimed mixtape ‘Ho, Why Is You Here?’ last year, of which boasted 12 confidence-oozing tracks that at no moment presented any flash of self-doubt, set the female emcee up nicely as her brash persona took centre throughout. From the stand-out tracks ‘May I’ and anthemic hit ‘In The Party’, a song that brushes any form of hater to the side, “Yeah, dicks up when I step in the party / Yo' main dude wanna feel on my body / And if I take I him, bitch, I won't say I'm sorry” – it’s safe to say Flo Milli is the epitome of ‘bad b energy’.

Filled with controversial yet empowering statements from start to finish, it’s a bundle of riveting, raw, and addictive statements. When asked if there was anything – specifically - she wanted to push with this project Flo comments: “I wanted to emphasise having strength and a voice as a young female. I didn’t want to make everything about boys and instead learn to love yourself, and to love yourself no matter what. You can chase your dreams at a young age, and that’s what I wanted to put across to my listeners”.

Being in such a male dominated industry can be daunting to some female artists, especially if what you are putting out to the world is as raw and bold as ‘Ho, Why Is You Here?’; whether or not you’re anxious about how people will react, dropping something that authentically represents your true self can be overwhelming. Asked if she was ever apprehensive about dropping the mixtape, she confidently responds: “No, I never felt hesitant or apprehensive as to how people would take it because I’m unapologetically me every day of my life. That goes over into my music, I would never care what anybody else thinks… as long as I approve it, then that’s all that matters”.

Over time female empowerment has become more prevalent than ever, and it’s about time too. Each year more and more female rappers across the world are owning their power and strength and putting it on a pedestal for all to hear, whether you agree with it or not. However, most women in the industry are often looked at as competitors and not friends; in fact, some may see it as a threat when two or more strong women come together as one, and let’s be honest that sucks. What are the first things that come to mind when you think of female empowerment? Strength? Unity? Power? For Flo, it’s about uplifting each other. “The first thing that comes to my mind is Queen Latifah and being able to encourage each other, seeing each other’s light and acknowledging it”.

PHOTO CREDIT: Joelle Grace Taylor 

Surrounded by strong women her entire life and looking up to the likes of her mother, Lauryn Hill, Missy Elliott, Beyoncé, Shakira, and Rihanna, it was inevitable that Flo’s confidence would shine through. For many young men and women, this isn’t always the case, and is something that can take years to build, so I was curious to know where she draws this energy from. “I’ve built strength over the years as a kid, and growing up around strong women, you have no choice but to be that way. If you don’t love yourself, then nobody will. I have always had that installed in my mind at a young age to always be strong, to be sure about myself, and love what I do. Being my biggest supporter has helped me believe in myself even more,” she says.

“My number one piece of advice would be to not compare yourself to others on social media,” she adds. “I know social media is a big thing in our generation and people of my age tend to do that, looking at whether the other person has more success than you do; I would say do not let that stop you. If anything, let that empower you to do better than your peers. A lot of people get discouraged and don’t pursue things because they aren’t good enough. As women we possess the ultimate superpower and create life! Everyone should always stick to their individuality and move at their own pace to the top”.

Before the end, there is a final interview that interested me. I have dropped in some songs/videos from Flo Milli. I would urge people to spend even longer checking out the work of one of the finest rappers on the planet. W Magazine posed to some questions to Flo Milli a few months back. There are a few questions that caught my eye:

“A certain audacity comes out in your music. Were you always like that?

I come from a household full of women. We used to argue a lot. When you’re around women all your life, you adapt to the attitudes. The energy I’m bringing is like, How dare you, because I’m that bitch. [Laughs] And it’s because I’ve always been around it. I had to be strong, because in high school, it was hard to accept that I had a lot of confidence—it would trigger people’s insecurities. But to me, I don’t give a fuck.

What was your original career plan?

It was always rapping, but I also wanted to act. Me and my older sister would rap in my room for fun. And of course, I grew up in a household where my mom loved music too, so it came natural to me. I was a big fan of Shakira. Gwen Stefani. Fergie. I did a talent show when I was 9 or 10, to “Fergalicious.” I was very much into that type of music—prissy, but still attitude-y.

Do you worry about being too pop, or do you not focus on genres?

I think about how I can reinvent myself, but I don’t box myself into one thing. It’s cool to try new things and see what my range is. I’m gonna always think about what I find good first. And if I like it, I know somebody else is gonna like it”.

I am going to end it there. The tremendous Flo Milli showcased her talent on Ho, why is you here ? The world will await to see where she goes next. Such is the quality and consistency of the music from female rappers this past few years, we have been treated to music of the highest order. In an exciting and growing sea of artists, Flo Milli is definitely making a name for herself. If you are unfamiliar with the buzz around her, correct that now and go to listen to…

HER incredible music.

____________

Follow Flo Milli

PHOTO CREDIT: Brandon Bowen 

Official:

https://www.flomilli.com/

Instagram:

https://www.instagram.com/flomillishit

Twitter:

https://twitter.com/_FloMilli

Facebook:

https://www.facebook.com/FloMilliOfficial/

Spotify:

https://open.spotify.com/artist/08PvCOlef4xdOr20jFSTPd

YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCylw9yLlhFVX_vIdjc6DjGQ

FEATURE: Spotlight: Tamera

FEATURE:

 

 

Spotlight

PHOTO CREDIT: Morgann Eve Russell 

Tamera

___________

THERE are so many great artists…

I want to include in Spotlight in the coming weeks. If you look back at most of the recent editions, you will notice the majority of artists are women. I think that is because a lot of the most compelling music is being made by them – though I will include more men and male bands in future parts. Even though Tamera is not brand-new off of the block, she is a rising artist who is making some incredible music. Although she appeared on The X Factor back in 2013, Tamera has defied any expectations and stereotypes one would associate with talent show contestants. She is a young artist who is primed to do big things! I want to source a few interviews where we get to know from the London-based, Kent-born treasure. I shall come to 2021 interviews soon. Before that, PRS for MUSIC spotlighted a fascinating rising talent last year:

“Following on from her debut single Romeo and follow up Don’t Phone, Kent-born artist Tamera has released her third and most impressive offering yet, Flipside.

Speaking on the track, Tamera says: ‘Flipside is about having no energy to deal with relationship woes, reclining into procrastination and setting everything aside to deal with tomorrow, or else you might hurt someone’s feelings with an aggravated tongue.’

2020 will see the release of Tamera’s highly anticipated debut EP, so now’s the time to get to know her a bit better.

Read all about her.

Who?

Tamera.

What?

A rising R&B songstress with impeccable, sultry vocals who must not be slept on.

From where?

Gravesend, Kent.

What’s the story?

One of the UK’s most breathtaking new talents, Tamera’s her incredible vocal ability and penchant for relatable lyrics about life, love, finding her place in the world has earned her early fans across the board.

Tamera only has a handful of releases under her belt but has already been championed by tastemakers like Giles Peterson and DJ Target. Back in March, she played a sold-out debut performance show for Annie Mac Presents alongside Joy Crookes.

Sounds like?

Silky, seventies, neo-soul.

Predicted to?

Drop one of the smoothest EP’s of 2020.

Must hear?

Her latest single Flipside. Tune in below”.

There are a few, great more recent interviews that proudly highlight the talents and huge promise of Tamera. CHECK-OUT had a deep conversation for an artist who has a huge online following, yet her music is perhaps not as widely-known as it will be very soon:

“Tamera, hailing from Kent but having relocated to London four years ago, is one of the many hot new musical acts to hit our radar over the past few months. Applauded for her seductive R&B beats and teasing lyrics, Tamera’s music truly can transport you somewhere tranquil; her track Wickedest just makes you want to hop in a hammock and sway your troubles away. “Your secret's safe if I say so,” she practically coos in our ears.

Phoebe Shardlow: Do you remember the first song you ever made?

Tamera: Oh my god! I actually do, which is wild. I was probably around 17 and just got signed to a major label and they told me ‘first of all we’re getting you in the studio so you can start writing’. I’d never been in a studio before, it was all so exciting to me - so I went to my best friend’s house and I was like ‘okay babes you’ve got to help me write some songs before I go’. We get a YouTube beat and start writing a song that is so silly; all about waking up in some fresh new Jordans and it’s a sunny day and living every day like it’s my birthday. Looking back it’s so silly but we had so much fun trying to get there and it’s made me realise how far I’ve come.

PS: It’s totally different from where you are now.

Tamera: 100% completely different. I don’t think I knew what kind of artist I wanted to be either. I did what I thought I should, what a good song should be. Eventually, I realised you have to dig deeper and draw things out from yourself, instead of looking from the outside”.

PS: Who have been some of your greatest musical influences?

Tamera: Ooh! That’s a tough one, I listen to so many different things. I’d say that more recently I’ve been listening to a lot of Drake and KENDRICK LAMAR. I love to study rappers and the way they place their cadences and their flows. They get a lot more out of a song and in turn, are often way more creative with how they get it all out. I think it’s so fascinating, especially Drake with the punchlines, I mean that dude has been consistently giving us punchlines over the last decade.

Tamera insists to me that outside the studio she’s actually quite boring, but with such an impressive body of work being inspired by her life experiences, I sincerely doubt that. But she’s a woman of comfort and simple pleasures, I can confirm. She cherishes long baths and catching up on Love Island - I ask her what she thought of the final, did she think Choby was robbed?  But Tamera is pleased for Millie and Liam and thinks the right couple won. Reality TV aside, I truly digressed here, what does the future hold for Tamera? She tells me of hopes for some music in the charts, a tour and how she’d really like to own a house.

PHOTO CREDIT: Morgann Eve Russell  

PS: Let’s say you have the most extravagant world tour ever and you could get any designer to do the clothes - who would it be?

Tamera: There’s this London designer called Mia, her label is called MYAEMADE. She’s lit, very lit.

PS: We’re gonna have to find her for Check-Out! And if you could perform anywhere, where?

Tamera: The Royal Albert Hall, it’s so beautiful.

PS: Could you ever imagine yourself doing anything other than music?

Tamera: I feel like if I wasn’t in music and I wasn’t an artist the only other thing I could imagine myself doing and being passionate about is some kind of a writer.

As the world begins to open up again, Tamera can’t wait to meet you all. With new songs on the horizon, the singer tells me how hungry she is to get up on stage again -  her first and only live show was back in early 2020. But speaking of hunger, it’s time for a classic Phoebe Shardlow question…

PS: You can invite three people, dead or alive, to dinner - who are they?

Tamera: Whitney Houston, Prince, and Amy Winehouse”.

<

One of her best tracks to date is Strong for Me. It is a song that everyone should listen to (as they should to the rest of her catalogue!). PAPER wrote about the incredible track back in August:

“UK artist Tamera's new track is sure to have fans consciously uncoupling from their toxic relationships. Out today, "Strong For Me" asks hard questions and ultimately comes to equally difficult conclusions, making sure the listener feels every bit of the heartbreak.

Though understandably hurt and angry with a seemingly apathetic partner, Tamera focuses on the moment of calm clarity in "Strong For Me," as opposed to the feud and fallout. "I'm so tired of being the only one to fight," she sings. Tamera is waving the white flag, realizing that there's more strength in her ability is to walk away than in her attempts to win the match.

Speaking exclusively with PAPER, Tamera revealed how the song came to life. "I could only write this song when I had reached a place of strength," she said. "It took a lot of strength to confess my faults so openly or even to become aware of them."

She continued, "Giving your love so generously and freely only to have ugliness returned really can break someone and cause them to be a colder person to the people that genuinely do love them and that's what this song is about."

 Of course, finding the strength to move on doesn't come without its emotional battles and in the accompanying video, Tamera brings the metaphorical emotional pendulum to life. On one side, she's the peaceful lover, surrounded by butterflies and performing sweetly for the camera. When the frame cuts, she's dressed in dark clothing, sipping something to control the pain — breaking down.

"I wanted to capture the feeling of being emotionally exhausted and how that can push us into self-isolating and self-medicating in a desperate attempt to grasp onto happiness," she said.

"Strong For Me" is just Tamera's latest in a long string of successes over the past few years. Last year, her breakout single "Flipside" garnered her acclaim across the internet and led to Amazon Music UK naming her "One To Watch," alongside Bree Runway and Ivorian Doll, while this summer's release of "Wickedest" has garnered over a million streams — surpassing her previous hits”.

There is a lot more I could write about the amazing Tamera! With so many interesting and original women pushing through and releasing such phenomenal music, it is a pleasure to write about artists like Tamera! I will end with a recent interview. A new series, Young Gifted And Black: Women In Music x YouTube Music, was launched for Black History Month this month. Tamera is the last name to be featured. It is interesting reading the Music Week conversation, as you can hear the tangible sense of joy and positivity that emanates from an artist who has so many great years ahead:

“Singer and songwriter Tamera is really excited about the next phase of her career.

“I'm ready for music now. I’m about to release my first EP, which is insane, and I sold out my first headline show last week, like what the heck is going on?”

It’s not surprising that she is so amped. All of this has been a long time coming for the 26-year-old from Gravesend, who first came to the public’s attention in 2013 as a 16-year contestant on the X Factor.

Last year, Tamera had to put things on pause for a bit due to the pandemic. But she is now back in business and along with some upcoming live shows, she is gearing up to release an EP, her first project.

 “These are songs I've been working on over the last year and a bit,” she says. “There's going be visuals to all of them, which I'm super excited about. I've already started the next project as well, so there's going to be a whole lot more new music to come.”

Tamera is also one of the 132 black creators and artists being championed by #YouTubeBlack Voices program.

“YouTube are doing an amazing thing with Black Voices,” she says, “supporting Black artists, producers and writers in the industry, helping to give them a voice and putting them on to different opportunities.”

So, it’s clear that great things are on the horizon for Tamera and although she’s been a part of the industry for a few years now, she is just getting started.

How did you start with music?

“I always loved singing. I always loved the creative side of life. So, I used to draw a lot and paint a little bit more seriously when I got into my teens. I will never forget; I had a descriptive writing English lesson in primary school, and I think I was in year three or something, quite early on. My teacher put up a picture of an old Grecian town with a well. She said: ‘just describe what you think you would hear, smell, see if you were standing there in the middle of the picture’, and it really made me think about writing and, you know, creating pictures in people's heads with words. And that really fascinated me. So that really got me into writing. And I started writing short stories and poems and stuff like that. I did try and write songs when I was young. But you know, I don't think I'd lived that much, so I didn't have much perspective.”

Some people may have first heard of you from your time as a contestant on the X Factor back in 2013, what was that experience like?

“I get so red when people mention it (laughs). But I will say that it was an incredible opportunity, and I’ve learned so much. But when I think back to that little chubby baby that I was then, I was only 16 at the time and I had planned to go to performing arts college. Then I got through to the live shows of the X Factor in my second week of college. I was a bit conflicted about whether to stay at college or go on the show, so I spoke to my teacher, and he was like: ‘You're going to get so much experience in the music industry going on the show, and that's what you're going to college for. So, if you just document everything you're doing we can grade you on it.’ So that was amazing!”

And have you experienced many challenges due to being a woman, or a Black woman in the music industry?

“I try not to pay attention. You know, I feel like there's so many negative things that can happen to us as human beings. We have to deal with a lot. This world in 2021 is very crazy, so I find it easier if I just focus and have tunnel vision. That's why it's been super important for me to find a good team because it's not like something that I want to change too often. I really want to have the same people around like a solid unit.”

 What are you most excited about moving forward with your career?

“I’m most excited about performing just because when I started releasing my music at the end of 2019, and at the start of 2020, I was supposed to performing a lot, doing shows, and touring, but then obviously Covid-19 hit, and no one could go outside. So, I didn't do any shows last year at all. I've only just started getting back into it about a month ago, so I'm really excited to perform more and meet people that have been supporting me and see their reaction”.

Going forward, we are going to hear and see a lot more from one of our brightest young talents. Her popularity on social media is not because of hype or anything shallow. Instead, it is raw talent and music that has resonated with so many. If you have not heard Tamera, then go and check her out (links are at the bottom) and dive into her music. I am not sure whether there is an album or tour dates later this year. There is definitely going to be demand for more songs. I discovered her fairly recently but, ever since, I have been spinning her tracks and falling for them! She is someone I predict great things for. Do ensure that Tamera is part of your…

REGULAR rotation.

__________

Follow Tamera

 Instagram:

https://www.instagram.com/tamera

Twitter:

https://twitter.com/officialtamera

Facebook:

https://www.facebook.com/tameramusicofficial

Spotify:

https://open.spotify.com/artist/4S68J6bchvHhqHO1Kp8W9X

YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYebCAWmdVyP6EEINxRFEfg

FEATURE: The Lockdown Playlist: Songs from Albums Shortlisted for the Welsh Music Prize 2021

FEATURE:

 

 

The Lockdown Playlist

IN THIS PHOTO: The Anchoress (Catherine Anne Davies) is one of the shortlisted artists for this year’s Welsh Music Prize for her  second studio album, The Art of Losing

Songs from Albums Shortlisted for the Welsh Music Prize 2021

___________

BECAUSE the shortlist…

for this year’s Welsh Music Prize (Gwobr Gerddoriaeth Gymreig) has been announced, I wanted to compile a playlist of songs from the amazing artists featured. There is always so much attention when it comes to ceremonies like the Mercury Prize and BRIT Awards. A lot of focus is on English artists. In fact, when you look at the winners of the Mercury Prize the past few years, it has not gone far out of London! There is such a rich and fertile scene in Wales - and there has been for many years. So many wonderful and worthy artists who deserve a lot of acclaim. The shortlist for this year’s Welsh Music Prize is typically outstanding and filled with terrific albums! Grabbing from the Prize’s official website, this is what the Welsh Music Prize represents:

“Founded in 2011, the Welsh Music Prize celebrates the finest music made in Wales or by Welsh people around the world. Originally originally launched to co-incide with Swn Festival it has now grown into its own, taking place each Autumn.

With a commitment to diversity and fine production, the Welsh Music Prize will continue to champion the best new music in Wales”.

The twelve shortlisted albums this year are: Afro Cluster – The Reach, The Anchoress – The Art of Losing, Carwyn Ellis & Rio 18 – Mas, Datblygu – Cwm Gwagle, El Goodo – Zombie, Gruff Rhys – Seeking New Gods, Gwenifer Raymond – Strange Lights Over Garth Mountain, Kelly Lee Owens – Inner Song, Mace the Great – My Side of the Bridge, Novo Amor – Cannot Be, Whatsoever, Private World – Aleph, and Pys Melyn – Bywyd Llonydd. I am going to include two songs from each album. The standard and quality is the highest it has been for many years! We will find out who the winner is later in the year. Until then, here are tracks from albums made by…

TRULY wonderful Welsh artists.

FEATURE: A Buyer’s Guide: Part Seventy-Eight: Bananarama

FEATURE:

A Buyer’s Guide

Part Seventy-Eight: Bananarama

___________

A little complicated and different…

Bananarama are a group who have had some line-up changes through the years. Currently consisting of Sara Dallin and Keren Woodward, I remember when Siobhan Fahey was a member back in the 1980s. I am going to come to my recommendation of Bananarama’s essential four albums, the underrated gem and their latest studio album. I will end with a book about the group. Before then, AllMusic provide some biography:

“Bananarama embodied so much of the bespangled excess of the '80s that they came to define at least a portion of the decade. At the outset of their career, the trio of Keren Woodward, Sarah Dallin, and Siobhan Fahey were post-punk renegades redefining the girl group sound for the new wave era. Early on, they received an assist from Terry Hall. The lanky, laconic Specials singer enlisted them as vocal support for "It Ain't What You Do (It's the Way That You Do It)" and "Really Saying Something," early hits for his group Fun Boy Three. Both covers went into the British Top Ten in 1982, laying the groundwork for Bananarama's own smash "Shy Boy." The trio cultivated a strong following in U.S. dance clubs, which helped their single "Cruel Summer" become a Top Ten hit in 1984 and laid the groundwork for the international blockbuster "Venus" in 1986. "Venus" strengthened Bananarama's dance connections, a reinforcement that not only gave them another huge worldwide hit in 1987 with "I Heard a Rumour," but kept the group alive over the decades. Fahey left the group in 1988, but Woodward and Dallin persevered, racking up an enormous number of hits in the U.K. and around the globe, earning a certification from the Guinness Book of World Records as the most successful female band worldwide.

