FEATURE: Spotlight: Sienna Spiro

FEATURE:

 

 

Spotlight

 

Sienna Spiro

_________

I will end with a review…

for her new E.P., SINK NOW, SWIM LATER. One that has got a lot of critical praise, it is no wonder the amazing Sienna Spiro is being talked about as a talent to watch. The nineteen-year-old London-based artist is turning heads right now. I am going to move to a few interviews with her. So that we can discover more about this incredible artist. Sienna Spiro is the daughter of jeweller Glenn Spiro, who named a yellow diamond ring the Sienna Star after her; when auctioned in June 2021, the diamond sold for $3.4 million. It is a pretty cool fact. However, it is her musical upbringing that is more important. The artists she was exposed to in her earliest years. Influenced and affected by artists such as Frank Sinatra, Etta James, and Amy Winehouse, Spiro began writing songs at the age of ten. She was also inspired by Hip-Hop artists of the 2000s. During the pandemic, in 2021, Spiro started uploading videos of herself perform to TikTok. Gaining momentum and love across the platform, she released a series of popular and extraordinary singles. Last year was a busy and exciting one for her. She is in the middle of a run of tour dates at the moment. Tomorrow (11th March), she plays at the 02 Academy Brixton alongside Nao and Nectar Woode. I predict that she will be playing huge international dates and big festivals stages soon enough. I am going to start out with this feature from New Wave Magazine. They are big fans of Sienna Spiro’s work:

“You may know Sienna from her breathtaking covers on TikTok that distract you from scrolling and pull you in to listen to the 18-year-old’s newest releases that hear her soulful raspy tone. What is for sure is the talent Sienna Spiro has possessed from songwriting since ten years old. Beyond her years in her capabilities within sound, composition and performing, the singer debuts two new singles this year, ‘NEED ME’ and as of today, ‘MAYBE’. Sienna tells us, “It’s a super intimate project. These songs are for people to get to know me but also to interpret and feel in their own way”.

In conversation with New Wave Magazine, Sienna opens up about her journey so far into the music industry and learning the process behind creating, finishing and releasing a song. Something that is quite clearly natural for the artist. From pre-teens into adulthood, Sienna’s well versed background of sounds has evolved her into a multitalented songwriter with no limits to her talent in genre techniques. “It comes really naturally because it’s what I listen to growing up as a kid”.

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A post shared by SIENNA SPIRO (@siennaspiro)

“It feels weird to have something out. Going from bedroom songwriting to writing with other people but I love the writing process”.

The single ‘NEED ME’ hailing in over 1.2 million streams, is an experimental ballad drawing from Sienna’s personal experiences in a soulful captivating sound. The minor chords and key changes create a solid foundation as a mature and delicate introduction to the singer’s artistry. Inspirations include jazz musicians such as Etta James and Frank Sinatra but also include a range of Hip hop legends from the early 2000’s who have created a natural influence over her music and fashion styles.

In the digital age of TikTok, the platform has grown Sienna’s audience into a community she deems feels more like “friends rather than fans” who recognise the singer and relate to her on a personal level. Reinforcing this connection through both singles, the artist utilises each track to draw emotion, frustration and confusion into riffs, runs and a strong vocal range that carries her raspy notes.

Most recently performing at London’s KoKo Camden venue, Sienna says she is most comfortable when singing at acoustic shows and expresses the value of gaining feedback from her performances. Not to mention the importance of what she is wearing she says, “what I wear matters massively, I cannot sing in a dress”.  It comes naturally for the singer to dress in style, it impacts more than comfortability, combining her love for Hip hop in music with streetwear in her style”.

There is a lot of new press interest for Sienna Spiro. Someone who is going to have a very long and illustrious career, at only nineteen, it is incredible how assured and complete she sounds. Like she has been making music for decades. It will be exciting seeing how Spiro expands and evolves through the years. I want to move to this interview from 10 Magazine and highlight a lot of their chat with this stunning and original artist:

“With a voice that lingers long after the last note fades, Sienna Spiro is more than just a rising star – she’s a storyteller, weaving raw emotion and intimate confessions into every song. At just 19, the London-based singer-songwriter has already built a powerful presence, amassing millions of streams and captivating audiences with her distinctive blend of soul, R&B and pop.

Sienna’s journey began in quiet moments of self-discovery, writing songs from a young age of 10. But it was her spine-tingling cover of Donald Glover’s Redbone – which racked up over 6.7 million views on TikTok – that first revealed the sheer magnetism of her voice. That moment of viral recognition wasn’t just a fleeting spark; it was the ignition of something much bigger. When she finally introduced the world to her own music, the response was instant. From the hypnotic allure of her debut single Need Me to the vulnerable, aching ballad Maybe., Sienna’s ability to translate emotion into melody has earned her nods from the likes of SZA and Snoh Aalegra, as well as chart placements across Denmark, Sweden, Norway and the UK.

Now, with the release of her highly anticipated debut EP on February 21st, Sienna steps fully into her artistry. Featuring the passionate defiance of Need Me, Back to Blonde and a collection of unreleased gems, this body of work cements her as a voice impossible to ignore. It’s not just music – it’s an invitation into her world, where heartbreak, self-discovery and resilience come alive in every lyric.

Fresh off a sold-out headline show at Hoxton Hall and celebrating one million streams for Back to Blonde, Sienna Spiro is ready for the next chapter. If her path till now is any sign, this is just the start.

1. Who is Sienna Spiro?

Still trying to work that out.

2. Three words that sum up your vibe?

Stubborn. Passionate. Honest.

3. Which artists had the biggest influence on you growing up?

My dad used to play the greats – Frank Sinatra, Nina Simone, Etta James, Donny Hathaway, Marvin Gaye and Sara Vaughn in the house all the time and that’s really what started my love for music.

4. What can fans expect from your new EP?

They can expect a really intimate project, where I feel they can get to know me on a personal level but also discover their own meanings within the songs. The EP is also split into two sections with ‘sink’ songs and ‘swim’ songs so I feel there’s something in there for everyone.

5. What do you hope fans take away from this EP?

I hope they take away whatever they are needing at this moment in their life. I also intentionally kept the music stripped back, so people can focus on the real song and  get to know me better.

6. What has been your career highlight so far?

Definitely my headline show in November. That was really an insane unmatched experience which I’ll never forget.

7. How does TikTok influence your creative process?

I don’t think TikTok influences my creative process, but it definitely is a sounding board and a place of discovery which I think is amazing”.

I am going to get to a new interview from NME very soon. Before I come to that, I want to highlight Wonderland. and their interview with Sienna Spiro from last month. Someone I am new to but am committed to following, I can definitely understand why there is a tonne of excitement about her. Like she could raise to the same heights as some of her music idols. Perhaps our next true great voice. Someone that will be talked about many years from now:

“How would you describe your sonic identity? What ingredients go into the Sienna Spiro melting pot?

My sonic identity at the moment feels both intimate and expansive. It’s grounded in raw vocals, paired with interesting and original melodies and textures. Lyrically, I strive for honesty and visceral expression, without dictating too much of what I think the listener should feel. Frank Ocean is kind of the pinnacle of lyricism for me. I have a deep love for jazz and soul, which will always be part of my sonic DNA, alongside influences from hip hop, R&B, folk, and even Latin music.

Why did you decide to start pursuing music as a career?

It was never really a conscious decision to be honest, its always been the natural thing to do. I don’t think I could or would want to do anything else. Music is such a big part of me and the fact I get to do it as a job is insane and such a blessing.

Congratulations on your debut EP, “SINK NOW , SWIM LATER”! How are you feeling about the release?

Thank you so much!! It’s a weird feeling you know, I’ve been working on this project for so long and its been such a process to get all the songs and creative right that it feels like a relief to finally have it out but i’m also very nervous and really hope people resonate with it!

What was the process of creating the work?

I wrote these songs over a period of time where I was finding my sound and finding the people I wanted to work with- so the songs came first and then I found the title which just made everything make sense and the world started coming together.

What inspired you sonically throughout the process? Is there any key influences?

My main influences have always been jazz and soul so naturally that was a huge influence for me, As well as different sounds, I love different textures and weird sounds usually things I hear in everyday life or in the studio would just spark something in me and id feel inspired and that where some of the songs where born. But some artists that I listened to during the time I was writing these songs where Frank Ocean, Nina Simone, Olivia Dean, Lianne La Havas, Mustafa, Stevie Wonder, Donny Hathaway, Beatles, Little Simz etc.. Theres been so many artists that have inspired me so these are just a few.

What are you tackling across the project, thematically?

This project was written at a time of significant change in my life. It explores the complexities of being young and a woman, the beginnings and endings of relationships. Even though the songs all have their own story and world they all relate to the feeling of being on the outside, whether thats needing validation, the desire to be kept around or even just needing an escape and doing that through fantasy. This project (I think) really captures what its like to be a young person who feels a lot in todays society.

Your songwriting is admirably vulnerable throughout. How did you find the comfort and confidence and be open and honest in the way you express yourself as an artist?

Thank you! To be honest I really struggle with vulnerable songwriting because it often means being honest with yourself! Which I am not very good at. But I really surrounded myself with people that allowed me to feel safe and pushed me to do better, and i’m so grateful because for the music on this project where its so intimate it’s incredibly important”.

Before finishing off with a review for SINK NOW, SWIM LATER, I want to come to a great interview from NME. A breakout artist who has such a distinct sound and is both grounded and ambitious, it is amazing people like SZA not only know about her music but are cosigns. Putting their name and weight behind her! Not a bad achievement for someone who is just starting out in a professional sense:

“For Spiro, the journey to her debut EP has been long and, at times, challenging; she started writing her own songs from age 10 and found solace in words when she struggled to fit in growing up. “I always felt like the biggest weirdo ever and I got bullied,” she shares. “Everyone made me feel so alien. And I also think that had something to do with being undiagnosed with ADHD at the time.”

But that all changed when she joined East London Arts and Music (ELAM) aged 16 and connected with fellow musically-minded creatives. At the same time, her online covers – often filmed from the floor of her shower or planted on her bed – began to take off thanks to her truly powerful voice, which channels the timeless blues, soul and jazz vocals of legends like Etta James and Ella Fitzgerald, who Spiro listened to during her childhood.

In fact, mere weeks after uploading her TikTok cover of Finneas’ ‘Break My Heart Again’, she found a manager and decided to drop out of music school after eight months to move with the momentum of her fledgling career. Now signed to Capitol Records, her new EP is an intimate introduction to the personal stories behind her soulful vocals. As she looks to the year ahead – which includes a support stint on tour with Nao – Spiro reflects on the last nine months of growth, her first ever shows and hopes for the year ahead.

Your first TikTok cover was ‘Break My Heart Again’ by Finneas. What was your reaction when you saw the viral response?

“I filmed that cover literally just before I was about to get on a train to go to Reading Festival. I remember I posted it the first day I joined music college. I didn’t think anything of it, and then it was so overwhelming. It reached a bunch of people and I got so many messages from people that wanted to collaborate and people that wanted to meet. The most full circle thing to me was I ended up doing a session with him last year.”

Your live vocals are so powerful. Have you always been a confident performer?

“I’m quite a shy person, even though that’s quite shocking. But I feel the most myself [when] performing. It’s where I feel the most present. When I was younger, I really felt like nobody would ever listen to me, and I’ve always had trouble speaking and expressing myself, and I’ve felt the most seen and the most listened to when I was performing and when I was on stage.”

SZA commented on Instagram that your cover of Childish Gambino’s ‘Redbone’ was “insane”. What was going through your head when you read that?

“There’s been a bunch of things that have happened where I’ve just been like, ‘There’s no way this is real!’ I had a bit of a silent moment and I had to step out of the room, called a couple of my friends and just freaked out for a second. I’m such a huge fan of hers, and I’m so in awe of her and love her so much, that that was a very crazy moment.”

You said the songs on your new EP were written during a time of trying to navigate the “layers of being young and being a woman”. What did that look like?

“There’s so much that didn’t make sense, especially in the world at the time for women and in politics. There’s so many struggles that women have and that I’ve had myself, especially with body image. I struggle with that a lot, and there’s a song called ‘Cyanide’ which is quite toxic but it’s very real. And I really wanted to make sure I wasn’t lying and being honest. A song like that is the stuff that was going through my head, and it was me trying to make sense of things.”

Your numbers across streaming and social media are already huge. How have you found that process of making fans so quickly?

“It’s a really surreal process because you’re kind of thinking ahead of everything. And there’s rarely a moment that you sit back and think, ‘These are real people’ until it’s in real life, and then you see people, and you interact with people, and you watch people interacting with your music.

“I don’t even know how to compartmentalise it, because that’s what I need to do to understand things. But it’s really crazy, to be honest; I sometimes find it hard to believe myself.”

What do you see when you think about the future of Sienna Spiro?

“The main goal that I’ve always wanted to achieve is writing an album that I hope changes music in a good way, and that I feel completely proud of, start to finish. Because I think that’s hard to achieve with all the rush these days. I really hope that is something I achieve”.

I am going to end up with and return to New Wave Magazine. Their thoughts on the spellbinding and phenomenal E.P. from Sienna Spiro. Do make sure that you are aware of her and get involved with her music. I would expect her name to be in the mix when the full line-up for this year’s Glastonbury Festival is announced. She is going to go very far in music, that much is clear:

“Teasing singles throughout the year, giving a jaw dropping debut performance in Hoxton this past November, and announcing her UK & European tour this week, we included have been counting down the days to hear the full project of Sienna Spiro’s debut EP SINK NOW, SWIM LATER. Writing the material for the EP since Sienna was 16 years old, the four year journey has been executed into an exceptional 8 track project delivering more than our expectations.

PHOTO CREDIT: Petros

Reminiscing on our conversation for New Wave in July of last year it is hard to believe how far the artist has come in such a short amount of time. Then, listeners from TikTok were melting over her Donald Glover & Amy Winehouse covers and requesting classics for the singer to record which eventually catapulted into her original verses being shared for the world to hear. “BUTTERFLY EFFECT” opens the project with a sombre entrance to the project with a title that foreshadows the effect of Sienna’s debut, one intital beginning that is about to make a large difference in this chaos theory.

Her magnetic performances via the screen were enough to have viewers and fans hooked creating a young loyal fan base for the singer to relate her lyrics to. This fan base were the ones who sang word for word at Hoxton Hall to the five songs of the EP that were already released last year. Sienna used her first solo show as an opportunity to give us a glance at the full track list including newer additions “ORIGAMI” and “CYANIDE”. There was a lingering sense of awe and emotion in the crowd which is exactly how it feels to listen to this EP back to back. A complete journey of ups and downs, feelings of loneliness, anger, frustration and insecurity comes along with tracks that also create an empowering sound of vengeance, power and confidence.

The EP’s cover art is expectedly on brand for the singer featuring her signature tomboy style, an oversized tailored look and a vintage car for what we can only guess to be part of her admirable storytelling approach, photographed by Petro Studio.

Last week Sienna’s second track on the EP featured as BBC Radio 1’s Song of the Week which currently has almost 4 million streams. Radio hosts compared Sienna’s vocals to those of Raye and a “young Adele”. Counting jazz musicians from Sinatra to Fitzgerald to hip hop legends as her inspirations, there are fusions of both genres combined with pop melodies that build her unique sound. The slower acoustic track “I DON’T HATE YOU” captures Sienna’s soulful raspy tones that magnetically draws you into her lyrics through a scalic minor crescendo. Effortlessly, Sienna’s voice glides off the back of strings and drum rolls on this track layered with echoing backing vocals that build up to a breathtaking outro. Tracks like this one and “BACK TO BLONDE” build Sienna’s repertoire that cements her as one of the contenders you think of for a record like the Bond theme song.

“ORIGAMI” begins with semibreve accordion notes giving an eerie introduction into the heartfelt gospel-like track. Sienna mixes her production with string sections, heavy bass instrumentation and fluctuates between soft vocals and raspy riffs and runs that blend so well together you never know how the next verse is going to sound. In contrast to the London born artist’s favourite track “MAYBE”, hears forte piano chords and arpeggios and violins form a breakup anthem accentuated by Sienna’s powerful voice on what is by far her most popular track so far on the project reaching over 37.5 million streams.

Experimenting with a more sultry sound “CYANIDE” has a darker feel with an electric guitar underpinning the heavier lyrics Sienna sings. The words create a sense of numbness that flow over metaphorical lines on body confidence, young love, and simply the mind of a young woman’s tribulations, “just wanna be thin, I know it won’t be enough… if you wanna see my blueprint it’s not under my blue jeans”. The artist’s debut project unleashes a rare lyrical vulnerability and talent of executing multiple tracks that share this feeling in a variety of ballads and anthems for her audience.

Every year, month and week there are new artists entering the music space, even more frequently from London within the pop scene. Less often are they 19 years old with a tour including Australian/EU & UK shows with co-signs from the likes of Snoh Aalegra & SZA, and an EP under their belt. Since her viral TikTok covers there was an unwavering confidence in Sienna’s listeners that she was destined for success in the jazz and pop industry, this EP has just confirmed it. If you came from a first listen of “TAXI DRIVER” or “NEED ME”, there is more of the personal journey to hear on this project. Be prepared to have your heart strings pulled on in Sienna Spiro’s debut EP as it unleashes a new sound experience that you didn’t know you needed to feel until now”.

I will end things there. Undoubtably one of the most important artists of this year, there is so much love out there for Sienna Spiro! Being tipped as a massive name of the future, it is jaw-dropping hearing her sing. That voice so distinct and soul-stirring. In Sienna Spiro, we have in our midst a…

BREATHTAKING artist.

____________

Follow Sienna Spiro

Instagram:

https://www.instagram.com/siennaspiro/

TikTok:

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

YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCd5sMkyvImc50eLIpwy3UaQ

Spotify:

https://open.spotify.com/artist/02gSuSAWEdWa5UOvqzjX6v?si=tCAGWFcDQsiTkgMykZUBNw

FEATURE: The Gold Standard: Brilliant Queens of Rap and a Genre Still Struggling with Misogyny and Inequality

FEATURE:

 

 

The Gold Standard

IN THIS PHOTO: Megan Thee Stallion

Brilliant Queens of Rap and a Genre Still Struggling with Misogyny and Inequality

_________

LIKE so many people…

IN THIS PHOTO: Doechii

of my generation, I grew up listening to and inspired by the music of Rap’s queens. Some real icons and queens came through in the 1990s. As we recently celebrated International Women’s Day (8th March), it made me think of genres where women are still overlooked or discriminated against. Even if women are ruling Pop and other genres, Rock, Alternative and others still struggle with gender imbalance and misogyny. One of the worst offenders is Rap. It is a genre still seen as a man’s place. Still very much struggling when it comes to supporting and encouraging women. Still great toxicity and sexism. Even if the U.S. is seeing new queens like Doechii rule and strike forward, here in the U.K. there is a much less balanced Rap scene. Very male-dominated. A genre of music not as active and notable compared to Rap coming out of the U.S. Women in Rap are breaking barriers and setting records. It was notable that Doechii became only the third woman in GRAMMY history to win the Best Rap Album ever. Here is some more information:

“Don't mind us crying after watching Doechii's acceptance speech at the 2025 Grammy Awards.

The Tampa born rapper became only the third ever woman to win Best Rap Album at the 67th Annual Grammy Awards on Sunday for her standout mixtape Alligator Bites Never Heal. The moment was especially meaningful considering the last woman to win in that category, Cardi B, was present to award Doechii with the honor. Before Cardi B and Doechii, Lauryn Hill was the first ever woman to take home the award for Best Rap Album for The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill in 1999. Doechii accepted her award, one of the first of the evening, in a custom Thom Browne number, a designer that has been supportive of her since her rise as an emcee to watch in recent years.

"I don't wanna make this long but this category was introduced in 1989 and only two women have won— Lauryn Hill — wait, three women have won! Lauryn Hill, Cardi B, and Doechii!" the rapper began her speech. "I put my heart and my soul into this mixtape—I went through so much and I dedicated myself to sobriety and God told me I would be rewarded and he would show me just how good it can get."

Doechii continued her speech with an inspiring message to her fans and any young women watching tonight's ceremony.

“I know there’s some Black girl—so many Black women—watching me right now. And I wanna tell you, you can do it," she said through tears. "Anything is possible. Don’t allow anybody to project any stereotypes on you”.

It is important to highlight women across Rap and Hip-Hop. Think about the legends and icons of the past who paved the way for the queens of today. I don’t think enough is said about women of Rap. Last year, Spotify presented The Gold Standard: An art exhibit celebrating Hip-Hop’s women-led renaissance:

“Women have been integral to hip-hop from the beginning, contributing to its growth despite encountering barriers and significant challenges. As early icons like MC Lyte, Salt-N-Pepa, and Queen Latifah used the their bold lyrical styles to advocate for women’s rights, they paved the way for Lil’ Kim, Missy Elliott, and Ms. Lauryn Hill to command the spotlight in the ’90s and ‘00s through their diverse expressions of confidence, femininity, and allure.

Today we are in a golden era of women in hip-hop, one in which MCs like Cardi B, Megan Thee Stallion, and Doja Cat have simultaneously enjoyed unprecedented success. To celebrate this renaissance, Spotify hosted The Gold Standard, a special art exhibit in NYC spotlighting the new generation of women in hip-hop, celebrating their influence on music and culture from 2018 to today.

Featuring the work of fine artist Manon Biernacki, The Gold Standard features Cardi B, Megan Thee Stallion, Doja Cat, City Girls, Saweetie, Latto, Sexyy Red, Ice Spice, GloRilla, and Flo Milli as subjects in a series of Spotify-commissioned portraits.

Following a Renaissance theme, each piece in the series nods to each woman’s artistic mastery and honors their contributions in shaping the genre.

“A playlist like Feelin’ Myself continues to prove that there is strong demand for women in hip-hop and the music they make. The listeners are often early adopters, and they tend to go hard for their faves,” said Briana Younger, Spotify Editorial Lead, Hip-Hop. “Over the years, we’ve seen more women than ever breaking out and having these big cultural moments that energize people. The playlist is best for being a snapshot of the most recent stuff, but with the exhibit, we wanted to showcase the longevity of this era. All of the women we included and even others that we didn’t—they aren’t just one-hit wonders or has-beens. They’ve consistently been a part of the conversation, evolving the way artists can function and have success in this landscape, and it’s important to celebrate that”.

Even if, in the U.S for sure, there is a new wave of incredible women in Rap, there is still an issue with lyrical themes from male artists. Even to this day, there is still objectification and misogyny. This not only encourages other male Rap artists to follow suit. It sends out an incredible toxic and troubling message of how men in the genre view women. A decades-old issue that has not really died down at all. In 2024, NME published a feature looking at a resurfaced clip from 2022, where AJ Tracey discussed objectification of women in Hip-Hop and Rap:

“Recently, a clip recirculated online of the West Londoner talking at the prestigious Oxford Union in October 2022. A student asked Tracey if the objectification of women in rap and drill was integral to the genre’s culture and how to change it.

The ‘Ladbroke Grove’ star began by thanking her for her question, adding that it is “a serious one”.

“I do not think the culture and the objectification of women are one and the same,” he said. “I think it’s a decision young men make – to rap about certain topics. Sometimes they feel that they are rapping about their lived experiences but, in general, they’re actually hurting a large group of people by the comments they make.

He explained further: “And, I’m sure a lot of them aren’t aware because they’re young and naïve. I’m sure I’ve said things in the past that are offensive to certain groups but as you learn and grow – as a human and as an artist – you learn to not say these things. Some of the environments you grow up in are very toxic and we don’t learn these lessons as a kid, and we have to learn them as an adult and, by the time you get to an adult – if you have the spotlight on you – these mistakes that you’re making are amplified.”

He added: “So, to answer your question: it’s, again, something that we have to tackle. I don’t think a lot of the youth that are making a lot of the comments that you are alluding to: they’re not aware of the severity of what they’re saying and how hurtful it is to other people. So, it’s something that we need to teach, for sure.

“As I say, any good artist is growing and evolving – any human, to be honest. We’re all changing and we need to look out for each other and make sure that we’re pulling people up when we can”.

Not only is there misogyny throughout Hip-Hop. There is this continuation of misogynoir (hatred against Black women). The Rap beef continuing between Kendrick Lamar and Drake not only reveals a nastiness and some rather obnoxious accusations – Lamar accusing Drake of being a paedophile -; women are used as pawns and collateral damage. The genre has a real misogyny issue. I am going to move on in a minute. For Black women, misogyny is nothing new. This article highlights that in the wake of the Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs sex trafficking case from last year. Amy DuBois Barnett wrote about Andre Harrell, the founder of Uptown Records and the kingmaker who gave Diddy his first break, and words of advice he gave to her. If Hip-Hop and Rap used to be a battleground for men to sort out their feuds and beefs, it was also about how they were going to (mis)treat women – who they viewed as property and assets. Have things really improved at all?

“Andre’s wise words stuck with me as I puzzled how to command respect within a culture that valued physical attractiveness and style over my master’s degree and my position running a key source of relevant journalism for a critical demographic. I understood what Andre meant, that much of the male bravado in hip-hop masked anger, frustration and corresponding deep insecurity that stemmed from poverty, trauma and emotional voids. And that the misogyny within hip-hop culture ran as deep among the mostly male execs as it did the music itself.

After its explosive growth from a regional subculture to a multimillion-dollar international industry, hip-hop was at a zenith. Hip-hop and mainstream culture were indistinguishable; models were walking high fashion runways in dookie chains and durags, and hip-hop music executives and artists ran a key part of New York’s social scene. I’d watched hip-hop’s decisive takeover in the 1980s from the front stoop of my family home in Harlem. Kurtis Blow, Run DMC, LL Cool J, Queen Latifah and Will Smith were releasing party songs that still get people to the dance floor. Though the music began to change in the late ’80s, the predominant vibe into the early ’90s was still funky, fresh fun.

But the increasing violence of inner cities altered by drug use and poverty spawned the rise of gangsta rap, which would end up dominating the genre by the mid-’90s. At first, music labels wouldn’t even sign music with misogynistic overtones. But as gangsta rap’s glorified depictions of violence gained acceptance within lyrics and urban iconography, so did sexually explicit themes that, ultimately, expanded into widespread misogyny. Women were derided with vulgar nicknames and viewed as whores deserving of violence.

Sociologist Ronald Weitzer and criminologist Charis E. Kubrin, both of George Washington University at the time, wrote a 2009 journal article titled “Misogyny in Rap Music” that described five main misogynistic themes: derogatory naming and shaming of women, sexual objectification of women, distrust of women, legitimating violence against women and celebration of prostitution and pimping.

