FEATURE: Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love at Forty: Fifteen: The Morning Fog

FEATURE:

 

 

Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love at Forty

Fifteen: The Morning Fog

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PERHAPS there is…

less to be said about this track than the rest of Hounds of Love’s. Kate Bush’s fifth studio album turns forty on 16th September and, to mark that, I am writing a series of twenty features that take us inside the album and around it. The promotion, legacy and success. The final feature about its songs takes us to the uplifting finale, The Morning Fog. The second-shortest track on the album (behind Under Ice), it clocks in at 2:37. In terms of streaming on Spotify, it is the ‘least popular’. Maybe because it is the final track, or others fancying the singles rather than other songs. It is a track that is not played much or has been talked about much. It did appear in an episode of the U.S. series, The Bear. There are a couple of things I want to cover off. I will come to Leah Kardos once more and her book, Hounds of Love for 33/1. Maybe not surprising that she does not expend as many words on this song as most of the remainder of the album. It is a short track but perhaps the most important. Because it is the end, but also the end of this struggle. A woman lost at sea is rescued and taken to land. That is what we hope and assume. This sense of relief and making it through the night. The chance for her to tell family what they mean to her. A rebirth and rescue. Even if it is a fairly brief song, it packs so much in! I want to start out with the Kate Bush Encyclopedia and their article on the song. Specifically, a section of an archive interview from 1992 where Kate Bush shared some words on The Morning Fog:

“Well, that’s really meant to be the rescue of the whole situation, where now suddenly out of all this darkness and weight comes light. You know, the weightiness is gone and here’s the morning, and it’s meant to feel very positive and bright and uplifting from the rest of dense, darkness of the previous track. And although it doesn’t say so, in my mind this was the song where they were rescued, where they get pulled out of the water. And it’s very much a song of seeing perspective, of really, you know, of being so grateful for everything that you have, that you’re never grateful of in ordinary life because you just abuse it totally. And it was also meant to be one of those kind of “thank you and goodnight” songs. You know, the little finale where everyone does a little dance and then the bow and then they leave the stage. [laughs]

Richard Skinner, ‘Classic Albums interview: Hounds Of Love. Radio 1 (UK), aired 26 January 1992”.

There has not been much written about this song. A tiny bit here and there. You cannot talk about Hounds of Love and ignore the importance of The Morning Fog. It the end of the ordeal that Kate Bush’s heroine faces during The Ninth Wave. This 2023 article is a review of Hounds of Love. Here is what was written about The Morning Fog: “It’s warm acoustics and comforting tone allows us to breathe again after facing such a taxing psychological journey. It is through her near-death experience that she has gathered a new respect for her loved ones and life itself, “I’m falling/ And I’d love to hold you now/ I’ll kiss the ground/ I’ll tell my mother/ I’ll tell my father/ I’ll tell my loved ones/ I’ll tell my brothers/ How much I love them.” Some fans have argued that this song is her spirit looking back at her life and taking the lessons from this life to the next”. I am going to include pretty everything Leah Kardos says about The Morning Fog because, amazingly, I don’t think anyone has ever written this much about the track (apart from me). “As the world comes back into focus in the morning light, the final track of The Ninth Wave concludes the suite with lightness”. After the haunting and epic Hello Earth, we get this real shift with The Morning Fog. It is a moment where there is either this salvation or chance to return home. Or else, this is the afterlife. I like to think that the woman was rescued and everything worked out okay. Leah Kardos mentions how the lyrics are ambiguous regarding the fate of the woman. I shall end by looking at some of them. In terms of the music. It is “reassuringly bright in B major, bobbing down from, B to Asus2 and E/G# and back up again without a hint of darkness or danger. John Williams’s double-tracked nylon string guitar decorates the gently pulsing LinnDrum sequence with delicate picked rhythms and improvised melody  overflowing in sunlit sweetness”.

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I do wonder why few have gone inside the songs. Looked beyond the singles. Even though The Ninth Wave should be seen as a suite, each of the seven songs deserves more words and examination. I am not sure whether that will happen as we head towards the fortieth anniversary of Hounds of Love on 16th September. Del Palmer’s upbeat and bouncy bass is one of the standout elements of The Morning Fog. “Bush sings about falling ‘like a stone, like a storm’, which could suggest to some that she is being pulled down into the water’s depths one last time, or alternatively that she is falling to earth with gravity, back to safety”. I have mentioned this when I last covered The Morning Fog. However, there is this mystery about the song. No clear outcome. That ambiguity is what makes the track and The Ninth Wave so intriguing and nuanced. That being “born again  into the sweet morning fog” is either literal or it could be Bush/the heroine on the other side. Whichever it is, you can feel this real sense of safety. After the hours of being stranded at sea, this is a moment she thought she would never experience. Following the communication struggles and issues that we have heard through Hounds of Love and The Ninth Wave, this is clarity. Bush able to tell her family exactly how she feels. Themes of love and how to appreciate and understand people. The greatest and most sincere declaration of love left to the very end. Kate Bush’s ecstasy at being back on land. Bush said how she wanted The Morning Fog to be this bowing to the audience. This “thank you and goodnight” track. Where the performer thanks those watching. Seeing Hounds of Love as this concept album or production, this is the glorious curtain call. I always wonder whether a filmed version of Hounds of Love and The Ninth Wave could come about. Bush did perform most of the album during her 2014 residency, Before the Dawn. However, I think there is more life to come from this classic album!

At the end of The Morning Fog, Bush takes a minute to namecheck her family. She thanks “her mother, father, partner and brothers. And with that, the song takes a small bow, resolving with a dainty falling 5th on Williams’s classical guitar”. In terms of the lyrics, I love the mix of the poetic and personal. The vivid images of the opening few lines: “The light/Begin to bleed/Begin to breathe/Begin to speak/D’you know what?/I love you better now”. It is heartfelt and passionate but there is also this connection to nature and the world around. Something that runs right through Hounds of Love. In almost every single song. The line, “I love you better now” is perhaps the standout of the album. The meaning behind it. The choice of ‘better’ rather than ‘more’. Not just the quantity of her love but the quality. More appreciative than before, perhaps. The composition is fascinating too. Her brother Paddy Bush on violins and fujare. This instrument originated in central Slovakia as a large sophisticated folk shepherd's overtone fipple flute of unique design. Kevin McAlea on synthesiser alongside John Williams on guitar and Del Palmer on bass. Coming together to create this sumptuous, evocative and delightful sound. I am going to end now. In the final five features of my twenty-feature run, I am going to look at the legacy of Hounds of Love, Bush as a producer, and its meaning and significance forty years later. Saying goodbye to the songs themselves, it has been great revisiting The Morning Fog. Though not as popular as the other cuts on Hounds of Love, I have a lot of affection for it. Such a brilliant song that has this importance. In terms of the narrative of The Ninth Wave but also the concept and narrative of Hounds of Love. The title track is anxious and fearful. Bush running away from these hounds of love. Scared to commit. On The Morning Fog, it is like when people find God after trauma. Discovering this type of faith after a harrowing event. After the darkness, turbulence and fear that came before, The Morning Fog is the moment we see this transition through the cold and chill. Past the foggy morning and…

INTO the light.

FEATURE: Oasis’ (What's the Story) Morning Glory? at Thirty: Inside the U.K. Singles

FEATURE:

 

 

Oasis’ (What's the Story) Morning Glory? at Thirty

Inside the U.K. Singles

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ONE of the biggest albums…

of the 1990s turns thirty on 2nd October. There will be a lot of attention around Oasis’ (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? The second album from the band, they are currently on tour. Having played many dates in the U.K., they will soon be heading overseas. In fact, by the time you read this, they will be. Reunited and playing on a global stage, no doubt their 1995 album is getting a lot of love for new and decades-old fans alike. For this second anniversary feature, I am focusing on the U.K. singles. In total, four singles were released in the U.K. They were released elsewhere too, but these are ones U.K. audiences could buy. Two more were released, though they were not U.K. releases. Morning Glory was a U.S./Australia single, whilst Champagne Supernova was released in Australia. The latter would have been a huge hit here! I think Morning Glory should have been released in the U.K. instead of Roll with It. Going up against Blur’s Country House in the summer of 1995, I think it would have won the race to the top of the U.K. chart. That said, Wonderwall and Don’t Look Back in Anger were huge. I am going to tackle the single chronologically. In each case, bringing in some background and reviews for each song. Giving my rating on each of them. From the lead-off single, Some Might Say, to the final U.K. release, Don’t Look Back in Anger, this was a wild ride for a band that achieved world domination! Let’s get down to these distinct and amazing singles. Ones that live to this day and still sound new and thrilling…

Some Might Say (8/10)

U.K. release date: 24th April, 1995

The Backstory:

“Noel has never been shy about his influences, or the fact that he would happily “repurpose” songs he loved in his own work. The Beatles, Bowie and Pink Floyd were obvious touchstones in Oasis songs but the inspiration behind Some Might Say is one of Noel’s more curious lifts, taking its cue from a song by long-forgotten US rockers Grant Lee Buffalo.

“They were an American indie band who had this tune called Fuzzy,” Noel explained in an interview to mark …Morning Glory’s 25th anniversary a few years ago. “You can see it’s a big influence on Some Might Say. I’ll obsess about a song for years and I’ll rip it off 12 times and get 12 different tunes out of it.”

“Everything I do is a nod to something or other,” he continued. “I’m not a genius, I’m a fan of music. Paul McCartney is a genius and Morrissey and Bob Dylan. I’m not, I’m just fans of theirs. I’ve got a good knack of putting shit together but I’m not a snob about where it comes from – I’ll tell you. Nothing is original, there’s only 12 notes anyway.”

The similarities are clear as soon as Fuzzy begins, not so much in anything about the songs themselves – one is a delicate acoustic number and the other is a chugging rocker but both are rooted in a swinging, bluesy riff.

Some Might Say, as Noel explained to Fran Healy in an interview for the Travis frontman’s radio show a few years ago, was written almost a year its release. “When I wrote it, I was living opposite a studio in Chiswick called Eden Studios,” he recalled. “Across the road, they had a house where if you were working at Eden Studios, you could rent one of the rooms. But I wasn’t working there and for some reason I was living there, on the top floor, above Mike Oldfield’s ex-wife, not that that has anything to do with anything. I wrote it over a couple of days in the top flat. I’d just moved to London and was sampling the nightlife of London and I remember coming home at all hours of the morning and writing, which is why the lyrics are quite nonsensical… dogs itching in the kitchen and all that, I was quite hammered when I wrote it. Everybody would read different things into the lyrics and I’d just agree with all of them, going, ‘Yeah, that’s what it is!’.”

Returning from a bout of touring a few months later, Noel was determined to get a demo on tape, not a regular occurrence at the time, he said. “I was so excited about it I wanted to do a demo. At that point, I wasn’t big on doing demos. It was the only demo I did for Morning Glory.”

He contacted Owen Morris, the producer who had rescued Definitely Maybe when sessions weren’t going to plan and who was away working with The Verve on what would become their second record A Northern Soul. “He said, ‘I’m in Wales with The Verve but I think they’re having the weekend off, so why don’t you come down for the weekend?’,” Noel remembered. “I jumped on the train and went to Loco Studios and the demo is actually recorded with all of The Verve’s equipment, it’s me playing the drums and the bass and all that but it’s Nick McCabe’s rig and Simon Jones’ bass.”

It proved to be a journey worth taking – on the way back Noel’s train broke down in the Severn Tunnel and whilst sitting there, he wrote the classic Oasis B-side Acquiesce. “It turned out to be one of the best weekends ever,” he beamed.

The band recorded a new take of Some Might Say for the single release but Noel says he prefers the demo version. “It was a tiny bit slower and a bit more 70s,” he explained. “The way we did it with Oasis was a bit more Britpop. The demo was a bit dirtier and sleazier. The demo was slow and a bit more boozy.”

Released in April 1995, Some Might Say went to Number One and also marked the end of Oasis Mk 1 – original drummer Tony McCarroll plays on the track but by the time it was top of the charts, he had been replaced by Alan White behind the kit.

“It’s a funny song in the Oasis catalogue cos we gave up playing it pretty quickly because Liam struggled with it,” Noel reflected. “It’s probably my favourite Oasis song, I think the chorus is brilliant. I’ve always got fond memories of it” – LOUDER

A Critical Review:

“Who out there’s one of the lucky people going to the Oasis reunion gigs in the summer? If you are and reading this, I hope you have a good time. I could say I was jealous, but I feel all right knowing that the Gallagher brothers are way past their ’20s and probably won’t be as great live as they were 30 years ago. But it’s nice knowing that Noel and Liam seem to be getting along now, or so it seems. I guess everyone will have to wait and see until that big tour starts in July. It’ll be a spectacle, I’m sure. I like a bunch of Oasis songs. Most of them happen to be singles. I got the Stop the Clocks compilation a long time ago, which is an ideal package if you want to start getting into the band. For any artist, the singles are picked ’cause they’re considered to be the best songs. But that’s something that truly applies to Oasis. ‘Some Might Say’ was the first single from (What’s the Story) Morning Glory?, released in April 1995 – six months in advance of the album. Oasis were already a name in the UK ’cause of Definitely Maybe, and people liked ‘Some Might Say’ so much that it shot straight to number 1 in the charts after its first week.

It’s up there as one of my favourite Oasis songs too. Just like its music video shows, the chugging guitar introduction feels like a rocket ship launching and when the band enters you’re just taken into the stratosphere and never come down from that point on. The song sees Noel Gallagher on some kind of quasi-philosophical line of thinking. “Some might say they don’t believe in heaven/Go and tell it to the man who lives in hell.” “Some might say that we should never ponder on our thoughts today ’cause they hold sway over time.” Some good, good lines. The main line to focus on is the one that precedes the chorus, “Some might say we will find a brighter day.” We all hope for that, don’t we? And then there’s lines about standing at a station in need of education and sinks full of fishes and dirty dishes. The chorus is a bunch of nonsense, but alongside the music, it sounds out of this world.

And like the songs that were listed on Definitely Maybe, ‘Some Might Say’ is designed to be played loud. Guitars levels are boosted to the max, tracks and tracks of overdubs are existing on there. Noel Gallagher’s said before that he doesn’t like the sound of …Morning Glory, but at least to me, this song is where the way it’s loudly mixed works massively to its advantage. Liam Gallagher sings the track very, very well, and I thoroughly enjoy the back and forth between he and Noel during the song’s final moments amidst the feedback and uplifting chord progression. Those guitars that go on and on for the gradual fade-out outro, I could listen to for at least two more minutes, and the story goes that the band kept on playing that outro for a long while after the album’s fade because they were enjoying it so much and didn’t want to stop. I read that somewhere, I’m sure. Or watched Noel say that in a video, I wish I could find it. He does consider it to be one of the band’s finest moments, I have the evidence for that. And as a listener, I wouldn’t argue” – The Music in My Ears

Roll with It (7/10)

U.K. release date: 14th August, 1995

The Backstory:

“Coming out in the autumn of 1995, (What’s The Story) Morning Glory? was the soundtrack to a pair of different life-changing events. The first one was my job at a company in San Francisco called Art & Science, an agency that built websites for other companies.

In late 1994, I’d discovered the World Wide Web, so in early 1995 I taught myself HTML, built my own personal web page (which still exists!), and that summer, responding to an ad on Usenet, got myself a temporary gig with Art & Science building the first website for The American Association of Neurological Surgeons.

It was supposed to be a three month gig, but the day after I got it, I walked into the weird, small, libertarian ad agency I’d been working for — the job that allowed me to move from Fresno in the first place — and quit, because I had every confidence in the world that if I worked my ass off, it would become a permanent gig. And that’s what ended up happening, and while I was at Art & Science, I worked on early websites for Joe Boxer and SoCal Gas before I left for the greener pastures of Organic Online.

And throughout that fall I tortured my co-workers with repeated playings of (What’s The Story) Morning Glory? which was both a bit popular and a bit rock ‘n’ roll for the cool younger kids I was working with. But I didn’t care, cos I loved it so much.

You gotta roll with it
You gotta take your time
You gotta say what you say
Don’t let anybody get in your way
‘Cause it’s all too much for me to take

The other major thing that happened was that Rox & I decided to move in together, so the days of flying back-and-forth just to be with each other ended and the days of just being with each other began. And she loved this album as much if not more than I did, so it was a soundtrack to the weekends of apartment hunting in Oakland even more than Definitely Maybe had been the soundtrack of driving around L.A.

Don’t ever stand aside
Don’t ever be denied
You wanna be who you’d be
If you’re coming with me

“Roll With It” has more hooks that a wharf full of bait shops, kicking off with a big echoing guitar, and even bigger before Liam Gallagher slams in, sneer and confidence fully intact leading off with the chorus. Or if it’s not the chorus, it would be the chorus of a lesser song. Given Noel Gallagher’s penchant for writing songs with a shitton of repetition, it’s nearly impossible to know for sure exactly what the chorus is. So it could be this.

I think I’ve got a feeling I’ve lost inside
I think I’m gonna take me away and hide
I’m thinking of things that I just can’t abide

Or maybe it’s this, with Noel’s backing vocals echoing around Liam’s lead.

I know the roads down which your life will drive
(Drive life will drive life will drive)
I find the key that lets you slip inside
(Slip inside slip inside)
Kiss the girl, she’s not behind the door
(Behind the door, behind the door)
But you know I think I recognize your face
But I’ve never seen you before

There’s a really nice drum part here were Alan White double times at the end of the verse (or chorus or bridge). Yeah. It’s a bridge, because it sets up a repeat of the chorus, only this time Noel is doing a totally boss falsetto harmony, and then it goes directly into the guitar solo.

You gotta roll with it
You gotta take your time
You gotta say what you say
Don’t let anybody get in your way
‘Cause it’s all too much for me to take

And’s its a great guitar solo, too, taking its fucking time, because Oasis never cared how long their songs were, especially the catchy ones, and so Noel plays long arcing lines against the echo chamber he’s created, though, if listen carefully, you can hear a cowbell buried in the plethora of percussion they layered on.

There’s a bit more static and noise and echo on (What’s The Story) Morning Glory? than there was on Definitely Maybe, like they were trying to get rockier while at the same time writing poppier tunes. And “Roll With It” pulls off that trick with aplomb, gliding into the coda with squealing guitars and one last Noel / Liam counterpoint vocal.

I think I’ve got a feeling I’ve lost inside
(So take me awaaaaaaaaaay)
I think I’ve got a feeling I’ve lost inside
(So take me awaaaaaaaaaay)
I think I’ve got a feeling I’ve lost inside
(So take me awaaaaaaaaaay)
I think I’ve got a feeling I’ve lost inside
(So take me awaaaaaaaaaay)
I think I’ve got a feeling I’ve lost inside
(So take me awaaaaaaaaaay)
I think I’ve got a feeling I’ve lost inside
(So take me awaaaaaaaaaay)
I think I’ve got a feeling I’ve lost inside
(So take me awaaaaaaaaaay)
I think I’ve got a feeling I’ve lost inside
(So take me awaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay)

Noel’s final vocals fade into the ether as the guitars rise up and take “Roll With It” to its ending, a whole entire universe in a little under four minutes. Say whatever you want about their public personae as complete and utter yobs, they sure as shit knew how to craft a great pop song.

And while “Roll With It” was totally ignored here in the United States, where it was clear that nobody gave a rats ass about Britpop, it was their fifth straight top ten single in the U.K. making it all the way to #2, and they were just getting going” – Medialoper

Critical Reviews:

“The AllMusic editor Stephen Thomas Erlewine described 'Roll with It' as "an assured stadium rocker that unabashedly steals the crown from Status Quo". David Stubbs from Melody Maker wrote, "This isn't the mounting cascade of manna and adrenalin that was 'Some Might Say' or 'Acquiesce'. It's subdued by comparison, a light shower after that musical thunderstorm, something for us to kick through the puddles to until their next mighty moment of precipitous pop. Rolling along, marking time, fair enough." A reviewer from Music & Media said, "When was it that dance fans predicted the end of rock? By going two steps back to the '60s Oasis takes it six steps forward. So roll over you sceptics, "my my, hey hey, rock 'n' roll is to stay."" Mark Sutherland from NME wrote, "Have no fear, you will la-la-la-like it. It is, after all, a pretty good record." Andrew Harrison from Select named it "Oasis' weakest single, but still far from the Quo travesty of legend, even if the song might conjure visions of flying wetlook perms." Leesa Daniels from Smash Hits gave it two out of five and named it "the weakest track" of the album, "and Liam sounds like he's got a sore throat” - Wikipedia

Wonderwall (10/10)

U.K. release date: 30th October, 1995

The Backstory:

“Liam Gallagher is rarely at a loss for words, snide or otherwise. But during a recent interview with Rolling Stone, the singer was left momentarily speechless after being informed that “Wonderwall,” the monster 1995 ballad he sang with his old band, Oasis, is on its way to approaching 1 billion streams on Spotify.

“That’s pretty big, man,” Gallagher says, finally, as if it took a few seconds for the enormity of that figure to sink in. Then the old Liam, the one who loves to bash his songwriting brother, Noel, returns. “You know who that is — that’s Noel, probably. He sat there for an hour and a half, constantly on that finger, click click, click. That’s why he’s always pointing at people.”

Jokes (and typical Gallagher-brother shtick) aside, “Wonderwall” has become the song that will not die — a Nineties hit that has transcended its era and become a new standard. Released 25 years ago next month on Oasis’ second album, (What’s the Story) Morning Glory?, “Wonderwall” regularly streams about 500,000 times a week (or 750,000, if audio and video streams are combined), according to Alpha Data, the data-analytics provider that powers the Rolling Stone Charts. Last year, Rolling Stone’s Tim Ingham estimated that “Wonderwall” was generating about $2,650 in recorded-music royalties on Spotify every 24 hours, or $1 million a year. In recent years, as Ingham notes, it’s been one of the few songs from the previous century to appear in the Spotify Top 200, a chart dominated by new pop, hip-hop, and Latin tracks.

“Wonderwall” stood out the moment it was released, not simply because it didn’t adhere to the hopped-up new-British-Invasion blare Oasis had become known for. A declaration of love and support for someone who was struggling, it didn’t swagger the way the band’s previous songs had; it was openhearted and earnest, with a melody and busker-simple arrangement that made both Oasis and Liam sound vulnerable. From the start, the song felt timeless — a feeling born out by the fact that it’s been covered roughly 100 times. One Direction harmonized to it on a beach; Ryan Adams and Cat Power each turned it into skeletal mood pieces; Paul Anka recast it as big-band lounge tune; LeAnn Rimes made it a pop-country ballad; and pianist Brad Mehldau transformed it into jazz. “Something about ‘Wonderwall’ has always moved me,” says Rimes. “In the Nineties, I was enveloped in full-blown teenage angst, and it was the perfect soundtrack for it” – Rolling Stone

A Critical Review:

“Despite Robson & Jerome denying it the UK top spot, this song went on to become Oasis’s best-selling single in the UK, and it’s not hard to find reasons. Liam’s instantly recognisable vocal tone, of course, must rank high on the list, balancing super-focused midrange, cutting nasality, and (on higher-register lines such as “I don’t believe that anybody” at 0:33) a hint of tastefully grainy break-up.

However, I really rate the drums here too. The choice of brushes is a great production move, as this instinctively feels like it better matches the arrangement’s prominent acoustic guitar and solo cello. Delaying the drummer’s second-verse entry by three beats is also inspired, not only because it’s so unexpected, but because it prevents the drums obscuring the cello’s first entry and also adds stress to Liam’s vocal rhythms on “street that the” — wisely resisting the temptation to plant a snare under the word “backbeat”, which I don’t think would have been nearly as attention-grabbing. And that fill after the first chorus is also a classic!

The harmonies are impressive as well, because of the way Noel manages to puzzle out a satisfying progression using five different chords ( A, B7sus4, D9, Esus4, and F#m7) which all share two notes ( A and E). This means that those notes can be sustained as upper pedal tones pretty much throughout — no wonder U2’s guitarist Edge has apparently said he wishes he’d written ‘Wonderwall’, because those pedal tones would have been ideally suited to his trademark long-tail echo effects.

What mystifies me a little with this song, though, are the disparities between the original album and the version on the band’s Stop The Clocks (2006) and Time Flies (2010) greatest hits collections. Now I can understand why the drum fill after the first chorus appears to have been drastically EQ’d, because the kit was clearly mixed to leave plenty of room for the harmonic and melodic parts, which means it does sound rather thin in isolation at that moment. But why has the entire mix apparently been polarity-inverted for the compilation? I accept that some people feel this makes a sonic difference, but if the improvement were so cut and dried, then it’s curious that the very same mastering engineer didn’t repeat the polarity-inversion move for his 2014 album remaster.

Then there’s the fact that the left and right channels appear to have been swapped for the compilation. Compare the positioning of the clean guitar counterpoint under “all the lights that lead us there are blinding” (1:11), for instance, or the electric guitar’s sustain at the end of chorus one. But what’s weirder is that this doesn’t remain consistent, since the verse sections don’t seem to have been channel-swapped — the opening acoustic guitar is noticeably brighter and pickier on the left side in both cases, for instance. What could possibly have been gained by doing this? It makes no sense to me at all. Yet if it’s a simple goof, then isn’t it actually the kind of thing you’d expect a top-flight mastering house to be quality-controlling for, especially with their highest-profile artists?” – The Mix Review

Don’t Look Back in Anger (9.5/10)

U.K. release date: 19th February, 1996

The Backstory:

“Saturday, April 22, 1995, Sheffield Arena: a momentous Oasis date for two reasons. Sadly for Tony McCarroll, it was his last ever gig drumming for the band. But when one thing ends another begins, and it was in Noel Gallagher’s acoustic set that night that he played ‘Don’t Look Back In Anger’ for the first time, sandwiched between ‘take Me Away’ and ‘Talk Tonight. “I only wrote this on Tuesday,” he told the crowd, before sort-of dedicating it to The La’s frontman Lee Mavers: “You’ve not heard this one before, mate.” The original inspiration for the song came from Noel Gallagher visiting Paul Weller at The Manor studios in Oxford to play on the track ‘I Walk On Gilded Splinters’. While there, Weller played his song ‘Wings Of Speed’, and that was that.

Things were less simple in the recording studio. It began when Noel played both ‘Wonderwall’ and ‘Don’t Look Back In Anger’ to Liam, and asked him which one he wanted to sing. Liam chose ‘Wonderwall’, which was committed to tape without a hitch. When the time came to do ‘…Anger’, Liam wasn’t needed so went to the pub. Friendly man that he is, he proceeded to invite around 30 pissed Monmouth locals back to the studio from local boozers The Old Nag’s Head and The Bull. Noel turned up a few hours to find, according to Alan McGee, “half of fucking Monmouth” in his room, and “complete strangers playing with £30,000 worth of guitars”. He adds: “one of them asks him for the number of a cab and Noel kicks them out. A punch-up ensues, and Noel chases Liam out with a cricket bat.”

As Owen Morris tells it: “The next morning, Noel had left. The band was over. The album dead. No one knew if he was coming back. We were all gutted.”

A couple weeks later Noel did come back, and the band got back to business. But the question remains: do any versions of Liam singing ‘Don’t Look Back In Anger’ exist? Opinions differ. When quizzed by David Huggins of the Oasis Recording Info website, Rockfields Studios engineer Nick Brine said in an email: “My understanding is that Liam did record a vocal on the album version, but I think it was just one run-through for a bit of fun really.” Owen Morris refutes this claim: “Liam absolutely did not sing ‘Don’t Look Back In Anger’ at any point. Nick Brine’s memory is incorrect”.

But, intriguingly, Noel Gallagher said this to MOJO in 1997: “When I gave [Liam] ‘Don’t Look Back In Anger’ he’s singing ‘But don’t back in anger, not today’. I’m saying, It’s ‘don’t look back in anger’. ‘He’s saying, ‘Well, that’s not what’s fuckin’ written ‘ere, Chief.’” Whether anything was recorded, and whether it will ever be released, Noel only knows” – NME

A Critical Review:

“Their title-belt rhetoric, Liam’s snarl, and the brick-wall loudness of Oasis’ radio sound made it easy not to notice how thoughtful Noel Gallagher’s lyrics could be. They weren’t especially clever lyrics, or meaningful, or even coherent, but “Whatever” and “Some Might Say” and “Roll With It” and “Wonderwall” and this one all have a reflective streak – bits and bobs of beermat philosophy giving the lie to the idea that Oasis were only a gang of sneering blusterers. Of course, this is more evidence that Oasis weren’t ever really a Britpop band – that scene had an art-pop appreciation for smart, satirical or formally dense lyrics, and even the unworked songs are very knowing about it (“Woo-hoo!”, indeed)

Noel seemed to prefer offhand sincerity, collages of lines that sound good sung, their emotional payoffs poking through puns, rhymes and boilerplate. According to both brothers, the “So, Sally can wait…” line that rouses “Don’t Look Back In Anger” from its slumberous verses was a happy collaborative accident, Liam pouncing on a phrase Noel had pulled from the air and ordering him to keep it. But the whole song feels like a similar patchwork, really good lines – “Please don’t put your life in the hands / Of a rock and roll band” side by side with fumbling about slipping inside the eye of your mind. The magpie phrase-lifting of the title sets the tone for the whole thing.

It might seem perverse to focus on “Don’t Look Back In Anger”’s lyrics, which are a tiny part of why it got to Number One and why it’s one of the band’s milestone tracks. But the rest of it leaves me almost completely cold, even when I can see what it’s up to. The opening piano, a lift from “Imagine”, is one of the group’s least subtle bits of behavioural priming – this is going to be a Big Song, Noel shooting for the Hall of Fame with a pained, ponderous rock ballad. I rarely like that kind of thing, and no surprise, I don’t really like this. It’s a treacly, high-gravity listen – guitars and drums and strings all jostling for space, dragging each other down. And while Liam’s singing wouldn’t have fitted this song’s rueful tone, Noel’s delivery veers between heartfelt and maudlin – particularly when he lets the song fizzle out at the end. Comparisons to “Wonderwall” – with Liam in total, electrifying command of a much tighter arrangement – are inevitable, and don’t flatter this song.

But something I do appreciate about it is that, in the context of rock tear-jerkers and lighter-wavers, the scrappy lyrics are an asset. There’s a sort of story here* – bye, Sal! – but no message or particular claim of wisdom, nothing you’re expected to agree with. Instead, the song flails about in a sump of self-justification and sentimentality, and is all the better for it. I have been drunk, and I have put big, sentimental rock music on when drunk, and felt the beery swell of nameless emotion just out of reach of my befuddled mind, and while I’d never use this track for it, I can recognise that use in it. That just-out-of-reachness – that catalyst for messy, dredged-up, inchoate feels – is the one way “Don’t Look Back In Anger” does stand comparison with “Wonderwall”.

