FEATURE: Kate Bush: The Deep Cuts: A Coral Room

FEATURE:

 

 

Kate Bush: The Deep Cuts

A Coral Room

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THIS run of features…

 IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 2005/PHOTO CREDIT: Trevor Leighton

casts a light on the deep cuts that get overlooked when thinking of Kate Bush. Most of the songs of hers played on radio are better-known singles and bigger hits. It is quite rare that something deeper and less-known is spun. I aim to focus about twenty songs or so before concluding. Maybe overlooking 2011’s Director’s Cut (as that is reworked songs from The Sensual World (1989) and The Red Shoes (1993), I might time songs from Lionheart, The Red Shoes, Aerial and 50 Words for Snow until closer to November (when they all celebrate anniversaries). I might publish those features in October, so I am going to look at deep cuts from other albums before then. Today, I will actually take a song from Aerial. Released on 7th November, 2005, Bush’s eighth studio album arrived twelve years after The Red Shoes. Many didn’t know whether there would be another Kate Bush album or not. An album that was embraced and loved by critics, Aerial combines Folk, Renaissance, Classical, Reggae, Flamenco, and Rock. Thinking back to her classic 1985 album, Hounds of Love, Aerial is divided into two thematically distinct collections. The first disc (as Aerial is a double album), A Sea of Honey, features a series of unconnected songs. The second disc, A Sky of Honey, consists of a single suite of music (nine tracks in total) that is about a single summer day, beginning in the morning and ending twenty-four hours later with the next sunrise. Like Hounds of Love, there is this concept and series of wonderful songs connected that tell this bigger story.

A song from the first disc, A Coral Room, is a gem that doesn’t really get talked about that much. Maybe I have heard it on the radio a couple of times, but when it comes to songs that are better known or played, this is very low down the list. It is a shame, as Aerial is one of Kate Bush’s best albums. Aside from the single, King of the Mountain, the rest of the tracks are relatively unexplored. I think that Hounds of Love still has this dominance when it comes to radio play and hegemony. A few singles from other albums, but it is a shame the deeper cuts do not get a good showing. In terms of the tale of A Coral Room, this is what Bush said about its origins and intention:

“There was a little brown jug actually, yeah. The song is really about the passing of time. I like the idea of coming from this big expansive, outside world of sea and cities into, again, this very small space where, er, it's talking about a memory of my mother and this little brown jug. I always remember hearing years ago this thing about a sort of Zen approach to life, where, you would hold something in your hand, knowing that, at some point, it would break, it would no longer be there. (Front Row, BBC4, 4 November 2005)”.

The purpose of this run of features is to throw light on songs that showcase Kate Bush’s full talents. I have nothing against the singles, but these deeper cuts are where we see those weirder and wonderful moments. Songs that unfold over time or have something about them that takes you somewhere else. A Coral Room is one such song. With Michael Wood providing the male vocal and Bush on vocal and piano, A Coral Room is one of the simpler tracks from Aerial. I have looked at this song before, and I noted how the lyrics are among Bush’s very best and most evocative. The first verse alone take you to another place: “There's a city, draped in net/Fisherman net/And in the half light, in the half light/It looks like every tower/Is covered in webs/Moving and glistening and rocking/It's babies in rhythm/As the spider of time is climbing/Over the ruins”. Bush sings the song so emotionally and tenderly! It is a wonderful track that should be on everyone’s radar. The verse where she references her mother is especially stirring and touching: “My mother and her little brown jug/It held her milk/And now it holds our memories/I can hear her singing/"Little brown jug don't I love thee"/"Little brown jug don't I love thee"/Ho ho ho, hee hee hee”. A Coral Room is magnificent and one that maybe only the big Kate Bush fans know about. The deeper cuts are fascinating songs. Kate Bush’s are among the most diverse, unique and varied. It is definitely…

WHERE some of her best moments lie.

FEATURE: Metal Guru: The Iconic Marc Bolan at Seventy-Five

FEATURE:

 

 

Metal Guru

The Iconic Marc Bolan at Seventy-Five

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ON 30th September…

 PHOTO CREDIT: Ron Howard/Redferns

we will remember the late Marc Bolan. He was born on that day in 1947 so, ahead of his seventy-fifth birthday, I wanted to mark his legacy and brilliance with a playlist of his best songs. The iconic and influential lead of T. Rex, Bolan was a pioneer of the Glam movement. Inspired artists as popular and acclaimed as David Bowie, one cannot underestimate the importance of this remarkable musician. Bolan was posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2020. In the late-1960s, Bolan rose to fame as the founder and leader of the psychedelic folk band Tyrannosaurus Rex. Like I do with my Inspired By… feature, I am going to put in some biography about Bolan before getting to music. In this case, it will be a playlist of the best work from Tyrannosaurus Rex and T. Rex. On 16th September, we remembered Bolan on the forty-fifth anniversary of his death. The T. Rex legend died two weeks before he would have celebrated his thirtieth birthday. Even though he was not with us long, he influenced so many other artists through the years. I am going to end with a definitive playlist of Bolan’s best work. Firstly, AllMusic provide us with biography about the remarkable Marc Bolan:

“Singer/songwriter/guitarist Marc Bolan was one of the major glam rock figures of the early '70s, especially in England. After releasing his debut solo single, "The Wizard," and its follow-ups, "The Third Degree" and "Hippy Gumbo," on Decca Records in the U.K. in 1965-1966, he joined the band John's Children in 1967. The same year, he and percussionist Steve Peregine Took formed Tyrannosaurus Rex, an acoustic duo. They made three albums, My People Were Fair and Had Sky in Their Hair but Now They're Content to Wear Stars on Their Brows (1968), Prophets, Seers and Sages, the Angels of the Ages (1968), and Unicorn (1969), then split, with Bolan retaining the band name and teaming up with Mickey Finn on the electric Beard of Stars (1970).

By the end of 1970, with the name abbreviated to T. Rex, Bolan and Finn scored a U.K. hit with "Ride a White Swan," the first of ten straight Top Ten hits, and the album T. Rex. Adding bass player Steve Curry and drummer Bill Fifield, T. Rex expanded into a full-fledged rock & roll band, and scored a number one hit with "Hot Love" and another with "Get It On." (Under the title "Bang a Gong (Get It On)," the song became T. Rex's only substantial U.S. hit, making the Top Ten in 1972.) This was followed by the landmark album Electric Warrior (1971), which topped the U.K. charts and included the single "Jeepster." Then came "Telegram Sam," T. Rex's third U.K. number one. "Metal Guru" became T. Rex's fourth number one in May 1972. (During this period, with T.Rextasy hitting Britain, numerous reissues also charted.) The next new T. Rex album, The Slider, became a Top Ten hit in July 1972. T. Rex's seventh straight Top Ten single, "Children of the Revolution," peaked in the charts in September, followed by "Solid Gold Easy Action" in December. In March 1973 came "Twentieth Century Boy," the ninth T. Rex Top Ten single, and the Top Ten album Tanx. In June, "The Groover" became the band's tenth and final Top Ten single.

In August, Bolan tested the waters for using his own name on records, issuing the non-charting "Blackjack" single credited to Marc Bolan with Big Carrot, but then he retreated to the T. Rex rubric, though the original group was fragmenting. Bolan and T. Rex's commercial and critical fortunes declined afterwards, as they released Zinc Alloy and the Hidden Riders of Tomorrow (1974), Bolan's Zip Gun (1975), Futuristic Dragon (1976), and Dandy in the Underworld (1977). Bolan died in an automobile accident in 1977, and his work has been reissued frequently in the U.K.”.

On 30th September, fans of Marc Bolan will mark the late pioneer’s seventy-fifth birthday. It is hard to distil his essence and impact in a playlist, but below are some of his great songs, from his earliest days with Tyrannosaurus Rex to the final T. Rex work, this is the incredible music from…

THE remarkable and deeply missed Marc Bolan.

FEATURE: It’s Me, Cathy! Kate Bush and the Signing of the Deal

FEATURE:

 

 

It’s Me, Cathy!

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in a Tokyo hotel in June 1978/PHOTO CREDIT: Getty Images/Koh Hasebe

Kate Bush and the Signing of the Deal

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I am once again…

referring to the pages of Classic Pop and their recent special dedicated to Kate Bush. I have been getting a lot from it, and it has definitely influenced me and provoked new features and ideas. One that I have sort of covered before but want to return to is when Kate Bush signed her record deal. Born as Catherine and known as Cathy, I like the fact that Kate Bush seems more like a professional name. This separation from the teenager who was at home and making music and the woman who would release one of the most outstanding and original debut singles, Wuthering Heights, when she was nineteen. I am fascinated about the earliest days and planting the seeds. Bush signed with EMI in July 1976, shortly after her eighteenth birthday. In terms of getting from her home to a record label, I have covered this before, suffice to say that David Gilmour was a big reason for her signing. He paid for her to have professional recordings in 1975 of The Man with the Child in His Eyes, The Saxophone Song and Humming (the first two appeared on her debut album, The Kick Inside), and he acted as Executive Producer. Bush had about fifty songs (culled from hundreds), and Gilmour selected three to record. Bush could have excelled academically and gone into another field. Her father Robert was a doctor she could have followed suit. Maybe into psychology or something adjacent. There were options.

 IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in Japan in 1978 (she performed live there, made a commercial for Seiko and released two singles, Moving and Them Heavy People)

Instead, with the £3,000 advance given to her by EMI (together with £500 with EMI Publishing), and a small inheritance from her aunt, Bush had the money so she could work on her music and develop her career. Amazing to think that, leaving school before her A-Levels, she then moved to a property in Lewisham with her brothers John and Paddy. They all lived in the same property and had their own flats! I get comedic images of them each on a floor and hanging out in the evenings. Quite a cute and idyllic view! It would have been helpful and of great comfort that Bush, the youngest sibling, had her brothers around for support. Both were musical (especially Paddy, who played on her debut albums and throughout her career), and they had her back. That support was invaluable at a time when she was relatively unknown and there was no guarantee when her debut would be recorded and what would happen. Bush took up dance lessons with Arlene Phillips and Robin Kovac (who choreographed the routine for Wuthering Heights (the white dress version), and mine with Lindsay Kemp and Adam Darius. Useful tools that would feed into her music, live performances and even her songwriting. It was a busy time before she went into the studio in 1977 to resume recording of The Kick Inside. It is that signing of the deal and the soft approach of EMI that is encouraging.

Most record labels would have signed Bush and then, as they had paid an advance or she was paid, they’d expect an album within months. This is sort of what happened after Bush released her debut album. She was given months to follow it up. Though Lionheart is excellent, the fact it was released in 1978 meant she was so busy promoting her debut that she did not have sufficient space and creative impetus and freedom to write an album that satisfied her. As it was, she only wrote three new songs for Lionheart. Anyway, EMI saw Bush as a long-term artist so, when she signed the deal, she was free to write and to work at her own rate. Little did they know that Bush would become an artist who took quite a while to complete albums! Whilst some see that as procrastinating and a negative, it actually means that she can make the albums sound as she wants them. Bush has expressed some unhappiness with The Kick Inside, in the sense she did not get as much say as she would have liked and was more of a bystander rather than the architect. I think the album would have sounded poor if it was rushed and EMI raced her into the studio. EMI knew that, if they were trying to sell a fifteen or sixteen-year-old, then it would be quite a hard pitch! They knew she was a promising and growing talent who they could market easier a while down the line. Although Bush was still nineteen when her debut album came out, she had matured and was at an age where she could handle the demands.

It is interesting reading Classic Pop, as David Gilmour had a different version of events. Rather than EMI claiming they wanted Bush to mature and have space before they called her into the studio, it seems like there was delay and dispute about which producer should helm the album. Gilmour contacted Andrew Powell before Bush headed to record in June 1975. Gilmour handed a tape to Powell and control of the project. With Geoff Emerick engineering, Powell was naturally the right producer as early as 1975. With EMI perhaps feeling he was wrong or not the right fit, perhaps The Kick Inside could have come to fruition earlier than it did. I am not sure what course of events would have taken place had a different producer been selected! Gilmour insists that EMI felt that Bush didn’t have enough good songs and the ones they had been given were a fluke. Feeling Powell was a dud, this quest to find various producers circled back around to Gilmour’s insistence that Powell was the right choice. I don’t think Bush had too much say or was caught in the dispute, but it must have been a little unsettling for her. It is true that EMI had a lot of faith in her but, as a unique voice and special talent, there were no comparisons out there. No protocol when it came to how to proceed and what to do with her!

Bush was an accomplished pianist and singer, but she was still developing and has no live performance experience. Her brother Paddy graduated from a musical instrument technology course, and he wanted to put on a performance at a gallery in Whitechapel. A band was put together – not dissimilar to the KT Bush Band that would tour pubs and clubs around London and beyond before Bush recorded The Kick Inside -, that featured Barry Sherlock, Vic King and the two Bushes. Kate Bush did not sing then. Instead, she danced in a woolly, tight-knit outfit and mimed this sort of trumpet thing. It has been compared with the Blue Meanies from The Beatles’ Yellow Submarine film. I think that transformation from Cathy to Kate Bush happened when the KT Bush Band did their demo on 5th April, 1977. That line-up comprised Vic King, Del Palmer (who Bush was in a relationship with until the ‘90s) and the Bush siblings (Paddy and Kate). Bush would record The Kick Inside in July and August 1977, where the full transformation from the aspiring artist who lived at the family home at East Wickham Farm in Welling, to the teen who moved to London and made her first steps into an industry that, before long, were fascinated by this once-in-a-generation talent. Those early months really compel me. Learning more about Bush signing with EMI and, interestingly, the struggle between EMI and David Gilmour when it came to securing and accepting Andrew Powell as the producer (he would also produce Lionheart but would not continue from Never for Ever, her third album, onward). Planting those seeds and laying the groundwork is such an important time. It is really interesting learning how Bush was discovered and EMI’s approach to her. I wonder if anyone at the label or watched the KT Bush Band in 1977 were quite aware of…

WHAT Kate Bush would unveil to the world!

FEATURE: (I Love You) Just the Way You Are: Billy Joel's The Stranger at Forty-Five

FEATURE:

 

 

(I Love You) Just the Way You Are

 Billy Joel's The Stranger at Forty-Five

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I have been doing a lot of features…

 PHOTO CREDIT: Michael Putland/Getty Images

that mark legendary albums celebrating big anniversaries. One that almost passed me by is Billy Joel’s sensational fifth studio album, The Stranger. It was a commercial and critical breakthrough for him. Maybe the fact was because it was the first of Joel's albums to be produced by Phil Ramone (with whom he would work for five subsequent albums). Joel’s previous album, 1976’s Turnstiles, sold poorly and was not overly-loved. It is a great album, but the sense of resurrection and revelation on The Stranger is amazing! Consider the fact this album came a year after his previous one makes the quality on it that much more remarkable. It is Joel’s band that help to define and make The Stranger. The band consisted of drummer Liberty DeVitto, bassist Doug Stegmeyer, and multi-instrumentalist saxophonist/organist Richie Cannata. Spending six weeks at number two on the US Billboard 200, The Stranger is a masterpiece. You can see a track-by-track guide of the album. Featuring some of Joel’s defining songs – including Just the Way You Are, She’s Only a Woman and Scenes from an Italian Restaurant -, there will be a lot of new love around The Stranger ahead of its anniversary on 29th September. I wanted to pull in first Pitchfork’s review of The Stranger. They provide us with some useful background:

“The Stranger is the reason we know who Billy Joel is. Before the album, his fourth for Columbia and fifth as a solo artist, Joel had two Top 40 songs: “Piano Man,” about a guy (Joel) who got stuck playing bar tunes to a bunch of drunks, and “The Entertainer,” about a guy (Joel) who got stuck playing music for a fickle audience and whose label cut that other song in half just to fit on the radio. Joel was raised in Hicksville, Long Island, classically trained on the piano, and giddily admired the real rock’n’roll of the 1950s. He was something of an anomaly on the label of Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen, not an impassioned poet, prophet, or star, just a guy with a choir boy’s tenor who loved melody and technique and when songs sounded good. He wasn’t his label’s priority and he wasn’t much of a name, but then he went ahead and made an album filled with classics.

Joel says he didn’t make The Stranger like it was his last shot at success, but it’s hard to see it any other way. Famously, Joel likes to say that he didn’t want to put the biggest song on the album. “That’s one of the greatest songs I’ve ever heard,” Linda Ronstadt apparently told Joel after hearing “Just the Way You Are” in the studio. A lot of people have since agreed with her, including those at the Recording Academy, which gave Joel the Grammys for Record and Song of the Year.

The success of The Stranger did a lot to erase, or at least ameliorate, Billy Joel’s reputation as an aggrieved musician who made a point of despising the dog and pony show of music promotion. He cut his teeth as a young musician, playing on three albums before his 1971 solo debut: The Hassles and Hour of the Wolf, with his bar band the Hassles, and the proto-metal Attila, with his buddy and fellow former Hassle Jon Small. The albums weren’t notable enough even to call them failures. His debut, however, was a failure and objectively fucked up. For some reason, Artie Ripp, who produced the album and signed Joel despite his commercial track record, simply didn’t notice or care that the mixing machine was set incorrectly, leaving Joel’s vocals on Cold Spring Harbor pitched up “like Alvin and the Chipmunks.” Joel smashed his test pressing, and still claims to hate the album.

After Cold Spring Harbor, Joel drove across the country to Los Angeles with his girlfriend Elizabeth Weber and her 5-year-old son Sean. (The hiccup was that Weber was married to Jon Small, who figured his wife and son were kidnapped and went West to locate them and bring them back to Long Island. Weber later married and managed Joel.) In Los Angeles, Joel struck a deal with Columbia and made two albums, Piano Man and Streetlife Serenade. While the former had its champions, not many people liked Streetlife Serenade. Stephen Holden, who eventually wrote glowingly about Joel for The New York Times, opened his Rolling Stone review, “Billy Joel’s pop schmaltz occupies a stylistic no man’s land where musical and lyric truisms borrowed from disparate sources are forced together.” Joel returned to New York in 1975 and made Turnstiles, which Village Voice critic Robert Christgau called “more obnoxious.”

The secrets to The Stranger’s success, however, are scattered across Joel’s first four albums, unfortunately buttressed by a lot of unremarkable songs that lack their own punch. Take “James,” from Turnstiles, inspired by Joel’s high school friend and bandmate Jim Bosse. Joel lightly excoriates James for pausing his artistic ambitions to go to college and “living up to expectations.” The melody is not particularly gripping and the chiding doesn’t feel particularly deserved. Now turn to The Stranger, which opens thrillingly with another mild diatribe against middle class professional ambition, “Movin’ Out (Anthony’s Song).” As soon as the needle drops, Joel is smashing on his piano and the bass is kicking up the groove, playing with gusto and rhythm.

Also from Turnstiles is “Summer, Highland Falls,” my favorite pre-Stranger Joel song. His piano chords are enchanting, and he coins his greatest phrase from a non-hit: “It’s either sadness or euphoria.” As charming as “Summer, Highland Falls” is, it’s also absurdly wordy: “How thoughtlessly we dissipate our energies/Perhaps we don’t fulfill each other’s fantasies.” Again, fast forward to 1977 and “Only the Good Die Young,” Joel’s cleverest Stranger song lyrically: “You didn’t count on me/When you were counting on your rosary,” and, “You say your mother told you all that I could give you was a reputation.” It’s a hoot.

Joel made The Stranger with his road band, largely the same group who played on Turnstiles. The big difference was that Joel produced Turnstiles himself but brought in the well-regarded Phil Ramone for The Stranger, with whom he struck a long-term relationship. Joel claims that he chose to work with Ramone—known for work with Paul Simon and Phoebe Snow and co-producing Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson’s A Star Is Born—instead of the legendary Beatles producer George Martin because Martin wanted the pianist to record his album with session musicians, which Joel attempted to poor results on Streetlife.

Ramone liked Joel’s band—most importantly comprised of bassist Doug Stegmeyer, drummer Liberty DeVitto, and multi-instrumentalist Richie Cannata—and wanted to bring their live energy to life in the studio, where things had rarely clicked for Joel. One of the most frequent criticisms in his early career was his inability to translate the magnetic personality of his live performances onto his records. An early 1977 concert preview from the Los Angeles Times read: “A common question about the 27-year-old New Yorker is why such a scintillating performer hasn’t become a star.” Later, as if to prove the point, Joel gathered his unheralded songs on the 1981 live compilation Songs in the Attic where the early material absolutely soars and the crowds erupt.

With Ramone behind the boards and the band intact, Joel made an album with a verve and attitude he’d never achieved, sounding like an actual rock star, one who’s sardonic but hopeful. Almost every song on The Stranger has one accusatory line or another, a facet of his lyricism that Joel is quick to attribute to the general unhappiness of a person whose father, a Jewish refugee of Nazi Germany, purportedly told him as a little boy, “Life is a cesspool.” I’d be naïve, however, to try to argue that Joel made depressing songs, no matter how depressed he was while he was making them. Joel is a straightforward, often simplistic lyricist, and he composed primarily in the major key. And it’s that tension, the meeting of bombast and the mundane, that makes The Stranger the greatest success in his catalog.

The juxtaposition bursts open on The Stranger’s centerpiece “Scenes From an Italian Restaurant.” Across seven and a half minutes, Joel tells the superbly ordinary tale of Brenda and Eddie, high school sweethearts turned divorcées reuniting for dinner. The music tells another story, as Joel and his piano are accompanied by a carnivalesque swirl of accordion, saxophone, tuba, and the works, and it’s all for lines of unadulterated chitchat, such as, “Things are OK with me these days/Got a good job, got a good office/Got a new wife, got a new life/And the family is fine.” The music, understandably, is most jubilant when it soundtracks Brenda and Eddie’s good ol’ days, but those yesteryears aren’t exactly exceptional: “Nobody looked any finer/Or was more of a hit at the Parkway Diner”.

I will finish off with a couple of positive reviews for a classic. AllMusic highlight how there appears to be a thematic thread or concept running through The Stranger, although I don’t think that is what Billy Joel intended:

“Billy Joel teamed with Phil Ramone, a famed engineer who had just scored his first producing hits with Art Garfunkel's Breakaway and Paul Simon's Still Crazy After All These Years for The Stranger, his follow-up to Turnstiles. Joel still favored big, sweeping melodies, but Ramone convinced him to streamline his arrangements and clean up the production. The results aren't necessarily revelatory, since he covered so much ground on Turnstiles, but the commercialism of The Stranger is a bit of a surprise. None of his ballads have been as sweet or slick as "Just the Way You Are"; he never had created a rocker as bouncy or infectious as "Only the Good Die Young"; and the glossy production of "She's Always a Woman" disguises its latent misogynist streak. Joel balanced such radio-ready material with a series of New York vignettes, seemingly inspired by Springsteen's working-class fables and clearly intended to be the artistic centerpieces of the album. They do provide The Stranger with the feel of a concept album, yet there is no true thematic connection between the pieces, and his lyrics are often vague or mean-spirited. His lyrical shortcomings are overshadowed by his musical strengths. Even if his melodies sound more Broadway than Beatles -- the epic suite "Scenes From an Italian Restaurant" feels like a show-stopping closer -- there's no denying that the melodies of each song on The Stranger are memorable, so much so that they strengthen the weaker portions of the album. Joel rarely wrote a set of songs better than those on The Stranger, nor did he often deliver an album as consistently listenable”.