When music labels saw the traction that violent and misogynistic music was getting, they shifted their approach to distributing gangsta rap records (while still not signing the artists). When music chronicling murderous street life and sexist violence began to get radio play, the labels gave in and started signing gangsta rap artists. Interscope’s groundbreaking partnership with Dr. Dre, Suge Knight and Death Row Records opened the floodgates and led to the proliferation of “controversial” hip-hop.

The culture surrounding the music shifted too, emboldening artists and executives to unabashedly play out the misogynistic musical themes in real life; it became aspirational for men to be violent toward women. Because, at its peak, hip-hop culture was synonymous with mainstream culture, the impact of this was felt not just in music but also in fashion, sports, film and all entertainment forms. It became acceptable for a platinum rapper to grab my ass in a club, for a well-known label executive to lock the doors of a limo and refuse to let me out until I kissed him, for my Motorola pager to be filled with lewd propositions from entertainment and sports power brokers, or for men to casually call me a “bitch” or “ho” when turned down. I heeded Andre’s advice while watching women without benefit of his sagacity make one too many missteps with the wrong baller and get treated much, much worse”.

If a surge in brilliant and empowering female talent in the U.S. existed in a scene that is still clearly misogynistic, there seems to be less attention paid to female rappers in the U.K. It is clear that male Rap artists in the U.S. do not protect or support women. Still very much a case of women fighting to be heard without much allyship from men. In the U.K., there does seem to be a real lack of female Rap and Hip-Hop artists. Do they look at the scene here and feel discouraged?! I am sure there are so many incredible women in Rap who want to come through but are looking at the genre in the U.K. and feel disheartened. This article from The Times reacted to Little Simz being the only woman nominated in the Best Hip-Hop/Grime/Rap act category at this year’s BRITs. She has won before but lost out this year to Stormzy. One woman in a five-person category. Very telling about the lack of female representation across these genres at the BRITs:

“We have to fight harder to be seen.” “As a woman you have to work much harder.” “Men can be mediocre and still thrive. Women have to be extra good, extra different, extra interesting.” These are the sentiments of three successful British rappers: Cristale, Ms Banks and Enny.

It’s no surprise — just look at the nominations for the major music awards in the UK. In the four years since the hip-hop/grime/rap category was introduced at the Brits, only one woman has been nominated: Little Simz (in 2022, 2024 and this year). She is also the only woman to have won the award for best hip-hop act at the Mobos in the past ten years, a prize she took home in 2023 and 2024. No British female rapper made it on to the Top 40 albums or singles chart in 2024.

This gender disparity is all the more striking because in the US it’s the opposite story. Doechii, a ferociously talented 26-year-old from Florida, won the Grammy for best rap album in February. More and more female rappers are making the Top Ten there — from Nicki Minaj and Cardi B to Megan Thee Stallion, Ice Spice and Doja Cat — to the extent that in 2023 the New York Times announced: “The future of rap is female.” That said, Doechii was still the only woman on the list of nominees for that Grammy category this year and she, Cardi B and Lauryn Hill are the only women to have won it.

“There’s a very masculine energy within rap. Sometimes women are made to feel like it’s not their place,” says Ms Banks, a 30-year-old rapper from London with 500,000 monthly Spotify listeners. She and Cristale both talk about receiving comments on social media telling them to “get back to the kitchen” and that women shouldn’t rap.

The history of the genre bears this out. “In the Nineties and 2000s, there was a one in, one out mentality. They could only ever support one woman at a time,” explains Arusa Qureshi, the Scottish-based author of Flip the Script: How Women Came to Rule Hip Hop. “In the UK we still haven’t got past that.”

In David Kane’s book on UK rap, What Do You Call It?, he interviews the British rapper Shystie, who tells him that in the early 2000s the radio wouldn’t play both her and Estelle, another female rapper, so they went for Estelle. “That kind of deterred me from making more music,” she recalls.

Despite the hurdles, British women have been making their mark on rap since it came over from the US, starting with Cookie Crew, the duo who formed in south London in 1983. “I remember seeing Ms Dynamite on the Mobos on TV and being obsessed with her,” says Tiffany Calver, 30, a BBC 1Xtra host whose show spotlights emerging hip-hop artists. She points to Estelle, Lisa Maffia, Lioness, Lady Leshurr and Shystie as other favourites from her childhood. “But the fact of the matter is I can list you all of these names quite quickly, whereas if you were to ask me about the male counterparts I’ve grown up listening to we’d be here for hours.”

In 2022 Little Simz burst into the mainstream consciousness with four Brit nominations, a win for best new artist, four Mobo nominations and a best album win for Sometimes I Might Be Introvert, as well as taking home the Mercury prize and an Ivor Novello for her song I Love You, I Hate You. “We were so happy because it was a ‘finally’ moment, screaming from the rooftops: finally she’s being seen,” Calver says. But, she adds, it was interesting to see her win best new artist. “I’d known Little Simz as an artist since ten years before that — it definitely was not an overnight thing.” In fact she released her first mixtape, Stratosphere, in 2010, aged 16.

Her independence and refusal to compromise have inspired other artists, such as Enny, 30, from London, who has two million monthly Spotify listeners. Marketing and image is a big part of that. “Women are starting to expand outside of the stereotypical idea of what a female rapper should be,” Enny says. For her this stereotype is “oversexualised — I’m not going to beat around the bush”. Ms Banks releases her music independently and promotes it herself.

Little Simz also became known to the wider public through her acting work, most prominently playing Shelley in Top Boy and herself in the Spider-Man film Venom: Let There Be Carnage. Cristale, 23, the only woman nominated in the hip-hop category at this year’s Mobos, also appeared in Top Boy as well as Channel 4’s Queenie, expanding her audience. “I definitely think acting has had a massive part to play in my development because it showed people that I’m a multi-genre artist.” She has more than a million followers on TikTok, not just thanks to her music but also her entertaining “get ready with me videos”.

Women still need more exposure. “The guys get to have a lot of fun,” Enny says. “They get to do football stuff and all these charity things. I don’t think there’s a space that pushes that same energy for women.” They also, crucially, are under-represented on the live scene, an issue that’s compounded by the closure of many grassroots music venues: 125 in 2023 and two still closing every month.

In 2021 researchers from Utrecht University and Universitat Pompeu found that streaming services were more likely to suggest male artists. Festivals are still male-dominated: 63 per cent of the acts in UK line-ups last year were either all-male or male-led. This month Wireless, a rap and hip-hop festival in London, announced that the Canadian rapper Drake would headline all three days. The top five most popular songs on UK radio last year were by men; female artists made up just 26.8 per cent of plays.

A report from the women and equalities committee last year also found that women were under-represented in positions of authority in the music industry. Ms Banks recalls moments where “you’re not really always looked at as a colleague or someone that you can just collaborate and work with. It’s more what they can gain from you … sexual advances and stuff.”

There is an overriding feeling of optimism, however, in all my conversations with rappers, writers and tastemakers. Calver points to the proliferation of women hosting rap, grime and drill shows, such as Ellie Prohan on Kiss and Sian Anderson, a fellow 1Xtra presenter”.

I wanted to talk about the modern women in Hip-Hop and Rap that are successful in a genre that has long been focused on men. Where women have been and are still seen as property or inferior. Whilst the U.S. is spotlighting some amazing women coming through right now, there seems to be a real issue in the U.K. A comparative lack of visibility. If rappers like Stefflon Don and Nadia Rose were killing it a few years back, how many women other than Little Simz do people name when they think of women in British Rap, Grime and Hip-Hop? There does need to be a change. In terms of the U.K. scene and making it more accessible for and conscious of women. Ensuring their voices are heard and new talent is nurtured. That contemporary Hip-Hop and Rap queens are given the same opportunities of their male counterparts in terms of festival slots and playlists. The recent success of Doechii at the GRAMMYs should both shine a light on female talent in Rap but also raise questions. A lack of award representation. Misogyny and misogynoir together with a lack of support from their male peers. Apart from a few cosigns and collaborations, women still crop up in Rap lyrics as objects. Subjected to violence, degradation and toxic remarks. The queens of Hip and Rap, past and present, deserve…

HUGE respect.

FEATURE: The Digital Mixtape: All Saint: Melanie Blatt at Fifty

FEATURE:

 

The Digital Mixtape

PHOTO CREDIT: David Fisher/Shutterstock (via The Guardian)

All Saint: Melanie Blatt at Fifty

_________

PERHAPS this birthday might not…

IN THIS PHOTO: All Saints (Nicole Appleton, Melanie Blatt, Shaznay Lewis and Natalie Appleton) in 1997/PHOTO CREDIT: Tim Roney

be on everyone’s radar. Melanie Blatt, a quarter of All Saints (with Shaznay Lewis, Nicole and Natalie Appleton) turns fifty on 25th March. All Saints were hugely important to me when I was a teenager. Their amazing debut album, All Saints, came out in 1997. I still have it somewhere. The group’s most recent album, Testament, was released in 2018. I live in hope that we have not heard the last of All Saints. Melanie Blatt has released solo material and collaborated with other artists. I will include a few solo tracks/collaborations into mix. Before getting there, I want to bring in a bit of biography from AllMusic:

“Melanie Blatt was the founding member of one of the most successful girl groups of the '90s, All Saints. Born in Camden, London in 1975 to a French mother and English father, Blatt attended the prestigious Sylvia Young Theatre School at the same time as Denise Van Outen, Emma Bunton, and future bandmate Nicole Appleton. After performing in Drive, a short-lived band featuring U.S. actress Julienne Davis, and providing backing vocals for dub-funk outfit Dreadzone, she met songwriter Shaznay Lewis and, along with Simone Rainford, formed All Saints 1.9.7.5. Following the departure of Rainford, the pair recruited sisters Nicole and Natalie Appleton, dropped the numbers from the group's name, and signed a record deal with London Records. All Saints went on to become the Spice Girls' biggest rivals, scoring five number ones, two multi-platinum albums, and two Brit Awards before disbanding in 2001.

Following collaborations with Artful Dodger on the Top Ten hit "TwentyFourSeven" and hip-hop outfit Outsidaz on "I'm Leavin'," she released her first solo single in 2003, the Xenomania-produced "Do Me Wrong," and began work on her debut album, Shine, with Aqualung's Matt Hales. However, following the failure of her second single, "See Me," to enter the Top 75, plans for its release were shelved and she parted company with her label. In 2006, she reunited with the rest of All Saints to record third album Studio 1, and has since abandoned a music career to concentrate on her TV work. Blatt also appeared in the critically panned Dave Stewart gangster film, Honest, and on ITV2 covering the Brit Awards and participating in the network's music chat show The Hot Desk”.

An artist I have always admired, I do hope that we will get All Saints back and another album from them. There is this great interest and revival of girl groups or all-female groups from the 1990s and 2000s such as Girls Aloud and Sugababes. Because the saintly Melanie Blatt celebrates her fiftieth birthday on 25th March, I wanted to assemble a mixtape with some All Saints and deep cuts together with a few solo/collaboration cuts. This is a hearty salute to…

AN incredible artist.

FEATURE: Early Risers: Predicting Which Albums Could Be in the Running for the Mercury Prize 2025

FEATURE:

 

 

Early Risers

IN THIS PHOTO: Sam Fender

Predicting Which Albums Could Be in the Running for the Mercury Prize 2025

_________

ALTHOUGH it is March…

IN THIS PHOTO: Lambrini Girls/PHOTO CREDIT: Nicole Osrin

I wanted to look ahead to the Mercury Prize. Although the awards are not until the autumn, we are sort of halfway between last year’s ceremony and this year’s. Last year’s prize was won by English Teacher. Their album, This Could Be Texas, was a deserved winner. I think there are some strong albums released late last year and this year that are likely to be among the shortlist when it is announced later in the year. That usually happens a few months before the ceremony. Highlighting the best albums from British and Irish artists, the Mercury Prize is one of the highlights of the music calendar. Because of that, I wanted to do an early temperature check. Ten albums that could be on the shortlist of ten. Some of the albums that could be in contention…

LATER in the year.

___________

Sam Fender – People Watching

Release Date: 21st February, 2025

Label: Polydor

Producers: Adam Granducie/lMarkus Dravs/Sam Fender/Dean Thompson/Joe Atkinson

Review:

“Sam Fender has had a hell of a few years. Granted, with the release of his 2019 debut ‘Hypersonic Missiles’, he rocketed to the top of the charts, but the fervour that would unfold in the wake of its follow-up, 2021’s ‘Seventeen Going Under’ was still hard to comprehend. Graduating rapidly to festival headliner, and bagging a slew of awards along the way, his step up to a bonafide stadium artist has been swift.


It’s little surprise as to why; on ‘Seventeen Going Under’ the North Shields songsmith penned a series of powerful, poignant offerings that dug deep into the heart of working class struggle, with the kind of consideration and compassion that only can only ever come via real life experience. It was stunning in its sentiments, and along with some perfectly-plotted meme moments along the way (his hungover appearance on BBC Breakfast still does the rounds now), his reputation as the ultimate man of the people was solidified.

That’s why his next step is all the more interesting. With a handful of stadiums already booked and on their way to selling out (this year will mark his third, fourth and fifth time filling his beloved St. James’ Park), it’d be easy to imagine Sam busting out ten ready-made bangers for this third record, but what he does instead is so much more satisfying. While led by its storming - but no less devastating - lead single ‘People Watching’ (its chorus’ anthemic refrain of “Somebody’s darling’s on the street tonight” is up there with ‘Dead Boys’ and ‘Spit Of You’ in terms of a lyrical trojan horse), the album is, on the whole, much more sedate than its predecessor.

Unafraid of delving into both the personal and political - and, at times, where the two very much intertwine - ‘People Watching’ is an album that burrows under the skin of current society and refuses to dress up its stark reality. Take ‘Chin Up’’s tale of the current cost of living crisis (“The cold permeates the neonatal baby / Can’t heat the place for fucking love nor money”) or the disastrous impact of privatisation and capitalism explored in ‘Crumbling Empire’ (“My old man worked on the rail yard / Getting his trade on the electrical board / It got privatised, the work degraded / In this crumbling empire”); these songs paint a vivid and all too real picture of society in disarray.

But in among these portraits of the “marred streets”, there’s also a glimpse into the mind of our narrator: a young man struggling to find his place in this new version of his world. The twinkling ‘Wild Long Lie’ - a song that will seems all too familiar for any expats heading back to their hometown at Christmas - showcases this best, with Sam’s quiet realisation of “I think I need to leave this town” perhaps optimising the feelings of displacement that fame can so swiftly bestow.

Unsurprisingly, for an album that feels so intimate, its music follows suit. Having worked with The War On Drugs’ Adam Granduciel, there’s an almost filmic quality to these tracks (especially in the widescreen, Joni Mitchell-nodding closer ‘Remember My Name’), matching the observational nature of their lyrics. Less adrenaline-fuelled than some of his previous work, it’s also easy to sense the fingerprints of his own musical hero here too; while ‘Seventeen…’ could mirror Springsteen’s 1975 break-out ‘Born To Run’, this feels closer to the darker, more meditative moments of ‘Darkness On The Edge Of Town’.

Is this the album that people are expecting? Probably not, but that doesn’t matter. Instead, ‘People Watching’ is a bleak but astonishing rumination on our current times, viewed through the lens of Sam’s whirlwind past few years - an album that undoubtedly firms up his position as one of the great songwriters of our time” – DIY

Standout Cuts: People Watching/Crumbling Empire/Remember My Name

Key Track: Wild Long Lie

The Cure - Songs of a Lost World

Release Date: 1st November, 2024

Labels: Fiction/Lost/Polydor/Universal/Capitol

Producers: Robert Smith/Paul Corkett

Review:

“Our first taster from the album was the opener, ‘Alone’, it still stands as a perfect vibe-setting number for the album. Reminiscent of the outfit’s ‘Disintegration’ era, the band builds a mood for over three minutes before Smith enters the picture, his voice unchanged since the 80s.  With imagery of birds falling from the sky and bitter dregs, it’s apparent that we’re not getting another ‘Friday I’m in Love’ on this album. That’s not to say there isn’t beauty to be found. The following ‘And Nothing Is Forever’ is gorgeously wistful, Roger O’Donnell’s sparkling keys adding sweetness to Smith’s tale of loss. It’s classic Cure and really captures what makes the band so unique. A command of shadow and light.

The icy ‘A Fragile Thing’ may be the closest the album gets to producing a ‘pop’ number. Matching the spirit of the group’s mid-90s b-sides, the track feels like an anti ‘Lovesong,’ Smith’s conversational vocal delivery dropping harsh truths about how love and commitment can be a blessing and curse. ‘Warsong’ sees The Cure at their most mighty in decades, guitarist Reeves Gabrels unleashing wailing guitars as Smith roars about the poisoning effect of hatred and pride. Especially poignant with the current geopolitical issues.

‘Drone: No Drone’ sees the welcome return of what this reviewer likes to call ‘Sassy Smith’ mode. During these moments – see also ‘Wendy Time,’ ‘Never Enough‘ – the messy-haired icon spits lyrics over a funky beat with a tangible level of irritability. It’s a fun reprieve from the emotional heft of its surrounding tracks and gets the head bopping. A good thing, too, as the following ‘I Can Never Say Goodbye’ deals directly with the loss of Smith’s older brother Richard. A stately affair, the track is bound to resonate with those who’ve felt the world-changing effect of grief, Smith delivering his best vocals on the record.

The previously unheard ‘All I Ever Am’ makes for a welcome surprise, Gallups’ zippy bassline leading the charge on SOALW’s most uptempo moment. Sure, it’s still focused on memories and regret, but it’s a bit of a banger at the same time, Smith’s baritone bass laying down some serious licks. Before we know it, we come to the aptly titled closer ‘Endsong,’ arguably the number that made the biggest impression when aired live a few years ago. With a length of 10:23, it’s clear listeners are in for something epic, and boy, the band delivers.

Sounding melancholic and majestic as only The Cure can, ‘Endsong’ is a behemoth of emotion. A thick wall of tribal drums and shrieking guitars creates an apocalyptic tone, only reinforced by Smith’s mention of ‘blood red moons’ and repeated refrain of “It’s all gone.” It quickly joins the ranks of other great Cure closers, such as ‘Sinking’ and ‘Bloodflowers.‘ It sounds enormous and best captures SOALW’s spirit. There is no escaping the passing of time.

The old idiom ‘Be careful what you wish for’ is often applied to veteran groups dropping a new album but definitely not here. With ‘Songs Of A Lost World,’ The Cure has not only produced something worth the wait but added another classic to their already sterling catalogue. This is a late-career gem from one of the world’s most idiosyncratic acts.

With a sense of finality running through the LP, it was fair to assume that this may indeed be the end of The Cure’s story. However, as fans know, Robert Smith’s future plans are ever-shifting and a recent interview has revealed another album is almost complete. Onwards then! 9/10” – CLASH

Standout Cuts: A Fragile Thing/Drone:Nodrone/All I Ever Am

Key Song: Alone

Laura Marling – Patterns in Repeat

Release Date: 25th October, 2024

Labels: Chrysalis/Partisan

Producers: Laura Marling/Dom Monks

Review:

“Laura Marling’s rightly-lauded last album, ‘Song For Our Daughter’ (2020), saw her achieve the supreme feat of creating an intensely moving body of work around an imagined child; in the four years since, she actually has become a mother, and the result is ‘Patterns In Repeat’ - a tapestry of love, lineage, and the inextricable links between parents and their children. Now eight albums in, Marling has always mined emotional depths with only the most simple of tools - namely, an acoustic guitar and that singular voice - and here, her signature understatedness is taken even further. The record features no drums at all; instead, each track is blanketed by swathes of lush strings, any additional embellishment having been deemed surplus to requirements. As such, ‘Patterns In Repeat’ is both stunningly intimate and endearingly raw; recorded in Marling’s home studio with her child there in the room, there are aural fingerprints of domesticity - her baby’s gurgling, or the shake of a dog collar - stamped across the finished product, enduring testaments to the context of its creation.

The love of a parent is an obvious, palpable throughline - opener ‘Child Of Mine’ is the purest distillation of such, a pact made and promise sworn: “Last night in your sleep you started crying / I can’t protect you there though I keep trying / Sometimes you’ll go places I can’t get to / But I’ve spoken to the angels who’ll protect you”. Around this central spool, however, are wound the threads of the myriad other emotions parenthood awakens. ‘Looking Back’ (written by Marling’s own father when he was in his twenties) and the incredibly poignant ‘Your Girl’ (which lands like a response to the call of ABBA’s ‘Slipping Through My Fingers’) both speak to a renewed, acute awareness of the passing of time; centrepiece ‘The Shadows’ is a reflective rumination on how the start of one chapter necessitates the end of another. The twinned ‘Patterns’ and ‘Patterns In Repeat’, meanwhile, see her consider her own childhood through a different, more empathetic lens, having gained a deeper understanding of the behaviours and decisions of her parents.

“I want you to know that I gave it up willingly / Nothing real was lost in the bringing of you to me,” Marling sings softly on the titular closing track. Ahead of giving birth, she has said she faced the internal question of whether motherhood would dilute or extinguish her artistry. ‘Patterns In Repeat’ is a deft and conclusive answer” – DIY

Standout Cuts: No One’s Gonna Love You Like I Can/Caroline/Lullaby

Key Song: Child of Mine

FKA twigs - EUSEXUA

Release Date: 24th January, 2025

Labels: Young/Atlantic

Producers: Aod/Jeff Bhasker/Marius de Vries/Eartheater/FKA Twigs/Felix Joseph/Koreless/Ojivolta/Stuart Price/Stargate/Tic

Review:

“This “bliss” is unlike any other. According to her, we can redeem its most exact sense by using the term “eusexua” that she coined while filming in Prague three years ago, with dance music and culture’s tremendous help. It encompasses propitious feelings born out of sexuality and – to add from her hypnotising performances for Valentino and On – honest desperation to feel a connection. In some way, physicality is naturally embedded into it: bodies doing freestyle choreographies in a hazy, brutalist warehouse, techno beats consuming every sound that dares to compete against them. On the titular record, that very sense paints a similar setting (see the music videos for this era so far) in which her vocal and musical power meet their most emotive selves.

As she remarked in a recent interview, EUSEXUA isn’t a bona fide dance album but rather a “love letter” to the genre that has reframed her thinking. The pulpish slashes and abrupt reverses on its spectacular high point “Drums of Death” and the head-spinning climax on “Striptease” may sound like extreme yearnings. Yet, the transformative music takes pride in externalising them and granting a concrete form that we can use as a mode of cathartic release. This is a fresh resolution for her music career. “Perfect Stranger” and “24hr Dog” reek of hopeless impulses sprung from the festering need for human contact, but they don’t develop like her past works. The hysterical pleasures overrule them, sustained by dance and techno’s gratifying template.

Twigs continues to emphasise more on how words sound and less on what they mean. Her lively 2022 mixtape CAPRISONGS was the starting point, on which “meta angel”, “jealousy”, and many more wring out syllables like clothes soaked in luxurious detergent water. Where words were cherry-picked to bring forth an irresistible manifesto of female power on 2019's MAGDALENE, they’ve transmuted into well-articulated carriers of limpid emotion on EUSEXUA – a pivot from complex syntax. Succinct instructions like “Turn your love up loud to keep the devil down” on “Girl Feels Good” and “Work me to satisfy the core of your mind” on “24hr Dog” dominate the lyrics while their orgasmic melodies take over as the singular showcase for twigs’ unique songwriting.

They sometimes leave an uncatered desire for more lyrical depth. In several cases, however, the electrifying music makes up for what’s unfulfilled. For the first time, Koreless takes up the role of EUSEXUA’s primary producer. He casts an eerie mist over every song, a motif that mostly clears towards the end of each piece where all kinds of beats collide and generate a more liberating version of themselves. On “Sticky”, twigs gives in to bodily pleasures, evading “overcomplicated moments”, then snappy, lightning-struck synths plummet down as an escape route. “Room of Fools” delivers a dreamlike transcendence led by her majestic voice after clashes of Björk-esque stems. Koreless’s outstanding lead in the production undeniably shapes much of EUSEXUA’s deliciously bizarre identity.

The vocal contribution from Eartheater on the title track, the ear-catching twists and turns from Stargate on “Perfect Stranger”, and the darker tunes from Ojivolta all make an unrivalled masterclass on world-building. Even the cranky shockwaves, like “Childlike Things”, lurch forth without alienating what’s already established. But EUSEXUA tumbles down into an undesirable hole at the last minute. When putting the healing message aside, “Wanderlust” is amongst her weakest closers for its more predictable structure; after many wild switch-ups and uses of left-field imagery, placing it as the finale feels like an unnerving undoing of their function. It may be a wake-up call to festering reality. All seismic pleasures must meet their end, after all, and what else can we do except relive them by clicking rewind?” – The Line of Best Fit

Standout Cuts: Eusexa/Perfect Stranger/Striptease

Key Song: Room of Fools

Lambrini Girls – Who Let the Dogs Out

Release Date: 10th January, 2025

Label: City Slang

Producers: Daniel Fox/Lambrini Girls

Review:

“The tree’s come down, the hangover’s passed and it’s time to rage again. Peace on Earth can’t last forever anyways, and no amount of tinsel can disguise society’s broken foundations. Thankfully, with their debut album, Lambrini Girls are here to sort it out. There might be protest albums everywhere right now, but Who Let The Dogs Out? goes far beyond mere chest-beating and shitting on the government. This one is special. It might also be the most fun you’ll ever have while screaming at the world.

For Phoebe Lunny and Lily Maciera, fun and fury are inextricable. It certainly helps the medicine to go down, but it gives them an irresistible edge as they make a righteous racket about gentrification, workplace sexual harassment, neurodiversity and more.

Impressively still, pretty much any of these tracks could have been a single. The quick-witted Filthy Rich Nepo Babies ('Hugo wants to be a rock star, smashing up five grand guitars / His dad works at Sony') and the sapphic twist-and-shout of No Homo ('I like your face and it’s in a gay way!') are overflowing with outlandishness, but this band can lurch between silly and serious quicker than you can say ‘patriarchy’.

Even in Nothing Tastes As Good As It Feels’ confrontational, often uncomfortable examination of eating disorders, they still squeeze in wisecracks. 'Kate Moss gives no fucks that my period has stopped' they rage. By its end, Phoebe’s screaming 'GIVE ME FULL FAT, YOU FUCKING BASTARDS!'