*Though one particular coherent reading did jump out at me – what if that opening steal isn’t just a signal of the type of song this is going to be, but is an explicit admission: this song is Lennon fanfic, and Lennon is its “you”. It’s a fantasy where Noel gets to be John’s buddy – a Mary Stu. “Take me to the place that you go…” – and there’s Noel hanging out in Strawberry Fields, being there at the bed-in, helping him out – saving him, maybe – with some down-to-Earth Gallagher wisdom, vibing off his presence as “Sally” is left behind – no wonder Liam didn’t get to sing this – and kissed off with a snide cultural reference because that’s the kind of thing John Lennon does for Noel, his best friend forever. And there, walking on by, we shall leave them.

Score: 4” – Popular-numer1s

FEATURE: Spotlight: ADÉLA

FEATURE:

 

 

Spotlight

PHOTO CREDIT: Savanna Ruedy

ADÉLA

__________

I am going to come to…

PHOTO CREDIT: Patricia Garate

some recent features and interviews with the incredible ADÉLA. Adéla Jergová is a Slovak singer-songwriter and dancer. She took part in Hybe and Geffen Records' 2023 survival show, Dream Academy, a competition to form a global girl group. As a solo artist, she has released some amazing singles. This year, Machine Girl and DeathByDevotion have thrilled critics and fans. Her new E.P., The Provocateur, is out on 22nd August. I am writing this before that date but, by the time this is shared, that E.P. will be out. I think that there will be a call and demand from her fans to release a debut album. I starting out with a 2024 interview from Out. She talked about, among other things, her single, Homewrecked, and her biggest musical influences:

“Earlier this summer, streaming giant Netflix casually released Pop Star Academy: KATSEYE and sent international pop stans from all over the world into a frenzy.

The eight-part docuseries chronicled dozens of teenage girls traveling to LA to begin a training and development program produced by K-Pop record label HYBE to form their first "global girl group." This is how we meet Adéla, a girl from Slovakia whose big dreams outgrew her small town and country. And the dream was just within reach until the production revealed, after over a year of training, that the Top 20 girls would actually be competing against each other for just 6 spots.

Thus began Dream Academy, a global show that concluded last fall and produced the girl group KATSEYE. Though Dream Academy waded into some unethical waters, Pop Star Academy shows the highs and the lows of the participating contestants and what it takes to put together a group that can capture the entire world's attention.

Out: You're releasing your debut song tomorrow. How does it feel?

Adéla: I feel so f--king excited. Ever since the show came out, I've been getting so much attention, and when the show ended and during the last couple of months of the show, I knew that that wasn't the place for me. And I just felt like I needed to find my own path and my own artistry. And that's what I've done ever since the Dream Academy social media part of the show ended. I've been here and I've been working with producers and writers and trying to find a sound that feels like me and that I really can hone in on.

I feel like when you're training for something like a girl group, it's a lot of adapting to each other, feeling each other out, also trying to give a certain fantasy and vision that's put on you because it has to be. After I came out of that, I was like, 'Wait, what the f--k? Who am I?'

But this song, I wrote it with me and [Liam Benayon] and produced it with Dylan Harrison and Riley Aki, and it just feels exactly like me. The story is super personal and I'm so excited. It's so campy and weird and dramatic and way too much. And honestly, that's a lot of what I've always been told. Even down to my face. They used to tell me, you have a Jim Carrey face. And I was like, wait, work? Yeah, I do. But now I get to do that, and it feels really fun, and the people haven't responding to it really well, and I just really appreciate it. So I was super excited. This is the first one, and it's only going to get better and bigger.

Can you tell me about the lyrics of "Homewrecked." Is it about your experience on the show? A man?

I kind of like people not really knowing. If you put whatever meaning you want to it, I leave it up to you. Just know that it is rooted in real experience, and whether you take it literally or you go the more abstract route, I kind of enjoy seeing everybody's take on it.

When I wrote it though, in my head, it was about infidelity and it was about dealing with the worst feelings that you have of somebody close hurting you in such a way. And it's basically about killing the mistress that they cheated on somebody with. So it's about killing the person that they hurt you with. And it's not in the sense of let's put all the blame on the girl, but it's about, I want to hurt you so bad that this person that makes you happy, I want to kill them because you hurt me. Which didn't that happen in real life? And if it did, I wouldn't be telling you.

Who are your biggest musical influences? Who do you grew up listening to?

I am the biggest Beyoncé stan there is. I'm the biggest BeyHive you've ever f--king met. I've watched Homecoming, no joke, 17 times. I've watched it so much. And I made everybody in my closest circle watch it too. And I actually dragged Emily and Megan to the Renaissance world tour and to the movies too. I was like, if we want to do this. Let's f--king learn from the best. Yes, the tickets are expensive as f--k. We're going. We have a shoot tomorrow. I don't care. We're going.

Lady Gaga is a huge inspiration. I think seeing her artistry and seeing how absolutely unhinged she's been in her career. But how it's so intentional though, to me, that's so interesting and beautiful. And seeing all the different parts of her. You have the Fame monster, and they have Joanne, and then it's like, now we're in her jazz era with Tony Bennett. What an artist. And I think that's a huge inspiration. I obviously love Chappell Roan. I think she's so amazing. I think she's doing something that hasn't been done before, and it's just so fresh and amazing to see vocally. I grew up listening to Aretha Franklin and Whitney Houston. And Mariah and Ariana. I was the biggest Ariana Grande stan. The pop girl is Britney. I really grew up just immersed in pop through and through, and I used to get ridiculed a lot growing up. People love to make fun of pop. It's like, girl, pop stands for popular, and it's popular for a reason. Oh, also Troye Sivan and Charlie xcx.

As someone who quite literally studies this industry and what it does to pop stars, just keep uplifting each other up because people will try and try to tear y'all down. This is all just entertainment and fake for them.

And everybody has been. KATSEYE members, non-KATSEYE members, everybody. We've all been very just drilling it in, like, are you okay? Are you good? I'm seeing what's being said. It's so actually loving, and it's actually what was so surprising about, honestly, the whole experience is the entire time, the whole class of the girls, or the cast of the show, it was just such an example of what people paint out girls to be. You would think that it would be so catty and mean, but there was none of that. Seriously none. Our project managers, they would say, 'F--k, we were so scared. But honestly, we got so lucky with all of you.' There was so much maturity and love with everything. The way that we handled each other. Everybody was so aware that it's such a tough thing to go through. We're all in such a weird position, and nobody intentionally tried to hurt anybody. And if there were issues, we talked them out, whether they showed it on camera or not, there's so many conversations honestly, that we also chose to have off camera. We we're real people, and you're seeing real things, but some things you don't want to show. You know what I mean? So it was definitely interesting. But I think for me and for all of us, where it was very authentic and it showed us actually going through what we were going through, and we're all just glad that we have each other and that we know what happened and that we're all good. Everybody wishes everybody the best. Seriously. That's how we feel”.

In this interview with The Line of Best Fit, ADÉLA talked about being raised in a conservative household and her early obsession with American Pop music and culture. The Slovakian artist has her own blueprint for Pop. Now residing in Los Angeles, this is someone who is primed for long-term success and endurance:

“Jergová was quite the determined pre-teen. Raised on the homogenised Internet, she had a "deep, guttural knowing" that she could attain fame — she saw bloggers like Bethany Mota go from a regular girl to a superstar influencer, along with countless others liker her gaining a following by sharing their talent. Performing "was the only thing that I ever wanted to do," she tells me, and the rigorous demands of becoming a professional ballerina — eight hours of practice, followed by more after hours — gave her a hardened sense of discipline, as well as a competitive, sly mindset. "I got off on the fact that I was working when everybody else was sleeping," she says.

"I was so narrow-mindedly, like, how do I get from Point A to Point fucking Z?" she asked herself. It’s not easy to go from a child in a small, foreign country to one of the most exciting Gen-Z pop stars of the moment — or even have the guts to think about such a feat in the first place. "In a childlike, stupid way," Jergová says with a smile, "and it really worked for me."

Her approach — working very very hard — has resulted in some spectacular results. Her latest single, February’s "MACHINE GIRL", is a succinct and sharp send-up to entertainment television where reality is distorted, people are treated like pawns, and extremity triumphs over nuance. "Why you comin’ at me, baby? Yell at the machine, girl!" she taunts. The video, choreographed by Jergová and Miguel Zárate, is angular and violent; a line of six women battle each other while playing to the camera, swinging at heads and threatening ankles. Grimes, who co-produced the track after DMing Jergová out of the blue, cameos at the end to advise the catfighters to turn up the rage.

It’s a not-so-subtle jab at her time in Pop Star Academy, the Netflix competition show where contestants audition to join the meticulously-created global girl group that would become KATSEYE. Jergová was one of the first to be eliminated and is not shy about the fact that it hit her hard: "It was the worst year of my life," she says, calling it "identity-stripping."

Most girls went home after being kicked off, to reprogram or destress, but it wasn’t an option for her: "I just knew that if I went home in that moment and I wallowed in that rejection and sadness that comes with such a life altering thing, I would not be back."

A trip back to Slovakia would mean starting over, back to a childlike blankness, which didn’t fit with the curated life plan she set out for herself. "Do you think I'm gonna go to college after I spent two years doing this every single day?" she asks. "For years, doing singing and dance lessons? I didn't have a childhood, and you want me to go to college? What are you talking about?"

Jergová knew she had to stay in LA and undergo the artist’s rite of passage — to find "a really shitty apartment and move out here and figure it out." After a quick trip home to renew her visa, it was a year of exploration and trial and error — before she arrived at her now-cemented electronic, explosive pop, she went through an indie rock phase she knew didn’t suit her ("The only music that I've ever listened to is pop music. Like, what am I doing?" she says). On her vision board are the typical influences of Britney, Madonna, Lady Gaga, as well as more esoteric picks like Imogen Heap and M.I.A. Her songs are brash, cutting, unafraid to show Jergová's vision for ADÉLA first and foremost.

"My whole ethos as a human is that I'm extremely imperfect, and so is everybody else, and I find that so beautiful," she says. "I find both sides of me interesting. Obviously, my first song was about me wanting to kill my dad's mistress. I mean, probably not the right emotion to have. But it's real! You would be mad too!" She’s talking about “HOMEWRECKED”, her revenge hit-and-run fantasy that unfurls with a "rotten, ugly rage inside of me." After she makes her mark, she flees to America. "I'm not very interested in keeping it very PC or down the middle of the line, nice girl, because I don't think I'm that at all. If you've seen the show, and if you've watched any of my content or consumed any of my music, I think one can tell I'm just interested in expressing myself to the fullest."

Not having full control of her vision would be incompatible with how Jergová operates. Maybe getting eliminated from Pop Star Academy was a blessing in disguise — now she has the full opportunity to progress independently. "If there’s six people in a group, you can’t let everyone have creative freedom, it’s never gonna work. That’s what K-pop is. But now being a solo artist at an American label, I get to completely be myself." Do you think she’d come all this way just to acquiesce to someone else’s ideas? In fact, when she auditioned, being in a group was never really a part of her plan. The executives on the show agreed, saying she’d work more as a solo artist, which she learned retroactively. "That would have been nice to hear," she says.

Her music videos are filled with comments from fans relieved she went solo, but she’s been receiving somewhat misguided pushback, too. I bring up her post I saw a while ago, with a pouty Jergová sitting atop a Capitol Records contract. "I sold out fr," she says in the caption. In our conversation, she has no qualms about reaping the benefits of a team behind you – "Being a pop artist is hard. You need budget, time, effort, people to be passionate about it" – but some may see a label backing not as a career boost but as autonomy regression.

Jergová’s plan is assertive and bold, uncompromising and commanding (when people hear it, she hopes that they’ll have a thought – whether it’s admiration or irritation). Two songs that complete her upcoming EP are gritty, sublime, perfect for the club’s flashing lights, like if Tate McRae fused with Charli xcx with the help of Grimes. There was a lot of "speed dating," Jergová says, to make the perfect team, which is now made up of Alex Chapman, Leland, Dylan Brady, Blake Slatkin, among others. It’s a conceptual project that centers an exaggerated version of ADÉLA — sort of a character anyway — growing up, moving to Los Angeles, making it as a pop star. There’s some truth to the mistress-killing — or at least, she certainly felt the visceral rage at the time. "I saw this Greta Thunberg quote the other day, where she says, 'I think we need more angry women.' I agree. I am quite the young angry woman”.

PHOTO CREDIT: Jason Omar Al-Taan

I am finishing off with an interview from NME around the release of The Provocateur. That title very much describes her role in Pop. Someone pushing boundaries and staking her claim as a future legend. For anyone who has not heard her music, do go and check out the stunning ADÉLA:

“Dropping on August 22, her debut EP ‘The Provocateur’ has plenty of depth. As it pivots from MARINA-esque electro (‘Homewrecked’) to Britney-style robopop (‘Superscar’) and industrial club thumpers, ADÉLA documents the thrills and pitfalls of navigating the music industry as a self-aware and very ambitious young woman. “Maybe I should count myself so lucky, so lucky,” she sings on ‘Superscar’. “All these dirty hands, they wanna touch me, so touch me.”

The project is smart, sharp and savagely catchy, but “not musically very cohesive” in ADÉLA’s eyes – something she’s perfectly happy with. “It’s got the first song I ever made and the last song, which was finished literally last week,” she says. “So to me, it’s meta in a way, because it’s this snapshot of, like, ‘How does this girl feel about what she’s trying to achieve, and how is she finding all the things she has to do to get there?'”

One such thing is dealing with the way “the public is suddenly perceiving her”, which she believes is “so different from who I am as a person, really”. But ultimately, she “doesn’t give a fuck” about it all. On the hyperpop stomper ‘Machine Girl’, which was co-produced by Grimes, ADÉLA sings about being a “pinned up poster of pop perfection” who’s “d-d-drippin’ in drama”, but also tells us: “Past her lips, you will find her brain.” She’s committing to the role of high-maintenance pop starlet with a knowing wink.

When she moved to Los Angeles three years ago to pursue a music career, she felt immediately at home. “Whereas in Slovakia,” she adds, “I stick out like a sore thumb.” Did she try to soften her natural bluntness? After all, LA’s entertainment enclaves practically run on tactful euphemisms. “No, I refuse!” ADÉLA replies gleefully. “I think it’s kind of funny, and people actually like it because they’re just not used to it.”

In 2023, she landed a place on The Debut: Dream Academy, a YouTube reality series that created the K-pop-inspired girl group KATSEYE. ADÉLA was the first of 20 hopefuls to be eliminated, but again, she was undeterred. When it was followed a year later by the Netflix docuseries Pop Star Academy: KATSEYE, she was ready with an attention-grabbing debut single. “I’ll catch you with that dirty little whore,” she sings on ‘Homewrecked’, chastising her father for his extramarital affair.

“I was very logical about it,” she says. “Because no matter if I was a background character or more prominent, I knew I’d have the most eyes on me ever. But I ended up being quite the provocateur on the show.” ADÉLA isn’t exaggerating: after the series premiered, the first comment she read was from a troll calling her an “ugly, stupid ass bitch”.

ADÉLA wrestles with her post-reality show reputation across the EP: her way of telling trolls that “I’m not gonna be submissive just to win over public perception, because that’s not reality, it’s bullshit”. Besides, bullshit would get in the way of her purpose as a pop star. “I’m here to make people more comfortable with being uncomfortable,” ADÉLA says. “Being human – truly human – in pop music, I like to talk about my imperfections. To me, the negative sides of myself are just as interesting as the positive sides”

One of the most promising and talented artists coming through right now, there is going to be a lot of new fans discovering the music of ADÉLA. A new E.P. is due and there will be a string of live dates. She plays London’s Basing House on 19th September. There will be global dates and some huge moments ahead. For anyone new to the magic of this amazing artist, do go and make sure that you…

CHECK her out.

____________

Follow ADÉLA

PHOTO CREDIT: Jason Omar Al-Taan

Instagram:

https://www.instagram.com/adelajergova/

TikTok:

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

Twitter:

https://x.com/adelajergova

Spotify:

https://open.spotify.com/artist/2qanRMyA5bNuTvz1dK45OP?si=0whPNP3ZR5yffb4kr6VR0A

YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/@AD%C3%89LAJERGOV%C3%81

FEATURE: Beneath the Sleeve: Nick Drake - Five Leaves Left

FEATURE:

 

 

Beneath the Sleeve

Nick Drake - Five Leaves Left

__________

BEFORE discussing…

IN THIS PHOTO: Nick Drake in 1969/PHOTO CREDIT: Keith Morris

the album and giving a bit more detail about its brilliance and legacy, it is worth noting that there is an expansion on Five Leaves Left. Nick Drake’s debut studio album was originally released on 3rd July, 1969. It has recently had this reissued and expanded edition. The making of edition gives us demos, alternative versions and outtakes. Giving us greater insight into this classic album. One that still sounds remarkably engrossing and beautiful fifty-six years after its release. This feature gives more details about Nick Drake’s 1969 debut:

“Between 1969 and 1972, Nick Drake recorded three stunning studio albums of detached yet vivid Blake-ian lyricism ripe with images of the elements and an autumnal brand of chamber folk rolling behind his handsomely burnished baritone. If you can imagine David Sylvian, only sadder and still somehow more alive, you can picture Drake’s glass-spun wonder and doomed romanticism. Produced by legendary aficionado of all things rural Joe Boyd and featuring Fairport Conventioneer Richard Thompson along with a small string section, Five Leaves Left was Drakes’s first album, one filled to the brim with his delicate and bluesy bounty, yet somehow leaving the listener with something incomplete about the process. Where did he come from and how did he find his way to the UK’s king of all things dulcet and rustic, Boyd? Why was this guy so moody and sullen? Could he, perhaps, speak up a bit?

To answer these questions, Island/UMe has just released a dissection of the debut across four vinyl albums—a collection that starts not with the singer-guitarist’s 4-track demo recorded in his college dorm room in January 1968, but rather mere months later when Boyd got wowed by the composer-vocalist and pushed him immediately into Sound Techniques studio that March. Meant to tell a story of Five Leaves Left’s construction, each demo, outtake, and previously unheard version on The Making Of radiates the piecemeal feel of a novice grasping his way through a new endeavor (didn’t all of Drake’s music sound randomly unvarnished despite their ornate orchestration?) and one’s personally burgeoning art form. That this box’s final disc is the original album—lustrously remastered, but not over-mastered, by its original engineer, John Wood—gives the new collection a sense of history to go with its mystery.

Not that its third album of sessions toward the end of 1968 isn’t musically valuable, lending new ears to the fresh, previously unrecorded “River Man” as it does—but it’s albums one and two of The Making Of that show off, in great detail, how something so unassuming got assumed. Here, the never-before-heard tapes of Drake’s Cambridge buddy Paul de Rivaz and fellow student and string arranger Robert Kirby from October 1968 unfurl with Drake doing his assuredly skeletal thing on warm, weird moments such as “Blossom” and “Made to Love Magic” while preparing for an upcoming live performance. The intimacy and unhampered realness of “Day Is Done” and “Time Has Told Me” are weighed starkly against Drake’s surprisingly talky bits of conversation where he’s very clear on what he wants: sounds that should be “as expansive as possible” and “celestial.” Lest anyone think that Nick Drake wasn’t career-minded, stop here. “I’m afraid this is proving to be an unprofessional tape altogether partly due to intoxication,” he says, quietly, before moving into a spirited take on “Mickey’s Tune.”

Album one is the logical starting point for this box—one where you hear Boyd in March of 1968 announcing, “OK, here we go, whatever it is, take one,” before Drake leapt into the small, pretty storm of “Mayfair,” run roughshod into “Time Has Told Me.” Oddly enough, Drake’s spare, rustic takes of “Fruit Tree,” “Man in a Shed,” and “Saturday Sun” are the same three songs that close out the windswept, fall-weather luster of Five Leaves Left and its silvery sophistication in its finished version. Not only is this box set a gorgeous addition to the recent dissection of Nick Drake’s valued work, it’s also a schematic on how his other two studio albums should tell their stories in full”.

I will explore this new box-set very soon. It is not only important for existing Nick Drake fans. The Making of Five Leaves Left is a perfect introduction for new listeners. Those who might not know anything about Nick Drake. In 2019, The Student Playlist provided a detailed and interesting examination of Five Leaves Left and Nick Drake’s career. There are some sections from the feature that I want to use here, but do go and read the whole thing:

“A keen student of literature, having read English Literature at Cambridge University, Drake’s lyrics are evocative yet cryptic enough to withstand almost endless analysis. Inspired chiefly by a childhood of English Romantic poets, the likes of Blake, Yeats and Vaughan in particular, the lyrical and musical themes on his 1969 debut album Five Leaves Left are instantly timeless and transportive. Fascination with human behaviour and interaction is one core theme, but his observations haven’t yet been steeped in the hopeless alienation that would characterise Drake’s later work.

Quite aside from the breathtaking and consistently excellent quality of Drake’s songwriting at the age of just 20, on top of Joe Boyd’s generous production and the virtuoso musicianship from the aforementioned Thompsons as his backing, what’s most striking about Five Leaves Left is how clear and visionary it is. Although every single note is almost obsessively arranged and rehearsed, it never feels like a museum piece – instead, it’s a living, breathing musical document, as relevant today as it was back then, and one that just as accurately reflects the late Sixties as Sgt. Pepper’s or Tommy. Instead of the sunshine and love of the California hippy vision, Five Leaves Left was something more debonair and English. Although Boyd’s production was warm, Drake’s songs and delivery were pastoral and melancholic, like the cool shade of a tree on a blazing summer afternoon. His carefully picked and strummed acoustic guitar rings out with crystalline beauty, tying together the album’s (slightly) more upbeat moments with its baleful ones.

The clean, stern string arrangements on the stunning ‘Way To Blue’, its bittersweet atmosphere underscored by the shifting minor-major key shifts, were the result of Nick Drake’s insistence on getting his schoolfriend Robert Kirby to score the strings for it, against the advice of Boyd and the label. It’s minor, but it does show that Nick Drake wasn’t always an introverted, self-questioning soul, and in artistic terms was capable of getting his vision across with assurance.

“So I’ll leave the ways that are making me be / What I really don’t want to be,” he sings in his floaty, peculiarly English baritone on the lush opening track ‘Time Has Told Me’, a gorgeous moment that speaks to a quiet optimism, a mood that ended up being all too rare in Drake’s writing. The fantasia of ‘The Thoughts Of Mary Jane’, with its (incredibly) uncredited flute-playing adorning a wistful melody. and evaporates like a daydream. The spectral ‘Fruit Tree’ could almost pass for a McCartney-esque rumination on existence (“Life is but a memory / Happened long ago / Theatre full of sadness / For a long forgotten show”), and the galloping piano of ‘Man In A Shed’ chases Drake’s guitar around the mix in an upbeat moment that breaks the pace.

These moments are all brilliantly reflective of the British folk scene at the time, but Five Leaves Left also drifts in to darker and less musically conventional territory for the genre. Take the weary, questioning lyrics of ‘River Man’, for instance, Drake making allusions to concepts about actions and consequences. That mood is ruminative and mysterious, but tracks like the bare-boned ‘Day Is Done’ are much starker, reading like a heartbreaking essay on negativity and the futility of effort (“When the game’s been fought / You sped the ball across the court / Lost much sooner than you would have thought”). On the beguiling ‘Three Hours’ and the hidden gem of ‘Cello Song’, Drake and his musicians explore quasi-Eastern sounds that pitch his music halfway between folk and psychedelia.

Although it failed to register any kind of commercial impact, Drake’s backers at Island felt it logical to carry on in the same vein as Five Leaves Left. He and Boyd went all-out for his second album Bryter Layter, released in 1971 and festooned with a much more generous backing of organs, bass guitars, and choir and strings in places”.

I have heard some recent interviews where Gabrielle Drake, Nick’s sister, talks about Five Leaves Left and her brother. I am going to move to a feature from Rolling Stone about The Making of Five Leaves Left. I think we learn more about Nick Drake as a songwriter with these outtakes and demos. This peerless talent working out these songs that have endured for decades and inspired so many other artists:

“Sound Technique’s control room overlooked the recording floor, and Boyd often sat there while Wood and Drake worked below. The engineer spent a lot of time with Drake, even sometimes driving the songwriter back to Cambridge on his own way home to Suffolk. “I always had a very easy relationship with Nick, and we’d talk about anything,” Wood says. “He had a sense of humor. He wasn’t dour at all, but he was quiet.”

You can get a sense of Drake’s personality on the second tape, cut on a Grundig reel-to-reel recorder in the fall of 1968 by fellow Cambridge student Paul de Rivaz, whom Drake met the previous year. “I will never forget his rendition of ‘House of the Rising Sun,’” de Rivaz tells Rolling Stone. “The guitar riff at the beginning was absolutely made for him.”

Drake was working with arranger Robert Kirby, who was also attending Cambridge at the time. It’s fascinating and intimate, as though you’re sitting in the room with these university students. Fans will likely lose their minds here as they hear Drake actually speaking before each track, appearing chatty and joyful, a stark contrast to how the public perceives him. “As you can tell from some of the comments in the tape, he was jolly about a number of things, and quite jokey,” says de Rivaz. “I’m so glad we can reveal the true Nick,” adds Gabrielle.

Before the crisp, delightful “Mickey’s Tune” — completely unheard until now — Drake admits the tape is proving to be “unprofessional,” and jokes that he’s intoxicated, though de Rivaz says he was probably just hungover. (When I mention this moment to Wood, he said, “Nick certainly smoked weed, but he never, ever worked when he was anything other than absolutely stone-cold sober.”)

The direction that Drake gives Kirby on the tape — possibly some flute here, a string quartet there — demonstrates that even before his debut was recorded, Drake knew how he wanted his music to sound. (The liner notes reveal he was a fan of the Beach Boys’ 1966 classic Pet Sounds.) “At that very young age, he knew exactly what he wanted, and this recording showed it,” Gabrielle says. This proved to be especially true when musician Richard Hewson first contributed arrangements to the album, and an unsatisfied Drake used Kirby instead. “I think it’s a bit of a sore subject, to be honest,” Storey says of Hewson’s early involvement.

De Rivaz ended up keeping the tape, and never forgot about it in the ensuing decades. “I knew it was worth keeping,” he says. “I thought, ‘Well, a little bit of history, I’ll keep it.’” Though de Rivaz traveled the world for his job with British Petroleum, he kept the tape safe in his London home, refusing to fly abroad with it in fear of magnetic scanners at airports. A lifelong horse rider, he connected with Chandler in April 2017 through his fellow polo player Kenney Jones (drummer for the Faces and the Who). “I was sitting at home,” de Rivaz remembers. “The phone rang, and somebody said, ‘Hello, I’m Johnny Chandler from Island Records, and I think you might have an interesting tape.'”

De Rivaz then met with Callomon and Gabrielle at Abbey Road. “I duly appeared and said, ‘This is the tape, which you’re not going to play, and this is the CD, which has a copy of what’s on it,’” he said. “When it finished, there was this sort of silence, and poor Gabrielle was physically a bit upset, hearing her brother after so many years.”

Asked about this moment, Gabrielle tells Rolling Stone, “It was a sudden light thrown onto the Nick of my youth and his — a Nick too often hidden behind the cloud of his final sad years”.

I am going to end with a review for The Making of Five Leaves Left. However, it is worth thinking about the legacy of the album. Even though it was not really a commercial success, that does not really matter. The fact that we are still talking about the album and it has been so talked about. That is much more important than sales. Classic Album Sundays wrote about how Five Leaves Left sold low. However, it went on to inspire other musicians and now is this timeless album:

“Although Boyd was sure that Drake’s first album would follow in the footsteps of Leonard Cohen’s debut that sold 100,000 copies despite the singer/songwriters refusal to tour, the response to the release of ‘Five Leaves Left’ was underwhelming. The only British radio DJ to give the album airtime was John Peel but even this behemoth’s support did little to spark sales which totalled about 6,000 (a lot by today’s standard’s but depressing by those of the late sixties).

However, with time yet sadly decades after Drake’s early death, ‘Five Leaves Left’ and Drake’s following two albums ‘Bryter Layter’ and ‘Pink Moon’ have grown in popularity inspiring musicians such as R.E.M.’s Peter Buck, Dream Academy (who penned a song in tribute to the late musician) and Paul Weller (who helped champion Drake’s music), amongst countless others. Perhaps the fact that Drake did not neatly fit into a popular sound and genre at the time of his debut’s release in 1969 prompted his posthumous cult status as ‘Five Leaves Left’ does not sound like a reflection of the times but in effect, timeless”.

I will end with a review from The Line of Best Fit for The Making of Five Leaves Left. You can buy that album here, though you can obviously stick with the original. It is a gorgeous and rich album that I first heard when I was a teenager and I have loved it ever since. Even though I have not revealed much about the making of the album, I hope I have taken you a little deeper into Five Leaves Left and its brilliance:

“Earlier issuings of material not included on the original three albums have necessarily been rather fragmentary in nature, and although it is good to have both Time of No Reply that has unreleased songs, in addition to more familiar ones in different arrangements, from the years 1968 and 1974, and Made to Love Magic that similarly provides unreleased recordings from those years, this new issue is, in so many respects, by far the finest of all, including so much in an appropriately-presented way that allows a remarkable insight into the work and the decision-making behind that first record within the more concentrated 1968-69 timeframe.

For instance, the de Rivaz-tape version of “Made to Love Magic” is beautiful and, wonderfully, has Nick carefully explaining how a flute would accompany his guitar at certain points. The version orchestrated by Richard Hewson and included on Time of No Reply, though manifestly better recorded, seems a little over-lush, lacking the elemental quality of the college room rendering. On the Made to Love Magic album, a composite version, simply called “Magic” (from Sound Techniques [1968] and Landsdowne Studios [2003]) that has some creative orchestration and re-mixing by Robert Kirby and John Wood, is undoubtedly better than Hewson’s, not least because it has the flute part prominent, but it has not the extraordinary combination of delicacy and starkness that makes the student account so compelling.

The choice and sequencing of material from various dates and sessions show both intelligence and sensitivity. Of course, as the Preface, written by Cally Callomon (who, with Gabrielle Drake, manages Nick’s Estate) in the accompanying book acknowledges, some would like to have everything on the record, as it were. However, what is presented has been judiciously selected and respectful of the artist, and shows both development and, in places, roads that could have been, but were not, taken. A fine illustration is provided by a comparison of “Strange Face” from the Beverley Martyn reel (a spare rendition, with just vocal and guitar) with the rough mix of a very different version (vocal, guitar, congas, shaker and various other unspecified instruments) from six months on; the composition later became “Cello Song”. Similarly, the accounts of “Day Is Done” include some imaginative instructive reconstruction to highlight the thought processes over the period April ‘68 / November ‘68 / April ‘69.

