FEATURE: The Digital Mixtape: Winter Warmers and Chilled Vibes

FEATURE:

 

 

The Digital Mixtape

PHOTO CREDIT: Stephen Leonardi/Pexels

Winter Warmers and Chilled Vibes

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IT is the time of year…

PHOTO CREDIT: Thought Catalog/Pexels

when we are leaving behind Christmas and the start of the year. It is cold and wet and people want the weather to warm up. In addition, there is quite a lot of stress around. Frustrated by the weather or finances or setting personal goals, January is not the nicest month. Although there are warmer and more relaxed days ahead, it is a point of the year when people are struggling to get into the mood. Because of that, I have put together a playlist that blends winter warmers and chilled vibes. Songs that warm the blood and some relaxing chill-out tunes that help with the stress. A warming and stress-easing concoction that hopefully will help lift the mood, it is designed to lift January blues and any stresses of the new year. If you are in need of some remedy, then I hope the mixtape here puts you in a…

 PHOTO CREDIT: Riccardo/Pexels

BETTER frame of mind.

FEATURE: Emerald and Gold: Kate Bush in the Motherland

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Emerald and Gold

Kate Bush in the Motherland

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I have written about…

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1985/PHOTO CREDIT: Guido Harari

Kate Bush and her connection to Ireland. Her late mother Hannah was Irish and they had family there. In terms of musical and personal influence, Ireland was key right through her career. It became more obvious in her music on albums like The Dreaming (1982), Hounds of Love (1985) and The Sensual World (1989). When she was in her mid-twenties and early-thirties, Bush drawing more from her ancestral home. People naturally assume Bush is this quintessential English artist. Though England has been key to her and made its way too into the music, we can’t overlook the importance of Ireland. Rather than return to the same topics I covered before, I wanted to explore something different. It is clear that certain albums demanded Bush worked rigorously at various studios. That was especially true of The Dreaming. This was a time when Bush was producing solo and really wanted to throw everything into the album. I see 1981 as an especially frantic and packed year in terms of hours logged in the studio. Not only ensuring her performances and that of her musicians were up to scratch, Bush was considering how her production would sound. Adding layers and new sounds to the mix. Maybe finding it hard to reign things in, one of the biggest advantages was that Bush had a connection to Ireland. Having visited as a child and been there a fair few times, she knew it offered this sense of comfort and peace. Also, in terms of the musicians she could work with there, it would change things. Although there are Irish sounds on Night of the Swallow (Liam O'Flynn – penny whistle and uilleann pipes; Seán Keane – fiddle; Dónal Lunny – bouzouki), it wasn’t until Hounds of Love where Bush found time to get to Ireland. I will come to the Irish sessions and the artists she worked with there. However, Bush also managed to spend some time unwinding. The first time she had been able to visit and spend quality time in Ireland since she was a girl.

People do not realise how important Ireland was in terms of Hounds of Love. The inspiration it provided and how vital it was for Bush to get her head clear and find some perspective. A good majority of the lyrics for Hounds of Love were completed in Ireland. Bush would use Ireland again for 1989’s The Sensual World. The title track is a classic example. Based around James Joyce’s Ulysess and the soliloquy from Molly Bloom, the motherland was never far from her heart. For Hounds of Love, she embraced the natural sounds and geography of the country to open her mind and colour her songs. Jig of Life boasts John Shehan’s fiddles; Liam O’Flynn’s uilleann pipes and Donal Lunny’s bodhrán beats. I love reading any article connecting Bush to Ireland. I will drop in one example soon. The whistle parts from Sheehan on And Dream of Sheep is especially affecting. Although Bush had family in Ireland and it was very much a second home, there was resistance and reluctance from some at Windmill Lane Studios. Situated in Dublin, it was a space that would see laid down some of Hounds of Love’s finest moments. Maybe national wariness, the thought of an English pop star coming over was met with some frostiness. However, soon enough, Bush was welcomed with open arms and was taken to heart! Bush felt that familiar connection. Like she was meant to be there. An inspired decision to record in Ireland. The calmer setting and the stunning landscape meant Bush’s creative mind was freed in a way that it was not in London. She nodded to Ireland for The Sensual World. Touches to be found on The Red Shoes.

Not to suggest Hounds of Love is a relaxed and sunny album. Like The Dreaming, there are moments of fear and tension. If The Dreaming’s seemed more to be claustrophobia and anxiety from the point of characters’ perspectives – expect Get Out of My House, which seemed to be personal -, Hounds of Love seemed more personal to Bush. Some of her fears coming to the surface. However, there is never a sense of the music weighing on top of you. Of it being a hard listen. It is powerful and beautiful. After returning from Ireland, most of 1984 was dedicated to overdubs and technology. As Tom Doyle writes in his book, Running Up That Hill: 50 Visions of Kate Bush, Bush’s working methods were cemented and centred around technology. Perhaps that experience in Ireland and the free and often ecstatic spirit was a holiday. It was back to business when she came back to East Wickham Farm. This amazing programme from last year, Give Kate Bush Back to the Irish, explores her songs and how Ireland is evident commonly and effectively. I want to bring in a bit of a 2014 article from the Irish Independent. It writes how Bush is proud of her Irish roots:

“A quiet and stable family life is important to Kate. Bush is married to guitarist Danny McIntosh, whom she met in 1992 while recording her seventh album, The Red Shoes. She told me that her mother was a massive source of inspiration to her, especially when she collaborated with legendary Irish traditional musician Dónal Lunny on a version of 'Mná na hÉireann'.

"Although she'd already passed away, I really felt that she was there helping me get it right," Bush said. "I loved singing it and I hope I did an okay job, because I never spoke or sung in Irish before."

"I'm incredibly proud of being half-Irish. I really wanted to get that Irish blood in me to come through, so I worked very hard on it."

Dónal Lunny confirms that Kate poured her heart and soul into the recording sessions. "She never told me that about her late Mother, but it clearly meant an awful lot to her," Lunny says.

"It was a joy to be in the studio with her. Kate is a very vivacious, happy and positive person. She is great fun to be around. I'm absolutely delighted that she is back playing concerts."

Bush performed on The Late Late Show in 1978. When she was briefly interviewed by Uncle Gaybo, a very shy Kate refused to reveal her mother's maiden name, claiming that her family would prefer anonymity as they were receiving a lot of unwelcome attention in the UK due to her increasing fame.

Despite her heritage and numerous collaborations with traditional musicians, this remains her only performance on Irish soil”.

The Sensual World also saw Bush record once more at Windmill Lane Studios, with Bill Whelan conducting the sessions there (he also conducted the Irish sessions for Hounds of Love). With Davy Spillane, John Shehan and Dónal Lunny  adding their magic to The Sensual World, Never Be Mine and The Fog, Bush knew how powerful it was reconnecting with these musicians. A chance also to give her heart to Ireland. Obviously, these wonderful musicians were a big reason why Bush travelled over there. She could also find great connection with the land and people. The friendliness and generosity of them. Though she got this in England, there was something different in Ireland! The views around her so much more evocative than back in England. I often felt most of Hounds of Love was written at East Wickham Farm. Though it was actually Ireland. I didn’t know there was this uncredited part of her most popular album! How crucial Ireland was. Not only for the studio and players. It is clear that the country dug into her soul and unlocked her best work. She was able to write and create in a new way. The same with The Sensual World, though not quite as extensively. I think Bush had a natural curiosity about Ireland because of her mother. Hannah Bush was born in 1918 in County Waterford. At such a terrible time, in a quite rural setting, it must have been strange for her. Born Hannah Daly, she grew up at a farm outside Dungarvan and was from a deeply musical family. Kate Bush taken to Ireland as a child by her family. Seeds planted and this history being written. I am going to end things there. This emerald island producing gold! A wonderful nation filled with wonderful people. We need to discuss Ireland more when we look at albums like Hounds of Love and The Sensual World. This verdant, incredible and spiritual motherland…

STANDS for comfort.

FEATURE: Banquet: Bloc Party’s Silent Alarm at Twenty

FEATURE:

 

 

Banquet

Bloc Party’s Silent Alarm at Twenty

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PRODUCED by…

Bloc Party and Paul Epworth, one of the finest debut albums of the 2000s (the first decade of the twenty-first century) turns twenty on 2nd February. Silent Alarm is the amazing introduction of the London band. Recorded in Copenhagen and London, the album reached number three in the U.K. Many know the album for singles such as Banquet and Helicopter, though Silent Alarm is packed full of classics. I am going to end with a couple of reviews for Silent Alarm. There are a couple of features that I want to start out with. In 2018, Vibe Music wrote why Bloc Party’s debut album is the most important of its generation:

“Culturally, the world was in a weird position. We had only seen a small percentage of how big a dickhead Kanye West would become. Simon Cowell was at the peak of his stranglehold over the world with his assembly line of reality TV wannabes. And the country had somehow gone mad when ‘crazy frog’ sold by the bucket load. In terms of the indie rock scene, however, everything was rosy. The glut of drab, lifeless weepy rock bands that got big in the wake of Britpop were slowly fading thanks to the likes of the Strokes, Franz Ferdinand and the Libertines, with the likes of Kasabian and Arctic Monkeys ready to take up the mantle. But amidst all of these great acts, Bloc Party arrived to drop an album that would stand as a snapshot of its era. Audibly and aesthetically, Silent Alarm is as identifiably a part of its era as Franz Ferdinand’s and Arctic Monkeys classic albums. The spiky guitars, yelping vocals and tight rhythms can be found in a myriad of bands around at the time. But while it’s revered by critics and Bloc Party’s diehard fans, Silent Alarm isn’t as revered or lionised as its contemporaries. Which is a shame, because this album is probably the only album of its time that is just as important and relevant today as it was when it was first released.

While all those bands I mentioned wrote great songs that still get a reaction whenever you hear them on a night out, they’re not songs that tick with you and make you think. It took Pete and Carl wanting to kill each other that caused them to write songs as complex as ‘Music When the Lights Go Out’. Franz Ferdinand aimed to dominate dancefloors and Kasabian the terraces, while Alex Turner hadn’t fully matured as a songwriter yet. Bloc Party’s frontman and lyricist Kele Okereke, however, was writing about a wider palette of themes and topics. How many other bands of the time can you think of that could score a hit song like ‘Helicopter’, with lyrics focusing on Bush’s foreign policy? Or, in ‘Price of Gasoline’, the general public’s ignorance of the hypocrisies of the Iraq war? Okereke aimed to make music that made the listener think as much as dance.

In our current era of pleasant and happy-to-be-here bands afraid to express an opinion less they offend anyone, it’s inspiring to hear a band speak with conviction on issues that they’re genuinely angry and passionate about. In fact, looking at the mess that the world finds itself in today, it would be interesting to see what an up-and-coming Bloc Party could create if they were getting started today. And in an era defined by the #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter movements, Bloc Party stood apart from the very white ‘boys club’ of indie rock music. With a drummer of Chinese origin, and a singer both black and gay, they score high on the minority bingo. The Bloc Party of 2005 were as progressive then as they would be today.

This abrasive and upfront attitude is reflected as much in the music as it is in the lyrics. If there’s one word that can describe the sound of Silent Alarm, it’s tense. This is an album that sounds like it’s about to split apart at the seams at any minute. No guitarist at the time could sound as sharp as a knife like Russell Lissack did. Matt Tong and Gordon Moakes’ tight rhythms held the songs together whilst propelling them forward with an uncontrollable urgency, while Okereke’s vocals scream and howl like he’s trying to reach through the speakers, grab you by the shoulders and start ranting and raving in your face.

But Silent Alarm works as much on a personal level as it does on an intellectual. Much of the album focuses on themes and subjects you wouldn’t find in many indie bands catalogues. Songs about depression, loneliness, mental illness and addiction don’t exactly make for great singalongs. But Silent Alarm is one of the most deeply layered and thoughtful album of its time. Contextually, the album and band it can be compared to most is Joy Division and Ian Curits’ lyrics. Think about it; ‘She’s Hearing Voices’ is a spiritual successor to ‘She’s Lost Control’, Okereke’s unsettling words about how “she just can’t sleep” and “she’s falling down the stairs, she’s tearing out her hair” mirroring Ian Curtis remarking on how “She’s Lost Control again”. The lyrics of ‘Like Eating Glass’ centre on loneliness and feeling cut off from everyone, the subject of the song comparing his isolation to something torturous: “Like drinking poison, like eating glass”. It’s not hard to compare this to Curtis’ feelings of anxiety and self-doubt in ‘Isolation’.

Throughout Silent Alarm, Okereke touches on feelings of loneliness and panic in a way that none of his contemporaries could, with listeners able to relate to and take comfort in songs that reflect their difficult situations, and while it’s arguable that Bloc Party would write individual songs that reflect on these issues better later on (‘I Still Remember’ and ‘Flux’ being perfect examples), Silent Alarm is their only album in which these songs coalesce with the bands other themes and ideas to create a cohesive whole. It’s an album that affects your heart as much as your head, and stands as a piece of art that can challenge your ideas about the world and yourself.

In the end, the tragedy of Bloc Party is that for a band that felt so special when they first arrived, they eventually fell into the same clichés as many other bands have before; diminishing returns, members exiting, a frontman more concerned with his solo career. For how much they stood out at the time, Bloc Party’s career followed the likes of Franz Ferdinand and the Strokes: brilliant, game changing first album; second album that sold more but wasn’t as good; third album that’s just plain crap; and subsequent music that’s good but nothing special. Following Silent Alarm, A Weekend in the City was good, but couldn’t match its predecessor. When I first heard third album Intimacy I thought it was one of the worst albums I’d ever heard, and was the point where the band completely lost their momentum. Four had one perfect song in ‘V.A.L.I.S’ but nothing else was memorable, and by the time of their latest album, HYMNS, there were only two original band members left, and they sounded like they’d completely stopped giving a shit. Okereke’s solo work had begun influencing the direction of the band, and his lyrics suffered due to it. Seriously, how did a guy who once wrote a line as simultaneously bizarre and intimate as “you told me you wanted to eat up my sadness, well jump on, enjoy, you can gorge away”, end up writing something as cringe worthy as “tell your bitch to get off my shit, smoking on that home-grown”?

While there following work has done a lot to dent Bloc Party’s reputation, particularly Intimacy (honestly – fuck that album), the power of Silent Alarm remains as potent as it did the first time the world heard it. While their sound and aesthetic has influenced bands like Foals and The Maccabees, none of them have come close to creating something as profound as Silent Alarm: not even Bloc Party themselves. And while the world seems as chaotic and confusing as it was in 2005, it’s inspiring to know that there’s an album that can force you to confront the problems within the world, and can make you reflect on the feelings and insecurities in your own life”.

In 2015, Interns looked at Silent Alarm ten years on from its release. I think that it is still one of the most important debut albums of the past twenty years. Ahead of its twentieth anniversary, I think it is important to explore this incredible album. One that continues to receive so much love and attention to this day. It is a stunningly confident debut from a band who are still going today:

“In the ten years since Bloc Party released their iconic debut album Silent Alarm, there’s been much discussion about how indie bands fit into the music scene. Guitar music has been declared dead and then reborn a number of times, but the truth is most of the bands that occupied that spectrum of music in 2005 have since died or faded. Bloc Party’s fourth album, released in 2012, failed to excite like their past releases and their lead singer Kele Okereke has turned predominantly to electronic music.

In 2005, twee was popular. It was cool to be British, it was cool to play a high-slung guitar and it was cool to have ironic, lengthy song titles. Franz Ferdinand, Kaiser Chiefs, Elbow and Maximo Park thrived while the Arctic Monkeys were arriving as the coolest nerds on the planet. Of course now, Alex Turner is a high-quiffed rock god and the Arctic Monkeys have shed nearly any signs of indie tweeness that they ever had in favour of a confident, stadium-ready sound. In comparison, Franz Ferdinand, Kaiser Chiefs and Maximo Park have fallen far from their perch at the top of the Alternative rock pyramid of 2005.

At this point it’s uncertain whether we will ever hear a new Bloc Party album again. Kele has just released his sophomore record Doubt and also ruled out any possibility of a Silent Alarm anniversary tour. But 10 years ago, Silent Alarm had Bloc Party pegged as the greatest indie-rock band around at that time. Pitchfork and NME both agreed (a rare conclusion) that Silent Alarm was brilliant with the latter awarding it the title of the best album of 2005. For context’s sake, Franz Ferdinand, Arcade Fire, The White Stripes and Kaiser Chiefs also featured on that list.

The indie band was flourishing. Myspace was a thing and the song you chose to play on your myspace page was just as important as a perfectly-angled profile picture. You couldn’t just choose a pop song, you had to select a song by an artist that people would think you were cool for having known or thank you for introducing them. Bloc Party fit that brief perfectly. Silent Alarm was explicitly melodic enough to please people on the surface and deep enough for music snobs to pick apart delightedly.

Let’s not sell Silent Alarm short, however. It wasn’t just an album for people’s mySpace page. It was much more than that. It was an album that stood out in a year when the music industry was flooded with indie-rock albums. It was a confident debut that was aware of what it had to do in order to impress. It was emotional, daring, expansive and colourful. As far as Okereke was concerned, every song had to sound like a single. Every song had to hit you as hard on the first listen as on the twentieth. As Pitchfork pointed out at the time, Bloc Party’s biggest strength and weakness was that they “are like one of those people who are so well-groomed that it's hard to remember exactly what they look like.”

At the time I could measure how great a guitar-band’s melody was by how many people sung along to it when they track started. Still today if Silent Alarm is played for a room of people they will at least murmur the riffs of Banquet and Helicopter. The riffs were just as important as vocal hooks were and acted as a temptation to draw you into the songs within the first few seconds. Listen to the first few chords of This Modern Love and your heart immediately jumps into your throat.

When the album came out NME said that it was “time for anti-heroes”. Nowadays it’s almost more likeable to be a 'freak' than to be cool, as Lady Gaga has worked so hard to champion, but back then it was very almost unheard of for a band to be so different and yet be so cool. Oasis were cool because they were abrasive rockstars. The Libertines were appealing because they were anarchic. Coldplay fit in because they were creating stadium-rock that attached them to no type of person and as a consequence made them appealing to every type of person. NME writes, “Bloc Party are to be believed in because they are a band for the whites, the blacks, the straights, the hip-hop kids, the freaks, the geeks, the emo kids, the punk-funkers, the queers and, yes, the fashionistas.”

Silent Alarm dealt with themes of sleep deprivation, consumption and love. It’s never derogatory nor does it ever brag about bad behaviour. You won’t hear anything that would require them to shout it through a megaphone, instead they’re beautifully subtle. Okereke is gay but love was dealt with as love. None of the lyrics ever confine issues to a certain type of person. Rather the songs are about the universally differing emotions of human-beings. Those that don’t suit just one type of person. As such Silent Alarm was an album for all those people that NME listed and more. Albums that manage to do that transcend genres. You didn’t need to be a fan of indie rock to appreciate Silent Alarm. This is still a quality that drawers us to albums today. As an example, Caribou’s Our Love and Sharon Van Etten’s Are We There from last year also succeeded because they dealt with love and life in a way that was both personal and universal.

It should be kept in mind that Okereke was a gay, black man operating in an indie rock world mostly dominated by white men who made their appreciation of good-looking women almost suspiciously explicit. Not that Silent Alarm needs that kind of sentiment attached to it because it’s lyrical content was so far above being petty.

Some of the above makes out that Bloc Party weren’t incredibly cool. That’s not my intention. Bloc Party were cool. They operated in a time when hype bands had to be cool. They were well-dressed, guitar-thrashing Brits who sung about sex. But they did so in their own way. There were never stories of the band stumbling out of clubs with Kate Moss nor did they try to dress with the same rock swagger or cite The Smiths as a lifelong reference when it was in vogue to do so. Okereke admitted to Uncut that he’s only been a Smiths fan for a short time. Most people are in the same boat, but rarely do they admit it. Apparently everyone owns an original copy of The Smiths on vinyl. The point is, Bloc Party were cool on their own terms. Okereke even told Pitchfork in 2006, “I feel that's important that I have some place to go that isn't on the cover of a magazine. I signed up to make music. That's it.”

The final point to make about Bloc Party is that Silent Alarm feels fresh. Every band was referencing bands from the past. The Strokes harked loosely back to The Ramones, then every band referenced The Strokes for ten years. Kaiser Chiefs drew influences from The Beatles and The Clash. Franz Ferdinand cited ‘80s artists Orange Juice and Josef K. Silent Alarm never felt as if the band were looking back for inspiration. There was definitely signs of inspiration from the current British indie-rock scene of the time, but if there were any influences they were modern. In the same interview with Pitchfork, Okereke said, “There's too much rock that relies a fetishism or nostalgia for the old ways. That's a real enemy to music. It needs to be constantly looking forward”.

Let’s finish off with a couple of reviews for Silent Alarm. Pitchfork noted how Bloc Party built on the success of earlier singles and E.P.s, drawing from the darker end of the Indie Pop spectrum of the 1980s. They celebrated the “record's charismatic sophistication and outstanding songwriting that emphasizes substance-over-style”. It is an interesting review from an American publication. Getting to grips with an exciting and ambitious British group who did make a dent in America in 2005. However, the biggest reception was from the U.K. and Europe:

“Lead single "Banquet" is wonderfully tight and energetic-- the same kind of spiffy half-dancing rock as Franz Ferdinand's "Take Me Out" or Duran Duran's "Planet Earth". That's easy to pull off when you've got a drummer this good, and a bassist that locks in with him so neatly, whether it's for rock charge or disco hustle. That, in fact, has been Bloc Party's main selling point, apart from the whole Remarkably Competent thing: When the rhythm section stretches its limbs, they leap a good distance away from the straight-ahead eighth-note riffing of the others in this game. Filter in their timely post-punk moves, Bunnymen gestures, and pop ambitions, and you start to feel like this is what it might have been like to listen to the Police or XTC in the early 80s; the sound of a straight-up rock band just a shade more sophisticated, and a little more interested in rhythm, than most of their peers.

And of course the opener, "Like Eating Glass", is even grander and snappier than "Banquet", as if to promise from the start that these guys take your purchase seriously. The songwriting is simple in style (forward rhythm, tidy hooks, guitars) but smart in detail-- all stops and starts, bridges and breakdowns, firework flourishes and tasteful studio tweaks. Even more striking are the precision and sheer good taste of the performances: It's not so easy to show off within the confines of songs this focused, but these guys seem to manage just fine.

So you get all the usual scrubbed-up gifts: the slower song, the slower song that turns into a faster one, the one with the studio effects, the one with the handclaps. A lot of this material is surprisingly scripted, as if someone spent whole nights in the practice space trying to get a two-bar guitar transition to work Just So. Okerere has a voice that's weirdly similar to the singer from the long-forgotten Adorable, with whom Bloc Party share a hell of a lot more than an appreciation for the Bunnymen: It's a vaguely-strangled back-of-throat thing that lets him moan and shout with refreshing gusto when the band gets going. (Typically ambitious topics of moaning: other people, culture war, girls and society and stuff.) The voice weakens a bit when he needs to croon, but crooning isn't really the point here. Bloc Party can be pretty, even sappy, but they're never looking to be atmospheric; they can rock, but they're never looking to whip up dark drama. This album charges happily down the center-- it shakes its hips now and then, and it whispers here and there, but it always seems to come back to tight and bouncy.

People will love this record. And so, inevitably, the people who don't love it will start complaining. And when they complain, they'll point out that this is just a regular-old rock album, full of all the current stylish rock-album tricks. And they'll be absolutely right; at worst, Bloc Party are like one of those people who are so well-groomed that it's hard to remember exactly what they look like. But really, a complaint like that misses something: Being a good ol' unchallenging rock band is this outfit's whole point-- and their biggest strength”.

I am going to finish off with a review from NME. They awarded Silent Alarm 9 out of 10 when they sat down with it. For anyone – like I say in all album anniversary features – who has not heard Silent Alarm or knows much about Bloc Party, do go and seek out this incredible work:

“Recorded with Paul Epworth far away from their birthing pool in London’s New Cross (they originally came to NME’s attention on Angular Records’ legendary unsigned band compilation ‘ The New Cross’) in “polite, civilised and pretty” Copenhagen last year, ‘Silent Alarm’is no‘Franz Ferdinand’. In fact, listen to it with the words ‘popular’ and ‘arty’ in mind and its spirit is closer to the Manic Street Preachers’ ‘The Holy Bible’.

The themes of sex, boredom and consumption should be familiar to students of that haunting album. Just check the railing against America on the Bush -baiting ‘Helicopter’ (sample lyric: “Just like his dad, just like his dad (same mistakes)/Some things will never be different”). Or the military march-meets- Berlin Love Parade stomp of‘Price Of Gas’, the price of course being not 91.4p a litre but the corpses of thousands of innocent Iraqis (“I can tell you how this ends/We’re gonna win this – WAR WAR WAR WAR WAR WAR WAR!”).

Beyond politics, Kele and Gordon’s lyrics also take in sex (“I still feel you and the taste of cigarettes” – ‘Blue Light’), boredom and consumption (“The fear and the yearning/The fear and the consumption” –‘Positive Tension’) and loneliness/depression/paranoia in 21st-century Britain (the first lyric on the LP is “It’s so cold in this house”, for fuck’s sake).

But where they manage – yet again – to sneak out of a pigeonhole is that street preaching, manically or otherwise, is not for them. They’ve shied away from the sloganeering as they’ve got further into the public spotlight. Their official website has featured quotes from Bertrand Russell, nods to JG Ballard, and articles titled “What They Want Pop Stars To Be” and “Intellectualising Fleetwood Mac”. The album takes its name from a New Scientist article about an earthquake detection system in Japan, but the relevance to the band is obvious. ‘Silent Alarm’is an early-warning system, a wake-up call for seismic events to come, but not one that’s wielding a megaphone on a street corner.

Bloc Party are pretty slippery customers. Give them a ‘new Franz’ or ‘new Manics’ tag and ‘Silent Alarm’ will wriggle free in seconds. It’s an LP as committed to pigeonholes as Pete Doherty is to turning up on time for gigs. Within seconds of the listener discerning that ‘Silent Alarm’ is a fine punk-funk album (hear ‘ Helicopter’, the mouth-dryingly intense‘Pioneers’, the breakneck rumble of‘She’s Hearing Voices’), Bloc Party will pull out the sombre, least punk or funky thing possible (their‘Street Spirit’, ‘So Here We Are’, or the echoey, unsettling‘Compliments’). As quickly as I could declare them the finest emo band Britain’s ever produced, they’ll weasel out of it. The proof is unquestionable (the LP’s emotion and post-hardcore riffs backbone, and that in researching this review we found not one but two pictures of Kele wearing a backpack) but the xylophone-tastic, ‘Bitter Sweet Symphony’-style epic ‘This Modern Love’ is so beyond emo it’s untrue. Which shows that Bloc Party are the Kriss Kross, Prince and Kate Bush -worshipping disposable pop kids that they have always claimed to be and not some maudlin post-punk muso types, as some have branded them.

With The Libertines on ice, London needs to get moving again and Bloc Party are the band for the job. Not only can they match the Libs for musical urgency and passion, but Bloc Party are managing to speak to people like Pete’n’Carl did too. They find “rock star behaviour completely abhorrent” (they’ll turn down that invite to Kate Moss’ next birthday party) and in that respect they’re the complete opposite of The Libertines. But in terms of the honesty and vulnerability shown here, and the fact that they’re unafraid to put themselves on the line, they are the true heirs to the Libs’ legacy.

They connect because their concerns are universal. Everyone knows someone like the woman suffering at the centre of ‘She’s Hearing Voices’ – “She’s hearing voices call her/She’s hearing voices warn her/She just can’t sleep in her bed/She just can’t sleep.” Not being able to sleep (a clinical sign of depression, or maybe it’s just plain old heartbreak) appears elsewhere on this record; “I can’t eat, I can’t sleep/I can’t sleep, I can’t dream”, Kele sings on‘Like Eating Glass’. In the same song, there’s the latchkey kids we were or we knew in “The children sent home from school/Will not stop crying”.

The xylophone-powered anthem ‘This Modern Love’ was made for being 15 years old, lying on your bed staring at the ceiling (“You told me you wanted to eat up my sadness/Well jump on, enjoy, you can gorge away”).

And there’s the wonderful ‘Pioneers’ which manages to combine the ridiculous hopelessness and optimism of, well, life itself. “If it can be broke then it can be fixed”, Kele gasps, like he’s defusing a bomb. “If it can be fused then it can be split” – he is defusing a bomb! And the chorus continues the theme with “We promised the world we’d tame it/What were we hoping for?”

Bloc Party aren’t just hoping, they’re trying. Maybe it’s over-long at 13 tracks but that’s just us being picky. ‘Silent Alarm’ is the unpigeonholeable soundtrack to 21st-century life as a cast-off. In a world of posers, fakers and bandwagon-jumpers, Bloc Party are unquestionably ‘4 real’. They never shy away from showing their truest feelings, even if those are of vulnerability or weakness. It’s this honesty which has spoken to people and will speak to a hell of a lot more when ‘Silent Alarm’ rings out beyond the desks of music journalists.

Bloc Party are to be believed in because they are a band for the whites, the blacks, the straights, the hip-hop kids, the freaks, the geeks, the emo kids, the punk-funkers, the queers and, yes, the fashionistas. Not because they are all these things (though they are a lot of them), nor because they’re all things to all men (in fact they’re the complete opposite). Back in 2002, Pete’n’Carl said it was‘Time For Heroes’. Well now it’s the anti-heroes’ time”.

On 2nd February, it will be twenty years since Bloc Party unleashed Silent Alarm. In terms of its legacy, Silent Alarm was shortlisted for the 2005 Mercury Music Prize. It lost out to Antony and the Johnsons' I Am a Bird Now. Silent Alarm was also nominated for the 2005 Shortlist Music Prize, but it was beaten by Sufjan Stevens' Illinois. It was also  named Album of the Year for 2005 by NME, where it finished ahead of Arcade Fire's Funeral. Two decades after it came out, the mighty Silent Alarm still sounds…

FRESH and alive.

FEATURE: It Could Sing You to Sleep: Why Kate Bush Valuing the Authenticity and Warmth of Physical Music Is Important in the Modern Age

FEATURE:

 

 

It Could Sing You to Sleep

IMAGE CREDIT: Mark Wallis

Why Kate Bush Valuing the Authenticity and Warmth of Physical Music Is Important in the Modern Age

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ALTHOUGH the image above…

IN THIS PHOTO: A Before the Dawn official press photo/PHOTO CREDIT: Gavin Bush

is not actual DVD artwork, it is a fan-made design of a hypothetical DVD for Kate Bush’s Before the Dawn residency. She did put cameras in the Eventim Apollo to film her performance. Some seats were moved on 16th and 17th September (2014) to film the show. There was this desire to release the residency in DVD form. However, Bush was not happy with the film and it will remain forever unreleased. Not a slight on the team who filmed it and the quality of their work. However, maybe the overall effect was quite washed-out and you did not get the same atmosphere and immediacy that one got from the residency. Bush might not have liked how she looked. Maybe like a spectator filming the show rather than it being this immersive and dazzling production, respect to Kate Bush for withholding the DVD! Releasing something she is not happy with would go against her ethos and values. What is interesting is that Bush considered it being filmed to start. The idea of keeping the experience secret and for those who paid to be there. However, for prosperity or as a record of what went down, that would make sense. It is amazing that, in the modern age, there exists a residency/live show with almost no visual record. A few people did film and take photos – against Bush’s advice and warning – but, for the most part, only those who saw Before the Dawn know what it was like. It is this wonderful bonding secret. Though, for those who never got to see her, we will forever wonder what it was like being there. It got me thinking beyond that residency and Bush’s values as an artist.

IN THIS PHOTO: A Before the Dawn official press photo of Albert McIntosh during Hello Earth/PHOTO CREDIT: Gavin Bush

It is clear, from the way she has reissued her albums and made sure the sound quality is as good as it can be, how she wants people to listen physically – and not just stream albums. She also reissued the albums again and designed these new vinyl editions. Bespoke and wonderful, this is an artist who goes out of her way to ensure that the listener has the best experience. From seeing the vinyl to putting the needle down, Bush is involved with each step. Briefly going back to Before the Dawn. I think she was pioneering in terms of wanting phones to be kept away. Asking people not to film the show or take photos, for the most part, people obliged. There were those few who disregarded the advice. This being Kate Bush’s tribe, most respected her wishes and were present in 2014. Did many artists prior to 2014 do that?! In years since, everyone from Jack White to Alicia Keys to Bob Dylan have asked audiences to comply. Putting their phones in pouches that they can collect after the gig. It is a divisive subject. Many feeling this is policy is not fair and they might need their phone in an emergency. This idea of it being strict. However, if an artist wants their audience to be involved in the show, then it is fair enough! I have written about it before and still wonder if Kate Bush was among the first to ask for a phone-free audience. What her request proved is how top of her priority list is for people to connect with her work. In physical terms, mastering the sound and being involved in that process. The physical aspect of an album. Hard as it is to fight against the streaming tide, Kate Bush is standing firm!