We know Lambrini Girls are noisy sorts, but they’ve not quite had enough credit for how great they are with guitars. If they happened to be on a mission to change that, it shows. The menacing buzz that powers opener Bad Apple sounds as much like a distress signal as the police siren that opens it. The squalling Love – a tirade against mistaking toxicity for genuine love – boasts riffs that must have been created with some secret sauce that induces cravings for endless repeat plays.

It all ends with a discordant dance party in the form of C**tology 101, a joyful celebration of self that reclassifies everything from letting go and setting boundaries to autistic meltdowns and 'Doing a poo at your friend’s house' as 'c**ty'.

Still, they’ve done something even more audacious than releasing a track with an off-the-scale number of C-words in it. They’ve dropped an album of the year contender just 10 days into 2025. Big power move, that. Verdict: 4/5” – Kerrang!

Standout Cuts: Company Culture/You’re Not From Around Here/Cuntology 101

Key Song: Filthy Rich Nepo Baby

Rose Gray – Louder, Please

Release Date: 17th January

Label: PIAS

Producers: Pat Alvarez/Zhone/Sur Back/Joe Brown/Alex Metric/Rob Milton/Sega Bodega/Ryland Blackinton/Vaughn Oliver/Sam Homaee/Frank Colucci/Shawn Wasabi

Review:

“Rose Gray’s ‘Louder, Please’ is a mission statement for life from an artist with a laser guided focus on ecstatic dance floor abandon and the transcendent power of dance music’s energy rush.

Hedonism and the desire to have more, more, more permeate the whole record. Opening track ‘Damn’ sets the tone with its rough and dirty groove while ‘Free’ is warm and enveloping in its blissed out expansiveness. The lyrics often have a spiritual and inspiring quality to them that harkens back to the prime era of late 80s dance discovery when anything seemed possible

The thing that makes the album so engaging is it’s not just a parade of beats and poppers o’clock bangers. There’s depth, feeling and rich emotion from Gray’s skilful songwriting, a testament to the years she spent honing her craft as an artist and writer. All this is highlighted in stunning fashion on the spoken word memories and reflections of ‘Hackney Wick’, nostalgic and stirring it’s a track that evokes The Streets ‘Weak Become Heroes’ and feels like something Gray has waited all her life to say.

The album is a sonic journey for head, body and soul to soundtrack all your partying needs for 2025” – DORK

Standout Cuts: Wet & Wild/Party People/Switch

Key Song: Angel of Satisfaction

Heartworms – Glutton for Punishment 

Release Date: 7th February, 2025

Label: Speedy Wunderground

Producer: Dan Carey

Review:

“You’d be forgiven for seeing the stark, black-and-white artwork of ‘Glutton For Punishment’ and assuming it contains a much gnarlier or darker set of music than it does. Its provocative title echoes industrial music’s aesthetic obsession with BDSM imagery; the kind of phrase Depeche Mode or Nine Inch Nails would have utilised back in the mid-1990s.

‘Glutton For Punishment’ is painted in dark hues, but its electro, industrial and post-punk blend is an impressively vibrant and straight-up fun listening experience, rife with kinetic rhythms and strong choruses that worm their way into your brain once they’ve conquered your heart. On her impressive debut, Heartworms (real name: Jojo Orme) unveils a seemingly effortless knack for making jet-black music that explodes in vibrant colour across your frontal cortex.

Produced by the in-demand Dan Carey (Fontaines D.C., Squid, Wet Leg), ‘Glutton For Punishment’ is a proper auteurist collection – nine tracks that revel in and unpick its creators’ myriad obsessions, both aesthetic and psychological. Along with the goth-tinged genre blending, Orme’s interest in military history rears its head on imagistic highlights ‘Warplane’ and ‘Extraordinary Wings’, while explorations of a fractured relationship with her mother appear on the engrossing ‘Smuggler’s Adventure’.

However, for all the intriguing and enigmatic lyricism, it’s Orme’ musical craft that really stands out. No two tracks on ‘Glutton For Punishment’ sound alike, but are held together by Heartworms’ commitment to an ambitious and successful attempt to juggle differing tones. A track like ‘Jacked’, built around dark techno synths, or ‘Mad Catch’ and its unusual, angular lead guitars, teeter on the edge of abrasion, but are fused to such strong, powerful vocal melodies and danceable grooves that they consistently materialise as gripping, singular goth pop bangers.

The only tiny criticism is that once or twice Heartworms’ palette ventures a little too close to retro eighties post-punk worship; see the guitars and drum machines of ‘Celebrate’ as an example. But other than that minor quibble, this is a seriously strong debut from an artist in total command of her craft, one that’s all the more impressive for so elegantly incorporating eccentric, sometimes abrasive ideas into its unabashedly pop vision. 8/10” – CLASH

Standout Cuts: Just to Ask a Dance/Extraordinary Wings/Glutton for Punishment

Key Song: Jacked

jasmine.4.t  - You Are the Morning

Release Date: 17th January, 2025

Label: Dead Oceans

Producers: Julien Baker/Phoebe Bridgers/Lucy Dacus

Review:

“Released via Phoebe Bridgers’ Saddest Factory Records, her signing is the stuff of indie legend. Having toured with Lucy Dacus pre-transition, they continued to demo-swap until Cruickshank convinced her friend to play the tracks to Bridgers. Both musicians wanted to produce the album, and with their boygenius bandmate Julien Baker privy to the conversation, it was settled that all three would take on the role. Cruickshank then flew her trans-femme bandmates to LA to join her for the recording.

The songs on You Are The Morning were born out of some of the darkest moments of Cruickshank’s life. After coming out to her friends and family in Bristol, she found herself homeless and dealing with a divorce. She moved to Manchester and slept on floors and sofas, quietly writing her thoughts, experiences and fears into song.

Tracks like “Woman,” the first song she wrote after coming out, are so dense in emotion you can feel them tightening across your chest. Recorded with the Trans Chorus of Los Angeles, the song takes on a new, and perhaps even more vital importance upon its release.

Community is a big theme for Cruickshank, and the bright reprieve of “Best Friend’s House,” with its Daniel Johnston innocence, captures the warmth and safety of something so simple.

First single “Skin on Skin” is a blow-by-blow of Cruickshank’s formative experience of t4t intimacy, the lyrics as evocative as Baker’s guitar solos, while the Elliot Smith indebted chug of “Elephant” eschews chorus for an ever-captivating rhythmic revolution of verse.

Her love of Adrianne Lenker plays out across some of the record’s more delicate moments, including its title track which platforms her intricate guitar-work alongside poetic ode. Written for one of her best friends, the song breaks into chorus with a message of hope.

It’s that promise that things might get better which forms the heart of You Are The Morning. Even on the wild-eyed bombast of the Bridgers duet “Guy Fawkes Tesco Dissociation,” as Cruickshank imagines herself floating in a blood-filled tub, there’s still the glimmer of a brighter future. “I won’t act,” she promises, the track itself alive with staccato turn of phrase. “With my eye movement I’ll see you dent cans just for to get the discount. We can rewind and un-dent reprocess and desensitise,” she sings, each line its own hook.

Just as Cruickshank has put her body and soul into the writing of her debut, the boys’ production perfectly complements its dynamics and sentiment. There are moments when they turn the pressure up; from the aching harmonies of “Breaking in Reverse” to the wall of sound on “Elephant,” and moments when they bring it crashing down. “New Shoes" – an old release reworked with loaded emotion – almost feels invasive to listen to.

You Are The Morning comes at a time when life is getting darker for the trans community. While Cruickshank couldn’t have predicted the political climate her album would be greeted with, she could probably have guessed it. Even though the songs are painfully personal, they offer a wider hope. The world feels dark right now, but albums like this give promise that the dawn is coming” – The Line of Best Fit

Standout Cuts: Skin on Skin/You Are the Morning/Guy Fawkes Tesco Dissociation

Key Song: Woman

Antony Szmierek - Service Station at The End of the Universe

Release Date: 28th February, 2025

Labels: Mushroom Music/Virgin Music Group

Review:

“Manchester’s Antony Szmierek has always had a knack for finding profound meaning in life’s mundane waypoints, and his first full-length record transforms these familiar pit stops into a metaphysical journey that would make Douglas Adams proud.

The former teacher turned word-wielding dance architect hasn’t just crafted an album – he’s created an entire universe where everyday characters cross paths at his imagined Andromeda Southbound services.

The album opens with its title track, a swirling blend that introduces us to an ensemble cast including a hen party, a wandering yoga teacher, and star-crossed lovers who could have stepped out of a Mike Leigh film. These characters weave through the record like threads in a cosmic tapestry, their stories intersecting and diverging with the precision of orbital mechanics.

The production throughout is masterful, echoes of musical heritage scattered throughout, but in a way that never feels derivative. Instead, Szmierek has absorbed these influences and reassembled them into something distinctly his own. ‘The Great Pyramid of Stockport’ might be the album’s creative peak, turning a local landmark into an existential meditation on permanence and legacy. It’s preceded by ‘Rafters’, where “the Patron Saint of Withington” meets “a pound shop Geri Horner” in a love story that somehow manages to be both ridiculous and deeply moving.

The record closes with ‘Angie’s Wedding’, a euphoric finale that brings the whole cast back together in what might be heaven, might be a wedding reception, or might be both. The Orbital-inspired synths and breakbeats create a sense of transcendence that feels earned after the journey we’ve been on.

What makes ‘Service Station At The End Of The Universe’ so special is how it balances its narrative framework with genuine heart. Szmierek has created something rare: an album that works both as a collection of immediate, affecting songs and as a larger narrative about how we find meaning in the spaces between destinations. It’s like overhearing a hundred different stories while waiting in line for a mediocre coffee, and realising we’re all chapters in the same grand novel” – DORK

Standout Cuts: Rafters/The Great Pyramid of Stockport/Angie’s Wedding

Key Song: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Fallacy

Richard Dawson - End of the Middle

Release Date: 14th February, 2025

Labels: Weird World/Domino

Producers: Sam Grant/Richard Dawson

Review:

“The intrigue surrounding Richard Dawson’s latest album begins before you’ve even pressed play. With a title like ‘End Of The Middle’, the veteran Geordie folk singer is inviting multiple interpretations of his work without even needing to hear a guitar string strummed or his characterful drawl.

In an era of such political upheaval, it could very easily point to the end of centrism as a political ideal. The world over, politics is increasingly being fought by those on the fringes, in particular the far-right, who continue to shout the loudest and dominate a news cycle that simply cannot find a way to contain its pervasive, damaging rhetoric.

Equally, it could relate to our relationship with aging, a topic equally at home in the current zeitgeist with films like The Substance throwing a spotlight on both personal and societal reactions to that most natural of human process. Zeroing in on Dawson’s own personal context – approaching his mid 40s, originating from the north of England, with a career of socially-focused music behind him – seems to provide a third, most tantalising reading. Class.

The idea of a class system is not something unique to the United Kingdom, but it does feel like our specific approach to connecting people’s worth to their monetary wealth is uniquely long-standing and sophisticated, making it difficult to define and, therefore, even more complex to untangle in the name of progress.

With this reading, ‘End Of The Middle’ turns into a record that focuses on the end of an accepted definition of a British middle class. With those sitting on hereditary wealth beginning to define themselves as working class simply because they have a part time job with little-to-no stakes, there’s an argument to be had about whether it’s become redundant as a concept already.

Dawson, seemingly, doesn’t think so, as he takes 45 minutes and nine songs to construct a collage of the relative comfort and mundanity that comes with being envious of those richer than you and those worse off than you. In other hands, there’s the potential for this subject matter to transform a record into an embittered undertaking, but Dawson is a cannier operator than most.

Instead, he presents this reality at face value, injecting these compositions with the kind of humour that draws a wry chuckle, and the kind of quaint familiarity that makes this all seem fairly aspirational, even if the characters at the centre of its gaze are discomforted by their lot in life.

Taking his cues from Japanese film director Yasujirō Ozu, a man who used his entire filmography to track how intergenerational familial tensions reflect wider societal discussions about traditions and transformation, Dawson allows you to make the call for yourself on how you feel about those in this comfortable limbo. It’s an exceedingly impressive character study that, with its straight-faced and straight-laced perspective, gets under the skin of these conversations in a way that you fear a more judgemental or overtly sympathetic observer wouldn’t be able to.

An album of rare patience and empathy, ‘End Of The Middle’ doesn’t ever allow itself to descend into forthright commentary. Instead, it presents its scenes to you, inviting you in, and allowing you the time to reflect on the quiet luxury of finding such comfort a drag, in turn asking you to consider the fates of those who would find such a life an aspirational relief from the breadline. An album for our times, indeed. 8/10” – CLASH

Standout Cuts: Gondola/The question/Polytunnel

Key Song: Boxing Day sales

FEATURE: Groovelines: Kylie Minogue – Spinning Around

FEATURE:

 

 

Groovelines

Kylie Minogue – Spinning Around

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IT has been a while…

since I did a Groovelines feature. This is where I explore a classic song. The reason I am spotlighting Kylie Minogue’s Spinning Around is because it turns twenty-five later in the year. Minogue is currently on tour and is in the U.K. soon. From all accounts, Kylie Minogue’s Tension Tour is getting huge love. There will be a lot of eyes on her. The past couple of years have seen her hit a new career peak. 2023’s TENSION got a lot of five-star reviews. Many see her work now as the best she has ever released. Many might argue it was her first two albums of the twenty-first century. After the mixed reviews for 1997’s Impossible Princess, few expected what Kylie Minogue delivered in 2000 with Light Years and 2001’s Fever. Two of her greatest albums, it was a renaissance and reinvention that showed you could never write her off! On 19th June, the first single from Light Years was released. Spinning Around was a number one in the U.K. and Minogue’s native Australia. The single was a revelation! I wonder if there are any plans for a twenty-fifth anniversary special. Something to mark one of the most important releases of her career. Before getting to some features about Spinning Around, I want to get to some information from Wikipedia regarding the legacy of Spinning Around:

“Following its release, the music video became popular for the gold hotpants Minogue sported. It resulted in a media sensation regarding her bottom. British national broadsheet newspaper The Sunday Times deemed her bottom a "wonder of nature" and The Sun sponsored a campaign to "have Kylie Minogue's rear-end heritage-listed, preserved for "posteriority" on the grounds that it's an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty." Readers were requested by the tabloid newspaper to persuade the government to make sure "[Minogue's] bum remains in safe hands - by turning it into a national institution." Rumours and speculations claiming Minogue had undergone plastic surgery to make her bottom look more appealing also began to arise during this time. In the same year, English broadcaster and journalist Johnny Vaughan commented "if an alien landed on Earth he would think Kylie's arse is the world's leader." Minogue's stylist and close friend William Baker explained his decision to "showcase" her bottom in the video, saying "Kylie's bottom is like a peach - sex sells and her best asset is her bum.” The singer's response to the attention regarding her bottom was "dry," claiming "You never know what the future holds. It could become a pear." It was reported that Minogue had her bottom insured for five million dollars”.

Co-written by Paula Abdul, Spinning Around is ranked alongside the best Kylie Minogue singles. I shall end with links to a couple of single ranking features where Spinning Around is high in the mix. First, in 2020, Official Charts spoke with the track’s producer, Mike Spencer. One cannot really overstate the impact the song made in 2000. A perfect summer hit, it was also seen as a bit of a comeback and career resurgence for Kylie Minogue. I was in sixth-form college when Spinning Around arrived. It was a song that was played widely and fondly discussed. Having been a fan of Kylie Minogue since I was a child, it was a real revelation:

“As comebacks go, Kylie's Spinning Around, released in 2000, was less a reinvention and more a reminder of what Kylie Minogue is all about: fun, sparkly and undeniably catchy pop tunes.

After taking a left-turn on 1998’s Impossible Princess, an intriguing, experimental album that divided critics, Spinning Around was a return to the core principles of Brand Kylie. It was fun. It was camp. It was for the clubs. It was tiny gold hot pants.

Rather than re-treading her Stock, Aitkin & Waterman sound, which didn't hold the nostalgic value then that it has today, Spinning Around played into the disco-pop revival happening in 2000 (see also: Spiller’s Groovejet and Modjo’s Lady Hear Me Tonight).

The result was Kylie’s I Should Be So Lucky for the new Millennium - and it went down a treat with the public. Spinning Around landed straight in at Number 1 on the Official Singles Chart with opening sales of just over 82,000. Against the odds, Kylie was back.

To celebrate the release of her new album, Golden, read back our interview from 2018 with Mike Spencer, who produced Spinning Around (and has also worked on this incredible list of hit singles) and told us more about how Kylie's big comeback track came together.

Hello Mike! All these years later, Spinning Around is still a great pop song. It’s aged well, don’t you think?

"I guess it has, yes! It was part of the beginning of Kylie’s sort-of second incarnation. At the time, I was just starting out - I’d had very little chart success. In fact, Spinning Around was my first Number 1 record."

How does someone who was just starting out as a producer suddenly get to work with Kylie?

“I remember I was based in Roundhouse studios in London at the time. People at this point had assumed Kylie couldn’t get back inside the Top 20. Obviously she’s really famous and an iconic artist, but her career had gone adrift somewhat. I guess it was just one of those records that struck a chord.

“I’d been working with Beverly Knight at the time on music that had a very soul edge to it, and that’s what Spinning Around was in its original demo form. It was a soul record. The musicians I was using on it were Rob Harris from Jamiroquai and Winston Blissett who played for Lisa Stansfield. We upped the tempo and made it into a disco record. We didn’t know if it was necessarily the right thing to do, but it felt like a return to where she’d come from, back to what she does best."

You’d sort of updated Kylie’s '80s sound for the Noughties.

"In retrospect maybe, but we weren’t thinking like that at the time. The SAW (Stock Aitken Waterman) sound was very processed, very programmed. Although this was a processed dance record, it actually has real instruments playing, harping back more to the original disco era. In hindsight, it looks like a genius move, but at the time – honestly - it was a bit of a shot in the dark."

After that initial meeting, what was she like to work with in the studio?

"I recorded the instruments with the band in London and flew out to do the vocals with Kylie. I met her in a restaurant on Sunset Boulevard on January 4. I remember I was quite star struck actually. She was great in the studio. We spent a week out there recording the vocals [and] the whole experience was really fantastic."

Wasn’t Spinning Around originally intended for Paula Abdul? She has a writing credit on the song.

"I sort of knew it had been for her at some point – she definitely has a writing credit on it. That version was a lot slower – much slower in fact. It was a different song – the tune, production and concept were all different.”

Given Kylie’s career seemed to be on a downturn, was there pressure to make sure this was going to be a hit? Was there a brief on what sound they were going for?

“Not really, no. I’d had a level of success with Beverley at Parlophone and they seemed to like what I was doing with her, in particular a remix I’d done for her I’d based on Chic’s Good Times. The label liked that and asked for a similar treatment with Kylie. It was rough though. It was a, ‘Can you make this work? Can you unlock it?’ situation rather than specific instructions.

“There wasn’t much noise around Kylie at the time, which is probably why I was lucky enough to get the gig in the first place. Nobody was falling over themselves to work with her. I loved the whole experience though."

There’s an effortless quality to the song; how long did it take to bring it together?

“Quite a while. I remember I recorded the band in a studio in London on tape and ran it into Pro Tools. I also recorded a vocal on 2” tapes and took it out to LA. I remember because I got stopped at the airport with them”.

 Not as much has been written about Spinning Around. Not as much as there should have been. I do hope that there is more words written about Spinning Around closer to its twenty-fifth anniversary on 19th June! I want to bring in an NME review from 2005:

“And on she goes. The years might pass but Kylie will only look younger, keep wearing smaller and smaller hotpants and continue pumping out ever more hyperactive pop music. Even when she’s done little more than eat at The Ivy for two years, she attracts more interest than all the mini-Britneys can hope for in a lifetime.

It’s good to know there’s some things in life you can rely on. And after Dance Kylie, Dodgy Madonna Kylie and Ill-advised Indie Kylie, the pint-sized Princess of Pop has returned to what she knows best. ‘Spinning Around’ is made of the same fizzing, giddy disco-pop that made Kylie famous in the first place and will thrill gay discos everywhere. Co-written by (yikes!) Paula Abdul, it has gloriously little substance and little worth remembering above the glittery, hi-NRG chorus where Kylie reminds us all that she’s back, back, back (“I’m spinning around, get out of my way”). Indie chancers throw away your hair slides and take note. This is the sound of someone enjoying what they do. Does it scare you?”.

In 2020, The Guardian ranked Kylie Minogue’s singles. They placed Spinning Around at number one (“Over the course of her career, Kylie has tried her hand at being Indie Kylie, Moody Kylie, Mature Kylie and indeed Covering Toots and the Maytals on a Children’s TV Show Kylie (see her 2009 version of Monkey Man with the Wiggles). But the fact remains that Kylie was essentially put on this earth to make glitzy, euphoric, balls-out pop bangers, and Spinning Around is the glitziest and most euphoric of the lot. A bold restatement of core values following her 90s dalliances with the left field; a perfect pop-disco nugget, a single only the terminally joyless could fail to enjoy”). Last year, when deciding on Kylie Minogue’s best forty songs, Classic Pop placed Spinning Around twelfth (“Not necessarily everybody’s favourite Kylie song – even her new label Parlophone didn’t hear a hit at first – this track brought the forlorn princess back into the public consciousness after an extended plateau. Co-written by Paula Abdul (for whom it was originally intended), the original demo was a down-tempo affair, so much so that producer Mike Spencer dubbed it “a different song”… but once it had been augmented with a classy disco design, and with eye-popping gold lamé hotpants in the video, Kylie was propelled back to No.1”). A single that Kylie Minogue has performed multiple times live since its release (including on her current tour), Spinning Around is a real fan favourite. It turns twenty-five on 19th June. The lead single from her seventh studio album, Light Years, the album itself turns twenty-five on 22nd September. I wanted to shine a light on its most famous single as I wonder if it will get a twenty-fifth anniversary release. Maybe Minogue will say a few words about the track. Hugely influential to this day, there is no doubt Spinning Around has influenced legions of artists…

SINCE its release.

FEATURE: Kate Bush: The Tour of Life : The Success of Her Albums vs. Singles

FEATURE:

 

 

Kate Bush: The Tour of Life

The Success of Her Albums vs. Singles

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ONE of the most notable…

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

aspects of Kate Bush’s career is the comparative chart success of her singles and albums. I know it can be difficult putting together a consistent run of singles. With each song sounding different and released at different times, it can be tricky finding that balance. Even though Kate Bush had quite a few top twenty singles, there were others that charted much lower. However, when you look at her ten studio albums, her greatest hits collection, 1986’sThe Whole Story, and the 2016 live album, Before the Dawn, they all charted in the top ten in the U.K. In fact, with the exception of Lionheart – which reached number six – all of those albums charted in the top five. That is a remarkable achievement! Not many artists can claim such statistics. There is quite a gulf between Kate Bush’s albums and singles when it comes to commercial success. I suppose people will buy the album but think that the singles are really not as essential. In terms of singles released from her studio albums, I think Kate Bush has had four top five successes. There are a smattering of singles that reached the top twenty and a few that either didn’t chart or were very low. There Goes a Tenner reached ninety-three. That was from The Dreaming. Deeper Understanding (from Director’s Cut) reached eighty-seven, whilst Wild Man (50 Words for Snow) reached seventy-three. When those singles/albums came out in 2011, Bush had a run of eleven top ten albums. More impressive than this, top five albums in five different decades. I suspect, when an eleventh studio album does come out, it will place in the top five. One can look at some of her more modern singles. They charted quite low as they are digital releases. Maybe people streaming or buying the albums.

Kate Bush’s fans love to hear her music on a physical format. She urges her listeners to do that. If a single comes out digitally and there is no physical product then fewer people will buy them. Perhaps Bush does not see herself as a singles artist. It is about the albums. It wasn’t until 1982’s The Dreaming when we saw this huge and dramatic difference between the singles and album placings. The Dreaming reached three in the U.K. One of its singles, Sat in Your Lap, reached eleven. The remaining singles charted low or not at all. It wasn’t really a singles album. You can see albums like The Kick Inside (1978), Never for Ever (1980), Hounds of Love (1985) and even The Sensual World (1989) as having more obvious singles. It is hard when it comes to singles. Choosing ones that are commercial vs. ones that Kate Bush wants to put out there. If EMI wanted her to write singles and get radio play, Bush more and more was concerned with a body of work that was true to her vision and not motivated by the need to write hit singles. Hounds of Love compromised a bit in that sense. In terms of the album position (one in the U.K.) and the fact all of its four singles were top forty (three in the top twenty) meant that the balance was struck. However, since then, and especially from King of the Mountain (from 2005’s Aerial) onwards, Bush has not been too invested in singles. In the EMI years, they might have wanted three or four singles at least to come from each album. Aerial has one single. Director’s Cut and 50 Words for Snow had one single each. A taste of the album. Bush wanting people to invest in albums. Digital singles perhaps not holding any appeal. 50 Words for Snow sold 50,000 copies in the first week of its release.

I guess one can look at her album success and that is the main story. A single that went top twenty in the 1980s could have sold more than a top ten song from another decade. Same with the albums. The Kick Inside sold over a million and went to number three. It would have sold more than The Red Shoes, which reached number two in the U.K. The chart positions can be a bit misleading. In terms of the singles market, perhaps it was more about trying to fit in the scene at the time. Hammer Horror from 1978. Not really like anything around it. However, the album it is from, Lionheart, was a chart success. Is it a case of the albums being bought mainly by her fanbase and that love and dedication never waning. The singles being more about the general public. I wonder why there was such a discrepancy between the success of the singles from 1985’s Hounds of Love and those from The Dreaming. Was it a case of 1982’s music scene being dramatically different to what Bush was putting out, or are the singles on Hounds of Love better and more ‘radio friendly’? Everyone will have their own views. Both of those albums sold well, though The Dreaming was dwarfed by Hounds of Love. Lionheart reached number six in the U.K. but has sold more than The Dreaming – which reached three in the U.K. I am fascinated by the numbers. Why certain albums sold okay and charted high whereas others sold big and charted slightly lower. The same with singles. From her number one debut single, Wuthering Heights, in 1978, through to and including Army Dreamers (1980), Bush had all top forty singles in the U.K. One exception was Hammer Horror reaching forty-four. From 1980’s December Will Be Magic Again through to Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God) in 1985, there was this weird period. Singles like Night of the Swallow and There Goes a Tenner struggling.