Neil Storey’s extensive research in locating all surviving tapes and takes is worthy of the highest praise. The physical quality of the book is uniformly excellent (textured covers and thick glossy pages, with finely reproduced images), and the extensive essay covering the recording processes is especially good on the discussions concerning the arrangements, with valuable detailed recollections from Joe Boyd and double bassist Danny Thompson, as well as from Robert Kirby, a music student friend who not only recorded Nick doing an exquisite one-off piano and vocal version of “Way To Blue” in Cambridge, but also carefully worked out some fine orchestration features: “He’s done a rather beautiful string quartet arrangement for “Day Is Done” … Naturally, it’s rather a lengthy process” noted one letter home.

The narrative of Five Leaves Left is long and complex. Now that it has been told, in words and music, the record’s greatness is surely only enhanced. This release is the culmination of a remarkable project for which we should all be grateful to Gabrielle Drake and the archival team”.

One of the all-time best debut albums, Nick Drake’s Five Leaves Left should be heard by everyone. I would recommend it to everyone. Despite the fact Nick Drake’s recording career was quite short, his influence is huge. His songwriting genius clear. His 1969 debut is sublime. If you have not heard  Five Leaves Left yet, then make sure you do. It is a listening experience…

YOU will not forget.

FEATURE: Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love at Forty: Fourteen: Hello Earth

FEATURE:

 

 

Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love at Forty

ILLUSTRATION CREDIT: Marius Herbert (from the book, Finding Kate, written by Michael Byrne) 

Fourteen: Hello Earth

__________

THE penultimate song…

on Hounds of Love, I am now at the incredible and epic Hello Earth. After I have focused on the tracks and have come to the end of the album, there are a few other features that I want to cover. For now, I am going deep with one of the standout moments from Kate Bush’s fifth studio album. A track that shows her true skill as a producer. I am going to refer to Leah Kardos and her book, 33 1/3 Hounds of Love. She goes into detail about this track. Before then, there is some interview archive from the Kate Bush Encyclopedia, where Kate Bush talks about the song. It sounded like it was a real challenge realising this amazing moment! One that comes at a crucial moment in The Ninth Wave. Following Jig of Life and this spirited number where the heroine is urged to stay awake and survive, here we have this vision of the woman floating above Earth. Or someone looking down on her. It is atmospheric and cinematic:

“‘Hello Earth’ was a very difficult track to write, as well, because it was… in some ways it was too big for me. [Laughs] And I ended up with this song that had two huge great holes in the choruses, where the drums stopped, and everything stopped, and people would say to me, “what’s going to happen in these choruses,” and I hadn’t got a clue.

We had the whole song, it was all there, but these huge, great holes in the choruses. And I knew I wanted to put something in there, and I’d had this idea to put a vocal piece in there, that was like this traditional tune I’d heard used in the film Nosferatu. And really everything I came up with, it with was rubbish really compared to what this piece was saying. So we did some research to find out if it was possible to use it. And it was, so that’s what we did, we re-recorded the piece and I kind of made up words that sounded like what I could hear was happening on the original. And suddenly there was these beautiful voices in these chorus that had just been like two black holes.

In some ways I thought of it as a lullaby for the Earth. And it was the idea of turning the whole thing upside down and looking at it from completely above. You know, that image of if you were lying in water at night and you were looking up at the sky all the time, I wonder if you wouldn’t get the sense of as the stars were reflected in the water, you know, a sense of like, you could be looking up at water that’s reflecting the stars from the sky that you’re in. And the idea of them looking down at the earth and seeing these storms forming over America and moving around the globe, and they have this like huge fantasticly overseeing view of everything, everything is in total perspective. And way, way down there somewhere there’s this little dot in the ocean that is them.

Richard Skinner, ‘Classic Albums interview: Hounds Of Love. Radio 1 (UK), aired 26 January 1992”

I am going to come to what Leah Kardos notes about Hello Earth. She notes how the song draws together all the music, sonic and lyrical themes ad layers of the album. At over six minutes, it is the longest song on Hounds of Love. It also has the most players on it. If some feel that Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God) is the most epic song, it really is Hello Earth. Almost like a climax. The biggest moment in the film where the action reaches its peak. We have “drummer Stuart Elliott, guitarist Brian Bath, bassist Eberhard Weber, pipes by O’Flynn and bouzouki by Lunny, in addition to a choir (by Richard Hickox Singers), orchestral strings, horns and percussion, arranged again by Kamen”. Michael Kamen and his orchestral arrangements is crucial to the swell and epic nature of Hello Earth. As Bush’s heroine looks down on the seas from way above, she is “helpless to stop a destructive storm she sees forming over America and moving out to sea (‘Can’t do anything…’)”. Leah Kardos observes how “Bush calls back to ‘Hounds of Love’ (the declarative ‘Here I go, don’t let me go! becomes a regretful ‘Why did I go?’), ‘Waking the Witch’ (‘Get out of the waves, get out of the water’), with keyword nods to ‘Mother Stands for Comfort’ (‘Murderer!’) and ‘Cloudbusting (‘Out of the cloudburst’)”. It is, as Kardos writes, like a Broadway musical. Bringing all the themes that have gone before into this big number. All coming to the surface of the narrative. All the pieces fit together. The only problem is the gaps. Where the chorus should be, there was the decision as to what would be there.  Composer Michael Berkeley transcribed and arranged a Georgian folk song, Zinzkaro – for the Richard Hickox Singers –, which needed to be similar to the Werner Herzog/Nosferatu piece that Bush had heard and wanted to use. Michael Berkley “characterized Bush’s creative approach as ‘zany (and) ambitious’, later recalling how he was sent a cassette with copious colourful notes, adding ‘she talked of the sound quality in the most graphic terms … indeed, she was thrilled when I suggested we create our own new language for this chorus of the spheres”. “With the lowest strings oozing down from F to C# and the highest strings inching upwards from high C to C#, is a spine-tingling musical manoeuvre, a panoramic aspect radio shift”.

There is a slow-motion portamento that slides to this widescreen drone. There are moments of whale song and sonic blips. Suggestions that the heroine could be sinking. Bush whispers in German “Tiefer, Tiefer, irgendwo in der tiefe gibt es ein licht”. This translates to “Deeper, deeper, somewhere in the depths there is a light”. Maybe this is the moment of death where Bush’s stranded woman – whether she truly casts herself in this role or someone else – or a psychological awakening. It almost comes full circle. And Dream of Sheep was when she wanted to sleep and drift to rest after being lost at sea. Kardos notes how Hello Earth “fulfils the promise of ‘And Dream of Sheep’, with Bush finally  soothing the ‘little earth’ to sleep after the long struggle to stay alert”. Whatever your interpretation regarding the fae of the heroine, one cannot deny what a pivotal and huge moment Hello Earth is. You can also hear why it would have taken so long to put together! Bush, as producer and songwriter, having to realise her vision and provide this suitably epic song that also keeps the narrative moving and stands alone in its own right. Completely different to the songs either side of it (Jig of Life and The Morning Fog). The Morning Fog could be the death-dream of the heroine as she envisions a happy rescue, or it could actually be the rescue after so long struggling to stay alive. The realisation of that hope and bravery. Hello Earth truly showcases Bush’s gifts as a producer and composer. Few other artists in Pop in 1985 were writing songs like this. I am looking forward to moving to The Morning Fog. This conclusion of a wonderful album. You never really know what occurred at sea. If Kate Bush/the heroine escaped and was rescued. I think it is left in the minds of the listeners as to….

WHAT really happened.

FEATURE: A Fresh Focus: Anton Corbijn’s Icon Award and the Importance of Music Photography

FEATURE:

 

 

A Fresh Focus

IN THIS PHOTO: PJ Harvey in 1998/PHOTO CREDIT: Anton Corbijn

Anton Corbijn’s Icon Award and the Importance of Music Photography

__________

THIS was announced…

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1982/PHOTO CREDIT: Anton Corbijn

a little while ago, but I want to come to it now. Music photography is hugely important. I think that it is underrated and not talked about a lot. I can see why artists get coverage and attention. However, we cannot really overlook the importance and role of music photographers. There are so many great music photographers working today. Award shows celebrating them should very much be highlighted more. I grew up reading music magazines and seeing artists of the day shot. Wonderful poses and terrific compositions. Images that will endure forever. I guess all big music fans have their favourite music photographer. There are these icons that have worked with some of the all-time best artists. One of those legends who is being honoured very shortly is Anton Corbijn. I think I mentioned him recently in a Kate Bush feature. He took some shots of her in 1982. He photographed her for an NME interview around the release of her fourth studio album, The Dreaming. I am going to come to a feature about Corbijn soon. However, Rolling Stone wrote how this wonderful and decades-successful photographer is being awarded at the forthcoming Abbey Road Music Photography Awards:

“Dutch photographer, filmmaker, and music video director Anton Corbijn will be presented with the Icon Award at the annual Abbey Road Music Photography Awards.

Corbijn has photographed numerous notable subjects over the course of his 40-plus-year photography career, including Tom Waits, David Bowie, Kurt Cobain, Ian Curtis, Clint Eastwood, Bryan Adams, Cameron Diaz, Miles Davis, Frank Sinatra, William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Joni Mitchell, Robert De Niro, Gerhard Richter, Ai Weiwei, and Lucian Freud. He is considered to be the house photographer for U2 and Depeche Mode, and has shot both artists for several decades. He has directed music videos for artists like U2, Depeche Mode, Nirvana, Metallica, Nick Cave, Johnny Cash, Arcade Fire, Coldplay, and The Killers.

“Photographing musicians was a love that became a full-on mission in the early ‘70s,” Corbijn said in a statement. “From hanging around the front of the stage to being 100 percent in charge, it’s been an exciting place to be. I like to think I evolved over the years, but I am still excited by music and photographing musicians now and then. To receive recognition from a body that contains the name of Abbey Road and with some of my peers as judges, I can only be grateful! Thank you!”

Abbey Road’s Director of Marketing & Creative, Mark Robertson, added, “Anton Corbijn’s work has been part of the cultural fabric of modern music for over five decades. His photography doesn’t just document — it defines, it innovates, and it inspires artists, fans and photographers alike. At Abbey Road, we’re thrilled to celebrate a true icon whose artistry continues to influence.”

Previous winners of the Icon Award, selected by the Music Photography Awards’ judging panel, include Jill Furmanovsky in 2024, Henry Diltz in 2023, and Eric Johnson in 2022. This year’s judging panel include Rankin, Nile Rodgers, Eric Burton, Joe Keery, Scarlet Page, Dimitri From Paris, Julia Cumming, and Simon Wheatley.

Abbey Road Music Photography Awards will be held at Abbey Road Studios in London on Oct. 2. The awards were founded in 2022 and span numerous categories, most of which are open for public entry. Last year, the Abbey Road Music Photography Awards attracted more than 22,000 entries from 30 different countries. This year’s awards will feature two new categories: Portrait and Festivals. Nominees for the remaining categories will be announced in September”.

It is well timed that Anton Corbijn is being honoured. As this DAZED feature from last month outlines, the esteemed and hugely respected photographer is being honoured with a new show at Fotografiska in Stockholm. With a career spanning over fifty years, this is someone that is going to be inspiring photographers coming through:

“The oldest son of a preacher, Anton Corbijn grew up in a religious island community in the Netherlands – far from the revolutionary cultural scenes where he’d later make his name as a photographer. “Across the border from the island was the ‘promised land,’” he says. “That’s where music was made. It was a different, freer life. I elevated the idea of a liberal lifestyle, as opposed to the lifestyle I had.”

For Corbijn, the camera was a route out of the place where he grew up, to get closer to the musicians and their liberated way of living. 50 years later, he’s worked with many of the most important artists of our age, from Björk to Joy Division, Nirvana to Depeche Mode, Kate Bush to Captain Beefheart and David Bowie. But in 2001 he briefly returned to his hometown, taking time to reflect on its place in his life and career to that date. The resulting photo series, titled Staged, sees the photographer himself dress up as dead music idols, including Elvis Presley, Kurt Cobain, and John Lennon.

“I combined the obsession I had with music [and] my parents’ obsession with life after death,” he explains. The intent was “playful” and never actually meant to deceive, but it helped shape a new mythology for the village nevertheless. “We had an exhibition in the town hall,” he adds, “and I heard people saying, ‘Gee, I didn’t realise Bob Marley was in our village!’”

There are some photographers who can show us our favourite celebrities (musicians, actors, artists, models, and so on) in a totally new light. Then, there are photographers who shape how we see those icons to begin with, who help write their foundational myths. Anton Corbijn is among the latter. Picture many of the famous faces he’s worked with over the last 50 years, and there’s a good chance you’ll see them as imagined through his lens: Nick Cave frowning in a raw black-and-white portrait, a moonlit Courtney Love in the shadowy Atlantic ocean, Patti Smith turning her own camera on the viewer.

“For five decades, Anton Corbijn’s visual language has found expressions through photography, feature films, graphic design, music videos, stage design, books, and more,” says Pauline Benthede, global vice president of exhibitions at Fotografiska, opening a career-spanning retrospective of Corbijn’s work at the Stockholm gallery to celebrate its 15th anniversary. “He is an artist who has changed popular culture as we know it.”

Since its opening in 2010, Stockholm’s Fotografiska has hosted exhibitions of Corbijn’s work on three occasions – the photographer himself says the gallery feels like a “second home” by now. On the flipside, Corbijn’s work has had a ripple effect on the culture of the city itself. Born and raised in Stockholm, the 32-year-old photographer Noah Agemo used to skip school to visit Fotografiska. “I’ve never really been good at school,” he tells Dazed in his studio. “So I got a year’s [Fotografiska] membership, and I just went there like every day... That’s when I saw Anton’s first exhibition.” He was particularly affected by a photo of the trip-hop musician, and early member of Massive Attack, Tricky, with a butterfly on his chest. “I was like, ‘Wow, I didn’t know you could do that with musicians,’” he says. “I was like, ‘Maybe I can do that as well”.

PHOTO CREDIT: ATC Comm Photo/Pexels

I hope that the Abbey Road Music Photography Awards not only honours and spotlights modern greats, but gets people discussing music photography. Those working for music magazines and independently. You can read more about Abbey Road’s Music Photography Awards here. An article that showcases some of his best shots. In an age where everyone is a photographer and we see countless images on Instagram and social media every day, is it harder to stand out as a photographer? I follow a few music photographers online, including Phoebe Fox, and I always marvel at their work! I use quite a few photographers for my features. Maybe with fewer prominent print magazines as there were decades ago, we discuss music photography less. However, I think that the Internet and music journalism online does allow plenty of opportunities and exposure. These amazing interviews where photographers’ work can be seen. I recently wrote about music photography and how I love long-form interviews where an artist is captured in a number of different settings. There are a lot of ambitious and passionate young photographers whose work deserves more attention. There is a lot to be discussed regarding music photography in the modern age. I would love to see more music photography award ceremonies.

IN THIS PHOTO: FLETCHER/PHOTO CREDIT: Phoebe Fox

More exhibitions that collect the work of modern photographers and established icons. I also think photos are more than individual snaps and moments. They shape our understanding of music and can inspire not only other photographers and fans. The artists themselves can be inspired.  I shall end with some words from the Managing Director at Abbey Road, Sally Davies: "Music photography doesn’t just document culture — it plays a vital role in shaping it. With the Music Photography Awards we're proud to champion the image-makers capturing music’s most powerful moments and pushing the boundaries of visual creativity. And as the awards evolve into the cornerstone of our Music Photography Accelerator, it's exciting to not only spotlight talent, but continue to nurture it, helping it connect and thrive. It's about opening doors for the next generation of music photographers, and we can’t wait to see the incredible work they will submit this year”. Music photography and the print media that I grew up with is perhaps less common now. I think the artists rightly get a lot of love and exposure, but those who photograph them and take these amazing live shots do not get discussed in the same breath. It is hard to ignore just how important music photography. For artists, it can craft and build their identity and connect with their audiences. Live shots capture these very special moments. I think, with so many photos shared online, the form can be disposable and a little overwhelming. Music photography is about the quality and precision. These very special moments that we can cherish for years. It is crucial that music photographers are given more light and love and really put…

BACK in focus.

FEATURE: Kate Bush: Something Like a Song: Rubberband Girl (The Red Shoes)

FEATURE:

 

 

Kate Bush: Something Like a Song

Rubberband Girl (The Red Shoes)

__________

I have written about this track…

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush photographed in 1993 during filming the short film, The Line, the Cross and the Curve/PHOTO CREDIT: Guido Harari

a few times through the years. Rubberband Girl is a song that is on Kate Bush’s The Red Shoes. Released as a single, it had two videos made. Not that many people have spoken about Rubberband Girl. I might revisit some of what I have written before. However, as it is coming up to its anniversary, I am featuring it again. I am going to be grabbing some information from Kate Bush Encyclopedia and what they have said about this song. Released in the U.K. on 6th September, 1993 and 7th December, 1993 in the U.S., it is one of the most underrated Kate Bush singles. The single release schedule was a bit odd for The Red Shoes. The first single release was an obvious one. Rubberband Girl is a natural lead single. However, a day after this song was released as a single, Eat the Music was released in the U.S. That decision to bring out one song in the U.K. (and other countries) and another in the U.S., three further singles were released. The final one, And So Is Love, was released on 31st October, 1994. Maybe an odd choice for a Hallowe’en single in a year when Britpop was ruling! However, I think the album as a whole is incredible. Maybe the production does suffer some of the worst traits of 1990s music. A bit compressed and lacking in depth and soul. Bush addressed this for 2011’s Director’s Cut. That was an album where Bush reworked and re-recorded songs from The Red Shoes and 1989’s The Sensual World. Rubberband Girl was one of the songs included for re-examination. I don’t think Bush had any strong attachment to the song or was overly-keen to include it. Maybe she felt the first single from that album was too important to leave it as it was. However, I love the original.

This fantastic single came out in the U.K. as a 7” single, a 12” single picture disc, a cassette single and a C.D.-single. The U.S. only had the C.D. version. The B-side to Rubberband Girl was Big Stripey Lie. This is a great deep cut where Bush played electric guitar for the first time on record. A reasonable chart success, Rubberband Girl did get to number twelve in the U.K. I am going to go into a bit more detail. Kate Bush merely thinks of Rubberband Girl as a bit of a fun. A pop confection, I think that it is better and deeper than this. The Red Shoes has some truly wonderful moments. Moments of Pleasure, Eat the Music and Lily. Maybe there are a few slightly weaker tracks, though the album as a whole is a lot stronger than it is given credit for. Also from the Kate Bush Encyclopedia, this is what Bush said in 2011 about the superb Rubberband Girl:

“I thought the original ‘Rubberband’ was… Well, it’s a fun track. I was quite happy with the original, but I just wanted to do something really different. It is my least favourite track. I had considered taking it off to be honest. Because it didn’t feel quite as interesting as the other tracks. But I thought, at the same time, it was just a bit of fun and it felt like a good thing to go out with. It’s just a silly pop song really, I loved Danny Thompson’s bass on that, and of course Danny (McIntosh)’s guitar.

Mojo (UK), 2011”.

In the November 1993 edition of Future Music, we get some perspectives from Del Palmer. He was responsible for engineering and mixing on The Red Shoes. He and Bush used to be in a relationship. By the end of 1993, that relationship had ended. However, he continued to work alongside her up to and including her latest studio album, 2011’s 50 Words for Snow. He sadly died last year. He was an essential and enormous part of her career. Here is what he had to say about Rubberband Girl: the exciting and catchy lead track from Kate Bush’s seventh studio album:

“Chosen as first single from the album, Rubberband Girl is up-tempo and infectiously melodic. Originally, the first single was intended to be Eat The Music. but during the production of the film to accompany the album, Rubberband Girl seemed to be catching everyone's imagination, and has proved to be a substantial chart success.

Although the song has a relatively straightforward pop/rock feel, the vocals are multi-tracked and some of them seem incredibly low-pitched. "This song and And So Is Love are typical of the live band feel," explains Del. "We were trying to create a very accessible, live sound and the fastest way to record was to have at least two or three people playing together initially.

"On Rubberband Girl the bass, drums and basic keyboards were all done together, but we did change the whole track afterwards in the sense of editing it digitally rather than re-doing tracks. The bass and drum sound was important because we wanted to have them consistent throughout the album."

Although Stuart Elliot and John Giblin's performances tended to go on to tape 'live' at an early stage, this didn't avoid the need for subsequent changes. "When you put later tracks down, the earlier ones sometimes have to change because the whole feel of the piece changes. Sometimes we had to do the bass and drums three or four times, not because we were unhappy with the original performances, but because the feel of the song had altered as new tracks were added. Rubberband Girl is one of the few that worked first time - it just has a basic rock feel with a riffing guitar, the backing vocals went down first and then we tried various lyrics and lead vocal ideas.

"In most songs the lyrics change a lot during the recording process, although a basic seed remains solid. It often gets to the point of struggling over just one word which has to be returned to many times -there's never any pressure to write a song to fill a particular function, like acting as a single or being a very slow ballad, so the whole feel can often change”.

There has been a bit of a mixed reception to Rubberband Girl. I last wrote about it late last year. I don’t think that it has aged badly. It is coming up for its thirty-second anniversary. I want to collate some of what has been said already. In 2022, Classic Rock History placed Rubberband Girl in their top ten Kate Bush songs: “The Kate Bush song “Rubberband Girl” was a bit of a departure for Kate Bush, but it was still so brilliant. Anything Kate Bush composed, recorded, and performed was simply stunning. She was that rare of an artist. We should have done a top 100 Kate Bush songs list instead. The song “Rubberband Girl” was released on the album The Red Shoes. The record was issued in 1993. The album featured an incredible lineup of guest musicians, including Jeff Beck, Eric Clapton, and Prince”. This blog provided a very generous review of Rubberband Girl: “Rubberband Girl 9.5/10. This is Kate Bush's most dance-poppy track. "Running Up That Hill" was a big hit on the club scene, but this one seems even more danceable. However, this is far from a cheap track. The groove is fairly off-kilter but still danceable --- in that way it's comparable to a Roxy Music song…

She has enough taste to have a nice rhythmic saxophone, xylophones, awesome guitar solos, her brand of freaky singing (including a bit of 'play acting' ... dialog and even some goofy "rubber band" vocals) ... All of this PLUS a melody that's catchier than anything... There's really quite a lot in this song, and you'll have fun hearing it multiple times I'm sure”. Although Bush wrote the song quite quickly in the studio (not something she did often), I feel there is something personal about Rubberband Girl. Maybe personal circumstances and a slight downturn in critical praise after the massive success and 1985’s Hounds of Love might have made her feel like she needed to bounce back. Some critics writing her off. Entering the 1990s and trying to adapt to a very different music scene with a lot of ‘new Kate Bushes’ being spotlighted, it was a moment for strength and resurgence: “A rubberband bouncing back to life/A rubberband bend the beat/If I could learn to give like a Rubberband/I’d be back on my feet/A rubberband hold me trousers up/A rubberband ponytails/If I could learn to twang like a Rubberband/I’d be a rubberband girl”. On 6th September, Rubberband Girl turns thirty-two. The first taste of a new album following 1989’s The Sensual World, the public did respond to it. However, I think critics were muted in their praise. People need to reassess. It is a fantastic elastic track from one of music’s…    

ABSOLUTE best and strongest.

FEATURE: Spotlight: Sasha Keable

FEATURE:

 

 

Spotlight

PHOTO CREDIT: Jeff Hahn

Sasha Keable

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THIS is an artist…

PHOTO CREDIT: Becca Wheeler

who has been around for a very long time. Over a decade. However, like so many artists I feature in this series, I spotlight those who I feel are either not as known as they should be or are hitting a new stride. It is definitely an exciting moment for Sasha Keable. Her latest E.P., act right, was released earlier this month. This is someone that should be known to everyone. I am bringing together a few different interviews so that we get to know better this incredible talent. I want to start out with this article from The Outlook. I am a little late to Sasha Keable. It is evident that this artist is primed for massive things:

“Sasha Keable, a singer-songwriter hailing from South London, has been making waves in the music scene since 2013. That year marked her first significant recognition as she featured in several singles, including DJ Zinc’s “Only for Tonight” and Disclosure’s “Voices.” Her unique style, combined with her Colombian heritage, adds a rich authenticity to her artistry, allowing her to express her identity. With a dynamic voice, emotionally raw lyrics, and a musical range that spans trip-hop, classic R&B, and soul, she has captivated listeners around the globe.

Keable began to gain momentum with the release of “That’s the Shit,” one of her breakout tracks in 2018. Her reputation furthered in 2021 when she collaborated with renowned London R&B artist Jorja Smith on “Killing Me.”

Throughout her life, Keable has drawn inspiration from various experiences that have shaped her both as an artist and an individual. In a 2021 interview with “Coeval Magazine,” she reflected on how growing up without a television fueled her passion for music. “I was drawn into music when my parents split up, we didn’t have much money, so we didn’t have a TV. He [Dad] would print off tabs of songs and to entertain ourselves when he got back from work, he would play guitar, and I would sing along.”

The connection provided comfort during her parents’ divorce and solidified her deep bond with music. As she discovered her singing ability, her musical journey took off. She recounted that at 10 or 11, she fell in love with writing music long before her passion for singing fully blossomed. This pivotal moment encouraged her to explore her potential rather than simply absorb the artistic expressions of others.

Around the same time, she uncovered her musical preferences. Keable grew up listening to R&B, rock, and Colombian music while delving into works by 1970s Motown legends. The passion and heartbreak found in these classics resonated deeply with her and played a significant role in shaping her as a musician. Her work frequently revolves around themes of love and heartbreak.

These elements prominently feature in her hit song “Hold Up,” the first track she released in three years, which garnered attention when released in April 2024. The song’s impact was amplified by a live performance on BBC Radio and a music video that amassed over 723,000 views.

With raw emotion, she confronts heartache from infidelity, expressing feelings of betrayal: “What’s the point in feeling? Yeah/ Been kicked, I been bruised/ And it’s me I turn to/So if you think I need you get that out your head.” In an interview with “New Wave Magazine,” she shared that the song emerged from a desire to reclaim her power: “The new music came from a place of feeling powerless in everything else in life, the only place I felt safe and like I had control over the outcome was in the studio.”

Keable continued to build on her momentum with consecutive releases and collaborations. In June 2024, she released “Auction,” featuring the R&B singer Destin Conrad, known for his sultry sound. In September, she unveiled another collaborative track with American singer and rapper 6LACK titled “Take Your Time.” The momentum from these singles paved the way for her own single “Why,” which delves deeper into love: “Who gave you permission to be this perfect?/ I think you should go ahead and thank your mama for me/ Lord knows what I did to deserve this.” This track captured considerable attention, leading her to perform it on the popular YouTube show “A COLORS SHOW,” where artists perform in a one-color room with only a microphone.

With her rising popularity, the video has garnered over 793,000 views. Her most recent release in December 2024, “NIGHT OFF,” a collaboration with fellow R&B artist Isaiah Falls, has become her most streamed song on Spotify, amassing over 6.6 million streams. Keable’s dedication and hard work are yielding impressive accolades.

In January 2025, she was featured on Spotify’s “Artists to Watch 2025” list, as well as Amazon Music UK’s “Artists to Watch 2025.” Her extraordinary achievements in 2024 have set a strong foundation for her continued success in 2025. In February, she received a nomination for Best R&B/Soul Act at the annual Music of Black Origin (MOBO) Awards.

Sasha Keable’s journey, driven by a lifelong passion for music, has shaped her into the remarkable artist she is today. As she continues to evolve and grow, fans eagerly anticipate what she will create next”.

There are two recent interviews that I need to get to. The first is from NOTION. For the Amazon Music Breakthrough UK: Artists To Watch 2025 list, they spoke with an artist who was on the rise. Even though she has been performing and releasing music for years, 2025 is a year when so many new people are looking her way. Such a distinct and stunning name. The minute you hear her music, you will be captivated and under her spell:

“Bursting onto the scene thanks to collaborations with the likes of Disclosure and DJ Zinc, Sasha Keable’s chameleonic voice has been captivating listeners for over a decade. Sasha has since found her own lane: a soulful force, she weaves together R&B, pop, and jersey with emotive storytelling to create an intimate and electrifying sonic experience.

The release of her EP Intermission, which includes ‘Killing Me’ featuring Jorja Smith, was followed by a three-year hiatus before she returned with the gospel-tinged ‘Hold Up’. Quickly becoming a beloved track in the industry and beyond, with co-signs from the likes of John Legend, Wu Tang Clan, and Maya Jama, Sasha Keable has dropped banger after banger since.

As she continues to evolve and collaborate with some of the world’s most exciting artists like 6LACK and DESTIN CONRAD, we sit down with Sasha Keable, to talk falling in love with music and where her most unexpected inspiration comes from…

Do you remember the moment you fell in love with music?

Music has always been my world. My dad would print off tabs of songs and after work, he would play guitar and I would sing along. My older sister was the person that got me into R&B and my mum and Abuelita played a lot of Cumbia & Vallenatos. I guess I fell in love with music because it allowed me to connect deeply with who I am and tell my story in a way nothing else could.

What are you manifesting for 2025?

I’m manifesting growth, freedom, and fearless creativity. Moving to Miami is something I’ve been dreaming about—it feels like a place where I could thrive both personally and musically. It’s strange coming to a place that’s not in South America and hearing so many people speak Spanish, but I love that connection to my heritage. I’m also manifesting Grammy nominations, sold-out shows, and creating music that resonates globally while staying true to myself.

What’s the proudest moment of your career so far?

Definitely when Beyoncé mentioned me as one of the next-generation artists to watch. That kind of recognition is insane. But also, hearing fans sing back my lyrics at a EU sold out tour, that’s a feeling I’ll never get used to, and it makes me so proud.

What do you hope people take away from your music?

I want my music to feel like a safe space. Whether you’re celebrating, healing, or just figuring things out, I want people to feel like my songs are there for them. It’s all about connection and making people feel seen and saying things people can’t find the words for themselves”.

I will end up with a review for act right. No doubt one of the best E.P.s of this year. You can sense that next year will be the biggest one for Sasha Keable. DAZED spoke with Keable in June. After a decade of working hard, she is now getting her flowers and finding her feet:

“There isn’t one recipe for success in the music industry. For some artists, the ascent can be quick (too quick even), with TikTok unlocking the power to make someone a star overnight. For others, success is an uphill battle that takes decades of hard work, determination and resilience. Even the ones who do get boosted by social media streams have, more often than not, been grinding behind the scenes for years prior – take Doechii, Raye or Charli xcx, for example.

Towards the end of last year, Sasha Keable made her Colours Show debut – the music platform and YouTube channel that showcases emerging talent from around the world. She’s also been drip feeding us new music (her first in over two years), while over on TikTok, a quick scroll through any R&B lover’s feed and you’ll likely be told that Sasha Keable is one of the hottest new artists coming out of South London. By definition, she is an emerging artist. But Sasha has been releasing music and laying the groundwork for her career for well over a decade now.