When it came to Before the Dawn, she wanted the sort of live experience she had when she was young. When she performed in 1979 for The Tour of Life. There were no phones (as they had not been invented) and everyone was focused on the stage. The more technology advances, the more it replaces human contact and interaction. Bush sees similar dangers in the digital world. Music becoming a commodity and something ephemeral. People skipping tracks or jumping through an album. How digital music can disappear or be manipulated. When it comes to her albums, she both wants as many people as possible to listen on physical formats. She also values the experience of listening to an album in full. When she writes and produces her albums, that is how she wants people to experience them: in an unbroken state. I am going to expand on this for another feature. However, it is timely to discuss Bush’s dedication to physical music and something traditional yet relevant today. How vinyl and formats like cassette and C.D. are rising and coming back. It is about preservation and legacy. Making sure that people pass her albums through the generations. That her music is presented in its finest form. That it has this warmth and tactile feel. That it has this rich quality. You can see this consideration and architecture across her whole career. The videos and photoshoots. Making sure everything is as striking, original and appealing as possible. If another album does appear in the future, you know Bush will make every effort to make the listening experience as wonderful as possible! Maybe she will expand the physical format options and release it on cassette.

I am going to wrap up in a second. I am sort of glad there is not a Before the Dawn DVD. It means all the hard work Bush and her team put into the set design, lighting, costumes and every detail of the performance was for those who were there. A theatrical experience. It would lose clarity, colour and depth if it was transferred to DVD. Even if it was HD and on Blu-ray. Same with her albums. I always prefer listening to them on physical formats. Streaming is okay, though Bush encourages people to buy albums and hear them as she intended. I do admire how she has these values. Some might say her reissuing albums is a cash-in. Something to exploit a new wave of fans coming on board. In fact, it is Bush knowing people are discovering her music fresh and she wants to make sure they buy her albums. So they can be kept and played for years. So the songs she recorded years ago are as affecting and real. Maybe one day she will upgrade her music videos to HD and they will come out on DVD. Before the Dawn never will. That is a good thing. In a music world where social media and the digital rules, anything Bush does going forward always will prioritise the physical. Making sure her music, videos or anything else is presented in her own vision. Always thinking about the fans, it is another reason she is so loved. If you are new to Kate Bush and maybe have streamed some of her music, I would urge you to invest in an album or two. Take that step and get that ultimate pleasure: hearing that beautiful music radiate with warmth and richness. Words Bush definitely has in mind when remastering and working on the sound. Against the dominance of streaming, physical formats are fighting and resonating with people who want to connect with music. To feel the music. That is the beginning of…

A new dawn.

FEATURE: This Woman’s Worth: The Far-Reaching Influence of Kate Bush…from Music to Hollywood

FEATURE:

 

 

This Woman’s Worth

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush on 25th November, 1980 from the Delius (Song of Summer) performance on the Russel Harty Show in England/PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush

The Far-Reaching Influence of Kate Bush…from Music to Hollywood

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I am going to start off…

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush during 2014’s Before the Dawn residency/PHOTO CREDIT: Gavin Bush/Rex 

with a little slice of 1985’s Hounds of Love. Some testimony from those who worked with Kate Bush on this album. I am using this feature to return to 2014’s Before the Dawn and the famous faces who were at that opening night, in addition to the artists who also name-check Bush. A galaxy of stars who have each been moved and affected by Kate Bush. However, I was thinking about a passage from Graeme Thomson’s Under the Ivy: The Life and Music of Kate Bush. Youth (Martin Glover) played bass on the album. He noted how her music had this Druidic quality. How there was this mystical magic that ran through it. He said how the music they were making had this Bardic element. That it was part of an old English tradition. How it was not overt, “it was hidden”. Making this classic album with the use of cutting-edge technology. Thinking about how Bush was creating and how good her producing was. A song like Jig of Life. She wanted layers of percussion so handed it to Charlie Morgan an array of Irish instruments. (the lambeg, the bodhran etc.), and asked him to fill all twenty-four tracks with beating and booming. So unconventional and a curveball, there was this layer and world of drums! No other producer would think like that. The home studio she built was designed so there was no glass partition between the live room and the control room. A microphone was used for two-way communication. This was to make her feel less self-conscious. Bush admitted that she would have to psyche herself up and get a little drunk. Whether that was a euphemism or not, Youth observed how there was weed at the sessions. Bush using exotics to get into a mindset. It was this wonderful environment. Songs being added to or having things taken away. Bush knowing the right balance and always open to changing things up. It is no surprising that she has endured as an artist and producer. Someone who definitely made an impact on musicians who worked with her.

I am going to end with Before the Dawn and expand on an idea I posited before. However, think about the run-up to that residency. Bush barely uttered a word and did not do the usual media cycle. There were no huge social media campaigns. Instead, she asked whether people coming to see her could not film it and just be in the moment. The fact that she wanted people to experience the show without being distracted. I might expand on this for another feature. One of the first artists to try to ban phones at gigs. How influential that decision was. However, it is clear that the first night in August 2014 showed what love there was for Kate Bush. Fans travelling from around the world. Few other major artists have such a varied and eclectic roll-call of celebrity fans. Those who she in her own way has touched. David Gilmour, Grace Jones, Marc Almond and Björk in alternance. Rather than it being a fashionable thing, they all were fans of her music so wanted to see something spectacular and pay their respects. Elton John, Paul McCartney and Johnny Depp saw her. Anna Calvi and Gemma Arteton. Daniel Craig and Kylie Minogue queuing up to see her. Some nights on Before the Dawn Bush would hang around the V.I.P. area and chats. Other nights she would go home. Thinking about all of those names and when they first encountered Kate Bush. How they take aspects of her music and career and use it in their own work. That is really fascinating. Although we got some words from celebrities during the 2014 BBC documentary about Kate Bush, there has not been a wider visual or audio examination. Where people from music, Hollywood and beyond talk about Kate Bush, what she means to them and why she is so influential. Maybe Bush would not allow such a project, though it would define and unpick exactly why she is so beloved and important.

In 2025, we have a moment to look around and see why Kate Bush is so important. This woman’s worth. As she has done all the reissues and retrospection and there is this moment before she announces a new album (possibly), we can stand and consider Bush’s reach and influence. Bush, certainly after 2014, confirmed as a national treasure. Even if there is a generation who either do not know Kate Bush or only know her for Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God), it is clear that those of a certain age – those over thirty/thirty-five I would say – hold so much admiration for her. She has reached new people. It may not be only for the music. Bush’s bravery, independence and kindness. How she is formidably original and pioneering. There is that issue about the new wave of affection being tied to one time and place. 2022 and Stranger Things; Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God) and its chart success. I hope that the discourse around Kate Bush widens and there is more investigation of all of the albums. New eyes and fans might define her with one song because she is largely inactive and the catalogue is curated. People who have known her work for longer and were there in Hammersmith to see her in 2014 know the multiple sides of this icon. The earthquake and tidal wave of love that followed her 2022 success showed how many fields her music touches. Reserved only to a select elite of artists, Bush permeates the worlds of music, T.V., literature, theatre, radio, sport, fashion and, as Graeme Thomson writes, queer discourse. This will only expand and broaden as she enters this new phase of her career. Now sixty-six, Bush might now be preparing a new album. One of the most humbling aspects of Before the Dawn was seeing her extended musical family all together. Alongside Kylie Minogue was Alison Goldfrapp, Sophie Ellis-Bextor, Florence Welch, Alison Moyet, Ellie Goulding and Bat for Lashes. Making me wonder whether, one day, we will get a tribute album where some of these artists and more tackle a Kate Bush song each (or there are tantalising duets and collaborations!).

The Running Up That Hill documentary found artists like St. Vincent and Tori Amos singing the praises of an artist who left her mark. Artists including Solange Knowles and The Last Dinner Party have covered her music in recent years. It is not a case of artists in their forties, fifties and sixties flocking to see Kate Bush. There is this new breed of younger artists who are also genuinely respectful of Kate Bush and appreciate her genius. Billie Eilish no doubt has been affected by Kate Bush and responds to something primal. You can hear Bush’s influence in Eilish’s work. The same with Olivia Rodrigo. Lana Del Rey, Fiona Apple, ANOHNI, Lorde, Joanna Newsom, and Janelle Monáe. I don’t think it solely because of viral moments or T.V. show exposure that accounts for a younger generation of artists joining an army of Kate Bush fans. What could account for this dedicated love from such a wide and unconnected group of artists? People beyond music too? Maybe it is how Kate Bush rarely did what was expected. Not guided and moulded by a record label, it is her independence and tenacity that no doubt motivated and inspired legions of well-known fans. For the like of me and you too. Her career has, by and large, been controlled by her. Now, at a time when there is overexposure and so much required of artists to promote their work, Bush remains relatively grounded and quiet. She has the sort of life and career that so many people. The reception she got for the Before the Dawn shows proves that she is one of the finest live performers ever. Such imaginative stage design and a superb production, the mix of music, the visual and cinematic can explain why she drew fans from music, film and the stage alike. It is going to be compelling looking ahead a few years and the new wave of artists and those in the arts naming Kate Bush as an influence. It all adds value and stock to this incredible artist.

One of my great regrets is that I did not get to see Kate Bush during Before the Dawn. There has been no definitive decision as to whether she will perform live again or not. If she did come back to the stage perhaps for the final time, what would a show consist of? Parts of a new album combined with elements of earlier albums like Never for Ever, The Dreaming or even The Sensual World? I doubt Kate Bush will want to repeat herself in terms of songs performed. There would have to be a whole new concept and world created. Would she go back to the Eventim Apollo, or would it be another London venue? You can never rule out another residency from Kate Bush, though I would imagine she would do a small run of dates and not twenty-two. As much as anything, we would see another opening night as anticipated as the one in August 2014. With it, another wave of big names who have been influenced by Kate Bush. Whereas Before the Dawn has audience members including Big Boi and Lauren Laverne, a whole new generation of artists, writers and creatives would flock to London to see Kate Bush. It would be amazing! Rather than it being idol stargazing, it would show those who admire her work. How diverse her influence remains. The post-Stranger Things effect. I might write another feature calling for a Kate Bush tribute album as I am surprised it hasn’t happened. In case she has vetoed and blocked the possibility. If we might not see another documentary made about her, we are going to hear from those across a wide spectrum of disciplines wax lyrical about Kate Bush. All adding to the value and legacy of…

A music great.

FEATURE: Kate Bush: The Tour of Life: Pin-Ups

FEATURE:

 

 

Kate Bush: The Tour of Life

PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush

Pin-Ups

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I have written…

IN THIS PHOTO: David Bowie in 1973/PHOTO CREDIT: Mick Rock

about some of the artists Kate Bush has been inspired by. In terms of artists who songs she has covered. Those that she had a close association. How she idolised the likes of Elton John and David Bowie. I am going back to David Bowie in a bit. The title of this feature actually is the title of a David Bowie album from 1973. It was Bowie covering songs by artists he admired. It was not that well received. However, it was one of his earlier albums and an interesting project. That year, 1973, seems relevant when talking about Kate Bush. A year when she say the final gig of David Bowie’s final Ziggy Stardust gig. She was also discovering music from popular culture, her brother and family. Actually, let’s go back a year to 1972. A year where there were quite a few uplifting piano ballads in the charts – Simon and Garfunkel and John Lennon among the contributors -, this would have inspired the thirteen/fourteen-year-old Bush. Someone who was writing her own songs and developing aspirations of her own, I want to muse and consider the posters she might have had on her wall. Perhaps vinyl records of various artists. What she was taking from the music she loved. How this affected her and made her a stronger songwriter. It is clear that 1972 and 1973 were formative years. Compared to the end of the decade when there seemed to be a downer mood and a lot of political anger in music, the beginning of the 1970s did seem slightly more optimistic. Bush was still at school but she had already written quite a few songs and demoed many of them in 1973. By 1972, it is safe to say that her tastes extended beyond her brothers’ collections. What they were introducing their little sister to.

Let think about some ‘pin ups’. I would say David Bowie was on her wall. Maybe Bush had a copy of Aladdin Sane. Not much is written about the records she bought. Living in Welling, Kent, it would have been a bus ride to get to her local record store. Someone turning her lyrics into demos (rough but still beautiful), Bush was carefully curating a trove of musical influences. Not many female artists in the mix. Even though she no doubt would have been affected by Carole King’s Tapestry in 1971 and Joni Mitchell’s Blue the same year, she might also have latched onto Mitchell’s For the Roses of 1972. Even if she would say in interviews from 1978 that she was not really inspired by fellow female artists, you can hear shades of them in those early songs from Bush. Maybe not such a fan of Carole King, I do think there is a connection between Tapestry and some songs on The Kick Inside. If Bush’s style was less confessional and her piano playing more inventive, songs such as I Feel the Earth Move and Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow? are not a million miles away from what Bush was singing. The KT Bush Band’s brief reign revealed a few influences from Bush in terms of songs she covered. Artists like Steely Dan and The Beatles represented. As I have written about previously, she would have had Steely Dan in her mind by 1977. Maybe not in her world in 1973 (the year they released Countdown to Ecstasy). In 1972, The Beatles had only been apart for two years, so I am not sure whether Bush would have had any Beatles’ music or posters in her collection. If Bush was not as drawn to female songwriters of the early-1970s as she was bands, that is not to say their music made no impression. It was an exciting and variegated time for music.

Heavy Metal and Glam sitting alongside one another. Together with a love of Elton John, Bush would also have found a lot to love about bands like Deep Purple and Slade. The differences between them but also a similarity. How individual they were. Glam particularly would have appealed to a side of Kate Bush. The theatricality and fashion. The campiness and beauty. A mystique and strangeness that was not conformative and boring. T.Rex and David Bowie’s music surely important, though the aesthetics and looks that Marc Bolan and David Bowie projected would have struck her heart in addition to her creative mind. Again, in terms of wall posters and records, was there space for T.Rex? I can feel their presence in some of her earlier work. I think Bush was not a fan of the Americanisation of music. British artists adopting U.S. affectations and accents. Bowie’s intonations and delivery. Roxy Music were particularly influential. Bush finding a bond with Bryan Ferry. Resonating deep inside, I guess she would have picked up a copy of For Your Pleasure (1973). Songs such as Do the Strand wowing her. 1974’s Country Life would have stirred something inside her too. It was not only the sounds of the 1970s that were connecting with Kate Bush. Artists from her parents’ generation like Billie Holiday and Elvis Presley were in her record collection. I would love to have been a fly on the wall at East Wickham Farm in Kate Bush’s bedroom and rifle through the records! I guess it would have been an assortment of singles and albums. Maybe making a trip to town to stock up. However, her brothers would have bought quite a bit of music and shared if with their sister.

As Rob Jovanovic writes in his book, Kate Bush: The Biography, Bush would have had a bedroom to herself. In an affluent middle-class household, there would not have been the room sharing and crammed conditions many families faced. Next to her room was a den. In it were comfortable sofas, cushions and a prized record player. Like a nook where she could escape and have a proper environment to experience this eye-opening and mind-expanding music. I know there would have been some room for posters. Maybe vinyl propped up. Bush struck by the artwork on the covers. She would have invited friends over for sleepovers and borrowed more and more from her brothers. Putting the needle down on all kind of different albums and having her mind nourished and motivated. All of these experiences formative when we consider Kate Bush as an artist and how that would shape her sound and musical personality. Bush said in an interview how Billie Holiday was an influence. How she loved her voice and it stirred something inside her. So haunted, powerful and beautiful, you can feel that when you listen to some early Kate Bush tracks. Maybe The Man with the Child in His Eyes can be traced back to Holiday. Perhaps too Symphony in Blue from Lionheart? People might have their own thoughts on that. Bush was also seeking out progressive artists like David Bowie and Steely Dan. Bush identified more with male artists. Perhaps the singer-songwriter genre was not as interesting to her. Attracted more to bands like Thin Lizzy and Boomtown Rats. As I have said before, Bush worked mainly with male musicians and personnel. It was the way things were. However, it is clear she has had an impact on so many female artists. Bush definitely had David Bowie on her wall, but from which era? I would say Ziggy Stardust and that era (1972-1973).

I will expand on this more when writing about why Elton John was especially important in terms of the piano and how Bush was attracted to that. She did say how she had a crush on John. Maybe another poster that was on her wall. She has name-checked Madman Across the Water as a favourite album. Someone whose piano playing was at the forefront, it was different to all the guitar bands that were fashionable through the 1970s. Bush wrote to Elton John quoting Bernie Taupin and hand-delivered it to the BBC hoping he would get it – though he probably never did. The two did collaborate together in 2011 and are friends. I am not sure whether Bush’s demos she was producing around 1973 were directly inspired by the artists on her walls. Not lyrically at least. Many of her very earliest songs were quite heavy and dark. It is clear that her musical heroes and loves were definitely playing their part. Adorning her walls and her record player, I have always felt it was a missed opportunity Bush did not for her own Pin Ups album and cover songs by artists like Roxy Music and Elton John. Those she did cover an Elton John song, Rocket Man, in 1991, hearing her approach another of his song would be fascinating. It is interesting that perhaps her two biggest music idols did not get on. Elton John and David Bowie somewhat at odds. Bowie feeling that Elton John’s Rocket Man was a low-grade and pale version of Starman or Space Oddity. Bowie acknowledged that other people could write about space, but he must have felt John was taking from him. Even so, Bush had room for both artists. Radio Luxembourg was important. If pirate radio had been all but killed by commercial stations like BBC Radio 1 by 1967, Radio Luxembourg was different. When she was in the bath, a then-thirteen-year-old Kate Bush heard Starman for the first time. That was in 1972. Those years of 1972 and 1973 so crucial when we consider the sounds and artists that influenced Bush.

When writing a foreword for a David Bowie MOJO special, Bush recalled her fascination. This insect-thin man who dressed so differently. Theatrical and bizarre, was that a dress he was wearing? If artists of the early-1970s were not noted for their fashion sense, you can feel Bush being lured by artists whose style was as standout as their music. Bryan Ferry. Elton John. David Bowie. Bush, in that MOJO foreword, said how Bowie’s poster/picture was on her wall alongside a sacred space reserved for Elton John. Two rivals who found harmony at East Wickham Farm. Such a shame that she never collaborated with Bowie. This is something I recently wrote about and mourned. I am not sure how much of this bedroom obsession reflected in live music and gig-going. She definitely saw Bowie’s final performance as Ziggy Stardust, but what of other artists?! Maybe given the fact she was so young meant she was not going to as many gigs as someone older. Having to think of school and be responsible. However, what is clear is that music she discovered and also borrowed from her brothers made its way into her head, heart, wall and onto the record player. From Billie Holiday to Roxy Music, in their own special way, these were pin ups for her. I do think about Kate Bush’s family home and how music affected her. The posters on her walls and the records she cherished. How it would be this source of passion but also sanctuary. Life-changing and enormously vital to her songwriter, it has been interesting exploring these…

IMPORTANT pin ups.

FEATURE: Aftermath: Tricky’s Maxinquaye at Thirty

FEATURE:

 

 

Aftermath

Tricky’s Maxinquaye at Thirty

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ON 20th February…

one of the most important and acclaimed albums of the 1990s turns thirty. Tricky’s debut studio album, Maxinquaye, turns thirty. Angered and stifled by the lack of exposure and opportunity he found working with Massive Attack, he soon met Martina Topley-Bird. They hit it off quickly and had a common goal. She was signed with 4th & B'way. Tricky recorded Maxinquaye the following year, with Topley-Bird acting as the album’s primary vocalist. There are guest spots from artists such as Alison Goldfrapp. Reaching three in the U.K., Tricky’s debut album was a massive success. In years since it is seen as one of the most groundbreaking Trip-Hop albums ever. Even if Tricky does not like that term, alongside Massive Attack’s Blue Lines, Maxinquaye is seen as one of the pivotal and defining albums of the year. Ahead of its thirtieth anniversary, I will bring in some feature and reviews. Before getting to reviews of the original, it is worth noting the fact Maxinquaye has been reissued, where some of the tracks were reworked by Tricky. Speaking with NME, Tricky revealed why he wanted to reapproach the album:

“The Bristol-born artist (real name Adrian Thaws) is known for co-founding Massive Attack, who spear-headed the ‘trip-hop’ scene along with Portishead and Tricky himself. He released his debut solo album ‘Maxinquaye’ in 1995, which featured Tricky on production and singing with his then-partner, Martina Topley Bird. NME declared ‘Maxinquaye’ as Album of the Year over Oasis’ ‘What’s The Story (Morning Glory)’ and Radiohead’s ‘The Bends’. It was also nominated for the Mercury Prize, but lost out to Portishead’s ‘Dummy.

Reflecting on the legacy of ‘Maxinquaye’, Tricky said: “I do appreciate it, but I can also see the damage done to my mind as well.”

The musician reportedly struggled with the fame that came with ‘Maxinquaye’; with Thaws moving to New York to protect his anonymity. After living in LA, Paris, and Berlin, he is now residing in Toulouse.

The reissue, which Tricky called a “reincarnation”, features five tracks rewritten entirely by Tricky (‘Aftermath’, ‘Strugglin’, ‘Pumpkin’, ‘Hell Is Round The Corner’ and ‘Ponderosa’). ‘Maxinquaye (Reincarnated)’ also features eight previously unreleased remixes, including one by Leftfield.

Tricky said he wanted to rewrite the songs, as he believed the original sounded “dated”, and was inspired to update the album with his musical evolution and current feelings on certain tracks.

“I wanted to take them somewhere else,” he explained. “I’ve had so much love over the years that I have to put some effort into it, the people deserve that. I’m very grateful for the support I’ve had all these years.”

The album is named after Tricky’s mother, Maxine Quaye. She suffered from epilepsy and was placed in a psych ward when Tricky was just 12 months old; her grandmother took Tricky into her care.

Shortly after Tricky decided to call the reissue a reincarnation, he reportedly received a call from a cousin in Tipperary, saying he knew of a box containing the only known photograph of him and his mother together. That box was found with their great-grandmother, who lived with family in Colorado. That photo is now the cover of ‘Maxinquaye (Reincarnated)’. “The timing was just ridiculous,” said Thaws. “It was meant to be.”

The box also contained a letter written by Quaye in the psych ward, which Tricky had never seen before.

“It’s very depressing,” he said. “My mum was saying: ‘Thank you for looking after Adrian, Gran. I know it must be difficult for you because he’s young’. I’ve never heard what my mum was going through, so that really fucked me up.”

Maxine Quaye killed herself when Tricky was just four. His album is a significant reflection on the impact of her loss.

He also spoke about the recent death of his daughter, Mazy of 404, which the reissue addresses. Tricky and Topley-Bird had Mazy (also Mina), who was born a month after the release of ‘Maxinquaye’. In 2019, she took her own life in a psychiatric hospital.

“Since Mazy died, my mind is fucked and I’ve had to stop smoking weed for a bit, I started getting paranoid,” he said. “I was speaking to Martina; she said, ‘When ‘Maxinquaye’ came out, that’s when you started getting paranoid’.”

The updated lyrics on ‘Aftermath’ reference the months after Mazy died: “I see it through the town/There was a friend of mine/Feel it all the time/I might lose my mind.”

Tricky also recently lost his childhood hero, Terry Hall of The Specials (they previously collaborated on 1996 album ‘Nearly God’). “Terry dying, I felt like I had a part of my youth torn away from me,” said Tricky. A month before his death, Hall had emailed Tricky a picture of the pair from 1995, New Year’s Day.

The Specials, he recalled, were “the first band I heard who were like me.”

“They gave me hope,” he continued. “If these guys can do it, I can. The Specials were talking about council flats, going out on a Saturday night, doing the same stuff me and my mates were doing, singing about society. Without The Specials, I wouldn’t be doing music.”

Tricky, who does not normally attend funerals (“I’m not brave enough to deal with them”), attended Hall’s last year: “I felt I had to go, I don’t know what it was.”

“I cried at a baby at his funeral,” he confessed. “I was alright until they showed all his pictures from life, and then I was just blubbering. I can’t listen to The Specials anymore. But it’s the same thing with Mazy, I still can’t look at her picture. When I’m going through my phone and Mazy comes up, I’m like… whoa. I can’t deal with it. Hopefully that’ll change.”

During the recording of ‘Maxinquaye’, Tricky suffered a severe asthma attack, and Hall drove him to the hospital: “He shit himself. His face turned grey, he thought I was gonna die. Luckily, we got to the hospital.”

The artist also opened up about the legacy of trip-hop, which he labelled “fucking stupid” and “lame”.

“It became really hipster and corny, all this trip-hop stuff,” said Tricky, who has historically rejected the term. While noting the recent 90s revivalism in music, he did not believe trip-hop could make a similar resurgence as genres of the time like jungle. “I don’t think it can have a resurgence because there weren’t enough artists claiming it,” he said. “But there’s a resurgence in different ways – Billie Eilish, some of her stuff sounds like me. So that’s a resurgence, because she’s had huge, huge success”.

‘Maxinquaye’ and its biggest hit, ‘Hell Is Around The Corner’, is known for sharing the same sample with Portishead’s ‘Glory Box’ – Isaac Hayes’ ‘Ike’s Rap II’. Looking back on it today, Tricky told NME that this was purely coincidence.

“We’re in the car with two women, one is driving me back to my apartment,” he said. “I’m playing [‘Hell Is Around The Corner’] and she told me, ‘Geoff [Barrow] sampled that!’ Which is crazy: it’s the same sample, same speed, but they’re two different songs, so it didn’t bother me.”

Tricky’s former engineer Mark Saunders (who worked on ‘Maxinquaye’) alleged that Tricky and Barrow had a fight about the alleged sample at the 1995 Mercury Awards. However, Tricky has denied the fight ever happened. “Geoff’s a lovely guy! He’s a real positive guy, even though he’s been thinking the world’s gonna end for the last 20 years,” he joked.

“He ain’t the sort of guy to say, ‘Fuck you, you used the same sample.’ There’s no up and down with Geoff, he’s the same guy as years ago; he’s humble.”

Tricky also claimed that Saunders, who published a blog in 2021 detailing the process of ‘Maxinquaye’, did not accurately portray how the album was made.

“On my baby’s grave, that guy exaggerates what happened,” he said. “He said once that he would play stuff when I was outside the studio, like the guitar, and I would come back and not notice it. Come on, that’s ridiculous.”

Tricky added that Saunders was a “good dude, but a strange guy”.

Prior to coming to a couple of reviews, I want to highlight two anniversary features. Both published to mark Maxinquaye’s twenty-fifth anniversary. These 2020 features are illuminating. I want to start by quoting from Albumism and their recollections and writing about a classic. Even if Tricky has reapproached it, one cannot deny the power and influence of the 1995 release:

“In the mid 1980s, aspiring emcee Adrian “Tricky” Thaws joined the now-legendary Bristol sound system collective The Wild Bunch, who would later morph into Massive Attack. Tricky’s association with the group would serve as his career launching pad, as they featured his signature raspy vocals and haunting lyrics on the title track of their landmark 1991 debut album Blue Lines, as well as two songs—“Karmacoma” and “Eurochild”—from their acclaimed 1994 follow-up LP Protection. No longer content with his relegated role as a secondary contributor residing on the periphery of his peers’ spotlight, Tricky ultimately abandoned his collaborative work with Massive Attack to devote his creative restlessness and passions toward crafting his debut solo album.

Titled as an homage to Tricky’s late mother Maxine Quaye, Tricky’s inaugural long player Maxinquaye more than delivered upon the promise that had been manifest in his previous supporting roles, and heralded the proper arrival of a wickedly talented voice and musical visionary. A gritty, intoxicating, and inventive head-rush of an album, the Mercury Prize-nominated Maxinquaye confirmed that Tricky’s musical imagination was more vivid than the vast majority of artists working at the time.

While the album is primarily indebted to hip-hop, it succeeds in merging multiple styles including ambient, dub, reggae, and rock, making it damn near impossible to pigeonhole, and thankfully so. The twelve songs are dominated by atmospheric, chilled-out fare that sounds like the most beautifully dark and twisted lullabies you’ll ever dream of hearing. And a few propulsive, beat-driven compositions are incorporated throughout to ensure a more balanced, monotony-free listening experience, overall.

What ultimately makes Maxinquaye so unforgettable is that it is an album of marked contrasts that play off of each other to extraordinary effect. The most striking example of this is the intriguing juxtaposition of featured vocalist Martina Topley-Bird’s freshly alluring voice with Tricky’s substantially less polished, unabashedly raw wordplay. In theory, the combination of such antithetical vocal styles shouldn’t engender such an enchanting sound. But it most certainly does here.

Presumably well aware of the vocal gold he had to work with in recording the album, Tricky actually defers much of the spotlight to Topley-Bird, whose not-so-secret weapon of a voice features on the majority of the songs and very nearly steals the show, single-handedly. And though she contributes to just one song (“Pumpkin,”), Alison Goldfrapp also thoroughly dominates the proceeding with her vocal charms, which would figure prominently in helping to secure worldwide plaudits for her five-and-a-half years later with the release of Goldfrapp’s debut LP Felt Mountain (2000).

In addition to its seemingly incongruous vocal pairings, Maxinquaye’s duality is further manifested in its sonic inspirations. It sounds very much like a futuristic record, and remarkably so, considering that it borrows so heavily from the classic soul and hip-hop that predates it. Samples abound throughout the album, most notably on “Brand New You’re Retro” (Michael Jackson’s “Bad”), “Aftermath” (Marvin Gaye’s “That’s the Way Love Is”), “Feed Me” (KRS-One’s “Sound of Da Police”), and “Hell is Around the Corner” (Isaac Hayes’ “Ike’s Rap II,” which was also lifted by Portishead on their “Glory Box” single released just weeks prior to Maxinquaye’s arrival).

The key to making this dichotomy between old and new work so effectively is Tricky’s commitment to constructing these songs as distinctively original compositions, as opposed to the lazily recycled rehashes of already-proven songs that producers of lesser ambition often lean on. “Black Steel,” a cover of Public Enemy’s classic prison-break anthem “Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos,” is the prime example of Tricky’s originality. Aside from staying true to Chuck D’s lyrics (sung by Topley-Bird here), the song’s mix of propulsive drums and guitars sounds nothing like PE’s version, further affirming the album’s pure ingenuity.

Tricky has recorded a dozen albums since Maxinquaye, and with each subsequent recording, he has gradually abandoned the more subdued approach of his debut, in favor of more rugged, harder-hitting sounds. So Maxinquaye represents a bit of an anomaly—and a brilliant one—when considering his catalog as a whole. It’s a fantastic record that requires repeated, focused listens (headphones highly recommended) to fully understand and appreciate its genius”.

I hope there is new light shone on Maxinquaye on 20th February when it turns thirty. It is a phenomenal album that influenced so many other artists. The Quietus published a feature in 2020. David Bennun interviewed Tricky through the years and wrote about how his experiences with the album have changed since it was released:

“Maxinquaye is around an hour long and the first three-quarters of that is left-field bubblegum gold. It opens with a cover version, of sorts: ‘Overcome’, in which Tricky remakes his own Massive Attack number, ‘Karmacoma’, as a thick, unquiet fever dream – and an almost cubist vision of a moment in time that encompasses within the same frame a couple walking through quiet suburbs as the Gulf War rages three thousand miles away. It’s one of two numbers not first heard on Maxinquaye, the other being ‘Black Steel’, the ingenious rock version of Public Enemy’s ‘Black Steel In The Hour Of Chaos’. I’ve met a fair few people who know the song only from here, and for whom the original, when they seek it out, is as startling as the Maxinquaye take was then. Between them comes ‘Ponderosa’, dragging its clanking chains like Marley’s ghost. (Jacob, not Bob. There was an awful lot of Bobness bobbing about just then, but Tricky had stranger fish to fry; retrieved via submersible from the depths where weird things swim.)

I notice only now how much ‘Ponderosa’ echoes Tom Waits. Returning to Maxinquaye with ears tempered by time, and with the shock of its newness having long since receded, its sources are easier to spot. Which makes it no less remarkable. Twenty-five years ago, it was possible to believe you’d never heard anything like it before; when of course, what you’d never heard before was this particular adaptation. Which is the beauty and joy of the new – not that it’s without precedent, but that it feels that way.

‘Hell Is Round The Corner’, for instance, didn’t just revolve upon an Isaac Hayes loop, but upon the same loop (from ‘Ike’s Rap II’) Portishead had already used on the exquisite ‘Glory Box’. It’s a measure of each act’s invention that each track seemed fresh and entire of itself. Everybody concerned may have tried to distance themselves from the notion of a Bristol scene – "I was supposed to have invented trip hop, and I will fucking deny having anything to do with it," said Tricky, with understandable venom – but there was certainly a Bristol sound, and we know now it constituted British indie-pop’s last grand sub-cultural flourish before Britpop’s dead hand fell upon it.