Certain singles released for specific countries and territories. They tended to struggle compared to those more on general release or released in the U.K. From Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God), Bush did not have another top five U.K. single for twenty years: King of the Mountain. The expectation and wait for new material accounts for the latter’s success. It is surprising that songs like The Big Sky (Hounds of Love), This Woman’s Work (The Sensual World) and even Rubberband Girl (The Red Shoes) did not crack the top ten. After King of the Mountain, there was this dive in single chart positions. Lyra (which featured in the film, The Golden Compass) was released in 2007 and reached 187. Deeper Understanding and Wild Man reached the top 100 but not by much. Even if there was inconsistency and real peaks and troughs, her albums remained solid and popular. The Red Shoes and Aerial went Platinum. However, Director’s Cut and 50 Words for Snow went Gold. That may seem like a decline. That being said, both of those latter albums were top five. I guess the fact each only had one single released and it was a time where physical singles were not a thing accounts in some ways to a slightly less impressive album sales haul. However, Kate Bush has remastered and reissued her studio albums since 2011. The overall sales figures given a boost whereas her singles are a thing of the past. Like The Beatles releasing a boxset with all of their singles in for the fans, I would love to have all of Kate Bush’s singles in this nice boxset! I wonder what accounts for the mixed fortunes of the singles compared to the solid showing for her albums. Fans knew when the albums came out and knew they wanted to buy them. Maybe the singles did not appeal too much or mixed reception from the press put some people off. Her albums were going to sell well no matter what. However, the singles has to compete with what was out at the time and had to fit in too. No surprise Hounds of Love’s singles did well considering the Pop and Rock scene of 1985. Compare that to, say, The Dreaming’s singles from 1981, 1982 and 1983 and The Red Shoes’ singles from 1993 and 1994. Everything around them vastly different. Especially the 1990s.

Maybe other people will have their theories. I wanted to explore this subject. In her early career, certain singles were released for different countries. Bush sometimes battling EMI to make sure the singles she wanted to come out were released. It is about the timing of the singles. The third, fourth or fifth single from an album is not going to do as well as the first or second. Also, I guess it depends how close the singles came out in relation to an album regarding their success. The Dreaming suffered because its first single, Sat in Your Lap, was released two years before the final one. However, when it came to albums like Hounds of Love and The Sensual World, it was a bit more consistent. In terms of albums that have a fair few obvious singles, I would say only The Kick Inside, Never for Ever and Hounds of Love stand out. It is a hard thing to judge and explain. You can say that it doesn’t matter how well the singles did but it would have done at the time. Even in 2005 or 2011, Bush needed the single to get attention and radio time. Even if the albums got into the top five, that is not to say EMI were okay with the singles being a bit patchy in terms of their commercial lure. I love how twelve albums from Kate Bush have reached the top ten! Few artists can match that! However, Bush’s singles ranged from chart toppers and those in the top ten to ones that didn’t chart or were very low-placed. So curious and interesting. Although Bush released some iconic singles and we must acknowledge that, it is very clear that the chart success and consistent run shows that she is…

VERY much an albums artist.

FEATURE: The Digital Mixtape: Flower Power Cuts

FEATURE:

 

 

The Digital Mixtape

 ART CREDIT: Julia Tulub

Flower Power Cuts

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NOT really motivated by anything…

PHOTO CREDIT: Viktoria Slowikowska/Pexels

I have been thinking about the summer of 1967. That first Summer of Love. Images of togetherness, free love and flower power. Whilst some may dismiss that period as idealistic or ineffective, I do think that the modern world could learn from that time. We need a new Summer of Love. Against the hatred and division in the world, it is a very strange and destabilising time. I hope that things improve but they do not look good at the moment. To help distract for a moment from the unfortunately grim realities of the world, I have compiled a mixtape of Flower Power songs. Some peaceful, inspiring and colourful songs from back in the 1960s and 1970s. A collection that could and should appeal to multiple listeners and generations. Evocative songs I feel are still relevant today. Sit back and relax to this…

PHOTO CREDIT: cottonbro studio/Pexels

INCREDIBLE mix.  

FEATURE: Spotlight: Revisited: Doechii

FEATURE:

 

 

Spotlight: Revisited

PHOTO CREDIT: IB Kamara for DAZED

Doechii

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IT may seem…

PHOTO CREDIT: John Jay

underwhelming or lacking if I include Doechii in Spotlight: Revisited. Seeing as she is a huge artist now who is very much on her way to the mainstream, one might not be able to label her as a ‘new’ artist. However, as this feature is me shining new light on artists I originally included in my Spotlight feature, I wanted to return to Doechii. To me, she is the most essential and finest voice in Hip-Hop right now. I love her music. So distinct, compelling and original, this is someone who is going to the big leagues. Hip-Hop and Rap still have an issue with sexism and misogyny. Doechii is an artist who will inspire other women coming through. There is nobody on the scene who writes like her. I am fascinated to see where she goes. Her 2024 mixtape/album, Alligator Bites Never Heal, was received to critical acclaim. I am going to end with a couple of reviews for the mixtape. First, I want to get to a few recent interviews with Doechii. The first interview I want to spotlight is from The Cut. Fresh from her GRAMMY win, the unapologetic Florida rapper was only getting started. The rest of this year is going to be massive for her:

“Though she has experienced this kind of virality before, mostly on TikTok, where her songs tend to soundtrack everything from puppeteering performances to “Get Ready With Me” videos, this moment feels different. She’s collected co-signs from Kendrick Lamar (he called her “the hardest out”) and Tyler, the Creator, who told me, “She’s really sick. Like, super-duper-duper-duper good.” And then there are those Grammy nominations: Best New Artist, Best Rap Performance, and Best Rap Album. She’d go on to win the Grammy for Best Rap Album, giving a heartfelt speech to boot. Since the category’s creation in 1996, she said, “two women have won …” Then she corrected herself: “THREE women have won! Lauryn Hill, Cardi B, and Doechii!” The moment was capped off by a performance of her songs “Catfish” and “Denial Is a River,” in which she rapped with a fleet of dancers wearing Thom Browne. (“This is serious,” she told me between rehearsals before the show. “It reminds me of when I would do talent shows and it was cute for everybody, but it was very, very serious for me.”) Right after the ceremony, she dropped a celebratory track, “Nosebleeds,” with a gramophone as the single’s cover art. On the song, she boasts, “Everybody wanted to know what Doechii would do if she didn’t win / I guess we’ll never …,” seemingly referencing Kanye West’s infamous Best Rap Album winner’s speech at the 2005 Grammys.

Doechii’s career has been operating in hyperspeed ever since the artist released her 2020 single “Yucky Blucky Fruitcake,” an acerbic, wry song about bits of her childhood — food stamps, Lisa Frank lipstick, and getting caught masturbating. The title was inspired by Barbara Park’s Junie B. Jones children’s-book series. “I was a lot like Junie. She did what she wanted. She was very curious, and she just went for it,” Doechii says, settling into a small leather couch back at her hotel, both legs crossed beneath her, brown leather boots still on. “Even though she had her issues, she had this feminine rage about her that I really, really liked.” Since “Yucky Blucky Fruitcake,” she has received pressure from her label and fans to make cookie-cutter hits to please the masses, but she pushes back: “I don’t like making music just for a moment. I like to make music for therapy, for an inner experience, an inner purpose, and not just for an algorithm.”

Doechii was born Jaylah Ji’mya Hickmon in Florida. She says her dad writes raps in his spare time and her mother, the more “analytical” one, primarily raised her. She grew up in Tampa, a place she says will always inform her body of work. Her “Swamp Princess” persona and the reptilian titles of much of her discography? That’s all Florida. But it’s not only her artistry that’s been influenced by the Sunshine State — “My chaos, my freedom, just my raunchiness,” she says. Doechii remembers a night at her grandmother’s house by the railroad tracks when she, her cousins, and her younger sisters, all still children, tore off their shoes and began racing on a patch of concrete. “The whole family was outside barefoot. The little kids would race. The aunties. Then we made Grandma and Grandpa race. We just do it bare feet,” she tells me. “That’s the most Florida shit.”

When she was in the sixth grade, she says God told her to write down the phrase “I am Doechii.” The decision saved her life. “I don’t want to get super-dark,” she says, raising her eyebrows when she looks at me. “I was getting bullied so bad that I was thinking about killing myself. I realized, Oh, fuck, I’m gonna kill myself and then I’m gonna be the only one dead. The bullies aren’t gonna be with me, and everything they said is not coming with me either. I would just be gone,” she says matter-of-factly before cracking a half-mouthed grin. “And then I was like, Fuck that!” She’s almost yelling now, leaning back into the couch and waving her hands playfully. “Fuck that shit! I’m not going for that! And this wash of peace came over me, and I received ‘I am Doechii.’ But it was more like this feeling of — I made a choice, a decision. I am the most important character in this movie. This is my motherfucking movie.”

Doechii’s sound is a callback to old-school ’90s hip-hop; playful, up-tempo contemporary spoken word; pop-culture references; and Gen-Z shitposting. On Alligator Bites, which she says is for “the girls and the gays that have a passion inside of them and are sassy, independent, strong, but they need an extra push,” she mocks the hamster wheel of the music industry, blows raspberries, and trolls her own label, yet still pumps the brakes on the irony by peppering in soulful bridges. She claims the mixtape’s name popped into her head via the same higher power that christened her with her stage name. “God told me to do it, and I did it,” she says. The meaning of the mixtape’s title still evades her, but Doechii trusts the process: “I know that God will reveal to me what it means later.”

PHOTO CREDIT: Richie Shazam

On “Nissan Altima,” Doechii flexes her rapping chops and gets cheeky about her bisexuality — “She munchin’ on the box while she watchin’ Hulu” — in just two minutes. “Denial Is a River” is a traversing, therapeutic conversation. “People are a little bit worried about you … / Why don’t you just tell me what’s been goin’ on?” the other voice asks before Doechii admits to her experiences with drugs and alcohol: “I like pills, I like drugs … / I like daydrinkin’ and day parties and Hollywood … / The shit works, it feels good, and my self-worth’s at an all-time low.” It’s a relatable cycle of self-destruction, and Doechii’s vulnerability is striking. “I have moments where I am worried and I’m like, Maybe I should dial it back because that’s a little too honest, but I don’t give a fuck because I know that in the end, it’s going to pay off more for me to be real,” she says. “In my music, I have to be raw and explicit or else it’ll make me uncomfortable. I don’t like secrets.” To record the mixtape, she locked herself away for an entire month, letting only her sound engineer, Jayda Love, in on the process.

PHOTO CREDIT: Richie Shazam

Doechii attributes the retro sound of much of Alligator Bites to her newfound sobriety, a lifestyle she adopted this past summer to allow her brain to “remember things.” She has started to feel a little sentimental, too. “I’m gravitating back towards things that I used to love,” she tells me. “The first album I ever purchased and ever remember listening to in full length was The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill.” The nostalgia trip also inspired the creative direction of her “Denial Is a River” music video, a modern-day homage to the laugh-track sitcoms of the ’90s, starring Zack Fox, Rickey Thompson, and Earl Sweatshirt, among others. “Old-school hip-hop is vulnerability,” Doechii says. “I’m gravitating towards the pure skill that was incorporated. Anyone who doesn’t think that hip-hop is an intellectual genre, I think that assumption is rooted in racism.” The women who paved the way for someone like Doechii to come along — Lil’ Kim, Mary J. Blige, Missy Elliott — pushed back against the notion that sexual liberation had to come at the cost of vulnerable emotional transparency. “The feeling that I have when I listen to The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill is the same feeling I want some other Black little girl to have when she listens to me,” Doechii says. “And in order for her to have that feeling, I have to talk about my feelings”.

There is a lot of new buzz around Doechii after she won the GRAMMY for Best Rap Album. In the process, she became only the third woman ever to win that trophy (Ms. Lauryn Hill is one of the other two women). I want to start with a brilliant interview from DAZED. Discussing the GRAMMYs, Met Gala and Superbowl, it is a time when the whole world has caught up. People around the world know Doechii’s name:

“Outside of the big night, what is a typical day in the life of Doechii? Is there a routine you adhere to?

Doechii: Lately, I’ve been starting my mornings early with tea and a good stretch. I’ve been trying this peach ginger tea. It’s really good. I like to meditate and have time to myself before I start the day. I’m around a lot of people all the time and as much as I seem social, I’m really an introvert and I like to be by myself. I have my routine before I get social in the day, and then I either write a poem or try to create something in some way before I start. And then I get straight into work.

I’m sure you’ve seen everyone reposting your old YouTube videos by now. Coincidentally, the day before our shoot was 10 years to the day of your first YouTube upload. In the second video you posted, you spoke candidly about practising your confessions: “Every morning and then, right before I go to bed, I confess everything that I want in my life and watch it come to pass.” Is this something you still do today?

Doechii: Absolutely. When I talk about my meditations, a lot of it includes my confessions and the things that I desire. I still take time to imagine and dream and think of new goals... Actually, I’m going to change the word ‘goals’ to: I just like to imagine. You have to dream and find time to dream or else you stop creating new things to chase. So, yes, I like to do that, and I like to have my affirmations and claim them.

Tell me about that girl. Who was Jaylah back then, and what’s her backstory?

Doechii: I’m still that girl. I’m very good at chasing my dreams. I’ve always been mesmerised by my life and what it could be. The concept of being able to manifest anything is cool to me, and so I made it my business. I just wanted to share with other people the cool things that I’d learned and tapped into. How you could dream and be something. How you can change yourself and change your circumstances. And I would just vlog my life because I thought the way I lived was cool and I wanted to teach people how to tap into this thing. And that’s who that girl was and still is.

PHOTO CREDIT: IB Kamara

I’d love to get a sense of Tampa and some of your earliest memories or pivotal moments of growing up there. How has it informed you?

Doechii: One moment sticking out to me is around 2007, when I lived in Sulphur Springs and my house was one house over from this community rec centre. It was in the hood, and they would do barbecues and sports, and all the kids from the neighbourhood would go there. A lot of my earliest memories of Florida are based around community and culture. Black people coming together, being creative and doing cool shit. Everybody would come to the rec centre on the weekends and stunt in the hardest outfit, just to do it. My earliest memories of fashion and showing up in a look and getting a look off was at my local rec centre. Or playing tetherball in the heat; everybody coming with the hardest hairdos and music, rappers and mixtapes, all of that started in that community. A lot of my memories are based around that.

Where in those moments was Doechii born? How did she come to be?

Doechii: Doechii wasn’t born until years later. This was around sixth or seventh grade. I was bullied so bad that I was becoming somebody else for someone else’s comfort. It fucked up my head because I always knew I was that girl. I always knew I was dope as fuck. My taste level was very high when I was young. I was not into the shit that everybody else was into. Not to say they weren’t into cool shit, but my shit was just cooler. So, anyway! [laughs] I was in a position where I thought about killing myself because the bullying was so bad. Then I had this realisation: I’m not gonna do that, because then they’re gonna all get a chance to live and I’m gonna be the one dead, and look at my taste! Nobody wants that. I don’t want that. That’s not the life I want to live. It made me realise I had gotten down to a point where I was thinking about taking my own life because of what other people thought about me, and I realised, “OK, what do I really think is important? What do I want here?” I had that realisation pretty young, and that birthed Doechii.

Who were you becoming? Who did you want to be?

Doechii: When people bully you, they want you to feel ashamed of yourself. They want you to feel insecure, to feel bad. They want you to feel ugly, like, “Bitch! You shouldn’t have that confidence. Look at you, your dark skin, you’re ugly, you’re stupid, you’re weird. Why are you wearing that? You should not feel this confident and be looking like that.” That’s how they wanted me to feel, and I was starting to become that person. Like, “Oh, maybe I shouldn’t be acting like this. This confident. Maybe I shouldn’t be wearing these things, maybe I shouldn’t be listening to this type of music. Maybe I shouldn’t be going these places.” I was in gymnastics and shit when it wasn’t cool. I was becoming less of myself to make them more comfortable, to fit the box that they wanted me in, and that wasn’t truly who I was. I was brilliant and have always been stunning.

You’ve described yourself as an alt Black girl and have just detailed some of your struggle to fit in in the past. SZA recently discussed the lack of alt-Black-girl representation when she was growing up on The Drew Barrymore Show, and so I wanted to ask you your take on this. Did that representation exist for you at all?

Doechii: Yeah, that representation for me was in Janelle Monáe, Lauryn Hill, SZA in high school, André 3000 – Outkast in general, actually – Missy Elliott. Those alt-whimsical archetypes in music are what I lean towards. Grace Jones!

What role does storytelling play in your writing? Alligator Bites Never Heal has a clear narrative but how do you translate these personal stories into universal messages?

Doechii: I treat songwriting like my vlogs. I treat the songs like my diary. Just say what it is – say what happened, honestly. I have no idea. I don’t know how I’m doing this. I don’t know how it’s translating to the masses at all. I’m just being really honest about my life. That’s it.

How does vulnerability or transparency serve you and the work that you create?

Doechii: It is my gateway to the next part of myself; honesty, authenticity and audacity are how I unlock the next level of myself. I have to do that by being honest about who I am in each moment. Sometimes that can be hard. And that’s what vulnerability is to me. It’s having the audacity to be real with yourself and then love yourself. Like, this is who I am right now. I don’t like this part of me, but it’s still worth it, right? It’s still worth talking about and writing about”.

I am going to end with a couple of reviews for the phenomenal and award-winning Alligator Bites Never Heal. NME awarded it four stars and had a lot of praise for an artist blowing up right now. I hope that Doechii comes to the U.K. and performs a few dates as there are so many people here who would love to see her on the stage:

“With her last offering – the 2022 EP ‘She/Her/Black Bitch’ – Tampa’s Swamp Princess proved to the world why she was a hybrid-pop powerhouse in the making. Doechii’s effortless switch between her avant-garde rap bark and syrupy vocals showed she has musical agility like no other; pair that with her unapologetically quirky style, and she quickly secured a spot in the upper echelons of current hip-hop. But, on her third mixtape, ‘Alligator Bites Never Heal’, her wacky personality takes a dip, and Doechii adopts the darkness of the swamp.

The 26-year-old’s latest single ‘Boom Bap’ wasn’t just a satirical clap back at those who “said they wanted her to rap” – it sets the tone for the throwback hip-hop vibes that can be found throughout the record. That’s no bad thing – Doechii is a witty, comical songwriter who can tell you vivid stories with little effort, and this approach allows that side of her to shine (see ‘Denial Is A River’ for proof of that, where she narrates the heart-wrenching time she found out she was being cheated on while in her own therapist’s chair). But, compared to her recent singles’ dance and pop-R&B sounds, this lyrical style is a swift detour that takes over most songs on the 19-track mixtape.

‘Alligator Bites Never Heal’ doesn’t feel like a record made for radio or to show off how adaptable Doechii can be. Instead, it reflects her personal struggles – like the doom she feels about approaching her thirties, industry politics and label demands, and her place in the music world. Through it all, her honesty must be commended.

From the opening track ‘Stanka Poo’, she gets candid, sharing that she feels reduced to a “TikTok rapper, part-time YouTube actor”. ‘Boiled Peanuts’ continues her frank sharing, the rapper complaining, “Label always up my ass like anal beads / Why can’t all these label niggas just let me be?” before calling herself a “dying sunflower leaving a trail of seeds”. This sense of being trapped or feeling inadequate is all over the mixtape, turning what should be a bright and joyous record into something more upsetting.

‘Alligator Bites Never Heal’ ultimately finds its way to a brighter place as Doechii pulls us out of the dark and misty swamp and into the warmth of her current home in the Sunshine State. After ‘Nissan Altima’, the Floridian shows off her musical versatility, trying out new genres like bossa nova (‘Beverly Hills’) and synth-led hip-hop (‘Huh!’, ‘Fireflies’). The gentle guitar and airy harmonies of the soulful titular track, meanwhile, create an ethereal experience while Doechii begs us to “dance with her”.

At first, Doechii gets into the nitty gritty on this release, but – by the end – she finds solace and strength, making the mixtape feel more like a sonic diary of her emotional journey. It’ll take time to see if it becomes a standout in her discography, but this boldly brazen record definitely makes a statement”.

I am going to finish off with a review from Rolling Stone. I think most people in the U.K. know Doechii from DENIIAL IS A RIVER. It is a phenomenal cut. I would urge people to explore the rest of her catalogue. We are going to get many more albums from Doechii. There is no doubt this queen is primed for greatness:

“Doechii — a fierce and fearless lyricist with a natural ability to shape-shift — became Top Dawg Entertainment’s first female rapper right on the heels of Kendrick Lamar’s departure from the label. That could have set her up to be an heir to an impossibly gilded throne. It would make sense to look at her that way. The expanse of talented rappers left on the roster are Lamar’s friends who have solidified their own domains, too established in those roles to take such a vaunted spot. Though Doechii’s signing was preceded by young Long Beach rapper Ray Vaughn’s, she quickly garnered a broader audience with the viral hits “What It Is (Block Boy)” and “Yucky Blucky Fruitcake” — one a sexy, sung homage to early-aughts R&B with a sample of TLC’s “No Scrubs,” the other a hybrid of high-energy schoolyard bars and raps over dreamy Nineties hip-hop. She quickly crafted opening-act slots on tour with SZA and Doja Cat into major moments, crushed Coachella, and got loved on by women across Black music, from Janelle Monáe to JT of the City Girls. With SZA currently standing as the toppest of the dawgs on TDE’s roster, it’s fair to wonder if she and Doechii will shape the future of the label’s prestige.

Yet, with her full-length debut, Alligator Bites Never Heal (a gesture to the Florida roots of the self-proclaimed “Swamp Princess”), she makes herself more than a successor. She’s a fully realized artist, with immense technical and curatorial skill. (This is one of the only recent albums that deserves to be 19 tracks long.) On it, she slickly glides from gritty boom-bap, sensual electronic, dance music, Miami jook, and earnest soul with a wicked pen and brilliant charisma. Her varied vocal tics and beat selections are often akin to Lamar’s — like her creeping and nefarious “Skipp,” which plays like a spawn of Untitled Unmastered’s tracks two and seven — but she also sounds like as much a student of A Tribe Called Quest, Missy Elliott, and Nicki Minaj.

She’s also just a human being, and most often she simply sounds like Doechii. This is a feat of originality for someone so early in her mainstream career. The standout is “Denial Is a River,” in which Doechii gives an Oscar-worthy performance as both herself and a therapist of sorts in an immaculate display of her quirks, relatability, and tenderness. She dishes on her depression and failed relationships, and defends a pesky drug habit she picked up in Hollywood, before blasting into “Catfish,” an assertion of why she made it there. Doechii can be brash, reckless at the mouth, and dizzyingly dexterous, but her gentle heart is at the mixtape’s core — her fears, vices, and dreams as she becomes who she always knew she could be are at the center.

Early on Alligator Bites, she seeks to settle any debate about her rap bona fides, with track after track of hardcore spitting on beats that sound like they were plucked out of hip-hop’s golden era and had the dust blown off them. Yet, on the sarcastic single “Boom Bap,” complete with retro scratching by her touring DJ, Miss Milan, she pokes fun at the idea that her ability to skate like that is what makes her worthwhile. After making fart noises into the mic and peppering the song with deeply unserious scatting, she says, “Get Top on the phone/Tell him it’s all rap, nigga.” It’s a rather brazen evocation of her label head and a nod to Lamar’s Untitled Unmastered itself. “Say it’s real and it’s rap and it boom and it bap and it bounce and it clap and it’s house and it’s trap – It’s everything! I’m everything!” she screams.

Throughout the emotional journey of Alligator Bites, she confronts the expectations of her label as a major source of strife for her (without exactly differentiating between TDE and Capitol Records, where she is also signed). She bemoans that they’re “always up my ass like anal beads” and pushing her toward “TikTok music,” but also shows reverence: “Who’d-a got the ball from Big Moo,” she says of current TDE co-president Moosa Tiffith, who signed her, “and who’d-a dunk it?” Later, at the end of “Profit,” where she raps, “My label hate the direction I’m going, they knock my shit,” there’s a recording of a call between the two of them. “I just wanna tell you that I’m proud of you,” Tiffith tells her. “I love you, like, talk your shit, go crazy. I mean, go be the icon that you are.” It feels familiar, like the historically contentious but fruitful relationship between SZA and her manager and TDE co-president Terrance “Punch” Henderson, and you see what magic has come of that. Here, the result is one of the year’s very best albums”.

Let’s leave things there. Doechii will be playing in the U.K. on 23rd August. She will feature at Victoria Park. She has also been confirmed for Glastonbury. A huge platform and well-deserved booking. A perfect moment for her to slay in the U.K.! If you have not witnessed the brilliance of Doechii then check her music out. In years to come, she will rank alongside the queens of Hip-Hop. The icons she looks up to. This amazing artist has…

A bright future ahead.

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Follow Doechii

PHOTO CREDIT: IB Kamara

Official:

https://www.iamdoechii.com/#/

Instagram

https://www.instagram.com/doechii/

TikTok:

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

YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCksiqtuWYtN2YluvAQnV2dQ

Spotify:

https://open.spotify.com/artist/4E2rKHVDssGJm2SCDOMMJB?si=2soCU8AvScWiiizD3YcDvw

FEATURE: Kate Bush’s Purple Reign: Prince and Our Queen

FEATURE:

 

 

Kate Bush’s Purple Reign

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1993

 

Prince and Our Queen

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THIS is the second feature…

IN THIS PHOTO: Prince in 1993/PHOTO CREDIT: Lynn Goldsmith

in a row (published but not shared) where I am taking from Tom Doyle’s brilliant book, Running Up That Hill: 50 Visions of Kate Bush. There is a section that caught my eye. Maybe some Kate Bush fans do not realise Kate Bush and Prince worked together. Bush was featured on Prince’s 1996 album, Emancipation. That was a rare occasion where Bush featured on another artist’s album. She had done earlier in her career. Featuring alongside the likes of Peter Gabriel, Big Country, Roy Harper and Go West. However, by the 1990s, it was quite rare for Bush to feature on any other artists’ work. Her and Prince had a kinship. Even though they were collaborating remotely and did not see each other often, there were similarities between them. In terms of how they worked and this idea they were both slightly reclusive and strange. Press perceptions around Prince and Kate Bush. However, when they did work together for Kate Bush’s 1993 album, The Red Shoes, the result was not brilliant. I have spotlighted Why Should I Love You? before. I have also mentioned how, when Prince and Madonna worked together for her 1989 album, Like a Prayer, the song they collaborated on was underwhelming. That was Love Song. The two briefly dated in the 1980s and they had a complex relationship. However, there was a more straightforward relationship between Prince and Kate Bush. What could have been a wonderful and harmonious collaboration – think Bush and Peter Gabriel’s duet, Don’t Give Up – instead was an overloaded and messy. On 21st April, it will be nine years since Prince died. Only fifty-seven, Kate Bush was among those who paid tribute. When promoting the live album of Before the Dawn in 2016, she talked to Matt Everitt and shared her memories of Prince. It was a huge loss for the music world.