Blending R&B with gospel and soul, the British-Colombian artist is known for her emotionally-charged lyricism and smoky, winding vocals. Since graduating from The Brit School in the early 2010s and being whisked off on tour with Disclosure and Katy B at the height of their fame, Sasha’s career has felt like two steps forward and one step back. In an interview from last year, she confessed that this would be her final attempt at making it as a musician – if it doesn’t work this time, she’ll change her focus to writing for other artists instead.

So far, at least, it seems like her patience is paying off. All six of the singles that she’s released in the past 12 months have garnered multi-millions of streams (each). She’s playing Glastonbury, Jools Holland, Little Simz’ Meltdown festival and she doesn’t plan on slowing down with the new music either. Even Beyoncé is a fan – she listed Sasha as one of the best artists she’d heard in 2024 in an interview with GQ.

Hey Sasha! How’s life at the moment?

Sasha Keable: Life is good! Life is busy. It’s pretty insane, actually, but it’s good.

How did it feel to release your latest single, ‘Act Right’?

Sasha Keable: It felt really good to put that out. I’d been going through a heartbreak, and it felt good to say my piece in a clear and concise way. The response has been great. I’m always shocked at how engaged everyone is with every release that I’ve put out.

People online are desperate for more music from you…

Sasha Keable: I honestly get harassed online. I’ll tease something, and after an hour, they’re like ‘Release it already!’ I'm like, let’s build up some excitement and mystery. But I think people really want a project from me, which is why I’m really excited to put out a body of music and let that tide people over for a second.

You once said that if it didn’t work this time, you would give up trying to make it as an artist and write for other people instead. Do you feel like it is working this time?

Sasha Keable: Yeah, absolutely. I’m not about to give up. It’s a really difficult industry and when you’ve been working at it for as long as I have, you have so many moments of doubt. It can be really lonely and a lot of stress from a lot of different angles. It’s a really hard industry to crack. But I’m definitely nowhere near the space that I was when I was feeling those feelings, because it’s actually working now and I’m doing the right things.

I’ve never cared if I’m famous, I’ve never cared about any of that. I’ve always just wanted to do music because I enjoy it so much

What kept you going when you thought you might give up?

Sasha Keable: For me, it’s being in the studio and making music. When I’m not creating, I lose sight of my purpose. I’ve never cared if I’m famous, I’ve never cared about any of that. I’ve always just wanted to do music because I enjoy it so much. It’s my number one love in life. But even me saying that if I don’t make it then I’ll write for other people – that’s still a win for me, being able to create will always be a win”.

NME awarded act right a five-star review. Grit, grace and heart infuses the E.P. NME noted how act right is a “rich, honey-voiced collection with sapphic desire, Motown soul and the bite of contemporary UK R&B”. It is hard to argue with that assessment. If that does not convince you to follow Sasha Keable then nothing will! She is a music treasure:

“Sasha Keable has long been propped up as the future of R&B. At first, she was seen as a dance-floor powerhouse – her breakthrough with Disclosure on ‘Voices’ marked her as a voice that could command a club in one note. Her first two EPs, 2013’s ‘Black Book’ and 2014’s ‘Lemongrass and Limeleaves’, were released to great fanfare.

After a three-year hiatus, she came back in 2024 bigger and badder than ever with ‘Hold Up’, showcasing her emotionally rich and unfiltered perspective on life and love that truly cemented her artistry. With Adele comparisons and a blessing from Beyoncé earlier this year, the British-Colombian star could easily have buckled under the pressure on her fifth EP, ‘Act Right’. Instead, Keable shrugs it off and delivers seven tracks that feel like the gold standard for modern R&B.

We’ve already tasted much of this feast. Singles like ‘Why’ and the titular track are conversational and gut-wrenching. The former is rooted in the purest and happiest form of love, yet there’s a pang of self-doubt in the mournful question: “Why is it me… you give all this love to?” It’s the sort of line that could have been penned by Aretha Franklin or Lauryn Hill when they redefined pain as power. ‘Act Right’ carries the raw frustration and emotional depth of Donny Hathaway, wrapped in the warm, confessional soul of Amy Winehouse. That emotive nuance is what makes this project such a stunning reintroduction to the world.

There are earworms at every turn, especially on the deeper cuts. The Leon Thomas-assisted ‘Move It Along’ wraps you in a warm sonic blanket with heavenly stacked ad-libs and a churchy, whining guitar, and when Keable’s opening guttural “Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeaaaah” hits, you soon realise you’ve just downloaded your newest vocal stim for the week.

‘Work’ – featuring Jamaican-born rapper BEAM – is a steamy slow-burner, too. The whiplash between Sasha’s silken croon and BEAM’s slackness might feel jarring at first, but listen closely. Hidden in her velvet phrasing, she’s a temptress, seductively commanding her lover to “lift up my skirt, grab my neck and say you care for nothing” – her sapphic desires a match for the rapper’s crassness.

The new cuts prove just as irresistible. ‘Can’t Stop’ finds Keable dropping into a just-between-us coolness, almost bragging about her toxic potential before roaring through the chorus about her addiction to the chaos. Her effortless runs beg to be mimicked (badly), while the post-chorus swirls with echoed, muffled layers that pull you deeper in”.

I will wrap up here. One of our brightest and best artists, here is someone who has been working tirelessly for over a decade. However, it seems like now is her time. A moment where Sasha Keable is releasing her best music and seems primed for many more years in the industry. Who knows how far she can go?! The superb act right is a truly brilliant work. It is going to be fascinating to see where Sasha Keable goes…

FROM here.

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Follow Sasha Keable

PHOTO CREDIT: Yana Van Nuffel

Official:

https://www.sashakeableofficial.com/

Instagram:

https://www.instagram.com/sashakeable

TikTok:

https://www.tiktok.com/@sasha.keable

Spotify:

https://open.spotify.com/artist/7MxGWmiAbqjNOGmj23wbWf?si=wxX9CcC6T9C8_o9X5O0KqA

YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC1_Ej3EWAay6ACKFS8eYfNg

Facebook:

https://www.facebook.com/SashaKeable

FEATURE: Now He’s Sitting in His Hole: Kate Bush’s Army Dreamers at Forty-Five

FEATURE:

 

 

Now He’s Sitting in His Hole

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush on the set of the Army Dreamers music video in 1980

Kate Bush’s Army Dreamers at Forty-Five

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AHEAD of the…

forty-fifth anniversary of Never for Ever on 8th September, there are a few features I want to put out. Kate Bush’s third studio album is among her best yet remains underrated. On 22nd September, the album’s third and final single turns forty-five. Army Dreamers reached sixteen in the U.K. In 2024, Army Dreamers gained new attention through TikTok increasing its popularity among younger generations. The surge in interest saw a 1,300% increase in streams. That song being used to score so many short videos. I have written about Army Dreamers a lot, so I will try not to repeat too much of what has come before. However, as the song is almost forty-five, I do want to start off with some valuable interview archive. Kate Bush talking about this song. At this point in her career, many were associating her with a particular imagine and sound. Nothing seen as political or serious. Breathing, the first single from Never for Ever, was a definite reaction to her. Now in her early-twenties, being influenced more by subjects around warfare and the nuclear threat. Army Dreamers is Bush talking about the insanity and futility of war. Where it takes young lives for no reason:

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

Colin Irwin, ‘Paranoia And Passion Of The Kate Inside’. Melody Maker (UK), 10 October 1980

The song is about a mother who lost her son overseas. It doesn’t matter how he died, but he didn’t die in action – it was an accident. I wanted the mother to be a very simple woman who’s obviously got a lot of work to do. She’s full of remorse, but he has to carry on, living in a dream. Most of us live in a dream.

Week-long diary, Flexipop, 1980

No, it’s not personal. It’s just a mother grieving and observing the waste. A boy with no O-levels, say, who might have [??? Line missing!] whatever. But he’s nothing to do, no way to express himself. So he joins the army. He’s trapped. So many die, often in accidents. I’m not slagging off the army, because it’s good for certain people. But there are a lot of people in it who shouldn’t be.

Derek Jewell, ‘How To Write Songs And Influence People’. Sunday Times (UK), 5 October 1980”.

PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush

There are a couple of features that I want to get to that provide more insight and depth. I am moving to Kris Needs's first ZigZag interview from 1980. I am not sure of the exact date, but it must have been after Never for Ever went to number one in the U.K. Right near the end of 1980. It is a good interview and has some useful observations and information. There is a part about Army Dreamers in it. Kate Bush did a lot of promotion in 1980, and each interview provides something different:

“It'd be good if people could see that you're doing stuff that's pretty new, too. You could never mistake Kate Bush for anyone else.

"Oh, great. I'd like to think that, but it's not for me to say. When you first come out, people say you're the new thing. then when you've been around for two or three years you become old hat, and they want to sweep you under the carpet as being MOR, which I don't feel I am from the artistic point of view. It doesn't feel like MOR to me at all, although I wouldn't call it Punk! Sometimes it's not even rock...I don't know, I think it's wrong to put labels on music. Even Punk, that's really just a label for convenience--it covers so many areas. I think sometimes it can actually kill people, being put under labels. I think it's something that shouldn't be encouraged. If people could just accept music as music and people as people, without having to compare them to other things...which is something we instinctively try to do."

The way you're presented in the press could alienate some people, I s'pose.

"Don't you think any form of publicity alienates the person who is not involved in it? I think that's part of the whole process. That's why I feel that the good thing about albums and gigs and even radio is that you are directly communicating with your audience, but with papers and appearances on TV you're not really relating directly."

Does the bad criticism hurt you?

"No, I don't get hurt. I've read a few reviews of the album, an some of them really couldn't stand me, probably much more than the album. In fact, one guy didn't like me so much, he had to write four columns of 'I can't stand Bush!' That's cool. Sometimes I find it funny. I think a bad review is a good omen in some papers."

At least that's a positive reaction.

"Yeah, if they really hate you, it's just as good as really liking you. You're really getting under their skin so much that they've got to speak about it. That's great!"

And the album still came in at number one.

"I can't believe it, still. Every time I tell someone I feel like I'm lying. I couldn't have asked more for such an important step in what I'm doing, because I feel that this album is a new step for me. The other two albums are so far away that they're not true. They really aren't me anymore. I think this is something the public could try and open up about. When you stereotype artists you always expect a certain kind of sound.

"I'd really like to be able to leave myself open to any form of music, so if I wanted to, I could do funk tracks on the next album, I could do classical, I could do bossa novas. I think it's best to stay as open as you can. As a person I'm changing all the time, and the first album is very much like a diary of me at that time--I was into a very high range. The same with the second album, and I feel this is perhaps why this one is like starting again. It's like the first album on a new level. It's much more under control."

You took a long time doing it. [You think that one took a long time!]

"Yeah, it did. It took a lot of work, but it was very beautiful work because it's so involving and it's so like emotions. It's totally unpredictable and you can fall in love with it or you can hate it or if you want to you can ignore it: you know, all the things that you can do with people."

That's one of the main things I like about the music--the emotions running around.

"I think everyone is emotional, and I think a lot of people are afraid of being so. They feel that it's vulnerable. Myself, I feel that it's the key to everything, and that the more you can find out about your emotions the better. Some of the things that come into your head can be a surprise when you're thinking."

The next single is Army Dreamers, which sounds like a wistful little waltz-time ditty on first hearing, though a bit sombre. Kate adopts a lilting Irish accent--all very nice. But listen to the words and she's mourning her dead son, killed in the army. I thought Kate was singing about Northern Ireland, but not necessarily...

"It's not actually directed at Ireland. It's included, but it's much more embracing the whole European thing. That's why it says BFPO in the first chorus, to try and broaden it away from Ireland."

What about the Irish accent?

"The Irish accent was important because the treatment of the song is very traditional, and the Irish would always use their songs to tell stories, it's the traditional way. There's something about an Irish accent that's very vulnerable, very poetic, and so by singing it in an Irish accent it comes across in a different way. But the song was meant to cover areas like Germany, especially with the kids that get killed in manoeuvres, not even in action. It doesn't get brought out much, but it happens a lot. I'm not slagging off the Army, it's just so sad that there are kids who have no O-levels and nothing to do but become soldiers, and it's not really what they want. That's what frightens me”.

I will finish off with my personal thoughts about the song. Why it is so important. First, Dreams of Orgonon published a deep and detailed feature about Army Dreamers. Some interesting analysis and fascinating thoughts. I have selected a few sections. Hopefully providing additional texture. Army Dreamers is one of Kate Bush’s finest songs. One that is so relevant to this day:

“Since we’re used to Bush being asleep to political infrastructure and class, we can at least turn to her complex politics of domesticity. While she doesn’t interrogate the structural causes of political violence, she’s still centering a song around the vulnerable people whose lives are destroyed by it. Never for Ever is populated by mothers and wives. Five of its eleven songs explicitly focus on maternal and uxorial figures, and that’s if we don’t count the broadly familial “All We Ever Look For.” Bush’s wives and mothers tend towards fatigue over their familial roles, experiencing emotions that contradict their outward actions or social operations. Bush’s mothers are an intrinsic good whose absence or loss is a tragedy, and whose losses are a social catastrophe. Key to the mother’s characterization in “Army Dreamers” is absence. She bemoans not merely her lost son, but his lost opportunities and the things she couldn’t provide for him. “What a waste of army dreamers,” muses Bush, in a ritual mourning of military casualties, which treats them as a cessation of dreams.

Most impressive is the way “Army Dreamers” treats the mother as an individual while also stressing her importance to her family. Stripped of her duties to her son, she is left with no more motherhood to perform. This suggests that while war is horrible, the people who are left behind have their own experiences of it. Men get sent off to die, and the women they leave behind are expected to grieve dutifully. Yet they’re prescribed a performative kind of grief — the actual effects of trauma are widely besmirched and ignored by the jingoistic reactionaries who send civilians off to die. Women are usually seen as broken when their soldiers fail to come home — this isn’t quite what Bush does. Is the mother broken? No, of course not. Has she had a vital part of her life snatched from her? Utterly.

There’s a touch of sentimentalism to this, if at least a grounded and humanitarian one. Violent deaths are often devastating because they cut short the lives of unsuspecting civilians who’ve been planning to go live their lives as usual the next day. Bush’s anti-militarism is hardly strident, but “Army Dreamers” has an edge to it even in its understatedness, blaming the services of “B.F.P.O” for overseas tragedies (although interestingly, her son’s death appears to be an accident — there’s little fanfare of death, no suggestion of the glory of battle). The horror of the death is largely its silence — all the things that couldn’t happen, no matter how much saying them would make them so.

The politics of the situation are left understated, as is typical for Bush, and yet with a light inimical rage, as if Bush is finally turning to the British establishment and shouting “look at what you’ve done!” While “Army Dreamers” is far from an indictment of the military-industrial complex (indeed, it has more to do with the British Army’s consumption of Irish civilians than anything else), its highlighting of war as futile is striking. “Give the kid the pick of pips/and give him all your stripes and ribbons/now he’s sitting in his hole/he might as well have buttons and bows” is a line of understated condemnation that spits on military emblems (pips are a British Army insignia) and consolidates trenches and graves. “B. F. P. O.,,” intone Bush’s backing vocalists again and again. In interviews, Bush backpedals from any perceived anti-militarist sentiments in her work (“I’m not slagging off the army…”), but her song tells a different story: nothing comes with B. F. P. O. except carnage.

In the song’s music video, Bush’s final collaboration with director Keef MacMillan (the two strong-willed auteurs could only collaborate together for so long), the visceral glimpses of departed loved ones that plague mourners gets captured in one devastatingly simple moment. Bush, a soldier stationed in a forest and surrounded by men in camo, turns to a tree to see her lost son. She runs to embrace him, and he’s gone before she reaches the tree. There’s a hard cut to Bush’s eyes flashing wide open. There it is: trauma and grief in a glance. Waking up, but still living the same dream.

Recorded in spring of 1980 at Abbey Road. Released with Never for Ever on 7 September 1980; issued as a single on 22 September 1980. Performed for television numerous times, including on programs in Germany and the Netherlands. Personnel: Kate Bush — vocals, production. Stuart Elliott — bodhrán. Brian Bath — acoustic guitar, backing vocals. Paddy Bush — mandolin, backing vocals. Alan Murphy — electric guitar, acoustic bass guitar, backing vocals. Duncan Mackay — Fairlight CMI. Jon Kelly — production, engineering. Photo: BTS picture from music video (cred. John Carder Bush)”.

I have brought in some information and resources that I featured in previous features. One as recently as last year. However, back in June, Kate Bush News reported how Army Dreamers was in with a shot at overtaking Wuthering Heights (from 1978’s The Kick Inside, this was her debut single) on Spotify. As I type this (11th August), Army Dreamers is less than a million streams shy of overtaking Wuthering Heights (update, 16th August: Army Dreamers has now overtaken Wuthering Heights). Its video has thirty millions views on YouTube:

“We’ve certainly been keeping an eye on streaming and digital services since Kate’s global smash hit with Running Up that Hill in 2022. And later this Summer something quite unexpected is likely to take place on the world’s biggest music streaming platform, Spotify. While none of Kate’s songs are now ever likely to overtake Running Up That Hill as her most streamed track, if daily streams continue as they currently are, Army Dreamers will supplant Kate’s signature hit single, Wuthering Heights, on the 15th August as her second most-streamed song on Spotify. We project it to reach in excess of 230 million streams in or around that date.

This milestone is significant for a couple of reasons. Firstly, of all of Kate’s well-known hits, even just a few years ago it would have been expected that only Cloudbusting, This Woman’s Work, Babooshka, The Man With The Child In His Eyes or Hounds of Love would be among the songs that could possibly challenge Wuthering Heights in global popularity, even on streaming services which traditionally skew to a younger demographic. Army Dreamers, while well-loved, never seemed to have the same traction as those huge hit songs.

Secondly, as we reported last year, Army Dreamers has captured the imagination of young people the world over and has become a viral sensation on TikTok and Instagram, with that demographic latching on to the beautiful sentiments in the song as they grapple with at least two dreadful major world conflicts happening on the news in Ukraine and Gaza. Kate is not unknown in the wider world anymore (thank you, Stranger Things) and here she is spelling out the futility of war in perhaps the most effecting way possible, through this achingly timeless song.

The Army Dreamers phenomenon has not, we imagine, been lost on Kate herself. We have reported in March that Kate has helped raise over £500,000 for the charity War Child in just the last year alone, with the release of her animated film Little Shrew, and the money raised from her signed Soundwaves art prints and Boxes of Lost at Sea vinyl presentations. And, if you visit Kate’s official Fish People website landing page today, you will notice that the Army Dreamers music video is presented in all its glory (in a good quality Vimeo stream) for fans old and new to enjoy. We’re also very fond of the “Mrs Mop” performance above that Kate did on Rock Pop in Germany in 1980, along with Paddy Bush, Del Palmer and Andy Bryant as her performing soldier pals”.

There is new and continued relevance when we think of Army Dreamers. Apart from the war that is happening in Ukraine and the destruction and violence from Russia, there is also genocide in Palestine. The young soldiers that are being killed in the Ukraine-Russia conflict means Army Dreamers’ lyrics are as powerful and important now as they were in 1980. It is the murder of children in Palestine that I feel also gives Army Dreamers gravitas. Not young soldiers being killed and their lives being cut short. We can see the victims of genocide. Those being wiped out. By the time this feature is shared – in less than a month -, Army Dreamers would have comfortably overtaken Wuthering Heights on Spotify as Kate Bush’s second-most-popular song. Maybe it is the timeliness of it. How it is relevant to what is happening in the world now. It is a magnificent song that I also hope shines a light on Army Dreamers. The album turns forty-five on 8th September, so I hope that there is a lot more written about it. Still under-discussed and not seen as one of Bush’s best albums. MOJO ranked Kate Bush’s fifty best songs last July. They placed Army Dreamers eleventh (“The third and final single to be lifted from Never For Ever delivered a sucker-punch in a gossamer glove. A haunting waltz, built around double bass, gentle stabs of cello, sampled pistol-cocks and a spectral mandolin figure, its message was an unsettling mix of the motherly and political: that working-class boy soldiers join up, and die, because other more glamorous occupations aren’t open to them. Delivered in Bush’s best wide-eyed whisper, it matches Elvis Costello’s Shipbuilding for its profoundly humanist reading of the everyman’s tug of war and pride”).

When ranking her twenty-nine singles in 2018, The Guardian placed Army Dreamers sixth (“Subtly affecting, promoted with a supremely bizarre performance on German TV – involving a rubber-glove-sporting Bush sweeping the stage while dressed as a cleaner – Army Dreamers demonstrates the influence of folk music on her work. Its anti-war message is straightforward, but its eerie mood gets under your skin and into your bones like cold weather”). I will leave things there. The third single from Never for Ever, Army Dreamers turns forty-five on 22nd September. One of her most important, affecting songs to that point, its lyrics might seem only relevant to 1980 and the violence then. The Iran-Iraq War started in September 1980. In 1979, there was the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the ongoing Troubles in Northern Ireland. Kate Bush undoubtably affected by images of young soldiers losing their lives. Some of Army Dreamers’ lyrics strike hard: “But he didn't have the money for a guitar/(What could he do?)/(Should have been a politician)/But he never had a proper education/(What could he do?)/(Should have been a father)/But he never/even made it to his twenties/What a waste/Army dreamers/Oh, what a waste of/Army (army) dreamers (dreamers)”. Forty-five years after it was released, this incredibly potent and moving song has connected with a new generation of artists and fans alike. It has found life on TikTok and it is understandable why many can relate to the song in 2025. Someone who wrote a masterpiece that moved people in 1980 and continues to forty-five years later, it is just shows what a…

REMARKABLE artist Kate Bush is.

FEATURE: The Great American Songbook: Tori Amos

FEATURE:

 

 

The Great American Songbook

PHOTO CREDIT: Chris Carroll/Corbis

Tori Amos

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IN the next part…

of The Great American Songbook, I am keen to share a twenty-song mixtape from Tori Amos. The North Carolina-born artist recently turned sixty-two. She is one of the most singular and distinct artists. An incredible songwriter and voice, Amos has influenced generations of songwriters. Her debut album, Little Earthquakes, was released in 1992. Her seventeenth album, The Music of Tori and the Muses, was released earlier this year. It is the soundtrack to the children's book, Tori and the Muses. Before I get to the mixtape that salutes a tremendous artist whose catalogue is one of the most impressive in all of music, I am getting to some biography that charts the life and career of Tori Amos:

“American singer/songwriter Tori Amos is one of several artists to have a breakthrough in the '90s by combining the stark, lyrical attack of alternative rock with a distinctly '70s musical approach, creating music that fell between the orchestrated meditations of Kate Bush and the stripped-down poetics of Joni Mitchell. In addition to reviving those singer/songwriter traditions of the '70s, she has also reestablished the piano as a rock & roll instrument, commanding the keys with both intimacy and aggression. After a late-'80s critical stumble with her glam rock-inspired project Y Kant Tori Read, she paused to realign, following her instincts as she returned her focus to piano-based compositions. The resulting album -- 1992's landmark classic Little Earthquakes -- set her on a path to a decades-spanning legacy that also established one of the most dedicated fan bases in popular music. Expanding on her debut's deep confessionals and unflinching, provocative perspective, she soon achieved platinum success with chart hits with the seminal Under the Pink (1994) and experimental Boys for Pele (1996). With each successive album, Amos and her piano remained at the core, even as she expanded her scope with forays into electronica on 1998's From the Choirgirl Hotel and 1999's To Venus and Back. Hopping from Atlantic to Epic, her albums began to swell in both length and storytelling, delving into concepts like American identity (2002's Scarlet's Walk and 2007's American Doll Posse) and life and death (2005's The Beekeeper). At the turn of the 2010s, she took a detour from pop with a holiday album (Midwinter Graces) and classical crossovers with Deutsche Grammophon (Night of Hunters and Gold Dust) before returning to her trademark style on 2014's Unrepentant Geraldines and 2017's Native Invader. In 2021, she continued a late-era streak with her 16th album Ocean to Ocean.

he daughter of a Methodist preacher, Myra Ellen Amos was born in North Carolina but raised in Maryland. She began singing and playing piano in the church choir at the age of four, and songwriting followed shortly afterward. Amos proved to be a quick learner, and her instrumental prowess earned her a scholarship to the preparatory school at Baltimore's Peabody Conservatory. While studying at Peabody, she became infatuated with rock & roll, particularly the music of Led Zeppelin. She lost her scholarship at the age of 11 -- quite possibly due to her interest in popular music -- but continued writing songs nevertheless, eventually moving to Los Angeles in her late teens to become a pop singer. Atlantic Records signed her in 1987, and Amos recorded a pop-metal album called Y Kant Tori Read the following year. The record was a failure, attracting no attention from radio or press and selling very few copies; nevertheless, she didn't lose her record contract. By 1990, Amos had adopted a new approach, singing spare, haunting, confessional piano ballads that were arranged like Kate Bush but had the melodies and lyrical approach of Joni Mitchell. Atlantic sponsored a trip to England in 1991, where she played a series of concerts in support of an EP, Me and a Gun. The harrowing "Me and a Gun" was an autobiographical song, telling the tale of Amos' own experience with rape. It gained positive reviews throughout the media, and both the EP and the supporting concerts sold well. Little Earthquakes, Amos' first album as a singer/songwriter, was released in 1992 and fared well in both the U.S. and the U.K. Earthquakes featured some of the most enduring songs in her catalog, including "Silent All These Years," "Precious Things," "Winter," and "Crucify." The same year, she released the Crucify EP, which featured cover songs like Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" and Led Zeppelin's "Thank You." 

Delivered in early 1994, Under the Pink -- the proper follow-up to Little Earthquakes -- was an even bigger hit, selling over a million copies and launching the iconic singles "God" and "Cornflake Girl." Pink also included a duet with Nine Inch Nails' Trent Reznor on "Past the Mission."

Two years later, Amos delivered her third album, Boys for Pele. The LP was her most ambitious and difficult record to date, adding harpsichord, gospel touches, and jazzy overtones to her piano-driven style. Pele debuted at number two and quickly went platinum. The Hey Jupiter EP arrived later that summer and featured live versions of B-sides "Honey" and "Sugar."

Amos spent much of 1997 dealing with personal matters, including a devastating miscarriage and a new marriage. These events would shape the entire tone of her fourth album, From the Choirgirl Hotel. Released in the spring of 1998, Choirgirl debuted in the Top Five and was certified platinum. After years of Amos flirting with the dance world -- she sang on BT's "Blue Skies" and hit number one on the dance chart with Armand van Helden's remix of "Professional Widow" -- Choirgirl was notable for the inclusion of dark electronic textures and synth programming. The album also provided the backdrop for her first tour backed by supporting musicians. The Plugged '98 trek featured Steve Caton on guitar, Jon Evans on bass, and Matt Chamberlain on drums. Selections from the journey were preserved on the two-disc To Venus and Back, which was released in September 1999. In addition to the transformed live versions of songs from her early era, Venus included a disc of new material like the Grammy-nominated single "Bliss." In 2001, Amos returned with the covers album Strange Little Girls, which featured her takes on songs by acts like Depeche Mode, Lou Reed, Slayer, Neil Young, the Beatles, and Eminem. The collection also marked her last release of new material for Atlantic.

The next year, she found a new label home with Epic and unveiled her sprawling conceptual post-9/11 epic, Scarlet's Walk. Home to hit single "A Sorta Fairytale," it was eventually certified gold i the U.S. A retrospective best-of collection, Tales of a Librarian, was issued on Atlantic in 2003. Librarian compiled notable hits and deep cuts from the first five albums of her solo career, as well as two new tracks and re-recorded B-sides.

Her eighth studio album, The Beekeeper, was released in 2005. Her fifth Top Ten debut, it was later certified gold. In conjunction with the LP release, Amos also published her first book, the New York Times best-selling autobiography Piece by Piece, written with Ann Powers. The massive five-disc Piano collection arrived in 2006, boasting a cornucopia of album cuts, B-sides, unedited and alternate versions, demos, and seven previously unissued tracks.

Amos issued the eclectic and hard-rocking American Doll Posse in 2007, a sprawling group of songs that found the artist assuming five archetypal personalities, all of whom were based on feminine gods in Greek and Roman mythology. As she toured in support of the album, Amos released live digital recordings of each concert as part of the Legs and Boots concert series, which grew to encompass 27 albums. Although each release was made available to fans, Amos also released a "best-of" Legs and Boots compilation in March 2009, creating its track list from various recordings during the tour.

Meanwhile, she also focused on writing new material during the tour. Those songs would find their way onto her tenth studio album, Abnormally Attracted to Sin. Released in May 2009, it was the first with Amos' new label, Universal Republic. It marked her seventh Top Ten debut on the charts. A holiday album, Midwinter Graces, followed closely behind, appearing before the end of 2009 and garnering warm reviews.

Afterward, Amos began a period in her career where she delved headlong into the world of classical music. In September 2011, she unveiled her 12th album, the classically based song cycle Night of Hunters, on Deutsche Grammophon. A conceptual work based on familiar motifs by composers like Satie, Chopin, Schubert, and Bach, Amos' recording centered on a couple torn apart by life's difficulties and monotonies, and the female protagonist's journey to find wholeness within herself. In addition to featuring her daughter Natashya Hawley and niece Kelsey Dobyns on vocals, Amos also collaborated with the string quartet Apollon Musagete, arranger John Philip Shenale, and clarinetist Ernst Ottensamer. While Night of Hunters only peaked at 24 on the Billboard 200, it helped Amos become the first female artist to simultaneously chart in the Top Ten on the rock, alternative, and classical charts. An instrumental version of the album -- Sin Palabras -- was also released that year.

Inspired by her classical foray, Amos' next move was to re-record some of her older songs, newly arranged by John Philip Shenale with the Metropole Orchestra. The resulting set, 2012's Gold Dust, appeared almost exactly a year after Night of Hunters; it debuted at 63 on the Billboard 200. Amos continued her creative exploration in 2013. After several years in gestation, the musical The Light Princess -- based on the fairy tale by Scottish fantasy writer George MacDonald and with music and lyrics by Amos -- premiered at the National Theatre in London to wild critical acclaim and was nominated for best musical in the prestigious Evening Standard Theatre Awards. The original cast recording would be released in 2015.

In May 2014, Amos announced her return to pop with her 14th studio album, Unrepentant Geraldines (Mercury Classics). Heavily inspired by her marriage and love of fine art, the album returned Amos to the Top Ten for the first time in five years. A world tour in support of Geraldines saw Amos return to performing solo on her piano without accompanying musicians. Deluxe reissues of the seminal Little Earthquakes and Under the Pink arrived in 2015, including a disc of the remastered album and a second that featured B-sides and other rarities. Boys for Pele received the same treatment for its 20th anniversary in 2016. The following year, Amos returned in September with the self-produced Native Invader. Her 15th full-length, Native Invader was heavily influenced by nature, the sociopolitical turmoil following the 2016 U.S. election, and her mother's failing health. The album included the singles "Reindeer King" and "Up the Creek," which once again featured her daughter on vocals.