Before ending this feature, I want to highlight SLANT’s excellent review of a masterpiece from 1977. Joel would follow The Stranger a year later with the brilliant 52nd Street. This was the start of a new and successful phase for him:

“Billy Joel’s seminal 1977 release The Stranger is a concept album of sorts, an ode to the singer’s native New York underscored by his paranoid obsession (and resistance) to change. The album begins with “Movin’ Out (Anthony’s Song),” which decries the popular ‘70s notion that moving out to the suburbs and starting a family is the means to a better life—“Who needs a house out in Hackensack?” he asks, “Is that all you get for your money?” While Joel’s music has always been patently “American,” The Stranger is, in many ways, a rejection of the American Dream. (It’s a proud

Billy Joel’s seminal 1977 release The Stranger is a concept album of sorts, an ode to the singer’s native New York underscored by his paranoid obsession (and resistance) to change. The album begins with “Movin’ Out (Anthony’s Song),” which decries the popular ‘70s notion that moving out to the suburbs and starting a family is the means to a better life—“Who needs a house out in Hackensack?” he asks, “Is that all you get for your money?” While Joel’s music has always been patently “American,” The Stranger is, in many ways, a rejection of the American Dream. (It’s a proud New York record without the obviousness of “New York State Of Mind,” and it’s purely American without using slogans like “born in the U.S.A.”)

Joel’s struggle to keep things constant is apparent on “Just The Way You Are,” an uncharacteristically gooey ballad (for this early in his career) that, like most of his songs, displays an underlying sadness: When he says “I just want someone that I can talk to,” you get the impression that the “you” he’s singing to could be any woman at all. Joel’s pessimism peeks in atop the bouncy piano of the Broadway-style “Scenes From An Italian Restaurant” (his “A Day In The Life,” if you will, albeit from the perspective of a bitter New Yorker); it’s the tale of Brenda and Eddie, the prom king and queen who moved out the suburbs to start a new life together but, as Joel poignantly narrates, “just didn’t count on the tears.” Other songs are downright cynical (“Only The Good Die Young,” which explains a girl’s Catholic blues by way of the greaser down the block), while others are thinly veiled in optimism (“She is frequently kind/And she’s suddenly cruel,” Joel sings along to the classic, delicate melody of “She’s Always A Woman”). The Stranger might not carry the weight of Albert Camus’ famous novel of the same name, but its title track certainly finds the singer in an existential crisis, unable to completely expose his true self to his lover or himself: “Well, we all have a face/That we hide away forever/And we take them out and show ourselves/When everyone has gone.” As proof of this seemingly eternal loneliness, most recently displayed by a public announcement that he was actively searching for a new wife (the hunt ended when he met Kate Lee, now 23, in 2003), the album’s cover finds Joel alone on a bed looking down at his mask on the pillow beside him”.

On 29th September, I hope that Billy Joel himself thinks about The Stranger and recalls how it was received and what it was like making the album. Arguably his greatest ever album, you can play it today and it still holds so much power and genius. Since its release, The Stranger has featured in lists of the best albums ever. Few could argue against the assertion that The Stranger is…

AMONG the best albums ever.

FEATURE: Revisiting... Bebe Rexha - Expectations

FEATURE:

 

Revisiting...

  Bebe Rexha - Expectations

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I think that…

Better Mistakes was one of the more underrated albums from last year. The work of the New York-born artist Bebe Rexha, I do feel that this album warrants another spin. This feature re-examines and spotlights great albums from the past five years. Rexha’s solid 2018 debut, Expectations, is an album that did not get hugely positive reviews across the board, though there were a few positive reviews. I think that it deserved a lot better, as it is a really strong album. Many praised the album’s production and Rexha's vocal performance. Some highlighted the lyrics as being a little weak, generic or impersonal. Expectations debuted at number thirteen on the US Billboard 200 chart. On 23rd October, 2020 the album was certified platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) for combined sales and album-equivalent units of over a million units in the United States. I think that it is a bit strange that only three singles were released from Expectations. Many great or established Pop artists may put out four or five singles from an album. I Got You came out in 2016, Meant to Be in 2017, and I’m a Mess in 2018. That one single a year thing seems unusual! It would have been great to have one or two more singles released in 2018. That said, Rexha only put out four single from Better Mistakes. Regardless, I want to come to a couple of positive reviews for Expectations.

I am going to start off with an interview from NME. They chatted with her in 2018 around the release of her anticipated and brilliant debut album. In interviews, Bebe Rexha comes across as very personable and interesting. Definitely an artist who will go on to big things:

“‘Expectations’ is quite a loaded title. What does it mean?

“Oh man! I just think life is very unexpected. You expect to fall in love this way, to be successful this way… this is how you plan your life to go – you’ll get married and have kids and this and that – but life is always kinda like: ‘Na ah ah, I’m going to do it the way I want to!’ It’s good to keep your expectations kinda low so that you never know what to expect, and just go with the flow.”

It follows two quite different EPs – what can we expect from the album?

“Everything that’s ever inspired me and that I’ve put out – I think it will all make sense. The first song I put out on Spotify or on any streaming services was ‘I’m Going to Show you Crazy’ – it was like this pop/rock song and I was touring it on Warped Tour. It was all these rock, emo and screamo kids, and this was a pop/rock record based on mental health care, really raw and in-your-face. Later, I slowly went into dance records, and then did the G-Eazy song. So I’m taking all of my favourite things and combining it so that people understand how that all came from me.

Quite an eclectic album, then?

“It feels cool, it’s eclectic. I take ’90s guitar sounds that I love – I was inspired by No Doubt – and then I love hip hop music, but obviously I’m not a rapper. So I thought: ‘How can I combine that with urban and rhythmic?’ So I took rhythmic drum patterns and 808s and put them underneath a cool guitar, and just write super-real songs on them.”

You recently held a dinner for women in the music industry, right?

“It was called ‘Women in Harmony’. I don’t know, I just feel like nobody ever does anything for girls in LA, especially in the music business. It was basically just a dinner to celebrate women in music who can write songs and sing. So many people showed up, it was cool – like Avril Lavigne and Ester Dean and Charli XCX and all these massive songwriters. It was really cool.”

Did anything big go down?

“I did do a speech, but I don’t know what I said, I didn’t practice it. I was like: ‘We’re all bad bitches’. I was in the moment. It was cool – I was really nervous though, I wanted everyone to be happy. Have you ever hosted a dinner or something? I wanted to make sure everybody got food. At one point it got so packed because I didn’t expect so many people to show up. I had no more room at the table, I had to pull chairs out and give up my seat.”

You’ve written songs for big names like Rihanna and Nick Jonas. What’s it like giving songs to other people as opposed to releasing them yourself?

“A lot less stressful. You write the song, but it’s not going out under your name. When you put something out under your name, it takes a lot of time and work to really promote it. But if the song fits for either me or another artist, it’s fulfilling in both ways. It really is”.

With some great hooks and a tracklisting that means there is balance in terms of quality and sound, Expectations is an album that should have got more props and love back in 2018. There were those who provided praise and positivity towards Bebe Rexha’s debut. In their review, this is what NME observed:

“According to the second sentence of her Wikipedia page, Bebe Rexha is “best known for her collaborations with other artists”. This observation may sound like a Drag Race-style sass, but it’s hardly misleading: Rexha’s biggest hits have been team-ups with EDM star David Guetta (‘Hey Mama’), rapper G-Eazy (‘Me, Myself & I’) and country duo Florida Georgia Line (‘Meant To Be’). But while she’s also jumped on less glittering singles like Louis Tomlinson’s boring electro bop ‘Back To You’, Rexha is no ropey rent-a-vocalist. If this hard-working New Yorker adds vocals to a banger, chances are she’s written it too, and her distinctive songwriting style shines through this debut album.

To put it mildly, Rexha’s lyrics are a bit bleaker than those you get from Jess Glynne. “Nobody shows up unless I’m paying – have a drink on me, cheers to the failing,” she sings on ‘I’m A Mess’, which re-imagines the chorus from Meredith Brooks’ ‘Bitch’ as: “I’m a mess, I’m a loser, I’m a hater, I’m a user.” The just-a-tad melodramatic ‘Ferrari’ sees Rexha compare herself to a “Ferrari pulled off on Mulholland Drive” because “living in the fast lane’s getting kind of lonely”. On ‘Sad’, she simply shrugs, “Maybe I’m just comfortable being sad.” If this makes Rexha sound kind of emo, that’s because she is kind of emo: before going solo, she was a member of Pete Wentz’s short-lived side-project Black Cards.

Though Rexha works with a range of producers here, ‘Expectations’ is generally pretty cohesive, with many tracks built around tropical or trap-influenced beats and guitar lines inspired by No Doubt. Recruiting Migos’ Quavo to rap about private jets on ‘2 Souls On Fire’ feels incongruous, and her cute country hit ‘Meant To Be’ ends the album with a loved-up smile rather than its typically gutsy grimace. But these slight aberrations are outweighed by catchy but anguished pop songs like ‘Steady’, about a toxic relationship, and ‘Shining Star’, on which she rhymes “fucked up ways” with “drunken gaze”.

‘Expectations’ isn’t flawless, but it’s a compelling re-introduction to an underrated artist – one capable of putting her own stamp on current pop sounds. On this evidence, Rexha’s Wikipedia page will soon be due an update”.

I am going to round off with a good review from Rolling Stone. One of the best upcoming Pop artists of the time, I think that Expectations fulfills its promise and delivers results. Rexha does stand out as having an original and personal voice, in spite of some heavy reliance on Auto-Tune in places. I am glad that Expectations was a commercial success from a very underrated artist:

“BEBE REXHA’S VOICE makes a quirky, squirmy sound that may not be your cup of squeak. But if it is, then it’s crazily irresistible and, given the right melody, unstoppable. Her serpentine wail is the precious ingredient in some of today’s biggest hits, the factor that’s turned otherwise bland songs like Louis Tomlinson’s “Back to You” and Florida Georgia Line’s “Meant to Be” into body-rocking and chart-topping gold.

But after years hustling in the shadows of other people like Nicki Minaj, Lil Wayne, David Guetta, G-Eazy and more (she also wrote Eminem and Rihanna’s 2013 hit “Monster”), the 28-year-old singer’s first album has next to no guests. She is pop’s Giving Tree no more. And, judging by the lyrics, Rexha has been feeling rather raked over. “Maybe I’m just comfortable being sad,” she sings with a dark quaver on “Sad.” As the song and its title suggest, Expectations is full of sexy songs and a cornucopia of self-esteem issues.

“I’m A Mess” updates Meredith Brooks’ 1997 classic “Bitch”: “I’m a mess, I’m a loser/ I’m a hater, I’m a user/ I’m a mess for your love it ain’t you/ I’m obsessed, I’m embarrassed.” “Don’t Get Any Closer” also goes hard on the Nineties diva fandom, nailing the Gwen Stefani power squeal when she threatens to share “all the things I’ve been hiding” over the crackle of a record player she’s tooling with in her attic of secrets. On the other side of the spectrum, there’s the lusty romp “Self Control,” which is more like Hey Baby-era No Doubt, with its dancehall vibes and lyrics about giving into an obsession: “And I don’t mean cigarettes and alcohol,” Rexha sings.

On Expectations, Rexha paints herself as a heroine trapped in an ivory tower of her own making. But her cat-scratching upper register suggests sensitivity more than vengeance. She turns an Ed Sheeran-esque ballad like “Knees” into a firecracker of desperation, singing “I’m praying for closed doors and open windows … Don’t be scared to leave.” She does even better on “Ferrari” by enunciating the hell out of “Mulholland Drive” as she slams on the accelerator because “living in the fast lane’s getting kind of lone-lay.” As Brittney Spears, the ultimate Nineties queen, said on her own debut 20 years ago, Rexha’s lone-lay-ness is killing her”.

Released back on 22nd June, 2018, Bebe Rexha’s Expectations is an album you should all check out. Recently scoring chart success in Australia with David Guetta on I’m Good (Blue), here is an artist who I hope we hear a lot more from. A terrific talent who should be better known and played, go and check out 2018’s Expectations. Never as adored and praised as it should have been upon its release, I feel that it should get a whole new audience…

FOUR years later.

FEATURE: Kate Bush Blows Away the Blues: The Fun and Incredible Atmosphere of Recording Never for Ever

FEATURE:

 

 

Kate Bush Blows Away the Blues

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in London on 15th June, 1980/PHOTO CREDIT: Hulton Archive via Getty Images 

The Fun and Incredible Atmosphere of Recording Never for Ever

__________

I didn’t bring this up…

when I wrote a series of features around the anniversary of Kate Bush’s third studio album, Never for Ever. Released on 8th September, 1980, there had been a lot of change and progression in her songwriting and production. In fact, Never for Ever was the first time Bush has taken the production reins. Producing alongside Jon Kelly – who was an engineer on The Kick Inside and Lionheart -, these two young and ambitious minds seemed to have a ball! I can only imagine how hectic Bush’s 1978 and 1979 were. 1978 consisted of her recording two albums, promoting around the world and barely getting a moment to enjoy her career. The Tour of Life in 1979 was a chance for Bush to tour the albums but do so more on her own terms. She had to put up a lot of her own money to stage and realise her visions. She lost quite a bit of money, yet the tour was a big success. Draining as that was, Bush was already working on Never for Ever by September 1979. A year before it came into the world, she was concocting new sounds and pushing her work to the next level. I will come to something I recently read in Classic Pop’s special about Kate Bush. They talked about Never for Ever and what the recording atmosphere was like.

Before coming to that, I want to bring in some quotes from Kate Bush, where she discussed the album. These were taken from the Kate Bush Club newsletter of September 1980. It is clear that, as a producer, she wants to distinguish her songs and give them all their own character and shape. Perhaps she felt her first two albums were homogenous or lacked any distinction and development:

“Now, after all this waiting it is here. It's strange when I think back to the first album. I thought it would never feel as new or as special again. This one has proved me wrong. It's been the most exciting. Its name is Never For Ever, and I've called it this because I've tried to make it reflective of all that happens to you and me. Life, love, hate, we are all transient. All things pass, neither good [n]or evil lasts. So we must tell our hearts that it is "never for ever", and be happy that it's like that!

The album cover has been beautifully created by Nick Price (you may remember that he designed the front of the Tour programme). On the cover of Never For Ever Nick takes us on an intricate journey of our emotions: inside gets outside, as we flood people and things with our desires and problems. These black and white thoughts, these bats and doves, freeze-framed in flight, swoop into the album and out of your hi-fis. Then it's for you to bring them to life. (Kate Bush Club newsletter, September 1980).

Each song has a very different personality, and so much of the production was allowing the songs to speak with their own voices - not for them to be used purely as objects to decorate with "buttons and bows". Choosing sounds is so like trying to be psychic, seeing into the future, looking in the "crystal ball of arrangements", "scattering a little bit of stardust", to quote the immortal words of the Troggs. Every time a musical vision comes true, it's like having my feet tickled. When it works, it helps me to feel a bit braver. Of course, it doesn't always work, but experiments and ideas in a studio are never wasted; they will always find a place sometime.

I never really felt like a producer, I just felt closer to my loves - felt good, free, although a little raw, and sometimes paranoia would pop up. But when working with emotion, which is what music is, really, it can be so unpredictable - the human element, that fire. But all my friends, the Jons, and now you will make all the pieces of the Never For Ever jigsaw slot together, and It will be born and It will begin Breathing. (Kate Bush Club newsletter, September 1980)”.

Paul Lester wrote in Classic Pop about Never for Ever. Whilst I knew about the songs and a lot of the finer details, I was not aware of the atmosphere and sense of fun that was being created in the studio. I think one of the reasons why the album took as long as it did was that there was a lot of joy among the hard work! Recording would often run into the small hours. Whilst Bush was quite exacting as times as a producer, she was also a real joy to be around. Recording moved into Abbey Road’s famous Studio 2. A space that The Beatles made famous, Bush had a notepad, where she dedicated a page to each of the tracks. On the page, she would write out requirements for instruments, effects, and harmonies. She definitely took to producing, but it is also something that she was very serious about. Quite methodical, diligent and focused, there was also a great amount of fun. If there has been too serious and work-focused vibes from Bush, you would have heard that sense of strain and lack of joy in the music. As it is, one can hear a sense of something special in the notes. The musicians, trusting Bush and given this fantastic environment, almost sound happy playing. That may seem weird, but you can feel a positive energy.

 IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush at the British Rock and Pop Awards, February 1980/PHOTO CREDIT: Mirrorpix

Never for Ever was completed with tender and caring hearts. Bush, somewhat modestly and self-deprecating, was a little dismissive of her own strength and value. “I am only little, a female, and an unlikely producer!”, she said. Appreciative of the musicians for their dedication, understanding and patience, Bush said how they all stood patience as she “squirmed and contorted” her way through explanations of the visuals and audio aspects. Jon Kelly had fond memories of the time recording. Although it would have been expensive to record at places like Abbey Road, Never for Ever was made a real home record. Decking the studio with flowers, plants and friends. Making that spaces warm, welcoming and homely, it is said that Bush’s tipples of choice were chocolate, cigarettes with a little bit of Courvoisier! Quite an interesting mix, one can almost smell and sense the vibe and aroma of the studio! I can picture Bush, after recording a track, sitting with her musicians smoking a cigarette, chocolate nearby, surrounded by some flowers and a jolly atmosphere. Although Never for Ever is a serious album, there is a sense of fun and frivolity in it. To get the glass sound effect we hear on the opening track, Babooshka, glasses were smashed on the stairs and fed into the Fairlight CMI – a groundbreaking technology that opened up so much for Kate Bush and her music. You can hear Never for Ever and feel and sense the respect and affection between the musicians and Kate Bush. Someone who always created a great environment to record in, I did not know about some of the little moments and details about Never for Ever.

I wanted to briefly revisit Never for Ever because of the fun that was evident during the recording. As a body of work, it ranks alongside Bush’s best. Going to number one in the U.K., Bush was the first female solo artist to enter the chart at number one with a studio album. It was also Bush’s first number one album. It went to show that, to an extent, if she struck the right balance between fun and focus and that was heard in the songs, the public would detect that. Also, by 1980, Bush was growing in terms of popularity and awareness. Bush was excited to produce. She said how “the freedom you feel when you’re in control of your music is fantastic”. She also observed that “as soon as you get your hands on the production, it becomes your baby”. Bush noted that you would do anything for your child and so she was incredibly committed to doing everything to ensure Never for Ever was not only as good as it could be. She took care of her musicians, and, in turn, they gave her a lot of respect, extra time and input. I thought I knew almost everything about Never for Ever, but Classic Pop’s new spread and deep dive into Kate Bush’s work taught me new things! It makes me appreciate the album even more and Bush’s work and methods as a producer. Alongside Jon Kelly, they shared laughs, cigarettes, long hours and good times. In a studio of flowers and home comforts, the magical and marvellous Never for Ever was created! An album that must have been a blast to be involved in, I think thew happy experience of producing inspired the musicians around her. It is most definitely…

SO rewarding and delightful to learn.

FEATURE: Give It Up, Do As I Say! Madonna's Erotica at Thirty: Going Deep with Its Iconic Title Track

FEATURE:

 

 

Give It Up, Do As I Say!

 Madonna's Erotica at Thirty: Going Deep with Its Iconic Title Track

__________

I discussed the title track…

back in March as part of a series where I highlighted iconic music videos. This is a feature that I need to get back to! Anyway, as Madonna’s Erotica is thirty on 20th October, this feature about it concerns its amazing title track. Released as the album’s first single on 29th September, 1992, I can see why she wanted to lead with it. Erotica is a title track that defines the album in my view. Announcing this new-look and sounding Madonna, it was the introduction to her alter ego, Mistress Dita, and it was also one of the most sensual and controversial tracks. Wanting to announce this new album with one of her defining cuts, the singles from Erotica started off quite raw and sexual – Deeper and Deeper and Bad Girl -, whilst Rain announced something more sensitive. Reaching number three in the U.K. and U.S. upon its release, Erotica is considered to be one of Madonna’s best singles. I am going to come to a Wikipedia article, where they list the reaction to the song. Having had so many remixes through the years, this is a track that has endured and evolved in various forms. I think, when the video premiered in 1992, there was this more negative reaction. Many felt Madonna was repeating herself and that the sexualisation of her image and music was old hat. Perhaps feeling she was trying to be provocative and shocking rather than artistic or credible, the Sex book (which came out the same day as Erotica) and Erotica album definitely cemented the fact that this was a bold and liberating phase for Madonna.

It is a shame that she experienced a lot of blowback and criticism in 1992. Having triumphed and released this acclaimed album with Like a Prayer in 1989, 1990 saw the release of Vogue, in addition to the greatest hits album, The Immaculate Collection. In the lead-up to Erotica, Madonna was definitely an artist going from strength to strength! Not that Erotica took her down, but it was definitely a more difficult period when it came to winning over critics. The title track, now, is seen as stunning and one of Madonna’s best releases. It is interesting thinking about Erotica and the first taste of the album of the same name. In a feature from Billboard in 2017, they spoke with Here’s what producer-writer Andre Betts, backup singer Donna De Lory, producer-writer Shep Pettibone, co-writer Tony Shimkin and Living Colour bassist Doug Wimbish recall of the writing and recording of Erotica. One part of the interview was about the release of Erotica. Similar in tone and sound to Justify My Love (released as a single in 1990 around the release of The Immaculate Collection), the second single. Deeper and Deeper, took her back to House and Disco roots:

“The first single and title track, “Erotica,” set the tone for her album and the Sex book (a Middle Eastern-flavored version entitled “Erotic” was included on a CD with copies of Sex). But unlike many of the other tracks on Erotica, “Erotica” underwent numerous radical changes during the album sessions.

Shep Pettibone: “Erotica” was four different songs throughout the process. She loved the groove. She would sing it one way, background vocals harmonies and all, then decide to erase everything and start over again. Every version was very good. Shame she made me erase stuff.

Shimkin: The original version of “Erotica” wasn’t as slinky and sexy and grimy and dirty sounding until we were in the mixing process of the record, [which was] more toward the final stages. It was experimentation. When we realized it was going to be the first single and started working on the remix, it took on a different, darker vibe. That’s when the character emerged, this Dita, when she ad-libbed the speaking parts. Then the character became something that took over.

Pettibone: At one point this was a finely tuned album. She scrapped that and wanted it dirty, murky and not polished.

De Lory: She was more grown up; she was more mature. She had her statements to make and you were there supporting her.

IN THIS PHOTO: Madonna in 1992/PHOTO CREDIT: Steven Meisel 

If “Erotica” was a bold sonic departure for Madonna, the second single, “Deeper and Deeper,” found her in more familiar disco and house territory – it even featured a lyrical shout-out to her No. 1 hit “Vogue,” which  “Deeper and Deeper” producers Pettibone and Shimkin also worked on.

Shimkin: The music [for “Deeper and Deeper”] was fairly complete when we handed it to her, with the exception of the middle break bridge section, which took on this Spanish flamenco feel. It had the disco-y feel, the chorus and the melody was all intact, but when we were in the studio transferring the demo elements and adding new elements and getting ready for the mix, I was sitting on the couch in the control room with a guitar and started futzing around with the guitar line in the flamenco guitar section. And she was like, “Yeah, let’s do that.” Then Shep came up with the idea, “If we’re going to go for it, let’s go for it – let’s add castanets and really take it there.” It was an odd thing — it’s not what you normally think of doing in a disco song or club song. But it was a creative process and a lot of fun. [Ed. note: Originally, “Deeper and Deeper” was Shimkin’s only credited co-write on the album; he’s since been officially credited as co-writer on six other tracks.]

De Lory: All the records with her, you’d show up at the session and you just couldn’t wait to hear what she was doing now. By then I’d gotten to know the fans really well, and I thought “the fans are going to love this,” especially when we did “Deeper and Deeper.” Niki and I loved those songs because we wanted to belt it out. We had so much fun. I remember the brilliance of her vocal arrangements, how she’d wait ’til the end to bring something new in, and you don’t want it to fade out, but it is fading.