It is great that he and Kate Bush worked together. Although separated by technology, the two did get to share some recording space together. Tom Doyle argues how the two don’t seem to have much in common on paper. Prince was this showman who was not averse to publicity and loved the stage. He was fine with fame. Bush, someone who was more private and never wanted to be famous, seemed to be an opposite. However, the two shared common ground then it came to the recording studio. Both wanted control over their music. Bush got that in 1982 when she produced The Dreaming. Prince found it earlier when 1978’s For You came out (two months after Bush’s debut, The Kick Inside). Both were both in 1958. Prince born seven weeks after Kate Bush. These musical prodigies, there was this connection. Think about their work in the 1980s. Prince’s When Doves Cry has no bassline. A lot of Hounds of Love features no bass. When Doves Cry and Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God) have vocal choirs and LinnDrum beats. Idiosyncratic synth lines and brilliantly deployed and stacked vocals. When Doves Cry arrived in 1984. A year later, Bush released Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God). It was not until 1990 that the two met in person. She was there for one of his dates during his Nude Tour. It was a more stripped-back (no pun intended) tour compared to the Lovesexy Tour of 1988 and 1989. Bush said how Prince was the most extraordinary and innovative live performer she had seen. Prince told his engineer Michael Koppelman that Bush was his favourite woman. Prince and Bush met backstage. The idea of them working together was floated. After Prince returned to the U.S. after the Nude Tour completed, he and Kate Bush spoke on the phone. Bush had this song – Why Should I Love You? – that she felt would benefit from having Prince’s vocals on backing. Listen to the demo of Why Should I Love You? and it sound vastly different to what would appear on 1993’s The Red Shoes! What is on the album is a reduced and cutdown version of what Prince sent back to Bush. The seven-minute-long version (which leaked online) that Bush intended for The Red Shoes had some similarities with tracks like When Doves Cry. Understandable why it might appeal to Prince.

Rather than Prince adding his vocal and it being this long and interesting song that could end The Red Shoes, Prince took it apart. He “tore it apart, rebuilding it entirely”. As Tom Doyle notes, Prince looped “a four-bar section from the chorus of the song, he engulfed it with an avalanche of ideas, filling up two 24-track tape reels, adding new drums, playing guitar, bass, keyboards and, almost as an afterthought, singing the actual vocal hook”. Michael Koppelman had to point out to Prince that he had sung a part wrong. The line, “of all the people in the world” he had recorded “all of the people in the world”. This possible dream collaboration had gone slightly awry! Prince rather confidently said he and Bush spoke about it and she was okay with him changing the words. Koppelman arrived at the studio one day to find Prince cutting up his vocal takes and sampling them to rearrange the words. Perhaps Prince realising he had made a mistake but not admitting it! The master tapes were sent back to Kate Bush and nothing was changed. She called the studio in the U.S. and was informed Prince was working on the track. A month after that, Prince’s tapes arrived at East Wickham Farm. Del Palmer (Kate Bush’s engineer and former boyfriend) told Sound on Sound how Prince had covered forty-eight tracks with everything you could imagine Not a complete disaster, he and Bush went over the song time and time again to get it into shape. Puzzling what to do with it, the version on The Red Shoes is closer to Prince’s overloaded version than Kate Bush’s more retrained original. It is one of those what-if moments. If Prince has reigned it in. If Bush had not asked him to feature and released her version. Their relationship working on that track was remote. They never met and instead would send each other stuff. Pre-Internet (or it was in its infancy), this was tapes mainly sent in the post. A bit of a letdown, it was perhaps impossible to meld these two incredible artists satisfactorily.

Listen to Bush’s backing vocals for My Computer on 1996’s Emancipation. A song that examined online relationships – Bush was ahead of the curve and sung similarly about technology’s grip for 1989’s Deeper Understanding -, you can barely detect Bush’s voice. For two artists that admired one another so much, it is a shame there is not a good, clear and clean example of the two in harmony. One can blame Prince for letting his ego take control. However, maybe he was not able to work with another artist and hone things in. Similarly, when Bush has worked with other artists since, she has called the shots and not allowed anyone else to control its direction and sound too heavily. When Prince died in 2016, she commended his artistry and control he had over his output. I can picture the two meeting in 1990 when Bush went to see him perform during the Nude Tour at Wembley Arena. I can imagine they were both quite nervous. Bush admired Prince so that opportunity to work with him was a must. Even if the final result was not as she’d imagine, she can at least she had Prince on one of her studio albums! I often wonder too if they would collaborate again if Prince were still with us. You can imagine they would be nodding to each other. It is such a tragedy that Prince died. As Prince died on 21st April, 2016, I wanted to use this feature to talk about the time he and Kate Bush met. Working together first on Why Should I Love You? Bush featuring on his My Computer. It is credit to Kate Bush that Why Should I Love You? was not one of the songs she reworked for 2011’s Director’s Cut. That album saw Bush reapproach songs from 1989’s The Sensual World and The Red Shoes. Maybe she considered Why Should I Love You? but wanted to honour Prince and not change it. It was clear then as it is now that Prince has a very…

DEAR place her heart.

FEATURE: Kate Bush: The Tour of Life: The Q Awards, 2001

FEATURE:

 

 

Kate Bush: The Tour of Life

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush at the Q Awards on 29th October, 2001/PHOTO CREDIT: Getty Images 

The Q Awards, 2001

_________

I have written about this before…

but I wanted to come back to a pretty big and important event from Kate Bush’s career. After The Red Shoes came out in 1993, there was a period when Kate Bush was out of the public eye. There was the odd single release and thing here and there but, for the first time in her career, there was a very long gap where we did not know if another album would come. Of course, Bush did release a double album in 2005. Aerial was released that year but she wrote some of the album way before then. However, in 2001, there was not really any expectation Kate Bush would bring us new music. The longest gap she left between albums to that point was between The Sensual World in 1989 and The Red Shoes in 1993 (there was also a four-year gap between Hounds of Love in 1985 and The Sensual World). We have had a longer gap since. Bush has not yet followed up on 2011’s 50 Words for Snow. However, there have been interviews with her since. She gave us her Before the Dawn residency in 2014. Bush’s most recent interview was near the end of last year. However, it was quite unexpected that we would hear from her in 2001. Not to repeat too much of what I have said before. However, I did want to mention a 2001 appearance at the Q Awards and an interview around that. It had been about seven years since Bush was last seen in public. Since 1994, things had been pretty quiet. It is amazing that journalists might struggle to recognise Bush after that time. It is like if Paul McCartney went away for seven years, you would still be able to recognise him after that time. The truth was Bush had not changed radically. She was still the same distinct and engaging person she was in the 1990s. However, now, there was a fresh energy and impetus. She became a mother in 1998 and was enjoying caring for her son, Bertie. There must have been some hesitation around appearing in public and doing any interviews after such a long time away.

However, it was journalist John Aizelwood that was tasked with interviewing Bush in a challenging year. In September 2001, there were the terrorist attacks in the U.S. Less than two months later, the Q Awards took place. It was a very strange atmosphere. Perhaps not as rowdy and charged as years previous, I guess there was a feeling of sombreness and  fear in the year. Kate Bush must have felt affected by what happened in the U.S. so might not have been quite in the mood to do an interview of speak positively. In spite of the time period, she did give her time to Q and John Aizelwood. The journalist was worried he would not recognise Bush. However, he did instantly. She was dressed down in jacket and trousers. This expectation that she would be in something eye-catching and starry. A woman now in forties, not much has altered. Bush noted Aizelwood and waved him over. They were at Harrods. She ordered a pot of tea and they sat down to chat. It was an interesting time for her. The year previous, in 2000, Peter Gabriel let slip that Bush had a child. This set the press in a frenzy. Maybe she felt she needed to do some press and speak after the sort of hysteria from the tabloids. This feeling that Bush had hidden a child away and this was scandalous. She had also been tipped to win a Q award, so she used the occasion to do her first press interview since 1994. John Aizelwood noted how Bush seemed keen to do the interview and it was not forced. Four years almost to the date until she released a new album, this was an occasion for Bush to buy herself a bit of time. EMI would have been excited for her to do the interview too. Aizelwood briefly met Kate Bush’s husband Danny McIntosh and son Bertie. They went off to shop. Bush told Aizelwood that she didn’t always want children but she looks at her son and knows that magic exists. She gave birth to him. Clearly, this was a very different artist to the one who was giving interviews in 1993 and 1994.

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush and John Lydon

One of the points that came out of the interview is how Bush was drained following The Red Shoes. The batteries had run out and she needed “to restimulate”. Sending time watching bad sitcoms and quiz shows, she wanted to be in a position where there were no demands. She saw friends occasionally but she was flat and needed time away. I am paraphrasing from a chapter in Tom Doyle’s Running Up That Hill: 50 Visions of Kate Bush book. He dedicated a chapter to 2001 and that interview/award appearance. Aizelwood was told that Bush lived in a flat in central London. She told him where but asked she did not print it. She had gone to see films and shows but kept life pretty undramatic. It was not too long until family and motherhood was on her mind. Aizelwood did get out of Bush that she was working on a studio album. Comparing her to director Stanley Kubrick – who died in 1999 -, she said how she adored him and how he had creative control. When pressed about the album and when it will arrive, Bush did not give too much away. It would be four years until she released Aerial so it was quite a gamble revealing that information and there being such a long period until anything arrived. Bush said she didn’t want to discuss something that was not finished. I am a tad confused as to when the Q Awards took place in 2001. I thought it was November but, as Tom Doyle writes, Bush arrived early at the Park Lane Hotel ahead of the award ceremony on 29th October, 2001. Our of practice being in front of photographers, rather than the mandatory and somewhat outdated red carpet process – where artists and actors pose for the cameras and give short interviews to everyone – Bush rushed down and inside. That is what every one of us would do but, as there was expectation she would chat, she was booed by the assembled press and crowd.

Bush was worried that the public were booing her. John Aizelwood reassured her they did not but she was already deflated. This special occasion did not get off to the best of starts! It was a busy and existing year for music. Musicians including Liam Gallagher, Damon Albarn, Cher, members of Manic Street Preachers and Radiohead were all at the ceremony. Word got round that Kate Bush was there. It must have been this moment of joy for them but also a feeling they might be upstaged! Maybe impetus that they should be on their best behaviour too! One might expect everyone there to be fawning and invade her privacy. The only artist who maybe crossed that line was Elvis Costello, who walked over to her table and gave her his phone number in the hope he would collaborate with her – to this date they never have. Fanboying over Kate Bush, she must have been taken back by all this interest! Considering her previous album came out in 1993 and it did not get a great reception, it just showed how loved and relevant she was – even when she was not releasing music. Her musical peers were pleased to see her. Midge Ure presented the Classic Songwriter Award to Kate Bush. Recalling the first time he met her, when Bush’s name was read out, everyone in the room for on their feet applauding this moment. I love how Bush’s first words were “Ooh, I’ve just come (cum)”. This was a line from The Fast Show. Bush always a fan of comedy. Not what anyone would expect from her, it perhaps took away some understandable nerves! Once the rapture died and Bush chatted to Donavon, she was whisked upstairs where she had her photo taken with John Lydon. A fan of each other’s work, when Lydon collected his Inspiration Award, he declared how much he loved Kate Bush and her music. Quite a magic and strange evening at the Park Lane Hotel! Lydon was interviewed after he left the stage. He was not happy how artists were clearly indebted to her – he was not kind about Tori Amos –, and he said how Bush was a true original. Not someone abiding by slavish rules.

Like Elvis Costello, Lydon was rendered someone quiet and spellbound by Bush. The same man who arrived at the ceremony in a horse-drawn rag and bone cart and was very much as punk as you’d expect was now polite and well-mannered! Unlike Elvis Costello, John Lydon was not trying to get Bush to work with him. Instead, it was two friends sharing a moment together. Nigel Godrich (the Beck/Radiohead producer was at the helm for the latter’s 2000 album Kid A and 2001’s Amnesiac) was also trying to creatively hook up with Kate Bush. Noting how as a teenager he identified with her music, I guess he wanted to produce or mix her next album. Bush was doing things on her own and, though touched, would never invite or satisfy these unsolicited requests. Before John Aizelwood said goodbye to Kate Bush, she revealed her proudest achievement of 2001 was quitting smoking. Something she did for her son I am guessing, Bush also confessed the last record she purchased was Bob the Builder’s Can We Fix It? Bush said she and a few people were going for drinks. She did not say where. Aizewlood concluded how things spiralled out of control. First badly and then really well. She was very happy there and there was ample proof that she was loved. Maybe that night spurred her creative process and expanded her ambitions regarding Aerial. That people were genuinely excited about what was coming next. Aerial did arrive in November 2005. Perhaps those who attended the Q Awards in 2001 felt Bush was just about to release new music. There would be a wait. However, when Aerial did arrive, we could understand why it took quite a while to come to light. I think about the 2001 award appearance and wonder if there will be an occasion soon where Bush gets an award and shows up. You would hope that the BRITs would have made an award for her. I think that the NME Awards should make some space for her. Any excuse to honour Kate Bush! It would be worth it to have a repeat of the 2001 Q Awards and…

THAT wonderful night.

FEATURE: International Women’s Day 2025: Inspiring Change and Togetherness in the Music Industry

FEATURE:

 

 

International Women’s Day 2025

PHOTO CREDIT: KoolShooters/Pexels

Inspiring Change and Togetherness in the Music Industry

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AS 8th March…

IN THIS PHOTO: Sabrina Carpenter/PHOTO CREDIT: Getty Images

is International Women’s Day, I want to put out the third and final feature to mark that. In music terms, there is no denying that the music industry is now being dominated by women. In terms of the best music being made. Not in terms of those in power and those with the most control. Think about the most acclaimed artists and best albums. Women are ruling and getting the most attention. They are also sweeping award ceremonies. The GRAMMYs was defined by female brilliance. So too was the recent BRITs. Charli xcx among the big winners. Even if the awards were slightly skewed towards men, it was women who shone brightest and won biggest. There is still not true equality in terms of this sense of achievement, boundary-breaking brilliance. I think the reverberations from the GRAMMYs and BRITs – and other award ceremonies – should compel some form of change and moves towards parity. When we look around, there are still fewer opportunities for women. Most professional producers are men. In terms of the songwriters appearing on the Billboard Top 100 and radio playlists. Most are men. Last year saw female journalists, artists and those in the industry talk about misogyny and discrimination. The rise in sexual assault. Radio playlists still have this male bias. Journalists writing about the male bias on Spotify. Huge festivals and smaller ones still struggling to book women and make them headliners. It is very much their issue and not because of a lack of options and visibility. Boardrooms and studios male-heavy and getting worse because of lay-offs and cuts. Across music, there is this gap between the quality of music and what women are bringing and the way they are represented and rewarded. In spite of award blitz and chart success together with huge reviews and sell-out tours, I think this International Women’s Day should be a chance for the industry to reflect and commit to change. When I see award ceremonies like the BRITs, GRAMMYs or something like that, there are few occasions when men speak about women in music and their excellence. Solidarity and showing their feminism. Very few interviews where men in music are talking about women. Both in terms of how things need to improve whilst saluting their power.

The enormous creative weight women are creating and the value they generate. Although there is not female solidary across all genres, we are seeing a lot of togetherness and support. Women in the industry connecting and there being this sisterhood. That is not to say men are not doing enough. In terms of collaboration and men in music giving props and shout outs to women, things are better than they used to be. However, it is quite telling that at virtually no televised or big event do you see anything in the way of true support from men. There is no viable and substantial feminist movement or agenda from men. Few using their platform to talk about women in studios, those on stage and the incredible songwriters and artists who are dominating. Look at wider society and when you search for the best feminist writers, books and thinkers, virtually all of them are women. In fact, I think all of them are. In terms of men writing about a feminist movement or tackling gender equality, virtually none. Maybe zero in history who have written about feminism and the need for men to be involved. This hugely one-sided thing. Of course, there are male journalists who write about women and spotlight female artists. However, when it comes to writing about issues around equality, gender, discrimination and abuse for instance, again almost everything is written by women. The importance of discussing these things and the pleasure of raising women and showing support should be expected and mandatory. As I have written before, there is no positive male movement. No movement too that integrates men into the feminist movement. Into the next or new wave. No male voices or pens contributing. Music is the most brilliant, universal thing that brings us together. A common language. I am not saying women are in dire need and they are accusing men of lacking empathy or support. I just look around and see women killing it and there being very little from men in terms of seeing this and showing their solidarity and also calling the industry out for its failings.

PHOTO CREDIT: Pixabay/Pexels

Sexism is still rife throughout music. It is not a thing that ended in the 1990s or has necessarily died away. As recently as last year reports were published regarding male bias and ongoing discrimination. I do love it when men in music – whether artists, journalists or someone else – champion women or talk about the wave of female dominance. It does not happen often but it is clear that there is at least this recognition. However, it seems foundational. When it comes to those fighting for equality. Highlighting systemic and endemic issues and also coming out as feminists – or if that word seems unappealing or outdated to some, then a modern substitute -, then there is this problem. Now more than ever there seems to be this need for unity and more from men in music. It is frankly depressing that you can go to any search engine and look for men writing about feminism or tackling subjects around gender and equality. Prominent voices are women’s. In terms of column inches and soundbites, far too few men contributing and doing what is required. One might say that music is an equal playing field and there is no need for it. Women would find it somehow insulting and ingenuine if men were more proactive. I look at all the female excellence, this solidarity and impact – from innovative artists, those slaying on the red carpet; the awesome collaborations, world-class albums and year-defining singles, plus those in every corner of the industry whose voices are so vital – and something is missing. I do think that there needs to be change. Coming off the back of the BRITs – where Jade, The Last Dinner Party, Charli xcx and Billie Eilish were among the winners -, there were some male journalists shouting out the winners (I think CLASH’s feed commentary was from Robin Murray). It got me thinking about music’s queens. How important they are and how we need to see greater moves towards equality and solidarity. An important subject to raise…

ON International Women’s Day.

FEATURE: Spotlight: Sunday (1994)

FEATURE:

 

 

Spotlight

PHOTO CREDIT: @bypip

Sunday (1994)

_________

IT is great that…

the brilliant Sunday (1994) will be playing in the U.K. in May. Their debut tour is one that you will want to be a part of. An acclaimed band that are being tipped as one that will help define the sound of 2025, I am going to get to some interviews with the trio that consists of Paige Turner, Lee Newell, and drummer ‘X’. I am new to their music so it has been interesting learning more about them. The British/American group have a sound I think will take them very far. There are a good range of interviews out there. Some are from 2024. One or two from this year. I am going to head back to last year for the first two. Even if the trio are being tipped as ones to watch this year, they were very much on the rise last year. On the radar of many people. Their debut tour – which starts on 26th April – will bring their music to new people. I want to start off with an interview from DIY. Last year, they spoke with the creative centre of Sunday (1994): Paige Turner and Lee Newell:

“What are your earliest musical memories?

Lee: I remember being carted about in the backseat of my dad’s shabby white Citroën BX. It was back in the early 1700s, so we’d be listening on cassette. He’d play The Prodigy, Skunk Anansie, The Smiths, Nirvana, Pet Shop Boys and everything in-between. I was an only child to teenage parents, so I got a very contemporary musical education. The backseats were right next to the speakers; it sounded tinny and harsh, and I absolutely loved it.

Paige: Being in a Jazz club on a weeknight with my parents and grandparents watching my grandfather play a set. It always seemed to end so late that I never wanted to get up for school the next day. My first songwriting experience was on my grandparents’ couch with my brother and an acoustic guitar. I was so nervous to try and write, but I remember being so proud and then my mom forced us to perform it at a family dinner. It was awful.

You come from Slough and California - two backgrounds that seem on the surface to be very different. What were these places like to grow up? What would you say is the common thread that creatively ties you two together?

Lee: I found it extremely difficult. It was a very violent place to grow up, and as exciting as exposed brick. As soon as I stepped outside the haven of home, I was a nervous wreck. It felt like I was stolen from another world and left to decay on a planet that did not breathe the same air as me. When I found other people that felt the same I would cling on to them, and they’re still my best friends to this day. It was the same when I first met Paige - I couldn’t spend a minute away from her. It was like we were part of the same cosmos.

Paige: The suburbs of California were quiet and mundane; smoking weed in the Costco parking lot wasn’t exactly Camden Town. I was trying to escape to gigs and festivals every chance I had, dreaming that I could be the singer of one of those bands I was seeing. When I met Lee my whole world opened up; I haven’t been bored since.

There’s a real sense of nostalgia to your output; does this stem from a yearning for a particular time/place, or from a more general escapist desire?

Lee: We get that a lot! Although I have to say, it isn’t intentional. Lyrically, the songs are about significant moments of our lives, so perhaps the nostalgia stems from there. Sonically, we just write from a place of instinct - I just throw my guitar around the room until it makes a noise we like. Then we record it”.

I would urge anyone new to Sunday (1994) to read other interviews and listen to all of their music. This is a group that very much have their own sound. One that is being taken to heart by people around the world. Let’s move to another 2024 interview. This one is from The Line of Best Fit. I am so excited about Sunday (1994). Even if they are quite fresh to me, I can instantly tell they are here for the long-run:

“Creatively, Paige Turner and Lee Newell are two sides of the same coin; one complimenting the other and finding space for each others’ ideas at any given moment; listening to their music there’s a kindred chemistry. So it would be hard to believe that they grew up on opposite sides of the world, one in LA, the other in Slough.

Newell, hailing from England – and previously the vocalist in reviled indie band Viva Brother – was raised on “whatever my dad was listening to," he tells me. "He was very young, so I had quite a contemporary sort of musical upbringing in terms of a parent's point of view. So I was listening to Prodigy, The Clash, REM, and then, like, Britpop stuff, Oasis and Blur and all that Suede.”

Turner however leant on the likes of jazz through her grandfather. “I don't listen to too much jazz, but some of that influence definitely I would take into my vocal approach. My dad loved classic rock, Led Zeppelin, and Steely Dan. I mean, The Beatles, obviously.”

Locations and upbringings aside, their pursuit of music and willingness to share it is what enabled them to find common ground and expand as artists. The pair met backstage while Newell was touring as part Brooklyn synth group Love Life and supporting The Neighbourhood. It was the ultimate meet-cute for musicians. Becoming friends first, he tells me they “haven't really left each other's side since, truthfully.”

Since forming as a group – along with an enigmatic drummer known simply as "X" – they’ve released a self-titled debut EP and are now gearing up for the deluxe edition, with the first single being “TV Car Chase”. Given that introductions only happen once (and they say first impressions count) they tell me just why the deluxe EP is so important, for both the fans and for themselves. “So we'd released six songs before, and the first one we put out was ‘Tired Boy’, which is a similar pacing to ‘TV Car Chase’. So it felt like a reintroduction,” Newell tells me.

Turner agrees on the sentiment: “The other two songs that are on the deluxe that are coming out, are maybe like, a different side to us. So we didn't want to scare people and make people think, ‘oh shit, they've already changed.’ I mean it doesn't sound too different from what we put out. We just wanted to ease back into the release.”

What reaffirms the pair's confidence in their music is that they aren’t ready to stray away from it to shock listeners, with Newell explaining, “We tend to sort of go for more mid paced, slower songs, because I feel like you can get the message across easier lyrically, at least.”

Such mid-paced tracks are becoming a signature for the group, making it clear that lyrical content is as important as all the other elements that make up the DNA of Sunday (1994). Their process is usually organic and much like many musicians, it’s a coping mechanism, a time of reflection and in this case, survival as Turner tells me. “I went on antidepressants, and I was still very in a very dark place while we were writing the song," she says. "And if anything, these three songs on the deluxe were kind of the thing that got me through that period. I was feeling so terrible. But I would be like, ‘no, let's just sit down and write a song’, because it was the only thing that distracted me from what was going on in my mind”.

Sunday (1994)’s eponymous debut album came out last year. It is a remarkable and affecting listen I think. I will end with a review of that album. Before getting there, the final interview I want to source from is DORK. Published in January, their feature charts the progress of the band. One that has had this long gestation and evolution process. Countless demos and a decade before they were really fully in bloom:

“In a world where artists are expected to have it all figured out as teenagers and know not only their creative identity, but how to cope with the pressures of presenting it, it’s more refreshing to see people who have taken their time in figuring it out. It then becomes more fulfilling for them, of course, but also richer for the listener – the artists know more about who they are and what they can do.

“After going through a lot of heartbreak within any field, if at the end of it you still want to keep going, that says a lot,” Lee affirms. “I don’t think suffering for your art is a pre-requisite, but I don’t think it hurts. You find out who you really are when you struggle. We’re figuring out who we are now.”

That journey of exploration and discovery is documented on the EP, and emotions run high, but not always in the way you’d expect. Take ‘Blonde’, a tale about watching your man leave you for a younger, prettier model – rather than being angry at her ex or bitter towards the new woman, feelings are internalised and self-directed as Paige fulfils a fantasy in her mind.

She recounts, “When you’re young and experiencing something like that, you can’t help but think: what’s wrong with me? Why do they want someone else? There must be something wrong with me. That’s a trait we both have in common; we both constantly think everybody hates us.”

PHOTO CREDIT: Nick Espinal

‘The Loneliness Of The Flight Home’ puts Paige in Lee’s mind as he pens his sorrows during a particularly dreary journey to the UK, and this magical fusion of minds shows off the band’s transatlantic appeal. It also highlights the main draw of Sunday (1994): the infatuated, complex couple at the centre of it all.

“Paige is so much better at articulating how I feel than I am,” Lee praises. “We’ve unlocked another level to our relationship, and I feel like I learn more about Paige through our music. It’s been fascinating and I feel super lucky to be able to do this together.”

There are some complexities to this, as Paige recognises. “I feel bad for other people who come into working with us because we have to try hard to make it not be just us two against everybody else. It’s an interesting dynamic.”

It’s good that the duo are used to spending time together because there’s plenty more of that to come – after selling out their debut live shows in the UK and the US, they are lined up to hit the big stages in support of girl in red. On top of all that, and recently expanding their EP with a deluxe rerelease, they are now formulating new music to expand their world.

While they try to ignore overthinking any outside opinions and stick to the fundamentals (“if we both like it, then that’s it”), Paige and Lee are both bolstered by the support they have been shown. “The main way our new music has been coloured is that we feel more confident,” Lee says. “Everything feels a little more technicolour, just more of what it already is.” Meanwhile, Paige is ready to let loose: “I’m not as nervous to say anything that’s out of left field; the fans have shown us that they get it. Time to say some weird shit”.