Closing out the decade, Amos penned another memoir that was released in 2020. Resistance: A Songwriter's Story of Hope, Change, and Courage chronicled her own personal history through specific songs and their placement in American history. At the end of the year, she returned to holiday music with the seasonal EP Christmastide, which reunited her with her 2000s bandmates, drummer Matt Chamberlain and bassist Jon Evans. The rhythmic pair later joined Amos for her 16th set, Ocean to Ocean, which arrived in October 2021. Recordings from her extensive 2022-2023 tour that followed -- where she was accompanied by bassist Jon Evans and drummer Ash Soan -- were released in 2024 in the form of Diving Deep: Live. Her next project came in the form of a New York Times bestselling children's book titled Tori and the Muses, which was accompanied by a companion album, The Music of Tori and the Muses. Released in February 2025, the whimsical nine-song set featured contributions from Jon Evans, Matt Chamberlain, Ash Soan, and John Philip Shenale”.

In terms of the greats of music, Tori Amos is up there with the best of them. I do hope that she has many more albums in her, as each one is extraordinary. It has been impossible distilling her career into twenty songs, but the mixtape to end this feature is, in my view, the best of her best. This extraordinary artist produced music that could…

ONLY come from her!

FEATURE: Iceblink Link: Cocteau Twins' Heaven or Las Vegas at Thirty-Five

FEATURE:

 

 

Iceblink Link

Cocteau Twins' Heaven or Las Vegas at Thirty-Five

__________

THE sixth studio album…

IN THIS PHOTO: Cocteau Twins, left to right: Robin Guthrie, Elizabeth Fraser and Simon Raymonde/PHOTO CREDIT: Dave Tonge/Getty Images

from the Scottish band, Cocteau Twins, Heaven or Las Vegas turns thirty-five on 17th September. Released two years after Blue Bell Knoll and three years before Four-Calendar Café, this was a golden run from the band. However, Heaven or Las Vegas might be the best and most influential album they released. Reaching number seven in the U.K., this was one of the first classic albums of the 1990s. Led by Elizabeth Fraser, who has one of the most distinct and unique voices in music history, there is something intoxicating and unforgettable about Heaven or Las Vegas. Fraser creates her own worlds when she sings! Her own language. Ranked alongside the best albums of the 1990s – and of all-time -, I know there will be fresh retrospection closer to its anniversary. On 17th September, 1990, this amazingly beautiful and strange album was released. I have found some features and reviews for Heaven or Las Vegas. Even if they may repeat some background and facts, they are all well worth reading. I want to start with Guitar and their 2020 salute. They write how Heaven or Las Vegas is defined by the band’s influential guitarist and producer, Robin Guthrie:

“The ethereal splendour of Heaven Or Las Vegas disguises the dark cloud under which it was crafted, the sessions at the band’s September Sound studio, once owned by Pete Townshend, overshadowed by the transience of death, birth and heartbreak. “It was trying to mask all the other shit that was going on that we didn’t want to stop and think about for too long,” says Raymonde, whose father the composer and arranger Ivor Raymonde died while they were making the record. Furthermore, Fraser and guitarist/producer Robin Guthrie welcomed their first child, Lucy Belle, into the world just as their relationship began to falter under the weight of Guthrie’s struggles with addiction. It’s all chronicled on an album of transcendent beauty, with a guitarist at the peak of his powers its central figure.

A gentle sort of player

While many Cocteaus fans were swept away by Fraser’s hypnotic vocal layering, Guthrie was an equally essential force, and Heaven Or Las Vegas was a personal crusade to get the intricate symphonies that occupied his brain onto tape. Initially a punk fan and under-confident player, the self-confessed gearhead from Grangemouth, Scotland, developed his own singular style, eschewing solos and instead constructing composite parts out of stacked chords and icy arpeggios lavished with effects. Alongside Kevin Shields, he became the source from which a crop of ‘textural’ guitar players drew inspiration. “I’m a very gentle sort of player, and I let the electronics do the work,” Guthrie told xlr8r.com “It’s quite an opposite approach from the vast majority of electric guitar players who bash the hell out of their instrument.”

On Heaven Or Las Vegas, Guthrie played four electrics – a 1959 Jazzmaster, 1959 Stratocaster, a PRS and on the title track’s divine slide solo a modified Levinson Blade JM, running into the desk through Marshall 9000 Series and Gallien-Krueger preamps. Alongside an array of rack effects, he used BOSS chorus, phaser, flanger and vibrato pedals, a Cry Baby wah, a Yamaha D1500 delay and an Electro-Harmonix Clone Theory chorus/vibrato. The result was, to borrow The Verve’s debut album title, a storm in heaven, and it often sounded uncannily like a synthesiser. “The aim was to make music with punk’s energy but more finesse and beauty, and that shiny, dense Phil Spector sound,” said Guthrie.

Their finest hour

“We like it better than all our last records,” said Guthrie on Heaven Or Las Vegas’ release on 17 September 1990. “That’s why we continue to make more – because if we made the perfect record we’d sit back and say, ‘We can’t do any better than that’. We think all our other ones are fucking crap.”

Q’s Martin Aston concurred, calling the record “their finest hour”. Colin Larkin ranked Heaven Or Las Vegas at 218 in his All-Time 1000 Albums book, noting “their music has a sustainable beauty free of regard for contemporaries or peers”. The album was the band’s most successful, landing at No.7 in the UK chart, but it was to be their last for 4AD. While they released two more LPs on Fontana, Cocteau Twins finally split in 1997, later calling off a reunion because Fraser couldn’t stand the idea of being on stage with Guthrie.

If it was a final flutter before everything began to fall apart, Heaven Or Las Vegas was an astonishing success, and Robin Guthrie’s playing left behind a smouldering torch that the coming wave of stompbox-hungry sonic sorcerers would pick up and carry forth – many of them on 4AD and Raymonde’s Bella Union label. Heaven Or Las Vegas? The Cocteaus’ sixth album is emphatically the sound of the former”.

Robin Guthrie, Elizabeth Fraser and Simon Raymonde released one of the best albums of the 1990s only nine months into the decade! Even now, you cannot compare anything to Cocteau Twins’ Heaven or Las Vegas. Such a beguiling and bewitching album. Transformative and transfixing music, Pitchfork reviewed the 2014 reissues of Blue Bell Knoll and Heaven or Las Vegas. They say how the 4AD-reissued albums spotlight Cocteau Twins as “boundary-pushing innovators as first and foremost a pop band”:

“Even as the band soared commercially and creatively, personally they suffered. Between the release of Blue Bell Knoll and the recording of Heaven or Las Vegas, Fraser gave birth to the couple’s first child, a daughter, yet Guthrie remained deep in the throes of drug addiction, which made him paranoid and angry. Raymonde mourned the death of his father. Suddenly the stakes for the Cocteau Twins seemed impossibly high. “Fraser named the album Heaven or Las Vegas [as] a suggestion of music versus commerce, or perhaps a gamble, one last throw of the dice,” Martin Aston writes in Facing the Other Way: The Story of 4AD, implying that the band was close to imploding.

Instead, they turned all that turmoil and uncertainty into the best album of their career. Heaven or Las Vegas explodes in Technicolor from the first melty guitar chords on “Cherry-Coloured Funk”. Every note sounds like a new and richer shade of indigo and scarlet and violet than the previous one, and it doesn’t fade until closer “Frou-Frou Foxes in Midsummer Fires” descends into silence. If Blue Bell Knoll is spare and ambient, Heaven is supersaturated: lush without being vulgar, luxuriant without being indulgent. Tellingly, some lyrics bubble up to the surface, often loaded with personal meaning: “cherry,” “perfection,” “burn this madhouse down.” On a song called “Pitch the Baby”, ostensibly written for—or at least sung to—the couple’s infant daughter, Fraser repeats, “I’m so happy to care for you, I only want to love you,” as a sweet lullaby. We may not always be able to understand her lyrics, but that doesn’t mean they’re not important. In fact, her lyrics would never be more vital or confessional than they are on Heaven or Las Vegas, which lends the music added emotional and conceptual heft.

What’s particularly remarkable about the album is how compact it is: All but two of these 10 tracks clock in around three-and-a-half minutes, and the whole thing is over and done with in a mere 38 minutes. That succinctness may have something to do with Raymonde’s increasing role in the group. His bass playing, especially on “Pitch the Baby” and “Fotzepolitic”, not only adds to the texture and, yes, the groove of the music, but also gingerly anchors these songs: He prevents them from flying off into the ether, but never lets them grow rigid or staid. The result is an album that perfectly balances ambition with accessibility. Together, these two releases—which were their last for 4AD—present the Cocteau Twins as first and foremost a pop band, and pop rarely sounds as transformative and as transfixing as it does here”.

I don’t know if I heard Cocteau Twins or knew much about their music in 1990. I would have been seven. I think it was years later when I discovered them. However, I do listen to tracks from Heaven or Las Vegas every so often. I can appreciate how special the album is. When I do listen to the entire album, it is this phenomenal and engrossing listening experience. I wonder if there are any plans for the thirty-fifth anniversary on 17th September. Albumism wrote about the band’s fifth studio album in 2020:

“Pitch” picks up where “For Phoebe Still a Baby” on Blue Bell Knoll (1988) left off; she has now given birth to Lucy Belle. Where “Phoebe” drifts and wavers, “Pitch” is rooted and grounded in the act of giving birth and mothering, rather than the abstract. “I only want to love you,” she coos in her lullaby. Fraser’s lyrics are still the ethereal spellcasting of previous albums, but her pronunciation is clearer and, as such, more accessible to the wider audience the band was given after signing with Capitol Records in 1988.

Though hardly a concept album, the twin themes of birth and death echo across the landscape. Raymonde’s father Ivor, a renowned composer for acts including Dusty Springfield, died during production, and “Frou-Frou Foxes In Midsummer Fires,” the album’s final track, wrestles with “a war we all lose.” Fraser whispers and the boys play sparsely until the chorus, not a dirge, but a reflection on the passage of life and time.

Appearing as the second track on the album, “Iceblink Luck” ties both themes together, Guthrie and Raymonde’s wall of sound turned glass and lit from the dance floor like New Year’s Eve. It’s a tender song, a last-ditch dream as Fraser tries to honor the elder Raymonde’s past and resolve her soon-to-dissolve future with Guthrie. “You’re really both bone-setters / thank you for mending me babies,” she sings to the man and the ghost and the babe in her arms, a mending that, like the plaster of a cast, is only temporary. Three years later, while recording Four Calendar Café (1993), she would suffer a nervous breakdown and Guthrie’s drug problems would worsen, the relationship soured and never recovered. But for the moment, there is love between the three Twins, there is hope.

The hope doesn’t last, alas, crumpling on “I Wear Your Ring” and “Fotzepolitic.” They held it together for two more albums before their contract ran out and they disbanded. All three have gone on to produce and record a lifetime’s worth of music since, though a reunion in 2005 was scrapped when Fraser admitted she couldn’t endure being on stage with Guthrie”.

There is one more feature I want to include here. It is from CRACK. Published in 2021, the feature coincided with Miley Cyrus covering Heaven or Las Vegas’s title track. Singing the song when opening the Resorts World Casino in Las Vegas, it was a nervous moment for fans of Cocteau Twins. A band and discography that is hard to cover and make different, how many can tackle the Scottish band’s incredible music and make it sound original or even competent?! Though Miley Cyrus did a good job, one of the incredible things about an album like Heaven or Las Vegas is that is so distinct and untouchable:

“Heaven or Las Vegas, the album, was the moment Cocteau Twins became the band they had always threatened to be. It’s the record with the strongest pop songs and the most sparkling instrumentation. Both the happiest and the saddest work in their canon, Heaven or Las Vegas was when it all seemed to work for them, not so much a step-up from the preceding Blue Bell Knoll as a vast leap into the ether. The artistic success of Heaven or Las Vegas is often linked to Elizabeth Fraser and Robin Guthrie – lead guitarist and Fraser’s then-romantic partner – becoming parents during the recording of the album. Fraser once said that being pregnant had given her clarity and confidence, which was lost when the baby was born and the couple were plunged into parenthood. A number of songs on Heaven or Las Vegas directly address Fraser’s experience of motherhood, in particular Pitch the Baby, a moment of ecstatic optimism.

But mixed with this hope is the creeping influence of the darker side of life, as Guthrie’s cocaine use became increasingly problematic. This gave Heaven or Las Vegas an intriguing – and perhaps unique – push and pull in the band’s catalogue, as anxiety stalked contentment and joy looked nervously down on depression. Bassist Simon Raymonde wrote brooding album closer Frou-Frou Foxes in Midsummer Fires the day after his father died, while opener Cherry-Coloured Funk feels like a blues song on a gloomy day in heaven, the mournful melody and moody chords of the verses bursting into a chorus of glorious joy, like a plane breaking through storm clouds to reveal blue skies.

This may sound like over-exuberant nonsense. But it’s hard not to get hyperbolic when faced with a work as perfectly different as Heaven or Las Vegas, a record that takes the base elements of rock music – guitar, drums, bass and voice – and alchemises them into something entirely foreign. You can trace the influences of Siouxsie and the Banshees and Kate Bush on the Cocteau Twins, particularly in their early years. But by 1990 nobody really sounded like them, their music instantly recognisable in its immaculate shimmer, as if washed clean of dirt to take on more emotion.

Cocteau Twins eventually split in 1997, with personal animosity so far preventing a reunion. But the band’s reputation has only grown since, becoming a touchstone for a kind of rapturous mysticism, to the point that The Weeknd sampled Cherry-Coloured Funk on his 2011 mixtape House of Balloons and no one batted an eyelid. Even Prince tried to emulate the Cocteau Twins, recording Tictactoe for his 2014 album Plectrumelectrum after a night partying to the band’s music”.

An album like no other, I am curious to see what is written about Cocteau Twins’ Heaven or Las Vegas on 17th September. Although I am slightly late to the band and this masterpiece, I can now appreciate why it is so admired and has this incredible reputation. Even if Heaven or Las Vegas had a troubled past and gestation, in its finished form, it sounds more extraordinary and resounds harder than any other album by the Cocteau Twins. Did fans of the band know what would come with Heaven or Las Vegas…

BACK in 1990?!

FEATURE: The Digital Mixtape: Dame Julie Andrews at Ninety

FEATURE:

 

 

The Digital Mixtape

IN THIS PHOTO: Dame Julie Andrews in 2019

Dame Julie Andrews at Ninety

__________

THIS is perhaps a bit…

IN THIS PHOTO: Dame Julie Andrews in 2013/PHOTO CREDIT: Eva Rinaldi

of a detour for me. I would not normally discuss someone like Dame Julie Andrews on my blog. Nothing against her but, as she is not releasing music, it would be unusual for me to otherwise write about her. However, on 1st October, Dame Julie Andrews turns ninety. The British-born actor, singer and author possess one of the greatest voices ever. I am going to end this feature by assembling some songs from films that starred Andrews. Some of her best performances. Not all the soundtracks were available on Spotify, so I have accessed and included as many as I could find. Cast recordings and film soundtracks. Andrews achieved significant chart success, particularly with soundtracks for Mary Poppins (1964) and The Sound of Music (1965), both of which topped the U.S. and U.K. charts and earned multi-platinum certifications from the RIAA. Before getting to a playlist, I want to source this extensive and comprehensive biography of the magnificent Dame Julie Andrews;

“The star we know today as Julie Andrews was born Julia Elizabeth Wells in Walton-on-Thames, Surrey, then a small village, roughly 18 miles south of London, England. Her father, Ted Wells, was a schoolteacher and enjoyed the simple life of the countryside. Her mother, Barbara, a talented pianist, taught piano but longed for a career on the stage. Ted and Barbara Wells divorced on the eve of World War II, and Barbara married Ted Andrews, a professional singer. Ted and Barbara Andrews formed a musical act and toured England entertaining the troops. Ted Andrews gave the little girl her first singing lessons, and was immediately impressed with the child’s strong voice, large vocal range, perfect pitch and precocious musical ability. At age eight, she was taken to study with Lilian Styles-Allen, a noted concert singer. Styles-Allen trained her pupil in operatic repertoire and taught her the perfect diction for which she would become famous. Although Julia remained close to her father, she lived with her mother and took her stepfather’s surname when she joined the family act at age ten.

Julie Andrews, as she was now known, made her radio debut in 1946, singing a duet with Ted Andrews on a BBC variety show. She gave her first performance as a solo artist at London’s Stage Door Canteen, where she was seen by two members of the Royal Family, the mother and sister of the present Queen. The exquisitely self-possessed little girl with the crystal-clear voice was attracting the attention of serious theatrical management and was soon ready to make the move from provincial music halls to the theaters of London’s West End. At age 12, Julie Andrews was cast in a musical revue, Starlight Roof, at the London Hippodrome. Her first appearance stopped the show, and the revue ran for over a year. Julie Andrews became the youngest performer ever to appear at a Royal Command performance, singing an aria from Mignon for King George VI at the London Palladium.

IN THIS PHOTO: Twelve-year-old Julie Andrews at play in the family music room in this 1947 publicity photo/PHOTO CREDIT: Bettmann/CORBIS

The American film studio, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, which had recently opened a London branch, made a screen test of the young singer, perhaps seeing her as a successor to the child singing stars of the pre-war era. The studio failed to offer her a contract, dismissing her as “unphotographable.” Nevertheless, she soon appeared on one of Britain’s first television variety programs.

The teenage Julie Andrews was a regular presence on popular British radio shows in the 1950s, and as she grew into young womanhood, she played leading roles in a series of Christmas pantomimes. The “pantos,” a holiday tradition in Britain, are popular family entertainments, usually based on a familiar fairy tale. Far from being silent, as the name might suggest, they typically include lots of singing, dancing and male comedians in drag. Each holiday season of her teens found Julie Andrews playing another fairy tale heroine, from Little Red Riding Hood to princesses in Aladdin and Jack and the Beanstalk. She was appearing in one of these when she met an aspiring artist named Tony Walton, who would play a large role in her later life. During the regular season, she continued to perform as a solo artist and with Ted and Barbara Andrews.

Julie Andrews was playing the title role in the pantomime Cinderella when she was first seen by the songwriter Sandy Wilson and the American producer Cy Feuer. Wilson was the creator of a popular West End musical, The Boy Friend, a pastiche of the musical comedies of the 1920s. Cy Feuer planned to bring the show to Broadway and wanted to recruit a British cast to preserve the flavor of the London production. When Feuer and his partner, Ernest Martin, offered Julie Andrews the lead in the Broadway production of The Boy Friend, she was reluctant to travel to America. She was only 18 and had never traveled so far from her family. She finally agreed to a one-year contract, and boarded the plane for the country where she would spend most of her life.

IN THIS PHOTO: Julie Andrews in High Tor, filmed in 1955 by Desilu Productions and broadcast 10th March, 1956, on the television series, Ford Star Jubilee. The film starred Bing Crosby, Nancy Olson, Hans Conreid, and Keenan Wynn/PHOTO CREDIT: CBS

The Boy Friend was an immediate success on Broadway, and the teenage Julie Andrews was a sensation, delighting critics and audiences with her fresh good looks, grace, sparkling singing voice and gem-like diction. She was asked to audition for the words and music team of Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe, who were preparing the original production of My Fair Lady, their musical version of the play Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw. Lerner and Loewe had not enjoyed a success on Broadway since Brigadoon, almost a decade earlier, and many Broadway hands doubted that the two could make a

The role of Eliza Doolittle in Pygmalion — a bedraggled street urchin in the first act, transformed into a regal society beauty in the second — had already been played by many distinguished actresses on stage and screen. The musical adaptation called for a versatile young actress who was also an accomplished singer. Although a number of established stars coveted the part, Lerner, Loewe and director Moss Hart decided to take a chance on the 20-year-old Julie Andrews, who had never before acted in such a demanding role. Her costar, Rex Harrison, an experienced stage and film star, had never sung on stage before. The rehearsals were difficult. Although Andrews was more than capable of carrying off the demanding songs, her relative lack of acting experience caused unease in the company. Director Hart worked with her tirelessly, a process she recounts in her interview with the Academy of Achievement.

When My Fair Lady opened in 1956, it was an unprecedented success. Critics acclaimed it as the greatest musical ever staged and it sold out months in advance. Julie Andrews won universal praise for her incandescent performance. The original cast recording became a best-seller, one of the most successful releases in the history of Columbia Records. It remained a mainstay of the label’s catalogue for many years.

Days before the show opened, Andrews also made her American television debut in a musical version of the Maxwell Anderson play High Tor, appearing opposite Bing Crosby. After playing Cinderella in pantomime and starring in the most successful of modern Cinderella stories, Julie Andrews was asked to play the role yet again when America’s premier theatrical songwriters, Rodgers and Hammerstein, wrote an original musical for television with the new star in mind. Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella aired live on CBS, with Andrews taking a night off from her eight-performance-a-week schedule in My Fair Lady.

After two years of playing Eliza on Broadway, Julie Andrews returned at last to England to star in My Fair Lady in London’s West End. The show was just as successful in London as it had been in New York, and she settled in for a second long run in the show. While in London, she renewed her acquaintance with her childhood friend Tony Walton, who was now embarking on his own theatrical career as a designer of sets and costumes. Andrews and Walton were married in 1959.

Back in New York, Lerner, Loewe and director Moss Hart were eager for Julie Andrews to star as Queen Guinevere in their new musical, Camelot, with Richard Burton as King Arthur and Broadway newcomer Robert Goulet as Lancelot. Despite the acclaimed performances of a prodigiously talented cast, the show’s Broadway run got off to a rocky start. Initial ticket sales were slow, but when Andrews and Burton performed scenes from the show on the popular Ed Sullivan television program, box office demand skyrocketed. The original cast recording sold well and was a particular favorite of President John F. Kennedy and Mrs. Kennedy in the White House.

During her two-year run in Camelot, Andrews was approached by Walt Disney to star in a film musical of the children’s book Mary Poppins. At the time, she was expecting her first child, but Disney was willing to wait until after her child was born to begin production. Andrews and Walton had a daughter, Emma, in 1962. Andrews had hoped to be cast in the film version of My Fair Lady; she and her many admirers were disappointed when Warner Brothers chose to cast an established film star, Audrey Hepburn, in the role. Publicity surrounding the choice was intense; Hepburn was not a trained singer, and her vocals were dubbed by singer Marni Nixon.

Meanwhile, Julie Andrews set to work on her film for Walt Disney. Mary Poppins was a huge success and immediately established Julie Andrews as an international film star. Her triumph was confirmed when she won the 1964 Best Actress Oscar for her very first film appearance. She followed up this success with her dramatic film debut in the World War II satire The Americanization of Emily with James Garner, who would become a frequent co-star and lifelong friend.

IN THIS PHOTO: 1965: Julie Andrews as Maria von Trapp in the motion picture classic The Sound of Music. A heartwarming story, it is based on the real-life adventures of the Von Trapp Family singers, one of the world’s best-known concert groups in the era immediately preceding World War II. Andrews plays the role of Maria, the tomboyish postulant at an Austrian abbey, who becomes a governess in the home of a widowed naval captain with seven children, and brings a new love of life and music into the home. The Sound of Music is the third-highest-grossing U.S. movie of all time

Andrews scored the most spectacular success of her career with the starring role in The Sound of Music, another Broadway musical adaptation and the most successful motion picture made up until that time. Andrews was nominated for an Oscar again, and the film was honored as Best Picture of the Year. It remains a beloved classic. Forty years after its original release, it draws huge crowds to massive outdoor sing-along screenings such as those held in the 25,000-seat Hollywood Bowl. The reigning international film star of the mid-1960s, Andrews starred in the most successful film of 1966, Hawaii, and in the Alfred Hitchcock thriller Torn Curtain with Paul Newman. In 1967, she shone in yet another successful musical, Thoroughly Modern Millie. That same year, her marriage to Tony Walton ended, although the pair remained close friends and have often collaborated in the years since.

A film biography of the British singer and actress Gertrude Lawrence — Star! — was a box office disappointment. Audiences were turning away from musical films. Her next starring vehicle, a musical spy story of the First World War, Darling Lili, was also a commercial failure, but proved to be a personal success for Andrews on another level. Her first collaboration with director Blake Edwards, it marked the beginning of a 41-year partnership in art and life. Andrews and Edwards were married in 1969. The couple raised his two children from a previous marriage and adopted two more of their own.

 After a number of successful television specials with her friend Carol Burnett, Julie Andrews hosted her own weekly variety show on CBS television in the 1972-73 season. She also enjoyed great success as a concert artist, with appearances at the Royal Albert Hall and the London Palladium. In these years, she also began writing children’s books under her married name, Julie Andrews Edwards. After the success of Mandy (1971) and The Last of the Really Great Whangdoodles (1974), she collaborated with her daughter, educator Emma Walton Hamilton, on Dumpy the Dump Truck and its many sequels, a popular series of books for very small children. Her novels Dragon and Simeon’s Gift introduce young readers to the lore of the Middle Ages. Several of her books have been illustrated by her ex-husband, Tony Walton.

Although Hollywood was no longer producing the kind of musical films that had made her famous, Julie Andrews continued to develop her dramatic talents in a wider variety of roles in the 1970s and ’80s, appearing in a number of films directed by her husband, Blake Edwards, including The Tamarind Seed, 10, S.O.B. and That’s Life. Andrews and Edwards enjoyed a notable success with the 1982 film Victor/Victoria, in which Andrews played a woman who disguises herself as a young man and achieves success on stage as a female impersonator. This comedy of gender confusion struck a chord with international audiences in the 1980s and reunited her with co-star James Garner.

In the 1990s, Andrews became increasingly involved in international charities. Since 1992, she has served as Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM), which assists women and their communities in impoverished countries. Another favorite charity is Operation USA, a California-based international relief agency.

Andrews returned to the New York theater in 1993 with an appearance in the small ensemble cast of the Stephen Sondheim revue Putting It Together. It was clear that theater audiences wanted more of Julie Andrews, and she brought a stage version of Victor/Victoria to Broadway in 1995. An enormous success with critics and the public, Andrews appeared in the show for two years. After developing vocal problems, due to the growth of ovules on her vocal cords, she sought treatment through surgery, but the operation damaged her larynx irreparably, effectively ending her singing career. Expert opinion concluded that the surgery had been improperly performed and Andrews received a settlement, reported to be as high as $30 million.

Her speaking voice remained unimpaired, and Andrews has continued her acting career. A new audience discovered Julie Andrews through her role as the Queen in the film The Princess Diaries and its sequel. Her speaking voice has also been heard in the animated Shrek films and in 2010’s Despicable Me. In the sixth decade of her career, Julie Andrews explored still more avenues of the performing arts, directing a successful revival of The Boy Friend, the show that first brought her to America as a teenager. She has continued to act, direct, write and contribute her boundless energy to favorite causes, including Operation USA and Haitian earthquake relief.

In 2008, Andrews published the first volume of her autobiography: Home: A Memoir of My Early Years, recounting her life up until her departure for Hollywood to star in Mary Poppins. The book received excellent reviews and immediately went to the top of The New York Times bestseller list. The same year, she toured the United States  in a concert performance with orchestra and backup singers, Julie Andrews: The Gift of Music.

IN THIS PHOTO: During the Academy’s 2006 International Achievement Summit in Los Angeles, Dame Julie Andrews shared her vivid memories of shooting the timeless classic The Sound of Music right there at the 20th Century Fox studio

She topped the bestseller lists again in 2010 with her 23rd book, A Very Fairy Princess. The same year saw Julie Andrews back on the big screen in The Tooth Fairy, and marked her return to the London stage for the first time in 21 years, in a performance of Julie Andrews: The Gift of Music at the O2 Arena before 20,000 adoring fans. This triumphant year came to a sad end with the loss of her husband of 41 years, Blake Edwards, shortly before Christmas. Julie Andrews and her children were with Edwards at the time of his death in a Santa Monica hospital. The couple had long maintained homes in Los Angeles and in Gstaad, Switzerland.

Julie Andrews published a second volume of autobiography, Home Work: A Memoir of My Hollywood Years, in 2019. She continues her alternate career as children’s book author and advocate for literacy and the arts.  To date, Andrews and her daughter, Emma Walton Hamilton, have written more than 30 books for children and young adults. In April 2020, as families all over the world sheltered at home to arrest the spread of the COVID-19 virus, American Public Media announced a new weekly podcast series, Julie’s Library, in which Andrews and her daughter read their favorite children’s books aloud, with music, sound effects and special guests.  Andrews hopes these podcasts will “bring the comfort of storytelling to families during these unprecedented times.”

I have not really been able to do her justice her. In terms of her interviews and screen appearances. The body of music she has recorded. Amazing to think that Andrews’s first film credit was for 1952’s La Rosa di Bagdad. Her most recent was in 2022, where she provided a voice for Minions: The Rise of Gru. I wanted to provide this small salute and love letter to one of the greatest actors and singers…

WHO has ever lived.

FEATURE: John Lennon at Eighty-Five: His Best Beatles and Solo Songs

FEATURE:

 

 

John Lennon at Eighty-Five

PHOTO CREDIT: Linda McCartney

His Best Beatles and Solo Songs

__________

I am going to write…

a few features before 9th October. That is when we mark what would have been John Lennon’s eighty-fifth birthday. Lennon was killed in 1980. One of the greatest songwriters ever, as founder of The Beatles, his place in cultural history is clear. Such an important songwriter, he has been responsible for some of the greatest and most influential music ever. So many artists cite John Lennon as an influence. For this first feature, I have compiled a playlist of the best Beatles songs he wrote. I also have included some incredible solo songs. Ones he recorded as part of John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band. Before I get there, I want to bring in some biography about a musical genius:

“Out of all the Beatles, John Lennon had the most interesting -- and frustrating -- solo career. Lennon was capable of inspired, brutally honest confessional songwriting and melodic songcraft; he also had an undying love of straight-ahead rock & roll. But the extremes, both in his music and his life, were what made him fascinating. Where Paul McCartney was content to be a rock star, Lennon dabbled in everything from revolutionary politics to the television talk show circuit during the early '70s. After releasing a pair of acclaimed albums, John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band and Imagine, in the early '70s, Lennon sunk into an infamous "lost weekend" where his musical output was decidedly uneven and his public behavior was often embarrassing. Halfway through the decade, he sobered up and retired from performing to become a house-husband and father. In 1980, he launched a comeback with his wife Yoko Ono, releasing the duet album Double Fantasy that fall. Just as his career was on an upswing, Lennon was tragically assassinated outside his New York apartment building in December of 1980. He left behind an enormous legacy, not only as a musician, but as a writer, actor, and activist.