Shimkin: We were in the process of adding background vocals [to “Deeper and Deeper”]. Most of the vocals came from a Shure SM57 and a quarter inch tape from the demo session, but we did recut some of the vocals. And Shep, while recording, was singing the “Vogue” line over “Deeper and Deeper.” She heard it and emulated it, and it just made it. It’s happenstance when the melody and key of an original song meld with another one. I think Shep may have suggested [keeping the “Vogue” reference] as a joke and she did it, and we decided to keep it.

Pettibone: Yes [that’s what happened]”.

You can actually get a special picture disc vinyl or Erotica to celebrate the thirtieth anniversary. I will finish off in a little bit. I can imagine what it was like seeing the video for Erotica and hearing this song for the first time in 1992. Many Pop artists since have taken Erotica to heart and helped to reshape Pop. The title track and album definitely gave confidence to a lot of women in music coming through in terms of expressing themselves. Here is Wikipedia’s collation of the changing and varied reaction to Madonna’s Erotica:

“Upon release, "Erotica" was generally well received by music critics. For Billboard, Larry Flick referred to it as a "sensual slice of aural sex" that "twists the vibe of 'Justify My Love'", and highlighted the "deep and complex" arrangement. From the same magazine, Joe Lynch named the song a "bold sonic departure" for the singer. Writing for AllMusic, Jose F. Promis classified it as one of the "darkest, most sinister, and most interesting" singles in her catalog. Rolling Stone's Arion Berger wrote that, unlike "Justify My Love", which gathered its "heat from privacy and romance", "[The Madonna of] 'Erotica' is in no way interested in your dreams [...] [the song] demands the passivity of a listener, not a sexual partner". Berger concluded his review by referring to "Erotica" as "insistently self-absorbed — 'Vogue' with a dirty mouth, where all the real action’s on the dance floor". Slant Magazine's Sal Cinquemani deemed it "brilliant". J. Randy Taraborrelli, author of Madonna: An Intimate Biography, pointed out that "['Erotica'] wasn't a surprise for anyone who had been paying attention to [Madonna's] recent music. She had shown her hand earlier with Breathless when she sang 'Hanky Panky', the song about spanking [...] then there was her single 'Justify My Love' [...] 'Erotica' though, was the full-blown music exploration, an exhibition, of what we were to believe was Madonna's sexual reality." The New York Times' Stephen Holden praised the singer's "foggy growl [that] contrasts dramatically with the shrill little-kid voice from [her] earliest records". For Gavin Martin from The Seattle Times, the singer's voice "sounds as though it's coming from somewhere dark and menacing: as far as you can tell it sounds like a man".

Allen Metz and Carol Benson, authors of The Madonna Companion: Two Decades of Commentary, said the track was "a bondage update on 'Justify My Love'". Similarly, while reviewing GHV2, Cinquemani called it a sequel to "Justify My Love", that is "as distantly icy as it was erotic", and a "creative high for a career on the verge of public turmoil". At Blender, Tony Powers considered the song one of the album's standout tracks. In less favorable comments, Anthony Violanti from The Buffalo News said the track was the album's weakest, and dismissed it for being a "carbon copy" of "Justify My Love". Cashbox's Randy Clark said that, musically, the single did not offer anything new, and called it a "melody-less 'Vogue'". Charlotte Robinson of PopMatters was also negative on her review; she felt the song did not age well, and referred to it as a "cold, dispassionate sexual fantasy" with "adolescent" lyrics intended to shock. Jude Rogers, writing for The Guardian, opined "Erotica" is an "oddly sexless Sex-era single, not helped by awkward synthesised sighs". Finally, Entertainment Weekly's David Browne panned it as "depressingly trite [...] between its frigid melody and your scary 'My name is Dita' spoken bits, it’s about as sexy as an episode of the Shelley Hack-era Charlie's Angels".

Retrospective reviews have been positive. In 2011, Slant Magazine placed the song at number 34 on their list of "The 100 Best Singles of the 1990s"; Ed Gonzalez praised Madonna's "throaty" vocals for making the song's "taunting, aggressive lyrics —an elaborate exploration of sex, from seduction to disease— feel unmistakably honest". Matthew Jacobs from HuffPost placed the song at number 23 of his ranking of Madonna's singles, calling it a "a period of innovation for the singer". On Gay Star News' ranking, the single came in at number 17; Joe Morgan called it "daring, sexy, and unabashed". Entertainment Weekly's Chuck Arnold considered "Erotica" Madonna's 10th greatest song, and PinkNews' Nayer Missim her sixth; the former opined it was "the boldest move she could have made at the height of her career", while the latter said the song was among the "most carefree, unpretentiously sexy music ever released". Arnold also pointed out that with "Erotica", the singer "introduced the pop-diva alter ego: Before Mariah gave us Mimi and Beyoncé gave us Sasha Fierce, [Madonna] gave us the dominatrix Dita".] This opinion was shared by Louis Virtel, writing for The Backlot, who named the song Madonna's eight best, and a "hot, smutty grind of a dance anthem". For Idolator's Mike Wass, the song is Madonna's seventh best lead single, and one of her most "wildly experimental" and interesting. Morgan Troper, for Portland Mercury, named "Erotica" an example of "scary-sexy" Madonna, and one of her "five sexiest songs that aren't 'Like a Virgin'".

 Scott Kearnan from Boston.com wrote that, "No pop star of her fame has been this sexually transgressive before or since [...] Rihanna sings about 'S&M' like it’s a song about My Little Pony, but [Madonna] dishes on pain, pleasure, and power with the conviction of a whip crack"; he named "Erotica" the singer's sixth best. The song came in the 22nd position of Billboard magazine's list of Madonna's singles, with Lynch hailing it "the boldest, riskiest reinvention in a career full of them [...] An icy declaration that it was time to kick open the doors on kinks and own them without shame". For The Tab's Harrison Brocklehurst, it's "one of the sexiest songs of all time". El Hunt from NME wrote: "Defined by sleazy Shep Pettibone beats, orgasmic gasps, and choice lyrics [...] ['Erotica'] makes 50 Shades of Grey look tamer than a fully-domesticated alpaca".[49] From the Official Charts Company, Justin Myers considered the Sex version of "Erotic" to be one of Madonna's "hidden gems". Finally, WatchMojo's Lisa Yang placed "Erotica" among Madonna's most underrated songs, adding that it "has aged gracefully thanks to its progressive lyrics and seductive sound".

I think that there should be a lot of new respect and focus on Erotica’s title track on its thirtieth anniversary on 29th September. I also think that the, when it turns thirty on 20th October, warrants fresh inspection and re-evaluation. Its title track has split people, but I think that it is one of Madonna’s best and most defining moments! On 29th September, the world will mark thirty years of Erotica. There is no denying that Erotica’s title track was…

A historic moment in music history.

FEATURE: Rumours/Will Anything Happen? Revisiting My Dream Two Music Biopics

FEATURE:

 

 

Rumours/Will Anything Happen?

IN THIS PHOTO: Blondie’s Debbie Harry in 2019/PHOTO CREDIT: Ann Lawlor 

Revisiting My Dream Two Music Biopics

__________

I have written about this…

IN THIS PHOTO: John McVie, Christine McVie, Stevie Nicks, Mick Fleetwood, and Lindsey Buckingham of Fleetwood Mac circa 1977/PHOTO CREDIT: Richard Creamer/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

a few times but, as I think more and more about it, there are a couple of music biopics and films that I would love to see. I know that Blondie’s lead, Debbie Harry, has supported the idea of a Blondie biopic. She has even imagined who might play her. Whilst some artists might be a bit too precious and guarded about themselves to allow a film to be made, that is not the case with Blondie. The legendary band are still touring, and Debbie Harry remains this icon. One of the most compelling and influential artists ever, having any film where she is being portrayed and is at the centre would be essential viewing. There have been Blondie documentaries and related films, though there has not been a biopic or anything that revolves around their music as far as I know. It seems like the perfect time to capitalise on the fact that Blondie have been touring and there is news that they are making new music. I cannot wait to hear the New York band’s follow-up to 2017’s Pollinator. Blondie’s third studio album, Parallel Lines, recently turned forty-four. In terms of time period, I am not sure whether there would be a biopic or film about the band’s origins and them playing around New York up until their eponymous album of 1976. In terms of the most successful era of Blondie, I guess the 1977-1978 era of Plastic Letters and Parallel Lines would be a good focus.

I guess it is hard to paint a picture of Blondie’s legacy and brilliance in a single film. I think focusing on a certain period would be good. Maybe it would be the early days and a look at how the band got together and rose. At the height of their popularity at Parallel Lines, it would be fascinating looking inside their world. Titles sort of suggest themselves. Sunday Girl (from Parallel Lines) or Atomic (from 1979’s Eat to the Beat). I think that a biopic around the band in general could work, but it is clear that Debbie Harry would be at the front. That said, Clem Burke, James Destri and Chris Stein would be integral. It is their chemistry and connection that makes the music unique and timeless. There is also the possibility of putting Debbie Harry as the subject. Making a film about her. Possibly based around her memoir, Face It, it could be a life/career-spanning film that portrays her at different times with a different actor taking on different ages, if you see what I mean? That would be something fascinating to watch! I do not know whether she would want something so personal on the screen, but the subject and narrative arc would be fascinating. There is a third option when it comes to Blondie’s music. Similar to what happened with Bruce Springsteen’s work on Blinded by the Light, the music can be used as a soundtrack to a larger and different story.

 IN THIS PHOTO: Hayley Williams/PHOTO CREDIT: Lindsey Byrnes

By that, I mean there could be a fictional romance or anything that is scored by Blondie. Apologies if I am repeating what I have written before but, with such a rich catalogue, a Blondie musical film would also be interesting. Classics like Rapture, Heart of Glass, Call Me, and Dreaming could score a coming-of-age film or something similar. It would be interesting to imagine! As much as anything, I do feel there is a demand and desire to see something like a Blondie biopic. The fact that Debbie Harry would not be adverse means that the band could give it their blessing and backing. Maybe something is in the works, but I would like to think there is an opportunity for someone to write something now. As I say, the band are working on new material. In fact, there is an interview with the band in the new Classic Pop. Always relevant and popular, the mighty Blondie warrant a big screen salute. It is exciting who could play the band members. I mooted before how Margot Robbie would be a great Debbie Harry, but I am not sure whether Robbie is too tall or looks similar enough – though resemblance is not as important as getting the role right. Maybe Elizabeth Olsen or, if you want an artist, then Hayley Williams (Paramore) seems to stand out! Maybe Taylor Swift, Billie Eilish or Rebecca Lucy Taylor (a.k.a. Self Esteem)? I think Williams would fit in terms of age/height and looks, but actors like Robbie and Olsen would also fit. In terms of casting, getting Harry right is perhaps the most important thing. Madonna is directing her own biopic and Julia Garner will play the Pop queen. Maybe Blondie would audition the actors to play them!

Moving onto another biopic or film that I would love to see, I have talked about Fleetwood Mac’s classic 1977 album, Rumours. We all know the tracks from the album, but the story of its recording is as compelling and interesting. The band were at loggerheads and divided. Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham were splitting and not on good terms. Christine McVie and John McVie were also parting and going through struggles, and Mick Fleetwood was in the middle and facing his own problems. There was not great communication during recording, plus there was excess in terms of drug-taking. It is a wonder that the album got made at all! Not only did it get made, but it is an undeniable classic that ranks alongside the all-time best! I would love to see this come to the big screen. I am not sure whether the band would authorise it. Buckingham was fired from the band, and I am not sure whether they are remaining active. Their last tour date was a while ago, plus I do not think they have plans to record another album. That wouldn’t be an obstacle. They do not need to be an ongoing concern to generate interest and connect. Everyone knows who Fleetwood Mac are, and the Rumours album is one of the best-known. In fact, when it comes to vinyl sales, Rumours is always on the chart. People cannot get enough of this classic! The songs are all superb and the album as a whole is one that should be preserved for all time. Seeing the recording of it dramatised would be so fascinating!

It would need the band approval so, unlike the Blondie biopic, maybe it would be more difficult to get green-lit. Regardless, you never can bet against it. It is rare that an album recording gets made for the big screen, but Rumours is unlike anything else. It would not only be about the controversies and tensions. Looking inside the studio and hearing those songs come to life would hook Fleetwood Mac fans and new converts alike. There is triumph and success alongside the more difficult times. Maybe calling the film Dreams or Don’t Stop (two of the best songs on the album) would be a good fit here. I think that there would be demand and popularity. If the tone was right and the story was honest and balanced, then you could get a great film that would win critics and fans. I am not sure who could play the band but, like Blondie, you could either have existing musicians or actors filling the roles. If the band were supportive of the idea, then I could imagine they’d be invested in the casting. Such a standout and timeless album, the story of Rumours’ recording and release is one that could make for such a brilliant film. Let us see what happens and whether that is a possibility.

There are always going to be music biopics and films, and they can be good and bring people in, or they hide the truth and tend to be a bit flat. Of course, getting the tone right and finding the right actors is always difficult. Fleetwood Mac are a band that I don’t think have been portrayed on the big screen. Going inside Rumours and seeing that portrayed would really draw in the crowds I think. Similarly, a Blondie biopic seems long overdue. Consider some of the artists who have been put on the big screen, and I feel few could argue against a Blondie biopic! Actor-wise, it is tough to narrow down who could play the iconic Debbie Harry. Both of these legendary bands have made such a difference in music and they are both very different but hugely popular. Neither band are niche or have had their time, and their music will influence and inspire artists for years to come. With such remarkable and fascinating musicians in both bands, there could be these electric and memorable biopics. Both would be set in the 1970s, I guess. Unless you did a career-spanning Blondie biopic, each would have an American setting in the late-1970s. That is such an interesting time in general but, like I mentioned with Blondie and a film that uses their music as a soundtrack, you could have Rumours scoring a fictional film – though I think one set around the making of the album would be better. I am not sure whether there are plans to make films about Blondie or Fleetwood Mac, but I love the fact that Debbie Harry would be quite invested in who plays her and what comes about! Nothing is rumoured at the moment but, when it comes to these two classic bands and their wonderful music, biopics need to come to the big screen…

ONE way or another.

FEATURE: The Deepest Understanding of This Woman’s Work: A Thank You to Seán Twomey and the Kate Bush News Website

FEATURE:

 

 

The Deepest Understanding of This Woman’s Work

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

A Thank You to Seán Twomey and the Kate Bush News Website

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THIS will not be a long feature…

 IN THIS PHOTO: The Kate Bush News website founder and Kate Bush Fan Podcast host, Seán Twomey/PHOTO CREDIT: Kate Bush News/Seán Twomey

but I wanted to react to something that I saw in Classic Pop’s special magazine dedicated to Kate Bush. One section was given up to the Kate Bush News website. I am going to come to the interview that its founder Seán Twomey. He has been running the Kate Bush News website since 1998. Peter and Krys Fitzgerald-Morris and Dave Cross are the editors of HomeGround (the Kate Bush Magazine), the world’s longest-running Kate Bush publication, since 1982. They The final edition was in 2011 (though a special digital edition was published this year to mark their fortieth anniversary). HomeGround magazine joined forces with Twomey in 2011. I am writing this on 24th September. The site marked forty years of The Dreaming on 13th September. Last week, the Kate Bush Fan Podcast’s fifty-second episode was given over to discussing this summer. One of the only Kate Bush fan podcasts out there, it is a cornerstone of Kate Bush News. There are a few other podcasts – I am going to do an albums one soon -, but none have the knowledge of Bush’s music that Seán Twomey has! He has been reporting about Kate Bush for so many years. He even met her at her old family home of East Wickham to celebrate Paddy Bush’s fiftieth birthday. He developed a friendship with Kate’s brother through the site. The Kate Bush Fan Podcast is the go-to podcast. In the same way the Kate Bush News website is the portal you need to refer to when it comes to all things Bush. In fact, they were given exclusive access by EMI to announce the release of Aerial in 2005. No small honour when you consider this was Bush’s first album in twelve years!

katebushnews.com · Kate Bush Fan Podcast Episode 52 - The Summer of Kate!

Anyway. The latest podcast explores the magnificent and eventful summer. One where Kate Bush has been deeply in focus. Stranger Things featured her Hounds of Love hit, Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God), in a key scene. There was rumours and whispers before that, as Winona Ryder (who features in the series) wore a badge of Kate Bush (I think it was a photo of Bush in her Lionheart period). People wondered what it could mean. Few could have guessed that an iconic song would feature and then go on to hit number one in the U.K. and around the world! That was Bush’s second U.K. number one. Her first, Wuthering Heights, was in 1978. Breaking records all over the place, the classic song got new attention and life. Lots of artists covered the song (most were pretty average; Rita Ora’s abysmal version was the final straw and showed why you need to stay away from a song only Kate Bush can perform with any memorability!). Bush’s music found a new audience and, to top it off, she gave a rare interview to BBC radio’s Woman’s Hour! I have included that at the end of this feature. Bush explained how grateful she was that people responded to the song and Stranger Things in the way they did. She also revealed how she was gardening a lot; the fact she has an ancient mobile phone, and how happy she was right now. It was a wonderful interview that few could have anticipated! Bush also provided several updates to fans on her official website.

Making sure that fans were aware of all the latest happenings, Twomey and his team have been covering everything with passion and dedication. It has been such a wonderfully busy and exciting year for Kate Bush! Her fans have rejoiced. Bush has provided her thoughts and insights to a new documentary, If These Walls Could Sing, directed by Mary McCartney about Abbey Road Studios (where Bush recorded at several times). PROG magazine had a Kate Bush cover and provided a poster. Classic Pop dedicated an entire issue to Bush. Credit to the magnificent website for keeping abreast of everything! I am not sure how they are made aware of the news, but I am guessing it is a combination of getting first-look access and being told the news before other sources. Fans will send in links and news and, together, there is this updated and essential site for all things Kate Bush! I think 2023 will be quieter than this when it comes to Bush and developments/news! But 2022 is not over yet. There is a new book, Running Up That Hill: 50 Visions of Kate Bush, by Tom Doyle coming out late next month. I suspect that Bush will send out a Christmas message on her official website before the big day. Who knows what other news we might get between now and then. Maybe some cover versions, another magazine spread or, as everyone in the world hopes (but seems unlikely) some new albums news!

 IN THIS PHOTO: HomeGround’s Peter and Krys Fitzgerald-Morris and Dave Cross with Kate Bush (and a half-hidden Del!) at the 1990 Kate Bush Club/HomeGround Convention (photo via the Kate Bush News website)

I am going to wrap up by selecting a few parts of that interview Seán Twomey gave to Classic Pop recently. I hope to speak with Twomey for a Kate Bush podcast in the future. There are some big anniversaries next year. My favourite-ever album – and Bush’s magnificent debut, The Kick Inside - is forty-five in February. Bush is sixty-five on 30th July. Plus, one of her really underrated albums, The Red Shoes, is thirty in November. I know there will be more books, magazines and articles written about this timeless icon. She is someone who seems to be more popular now than she has ever been. That is no mean feat when you consider the fact that her most recent studio album came out in 2011! That was the year that Seán Twomey and HomeGround joined forces to create this website that is the most essential resource for Kate Bush information. It was only right that, in a magazine special (from Classic Pop) concerning Kate Bush’s career and music, that they should get some words from one of the world’s leading authorities about Kate Bush. Twomey himself has modestly said how there are others out there who know more about Bush than himself. I am not too sure! Who is the Mark Lewisohn (the world’s leading authority on The Beatles) of the Kate Bush universe!? Even though I claim to have written more Kate Bush features than anyone alive, Twomey has deeper love and wider knowledge than me! There were a few questions that caught my eye. The first one concerned his reaction to hearing Kate Bush for the first time…

I think that this experience is one many of us share when tracing our love of Kate Bush. Twomey recalls that the ‘white dress’ version (the original U.K. video that was rejected by America because it was too intense and weird. A second, with Bush in a red dress, was filmed for the U.S. The single did not make an impact there) was “constantly present”. He told how her “high-pitched register and swooping arm moves were unlike anything else on telly at the time”. That is how I felt! That was my first experience of Kate Bush. The video for her amazing debut single was so unconventional. Not choreographed like Pop videos (it was choreographed by Robin Kovac) I was used to seeing, I was about four when I first witnessed it. The family had a copy of the 1986 greatest hits album, The Whole Story, on VHS. The Wuthering Heights video was strange and almost theatrical. Differing from the somewhat conventional music of the 1980s and 1990s, this was a revelation! Twomey revealed how he became invested in Kate Bush at the age of sixteen. This was a time when he was listening to a lot of Indie bands. Quite a refreshing break from that rather tooled and unsurprising sound, Bush’s diverse and original music was a revelation. Stating that it was when he discovered the HomeGround fanzine that his casual and growing love turned into a passion, this was the way artists like Bush were discovered in the pre-Internet age. Bush herself contributed to the fanzine and wrote about her creative process and working. She even attended some fan conventions so, for someone finding out about Bush’s music, having this unique and invaluable information was crucial. Fanzines bonded fans and was this community in itself. I almost envy Twomey’s experience! I turned into a diehard later on, at a time when social media was existent and fanzines like HomeGround were in their final moments.

The origins of the Kate Bush News website can be traced to 1997. Twomey told Classic Pop that, this year, he wanted to have a go at building a site. Kate Bush seemed a natural choice! Noting how existent sites were galleries and almost surface without saying much about what makes Bush special and who she is as an artist, it seemed a no-brainer to counteract that with something informative and deep. Launching the site in January 1998, Twomey said how people thought he was crazy “doing a news site in the middle of what turned out to be her epic 12-year gap between albums!”. 1998 was the year Bush gave birth to her only child, Bertie/Albert. She had already written songs for Aerial by then, but giving birth put a halt to that and also changed the way she wrote and what she wrote about. It seems almost symbolic that the leading Kate Bush website was born the same year as something life-changing and momentous came into Bush’s life! I shan’t quote every answer, but I shall skim each of them. Twomey explains how his objective for the Kate Bush News website is to be informative and up-to-date. Bringing HomeGround into the digital realm was a good move by Twomey, as it means that they can continue on in a different form. It is fitting that the classic and adored fanzine should team with the founder of the number one Kate Bush website. I know that Kate’s brother John (Carder Bush) will be on an episode of the podcast soon. Bush’s other brother Paddy has been in touch (he is seventy in December). Del Palmer – Bush’s former boyfriend and someone who has worked with her before The Kick inside; he was the engineer for 2011’s 50 Words for Snow – has also been very supportive.

When asked what significant things about Kate Bush have been learned since he started the site, Twomey said how he put her on a pedestal and was almost worshipping at her altar.  “I quickly appreciated just how down-to-earth and completely disinterred with being famous Kate is”. That is something that strikes me. Deified in the sense that she has heavenly talent and ability, Kate Bush is also completely normal. Not the reclusive and spooky woman that tabloids and idiots have labelled her as for years, she is one of the most well-adjusted and kindest people in all of music! Twomey noted how, what is remarkable about Kate Bush, is that no matter what mood he is in, there is a song that can fit that – whether he needs to be lifted or kept in a good mood. Rocket’s Tail and Among Angels were among the tracks he singled out. The final question Twomey was asked was how he sees the Kate Bush News website developing. He is going to keep the podcast and, of course, stay on top of all the news and Kate Bush adjacent bits (books influenced by her or an artist covering one of her songs etc.). He also said how he might get into video podcasts too. This is something I have written about for a future feature. Namely, how there should be a video series or podcast that explores each of Kate Bush’s albums. To the best of my knowledge, there is not a Kate Bush channel on YouTube that discusses albums, has interviews and is similar to the Kate Bush News website. I think fans can really get behind a Seán Twomey-created video podcast or channel!