"If I was in a band," one usually electronics-averse colleague said of Maxinquaye, "and I heard this, I’d probably think, why am I even bothering?" ‘Pumpkin’ was likely the point at which all those soon-to-be trip-hoppers, who must have thus far listened with a combination of awe and despair, thought to themselves, "Hang on, we could have a go at this." Five tracks in, it’s the first thing on there that sounds straightforward enough to be attainable. A steady beat, a climbing tune, a torchy vocal… and Tricky growling allusive filth beneath it, but that’s the bit they usually decided they could do without. Inevitably, if you had to choose between it and the entire catalogue of things that resemble it, you wouldn’t need to blink, let alone think about it.

It probably didn’t happen that way, though, because the soon-to-be trip-hoppers had a head start with ‘Aftermath’, which thirteen months previously had been Tricky’s first release, causing a multitude of ears to prick up and jaws to drop. That shuffling beat, that slumberous, claustrophobic atmosphere, Martina’s voice flitting through it, deadpan and spectral. Only a year after Jacques Derrida proposed the idea of hauntology, Tricky and Martina created an exemplary musical manifestation of it. As debut singles go, it’s up there with the greatest of them – ‘Virginia Plain’, ‘Anarchy In The U.K.’, name your own favourite – as both a statement of intent and a gobsmacking thing. Something that one moment wasn’t there and the next moment was, and made life feel different because of it. "Just when I thought I could not be stopped," murmurs Tricky at the end of the longer album version, revealing another apt and, in hindsight, unsurprising source – ‘Ghosts’, by Japan.

‘Abbaon Fat Tracks is pure sleaze’; the sly, whirring ‘Brand New You’re Retro’, a semi-parodic and wholly brilliant rap throwdown. ‘Suffocated Love’, which lives up to its title, is yet another blueprint much consulted and never bettered. Because, how could it be? The only way you’d have the imagination to improve on it was to be the person who thought of it, and that person never tried. Then there’s ‘You Don’t’, which stands alongside ‘The Rhythm Divine’ and ‘History Repeating’ as a magnificent, melodramatic Shirley Bassey electro track, despite Shirley Bassey not appearing on it; Icelandic singer Ragga fills in neatly.

Again, I’m struck by how songs which then seemed to spill their contents over their brims now seem so spare and tidy. I’d say there’s not an ounce of fat on Maxinquaye, and it would be true but for the final two tracks, ‘Strugglin” and ‘Feed Me’, which aren’t bad by any measure. They’re the most avant-garde and overtly "difficult" things on the album, and in being so they emphasise just what corking pop tunes are the ten tracks which precede them.

Maxinquaye was an album of its time largely because it made its time what it was. For better or for worse. Out of its time, it belongs to a category beyond that of mere genre. It’s one of those albums whose radicalism is matched by its brilliant immediacy, an inescapable barrage of pleasure bombs whose revolutionary impact is succeeded by an undimmed afterlife. Revolver, Highway 61 Revisited, Supa Dupa Fly, Technique, Maxinquaye. Argue the toss about their relative greatness if you care to; still, you understand the type. You don’t get a lot of those lately, not because nobody is capable of producing them, but because our pop culture is seldom cohesive enough to recognise them. Sic transit gloria Tricky, and all his kind”.

Before wrapping up, there are a couple of reviews I want to bring in. AllMusic had their say about a classic album. One that is not only seen as one of the best albums of 1995 but one of the greatest of all time. An album we will be speaking about for decades:

“Tricky's debut, Maxinquaye, is an album of stunning sustained vision and imagination, a record that sounds like it has no precedent as it boldly predicts a new future. Of course, neither sentiment is true. Much of the music on Maxinquaye has its roots in the trip-hop pioneered by Massive Attack, which once featured Tricky, and after the success of this record, trip-hop became fashionable, turning into safe, comfortable music to be played at upscale dinner parties thrown by hip twenty and thirtysomethings. Both of these sentiments are true, yet Maxinquaye still manages to retain its power; years later, it can still sound haunting, disturbing, and surprising after countless spins. It's an album that exists outside of time and outside of trends, a record whose clanking rhythms, tape haze, murmured vocals, shards of noise, reversed gender roles, alt-rock asides, and soul samplings create a ghostly netherworld fused with seductive menace and paranoia. It also shimmers with mystery, coming not just from Tricky -- whose voice isn't even heard until the second song on the record -- but with vocalist, Martina Topley-Bird, whose smoky singing lures listeners into the unrelenting darkness of the record. Once they're there, Maxinquaye offers untold treasures. There is the sheer pleasure of coasting by on the sound of the record, how it makes greater use of noise and experimental music than anything since the Bomb Squad and Public Enemy. Then, there's the tip of the hat to PE with a surreal cover of "Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos," sung by Topley-Bird and never sounding like a postmodernist in-joke. Other references and samples register subconsciously -- while Isaac Hayes' "Ike's Rap II" flows through "Hell Is Around the Corner" and the Smashing Pumpkins are even referenced in the title of "Pumpkin," Shakespear's Sister and the Chantels slip by, while Michael Jackson's "Bad" thrillingly bleeds into "Expressway to Your Heart" on "Brand New You're Retro." Lyrics flow in and out of consciousness, with lingering, whispered promises suddenly undercut by veiled threats and bursts of violence. Then, there's how music that initially may seem like mood pieces slowly reveal their ingenious structure and arrangement and register as full-blown songs, or how the alternately languid and chaotic rhythms finally compliment each other, turning this into a bracing sonic adventure that gains richness and resonance with each listen. After all, there's so much going on here -- within the production, the songs, the words -- it remains fascinating even after all of its many paths have been explored (which certainly can't be said of the trip-hop that followed, including records by Tricky). And that air of mystery that can be impenetrable upon the first listen certainly is something that keeps Maxinquaye tantalizing after it's become familiar, particularly because, like all good mysteries, there's no getting to the bottom of it, no matter how hard you try”.

Let’s finish up with a review from Pitchfork. They made some interesting observations about Tricky’s amazing and seismic debut. I think I first heard the album in the 2000s but it has stayed with me ever since. It is one of the most affecting albums I have ever heard:

“Topley-Bird also brought the lion’s share of vocal melody to Maxinquaye, spinning off improvised tunes like velveteen rabbits from a hat. Rather than suggesting that Topley-Bird listen to his tracks in advance and reflect on what she would sing, Tricky would apparently hand his teenage foil a set of lyrics and send her off to the kitchen to improvise a take. It was, Topley-Bird said, “totally instinctive.” “There was no time to drum up an alter ego,” she told The Guardian. Yet the melodies she came up with are otherworldly and sublime, from the hairs-on-the-back-of-the-neck revolt of “Strugglin’” to the disinterested disgust she lays on “Abbaon Fat Tracks.”

These various themes—happy accidents and wide tastes, casual melodic power and genre ambivalence—collided on “Black Steel,” a strutting, guitared-up half-cover of Public Enemy’s “Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos” that dented the UK charts. The track started with a scratchily recorded drum loop from “Rukkumani Rukkumani,” taken from Indian film composer A. R. Rahman’s Roja soundtrack, which Tricky had received from the mother of his former girlfriend and to which someone—possibly Saunders—added a backward guitar riff. When it came time for Topley-Bird to record her vocals, Tricky couldn’t be bothered to write them out in full, so Topley-Bird ended up using just the song’s first verse, to which she improvised one of her most powerful melodies, twisting and swooping like a bird escaping from its cage. Techno-rock act FTV, who Tricky had met at a gig, added snarling guitar and Sex Pistols-style drums to create a supremely unlikely—and yet entirely fitting—Bollywood/rock/techno/hip-hop take on the Public Enemy classic.

Maxinquaye was an immediate sensation in the UK, selling 100,000 copies in its first months of release. It even made an impact in the U.S.—something almost unknown for a hip-hop-leaning act from the UK at the time—and Tricky teamed up with Gravediggaz for The Hell EP, cementing a stylistic union with RZA. For an album so rooted in Bristol, Maxinquaye’s reach remains surprisingly universal: Tricky might have claimed that Beyoncé had never heard of him when she invited him to guest at her 2011 Glastonbury headline slot, but without the critical and commercial success of his debut, that bizarre cameo surely would never have happened. Such public recognition came at a price. Alongside the output of Portishead and Massive Attack, Maxinquaye would come to be seen as a leading work of the trip-hop movement, a stylistic tag that Tricky hated. “I don’t really know what trip-hop is, I think it’s bollocks to be honest,” Tricky told Dummy in 2013. “People call Morcheeba trip-hop don’t they? Well I’ve never listened to them.”

You can understand his distrust of the label. Tricky’s music is far darker and more abstruse than the soft-soap hip-hop beats of Morcheeba or Sneaker Pimps; it is far more claustrophobic than Massive Attack’s celebrated trio of ’90s albums; and there is little to no connection between the scorched velvet of Tricky and Topley-Bird’s vocal pairing and the operatic intensity of Portishead’s Beth Gibbons. Tricky had poured his whole life into Maxinquaye and had no desire to see his music watered down by weakling imitators armed with a sampler and a couple of library-music albums.

Even if his debut were trip-hop, Tricky would spend the next few years recording an increasingly bleak collection of records intended to “kill all that Maxinquaye bullshit,” resulting in the noxious paranoia of Nearly God and the vibe-suffocating desolation of Pre-Millenium Tension. With the ratcheting nerves of Tricky’s subsequent albums—2020’s Fall to Pieces was his 14th—Tricky’s star has faded somewhat, and he has bounced label to label and collaborator to collaborator. For almost 30 years, listeners have been waiting for Tricky to return to the monumentally anomalous charms of Maxinquaye, a record regularly cited among the best albums of the ’90s.

They will wait in vain. To revisit such singular territory is unthinkable, like wishing lightning would strike twice with a slightly updated color scheme. Even if Tricky wanted to return to the sound of Maxinquaye, he almost certainly couldn’t. Maxinquaye was based on musical instinct—on not knowing what was right, and caring even less. But chance encounters happen only once, and innocence lasts only so long. In recording Maxinquaye, Tricky inevitably started to absorb the conventions of musical production, slowly strangling the goose even as it laid the golden egg. Fall to Pieces is a great album, agonizing in its wounded depths; but, the odd anarchistic touch aside, it is a fairly orthodox record, one that appears to know all about eight-bar sections, consonant harmonies, and the other musical conventions to which Tricky was once so gloriously indifferent.

Like fashioning a house of cards in a strong wind, Maxinquaye held its destruction in its own creation and its failure in its success: a borderline unclassifiable work that was Tricky in both name and nature. If we can no more remake Maxinquaye than land another first man on the Moon, it remains a magnificent singularity, a full-on solar eclipse of an album that blotted out all precedent to seek refuge in the shadows”.

On 20th February, it will be thirty years since Tricky released his masterpiece debut, Maxinquaye. I wonder if he will share his thoughts on the album. As he has re-released it and reworked some songs, maybe he feels a bit of distance with his 1995 original. However, he cannot deny the album has impacted so many people. A defining Trip-Hop work, thirty years on, we are still talking about…

A work of genius.

FEATURE: The Digital Mixtape: Big Boi at Fifty

FEATURE:

 

 

The Digital Mixtape

Big Boi at Fifty

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ONE of music’s…

IN THIS PHOTO: Big Boi with André 3000 (Outkast)

biggest artists turns fifty very shortly. Because of that, I wanted to celebrate that with a playlist featuring some of his biggest songs and some deeper cuts. That artist is Big Boi. Antwan André Patton is one of half of Outkast. A successful solo artist in his own right, the Georgia-born artist turns fifty on 1st February. Before coming to a mixtape with some Outkast tracks and Big Boi solo cuts, I wanted to get to some biography about him. For that, AllMusic are on hand:

“Outside his partnership with André 3000 as OutKast, and apart from his central role in the Dungeon Family collective, rapper and producer Big Boi has built a lengthy parallel discography on his own. Known for his cool demeanor and witty, high-velocity wordplay, Big Boi effectively debuted as a solo artist with the first half of OutKast's Grammy-winning blockbuster Speakerboxxx/The Love Below (2003). Sir Lucious Left Foot...The Son of Chico Dusty (2010), his first true solo album, hit the Top Ten of the Billboard 200 with a push from the Grammy-nominated single with "Shutterbugg." Big Boi's additional solo albums, namely Vicious Lies and Dangerous Rumors (2012) and Boomiverse (2017), along with the collaborations Big Grams (with Phantogram; 2015) and The Big Sleepover (with Sleepy Brown; 2021), have been balanced with extensive time clocked as a producer and featured artist. Killer Mike and Janelle Monáe are among the artists whose careers he has boosted in those and other capacities.

After OutKast broke through in 1993 with the Top 40 hit "Player's Ball," Big Boi -- born Antwan André Patton in Savannah, Georgia -- made select solo featured appearances for the next ten years. "Dirty South" (by fellow Dungeon Family members Goodie Mob), "All N My Grill" (Missy Elliott), "In da Wind" (Trick Daddy), and "A.D.I.D.A.S." (Killer Mike) were charting singles. For the fifth OutKast full-length, Big Boi and André 3000 opted to record separate sets bundled as Speakerboxxx/The Love Below. The Billboard 200-topping release won the 2003 Grammy Awards for Best Rap Album and Album of the Year. Over the next three years, Big Boi branched out with his Purple Ribbon label, which released the Purple Ribbon All-Stars compilations Got That Purp and Got Purp? Vol. II. The sequel contained early appearances from Janelle Monáe and the Top 40 hit "Kryptonite (I'm on It)," a posse cut featuring Big Boi and Killer Mike. Big Boi additionally guested during this time on Brooke Valentine's Top 40 entry "Girlfight" and Fantasia's charting "Hood Boy." OutKast's lengthy hiatus began after the subsequent Idlewild project in 2006.

Big Boi prepared his first proper solo album, and over 2008 and 2009 offered some stray singles. "Royal Flush," on which he linked with André 3000 and Raekwon, was nominated for a Grammy in the category of Best Rap Performance by a Duo or Group. In 2010, he was on Janelle Monáe's "Tightrope" and issued another solo single, "Shutterbugg," before Sir Lucious Left Foot...The Son of Chico Dusty arrived that July. The loose and rollicking set entered the Billboard 200, R&B/hip-hop, and rap charts at number three. "Shutterbugg" bagged another Grammy nomination in the rap field, and "Tightrope" was up for Best Urban/Alternative Performance. In December 2012, the follow-up Vicious Lies and Dangerous Rumors hit number 34 on the Billboard 200 with a guest list that extended far beyond the rap realm to involve the likes of Little Dragon, Wavves, and Phantogram. Big Boi continued to work with the latter act as Big Grams, whose self-titled EP peaked in the Top Ten of the rap and alternative charts in 2015. He offered his third official solo LP, BOOMIVERSE, in June 2017. The production was handled primarily by longtime partners Organized Noize, along with assists from the likes of "Shutterbugg" collaborator Scott Storch, Dr. Luke, and Cirkut.

Between albums, Big Boi picked up a Grammy nomination for Best Rap Song with Danger Mouse's "Chase Me," a track that also involved Killer Mike and El-P (aka Run the Jewels). Coinciding with his appearance in February 2019 alongside Maroon 5 at the Super Bowl half-time show in Atlanta, Big Boi issued the single "Doin' It," featuring Sleepy Brown. Additional collaborations with Brown followed, such as "Intentions," which also featured CeeLo Green, and 2020's "Can't Sleep."The Big Sleepover, Big Boi and Sleepy Brown's long-promised collaborative album, was planned for 2021, preceded by another single, "The Big Sleep Is Over”.

A tremendous artist who turns fifty on 1st February, I wanted to recognise the brilliance of Big Boi. Below are examples of his work. From the earliest days of Outkast through to his most recent solo project, this is one of music’s greats. Ahead of his fiftieth birthday, this is a musical salute to…

>

THE amazing Big Boi.

FEATURE: History of Touches: Björk’s Vulnicura at Ten

FEATURE:

 

 

History of Touches

Björk’s Vulnicura at Ten

_________

THIS feature…

is all about Björk’s eighth studio album. One of her very best. On 20th January, it will be ten years since the release of Vulnicura. Björk explained the album represents her feelings before and after her breakup with American contemporary artist Matthew Barney and the healing process. I am going to end with a few of the reviews for an album heralded as one of the most honest and best from the Icelandic icon. One that I hope is written about as it turns ten very soon. The companion album, Vulnicura Strings, was released on 6th November, 2015. I am not going to drop in the whole feature. However, in April 2015, Sound on Sound took us inside the recording of Björk’s Vulnicura. Before moving onto some of the many impassioned reviews, it is worth discovering a bit more about how this incredible and revealing album started and came to life. More of an insight into Björk’s creative process and some of the technology used for the recording:

“Much of the writing and recording of Vulnicura took place at Björk’s New York home, where she has the ultimate 21st Century studio. The total music–tech content consists of an Avid Pro Tools HD Native Thunderbolt system, Genelec 1032 monitors (“I like them a lot, they sound very creamy. But they can be deceptive, because everything sounds good in them. So you have to be a little careful.”), an M–Audio controller, a Telefunken ELAM 251 microphone and Neve 1081 mic preamp.

Björk takes a hands–on role in directing her string players, as here at Syrland Studios during the making of Vulnicura. For Chris Elms’ first string session at Sundlaugin Studio in Reykjavik, a 15–piece string section was miked very close. “Melody and emotion come first. I will then slowly work on the lyrics. I wrote most of the melodies walking outside, hiking I do that a lot. The melodies whirl in my head, and build up momentum, and then I slowly figure out what kind of shape, structure and mood they need. With this album being what I have called my most ‘psychological’ album, the lyrics were important and strings would support the kind of emotions I had to express.”

Once Björk is clear on the melodies, lyrics, shape and mood of a piece, she will record, edit and comp the vocals in Pro Tools, and in the case of Vulnicura, “work on the string arrangements. I mostly work from my vocal melodies, and I then have the freedom of the computer to arrange.”

She has never really played traditional instruments very much, “which is why I was so excited about the laptop in 1999. I learned to use Sibelius in that year, and most of Vespertine was done on Sibelius — all the music boxes, harps, glockenspiels, and so on. It was the same with ‘Ambergris March’ [from Drawing Restraint 9, a soundtrack album she made in 2005 with Matthew Barney]. With the string arrangements I did on Post [1995], Homogenic and Vespertine, I gradually learned to arrange, but with Vulnicura also to transcribe and conduct when needed. I also started using Pro Tools in 1999 and kinda got hooked. I like that it isn’t on a 4/4 grid, and I can be more focused on the narration, look at the music from a film perspective, rather than as a ‘house’ club thing. But to be honest, by now you can do all things in all programs, so it is mostly about what you feel comfortable with. At the end of the day, it is about the emotion. As a singer I have also always liked the challenge of not being too hooked on gear. This maybe comes from singing through bass amps in punk bands as a teenager. If you want a certain timbre, make it with your throat!

Further string sessions took place at Syrland Studios, with a larger ensemble. For an even more intimate sound, all their instruments were miked with clip–on DPA omnis. “I don’t use samplers much. I will usually gather soundbanks for each album and will then play them in on keyboards. This applies for simpler beats in songs like ‘Venus As A Boy’ [from Debut] and ‘Cosmogony’ [from Biophilia], and so on. I play my string arrangements on the keyboard or in Sibelius, but more and more I am using Melodyne to do complex arrangements with my voice. I will then copy those arrangements over to the strings.”

Enter Arca

For the first two thirds of 2013, Björk worked alone with her musical material, both in New York and in Reykjavik. Given the heavy subject matter, it was a daunting task. But, she explains on her web site, “then a magic thing happened to me: as I lost one thing something else entered. Alejandro contacted me late Summer 2013 and was interested in working with me. It was perfect timing. To make beats to the songs would have taken me three years (like on Vespertine) but this enchanted Arca would visit me repeatedly and only a few months later we had a whole album!”

In our interview, Björk elaborates: “When Alejandro first came to Iceland, in October 2013, I had seven songs ready, with vocals and with Sibelius string arrangements. Because of the subject matter the structures were pretty formed. We then sat together, and he in an almost clairvoyant way programmed the beats. In the beginning I sat next to him, and would sometimes tap the basic shape of the beats on the table. Then after he had come to Iceland several times we got to know each other, and we started writing together. We co–wrote half of ‘Family’, and ‘Notget’ was very 50/50.”

Bobby Krlic aka the Haxan Cloak. Chris Elms at London’s Strongroom Studios .Alejandro Ghersi, aka Arca, is regarded as one of the rising stars of the electronic music world. The Venezuelan, who lives in East London, has enjoyed a tremendously successful two years, programming beats for four songs on Kanye West’s Yeezus (2013) and co–producing the whole of FKA Twigs’ EP2 (2013) and part of her debut album LP1 (2014). Last November he released his first solo album, Xen, on Mute.

“When Björk played me the record’s songs in demo form, the strings and vocal were fully formed; the lyrics were finished and a few of the songs themselves were finished right down to their final structure. I cried like a baby first time I heard ‘Family’ and ‘Black Lake’ in their demo stages! After that we just began to unite in finding ways of solving design problems emotionally, so to speak, regarding the production. We began to do this kind of graceful dance. There was a lot of silent understanding about things, a lot of respect. Every song was different, but the tone of the actual work was childlike and fun, with us dancing and laughing to the beats. There was something really beautiful about working on a record on such a heavy subject matter with such a delicate lightness and playfulness”.

I am going to round things up soon. Before that, there are a few reviews that I want to highlight. The first is from Pitchfork. Heralding Björk’s powerful singing and the fact that she ventures into the common break-up album territory but does it in a unique, powerful and personal way, it still has the power to move a decade later:

“Vulnicura is loosely arranged around the chronology of a relationship: the period before the breakup, the dazed moments after, the slow recovery. It’s a sense of time that’s both hyper-specific—in the liner notes, Björk places each song up until the two-thirds mark in an exact point on the timeline, from nine months before to 11 months after—and loose, with half-moments that span entire dramatic arcs. "History of Touches", for example, is a near-forensic exhumation of the precise time of relationship death. The song begins and ends upon the narrator waking her soon-to-be-ex-lover, and Arca’s programming develops in slow motion as Björk’s vocal and lyric circle back upon the scale and warp the timeline: "The history of touches, every single archive compressed into a second." There’s some "Cocoon" in there, in the post-coital setting and smitten sigh, but there’s also the unmistakable sense that everything Björk describes is expiring as she speaks it. It’s luxuriant and bleary and sad, something like sleepwalking infatuated through an autopsy. Skip to several months after in the record's progression, album centerpiece "Black Lake", a masterwork of balancing elements: Björk’s requiem strings leading to Arca’s tectonic-plate percussion and vocal patches, cuttingly crafted (in unmistakably Björk fashion) lines like "I am bored of your apocalyptic obsessions" giving way to lines far more unadorned and unanswerable: "Did I love you too much?"

What keeps these questions from sounding maudlin are those flashes of rueful wit (elsewhere, on "Family": "Is there a place where I can pay respects for the death of my family?") and Björk’s vocal delivery; she’s at least twice expressed her admiration, at the pure musical level, of fado singer Amália Rodrigues, and you can hear it in how she leans into syllables, indulging feelings then dissecting them. Rarely does Vulnicura sound anything but seamless; her palette blends in drum-and-bass loops, flatline effects, groaning cellos, pitch-warped echoes by Antony Hegarty. The more Björk has grown as an arranger, the less dated her albums sound; closer "Quicksand" initially scans like it’s approaching over-timely Rudimental territory, but it’s a little late in the album for that, and this is soon subsumed into a string reverie that’s unmistakably hers.

In Björk’s discography, Vulnicura most resembles Vespertine, another unyieldingly cerebral work about vulnerability and being turned by love to besotted viscera, and also an unmistakably female album. Vulnicura doubles down on these elements, from the choir arrangements to the yonic wound imagery of the cover, like Björk’s attempt at a grand unified photoshoot of female pain, to Vulnicura’s echoes from the first track ("Moments of clarity are so rare—I better document this") of the long tradition of women artists thinking and rethinking their own life stories, in public, until they coalesce into art. Fittingly, when Björk dispenses with the breakup framework (and timestamps) two-thirds of the way through the album, Vulnicura becomes about more. "Mouth Mantra" is part glitchy nightmare of grotesque imagery ("my mouth was sewn up… I was not heard") and part reassertion of her artistic identity: "this tunnel has enabled thousands of sounds."

It isn’t just her. "I want to support young girls who are in their 20s now and tell them you’re not just imagining things," she told Pitchfork, and on "Quicksand" Vulnicura shifts finally from personal documentation of one person’s rough year to words for those who’ve stayed for it all: "Every time you give up, you take away our future and my continuity—and my daughter’s, and her daughters, and her daughters," Björk sings on the track, just before it cuts off mid-string cadenza. It’s possible to hear this as resignation, but it’s also possible to hear it as a note of hope, that there is a future after coming out of such an emotional wringer, if not quite one that’s reassuring. The ambiguity feels honest”.

I am going to move to a review from NME. Named as one of the best albums of 2015 – Rough Trade and ABC News put it at number one -, it reached number one in Iceland and eleven in the U.K. I would rank Vulnicura among the best Björk albums. It is a stunning listen! For anyone who has never heard it, go and seek it out now:

“Björk’s last album, 2011’s ‘Biophilia’, was a multimedia project examining the connections between nature, sound and technology – or “the universe”, as she succinctly put it. It became known as an “app” album and it wasn’t a gimmick. It made a powerful (and fun) statement about how the 49-year-old’s home country, Iceland, could be run after the financial crisis, instantly making almost everyone else operating in the field of popular music seem a bit thick.

‘Vulnicura’, her eighth full-length, appears to forgo the grand gesture by concentrating on the personal within a very established format – the breakup album. But as Björk herself said on Facebook when the record was rush-released on 20th January (a consequence of it leaking the weekend previous), “First I was worried it would be too self-indulgent, but then I felt it might make it even more universal.”

Opener ‘Stonemilker’ is set, according to the liner notes, nine months before her breakup from American artist Matthew Barney – father of her second child. On it, Björk sings, “I better document this”. Perhaps what’s most shocking about ‘Vulnicura’ is not that it’s a traditional, straightforward set of songs (that’s just Björk not repeating herself), but how true a document of real life it is. There’s less allegory and metaphor in the lyrics than usual, resulting in Barney getting a very direct kicking. Communicating with him is like “milking a stone” she sings on ‘Stonemilker’; by ‘Black Lake’ – set two months after the breakup – she’s bored of his “apocalyptic obsessions” and accusing him abandoning their family.

So raw is the lyrical narrative (it ends ambiguously with three undated tracks that offer no real resolution, but some optimism), it almost distracts from how clever and detailed the musical backdrop is. Masterful string arrangements by Björk (‘Lionsong’, ‘Family’) express matters of the heart with the same candour as the words, while Venezuelan producer Arca’s fractured, difficult beats (‘Lionsong’, ‘Notget’) – often in uncommon time signatures – reflect the disruption to Björk’s real-life rhythm. It’s not an easy listen, but a brave, beautiful and affecting album – an attempt to find order in chaos that, as she wishes for it, offers a “crutch” to the heartbroken”.

The final review is from The Line of Best Fit. Gathering widespread acclaim, Björk would follow Vulnicura with 2017’s Utopia. Her most recent album, Fossora, was released in 2022. This amazing artist has barely put a foot wrong in a career that is more than three decades old. Not many artists can claim that kind of consistency!

“The above quote is excerpted from a larger note about the album, its concepts, its production and its early release (originally scheduled for March, it was pushed ahead nearly two months after being leaked a mere week after its announcement). It's not the singular point of Vulnicura—an album about breaking up, falling apart, lashing out, pulling together and moving on—but that message is ever present at its core: There is a way out. It's jaded, it's bitter, it's ugly, it's painful—but it ends.

Vulnicura is Björk's ninth studio album—assuming you include her 2000 Dancer in the Dark soundtrack Selmasongs (which you, of course, do) and not her 1977 self-titled child album (which you, of course, don't)—and features production from Arca and engineering from The Haxan Cloak, alongside Björk herself. The album is essentially broken into chapters: the bitter end, the breakup and the first steps forward. Its very name, Vulnicura, melds the Latin vulnero and cura: the wound and the cure—and captures everything between the two.

Though Björk describes Vulnicura as a "heartbreak album" centered on her breakup with artist Matthew Barney, it is not, in the strictest terms, an album about solely about a breakup. Rather, it fixates itself on an entire cycle of heartbreak—its inception and its inevitable aftermath: despondence where there once was love and hope where there was once despondence. For despondence has its way of breeding hope—creating the claustrophobic tunnel through which a light inevitably shines at the end of.

Interestingly enough, Björk contrasts Arca's knack for speedy beat-making on Vulnicura with the three years it took her to produce 2001's Vespertine. Yet, on the Björk Genre-Transcendence Scale®, Vulnicura finds its sound and style nestled most snugly next to that very album. And—speaking from a more biased place—it's also her greatest work since. Though it's built around a thematic concept, Vulnicura is not caught in the lofty conceptual trappings (be they for worse or for better) of the three albums she's released over the last 10 years: Biophilia, Medulla and, to a lesser extent, Volta.

Vulnicura is as dark and ominous as one might come to expect from a Björk album (especially one boasting involvement from Arca and The Haxan Cloak), yet it's filled with these delicate, shining moments within its darkened overtones. There's the guttural conclusion to "Notget," in which Björk exasperatedly offers one last repetition of the song's mantra: "Love will keep us safe from death." Or how Björk and her featured vocalist/"Goddess of Love" Antony Hegarty collude their intricately layered vocal tracks among the dense string arrangements and caustic beats of what the singer calls her "worship-of-love" song "Atom Dance."

Yet where "Notget" and "Atom Dance" showcase the aftermath, displaying disparity laced with a mere tint of hope, at the other end of the spectrum lies the angry and omnivorous "Black Lake" (which Billboard amusingly called a "10-Minute Diss Track" with a snide likening to Big Sean & E-40's "I Don't Fuck With You"). Here, across ten minutes of brooding tension and sparse intermissions, Björk lets the bad blood boil, unleashing all five stages of grief in near unison. She recounts the good, the bad, the worse and the efforts made to make it work, before lashing out "You have nothing to give / your heart is hollow."

Björk has said that she wanted to put this all out there at once, formatted as a chronicle of sorts. She has succeeded and then some. Vulnicura is stark and powerful in a way that Björk has merely danced around for years. Here, in these songs, she has shed all of her skin: the lavish costumes, the genre-defying ambiguity, the punk rock empowerment, the unwavering emotional fortitude and the entirety of all assumed personalities that one might instinctively assign an icon. Here, on Vulnicura, she is simply Björk: a rattled human being caught within an emotional vortex, letting off the sort of violent chemical reflexes we are all prone to. Vulnicura is humanity at its most volatilely sublime”.

Vulnicura Strings provided a more uncompromising and intimate take on the original album. It was a fascinating project. Vulnicura Live, also released in 2015, features fourteen songs with The Heritage Orchestra that were captured during her Vulnicura tour. Turning ten on 20th January, Vulnicura is a phenomenal album from Björk. Demonstrating why she is one of the most distinct, versatile and consistent artists ever. It the work from a master that…

EVERYONE needs to hear.

FEATURE: Aerial Vision: Saluting the Production on A Sky of Honey

FEATURE:

 

 

Aerial Vision

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

Saluting the Production on A Sky of Honey

_________

THERE is denying…

how generous a record Aerial is. Kate Bush’s eighth studio album was released in 2005. Her first album in twelve years, maybe there was this sense that a double album would sort of help to justify that amount of time away. Give the fans value after such a patient wait. Even though there has been a longer gap since her latest studio album, 2011’s 50 Words for Snow, and now, we are not expecting anything as full and long as Aerial! However, Kate Bush’s only double album is a masterpiece. Like Hounds of Love, it has two distinct halves. The first a selection of songs without a particular thread or throughline. Maybe Hounds of Love’s first half is about love, wonder and discovery. Aerial’s perhaps about family and the home. One can put Hounds of Love’s second side, The Ninth Wave, against Aerial’s second disc, A Sky of Honey. In terms of which is the best. I think I have done in the past! However, rather than do that here, I want to single out A Sky of Honey. I listened to it again recently. I don’t think I appreciated before how amazing the production is on it. The whole of Aerial. Bush’s manipulation of sound and use of natural sounds working together. The blend of instruments and choice of players. It is this banquet that blows the senses! I keep writing how people do not appreciate Bush as a producer. One need only listen to A Sky of Honey to realise she is one of the best producers ever. All the details and strands through that suite. My favourite might be when Bush sings with/mimics a bird (a blackbird?) on Aerial Tal! I am building from a feature about the suite I published in 2023.

