FEATURE: Groovelines: Don McLean – American Pie

FEATURE:

 

 

Groovelines

  

Don McLean – American Pie

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I am probably not going to…

IN THIS PHOTO: ‘The day the music died’ … the 1959 plane crash that killed Buddy Holly is thought to be one of American Pie’s references – but Don McLean hints it could be about his father’s death/PHOTO CREDIT: Hulton Archive/Getty Images (via The Guardian)

teach you too much about a song that is considered to be one of the defining moments of twentieth-century music. American Pie was written and recorded by Don McLean. Recorded at Record Plant in New York, it was included on the 1971 American Pie album. The single was a number-one U.S. hit for four weeks in 1972. The reason I am focusing on this song now is because Don McLean turns eighty on 2nd October. Many might remember Madonna’s cover of American Pie that was released in 2000. Simply, yes, American Pie is in part about the day Buddy Holly died (3rd February, 1959) and, with it, music dying. It is, as the song goes, “The day/the music died”. Don McLean is, and I say this with all the respect I can muster, an artist like Van Morrison. Part of a different time, they probably view this woke and more progressive age as something cynical, wrong or bullsh*t. Perhaps sharing the same emotional palette as Van Morrison, you cannot argue against the fact both are masterful songwriters. Also, this is a case of perhaps separating the art from the artist. Saluting his contributions and amazing career, and this incredible and world-class song, but also not entirely relating to the man behind it. In terms of his politics and views. However, as Don McLean is eighty on 2nd October, I couldn’t pass up on the chance to spotlight his best-known song. I am going to start with features that look inside the track. Its origins and why it is so effecting, historic and brilliant. Even if the song unfortunately inspired a series of gross and terrible films of the same name, we can overlook that. Get back to the genius of the 1971 song. Why, fifty-four years later, it has taken on a whole new light and meaning. If its creator might not relate to Gen Z and younger listeners who have their own relationship with American Pie, that is okay. We salute the genius who created the song!

I am going to come to an interview with Don McLean from The Guardian that was conducted in 2020. Even if people think American Pie is about the souring of the 1960s and the death of Buddy Holly, there is also family relevance and tragedy that connects to it. American Pie has spawned, among other things, a film, stage show, and a children’s book. It has this amazing and evolving legacy. I want to move to Tom Breihan’s piece for Stereogum and their Number Ones series. He wrote about American Pie. Even though he is indifferent and recognises American Pie means a lot to many but not him, his interpretations at least are really interesting. He explores the lyrics and the origin of the song:

“Don McLean was 13 on the day the music died. One night in February 1959, Buddy Holly and his band had just played a show in Clear Lake, Iowa. This was a ridiculous tour, all small upper-Midwest cities and cold climates. The routing didn’t make any sense. Holly was sharing the bills with Dion & The Belmonts, Richie Valens, and the Big Bopper, and a young Waylon Jennings was playing bass in his band. Holly usually travelled by bus, but he was sick of wearing dirty clothes, and he wanted a little time to unwind and do laundry before the next gig. So he chartered a plane to fly him to the next show in Moorhead, Minnesota. That plane crashed shortly after takeoff, killing everyone on board. The Big Bopper was 28. Buddy Holly was 23. Richie Valens was 17, just four years older than Don McLean.

McLean grew up in New Rochelle, New York, and he was working as a paperboy in 1959. When he learned about the crash, he was folding the newspapers that he’d have to deliver that morning. It left an impact. McLean found his way into folk music, playing up and down the East Coast and falling under Pete Seeger’s wing. And a decade after that plane crash, McLean started writing “American Pie,” a sprawling and portentous epic that did its best to tie that crash to the death of a whole generation’s innocence.

If you’re going to attempt to interpret the lyrics of “American Pie,” you’re going to venture into the realm of pure conjecture. McLean isn’t talking. Of those lyrics, McLean once wrote, “They’re beyond analysis. They’re poetry.” In one interview, asked about the meaning of the song, McLean snapped, “It means I don’t ever have to work again if I don’t want to.” Four years ago, McLean sold his handwritten lyric sheet at auction for $1.2 million, and he wrote, “I wanted to make a whole series of complex statements. The lyrics had to do with the state of society at the time.”

McLean left those lyrics cryptic and elliptical enough that high-school English classes and stoned kids in dorm rooms have been puzzling over them for decades. There are all sorts of little references in there: the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Kent State, Altamont, Janis Joplin, Charles Manson, the Byrds, the Cold War. There’s a Lennon/Lenin pun, which might also be a pun about Karl Marx and Groucho Marx. Pretty much everyone agrees that the Jester, a recurring character in the song, is Bob Dylan. Dylan steals James Dean’s coat and Elvis’ throne, and then, after his motorcycle crash, he finds himself sidelined in a cast. And all this has something to do with the burst of excitement that greeted the birth of rock ‘n’ roll — that whole mythic ’50s ritual of drag-races and backseat makeouts — and the way it eventually turned into nothing. The levy was dry”.

There are actually a couple of Don McLean interviews I will source, as it is interesting reading his reflections. Let’s get to that interview with The Guardian from 2020. I was not alive during the 1960s so not really aware of the impact of what Don McLean was writing about and where he was coming from. I was not alive in 1971 when American Pie came out. However, I get something different from the song. Someone younger, looking at it through a different lens. I did not know how old Don McLean was when he wrote American Pie, so it is startling to discover that fact! A huge achievement for any songwriter but, only in his twenties, it gives American Pie extra meaning and weight I think:

“McLean wrote it half a century ago, at the age of 24 – and to mark the anniversary, a new documentary, inevitably titled The Day the Music Died, will be released. A Broadway show is planned for 2022, and even a children’s book. That’s a lot of fuss for one song: McLean’s moment, perhaps, to tell the world once and for all what the lyrics actually mean.

There’s general agreement that the song is about the cultural and political decline of the US in the 1960s, a farewell to the American dream after the assassination of President Kennedy. “Bye bye Miss American Pie,” he sings. “Drove my Chevy to the levee but the levee was dry.” But McLean has always kept stumm about the allusions in his verses. “Carly Simon’s still being coy about who You’re So Vain was written about,” he says. “So who cares, who gives a fuck?”

Plenty do. Every line of American Pie has been stripped bare. There are fan websites dedicated entirely to decoding it. Who was the jester who sang for the king and queen in a coat he borrowed from James Dean? What exactly was revealed the day the music died? The Vietnam war, social revolution, Bob Dylan, Elvis Presley, JFK, Mick Jagger, Martin Luther King, Charles Manson, Hells Angels, The Beatles, hallucinogenic drugs, God, the Devil – they’re all in there, aren’t they? No one can be totally sure, except one man.

For McLean, though, the genius of the song is in its structure, not its words: a perfect fusion, he says, of folk, rock’n’roll and old-fashioned popular music. The slow intro is the pop part, but then the piano kicks in and the tempo speeds into the chorus – that’s the rock’n’roll bit. The folk component is in the verse-chorus-verse composition. “I’ve never said that to anybody in 50 years,” says McLean.

Hmm, I say, that’s not really the scoop I was looking for. But then there’s no point asking McLean direct questions about what the song means: he’s too well practised at flicking them off. “It means I’ll never have to work again,” he used to quip.

For all its catchy sing-along jauntiness, there’s little to really cheer about in American Pie. It’s devoid of hope. McLean did come up with a more upbeat verse where the music gets “reborn” at the end. But he ditched it. “Things weren’t going that way,” he says. “I didn’t see America improving intellectually or politically. It was going steadily downhill, and so was the music.”

He takes me back in time again – to the innocent days, supposedly, of the 1950s that American Pie is lamenting. But McLean hated growing up in what he describes as a small house in an upper middle class neighbourhood of New Rochelle, in New York. People discriminated about everything, he says. “If you didn’t drive the right car, if you didn’t have enough money, if you didn’t wear the right shoes. I hated those fuckers.”

He’s burdened by the pain and grief of his childhood, even now. The opening of American Pie is largely accepted as mourning Buddy Holly, who died in a plane crash in 1959. Holly was McLean’s musical idol as a kid, but could that verse equally be about his father? “You’ve hit the nail on the head,” he says. “I mean, that’s exactly right. That’s why I don’t like talking about the lyrics because I wanted to capture and say something that was almost unspeakable. It’s indescribable.” He adds: “American Pie is a biographical song.”

That’s how he feels, he says, thanks to the legacy of American Pie. “Writing a song that everyone on Earth knows shouldn’t make you resentful,” he says. “But you better have a lot inside you – because it’s gonna get sucked out”.

I am going to pick up from a bit later in a Goldmine interview from 2022. A particular point that interests me. They spoke with Don McLean to mark fifty years of a masterpiece that he still beams with pride about when people ask how he wrote the song. McLean was also very kind about Madonna and her cover version. Recognising how she provided her own take. I do wonder if any modern artists will cover American Pie very soon. It might take on a new angle given where America is now under Donald Trump:

“Eventually, the topic changes to interpretation, a topic McLean is used to addressing, especially the burning question about whether Bob Dylan is the inspiration for the jester.

“If I had wanted to say Dylan was the jester, I would have said his name, and if the king was Elvis, I would have said Elvis. Only Jesus had a thorny crown, so I meant these things to be open-ended because it was a dream. That’s the idea of the song, it’s always morphing.

“I mention James Dean by name, so it’s not like I didn’t want to mention names.”

McLean never mentions Buddy Holly by name, either. Nevertheless, he thinks it is a waste of time to overanalyze the song’s iconic lyrics for some hidden or deeper meaning.

“It’s a mistake to do that with the song. When you see this movie that is coming out next year about the making of the song, it goes everywhere; it goes to the drugstore where I wrote the chorus, the house where I wrote the rest of the lyrics, the music store that I said was the sacred store in the song on Main Street in New Rochelle. It will shed a lot of light on a lot of things.”

What is clear when you talk to McLean, is the song’s impact on the career of his musical idol, Buddy Holly.

“I got a letter from John Goldrosen, I found it the other day. He said that when he wrote his book about Buddy Holly, nobody was interested in a book about a dead rock star until after the song came out, and that is what elevated Buddy to the status he deserved. He probably would have anyway because of Paul McCartney or something, but it happened because of ‘American Pie.’

“I met both of his brothers; he had one named Larry and another named Travis. They were both involved in the Holley Tile Company (Buddy’s stage name was spelled differently) and Buddy would have either been picking cotton or laying tile in Lubbock if he wasn’t a musician.

“Larry was a nice guy, but he always liked to hold court. Travis looked like Buddy but was more shy and reticent. I have several letters from him.

“Travis was at a thing we did in 1979 or 1980, and he told me he wanted to shake my hand and told me he was driving in his truck, heard ‘American Pie’ and he pulled over to the side of the road and jumped for joy.

“You have no idea how wonderful it made me feel,” McLean said.

McLean and Holly’s legacy will be forever entwined. It is a huge source of pride for McLean and lends insight to what makes “American Pie” so special. At its core, it’s a song about the relationship between Holly and McLean, a fan and artist relationship any music lover can appreciate. “I brought Buddy back to life, and he brought me back to life”.

I will finish with an article from Metro from last year. Not to sour or take anything away from the more glowing recollections of American Pie, Don McLean was asked what American Pie means today. Even if his opinions on a more progressive and woke society is misguided and ill-informed, it is interesting hearing McLean discuss the song, and America, fifty-three years after he wrote one of the greatest song ever:

“When asked what American Pie means to him today, McLean begins: ‘The song really does open up a whole historical question about what happened in the 60s and assassinations and the history that forms the backbone of the song as it moves forward.

‘This song talks about the fact that things are going somewhat in the wrong direction, and I think that they’re still going in the wrong direction. I think most people looking at America now kind of think that too.

‘I mean, we certainly have a wonderful country, and we do wonderful things, but we also are in the middle of all this woke bulls**t, you know, and all this other stuff that there is absolutely no point to, as far as I can see, other than to undermine people’s beliefs in the country. That’s very bad.’

Expanding on so-called ‘wokery’ and what type of person he is, McLean declares himself as someone

But there’s a constant flow of information and suddenly nothing makes much sense. You have to concentrate in order to write songs like I did, or like other songwriters did in the past, or screenplays or novels or poetry.’

He continues: ‘We have the opportunity to make a change and make a difference in people’s lives simply because we’re alive and you can do a good thing for somebody, you can forgive someone, you can help someone, you can love someone, rather than be angry all the time.

‘There’s so much anger out there. So many of these college students have been given everything, and they’re just angry. They don’t know why they’re angry. They don’t even know what to be angry about.

‘It’s really a symptom, I think, of the fact that they’re frustrated. They don’t have a path that they can tread in life that leads to a better life’”.

Don McLean celebrates his eightieth birthday on 2nd October. Rather than put out a career-spanning playlist, I wanted to focus in on his best-known and loved song. He has written other classics (such as Vincent), through American Pie is the most enduring and adored. One that is still being talked about to this day. I have heard American Pie numerous times and its appeal and power still hits hard. It moves me as much as the…

FIRST time I heard it.

FEATURE: Kate Bush: The Tour of Life: All Emotion and with Devotion: Is Kate Bush the Most Visually Engaging and Arresting Artist Ever?

FEATURE:

 

 

Kate Bush: The Tour of Life

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

 

All Emotion and with Devotion: Is Kate Bush the Most Visually Engaging and Arresting Artist Ever?

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THIS is not a question that asks…

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1978/PHOTO CREDIT: Gered Mankowitz

whether Kate Bush is the most beautiful artist ever. Though, if you look objectively, there is not many who can challenge her! It would be slightly prurient and debasing reducing Kate Bush to her looks. However, as so many of her early interviews revolved around (mostly men) fantasising, objectifying and discussing her beauty and sex appeal, luckily the narrative did change. However, there is no getting around the fact that Kate Bush is one of the most beautiful women ever! Breath-taking and a goddess, she was a crush and pin-up for so many people. However, this feature relates more to the photographic side. I know I spend a lot of time in this area. I am going to move to other areas in future features. This is a question I posed a while back, so I wanted to update and revisit. Not many people have discussed this. In terms of thew photos and videos. How you get this impact and effect that you do not get from other artists. To do with the clothing, the poses and the looks. David Bowie might be seen as the most visually engaging and memorable artist ever. However, think about Kate Bush. From the very start when there were promotional photos of Wuthering Heights and The Kick Inside (1978) by Gered Mankowitz. Remarkable photos for 1985’s Hounds of Love by Guido Harari. Some gorgeous photos around Aerial’s release in 2005 by Trevor Leighton. Kate Bush looking remarkable and so engaging for 2011’s Director’s Cut and 50 Words for Snow. The latter was released when she was fifty-three. Still one of the most photogenic and remarkable artists ever. How she can grab your soul and heart with a simple look!

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in promotional shot for 2011’s 50 Words for Snow

Perhaps it is not a surprise that she could seduce and drop the jaw. Having been photographed professionally since she was a teenager and shot by her brother John as a young child, Kate Bush and the camera had this relationship that went back to the 1960s. Even if there has not been a public or professional photos of her for over a decade, you only have to look at the archives to see how Kate Bush commands the visual media. It is not only her remarkable photos. Her videos too are so visually rich. In photos, she can look everyday and girl-next-door but have this aura and potency that I have not seen from another artist. In other shots, she is almost this classic Hollywood actress! One has to credit the photographers she collaborated with and their concepts. However, I think the reason why the photos are so stunning and timeless is because of Kate Bush. It is almost hard to explain. Something deep and spiritual. One also has to recognise Kate Bush’s natural beauty. It is hard to get around the fact! A timeless beauty, her promotional images for her later albums are as striking and heart-melting as those for her earlier albums. However, to me, it is the dynamics and layers of each photo that resonate. In terms of the outfits worn and the expressions. The poses and emotions that come out of her. The same for videos. You watch Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God) (Hounds of Love), The Sensual World (The Sensual World), Wuthering Heights (The Kick Inside) or Babooshka (Never for Ever) and the sense are overwhelmed There is something magical and mystical. This allure that Kate Bush has. You watch these videos and they stay in your mind forever. An exceptional dancer and someone whose physical movements connect with the music and bring the songs to life, this was also evident for anyone who has seen her perform live.

I guess David Bowie and Madonna have that same ability. They can adopt a manner of looks and personas and make them feel unique and ageless. Inspiring artists decades later. The same with Kate Bush. I have long-argued that there needs to be an exhibition or new volume of photos. Looking through the years, maybe shots that people have not seen. There are so many photos that either have not been seen or are reserved to more expensive coffee table books – that most cannot afford to buy. When you read interviews from photographers who have worked with her – from John Carder Bush to Brian Griffin to Gered Mankowitz -, they always commend Kate Bush’s commitment, kindness, professionalism and passion. How she is so patience, collaborative and inspiring. Making them better photographers! I don’t feel there is another artists whose photos and videos will create a bigger impact than Kate Bush’s. I would love to see a series of photos of her now, though I can understand Bush wants her privacy. When she does release an eleventh studio album, promotional photos might not even feature her. It is unlikely she will ever feature in a video. There will be no T.V. interviews. 2014, and for those who saw her Before the Dawn residency, would have witnessed the end of Kate Bush as a visual (or visible) artist. In terms of seeing her in the flesh. That is not to say that we will never see a new photo of Kate Bush. However, when we talk about her photographic, cinematic and visual legacy, we are probably ending the story at 2014.

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush rehearses her song, The Red Shoes (for the 1993 short film, The Line, the Cross and the Curve), while the crew are setting up lights and camera/PHOTO CREDIT: Guido Harari (via the BBC)

Perhaps Kate Bush would balk at the thought of this incredible retrospective or exhibition. However, she cannot argue against the fact that her visual output is among the most distinct, beautiful, nuanced, emotion-provoking and important in all of music history. There are photos of her that I first saw years or decades ago that are still in my mind. The fact the Wuthering Heights video has stayed in my brain for thirty-something years is because of the expressions. The wide eyes and the choreography. The way Kate Bush somehow draws you into the video and the song! The same with the photos. Even if it is a shot of her on location or a simple portrait, there is something undeniably electric and seductive. You are fascinated and entranced! Again, this is not about the beauty of Kate Bush. It goes beyond the surface. A deeper and rare quality. Few artists have that Midas look. The innate and natural ability to not only immerse and transfix those who see her photos. She does the same to the photographers! The fashion throughout the years is also a major reason. She can be this divine and Hollywood-esque star or someone in jeans and boots. She can be quirky and eccentric (she has been photographed with a stuff/fake crocodile before!) but also so unvarnished and bare. Everything coming from her eyes or something she does with her mouth. Like I said, it is so hard to explain how she does it or what that secret ingredient is! To me, there is no other artist whose promotional photos and album covers are as visually remarkable. Those that stir the senses! The same with her captivating music videos. Even if she is made up to look dirty as in the case of There Goes a Tenner (The Dreaming) or shot from the waist up for King of the Mountain (Aerial), these videos linger long in the memory. Those artists that have almost this supernatural or divine sense of gravity, wonder and something that stops the heart, Kate Bush is very much in a league of her own. I don’t think that there is another artist…

WHO comes close.

FEATURE: In the Arms of Sleep: The Smashing Pumpkins' Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness at Thirty

FEATURE:

 

 

In the Arms of Sleep

 

The Smashing Pumpkins' Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness at Thirty

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IT is always a risk…

when artists put out a double or triple album. In terms of how they will be received and whether they are going to have a lot more filler than they should. It can be a case of quantity over quality. However, I admire the ambition at play. In the case of The Smashing Pumpkins’ third studio album, Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, there is no denying that it is phenomenal. A classic! Released on 23rd October, 1995, in the United Kingdom and the following day in the United States, I wanted to mark thirty years of an album that arguably changed the face of Alternative Rock. I want to start out with a 1995 interview from Guitar World, where the band’s lead, Billy Corgan (who was the lead songwriter), and James Iha (guitars) spoke about Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, and also some of the gear that they used on the album:

“There's everything from piano ballads to the thrashy-trippy guitar rave-ups that have won the Pumpkins their honored place in the alternative rock pantheon. There are also moments of Beatles-esque music hall whimsy, of Queen-ish massed guitar grandeur, and trips to that sub-aquatic textureland where Prince and Jimi chase foxy mermaids through eternity.

Produced by the British dream team of Flood and Alan Moulder, the record is one whopping huge canvas, which Corgan and co-guitarist James Iha have covered with every guitar color at their collective command.

Guitar World: Did you know from the outset that this was going to be a big album?

Billy Corgan: "Yes. We almost had enough material to make Siamese Dream a double album. With this new album, I really liked the notion that we would create a wider scope in which to put other kinds of material we were writing."

With this new record, I think you've found a way not to repeat yourself, but still to satisfy people's expectations of a Smashing Pumpkins record.

Corgan: "Well, we really went into the record with the notion that this would be the last Smashing Pumpkins record. I mean, we plan on doing another record, but we don't plan on doing another record as the band that most people know. This kind of approach, style, music... everything is going to change."

Are you disbanding? Is that what you're saying?

"No, I'm saying we've reached the end of one creative ebb and flow. And it's time to go down a different musical path. Our options are either to disband, or that we will force ourselves to go in a different direction.

"We've got a lot of different viewpoints on the culture at the moment. We believe that, to a certain degree, we're taken for granted. It's hard to explain, but you just reach a point where you know it's time to move on."

How did you get involved with Flood?

James Iha: "Billy and I are both real big fans of his work. I'm sure both of us own at least 10 CDs that Flood has worked on. And they're all different. Not typical rock bands – all very individual".

There are a couple of features I want to include before a review from Pitchfork. In 2016, Medium published their feature about Mellon Collie and The Infinite Sadness, which they argued might have been the swansong for Alternative Rock. With ambition and ego, Billy Corgan and his bandmates might have arguably released their generation’s The Beatles (or ‘The White Album’):

“But as alternative rock was quickly slipping into the past, The Smashing Pumpkins released Mellon Collie and The Infinite Sadness, arguably the genre’s last great album. It’s the perfect swan song. While rock music was going towards a friendlier, but slightly fatigued sound, Mellon Collie was a whirlwind of energy — even its ballads were dynamic and exciting. To do so they drew from the entire history of the alt-rock, which seems impossible considering the genre itself is so diverse. But somehow the Pumpkins captured all of it and made what could be considered their generation’s White Album: a final recap of the movement made by the only band who was both egotistical and talented enough to take on the task.

It’s ironic that the band who released an album summing up alternative rock was in many ways an outsider to the rest of the scene. Many of the bands came out of a punk tradition where the ultimate sin is acting like pompous, self-centered rock stars. But that’s exactly what they were — especially Billy Corgan, the band’s dictator of a leader, who rivals Kanye West for having the most bloated ego in music history. Unlike the other alternative bands who eschewed fame, or at least wanted to look like they didn’t want to be famous, Corgan was explicit about his desire for the Pumpkins to be recognized as the best and biggest band in the world. And they certainly looked the part, being the only alternative band to fully embrace the glammed out rock star look.

Musically, the difference between Corgan and his peers was just as apparent. On their previous album, Siamese Dream, he famously layered dozens of guitar tracks on each song to make the album sound as grandiose as possible —Mellon Collie co-producer Flood calls this the “Pumpkin Guitar Overdub Army” tactic. When asked about this in a Guitar World interview, Corgan said “When you are faced with making a permanent recorded representation of a song, why not endow it with the grandest possible vision?” But his peers thought the exact opposite. Most alternative bands wanted their records to sound exactly how they performed live, without any studio frills. For those bands this was an important sign of authenticity that they learned from their punk rock upbringing. But Corgan was a maximalist at heart, growing up inspired by flashy arena rock and metal bands rather than the punk rock that inspired most of the scene.

Corgan’s “grandest possible vision” philosophy is laid out in full display on Mellon Collie — it’s an incredibly long and bloated journey. It opens with a three minute piano intro saturated in strings and woodwinds that makes it sound like its straight out of an old Hollywood cinema classic. And over the next 27 songs they do everything from electronic ballads (“Beautiful”) to pop-rock (“Muzzle”) to obnoxious, borderline unlistenable, metal (“X.Y.U.” and “Tales of a Scorched Earth”). Even the album’s most subtle moments sound like they’re added in to make the big moments sound absolutely huge.

This kind of sprawling epic wasn’t what typically sold in 1995, but it became a sensation because of Corgan’s ability to balance out his experimental side with the ability to write different kinds of hit singles that appealed to different audiences. Songs like “Bullet With Butterfly Wings” and “Zero” were as nihilistic and heavy as any Soundgarden single, while the soaring ballads “Tonight Tonight” and “1979” fit perfectly in the new softer landscape they found themselves in. As different as these songs are from one another, they all became smash hits. This diversity is how they managed to become the most successful band in the world — if only briefly — in such a wildly transitional year for music”.

Before coming to a review from Pitchfork, it is worth bringing in Guitar.com’s take on Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. This is an album where guitar is very much key in the mix. Up front and loud. It is a sprawling album in many ways – not surprised given that it has twenty-eight tracks! – but it never feels bloated or has too much filler:

“There are a lot of bells and whistles on Mellon Collie but it’s saved from the double album scrapheap by the clear-eyed purpose of Corgan’s writing. It’s instructive, for example, to note how much of Tonight, Tonight’s pomp carries over to its guitar-bass-drums demo, with its majestic strings cast almost as the icing on the cake rather than a crucial structural element. There is the temptation to cut off disc one at the knees (or after the monstrous Bullet With Butterfly Wings) and draft in tracks like 1979, Stumbleine and X.Y.U. from disc two to create one all killer-no filler record, but that would betray the scope of the undertaking.

Mellon Collie is not a concept piece, and neither is it prone to meandering instrumentals or empty statements, but it is big. The singles are all hall of famers, and yet it’s impossible to discount the raw power of Here Is No Why (the Lemonheads with a violent streak) or singsong weirdness of We Only Come Out at Night (listen again with the Shins in mind, remarkable). Corgan knits the whole thing together with a sense of howling bombast, from the guitar freakouts of Jellybelly to the sweeping To Forgive, which knows precisely how affecting it is and lays it on real thick.

Triumph into disaster

Upon release, Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness did what the Pumpkins wanted it to do. It sold. It became their first and to date only number one on the Billboard 200 and quickly went platinum. In 2012, it crossed the diamond threshold in the US. Similarly, it was generally well-reviewed and has matured like a fine wine. In a 9.3 review of the LP’s deluxe edition, Pitchfork’s Ian Cohen observed: “During a time when rock heroes were hard to come by, Smashing Pumpkins took it upon themselves to make a record that only teenagers could love and for many it was the only one they needed.”

But on the ground Mellon Collie was followed by a string of tragedies and fallings out. Touring keyboard player Jonathan Melvoin died of an overdose in the summer of 1996 after injecting heroin with Chamberlin in a Manhattan hotel room. Chamberlin was subsequently arrested on drug possession charges and later sacked. The tour was cancelled as it was about to crest at Madison Square Garden. Months earlier, a 17-year-old fan had been fatally injured at a show in Dublin despite the band’s vocal anti-mosh stance. Corgan was rocked by the loss of his mother, and he got divorced. By the time Adore was released in 1998 they were splintering. Wretzky’s dislocation from the group became permanent and the lights were turned out altogether following 2000’s Machina/The Machines Of God.

This ending cast a long shadow, but Mellon Collie’s legend has only deepened over time. With the Pumpkins back in action (Corgan joined by Iha, Chamberlin and Jeff Schroeder) each move they make is placed next to its high watermark. Outside of the music, its status as a priceless 90s rock artefact has been sealed in amber by tens of thousands of ‘Zero’ t-shirts and the band’s guest spot in Homerpalooza, a classic episode of The Simpsons. Billy Corgan, Smashing Pumpkins. Homer Simpson, smiling politely. It doesn’t get bigger than that”.

In 2012, Pitchfork published their review of an album that they rightly stated was a very generous record. One that was purely intended for teenage. It communicated with them. For many, it was the only album that they needed. Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness still sound remarkable and bracing thirty years later. There are great features like this, that look at the legacy and brilliance of Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness:

“This is perhaps the only Smashing Pumpkins record where they acted like an actual band rather than Corgan and his resentful charges. It's hard to pinpoint where the influence of James Iha or D'Arcy came into play (not so with the phenomenal drumming of Jimmy Chamberlin), but with the oversight of producers Flood and Alan Moulder, Mellon Collie was developed through protracted jam sessions and personal interplay. Siamese Dream, for all of its symphonic grandeur, was a fairly standard rock album and a solitary one-- nearly all of the guitar and bass parts were rumored to have been performed by Corgan himself. Meanwhile, Mellon Collie indulges in styles more associated with hermetic artists-- ornate chamber-pop ("Cupid De Locke"), mumbly acoustic confessionals ("Stumbleine"), and synthesized nocturnes (mostly everything after "X.Y.U."). And it does so while feeling like the work of four people in a room.

Mellon Collie's remarkable breadth is the best indication of Corgan's ability to let loose. You could pick five songs at random and still end up with a diverse batch of singles that would make a case for Smashing Pumpkins being the most stylistically malleable multi-platinum act of the 90s. Maybe it wouldn't sell as many copies, but picture an alternate universe where heavy rotation met the joyous, mechanized grind of "Love", "In the Arms of Sleep"'s unabashed antiquated romanticism, the Prince-like electro-ballad "Beautiful", "Muzzle"'s stadium-status affirmations, or the throttling metal of "Bodies".

The ubiquity of the five songs that did become singles overshadows just how idiosyncratic and distinct they were in the scope of 1995. Has there been anything like "Tonight, Tonight" since? Orchestral strings typically signify weepy balladry or compositional pretension in rock music, not wonderful, lovestruck propulsion. While "Tonight, Tonight" is now inseparable from its Le Voyage dans la lune-inspired video, that the music existed without its guidance only stresses the Pumpkins' sonic creativity. "Thirty-Three" was the final and least heralded of the singles-- where on alt-rock radio was there room for a slowpoke, time-signature shifting country song with phased slide guitars and shuffling drum machines?

"Zero" and "Bullet With Butterfly Wings" are the ones that riled up the older folks and, yes, the lyrics are pissy and juvenile and fairly embarrassing. That said, they're far more interesting from a sonic perspective than they're often given credit for. They're the songs where Flood's digitized production fits better than the saturated, analog warmth Butch Vig lent to Siamese Dream. They're basically new wave performed as pop-metal.

And of course, there's "1979", the one everybody can agree on. On a record that reveled in 70s prog and pomp without being restricted to it, it sounds futuristic. And while just as youth-obsessed as everything else here, it's one of the few times where high school sounds like something that can be remembered fondly. Corgan loves to stress how it was the last song to make the record, and while its chorus does have an effortless charge embodying the "urgency of now," it's the only Mellon Collie song that functions best as nostalgia. That reading is no doubt abetted by another fantastic video, but while "1979" is an unimpeachable song, the rush to praise it as an outlier does its surroundings a tremendous disservice. While Mellon Collie is the realization of all Billy Corgan's ambitions, most of the criticisms surround the lyrics for not being as personal as those on the tortured Siamese Dream. It's this way by design.