I will end things there. I wanted to quote from the fascinating and revealing interview in Classic Pop. It was great hearing when Kate Bush came into Seán Twomey’s life and how her music affected him. We almost take her music for granted. I wonder how many fans think back to that first discovery of her music and how they reacted to it. If you did, I reckon you would be quite moved! I think that the Kate Bush News website is the most authoritative and informative source when it comes to the beloved pioneer from Kent. There are great books about Bush. There is the odd podcast (away from the Kate Bush Fan Podcast), together with magazines and special spreads. When it comes to the online sources, the Kate Bush News website is the one! Kate Bush’s official website posts announcements from the icon, but as that does not happen regularly, where does one find out about what is happening with Kate Bush? That is taken care of by Seán Twomey, Peter and Krys Fitzgerald-Morris and Dave Cross. Lots of love to the website – and long may they continue to shine, inform and keep us all included and embraced!

PHOTO CREDIT: The Kate Bush News website

2022 has been an unexpectedly hectic and successful year for Kate Bush’s music! Breaking records, topping charts and featuring on one of Netflix’s biggest series, Stranger Things, it is amazing that she remains so popular and adored nearly forty-five years after her debut album was released. Who knows what is next for Kate Bush. Will we ever hear that teased track that Big Boi seems to suggest features Kate Bush?! Will Bush release an eleventh studio album? Will we get album reissues, new books or will Bush be made a Dame (if you ask me, that is long overdue!)? Indeed, will the legend be finally inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame next year (she has been nominated three times and lost out on each occasion), or will she do something special for her sixty-fifth birthday next year?! All we know is that the magnificent Kate Bush News website will let us know! For all they have done since 1998 – 2011 if you see that as the date when the website was truly born because of the unity with HomeGround’s editors –, and especially throughout this busy and brilliant year for Kate Bush, fans all around the world offer…

THEIR sincere thanks and love!

FEATURE: Behold the Girl: Saluting the Modern-Day Icon Rina Sawayama

FEATURE:

 

 

Behold the Girl

PHOTO CREDIT: Thurstan Redding for NME 

Saluting the Modern-Day Icon Rina Sawayama

__________

IT seems like a good time…

 PHOTO CREDIT: Thurstan Redding for NME

to proclaim a tremendous young artist whose latest album, Hold the Girl, marks her as a modern-day icon. In a music scene where the incredible Charli XCX stands alongside Self Esteem and Dua Lipa, there are so many incredible women who are headline acts producing some of the best and most inventive music around. Rina Sawayama, I think, is one of the greatest artists in the world. Born in Japan and based in London, the thirty-two-year-old released her second studio album on 16th September. One of the best albums of this year, it is guaranteed to pick up awards and mark her as someone who will continue to produce extraordinary music. 2020’s SAWAYAMA was a stunning debut album that should have been nominated for a Mercury Prize and countless awards. It was a travesty that she addressed. Seemingly ineligible from being included for a BRIT or Mercury Prize, rules have now changed. She is a British artist who was born in Japan, so she should not have any issues when it comes to Hold the Girl scooping massive acclaim and awards. I want to focus this feature on Hold the Girl and how Rina Sawayama has grown into this captivating and iconic artist. I will use some interviews and reviews that make the point. For anyone who has not heard Rina Sawayama or listened to her music, you will be blown away!

I am going to come back to a recent NME interview that traced things back to the earliest days and looked ahead to where Sawayama is heading next. The genre-defying artist definitely hit the ground running and cemented her own sound and style on her 2020 debut:

“Born in Japan in 1990, Sawayama moved to London when she was five. Raised by her single mother, she rebelled in her adolescence, sneaking out of the house to go to indie gigs. “Landfill indie was literally my entire identity for a couple years,” she says, recounting these heady teenage years. “I’d wear some white skinny jeans and Converse and go to gigs on my own underage. It was honestly the best time of my life.” She went on to study at Cambridge University, dropping her first track in 2013 (‘Sleeping in Waking’) after graduating, and hustling as an independent artist for several years.

2017 saw the self-release of mini-album ‘Rina’, a glittering collection of avant-garde production meshed with hooks Britney Spears would pine for. A string of singles followed, including fan-favourite ‘Cherry’, a searingly honest tune that sees Sawayama reflect on her own sexuality (“Even though I’m satisfied/I lead my life within a lie“). With these early releases Sawayama carved out a clear sonic world, and saw her fanbase grow into a dedicated community dubbed ‘Pixels’.

Signing to Dirty Hit to 2019 (home of The 1975 and Beabadoobee), her debut album, the critical smash ‘SAWAYAMA’, landed the following year. A savvy, smart collection of future-facing pop songs, it received the five-star treatment here at NME, hailed as a “deeply personal self-portrait [that] lays waste to genre constraints”.

Sawayama’s disregard for genre on her debut was fresh and exciting, particularly the use of nu-metal on the phenomenal single ‘STFU!’. The ferocious track saw her rage against racist microagressions, reintroducing a once-maligned sound back into the mainstream. Artists like Wargasm and Cassyette now fearlessly embrace the scene, but Sawayama is humble about the impact she’s had today, name-checking artists like Poppy who’ve also embraced and revolutionised nu-metal in recent years.

Work began on the follow-up to ‘SAWAYAMA’ during the early days of the pandemic in 2020; Sawayama is still coming to terms with the juxtaposition. “What I was experiencing during that time was…” she pauses. “On one hand it was the shared experience of everyone being under this very traumatic period in time where we were kept in our house.” On the flipside though, “nothing happened, every day was the same.”

On top of the universal dread and confusion, Sawayama was also faced with the strange experience of watching her debut album take-off from behind a screen. She reflects: “It was just this crazy, constant, absolute sensory overload on my screen, and then not being able to switch off from it whatsoever because there’s nothing else to do, and it really made me forget a lot of things. That whole time is a bit of a blur for me”.

I shall jump to some reviews of Hold the Girl soon. I wanted to select this Australian interview, as it does highlight some interesting points and questions. Sawayama is touring Australia in January, and next month sees her embark on a number of dates in promotion of Hold the Girl. It is no wonder that there has been such explosion of love and respect for her amazing second studio album:

“Crucially, Hold The Girl is profoundly personal. Lockdown was tumultuous emotionally for Sawayama – past trauma resurfacing. "It was really hard. Professionally, the pandemic was the busiest time for me. Things were going much better than I ever expected them to – and so that was amazing – and just seeing people listen to my music and react to my music during this horrible time was such a blessing. But, personally, I was really struggling with my mental health – like a lot of people I know have."

"I still haven't gone back to Japan to see my family. I was feeling pretty isolated. I think it was an opportunity to really reflect on, like, the stones that have been left unturned in my therapy. So I kind of went back to therapy."

"I guess the things that were all brought up made it to this record – and it would be pretty tumultuous. It was pretty intense. But, obviously, the therapy and also creating this record really helped push that out. I feel pretty happy and healed."

 PHOTO CREDIT: Olivia Lifungula for The New York Times

Hold The Girl has a resonant overture in Minor Feelings – the symbolic title borrowed from a collection of essays by Korean-American poet Cathy Park Hong. The song represents the LP's "thesis" – Sawayama, a Third Culture Kid, contemplating her identity and life as a minority (the longtime UK resident successfully challenged exclusionary eligibility criteria for British awards like the Mercury Prize).

"At the time, I was really seeing a lot of Asian hate going on and kind of not enough furore around it – people weren't saying it loud enough. It was just this kind of symptomatic-ness of the Asian experience – about feeling lots of things, having lots of micro-aggressions and now real proper aggressions and hate crime happening during the pandemic and the rhetoric around the pandemic not being helped by Trump, obviously… It just felt like, these have been minor feelings and now they're majorly getting me down… I guess it was kind of like to address these deep-seated issues that I needed to address."

Early in the pandemic, Sawayama enrolled in an Oxford online writing course centred on biography. "I always try and draw inspiration from things other than music," she says. "I always think of myself as a storyteller first and then songwriter." However, Sawayama didn't complete the program. "I did a little bit of it," she demurs. "I chickened out in the bit that I had to reveal my stories."

Latterly, Sawayama has ventured into acting. "Again, I love telling stories. I love getting into character. I wanted to get into acting, because I just loved doing that for my music videos." In 2019 Sawayama appeared in Idris Elba's Netflix sitcom Turn Up Charlie – Elba portraying a DJ-cum-nanny. "He's so great!"

Travelling with a Kindle, Sawayama has lately read bell hooks' "beautifully written" 2000 tome All About Love: New Visions. As far as films, she recommends the absurdist comedy Everything Everywhere All At Once – Michelle Yeoh leading an Asian cast. "It just completely blew my mind," Sawayama stresses. "Most people who've watched the movie can't even explain what the movie is about, because it's such a multi-genre movie."

Musically, Sawayama admired Lorde's Solar Power – "a controversial choice," she concedes. "I really loved the world that she and Jack [Antonoff] created. Also, I saw her live and then it kind of made it make more sense. I thought the satire behind the whole thing was very clever. It just shows how capable Lorde is as a lyric writer, a songwriter – it was fantastic."

Plus Sawayama has a new hobby in mind. "I like to try things I'm scared of," she divulges. "I don't really have time to do it at the moment, but I would love to try horse-riding. I'm really scared of horses, but everyone says they're like big dogs… and I love dogs."

Alas, Sawayama is less sanguine about reality – her concerns the UK's cost of living crisis, exacerbated by Brexit, and prevailing religious conservatism Stateside. "I try and be positive, but I'm not really," she rues. "I'm not very hopeful for the politicians in power to get anything right, to be honest." Sawayama "fumes" about political corruption, particularly vested interests. "But," she pivots, "what I do have faith in is community… I really think that, with the lack of support from the top, always grassroots is the only thing that's left." Privately, Sawayama gives to charity. "But, what I can do as an artist is to – even if it's 1000 to 3000 or 5000 people in a room, if I can make them happy and leave them feeling empowered, then that's really all I can do."

Auspiciously, Australian Pixels can anticipate a Hold The Girl tour. "We're definitely working on it right now, yes," Sawayama teases. "Australian fans have been so kind to me, and I've never been to Australia, so I would love to come”.

One of the best-reviewed albums of the year, Hold the Girl is a modern-day classic. I would advise that you go and get Hold the Girl on vinyl and treasure it. So many different sounds and genres fuse and wind together in these amazing songs. It is the way Sawayama utilises and experiments with varied sounds makes her music so memorable, nuanced and standout. This is what CLASH wrote in their review:

“Rina Sawayama is an artist consistently pushing the boundaries of what pop music can be, blending a myriad of styles from hyperpop to nu-metal, all while juggling collaborations with everyone from Elton John to Charli XCX. Debut album, 2020’s ‘SAWAYAMA’, encapsulated this genre-fluid ideology and was executed extremely well. Critical acclaim ensued, among Mercury Prize dramata. 2022 delivers (the dreaded) sophomore LP ‘Hold The Girl’, which is once again an album that refuses to play by the rules and has Rina Sawayama doing whatever she wants. And the result is one of the best pop records of the year.

‘Hold The Girl’ ignites with sombre opener ‘Minor Feelings’, which shows Sawayama crooning over delicate guitars and synths, before exploding into an anti-climax. No loud drums or screaming guitars solos like we’ve become familiar with (see debut opener ‘Dynasty’), but a choral-tinted outro (very of the time). It transitions into the title track ‘Hold the Girl’ via some fountain sounds, and the title track has Sawayama kicking the pop factor to one hundred. Centred around a 2-step rhythm and classic garage vocal chops, Sawayama blazes through some of her best vocal performances to date and the track delivers hooks galore. ‘This Hell’ also delivers infectious hooks and is clearly a track created for a live environment.

While Rina Sawayama continues to rule as Dirty Hit’s pop princess, she is also refusing to do only that. Cuts like ‘Catch Me In The Air’ and ‘Forgiveness’ lean more into soft and pop rock territory, without ever losing her pop polish. ‘Forgiveness’, especially, crashes into a raucous breakdown, balancing delightful theatrics with crunchy guitars and synthesisers. Contrastingly, she also knows how to write a great ballad. ‘Send My Love To John’ is the token ‘slow song’ on the record but supplies arguably Rina Sawayama’s best studio vocal performance ever. ‘Send My Love’ balances folky guitars, and has some amazing riffing work vocally from Sawayama. The Cohen-esque melody lifts adds a nostalgic element, an unexpected but welcomed juxtaposition to the high-intensity modern sounds of the rest of the record.

Closer ‘To Be Alive’ seems to a track that is bridging the gap between hyperpop and mainstream pop – an event that many have been awaiting. The melodies are inherently pop, but the glitchy and beautifully jarring aspects of the beat tease the realms of hyperpop. The sporadic snare hits toward the back end of the track are reminiscent of the late SOPHIE’s incredible work, and the plucky synths wouldn’t be out of place on a PC Music project.

‘Hold The Girl’ is a record that holds something for everyone. Rock riffs, club beats, saccharine melodies, 2000s pop… it truly covers a lot of ground. Like debut record ‘SAWAYAMA’, this sophomore LP does a bit of everything, but this time around feels more refined, consistent and polished: exactly what a follow up should be. And on a label roster saturated with enormous amounts of talent, Rina Sawayama is making a pretty good claim to being the ruler.

9/10”.

Before wrapping up and including a career-spanning Rina Sawayama playlist from Spotify, there is a five-star review from DIY that shows so much love and admiration from such a wondrous and instantly impactful album:

“Rina Sawayama has always been her own kind of pop star, constantly defining and redefining what exactly the term means for her. The Japanese-born, London-bred musician has carved out her own niche within the pop canon as a new kind of artist, a kind who studied politics at Cambridge before deciding that she wanted to give the music thing a go. As an East Asian musician, she has refused to box herself into one label - and this is especially true with second full-length ‘Hold the Girl’. Her music touches on the struggles she’s faced with integrating herself into the immigrant diaspora and feeling marginalised as a British-Asian, while also covering the unique and profound yet lonely and fraught experience of being a daughter raised by a single mother. All this, of course, is threaded with further themes about embracing her queerness, acknowledging the alienation she felt as a child, and the welcoming of her “chosen family”. Rina has lived many lives, and in her music, reflects on the experiences of each while still acknowledging that her story is still continuing to be written, by her own hand.

Across ‘Hold the Girl’, Rina is her most candid yet about the experiences which led to her having to grow up more quickly than most. The record is anchored by a certain sense of sadness that comes with mourning the childhood she feels that she lost, but the understanding that life is an ongoing journey - and learning to accept feeling hopeful for the future and chapters that have yet to be written. Rina curated the track listing as a way to guide the listener through the reflective journey of identifying and processing her childhood trauma as an adult going through therapy.

Opener ‘Minor Feelings’ takes its title from the book by the poet Cathy Park Hong that centres on the marginalisation of Asian Americans - “Minor feelings are getting me down” - with Rina speaking on feelings of otherness and loneliness she had long harboured, speaking frankly of her want to acknowledge emotions that she had long repressed. The song’s reflective nature sets the pace for the rest of the record, which combines an eclectic palette of bombastic, heart-on-sleeve euphoric pop and angsty dancefloor fillers whose influences range from Garbage to Avril Lavigne; Kacey Musgraves to The Corrs. The tracks rage with emotional depth; the heartfelt ‘Catch Me in the Air’ is a tribute to the very particular relationship between a single mother and her daughter who constantly have to take turns “catching” each other, while the club-ready queer anthem ‘This Hell’ openly embraces being eternally damned (with a nod to Shania Twain in the opening).

‘Forgiveness’ and ‘Holy’ further chart the continuous and arduous path to healing from long-felt wounds, while ‘Frankenstein’ marks one of the record’s darkest moments. It’s an honest and visceral look into more painful moments that come with processing past pain: “I’m trying to be normal, but trauma is immortal… This is so unbearable, make it stop, this is more than medical / All I want is to feel beautiful, inside and out.” Phantom’, meanwhile, addresses the ghost of past selves and the mourning of the loss of innocence: “I’ve been trying to find her since / She gave a little too much away… I don’t wanna do this without you / I don’t wanna do this if you’re just a ghost in the night.”

The metaphors for healing continue with ‘Hurricanes’, in which Rina takes it upon herself to find betterment in growth – “I’m not the girl I tried to be yesterday” – with the emotional arc finding a positive resolution with record-closer ‘To Be Alive,’ where the imagery of storms and thunder are replaced with blue skies and newfound clarity. “It’s just temporary pain,” Rina reminds herself with finality. Rina makes it very clear that the roadway to a better tomorrow takes constant work, but with every three-minute euphoric pop banger, she gets a little closer to it”.

It is worth looking forward to seeing what is coming from Rina Sawayama. I have said for a while how she would make a phenomenal film star and captivating screen presence. She will appear on screen soon, and I hope that we see a lot more from her in that sense. Coming back to NME, and they asked her about recent screen work and plans:

“Another superstar Sawayama has worked with recently is Lady Gaga, collaborating with producer Clarence Clarity on a rendition of ‘Free Woman’ for Gaga’s 2021 remix album ‘Dawn of Chromatica’. Both Sawayama and Gaga are ground-breaking artists, forging their own sounds without compromise, and both dominating when they’re on stage, it’s not hard to see why Sawayama has received comparisons to the pop juggernaut. Is this a career trajectory she’d aspire to at all?

“Definitely,” Sawayama says. “I love Gaga. I loved Gaga the most, and I respected her the most, when she did [2016 album] ‘Joanne’ because it was so not what people expected. It’s one of my favourite albums by her, which I know is a controversial opinion, but I think ‘Joanne’ is so emotionally in tune and so incredible and the way she played those tiny gigs was amazing. I think that she likes to keep it fresh. Definitely that’s something I want to pursue.”

Like Gaga, Sawayama is also making steps in other creative realms, including an acting gig in 2023’s John Wick: Chapter 4 alongside Keanu Reeves; the sort of acting role that could see Sawayama add Hollywood A-lister to her resume. “My team are all just so shook by the idea that we even got offered John Wick, so I think… none of us really know what’s gonna happen,” she says honestly, considering the right words to describe how she feels about her next adventure. “We’re just like, ‘What does happen to people in movies?’”

“I will say that the movie is amazing,” she adds of the flick. “I’m so excited for people to see it in the cinema, because it’s definitely, 100 per cent the best John Wick that’s ever been, and I’m not being biassed, like honestly, the scale is insane this time.” Sawayama confirms she’d “definitely” take on further acting roles in the future, enjoying the alternative creative practice. “It’s such a different process to music, and even though you have control over your character, it is someone else’s movie so you have to really work in a team. It’s nice to not have that responsibility sometimes,” she says.

For now, though, she’s gearing up for her upcoming tour. Working with a huge team that includes costume designers, tour and musical directors, and her band on “the most insanely big production”, with natural performer Sawayama at helming the show it’s sure to be a spectacle. Her 2021 shows received rave reviews, paving the way for her Best Live Act win at the BandLab NME Awards 2022 earlier this year.

“I used to post on the back of NME to recruit for band members. So it’s so surreal to even get an award from NME. It was really, really weird…one of the things I haven’t fully processed, but it makes me want to keep working on my live shows. I’m really, really passionate about it, the audience experience most of all.”

This excitement for the tour, and aspirations for these upcoming shows, is something that’s abundantly clear when talking to Sawayama. As she explains: “You can remember a gig you went to when you were 15 forever, and I always want to make that moment for people.” Time to strap on those Converse and skinny jeans and launch yourself into the pits, as Rina once did: these memories, after all, will last a lifetime”.

A peerless talent whose second studio album seems to (somehow) exceed the brilliance of her debut, SAWAYAMA, Hold the Girl is one of my favourite albums from this year. I do genuinely believe that Rina Sawayama is a sensation who will go down as a legend. An icon of the modern times, it will be truly exciting and curious what she does for album three and where her music takes her next. At the moment, she is readying herself for international travel and a hectic end of the year. Let’s hope that she gets a chance to reconnect with family and take a breath soon, as burn-out and exhaustion would be the last thing she needs. Having released a celebrated album, so many eyes are on the stunning Rina Sawayama. She is truly one of our…

GREATEST treasures!

FEATURE: Los Ageless: The Incredible and Incomparable St. Vincent at Forty

FEATURE:

 

 

Los Ageless

The Incredible and Incomparable St. Vincent at Forty

__________

I was thinking about…

 PHOTO CREDIT: Bryan Adams

ranking her studio albums or doing something a bit different to mark the upcoming fortieth birthday of Annie Clarke, a.k.a. St. Vincent. It may seem insulting or in bad taste to focus on age but, actually, it is a great excuse to celebrate a phenomenal and hugely influential artist on a big birthday. On 28th September, St. Vincent is forty. With decades ahead of her, I wanted to wrap things up with a career-spanning playlist. A mix of the singles and deep cuts. She put out her amazing debut, Marry Me, in 2007. Last year’s Daddy's Home was perhaps the finest album yet from the always amazing and unique St. Vincent. An artist who gets stronger and more astonishing with every release, there is nobody in the same league as the divine Annie Clark. As St. Vincent, she has given the world so much amazing music. She has also written and directed a segment in the 2017 anthology horror film, XX. She also co-wrote and starred in the underrated and brilliant psychological thriller film, The Nowhere Inn (2020). I hope that we see Annie Clark/St. Vincent appear in films in the future, as she is compelling presence and awesome talent! Apologies for repeating myself but, before getting to an ultimate and extensive St. Vincent playlist, here is some biography about a modern-day icon:

“With her literate, emotionally intricate songwriting and inventive guitar playing, St. Vincent's Annie Clark excels at subverting rock and pop conventions. A Berklee School of Music student whose love of grunge acts like Nirvana and Soundgarden inspired her to learn guitar, she introduced her genre-bending approach on 2007's Marry Me, which fused elements of indie, rock, electronic, and jazz in surprising ways. From there, her increasingly accomplished albums revealed the breadth and depth of her music. As the years passed, she achieved a rare balance of critical and commercial success: Clark made her chart debut with the complex storytelling of 2009's Actor; became the first solo female artist to win the Grammy Award for Best Alternative Album in 20 years with 2014's icy, witty St. Vincent; and cracked the Billboard Top Ten with the anti-pop of 2017's Grammy-winning MASSEDUCTION. On 2021's Daddy's Home, she made the warmth and sleaze of the early '70s her own while continuing to challenge her listeners and herself.

St. Vincent was born Annie Erin Clark on September 28, 1982 in Tulsa, Oklahoma and spent most of her childhood in Dallas, Texas. She began playing guitar at the age of 12, and picked up some valuable lessons on the life of a touring musician as a teenager when she joined her uncle Tuck Andress on the road with his popular jazz duo Tuck & Patti. After graduating from high school in 2001, she studied at the prestigious Berklee School of Music, and recorded a self-released, three-song EP with fellow students in 2003, Ratsliveonnoevilstar.

In 2004, Clark left Berklee and joined the extra-large Baroque pop group the Polyphonic Spree as a guitarist and a singer; she toured with the band, and appeared on the sessions for their 2007 album The Fragile Army. Also in 2004, Clark performed with Glenn Branca's 100 Guitar Orchestra for a recording of one of his avant-garde symphonies. In 2006, she left the Polyphonic Spree and joined the backing band of like-minded pop composer Sufjan Stevens. She recorded a three-song EP to sell at her shows with Stevens, on which she adopted the name St. Vincent (inspired by the New York hospital where poet Dylan Thomas died as well as her great-grandmother's middle name). During this time, she also recorded her debut album with musicians including Polyphonic Spree members Louis Schwadron and Brian Teasley and keyboardist Mike Carson, a frequent collaborator with David Bowie. Arriving in July 2007 on Beggars Banquet, Marry Me won critical acclaim, and in 2008 Clark won the PLUG Independent Music Award for Female Artist of the Year.

Once the Marry Me tour was over, Clark started work on the second St. Vincent album. Largely written at home on her computer and informed by the lushly fantastical sounds and imagery of films such as Snow White and The Wizard of Oz, May 2009's Actor was produced by John Congleton and marked Clark's debut on 4AD.