I don’t think enough has been written about A Sky of Honey. In terms of its scope and brilliance. How it puts together these beautiful nine songs that are all very different. We are taken through the course of a summer’s day. We experience the joys of the dawn and down to the sunset before seeing the light rise again. I love Kate Bush’s production through her career, though I think it is possibly at its peak here. Perhaps the joys of motherhood (her son Albert was born in 1998) made her look more the joys of a new day. Being in the garden and having nature all around her. Although she always had admiration for birds, there is this new context in Aerial and through A Sky of Honey. There is much more than that. My highlights of A Sky of Honey is Prologue, Bertie (Albert, who replaced Rolf Harris’s vocals for the 2018 reissue of Aerial) on The Painter’s Link and the ecstatic Aerial. It takes multiple listens before you can properly absorb all the colours and shades in Bush’s palette. It is this arresting visual feast that compels you to close your eyes and imagine yourself in the songs. Even if The Guardian found some parts of A Sky of Honey cloying, they did salute Bush’s genius:

“Disc two, subtitled 'A Sky of Honey', is a suite of nine tracks which, among other things, charts the passage of light from afternoon ('Prologue') to evening ('An Architect's Dream', 'The Painter's Link') and through the night until dawn. Things get a little hairier here.

The theme of birdsong is soon wearing, and the extended metaphor of painting is laboured. But it's all worth it for the double-whammy to the solar plexus dealt by 'Nocturn' and the final, title track. In 'Nocturn', the air is pushed out of your lungs as you cower helplessly before the crescendo. 'Aerial', meanwhile, is a totally unexpected ecstatic disco meltdown that could teach both Madonna and Alison Goldfrapp lessons in dancefloor abandon. It leaves you elated, if not a little exhausted. After the damp squib that was The Red Shoes, it's clear Bush is still a force to be reckoned with”.

I am going to come to another feature soon. I imagine Kate Bush creating A Sky of Honey and starting with the concept. Maybe thinking about birdsong and using that as a foundation. The way she builds out and thought about telling a story of this summer’s day. Following the light rise, fall and come back. The production sounds is clear but not polished. There is this perfect mix which means all the instruments and vocals are perfectly placed. The way everything is crisp and clear. A step on from 1993’s The Red Shoes. A Sky of Honey sounds natural and almost analogue, though there is also this clarity and sheen that brings everything to life. It would be tempting, as producer, to throw so many sounds into the mix to maximise impact. Although there is a lot of instruments and sounds through A Sky of Honey, there is enough space in the songs. Bush knowing the perfect blend and balance. The way that she seamlessly mixes various instruments and sounds to get this incredible unity. The soundscapes she produces is intricate and also widescreen. Personal and universal. Contrasts and extremes that not everyone could perfectly match! I will ask whether A Sky of Honey is due some more investigation or visual representation. First, Secret Meeting shared their thoughts about A Sky of Honey:

“Act two, A Sky of Honey, is a standalone concept album that is meant to be listened to in its 42-minute entirety. At the time of release, following retailer ‘feedback’, EMI convinced Kate to break the track into nine separate songs, which is how they appeared on the physical release. However, she withheld Aerial from all streaming sites for five years until agreement was reached that A Sky of Honey was made available as the singular listening experience that was originally intended.

A Sky of Honey is quite possibly the greatest sequence of music ever put together and is as masterful a concept as Kate’s 1986 Hounds of Love feature, The Ninth Wave. Here though, the production is much slicker, the musicality more relaxed, and the overall work evokes a lush and beautiful landscape seldom achieved in non-visual art forms. A Sky of Honey is a joyful and organic collection of music that broods with all the romanticism of spending time at a jubilant celebration with a soulmate. It’s a dreamy meditation on the passing of a beautiful 24-hour period. Never has a 42-minute sequence of music stimulated the senses so brilliantly as to induce a mindful state, captivating attention to the passing only of the unfolding beauty of the record.  It is simply impossible to focus upon anything else while this staggeringly beautiful passage of music outs.

A Sky of Honey was also the most outstanding act of Kate’s 2014 Hammersmith Apollo residencies – the centrepiece of the greatest show that I have ever witnessed. Never has a flow of music worked so well as the accompaniment to a performance art piece as put on by Kate et al on those 22 nights in September 2014.

A Sky of Honey is a conceptual masterpiece. It builds into a euphoric and deeply rewarding crescendo where ‘all the birds are laughing’ and whereby everyone is encouraged ‘come on lets join in.’ It cements Aerial as perhaps the greatest work of the world’s most astounding and important female artist, whose musical legacy remains unsurpassed by all but a tiny elite of similarly vital visionaries”.

I have written before how I think there should be some sort of visual representation of A Sky of Honey. Even though Kate Bush brought it to the stage in 2014, most people did not see it or ever will. I have written about how it would be good to get a film of The Ninth Wave. Maybe not a film, there is more that can be done with A Sky of Honey. Whether it is a playback or album stream. Not that many podcast episodes about it (or any). Dissecting the songs and discussing the amazing production. Whether a series of animations or something else, it would be great to see A Sky of Honey visualised. I would urge people to listen to A Sky of Honey as a whole. An Endless Sky of Honey. It is a remarkable listening experience! Maybe it features Kate Bush’s best production. It is almost hard to put into words why it is so engaging and moving. Every time you play A Sky of Honey, new details emerge. Sounds you might not have heard the previous time around. Bush has this ability to give her songs such nuance. A Sky of Honey never seems too long or unfocused. Every track has its place. Credit too to Del Palmer for his engineering brilliance. However, it is Bush’s production vision and instinct that makes A Sky of Honey one of the best things she ever put her name to. You are brought into this bright, beautiful and beguiling sonic world. One with warm and slinky beats. Birdsong and air. Something darker and more twisted at times. The renaissance guitar and importance of the piano. The exquisite string work from the London Metropolitan Orchestra. Despite the fact Rolf Harris appeared on the 2005 original, he cannot damage the reputation of A Sky of Honey. Bertie’s vocals sound more commanding and natural that Harris’s efforts. I would love for A Sky of Honey to find new lease. Maybe a short film or people talking about it on a podcast. I wanted to show my affection and admiration for…

AN immaculate suite of songs.

FEATURE: We Paint the Penguins Pink: Kate Bush’s Production Doubts and Her Role as a Visual Auteur

FEATURE:

 

 

We Paint the Penguins Pink

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1982/PHOTO CREDIT: Pierre Terrasson

Kate Bush’s Production Doubts and Her Role as a Visual Auteur

_________

I am…

combining a couple of subjects relating to Kate Bush but also circling back to a topic that I recently covered, in addition to leaving the door open to expand more on the subject of Kate Bush’s videos. I don’t think I can quite cover it in this feature. I am struck to write about her production doubts and her growing role as a music video visionary. How they sort of coincided. I am returning to Tom Doyle’s Running Up That Hill: 50 Visions of Kate Bush. There is a section that takes us back to 1982’s The Dreaming. There is a nice little detail I was not aware of that is a slight tangent to start on. How one of the songs, Leave It Open, left some fans guessing. As to what Kate Bush sings at the end of the song. It was a bit of a competition. Bush set the challenge. She went with a commonly held theory that it “we paint the penguins pink”. She had to reveal that the actual words were “we let the weirdness in”. She signed off one of her fan newsletters with those words, thus letting fans know of the exact wording. It is relevant to discussing The Dreaming. There was this dynamic. EMI not sure Kate Bush was ready to helm her own album. Even though she co-produced 1980’s Never for Ever and it went to number one, there was not this great confidence in her production skills. Bush was adamant that she was going to produce her fourth studio album. Another step towards the autonomy that she wanted from the start of her career. The start of recording was quite fraught. In the close and overcast summer of 1981, Bush was holed in the studio. Riots were breaking out up and down the country, fuelled by the controversial stop-and-search policy from the Metropolitan Police. Bush acknowledged the un-summer-like weather and wrote to her fans hoping that everyone was okay. Recognising how things were changing, that was very much the case with regards her career.

I have tackled this subject before but will come at it from a different angle. How doubts around Bush’s production prowess happened at a time when she was broadening her scope and vision. Her videos becoming more cinematic. Her music going deeper. If EMI wanted something fairly commercial that would sell and keep her in the critics’ good books, Bush was thinking of taking her work somewhere else. Rather than it being a kick against expectations and what people wanted, instead this was someone who was working in a less rigid way than before. This meant various studios were used. Her sound more layered and complex. It was not only record label people asking if Bush should be producing her work. Even people she had worked with for years were doubting her and trying to put caution in her mind. It meant that Bush was doubting herself. Something that would be realised and at its apex for 1985’s Hounds of Love, that combination of Bush’s role as a producer and making her music more visual. Like very short films and less like ordinary and simple Pop songs. It is understandable there was some reservation and hesitation from the label and those close to Kate Bush. However, for all the care and hope she was not being set up for a fall, Bush did push ahead. She let the weirdness in! Even if there were doubts in Bush’s mind, she committed a lot of money to making The Dreaming an album that stood out from anything else she did previously. Investing thousands of pounds buying her own Fairlight CMI, she was also in awe of David Byrne and Brian Eno’s 1981 album, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. I’d like to think that the fact the album had the word ‘Bush’ in it spoke to her in a personal way! That album, featured ‘found sounds’ vocals including a talk show host, a preacher and a radio D.J. You can feel the influence run through The Dreaming. How different vocal sounds and characters are woven through the songs. Bush, as a producer, approach sound and dynamics in a new way.

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Bush had also learned a lot working with Peter Gabriel on his third solo studio album from 1980. Taking notes about the studio and technology. It was a strange new way of working. Without anyone producing alongside her, everything was on Kate Bush. At all times, there must have been niggles and doubts. How those words from people were bouncing around her head. When you think about Kate Bush, do we really talk about her role as a producer?! It is something I want to keep exploring and highlight. Although Bush did have some reservations and perhaps there was some retroactive ‘vindication’ from those who felt she was maybe out of her depth – The Dreaming came two years after her previous albums, the singles did not place high and the album sales much lower than for The Kick Inside -, she was opening her horizons and was not far from her acclaimed masterpiece, Hounds of Love. It must have been a challenging time for Bush producing alone. That thing about bouncing ideas off of someone else. Though Del Palmer (who was her boyfriend at the time and played on the album) was alongside her, she was very much in control. What is notable is how Bush as producer was very much thinking in this more ambitious, detail-focused way. Thinking of how to add to a song without overloading things. One example was a happy accident. Bush arriving home one day and pressing ‘play’ on her answer phone. It had broken so that only the end of messages were being played, so what we got was a lot of ‘byes’ and variations. Bush used these at the end of All the Love. It is haunting and moving at the same time. I wanted to keep the focus on The Dreaming. I will explore other albums in future pieces. Perhaps the doubts about her experience as a producer spurred her on. Bush was paying a lot of her own money so it is understandable that she wanted control. Bush was working between multiple studios. At one time, used all three studios at Abbey Road to get the effects she was looking for. The results were incredible. I keep tussling about my top-three Kate Bush albums. The Kick Inside is always first and Hounds of Love in the top three maybe. I sort of think Never for Ever should be up there too, but the more I hear The Dreaming, the more it blows me away! Think of songs like Get Out of My House and listen to the production. How idiosyncratic and effecting the song is.

If the singles from The Dreaming did not fare well, Bush was getting more invested in directing. She had assisted with video direction to this point, though it would not be long until she directed her videos. Hounds of Love’s title track was the first video she directed solo. She was very involved with the look and feel of the visuals for The Dreaming’s videos. Paul Henry directed the video for The Dreaming. Bush and her dancers performing on a floor covered over with builders’ sand. There were polystyrene rocks and a sun and moon made of carboard. Bush in a silver-white jumpsuit. The scale and visual arrest of the videos matching Bush’s details and production. How much she put into the songs. It called for videos that were more widescreen and akin to short films. Even if The Dreaming’s video was a day’s shoot, it is affecting. Some of the shots have not dated well, though the use of long shots and not the usual quick cuts and close-up that you get from Pop videos was forward-thinking and bold. Something that was a mixed blessing. The fact the single did not do well can’t really be attributed to the video. However, some affects used were quite futuristic. Bush and dancers pulling on a rope that was actually a green laser. Bush also summoning birds to fly with her hands. It was quite a smooth shoot. The was a bit more rigorous and problematic. Bush favouring long shots and not keen on close-ups. She was told to reign it in for the next video. That was for There Goes a Tenner. The Dreaming’s video had a grubby look so, to nod to that for the next video, Bush put dirt on her face. Like it was a continuation of that video. Perhaps weaving stories together to try and form a bigger whole. The budget had increased so the video could be more ambitious. One of the biggest regrets is that the videos were not seen that widely as the singles were not big hits. However, what was clear is there was this connection between the videos and album production. Bush wanted to be more involved and was thinking big. Bush also had a vision of what her album covers had to look. This idea of her as a visual auteur quite deserved. Bush was also directing whilst on the set of There Goes a Tenner. Passing instructions around that often clashed with Paul Henry’s vision.

One reason why she stopped working with director Keith MacMillan (Keef) was that he could be quite awkward to work with. I also think Bush wanted to widen her field and go in a different direction. Not that Paul Henry was difficult to work with. Though it is telling that the next video for The Dreaming, Suspended in Gaffa, used all of Paul Henry’s crew expect him! This takes me back to initial doubts. Those thinking Bush maybe should not produce. Considering the look of her videos and how the album was successful and sounds amazing, were these justified?! There would have been some cause for more caution when Bush made it clear she would continue to produce alone. Nobody could predict Hounds of Love and its genius! One thing that stands out is that detail coming in. How her music was getting more complex. More technology at her fingers meant she was moving away from the sounds of The Kick Inside and Lionheart (both released in 1978). I am going to return to The Dreaming for another feature soon. One that talks about the promotion  Bush undertook for that. However, after that, I am going to look at her career more generally and look at her early career and also return to Hounds of Love. The Dreaming was Kate Bush trying to assert more control. Silence those doubting her. There is no denying the influence of The Dreaming, even though it is not discussed much. In 2012, when writing about The Dreaming on its thirtieth anniversary, The Quietus highlighted the brilliance and impact of her 1982 album:

“By the ‘Hounds Of Love’ promo she was directing herself. Another area the "shyest megalomaniac" wrestled control of. ‘The Ninth Wave’ was another tribute to her imaginative powers, the song suite being the sexy, acceptable face of prog rock. She even had a hit in America. Although she had to change the name from ‘A Deal With God’ to ‘Running Up That Hill’.

But it was The Dreaming that lay the groundwork. It ignited US critical interest in her (including the hard-assed Robert Christgau and the burgeoning college radio scene finally gave Bush an outlet there. Hounds Of Love, remains the acme of this singular talent’s achievements. It uses ethnic instrumentation while sounding nothing like the world music that would be popularized through the 80s. It is a record largely constructed with cutting edge technology that eschews the showroom dummy bleeps associated with synth-pop. At the time, she talked of using technology to apply "the future to nostalgia", an interesting reverse of Bowie’s nostalgic Berlin soundtrack for a future that never came. Like Low, The Dreaming is Bush’s own "new music night and day" a brave volte face from a mainstream artist. It remains a startlingly modern record too, the organic hybridization, the use of digital and analogue techniques, its use of modern wizadry to access atavistic states (oddly, Rob Young’s fine portrait of the singer in Electric Eden only mentions this album in passing).

For such an extreme album, its influence has been far-reaching. ABC, then in their Lexicon Of Love prime, named it as one of their favourites, as did Bjork whose similar use of electronics to convey the pantheistic seems directly descended from The Dreaming. Even The Cure’s Disintegration duplicates the track arrangement on the sleeve and the request that ‘this album was mixed to be played loud’. ‘Leave It Open’‘s vari-speed vocals even prefigure the art-damaged munchkins of The Knife vocal arsenal. Field Music/The Week That Was arrayed themselves with sonics that seem heavily indebted to Bush’s work here. Graphic novelist Neil Gaiman even had a character sing lyrics from the title track in his The Sandman series. John Balance of post-industrialists Coil confessed that the album’s songs were all ideas that he later tried to write. But Bush got there first. And The Dreaming remains a testament to the exhilarating joy of "letting the weirdness in”.

I am fascinated by that pre-The Dreaming period. When Bush was being asked whether she should produce alone. How that then led her to different studios and there was this expansion of her sound. Her incredible vision as a producer resulted in a masterpiece. Alongside this, Bush was becoming more visually involved. Wanting to direct her own videos. Whether trying to prove a point to herself, others or this was a natural development, it laid the foundation for Hounds of Love. The Dreaming should not be seen as a lesser Hounds of Love. Although the album was expensive to make and was not a huge commercial success, it is one of her richest and most important albums. Even if Kate Bush let the weirdness in, it proved to be…

THE right decision.

FEATURE: Here’s Where the Story Begins: The Sundays’ Reading, Writing and Arithmetic at Thirty-Five

FEATURE:

 

 

Here’s Where the Story Begins

The Sundays’ Reading, Writing and Arithmetic at Thirty-Five

_________

IN 2020…

I celebrated thirty years of The Sundays’ debut album Reading, Writing and Arithmetic. I am returning to it for its thirty-fifth anniversary. I am going to bring in some features and reviews for this classic album. Even though it was released in the U.S. in April 1990, it came out on 15th January here. The ‘Reading’ in the title is not reading…as in reading a book. It is the town in Berkshire. The Sundays’ hometown. Standout tracks like Here's Where the Story Ends and Can’t Be Sure have endured to this day. The band’s third and final album, Static & Silence, was released in 1997. However, their debut is still the standout. Before getting to a feature, I want to begin with a review from the BBC:

“Nearly 20 years ago, with Madchester at the height of its popular appeal, a band about as far removed from The Happy Mondays as it was possible to be briefly rivalled Bez, Shaun and friends as the new darlings of the independent music scene. With the release of their debut album Reading, Writing And Arithmetic, The Sundays received a flurry of euphoric reviews comparing the London quartet to The Smiths, and it's fair to say that David Gavurin builds his songs around the same peculiarly British melancholy yet achingly pretty guitar jangle immortalised by Johnny Marr.

But the most distinctive ingredient about the Sundays was always Harriet Wheeler's voice, which positions the group as a kind of missing link between the ethereal soundscapes of the Cocteau Twins and the more chart-friendly indie-pop of The Cranberries. Like Liz Fraser and Dolores O'Riordan, Wheeler's vocals transfer effortlessly from a fragile whisper to a passionate shriek, taking often simple melodies and leading them on a merry dance across her whole impressive range.

The two best known tracks on Reading, Writing And Arithmetic are the singles Can't Be Sure and Here's Where The Story Ends, and two decades later these remain the best examples of The Sundays' appeal with their instant, breezy hooks and delicate, shuffling rhythms. The rest of the album is a little less immediate, but gradually tracks like Hideous Towns and I Kicked A Boy work their way insidiously inside your head, with Wheeler's angelic, almost hypnotic voice leading the charm offensive.

The Sundays never again recaptured the heights of their debut record, fading slowly into obscurity as the world they inhabited gave way to the brash, confident swagger of Britpop. While Reading, Writing And Arithmetic is perhaps a little too fey and lightweight to warrant true classic status, it is nevertheless a sweet, beguiling piece of work that is utterly of its time, yet still fresh and enjoyable today”.

Just prior to getting to a feature from 2010, I want to start with this feature from Classic Pop published in 2022. Even though they had the genius guitar twang of The Smiths and the ethereal splendour of the Cocteau Twins, the Berkshire band were definitely not one who played the Pop game:

“The Sundays were pretty rubbish at being pop stars. No glitzy aspirational image, barely did interviews, low-key videos, and a less-than-showy live show… Only thing is: The Sundays made near-celestial pop music. In a career that never reached its promise, they released only three albums: this, their 1990 debut; 1992’s Blind and Static & Silence five years later. After that, The Sundays simply stopped.

Of course, whether The Sundays were ‘pop’ very much depends on one’s definition. The Sundays weren’t even that popular: only one Top 20 single, Summertime, from their swansong album and they were barely recognisable as stars, other than to those who adored them. But they were very ‘pop’ in that alternative/indie way, and one of the most melodically beautiful bands of their era.

When they emerged in 1988-89, indie pop and UK pop in general – was undergoing something of a spin around. Guardians of the student galaxy, The Smiths, had recently split. On the rise were a much more hedonistic indie bunch in the shape of nascent ‘Madchester’ bands Happy Mondays and The Stone Roses.

Mainstream pop was sweating to the sounds of early house and the Hi-NRG puppets of Stock Aitken Waterman, and even Paul Weller had gone all Italiano sophisticate (white jeans, anyone?). Dance culture was very much back in.

By contrast, The Sundays sounded like something still lurking in the darker days of 1984 and anti-Maggie resentment/escapism. As writer/broadcaster Stuart Maconie notes in his 2013 book, The People’s Songs: The Story Of Modern Britain In 50 Records: “Indie offered a different narrative to the one that is generally seen as the story of the 1980s: vintage clothes, old records, bedsits, Penguin Modern Classics, black and white movies, instead of the Champagne, Filofaxes and outsize mobile phones of Thatcher’s children.” Spot on.

Although a four-piece, The Sundays were essentially the work of a partnership, both professional and personal.

David Gavurin met Harriet Wheeler at Bristol University and soon became intertwined. He was reading Romantic Languages; she, English Literature. So, if The Sundays were an archetypal ‘student band’ that’s because they were, indeed, archetypal students.

The Sundays’ rise was remarkably rapid. The foursome formed in 1988 and just a month after their first gig they’d debuted at Camden indie sanctuary The Falcon to sky-high praise.

Melody Maker’s reviewer Chris Roberts described the band as “the best thing I’ve ever heard”, and comparisons to the Cocteau Twins, Smiths and Sugarcubes were duly made. Before you could shout “black cardigans!”, a label bidding war for The Sundays was raging.

The thing is, The Sundays didn’t really have enough songs for an album at this point. In one of their extremely rare public utterances, a Melody Maker interview to promote the release of Reading, Writing And Arithmetic… in January 1990, they explained how they were almost devoid of ambition beyond the noise they made.

Gavurin concurred that although they liked playing live, writing songs was, in reality, their only goal. “If we hadn’t been so bloody lucky enough with getting all those reviews right at the start, I could imagine a situation where we wouldn’t have stuck at this for bloody ages.”

“Bloody ages?” They were just 18 months old as a band. Wheeler notably said there was “never a time I wanted to be incredibly famous or in a pop group” although she did confess to pretending to be Michael Jackson as a girl: “which took quite a leap of faith.”

After that London debut (the band had moved to the capital), The Sundays were destined for an indie big-hitter: 4AD, home of the Cocteau Twins, or Rough Trade, previous home of The Smiths. Naturally. 4AD were in pole-position until owner Ivo Watts-Russell foolishly asked Gavurin and Wheeler to think carefully about which label to sign with. They bluntly answered: Rough Trade.

In Neil Taylor’s 2010 book, An Intimate History Of Rough Trade, Gavurin argued – possibly joked – that The Sundays chose to sign to Rough Trade because “it was near our flat.” When the band first met RT’s co-directors Geoff Travis and Jeannette Lee, who had only joined the company in 1987, immediate impressions were positive.

Lee had previously been a member of John Lydon’s Public Image Ltd, was married to Gareth Sager of The Pop Group, and had a solid knowledge of Rough Trade’s post-punk modus operandi. In the book, Gavurin is quoted as saying: “What appealed to us about the two of them was that they seemed incredibly straightforward… For us, Rough Trade was this immensely cool and significant label, yet there was no arrogance about them. They basically came over as a couple of unassuming music fans.”

“The Sundays were very particular about making decisions,” Jeannette Lee tells Classic Pop. “They wanted to talk in great detail about everything before they decided who to sign for – what the singles would be, the artwork… Maybe what Ivo Watts-Russell asked them was 4AD’s downfall. After that, I made a mental note never to use that tactic when trying to sign a band!”

Perhaps tellingly, The Sundays chose previous Smiths sleeve designer Jo Slee and decided their own touring schedule. Debut single Can’t Be Sure, backed with I Kicked A Boy, was released in January 1989 and – as was in “the indie rules” of the day – the BBC’s John Peel was an early champion. The single only peaked at No.45 in the UK chart, but that was a pretty good result for a label such as Rough Trade.

Still, The Sundays were happy at the record label. “The culture seemed to be one of openness and co-operation,” continued Gavurin in Taylor’s book, “and we got on well with everyone there. We used to walk down Caledonia Road, and it became a sort of home-from-home.”

Lee remembers it as simply fun.

“They knew what they were doing was good. But they were very careful not to seem smug or overly confident. They’re both self-deprecating and you can hear that in the words. They’re both the funniest people, and we had such a laugh making that record. Obviously, they are a couple but they’re a very good working couple as well. A very solid double act.”

Rumours that the album took a year to record are wide of the mark, though. “Oh, no, that would never have been the plan,” adds Jeannette Lee. “They were particular, they are slow. But only because they wanted to be very certain about what they put out. Some people just record and fling something out and see what happens. Not The Sundays. They are perfectionists.”

In a 2014 email interview with American Way, Gavurin and Wheeler explained of Reading, Writing And Arithmetic, “As writers, the odd thing is that you’re as likely to think back to the place where the songs were actually composed as to any location or situation that inspired their creation. So in the case of Can’t Be Sure and Here’s Where The Story Ends in particular, these songs transport us to the minuscule boiler room attached to the equally cramped rented flat we were living in before our careers took off.

“At the time, despite the industrial noise of the hot-water system and the frequent burglaries, this felt like the perfect writing environment, and virtually all of what ended up on our first album originated there. Not very poetic, but there you have it!”

The album sold well but, regrettably, trouble was ahead. Rough Trade’s financial strife with their distribution arm meant The Sundays, who had only just appointed a manager, soon had to leave to realise even the ambition of another record. “We had long-term hopes with them, obviously,” says Lee.

“We were very close and had talked a lot about the second album. But between that first record being released and the second, that’s when all Rough Trade’s distribution problems occurred. I just remember one day David saying, ‘Let’s not talk about the second album at the moment because there’s a problem we need to look at’.

“I realised we were going to lose them. No hard feelings at all, they had no choice really, but it was heartbreaking.”

The Sundays moved to Parlophone, and followed up with Blind (1992). And, after a long hiatus due to children, Static & Silence (1997). But then they simply stopped making records. They do still write, but said to American Way: “First, let’s see if the music we’re currently writing ever sees the light of day.”

Settled down with 20-something children, and with a reliable heating system, maybe they’ve now just run out of things to write about.

A shame, maybe, but it’s worth revisiting Gavurin’s interview words from 1990: “Non-events are almost sneered at,” he mused. “You don’t see big movies about non-events…”.

In 2010, to mark its twentieth anniversary, Iain Moffat was writing for The Quietus. It is revealing and illuminating reading his words about this seismic debut. I don’t think its influence can be overstated. As Moffat writes, Reading, Writing and Arithmetic was the first classic of the 1990s:

“The first great album of this decade is something that looks likely to be up for debate for some time yet, but there was a time when things were rather more clear-cut; specifically, thirty years ago. Of course, to really appreciate the impact of the Sundays, it’s instructive to look back ever so slightly earlier, to a time that, for a significant sector of the music press readership, was something of an annus horribilis some time before that phrase had really developed much cultural currency, namely 1988. This, you’ll recall, was when the still-going journeyman phase of Johnny Marr’s career really began in earnest, when the notion of things as post-Housemartins referred to their dissolution rather than their figurehead status, and when the indie charts were overrun by – wah! – house music and – double wah! – Kylie Minogue. Yes, we know, but it was a far more purist age. Anyway, imagine the collective sigh of relief when Camden started regularly playing host to a band who could actually be the Smiths and the Cocteaus IN THE SAME SONG. Come to think of it, that’d be quite the sight to behold even now…

Needless to say, the obligatory A&R bunfight ensued, followed by a solitary single that went on to top by a whisker the most top-end-classic-heavy (at least since punk) of John Peel’s Festive 50s and then a for-the-time substantial hiatus that led to this being arguably the most salivatingly-anticipated album of its era. Little wonder it was so adored back then, but what’s perhaps surprising is the potency it retains even stripped of all that context. This, it must be said, is down most of all to one salient point: nothing at all wrong with the rhythm section, of course (in fact, drummer Patch Hannan would go on to appear on one of the decade’s most underrated albums, theaudience’s splendid debut), but the Sundays’ charm has survived chiefly because they were helmed by two thoroughly stellar talents.

Harriet Wheeler’s voice is a genuine one-off, giddy and effortlessly gymnastic without ever losing sight of the humanistic warmth at its core – the crystalline prettiness she brings to ‘You’re Not The Only One I Know’ lends it a gorgeous quality brilliantly at odds with the mundane minutiae of the lyrics, while her hurtling from punchy gurgles to stage-whispery confiding makes ‘Skin & Bones’ a terrifically arresting opening. Conversely, David Gavurin is one of the great overlooked guitarists of the entire canon; he might display shameless debts to more familiar figures at times (the aforementioned Marr on ‘A Certain Someone’, James Honeyman-Scott on ‘I Kicked A Boy’), but there’s a passion and a very real sense of release to his excursions in spangle’n’jangle that make for listening that’s much more bewitching that any mere xeroxing could be.

What’s also especially striking – and, given the title, wholly appropriate – is just how strong a reflection of student-age life this is, which, on reflection, is a rarer gift than might initially be assumed (consider, if you will, how much easier it is to rattle off lists of artists whose oeuvres correlate with adolescent experiences or properly grown-up concerns). At times, this can be remarkably specific – the excellent ‘I Won’ is perhaps the only song to ever build itself around flatshare politics – but it also captures the sensation of a life spent in preparation for a rather daunting sense of possibility. ‘Hideous Towns’ best expresses the intimidation this entails ("never went to Rome / I took the first bus home" etc), but it rears its head repeatedly, Wheeler at one point taking solace in the thought that "there’s no harm in voicing your doubts" and, on ‘Can’t Be Sure’, reflecting with perhaps an overly optimistic confidence that absolute conviction in what lies ahead is bound to emerge. Eventually.

On top of this, there’s a fearless smartness in abundance here that it’s all too frequently been reasonable to contend has been the great casualty of indie’s exodus from the ghetto. The Sundays were never as prone to flourishes as, say, Wild Beasts, but there’s a similar enthusiasm for language, punning on the militaristic aspect of the phrase "Salvation Army", opting for more poetic turns of phrase when lesser artists would have unthinkingly travelled a far more prosaic path ("it’s that little souvenir of a terrible year that makes my eyes feel sore," for instance, is a lovely touch), and coming out with throwaway jewels and joltingly organic observations at regular intervals – it’s difficult to think of anyone else, even back then, whose finest hour in ‘My Finest Hour’ would be simply "finding a pound in the underground", and even listening now lines like "fit the flowers in the bottle of fake cologne" leap out as inspired and uniquely evocative.

Admittedly, these are heights that would never be repeated; a second single apparently couldn’t be plucked from this because the band had no more songs that they could’ve put on the B-side (an issue reminiscent, in a curious parallel, of a certain New York band, also on Rough Trade, who could be said to have kick-started the decade that followed), second album Blind didn’t feature on anybody’s best-of-’92 lists, and the marked improvements of Static & Silence (containing their Newman and Baddiel theme a full four years after the fact) got somewhat swallowed up as the indie implosion began gathering pace, and, while a formal split’s never taken place, there’s been no activity to speak of since. Moreover, this sets down a blueprint that would be followed with spectacularly diminishing returns by the Cranberries, which we’re sure they’d rather not dwell on”.

Tomorrow, it will be thirty-five years since The Sundays released one of the most important debut albums of the 1990s. Its legacy and influence being felt to this very day. I listened to the album not long after it came out and have loved it ever since. Even if The Sundays burned brightly briefly, with Reading, Writing And Arithmetic, they most certainly…

LEFT their mark.

FEATURE: How Soon Is Now? The Smiths’ Meat Is Murder at Forty

FEATURE:

 

 

How Soon Is Now?

The Smiths’ Meat Is Murder at Forty

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I am looking ahead…

to 11th February and the fortieth anniversary of perhaps the most underrated or under-discussed album from The Smiths. Their second studio album, Meat Is Murder, was released in 1985. It was a tremendous year for music. Standing alongside the best albums of the year is this classic. It contains a few of The Smiths’ best songs. The Headmaster Ritual and Barbarism Begins at Home. How Soon Is Now? was included on the U.S. L.P. release. Arguably the very finest Smiths song! Compared to 1986’s The Queen Is Dead, there was not as much attention and focus on Meat Is Murder. Look online now and there is still comparatively little written about it. Granted, it is not as strong as The Queen Is Dead or Strangeways, Here We Come, but it is a remarkable album that warrants discussion. I am going to get to some features about The Smiths’ second studio album. First, this review from The Guardian highlights the strengths of Meat Is Murder:

“With their second proper album Meat Is Murder, the Smiths begin to branch out and diversify, while refining the jangling guitar pop of their debut. In other words, it catches the group at a crossroads, unsure quite how to proceed. Taking the epic, layered "How Soon Is Now?" as a starting point (the single, which is darker and more dance-oriented than the remainder of the album, was haphazardly inserted into the middle of the album for its American release), the group crafts more sweeping, mid-tempo numbers, whether it's the melancholy "That Joke Isn't Funny Anymore" or the failed, self-absorbed protest of the title track. While the production is more detailed than before, the Smiths are at their best when they stick to their strengths -- "The Headmaster Ritual" and "I Want the One I Can't Have" are fine elaborations of the formula they laid out on the debut, while "Rusholme Ruffians" is an infectious stab at rockabilly. However, the rest of Meat Is Murder is muddled, repeating lyrical and musical ideas of before without significantly expanding them or offering enough hooks or melodies to make it the equal of The Smiths or Hatful of Hollow”.