The terms "sad machines" and "teen machines" are interchangeably used during "Here Is No Why", a pep talk to the outwardly sullen mopes who Corgan urges to break free of either and ascend like its heroic guitar solo. "Bullet With Butterfly Wings" is notorious for its chorus, but teen angst doesn't fight fair; you need some seriously heavy ammo to resist it. The mudslide of distortion that ushers in its bridge leads towards two minutes of the most viscerally exciting music that Smashing Pumpkins produced. Then immediately after, the mournful "To Forgive" devastates with a personal detail that gives Corgan credibility in all of this: "And I remember my birthdays/ Empty party afternoons." This is the kind of youthful, inexplicable emotional whiplash that can result in an immolating hatebomb called "Fuck You (An Ode to No One)" being followed by a giddy proclamation that "love solves everything." It's clearly not a mature way of dealing with life, but that's only a problem if you somehow believe Mellon Collie isn't meant as rock 'n' roll fantasy. When Corgan declares "I know that I was meant for this world" during "Muzzle", it's your happy ending.

So, yes, most people who have developed a meaningful relationship with Mellon Collie did so in their youth. The question is whether you can get anything new from this in 2012. As with all of the Smashing Pumpkins reissues, Mellon Collie is giving: the Deluxe boxed set justifies its sticker shock by containing "re-imagined cover art, velvet-lined disc holder and decoupage kit for creating your own scenes from the Mellon Collie Universe," which is everything you'd imagine and thensome. There are an extra 64 tracks and only a few of them appeared on The Aeroplane Flies High, though most of these inclusions are demos or alternate takes, the sort of thing that should only be listened to multiple times by people who are being paid to do so, i.e., music critics and Flood.

But there is a way of hearing the same album differently as you refract it through your own experiences. "Thru the Eyes of Ruby" is rumored to have contained 70 guitar tracks; it's a wedding vow punctuated by Corgan snarling "youth is wasted on the young." This isn't meant to negate the intent of the 90 minutes that preceded it, it's a reminder of how Mellon Collie can communicate different things to someone who's 30 as opposed to 15”.

On 23rd October, we mark thirty years of The Smashing Pumpkins’ third studio album. I guess, because of costs, you do not really get many albums that are a double or triple. There is always that risk that people will tune out and there will be too many fillers tracks. When it came to Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, there was so much to love. It is a pioneering, groundbreaking and hugely influential album. If it was one of the last great Alternative Rock albums, in a wider sense, it is regarded as one of the best albums ever. This phenomenal work from a visionary Billy Corgan has lost none of its spark and potency…

AFTER three decades.

FEATURE: Spotlight: Radio Free Alice

FEATURE:

 

 

Spotlight

PHOTO CREDIT: Jack Moran

Radio Free Alice

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I will come to some interviews…

with the sensational Radio Free Alice very soon. In modern music, I think that solo artists get most of the attention. When it comes to the best albums released, most of them are from solo acts. However, there are plenty of promising and strong bands around. One of them is Radio Free Alice. The Australian quintet of Noah Learmonth (vocals, guitar), Jules Paradiso (guitar), Michael Phillips (bass, saxophone) and Lochie Dowd (drums) might be new to you. Big Hassle provide some background and biography of this terrific band:

“I can’t eat you, I can’t fuck you, so why the fuck would I come?”

Those were the parting words of Brian Jonestown Massacre frontman Anton Newcombe to Radio Free Alice’s band members. Hobbling over to the band, tequila in hand, as the band finished the early set of their Sydney residency at Newtown’s The Duke, the wiry icon offered words of praise. BJM were playing at the venue the next block down, and enjoying the natural rapport between them, the band invited Newcombe back to watch Radio Free Alice’s late set that night after BJM’s show. The invitation only to be rejected in the dry wit typical of the BJM founder, “I can’t eat you, I can’t fuck you, so why the fuck would I come?!”

At the vanguard of a new wave of high energy guitar rock and fast emerging as one of Australia’s most exciting young bands, Radio Free Alice released their first two EPs Radio Free Alice and Polyester.

With an operatic swagger and an angular, guitar-driven sound, the Melbourne group emerged with an art school musical palette, painted from a suburban Australian canvas. Immediate and arresting rock arrangements from the quartet meld with frontman Noah Learmonth’s distinctive yearning throaty vocal, harking to the stylings of Ian Curtis and Robert Smith. Guitars with clean tones and clever notes, melodic bass lines, urgent drum beats, and the occasional sax translate the band’s DIY recordings to an energetic, charismatic live show from the young quartet.

Following 2023 singles “Paris Is Gone” and “Look What You’ve Done,” which have received support from triple j, FBi and 3RRR, the band have opened for The Killers, Royel Otis, Sorry, Django Django, High School, The Snuts and a sold out four week residency at inner Melbourne’s Nighthawk. The band’s captivating live show saw them emerge from Brisbane’s BIGSOUND showcase and SXSW Sydney as one of the breakout artists for 2024, and backed up by NME who included them in their NME 100 list for 2025.

Having recently played festivals around Australia, a two month stint of club shows and festivals in UK/Europe and a sold out headline tour at home in Oz, expect more music from this frenetic new young band in 2025”.

I am going to end with a review of Radio Free Alice’s new E.P., Empty Words. I will also bring in some interviews from this year. Now, I want to step back to last year and CLASH’s spotlighting of an exciting, charismatic and atmospheric band who even then were being tipped as future greats:

“When a song grabs your ears and the band then plays your local independent grassroots venue then it’s a no brainer.  You have to go, especially when the band is from the other side of the world. ‘Paris Is Gone’ had been stuck in my head when I spotted Australian band Radio Free Alice were scheduled to play Sneaky Petes in Edinburgh – cap. 90. They did not disappoint. Charismatic and commanding the five-piece brought something a little different to the crowded post-punk landscape, but just what that is hard to define. With the band back on home soil CLASH decided to find out more – especially as their second EP ‘Polyester’ has just landed on streaming. Lead singer Noah Learmonth provided the answers – first-up, where does the bands name come from and were there any other names under consideration?

“There’s a good answer and a more truthful, boring answer to that question. The good answer is that in the 60s there were pirate radio stations based on ships and one of them was called Radio Free Alice. I’m not entirely sure if this is true. The more truthful, boring answer is that we ripped it off a record store in Darlinghurst in Sydney of the same name. I’ve been told the owner doesn’t mind. Funnily enough the band name that I was considering for a while was ‘Polyester’, but I don’t think people really took to it so I thought maybe I’ll just save it for an EP or something, which is where we landed. I still think ‘The Suicidal Pussycats’ is a great name but I’m yet to find anyone that will agree with me.”

Radio Free Alice are completed by Maayan Barnatan, Michael Phillips, Jules Paradiso and Lochie Dowd.  They formed in Sydney in 2020, inspired by the likes of Talking Heads, The Strokes and HighSchool, and are now based in Melbourne. They have just finished an extensive tour with headlines dates in the UK and Europe as well as festival appearances including The Great Escape, Live at Leeds, Supersonic and Dot to Dot.  Noah shares: “The responses were really good, probably better then in Australia, although we obviously have a bigger fan base here. I think we’re more suited to the UK. Surf rock is still the thing in Australia, which is worrying on a few different levels. The standout for me was a festival we played in Amsterdam called London Calling. One of the acts pulled out so we played twice in one day. There was just a massive crowd and it sounded great. Whenever it sounds great I’m happy. I care less about the crowd, I just want to feel like we’re actually a good band.”

Second EP ‘Polyester’ follows hot on the heels of their self-titled debut released in 2023 which includes the aforementioned ‘Paris Is Gone’. CLASH was interested to know what the main difference is between the two EPs in terms of inspirations. Noah explains: “The main difference for me is that Polyester is more subtle. On the first EP every song has these massively cathartic choruses, which will always have a place in my heart, but on this EP it’s all a little more restrained. More tasteful and considered. Probably darker too.”

Intriguingly Radio Free Alice undertook a slightly unconventional approach to the recording of Polyester.  It began in Melbourne but was then finished in studios, backstage areas, tour vans, street corners, hostel bunk beds and train stations while on tour.  “That sounds extremely romantic but it plays back to us feeling most inspired while on the road. We recorded the skeleton of the tracks in Melbourne but then recorded some extra bits and some vocal things while over here, and then did the final mixes in London.  We have a constant conveyer belt of songs and those four were the best of the old ones so it made the most sense.”

The opening bassline on ‘On The Ground’ immediately grabs you, and the lyrics are vivid including: “Dinner’s in the fridge you can eat it on the couch. I slap you on the back and say ‘you can’t afford that, afford that.'” Noah expands: “The song roughly follows the narrative of a toxic man who is seducing, or manipulating, a woman into being with him through his money. Something like that.”

Creatively the music always come first with Naoh admitting: “I often won’t write the lyrics till a day or so before going into the studio and will just sing gibberish at the live shows. That can go on for over a year. I can be very lazy”.

PHOTO CREDIT: Harry Baker

Last month, Wonderland chatted with Radio Free Alice as they were over in the U.K. performing. Playing to crowds in London venues and how different that was to the vibe in Australia. They were gearing up to release the much-anticipated Empty Words E.P. Radio Free Alice are gaining such momentum at the moment:

“How would you define your essence as a band?

Melodic post-punk would be a simple way to describe it.

Do you feel at home in the UK?

Yeah very. Culturally, musically, comedically, we love the UK and its history. We’ve borrowed so much from it, not just musically. I think history is really important. You could be writing lyrics in the same pub that Mary Shelly wrote Frankenstein. Australia’s got a lot of talent, but there’s a low ceiling.

How have the London crowds been? What’s a live show like?

Surreal. Seeing Brits shout lyrics back at us is very strange and cool. We’d love to think of our live shows as frenetic and vulnerable.

How’s the Aussie indie scene vs. British? Who should we watch?

The Melbourne scene is full of talent. Bands like Raindogs, Belair Lip Bombs, NPCEDE, shock corridor, sex mask are amazing, just to name a few. It’s a great scene for fostering talent. I’m unsure if London is a good in that respect, in terms of growing talent. Possibly not which I why I’m glad we started in Melbourne.

What’s the story behind the title “Empty Words”?

The title touches on the theme that threads the EP together, which is having been promised a future that never came. The 20th century, although we didn’t live through it, appeared to all be leading up to some kind of real change, a true social revolution, and yet all the turn of the millennium offered was a never ending cycle of repeating itself. We haven’t progressed culturally in 20 years, it’s all just recycled pastiches of the past. Movies, TV, fashion, music. It feels like society was promised something better than this. All the revolution talk of the 20th century amounted to nothing. We are aware however of the irony of talking about this whilst being a nostalgic sounding band, and there is an element of frustration about that, feeling like we’re part of the problem.

What’s next?

We’re touring UK/Euro till September, then America and then UK/Euro again, then Australia. So a lot of shows. We’re also in the process of finishing our first album, which is going to come out next year”.

I will actually move to this review from Hard of Hearing Magazine as they witnessed Radio Free Alice launch Empty Words at Brixton’s The Windmill. One of this year’s most startling, memorable and superb E.P., you come away from it with this deep impression. The band make a real impact across the tracks. It must have been thrilling for the crowd to witness the tracks played live:

“The EP is brimming with raw emotion and nervy momentum. Opening with the title track, first released back in March, ‘Empty Words’ sets the tone with a biting line, “They say that everything has changed / But nothing has happened,” delivered with jarring, unfiltered vocals. The sharp, witty lyrics add a tangible texture to the gritty and tightly wound instrumentation, which is feverish without ever losing precision.

‘Toyota Camryn’ follows, opening with pounding drums and a driving bassline that lays the groundwork for a jagged guitar melody. Raw, immediate vocals lead the verse, cutting through with the line “I believe in violence, the violence of killing time”, a bold phrase that nails the track’s restless spirit. When the chorus hits, it lands with melodic clarity and razor-sharp control.

Radio Free Alice do not shy away from dissonance, letting noise and euphony collide, embracing the tension. On ‘Regret’, a searing guitar bridge slices through rasping yet melodiously restrained vocals, delivering lines of visceral confession that feel both intimate and confrontational. Then, closing the four-track EP, ‘Chinese Restaurant’ is led by a persistent guitar melody underpinned by steady percussion. Learmonth’s vocal performance carries a restrained depth reminiscent of The Cure’s Robert Smith, giving the track a timeless and unsettled energy.

The raw urgency of the EP reflects the chemistry of four creatively ambitious musicians in their early twenties, forging a sound unbound by genre. Radio Free Alice are building something entirely their own, vital, unfiltered, and alive with possibility.

On ‘Empty Words’, Radio Free Alice confront the limits of language with biting precision. “I said I could kill them with my empty words or I could kill them all” is not just a lyric, it is a thesis statement for a band pushing back against meaninglessness with noise, dissonance, and the sheer force of presence. On stage, they embody this tension with songs that speed ahead of themselves without ever losing control. Their disarray is never accidental.

Together, the EP and the live show form a complete portrait that is neither polished nor resolved, but immediate and alive. It is a sound built on instinct, fueled by friction, and grounded in the kind of truth you only find when you scream it into a room full of strangers.

I am going to end with a review of Empty Words from DORK. For anyone who has not heard Radio Free Alice or knows a bit about them, do go and listen to their music. I think they will be back in the U.K. soon. Noah Learmonth, Jules Paradiso, Michael Phillips, Lochie Dowd and Maayan Barnatan are a sensational force:

“A wistful energy runs through Radio Free Alice’s third EP, ‘Empty Words’, like the fuzzy glow of a half-forgotten youth drama on VHS. Drawing on their art-school post-punk palette, the Naarm/Melbourne band deliver four tightly wound tracks that feel both urgent and full of romance.

The title-track, ‘Empty Words’, opens with nervy guitars and restless momentum. It takes a sideways glance at performative activism, mixing jagged riffs with a touch of melody that keeps things grounded. Frontman Noah Learmonth’s vocal shifts between operatic flair and raw-edged restraint.

On ‘Toyota Camry’, it hits a sweet spot. Laced with shimmering production and 80s-style backing vocals, the track pairs crisp, chiming guitars with a lyric sheet that captures fleeting teenage moments in sharp detail. It’s nostalgic, but not stuck in the past: cinematic, effortless and one of their finest songs to date.

‘Regret’ brings the mood down a notch, without losing any drive. The rhythm section holds it steady while Learmonth wrestles with emotional fallout. Closing track ‘Chinese Restaurant’ takes a more reflective turn, inspired by touring through UK venues stuck in nostalgic limbo. It’s quietly sad, offering a final glance at the past through steamed-up windows.

‘Empty Words’ doesn’t just build on Radio Free Alice’s earlier work, it sharpens it, deepens it and launches them somewhere far more interesting. Every track is a standout; every moment is considered. This isn’t just another promising EP from a buzzy guitar band, it’s a properly brilliant one: smart, stylish and already sounding like a future cult classic”.

After releasing Empty Words and completing a string of U.K. dates, the band headed to Europe. It has been a busy year for them. I can imagine an album coming along soon and there being opportunities for Radio Free Alice to play big festival stages. There is such a lot of great music around at the moment and the Australian five-piece are among the best and brightest. Make sure they are on your radar, because it is clear that this band are…

GOING to go far.

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Follow Radio Free Alice

FEATURE: Content/Content: Artist Burnout, Industry Expectation, and the Misnomer of the ‘Return’

FEATURE:

 

 

Content/Content

IN THIS PHOTO: Florence Welch (Florence + The Machine)/PHOTO CREDIT: Autumn de Wilde

 

Artist Burnout, Industry Expectation, and the Misnomer of the ‘Return’

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IT is not a new thing…

IN THIS PHOTO: Sam Fender is an artist who has spoken about his mental health struggles through the years

and in fact has been an issue in music for many decades. That idea of artists, especially those in the mainstream, producing a lot of content. Putting out music, doing interviews, touring, and generally not being out of the public eye for a second. The idea being that, if they are not visible or active for longer than a few months or so, then they are seen as dormant or, even worse, irrelevant. It is miserable that the industry thinks like that! Though maybe unavoidable. It is something that is present to this day. Social media perhaps puts pressure on artists that means they need to be putting content out all of the time. Some artists do like that, as it means they can engage with fans. However, I still think that there is this sense of expectation that means, unless you are releasing music regularly, touring, and also active online constantly, then you will be overtaken or seen as inactive. I wrote about the subject before, but I am coming back to that idea of the artist ‘returning’. Not to rant, it is relevant that the music industry – especially radio and music websites – stops using that word. ‘Return’. I mention this because, not only is it used constantly when any artist releases music after daring to be quiet for a few weeks. Two massive artists have had that label attached to them. Wet Leg released their eponymous debut album in 2022. Since then, they have been releasing singles and touring. They have not announced they are stepping away from music or they are going on hiatus.

Their new album, moisturizer, was released on 11th July. Three years between albums is seen as an artist stopping. The fact that Wet Leg were ‘returning’ is not only incorrect, but it also puts pressure on artists and is not good for their mental health. That they have to keep releasing music or else they are seen as faded or retreating. The same word was applied to Florence + The Machine. They released Dance Fever in 2022. Another three-year gap, Everybody Scream is out on 31st October. Like Wet Leg, Florence + The Machine have been touring and putting out music. It is something that drives me insane! It is not celebratory or right to say an artist is returning or ‘back’. It has this subtext. That you need to put out an album every year and never seemingly step away for a second. These artists are not taking a break. In the eyes of radio and the music press, they have gone away and are coming back. That must put this pressure on them that they need to up their game and never stop. We do need to recontextualise and actually think how we view artists. I know there is a lot of music out there so, to some degree, artists do need to put out new albums within a certain timeframe. However, the more people expect and the more we mislabel or hail this ‘return’ for an act who has left a three-year gap between albums, that then creates this push. They tour more, release more music and that has a big impact on their mental and physical health. It also means that we are going to lose artists. The prospect of burnout is very real. Streaming and physical sales do not make artists as much money as they would like – especially the former. Touring is a way of making money but, even then, artists sometimes lose money at gigs. It is an impossible situation.

I face the issue myself when it comes to content. The more I put out the more, I hope, it brings people in and attracts new followers. The long-term goal for me is being able to sustain my blog but also become more ambitious and have larger artists interested in interviews. Being able to expand my horizons. I do find that artists have this burden on them. A normal album cycle means so much work before a song is released. Teaser, trailer video, filmed pieces where artists talk about albums before the first of perhaps four or five singles is released. You then have all the promotional interviews before an album is released. Then there is as much touring as they can afford so they can make some money and be able to record again. A reason artists leave gaps between singles and albums is partly financial. Studios are very expensive and recording an album can cost thousands. If you want to sustain a career in music and do it full-time, then you either have to tour relentlessly or take another job. I know music fans can appreciate this. However, I have been annoyed by stations and the music press unconsciously adding weight onto the shoulders of artists. Digital burnout and the pressures of social media are also real. In 2022, this article reacted to Charli xcx leaving social media because of unkindness from fans. She has since come back, yet the pitfalls of always having to be online is being exposed to criticism, abuse and pressure from fans. Tegan and Sara were also affected by it:

“In January, Tegan and Sara launched a Substack newsletter offering in-depth insight into their creative process, which has more than 6,000 subscribers and a paid-for tier priced at $6 (£4.40) a month. “Substack is us unselfconsciously saying, ‘We like our words and our ideas and our stories have value’,” says Quin. “So much of what social media feels like is that we work for those companies, like Spotify, Instagram and Facebook, and don’t necessarily feel any benefit. It feels like I’m always just supplying more content for the food chain.”

Still, these alternatives aren’t wholesale replacements for social media. “I want to find people where they are,” says Quin. “I’m not trying to siphon them all into one place, but I’m never going to lie and tell you that I like social media. I hate it but I will do it because I don’t want people to miss out.”

Welsh agrees: “Sleeps Society and social media are complementary for us. Our social channels are there for casual fans who want to engage on and off but the community is for those who would consider us ‘their’ band.”

Despite the emerging alternatives available, the catch-22 remains for artists trying to have a healthier relationship to the internet while also promoting their work in an ever-more competitive field.

“Fans are intelligent people who can immediately see through artists spending time trying to do it all or having an impact just because they feel they need to be,” says Sophie Kennard, manager of Chase & Status. “The moment that it feels a bit disingenuous, it’s game over anyway. So they might as well utilise their time elsewhere.”

Ultimately, despite all the pitfalls of social media, there may be no going back. “Sometimes I wish the electrical grid would go down so I wouldn’t have to do it any more,” says Quin. “But we’re in the maze and I don’t know how to get out”.

PHOTO CREDIT: Thirdman/Pexels

Last month, Rolling Stone India ran a feature that asked what would happen to artists that didn’t want to feed the feed. That idea of constantly feeding the beast. Not only reserved to Indian artists, the industry is not talking enough about this expectation of always being visible. If, as I have repeated, you are not constantly on and out there, any new music after a brief spell is seen as a return. From where?! It is something that needs to change:

“In a 2025 study led by researchers at Goldsmiths and University College London (UCL), musicians described social media as a “content factory”—an environment that made them feel emotionally disconnected, anxious, and compulsively engaged, often at the cost of creativity. The paper, published in Frontiers in Psychology, featured interviews with 12 UK-based artists, who admitted that social media often made them feel “inferior,” triggered unhealthy comparisons, and took time away from songwriting and rest. One participant said, “I come off stage and the first thing I do is check my phone to see what people said online. It’s no longer about how the show felt—it’s about how it looks.”

This aligns with broader mental health data. A separate December 2024 study from UCL, involving over 15,000 UK adults from different nationalities, found that posting on social media—not browsing, not lurking—was linked to increased psychological distress one year later. Participants who posted daily reported significant declines in well-being, even after accounting for pre-existing mental health conditions. In contrast, those who consumed content passively showed no such decline. The lead researcher noted that the pressure to share publicly may fuel anxiety and identity stress, particularly among people whose careers depend on performing for an audience. Furthermore, a global study across 29 countries also found that excessive social media use is associated with lower well-being and higher psychological distress, especially in places where it’s widely used.

And it’s not just emerging artists feeling this strain. Addison Rae, one of the most recognizable faces of TikTok-era pop culture, has spoken openly about stepping back from the internet after feeling “so misunderstood” online. She described how the constant push to stay relevant made her feel disconnected from her real self. Actor Taron Egerton, while promoting his new show She Rides Shotgun, told the press that being back online after a hiatus made him feel “worse,” and that he intended to leave again soon. Their honesty speaks to something deeper—that even those who seemingly benefit most from social media can find it emotionally draining and creatively suffocating.

The music industry hasn’t made stepping back easy either. Let’s be honest: visibility is as close to currency as it gets. Algorithms reward frequency, not quality. Artists often feel like they’re being penalized for not posting enough—losing playlist spots, falling off festival shortlists, or being passed over for campaigns. Even artist managers and PR teams now factor in engagement rates before pitching for gigs. The assumption is: if you’re not online, you’re not working.

The current system incentivizes performance over process, packaging over patience, and audience growth over artistic exploration. Social media is framed as a solution, but for many artists, it’s another arena in which they must constantly compete, adapt, and sacrifice peace of mind.

It’s worth asking: why has an industry built around creativity become so tethered to platforms built around performance metrics? Why are artists expected to maintain a digital persona to validate their real-world output? And why does choosing rest or privacy still feel professionally risky?

If music is to remain a space for truth-telling, experimentation, and emotional honesty, then the systems that support it must also evolve. That means expanding definitions of success beyond visibility. It means supporting models where artistry doesn’t rely on feed frequency. And it means respecting an artist’s right to log off without disappearing because not every musician wants to be an influencer. And they shouldn’t have to be”.

There is a mental health issue in music that needs addressing, as this recent piece from The British Psychological Society explores. I guess this expectation for artists to perpetually be visible and feeding fans and the industry links to digital and psychological burnout. Artists limiting touring and, as a result, losing money. Which then causes another blow to their mental health. In March, at this year’s BRITs, The Last Dinner Party shared their experiences of burnout with NME:

“Looking back at how they were forced to cancel several live shows at the end of last year due to “emotional, mental, physical burnout”, the group told NME about the realisations they have had going into 2025.

“[It’s about] planning your year with limitations. Not just seizing every single opportunity because it’s great,” bassist Georgia Davies told NME. “You have to value yourself as the greatest thing. If you don’t put that first, everything else will crumble. Setting out your expectations for the year and what your physical and mental limitations are [is vital].

She continued: “We hope other artists learn from that, because we learned a really valuable lesson from having to [cancel shows], and we hope the industry at large absorbs some of it. A lot of other artists have had to do the same thing, and it’s tragic for the fans and everyone involved. I hope it’s something we all learn from going forward.”

Keyboardist Aurora Nishevci agreed, explaining how the band hope to encourage more widespread awareness across the industry: “There is not a lot of discussion. Historically, artists have not had a good time.”

She continued: “When you start a band, you just want to write music and play music. It’s something you love, but you don’t think you’re starting a business. You have to set the safeguarding for yourself, you have to learn how to run it and employ people. So when you enter into making any music from music — which is really hard in the first place — then there is that whole other learning curve that comes”.

IN THIS PHOTO: Billie Marten/PHOTO CREDIT: Frances Carter 

I think it is relevant to being in part of an interview that The Independent conducted with Billie Marten around the promotion of her new album, Dog Eared. An artist whose debut album arrived almost a decade ago, Marten is still seen as a ‘rising’ artist. Even though she is one of the hardest-working artists and has toured so much and released five studio albums, there is this perception she is still a teenage artist coming through. She also revealed how most artists are in financial ruin:

“Mostly, artists are in financial ruin no matter how successful they appear to be,” Marten affirms. “I’ve worked the hardest and the longest and I am the most busy I’ve ever been – and I am not doing great.”

Fair compensation has always been tricky to advocate for, considering that most musicians are more passionate about making music than money – “It’s cool to be in music, so why should you also get paid?”, Marten quips. She describes it as a reverse pyramid scheme: the artist is treated like they’re kings and queens at the top, waited on and chauffeured, with everyone else bowing down. But the reality is starkly different. “Everyone that’s hanging onto the artist is buying houses and having families and going on holiday,” says Marten wryly. “And the artists could never dream of doing that. It’s funny.” Though perhaps not “funny ha-ha”.

Rising overheads, inflation and shrinking show fees for touring artists are all major issues. But the biggest problem, financially, is the way we now consume music, which favours the tiny number of players at the top.

“There’s too much music and there are too many famous people,” Marten says frankly. She describes the Spotify royalties’ structure, which rewards those with the most plays with a bigger piece of the financial pie. “Less money is going to mid-level and low-level artists. It’s a capitalist mentality, essentially, and we’re all paying Taylor Swift.”

Though, I must admit, I have no regrets about meeting mine this time around (and not just because I’ve largely managed to avoid humiliating myself). Here is a woman who has, against the odds, managed to hold onto principles and idealism alongside the world-weary ennui. Who, despite her undeniably pretty voice, has done more than make a pretty record. “I just always hope that I’m making work that I believe in, and I’m making work for the right reasons,” she says when I ask whether her dreams have changed. “I hope that people find a home in it. And I hope that it’s an antidote to whatever their poison is – because I’ve seen people go through a lot of pain”.

I do wonder if there is any way to break this miasma and broken system. Most artists not being able to make money and facing burnout. This expectation that they need to put out content all the time. They can never be content and settled. They have to keep pushing and feed the machine. There being this discrepancy between artists at the top level and the rest. Such a massive gulf in terms of earnings and attention. Too much focus put on wealthy artists and not enough on other artists. The media and industry also need to stop expecting artists to keep releasing music! Not saying how they are ‘returning’ and ‘back’, rather than them simply continuing their career and actually not having been anywhere at all. That sort of labelling and misnomer is toxic and insulting! They need to realise the realities of the music industry today and what artists face. How they can’t afford to pump out albums every year and put out content every day. If things stay as they are and issues like burnout and pressure to put out content all the time is not addressed, then artists and the industry as a whole…

IS in real trouble.

FEATURE: Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love at Forty: Twenty: The Legacy and Influence of a Masterpiece

FEATURE:

 

 

Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love at Forty

 

Twenty: The Legacy and Influence of a Masterpiece

__________

THIS is kind of bittersweet…

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

as I am ending this twenty-feature series marking the fortieth anniversary of Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love. It turns forty on 16th September. In two days, we celebrate a masterpiece. The fifth studio album from Bush, I have covered all the songs and various aspects around the album. The final salute to Hounds of Love will look at its legacy and influence. I am going to source from a few different places. I will return to a recent edition of PROG, where multiple incredible artists talk about Hounds of Love and how Kate Bush has inspired and helped shape them. I will also get to Leah Kardos’s 33 1/3 Hounds of Love book. I will drop in a feature or two. However, starting out, I want to source from Graeme Thomson’s Under the Ivy: The Life and Music of Kate Bush. Thomson writes, in his amazing book, how “Hounds Of Love was enormously significant in determining the path of Bush’s future career and her subsequent media profile. It is both her best-selling blockbuster and her escape route, amassing the kind of sales and critical hosannas that allow an artist to do whatever  they want, whenever they want”. At this point, just before Hounds of Love was released, EMI left Kate Bush alone. Letting her get on with things. There would have been nerves that the album would have sounded like The Dreaming. The predecessor to Hounds of Love, that 1982-released album was lacking natural singles and was not seen as a massive commercial success. Regardless, and credit to them, EMI were not really forcing Bush to move in a different direction. The fact that Kate Bush was a producer and was almost showing the world why she was the right person to guide her own music, she proved any doubters and critical voices wrong.

Graeme Thomson notes how Kate Bush, and the way she handled fame and new attention, could have taught “Madonna a trick or two about how to be an emotionally and intellectually engaged female Pop phenomenon”. If someone like Madonna was embracing that stardom and toured, acted, and pretty much got her name and face everywhere, Bush recognised that this exposure and vulnerability was not desirable. Hounds of Love’s success, and Bush having her own home studio, meant that she did not have to work at a series of other studios, pay God knows how much, and very much be in the rat race. She never looked back. Thomson ends his chapter on Hounds of Love by writing the following: “Making and recording Hounds Of Love was not just a creative peak, but the first practical application of Bush’s working ethos: her career hereafter has become a self-sufficient cottage industry conducted in real time, at home, alone or among friends, keeping the industry and most other observers at several arms’ length”. Thomson observes that, once the heat and energy around the album started to die down after 1986, we would see less of her. Bush herself noted in an interview how she came out into the world to say that an album is out and then she would go away. Rather than be on this treadmill like most Pop artists, she was happier writing and being away from the spotlight. This is a legacy and aspect that has impacted so many artists. Maybe some would say it is impossible to be a major Pop artist today and not constantly being engaged and on social media. I will talk more about the legacy of Hounds of Love in terms of how it affects artists today. Or at least how it has enforced the ethos and sound of so many artists.

I shall quote a bit from the absolute final section of that Graeme Thomson chapter. He says how Hounds of Love “marked the birth of the Kate Bush we all now take for granted: an unimpeachable goddess, the critic’s darling, iconic, influential, a national treasure. Before 1985, the jury was divided. Hounds Of Love eventually settled the matter once and for all. It was a high watermark of artistic and aesthetic excellence – those songs, those videos, the languidly erotic sleeve, the mastery of technology – which she found almost impossible to better”. It is clear that Bush was at her happiest making Hounds of Love. You can hear and feel it in every note of the album. The same can be said of 2005’s Aerial. Another vast album with a conceptual aspect, this was when Bush was a relatively new mother and was infused with love for her new son, Bertie. I am going to skip to Leah Kardos’s words from her 33 1/3 book. How she goes so deep with Hounds of Love. She notes how “It’s a pop-historical monument; visionary, complex yet accessible, a high watermark in Kate Bush’s career, an ethereal masterpiece by all critical consensus. And yet the middle-aged record still vibrates with freshness in the continually evolving zeitgeist”. No doubt the new success for Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God) in 2022 - and 2023, when it surpassed a billion streams of Spotify - following its appearance in Stranger Things helped bring new eyes to the album it is from. A younger generation picking up the 1985 L.P. “But it’s also true that the reason Hounds Of Love remains so vital is because artists from every successive musical generation since it came out have carried its influence and embodied its legacy into the cultural fabric”. It is fascinating how Leah Kardos writes how (Hounds of Love’s) “impact on self-producing singer-songwriters, particularly non-male ones, has been seismic. The stunning triumph of Hounds Of Love cleared a path for future would-be innovators who now had less to fear from being labelled ‘eccentric’ or ‘hysterical’ by the misogynistic music press”. Bush’s stubbornness for advocating for herself and staying true to her vision also resonates through the years. Kardos writes how this belief and strength kicked doors open for artists who followed. “Her imagistic songwriting and immersive productions stretched the boundaries of what pop could be”.