A musical and lyrical step forward from her debut, the album earned strong reviews and more commercial success: Actor reached number nine on the Billboard Independent Albums chart and rose to number 90 on the Billboard Top 200 album charts. That year, Clark collaborated with Bon Iver on "Roslyn," a song for the soundtrack to Twilight Saga: New Moon, and found time to make guest appearances on albums by the Mountain Goats and the New Pornographers in addition to her busy touring schedule.

Late in 2010, Clark decamped to Seattle to write her third album, and reunited with Congleton to record it early the following year. Released in September 2011, Strange Mercy added a more personal dimension to Clark's songwriting and hit number 19 on the Billboard 200. Also in 2011, she appeared at a special concert paying homage to the pioneering indie rock bands chronicled in Michael Azerrad'a book Our Band Could Be Your Life, performing a striking version of Big Black's "Kerosene" that earned praise from group founder Steve Albini. That year, Clark also composed an instrumental version of the Actor song "The Sequel" that appeared on yMusic's album Beautiful Mechanical.

In 2012, Clark collaborated with Talking Heads musician David Byrne, whom she met in 2009 at Radio City Music Hall for the AIDS/HIV charity Dark Was the Night's benefit concert in 2009.

Initially, they planned to play a one-off show together, but after the pair began to trade ideas, the project snowballed into September 2012's album Love This Giant. Collaborations with Andrew Bird and Amanda Palmer also arrived that year, as did "The Antidote," which appeared on the Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn, Part 2 soundtrack. St. Vincent spent much of that year and 2013 touring in support of the project, and the companion release Brass Tactics was released in May 2013. Later in the year, she and Congleton began work on her fourth album. That November, Clark was given the Smithsonian American Ingenuity Award for Performing Arts. St. Vincent, which boasted some of her most accessible songwriting and challenging sounds, appeared in early 2014 and reached number 12 in the U.S. and number 21 in the U.K. That April, Clark fronted a reunited Nirvana at the 29th Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony, performing "Lithium" with the band. In February 2015, St. Vincent won the Grammy Award for Best Alternative Album, making Clark the first solo female artist to win that award in 20 years. Later that year, she appeared on the Chemical Brothers' album Born in the Echoes.

In 2016, Clark contributed a cover of the Rolling Stones' "Emotional Rescue" to the soundtrack of A Bigger Splash, directed a segment of XX, a horror anthology film featuring all-female directors, and designed a signature Music Man guitar for Ernie Ball. She became the first female ambassador for Record Store Day in 2017, and later that year released her fifth album, MASSEDUCTION, which she recorded with co-producer Jack Antonoff in New York and Los Angeles. Debuting at number ten on the Billboard 200, the album also included such collaborators as Kamasi Washington, Jenny Lewis, Tuck & Patti, Doveman, and Cara Delevingne and earned widespread acclaim. In October 2018, St. Vincent released MassEducation, a reimagining of MASSEDUCTION songs featuring Clark on vocals and Thomas Bartlett on piano. In early 2019, Clark won the Best Rock Song award for "Masseduction" at the 61st Annual Grammy Awards, where she performed a smoldering duet with Dua Lipa. Clark also produced Sleater-Kinney's album The Center Won't Hold, and that December saw the release of Nina Kraviz Presents Masseduction Rewired, a collection of remixes that featured reworkings of the album's songs by EOD, Jlin, and Laurel Halo.

The following year, Clark performed on the Chicks' album Gaslighter, appeared on Gorillaz's Song Machine, Season One: Strange Timez, and collaborated with Yoshiki on a classical arrangement of "New York." For St. Vincent's sixth album, May 2021's Grammy-nominated Daddy's Home, Clark reunited with Antonoff and used the music and atmosphere of the early '70s -- as well as her father's release from prison -- as a lens for her songs' character sketches”.

On 28th September, the remarkable St. Vincent is forty. An amazing musician, songwriter and performer, I am excited to see what comes next from her. Every album is this stunning work that you fully invest yourself in. Below is a playlist featuring wonderful St. Vincent singles, plus some deeper cuts that showcase the absolute brilliance of Annie Clark’s musical moniker. It leaves me to offer her lots of love and send…

MANY happy returns.

FEATURE: Inspired By… Part Seventy-Nine: D’Angelo

FEATURE:

 

 

Inspired By…

IN THIS PHOTO: D'Angelo circa 2000/PHOTO CREDIT: Mark Guthrie

Part Seventy-Nine: D’Angelo

__________

EVEN though he has only released…

three studio albums (one with The Vanguard), D’Angelo is a hugely influential artist who has made a big impact. One of the leading figures in the Neo Soul movement (alongside Angie Stone and Erykah Badu), his albums, Brown Sugar (1995), Voodoo (2000) and Black Messiah (2014) are classics! There has been new music since 2014, but I am not sure whether we will get another studio album from D’Angelo soon. He is such a phenomenal songwriter and singer, there is always going to be that demand and curiosity. I am going to end with a playlist of songs from artists influenced by the incredible D’Angelo. Before that, and as I do with these features, AllMusic provide a wonderful biography:

“D'Angelo established himself as an unwitting founder and leading light of the late-'90s neo-soul movement, which aimed to bring the organic flavor of classic R&B back to the hip-hop age. Modeling himself on the likes of Marvin Gaye, Prince, Curtis Mayfield, and Al Green, D'Angelo exhibited his inspirations not only with his vocal style -- albeit with a stoned yet emotive twist all his own -- but also wrote his own material, and frequently produced it, helping to revive the concept of the all-purpose R&B auteur. His first album, Brown Sugar (1995), gradually earned him an audience so devoted that the looser and rhythmically richer follow-up, Voodoo (2000), debuted at number one despite a gap of almost five years, and won that year's Grammy for Best R&B Album. A wait of nearly three times that length preceded the release of the bristlier Black Messiah (2014), a Top Five hit that made D'Angelo a two-time Best R&B Album winner. The musician since then has released "Unshaken," recorded for the soundtrack of the video game Red Dead Redemption 2 (2018).

The son of a Pentecostal minister, Michael D'Angelo Archer was born February 11, 1974, in Richmond, Virginia. He began teaching himself piano as a young child, and at age 18 won the amateur talent competition at Harlem's Apollo Theater three consecutive weeks. He was briefly a member of a hip-hop group called I.D.U. and in 1991 signed a publishing deal with EMI. His first major success came in 1994 as the co-writer and co-producer of the Jason's Lyric soundtrack single "U Will Know," a Top Five R&B hit featuring a one-time all-star R&B aggregate dubbed B.M.U. (Black Men United).

That led to the July 1995 release of Brown Sugar, D'Angelo's debut album. Across the next several months, the Top Ten of the R&B chart made room for three of its singles: the title track, written and produced with A Tribe Called Quest's Ali Shaheed Muhammad; a self-produced cover of Smokey Robinson and Marvin Tarplin's "Cruisin'"; and "Lady," made with Tony! Toni! Toné!'s Raphael Saadiq. In the process, Brown Sugar caught on with R&B fans looking for an alternative to the slicker mechanized sounds dominating the urban contemporary landscape, and went platinum. In October 1996, the majority of a September 1995 performance -- featuring another major studio collaborator, Angie Stone, on background vocals -- was released in Japan as Live at the Jazz Cafe, London.

Between proper LPs, D'Angelo took some time off and split acrimoniously with his management. Meanwhile, neo-soul, a marketing term coined by industry executive Kedar Massenburg, caught on as a legitimate subgenre with the success of like-minded artists such as Maxwell and Erykah Badu. D'Angelo surfaced on a handful of soundtracks, primarily via cover versions, contemporizing Eddie Kendricks' "Girl You Need a Change of Mind" (Get on the Bus), Prince's "She's Always in My Hair" (Scream 2), Ohio Players' "Heaven Must Be Like This" (Down in the Delta), and Ashford & Simpson's "Your Precious Love" (a duet with Badu, for High School High). He placed a DJ Premier-produced original, "Devil's Pie," on the soundtrack for Belly, and joined Lauryn Hill on "Nothing Even Matters," a cut off the Grammy-winning The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill.

After all that intermittent activity and a series of delays, D'Angelo made his full return in January 2000 with the looser and more jam-oriented Voodoo. Affirming the devotion and size of D'Angelo's following, the album debuted at number one. A highly collaborative and freewheeling recording, it was created at the same time as Erykah Badu's Mama's Gun and Common's Like Water for Chocolate, and involved much of the same personnel, some of whom -- including Badu, Common, ?uestlove, J Dilla, Q-Tip, James Poyser, and D'Angelo himself -- were dubbed the Soulquarians. The drifting falsetto ballad "Untitled (How Does It Feel)" narrowly missed the top of the R&B chart and won a Grammy for Best Male R&B Vocal. Voodoo likewise won for Best R&B Album. Throughout the remainder of the 2000s, D'Angelo made only a handful of recorded guest appearances. Most notably, he took part in a version of Fela Kuti's "Water No Get Enemy," recorded for the Red Hot + Riot compilation. Raphael Saadiq's "Be Here" and Snoop Dogg's "Imagine" were events by virtue of the artist's mere presence, while two versions of the Dilla production "So Far to Go" -- first heard on Dilla's posthumous The Shining, then reworked for Common's Finding Forever -- also reunited him with Soulquarians.

D'Angelo's long-awaited third album, said to be titled James River, was originally due in 2009 but did not materialize. In January 2013, Billboard asked ?uestlove about the status of the recording, and was told that "99% of it is done." Around this time, D'Angelo was performing more often, including European club dates and scattered festival appearances. In March 2014, Live at the Jazz Cafe, London, expanded and reissued internationally through Virgin, served as stopgap product once more. During the second week of that December, cryptic posts on various social media platforms announced "Black Messiah is coming." One of the earliest warnings came from journalist, author, and filmmaker Nelson George, who had recently featured D'Angelo for his Finding the Funk documentary and conversed with the musician for a public conversation facilitated by Red Bull Music Academy. On the evening of the 14th, George hosted an exclusive listening party for Black Messiah, an album credited to D'Angelo and his backing band, a mix of old and new associates dubbed the Vanguard. The LP was released the following day on RCA. More adventurous and outward looking than what preceded it, Black Messiah entered the Billboard 200 at number five and won the following year's Grammy for Best R&B Album, while lead single "Really Love" took Best R&B Song. D'Angelo toured briefly and wasn't heard from again until the October 2018 release of the video game Red Dead Redemption 2. Along with Daniel Lanois and Rocco DeLuca, he provided "Unshaken" for the game's soundtrack. The song was available commercially on its own the following January”.

If you are not aware of D’Angelo, I would recommend you go and seek out his three studio albums. Those who are fans already will be aware of how inspirational D’Angelo is. Such a powerful musical force, I do hope that we have not heard the last of him. A modern-day legend who has not put a foot wrong as an artist, he is awe-inspiring indeed! Below is a playlist containing the artists that either cite him as an influence or have been compared to D’Angelo. As you will see and hear, the talent below is of…

THE highest quality.

FEATURE: Pagan Poets: Kate Bush and Björk

FEATURE:

 

 

Pagan Poets

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush during 1979’s The Tour of Life/PHOTO CREDIT: Sipa Press/Rex Features

Kate Bush and Björk

__________

THIS is designed to be timely…

 PHOTO CREDIT: Vidar Logi

as the pioneer and sensational genius Björk releases her new album, Fossora, on Friday (30th). Shaping up to be one of her greatest albums, there are a lot of new interviews with the Icelandic legend. There is a great interview with Pitchfork; one with The Atlantic; another with Consequence of Sound. There are many more coming along. I am writing this on Friday 23rd, so I know that stuff will appear online that I have not included. Fossora is going to be one of the best albums of the year. I mention Björk, not just because she is releasing a new album, but because there are lines to Kate Bush. Many artists are influenced by her but, more than most, I feel Bush has been instrumental when it comes to influencing Björk as a producer, writer and songwriter. Vocally, Björk seems to have been inspired by The Dreaming (1982) and, to an extent, The Kick Inside (1978). The experimentation and layers on Kate Bush’s The Dreaming can be heard on some of Björk’s finest albums. In terms of the barriers broken and the unconventional nature of the music, I see comparisons between these two artists. Whilst some may feel Tori Amos is probably closest in nature to Kate Bush, I do think that Björk is the most similar. Both started in the industry when they were extremely young. Each release these stunning albums that are all different but utterly immersive and engrossing. Even now, in 2022, Björk still seems to nod to Kate Bush. Whether consciously or not, I can hear some of Bush’s essence and guidance weaving in and out of Björk’s sensational and beautiful music.

Björk lists The Dreaming as one of her favourite albums, and I get visions of Björk listening to Kate Bush’s earliest work like The Kick Inside when she was a child. Even though 1993’s Debut was not Björk’s actual debut album, right from the start, you can feel the presence and guidance of Kate Bush. Vocal sweeps and swoons on Human Behaviour make me think of Suspended in Gaffa (The Dreaming) mixed with Wuthering Heights (The Kick Inside) almost. Pagan Poetry and songs like this could have been included on Hounds of Love’s The Ninth Wave. The Sensual World (1989), I think, is in Björk’s mind when she is at her most sensuous and stunning. Whilst Björk is a truly individual artist who has no peers, it is humbling and interesting that she has mentioned Kate Bush in many interviews through the years. Recently, as Far Out Magazine write, Björk name-checked Kate Bush (when speaking with The Guardian) in regard to sexism in the music industry:

“If you wish to point to two women who have done more for the progression of music in the last 40 years, you probably can’t do any better than Kate Bush and Björk. Although both have unique qualities that make them distinct, both are critically acclaimed, commercially successful boundary pushers who have led the charge in progressive pop music for decades.

On one side is Bush, the classically trained former dance student turned intellectual pop star. Bush is the first woman to ever score a solo number one hit in the UK with a song she wrote and sang herself. This year, Bush nabbed another historic first: the longest gap between number ones, with ‘Wuthering Heights’ hitting the top of the charts in 1978 and ‘Running Up That Hill’ doing the same in 2022, a solid 44 years between number one singles.

 IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1993/PHOTO CREDIT: John Stoddart

On the other side is Björk, the incredibly futuristic genre-blender who has taken on everything from traditional Icelandic rhythms to grime beats to orchestral arrangements, sometimes within the same song.

In an interview with The Guardian, Björk opened up about how Bush’s reception was inherently misogynistic. “It was kind of sexist. People thought that Kate Bush was insane. People were embarrassed about admitting that they actually liked her and I think that is something, actually, one good thing about feminism nowadays is that she is not a threat at all”.

Björk doubled down on her fandom of Bush in an interview around the time of her album Debut. She called Bush “one of my heroes” and referred to her as “one of the biggest pioneering producers. Everybody just says, ‘Oh, she’s just a singer. She’s just a chick’. But they forget all the other work she’s done, that woman. She’s very, very, very gorgeous”

Although they have yet to collaborate in any real way, the influence that Kate Bush has had on Björk continues to filter into her music. Pick out any Björk song from the last 30 years, and it won’t take long to detect the strong presence of Bush”.

In 2001, the Kate Bush News website reported how the subject of Kate Bush arose in an interview. Björk was asked whether she wanted to work with Bush. Stating that she (Bush) is an artist who writes and produces her own music, the suggestion was that these two strong and almost self-sufficient artists might not blend. I have been thinking more and more about these two sensational artists getting together. Björk’s Fossora is her tenth studio album. Bush has released ten studio albums. If you include Björk’s eponymous 1977 album, she actually started releasing albums before Kate Bush! I do think that the two could work together. Even if Bush writes and produces a track, it would be a dream blend between these two staggeringly talented and important artists. I have written about how it’d be great to have a tribute album where artists perform their versions of Kate Bush songs. Björk appearing on it would be a no-brainer! Seeing as she is a fan of The Dreaming, I could see her rearranging and producing a terrific version of songs like Suspended in Gaffa, Get Out of My House, or Night of the Swallow. Go and pre-order Fossora, as it is going to be a typically mind-blowing Björk album! She is a true pioneer and an inspiration to so many other artists. Kate Bush is never too far from her mind. Having mentioned her in a recent interview, I do hope that they work together in the future. The influence Bush has had on Björk is clear and remarkable. Björk nods to Bush as this remarkable producer and someone who had to deal with so many sexist comments and obstacles from the press.

Not to say that Björk has become successful because of artists like Kate Bush, but it is amazing that one of the world’s greatest and most original artists put out her first professional album before Kate Bush, and yet sees her as someone who inspired her career and best work! It is testament to the fact that, decades after her debut album, Kate Bush is still being discussed and is hugely relevant. It is hard to say exactly how many rising artists now have been influenced by her. There are going to be countless others coming through and hitting a sound and vibe that can be linked to Kate Bush. I don’t think that we can discount any sort of collaboration between Björk and Bush. As I said, a tribute album where Björk tackles a Kate Bush song would be fabulous and really intriguing. Released on Friday, Björk will give us the sublime Fossora. What she has released from the album so far ranks up there with her very best work. An artist that never compromises and continues to surprise, evolve and stay right at the top of her game, it makes me think of Kate Bush and how her career mapped out. As the world wonders whether Bush will ever release another album, there is no doubting the fact that Björk has so much more music left in her. There have been ongoing and tiring rumours that Big Boi has worked with Bush or has music featuring her. I am not sure that we will ever hear that and, to be honest, it doesn’t excite me that much, Björk and Kate Bush on the other hand is a different thing! Let us hope that a collaboration between these two iconic artists happens…

SOME day in the future.

FEATURE: Spotlight: Rachel Mae Hannon

FEATURE:

 

 

Spotlight

PHOTO CREDIT: Guy Boggan

Rachel Mae Hannon

__________

HAVING released…

her new single, Breathe, yesterday (23rd), I am more and more in love with Rachel Mae Hannon’s music! The stunning Irish musician (hailing from Monaghan, she is now living in Dublin) has one of the most soulful and expressible voices I have heard! A beautiful, chocolate-rich and passionate blend. In terms of a colour palette, there are purples, blues and reds mixing with some warmer oranges and pinks. Sorry if that sounds a bit pretentious but, when it comes to sounds an artist’s voice, I imagine colours and shades coming from their mouths. Hannon’s voice and projection is extraordinary and from the soul. I am not sure whether she has an album coming later in the year or other singles, but everything she releases is sensational! Before continuing, Breaking Tunes (from earlier in the year) give us some details about the amazing Hannon:

“Rachel Mae Hannon is a soulful vocalist, multi-instrumentalist, songwriter and producer from Ireland. Her sound can be described as where pop meets neo-soul. The low range of her vocals and her eloquent use of harmonies as well as instrumentation gives her a distinctive soul pop sound.

Rachel has supported HAIM at the Trinity Summer Series, Tom Odell in The 3Olympia, and Eloise in The Sugar Club. She has also played the main stage at Sea Sessions 2022, Kaleidoscope 2022, and is set to play Indiependence 2022.

Her new single with video 'Work It Out' was released on the 6th of May.

PRESS:

"Vivid in its scale and scope, Rachel Mae Hannon’s lush sounding new single ‘Closer’ has an instantly attention grabbing vibe." - The Last Mixed Tape

“Rachel Mae Hannon is one to watch and the perfect soundtrack to a sunny day.” - Tara Kumar, RTÉ 2FM

"As calming as a sheet of morning mist over a lake, Rachel Mae Harmon's debut EP is sophisticated jazz/pop of the highest quality." - Tony Clayton-Lea Irish Times/Business Post)

‘You can hear strident heart-on-sleeve tones and sentiment on ‘Be In Love’. - Nialler9”.

I do adore her music and think that she could be a major star of the future. There is so much amazing and varied talent in Ireland right now. A remarkable nation that fosters unique and incredible potent artists, Rachel Mae Hannon is primed for glory. I think that her voice and talent is so dexterous, she could release a Jazz-tinged album or something soulful or smoky (in places, Hannon reminds me of Amy Winehouse, Lianne La Havas, Jorja Smith and Gemma Hayes). Someone who I could see interpreting some of her favourite songs or vintage classics in her own way, there is no telling just how far she can go! Breathe is a typically amazing cut from an artist who is growing in confidence and popularity. I am going to bring in some interviews that give us greater insight into the fabulous Rachel Mae Hannon. The first interview is quite ‘local’. IMAGE, chatted to her about her music, but also about her experiences in and around the beautiful and picturesque areas around Monaghan town. I have chosen some interesting sections:

“Home is … Killyvane, just outside Monaghan town. They say home is where the heart is – which I agree with – but home for me is also where you can make as many cups of tea as you want, take your shoes off when you feel like it, talk nonsense with your family, meet long term friends for walks, sing as loud as you can in the shower, and where you can write music in peace.

Where was your first home outside of your childhood home

My first home outside of my childhood home was student accommodation in UCD. I remember I was at the debs the night before my big move to Dublin, which did not help the nerves! I went to college without any of my close friends from school which I found so daunting at the time. But I can safely say that in this first year of living in Dublin, I made friends for life.

What was your first job?

My first job was as a face painter when I was in 3rd year of secondary school! After this, I worked in a newsagents in Monaghan called McConnon’s, then I worked in Roberto’s Coffee Shop, and more recently at the start of college, I was a piano teacher.

What’s your first/favourite memory in Monaghan?

One of my first and favourite memories of being in Monaghan is walking around Rossmore Park with my family. Even though I was that child that wanted to be carried absolutely everywhere, we used to have so much fun there – rolling down hills, having races (I never won), climbing trees, skimming stones, seeing calves being born and just generally exploring.

Where do you go to let your hair down?

In Monaghan, there are different bars where you can go out and have a pint and chats which I love doing when I go home. If I’m going for a pint with my family, we would usually go to Terry’s Bar. For gigs it is usually McKenna’s bar, and if I am going for a cocktail with a friend, I would go to the DV lounge. There is one nightclub in Monaghan town called Spy which I usually go to at Christmas time when I am home. The best thing about only having one club is that you know absolutely everyone will be there (some people think this is the worst thing about it!)

But besides going out and drinking, there are other places I go to let my hair down. The cinema, to one of the many coffee shops, for a walk around one of the local lakes. My favourite place of all is my piano room in my family home. This is where I can truly let my hair down, play piano, sing and write comfortably.

If you could buy any building in Monaghan, which would it be?

There are two buildings I would buy – Aviemore house in Monaghan town or Castle Leslie in Glaslough. Aviemore has a Victorian architecture feel to it that I love, it has a prominent hillside position with lights shining on it which I always admire when I drive past”.

I hope that Rachel Mae Hannon comes and plays in the U.K. I think there is a sizable chunk or love for her in London! Venues that would definitely house her. I could see her playing in Manchester, and maybe a Brighton gig. Perhaps it is a bit expensive to do a mini tour at the moment, though she has an impressive and highlight memorable collection of songs under her belt that can wow the crowds (the brilliant Hannon delivers an incredible set with her Neo-Soul/R&B gems). To that end, I want to flip to an interview from late last year from Last Mixed Tape. This was not too long after lockdown and the worst of the pandemic. She was asked how she got through the lockdowns and what it was like releasing her phenomenal E.P., Like It Is:

“What artist or album has gotten you through lockdown the most?

Tom Misch – Geography. I feel as though this album had a song for a lot of the emotions I was going through during lockdown. It had songs with the positive affirmation that you needed to pick yourself up when feeling low. For example,  ‘Disco Yes’ and ‘It Runs Through Me’ were perfect on the days that felt hopeless and monotonous. It also had slow-reflective songs like ‘Movie’ and ‘We’ve Come So Far’. As well as that, the album gave me such production and instrumentation inspiration while writing my own songs.

What’s influencing your music right now?

There are so many things influencing my music right now. I think live performance coming back into our lives is certainly one. Music has changed from 2D to 3D for me. At the beginning of lockdown, I thought only about writing and creating sounds in order to have an end result – a song to listen to. But since I have started back gigging, I see the music I create in a new light. It makes me think of how the songs can be altered or shaped into something completely new in a live setting – all while basing them off their original constructs. It showed me that each step of the process is just as important as the next. You can always add to the building blocks to develop a work – but it is up to you to know when to stop.