Although quite a personal take, Katharine Viner wrote about Meat Is Murder in 2011. Writing for The Guardian, their writers selected their favourite albums. There are some compelling arguments as to why Meat Is Murder is significant and holds a lot of treasures. An album that makes you stop and think. A snapshot of a particular time in British history:

“It starts as if in the middle of something – you're already part of this. Meat Is Murder is local and British from the first line – "Belligerent ghouls run Manchester schools" – and expresses fury at a kind of school life that has been forgotten. When the album was released, corporal punishment was still legal – it wasn't banned until 1986 – and everyone had a particularly sadistic teacher like Morrissey's "spineless swines". Mine was Miss Grant, who had a flat bat on which she had chalked two faces, one happy and one down-in-the-mouth – if the smiling face was showing, the bat would be hitting someone that day. The brilliantly titled Barbarism Begins at Home, during which Morrissey yelps as if in pain, is also about children being hit – "a crack on the head is what you get for asking". There's a lot of violence in the Smiths.

Rusholme Ruffians, with Johnny Marr's rockabilly riff, is about Manchester too and makes the city (home of much of the history of British feminism, socialism, vegetarianism and the Guardian) sound exciting, a place where things happen. Who wouldn't want to be ruffian from Rusholme? I was from the other side of the Pennines, but pilgrimages to the city (because of the Smiths) gave me style (old men's coats from Affleck's Palace, the second-hand clothes and records emporium that opened in 1982), rare Smiths 12ins (What Difference Does It Make? with Morrissey on the front instead of Terence Stamp), photos in front of Salford Lads Club, chance meetings with Morrissey's ex-girlfriend (artist Linder Sterling, working in Deansgate Waterstone's), and, just a little bit, a sense of possibility.

It's a record full of yearning("I want the one I can't have, and it's driving me mad"), the humiliating obviousness of when you want something ("It's written all over my face"), low expectations ("Please keep me in mind"), the melodrama of youth("This is the final stand of all I am"), and romance ("My faith in love is still devout").

It's also funny. "I'd like to drop my trousers to the Queen," sings Morrissey on Nowhere Fast. "Every sensible child will know what this means. The poor and the needy are selfish and greedy on her terms." It's hard to hear the song without wondering if Morrissey is already, on only his second album, parodying himself: "If the day came when I felt a natural emotion, I'd get such a shock I'd probably jump in the ocean."

I love the way What She Said, one of the best Smiths songs, is told from a female perspective – it's rare for male songwriters to write about women with empathy rather than desire – and how it taps into a certain kind of teenage girl's fantasies: "What she read, all heady books, she'd sit and prophesise … It took a tattooed boy from Birkenhead to really open her eyes." And the tune! Morrissey beats a path to your head, but it's Marr who carries the words to your heart.

And then, right at the end, the title track: a great political song, and the best ever written about animal rights. (Even famous vegetarian Paul McCartney, who has written tracks about the British in Northern Ireland, revolutionary politics and 9/11, has never written a song about vegetarianism. He once told me he'd always found it curiously hard to commit one to paper, even though he'd tried, and that he greatly admired the Smiths' effort.) Meat Is Murder's sinister opening, full of strange noises that conjure up an abattoir, moves into a terrible, beautiful melody. "The carcass you carve with a smile, it is murder … And the turkey you festively slice, it is murder." The song made me stop eating meat, and I haven't eaten it since”.

In 2015, a thirtieth anniversary feature was published by The Quietus. It is a really detailed and in-depth piece that reveals depths and layers of the album I had not considered. If you have not heard Meat Is Murder before then please do go and play it:

“The things that gave The Smiths the capacity to change lives were the same set of factors that ensure their records remain arresting and remarkable all these years later. Morrissey’s lyrics spoke about real lives with an honesty and a clarity that rock and pop often shied away from: here was someone writing about heartbreak and isolation not as mythic subjects that somehow glorified the sufferer, but as the all-too-real consequences of the everyday. You didn’t get the sense, as one sometimes does from songwriters, that they were trying to make it sound like they were doing all this to provide escapist or aspirational entertainment – the characters Morrissey wrote about were you, or the folks around you, or the people you thought you might one day be. They looked like a band, they had that indefinable star quality, and there was the strangeness of Marr’s music and the ambiguity around Morrissey’s in-song personas that meant you were never thinking they were just the same as you – but they were a lot nearer to being people you might know than the rest of the pop world of the mid-1980s. So as great as the music was, and as unique and untouchable as parts of it undoubtedly were, these records felt like they could have sprung from you, your mates, your wider social circle. As Thom Yorke put it, introducing Radiohead’s cover version of the opening track from Meat Is Murder during a 2007 webcast, "this is about when we were younger – but we didn’t write it." And in Marr’s capable hands, each lyric was arrowed into your head and your heart with the most appropriate and individual accompaniment, music reinforcing the lyric’s emotions and making the songs impossible to not have some kind of personal reaction to and relationship with. These songs became your friends.

The decision the band had come to about production by the time they made Meat Is Murder was important, too. Their first album had had to be completely re-recorded and nobody seems to have been overjoyed with the results. They stuck with producer John Porter right up to the final track made before the Meat Is Murder sessions began, and given how tremendously that song turned out, you do wonder whether the relationship was ended just when it had started to find its feet. Porter’s input to ‘How Soon Is Now’ proved critical: he encouraged Marr to locate the arrangement that worked and the final mix, which he oversaw, still ranks as one of the finest moments of 1980s music – hell, it’ll probably be in many people’s all-time Top 20. Yet the band decided to go it alone, and produce their second album themselves, with help from an engineer (Stephen Street). It could’ve gone wrong in a number of different ways, but what Marr and Morrissey may have lacked in studio experience they more than made up for in musical knowledge, self-belief, and a certainty in what they were doing and how it ought to sound. A brief hand, here, for Joyce and Rourke: according to the credits on every Smiths record they weren’t involved in writing the music, and their part in the court case that dominated proceedings after the band broke up will have soured many fans to them and cost them sympathy and empathy. But even Morrissey, as he despairs of what he considers their treachery in his book, acknowledges their particular and singular excellence: and on Meat Is Murder they came into their own giving these songs power and poise, perfectly preparing and solidifying the bedrock on which the songs were to be built.

‘How Soon Is Now’ was, infamously, rejected as a single by Rough Trade; in his autobiography, Morrissey tells of being brought down from cloud nine to terra firma when label boss Geoff Travis conspicuously failed to be as knocked-out by the track as the band were. That initial decision to relegate the song to b-side status was soon reversed – the track, included on the ‘William, It Was Really Nothing’ 12" and on the brilliant Hatful Of Hollow singles/b-sides/outtakes collection in 1984, was voted Number One in that year’s Festive 50, compiled by John Peel from listeners’ lists of their favourite three songs of the preceding 12 months, and Rough Trade bowed to the inevitable by making it a January a-side ahead of February’s release of Meat Is Murder. That it became the de-facto lead-in single to an album it doesn’t appear on and wasn’t made during sessions for is intriguing. But the objection that has been reported as the label’s major one to releasing it at the time it was new – that its sound would have been a surprise to the band’s extant fan base – still holds water. Nothing in their discography matches it, and if you were just presented with the records and had no contextual data available, placing that song into a sequence that shows a logical progression – of writing, performance or production – would probably prove impossible: certainly, if you had no other information to go on, you would probably place it after Meat Is Murder rather than before in the band’s chronology. Nevertheless, some of its sonic elements are echoed in the album made shortly afterwards, most notably the use of harmonics and sustained tones in Marr’s guitar parts. To these ears, those bits of ‘How Soon Is Now’ have always sounded like or evoked birds – the slide-guitar parts as avian calls while the sonic imagery seems to suggest flight. But maybe that’s just me.

Perhaps oddly, considering the album title and the way it helped usher in an age where vegetarianism and animal rights moved from the fringes to the mainstream of western society (seriously: you couldn’t get a veggie burger or a meat-free lasagne in a British cafe in 1984, and if you asked for a meal without meat you’d often have been laughed at), there’s no other song on the record that broaches those subjects. If there is a predominant lyrical concern, it’s violence and abuse – of teachers against pupils in ‘The Headmaster Ritual’, of parents against children in ‘Barbarism Begins At Home’. Yet in a way these ideas are all of a piece, the words chosen with deliberation and precision: "barbarism", "murder" – these evils have become banal or mundane, and by using words to describe them which remind the listener of the horror the writer wishes to highlight, we’re forced to confront an atrocity we take for granted because of its ubiquity and reassess our responses to it. In truth, therefore, the album’s key unifying theme is not vegetarianism, or bullying, but social conditioning and double standards. It’s a record that reminds you that you have to draw your own lines, because the places where others have tended to draw them for us are built on a foundation of hypocrisies.

Humour is never far away, even though this lot are supposed to be the masters of misery. In this one strange way (sorry), The Smiths are a bit like NWA: there’s quite a few laughs in the records, but significant parts of the audience seem predisposed not to find them. Morrissey is a hugely funny writer, as anyone who’s enjoyed his uproarious autobiography would have noticed without fail – yet too often his lyrics are taken at face value. This is nonsensical: we don’t presume him to be stumbling and inarticulate because the characters in his songs may be, yet many of us seem to assume that when he writes a couplet like "I want to drop my trousers to the world/I am a man of means – of slender means" that he’s bemoaning his lot rather than sending himself up for supposedly doing just that. There is also humour in the music. You can read Marr’s fascination with the "wrong" chords – such as how, in ‘The Headmaster Ritual’, he deliberately goes to a chord you’re not expecting next – or his apparent need to find new hoops for rock to jump through as devices intended not just to provoke and sustain attention but to raise a smile. What’s so consistently great about Meat Is Murder is that on more or less every track, it manages to do all of this, all at once.

‘Barbarism Begins At Home’, occasionally described as an attempt at funk, is fairly obviously not The Smiths putting in an application for a support tour with Level 42. Rather, between the lyric and Rourke’s bass line – a pastiche of the slap-and-pop style, more Kajagoogoo than Brothers Johnson – it is surely designed to evoke that atmosphere in an unhappy home where even the soundtrack is selected by others, where the individual and the different is crushed beneath the tyranny of supposed consensus. It’s difficult now to recall the era with quite the precision that may be required, and even harder to explain to anyone who’s come of age in our present epoch of digital superfluity – but music that the likes of The Smiths made was still very much considered to be the preserve of the outsider. They were among the most popular artists not connected to the major-label system, but their music was tolerated within the mainstream and never as big in commercial terms as their reputation today might make you think was the case. None of their singles got higher than Number 10 during the band’s lifetime: daytime radio play was limited, and even the evening-show plays they got became, eventually, a bit more begrudging, as they gained in popularity and DJs keen to champion new music perhaps felt the band were too big to need their help any more. Yet they were always more John Peel than Gary Davis, and so to hear this band – the heroes of the night – playing something that sounded like a slightly menacing, deeply unsettling take on the music daytime radio loved… well, you knew this couldn’t be an attempt at selling out – it was all about subverting.

The other clever musical joke comes in the form of ‘What She Said’, which Peel trailed on his show as The Smiths essaying heavy metal. It isn’t, quite, though you can sort of understand why he suggested it. Instead, what Marr did was to take the kind of double-time, triplet-based riff you’d occasionally find rock bands using for closing codas of songs, and constructed the entire piece out of it. The biggest wonder of all is that Morrissey managed to write and sing a song that could sit on top of it – it’s the lyrical equivalent of a winning ride on a bucking bronco. It’s ridiculous and brilliant at the same time – you’re laughing at how over-the-top it is while shaking your head in amazement at its daring. Marr even manages to finish the song in the "wrong" place – holding back the last crunching powerchord that would resolve the riff in a formally correct way (partially because the next chord in the sequence would send it all back to the top – for its duration, the riff seems to keep tumbling over itself, always ending back at the beginning in the musical equivalent of an Escher spiral staircase). It’s a short song and it’s showy, and it may be a bit too clever for its own good – but in its own way it’s a perfect encapsulation of what this band were about, and as fine if extreme an example of what they were capable of as can be imagined.

It’s also one of three songs on the album where Morrissey relies on ad libs apparently derived from folk song styles and traditions which take the place of hooks or choruses. It’s a curious habit and one he didn’t pursue for long. ‘Shakespeare’s Sister’, the non-LP single released just after Meat Is Murder and recorded around the same time, has a section in the middle where he gets close to it, but – unless a short blurt in ‘There Is A Light That Never Goes Out’ counts – the technique seems to be limited to this particular period. It happens in ‘The Headmaster Ritual’, where the hook is a wordless series of vocal sounds; in ‘Rusholme Ruffians’, as a kind of distant echoed response to the narrator’s rhetorical question about what would happen if "I jumped from the top of the parachutes"; and in ‘What She Said’, where it ends several of the stanzas. Why he chose to do this, and to do it such a lot but for such a brief period, isn’t clear, though it’s tempting to see it as both an attempt – possibly subconscious, though from someone so deeply committed to an ongoing investigation of what being British might mean, that seems unlikely – to imbue the Smiths’ material with something that tied it stylistically to a deep and ancient tradition of British songcraft, and at the same time as a nod to Pentangle, a key influence on Marr.

The curious approach to marketing the album reached a bewildering peak in the summer of ’85 when what one can consider the third single in the campaign was released. After ‘How Soon Is Now’ and ‘Shakespeare’s Sister’, the decision to release ‘That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore’ bordered on the obtuse. Other bands had done OK without having singles taken from albums, some of them even on Rough Trade (The Fall spring most readily to mind), so it wasn’t as if releasing a string of non-LP singles would have been unprecedented. The song had to be edited for release as a single – the false ending on the album became the real ending of the 45, lest any radio DJ be taken unawares and start to talk in the gap – and, with the definite exception of the title track and the possible exception of the beautiful, rain-spattered ‘Well I Wonder’, it’s easily the least immediate song on the record. That said, it remains a quintessential Smiths song, a bruised and beautiful thing aching with melancholy and simmering with the sense of explosive power held in reserve. A better bet, surely, would have been the other track on the album which distilled the essence of the band into a single song – ‘I Want The One I Can’t Have’ teeters similarly close to self-parody but is far more immediate, its up-tempo brashness probably better suited to the demands of mid-’80s daytime radio and more likely to tempt the curious uncommitted into a purchase.

The lesson is clear. This wasn’t a record that improves by being broken down into singles, parcelled up into hit-worthy packages, taken apart to be put back together later. In truth, any of these songs could have been singles, but perhaps it would have been better if none of them ever were. Gallagher is right: it is the band’s best album. The Queen Is Dead tends to take the plaudits, and Morrissey reckons the fourth and final studio LP, Strangeways, Here We Come, found the group firing on every cylinder and is, to his mind, their finest achievement. But the life-changing Meat Is Murder is the one”.

Although Meat Is Murder has more contrasting reviews compared to their eponymous 1983 debut and The Queen Is Dead, it is still an important part of their cannon. As it is forty on 11th February, it is worth shining a light on The Smiths’ magnificent second studio album. This site sourced a critical review from Rolling Stone:

“Lead singer and wordsmith Stephen Morrissey (who goes by his surname professionally) is a man on a mission, a forlorn and brooding crusader with an arsenal of personal axes to grind. Drawing on British literary and cinematic tradition (he cites influences ranging from Thomas Hardy and Oscar Wilde to Saturday Night and Sunday Morning), Morrissey speaks out for protection of the innocent, railing against human cruelty in all its guises. Three of the songs on Meat Is Murder deal with saving our children — from the educational system (“The Headmaster Ritual”), from brutalizing homes (“Barbarism Begins at Home”), from one another (“Rusholme Ruffians”). The title track, “Meat Is Murder,” with its simulated bovine cries and buzz-saw guitars, takes vegetarianism to new heights of hysterical caniphobia.

A man of deadly serious sensitivity, Morrissey recognizes emotional as well as physical brutality, assailing the cynicism that laughs at loneliness (“That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore”). Despite feeling trapped in an unfeeling world, Morrissey can still declare, “My faith in love is still devout,” with a sincerity so deadpan as to be completely believable.

Though he waves the standard for romance and sexual liberation, Morrissey has a curiously puritanical concept of love. He’s conscious of thwarted passion and inappropriate response, yet remains oddly distant from his own self-absorption. The simple pleasures of others make him uncomfortable as if these activities were the cause of his own grand existential suffering. Morrissey’s uptight romanticism wears the black mantle of a new Inquisition.

In contrast to Morrissey’s censorious lyrical attitudes is the expansive musical vision of guitarist and tunesmith Johnny Marr. When these two are brought into alignment, the results transcend and transform Morrissey’s concerns. The brightest example is the shimmering twelve-inch “How Soon Is Now?” (included as a bonus on U.S. copies of Meat Is Murder). Marr’s version of the Bo Diddley beat and his somber, reptilian guitars propel Morrissey’s heartfelt plea — “I am human, and I need to be loved, just like everybody else does” — into the realm of universal compassion and post-cool poetry. At this point, his needs seem real, his concerns nonjudgmental, and his otherwise pious persona truly sympathetic”.

On 11th February, we mark forty years of Meat Is Murder. The second album from The Smiths saw the band diversify. It was the band’s only album to reach number one in the U.K. In 2003, Meat Is Murder was ranked number 295 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. The album was also included in the book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die in 2005. I was keen to spend some time with Meat Is Murder ahead of its fortieth anniversary. It still holds power and relevance to this day. It is…

AN underrated gem of an album.

FEATURE: Spotlight: Chalk

FEATURE:

 

 

Spotlight

Chalk

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A band that are going to…

be making big waves this year, Chalk are appearing on many lists of ‘ones to watch 2025’. They are being tipped by so many different sites. I am quite new to their work but I can understand what all the fuss is about. Their upcoming E.P., Conditions III, is out on 1st February. The trio have a few great gigs coming up. They are playing the iconic King Tut's Wah Wah Hut on 27th February. I am going to get to some interviews with them. First, here is some biography about the brilliant Chalk:

“Chalk is the three-piece project of Irish musicians and now Academy Award winning filmmakers Ross Cullen Benedict Goddard and Luke Niblock. The band was formed in 2019 after they met whilst studying film and realised they shared the same musical vision and ambitions. The trio sprung out of the gates live, supporting London's PVA in Dublin for their first ever show, before selling out their debut hometown headline in Belfast and embarking on a UK/IRE tour starting on the 6th May. The tour included two full capacity shows as part of the First Fifty at Brighton's 'The Great Escape' Festival.

With the release of their debut EP 'Conditions', the band interweave their industrial noise/techno hybrid soundscape and the monochromatic gothic visual landscape they have created for themselves in an evocative and seamless manner.

The anthemic titular track 'Conditions' represents Chalk's exploration of everything life brings to us as human beings, both in our dreams and in our relationships, the deflating and the uplifting, the past and the future. It's about the seemingly eternal struggle to find out who we really are as people, wrestling to discover what our purpose is... and where we belong in this world.

"The love of the dance scene meets the love of raw darkly atmospheric noise" - Steve Lamacq, BBC 6 Music

"A band full of TNT... a sucker punch of a blow to the chest. Such an exciting starting point" - Jack Saunders, BBC Radio 1

"An utterly captivating sonic environment. It's post-punk for the end of the world" - Jonah Krueger, Consequence”.

The first interview I want to highlight is from March of last year. Their E.P., Conditions, came out a couple of months later. There was a lot of heat and excitable buzz around the group then. There is even more now. Rolling Stone spoke with the Belfast experimentalists. They also discussed forming a band in lockdown and making music bound to their city’s history:

“While acts on separate ends of this spectrum are producing exciting and boundary-pushing music, some of the most interesting music comes from those blending the two. Alongside the likes of Just Mustard and Enola Gay, Belfast’s Chalk draw from both post-punk and techno to make their intriguing, metallic racket.

Forming in the pandemic, the trio – formerly working together in a garage rock-type project – indulged their love of harsh and noisy electronic music to make debut EP Conditions, all without playing a single gig.

When they did start playing shows as we exited the pandemic, Chalk became a meatier sonic proposition, a change reflected in Conditions’ sequel EP, out now on Nice Swan Records. On it, they make rock songs imbued with the rattling synths and wobbling bass of techno. Whether it’s the pummelling sonics of ‘The Gate’, the foreboding slow burn of ‘Kevlar’ or the sweeping, widescreen synths of closer ‘Bliss’, everything is done with intensity at its core.

With their first proper tour ahead of them and new music on the horizon, the band discuss their beginnings, how playing live changed them, and how the complicated history of their hometown influences its signature sound.

What makes the Belfast electronic scene special, and how has it influenced the sound of Chalk?

Ross Cullen (vocals): If Chalk was a Dublin project, I don’t know where it would have ended up. You’re always pulling from influences around you, and we pulled from Belfast. At the start, we were trying to blend both the noise rock and industrial elements with a four-four kick, and living in Belfast – with the context of how huge the dance scene is here – was huge for us in terms of finding that starting point.

There’s something special here. We were talking to a promoter once and he was comparing Belfast and Berlin, these two cities with a lot of trauma. They both have this really pounding electronic dance scene. He called it ‘trauma techno’.

Benedict Goddard (guitar/synth): It’s a pretty apt description! It feels quite black-and-white – Dublin has guitar bands, Belfast has a dance scene – but it’s also correct.

You worked with Chris Ryan (Just Mustard, NewDad, Enola Gay) on Conditions II – what did he bring to the process?

Goddard: The guitars on the Just Mustard album was the reason we wanted to work with Chris. We were aware of the post-punk scene happening in Ireland, but it was a slow realisation. When we were writing the initial songs, we couldn’t even see any live music.

Cullen: Chris nudged us in the direction of more electronic parts. We never would have thought to include drum machine parts, but he helped us bring it all in.

Alongside your more electronic elements, what do you like about what the guitar brings to Chalk?

Goddard: The performance element is really important to us. There’s a certain physicality to the guitar that we really love. Then there are songs that I’m just playing a sampler for. As a groundwork, the guitar is the instrument I’ve been playing since I was a kid, and it lends itself to the stage. The sampler is its own other kind of beast. We want to incorporate more and more instruments as time goes on.

PHOTO CREDIT: Mathieu Zazzo

Does this straddling of genres extend to your live shows too? Do you like the idea of playing alongside a line-up of DJs as well as punk bands?

Cullen: At our first ever gig, we played with an ambient drum-and-bass artist and others. Curating that sort of night is important to us, so it’s not just three bands that sound the same. We had a DJ at another show alongside a band with sax and violin. We’re very open to making sure there’s a nice mix on the night. I’d love to do the late-night festival slots too though.

Does the word ‘band’ sit comfortably with you to describe Chalk? You play guitars and drums but it’s far from a traditional band setup…

Goddard: Did we throw around the idea of calling it a ‘project’ before we ever played live?

Cullen: We did! We were sick of writing that we were a band.

Goddard: I don’t really care now. We’re not big enough to be pigeonholed yet. We’re just happy that people are listening.

What else is coming up for Chalk?

Cullen: We’ve always been the kind of band to think a year or two ahead. We’re already thinking about a longer project and an album. It’s exciting for us to have these two EPs that people have come to really connect with, and we can’t wait to go and play it live. We’re especially excited to play Belfast – whenever I think about playing these songs live, I think about Belfast”.

In October, The Rock Revival celebrated a trio brilliantly and originally mixing Techno and Post-Punk. There is no doubt they are going to be playing festivals through the summer. If you are not following Chalk at the moment then make sure that you do. You will want to keep a track of what is happening in their world:

“Chalk’s racket sound is original in their scene, but increasingly to where they’re from. Belfast isn’t a city specifically known for its guitar music despite its talents, with electronic dance music taking the reins of the city thanks to now universal acts like Bicep. Originally taking a while to craft their identity, the band looked to their cities biggest scene.

“There is a bit of a spirit that this place has, and has always had thanks to the shape the music scene has formed. Obviously dance music is the massive genre here, and it’s where we look towards for our sound. We leaned more to electronic nights in Belfast initially, but we then looked to Dublin where that boom of guitar music was happening, like Fontaines D.C and The Murder Capital, and we wanted to have both of those genres in mind when making something. We never really saw ourselves as a band initially, so we looked at DJs for influence and then tried to merge the two to create something original to ourselves.”

While definitely considering themselves an Irish band, Chalk music doesn’t match what some might think of traditional Irish music. It goes further than that, with Ben stating they want their music’s themes to feel universal.

“With our lyrics, we like them to work in a more abstract way to invoke feelings rather than explicitly saying something. National identity is something that we’ve talked about exploring in future projects, though. We’re in our mid twenties, but a lot of people growing up here have a bit of a crisis with their identity, I’ve definitely felt that and others have too. Being torn into saying whether you’re British, Irish, Northern Irish. I think the EPs have alluded to that in a way, not knowing what to do in the context of this country”.

The result of all of their influences comes through on their recently released single, ‘Tell Me’, thanks to its electronic drums and intense post-punk inspired vocal performance. They recorded the track in Iceland after receiving an artist’s fund. “Yeah, I don’t think we’d be able to afford to go over with our own wallets”, laughed Ross.

“We didn’t get out much while there. The recording studio was in a really recluse part of the country, we had to drive three or four hours in a snowstorm to get there. It was a great experience, though, and we’re really proud of what we produced there.”

Quickly approaching the release of their third EP in as many years, Chalk can testify from firsthand experience the pressure on new bands now to be a constant outlet of work, whether it be from recording or touring.

“I think the best thing we can do is to not rush anything. We’re trying to learn to find that balance, but it’s difficult with festivals, tours and writing our own material. You’d love to take as much time as possible, but the clock feels as though it’s ticking in a way. In this industry, it’s important to stay consistent”.

I am finishing with a recent interview from DIY. If you are new to them then I would start at the beginning and work forward. You can hear and feel the evolution. There is a lot of anticipation and excitement around Conditions III. This is a going to be their year for sure:

“Taking all the best bits of the last decade’s post-punk boom (an unflinching lack of façade and compellingly visceral delivery) and injecting them with the vitality and vigour of the dancefloor, their soon-to-be-trilogy of ‘Conditions’ EPs speak of a band for whom genre is but a word. “We met at film school, and we were big fans of the whole post-punk scene as well, so I think we were maybe writing stuff like that ourselves,” guitarist and synth player Benedict (Ben) Goddard explains, speaking about the band’s earliest days. “But that just seems like such an easy solution when you’re first writing music together, and there are other bands we love like Holy Fuck – ” he pauses, endearingly apologising for swearing “ – that really drive into that electronic soundscape. Those sounds just excite us a lot more.”

Feeding off what drummer Luke Niblock calls Belfast’s “very strong, punky ethos”, the trio (completed by vocalist Ross Cullen) spent “maybe two years” honing their sound, splicing their guitar band DNA with the city’s digital proclivities before diving headfirst into the world of live performance – the context in which they arguably thrive the most. “The live set is always something we’ve been quite proud of since the start,” Luke confirms. “We like to play with emotion in how we structure it; we didn’t want it to just be ‘crash, boom, wallop’.” Instead, he continues, they “adapt the tension throughout the set”, offsetting more atmospheric moments with “an explosion of one of those more guitar-centric tracks.”

The beauty of releasing ‘Conditions’ as they have – as three separate, but linked, EPs – Ross explains, is that it’s allowed them to push the envelope while still maintaining the same thematic or atmospheric touchstones. “There’s a feeling of euphoria and anxiety we’ve been going between since the first EP, which felt right to continue to explore,” he affirms. “But I think we’re moving away from the abstract world [of earlier tracks] and beginning to find comfort in realism and more personal subjects.”

PHOTO CREDIT: Aaron Cunningham

Sonically, the original ‘Conditions’ (2023) foregrounds weighty rock breakdowns, while ‘Conditions II’ (2024) and its forthcoming final piece ‘Conditions III’ (2025) lean far more into electronica, utilising sampling for a collagic masterclass in tension and release. Take the latter’s pummelling lead single ‘Tell Me’; much like the viral interview in which Charli xcx walks us through the sonic arc of ‘365’’s night out, it encodes a whole emotional journey in under three minutes, moving from anxiety-inducing closeness to stabbing synths that recall Psycho’s famous shower scene. Elsewhere, the tightly-coiled spring of ‘Afraid’ (the cut we suspect Luke has in mind when he speaks of “a big riff track”) erupts into driving guitars, echoing IDLES as much as Orbital, while ‘Pool Scene’ and ‘Leipzig 87’, Ross notes, make use of a Moog One synthesiser to “go deeper into the ‘club sound’.”

In a marked change from busy Belfast, this latest EP also saw the band upsticks to rural Iceland to record – a location which both thoroughly satisfied their cinephile tendencies, and injected a healthy dose of delirium into proceedings. “We didn’t see darkness for about a week, and I’m sure that just does something to your head,” Ben says cheerily. “Once, we were in the insane heat of the studio’s hot tub, then I was recording a guitar take literally two minutes later in a robe.” He grins: “I was like, ‘Should we be doing this?’ And our producer was like, ‘This is when we’ll get the great stuff!’” By the sound of Chalk’s third instalment, he wasn’t wrong”.

For those new to Chalk, you should dive right in. I am excited to see where they head next and what they accomplish this year. After a successful and busy 2024, things will get even hotter and better for the trio! Building up an impressive and loyal fanbase, so many eyes are turning the way of Chalk. Hardly a surprise! This is a group that has the potential to go so far ad endure for years. If that is not recommendation enough…

THEN nothing is!