The genesis of Bananarama lies in the relationship between Keren Woodward and Sarah Dallin, who were friends since childhood. While studying journalism at the London College of Fashion, Dallin met Siobhan Fahey. All three women were involved in London's punk and new wave scene, which is how Woodward and Dallin befriended Paul Cook, the drummer for the Sex Pistols. Cook produced a demo for Woodward, Dallin, and Fahey -- a cover Black Blood's "Aie a Mwana," which the indie Demon Records released as a single. "Aie a Mwana" became an indie hit, helping Bananarama land a deal at Decca while also earning the attention of Terry Hall, the former lead singer for the Specials, who had just formed Fun Boy Three.

Hall had Bananarama guest on "It Ain't What You Do (It's the Way That You Do It)," the second single by Fun Boy Three. "It Ain't What You Do" turned into a massive U.K. hit in 1982, peaking at number four in the charts and turning Bananarama into stars. "Really Saying Something" -- a single that flipped the credit of "It Ain't What You Do," being billed to Bananarama featuring Fun Boy Three -- quickly followed in 1982, reaching number five on the U.K. charts. "Shy Boy" gave the group another Top Ten hit in the U.K., providing an anchor for their 1983 debut, Deep Sea Skiving. The album produced another hit single in the form of a cover of Steam's "Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye."

Though Deep Sea Skiving and its accompanying singles performed well in Australia and Europe, Bananarama were still an underground act in America, receiving play on MTV and doing well on the dance charts, but not cracking pop radio. It was 1984's Bananarama that broke the trio in the United States. "Cruel Summer" was the vehicle for their Stateside stardom. "Robert DeNiro's Waiting…" arrived first, getting significant play on MTV but going no further than 95 on Billboard -- in Britain, it peaked at number three, their best position to date -- but "Cruel Summer" was timed for a summer release in 1984, nearly a year after the song reached number eight in the U.K. "Cruel Summer" came close to replicating that success in the U.S., reaching number nine. At the end of the year, Bananarama appeared on Band Aid's charity single, "Do They Know It's Christmas?"

"Do Not Disturb" gave the trio a modest hit in 1985, but they returned in 1986 with their third album, True Confessions. Its lead single, a Stock, Aitken & Waterman-produced cover of Shocking Blue's 1969 hit "Venus," gave Bananarama their first number one hit in the U.S.; it also topped Billboard's Dance chart, as well as charts in Australia, New Zealand, Switzerland, and the Netherlands, while reaching eight in the U.K. None of the other singles from True Confessions came close to replicating that success, but 1987's Wow! gave Bananarama another international smash in the form of "I Heard a Rumour." "Love in the First Degree" also became a Top Ten hit in the U.K., earning a silver certification.

Shortly after the release of Wow!, Fahey left Bananarama. Her last appearance with the group was at the February 1988 Brit Awards; she went on to form Shakespear's Sister with Marcella Detroit. Woodward and Dallin were joined by Jacquie O'Sullivan, who debuted with the group on a re-recorded version of "I Want You Back," which was initially featured on Wow!; this version reached number five in the U.K. Greatest Hits Collection arrived in 1988, accompanied by the new single "Love, Truth and Honesty," which peaked at number 23. By reaching the charts, "Love, Truth and Honesty" helped Bananarama become the female group with the most entries in the U.K. charts. During 1989, the trio supported the comedy troupe Lananeeneenoonoo on a cover of the Beatles' "Help!" which was cut for Comic Relief; it was a number three hit in the U.K.

Pop Life, Bananarama's first album with O'Sullivan, contained several collaborations with Youth, along with productions by Stock, Aitken & Waterman. The album gave them three modest hits in the U.K.: "Only Your Love," "Preacher Man," and "Long Train Running." O'Sullivan left the group after its release, and Dallin and Woodward soldiered on, making their debut as a duo with Please Yourself. The 1993 album added two hits to the group's canon: "Movin' On" and "More, More, More," which both peaked at 24.

Bananarama entered a fallow period in the mid-'90s. Their next album, I Found Love, only saw release in Japan; it appeared under the title Ultra Violet in North America, Europe, and Australia, but conspicuously never was released in the United Kingdom. The French label M6 Interactions released Exotica in 2001, but the album didn't appear anywhere else. During this time, Bananarama kept popping up on television in the U.K., along with playing the occasional show, but they didn't launch a proper comeback until 2005, when Drama became their first album to be released in the U.K. since 1993. "Move in My Direction," the first single from the album, peaked at 14, with "Look on the Floor (Hypnotic Tango)" reaching 26. Bananarama returned with Viva in 2009, which had the modest hit "Love Comes." The Now or Never EP appeared in 2012.

Fahey rejoined Bananarama for a reunion tour in 2017; this was documented on a live album and home video released in July 2018. Fahey left the group before Bananarama recorded In Stereo, the duo's first full-length album in a decade, released in April 2019”.

If you are completely new to Bananarama and their history, I would recommend you try the albums that I have suggested below. From the 1980s sound through to the modern-day vibe, Bananarama has changed a fair bit. Let’s hope that there are going to be more albums. One of my favourite groups from the 1980s, Sara Dallin and Keren Woodward are keeping the group strong. I look forward to hearing…

WHAT comes next from them.

___________

The Four Essential Albums

 

Deep Sea Skiving

Release Date: 7th March, 1983

Label: London

Producers: Barry Blue/Dave Jordan/Jolley & Swain/Little Paul Cook/Big John Martin/Sara Dallin

Standout Tracks: Shy Boy/Young at Heart/Na Na Hey Hey (Kiss Him Goodbye)

Buy: https://www.discogs.com/sell/list?master_id=46512&ev=mb

Stream: https://open.spotify.com/album/4v3E9sT3n9mz3MWlrtmtVw?si=qlw4Hwx8RqmCPOsBZo4Niw

Review:

“Bananarama's first album is by far their best. Before they fell in with the lucrative but often boring Stock, Aitken & Waterman assembly line starting with 1986's True Confessions, Siobhan Fahey, Sarah Dallin, and Keren Woodward were unashamedly poppy, but they had enough artistic credibility to create a debut album that, barring a couple of small missteps, actually works as an album instead of a collection of singles with some filler. (They were even hip enough for their first single to be produced by ex-Sex Pistol Paul Cook.) Of course, the singles are terrific. There are four British chart hits in these 11 songs, and every one of them still sounds terrific, where later hits like "I Can't Help It" are terribly dated. The slinky "Shy Boy" and a rattling cover of the Marvelettes' "He Was Really Sayin' Somethin'" (co-starring the trio's early mentors Fun Boy Three) are classic girl group songs updated for the '80s, every bit as credible as any mid-level Spector or Motown singles. That Cook-produced debut single, "Aie a Mwana" (oddly left off the album's first U.S. edition), now sounds mostly like a curio of the brief tropical craze that hit the U.K. in 1981/1982, but "Cheers Then" is a heartbreaker, an absolutely lovely lost-love song that's possibly the best thing Bananarama ever did and certainly one of the top singles to come out of Great Britain in 1982. Surprisingly, though, Deep Sea Skiving has some album tracks that are the equal of the singles. A funky version of Paul Weller's "Doctor Love" (originally written for Weller's then-girlfriend Tracie Young, whose version came out in 1984) is a killer, as is the countrified "Young at Heart," written by the trio and Fahey's then-boyfriend, Robert Hodgens of the Bluebells (who did their own version on 1984's Sisters). Three more Dallin/Fahey/Woodward compositions present a well-rounded portrait of young girls on their own in the big city, with the bouncy, glammy "Hey Young London" like a night out on the town and the resentful "What a Shambles," a morning-after snit about an out-of-touch star from the point of view of three struggling working-class girls. It's the closing "Wish You Were Here," though, that caps the album's widely varied moods with a romantic wistfulness that's like the emotional flip side of "Cheers Then." Deep Sea Skiving is not perfect. "Boy Trouble" is awfully slight, and a cover of Steam's "Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye" is okay, but basically pointless. Still, it's Bananarama's finest album by far, and an underappreciated pop gem of its era” – AllMusic

Choice Cut: Really Sayin’ Something (with Fun Boy Three)

Bananarama

Release Date: 21st April, 1984

Label: London

Producers: Tony Swain/Steve Jolley

Standout Tracks: Rough Justice/Hot Line to Heaven/Roberto De Niro’s Waiting

Buy: https://www.discogs.com/sell/list?master_id=2869&ev=mb

Stream: https://open.spotify.com/album/4zHriUoFVrq0YZ2kIEOkIW?si=zMQbuIwlRoiOj2-YnkH9xA

Review:

“Whether addressing the intersection of drug culture and youth culture on “Hotline to Heaven” or exploring societal anomie on “Rough Justice,” Dallin, Fahey and Woodward are insightful versus clumsy when broaching socially conscious themes. That former quality is especially true of “Robert De Niro’s Waiting,” a snappy takedown of “hero worship” as Woodward defined it in a 2012 interview when questioned about the song. However, many fans have speculated for decades that “Robert De Niro’s Waiting” subversively addressed rape with lines like, “A walk in the park can become a bad dream / People are staring and following me / This is my only escape from it all / Watching a film or a face on the wall…!”

On the opposite side of the tonal spectrum are entries such as “Dream Baby,” “State I’m In” and “The Wild Life” that bring in a touch of conventional pop sass to balance out Bananarama’s heavier sides. As an aside, “The Wild Life” wasn’t included on the first pressings of Bananarama, it was a soundtrack feature for the 1984 American teen film of the same name and was tacked on to secondary Bananarama pressings in that territory.

Musically, the arrangements of the album are as progressive as its songwriting. Throughout the long player a diverse range of sounds are at play, from the flavorful pop-soul of “Dream Baby” to the airy acoustic vibe of “Through a Child’s Eyes.” Bananarama have no sonics limits here.

The warm, expressive grooves of “Cruel Summer,” Rough Justice” and “King of the Jungle” are of particular notice, indebted to an immaculate fusion of expert synthesizer sequencing and live instrumentation that yields an exotic pop composite of world music and soul rhythms. “Link”—a crafty interlude used to indicate the end of Side A on the originating vinyl pressing that went unlisted on this format and found itself restored on the subsequent CD reissues—puts this method into action in lush cooperation with Bananarama’s unison vocal style. A major leap forward from Deep Sea Skiving, Bananarama saw Dallin, Fahey and Woodward vocally communicating with a more confident eloquence which gifted a deeper emotional potency to the music and words of the LP.

As 1984 wore on, Bananarama and its post-“Cruel Summer” singles—“Robert De Niro’s Waiting,” “Rough Justice,” “King of the Jungle,” “Hotline to Heaven” and “The Wild Life”—met mixed reviews and sales worldwide. While it was far and away from a chart misfire, it wasn’t exactly a triumph; larger commercial victories awaited Bananarama further into the 1980s with True Confessions (1986) and Wow! (1987)” – Albumism

Choice Cut: Cruel Summer

True Confessions

Release Date: 12th July, 1986

Label: London

Producers: Tony Swain/Steve Jolley/Stock Aitken Waterman

Standout Tracks: A Trick of the Night/Do Not Disturb/More Than Physical

Buy: https://www.discogs.com/sell/list?master_id=46805&ev=mb

Stream: https://open.spotify.com/album/6CVuruIUWoYViZM97wgq9h?si=jwwEqzvySSCPzamFVLwuvQ

Review:

“After becoming one of the biggest girl groups in U.K. pop music history, and after scoring a Top Ten U.S. hit with "Cruel Summer," Bananarama reached the commercial pinnacle of their career with their third album, True Confessions. This album also marked an artistic change of pace for the trio because they began to utilize super hit producers Stock, Aitken & Waterman, who helped them turn the 1970 rock hit "Venus" into an unstoppable, unforgettable dance smash. In fact, their version was so huge that it became their only U.S. number one hit. The rest of the album, however, is a little darker than one might expect, with heavy lyrics and themes permeating the songs. Other highlights include the second single, "More Than Physical," which was also produced by Stock, Aitken & Waterman, the moody third single, "Trick of the Night," the saucy "Hooked on Love," the dance-pop of "Promised Land," and the seductive "Dance with a Stranger." To some, True Confessions was a departure of sorts from the post-punk, new wave girl group sound that made Bananarama so essential to early-'80s British alt-pop music. To others, it represents a shift to platinum success (which continued with their follow-up album, Wow!), and this album, along with the hit "Venus," are prime examples of classic '80s dance-pop music” – AllMusic

Choice Cut: Venus

Viva

Release Date: 14th September, 2009

Label: Fascination

Producer: Ian Masterson

Standout Tracks: Love Don't Live Here/Rapture/S-S-S-Single Bed

Buy: https://www.discogs.com/sell/list?master_id=326002&ev=mb

Stream: https://open.spotify.com/album/1cfn3c5NlxrzWkLv40XGem?si=yqnRggl9TPmlP8XFGbY-Fw

Review:

“In a post-Spice Girls pop world, where ‘Girl Power’ has been all too hastily supplemented by “How would you like us?”, it’s enormously satisfying to know that Bananarama never went away.

They may now be two middle-aged women and probably more intrinsically respectable than they ever imagined they might be, but they are the original UK girl group of the modern era – and the most successful – and serve to remind their spiritual spawn that there is an alternative, more independent-minded way to have a pop career.

They can do this because, and this is the most important thing about Bananarama and why everybody from Ms Dynamite to Girls Aloud to Lady Gaga should pay attention, they have never changed their approach to what they do. This may be their tenth album in their 30th year as a group and they may have acquired considerable sophistication along the way, but it still bristles with the sort of energy born out of total conviction that what they are doing is right for them. Regardless of what’s going on around them.

In this case it’s the hi-NRG-ish disco pop, which has served them well over time, with the producer here, Ian Masterton, not only getting the best out of the duo but making them sound a little bit contemporary by ushering in outside influences. As touches rather than fully-formed ideas, meaning the mix of self-penned tunes and covers – The Runner, S-S-S-Single Bed and Rapture – ploughs a pretty straightforward, synth-heavy path with not a great deal of tonal variation. That said, nobody knows their audience as well as this group – you wouldn’t survive for 30-odd years if you didn’t – and it’s not meant to be played as an album, but spun as one-offs in Europe’s most openly hedonistic discos.

Under those circumstances, the overblown dramas of the big keyboard explosions of Love Don’t Live Here and Tell Me Tomorrow or the relentlessly pumping Dum Dum Boy and Love Comes or the elastic groove in Seventeen will find a natural and enthusiastic home. Viva Bananarama, indeed” – BBC

Choice Cut: Love Comes

The Underrated Gem

 

WOW!

Release Date: 4th September, 1987

Label: London

Producers: Stock Aitken Waterman

Standout Tracks: I Can’t Help It/I Heard a Rumour/I Want You Back

Buy: https://www.discogs.com/sell/list?master_id=46781&ev=mb

Stream: https://open.spotify.com/album/4rf0QgMoJ4jVEjpX54GRH5?si=X9aiOS2eQeCNFXz7oFez-w

Review:

“It might sound like a bizarre criticism, but the trouble with Bananarama is that by the time they released this album in 1987 they’d got too good. When they started out at the beginning of the decade, the main thrust of their appeal was a kind of shambling amateurishness, like three girls at the back

of the school bus singing

for themselves with little thought for harmonies and vocal counterpoints.

Wow! is an incredibly slick pop record, as one might expect from the Stock/Aitken/Waterman factory, with chart-conquering hits I Heard

A Rumour and I Want You Back (and a seriously sly and sexy take on The Supremes’ Nathan Jones) the epitome of perfection. It still sounds pretty good, but naggingly clinical and with an absence of charm or humanity. It would be the last album by the original line-up, as Jacquie O’Sullivan replaced Siobhan Fahey on 1991’s Pop Life, also reissued as a deluxe model this month. The songs are more pedestrian, save for a lively take on The Doobie Brothers’ Long Train Running, while the following year’s Please Yourself found Keren Woodward and Sarah Dallin working as a duo and suffering from a similar drought of good material” – Record Collector

Choice Cut: Love in the First Degree

The Latest Album

 

In Stereo

Release Date: 19th April, 2019

Label: In Synk

Producers: Ian Masterson/Richard X

Standout Tracks: Love in Stereo/Intoxicated/Stuff Like That

Buy: https://www.discogs.com/sell/list?master_id=1536243&ev=mb

Stream: https://open.spotify.com/album/1MBIMtEqRi2n4ox7m5SnV0?si=9QB-eTseTmyXPdSebHX4lw

Review:

“No one expected Bananarama to reinvent themselves. Most likely, no one wanted them to either. One thing’s for sure, though: Sara Dallin and Keren Woodward aren’t going to mess with the formula. Instead, they’re going to distil it to its purest form.

Hiring producer Richard X  for opening track Love In Stereo is, therefore, a smart way to get people onside, its throbbing, Heart Of Glass synths underpinning an affectionate look at the way music revives powerful associations: “With you the music sounds better/ I can’t listen alone.” Better still, it cannily acknowledges their audience’s maturity, offering a sense of nostalgia with both its opening greeting – “Been a long time” – and its early reference to “a tape in the dashboard.”

What the title track does best, however, is fail to outstay its welcome. This is one of the greatest skills of all, and it’s one at which Bananarama often excel here.

As kickstarts go, then, Love In Stereo is pretty much immaculate, and that it’s followed by the summer disco fever of Dance Music – which borrows a trick or two from Kylie’s deathless Can’t Get You Out My Head – is another canny move.

The Venus-like Intoxicated delves into similar territory as well, the duo’s familiar unison voices breaking into harmonies before its chorus, and if that’s surprisingly restrained, it’s soon offset by Stuff Like That’s festive fireworks. There’s even a gentle comedown in the Morcheeba-like On Your Own.

Inevitably, though, some tracks are weaker: It’s Gonna Be Alright’s merely a pale shadow of Stuff Like That, Tonight’s chorus sounds like it’s deflating, and only the tense crescendo towards I’m On Fire’s climax redeems its formulaic overexcitement and trite sentiments.

In places, the duo also come across as surprisingly needy: Tonight’s “I need to feel you”, Gotta Get Away’s rather worrying “I wanna feel love so bad/ Like a heart attack”, Looking For Someone’s demanding “I don’t expect nothing but love” and It’s Going To Be Alright’s “I wanted a cowboy by my side/ I wanted a rodeo,” which is surely doomed to disappointment.

Still, whether or not they offer empowerment, who listens to lyrics when they’re dancing to Bananarama? After all, it ain’t what they do. It’s always been the way that they do it” – Classic Pop

Choice Cut: Looking for Someone

The Bananarama Book

 

Really Saying Something: Sara & Keren - Our Bananarama Story

Authors: Sara Dallin/Keren Woodward  

Publication Date: 29th October, 2020

Publisher: Cornerstone

Synopsis:

“From the duo behind the all-conquering Bananarama, Really Saying Something is a sparkling, funny and sincere story of lifelong friendship and a journey through popular music.

_______________________________________
'This book is like something from a movie' DERMOT O'LEARY

'[A] brilliant autobiography' MARTIN KEMP

A Sunday Times Best Music Book of 2020
A HuffPo Book That Got Us Through 2020
A Daily Mail Best Showbiz Memoir
_______________________________________
MUSIC, FAME AND A LIFELONG FRIENDSHIP.

Sara Dallin and Keren Woodward met in the school playground when they were four. They became international stars, first as a trio, then, for almost three decades, as a duo. 