Many have commented how Tori Amos’s debut album, 1992’s Little Earthquakes, bares similarities with Hounds of Love. Although a lot of the comparisons are lazy, there is no denying that Kate Bush’s influence is in there! From the sound of the album to its cover art, you  can feel Bush and Amos’s heartbeats entangled. Amos shared in an interview how The Ninth Wave, the second side of Hounds of Love, changed her life and turned it inside out. It made her brave enough to leave the man she was living with at the time. Leah Kardos asks us to look beyond Tori Amos and the other artists who have been inspired by Hounds of Love. They include Florence Welch, Natasha Khan (Bat for Lashes), Cat Power, Fiona Apple, Regina Spektor, Annie Clark (St. Vincent) and even Taylor Swift. Björk, Grimes and Imogen Heap are also inspired by Bush and Hounds of Love. In terms of how it showed that you can produce your own work in an industry that is sexist and often dominated by men. Bush, this role model for D.I.Y. artists  “wishing to control every aspect of their presentation, from studio construction to image curation”. It is not only that autonomy that has influenced a wave of artists but its “emotionally articulate artistry”. Artists like Jenny Hval Julia Holter and Brian Molko (Placebo) talked about how Hounds of Love shaped their lives. For Suede’s Brett Anderson, Hounds of Love was the album that made him want to make albums. Leah Kardos ended her book by saying, even though she is not a famous musician, Hounds of Love had a profound impact. In terms of how it allowed her to follow her muse and work the way she wanted to. The success of Hounds of Love allowed Bush the opportunity to wait three or four years between albums (twelve in fact between 1993’s The Red Shoes and 2005’s Aerial). “All evidence suggests that Hounds Of Love will continue to remain relevant, resonant and alive. Its beauty and generosity are timeless. Its message of love’s triumph over pain, isolation and darkness is something we need to hear, to feel, now more than ever”.

IN THIS PHOTO: The Anchoress (Catherine Anne Davies)/PHOTO CREDIT: Lily Warring

I cannot quote everything from the section of PROG’s celebration of Hounds of Love, where we get some reaction and insight from artists and how Hounds of Love has affected them. The Anchoress, Within Temptation’s Sharon den Adel, Auri’s Johanna Kurkela, The Blackheart Orchestra’s Chrissy Mostyn and Exploring Birdsong’s Lynsey Ward explored the magic and influence of the album. Mostyn spoke about how Bush’s “songwriting and sonic choices feel sophisticated and wholly deliberate”. She continued that Hounds of Love “feels like every facet of Kate Bush’s artistry at the very peak of its powers”. Chrissy Mostyn also raised an interesting observation: “Kate builds songs like Roman roads, not letting the hills and rivers of convention or comprise get in the way and not getting tempted by the gentle slopes and easy valleys”. She concludes how “Every song is a cathedral of creativity”. The Anchoress (Catherine Anne Davies) bought Hounds of Love from Fopp in Covent Garden (which is still there today). The first Kate Bush album in her collection, it was a revelatory moment: “I fell headlong in love with the album as an example of how you could be completely in control of your own vision as a songwriter, producer and performer”. The Anchoress was also moved by the unity of technology ambitiousness and the raw emotions explored and exposed through the album: “What was startling to me was the uncompromising collision of her playful sonic imagination, as heard in the dense production and use of Fairlight samples, alongside the emotional heft of her vocal performance. I was hooked. It’s been a touchstone for me ever since”. Lynsey Ward was a teenager when she first heard Hounds of Love. Captivated by Hounds of Love and instantly struck, she was not expecting an album like this, having heard Wuthering Heights (from 1978’s The Kick Inside) and the sound of that single. “I knew from the first listen that I’d carry her influence with me every day for the rest of my life”.

IN THIS PHOTO: Lynsey Ward (Exploring Birdsong)/PHOTO CREDIT: Tom Pallant

The Anchoress commended Hounds of Love, and it was influential in terms of her debut album, 2016’s Confessions of a Romance Novelist. The Ninth Wave more compelling to her than the A-side of Hounds of Love. As it was the first Kate Bush album she heard, there was this feeling that this more experimental side was normal. So it was natural that The Anchoress would harness this in her own music. A review did also say how The Anchoress’s debut is a Hounds of Love for the twenty-first century, something that delights The Anchoress! A very flattering description from someone who adores Hounds of Love! Johanna Kurkela was born when Hounds of Love came out. However, she admires Kate Bush and her explorative and experimental nature. A pioneering and explorative artist. Her band, Auri, has the same energy and ethos. “The best music is always born from authenticity and freedom”. The Anchoress highlighted how Hounds of Love shows how you can write more commercial songs like Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God) “whilst simultaneously satisfying your more experimental urges” on tracks like Mother Stands for Comfort. Obviously, go and buy Hounds of Love and experience this album. Many of you will have heard it multiple times, though many are coming to it new in 2025 – forty years after its release. It is this masterpiece that continues to influence artists sonically, emotionally or visually. Even Taylor Swift’s cover art for her new album, The Life of a Showgirl, distinctly nods to Kate Bush and her promotional images for Hounds of Love’s second side, The Ninth Wave.

I will actually end with one feature. It is from Rolling Stone UK from last year. In fact, this it is an extract from Leah Kardos’s Hound of Love book. However, I think it relevant when considering how the album became universally adored and went on to become this classic:

“As years pass, the album continues to accrue cultural value. Music publications like Rolling Stone, Q, NME, Uncut and Mojo have voted Hounds Of Love among the greatest albums of all time. In their 2016 retrospective review, Pitchfork gave the album a perfect ten out of ten, with critic Barry Walters lauding it as ‘the Sgt. Pepper of the digital age’s dawn; a milestone in penetratingly fanciful pop’. In a 1985 interview with Musician, Bush said her newest album was ‘the one I’m most happy with’. Twenty years later, speaking to Tom Doyle for Mojo, she admitted that she still felt proud of how Hounds Of Love turned out, calling it, ‘probably my best album as a whole’.

It is significant that her 2014 London concert residency Before The Dawn, the artist’s late, and so far only, return to live performance following a gap of thirty-five years from her last shows in 1979, the Tour of Life, had a setlist that included all but two songs from Hounds Of Love (the exceptions being ‘The Big Sky’ and ‘Mother Stands for Comfort’). Nestled in the middle of a three-act structure, The Ninth Wave was presented in its entirety as an immersive, music-theatrical experience, fulfilling Bush’s long-held aspiration to develop the piece in a visual direction (‘for me, from the beginning, The Ninth Wave was a film. That’s how I thought of it.’) Those lucky ones in attendance at Before The Dawn could finally experience something of the artist’s personal vision for the work. Bush’s unexpected return to the stage saw fans from all corners of the globe making pilgrimages to the Hammersmith Odeon (known today as the Eventim Apollo, formerly the Hammersmith Apollo). It was the same venue where she performed the final Tour of Life show in 1979, which was, until that point, assumed to be the last show she would ever do. Tickets sold out in a matter of minutes, and as a result of the incredible amount of buzz the concerts generated, Bush saw eight of her albums enter the UK top 40 chart simultaneously, becoming the first woman to have ever done so. On this particular statistic, she reigns alongside rarefied male company: Elvis Presley (with twelve entries in 1977 following his death) and The Beatles (eleven entries off the back of their 2009 reissues).

As of late, Hounds Of Love has been experiencing a fascinating renaissance in popular culture. During the summer of 2022, ‘Running Up That Hill’ reappeared on the worldwide charts due to a sudden and dramatic surge in its popularity, sparked by a prominent sync placement in the fourth season of Netflix’s sci-fi fantasy series Stranger Things. ‘Running Up That Hill’ (or ‘RUTH’, as the artist herself later referred to it) became a global phenomenon. Within weeks of the first seven episodes being released on 27 May, it was clocking eight-million-plus streams per day. Across June and July, it was the most-played track in the world, twice topping the Billboard Global 200 and reaching number one spots in Australia, New Zealand, Switzerland, Sweden, Ireland, Belgium, Lithuania and Luxembourg. Even though it was a significant hit in the UK back in 1985 (reaching number three), the song eclipsed itself in 2022, staying put in the number one spot for three weeks. ‘Running Up That Hill’ was named the UK’s Song of the Summer by the Official Charts Company, and its latent success broke a number of Guinness World Records: the single that took the longest time to reach number one (thirty-six years and 310 days from date of release); at sixty-three, she became the oldest female artist to reach number one, snatching the title from Cher, who was fifty-two when ‘Believe’ hit the top spot in 1998. In a Christmas message posted to her website, Bush reflected on her ‘crazy, roller coaster year’, saying, ‘I still reel from the success of RUTH, being the No 1 track of this summer. What an honour! . . . It was such a great feeling to see so many of the younger generation enjoying the song. It seems that quite a lot of them thought I was a new artist! I love that!’

The contemporary resurgence of ‘Running Up That Hill’ was surely a confluence of many factors and not purely reducible to the lyrical and musical qualities of the song itself, stunning as they are. Part of it was immaculate timing: 2022 was a difficult year, beginning as it did in the grip of the Covid variant Omicron, with people reeling from the fog and fatigue of lingering lockdowns, tentatively re-emerging into a terrifyingly altered world at war. In our collective experience of that fear and uncertainty, with the forced separations, traumas and losses of the pandemic’s stolen years, and in the face of a truly frightening ecological future, all the while we continue to be forced to navigate an increasingly toxic, socially and politically polarized reality, Bush’s song of radical empathy, trust and determination felt like a tonic. But the song was only one part of a larger work of art that many newcomers would soon discover. Hounds Of Love is a journey through the beautiful and difficult terrains of vast and complicated emotional landscapes. Within it are songs of stubborn desire, bravery and cowardice, magical thinking, guilt and innocence, cold love, childlike joy, darkness and whimsy, self-doubt, surviving something extremely difficult and emerging on the other side of it stronger, wiser, transformed. It’s a work of sweeping, thrilling ambition with a wealth of meticulous detail rendered in widescreen cinemascope – a work that was borne from a major work-life change that allowed the artist to write and record privately, in time with her own creative rhythms, returning to the same spaces where she sought emotional refuge in music as a child. Literate, musically elemental and atmospherically complex, the material strikes a balance between the accessible and strange, commercial and conceptual.

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

Structures are confidently grounded in intensifying repetition and the whole is elegantly stitched together with subtle, recurring themes, familiar harmonic angles, imagistic echoes. The music and lyrics are supercharged by Bush’s virtuoso vocal production and stunning use of the Fairlight CMI sampling synthesizer, with which she creates immersive soundworlds and sumptuous arrangements that combine the precision of cutting-edge music tech with the warmth and energy of rock and folk instrumentation. Familiar images return: pleading ghosts, sea, sky, night, land and dreamscapes; references to romantic literature; horror movies; books; Arthurian and folkloric symbolism; and uncanny animalia. The blackbird appears, a potent symbol that becomes a repeating reference in Bush’s work from this point onwards. From the album art on the front and back covers, we recognize the correspondence between different points of view from above and below; with the stars in her hair and the sea around her legs, we see the female body in the water and of the air”.

I will end it there. In two days (16th September), all Kate Bush fans will remember Hounds of Love. Many will share their opinions on social media. Why they love the album and how it touches them. For me, although it is not my favourite Kate Bush album (that is 1978’s The Kick Inside), it is one I recognise as flawless. The fact it has this first side with more commercial singles that are astonishing in their own right, but also this conceptual second side, The Ninth Wave. They both fit together but are very different! I was not lucky enough to see Bush mount most of the songs from Hounds of Love for her 2014 Before the Dawn residency, though those who went attest to how moving it was! In this twenty-feature run, I have explored the album’s songs and I have learned so so much. I have new appreciation and love for Hounds of Love. Kate Bush as a producer. How it is timeless and so relevant today! These amazing artists who have all been affected in personal and distinct ways. We will be listening to and discussing this phenomenal album...

FOR generations more.

FEATURE: One for the Record Collection! Essential October Releases

FEATURE:

 

 

One for the Record Collection!

IN THIS PHOTO: Cat Burns

Essential October Releases

__________

PERHAPS of the busiest months…

IN THIS PHOTO: Sigrid

for great new music, I am going to recommend albums due next month that you will want to pre-order. I am referencing this website. I am starting out with 3rd October and Idlewild’s Idlewild. The Scottish Rock band formed in 1995. Thirty years after their start and they prepare to release their eponymous album. This is one that you will definitely want to pre-order:

“Immediately, there is the sense of a band in motion, their storied past not an anchor but a spur. Idlewild's songs offer a string of compelling answers: "Everything adds up to the present moment, doesn't it?" Woomble asks.

Idlewild have been a lot of different things. They were a teenage punk band, slinging buzzsaw riffs and barbed refrains, before becoming one of the most compelling mainstream rock groups of their generation. With 2019's Interview Music, they made sprawling art-pop. On Idlewild, they welcome each of these past selves into the room.

Work on a follow-up to Interview Music was initially planned to begin immediately after the band wrapped up touring, but the pandemic put things into a skid. Touring the 20th anniversary of The Remote Part in 2022 was a visceral reminder of where they'd been and a prompt for what might come next.

They assembled songs that celebrated pop hooks and livewire distortion, as well as expressive interplay. Writing continued at Post Electric Studio in Edinburgh and the Isle of Iona Library, before a short, sharp burst of recording in early 2025.

The result is a lean, focused document -- 10 tracks that get in and out in 30 minutes and change. With Jones engineering and mixing, the production reflects a collaborative, in-house approach. "We were referencing ourselves... realising that we had a 'sound'," Woomble says. Facing forward, not back, Idlewild captures beauty, nuance, and clarity from three decades of sound and feeling -- spontaneous, purposeful, and unmistakably them”.

One of the biggest albums of this year comes from Taylor Swift. The Life of a Showgirl is out on 3rd October. You can pre-order it here. I am writing this feature on 30th August, so there will be more details revealed by the time you are reading this. However, Billboard provide us with some details of what we know so far:

“Taylor Swift didn’t rest for long after wrapping her global Eras Tour. After just eight months of downtime, the pop superstar all but broke the internet by revealing at 12:12 a.m. ET Tuesday (Aug. 12) that she’d be embarking on a brand new era with the release of an album titled The Life of a Showgirl, which will mark the 12th studio LP in her discography.

What was almost as eye-popping as the announcement itself was the way she shared the news. In lieu of her more recent method of unveiling new albums during award-show acceptance speeches — like she did for 2022’s Midnights at the VMAs and 2024’s The Tortured Poets Department at the Grammys — Swift instead chose a much more casual route of spreading the word this time. Joining boyfriend Travis Kelce on his and Jason Kelce’s New Heights podcast, the 14-time Grammy winner simply revealed the project’s existence and title in a clip posted to the show’s social media accounts, just one day before the full episode’s release.

“So, I wanted to show you something,” she said in the video, pulling a blurred-out vinyl from a “T.S.” brief case as the Kansas City Chiefs tight end beamed beside her. “This is my brand new album, The Life of a Showgirl.”

When the podcast episode finally dropped, filled with fresh details about the album, Swift also shared information about its cover art, release date and tracklist in an Instagram announcement. “And, baby, that’s show business for you,” its caption read.

As fans continue to clamor for all the information they can get on the LP leading up to its release date, Billboard is keeping track of every detail Swift reveals in the meantime. Keep reading to see everything there is to know — so far — about The Life of a Showgirl below.

The Title

The title of The Life of a Showgirl was the first detail Swift revealed about the project, doing so in the New Heights clip, which was posted after a timer on her website ticked down to 12:12 a.m. ET on Aug. 12. Fans immediately started to come up with theories about what inspired the theatrical name, with some people pointing out that scenes from Gold Diggers of 1933 — a 92-year-old film about showgirls — just so happen to match the aesthetic of her Eras Tour performance of “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived.”

“Okay wait I’m already obsessed with this album concept,” one fan wrote of the title on X. “The Life of a Showgirl potentially being about Taylor’s life during the eras tour, the highest of highs and the lowest of lows, the physical and mental toll, the glitz and the glam, the celebrations, the constant travel, the longing and long distance… I am OBSESSED”.

There are a few from 10th October that I want to get to. LANY’s Soft is an album that I think people should pre-order. For those who might not be familiar with the band. LANY are an American Pop-Rock band/duo from Los Angeles. They formed in Nashville in 2014 and consist of guitarist and lead vocalist Paul Jason Klein and drummer Jake Clifford Goss. There are additional musicians on Soft. However, at its core, LANY are a duo:

“Lany have quietly cracked the mainstream on their own terms as one of the most ubiquitous, unpredictable, and undeniable bands of this era. Tallying billions of streams, selling out legendary arenas, and earning widespread critical acclaim, the platinum-certified Los Angeles group consistently deliver rafter-reaching anthems anchored by airtight songcraft and the outsized personality of enigmatic frontman and songwriter Paul Jason Klein. Lany release their brand new album Soft. Thematically and visually Soft exists in tension — an intentional contrast of the hard and soft. Tangible, literal, physical hardness juxtaposed with metaphorical, relational (and, at times too, physical) softness. Sonically, the album explores these same tensions — much of the softness and vulnerability of lyric that has defined Lany’s acclaimed career, now with a harder, braver edge to the production”.

Another terrific album out on 10th October that I think people should get is Madi Diaz’s Fatal Optimist. You can pre-order the album here. This is a terrific American artist that everyone should know about. There are not that many details available about the album. However, this feature from July does give us some information about the Fatal Optimist and its lead single, Feel Something:

“Madi Diaz is set to delve deeper into the raw emotional landscape of heartbreak with her newly announced album, Fatal Optimist, scheduled for release on October 10, 2025, through ANTI-. The announcement is accompanied by the lead single and video, “Feel Something,” a track that offers a poignant first glimpse into what promises to be her most hauntingly sparse record to date.

Following her 2021 breakthrough, History of a Feeling, and the two-time Grammy-nominated Weird Faith from 2024, Fatal Optimist is being positioned as the powerful final chapter in a trilogy of albums exploring the nuances of heartache. This new collection of songs finds Diaz at her most vulnerable, cutting to the core of her experiences with startling precision.

The album was born from a period of intense isolation for Diaz. After the end of a significant relationship, she retreated to an island, a physical manifestation of the emotional solitude she was navigating. “I was already describing myself as an emotional island swimming in so much of an ocean of feelings,” Diaz shared in her journal. This time of introspection, confronting rage, embarrassment, and grief, ultimately led to a sense of inner wholeness and became the fertile ground for Fatal Optimist. “The only person I’m never gonna leave is myself,” she affirms.

Initially attempting to record the songs with friends, Diaz realised the album demanded a sound that mirrored her solitary experience. She restarted the process in Southern California with co-producer Gabe Wax (known for his work with Soccer Mommy and Zach Bryan), stripping the production down to its essentials: Diaz, her acoustic guitar, and subtle accompaniments.

The lead single, “Feel Something,” encapsulates the urgent, oscillating emotions of post-breakup limbo. Propelled by energetic acoustic strumming and Diaz’s masterful phrasing, the track captures the desperate yearning to reconnect with a love that has already been lost. The accompanying video, directed by Allister Ann, visually portrays this futility as Diaz reaches for a connection that is no longer there.

Reflecting on the single, Diaz says, “‘Feel Something’ is about the deep yearning and desire to connect. It’s the moment when you’re trying to call in the love that was lost. It’s the first single off the album because it has the sense of urgency and panic that I felt at that first moment I noticed I was alone in my relationship.”

In support of the album, Diaz has also announced an extensive North American tour for the autumn, offering audiences a chance to experience the profound intimacy of Fatal Optimist live”.

There is one more album due out on 10th October that I want to get to. The following three weeks are especially busy, so I will get there soon. However, The Wytches’ Talking Machine needs to be mentioned. I think I covered the Brighton four-piece quite a few years ago now. A band who have been around for a long time now but have never really got the full credit they deserve. I do think that Talking Machine should be investigated by all. You can go and pre-order the album here:

“The Wytches return for their latest incendiary album, Talking Machine, the Brighton 4 piece bringing a whole new avalanche of their undeniable psych inflused jet black soundscapes alongside a pleasingly lengthy tour. "I saw the term “Talking Machine” in a book I was reading about Thomas Edison" lead singer Kristian muses. "It was a nickname for gramophones. I thought that was fitting enough for an album title but I guess like a lot of people, the whole AI thing has been on my mind a lot and I saw a connection there too. Thomas Edison would host these events called Tone Tests where he’d demonstrate how much audio recordings had advanced by fooling the audience in to thinking they were listening to musicians playing live but it was actually all pre-recorded, playing from a gramophone. People feared that a lot of jobs in the entertainment industry and beyond would be replaced by technology, a lot like what’s going on now”.

There are five albums due out on 17th October I want to cover off. The first is bar italia’s Some Like It Hot. Another amazing band that I guess are a bit more underground, if you are unfamiliar with their work, you should definitely get involved with Some Like It Hot. For those who recognise the title, as Rough Trade explain, it bears some parallels with the classic 1959 film:

“Some Like It Hot is a 1959 film starring Marilyn Monroe, Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon about a group of rogue musicians on the adventure path. It is funny, sexy, rambunctious and evergreen – a showcase of a triple-threat cast at full-throttle. Some Like It Hot is also the new album by London three-piece bar italia – on Matador – and certain parallels are perhaps not accidental. It pulses with romance, intrigue, self-discovery and rapture over lustful rockers, spellbinding folk pop, punch-drunk ballads and undefinable moments that sneak up on you like a burst of 5pm sunshine. The record is the culmination of the joint world of Nina Cristante, Jezmi Tarik Fehmi and Sam Fenton – three singer-songwriters who have transcended their underground roots to embrace a bold, widescreen horizon.

The synergy of this three-way blunt rotation is embedded in the trio’s DNA. Cristante brings a studied actors’ sensibility to vocals ranging from honeyed (the aforementioned ‘Marble Arch’) to hell-bent and possessed (‘rooster’). Fehmi ranges from airy, brooding baritone (‘Lioness’) to mic-chewing megaphone histrionics (‘omni shambles’). Fenton, a wispy tenor, can veer between mystical melodicism and soaring blue-eyed soul within the same 8 bars (‘Plastered’).

The cultivation of their sound, from early homespun recordings like hand drawn sketches (the band presented an exhibition of their drawings in 2023) into the ceiling-wide brush strokes of Some Like It Hot, was chiselled via a relentless writing and touring schedule. When bar italia emerged in 2023 from an underground following to release two critically acclaimed albums on Matador only several months apart – the poised Tracey Denim and the grand The Twits – they were a shy, eye-contact-avoiding band, starting sets in darkness and just as soon disappearing backstage. They spent the next two years traversing the globe, with headline performances from Istanbul to Tokyo, sold-out multi-night stints in New York and Los Angeles, and festivals including Corona Capital, Glastonbury and Coachella. With over 160 shows worldwide across 2023-2024, they dispelled any mystique by becoming an exhibitionist and muscular five-piece that gives multiple encores – equally comfortable at festival mosh-pit incitement and moments of pin-drop intimacy.

Some Like It Hot is telling of this journey: a collection of rock songs voraciously embracing the main stage. The lightning choruses of ‘omni shambles’ and ‘Eyepatch’ show a band who have mastered melding their idiosyncrasies into tightly coiled pop songs. A pining for tangibility abounds: “just show me the face that you've been trying to hide”, Fenton opines on the Balkan-tinged waltz of ‘bad reputation’. Other songs surrender to abandon wholesale: “I was lost to the world from the moment we kissed”, Fenton sings on ‘rooster’, while on the 12-string new wave majesty of ‘Lioness’, Fehmi states, “You have no idea what I can do for you when I’m in this mood”.

One of the most consistent artists around, Miles Kane releases Sunlight in the Shadows on 17th October. Most of you will know about Kane, but for anyone who is perhaps fresh, I think that his latest release is going to be well worth seeking out. You can check out the album here. He is a remarkable songwriter. I have no doubt that this album is going to collect a lot of positive reviews. Small wonder when you consider his back catalogue and how he has produced stunning album after stunning album:

“Miles Kane's 2025 release, Sunlight In The Shadows, marks his first Easy Eye Sound album teaming up with Grammy-winning producer Dan Auerbach. Co-written with Auerbach, Patrick Carney, Daniel Tashian, and Pat McLaughlin.

The guitar-driven album signals a fresh direction in Kane’s ever-evolving solo career. Featuring “Love Is Cruel,” “I Pray,” and “Electric Flower.”

A dynamic performer and songwriter, Kane has spent over a decade shaping a distinctive path – both as a solo artist and as co-frontman of The Last Shadow Puppets, alongside Arctic Monkeys’ Alex Turner.

His previous solo albums include Colour of the Trap (2011), Don’t Forget Who You Are (2013), Coup De Grace (2018), Change the Show (2022), and One Man Band (2023), each showcasing a new side of his sound and artistry”.

An album I am particularly excited about is Poliça’s Dreams Go. The U.S. band formed in 2011. This album follows from 2022’s Madness. You can find out more about Dreams Go here. You can also pre-order it from Rough Trade. This is going to sit alongside the best albums of this year, I have no doubt. I have been following their music for a long time now and am always amazed. Such an incredible band that everyone should know about:

“Since their emergence from Minneapolis’ vibrant underground in 2011, Polica has carved out a singular space in electronic indie-pop, blending shadowy synths, pulsating rhythms, and the unmistakable vocal presence of Channy Leaneagh.
With Dreams Go, Polica deliver their most emotionally resonant and texturally rich work to date—a poignant meditation on loss, resilience, and the fragile beauty of holding on. Written and recorded in the shadow of bassist Chris Bierden’s glioblastoma diagnosis, the album is both elegy and act of preservation, capturing the band at a moment of profound transition.
The LP is a collection of eight new songs recorded at Pachyderm Studio in Minnesota, marking the band’s final sessions with Chris Bierden before he lost the ability to play. The record pulses with a raw, elegiac energy, a testament to the chemistry that defined Polica's first decade.
Though born of grief, Dreams Go is anything but static. It breathes, shimmers, and ultimately insists on the power of making art in the face of uncertainty. Dreams Go stands as a moving testament to the band’s creative bond, and to Bierden’s indelible role within it”.

Let’s round off with two albums that you will definitely want to get. One might be the best-reviewed album of the year. A huge release that you will not be able to avoid. I want to start with Sudan Archives’ THE BPM. You can pre-order the album here. In July, DJ Mag ran a feature that promoted the forthcoming THE BPM. They also published an interview with her:

“Sudan Archives has announced a new album. 'The BPM' will land on 17th October via Stones Throw.

You can check the LP tracks 'MY TYPE', which the artist describes as her first "rap rap song", and 'Yea Yea Yea', below. These follow 'DEAD', which landed in June accompanied by a video directed by Jonah Haber. A video for 'MY TAPE' has also been released and can be watched below.

Real name Brittney Parks, 'The BPM' is the vocalist, violinist, and producer's third album, and centres on the idea of striking out alone and following your own path to achieve artistic fulfilment.

Recorded in Chicago and Detroit — reflecting her mother's Michigan roots and her father's upbringing in Illinois — the album pays homage to the storied electronic music legacies of both cities and states. Shades of other regionalised US dance sounds, including Jersey club, are also evident, alongside more experimental beats. Meanwhile, fans are introduced to a new persona, Gadget Girl: a technologically advanced musician.

"I feel like my beats have always sounded a bit like where my parents are from, but this time it had this more experimental vibe to it, and I was very intentional about the fact that I wanted to make a dance record," Parks told Vogue in a recent interview. "My music has always been basically made with a lot of technology, a lot of little robots.”

"I was never the girl in a band in high school – I could only express myself for the first time when I got my first iPad and started making beats on it, and when I got my first electric violin. I’m all gadget girled out now, but I’ve never felt so free as a human,” Parks said.

Revisit DJ Mag's feature interview with Sudan Archives here”.

The album I am referring to that is going to scoop huge reviews is The Last Dinner Party’s From the Pyre. The second album from the London group, it follows the Mercury-nominated debut, last year’s Prelude to Ecstasy. Having toured extensively since that album’s release, it is impressive they have followed up so quickly with an album that has pushed their sound forward but seems like it might also top Prelude to Ecstasy in many ways:

“The Last Dinner Party on the new album: “This record is a collection of stories, and the concept of album-as-mythos binds them. ‘The Pyre’ itself is an allegorical place in which these tales originate, a place of violence and destruction but also regeneration, passion and light.
“The songs are character driven but still deeply personal, a commonplace life event pushed to pathological extreme. Being ghosted becomes a Western dance with a killer, and heartbreak laughs into the face of the apocalypse. Lyrics invoke rifles, scythes, sailors, saints, cowboys, floods, Mother Earth, Joan of Arc, and blazing infernos. We found this kind of evocative imagery to be the most honest and truthful way to discuss the way our experiences felt, giving each the emotional weight it deserves.” 
“This record feels a little darker, more raw and more earthy; it takes place looking out at a sublime landscape rather than seated an opulent table. It also feels metatextual and cheeky in places, like a knowing look reflected back at ourselves”.

There are three albums form 24th October that I want to highlight. I am really looking forward to Circa Waves’ Death & Love Pt.2. One of the very best bands around, Circa Waves are going to launch an album that will be among this year’s best. You can pre-order it here. I am a fan of the band, though I would also urge those who know little about the band to buy it:

“Circa Waves release their double album Death and Love via Lower Third. Death and Love Pt.1 was both terrifying and liberating to write, and is the first installment of urgent, 9-track hits of cathartic guitar-pop, serving as a powerful coping mechanism to help process frontman Kieran Shudall's near-death experience.

The album sees supreme indie hits including a nice big slab of Strokes-y dancefloor destruction of "Like You Did Before" to its first offering "We Made It", as well as the extremely topical and longing "American Dream".

Back in early 2023, Kieran received a call from doctors to say that the main artery in his heart was severely blocked. Two days later, he was lying on an operating table watching a wire being inserted into his heart to fix it. What followed was the canceling of a lot of shows, working out a lot of medication, and most crucially, now having to navigate a new way of life. And the results are quite simply stunning.

Self-produced by Kieran, and engineered by Matt Wiggins (Adele, Lana Del Rey, Glass Animals), the nine tracks that make up Death and Love Pt.1 ooze nostalgia, and hark back to the sounds and themes that made Shudall want to pick up a guitar in the very first place.

Death and Love is an incredibly powerful snapshot in time - a reflection on a moment of true terror, and the joy of coming through the other side. It's a brave and remarkable next step for a band in the finest form of their career”.