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Follow Chalk

Instagram:

https://www.instagram.com/chalkband

Twitter:

https://x.com/chalk_band

Bandcamp:

https://chalkbelfast.bandcamp.com/album/conditions-iii

Spotify:

https://open.spotify.com/artist/3qa9pv6B0dmiBVETLQOCpi?si=RIZb8OYHSHi23hURYFtz5Q

YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/@chalkband

Facebook:

https://www.facebook.com/chalkbelfast/

FEATURE: You Cut Along a Dotted Line: Placing Kate Bush’s Singles, Albums and the Ten Best Videos

FEATURE:

 

 

You Cut Along a Dotted Line

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

Placing Kate Bush’s Singles, Albums and the Ten Best Videos

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THIS might be something that…

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1985/PHOTO CREDIT: Guido Harari

other people do if Kate Bush announces a new album. You do get features that rank her singles, albums and songs in general. It usually comes off of the back of some bit of news or something new being released. I am going to move on to rank her studio albums, as my opinions have changed since I last explored that subject. I will also rank her ten best videos. I know she has made more than ten music videos, but I will order the ten essential Kate Bush videos. Before getting to that, I am going to tackle all of her singles. I have counted thirty-eight singles. This is all of her singles and not just U.K. I have excluded the 2012 remix of Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God) and the 2022 reissue, as they are essentially similar or identical to the 1985 original. However, I am including the Little Shrew (Snowflake) single from last year, as it is a radio edit so is different to the 2011 version from 50 Words for Snow - and that was not released as a single. I am also not including Don’t Give Up as it is a Peter Gabriel single and not a Kate Bush one. For each, I have included the year they were released as singles and (where necessary) the albums they are from. I will spend time exploring the top ten, though I will simply rank the other twenty-eight. Like album and video rankings, people might disagree with where I place the singles! She never released a bad single, though it is clear some were weaker than others. Here are numbers thirty-eight to eleven:

38. Lyra (2007, The Golden Compass Soundtrack)

37. Deeper Understanding (2011, Director’s Cut)

36. Love and Anger (1990, The Sensual World)

35. And So Is Love (1994, The Red Shoes)

34. Ne t'enfuis pas (1983, standalone single)

33. The Dreaming (1982, The Dreaming)

32. There Goes a Tenner (1982, The Dreaming)

31. Rocket Man (I Think It's Going to Be a Long, Long Time) (1991, Two Rooms: Celebrating the Songs of Elton John & Bernie Taupin)

30. Hammer Horror (1978, Lionheart)

29. December Will Be Magic Again (1980, standalone single)

28. Experiment IV (1986, The Whole Story)

27. The Man I Love (ft. Larry Adler) (1994, The Glory of Gershwin)

26. Strange Phenomena (1979, The Kick Inside)

25. Wild Man (2011, 50 Words for Snow)

24. Symphony in Blue (1979, Lionheart)

23. King of the Mountain (2005, Aerial)

22. Moments of Pleasure (1993, The Red Shoes)

21. Eat the Music (1993, The Red Shoes)

20. Little Shrew (Snowflake) (2024, standalone single/radio edit)

19. Moving (The Kick Inside, 1978)

18. Rubberband Girl (1993, The Red Shoes)

17. Sat in Your Lap (1981, The Dreaming)

16. The Red Shoes (1994, The Red Shoes)

15. Wow (1979, Lionheart)

14. Breathing (1980, Never for Ever)

13. Army Dreamers (1980, Never for Ever)

12. Suspended in Gaffa (1982, The Dreaming)

11. Cloudbusting (1985, Hounds of Love)

TEN

This Woman’s Work (1989, The Sensual World)

“John Hughes, the American film director, had just made this film called ‘She’s Having A Baby’, and he had a scene in the film that he wanted a song to go with. And the film’s very light: it’s a lovely comedy. His films are very human, and it’s just about this young guy – falls in love with a girl, marries her. He’s still very much a kid. She gets pregnant, and it’s all still very light and child-like until she’s just about to have the baby and the nurse comes up to him and says it’s a in a breech position and they don’t know what the situation will be. So, while she’s in the operating room, he has so sit and wait in the waiting room and it’s a very powerful piece of film where he’s just sitting, thinking; and this is actually the moment in the film where he has to grow up. He has no choice. There he is, he’s not a kid any more; you can see he’s in a very grown-up situation. And he starts, in his head, going back to the times they were together. There are clips of film of them laughing together and doing up their flat and all this kind of thing. And it was such a powerful visual: it’s one of the quickest songs I’ve ever written. It was so easy to write. We had the piece of footage on video, so we plugged it up so that I could actually watch the monitor while I was sitting at the piano and I just wrote the song to these visuals. It was almost a matter of telling the story, and it was a lovely thing to do: I really enjoyed doing it” Roger Scott Interview, BBC Radio 1 (UK), 14 October 1989 - Kate Bush Encyclopedia

NINE

The Sensual World (1989, The Sensual World)

“Because I couldn’t get permission to use a piece of Joyce it gradually turned into the song about Molly Bloom the character stepping out of the book, into the real world and the impressions of sensuality. Rather than being in this two-dimensional world, she’s free, let loose to touch things, feel the ground under her feet, the sunsets, just how incredibly sensual a world it is. (…) In the original piece, it’s just ‘Yes’ – a very interesting way of leading you in. It pulls you into the piece by the continual acceptance of all these sensual things: ‘Ooh wonderful!’ I was thinking I’d never write anything as obviously sensual as the original piece, but when I had to rewrite the words, I was trapped. How could you recreate that mood without going into that level of sensuality? So there I was writing stuff that months before I’d said I’d never write. I have to think of it in terms of pastiche, and not that it’s me so much” Len Brown, ‘In The Realm Of The Senses’. NME (UK), 7 October 1989” - Kate Bush Encyclopedia

EIGHT

Night of the Swallow (1983, The Dreaming)

“Unfortunately a lot of men do begin to feel very trapped in their relationships and I think, in some situations, it is because the female is so scared, perhaps of her insecurity, that she needs to hang onto him completely. In this song she wants to control him and because he wants to do something that she doesn’t want him to she feels that he is going away. It’s almost on a parallel with the mother and son relationship where there is the same female feeling of not wanting the young child to move away from the nest. Of course, from the guys point of view, because she doesn’t want him to go, the urge to go is even stronger. For him, it’s not so much a job as a challenge; a chance to do something risky and exciting. But although that woman’s very much a stereotype I think she still exists today” Paul Simper, ‘Dreamtime Is Over’. Melody Maker (UK), 16 October 1982 - Kate Bush Encyclopedia

SEVEN

Them Heavy People (1978, The Kick Inside)

“The idea for ‘Heavy People’ came when I was just sitting one day in my parents’ house. I heard the phrase “Rolling the ball” in my head, and I thought that it would be a good way to start a song, so I ran in to the piano and played it and got the chords down. I then worked on it from there. It has lots of different people and ideas and things like that in it, and they came to me amazingly easily – it was a bit like ‘Oh England’, because in a way so much of it was what was happening at home at the time. My brother and my father were very much involved in talking about Gurdjieff and whirling Dervishes, and I was really getting into it, too. It was just like plucking out a bit of that and putting it into something that rhymed. And it happened so easily – in a way, too easily. I say that because normally it’s difficult to get it all to happen at once, but sometimes it does, and that can seem sort of wrong. Usually you have to work hard for things to happen, but it seems that the better you get at them the more likely you are to do something that is good without any effort. And because of that it’s always a surprise when something comes easily. I thought it was important not to be narrow-minded just because we talked about Gurdjieff. I knew that I didn’t mean his system was the only way, and that was why it was important to include whirling Dervishes and Jesus, because they are strong, too. Anyway, in the long run, although somebody might be into all of them, it’s really you that does it – they’re just the vehicle to get you there.

I always felt that ‘Heavy People’ should be a single, but I just had a feeling that it shouldn’t be a second single, although a lot of people wanted that. Maybe that’s why I had the feeling – because it was to happen a little later, and in fact I never really liked the album version much because it should be quite loose, you know: it’s a very human song. And I think, in fact, every time I do it, it gets even looser. I’ve danced and sung that song so many times now, but it’s still like a hymn to me when I sing it. I do sometimes get bored with the actual words I’m singing, but the meaning I put into them is still a comfort. It’s like a prayer, and it reminds me of direction. And it can’t help but help me when I’m singing those words. Subconsciously they must go in” Kate Bush Club newsletter number 3, November 1979 - Kate Bush Encyclopedia

SIX

Babooshka (1980, Never for Ever)

“Apparently it is grandmother, it’s also a headdress that people wear. But when I wrote the song it was just a name that literally came into my mind, I’ve presumed I’ve got it from a fairy story I’d read when I was a child. And after having written the song a series of incredible coincidences happened where I’d turned on the television and there was Donald Swan singing about Babooshka. So I thought, “Well, there’s got to be someone who’s actually called Babooshka.” So I was looking throughRadio Timesand there, another coincidence, there was an opera called Babooshka. Apparently she was the lady that the three kings went to see because the star stopped over her house and they thought “Jesus is in there”.’ So they went in and he wasn’t. And they wouldn’t let her come with them to find the baby and she spent the rest of her life looking for him and she never found him. And also a friend of mine had a cat called Babooshka. So these really extraordinary things that kept coming up when in fact it was just a name that came into my head at the time purely because it fitted” Peter Powell interview, Radio 1 (UK), 11 October 1980 - Kate Bush Encyclopedia

FIVE

The Big Sky (1986, Hounds of Love)

‘The Big Sky’ was a song that changed a lot between the first version of it on the demo and the end product on the master tapes. As I mentioned in the earlier magazine, the demos are the masters, in that we now work straight in the 24-track studio when I’m writing the songs; but the structure of this song changed quite a lot. I wanted to steam along, and with the help of musicians such as Alan Murphy on guitar and Youth on bass, we accomplished quite a rock-and-roll feel for the track. Although this song did undergo two different drafts and the aforementioned players changed their arrangements dramatically, this is unusual in the case of most of the songs” Kate Bush Club newsletter, Issue 18, 1985 - Kate Bush Encyclopedia

FOUR

The Man with the Child in His Eyes (1978, The Kick Inside)

“The inspiration for ‘The Man With the Child in His Eyes’ was really just a particular thing that happened when I went to the piano. The piano just started speaking to me. It was a theory that I had had for a while that I just observed in most of the men that I know: the fact that they just are little boys inside and how wonderful it is that they manage to retain this magic. I, myself, am attracted to older men, I guess, but I think that’s the same with every female. I think it’s a very natural, basic instinct that you look continually for your father for the rest of your life, as do men continually look for their mother in the women that they meet. I don’t think we’re all aware of it, but I think it is basically true. You look for that security that the opposite sex in your parenthood gave you as a child” Self Portrait, 1978 - Kate Bush Encyclopedia

THREE

Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God) (1985, Hounds of Love)

“It is very much about the power of love, and the strength that is created between two people when they’re very much in love, but the strength can also be threatening, violent, dangerous as well as gentle, soothing, loving. And it’s saying that if these two people could swap places – if the man could become the woman and the woman the man, that perhaps they could understand the feelings of that other person in a truer way, understanding them from that gender’s point of view, and that perhaps there are very subtle differences between the sexes that can cause problems in a relationship, especially when people really do care about each other” The Tony Myatt Interview, November 1985 - Kate Bush Encyclopedia

TWO

Hounds of Love (1985, Hounds of Love)

“[‘Hounds Of Love’] is really about someone who is afraid of being caught by the hounds that are chasing him. I wonder if everyone is perhaps ruled by fear, and afraid of getting into relationships on some level or another. They can involve pain, confusion and responsibilities, and I think a lot of people are particularly scared of responsibility. Maybe the being involved isn’t as horrific as your imagination can build it up to being – perhaps these baying hounds are really friendly” Kate Bush Club newsletter, 1985 - Kate Bush Encyclopedia

ONE

Wuthering Heights (1978, The Kick Inside)

“When I first read Wuthering Heights I thought the story was so strong. This young girl in an era when the female role was so inferior and she was coming out with this passionate, heavy stuff. Great subject matter for a song.

I loved writing it. It was a real challenge to precis the whole mood of a book into such a short piece of prose. Also when I was a child I was always called Cathy not Kate and I just found myself able to relate to her as a character. It’s so important to put yourself in the role of the person in a song. There’s no half measures. When I sing that song I am Cathy.

(Her face collapses back into smiles.) Gosh I sound so intense. Wuthering Heights is so important to me. It had to be the single. To me it was the only one. I had to fight off a few other people’s opinions but in the end they agreed with me. I was amazed at the response though, truly overwhelmed” (ate’s Fairy Tale, Record Mirror (UK), February 1978 - Kate Bush Encyclopedia

Before coming to the album ranking, I have selected the best ten Kate Bush videos. There is some tough competition. People might have their own opinions and change the order, but I am pretty happy with my top ten. Such a visionary when it came to videos, I especially love when Bush stepped behind the camera and directed. There are examples of her work below. Here are the ten best Kate Bush videos…

TEN: The Sensual World

Directors: Kate Bush/Peter Richardson

From the Album: The Sensual World (1989)

NINE: This Woman’s Work

Directors: Kate Bush/John Alexander

From the Album: The Sensual World (1989)

EIGHT: Experiment IV

Director: Kate Bush

From the Album: The Whole Story (1986)

SEVEN: Army Dreamers

Director: Keith (‘Keef’) MacMillan

From the Album: Never for Ever (1980)

SIX: Breathing

Director: Keith MacMillan

From the Album: Never for Ever (1980)

FIVE: Wuthering Heights

Director: Keith MacMillan

From the Album: The Kick Inside (1978)

FOUR: Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God)

Director: David Garfath

From the Album: Hounds of Love (1985)

THREE: Little Shrew (Snowflake)

Director: Kate Bush

From the Album: Standalone 2024 single release/radio edit

TWO: Cloudbusting

Director: Julian Doyle

From the Album: Hounds of Love (1985)

ONE: Hounds of Love

Director: Kate Bush

From the Album: Hounds of Love (1985)

I am going to end by ranking Kate Bush’s ten studio albums. In each case, I shall include the release date, producer(s), and a sample review. I will also include the album in full. There is tough competition again but, once more, some albums superior to others. There is of course personal bias, but there will be common ground: people agreeing with the ranking. If anyone had some other opinions then let me know. This is where I rank Kate Bush’s albums…

TEN: Director’s Cut 

Release Date: 16th May, 2011

Producer: Kate Bush

Review:

“During her early career, Kate Bush released albums regularly despite her reputation as a perfectionist in the studio. Her first five were released within seven years. After The Hounds of Love in 1985, however, the breaks between got longer: The Sensual World appeared in 1989 and The Red Shoes in 1993. Then, nothing before Aerial, a double album issued in 2005. It's taken six more years to get The Director's Cut, an album whose material isn't new, though its presentation is. Four of this set's 11 tracks first appeared on The Sensual World, while the other seven come from The Red Shoes. Bush's reasons for re-recording these songs is a mystery. She does have her own world-class recording studio, and given the sounds here, she's kept up with technology. Some of these songs are merely tweaked, and pleasantly so, while others are radically altered. The two most glaring examples are "Flower of the Mountain" (previously known as "The Sensual World") and "This Woman's Work." The former intended to use Molly Bloom's soliloquy from James Joyce's novel Ulysses as its lyric; Bush was refused permission by his estate. That decision was eventually reversed; hence she re-recorded the originally intended lyrics. And while the arrangement is similar, there are added layers of synth and percussion. Her voice is absent the wails and hiccupy gasps of her youthful incarnation. These have been replaced by somewhat huskier, even more luxuriant and elegant tones. On the latter song, the arrangement of a full band and Michael Nyman's strings are replaced by a sparse, reverbed electric piano which pans between speakers. This skeletal arrangement frames Bush's more prominent vocal which has grown into these lyrics and inhabits them in full: their regrets, disappointments, and heartbreaks with real acceptance. She lets that voice rip on "Lilly," supported by a tougher, punchier bassline, skittering guitar efx, and a hypnotic drum loop. Bush's son Bertie makes an appearance as the voice of the computer (with Auto-Tune) on "Deeper Understanding." On "RubberBand Girl," Bush pays homage to the Rolling Stones' opening riff from "Street Fighting Man" in all its garagey glory (which one suspects was always there and has now been uncovered). The experience of The Director's Cut, encountering all this familiar material in its new dressing, is more than occasionally unsettling, but simultaneously, it is deeply engaging and satisfying” – AllMusic

NINE: The Sensual World

Release Date: 16th October, 1989

Producer: Kate Bush

Review:

“Even its most surreal songs are rooted in self-examination. “Heads We’re Dancing” seems like a dark joke—a young girl is charmed on to the dancefloor by a man she later learns is Adolf Hitler—but poses a troubling question: What does it say about you, if you couldn’t see through the devil’s disguise? Its discordant, skronky rhythms make it feel like a formal ball taking place in a fever dream, and Bush’s voice grows increasingly panicky as she realizes how badly she’s been duped. As far-fetched as its premise was, its inspiration lay close to home: A family friend had told Bush how shaken they’d been after they’d taken a shine to a dashing stranger at a dinner party, only to find out they’d been chatting to Robert Oppenheimer.

It’s more fanciful than most of The Sensual World’s little secrets. To hear someone recall formative childhood truths (the lush grandeur of “Reaching Out”) and lingering romantic pipedreams (the longing of “Never Be Mine”) is like being given a reel of their memory tapes and discovering what makes them tick. On “The Fog,” she’s paralyzed by fear until she remembers the childhood swimming lessons her father gave her, his voice cutting through the misty harps like an old ghost. Relationships on the album can be sticky and thorny. “Between a Man and a Woman” is half-dangerous and half-sultry, its snaking rhythms mirroring the round-in-circles squabbling of a couple. When a third party tries to interfere, they’re told to back off. This time, unlike on “Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God),” there’s no point wishing for a helping hand from God.

But if there are no miracles, there are at least songs that sound like them. For “Rocket’s Tail,” Bush enlisted the help of Trio Bulgarka, who she fell in love with after hearing them on a tape Paddy gave her. The three Bulgarian women didn’t speak English and had no idea what they were singing about, but it didn’t matter. They sound more like mystics during its a capella first half, and when it eventually blows up into a glammy stomper with Dave Gilmour’s electric guitar caterwauling like a Catherine wheel, their vocals still come out on top: cackling like gleeful witches, whooping like they’re watching sparks explode in the night sky. Its weird, wonderful magic offered a simple message: Life is short, so enjoy moments of pleasure before they fizzle out.

Perhaps that’s why there are glimmers of hope even in the album’s most desperate circumstances. “Deeper Understanding” is a bleak sci-fi tale about a lonely person who turns to their computer for comfort, and in doing so isolates themselves even more. But while there’s an icy chill to the verses, Trio Bulgarka imbue the computer’s voice with golden warmth. Bush wanted it to sound like the “visitation of angels,” and hearing the chorus is like being wrapped in a celestial hug. She pulls off a similar trick on “This Woman’s Work,” which she wrote for John Hughes’ film She’s Having a Baby, although her vivid, devastating interpretation of its script has taken on a far greater life of its own. It captures a moment of crisis: a man about to be walloped with the sledgehammer of parental responsibilities, frozen by terror as he waits for his pregnant wife outside the delivery room, his brain a messy spiral of regrets and guilty thoughts. Yet Bush softens the song’s building panic attack with soft musical touches so it rushes and swirls like a dream, even as reality becomes a waking nightmare. “It’s the point where has to grow up,” said Bush. “He’d been such a wally.”

She didn’t need to prove her own steeliness to anyone, especially the male journalists who patronized her and harped on her childishness as a way of cutting her down to size. Instead, The Sensual World is the sound of someone deciding for themselves what growing up and grown-up pop should be, without being beholden to anyone else’s tedious definitions. It gave her a new template for the next two decades, inspiring both the smooth, stylish art-rock of 1993’s The Red Shoes and the picturesque beauty of 2005’s Aerial. Like Molly Bloom, Bush had set herself free into a world that wasn’t mundane, but alive with new, fertile possibility” – Pitchfork

EIGHT: The Red Shoes

Release Date: 1st November, 1993

Producer: Kate Bush

Review:

“It's not all fainting hearts on Shoes, though. The mood ranges from the pure pop of "Rubberband Girl" to the exuberant reel of the title cut (an homage to the classic film), from the wistful verse and funky chorus of the Prince collaboration "Why Should I Love You?" to the West Indies-flavored "Eat the Music." The Red Shoes is a solid collection of well-crafted and seductively melodic showcases for Bush's hypercabaret style.

Canadian Jane Siberry has often been compared to Bush, partly due to the convenience of lumping together quirky female singer/songwriters but also as an acknowledgment that both are working in a personal subgenre of art rock. And there are similarities between Siberry's When I Was a Boy and Shoes – both display a preoccupation with the difficulty of separating pain and love; both evoke a questioning spirituality and a distinctly feminine earthiness.

But Siberry's album is as funereal and expansive as Bush's is tight and energized. Nothing Siberry has done in the past quite prepares the listener for this album's prevalent mood of spooky obsession, bewilderment and resignation, and deathbed reflections. Though there's occasionally a rumble in the reverie ("All the Candles in the World," for instance, is positively funky), the overall ambience is prayerful, abetted by a production that often creates a cathedral of silence between the low tones (husky viola or cello filigrees) and the spare front line (an acoustic piano or guitar). Though songs like "Temple" (co-produced by Siberry and Brian Eno) and "Candles" are immediately likable, long free-floating meditations like "Sweet Incarnadine" and "The Vigil (The Sea)" are the album's centerpieces, gradually unfolding songs about love and dying.

It would all be horribly pretentious – if not maudlin – in the hands of a lesser talent, but Siberry approaches her task with a fearless simplicity, resisting easy irony or cleverness. Like Bush she creates dramatic structure by using a variety of voices, from brimming-heart full tones to deadpan whispers. When I Was a Boy is a difficult disc to get into – the languidness at its center can be off-putting – but a little patience rewards you with a gem. (RS 670)” – Rolling Stone

SEVEN: 50 Words for Snow 

Release Date: 21st November, 2011

Producer: Kate Bush

Review:

“But in one sense, these peculiarities aren't really that peculiar, given that this is an album by Bush. She has form in releasing Christmas records, thanks to 1980's December Will Be Magic Again, on which she imagined herself falling softly from the sky on a winter's evening. She does it again here on opener Snowflake, although anyone looking for evidence of her artistic development might note that 30 years ago she employed her bug-eyed Heeeath-CLIFF! voice and plonking lyrical references to Bing Crosby and "old St Nicholas up the chimney" to conjure the requisite sense of wonder. Today, she gets there far more successfully using only a gently insistent piano figure, soft flurries of strings and percussion and the voice of her son Bertie.

Meanwhile, Fry's is merely the latest unlikely guest appearance – Bush has previously employed Lenny Henry, Rolf Harris (twice) and the late animal imitator Percy Edwards, the latter to make sheep noises on the title track of 1982's The Dreaming. Equally, Fairweather Low is not the first person called upon to pretend to be someone else on a Bush album, although she usually takes that upon herself, doing impersonations to prove the point: Elvis on Aerial's King of the Mountain, a gorblimey bank robber on There Goes a Tenner. Finally, in song at least, Bush has always displayed a remarkably omnivorous sexual appetite: long before the Yeti and old Snow Balls showed up, her lustful gaze had variously fixed on Adolf Hitler, a baby and Harry Houdini.

No, the really peculiar thing is that 50 Words for Snow is the second album in little over six months from a woman who took six years to make its predecessor and 12 to make the one before that. If it's perhaps stretching it to say you can tell it's been made quickly – no one is ever going to call an album that features Lake Tahoe's operatic duet between a tenor and a counter-tenor a rough-and-ready lo-fi experience – it certainly feels more intuitive than, say, Aerial, on which a lot of time and effort had clearly been expended in the pursuit of effortlessness. For all the subtle beauty of the orchestrations, there's an organic, live feel, the sense of musicians huddled together in a room, not something that's happened on a Bush album before.

That aside, 50 Words for Snow is extraordinary business as usual for Bush, meaning it's packed with the kind of ideas you can't imagine anyone else in rock having. Taking notions that look entirely daft on paper and rendering them into astonishing music is very much Bush's signature move. There's something utterly inscrutable and unknowable about how she does it that has nothing to do with her famous aversion to publicity. Better not to worry, to just listen to an album that, like the weather it celebrates, gets under your skin and into your bones” – The Guardian

SIX: The Dreaming

Release Date: 13th September, 1982

Producer: Kate Bush

Review:

“An embarrassment of riches then, bestowed upon an unworthy rabble. The Dreaming was released to a baffled public but the more open-minded sectors of the music press acknowledged Bush’s achievement. Despite many laudatory notices, watching Bush and Gabriel’s respective appearances on Old Grey Whistle Test confirms what she was up against. Gabriel is afforded due reverence as an art-rock renaissance man, Bush, on the other hand, while covering roughly the same ground, is ever so slightly mocked. Behind her unwavering propriety, irritation smoulders. As with her appearance on Pebble Mill, the usually sympathetic Paul Gambaccini constantly frames the music in context of its radio playability or lack thereof. Bush looks bewildered and more than a little wan. The music she had created was no longer so easily assimilated by daytime TV.

Another tour was talked about but never transpired. She left London. At her parents East Wickham home she created a 48 track studio and returned three years later with the masterpiece Hounds Of Love, knocking Madonna’s Like A Virgin off the top spot. It elevated her into the pantheon of greats, a grand dame of Brit-pop at the tender age of 27. The first side with its consistent rhythms, arresting hooks and l’amour fou turned her into a hi-tech post hippy hit machine. The singles’ videos were glossy excursions, some of them conceived on film rather than video. By the ‘Hounds Of Love’ promo she was directing herself. Another area the "shyest megalomaniac" wrestled control of. ‘The Ninth Wave’ was another tribute to her imaginative powers, the song suite being the sexy, acceptable face of prog rock. She even had a hit in America. Although she had to change the name from ‘A Deal With God’ to ‘Running Up That Hill’.

But it was The Dreaming that lay the groundwork. It ignited US critical interest in her (including the hard-assed Robert Christgau and the burgeoning college radio scene finally gave Bush an outlet there. Hounds Of Love, remains the acme of this singular talent’s achievements. It uses ethnic instrumentation while sounding nothing like the world music that would be popularized through the 80s. It is a record largely constructed with cutting edge technology that eschews the showroom dummy bleeps associated with synth-pop. At the time, she talked of using technology to apply "the future to nostalgia", an interesting reverse of Bowie’s nostalgic Berlin soundtrack for a future that never came. Like Low, The Dreaming is Bush’s own "new music night and day" a brave volte face from a mainstream artist. It remains a startlingly modern record too, the organic hybridization, the use of digital and analogue techniques, its use of modern wizadry to access atavistic states (oddly, Rob Young’s fine portrait of the singer in Electric Eden only mentions this album in passing).

For such an extreme album, its influence has been far-reaching. ABC, then in their Lexicon Of Love prime, named it as one of their favourites, as did Bjork whose similar use of electronics to convey the pantheistic seems directly descended from The Dreaming. Even The Cure’s Disintegration duplicates the track arrangement on the sleeve and the request that ‘this album was mixed to be played loud’. ‘Leave It Open’‘s vari-speed vocals even prefigure the art-damaged munchkins of The Knife vocal arsenal. Field Music/The Week That Was arrayed themselves with sonics that seem heavily indebted to Bush’s work here. Graphic novelist Neil Gaiman even had a character sing lyrics from the title track in his The Sandman series. John Balance of post-industrialists Coil confessed that the album’s songs were all ideas that he later tried to write. But Bush got there first. And The Dreaming remains a testament to the exhilarating joy of "letting the weirdness in” – The Quietus

FIVE: Lionheart 

Release Date: 10th November, 1978

Producer: Andrew Powell (assisted by Kate Bush)

Review:

“Proving that the English admired Kate Bush's work, 1978's Lionheart album managed to reach the number six spot in her homeland while failing to make a substantial impact in North America. The single "Hammer Horror" went to number 44 on the U.K. singles chart, but the remaining tracks from the album spin, leap, and pirouette with Bush's vocal dramatics, most of them dissipating into a mist rather than hovering around long enough to be memorable. Her fairytale essence wraps itself around tracks like "In Search of Peter Pan," "Kashka From Baghdad," and "Oh England My Lionheart," but unravels before any substance can be heard. "Wow" does the best job at expressing her voice as it waves and flutters through the chorus, with a melody that shimmers in a peculiar but compatible manner. Some of the tracks, such as "Coffee Homeground" or "In the Warm Room," bask in their own subtle obscurity, a trait that Bush improved upon later in her career but couldn't secure on this album. Lionheart acts as a gauge more than a complete album, as Bush is trying to see how many different ways she can sound vocally colorful, even enigmatic, rather than focus on her material's content and fluidity. Hearing Lionheart after listening to Never for Ever or The Dreaming album, it's apparent how quickly Bush had progressed both vocally and in her writing in such a short time” – AllMusic

FOUR: Aerial

Release Date: 7th November, 2005

Producer: Kate Bush

Review:

“As might be expected of an album which breaks a 12-year silence during which she began to raise a family, there's a core of contented domesticity to Kate Bush's Aerial. It's not just a case of parental bliss - although her affection for "lovely, lovely Bertie" spills over from the courtly song specifically about him, to wash all over the second of this double-album's discs, a song-cycle about creation, art, the natural world and the cycling passage of time.

It's there too in the childhood reminiscence of "A Coral Room", the almost autistic satisfaction of the obsessive-compulsive mathematician fascinated by "Pi" (which affords the opportunity to hear Bush slowly sing vast chunks of the number in question, several dozen digits long - which rather puts singing the telephone directory into the shade), and particularly "Mrs Bartolozzi", a wife, or maybe widow, seeking solace for her absent mate in the dance of their clothes in the washing machine. "I watched them going round and round/ My blouse wrapping itself round your trousers," she observes, slipping into the infantile - "Slooshy sloshy, slooshy sloshy, get that dirty shirty clean" - and alighting periodically upon the zen stillness of the murmured chorus, "washing machine".

The second disc takes us through a relaxing day's stroll in the sunshine, from the sequenced birdsong of the "Prelude", through a pavement artist's attempt to "find the song of the oil and the brush" through serendipity and skill ("That bit there, it was an accident/ But he's so pleased/ It's the best mistake he could make/ And it's my favourite piece"), through the gentle flamenco chamber-jazz "Sunset" and the Laura Veirs-style epiphanic night-time swim in "Nocturn", to her dawn duet with the waking birds that concludes the album with mesmeric waves of synthesiser perked up by brisk banjo runs.

There's a hypnotic undertow running throughout the album, from the gentle reggae lilt of the single "King of the Mountain" and the organ pulses of "Pi" to the minimalist waves of piano and synth in "Prologue". Though oddly, for all its consistency of mood and tone, Aerial is possibly Bush's most musically diverse album, with individual tracks involving, alongside the usual rock-band line-up, such curiosities as bowed viol and spinet, jazz bass, castanets, rhythmic cooing pigeons, and her bizarre attempt to achieve communion with the natural world by aping the dawn chorus. Despite the muttered commentary of Rolf Harris as The Painter, it's a marvellous, complex work which restores Kate Bush to the artistic stature she last possessed around the time of Hounds of Love” – The Independent

THREE: Never for Ever

Release Date: 8th September, 1980

Producers: Kate Bush/Jon Kelly

Review:

“In that sense, the LP’s final two tracks, despite being the most explicitly political Bush had ever written, aren’t quite the radical outliers they seemed back in 1980. For all their polemical grist, she saw them as personal, poignant stories just like all her others, and although most critics lauded them for reckoning with ‘real life’ in a way her older efforts didn’t, their power transcends such bogus rules of authenticity. They’re spectacular not because their subject matter is inherently weightier than yarns about paranoid Russian wives or grumpy syphilitic composers, but because Bush brings it to life with exactly the same kind of exquisite, singular imagination; they’re political songs that have been twisted and transmogrified so they can exist in her strange universe, not the other way round. If Never For Ever made her a bolder, sharper songwriter, it was still absolutely on her own terms.

And so on ‘Army Dreamers’, a misty waltz about a mother racked with grief and guilt when her son is killed on military manoeuvres, Bush resembles an otherworldly prophet rather than a common-or-garden tub-thumper. “Wave a bunch of purple flowers/ To decorate a mammy’s hero,” she sings softly, sadly, bitterly, her gentle Irish lilt mingling with its sweet, woozy mandolin and the Fairlight’s unnerving samples of cocking rifles (Bush thought the accent, combined with the thwack of bodhrán, had a poetic vulnerability her regular voice lacked – not the last time she’d invoke her Celtic roots for emotional heft). Its gauzy prettiness gives it the air of a nightmare taking place inside a snow globe, twice as crushing for her delicate touch.

Nothing, though, is as devastating as the closing ‘Breathing’, a vision of nuclear doomsday with a horrifying wrinkle, like Threads turned into a poisonous lullaby (Bush, ever prescient, actually beat the film by three years). She sings as a terrified foetus breathing in toxic fumes inside the womb, slowly being killed by the blast’s fallout because mother doesn’t stand for comfort at all in this grim new world. Every element is beautifully brutal: the brooding electronics that fill the air like dangerous smog; the chilling, fairytale-gone-wrong image of plutonium chips “twinkling in every lung”, made extra-disturbing by gorgeous, glimmering chimes; the ominous scientific lecture that builds to a billowing, mushroom-cloud explosion of ungodly noise, followed by the background singers’ dread chant of “We are all going to die!” Most harrowing of all is the strangled, throat-tearing terror in Bush’s voice. In the past she’d shrieked, yelled, whooped and wailed, but she’d never all-out screamed like she screams here, a guttural cry for help that freezes the blood: “Leave me something to breathe!” Bush was as proud of its apocalyptic nightmare as she’d been unmoved by Lionheart. “It’s my little symphony,” she boasted to ZigZag.

Like ‘Wuthering Heights’, Never For Ever made history: the first No 1 album by a British female solo artist. Yet its significance transcends chart milestones. For the next decade Bush would build on its potential to become, as she joked to Q in 1989, the “shyest megalomaniac you’re ever likely to meet”. Whereas her first three albums were squeezed into two-and-a-half years, the subsequent three spanned nine. The next one, the bewildering, avant-garde masterpiece The Dreaming, was the first she produced entirely by herself; soon after, she built a studio-come-sanctuary near her family home and hunkered away to make the flawless Hounds Of Love. Each record introduced new inspirations, new instruments, new collaborators and new methods, all indebted to Never For Ever’s triumph of bloody-minded determination. It doesn’t belong in her imperial period, but that imperial period wouldn’t exist without it.

Whenever people told Bush they didn’t understand Never For Ever’s title, she patiently explained it encapsulated her belief that all things, good and bad, eventually passed. “We are all transient,” she declared in her fan newsletter, and it’s hard to think of a finer choice for an album that, even now, exists in a glorious state of flux. Never For Ever proved how great Bush could be when given the control and freedom she craved. More tantalisingly still, it promised the best was yet to come” – The Quietus

TWO: Hounds of Love

Release Date: 16th September, 1985

Producer: Kate Bush

Review:

“On Hounds of Love, the singer who started directing her own videos at this point becomes total auteur, and takes such a firm grasp on every aspect of the recording process that she often replaces Del Palmer, her own lover, on bass. On “Mother Stands for Comfort,” an all-knowing maternal contrast to the delusional papa of “Cloudbusting,” she duets with German jazz bassist Eberhard Weber, who plays yielding mother to Bush’s wayward daughter. Her Fairlight clatters with the crash of broken dishes while her piano gently wanders, but Weber’s fretless bass maintains its compassion, even when Bush lets loose some freaky primal-scream scatting toward the end.

Skies, clouds, hills, trees, lakes—along with everything else, Hounds of Love is also a heated paean to nature. On the cover, Bush reclines between two canines with a knowing familiarity that almost suggests cross-species congress. She honors the sensual world's benign blessings on “The Big Sky” even while Youth’s raucous bass suggests earthquakes. Bush references its elements with childlike awe: “That cloud looks like Ireland,” she squeals. “You’re here in my head like the sun coming out,” she sighs in “Cloudbusting,” and her stormy emotions are reflected by the music’s turbulence. But nature’s destruction can also inspire us to seek solace in spirituality, and that’s what happens on Side Two’s singular suite, “The Ninth Wave.”