After finishing school, Sara studied journalism at the London College Of Fashion, while Keren worked at the BBC. They lived in the YWCA before moving into the semi-derelict former Sex Pistols rehearsal room and immersing themselves in Soho's thriving club scene. A year later they teamed up with Siobhan Fahey to form Bananarama. A string of worldwide hits followed, including 'Cruel Summer', 'I Heard a Rumour and 'Venus'. In a male-dominated industry, they were determined to succeed on their own terms and inspired a generation with their music, DIY-style and trailblazing attitudes. 

Narrated with humour and authenticity, and filled with never before seen photos Really Saying Something takes us from the early days to the world tours, to party games with George Michael, a close friendship with Prodigy's Keith Flint, hanging out with Andy Warhol in New York and a Guinness World Record for the most worldwide chart entries of any all-female group.

As well as the highs, Sara and Keren speak frankly about the flip side side of fame, revealing their personal struggles and the challenges of juggling family life with a demanding professional schedule. 

Really Saying Something is the story of two friends who continue to pursue their dreams their way - and have a great time doing it. It's a celebration of determination and a lifelong friendship, with an unbeatable soundtrack.
_______________________________________
'A wonderful, pantomime-like story of self-invention and continuous reinvention' LITERARY REVIEW

'Their friendship has seen them through their school years, adolescence, bad breakups, motherhood and comebacks, all of which is beautifully captured in their memoir Really Saying Something, which I devoured . . . what a nostalgia-fest' KATE THORNTON

'Brilliant, of course, absolutely wonderful' EAMONN HOLMES

'This cheery memoir showed how luck and canny shoe choices propelled Bristol school friends Dallin and Woodward to megastardom' UNCUT” – Waterstones

Order: https://www.waterstones.com/book/really-saying-something/sara-dallin/keren-woodward/9781786332660

FEATURE: The October Playlist: Vol. 5: The Greatest Kiss of Life I Ever Had

FEATURE:

 

 

The October Playlist

IN THIS PHOTO: SASAMI 

Vol. 5: The Greatest Kiss of Life I Ever Had

__________

IT is back to busy business as usual…

 IN THIS PHOTO: Alicia Keys

with this week’s Playlist. Last week was a little quiet in terms of big-hitting artists putting out music. No such problem this week! Alongside SASAMI is new music from Kylie Minogue & Jessie Ware, Kelly Lee Owens, BENEE, Blood Red Shoes, Alicia Keys, Lauran Hibberd, Kasabian, Alicia Keys, and Tori Amos. There is also music from Denise Chaila/MuRli, Lex Amor, Metronomy, Penelope Isles, and Anaïs Mitchell. If you need a boost to get you into the weekend, then I think the tuneage below should sort you out. It is going to be a wet weekend for many of us. Rather than brave the weather, put on these songs and they should help…

 IN THIS PHOTO: BENEE

MAKE things brighter!   

ALL PHOTOS/IMAGES (unless credited otherwise): Artists

__________

SASAMI – The Greatest

Kylie Minogue & Jessie Ware - Kiss of Life

Kelly Lee Owens - Unity (The Official FIFA Women’s World Cup 2023™ Theme) 

PHOTO CREDIT: Harry Were

BENEE – Doesn’t Matter 

Alicia Keys - Best of Me (Originals)

Blood Red Shoes – MORBID FASCINATION 

Lauran Hibberd – Charlie’s Car 

Kasabian – ALYGATYR

Nova Twins – Antagonist

Ed Sheeran – Overpass Graffiti

Lex Amor – Rocks 

Tori Amos – Water Metal Wood

Maddie & Tae - Madness

Denise Chaila, MuRli - Energy

Beach Bunny – Oxygen 

Koffee – The Harder They Fall

PHOTO CREDIT: Parri Thomas

Penelope Isles – Terrified

PHOTO CREDIT: Shawn Brackbill

The War on Drugs - Change

Maggie Lindemann – She Knows It

Pixey – Shine On

Strawberry Guy – I’ll Be There

PHOTO CREDIT: Diana Krall

Elvis Costello, The Imposters – Magnificent Hurt

Metronomy - It’s good to be back

Zuzu – Queensway Tunnel

Ama Lou – Trust Nobody

Larkins – No Life

PHOTO CREDIT: Jay Sansone

Anaïs Mitchell – Bright Star

PHOTO CREDIT: Tina Tyrell

Snail Mail – Madonna

Charlotte Dos Santos – Patience

Erica Cody – Gratitude

PHOTO CREDIT: Trinity Ellis

Shygirl – Cleo

PHOTO CREDIT: Joe Brennan

daine - cemetery dreams

Matilda Cole – Halloween

Wynona – Real World

The Parrots – Amigos

FEATURE: Inspired By… Part Thirty-Six: The Rolling Stones

FEATURE:

 

 

Inspired By…

IN THIS PHOTO: The Rolling Stones in 1964/PHOTO CREDIT: Terry O'Neill 

Part Thirty-Six: The Rolling Stones

___________

EXCUSE the long biography…

that is about to come but, for this part of Inspired By…, I am featuring one of the most influential bands ever. The Rolling Stones are legends who have made their mark on generations. Before I come to a playlist of songs from artists influenced by The Rolling Stones, here is some biography:

“By the time the Rolling Stones began calling themselves the World's Greatest Rock & Roll Band in the late '60s, they had already staked out an impressive claim on the title. As the self-consciously dangerous alternative to the bouncy Merseybeat of the Beatles in the British Invasion, the Stones had pioneered the gritty, hard-driving blues-based rock & roll that came to define hard rock. With his preening machismo and latent maliciousness, Mick Jagger became the prototypical rock frontman, tempering his macho showmanship with a detached, campy irony while Keith Richards and Brian Jones wrote the blueprint for sinewy, interlocking rhythm guitars. Backed by the strong yet subtly swinging rhythm section of bassist Bill Wyman and drummer Charlie Watts, the Stones became the breakout band of the British blues scene, eclipsing such contemporaries as the Animals and Them. Over the course of their career, the Stones never really abandoned blues, but as soon as they gained popularity in the U.K., they began experimenting musically, incorporating the British pop of contemporaries like the Beatles, the Kinks, and the Who into their sound. After a brief dalliance with psychedelia, the Stones re-emerged in the late '60s as a jaded, blues-soaked hard rock quintet. They had always flirted with the seedy side of rock & roll, but as the hippie dream began to break apart, they exposed and reveled in the new rock culture. It wasn't without difficulty, of course. Shortly after he was fired from the group, Jones was found dead in a swimming pool, while at a 1969 free concert at Altamont, a concertgoer was brutally killed during a Stones show. But the Stones never stopped going. For the next 50-plus years, they continued to record and perform, and while their records weren't always blockbusters, they were never less than the most visible band of their era; certainly, none of their British peers continued to be as popular or productive as the Stones. And no band since has proven to have such a broad fan base or such far-reaching popularity, and it is impossible to hear any of the groups that followed them without detecting some sort of influence, whether it was musical or aesthetic.

Throughout their career, Mick Jagger (vocals) and Keith Richards (guitar, vocals) remained at the core of the Rolling Stones. The pair initially met as children at Dartford Maypole County Primary School. They drifted apart over the next ten years, eventually making each other's acquaintance again in 1960, when they met through a mutual friend, Dick Taylor, who was attending Sidcup Art School with Richards. At the time, Jagger was studying at the London School of Economics and playing with Taylor in the blues band Little Boy Blue & the Blue Boys. Shortly afterward, Richards joined the band. Within a year, they had met Brian Jones (guitar, vocals), a Cheltenham native who had dropped out of school to play saxophone and clarinet. By the time he became a fixture on the British blues scene, Jones already had a wild life. He ran away to Scandinavia when he was 16 and had already fathered two children. He returned to Cheltenham after a few months, where he began playing with the Ramrods. Shortly afterward, he moved to London, where he played in Alexis Korner's group, Blues Inc. Jones quickly decided he wanted to form his own group and advertised for members; among those he recruited was blues pianist Ian Stewart.

As he played with his group, Jones also moonlighted under the name Elmo Jones at the Ealing Blues Club. At the pub, he became reacquainted with Blues, Inc., which now featured drummer Charlie Watts, and, on occasion, cameos by Jagger and Richards. Jones became friends with Jagger and Richards, and they soon began playing together with Taylor and Stewart; during this time, Jagger was elevated to the status of Blues, Inc.'s lead singer. With the assistance of drummer Tony Chapman, the fledgling band recorded a demo tape. After it was rejected by EMI, Taylor left the band to attend the Royal College of Art; he would later form the Pretty Things. Before Taylor's departure, the group named itself the Rolling Stones, borrowing the moniker from a Muddy Waters song.

The Rolling Stones gave their first performance at the Marquee Club in London on July 12, 1962. At the time, the group consisted of Jagger, Richards, Jones, pianist Ian Stewart, drummer Mick Avory, and Dick Taylor, who had briefly returned to the fold. Weeks after the concert, Taylor left again and was replaced by Bill Wyman, formerly of the Cliftons. Avory also left the group -- he would later join the Kinks -- and the Stones hired Tony Chapman, who proved to be unsatisfactory. After a few months of persuasion, the band recruited Charlie Watts, who had quit Blues, Inc. to work at an advertising agency once that group's schedule became too hectic. By 1963, the band's lineup was set, and the Stones began an eight-month residency at the Crawdaddy Club, which proved to substantially increase their fan base. It also attracted the attention of Andrew Loog Oldham, who became the Stones' manager, signing them from underneath the Crawdaddy Club's Giorgio Gomelsky. Although Oldham didn't know much about music, he was gifted at promotion, and he latched upon the idea of fashioning the Stones as the bad-boy opposition to the clean-cut Beatles. At his insistence, the heavyset yet meek Stewart was forced out of the group, since his appearance contrasted with the rest of the bandmembers'. Stewart didn't disappear from the Stones, though; he became one of their key roadies and played on their albums and tours until his death in 1985.

With Oldham's help, the Rolling Stones signed with Decca Records, and that June released their debut single, a cover of Chuck Berry's "Come On." The single became a minor hit, reaching number 21, and the group supported it with appearances on festivals and package tours. At the end of the year, they released a version of Lennon-McCartney's "I Wanna Be Your Man" that soared into the Top 15. Early in 1964, they released a cover of Buddy Holly's "Not Fade Away," which shot to number three. "Not Fade Away" became their first American hit, reaching number 48 that spring. By that time, the Stones were notorious in their homeland. Considerably rougher and sexier than the Beatles, the Stones were the subject of numerous sensationalized articles in the British press, culminating in a story about them urinating in public. All of these stories cemented the group as a dangerous, rebellious band in the minds of the public, and had the effect of beginning a manufactured rivalry between them and the Beatles, which helped the group rocket to popularity in the U.S. In the spring of 1964, the Stones released their eponymous debut album, which was followed by "It's All Over Now," their first U.K. number one.

That summer, they toured America to riotous crowds, recording the Five by Five EP at Chess Records in Chicago in the midst of the tour. By the time it was over, they had another number one U.K. single with Howlin' Wolf's "Little Red Rooster." Although the Stones had achieved massive popularity, Oldham decided to push Jagger and Richards into composing their own songs, since they -- and his publishing company -- would receive more money that away. In June of 1964, the group released their first original single, "Tell Me (You're Coming Back)," which became their first American Top 40 hit. Shortly afterward, a version of Irma Thomas' "Time Is on My Side" became their first U.S. Top Ten. It was followed by "The Last Time" in early 1965, a number one U.K. and Top Ten U.S. hit that began a virtually uninterrupted string of Jagger-Richards hit singles. Still, it wasn't until the group released "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" in the summer of 1965 that they were elevated to superstars. Driven by a fuzz-guitar riff designed to replicate the sound of a horn section, "Satisfaction" signaled that Jagger and Richards had come into their own as songwriters, breaking away from their blues roots and developing a signature style of big, bluesy riffs and wry, sardonic lyrics. It stayed at number one for four weeks and began a string of Top Ten singles that ran for the next two years, including such classics as "Get Off My Cloud," "19th Nervous Breakdown," "As Tears Go By," and "Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby, Standing in the Shadow?"

By 1966, the Stones had decided to respond to the Beatles' increasingly complex albums with their first album of all-original material, Aftermath. Due to Brian Jones' increasingly exotic musical tastes, the record boasted a wide range of influences, from the sitar-drenched "Paint It, Black" to the Eastern drones of "I'm Going Home." These eclectic influences continued to blossom on Between the Buttons (1967), the most pop-oriented album the group ever made. Ironically, the album's release was bookended by two of the most notorious incidents in the band's history. Before the record was released, the Stones performed the suggestive "Let's Spend the Night Together," the B-side to the medieval ballad "Ruby Tuesday," on The Ed Sullivan Show, which forced Jagger to alter the song's title to an incomprehensible mumble, or else face being banned.

In February of 1967, Jagger and Richards were arrested for drug possession, and within three months, Jones was arrested on the same charge. All three were given suspended jail sentences, and the group backed away from the spotlight as the summer of love kicked into gear in 1967. Jagger, along with his then-girlfriend Marianne Faithfull, went with the Beatles to meet the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi; they were also prominent in the international broadcast of the Beatles' "All You Need Is Love." Appropriately, the Stones' next single, "Dandelion"/"We Love You," was a psychedelic pop effort, and it was followed by their response to Sgt. Pepper's, Their Satanic Majesties Request, which was greeted with lukewarm reviews.

The Stones' infatuation with psychedelia was brief. By early 1968, they had fired Andrew Loog Oldham and hired Allen Klein as their manager. The move coincided with their return to driving rock & roll, which happened to coincide with Richards' discovery of open tunings, a move that gave the Stones their distinctively fat, powerful sound. The revitalized Stones were showcased on the malevolent single "Jumpin' Jack Flash," which climbed to number three in May 1968. Their next album, Beggar's Banquet, was finally released in the fall, after being delayed for five months due its controversial cover art of a dirty, graffiti-laden restroom. An edgy record filled with detours into straight blues and campy country, Beggar's Banquet was hailed as a masterpiece among the fledgling rock press. Although it was seen as a return to form, few realized that while it opened a new chapter of the Stones' history, it was also the end of their time with Brian Jones. Throughout the recording of Beggar's Banquet, Jones was on the sidelines due to his deepening drug addiction and his resentment of the dominance of Jagger and Richards. Jones left the band on June 9, 1969, claiming to be suffering from artistic differences between himself and his bandmembers. On July 3, 1969 -- less than a month after his departure -- Jones was found dead in his swimming pool. The coroner ruled that it was "death by misadventure," yet his passing was the subject of countless rumors over the next two years.

By the time of his death, the Stones had already replaced Jones with Mick Taylor, a former guitarist for John Mayall's Bluesbreakers. He wasn't featured on "Honky Tonk Women," a number one single released days after Jones' funeral, and he contributed only a handful of leads on their next album, Let It Bleed. Released in the fall of 1969, Let It Bleed comprised sessions with Jones and Taylor, yet it continued the direction of Beggar's Banquet, signaling that a new era in the Stones' career had begun, one marked by ragged music and an increasingly wasted sensibility. Following Jagger's filming of Ned Kelly in Australia during the first part of 1969, the group launched its first American tour in three years. Throughout the tour -- the first where they were billed as the World's Greatest Rock & Roll Band -- the group broke attendance records, but it was given a sour note when they staged a free concert at Altamont Speedway. On the advice of the Grateful Dead, the Stones hired Hell's Angels as security, but that plan backfired tragically. The entire show was unorganized and in shambles, and it turned tragic when the Angels killed a young Black man, Meredith Hunter, during the Stones' performance. In the wake of the public outcry, the Stones again retreated from the spotlight and dropped "Sympathy for the Devil," which some critics ignorantly claimed incited the violence, from their set. As the group entered a hiatus, they released the live Get Yer Ya-Ya's Out! in the fall of 1970. It was their last album for Decca/London, and they formed Rolling Stones Records, which became a subsidiary of Atlantic.

During 1970, Jagger starred in Nicolas Roeg's cult film Performance and married Nicaragua model Bianca Perez Morena de Macias; the couple quickly entered high society. As Jagger was jet-setting, Richards was slumming, hanging out with country-rock pioneer Gram Parsons. Keith wound up having more musical influence on 1971's Sticky Fingers, the first album the Stones released through their new label. Following its release, the band retreated to France in tax exile, where they shared a house and recorded a double album, Exile on Main St. Upon its May 1972 release, Exile on Main St. was widely panned, but over time it came to be considered one of the group's defining moments.

Following Exile, the Stones began to splinter in two, as Jagger concentrated on being a celebrity and Richards sank into drug addiction. The band remained popular throughout the '70s, but their critical support waned. Goats Head Soup, released in 1973, reached number one, as did 1974's It's Only Rock 'n' Roll, but neither record was particularly well-received. Taylor left the band after It's Only Rock 'n' Roll, and the group recorded their next album as they auditioned new lead guitarists, including Jeff Beck. They finally settled on Ron Wood, former lead guitarist for the Faces and Rod Stewart, in 1976, the same year they released Black n' Blue, which only featured Wood on a handful of cuts. During the mid- and late '70s, all the Stones pursued side projects, with both Wyman and Wood releasing solo albums with regularity. Richards was arrested in Canada in 1977 with his common-law wife Anita Pallenberg for heroin possession. After his arrest, he cleaned up and was given a suspended sentence the following year.

The band reconvened in 1978 to record Some Girls, an energetic response to punk, new wave, and disco. The record and its first single, the thumping disco-rocker "Miss You," both reached number one, and the album restored the group's image. However, the band squandered that goodwill with the follow-up, Emotional Rescue, a number one record that nevertheless received lukewarm reviews upon its 1980 release. Tattoo You, released the following year, fared better both critically and commercially, as the singles "Start Me Up" and "Waiting on a Friend" helped the album spend nine weeks at number one. The Stones supported Tattoo You with an extensive stadium tour captured in Hal Ashby's movie Let's Spend the Night Together and the 1982 live album Still Life.

Tattoo You proved to be the last time the Stones completely dominated the charts and the stadiums. Although they continued to sell out concerts in the '80s and '90s, their records didn't sell as well as previous efforts, partially because the albums suffered due to Jagger and Richards' notorious mid-'80s feud. Starting with 1983's Undercover, the duo were conflicted about which way the band should go, with Jagger wanting the Stones to follow contemporary trends and Richards wanting them to stay true to their rock roots. As a result, Undercover was a mean-spirited, unfocused record that had relatively weak sales and mixed reviews. Released in 1986, Dirty Work suffered a worse fate, since Jagger was preoccupied with his fledgling solo career. Once Jagger decided that the Stones would not support Dirty Work with a tour, Richards decided to make his own solo record with 1988's Talk Is Cheap. Appearing a year after Jagger's failed second solo album, Talk Is Cheap received good reviews and went gold, prompting Jagger and Richards to reunite late in 1988.

The following year, the Stones released Steel Wheels, which was received with good reviews, but the record was overshadowed by its supporting tour, which grossed over 140 million dollars and broke many box office records. In 1991, the live album Flashpoint, which was culled from the Steel Wheels shows, was released. Following the release, Bill Wyman left the band; he published a memoir, Stone Alone, within a few years of leaving. The Stones didn't immediately replace Wyman, since they were all working on solo projects; this time, there was none of the animosity surrounding their mid-'80s projects.

The group reconvened in 1994 with bassist Darryl Jones, who had previously played with Miles Davis and Sting, to record and release the Don Was-produced Voodoo Lounge. The album received the band's strongest reviews in years, and its accompanying tour was even more successful than the Steel Wheels tour. On top of being more successful than its predecessor, Voodoo Lounge also won the Stones their first Grammy for Best Rock Album. Upon the completion of the Voodoo Lounge tour, the Stones released the live "unplugged" album Stripped in the fall of 1995. Similarly, after wrapping up their tour in support of 1997's Bridges to Babylon, the group issued yet another live set, No Security, the following year. A high-profile greatest-hits tour in 2002 was launched despite the lack of a studio album to support, and its album document, Live Licks, appeared in 2004. A year later, the group issued A Bigger Bang, their third effort with producer Don Was.