I am going to end with this review for Sunday (1994). A wonderful album. I am not sure whether the group have plans for an E.P. this year or another album. It will be interesting to see what comes next. The recent single, Doomsday, is one of the best of the year so far I feel. Go and check out this remarkable trio:

“Forgive me while I wallow in the melancholic wonderland that is Sunday (1994)’s debut EP, a melodic treatise that conjures such cool 1990s-era bands as Curve, Garbage and the Sundays. In fact, I’d argue that the six songs—which include their debut single “Tired Boy” and its addictive followup, “Stained Glass Window”—are tuneful portals to another time. When I close my eyes, it feels like I’m back in the living room of our first apartment, where Diane and I spent many nights enjoying the random mixes created by our Sony 5-CD player. (We each picked two discs and agreed on one.) The EP would have fit in with whatever we paired it with, from the bands mentioned above to Shawn Colvin to the alt.country gems we enjoyed at the time.

Yet, as much as a throwback as these songs are, they simultaneously sound fresh and new. The latest single, “Blonde,” is a good example. Paige Turner’s pouty vocals wrap around wistful lyrics that find her longing to be like her old beau’s imagined new girlfriend, while Lee Newell’s emotive guitar wrings slo-mo reverberations from minor notes. There’s more going on than just that, however, from (Racer) X’s steady drums to the handclaps to the profane shout-out that follows the mention of Chatsworth.

The other new songs—“Mascara,” “Our Troubles” and “The Loneliness of the Long Flight Home”—fall into the same mood-inducing mode. Theirs is an analogue sound in a digital age, if that makes sense. Newell and Turner are self-professed cinephiles and, now that I’ve heard the EP in full several times, it’s safe to say that though Sunday (1994) create 35mm-lensed music, wide in scope, they approach their songs with a noir-ish sensibility, filling them with many shadows and just a little light”.

I will finish off now. There are a lot of artists coming through at the moment you need to connect with. Among the most interesting and worthy are Sunday (1994). I would be intrigued to hear what they sound like live. I can imagine that they are a pretty popular and arresting proposition. That might be something I can find our for myself when they come to the U.K. in May. In the meantime, listen to the incredible music…

FROM Sunday (1994).

___________

Follow Sunday (1994)

Official:

https://www.sunday1994.com/

TikTok:

https://www.tiktok.com/@thebandsunday1994

Instagram:

https://www.instagram.com/sunday1994forever/

Twitter:

https://x.com/Sunday1994band

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https://open.spotify.com/artist/1vTFaCiaR50b2IXELHW52U?si=mHOmo7yfTYOX2VjfvrL-XA

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FEATURE: The Digital Mixtape: That’s What’s Up: Linda Perry at Sixty

FEATURE:

 

 

The Digital Mixtape

PHOTO CREDIT: Don Hardy

That’s What’s Up: Linda Perry at Sixty

_________

IF many might…

only recognise Linda Perry as the lead of the band 4 Non Blondes (whose most famous song is What’s Up? of March 1993), others acknowledge her as one of the most important and acclaimed songwriters ever. Someone who has written songs that we all know and love. The playlist at the end of this feature combines many of those tracks. Linda Perry turns sixty on 15th April. Perry was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2015. It is only right that I salute her ahead of her birthday. Before getting to that playlist, it is worth bringing in some biography:

“Linda Perry, as lead singer and main songwriter for 4 Non Blondes, wrote the group’s international 1993 hit “What’s Up?” prior to establishing herself as a major songwriter and producer. Her writer/producer credits including such hits as Pink’s “Get The Party Started” and Christina Aguilera’s “Beautiful," both chart-toppers.

Born April 15, 1965 in Springfield, Mass., Perry pursued her interest in music while a teenager in San Diego, then moved to San Francisco in 1986, where she sang original songs and played guitar on the streets, having written her first song by age 15. She joined 4 Non Blondes in 1989 and became its lead singer and chief songwriter. Disappointed with its polished pop sound, she subsequently left to pursue a solo career, commencing with her 1995 solo debut album In Flight, and resulting in her successful songwriting/producing activities.
In 2000, Perry wrote and produced eight tracks for Pink’s Grammy-nominated album M!ssundaztood—including the Grammy-nominated “Get the Party Started.” The following year she wrote "Beautiful," which was nominated for a Grammy for Song of the Year and won Aguilera the Best Female Pop Vocal Performance Grammy--and "Cruz," both of which appeared on Christina Aguilera's hit album Stripped.

Since then her name can be found on compositions and recordings by numerous artists including Jewel, Britney Spears, Courtney Love, Gwen Stefani, Alicia Keys, Celine Dion, Blaque, Sugababes, Lillix, Robbie Williams, Melissa Etheridge, Sierra Swan, Solange Knowles, Gavin Rossdale, Juliette and the Licks, Lisa Marie Presley, Fischerspooner, Unwritten Law, L.P., Kelly Osbourne, James Blunt, Cheap Trick, Ben Jelen, Enrique Iglesias, Giusy Ferreri, Faith Hill, Gina Gershon, the Dixie Chicks, Vanessa Carlton, Kelis, Ziggy Marley, Skin, The Format, Goapele, The Section Quartet, Adam Lambert, KT Tunstall, Little Fish, and her band Deep Dark Robot, with which she toured in 2011.

Also in 2011, Perry, who has launched the labels Rockstar Records and Custard Records, began publishing acoustic cover songs that she recorded at the piano with her iPhone, and in 2014, she appeared in the VH1 reality television show Make or Break: The Linda Perry Project, in which she worked with young musicians.

Perry has won two ASCAP awards for her songwriting. Among her other noteworthy compositions are Alicia Keys’ “Superwoman,” Gwen Stefani’s “What You Waiting For?” and “Wonderful Life,” Courtney Love’s “Letter To God,” Christina Aguilera’s “Hurt” and “Candyman,” Kelly Osbourne’s “One Word,” Celine Dion’s “My Love” and James Blunt’s “No Bravery.”

In other activities, Perry works closely with several organizations to promote charity, freedom of expression, individuality and acceptance. These include the Los Angeles Gay & Lesbian Center, and the Art of Elysium, which encourages working actors, artists, and musicians to volunteer their time to creative enrichment programs for children battling serious medical conditions, and named her its Visionary Recipient of 2014”.

On 15th April, the music world will wish a very happy sixtieth birthday to Linda Perry. I hope that radio stations use the day as an opportunity to play songs written by Perry. The vast range of her talent is impressive. I am going to end things there. A genius songwriter who I hope writes a lot more songs yet. The tracks I have included in the mixtape are a combination of songs she either wrote solo or collaborated with other songwriters on. It goes to show that there are few other songwriters…

AS talented as her.

FEATURE: Remakes and Sequels: Kate Bush’s Director’s Cut at Fourteen

FEATURE:

 

 

Remakes and Sequels

PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush

Kate Bush’s Director’s Cut at Fourteen

_________

THIS time around…

when speaking about Kate Bush, I want to look ahead to the fourteenth anniversary of her ninth studio album, Director’s Cut. I take issue with people who say this is not a studio album because it is a one (an album) where Bush reworked and re-recorded older songs. Calling it a remix album rather than a studio one is incorrect. Director’s Cut is a new work and a new album. The first of two she would release in 2011. The second, 50 Words for Snow, arrived that November. Not much has been written about Director’s Cut. A few reviews and the odd piece but, largely, it is ignored and overlooked. Seen often as one of the less worthy albums of hers. If you look at album ranking features Director’s Cut often comes eighth, ninth or tenth. Granted, it is not in my top five Kate Bush albums, though I look fondly on Director’s Cut and would not write it off or see it as insignificant. Definitely part of the cannon. Director’s Cut revisits songs from 1989’s The Sensual World and 1993’s The Red Shoes. The songs were remixed and restructured; three of which were re-recorded completely. All of the lead vocals on Director’s Cut were recorded new, as were some of the backing vocals. The drum tracks were reconceived and re-recorded (Steve Gadd on percussion). Released on 16th May, 2011 through her Fish People label, this is unique in Kate Bush’s discography. The one and only time she has reapproached songs that first appeared on other studio albums. Rather than seeing this as remixing old tracks and this not being a studio offering, it very much should be seen as a completely new work. I think that her choice of tracks to explore are interesting. I have said before how some inclusions – such as Rubberband Girl (originally on The Red Shoes), Deeper Understanding (originally off of The Sensual World) and even Flower of the Mountain (originally titled The Sensual World) – are maybe odd and songs you might expect to feature, those such as Why Should I Love You? (The Red Shoes) and Love and Anger (The Sensual World) are not included.

It is interesting to learn why Kate Bush decided to embark on the album that would become Director’s Cut. Almost six years after she released the magnificent double album, Aerial, her mind was maybe thinking back. Before embarking on an album of al- original material, there was this sense of some of her older work needing to be reassessed and re-recorded. I can appreciate there are stresses and some unhappy memories associated with The Red Shoes. In retrospect, the album does not sound as warm and rich as it could have been. Perhaps too much machinery and technology at her hands when she produced The Sensual World. Wanting to strip these albums back and ensuring that only essential layers and sounds remain. Not only can we see these older songs in a brand new light. I know people were compelled to look back at the albums the songs are from. I am repeating things I have said before though, when thinking of Director’s Cut, we need some context. In this 2011 feature from The Guardian, there is some useful detail and background:

"I think of this as a new album," Bush said. Though some of the 11 tracks were first issued more than 20 years ago, all have new lead vocals, new drums, and substantially reworked instrumentation. Three of the songs, including This Woman's Work, have been completely re-recorded. "For some time I have felt that I wanted to revisit tracks from these two albums and that they could benefit from having new life breathed into them," Bush explained. "Now these songs have another layer of work woven into their fabric."

The Sensual World is perhaps the most changed of these tracks – it has not even retained its original title. Now called Flower of the Mountain, the original lyrics have been replaced by a passage from James Joyce's 1922 novel. "Originally when I wrote the song The Sensual World I had used text from the end of Ulysses," Bush said. "When I asked for permission to use the text I was refused, which was disappointing. I then wrote my own lyrics for the song, although I felt that the original idea had been more interesting. Well, I'm not James Joyce am I? When I came to work on this project I thought I would ask for permission again and this time they said yes ... I am delighted that I have had the chance to fulfill the original concept”.

Prior to coming to some reviews, I want to bring in part of an interview from 2011. Interview Magazine asked some interesting questions I wanted to highlight. There were not that many interviews conducted around the release of Director’s Cut. It is a shame. A certain level of apathy from the press. Maybe Kate Bush wanted fewer interviews around this album as she knew she would be releasing another one shortly afterwards. In retrospect, the level of exposure and attention paid to Directors Cut was underwhelming. I think people should explore this album, as many unfairly criticise it:

“Bush’s most recent album, Director’s Cut (Fish People/EMI), offers reinterpretations of 11 of her previously released songs, with new vocal performances and instrumentation. “Flower of The Mountain” (originally released under the title “The Sensual World”) is typical of Bush’s expansive musicality. A time-traveling ode to sensual surrender, the song draws on Arabic melodies to create a primal, ancient atmosphere. “Song of Solomon” is a slow, bouncing, bass-heavy blues groove, stretched out and slowed down as if played in zero gravity. “Lily” is a mad vision of fear, fire, funk, and biblical name-dropping. The content of the songs is equally diverse; on “Deeper Understanding,” she even offers a futuristic high-concept R&B ode to the addictive false solace of the Internet. But the finest and most startling moments on Director’s Cut are the simplest and most stark: “Moments of Pleasure” is a painful meditation for voice and piano, and the aching melancholy of “Never Be Mine” should literally come with a warning—it will stop you in your tracks.

Despite all the 52-year-old Bush’s successes, she has chosen to lead a very private life. She has only toured once and has generally been reticent about giving interviews. But when I spoke with her by phone from her home outside of London, she was gracious, easy-going, and anything but reclusive.

DIMITRI EHRLICH: I thought we’d begin with talking about Director’s Cut. Let’s talk about “The Sensual World” [off 1989’s The Sensual World]. I know that when you first recorded that song, you had originally wanted to use some text from James Joyce’s Ulysses, which is always a favorite on pop radio here in America.

KATE BUSH: [laughs] Yes.

EHRLICH: But the Joyce estate refused permission, and now, 22 years later you finally got the okay.

BUSH: Yes, originally, as you say, I wanted to use part of the text, and approached for permission, and was refused. I was a bit disappointed, but it was completely their prerogative—they were being very protective to the work, which I think is a good thing. So I had to sort of go off and write my own lyrics, which . . . They were okay, but it always felt like a bit of a compromise really. It was nowhere near as interesting as the original idea. When I started to work on this project, I thought it was worth a shot just asking again, because they could only say no. But to my absolute delight—and surprise—they agreed.

EHRLICH: Looking at your lyrics to “Song of Solomon,” I found it interesting how you juxtaposed sexuality with spirituality. What inspired that?

BUSH: Well, it was quite an interesting process for me to go back and re-sing these songs because, for all kinds of reasons, they’re not the songs I would write now. I can’t really remember what my thought process was when I wrote that one originally. I just thought it was one of those songs that could benefit from a revisit. That was just one of the songs that popped into my head. I didn’t really take a great deal of time choosing the list of songs, I just kind of wrote down the first things that came into my head.

EHRLICH: It’s funny. I’d think revisiting those songs would almost be like looking at old photographs or reading old love letters from a long time ago, because as a songwriter, the emotions that you’re tapping into are the most primal, raw, and immediate ones. Was it strange to step into the emotional clothing you had worn 20 years ago and see how it fit and wonder, Who is this person?

BUSH: Yeah, it was. At first, it was quite difficult, and, at a couple of points, I nearly gave up the whole process. I found that by just slightly lowering the key of most of the songs, suddenly it kind of gave me a way in, because my voice is just lower now. So that helped me to step back into it. And although they were old songs, it all started to feel very much like a new process and, in a lot of ways, ended up feeling like I was just making a new album—it’s just that the material was already written. When I listen to it now, it feels like a new record to me.

EHRLICH: Why did you decide to re-record existing material rather than do something new, or just release the old versions remixed, or whatever?

BUSH: Well, I really didn’t see it as a substitute for a greatest hits package, but it was something I’d wanted to do for a few years. I guess I just kind of felt like there were songs on those two albums [The Sensual World and The Red Shoes (1993)] that were quite interesting but that they could really benefit from having new life breathed into them. I don’t really listen to my old stuff, but on occasion, I would either hear a track on the radio or a friend might play me one, and there was generally a bit of an edgy sound to it, which was mainly due to the digital equipment that we were using, which was state of the art at the time—and I think everyone felt pressured to be working that way. But I still remain a huge fan of analog. So there were elements of the production that I felt were either a little bit dated or a bit cluttered. So what I wanted to do was empty them out and let the songs breathe more.

EHRLICH: Your music has always been defiantly different than American pop. Do you have a love-hate relationship with classic American pop? Do you just find it boring, or is there something about it that you secretly enjoy as a guilty pleasure?

BUSH: [laughs] What a thing to say! No, I mean, god, some of the best pop music ever has come out of the States. Some of that Motown stuff is some of the best songs ever written. It’s not that I don’t like American pop; I’m a huge admirer of it, but I think my roots came from a very English and Irish base. Is it all sort of totally non-American sounding, do you think?

EHRLICH: In a good way. Your music is very original—especially the lyrical structure. It doesn’t have the kind of obvious rhyme structure and subject matter.

BUSH: Oh, well, thank you. I think with some of the rhyme structures that might be connected to the fact that I do sing in an English as opposed to an American accent, which a lot of English singers have done.

EHRLICH: I went to Oxford for a period while I was in college, and we used to say America and Britain are two cultures separated by a common language.

BUSH: I think it’s a very interesting observation. I think I was just lucky to be brought up in a very musical family. My two older brothers were, and still are, very musical and very creative, and music was a big part of my life from a very young age, so it is quite natural for me to become involved in music in the way that I did.

EHRLICH: What were your early lyrics about when you began exploring composition?

BUSH: Initially, I used to just play hymns that I knew.

EHRLICH: Interesting that your music is so adventurous, melodically, because hymns tend to be very simple, so it’s interesting that you came from such a grounded place.

Bush: Well, I just sort of used to tinker around, and then I moved on to the piano. My father was always playing the piano. He played all kinds of music—Gershwin, all kinds of stuff. He was really a hugely encouraging force to me when I was little. I used to write loads of songs when I was really young, and he was always there to listen to them for me. And it was a really wonderful thing that he did because he made me feel that they had some worth, even when they didn’t really. And he was always very honest with me. He’d say if he didn’t think perhaps one song wasthat good, or he liked that one. What was greatwas that he’d give me that time, and would always come and listen when we’d written something. So, you know, he was fantastic because he gave me the sense that he believed in me.

Ehrlich: Your lyrics often seem highly personal, but some of your earlier songs drew on more cinematic source material, like old crime films for “There Goes a Tenner,” the British horror movie The Innocents [1961] for “The Infant Kiss,” and even The Shining [1980] for “Get Out of My House.” How do these sorts of influences make their way into your work? Is it a conscious thing, or does it just happen?

BUSH: Well, “Get Out of My House” was more to do with the book than the film, just to say that. But whatever is going on in your life when you’re writing has to somehow seep into your work. And maybe if my songs feel personal, that’s very nice. I like that. I take that as a great compliment. But there are very few that really have any sort of autobiographical content. I guess that you could say that “Moments of Pleasure” has some autobiographical content, probably out of all the songs I’ve written. But I think what is great is that if anything that I do is interesting to somebody else, then I really don’t think it matters at all what I had originally intended. If people like the song, or they can draw some feeling from it, then I’m really happy about that. Quite often, lyrics get misunderstood—and I never mind that either. I guess what all artists want is for their work to touch someone or for it to bethought provoking”.

PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush

I will wrap up soon. However, before doing so, it is worth getting some critical perspective. First up is NRP and their words. It was hugely exciting and unexpected when Kate Bush announced Director’s Cut. Since 2011, Bush has reissued albums and looked back. It was quite rare back in 2011. Not many occasions when she spent time and effort re-engaging with previous work. You know she must care deeply about The Sensual World and The Red Shoes but felt that something was missing. A new opportunity to record the songs so that you can feel and hear what was perhaps missing first time around:

“Bush is best known for her canonized 1985 album Hounds of Love. It's tempting to call that record a turning point in pop: It's as weird as it is catchy, as intelligent as it is danceable. And it's only gotten better with age.

Four years after Hounds of Love, Bush released The Sensual World, on which the uncompromising singer did something out of character: She compromised. The album's title track was conceived as a distilled version of Molly Bloom's soliloquy from James Joyce's Ulysses. (If you're like me and just couldn't make it to the end of Ulysses, you may remember the passage from Sally Kellerman's impassioned reading in the Rodney Dangerfield movie Back to School.) When Bush approached the Joyce estate about using actual passages from the book, the estate declined, leaving Bush to paraphrase the text as best she could. (So Dangerfield got the thumbs up, and Bush didn't? Who says the man didn't get any respect?)

In the eyes of fans, The Sensual World hardly suffered from the limitation, but "good enough" never sat right with Bush. So, more than 20 years later, she asked again — and this time got the answer she was looking for.

The opportunity to remake the song motivated Bush to tinker with other entries in her discography. The result is Director's Cut, a collection of 11 revamped songs that made their first appearances on The Sensual World and 1993's The Red Shoes. With new words and vocals, "The Sensual World" has been re-christened "Flower of the Mountain." Bush re-recorded all of her vocals and the drums, but left most of the other instrumentation untouched, including Eric Clapton's guitar in "And So Is Love." (Okay, so she's made a few mistakes here and there.)

For those familiar only with Hounds of Love, Director's Cut is bound to open eyes. It's less energetic, hardly danceable, and it at times resembles the work of Bush's duet partner Peter Gabriel. But give the songs time. Let Bush's songwriting sink in. Just like her, you'll find yourself wanting to return to them”

The second and final review is going to come from Pitchfork. I have found a few very positive reviews. Many tend to be the sort of three-star middling ones that hint at positives but also feel that there is something futile about Director’s Cut. Many preferring the original versions. I feel that Director’s Cut allows us to get this wonderful perspective on songs that have new gravity and meaning with a lower and older voice singing them. Especially tracks like This Woman’s Work and Moments of Pleasure:

“Director's Cut transforms songs from 1989's The Sensual World and 1993's The Red Shoes. Sometimes crucial elements (rhythm tracks, vocals) are re-recorded. Some aspects (like certain guest performances) are left unchanged. Occasionally an entire song gets a note-by-note remake. It's a major and unexpected reinvention of familiar and very time-bound material, not quite "new" and also not quite what fans have been playing for years now. The very different mix of Director's Cut changes not just the sound but the emotional kick inside many of these songs. What was once the work of a shy woman who came to roaring life on record is now just as often subdued, reflective, inward-looking. It's worthy of standing as its own entry in Bush's discography, without necessarily replacing the albums it draws from.

At the time of its release, The Sensual World seemed both up to date and not of its time. The glossy studio-obsessive production sounded definitely of its moment, fitting for the era of booming drums and reverb-soaked pop trifles from bands like Fine Young Cannibals and INXS. But the songs, and Bush's performances, were stark reminders that she actually came out of the same tradition that gave us the operatic vocals of prog rock, the jazz-tinged complexity of the Canterbury psychedelic scene, the unashamed theatricality that led to Peter Gabriel dressing up like a giant daffodil. It made for a strange hybrid, the smoothness of the Big 80s meets the complexity and expressionism of the prog 70s. Much of the record's tension came from wrapping shiny pop accessibility around songs that might burst into emotionally raw strangeness at any time. Bush played to the moment, but couldn't be contained by it.

By the time of The Red Shoes-- with its prog structures, guest-star guitar heroics, world music touches, all given another dose of pop polish-- Bush's music was too ornate to fit in with the stripped-down "realness" of alt-rock. It was also still too defiantly individual to sit alongside the work of her 70s and 80s peers, many of whom had moved into comfortable, profitable, and bland MOR singer-songwriter territory. Her moment hadn't so much passed-- though it'd be hard to point out anyone else making music that sounded like this at the time-- as she'd become a genre-of-one. The fussed-over textures and genteel folk touches of adult contemporary peeled back mid-song to reveal naked eroticism, rage, joy, Bush's voice spluttering out wordless weirdness or leaping into ecstatic ululations.

What Bush has done on Director's Cut, put simply, is to strip the 80s from these songs. (That goes for the Red Shoes material, too, even though the album was released in the 90s.) The gigantic drums and digital polish, what both dated the music instantly and gave it that stark contrast between accessibility and the deeply personal, have been replaced with less showy rhythm tracks, and a warmer, more intimate atmosphere. On the original "The Sensual World", the elements drawn from Celtic folk felt like striking intrusions in an all-digital world. Renamed "Flower of the Mountain" here, those rustic elements no longer feel quite so out of place, whether you found the original an intriguing hybrid or an awkward merger of old and new. The songs still don't have the feel of a band playing together, but they have a new unity, even the synthetic elements part of a lovingly handcrafted sound. "The Red Shoes", another Celtic-inflected standout, with one of Bush's wildest performances, gains a new intensity precisely because the instruments no longer feel so sterile”.

I do love the tone and feel of Director’s Cut. When critics rank the album as bottom or last, they always say that these new versions will never replace the original. That was never the aim. Rather than seeing it as Kate Bush covering her own songs, you need to see Director’s Cut as fresh work. A series of eleven new tracks. As a body of work, they hang together. Granted, I would replace maybe three of the tracks and bring in three that I feel would work better. I think I mentioned before how the tracklisting is unusually out of balance. Bush was obviously going to open with Flower of the Mountain as that was sport of the whole reason for Director’s Cut. However, it is very middle-heavy. Ending with Rubberband Girl seems odd as I feel that This Woman’s Work would have been a perfect closer. However, these niggles aside, we should show more respect for Director’s Cut. Released on 16th May, 2011, Bush’s ninth studio album cleared the path for 50 Words for Snow. As nobody else will write about Director’s Cut ahead of its fourteenth anniversary, I felt that it at least deserved…

THIS recognition.

FEATURE: Spotlight: Revisited: Antony Szmierek

FEATURE:

 

 

Spotlight: Revisited

PHOTO CREDIT: Charlie Cummings

Antony Szmierek

_________

ONE of the most remarkable…

PHOTO CREDIT: Ed Miles for DIY

and distinct artists of his generation, this Spotlight: Revisited is all about the one and only Antony Szmierek. I featured Szmierek not too long ago and I have also interviewed him. This was before his debut album, Service Station at the End of the Universe, was released. That came out on Friday (28th February). I would urge everyone to buy the album. Antony Szmierek is also on tour at the moment and is performing across the U.K. I think that his debut album is going to be in the mix when it comes to the Mercury Prize shortlist later this year. I am going to predict the artists who will be included in a month or two – an early temperature check. Now, I want to focus on an artist who is so original and compelling. This incredible poet that mixes incredible scenes with intoxicating sonic palettes. I love how he delivers his lines and what gravitas he brings to his songs. Prior to getting to a couple of reviews for Service Station at the End of the Universe, there are a couple of recent interviews that are worth addressing. I am so pleased Antony Szmierek is getting press attention and being given the opportunity to speak about his music. I want to start out with this new interview from DIY. Spotlighting a witty and must-hear voice in music, they explore Szmierek’s starry debut album. One that takes us through the cosmos:

“While the idea of his debut finally being shared with the world might yet feel abstract, it is, in fact, just a few short weeks until his ambitious but brilliant first full-length hits the shelves. Named as a nod to Douglas Adams’ Restaurant At The End Of The Universe – the sequel to British sci-fi classic The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, and a constant source of inspiration for Antony – it’s an album that personifies his approach as a musician, digging deep to find the beauty and joy in life’s mundanity, all while casting it through an otherworldly lens.

“I read it when I was like 11 or 12, on a caravan holiday in Wales. I was so taken by it,” he explains, on how Hitchhiker’s Guide… would become both his entry point to science fiction, and a building block for his own writing. “It’s so funny thinking back on it as a narrative point of origin. [I’m] nowhere near the level of Douglas Adams, but when you know that that’s when I started trying to write my own stuff, you can kind of see it… The first page of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and that bit at the beginning, the way it’s grand – talking about the dissolution of the universe, [asking] ‘are we real or are we not?’ – but in a really comedic way, almost with this sardonic, British, wry humour? I think that’s just what all of the songs are!” he laughs. “Even now that I try not to write like that, it must just be a concrete block at the bottom of the wall that I can’t get rid of. Reading that was big.”