The second album from 24th October I am highlighting is Just Mustard’s WE WERE JUST HERE. The County Louth band need to be on your radar. Their 2022 sophomore album, Heart Under, was hugely acclaimed. You can pre-order their forthcoming album here. I have never seen Just Mustard live but can imagine that the band are a sensational live experience. Here is some detail about the upcoming WE WERE JUST HERE:

“On WE WERE JUST HERE, Dundalk’s Just Mustard surge out of the shadows from the submerged world of Heart Under with a sound that leans toward light and euphoria. Their signature elements remain intact - warped guitars, cavernous low ends, twisted sound design - but this time the noise is channeled into something warmer and more melodic. Inspired by club spaces and physical joy, the songs strive for immediacy and feeling. Katie Ball’s vocals rise higher in the mix, capturing a conflicted pursuit of happiness that she describes as “trying to feel euphoric, but at a cost.” Produced by the band and mixed by David Wrench (FKA Twigs, Frank Ocean, Caribou) the album expands their emotional palette while keeping things strange, textured, and uniquely their own. WE WERE JUST HERE explodes into technicolor, creating a world that feels immediate, haunted and ecstatic”.

Before rounding up with four great albums that are due to be released on Hallowe’en, there is another big album out on 24th October you need to know about. Sigrid’s There’s Always More That I Could Say is an album I cannot wait for. I have been following her music since her 2019 debut album, Sucker Punch. You can pre-order’s new album here. This article from DORK provide more some detail about the Norwegian artist’s new work. One of the great artists in the world in my opinion. Someone else that does not get the full credit that she deserves:

“Sigrid is set to release her third studio album, ‘There’s Always More That I Could Say’, on 24th October 2025 via Island / EMI, and has shared a new single, ‘Fort Knox’, which landed as BBC Radio 1’s Hottest Record.

Written and co-produced with a renewed sense of creative freedom, the record is described as spanning infatuation, heartbreak and reflection. ‘Fort Knox’ channels post-break-up fury, recorded at a rustic studio by the harbour in Bergen — the same space where much of ‘Sucker Punch’ took shape.

‘Fort Knox’ follows ‘Jellyfish’, which Sigrid described as “easy, like a Scandinavian summer.” Both songs mark a return to instinct-led writing after she stepped back from “content culture” in 2024, with solo trips to remote parts of Norway and festival sets in South America helping reignite her creative spark.

“I love using my voice as a vessel to pour my heart out,” she shares, “but on this song, I wanted it to sound carefree, joyful and playful – maybe a bit nonchalant.”

‘Jellyfish’ was written with longtime collaborator Askjell Solstrand, who co-wrote and produced Sigrid’s breakthrough ballad ‘Dynamite’. This summer, Sigrid returned to European festivals, including Rock Werchter and a headline set on the Second Stage at Latitude. She also joined Ed Sheeran at Ullevaal Stadium in Oslo.

The tracklisting for ‘There’s Always More That I Could Say’ reads:

‘I’ll Always Be Your Girl’
‘Jellyfish’
‘Do It Again’
‘Kiss The Sky’
‘Two Years’
‘Hush Baby, Hurry Slowly’
‘Fort Knox’
‘There’s Always More That I Could Say’
‘Have You Heard This Song Before’
‘Eternal Sunshine’”.

The first album due out on 31st October that you need to pre-order is Anna von Hausswolff’s ICONOCLASTS. There is a recent interview between her and Iggy Pop that is well worth reading. There are not many details available about ICONOCLASTS. You can pre-order the album here. This follow’s 2020’s All Thoughts Fly. Her music is truly remarkable, so I am keen to see what comes from her sixth studio album. There is so much atmosphere and drama. Her 2020 album was entirely instrumental, performed entirely on pipe organ:

“Centered around her incomparable voice and expressive organ playing, the album features Iggy Pop and Ethel Cain among others. Together with producer Filip Leyman, she has crafted a true epic of experimental rock music, full of bombast and emotion. Growing out of her dance-theater piece Atlas Song which had a sold out run at Gothenburg's Opera, this is a singular artist at the absolute height of her powers”.

Cat Burns’ How to Be Human is available to pre-order here. Again, there is very little about the album available, but there are one or two recent interviews with Burns. Here is one that I would recommend you have a read of. Cat Burns is one of our finest songwriters and someone who is primed for huge and long-terms success. Anyone who has not heard her music and is not familiar with her then I would suggest you out her debut album from lats year, Early Twenties. Quickly following it up, I feel that How to Be Human will gain huge reviews:

“Multi-Brit and 2024 Mercury Prize nominee Cat Burns returns with How To Be Human.

It’s a deeply personal and introspective record, channeling Cat’s personal thoughts and even voice notes as she’s moves through a huge time of upheaval in her life, into a bright new chapter.
Cat’s written all songs, plus production comes from Rob Milton (Holly Humberstone/Chloe Qisha) plus Jordan Riley, Humble The Great, GG Stok. It's 16 tracks in duration, including the previous single ‘GIRLS!' and brand new ‘All This Love’”.

The penultimate album from October that I want to spotlight is Florence + The Machine’s Everybody Scream. You can pre-order it here. This feature from NME states how Everybody Scream is her most personal record yet. Florence Welch has been inspired by JADE’s new music and her experimental Pop. An amazing group, this is another remarkable album from Florence + The Machine. When the title track was released, there was such a hugely positive reaction. So much anticipation to hear what will come from their sixth studio album:

“Florence Welch has spoken about the moodboard she shared with IDLES‘ Mark Bowen when creating Florence + The Machine‘s new album ‘Everybody Scream’.

The London band are due to release their sixth studio record on October 31, and have previewed the project with its epic title track. Welch and co. had previously teased the follow-up to 2022’s ‘Dance Fever’ with a series of eerie videos.

The album contains contributions from Bowen, Mitski, and The National’s Aaron Dessner – all of whom worked with Welch on the title track, too.

During a new interview with Zane Lowe on Apple Music 1, Welch was asked about the cryptic series of photographs she shared on social media last month. One slide included the note “Swans vs Adele“, suggesting that inspiration had come from these two acts.

“When we started working together, I sent Bowen a playlist, and [Swans’] ‘It’s Coming It’s Real’ was on there,” Welch told Lowe. “I remember hearing that song, and just the build and intensity of it… it’s so ominous.

“I think that I was looking for was an ominous feeling, but that also has clarity and beauty, and those incredible soaring choruses of Adele, and incredible ballads.”

The singer-songwriter went on to reveal that she had been “looking a lot at pop” when making her new album. She referenced “the amazing things that are happening in pop” currently, “where it’s so experimental”.

“We were listening to ‘Angel Of My Dreams’ by JADE a lot in the studio, and it was like pulling all those things together,” Welch continued.

“Me and Bowen started sharing a notes app as well, and I would put lyrics in there. I just had ‘Florence + the Machine, Everybody Scream’, and that was it. Bowen came in and was like, ‘That looked like a title track to me’.

“He had this glam rock thing that started out, but then it broke down into this drone discordance that was really shocking, and sounded like a sonic scream. I was just listing ‘Everybody do this, everybody do that!’, and the song really didn’t become what it was until Mitski came on board.”

IN THIS PHOTO: Florence Welch/PHOTO CREDIT: Autumn De Wilde

Explaining what Mitski brought to the table, Welch said: “She came to the studio one day and was like, ‘You need a chorus. I just feel like there’s a chorus coming after this drone –  it’s so striking’.”

She added: “Working with her… honestly, she’s one of my favourite artists of all time. Getting to work with Bowen and Mitski on this record is just so special to me. I didn’t know if she even worked on other people’s records, but I reached out: ‘I know you’re in town for shows, would you like to come to the studio?’ And she said yes!

“We discussed what the song was about because it was just a list of commands at that point, and she was like, ‘I think you’re talking about the intimacy you have with the stage – and I have that, too’. We just started talking about that, and the song emerged from us talking about this thing. It was such an amazing couple of days.”

Inspiration for the ‘Everybody Scream’ album came from Welch undergoing lifesaving surgery during the ‘Dance Fever’ tour in 2023. She also began to look into spiritual mysticism and folk horror – understanding the limits of her body and questioning what it means to be “healed”.

These are themes that helped shape the record, along with exploration of womanhood, partnership, ageing and dying.

As for the title track, Welch told Lowe that the song “is about being an artist, and also being someone who’s kind of stressed sometimes about being visible or being out in the world, and who finds it kind of overwhelming to put out work”.

“There’s always a bit of me that wants to keep hiding – like, ‘No, no, no – I’m not ready, put it off’,” she said. “This time, I challenged myself to not delay a record. I was like, ‘Just move through the fear and put it out’. The song itself is about the pull back to the stage and why I always keep going back there, even though every time it takes a little bit more from me.”

She went on to say: “The title for this song came before there was even a song, because honestly, I just wanted to write a song that rhymed with Florence + the Machine. I was like, Wouldn’t it be amazing to have a title track that’s also the title of a record that rhymed with Florence + the Machine?’ [Laughs]. I was just like, ‘I just really want it to rhyme!’”.

The final album I am recommending is The Charlatans’ We Are Love. You can pre-order the album here. The band’s fourteenth studio album is one I am going to get. NME spoke with The Charlatans’ lead, Tim Burgess. Their first album in eight years, this is the band in a euphoric mood. Sounding at their very peak. Even if you have not been a fan since the beginning, I feel you need to get this album. I have been following them since I was a child and love the fact they are still going and strong:

“You worked with Dev Hynes, aka Blood Orange, who produced the album. How did he get involved?

“We wanted to work with Dev, and I’ve known Dev for a long time. The first time I saw him was [at] The Old Blue Last [in London], and he was playing drums for Florence, before Florence became the Florence that we know. It was just the two of them on stage, and I thought, ‘This is great’. They’ve stuck in my mind.

“And then, of all places, we met him again in New Zealand, and he was then Lightspeed Champion. We both talked about how much we liked each other, and so it was like a thing. I’ve always thought about him, and then I just dropped him a line. He was just really into it, and the timing was right for him.”

Dev’s credited as a producer alongside Spector’s Fred Macpherson and legendary producer Stephen Street…

“[Hynes] brought along Fred, and it was great because Dev had the control board and that power. And Fred really held the room. We’d worked with Thighpaulsandra [who performs in Burgess’ solo band] quite a lot as the engineer at Rockfield. We had ideas, but he helped shape them into songs.

“And then we went to do a few songs with Stephen Street. One we finished, and that’s on the album. The rest is Dev, Fred and Rockfield – and all that’s amazing, amazing stuff.”

Dev’s worked with the likes of Sky Ferreira, Carly Rae Jepsen and Kylie – did he sprinkle any pop magic on The Charlatans’ sound?

“I did like the Sky Ferreira track that he did [2013’s ‘Everything Is Embarrassing’]. But I think he just has a deft hand and a lightness of touch, and he really wanted The Charlatans to reconnect to their place of origin. We talked about hauntology and psychogeography.

“And the place that we were in, Rockfield – we have a lot of history with that. To reconnect to the place of origin, to have an appreciation of everything that we’ve done in our history – it’s a huge thing.”

IN THIS PHOTO: Tim Burgess/PHOTO CREDIT: Brian Cannon/Microdot 

What else inspired those sessions?

“We talked about The Madness Of Love, we talked about ‘La folie’ by The Stranglers, John Cassavetes and his incredible observations of love through film. It was just a great sharing of titan minds.

“[The album] sounds like us, but obviously it’s been mirrored through other people’s views of us, which is really interesting. It all helped to bring us to appreciate the power of the sound of The Charlatans, which is what everyone was aiming for.”

Your last album featured contributions from Paul Weller, New Order and Johnny Marr, among many guest musicians. Were you focused more on just the four members after a long time away?

“Yeah, it felt like we couldn’t have any more collaborators. But Kevin Godley actually popped up and sang some backing vocals on one of the tracks. Kevin Godley from 10CC, who we’re all big fans of, and Godley & Creme. And Peter Gordon – Dev recorded him in Manhattan, on the saxophone. So we only had very limited collaborators on this record.”

You’ve had three solo albums since The Charlatans’ previous record. Was this necessary to rejuvenate the band? Why is now the right time to return?

“Yeah, I think it’s important. We all felt we had to have the desire to make something, to have something to say, to be able to have something worthwhile that we all felt good about. We all love all 11 tracks, which is an amazing feat – for us all to love everything.

“So we’re all very happy with the record – I’m in awe of it. I think it’s the best record that we’ve done. I’m filled with elation and pride around it. I guess there’s times where it felt like a long time coming together. It’s at least two-and-a-half years making this one, off and on. But yeah, it’s great. It’s amazing”.

I will round it up there. You can look at other albums out in October here. I have missed quite a few out, though I think the ones that I have included are among the best and most interesting of the month. I hope that my suggestions have given you some guidance. From Taylor Swift and Florence + The Machine to Sigrid, Cat Burns and The Charlatans, October is shaping up to be…

A huge month for music.

FEATURE: Modern-Day Queens: Tems

FEATURE:

 

 

Modern-Day Queens

PHOTO CREDIT: Zoe McConnell for Billboard

 

Tems

__________

I think there…

PHOTO CREDIT: Bet Bettencourt

is a lot of desire and demand for a new Tems album. Her previous album, 2024’s Born in the Wild, was one of the best from the year. It was one of my favourites from the 2024. A remarkable and inspiring artist, she is a GRAMMY-winning Nigerian singer-songwriter and producer. Born Temilade Openiyi (in Lagos, Nigeria), after gaining traction and hype with her 2018 single Mr. Rebel and the incredible 2019 hit Try Me, Tems’s fame and name grew through collaborations on Wizkid's Essence and Drake's Fountains. I want to start by taking us to last year and an interview from W Magazine. Writing how Tems is ready for Pop queendom and how she was made for this moment, “Her name, Temilade, means “the crown is mine”. The release of Born in the Wild elevated her to a new level.

“Tems, 29, was born in Lagos to a British-Nigerian father and a Nigerian mother, who named her Temilade—which means “the crown is mine” in Yoruba. After a few years in the U.K., her parents separated, and Tems moved back to Lagos with her mother. She has described herself as a quiet child, and music soon became a passion and source of solace. Although her mother played Christian music at home, Tems eventually got her hands on a Destiny’s Child CD, which she studied as if it were the Rosetta stone. Last year, she opened up about the challenges she faced as a woman with a lower-register voice, which she and her bullies believed to be manly and unbecoming. Despite spending most of her teenage years attempting to sing in falsetto, eventually, at the urging of a cherished music teacher, she embraced her authentic tone. “I started to want that deepness. I wanted to lean into my weirdness,” she has said. Now the velvety, androgynous quality of her voice is one of the things that makes her so immediately recognizable and so impossible to impersonate.

When she was a college student, Tems reached out to many Nigerian producers, but they were not interested in helping to engineer the hybrid sound she was chasing: something more introspective, melancholic, and complex than the joyful and jubilant sounds of Afrobeats, which dominate Nigerian charts. Using Internet tutorials and Logic software, Tems learned how to record and produce in her dorm room, and in 2018 she shared her track “Mr Rebel” with the world. The release attracted a loyal following and interest from radio DJs, and resulted in her first management contract.

Not long after came “Know Your Worth,” a collaboration with Khalid, Disclosure, and Davido. Before she knew it, “Essence” ended up on Barack Obama’s 2020 annual playlist. Then Beyoncé’s team was knocking on her door, asking for a collaboration on Renaissance (Tems is featured, along with Grace Jones, on “Move”). She quickly established herself as one of the most distinctive forces in global pop. “What I’m trying to do,” she said in 2022, “or what I hope that god does through me, is change the image of the African woman to be something luxurious, or desired, or sought after. For the demand of the African woman to go up.… Let us not be chasing foreign things; let us be something to be chased.”

With the advent of TikTok and Reels, the music industry has been irrevocably altered by the attention economy. Artists are told by managers and major labels that their primary task is to capture people’s focus in the shortest amount of time possible, and to hold it for as long as they can. The rise of Gen Z has also seen the triumph of the relatable superstar: figures who are flawed, unfiltered, candid, and easy to identify with, for people still figuring out who they are. But one of the most interesting things about Tems is that there is almost nothing easily relatable about her. Her songwriting is mature, literary, and spiritual, and her cathartic melodies—many of which are freestyled—seem to pour out of her innermost psyche. Her music and visuals are an ode to everything that Internet culture seems to be eradicating: nuance, patience, depth, and an ability to see beyond the self.

For Born in the Wild, Tems wrote and produced many of the tracks herself. “It’s definitely more expansive,” she said of the record. “You know that Lion King song?” she asked rhetorically, before singing the lyric: “I just can’t wait to be free!” She claimed it’s been stuck in her head for the past six months. “That’s what I’m most looking forward to right now: sharing this story and being free”.

At the GRAMMYs earlier this year, Tems won the award for Best African Music Performance for Love Me Jeje. It has been a big year for her. She has just completed a series of gigs with Coldplay at Wembley Stadium. Someone that is going to go from strength to strength. Billboard spoke to Tems in May as she dealt with the demands of grind and globe-trotting stardom. As she was climbing the charts and making history, she was picking up legions of new fans:

“In March, Tems became the first artist to perform at The Dome, the new, 10,500-capacity venue in Johannesburg that Live Nation launched with Stadium Management South Africa and Gearhouse South Africa earlier this year. “We’re always looking to create epic moments,” Awoniyi says. “Live Nation let us know about the venue that they were building. Our agents spoke to them, and because we are very moments-focused, for her to be the first artist to perform there is cool.” Her team is carefully planning on rescheduling her show in Rwanda while adding new stops in Kenya, Ghana and, of course, Nigeria.

Bringing the fruits of her success back home remains fundamental to Tems’ mission. Pave Investments — an African private investment firm that backs platforms creating opportunities to develop and support African talent globally, such as Tems’ company, The Leading Vibe — reached out to her camp with the opportunity to join the San Diego FC ownership group. “I grew up around my uncles and brother watching matches, and because they’re so loud, I’m forced to pay attention. I always wondered about being able to be in the business of it because it’s a man’s world,” Tems says. In her role, she’ll work closely with the Right To Dream Academy, a youth association football academy that started in Ghana and has since expanded with branches in Egypt, Denmark and the United States. “That’s something that piqued my interest, being able to build other Africans up, build other children up and give them more opportunities that they wouldn’t have otherwise seen,” Tems says.

Her historic entrance into the sports realm aligns with the ethos of The Leading Vibe, which she established in 2020 and where she serves as a director. Named for a lyric from “Mr Rebel” — “I’m the crown, I’m the vibe, I’m the leading vibe” — it allows her to “[lead] by example” and make a “difference in the world” by holding and managing her assets (she fully owns her masters for For Broken Ears and co-owns the masters for If Orange Was a Place and Born in the Wild) while serving as an incubator for investment, philanthropy and new business ventures. Through The Leading Vibe, she’s working on an initiative to support young African female artists, songwriters and producers.

“The way her brand is constructed is not limiting. You can see her at a football match today, you can see her at Formula 1 tomorrow,” Awoniyi says. In February, Aston Martin reported that 15,000 people watched her perform “Higher” at the unveiling of its new car design for the 2025 F1 season at London’s O2 Arena. She’s yet to headline her own show at the famed venue, but Awoniyi says they “haven’t been trying to rush” her growth as an artist to ensure the longevity of her career.

Tems says she’s currently making music “that I’m really excited about that sounds nothing like Born in the Wild,” and that after contributing to the Black Panther: Wakanda Forever soundtrack, she wants to hear more of her music in film — maybe even in the form of an original score — and possibly get in front of the camera. But while her universe may be continually expanding, Tems still wants her impact on the world to be fulfilling”.

I am going to end with a feature from the BBC. Tems told them that women are not really respected in the industry. Tems has been helping African women overcome many of the hurdles in the music industry through “The Lagos-based nonprofit Audio Girl Africa, which describes itself as a “pan-African sisterhood building the future”, holds workshops and mentors female artists, A&Rs, marketers, and other music business professionals”:

“The two-time Grammy award-winner told the BBC that at the start of her career, she struggled to be taken seriously.

"I realised that there's always a cost. There's always a price that you pay. And a lot of those prices I wasn't willing to pay and there wasn't a lot of options," Tems said.

Afropop has gained immense global popularity over the past decade, but despite this growth it remains notoriously male-dominated.

The industry's so-called "Big Three" - Burna Boy, Davido and Wizkid - are all male - while their female counterparts, such as Tiwa Savage, external and Yemi Alade, have spoken out about the barriers they face because of their gender.

Earlier this year, Tems hit out following negative comments about her body, which were made online after a video of her performing was posted onto X.

She wrote on the social media platform: "It's just a body, I will add and lose weight. I never once hid my body, I just didn't feel the need to prove or disprove anyone. The more you don't like my body the better for me actually."

Tems told the BBC she wants "to change the way women see themselves in music", and hopes to achieve this through her new platform, The Leading Vibe Initiative.

The project aims to provide opportunities for young women throughout Africa's music industries.

"I promised myself that if I get to a place where I can do more, I will make this initiative for women like me and maybe make it easier for women to access platforms and access a wider audience and success," Tems said.

The initiative kicked off on Friday in Tems' hometown, Lagos. Vocalists, songwriters and producers were invited to a series of workshops, masterclasses and panel discussions, all with the aim of developing skills and connections.

Asked what advice she would give to young women wanting to crack the industry, she said: "I think it's important to have an idea of what you want for yourself, what your brand is, what's your boundary.

"What are the things that you wouldn't do for fame and the things that you would do?"

Tems, who has scored hits with the likes of Love Me Jeje, external and Free Mind, external, said anyone trying to break into the industry must be passionate about their craft.

"It's not everybody that sings that loves music. If I wasn't famous, I would still be doing music. I would be in some kind of jazz club... randomly on a Friday night," she said.

But this is far from Tems' reality. Five years on from her debut EP, she has collaborated with the likes of Beyoncé and Rihanna, racked up more than 17m monthly listeners on Spotify and headlined international festivals.

And next month, she will be supporting British band Coldplay during their sold-out run of gigs at the UK's Wembley Stadium.

Tems puts her success down to being "authentic" and "audacious".

One of the most important artists in music, Tems is not only building her own success and carving her own path. She is also ensuring that women in the industry, particularly African women, are heard and have opportunities. Subjected to barriers and sexism, this artist is empowering so many others. It is going to be interesting seeing what the next year offers Tems. How she moves from here. I have been a fan for a while now, though I feel her best days are still ahead. If you have not heard her music or know too much about the magic of Tems, then do go and follow her. The amazing Tems is someone that…

EVERYONE should salute.

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FEATURE: Spotlight: Maruja

FEATURE:

 

 

Spotlight

PHOTO CREDIT: Tom Oxley for NME

Maruja

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THIS month…

this amazing band have some dates in the U.K. They get to play home crowds. Playing Crash Records in their native Manchester on 15th September, they then head out to the U.S. and Canada, before they return to play dates in the U.K. and Ireland. Even though the band formed back in 2014, I think now is a real moment of excitement where they are getting on the radar of some big sites and sources. Maruja are a quartet consisting of Harry Wilkinson (vocals/guitar), Joe Carroll (saxophone/vocals), Matt Buonaccorsi (bass) and Jacob Hayes (drums). Their incredible and hugely popular music combines elements of Jazz, Post-Rock, Noise Rock and Spoken Word. Their lyrics blend themes around the socio-political whilst addressing and tackling subjects such as mental health. Their hotly-anticipated debut album, Pain to Power, will be released on 12th September. It was “recorded at Low Four Studio and produced by Samuel W Jones, who the band worked with on their three EPs to date. The extraordinary collection not only confirms the four piece as a creative force of nature but finds a deeply emotional and empathetic band concerned primarily with the power of community, both in the nuclear sense, as a tight knit creative unit, but also as a wider force for social and political change in the age of the individual”.  There are some great new interviews with the group that I want to take parts from. They are a hugely important force for good who use their voice to speak out and support those in need. Saoirse is a moving and powerful song for peace shared in solidarity for the people of Palestine. So many reasons to love Maruja and throw your weight behind them!

I am going to start out with an interview from CLASH that was published back in March. This was released around the release of their E.P., Tir na nÓg. The final part of a trilogy of E.P.s, the band ended 2024 with a huge run of gigs. One of the most exciting and exceptional live bands in the country, they were looking ahead to a possible debut album. We now know that this is a matter of days away:

“It’s been an extraordinary year for Maruja, from the offer to play Glastonbury off the back of an interview with Tom Ravenscroft and Deb Grant on their New Music Fix show on BBC Radio 6Music, to playing in 25 countries, releasing ‘Connla’s Well’, playing Ireland for the first time and of course (perhaps most notably) signing for Music for Nations towards the end of the year, the independent record label owned by Sony.

They have grafted at their craft and decided to take the plunge over a year ago, quitting their jobs and spending a month in a house writing music together.  They then immediately went out on their first headline tour. Jacob makes the not unsurprising observation that “we struggled to make money, and we put records on sale for the first time. But this year it’s been more comfortable. We’re glad we made the decision to take a financial loss last year, to focus 100% on the music, because the things that we’ve been able to do this year wouldn’t have been possible without the set-up of last year. You really knuckle down all the business things and really understand how vinyl works and merchandise and selling, and touring and how all of it works. Each of us now know it.”

For Maruja the live performance is integral to their very being. It’s an exhilarating experience to see the four-piece on stage, and their audiences have been growing quickly over the last 18 months or so, a testament to their work ethic. Their music goes from the extremes of chaos and mayhem to calm and quiet, Harry and Joe getting into the crowd, wiping up the mosh-pit, which is not usually required to be honest.

Whenever they play in Manchester the reception goes through the roof. Two nights at The White Hotel were extraordinary last spring, the walls dripping with sweat and the electricity in the air palpable. Harry shares: “Playing to a home crowd with us all living and being from Manchester, people go even harder because they know that we’re from there. It’s been a while since a band has come up through Manchester and has been like making waves as we have. So I think there’s a lot of people who are very excited for us as well, and they want to be a part of that movement. And it’s a beautiful thing to see, is to see us bring together so many different groups of people.”

“We were chilling with our boys after the show and they were saying, “Nothing gets everybody out like a Maruja gig. Nothing brings all the friends together like a Maruja gig.” And I thought that is great symbolism. Somebody asked me the other day, what does Maruja mean to you? Maruja means family to me, you know, I’m saying these are my family. And that’s the values that we reflect, solidarity, you know, and that’s the message we have. So whenever we play Manchester, there’s a overwhelming sense of pride in community.”

Joe added: “Until the music starts, and then it’s just unadulterated carnage!”

Looking forward to 2025, Maruja kick things off with the EP release before heading to North America for their first headline tour across the pond, including a prestigious SXSW slot. As a matter of fact, the New York show had to be upgraded such was the demand for tickets. Matt shares: “It’s just going to be a privilege, really, because we know that our fans over there are absolutely feral for us. We can see it on our social medias. They’re always like, come to Toronto, come to Baltimore, come to… I was about to say Bolton, but that’s England!” he laughs. “We’re all very excited, it’s going to be great.”

A debut album is in the planning, but for now the focus is on their North American trip this spring.  One thing is abundantly clear, Maruja mean business. Prepare yourself North America, there is a whirlwind coming”.

IN THIS PHOTO: The cover of Maruja’s debut studio album, Pain to Power

Last month, The Needle Drop spent some time with Harry Wilkinson, Joe Carroll, Matt Buonaccorsi and Jacob Hayes. With news of an album coming, it was an exciting and interesting chat. I want to take from a part of the interview that followed on from the band talking about their 2019 E.P., Knocknarea, and how there was a darker sound. A Tory government who were tyrannical. COVID-19 was not far away, and there was this awful mood and feeling in Britain. That radically changed how Maruja wrote and looked at the world:

“So there was literally an ideological shift that everybody in the band was going through at the time that started to seep into the music and seep into the creative process?

MB: Yeah, sure.

JH: Yeah. What Matt was saying is, when we first discovered jamming/improvising when it was just us four, there was maybe a few moments where we first discovered flow state and subconscious communication. Artists out there that are aware of what flow state feels like will know what we mean, and it's a really obvious thing to us that what we were doing — creating music this way — was completely democratic, ego-less, and a way to just connect spiritually and emotionally through the music you're making. And it was just the most complete way of creating a song because there's no one agenda that you have to meet. You know one person presenting an idea. It's all just coming from within us. We just decided that was the only... That's how we're going to create music from now on. The themes that we talk about are just...We improvised all the songs, and then from that, we then tweaked them, added lyrics, and have shaped different structures from them. Previously — sorry, after having improvised it, those emotions that we feel is reflective of the times. Matt was saying about the Tory rule. We'd just gone through Brexit. We was having an increasingly more right-wing shift in politics, seeing lots of more blame on immigrants and migrant workers. And then, yeah, COVID happened. So it was really just an outpour of what we were seeing and living around us. And I think improvising is just a really pure vessel for translating those emotions into music.

You're talking about the democratic creative process here, but how exactly... I think we have an idea of how that manifests in conversation, but how does that also manifest when you guys are literally playing in the moment and maybe one of you has a random idea, and you decide to just throw it out there? You know what I mean? Is there a way of one person does something and everybody follows in their direction in the moment, and it goes from there? Or maybe something gets thrown out and it doesn't quite take, and it just gets thrown into the abyss and we're moving on to the next thing?

JC: Wow. Yeah, it's pretty accurate! We definitely like... With the whole democratic thing, once you get locked into that, there isn't as much thought as that, to be honest. And you don't really... Because it's equally about listening as much as it is about playing. You're so tapped into what else is going on that every decision you make is following or influenced by something that has come before it. Or, you might make a little accident, and you'll then follow that. So it's almost... It's less like, "Oh, I might throw this in here!" and it's more like, you're discovering together and pushing yourselves with the energy in the room. That has led to us exploring really unique ways of approaching our instruments or really unique ways of transitioning from a certain sound into another sound. And with that approach, it just makes everything feel so cohesive, even though it can be like, some of the wildest shit you've ever heard. It's still all in the same world and all perfectly fit in with each other because it's all spawned from each other.

Specifically Harry, because I want to know how your lyrics play into this part of the band's creative process. I mean, obviously, you guys have up until this point — and I'm sure we'll continue to emphasize the importance of improvisation and everything...Obviously, one of your most recent EPs was this hugely instrumental improvisation release. There was also that vault project that you guys dropped that fans seem to be loving the hell out of. But what mind state or planning do you guys go into when you make that separation between "We're going to do a jam, we're going to record something that's going to be completely improvised," versus "We're going to move into something that is completely premeditated, we're laying lyrics to it, we're laying a message to it, and we're really working out the structure and all of the finer details," and everything like that.

HW: Yeah, I think a lot of the time we create...So like the boys are saying, the music is spawned from improvisation when we are literally just vessels for creative energy to flow through us. At that moment, we'll take the jam, we'll listen back to it and be like, "Yo, this five minutes here is absolutely amazing. Let's take this for a song." And then we will tweak it, and we'll be like, "Okay, well, we could have a verse here. Maybe this is a place for a chorus," or, "This is a bridge," or whatever it is. Sometimes we'll literally take the jam and just reenact the jam exactly how it is, and it's instrumental, or I might then write lyrics on top of it. But often it's taking a jam and then manipulating it into a song format that is a little bit more digestible, essentially. I'll then take away the landscape that we've created musically, and I will add my lyrics/message on top, depending on the sonics and how that's making me feel, what that is displaying to me creatively. This is me in a place of like, "Okay, maybe it's about this topic, or about this topic!" It really depends on what that song is giving to me, the music that we've written, how that's affecting me emotionally”.