Considering the magnitude of his achievements with the Beatles, Lennon's solo career is almost overlooked. Even during the height of Beatlemania, Lennon began exploring outside of the group. In 1964, he published a collection of his writings called In His Own Write, which was followed in 1965 by A Spaniard in the Works, and in 1966, he appeared in Dick Lester's comedy How I Won the War. He didn't pursue a musical career outside of the group until 1968, when he recorded the experimental noise collage Unfinished Music, No. 1: Two Virgins with his new lover, avant-garde artist Yoko Ono. Two Virgins caused considerable controversy, both because of its content and its cover art, which featured a nude photograph of Lennon and Ono. The couple married in Gibraltar in March 20, 1969. For their honeymoon, the pair staged the first of many political demonstrations with their "Bed-In for Peace" at the Amsterdam Hilton. Several months later, the avant-garde records Unfinished Music, No. 2: Life with the Lions and The Wedding Album were released, as was the single "Give Peace a Chance," which was recorded during the Bed-In. During September of 1969, Lennon returned to live performances with a concert at a Toronto rock & roll festival. He was supported by the Plastic Ono Band, which featured Ono, guitarist Eric Clapton, bassist Klaus Voormann, and drummer Alan White. The following month, Lennon and the Plastic Ono Band released "Cold Turkey," which was about his battle with heroin addiction. When the single failed to make the Top Ten in Britain and America, Lennon sent his MBE back to the Queen, protesting Britain's involvement in Biafra, America's involvement in Vietnam and the poor chart performance of "Cold Turkey."

Before the release of "Cold Turkey," Lennon had told the Beatles that he planned to leave the group, but he agreed not to publicly announce his intentions until after Allen Klein's negotiations with EMI on behalf of the Beatles were resolved. Lennon and Ono continued with their campaign for peace, spreading billboards with the slogan "War Is Over! (If You Want It)" in 12 separate cities. In February of 1970, he wrote, recorded and released the single "Instant Karma" within the span of the week. The single became a major hit, reaching the Top Ten in both the U.K. and the U.S. Two months after "Instant Karma," Paul McCartney announced that the Beatles were splitting up, provoking the anger of Lennon. Much of this anger was vented on Lennon's first full-fledged solo album, John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band, a scathingly honest confessional work inspired by his and Ono's primal scream therapy. Lennon supported the album with an extensive interview with Rolling Stone, where he debunked many of the myths surrounding the Beatles. Early in 1971, he released another protest single, "Power to the People," before moving to New York. That fall, he released Imagine, which featured the Top Ten title track. By the time Imagine became a hit album, Lennon and Ono had returned to political activism, publicly supporting American radicals like Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, and John Sinclair. Their increased political involvement resulted in the double-album Sometime in New York City, which was released in the summer of 1972. Recorded with the New York hippie band Elephant's Memory, Sometime in New York City consisted entirely of political songs, many of which were criticized for their simplicity. Consequently, the album sold poorly and tarnished Lennon's reputation.Sometime in New York City was the beginning of a three-year downward spiral for Lennon. Shortly before the album's release, he began his long, involved battle with U.S. Immigration, which refused to give him a green card due to a conviction for marijuana possession in 1968. In 1973, he was ordered to leave America by Immigration, and he launched a full-scale battle against the department, frequently attacking them in public. Mind Games was released in late 1973 to mixed reviews; its title track became a moderate hit. The following year, he and Ono separated, and he moved out to Los Angeles, beginning his year-and-a-half long "lost weekend." During 1974 and 1975, Lennon lived a life of debauchery in Los Angeles, partying hard with such celebrities as Elton John, Harry Nilsson, Keith Moon, David Bowie, and Ringo Starr. Walls and Bridges appeared in November of 1974, and it became a hit due to the inclusion of "Whatever Gets You Thru the Night," a song he performed with Elton John.

At the end of the year, John helped reunite Lennon and Ono, convincing the ex-Beatle to appear during one of his concerts; it would be Lennon's last performance.

Rock 'n' Roll, a collection of rock oldies recorded during the lost weekend, was released in the spring of 1975. A few months before its official release, a bootleg of the album called Roots was released by Morris Levy, who Lennon later sued successfully. Lennon's immigration battle neared its completion on October 7, 1975, when the U.S. court of appeals overturned his deportation order; in the summer of 1976, he was finally granted his green card. After he appeared on David Bowie's Young Americans, co-writing the hit song "Fame," Lennon quietly retired from music, choosing to become a house-husband following the October birth of his son, Sean (he had an elder son, Julian, by his ex-wife Cynthia).

During the summer of 1980, Lennon returned to recording, signing a new contract with Geffen Records. Comprised equally of material by Lennon and Ono, Double Fantasy was released in November to positive reviews. As the album and its accompanying single, "(Just Like) Starting Over," were climbing the charts, Lennon was assassinated on December 8 by Mark David Chapman. Lennon's death inspired deep grief throughout the entire world; on December 14, millions of fans around the world participated in a ten-minute silent vigil for Lennon at 2 p.m. EST. Double Fantasy and "(Just Like) Starting Over" both became number one hits in the wake of his death. In the years after his death, several albums of unreleased recordings appeared, the first of which was 1984's Milk and Honey; perhaps the most substantial was the 1998 four-disc box set Anthology, issued in conjunction with a single-disc sampler titled Wonsaponatime. Further archival projects arrived throughout the 21st century, including the 2006 documentary The U.S. vs. John Lennon, and a reissue series in 2010 that restored the original mixes of his catalog, while debuting a "Stripped Down" remix of Double Fantasy. Imagine received a lavish box set edition in 2018”.

On 9th October, we will remember John Lennon. It will be a sad day in many ways, as we imagine what Lennon could have achieved had he lived. However, we can also celebrate his legacy and work. Borrowed Time: Lennon’s Last Decade is a new documentary and features contributions from people who knew John Lennon. We get an insight into his final years. What he was planning in 1980 and what he was working on that year. It was a time when Lennon was going to return to England (from New York) and visit his aunt Mimi. Heartbreaking that he never did make it back. However, we need to remember him as a pioneering and iconic songwriter who helped changed popular culture. Someone still unmatched as we head towards…

HIS eighty-fifth birthday.

FEATURE: Feminist Icons: Jess Davies

FEATURE:

 

 

Feminist Icons

PHOTO CREDIT: Mefus Photography/Rhiannon Holland

Jess Davies

__________

THIS is a feature that…

never really got off the ground. The idea being to celebrate amazing women who I consider to be feminist icons. A chance to step away from music and focus on essential feminist voices who I admire and who are doing vital work. Maybe the women I selected do not think of themselves as feminist icons or would not agree with my words. However, when it comes to the women I have featured – including Michelle Obama and Caitlin Moran –, I think I am justified in elevating them to this level. The final edition of this feature focuses on someone I spotlighted earlier in the year. Jess Davies’s book, No One Wants to See Your D*ck: A Handbook for Survival in the Digital World is my book of the year. I also saw Davies speak for The Trouble Club earlier this year, and it was one of the best events they have put on this year. She is someone I follow on Instagram and Twitter and am always in awe of. I shall leave her be for the rest of the year, though I urge people to buy her book and follow her. Such an important voice, she is not only inspiring and empowering many young women. I was very affected by No One Wants to See Your D*ck: A Handbook for Survival in the Digital World, and I was shocked by the end. The extent to which many women are subjected to unwanted sexual imagers and abuse online. It is strangely relevant now. Alongside Laura Bates’s latest book – who covered some similar themes for The New Age of Sexism: How the AI Revolution is Reinventing Misogyny -, Jess Davies’s book is essential reading. I saw the news that Elon Musk’s A.I. has been accused of making explicit Taylor Swift videos. Jess Davies talks about deepfakes and image-based sexual abuse in No One Wants to See Your D*ck: A Handbook for Survival in the Digital World. It is horrifying to think how prevalent it is. Women’s photos and images used and placed on other women’s bodies. Simulating pornography. The number of men who access these videos and share them. An epidemic that is becoming more common because of A.I. and the fact social media sites do not do enough to protect women, it always makes me so angry!

Maybe Jess Davies would resent being labelled as a feminist icon. Perhaps too lofty a declaration. However, an icon is someone who is a representative symbol or someone worthy of veneration. She works tirelessly to raise awareness of the situation online. How there is this rise in image-based sexual abuse against women and girls. How technology and A.I. is helping create this horrifying state of affairs where personal photos are used to catfish people and appear in sexually explicit videos. Or men pay money to access the photos and share them with other men who, without spelling it out, gratify themselves. Also, consider the rise in sexual assault cases and the high-profile men this year alone who have been accused of rape, sexual assault and violence against women. Diddy among them. Jess Davies reacts to these stories, and she is someone who campaigns for women. I am not going to repeat too much of what I wrote recently, as I want to keep things fairly brief and new. However, in April, Davies spoke with The Guardian about No One Wants to See Your D*ck: A Handbook for Survival in the Digital World:

“Her book, No One Wants to See Your D*ck, takes a deep dive into the negatives. It covers Davies’s experiences in the digital world – that includes cyberflashing such as all those unsolicited dick pics – as well as the widespread use of her images on pornography sites, escort services, dating apps, sex chats (“Ready for Rape? Role play now!” with her picture alongside it). However, the book also shines a light on the dark online men’s spaces, what they’re saying, the “games” they’re playing. “I wanted to show the reality of what men are doing,” says Davies. “People will say: ‘It’s not all men’ and no, it isn’t, but it also isn’t a small number of weirdos on the dark web in their mum’s basements. These are forums with millions of members on mainstream sites such as Reddit, Discord and 4chan. These are men writing about their wives, their mums, their mate’s daughter, exchanging images, sharing women’s names, socials and contact details, and no one – not one man – is calling them out. They’re patting each other on the back.”

PHOTO CREDIT: Francesca Jones/The Guardian

It has taken years for Davies to shift the blame away from herself and on to them. For most of her adult life, she says, she carried shame and stigma around like a “weighted cross” on her back. “Every time I was taken advantage of, I kind of accepted it,” she says. “I thought: ‘Oh well, you’ve opened yourself up to this. What did you expect?’ Part of me believed that this is just how the world is, and this was all I was worth.” That message was delivered in so many ways. As a model, she tried setting boundaries, never shooting topless content. When she was once asked to pose in a mesh bodysuit, she agreed on the understanding that her nipples would be edited out. She was assured they would be. A month later, the pictures appeared in a Nuts magazine summer special, nipples very clearly on display, an image that was quickly scanned and shared on the internet. (Davies remembers crying in her mum’s arms as her standards collapsed in a “pathetic heap of lost hopes”.)

Her book sets the spotlight firmly back on the perpetrators to ask how their online behaviour could ever be accepted as “normal”, or “just what happens”. Davies doesn’t have to look very hard to find activity that should disturb anyone: nudify requests where AI apps are used to create fake nude images (“nudify my sister/cousin/mum/dead wife”); the collector culture – “One thread, for example, where someone requests images of girls from Birmingham or my home town Aberystwyth, gets hundreds of thousands of views because men from those places click on them,” she says. “Someone would say: ‘Has anyone got X from Plymouth?’ And men would reply: ‘Yes, I’ve got her, have you got Y?’ For me, that really hit home. These are men in our daily lives who we see every single day, whether it’s in the shops or at the school gate, or in our homes”.

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A post shared by Jess Davies- Presenter, Author & Campaigner (@_jessdavies)

Before moving on, I was affected by a piece Jess Davies wrote for GLAMOUR back in May. She noted how, for so long, she felt shame for daring to take an image of her own body. Now, she is taking back control and realising that this was not her shame to carry:

“Diving deep into the manosphere forums where their depravities were laid bare, I skimmed through threads that housed millions of non-consensual intimate images of women that were being traded and shared without their consent and clicked through the rotating pages of deepfake ‘porn’ requests that featured women that the men knew personally, including their family members. With a lump in my throat, I read through the sick rape fantasies they would each take turns to write and observed their online ‘games’ which saw them ‘risk’ women’s intimate images and personal details as currency.

Then when I’d finally seen enough I played the UNO reverse on them; learning about their twisted part-time activities, their sleuthing tactics and secret websites I pulled all this information together in a book that acts as a handy toolkit to arm women with the knowledge of what is unfolding in these online spaces in the hope of galvanising them to demand better from the tech platforms, the government and the men in their lives.

Each chapter concludes with accessible tips to help women don their own sleuthing hats and better protect themselves from the harms of online misogyny, while we wait for legislation and societal attitudes to catch up.

He believes there is a conspiracy against men, that our societies are not patriarchal and never were (because the very concept of patriarchy is a fabrication), and that women should not be allowed to have an abortion without a man's consent.

As Gisele Pelicot defiantly said, shame must change sides – and that goes for all victims of image-based abuse. While I almost lost myself in the darkness, not one of the multiple men who have removed my consent digitally and physically over the years has ever apologised. Society has failed to make them feel it’s needed; tech platforms have failed to hold them accountable.

I was done carrying the shame that was dumped on my back, and I wanted other survivors to feel that sense of relief too, which is why I wrote my book. No One Wants To See Your D*ck is an investigation into online misogyny and includes my own deeply personal experiences, along with interviews with incredible survivors, campaigners and experts of image-based abuse, including Glamour's Lucy Morgan, Professor Clare McGlynn and Elena Michaels from Not Your Porn.

It’s time we call out the deep-rooted misogyny that thrives online, that threatens to radicalise an entire generation of men through ‘masculinity’ grifters with podcast microphones, and call in parents, platforms and politicians to take a stand against the epidemic of violence against women and girls that is rampant in the digital world.

With Amnesty International UK’s recent polling finding 73% of Gen Z social media users have witnessed misogynistic content online and a fifth of female users having avoided or left social media platforms altogether due to the impact of online misogyny, it is vital that the UK government introduces Glamour’s comprehensive Image-Based Abuse law to better protect women and girls online and hold perpetrators to account.

Women should not have to accept or expect online misogyny in exchange for their digital citizenship”.

PHOTO CREDIT: Jess Davies

Think of the great feminists of our age. How they have lived through various decades of shift. Various waves of feminism and crisis that women face. The rise in sexism and misogyny. At all times, campaigning for equality and awareness. Highlighting the way women’s safety and dignity is almost an afterthought. Now, with the Internet and A.I., there are new issues and ways in which women are abused and exploited. There are so many amazing women who are writing books, publishing articles and posting on social media. Ensuring that they highlight the facts and make their voices heard. In the case of Jess Davies, her early life as a glamour model was at a time when lads’ magazines were rife. Where there was this lurid tabloid press and ickiness that ran through society – to be fair, it is still here, but it was especially rife in the '00s and before that in the '90s -, and she experienced such abuse and shame. Not that she should have felt shame but, as she explained to The Guardian, it took her years to shift that feeling of stigma and blame. Someone who is incredibly strong and inspiring in the face of what I would imagine to be daily abuse – she was sent unsolicited dic*k pics and sexually violent messages – and harassment. I want to source from this site, where Jess Davies shared evidence of the mass scale of abuse online. How there are various forums where deprived sexual fantasies are shared. Where women are degraded and threatened. She shared her own experiences:

“Misogyny has been normalised online and validated by influential figures who post harmful attitudes towards women. These creators have millions of views and while their posts are allowed to go viral on social media platforms, young men and boys will be led to believe these behaviours are okay and acceptable. Or worse, glorified and glamourised. Often we talk of content on mainstream social media platforms such as Meta, Tiktok and X but I would like to draw attention to the fringe forums. The sites such as 4Chan and forums including Nudostar and The Fappening are seen as more difficult or even impossible to regulate, so the millions of members on these sites are allowed to carry out their harmful abuse without any attempt to stop them.

On 4chan.com, a popular messaging board forum there is a thread titled ‘Adult requests’. In here, users post anonymously their explicit requests to other users which often include requests to create explicit deepfake images, ‘nudify’ pictures and ‘AI cum tributes’ of women. These women are often women that the men know personally, I have seen men requesting explicit deepfake’s of their mothers, sisters, ex-girlfriends and their teachers. Other users will fulfil their request, removing the clothes from the women in the image using AI technology and replacing them with computer generated naked bodies or porn scenes. These are often graphic and objectify women, consent is not required which I believe motivates these men. Recently, I have noticed an uptick in the requests for AI ‘face fucks’ of the women, which use AI technology to create a graphic and extreme oral sex scene.

Also prominent on manospehre forums are the mass trading and sharing of women’s intimate images without their consent. This is referred to by campaigners as ‘collectors culture’, where men are sorting women (often women they know) into folders under their home towns, relationship towards the men or their universities. Then, they all trade the women’s images without their consent as if they are baseball cards. One thread alone titled ‘Glasgow’ of Scottish women had over one million views, highlighting the popularity of this content. I have seen my own images traded in these forums under a request for women from my hometown, Aberystwyth. A small, coastal town in Wales. If this town is not safe from the depravities of collectors culture online, no town is.

We cannot continue to ignore the mass scale of absue that is happening in these forums, often forums that have millions of followers. This is not happening on the dark web, it is happening on fringe mainstream social media sites. While non-consensual intimate images of adults are still classified as ‘legal’ content, these forums will continue to thrive. There are millions of British men perpetrating this abuse because they can. They can get away with it, there is never any consequences for them while the women live with all the trauma inflicted on them for daring to exist in a woman’s body or engage in digital communications”.

A campaigner who I feel will write other books and make huge changes, I also think that she is a modern feminist icon. After a busy 2025, where she has been promoting her book and sharing her personal experiences, there must have been this mix of excitement and vulnerability. Revisiting times that were hugely upsetting and challenging. However, her social media posts are so informative and personal. Recently, she has discussed the misogyny the Lionesses have faced, and how women in football are still underheard and subjected to abuse and discrimination. This is someone I can see either running a charity or creating more documentaries. At a time when there is so much sexual violence and women’s privacy and body autonomy are being threatened, her voice is so important! Someone who, as I can attest, is compelling to listen to, Davies also has potential to be enter politics. However, after releasing No One Wants to See Your D*ck: A Handbook for Survival in the Digital World, I can see envisage Davies writing another book and continuing to campaign. The exceptional Jess Davies is…

AN amazing person and role model.

FEATURE: Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love at Forty: Thirteen: Jig of Life

FEATURE:

Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love at Forty

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

Thirteen: Jig of Life

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ONE of the most exciting…

and joyful tracks on Hounds of Love, I often think of this as the sister song to The Big Sky. If you want to pair songs from the first side and The Ninth Wave, I would say that Jig of Life does connect with The Big Sky. In the sense that there is a childlike wonder and link. The Big Sky sees Bush giddily excited looking at the clouds and imagining what could be. One that is shaped like Ireland. Jig of Life, to me, is the woman/Bush stranded at sea and her family and friends speaking to her. Urging her to wake up. I am going to come to Leah Kardos and her book, Hounds of Love. She shares some interesting analysis about the song’s themes and the composition. Before I get there, this article from the Kate Bush Encyclopedia shares an interview from 1992 where Bush spoke about Jig of Life:

“At this point in the story, it’s the future self of this person coming to visit them to give them a bit of help here. I mean, it’s about time they have a bit of help. So it’s their future self saying, “look, don’t give up, you’ve got to stay alive, ’cause if you don’t stay alive, that means I don’t.” You know, “and I’m alive, I’ve had kids [laughs]. I’ve been through years and years of life, so you have to survive, you mustn’t give up.”
This was written in Ireland. At one point I did quite a lot of writing, you know, I mean lyrically, particularly. And again it was a tremendous sort of elemental dose I was getting, you know, all this beautiful countryside. Spending a lot of time outside and walking, so it had this tremendous sort of stimulus from the outside. And this was one of the tracks that the Irish musicians that we worked with was featured on.
There was a tune that my brother Paddy found which… he said “you’ve got to hear this, you’ll love it.” And he was right [laughs], he played it to me and I just thought, you know, “this would be fantastic somehow to incorporate here.”
Was just sort of, pull this person up out of despair.

Richard Skinner, ‘Classic Albums interview: Hounds Of Love. Radio 1 (UK), aired 26 January 1992”.

There is a lot to explore regarding Jig of Life. It is a song that Bush recorded in Ireland, at Windmill Lane Studios in Dublin. There is a lot to love about the track. Bush’s brother John reciting a poem. Doing the narration and affecting an Irish accent. The rush you get from the composition. Uillean pipes, fiddles and bouzouki among the instruments that creates this frenzy. In terms of the narrative of The Ninth Wave, we are now past the point where there is much sign of hope. The heroine has expended so much energy and had to face such an ordeal. Struggling to stay awake and afloat, this is the moment when these voices come to her. Hallucinations and delirious auditory flashes. The connection to Ireland is important. Bush’s mother was Irish and there is that ancestry and connection. The antepenultimate song on the album, we then lead to Hello Earth and the finale, The Morning Fog. There is a lot I did not know about the song. As Leah Kardos begins: “The starting point for ‘Jig of Life’ took inspiration from the ceremonial music of Anastenaria, a centuries-old ecstatic dance and fire-walking ritual performed during religious feasts in Greece and Bulgaria. The music, inspired by a rare recording that Paddy Bush had found and shared with his sister, is characterized by repetitious, deep rolling rhythms and whirling figures performed on violin and tsabouna (Greek bagpipes)”. That is the origin and inspiration that only Kate Bush could be associated with! I do love to explore the origins for the songs on Hounds of Love. How The Ninth Wave’s title relates to the name of a poem from Alfred Lord Tennyson’s The Idylls of the King: the ninth wave. There is also a tie to The Coming of Arthur:

“Wave after wave, each mightier than the last,
Till last, a ninth one, gathering half the deep
And full of voices, slowly rose and plunged
Roaring, and all the wave was in a flame’

Kate Bush uses ‘the ninth wave’, inspired by ‘The Coming of Arthur’, as well Aivazovsky's iconic 1850 painting ‘The ninth wave’ which shows a group of people shipwrecked at sea, as a metaphor for the final wave before drowning, a moment which becomes the anchor of the album and provides its framing narrative”.

Bush was inspired by the music of Anastenaria, as “people worked themselves into a trance state through the hypnotic quality of the music”. Lifting those rhythmic musical qualities of the style, we notice that in the first section of Jig of Life. “Based on the Greek dhrómi mode (on a root of A), the tonality is mostly minor but with idiosyncratic instability on the second degree (B)”. I have quoted some of this text when I explored The Ninth Wave earlier this year, though I am returning now as Hounds of Love turns forty next month. Focusing on this extraordinary song, Bush is visited by a vision of her future self. One that urges her to stay awake and to live. It is this sort of vision that one might experience if they were dying or lost at sea There is so much poetry and folklore in the song. Leah Kardos observers how “the mention of ‘the place where the crossroads meet’ evokes once again the image of Hecate, the goddess in Greek mythology who is often depicted flanked by two dogs and sometimes shown with a triple-formed face that sees the past, present and future simultaneously”. I wonder if Hecate inspired the cover of Hounds of Love, where Bush is photographed with her two dogs, Bonnie and Clyde. There is a mix of Greek mythology and Ireland in Jig of Life. Taking from her mother’s homeland, John Shehan’s fiddle has this “deft melodic turn” that helps intensify the music “to a boisterous jig that’s thrillingly physical and full of blood”. Bush travelled to Dublin to work with these musicians who were arranged by Bill Whelan.

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1985/PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush

As involved and captured by the jig as we are, it suddenly stops. Bush repeats the words “’I put this moment… here’”. Her brother John’s voice cuts in with “’Over here”’ and the opening ceremonial theme strikes up once again”. There was an idea to pitch John Carder Bush’s voice higher to make it sound like a woman. That would have given his poem different meaning and impact. Maybe good that this never happened! Kardos ends her section on Jig of Life by writing how it is “A magical and affirming moment of temporal self-care; the powers of mothers from the past and future rallying at the crisis point to help Bush choose to live”. One of the deepest and most intriguing lyrics from Hounds of Love comes during Jig of Life: “And to your little boy and to your little girl/And the one hand clapping/Where on your palm is my little line/When you’re written in mine/As an old memory?”. Jig of Life seems like the final part of the middle. Two tracks in the first act, three in the second, and then two to end. From here, we move to the epic and stirring Hello Earth before a brief burst of sunshine and redemption from The Morning Fog. Jig of Life could be the dying voices our heroine cannot react to as she has fought too long. It could be – and I like to think so – the spirit and kick that she needs to stay alive and not give up hope. A transformative and pivotal moment from The Ninth Wave,  it causes my pulse to race and heart skip in time…

EVERY time I hear it.

FEATURE: Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love at Forty: Twelve: The Influence of Ireland and East Wickham Farm

FEATURE:

 

 

Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love at Forty

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1985/PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush

Twelve: The Influence of Ireland and East Wickham Farm

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I am continuing…

my twenty-feature run celebrating the fortieth anniversary of Hounds of Love. Kate Bush’s fifth studio album is forty on 16th September. I am making my way through the song on the album’s second side, The Ninth Wave. I am going to move to Jig of Life. That has Irish instrumentation and spirit. It features John Sheahan, Dónal Lunny and Liam O’Flynn. Bush recording at Windmill Lane Studios in Dublin for the Irish Sessions. It is clear that both Ireland and East Wickham Farm were instrumental when it came to influence for Hounds of Love. Her family home was a real draw. I wrote in a previous feature how 1983 was the year when she recharged and rebuilt. A bespoke home studio was built at East Wickham Farm and there was this new connection to her family. The space where she spent her childhood and wrote her earliest songs, it obviously had this personal and spiritual pull. I am going to start out by dropping in this article about the making of Hounds of Love. A passage that discusses Watching You Without Me and Jig of Life caught my eye:

“Double bass accompaniment by the legendary Danny Thompson. The gifted musician has nothing but compliments when talking about Kate Bush as a person and a musician: “She is a dream person to work with. People assume that these iconic people are beyond touch. You pull out to her house and she says ‘Hello Danny, want a cup of tea?’ Then you go in the studio and it is the other person that is serious about the music. It is a great profession to be in when you work with great artists who are also really fine people.”

The grim story takes a slight positive turn by offering hope in the form of the floater’s future self, asking them not to give up. After all, to paraphrase what Dizzie Gillespie said about Louis Armstrong: no you, no me. But it goes farther to explain that the future holds a family, kids, something to live for.

The song was written in Ireland, the clear influence of the country manifested in the arrangement: “It was a tremendous sort of elemental dose I was getting, you know, all this beautiful countryside. Spending a lot of time outside and walking, so it had this tremendous sort of stimulus from the outside.” A multitude of Irish folk instruments are played by John Sheahan (Fiddles, whistles), Donal Lunny (Bouzouki, Bodhran) and Liam O’Flynn (Uillean pipes). As in another Irish-influenced tune, Night of the Swallow from The Dreaming, Bill Whelan is responsible for the arrangement”.

We can see there what it was like for artists who recorded at East Wickham Farm. It is no surprise that Kate Bush wanted to return to East Wickham Farm. Not only is there the stability of home and family. There is that comfort of having that support at her feet. Whereas The Dreaming (1982) saw her work at various studios and it was intense and unhealthy, at home, she could spend time in her own studio and not worry about costs. Hounds of Love is an album defined by nature and the natural world. Water especially prevalent. East Wickham Farm offered this calm and bucolic beauty. There were the gorgeous flowers and the landscape. However, I think it was the working routine and the hospitality of East Wickham Farm that was most important. Paul Hardiman and Kate Bush continued sessions from April 1984 after she had spent a month in Ireland. The sessions, which were about six months, were idyllic. Hardiman remembers walking into the kitchen at East Wickham Farm and there being conversation flowing. Paddy Bush (Kate Bush’s brother) was always there. The dogs, Bonnie and Clyde – who appear on the album cover –, were there. Copious tea and food being prepared. Pigeons and doves were all over the place. Although it was very relaxing and happy, it was also hard work. Bush was producing on her own and wanted to prove to EMI that she was right to produce. They had doubts after The Dreaming was released. She would throw musicians curve balls or ask for something a little unorthodox. She wanted to add another percussive layer to Jig of Life, so she handed Charlie Morgan various Irish percussive instruments (including the lambeg) and asked him to fill twenty-four tracks with “clacking, beating and booming”, as Graeme Thomson writes in Under the Ivy: The Life and Music of Kate Bush. Bush did not have a glass wall between the live room and control room. It meant she relied on microphones and this two-way communication. It made her less self-conscious but also saved time.

It was family and that familiarity that helped infuse Hounds of Love with this sense of wonder and confidence. Sounding far more relaxed as a producer than previously, East Wickham Farm enforced the songwriting but it also allowed Bush to produce an album to her own specifications and to her own timeframe. Not being surrounded by smog and loads of people in a city allowed her the flexibility and quiet to concentrate. Even if the album was tough to record and there were some stressful times, she still recounted how it was the happiest time of her recording career. Connecting to childhood memories and times at the farm. Thinking back to her childhood years. Also, as I explained in my 1983 feature, Bush built her own dance studio and committed to a healthier diet. It was a magnificent time. Also influential was Ireland. Not only in terms of songs like Jig of Life. Quite a bit of Hounds of Love was written there. If the inspiration of Ireland can be heard in Jig of Life, the country and its people runs right through Hounds of Love. The landscape and its views. Bush very much moved by the sea and the land. Valleys and hills. The beautiful expanses that no doubt enforced the narrative of many of the songs. The Ninth Wave especially. Also, The Big Sky nicely references Ireland (“This cloud, looks like Ireland!”). I will talk about Ireland more when I discuss Jig of Life next. Bush’s mother Hannah was born in Ireland. She had family there. Having not spent a lot of time there since childhood, it was an overdue return. She would go back to record again for 1989’s The Sensual World. Nature, warmth, family and the views from both East Wickham Farm and Ireland were a big factor in terms of Hounds of Love’s writing and genius. These essential elements and lifeforces emboldening and defining…

HER greatest work.

FEATURE: Together for Palestine: Why a Benefit Concert for a Besieged People Needs to Motivate Prolonged Commitment from the Music Community

FEATURE:

 

 

Together for Palestine

Why a Benefit Concert for a Besieged People Needs to Motivate Prolonged Commitment from the Music Community

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LIKE it or not…

PHOTO CREDIT: TIMO/Pexels

but we live in a fascist country. The U.K. has become almost a dictatorship where free speech is banned. If you protest against a genocidal nation (Israel) then you are see as inciting violence and hatred. Anyone who shows support towards Palestine Action – essentially people against genocide and showing their disgust through peaceful measures – and being arrested and can spend time in prison. In fact, the maximum sentence you could face is fourteen year. Support for that group is seen as an act of terrorism. Think about all the actual crimes where you could get a more lenient sentence. We have come to a point where our own government is not only ignoring genocide but funding it! They have a political agenda that is to squash and imprison anyone who speaks out against a heinous and barbaric action. Yesterday (9th August) saw hundreds arrested in London after showing support for Palestine Action:

“Police have arrested 474 people at a demonstration in London in support of banned group Palestine Action.

The Metropolitan Police said 466 protesters were arrested for supporting the group, five for assaults on police officers, two for public order offences, and one for a racially aggravated offence.

Scores of people simultaneously unveiled handwritten signs with the message "I oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action" at the protest, organised by Defend Our Juries at Westminster's Parliament Square.