A far cry from the slick, showy takes on the genre in American culture, it’s actually the likes of Doctor Who and ‘90s cult comedy show Red Dwarf (“Imagine me meeting fucking Craig Charles when all this was first going on!”) that he cites as real inspirations. “All that stuff where it looks like you could push a wall down and it’s not real,” he grins. “The stuff that’s actually quite shit; that kitsch nature of it, and the sort of underdog thing that we have as British people – not quite the gloss of Americans. It seems to just naturally tie in with where I was brought up and this underdog nature of being from the North. I think it says a lot about British life; it’s like we’re always reaching for something that’s slightly bigger than ourselves and we never quite get there, then we laugh about it.”

While the backdrop to the record is, as its title offers, an intergalactic service station dotted with the kind of evocative details that would give The Jetsons a run for their money (take the self-titled opener’s “mid life crisis convertible star cruiser” or the kid riding a “coin operated meteorite”), the album’s heart is still very much about its cast. Built from his idea of the record “being an anthology, with these characters coming in and out”, each track acts as a detailed but universal vignette of life and love, doubt and loss, that just happens to take place in a galaxy far, far away.

“I think you don’t want it to be elitist,” Antony notes, on his candid approach to lyricism, that comes partly inspired by his own musical heroes – and fellow Northerners – Jarvis Cocker and Alex Turner. “I’ve got out of the habit of wanting to say clever words and trying to make it all seem grandiose, or that I’m dead smart because I know all these big words and everything. You’re trying to distil huge concepts that are probably quite wanky, but in a way where everyone can get on board. That’s teaching, I guess,” he nods. “I think I wouldn’t have been immune to doing that if I’d done this earlier on. [When you’re younger] you’re slightly more insecure, and a bit like, ‘this song needs to be clever or it needs to feel like I’m well-read’,” he adds, nodding to the positives of being in your mid-30s. “I think if you step away from that, you’re gonna make better stuff. I’m not averse to throwing in a huge word every now and again, but I’ll still talk about Twixes.”

It’s true that with Antony, what you see is seemingly what you get, which – in a way – makes the album’s focus on its fictional cast all the more intriguing. Dig a little deeper, though, and you will eventually find the narrator’s voice replaced by his own. “The record’s really sincere,” he says, “and that was something I was really, really trying to do. ‘Sincerity Overdrive’ was one of the first titles for it. [See what we did there? – Ed] That was literally the mission statement, a working title almost.

“But then I was like, how can it be this ‘sincerity overdrive’ record if I haven’t said anything?” he says, emphasis on himself. “It isn’t sincere if you’re doing it through characters. I realised I needed to be there,” he nods to the two tracks that are taken from his own personal perspective, “as that would wrap it up; if I admit these things about myself, then I’ve done it. No one will think about it this deeply, but it had to be within the confines of this narrative. I thought it was quite funny – that dry humour of breaking the fourth wall – just suddenly being like, ‘Oh, this one’s me now, I’m also here with all of these people”.

Antony Szmierek’s path is fascinating. A respected and brilliant teacher, he is now this incredible songwriter who is wowing revery audience he plays to. Szmierek has said before how was nervous to play before crowds but, unlike being a teacher, everyone who comes to see him play are there willingly! There is no sense of anyone being at his gigs who does not want to pay attention or participate. DORK spoke with Antony Szmierek last month. It is a brilliant interview I would advise people to read in full. An artist whose songs are filled with profound meaning and connection, the Manchester music resurgence is very much continuing with phenomenal artists like Antony Szmierek:

“The live show is where Antony Szmierek, both as a person and as a musical entity, really sparks into life, blending together rave-inspired hooks with a determination to deal with the big questions. Both of these ideas are placed at the centre of his upcoming debut album, ‘Service Station At The End Of The Universe’, due out in February 2025.

“I definitely wanted it to be more informed by the live show. I wanted to bring the audience with me because there’s always something different in every show that makes it all worth it. It also meant that I could really make those euphoric moments of people being together shine brighter because there’s a lot of sadness on the record, so it was important to bring in some hopeful energy.”

‘Service Station At The End Of The Universe’ transforms a motorway services on Antony’s fantasy motorway, Andromeda Southbound, from a place where dreams go to die into a study of social complexity, following the lives of the different characters that pass through on their way to a yoga class, a wedding, or back home to the one they love.

Introducing characters that in part represent Antony’s beloved North West upbringing, such as “the Patron Saint of Withington” in ‘Rafters’, but also illuminate parts of Antony’s own personality and questions that he himself deals with on a daily basis. Whether it’s accusations of being a class traitor in ‘Yoga Teacher’ or trying to cope with overthinking and existentialism in ‘The Great Pyramid of Stockport’, Antony’s whole self is poured into every aspect of the record, making it as genuine and believable as it could be.

Drawing on his eternal love for ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy’, one that ignited Antony’s passion for language, as well as local landmarks that have become key pillars of his life thus far, every picture is painted with nuance, style, and an observational accuracy that even the most experienced novelists struggle to recreate.

Pulling different literary ideas to the edges of their existence and rewinding threads to fit his huge new universe allowed Antony to create more lyrical layers than is possible on singles and EPs and underscores his immense writing talent.

“I guess in a way writing it was a lot like teaching,” Antony posits, “there’s something for the five kids in the class who really want to listen and pick up hidden meaning, but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t also something for people who just want really fun tunes with a good hook. I sort of take on this role of almost an omniscient narrator but also become the characters, it all winds together in the end.”

PHOTO CREDIT: Patrick Gunning

This ethos is at the heart of almost every track on the record, taking a seemingly everyday object or idea and elevating it into something with a profound and often existential meaning. The most obvious example of that comes from single ‘The Great Pyramid of Stockport’, which sees Antony take a local landmark and draw threads to the Pyramids of Giza, using two structures built centuries apart to explore legacy in a world that values speed and innovation.

“I was really surprised that nobody had written a song about it before; I was certain that Blossoms were gonna mention it on their album! On the surface, it just sounds like a song about this insurance company’s office in Stockport, but there’s a lot on there about getting older and time never stopping. There’s also a line about me cancelling plans because nothing feels real and I’m in tears in my bedroom, which sounds mad to have in a song about a big blue pyramid. I basically use observations as a way of projecting quite a complex idea, so the Stockport Pyramid actually ends up representing the question: ‘What’s the point in any of this?’”

Taking his cues from goth giants The Cure, Antony tried to be as sneaky as possible with his introspection, peppering super vulnerable lines into songs that you can only pick up on after a few listens. In this way, the album is able to bring together complex trauma responses and deep-rooted existential anxiety without ever getting weighed down by heavy topics.

PHOTO CREDIT: Patrick Gunning

“I definitely consider the album to have a Side A and Side B, and it is a spiral; everyone’s meeting at this service station before they go off and do whatever it is they do to make this meaningless existence worthwhile, like falling in love or going to a yoga lesson, and then it’s like ‘fuck, what if none of this means anything?’”

This hitman-like style of hiding his vulnerabilities comes to a head in ‘Restless Leg Syndrome’, a stream of consciousness that acts as the end of the album’s spiral, representing rock bottom before the album bounces back to peace, love, and joy. It’s fair to say that it’s the song on the album that is likely to become a fan favourite thanks to its brave open-heartedness, but also the one that Antony struggles with the most.

“I just worry it’s a bit much,” Antony states, “I’m proud of it, and I’m glad it’s on the record, but it’s the only one where I didn’t hide any lyrics, and it’s a bit scary. We’ve had to play it back to management, and the label and stuff, and people seem to like it, but I have to cover my ears and look away. I’m dreading playing it live the first time because I can’t get through it without crying at the moment.”

He continues: “I still wanted the record to be optimism bottled, though, and that’s why it ends on ‘Angie’s Wedding’. I guess it’s an allegory for heaven, it’s not elitist, everyone can go, it’s a celebration. I just needed to resolve it and say, ‘It’s all going to be ok in the end’, instead of ending on ‘Restless Leg Syndrome’ or ‘Crashing Up’, which is about getting older and having eczema; what a nightmare life is!”

Sonically, the record is as rooted in Antony’s personal and local past as the lyrical subject matter, clearly marked by Forton Service Station’s Pennine Tower adorning the album cover. Initially, though, re-establishing these close ties to the historically well-documented Manchester music scene was something that Antony pushed back against.

“I looked away from Manchester at first because I was trying to subvert my own expectations and second-guess what might come later, but it reached a point where I was like, ‘Nobody knows who you are yet; you’ve got to stick to who you are and what you do”.

I am going to end with a couple of positive reviews for Service Station at the End of the Universe. I am starting out with NME’s take on one of the best debut album I have heard in years. This arresting Pop poet might have been relatively unknown a couple of years ago. Now, Antony Szmierek is being tipped as a name to watch closely:

“For Szmierek, an author, poet, former high school English teacher and now full-time songwriter, ‘Service Station…’ is comfortably his most complete work to date. Showcasing the mastery with which he can envision a fully-fledged concept, he populates the record’s service station with a colourful cast of characters. Among them are bride-to-be Angie in the title track, the “patron saint of Withington” chatting up “a pound shop Geri Horner” in ‘Rafters’, and the hitchhiker travelling in search of some escapism (“You’re a galaxy / Take me away”).

Zooming in and out from this focal point, the record treads the line between fact and fiction, nodding to Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy and posing existential questions of what ancient Egyptians might accomplish in present-day Greater Manchester on ‘The Great Pyramid Of Stockport’ (“The possibilities are endless.”). Meanwhile, ‘Yoga Teacher’ makes for a woozy, calming highlight, doing exactly what it’s supposed to say on the tin (“Breathe in, release”). It also briefly explores Szmierek’s tendency to overthink, something he explores further on ‘Restless Leg Syndrome’, where his more calculated poetry spirals into momentary overdrive.

In amongst the zingers and vivid picture-painting, the record excels in its forays into mild electroclash (‘Big Light’) and house (‘Rafters’, ‘Take Me There’), unlocking another dimension to the rave-led element Szmierek has teased in the past. Here, his distinct monotone is at no risk of becoming a gimmick, when lyrics that plenty of post-punk bands would dream of penning are backed up by chameleonic, club-tastic soundscapes. ‘Service Station At The End Of The Universe’ isn’t the mark of an artist finding his sound, but a confident, authentic trailblazer who knows his craft inside out”.

I am going to end with a review from DIY. In a five-star assessment, they proclaimed an album that sounds British and local but also has this universal appeal. Quite appropriate when you consider the album’s title! I do think that this is an album that is going to be ranked alongside the very best of this year. If you have not heard Antony Szmierek then do go and follow him:

“To understand Antony Szmierek look no further than the title of his 2023 EP, ‘Poems To Dance To’, an apt depiction of the ex-English teacher’s rising blend of rhythmic spoken word and dancefloor ready production laying the backdrop for musings ranging from personal relationships to obscure places, and a poignant balance of fantasy and heavy realism. The sci-fi inspired title, a nod to Antony’s childhood favourite ‘A Hitchhiker’s Guide to The Galaxy’ that also spurned his breakthrough track, lays the path for references to home city landmarks, from the looming Stockport pyramid to the North West’s right-of-passage pub crawl, the Didsbury Dozen. It’s indicative of his outlook on his surroundings, an ever-blurred line between the tangible and the intangible, and one that will draw inevitable and not unjustified comparisons to the work of Mike Skinner. It’s prominent in the interlude’s respite found in the service station, a transient place that provides much needed consistency to the protagonist. His understanding of place grounds the otherwise lofty musings, not least the stunning stream of consciousness rising out of highlight ‘Restless Leg Syndrome’. It’s this stark contrast between the emotive and the physical that underpins much of his writing, mirrored further in the record’s pairing of poetry and inherently British genres ranging from acid house to garage and beyond. ‘Service Station…’ glides through this constant push and pull, a timeless portrayal of both the physical and emotional connection to people and place; fundamentally British yet beautifully universal”.

I would also recommend people see Antony Szmierek live if they can. Someone who is going to have a very long career, it has been a pleasure revisiting his music. He has been championed by the likes of BBC Radio 6 Music. Lauren Laverne is a particularly ardent and passionate fan of his work. I hope I can interview him again soon. Someone who is burning bright right now, this awesome songwriter deserves…

EVERY success.

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Follow Antony Szmierek

PHOTO CREDIT: Patrick Gunning

Official:

https://www.antonyszmierek.co.uk/

Instagram:

https://www.instagram.com/antonyszmierek/

Twitter:

https://x.com/antonyszmierek

TikTok:

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

Spotify:

https://open.spotify.com/artist/1odn2oz1bEsGWugQ8W3zhn?si=3hN9v5NfQIOukFOsEdBGIg

YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-VwXR6M4HD4Wo1UpTBi4SA

FEATURE: It Looks Lightest Before the Dawn: The Famous Names Who Attended Kate Bush’s 2014 Residency

FEATURE:

 

 

It Looks Lightest Before the Dawn

PHOTO CREDIT: Ken McKay/Rex 

The Famous Names Who Attended Kate Bush’s 2014 Residency

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BACK on 24th March, 2014…

Kate Bush provided her fans with a real treat. She announced that she would be on the stage at London’s Eventim Apollo for her Before the Dawn residency. Performing twenty-two sold-out dates between 26th August and 1st October, this was one of the most unexpected announcement of Kate Bush’s career. Look around now and there are a whole host of high-profile names that are Kate Bush fans. From artists to those in the media and beyond, there are some incredible and acclaimed people that cite Bush as an influence. There is renewed interest in her now considering the popularity and attention her music has garnered in the past few years. Back in 2014, one would imagine that the residency dates would be populated by regular fans. Of course, they are the majority of her fanbase and they travelled from around the world to see her. There is no hierarchy when it comes to her following. I have just published a feature marking forty-six years of The Tour of Life. Bush’s only tour, that happened in 1979. There might have been some big names in attendance at a few of the dates though, for the most part, they were your average, loyal and loving fans. Fast forward thirty-five years and the demographic had widened and expanded. Especially on that first date of 26th August, 2014, there were some huge names to show their love for Kate Bush. I will do some anniversary features for Before the Dawn closer to August. For this feature, I want to talk about the array of incredible names that paid tribute to Kate Bush back in 2014 for this stage triumph.

As Graeme Thomson notes in his biography, Under the Ivy: The Life and Music of Kate Bush, the side effect of the success and brilliance of Before the Dawn and Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God) being featured on Stranger Things n 2022, was how many constituencies she speaks to. World of comedy, literature, screen and queer discourse. We can look at the sphere of music and representatives who were there. Among the people who had this rare opportunity to show their support of Kate Bush was Lily Alen, PJ Harvey, Florence Welch, Anna Calvi, Grace Jones, Kylie Minogue, Annie Lennox, Adele and Alison Goldfrapp. In years since, artists like St Vincent, Olivia Rodrigo, Lana Del Rey, Lorde and Joanna Newsom have talked about Kate Bush or highlighted her as an influence. There is this whole other feature about just how far and wide her influence extends. All these different disciplines and corners of the map. Big Boi remains one of Kate Bush’s biggest fans. An event like Before the Dawn brought together such an array of artists. Representatives from Pet Shop Boys, Orbital, Prefab Sprout, Suede and Killing Joke were there. I believe Paul McCartney, Elton John,  David Gilmour and Peter Gabriel were in attendance. Decades-lasting artists that knew how hard it was to remain active and relevant after so many years. It was this glorious outpouring of love from music’s alumni. Artists who could identify with Kate Bush. Some she had worked with and called friends. Others whom she had never met but wanted to express their gratitude and fandom.

IN THIS PHOTO: Paul McCartney/PHOTO CREDIT: Getty Images

Outside of music, there were plenty of other big names in attendance. The world of film and theatre was well represented. Ian McKellen, Keira Knightley, Miranda Richardson, Jude Law, Gemma Arterton and Rachel Weisz. Directors Steve McQueen, Danny Boyle and Paul Greengrass. No doubt influenced by her music. Something they bring to their films. I wonder if we will see Bush’s music appear in future films from these directors. Throw into the mix the likes of Terry Jones, Tim McInnerney, Terry Gilliam, Noel Fielding, Dawn French, Frank Skinner, Jo Brand Lenny Henry. Those from the world of fashion were there. Stella McCartney and Kate Moss were at the concerts. Authors such as Jeanette Winterson, David Mitchell and Phillip Pulman were there. Winterson wrote about Kate Bush in an article praising her talent. Micthell wrote an introduction for Kate Bush’s lyrics book, How to Be Invisible (he also wrote some of Before the Dawn alongside Kate Bush). Although some rumoured megastars such as David Bowie and Madonna (and Prince) did not go to Before the Dawn, it is no surprising seeing the faces that went. Regular fans are brilliant and valuable, though celebrities and high-profile names how just how far her influence has spread. Its real impact. These names that saw Bush were not doing it to be seen or fashionable. They recognise that there was no Kate Bush before Kate Bush. That her catalogue goes deep and transcends boundaries, genres and time periods. The openness of her expression and singularity of her vision (thanks to Graeme Thomson for his words). David Bowie, Stanley Kubrick and Björk come to mind as comparisons. Individuals and mavericks. Futuristic and fearless. Those that mix humour, dark imagination and humour. Björk was among those who was at Before the Dawn. So too were Lauren Laverne and a galaxy of respected names from across the arts. Standing delighted and raptured with other fans.

After 2022, when Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God) was propelled back into public consciousness, there was once again this widespread outpouring of collective love. However, Before the Dawn offered something else. A physical base. This location where fans from so many different countries were stood close to some well-known fans. I have written before about the celebrities who were at Before the Dawn. Instead, here, it is worth noting why they were there. I guess a few were there because it was a big ticket and they were not huge fans. However, it was this shared salute that moves me. How authors, film actors, directors, musicians and writers alike joined together to see Kate Bush perform. Not only to see her perform. Because they are influenced by her. Because her music has made an impact on their life. Different generations all affected by Kate Bush in different ways. In August 2014, the BBC broadcast a documentary about Kate Bush to coincide with Before the Dawn. Some famous fans who were at Before the Dawn contributed (including Elton John, Big Boi and David Gilmour), alongside Tori Amos and St Vincent. I do wonder whether another live event might be announced in years to come. Kate Bush has not ruled it out entirely. Just think about who might be in attendance. Since 2014, a whole new generation of artists count Kate Bush as an influence. Rather than she Before the Dawn as a final live chapter, it might be the middle of a trilogy. One that started in 1979 and might end shortly. One of the most important aspect of Before the Dawn was seeing just how far Bush’s music had spread. Kate Bush might have been nervous when she stepped onto the stage for that first night of the residence on 26th August, 2014. However, alongside her ordinary and loving fans was this wave of high-profile and acclaimed people who were so keen to pay respect to this incredible artist. In 2014, during a very special run of concerts, the Evetim Apollo in Hammersmith was…  

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush during the filming of the video for And Dream of Sheep; a song that is part of her suite, The Ninth Wave/PHOTO CREDIT: Trevor Leighton

FILLED with love.

FEATURE: It All Led Up to This… Kate Bush’s The Tour of Life at Forty-Six

FEATURE:

 

 

It All Led Up to This…

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush performs Wuthering Heights during The Tour of Life in 1979

Kate Bush’s The Tour of Life at Forty-Six

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BEFORE getting down to things…

PHOTO CREDIT: Getty Images

people will call the tour different things. Originally called the Kate Bush Tour or Lionheart Tour, it was later renamed Tour of Life. I call it The Tour of Life, as I include the ‘The’. Everyone will have their own name or preference. In any case, there are some facts which are irrefutable. The Tour of Life had its warm-up gig on 2nd April, 1979 at Arts Centre, Poole and it ended on 14th May, 1979 in the Hammersmith Odeon. The set consisted of twenty-four songs. Tracks mostly taken from her first two albums, 1978’s The Kick Inside and Lionheart. A couple of new tracks, Egypt and Violin, would appear on Bush’s third studio album, Never for Ever. I am going to move on in a minute. First, the Kate Bush Encyclopedia provide some information when it comes to the rehearsals, the band and also an unexpected tragedy that occurred at the end of the warm-up gig in Poole:

“Rehearsals

The tour was to become not only a concert, but also incorporating dance, poetry, mime, burlesque, magic and theatre. The dance element was co-ordinated by Bush in conjunction with Anthony Van Laast – who later choreographed the Mamma Mia! movie and several West End smashes – and two young dancers, Stewart Avon Arnold and Gary Hurst. They held morning rehearsals for the tour at The Place in Euston, after which Bush spent afternoons in Greenwich drilling her band. Off stage, she was calling the shots on everything from the set design to the programme art.

Band

The band playing with Kate Bush on stage consisted of Preston Heyman (drums), Paddy Bush (mandolin. various strange instruments and vocal harmonies), Del Palmer (bass), Brian Bath (electric guitar, acoustic mandolin and vocal harmonies), Kevin McAlea (piano, keyboards, saxophone, 12 string guitar), Ben Barson (synthesizer and acoustic guitar), Al Murphy (electric guitar and whistles) and backing vocalists Liz Pearson and Glenys Groves.

Tragedy

The tour started on April 2 with a tragedy. The highly experienced lighting director Bill Duffield fell through an open panel high on the lighting gallery. He would die of his injuries a week later. Despite this, the tour still went on. A fundraising benefit concert was added to the schedule, taking place on 12 May 1979 to raise money for Bill’s family and featured Peter Gabriel and Steve Harley, for whom Duffield had also worked”.

 IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush pictured in Liverpool shortly before her The Tour of Life date at the city’s Empire Theatre on 3rd April, 1979

Even though 1979 was the year after Kate Bush released two studio albums, there seemed to be a longer history. Everything leading up to this. When Bush was playing in pubs and clubs in and around London in 1977 with the KT Bush Band. Even before then. Perhaps seeing David Bowie perform his final gig as Ziggy Stardust in 1973. There was something in Kate Bush from when she was a child and teenager. That desire to express her music in a huge and ambitious way. One of the reasons why I love The Tour of Life is that there was some unhappiness around her first two albums. At least a feeling that she was being guided rather than leading things herself. 1979 was mostly dedicated to this tour and her working on a third studio album. One she would co-produce. There are not that many features dedicated to The Tour of Life. It is good to get other people’s perspectives about this incredible event. Even though Bush put a lot of her own money into it and it actually lost money, the experience was a magical one. A chance for fans around the U.K. and Europe to see Bush on stage delivering this groundbreaking show. I have said before how the invention of the wireless head mic was a revelation. One that impacted live performance ever since. I am going to pop in some words from Dreams of Orgonon about The Tour of Life:

“Rather than feeding on nostalgia (a hard feat for a recent artist to pull off), Bush used her existing work as a diving board for her live shows. For all the strengths of The Kick Inside and Lionheart as albums, the live versions of a few of their songs are superior: the revamped band bring the songs a power the original recordings sometimes lacked. “Coffee Homeground” sounds tighter, and even the unimpeachable “Wuthering Heights” improves slightly when Alan Murphy improvises bits of the track’s guitar solo. There are plenty of odd musical choices throughout the shows: there’s an electronica-inflected rendition of Satie’s Gymnopedies leading into “Feel It,” and “James and the Cold Gun” becomes the 10-minute prog jam its album counterpart was itching to be. This doesn’t suggest that Bush has been constrained by the studio — in fact, it’s likely she works better outside of the traditional rock band format. But in many ways she’s liberated by her chance to do musical theater, showing off what her songs look like and pushing some aspects of their sound a bit further.

In theory Bush was doing the Lionheart Tour, as it was her most recent album. Yet in practice, it was equally the Kick Inside Tour. All the songs from both albums were performed barring “Oh To Be In Love” (perhaps justifiably — it’s the Bush album track which most feels like a holdover from the Phoenix years), plus a couple of new songs called “Violin” and “Egypt,” the latter of which we’ll return to next week. It’s a well-organized setlist, as Kick and Lionheart are both preoccupied with the sort of adolescent world-storming the tour is. Bush’s concert setlists show off this interplay of albums well: Act One is constructed around the lighter songs of The Kick Inside like “Them Heavy People” and “L’Amour Looks Something Like You” with the two new songs, while Act Two centers the anxiety-ridden bulk of Lionheart plus “Strange Phenomena,” and Act Three provides the show with a theatrical climax of “Coffee Homeground” and “Kite” before the encore of “Oh England My Lionheart,” and finally “Wuthering Heights.” Setlists can be unruly things: while touring for albums, you’ll want to intersperse the newer material with the hits. Bush keeps this in mind while also remembering she’s doing a stage show with act breaks and thematic resonances. It’s a strong act, one that’s bolstered by its setlist.

The artistic precision of the concert belies what occurred behind the scenes. Bush was exhausted by the shows and the preparation for them, with her essentially all-day rehearsal schedule giving her little-to-no time off. The scale of the shows and the extensive travel involved (Bush is famously afraid of traveling by plane) are likely a contributing factor to Bush’s decision to never tour again. A likely further cause is the tragic first night of the tour. During a warm-up concert at Poole, lighting director Bill Duffield fell through an open panel around the stage and landed on a concrete floor 17 feet below. After a week on life support, Duffield died. It was a traumatic moment for everyone involved in the tour, and gave the group pause about whether to continue. When they inevitably did, it was as much as because of the effort put into the shows as it was for Bill himself.

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush performing at the Falkoner Teateret in Copenhagen, Denmark during The Tour of Life in April 1979/PHOTO CREDIT: Jorgen Angel

Bush didn’t forget Duffield, keeping tabs as she did on everyone she worked with. The first date of the final London stretch of the tour was a benefit concert for Duffield’s family. The night saw a drastic departure from Bush’s other concerts in many respects: the setlist was significantly different, as Bush wasn’t the only singer performing that night. Two other artists who’d worked with Duffield were present: Steve Harley and Peter Gabriel. Bush had previously worked with established names (e.g. Geoff Emerick), but appearing onstage with established British rock stars was a step forward for her. Harley had scored a #1 single with his glam band Cockney Rebel in 1975 when they released “Make Me Smile (Come Up and See Me),” and didn’t fall out of the albums charts for the next few years. While in 1979 he was hardly the big name he had previously been, with his attempt to go solo beginning with a critically savaged and commercially disappointing album, he had hardly been forgotten by listeners of British pop. Peter Gabriel, however, was at the top of his game. Unlike Harley, Gabriel was confidently traversing through the early years of his post-Genesis career, with the first two of a quartet of self-titled albums under his belt, both of which had made the top 10, and a major solo tour under his belt. The classic “Solsbury Hill” had climbed to #13, and Gabriel was good to go. At the Duffield concert he performed the effervescent “I Don’t Remember,” a wild ballad of the kind of formalist mountain-climbing and despair Gabriel had made his bread and butter while in Genesis. A wailing Kate Bush joins him on backing vocals, and sounds like her larynx is about to combust under the weight of the song’s Frippertonics. Much easier on Bush is a traditional cover of “Let It Be,” a song she’d sung before but still hadn’t made her way into (this would change — wait until this blog hits the late Eighties). Conversely, Gabriel seems to struggle with the song, as Paul McCartney’s gentler songwriting chafed with the new modes of composition he’d been exploring on his own albums and tour. A duo was established, however: Bush and Gabriel would sing together again.