There are two more interviews that I want to bring in. The Quietus spoke with Maruja about their telepathic connection and their searing and unforgettable energy in the live arena which is replicated in their music. This connection between studio and stage. The Quietus note how there is solidarity on every note that Maruja play:

“That energy, that unified experience ravaging through the album, replicates their visceral live performances. It’s here where one can understand why Pain To Power feels the way it does. In their embryonic, improvisational stages Hayes says that tunes “reveal themselves in different ways”, often pulling, stretching, speeding up, and slowing down. In these moments, the roles of artist and audience overlap in fascinatingly spontaneous and sensory entanglements. Be it the immersion of the band in the pit of a live crowd. Be it the message of ‘see you in the trenches’ issued to those about to watch them perform before a gig. Be it the unanimously repeated mantra at the end of every gig Wilkinson initiates: “We wish you peace, prosperity and unity in these times of global oppression. Together we are stronger.”

If the medium is the message, Maruja’s message is clear. With the notion of community forever at the core, their aural bolt of sweat and flesh and scraps of clothing and calloused palms is a reactive force to be reckoned with. “Everything that’s gone on with Palestine Action,” says Wilkinson, “where a protest group has been turned into a terrorist organisation, shows the importance again of those safe spaces where people can release their emotions about the tragedy of what’s going on in the world, and protest. It is a place to protest and a place to show solidarity with each other and feel safe to be yourself around people that you maybe admire and that you connect emotionally with through their music.”

With a burning bullseye in sight, jazz, as Maruja grasp it, is less about genre, but more a yearning to breach certain emotional as well as sonic thresholds. As their music collapses into a concave of its own making, Maruja surpasses the physical realm as we know it, the result of a surge towards musical telepathy. “It’s those moments where we don’t need to be democratic about anything,” says Carroll. “The thing has been made. It’s more of a self-discovery than being taught in an academic way. There’s no sort of archaic depth to it. People like Miles Davis and Pharaoh Sanders are really big influences for us because you can really hear that, the way that they’re pushing the instrument and making these bizarre noises”.

PHOTO CREDIT: Samuel Edwards

I am going to end with some words from an NME interview published in May. I wanted to head back a bit before finishing because there are some sections of this interview that outline why Pain to Power might be one of the most urgent, important and, as we may discover, best albums of the year. I can see this gaining lots of five-star reviews from critics. If you have never heard of the band, then I would urge you to pre-order their album and support them as much as you can:

“A lot of themes on this album – and I mean stuff that the four of us, our generation and people across the world are experiencing right now – are about seeing so much turmoil, war, corruption, greed, horror through the screens of our phones,” the bassist told NME. “It’s easy to feel powerless when looking at all of this happening. Decades ago, you would have just heard about stuff like Palestine through the newspaper, but now the world is an open stage. We’re getting angles about all kinds of incredible suffering from different countries, different peoples.

“It’s so horrifying to try and take in all of this collective pain. The fact that we can try and turn this pain into power, into action, to come together to protest and form communities and celebrate solidarity and love over division – that’s quite powerful. ‘Pain To Power’ means to transform something that is making our lives so difficult and trying to change the world with that. The whole album is a study on that phrase.”

Ready to hit the road this summer ahead of their newly-announced dates across the UK, Europe, China, Japan and the US later this year, Maruja find themselves refreshed and inspired after a break following their recent and lengthy North American tour.

“It was wonderful,” said Buonaccorsi. “It’s a big culture shock going there, because it’s such a massive, grand place. Every single state, and in Canada, every single fan is lovely. There was a warm presence from them all and they were some of the most energetic and frightening crowds we’ve ever had. New York was just possibly my favourite show ever.”

Alluding to the ongoing debate and campaign around freedom of expression within music following Kneecap’s Coachella stunt for Palestine,  Buonaccorsi said he felt encouraged by the engagement from their fans.

“With the discourse, we’re in very politically sensitive times for both our countries – probably more so for America right now,” he told NME. “It meant that on some level, we could really relate to the fans that we were meeting. For the fans that were coming down to our shows across the States, they understood that our message is very much to be wary of authoritarianism and how that can descend into all kinds of ugly places.

“America is having a tough time right now. All the fans that were coming down were the exact type of crowd that would cheer, go crazy in moshpits. We welcomed each other with open arms. We look forward to much more of that”.

I will end there. I am fairly recent to Maruja, but I am definitely converted. A band that are so essential and not only speaking to people on a personal and intimate level, but also at a global level. In terms of their words around Palestine and how they are part of a growing group of artists risking more than their careers speaking out against genocide and showing solidarity with Gaza and those being displaced, starved and skilled. Despite a career together that has lasted over a decade, I think that their time is now. Pain to Power could well be among the best albums of 2025. It will definitely elevate them to a new level. With a huge fanbase in North America, I wonder where else they will head. 2026 is going to be their biggest year I feel. Maybe a Mercury Prize nomination for them? Big slots at major festivals? Who knows! When it comes to the mighty Maruja and how far they can go…

ALL bets are off!

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Follow Maruja

FEATURE: When You Can Dance I Can Really Love: Neil Young’s After the Gold Rush at Fifty-Five

FEATURE:

 

 

When You Can Dance I Can Really Love

  

Neil Young’s After the Gold Rush at Fifty-Five

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THE third studio album…

IN THIS PHOTO: Neil Young rehearsing backstage in Philadelphia in 1970/PHOTO CREDIT: Joel Bernstein

from Neil Young, After the Gold Rush was released on 19th September, 1970. Déjà Vu was the second studio album released by Crosby, Stills & Nash, and the first as a quartet with Neil Young. It is really interesting hearing the albums stand up against one another. Neil Young wrote Helpless and Country Girl for Déjà Vu. He co-wrote Everybody I Love You with Stephen Stills. However, After the Gold Rush is a singular effort. Except for a cover of Don Gibson’s Oh, Lonesome Me, this is Neil Young in full flight. After the Gold Rush, Southern Man, and Don’t Let It Bring You Down among the highlights. The album reached number seven in the U.K. and number eight on the US Billboard Top LPs & Tape chart upon its release. I wanted to mark the upcoming fifty-fifth anniversary of a classic album. I will come to a couple of features about After the Gold Rush. In 2015, on its forty-fifth anniversary, Ultimate Classic Rock & Culture discussed the album and its background. How Neil Young turned After the Gold Rush into a '60s requiem:

“Released on Sept. 19, 1970, it's also the end of an early chapter in Young's career. After breaking from Buffalo Springfield and releasing his debut solo album in 1968, the singer-songwriter would begin what would become the first of many career left turns. On 1969's Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, he plugged in and scraped away at the scabs with the young Crazy Horse.

But by the following year, when he was set to make a follow-up LP, he had fired them (but retained a few songs they had already laid down) and retreated to his basement in Topanga, Calif., where he started recording tracks for the follow-up record, a 360-degree turn into acoustic country and folk music with a group of musicians whose approach was a bit more delicate.

Rubbing against the plugged-in numbers left over from the Crazy Horse sessions, the new songs – which featured 18-year-old Nils Lofgren on guitar and piano, an instrument he was mostly unfamiliar with – helped create a ragged and almost disjointed record that's never quite sure if it's electric or acoustic, part of the '60s or part of the '70s.

And it's a brilliant juxtaposition, one that gives After the Gold Rush a feeling of frustration and resignation. It's a romantic album too – the soft "Only Love Can Break Your Heart" is a highlight – but the sting of "Southern Man," which immediately follows in the track listing, tempers the mood.

The entire album is like that: soft, hard. Quiet, loud. Acoustic, electric. It's almost as if Young was carrying around too many ideas – his first album with Crosby, Stills & Nash, Deja Vu, had only come out in March – and decided to pour them all out onto a 35-minute LP that serves as both a literal and metaphorical link between the abrasive Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere and the plaintive Harvest.

But more than any of this, After the Gold Rush puts an end to '60s idealism through a mix of songs that cut specifically – the meditative title track, a piano-driven ballad that ranks among Young's very best – and more abstractly (the album's opening cut, "Tell Me Why") into the deep, overriding sorrow that runs throughout the record. "Look at Mother Nature on the run in the 1970s," he sings on "After the Gold Rush," pretty much sealing a fate nine months into the new decade.

After the Gold Rush became Young's first Top 10 album, making it to No. 8 (he'd score his only No. 1 two years later with Harvest). Two singles were pulled from the record – the acoustic waltz "Only Love Can Break Your Heart" and "When You Dance I Can Really Love," recorded with Crazy Horse – but neither cracked the Top 30. It eventually sold more than two million copies.

And it remains one of Young's greatest works, a summation of his career up to that point and a sign of things to come. He'd explore the album's two opposing sides many times over the years, sometimes together (like on 1979's Rust Never Sleeps) but more often on separate projects that occasionally struggled to make sense of his whims and genre jumping.

One of the most fascinating aspects of After the Gold Rush is how and where it was made. Having listened to the album for decades, I was not aware of its recording and the conditions Neil Young was recording in. Maybe repeating some of the feature above, Classic Album Sundays told the story of After the Gold Rush in their article. Two years on from After the Gold Rush, Neil Young released another masterpiece with Harvest. Many argue, though, that After the Gold Rush is Neil Young’s finest work:

“Young’s dogged self-determination, despite its interpersonal downfalls, was a major artistic virtue that fed directly into what was perhaps his first true masterpiece. After The Gold Rush had its beginnings in an unlikely place. Dean Stockwell, a former child star of the ‘40s and ‘50s, had been encouraged by his friend Dennis Hopper to write a screenplay whilst the pair were in the jungles of Peru producing a film entitled The Last Movie. Hopper assured Stockwell that he had the relevant connections to help get the film made, and once back in the US the latter retreated to his home at Topanga Canyon in the Los Angeles Mountains to commence the writing process.

A fellow resident of the canyon and a close friend of Stockwell’s, Young was suffering through a prolonged period of writer’s block and was under growing pressure from his label to record an album of new material. After learning of the writer’s creative endeavour he was intrigued to learn more and asked Stockwell if he could read a draft of the story. The script, which has since been lost, was an unconventional, non-linear narrative with religious and psychedelic undertones. It loosely detailed an end-of-the-world scenario centred on the local Californian environment, in which a biblical flood threatened to pull the state into the ocean. Captivated by this messy but intriguing tale, Young recalls: “I was writing a lot of songs at the time, and some of them seemed like they would fit right in with the story.”

Ironically Hopper’s proximity to the project scared off any interested executives, and before long the film seemed destined to remain in limbo. Nonetheless, Young was fired up and undeterred, commencing work immediately on what he imagined to be the soundtrack of this deeply counter-cultural Hollywood film. Finding time to write and record was difficult, as large swathes of 1970 were blocked out by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s huge US Tour and further live obligations with Crazy Horse. In the precious gaps between shows, Young made initial recordings at Hollywood’s Sunset Studios, yielding “I Believe In You” and “Oh Lonesome Me” but quickly realised he preferred the atmosphere of the Canyon, continuing the process at the home studio set up in his lead-lined basement. It was here that his ensemble of bassist Greg Reeves, drummer Ralph Molina, and guitarist Nils Lofgren assembled.

The studio was a small and sweaty space, adjoined to a side control room from which producer David Briggs kept an eye on proceedings. The youngest of the ensemble, eighteen year-old Lofgren was brought in to play keyboards despite being a relative novice at the time of recording, highlighting Young’s unconventional laid back approach. Accordingly the musician recalls that “Neil didn’t mind rehearsing a bit” but they “didn’t belabour stuff.” It’s often considered that Young was attempting to merge musicians from both Crosby, Stills & Nash and Crazy Horse on this album, and Stephen Stills even appears on “Only Love Can Break Your Heart” to provide backing vocals.

The basement’s make-shift setup influenced the stark and plaintive sound of After The Gold Rush. Young featured solo on piano throughout the album, most notably on the title track which is often praised as the centrepiece of the album. Charting a surreal and fantastical course through three verses, the song starts in a medieval era of knights and peasants and ends in outer space with the remnants of humanity, after the world has descended into apocalypse”.

There are some reviews I want to end with. For Audioxide, André Dack, Frederick O'Brien and Marcus Lawrence penned their views on 1970’s After the Gold Rush. I want to share Dack and O’Brien’s assessment of one of the best albums of the 1970s. A sublime and mesmerising album that has touched so many people through the decades:

“André

After the Gold Rush is Neil Young at the absolute top of his game. It’s a masterpiece, plain and simple. His third studio album is as accomplished as any he’s ever released: an astonishing feat given he was only 24 years of age at the time. After the Gold Rush is a tight package that displays extreme versatility, covering an extraordinary range of musical ground and lyrical depth. Provocative rock jams with soulful guitar solos stand alongside romantic country ballads and heart-warming numbers led by playful piano.

For all its musical and personal scope, Young does incredible things with, seemingly, so little. Simple vocal melodies sung over elementary chords have no right to be as effective as they are here, but Young has the capability to floor listeners with his presence. If there’s an album that best showcases Young as a songwriter, After the Gold Rush is the most immediate choice. His poetry comes naturally, with no metaphor feeling forced. His personal musings and intricate stories aren’t bound by genres. Though his folk and country background is well known, Young’s songs transcend these origins. This is music for everyone.

It’s crucial to recognise that Young has been aided by some of the most extraordinary backing bands that contemporary music has ever seen. After the Gold Rush now celebrates its 50th anniversary, which is absurd given these songs do not sound like they were conceived half a century ago. There are a number of reasons for this, but most notable are the incredible arrangements that comprise the albums deeper cuts. The extraordinary tale of “Southern Man” is driven by stirring guitar, percussive piano parts, and the most glorious vocal harmonies you can ever dream of. It’s the kind of thing Radiohead have been replicating throughout their illustrious career.

“Don’t Let it Bring You Down” is another gem in this respect, showing the full force of the piano as an accompanying instrument. It puts many modern arrangements to shame. Young’s versatile vocals add a sprinkling of magic to these songs that propel them to legendary status. Whilst Bob Dylan’s voice has been a note of contention throughout the years, there’s simply no denying Young’s abilities. At its best, his voice smoothly sails through the mix like a delightful breeze, meaning that the music is not just magnificent, but accessible too.

Sounding as good as ever, After the Gold Rush remains one of the definitive albums released by, quite possibly, the greatest singer-songwriter we’ve ever seen. To those looking to probe Young’s daunting discography: start here.

Favourite tracks //

  1. Southern Man

  2. Don't Let It Bring You Down

  3. Oh, Lonesome Me

9 /10

Fred

Reviewing albums of this calibre is a bit of a double-edged sword. They’re a delight to listen to, and writing about them almost feels redundant. What is there to say about After the Gold Rush that hasn’t been already? It’s vintage Neil Young, as fine a blend of rock, blues, and country you’re ever likely to hear. Beautifully produced too, which always helps.

I suppose the best I can do is put the record in context with the other Young release we’ve reviewed. On the Beach is my favourite Neil Young record, and one of my favourite records ever. After the Gold Rush is not On the Beach. They’re different animals. This is a more jumbled, less miserable affair. The songs have a spring in their step, the zest of a born traveller going it alone. The record is an ideal introduction to Neil Young in that sense; it’s super accessible.

There are a good few classic tunes crammed into the 35-minute runtime. “Southern Man” is a one-inch-punch of a song, with low key one of the greatest rock solos going. The cover of “Oh, Lonesome Me” is so pathetic that it becomes kind of adorable, like Droopy the dog in musical form. The songs are eclectic, but they’re held together by the band which, with a few Crazy Horse members among their ranks, accompanies Young beautifully.

Young has always had a lightness that makes him more approachable than the icier singer/songwriter greats, be they Bob Dylan or Laura Marling. Few — if any — albums showcase that wamth better than After the Gold Rush. It’s Young on a roll, with a fire in his belly and love overflowing from his big Canadian heart. Half a century on, it remains a joy.

Favourite tracks //

  1. Southern Man

  2. When You Dance I Can Really Love

  3. Don't Let It Bring You Down

9/10”

I am going to end with AllMusic and their five-star review of After the Gold Rush. On 19th September, this phenomenal album turns fifty-five. I am not sure whether there will be new features and retrospectives. Perhaps a fifty-fifth anniversary is not as big as a fiftieth or even a sixtieth. However, I do hope that some take the time to share some thoughts and insights. After the Gold Rush is an album that needs to be shared and heard by the new generation:

“In the 15 months between the release of Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere and After the Gold Rush, Neil Young issued a series of recordings in different styles that could have prepared his listeners for the differences between the two LPs. His two compositions on the Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young album Déjà Vu, "Helpless" and "Country Girl," returned him to the folk and country styles he had pursued before delving into the hard rock of Everybody Knows; two other singles, "Sugar Mountain" and "Oh, Lonesome Me," also emphasized those roots. But "Ohio," a CSNY single, rocked as hard as anything on the second album. After the Gold Rush was recorded with the aid of Nils Lofgren, a 17-year-old unknown whose piano was a major instrument, turning one of the few real rockers, "Southern Man" (which had unsparing protest lyrics typical of Phil Ochs), into a more stately effort than anything on the previous album and giving a classic tone to the title track, a mystical ballad that featured some of Young's most imaginative lyrics and became one of his most memorable songs. But much of After the Gold Rush consisted of country-folk love songs, which consolidated the audience Young had earned through his tours and recordings with CSNY; its dark yet hopeful tone matched the tenor of the times in 1970, making it one of the definitive singer/songwriter albums, and it has remained among Young's major achievements”.

Frequently voted among the best albums of all time, After the Gold Rush sits alongside the all-time best Neil Young work. It may be his very best release. Still touring and recording to this day, his forty-ninth studio album, Talkin to the Trees, released under Neil Young and the Chrome Hearts, came out in June. Fifty-five years after its release, and Neil Young’s masterpiece After the Gold Rush…

CONTINUES to shine.

FEATURE: Groovelines: The Bluebells – Young at Heart

FEATURE:

 

 

Groovelines

 

The Bluebells – Young at Heart

__________

THIS might seem…

slightly random to include now. A song that was last a hit decades ago being spotlighted now. I often get ideas and inspiration from The Guardian. In terms of article they publish and artists they spotlight. I also look at websites like NME, though I tend to find The Guardian is more worthy and varied when it comes to what they publish. If I am influenced by them, I will try and expand on what they write and bring in other sources. That is the case for the Groovelines. A song that was originally recorded by Bananarama and appeared on their 1983 debut album, Deep Sea Skiving, it was then recorded by The Bluebells, where it appeared on their 1984 album, Sisters. Almost a decade after The Bluebells had disbanded, Young at Heart was re-released as a single on 15th March, 1993 after being featured in a British T.V. advert for the Volkswagen Golf. It has this odd history. Released on two different albums by two different groups within a year of each other and then coming back into the spotlight in a bigger way about a decade after its original release. Over three decades since it briefly brought The Bluebells back together, it is still being played and performed live. The band’s most recent album, In the 21st Century, was released in 2023. I will end with a new feature by The Guardian that brought together Robert Hodgens, a.k.a. Bobby Bluebell and Siobhan Fahey (formerly of Bananarama and Shakespears Sister (who are still together) as they reminisced about the creation of this much-loved song. I am going to come to some other articles in a bit. However, there are some personal reasons why I want to include The Bluebells’ Young at Heart in this Groovelines.

I have talked about this a lot, but the first album I recall buying with my own money as a child was the Now That’s What I Call Music! 24 that was released in April 1993. A month before my tenth birthday, I would have seen an advert for this album. I can’t recall if I bought it as soon as it came out, although it was not long after. This incredible compilation that had all these great hits from artists including Arrested Development, Duran Duran, Paul McCartney, 2 Unlimited, World Party and Shaggy, it also contained The Bluebells’ Young at Heart. I think I saw the song used on that Volkswagen Golf advert. I think that I bonded with the song when Now That’s What I Call Music! 24 came out and I was playing it. Sharing it with friends. I was captured by the spirit of the song and how uplifting it is. I never knew that it was originally recorded by Bananarama. Years later, even though the track is a bit dated and some might consider it corny, I have a lot of affection for it. Because its lyrics and mandate is quite pure and cannot be criticised. Concerning a child understanding about their parents' adult choices and compromises as they navigate their own growing up and the complexities of life. Young at Heart’s lyrics present and unveil this sense of budding maturity and empathy for the adults in their lives. Siobhan Fahey, who co-wrote the song, was inspired by watching the Frank Sinatra movie, Young at Heart. I love that. Before coming to that new article from The Guardian, where we get some contemporary perspective on the song from two of its writers, there are a few things I want to bring in.

As The Bluebells’ Sisters has been reissued, there have been some new interviews. Ayrshire Magazine spoke with founding member if the band, Ken McCluskey. It is hard for any artist that is associated with one song and that is what the fans want to hear. Maybe it can be a burden though, if this song unites generations and is so loved, it is also a  good thing:

“Mention The Bluebells and there’s one song that immediately springs to mind. ‘Young at Heart’ is undoubtedly the band’s biggest success having spent time in the top ten of the Official UK Singles Chart in both 1984 and 1993. When it was first released, it peaked at number eight but, thanks to Volkswagen using the song for what was, at the time, considered a rather audacious TV commercial, it climbed to number one nine years later.
It’s fair to say that the song remains a fan favourite, but what does founder member, Ken McCluskey, think about it?
“It’s good to play live because it gets the crowd up. Some people only know us for ‘Young at Heart’ and if you’ve got a big hit like that you should really play it, because that’s why most people come and see us”.

Classic Pop Mag chatted with The Bluebells’ Robert Hodgens about the reissue of Sisters. I do wonder how Young at Heart will fare decades from now. Is it a song that will resonate with young generations? I don’t think that it is reserved to those who are fans of The Bluebells or Bananarama. I loved the song as a ten-year-old but I still love it now. It is a song that never fails to lift me up:

“And talking of ‘commercial appeal’, Sisters has subsequently been dominated by the success of Young At Heart after it featured in a TV advert. What do you put the extraordinary long-term appeal of that track down to?

Its commercial appeal and long-term success is down to the fact that it’s just very catchy. The lyrics, too, they’re kind of eternal really, about people not realising what their parents have done for them until they actually leave home and become parents themselves. I think we all take our parents for granted and that’s a great theme to write about. The bassline by Lawrence Donegan has got a lot to do with it, too. The drumming by David was really different at the time, but overall, it’s Ken’s singing that makes it really timeless. Everyone seems to know the song, and I’m very grateful for the success it’s had.

Bananarama’s version of Young At Heart is very different to The Bluebells. Did you set out with the aim of radically reinventing the song or was it just a natural expression of your band’s sound?

When we wrote the song in Siobhan [Fahey’s] flat in Holborn, we always  intended that both of our groups would do it.

The Bluebells, in fact, played it for a long time in our live set. We did the kind of Northern Soul version of it and played it live on Switch, a Channel 4 TV programme. You can actually watch that version on YouTube if you want to look it up.

Bananarama recorded it with Jolley and Swain and I don’t think the girls were pleased with the recording. We actually played it live once with the girls at the Lyceum for a Gary Crowley night. It was really great. I wish someone had filmed that…

But when we came to record it, we’d evolved it into a Bluebells style. I was quite influenced by I Want You by Bob Dylan and really liked those kind of shuffling drums. We found a way to do it as a band that we really loved. And when Roger Ames heard it, he just thought it was a smash right away. We originally intended to get Helen O’Hara from Dexys to play the violin on it from, which was one of his bands, too, but Roger wasn’t too keen on the cross fertilisation of one of his most successful bands and one of his least successful bands! Helen has played with us live recently, though. She’s fantastic and hopefully we’ll have her again as a guest, somewhere special in the future”.

I have seen some reviews of Young at Heart that attack it or put it down. The fiddle solo sounding jarring or a novelty. The title and chorus corny. A song that could be compared to Dexy’s Midnight Runners’ Come on Eileen, which is about being young or genuinely young at heart. The Bluebells’ Young at Heart more about being older. And a song that sounds old and dated. Having these faults and flaws. If it does not sound captivating now, people need to remember how it affected people like me back in 1993. Why it was a hit in the first place. It is a song that some cannot see the appeal of but it is very special for so many others. A track that I feel has a lot of charm. Even though I don’t like everything about The Guardian’s new article, and it might be nitpicking – the headline quote spells the Pope without a capital B and The Bluebells without a capital B -, it is great to read Robert Hodgens and Siobhan Fahey discuss the origins of Young at Heart:

Robert Hodgens, AKA Bobby Bluebell, songwriter, guitar, vocals

“Siobhan is Irish but her father was in the British army, so she’d moved around and changed schools a lot. I think she had just wanted to escape, so we started writing lyrics about how her parents had got married young to have sex and have kids, because that’s what people did then. It was the first time since I’d left home that I also realised what our parents had done for us, which fed into the line: “How come I love them now? How come I love them more? / When all I wanted to do when I was old was to walk out the door?”

Bananarama recorded Young at Heart, but their version didn’t quite have whatever their big hits had at the time. Our record company boss Roger Ames suggested the Bluebells record it. We were big pals with Dexys Midnight Runners so thought of asking Helen O’Hara, who played fiddle on Come on Eileen, to play on our version. Roger said that would be “too much cross-pollination”, but the old story about us finding a fiddle player in the pub isn’t true – Bobby Valentino, who played on the single, was a session-player who laid the part down in a few minutes, and Lawrence Donegan came up with a killer new bassline.

In 1984, the song got to No 8 but then nine years later it was used on a car advert and it spent four weeks at No 1. The pope actually complained that the lyrics promoted divorce, which I thought was really funny – although my mum is Italian so she wasn’t best pleased.

IN THIS PHOTO: The Bluebells in 1984/PHOTO CREDIT: Steve Rapport/Getty Images 

Siobhan Fahey, songwriter

Bananarama had been living in a leaky loft space above the Sex Pistols’ rehearsal room, although we were all in a council flat when Bob used to come down and stay in my room. We weren’t long out of school, we were practically children, but it was an incredible time to be in London. We’d go dancing in the Wag Club and everyone there was in a band: Wham!, Culture Club, Sade.

Once Bananarama started having hits, we had to disguise ourselves to sign on for the dole in case they’d seen us on Top of the Pops. Then suddenly we needed material for an album. I remember Bob sitting with a guitar and going: “Let’s write a song.” He came up with the title Young at Heart after we watched the film, then I started writing lyrics about my relationship with my parents. You can hear the difference between our personalities in the song. My words reek with pain, his are more loving: two very different experiences of growing up.

Bananarama recorded Young at Heart as a northern soul stomper. We’d wanted Soft Cell’s producer but were told he only did synth bands, so instead we ended up with Barry Blue. It’s a flawed production but I like our version, although it doesn’t have the fiddle hook, which is so important to the Bluebells’ one. The song’s mix of dark and cheery lyrics with uptempo, uplifting music reminds me of Tamla Motown, which was the reason we formed a girl group. It was such an amazing time to be young, and we were two kids who wrote a song about our parents from the heart”.

Whilst it divides some and it may be a generational thing, I think about Young at Heart a lot. Although the Bananarama version is great, there is something about The Bluebells’ that gets me. Maybe it is a bit cheesy or corny, its lyrics and story is brilliant. Has real weight and depth. A track that is still thrilling fans to this day! Over forty years since it was first released, this is a track I would recommend to everyone. If you only listen to it once. This is a rousing and thought-provoking song that…

DESERVES more compassion and respect.

FEATURE: Thank You for Hearing Me: Who Will Be Cast As Sinéad O'Connor in a Planned Biopic?

FEATURE:

 

 

Thank You for Hearing Me

IN THIS PHOTO: A 1992 portrait of Sinéad O’Connor at a concert rehearsal, with the image of the celebrated Observer photographer Jane Bown reflected in her pupils/PHOTO CREDIT: Jane Bown/The Observer 

 

Who Will Be Cast As Sinéad O'Connor in a Planned Biopic?

__________

IT may already…

IN THIS PHOTO: Sinead O' Connor in Bray, Ireland in 2008/PHOTO CREDIT: Kim Haughton/Shutterstock

be in the works but, as a planned biopic of Sinéad O'Connor has been announced, there will be speculation around the casting. I am going to come to that and one name who has been mooted as the frontrunner. However, first, it is worth getting to the news about a biopic of an artist that we tragically lost in 2023. Aged only fifty-six, it was heartaching learning of the passing of the Dublin-born icon. An artist whose influence is so vast! The outpouring of sadness was immense. That love and respect for O’Connor. It is inevitable that a biopic would be announced at some point. The Guardian provides some details about an anticipated music biopic that charts the early career of the irreplaceable Sinéad O'Connor:

“A biopic of Sinéad O’Connor is in the works, with its backers including the company involved in Nothing Compares, the acclaimed 2022 documentary about the singer.

According to Variety, the film will be directed by Josephine Decker, who made a much-liked biopic of horror writer Shirley Jackson, starring Elisabeth Moss, in 2020. The script will be by Stacey Gregg, who has credits on TV series Mary and George, Little Birds and The Letter for the King.

Production companies behind the project include See-Saw Films, whose past output includes The King’s Speech, Shame, The Power of the Dog and Slow Horses, alongside Nine Daughters (God’s Creatures, Lady Macbeth) and ie:entertainment, which acted as executive producer on Nothing Compares.

O’Connor died in 2023, aged 56, after a string of hit records including the huge-selling Nothing Compares 2 U in 1990, and a tumultuous life marked with outspoken protest and controversy. In 1992 she ripped up a picture of the pope on US TV; in 1999 she was ordained as a priest by an independent Catholic group, and in 2018 she converted to Islam.

According to Variety, the film will follow O’Connor’s early years in the music industry, “tell[ing] the story of how one young woman from Dublin took on the world, examining how her global fame may have been built on her talent, but her name became synonymous with her efforts to draw attention to the crimes committed by the Catholic church and the Irish state”.

Even though Winona Ryder is someone who looks very similar to Sinéad O'Connor, you do wonder about the age of the actor who will play her. If they are focusing on the early years of Sinéad O'Connor’s career, will the actor be de-aged? Winona Ryder is fifty-three. The frontrunner at the moment is Natalie Portman. Again, someone who very much resembles Sinéad O'Connor and could portray her seamlessly, is the fact Natalie Portman is forty-four rule her out? I would hope not! If, as the Irish Times rightly observes, many films love to relish in the downfall and decline of women and female stars, this is a film that will not do that. As such, it cannot be restrictive or ageist regarding the actor who will play Sinéad O'Connor. It will be interesting to see what approach the film takes. I don’t think they necessarily need an actor in her twenties or thirties to play Sinéad O'Connor. However, it would also be nice to have a relative unknown portray her. Maybe an upcoming talent or someone coming through like Emma Mackey. She has appeared in a few big films and T.V. shows, though this could be her biggest role. It is important to remember that, if Sinéad O'Connor were alive today, she would be the most vocal against the genocide in Gaza and Palestine. She would have written songs about it and taken to the stage to voice her disgust! I can imagine her risking prison by protesting. An actor who plays her, in political terms, needs to be on the right side. Someone who is actively opposed to the genocide and has spoken about it. Or someone who has spoken against Israel and what they are doing. Natalie Portman could be a fit in that sense as, if the casting it wrong in that sense, it could be a disaster from the start. She is someone who has voiced her anger at the mistreatment of Palestine people and the violence that has beset them. That was back in 2018. In terms of recent comments and news, this article explains how Portman has shown support for Gaza:

“Among the posts was a call to donate to humanitarian efforts in Gaza, a rare move from a high-profile "Israeli"-American celebrity amid the ongoing war.