In 2006, Martin Scorsese filmed two of the group's performances at New York City's Beacon Theatre. The resulting Shine a Light, which included guest appearances from Buddy Guy, Jack White, and Christina Aguilera, was released in theaters in 2008. The accompanying soundtrack reached the number two spot on the U.K. charts. Following Shine a Light, the Stones turned their attention toward their legacy. For Keith Richards, this meant delving into writing his autobiography, Life -- the memoir was published to acclaim in the fall of 2010 and generated some controversy due to comments Keith made about Mick -- but the Stones in general spent time mining their archives, something they'd previously avoided. In 2010, they released a super-deluxe edition of Exile on Main St. that contained a bonus disc of rarities and outtakes, including a few newly finished songs like "Plundered My Soul." This was followed in 2011 by a super-deluxe edition of Some Girls that also contained unheard songs and outtakes. That same year, the Stones opened up their Rolling Stones Archive, which offered official digital releases of classic live bootlegs like 1973's The Brussels Affair.

All this was a prelude to their 50th anniversary in 2012, which the group celebrated with a hardcover book, a documentary called Crossfire Hurricane, and a new compilation called GRRR! The Stones also played a handful of star-studded concerts at the end of the year and in the first half of 2013, several of which featured guest spots from the long-departed Mick Taylor. These live shows culminated with a headlining spot at Glastonbury and two July 2013 concerts at Hyde Park; highlights from the Hyde Park shows were released that July and, later in the year, there was a home video/CD release of the concert called Sweet Summer Sun: Live in Hyde Park.

Over the next few years, the Stones played concerts regularly -- a highlight was a March 2016 concert in Havana, Cuba -- and slowly worked on an album that was teased in September 2016, the same week their Decca/London works were released as the box set The Rolling Stones in Mono. On December 2, 2016, the Stones released Blue & Lonesome, a collection of Chicago blues covers that was their first studio album in 11 years. The Stones had two major archival projects released in the last quarter of 2017: a 50th anniversary edition of Their Satanic Majesties Request and On Air, the first official release of their '60s BBC recordings. The band's 2018 No Filter tour of Europe spilled over into 2019 when they announced it would include a massive stadium tour of the U.S. The tour was delayed due to Jagger's need for emergency heart surgery -- he recovered successfully, and the band returned to the road -- but the release of the new compilation Honk was undisturbed. Concentrating on music made since 1971, Honk appeared in April 2019. Later that year came the arrival of the live LP/concert film Bridges to Bremen, which captured the group performing in the German city on September 2, 1998 in support of the Bridges to Babylon album. A 50th Anniversary edition of Let It Bleed also appeared in 2019. In April 2020, the Stones released the single "Living in a Ghost Town." It was their first new material since 2012, taken from sessions for a studio album that the band had been working toward since 2015. Later that year, they released a deluxe reissue of Goats Head Soup. On August 5, 2021, the Rolling Stones announced that Watts would be unable to appear with the band on an upcoming United States tour (already postponed because of the COVID-19 pandemic) due to health concerns, and that Steve Jordan (who had worked with Keith Richards on a number of projects) would be taking his place. Less than three weeks later, Charlie Watts died in a London hospital on August 24, 2021; he was 80 years old”.

Even though they have lost one of their key members, The Rolling Stones will continue to rock for many years to come. They have influenced so many artists (I won’t be able to include all of them here). Below is a selection of tracks from artists who owe a nod…

TO The Rolling Stones.

FEATURE: Modern Heroines: Part Seventy-Four: Self Esteem

FEATURE:

 

 

Modern Heroines

PHOTO CREDIT: Suzie Howell for The New York Times 

Part Seventy-Four: Self Esteem

___________

ALTHOUGH I have…

 PHOTO CREDIT: Eva Pentel for NME

featured Self Esteem (Rebecca Lucy Taylor) a few times recently, I have not included her in Modern Heroines. I wanted to wait until her new album, Prioritise Pleasure, was released. It has won some huge reviews and is being talked about as one of the best albums of this year. Following 2019’s Compliments Please, Prioritise Pleasure is an album that takes Self Esteem’s music to new levels. I am going to end with a playlist of her best tracks to date. One of our very best artists, it is worth starting out with a couple of reviews for Prioritise Pleasure. The album received widespread acclaim and garnered different observations and insights. This is how Loud and Quiet judged the record:

“Indie-pop veteran Rebecca Taylor, aka Self Esteem, embodies the role of a pop star with joy and confidence. She nails the technical elements, of course: the larger-than-life persona, the earworm choruses, the vocal excellence – it’s all there. But what makes her truly special is her ability to take us all with her, centring the listener in each glorious ‘fuck you’ to those who have wronged her, and in each vulnerable acknowledgement of pain. Taylor views her approach to pop as a Trojan Horse – a vehicle for poised and memorable feminist statements. Sure, it’s calculated, but it’s also raw and dangerous. Taylor’s shocking lyrical honesty goes beyond what most pop stars can offer.

Prioritise Pleasure is a frank, uplifting look at feminine survival in the midst of male violence and toxic social pressure, finding communal strength in timeless group vocals and ecstatic choruses. Early single ‘I Do This All the Time’ uses undecorated spoken word to reassure us (“Getting married isn’t the biggest days of your life / All the days that you get to have are big”), while ‘How Can I Help You’ opts instead for pummelling Yeezus-era drum hits. As a young drummer, Taylor was criticised by the men around her for the way her body moved on the kit – a grimly common experience for female percussionists. Here, her drumming becomes confrontational under lines like “I’ll always be wet, always be up for it / Politely sit, but I don’t know shit, do I? / And that’s how you live with it”.

Rather than using pop polish to mask uncomfortable truths, Prioritise Pleasure hits so powerfully specifically because it uses the language of a pop record to state them frankly. It’s masterful”.

It is amazing to think of the huge reaction that Prioritise Pleasure has been afforded – though, when you hear it, it is not that surprising. Self Esteem has been doing promotional work for the album and, going forward, I know that she will want to tour widely and extensively. You can see where she is playing and whether you still have a chance to get a ticket. There are a few interviews I want to highlight before I finish off. Before that, this review from DIY provides some useful notes and impressions:

“On her 2019 solo debut ‘Compliments Please’, Rebecca Lucy Taylor set out the stall for her project Self Esteem as an assertive but nuanced pop star. It’s with ‘Prioritise Pleasure’ that she’s upped the ante considerably. A powerful and potent look at - quite simply - the experience of being a woman in the present day, this is an album that encapsulates the fear, anger, dread and exhaustion that has become so commonplace in so many female lives. And yet, it’s a record that still offers comfort and levity; there’s a wittiness and dark humour that traverses the likes of ‘Moody’ - its opening line being the iconic “Sexting you at the mental health talk seems counter-productive” - and ‘Fucking Wizardry’, all the while remaining honest and raw, but free of judgement.

When the record’s opener ‘I’m Fine’ closes with a voice note of a woman in her early twenties explaining that - if approached by a group of men - her friends’ reaction is to begin barking like a dog - because “there is nothing that terrifies a man more than a woman who appears completely deranged” - Rebecca’s response is to begin howling herself.

It’s also an album that sees Rebecca continually pushing herself to explore new sonic avenues; eclectic instrumentation and bold sonics are the backbone of the record, with tracks switching from spoken-word manifestos (‘I Do This All The Time’) through to more traditional R&B pop formats (‘Still Reigning’) via gigantic gospel-backed offerings (‘Prioritise Pleasure’), and back again. Most importantly, though, this is a record that doesn’t compromise. An uncomfortable and unnerving listen at times - as any album dealing in this level of openness arguably should be - it’s also an absolutely necessary one. Through her own personal stories - and those of others - ‘Prioritise Pleasure’ manages to challenge accepted norms and help to exorcise long-buried demons; it’s powerful to the last drop”.

I am concentrating on Self Esteem’s most-recent album – though, with the playlist, I shall take songs from her debut album too. There has been a raft of interviews around Prioritise Pleasure. The album is a huge declaration of intent. It is also very honest and open. One of the hallmarks of Self Esteem’s music is her honesty. I think that is why so many people have connected with the album. In this NME interview, the artist’s honest nature is spotlighted:

“Such honesty is typical of Self Esteem, the name of the solo project Taylor launched in 2017 after leaving the indie-pop duo Slow Club. Currently, the 34-year-old musician is gearing up to release her second album ‘Prioritise Pleasure’, and has been playing for her largest crowds yet thanks to the runaway success of her poppy and powerful recent single ‘I Do This All The Time’, which is now in regular rotation on 6 Music. It will no doubt receive a rapturous response at the upcoming Green Man festival in Wales’ Brecon Beacons, where she’ll play before headliners Teenage Fanclub on the weekend’s second-biggest second stage.

“It’s a big slot for me,” she says, explaining that the plan is to air more songs from the upcoming album, along with plenty of choreo party spirit. “With the live show that we’re doing, there are dance routines like Pussycat Dolls… because they’re fun to play on.” She adds: “I enjoy playing into really shiny pop tropes. What I want to do is to use the palatable nature of pop to Trojan horse in my agenda. While you think you’re listening to something sexy or fizzy and poppy, it’s actually me trying to school you about consent.”

While some artists tend to mull over their message carefully before serving up a stream of manicured, media-ready mission statements in interviews, Taylor rarely censors what’s on her mind – aside from an incredibly rare clarification about the nature of her relationship with Kermit – and views openness as an important quality.

Taylor formed Slow Club in Sheffield in 2006 with fellow instrumentalist Charles Watson. After just over a decade together, the duo parted ways. Though she remains proud of the songs she and Watson wrote together – and is clear she doesn’t blame anybody for making her feel this way – Taylor began to feel suffocated by a sense of duty to the band. “The amount of songs I had that couldn’t go through the Slow Club lens – that then had to just disappear – was quite debilitating artistically,” she says.

Though Taylor doesn’t dwell on her sexuality (“my Wikipedia page says that I’m bisexual, and I’m like, ‘Wow – that’s news?”), going solo has proved freeing in certain ways. Looking back, she recognises the “inherent masculinity” and straightness of the indie scene Slow Club moved in.

She says that breaking away to do her own thing has been “the greatest joy”, adding: “Everything about that world was like, ‘Ooh – we just happen to be playing our songs quietly, don’t look at me, don’t make any sort of spectacle out of me; I’m just sort of accidentally talented. That’s something I never enjoyed about it. I want to put on a show – I want it to be too much!

“As a little girl this is what my life was like. I used to just write plays and do dances. I had this character called the Babylon Sorceress – she had this long purple dress with big sleeves and red hair. A very Florence [and The Machine] vibe actually. I told Florence about her. She was this misunderstood sorceress that was very cool, and I was very enamoured. All my female leads were very isolated and alone, and now look! My life was this Freddie Mercury fucking show. For a decade of my life, that was the worst thing about me. Now, to celebrate it is just hilarious.”

And, true to its title, ‘Prioritise Pleasure’ as a whole is an album that champions putting yourself first – even if it makes certain people uncomfortable. “I’ve done years of therapy, done plenty of work on myself, and read every fucking book you can fucking read about it, and it comes back down to true self-acceptance and self-love,” Taylor says. “It’s the answer to everything, but it’s still something that you’re meant to not do. I go down this road a lot, and I get quite upset. But then I think, no – just keep in my little part of the world, my group, accepting myself, loving myself, and then make my little silly songs and do my little silly dances. And if someone can learn from that and pass it forward, at least I’m doing something?”.

 PHOTO CREDIT: Eva Pentel for NME

Before getting to a recent interview, I want to source from The Skinny’s chat with Self Esteem. The sense of size and scale on Prioritise Pleasure (compared to Compliments Please) is evident. Everything is turned up:

“Prioritise Pleasure is the title of Taylor's new record as Self Esteem. Due on 22 October via Fiction Records, it's bigger in every aspect than its predecessor, from its supercharged instrumentation to the depth of emotion found in its lyricism and vocal layering. “I thought I would get loads more budget for the second album, and I did not,” she admits with a chuckle, “so it was like, 'Okay, so how do we turn everything up to 11 with exactly the same amount of money we had the first time around?' All the songs were just very there and clear to me, and Johan [Karlberg, producer] and I have now got a synergy that we didn't have on the first record so, weirdly, the only thing that was difficult was figuring out how to make an orchestra out of my mate Galps [Sophie Galpin] in Manchester on one violin,” she laughs.

“It's kind of fun in a way because the album is so big sounding and bombastic and widescreen and cinematic, which is what I wanted to do, but I still did it with fuck all… I'm so glad I haven't achieved what I want to achieve quite yet, because imagine if I had access to an orchestra or a full choir. That's what excites me about album three."

Before getting ahead of herself, she adds: "I said what I needed to with Compliments Please, but only just… and Compliments Please was 14 tracks but it could've been 20. I was like, let's just keep going, and the same's happened [on Prioritise Pleasure]. But I think it's because I've been a musician since I was 16/17, full-time doing it, and I had so many ideas I couldn't do. So many things I wanted to do, I've just parked, and I think I thought they were gone, but they weren't. So it feels like I'm extremely realised and it's all well thought out and unbelievably worked on, but it's just like the overflow car park's been opened.

“All it's been really, Self Esteem, is my manager has just listened to me and gone, ‘Okay.’ No pushback, barely any pushback ever. Even my label don't. And that's what happens when you just fucking listen to a woman and let her make what she wants to make."

But her incredible all-singing, all-dancing live band, and the support that in turn comes from them is also worth celebrating. “It’s unreal, I could cry even thinking about it,” Taylor says. “There's an extra layer I didn't realise was going to be there which is their personal gain from performing it, and what that does on the stage, there’s some sort of fucking mad chemistry that goes on where it feels bigger than playing it live. I want Self Esteem to be this multi-layered experience, not just an artist who you like the songs of and you go and see live, and there's something about, like, what a fucking evangelical moment we're having together that feeds into an audience.

“For many years I was like 'why am I even fucking doing this with my life? I’m skint, it's shit, I can't keep up with any relationships I've got, I'm the worst friend everyone's got because I'll never be at your wedding, I'll never be at your christening.' There's so many negatives, and the only positive was to create what I wanna make... there was always this negative self-talk of, ‘What's so important that you've got to say.’ And that's all dissipated now I've got this gang, that it's for them and then therefore it's for audiences and it does feel important to be doing it, which is what I always needed to feel”.

 PHOTO CREDIT: Suzie Howell for The New York Times 

The final interview that caught my eye sees Self Esteem being featured by the American press. She was profiled by The New York Times.. It shows that her music, and especially Prioritise Pleasure, has really made an impact and reached beyond the U.K. It means that there will be gig requests coming in from America soon enough:

“I have felt very alone most of my life, like ‘What is wrong with me?’” Taylor said, pointing to expectations for women to settle down and have children. Her recent success “makes me feel this overwhelming relief that I’m not a total weirdo.”

If Taylor has a manifesto behind “Prioritise Pleasure,” it’s encouraging people to put themselves first without denying that they can also make mistakes. The “pleasure” mentioned in the album’s title can take many forms, she said, including what she was looking forward to doing that evening: going home, ordering take out and watching “Succession.”

Self Esteem’s rise comes at a time when new attention is being paid to violence against women in Britain following the deaths of Sarah Everard, who was kidnapped and murdered by a police officer while walking home in March, and Sabina Nessa, who was killed while walking through a park in September. This month, there have been reports of women being injected with syringes at nightclubs, a variation of “spiking,” when drugs are dropped into someone’s drink.

Jude Rogers, a music journalist who has written about “Prioritse Pleasure,” said Self Esteem’s music feels right for the moment. “We needed a woman to appear who was going to say, ‘Enough,’” Rogers said. Self Esteem is “expressing all the messiness, all the frustration and all the anger of being a woman,” in ambitious pop music,” she added.

Taylor said she’s been concerned about her safety since she was a teenager, “which I guess is like the zeitgeist now.” She started writing the album in 2019, and decided to process a sexual assault she had survived through her music. “As someone who lives very free, I like to be sexual, I like to do what I want,” she said. “But suddenly it was taken from me and I had a decision to never enjoy myself in that way again, to never be the person I like to be, or turn it all into defiant euphoria.”

The end of a toxic relationship also informed the album, but the record has a strong thread of empowerment, which Taylor said was a result of more positive experiences. “I finally hit this beautiful cross section of I’m older, the therapy’s kicked in a bit, and I care less,” she said. While making the record, she stopped worrying about other people’s expectations of her and her career.

“People like to say they’re being honest in their songs and interviews, but really they very rarely are,” he said. “Rebecca is in everything, and people relate to that.”

At her London concert last week, the relating was nearly deafening, as fans shouted along with their favorite lines (“Sexting you at the mental health club seems counterproductive” was particularly loud).

One fan, Cat Carrigan, 30, said she’s drawn to a danceable Self Esteem track called “Moody” that’s both a tale of a relationship collapsing and an attempt to reclaim a common insult used against woman. “I’ve been called a moody cow many times in my life,” Carrigan said. “It’s not going to affect me anymore”.

A terrific artist who is going to keep on producing sensational albums, Self Esteem’s Rebecca Lucy Taylor is a definite icon of the future. An inspirational artist who is already driving and influencing her peers, do make sure that you investigate…

HER current album.

FEATURE: Modern Heroines: Part Seventy-Three: Faye Webster

FEATURE:

 

 

Modern Heroines

Part Seventy-Three: Faye Webster

___________

ONE of the most interesting…

and influential young artists in music at the moment, Faye Webster is someone who will go on to inspire so many others. I feel she is one of the most distinct songwriters and voices around. I am keen to get to a few interviews. The twenty-four-year-old released one of this year’s best albums, I Know I'm Funny haha, back in June. Such a clever and original songwriter, this is what DIY said in their review:

“By way of a thesis summary, Faye Webster’s confession on ‘Both All The Time’ takes the cake; “I’m loneliest at night / after my shower beer.” Capturing the modern dating experience in 11 well-crafted vignettes, ‘Funny..’ is an album that tracks the life-cycle of an ill-fated romance, with all the glorious highs and lows - trying to impress their family, sharing your deepest secrets and then scrabbling to find ways to piece yourself back together when it all goes tits up. Despite its tumultuous subject matter, Faye hasn’t abandoned the melodic Hawaii-Five-O charm of her earlier work, infusing it with just the right amount of bite. ‘Cheers’ drapes slinky, skippering guitars over a steely frame, while ’Sometimes’ is a SoCal Frank Ocean lullaby, dissolving its woes in a glass full of blissful piano. The music acts as a balm for the lyrical headspace; on ‘A Stranger’ she finds herself deep in self-pity, comparing herself to exes past through swooning spoken-word, while ‘A Dream with a Baseball Player’ beds its lyrical double-meaning in a swinging hip-hop bassline: “How did I fall in love with someone / I don’t know?” Maybe the entire relationship was a fiction? It’s difficult to tell, but it hardly matters. Endearing and relatable without ever lapsing into total fondue, Faye Webster knows exactly how to roll with life’s punches, how to find the humour in a vulnerable moment. She knows she’s funny, but we think she’s pretty smart”.

It is worth knowing more about the Atlanta, Georgia-based artist. In terms of her sound, I guess you could label Webster’s music as ‘Indie’ or ‘Alternative’. Apologies if I repeat anything when sourcing from a few interviews. There is a lot to uncover and discover regarding Webster! The first interview that I want to bring in is from Passion of the Weiss. In it, we learn about Webster’s early work – and how she has developed as an artist since then:

“When Webster released her first album at 16, Run & Tell, her sound clearly paid homage to the twangy country of her youth. But as she grew more active in the arts scene in Atlanta, moonlighting as a hip-hop photographer (she shot Lil Yachty and Killer Mike among others), her aspirations shifted. After becoming friendly with Awful Records artists online and at shows, Webster signed a record deal with the left-of-center rap label known for their genre-defying vocal styles, sounds and aesthetics. Awful released her tightly-compact, self-titled LP in 2017, a precocious debut for a then-unknown 20-year-old. Shadowing Awful creatives allowed her the opportunity to observe and learn from some of Atlanta’s most experimental acts, including Father and Ethereal, whom Webster credits as major figures in her ascension.