The government proscribed the group in July under the Terrorism Act of 2000, making membership of or support for it a criminal offence, punishable by up to 14 years in prison.

No officers were seriously injured, and the Met Police said the number of arrests was the largest made by the force on a single day in the last 10 years.

Home Secretary Yvette Cooper thanked police for their response, while charity Amnesty International described the mass arrests as "deeply concerning".

Footage from the square showed officers moving among the protesters, who were mainly seated on the ground, and speaking to them before leading them away.

Protesters whose details could be confirmed during processing were bailed with conditions not to attend any further protest in support of Palestine Action.

People who refused to give their details or whose identities could not be verified were taken into custody.

Many of the protesters didn't want to speak to media who came to cover the protest, but one - who didn't give her name - told the BBC: "If they ban Palestine Action, what other group is next? Until we're just no longer allowed to protest anything. That's the opposite of democracy."

Another, Claudia Penna-Rojas, 27, said: "I don't think anyone wants to get arrested, but I'm more concerned with what is happening to people in Palestine right now, and I refuse to be a bystander”.

I do think that it is appalling that we have a Prime Minister (Keir Starmer) who wants to remain silent and do nothing. Someone who is very much supporting Israel and does not care about those in Palestine who are being slaughtered. As our government does not care, who else in this country is going to show anger at what is happening?! Recently, Bob Vylan took to the Glastonbury stage to call out  the IDF (Israel Defence Forces). Glastonbury could have pulled power to the set, but they did not. The BBC condemned them. In fact, Glastonbury’s organisers, who you would think would support free speech - and said that this is something they do back – rowed back and said that they condemned Bob Vylan. It was a cowardly and pathetic show from an organiser and festival who want to supress free speech and anyone who stands against evil. Some artists have spoken our against Israel and there have been other acts who have taken to the stage to call out their genocide. Showing humanity for Palestine. That is what it is about. It is not about anyone inciting murder or calling for insurrection. Instead, it is rightly anger and disgust at what is happening. A genocide that is being shown on the news but governments are doing nothing. You get the feeling artists would like to put this into their music. To call out this barbarism. However, as people can spend years in prison for showing any form of support for Palestine Action – which, again, they are doing peacefully! -, then they have more than their careers on the line. It is a horrible time when the U.K. is being run as a fascist state. Perhaps nothing new, the evil of our current government is glaring!

It is not the case that the music industry is also doing nothing. In fact, a benefit concert is being organised and overseen by Brian Eno. The wonderful and much needed Together for Palestine. No doubt it will not be televised and there will be this media silence. Also, I guess artists are being warned not to follow Bob Dylan and Kneecap in voicing their anger at the IDF and outrage at what is happening. One feels it might be a slightly muted affair in that regard. However, it is a necessary show of solidarity from the music industry:

“The lineup has been announced for one of the largest-scale benefit concerts for Palestine since the intensification of conflict after 7 October 2023. It takes place at Wembley Arena in London on 17 September.

Brian Eno is overseeing Together for Palestine, which brings together British and Palestinian artists at the 12,500-capacity venue to raise funds for Choose Love, a British charity working with 23 partner organisations in Gaza to deliver food, medical supplies and other support.

The Palestinian musicians Adnan Joubran, Faraj Suleiman and Nai Barghouti are scheduled to perform alongside Eno and a host of top UK artists: Bastille, Cat Burns, Damon Albarn, Greentea Peng, Hot Chip, James Blake, Jamie xx, King Krule, Mabel, Obongjayar, Paloma Faith, Rachel Chinouriri and Sampha, with “one-off contributions” from Rina Sawayama, PinkPantheress and Riz Ahmed.

Eno said: “In the face of the horrors of Gaza, silence becomes complicity. Artists have always helped societies to point out injustice and imagine better futures. That’s why this concert matters. It’s time for us to come together – not just to raise our voices, but to reaffirm our shared humanity.”

Khaled Ziada, founder and director of the London Palestine film festival, is producing the event alongside Eno and Tracey Seaward, the film producer who also produced the 2012 London Olympic opening ceremony.

Ziada said: “In a world where governments and mainstream media have fallen silent in the face of genocide, this gathering becomes a chorus of resistance – where artists and communities come together to grieve, to rage and to stand shoulder to shoulder with the Palestinian people.”

Singer-songwriter Chinouriri, who supported Sabrina Carpenter on a recent tour, called on other musicians to “join me in building a bridge to victims in Gaza and beyond, we must break through the privilege of our bubble and speak with truth and justice”. Albarn said: “Pacifism is an action. Peace is an action. To live peacefully requires vision and commitment … I am grateful for this opportunity to act in solidarity with the Palestinian people.”

The production design of the event is being handled by Es Devlin, the Olivier and Tony award-winning stage designer who, as well as working in theatre, has designed huge pop shows for the likes of Beyoncé, the Weeknd, U2 and Lady Gaga.

Devlin is collaborating with Palestinian artist Malak Mattar on Together for Palestine, and said the Wembley Arena stage “will express the rich beauty of Palestinian culture”.

Eno has been a longstanding supporter of Palestine and the cultural boycott of Israel.

In 2017 he had a dispute with Nick Cave over the cultural boycott, with Cave characterising the boycott movement as “people that are trying to shut down musicians, to bully musicians, to censor musicians, and to silence musicians”. Eno replied: “This has nothing to do with ‘silencing’ artists – a charge I find rather grating when used in a context where a few million people are permanently and grotesquely silenced”.

IN THIS PHOTO: Nadine Shah played the Other Stage at Glastonbury 2025/PHOTO CREDIT: Getty Images

I do hope that this concert makes a difference and it raises a lot of money! That aid can be flown to Gaza and it means that starved and afflicted Palestinians can get the support they need. As our government seems hell bent on letting it happen and do not have any humanity, it is good that the music industry is doing something. Even Hollywood has been pretty inactive when it comes to any sort of similar fundraiser. After the dust has settled on the concert, what comes next? Obviously, the genocide will continue and there will be this pacifism from governments the world over. Although music alone cannot change the situation, it is incumbent on artists and those in the industry to keep speaking out. Obviously, there is that risk of censorship. Venues refusing to book artists and radio stations not playing their music. Even the possibility of artists facing criminal action. However, as we are in a fascist state and any form of protest against genocide is seen as criminal, then we need to do something. The question is, what? Songs do need to address Israeli genocide. I have not heard many examples of artists using their platform to speak out against it. Artists need to be more vocal in the media. Nadine Shah played Glastonbury in June, and she used her set as an opportunity show support for Palestine:

“The singer has been a vocal supporter of Kneecap throughout the recent Terrorism charges brought against their singer Mo Chara for allegedly voicing support for Hamas and Hezbollah during a gig last year. She also recently posted ‘Fuck the BBC’ on her Instagram page, and explaining it was because they had pulled the broadcast of a documentary called Gaza: Medics Under Fire.

While for the most part during her set of intense pop, she let the moving backdrop behind her do the talking for her - it was designed by digital artist Cold War Steve and ended on an image of Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu sat on sunchairs in a bombed-out Gaza, with Keir Starmer serving them cocktails - at the end of the show she read out an open letter by Artists for Palestine UK in support of Palestine Action, the direct action organisation who the government are proposing to ban under anti-terrorism laws.

She read that Palestine Action was intervening in a genocide and that, “We deplore the government's decision to proscribe it. Labeling nonviolent direct action as terrorism is an abuse of language and an attack on democracy”.

In terms of massive artists in the mainstream speaking out, there has been this silence. What about the biggest Pop artists of today? Where are they in this?! It does seem like they are either fearful of huge career repercussions or they do not feel it is appropriate to use their voice to speak out against genocide. Music has always been about protest. Even before Bob Dylan was writing protest songs in the early-1960s, there has been this platform where artists could speak out. Even during the time of Civil Rights clashes, the repercussions for protesting were not as severe as they are today. It is very positive that Together for Palestine is happening and thousands will turn out. I hope that it raises millions. Also, as much as anything, I hope that is spurs more artists into action. That it also shames our government and shows that the music industry has more comparison and humanity than they do! That they also seemingly reflect a growing anger and disgust in this country. People risking jail to call out genocide. It is an appalling world we live in. It is hard to tell how long this will go on. Will it be the case that Gaza is completely wiped out and every single citizen is killed or left to starve?! After that, do we just stand still and remain silent?! Israel is committing war crimes and they are being funded by governments around the world. It is horrifying that we are in a situation where it is down to the music industry and other sectors away from government to do the right thing. To take some form of action. From Bob Vylan to Kneecap to Nadine Shah to CMAT, there are those that want to speak out and see Palestine free. However, governments are prepared to arrest and imprison people. Censor anyone who speaks up. What an appalling situation to see this happen…

IN the modern age.

FEATURE: End It On This: No Doubt’s Tragic Kingdom at Thirty

FEATURE:

 

End It On This

No Doubt’s Tragic Kingdom at Thirty

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I know that some fans and reviewers…

IN THIS PHOTO: No Doubt (from left: Adrian Young, Tom Dumont, Gwen Stefani and Tony Kanal)/PHOTO CREDIT: Joseph Cultice

were not fans of No Doubt’s Tragic Kingdom, as they felt it was too ‘poppy’ and maybe a departure from their Ska roots. Calling the album too commercial or Pop-leaning seems insane! It is not at all. In any case, No Doubt, like any band, are allowed to evolve and change. In terms of the songs on their album, there are more than a few classics. Just a Girl, Spiderwebs and Don’t Speak are all huge songs. Led by the super-cool and legendary Gwen Stefani, I think you can hear D.N.A. from Tragic Kingdom in work by modern groups. Those that definitely are compelled by No Doubt’s underrated third studio album. It would be another five years until they followed this album with 2000’s Return of Saturn. On 10th October, 1995, Tragic Kingdom came into the world. Just a Girl was released on 21st September, 1995, so fans had an inkling into what the new album would sound like. A number one album in the band’s native U.S. and a huge success around the world, there were a lot of positive reviews for Tragic Kingdom upon its release. At the 1997 Grammy Awards, No Doubt was nominated for Best New Artist and Best Rock Album. In 2003, Tragic Kingdom was ranked number 441 on Rolling Stone's list of the 500 greatest albums of all time. NME included Tragic Kingdom on its 2020 list of "The best new wave albums ever". Because this immense album is coming up for its thirtieth anniversary, I want to spend some time with some features that take us inside its recording, the amazing songs and also the aftermath and legacy. I remember when Tragic Kingdom came out. I was twelve and I had heard a few No Doubt songs. I think the release of Don’t Speak in 1996 was a huge moment. One of the defining songs from my high school years.

Let’s start off with this article from last year. They provide a thorough and forensic breakdown. Providing insight and technical details. A lot of great information about the recording of Tragic Kingdom. Produced by Matthew Wilder, this was a moment when No Doubt ascended to new heights. Iconic songs like Just a Girl regularly played on music T.V. and widely shared on the radio. Songs from the album still popular and heard to this day. Maybe the best album No Doubt released:

“The creation of Tragic Kingdom was set against a backdrop of musical experimentation and personal upheaval. By the early 1990s, No Doubt had already established themselves as a band with a distinctive sound, blending ska, punk, and pop influences. However, their self-titled debut album, released in 1992, failed to make a significant impact commercially, largely overshadowed by the grunge movement that dominated the airwaves.

Despite these challenges, the band persisted, releasing The Beacon Street Collection in 1995, a self-produced album that demonstrated their growing confidence and musical maturity. This period of creativity and experimentation laid the groundwork for Tragic Kingdom. With the departure of Eric Stefani, who left to pursue a career in animation, the band was forced to reconfigure their songwriting process, with Gwen Stefani and Tony Kanal stepping into more prominent creative roles.

The album’s main contributors included Gwen Stefani on vocals, Tony Kanal on bass, Tom Dumont on guitar, and Adrian Young on drums. Additional musicians and collaborators enriched the album’s sound, bringing a vibrant mix of influences to the fore. The album’s title, a playful twist on Disneyland’s “Magic Kingdom,” reflects the band’s Southern California roots and the bittersweet themes explored throughout the record. The album artwork, created by photographer Daniel Arsenault, captures this duality, featuring Gwen Stefani in a striking red dress amidst an orange grove, symbolizing both the beauty and decay inherent in the “Tragic Kingdom.”

Recording Process

The recording of Tragic Kingdom was a meticulous process, spanning over two years from March 1993 to October 1995. The sessions took place across 11 studios in the Greater Los Angeles area, each contributing to the album’s rich and diverse sound. Studios like Total Access and The Record Plant provided the band with state-of-the-art facilities and a blend of vintage and modern equipment, essential for capturing the album’s eclectic style.

Matthew Wilder, the album’s producer, played a crucial role in shaping the sound of Tragic Kingdom. Known for his work with artists like Christina Aguilera, Wilder brought a polished yet dynamic approach to the recording sessions. His collaboration with engineer Paul Palmer ensured that each track was meticulously crafted, balancing the band’s ska-punk roots with broader pop sensibilities.

One notable challenge during the recording was the tension arising from the band’s personal dynamics, particularly the breakup between Gwen Stefani and Tony Kanal. This emotional backdrop added a layer of intensity to the sessions, with tracks like “Don’t Speak” capturing the raw vulnerability of their relationship. Despite these hurdles, the band managed to channel their personal experiences into the music, creating an album that resonated deeply with listeners”.

I am going to jump to a review from Pitchfork. They provided some interesting and excellent backstory and history. The lead-up to the recording of Tragic Kingdom. I think one of the most notable and important aspects was the lyrics by Gwen Stefani. A feminist whose lyrics on songs like Just a Girl very much fitted with a scene of incredible women who were using their music to hit out against sexism and the patriarchy, this anger and defiance mixes with the more colourful and heartbroken:

“Following the surge of third-wave feminism in the early ’90s, the mid-’90s became the peak of the “angry white female” era in rock and pop. It was a time when feminized aggression—from Hole and riot grrrl to Liz Phair and Alanis Morissette—was suddenly perceived as being on-trend, as if women haven’t been furious forever. Stefani, girly tomboy ultra, arguably benefited from this kind of branding, even while she maintained the fun, energetic personality that led Courtney Love to dub her a “cheerleader” and others to call her the “anti-Courtney Love.”

Lead single “Just a Girl” was Gwen’s bridge to planet angry. Upon its release in September 1995, it became a theme song for any girl fed up with living in a boy’s world—with the emphasis once again being on girl. Spice Girls would soon turn “girl power” into a full-on marketing technique, but “Just a Girl” was some kind of magic middle-ground in the context of ’90s pop-feminism: sassy, addictively sweet and sour, yet still accessible. Dumont’s indelible looping riff adds a taunting feeling, while the lyrics leave interpretation conveniently ajar with lines like “I’m just a girl/So don’t let me have any rights.” Never has Stefani’s vocal style—with its forays into babydoll voice and its breathless, swooping belts—felt more intentional as a performance technique meant to amplify her message. “Just a Girl” is not a subtle song, but what it’s doing is quietly masterful: The sarcasm subverts the underlying victimhood in a sneering way, but victimhood is also something girls (particularly white or privileged girls) quickly understand as a tool for getting what they want.

Gwen’s Tragic Kingdom-era pain was incandescent because it felt off the cuff, uninhibited, and barely removed from its cause. You saw that up close in “Don’t Speak,” the breakup ballad that pushed No Doubt’s success over the edge, topping the Billboard airplay chart for 16 weeks. Starting in late 1996 and continuing for much of 1997, flutters of Spanish guitar and angelic whispers of “hush hush, darling” were inescapable; for those listening across radio formats or watching MTV at the time, the song’s ubiquity reached “if I hear this one more time…” levels. But people also could not look away from the saga of Gwen and Tony, SoCal ska’s Stevie and Lindsey. Every night they’d hit the stage and seemingly be forced to relive their split through “Don’t Speak,” a song musically at odds with nearly everything in their upbeat catalog.

Not every song on Tragic Kingdom is overtly about the breakup or the frustrations of girlhood—this is ’90s California ska, after all, a few mostly positive chillers are required. But the album tracks skew cheesy, especially now. Ska bands of the era would sometimes show off their funk chops with a disco cut on their LPs, but No Doubt’s take, “You Can Do It,” is plagued by fake disco strings and a guitar jangle that borders on musical clip art. “Different People,” a brass-and-keyboard-led ska track about how the world is big and diverse, has the tension of a child’s picture book, and the depth of one too. Eric’s musical-theater-strikes-back closer “Tragic Kingdom” is cringeworthy in highly specific ways: the sampling of theme-park announcements, the egregiously drawn-out tempo changes, the fact that it seems to be about how evil Walt Disney is. (Besides, on an album like this, the most tragic of kingdoms is actually Gwen and Tony’s love story, not the suburbia surrounding Mickey’s castle.)

The rush of energy you get from Tragic Kingdom’s opening run is enough to keep the album within spitting distance of the ’90s canon, emblematic of a specific time and place. Other highs include sixth single “Sunday Morning,” where the seasoned band easily finds the pocket with nimble, driving percussion, reggae rhythms, and overdubbed harmonies. “End It On This,” one of the only songs credited to Dumont, Kanal, and both Stefanis, is low-key pummeling: Gwen, in all her high-low vocal glory, recalls the last kiss with Tony while the band fires on all cylinders. Every player gets to show off a little with their “thing,” but Dumont is the secret all-star: His tough opening riff sets the song into intricate lockstep. Dumont, much like fellow unlikely-’90s-rock-star Rivers Cuomo, was a Kiss fan and longtime metalhead; you can hear that in his guitar hooks, which lent Tragic Kingdom a fizzy edge”.

It is another review that I want to get to now. Billboard write how No Doubt sort of pogoed into people’s lives in 1995. The Orange County band had endured enough tragedy and dislocation for a few albums. However, Tragic Kingdom does not get bogged down with too much baggage. It is a spectacular album that does show its tears and scars, and yet there is a lot of pleasure, joy and a range in terms of emotions and themes:

“It was the outcome of three years of struggle,” said bassist Tony in a 1997 interview with Rolling Stone. “And there were casualties.”

There sure were. During the making of Tragic Kingdom, Eric quit to become an animator on The Simpsons, and Kanal ended his eight-year romantic relationship with Gwen. These things transpired as the group — rounded out by guitarist Tom Dumont and drummer Adrian Young — tried to reverse their commercial fortunes while maintaining their artistic integrity. Fate was trying to break their stride and slow them down, but luckily, they had producer Matthew Wilder — he of “ain’t nothing gonna break my stride” fame — at the controls. While not exactly the hippest guy in the world, Wilder helped Gwen and the boys strike the right balance between the bouncy ska of their early years and the other sounds they were already drifting toward.

That last point is crucial. While some ska fans blasted the band for abandoning its roots, this was no overnight ka-ching thing. No Doubt’s sophomore effort, 1995’s self-released Beacon Street Collection, is all over the map, and even the group’s 1992 self-titled debut isn’t a front-to-back genre record.

And besides, by blowing out ska’s borders, No Doubt was following in the proud footsteps of fellow California acts like Fishbone and Oingo Boingo — not to mention all those 2 Tone groups from England that Gwen and Eric grew up worshipping. After nearly a decade in action, No Doubt circa ’95 was an ambitious foursome with a metal guitarist, a Prince-loving funk bassist, and a drummer comfortable in various styles. They’d have done themselves a disservice by sticking strictly with ska, and they’d have never made it out of Anaheim.

Of course, they did make it out. Tragic Kingdom sold 16 million copies and reached No. 1 on the Billboard 200. Only one of the singles, “Just a Girl,” cracked the Hot 100, but that’s because the rest weren’t released as proper singles. That technicality meant that tunes like “Spiderwebs” and the mega-smash “Don’t Speak” could only climb the Billboard Hot Airplay chart, and climb they did, reaching No. 23 and No. 1, respectively.

As dramatized in the “Don’t Speak” video, Gwen’s emergence as a superstar was a huge part of the group’s success. For teen girls in the late ‘90s, she was a different sort of idol, a glamorpuss in track pants who’d play girly-girl one minute and raging punk chick the next. In a pop landscape filled with power female figures, (Alanis Morissette, Shirley Manson, Courtney Love, etc.), Gwen’s bindi-dotted, bare-abbed, Barbie-warrior-princess aesthetic made her an alternative to all the alternatives.

Eric’s departure left her to handle the bulk of the lyrics, and the Tony situation left her with lots to write about. It was serendipitous, suddenly having this forum to express the greatest heartbreak she’d ever experienced, though it couldn’t have seemed like it at the time.

Thanks to Tragic Kingdom, No Doubt became one of the era’s biggest bands, and two decades later, it still tours and records when the mood strikes. Gwen, meanwhile, is a bona fide solo star and beloved TV figure, thanks to The Voice”.

I am rounding off with two retrospective features. The first is from VICE. Writing back in 2015 for Tragic Kingdom’s twentieth anniversary, we get to discover why the band and the album proved so popular. I think it is their relatability and accessibility. Especially Gwen Stefani. Not ego-charged or concerned with fame, this was (and still is) an artist who could connect with her fanbase and was writing songs that they could identify with:

“What Gwen wanted to sing about was, and still is, incredibly relatable to anyone still figuring their shit out. On “Different People” she grapples with her place in a world full of “different people and all their different minds” as impending pop stardom beckons. “You don’t have to be a famous person just to make your mark,” she sings on the first verse, sounding as though she’s trying to convince herself as much as anyone. She continues: “A mother can be an inspiration to her little son / Change his thoughts, his mind, his life, just with her gentle hum.” Twenty years on, this couplet feels like the motherhood versus career conundrum neatly summed up for the TMZ generation.

“Different People” is one of several Tragic Kingdom highlights that could only have been written by a smart, ambitious, somewhat conflicted woman. “Hey You!” has Gwen suspiciously eyeing up a newlywed couple who are “Just like my Ken and Barbie Doll,” while “Just a Girl” is a wickedly sarcastic feminist anthem inspired by a scolding she received from her father after she stayed out too late with Kanal and drove home alone. “Oh I’m just a girl / All pretty and petite / So don’t let me have any rights,” she sneers at the top before sighing, “Oh, I’ve had it up to here!” over the outro.

Elsewhere, “Spiderwebs” is essentially Destiny’s Child’s “Bug a Boo” for the pre-cellphone era, while on “Excuse Me Mr.” Gwen casts herself in the role of a girl simply desperate to catch a guy’s attention, complete with a sonically slapstick middle eight. Funnily enough, the summer before Tragic Kingdom dropped, Gwen caught the attention of a man who would at least in part inspire her art for the next two decades: Bush’s Gavin Rossdale. Their fateful meeting and instant attraction occurred when both bands toured with the Goo Goo Dolls. They began dating soon after and married seven years later, with Rossdale inspiring numerous future No Doubt and solo songs including “Don’t Let Me Down” and “U Started It”—can you guess what those two are about?—before Gwen filed for divorce this past August citing “irreconcilable differences.” Both personally and professionally, 1995 was a massive year for La Stefani.

But nevermind Rossdale, a selection of Tragic Kingdom’s best songs hinged around another key relationship for Gwen: her long-term boyfriend and No Doubt bassist Tony Kanal, and aching power ballad “Don’t Speak” became the summation of her heartbreak in the wake of their split. At the time it was utterly inescapable, but perhaps because it’s been dimmed by over-familiarity, the album’s lesser-known breakup songs hit harder today. “Happy Now?” is filled with bitterness and defiance, “Sunday Morning” documents an unexpected role reversal—suddenly he wants her back—and “End it on This” sees Gwen finally throw in the towel. But far from becoming subsumed by, “You Can Do It,” is Gwen’s stop-wallowing-and-get-yourself-together song.

No Doubt would go on to make a more sophisticated album with 2000’s Return of Saturn (the lion’s share of the lyrics for which are dominated by the rollercoaster early days of her relationship with Rossdale), followed by 2001’s Rock Steady, which was precision-tooled by The Neptunes and William Orbit for chart success, before Gwen made her inevitable solo move in the mid-aughts. But Tragic Kingdom remains the band’s defining moment, a career-altering record that’s earnest, passionate, and reassuringly flawed. An album about breaking up, growing up, and thinking about shit; about not always knowing the answer and getting on with it anyway. Dumont summarized its personal impact on his Tumblr recently: “The whirlwind of world-touring and extensive promoting of Tragic Kingdom went on for two and a half years, and at the end of it we emerged, not only rock stars, but as men and women.” It shouldn’t take an act of God for you to give it another listen, but the passage of 20 years seems a perfect excuse to dive back in”.

I am going to finish off with a feature from 2020. GRAMMY revisited Tragic Kingdom on its twenty-fifth anniversary. Even though they say Tragic Kingdom was No Doubt’s sophomore album – it was their third, but 1995’s The Beacon Street Collection was an independent release, though it is technically their second album -, they wrote how it is a masterpiece. An album that had an impact on the Rock and Pop world at large. It still resounds to this day. It has translated and endured through the decades well. It has lost little of its magic:

“Tragic Kingdom is widely considered a breakup album, and it is, but the heartbreak also extends to more than just Stefani and Kanal. The band faced so much tragedy in their formative years, starting with suicide of co-founder John Spence in 1987 when they were only a year old. Spence shared vocal duties with a then-bashful Stefani and was a charismatic frontman who did backflips on stage. Days before No Doubt were to perform at the Roxy Theatre, a gig they hoped would be their big break, he shot himself. The Roxy was announced as the devastated band’s final show. They reunited a month later because, Stefani told Interview, it’s what Spence would have wanted. The unreleased song, "Dear John," pays tribute to their friend.

And then there was Eric’s exit. While it set No Doubt on their course, it rattled their confidence emphatically. It was traumatic, Dumont said. "We were just a group of friends who were really tight, and we had our band for years. Our band just got rocked with this intense, personal stuff." And, Stefani admitted, it almost made them give up. "We were sitting there saying to ourselves, ‘O.K., we are 26. We’ve been doing this for eight years. Maybe we should finish up and get adult lives now.’ Then the record came out and people thought it was good, which was really weird, because we were always the dork band from Anaheim." "The Climb," a psychedelic slow burner that alludes to overcoming obstacles, is one of Eric’s two solo offerings to Tragic Kingdom—the other being the freaky title-track, which describes a dystopian Disneyland and Walt’s cryogenically frozen tears as dripping icicles—and has emerged as a fan-favorite over the years.

But while No Doubt’s early years may have been flooded with drama, plumbing the depths of it helped them find their voice. Collective agony cultivated the strength of their bond and dug into an honest narrative about navigating loss that is not only powerful, but universally relatable. We all experience pain. It’s an intrinsic part of the human experience. And we tend to relate to art that, even if ever so slightly, taps into our grief because it expresses it in a way that we perhaps exactly can’t. It hits a nerve. And that’s deeply comforting—which is arguably why Tragic Kingdom continues to endure in the powerful way that it does: yes, it’s poetic, gorgeously dynamic, and sounded fizzy and fresh against the band’s radio contemporaries. But it’s also a symbol of hope in the wake of tragedy”.

I think I will leave it there. On 10th October, we will listen to Tragic Kingdom thirty years after its release. It seems hard to think it is that old! I remember the album fondly, and it was an important part of a special time in life. Even though most people know Tragic Kingdom for the singles, there are deeper cuts like End It on This and Tragic Kingdom which deserve more discussion and exposure! Go and listen to this truly great album. You only need to listen to it the once before you are…

TOTALLY smitten.

FEATURE: Champagne Supernova: Oasis’ (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? at Thirty

FEATURE:

 

 

Champagne Supernova

Oasis’ (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? at Thirty

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THIS is a moment…

IN THIS PHOTO: Oasis photographed at Glastonbury 1995/PHOTO CREDIT: Jill Furmanovsky

when one of the biggest bands of the 1990s are touring and bringing their classic music to new and existing fans alike. Oasis are thrilling audiences around the world. About to head to London in a couple of weeks, and then on to Australia, the band would never have imagined, even a couple of years ago, that they would be bringing their music to people far and wide! However, as they are reunited and this is an important year, there is speculation that there could be a new album or more tour dates. It is significant that Oasis are touring in 2025, as it is thirty years after they released their second studio album, (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? Released on 2nd October, 1995, it followed a year after their hugely successful and acclaimed debut album, Definitely Maybe. I am going to write another feature about the album closer to its anniversary. However, now, I want to spend some time with one of the most important albums of the 1990s. One that included Oasis greats like Champagne Supernova and Wonderwall. If some feel (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? is not as strong as Definitely Maybe, there is denying its popularity. It sold a record-breaking 345,000 copies in its first week in the U.K. Going on to spend ten weeks at number one on the UK Albums Chart. (What’s the Story) Morning Glory?  was Oasis’ breakthrough in the United States, reaching number four on the US Billboard 200, where it went on to be certified 4× platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). Two of its singles, Some Might Say and Don’t Look Back in Anger, reached number one in the U.K. Wonderwall and Roll with It reached number two. Champagne Supernova was never a U.K. single, though you feel it should have been!

I am going to come to some features and reviews for (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? It is an album that Noel Gallagher says he has tried to live up to. Such was the success and quality. I don’t think there are many weak moments on it. However, the singles really do stand out. Wonderwall is especially strong, and it remains Oasis’ most-streamed song. The two reviews I am going to end with are both for the twentieth anniversary reissue that came out in 2014. It contained bonus tracks and was this expanded release. Hard, as critics noted, to improve on perfection! However, before getting there, there are a few things to include. I have included the video above. This is where Noel Gallagher provided this detailed interview in 2020. He headed back to Rockfield Studios in Wales (this is where the band recorded the album. It was produced by Owen Morris and Noel Gallagher). NME highlight some key takeaways from the interviews. I have included my favourites:

“Noel just listened to ‘(What’s the Story) Morning Glory?’ for the first time in 25 years…

The writer of ‘Wonderwall’ probably doesn’t need to give himself a refresher on what he’s created too often, but the interview kicks off with Noel revealing that he listened to ‘What’s The Story…’ in full for the first time since its release ahead of its anniversary.

“Often I’ve wondered,” he said, “what’s a fucking 14-year-old getting out of this after all these years, you know when I’d see them at the gigs? What are they fucking hearing? I fucking I understood it today. You know, the words, the melodies. Liam’s voice is fucking on another level on that record. Because there’s nothing, there’s nothing around today that even remotely comes near to it.”

He recorded ‘Wonderwall’ sitting on an actual wall, watched by “a lot of sheep”

Noel was joined by [man from Rockfield Studios] for the new interview, and took a tour around the studios and its grounds. Passing a wall on the outside of the studio, Noel revealed that the recording of ‘Wonderwall’ took on a rather more literal meaning when he put one of the most iconic songs of all time to tape.

“That’s the wall that I sat on that day,” he remembered. “Fucking idiot, playing ‘Wonderwall’.” Gallagher went on to recall that “a lot of sheep were watching me do ‘Wonderwall’. I don’t know who was more freaked out, me or them.