Bush plays a sailor who finds herself shipwrecked and alone. She slips into a hypothermia-induced limbo between wakefulness and sleep (“And Dream of Sheep”), where nightmares, memories and visions distort her consciousness to the point where she cannot distinguish between reality and illusion. Is she skating, or trapped “Under Ice”? During her hallucinations, she sees herself in a prior life as a necromancer on trial; instead of freezing, she visualizes herself burning (“Waking the Witch”). Her spirit leaves her body and visits her beloved (“Watching You Without Me”). Then her future self confronts her present being and begs her to stay alive (“Jig of Life”). A rescue team reaches her just as her life force drifts heavenward (“Hello Earth”), but in the concluding track, “The Morning Fog,” flesh and spirit reunite, and she vows to tell her family how much she loves them.

As her sailor drifts in and out of consciousness, Bush floats between abstract composition and precise songcraft. Her character’s nebulous condition gives her melodies permission to unmoor from pop’s constrictions; her verses don’t necessarily return to catchy choruses, not until the relative normality of “The Morning Fog,” one of her sweetest songs. Instead, she’s free to exploit her Fairlight’s capacity for musique concrete. Spoken voices, Gregorian chant, Irish jigs, oceanic waves of digitized droning, and the culminating twittering of birds all collide in Bush’s synth-folk symphony. Like most of her lyrics, “The Ninth Wave” isn’t autobiographical, although its sink-or-swim scenario can be read as an extended metaphor for Hounds of Love’s protracted creation: Will she rise to deliver the masterstroke that guaranteed artistic autonomy for the rest of her long career and enabled her to live a happy home life with zero participation in the outside world for years on end, or will she drown under the weight of her colossal ambition?

By the time I became one of the few American journalists to have interviewed her in person in 1985, Bush had clinched her victory. She’d flown to New York to plug Hounds of Love, engaging in the kind of promotion she’d rarely do again. Because she thoroughly rejected the pop treadmill, the media had already begun to marginalize her as a space case, and have since painted her as a tragic, reclusive figure. Yet despite her mystical persona, she was disarmingly down-to-earth: That hammy public Kate was clearly this soft-spoken individual’s invention; an ever-changing role she played like Bowie in an era when even icons like Stevie Nicks and Donna Summer had a Lindsey Buckingham or a Giorgio Moroder calling many of the shots.

It was a response, perhaps, to the age-old quandary of commanding respect as a woman in an overwhelmingly masculine field. Bush's navigation of this minefield was as natural as it was ingenious: She became the most musically serious and yet outwardly whimsical star of her time. She held onto her bucolic childhood and sustained her family’s support, feeding the wonder that’s never left her. Her subsequent records couldn’t surpass Hounds of Love’s perfect marriage of technique and exploration, but never has she made a false one. She’s like the glissando of “Hello Earth” that rises up and plummets down almost simultaneously: Bush retained the strength to ride fame’s waves because she’s always known exactly what she was—simply, and quite complicatedly, herself” – Pitchfork

ONE: The Kick Inside

Release Date: 17th February, 1978

Producer: Andrew Powell

Review:

“The tale's been oft-told, but bears repeating: Discovered by a mutual friend of the Bush family as well as Pink Floyd's David Gilmour, Bush was signed on Gilmour's advice to EMI at 16. Given a large advance and three years, The Kick Inside was her extraordinary debut. To this day (unless you count the less palatable warblings of Tori Amos) nothing sounds like it.

Using mainly session musicians, The Kick Inside was the result of a record company actually allowing a young talent to blossom. Some of these songs were written when she was 13! Helmed by Gilmour's friend, Andrew Powell, it's a lush blend of piano grandiosity, vaguely uncomfortable reggae and intricate, intelligent, wonderful songs. All delivered in a voice that had no precedents. Even so, EMI wanted the dullest, most conventional track, James And The Cold Gun as the lead single, but Kate was no push over. At 19 she knew that the startling whoops and Bronte-influenced narrative of Wuthering Heights would be her make or break moment. Luckily she was allowed her head.

Of course not only did Wuthering Heights give her the first self-written number one by a female artist in the UK, (a stereotype-busting fact of huge proportions, sadly undermined by EMI's subsequent decision to market Bush as lycra-clad cheesecake), but it represented a level of articulacy, or at least literacy, that was unknown to the charts up until then. In fact, the whole album reads like a the product of a young, liberally-educated mind, trying to cram as much esoterica in as possible. Them Heavy People, the album's second hit may be a bouncy, reggae-lite confection, but it still manages to mention new age philosopher and teacher G I Gurdjieff. In interviews she was already dropping names like Kafka and Joyce, while she peppered her act with dance moves taught by Linsdsay Kemp. Showaddywaddy, this was not.

And this isn't to mention the sexual content. Ignoring the album's title itself, we have the full on expression of erotic joy in Feel It and L'Amour Looks Something Like You. Only in France had 19-year olds got away with this kind of stuff. A true child of the 60s vanguard in feminism, Strange Phenomena even concerns menstruation: Another first. Of course such density was decidedly English and middle class. Only the mushy, orchestral Man With The Child In His Eyes, was to make a mark in the US, but like all true artists, you always felt that Bush didn't really care about the commercial rewards. She was soon to abandon touring completely and steer her own fabulous course into rock history” – BBC

FEATURE: BRAT Summer: The Role of Women in the Rise of U.K. Physical Music Sales

FEATURE:

 

 

BRAT Summer

IN THIS PHOTO: Charli xcx/PHOTO CREDIT: Yasmin Istanbouli

The Role of Women in the Rise of U.K. Physical Music Sales

_________

2024 was one…

PHOTO CREDIT: Andrea Piacquadio/Pexels

with distinct features. In terms of the music that was ruling, women were very much on top. When it came to the best-reviewed albums and the music making the biggest impressions, women were dominating. I suspect this will continue throughout this year. An article from The Guardian caught my attention. Not solely reviving a decline in physical music, the role of women in music last year at least did ensure that there was a revival at the very least:

“Charli xcx’s Brat summer may have given way to cold winter, but the success of albums by female artists helped arrest a two-decade-long decline in sales of physical music.

Women led the way in recorded music this year, according to the British Phonographic Industry (BPI), topping the singles chart for 34 out of the 52 weeks and accounting for half of the top 20 albums for the first time.

Albums by female artists including Taylor Swift, Sabrina Carpenter, Charli xcx and Billie Eilish were the engine room of growth as combined sales of streaming and physical music rose by nearly 10% to smash past 200m albums or their equivalents as measured by the BPI.

Amid the encouraging numbers, the BPI sounded a note of warning that the government’s proposals to allow artificial intelligence firms to sidestep copyright rules put the UK’s powerhouse recorded music industry at risk.

But despite the looming digital threat, sales of analogue formats – led by vinyl – performed strongly.

Vinyl sales have risen for 17 successive years and increased rapidly again, up 9% to 6.7m units. Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department led the pack, beating Oasis’s first album, Definitely Maybe, amid excitement around the band’s reunion.

CD sales have been in steep decline in recent years but were down by just 300,000 to 10.5m, led by Coldplay’s Moon Music. Factoring in 182,000 sales in other formats such as cassettes, sales of recorded music in physical form rose by 1.4m to 17.4m, the first increase in two decades”.

Some might say that the best-selling album by women are from huge acts. That doesn’t really matter. They have contributed to much to the industry in terms of money generated. If people are buying vinyl and especially C.D.s and cassettes, then it is worth heralding these major artists. They have ensured that valuable physical formats remain vibrant and relevant. I don’t think it is a case of the physical format being desirable because it seems old-fashioned. Fans want to have this tangible connection to the music. This article explores the dominance of women last year:

“This year’s list not only celebrates musical diversity but also highlights the significant contributions of female artists across a number of genres. From Taylor Swift’s introspective The Tortured Poets Department to Charli XCX’s bold and unapologetic Brat, women have been leading the charge with boundary-pushing, genre-defying work. It’s also worth noting that across the pond Beyonce has become the first black woman to have an album top the country charts.

Why representation matters and is good for the industry

For decades, conversations about gender disparities in music have pointed to the underrepresentation of women. Female artists often face challenges in achieving the same level of visibility and industry support as their male counterparts.

In 2024, however, the narrative is shifting. This increase in representation is significant because it paves the way for a new generation of young women to see themselves in these roles. It normalizes success for female artists at the highest levels, creating a more equitable and inspiring musical landscape.

The strong presence of women on this year’s charts signals a growing appreciation for diverse voices in music. Women like Chappell Roan and Sabrina Carpenter bring unique perspectives and stories, while established artists like Taylor Swift and Billie Eilish continue to grow and develop.

As we move into 2025, let’s hope this momentum continues, ushering in an era where women’s success in music isn’t a surprising headline but an established norm”.

I suspect that this year will keep physical formats alive. I do hope so. It is not surprising women dominated last year. I think that they have been producing the very best music. Not to say men have been insignificant. One cannot discount them. In terms of originality and impact, women have been in charge. Their fanbases more dedicated, passionate and loud. So much dedication from them. It does lead to the question as to how this clear success and dominance translates this year. Festival bills are still not where they should be. Headline slots not automatically correcting and balancing. I do think that the industry needs to look at the facts. That women have been selling so many albums and producing such amazing music. Artists like Charli xcx creating this phenomenon and, in the process, perhaps the greatest album of 2024 with BRAT. I suspect that a festival like Glastonbury will have at least one female headliner, though there should be more. Other major festivals will drop the ball. It is a conversation we keep having but shouldn’t have to! Across the industry, more respect to women and more opportunity. Ensuring that there is far less sexism and misogyny. That there is not clear imbalance in various corners. Year on year, women are providing music with something truly special. The fact that they have contributed significantly to the health of physical music alone should be rewarded this year. Though, as the music industry is inherently sexist, it might take a while to shift. It is long overdue, but when it comes to the amazing women in the music industry, they need to be…

GIVEN them their dues.

FEATURE: It Started with a Kick: The Making of Kate Bush’s 1978 Debut

FEATURE:

 

 

It Started with a Kick

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in Hilversum performing Wuthering Heights on the Dutch series, TopPop, on 25th March, 1978

The Making of Kate Bush’s 1978 Debut

_________

THE final feature…

that marks Kate Bush’s debut album, The Kick Inside, at forty-seven takes us to the beginnings. If anyone wants to read more about The Kick Inside, I would suggest this book from Laura Shenton. There has not been a lot written about Kate Bush’s 1978 debut. In book form, anyway. It is such an important album it is surprising that more has not been published. It is my favourite album ever. It was released on 17th February, 1978. It introduced the world to a truly unique artist. I am going to finish with a couple of features around the extraordinary The Kick Inside. AIR Studios is now located at Lyndhurst Rd, London, NW3. It used to be situated in Oxford Circus by the tube station. It was a central location that was convenient for artists of the time. However, it being the heart of London meant there was this bustle and smog that surrounded the space. Even so, it was a perfect studio for Kate Bush. Opened in October 1970 by George Martin, it was this legendary studio space. Bush had began recording The Kick Inside before she recorded the majority of it in the summer of 1977. In June 1975, Bush entered AIR Studios to record The Man with the Child in His Eyes and The Saxophone Song (plus the unreleased track, Maybe/Humming). Bush reflected on her time at AIR Studios in June 1975. It would have been intimidating for any artist to step into that studio, let alone a sixteen-year-old. When she spoke to Tom Doyle in 2005, she recalled how brave she was. She was certainly brave. Determined even at that age, it was a wonderful experience overseen by David Gilmour. In July and August 1977, Bush was back there to complete the remaining eleven songs on the album. It was a very happy and exciting time. Bush learning new disciplines and working alongside seasoned musicians.

With comparative veterans like Ian Bairnson, David Patton and Stuart Elliott used to band work and no strangers to studios, there perhaps was this perception that Bush was this hippie chick that was going to be nothing special. This would be something routine and quick but not last in the memory. However, when Bush sat at the piano and started playing songs like Wuthering Heights, jaws nearly hit the floor! It was a revelation for these musicians. They were not used to an artist like Kate Bush. Even so, there was not a lot of trouble with communication. They bonded well and there was this mutual affection and trust. The routine would involve Kate Bush at the piano playing through the next song. The musicians would take it in before producer Andrew Powell handed out the chord charts. It was this disciplined and wonderful time where established musicians were perhaps learning in a new way. What was astonishing is the complexity of the songs. Compared to Pop music of the time, subjects tackled by Bush were by no means ordinary and predictable! Even when she wrote about love and lust, there was something poetic and almost classical about it. Harking back to an older time. From the pages of fiction. These immersive and engrossing worlds. Even though Andrew Powell produced The Kick Inside, he wasn’t guiding the recording like others would. In the sense an artist would largely be directed by the producer. Instead, Bush was giving the musicians these complete songs. A drummer like Stuart Elliott playing to her vocal. Responding to that top line and melody. These players probably used to not performing around a vocal. Having to play to a backing track and the vocal being dropped on top of it. It was almost like a live album. If later albums seemed more studio-bound and intense when it came to multiple takes and the use of technology, The Kick Inside is professional and polished but it also has a loose feel. As though all the songs were recorded live with very little modification.

Unlike other albums, Bush had honed, or at least was familiar with, these eleven songs (recorded in 1977). There was very little new creation in the studio. It meant the sessions were productive but not over-long. Backing tracks took four days. There was an incredible chemistry and energy. A connection and respect between Bush and her musicians. One of the most notable aspects of The Kick Inside is how her distinct vocal techniques, layers and sounds were there from the start. Tracks like Them Heavy People and Room for the Life. A blend of the strange and humorous. A cast of characters being woven into songs. Even if the band Bush played with were traditional in the sense of drums, guitars and bass, there were more unusual instruments mixed together. Beer bottles, boobams, clavinet and mandolin. Bush bringing in influences from her childhood. Her brother Paddy playing on the album no doubt opened her mind to sounds and sensations beyond the charts and commercial radio of the 1970s. Wuthering Heights was a revelation. Recorded during a full moon in March 1977, when the song was played back in the studio, Bush was moving and dancing along. Working out choreography that, with the assistance of Robin Kovac, would be used in the videos for the song. Or live performances at least. If the media and comics at the time found Bush ripe for parody after she released Wuthering Heights, Bush knew that she had written a song based on this passionate love affair. This incredible story written by Emily Brontë. EMI wanted James and the Cold Gun released as the debut single. There were other ideas from label men but few suggested Wuthering Heights. Bush fought for it. It was during a heated meeting when EMI’s Head of Promotions, Terry Walker, entered the room that things changed. He came in, put something on the desk, and said “Oh, hi, Kate. Wuthering Heights…great first single”. Perhaps the best timing in music history! Thanks to Tom Doyle’s Running Up That Hill: 50 Visions of Kate Bush for that information.

Before finishing, I will bring in a couple of reviews for The Kick Inside. First, I want to drop in some words from Kate Bush from 1978. I was interested in this interview from Melody Maker published in June 1978. Bush undertook so many interviews in 1978! A lot of them were quite sexist and obsessed with her looks. There are a few that stand out as being quite serious. This is one of the more respectful and interesting interviews:

“I think you can kid yourself into destiny. I have never done another job. It's a little frightening, because it's the only thing I've really explored, but then again, so many things are similar. They all tie in. I really feel that what I'm doing is what everyone else is doing in their jobs.

"It's really sad that pressures are put on some musicians. It's essential for them to be human beings, because that's where all the creativity comes from, and if it's taken away from them and everybody starts kneeling and kissing their feet and that, they're gonna grow in the wrong areas."

Everybody associates the whole star trip with material gains.

"But it's wrong. Again, the only reason that you get such material gains from it is because it's so media-orientated. If it wasn't, you'd get the same as a plummer.

"I worry, of course, that it's going to burn out, because I didn't expect it to happen so quickly and it has. For me, it's just the beginning. I'm on a completely different learning process now. I've climbed one wall and now I've got another fifteen to climb, and to keep going while you're in such demand is very hard. It would be different if I had stayed unknown, because then it would be progressing."

Kate Bush is a frequently sensuous woman but she has no wish to be hooked as a sex symbol or anything concerned with selling her body (metaphorically speaking) to achieve ambitions. She has, for instance taken a meticulous interest in EMI's promotion campaign to ensure that the sex angle isn't played.

"The sex symbol thing didn't really occur to me until I noticed that in nearly every interview I did, people were asking: 'Do you feel like a sex symbol?' It's only because I'm female and publicly seen. The woman is tended to be seen on that level because it gets them through quicker, like the actress who sleeps with the producer makes it.

"That seems so dated, because we're all shifting to a different level now. The woman's position in music is really incredible now. It's getting more and more accepted, if not more than men at the moment. God, there's so many females in the charts.

"I felt very flattered that those people should think of me in those sex symbol terms. That was my first reaction, but it can be very destructive. For a start, there are so many incredibly good-looking women around, and their craft is in that. They're either models or acting, so their physical image is important. What I really want to come across as is as a musician, and I think that sort of thing can distract, because people will only see you on a superficial level."

She would like to think, too, that being female has nothing to do with her success and that she is being judged primarily as an artist. She has very strong views on the matter.

"When I'm at the piano writing a song, I like to think I'm a man, not physically but in the areas that they explore. Rock'n'roll and punk, you know, they're both really male music, and I'm not sure that I understand them yet, but I'm really trying. When I'm at the piano I hate to think that I'm a female because I automatically get a preconception. Every female you see at the piano is either Lynsey DePaul, Carole King...that lot. And it's a very female style.

"That sort of stuff is sweet and lyrical, but it doesn't push it on you, and most male music -- not all of it, but the good stuff --really lays it on you. It's like an interrogation. It really puts you against the wall, and that's what I'd like to do. I'd like my music to intrude. It's got to. I think that anything you do that you believe in, you should club people over the head with it!

"Not many females succeed with that. Patti Smith does, but that's because she takes a male attitude. I'm not really aware of it as a male attitude. I just think I identify more with male musicians than female musicians, bucause I tend to think of memale musicians as...ah... females. It's hard to explain. I'd just rather be a male songwriter than a female. What it is, basically, is that all the songwriters I admire and listen to are male."

She loves Steely Dan and David Bowie ("I wish I could write constructions like his.") But she was probably most influenced by Bryan Ferry, during his days with Roxy Music and Eno. "It was the moods of the songs. They had a very strong effect on me, because that had such atmospheres.

"I really enjoy some female writers, like Joni Mitchell, but it's just that I feel closer to male writers. Maybe I want to be a man," she laughs. "I like the guts than men have in performing and singing --like the punks. Like the way Johnny Rotten would use his voice was so original, and you get very few females even having the guts to do that, because they unfortunately tend to get stereotyped if they make it.

"I really enjoy seeing people doing something that isn't normal, you know. It's so refreshing. It's like that guy, you know, 'Cor baby, that's really free.' John Otway. It was amazing watching him perform and you just don't get females like that."

What surprised me most about Kate, and it shouldn't have because she's only nineteen, was her awareness of the new wave. She seemed to regard new wave bands as contemporaries, and her comments about those bands in relation to her work seems to emphasise that.

"I don't regard myself as a rock'n'roll writer. I'd love it if someone said they thought I wrote rock'n'roll songs. That'd be great, but I don't think I am. Some of the punk and new wave songs are so clever. Quite amazing, really. It's a modern poetry idiom. Some of the lyrics are fantastic, so imaginative, not sticking to a reality level, shooting off and coming back again."

She mentioned the Boomtown Rats as "amazing" and was genuinely ecstatic when I told her of the Rats' fondness for her music.

"Do they? Really? Oh, I didn't think they'd be into me. Great! Fantastic! I wonder if really beautiful punk groups like that -- I think the Stranglers are really good, too, there are so many -- I wonder if they think I'm...not so much square, but whether they think... ah...square...Sort of oblong.

"I really admire those bands, and I really admired the Sex Pistols tremendously. I don't know if I liked them that much, but some of their songs were great. I admired them so much just for the freshness and the guts, although I did get a hypey vibe off it, and that they were in fact being pushed around, because it seemed more an image that was being forced upon them, from what people were expecting.

"I feel apart from those bands, because I feel I'm in a different area, but I really like to think that they get off on me like I do them. That's why I don't see them as contemporaries, because I'm apart. It's not a matter of being above or below them, but if it was, I think I'd be below them.

"I think they're on a new level, inasmuch as...it's hard to explain. They're definitely hitting people that need stimulation. They're hitting tired, bored people that want to pull their hair out and paint their face green. They're giving people the stimulation to do what they want, and I think I'm maybe just making people think about it, if I'm doing anything."

Do you see that as the main difference between your role and others'?

"Yeah. I'm probably, if anything, stimulating the emotional end, the intellect, and they're stimulating the guts, the body. They're getting the guts, jumping around. That's a much more direct way to hit people. A punch is more effective than a look. Teachers always give you looks."

Would you like to have that effect on people?

"I don't think I could becase..." She stumbles over the next bit. "...it's not what...I'm...here to...do. I really love rock'n'roll. I think it's an incredible force, but there's something about it that I don't get on with when I write it, maybe because I'm very concerned about melodies in my music, and generally I find rock'n'roll tend to neglect it a bit because it's got so much rhythm and voice that you don't need so much music.

"Some of the new wave, though, is so melodic. Like the Rich Kids {early EMI-produced new wave band led by Midge Ure}. I'm not really a rock'n'roll writer yet. I'd like to be, though, and I hope I'll become more that way orientated.

"Mind you, I identify with new wave music. We're both trying to stir something in the attitudes we've got, but I honestly don't know if I'm doing it. I guess I'm more interested in stirring people's intellects. It's longer lasting but not so much fun as new wave.

"The good thing about people like the Boomtown Rats is that not only is it really good, but it's really exciting and fun, and maybe my things are sometimes a bit too intricate to become fun. They're more picking pieces out and examining them. There's very little music on my album that will make you want to stamp your feet violently and hit your head against the wall.

"To actually understand what I'm about you have to hear the lyrics, which is a lot to expect; whereas in something like the Boomtown Rats, it's the complete energy that knocks you over”.

I will wrap up with a couple of reviews. The first, from the BBC from 2008 states how The Kick Inside is a one-off. No album since it sounds the same. That is true nearly seventeen years after the BBC review. For those who do not know about the album need to listen to it:

“The tale's been oft-told, but bears repeating: Discovered by a mutual friend of the Bush family as well as Pink Floyd's David Gilmour, Bush was signed on Gilmour's advice to EMI at 16. Given a large advance and three years, The Kick Inside was her extraordinary debut. To this day (unless you count the less palatable warblings of Tori Amos) nothing sounds like it.

Using mainly session musicians, The Kick Inside was the result of a record company actually allowing a young talent to blossom. Some of these songs were written when she was 13! Helmed by Gilmour's friend, Andrew Powell, it's a lush blend of piano grandiosity, vaguely uncomfortable reggae and intricate, intelligent, wonderful songs. All delivered in a voice that had no precedents. Even so, EMI wanted the dullest, most conventional track, James And The Cold Gun as the lead single, but Kate was no push over. At 19 she knew that the startling whoops and Bronte-influenced narrative of Wuthering Heights would be her make or break moment. Luckily she was allowed her head.

Of course not only did Wuthering Heights give her the first self-written number one by a female artist in the UK, (a stereotype-busting fact of huge proportions, sadly undermined by EMI's subsequent decision to market Bush as lycra-clad cheesecake), but it represented a level of articulacy, or at least literacy, that was unknown to the charts up until then. In fact, the whole album reads like a the product of a young, liberally-educated mind, trying to cram as much esoterica in as possible. Them Heavy People, the album's second hit may be a bouncy, reggae-lite confection, but it still manages to mention new age philosopher and teacher G I Gurdjieff. In interviews she was already dropping names like Kafka and Joyce, while she peppered her act with dance moves taught by Linsdsay Kemp. Showaddywaddy, this was not.

And this isn't to mention the sexual content. Ignoring the album's title itself, we have the full on expression of erotic joy in Feel It and L'Amour Looks Something Like You. Only in France had 19-year olds got away with this kind of stuff. A true child of the 60s vanguard in feminism, Strange Phenomena even concerns menstruation: Another first. Of course such density was decidedly English and middle class. Only the mushy, orchestral Man With The Child In His Eyes, was to make a mark in the US, but like all true artists, you always felt that Bush didn't really care about the commercial rewards. She was soon to abandon touring completely and steer her own fabulous course into rock history”.

I will end by featuring most of a Pitchfork review from Laura Snapes. She notes how The Kick Inside might seem like a young woman (nineteen when the album came out) likening her work to birth. The songs her children. In fact, it was a middle finger to that lazy assumption. So unlike many of her peers, these songs were almost profound and against what was expected from modern Pop artists:

“What made Bush’s writing truly radical was the angles she could take on female desire without ever resorting to submissiveness. “Wuthering Heights” is menacing melodrama and ectoplasmic empowerment; “The Saxophone Song”—one of two recordings made when she was 15—finds her fantasizing about sitting in a Berlin bar, enjoying a saxophonist’s playing and the effect it has on her. But she is hardly there to praise him: “Of all the stars I’ve seen that shine so brightly/I’ve never known or felt in myself so rightly,” she sings of her reverie, with deep seriousness. We hear his playing, and it isn’t conventionally romantic but stuttering, coarse, telling us something about the unconventional spirits that stir her.

And if there is trepidation in the arrangement of “The Man With the Child in His Eyes,” it reflects other people’s anxieties about its depicted relationship with an older man: Will he take advantage, let her down? This is the other teenage recording, her voice a little higher, less powerfully exuberant, but disarmingly confident. Her serene, steady note in the chorus—“Oooooh, he’s here again”—lays waste to the faithless. And whether he is real, and whether he loves her, is immaterial: “I just took a trip on my love for him,” she sings, empowered, again, by her desire. There’s not a fearful note on The Kick Inside, and yet there is still room for childish wonder: Just because Bush appeared emotionally and musically sophisticated beyond her years didn’t mean denying them.

“Kite” unravels like a children’s story: First she wants to fly up high, away from cruel period pains (“Beelzebub is aching in my belly-o”) and teenage self-consciousness (“all these mirror windows”) but no sooner is she up than she wants to return to real life. It is a wacky hormone bomb of a song, prancing along on toybox cod reggae and the enervating rat-a-tat-tat energy that sustained parodies of Bush’s uninhibited style; still, more fool anyone who sneers instead of reveling in the pure, piercing sensation of her crowing “dia-ia-ia-ia-ia-ia-ia-mond!” as if giving every facet its own gleaming syllable.

“Strange Phenomena” is equally awed, Bush celebrating the menstrual cycle as a secret lunar power and wondering what other powers might arrive if we were only attuned to them. She lurches from faux-operatic vocal to reedy shriek, marches confidently in tandem with the strident chorus and unleashes a big, spooky “Woo!,” exactly as silly as a 19-year-old should be. As is “Oh to Be in Love,” a baroque, glittering harpsichord romp about a romance that brightens the colors and defeats time.

She only fails to make a virtue of her naivety on “Room for the Life,” where she scolds a weeping woman for thinking any man would care about her tears. The sweet calypso reverie is elegant, and good relief from the brawnier, propulsive arrangements that stood staunchly alongside Steely Dan. But Bush shifts inconsistently between reminding the woman that she can have babies and insisting, more effectively, that changing one’s life is up to you alone. The latter is clearly where her own sensibilities lie: “Them Heavy People,” another ode to her teachers, has a Woolf-like interiority (“I must work on my mind”) and a distinctly un-Woolf-like exuberance, capering along like a pink elephant on parade. “You don’t need no crystal ball,” she concludes, “Don’t fall for a magic wand/We humans got it all/We perform the miracles.”

The Kick Inside was Bush’s first, the sound of a young woman getting what she wants. Despite her links to the 1970s’ egime egime, she recognized the potential to pounce on synapses shocked into action by punk, and eschewed its nihilism to begin building something longer lasting. It is ornate music made in austere times, but unlike the pop sybarites to follow in the next decade, flaunting their wealth while Britain crumbled, Bush spun hers not from material trappings but the infinitely renewable resources of intellect and instinct: Her joyous debut measures the fullness of a woman’s life by what’s in her head”.

On 17th February, 1978, Kate Bush released her flawless debut album. In fact, there is one other feature I want to bring in before closing. It is from 2023 and argues how The Kick Inside kicked Punk into touch. A rather direct and simple genre, Bush’s music was much more complex, beautiful, accomplished and interesting. It is no surprise that sexist critics couldn’t comprehend a genius when they heard one:

“Punk was so straightforward that in an age of complex prog rock, it was difficult to comprehend. In fact, in Charley Walters’ scathing Rolling Stone review of the Sex Pistols’ ‘Pretty Vacant’ he just about inadvertently defined the punk movement: “The music is overly simplistic and rudimentary,” he correctly wrote in the same way that a spade review might say that it is only good for digging. Before adding for good measure, “It’s also not very good.”

But suddenly, this rogue clan of spiky-haired loons began kicking up a storm—a maelstrom so unique that it was wrestled with and intellectualised as a musical statement that beheaded the bourgeoisie with an axe of pure individualism and blunt expression. Thus, it’s perhaps no surprise that when Kate Bush arrived as yet another curveball right in the middle of all this, she too was a missed point.

Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr play The Beatles' 'Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band'

She wasn’t yet 20 when her masterful debut album, The Kick Inside, arrived in 1978. But the starlet didn’t fit into the narrative and as such, she was seen as a fly in the ointment. Her reviews at the time were scathing. The Guardian called her an “odd combo of artiness and artlessness,” and dismissed her as a “middlebrow soft option.”

And NME followed up the barrage with the following: “[Kate Bush] all the unpleasant aspects of David Bowie in the Mainman era…. [Bowie manager] Tony DeFries would’ve loved you seven years ago, Kate, and seven years ago, maybe I would’ve too. But these days I’m past the stage of admiring people desperate to dazzle and bemuse, and I wish you were past the stage of trying those tricks yourself.”

Now, however, The Kick Inside is rightly regarded as a masterpiece. What happened? Well, the zeitgeist moved on quickly from the punk kickstart. It was a necessary lightning flash, and it changed the world, but after five short years, it had mutated into new wave for the most part. Oddly, the much-maligned Bush effort proved to be a pivotal moment of diegesis in this story.

You see, ultimately, Bush was the pinnacle of punk: if the movement was all about breaking away from the stilted norm in an individualistic and expressive fashion, then it doesn’t get much more profound on that front than the wailing ways of ‘Wuthering Heights’. As John Lydon proclaimed himself in a BBC interview: “At first, it seemed absurd, all that aaaaah and weeee, it was way up there,” Lydon commented. “But it wasn’t that at all. It fits. Those shrieks and wabbles are beauty beyond belief to me”.

The majestic The Kick Inside turns forty-seven on 17th February. Often seen as a stepping stone to better work from Kate Bush, it needs to be reassessed as an album as worthy, brilliant and necessary as Hounds of Love (1985). I hope people celebrate The Kick Inside in the coming days. A mighty and hugely original album, I still can’t quite get to bottom of its layers and nuances. It offers something new every time I pass through it. Even though she was nineteen when her debut arrived, Kate Bush’s career…

STARTED with a kick!

FEATURE: Rock the House: Run-D.M.C.’s King of Rock at Forty

FEATURE:

 

 

Rock the House

Run-D.M.C.’s King of Rock at Forty

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FEW acts in music history…

IN THIS PHOTO: Run-D.M.C. performing at the Live Aid concert at JFK Stadium in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on 13th July, 1985/PHOTO CREDIT: Frank Micelotta/ImageDirect

possess as strong a trio of albums as Run-D.M.C. The group’s first three albums are remarkable. Formed by Joseph Simmons, Darryl McDaniels, and Jason Mizel, they hail from Hollis, Queens, New York City. Their 1984 debut, Run-D.M.C., is a critically acclaimed masterpiece. Their third studio album, Raising Hell, may well be their most acclaimed and popular. Three compelling, inspiring and timeless albums within three years, that is quite some feat! Not that King of Rock is the lesser of the trio, though it is not held quite in the same esteem as its predecessor and successor. However, as it turns forty on 21st January, I wanted to spend time with it. I will come to some reviews for this amazing album. King of Rock saw Run-D.M.C. adopting a more Rock-focused sound. A few of its tracks boasting impressive riffs. King of Rock was ranked at number forty-four on NME’s list of the 50 Albums Released In 1985 That Still Sound Great Today. Before getting to a couple of critical reviews for Run-D.M.C.’s second studio album, I want to come to a feature from Albumism. In 2020, they marked thirty-five years if a hugely influential and important album:

“After being initially dismissed by Larry “Bud” Melman (of Late Night With David Letterman fame) for not “belonging” there, Joseph “Run” Simmons and Daryl “DMC” McDaniels stalk through the fictional hallowed halls, kicking down doors, completely unimpressed. The two mock broadcast performances by Bud Holly, Little Richard, and Jerry Lee Lewis. They make a point to step on a replica Michael Jackson’s glove, break a replica of Elton John’s glasses, and crown a bust of one of the Beatles with one of the duo’s trademark hats. Jason “Jam Master Jay” Mizell strikes a mean B-Boy pose. Run wields an electric guitar like a blunt instrument and menaces the camera with it. They finish by sauntering out of the exhibit after spray-painting “Run-DMC, King of Rock” on the wall.