This measured form of musical exploration gleaned from her time at Awful shined through on her 2019 Secretly Canadian debut, the swoon-worthy Atlanta Millionaires Club. The record reimagined the vintage folk of her youth in the form of dreamy, multi-instrumented soundscapes. The hazy, George Harrison-style guitar licks were still a fixture, but melancholic strings (“Jonny”) and somber brass sections (“Kingston”) gave the music more texture and depth.

You come from a family with deep musical roots, particularly in bluegrass and Americana. What are some of your earliest memories of music?

Faye Webster: I feel like the most influential early memories of music was just hearing my brother play guitar in the house. We had bedrooms that were sharing the same wall so I feel like I always heard him playing and I was like ‘I want to do that.

Your mother played the violin and your grandfather plays guitar as well. What did your family teach you about musicianship when you were getting started?

Faye Webster: I feel like the most influential early memories of music was just hearing my brother play guitar in the house. We had bedrooms that were sharing the same wall so I feel like I always heard him playing and I was like ‘I want to do that.

Your music style seems to carry on that familial folk and country feel to it, but also sounds modern with R&B and indie pop. How did that come about?

Faye Webster: I was always influenced by folk music especially like old country music because that’s what I grew up listening to. Being a young woman living in Atlanta I was slowly being influenced by other things, but I feel like I held on to this strong country root because that’s all I ever known. I think it just developed into my own thing.

PHOTO CREDIT: Pooneh Ghana 

Your first album, Run & Tell, dropped when you were 16. How do you think your sound has evolved since then?

Faye Webster: A lot. I really don’t relate to that record anymore. Just like in an artist sense, I feel like everyone grows and changes. I think as I’ve grown I’ve realized who I wanted to be and what I wanted to write about and what was meaningful to me. As a 16 year old I didn’t know any of those things. I think I’ve just spent more time figuring myself out.

What was it like growing up in a Hip-Hop juggernaut of a city like Atlanta?

Faye Webster: It was sick. I wouldn’t have wanted to change any part of my childhood. I think it was so cool to be put on to different shit so early in my life which I’ve really appreciated. I feel like I’ve learned so much sitting back and just watching people. Being around them in general. I have a very passionate love for this city. Everyone’s creative and it’s so diverse.

Where did the album title I know Im Funny haha come from?

Faye Webster: It was a lyric and I was like ok I’m done. This was all it was meant to be. Then when it came to the time of naming it I was looking through lyrics. I wanted to play off lyrics and was looking for this long extended title that no one would think you would name a record. This one was just the obvious answer no matter how hard I tried to avoid it.

Is this a phrase you’ve set either to yourself or others a lot?

Faye Webster: No never. I feel like when I’m writing songs I’m not thinking about writing a song, I’m just singing my thoughts out loud. I feel like that verse was such a random thing I was thinking about”.

Growing up in such a musical city like Atlanta, it must have been eye-opening and hugely exciting for Faye Webster! One can hear the influence of the city in her work…though I feel her childhood tastes and musical upbringing is also important. When she spoke with i-D back in June, the influence of Georgia, then and now, was raised and explored:

“Faye grew up in Atlanta surrounded by music. Her influences were a mesh of the city’s thriving hip-hop scene and her parents’ preferences for country western music (her mom, from Texas, loved Elvis Presley). After she released her first album, she signed with Awful Records, an Atlanta-based label whose roster was made up mostly of rap and R&B artists. It was there she connected with Father, a rapper and the label’s founder who would later feature on the song “Flowers” off her breakthrough third album, Atlanta Millionaire’s Club.

The diversity and inclusivity of the music scene in Atlanta are essential elements of Faye’s songwriting style. “Everybody is doing something different, but at the same time, we all fuck with each other. We get inspired by each other, take roots from each other and then build our own things,” she says. “It’s cool. It doesn’t feel competitive. I don’t think I’ve really been able to find that anywhere else.”

She recorded I Know I’m Funny haha at a studio in the college town that is Athens, Georgia with producer Drew Vandenberg. Because of Covid, recording had to be planned well in advance and all at once, which is the opposite of how Faye is used to making music. “This time was way more stressful, and I didn’t last as long as I should have in the studio. I had this mental breakdown and then went home because I couldn’t do it,” she explains. “But it was a good learning experience for the future, when I’m not able to get my friends in the room the next day. I need to be prepared for an interruption.”

PHOTO CREDIT: Pooneh Ghana 

Faye prefers the fresh feeling of a first take, of writing and recording one song at a time so she can fully immerse herself in it. “It’s not until I’m sitting in the studio, about to record, that I share the demo [with the band]. I don’t share demos ahead of time because I don’t want them thinking about it too much, like plotting or over-analysing. It’s a more accurate representation of what the song is supposed to be when it’s just like: this is what it’s calling for.”

Growing up, Faye made all her music on Garageband from the comfort of her bedroom at her parents’ house. Now, even though she loves the collaborative atmosphere of the studio, she still prefers recording vocals alone in her room. Her whisper-soft, crystal clear production is a signature part of her sound, as if she’s singing right into your ear. It makes every listen feel immediate and new, no matter how many times you’ve heard the song before.

Lyrically, Faye has a knack for nuance. She’s able to express what everybody else is thinking but nobody has said. “It’s like I’ve got this fuck-it mentality,” she says of her writing process. “I struggled with it in the past. I’d be texting my brother, like, ‘is mom going to be offended if I say this?’ But now, since I’ve gotten comfortable being honest, I find myself writing about different things because I just have this mindset of, whatever I’m thinking, I’m saying. I don’t want to sugarcoat it”.

 When asked if she ever struggles to write lyrics, Faye says she had trouble with just one song on the album: “Overslept”. “I literally could not finish writing that song, and I think that’s why I decided to hand it off to somebody else.” Faye sent the song to mei ehara, a Japanese artist who she met online two years ago. “I was listening to Emerson Kitamura and I scrolled down to related artists, which I have legitimately never done before, and I found mei. Literally the first 30 seconds I was like, is this me? Did I just find my soulmate? I followed her, and she followed me back, and then we developed this friendship. She’s been so influential to me.”

“Overslept” is breezy and relaxing, the kind of song that makes you want to stop and stare at clouds while you sway to the beat. It’s got an effortless feel, particularly in Faye and mei’s harmonies, as if the two were meant to sing together. “I was thinking about Father on the last record, and how fitting it was for how important he was to me at the time,” Faye explains. “So I was trying to think, who would be the most representative of what I’ve been doing the past few years while making this record? And that’s when I decided I was going to ask mei”.

There are a few more interviews that I want to quote from before wrapping things up. Pitchfork’s interview goes into the humour ands smartness of Webster’s I Know I’m Funny haha. She revealed how she manages to balance a fun, normal life with that of an artist who is definitely rising to new heights:

“Webster’s new album, I Know I’m Funny haha, which pairs her understated, often hilarious songwriting with her distinctive combination of pedal steel-soaked indie-pop, classic country, bittersweet R&B, and nimble lounge music. In her lyrics, Webster explores the subtle anxieties of a new relationship—when one partner falls asleep before the other, when one of their siblings forgets your name—and offers an acute window into her personal life. “There’s a very fine line,” she tells me the day after the show. “With my music, I want people who don’t know me to know every possible thing about how I feel.” She pauses. “But I also want privacy.”

As she navigates the awkwardness of indie stardom, Webster has found a delicate balance between savoring her life as a regular, fun-loving person—she gets particularly excited when talking about playing Animal Crossing: “This shit is fire! It’s fun to be a kid!”—and her more intense evolution as one of the most promising young songwriters working. For all her punchlines and casual asides, Webster’s stage presence is no joke. With her four-piece band’s tight, slow-motion grooves, she sings pitch-perfect, eyes closed in deep concentration, seeming more like a seasoned bandleader than a Gen Z homebody who would otherwise be yo-yoing and watching baseball.

“I’ve always been really chill,” she says, and indeed, during our conversation, her mood is proudly laid-back—giggling and riffing, suddenly slipping into a British accent or making sarcastic, meditative hand gestures as she delivers a particularly koan-like sentiment. “Something I talk to my therapist about is my fear of people not liking me,” she confesses. “And my therapist is like, ‘Well, what if they don’t like your music?’ But I don’t give a fuck! I’m so confident in my music because this is what I like to do. It’s all I know how to do, really. So if you don’t like it, I don’t care—because I do!”.

I was not even aware that Webster spent time in Nashville. In terms of its influence, it is a city that is not only home to some of the best Country artists. There is some great Pop and other sounds coming from the Tennessee city. FADER chatted with Webster in June. They ask about Nashville. They were also curious about how her new album differs from her previous release, Atlanta Millionaire's Club:

“Do you think you would have stayed in Nashville? Do you think there's an alternate universe where you stayed and tried to make it in the Nashville songwriting machine?

Probably not. Maybe if I went earlier at a younger age where I didn't really know what I wanted, I feel like it would have been possible. But I feel like as a young adult, it was kind of like I'm finding myself, I'm finding my sound and who I want to be, who I'm happy with, and I don't think I would have ever stayed.

So you've expressed this sentiment of the stuff you got out of, I guess, working with Awful and stuff like that was this sense of community and I wonder how you hold onto something like that as your music becomes more successful and as you step into playing much biggest shows, working with much bigger labels, that kind of thing?

Yeah. I feel like it was such a beautiful learning experience for me just to be a part of a group that was just so close and it wasn't always about music. It felt like family first and then we'll do music together. But it was nice because I had really never worked on music with other people before. It was a new concept to me and I wasn't really comfortable doing it and I feel like just being around musicians every day in Atlanta, I really just opened a new door for me. But definitely overall, always thankful forever for that group.

PHOTO CREDIT: HIGHSNOBIETY/Bryan Luna 

Do you think you still make music in that way that you developed while you were making music with all those people?

Yeah, for sure. I feel like doing collabs or just always working with somebody else is important just because nobody's brain works the same way. So it's nice to, I guess, almost subconsciously learn from making music or doing what this other person also does that you do and just getting a different mindset of it and a different approach. And I feel like it was influential in ways that I will never know and can never explain, but will keep doing somehow.

So this album is on an emotional level, it's quite different from Atlanta Millionaire's Club. That record was a little, maybe lonely or something. This one focuses on this different set of trials, navigating the early parts of a relationship. At what point during the writing and recording did you step back and realize like, "Oh, this is the kind of record that I've made."

Yeah. It really wasn't till the end. I feel like when I'm recording, it's not like I'm making a record. It's okay here's songs that I wrote and I'm tracking them and eventually it'll be a whole. But it's not really till it's all done and you're looking at it as a group, hearing it as a group where I was like, "Dang, I'm mentally stable and happy now." And it really was just a more hopeful project from what I feel I was making in the past.

Yeah. So I love this track, "A Dream With A Baseball Player," which is about having a crush on a baseball player. And I'm interested how important is fantasy to your music or to your songwriting process?

I feel like not that important just because with my song writing, I've always been the type of person who has to write about personal experience. I know people who can read a book and just write a song about this book or some made up and I'm just like, I've never been able to do that. So I don't know. I feel like that song is very dreamlike and it is me living in a fantasy, but it's a personal fantasy that I had at the time. You know what I mean? It's still a very personal experience.

And I guess on the topic of baseball, when I read about you, I feel like there's always a mention of games. There's yo-yo, chess, Nintendo Switch, going to the batting cages, stuff like that. I was wondering, what do you love about games? All these various different kinds of games? What do you thinks led you to being, for lack of a better word, a hobbyist in this way?

I don't know. I just like feeling like a kid sometimes. Like dude, I feel like everything in life is taken so seriously that it makes games and just fun pastimes extra fun, literally fun. I don't know. It just makes me happy”.

I am going to finish with an interview from The Line of Best Fit. I feel there is more optimism and light on I Know I’m Funny haha than Faye Webster’s previous work. Whilst a sense of loneliness has not gone, it seems less common. She was asked about solitude and how she spent her lockdown. The Line of Best Fit also bring up how critics have been eager to label and easily categorise the work of an artist whose material is so rich and without boundaries:

“Webster cites two clear influences on I Know I’m Funny haha. “I was listening to Hannah Cohen a lot,” she says. “She put out a record a while ago called Welcome Home and it’s become one of my favourite records of all time.” After discovering the Japanese artist Mei Ehara after trawling the related artists on Spotify for the first time, Webster became obsessed with her. “After listening to her for just 30 seconds I was like, ‘is this me?’ I even played her to my band in the tour van to make sure! I just fell in love with her instantly. (I listened to Ehara after the interview and she and Webster are indeed rather similar, their music both being built upon pillowy melodies and dulcet singing).” Ehara features on “Overslept” and the origins of the collaboration were endearingly innocent. “I followed her and then she followed me back,” Webster explains, visibly overjoyed by the memory. “We started messaging, emailing, basically being penpals. I decided to ask her to be on the record because she was so influential and she said yes right away.”

This is the thing: in the past it’s been almost comical to watch critics try and harang Webster into one genre. She’s been called an alt-country artist; she’s been noted as making R&B for homebodies; she’s even been lumped into hip-hop, presumably solely because Father was featured on Atlanta Millionaires Club. Her sound is really a distillation of all of these things and more, an artist both of Atlanta and not, who truly belongs after the obsolescence of strict genre categories. It’s impossible to restrict an album that contains the lithe pop flair of Ehara, the hip-hop influence of her Atlantan friends, and the swishing flourishes of country that come from a youth spent listening to her parents play country constantly in the house and car - her mum is from Texas and her dad is a bluegrass guitar player.

As this is a Faye Webster record, solitude is never fully gone. “There’s a difference between lonely and lonesome / But I’m both all the time,” she sighs in “Both All The Time”. Coming from the girl who told herself repeatedly “I should get out more” in Atlanta Millionaires Club’s “Room Temperature”, it feels like the timid acknowledgement that, perhaps, Webster will always be trapped within her introverted shell. What’s the difference between lonely and lonesome? “I think that ‘lonely’ is like, ‘dang, I don’t want to be alone right now, I want to be with somebody’, but ‘lonesome’ is when you just have no option. ‘Lonesome’ is when you feel alone forever and you can’t change it.” Indeed for the homebody Webster, nothing really changed during quarantine. “I feel like last year was easy for me, thankfully, because that’s what I’m like when I’m not touring anyway. I’m usually here (laughs while gesturing behind her). I guess I just enjoy being home and being in a safe space.”

It’s why one of her most passionate hobbies is the solo pastime of yo-yoing. She whiled away the empty hours of quarantine with her newfound love of yo-yoing, which started when she received a yo-yo in her Christmas stocking a couple of years ago. “I took the yo-yo on tour and went on social media looking for other yo-yo players and found the craziest community I’ve ever seen,” she says. “From there, I would link up with players on tour as we travelled to different cities. The more competitions I went to, the more people I met, I thought it was so sick. The community is so cool.” She might have had plenty of time for practice last year but it didn’t lead to any improvement. “It got pretty hard because my yo-yo friends would send me private YouTube links with videos of them trying to teach me something but it just wasn’t the same as being there with them! I need to see a yo-yo friend asap”.

I am going to finish off there. I will end with a playlist containing Webster’s best tracks. I feel, even with a number of albums under her belt, the best work is still ahead of her. A stunning modern artist who can go on and be a legend, make sure that you check out the music of the incredible artist. On I Know I'm Funny haha, Faye Webster has proven she is one of…

OUR very finest artists.

FEATURE: 50 Words for… Thinking About Kate Bush Album Listening Parties

FEATURE:

 

 

50 Words for…

Thinking About Kate Bush Album Listening Parties

___________

BECAUSE the success…

of Tim Burgess’ Tim’s Twitter Listening Party series continues unabated, I wanted to think about Kate Bush and her albums. None of hers have been featured in the listening events yet. Maybe it is because Bush would not tweet along and be involved with the listening parties. Because her latest studio album, 50 Words for Snow, turns ten on 21st November, it would be great to have her studio albums featured in listening parties. If it would not be possible in Burgess’ Twitter series, I feel there is a demand and possibility to do it separately. We could run up to 21st November and feature 50 Words for Snow on that date. In terms of the albums featured, it would be her ten studio albums; I would also include either the 1986 greatest hits collection, The Whole Story, or 2018’s Selections from the Other Sides (both feature the song, Experiment IV; I am keen to avoid repetition). It would not be exactly the same as Tim’s Twitter Listening Party. There, a musician or someone associated with an album would tweet about every song from an album played. People also tweet along and there is this community spirit. I think it would be great if there was a series of listening parties that runs up to the tenth anniversary of her latest album. With eleven albums in total, there could be one every day from 11th November.

It would run chronologically, except for, say, Selections from the Other Sides. The Kick Inside (11th), Lionheart (12th), Never for Ever (13th), The Dreaming (14th), Hounds of Love (15th), The Sensual World (16th), The Red Shoes (17th), Aerial (18th), Director’s Cut (19th), Selections from the Other Sides (20th), and 50 Words for Snow (21st) would be the order and plan. In terms of the listening parties, it would be nice if people involved with the albums took part. Whether it was Del Palmer (who played on many of Bush’s albums and has engineered her albums from the 1980s on), to musicians like Ian Bairnson, or contributors like Elton John (who was a guest vocalist on 50 Words for Snow, having some first-hand recollections would add a sense of authority and personal insight. It would be a celebration of an artist who, even ten years since she last released an album, has an adoring and massive fanbase. It would be a case of playing the studio albums in full. Whether it would be led by a musician/guest or there would be a moderator, listening and fans could join and share their experiences of the tracks. Perhaps it is too late to get things organised in time to end on the tenth anniversary of 50 Words for Snow. At the very least, having 50 Words for Snow or another one of her albums featured would be great. Having given so much to the world with her music through the years, getting the online community to share their memories and impressions would…

MAKE for quite a thing!

FEATURE: Songs in the Keys of Life: Keeping Music Media Alive

FEATURE:

 

 

Songs in the Keys of Life

PHOTO CREDIT: Markus Winkler/Unsplash 

Keeping Music Media Alive

___________

I have spent years…

PHOTO CREDIT:: Mateus Campos Felipe/Unsplash

putting out content and stuff for my music blog. It has been good to do, though I have also not received any money from it. I have been going back and forth through the years. I cannot afford to subscribe to every website I look at for music information. I can understand why websites put up paywalls. When you, like me, digest a lot of media, it can be difficult to afford to pay for everything you read. I have a few subscriptions for sites that I use a lot – The Guardian, The New York Times etc. -, but there is a bit of guilt when I go to other websites and do not pay anything! In order to ensure that we have music media for generations to come, sites and the printed press have to rely on financing. Whether that is through subscriptions or advertising, it is necessary given the competition out there. I have seen so many smaller blogs and sites close because they are struggling to provide content unless they can raise a lot more money. I personally prefer the subscription option as opposed the proliferation of adverts you find on websites. I think what puts off a lot of people is the cost of subscribing to every website and music magazine. If you research a lot or want a broad view of music, it can mount up quite a bit. One might say that, if you want to read content and be informed, then paying a small fee to everyone who you take from is only reasonable! I feel, like Spotify, journalists are not getting paid what they deserve.