I also think social media is heavily influencing my music right now. Seeing other like-minded (or unlike-minded) artists broadens your horizons when it comes to listening, creating and performing.

As well as this, I think re-experiencing things for the first time in a while since restrictions have eased has influenced how I view myself and the wider world, and therefore how I create my music. Lockdown was a great time to be retrospective on life, and this inevitably influenced me and my taste and composition of music.

Tell us about your new E.P., Like It Is, what was the inspiration behind the record?

My debut EP Like It Is is all about understanding my own emotions and the importance of communicating these with others. The EP explores a journey of being true to myself, of opening up, and saying it ‘like it is’.

I wanted the EP to have a dream-like quality in its sound, to express the passing thoughts I had throughout making it. I also wanted to create a work that I enjoyed performing and listening to myself, and have it as something that I will always look back on and be proud of.

Each of the tracks on the EP are my emotional responses to certain situations caught in time –  I see the work as a mini time capsule of my life.

For example, the first track that was released from the EP was ‘Alright’. I wrote this song at a time of losing someone important in my life. Therefore the track focuses on our individual experiences of recovery, moving on, and our constant ability to rediscover ourselves.

The second single from the EP was ‘Closer’, and this is about the frustration of not being able to have physical contact with people (especially during lockdown). It is about the longing to get closer to people, yet the uncertainty of where people’s boundaries lie.

The unreleased tracks from the EP include ‘Tell Me’ and ‘Road’ (out on October 8th). These tracks explore the ideas of looking for reassurance in relationships and celebrating how we are somewhat sculpted by those we surround ourselves with”.

The scene is particular busy with young Pop, R&B, Soul and Indie artists. Each has their own sound and, though many stand out and have a clear future, I think others will struggle because they are not distinct enough or have the requisite edge or unique selling point. It is not their fault at all: the scene is so busy and bustling, it is very tough to nestle free from the rabble and acquire your own territory. There are some really promising artists who, sadly, fade away. There is no denying that Rachel Mae Hannon has a bright future. Songs like Breathe, Work It Out and Be in Love are all so interesting and rich. In the same way artists like Nadine Shah are moving into acting, I also think there is something about Hannon that means that she could move into acting (I forgot to mention that St. Vincent, Halsey and Alana Haim also act!). Her voice has a sultriness and soulfulness, but there is a youthful energy and spark coupled with something more vulnerable and emotive. Many new artists are too limited when it comes to their subject matter and their vocals. You listen to Rachel Mae Hannon, and you get the sense of someone who had many years of experience inside of her.

I feel Hannon has this breadth and versatility that means she has very few limits when it comes to her sound and where she might head. At the moment, I can detect a few of her influences on her sleeve, but there is also that deeply personal element to her music. As she plays more stages, releases more music and explores new territory, the sensational Irish artist will get international requests, festival dates and huge plaudits. As I say, I wonder if an album is in her mind. Maybe that will be something for next year, because there is definitely a lot of love from the press and fans right now! The fact Breathe is already acquiring so much applause and commendation shows that she is a name to watch. Both vibrant and beautiful, open yet with an air of mystery, go and follow Rachel Mae Hannon’s music now. Support her on social media and, if there are future live dates near you, do go and see her play. These are the early days, but all the signs point towards the wonderful Rachel Mae Hannon enjoying…

MANY wonderful years in music.

______________

Follow Rachel Mae Hannon

 PHOTO CREDIT: @seanmannion411

Instagram:

https://www.instagram.com/rachelmaehannon/

Spotify:

https://open.spotify.com/artist/4rwzqtDRqtNiXyoUuNl8Fc

TikTok:

https://www.tiktok.com/@rachelmaehannon

Twitter:

https://twitter.com/rachelmaehannon

YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/c/rachelmaehannon

Bandcamp:

https://rachelmaehannon.bandcamp.com/

Facebook:

https://www.facebook.com/rachelmaehannonmusic/

FEATURE: Turn That Heartbeat Over Again: Steely Dan's Can't Buy a Thrill at Fifty, and Putting the Legendary Band’s Music Back on Vinyl

FEATURE:

 

 

Turn That Heartbeat Over Again

 Steely Dan's Can't Buy a Thrill at Fifty, and Putting the Legendary Band’s Music Back on Vinyl

__________

IT was only a matter of…

 IN THIS PHOTO: Steely Dan circa 1972 (Donald Fagen can be seen at the top right, Walter Becker at the bottom far right)

a couple of weeks ago that I was bemoaning the lack of Steely Dan on vinyl. The group, led by Donald Fagen and Walter Becker, demand their music be played on that format. They haven’t literally said that but, as the musicianship is so extraordinary and precise and there is so much attention paid to the sound and production, this is the way their albums need to be heard. Until recently, you could get 1977’s Aja and one or two others new on vinyl. You could dig around Discogs or get a second-hand copy of their other albums, but it is a bit baffling the other studio albums have not been reissued. Whist there are not new editions with demos, outtakes, and extras on them, finally there is light at the end of the tunnel for those hoping for Steely Dan vinyl reissues. Starting with their phenomenal debut album, Can’t Buy a Thrill. I was never sure when this album was released in November 1972. In terms of the release date, I would assume the 4th, as this is when the fiftieth anniversary edition is out. You can pre-order is from Resident or Amazon.co.uk. It seems that, as I had hoped for all this time, the studio albums not freely available on vinyl (pretty much Aja and maybe their last two studio albums, Two Against Nature and Everything Must Go) are going to be reissued through this and next year. This article explains more:

“Steely Dan’s acclaimed debut album, Can’t Buy A Thrill is set to be reissued on vinyl through Geffen/UMe on November 4. The album has been remastered from the original tapes and will be available on 180-gram black vinyl.

Led by the songwriting and virtuoso musical duo of Walter Becker and Donald Fagen, Steely Dan released an extraordinary run of seven albums on ABC Records and MCA Records from 1972 through 1980. Filled with topline musicianship, clever and subversive wordplay, ironic humor, genius arrangements, and pop hits that outshone the Top 40 of its day, their records, which were as sophisticated and cerebral as they were inscrutable, were stylistically diverse, melding their love of jazz with rock, blues, and impeccable pop songcraft.

Steely Dan’s classic ABC and MCA Records catalog is now set to return to vinyl with an extensive yearlong reissue program of the band’s first seven records, which is being personally overseen by founding member Donald Fagen. The LPs, most of which haven’t been widely available since their original release, will be available on 33 1/3 RPM 180-gram black vinyl via Geffen/UMe, and as a limited-edition premium 45 RPM version on Ultra High-Quality Vinyl (UHQR) from Analogue Productions, the audiophile in-house reissue label of Acoustic Sounds. Analogue Productions will also release this series of titles on Super Audio CD (SACD).

The series will kick off on November 4 with the album that started it all, the band’s legendary 1972 debut LP, Can’t Buy A Thrill, now in its 50th anniversary year, featuring the band’s breakthrough hits, “Do It Again,” “Reelin’ in the Years,” and the recently viral “Dirty Work,” with original lead vocalist David Palmer.

Additional albums will roll out periodically throughout 2022 and 2023 and will include the band’s sprawling 1973 sophomore LP, Countdown to Ecstasy, with such standouts as “Bodhisattva,” “Show Biz Kids” and “My Old School,” sung by Donald Fagen who took over as lead vocalist; 1974’s jazzy Pretzel Logic, their first Top 10 album with the massive hit, “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number;” 1975’s swing-pop perfection Katy Lied, with highlights “Black Friday,” “Bad Sneakers” and “Doctor Wu,” and the addition of Michael McDonald on vocals; 1976’s guitar-driven The Royal Scam, featuring “Kid Charlemagne” and “The Fez;” 1977’s platinum-selling jazz-rock masterwork Aja, which includes the three hit singles – “Deacon Blues,” Peg” and “Josie” – and the elegant title cut; and their final album for MCA, and last for 20 years, 1980’s brilliant Gaucho, with “Hey Nineteen,” and “Time Out Of Mind,” featuring Mark Knopfler on guitar.

All albums are being meticulously remastered by Bernie Grundman from the original analog tapes except for Aja, which will be mastered from an analog, non-EQ’d, tape copy, and Gaucho, which will be sourced from a 1980 analog tape copy originally EQ’d by Bob Ludwig. (There’s no evidence the original tapes containing the flat mixes of Aja and Gaucho were delivered to the record label and it’s presumed the tapes no longer exist.) Lacquers for UMe’s standard 33 1/3 RPM 180-gram version will be cut by Alex Abrash at his renowned AA Mastering studio from high-resolution digital files of Grundman’s new masters and pressed at Precision. They will be housed in reproductions of the original artwork.

The 45 RPM UHQR version will be pressed at Analogue Productions’ Quality Record Pressings on 200-gram Clarity Vinyl, packaged in a deluxe box, and will include a booklet detailing the entire process of making a UHQR along with a certificate of inspection. Each UHQR is pressed, using hand-selected vinyl, with attention paid to every single detail of every single record. All of the innovations introduced by QRP that have been generating such incredible critical acclaim are applied to each UHQR. The 200-gram records feature the same flat profile that helped to make the original UHQR so desirable.

The Steely Dan vinyl reissue program follows last year’s release of Steely Dan’s Northeast Corridor: Steely Dan Live! and a live version of Donald Fagen’s acclaimed solo album, The Nightfly Live, which were both released via UMe on 180-gram vinyl, CD, and digital. The first live Steely Dan album in more than 25 years, Northeast Corridor: Steely Dan Live! was recorded across tour dates at New York City’s Beacon Theatre, The Met Philadelphia, and more, and showcases selections from Steely Dan’s extraordinary catalog of slinky grooves, sleek subversive lyrics, and infectious hits. Fagen’s The Nightfly Live was performed live by The Steely Dan Band”.

I will talk more about their other albums but, when it comes to important debuts, I think that Can’t Buy a Thrill is underrated. Of course, Aja is the classic Steely Dan album. Their third, Pretzel Logic, was released in 1974. This is when the group sounded like they were really in their stride. Although there are some flaws on their 1972 debut – too little of Donald Fagen singing (David Palmer led several songs as Fagen did not like the sound of his voice or felt it was a frontman) and the fact the album is a bit top-heavy -, Can’t Buy a Thrill is a classic. Dirty Work, Midnite Cruiser, Reelin’ in the Years, Do It Again and Turn That Heartbeat Over Again are songs I grew up with. Genuinely one of the greatest albums ever, this is what Pitchfork wrote in their 2019 review:

“After graduating, Fagen and Becker shopped their demos around various record labels, most of which laughed them out of their offices. Producer Gary Katz landed them a job as staff songwriters at the L.A. label ABC Dunhill, known for putting out records by North American rock bands like Steppenwolf and Three Dog Night. The work was steady but boring, and Katz soon encouraged the two musicians to form their own band. Fueled more by a distaste for the early ’70s rock milieu than anything, Becker and Fagen ganged up as Steely Dan, a band named for a rubber strap-on in William S. Burroughs’ surrealist novel Naked Lunch.

They must have had some idea of what they were about to become. “The newly formed amalgam [of Steely Dan] threatens to undermine the foundations of the rock power elite,” Fagen wrote under the pseudonym Tristan Fabriani in the liner notes to the band’s 1972 debut, Can’t Buy a Thrill (they got the title from Bob Dylan, one of the few contemporaneous American musicians they could stand). “Amalgam” is right; rather than adhere to a standard rock formula, Steely Dan overloaded their sessions with players who could do Latin jazz or hot electric solos. They were a band who wanted more of everything: more guitarists, more drummers, more singers, spiraling out in a fever dream of excess. Fagen and Becker were the only writers in the room, but the credits for Thrill number a dozen musicians on instruments as far-flung as electric sitar and flugelhorn. Having escaped the sterile confines of commercial pop songwriting, Steely Dan were hell-bent on making a mess.

On paper, Thrill sounds as thorny as Italian prog, the product of a bunch of noodlers fiercely guarding their niche. But the record’s core hums with Fagen and Becker’s meticulous admiration for everything that makes pop tick. Bitter-mouthed contrarians in interviews, they wrote songs every bit as charming and delectable to the ear as the peers they claimed to despise. The members of Steely Dan appeared to take themselves as seriously as long-suffering jazz purists in a world drunk on three-chord ditties, and then they shot up the pop charts with sunny, flippant ear candy-like “Reelin’ in the Years.”

As badly as they felt the need to differentiate themselves from mainstream rock’n’roll, it was always a part of Steely Dan. They claimed the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, and Dylan as influences before doing so became an outrageous cliché. Echoes of Zombies’ psychedelia and Beach Boys’ sunshine also waft through Thrill. Fagen and Becker stockpiled their debut with hooks aimed straight at your dopamine receptors, with vocal harmonies and gleaming guitar lines braided tight. The weird was there, embryonic, waiting to unfurl on later, more adventurous albums. But it curled itself up in service of pleasure.

Take “Dirty Work,” basically an Eagles song, or the “na-na-nas” of the post-hippie strutter “Change of the Guard”: No matter how detached they felt from it, Steely Dan put out pop music. They tried to make a ruckus and ended up polishing gems for broad consumption. “We’re a strange band y’know. The music is all WRONG,” Fagen told Melody Maker in 1974. “Our songwriting process is not unlike the creation of junk sculpture.” If they identified with the gritty combines of mid-century artist Robert Rauschenberg, the songs they turned out were more like the sardonic baubles of Jeff Koons: fun, often hilarious, easy on the senses, and full of an unwavering disregard for the concept of authenticity.

Decades into their career, Fagen and Becker would claim the early hits as Trojan horses for complex musical ideas. “It was better to have our songs pass as pop songs and then have whatever else we wanted in them afterwards,” Becker said in 1995, as if the shimmering surface of Thrill were merely an excuse to smuggle their real musical passions into the mainstream. But the cresting harmonies and the guitar solos on “Reelin’” don’t sound like a front. They sound like a blast, like a group of young and insecure jazz dweebs egging each other on until they’ve made something so absurd even they can’t deny its allure.

Steely Dan crouched behind irony for much of their early career, and their popular legacy remains steeped in it. The hits from Thrill, “Do It Again” and “Reelin’ in the Years,” blare out from classic rock stations right next to Black Sabbath, Yes, and all the other peers they shit-talked at the time. Their flair for melodrama, humor, and quick compositional turns got sucked right up into the most vapid (and delightful) of late ’70s hair metal hits, like Journey’s “Wheel in the Sky” and Styx’s “Renegade.” They were so skeptical of rock music they ended up gilding it, breaking it down, and piecing it back together strangely enough for it to approach perfection”.

I am glad that we are getting a fiftieth anniversary release of Can’t Buy a Thrill. It is a shame that, like with The Beatles’ albums, there are not some alternate takes and a larger release, but the fact that we can now get Can’t Buy a Thrill on vinyl is a treat we have been denied for a while! Also getting the other studio albums on vinyl is going to be something every fan can support. Many might have the vinyl copies from years ago, but I did worry that a lack of vinyl albums might mean many are missing out. Introducing that incredible music to new listeners is so vital. Vinyl is the best format for Steely Dan’s music, as you can keep those L.P.s and pass them down through the generations. I have been longing to have Can’t Buy a Thrill on vinyl. It is a relief that this will now happen and, through the next year and a bit, the remainder of the catalogue not widely available on vinyl is going to be coming out. A wonderful group (or duo if you feel it is Donald Fagen and Walter Becker with a rotating collection of musicians), Steely Dan are among the most important significant artists ever. Their 1972 debut still sounds phenomenal to this day! Steely Dan fans around the world are happy that, on 4th November, Can’t Buy a Thrill will be available on vinyl…

AFTER all of this time.

FEATURE: From Blackburn to London… Celebrating Fifty-Five Year of BBC Radio 1

FEATURE:

 

 

From Blackburn to London…

IN THIS PHOTO: Tony Blackburn at the BBC in 1967 

Celebrating Fifty-Five Year of BBC Radio 1

__________

I wanted to mark an important anniversary…

 IN THIS PHOTO: One of BBC Radio 1’s finest current broadcasters, Clara Amfo/PHOTO CREDIT: Harper’s Bazaar

that I hope the BBC will mark. Of course, on 18th October, the BBC turns one hundred. Before that, one of the BBC’s cornerstones turns fifty-five. I am referring to BBC Radio 1, 2, 3 and 4. They came to air on 30th September, 1967. What a wonderful period in history to air your first broadcast! The likes of The Beatles were releasing some of the world’s best music, and it was just after the first Summer of Love (that took place in Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco). It was a time of political unrest and protest. Many in the U.S. objecting to the war in Vietnam. In the U.K., things were a little less turbulent. Queen Elizabeth II was on the throne. Labour’s Harold Wilson was re-elected Prime Minister in 1966. That same year, England lifted the World Cup for the only time. It was a contrasting time, but one of the excitement in Britain. To launch these different radio stations on 30th September must have been hugely exciting! They have all grown through the years but, in terms of inception, BBC Radio 1 was the biggest talking point. In terms of rebranding and launching, this is what happened on 30th September, 1967:

·       “BBC Radio 1 was launched as a pop music station, initially on a part-time basis.

·       The BBC Light Programme (launched 29 July 1945) was renamed BBC Radio 2 and broadcast easy listening music, folk, jazz, light entertainment and sport.

·       The evening BBC Third Programme (launched 29 September 1946) and daytime BBC Music Programme (launched 22 March 1965) were merged under the heading of BBC Radio 3, although the Third Programme kept its separate title until 3 April 1970.

·       The BBC Home Service (launched 1 September 1939) became BBC Radio 4”.

Whilst it important to mark the name change and formation of four of the BBC’s radio stations (5 Live was founded in the 1990s; BBC Radio 6 Music in 2002), BBC Radio 1 was the one that started its life in 1967. It is interesting looking at a photo with the original line-up of presenters (“This is the original DJ's and Presenters of Radio 1 from the 30th September 1967 . First on the air with The Breakfast show Tony Blackburn top left next to Jimmy Young and Kenny Everett. A few others I recognize are middle row Terry Wogan. Bottom Row left to right Pete Murray, Ed Stewart . Middle Mike Raven and on the end John Peel. Directly above him, I think is Bob Holness”). On that morning of 30th September, 1967, Tony Blackburn broadcast the first BBC Radio 1 breakfast show from London. You can see a photo of Blackburn launching that show, and you can hear that broadcast below. Not knowing whether the station would continue into 1968 must have been quite strange. Fifty-five years later, and the station is still going strong! In terms of popularity, it is the third most-listened-to BBC station behind BBC Radio 2 and BBC Radio 4. I wonder if Tony Blackburn and his colleagues think back to 30th September, 1967 and what was to come! A hugely interesting time in British cultural history, I can only imagine what the broadcaster and listeners alike were thinking! It is strangely emotional listening to Tony Blackburn deliver his opening link. Of course, he is still with the station and works at BBC Radio 2 and BBC Radio London.

Given that a lot of focus will be on the BBC’s centenary next month, I wonder whether the BBC Radio networks, especially BBC Radio 1, will mark the fifty-fifth anniversary. Not only did this new station make its steps into the world., but the renaming of the stations is also crucial. That sense of unity and consistency. Each station has (and still does) have its own identity, but that has only increased in the years since. As music has diversified so much since 1967, it means that BBC Radio 1, 2, 3 and 4 have their own schedule and demographic. For BBC Radio 1, I think it broadly similar to 1967, in the sense they focus on the best Pop music of the day. Taking in EDM and other genres, it is a station primed more for a younger audience. In terms of groundbreakers, aside from that original line-up, I think Annie Nightingale really opened doors. She still works for the station amazingly, but she joined BBC Radio 1 in February 1970. Nightingale became the first ever female D.J. on BBC Radio 1 when she joined the station. A pioneer, I think that she is responsible for changes (although slow) happening on stations that were largely male-dominated. Now, I think some of the most important, interesting and talented voices on BBC Radio 1 are women. From Sian Eleri through to Arielle Free, Clara Amfo, Adele Roberts, Charlie Tee, and Nat O’Leary, this incredible talent, diversity and strength is, in part, because of Annie Nightingale! Of course, every broadcaster and producer at BBC Radio 1 is equal and special, but I wanted to nod to the incredible women at the station.

 IN THIS PHOTO: Sian Eleri/PHOTO CREDIT: Insanity Group

Of course, BBC Radio 1 now has sister stations. IXtra (with great broadcasters like Nadia Jae) sits alongside Radio 1 Dance and Radio 1 Relax. The past few weeks have been very different for the stations due to the death of The Queen. Having to adopt a more respectful, relaxed and chilled soundtrack, things are starting to go back to normal. I have been listening to BBC Radio 1 since the 1990s, and I discovered so much great new music through broadcaster such as Annie Nightingale and Annie Mac (who now occasionally works at BBC Radio 6 Music). As part of the BBC marking its one hundredth anniversary, it has provided a timeline of BBC Radio 1. That 30th September first show has gone down in history:

“Tony Blackburn opened Radio 1 on 30 September 1967 at 7.00am, with Robin Scott, then Controller Radio 1, standing over him! The station set out with a blank sheet of paper to create a new style of radio, a 'DJ style', by that time heard only on the pirate radio stations, which had recently been forced to close”.

Blackburn played "Flowers in the Rain" by The Move as the first track. On air next was Leslie Crowther of Crackerjack fame, then a five minute quiz with Duncan Johnson. The next big music show of the morning was a lively mix of tracks with Keith Skues, who can still be heard on air, late night on local radio”.

Annie Nightingale was the first woman on the station in 1970. In 1984, The Ranking Miss P (a.k.a. Margaret Anderson) was the first Black female DJ on Radio 1. By 1995, Radio 1 was the first to go digital, launching on DAB that autumn. The 1990s, it seemed, marked the biggest shift for BBC Radio 1:

“Matthew Bannister Radio 1 Controller from 93-98, was famous for attracting a completely new audience to the station.

Bannister arrived with a remit to radically shake up Radio 1. The station had kept its loyal audience since the 1960s, but by 1993, the output was thought to sound old, tired and worn out. Bannister terminated the contracts of 8 of the longest serving DJ’s and banned any music recorded before 1990 from being played. New DJ’s were added, and the station started to attract a newer younger audience, but the shift to a new order was painful. The DJ’s in jokes were out, as the cool 90s progressed.

April 1995 was Chris Evan’s debut on Radio 1. Sitting in the Breakfast Show hot seat, he turned the programme upside down.

His early morning slot was packed with innuendo which for many critics went too far. He encouraged two female guests to perform a strip show live on the programme, and humiliated some of his team on air, two examples from a list of edgy items. After a tasteless joke about holocaust victim Anne Frank, a string of complaints followed. In January 1997 he asked for a four day week, sparing Fridays to work on his Channel 4 TV show. BBC management rejected this and he left the station”.

From the modern crop of brilliant broadcasters such as Greg James, Arielle Free, Sian Eleri, Vick and Jordan, Matt and Mollie, Sarah Story and beyond, there is such a diverse and hugely talented line-up on the station now. On 18th October, the BBC turns one hundred. I wanted to mark another big anniversary before then. One of its most popular radio stations started life fifty-five years ago on 30th September. Led by the legendary Tony Blackburn, BBC Radio 1 has grown through the years. I hope that something happens for their birthday – even if things have been muted as of late out of respect for The Queen. Still a go-to when it comes to incredible live performances, the hottest new artists and the best modern tracks around, there has been evolution. Offering a wider remit of music and a more diverse line-up of D.J.s – and, as I said, one where women are very much at the front -, I know that the station will make it to its one hundredth birthday. That is quite a scary thought! Now, it is a slick and huge station that has a big crew ensuring that the schedule runs smoothly. Back in 1967, things were not quite like that! On that morning of 30th September, 1967, Tony Blackburn ushered in a new era for the BBC. With such professionalism and passion – qualities that he exhibits, maintains, and augments to this very day -, the world said hello to BBC Radio 1. Despite some problems, the listening figures were huge. Launched to meet the demand for music generated by pirate radio stations, when the average age of the U.K. population was twenty-seven, it is fascinating to see how the empire has grown in terms of its demographic and mandate! A truly remarkable station that made its way into homes on 30th September, 1967, I wanted to wish the station…

A very happy fifty-fifth anniversary.