It was a wild time for Bush. “It’s like I’m seeing God, man!” she said enthusiastically. When she’s onstage in a black-and-gold bodysuit and blasting her bandmates with a golden, it’s easy to believe she made that comment while looking in a mirror. It takes a shot of the divine (or perhaps a deal with it?) to stage a tour of this magnitude and success while dealing with such severe drama behind the scenes? It’s no wonder Bush stayed in the studio after this, recording closer to home all the time until she set up a studio in her backyard. Even when she finally returned to the stage thirty-five years later, she made sure her venue was in nearby London. 1979 was a different time. A Labour government was feasible, and Kate Bush was regularly on TV. She plays things close to the chest now, never retiring from music but often looking infuriatingly close to it. In a way, she retired in 1979. Kate Bush the media sensation was a spectacle of the Seventies. She cordoned herself off afterwards, becoming Kate Bush the Artist. Next week we’ll look at Never for Ever, the first post-tour Kate Bush album where she unleashes a flood of ideas into the world. What does one do after the Tour of Life? In Bush’s words: “everything”.

In 2020, Prog wrote about The Tour of Life. I have said how everything led up to The Tour of Life. It was a chance for Kate Bush to asset some independence and create a project very much in her own vision. It was a big undertaking. Throwing so much into it, Bush’s reputation was on the line:

“But in many other respects, the tour was utterly grounded in reality. The singer spent six months beforehand working herself to the bone as she attempted to forge a brand new model of what a live show could be, then another two months doing the same as she took it around Britain and Europe. And it was hit by tragedy when lighting engineer Bill Duffield was killed in an accident after a warm-up show, his death almost bringing the whole juggernaut to a halt before it had even started.

But all that was in the future when the idea for the tour was conceived. Ironically, Bush herself was the first to admit that there was no need for her to do it. “There’s no pressure,” she said in 1979. “But I do feel that I owe people a chance to see me in the flesh. It’s the only opportunity they have without media obstruction.”

“Kate was never at ease in the public eye,” says Brian Southall, who was Artist Development at Bush’s label, EMI, and had worked with the singer since she was signed. “Whether that was performing on Top Of The Pops or doing interviews. She was very reserved, very wary, I think by nature shy. So this spotlight on her was new.”

The singer was fully aware that anything she did would have to raise the bar on everything that came before. But even then, she was trying to manage expectations – not least her own. “If you look at it, it’s my reputation,” she said 1979. “And yes, I hope that it’ll be something special.”

EMI were unsure what the show would involve, so the costs were reportedly split between the label and Bush herself. In return, they got an artist who threw everything into her biggest endeavour so far.

“She was very determined about how her music was presented and performed – that was pretty obvious from her first album,” says Southall. “So no one saw any reason to step in and stop it. The rock’n’roll story was that you put singles out, you put albums out, you went on Top Of The Pops, you toured. But she wasn’t prepared to do the conventional thing.”

In fact no one realised just how unconventional it would be – with its choreography, dancers, props, multiple costume changes, poetry and in-house magician, there was no precedent with which it could be compared.

Rehearsals began in late 1978. Bush had already trained with experimental dancer/mime artist Lindsay Kemp, one-time mentor of David Bowie. But this tour would entail a new level of aptitude entirely, and the stamina to simultaneously dance and sing for more than two hours every night.

Dance teacher Anthony Van Laast was brought in from the London School Of Contemporary Dance to choreograph the shows and help hone Bush’s abilities. Van Laast brought with him two protégés, dancers Stewart Avon Arnold and Gary Hurst. Van Laast put the singer through the equivalent of boot camp at The Place studio in Euston, working with her for two hours each morning. Bush’s own input was crucial to the developing routines.

“Kate knew what she wanted, she had very specific ideas,” says Stewart Avon Arnold today. “What she wanted was in her head, and she wanted people around her who could help her put it into movement. She had so many hats on at that point – artistic, creative, musical.”

If the mornings were for the dance aspect of the slowly coalescing show, then the afternoons were for the music. As soon as she was done with Van Laast, Bush would make the eight mile journey to Wood Wharf Studio in Greenwich, south London, where she would meet up with a band that included Del Palmer, guitarists Brian Bath and Alan Murphy and her multi-instrumentalist brother, Paddy Bush. Also present was her other brother, John Carder Bush, who would perform poetry (and whose wife would provide vegetarian food for the tour). It was hard work for everyone involved and as the show neared, Bush would work 14 hours a day, six days a week”.

Rather than repeat what I wrote in previous anniversary features, the angle I want to bring in here is that balance between the risk and gamble Bush took and how necessary The Tour of Life was. As a popular artist, she was expected to tour. However, it was the sheer scale of the production that was unexpected. Not just an ordinary Pop tour. Despite some flawed moments and some mixed reviews, there was a lot of ecstasy and celebration for The Tour of Life. I think it gave Kate Bush the confidence to record a third studio album more ambitious than her first two. It also remains this oddity: Bush’s one and only tour.

PHOTO CREDIT: Rex

On 2nd April, it will be forty-six years since the first performance. In terms of the risks, there was a lot on the line. Kate Bush’s reputation. She said that and must have been terrified. The fatigue and hassle of travelling. Going in cars, buses and planes to various destinations. Not having much time to rehearse when she was in various towns and cities. There was also the sense of expectation. Bush’s expectation and that of critics. The need to blow everyone away and prove herself. Also, the financial burden. Bush and the label both putting money in. Expectations EMI had in terms of its profitability and success. There was also how Bush would follow it. Whether she would tour again. Fans hungry to see her play. The upsides outweighed the risks. The realisation of an ambition. The huge critical acclaim. The energy and skills Bush took from The Tour of Life to producing and writing her next album. The legacy The Tour of Life has. A female artist merging theatre, mine, poetry and music. That headless mic invention. Going beyond the boundaries of a traditional Pop concert. That has impacted artists today. I have also said how there needs to be a 4K/HD version of The Tour of Life. A special that has the 1979 Nationwide documentary and then a set from The Tour of Life afterwards. We are still talking about the tour all these years later. Whether the Lionheart Tour, Kate Bush Tour or The Tour of Life, it is a spectacle that fans of Kate Bush adore. I would have loved to have been at one of the shows! Bush has spoken about it in years since and recalls how she really enjoyed the experience. I think it is a part of her career that deserves more attention. On 2nd April, when Kate Bush walked onto the stage at Arts Centre, Poole, that the first steps of this incredible tour would…

GO down in music history.

FEATURE: International Women’s Day 2025: Queens That Opened My Eyes to the Power of Music

FEATURE:

 

 

International Women’s Day 2025

Queens That Opened My Eyes to the Power of Music

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IN the second feature…

IN THIS PHOTO: Björk in 1995/PHOTO CREDIT: Corbis

ahead of International Women’s Day on 8th March, I wanted to talk about the queens of music that expanded my horizons. I grew up in the 1990s when the music industry was hugely dominated by men. There was a definite bias towards them. A toxicity in the press and a misogyny that must have been incredibly hard. This rolled into the 2000s. The way so many young women were projected in the media. Over-sexualised. I was probably too young to realise how bad it was for women. Although a lot of my music tastes were male artists and bands, it was women in music that truly opened my eyes to its power and possibility. I have said before how Madonna was one of the first artists I really fell for and admired. I heard her music all through my childhood and loved her albums of the 1980s. However, when Ray of Light arrived in 1998, it awoke something in me. I had not really bonded with Electronic or Dance music. Ray of Light not only confirmed the fact Madonna was peerless. It also compelled me to delve into genres I had not really investigated before The fact Madonna kept reinventing herself. Ray of Light scored some of my best moments at high school. Some really happy times. It is obvious how much of an impression Kate Bush made on me. If Madonna and artists like Björk arrest my senses because of their music diversity and how incredibly strong individual and original they were, Kate Bush opened the senses. Albums like The Kick Inside and Hounds of Love revealed this artist with a singular voice. Even as a teenager I knew how rare it was for a female artist to produce her own album. Something not encouraged in the 1990s perhaps. Or not common. Bush’s incredible work in the 1980s no doubt inspired so many women coming through a decade later. Although I was very into Britpop, I found that a lot of incredible women releasing amazing work were perhaps not giving the same amount of oxygen and respect. Jagged Little Pill by Alanis Morissette was an album that was so different to anything from the Britpop crowd.

Artists like Alanis Morissette and bands like Republica, Sleeper and Elastica definitely provided something fresh and exciting. One of the biggest music loves of my teenage years was R&B and girl groups. I was never a huge fan of the Pop mainstream and found a lot of commercial Pop uninspiring. Groups such as TLC, En Vogue, Spice Girls and All Saints were fond loves of mine. The chemistry in the groups and their incredible dynamics. The fact they could have this Pop core but there was grit, swagger, passion and elements of R&B and so many other genres in the mix. Because of this, I explored R&B an Soul. Going off in different directions. Phenomenal artists like Lauryn Hill. Making me not only more connected with music and the emotions expressed. Compelled by wider and important issues. Not to say male artists were insignificant or not discussing important things. However, a lot of the Hip-Hop and Rap queens of the 1990s and 2000s made me a lot more conscientious and politically-minded. I am not sure exactly when it happened. I had been into groups like Public Enemy and N.W.A. However, there was something amazing and empowering women in the genes that spoke to me more. Whitney Houston, Amy Winehouse, Gwen Stefani and so many other women whose music and phenomenal talent changed me in different ways. The Pop music of Kylie Minogue in my childhood was addictive. Albums like Light Years (2000) and Fever (2001) helped me through some tough times when I started out at university. I think back at my musical education through the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s. So much admiration to incredible women. Releasing music in an industry that didn’t always have their best interests at heart. The sort of barriers and obstacles in front of them.

Looking around the music scene of the past decade or so, things have changed but not improved enough. Year in and year out, women are producing the finest music. There are too many names to mention, but this domination hopefully will see bigger strides towards equality. Less discrimination. You only have to look around and see Pop icons like Charli xcx and Billie Elish. Taylor Swift setting recordings and inspiring so many other women. Maybe I cannot articulate it as well as I should. Women changed how I looked at music. Their music still with me now. As I look at the new wave of artists coming through, there is so much to be excited about. I think about the future and how it is different to when I grew up. There are more platforms and opportunities for women. Even though festivals and radio playlists are not equal and need to shift, media attitudes have changed. Not as toxic and sexist as past decades, I want to show my love and respect to queens past and present who have impacted me. On International Women’s Day, I will be listening to playlists of songs from women who were instrumental and important in my childhood. Those who followed me through adulthood and are slaying today. From the artists who led me to new genres, scored wonderful memories, got me through tough times and showed me a whole world of possibilities, it is only right I salute the women who…

CHANGED my life.

FEATURE: International Women’s Day 2025: The Best Singles and Songs from the Best Albums By Women This Year

FEATURE:

 

 

International Women’s Day 2025

IN THIS PHOTO: Victoria Canal/PHOTO CREDIT: Martina Matencio/Rolling Stone UK

The Best Singles and Songs from the Best Albums By Women This Year

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FOR my first feature…

IN THIS PHOTO: FKA Twigs

around International Woman’s Day 2025 (which takes place on 8th March), I thought it would be a good opportunity to compile a playlist of songs from terrific albums this year. The very best singles. Saluting some amazing queens across different genres, it will go to show what an incredible contribution women are adding to the modern music scene. Without doubt producing the best music of our time, I do hope this year is one where we will start to see more of a move towards gender parity across all areas of music. How there will be greater recognition of women’s rights and quality. That there is greater action taken with regards the rise of sexual assault and abuse. That an overdue music #MeToo movement arises or takes some shape. That, above all, women feel truly safe and valued. I don’t think this is the case at the moment. This year is quite new, though we have already seen some truly astonishing albums and singles from amazing women. Before getting to the mixtape, this feature from the United Nations talks about the themes and objectives of this International Women‘s Day:

“On 8 March 2025, join us to celebrate International Women’s Day under the theme, “For ALL women and girls: Rights. Equality. Empowerment.”

This year’s theme calls for action that can unlock equal rights, power and opportunities for all and a feminist future where no one is left behind. Central to this vision is empowering the next generation—youth, particularly young women and adolescent girls—as catalysts for lasting change.

Besides, the year 2025 is a pivotal moment as it marks the 30th anniversary of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action. This document is the most progressive and widely endorsed blueprint for women’s and girls’ rights worldwide that transformed the women’s rights agenda in terms of legal protection, access to services, youth engagement, and change in social norms, stereotypes and ideas stuck in the past.

Engage media, corporate leaders, governments, community leaders, civil society and youth, and others with influence to take action in your communities. Ask leaders to take action and invest in promoting women’s rights and gender equality. Share International Women’s Day stories and messages on digital platforms, using the hashtag #ForAllWomenAndGirls to spark dialogue and inspire action”.

In the next feature around International Women’s Day, I will talk more about the need for parity and improvement through the industry but also salute some of the brilliant women who are truly inspiring. For now, I have assembled a collection of songs from sisters in music who have crafted gold this year. It does underline and emphasise my point that women in music are…

IN THIS PHOTO: Doechii

RULING and in charge.

FEATURE: Generation Alpha: Feminism’s Next Wave, A Need for Hope and a Positive Men’s Movement

FEATURE:

 

 

Generation Alpha

PHOTO CREDIT: Thaís Sarmento/Pexels

Feminism’s Next Wave, A Need for Hope and a Positive Men’s Movement

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IF you…

 IN THIS PHOTO: Caitlin Moran/PHOTO CREDIT: Jay Brooks/The Guardian

forward to the 1:56:35 section of the video embedded below, you will see The Trouble Club’s Ellie Newton talking with Caitlin Moran. You can see her preparing for the interview. That would have been quite intimidating. One of the biggest and best guests The Trouble Club has hosted, Moran was speaking from Manchester Central Exchange Auditorium on Saturday, 15th February. I was not able to get there myself, though I did watch it online. A lot struck me. I am going to include another interview with Caitlin Moran and also a bit about her most recent book, What About Men?, from 2023. It was subjected to some harsh reviews, but also some really nice ones. You can buy it here:

“3. It makes peace in the gender war

Moran’s honesty and humility offers us a model of how to transcend the culture wars without avoiding the difficult conversations. Her book suggests that men and women can bring the best out of each other by celebrating our differences. Moran shows us that we don’t live a zero-sum game:  in order for women to win men don’t have to lose and vice-a-versa. She offers a vision of a different way for men and women to relate to each other. As a firm believer in the power, possibility and pursuit of peace whether in the Russia-Ukraine war or the politically-driven culture war or the subtleties of gender war, I sincerely appreciated her efforts.

4. It celebrates good masculinity

Moran believes our society will be happier and healthier if men and women find ways to celebrate and appreciate one another.  It was this line in her book that struck me as a vital perspective:

“There should be no shame in being a man. Being made to feel shame for how you are born is something every other progressive movement is trying to remove and trying to impose it on the one group that didn't until recently feel shame; straight white men, benefits no one.”

5. It is hopeful

It’s been a long time since I have read something about gender which was as full of hope as this book is. Sadly, many books in this field are written in a bid to fight one’s corner, including those coming from the church. Moran’s posture offers us a much-needed challenge. If an outspoken feminist, who claims to have only stepped inside a church once in her life, (apparently for Rev Richard Coles’ last service in his parish) has no fear of showing support to men and their rights, or of promoting a Christian sexual ethic of commitment before sex, or of seeking to find a peaceful resolution to the gender wars, how much more should Christians be willing to do the same?

My one and only issue with the book was when it tended to lapse into stereotypes. Being the sort of man who doesn’t like to fix things (I wish I did and I could), and who doesn’t find it hard to express emotions (have I overshared already?) and who does care about my appearance (check out my latest charity shop find!) I sometimes felt a little misunderstood. Or even worse, unintentionally pigeonholed as not really being Caitlin’s idea of what a man is. This is one of the biggest challenges of anyone writing about gender, how to do so without either reinforcing stereotypes or ignoring genuine difference”.

Caitlin Moran is known best for writing about women and her perspectives. Celebrated books like 2011’s How to Be a Woman and 2020’s More Than a Woman. Cailtin Moran noted, when speaking for The Trouble Club, how there were no books out there about positive masculinity or one that tried to create this positive men’s movement. No men were writing about it so she thought that she could. However, from liberal and right-wing men alike, they attacked her because they felt like she was trying to tell them (men) they were not in touch with their emotions. Jokingly calling the book a waste of f*cking time, there was this frustration I felt. How a book with really good intentions that wanted to create conversations and changes, instead, led to criticism and abuse online. Moran said how she had to deactivate – or take herself off – Twitter/X for a month. She told Ellie Newton how there is a rise in extreme violence and abuse from men. How the majority of the prison population are men. The majority of the homeless population. How also the leading cause of death for men under fifty is suicide. There is a rise in right-wing attitudes, incels and men looking to vile and poisonous influencers like Andrew Tate and Jordan Peterson. With women becoming perhaps more liberal, Moran asked whether we will have marriages a decade from now if men and women are moving in different directions politically and ideologically. How there is not a positive men’s movement. One that addresses issues and worrying trends and discusses it. How there is this sense of progression and interactions that can help to tackle this rise in violence and abuse from men but also address the high suicide rates and what can be done. A lot of work to be done, it seems extraordinary that no positive men’s movement exists in 2025! No wonder Caitlin Moran felt she could and should write a book like What About Men? Too bad the people she was writing it for felt it was an excuse to vilify her!

PHOTO CREDIT: Anh Nguyen/Pexels

I look around society now and observe when moving through London how much low-level aggression and toxicity there is from men. Always a sense of danger and violence. How insanely scary it must be for women. Margaret Atwood’s quote of “Men are afraid women will laugh at them, women are afraid men will kill them” still sounds so relevant today. With this move to the right and young men especially being mobilised by incels and misogynists, there is a definite desire for collective action. Men talking to other men about changes and addressing something hugely troubling. What resonates with me too was what Caitlin Moran was saying about women. How she learned – when discussing her daughter’s eating disorder and severe mental health issues – to listen and not constantly try to fix things. How women come to men with a problem or crisis and men try to ‘fix’ it, rather than listen. I think that discipline that many women naturally possess is a reason why perhaps men are far less receptive of a positive men’s movement or engaging in feminism in a productive and useful way. That may seem all-encompassing but Moran left the audience with something wonderful. She has shelved (for now) a planned book and instead wanted to get out a series of love letters in book form. At such a dark and violent time, there is a need for serotonin and hope. She quoted Nick Cave who said, “hope is optimism with a broken heart”. At a time when it is hard to be optimistic, can we offer each other hope? I think the book is going to be How to Be Hopeful, though it might just have been her thinking of a placeholder. I will end with the main reason for this feature. The reason Moran wrote What About Men? is, as she explores in this feature (with regards to male problems and issues), “no sense of these all being folded in together, under the subject “How things needs to change for boys, and men” in the way they have in feminism”.

In 2020, when revisiting How to Be a Woman, Caitlin Moran noted how she looks back at the book and realises some of the things that she got wrong. Some women in the audience up in Manchester on 15th February thanked Moran for that book and what it meant to them. However, in her thirties when it was written, Moran is just shy of being fifty now. She sees it with different eyes. She did in 2020:

“In the decade since writing that book, the world has come to look very different. Now, happily, feminism makes constant, worldwide news. Beyoncé makes albums that feature Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie explaining what a feminist is. Dior does shows with the word “FEMINIST” emblazoned over the catwalk. Topshop sells “This is what a feminist looks like” T-shirts. #timesup, #MeToo, the Bechdel test, emotional labour, slut-shaming, free-bleeding, the pay gap, gaslighting, intersectionality, trans rights – it’s a fertile age for feminist consciousness-raising and lexical expansion. Whatever aspect of feminism you are most interested in, you can go online and find thousands, if not millions, of others who feel just like you. 

Social media has reminded us of the most intriguing yet exhilarating fact about feminism: there is no feminist bible. Feminism isn’t a science. It’s just an idea; a completely freelance, voluntary, crowd-sourced and brilliant idea, in which women and, yes, sometimes men, go about identifying, then trying to solve the problems of girls and women. And, one of the things I feel we sometimes forget , celebrating their brilliance. Although it might occasionally feel like it, being a woman isn’t just a set of difficult questions. The female population of the Earth is also a set of answers. It’s a billion seeds of potential. It is a field of blossom, just waiting.

Once every few years, as an act of self-lacerating nostalgia for my younger self, I reread How To Be A Woman and marvel not over what I got right, but what I got wrong. I was in my early 30s, had two small kids, and was convinced that, in a small way, I knew everything. I figured that the most difficult part of parenting was over; after all, I’d had two human beings bobsled out of my vagina. It couldn’t get worse, right? Hahaha – oh, how I underestimated the teenage years. Potty training is a mere bagatelle compared to negotiating a 15-year-old accusing you of “slut-shaming” her when you suggest a backless dress might not work for school and that she should, perhaps, consider a cardie, instead. And if your family has to help a child with a serious illness – in our case, a four-year eating disorder – it is something that will, over and over, have you absolutely on your knees, believing this might not be something you can deal with, after all. That, despite all your feminism, you are useless to your daughters”.

It is difficult to say which wave of feminism has just passed. Maybe the fourth and fifth have happened. Caitlin Moran said that the fourth has passed. Some articles like this argue a fifth wave of feminism is loosely defined, confused or might not have happened. What are its objectives and what does it stand for? This article states how a fifth wave might be about embracing male tenderness and trying to reverse or at least counteract a lot of the toxicity that has been bubbling up. This article dates back to 2019 (others are a little newer) and writes how “The fifth wave looks more like the second wave, and so we recognize it as “feminism,” whereas the fourth wave—which avoided the vocabulary of “opposition” and “fighting” in favor of identificatory feelings and personal stories—didn’t feel like a noticeable shift, even though it radically transformed the way women articulated their experiences”. Maybe now we are looking to a sixth wave. A lot has happened in the past few years that authors and feminists like Caitlin Moran are talking about. She wants a new wave to be about positivity, serotonin and joy. Women feeling safer; not being so-self-critical. Changes that everyone can do. There is no one fit for a feminist. The lexicon needs to be as broad as possible. Maybe the COVID-19 pandemic (which started just over five years ago) accelerated a fifth wave. Maybe a sixth has (or should be) accelerated by the new rise in male violence, sexual abuse, incels and the unflinching darkness we are seeing in the world.

PHOTO CREDIT: Ivan Samkov/Pexels

The fact that now more than ever men and women are shifting in opposite directions and it might be impossible for there to be common ground and any sense of harmony makes the next wave of feminism urgent yet challenging. Whether someone specific would herald that in or whether it would naturally bloom. One of the most notable and worrying aspects of writing about feminism is the lack of men who celebrate it and want to be part of it. I have not actually seen anyone online write about a positive men’s movement but, even more blatantly, I am not sure whether there has ever been an article from a male writer about feminism and a new movement - or reacting to the previous one. How and why men should play more of a part; discussing their role. Considering tens of millions of men around the world have access to the Internet, can it be the case that literally none of them have ever published a feature, thought-piece or Substack about men’s need to be a part of their conversation?! Positivity about feminism and celebration of the incredible and inspiration women in the world? I have done a cursory Google, though the vast majority – bar possibly a single/double-digit tally – of the pieces are by women. Men do not need to be ‘qualified’ to be a feminist or write about it. There is no entry exam! When Caitlin Moran was talking about all the great things we can do and how things are so hard for women, I wondered why men have not reacted to this with proactivity and incentive. Determined to make things better, to be a big part of the next wave of feminism and also construct and build a positive men’s movement that can run in conjunction with a sixth/next feminist movement. As a journalist in his forties, maybe my perspective and words are not as relevant or affecting as younger and older women who are calling for change, action and the manifesto/mandate for the next feminist movement.

IN THIS PHOTO: Michaela Coel/PHOTO CREDIT: Michael Loccisano/Getty Images

When looking out to the music industry for example, there are incredible and empowering women who are creating this sense of strength and togetherness. In terms of the effort from men – who I am not bashing but saying need to do more -, very few are boosting women, talking about the rise in violence and sexual abuse or using their platform to spotlight women and their brilliance. Not that zero men in music do that but the numbers are very low. When it comes to anything akin to a new feminist movement, you do not hear them talk about it or include anything in their songs. Maybe a harder task than if you are a journalist, though they can and should do a lot more. For last year’s International Women’s Day – 8th March – Glamour recognised brilliant modern-day feminists; so too did ELLE (including Michaela Coel, Angelina Jolie and Tarana Burke). In almost no features or articles do we see men listed. It seems staggering that there are pretty much no/few men raising their voices and showing their support. It is not the case that you can only be a meaningful feminist if you are a woman and have shared experiences of discrimination and inequality. Maybe men feel that they are not qualified or genuine. Not to focus purely on Caitlin Moran but, quoting from The Guardian article she wrote in 2020: “I feel I should croakingly remind everyone, once more, about the most crucial, brilliant, sometimes frustrating thing about feminism: it’s really not a science. It has no rules. It’s still just an idea, created by millions, over centuries, and it can only survive if the next generation feels able to kick ideas around, ask questions, make mistakes and reinvent the concept over and over, so we can build the next wave of feminism. And the next. And the next”. Caitlin Moran, when speaking with Ellie Newton, saying the next wave of feminism needs to be about joy and serotonin and hope – because we need that right now! I was so compelled by her words. How there needs to be a positive men’s movement but also, related, there need to be more men actively joining a new feminist movement and showing their solidarity and time. Not to boast but to dispel and trying to counteract the fact there is not only no progressive centrist men’s movement, but also show their (minor and lacking) support of women. On Saturday, 8th March, it is International Women’s Day. I have been thinking about Caitlin Moran’s recent talk, her books, wider discussions around a progressive men’s movement and when a new wave of feminism will rise - and what form it will take. I have been so motivated to do something, learn more and to do better myself. I really do think  change and progression can happen. That desire (with regards the next wave of feminism) for there to be joy, hope and optimism is a…

PHOTO CREDIT: RF._.studio/Pexels

WONDERFUL thing to hope for.