“I remember saying to Owen [Morris, co-producer], I’ve got this song called ‘Wonderwall’, I want to record it on a… wall.” Didn’t turn out bad in the end, we suppose.

Only the songs written pre-Rockfield on the album have a second verse…

It’s well known that ‘(What’s The Story) Morning Glory?’ was written in a lightning fast 12 days. Booking Rockfield for six weeks, the band only used three of them, one of which saw them scatter across the country after a fight put a stop to proceedings. “I remember it just being really really fucking fast,” Noel remembers, “and half the songs hadn’t even been written when I got here.” He explained: “If you listen to the record, it’s split into two halves. Half of the songs have got a second verse, they were all written before I got here, and the rest of the songs are just the first verse twice, and then maybe a third time. That was me getting in here and going, ‘You know what? Fuck it.’”

The band were expecting the album to be hated upon its release

“It didn’t get one good review, I don’t think,” Noel remembered of the critical response from journalists upon the release of the album. “I think we were waiting for that,” he added, saying that journalists at the time, as well as the band’s record label, were “expecting ‘Definitely Maybe’ part two”. “I was expecting it to be not well-received.”

“[Journalists] had to second-guess everything after ‘Morning Glory’, because they’d got it so wrong,” Noel said. “That’s why when ‘Be Here Now’ came out, which isn’t a great album, it got 10/10 everywhere. It didn’t get one bad review, because they didn’t want to be made to look like dicks again”.

I want to come to an interesting interview from 1995, where Noel Gallagher sat down ahead of Oasis’ Croke Park shows. It was from the Hot Press archive. However, before that, I wanted to get some information about the making of (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? This article from July provides a deep dive into Oasis’ second studio album. One that will get a lot of new inspection ahead of its thirtieth anniversary on 2nd October:

“Financing came from Creation Records, led by Alan McGee, who believed in Oasis’s vision. The recording budget was estimated at £60,000—a substantial sum, but modest compared to the album’s eventual impact. Financially, the band faced the usual pressures of second-album expectations, but McGee’s support and the band’s drive saw them through.

The album’s title, “(What’s The Story) Morning Glory?”, came from a phrase used by Noel’s friend Melissa Lim, which itself originated in the film Bye Bye Birdie. The cover, designed by Brian Cannon, features two men passing on Berwick Street, London—a nod to the area’s record shops. The sleeve cost £25,000 to produce, with Cannon and DJ Sean Rowley as the men on the cover. Producer Owen Morris can be spotted in the background holding the master tape. Noel later admitted he wasn’t entirely happy with the cover, but its image has become iconic.

Recording Process

The story of the recording sessions is as compelling as the music itself. The main sessions took place at Rockfield Studios in Wales during May and June 1995. This studio, founded in 1961, is renowned for its rural setting and classic equipment. Previous clients included Queen, Rush, and Coldplay, making it a legendary place for bands seeking inspiration and technical excellence (Sound On Sound).

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Producer Owen Morris, working alongside Noel Gallagher, drove the sessions with a fast-paced, no-nonsense approach. The band recorded the album in just 15 days—often finishing a song each day. The focus was on capturing energy and immediacy, not endless perfection. Engineer Nick Brine handled the technical side at Rockfield, while mixing was completed at Orinoco Studios in London. Owen Morris had previously worked with bands like The Verve and The Rolling Stones, bringing valuable experience to the table.

Recording was not without its challenges. The band’s hard-living reputation followed them into the studio, but producer Owen Morris kept them focused. Paul Weller’s contributions—especially on “Champagne Supernova”—brought a new dimension to the sound. The sessions were intense but creative, with the group feeding off each other’s energy. Noel Gallagher later described the sessions as “a mad blur,” but the results speak for themselves.

Touring and Promotion of (What’s The Story) Morning Glory?

The promotional campaign for (What’s The Story) Morning Glory? was bold and relentless. Singles were released ahead of the album, with “Some Might Say” coming out in April 1995, followed by “Roll With It” in August, which led to the much-publicised “Battle of Britpop” with Blur. The rivalry between the bands became a media sensation, drawing huge attention to both groups. Not only that, but Oasis made frequent television appearances, radio interviews, and magazine covers to keep the spotlight shining.

The album’s tour ran from 22 June 1995 to 4 December 1996, starting with a warm-up gig at Bath Pavilion. The tour featured major UK outdoor concerts, including two nights at Maine Road, two at Loch Lomond, and two at Knebworth House—each attended by 125,000 fans. The Knebworth shows were the largest ever held by a single band in the UK, with 2.5 million ticket applications. The tour visited Europe, North America, Australia, and Asia, with more than 100 shows in total”.

I will focus more on particular songs in the second feature. Maybe spotlight the singles or go inside the legacy of the album. There is not as much written about (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? as there is Definitely Maybe. Perhaps the latter is more impactful, as it was Oasis’ debut. However, in terms of hype, excitement and expectation, few albums of the 1990s were bigger than Oasis’ (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? I am going to move to that Hot Press interview from 1995. There are some interesting interviews with the band that year. However, this one caught my eye. Noel Gallagher, as you’d expect, unfiltered and candid! It does provide some useful context and helps give us an understanding of the album and what Oasis were feeling ahead of the release of (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? A seismic album:

While it took Manc neighbours the Stone Roses a Fleetwood Mac-esque five years to record theirs, Oasis’ second album was cranked out in a fortnight with a good few of the guitar and vocal tracks laid down in one take. Ranging from the nihilistic guitar thrash of ‘Hello’ to the psychedelic bubblegum of ‘She’s Electric’, Morning Glory ram-raids its way through 30 years of Britpop finery with nobody, not even Blur, standing an earthly of pulling them over.

“I look at the Roses and thing, ‘fuck me, how did a top band like that manage to disappear up their own arses?’ Second Coming would’ve been an alright album if it'd come out a year after the first one but the build-up from the press and sense of expectation from the fans was so over the top that it was automatically going to be a disappointment.

“Maybe it does exist,” Noel proffers, “but I’ve certainly never experienced ‘difficult second album syndrome’. I’m happy that Morning Glory’s the best record we could possibly have made and if people disagree with that, fair enough, they’re entitled to their opinion. Even if it’s wrong. The only time I feel pressured is when someone comes up, recites the lyrics from ‘Live Forever’ and says, ‘that song prevented me from committing suicide’. I mean, I’m delighted it gave you the strength to carry on but it’s a heavy responsibility, particularly when they’re total strangers.”

Hot Press can also exclusively reveal – unless he’s blurted it out since to someone else – that Noel's done a Bruce ‘n’ Tarby and brought in Paul Weller to supply a few extra riffs.

“Yeah, we were strolling along the 17th fair­way when I stopped, gave him a big hug and asked whether he’d be a luvvie and come in and play on our album. Nah, what happened is that me and Paul have become really good mates, he heard some of the rough mixes and went, ‘I wouldn’t mind a bit of that’. Naturally, I was happy to oblige.

“It was another case of meeting someone who I idolised and realising that he’s just a bloke from Woking who likes his beer and writes damn fine tunes. I’ll sit in the room and say, ‘why are you such a miserable cunt all the time?’, which I know he prefers to endless questions about The Jam and the fucking Style Council. Actually, I did have a word with him about all that crap instrumental stuff he did during his Cappuccino Kid-phase, but when you consider he’s been going 20 years and Stanley Road’s the best album he’s done yet, I think you can forgive him for the occasional dip”.

Actually, I am only going to feature one review for the 2014 anniversary reissue of (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? I am being Oasis-like ramshackle when it comes to order and cohesiveness! Instead, I want to finish with a bit about its legacy Earlier this year, xs noize said this about its legacy:

“(What’s the Story) Morning Glory?” is widely regarded as one of the defining albums of the Britpop era and among the greatest records of the 1990s. It frequently appears on lists ranking the best albums of all time, reflecting its lasting impact on music history. Beyond its commercial success, “Morning Glory” became a cultural landmark, capturing the spirit of mid-’90s optimism and excess. Its tracks were everywhere—blaring from pubs, filling stadiums, and resonating with a broad audience, from dedicated rock fans to casual listeners. Songs like “Wonderwall” and “Don’t Look Back in Anger” transformed into anthems of unity and resilience, often sung by crowds at public events and gatherings. The album also cemented Oasis’ legacy in rock history, earning them numerous accolades, including the 1996 BRIT Award for Best British Album. Its influence can be traced through countless bands that followed, while its tracks remain staples on radio playlists and in live performances. Propelled by the success of “Definitely Maybe”, “Morning Glory” catapulted Oasis from indie crossover success to global rock superstardom. It is often highlighted by critics as a pivotal moment in British indie music, illustrating just how deeply independent music had penetrated the mainstream”.

I’ll get to Pitchfork and their take on the reissue of (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? Even though the original is pretty great and know, the expansion and three-disc reissue gave listeners access to unheard tracks and provided this wider and deeper story of a massive album that turned Oasis into truly global superstars. It definitely did not hurt their egos when the album sold by the bucketload! Regardless, you can feel the effects and influence of (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? thirty years later. As we speak (pretty much), the band are playing songs from the album on the stage:

“It’s hard to remember now, but when (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? was released in the fall of 1995, Oasis were losers. Sure, their 1994 debut album Definitely Maybe had gone straight to No. 1 on the UK albums chart, and sold several million copies worldwide. But in their first true test of post-success fortitude, Oasis could no longer claim the title of biggest rock band in the land. “Roll With It,” the teaser from Morning Glory, was released August 14, 1995—not coincidentally, the very same day as “Country House”, the jaunty new single from their bitter rivals in Blur (aka the London art-school yin to Oasis’ Mancunian street-tough yang). A year’s worth of tabloid sniping between the two groups—which hit its peak/nadir when Oasis architect Noel Gallagher declared that Blur’s Damon Albarn and Alex James should “catch AIDS and die” —had effectively come down to the UK chart equivalent of an after-school fistfight. And in this case, it was Oasis who walked away licking their wounds—that week, “Country House” outsold “Roll With It” by more than 50,000 copies to take the No. 1 spot.

As it should’ve: “Roll With It” is nobody’s favorite Oasis song and would be hard-pressed to crack a Top 20 list of the band’s all-time best. It's a catchy enough tune, sure, but its shoulder-shrugged message of “you gotta roll with it” felt atypically blasé coming from a band that had previously endorsed self-deification, immortality, and shagging well-heeled medical professionals in helicopters. However, for a band never encumbered by humility, the decision to go with Morning Glory’s weakest song was, in retrospect, Oasis’ cockiest gesture yet: They were willing to take the first strike in the so-called Battle of Britpop because they knew it was only a matter time before they’d be delivering the knockout blow.

(What’s the Story) Morning Glory? would go on to sell more than twice as many copies in the UK as Blur’s contemporaneous The Great Escape, and, over the following two years, it served as the unofficial soundtrack to England's imminent changing of the guard. But, just as significantly, it achieved a metric of popularity that had proven so elusive to Oasis' Britpop peers: bonafide American success, with the album reaching number 4 on the Billboard charts and selling 3.5 million copies Stateside. (The Great Escape, meanwhile, languished in the lower reaches of the Top 200.) For all their unibrowed laddism and two-fingered paparazzi salutes, Oasis projected a glamorous image of Englishness that was potent enough to stoke the Cool Britannia fancies of those North American Anglophiles who make trips to specialty shoppes to load up on Dairy Milk bars, but (unlike Blur) not so colloquial as to alienate the heartland. It’s the stuff upon which Austin Powers franchises and Brit-themed pub-chains would later be built.

Fortuitously arriving at the mid-point of the '90s—and representing the peak of a Britpop narrative that took root with the retro-rock renaissance of the Stone Roses and the La’s five years previous—(What’s the Story) Morning Glory? is Oasis' absolute pinnacle. If Definitely Maybe presented Oasis' raw materials—’60s psychedelia, ’70s glam and punk, Madchester groove—Morning Glory melted down and remoulded them into a towering sound that was unmistakably their own, with those omnipresent (but never ostentatious) string-section sweeps classily dressing up the songs like ribbons on a trophy. And yet the real triumph of Morning Glory is measured not by the tracks that have since become karaoke classics, first-dance wedding standards, and go-to bathtub sing-alongs, but the exceptional album tracks that never got a shot at certain chart supremacy—like the jet-roar jangle of “Hey Now” (for my money, the best Oasis song never to be issued as a single) and the crestfallen “Cast No Shadow”, dedicated to a then-mostly-unknown Richard Ashcroft of the Verve, a band that would soon reap the benefits of Oasis’ American incursion.

Ironically, the Oasis-whetted appetite for all things English was arguably also crucial to the impending Stateside success of the Spice Girls, who would usher in a wave of preteen-targeted pop that would eventually push guitar-oriented rock acts down the charts by decade's end. And what’s most striking about listening to (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? today is how, at the height of their powers, Oasis seemed to be bracing for their own eventual downfall. The tone of the album is decidedly darker and more reflective than the working-class escapism of Definitely Maybe, be it the foreboding “it’s never gonna be the same” prophecy of opening salvo “Hello”, the title track’s white-lined dispatches from the after-party circuit, or the cigarette-lighter-illuminated comedown of “Champagne Supernova”, wherein Oasis already sound nostalgic for the idealism of their debut album. And while Noel still deals in absurdist metaphor here (how exactly does one slowly walk down the hall faster than a cannonball?), he also emerges as a more personable, sobering foil to brother Liam’s bratty swagger—not just on his showstopping star turn on “Don’t Look Back in Anger”, but also in the way his backing vocals imbue “Cast No Shadow” with a deeper sense of despair”.

There are a couple of different takes regarding the legacy of Oasis’ (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? One of the black marks is that the vile and convicted sex offender Gary Glitter has a co-writing credit on the opener, Hello. It is this stain and a huge shame that Oasis will play this song live, lest they be earning money for a repulsive human being! In any case, one cannot argue with the quality of the music and how the album slotted into British music in 1995. In 2015, The Observer wrote about the complex legacy of Oasis’ second studio album:

“Like many of its contemporaries, the 11-track Glory, which has sold more than 20 million copies worldwide, has aged spectacularly well, especially in light of bands formed in its wake—the Killers, Coldplay, Arctic Monkeys and so on—trying (and often failing) to recreate the record’s specific blend of ego, vanity, skill and attitude. That the album was also the band’s sophomore effort, following the 1994 breakthrough Definitely Maybe, only enhances Oasis’ already formidable reputation.

Granted, at the time of its release, critics almost uniformly dismissed Glory, writing it off as nothing more than a rehash of other, better British rock bands: “Throughout, it’s Gallagher’s way with a tune, any tune, that remains their trump card, as in the way ‘Some Might Say’ piles hook upon hook, shamelessly buttressing its assault on the memory: well, if that bit doesn’t get you humming, it suggests, how about this bit? Or this?” wrote the Independent’s Andy Gill upon Glory’s initial release.

Derivative, sure—glam pioneer Gary Glitter earned a co-writing credit on “Hello”, owing to the striking similarities between the Oasis song and his own 1974 tune “Hello, Hello, I’m Back Again“—but in that sense, Oasis prefigured pop music’s eventual infatuation with hip-hop, sampling and mash-ups. What was sacrilegious in the mid-1990s is now utterly commonplace among the 21st century’s reigning pop stars—just consider Sam Smith’s brief kerfuffle over just how much Tom Petty influenced the sound of his smash hit “Stay With Me”.

But strip-mining your record collection for inspiration doesn’t mean much if you don’t have the chops to back it up. And in that sense, Oasis stands alone.

Much like the albums crafted by the Gallagher brothers’ beloved Beatles, there’s a casual brilliance to so much of Glory that its stature as one of the landmark albums of the 1990s, despite the critical establishment’s initial revulsion and dismissal of Oasis, seems a given. The album spawned six hit singles, including “Wonderwall”, “Some Might Say”, “Champagne Supernova”, “Roll With It” and “Don’t Look Back in Anger”, yet Glory is remarkably cohesive. The record, produced by Noel Gallagher with Owen Morris, unfolds with unhurried ease, fading in with the youthful bravado of “Hello” and slipping away with the languorous, liquid fade-out of “Supernova”.

Strip-mining your record collection for inspiration doesn’t mean much if you don’t have the chops to back it up. In that sense, Oasis stands alone.

It’s easy to get lost in the almost taffy-like give and take of lengthier tracks like “Some Might Say” or “Champagne Supernova”—listening to these songs 20 years later is to be reminded that British rock bands still stand alone when it comes to cultivating an almost tangible atmosphere on their albums. Delving into the second and third discs of (What’s the Story) Morning Glory?’s special edition puts the accomplishment in greater context.

The second disc, full of period B-sides taken from the UK singles, finds Oasis toggling between acoustic sensitivity (“Talk Tonight”; “Rockin’ Chair”) and snarling bombast (“Acquiesce” and “The Masterplan”), but with less finesse than is found on Glory proper. (Still, “Round Are Way”, a B-side from the Wonderwall single, might be the greatest Oasis track to ever miss out landing on a record.)

That Oasis, at that moment in its career, was able to demonstrate restraint and ruthlessly cull its absolute best speaks to the savvy of the Gallagher brothers and their band mates. The axiom about having your whole life to make your first record, but hardly any time to make your second certainly applies: 14 months elapsed between Oasis’ first and second LPs. Perhaps it was the Beatles influence again—just dive in and do your best, and let the work dictate the direction of things”.

I am going to end with GRAMMY and their feature from 2020. Many note that, in spite of the odd less-than-epic song here and there, (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? has aged really well. Songs like Champagne Supernova and Don’t Look Back in Anger still stir emotions and, for me at least, ensure memories flood back! Me as a child hearing this music for the first time:

“Rightly considered one of the eminent forces of 1990s Britpop, Manchester troupe Oasis found sizable acclaim and attention with 1994's Definitely Maybe. Like Radiohead’s Pablo Honey the year before, though, it was a strong but noticeably raucous and rudimentary debut. That said, there was enough potential to assume that its follow-up would feature more refined arrangements, production and songwriting. Fortunately, 1995's (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? offered precisely that.
True, a few songs became too big for their own good (you know the ones); plus, it was a more traditionally retro second effort than, say, Radiohead's innovative and diverse The Bends or the characteristically strange first releases from Oasis’ ostensibly direct rivals, Blur; yet, (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? was a major step forward for the famously combative Gallagher brothers and crew. Twenty-five years on, it remains a top-notch slice of Britpop wistfulness.

Following the success of Definitely Maybe, Oasis were already showing signs of external triumph and internal turmoil. They’d spent much of 1994 touring and living the typical rock star lifestyle; as a result, the now-legendary tensions between Noel and Liam Gallagher truly began, with a September 1994 show in Los Angeles resulting in Liam throwing a tambourine at his brother, leading to Noel momentarily quitting the band. Thankfully, they reconciled, continued playing gigs, and focused on writing what would become (What’s the Story) Morning Glory?

Predictably, they stayed with Creation Records, and the main quintet from Definitely Maybe carried over here; however, the sequence served as a transitional work in terms of drummers, with founder Tony McCarroll only playing on one track—"Some Might Say"—while his replacement, Alan White, played on everything else. Rather than create in several locations, they stuck to just one place—Rockfield Studios in Wales—and simplified further by using just two returning producers: Noel Gallagher and Owen Morris. By most accounts, the recording sessions were smooth, swift, and fruitful.

In the run-up to release, the press helped Oasis stir up more controversy with Blur. Specifically, both bands issued singles on August 14, 1995, with Blur’s "Country House" quickly outselling Oasis’ "Roll With It" by about 50,000 copies. In response, Noel told The Observer the following month that he wished members of Blur would "catch AIDS and die." He issued an apology shortly thereafter, but the remark continued to serve as a chief example of Oasis’ well-known bitterness.

Despite all of that disorder, (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? outdid its predecessor commercially. In fact, it sold nearly 350,000 copies in its first week alone and entered the U.K. charts at No. 1. (It remained at the top of the charts for the rest of the year and eventually became one of the best-selling U.K. albums of ever.) Comparably, it reached #4 on the Billboard 200, with six singles being out out between April 1995 and May 1996. It also fared quite well in Canada, Sweden, New Zealand and elsewhere, so it’s fair to say that the LP was a global hit.

It’s a bit ironic, then, that initial critical reviewers weren’t entirely enthusiastic, with publications like Q, the Chicago Tribune, Melody Maker and The Independent voicing significant gripes. In contrast, Entertainment Weekly, the Los Angeles Times, NME, and Rolling Stone were more positive. Of course, the record is now considered a classic, with a high ranking in several articles and books about the greatest albums of all time. It even won "British Album of 30 Years" at the 2010 Brit Awards.

Although other releases from back then may have pushed more boundaries, (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? still shines in terms of recalling the splendor of the 1960s British Invasion within a modern edge. For instance, "Roll with It"—with its poppy melodies, backing chants and twangy guitar strums—sounds like a lost Lennon tune from Help! or Rubber Soul. The same can be said for the brighter and more playful "She’s Electric"; the dreamily epic "Cast No Shadows"; and the decidedly biting and symphonic "Hey Now!" That’s not to say that Oasis were being too derivative—rather, they incorporated such homages into an irresistibly invigorating and poignant new stew.

Similarly, the immensely popular "Wonderwall," "Don’t Look Back in Anger" and "Champagne Supernova" are still among the best tunes from the Britpop era. In particular, "Wonderwall" is a quintessential example of a 1990s acoustic rock ode complemented by strings, with a lovely juxtaposition of hip verses and compelling choruses. The piano-led "Don’t Look Back in Anger"—their first single with Noel on lead vocals—is just as gripping yet even more nuanced, touching and charming. As for "Champagne Supernova," its cryptically poet lyricism and fiery guitarwork (courtesy of Paul Weller) taps into 1970s classic rock while also harnessing the optimism and softness of the previous decade’s folky warmth.  

Even the unruliest tunes—"Hello," "Some Might Say" and “Morning Glory”—manage to conjure Definitely Maybe whilst showcasing advanced techniques. The hooks are bigger, the layers are denser and the scopes are larger. There are also the two "Untitled" entries (a.k.a "The Swamp Song—Excerpt 1" and "Excerpt 2"): the first is a quick and relatively abstract interlude full of vibrant post-punk carnage, while the second cleverly reprises its forebearer beneath the soothing sounds of water. Sure, they may not be significant when heard in isolation, but the ways in which they tie together—as well as how they segue in and out of the tracks around them—give the LP a stronger sense of continuity and ambition.

Two-and-a-half decades later, (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? is still a great record. At the time, it propelled Oasis further creatively, commercially, and—at least to an extent—critically, all the while dominating the high school hangouts and dorm room memories of countless Gen Y fans. Thus, it’s a significant time capsule as much as it is a superb piece of entertainment, and while real-life incidents may have marginally marred our nostalgia for it, when considered outside of that drama, it’s well worth looking back in appreciation”.

On 2nd October, we will celebrate thirty years of Oasis’ (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? The pressure to follow such a distinct and popular debut album could have ruined other bands. To be fair, it almost did that to Oasis, though Liam and Noel Gallagher constantly fought anyway - so it is a minor miracle they are on stage together now and seemingly, for now, reunited! It gives the album new weight and significance that Oasis are (briefly) reformed. They get to play these songs with fresh eyes. To fans who were there in 1995 or the children of the parents who were! Each person has their own perspectives and memories of the album. If you were around in 1995, you would have known how significant a release it was. Thirty years later and (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? has…

NOT lost its swagger and brilliance.

FEATURE: Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love at Forty: Eleven: Watching You Without Me

FEATURE:

Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love at Forty

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

Eleven: Watching You Without Me

__________

THE final five features…

I will run as part of this twenty-feature series marking the fortieth anniversary of Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love on 16th September are about the aftermath. The legacy of the album, its promotion and some discussion also around photography of Bush shot in 1985. After this feature, I only have three more songs to cover from the album. Those are Jig of Life, Hello Earth and The Morning Fog. However, the fourth track on Hounds of Love’s second side, The Ninth Wave, is on my mind today. I want to go deeper with Watching You Without Me. Following the intense Waking the Witch and its terror, this is a shift of pace and sound. That track features voices coming to Kate Bush’s heroine. Imploring her to stat awake. Others that seemed like hallucinations. Her being judged as a witch and put on trial on the water. It is a frantic and busy song that has a similar energy to Jig of Life, though the moods and lyrics are very different! Coming in the middle is this more serene and meditative song. One that is also haunting and upsetting. Family of the woman adrift at sea looking at the clock and wondering where she is. Not one of the most popular or talked-about songs on Hounds of Love, I do think that Watching You Without Me is a pearl. Beautifully composed and with typically remarkable production, I will once more come to Leah Kardos’s 33 1/3 Hounds of Love book, that goes into detail when it comes to this song. Go and buy the book, as it gives us context and background to Hounds of Love and talks about its legacy. Watching You Without Me was among the ten songs from Hounds of Love (Mother Stands for Comfort and The Big Sky were omitted) that were performed during Kate Bush’s twenty-two Before the Dawn dates in 2014. I am going to come to Leah Kardos’s words soon. Before that, here is some interview archive, where Bush discusses the beautiful and desperately sad Watching You Without Me:

“Now, this poor sod [laughs], has been in the water for hours and been witch-hunted and everything. Suddenly, they’re kind of at home, in spirit, seeing their loved one sitting there waiting for them to come home. And, you know, watching the clock, and obviously very worried about where they are, maybe making phone calls and things. But there’s no way that you can actually communicate, because they can’t see you, they can’t you. And I find this really horrific, [laughs] these are all like my own personal worst nightmares, I guess, put into song. And when we started putting the track together, I had the idea for these backing vocals, you know, [sings] “you can’t hear me”. And I thought that maybe to disguise them so that, you know, you couldn’t actually hear what the backing vocals were saying.

Richard Skinner, ‘Classic Albums interview: Hounds Of Love. Radio 1 (UK), aired 26 January 1992”.

Waking the Witch ends with a rescue helicopter overhead that implores the woman to get out of the water. Though, and I never understand why, they do not rescue her. Perhaps it is a hallucination again. Or they could not pick her up. It is one of those clichés when it comes to films and shows that involve someone at sea or an island. The helicopter overhead and them waving frantically and it flying past. After the exhilaration and energy of Waking the Witch, Watching You Without Me “blinks awake in a different realm”. This is one of the calmest tracks on Hounds of Love. Right up there with And Dream of Sheep. I love the musical dissection from Leah Kardos. She notes how there is “a minimal LinnDrum rhythm, augmented with side-stick backbeat and a syncopated floor tom by Stuart Elliott, Bush’s voice mumbles a quick oscillation across a 5th, sounding like a car engine that won’t start – a trapped utterance glitching between repelling magnetic fields”. I will talk more about the lyrics to end. However, the composition is fascinating. So different to anything else on Hounds of Love, it is an album so varied, yet it all hangs together! “The music rocks back and forth between B♭ and C (the same chord relationship, ♭VII to I, of ‘The Big Sky’) like a hypnotist’s swinging watch”.  Leah Kardos writes how Stuart Elliott’s percussion has this ticking motion. Simulating a watch. A family waiting for their daughter to return maybe. The percussive pulse is just slightly below sixty beats per minute. A wonderful consideration that adds this sense of urgency and anxiety. Of time ticking and there being this infinite wait and sense of the unknown. Seconds seem like hours to the family! For the woman on the water, she is longing to be safe and rescued. She would love the boredom or familiarity of being in that house – where people wait not knowing the fate of their loved one. Leah Kardos notes, before the main vocal starts, that we are “in a liminal space between life and death, wakefulness and sleep; Bush is trapped in limbo”.

The lyrics are heart-aching and painful. That sense of stress and uncertainty. Not knowing where this woman is. Little do they know the extent of the drama she has already faced! Bush does not deliver the lyrics in this strained and hyperactive way. The fact that she sings in this almost resigned or wistful way adds extra punch and gravity to Watching You Without Me. Consider these lines: “You watch the clock/Move the slow hand/I should have been home/Hours ago/But I’m not here/But I’m not here/You can’t hear me/You can’t hear me/You can’t feel me/Here in the room with you now/You can’t hear what I’m saying/You don’t hear what I’m saying, do you?”. Words that might seem personal to this situation, but I think we can all relate to in some form or the other. That sense of loss. When someone dies and you notice the space left vacant. Bush sings “There’s a ghost in our home/Just watching you without me/I’m not here”. This is the point when some theorise the heroine died at sea and that mention of a ghost relating to death rather than an absence. That Jig of Life is either dying thoughts or happened after she had passed. And it is a futile rally cry for strength and survival. One of the most mysterious, intriguing and compelling songs Kate Bush ever wrote, Leah Kardos explains how “With the soft whine of radio static and morse code ‘SOS’ message, the song bursts out of its trance at 2’19” to a bright Hindustani teental rhythm, complete with hand cymbals  (a rare exception to Hounds Of Love’s no-cymbals rule)”. The lead vocal where Kate Bush sings “Don’t leave me/Don’t Leave Me” is sung backwards and double-tracked at the octave. The tutti strings by Michael Karmen are especially striking and stirring. Kardos says how the backwards singing recalls The Dreaming’s backwards vocals on Leave It Open. “and the spoken South Indian taal rhythm (konnakol) across the coda of ‘Get Out of My House’ (performed by Esmail Sheikh)”. I think some of the backwards vocals was inspired by The Beatles and how they would often put in backwards vocals with messages in them that, when played forward, would provide this treat for listeners (or a shock in some cases!).

Around about the 2’48” mark, there is this backwards vocal that is hard to discern. Bush might be singing “We really see” or “releasing”. Leah Kardos has played it forward and opinions that it could be Bush singing over and over “be silly”. A lovely detail and a mysterious element so the song. Also, that backwards vocal seemingly from a ghost. A spirit from another world. An auditory hallucination and sign of a mind lost at sea that is exhausted and fevered. Maybe losing hope of salvation and life. Just as we feel the action will quiet even more to a close, there is that return to the chopped vocals of Waking the Witch. There is this harrowing plea for help: “Listen to me/Help me baby/Talk to me”. It is not the first time that Bush had explored communication between the spiritual realm and reality. However, unlike Wuthering Heights (from 1978’s The Kick Inside) and Houdini (from 1982’s The Dreaming), Kardos rightly points out how, on Watching You Without Me, Bush lets you feel “the frustration and loneliness of insurmountable distance”. Things would change after this song. We then get the boost of energy and hope on Jig of Life before the contrasting Hello Earth and The Morning Fog. The former is a longer and more operatic and grand song where we think the heroine is watching above the earth, down at this spec in the ocean. The finale is this shorter and jumpier song that seems cheerier. The heroine saved (or was she?) and thankful. The chance to kiss the ground and let her family know how much she loved them. The same family who might have lost hope during Watching You Without Me. Did that ever happen and were they truly reunited?! Those who saw Bush in 2014 for Before the Dawn would have sensed that mix of emotions. Seen the action unfold. I was not here. They were watching her without me! It makes me so sorry I did not witness Watching You Without Me performed live…

IN London in 2014.