PHOTO CREDIT: NeONBRAND/Unsplash

The survival of music media is essential. There are so many artists in the world now that all rely on promotion and exposure. Websites and magazines will always remain vital and required. Many argue that music media should be free. I am sort of split. I can survive as I am at the moment, as my costs are not too high. I am not going to gigs, travelling or incurring any real costs for my blog. Aside from a Squarespace subscription and the odd payment here and there, I can run my site for free. I am hoping to become more ambitious in 2022. I want to do a bit more in terms of videos and features. Whether that is a podcast or something filmed, it will require a larger budget. Because of that, I have been thinking about ways to get around that. I am not going to start putting adverts on the site. Many have emailed me to advertise on my site, but it is not something that I like. Many of the emails are from gambling companies and people I do not want to promote.  I feel the best solution is to offer a subscription service through Patreon. I have seen some blogs and sites do this. I subscribe to a couple. For that, you can tailor how much you pay per month and, for that, you get exclusive content. This not only gives subscribers a little extra; the website owner also gets a little bit of money in order to widen their horizons and keep their website going.

PHOTO CREDIT: Cody Board/Unsplash

I am keen to diversify and become a little bit more YouTube-friendly next year. I am conscious this will require a different outlay in terms of recording equipment and how much I spend each month. Whereas a paywall sort of forces people to pay to view content, subscriptions rely on generosity – perhaps yielding fewer offers and less money. There is always that downside, mind. If a journalist wants to do more and reach a larger audience, that means being a bit more wide-ranging regarding features and keeping things fresh. I have not done a podcast yet, and I am aware that I may need to hire a studio to produce those. Due to that, trying to get people to subscribe is a way of affording that. There will always be that personal battle regarding seeing music content online for free and paying various sites a monthly fee. I am appreciative of those who do not put up paywalls and allow free browsing. I barely use some of the websites I pay for some months – so it makes me wonder whether a fixed monthly fee is the best course. In any case, I feel we all need to keep music media alive and flourishing. With more musicians around now than at any other time (and with such diversity), music websites and magazines are highlighting the best new artists and most fascinating albums. If the pandemic has taught us anything, it is that music is so important to us all. The same goes for music media and what it can teach us (in terms of all the new artists and wonderful features). I think we all need to back it and keep it strong now…

 PHOTO CREDIT: Daniel Thomas

MORE than ever.

FEATURE: You Make a Good Case… The Overuse of UPPERCASE and lowercase Song and Album Titles in Pop Music

FEATURE

You Make a Good Case…

IN THIS PHOTO: Olivia Rodrigo/PHOTO CREDIT: Hanina Pinnick

The Overuse of UPPERCASE and lowercase Song and Album Titles in Pop Music

 IN THIS PHOTO: Lil Nas X

phenomenon or thing, but there is a proliferation of artists using lower and uppercase lettering in their song titles. One can go back a long way t see other artists doing this. Prince has done it a few times. He also liked to abbreviate and use the letter ‘u’ instead of writing ‘you’. In terms of using upper and lowercase, it is something that has become more pronounced in the past few years. I am not sure whether using bold casing or dropping it down is a form of emotional emphasis. I have spoken to people about this. Some say that it is artists expressing themselves. Why keep things conventional if you are trying to stand out?! Uppercase definitely emphasises a point. If you have your song with capital letters, that makes it seem more urgent. To me, the whole thing smacks of poor English. In a texting age, it seems like, rather than upper and lowercase being an artist statement, it is a sign of laziness. I feel artists should be original when it comes to song titles and how they present their music. The industry always needs to evolve. By having a song or album where all the lettering is lower or uppercase, it just seems messy and frustrating. Not that this generation will adopt similar habits when they write, but people will see song titles written out like this and it might affect the way they write – whether that is in school or something else. Some artists blend upper and lowercase lettering. They might have a song title where one word starts with a capital letter and the rest is in lowercase.

I am not sure which is most annoying. I do feel artists doing all lowercase is the most irritating. It is how I imagine most people text these days. Is it a chance to connect with a teenage audience? Does a song that looks like text-speak offer great connection with the target audience? Many might opinion how it is not a big deal, though I think it does represent a trend that is worrying. There are particular artists culpable of having their album and song titles all in capital letters. I feel this is a sense of declaration; the need to be heard. Rather than let the music do the talking, the titles are there is all their striking (and annoying) capitals. I want to refer to an article from The Washington Post that explored this phenomenon. From artists such as Taylor Swift and Billie Eilish, big artists are not immune from all-lowercase or all-uppercase:

“It’s hard to pinpoint when the QWERTY became the most significant keyboard in contemporary music, but pop’s strange relationship with the shift key has mutated from a trend into a practice. Taylor Swift likes to type out her song titles in all lowercase letters, “like this.” Lil Nas X prefers them in all caps, “LIKE THIS.” On her latest album, Willow Smith — who performs as WILLOW, mononymously uppercased — is getting the space bar involved, too, which means that some of her song titles look “l i k e t h i s.”

If there’s a consensus explanation for why our playlists and pop charts now look as typographically gonzo as our messiest group texts, it’s generational: Today’s stars are 21st-century digital children who grew up expressing their multitudes by tweaking the keystrokes in their text messages, social media posts and more. And this isn’t exactly kid stuff anymore. All of the songs on Kendrick Lamar’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2017 album “DAMN.,” were titled with single words, every letter capitalized with a period at the end of each word. By simply showing us the album’s track list, Lamar was framing his music as something declarative and decisive. Our eyes were listening before a sound touched our ears.

And yes, these stylizations may have seemed superficial and annoying at first, but now that we’ve stared at them long enough, our listening experience is beginning to change — and in ways that vary from artist to artist, song to song. For instance, Billie Eilish’s lowercase song titles might underscore the delicate intimacy of her singing, while Swift’s tiny letters telegraph modesty, humility and down-to-earthness. For the caps lock crowd, a sequence of big, blocky letter-shapes can feel triumphal, or boisterous, or rude, or needy.

Or, in the case of Lil Nas X’s debut album, “MONTERO,” all of the above. After the history-making success of “Old Town Road,” the Atlanta native is still learning how to close the gap between his massive persona and his developing songcraft, which means the big-lettered tunes on “MONTERO” run the gamut from totally anthemic (the title track) to somewhat anemic (“VOID”). But Lil Nas X obviously knows how to stand out in a digital crowd, so on the major streaming services, where all the fonts are uniform, his uppercase song titles perform a function: HEY, OVER HERE.

Before the streaming era, artists liked to pinch and twist the letters in their names, using their album covers to posit themselves as rebels, rule-breakers and typographic scofflaws. In the 1980s, k.d. lang emerged as the e.e. cummings of cowpunk. In the 1990s, OutKast had that capital “K” while Eminem and Korn occasionally reversed certain letters in their monikers for kicks. In the aughties, indie fans experienced an all-caps-no-vowels craze — MGMT, MSTRKRFT, SBTRKT — as well as the sadistic alt-capping of tUnE-yArDs, which, thankfully, was not communicable.

More recently, scores of rappers have taken stage names that seem like they were never meant to be uttered out loud in the first place. The most vexing in the lot — XXXTentacion, 6lack — felt more like screen names, or maybe even like echoes of Prince’s famously unpronounceable glyph, which, in hindsight, may have been the Artist’s attempt at stripping his identity of a vocalized sound. When we thought of Prince, he didn’t want us to hear the word “Prince” in our mind’s mouth. He wanted us to hear music.

Stylized song titles can help us better hear a song inside the silence of our own consciousness, too — as with Olivia Rodrigo’s debut album, “SOUR.” It’s the big, shiny, breakout pop record of 2021, and Rodrigo’s stylizations play their part, performing an artful little rope-a-dope: With the album’s title in all uppercase, but the song titles uncapitalized, Rodrigo urgently beckons us to come over and check out the tiny treasures she’s holding in the palm of her hand.

One of them is “drivers license,” a vroom-vroomy power ballad that spent eight consecutive weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 this year, its layered metaphors capturing the painful teenage sensation of not being able to control the direction of the road in front of you. In this song, and in most of the songs on “SOUR,” Rodrigo’s singing feels attentive, detailed and highly alert, communicating broad, chaotic, teenage emotions in an elegant, lowercase, teenage way.

Then there’s “t r a n s p a r e n t s o u l,” the opening track on WILLOW’s new album, “lately I feel EVERYTHING.” The song itself is a taut and propulsive rock-like thing with professional punk drumming services provided by Travis Barker of Blink-182. But throughout, WILLOW’s voice remains loose and yearning, like she’s trying to steady herself to that beat. Suddenly, those wishy-washy spaces in the song’s title reveal a surprise tension, like the letters are being pulled back together instead of drifting apart.

Like Rodrigo and WILLOW, Eilish does similar mixing-and-matching on her excellent new album, “Happier Than Ever.” Nearly everything on the track list adheres to the common rules of capitalization, save for one all-lowercase entry (“my future”), and two in all caps (“GOLDWING” and “NDA,” the latter of which is an acronym, so it doesn’t really count). And that’s a shift from Eilish’s 2019 debut, an album of all-lowercase songs that seemed eager to perform a terrific metaphysical trick, quietly drawing us into their whispery verses until we were so close, the music felt colossal. Her smallness became a closeness which became a bigness”.

Whether it is a case of artists copying others and wanting to stand out due to uppercase or lowercase, we do not really need song and album titles shouted out – nor do they need to be all lowercase so it is like the artists could not be bothered to turn on the caps lock button! There are also artists who put their name all in capitals or lowercase. I get what The Washington Post said, specifically when it comes to Billie Eilish – lowercase lettering for her songs on a quieter and whispered album, whilst her follow-up is bolder and more confident. I can appreciate how the casing can reflect the mood and tone of a song (or album). It seems unnecessary to reflect that with the lettering, whereas it was seldom needed years ago. Think back to the Pop or the 1990s and ‘00s. Some artists did dabble with all lower or uppercasing, though it was rarer. It seems there has been this real proliferation and influx. The Washington Post argued that having all lower or uppercase changes the way we listen to songs and how they impact us, I am not too sure myself. I could listen to the same songs with the titles written correctly and get the same effect. How many of us are actually looking at the song’s title when we are listening along? I envisage people listening on phones and not paying too much focus to what is on the screen. I don’t think Pop artists (though it affects other genres too) need to shout everything or have their titles low and whispered – or, worse, mixing the casing altogether and making the title look really odd. If the music is good and original, that is what keeps the listener invested and will make the difference. I do feel the wave of lower and UPPERCASE titles needs to end. The likes of Billie Eilish and Taylor Swift are successful because of their music and their innovation. I don’t think the connection between upper/lowercase lettering and its psychological connection…

MAKES much of a difference.

FEATURE: Vinyl Corner: Foals – Total Life Forever

FEATURE:

 

 

Vinyl Corner

Foals – Total Life Forever

___________

ON this occasion…

 PHOTO CREDIT: Getty

I want to feature Foals’ second studio album, Total Life Forever, into Vinyl Corner. This is an album that is also quite underrated. Released on 10th May, 2010 through Transgressive Records, it is a fantastic record that I would urge people to see out on vinyl. There are some epic cuts from the album. Spanish Sahara and This Orient are possibly the best-known songs from Total Life Forever.  Some reviewers at the time noted how the album has contrasting moods and it is not as consistent as it could have been. There were some mixed reviews and a whiff of disappointment in many reviews. That being said, Total Life Forever was shortlisted for the 2010 Mercury Music Prize and has been named as one of the best albums of the 2010s by a few publications. It is a great record where one does not have to know about Foals and their history to enjoy. Quite different to their 23008 debut, Antidotes, Total Life Forever is a beautiful record that has so many highpoints. The reason I would select it for vinyl consideration is the quality of the production (from Luke Smith) and the immersive nature of the songs. Listening to Total Life Forever is quite an experience. There are a couple of reviews that I want to draw in.

One, from AllMusic, has positives to it – yet there is a sense that some fans might not be completely on board by the changes and developments between Antidotes and Total Life Forever:

“After Foals scrapped the mix of their debut, Antidotes, by TV on the Radio’s Dave Sitek, it was clear that they were a band that was interested in creating their own sound. That sentiment may be why their follow-up, Total Life Forever, sounds more like a reaction to their first record than a continuation of it. Many of the elements that drove Foals into the spotlight in the first place are definitely still in place. There’s plenty of cascading, Minus the Bear-style guitar work and funky Talking Heads influence in their math-pop-meets-the-dancefloor rhythms. What’s missing is the edge. Total Life Forever is considerably more subdued than its predecessor, lacking much of the uptempo thump found on Antidotes. In its place is a mellower, more spacious sound. While this new sound is still danceable, it’s far more refined than the angular post-punk riffing that fans might be expecting. Right from the beginning, the album-opening, “Blue Blood” makes it clear that Foals are taking a different, more patient approach to songwriting, letting the song build and build on itself as it methodically works itself into a frenzy before leaving the way it came in. Because of the changes here, fans of the early, pre-Antidotes singles may find Total Life Forever to be too restrained, lacking the youthful vigor of their debut. Where some see restraint, others may very well see refinement, and those who appreciated Antidotes' more spacy passages will find that Foals' reinvention of their sound is a calculated risk that definitely pays off”.

I will finish with an NME review. There is a little more passion and positivity in their words. I feel Total Life Forever is an album that got mostly positive feedback in 2010. In years since, it has been re-envaulted and reappraised. It has definitely risen in value through time. This is what NME said in their review from 2010:

“Pity Foals. All they ever wanted was a steady supply of Rizlas and to play weird music. Unfortunately they wrote a couple of songs some kids enjoyed dancing to, but then had the temerity to follow them with an excellent, underrated debut that sounded nothing like ‘Hummer’ and ‘Mathletics’. Then they decided one cult hero producer wasn’t the right fit and, understandably, looked elsewhere, but all anyone wanted to know was why they’d fucked off the guy from TV On The Radio. Meanwhile, they were selling out huge venues – huge for a band who can legitimately cite Don bloody Caballero as an influence – making countless young feet dance and quietly slipping onto major label Warner, but only now does their music feel… comfortable. Not in the easy-listening sense, but ‘Total Life Forever’ crawls and creeps like a tender portrait of their paranoid selves in the way that ‘Antidotes’ always threatened to: it is nervous, intense and quite brilliant.

It pivots on the staggering ‘Spanish Sahara’, by now familiar but still such a treat with its blossoming guitars and gently relentless momentum, and ‘Black Gold’, hooked around a Mike Tyson quote and tripping acrobatically between the stuttering disco-punk of their past and something teasingly expansive. Either side lie the title track and single ‘This Orient’, equally buoyed by Yannis Philippakis’ sparse vocals (he’s singing smoothly rather than barking this time, which is perhaps the biggest single change) and a new-found sense of freedom that means they can flick around from the staccato rhythms of the former to the eye-wateringly bright pop of the latter and still sound like the same band. It’s that playfulness that makes ‘Total Life Forever’ so much fun.

Witness ‘Miami’, one of the most extroverted songs Foals have ever made. It is that rarest of beasts – a colossal pop song that is clever enough to appear dumb, being as it is as much of a genre-splicing mash-up of hip-hop and post-punk as anything MIA could conceive. And ‘After Glow’ has something of a woozy 6am comedown about it, spreading out over six minutes before curling up in a corner after a flurry of beatsy percussion. ‘Blue Blood’ is the last remnant of that Afrobeat tag that has dogged them unnecessarily for years. All fundamentally different. All superbly consistent.

Thematically, ‘Total Life Forever’ is isolated, cold and worried about what’s to come: “I know a place where I can go when I’m low”, hums the title track; “Don’t forget everything we cared for”, pleads ‘After Glow’; ‘Black Gold’ warns “the future’s not what it used to be”. Emotions are hinted at and almost always obscured in a thick mist of imagery; whole songs turn on a sixpence. In the wrong hands such a wilfully oblique tone would be frustrating – further ammunition for the imagination-starved minceheads who claim Foals are too clinical to be worthy of love – but throughout the album the neuroses of its fathers are presented not only unflinchingly but in a winningly human way. If you’re reading this and are the parent of any particular Foal, phone them. Offer a hug. Sounds like they need it.

Sure, ‘Total Life Forever’ is flawed – it takes half a dozen listens before the quality of it really sinks in, and is so all over the place that only the most devoted won’t find it initially maddening. But throughout is a braveness and naive sense of wonder (through the perfect murk of Luke ‘Clor’ Smith’s production shines the will of a band who want to keep pressing buttons until something magical happens) that confirms what ‘Antidotes’ suggested: that Foals will never be anything other than Foals, and if we follow them into the fog then, well, visions of startling clarity await”.

Go and check out an album that, eleven years after its release, is still being played and praised. The second album from the Oxford band, I think that Total Life Forever might be their strongest work. If you have never listened to Total Life Forever, go and check it out. Owning the album on vinyl gives the songs and sound extra consideration. It provides a different listening experience compared to listening digitally. Even if some were not entirely convinced by Foals’ Total Life Forever in 2010, I think that it is…

A remarkable release from the band.

FEATURE: Spotlight: PinkPantheress

FEATURE:

 

 

Spotlight

PHOTO CREDIT: Brent McKeever 

PinkPantheress

___________

ONE of the most talented…

 PHOTO CREDIT: Brent McKeever

and original artists in music right now, I am excited by PinkPantheress’ music. There is an air of nostalgia to it, yet it is distinctly fresh and forward-looking. I will come to a review of her extraordinary mixtape, to hell with it, in a minute. There is a lot to uncover and reveal when it comes to the British wonder. Although there are aspects of her personal life that she keeps private, her interviews do give one an insight into the music and creative process. The first interview I want to bring in is from The Guardian. Earlier this month they spotlighted an incredible young artist who is still balancing academic commitments with music:

“In December, a TikTok user in London named PinkPantheress started uploading clips of a song, intending to keep at it until “someone notices”. Ten months later, the social media platform named her song Just for Me its breakout track of the summer; it has more than 20m plays on Spotify and, after being sampled by the drill rapper Central Cee, went into the UK Top Five.

A flood of similarly fleeting tracks have followed: rarely lasting more than two minutes, they are mostly self-produced, lo-fi mash-ups of saccharine-sweet vocals and jungle and drum’n’bass beats. Gen Z adores her; Grimes and Charli XCX are fans; Lizzo and Charli d’Amelio, TikTok’s reigning queen, have used her music to soundtrack their own TikToks.

Her relative anonymity has accentuated the interest. She had more or less hidden her face on TikTok until recently. As we meet on a video call for one of her first on-camera interviews, her publicist sternly instructs me not to reveal her name. It is about convenience, says the 20-year-old film student.

“At the end of the day, I am still at uni and I enjoy my life outside of doing interviews,” she says. I expect her to be shy, but she is the opposite: self-deprecating and funny, shooting back thoughtful, intelligent answers deadpan. She clearly recognises her growing stardom, but isn’t flustered by it. “I am just an internet kid at the end of the day – always have been and always will be,” she says.

This week, she releases her debut mixtape, To Hell With It. Her first for the major label Parlophone, it features self-produced tracks alongside collaborations with Mura Masa. Her bubbly, high-spirited productions disguise melancholy lyrics (“We split in two, now you don’t want me,” she laments on Noticed I Cried). They are not inspired by her life, but rather tales of troubled teens in Jacqueline Wilson novels and TV shows such as Waterloo Road.

Born in Bath in 2000, PinkPantheress moved to Kent at five with her mother, a carer of Kenyan heritage, and her English father, an academic now based in the US. She fronted a band in her early teens, covering My Chemical Romance songs and taking inspiration from Paramore’s Hayley Williams; they made their debut performance at a school fete. “I had jeggings on and cut a hole in the knee to look more emo,” she says. “I’m a really nervous performer now, but I remember not caring about who was watching and how many people. I left the stage thinking I killed it, even though I was super off-key. I was too young to be nervous. Hopefully, I’ll get back to that point.”

In her later teenage years, she created songs on GarageBand, singing over sped-up old-school jungle and garage beats she found via YouTube and friends from the DJing and skateboarding scenes. She wanted to make music professionally, but found little success posting her music on SoundCloud, so she moved to London, where she is now based, to study film as a backup. “I thought every artist was an industry plant or something,” she says. “These people weren’t ever like me, not just a student or normal person. I was a bit naive, I think.”