FEATURE: Before Today: The Remarkable Tracey Thorn at Sixty

FEATURE:

 

 

Before Today

 The Remarkable Tracey Thorn at Sixty

__________

ONE of my favourite artists ever…

 IN THIS PHOTO: Tracey Thorn with Ben Watt as Everything But the Girl in 1984/PHOTO CREDIT: PA/LFI

the iconic, fantastic, and inspiring Tracey Thorn is sixty on 26th September. One half of Everything But the Girl (with Ben Watt), I wanted to mark her upcoming birthday with a playlist featuring some of her wonderful songwriting and vocals as part of that duo, in addition to some of her solo material. A wonderful producer and talent, I would recommend people buy this year’s My Rock ‘n’ Roll Friend:

“The indie pop icon and bestselling author of Bedsit Disco Queen and Another Planet gifts the reader with a window into her friendship with Go-Betweens drummer Lindy Morrison in this characteristically witty and affectionate volume.

In 1983, backstage at the Lyceum in London, Tracey Thorn and Lindy Morrison first met. Tracey's music career was just beginning, while Lindy, drummer for The Go-Betweens, was ten years her senior. They became confidantes, comrades and best friends, a relationship cemented by gossip and feminism, books and gigs and rock 'n' roll love affairs.

Morrison - a headstrong heroine blazing her way through a male-dominated industry - came to be a kind of mentor to Thorn. They shared the joy and the struggle of being women in a band, trying to outwit and face down a chauvinist music media.

In My Rock 'n' Roll Friend Thorn takes stock of thirty-seven years of friendship, teasing out the details of connection and affection between two women who seem to be either complete opposites or mirror images of each other. This important book asks what people see, who does the looking, and ultimately who writes women out of - and back into – history”.

Before coming to a playlist with some of the very best Everything But the Girl and solo cuts, AllMusic provide some biography about one of our very best and most important artists and writers. I hope that Thorn gets a load of love on 26th September:

“One of the most enduring English singer/songwriters, Tracey Thorn began making music with Stern Bops and then, more notably, Marine Girls, a minimalist pop group that released a pair of albums inspired by Young Marble Giants and the Raincoats. While Marine Girls were active, Thorn released A Distant Shore, a relatively moody, if similarly skeletal solo album, on Cherry Red in 1982. Around that time, she met Ben Watt -- who was also signed to Cherry Red -- and formed a partnership as Everything But the Girl. From 1984 through 1999, Thorn and Watt released ten albums that shifted from indie pop to slick sophisti-pop to downtempo club music. Additionally, Thorn appeared on recordings by the likes of the Style Council, the Go-Betweens, and Massive Attack. Shortly after having twin daughters together, she and Watt put EBtG on ice, as Watt DJ'ed and operated his Buzzin' Fly label while Thorn stayed home with the children. They had a third child, a boy, in 2001.

After several years away from music, Thorn began writing again and recorded her second solo album, Out of the Woods, which was released in early 2007. Instead of working with Watt, she collaborated with a number of producers, including Ewan Pearson, Charles Webster, Cagedbaby, Sasse, and Martin Wheeler.

A year later, Thorn and Watt married. Pearson returned as sole producer of Thorn's 2010 effort Love and Its Opposite, released in the U.K. by Watt's Strange Feeling label. In 2012, Thorn released Tinsel and Lights, a holiday album featuring songs by contemporary composers. A well-received memoir, Bedsit Disco Queen: How I Grew Up and Tried to Be a Pop Star, was published in 2013. Following that were a couple low-key releases, including the two-song Molly Drake Songs (recorded with Watt for a BBC 4 documentary about the mother of Nick Drake) and "Under the Ivy" (a Kate Bush cover). Thorn was sought out by screenwriter and director Carol Morley to provide the soundtrack for The Falling, a drama that debuted at the BFI London Film Festival in 2014. Just prior to the film's wider release the following April, Thorn's contribution -- eight short songs -- was issued as Songs from the Falling.

Thorn's career as a writer kept going strong. In 2014, she started writing a column for The New Statesman and in 2015 published Naked at the Albert Hall, a book delving into the art of singing. Her own voice was heard again later that year on a compilation of her work as a solo artist: Solo: Songs and Collaborations 1982-2015. She also appeared as a guest vocalist on John Grant's album Grey Tickles, Black Pressure. She stayed quiet on the musical front for the next few years, only appearing on Jens Lekman's 2017 album Life Will See You Now. She had begun writing songs for another album in 2016, however, and in 2017, began recording them with producer Ewan Pearson, bassist Jenny Lee, and drummer Stella Mozgawa (both of whom play in Warpaint). Along the way, vocalists Shura and Corinne Bailey Rae stopped by to add contributions. The record, simply titled Record, was issued in March of 2018 by Merge in North America and by Unmade Road everywhere else”.

To salute Tracey Thorn ahead of her sixtieth birthday, I wanted to highlight her brilliance. One of the most distinct and remarkable voices the music world has ever produced, I do hope that Thorn releases some more music in the future. It only leaves me to wish her…

MANY happy returns!

FEATURE: Through the Fog: Kate Bush’s Magnificent and Ethereal The Sensual World

FEATURE:

 

 

Through the Fog

Kate Bush’s Magnificent and Ethereal The Sensual World

__________

AS Kate Bush’s…

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

sixth studio, The Sensual World, is thirty-three on 17th October, I am going to do a run of features about it. November is busy with album anniversaries, and the only studio album marking its birthday in October is The Sensual World. To start, I want to do a general feature. A couple promotional interviews Bush conducted around the release of The Sensual World in 1989, a look at where critics and music publications rank the album (compared to the rest of her catalogue), and a rounding up from me. Before that, a little bit of detail about its chart position – and some words from Kate Bush about The Sensual World. Reaching number two in the U.K., this album features three tracks on the album feature backing vocals by the Trio Bulgarka. I think they add so much. It was the first time that Bush had worked with the Bulgarian vocal ensemble. She would do so again for 1993’s The Red Shoes. After releasing her most successful and popular album, Hounds of Love, in 1985, there would have been this huge anticipation and excitement four years later. The Sensual World’s title track came out in September, so the public got a taste of the album and Bush’s new direction before the album arrived. Recording largely at her home studio (the same one that was used for Hounds of Love), there was also some recording at Windmill Lane (Dublin, Ireland). I love the fact Bush kept at home – and, as she travelled to Ireland to record bits of Hounds of Love – and did not rely too much on machines and technology this time.

Perhaps less busy and layered in terms of compositions, Bush felt a bit overwhelmed by the machines around her and she wanted to focus more on the songs. The Sensual World was originally released on L.P., C.D., tape, and MiniDisc. In 2011, the album was released on the Fish People label. I do hope that The Sensual World comes back out on cassette. I have it on vinyl, and I think it is one of these albums I will keep forever. I might pop in a review of the album when rounding up. Here is how Kate Bush felt about the album when asked in a couple of different interviews:

“Other people have said to me that they think this album is very dark, although for me I think it's my happiest album really. I find some of the tracks quite funny where other people say they find them scary. Although I have a dark sense of humour, maybe it is a subconscious thing that just goes into my music, because I think when I was writing this album that was perhaps something I was feeling a little - a sense of being a bit scared. Maybe it comes out in the music. I do think it's a very big self- therapy thing now - the more I work on an album the more I think it's almost a process for me to try and heal myself, have a look at myself.

 Do you know what I mean? Actually a very selfish thing in a way, but I think art is. I do think what artistic people are trying to do is work through their problems through their art - look at themselves, confront all these things. (...) It's not that the album is written about me, not that it is autobiographical, but it is the most direct process I've used for an album. It's in my own studio and I had a lot of time so as not to be under pressure by outside forces. I've recorded the whole album with Del so it's just myself and Del in a very close relationship working together very intensely and it was hard for me to write this album. To actually write the songs was very difficult, and for the first time really, I went through a patch where I just couldn't write - I didn't know what I wanted to say. (...) Everything seemed like rubbish - you know? It seemed to have no meaning whatsoever. Somehow I managed to get a sense of some meaningfulness, and that's why (...) to me now, albums are perhaps a way of helping myself, but maybe helping other people too. To work through my problems maybe will help other people too. To work through my problems maybe will help other people to work through their problems. Maybe the meaningfulness of art is that once you've got over your selfish work within it, you can give it to other people and hopefully it might at least make them smile or something. (Roger Scott, Interview. Radio 1 (UK), 14 October 1989)

I think this album for me, unlike the last album, say, Hounds of Love, where I saw that as two sides - one side being conceptual - this album is very much like short stories for me. Ten short stories that are just saying something different in each one and it was a bit like trying to paint the pictures accordingly. Each song has a different personality and so they each a need little bit of something here, a little bit of that there - just like people, you know, some people you can't walk up to because you know they're a bit edgy first thing in the morning. So you have to come up sideways to them, you know, and it's kind of like how the songs are too. They have their own little personalities, and if it doesn't want you to do it, it won't let you. (The VH-1 interview, January 1990)”.

I won’t say too much before each interview, other than to say there were a few things from each that I loved. The first, from Melody Maker in October 1989, is great. Bush spoke with Steve Sutherland. I have selected some parts of the interview that I found especially interesting:

“It took Kate Bush four years to make The Sensual World, and we've been given an hour to talk about it. Great.

I think about telling Kate how surprised I am she's so small, or how shocked I am she smokes, but time is not on my side so I decide, instead, to tell her how delighted I am that she's come to the conclusion that the past and the future aren't beyond changing. The album sounds so optimistic in an era when absolutely everything appears to be falling apart.

<Kate naturally loves this interpretation, but the fact is that the album is certainly as loaded with dark and pessimistic images and ideas as it is with optimistic ones. In IED's opinion Sutherland has swotted up on what Kate has been saying recently, and is now rephrasing a lot of her own preferences in conversation with her, as though they were his own ideas rather than borrowed ones, precisely in order to ingratiate Kate. It works, and it may even be a good idea, since the other methods of engaging her in conversation have seldom produced great publishable material.>

"Oh, thank you! Thank you so much! That's really how I wanted it to be but, talking to a lot of friends and that, they feel it's a dark album."

I didn't think that at all...

"Oh, great."

...I thought some of the situations were dark, but the way they're resolved is optimistic. <What about the way Heads, We're Dancing is "resolved"? What about the way Deeper Understanding is "resolved"? What about the way Never Be Mine is "resolved"?>

"Oh, that's great. Thank you. Yes. That's really great. I'm so pleased you heard it like that. You see, for a lot of people it's so complicated to listen to, and that worries me, because I like the idea of people being able to listen to it easily and...uh...I don't want to confuse people but, for some people, it's very hard for them to even take it in, let alone sort of get anything out of it.

"I do think art should be simple, you see. It shouldn't be complicated, and I think, in some ways, this has come across a bit complicated." <This is one of Kate's "new" ideas--opinions which she has not really made prior to 1989, but which she has been repeating in multiple interviews since the release of the new album. IED finds it highly intriguing, because it is so vague and so patently at odds with the way her own art has always been--and continues to be--made.>

Maybe that's because, for me, the album's about relationships--the relationship between language and emotion, the relationship between language and music, the relationship between emotion and music and how all this expresses, or more crucially fails to express, the relationship between people. And relationships, as we all know, are never ever easy.

"How interesting. Could you give me an example?"

Well, in Love and Anger you say, "It's so deep I don't think that I can speak about it," as if language betrays your aims, and then you go on to say, "We could be like two strings beating/Speaking in sympathy," which suggests that music, rather than language, comes closest to expressing our emotions.

"Yeah! Actually, Love and Anger was an incredibly difficult song for me to write and, when people ask me what it's about, I have to say I don't know because it's not really a thought-out thing. It was so difficult for me to write that: in some ways, I think, <it's> about the process of writing the song: I can't find the words; I don't know what to say. This thing of a big, blank page, you know: it's so big...It's like it doesn't have edges around it, you could just start anywhere."

She studies her socks for a moment.

"Yes...um...I don't think I was consious of it, but it's something I'm aware of when writing songs. <Has IED missed something here, or did Kate just contradict the first half of this sentence in the second half?> There's such a lot you need to say through words. And it's a beautiful thing, language: actually being able to put words together and say something...maybe say two things in one line. But, like you say, it misses the mark so often."

You created your own language, too, don't you? It seems when you're at your most sexual, your most emotional, you emit...the only word I can find for it is noises, but that sounds too crude. Your "Mmh yes" on The Sensual World (the most heavenly sound ever on Top of the Pops ) and your "Do-do-do-do-do" in Heads, We're Dancing are like cries that language has deserted you or, more positively, an attempt on your behalf to merge words and music, to create a new emotional language from a combination of meaning and sound. I remember you used to go "Wow!" when words failed you. It shivers me. It's thrilling.

"Well, I think that's a lovely thing to say...Yes, often words are sounds for me. I get a sound and I throw it in a song and I can't turn it into a word later because it's actually stated itself too strongly as a sound. Like, in Love and Anger, the bit that goes 'Mmh, mmh, mmh' was there instantly and, in itself, it's really about not being able to express it differently. Do you know what I mean?"

Indeed I do. Liz of the Cocteau Twins does it all the time. She never sings a lyric as such, it's all noises. <Actually this is not true. Fraser has admitted that she picks real words and names from dictionaries, but simply throws them together without a narrative foundation.> But somehow, the way you burst language, the tension that leads to the victory of sound over sense whips your music into another dimension. It's the frustration that gives your songs dynamic, and the way you remedy it that makes them attractive. Most of the Sensual World LP seems to be saying, " This can be worked out ." <IED does not agree. Fully half the songs on the album simply do not bear this claim out.>

Between a Man and a Woman is almost a soap opera situation, with you trying to drive off any external interference which might ruin the chances of a relationship's natural growth. It's like you're saying we live in a fast culture--fast food, fast-edit TV, disposable pop, disposable sex--and, if we don't get instant gratification, we're not interested. You seem angry and determined.

"Well, that's nice, because when people ask me about this song, in terms of having to talk about it, it's rubbish. But yes, I think you're right, it is perhaps about how you actually have that choice sometimes, whether to interfere or not. <This was not Sutherland's idea at all, but Kate's.> You know, there's this tendency to want to leap in and take over and control: 'Oh, I know best!'; when I think a relationship is a very delicate balance: it's very easily tipped, and then needs to be refound again”.

I will round up with an interview for an album that many fans (though not critics) to be outside of her top five. A different album to Hounds of Love when it comes to sound and lyrics, maybe some fans wanted something more similar to Hounds of Love. The Sensual World is magnificent. Bush spoke with Q’s Phil Sutcliffe in November 1989. Here are some extracts:

“This time round, apart from dancing and running, the panacea was the garden at the house she and Del moved into three years ago in Eltham, Southeast London (brother Jay and family live next door; her parents' home still only half an hour away). "I sometimes I think I might as well just be a brain and a big pair of ears on legs, stuck in front of a mixing desk," she says. "But when I took that break from The Sensual World I really got into gardening. I mean, it's literally a very down-to-earth thing, isn't it? Real air. Away from the artificial light. Very therapeutic."

Another renewable source of inspiration has been exotic instrumentation, usually provided by a visit to Dublin and various members of the staunchly traditional folk troupe, The Chieftains, or by turning to brother Paddy (who specialised in making medieval instruments at the London College of Furniture and will knock out the odd koto or strumento de porco as and when). But for The Sensual World she's leavened the Celtic skirl with a bit of Balkan. She first heard the Trio Bulgarka in '86 and was suitably astonished. A year later it dawned on her that their full-throated harmonies might suit her songs. Connections were made through Joe Boyd of Hannibal Records, their UK label, and Kate flew out to Sofia for an entrancing experience of world music.

"They couldn't speak a word of English and I couldn't speak a word of Bulgarian," she says. "Everything went through translators and it didn't matter at all. Lovely working with women, and especially them, they're very affectionate. We tended to communicate through cuddles rather than words. In fact, we could get on perfectly well without the translators. At one point we were talking away in the studio when the translator walked in and we all shut up because she'd suddenly made us self-conscious about what we were doing." The Trio can be heard on three tracks, including the strikingly unlikely setting of Deeper Understanding, a very modern-world song about an alienated woman and her relationship with her computer.

"This is definitely my most personal, honest album," she says. "And I think it's my most *feminine* album, in that I feel maybe I'm not trying to prove something in terms of a woman in a man's world -- God, here we go!" She seems to be wary of provoking a heavy debate about feminism. "On The Dreaming and Hounds Of Love, particularly from a production standpoint, I wanted to get a lot more weight and power, which I felt was a very male attitude. In some cases it worked very well, but.. . perhaps this time I felt braver as a woman, not trying to do the things that men do in music."

The Fog is a brave song. It co-stars Kate's dad on spoken vocals intoning with fatherly/doctorly reassurance, "Just put your feet down child/'Cos you're all grown-up now".

"I started with the idea of a relationship in deep water and thought I could parallel that with learning to swim, the moment of letting go," she says. "When my dad was teaching me to swim he'd hold both my hands, then say, Now, let go. So I would, then he'd take two paces back and say, Right, swim to me, and I'd be, Oo-er, blub, blub, blerb. But I though it was such a beautiful image of the father and child, all wrapped up in the idea of really loving someone, but letting them go, because that's a part of real love, don't you think, the letting go?"

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

So it's personal about Kate and her father then. It sounds as though it might be personal about her and Del too.

"Yes, it does, doesn't it?" She laughs, really amused by her professionally evasive reply. "Have you ever watched Woody Allen being interviewed? Obviously his films are very personal and when the interviewer asks him the 'Has this happened to you then?' question, he's all.. ." She cowers back into her chair, crosses and uncrosses her legs, thrashes about like a speared fish. "Then he'll say, Uh, well, no, I'm just acting out a role. It's ironic, but it's much easier to speak about very personal things to lots of people through a song, a poem or a film than it is to confront the world with them through someone asking questions. Maybe you worry because it's going to be indirectly reported."

Kate Bush leads a quiet, fairly limited life so her options on subject matter my be relatively restricted. Although she has ventured into political issues with Breathing (nuclear war) and The Dreaming (Aborigine rights), she generally declares her own ignorance and refrains from writing songs that would only prove it. But she will often borrow a story and make it her own -- from books (Wuthering Heights, obviously, and Cloudbusting, from Peter Reich's memoir of his father called A Book Of Dreams), TV (Pull Out The Pin was inspired by a documentary about the Viet Cong), or films (the idea for Get Out Of My House came from The Shining).

However, it was a story told by an older friend that sowed the seeds for Heads We're Dancing, a near-disco piece about a night out with Hitler. "Years ago this friend of mine went to a dinner and spent the whole evening chatting to this fascinating guy, incredibly charming, witty, well-read, but never found out his name," she says. "The next day he asked someone else who'd been there who it was. 'Oh, didn't you know? That's Oppenheimer, the man who invented the atomic bomb.' My friend was horrified because he thought he should have given the guy hell, attacked him, he didn't know what.

"But the point was one moment this person is charming, then when you find out who he is, he's completely different. So I thought, Who's the worst person you could possibly meet in those circumstances? Hitler! And the story developed. A woman at a dance before the war and this guy comes up to her tossing a coin with this cocky chat-up line, Heads we're dancing. She doesn't recognise him until she sees his face in the paper later on and then she's devastated. She thinks that if she'd known she might have been able to *get* him and change the course of history. But he was a person who fooled a tremendous number of people and I don't think they can be blamed. It worries me a bit that this song could be received wrongly, though."

It could well be that the musically extended family and extended home of Kate Bush even embrace her feelings for her songs themselves. She has an intimacy with them, a distinctive candour about sensuality and sexuality to which her present album title track is something of a natural conclusion.

It passed more or less unnoticed in her early days that she was casually breaking taboos in every other song. Tricky items on her agenda included incest (brother and sister in The Kick Inside, woman and young boy in The Infant Kiss), homosexuality (Wow, Kashka From Baghdad) and period pains (Strange Phenomena, Kites [sic]). Her sympathetic, non-judgmental approach was probably one of the less obvious reasons why she appealed so strongly to both sexes, but she would occasionally remark that she was grateful the tabloids didn't read lyric sheets. Otherwise she could have been up to her neck in bishops and Mrs. Whitehouse demanding that the nation's children be protected from this filth.

In fact, the moment anyone other than a fan thinks they've spotted a hint of sex in her songs she becomes very hesitant. Once, when she was working on Breathing, an EMI executive walked in to be greeted by the hypnotic "out-in, out-in, out-in" chant. Taking a firm hold on the wrong end of the stick, he asked her how she could even dream of releasing this pornography. The possibility of such gross misunderstandings shakes her faith in the "purity" -- a favourite word -- of what she's doing. But not enough to make her back off.

"Don't you think Art is a tremendous sensual-sexual expression? I feel that energy often.. . the driving force is probably not the right way to put it," she says, still trying to skirt the fnaarr-fnaarr potential of the topic.

Whether or not her speculation about the nature of Art is on the money, she made her own experience of the creative process quite clear with the cover of Never For Ever. A cornucopia of fantastic and real, beautiful and vile creatures -- the products of her imagination -- is shown swirling our from beneath her skirt. At the time, thinking about this and the steamy, masturbatory atmosphere of many of the songs she wrote in her teens such as The Man With The Child In His Eyes and Saxophone Song, she said: "It's not such an open thing for women to be physically attracted to the male body and fantasise about it. I can't understand that because to me the male body is absolutely beautiful.. . Physical masturbation, it's a feeling so bottled up you have to relieve it, as if you were crying."

The Sensual World is a song that translates the old ache to a different level -- with the invaluable help of James Joyce. "I had a rhythm idea with a synth line I took home to work on one night," she says. "While I was playing it this repeated *Yes* came to me and made me think of Molly Bloom's speech right at the end of Ulysses -- which I *have* actually read all through! I went downstairs and read it again, this unending sentence punctuated with 'yeses', fantastic stuff, and it was uncanny, it fitted the rhythm of my song." (The last lines of Molly Bloom's great stream of consciousness read: "then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.")

Although to Kate "it felt like it was meant to happen", when she applied through "official channels" (presumably the Joyce estate) for permission to use it, she was refused. But she wasn't to be deflected. "I tried to write it like Joyce," she says, smiling in self-mockery. "The rhythm at least I wanted to keep. Obviously I couldn't do his style. It became a song about Molly Bloom, the character, stepping out of the page -- black and white, two-dimensional, you see -- and into the real world, the sensual world. Touching things." She declaims exaggeratedly. "The grass underfoot! The mountain air! I know it sounds corny, but it's about the whole sensual experience, this wonderfully human thing. . ."

And lines like "his spark took life in my hand"?

"Yes, it is rather saucy. But not nearly as sexy as James Joyce." She looks concerned again. "I'd be really worried -- there's nothing I can do about it now because it's all part of the process -- but I would be worried if people felt this ambiguity between sensual and sexual.

"I definitely *became* a person when I left school and suddenly took control of my life," she says. "I felt like that was the first time I'd really been there. Do you.. .? It was the beginning of my life really.

"Now I think I get a tremendous amount of security from my work, through being able to write songs. Though perhaps I'm very insecure except when I'm working. There again I work so much.. . I'll have to think about this. I'll be thinking about it all day now. What I'm looking out for is to let go of being so damned obesessive about work that I just get sucked into it. It's important for me now for there to be some kind of, er, *lightness* about it.

"You know, it's only an album. That is what I keep saying to myself”.