Portman, who was born in Jerusalem and holds dual citizenship, shared content featuring demonstrators in Tel Aviv demanding an end to the war and the return of "Israeli" captives held in Gaza. One of the posts specifically pointed followers to a campaign collecting donations for Palestinian civilians affected by the genocide, a gesture likely to spark both praise and criticism across the political spectrum.

IN THIS PHOTO: Natalie Portman photographed in 2025/PHOTO CREDIT: Lachlan Bailey for Vogue Australia

The Oscar-winning actress has long held a nuanced position on the "Israeli"-Palestinian issue. In 2018, she famously declined to attend the Genesis Prize ceremony in "Israel", citing her distress over recent events and her refusal to appear as endorsing then-Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “Like many Israelis and Jews around the world, I can be critical of the leadership in Israel without wanting to boycott the entire nation,” she wrote at the time.

Portman has previously criticized the "Israeli" nation-state law as "racist" and expressed concern about policies that, in her view, undermine equality and democracy. Yet, she has also remained firmly opposed to the BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) movement and has maintained her cultural ties to "Israel", including directing a Hebrew-language film in 2015.

However, her posts add to growing voices challenging official narratives and calling attention to Gaza’s humanitarian crisis”.

It is impressive that an Israeli-born actor would take this stance. One might say it is simply humanitarianism, however, there are many actors in Hollywood who have either shown support for Israel or have revealed themselves to be Zionist. Natalie Portman could simply not be cast as Sinéad O'Connor if she was part of that group. O’Connor’s estate would definitely not allow it. Although it is more important to cast someone who will sound and look like Sinéad O'Connor and capture her personality and genius, we know full well the horror of what is happening today in Gaza and what O'Connor would say. Anyone playing her, even in her early career, needs to match O’Connor’s ethics, politics and worldview.

IN THIS PHOTO: Niamh Algar/PHOTO CREDIT: Christian Tierney

Belfast actor Lola Petticrew and Westmeath-born Niamh Algar are also among those who have ben tipped to play Sinéad O'Connor. Again, they are closer in age to when Sinéad O'Connor career began, though I would still like to think that the filmmakers would not use that as a barrier. Saoirse Ronan is someone else that could play Sinéad O'Connor. Will we see a huge actor like her cast or someone that is more unknown? Nothing is confirmed yet in terms of who will play O’Connor. Many on social media said it should be an Irish actor. Someone who is a naturally great singer. To be fair, Natalie Portman has a great voice and could easily learn the accent and O’Connor’s singing style. The delivery, intonations and cadence of her voice. Unless, like some recent music biopics, the actor will mime to the recordings, it will be quite a lot of work and preparation needed to accurately portray someone as unique and rich as Sinéad O'Connor. Even though Natalie Portman seems like a favourite and someone who definitely looks like the late icon, there is a lot to consider and balance. In terms of the age range, nationality of the actor and their experience. Whether you go for a big name that would naturally help bring people into the cinema or a newer actor who might be a more natural fit. Whoever is cast is going to get this wonderful opportunity to play a music genius early in her career. Whether the film starts before the release of Sinéad O'Connor’s debut album, The Lion and the Cobra, in 1987 or in 1990 when she released her second studio album, I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got. It is going to be a biopic that will naturally receive scrutiny. I do think that the filmmakers will get the balance right in terms of the script and narrative. Casting the right lead is essential. Whether it is Natalie Portman or Niamh Algar, you know they will pour their heart, passion and every ounce of their being into the role! It is the least the dearly-departed queen deserves. An artist that…

WE all sorely miss.

FEATURE: Kate Bush: Something Like a Song: Kashka from Baghdad (Lionheart)

FEATURE:

 

 

Kate Bush: Something Like a Song

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1978/PHOTO CREDIT: Brian Aris

 

Kashka from Baghdad (Lionheart)

__________

IN November…

Kate Bush’s second studio album, Lionheart, turns forty-seven. Following nine months after The Kick Inside, it was a rushed album in many ways. EMI determined to get a follow-up to a very successful debut. Bush was not able to write many new songs. Only three, in fact. Kashka from Baghdad is one that she pulled from her archives. Perhaps primed for The Kick Inside, it was not included for some reason. When it came to a second studio album, Bush did have to consider songs that might not have fitted with The Kick Inside. Not released as a single but undoubtably a highlight of the album, I last wrote about the song in 2022. Focusing on it as a deep cut, it is from an underrated album. Consider the ten tracks on Lionheart and the streaming numbers. Every track has been streamed over a million times but, considering how this is Kate Bush and she is a major artist, one would hope the tracks would be listened to more. Even though Wow (the album’s second single) has been streamed nearly ten millions times, Kashka from Baghdad is hovering under one-and-half million. It has not been featured on a TV. Show or film soundtrack. It did get exposure in 1979 when Kate Bush performed it as part of The Tour of Life. It was performed live for Michael Aspel in 1978, though it has not been discussed much in the modern age.

Kashka from Baghdad dates back to 1976. Amazing to think that Kate Bush wrote this song when she was eighteen (or possibly seventeen). No artist her age was writing songs like this! The documentary I have included above is around Kate Bush’s The Tour of Life. There is a short section where her brother, Paddy Bush, is interviewed and stands over an instrument. That is a  strumento da porco. He plays it on Kashka from Baghdad. It adds something unusual and exciting to the song. Giving it an extra sense of spice and the exotic. I love how this song was performed for Ask Aspel. Kate Bush originally wanted to perform In the Warm Room, though the show’s producers felt it was perhaps too risqué or sexual. Instead, they gave the green light to a song about two homosexual lovers. Before moving along, the Kate Bush Encyclopedia have some interview archive where Bush spoke about the inspiration behind Kashka from Baghdad:

“That actually came from a very strange American Detective series that I caught a couple of years ago, and there was a musical theme that they kept putting in. And they had an old house, in this particular thing, and it was just a very moody, pretty awful serious thing. And it just inspired the idea of this old house somewhere in Canada or America with two people in it that no-one knew anything about. And being a sorta small town, everybody wanted to know what everybody what else was up to. And these particular people in this house had a very private thing happening.

Personal Call, BBC Radio 1, 1979”.

I am going to come to a great feature from Dreams of Orgonon that I referenced back in 2022 when writing about Kashka from Baghdad. One that warrants repetition. It is interesting how Kashka from Baghdad fits alongside more sexual songs on Lionheart such as In the Warm Room and Symphony in Blue. A fair few of the songs on The Kick Inside had a similar mood and feel (Oh to Be in Love, L’Amour Looks Something Like You, Feel It etc.). In some interviews from 1978, there were mentions to Kashka from Baghdad. It is included in this chat Kate Bush had with Harry Doherty for Melody Maker in November 1978:

“Musically, the tracks on Lionheart are more carefully structured than before. There is, for instance, a distinct absence of straight songs, like the first album's Moving, Saxophone Song, The Man With the Child in His Eyes and The Kick Inside . Here, only Oh England, My Lionheart makes an immediate impression and I'm not sure that the move away from soft ballads (be it to secure a separate image) is such a wise one. As Bush proved on those songs on The Kick Inside, simplicity can also have its own sources of complication.

There is much about this album that is therapeutic, and often Kate Bush is the subject of her own course. Fullhouse is the most blatant example of that. <There is no evidence that this song is autobiographical.> On of the album's three unspectacular tracks musically (along with, in my opinion, In the Warm Room and Kashka From Baghdad ), it is still lyrically a fine example of ridding the brain of dangerous paranoias. The stabbing verse of "Imagination sets in,/Then all the voices begin,/Telling you things that aren't happening/(But the nig and they nag, 'til they're under your skin)" is set against the soothing chorus: "You've really got to/Remember yourself,/You've got a fullhouse in your head tonight,/Remember yourself,/Stand back and see emotion getting you uptight."

Even Fullhouse is mild, though, when compared to tracks like Symphony in Blue, In the Warm Room and Kashka From Baghdad, which exude an unashamed sensuality. Symphony in Blue, the opening track, is a hypnotic ballad with the same sort of explicit sexual uninhibitiveness as Feel It from the first album. "The more I think about sex,/The better it gets,/Here we have a purpose in life,/Good for the blood circulation,/Good for releasing the tension./The root of our reincarnation," sings Kate happily”.

No doubt Kate Bush was keen to explore so many different types of love and relationships through her music. I am interested what Dreams of Orgonon observe about the song. Kate Bush’s relationship with queerness and queer fandom is huge. She has inspired the L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.+ community and influenced queer artists like St. Vincent. Quite a few of her songs are queer friendly. Very few deal directly with homosexual relationships. Whilst it was a positive step and commendable, in terms of race relationships and representation, is the track misjudged or problematic? This article explores those questions:

“Kashka from Baghdad” thus articulates a certain type of sexual desire. It expresses a desire for a threesome. The disjointed chorus is a wail of barely suppressed lust. “I long to be with them.”  The demo makes it clear some shame comes with these feelings: “what would I do if I were seen?/what would I do if they knew my feelings?” So the slash has another player, distant from the action and narrating it from an outside position. This makes explicit the song’s voyeurism (“I watch their shadows/tall and slim in the window opposite”). Kashka and his lover are spied on. They’re desirable because they present some Other path to ecstasy (a four-word concept that explains every fetish in Bush songs).

There are major issues with this. Bush is a heterosexual woman who doesn’t do a stellar job of checking her privilege at the best of times. “Kashka” is no exception. The problem with Bush’s particular brand of slash fiction is that heterosexual pleasure is the altar on which gay acceptance is sacrificed. Kashka can only self-actualize by surrendering his homosexuality to heterosexual consumption.

Homosexuality is a spectre that haunts the song. It’s never allowed to appear onstage. It’s hearsay or it’s a shadow on the wall, something nobody in the song sees up close (“old friends never call there/some wonder if life’s inside at all”). It’s the stuff of gossip and its pleasure comes from its illicitness. Bush clearly has no problem with the illicit. In fact, she clearly considers it a good thing. But she still falls into the trap of speaking of it in hushed tones, something naughty that must be kept behind closed doors rather than pushed into the light.

This makes her treatment of Kashka’s gay life as a matter of secrecy distressing. The polite heterosexual audience needs its eyes shielded from the gay sex it’s teased with. Yes, remaining in the closet is a safety measure for many if not most gay people. But it takes a severe toll on one’s mental health. In “Kashka” the closet is a place where great, magical events happen (“at night they’re seen laughing”). The difficulties of closeted life don’t enter the equation. Bush reduces Kashka and his partner to an instrument of pleasure and titillation.

There’s a certain half-bakedness to the song as well. It awkwardly traverses through D minor and D major before exploding into the chorus in F major. “Kashka” sounds ill at ease, as if its singer is almost afraid to sing it. But indeed she sings it as if it’s naughty. And, well, yes, songs about gay sex are naughty.

One suspects this is why Bush decided to perform it on children’s television. The sheer gall of performing “Kashka from Baghdad” on a program for children like Ask Aspel is awe-inspiring and probably the best thing about the song. And the cherry on top is that Bush chose it as a replacement for “In the Warm Room,” a staunchly heterosexual track with lyrics like “her thighs are soft as marshmallows.”

There’s some courage in “Kashka.” But for the most part it’s Bush striking for gay representation and mostly landing on gay objectification. Kashka and his lover aren’t properly given the song. Why do they never go for walks? Because Bush gentrified the road.

Demoed in 1976. Recorded between July and September of 1978 at Super Bear Studios in Berres-les-Alpes, France. Personnel: Kate Bush — vocals, piano. Charlie Morgan — drums. Del Palmer — bass. Harmonies, stramento da porco, mandocello, and panpipes — Paddy Bush. Andrew Powell — joanna strumentum, production. Stuart Elliot — percussion”.

It is important to discuss the lyrics and themes explored through Kashka from Baghdad. That idea that the song could have been about gay representation and something that stood out in 1978. At a time when there were very few songs that were talking positively and proudly about gay relationships. However, I think that it is a very important track where Bush was not trying to objectify or gentrify. Instead, as a teenager, perhaps she did not have the experience and vocabulary to write a song that took a different angle. I don’t think Bush was being titillating and childish. The fact that we are discussing and dissecting this song forty-seven years after it was first heard shows that it is very important. In terms of its composition and vocal performance, I think it is one of Kate Bush’s best from her first two albums. There is this sense of desire and forbidden love (“I watch their shadows/Tall and slim/In the window opposite/I long to be with them”) and taboo (“Kashka from Baghdad/Lives in sin, they say/With another man”). Some beautiful instrumentation. Paddy Bush on strumento da porco, mandocello and panpipes; Andrew Powell (who produced Lionheart with assistance from Kate Bush) on joanna strumentum. Some wonderful bass from Del Palmer and Charlie Morgan and Stuart Elliott on percussion. Kate Bush on piano. I really love Kashka from Baghdad and feel that it is an important song that, whilst perhaps a little naïve or problematic in places, is fascinating and important to discuss. A gem from 1978’s Lionheart that people…

NEED to listen to more.

FEATURE: Elizabeth Alker’s Everything We Do is Music: How 20th-Century Classical Music Shaped Pop: An Essential Book for Every Music Fan

FEATURE:

 

 

Elizabeth Alker’s Everything We Do is Music: How 20th-Century Classical Music Shaped Pop

IMAGE CREDIT: Faber & Faber

 

An Essential Book for Every Music Fan

__________

I have known…

IN THIS PHOTO: Little Simz and the Chineke! Orchestra at the Royal Festival Hall, London, during this year’s Meltdown Festival (which Little Simz curated)/PHOTO CREDIT: Pete Woodhead

Elizabeth Alker’s work for a while now.; Years ago, whilst working for BBC Radio 6 Music, she presented the music news. Now, on BBC Radio 3, she hosts Unclassified and Classical Live. I have written some features recently about Classical music. How Pop artists are performing live with orchestras. It is not just a cynical way to appear grander and classier. They know that this incredible addition adds something incredible to their music. I think that Classical music is still seen as niche and orchestras are not just reserved for that world. Like Pop/Rock and Classic have nothing in common. Whether performing alongside Dua Lipa or another artist, uniting these different spheres is extraordinary. It means that Pop fans and those who come to see the artist are introduced to music and a genre they might not know about. It is not cheapening Classical and making it more pop culture. I think that it gives it long overdue attention. It is not only Pop with a capital P that uses Classical musicians. Little Simz recently performed with the Chineke! Orchestra. That took place in June during her Meltdown Festival set. A perfect combination, these songs were given nuance because of the orchestra. I think we will see a lot more of this going forward. However, it is not a new phenomenon for Classical and Pop worlds to meld. This has been something that has been present for decades. Maybe not as fulsome and epic and fifty-two-piece orchestras and massive Pop artists (Dua Lipa) playing at the Royal Albert Hall. Think of groups like The Beatles and how Classical artists can be heard in their songs – most noticeably Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’s A Day in the Life.

This brings me to Elizabeth Alker’s book, Everything We Do is Music: How 20th-Century Classical Music Shaped Pop. It is released on 28th August through Faber & Faber. (I might check out the Audible version). People might not realise how extensive the usage of Classical music is in the history of Pop music. Specifically, the previous century. Alker has been promoting the book at the moment. As a music fan who is keen to not only broaden my horizons and knowledge but also learn more about the Pop world in general, this is fascinating! I listen to BBC Radio 6 Music a lot but do not tune into BBC Radio 3 as much as I should. I do not listen to modern Classical music. I know how important this is. Considering the debt Pop music owes to Classical artists, I am compelled to investigate shows like Unclassified. Not only modern Classical artists too. I don’t think we can think about Pop music in the twentieth-century without recognising the influence of Classical music:

“A panoramic exploration of the ways in which pop and rock were transformed by the pioneering visionaries of classical music.

The worlds of pop and rock owe a much greater debt to the classical canon than we realise. A direct and fascinating lineage draws from the experimentalism of Pierre Henry to The Beatles' 'Tomorrow Never Knows', from Stockhausen to Donna Summer's 'I Feel Love' and from Bruckner to Sonic Youth via Glenn Branca.

In Everything We Do is Music, Elizabeth Alker shines a light on the fertile ground that exists between the borders of classical music and pop. She showcases the innovators of the former and their fans and collaborators in the latter, and explores how together these artists challenged the notion that such musical worlds are mutually exclusive.

** Featuring interviews with Sir Paul McCartney, Steve Reich, Nils Frahm, Soweto Kinch, Jonny Greenwood, the Blessed Madonna and more. **”.

I am going to move to an interview with The Times. Elizabeth Alker explains how this great divide that has always seemingly existed by the disparate worlds of Pop and Classical are starting to blur. There is a harmony, relationship and chemistry that has been present in twentieth-century Pop music and influenced and shaped it sound – and continue to this day:

“It started when I was a kid and my dad played Tubular Bells by Mike Oldfield,” Alker says, who grew up in Rochdale, the child of classically trained pianists and music teachers, of her mission to bring classical and pop under the same umbrella. “He would get really excited and say, ‘Wait for this!’ as the various instruments came in. Hearing pop infused with the spirit of classical music was interesting to me.”

Alker’s argument is that many of today’s classical musicians grew up listening to pop and are informed by it. “Anna Meredith is a good example,” she says, citing the Mercury prize-nominated Scottish composer. “She likes going to karaoke bars and singing power ballads.”

Then there is the American composer Rhys Chatham and his involvement in no wave, the late-Seventies New York movement of which Sonic Youth and the singer Lydia Lunch were a part, where musical ability was rejected in favour of ideas and attitude. Chatham’s revelation came from seeing the punk pioneers the Ramones at the insalubrious Manhattan dive CBGB’s in 1976.

“Chatham told me that because he had trained in a classical way he was too stiff,” Alker says. “People can train for years in classical music and still come up with something really boring. He went to punk bars where people were throwing beer over each other. Playing one chord with real attitude will impact an audience far more than a symphony played with no attitude. It is the spirit of the thing that people latch on to.”

As Alker points out, behemoths of the western classical tradition such as Mozart and Vivaldi were, like all the best rock and pop stars, larger-than-life characters possessed of both manic intensity and great tunes. “And composers like Bartok and Dvorak looked at what was happening in folk music, which is what Bob Dylan did. The music of Vaughan Williams sounds like England. That isn’t so different from the pastoral psychedelia of the early Seventies.”

Hang on a minute, rock’n’roll is essentially the blues speeded up — how can classical music be as important to the story as Alker says it is? “Jean-Michel Jarre is very good on this,” she replies. “He went to gigs by British groups at the Paris Olympia in the Sixties, saw how their sound came from America, believed it could be infused with the European classical canon and realised it was possible through electronics.”

IN THIS PHOTO: Elizabeth Alker/PHOTO CREDIT: Jake Millers

The Second World War played a key part. Alker explains that advancements in technology accelerated due to the war, with new studios set up throughout Europe to make propaganda broadcasts. In the decades that followed pioneering European composers such as Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry used their classical training on this technology and the studio space available to them. “The development of electronica in Europe ran parallel to the explosion of blues-based rock’n’roll in America,” Alker says. “And combining it all were the Beatles.”

Alker spoke to Paul McCartney, who attended concerts by European electronic composers such as Karlheinz Stockhausen and Luciano Berio just as the Beatles were changing pop with Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and the White Album. “Paul was gloriously unpretentious about it,” she says. “He went to find pioneering classical music and brought it back into the Beatles’ sound, which George Martin allowed and facilitated. He said at one point, ‘We don’t work music, we play music.’ Paul was unburdened by academia. He didn’t care if people took him seriously or not and it was so refreshing.”

Over in Germany and Japan the shame of being on the losing side of the war, not to mention embracing fascism, required a total reinvention. “Stockhausen was creating a new electronic sonic palette from scratch, which has symmetry in Germany building a new culture from the ashes,” Alker says. “Kraftwerk then looked to Stockhausen as the touchstone for the new German tradition. And the parallels with Japan were obvious. Both countries were using machines to build themselves up again, which led to a classically trained musician like Ryuichi Sakamoto forming [the Japanese electro-pop pioneers] Yellow Magic Orchestra.”

There are plenty of other rabbit holes Alker heads down: the droning intensity of the Velvet Underground being a product of the viola player John Cale studying under the composer La Monte Young. Ambient house taking its cue from the sampling techniques of the New York composer Steve Reich. In Everything We Do Is Music Alker breaks down the idea that classical and rock and pop are distinct traditions with nothing to do with each other and argues that goes all the way to the lifestyle”.

IN THIS PHOTO: Paul McCartney with Brian Epstein at Abbey Road Studios/PHOTO CREDIT: David Magnus/Shutterstock

I am going to end with an extract of an interview between Elizabeth Alker and Paul McCartney that appears in Everything We Do is Music: How 20th-Century Classical Music Shaped Pop. McCartney explaining and exploring how people like John Cage and great Avant Garde composers were hugely instrumental. How he owes a debt to them. It is a fascinating interview that appears in full in the book. Elizabeth Alker writing for The Guardian. If you are a Beatles/McCartney fan or not, what the icon says about the role and influence of Classical composers and innovators has not only infused his writing and music. It extends right through the world of Pop in the twentieth-century – and, as mentioned, Pop of today:

“In the mid-1960s, as well as topping the charts, turning a generation of teenage girls hysterical and finding themselves the focus of obsessive media attention, the Beatles were also engaged with, and

The Beatles, McCartney tells me, also took their cue from the 1956 piece Radio Music by John Cage for one of the band’s most famous songs: “Cage had a piece that started at one end of the radio’s range,” he says, “and he just turned the knob and went through to the end, scrolling randomly through all the stations. I brought that idea to I Am the Walrus. I said, ‘It’s got to be random.’ We ended up landing on some Shakespeare – King Lear. It was lovely having that spoken word at that moment. And that came from Cage.”

Two men who certainly did that were French composer-engineers Pierre Henry and Pierre Schaeffer who, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, pioneered a style of composition called musique concrète. Working in Parisian studios set up for propaganda broadcasts during the second world war, the pair used turntables and tape machines to forge an entirely original method of composing which, in line with French movements in art and philosophy at the time, sought to deconstruct established ideas and build from scratch a new means of making music.

This was iconoclasm driven by an erosion of trust in a ruling class that had led millions to their deaths during two brutal international conflicts. Schaeffer and Henry recorded natural or found sounds on to magnetic tape – the bark of a dog, the whistle or chugging of a train, a cackling voice – and then, using tape machines to slow down, speed up or reverse the original sound, they created collages of altered or “manipulated” recordings that are completely bewildering and mesmeric. Our ear is lured by that which is familiar and then unsettled by its abstraction. The suggestion is that all is not what it seems – the very essence of psychedelia.

“Not everything we see is clear and figurative,” McCartney says to me, pointing to a Willem de Kooning painting next to us on the wall. “Sometimes when you’re asleep or you rub your eye, you see an abstract: your mind knows about it. We know about this stuff. It was the same with music. We were messing around, but our minds could still accept it because it was something that we already kind of knew anyway. Even though we were in another lane to more classical composers, we were kind of equal in that we also wanted freedom.”

After buying a pair of his own Brenell tape machines, McCartney set about looping and spooling these ideas into the work he had to do for “his day job”. He describes the recording of Tomorrow Never Knows, “which was shaping up to be kind of a far-out Beatles song”. McCartney remembers carrying a plastic bag full of tape loops – on which he’d recorded various sounds at home – to Abbey Road during sessions for Revolver. “I set up the tape machines to create popping, whirring and dissolving sounds all mixed together”.

The result is a myriad of strange musical textures and meditative drones, a sonic vacuum into which all our troubling thoughts and feelings are swallowed up and disappear. It’s a big part of what made the Beatles as colourful as the recreational substances that were so popular at the time. It’s also the alchemical element in their work that helped put them in a different league, in terms of their legacy and influence.

Eventually John Lennon also procured a pair of Brenell machines and entered new realms of experimentalism. This produced the hypnotic track Revolution 9: “John was fascinated and he loved the craziness of it,” McCartney says. He, meanwhile, preferred to use these new studio gadgets “in a controlled way”, working within the pop-song format, cherrypicking interesting stylistic elements and twisting them into the Beatles’ established song-writing template.

Together the pair fashioned a new, intelligent and avant garde-informed kind of pop music – a reminder, as if we need it, of the magic of the Lennon-McCartney partnership. The push and pull of two genius creatives working together to upend the status quo. “You think, ‘Oh well our audience wants a pop song,’”.

My quest into the roots of this trippy magic in the Beatles’ music is just one of many explorations I made into the way the 20th century’s most innovative pop musicians borrowed from the classical avant garde, for my book Everything We Do Is Music. In it, I draw a line from John Cale’s drone in the Velvet Underground to the extraordinary Indian classical-inspired sounds in music by La Monte Young; and connect the blistering microtonality of Polish sonorism to the angst-ridden rock of Radiohead. The feminist philosophies of Pauline Oliveros formed a blueprint for techno, meanwhile, and US composers such as Edgard Varèse, John Cage, Steve Reich and Philip Glass found ways to reflect the energy and freneticism of the urban metropolis in their work. In each case, I found that artists on both sides of the pop/classical divide reached across it, disregarding those things that usually separate us – education, class, nationality, gender – to do something epochal”.

Pop and Rock have been transformed by Classical music and its innovators. For the reviews that have arrived already (“Revelation after revelation . . . I love music more for reading it.' Guy Garvey; 'Alker joins the dots by following myriad musical ley lines. A fascinating journey into sound.' Mark Radcliffe; 'Reveals so much about the hidden connections between the sounds we love . . . A must read.' Sara Mohr-Pietsch”), it sounds like every music fans needs own this book! On Tuesday, 2nd September, Elizabeth Alker will be in conversation with Mary Anne Hobbs (BBC Radio 6 Music) at Foyle’s Bookshop on London’s Charing Cross Road (107). You can get your ticket and hear what is likely to be a fascinating discussion between two friends an music lovers. How perhaps the worlds of BBC Radio 3 and BBC Radio 6 Music are linked. In a wider sense, a delve into the vital role Classical music and its composers played in shaping Pop music last century. Its legacy and effects being felt, evolved and continued now. There is no doubting that Everything We Do is Music: How 20th-Century Classical Music Shaped Pop is one of the most essential and must-read music books…

OF this year.

FEATURE: The Great American Songbook: Outkast

FEATURE:

 

 

The Great American Songbook

IN THIS PHOTO: Outkast’s André 3000 and Big Boi

 

Outkast

__________

THIS feature series…

PHOTO CREDIT: Kenneth Cappello

is about American artists and songwriters who are extraordinary and hugely influential. For this part, I am focusing on one of the most influential Hip-Hop acts ever. Outkast formed in Atlanta, Georgia in 1992 and consist of Big Boi (Antwan Patton) and André 3000 (André Benjamin, formerly known as Dré). I will end with a mixtape of twenty essential Outkast songs. Before that, below is some biography that tells the story of a legendary and enormously influential Hip-Hop duo:

“Benjamin, who grew up in Decatur, and Patton, a native of Savannah, met as tenth graders at Tri-Cities High School in the East Point area of Atlanta. Their mutual interest in rapping led them to form a group, and they soon began a relationship with Organized Noize, a production team headed by Rico Wade, which operated out of an unfinished basement studio known as “the Dungeon.” Through Wade and the so-called Dungeon Family, the rappers met LaFace Records founders and producers Antonio “L.A.” Reid and Kenneth “Babyface” Edmonds, who signed the two to a contract when they were both seventeen years old.

Their first single, the Christmas song “Player’s Ball,” spent six weeks at the top of the Billboard rap charts in 1993. The duo released their first album, Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik, in 1994, which yielded two more successful singles. Produced by the Organized Noize team, the album featured a guest appearance by fellow Atlanta hip-hop group Goodie Mob and sold more than a million copies. In 1996 OutKast released ATLiens, which featured several songs produced by the duo, including the hit song “Elevators (Me and You).” With this album Benjamin developed a persona of a mystical, abstemious “poet” that stood in contrast with Patton’s image as a partying, womanizing “player.” The album met with widespread critical and commercial acclaim, selling more than a million and a half copies.

Patton and Benjamin solidified their creative control by producing most of the songs on their next album, Aquemini (1998), which reached sales of 2.5 million copies. The album yielded another hit single for the group, “Rosa Parks,” and the song’s namesake, the civil rights–era legend Rosa Parks, filed a lawsuit against the group, but a judge eventually affirmed OutKast’s right to use her name in the song.

The album Stankonia (2000) represented a tour de force for OutKast and their label LaFace. The album, which sold 4 million copies, was primarily produced by OutKast, and was greeted with near-universal critical acclaim. The single “Ms. Jackson” became their first number-one pop single, and the album garnered five Grammy Award nominations and won two Grammy Awards. Subsequently, they toured as the opening act for hip-hop singer Lauryn Hill, using a live backup band and cementing their position as representatives of hip-hop music’s creative vanguard. Following the release of Stankonia, the pair started their own record label, Aquemini Records, and in mid-2001 (a year that also saw the introduction of another venture, OutKast Clothing) released the label’s first record, by rapper Slimm Calhoun.

OutKast released Speakerboxxx/The Love Below in 2003, which proved to be an enormous commercial, critical, and crossover success, earning the duo three Grammy Awards, including the award for Album of the Year, demonstrating the record’s strong appeal to a pop music audience. The album produced two hit singles, “Hey Ya!” and “The Way You Move.” In 2004 “Hey Ya” achieved multiplatinum status with the Recording Industry of America for number of downloads sold. That same year OutKast received the Atlanta chapter of the Recording Academy’s Atlanta Hero Award, along with producer Dallas Austin, concert promoter Alex Cooley, and pianist Chuck Leavell.

In 2005 the duo released Outskirts: The Lost Remixes, and in 2006 they starred together in the musical film Idlewild, set in the South during the 1930s. That same year they released an album of the same name that was inspired by, but not a soundtrack to, the film.

Benjamin’s acting career began a few years before his work on Idlewild. He moved to Los Angeles, California, in 2002 to pursue an acting career and landed his first small role in the film Hollywood Homicide (2003). He next appeared in the 2005 films Be Cool, Four Brothers, and Revolver (with a U.S. release date of 2007). In 2006 Benjamin began providing the voice of Sunny Bridges in the animated television program Class of 3000 (2006-7), followed by roles in the films Battle in Seattle (2007) and Semi-Pro (2008).

The duo followed separate paths in the years that followed, with Patton releasing a series of well received solo works, including his acclaimed debut, Sir Lucious Left Foot: The Son of Chico Dusty (2008). Though he occasionally collaborated with other artists, Benjamin would not release a full length album until 2023, when he dropped New Blue Sun, an entirely instrumental work consisting largely of woodwinds”.

I am going to come to that mixtape. Terrific tracks from Outkast. If you are a huge fan of theirs or do not really know about them, I hope that this assortment of songs is of interest. Big Boi and André 3000 at their very best. It goes to show why they…

ARE so revered.