Even without the video, the song itself is as arresting as it is confrontational. Run-DMC were already no stranger to incorporating electric guitar into their music, with the success of “Rock Box” from their self-titled debut album Run D.M.C. (1984). However, “King of Rock,” well, rocked even harder, “with a sound so strong that it’s knocking down trees.” Session-player Eddie Martinez shreds a hard rock groove that dominates the track, backed by the simplest of drum tracks. On the mic, Run and DMC swagger like the baddest motherfuckers on the planet Earth, “rocking without a band.”

When I heard “King of Rock,” something about it spoke to me in a completely different way that artists like Michael Jackson, Prince, or Van Halen ever had. There was a power in Run-DMC’s raps that was undeniable and still reverberates three-and-half decades later.

There was no denying the brashness and confidence that the pair radiated. Rappers have been proclaiming that they are the best to ever pick up a mic since the first emcee ever picked up a mic. But rappers had always sought to express their domination over other rappers. On this single, and moreover, the album, Run-DMC were putting Rock & Roll icons on notice.

King of Rock is mostly thought of these days as the album sandwiched between Run-DMC’s groundbreaking debut and Raising Hell (1986), which turned them into unquestioned superstars. It was as financially successful as either album, going Gold in six months, but ultimately not certified Platinum until a couple of years later. But in re-listening to it in full for the first time in years, with this album, the trio was asserting that they were ready for prime time.

Run and DMC further honed their lyrical technique of rhyming in tandem, which they first displayed on Run-D.M.C., and fueling each other was their energy throughout King of Rock. Occasionally each emcee will kick a short verse, but often they go line for line, word for word, and even syllable for syllable.

The pair’s ability to rhyme as a unit is on full display on “You Talk Too Much,” where they decry dastardly liars who talk trash. Hip-Hop beat creation was still in its formative stages during the mid-1980s, so the song, like all the others on the album, relies on the understated genius production of Larry Smith. Here he works the drum machine and keyboards to perfection, with Run and DMC chiding the nameless sucker because “your mouth’s moving fast, and your brain’s moving slow.”

Run-DMC delves into socially conscious hip-hop with “You’re Blind,” a screed against greed and the valuation of money over humanity. The pair alternately berating slumlords for profiting off of the poor without giving back and rebuking hustlers, drug-dealers, pimps, and wannabe gangsters for living off the misery of the community.

Even the fairly goofy songs on the album are musically compelling. “It’s Not Funny” is held together by innovative drum programming and sharp scratches by Jay, who precisely cuts up slowed down vocals from an Eddie Murphy stand-up. “Roots, Rap, Reggae” pays homage to hip-hop’s Jamaican roots, with Run and DMC bouncing off of each other over a minimalistic, low-tech version of a reggae riddim. They’re assisted by dancehall legend Yellowman, fresh off the success of King Yellowman (1984). It’s ultimately a lightweight track, but one of the early cross-genre collaborations between respective stars of their musical kingdoms.

King of Rock is at its strongest when Run and DMC keep things focused on their own exploits. “Can You Rock It Like This,” the album’s third single features the pair describing the cost of their superstardom. The track, reportedly ghost-written by a young LL Cool J,  begins with Run boasting about “signing autographs for three months straight” while DMC brags about how his “face is a thousand lipstick flavors.” But the two walk the line between basking in the attention their stardom has earned them and exasperation at their lack of privacy.  Still, they ultimately commit to their continued super-stardom, proclaiming, “And if you mess with us, you’ll be a real short liver / You may be big but our bodyguard’s bigger!!!!!”

The album ends with “Daryl and Joe,” the third installment of Run-DMC’s “Krush Groove” series (preceded by “Sucker MCs” and “Hollis Crew” and followed by “Together Forever”). The track is a culmination of all of the styles, both musical and lyrical, the group utilizes throughout King of Rock. Larry Smith put together continuously changing drum tracks and keyboard progression that sounds inspired by Art of Noise’s “Close to the Edit.”

Run and DMC are at their fiercest on “Daryl and Joe,” delivering their lengthiest verses on the album, extolling their skills as emcees. “Travel round the world with my mind at ease,” Run boasts. “No Calvin Klein, just wearing Lee’s.” DMC, as always, is a commanding presence on the mic, booming, “When I perform, many hearts I warm / I’m better known, as the Quiet Storm / I don’t talk too much but I got beef / When I kill emcees, I cause grief.” Jay continues to showcase his prowess on the tables providing his scratches throughout the track, but really getting loose during the extended outro”.

It is fascinating looking at a run of three phenomenal albums. How the former compelled and built to the second which then affected the latter. From The Beatles to Madonna to Radiohead, we can look at their trios of classic albums and the relationship between them. I don’t think that it is fair to say King of Rock is a lesser cousin of Run-D.M.C. and Raising Hell. It is a stunning album from one of Hip-Hop’s true pioneers. I will move on to a review from AllMusic. They shared their thoughts on an album that warrants more discussion and investigation:

“Take the title of Run-D.M.C.'s King of Rock somewhat literally. True, the trailblazing rap crew hardly abandoned hip-hop on their second album, but they did follow through on the blueprint of their debut, emphasizing the rock leanings that formed the subtext of Run-D.M.C. Nearly every cut surges forward on thundering drum machines and simple power chords, with the tempos picked up a notch and the production hitting like a punch to the stomach. If the debut suggested hard rock, this feels like hard rock -- over-amplified, brutal, and intoxicating in its sheer sonic force. What really makes King of Rock work is that it sounds tougher and is smarter than almost all of the rock and metal records of its time. There is an urgency to the music unheard in the hard rock of the '80s -- a sense of inevitability to the riffs and rhythms, balanced by the justified boasting of Run and D.M.C. Most of their rhymes are devoted to party jams or bragging, but nobody was sharper, funnier, or as clever as this duo, nor was there a DJ better than Jam Master Jay, who not just forms the backbone of their music, but also has two great showcases in "Jam-Master Jammin'" and "Darryl and Joe" (the latter one of two exceptions to the rock rules of the album, the other being the genre-pushing "Roots, Rap, Reggae," one of the first rap tracks to make explicit the links between hip-hop and reggae). Even if there a pronounced rock influence throughout King of Rock, what makes it so remarkable is that it never sounds like a concession in order to win a larger audience. No matter how many metallic guitar riffs are on the record, this music is as raw and street-level as the debut. It manages to be just as dynamic, exciting, and timeless as that album, as it expands the definition of what both Run-D.M.C. and rap could do”.

Before finishing up, I will bring in a review from Rolling Stone. King of Rock and You Talk Too Much are among Run-D.M.C.’s most popular and recognisable tracks. Ahead of its fortieth anniversary on 21st January, I was keen to spend some time with an underrated and terrific classic. I hope others discuss King of Rock and ensure it is heard and seen by a new generation:

"I'm the king of rock, there is none higher," insists D.M.C. at the beginning of the title cut, adding, "Sucker emcees should call me Sire!" It's an outrageous boast, even given the usual braggadocio of rap artists, but for all its audacity, it's a rhyme that's damned hard to refute. There may be better rappers around than Run and D.M.C., but together with Jam Master Jay they make the freshest team you're likely to hear, and in hip-hop circles, fresh is the compliment that counts.

What makes Run-D.M.C. so different? Its sound, for one thing. Where most rappers try to bring home the beat by working out verbal variations on the band's groove, Run-D.M.C. attacks on all fronts. The drum tracks treat the beat like a basketball being slam-dunked; Jam Master Jay slips and slides through the rhythm with his scratching and cutting; even Run and D.M.C. get into the game, adding emphasis with lines or by dropping in and out of unison. And their delivery is so well integrated into a rap's pulse that you almost hear them twice, first as part of the dance beat, and then as part of the story.

Catching every word is important, though, because Joe Simmons and Darryl McDaniels – Run and D.M.C. – definitely have something to say. Even though King of Rock offers nothing on the level of their first single, "It's Like That," the LP does deliver some worthwhile commentary. "You're Blind" uses an ominous guitar riff to punch holes in some of the illusions about underclass life, while "Roots, Rap, Reggae," cut with Yellowman, pays belated tribute to the musical connections between Kingston and the Bronx. Jam Master Jay gets into the act on "It's Not Funny." backing the hard-time rap with a scratch-mixed groove built from an angry "ha, ha – very funny."

But the most resonant moments on King of Rock come from the way the trio employs electric guitar. This isn't entirely new – on Run-D.M.C., their debut LP, "Rock Box" dressed up the pulse of an electric drum with the whine of heavy-metal guitar – but "King of Rock" takes the idea to the limit, letting Run-D.M.C. crunch and pop like a sort of hip-hop Black Sabbath. It's a real breakthrough, because by demonstrating that both rap and heavy metal run on the same primal energy, Run-D.M.C. makes an important point: The difference between one fan's music and another's is not nearly as great as radio or MTV might suggest. Whether or not Run and D.M.C. will extend their reign outside of their current following remains to be seen, but King of Rock shows that these guys are no mere pretenders to the throne. (RS 444)”.

For those who are not aware of Run-D.M.C.’s second studio album, I would advise people to check it out. King of Rock is a the second of a golden run of albums from the Queens legends. Not as played and talked about as much as it should be, I think it still sounds fresh and relevant today. An album that has no doubt inspired other artists. If you have not played it in a while, then please do…

SPEND some time with it.

FEATURE: Changes: Remembering the Iconic David Bowie

FEATURE:

 

 

Changes

IN THIS PHOTO: David Bowie in 1975/PHOTO CREDIT: Steve Schapiro

Remembering the Iconic David Bowie

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IT is quite bittersweet…

PHOTO CREDIT: Christian Simonpietri/Sygma/VCG via Getty Images

entering a new year and having to think about a music icon that is no longer with us. David Bowie would have celebrated his seventy-eighth birthday on 8th January. On 10th January, we remember Bowie as it will be nine year since he died. Such a shock that nobody was prepared for, the world lost one of music’s all-time greats. To both mark his birthday and also remembering him, I will end this feature with a mixture of David Bowie classics and some deeper cuts. I know other people will pay tribute to David Bowie in their own way. It is hard to believe he has been gone for nine years now! His absence is still being felt. Nobody in music quite like him there will ever be another with his mix of talent and invention. Prior to coming to that playlist, I want to bring in Biography’s words about one of music’s pioneers:

“Who Was David Bowie?

Rock star David Bowie's first hit was the song "Space Oddity" in 1969. The original pop chameleon, Bowie became a fantastical sci-fi character for his breakout Ziggy Stardust album. He later co-wrote "Fame" with Carlos Alomar and John Lennon, which became his first American No. 1 single in 1975. An accomplished actor, Bowie starred in The Man Who Fell to Earth in 1976. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1996. Shortly after releasing his final album, Bowie died from cancer on January 10, 2016.

Early Years

Known as a musical chameleon for his ever-changing appearance and sound, David Bowie was born David Robert Jones in Brixton, South London, England, on January 8, 1947.

Bowie showed an interest in music from an early age and began playing the saxophone at age 13. He was greatly influenced by his half-brother Terry, who was nine years older and exposed the young Bowie to the worlds of rock music and beat literature.

But Terry had his demons, and his mental illness, which forced the family to commit him to an institution, haunted Bowie for a good deal of his life. Terry committed suicide in 1985, a tragedy that became the focal point of Bowie's later song, "Jump They Say."

After graduating from Bromley Technical High School at 16, Bowie started working as a commercial artist. He also continued to play music, hooking up with a number of bands and leading a group himself called Davy Jones and the Lower Third. Several singles came out of this period, but nothing that gave the young performer the kind of commercial traction he needed.

Out of fear of being confused with Davy Jones of The Monkees, David changed his last name to Bowie, a name that was inspired by the knife developed by the 19th-century American pioneer Jim Bowie.

Eventually, Bowie went out on his own. But after recording an unsuccessful solo album, Bowie exited the music world for a temporary period. Like so much of his later life, these few years proved to be incredibly experimental for the young artist. For several weeks in 1967 he lived at a Buddhist monastery in Scotland. Bowie later started his own mime troupe called Feathers.

Around this time he also met the American-born Angela Barnett. The two married on March 20, 1970, and had one son together, whom they nicknamed "Zowie," in 1971, before divorcing in 1980. He is now known by his birth name, Duncan Jones.

Pop Star

By early 1969, Bowie had returned full time to music. He signed a deal with Mercury Records and that summer released the single "Space Oddity." Bowie later said the song came to him after seeing Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey: "I went stoned out of my mind to see the movie and it really freaked me out, especially the trip passage."

The song quickly resonated with the public, sparked in large part by the BBC's use of the single during its coverage of the Apollo 11 moon landing. The song enjoyed later success after being released in the United States in 1972, climbing to number 15 on the charts.

Bowie's next album, The Man Who Sold the World (1970), further catapulted him to stardom. The record offered up a heavier rock sound than anything Bowie had done before and included the song "All the Madmen," about his institutionalized brother, Terry. His next work, 1971's Hunky Dory, featured two hits: the title track that was a tribute to Andy Warhol, the Velvet Underground and Bob Dylan; and "Changes," which came to embody Bowie himself.

Meet Ziggy Stardust

As Bowie's celebrity profile increased, so did his desire to keep fans and critics guessing. He claimed he was gay and then introduced the pop world to Ziggy Stardust, Bowie's imagining of a doomed rock star, and his backing group, The Spiders from Mars.

His 1972 album, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, made him a superstar. Dressed in wild costumes that spoke of some kind of wild future, Bowie, portraying Stardust himself, signaled a new age in rock music, one that seemed to officially announce the end of the 1960s and the Woodstock era.

More Changes

But just as quickly as Bowie transformed himself into Stardust, he changed again. He leveraged his celebrity and produced albums for Lou Reed and Iggy Pop. In 1973, he disbanded the Spiders and shelved his Stardust persona. Bowie continued on in a similar glam rock style with the album Aladdin Sane (1973), which featured "The Jean Genie" and "Let's Spend the Night Together," his collaboration with Mick Jagger and Keith Richards.

Around this time he showed his affection for his early days in the English mod scene and released Pin Ups, an album filled with cover songs originally recorded by a host of popular bands, including Pretty Things and Pink Floyd.

By the mid 1970s, Bowie had undergone a full-scale makeover. Gone were the outrageous costumes and garish sets. In two short years, he released the albums David Live (1974) and Young Americans (1975). The latter album featured backing vocals by a young Luther Vandross and included the song "Fame," co-written with John Lennon and Carlos Alomar, which became Bowie’s first American number one single.

In 1980, Bowie, now living in New York, released Scary Monsters, a much-lauded album that featured the single "Ashes to Ashes," a sort of updated version of his earlier "Space Oddity."

Three years later Bowie recorded Let's Dance (1983), an album that contained a bevy of hits such as the title track, "Modern Love" and "China Girl," and featured the guitar work of Stevie Ray Vaughan.

Of course, Bowie's interests didn't just reside with music. His love of film helped land him the title role in The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976). In 1980, Bowie starred on Broadway in The Elephant Man, and was critically acclaimed for his performance. In 1986, he starred as Jareth, the Goblin King, in the fantasy-adventure film Labyrinth, directed by Jim Henson and produced by George Lucas. Bowie performed opposite teenage Jennifer Connolly and a cast of puppets in the movie, which became a 1980s cult classic.

Over the next decade, Bowie bounced back and forth between acting and music, with the latter especially suffering. Outside of a couple of modest hits, Bowie's musical career languished. His side project with musicians Reeve Gabrels and Tony and Hunt Sales, known as Tin Machine, released two albums, Tin Machine (1989) and Tin Machine II (1991), which both proved to be flops. His much-hyped album Black Tie White Noise (1993), which Bowie described as a wedding gift to his new wife, supermodel Iman, also struggled to resonate with record buyers.

Oddly enough, the most popular Bowie creation of that period was Bowie Bonds, financial securities the artist himself backed with royalties from his pre-1990 work. Bowie issued the bonds in 1997 and earned $55 million from the sale. The rights to his back catalog were returned to him when the bonds matured in 2007.

Later Years

In 2004, Bowie received a major health scare when he suffered a heart attack while on stage in Germany. He made a full recovery and went on to work with bands such as Arcade Fire and with the actress Scarlett Johansson on her album Anywhere I Lay My Head (2008), a collection of Tom Waits covers.

Bowie, who was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1996, was a 2006 recipient of the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. He kept a low profile for several years until the release of his 2013 album The Next Day, which skyrocketed to number 2 on the Billboard charts. The following year, Bowie released a greatest hits collection, Nothing Has Changed, which featured the new song "Sue (Or in a Season of Crime)." In 2015, he collaborated on Lazarus, an Off-Broadway rock musical starring Michael C. Hall, which revisited his character from The Man Who Fell to Earth.

Bowie released Blackstar, his final album, on January 8, 2016, his 69th birthday. New York Times critic Jon Pareles noted that it was a "strange, daring and ultimately rewarding" work "with a mood darkened by bitter awareness of mortality." Only a few days later, the world would learn that the record had been made under difficult circumstances.

Death and Legacy

The music icon died on January 10, 2016, two days after his 69th birthday. A post on his Facebook page read: “David Bowie died peacefully today surrounded by his family after a courageous 18 month battle with cancer."

He was survived by his wife Iman, his son Duncan Jones and daughter Alexandria, and his step-daughter Zulekha Haywood. Bowie also left behind an impressive musical legacy, which included 26 albums. His producer and friend Tony Visconti wrote on Facebook that his last record, Blackstar, was "his parting gift."

Friends and fans were heartbroken at his passing. Iggy Pop wrote on Twitter that "David's friendship was the light of my life. I never met such a brilliant person." The Rolling Stones remembered him on Twitter as "a wonderful and kind man" and "a true original." And even those who didn't know personally felt the impact of his work. Kanye West tweeted, "David Bowie was one of my most important inspirations." Madonna posted "This great Artist changed my life!"

In February 2017, Bowie was recognized for the success of his final album, as he was named the winner in the Best Alternative Rock Album, Best Engineered Album (Non-Classical), Best Recording Package, Best Rock Performance and Best Rock Song categories at the Grammy Awards.

In late 2017, HBO unveiled a trailer for the documentary David Bowie: The Last Five Years, which explores the period in which the artist released his final two albums and brought his stage musical to life. Airing January 8, 2018, on what would have been his 71st birthday, the documentary features never-before-seen footage of Bowie and conversations with the musicians, producers and music video directors who worked with him on his final tour.

In the spring of 2018, Spotify's "David Bowie Subway Takeover" was unveiled in New York City's interconnected Broadway-Lafayette and Bleecker Street stations. An extension of the "David Bowie Is" exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum, the subway displays included splashy photos, fan artwork and quotes from the musician, with each major piece containing a Spotify code for audio accompaniment”.

On 8th January, we celebrate David Bowie’s seventy-eighth birthday. It is sad knowing that two days later we mark nine years since he died. With his final album arriving on his birthday and two days before his death, he left this masterpiece, Blackstar. It will take many years before many of us can get our heads around the fact this idol is not around anymore. What we can do is celebrate his music and what he left the world. A true original that will inspire and be remembered for decades and possibly centuries to come, you cannot ask for more than that! To honour David Bowie, below is a career-spanning playlist combining a lot of his better-known numbers but also some lesser-played works. It goes to show that the Starman was…

LIGHT years ahead of everyone.

FEATURE: Jeux Sans Frontières: Will Kate Bush and Peter Gabriel Ever Collaborate Again?

FEATURE:

 

 

Jeux Sans Frontières

IN THIS PHOTO: Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush attending the BPI Awards in London on 9th February, 1987 after winning in their categories (Gabriel won British Male Solo Artist (and Best Video of the Year for Sledgehammer), whilst Bush won in the British Female Solo Artist category)/PHOTO CREDIT: Dave Hogan/Getty Images

Will Kate Bush and Peter Gabriel Ever Collaborate Again?

_________

THERE are few people…

IN THIS PHOTO: Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush on stage together during a benefit concert for Bill Duffield at the Hammersmith Odeon on 12th May, 1979/PHOTO CREDIT: Max Browne

more influential to Kate Bush than Peter Gabriel. I have written before how they were connected through the years. In brief, their first association was during a benefit concert Kate Bush held for Bill Duffield in London in 1979. He was a young lighting assistant/engineer who tragically died during the warm-up gig for The Tour of Life. In his memory, Bush made one of her tour dates a benefit for someone who she knew briefly but liked very much. Steve Harley was also on the bill (he and Peter Gabriel had previously worked with Bill Duffield). Peter Gabriel would inspire Bush to embrace technologies like the Fairlight CMI. He introduced her to that revolutionary piece of kit. She also recorded at Townhouse Studios for The Dreaming (1982). Gabriel recorded there previously and she was compelled to use that space because of him. There was a time when they were going to write a song together called Ibiza. That never came to pass. Bush appeared on three Peter Gabriel songs across two albums. For his third eponymous album released in 1980 (otherwise known as Melt), Bush provided backing vocals for Games Without Frontiers and No Self Control. Even if those two songs involved little more than small input from Bush, it was hugely effective. She is haunting on Self Control; seductive on Games Without Frontiers. The two had this close friendship. Bush took guidance from Gabriel when it came to emphasising percussion and putting that up front. How he recorded and the sort of sounds he put into his albums. In 2000, Gabriel accidentally let slip to the world that Kate Bush had a son (Bertie was born in 1998). That blew up in the tabloids. He almost let slip that Bush was planning a 2014 residency! I am not sure whether those blunders cost them their friendship, though I think they are still quite close.

That is a very rushed and brief overview of their history. From 1979, there was this kinship. Both very assured and pioneering artists who were experimental and built their own studios, Bush would appear on a Peter Gabriel song for the third time for Don’t Give Up. Released in 1986, it is a song where Gabriel and Bush compliment each other perfectly. Initially the part was going to go to Dolly Parton but she turned it down. Even if Bush’s first take was not to her satisfaction and she needed to record her vocal again, what she produced was perfect! The video of the two embracing is so beautiful and tender. I will move on in a minute. Before that, I want to bring in a feature from PROG, where we learn about how Kate Bush and Peter Gabriel came together. From a tragic event was born this decades-long friendship:

“In 1979, an accidental death during Kate Bush's UK tour led to a chance meeting with Peter Gabriel, and a creative partnership was born from tragedy

When Kate Bush embarked on her groundbreaking The Tour Of Life in spring 1979, it turned the notion of a live concert on its head. Fully choreographed by Anthony Van Laast, the sold-out 28-date tour was a visualisation of her first two albums, The Kick Inside and Lionheart. Much was made of it costing between £200,000 and £250,000 and employing 40 people – it was just at the very cusp of the touring industry being taken seriously. Such was the furore about the upcoming spectacle, there was a BBC TV Nationwide special on the tour to coincide with the opening night at Liverpool Empire.

However, for Bush, it would end up being overshadowed by the tragic, accidental death of Bill Duffield, her 21-year-old lighting director. On April 2, 1979, after a warm-up gig at Poole Arts Centre, Duffield was undertaking the so-called ‘idiot check’ where the final crew member present inspects the entire performance area to make sure nothing has been left behind. He fell 17 feet through an unlit open panel on the stage to a concrete floor below and died a week later in hospital from his injuries.

A memorial concert for Duffield was planned at the end of Bush’s tour on May 12 at Hammersmith Odeon. The evening was to be an emotional tour de force, where Bush was joined by two artists who had previously worked closely with Duffield – Peter Gabriel and Steve Harley. They duetted with Bush on Them Heavy People and The Man With The Child In His Eyes. Bush joined Gabriel on his yet-to-be released I Don’t Remember and they all sang The Beatles’ Let It Be to close.

If Duffield had not died, Bush and Gabriel may not have met. They hit it off immediately; Gabriel’s painstakingly free approach to his work was to inform her in a way few artists had ever done. The meeting had a profound effect on her – within months she would be singing on Gabriel’s third album, and through those recording sessions, she first encountered the Fairlight CMI synthesiser. Years later, in 1986, she accompanied him on one of his most powerful statements.

An evocative ballad, Don’t Give Up was partially inspired by the startlingly evocative Dorothea Lange pictures of Americans during the Great Depression. Written as a duet, Gabriel initially envisioned Dolly Parton to sing with him. Instead he turned to Bush, who was then enjoying huge commercial success in the wake of Hounds Of Love, to add the impassioned female vocal part. Over the gentle swell of Richard Tee’s gospel-influenced piano part, the song was a masterpiece of understatement that was in step with the straightened times lurking beneath the shiny veneer of the era.

Don’t Give Up spoke directly to a disaffected population. In 1981, Margaret Thatcher’s Employment Secretary Norman Tebbit infamously used an analogy about his father being out of work in the 30s, and instead of rioting, he got on his bike and looked for work. This became interpreted popularly as telling the unemployed to ‘get on their bike’ to find a job. Gabriel’s tale of a dispirited man at the end of his tether looking for work touched a raw nerve with millions of listeners in the UK and, latterly, the world”.

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate and Paddy Bush alongside Peter Gabriel during recording of Bush’s 1979 Christmas special, Kate/PHOTO CREDIT: Getty Images

The two crossed paths at various times through their career. Whether it was sharing a stage at an award show or when Peter Gabriel was on Kate Bush’s 1979 Christmas special, they were very much in each other lives a lot. There is no doubt that Gabriel was this exciting and unique musician that spoke to Kate Bush in a way few others have. In terms of his use of technology and how unusual his music was compered to the mainstream and artists around them. I am going to include as many videos and photos of them together before wrapping up. I will come to the main point of this feature shortly enough. On the credits for Bush’s 1980 album, Never for Ever, she thanked Peter Gabriel for “opening the windows”. In the sense that he provided her with inspiration. The connection with the Fairlight CMI. Jon Kelly, who produced Never for Ever with Kate Bush, recalled how Peter Gabriel would pop into the studio a few times and sit there quietly and watch. I can hear shades of Peter Gabriel’s previous albums in Never for Ever. Songs like Babooshka, I feel, connect to Peter Gabriel. Maybe he was getting ideas for his next album. His fourth eponymous album, released in 1982 (otherwise known as Security), could have taken elements from Never for Ever. Also, Bush would have been influenced by Peter Gabriel’s music at the time for 1982’s The Dreaming. Hounds of Love maybe in some ways influencing Peter Gabriel’s So. They were definitely keeping an eye on each other. There is a suggestion from some that Kate Bush’s befriending of Peter Gabriel was quite calculated.

The fact Kate Bush wanted to be just like Peter Gabriel. Maybe there was some of that at the start, through there was an instant connection and mutual respect. They had a lot in common and there was never any real competitiveness. Bush and Gabriel always respectful of one another. It would be cynical to suggest that Bush zeroed in on Gabriel for commercial and musical gain. She approached him to play that 1979 benefit concert for Bill Duffield. There was this sense of reciprocation. Bush appeared on two Peter Gabriel albums. He featured in her Christmas special. Gabriel had this unorthodox music approach, less-than-traditional lyrics and was a visionary. This definitely appealed to Kate Bush. She said in an interview how Gabriel was the only artist who had the same approach as her, in the sense he was going for the emotional content of the lyrics. He also changed his voice too for various tracks. It was during the Never for Ever sessions Bush was invited to Townhouse to record with Gabriel. That experience opened her eyes. A studio she would soon use, it was also perhaps the first time Bush collaborated with another artist for a studio album. She did collaborated with Roy Harper, but in terms of frequency, Gabriel might have been key in terms of casting Bush’s voice in a different context. I also forgot that Bush performed with Peter Gabriel on I Don’t Remember during the 1979 Bill Duffield tribute. So it is four Gabriel songs in total (three studio and one live outing). I always forget (ironically!) I Don’t Remember, as people really talk about Games Without Frontiers and No Self Control. I am not surprised they did not manage to write Ibiza together. Both are independent songwriters and would have found it hard to share a song and make it work. Bush was clearly enamoured and in awe of the technology Peter Gabriel had at Townhouse, and that really influenced her when she recorded The Dreaming. It is her most Gabriel-sounding album.

Kate Bush was particularly impressed by the gated drum sound that Gabriel used at Townhouse. You can hear that on numbers through The Dreaming. Hugh Padgham was the engineer for Melt. Bush went worked with Padgham in 1981 for The Dreaming. Though he doesn’t have fond recollections of their time together – maybe too much experimenting and it not being that engaging -, it shows that Bush was taking sounds, technology and even personnel from Peter Gabriel! What always intrigues me is how Gabriel has not appeared on a Kate Bush album. Neither have really talked about that omission. No doubt Bush would have been tempted to ask him and maybe include Gabriel on Never for Ever or The Dreaming. Bush used backing vocalists for albums to that point, though no truly big artists had ever appeared on her albums at that point. Maybe they would steal focus or it would seem like an easy way for her to get attention. I often wonder what it would have been like if Peter Gabriel appeared on a few tracks from The Dreaming. Maybe popping in to help on Get Out of My House, Houdini, Pull Out the Pin or even Sat in Your Lap. He could have provided male vocals for a few lines on All the Love. I think the fact Bush was not writing for men or doing duets meant that it would have been hard to include Gabriel. Would he have been happy doing backing vocals similar to the ones Bush did for him in 1980?! Instead, it was a case of Bush appearing on Gabriel’s albums and the two of them keeping this friendship going. There was not a lot of interaction after 1987. There are three albums where I feel Gabriel could have appeared but did not – and I wonder if he was asked.

The first is 1993’s The Red Shoes. That album featured guest vocals by Prince and Lenny Henry (among others). There are songs on there I could well see Gabriel fitting into. Perhaps more instrumentally than vocally. 2005’s Aerial could have benefited from his vocals. On Somewhere in Between, where Bush sings with the late and missed Gary Brooker. I always felt that was a song that had Peter Gabriel written over it. Though Brooker is wonderful, was Peter Gabriel ever in her thoughts?! The same could be said for tracks on 50 Words for Snow. Gabriel could have done the vocal that Andy Fairweather Low does for Wild Man. Maybe he could have been included in a track like Lake Tahoe. All these possibilities. The creative partnership running between 1979-1986/’87 (they performed on stage together in 1987 for Amnesty International’s Secret Policeman's Third Ball at the London Palladium on 26th March). Even though they are still friends, why was there no further studio collaboration post-1987? You can read about the artists Bush collaborated with here. She never did get to work with a hero of hers, David Bowie. Paul McCartney has not appeared on her albums. I would, above all else, love to hear Peter Gabriel on a Kate Bush album as it would reignite this creative bond. Gabriel is still so innovating. His latest album, 2023’s i/o, was hugely acclaimed. With Gabriel still recording and Bush stating she is down to consider working on a new album, there is this question as to whether the two friends will join forces. I would love to hear Peter Gabriel in the mix! Maybe not a duet like Don’t Give Up, there would be this blank canvas where Gabriel could be included.

Who knows. I have been thinking about them both and how they came together. In such odd and unhappy circumstances, Bush was clearly bonded quickly with Gabriel. Seeing the way he worked, the two observed each other work and there was this connection. Bush appearing on four Peter Gabriel songs and the two performing together for her 1979 Christmas special. It is clear they kept in contact for years after 1987, though no new studio collaboration. We can never write the possibility off. Many hope a new Kate Bush album has fewer collections than 50 Words for Snow. If there was only one spot, people might want someone like Björk. Maybe Paul McCartney. For me, it would be Peter Gabriel. This studio reunion between two old friends who have a very similar musical mindset, fans of both would love it! It is a new year and there are all sort of potential bits of news. How awesome would it be if one were that Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush were working together! In 2011, during an interview with The Quietus, Peter Gabriel was asked about Don’t Give Up:

“With ‘Don’t Give Up’, did you originally ask Kate Bush to recreate her part or did you choose Ane Brun for the project?

PG: Well, I wanted to do it this way because I’d been singing it on tour with Ane and she’d been doing such a beautiful job. There’s an interesting story about this song. Because there was this reference point of American roots music in it when I first wrote it, it was suggested that Dolly Parton sing on it. But Dolly turned it down… and I’m glad she did because what Kate did on it is… brilliant. It’s an odd song, a number of people have written to me and said they didn’t commit suicide because they had that song on repeat or whatever, and obviously you don’t think about things like that when you’re writing them. But obviously a lot of the power of the song came from the way that Kate sings it”.

Will we see Kate Bush and Peter Gabriel uniting in 2025?! We can never rule it out. One of the most interesting chapters of her career is her respect of and work with Gabriel. How they have this long and loving friendship. I wonder when the last time is they spoke. If they exchange Christmas cards! It is clear that the geniuses are incredibly similar artists and have this singular talent. It would be a real dream if the two stepped into the studio together…

ONCE again.