SPIN actually ranked The Sensual World fourth in their feature from earlier in the year. NME placed it third in 2019. Although most critics would place The Sensual World in the top three or four Kate Bush albums, I have seen many fans online place it lower – feeling it is inferior to her very best work. It is a shame a lot of the reviews published in 1989 have not been archived or are unavailable to view. Most critics were very much on board with The Sensual World. Not repeating herself, Bush roved herself to be in a different league (as David Quantick wrote for NME in 1989: “A strange and remarkable record which has very little to do with anything else musical, a fair bit to do with the real world of sex, love, and introversion, and everything to do with uniqueness. Kate Bush remains alone, ahead, and a genius”). This is what AllMusic said in their review in 2011:

“An enchanting songstress, Kate Bush reflects the most heavenly views of love on the aptly titled The Sensual World. The follow-up to Hounds of Love features Bush unafraid to be a temptress, vocally and lyrically. She's a romantic, frolicking over lust and love, but also a lover of life and its spirituality. The album's title track exudes the most sensually abrasive side of Bush, but she is also one to remain emotionally intact with her heart and head. The majority of The Sensual World beams with a carefree spirit of strength and independence. "Love and Anger," which features blistering riffs by Bush's mentor and cohort David Gilmour, thrives on self-analysis -- typically cathartic of Bush. Michael Nyman's delicate string arrangements allow the melodic "Reaching Out" to simply arrive, freely floating with Bush's lush declaration ("reaching out for the star/reaching out for the star that explodes") for she's always searching for a common peace, a commonality to make comfort.

What makes this artist so intriguing is her look toward the future -- she appears to look beyond what's present and find a peculiar celestial atmosphere in which human beings do exist. She's conscious of technology on "Deeper Understanding" and of a greater life on the glam rock experimental "Rocket's Tail (For Rocket)," yet she's still intrinsic to the reality of an individual's heart. "Between a Man and a Woman" depicts pressure and heartbreak, but it's the beauty of "This Woman's Work" that makes The Sensual World the outstanding piece of work that it is. She possesses maternal warmth that's surely inviting, and it's something that's made her one of the most prolific female singer/songwriters to emerge during the 1980s. She's never belonged to a core scene. Bush's intelligence, both as an artist and as a woman, undoubtedly casts her in a league of her own”.

In future features, I will explore particular songs. I want to talk about the videos for the singles, The Sensual World, This Woman’s Work and Love and Anger. With some incredible direction from Bush on the videos, The Sensual World was less singles-packed as was the case with Hounds of Love’s first side. Regardless, the title track reached twelve in the U.K. This Woman’s Work reached twenty-five here, whereas Love and Anger reached thirty-eight. Ahead of its thirty-third anniversary next month, I am keen to spend time with The Sensual World. Following up Hounds of Love is daunting for any artist. Bush showed no need to top it or release something similar. Instead, what we have is a remarkable album that stands on its own and ended her incredible 1980s output with one of her best works. I first heard The Sensual World when I was a child in the 1990s. All these years later and I am…

HELPLESSLY seduced by it.

FEATURE: Second Spin: Beck - Sea Change

FEATURE:

 

 

Second Spin

Beck - Sea Change

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IT may seem odd…

 PHOTO CREDIT: Wendy Redfern/Redferns

to include a Beck album in Second Spin. This feature highlights albums that are underrated or under-played. In terms of the latter, I don’t think Sea Change gets as much airplay as albums like Odelay (1996) or Midnite Vultures (1999). There are a couple of other reasons why I wanted to spotlight Sea Change. I think that it was underrated upon its release. Most reviews were positive, but there were a few more mixed. Such a stunning and personal album, Sea Change deserved even more than it got. I don’t think many people know Sea Change that well. Maybe they do not know beyond singles like Guess I’m Doing Fine. The final reason I am spending time with Seas Change is the fact it is twenty on 24th September. Many will mark the twentieth anniversary of one of Beck’s most important and best albums. If you look at Beck’s discography, Sea Change arrives sandwiched between two quite vibrant and eclectic albums. Sea Change’s title is quite apt, as Midnite Vultures is a full of different sounds and textures. You only need to look at the strange and neon front cover to know that this album was going to be quite wild, strange, bright and hypnotic! Similarly, Guero has that mix of sounds and styles. With a more composed and less bright cover, it was released three years after Sea Change. Similar to Odelay in the way it fused varied genres, Beck clearly needed to be more personal and deeper with his eighth studio album, yet he returned to something a little more experimental and bolder on Guero.

Interestingly, 2014’s Morning Phase sort of mirrored a lot of the emotions and themes from Sea Change (Beck felt that Morning Phase was a companion piece to Sea Change). Maybe critics who were not sold on Beck’s 2002 album were reacting to his past work and how much of a departure this was. Tackling themes of heartbreak and desolation, solitude, and loneliness, this was the freewheelin’ sonic maverick actually creating something more mature, soul-bearing and personal. I think there was confusion and a bit of disappointment from some. Even though Sea Change did get a lot of love, it is disappointing that some were a bit cold. I am going to end with a couple of the positive reviews, in the hope of convincing those who have not heard Sea Change to listen to it. There are a couple of features I want to highlight. The first, from Guitar.com, is a fascinating 2021 article that discusses the genius of 2002’s Sea Change:

“As musical swerves go, the one Beck made between 1999’s Midnite Vultures – a tongue-in-cheek day-glo mashup of soul, funk and Prince – and 2002’s Sea Change – a collection of introspective, heartbroken acoustic-guitar songs – takes some beating. Yet the detour wasn’t entirely without signposting; Beck had revealed a more subdued, traditional-folk side to his songwriting on 1998’s Mutations and glimpses of it before that, saying in an interview at the time of Sea Change’s release: “There are threads of what I’ve done before. If you listen to my earlier B-sides, you’ll hear this record. I have been wanting to make this record for years.”

While some critics had become increasingly irritated by Beck’s eclecticism, there was to be no burying of his singer-songwriter aspirations beneath layers of genre-hopping sonic trickery with Sea Change. The record links its songs together into one coherent sonic atmosphere throughout – quite an achievement, considering it was masterminded by an artist who rarely sounds the same for two bars, let alone 12 songs. The album’s consistency was helped by Beck’s reliance on a trusted core band of musicians including bassist Justin Meldal-Johnsen, drummers James Gatson and Joey Waronker, keys player Roger Joseph Manning Jr and guitarist Smokey Hormel, with the basis for many of the tracks being recorded live in LA’s Ocean Way studios.

Americana Godrich

As well as producing Mutations, producer Nigel Godrich had recently overseen Radiohead’s transition from guitar-centric alt-rock to expansive, electro-influenced art-rock between 1997’s OK Computer and 2000’s Kid A. For Sea Change, he was entrusted with taking Beck’s sound in the opposite direction: away from the futuristic kaleidoscope of electronic influences that collided on Midnite Vultures, to focus Beck’s manic imagination on crafting sonic details around a bedrock of more traditional, performance-based instruments.

The sound of the room, the production and engineering decisions, the quality of the playing and the obvious work that went into the arrangements all play their part in making Sea Change an incredible-sounding record. From the majestic strummed acoustic that opens the record onwards, it’s often cited as a benchmark hi-fi recording, with huge dynamic range between its punchy low end and warm and ethereal reverbs. Throughout, the nuances of Beck’s bitter, lovelorn vocal performances in particular are captured perfectly, making him seem to whisper confessionally in your ear.

While the songs are intentionally simple and direct, the orchestration of instruments and effects is anything but. This is probably why Sea Change was compared on its release to artists with very little in common aside from their mastery of melancholy, with critics drawing comparisons to Nick Drake, Syd Barrett, Serge Gainsbourg, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell and Neil Young, among others.

Strumming the heartstrings

We’re here to talk guitars, of course, and Sea Change uses the six-string to its fullest to create atmosphere and intensify the emotional charge of the songs, employing everything from clean acoustic picking to effects-lathered experiments to convey the message.

Opener The Golden Age defines the soundscape: naked strummed guitars contrast with ghostly vocal reverbs courtesy of Ocean Way’s studio plates, while pedal-steel-esque licks, glockenspiel and flickering washes of effects, organ and gritty country-electric lines flare up and drift away into the distance”.

In 2020, Udioscovermusic.com observed how Sea Change was Beck finding new maturity for the new millennium. Rather than continue with the lyrical and sonic persona many knew him for, this was a real break that took many by surprise:

“A new openness in Beck’s lyrical approach was certainly in plain sight, largely devoid of the whip-smart irony that had been his trademark. From the acoustic opener “The Golden Age” onwards, it was matched by an affecting simplicity and directness in the song constructions themselves, sometimes elegantly illustrated with lush strings.

Beck’s album contained such titles as “Lonesome Tears,” “Lost Cause” and “Already Dead,” as well as the reflective “Guess I’m Doing Fine.” It was far removed from the rambunctious verve of “Where It’s At” or “Sexx Laws.” “Forlorn folk,” The Guardian called it. But when he spoke to writer Paul Lester for that newspaper, he typically chose not to show his hand about the album’s emotional motivation.

“I don’t talk too much about my personal life,” he said. “You’ll get a thousand times more of me from my music than anything I could say in an interview. When you start opening yourself up in that way, it cheapens your life.”

The album was introduced by the engaging lead promo track “Lost Cause,” followed as a single by “Guess I’m Doing Fine,” which had a video directed by Spike Jonze. Sea Change was every bit of the gear shift that its title implied, but many of Beck’s admirers were eager to make the leap of maturity with him.

The long player peaked at No.8 in the US, made the top ten in his stronghold of Scandinavia and was a Top 20 success in the UK, Australia and elsewhere. It went on to sit comfortably inside the Top 20 of Rolling Stone’s list of the best albums of the 2000s.

Playful on tour

After some shows early in 2002 and an appearance in the spring at the Coachella Festival, Beck teed up the LP release with an August tour of the US. There was certainly no trace of glum introspection when he arrived at the Michigan Theater in Ann Arbor, as MTV reported.

“Beck’s two-hour acoustic performance had a playful vibe throughout,” wrote Christina Fuoco. “He filled the show with sly remarks, showing a different side to his flashy, leisure-suit-wearing self. The concert was a free-for-all, with fans shouting out names of songs in hopes that Beck would perform them.

“Sporting jeans, a white button-down shirt, Converse sneakers, dishevelled hair and rosy red cheeks, Beck cracked jokes the minute he hit the stage, which looked like an unkempt music classroom.” The show featured a guest appearance by Jack White, who joined Beck on “Cold Brains” and a version of “Last Fair Deal Gone Down,” by their mutual inspiration Robert Johnson.

Laughing and joking with the audience and cracking up as he attempted to play “Sissyneck,” Beck eschewed most of his more beat-driven hip-hop flavors. “I’ve been trying to figure out how to do the hip-hop thing live,” he said. “I’ve been studying LL Cool J’s Unplugged for 15 hours straight. I have not figured [it out]. It’ll come to me.”

A song every two days

Beck told Record Collector that the Sea Change sessions resembled those with Godrich for Mutations. “It turned into a song every two days,” he said. “Mutations we recorded and mixed in two weeks, this was probably three and a half but we got a little more ambitious I think, because we had orchestral arrangements and different musicians coming and going.”

The sessions took place at Ocean Way Studios in Los Angeles. “It was a reunion of sorts,” he said. “It was something we’d been planning for four years, talking about. 9/11 happened and then people weren’t working as much, I think we originally wanted to do this record a year and a half ago, but it took a while for people to line up.”

The record repaid that perseverance, just as it continues to reward repeated listens. Beck followed its release with another North American tour in the autumn that included two nights at the Beacon Theatre in New York and another at the Universal Amphitheatre in LA. The album went gold in America in 2005; the sea change had been completed to great effect”.

Let’s end with two positive reviews for the incredible Sea Change. As it is twenty on 24th September, it is a perfect time to reassess and re-explore a masterful work from one of music’s innovators and most remarkable artists. AllMusic had a lot of love reserved for Beck’s Sea Change when they reviewed it:

“Beck has always been known for his ever-changing moods -- particularly since they often arrived one after another on one album, sometimes within one song -- yet the shift between the neon glitz of Midnite Vultures and the lush, somber Sea Change is startling, and not just because it finds him in full-on singer/songwriter mode, abandoning all of the postmodern pranksterism of its predecessor. What's startling about Sea Change is how it brings everything that's run beneath the surface of Beck's music to the forefront, as if he's unafraid to not just reveal emotions, but to elliptically examine them in this wonderfully melancholy song cycle. If, on most albums prior to this, Beck's music was a sonic kaleidoscope -- each song shifting familiar and forgotten sounds into colorful, unpredictable combinations -- this discards genre-hopping in favor of focus, and the concentration pays off gloriously, resulting in not just his best album, but one of the greatest late-night, brokenhearted albums in pop. This, as many reviews and promotional interviews have noted, is indeed a breakup album, but it's not a bitter listen; it has a wearily beautiful sound, a comforting, consoling sadness. His words are often evocative, but not nearly as evocative as the music itself, which is rooted equally in country-rock (not alt-country), early-'70s singer/songwriterism, and baroque British psychedelia. With producer Nigel Godrich, Beck has created a warm, enveloping sound, with his acoustic guitar supported by grand string arrangements straight out of Paul Buckmaster, eerie harmonies, and gentle keyboards among other subtler touches that give this record a richness that unveils more with each listen. Surely, some may bemoan the absence of the careening, free-form experimentalism of Odelay, but Beck's gifts as a songwriter, singer, and musician have never been as brilliant as they are here. As Sea Change is playing, it feels as if Beck singing to you alone, revealing painful, intimate secrets that mirror your own. It's a genuine masterpiece in an era with too damn few of them”.

In 2002, Rolling Stone gave Sea Change five stars. Listening to the album now, and it still has that ability to get under the skin and really provoke emotions! Such a brave release from an artist who was very much expected to repeat Odelay and Midnight Vultures, Sea Change was a much-needed shift from Beck:

“In 1994, Beck Hansen released his first major-label album. He called it Mellow Gold, and we all laughed at the irony: slacker caricature and coffeehouse hip-hop billed like a K-tel makeout platter. But Sea Change, his eighth album, is the real thing — a perfect treasure of soft, spangled woe sung with a heavy open heart.

It’s the best album Beck has ever made, and it sounds like he’s paid dearly for the achievement. He reportedly wrote these twelve wine-dark songs after breaking up with his longtime girlfriend. Significantly, two of Beck’s finest songs of the last decade were also pristine love-sucks blues: “Asshole,” on his ’94 garage-folk detour, One Foot in the Grave, and the raga moan “Nobody’s Fault but My Own,” on 1998’s Mutations. Sea Change, gleaming with twang and heartbroken strings, is an entire album of spectacular suffering.

This kind of candor does not come easily even to great record makers, and Beck, one of our sharpest, has never had much cause for such direct reflection. The satirical impatience and throbbing collage of his most commercial work — Mellow Gold, 1996’s Odelay, the ’99 pillow-talk pastiche Midnite Vultures — has always been more exhilarating than touching, a triumph of guarded magnificence. But you can clearly hear Beck banging between bravado and paralysis all over Sea Change. He gives his departing other a grand send-off at the start of the album, in “The Golden Age” (“Put your hands on the wheel/Let the golden age begin”), then fills the rest of the song with his own fear of going nowhere fast: “These days I barely get by/I don’t even try.” Compared to other titles here, such as “Lost Cause” and “Already Dead,” “Guess I’m Doing Fine” is happy talk. In fact, Beck is doing anything but; the low, slow way he sings on his way to the song’s punch line — “It’s only tears that I’m crying/It’s only you that I’m losing/Guess I’m doing fine” — is a powerful admission of failure.

The clarity of his crisis has a lot to do with the naked strength of Beck’s singing. For someone who started out as a teenage folk hobo — just voice and strum — Beck has rarely walked this far out in front of the music on his own records. And considering his eternal-high-school looks, he possesses a surprisingly manly tenor, a clean, deep instrument of lust and worry. It fills the big spaces in Nigel Godrich’s haunted production — the backward-tape buzz in “Lost Cause”; the desert-Bach air of the keyboards in “Nothing I Haven’t Seen” — with the combined pathos of Nick Drake, the solo, freaked-out Syd Barrett and the John Lennon of Plastic Ono Band. When Beck and Godrich pour on the Indo-Beatles chaos in “Sunday Sun” — ghostly pounding piano and not-so-unison guitar; a meltdown coda of drums and distortion — you can still hear Beck’s resignation and unsteady resurrection inside the song.

The Drake and Barrett comparisons are not idle flattery. Just as Mutations was Beck’s homage to Tropicalia — Brazil’s late-1960s revolution in art, sound and romanticism — Sea Change suggests that Beck has been studying the British early-1970s school of psychedelic-comedown melancholy. The coal-gray cry of string arrangements by Beck’s father, David Campbell, in “Lonesome Tears” and “Round the Bend” recall Robert Kirby’s exquisite orchestrations on Drake’s 1969 album Five Leaves Left. Godrich, who as a producer and engineer helped put the Pink Floyd in Radiohead, shows the same flair here for shadows and suspense. Beck made this record with a full band, including guitarist Smokey Hormel, keyboard player Roger Manning and drummer Joey Waronker. Yet on every song, it sounds like Beck is the only one in the room, alone with his questions and stumped for answers.

When Beck recently performed at New York’s Lincoln Center, he mixed some of these new songs with breathtaking covers of “No Expectations,” by the Rolling Stones,” Big Star’s “Kangaroo,” the Zombies’ “Beechwood Park” and “Sunday Morning,” by the Velvet Underground. It was a perfect fit — songs about commitment and loss, written and sung by the wounded. Beck didn’t play any Dylan, but he didn’t have to. As a young folk singer at the turn of the Nineties, Beck set out to be his own Dylan. With Sea Change, he has made it the hard way, creating an impeccable album of truth and light from the end of love. This is his Blood on the Tracks”.

Twenty years after this masterpiece album was release, and I am reading reviews that are quite middling or not that convinced. Maybe there should be some retrospective assessment as Sea Change has been frequently voted as one of Beck’s defining albums. I think that the brilliant, beautiful and successful Sea Change (which reached the top twenty in the U.S. and U.K.) is fully worthy of a new take and wave of affection. This is an album undervalued by some that really does deserve…

MUCH more love.

FEATURE: Is This the Right Thing to Do? Inside Kate Bush’s Hammer Horror

FEATURE:

 

Is This the Right Thing to Do?

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1978 in a Lionheart album outtake (different expression), shot by Gered Mankowitz at his photo studio on Great Windmill Street in Soho, London around September/October

Inside Kate Bush’s Hammer Horror

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I have been doing quite a few features…

around three Kate Bush albums: Never for Ever, The Dreaming and Hounds of Love. All celebrating anniversaries this month, it has been important to write about them. When thinking about Never for Ever and how it pushed Bush’s music and ambitions on from her first two albums, The Kick Inside (1978) and Lionheart (1978), it got me thinking about one of the songs from the latter. I have mentioned Hammer Horror in other features, but I have not spotlighted it and dug deep at all. One reason for this is that it has often been viewed as one of her weaker tracks. Maybe a lesser song from an album that is not among the essential releases. I have almost had to defend Lionheart on many occasions! Far from it being this disappointing follow-up to The Kick Inside, it is a fantastic album with many highlights. Wonderful songs like Wow and Symphony in Blue show what a mature, varied, and exceptional songwriter and creative mind Bush was. There are a couple of unusual things associated with Hammer Horror. For a start, it did not stand out as a lead-off single. One would think Wow was a more obvious choice. That song is the third on Lionheart. Hammer Horror is at the very end. Also, in terms of its sound and energy, maybe it would have been better as a second or third single. I am surprised only two singles were released from the album.

Sure, Symphony in Blue was put out in Canada and Japan, but I think it could have been put out in the U.K. and the rest of the world. Also, Kashka from Baghdad suggests itself as a single. EMI pushed a second album so soon after The Kick Inside (Lionheart came out nine months later), so why only two singles? That was the same story with the debut but, trying to increase Bush’s profile and keep momentum rolling, a third single would have been possible. Hammer Horror got to number forty-four in the U.K., but it did reach seventeen in Australia, ten in Ireland and twenty-five in Netherlands. It is quite cruel how some reacted to the first single from Bush’s second studio album. The Kate Bush Encyclopedia unites some of the less kind opinions about Hammer Horror:

“On Radio 1's Round Table on October 27, 1978 the single was reviewed by DJ's John Peel ("I didn't like the album at all and I'm not too enthused with this either") and Paul Gambaccini ("It doesn't grab me immediately as The Man With The Child In His Eyes"). Record Mirror's Ronnie Gurr opined: "Kate keeps up the formula and doesn't upset the fans... sounds like Joni Mitchell popping tabs with the LSO." In NME, Tony Parsons wrote: "Ominous post ELO orchestration with the unrequited lust of a broken affair viewed as living dead love-bites-back as in classic 50's British celluloid, a real nail biter, hypnotic and disconcerting”.

 IMAGE CREDIT: iniminiemoo

I really like Hammer Horror. It is a song I was not always hot about. It came out as a single on 27th October, 1978. The more I have written about Lionheart and its worth, the more I like it final track. In terms of themes, this was not new territory for Kate Bush:

“The song is not about, as many think, Hammer Horror films. It is about an actor and his friend. His friend is playing the lead in a production of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, a part he's been reading all his life, waiting for the chance to play it. He's finally got the big break he's always wanted, and he is the star. After many rehearsals he dies accidentally, and the friend is asked to take the role over, which, because his own career is at stake, he does. The dead man comes back to haunt him because he doesn't want him to have the part, believing he's taken away the only chance he ever wanted in life. And the actor is saying, "Leave me alone, because it wasn't my fault - I have to take this part, but I'm wondering if it's the right thing to do because the ghost is not going to leave me alone and is really freaking me out. Every time I look round a corner he's there, he never disappears."

The song was inspired by seeing James Cagney playing the part of Lon Chaney playing the hunchback - he was an actor in an actor in an actor, rather like Chinese boxes, and that's what I was trying to create. (Kate Bush Club Newsletter, November 1979)”.

Wow is about actors and the stage. The themes of horror and suspense carried on through Bush’s career. There was enough of it through Lionheart. Think about songs like Coffee Homeground (Hammer Horror’s B-side), and Full House. There is anxiety and something eerie in those songs. I do like the fact Bush performed Hammer Horror live a before it featured during 1979’s The Tour of Life (along with most of the songs from The Kick Inside and Lionheart). Bush performed Hammer Horror in various places all over the world. She performed it on Countdown in Australia on 12th October, 1978 (for its world premiere), and at the San Remo festival in Italy in 1979. This was an old song of hers that dates back to its demo in 1977.

I like the fact that, in terms of its rhythms and sounds, it is different to anything on The Kick Inside. Even as soon as Lionheart, Bush was looking to keep fresh and move forward. I love Bush’s performance on Hammer Horror. I also love the lyrics. Right from the off, you know this track could not come from anyone else: “You stood in the belltower/But now you're gone/So who knows all the sights/Of Notre Dame?”. Some of my favourite lyrics from Lionheart can be found on Hammer Horror. This is a particularly pleasing and interesting passage: “Rehearsing in your things/I feel guilty/And retracing all the scenes/Of your big hit/Oh, God, you needed the leading role/It wasn't me who made you go, though/Now all I want to do is forget/You, friend”. Features like this one not only rank Hammer Horror quite low when it comes to her best singles. It also reveals that she was not a great fan of Lionheart and making it. Maybe feeling too rushed and unable to have much say and time to make the music she wanted to, it is a shame. Last year, Classic Pop did rank it fairly high up their list. I think that Lionheart should be reappraised and re-released with any extras and demos available. Not many of Bush’s lesser-heard singles get airplay. I feel Hammer Horror is worthy of a lot more respect than it received. Much more than a weaker single or something that it not up there with her best work, I think Hammer Horror is…

A great song.