FEATURE: John Lennon at Eighty-Five: Exploring Five of His Masterpieces

FEATURE:

 

 

John Lennon at Eighty-Five

IN THIS PHOTO: John Lennon in 1971/PHOTO CREDIT: Iain MacMillan

 

Exploring Five of His Masterpieces

__________

LOOKING ahead to…

IN THIS PHOTO: John Lennon and Yoko Ono sitting next to George Adamy’s artwork Month of June 1970, in New York on 4th September, 1971/PHOTO CREDIT: Iain MacMillan/Yoko Ono Lennon

9th October, that is when we remember John Lennon on his eighty-fifth birthday. It is sad that we lost the legend almost forty-five years ago now. However, rather than make this morbid or tragic, I want to use this birthday feature to spotlight and explore five of his songwriting masterpieces. Three of them were with The Beatles and two of them are solo songs. Demonstrating his songwriting genius and versatility. I am going to go inside In My Life, I Am the Walrus, Strawberry Fields Forever, Imagine and Jealous Guy. Some would include others or remove one or two, but I think we get a good representation of his brilliance. One Beatles song from 1965’s Rubber Soul (In My Life), and two from 1967’s Magical Mystery Tour E.P./album (I Am the Walrus and Strawberry Fields Forever; the latter of which was a double A-side with Penny Lane). Imagine was from the 1971 album of the same name. Jealous Guy is taken from Imagine too. I am going to start out with the standout track from The Beatles’ Rubber Soul. Even if Paul McCartney might claim he wrote some of In My Life, it is a John Lennon song. One of his most personal and tender. Maybe not renowned for that beforehand, it showed a new side to his songwriting. It is a beautiful song that so many people can relate to. A piece of work that Lennon referred to as his first major work as it was one he wrote about his own life. There are claims that Paul McCarney wrote the melody. However, the majority of In My Life is from John Lennon. Thanks to The Beatles Bible for some background to the song and some interesting interview archive:

“Lennon regarded ‘In My Life’ particularly highly, citing it – along with ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’, ‘I Am The Walrus’, and ‘Help!’ – as among his best.

For ‘In My Life’, I had a complete set of lyrics after struggling with a journalistic vision of a trip from home to downtown on a bus naming every sight. It became ‘In My Life’, which is a remembrance of friends and lovers of the past. Paul helped with the middle eight musically. But all lyrics written, signed, sealed, and delivered. And it was, I think, my first real major piece of work. Up till then it had all been sort of glib and throwaway. And that was the first time I consciously put my literary part of myself into the lyric. Inspired by Kenneth Allsop, the British journalist, and Bob Dylan.

One of the first songs to be recorded for Rubber Soul, The Beatles recorded the rhythm track of ‘In My Life’ on 18 October 1965. This they did in three takes, after a period of rehearsal.

The instrumental break was left without a solo, as the group was undecided as to how it should sound. This dilemma was solved on 22 October by George Martin.

‘In My Life’ is one of my favourite songs because it is so much John. A super track and such a simple song. There’s a bit where John couldn’t decide what to do in the middle and, while they were having their tea break, I put down a baroque piano solo which John didn’t hear until he came back. What I wanted was too intricate for me to do live, so I did it with a half-speed piano, then sped it up, and he liked it.

George Martin
Anthology”.

IN THIS PHOTO: John Lennon in Austria in 1965/PHOTO CREDIT: Roger Fritz

The Pop History Dig provide some wonderful details about In My Life. What they write and have collated about the song’s legacy. How it affected John Lennon’s songwriting. How it has affected other people. It is without doubt one of the greatest songs from The Beatles. You cannot hear anything but John Lennon’s voice in the song:

“However, what is most notable about “In My Life,” in addition to its role in the evolution of the Beatles’ and Lennon’s music, is the song’s usage and popularity since 1965.

Among Beatles fans, and even non-fans, “In My Life” has become a favored piece of music. It is heard frequently at weddings, anniversaries, funerals and other occasions, whether family celebrations or more somber public occasions where nostalgia and reflection are called for. Some who have grown up with the song, have requested in advance that it be played at their funerals as a remembrance and farewell song.

According to SongFacts.com, “In My Life” was played at Kurt Cobain’s funeral in 1994. Cobain was the frontman for the rock group Nirvana. The Beatles were an early and important music influence on him. Cobain had cited Lennon as his “idol” in journals he kept during his time with Nirvana. At the 2010 Oscars ceremony, James Taylor performed “In My Life”during the “In Memoriam” segment, honoring film stars and entertainers who died the previous year. And among everyday people, too, the song has resonance in a variety of ways. “Charles” of Bronxville, New York, for example, adding a comment at SongFacts.com, noted:

…When my daughter was born, she was delivered by C-Section. I was in the delivery room and got to hold her. Once she was bundled up, the Dr. said I should take her out to the waiting area while they closed the incision. I took her out and held her. I sat there with tears rolling down my face and sang this song to her. I thought it should be the first. I still do.

“Mister P” of Magnolia, Texas, also writing on SongFacts.com, noted: “As fine a song as ever penned. It took several decades of maturing for its lyrics to finally hit me. I don’t know how such a young man could create such mature lyrics.” Lennon was 25 years old when he wrote “In My Life”.

Let’s move to two epic and beautifully unusual songs from Magical Mystery Tour. I Am the Walrus only appeared on the Magical Mystery Tour E.P. and album and was never released as a single. I am going to return to The Beatles Bible, because there are some crucial and revealing interview archive material. It is criminal that I Am the Walrus was never released as a single:

“Lennon had wanted ‘I Am The Walrus’ to be The Beatles’ next single after ‘All You Need Is Love’, but Paul McCartney and George Martin felt that ‘Hello, Goodbye’ was the more commercial song. The decision led to resentment from Lennon, who complained after the group’s split that “I got sick and tired of being Paul’s backup band”.

The song was written in August 1967, at the peak of the Summer of Love and shortly after the release of Sgt Pepper. Lennon later claimed to have written the opening lines under the influence of LSD.

The first line was written on one acid trip one weekend, the second line on another acid trip the next weekend, and it was filled in after I met Yoko.

John Lennon, 1980
All We Are Saying, David Sheff

‘I Am The Walrus’ was a composite of three song fragments. The first part was inspired by a two-note police siren Lennon heard while at home in Weybridge. This became “Mr city policeman sitting pretty…”

Hunter Davies recounted the beginnings of the second part in his authorised 1968 biography of The Beatles:

He’d written down down another few words that day, just daft words, to put to another bit of rhythm. ‘Sitting on a cornflake, waiting for the man to come.’ I thought he said ‘van to come’, which he hadn’t, but he liked it better and said he’d use it instead.

The third part of ‘I Am The Walrus’ started from the phrase “sitting in an English country garden” which, as Davies noted, Lennon was fond of doing for hours at a time. Lennon repeated the phrase to himself until a melody came.

I don’t know how it will all end up. Perhaps they’ll turn out to be different parts of the same song – sitting in an English garden, waiting for the van to come. I don’t know.

John Lennon
The Beatles, Hunter Davies”.

In 2017, The Atlantic analysed I Am the Walrus fifty years after its release. A song that could mean nothing or everything, it is an undoubted John Lennon masterpiece. One that has not been matched by anyone. Again, this is one of the greatest Beatles songs. Completely different to In My Life, it shows that there were no limits to Lennon’s songwriting imagination and depth:

“Nonsense comes in many shapes and sizes. You can use relatively plain language to conjure absurd or incongruous images, like the act of sitting on a cornflake. You can juxtapose words that don’t seem like they belong together, like semolina and pilchard (coarse wheat and sardines, an odd mix—though Hunter Davies says they were both “foods from the ’50s that we all hated”). You can make new, silly-sounding words by playing with preexisting words, like rhyming expert with texpert, or melding crab and locker into crabalocker. Or you can make goo-goo noises.

Lennon fills out the chorus with the purest of nonsense. In the lyrics printed in the Magical Mystery Tour gatefold, it says GOO GOO GOO JOOB, but most prefer to transcribe it as goo goo ga joob or goo goo g’joob. The third syllable is unstressed, both in terms of the syncopated meter and the phonology of the nonsense words, so it’s not a full-fledged goo.

It’s unforgettable gibberish, though it often gets mixed up in people’s memories with coo coo ca-choo from Simon & Garfunkel’s “Mrs. Robinson,” as the two songs came out around the same time. “I Am the Walrus” was recorded in September 1967 and released on record that November. The Graduate hit movie theaters in December, featuring an early partial rendition of “Mrs. Robinson,” but the complete version with coo coo ca-choo in it didn’t come out until April of the following year, on the album Bookends. So Paul Simon might have been nodding at Lennon, but not vice versa.

Some Beatle-ologists claim that goo goo ga joob is taken from James Joyce’s stream-of-consciousness epic, Finnegans Wake. It certainly sounds Joycean, and it would be nice to think of “I Am the Walrus,” Finnegans Wake, and Carroll’s Alice stories forming a kind of wordplay-laden intertextual triangle. Finnegans Wake, after all, has many echoes of Carroll, and the eggman Humpty Dumpty figures in it as well, with his great fall paralleling the Fall of Man. One would-be expert-texpert on the “Turn Me On, Dead Man” website wrote that goo goo ga joob are “the last words uttered by Humpty Dumpty before his fall”.

I will move to a couple of John Lennon solo songs in a minute. However, before moving on, it is worth noting another 1967 classic. Maybe there was lysergic influence that helped shape I Am the Walrus and Strawberry Fields Forever. Strawberry Fields Forever is often voted as the greatest Beatles track ever. Further proof of John Lennon’s brilliance. The Beatles Bible is once again at hand to provide some interview archive about a song that formed part of the double A-side alongside Paul McCartney’s Penny Lane:

“Like ‘Penny Lane’, ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ was a nostalgic look back at The Beatles’ past in Liverpool. Strawberry Field was the name of a Salvation Army children’s home near John Lennon’s childhood home in Woolton.

I’ve seen Strawberry Field described as a dull, grimy place next door to him that John imagined to be a beautiful place, but in the summer it wasn’t dull and grimy at all: it was a secret garden. John’s memory of it wasn’t to do with the fact that it was a Salvation Army home; that was up at the house. There was a wall you could bunk over and it was a rather wild garden, it wasn’t manicured at all, so it was easy to hide in.

Paul McCartney
Many Years From Now, Barry Miles

With his childhood friends Pete Shotton and Ivan Vaughan, Lennon would roam the grounds of Strawberry Field. Additionally, each summer there would be a garden party held in the grounds, which he especially looked forward to.

As soon as we could hear the Salvation Army band starting, John would jump up and down shouting, ‘Mimi, come on. We’re going to be late.’

Mimi Smith
The Beatles, Hunter Davies

Through the lens of LSD, however, the song turned from simple nostalgia into inward reflection. Lennon’s self doubt came to the fore, at times clouded by inarticulacy and hallucinogenic sensations.

He later described ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’, along with ‘Help!’, as “one of the few true songs I ever wrote… They were the ones I really wrote from experience and not projecting myself into a situation and writing a nice story about it.”

The second line [sic] goes, ‘No one I think is in my tree.’ Well, what I was trying to say in that line is ‘Nobody seems to be as hip as me, therefore I must be crazy or a genius.’ It’s the same problem as I had when I was five: ‘There is something wrong with me because I seem to see things other people don’t see. Am I crazy, or am I a genius?’ … What I’m saying, in my insecure way, is ‘Nobody seems to understand where I’m coming from. I seem to see things in a different way from most people.’

John Lennon, 1980
All We Are Saying, David Sheff”.

Earlier this year, Music Radar wrote about Strawberry Fields Forever. A song that Lennon claimed was the best that he wrote for The Beatles, Lennon claimed it was “psychoanalysis set to music”. It was so far ahead of its time. I don’t think we have heard a song like it. Artists might try and channel the spirit of Strawberry Fields Forever. However, it is distinctly the work of John Lennon and cannot be equalled:

“On 13 February 1967, Strawberry Fields Forever was released as a double A-side with Penny Lane.

In line with the band’s usual practice of not including tracks released as singles on albums, Strawberry Fields Forever was omitted from Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, a decision which George Martin later acknowledged was a “dreadful mistake”.

Strawberry Fields Forever/Penny Lane was the first Beatles single since Please Please Me in 1963 not to reach No. 1.

The song reached No. 2 in the UK, kept from the top slot by Englebert Humperdinck’s Please Release Me.

Music writer Peter Doggett noted that the failure of Strawberry Fields Forever/Penny Lane to reach the top slot was “arguably the most disgraceful statistic in chart history”.

Doggett described Strawberry Fields Forever as "the greatest pop record ever made" adding that it is “a record that never dates, because it lives outside time”.

The stunning inventiveness of Strawberry Fields Forever left both fans and critics bewildered and breathless.

It was the sound of The Beatles taking a huge creative stride forward.

In the States, the song marked the point at which writers sought for the first time to elevate pop to a higher cultural plain. A 1967 feature in Time magazine led the way:

“[The] Beatles have developed into the single most creative force in pop music. Wherever they go, the pack follows. And where they have gone in recent months, not even their most ardent supporters would ever have dreamed of.

“They have bridged the heretofore impassable gap between rock and classical, mixing elements of Bach, Oriental and electronic music with vintage twang to achieve the most compellingly original sounds ever heard in pop music”.

There are many masterpieces Lennon wrote as a solo artist. Whether on his solo albums or with Yoko Ono, I could have included so many other. Working Class Hero (from 1970’s John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band) or #9 Dream (from 1974’s Walls and Bridges). However, I want to feature two from 1971’s Imagine. I shall start with the title track. In 2018, the BBC ran a feature that coincided with the release of the book, Imagine John Yoko. Ono was finally credited as a co-writer of Imagine in 2017. Although it is a co-write, it is still John Lennon at the core. Him driving the song. Therefore, I can consider it his masterpiece and Yoko Ono’s:

“It is the ultimate peace anthem; an ode to idealism. But Imagine is also a song about love. When it was composed, in 1971, John Lennon and Yoko Ono had been together for three years. She was lambasted by some as the ‘dragon lady’ who had broken up Lennon's marriage to Cynthia – and, in the process, The Beatles. Yet, as a new book from Thames & Hudson suggests, Ono was misrepresented – even when it came to being credited for a song’s creation. In a 1980 interview reprinted in Imagine John Yoko, Lennon admits that Ono was equally responsible for Imagine; in 2017, Ono was formally recognised as co-writer of the iconic song.

As the book shows, through a collection of rarely seen photos and archive interviews along with insider accounts detailing the making of the album, Lennon and Ono inspired each other from their first meeting.

I always had this dream of meeting an artist woman I would fall in love with – John Lennon

In 1966, Lennon went to a preview of Ono’s show at the Indica gallery in London, and wanted to contribute to a piece called Hammer a Nail in. But Ono was reluctant to let him, as she recalls in an archive interview in the book. “I said, ‘All right, if he pays five shillings, it’s okay,’ because I decided that my painting will never sell anyway.”

IN THIS PHOTO: John Lennon and Yoko Ono at a roadside telephone booth in New York, June 1971/PHOTO CREDIT: Yoko Ono Lennon

Lennon had another idea, adding in the interview: “I said, ‘Listen I’ll give you an imaginary five shillings and hammer an imaginary nail in, is that okay?’ And her whole trip is this: ‘Imagine this, imagine that.’”

Ono replies: “Imagine, imagine. So I was thinking, ‘Oh, here’s a guy who’s playing the same game I’m playing.’ And I was really shocked you know, I thought, ‘Who is it?’”.

The song, in a way, deals with imagining another world on the level of two people – as well as in a larger sense. “George Orwell and all these guys have projected very negative views of the future. And imagining a projection is a very strong magic power,” said Ono. “I mean that. That’s the way society was created. And so, because they’re setting up all these negative images, that’s gonna create the society. So we were trying to create a more positive image, which is, of course, gonna set up another kind of society.”

Lennon referenced humans’ desire to fly – “which might’ve taken us a long time, but it took somebody to imagine it first”. He explained his reasoning. “People said, ‘You’re naive, you’re dumb, you’re stupid.’ It might have hurt us on a personal level to be called names, but what we were doing – you can call it magic, meditation, projection of goal – which business people do, they have courses on it. The footballers do it. They pray, they meditate before the game… People project their own future. So, what we wanted to do was to say, ‘Let’s imagine a nice future.’”

Ono describes how they felt about Imagine at the time: “We both liked the song a lot but we honestly didn’t realise it would turn into the powerful song it has, all over the world… We just did it because we believed in the words and it just reflected how we were feeling”.

I will end with a song that is distinctly John Lennon. Completely his D.N.A. Jealous Guy is also from 1971’s Imagine. Like In My Life six years earlier, Jealous Guy is hugely honest and open. John Lennon opening his heart and soul. A song about the possessive nature of love and devotion, it was this apology and decleration to Yoko Ono. Udiscovermusic took us inside the song for their feature of 2024:

“One of John Lennon’s best-known and most-loved songs, “Jealous Guy” first saw the light of day on his 1971 Imagine album, before Roxy Music had a No.1 hit with their version, released in February 1981 as a tribute to the then recently murdered ex-Beatle. Even by the time John finished his version, however, the song had already been through a number of incarnations.

‘I was dreaming more or less’

“Jealous Guy” began life during The Beatles’ time studying Transcendental Meditation with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in Rishikesh, India, in spring 1968. Both Lennon and McCartney composed songs inspired by a lecture given by the Maharishi about humans’ position as the sons of mother nature. Paul’s “Mother Nature’s Son” is one of “The White Album”’s more gentle moments, while John wrote “Child Of Nature,” a song that began “On the road to Rishikesh, I was dreaming more or less,” sung to the melody that would become familiar to millions as “Jealous Guy.”

The Beatles recorded a demo of the song in May 1968 in preparation for inclusion on “The White Album.” That Esher demo is a tender performance, with mandolin adding a Mediterranean flavor to the piece. For whatever reason, however, the song didn’t make the album; Lennon reintroduced it during the Get Back sessions of January 1969.

‘I was a very jealous, possessive guy’

By the time the song reappeared in 1971, only the melody remained. Encouraged by Yoko Ono to “think about something more sensitive,” John penned a new set of lyrics that seemed to address his changing attitude towards women. Talking to journalist David Sheff in 1980, he revealed: “The lyrics explain themselves clearly: I was a very jealous, possessive guy. Toward everything. A very insecure male. A guy who wants to put his woman in a little box, lock her up, and just bring her out when he feels like playing with her. She’s not allowed to communicate with the outside world – outside of me – because it makes me feel insecure.”

This certainly ties in with a subject John spoke about at the time of recording the Imagine album. In an interview with the BBC’s Woman’s Hour radio show, conducted at his Tittenhurst home, where the album was recorded, he talked about his changing view of relationships: “When you actually are in love with somebody you tend to be jealous, and want to own them and possess them one hundred percent, which I do… I love Yoko, I want to possess her completely. I don’t want to stifle her, you know? That’s the danger, that you want to possess them to death.”

‘So flabbergasted I can’t play’

The song was recorded at the eight-track studio that John had built at Tittenhurst Park, near Ascot, on May 24, 1971. A number of notable musicians contributed to the recording, among them in-demand session musician Nicky Hopkins, whose distinctive, gospel-tinged piano makes the song instantly familiar from the off. As Yoko later put it: “Nicky Hopkins’ playing on ‘Jealous Guy’ is so melodic and beautiful that it still makes everyone cry, even now.”

Drummer Jim Keltner described the session as “like being in a dream,” noting, “Nobody in the world ever played piano like Nicky Hopkins, and Klaus [Voorman] has such a tremendous deep feel on the bass. Having John’s voice in your headphones, glancing up and seeing him at the microphone – 1971 – fresh from The Beatles and such a tremendous musician and songwriter – singing this beautiful, haunting little song. You only have a few moments of those in your life as a musician and that was one of them.”

Also present at the session were Joey Molland and Tom Evans from Badfinger. Molland later wrote of the session: “In walks John Lennon and he’s really bug-eyed, really gone – ‘Hello everybody!’ He was shouting. It was 11 o’clock at night and he’d just gotten out of bed… I was just in awe, just ga-ga. Then he sits down on the stool and starts playing ‘Jealous Guy’ and I’m so flabbergasted I can’t play”.

Five songs that showcase the songwriting genius of John Lennon! Whilst Paul McCartney might have assisted with In My Life and Yoko Ono co-wrote Imagine, they are still very much his work. I am glad that Yoko Ono was finally credited for Imagine. On 8th October, the world will remember John Lennon on what would have been his eighty-fifth birthday. Surviving Beatles Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr no doubt will share some words and love. One of the greatest songwriters the world will ever see, no doubt people will have views as to which other songs can be considered John Lennon masterpiece – there are dozens when you think about it! These are five that are particularly important to me. Songs from a phenomenal artistic voice that…

WE all dearly miss.

FEATURE: Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love at Forty: Nineteen: Inside Guido Harari’s Fascinating Photoshoot

FEATURE:

 

 

Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love at Forty

 ALL PHOTOS: Guido Harari (except the Hounds of Love cover; photo by John Carder Bush) 


Nineteen: Inside Guido Harari’s Fascinating Photoshoot

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THE penultimate feature…

of my twenty-feature run celebrating the fortieth anniversary of Kate Bush’s Hound of Love on 16th September sort of returns to the very first feature. For that, I looked at the cover shoot and that brilliant shot from her brother, John Carder Bush. How it took a long time to set up. However, the final result, where Bush is lying with her dogs, Bonnie and Clyde, is perfect! For the final feature, I am going to explore the legacy of Hounds of Love. I will take from PROG’s recent edition, where they celebrate forty years of Hounds of Love. One of the sections that particularly appealed to me is there they look at some of the promotional images from 1985. Those taken by Guido Harari. Taking his words and photos from his book, THE KATE INSIDE, we get an insight into the importance of these images and how the session took place. His personal recollections of working with Kate Bush. They collaborated between 1982 and 1993, though the photos he took around Hounds of Love might be his finest. I am going to quote from the article in PROG and some of the standout words from Harari. He remembers how Bush would not fax or do anything like that. She preferred to call. She called Harari to see if he would be up for shooting her early promotional images for Hounds of Love: “My heart was pounding as I set out to meet Kate and discuss the shoot at (East) Wickham Farm”. Up to this point, Guido Harari has photographed the likes of Peter Gabriel and Joni Mitchell. This was arguably his most important and best assignment. As he revealed: “But this offer from from Kate was too good to be true, and within days I flew to London”.

I do love the romance of him being called and then flying out to London (from Italy)! The excitement of spending valuable time with Kate Bush and capturing these early promotional images for what would be deemed her greatest work. He did not know that at the time. However, there is also the responsibility of coming up with concepts that would do justice to Hounds of Love and maybe match the mood of the album. After Bush sent a car to the airport to transport Harari to Welling, he started looking out at these “Flemish -looking skies filled with clouds, wondering what on earth to expect”. I guess his time with her for The Dreaming was done in studios and various locations. This was him meeting Kate Bush at her family home. Once he got there, Bush took him to the recording studio she had specially built. With no window between the recording and control rooms, he was not lucky enough to get a preview of the album. That might have helped his creative process and feel of the shoot. However, Bush rightly wanted Hounds of Love to remain private until she was ready. Bush told Harari how she moved from the city to countryside and took eighteen months to write and record this material. The rest of the time she spent recognising her own environment. “When you work intensely, if you want to stay in control of everything you do, it just takes much more time”. That was in response to Harari asking if she moved to the country to retain her sanity (Bush’s word, but that was his gist!). “The house seemed so silent, so quiet and so removed from the outside world”. Bush did not mind, as she said she didn’t have a thriving social life anyhow. “People who come here are not necessarily people I know, but people who are involved in my projects”. Bush said the way she worked is very “mental”, so she needed to get away from distractions and could not work out of these studios that cost a lot. Working hugely long days all week was too much.

Guido Harari noted how Bush was the warmest person he had met. Nothing like the people you see in her videos. In the sense you get these characters that can be more steely or bold. Softly-spoken and very hospitable, he asked her about the multiple voices that she brought into her music. A way of transcending the song and music. Bush said how writing a song was like writing a play. “You can almost hear a conversation going!”. Guido Harari realised how Gered Mankowitz has covered a lot of ground with his shots of Kate Bush taken during her first two albums – 1978’s The Kick Inside and Lionheart –, and her brother John Carder Bush had developed these conceptual covers and fascinating shots. Bush, by 1985, was definitely making her videos more cinematic. Guido Harari, it appears, made suggests regarding locations – which Bush quietly skipped over or vetoed. “She took me aback by saying there was no need for further avenues.  She had no fixed ideas except the general notion of a full day photo shoot”. Bush wanted a good range of photos that would be good for the press but, with no preconceived concepts or guidance, he had to capture the real Kate Bush with no mask. No script. It was quite daunting! Nobody had expressed such openness and honesty. Made him feel as trusted and spoken so softly. This was something that struck Guido Harari. “Time dims the memory a bit, but as I recall we very quickly decide that the best idea was to play together”. There is no huge planning ahead with celebrity shoots. When the lights are on and the Polaroids are coming out, Guido Harari said how you face the “challenge of chemistry, of shifting moods, and keeping contact with your subject at a high level”.

Back in Milan on 25th June (1985), Guido Harari and his assistant Neri Oddo spent the day painting cloth backdrops for the shoot. On 26th, they flew back to London and checked in at Waverley House, which was conveniently located close to Holborn Studios. The following day they were at the studio and ready. Noticing how there was a tiny door in the middle that would lead to a dressing room. Everything was taking shape. There was the painting of paper backdrops and setting up the lighting. The next day, the shoot would happen. Polaroid packs and Nikons armed and ready! Film holders out the bag and begging to be held. In a state of excitement, they ran across the road to a market to grab some crates which they used to fashion Japanese blinds that would “create a mood that would go with one of Kate’s kimonos”. On 28th, on the morning of the shoot, the expectation was making its weight felt. Kate Bush walked in with her hair and makeup artist, Tina Earnshaw. Refreshingly and wonderfully, there was not a pack of publicists, managers, record label people that were monitoring everything and making demands. This was Kate Bush and the absolute bare minimum in terms of personnel. Such a relief for a photographer who was flying blind a little in terms of the final vision and how the shoot would pan out! Not having to defer to record label flunkies and have his work scrutinised and changed, it was a dream start! Hair and makeup took about an hour. Even though this was Kate Bush pretty much at the height of her popularity and creative peak, there was no pressure at all. “The process was so unmannered, so matter-of-fact – so gloriously without bullshit”.

Guido Harari admired how Kate Bush could have this faraway look and then descended into giggles. You get these individual portraits and you can sense a mood, though it only tells a specific moment and expression. Getting a series of shots where she goes from straight to in stitches is more fluid and revealing, I feel. In order to break any ice that was there, Harari asked Bush to run around the studio so he could see the goofier side of her. Capturing her unguarded, he wasn’t meant to have any film in the camera. Like dance warm-up – which Bush would be familiar with -, this was a way to loosen up and prepare. Before getting down to the serious stuff! Instead, Bush was pulling funny faces and acting like a child; not sure of what was happening but very game and accommodating. In those days, they would create crescendos with makeup and clothing. Often going from the more casual to elaborate. “I love the series of photos with the pillbox hat. It was probably the only time Kate would wear high heels on the shoot, so I suggested  she walk “against the wind” pretending she was losing her balance”. It is fascinating hearing these behind the scenes nuggets from Guido Harari. How he would overexpose the film one stop to avoid costly retouching. At one point, he saw Kate Bush’s dressing room door ajar – he would never venture in usually out of respect for her privacy – and he could overhear this conversation between her and Tina Earnshaw. Bush had this very heavy Japanese makeup on and her hair wasn’t quite set. She had some residue and makeup on her shoulders and her T-shirt. Seizing the opportunity for this unique and spontaneous shot, he dragged Bush into the studio and made sure powder did not fall off. Trusting Harari’s vision and process. He grabbed some red lipstick and put a smudge on her lips. Bush acknowledged him and gave her approval with a smile. I covered this a bit when recently including this very shot in a feature about Kate Bush and Guido Harari. Howe this shot (below) is among the most iconic. It definitely stands out as being unusual, vulnerable and very alluring!

They moved onto the Japanese blinds and kimono. The mood shifted to dark. At this point, they had been shooting for twelve hours without lunch or a break. There had been minimal conversation amidst the set changes. It is testament to the patience and professionalism of Kate Bush that she kept going but gave her all at all points! “We’d run of energy, but decided to proceed with two more shots with kimonos, including the one with Kate bathed in blue light against a blood-red backdrop”. At around one in the morning, Bush asked Harari if he was a bit tired. They binned the idea of one last shot with UV lights. Harari was “pretty sure we had a great number of beautiful images that would please both Kate and EMI. The shoot certainly did the business for Hounds Of Love: photos would be published all over the world and years later in the boxset This Woman’s Work”. You can purchase THE KATE INSIDE and get a physical copy of this wonderful book with those shots. From the initial phone call, right through to that tiring early-morning hour where they wrapped up, it was quite a process! No doubt so many happy memories for Guido Harari (and Kate Bush). What we got are some of the best images of Kate Bush. You can see the trust and respect between them. How comfortable she felt. Someone Bush trusted and knew would deliver something special, we all have our favourite Guido Harari Hounds of Love photos. I love that look of her in Japanese makeup with the smudge of lipstick. I also love the shot with her in a gold jacket and her with eyes closed (at the very top of this feature). So enticing, romantic and peaceful, it has been a treat exploring the process and itinerary of a fabulous photoshoot! This beautiful union between a genius and warm-hearted artist and…

A masterful photographer.

FEATURE: The Digital Mixtape: Jimi Hendrix’s Best and Deep Cuts

FEATURE:

 

 

The Digital Mixtape

PHOTO CREDIT; Gered Mankowitz/Iconic Images

 

Jimi Hendrix’s Best and Deep Cuts

__________

ON 18th September, 1970…

PHOTO CREDIT: Bent Rej

the world lost Jimi Hendrix. Aged only twenty-seven, it was a huge shock to hear of the death of one of the greatest artists of his generation. A virtuoso guitar player and hugely underrated singer and songwriter, I am putting together a mixtape of big songs and some deep cuts as we mark fifty-years since Jimi Hendrix died. His legacy remains. He has inspired so many other artists and guitarists and is still considered to be among the best (if not the best) guitarists ever. Such a powerful and intelligent player, his peerless talents will come to the fore at the end. However, before I get there, I want to drop in some biography. So, for anyone not au fait with his music and career, we can learn more about Jimi Hendrix:

“Widely recognized as one of the most creative and influential musicians of the 20th century, Jimi Hendrix pioneered the explosive possibilities of the electric guitar. Hendrix’s innovative style of combining fuzz, feedback and controlled distortion created a new musical form. Because he was unable to read or write music, it is nothing short of remarkable that Jimi Hendrix’s meteoric rise in the music took place in just four short years. His musical language continues to influence a host of modern musicians, from George Clinton to Miles Davis, and Steve Vai to Jonny Lang.

Jimi Hendrix, born Johnny Allen Hendrix at 10:15 a.m. on November 27, 1942, at Seattle’s King County Hospital, was later renamed James Marshall by his father, James “Al” Hendrix. Young Jimmy (as he was referred to at the time) took an interest in music, drawing influence from virtually every major artist at the time, including B.B. King, Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Buddy Holly, and Robert Johnson. Entirely self-taught, Jimmy’s inability to read music made him concentrate even harder on the music he heard.

Al took notice of Jimmy’s interest in the guitar, recalling, “I used to have Jimmy clean up the bedroom all the time while I was gone, and when I would come home I would find a lot of broom straws around the foot of the bed. I’d say to him, `Well didn’t you sweep up the floor?’ and he’d say, `Oh yeah,’ he did. But I’d find out later that he used to be sitting at the end of the bed there and strumming the broom like he was playing a guitar.” Al found an old one-string ukulele, which he gave to Jimmy to play a huge improvement over the broom.