She migrated to TikTok because of the platform’s openness to throwaway, imperfect content – and quickly went viral. “It took me until I was 19 to realise that there was a way of getting into music without having loads of industry connections,” she says. “If XXXTentacion can use SoundCloud and do it that way, then I feel like I can, too”.

Apologies for messing with chronology a bit in terms of interviews! There are a lot of great pieces that give us new information about PinkPantheress. This NME feature and interview from last month asks, among other things, why there used to be a sense of anonymity to PinkPantheress:

“For a good amount of time, you kept your identity hidden. Why?

“I think it’s down to how much you put out there. I wanted this to be more about the music than how I presented myself. It’s about how much you can control, and you can’t control everything, but I’ve decided that I can sometimes be incognito. It’s nice that people are interested, but also feel like, ‘Well, I can only give them what I want to give them’. I love the privacy I have as of right now.”

Did you think you’d ever be in this position?

“I’ve wanted to be an artist my whole life, but I kind of suppressed it because I thought that the chances of it actually happening were slim to none, and it also wasn’t really in keeping with what I was doing at the time. It’s been something that I have wanted to do since I was 10. When I was in school, I was leaning more towards a career in film. I’m still at university to do film – and I’m not planning to drop out. I’m going to stay here as long as I can, yet I do feel like film is a closed book for me. But it’s not fully closed because I still love it and I want to direct videos.”

What was the moment in which you wanted to become PinkPantheress?

“I’d say it was when I saw Paramore live at Reading Festival when I was younger, and I saw Hayley Williams on stage. She was doing something that I wanted to do, so I thought I’d better start manifesting early so I can get there.

“Performer-wise, Hayley Williams is a big influence; she’s amazing and one of my favourites in this game. I have never seen someone have so much fun on stage and look so effortless while doing it. I was so jealous of her”.

Where does your love for the garage and drum and bass samples you use come from?

“If you’d listen to my music and think, ‘No one’s done that before’, then it’s probably because of my melodies. Typically the people who sample garage are rappers, which is super cool; artists take modern songs and make them garage hits, like AJ Tracey’s ‘Ladbroke Grove’. I’m a big fan of that.

“For me, what I want to do – because I’m super lazy – is to take a garage beat that I really, really like and chop it down a bit, make a loop out of it, and then sing on top of it. There’s no one in the UK that doesn’t like garage, so it’s that with a twist”.

The penultimate interview I want to bring in is from NRP. Apart from the great sonic innovation and memorability of PinkPantheress’ music, her tracks are quite short and to the point:

“Do you ever think about your music through the lens of K-pop?

I do, actually. One thing about Korean music that really drew me to it in the first place was the topline writing, because the topline writing is a lot more intricate than Western pop. Some of the melodies, they're just way more interesting, in my opinion, as well as the instrumentals. One of my earliest tracks as PinkPantheress was an instrumental from a K-pop group called EXID. I sample Korean rappers and I think it's just a great genre of music, if you can call it a genre. I mean, it's not really a genre. It's a great community.

"Pain" was your first song to really take off. What do you remember about recording that song?

When I posted "Pain" I was doing one song a day. I was really sure what I wanted to achieve through TikTok and it was obviously to get a bigger audience. I was like, I'm just going to try and do this as quick as I can, because I'm really impatient with everything. I kind of resorted to doing one song a day in order to speed up the process, which sounds bad. It sounds like I was fully rushing it, but it was also a challenge for myself. I was taking like an hour a day when I got back home from university to write a 20 second loop, which sounded like it could develop into something longer than 20 seconds. "Pain" just happened to be one of those.

You were talking about being impatient with how you make and release music. Does that partly explain your songs being on the short side?

That definitely comes into it. When it comes to my own personal writing, I get kind of tired of hearing the same melodies over and over. The way that a usual song is structured is you'd have two verses, two choruses, maybe a [post-chorus], then obviously a fade out. It feels awkward for me to write any more than I feel like I have to. That being said, I've never been opposed to writing longer than one minute. It's kind of like, I make a song and in my head, I'm like, this must be the three minute mark, and then somebody will tell me it's only come to like two minutes. [laughs]

I listen to the mixtape and it feels a lot longer than it actually is. I don't know why that is.

I try to jam pack my songs. I try and flesh out the song as much as I can given the short amount of time I've got. I'll sing the same melody once, then move to another melody, then another melody. It's like you're getting a few melodies in a minute. I don't blame people for being like, this could be a bit longer because this isn't developed enough. People just have different attention spans and sometimes it takes people longer to really immerse themselves in a song. And I think the only remedy for that when you're listening to me is just to replay it if you want, if you so wish.

Your music is often described as nostalgic. What do you think about the baggage of that word?

I think I get it. I don't personally really get that feeling when I listen to my stuff. I think I've actually kind of come up with a theory as to why a lot of people think it's nostalgic, and it's just because [of] the beats, because they're naturally from the 2000s. But I think the way that my melodies sit on the beat are probably the reason that people are like, "I've definitely heard this kind of thing before." It's like, nah, I think you're hearing a lot of things. You're hearing a lot of music that you used to listen to in one, at the same time. That's essentially why it feels nostalgic.

If you used to listen to Green Day when you were younger, I use some of the melodies that they use, because I use pop punk melodies. If you've heard the beat before and you feel like you've heard it somewhere, you probably have. Nostalgia for me is a positive word. I think it means that people feel more comfortable because it's like, I feel safe listening to music.

Are there any artists that you want to work with in the future?

Oh 100% I definitely want to work with Kaytranada. I literally bring him up honestly, every single interview because I'm just like, I love you. You are a genius.

How do you want fans to understand you after this mixtape?

The first and foremost thing is if you like breakbeats and you like DnB, you need to tap into the British classics. Get a vinyl, go onto YouTube, type in Shy FX, type in Adam F, type in Sunship. I think if there's one thing I want people to know about me, it's that my music only scratches the surface of what real DnB is. Please take the dive that you need to do if you enjoy it and properly. And don't worry about me. A lot of people worry about me and think I'm super sad all the time because all my lyrics are so sad. But...no. I'm happy. [laughs] I'm happy”.

The brief aspect of PinkPantheress’ songs is also raised in the Billboard interview from a week or so back. Among other things, she gives a shout-out to her supportive peers in the interview:

“Fans might be led to believe that the widely discussed brevity of her songs -- only three out of the 10 tracks on to hell with it extend past two minutes, with only one marginally over the 2:30-mark -- stems from the time constraint of TikTok videos, which were previously capped at 60 seconds, but, as of July 1, now have a three-minuted extended maximum.

"When I write a song, I kind of get bored very easily of the same melody over again, so I kind of just end up going, 'Yeah, I'm gonna end the song here.' And funny enough, when I'm ending the song, I'm like, 'This is like three minutes, right?'" she says with a laugh that in and of itself is noticeably clipped. "I'm surprised by how actually short it is myself, to be fair, because I'm not intending them necessarily to be that short."

Her peers certainly don't feel bored singing her melodies over and over again, as heard in Giveon's gut-wrenching ballad cover of "Just For Me" for BBC Radio 1xtra Live Lounge and in Central Cee's U.K. drill hit "Obsessed With You," which heavily samples the same song and went all the way to No. 4 on the U.K. Singles Chart (the original "Just For Me" peaked at No. 27).

"It's like being in school -- sounds really weird actually, I don't know why I'm using this analogy -- and I've got loads of classmates," she says of other artists' reactions to her music. "It's like Central Cee's like a year above and he's like, 'Wow, you're doing really good...' I think it makes me feel like a lot of things are actually truly achievable when it comes to music. I feel like before, even when I had 'Break It Off' and 'Pain' out, I still felt very distanced between myself and a lot of the musicians I look up to."

The school analogy PinkPantheress makes earlier about relating to other artists makes sense coming from a girl studying film at the University of the Arts London. But when asked if she's still attending, the singer-songwriter coyly replies, "I think so" with a chuckle. "I've yet to confirm that for sure”.

I am going to end with a review for her mixtape, to hell with it. Pitchfork were keen to have their say about an amazing release. There is no doubt that, with to hell with it, we have an incredibly promising artist in PinkPantheress. I wonder whether new success and attention means we will get to know more about the woman behind the moniker:

“But what sets PinkPantheress’ music firmly in the modern day is her voice, an ethereal, pixelated miasma that breaks from the earnest delivery of her British predecessors. Her pinched coos feel hyperreal, the edges of her syllables sharpened as if sung by a swooning voice-to-text machine. There are obvious comparisons to futuristic singers like Grimes and Poppy, but PinkPantheress’ strangely soothing vocals also recall the performative over-enunciation of “TikTok voice.” That intimate quality reflects the recording process for most of her early singles, which were tracked lying down in her college dorm room because she felt unable to sing standing up. The combination of retro samples and Clairo-esque bedroom pop delivery breaks the early-2000s spell: Sure, those songs were perhaps more “cringe,” but their vocals were overdubbed to the high heavens. PinkPantheress feels like she’s whispering in your ear.

While she’s clearly a passionate scholar of the early millennium, she also seems aware that this era of her career can only go so far. Most of her songs are maddeningly fleeting, as if a longer look would reveal cracks in the facade. But PinkPantheress is beginning to push beyond genre tropes; though to hell with it is essentially a collection of previously released singles, the tape’s new songs hint at broader palettes and bigger risks. Where earlier lyrics were almost all outward projections onto an anonymous crush, “Reason” and “Nineteen” reflect on her own life. The latter, with its crashing waves and drawn-out violins, is the closest the record gets to a ballad. “I wasn’t meant to be/This bored at 19,” she confesses, a grounding moment on an album saturated with post-party depression.

It’s a slow and sensual track underscored by a low bassline, and unlike the rest, it builds without cutting to a breakbeat drop. It still doesn’t exceed the maximum allotted time for a TikTok, but it’s constructed for private sentimentality, not internet virality.

PinkPantheress succeeds where cheaper imitations fail because her reference points feel lived-in rather than opportunistic. She adds an undeniably contemporary spin on her trove of samples, imbuing them with the intimacy and immediacy that comes from a childhood spent on self-confessional platforms like Tumblr and TikTok. On to hell with it, PinkPantheress sculpts a digital-age paradise that exists only in an invented memory of the past, setting the stage for a career set more firmly in the present”.

I shall leave it there. There is going to be a lot more great music from PinkPantheress. So far, we have this selection of amazing music that stands out from everything around it. On the strength of what she has produced so far, our very own PinkPantheress has…

A huge future ahead.

_______________

Follow PinkPantheress

Twitter:

https://twitter.com/pinkpantheress2

Instagram:

https://www.instagram.com/pinkpantheress/

YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCufuq24Cef6-CdmEiZmXTBg

Spotify:

https://open.spotify.com/artist/78rUTD7y6Cy67W1RVzYs7t

Soundcloud:

https://soundcloud.com/pinkpantheress

FEATURE: Groovelines: David Bowie – Space Oddity

FEATURE:

 

 

Groovelines

David Bowie – Space Oddity

___________

I have been thinking about space…

as, a couple of weeks back, William Shatner travelled into space. For some reason, it got me thinking about David Bowie’s Space Oddity. It is surprising that this track was not originally a success. It got to number one in he U.K. in 1975, though it was a slow burner. It was first released by as a single on 11th July, 1969 before appearing as the opening track of Bowie’s second album, David Bowie. Following the commercial failure of his eponymous debut album in 1967, Bowie's manager, Kenneth Pitt, commissioned Love You till Tuesday. This was a promotional film intended to introduce Bowie to a larger audience. For this film, Bowie wrote Space Oddity: a song about a fictional astronaut named Major Tom. I want to bring in a couple of articles relating to Space Oddity. It is a song that has quite a story and history. This article from July reveals how, even when the song was recorded, there was a feeling that this was something very special:

“David wrote ‘Space Oddity’ for the two of us to sing”

In February 1969, Bowie went to Morgan Sound Studios on Willesden High Road to record a 28-minute film called Love You Till Tuesday, the title of a song Bowie had recorded for Decca in 1967. The film had been suggested by Günther Schneider, producer of German TV show 4-3-2-1 Musik Für Junge Leute. The promotional film was an attempt by Pitt to bring Bowie to a wider audience.

Bowie was playing alongside Yorkshire-born guitarist John “Hutch” Hutchinson, who had been touring with Bowie as part of a duo called Feathers. Bowie had picked him out at an audition a couple of years before. “David wrote ‘Space Oddity’ for the two of us to sing. It is a duet song, ‘Ground control to Major Tom,’” Hutchinson later told oneandother.com, in an interview to promote his biography Hutch And Bowie. During the recording session, the guitarist sang the “ground control” sections while Bowie sang as Major Tom.

All did not go smoothly that day, however. As Bowie was rehearsing the final scene, where the astronaut is caressed by two space seductresses – played by Samantha Bond and the production assistant Suzanne Mercer – Pitt clashed with director Malcolm J. Thomson, who wanted to make the scenes considerably more risqué. In the end, the film was shelved and was only eventually publicly released as a video in 1984. This version of “Space Oddity” is owned by Decca Records, after Pitt sold the rights to Love You Till Tuesday to PolyGram that year. A DVD of the film was released in 2005.

“It was clear that he had composed something extraordinary”

Despite the disappointment over the film’s non-release, Pitt was convinced that the 22-year-old Bowie had created a truly special song about a fictional astronaut. “It was clear from this first ‘public’ outing of the song that David Bowie had composed something extraordinary,” said Pitt.

Bowie subsequently demoed further versions of the song in an attempt to secure a record deal, which led ultimately to the hit version that was recorded on June 20, 1969, made with Elton John’s producer Gus Dudgeon. The song was released on July 11th, just over a week before Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stepped foot on the Moon. The BBC played “Space Oddity” during their coverage of the Apollo 11 landing. “I’m sure they really weren’t listening to the lyric at all,” said Bowie later. “Of course, I was overjoyed that they did.”

“I have always dealt with alienation and isolation”

Bowie said that most people presumed the song was written about the space landing, without knowing the original inspiration of Kubrick’s film. He would later revisit his Major Tom character in the songs “Ashes To Ashes” and “Hallo Spaceboy,” and the music video for “★.”

“Thematically, I have always dealt with alienation and isolation. I have often put myself in situations where I am isolated so I can write about that,” said Bowie. “Space Oddity,” the atmospheric tale of an abandoned astronaut orbiting Earth, remains one of the most quirky and poignant songs of the late 60s. This masterpiece has continued to influence society into the 21st Century.

Cover versions have been recorded by artists as diverse as Sheryl Crow, Def Leppard, Tangerine Dream, and William Shatner. In May 2013, Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield, commander of Expedition 35 to the International Space Station, recorded a version in space that went viral – dedicated to the “genius of David Bowie”.

It is amazing to think how Space Oddity has affected so many people and been taking to heart by many other artists. One of David Bowie’s most-popular songs, it is as moving now as it was years ago. After Space Oddity was originally released, it has taken on a new life through the decade. The Financial Times produced a feature that mentioned ways in which Space Oddity has been adapted and adopted after Bowie’s original release:

“In 1970, Bowie voiced a version with romantic Italian lyrics, “Ragazzo Solo, Ragazza Sola” (“Alone Boy, Alone Girl”). He issued a new acoustic interpretation of ‟Space Oddity” in 1980, and live recordings have surfaced down the decades, as have the spartan, atmospheric demos. Cover versions took some time to appear, probably because the song was strongly stamped with Bowie’s personality. Comedy group The Barron Knights snickered a feline parody in 1977 (“Birth control to Ginger Tom”), but from this point on, the song was treated reverentially. Most covers tightly followed the blueprint of the original, including Def Leppard’s, and versions by very different German bands, Helloween and Tangerine Dream. One exception to the Xerox treatment came from US jazz-fusion arranger Dave Matthews, whose 1977 take was at least different if not entirely convincing, breaking with convention by being sung by a woman, Googie Coppola. Natalie Merchant included the song on a live album in 1999.

Though ‟Space Oddity” cut Major Tom adrift, he enjoyed an impressive afterlife. Bowie revisited the character in “Ashes To Ashes” (1980), depicting the astronaut as a junkie, echoing his own troubles. 1995’s ‟Hallo Spaceboy” saw some of the lyrics rehashed at the prompting of collaborators Pet Shop Boys, and what is assumed to be Major Tom’s corpse took a grim curtain call in the video for ‟Blackstar” (2016).

In 1983 electro-popper Peter Schilling had a hit with “Major Tom (Coming Home)”, its hapless protagonist suffering another mishap. Canadian electronic artist K.I.A. offered ‟Mrs Major Tom” in 2002, with singer Larissa Gomes recounting the yarn from the wife’s point of view. This was covered by Sheryl Crow on William Shatner’s Seeking Major Tom, a 2011 album which also included the Star Trek actor’s clunky reading of ‟Space Oddity”.

Perhaps inevitably, the Major actually travelled into space when Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield sang ‟Space Oddity” on the International Space Station in May 2013. Careful not to tempt fate, Commander Hadfield amended the lyrics so Major Tom finally made it home. Though the video caused consternation for lawyers (was a song performed in orbit subject to terrestrial copyright?), Bowie was delighted, declaring it ‟possibly the most poignant version”.

I am going to end it there. There are many David Bowie classics to unpick and dive inside…though there are few as timeless and important as Space Oddity. I wonder whether Bowie knew, when writing the first few words of the song, that it would turn into such a seismic release. As I said, listening to the song today, it has definitely lost…

NONE of its power.

FEATURE: Eternal Flame: An Ongoing and Endless Love for Susanna Hoffs

FEATURE:

 

 

Eternal Flame

 An Ongoing and Endless Love for Susanna Hoffs

___________

ASIDE from using a photo (below)…

that I featured in a 2019 article about Susanna Hoffs, I am also going to repeat some things I have said about the amazing musician. This is quite a short feature that is not tied to any anniversary or out there for any reason other than to celebrate an amazing person! There are particular women in music who I have endless love and respect for. Kate Bush and Madonna are examples. Susanna Hoffs is another. She is best known as a co-founder of The Bangles. She founded the group (originally called the Bangs) in 1981 with Debbi and Vicki Peterson. It is amazing to think that the iconic group were formed forty years ago! The Bangles released their first full album, All Over the Place, in 1984. Hoffs embarked upon a solo career after The Bangles disbanded in 1989. Her debut solo album, When You're a Boy, came out in 1991. She has also recorded music as part of Ming Tea (a faux 1960s British group with Mike Myers and Matthew Sweet) and recorded with Matthew Sweet. Hoffs is definitely one of the coolest people in music! I follow her on Twitter. Aside from posting videos of her performing, I love reading about her. She is so inspiring and compelling. She has put out some music the past year or two – including last year’s track, The Only Thing, with Travis -, and I hope that we hear more from her.

I have said this quite a few times before through the years. One of my earliest music memories is seeing the video for The Bangles’ Eternal Flame when I was five or six. I was watching through the banisters as my parents were playing VH1. That song was released in 1989. It features Hoffs on lead vocals. She has said that she actually sang the studio recording of the song completely naked after producer Davitt Sigerson pranked her by telling her Olivia Newton-John recorded nude in the same studio (later revealed to be a lie). Hoffs has said, because the studio was dark and she could not be seen, it was quite freeing – and, actually, she recorded a lot of her parts for the Everything album naked! Aside from that rather intriguing and wonderful fact, it is the sheer beauty and quality of Susanna Hoffs’ writing and vocals that I fell for as a child. Although I loved the other Bangles - Debbi Peterson, Vicki Peterson and Michael Steele -, it is Hoffs that has captivated me. Videos of her in Walk Like an Egyptian and Manic Monday solidified this! One of the most important groups of my early years, I followed her solo work and really love her albums. Her 1996 eponymous album is one that I regularly come back to. Still one of the most sensuous, varied and powerful voices in music, there is nobody out there like Susanne Hoffs!