By the summer of 1958, Al had purchased Jimmy a five-dollar, second-hand acoustic guitar from one of his friends. Shortly thereafter, Jimmy joined his first band, The Velvetones. After a three-month stint with the group, Jimmy left to pursue his own interests. The following summer, Al purchased Jimmy his first electric guitar, a Supro Ozark 1560S; Jimi used it when he joined The Rocking Kings.

In 1961, Jimmy left home to enlist in the United States Army and in November 1962 earned the right to wear the “Screaming Eagles” patch for the paratroop division. While stationed at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, Jimmy formed The King Casuals with bassist Billy Cox. After being discharged due to an injury he received during a parachute jump, Jimmy began working as a session guitarist under the name Jimmy James. By the end of 1965, Jimmy had played with several marquee acts, including Ike and Tina Turner, Sam Cooke, the Isley Brothers, and Little Richard. Jimmy parted ways with Little Richard to form his own band, Jimmy James and the Blue Flames, shedding the role of back-line guitarist for the spotlight of lead guitar.

Throughout the latter half of 1965, and into the first part of 1966, Jimmy played the rounds of smaller venues throughout Greenwich Village, catching up with Animals’ bassist Chas Chandler during a July performance at Caf‚ Wha? Chandler was impressed with Jimmy’s performance and returned again in September 1966 to sign Hendrix to an agreement that would have him move to London to form a new band.

Switching gears from bass player to manager, Chandler’s first task was to change Hendrix’s name to “Jimi.” Featuring drummer Mitch Mitchell and bassist Noel Redding, the newly formed Jimi Hendrix Experience quickly became the talk of London in the fall of 1966.

The Experience’s first single, “Hey Joe,” spent ten weeks on the UK charts, topping out at spot No. 6 in early 1967. The debut single was quickly followed by the release of a full-length album Are You Experienced, a psychedelic musical compilation featuring anthems of a generation. Are You Experienced has remained one of the most popular rock albums of all time, featuring tracks like “Purple Haze,” “The Wind Cries Mary,” “Foxey Lady,” “Fire,” and “Are You Experienced?”

Although Hendrix experienced overwhelming success in Britain, it wasn’t until he returned to America in June 1967 that he ignited the crowd at the Monterey International Pop Festival with his incendiary performance of “Wild Thing.” Literally overnight, The Jimi Hendrix Experience became one of most popular and highest grossing touring acts in the world.

Hendrix followed Are You Experienced with Axis: Bold As Love. By 1968, Hendrix had taken greater control over the direction of his music; he spent considerable time working the consoles in the studio, with each turn of a knob or flick of the switch bringing clarity to his vision.

Back in America, Jimi Hendrix built his own recording studio, Electric Lady Studios in New York City. The name of this project became the basis for his most demanding musical release, a two LP collection, Electric Ladyland. Throughout 1968, the demands of touring and studio work took its toll on the group and in 1969 the Experience disbanded.

The summer of 1969 brought emotional and musical growth to Jimi Hendrix. In playing the Woodstock Music & Art Fair in August 1969, Jimi joined forces with an eclectic ensemble called Gypsy Sun & Rainbows featuring Jimi Hendrix, Mitch Mitchell, Billy Cox, Juma Sultan, and Jerry Velez. The Woodstock performance was highlighted by the renegade version of “Star Spangled Banner,” which brought the mud-soaked audience to a frenzy.

Nineteen sixty-nine also brought about a new and defining collaboration featuring Jimi Hendrix on guitar, bassist Billy Cox and Electric Flag drummer Buddy Miles. Performing as the Band of Gypsys, this trio launched a series of four New Year’s performances on December 31, 1969 and January 1, 1970. Highlights from these performances were compiled and later released on the quintessential Band of Gypsys album in mid-1970 and the expanded Hendrix: Live At The Fillmore East in 1999.

As 1970 progressed, Jimi brought back drummer Mitch Mitchell to the group and together with Billy Cox on bass, this new trio once again formed The Jimi Hendrix Experience. In the studio, the group recorded several tracks for another two LP set, tentatively titled First Rays Of The New Rising Sun. Unfortunately, Hendrix was unable to see this musical vision through to completion due to his hectic worldwide touring schedules, then tragic death on September 18, 1970. Fortunately, the recordings Hendrix slated for release on the album were finally issued through the support of his family and original studio engineer Eddie Kramer on the 1997 release First Rays Of The New Rising Sun.

From demo recordings to finished masters, Jimi Hendrix generated an amazing collection of songs over the course of his short career. The music of Jimi Hendrix embraced the influences of blues, ballads, rock, R&B, and jazz a collection of styles that continue to make Hendrix one of the most popular figures in the history of rock music”.

I shall leave things there. The incredible and much-missed Jimi Hendrix died on 18th September, 1970. It was a hugely sad moment. However, rather than mourn his loss, we should celebrate his wonderous body of work. Those live performances which have been etched into history. Nobody can match him when it comes to the guitar in my view. Even though he is no longer with us, Jimi Hendrix’s legacy and genius will…

BURN bright for generations.

FEATURE: Pulling Out the Pin: Kate Bush's The Dreaming at Forty-Three

FEATURE:

 

 

Pulling Out the Pin

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush signs copies of The Dreaming for fans at the Virgin Megastore, Oxford Street in London on 14th September, 1982/PHOTO CREDIT: Pete Still/Redferns

 

Kate Bush's The Dreaming at Forty-Three

__________

THIS album anniversary…

might get buried a little, as there are two huge Kate Bush anniversaries in September. Never for Ever turns forty-five on 8th September. Even bigger is the fortieth anniversary of Hounds of Love, which happens on 16th September. However, the album that fitted between the 1980 and 1985 releases is 1982’s The Dreaming. On 13th September, Kate Bush released her fourth studio album. If you consider Never for Ever as a bridge between her first two albums – The Kick Inside and Lionheart (1978) – and where she was heading and Hounds of Love as her apex and her most accomplished album as a producer, then The Dreaming was the moment that Bush entered a new world. Producing solo for the first time and experimenting more than we had heard before, many cite this as her least commercial album. In terms of the songs, there are few that are single-ready and as accessible as tracks on Never for Ever and Hounds of Love. However, I think it is one of her richest and most fascinating albums. Not only an audio representation of an artist pushing boundaries and utilising technology around her. I think The Dreaming provides a window into Kate Bush’s psyche around 1980, 1981 and 1982. How she wanted to push her sound forward but, at the same time, there was this stress, expectation and hectic workload. Releasing such a detailed and layered album solo as a producer and writing and performing all the songs. Bush was still promoting Never for Ever towards the end of 1980, but The Dreaming was already coming together at that point. She barely gave herself chance to rest. After Never for Ever reached number one, EMI would have been keen for Bush to follow that up with an album quicker than she did – though it was only two years until The Dreaming came out!

To highlight the brilliance of this album ahead of its forty-third anniversary, I want to introduce some features. I will start out with some extracts from a couple of 1982 promotional interviews. However, before I get there, I want to quote from an interview Bush was involved with in 1986. In the years since The Dreaming was released, when asked about the album, she looks back with some shock and surprise. Like she had gone mad. How there was all this anger. It was her being ‘an artist’. However, I think The Dreaming is one of her absolute best albums. As a songwriter and producer. Thanks to the Kate Bush Encyclopedia for their resources around The Dreaming. This interview is really interesting:

“I have no doubt that those who buy singles because they like my hits, are completely mystified upon hearing the albums. But if it comes to that, they should listen to itloudly!If a single theme linkedThe Dreaming, which is quite varied, it would be human relationships and emotional problems. Every being responds principally to emotions. Some people are very cool, but they are silenced by their emotions, whatever they might be. To write a song, it’s necessary that I be completely steeped in my environment, in my subject. Sometimes the original idea is maintained, but as it takes form, it possesses me. One of the best examples would be this song that I wrote on ‘Houdini’: I knew every one of the things that I wanted to say, and it was necessary that I find new ways that would allow me to say them; the hardest thing, is when you have so many things to fit into so short a space of time. You have to be concise and at the same time not remain vague, or obscure. The Dreaming was a decisive album for me. I hadn’t recorded in a very long time until I undertook it, and that was the first time that I’d had such liberty. It was intoxicating and frightening at the same time. I could fail at everything and ruin my career at one fell swoop. All this energy, my frustrations, my fears, my wish to succeed, all that went into the record. That’s the principle of music: to liberate all the tensions that exist inside you. I tried to give free rein to all my fantasies. Although all of the songs do not talk about me, they represent all the facets of my personality, all my different attitudes in relation to the world. In growing older, I see more and more clearly that I am crippled in facing the things that really count, and that I can do nothing about it, just as most people can do nothing. Making an album is insignificant in comparison with that, but it’s my only defense.

Yves Bigot, ‘Englishwoman is crossing the continents’. Guitares et Claviers (France), February 1986”.

Many critics were baffled by the dense soundscapes on The Dreaming. Wondering why the tracks were like they were. Wanting something perhaps simpler and less layered, maybe Bush took some of this on board for Hounds of Love. Though it is a layered album that is ambitious and widescreen, it is not quite as dense and smoggy as The Dreaming. More natural. Natural light. The Dreaming was originally released on L.P. and tape. Unlike Never For Ever, the L.P. was packaged in a regular sleeve, featuring the lyrics on the inner sleeve. In 2023, a smokey-colour vinyl was released. The first 1982 interview I am taking from is Karen Swayne's KERRANG! interview. I do love the fact KERRANG! were interviewing Kate Bush! It is quite a revealing chat. Bush stating how she wants The Dreaming to endure and be remembered:

“Were you pushing it more to create different sounds?

"In a way. But I probably used to push it more in other ways. I went through a phase of trying to leap up and down a lot when I was writing songs. I used to try to push it almost acrobatically. Now I'm trying more to get the song across, and I have more control. When I'm trying to think up the character is when it needs a bit of push."

Do you always try to put yourself in the role of a character, then?

"Yeah, normally, because the song is always about something, and always from a particular viewpoint. There's normally a personality that runs along with it.

"Sometimes I really have to work at it to get in the right frame of mind, because it's maybe the opposite of how I'm feeling, but other times it feels almost like an extension of me, which it is, in some ways."

You have been accused in the past of living in some kind of fantasy world. Would you say you refuse to face up to reality?

"Now. I think I do, actually, although there are certain parts of me that definitely don't want to look at reality. Generally speaking, though, I'm quite realistic, but perhaps the songs on the first two albums created some kind of fantasy image, so people presumed that I lived in that kind of world."

Where do you get the ideas for songs from?

"Anywhere, really. They're two or three tracks that I had the ideas for on the last album but never got together. Others come from films, books or stories from people I know. That kind of thing."

What about Pull Out the Pin, a song about VietNam? Was that something you'd always wanted to write about?

"No, I didn't think I'd ever want to write about it until I saw this documentary on television which moved me so much I thought I just had to."

The title track concerns the abuse of Aborigines by so-called civilised man. Where did that interest come from?

"That's something that's been growing for years. It started when I was tiny, and my brother bought Sun Arise [a hit of the early 1960s by Rolf Harris.]. We thought it was brilliant--to me, that's a classic record. I started to become aware of the whole thing--that it's almost an instinctive thing in white man to wipe out a race that actually owns the land. It's happening all around the world."

Do you hope to change people's opinions by what you write?

"No. Because I don't think a song can ever do that. If people have strong opinions, then they're so deep-rooted that you'll never be able to do much. Even if you can change the way a few people think, you'll never be able to change the situation anyway.

"I don't ever write politically, because I know nothing about politics. To me they seem more destructive than helpful. I think I write from an emotional point of view, because even though a situation may be political, there's always some emotional element, and that's what gets to me."

The thoughts and ideas are expressed through a variety of sounds, an adventurous use of instruments and people--from Rolf Harris on dijeridu to Percy Edwards on animal impressions! Kate has also discovered the Fairlight, a computerised synthesiser.

"It's given me a completely different perspective on sounds," she enthuses. "You can put any sound you want onto the keyboard, so if you go 'Ugh!', you can play 'Ugh!' all the way up the keyboard. Theoretically, any sound that exists, you can play.

"I think it's surprising that with all the gear around at the moment, people aren't experimenting more."

Whatever you may think of Kate Bush, you could never say that she's not been prepared to take risks. In the four years that have passed since her startling first single Wuthering Heights, she has grown increasingly adventurous and ambitious, creating music that she hopes will last longer than much of today's transient pop.

Of The Dreaming she says: "I wanted it to be a long-lasting album, because my favourite records are the ones that grow on you--that you play lots of times because each time you hear something different."

Never particularly a public fave, her last live shows were three years ago, and although she plans to do some in the future, they'll take at least six months to prepare. [Try six years and counting.]

She admits that she found her initial success hard to cope with at times.

"I still find some things frightening. I've adjusted a hell of a lot, but it still scares me. There are so many aspects that if you start thinking about are terrifying. The best thing to do is not even to think about them. Just try to sail through”.

I shall move on in a minute. I am trying to include interviews I have not sourced often. This Poppix interview appeared in the summer of 1982. I do wonder whether, when these interviews appeared, people who were not aware of Kate Bush were converted. It is interesting that she appeared in Pop magazines, but also more fringe publications:

“The album is entirely produced by Kate Bush, something she has never done before, her previous albums being co-produced by her and Jon Kelly. [Actually the first album was produced by Andrew Powell, and the second by Powell with the assistance of Kate.] So why did she decide to do the production of the album herself?

"After the last album, Never For Ever, I started writing some new songs. They were very different from anything I'd ever written before--they were much more rhythmic, and in a way, a completely new side to my music. I was using different instruments, and everything was changing; and I felt that really the best thing to do would be to make this album a real departure--make it completely different. And the only way to achieve this was to sever all the links I had had with the older stuff. The main link was engineer Jon Kelly. Everytime I was in the studio Jon was there to helping me, so I felt that in order to make the stuff different enough I would have to stop working with Jon. He really wanted to keep working with me, but we discussed it and realised that it was for the best." [Phrased with typical Bush delicacy.]

Sat In Your Lap, Kate's last major hit in the British charts, is also included on the album.

"We weren't going to put it on initially, because we thought it had been a single such a long time ago, but a lot of people used to ask me if we were putting Sat In Your Lap on the album and I'd say no, and they would say 'Oh why not?' and they'd be quite disappointed. So, as the album's completion date got nearer and nearer, I eventually relented. I re-mixed the track and we put it on. I'm so glad I did now, because it says so much about side one, with its up-tempo beat and heavy drum rhythms--it's perfect for the opening track."

You mentioned earlier that you wanted the album to be different, to be a change. Is that aspect of change particularly refreshing to you? Is it important for you to keep changing?

"Yes, it's very important for me to change. In fact, as soon as the songs began to be written, I knew that the album was going to be quite different. I'd hate it, especially now, if my albums became similar, because so much happens to me between each album--my views change quite drastically. What's nice about this album is that it's what I've always wanted to do. For instance, the Australian thing: well, I wanted to do that on the last album, but there was no time. There are quite a few ideas and things that I've had whizzing around in my head that just haven't been put down. I've always wanted to use more traditional influences and instruments, especially the Irish ones. I suppose subconsciously I've wanted to do all this for quite some time, but I've never really had the time until now."

Your songs are nearly always based around a story of sorts. Is it important for you to have a meaning behind your songs?

"Oh yes, I think it gets more and more so, because although on the first two albums the songs were always based on something, they weren't all that strong; but now I get more involved with the ideas behind a song, and I do my best to make the concept as vivid and as solid as I can. On the new album, for instance, there is a track about the legendary ecapologist Houdini. During his incredible lifetime Houdini took it upon himself to expose the whole spiritualist thing--you know, seances and mediums. And he found a lot them to be phoney, but before he died Houdini and his wife worked out a code, so that if he came back after his death his wife would know it was him by the code. So after his death his wife made several attempts to contact her dead husband, and on one occasion he did come through to her. I thought that was so beautiful--the idea that this man who had spent his life escaping from chains and ropes had actually managed to contact his wife. The image was so beautiful that I just had to write a song about it." [The full story is quite complicated, but Mrs. Houdini later stated that no such contact was ever made. Kate has indicated in other interviews--conducted presumably a bit later than this one--that she was aware of the dubious aspects of the story, but that the beauty of the concept and imagery were no less true for that.]

"Now that the album is completed, it doesn't mean that my work has ended. There are so many things that I want to do connected with music, and I want to do them as soon as possible. In fact, I see myself being pretty well committed for the next couple of years. I'd like to do a show with both this and the last album, and there are a few videos as well, but I just don't know if or when I'll get the time.

"As for tours, well, I haven't got any planned, but I'm beginning to think about it. THe last tour was so much effort, and it cost so much money, and we actually spent about four months rehearsing for it, so the thought of another one is a little bit daunting. It's such a big thing to commit yourself to--it's like a whole year taken out of your life. It scares me a bit”.

There are a couple of features that I want to come to before wrapping up. In 2022, Lauren Thorn wrote for Medium as to how The Dreaming has left its mark on the Pop work. A masterpiece album that is not as mad and alien as people think, it was Bush taking a different direction. It is the case that people expect artists to repeat themselves and we get comfortable with a particular sound. When they do something very different then we ask why. And how we can’t connect with the album. It is only years later when you appreciate the brilliance of the album and that decision to move on. That is the case with The Dreaming:

“Produced entirely by herself, The Dreaming is a testament to Kate Bush’s creativity. At the time of its recording, she had already carved out a niche for herself with her first 3 albums. Songs like Babooshka and Wuthering Heights defined her as a theatrical, siren-like popstar, showcasing her hypnotic soprano voice and uniquely literary lyrics. Many of the songs for these albums were written over the course of her teen years, brought into EMI, recorded, produced, and then compiled into albums. The Dreaming was the first album for which Kate wrote entirely new material, thus allowing her newfound creativity and artistic freedom. To add to this, she handled all production and songwriting duties. The songs of The Dreaming have minimal credits, often only including background singers and Kate’s brother, Paddy. Kate used The Dreaming to fully capitalize on this independence, creating some of the most original music of the 1980s.

Upon its release, however, The Dreaming received mixed reactions. The consensus among critics was one of confusion and mild approval. Writing for Smash Hits, Neil Tennant described the album as “Very weird… obviously trying to become less commercial.” Melody Maker called the album, “initially… bewildering and not a little preposterous,” but admitted that if you would, “ try to hang on through the twisted overkill and the historic fits…there’s much reward.” It was not a complete commercial failure, but was Kate Bush’s lowest-selling album to date, remaining on the UK Hot 100 for only 10 weeks and peaking at number 3. Its lead single, There Goes a Tenner, did not chart at all in the UK. The Dreaming received only a silver certification. Bush seemed to view the album with an inkling of shame, referring to it as her ‘she’s gone mad’ album.

Despite its lukewarm critical reaction, The Dreaming was a pioneering work of pop music. It made extensive use of the Fairlight CMI, a synthesizer that would come to dominate the music of the 80s. With this new technology, Kate created a maximalist labyrinth of sound that captured the zeitgeist of the decade, despite the album being released only in its third year. There are hints of The Dreaming everywhere in 80s music, from Depeche Mode to Siouxsie and the Banshees, to The Smiths. And, although the album leverages the musical trends of the 80s such as New Wave and Post Punk, it still remains, firmly and fiercely, its own unique work.

Even now, The Dreaming’s influence can be heard in pop music, from radio-friendly hits to art-pop masterpieces. On her widely adored 2020 album Fetch The Boltcutters, Fiona Apple achieved many of the same feats Kate Bush pioneered on The Dreaming. The wild emotive singing, complex lyrics, and frantic clattering production express the same sort of feminine rage so potently articulated by Bush in 1982. On a much more accessible note, Lady Gaga’s Born This Way utilizes synthesizers in a similar way to Bush in 1982, creating an atmosphere of mania and density. MARINA’s 2010 single Mowgli’s Road borrows heavily from The Dreaming, with its quirky vocal performance and heavily percussive production. Artists such as Imogen Heap and Bjork have cited Kate Bush and The Dreaming as influences in their work, and her innovation set the stage for the success of artists like St. Vincent, Julia Holter, and Joanna Newsom. The Dreaming was even influential in Kate’s own career, allowing her to broaden her production skills and preparing her to create what is more commonly thought of as her definitive masterpiece, Hounds of Love.

The Dreaming was not a critical or commercial success. It was, however, a cultural one. While it seemed inconsequential upon release, its influence has seeped deep into the core of pop music. It has received a critical reappraisal as well, receiving positive reviews from publications such as Pitchfork and NPR. There will never be another album like The Dreaming, but there will be many more who try”.

On 13th September, Kate Bush’s The Dreaming is forty-three. It is an album that I really love. In terms of rankings and where critics place it alongside her other studio efforts, it usually fairs well. Rough Trade ranked it second in 2023. NME placed The Dreaming fourth in 2019. Stating this is about “about adventure beyond borders”. In 2022, SPIN put The Dreaming in third: “Writing in in The Village Voice, Robert Christgau called it “the most impressive Fripp/Gabriel-style art-rock album of the postpunk refulgence”. A remarkable creation from a music pioneer who went on to release six other albums that are all vastly different, The Dreaming is this fascinating middle point between Never for Ever and that older/early sound and Hounds of Love. Even if many critics rank the album high, I still think that The Dreaming lacks the…

RESPECT it deserves.

FEATURE: Spotlight: EMEREE

FEATURE:

 

 

Spotlight

ALL PHOTOS: Margot Stewart 

 

EMEREE

__________

HERE is an artist…

that you know is primed for a long future in music. EMEREE is “the project born by Melbourne’s standout musician, producer, and multi-instrumentalist Gabrielle Emery. Her music confidently shines alongside contemporary R’n’B fusion artists RAYE and Cleo Sol. The homage to classic soul in the ilk of Amy Winehouse is woven into EMEREE’s self-produced records. Combining her four-octave vocal range, Motown grooves, 90’s R&B flair and warm production makes EMEREE unmissable. Feeling both warmly familiar and undeniably unique in 2024 is no mean feat. As a writer, her lyrics often explore the realms of sexual identity and female empowerment with addictive honesty. With her works generating over 50 million streams on DSPs and millions of views on TikTok, EMEREE is solidifying herself as one-to-watch in the Australian industry”. EMEREE recently played the Great Escape in Brighton. Her mixtape, Maybe I’m Just Too Sensitive (I Am), is out on 11th September. She was also one of NME’s Essential Emerging Artists for 2025, where they said the following:

“From: Melbourne, Australia
For fans of: Amy Winehouse, Raye
A spellbinding blend of contemporary R&B and soul tied together by one of the most incredible new voices out of Australia, EMEREE’s debut EP ‘Gold’ marked the Melburnian as one to watch. Bold yet introspective, her music – which she says she makes “for crazy bitches” – approaches matters of the heart (and the bedroom) from a distinctively queer female perspective with a refreshing warmth and candour. GY
Key track: ‘Smooth Honey’”.

There are a few interviews from this year I want to get to. Couch Mag spoke with EMEREE around the release of her then-new single, Eyesore. This is an artist I discovered through NME, and I am looking back at older interviews and listening to her music. This is someone I am committed to staying with. I will come to an NME interview to end things:

“· Your latest single “Eyesore” has been described as “petty, polished, and revenge that smiles while it stings”. What sparked the idea for this track, and how did you land on its tone?

One specific person absolutely inspired this one, and I don’t usually write that way (or admit to it). He had the biggest ego I’d ever experienced, so I didn’t feel too bad. I wrote this after having to block and completely remove him from my life. There’s plenty of context laced throughout the song, but my favourite is the end of the second verse, “and she’ll help me burn you out with sage”. This was inspired by a time when he actually said to me, “At least I didn’t turn any girls gay”.

·  The DIY music video is packed with vintage horror and camp. What inspired the visual concept, and how involved were you in the direction and styling?

There’s actually a WILD movie that inspired me that I watched with my housemate called ‘Isle Of Lesbos’. It’s a low-budget queer movie from the 90’s and it’s so wild and that definitely inspired the aesthetic and ‘intentionally low-budget’ feel of the video. Obviously there’s also influence of Sabrina Carpenter in there, but it’s mostly 80’s campy horror movies. I made it entirely DIY with my friends, and edited it myself whilst travelling.

·  There’s this magnetic duality in your music: glossy pop production with razor-sharp lyrics. How do you balance those worlds in your writing and sound?

Because I’m a producer, I’m often working in rooms with different writers and artists, and I think the best thing you can do is step outside your comfort zone and write truthfully – and even a step beyond that and go more theatrical. I used to write very safely when I was younger, and I am now often in rooms with writers where they’ll say, “Oh I don’t know if I want to say that it might be mean/raw/too much. I’m always the one to go WRITE IT! Anything you can write, I can write meaner”. I think it’s a great way to get better writing from people. The moment you stop thinking about how it’s going to be interpreted, the more relatable your lyrics will become. At the end of the day, it’s just art. This is where you can explore those characters and make things that aren’t necessarily your true self. I produce based on my instincts and my influences, and there’s always a lot of R&B and Soul influence. I am always trying new things with my production and it’s also an area where I like to explore beyond ‘safe’.

·  You’re known for championing female and queer voices in music. How do identity and empowerment shape your creative output?

It’s amazing once you find your community, how much it shapes you. I really struggle being away from my people now which is not something I have experienced before. I have a very strong foundation of queer and neurodivergent communities around me back home, and so travelling often takes it out of me, as that can be harder to connect to. I think finding your community and realising that they do exist and you’re not alone helps to create more vulnerability and truth in your lyrics, because I know there’s an audience there for it”.

The next interview is from Contact Music. EMEREE spoke about what it was like being honoured by NME as one of their one-hundred artists to watch. Her single, Spring Cleaning, addresses a domestic abuse ordeal, and what her long-terms goals are. I do hope that she comes and plays in the U.K. at some point. Fans over here would love to see her on stage:

“CM: Did fellow Australian singers, such as Kylie Minogue, Iggy Azalea and many others, inspire you to become a musician?

E: I wouldn't necessarily say the big Australian artists. Some of the music that I listened to was people who aren't necessarily quite as big, but their music found a fan base for themselves somehow, just because they've found a way to connect to people. And I think that's really cool. I think my ideal career would be like Mark Ronson, where you get to produce for all the artists, because I love producing so much, and it's so fun. But you also get to have your own project and get to be a little bit freer with it. You get to experiment more because you've got the production as well, so you can do the commercial hits with them. And then kind of focus on really exploring your own project.

CM: It's nice to do a bit of both, isn't it? I suppose it changes up the routine.

E: Yeah, it does. Getting to produce, you're working with someone else's vision. And there's just nothing more powerful than collaboration. And it's such a cool thing to get to be a part of someone's art.

CM: You've mentioned in the past that the type of music that's inspired you is 1950s and 1960s, soul and gospel. What is it about those genres from that time period that you fell in love with?

E: I just like how raw it is. I love the groove of that era of music, all the soul that is in it. I like how things aren't as clean. And that's something that I really try and reflect, even in my more modern productions, I really like to keep things a bit more raw, and I don't clean, quote, unquote up the mix as much, and I leave frequencies in that other people might take out because I want all that authenticity. And I really like to record real instruments in real rooms and really utilise the space that I'm in, because I think that's such a crucial part of those sorts of records; you can just feel that everyone was just in that room.

CM: You've been named as one of the top 100 artists to watch in 2025 by NME. What does that mean to you?

E: Oh, that was crazy. The manager called me and then sent me the email. And I was like, 'I know NME. WHAT?' And then I looked at the other people on the list, and I was like, 'How did they even know that I existed?' It was just really crazy. I think that's been the craziest thing over the last year. Before, I was putting myself forward to get any opportunity, but now they're just coming to me, which is wild and amazing, and I'm grateful.

CM: Spring Cleaning's lyrics are incredibly powerful, and you address your domestic violence experience through that. How proud are you of the single?

E: It's been really good. I feel like I had to because in the lead up to it coming out, I was quite obviously vulnerable. I hadn't talked about these things publicly at all, and I've still kept a lot of the details very private, purely from a safety perspective. It was really special how many people reached out to me, and because it's such a common issue, people really resonated with it, and it's been really nice to see it received, especially on the other side of the world. And I love that it was co-written with three other women. It was such a special writing experience because I really hadn't been able to put my feelings into words in that kind of way. And these women really helped me. I was spilling everything out, and they were turning it into poetry. And I was like, 'Wow.'

CM: Why did you feel it was important to address your experience through Spring Cleaning?

E: I just want to get this f***** out of my head. And it's just about taking back the space in your brain that a traumatic experience like this takes up. It happens to be for domestic violence for me. When you go through something very traumatic, such as PTSD or anything like that, it just takes up such a huge space in your brain. And I was like, 'I'm just so sick of thinking about this person.' It's not about them anymore. It's actually about me, and that's what the whole song is really about.

CM: What would you say your one long-term goal is for the rest of your music career?

E: I just want to be making music every day. That's really all I care about. As long as I can make music every day, and I can pay to have a roof over my head”.

I am going to end with NME’s recent interview. I have chosen passages where we get to learn about EMEREE as a producer. Her perspective on the industry and the fact that there is still imbalance. She also discusses how she is in the U.K. recording at the moment. I cannot wait to hear what the mixtape, Maybe I’m Just Too Sensitive (I Am), has to offer:

“But before she got heads turning as an artist in her own right, EMEREE started out producing music behind-the-scenes for others in the Australian music industry, including Tyla Jane (2021’s ‘Energy’) and Sophia Petro (2023’s ‘Memory of You’). While the singer enjoys being in the spotlight now, she admits that she still finds touring and performing “a lot more draining” than being in the studio working on music – whether for herself or others.

“I just love being a producer and I really resonate with that side of my craft more,” she says, adding that the “ideal situation” would be to follow the career path of someone like Mark Ronson. “Being in studios every single day, working, producing, writing, doing whatever for those artists. Then, I get to completely let loose with my project and just do whatever weird things that I want to, rather than having to focus on, ‘Oh, this needs to be good for charts.’”

At the same time, EMEREE is more than aware how male-dominated the production side of music can be. “It’s just immensely harder to be taken seriously [as a female producer] for some reason. They think I know how to use GarageBand or could fumble my way through Logic, but I’ve done a whole ass audio engineering degree,” she says. “I’m still getting in those rooms, and people will be like, ‘Oh, so when’s the producer getting here?’ And I’m like, ‘I’m the producer.’ And they’re like, ‘Oh, yeah. But when’s the engineer getting here?’”

She believes that “things need to start changing in those big rooms” and for women to be properly credited for the work they’ve done. “There’s plenty of female artists who also do a lot of their own production, like Ariana Grande, who does all her vocal production,” she adds. “It’s about realising that there might be some internalised misogyny, of having this view of what a producer should look like.”

For now, EMEREE is enjoying living the life of a burgeoning artist and producer, flying across the world to London and doing “50 days back-to-back of at least one session every single day” and still not being tired after. “I literally never get sick of being in the studio,” she tells NME, admitting that she has “a stupid amount of music in the backlog” awaiting release. “I think it’s good that I always start and finish my songs myself. And I don’t think that’s ever gonna change. And I don’t really want it to”.

If you have not followed EMEREE yet then make sure that you do. She is an extraordinary human who is among the best rising artists around. Such a tremendous producer and songwriter, it is going to be so interesting watching her career grow. The mixtape, Maybe I’m Just Too Sensitive (I Am), is out on 11th September. Someone that needs to be…

ON your radar.

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Follow EMEREE