There are a couple of interviews that I want to drop in before I finish. The first is from 2012, where Hoffs was promoting her album, Someday. Apart from discovering about songs on the album, Hoffs also spoke about The Bangles and her experiences in the group:

“Jeb: The songwriting on the new album is fabulous. How did you meet Andrew Brassell that you co-wrote with?

Susanna: That makes me feel so good. This kid, I met through my niece, moved out to California from Nashville. They were friends and he was playing in the Nashville scene for a long time. She is a big fan of his guitar playing and his songwriting, so he came out for a visit and she introduced him to the family.

His name is Andrew Brassel, but we all just call him Brassell. We all took to him instantly. He was checking out LA to see if he could make a start as a musician here. We welcomed him and showed him around. I had a show with The Bangles on Lilith Fair the weekend that he arrived, so I told him to come up and see the show. He met the girls and we sort of just adopted him.

I never thought we would end up writing songs together. He, eventually, decided to come to LA and I told him that he could stay in my guest room until he got sorted out and figured out where he wanted to live. He had a guitar glued to him the entire time he was here. It really inspired me to see someone who was playing music constantly. He was always making stuff up in the spur of the moment. I would be in the kitchen washing dishes and there would be this music he was playing and I would start hearing these melodies in my head. I would run in and say, “What is that? Is that a song?” He’d say, “I suppose it could be.”
He is one of those people who have a singular focus, which is the beauty of being in your mid-twenties. It is easier to be that way then, than it is for me now, at my age.

We sat down and started writing together and it was an instant click. Because he was a fixture in our household, it kind of forced me to pay attention. Once that creative spark in me got ignited, then it just flowed. It was really an unexpected joy to discover this unexpected writing relationship.

“Jeb: “Regret” is a great song.

Susanna: There were a lot of times when Brassell would observe me and my life and notice what I was going through. When we sat down to write this was all very fresh.

Giving him the opportunity to stay in our guest room allowed us to have very concentrated time focused on our songwriting. We would be sitting around having coffee and I would say, “I always wanted to write a song about regret.” I am talking bout trying to go back and fix things in your life even though it is not a very useful thing to do. We have all been there and done that. We try to get past these regrets. I think I was mentioning this problem about waking up in the middle of the night and thinking about things I had done and things that I wish I had done differently. It is on the darker side of the emotions on the album.

Jeb: Was “Raining” the song you did with Mike Campbell of Tom Petty’s band all those years ago? Where did that come from? Surely you were not saving that back for your next solo album all of this time.

Susanna: I have had that so many years it is ridiculous. I showed that song to The Bangles for Sweetheart of the Sun but they didn’t pick it. I found this box with these cassettes in it.

Part of the reason this solo album took so long was that I was writing for myself just as a creative outlet, clear back to 1989. I did a couple of solo albums where I collaborated with other people. Songs that I had just written got left in a shoebox up on a shelf. There were two Bangles records in the last ten years that were made. Things got busy and the song just stayed in the box. I’m so glad that song survived all of those years in the box.

I reconnected with both Mike Campbell and Mitchell Froom, oddly enough through Brassell. How weird is that? He wanted me to come with him to see a show by his friend in Largo, Caitlin Rose, who is a singer songwriter he has worked with over the years. She was playing a show opening for Ron Sexsmith. I had no idea Mitchell would be there. He was there to see Ron and I was there to see Caitlin.

Another time I was seeing another friend of his named Tristan, who is a great singer/songwriter. I went to the show and Benmont Tench, who played on the demo of “Raining” back in 1989, was there. He told me to call Mike. I was really shy. It took a lot of courage for me to call him. I sent him the song because he didn’t remember the song right then. He inspired me to do a rewrite on it and bring it up to date. We went back and worked on it and it has now seen the light of day.

 Jeb: You were young and cute when you were with The Bangles, you were, however, a songwriter, which differentiated you from the norm.

Susanna: When I started out it was all about songwriting. It was the opposite of American Idol. It was very garage rock. The Bangles were very much like that. We were kids who sat in their rooms writing songs and put a band together and rehearsed in the garage. We, then, made a cassette that we could take to club owners to get them to let us play in their club. It was very grassroots.

Jeb: Did you think that girls would look up to you or were you just being a musician?

Susanna: I was just being a musician. I was very inspired by the Go-Go’s. It was a fact that I downplayed during The Bangles because we were compared to them one hundred percent of the time. We started to not want to emphasize that. For me, in particular, maybe more so than the other girls in the band, I was very influenced by the Go-Go’s.

I had just graduated from The University of California at Berkeley in the Bay Area and had been smitten by the whole rock scene in the clubs that was going on. I saw the Sex Pistols, I saw Patti Smith. I was going to see all of the punk bands.

When I came back to LA, I was transformed and I wanted to do this. I went to see all of the great LA bands that were coming out in the late ‘70’s and early ‘80’s. I saw the Go-Go’s at the Whiskey A Go Go.

Jeb: Describe the scene to me.

Susanna: It brought it down from Stadium Rock, which seemed very inaccessible to kids playing music. It was very raw. It no longer seemed unattainable to be in a band. I was very heavily influenced by Bonnie Raitt and Joni Mitchell back when I was in high school, so I wanted to write songs. I was very influenced by Linda Ronstadt but I was more into the folky thing. I was also influenced by Patti Smith.

The bridge between Joni and Patti saw me go from playing acoustic guitar to electric guitar. I was seeing a lot of rock and roll live. When I saw Tina Weymouth playing with the Talking Heads I got very excited about playing in a band. I think the combination of seeing Tina and Patti and the Go-Go’s and a lot of other bands on the scene led me to start putting ads in The Recycler and that is how I ended up meeting the girls in The Bangles.

Jeb: When did you know you were good enough to make it?

Susanna: When we met, though that ad, Vicki [Peterson] and Debbi [Peterson] came over to my house; I was still living at home. We played in the garage and we became a band that night.

We had a friend of the family visiting us from New York, who was staying in our guest room and she heard us play and said it sounded like we had been together a long time. She was amazed. We really clicked. We played “White Rabbit” from Jefferson Airplane, which Vickie and Debbi taught me. It was just two chords and I was like, “Wow, I never realized that. It sounds so complicated.” We played that song and it sounded really good and I said, “Let’s do this.”

We got off to a quick start, but then we had to do what all garage bands do; we had to work on the set list and we had to play some parties and we had to get gigs in Hollywood. We would have to drag our gear to rehearsal studios and all of that. We were not an overnight success. We had a long time where we paid a lot of dues.

Jeb: You were very young. Your album came out and was a hit. How were you mature enough to handle the fame. How did you do it?

Susanna: it was hard. It was very scary. You go from the little bubble of your dreams of musical aspiration and all of this excitement and energy and creating your sound and finding your communal voice as a band to being in a business. You find out what your sonic quality is that you want to share with the world, which for us was jangly guitars and four part harmonies. Suddenly, you get signed and enter the business side of it. There are teams of people in suits, mostly men and they are staring at you and sizing you up and trying to figure out what to do with you and how to sell you. You realize that your little bubble of creativity is no longer a little bubble. You’re out in the world subject to a list of people’s opinions that you never thought you had to consider.

We were managed by Miles Copeland, who I love and who did a fantastic job as our manager. After some time, he started working with an all-girl band that he sort of cherry picked from other bands. I think Darryl Hanna may have been in that band; I don’t quite remember all of the details but they were a put together band and they were also incredibly gorgeous. I remember sitting there with The Bangles feeling kind of insecure. We were hit with this feeling of how are we going to deal with this.

We wondered why he was doing that. It was irrational, for sure. I have not even thought of this for years. We thought maybe we were lacking and that there was something missing in The Bangles. It didn’t turn out to be the case, but it is an example of how everyone was judging us and wanting us to deliver things and we were trying to do that.

All of these things come into play and I think that with all-girl bands, in particular, there is a feeling that it is a novelty. We had this pressure to explain ourselves. People would ask us how we came to play our instruments and why we were an all-girl band. It was like it was an odd concept for a girl to play drums or bass. It felt like nobody believed that there could be an authentic inspiration for us. It was bizarre and I never really understood that.

Jeb: What do you think it is about The Bangles that makes people still want to go see you today?

Susanna: I think there is a great nostalgia for the ‘80’s. It was a really fun time for music. We felt like we were drenched in our ‘60’s influence and that we really didn’t fit into the ‘80’s but, then again, “Walk Like an Egyptian” is an anthem for that time. “Eternal Flame” is also a big song for that era, in a music box sort of way. There is a nostalgia for that time period, just like I have nostalgia for ‘70’s music.

I think people want to see bands that are fun. People want a fun night and to see music that makes them feel happy. We are very lucky—very lucky that we are able to be doing this and for that connection that we made with our fans.

The last interview I am pulling from is from last year. Again, Hoffs discussed The Bangles and what the group represented. The fact that the group, as women, were pitted against another female band like The Go-Go’s is a sad reflection of the scene in the 1980s:

“While the decision to form an all-female band was intentional, the stereotypes that accompanied that choice seemed unavoidable. Constant comparisons to the Go-Gos, while not completely unwarranted (Hoffs has admitted their influence), dominated critical appraisals of the band, treating both bands almost as novelties rather than acknowledging their individual and autonomous contributions to the eighties musical soundscape.  Hoffs reflects: “There was definitely a funny fixation on…our gender….and if there’s two girl bands, ‘let’s make it a competition’ instead of ‘where are all the girls?’…’where are all the other women?’ I mean, we know they’re out there!”’

For Hoffs, the previous generations of female musicians had paved the way for her own development. In turn, as both a performer and a songwriter, Hoffs’ voice has influenced new generations of aspiring female musicians. “Eternal Flame,” which she wrote alongside Bill Steinberg and Tom Kelly, gave the Bangles an international number 1 hit, and has since become a favorite song for artists (of all genders) to cover.  She has put out three solo albums of original material, including the critically acclaimed Someday (2012), which American Songwriter gave 4.5 out of 5 stars and concluded that it was “easily and undeniably Hoffs’ most definitive musical statement to date.” Still, her role as an inspiration for girls ready to rock can still seem surreal. At the release of her last album, Hoffs told Goldmine: “I am very touched and flattered when people say that The Bangles, or I, have been an influence for them. I’m always surprised, because I don’t think of myself that way. It is so moving to me that I could influence somebody to do something positive or to make music.”

What’s next for this vivacious musician?

Hoffs is currently finishing up a new album, and revisiting her past, with the rediscovery of an unreleased album from 1999 that includes collaborations with an exciting line-up of musicians including Dan Schwartz, Bill Bottrell, Dillon O’Brien, and Charlotte Caffey. The future is full of music – new and old – from Hoffs, promising a continuation of the infectious enthusiasm and joy for the art of music making that has characterized her entire career.

This was just an excuse to write about one of my favourite artists. Actually, it is looking ahead to possible music (and, at the very end, there is a playlist featuring some of Hoffs’ key tracks). Go and follow her on Twitter and Instagram, as she is always fascinating! Check out her official website, where there is some bio and great detail that I have not included. Another salute to an amazing human and a musician who, through the decades, has brought so much joy to people. There are so many who are looking ahead to new music and what is coming from the Californian-born treasure. I was seduced by the amazing Susanna Hoffs when I was very young. This is an eternal flame (forgive the pun!) that will…

NEVER lose its heat.

FEATURE: The Kate Bush Interview Archive: Colin Irwin: Melody Maker (1980)

FEATURE:

 

 

The Kate Bush Interview Archive

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in December 1980/PHOTO CREDIT: Patrick Lichfield 

Colin Irwin: Melody Maker (1980)

___________

I am heading back to 1980…

for this part of The Kate Bush Interview Archive. Thanks to this invaluable website for providing a huge resource regarding Kate Bush interviews. I have been thinking about Never for Ever (her third album which was released in 1980) and how it was a transformation in terms of her lyrics and sonic progression. It was, at that point, the biggest and most notable evolution in her music. Colin Irwin of Melody Maker interviewed Bush in Munich. Although there is talk about Bush’s sexuality and sensuality, there are some useful insights regarding the songwriting and characters in her songs. There are some sections from the promotional interview (of Never for Ever) that I want to include:

“I mean, no sweet, flippant family entertainer ever wrote a song as sexually explicit as Feel It. No surrogate Olivia Newton-John ever tackled a subject like incest (The Kick Inside). No cosseted girl-next-door would ever dare conduct a fantasy around a saxophone (Saxophone Song).

The lights suddenly pick out Kate on the other side of the studio, standing perfectly still, the bass standing phallically before her, her eyes wide and manic, staring at the camera.

The intro to Babooshka, the bottom portrudes, and she's away, jumping and thrusting, and utterly living the part. A bunch of photographers have been allowed in to the studio, and push and jostle each other for the best views.

As the song ends, several kids chase her for an autograph, but she's already gone, flitting away on her broomstick, or does she merely turn into a pumpkin?

Kate re-emerges, totally unrecognized, sitting alone at the side, observing, waiting for her next party-piece. She's dressed as a haggard washer-woman in dowdy clothes and headscarf.

It's a routine she's never tried before and she's been nervous it all day. The song is Army Dreamers, a track from Never For Ever and the next single, a simple but melancholy little song in which Kate appears as a weary mother reflecting on the death of her son, a soldier killed on duty.

"Should have been a rock star...But he didn't have the money for a guitar..." Three soldiers dressed in British army camoufflage uniforms appear, one carrying a mandolin, one a Tommy gun [played by Paddy Bush and Del Palmer respectively], another in the role of a sergeant barking orders.

"Should have been a politician...But he never had a proper education..." Kate shrivels and cringes behind the soldiers, her face crumpled and distraught. The soldiers march and prowl and stand at attention.

"Should have been a father...But he didn't even make it to his twenties..." The song is all the more striking for the pretty tune, and the genteel structure, the innocence of the lyric.

It end with the three soldiers cowering in a heap, Kate spreadeagled protectively above them. Purely as a piece of theater it's brilliant. RockPop has never seen anything like it, that's for sure.

Kate has an enormous number of relatives in Ireland, and she's fearful of the Irish reaction to Army Dreamers. Ireland isn't mentioned in the song, and she inserted a reference to BFPO to divert attention; but let's face it, the song's a contemporary one with its mention of rock 'n' and there ain't too many other places a young soldier is gonna get killed in action right now.

"It's the first song I've ever written in the studio," she ask her about it. "It's not specifically about Ireland, it's just putting the case of a mother in these circumstances, how incredibly sad it is for her. How she feels she should have been able to prevent it. If she'd bought him a guitar when he asked for one.

"Have you heard Roy's new album?" she says suddenly. Er, Roy? Oh, Harper, of course. They appear on each other's albums. He gets a dedication on the sleeve of Never For Ever: "Special thanks to Roy Harper for holding on to the poet in his music".

No, Kate, I haven't heard the album. "You should." Adrian Boot took it, took the sleeve photograph. "Actually" says Kate sweetly, "I didn' like the sleeve." Adrian looks hurt. "The photograph was great, I just didn't like the sleeve" she reassures him.

A flood of chatter follows. Did I know Dave & Toni Arthur/What are the Dransfields doing now/Do I like the Bothy Band? "I've a very strong folk music influence" she says.

"First songs I ever sang were dirty sea shanties. I'm very proud of it, I can't think of a nicer influence. Traditional music says a great deal about the country. English folk music is a lot different from Irish folk music, not only musically, but lyrically. I mean, that song She Moves Thro' the Fair: it sums up the Irish spirit. It's incredible, so moving."

 

Certainly her fascination for traditional ballads is the key to her more lurid story-lines. The Kick Inside was inspired by the richly colourful ballad Lucy Wan, in which a brother murders his sister when she becomes pregnant by him (though there are numerous variations). Kate's version has the sister committing suicide.

Babooshka is similarly based on a song called Sovay Sovay. I tell her I'll listen to Roy Harper's album if she'll listen to an album called Carolanne by Carol Pegg, which includes a similar embellishment on Lucy Wan.

My favourite track on the album is The Wedding List. "Oh, really?" she says bubbling, the little kid who's been given a puppy for Christmas.

"That was based on a film, a Jeanne Moreau film I once saw on the telly, when the bride's husband was killed and she sought revenge for those responsible." She spends the next 15 minutes relating the plot of the film, ending in a breathless flourish. "It was an amazing film. Can't remember what it was called, though." [The film, Truffaud's tribute to Alfred Hitchcock, is called La Mariee etait en noir, or The Bride Wore Black.]

Films and fiction, in fact, count for a prominent chunck of her inspiration. And whatever you feel about the histrionics and the wayward vocalising, you've got to concede that in a chart overflowing with grey music and tepid lyrics, the success of a colourful number like Babooshka, for example, has to be healthy.

She's reticent to agree [sic]..."Well, it does always amaze me how songs get in the charts that are--I won't say rubbish, because they're not -- but the sort of songs that so many people could write.

"I often find myself inspired by unusual, distorted, weird subjects, as opposed to things that are straightforward. It's a reflection of me, my liking for weirdness."

They don't come any weirder than The Infant Kiss. This, she explains patiently, was based on a film, The Innocents, which had itself come out of the Henry James book, The Turn of the Screw. A governess goes to stay with a man to look after his two children, who are possessed by the spirits of people who lived there before.

"Some people might think it's a song about...what's the word when older women fancy little boys?" Paedophilia? [Kate probably knows this word better than she lets on: she made a similar claim of ignorance of the word in the Hot Press interview, also included in this volume.] "Well, it's not actually that, and it would worry me if people mixed it up with that because that's exactly what worries her so much. I find that distortion very fascinating and quite sad. And frightening. The thought of someone old and evil being inside a young and pure shell, it's freaky."

But you really live out your roles and fantasies. Playing the mother in Army Dreamers.

"Yeah, I seem to link on to mothers rather well. As I've grown up a bit I've become very aware of observing my own mother trying to observe me. It's fascinating. When I was a kid I never really thought about her, about how she ticks.

"But I can be more objective now and I find it fascinating about mothers, that there's something in there, a kind of maternal passion which is there all the time, even when they're talking about cheese sandwiches. Sometimes it can be very possessive, sometimes it's very real."

Kate doesn't know when she'll be touring again. She enjoyed her one tour, and it gave her a thrill to choke the critics who'd suggested she'd be a disaster on stage, that she couldn't sing live. But it takes six months out of a year to rehearse and prepare for a tour the way she wants to do it, and will also cost her enormous amounts of money to stage.

"Not that I mind losing money on a tour--there are so many benefits from it--as long as we don't go bankrupt. We do want to tour again, we will tour again, because there are so many things we still want to do on stage, but we'll have to think about it very carefully because it will stop me doing a lot of other things."

On the plane back to London the next day I ask her about Peter Gabriel. They did, after all, record together on Games Without Frontiers, and I thought I'd detected a Gabriel influence on Never For Ever. I ask about Peter Gabriel and she talks about Pink Floyd.

 "That last album of his was fantastic, but I don't know if it was a direct influence on me. He may have opened up bits in me I hadn't thought of, but a more direct influence was The Wall.

"It got to the point when I heard it I thought there's no point in writing songs any more because they'd said it all. You know, when something really gets you, it hits your creative centre and stops you creating...and after a couple of weeks I realized that he hadn't done everything, there was lots he hadn't done.

"And after that it became an inspiration. Breathing was definitely inspired by the whole vibe I got from hearing that whole album, especially the third side. There's something about Floyd that's pretty atomic anyway."

We part at Heathrow, she to the next leg of the Never For Ever promotion There's a day of interviews ahead; personal appearances at record shops in Glasgow, Manchester, and London; various radio station interviews and a visit to a dealers' party in Birmingham, where she will personally meet the EMI employees who'll be flogging her new album. They in turn-cream themselves stupid and get their photographs taken with the great lady”.

It is really interesting reading the transcript of that Melody Maker interview. Even though the promotional duties for Never for Ever were quite intense, Bush was as enthusiastic - giving and warm as you could imagine. It is testament to her professionalism and engaging nature that she provided so many memorable interviews. The snippets of the interview above is a fascinating insight into…

ONE of her best albums.